ABSTRACT
The rising interest in multilingualism, across various disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, probably refl ects widespread but ambivalent perceptions of linguistic diversity and its importance, and the sphere of work is one of the terrains where this ambivalence is most in evidence. Indeed, one question must be settled before we proceed: is multilingualism an increasingly important phenomenon, gaining currency as the bundle of processes often called “globalisation” is gaining ground? Or does globalisation essentially abet the role of one hegemonic language, eroding multilingualism to a mere set of bilingual pairs combining the hegemonic language with a local one? Strangely, there seems to be little interaction between proponents of either view, with the result that two independent lines of discourse are deployed with few opportunities for them to be confronted, let alone reconciled.
