ENGLISH IN THE WORKPLACE IN SWITZERLAND BETWEEN IDEOLOGIES AND PRACTICES

A widely shared opinion states that English in its international form is particularly suited for the economy. Consequently, a shift from national languages to English as corporate language has been observed in many countries. However, this choice is not based on the results of scientific research, but rather on ideologies. In many cases, the real practices can differ quite significantly from what people think and/or tell they do. This calls for empirical research. In this paper, we will analyse the demolinguistic situation of Switzerland with a special focus on English at work, have a look at the public debate about English and national languages at school and acknowledge the actual linguistic practices in several types of economic environments, in order to answer the question whether English and/or any other language dominates communication at work in Switzerland.


1
Factors which make a language influential (Weber 1995(Weber /2003 winter issue of the ACTFL Newsletter porting in a brief paragraph a ranking of ten most influential languages," we have een the same paragraph appear in state ign language newsletters. While the parasome criteria used in the ranking, it has us about the original article. After much e were able to find the British publication day (Vol. 2, Dec. 1997) and the specific ted here, with the kind permission of the editor, Geoffrey Kingscott. The article appeared under the rubric "Geolinguistics." We decided to reprint the article in its entirety, despite its length, because its density and its complexity make it difficult to summarize or extract other than in the very brief form we have all seen, as previously indicated. We hope you will find it interesting as well as be warned away from any sense of security or smugness about the second place of French after English.

TOP LANGUAGES
ardly risks controversy with the statement today English was a more influential lange world-wide than Yanomami. To a child's y that should be -informed parenff would be that hundreds of milpeakers while could with diffiatch together ally difficult and d off-spring could out that in this se would be the tant language of At this point, the d parent would rat off to annoy se. guage, including is the most imuage of the world ers. Rather than 'important' we shall here, therefore, use the world 'influential' in its stead. Chinese is a very influential language, no doubt about it, but is it more so than ments make sense only if one looks at the world-wide picture, not just parochial bits of it. What does 'influential' mean in this context? Each language carries considerable cultural, social, historical and psychological baggage. As anyone who has ever had to learn a foreign language knows, doing so in many ways alters one's attitudes and world view.
To what extent, in what form and how deeply such changes actually manifest themselves in the individual learner depends on many factors, the circumstances that have led to the decision to learn the foreign language, the learner's character, intelligence, education and background. Theories on this subject need not detain us here. The very discovery that one can actually express the same thing in different words or look at something in totally different ways alone widens many a mental horizon. But not all. There are polyglot fanatics and it would be naive to claim that knowing a foreign language necessarily reduces aggression and the risk of war. It helps if other conditions are right, but more than linguistic skill is needed to bring that about. Leaders in what used to number of major fields (science, diplomacy, etc) using the language internationally 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 economic power of countries using the language number and population of countries using the language socioliterary prestige points points points points points • Communication in a lingua franca learnt as a foreign language may be accompanied by a lack of emotional involvement (Fine 1996, 494). • Speaking a FL may lead to less precise formulation and thus to a loss of information.

Practices
An important part of the DYLAN-project consisted in a fine-grained examination of numerous interactions in business contexts in order to understand how the very diverse linguistic repertoires of speakers operating in increasingly multilingual environments develop and how actors make the best use of their repertoires and adapt them skilfully to different objectives and conditions. Careful observation of actors' multilingual practices revealed finely tuned communicational strategies drawing on a wide range of different languages, including national languages, minority languages and lingue franche. The aim was to understand which communicative strategies are used in settings where several languages are used that are not all spoken equally well by all the individuals concerned. Understanding these practices, both their meaning and their implications, helps to show in what way and under what conditions they are not merely just a response to a problem, but an asset in business, political, educational, scientific and economic contexts.
One of the results of this research was the disproval of the common assumption that everyone speaks English. Participants adopt a wide range of strategies, and they do so in an extremely variable and dynamic way, constantly reassessing the solutions chosen. These strategies can be positioned on two axes. One axis contrasts "monolingual" strategies ("one language only" [OLON] and "one language at a time" [OLAT]) with "multilingual" ones ("all the languages at the same time" [ALAST], sometimes called "all language at all time" [ALAT]), and the other one links the "exolingual" pole (greatly asymmetrical repertoires) with the "endolingual" one (participants share the same repertoire). The following graph illustrates the diversity of solutions chosen, the solution inside the oval pointing to different forms of use of lingue franche: On the other hand, the heterogeneity of members of scientific teams can be conceived as a chance. Indeed in mixed teams or research groups, the clash of different perspectives, modes of interpretation or prediction (Page 2007), and different forms of language use in "conceptual spaces" (Boden 1996), more precisely in "in-between spaces" (Bhabha 1994) between cultures result in cognitive creativity (cf. Mitchell/Nicholas 2006, 72). The innovation concerns among others the way in which actors organise their meetings, structure their collaborative practices, set up rules, negotiate or even impose general attitudes concerning the use of languages -and finally the knowledge that is constructed itself (Berthoud et al. 2012(Berthoud et al. , eds. 2013).
