Quelles langues pour quels usages? Le cas d'un site de construction d'une usine de nickel en Nouvelle-Calédonie

The ethnographic field study held as employee of a major industrial building site in New-Caledonia, a remote French island situated in the South Pacific gave me access to intricate data on multilingual language practices in a short-lived city dedicated to labour. It allowed me to observe <i>the language part of the work</i> (Boutet 2001) and the balance of power between the transnational companies' global languages (English and French) and the wide variety of local languages spoken by the Filipino and Oceanian workforces mobilized to erect the plant. This led me to examine the gap between a normalized multilingualism supported by procedures and a relational multilingualism connected to belonging networks (professional, ethnical, social, cultural…). Breaking the rules of language boundaries, this industrial field proved to be a unique opportunity to analyze complex sociolinguistic reconfigurations at work illustrating the notion of <i>sociolinguistic division of labour</i> (Duchêne 2016).