Chapter 3

Cross-jurisdictional linguistic cooperation in multilingual federations

Political federations or quasi-federations characterised by linguistic diversity have developed various strategies to strike a balance between mobility and inclusion of (internal and external) migrants. This chapter first looks at the comparative performance of linguistic management and coordination between the central state and federal entities, mainly comparing Canada and the US, while exploring possible comparisons with India, in order to provide the EU with examples of language policies in large economic and political unions. We show that the experimental potential of sub-state entities, the cooperation between the public and the private sector, and reciprocity among sub-units are key to achieving linguistic non domination (Section 1). It then suggests mobility and inclusion equilibria via linguistic subsidiarity and reciprocity for the EU (Section 2). It concludes by introducing a new tool, a ‘language passport’ we have called Linguapass (Section 3). The expected benefits of Linguapass on an individual level are to recognise and document the linguistic skills of migrants in official and non-official languages and hence to facilitate their mobility and inclusion; on a collective level, commitment to equal and reciprocal accreditation and funding of Linguapass by the EU as a whole, as well as by European regions and some large existing language clusters, is a novel form of equitable and feasible language cooperation and coordination.

Published online: 21 January 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/wlp.9.03von