Fostering Linguistic Capital: A Roadmap for Reversing the Diversity Crisis and Activating Societal Benefits in Europe

The FOSTERLANG project aims to have a transformative effect on how minoritised languages are protected, used and promoted in Europe in the context of the competitive societal dynamic between dominant and non-dominant languages.

This will be achieved by developing evidence-based diagnostics of the minority-language condition and by suggesting strategic and technologically informed initiatives to protect and enhance their socio-economic position.

The project consortium brings the cross-cultural, multidisciplinary expertise of 14 participating organisations in an ambitious partnership of intellectual enquiry on key societal aspects of protecting the EU linguistic diversity.

Its members combine strengths and expertise in sociolinguistics, social anthropology, education and pedagogy, language planning, digital innovation, computer science, public policy and language revitalisation.

The partners will work in tandem to develop a new societal and institutional dispensation by which minoritised language communities will catalyse their contested linguistic capital to counteract the socio-political and economic forces which continue to undermine a sustainable future for Europe’s linguistic minorities and migrants.

The work packages are centred on fostering linguistic capital not only from the perspective of protecting Europe’s multicultural diversity, but also to indicate how linguistic capital can enhance other components of human capital, such as economic, demographic and health-related well-being.

The project aligns with strategic priorities of EU and the Horizon Europe programme in fostering societal coherence of different linguistic communities living in their shared spaces.

The major outcome will be a Linguistic Capital Road Map which will set out a substantive set of recommendations for the short, medium and long-term on effective and meaningful strategies for fostering Europe’s linguistic capital and for safeguarding grassroots multilingualism.