Cultural assets are things to cherish. Scan the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and it will be clear that Europe bristles with treasures: from the cultural landscapes of the high valleys of Andorra to the wooden churches of northern Romania. Michelangelo paintings and Gothic cathedrals are self-evidently worth hanging onto. Yet some of Europe’s most important cultural assets are utterly intangible.

Take language, an asset we too often take for granted. Most Europeans somehow learn to get by in one or two other languages beyond their mother tongue. And occasionally we run across folk on our travels who have not had the chance to practice, still less to perfect, another language and remain sadly monolingual. Plus of course a fair number of diehards who elect to remain assertively and stubbornly monolingual for one reason or another.

Europe’s rich diversity of languages captures the media spotlight this week with the European Day of Languages (EDL). Officially slated for Wednesday but celebrated earlier in the week in some countries, EDL is an initiative of the Council of Europe and will be marked in the Council’s forty-seven member states.

Language is a wonderful thing. So why not celebrate the European Day of Languages by getting your tongue round a few pharyngeal fricatives and then check out some of Europe’s threatened minority languages? These are cultural assets on the brink. Mirandesa, Kashubian, and Sorbian are just three of the many we’ve come across over the past year—in Portugal, Poland, and Germany respectively.

This is the second in a series of fortnightly blog posts by the editors of hidden europe.

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