Multilingual Encounters in Europe’s Institutional Spaces: Advances in Sociolinguistics 9781441107817, 9781472541987, 9781441168818

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Multilingual Encounters in Europe’s Institutional Spaces

Advances in Sociolinguistics Series Series Editors: Tommaso M. Milani, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa Since the emergence of sociolinguistics as a new field of enquiry in the late 1960s, research into the relationship between language and society has advanced almost beyond recognition. In particular, the past decade has witnessed the considerable influence of theories drawn from outside of sociolinguistics itself. Thus rather than see language as a mere reflection of society, recent work has been increasingly inspired by ideas drawn from social, cultural, and political theory that have emphasised the constitutive role played by language/discourse in all areas of social life. The Advances in Sociolinguistics series seeks to provide a snapshot of the current diversity of the field of sociolinguistics and the blurring of the boundaries between sociolinguistics and other domains of study concerned with the role of language in society. Discourses of Endangerment Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages Edited by Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller Globalization and Language in Contact Scale, Migration, and Communicative Practices Edited by James Collins Globalization of Language and Culture in Asia Edited by Viniti Vaish Intercultural Contact, Language Learning and Migration Edited by Jean Conacher Language, Culture and Identity An Ethnolinguistic Perspective Philip Riley Language Ideologies and Media Discourse Texts, Practices, Politics Edited by Sally Johnson and Tommaso M. Milani Language Ideologies and the Globalization of ‘Standard’ Spanish Darren Paffey Language in the Media Representations, Identities, Ideologies Edited by Sally Johnson and Astrid Ensslin Language and Power An Introduction to Institutional Discourse Andrea Mayr Language Testing, Migration and Citizenship Edited by Guus Extra, Massimiliano Spotti and Piet Van Avermaet Linguistic Minorities and Modernity, 2nd Edition A Sociolinguistic Ethnography Monica Heller Multilingualism A Critical Perspective Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese Semiotic Landscapes Language, Image, Space Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow The Languages of Global Hip-Hop Edited by Marina Terkourafi The Language of Newspapers Socio-Historical Perspectives Martin Conboy The Languages of Urban Africa Edited by Fiona Mc Laughlin The Sociolinguistics of Identity Edited by Tope Omoniyi

Multilingual Encounters in Europe’s Institutional Spaces Advances in Sociolinguistics Edited by Johann W. Unger, Michał Krzyżanowski and Ruth Wodak

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2015 © Johann W. Unger, Michał Krzyz˙anowski, Ruth Wodak and contributors 2014 Johann W. Unger, Michał Krzyz˙anowski and Ruth Wodak have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-0781-7 PB: 978-1-4742-5474-8 ePub: 978-1-4411-4484-3 ePDF: 978-1-4411-6881-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents 1

Introduction: Encountering Multilingualism in Europe’s Institutions Johann W. Unger (Lancaster University), Michał Krzyżanowski (Örebro University) and Ruth Wodak (Lancaster University)

Part 1  Private-sector Institutions 2 3

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Language Management Measures and Their Impact in Companies Operating in a Context of Linguistic Diversity Georges Lüdi (University of Basel) Language Choice and Participation Management in International Work Meetings Vassiliki Markaki (University of Geneva: Haute Ecole de Santé ARC), Sara Merlino (University of Basel), Lorenza Mondada (University of Basel), Florence Oloff (University of Basel) and Véronique Traverso (ICAR Research Laboratory, University of Lyon and CNRS) Economic Capitalization of Linguistic Diversity: Swiss Multilingualism as a National Profit? Alexandre Duchêne (University of Fribourg) and Alfonso Del Percio (University of Fribourg and University of St Gallen)

Part 2  National and Supranational (Political) Institutions 5 6

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Multilingual Communication in Europe’s Supranational Spaces: Developments and Challenges in European Union Institutions Michał Krzyżanowski (Örebro University)

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The European Parliament: Multilingual Experiences in the Everyday Life of MEPs Ruth Wodak (Lancaster University)

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vi Contents

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Multilingualism in the European Commission: Combining an Observer and a Participant Perspective Bernhard Forchtner (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Part 3  Educational Institutions 8

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Discourses of Aspiration and Distinction in the Local School Economy Adrian Blackledge, Angela Creese and Jaspreet Kaur Takhi (University of Birmingham) The Genealogy of Educational Change: Educating to Capitalize Migrant Students Luisa Martín Rojo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

10 Negotiating Multilingualism in Flemish Higher Education Frank van Splunder (University of Antwerp) 11 Building a Multilingual University in Institutional Policies and Everyday Practices Emilee Moore (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Universitat Internacional de Catalunya) and Luci Nussbaum (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) Index

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Introduction: Encountering Multilingualism in Europe’s Institutions Johann W. Unger (Lancaster University), Michał Krzyżanowski (Örebro University) and Ruth Wodak (Lancaster University)

About this volume There are several key assumptions that lie at the heart of this edited volume, and which unite the different theoretical and methodological approaches in various institutional contexts that can be found in subsequent chapters. First, like many scholars who share a broad interest in language in society, we see institutions as key sites for empirical research, mainly because they are the spaces within which policy decisions are made and implemented, and where the individuals who are affected by policies interact with the individuals charged with enforcing them (see Krzyżanowski, 2010; Krzyżanowski and Oberhuber, 2007; Muntigl et al., 2000; Wodak, 2011). Second, these interactions in present-day Europe are increasingly likely to involve individuals with different first languages. Sometimes, the encounters take place predominantly in the first language of one or the other of the interlocutors but also, increasingly, in a language that is not the first language of either, or in several languages in sequence or at once. This is not to say that this situation is unique to Europe, nor to the present day. As Romaine (2012: 445) remarks, ‘bilingualism and multilingualism are normal, unremarkable necessities of everyday life for the majority of the world’s population’. Furthermore, Europe is or was home to many venerable institutions with a long and rich multilingual history (e.g. the European Union, the Catholic Church or the Austro-Hungarian Empire). And yet, the predominantly monoglot ideologies (see Silverstein, 1996) underlying most of present-day Europe’s nation-states and the ‘sociolinguistic regimes’ (see Gal,

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2010; Krzyżanowski and Wodak, forthcoming; and chapters by Krzyżanowski and by Wodak, this volume) of supra-national institutions have meant that multilingualism has had to be ‘rediscovered’ in some cases, while it is actively resisted in others (see e.g. Phillipson, 2003). Even in scholarly work there is an ongoing debate, as outlined below, about the nature of multilingualism, and its relevance to different objects of investigation. Thus what the contributors to this volume set out to do is to explore and discuss different ways of researching the discursive dimensions of these multilingual encounters, and to examine critically their institutionally bound dynamics as well as their relevance to policy, to politics and society as a whole. This includes institutions at Europe’s local, regional, national and supranational levels; we outline some of the most relevant research into institutions at these different levels below. There are of course numerous theoretical and methodological approaches to this topic, and the contributions represent a broad cross-section of these. They put particular emphasis on critical and interdisciplinary approaches to discourse and communicative interaction, and on language policy and planning. The interdisciplinary orientation of this volume brings together the work and approaches of linguists of various traditions, ethnographers, sociologists, educational researchers and political scientists, to name but a few. The different ways of integrating context – for instance through ethnographic fieldwork and/ or discourse-historical analysis of salient texts – is a further strength of this volume. This introductory chapter summarizes these approaches and describes some of the previous scholarly debates on multilingualism, before offering an overview of the whole volume.

