NEW SPEAKERS IN A MULTILINGUAL EUROPE: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES
Our work is linked to broader discussions around multilingualism and linguistic sustainability in Europe and other parts of the world.
Globalization, increased mobility and transnational networking transform the linguistic ecologies of contemporary societies.
These issues have been explored by members of the New Speaker Network, funded under the auspices of EU COST (2013-17). The aim of the network has been to bring multilinguals into the focus by investigating the challenges and opportunities involved in acquiring, using and being understood as a “new speaker” of a language in the context of a multilingual Europe.
From this perspective, new speakers are multilingual citizens who, by engaging with languages other than their “native” or “national” language(s), need to cross existing social boundaries, re-evaluate their own levels of linguistic competence and creatively (re)structure their social practices to adapt to new and overlapping linguistic spaces.
The European-wide network facilitates structured dialogue and collaboration amongst researchers working across different multilingual strands:
Regional minorities
Immigrants
Transnational workers