Globalisation and linguistic disturbance in New Caledonia

Abstract

The following paper is a qualitative study of the way Kanak cultural activists in New Caledonia perceive the impact of globalisation on their linguistic communities. The data has been gathered from sixteen questionnaires and analysed thematically. The participants all connected globalisation to colonisation, and perceived both as processes disturbing the balance of their communities. This ultimately seems to result in a process of language shift that replaces traditional Melanesian ‘reciprocal’ multilingualism (Jourdan, 2007) with French monolingualism, through a brief bilingual phase.