engleski

Multilingualism – English as a ligua franca and other second and foreign languages in Europe

Throughout history, the most positive effects of European multilingualism have been diverse cultural, scientific and civilization achievements. Since no complete population in any single European country has been monolingual, mutual influence and exchanges have been considerable, which led not only to linguistic contacts, but also to numerous exchanges of ideas and goods, inventions and other achievements. Current surveys show that Europeans still hold bilingualism and multilingualism in high esteem. In order to learn how such positive multilingual environment influences the usage of various languages in Europe and, more specifically, in Croatia, data from the EU and CE documents and other publications are analysed, presented and discussed in the light of the M + 2 Barcelona goal. The aim was to determine whether political decisions, in addition to an increasing official multilingualism within European institutions, coupled with ICT and audio-visual media present in the lives of European citizens, have influenced personal multilingualism (the actual usage of the second and third languages) in a positive way regarding the passive and active usage of those languages. Moreover, the position of English as a lingua franca in such an environment is investigated in order to establish whether there are changes in its significance and regularity of usage among European citizens due to their positive attitudes towards the M + 2 principle. An interpretation of the European results as compared with the Croatian data is given. With that in view, it might be important to envisage measures which could be undertaken to boost the usage and learning of the world languages as well as of the smaller and less- used European languages and non-European languages.

multilingualism; lingua franca; English; foreign languages; Europe

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