Plurilinguisme dans le monde du travail: l’analyse des besoins

Abstract

Multilingualism at work is often studied in an ethnographic perspective, which offers a description of actors’ practices and suggests ways to account for the observed practices. This text, however, examines multilingualism with a different approach and explores its connections with economic variables, in particular value added. The text proposes a synthetic overview of the concepts and methods required to formulate, in theoretical and empirical terms, a set of relationships linking economic value with language skills and language practices. It then reports some numerical results from econometric studies carried out in Switzerland over the past fifteen years, straddling micro- and macroeconomic perspectives on the value of languages. This approach makes it possible to investigate the foreign language needs of firms not only in the specific context of a givencompany, but at a general level. It also spells out the links between the language needs of firms and the latter’s motivations in terms of costs and profit. Moreover, understanding these relationships provides knowledge that can help orient some decisions in language planning and language education policy.