The Erasmus student mobility programme allocates three explicit objectives to the experience of spending a few months studying in another European country: to benefit educationally, linguistically and culturally; to promote co-operation between institutions; and to contribute to the development of a pool of well-qualified, open-minded and internationally experienced future professionals (European Commission,1996). However, although not stated as one explicit objective, the programme has sometimes been referred to as one of the most powerful tools of European integration. However, little research has been done so far on how this may alter students' attitudes towards aspects of identity and feelings of citizenship. In this light, our study intends to cover this area of research by means of a set of quantitative and qualitative measures to determine the extent to which the Erasmus experience affected the sense of self as European citizens among a cohort of students from the University of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain), their position towards the notion of European citizenship and how this relates with the development of their plurilingual competence. Quantitative measures are based on the results of two questionnaires, one before and the other after the study abroad experience, whereas qualitative data were obtained through the analysis of discussion groups focusing on aspects of European vs. national identity and citizenship.

European higher education institutions are in general highly committed to internationalization, seeing it as providing ways into the global education market, as an indicator of academic excellence, and for generating income. In multilingual settings, minority languages are not always given adequate consideration in this process and may be a source of tension and ambiguities in the local communities and universities. We report part of a study of international and home students at universities in two bilingual contexts: the University of Lleida (Catalonia) and Cardiff University (Wales). They were asked about their understanding of what an 'international university' is, and also how they saw the implications of internationalisation in the universities for the respective minority languages. Results show some differentiation amongst the student groups. For example, in the case of the first item, the Lleida home students associated international universities with opportunities for travel, exchange, and employment advantages far more than the other groups. And in the case of the second, international students at Lleida showed greater negativity and opposition towards the minority language than other groups. Findings highlight the difficulties in reconciling the vitality of minority languages with the forces and priorities of internationalisation.

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The topic of the internationalisation of academia has recently attracted attention from sociolinguists and language policy scholars. In this paper, we 1 compare two different universities from two contrasting contexts in Europe in order to find out more about their projected stance (Jaffe, 2009) and attitudes towards the different languages present in their immediate contexts. In particular, we compare the University of Tartu (Estonia) with the University of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain), analysing several key parameters. The purpose of the comparison is to contrast, from a sociolinguistic point of view, the higher education setting of two medium-sized language contexts in Europe (Vila & Bretxa, 2015) with different demolinguistic and language political features. The results show that both institutions adopt a similar stance in connection to their respective national language (a protectionist attitude), but they take different approaches towards the other societal language and English. We read these differences in light of the broader historical and socio-political backgrounds, which we suggest are reflected in the microcosm of the universities here analysed.