Linguae Europaeae

by Costanza Vallicelli Costanza Vallicelli is a MA student in Italian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the future, Costanza hopes to continue her graduate studies and become a professor, specializing in understudied Romance languages and heritage speakers. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. On Sunday mornings at Bethany Church, also known as Biserica Betania, a Romanian Pentecostal church in the northern suburbs of Chicago, dozens of people, most of them of Romanian origin, gather for the Sunday service. At the entrance of the church, people of all ages greet each other in a mix of English and Romanian. Once the service starts and the entire congregation joins together to celebrate their faith, their language of choice is one, and unified: Romanian. The church leaders conduct sermons in Romanian, the choir sings in Romanian, and members of the congregations pray aloud in Romanian. They might not be aware, b...

Image by MLbay by Dalton Ascone Dalton Ascone is a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, majoring in Linguistics, and minoring in Teaching English as a Second Language. Upon graduating, he hopes to remain in academia to pursue his research interests, which include bilingualism, second-language acquisition, and language maintenance in diaspora communities. He wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. The names of the participants have been altered in order to protect their anonymity. The Iranian diaspora is diverse and widespread, but if one were to try to describe one trait that unites all its members, it is this: they live their daily lives between a rock and a hard place. Between the broken immigration systems of their nations of residence, the endless coils of red tape they are forced to dance through, and the delicate geopolitical situation of their homeland, for some, the stress is so overwhelming that it becomes mund...

Figure 1: Swedish flag and geographical location by Mariam Abushamaa Mariam Abushamaa is a recent UIUC alum and incoming law student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She majored in linguistics and hopes to become a lawyer, using the skills she learned from studying language and assisting in research projects at the University of Illinois in her future career. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. Sweden is known for being one of the most accepting countries of new immigrants, but recent proposals may reflect a change in this attitude. For example, new proposals, such as one limiting the rights to publicly funded interpreters, may cause a lot of new roadblocks for immigrants to Sweden who do not speak the language fluently (“Proposed Limits on the Right...”). Imagine for instance a healthcare system that is completely free to everyone, and suddenly your access to free healthcare is hindered because of your inability to speak Sw...