A first panel will investigate the implications entailed by the commitment to multilingualism in the European Union on the level of both policies and politics. The discussion will bring together contributions addressing these implications from a bottom-up perspective, focusing on actual multilingual practices from below and the link between individuals’ language repertoires and their civic identities, and analyses adopting a top-down approach, exploring the evolution of EU language policies and the recent shift in framing from a civic to an increasingly utilitarian direction in discourses advocating multilingualism.

In this way, the discussion aims to tackle the tension that exists between the utilitarian and instrumental dimension of language on the one hand and the cultural and identity dimension of language on the other – a tension that is not only present in the actual language policies implemented but also explicitly or implicitly in much of the existing literature, and which has remained largely unexplored.

By raising the question of the compatibility between the use of a lingua franca as means of communication with the preservation of the existing linguistic diversity, the contributions will more largely engage in assessing alternative future policy scenarios allowing to overcome the English versus multilingualism dichotomy prevalent in the existing debate on European language policy.