The goal of this research project is to examine language ideological debates throughout the period 1970-1990 in two international organisations, the Council of Europe and the European Union, from a critical sociolinguistic perspective. Their discourses on multilingualism and their recommendations for language teaching have shaped language policy in education in many European contexts since. Therefore, this sociolinguistic project seeks to historicise current language ideological debates and language-in-education policies in Swiss cantons and Catalonia in Northern Spain where the two researchers are based.
This collaborative project aims to generate new knowledge on the discourses of multilingualism that ideologically construct a “rise” or “decline” of languages at a key socio-political and historical juncture in Europe. We will analyse and compare the data collected in two international organisation archives, both physical and online, to paint a broader picture of language ideological debates in Europe and their impact on different regions. This comparative account of language discourses and policies will allow us to avoid the pitfalls of methodological nationalism, which takes the nation-state as the taken-for-granted unit of analysis and obscures the transnational circulation of discourses.