Institute for the Study of European Transformations (ISET) Other Europe: agents of transformation-ISET - HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication dans un congrès Année : 2008

Institute for the Study of European Transformations (ISET) Other Europe: agents of transformation-ISET

Résumé

As David Crystal points out in The future starts here ", see http://www10.gencat.net/casa_llengues/binaris/parlament_David_Crystal_EN_tcm303-50901.pdf, three sociolinguistic revolutions occurred in the nineties and are evolving today at swift pace: i) globalization of English as a world language, ii) sociolinguistic "death" for roughly more than half of the world's languages in the next half of the century, and iii) the rise of Internet as a global medium. Two additional revolutions could be mentioned: iv) the rise and fall - and particularly, the collapse - of pluralistic language planning in former or new confederative zones, as in ex-Yugoslavia and Russia, but also Central and Western Europe; v) increasing immigration flows all over the world, entailing new challenges for multilingual integration in the "First World" countries, where xenophobia and racial polarisation are strengthened by a strong return of Jacobin and chauvinistic attitudes. In this presentation, the author tried to show trough a theory of integration and disintegration applied to multilingual contexts how populism and nationalism thrive on a distortion of facts: endangered languages actually suffer much more from national chauvinism than from the expansion of English as an international Lingua Franca, which may be considered as an asset for a more connective and tolerant world; Internet turns out to be a widely open medium to linguistic minorities, and plays an outstanding role in fostering diffusion and elaboration of languages such as Kaszub or Frisian and many endangered languages, though we should not rely only on virtual spaces for the support of sociolinguistic pluralism; while some minority languages as Welsh and Basque are experiencing a significant sociolinguistic revival through language planning, a whole set of languages previously protected by federative states are entering a process of assimilation in Eastern Europe. As far as immigration in Europe is concerned, integration is most often understood as mere assimilation, while integration is a complex process depending on the balance of four kinds of inclusive and exclusive trends in society (assimilation, pluralism, separation and segregation), determined by at least three independent factors (structural, as citizenship and linguistic identity; functional, as social mobility, job opportunities and bilingualism; attitudinal, as tolerance). Unfortunately, the populist mind bets more on assimilation and overt functional and attitudinal segregation than on pluralism and tolerance, heading towards a disintegrative approach to new demographic and socio-cultural patterns induced by globalization. With the weakening of national state and social welfare induced by economic globalization, national statesmen actually can afford a certain amount of national disintegration more easily than in the past fifty years, while populism thrives on division, polarisation and conflict, often encouraged by bewildered voters. We should expect a counter-cynical program from social sciences, in order to fight back the new rhetoric of semantic shifting (e.g. the wrongly construed equations integration = assimilation, or multiculturalism = disintegration, while most of the so called "multicultural policies" are actually undermined by covert separation and segregation). New conceptual tools are needed, such as a genuine Integration Theory, and new forms of axiology in order to unveil of the three major strategies of the populist mind: conceptual shifting, subjective polarisation and role inversion.
Loading...
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

halshs-00762881, version 1 (08-12-2012)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-00762881 , version 1

Citer

Jean Léo Léonard. Institute for the Study of European Transformations (ISET) Other Europe: agents of transformation-ISET. International Colloque, Jan 2008, United Kingdom. ⟨halshs-00762881⟩
58 Consultations
0 Téléchargements
Dernière date de mise à jour le 28/04/2024
comment ces indicateurs sont-ils produits

Partager

Gmail Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Plus