Linguae Europaeae

Poster for the anti-refugee Swedish Democrat party, a growing political group ( source ). By Sonja Brankovic Sonja Brankovic is a senior studying mechanical engineering at U of Illinois. She took ITAL 418 this past spring as a part of her International Engineering Minor in Germanic Studies. Sonja says: “This class has been unlike any other in European history and culture in that it has opened my eyes to marginalized perspectives I have never encountered before (even in personal travel and studying abroad). The course gave me a foundation to analyze historical language topics—the evolution of Basque’s codification, the ongoing linguistic de-Russification in the Baltic countries—as well as the ability to assess how the current refugee crisis will have an impact on the European linguistic landscape. This assessment is the main theme of my blog entry, and will hopefully give an idea of why the influx of Middle Eastern languages to Sweden is such a complex issue, and will continue t...

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...