Das Forum Language and Society ist eine Reihe von Gastvorträgen zu Themen der Soziolinguistik. Doktorierende der GSH können sich die Teilnahme als Zuhörende mit 0,25 ECTS pro Vortrag anrechnen lassen.
This contribution aims to show how state and nationalist interests are embedded and reproduced in the construction of “linguistic diversity” in a complex of power relations within an international institution, namely the Council of Europe. As part of this discussion, I analyse two successive emblematic discursive events produced within the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe: Recommendation 814 on Modern languages in Europe from 1977 and Recommendation 1383 on Linguistic diversification from 1998. Drawing on a sociolinguistic and genealogical discourse analysis approach, I show that the imagination of European linguistic diversity is not timeless but dependent on and adaptable to societal conditions and to (inter-)state relationships of power whose dynamics run society. The analysis of the debates constitutes a contribution to the understanding of specific historical moments and the shaping of language ideologies in an interstate institutional context aiming at constructing Europe. It also allows us to grasp the continuity of the Council of Europe’s current discourse on linguistic diversity – and its management – in relation to its discursive, thus ideological, anteriority.