The EU Policy on Institutional Multilingualism: Between Principles and Practicality

This article brings to light several inconsistencies within the narrative of the EU policy on institutional multilingualism. The EU has invoked fundamental EU principles of democracy, equality and transparent government, to publically bolster the need for its institutions to communicate and operate in the languages of its citizens. However, these principles do not allow for the pragmatic and budgetary arguments that the EU uses to justify the in reality limited number of official and de facto working languages of its institutions. The article argues that this disagreement could be resolved if the narrative of the EU's language policy would include the objective that all European citizens master any of the languages that the EU institutions use. In that light, the article recommends that further research is done into the question whether the EU should accept or even encourage the spontaneous development of English as a de facto pan-European lingua franca.

The sociolinguistic situation of ǂHoan, a moribund 'Khoisan' language of Botswana

In 2010, we conducted a sociolinguistic survey on the moribund 'Khoisan' language ǂHoan (Ju-ǂHoan), spoken in Botswana at the fringe of the Kalahari Desert. The survey aimed at investigating language use, degrees of multilingualism and language attitude among the ǂHoan speakers. Data collection was done on the basis of a questionnaire. We found that the positive language attitude of individuals towards ǂHoan often conflicts with the community's attitude towards this language, resulting in a split of actual language use between the family and more formal situations. All ǂHoan speakers are at least bilingual speaking the local lingua franca Kgalagadi (Bantu) besides ǂHoan. Most of them are in fact even trilingual, speaking Gǀui (Khoe-Kwadi) in addition to ǂHoan and Kgalagadi. Most of our results stand in line with an earlier sociolinguistic survey on ǂHoan by Batibo (2005a) which was carried out in 2003. In comparing Batibo's results to ours, changes in the sociolinguistic situation of ǂHoan as well as differences between the different villages will be pointed out.

Review of "Lingua e diritto. Livelli di analisi"

The book Lingua e diritto: Livelli di analisi brings together contributions by scholars from different fields: anthropology, theory and philosophy of law, comparative law, European law, translation, discourse analysis, pragmatics, morpho-syntax and cognitive linguistics. Contributions deal with a number of issues situated at the interface between language and law: questions of meaning and the interpretation of legal texts, the nature of legal interpretation, problems of ambiguity and vagueness in legal texts, the characteristics of legal language, legal terminology and the multilingualism of European law. As a whole, the book provides insights into a number of different topics and perspectives situated at the interface between language and law. It is of interest both to lawyers and linguists as a valuable and very welcome contribution to the field of legal linguistics.