Dire et faire. Analyse des relations entre normes et pratiques de la langue au sein d’une société publique de radiotélévision multilingue: le cas de SSR idée suisse

This article presents the key concepts and outcomes of the ethnographic research project "idée suisse: Language policy, norms, and practice as exemplified by Swiss Radio and Television". The research question was whether and how the Swiss broadcasting company, caught between public service demands and market forces in a multilingual country, should, can, and actually does fulfil language policy requirements (see section 1). Four research modules were combined: module A focused on external language policy expectations; B on organizational-hierarchical internal rules; C on text production, and D on quality control follow-up communication (2). The synthesis of the results of the four modules shows that policy makers, management, chief editors, and journalists turn out to have very different views of what public broadcasting should be and what language has to do with that (3). Four possible frames for the interpretation of these results will be discussed: the consonance/dissonance frame, the hypocrisy frame, the functional dysfunction frame, and the hidden knowledge frame (4). The discussion of the four interpretation frames will reshape a core problem of Applied Linguistics: providing adequate knowledge transfer between research and application fields – one of the ways for us Applied Linguists to bring together our own talk and action (5).