Abstract: The multilingual reality of the European Union is not just limited to its twenty official languages. In fact, regional languages (Regional Minority Languages or RML) are gaining increasing recognition with the introduction of policies for their development. But, besides this, there is another linguistic reality that has hardly been taken into account and which, however, has reached a magnitude comparable to that of regional languages: we refer to the languages spoken by the millions of immigrants who have come to Europe (Immigrant Minority Languages or IML). Convinced that the European multilingual reality will become an important public debate subject in the short term, in this study we aim to analyse the role played by television in the evolution and development of both RML and IML. Our main objective is therefore getting to know properly the reality of television in European minority languages, both in RML and IML: what television channels are there, what are they like, their target communities, their objectives, the strategies used to meet their objectives and how to assess their activity as referred to the revival of the language in question. Once we have collected this information, it will be possible to compare both realities by taking their common ground and differences into account, and draw conclusions common to both of them, if any. All in all, what this project is trying to is to look for some common ground between two realities that have been so far treated separately, both at research and at a political level. So, in the light of their shared aspects, we will try to pay attention to those communities often unknown to each other and considered as almost irreconcilable (on the one hand, the European historical ethnic communities and, on the other hand, the immigrant minorities).

Reference: EHU 06/41 ARANA ARRIETA