Two Linguas Francas? Social Inclusion through English and Esperanto

Federico Gobbo and László Marácz
Additional contact information
Federico Gobbo: Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
László Marácz: Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands / Department of International Relations, L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Kazakhstan

Social Inclusion, 2021, vol. 9, issue 1, 75-84

Abstract: New forms of mobility presuppose a technological factor that frames it as ‘topological proximity,’ regardless of the nature of the mobile agent (human being, robot ware, animal, virus, digital object). The appeal of the so-called linguas francas is especially evident in human beings showing high propensity to move, i.e., motility. They are usually associated with transnational communication in multilingual settings, linguistic justice, and globalization. Paradoxically, such global languages foster mobility, but, at the same time, they may hinder social inclusion in the hosting society, especially for people in mobility. The article compares English as a lingua franca and Esperanto in the European context, putting together the linguistic hierarchy of transnational communication (Gobbo, 2015) and the notion of linguistic unease, used to assess sociolinguistic justice (Iannàccaro, Gobbo, & Dell’Aquila, 2018). The analysis shows that the sense of belonging of their respective speakers influences social inclusion in different ways. More in general, the article frames the linguistic dimension of social inclusion in terms of linguistic ease, proposing a scale suitable for the analysis of European contexts.

Keywords: Esperanto; hyper-place; lingua franca; linguistic easiness; linguistic justice; mobility; onlife; social inclusion; sociolinguistic justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/article/view/3662 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:socinc:v9:y:2021:i:1:p:75-84

DOI: 10.17645/si.v9i1.3662

Access Statistics for this article

Social Inclusion is currently edited by Mariana Pires

More articles in Social Inclusion from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().