Miquel Strubell^a* & Isidor Marí^a

Localisation and globalisation in Catalan companies’ language policies

Abstract

Catalan companies have, until very recently, had the Spanish-speaking world as their main market. Following long periods of legal and official repression of the public and commercial use of Catalan, globalisation now places them in a new, multilingual context that makes feasible the use of Catalan alongside that of other languages. This paper describes in what ways Catalan companies (whether or not exporters to the rest of Spain and/on the rest of the world) include the use of Catalan alongside other languages. The study reports on the ELAN.cat project, a partial replication of the EU-wide study of exporting firms conducted by Hagen. About 1071 Catalan firms were investigated, of which a third were exporters to markets outside Spain. Five hypotheses were tested, relating the management of multilingualism, company ownership and the main market, with the use of Catalan. The use of Catalan was found to be so widespread within companies that it failed to act as a discriminating variable in several of the hypotheses; in several cases, the correlation was negative. Low levels of awareness of the need for intercultural training were also detected. The implications of the results for the international competitiveness of Catalan firms are briefly discussed.

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