Language marketing in Europe

(eng) History has witnessed various initiatives for language planning and policy, such as standardisation and normalisation through institutions as the Académie Française or the Real Academia Española. Recently, language scientists and planners have acknowledged that in addition to mother tongue speakers foreign language speakers also increasingly determine the importance of a language. Acknowledging this new battlefield, EU languages try to gain more importance through language marketing efforts. I will first discuss the concept of language marketing (Domínguez 1998) and highlight the particular difficulties of promoting a language and culture abroad in an area where the language is not supported by a legislative power or only to a limited extent, as opposed to more traditional language planning and policy initiatives which are implemented within a state’s own territory (Cooper 1989, Kaplan & Baldauf 1997). In order to concretise these differences, I will focus on the British Council, the Alliance Française and the Instituto Cervantes in a European context. My presentation will include a description of their structure - discussing the link with a nation-state, the type of activities organised and special attempts concerning the European Union (in its composition before and after the 2004 enlargement) programmes, officials and actors - as well as an assessment of the efficiency of the initiatives and language marketing in general. Finally, I will present CICEB, the umbrella organisation of various language and culture organisations in Brussels. I will discuss its reason for coming into being as well as the difficulties and opportunities it presents for a language and culture promotion conglomerate at supranational level. In my conclusion, I will highlight the particularities of the marketing of foreign languages and cultures in the European Union and I will link the difficulties of this concept to broader cultural and sociological concepts such as the concept of nation-state and consociationalist theory.