The Economics of the Multilingual Workplace [antikvár]

IntroductionThere are many ways to approach multilingualism. Most of the perspectives on multilingualism found in the scientific literature are rooted in linguistics and its various subfields, particularly sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, or fall under the generic heading of 'applied linguistics', a label contested by some, but which has nevertheless gained currency among scholars who wished to demarcate themselves from the line of investigation developed, for example, in Chomskyan linguistics.However, other perspectives on multilingualism have appeared. The best known of these avenues may well be the sociology of language, which has benefited from the possibility to "fall [. . . ] easily into the growing company of sociologies of this and that".1 We are not dealing with water-tight compartments, and it is not always easy to distinguish between the treatment of multilingualism proposed by the sociology of language and by sociolinguistics, just like the boundaries between some psycholinguistics and the study of language acquisition, though clear in principle, are sometimes hard to pin down in practice. Yet the range of approaches to multilingualism developed over the past forty years is not confined to the immediate neighbours of the language disciplines. New perspectives on multilingualism have been opened in fields as diverse as geography, political science (including, in particular, normative political theory), law and economics.Mapping the epistemological and conceptual interrelationships between these perspectives on multilingualism and linguistic diversity would certainly constitute a useful case study in the challenges, pitfalls and rewards of interdisciplinarity and offer fascinating vignettes of intellectual history. Such an endeavour, however, would be well beyond the scope of these opening remarks. The goal of this introduction is simply to explain the philosophy underpinning this book, which approaches multilingualism in a perspective that is quite different from what is generally offered in various strands of the language sciences.Our aim is to investigate multilingualism at work with the concepts and models of economics. At a general level, we are interested in how (and how much) linguistic variables (in particular, those that denote multilingualism) on the one hand, and economic variables on the other hand, influence each