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

Anne [e-mail] Morel-Lab (1)

1 ICAR - Interactions, Corpus, Apprentissages, Représentations

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 the language part of the work (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 sociolinguistic division of labour (Duchêne, 2016).

Mots clés: Colonisation; glottophagy; Language part of the work; multilingualism; transnational companies; professional mobilities; sociolinguistic division of labour

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Linguistique; Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Anne [e-mail] Morel-Lab. Quelles langues pour quels usages ? Le cas d'un site de construction d'une usine de nickel en Nouvelle-Calédonie Anne MOREL-LAB. Bulletin suisse de Linguistique appliquée, 2017, Processus de différenciation: des pratiques langagières à leur interprétation sociale, Actes du colloque VALS-ASLA 2016 (Genève, 20-22 janvier 2016) (spécial 2017), pp.153-163. ⟨halshs-02554643⟩