Georges Lüdi

La gestion du plurilinguisme au travail entre la « philosophie » dee l’entreprise et les pratiques spontanées

This paper presents first results of the European project DYLANs Basel module. The module aims at understanding the ways in which Swiss companies and International companies based in Switzerland manage the linguistic diversity prevalent in Europe on the one hand and the multilingual practices observable at the workplace on the other hand.

Patterns of language in polyglossic urban areas and multilingual regions and institutions: a Swiss case study

Abstract Growing mobility of important parts of the worlds population has led to a massive increase in multilingualism in post-modern societies and a lasting change from homoglossic to polyglossic communities with important “deterritorialised” linguistic minorities, mostly plurilingual to a variable degree. Ideologies and practices of communication in old and new multilingual contexts vary largely. The “solutions” for overcoming potential problems go from using a lingua franca (often English), inventing pidgin like emergent varieties, choosing the language of one of the interlocutors known (partially) by the others (namely in the case of immigrants), insisting on receptive competences (everybody uses his or her own language, e. g. in officially multilingual institutions), to various forms of mixed speech and, of course, to interpretation and translation processes. Drawing on extensive field work in bilingual institutions and multilingual companies in Europe, particularly in Switzerland, we propose to discuss various ways of mobilizing multilingual repertoires in situations of cross-linguistic and intercultural communication. The analyzed data will mainly consist of dyadic and polyadic oral interactions. It will also include written texts and signs that are part of the linguistic landscape. Our work is grounded in the assumption that multilingualism is no longer considered a marginal phenomenon, only of interest to specialists, but instead a characteristic of the majority of human beings.

Diversity and multilingual challenges in academic settings

ABSTRACT Higher Education is caught between internationalization on the one hand and the quest for local support by fostering local practices on the other. The clash between uniformity-standardization and localization-specialization manifests itself in every university trying to adopt internationalization strategies. How can universities manage this tension? Is diversity considered beneficial or a barrier to the internationalization process? The aim of this paper is to explore under what conditions a multilingual academic and scientific program helps to create an inclusive environment in academic settings to cope with international mobility and language diversity. The paper will discuss concepts of multilingual education upon which universities can draw. An analysis of multilingual policies will shed light on the ways they shape and create favorable conditions for the construction and transmission of knowledge in an internationalized academic context. The results drawn from the experts’ perspectives on language policy and from the analysis of plurilingual practices in the process of knowledge construction, where hybridity is associated with multimodality, point towards a balance to be found between the use of an English lingua academica and the plurilingual academic and scientific cultures.

Basel: einsprachig und heteroglossisch

SummarySituated in the officially monolingual German part of Switzerland, the city of Basle is, in reality, very heteroglossic. Almost 30 per cent of its inhabitants are not Swiss citizens, and most of these are not native German speakers. In some of the city’s primary schools, more than 60 per cent of the students are non-native German speakers. Does the linguistic landscape (as defined by Landry/Bourhis 1997) reflect these demographic facts? Our analysis is based on comprehensive photo documentation of a representative sample of shopping streets in demographically different parts of the city. We tried to understand the process of linguistic landscaping (that is, landscaping focusing on by whom, for whom and with what?). As one would expect, German is almost exclusively used in official signs (on public roads and government buildings) and also dominates in commercial and private signs, even without regulation by linguistic laws. Sometimes, German is replaced by Swiss German dialect to further shape a local identity. English is very visible in the linguistic landscape, particularly in the city centre. However, except for in brief commercial signs, it is mixed with German. These bilingual signs do not address native English speakers; indeed, any detailed information is written in German. It seems that English words or names are used to give shops and companies products international panache. The other official languages of Switzerland, even French, as the language of neighbouring France, appear much less often. On the contrary, languages of immigration, in particular Turkish, are very visible, especially where immigrants live. There, one finds monolingual signs in different languages, mostly with cultural or private content, but again bilingual signs (Turkish-German, Portuguese-German, etc.) dominate. These document the fact that multilingual authors utilize their repertoire to earn maximum economic and symbolic benefit. We conclude that German is the lingua franca among speakers of other languages, and that substantial presence of German in signs produced by immigrants is proof of, but also an instrument for, their integration. On the other hand, the presence of various languages in the semiosphere raises the awareness of the world’s linguistic diversity to the local majority and can even produce an incipient plurilingualism.