The many meanings of multilingualism in late-modern (European) societies The process of European nation-state formation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was also a process of linguistic homogenization. As Martin-Jones et al. (2012a: 2) put it, citing Hobsbawm (1990): ‘the nation-state came to be conceptualised in Western thought as an organic essence and as a linguistically and culturally homogeneous entity, linked to territory and to “a people” ’. This drive towards imagined homogeneity (see also Anderson, 2006 on ‘imagined communities’) was often led by and enacted in institutions – the growing



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state bureaucracies of Europe with centralized information repositories, the increasingly standardized education systems and the economic imperatives of globalized capitalist enterprises all contributed to this drive (see e.g. RindlerSchjerve and Vetter, 2007; Krzyżanowski and Wodak, 2011; Hüning et al., 2012; Wodak, 2012; see also Parekh, 2008; Krzyżanowski, 2010 on multicultural identities and globalization). Although there is no shortage of scholarly voices critiquing homogenized and simplistic views of language, nationality and society (e.g. Bourdieu, 1991; Billig, 1995; Heller, 2011; Busch, 2013), it is nevertheless important to keep expanding the field of applications of critical research in this area, and to challenge potentially damaging policies. As numerous studies of language and globalization have attested (Blommaert, 2010; Duchêne and Heller, 2012), the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been a period of intense upheaval and rapid change as far as language practices are concerned – this theme is also taken up in various ways in the following chapters. It is crucial to keep in mind the term ‘multilingualism’ itself is not without contention. Early approaches to language in the nascent discipline of linguistics were essentially concerned with (usually monolingual) ‘native speakers’ (MartinJones et al., 2012a: 4), or later with language learners, but did not necessarily allow for multilingual individuals with their own sets of (multilingual) practices. As early as the 1960s, Fishman (1967) lamented the disconnect between psychological understandings of bilingualism and sociological understandings of diglossia. At the same time, the sociological notion of code (Bernstein, 1964, 1971; see also Ivinson, 2011) and the sociolinguistic interest in variation (e.g. Labov, 1966) provided an opening for scholars wishing to critique the prevailing ‘one speaker–one language’ ideology. However, Martin-Jones et al. (2012b), tracing the history of multilingualism as a concept in linguistic, ethnographic and sociological enquiry, point out that it was not until relatively late that more nuanced understandings developed within sociolinguistics (see e.g. Pratt, 1987). Gradually, however, multilingualism came to be seen as an object of enquiry in its own right, going beyond the rather limited understandings of bilingualism and diglossia critiqued by Fishman (see e.g. Gal, 1979; Heller, 1988; Romaine, 1989 for early work; see also Spolsky, 2011 on Fishman). However, it was not long until multilingualism itself became a problematic label for some scholars (see e.g. Pennycook, 2011; Sallabank, 2011; Pennycook, 2011 for recent discussions in various contexts); in critiquing and developing this concept, scholars have come up with a plethora of alternatives, including partially overlapping terms such as plurilingualism, polylingualism, interlingualism, multiplurilingualism,

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metrolingualism, superdiversity, translanguaging and crossing (see Weber and Horner, 2012 for an overview). It is not the purpose of this book to provide a general introduction to multilingualism, nor to redefine it as a concept. Nevertheless, the large numbers of recent scholarly books (e.g. Blackledge and Creese, 2010; Blommaert, 2010), journal special issues (e.g. Kelly-Holmes and Milani, 2011), edited collections (e.g. Extra and Gorter, 2008), handbooks (e.g. Wodak et al., 2011; Gardner and Martin-Jones, 2012; Martin-Jones et al., 2012b) and textbooks (e.g. Weber and Horner, 2012) demonstrate the ongoing scholarly interest in and relevance of this topic. What many of these recent scholarly treatments share, and what sets them apart from earlier work, is a focus on practices rather than varieties, and on linguistic repertoires instead of (or in addition to) linguistic identities. This is taken up in several of the chapters in this book (see below) which undertake detailed, often ethnographic, accounts of multilingual institutional contexts and show the nuanced nature and multivoicedness (Blackledge and Creese, 2010; see also Pavlenko et al., 2001) of institutional interactions. Moreover, the focus has been extended to multimodal analysis (see Milani and Johnson, 2010), for instance while analysing video recordings of classroom interactions or of linguistic landscapes (see chapters by Markaki et al., Martin Rojo, and Lüdi in this volume). Another research tradition in which multilingualism has also been of relevance to scholars is the field of language policy and planning. Critical approaches to language policy (e.g. Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 1994; Pennycook, 1999; Tollefson, 2002; Phillipson, 2003; Ricento, 2003; Canagarajah, 2005; Berthoud and Lüdi, 2011; Krzyżanowski and Wodak, 2011; McCarty, 2011; Piller and Takahashi, 2011; Shohamy, 2012; see Unger, 2013, for an overview), often starting from a position of critiquing specific language policies in national and nationalist contexts, have studied institutions of various kinds with a view to exposing the material and symbolic damage these policies can do to particular social groups or communities, such as linguistic minorities, migrants and so forth (e.g. Piller and Takahashi, 2011). Much of this work has been on (nation-)state-level policies (e.g. May, 2001), and has hence focused mainly on legislation, education and governmental policies. Describing and critiquing the imbalances caused by laws and policies that either ignore or insufficiently support minority languages is of course important with regard to multilingualism as well. The groups of minority-language speakers described in language policy research are often multilingual, having to use the official or majority language in official interactions of various kinds, including contact



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with political representatives. A growing number of language policy-related studies also encompass supranational (e.g. Krzyżanowski and Wodak, 2011; Romaine, 2013), educational (e.g. Blackledge and Creese, 2010) and privatesector (e.g. Barakos, 2012) institutions, and this book extends the scholarship in this field. Moreover, debates on whether language tests should be required in order to acquire the right to immigrate to a country have now also been taken up in work on multilingualism (see e.g. Hogan-Brun et al., 2009). A newly imposed hegemonic national language regime is being imposed by state officials; thus, in spite of all the policies endorsing European multilingualism, tendencies of renationalization are emerging and gaining importance (Krzyżanowski and Wodak, 2009; Bauböck and Joppke, 2010; Bauböck, 2012; Fortier, 2012; Messer et al., 2012; Bauböck and Wallace, 2012; Wodak, 2013, forthcoming). Martin-Jones et al. (2012a: 1) identify the influence of ‘critical and post-structuralist perspectives from social theory’ on recent research into multilingualism, and the ‘shift of focus to empirical work, which is interpretive, ethnographic and multimodal in nature’. We would argue that what sets apart much of this recent work is that it takes account of the discursive nature of multilingual interactions, and also examines what is said about multilingual interactions, rather than just studying the interactions themselves. This discursive turn in multilingualism has occurred in two ways. First, for some time now, scholars in discourse studies have taken an interest in multilingualism (e.g. de Cillia, 1996; Blommaert, 1999; de Cillia et al., 2003; Blackledge, 2005; Wodak, 2005; de Cillia and Wodak, 2006; Rindler-Schjerve and Vetter, 2007; Krzyżanowski and Wodak, 2011; Busch, 2013). Second, some scholars already working on multilingualism in other frameworks have emphasized the discursive dimensions of their data (e.g. Gal, 2006, 2010; Duchêne and Heller, 2012; Jaffe, 2012; Romaine, 2013). Furthermore, in many of these discussions of multilingualism the concept of language ideologies has also been redefined (see Kelly-Holmes and Milani, 2011, and chapters by Krzyżanowski and by Wodak in this volume). Finally, the growing use of ethnographic approaches to multilingualism (see Gardner and Martin-Jones, 2012) has also contributed to this trend, particularly as scholars have recently been exploring and debating the synergies between ethnography and (critical) discourse studies (Krzyżanowski, 2011). In this volume, then, we hold the discursive aspects of multilingual encounters in institutions to be a vital entry point into understanding how institutions and the individuals who interact within them regulate and are affected by multilingualism.

