SPOTLIGHT ON… FRANÇOIS GRIN

François Grin is full professor at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting (FTI), where he teaches economics at Ba and Ma level and directs the Observatoire ÉLF (Observatory on Economy, Languages and Training). He is an expert in language economics, education economics, and the evaluation of public policies in those fields. He has authored numerous research publications and piloted several international research projects. He also heads the Délégation suisse à la langue française. In this interview, he presents two new projects, one of which is funded by a prestigious Advanced Grant awarded by the Fonds national suisse (FNS).

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Congratulations! You have been awarded a highly competitive FNS Advanced Grant. How do you explain your success?

Thanks! Let me start by saying that there’s always a degree of chance in these evaluation processes. Over the course of my career, I’ve seen more than one project rejected on the basis of critiques that are sometimes well-founded, but sometimes highly questionable… You can’t control that side. But what you can do is do your best to put in a proposal that is stimulating, coherent, and that tries to break new ground. For me, the biggest boost came from the four very positive appraisals I received from (anonymous!) experts a few months prior to the FNS decision, which was very gladdening. In terms of the content, what may have helped the GLAD (Governance of language diversity) project win the grant was the sincerity of its interdisciplinary outlook. In an academic realm that is often strongly siloed, interdisciplinarity is often a handicap, but in some circumstances, it can be a definite plus.

You are launching two new projects this spring - GLAD and RAMAL. Can you tell us about them?

GLAD is a very adventurous project that starts from fundamental theoretical considerations to look into two aspects of language policy that are so far largely unexplored. First, what makes language diversity more or less positive (and therefore desirable) in the view of social stakeholders – or, conversely, what can make social stakeholders reject it? Much of the answer probably lies in representations, which leads us to the intangible or symbolic aspects of language diversity. As a result, the second dimension to the GLAD project is identifying and measuring these symbolic aspects. We will be importing concepts developed in other fields of specialism, for instance environmental economics, to apply to languages. It’s a bold project and at this point I have no idea what we will find, but that was one of the evaluation criteria for this funding bid – projects had to be high risk, high gain.

RAMAL (Représentations, attitudes et motivations dans l’apprentissage des langues) looks at plurilingualism in the federal administration. The Confederation’s language policy has implemented various measures to promote internal plurilingualism. Fundamentally, the measures support the supply end of the equation, by which I mean they supply the means to develop plurilingual people, and by extension, multilingual practices in the administration. But what about demand? What do administration staff think about pluri- and multilingualism? What are their expectations? What obstacles do they encounter? Research into this facet of reality aims to underpin the long-term effectiveness of language policy.

I should stress that both projects illustrate why it is strategically vital for an institution like the FTI to approach its field of research with a broad perspective extending beyond translation and interpreting practice, incorporating the study of language diversity as a precondition for its very existence.

What makes GLAD and RAMAL stand out from your previous research projects on multilingualism?

I wouldn’t describe them as a new departure, rather as building on earlier research. Take GLAD, for instance – one underlying principle of the FNS advanced grants is to make use of accumulated experience to further our understanding of a given phenomenon. So they are directly connected to some of my theory-based publications dating back to the 1990s and to more recent work published in the past three or four years. GLAD’s interdisciplinarity also echoes a European large-scale integrated project like MIME (Mobility and Inclusion in Multilingual Europe, 2014-2018). There are also links to various projects of mine over the past thirty years on pluri- and multilingualism in Switzerland. Here I have in mind projects like CLES, LEAP, Suisse—Société multiculturelle, PAC and APSIS, for instance, all outlined on the Observatoire Économie-Langues-Formation (ÉLF) page on the FTI website. That said, what is new about both RAMAL and GLAD is that we will be developing analytical tools that help bridge the gap between theory and empirical measurement, leading to brand new data that opens up avenues for analyses that have never been undertaken before.

What difficulties do you expect to encounter and what results do you expect to find?

The difficulties depend on the project. For RAMAL, one challenge is being true to the specific context of the Swiss federal administration, which is crucial to a fair evaluation of the difficulties and potentialities of a genuinely multilingual working environment. We must therefore build a clear analytical framework to approach this reality, but we will also have to be very good listeners. For GLAD, the conceptual scope is considerable, and I sometimes find it a bit intimidating. For now, the challenge is absorbing concepts and information of extraordinarily different kinds, from social psychology to geopolitics and economic theories of value. The end goal is to carve out an analytical framework that is broad-based yet targeted and thorough yet flexible… This framework will let us make the most of the data we collect. At this stage, I don’t know exactly what the outcome of the GLAD project will be, but in all honesty, I am firmly convinced that whatever information it gives us will be very rich and entirely new. It will also be useful to us and other people and will shed light on language diversity and its impact on contemporary societies. At a time when democracies are under greater threat than they have been for decades, such research is absolutely crucial.

In short, the challenges and issues at stake are both sizeable. But I am lucky enough to have excellent working conditions to tackle them at the FTI – with special thanks to the admin and tech teams! I’m also lucky enough to have a great research group with me at the Observatoire ÉLF. Without them, none of this would be possible. All these projects are built on teamwork.