Language Policy and Language Practice in the Workplace

Abstract

The continuous social-political changes in the broader European region as well as increasing mobility and collaboration between countries are shaping a new financial-social and multilingual environment.
The aim of this paper is to discuss language practice in four multinational companies situated in one EU country, namely Greece, and to problematise the extent to which the dynamics of foreign language use are reflected in the country’s language policy regarding workplace languages. Special attention is paid to the use of Greek in companies where the official working language is English. The paper reports data from two projects on language policy and language use. The findings show that while English is a language reported as needed by the employees, other languages (including Greek as a foreign language) play an important role in business interactions