Linguae Europaeae

by Eda Derhemi In the beginning was the Word … As humans we are defined by and immersed in language. We often think of it as a simple means of communication, but, on deeper reflection, the way we see our language is much more complex than that. With the strengthening in recent centuries of the link between language and national identity (a link built and maintained subjectively through human interaction and interpretation), symbolic attachment to one’s language has also come to mean hate for the language of whoever was perceived as national enemy. Potentially that link could have remarkable power for social mobilization, cohesion and interaction. Joshua Fishman has written insightfully on the positive power of the symbolic link of language and ethnicity. But it can also be a reason for wars, and it is a favorite topic for political manipulation and propaganda. The mobilizing power of language understood as a symbol of group identity is much greater than that of language as the too...

by Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Eda Derhemi, Jessica Nicholas, Jui Namjoshi, and Alessia Zulato, bloggers and editors of this site Latin is not a dead language, Croatian is the newest official state language of the European Union, there are many sides to Catalan identity in Spain, Albanian is still spoken in some villages in Italy and Greece, and Maltese is also a language, not just a type of dog! In case you’ve ever wondered where all this kind of information can be found and how they fit together, you’ve just found the ideal blog site: log on to read us every other week! Today, on European Multilingual Blogging Day , we have the privilege of writing about ourselves, as Linguis Europae is celebrating its one-year anniversary. The idea of this site was born from the stubborn determination of getting students to write something fresh and new about European languages and cultures in the foreign language that they study. We are grateful to the EUC for the Foreign Languages Across the Curricul...

Jacqueline Yonover is a Global Studies major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She composed this blog entry in the ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ (GER  418) course in the spring of 2013. by Jacqueline Yonover Location of Cataluña Image Source   The Catalan language is a Romance language that is has been characterized by many years of conflict related to issues of identity among the Catalonian people (Gruyter, 2008). It is language that has always maintained linguistic, cultural, and economic differences compared to that of the rest of Spain (Cos Pujolar, 2006).   The origins of Catalonia’s contemporary linguistic controversy can be traced back to the dynastic developments, which began with the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and furthermore the unification of Spain in 1469 (Gruyter, 2008). The state of the Catalan language has changed continuously since the 1400’s—experiencing periods of dominance and also years...