Conference Agenda

This paper explores the management of European multilingualism as carried out by the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO). This office is, among other things, responsible for recruitment of staff for the European institutions. Since approximately 2004/2005, several Member States have taken legal actions against such competitions in which the EPSO repeatedly attempted to pre-determine the language choices on certain applicants’ behalf. This research concentrates on a series of mutually interconnected cases which were gradually decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) over the past 15 to 20 years. The main research question concerns the extent to which the choices of the second language for such open competitions are, or are not allowed to be limited to English, German and French, which also holds for the course of the competitions themselves. Special attention is paid to the status of German in these procedures as well as to the issue of how unequivocally the CJEU supports linguistic diversity in its judgements. The theoretical and methodological basis for the research is Language Management Theory (Kimura/Fairbrother 2020, Dovalil 2022), according to which language management is defined as various agents’ behavior toward language. Although the social status and power of the crucial agents (European institutions, Member States, CJEU) are determined by legal regulations, their interests often diverge.

References:

Dovalil, Vít (2022): Metalinguistic activities as a focus of sociolinguistic research: Language

Management Theory, its potential, and fields of application. Sociolinguistica 36/1, 35-53.

Kimura, Goro/Fairbrother, Lisa (eds.): A Language Management Approach to Language

Problems: Integrating macro and micro dimensions. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John

Benjamins

The establishment of modern nation-states has closely intertwined language policies and the widespread implementation of modern educational systems. Despite its geography encompassing diverse linguistic and cultural groups, Iran selected only Persian as the official, national, and educational language as part of the nation-building process with the establishment of the modern state in 1925. After a century-long process, recent research indicates that children from linguistic minorities attribute their high dropout rates and poor academic performance primarily to the lack of education in their mother tongues (Modarres, 2009; Kalantari, 2011). The deprivation of education has particularly adversely affected girls. In an interview in 2017, the Deputy Minister of Education reported that 50% of girls in border regions were forced to drop out of school from high school onwards and were unable to continue their education. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the negative experiences encountered by Turkish women in Iran who were deprived of education in their mother languages within the Persian educational system.

This research, conducted as part of a doctoral thesis defended in 2022 (Kabiri, 2022), involved semi-structured interviews with Turkish women aged over 18 residing in the cities of Tabriz and Hoy. These women belonged to various age groups, educational levels, socio-economic statuses, and employment statuses. The study results indicate that due to the stigmatization, failures due to Persian education, psychological pressure, experiences of inequality, and the covert and indirect prevention of the language even when punitive methods are removed, Turkish women in Iran faced degradation due to their mother tongues, leading to linguistic genocide (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000).

Kaynakça

Kabiri, H., (2022), The Role of Turkish Women in the Process of Identity and Language Transfer in the Context of the Policies Implemented in Iran, Hacettepe University, Sociology Department, Phd Thesis.

Contemporary Iran is estimated to be home to 75 languages. Yet, since the rise of Persian nationalism over the past century, the State’s language management and policies have granted the official status to the Persian language and script alone, having led to regulations prohibiting any public use of non-Persian language and script in signage (Mirvahedi, 2019). Against this backdrop, this paper investigates ideological and political indexical meanings of the de jure and de facto policies as well as grassroots practices by ethnic minority groups with respect to writing and choice of script(s) in Iran. I draw on different government policy documents, and samples of writing on social media and linguistic landscapes by different official and private social actors in different parts of the country. I would showcase how the State’s monolingual language policies are undermined by the political and economic situations imposed by sanctions over the past decades, on the one hand, and how this, in turn, has provided space for commodification of ethnic minority languages to attract tourists from the neighbouring countries. While this could be implied and interpreted as identifying with the co-ethnic population just across the borders, thus a threat to the national unity, the State has swallowed its pride and remained silent to benefit from multiscriptal writing by ethnic minority groups (Heller & Duchêne, 2012)

Morocco is a multilingual and multicultural postcolonial country. The Amazigh, Arab-Muslim, African, Mediterranean cultural legacy, and French and Spanish colonization, make the region a linguistic field that resists any kind of categorical or final analysis. Four main languages are used in Morocco: Darija (Moroccan Arabic), the largest spoken variety of the country, Standard Arabic which is a combination of Classical and Modern Arabic, Tamazight, which has three distinct varieties: Tarifit, Tashelhit and Tasusit, French which is of a wider use in the school system, the administration and the media. In addition to these, Spanish is used in the north of Morocco, and English is gaining ground especially in higher education. This multilingualism is further fraught with linguistic phenomena such as diglossia and triglossia (Youssi 1983), quadriglossia (Ennaji 2011), and even poliglossia (Fasold 1984). All these factors make Morocco an intensely conflicted linguistic area and cause a set of socio-cultural problems that influence the policy of language implementation. The Moroccan post-independence Constitution made Standard Arabic the official language of the country; but, with the rise of the Arab Spring in 2011, the government granted Tamazight the status of the second official language; however, none of these two languages assumes this responsibility because they are not used in all public sectors. The overriding aim of this paper is to provide a descriptive, critical, and synthetic survey of the diversity, dynamics and policies of language, as well as the different types and levels of linguistic planning that are currently taking place in Morocco. The paper also endeavors to contribute to the field of LPP by proposing some guidelines for a multidimensional model that could suit the problematic multilingual contexts such as Morocco, and open new horizons for LPP to expand its theoretical perspectives.