The European Commission has announced the establishment of a high level group on multilingualism. The group, comprising eleven experts in the field from across Europe, has been set up in response to the 2005 communication from the Commission “A new framework strategy for multilingualism" (see November 2005 issue of the ACA Newsletter Education Europe). The high level group is supposed to advise the Commissioner for education, training, culture and multilingualism on the development of initiatives and new ideas on a variety of themes including the links between languages and research, languages and the media, languages for business, the use of new technologies for translation and interpretation and strategies to promote language learning.

The high level group is holding its first meeting on 3^rd October. The group will meet five more times before the presentation of its recommendations on the European Day of Languages (26^th Septemlber 2007).

The members of the high level group are:

• Barbara Cassin (French - Director of Research, Centre National de la Recherce Scientifique, Paris)
• Abram De Swaan (Dutch - Professor of Sociology, University of Amsterdam)
• Rita Franceschini (Italian, Professor of Language Science and Linguistics, Rector of the Free University of Bozen - Bolzano)
• Branislav Hochel (Slovak - Professor of Translation Studies, Comenius University Bratislava)
• Hanna Komorowska (Polish - Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching, Warsaw University)
• Wolfgang Mackiewicz (German - Honorary Professor of English Philology, Freie Universität Berlin)
• Isabella Moore (British - Director of the National Centre for Languages, CILT)
• Barbara Moser-Mercer (Austrian - Professor of Conference Interpreting, University of Geneva)
• Josep Palomero (Spanish - Vice-President of the Academia Valenciana de la Llengua)
• Ineta Savickienë (Lithuanian - Head of Regional Studies, Vytautas Magnus University)
• Jaana Sormunen (Finnish - Executive Producer for Modern Languages, YLE)