Les représentations du plurilinguisme et de la gestion de la diversité linguistique dans les entreprises : les imbrications entre une monophonie collective et la polyphonie des énonciateurs singuliers

Thematic interviews with around twenty executives working in five multinational companies (located in Alsace) have allowed us to reveal their representations and perceptions about their linguistic practices at work, about their multilingual skills and, finally, about the actions or measures that the companies (implicitly or explicitly) advocate on language management. Discourse analysis has highlighted certain widely-shared representations, both within a company or among different companies, which indicate the support or the submission to a dominant ideology that is at the base of group identity. However, during interactions, this collective monophony contrasts with more personal positions (individual representations) which modify the agents’ relations to established representations (support, detachment or rejection). Our focus is thus placed on these differences or tensions, in order to identify more accurately the problematic aspects of multilingualism and of linguistic and cultural diversity management in companies.