Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa: Plurilinguismo in Europa ... - EURAC

Research on the linguistic situation in the Lublin Region
come from Ukraine. One of the reasons that those languages are so rarely taught is, apart from
the lack of interest, the fi nancial aspect. Unfortunately, Lubelszczyzna belongs to one of the
poorest regions in the European Union and the Polish system of investing funds in education still
leaves much to be desired. According to the Lisbon strategy, a minimum of 3% GDP has to be
allocated for education, while in Poland the fi gure is 0.34 % - ten times less than the required
minimum.
4. Glimpse at research results
While conducting our research it appeared rather problematic how to defi ne the key term in
our examination. It could not be called “a frontier language” since this sort of language does
not exist as such. Therefore, actually we researched the languages of our neighbours to fi nd out
how they are evaluated and perceived by prospective learners.
4.1 Interviews
For the purposes of the project twenty people have been surveyed according to the model
provided. Two groups of students were taken into account - those who came from or had
roots in Ukraine or Byelorussia, and respondents who had no connection with the countries
in question. The reason for our choice was to observe possible similarities and differences in
the perception of the languages of our neighbours, as well as the attitudes towards learning
them.
What transpires from our study is that Ukrainian and Byelorussian are not considered
“important” languages because the Poles look for jobs in the western parts of Europe and,
therefore, they need to speak English or German which, on the other hand, are regarded as
universal languages. The research showed that the command of foreign languages among the
respondents is considerable – all of them learnt English or German or both at school or through
private lessons, two learnt Latin and two Russian, one Spanish and one French. Only one person
admitted speaking English before going to school. The respondents who had roots in Ukraine or
Byelorussia all spoke Ukrainian or Byelorussian (and often Russian) before they started school.
The task of ranking the languages according to the degree of their importance brought
interesting results. The majority of respondents involved in the survey listed English as the most
important language, mentioning Polish or Russian as second, then Ukrainian and, in the last
position, Byelorussian. Listing Byelorussian as the least popular language results mainly from
the ignorance of Byelorussian culture and the signifi cantly smaller number of students from this
country than from Ukraine. Moreover, the two languages seem to bear enormous resemblance
for those who do not speak them. Two respondents claimed that all the languages in question
were equally important.
The participants of the survey most frequently gave the following reasons for their linguistic
ranking: “I list them according to what degree I am familiar with them”, “I list them according
to the frequency of their use”. However, in some cases extra-linguistic motivation was the
main factor as a few respondents ordered the languages according to their popularity in the
province. Russian, for instant, was listed fi rst for the sake of its importance in developing
relations with the Eastern countries, while Ukrainian was appreciated because of the feelings
of sympathy with the recent events in Ukraine, that is “the Orange Revolution”.
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