Abstrakt
With branches in various countries all over the world, multinational companies are (super)diversified in terms of the ethnicity of the workers (both the blue and white collar) and the communicative resources they use. Though this may be true to varying degrees depending on the particular multinational and the territory of its operation, multinationals must face, and as a matter of fact they do face, this (super)diversity to be able to manufacture and/or trade effectively.
For this purpose, they perform various acts of standardization in nearly all areas of their activities, including communication. Against the background of the language situation of few branches of select multinationals, this paper deals particularly, though not exclusively, with the issue of the corporate language in multinationals.
We pay attention to how the corporate language has been introduced in a particular multinational, who uses it for what purpose and under what circumstances. We address the question of the extent to which this act of standardization restricts linguistic (super)diversity in multinationals and we demonstrate the pluses and minuses of these and similar standardization acts.
The paper uses Language Management Theory (Nekvapil & Sherman 2015, 2013), which can provide an appropriate theoretical methodological framework to cover one important aspect of the superdiversity constellation, namely increased linguistic and communicative sensitivity of social actors (see Blommaert & Rampton 2011:8).