New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges

Globalization, increased mobility and transnational networking transform the linguistic ecologies of contemporary societies. In this COST Action the aim is to bring multilinguals into the focus of these processes by investigating the challenges and opportunities involved in acquiring, using and being understood as a “new speaker” of a language in the context of a multilingual Europe. New speakers, from this perspective, are all multilingual citizens who, by engaging with languages other than their “native” or “national” language(s), need to cross existing social boundaries, re-evaluate their own levels of linguistic competence and creatively (re)structure their social practices to adapt to new and overlapping linguistic spaces. The network facilitates structured dialogue and collaboration amongst researchers from three different multilingual strands: regional minorities, immigrants and transnational workers. Through the network, the Action will foreground common threads across the different strands, compare “new speaker” profiles across multilingual contexts and develop a holistic understanding of this new sociolinguistic paradigm that can help to rethink how languages are managed at all levels including education, healthcare, workplace, family, community, the media, cyberspace and public institutions.