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EOP Editorials

Mar 2024

EOP Editorials

Tout a-t-il été dit sur les anglicismes et les emprunts linguistiques ?

La question des anglicismes provoque facilement des réactions épidermiques. Pour les uns, les emprunts systématiques à l’anglais sont dans l’ordre des choses et ils n’hésitent pas le cas échéant à invoquer la dette du français à l’anglais depuis que, par le fait de Guillaume le Conquérant (Hastings,1066), 50 % du vocabulaire anglais est dérivé du français du XIe au...

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Nov 2023

EOP Editorials

Is the language fascist?

"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,...

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Jul 2023

EOP Editorials

The language of Europe is plurilingualism. There is no alternative

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...

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Apr 2023

EOP Editorials

Long live Europe! But which Europe?

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...

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Jan 2023

EOP Editorials

"Europe without shores' and the global free flow of ideas

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...

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Oct 2022

EOP Editorials

Plurilingualism, a cultural revolution

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...

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Aug 2022

EOP Editorials

Languages and mathematics, the same battle!

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...

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Mar 2022

EOP Editorials

Plurilingualism and Universalism

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...

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Jan 2022

EOP Editorials

Plurilingualism: between diversity and universality

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...

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Nov 2021

EOP Editorials

  • anglicismes
Deconstructing anglicisation and anglicisms (II) – The linguistic sinks

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,...

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Jul 2021

EOP Editorials

  • anglicismes
Deconstructing anglicisation and anglicisms (I)

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...

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Apr 2021

EOP Editorials

Language, that unthought of

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...

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Oct 2020

EOP Editorials

Linguistic sovereignty? (III)

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...

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Oct 2020

EOP Editorials

Linguistic sovereignty? (IV and end)

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...

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Sep 2020

EOP Editorials

Linguistic sovereignty ? (II)

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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Jun 2020

EOP Editorials

Linguistic sovereignty? (I)

There is a lot of talk these days about "economic sovereignty". Could we talk about "linguistic sovereignty"? The word "sovereignty" is essential. If the concept itself appeared with the birth of the modern state and expresses the superior power of the state over any other kind of power, and since the state ceased to owe its existence to God, it had to draw its legitimacy from the people who are...

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Mar 2020

EOP Editorials

Can the state of the world change the linguistic order ?

Prenez soin de vous et de tous - Passen Sie auf sich und alle anderen auf - Prenditi cura di te stesso e di tutti gli altri - Cuida de ti mismo y de todos los demás - Ai grijă de tine și de toată lumea - Take care of yourself and of everyone else.   Can the state of the world change the linguistic order ? This is a question that one can legitimately ask, even if one does not have the...

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Jan 2020

EOP Editorials

A new dictionary on anglicisms

Why be interested in Anglicisms when you don't sacralize the language and try to preserve it as a museum piece. Because language is a living organ that structures our relationship to the world and which itself undergoes all the transformations and twists of the world. Speakers will therefore seek in its own resources or in other languages the means to understand and say or write what they have...

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Oct 2019

EOP Editorials

The time of plurilingualism

The Roman Empire was not monolingual, but bilingual, because the Roman elites discovered the full value of the Greek culture and language from which they drew their inspiration. Everyone knows Gargantua's letter to Pantagruel in Chapter 8 of Rabelais’ Pantagruel in which Gargantua, before even listing the long list of fundamental knowledge to be acquired in the sciences, arts, law, history and...

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Jul 2019

EOP Editorials

Views on Africa and the linguistic challenge

Views on Africa and the linguistic challenge On returning from the first World Congress of Francophone Researchers and Experts organized by ACAREF (Académie africaine de recherches et études francophones) at the University of Ghana, Legon, Accra, from 11 to 14 June 2019, it is natural to take a benevolent look at Africa. First of all, this congress, which attracted nearly 250 participants,...

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Mar 2019

EOP Editorials

Francophonie has a bright future ahead of it

March 20 is the International Day of Francophonie, an opportunity to take stock of this rather unknown reality. Some see it as a pure extension of the French language of France, whose future would be bleak. Others see it as a colonial legacy to be liquidated as a matter of urgency Or others imagine it as a literary empire, a major part of a world literary republic. We can extend for a long time...

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Jan 2019

EOP Editorials

Variations on the theme of "Plurilingualism and sustainable development" - 5th Plurilingualism European Conference - 4th call for papers (deadline : March 15, 2019)

If plurilingualism were simply to defend languages (in fact its language) as a kind of sacred object, a wonder of nature to be safeguarded at all costs, we would actually not have much to say. The reality is that languages are infinitely more than just a museum object. In Halte à la mort des langues (2,000), Claude Hagège simply points out that it is languages that make history possible....

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Nov 2018

EOP Editorials

"Plurilingualism in sustainable development", theme of the 5th European Conference on Plurilingualism, triple challenge: scientific, political and media (2nd call for papers - Deadline extended to 31 January 2019)

By establishing a web of links between languages and development, we are entering an area where language issues are rarely present, while many of the works on languages actually concern development issues. By choosing "sustainable development" as the theme for the 5th Congress, we questioned ourselves as linguists on the validity of the expression "sustainable development". As if "sustainable...

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Sep 2018

EOP Editorials

Grande consultation publique de la Médiatrice européenne sur l’emploi des langues au sein des institutions, organes et organismes de l’Union européenne

La Médiatrice européenne organise une grande consultation publique sur le fonctionnement linguistique de l’Union européenne. Si elle le fait c’est clairement parce qu’elle constate des dysfonctionnements réguliers et graves, ce qui légitime le combat que l’OEP mène depuis plus de douze ans, et c’est aussi parce qu’elle pense qu’il est possible de l’améliorer, ce qui est...

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