On the reciprocal influence of language politics and language education: The case of English in Switzerland

Linguistic diversity in Switzerland, which is generally regarded as a successful case of language management, is currently being challenged. One of the most significant reasons for this is the growing importance of English. While national languages were traditionally taught as the first foreign language and English as the second foreign language throughout Switzerland, English has gained in importance, leading, in some cantons, to its earlier introduction, or/and more hours of English in the curriculum. This paper reviews these issues, taking the historical roots and institutional aspects of Swiss multilingualism into account. Current developments in language education are analysed not just as pedagogical, put as political and policy responses to the major challenges confronting the longstanding principles of diversity management in Switzerlan

L'anglais comme lingua franca : questions de coût et d'équité. Commentaire sur Philippe Van Parijs

Ce commentaire replace la contribution de Philippe van Parijs dans la perspective de l'évaluation économique des politiques linguistiques. Il met en évidence le caractère inéquitable des propositions de van Parijs, ainsi que les risques graves qu'elles font courir à la diversité linguistique en Europe. Il tente de montrer que l'intérêt commun suggère la recherche de solutions alternatives pour gérer la diversité linguistique de l'Europe. Ces solutions, cependant, supposent que les autorités nationales coordonnent leur action.This rejoinder discusses Philippe van Parijs's contribution in the perspective of the economic evaluation of language policies. It stresses the inequitable character of van Parijs's recommendations, as well as the serious risks they imply for linguistic diversity in Europe. It also tries to show that the search for the common good requires looking for alternative ways of managing Europe's linguistic diversity. Such solutions, however, require national governments to coordinate their action

The EU's Financial Support for Regional or Minority Languages : A Historical Assessment

ISSN 0354-0286 Print/ISSN 1854-5181 OnlineThe EU professes to have a positive policy towards RMLs, as enshrined in Article 22 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. Since the beginning of the 1980s the then European Economic Community has shown some awareness of the issue and has tried to support RMLs in a variety of ways. This support, nevertheless, has decreased over time, in particular since 2000. The goal of this article is to provide a detailed financial assessment of EU support to RMLs from 1994 to 2006 and to present the main trend in RMLs support after 2006. This article, based on official data, shows that the amounts concerned, even during the relatively more favourable 1990s, have remained small. We also conclude that RML-specific programmes and actions (as opposed to mainstreaming support) have been much more successful at channelling resources towards RMLs. We conclude the article by discussing the most important trends in RML support after 2006, showing that supportfrom the EU in this area has remained modest.Peer reviewe

CMB-S4: Forecasting Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves

CMB-S4---the next-generation ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment---is set to significantly advance the sensitivity of CMB measurements and enhance our understanding of the origin and evolution of the Universe, from the highest energies at the dawn of time through the growth of structure to the present day. Among the science cases pursued with CMB-S4, the quest for detecting primordial gravitational waves is a central driver of the experimental design. This work details the development of a forecasting framework that includes a power-spectrum-based semi-analytic projection tool, targeted explicitly towards optimizing constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r$, in the presence of Galactic foregrounds and gravitational lensing of the CMB. This framework is unique in its direct use of information from the achieved performance of current Stage 2--3 CMB experiments to robustly forecast the science reach of upcoming CMB-polarization endeavors. The methodology allows for rapid iteration over experimental configurations and offers a flexible way to optimize the design of future experiments given a desired scientific goal. To form a closed-loop process, we couple this semi-analytic tool with map-based validation studies, which allow for the injection of additional complexity and verification of our forecasts with several independent analysis methods. We document multiple rounds of forecasts for CMB-S4 using this process and the resulting establishment of the current reference design of the primordial gravitational-wave component of the Stage-4 experiment, optimized to achieve our science goals of detecting primordial gravitational waves for $r > 0.003$ at greater than $5\sigma$, or, in the absence of a detection, of reaching an upper limit of $r < 0.001$ at $95\%$ CL.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, 9 tables, submitted to ApJ. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1907.0447