Chapter 15. Policies and practices of multilingualism at Babeş-Bolyai University (Cluj, Romania)

This study focuses on the relationship between multilingual policies and practices and their representations at the Babeş-Bolyai University (BBU) of Cluj, Romania, drawing on a broad theoretical background provided by sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, semantics, cognitive analysis and didactics, within a convergent set of academic contexts: European, Romanian, regional and institutional. We signpost how multilingualism became a seminal entry on the BBU’s political agenda as scaffolded by the three-tiered language policy of this university – the study-lines in regional languages (Romanian, Hungarian, German), the provision of full study programs in widely spoken languages (CLIL), and the teaching of specialized modern languages (LSP). Most importantly, in line with the core questions the Dylan Project has attempted to find answers to, we scrutinize the multilingual practices of the BBU, the attitudes adopted to multilingualism and its representations among students and members of the academic community. Thus, by analyzing the corpora gathered through video-taping LSP and CLIL classes and interpreting the data resulting from a collection of faculty interviews and student questionnaires, we aim to identify the conditions under which multilingualism may become a resource, as well as a problem, for communication and knowledge transmission.