The European Union: on the Path to Linguistic Equality or Hidden Language Monopoly?

The article discusses the use of diff erent languages in the development of documents in the institutions of the European Union. It is explored by measuring various aspects of competition between languages. Measuring instruments are the polylingualism coeffi cient, the language integration index and the index of language monopolization. The purpose of the article is to determine the impact of integration processes in the European Union on the competition of languages and to assess the using of languages in the production of original documents in the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union, as well as in the proceedings of the Court of Justice of the EU. The linguistic capital of the population of the Union is also assessed on the basis of the proposed author’s original methodology. The results of the research show that there is a strong trend towards an increase in language monopolization in all of the above mentioned EU institutions. The diff erence is that EU judges favor the French language, while the European bureaucracy prefers English. The author thinks that the EU member states that joined European integration after 2005 is a serious factor. They hastened the monopolization of the English language. The EU population aged 15 and over shows the opposite trend. Their level of linguistic competition was growing. The reasons for this were the recent waves of expansion of the Union and migration. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that the conditions for the growth of language competition have changed in the EU. If by 2000 it took place in the environment of stable bilingualism of the population of the Union, then in 2005 and 2012 it is characterized by the dominance of monolingualism with trends of its further growth. The European bureaucracy can continue to strengthen the economic motivation for learning English and position it as “minimally ethnized” and the only intercultural communication medium in the EU. In this sense, Brexit is more likely to be a factor not so much weakening as a further strengthening of the competitive position of the English language in the Union.

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