Multilingualism has always been a constitutive characteristic of Europe, and it is the pillar of the European Union motto “United in diversity”, one of the four official EU symbols. However, paraphrasing Orwell, even if all EU official languages are equal but some are more equal than others. In particular, English, along with French and, in some measure, German, are more used within the EU institutions. In the early 1950s, the language policy regime of the emerging “Continental community”, ancestor of the EU, was hotly debatted before the Council Regulation No 1 of 1958. Interestingly, similar alternatives emerged in the recent public consultation about multilingualism in the EU institutions set up by the European Ombudsman (report, Feb 2019). The talk speculates on a possible “Brexit effect” — whatever it will happen or not — on the resurgence of alternatives to a passive acceptance of the defacto preminence of English (followed by German and French), investigating how much such alternatives are feasible in realistic terms, given the current legal asset of EU.
Federico Gobbo is full professor at the University of Amsterdam on the special Chair of Interlinguistics and Esperanto. Among his research interests, there are: language policy, multilingualism and mobility in the EU, language representation and identity, invented languages, computational argumentation.
This video was recorded at the Polyglot Gathering in Bratislava 2019 ([ Ссылка ]).
