As if you didn’t know already, Saturday 9th May was Europe Day - an annual celebration of peace and unity in Europe.

It was on that day in 1950 that marked the first move towards what we now call the European Union, which today has five hundred million people living in twenty seven member states. That’s a lot of people and, of course, a lot of languages.

But there are slightly less official EU languages than there are member states, given that languages such as French, English and German are shared between a number of countries, but that still makes twenty three official European vernaculars.

The EU has been encouraging multilingualism for a long time now, with several funding initiatives in place aimed at promoting language learning. Such initiatives are crucial to the long-term health of many languages and help to ensure that we appreciate linguistic diversity.

On a slightly different note, Saturday was also a significant day for Lingo24’s Romanian contingent in Timisoara. The 9th of May is Independence Day in Romania, and signifies their parting of ways from the Ottoman Empire in 1877.

So all in all, Saturday was some day!