Posted by Sabine Ehrhart on April 15, 2011
 
By Sabine Ehrhart, associate professor in ethnolinguistics, University of Luxembourg.
 
What is linguistic ecology?

Luxembourg – Photo : LeJyBy (cc)

Just as ecology studies the bonds between living elements in a given space, linguistic ecology studies the bonds between languages, or rather between the people who speak certain languages, within a given area.

Thus linguistic ecology includes a dynamic vision of languages, centered on humans and their social interaction; a crucial change compared to many other approaches of language science, which have tended to focus on linguistic systems and their inner mechanisms.

Most recently, linguistic ecology has found an application in the school environment, and carries the promises of new solutions to the challenges that are faced nowadays. Indeed, linguistic ecology studies the links between the languages of school as well as those of the society surrounding school, and therefore it is able to suggest perspectives in education policy and linguistic development, with an aim to improve the chances of a large number of pupils.
 
Luxembourg, home to one of the richest linguistic diversities in Europe

Luxembourg is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in Europe, a linguistic diversity that can be explained by the country’s location at the heart of the continent as well as by significant immigration movements along the 20th century.

Another specific feature of Luxembourg is that the languages spoken there aren’t shared over different geographical zones: instead, they coexist actively in everyone’s life. A phenomenon we have called multiplurilingualism.

At school, pupils first use Luxembourgish in the lower grades, then German is introduced with the acquisition of basic literacy (around 6), and thirdly, French is introduced from the age of 8.

To these three main languages can be added the learning of foreign languages: English, Spanish, and sometimes Italian.

Also worth noting are the heritage languages of the immigration children, spoken at home by nearly half of the pupils.

Luxembourgeois, allemand et français : trois langues pour un pays. – Photo : Ingo Schandeler

The LACETS project

This is the context that gave birth to the LACETS research project (Langues en contact dans l’espace et dans le temps et leur impact sur le milieu scolaire – « Language encounters in space and time and their impact on the educational environment ») at the University of Luxembourg, a project engaging an ecolinguistic approach.

In the course of our research, we have observed and analyzed different models that involve linguistic and cultural diversity at school:

– tutoring in Luxembourgish,

– parallel courses in Portuguese at school hours, for children from the country’s large Portuguese community (accounting for 80% of the pupils with a foreign background),

– tutoring in other migrant languages outside the schooling sphere,

– overall valorization of all the pupils’ languages, unlimited to the official languages of education.

We have followed different classes at preschool and primary school level over a four-year study, to reach the conclusion that involving all of the languages brought by the children was more advantageous for all the participants and all the languages than focusing on only one.

This involvement could be somewhat symbolic for some of the languages, at specific times of school life such as greetings, or through ‘bon appetit’ and ‘happy birthday’ songs. The fact that all the languages were allowed to resonate in the context of school granted some degree of freedom to the children, including when it came to learning other languages such as those of the education system, or those spoken by their classmates.

Detailed assessment of the results is still in process, especially in regards to skill development in each of the languages involved (that of home, of education, etc.), this will be extended through the naturalink research project launched in April 2011.