Language and Society

The interdisciplinary research project ELDIA began in March of this year. Coordinator Anneli Sarhimaa tells us how the project hopes to contribute to a better understanding between the different languages in today’s Europe.

Professor Sarhimaa, the interdisciplinary research project you are coordinating is called “European Language Diversity for All”. Why “for all”?

The focus of our project is the way we all handle majority and minority groups. So all of the people involved with the social reality that emerges from this interaction should also be able to contribute to it.

How to languages interact?

Majority and minority groups interact with each other just like regional languages, national languages and international lingua francas. Languages interact via the people who speak them. They can therefore affect each other, for example when certain elements from one are borrowed in another or the two compete in certain areas of our culture.

The stated goal of the project is to develop systematic and universal methods for describing, measuring and evaluating the displacement powers, if you will, of the different European languages…

Yes, with the European Language Vitality Barometer – EuLaViBar for short – we are trying to develop a multidimensional model that can demonstrate the various facets of the social, lingual and legal situation of Finno-Ugric minority languages, for example.

What criteria did you use to select the 14 language communities to be evaluated?

The languages we selected cover the whole spectrum of minority languages and are therefore ideally suited to the development of a universally applicable vitality barometer. Among the languages to be researched are historically as well as recently arrived minorities, but also ones in which both of those apply such as Finnish people living in Sweden. There are also languages on both sides of the East-West border and some with either established or very new written languages.

What will the research be like from a practical perspective?

Our statisticians work with the other researchers on the project to develop a statistically sophisticated tool to do random sampling. At first, a standardized questionnaire will be tested in a pilot project. That questionnaire will explore which languages are spoken in the respondent’s family, which one he/she speaks in which situations, how majorities and minorities see themselves, and how they feel they are seen by others, for example.

Then, the questionnaires will be sent to a representative selection of people. Our field researchers will also be doing video interviews that will be evaluated, and the case studies that come from all this work can then be directly compared to each other due to the consistency of the methodology.

In addition, lawyers and sociologists will be taking part in this interdisciplinary research. The lawyers will be looking at regulations imposed on the language groups we are studying, in particular the special laws regarding minorities, but also universal laws for all citizens. The sociologists will be carrying out media analyses in order to extract topics of discourse that are relevant to the project.

How does ELDIA differ from other research projects on the subject of multilingualism in Europe?

Multilingualism in Europe is mostly analyzed with regard to competition between national languages and international lingua francas, for example the relationship between French or German and English. And if minority languages are studied, the focus is typically on the members of the minority.

What we are doing is involving the national and international lingua francas as well as the minority languages and taking into consideration members of both the minority groups and the majority groups. Our project covers more angles than previous projects.

Does it touch on the rivalries between languages as well?

Of course languages compete with each other. Depending on the social realms in which a language is used, it potentially enters different parts of our lives and can even supplant the existing language.

In our project we want to study the vitality of European languages, including the direct and indirect competition with other languages. But we don’t want to assess that. We want to focus more on how both minorities and majorities deal with and make decisions regarding language.

To what degree will the results of the project be transferrable to language realms outside of Europe?

The EuLaViBar should be universally applicable. By selecting a wide swathe of scenarios we will have already covered a lot of possible points of departure for future research. In addition to its universal applicability and transferability, the barometer will also be conceived such that the structure of ELDIA can be used but that any necessary adjustments can be made for researching other languages.