How multinational corporations affect their local surroundings: Sociolinguistic insights from the Czech Republic
Abstract
Multinational companies can relatively easily affect the social and communicative processes taking place not only within their branches, but also in their geographical surroundings. This feature has been largely overlooked in the specialized sociolinguistics literature.
In this paper, we focus on how multinational companies that operate in the Czech Republic and are based in two countries, Germany and South Korea, change the social and language life, and also the appearance (linguistic landscape), of neighboring towns. We begin by detailing the research background that has led to the current project.
We then take a more critical look at the context we are currently examining and introduce our theoretical-methodological approach, based in Language Management Theory (Jernudd & Neustupný 1987; Nekvapil 2016). We detail the most relevant characteristics of the German and Korean communities in the Czech Republic, which contribute to the historical-structural conditions that assist us in our analysis (cf.
Tollefson 1991). We then examine the cases of two municipalities, Frenštát pod Radhoštěm and Frýdek-Místek, revealing that the observable diversifying impact of the Korean multinationals is considerably higher than that of the German multinationals, and at present is the object of significantly more socio-cultural management.