Language and a Continent in Flux

Abstract

This article introduces the present forum edition on linguistic identities in twenty-first-century Europe. We consider how discourses of inclusion and exclusion, embedded in discourses of the nation, continue to be relevant in understanding and interpreting the social, cultural and political status of (minority) languages and their speakers. In order to introduce the various studies that comprise this forum, we relay how language debates provide a lens through which wider systems of prestige and hierarchy may be focused. Such debates can, at one and the same time, both alter and reflect the meanings and interpretations of Europe itself.