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Overview of the volume The first part of this volume is concerned predominantly with private-sector institutions – businesses of various kinds, multinational companies and other similar contexts. In the first contribution, Lüdi (Chapter 2) presents the results of a methodologically multifaceted study into the linguistic practices of Swiss workplaces. Like our other contributors (see below), he finds that common-sense understandings of ‘language’ as monolithic and static are not matched by real-world practices. Rather, plurilingual individuals in multilingual companies assemble the linguistic repertoires they require to match functional needs and ideological inclinations. In Chapter 3, Markaki, Merlino, Mondada, Oloff and Traverso analyse implicit and explicit decisions about language choice in international work meetings. They adopt a conversation-analytic and ethnomethodological framework, which allows for a very fine-grained examination of linguistic and gestural practices in these meetings. Choices about which language to use can be made, negotiated, changed and challenged in multiple ways, and participants draw on local contingencies as much as institutional expectations in making these choices. While the preceding two chapters largely deal with spoken interactions, Duchêne and Del Percio (Chapter 4) analyse the written promotional material of an institution charged with attracting inward investment. Like the preceding chapter, Duchêne and Del Percio are not just concerned with discourse that makes use of multilingual repertoires, but also with (meta) discourse on multilingualism – in this case, used to construct Switzerland as an ideal place to do business. In Part 2, we move from national and international private-sector enterprises to supranational political institutions. In Chapter 5, Krzyżanowski examines the history of multilingualism in the EU and its predecessors. He argues that multilingualism has always been central to the European project, but that challenges around the ‘management’ and regulation of multilingualism came particularly to the fore during the large increase(s) in EU members in the 2000s. Following extensive fieldwork in different EU institutions, Krzyżanowski is able to analyse the politics (and policies) of EU multilingualism critically and to point to several challenges the EU must face in order to improve its still-ailing multilingual communication. Wodak (Chapter 6) continues with this focus on the EU and reports on language ideologies related to multilingualism in the European Parliament. She draws on critical discourse studies and critical approaches to sociolinguistics, bringing together a number of theoretical and



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methodological influences from both fields. Her key finding, from an ethnographic study of MEPs’ daily work practices, is that they are under constant and conflicting pressures to uphold the multilingual principles of the Parliament on the one hand, but on the other to cope with their daily workload, which often means defaulting to a convenient lingua franca (typically English or French). In the final contribution to this part, Forchtner (Chapter 7) presents the findings from a study of meetings in the European Commission. Using code-switching as his object of investigation, he is able to show that national and/or institutional language policies and ideologies are relevant in the context of EU expansion, but recede in importance in these ‘closed’ spaces. Rather like in the case of MEPs and multinational businesspeople, pragmatism dictates that local factors will determine how and when participants draw on their multilingual repertoires. The final part consists of studies of multilingualism in educational contexts, including complementary schools for ‘heritage’ language education, secondaryschool practices involving children of migrants, and English as a lingua franca in higher education. Blackledge, Creese and Kaur Takhi (Chapter 8) conduct a linguistic ethnographic study of ‘Panjabi heritage’ students in complementary schools, drawing particularly on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and on Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. They are able to show the importance of aspiration in these students’ lives, as they negotiate their home, mainstream school and complementary school experiences. At the same time, they also critique the concept of ‘multilingualism’ as a useful frame for analysing these kinds of encounters. In Chapter 9, Martín Rojo critically examines how schools contribute to social inequality by managing the language use and linguistic resources of the descendants of migrants in particular ways. Her ethnographic investigation not only involved the observation and critical evaluation of classroom practices, but ultimately led to changes in teaching methods and procedures at a secondary school in Madrid. In van Splunder’s contribution (Chapter 10), the role of English in particular, and other languages more generally, is examined in the context of higher education in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Van Splunder uses a multimethod approach to compare national/ regional language ideologies with those found within a higher-education institution. The following and final chapter, Chapter 11, also discusses the role of English as a lingua franca in European higher education. Moore and Nussbaum contrast official policies and specific practices at a Catalan university with respect to the internationalization that has become an important part of the identity formation of many universities, not least due to the Bologna process. They examine how ‘local’ and ‘international’ are articulated in service

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encounters and official ceremonies, and find that participants have to negotiate multiple language ideologies during these encounters and mobilize plurilingual resources in accomplishing often overlapping goals.

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Krzyżanowski, M. and Oberhuber, F. (2007), (Un)Doing Europe: Discourses and Practices of Negotiating the EU Constitution, Brussels: PIE – Peter Lang. Krzyżanowski, M. and Wodak, R. (2009), The Politics of Exclusion: Debating Migration in Austria, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. —(2011), ‘Political strategies and language policies: the European Union Lisbon strategy and its implications for the EU’s language and multilingualism policy’, Language Policy, 10: 115–36. —(forthcoming), ‘Dynamics of multilingualism in post-enlargement EU institutions: perceptions, conceptions and practices of EU-ropean language diversity’, in A.-C. Berthoud, G. Lüdi and F. Grin (eds), Exploring the Dynamics of Multilingualism, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Labov, W. (1966), The Social Stratification of English in New York City, Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Martin-Jones, M., Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2012a), ‘Introduction: a sociolinguistics of multilingualism for our times’, in M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, London: Routledge. —(2012b), The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, London: Routledge. May, S. (2001), Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language, Harlow: Longman. McCarty, T. L. (2011), Ethnography and language policy, New York, London: Routledge. Messer, M., Schroeder, R. and Wodak, R. (2012), Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Vienna: Springer. Milani, T. and Johnson, S. (2010) ‘Critical intersections: language ideologies and media discourse’, in: T. Milani and S. Johnson (eds), Language Ideologies and Media Discourse, London: Continuum, 3–14. Muntigl, P., Weiss, G. and Wodak, R. (2000), European Union Discourses on Unemployment, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Parekh, B. (2008), A New Politics of Identity: Political Principles for an Interdependent World, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pavlenko, A., Blackledge, A,. Piller, I. et al. (2001), Multilingualism, Second Language Learning, and Gender, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Pennycook, A. (1999), ‘Development, culture and language: ethical concerns in a postcolonial world’, The Fourth International Conference on Language and Development: Partnership and Interaction in Language and Development, Language Centre, Asian Institute of Technology, Pathum Thani, Thailand: Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. —(2011), ‘Global Englishes’, in R. Wodak, B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill (eds), The Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics, London: Sage, 513–26. Phillipson, R. (2003), English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy, London: Routledge.



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—(2006), ‘Language policy and linguistic imperialism’, in T. Ricento (ed.), An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 346–61. Piller, I. and Takahashi, K. (2011), ‘Language, migration and human rights’, in R. Wodak, B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill (eds), The Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics, London: Sage, 573–87. Pratt, M. L. (1987), ‘Linguistic utopias’, in N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant, et al. (eds), The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 48–66. Ricento T. (2003), ‘The discursive construction of Americanism’, Discourse & Society, 14: 611–37. Rindler-Schjerve, R. and Vetter, E. (2007), ‘Linguistic diversity in Habsburg Austria as a model for modern European language policy’, in J. D. Ten Thije and L. Zeevaert (eds), Receptive Multilingualism: Linguistic Analyses, Language Policies and Didactic Concepts, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 49–70. Romaine, S. (1989), Bilingualism, London: Blackwell. —(2012), ‘The bilingual and multilingual community’, in T. K. Bhatia and W. C. Ritchie (eds), The Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism, Chichester, UK: WileyBlackwell, 445–65. —(2013), ‘Politics and policies of promoting multilingualism in the European Union’, Language Policy, 12: 115–37. Sallabank, J. (2011), ‘Language endangerment’, in R. Wodak, B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill (eds), The Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics, London: Sage, 496–512. Sebba, M. (2011), ‘Societal Bilingualism’, in R. Wodak, B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill (eds), The Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics, London: Sage, 445–59. Shohamy, E. (2012), Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches, London: Routledge. Silverstein, M. (1996), ‘Monoglot “standard” in America: standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony’, The Matrix of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology, 284–306. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., Phillipson, R. and Rannut, M. (1994), Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Spolsky, B. (2011), ‘Ferguson and Fishman: sociolinguistics and the sociology of language’, in R. Wodak, B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill (eds), The Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics, London: Sage, 11–23. Tollefson, J. W. (2002), Language Policies in Education: Critical Issues, Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Unger, J. W. (2013), The Discursive Construction of the Scots Language: Education, Politics and Everyday Life, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Weber, J. J. and Horner, K. (2012), Introducing Multilingualism: a Social Approach, London: Routledge. Wodak, R. (2005), ‘Linguistic analyses in language policies’, in T. Ricento (ed.), An Introduction to Language Policy. Theory and Method, Oxford: Blackwell, 170–93.

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—(2011), The Discourse of Politics in Action, Basingstoke: Palgrave. —(2012), ‘Language, power and identity’, Language Teaching, 45: 215–33. —(2013), ‘Dis-citizenship and migration: A Critical Discourse-Analytical Perspective’, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 12. —(forthcoming), Politics of Fear, London: Sage. Wodak, R., Johnstone, B. and Kerswill, P. (2011), The Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics, London: Sage.

