Crown Princess visits language success in Bergen

Crown Princess Mette Marit board Literature trainCrown Princess Mette Marit board Literature train.Photo: Heiko Junge / NTB scanpix

Princess Mette-Marit will leave on her literary train from Bergen to Oslo this week. She is kicking off this year’s program with a visit to a language cafe in Bergen on Wednesday.

The Language Café at Bergen’s library has been a huge success, and fits into this year’s Literature Train theme – outsider – as well as the Crown Princess’ vision: Creating a love of reading in people. Within three years, the project has become a huge success, and language cafes have popped up at another three branch libraries. New projects are now in the pipeline, and meetings at the café draw between 70 to 100 participants each week at the main library alone.
“Exclusion has been turned to inclusion,” the initiator Anne Berit Helland said on the topic.

As the special librarian for multilingual services, she has noted the effects of people practicing Norwegian at the library.
“We have noticed a greater demand for both easy to read books in Norwegian and books in immigrants’ own language. Now we are focusing on bilingual books, so people can read the text in Norwegian and in their own language,” she says.

On Princess Mette-Marit’s third trip with the Literature train, the train will visit Voss, Gol, Hønefoss and Oslo, in addition to Wednesday’s visit to the language café and Litteraturhuset in Bergen.

Source: NTB scanpix / Norway Today