Bilingualism and European Politics

Abstract

In this article, the author will define the term of “code-switching” and the concept of “bilingualism”: phenomena which have been raising increasingly more interest among sociolinguists. In the second part of the paper, notions of early and late bilingualism and their characteristics will be presented. The author will write about the flux of well-known languages, bilingual expression, and the problem of the interference of one language in another. In the third part, the author will focus on how the terminology used in today’s European community institutions is presented in the classification of foreign languages according to European institutions. It is important to point out that, according to the SCIC and the DGT (the main recruitment agencies of translators and interpreters), there is no such thing as total bilingualism but rather a risk of a lack of a mother tongue. In other words, there is the lack of full mastery of any language. It is precisely for this reason that special language tests have been prepared over the years with the aim of determining which language is the true mother tongue.