The role of LPLP in a changing landscape

Abstract

There seems to be a broad consensus nowadays among scholars, politicians, journalists and citizens at large that in the course of the last few decades, and particularly since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, linguistic and cultural diversity has moved to the forefront of public concerns. The prominence of linguistic and cultural diversity as a major social issue of our times is an interesting fact in its own right. Some fifty years ago, technical progress and economic growth were often assumed, particularly among cosmopolitan elites, to usher in a new era in human history, in which matters of language and culture would become little more than peripheral embellishments, or impediments, in the life and progress of modern societies. Despite social change (epitomized, in Europe, by the May 1968 movement) and emerging geopolitical shifts (illustrated by the evolution of the Vietnam war), belief in the unidirectionality of progress remained dominant. In many quarters, languages were essentially seen as problems, and those problems were meant to be solved – for example in the context of decolonization. However, things have turned out quite differently. Several momentous changes in recent history can help explain why questions of language and culture have regained such visibility. Without attempting an in-depth analysis of these changes and their respective impacts, we can identify three of them. The first is the geopolitical shift marked by the demise of the erstwhile Soviet Union. A rivalry between major powers that had, for most of the 20th century, operated as a structuring feature of the international geopolitical order has, though not exactly vanished, fundamentally changed. The dissolution of the Soviet Union at the turn of the 1990s has allowed the re-emergence and re-assertion of components of ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity that had often been discounted as passé or irrelevant. This re-emergence bears witness to the remarkable resilience of the linguistic and cultural facets of human societies. The second of these changes is embodied in accelerated technical progress, particularly in ICT, including automatic translation, together with the possible practical uses of these technical advances. The effects on diversity of technical