The Meeting between Foreign Languages. The Linguistic Hierarchies in the Language Policy Discourse in Denmark, France and Germany.

The European societies of today are multicultural and multilingual, and greatly influenced by the meetings between foreign cultures and languages – meetings which are more or less rewarding or conflict-ridden. The intercultural and interlinguistic foreignness may be characterized as constitutional and graduative: Cultures and languages may be characterized as more or less foreign (see foreign language vs foreign languages). Hence follows issues of cultural and linguistic hierarchism, recognition of languages and their discrimination.
The dissertation, which is based on sociolinguistic and discourse analytical studies, will analyse the representations of foreign languages in selected Danish, German and French language political texts from 2004 and 2005 and the coice of languages in danish, german and french public schools. The main interest lies with language ideology and the linguistic hierarchies which manifest themselves in the three societies.