What is the Elips?

ELIPS is the acronym for European Languages in the Public Sphere. It is a project initiated by EFNIL concerning the use of the national languages of Europe as instruments of communication for government, legislation, and public administration. The survey gives users an overview of the situation in Europe and allows them to compare the situation of individual languages and countries. For EFNIL itself the survey will constitute a basis for sharing knowledge and experiences among member institutions and for policy actions and proposals.

How to use Elips?

• Click the Select data tab and select questions and countries. You may select as many as you like or all countries and questions at once.
• Choose a presentation mode: you can group the information by question and then by country or by country and then by question.
• Select Comments after individual questions if you want more detail or explanatory information provided by respondents.
• Select Submit or press the Enter key on your keyboard to start the search with the selected search criteria.
• Use the Go back button in your browser or the Alt + Left arrow keys on your keyboard to go back and modify your search criteria.
• Click on Select data or double-click the box Select all questions and/or Select all countries to start your selection of search criteria from scratch.
• You can also use Search to search the whole database for a relevant term or phrase, e.g. gender, to see where a given term is mentioned.

What can you find in ELIPS?

The ELIPS survey is based on a questionnaire which was filled out between July 2018 and September 2019 by the official institutions for language of each member country in the European Federation of National Institutions for National Languages (EFNIL). It covers the following aspects:

• the use of straightforward, reader-oriented and understandable language by public authorities and administration, which includes both the use of plain language (part 1) and easy-to-read language (part 2);
• the existence of policies and actions for and the availability of high-quality official terminology for government, legislation and public administration (part 3);
• the existence of policies and actions concerning the use of languages other than the official one(s) in certain situations and of policies and actions to cater for cultural, sexual and gender diversity; (part 4)
• the existence of training programmes for civil servants and the aspects these programmes cover (part 5);
• the existence of collaboration (structures) between the responsible bodies in EFNIL’s member states and the EU (part 6).

The survey contains descriptive information about materials, policies and actions as well as, where possible, references and links.

Please note the following

Some information is not applicable to certain countries as a whole. Where this is the case, the countries in question are indicated with a brown colour, labelled as multilingual countries. For Finland, there is separate information for Finnish and Swedish; for the UK there is separate information for the constituent countries of the United Kingdom, i.e. for England, Scotland, Wales and Nothern Ireland; and for Belgium there is only information for the Dutch-speaking north of the country, i.e. Flanders. This created a particular problem for the representation of the information in the form of maps. The three member states mentioned above, i.e. Finland, the UK and Belgium, are shown in a separate colour (brown) and are not represented according to the answer to a particular question. We invite users to check the textual information for these countries in order to gain a complete overview of the situation.

Unfortunately not all countries represented in EFNIL submitted data to ELIPS and some European countries are not represented within EFNIL. The survey does not contain data for the following countries: the French Community of Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, France, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Spain.

Contact

We are constantly trying to improve the ELIPS survey. Your feedback is important.

Do you have suggestions for improvements? Have you discovered mistakes? Do you have proposals for future actions or for the completion of the data?

Please let us know.

Email: efnil@nytud.hu

Participating Countries

• Austria
• Belgium
• Bulgaria
• Denmark
• Estonia
• Finland<
• Germany
• Grand Duchy of Luxembourg
• Greece
• Hungary
• Iceland
• Ireland
• Italy
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Malta
• The Netherlands
• Norway
• Portugal
• Slovak Republic
• Slovenia
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• United Kingdom