LANGUAGE AND CULTURE POLICIES OF EUROPEAN UNION IN TERMS OF TURKEY’S MEMBERSHIP

In this study, Turkey's EU membership was examined in terms of language and cultural issues. Within this context, studies conducted within EU regarding language and culture policies were evaluated and it was tried to point out Turkey’s situation in terms of these policies with a comparative method. In the process of EU integration and competition, it is of great importance that the multilingualism will be a necessity, and not only students but also adults should be taken into consideration in terms of foreign language education and policies should be defined for them to learn minimum three languages. EU’s effort to assess and disseminate member countries’ languages on an equal basis is a consequence of the fact that it is against monolingualism and defences multilingualism. The number of official languages will increase to twenty four with the membership of Turkey and Turkish (15%) will be the secondly most spoken mother tongue after German (16%) within EU. However, it can be seen that the proportion of Republic of Turkey’s citizens’ knowing a foreign language is quite behind compared with that of EU citizens. Yet the research done in 2012 showed that slightly more than half of the Europeans (54%) can communicate in a language apart from their native tongue, 25% of them know minimum two languages and %10 of them can communicate in minimum three languages. It can be predicted that Turkey will not face too many problems in terms of culture during EU membership process and it will overcome this process more easily than other countries because of its multiculturalism experience that continues from its past to present, and EU will live real cultural diversity with the membership of Turkey.