Language Policy & the Multilingual City:
EUROMEC
2014 – present
“Identities in urban contexts: the European multilingual city”
In 2014 a Jean Monnet Network on ‘European Identity, Culture, Exchanges and Multilingualism’ (EUROMEC) was established. It aims to become a reference point for researchers in the themes of European identity, culture, European citizenship, exchanges and multilingualism. The network is coordinated by the Faculty of Philosophy, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, with the support of the “Jean Monnet” initiative of the Erasmus+ programme on the European Commission.
A major strand of the work, coordinated by Lid King, is a focus on identities in urban contexts – the multilingual, multicultural city, which we see as a key driver of the multilingual future. In this project we aim to increase our understanding of how the city is becoming part of networked new identity spaces where the meaning of ‘here’ is changing because it relates less to national hinterlands and more to preference networks, where the meaning of “neighbour” has expanded from a pre-industrial definition of the next village and a twentieth century definition of the bordering country to a global definition determined by air routes and migration patterns.
To this end we are engaged in an analysis of attitudes towards multilingualism among the educated young in 4 European cities – Dublin, Cracow, Sofia and Thessaloniki. This project is using “Q methodology” more commonly used in fields other than language policy, as a way of combining objective and subjective analysis. The initial results have been very promising and we aim to produce a review of this research as well as a major publication by Professor Joe LoBianco. The network will host a Summer School and Conference in Dublin on July 10-15, 2017.
This work is a continuation of research carried out by previous networks – LUCIDE, Language Rich Europe – which provided data from cities across Europe (and beyond).
