Linguae Europaeae

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...

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...