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Introduction
The last ten to 15 years have seen a large number of theoretical contributions on the design and development of corporate language policies (CLP), for example [3] Bergenholtz et al. (2003), [5] Bergenholtz and Johnsen (2006), [11] Dhir and Gòkè-Paríolá (2002) [22] Kristensen (2003) and [24] Lauridsen (2008) to mention just a few, and a large number of Danish companies and organisations have in fact designed and implemented different types of CLPs as discussed by for example [10] da Silva et al. (2003), [37] Sørensen (2006) and [27] Lindquist (2007). All these theoretical contributions are no doubt very useful, however one crucial aspect needs further theoretical attention; the integration of the communication policy (CP), the corporate language policy (CLP) and the corporate information portal (CIP), which will be further defined and discussed below.
The data collected also seem to indicate that theory formation is needed and that the situation in the Danish corporate sector leaves much to be desired, because CLPs are rarely sufficiently operationalised in practice, first of all because they are neither linked with operational tools such as the CIP nor the company's CP. The practical implications of this unfortunate approach are severe; corporate communicators do not get the type and amount of help they require when communicating and the company's corporate communications efforts become fragmented and without a clear strategic direction.
The topic of this article is relevant for corporate communications as an interdisciplinary field of research and practice, because the corporate language policy is not well represented in the corporate communications literature. Corporate communications as discussed by for example [38] van Riel (1995), [9] Corneliussen (2004) and [8] Christensen and Morsing (2005) has so far not taken into account the increasingly multilingual and international nature of companies and addressed the operational surface linguistic dimension. This article attempts to do just that by offering a discussion of how the three communication artefacts may be integrated. The focus of this article is not to discuss the role of language in corporate communication as discussed by for example [29] Marschan et al. (1997), [28] Marschan-Piekkari et al. (1999) and [1] Andersen and Rasmussen (2004), who all make strong case for the impact of language skills in corporate communication, but to discuss how...