"Measuring the presence of languages on websites and social networks of universities in multilingual environments is a novelty for sociolinguistic research", the authors state in the justification of their work. It is, therefore, a pioneering study that aims to "determine to what extent English, other foreign languages and minority languages are present in these telematic media in contrast to the first state language".
The study concludes that "only 22.7% of the universities analyzed allow the official website to be opened directly in the minority language, and practically all of them are Spanish institutions, especially in Catalan-speaking areas." The research has analyzed 88 European universities, all of them included in the Shanghai ranking that includes the 1,000 most important in the world.
In addition, only "4.5% offer the possibility of choosing the language, and the majority of these universities are from areas of Celtic origin in the British Isles. Minority languages are also present in only 27.5% of the videos presentation of the university on YouTube (again, mainly in Catalan-speaking universities, but also in Galician), compared to 11.3% in English and 57.5% in the first language of the state".
The work -published in the International Journal of Society, Culture and Language- is the work of professors from the Department of Sociology and researchers from the Interuniversity Institute for Social Development and Peace of the University of Alicante, Lluís Català, Rodolfo Martínez and Clemente Penalva.
In their study, they point out that "in all situations, the majority language dominates over the minority language and English". However, the authors consider it necessary "to separate the behavior of websites from social networks since, in the first case, the possibilities of resorting to several languages are greater." For this reason, the percentages of languages other than the dominant one, "especially in English", are higher than in social networks.
In all languages, the percentages are higher on the web pages of the degrees than on the news, "since the content of the study plans is more static and permanent. Therefore, there is more time to translate and it is more justified to do so. However, the variation between one type of content and another is much greater in English, which reaches more than half of the study programs of European universities in multilingual environments.
Also, university Facebook and Twitter accounts write very few bilingual or trilingual posts, especially on Twitter, due to the limited number of possible characters. The difference in favor of the official languages is considerable, since the percentages of content in the minority language of the region and in English are barely 15% in both social networks. "Minority languages have an advantage on Facebook and English on Twitter because in Eastern European countries it is often conceived as a means of international dissemination," the authors of the paper emphasize.
Undoubtedly, the variable that most determines the use of different languages in electronic media at European universities in multilingual environments is the geographical area, since it marks a statistically significant difference in all languages and all media.
The most relevant difference occurs in the case of minority languages, since the vast majority of Spanish universities in multilingual environments write content in them, compared to a residual use of these languages in the rest of Europe. The majority language is the one used in all the media in France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Eastern countries, (except Twitter in the last case, for the reason mentioned). The lingua franca (English) is relatively present in Scandinavia and other western countries, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands.
The study offers an explanation for Spain's singularity: "the capacities that the State of Autonomies endows the regions and the importance given to languages in the context of repairing the situation of discrimination and linguistic persecution of the Franco dictatorship imply a public promotion and subsequent use of the minority language that cannot be compared with the rest of Europe," the document states.
The different political and legal situations of the regions in However, the study has verified that this greater concern for the promotion of the minority language, instead of competing with English, "goes hand in hand with what could be defined as a commitment due to multilingualism. Therefore, web pages of degrees from Spanish universities in multilingual environments present the highest percentage both in minority language (93.1%) and in English (77.2%)".
From a geographical perspective, the UA study confirms that France is not very prone to multilingualism, that Spain is committed to the languages that have fewer speakers and that the rest of Western Europe (the Netherlands, Scandinavia...) is committed to more for English than in other territories.
Among other variables, UA professors have analyzed digital content on study websites, news and social networks taking into account variables such as territory, legal recognition of languages, the position of the state regarding the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, the degree of administrative decentralization, the political spectrum of the government in the last three legislatures of the region where the university is located, as well as its size, that is, the number of students and academic staff.
"All these data suggest that multilingual spaces, defended as essential to maintain multiculturalism and diversity in public statements by representatives of many States and numerous European universities, are not a reality, since most choose to limit their digital communications to the official language. Both minority languages and English have a clear secondary role in the global European context, despite the multilingual rhetoric of the European Higher Education Area and the growing internationalization of higher education", says Professor Lluís Català.
The study carried out by the AU researchers and sociologists will be presented at the next World Congress of Sociology, which will take place from June 25 to July 1, 2023 in Melbourne (Australia). This work has been financed by the Department of Education, Culture and Sport of the Generalitat Valenciana, through subsidies for the promotion of research work and studies in the field of linguistic planning and applied linguistics in 2022.
