Language and Identity in Europe

Figures

Figure 12.1. Knowledge of the European Union

Figure 12.2. Knowledge of European Union vocabulary items

Figure 12.3. How do you feel about learning more about the EU?

Figure 12.4. How do you feel about being an EU citizen?

Figure 15.1. Intensity of Turkey/PKK conflict vs Turkish migration policy responses

Tables

Table 5.1. Social networks and users/languages

Table 9.1. Search terms used across electronic databases

Table 9.2. Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Table 9.3. Primary themes

Table 12.1. Thematic field ‘My country and the world’

Table 15.1. Casualties in the government of Turkey/PKK conflict

Table 15.2. Migrants seeking international protection in Turkey since 1970

Acknowledgements

The editors wish to acknowledge the support of the European Commission’s Erasmus+ Programme¹ which enabled the EUROMEC Jean Monnet network to come to life as an active laboratory of European identities and multilingualism, ably co-ordinated by a team led by Professor Maria Stoicheva at Sofia University in Bulgaria. We are grateful to Ms Caitríona O’Brien, Mr John Egan and Mr Chang Zhang in Trinity College Dublin for their helpful contributions to the preparation of our manuscript. We also thank the reviewers who provided valuable feedback on early drafts of our manuscript. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the contributions of all the authors who worked with passion and patience as we compiled this volume.

Introduction

This book brings together research perspectives on the themes explored within the Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Network: ‘European Identity, Culture, Exchanges and Multilingualism’ (EUROMEC). The contributions that form this volume are the responses of rising European researchers to the challenges of language and identity in the context of a multilingual Europe. The Jean Monnet network that ran formally from 2014 to 2017, and continues in bilateral partnerships, aimed to build knowledge for researchers on the themes of European identity, culture, European citizenship, exchanges and multilingualism. The network was established and co-ordinated by the Faculty of Philosophy, Sofia University ‘St. Kliment Ohridski’, and supported by the Jean Monnet activities of the European Commission’s Erasmus+ programme.

The chapters that follow are the result of a formal call for contributions following EUROMEC’s third summer school (Trinity College Dublin, June 2017), which set its locus in the contemporary European city and explored the extent to which diversity, and in particular linguistic diversity, affects identity formation in the European context. The summer school provided an exciting opportunity for early career researchers from various areas within the arts, humanities and social sciences to engage actively in the study of identity in European urban contexts alongside a team of expert academic researchers from the world’s most eminent universities.

The Jean Monnet scheme is dedicated to promoting excellence in European Union (EU) studies worldwide. Jean Monnet activities have a history of more than twenty-five years and have provided support mainly to European integration studies in universities, involving more than 800 universities in nearly eighty countries of the world, thus becoming a major factor for promoting excellence in European studies and EU research. These projects aim to build bridges between academics, researchers and EU ←1 | 2→policymakers. The EUROMEC network brought together Jean Monnet chairs and researchers in the area of European identity, culture, citizenship, mobility and multilingualism, drawn from seven European universities (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland; Durham University, UK; the University of Luxembourg; Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; Matej Bel University, Banská Bystrica, Slovakia and Leuven University, Belgium) and Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. The network was co-ordinated by Sofia University in Bulgaria, and several of the chapters that follow reflect the high level of research activity at Sofia University on topics of European identity, culture and education.

The next three chapters explore case studies of European cities – Prato (Italy), Brussels (Belgium) and Plovdiv (Bulgaria) – where issues of identity and belonging are in flux. Prato is one of Italy’s most diverse small cities and is home to one of Europe’s largest Chinatowns. Piero Ianniello explains how Prato’s educational system manages the educational inclusion ←2 | 3→of migrant children. Brussels is similarly a site of pronounced social, ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity. Jingjing Li describes the Recyclart initiative, an innovative civic, bottom-up practice which is attempting to engage with the city’s development policy in the area of urban inclusion. Recyclart represents both an artistic space and a community which meets the needs of residents through the transformation of neglected public space in the city. The case study of the ancient city of Plovdiv explores connection and belonging with the city’s industrial past, and the creation of a new heritage community. Plamena Zayachka examines how Plovdiv’s citizens became actively engaged in the process of collective cultural preservation targeting the city’s former tobacco warehouses.

The next four chapters examine the theme of language and identity. Chapter 5 moves from physical city space to the virtual multilingual city. Denitza Gencheva describes a corpus study of code-switching in the Bulgarian-language community on Facebook, which is predominantly bilingual (Bulgarian-English). In this online community, she argues that speakers of lesser-used languages may be compelled to adopt the use of majority languages in order to participate fully in the digital arena. Vihren Evgeniev Mitev takes this area further in the next chapter, where he draws on the work of Judith Harris to elucidate a theory of personality, which addresses the importance of language in the process of its formation, according to research in the field of philosophical anthropology. Chapter 7 continues with the theme of language and identity and addresses the case of Moroccan immigrants and their direct descendants in post-war France. Reporting on an ethnographic study, Yacine Chemssi compares the process of linguistic identity negotiation among the early Moroccan Muslim immigrants’ generation and that of first French-born descendants’ generation in post-World War II France. In Chapter 8, Bronagh Ćatibušić broadens the discussion of language and cultural identity beyond the metropolis in her review of issues related to Syrian refugee resettlement in Ireland. She considers some implications of resettlement for both refugees and host communities outside major urban areas.

The next five chapters turn to matters of language education policy and practice. Kathleen McTiernan, Aoife Parkes and Lorna Carson report on a systematic review of approaches to multilingual education in the ←3 | 4→primary sector in Europe’s schools. Desislava Karaasenova addresses transnational academic mobility in the academic sector, reporting on an interview study of Bulgarian scholars who travelled to the United States under the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program. She examines the effect of culturally conditioned assumptions and orientations on their actions and reactions during their mobility. Continuing with the theme of academic training, in Chapter 11, Nikolina Tsvetkova and Nadya Birezhakli investigate the role of language in doctoral training in the European Higher Education Area. Drawing on a corpus of qualitative data collected among doctoral students of social sciences at Sofia University in Bulgaria, they identify key aspects of Ph.D. education related to first and second language use and explore the role of language in developing perceptions of belonging within a research community.