Resumen de Multilingualism among Brussels-based civil servants and lobbyists: perceptions and practices
This article explores the multilingual and multicultural aspects of community-building, networking and communication in the European Union’s (EU) political and administrative system. We investigated the networking and communicative preferences of EU civil servants and lobbyists using survey data and thematic interviews. Our aim was to gain a deeper insight into the ways formal and informal language policies correspond to perceptions and practices of multilingualism among our target group. On a general level, we also explored how decisive the role of multilingualism is in the EU’s administration and among lobbyists. We hypothesized that the social and working environment in Brussels, along with the growing use of (Euro)-English contributes to the construction of the cosmopolitan identities of EU civil servants and lobbyists. The findings indicate that although multilingualism appears across the different social contexts under investigation, all of these contexts are heavily dominated by (Euro-) English. Further, in their professional interactions the respondents are highly aware of the relationship of language(s) to power and they prefer the usage of languages that are more power-neutral in their actual setting even if this comes with the cost of mutual unintelligibility. The findings imply that multilingualism plays a less significant role in the social and working lives of Brussels based civil servants and lobbyists than previously assumed (cf. Phillipson, 2003).
