1 Applied Linguistics and the use of minority languages in education Jasone Cenoz & Durk Gorter Why minority languages? Minority languages can be defined is different ways. The United Nations felt a need for a clear definition of the concept „minority‟ but even after many years of study was not successful in reaching full agreement. Special Rapporteur Capotorti (1979: 7) defined a minority as: “a group numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a State, in a non-dominant position, whose members -being nationals of the State - possess ethnic, religious, or characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religion or language.” This definition still today reflects the general understanding of minority in international law (Pentassuglia 2002: 72) and it covers most minority situations (Thompson 2001: 130). It is clear that the description given in the Charter for regional or minority languages the Council of Europe is derived from this definition. The Charter refers to “languages that are traditionally used within a given territory of a state by nationals of that state who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the state's population and [are] different from the official language(s) of that state”. However, it explicitly excludes dialects of the official language(s) of the state or the languages of migrants. From the definition is may be clear that minority does not necessarily mean „small‟. Quechua and Catalan with millions of speakers are also minority languages. The difficulty of arriving at an agreed upon definition is related to the different criteria that may be used to label a linguistic variety as a minority language or not. Minority languages have traditionally been the concern of minority language speakers themselves and to a large extent ignored by speakers of majority languages. Minority language speakers feel minority languages as part of their identity and also very useful in everyday communication. With a few exceptions, the use of minority languages in education and research on minority languages has had a limited impact in the field of Applied Linguistics. However, there are several reasons to focus on minority languages in education and among them we could mention the following three: i) the extended use of minority languages in the world today; ii) the contribution of minority language