Linguae Europaeae

Ripple effect or what’s with English after the Brexit? By Zsuzsanna Fagyal The United Kingdom’s referendum in favor of its withdrawal from the European Union, also known as Brexit, was undoubtedly the biggest news about the European Union this summer. Its lesser-known ripple effect was the intense speculation in the immediate aftermath of the vote that English could lose its prominent position in Europe as a result of the Brexit. Such speculations were unexpected, to say the least. Before the Brexit, discussions about English in the European Union tended to focus on the opposite: a possible take-over of other languages by English. “ Should English be the only official language of Europe? ”, asked the Debating Europe blog space two years before the Brexit vote, eliciting thousands of passionate comments from experts and citizens who gave this question a serious consideration. Speculations about English’s purported loss of status in Europe were also surprising in light of stati...

Why is it important to celebrate a Day of Languages? – introducing the new Linguis Europae series of students’ blog entries for 2016­-2017  By Eda Derhemi (PhD) Languages are the house we as humans live in. They make us special and shape our world and ourselves. We are deeply concerned about the extinction of species, of fish, plants and animals, but we seem to feel more confident about the survival of languages, unless we live in small communities whose languages are threatened and we directly experience language death. Such communities are not rare and they show a remarkable diversity. But understandably, the more they lose their “voice” and therefore their culture, the less we hear from them or know about them; we lose forever a part of our knowledge, of our culture and our practices, and we lose the heart of what UNESCO considers “ intangible heritage. " With fewer languages we as humans are poorer. The Ethnologue’s 19th edition of Languages of the World, 201...

By Jessica Nicholas Jessica Nicholas is a PhD Candidate in the Department of French and Italian. Specializing in French Linguistics with a concentration in Romance Linguistics, she has a particular interest in language ideologies, variation, and education. Map highlighting Lesbos In the past few years, the Greek island of Lesbos has been featured in the international news as a frequent first stop on the path to Europe for refugees fleeing war in the Middle East and North Africa. Lesbos (also spelled Lesvos) is an island in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, only six miles from the Turkish mainland. Now a part of Greece, Lesbos has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years, with ruins dating from as long ago as 3200 BCE. Due to its location, it changed hands many times between kingdoms and empires of the Mediterranean, most recently the Ottoman Empire and finally Greece (Mavridis, 2016). This means that the island was routinely multilingual and religiously diverse, at l...