Last year, the 5th grade* of the Graubünden canton school from Chur was selected to take part in the Erasmus+ project “Champions of Languages and Minorities”. The objective of this European programme in the education, youth and sport sphere is to preserve the linguistic minorities in Europe.


The class from the canton of Graubünden (Grisons) now has the opportunity to take part in this exciting project, together with other school pupils from Finland, Italy, Poland, Scotland and Wales.

At the meeting of the young people, the importance of their own language and culture and the awareness of linguistic tradition are central. The participants are given a sense of the need to maintain and keep alive their mother tongue. Minority languages such as Rhaeto-Romanic hold their own alongside majority languages. The way in which a majority language can take over is a considerable problem and not infrequently leads to the death of a minority language and, consequently, to a loss of tradition and culture. On this occasion, the school pupils are given the opportunity to exchange ideas and views with others of the same age who have experience of similar linguistic challenges.

Besides Finland, the class has already been able to travel to Poland and Italy (Southern Tyrol). The project will be concluded with a visit to Wales in spring 2018. RTR (Radiotelevisiun Svizra Rumantscha) accompanied the class on the trip to Finland last December and recorded it in a video (Rhaeto-Romanic).

* UK year 6