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Transnational companies

The granting of special status to English and the advertising of that status spread throughout large firms during the 1990s, and particularly among those trying to achieve a global position through takeovers and mergers. Examples are ABB (Asean-Brown-Boveri), Alcatel, Aventis, Daimler-Chrysler, EADS (European Aerospace Defence and Space), Novartis and Vivendi. Until the early 1990s these companies were particularly solidly established in their countries of origin, had a highly organised head office in those countries and covered a whole network of branches.

Nowadays they regard themselves as transnational companies which are less identifiable with particular countries or which may even wish not to be identified with specific countries. They accordingly change their names and the location of their head offices and declare English to be their official language.

Aventis resulted in this way from the merger of Rhône-Poulenc and Hoechst, two companies previously identified very clearly with their countries of origin, France and Germany. Its head office has been located in Strasbourg, a city which has no links with the founder companies but instead probably has a practical advantage and symbolic importance. Its decision to confer a special status on English is deliberately flaunted by its top executives.

Alain Godard, President of Aventis Crop Science, formerly Rhône-Poulence Agro (recently sold to the Bader group), has declared: "Vice-President Gerhart Prante and I speak with the same voice in English, the company's official language." (Le Monde, 08.02.2000). Its Director of Human Resources was even more explicit: "We must build a common culture around English, which is establishing itself as our working language" (Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace, 12.04.2001). At the end of the 1990s Siemens AG decided that German was no longer appropriate to its global scale and replaced it with English, which was identified as a company language. English became the official language of Daimler-Chrysler from the moment when Daimler-Benz (Mercedes) and Chrysler merged. However, German is still very much in evidence in Mercedes plants outside Germany.

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