Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - The European Union in Cyberspace. Multilingual Democratic Participation in a virtual public sphere?
AU - Wodak, Ruth
AU - Wright, S.
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - This article analyses the European Union's Futurum discussion forum. The EU hoped that Futurum would help close the acknowledged gap between institutions and citizens by facilitating a virtual, multilingual, transnational public sphere. Futurum was both an interesting example of how the EU's language policies shape the structure of deliberative experiments and of a public debate about their relative value. We combine various quantitative measures of the discussions with a critical discourse analysis of a thread which focused on language policies. We found that although the debates were predominantly in English, where a thread started in a language other than English, linguistic diversity was more prominent. The discourse analysis showed that multilingual interaction was fostered, and that the debate about language policies is politically and ideologically charged.
AB - This article analyses the European Union's Futurum discussion forum. The EU hoped that Futurum would help close the acknowledged gap between institutions and citizens by facilitating a virtual, multilingual, transnational public sphere. Futurum was both an interesting example of how the EU's language policies shape the structure of deliberative experiments and of a public debate about their relative value. We combine various quantitative measures of the discussions with a critical discourse analysis of a thread which focused on language policies. We found that although the debates were predominantly in English, where a thread started in a language other than English, linguistic diversity was more prominent. The discourse analysis showed that multilingual interaction was fostered, and that the debate about language policies is politically and ideologically charged.
KW - argumentaion analysis
KW - discourse analysis
KW - electronic democracy
KW - European Union
KW - language policies
KW - multilingualism
KW - multimodality
KW - public sphere
U2 - 10.1075/jlp.5.2.07wod
DO - 10.1075/jlp.5.2.07wod
M3 - Journal article
VL - 5
SP - 251
EP - 275
JO - Journal of Language and Politics
JF - Journal of Language and Politics
SN - 1569-9862
IS - 2
ER -