EDITORIAL | REDAKTORIAUS ŽODIS

Abstract

On the threshold to the third decade of the 21st century communicative competences have been increasingly gaining importance not only as an indispensable and omnipresent component of individual professionalism and dignity but also as an indivisible part of the overall humanistic values. We are living through the times of a gradual and highly revealing transition away from segmenting languages into ‘native’ vs. ‘foreign’, ‘ours’ vs. ‘theirs’, ‘lingua francas’ vs. ‘the less widely taught or used ones’, ‘the prestigious’ vs. ‘the marginalized’ and ‘the powerful’ vs. ‘the powerless’. This transition of blurring the lines will hopefully lead us towards languages in harmony and synergy at one’s personal disposal, or in one’s personal plurilingual repertoires, which used skillfully can result in harmonious and peaceful multilingual living and learning environments. Such progressive approach is still mostly visible at the conceptual level in academic contexts but has also been gaining momentum through integration into the EU political agenda and projects. Much of this transition has been spread with the release of the 2018 Companion Volume of the Common European Framework of Reference with the new descriptors even more focused on cherishing and celebrating linguistic diversity on a personal, community or society level. The descriptors of 2001 had already introduced a ground-breaking innovation of abandoning the deficiency approach in language learning and teaching and embracing a motivation-driven ‘can do’ technique opening the way to appreciate every bit of communicative skills one continues to compile as a life-long endeavor. Through the accurate elaboration on plurilingual and pluricultural competences, CEFR 2018 made a big leap forward not only at the interactional level, demonstrating the versatility and dynamics of one’s plurilingual repertoires, but most importantly at the value level engendering equity and appreciation of every linguistic resource: be it English as a global skill, Lithuanian as the language of schooling or Turkish as a heritage language in a big European metropolis.A few European initiatives are well in place to be mentioned at this point. To opt for an inclusive and harmonious society it has been understood that social inclusion must necessarily be paired with linguistic inclusion achieved by ‘teaching through a multilingual lens’ (Cummins and Persad, 2014) or linguistically sensitive teaching. Hence LISTIAC project1, commenced in 2019, has assumed a mission to be ‘here for change’ in the awareness, attitudes and actions of scholars and policy makers as well as current and future teachers of general education. It has also been understood that the plurilingual competence being of a complex and dynamic nature itself has broad potential for its exploitation in various professional and multilingual encounters. Thus, in 2019, MiLLat project2 was initiated by European scholars in quest for the most efficient scenarios in the development of language learners’ mediation skills in higher education. Last but not least to be presented here is the EU initiative of building up strong European university alliances to advance synergies in studies and research. As one of such alliances, ‘Transform4Europe – T4E’3, created by seven universities from Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Spain in 2020, shares a vision of a common ‘multilingual campus’ with a common language learning policy focused on the promotion of each partner’s state languages as a significant part of a plurilingual bouquet and a significant step forward towards ‘unity in diversity’.The current volume is closely attuned to the above-described evolving global realities and the ensuing urge for pluralistic scenarios in the efficient coexistence of languages and cultures. We start with a section on language and identity related issues concentrating on the emerging situations, needs and measures in search for the preservation and revival of languages. By placing revivalistics in juxtaposition to documentary linguistics, a conceptual article by Ghil’ad Zuckermann examines the ways towards the synergistic effort of revivalists and minority communities to maintain languages and identities. The second article of this section analyses language development in communities through grammatical and lexical transformations in the processes of pidginization. A variety of approaches towards linguistic inclusion through education are scrutinised in the second section devoted to language education in multilingual and multicultural settings. Each of the four co-authored articles tackles a different linguistic constellation composed of different languages in different sociolinguistic environments, but all of them united by such typical components as the dominant mainstream language(s), the target foreign language(s) and the diverse heritage languages, which makes the learning process complex and in need of smart methodological solutions. The four remaining articles cluster into two sections one focusing on multilingual encounters and another on issues in translation. This is where we bring in a multilingual approach in the linguistic landscape of the current volume as one of the articles is written in German and one in Lithuanian. The multilingual encounter in the German article deals with the crisis communication in the corporate discourse of a Lithuanian and a German company, while the second article of this section analyses the multilingual and multicultural interactions along the global vs. local axis. Finally, the section on translation zooms into the cultural and professional specificities in a translation process.

References

Cummins, J., & Persad, R. (2014). Peel District Board of Education Teaching Through a Multilingual Lens: The Evolution of EAL Policy and Practice in Canada. Education Matters: The Journal of Teaching and Learning, 2(1), 3–40.