Gorter, D.

J. Cenoz,

English

KNAW Repository

Introduction.
Trilingualism and minority languages
in Europe
JASONE CENOZ and DURK GORTER
Trilingualism and multilingualism is common in Europe and in many
other parts of the world. It is the result of historical, social, and political
factors and can involve combinations of di¤erent types of languages
(Cenoz and Jessner 2000). Some of these languages are o‰cial national
languages in European states such as French, English, Spanish, or Ger-
man, which are spoken by millions of people as a ﬁrst language. Others
are minority languages or lesser-used languages, which in some cases are
only spoken by a few thousand. Minority languages in Europe are usually
divided into two main groups: established or regional minorities on the
one hand and immigrant minorities on the other (see Turell 2000; Extra
and Gorter 2001). This special issue of the International Journal of the
Sociology of Language refers to the former and focuses on the use of dif-
ferent languages in education in European regions in which an autochtho-
nous minority language is spoken. In these regions, speakers of the mi-
nority languages are usually proﬁcient in the majority national language
and learn additional languages at school. In many cases speakers of the
majority languages also learn the minority language.
The spread of English as a language of international communication
and its increasing use as the European lingua franca has created the need
to learn this language for those speakers of minority languages who do
not live in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Nowadays, English is the
most common foreign language in Continental Europe, and in the case
of regions with minority languages it is not the second but the third or
fourth language. Therefore, schools in these regions have the need to go
beyond bilingualism and to promote trilingualism and multilingualism as
one of the most important aims in education.
Multilingualism in European regions in which a minority language is
spoken presents great diversity. Important di¤erences can be found re-
garding the demography and status of the languages. The number of
speakers can range from almost seven million in the case of Catalan to
a few hundreds or thousands in cases such as Cornish, North Frisian,
0165–2516/05/0171–0001 Int’l. J. Soc. Lang. 171 (2005), pp. 1–5
6 Walter de Gruyteror Sami. Two European minority languages are o‰cial state languages
(Luxemburgish and Irish), some have co-o‰cial status in some of the re-
gions in which they are spoken (Basque, Catalan, Welsh), and others do
not have o‰cial recognition (Breton, Occitan, Macedonian). These im-
portant di¤erences in demography and status have implications for the
use of the minority languages in education, attitudes toward the minority
languages, and minority language maintenance or loss (see also Nelde et
al. 1996).
The majority languages used in these regions also present di¤erences in
terms of demography and status, and the use of English as a language of
wider communication does not have an equal status in di¤erent European
regions either. The spread of English over Europe is not uniform and
there are important di¤erences between northern and southern Europe.
The use of English in society and the media is more common in Scandi-
navia and the Netherlands than in Italy or Spain and these di¤erences
have implications for the curriculum design in multilingual schools.
The focus on multilingualism and multilingual education we have
adopted in this special issue highlights the similarities and di¤erences be-
tween di¤erent regions by looking at the speciﬁc dynamics of combining
di¤erent languages in education. That is, it focuses on the situations cre-
ated in educational settings by the use of a minority language and two
other languages of wider communication rather than focusing only on
the situation of minority languages in the school contexts.
This special issue was conceived to give an account of trilingual educa-
tion in Europe as related to the use of autochthonous minority languages.
Education is important for maintaining and revitalizing minority lan-
guages, and the relationship between education and society is bidirec-
tional. Education can contribute to the development of proﬁciency in
minority languages by teaching these languages and through these lan-
guages but it also reﬂects the demography and status of minority lan-
guages in society. The articles included in this volume clearly reﬂect the
di¤erent situations and the relative role of the minority and majority lan-
guages as school subjects or languages of instruction in di¤erent Euro-
pean regions. Education has to face the new linguistic challenges of soci-
ety and integrate the teaching of languages of wider communication
along with the teaching of minority languages. The cases included in this
volume show di¤erent ways in which three or more languages can be in-
tegrated in the school curriculum.
Trilingualism and multilingualism present characteristics di¤erent from
bilingualism at the individual, sociolinguistic, and educational levels. The
study of trilingual education in di¤erent European regions provides
the opportunity of studying these three levels. The study of individual
2 J. Cenoz and D. Gortermultilingualism can contribute to the development of psycholinguistic
theories of speech processing in multilinguals and to the analysis of indi-
vidual di¤erences in language acquisition. The study of school trilingual-
ism can also contribute to sociolinguistic theory by discovering new pat-
terns in areas such as vitality perception, attitudes, or language change
when three or more languages are involved. Finally, the study of school
trilingualism is certainly relevant for educational research because it im-
plies new developments in curriculum design, teacher education, and ma-
terial development.
This collection of articles includes a theoretical paper on trilingualism
and multilingualism and the study of seven cases of trilingual education
in Europe. The volume also includes two book reviews on multilingual-
ism in Europe.
These cases are not the only examples of trilingual education, but they
cover a wide range of situations. The minority languages involved di¤er
regarding their demography and status: Swedish, Basque, Frisian, Cata-
lan, Irish, Ladin, and Romanche. The majority languages involved also
present important di¤erences: Finnish, Spanish, Dutch, English, Italian,
French, and German. The seven situations also di¤er regarding the lin-
guistic distance between the languages involved. All the languages except
