Description of a European language preservation Ecosystem

All European countries are multilingual, i.e. more than one language variety is used in each. Each language exists in an ecosystem: in relation to other languages and non-linguistic factors that affect language use: e.g. policies, education, inter-group relations. Some ecologies are healthy and support sustainable multilingualism, but more often linguistic ecologies are unbalanced and disadvantage minority languages and their speakers. Languages become endangered when speakers abandon them for a language that is associated with a more powerful group or with social advantage, or because the speakers suffer from discrimination. This deliverable aims to describe and analyse the ecologies of all the case study languages, utilising and developing the framework developed by Calvet (1998). Some of these languages are crossborder languages and so have a more complex ecosystem; this is fairly common in Europe and worldwide. These analyses will give an overview of how languages and their groups are playing important roles on international, European and regional level and what their levels of intervention are, also in order to identify pathways of support and decision making on the one hand and useful connections and networking opportunities on the other. We also aim to identify common patterns in order to produce generalisable recommendations.