Mapping Minority Multilingualism: Perspectives from Central and South-Eastern European Borderlands – Introduction to the Thematic Issue

Abstract

The essays in this thematic issue explore an important but often overlooked legacy of European multilingualism and the various power asymmetries and ideological values that characterize it, namely the multilingual practices of ethno-linguistic groups on Europe’s south-eastern periphery. Although the European Union has in the past twenty years adopted legislation that explicitly celebrates and supports multilingualism, linguistic diversity and minority language rights, its language policy has received criticism for tending to rely on and embolden national standardizing language regimes (Gal 2006; Leech 2017; Mandić and Belić 2018). Indeed, the European focus on the protection of language diversity and language rights appears to reaffirm a static model of language in that it relies upon “the idea of a European polity based on the cooperation of distinct nation states” and upon related codified languages which can be traced back to ideologies of Romantic authenticity and Enlightenment universality (Leech 2017: 34–35; Gal 2011). Scholars of the EU’s language and multilingualism policy found that the official discourses oscillate between highlighting traditional cultural values like diversity and the right to education in the speakers’ first language on the one hand, and promoting economic values and ideologies on the other hand (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2011; Romaine 2013).

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