The european union in cyberspace: Multilingual democratic participation in a virtual public sphere?
Authors: Wodak, R. and Wright, S.
Journal: Journal of Language and Politics
Volume: 5
Issue: 2
Pages: 251-275
eISSN: 1569-9862
ISSN: 1569-2159
DOI: 10.1075/jlp.5.2.07wod
Abstract:This article analyses the European Union′s Futurum discussion forum. The EU hoped that Futurum would help close the acknowledged gap between institutions and citizens by facilitating a virtual, multilingual, transnational public sphere. Futurum was both an interesting example of how the EU′s language policies shape the structure of deliberative experiments and of a public debate about their relative value. We combine various quantitative measures of the discussions with a critical discourse analysis of a thread which focused on language policies. We found that although the debates were predominantly in English, where a thread started in a language other than English, linguistic diversity was more prominent. The discourse analysis showed that multilingual interaction was fostered, and that the debate about language policies is politically and ideologically charged. © 2006 John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Source: Scopus