Part One

Private-sector Institutions

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Language Management Measuresand Their Impact in Companies Operating in a Context of Linguistic Diversity Georges Lüdi (University of Basel)

Introduction Aside from international institutions and higher education, workplaces are a setting where major changes in the extent of multilingualism are observable as businesses acquire more and more international partners, where there is an increasing number of partnerships within and between businesses scattered across various countries, and an increasing number of staff from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds who are working in the same teams, both physically and virtually. In this context, it is essential to understand better how social actors mobilize multilingual resources in their professional practice, how they perceive, represent and actively shape the multilingual and multicultural character of their work and projects, and how companies regulate, prescribe, enforce or reduce the multilingual dimensions of these dynamics. The macrocontext of our research is the officially quadrilingual Switzerland (German, French, Italian; in most cases, the fourth national language, RhaetoRomance, plays only a symbolic role) and the trinational Upper Rhine Region, also characterized by a language contact situation (German, French, Alemannic). We mainly worked with three different types of firms: companies operating globally but based in Switzerland, companies operating at a national level, i.e. across internal language borders, and at the regional level in the Upper Rhine (see Lüdi [ed.], 2010 for a full account).

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Contextualization Because of the stereotype that language is transparent, management research frequently does not take multilingualism into account when dealing with the planning of internal as well as external communication in companies (e.g. Bruhn, 2003). In addition, the dominance of English in businesses is taken for granted, as formulated by a French-speaking transnational medical leader in : ‘Et euh bon, sinon, je parle l’anglais, parce que, parce qu’ici on parle anglais globalement’ [and, erm, well, if not, I speak English, because, because here one speaks English globally], or by two managers of : ‘the common language is English’ and : ‘English is, as I said, the official management language … of the company, so at management meetings, in most mixed conferences, English IS the language.’ Accordingly, an important part of the preceding research concentrated on a shift of companies’ language to English and on the forms of English used at work, respectively (e.g. Truchot, 1990; Vollstedt, 2002; Crystal, 2007; Rosenberger, 2009; Mauranen and Ranta, 2009). Fieldwork which was carried out in the international and national companies operating in multilingual contexts we worked with did, however, show that many implicit language policies and overt management measures of companies do indeed deal with linguistic diversity, be it in the context of diversity management or in terms of defining a corporate culture and a corporate language, and that these practices do not only concern English. In addition, observable language use is astonishingly multilingual. This justifies the fact that our work is based on a ‘multilingual mentality‘, i.e. that we are essentially focusing on the diversity of languages present in the workplace and in their alternative or mixed use. The basic questions are, therefore, what do actors in businesses actually do to cope with this diversity, and how, and under what conditions, ‘multilingual solutions’ are not just a response to a problem, but a genuine advantage? Indeed, ideologies and practices of communication in multilingual contexts vary hugely. The ‘solutions’ for overcoming potential problems include using a lingua franca (often English), inventing pidgin-like emergent varieties, choosing the language of one of the interlocutors known (partially) by the others (namely in the case of immigrants), insisting on receptive competences or lingua receptiva (e.g. in institutions which are officially multilingual), using various forms of mixed speech and, of course, offering interpretation and translation facilities (see Lüdi et al., 2010a, 2010b).



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Two arguments prevail in the analysis of these solutions from the perspective of companies. The first deals with communicative success: in which way are they more or less efficient? The second takes into account the inclusion or exclusion of people: in which way do they respect the claim for equity? One can re-examine the question from a European perspective by asking what exactly the conditions are wherein the linguistic diversity prevalent in Europe is potentially an asset for companies rather than an obstacle.1 This means assessing communicative situations involving speakers of different languages in a range of contexts and showing in what ways, and under what conditions, the distinct modes of thinking and acting carried by different languages can promote the creation, transfer and application of knowledge.

Research questions and methods This chapter draws upon data mainly collected together with Linda Pfefferli (Pfefferli, 2008, 2010) working with , a company operating in the domain of goods distribution in all linguistic regions of Switzerland; the percentages of the approximately 60,000 employees speaking the national languages roughly correspond to those in the general population; less than 4 per cent of the employees have a non-national idiom as their dominant language. works like a private company, but all the shares are owned by the state, so it is kind of a half-public and half-private institution. The main research questions were: MM

MM

MM

How does deal with a workforce coming from the three main language regions for cross-linguistic communication and at its headquarters? What is the role played by the international lingua franca, English, for internal and external communication in this context? Are there tensions between the approach of the company, the representations of the employees and actual practices?

In order to answer these questions, we adopted a mixed-methods approach, collecting and analysing different types of data, such as official documents, interviews with agents at different hierarchical levels,2 job adverts, websites, the linguistic landscape, tape recordings of multilingual and monolingual

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interactions in the workplace,3 etc. The aim was not to verify pre-established hypotheses but to achieve a deep understanding of communicative strategies in the workplace as they are used and reflected upon by the participants themselves. Here, we will mainly draw on the documents and interviews, but also briefly illustrate our findings with one example of a plurilingual meeting. More precisely, the research underlying this chapter sought answers to the aforementioned research questions by analysing multilingual interactions in companies, investigating language policies at firm level, describing representations of different actors within a business context, and analysing tape-recorded examples of actual language use at work. In the past, multilingualism was approached either in the context of actual language practices, from the perspective of language policy or management, or through analysing people’s representations about multilingualism – in other words, their declared choices (there were exceptions, e.g. Stalder, 2010). What is original in our research is that we do not concentrate on the corporate culture of companies (including their language philosophy and language management measures) or on language representations or on actual language use; instead, we try to relate the three dimensions to each other. We are particularly interested in the impact of management measures on language use and on the ways these measures inversely reflect both language representations and use. Interaction in work settings was investigated by describing how and where employees mobilize which languages, and with whom. An analysis of those linguistic practices was combined with observations about the actors’ communication strategies and the language philosophy of the company. The connection between these dimensions is based on several theoretical frameworks: first, conversation analysis and the ethnography of communication, as well as their related methodologies, consisting of audio recordings of work meetings in businesses; second, the analysis of multilingual skills inspired by the study of exolingual settings; third, an approach to communication of and in the enterprise; and, finally, a discourse analysis of the language philosophies and management measures of the observed companies. The confrontation between management measures, actors’ representations and recurrent behavioural patterns emerging in linguistic practices led to observations of an area of tension between discourse on languages at work and actors’ actual behaviour. These tensions also concern ‘lay theories’ about multilingualism and language in general. The aim of this contribution is to reflect on these tensions – and on the ‘programmability’ of multilingual communication.



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Conceptual framework By language management (Truchot [2009] talks about ‘traitement des langues’) we mean all the measures taken by a company concerning collaborators’ representations of language(s) and the construction of their linguistic repertoires, as well as their use in internal and external communication. We investigated, for example, the choice of corporate language, the role of languages in the hiring and promotion of collaborators, measures aimed at increasing these competences (language courses, exchange programmes between language regions [cf. Höchle, 2010 and forthcoming]), guidelines for a common corporate style, directives for linguistic landscaping and the companies’ websites, etc. (see Lüdi [ed.], 2010 for more details). Language management should not be confused with language policy, i.e. the totality of forms of intervention (including non-intervention or laissez-faire) taken by a political authority with the aim of orienting and regulating the use of one or several languages by the administration and/or the general public in a given political space. These forms of intervention reflect the ideological choices and principles that determine the selection of objectives. The latter may concern the status, domains of use, geographic distribution and form (corpus) of one or more concurring linguistic varieties (Berthoud and Lüdi, 2010). Note that, in this study, language practices are not restricted to oral interaction and the usual literacy practices (HäckiBuhofer, 1985), but include forms of advertising, the production of websites, linguistic landscaping, job adverts and hiring practices, etc. An important objective of our study is to investigate what ‘really’  happens in companies in relation to languages. In order to realize this objective we conducted extensive interviews with actors at all levels of the company’s hierarchy. But ‘reality’ is, of course, never mirrored directly in the discourse we collect, but always refracted by the views of the speakers/writers. In other words, we analyse their representations, both social and individual, on languages, their management, value, learning and use (see Bothorel-Witz, 2008). A psychosocial approach to representations sees them as ‘interpretative systems governing our relation with the world and with others [that] orientate and organise our conduct and social communication’ (Jodelet, 1989: 36, our translation). They define ‘a space of meaning shared by all members of the group’ (Moliner and Guterman, 2004). The accent lies on the content, i.e. on the ‘shared character of knowledge disseminated in a location or in a social group’ (Bothorel-Witz, 2008: 44). In contrast, we insist on their discursive nature resulting from the social

