engleski

The European Union: A Babel of New Languages and Cultures

As a supranational political organization, today's expanded European Union covers most of the European states. If we recall Umberto Eco's statement that Europe begins with the birth of its vernacular languages and Europe's critical culture starts as a reaction to their flourishing, clearly Europe long ago encountered the "drama of fragmentation of languages", that is, multilingualism. It was "first a Babel of new languages and only after that a mosaic of nations." The formation of the EU continued the process: in the public sphere regional languages, like regional cultures, better their relative status thanks to the "Europe of regions" principle. Indigenous minority languages also expand, but so do the non-indigenous ones termed "temporary" or "currently represented", among them such non-European languages as Arabic, Chinese, or Turkish. Living on Community territory, all such languages contribute, each in its own way, to the creation of a complex European identity which is by definition multicultural and multilingual. Such an identity, to be sure, existed in Europe before the Union, and hence still exists even now in those countries which are not or not yet EU members. In the amalgam that we call "European identity" all the individual identities interact and perpetuate themselves on another level, creating new linguistic, cultural, and other hybrid identities. Each language community's contribution to creating the modern European identity is, as expected, proportional to its place on the social ladder, yet that is not the only relevant factor, since the boundaries between languages and cultures are neither sharp nor impermeable – this is the message of interculturalism. Although the international EU both indirectly and directly promotes its multilinguality and interculturalism, attitudes toward languages and everyday practice show just the reverse – a hierarchy of languages and cultures, and a monolingual pattern as a result of the dominant ideology of the majority.

languages; cultures; multilingualism; interculturalism; European identity; EU

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