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The Normalisation of Multilingualism Across Europe

In this presentation, I will discuss the spread of multilingualism across Europe, and whether or not this is normalised. In this context, I will use the word ‘normalised’ under the definition of being not unusual, or expected, with the consideration of if it is celebrated or even tolerated within both officially monolingual and multilingual nations. I am interested in how an officially multilingual nation operates both at an individual level and a societal level, and will observe this particularly within the context of nations such as Switzerland. In doing so, I will look at terms like ‘diglossia’ and ‘code switching’ to see how individuals interact within these multilingual communities, and comment on the fluidity of multilingualism within European society. In an extension of this, I will also attempt to distinguish the terms ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’ from one another semantically, to interpret whether or not multilingualism within Europe can be perceived as normalised by its citizens. In this study, I will analyse the political discourse of the media to assess the public feeling towards multilingual communities within Europe. As well as this, I will refer to resources such as census data and other statistical data to support my study. The main settings observed in this talk will be schools across Europe, accessed through the literature of researchers within the field, as these are particularly useful for this study, given that several different communities are merged together within these environments, which are generally presented under the guise of monolingualism. I will then refer to the European legislation on language education policies, and explore how these policies operate in context. From my study, I argue that the spread of multilingualism is normalised across Europe to an extent, however whether or not this notion is positively received remains open for discussion in this paper.