ABSTRACT
The EU’s tension between unity and multiplicity has clear political contours around the notions of nationalism and transnationalism. This chapter draws insights chiefly from political theory and political philosophy to reveal the political underpinnings of the EU’s language and translation regimes, with a special emphasis on the normative challenge posed by Brexit. Will English lose its de jure status of official EU language? Will its de facto lingua franca status be finally officially acknowledged? Will the EU or EU member states claim their own varieties of English? Or will English rather lose its dominant – albeit unofficial – role in the EU in the wake of Brexit? These different prognoses are analysed in this chapter against the backdrop of language contact and dynamic, as well as language justice, in the EU. Crucially, the chapter unveils that the prerequisite of a common language (today, English) for the emergence of a European public sphere might have become superfluous in view of the bloc’s nascent transnationalism, and suggests that the imperative of a common language be replaced with the imperative of intercomprehension and transcultural competence (the transcultural turn).
