ABSTRACT
A generally acknowledged role of school education is to equip students with good communicative skills. This chapter discusses some key sociolinguistic issues affecting formal education. It examines the application of the standard language ideology and the single-language ideology in the context of contemporary Germany's multilingual society. The chapter then considers foreign language teaching in relation to the EU's '1+2 model' and implications for the promotion of regional and minority languages. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, there has been a revalorisation of practices that are part of local and regional culture in German-speaking countries. Low German (Niederdeutsch or Plattdeutsch) is spoken all over northern Germany, and thus covers an area much larger than Schleswig-Holstein. The autochthonous variety of Danish in the area is Sonderjysk, but it has declined rapidly over the last 30 years or so and has now all but disappeared south of the Danish-German border.
