Linguistic challenges during the Covid 19 pandemic in European Union

Abstract

It seems that in the last few years the crises in Europe are at the order of the day, on each country’s agenda. From an economic crisis to a sanitary crisis and lately a security crisis, the European Union has to face different challenges. Communication in this period is very important in order to keep us safe and to be protected. During the Covid-19 pandemic European Union faced different linguistic challenges (Piller, 2020; Civico, 2021) that caused misinformation or lack of information among the people. As Marco Civico observes, “People with limited knowledge of the local dominant language may be excluded from information campaigns about measures to contain the spread of Coronavirus and vaccines.” (Civico, 2021:2) Linguistic diversity and multilingual communication in European Union is a reality, being one of its main objectives. However, the multingualism is challenging (Czyzewska, 2014) and one of the most important limitations in communication that came with the Covid-19 pandemic is the devaluation of minority and regional languages and the rise of English-centered multilingualism in the communication (Crnic-Grotic, 2020). Our paper will be structured in two main parts. In the first part we will discuss about the difficulties and challenges of multilingualism in European Union nowadays and we will focus on the multilingual communication during emergency situations (Civico, 2021). In the second part we will review the strategies adopted by European Union regarding the multilingualism during the Covid-19 pandemic and we will try to analyze how minority and regional languages were impacted by them. In both situations we will base our research on the official websites of the institutions of the European Union and on studies or articles already written by other researchers and scholars. On the basis of the findings of this review, we will propose a number of conclusions about the causes and consequences of the difficulties related to multilingualism in emergency situations. According to Ingrid Piller, Jie Zhang and Jia Li (Piller & all, 2020:503), Covid-19 crisis is a great lesson for us to open a space for intercultural dialogue and to better integrate the multilingualism in communication.

Keywords

• linguistic challenge
• communication in eu
• multilingualism
• communication in crisis
• communication during covid-19