From Babel to Brussels: European Integration and the Importance of Transnational Linguistic Capital

Abstract

His main fields of interest are: comparative cultural sociology, European integration, sociology of the public sphere. His most important book publications include Cultural Overstretch? Differences Between Old and New Member States of the EU and Turkey (Routledge 2007); The Name Game.

Multilingualism and European Identification

“…The Eurobarometer questionnaire asks respondents about their mother tongue and then about all the languages that they speak well enough to have a conversation. Until now, this has been the main source of comparative data on ML across Europe (e.g., De Swaan ; Gerhards ), although self‐reports of ML are often inaccurate and include systematic bias (Edele et al. ).…”

“…Numerous authors (e.g., Anderson 1983;Brubaker 2013;Gellner 1983;Hobsbawm 1992) have noted that the centrality of communication for economic and political organization in modern society turned language into a major cultural marker of ethnic and national identity, even though it is not necessarily the main or only one (e.g., Cornell 1988;Lopez and Espiritu 1990;Wimmer 2002) The onset of the second wave of globalization has transformed society's linguistic requirements and multiplied opportunities to learn languages (e.g., Gerhards 2012;Luo and Shenkar 2006). In a world in which transnational corporations operate in different countries, where international exchange increases exponentially, where millions of people are able and willing to move for short or long periods of time, and where long-distance communication across space is both easy and cheap, the demand for and prevalence of people who are fluent in various languages have increased dramatically.…”

Cosmopolitan cultural consumption: Preferences and practices in a heterogenous, urban population in Switzerland

“…As Bourdieu has nicely shown, the ability to speak the national standard language without accent is a form of capital in national fields like the labor market or the educational system (Bourdieu, 1990). With the increasing transnationalization of social relations and economic exchanges, the geographic range of the linguistic market has increased, and the ability to speak foreign languages therefore has become a major form of linguistic capital (Gerhards, 2012;Rössel and Schroedter, 2013). The market for linguistic capital is not restricted to labor markets or the educational system, but foreign language proficiency is, in many cases, a necessary condition for trading, working, loving or marrying internationally.…”

“…With the increasing transnationalization of some social fields, cosmopolitanism is no longer focused on the national but on the transnational and even global level, whereas the locals are mainly interested in the local and national arena (Hannerz, 1990;Fligstein, 2008;Meuleman and Savage, 2013). Thus, the terms locals and globals have to be understood in relation to the existing social fields and their geographical spread (Gerhards, 2012). In lifestyle and consumer research the issue of cosmopolitanism dates at least back to the 1990s, when Holt (1997) (Prieur and Savage, 2013;Roose et al, 2012;Meuleman and Savage, 2013).…”

Transnational linguistic capital: Explaining English proficiency in 27 European countries

“…As the world system consists of different nation-state 'containers' (Taylor, 1994) and as most nation-states have different official languages, participation in globalisation is among other things dependent on people's ability to speak the languages of others. Two forms of what we call transnational linguistic capital can be distinguished (Gerhards, 2012). 2 One can simply count the number of foreign languages a respondent speaks.…”