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construction of a common meaning by virtue of the universe of beliefs held by each interlocutor (Martin, 1987). Only as topics of conversation can they be converted into objects of discourse and made identifiable as such in texts (Gajo, 2003: 527). Their social and shared character results from certain construction processes in discourse and this is manifested in the form of sets of recurrent utterances of an inter-discursive nature, resulting in a high degree of stereotypy (Py, 2004) and stability. Since the time of Aristotle, two levels of shared social representations or ‘commonly held beliefs accepted by the wise/by elder rhetors and/or by the public in general’ are distinguished: doxa (δόξα) and endoxa (ἔνδοξα). Endoxa is a more stable belief than doxa, because it has been ‘tested’ in argumentative struggles in the polis by prior interlocutors. In the case of companies, one may speak of endoxa when a representation is endorsed or legitimized by the highest levels of management. Mara, a lab assistant at , said in her interview: ‘And I know, I heard it many times, English is the language of .’ English is the language of fulfils all the conditions for a pre-constructed, recurrent formula. Mara mentions this recurrence herself, and thus she re-echoes what is said throughout the company in the form of reported speech that confers on the proposition a kind of evidence. Social representations are seldom homogeneous. Thus, the discourse we collect is characterized by different forms of polyphony (or multivoicedness). This concept was coined by Bakhtin to explain the presence of several cognitive subjects in the novels of Dostoevsky, where the author, or rather narrator, acts as one participant among others in the dialogue. If we assimilate the corpus of interviews in each company into one text (thus ‘rescuing’ the company=person metaphor), we then find a ‘plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with his own world that combine but are not merged’ in the unity of the communicative event (Bakhtin, 1984: 6–7). Later on, Ducrot (1984) and his French colleagues refined the notion, insisting on the fragmentation of the speaker in the framework of a theory of enunciation. Following a convention set up by the Council of Europe, we distinguish between social and institutional multilingualism and individual plurilingualism. The first concerns communication with groups that speak different languages, in internal or external communication. How do companies respond to the challenge of the linguistic diversity prevailing among their stakeholders (collaborators, clients, local authorities, etc.)? What is their corporate philosophy concerning the management of multilingualism? The answers to these questions are manifold, and involve more than a simple dichotomy between



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‘monolingualism’ and ‘multilingualism’. The easiest solution would seem to be a single corporate language, including, for the purposes of internal communication, the solution known as OLON (‘one language only’). Many interviewees have interiorized the stereotype that there should be one main language for the company. The term corporate language is, however, seldom used. Rather, we find wording such as: ‘English is, as I said, the official management language … of the company, so at management meetings, in most mixed conferences, English IS the language’ (Karim B. ). An alternative solution involves communicating with a person or groups of people in their respective different languages, mostly with the help of translators. This allows stakeholders to stick to one language. The underlying view of multilingualism is generally ‘additive’: people speaking different languages live in mainly monolingual communities in contiguous territories or, more and more frequently, coexist in the same spaces. Individual plurilingualism requires alternative models. All the companies analysed, those with a strict corporate language policy included, employ and in many cases need a plurilingual workforce, e.g. in the headquarters of . Bloomfield’s conception, requesting a ‘native-like control’ in each language, such that it would be impossible for listeners to distinguish the speaker from a native speaker (Bloomfield, 1933) does not match the observations in the field, even if it is shared by most of the actors (and most probably by the general public).4 Many scholars believe that accomplished bilinguals or ambilinguals are very rare or may not even exist at all (Dewaele et al., 2003). In fact, fine-grained observation and analysis of workplace practices now allow for a better understanding of which communication strategies or ‘methods’ are used in settings with several languages that are not all spoken equally well by all the individuals concerned. Clearly, the common assumption that everyone speaks English was disproved. Participants adopt a wide range of strategies, and they do so in an extremely variable, flexible and dynamic way, constantly reassessing and readapting the solutions chosen in the course of an activity. ‘Monolingual’ strategies (‘one language only’ or ‘one language at a time’, fully mastered by both, one or none of the participants) alternate with ‘multilingual’ ones (‘all the languages at the same time’), e.g. the lingua receptiva mode (ten Thije, 2007; ten Thije and Zeevaert, 2008), in which everybody speaks his/her own language and is expected to understand the ones used by the other speakers, but also more mixed forms of multilingual speech. The underlying multilingual competence can be perceived as an open set of grammatical and syntactic (and of course mimogestual) microsystems, partially stabilized and available to the speaker as well as to the interlocutor. They often

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stem from different varieties of a language or from various languages, as well as from diverse discourse experiences. A free and active subject has amassed a repertoire of resources and activates this repertoire according to his/her needs, knowledge or whims, modifying or combining them where necessary; this happens mostly during interaction, in collaboration with a partner(s); as such, one can speak of shared resources. Multilingual speech is often dismissed as ‘bad usage’, but Jessner (2008a, 2008b) has argued that multilingual settings are not characterized by the absence of norms, but by proper ‘multilingual norms’. Hence, multilingual practices are not unshaped but are the locus of ‘emergent multilingual grammars’, comprising techniques of interaction such as code-switching (see Myers Scotton [1997] for a ‘grammar of code-switching’), spontaneous translation or ways of using lingue franche. Adapting a statement by Larsen-Freeman (2003), one could speak of ‘the fixing or sedimentation of forms that are understood to constitute grammar’. Of course, ‘grammar’ has to be taken here in a broad sense, including discourse strategies such as the use of code-switching as a resource for organizing interaction (Mondada, 2007) or interpretation by peers (Merlino and Mondada, forthcoming). Not only is the choice of a lingua franca just one of many solutions, the form of the lingua franca depends heavily on the speakers’ levels of competence as well as on the ‘habitus’ they assume, ranging from a monolingual-endolingual mode (among speakers who strongly adhere to language standards) to a monolingualexolingual one (where language standards are disregarded to a high extent), or from a multilingual-endolingual mode (found in highly multilingual communities) to a multilingual-exolingual one (where the speakers draw on a mixture of linguistic resources). Thus English or German used as a lingue franche are not varieties of these languages but must be located in a field of ‘mixed’ forms of speaking that use the whole range of the speakers’ repertoires. Hence, a lingua franca is by definition a kind of hybrid, a ‘rough-and-ready’ version of the language (Hülmbauer, 2009; Seidlhofer, 2010; Böhringer and Hülmbauer, 2010; Mondada, 2012; Hülmbauer and Seidlhofer, forthcoming). In addition to their linguistic resources, participants make coordinated, systematic use of a whole range of multimodal resources (Mondada and Gajo, 2007; Markaki and Mondada, 2009). In settings where participants are aware that their competence is asymmetrical, solutions that enable the multilingual situation to be managed are developed in the course of the activity. Such solutions are not pre-existing models that are simply adopted as they stand, but invented in situ by the plurilingual participants and negotiated throughout their interaction, thus exploiting



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their cognitive and strategic flexibility. These rough-and-ready solutions allow for maximum flexibility and adaptability to the context. Note that these patterns are quite different from classic bilingual interactions in traditionally bilingual communities such as that of the Puerto Ricans in New York, or Alsatians, even if the translinguistic markers5 might belong to similar categories.

