Past Event

Communicating Europe: “Hegemonic Multilingualism/National Monolingualism?”  Integrating Sociolinguistics, Language Policy Research and (Critical) Discourse Studies.

Professor Ruth Wodak
Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies, Lancaster University 
* 2012 FASS Distinguished Visitor  

In this lecture, I will discuss different theoretical and methodological approaches which are deemed adequate in analyzing, understanding and explaining multilingual policies and practices (and their history) in the European Union, taking the 6th EU framework project DYLAN as point of departure. Simultaneously, I will also discuss recent tendencies of re/nationalisation while focussing on the established hegemony of specific languages or by re-emphasising the national language and /or the language of the majority. 

In linking macro, meso and micro levels of investigation, it is worth reflecting on the current scope of sociolinguistics, language policy research, as well as (critical) discourse studies. Does it still make sense to draw distinct boundaries between different paradigms, schools, and approaches? Or would it make sense to transcend traditional boundaries in order to arrive at the best possible analysis and explanation? 

In my lecture, I thus first present the various theoretical and methodological approaches employed in analyzing multilingual practices in interactions inside European Union (EU) institutions as well as the policies which regulate and govern such practices and the language attitudes and ideologies underlying both regulations and practices. On the basis of vast fieldwork conducted in EU organizational spaces throughout 2009 (with the project team located at Lancaster), I then explore different types of communication in order to illustrate how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and officials at the European Commission practise and perform multilingualism in their everyday work (Wodak et al. 2011; Krzyżanowski & Wodak 2011). Here, I draw on existent sociolinguistic ethnographic research into organisations and interactions, and integrate a multi-level (macro) contextual and sequential (micro) analysis of manifold data (observations, field notes, recordings of official and semi-official meetings, interviews, and so forth). In this way, a continuum of context-dependent multilingual practices becomes apparent which are characterised by different patterns of language choice and which serve a range of both manifest and latent functions. 

By integrating the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with sociolinguistic ethnography, the intricacies of the increasingly complex phenomenon of multilingualism in transnational-organizational spaces, which are frequently characterised by diverse power-related and other asymmetries of communication, can be adequately coped with. 

About the Presenter

Ruth Wodak has held the position of Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK, since 2004 while remaining affiliated to the University of Vienna as Full Professor of Applied Linguistics. Besides many other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996. In 2008, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament and in 2010 received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Örebro in Sweden. In 2011, she was awarded the Grand Decoration in Silver for Services for the Austrian Republic. She is Past-President of the Societas Linguistica Europea, member of the Academia Europaea and corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Recent book publications include Migration, Identity and Belonging (with G. Delanty, P. Jones, 2008 [2011]), The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation (with H. Heer, W. Manoschek, A. Pollak, 2008); The discursive construction of national identity (with R. de Cillia, M. Reisigl, K. Liebhart, 2009); The Politics of Exclusion (with M. Krzyżanowski, 2009); Gedenken im Gedankenjahr (with R. de Cillia, 2009); The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (with B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill) and The discourse of politics in action: ‘Politics as Usual’ (Palgrave), 2nd revised edition (2011).