Artificial intelligence is a major global concern today, and the question we must ask ourselves—beyond the scientific issues—is: How shall we coexist with artificial intelligence? How will the different cultures of the world adapt to it? The challenge is both fascinating, and for some, exciting, but also unsettling. What we have absolutely no right to do is criticize, challenge, or oppose it...
The European Conference on Plurilingualism (https://assises. observatoireplurilinguisme.eu/accueil), organized since 2005 by the European Observatory on Plurilingualism, is a triennial event that brings together researchers, public and private decision-makers, civil society actors, economic, social, professional, and educational leaders, and ordinary citizens, to clearly address linguistic issues...
European universities have a duty to promote both European identity and the diversity of languages and cultures in Europe. Under the guise of international education, university courses taught exclusively in English have developed throughout Europe, which amounts to a form of economic and cultural hegemony whose long-term consequences could be disastrous. The circulation of knowledge is...
Les universités européennes se doivent de promouvoir à la fois l'identité européenne et la diversité des langues et des cultures en Europe. Sous couvert d'enseignement international, des enseignements universitaires uniquement en anglais se sont développés dans toute l'Europe, ce qui s'assimile à une forme d'hégémonie économique et culturelle dont les conséquences à terme peuvent...
During a lively dinner debate, my conversation partner asked me what plurilingualism is. I replied, in accordance with the usual definition, that plurilingualism is the ability of a person to use at least one language other than their first or mother tongue adequately. However, this answer seemed a little short to me, and I remembered a lecture given by Heinz Wismann in Brussels in 2008 in which...
The 7th edition of the European Conference on Plurilingualism will take place in Paris on May 20, 21, and 22, 2026, more than twenty years after the first edition (Paris, October 2005). In L’économie du 20e siècle (The Economy of the 20th Century), French economist, historian and philosopher François Perroux stated that "we do not have a comprehensive, coherent and usable theory of what I...
Between 2004 and 2007, ten countries that had previously belonged to the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia and the USSR, joined the European Union, politically, but militarily, they joined the Atlantic Pact and its integrated military component under American command and armament, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Negotiations, in accordance with the unwritten language rules of these two...
This is a hitherto little-developed, yet essential, approach. Yes, plurilingualism, when we take a close look at the concept of language in terms of both its educational scope and everyday life, reveals a social dimension which deserves attention. We take as our starting point the practical case which has recently emerged that levels of literacy (language) and numeracy (mathematics) are falling...
It is, of course, the Cité internationale de la langue française, and the title was inspired by Heinz Wismann's magnificent book Lire entre les lignes1, which I highly recommend. This will be our Ariane’s thread through the monument that is the CILF. The ambition is immense, concerning the French people, but also and mainly all those outside France who share this language. Villers-Cotterêts...
The issue of anglicisms easily provokes instructive reactions. For some, systematic borrowing from English is the natural order of things, and they do not hesitate to invoke the debt owed by the French langage to the English langage since, thanks to William the Conqueror (Hasting, 1066), 50% of English vocabulary was derived from French between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Some people...
"Language, as the performance of all language,is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist." Rereading Roland Barthes' inaugural lecture at the Collège de France (7 January 1977)1 We would like to talk about the inaugural lecture given by Roland Barthes at the Collège de France on 7 January 19772. It was in this communication that Roland Barthes described language,...
The language of Europe is plurilingualism. There is no alternative The former Commissioner for Education and Multilingualism, Androulla Vassilliou, liked to say that plurilingualism was in Europe's DNA. And she was right. You only have to read some of the articles of the founding regulation adopted unanimously by the members under the Treaty of Rome, Regulation No. 1 of 1958, to be convinced of...
As we approach Europe Week, the week which includes two anniversaries, that of May 8, 1945, the end of the Third Reich, and that of May 9, 1950, the date of Robert Schumann's founding speech, how can we talk about Europe today in a world in turmoil, where the balance of powers is being reconfigured, where the fate of Europe is marked by the return of war and bizarrely hostile slogans expressing...
We have defended in previous editorials the point of view that ideas and languages cross the political boundaries, not that because political boundaries do not play a role, but because boundaries have never been watertight and political power is an important actor, but one among many. We have borrowed the expression from the title of a famous work published in 1954 by the economist, historian...
We must move away from monolingualism. When, in the wake of the first European Conference on Plurilingualism (Paris, November 2005), the organisers decided to create the European Observatory on Plurilingualism, people were a long way from imagining where the choice of the term "plurilingualism" over "multilingualism" would lead us. Unlike the Council of Europe, which is the true creator of the...
A recent survey published by the daily newspaper Le Figaro1 , revealed that according to a 2013 memo from the Ministry of Education's Statistics Directorate, 40% of CM2 teachers reportedly said they had received no training on the French language, its learning and teaching. This is troubling, to say the least. Then it was the Express, in its 30 June 2022 edition, which published an alarming...
When we created the European Observatory for Plurilingualism in 2005, we had no idea that the issue of languages and plurilingualism could be at the heart of a political and philosophical debate absolutely fundamental for the present and future. Our initial questioning was provoked by a very rapid phenomenon which marked our European linguistic space. On the one hand, it was the fact that within...
Language and language have had a prominent place in philosophy since antiquity. However, the problem of linguistic diversity appeared with Leibniz, Vico and Humboldt. Two closely related questions have always been raised: the link between language and the "real world", and the question of universality, which seems to join the "search for the perfect language", which tends to be confused with...
Deconstructing anglicisation and anglicisms (II) – The linguistic sinks1 Among the 3.8 million viewers who watched the debate between Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Éric Zemmour on the French channel BFMTV on 24 September, some may have noticed, to their surprise, that the expression "fact-checking" came up about fifteen times in the mouths of the journalists and the debaters, who were surprised,...
Deconstructing anglicisation and anglicisms (I) 1 The term "deconstruction" triggers emotions and passions pitting the demolitionists' clan against the conservatives'. Critical activity is as old as philosophy. If we want to act, we must first understand. To trace the critical approach back to the origins of philosophy is in fact to mobilise the most recent layer of the human mind, which is...
In his inaugural lecture on general linguistics at the Collège de France on 26 October 2020, the linguist Luigi Rizzi observed that "language is a central component of human life. We live immersed in language. We use it to structure our thoughts, to communicate our thoughts, to interact with others, but also in games, in artistic creation. Its omnipresence, paradoxically, makes language...
In a first editorial we showed that linguistic territories did not generally coincide with political territories and that the relationship between language and politics was a complex one. To say that the influence of a language is directly linked to political power is true only to a certain extent. In a second editorial, we tried to show that linguistic awareness is a new idea, closely linked to...
We have come to the end of our investigation into linguistic sovereignty. We have seen that languages cross borders in many ways, although they are always rooted in territories, even when they have characteristics of common languages or lingua franca. Unlike economic properties which must be disposed of when they are passed on to someone else, in the case of languages and everything they carry...
In our previous editorial, we made it clear that language was not at all the means of communication that a narrow conception of language has managed to impose, but the immense power it has always been. The idea of bringing "sovereignty" and "language" closer together may come as a surprise since sovereignty is simply the basis of international relations and the UN is founded on the sovereign...
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