However, actors and decision makers do not, normally, chose their actual behaviour on the ground of the results of scientific research, but rather based on ideologies, i. e. shared public beliefs. In many cases, the real practices can differ quite significantly from what people think and/or tell they do.
This calls for empirical research along different lines. In the following sections, we will first analyse the demolinguistic situation of Switzerland with a special focus on English at work. We will then have a look at the public debate about English and national languages at school. Finally, we will acknowledge the actual linguistic practices in several types of economic environments, from SME to multinational companies, in order to find answers to the question whether English and/or other languages -or maybe no single language at alldominates communication at work in Switzerland.

THE DEMOLINGUISTIC SITUATION OF SWITZERLAND
Human societies have always been multilingual. However, growing mobility of important parts of the world's population has led to a massive increase in multilingualism in postmodern societies and a lasting change from homoglossic to polyglossic communities with important "deterritorialised" linguistic minorities, mostly multilingual to a variable degree. Throughout many centuries -and fostered by the processes of nation-building and language standardisation -the prevalent image of linguistic diversity was that of a patchwork of rather homogeneous language communities which are in contact at their peripheries, through trade relations and exogamous marriages, but remain fundamentally monolingual. In modern times, particularly in urban contexts. such communities interpenetrate each other in new, original ways.
Switzerland represents a particularly interesting case in this respect. Since the constitutional process in the first half of the 19th century, the country is institutionally multilingual with German, French and Italian as national languages. Shortly before World War II, Romansh was added to this list. Since the 50ies, the steady increase in the number of migrants, expats, refugees, etc. has added different layers of non-national languages to this basis. From 1950 to 2013, their percentage as main languages rose steadily: For constitutional reasons, the distribution of the languages varies from one language region to the other, the respective official language reaching between 68% (Rhaeto-Romansh) and 88%.
English is not very frequent as main language (less than 5%). Nonetheless, for some people it is heading towards the status of "5 th national language" (see Watts et al. 2001 and section 3) due to its presence in the linguistic landscape and as a language spoken at work. According to the figures published online by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office in 2012, one of five jobholders in the canton Basel-Landschaft, one of four in the Canton of Zürich and almost every third in the canton Basel-Stadt ticked the box "English at work". English is mostly spoken in addition to other languages (Swiss German is spoken by four of five, Standard German by one of two jobholders). The figures are similar in the French (Geneva comparable to Zürich, Vaud comparable to Basel-Landschaft) and clearly lower in the Italian part of the country (less than one and a half of ten in Ticino).

58
Graph 2: Language use in different Cantons of Switzerland There are however tremendous differences between different job categories. In Basel-Stadt, for example, the proportion goes from less than one of ten (Craft and related trades workers, Plant and machine operators and assemblers, Elementary occupations) to over four of ten (Professionals) and even one of two (Managers). These differences are reflected in provisions concerning the language requirements (based on the levels of the CEFR) for vocational training as exemplified by a table produced by the Pedagogical University of Central Switzerland that distinguishes between first and second foreign language:  As can be seen in this list, for many professions the knowledge of more than one foreign language is requested, French (or even Italian) preceding even sometimes English. This corresponds to the need of the labour market as documented in several quantitative studies (Lüdi et al. 2005, Andres et al. 2005. They showed that the labour market is remarkably multilingual, and that the higher the percentage of English is (by canton and by socioprofessional categories) the more other languages are used. March 2015, voters in Nidwalden rejected -by a majority of more than 61% -an initiative sponsored by the right-wing UDC party that would have resulted in French being dropped from the canton's primary school curriculum. The debate is far from being closed because similar initiatives have been launched by groups of teachers and politicians in a number of other German speaking cantons. Their main overt argument is that children are over burdened, are losing interest in language learning, and that other important subjects are neglected. But in reality, the initiative to stop the teaching of two "foreign" languages at primary schools has a hidden agenda; it is clearly directed against French because nobody questions the priority of English and the necessity to teach it as early as possible.

