Belçikalı Frankofon nüfusun Almanca ve Karolenj Frankçası hakkındaki dilsel temsilleri

This Master's thesis deals with social representations of language deployed by the French-speaking Belgians that are living in direct contact with German, and « Carolingian Frankonian », a regional language of Germanic origin. Drawing on a field study that has been conducted in two municipalities located in the Liège Region, namely Plomières and Welkenraedt, the thesis seeks to illustrate the ways in which the French speakers come to imagine the "otherness" of the other, the language of the other, the linguistic diversity of the space and the issues that are related to the power struggle between the existing languages, through a linguistic analysis of simultaneously produced discourses pertaining to categorization, denomination, evaluation and hierarchization of German, Carolingian Frankish and also the practices of speakers of these languages. Considering that the social reality constantly is constructed and negotiated within discourse by social actors, this study of sociolinguistics will embrace the socio-constructivist epistemology in the same way as social psychology, discipline from which it takes its object of study. The above stated theoretical and epistemological basis necessarily leads to favor a qualitative approach for processing the data collected from the field. In this direction, a micro corpus which is composed of four interviews has been constituted for the purpose of reporting on the discursive construction of social representations about languages. By focusing on the argumentative and discursive resources that the speakers make use of while putting their social representations into words, the thesis argues that the discursive construction of representations in a multilingual context implies at first the discursive construction of the imagined otherness of the other, while this process is done by way of a series of discursive and argumentative strategies that the speakers make use of when they need to express the convergences, divergences, resemblances and differences that they imagine exist between their own language and the languages of the others. Key words : Sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, multilingualism, French-speaking world, linguistic representations, socio-constructivism