Results A multilingual philosophy and corresponding language management measures Unlike other companies operating in contexts of linguistic diversity, which seek to impose a single ‘corporate language’ on their employees, the language philosophy of does not seek homogeneity, but rather strives for plurilingualism: is a multilingual company and encourages multilingualism at work. Beyond the services of its linguistic department, it proposes language courses to its collaborators and the possibility of working in other linguistic regions. (webpage, as it was in 2008)

The company views itself as multilingual in the compass of its philosophy of diversity management. The vocabulary used in the official documents includes terms referring to high ethical values (égalité, chances, s’épanouir, créer des valeurs, estime réciproque, acceptation, tolérance, intégration [equal opportunities, to blossom, to create values, mutual respect, acceptance, tolerance, integration]), to economic success (profit, atout, avantages, rentabilité, efficience [profits, assets, advantages, profitability, efficiency], etc.), to social benefits (for collaborators, clients and the society in general) and to management measures (promote, motivate, creation of mixed groups, language learning, etc.). In order to implement these values, a language philosophy was elaborated that is grounded in five principles: 1 The company shapes its language management ethos according to the template of a multilingual Switzerland and the principle of territoriality put in place in Switzerland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: In each of the language regions, operates monolingually, almost exclusively, in the official language of the region. This principle is known as OLAT, ‘one language at a time’.

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2 At the headquarters in Berne, the company seeks a proportionality of speakers of German, French and Italian, even if this goal is difficult to achieve because members of the linguistic minorities hesitate to move to the (German-speaking) capital for work. 3 National languages are prioritized in internal communication: Deutsch, Französisch, Italienisch und im Bedarfsfall (internationale Bereiche, spezifische Themen) Englisch sind die Arbeitssprachen im mündlichen und schriftlichen Verkehr.  [German, French, Italian and where necessary (international domains, specific topics) English are the working languages for oral and written communication.]

4 Moreover, English is explicitly ruled out by the CEO in everyday communication inside Switzerland. It is as Mr Kull says: inside Switzerland, there is no appearance of English. He just doesn’t want it, that’s why in our section we now have to adapt ourselves, this was decided in March … and he doesn’t want English inside Switzerland, but the national languages. (Eva Vetsch, 080404)

5 The company insists on the creation of linguistically mixed teams: is convinced that mixed teams are necessary at all levels and in all domains in order to meet the actual and future challenges … Empirical studies have shown that collaborators working in mixed teams and a context free of discrimination are more motivated and therefore more productive and innovative. wants to exploit this potential consciously. (Directives for diversity management, original in German) Les différences de cultures ainsi que la diversité des expériences et des compétences réunies au sein des équipes mixtes font qu’elles comprennent mieux les attentes de notre clientèle. [The cultural differences and the diversity of experiences and skills present in mixed teams entail that they understand better our clients’ expectations.] (Marlène R.)

As a consequence, meetings should always be multilingual, where each member is supposed to speak his/her own national language: And we have a twice-monthly meeting, and all the languages are represented at this meeting. And the rule, the in-house rule, is that everybody can speak their own language at meetings. (Wanda M., HR)

These principles constitute the endoxa, i.e. the socially shared knowledge that is officially legitimized by the company’s governing board. In the following



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section we will examine whether they are really endorsed in the interviews we led with relevant actors and whether this really determines their communicative behaviour. In order to do this, we will mainly concentrate on the language management, representations and practices at the headquarters and mostly exclude considerations dealing with the – officially monolingual – language regions, the languages of immigration (they correspond to about 10 per cent of the population of Switzerland) and with other stakeholders, e.g. tourists. In so doing, we are particularly interested in the impact of management measures on language use (or on the discourse about language use that we witnessed) and on the ways these measures inversely reflect language representation and use.

A polyphonic view of the linguistic reality in Measures for fostering employees’ linguistic competence One of the management measures involves documenting staff members’ multilingual competence, analysing their language needs and organizing corresponding training possibilities. This is done by adapting the so-called BULATS-framework (Business Language Testing Service – a Cambridge University Press product) into a language skills index project. In a document preparing a pilot in the human resources unit, the manager responsible writes (Wanda M., 13 June 2007): There is now a much higher need for good knowledge of a second native [sic = national] language and English in order to improve communication within and outside . Mixed teams and our own companies abroad make this essential. At the moment, there is no information available about this knowledge … – needs to be able to manage the everincreasing number of foreign-based companies, in addition to our multilingual, multicultural Business Units.

The goals of the project were ‘to have an accurate assessment of the communication/language skills of the involved staff ’, more precisely to know ‘who needs to improve [his or her] language skills in order to deal with mixed teams and clients from other language areas’. It concerned ‘English (where necessary for job function) and German for French and Italian speakers and French for German and Italian speakers’. Italian would be tested ‘where necessary for job function’. The authors of the project applied the scales proposed by the CEFR and developed by the Council of Europe, decided that B2 would be ‘the minimum knowledge level required for reasonable communication in a foreign

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language’ and that for members of the cadre ‘the requirement would be higher – C1 level’. It is significant to note that English – which plays a minor role in as we will see later on – appears first, while Italian, the third national language, is given peripheral importance only. Here, a first rupture between the philosophy and its implementation appears. A second rupture emerged in the following years when the project was implemented. In fact, while it was the head office that elaborated the project, the budget for language training remains with the different business units, which are free to send (or not) their employees on the respective language courses. Therefore, the implementation of the project was and still is quite heterogeneous owing to the hierarchical stratification of language management measures. Indeed, different departments of rely on different forms of steering language behaviour. For example, with respect to the prioritization of single languages, the department heading the nine international branches promotes a massive use of English, in contrast to the rest of the company, to the point where a local manager complains about internal documents being distributed in English only, i.e. in a language his labourers do not understand. Thus, our first conclusion is that there is far less homogeneity than one would expect in the company’s language management, and the company’s (or rather its members’) discourse is polyphonic.

‘Everyone speaks his/her own language’ As stated before, the ‘official’ language philosophy of follows the principle of ‘receptive multilingualism’  or lingua receptiva that allows employees to express themselves more freely and to manifest their identity: Alle Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter arbeiten in ihrer eigenen Sprache, sofern diese eine der Arbeitssprachen ist und es aufgrund der Funktion sinnvoll und möglich ist. Sie verfügen über geeignete Hilfsmittel (Software, Wörterbücher und Dokumentationen) in dieser Sprache soweit für die Tätigkeit notwendig. [All collaborators work in their own language providing that it is one of the working languages and this choice is useful and possible. They dispose of appropriate auxiliary means (software, dictionaries, documentation) in this language where necessary for the task.]

But already this official directive restricts the right to one’s own language by saying: ‘makes sense and is possible’. The recurrent opinion of the staff members we interviewed brings even more shades to the issue of language. First, people may speak the language



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they want (jede dörf das rede wo-n-är will [everyone may speak the language he wants] Gregor S.). According to Richard T., the internal rule is ‘dass jede in sinere Muetersprach ret aso mir Hochdütsch eh dütschsprächend, aber süscht das eigentlich dr dr eh französischsprächend Mitarbeiter dä het chönne französisch rede’ [that everyone speaks in his mother tongue, so we the speakers of German use Standard German, but otherwise that in actual fact the French-speaking collaborator could have spoken French], i.e. the Swiss Germans do use German, the Romands can in principle speak French. Wanda M. similarly uses a can-formulation: WM: … the rule, the in-house rule, is that everybody can speak their own language in meetings.

In fact, the intercomprehension strategy draws upon existing, even if asymmetric, multilingual competences. According to the common opinion, or doxa, these are, however, unequally distributed. It starts with the recruiting practice, as Annina G. from Human Resources concedes in response to a question about the balance between the applicants’ professional and linguistic skills: ehm das wäre, das ist halt auch wieder ehm bei einem Deutschschweizer würd ich sagen, der nicht so gut Französisch kann, nicht so ein Problem. Der kann sich hier durchschlagen, das geht. Umgekehrt müsste ich leider sagen «  keine Chance », einfach weil ehm weil so viel auf Deutsch, der könnte fachlich noch so gut sein, wenn der die deutschen Konzepte nicht lesen könnte, hätte der ein Problem und da muss man einfach klar auch sehen, das ist zumindest hier in der Administration so, dass da die Romands klar benachteiligt sind. Beim Deutschschweizer da kann man über ja wenig gute Sprachkenntnisse leichter hinwegsehen.
[errm this would be, this is again, a German-speaking Swiss lacking good competences in French, I’d say, is not really a problem. He could muddle through, that’s possible. The other way round, I would say ‘no chance’, simply because errm there is so much in German, s/he could be excellent professionally, if s/he is not able to read the German documents, s/he’d have a problem; it is evident, at least here in the administration, that the Frenchspeaking Swiss are clearly disadvantaged. With a German speaker one can overlook less-good linguistic skills.]

