Disenfranchisement and Diversity in Multilingual Societies.

We consider a linguistically diversified society that has to select a set of languages to be used for official purposes. We examine the notions of language disenfranchisement and linguistic standardization that is created when one or more languages fail to be included in the list of the official ones. For the analysis of our quantitative disenfran-chisement indices, we use the Dyen percentage cognate matrix of linguistic distances between languages. We then apply survey and population data on language proficiency in the European Union before and after its latest enlargement in May 2004.