Principal Investigator: Tihana Kraš
This five-year project funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration (FP7) studies multilingualism in Europe from different perspectives – linguistic, cognitive and sociological – at the level of the individual citizen, group and society. The project deals with regional/minority languages and their speakers, heritage languages and speakers, multilingual speakers with communicative disorders, and typically-developing multilingual speakers of different ages and proficiency levels. The ultimate goal of the project is to contribute to evidence-based decision-making related to multilingualism in education, health and society as a whole. The project consortium consists of seventeen institutions from eight European countries (the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia) and is coordinated by the University of Leiden (the Netherlands). The project team from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka, consisting of Ana Bratulić, Dr Branka Drljača Margić, Dr Tihana Kraš (leader) and Siniša Smiljanić, investigates the patterns of use of Italian as a minority language and the attitudes towards it in Rijeka and Istria, the advantages of multilingualism on the cognitive system, and the impact of the native language on ultimate attainment in second language acquisition.