In the central administration (‘here’) German is clearly more valued than French (she does not even mention Italian), which leads to discrimination against the Romands (French-speaking Swiss). The way she expresses herself, beginning with a hypothetical ‘I would say’ and ending with the general phrase

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‘one can overlook less-good linguistic skills’, suggests she is talking about a shared knowledge which she does not necessarily endorse. In fact, the lack of balance results in a situation where the right to speak one’s own language is not always exercised by members of the minority, as stated by Marlene R., the person responsible for diversity management: The advantages and disadvantages are obvious, in a way; depending on the language choice in a given team, somebody will get slightly handicapped. We simply have the basic rule that everyone shall be able to speak his or her language, and actually this should be put into practice, whereupon in everyday life you always find examples of people from the Romandie telling me I prefer to write my mail in German to be sure to get an answer. Such examples exist.

Obviously, the practice does not match the regulations, and speakers of minority languages may feel marginalized by the German-speaking majority. Wanda M. confirms this representation: What often happens, in my experiences of meetings in other business units because I’m including the part(y) for presentations, I notice that French speakers or certainly Italian speakers, they speak German because they’re afraid they won’t be understood if they speak French. And they want their message to get (across).

In a form of ‘référenciation expériencielle’ [testimonial act of referring] (Petitjean, 2009), an experience is reconstructed in discourse. According to the experience of Wanda M., this is true of Italian speakers. Richard T. also confirms that there is no equal opportunity for them to speak their language: A colleague from the Ticino sometimes tried a bit [to speak her mother tongue], but in general she fell flat, that is nobody understood her, and then she normally spoke French and errm Standard German.

In conclusion, there is a gap between the endoxa and the doxa: everyone knows the general regulation, but they also know that it cannot be implemented because of a lack of competences (and willingness to acquire them) within the German-speaking majority. Therefore, the right to speak one’s own language is ensured only very partially.

The role of English We soon noticed the restriction concerning the use of English in the official regulations (im Bedarfsfall [in case of need]). In fact, the internal use of English



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is severely restricted according to the endoxa, because of the very explicit directive by the CEO quoted above: In Public Service A, there is practically no role [for English]; so, here you don’t have to know English, generally, it is not important … and now the English terminology has progressively to be abandoned, so all the terms must be in German, French, Italian … practically, no English is used. (Annina Gerlach, SA_LAN_AG_071218)

Erich S., working in the international section of , establishes a clear contrast between his division, where the working language is English, and the company in general, where ‘everything has to be named in German or French, but no English, except with . However, this does not mean that this view is generally accepted: Firstly, we do have the political pressure … to support the national languages. And Mister Kull, the Chief Executive Officer, is absolutely rabid about this … he has outlawed the use of English terms when speaking German, French, it’s outlawed, and that’s official … he really went very, very, very far in this, and we all had to change our job titles. Samantha Rogers isn’t allowed to be called Director of Studies … (Wanda McDonald, SA_LAN_WM_070821, 41.20)

In Wanda M.’s discourse, one can clearly distinguish the shared representation and her emotional distance from it. Concerning the use of English for communication between the Swiss language communities and inside the headquarters, an internal survey, published in the employees’ newspaper, showed a clash of opinions between the promoters of the national languages and those of English, as illustrated exemplarily by two contrasting (anonymized) statements: l’anglais est une langue de contact universelle; ll s’impose donc comme seconde langue, comme c’est à  l’école secondaire à  Zurich. J’appuie la proposition selon laquelle l’anglais devrait devenir la langue véhiculaire au sein de l’entreprise. Ainsi, nous pourrions communiquer dans un idiome qui est une langue étrangère pour presque tout le monde. [English is a language of international contact; hence it imposes itself as a first foreign language as is the case at secondary school in Zurich; I’m backing the proposition that English should become the vehicular language inside our company. This would allow us to communicate in a language that is a foreign language for almost everyone.] Nous avons la chance de vivre dans un pays où  l’on parle quatre langues et où  vivent des gens de culture différente. Où trouve-t-on une telle richesse

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Multilingual Encounters in Europe’s Institutional Spaces sur un territoire si petit? A nous de tirer parti de cette situation privilégiée. Lorsqu’on s’adresse à une personne d’une autre langue, il faut au moins vouloir la com- prendre; question de respect. D’ailleurs, il vaut mieux parler un allemand approximatif ou un français-fédéral plutôt qu’un anglais lamentable. [We are lucky to live in a country where four languages are spoken and people of different cultures live together. Where can you find such richness in such a tiny territory? It is our duty to exploit this privileged situation. When you address a person speaking a different language, you must at least want to understand; it’s a question of respect. By the way, it is better to speak an approximate German or ‘Français fédéral’ (a variety of French typical for the central administration) than lousy English.]

A non-representative poll indicated that about 59 per cent of the respondents were in favour of the national languages, and 41 per cent in favour of English. Both opinions are recurrent in the discourse of the company’s collaborators. The arguments used by both sides are an inherent part of the shared public knowledge; they are also known by the opposite party, and constitute thus components of the company’s polyphonical doxa.

Emergence of plurilingual practices, negotiated among participants Reading the statements of the interviewees, one could believe in very clear language choices, i.e. mostly German only, in the international section English only, and sometimes in mixed meetings, according to the principle, each person sticks to his/her main (or preferred) language. Wanda M., head of language training of British origin, adds another shade to this picture, saying: And we have a twice-monthly meeting, and all the languages are represented at this meeting …  Sometimes everybody decides ‘Okay, we’re going to speak English today’, so everybody tries to communicate everything. Sometimes it’s French and then other times it’s a mix …  No one sticks rigidly to their own language. And then you suddenly find the French speaker doing part of the meeting in German, and it’s just so fluid that in a way you don’t even really think about it.

Two short sequences of a tape-recorded business meeting in the HR division illustrate that this representation matches actual practice. These sequences were recorded during an informal breakfast meeting of the HR board of , a common occurrence, held shortly before Christmas. The majority of participants were German-speaking, a minority French-speaking. One board



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member (Wanda M.) is British; she has lived in the French-speaking part of Switzerland for many years and became fluent in French. She understands German without any difficulty. The section head, Benjamin H., who is leading the meeting, starts in German, French and English to acknowledge the three languages represented in the room. He then comments on the language choice: ‘even if is fundamentally German-oriented, we could now continue in French (…) or we could do it in English’. Neither of these solutions will be chosen, however, nor will the in-house rule (‘everybody speaks his/her own national language’) be respected. 13 BH: jetzt wäre ich wahnsinnig froh wir hatten immer gesagt äh (always) I switch no I’d be very happy we had always said ehm 14 in English for a moment (.) we have said always that we’d like to use this a bit 15 informal way jetzt sitzen wir hier so etwas schön geordnet aber wir hatten now we are sitting here kind of properly ordered but we had 16 immer gesagt wo drückt uns der schuh was was was liegt an an was ähm habe always said where does the shoe pinch what what what is pending ehm what 17 ich für gerüchte gehört ähm (.) was beschäftigt mich was müsste man rumours did I hear (.) what bothers me? what should we 18 eigentlich los werden gibt es da irgendetwas (.) ich finde es irgendwie etwas get shot of? is there anything (.) I think it is in a way 19 schwierig so formell aufgestellt zu sein dafür aber gibt es etwas was was difficult to be so formally aligned for that purpose but is there something that 20 euch am Herzen Herzen liegt (4 s.) is close to your hearts? 21 WM: I would just like to say that informal bit ähm (xxx) yeah I think that if we 22 moved the tables out and sat around both sides we have more contact because 23 this is a bit like a board meeting ((general laughter)) 24 & and I feel like I’m the head of the board & this is quite nice

((the tables are moved and the meeting continues a couple of minutes later))

29 BH: also gibt es irgendetwas wo euch auf dem herzen liegt/ so is there anything that is close to your hearts? 30 (7s) alle wunschlos glücklich/ all of you completely satisfied? 31 kann ich mir nicht vorstellen (…) gut dann machen I cannot imagine (…) well let’s do it 32 wir es vielleicht anders habt ihr irgend etwas maybe in a different way did you hear something

