Zur Rolle der Nachbarsprachen in der grenzüberschreitenden deutsch-französisch-luxemburgischen Sicherheitskooperation
Hauptsächlicher Artikelinhalt
Abstract
The article deals with the role of the neighbouring languages German and French in cross-border cooperation in the field of public security. It analyses a corpus of interviews conducted along the German-French-Luxembourg border at eight Gendarmerie/police stations in Lorraine, Alsace, Luxembourg and Baden-Württemberg. Geographically, the analysis thus covers different national border contexts; at the same time, two different organisational and communicational contexts were investigated: linguistic interaction between two (organisationally independent) national units (French Gendarmerie Nationale and German/Luxembourgish police) on the one hand and in organisationally joint units that deliberately operate across borders on the other. The aim of this article is to open up the topic of multi-/plurilingual communication in the workplace for the so far rarely treated context of cross-border communication in the field of security from an applied linguistic's perspective. The analyses show the high relevance of the neighbouring languages for the everyday cross-border work of the police/gendarmerie and illustrate that the potential for language problems can be localised at different levels: first the interaction between two national units (French gendarmerie and German police) and second the interaction between the respective national and cross-border level. Both constellations imply specific challenges for successful multi-/plurilingual communication.