THE IDEOLOGICAL DEBATE
As some bloggers put it in their comments to an interview in the news portal 20 Minuten on March 29th, 2014:
Das "Problem" liegt doch ganz woanders: Englisch wird immer wichtiger, Englisch ist auch in der Schweiz immer verbreiteter und entsprechend sehen immer mehr Leute keinen Grund darin, Französisch zu lernen. Was man nicht lernen WILL, KANN man nicht lernen; viele Leute WOLLEN Französisch nicht mehr lernen, also muss sich das Schulsystem anpassen und Französisch durch Englisch ersetzen. (...) Adds promoting English courses for children exploit the common belief that knowing English assures the children a bright future: Graph 3: Language courses for children Many commentators simplify the language question along two axes: (a) bilingualism (one second language as "language of communication" in combination with the respective local language as "language of identification" [House 2003]) is enough; it is better to speak one additional language well (be it reality or only a myth) than several languages approximately. Today this 2nd language is English, but it could also be Chinese as thematised in the following cartoon by Jaermann and Schaad published in the Tages-Anzeiger some time ago: Graph 4: Cartoon early language learning (b) languages are transparent; if everybody spoke English, intercomprehension would be perfect and misunderstandings due to linguistic and cultural diversity could be avoided (see also Wright 2011).
In a way, this debate reproduces a struggle originating in a period of emerging nationalism and "national languages": The best way to solve communication problems in a period of Babylonian confusion is to come back to one unique language of communication, without any negative side effects. 2 The main arguments in favour of the one-language-only solution are the worry of effectiveness, but also the equality of the chances to participate in a global speech community whatever the language and the culture of the concerned persons may be (cf. Kekulé, 2010). In contrast to the creation of the nation states, the English-only phenomenon is global and affects all the countries and language regions in the same way.
If only languages were transparent... Detailed analysis of interactions in English as lingua franca in the framework of European research project Language Dynamics and Management of Diversity (DYLAN) 3 revealed that the resources used are sometimes treated as only partially shared, as opaque to a certain degree, and as needing some repair, and that many other communication strategies can be observed in business contexts. In other terms, actual communication practices often challenge the ideological prejudices.
It is uncommon indeed that all members of a mixed group share the same plurilingual repertoire and understand all others' preferred languages. Nonetheless, the choice of a lingua franca -mostly English -might be a suboptimal procedure in business communication and can entail severe drawbacks: • Speaking the same language levels differences and might create the illusion of shared values and representations. Different languages carry a different epistemic potential (Fetscher 2013) the perception of which could be part of the resources for mixed team members' boundary spanning ability in multinational corporations, cultural and language skills influencing the extent to which boundary spanners perform most demanding functions (Barner-Rasmussen et al. 2014).
• The perception of one's lack of competence in the lingua franca is reflected in more insecurity.
• Communication in a lingua franca learnt as a foreign language may be accompanied by a lack of emotional involvement (Fine 1996, 494).
• Speaking a FL may lead to less precise formulation and thus to a loss of information. The harms and losses caused by "monolingual solutions" have already been mentioned in section 1.

PRACTICES
An important part of the Dylan-project consisted in a fine-grained examination of numerous interactions in business contexts in order to understand how the very diverse linguistic repertoires of speakers operating in increasingly multilingual environments develop and how actors make the best use of their repertoires and adapt them skilfully to different objectives and conditions. Careful observation of actors' multilingual practices revealed finely tuned communicational strategies drawing on a wide range of different languages, including national languages, minority languages and lingue franche. The aim was to understand which communicative strategies are used in settings where several languages are used that are not all spoken equally well by all the individuals concerned. Understanding these practices, both their meaning and their implications, helps to show in what way and under what conditions they are not merely just a response to a problem, but an asset in business, political, educational, scientific and economic contexts.
