At the beginning of June, the Finnish Defence Language Centre / Finnish National Defence University has assumed the chairmanship of the NATO Bureau for International Language Co-ordination (BILC) for the three-year period 2025-2028. The organization is chaired by the Head of the Language Training Branch of the Defence Language Centre, M.Soc.Sc. Laura Murto.
BILC is an organization among NATO and its Partner nations which focuses on improving language proficiency and training in the military context. Its central duties include standardization of language proficiency testing in the member nations’ armed forces as well as sharing of best practices in language training and knowledge involving terminology.
Finland is the first Northern European country to chair BILC. The chairmanship strengthens the Finnish Defence Forces’ international competence profile and enhances Finland’s visibility among the NATO member and partnership countries. Laura Murto thinks that also the Defence Language Centre will gain new competence serving as the chair:
“Language, communication and culture are things that cannot be separated from one another, so the experience to be gained from working as the BILC chair will contribute to the Defence Language Centre’s own competence in this field. This competence, in turn, will be channelled into the education provided by the Defence Language Centre both in degree studies and continuing training,” Murto points out.
Founded in 1966, BILC serves as an advisory language specialist body for NATO nations and is an important promoter of interoperability in the military alliance. Each NATO member nation is responsible for its own language proficiency assessment and creates its own language proficiency examination based on the STANAG 6001 standard. The main role of BILC is to support the uniform interpretation and application of STANAG 6001.
BILC chairmanship is transferred at its Annual Conference to a member nation on a rotational basis for a period of three years at a time. In the early years of BILC, chairmanship always belonged to big member nations. Recently, responsibility for rotational chairmanship has been extended to other Allied nations as well. In fact, previous chair nations include Bulgaria and Slovenia followed by Croatia, the most recent one of them.
