Journal: Cahiers de l'ILOB
Issue: Langues en milieu de travail, langues au travail - Languages in the workplace, languages at work
Call Deadline: 30-Sep-2025

Call for Papers:

Thematic issue:

The issues surrounding language management and plurilingualism concern all human activities, and all age groups are likely to be affected by plurilingual practices, policies, and norms that govern their use. This is particularly true in the workplace where language issues are intimately linked to identity as well as political, economic, communicational, and social dynamics.
Language policies and practices in the workplace have been studied in a wide variety of professional contexts, notably in Europe (Dompmartin-Normand & Thamin, 2013; Harzing et al., 2011; Lønsmann, 2014), Asia (Fairbrother, 2018; Jenks & Lee, 2019; Lam & Yu, 2013), and Australia (Cho, 2022 ; Harrison, 2013), as well as in Canada (Premji et al., 2022; Roy, 2001) and around the world. Research has focused, for example, on the role of English as a lingua franca (Gunnarsson, 2013), or corporate language in the private sector (Angouri, 2013; Barakos, 2020; Brannen & Mughan, 2017; Doehler et al., 2017). This body of research studies the effects of such linguistic and ideological hegemony on power relations within workplaces (Kankaanranta et al., 2018), as well as on linguistic and cultural diversity in general, particularly in minority (Barakos, 2018; LeBlanc, 2014; Schedlitzki et al., 2017) and Indigenous linguistic contexts (Kelly-Holmes & Pietikäinen, 2014; Møller, 2016).
Other studies focus on language policies and practices in public domains such as healthcare (Brown et al., 2012), education (Lancereau-Forster, & Martinez, 2018; Ramjattan, 2019), the civil service (Commissariat aux langues officielles, 2021), and the legal system (Nasager, 2020). These studies show, amongst other issues, how policies become barriers to workplace accessibility and social justice, and how they contribute to reproducing social and linguistic inequalities (Shohamy, 2006).
Finally, while the issue of language in the workplace is often linked to mobility (Itani et al., 2015; Kingsley, 2013), immigration (Béland, 2008), international relations (De Saint Robert, 2022) and globalization (Aneesh, 2012; Lavric et al., 2017), it also makes visible social, political and economic processes that take place on a local scale (Dubois et al., 2006 ; Duchêne & Heller, 2012).
Studying languages in the workplace is often motivated by a concern for the well-being of individual workers and linguistic communities. An interest in languages at work also highlights the processes of social exclusion and discrimination that often lie behind language policies and practices in the workplace (Piller, 2016).

This volume aims to bring together scholarly work on languages at work in a variety of contexts, in order to highlight recent research in this field from an interdisciplinary perspective.

For this issue, we invite submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
• Language policies and practices in the workplace, whether in the private or public sector, at the national, international, or supranational level
• Bilingualism, plurilingualism, multilingualism, and translanguaging in the workplace
• Migration trajectories, international mobility, and transnationalism
• The role of Indigenous languages and cultures in the workplace
• Minority language communities
• Neoliberalism, the economy, and the commodification of languages
• Linguistic variation, norms, standardization, and language practices
• Teaching and learning language for specific purposes (e.g. English for Specific Purposes; français sur objectifs spécifiques)
• Language assessment in the workplace
• Diglossic dynamics
• Linguistic discourses, attitudes, and ideologies
• Glottophobia; linguistic insecurity, and social and linguistic discrimination
• Individual and collective identities

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
Applied Linguistics
Language Acquisition
Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
French (fra)