One of the results of this research was the disproval of the common assumption that everyone speaks English. Participants adopt a wide range of strategies, and they do so in an extremely variable and dynamic way, constantly reassessing the solutions chosen. These strategies can be positioned on two axes. One axis contrasts "monolingual" strategies ("one language only" [olon] and "one language at a time" [olat]) with "multilingual" ones ("all the languages at the same time" [alast], sometimes called "all language at all time" [alat]), and the other one links the "exolingual" pole (greatly asymmetrical repertoires) with the "endolingual" one (participants share the same repertoire). The following graph illustrates the diversity of solutions chosen, the solution inside the oval pointing to different forms of use of lingue franche: Graph 5: Overview of language practices Not only is the choice of a lingua franca such as English or French just one of many solutions; in addition, its form depends heavily on the speakers' levels of competence, ranging from a monolingual-endolingual mode (among speakers with a mastery of the lingua franca at a very high level) to a monolingual-exolingual one (where a barely mastered language is chosen for communication) or a multilingual-exolingual mode (where the speakers occasionally draw on other linguistic resources) and extreme forms where the lingua franca is a kind of hybrid, "rough-and-ready" version of the language. Other solutions comprise the lingua receptiva mode (sometimes known as "Swiss" or "Scandinavian" model [Lüdi/Höchle/Yanaprasart 2010]) in which everybody is expected to speak his/her own language and to understand the ones of the other speakers, and, of course, different forms of interpretation.
national languages, minority languages and lingue franche. The aim was to understand which communicative strategies are used in settings where several languages are used that are not all spoken equally well by all the individuals concerned. Understanding these practices, both their meaning and their implications, helps to show in what way and under what conditions they are not merely just a response to a problem, but an asset in business, political, educational, scientific and economic contexts.
One of the results of this research was the disproval of the common assumption that everyone speaks English. Participants adopt a wide range of strategies, and they do so in an extremely variable and dynamic way, constantly reassessing the solutions chosen. These strategies can be positioned on two axes. One axis contrasts "monolingual" strategies ("one language only" [OLON] and "one language at a time" [OLAT]) with "multilingual" ones ("all the languages at the same time" [ALAST], sometimes called "all language at all time" [ALAT]), and the other one links the "exolingual" pole (greatly asymmetrical repertoires) with the "endolingual" one (participants share the same repertoire). The following graph illustrates the diversity of solutions chosen, the solution inside the oval pointing to different forms of use of lingue franche: Monolingual use of a lingua franca (among speakers with a very good knowledge) endolingual "ideal" communication between persons sharing the same dominant language (monolingualexolingual mode) Endolingual-plurilingual mode between members of a community of practice sharing the same plural repertoire Exolingual and virtually monolingual use of a lingua franca with occasional recourse to other languages of the repertoire monolingual plurilingual ± extreme exolingual-plurilingual speech where participants activate all components of their repertoires exolingual An extreme plurilingual mode can by the way also be observed in written discourse as exemplified by an ad of Swiss Airlines (NZZ am Sonntag, 1.3.2015). The slogan "our sign is a promise") and the syntax of the headline ("volare to vingt-deux new destinations in ganz Europe") are English (= matrix language); the inserted lexical units belong to English and three of four national languages.
The choice of language(s) at work in a mono-/multilingual mode largely depends on the participants' profiles and competence, as well as on the -negotiated -framework of participation (see Lüdi et al. 2012). In settings where participants are aware that their competence is asymmetrical, solutions that enable the multilingual situation to be managed are developed in the course of the activity. Such solutions are not pre-existing models that are simply adopted as they stand, but invented in situ by the multilingual participants, and negotiated throughout their interaction, thus exploiting their cognitive and strategic flexibility mentioned above. These rough-and-ready solutions allow maximum flexibility and adaptability to the context. Our observations confirm the findings by Mondada (Mondada/Nussbaum 2012, Mondada 2012) that actors use all these strategies in a very systematically patterned way, based on underlying socially constructed knowledge. Note that these patterns are quite different from classic bilingual interactions in traditionally bilingual communities such as Puerto Ricans in New York, or Alsatians, even if the translinguistic markers 4 might belong to similar categories.
Two cases of plurilingual interactions in very different business contexts can exemplify the diversity of strategies used.
The first interaction (examples 1 -3) was recorded in 1999 by Isabel Kamber in a publishing-house in Montreux (French speaking part of Switzerland), and transcribed and published by Wetzel-Kranz (2001). DC, a German speaking programmer presents a new computer programme specially designed for the management of scientific articles to be published in a review. Florence's and Yolande's (the two collaborators') preferred language is French; the L1 of Rainer, the head of the unit, is German; his French is not very good and he prefers English.
Several observations are to be made: (a) the dominating mode is plurilingual; all the participants have at least a passive knowledge in all the others' languages.
(b) the language choice is frequently renegotiated, sequences of exploratory language choice alternating with sequences where French, German and English are the lingue franche and at the same time the matrix language in which elements of all the other languages are embedded (Myers Scotton 1997).
