2.1. Language as an ideological construct

TThe European Union brings together 27 countries whose citizens belong to different cultural circles. Some of them are relatively homogeneous, while others are an amalgamation of many ethnic groups and cultures, speaking different official languages or a whole range of dialects and vernaculars of the country’s official language. Some of them have the status of ethnic (regional) languages or official auxiliary languages spoken by a local national minority. At the communicative level, the efficient functioning of such a community requires the implementation of language policy and its appropriate promotion in the member states. These, in turn, may have their own ambitions in this regard and not always fully implement the general assumptions. Considering the context of the present study, this chapter also focuses on Poland’s policy as a member state of the European Union. We present the problems of all linguistic divisions, and given the context of these considerations, we refer to learning mobility, which serves to implement the assumptions of language policy on the one hand and contributes to the cultural and linguistic integration of the residents of the European Union on the other.

As already mentioned, language is a vital element of the identity of social, ethnic or national groups, also in historical terms. It is therefore unsurprising that nations fighting for autonomy or rebuilding their statehood often find the revitalisation and strengthening of the role of their language to be of great importance. Within these nations, there are also strong tendencies towards language standardisation. This is the case with the Ukrainian language in Ukraine and the language of the Basques living in the territory of Spain, both considered guarantators of a distinct national identity. The language policy of both Ukraine and the Basque Country is aimed at complete codification of the language, defining its legal status, dissemination and validation. Similar claims are made for the “Kashubian language”, which used to be a local dialect, but after long discussions, supported by linguistic research and promotional campaigns of the Kashubian community, achieved the status of a regional language, i.e. an ethnolect (Act of 6 January 2005 on national and ethnic minorities and on the regional languages, 2005). In fact, in all these cases one can speak of a melting pot of various dialects – from the sociolinguistic point of view – or a set of linguistic practices on a given territory, i.e. languaging – from the point of view of ecolinguistics (Lankiewicz, 2014) – which, due to political and social reasons, was unified and standardised into a distinct language to maintain a distinct ethnic or national identity.

One of the regions of Europe where linguistic divides are a direct outcome of political activity is the Balkans. The “Serbo-Croatian language”, a linguistic term used to collectively define the language practices of the former Yugoslavia, has been broken down into four separate standards used to define the ethnic (or national) identity: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. In fact, all these mutually understandable varieties are one language (its written form uses the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic or both). Linguists point out that they stem from the same dialectal group and the differences between them are smaller than those between the varieties of European languages still used in postcolonial countries or overseas territories (e.g. English, Spanish, Portuguese; Kordić, 2010).

Apart from linguistic disputes about the distinctiveness of individual languages, one may be tempted to say that today’s separation or coordination of languages is a result of language policies of specific countries, and more precisely, the result of the political activity of a given ethnic, social or political group. History offers many examples in which language policy played a significant role, with varying degrees of success, in efforts aimed at territorial unification and building national identity.

A strong tendency toward linguistic standardisation and unification is demonstrated by nationalist movements, which deem language to be not only a tool for building a sense of cultural and national distinctiveness, but also a propaganda instrument. For leaders such as Benito Mussolini or Franciso Franco, imposing a language standard was supposed to evoke a sense of community in a specific group and temper separatist movements or tendencies. On the other hand, the consistent use of the top-down propagated “newspeak” served indoctrination purposes. In his theory of cultural hegemony, Antonio Gramsci (1971[1991]) emphasised that the most subtle way to control, one that does not require the use of direct means of coercion, is the ideologisation of language.

It can also be concluded that many languages were granted the status of a language quite arbitrarily, and such decisions were often due to political reasons and resulted from divisions and aspirations that were not strictly related to the distinctiveness of the communication code. This is why contemporary linguistics often substitute the word “language” with “languaging”, which has at least two meanings. On the one hand, it refers to the fact that in spontaneous communication language users, in principle, do not limit themselves to one linguistic repertoire but use all the linguistic resources available to them. On the other hand, individual languages are seen as a continuum: the more distant the linguistic centres (in the sense of the standard usage of a given language), the greater the lexical, syntactic or phonological differences between them. Examining language issues from a sociolinguistic perspective, some researchers point