‘What’s the most beautiful language in the world?’: avoiding accusations of prejudice while reinforcing dominant ideologies in the mediatisation of multilingualism

The media often frame multilingualism through a commodified and parallel monolingual lens, reinforcing prejudice, by sustaining the hegemony of English and promoting elite forms of multilingualism. This study examines how multilingualism is constructed in the Easy Languages video series, which promotes intercultural understanding but aligns with dominant mediatisation practices. Viewing multilingualism as a socioculturally shaped discursive resource, this paper integrates Critical Discourse Studies and Language Ideology perspectives to explore how the discursive tension between prejudice and tolerance is navigated. Producers, through editorial control, prominently advocate intercultural rhetoric, while dominant ideologies of multilingualism are largely articulated by the interviewees featured in the videos. This strategic distribution of perspectives allows the series to safeguard its self-image of tolerance and deflect accusations of prejudice while talking with prejudice.