The Genealogy of Multilingualism

Multilingualism is regarded as offering a solution to the problem of linguistic diversity in Europe, and has become a popular subject of study across different disciplines of social sciences. Moral and political philosophers wonder whether multilingualism is a good in itself and whether its adoption, in the European context, would not entail cases of injustice. Europeanist historians and historical anthropologists question the role played by languages in the creation of national identities and the potential consequences of adopting multilingualism in Europe. Political scientists focus on identifying the most efficient policies to achieve multilingualism and try to determine their political implications in terms of social integration. As for political economists, they carefully assess the cost-effectiveness of those policies for European institutions. Interdisciplinary teaches us that these different branches of social sciences study different aspects of a same reality, aspects that mutually enrich themselves and therefore contribute to deepen our basic understanding of multilingualism. But in order to secure this outcome, we must constantly fight the corollary and oft-neglected consequence of academic specialisation: a potentially detrimental distance between specialist’s findings and the unity of meaning enabling common research. The genealogy of multilingualism we offer in this paper precisely aims to restore such a unity of meaning while avoiding the trap of essentialism. Its objective is to help evaluating the variety of the underlying, implicit, and sometimes contradictory meanings of multilingualism.