Linguae Europaeae

Image: Erin O'Malley on Flickr By Elizabeth Lorentzen Elizabeth Lorentzen is a senior from Arlington Heights, Illinois, studying Speech and Hearing Sciences. She is also completing a minor in Italian Studies. With approximately 5 million speakers, the Sicilian language is vigorously used throughout Sicily and its satellite islands (Lewis, 2016). However, there are still numerous people who believe Sicilian is merely a dialect of Italian, not its own distinct language; the Italian parliament has failed to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and Sicilian is not recognized by the national law 482 which recognizes and protects 12 languages and dialects spoken in Italy. Additionally, Sicilian is not standardly used in schools, nor is it commonly written or read by the people who use it in daily life. According to the UNESCO rankings, Sicilian is a vulnerable language, meaning there is limited language use at home by a portion of the population; me...

Photo by Jorge Guerrero, courtesy of Yahoo! Could sound-change in language contact situations threaten a language? The case of Spanish-Catalan bilingualism By Stephanie Landblom Stephanie Landblom wrote this blog entry for the course “Language and minorities in Europe” (FRIT 418) in Spring 2016. She is a graduate student in Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include second language acquisition with a focus on second language phonological acquisition. Despite the fact that bilingualism and multilingualism is a common phenomenon across the world, it is often mired in controversy. For instance, much has been said about whether being bilingual puts speakers at a cognitive advantage or disadvantage, which is especially relevant to parents trying to raise their children in a global society, immigrant parents, as well as for governments considering linguistic educational policies. Decades ago, it was widely believed that bei...

English Usage by Dutch Speakers on Facebook By Andrew Van Marm Andrew Van Marm wrote this blog entry for the course “Language and minorities in Europe” (FR/IT 418) in Spring 2016. He is a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign majoring in Political Science, and has a special interest in the geographic and linguistic history of the European continent. Minority languages are particularly interesting to his work, as they represent the cultures of Europe that were once widespread. Among the countries of the European Union, English holds a special place in the Netherlands. According to the European Commission (2012), "at a national level English is the most widely spoken foreign language in 19 out of the 25 [EU] Member States." Out of these 19, the Netherlands has one of the highest proportions of English speakers at 90%. In comparison, the percentage of English speakers in the United States is 94%. (U.S. Census Bureau, 2007) This makes the Netherlands a...

Exploring the Erasmus Experience: Participating on exchange may impact intercultural competency By Juliane Micoleta Julianne Micoleta wrote this blog entry for the course “Language and minorities in Europe” (FRIT 418) in Spring 2016 as a rising senior, majoring in Political Science and minoring in Global Studies. Boasting a budget of 14.7 billion euros and more than four million opportunities to study, train, gain experience, and volunteer abroad, the European Union’s Erasmus Program works towards providing life-changing experiences to thousands of Europeans every year. First established in 1987 by the EU, the premise of the Erasmus program is to provide students, registered in higher institutions, within the EU foreign exchange options to study abroad, according to the Erasmus program website . Now, nearly 30 years later and set to last until 2020, the Erasmus program does not have opportunities for just students anymore. Combining seven other programs, it now houses oppo...

Internet Interference: The Linguistic Ambidexterity of the World Wide Web and the Dying Languages By Rebecca Demski Rebecca Demski wrote this blog entry for the course “Language and minorities in Europe” (FRIT 418) in Spring 2016. She is a sophomore in Communications at UIUC, and is particularly interested in telecommunications and linguistics. It’s no mystery that the introduction of the Internet in the 1990s revolutionized the world; its genesis was akin to that of the printing press. Communications were an obvious target susceptible to change and with communications, so to, languages. Approximately 3 billion people have access to the Internet (Chang). A little less than half of the global population has formed and made a digital footprint, so to speak, simply by means of existing. What about the other three-fifths? The other excluded 4.2 billion people are threatened because they have no voice in the ‘conversation’ amongst users taking place. Only about 300 of the 7,100 la...