Linguae Europaeae

By: Fengming Lu Editor: Zsuzsanna Fagyal-Le Mentec (Associate Professor, French, UIUC) Fengming Lu is a native of China and a fluent speaker of Swedish and other European languages. He was a graduating senior in Political Science in the spring of 2012 when he was enrolled in the European Union Center’s ‘Language and Minorities in Europe (418)’ course and composed this informative blog entry on languages in Sweden. Image Source Whenever I mention in the United States that I have studied Swedish as a foreign language, I am often asked the following questions: “Really? Do they have their own language? Do they speak English as their official language, too? Do they speak three languages, French, German, and Italian?” I bet those who ask last question are confusing Sweden with Switzerland. These questions may sound strange but they reflect the fact that people know very little about languages in Sweden. So, here are some general facts. The official state language of Sweden is Swe...

A review of El bilingüismo en el mundo hispanohablante (Bilingualism in the Spanish-speaking world) by Silvina Montrul. by Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez is a Ph.D student in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at the University of Illinois where she is conducting her research in Basque-Spanish bilingualism. The author of this book, Professor Silvina Andrea Montrul , is a Professor in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois. She is the director of the Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab (SLAB) and the founder and director of the University Language Academy for Children . Editor: Jessica Nicholas (PhD Candidate in French) Source: United World College Maastricht Geography wiki What is common between a Catalan, a Basque, and a Galician from Spain? Try this: all three speak a local language at home and so-called Spanish (Castilian) in school and at work. Tru...