A Linguistic and Literary Perspective on Multilingual Societies

The Autumn School: A Linguistic and Literary Perspective on Multilingual Societies invites Bachelor's and Master's students, from the EUTOPIA Network and beyond, to reflect on the challenges that highly multilingual societies are faced with, and on the opportunities that such diverse societies can offer. We will address this topic from both a linguistic and a literary perspective, raising questions and opportunities that most cosmopolitan societies face in the 21st century:

• How do multilingual societies cater to the communicative needs of their population, including inhabitants who do not (yet) speak the official or dominant language(s)? Which approaches have been developed in multilingual societies to address the challenges of communicative diversity? How can language policy and planning remain manageable in a highly diversified linguistic setting? How do speakers themselves navigate their multilingual environment?
• How do multilingual societies stimulate cultural production in e.g. literature, music, film? What challenges do authors and artists face in multilingual societies? How does cultural policy address multilingual realities? Which bottom-up initiatives can we observe in the cultural sector?

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