Basque and Finnish are Indo-European, and the di¤erent combination of
languages can involve di¤erences regarding typology (for example Fri-
sian, Dutch, and English vs. Basque, Spanish, and English). The educa-
tional systems present great diversity regarding the linguistic aims of the
schools, the use of the languages as subjects or medium of instruction and
the school year in which the di¤erent languages are introduced.
Trilingual education faces important challenges for the maintenance
and development of minority languages and the achievement of multilin-
gual competence. Will the teaching of additional languages have a posi-
tive or a negative e¤ect on the development of minority languages?
When should the di¤erent languages be introduced? Will children mix
the di¤erent languages? Will trilingual education have a positive e¤ect
on cognitive development? How can trilingual education be organized?
The articles included in this special issue are based on educational pro-
grams that have tried to combine the maintenance and development of
minority languages with the need to acquire languages of wider commu-
nication. These educational programs have dealt with these questions and
have provided di¤erent answers to them depending on their own sociolin-
guistic and educational contexts.
In ‘‘Theoretical perspectives of trilingual education,’’ Larissa Aronin
analyzes the similarities and di¤erences between bilingualism and multi-
lingualism and discusses the distinctive features of trilingualism and
Introduction 3multilingualism. She also considers the potential contribution of studies
in this area to the sociolinguistic enterprise.
The ﬁrst four cases of trilingual education included in this volume have
English as a third language but present important di¤erences regarding
the extent to which the minority language and English are used as lan-
guages of instruction. They also involve important di¤erences related to
the demography and status of the minority language.
In ‘‘Toward trilingual education in Vaasa/Vasa, Finland,’’ Siv Bjo ¨rk-
lund discusses the integration of Swedish, Finnish, and English in the
curriculum and the results of research studies on the acquisition of lan-
guage proﬁciency and attitudes. This article shows the shift from bilingual
education in Swedish and Finnish to multilingual education including the
introduction of English from an early age.
In her paper ‘‘English in bilingual programs in the Basque Country,’’
Jasone Cenoz also explains the need for bilingual education to become
trilingual in the Basque Country and presents the results of several re-
search studies on the inﬂuence of bilingualism on the acquisition of
English as a third language and the e¤ect of early instruction on the de-
velopment of language proﬁciency and attitudes. She also discusses the
challenges that the Basque educational system has to face in the near
future.
Friesland, which is the topic of the next case study, has similarities re-
garding the number of speakers of the minority language with the Basque
Country, but it di¤ers from the Basque Country in the more limited use
of the minority language at school and the extensive exposure to English
in everyday life in the Netherlands. Apart from analyzing di¤erent as-
pects of multilingualism in Friesland, Durk Gorter in ‘‘Three languages
of instruction in Frysla ˆn’’ discusses a project to use three languages as
languages of instruction.
In ‘‘Trilingualism in the Catalan educational system,’’ Carmen Mun ˜oz
summarizes the use of the three languages, Catalan, Spanish, and English
in the curriculum and the teaching conditions and describes in more detail
the teaching of English as an additional language within the bilingual
educational system. Her paper also reports the results of two studies
on language achievement in the three languages and attitudes toward
English.
The last three articles involve the acquisition of French and German/
Italian as a third language. Muiris O’Laoire in ‘‘Three languages in
schools in Ireland’’ discusses the acquisition of Irish, English, and a for-
eign language in Irish schools and the challenges of trilingual education
for language policy. He also reports the results of some research on the
role of metalinguistic awareness in language learning.
4 J. Cenoz and D. GorterIn the paper ‘‘L’insegnamento trilingue nelle localita ` ladine della pro-
vincia di Bolzano,’’ Roland Verra presents the multilingual education in
the Ladin area, Italy, where Ladin, Italian, and German are the school
languages and English is also taught as an additional language. Verra
describes the characteristics of the schools, the results, and the future
challenges.
In the article ‘‘Trilingual education in Switzerland,’’ Claudine Brohy
describes di¤erent types of trilingual education in a multilingual country
not belonging to the European Union. She also discusses some projects
on the learning of French and English as a third language.
This special issue is a contribution toward trilingualism and multilin-
gualism, a line of research that is quite new in sociolinguistics and applied
linguistics. The discussion of di¤erent contexts can be a contribution to
research in these areas and can also provide examples of the implemen-
tation of multilingual education that can be useful for other contexts.
Di¤erent sociolinguistic contexts with minority languages share some
characteristics, but the complexity of the di¤erent contextual elements in-
volved in trilingualism make necessary the adaptation of these programs
to the contextual and educational characteristics of new settings.
University of the Basque Country
Fryske Akademy/University of Amsterdam
References
Cenoz, J.; and Jessner, U. (eds.) (2000). English in Europe: the Acquisition of a Third Lan-
guage. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Extra, G.; and Gorter, D. (2001). Comparative perspectives on regional and immigrant mi-
nority languages in multicultural Europe. In The Other Languages of Europe, G. Extra
and D. Gorter (eds.), 1–41. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Nelde, P.; Strubell, M.; and Williams, G. (1996). Euromosaic — the Production and Repro-
duction of the Minority Language Groups in the European Union. Luxembourg: O‰ce for
O‰cial Publications of the European Communities.
Turell, M. T. (2000). Spain’s multilingual make-up: beyond, within and across Babel. In
Multilingualism in Spain, M. T. Turell (ed.), 1–57. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Introduction 5

Trilingualism and minority languages in Europe

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