Multilingual Habitus and Language Prestige: Value Profiles of Croatian, English, German, and Italian in Croatia

Abstract

In a multilingual world, languages represent various forms of capital in society and gain or lose prestige depending on how transferable they are perceived to be into social, cultural, economic, and symbolic capital. The dominance of the English language and social media content in the Information Age affects people’s language worldwide. In many countries, there is a significant trend toward diglossia, where the national language is used alongside English, leading to the marginalization of all other languages. In Croatia, an EU member state, the most popular foreign languages are English, German, and Italian. However, due to the linguistic dominance of English, foreign languages other than English have experienced a loss of status. This shift implies that people’s perceptions of the types of capital those languages represent are changing and that there is a movement from multilingualism toward diglossia. This goes against the strongly promoted idea of multilingualism in the EU, where language variety is considered a valuable form of symbolic and cultural capital. Within that framework, this study aims to examine the attitudes of multilingual speakers in Croatia toward the four languages included in the study. The goal is to determine whether they perceive a language to represent a form of social, cultural, economic, or symbolic capital. Furthermore, based on the results, it will be concluded whether multilingual language practice is affected and whether there is a clash between the desired multilingual habitus of European citizens and their perceptions of language values, which determine their language choices.