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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 373

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

‘A BADGE OF EUROPEANNESS IF YOU LIKE’: SHAPING IDENTITY THROUGH THE EU’s INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE ON MULTILINGUALISM

Authors: Zappettini, Franco
Submitted by: Zappettini, Franco (University of London, Birkbeck College, United Kingdom)

Adopting a social constructivist perspective and using Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997) this paper aims to illuminate the role of the EU’s institutional discourse on multilingualism in the construction and reproduction of Europeanness.

The research gathers data from a corpus of official speeches given by the European Commissioner for Multilingualism between 2007 and 2010. Data is analysed to identify how linguistic realisations sustain the major discursive topoi (Wodak and Meyer, 2009) related to (multi)linguistic ideologies and how these in turn feed into the wider discourses of  EU integration and identity.

Findings suggest that discourses on multilingualism - largely a recontextualisation of the Lisbon Treaty and other key policy documents - have been instrumental in drawing on cultural, civic and economic narratives to construct Europeanness as a sui generis identity thus reflecting the inherent tensions of the ‘Unity in Diversity’ philosophy and the market imperatives.  The discursive construction of Europeanness has primarily relied on a conflation of discourses organized around representations of multilingualism as both a ‘brought along’ (cultural) and a ‘brought about’ (civic) dimension of Europeanness.

At the same time Europeanness has been constructed in discourses related to the democratisation of the EU polity and its institutions through topoi of linguistic equality, communication and citizenship. These discourses have been instrumental in positioning Europeanness vis-a-vis other identities by claiming uniqueness for the normative recognition of the European in-group’s linguistic diversity as well as the legitimisation of the EU itself.

Finally it is argued that, whilst distancing itself from monist ideologies, through the constraints of its own institutional setup, the EU’ discourse on multilingualism has possibly nevertheless contributed to a reproduction of the nation-state vision of language and identity.