Odile Schneider-Mizony

The contribution examines how the paradigms of historical, conflict, contact and ecolinguistics respectively shed different light on the relation between German and French as neighbouring languages. Historical linguistics sees the neighbourly language contacts as the result of bellicose and societal interferences; conflict linguistics centres on tensions and dominance behaviour between governments and linguistic enclaves or linguistic minorities. Contact linguistics takes account of the fact that any change in neighbourly language situations could also be seen as the result of conflict-free societal changes. Ecolinguistics follows this perspective on frame conditions – instead of historically important events – still more thoroughly, and its research focus on „linguistic landscape“ exposes bilingual landscapes as compensation for the loss of bilingualism. The survey shows after all that conflict linguistics is not the only fertile description of neighbourly language relations.

The contribution discusses the choice of language of French Germanists in their scientific publications. Contrary to the international academic world and the spreading of English in it, this pilot study to a bigger survey shows that the discipline of German Studies in France only uses two languages: German as the object language and the lingua franca of the guild, and French as meta-language and conveying code for the national language community. However as a recent development a slight Anglicisation can be observed.
 

For a better understanding of languages and cultures in French language teaching policy

This survey article about the situation of language teaching policy in France in 2012 looks mainly at the changes introduced by the European language policy. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages puts less emphasis on linguistic skills than on social-ethical goals and so furthers, at least in France, a language teaching aiming at a soft interculturality without much knowledge about geography, history and civilisation of the corresponding country.