Paper short abstract:

The Bilingual Education Project is founded on the need to counter the disadvantages faced by children in Cape Verde whose mother tongue is officially excluded from formal education. This project shows how formal education can contribute to the construction of cultural identity.

Paper long abstract:

Despite academic and scientific recommendations, Cape Verde does not yet include mother tongue teaching across the board in its education policy.

In the academic year 2013/2014 the Ministry of Education of Cape Verde gave an official approval to implement a Bilingual Education Project to run for 6 years. This project fostered public discussion on issues of bilingualism and motivated scientific events on bilingualism in Cape Verde.

At the level of linguistic diversity, it gives a new value to a Creole language, which has never been the target of favourable linguistic policy in Cape Verde. It also facilitates the process of preserving one's own language. This project brought far reaching cultural benefits. It respects and implements what is stipulated in the Constitution of Cape Verde, this is the language that the Cape Verdeans use in their daily life and to communicate with those who are in the diaspora. It is not by chance that all Cape Verdeans share the opinion that the Creole language is the greatest cultural identity reference point of the Cape Verdean nation. The mother tongue of Cape Verde is an Intangible Cultural Heritage that plays a fundamental role in the preservation of oral traditions (a history of traditional oral literature, songs of work, traditional medicine and other popular knowledge), it is the chosen language by which the people express themselves at all Cape Verdean cultural events.