In a first sequence (example 1), the matrix language is French. In line 8, Florence makes a participant related code-switching to German to make DC feel more confortable; he sticks to French, but, corresponding to the level of his competence, in a clearly exolingual mode, with many insecurities and mistakes (e.g. *comprener [l. The preceding considerations draw upon a functional conception of multilingualism (CECR 2001). A set of skills in different languages, from near native to very partial, is seen as an integrated whole which is more than the sum total of its parts. Such a "multicompetence" (Cook 2008) or plurilingual "repertoire" (Gumperz 1982;Gal 1986;Lüdi 2006;Moore & Castellotti eds. 2008;Lüdi & Py 2009, etc.) was defined as a set of "resources" -both verbal (registers, dialects and languages) and non-verbal (e.g. mime and gestural expression) -that are shared and jointly mobilised by the actors in order to find local solutions to practical problems (Mondada 2001;Pekarek Doehler 2005).
Where one language only seems appropriate or possible, participants try to remain with this choice as much as possible. This is the case for French in example 1, German in example 2 and English in example 3. Nonetheless, -referring to English -, the Vienna specialists in lingua franca speak of a "multilingual mode": When language users are in an ELF mode, the range of resources and possibilities available to them is not limited to English however. Even though English is apparent on the surface, all of the speakers' linguistic resources are concurrently available for use. They are not automatically switched As a matter of fact, the ways of using a lingua franca depend heavily on the speakers' levels of competence, ranging from a monolingual-endolingual mode (among speakers with a mastery of the lingua franca at a very high level) to a monolingual-exolingual one (where a barely mastered language is chosen for communication) or a multilingual-exolingual mode. The results of all Dylan teams having worked on this topic point into the same direction. A lingua franca -be it French, German or English -is not a variety, but "actually constituted by very heterogeneous and multilingual varieties" (Markaki et al. 2013, 26), a kind of open variational space. This is of course also true for English: "Like any lingua franca, ELF emerges in multilingual settings. It is not only realised within, but also through linguistic diversity." (Hülmbauer/Seidlhofer 2013, 388). The more exolingual the setting is and the broader the interlocutors' repertoire, the more the speakers will draw occasionally on other linguistic resources. Talk in lingua franca is "interwoven with speakers' overall linguistic repertoires" (Hülmbauer/Seidlhofer 2013, 387). Thus, English as lingua franca appears "to be a multilingual mode" and the linguistic means used correspond to the "kind of hybrid, "rough-and-ready" version of the language" mentioned above (Lüdi et al. 2013). In other words, the use of a lingua franca does not differ categorically from plurilanguaging, but constitutes a borderline case of the latter.
Our second case study comes from a very different context. Recorded by Lucas A. Barth (2008) at a counter of the railway station of Basel, it presents a transactional interaction between an officer and a client. As the client answers in English to the Swiss German greeting guete Tag (LINE 2), the officer switches to English too and the whole transaction will be carried out in a monolingual-exolingual mode: The sequence consists of two parts. Firstly, the aim of the client is to buy a first class ticket to Milan (lines 1-25). Despite of some linguistic problems, solved by frequent reformulations by the officer (lines 7-8) and non verbal means (lines 13-16), this goal is achieved. In a side sequence, he then tries to get his original ticket Milan-Copenhagen reimbursed, a journey he could not complete because of administrative problems with the Germans (police german turn to Italy,. This part of the interaction is hardly comprehensible, but the officer is able to make a guess because the client provides the original ticket. However, he relegates him to the Italian railway company and returns to the first aim, the payment of the ticket. In this monolingual-exolingual interaction, no other means than English, gestures and material objects are used. Nevertheless, this transaction illustrates well the rough-and-ready character of the lingua franca that is used. In the client's turns, there is no elaborated syntax (I want going to Kopenhagen and police eh german eh turn to Italy), no verbal morphology (past time), no articles, minimal use of prepositions, etc. He sticks to a pre-grammatical mode of communication (Givón 1984(Givón , 2 20011998) that is heavily knowledge based and where word order is mainly characterised by the information status of discourse elements. Speaking about the use of English as lingua franca, we must acknowledge that it includes such minimal forms of English that are very far away from "Queen's English".

