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The effects of multilingualism

More than half of Europeans speak two or more languages. Linguist Lisa Cheng investigates the various forms of multilingualism in Europe from a linguistic, cognitive and sociological perspective. She looks for instance at the way in which minority languages influence the standard language of a country, and investigates the effect of multilingualism on cognitive capacity. This research on multilingualism is supported by the European Commission and carried out in no fewer than eight different countries: the Netherlands, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Slovenia and Croatia. Leiden University is co-ordinator of the project and is responsible for the collaboration within this large-scale project.

Here you can read more about the influence on the standard language, the effect of multilingualism on cognition, how the project contributes to European policy and about language policy in schools.

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