Multilingualism as a new EU-strategy and the impact of European political border shifts on languages
Multilingualism as a new EU-strategy and the impact of European political border shifts on languages

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyses the relation between languages and borders. Borders can be political, economic, cultural, etc. but they can also be linguistic. Like all kinds of borders, language borders are dynamic and they highly depend on political border shifts. The article offers an overview of the historic development of languages and borders during the 19th and 20th centuries and its impact on language typology. It also offers a classification of cross-border languages and reviews language diversity in Europe while analyzing European multilingualism as a new strategy of the EU.

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