CONCLUSIONS
English is very important, indeed, as business language in Switzerland, in particular -but not only -for external communication. But this does not mean that it replaces the national languages. In fact, multilingual solutions prevail where participants draw on their entire repertoire. This is even true for the written mode. In their 2013 contribution about English as lingua franca to the Dylan book, Hülmbauer and Seidlhofer restrict the range of their findings to spoken language because it is "less constrained by the standardising forces associated with writing" (Hülmbauer/Seidlhofer 2013, 392). However, the written language might be affected as well. Concerning reporting about the experimental work in his unit, the head of a research laboratory with <Pharma A>, confesses Tous les rapports doivent être en anglais. Tout document officiel, le study plan, doit être en anglais. Le travail expérimental, ça peut être en allemand ou anglais. Il y a ce que nous appelons raw data, les données brutes, c'est en allemand. Les working documents, les documents avec lesquels elles [sc les laborantines] travaillent, sont en allemand, et ça, c'est un peu toléré parce qu'on est en Suisse. C'est un mélange. Parfois c'est intéressant, mais je ne me rends pas compte quand je parle et parfois il y a un mélange linguistique. This can be seen as an asset instead of as a problem. The members of the lab bring with them a wide experience in different research cultures (Swiss, French, English); in their daily work, they use a language mix 1 that allows for precision and creativity in their respective comfort zones. However, the official reporting is in English (see Lüdi ed. 2010 andLüdi et al. 2013).
1 In order to know how real life communication at the workplace matches these declarations, we not only audio-recorded different team meetings, we also convinced some persons to record all their verbal inter-actions during two working days with a clip-on microphone. Jamal H., head of the Lab B, was one of the participants in this study. The recordings firstly confirm the hypothesis that English is the most frequently used language by him and indeed with him (68%). All the meetings with members of his lab with one exception, including many encounters with other people, most phone calls, the greetings in the corridors and the small talk in the cafeteria, were all in English. However French obviously competed with English in his daily practice from small talk to negotiations with IT Graph 6: Flowchart representing the process of writing an English report In other words, the team is linguistically mixed, team members are plurilingual to a different degree, bring along readings and research experiences in different scientific cultures in their "educational suitcase" -and are facing the task to produce texts in English as corporate language only. We start from the premise that the asset that should be exploited for major innovation is reflected by the content of the members' respective suitcases.
In our flow chart we suggest that English might be in fact the language of reporting, but that all of the speakers' linguistic resources might have been concurrently used during the process of elaboration of knowledge. In other words, even scientific discourse produced in academic English (i. e. eventually corrected by native readers) "may only be superficially monolingual, in the sense that beneath the outward expression of this discourse, the many mental stages of its elaboration have taken place in another, or possibly many other languages"; thus, discourse in one given language "draws on a stratification embodying other linguistic inputs." The internal discussions correspond to the ALAST mode.
One of the conclusions of DYLAN claims that this is an asset: specialists up to a long scientific discussion about an experience protocol (23% of the overall speaking time). The underlying rule is: if an interlocutor is francophone, speak French and if his or her preferred language is another than French then use English. Jamal H. makes one exception to his second rulewhen addressing a lab assistant of Hungarian origin, he systematically chooses German (9%). In addition, Jamal H.'s microphone records a great number of Swiss German conversations in his immediate entourage indicating that he is frequently exposed to this language. This superposition of layers probably has particular relevance for scientific and academic discourse, because the elaboration of analytical thought embodied in written or oral productions can proceed differently depending on the linguistic resources exploited in the process. (Berthoud et al. 2013, 451).
The (re)discovery of the layers beneath the surface may then be compared to an exercise in "thick description" -a notion proposed by Usunier (2010) in the continuity of Geertz's (1973) approach to the interpretation of cultures. "Thick standardisation" -focuses on the complex dynamics between diversity and standardisation, the presence of the "different" within the homogeneous, and the diversity which exists within uniqueness. From the outset, the use of a standardised form, reflecting the desire to reach a certain threshold of mutual comprehensibility in the broadest sense, must be understood in full awareness of the potentially deceptive character of standardisation that may sometimes lead to a failure to understand even when you think you do. In other words, the use of a single language (whether English or any other) can create a false impression of shared meaning, when in fact actual meanings may differ and reflect deeper linguistic layers. Here again, one implication is that communication will be more reliable if allowance is made for these complex, intrinsically multilingual processes.
It is time to conclude. It results from our investigations that • English is increasingly important in the Swiss business world, but rather in addition than instead of other languages; • as a general rule, English is one of the components of an integrated plurilingual repertoire; • in most cases, the practice of English as lingua franca corresponds to an exolingual mode that bears more or less traces of the users' other languages; • more generally, plurilingual solutions to the firms' and their employees' communicative challenges are not only frequent and normal, but represent a real asset rather than an emergency solution.