Towards openly multilingual policies and practices: assessing minority language maintenance across Europe (Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights)

Abstract

This volume is a monograph on the health of 9 Finno-Ugric languages in 12 communities across 8 European countries – communities that are numerical and linguistic minorities in their respective regions. The book is based on research conducted between 2010 and 2013 under the European Union-funded European Linguistic Diversity for All (ELDIA) project. In all, 3388 individuals from 13 minority-language groups, and 1460 individuals from majority-language or control groups from 7 countries were interviewed for this massive project. Each interview comprised close to 300 variables (p. 48). The book presents the ELDIA research outcomes using an analytic tool developed specifically for the project, the European Language Vitality Barometer (EuLaViBar), which provides a numero-graphical overview of the health of the minority languages assessed in various domains. The book is part of a series of monographs on Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights, edited by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, a name synonymous with Linguistic Human Rights (LHR) studies. The following review will summarise the contents of individual chapters of the book, and then critique the work in matters of overall content, graphical and textual layout and style, and its core argument.