Imaginaire (méta)linguistique et langue objet: le cas du FLE

More than a quarter of a century since its formulation, we can rightfully wonder about the effectiveness of the « centre-periphery » metaphor. In order to do this, we should take into account the symbolic contents it acquired over time, ranging from geometry to less static fields like town-planning and sociology. Those contents, which have become stable in the speakers’ thought-world, convey debatable evaluations when we apply them to linguistic expressions (faits de langue). The coming and going of migrations between centre and periphery (peripheries) at different levels will be illustrated by examples highlighting the problematical aspects of an evaluation of this image in terms of positive vs negative or essential vs incidental. Finally, we shall deal with the operational character of the centre-periphery image in the didactics of French as a foreign language.