ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the issue of linguistic conflict in linguistically diverse workplace settings. It describes the data from interviews with 30 cross-border workers in Luxembourg to examine how participants construct linguistic conflict in the workplace. The chapter describes the theoretical framework of language ideologies and their relationship to linguistic conflict, before providing more detail on the data used for the study. It focuses on how participants use the language ideologies to promote their own interests and to construct discursive spaces of inclusion and exclusion in Luxembourg. The chapter draws on explicit metalinguistic discourse elicited through individual interviews. In some cases, the interviewers felt too as if language acted as a proxy for other points of contention in participants’ discourse, place of residence, cultural identity or social difference in general. The differences in ways that language ideologies are conceptualised by different researchers is reflected in the different kinds of data, methods and analytical approaches used to study them.
