Novos falantes numa Europa Multilingue: Oportunidades e Desafios
Globalization, increased mobility and transnational networking transform the linguistic ecologies of contemporary societies. This COST Action brings multilingual speakers into the focus of these processes by investigating the challenges and opportunities involved in acquiring, using and being understood as a “new speaker” of a language in the context of a multilingual Europe. New speakers, from this perspective, are all multilingual citizens who, by engaging with languages other than their “native” or “national” language(s), cross existing social boundaries, re-evaluate their own levels of linguistic competence and creatively (re)structure their social practices to adapt to new and overlapping linguistic spaces. The network facilitates structured dialogue and collaboration amongst researchers from three different multilingual strands: regional minorities, immigrants and transnational workers. Common threads across the different strands will be foregrounded, “new speaker” profiles will be compared across multilingual contexts and a holistic understanding of this new sociolinguistic paradigm will be developed, one that can help rethink how languages are managed at all levels including education, healthcare, workplace, family, community, the media, cyberspace and public institutions.
Network activities aligned with this Action will be carried out in three research phases, leading to the following outputs: a portfolio of new speaker profiles within each of the three multilingual sub-strands; identification of three main cross-sectional explanatory themes for new speaker practices, in particular those requiring additional research; identification of guidelines for policy changes and key research areas, teams and research projects that further enhance an understanding of new speakers practices in a multilingual Europe.
Coordinator:
Dr. Bernadette O'ROURKE (Heriot-Watt University)
Partners:
30 members (18 countries)