Multilingualism As Social Policy: Assessing the Fairness of the EU’s Language Regime

This presentation deals with the evaluation of the fairness (or linguistic justice) of the current language policy of the European Union (EU). By linguistic justice, I mean the distributive consequences of language policies on the relative position of citizens. More precisely, I address the following question: what would be the distributive effects on European residents of a change of the current multilingual language policy of the EU, founded on the formal equality between 24 official languages? Using statistical analysis and a comprehensive dataset provided by Eurostat in 2013, I correlate data on the knowledge of first and second languages of EU residents with data on their age, income, education and social status. I calculate the percentage of EU residents who do not understand a given language by country and by socio-economic status. Then, I use this percentage as an indicator to identify who would win and who lose if a restrictive language policy were adopted by the EU (e.g. an English-only or and English-French-German language regime). Results reveal that a drastic reduction in the number of official and working languages of the EU would disadvantage not only (and quite obviously) the residents of some countries; it would also be particularly detrimental to EU residents with a low level of education and low income, and to the socially excluded. Hence, providing multilingual communication through 24 official languages can contribute to the social cohesion in the EU. This presentation presents the results of a two-year research project funded by the European Commission.