Austrian Chancellor Says Proposal for Almost 400 Bilingual Place Signs is Absurd

Vienna, 2 July - Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel has labelled a Slovene minority request that bilingual place signs be placed in nearly 400 places in Carinthia as "absurd". In an interview for the Vienna-based weekly Der Falter, Schuessel said that it was difficult to place signs in 90 towns around Carinthia in 1976, while the number of Slovene-speaking persons in the Austrian province has dropped since then.