Research that considers the relevant temporal, spatial, and societal contexts of a corporate language policy remains scarce to date within the field of sociolinguistics. In contrast to approaches that take companies as static entities, this article focuses on a Belgian multinational corporation over the course of over 20 years and contextualizes…

This paper investigates an abortion clinic's procedural choices regarding the management of linguistic diversity. It focuses in particular on how language serves as capital for clients' agency in decision-making regarding their abortion treatment. Based on linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork in a Flemish abortion clinic, we analyse the clinic's…

In the globalized economy, old metadiscursive regimes have been challenged by new conditions which are often considered to be more favourable to heteroglossic practices. In Flemish Belgium, the liberalization of the TV market is said to have transformed the broadcaster VRT from a public service aiming at educating viewers into a competitive…

In the past decade, research on language policy has shifted from a top-down approach toward the inclusion of micro-political aspects and ethnographic approaches. In studies of bilingualism and bilingual acquisition the role of parents and parenting has always been mentioned as an important (although somewhat peripheral) factor. In this paper, our…

When in 1908 the Belgian government took over the Congo from King Leopold II, a charter was drafted that would serve as a constitution-like statutory code for the new colony. Article 3 in this "Colonial Charter" dealt with language and linguistic rights. It epitomized the duality of language questions with which Belgium remained faced…

This paper discusses data from a Dutch-medium secondary school in Brussels where almost all pupils speak a different language than Dutch at home. It illustrates that teachers' preference for maintaining the school's monolingual policy did not preclude their creation of haphazard or humorous multilingual interstices that temporarily alleviated the…

This article explores the multilingual and multicultural aspects of community-building, networking and communication in the European Union's (EU) political and administrative system. We investigated the networking and communicative preferences of EU civil servants and lobbyists using survey data and thematic interviews. Our aim was to gain a…