In this volume the team of the research group CIRCULA jointly addresses one of the topics of greatest interest to understand the relations between language and society: the representation of authority in discourses on language. And it does so through the analysis of the columns on language, a journalistic genre in which opinions of the language are accepted or rejected according to the criteria of some type of authority. The panromanic scope of the works - Latin America, Spain, Canada (Quebec), France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy - and the wide range of dates - XIX and XX centuries, which cover the entirety of its existence - allow a contrastive, diatopic and diachronic approach to the relations between language and power through this particular type of metalinguistic discourses in the press.

Les idees que les locuteurs, et non seulement les linguistes, se font des langues influencent leur usage, les transforment et contribuent a definir leurs normes. Ce volume aborde, dans une perspective comparative, des debats sur les langues romanes: des manifestations anciennes et actuelles du purisme a la recherche d'une langue commune, de la langue journalistique a celle utilisee dans la traduction et des commentaires des experts aux doutes des locuteurs et scripteurs. L'analyse discursive et textuelle appliquee aux textes vehiculant les ideologies linguistiques revele des questionnements negliges dans les grammaires ou dans les publications linguistiques traditionnelles.