Official Language: Art. 8 of the Austrian Constitution declares that "German is the official language of the Republic without prejudice to the rights provided by federal law for linguistic minorities". It continues that it recognises languages by authochtine ethnic groups, and the Austrian sign language.
Co-official Languages: The regional co-official languages of official minorities (regionale Amtssprachen, Minderheitensprachen) in Austria are Slovenian/Slovene in Carinthia and Styria, Burgenland-Croatian in Burgenland, Romanes/Romany in Burgenland, and Hungarian in Burgenland and Vienna, Czech in Vienna. Austria sigined and ratified the European Charter for Regional or Miniority Languages.
Language Strategies: The Austrian language policy is focused in the area of education, being taken care of by the Federal Ministry of Education and Women (Directorate I/5 Diversity and Languages) in a European context and aligned to European policies. A particular focus is put on the promotion of multilingualism and linguistic diversity. The European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) of the Council of Europe located in Graz is of particular importance, not only at the European level, but also for the national activities (LEPP-process - language education policy profiles), policies and strategies in modern language learning in the educational context. The Austrian language competence centre (ÖSZ) is offering direct support to schools in terms of language courses, didactics, new media, learning materials, multilingualism, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), quality label awards, teacher training, minority language support, immigrant language support, etc., at all levels of education. The Austrian language committee ÖSKO (Österreichisches Sprachenkomitee) is a participative platform for promoting multilingualism and linguistic diversity.
Language technologies: There is no specific strategy directly geared at language technologies. The Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) pursues an “Austrian ICT of the Future” programme in the areas of systems of systems, trusted and intelligent systems and interoperability. Language technology and natural language processing R&D is particularly relevant to data analytics, big data, data integration, semantic processing and semantic systems, knowledge work, ontology engineering, etc. and they are thus key to the national technology innovation policy. The Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy is an active member of the European ESFRI strategy for research infrastructures and is actively supporting the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research infrastructure initiatives at national level, among them the research infrastructure for language resources and language technologies CLARIN. Austria has been a founding member of CLARIN in 2007 and of CLARIN ERIC in 2012. The policy of the ministry has been to empower a national consortium in the context of CLARIN-AT, to build up a national language resource and language technology research infrastructure, in particular coordinated by the University of Vienna (Centre for Translation Studies (UNIVIE-CTS) and the Institute for Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology (ICLTT).
Austrian LR Stakeholders (LTO Directory)
Austrian LR Policy Makers (LTO Directory)
Other Relevant Organisation:
Relevant international NGOs located in Vienna are: INFOTERM the International Information Center for Terminology founded by UNESCO in 1971) and TermNet, The International Terminology Network for Terminology ( since 1988)
Sprachinstitut des Bundesheeres covers languages services (translation, interpreting), language teaching and terminology management
