LINGUISTICS IN GLOBAL EUROPE

In the days of economic crises, the idea of Europe as a Common
Home is being threatened and with it the idea of a European
Community in the sense of a European Identity and a set of
Common European Values. Thereby, European cultures and
languages are important components for common cooperation
and mutual respect of each other’s linguistic and cultural
background. Anyone who is multilingual and can speak and
understand more than one language will realize what the
European idea of the unity of cultures and languages in Europe is
about. There is no question concerning the existence of such a
common European unity, linguistic community and European
identity in the European communication between ethnic groups
and political systems, containing not only a linguistic, religious,
legal and technical basis but also the great amount of common
historical and social traditions in law, religion, social behaviour
etc.
The topic of this article will cover the development of linguistics
in Europe for the last years. It is therefore a summary of some
experience with efforts to Europeanize the science of language.
There is a tendency to criticize the social and political demise of
linguistics research during the past few years, but nevertheless to
point out the great prospects and possibilities of linguistics in
global Europe is no doubt of great importance. Linguists today
must be a completely new type of language science with wide
perspective in dealing with the languages of Europe and without
thinking of languages and cultures in Europe from a rather
limited national point of view. The world famous Ferdinand de
Saussure defined man’s multilingual capacity to learn, understand
and speak several languages as “la faculte du langage” (Saussure
F. de, 1990). He believed it to be a wonderful gift of man. Indeed
the monolingual view of man’s cognition as proclaimed by
traditional, structural and generative linguists was a fallacy.
Eurolinguistics has arrived as a new orientation and as a
challenge to people who are calling for a renewal of general
linguistics away from the obsession with empty formalism and
away from endless pragmatic and cognitive linguistics. What
brings Eurolinguists together now is the opening of a completely
new type of linguistics, for which time, space and social
dimensions play an indispensable role for linguistic descriptions.
The very term “Eurolinguistics” containing the prefix Euro- is as
such a challenge, because it forces us to a much broader Europewide perspective in dealing with the languages of Europe.
A new branch of linguistics has established itself in research but
has remained unrecognized or ignored in the mainstream of
today’s educational policy at the university level, both by the
educational establishment itself as well as the majority of the
established linguists. Politicians and educators have also
neglected the interaction of European languages and cultures,
especially concerning the study of linguistic minorities and their
languages, in spite of their assurances. Substantial economic
support in the form of new chairs and research funds for minority
languages are rare, because funding of new Eurolinguistic
projects and scholarly acceptance of the Europe-wide orientation
have hardly been forthcoming in European countries. Mothertongue education and English dominate the whole didactic field
in the schools and universities in spite of the proven advantage of
the spread of bi- and multilingualism for European
communication as an alternative to English.
Furthermore, even the growing number of publications on
language contact and conflict together with numerous
Eurolinguistics conferences and workshops throughout western
and central Europe have had little effect towards a
Europeanization of present-day language teaching.
Most young Europeans with a tertiary education remain
completely unprepared for European matters in politics,
economics and social challenges in thinking and acting European.
It is up to us after the shift of the millennium to create new
conditions for a fundamental reform in educational planning for
Europe. Such an overall educational plan for Europe does not
exist yet. Such a plan should, however, include all the specific
major and minor linguistic and cultural characteristics of the
European peoples, which all-European countries and ethnic
groups share together.
The foremost goal of this educational plan is to introduce
Eurolinguistics as a subject in its own right, which is only one
part of the Europeanization process for schools and universities.
Keywords: linguistics research, new perspective of the European
languages, monolingual national research, multilingual capacity
to learn, to promote a multilingual goal, Linguistics in Global
Europe.