Les argumentaires du plurilinguisme

Plurilingualism seems to have become a cause célèbre over the past decades in Europe. Nobody advocates monolingualism, even the British, who have practically eliminated languages from their curricula. This means that plurilingualism does not mean the same thing for everyone. In this paper, we are going to review a number of arguments put forward in favour of plurilingualism by the Council of Europe and various communities: the Anglophones, the speakers of less widely used and less taught (LWULT) languages, the specialists in intercomprehension, the militant plurilingualists, and finally, the French. We shall show that behind the rhetoric, each community is trying to press on with their own interests. European institutions have up to now failed to acknowledge the conflicting linguistic interests of their members and this probably explains why they have been unable to develop plurilingualism. This paper argues that any conflicting interests as there are should be carefully acknowledged so that Europeans can eventually design a language policy that will allow for the development of each language according to history and ambition. We shall give realistic guidelines for a global European language policy which can be adopted by each country and tailored to its own needs. We shall illustrate this with two examples: French, also valid for German and Italian, and Romanian, also valid for the less widely used languages.