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32 33 34 35 36

gehört was euch beschäftigt was man vielleicht (..) that bothers you that we should perhaps (xxxx) sollte (.) oder (xxxx) (.) or ihr wisst schon alles (13s) alors il y a pas de you know already everything in French) so there are no (13s) problèmes (.) pas du tout (.) tout clair/ (7s) problems, nothing, everything is clear

In line 13, the head of the section switches to English. Does he want to display his fluency in English, his preferred foreign language, or is it a strategy to include Wanda M. (who would not need this accommodation because she reacts immediately to the long monologue of Benjamin H. in German [l. 15–20])? Probably both. In contrast, Wanda M. always insists on speaking her language, English, despite breaking the internal language regulations – and without any need, because she is totally fluent in French. Her behaviour is slightly subversive, manifesting at the same time her identity and her refusal to admit the banishment of English, as we saw above. Also, French is not very welcome in this section (‘some could feel uneasy if we spoke French’, says Benjamin H. at the beginning of the meeting). When he switches to French (l. 35), it is a way of addressing directly the few French speakers in a more or less desperate effort to keep the meeting going. As the meeting continues, English will be used much more frequently than French, without any negative reaction from the other participants; they follow the conversation, laugh at the appropriate moments; some even start using English, as does the section head, in particular in reaction to the turns of Wanda M. In conclusion, even if the dominant language is German (playing here the role of the lingua franca of the HR section), the mode chosen is multilingualexolingual, three languages being used during the meeting that are often not the first languages of the participants; and the meeting is characterized mainly by the ‘multilingual speech’ used by the section head, with a surprisingly high proportion of English.

Perspectives Language management is not confined to the choice of one or several languages for a company. The measures taken to manage internal linguistic and cultural diversity are manifold and include the means to assess and improve the



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staff ’s intercultural and language skills in order to make the institution more competi­tive. An important instrument in this context is the creation and preferential treatment of mixed teams. Previous research has emphasized the cognitive and social advantages enjoyed by multilingual individuals (Hakuta, 1985; Hakuta and Diaz, 1984; Nisbett, 2003; Bialystok, 2005, 2009; Compendium, 2009; Furlong, 2009). Generally speaking, individual multilingualism appears to favour creativity, be it in linguistic terms (the ability to choose between two mental lexica, the emergence of hybrid linguistic forms, see Lüdi, 1995; Furlong, 2009), at a cognitive level (broader access to information and alternative ways of thinking and perceiving the world), at an interactional one (greater flexibility in adjusting to new communicative contexts) or even at a strategic level (modes of negotiation, decision-making, problem-solving or monitoring action). The experiences reported by the managers who were interviewed transfer this finding to mixed teams (Lüdi et al., forthcoming). In addition, inasmuch as ‘understanding each other’ does not simply mean speaking the same language but also ‘understanding each other culturally, via the language’, the multilingual asset is always an intercultural asset as well. One could even argue that the advantages mentioned above result, in fact, from cultural rather than linguistic diversity, in the sense that members of mixed teams do not share the same values and experiences or the same world view, owing to their roots and their early socialization in different cultures. The companies’ experiences would thus confirm research findings in that cognitive creativity results from the clash of different perspectives, modes of interpretation or prediction (Page, 2007), and different forms of language use in ‘conceptual spaces’ (Boden, 1996), more precisely in ‘in-between spaces’ (Bhabha, 1994) between cultures. These ‘third spaces’ offer stages where a range of possibilities can be explored, and where ‘thinking for speaking’ (Slobin, 1991) corresponds to a way of ‘thinking at or beyond the limit’ (Hall and Du Gay, 1996). But the success of mixed teams relies on efficient communication. As explained above, our team conducted fine-grained observations and analysis of workplace practices in several companies. The aim was to understand which communicative strategies are used in settings with several languages that are not all spoken equally well by all the individuals concerned. The first result of this research was, as indicated above, the disproving of the common assumption that everyone seeks to speak one and the same language. Participants adopt a wide range of strategies, and they do so in extremely variable and dynamic ways, constantly reassessing the solutions chosen.

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Our corpus of audio recordings contributes to a classification of strategies positioned on two axes. One axis contrasts ‘monolingual’ strategies with ‘multilingual’ ones; and the other one compares the ‘exolingual’ pole (greatly asymmetrical repertoires) with the ‘endolingual’ one  (participants share the same repertoire). The choice of language(s) – including the choice of a lingua franca – that is available in a mono-/multilingual mode depends largely on the participants’ profiles and levels of competency, as well as on the ‘negotiated’ framework of participation (see Lüdi et al., 2012; Mondada and Nussbaum, 2012). Our observations confirm the findings of Markaki et al. (2012) that actors use all these strategies in a very systematically patterned way, based on underlying, socially constructed knowledge. These findings are not easily accountable by most conventional, i.e. ‘additive’, views of multilingualism; in fact, we propose to explain them by referring to two (partly complementary and partly competing) ways of theorizing and representing multilingualism as such. The first is rather conventional, and is shared by most of the actors in our field (and most probably by the general public). It reproduces traditional views, based on standardization processes in national languages, that have to be mastered as fully as possible, and on a conception of languages as idealized, timeless and decontextualized ‘objects’, each neatly separated from the other, with language preceding language use. It is on this basis that forms of institutional multilingualism are chosen by , and that translators perform their crucial work as mediators between people and institutions speaking different languages. It allows stakeholders to stick to one language. Such an additive view of multilingualism reflects, as we said before, a fundamentally monolingual concept of communication (OLON or OLAT). It can even lead to subtractive forms of multilingualism whereby a language is disregarded (see the example of Italian in quoted above) or simply where one language has to be selected to the disadvantage of others, as determined by the guidelines of : ‘If the participants come from several linguistic regions, we agree on one working language.’ The second is more implicit, more novel and generally less well known and less accepted. It corresponds to the ‘rough-and-ready’ notion of languages and multilingualism that emerged from the preceding sub-chapter. In this case, language use (languaging6) precedes language, particularly in the form of ‘plurilanguaging’. Firmly anchored in numerous practices observed in our terrains, it also appears explicitly in the actors’ social representations or doxa.



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This second view draws upon a functional conception of multilingualism, defined as the ability to interact, irrespective of the level of proficiency, in several languages in everyday settings (CECR, 2001). A set of skills in different languages, from very high to very partial, is seen as an integrated whole that is more than the sum total of its parts. Incidentally, the term multilingual ‘competence’ or ‘multicompetence’ (Cook, 2008) is sometimes replaced by ‘repertoire’ (e.g. Gumperz, 1982; Gal, 1986; Lüdi, 2006; Moore and Castellotti [eds], 2008; Lüdi and Py, 2009), defined as a set of ‘resources’ – both verbal (registers, dialects and languages) and non-verbal (e.g. mime and gestural expression) – that are shared and jointly mobilized by the actors in order to find local solutions to practical problems (Mondada, 2001; Pekarek Doehler, 2005). The underlying view of human activity and cognition is contextual and interactional (Mondada, 2001), and language is seen as emergent (Hopper, 1998; Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, 2008) from ‘doing being a speaker of a language’ (Mondada, 2004). The resources can be seen as a kind of tinkerer’s (bricoleur’s) toolbox (Lévi-Strauss, 1962); the speakers display creativity, and the boundaries between the languages may even vanish (see Lüdi et al., [2009] and Greco et al., [forthcoming] for examples). As a follow-up to this kind of analysis, one might start to question the notions of ‘language’  and ‘language boundaries’. On the one hand, ‘hybrid words’ (words still belonging to one language and already belonging to another, e.g. Croft, 2000; Cook and Wei [eds], 2011; Greco et al., [forthcoming]) emerge as a production strategy at the position of language boundaries; on the other hand, one might argue that the traditional view of ‘language’, which is based on the ideology of ‘standard languages’ as it was developed in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cannot account for these forms. The speakers do not resort to pre-existing varieties, but move around creatively in an open and variable space of linguistic resources, and take risks. In an extrapolation of the notion of languaging, Makoni and Makoni (2010) have forged the term multilanguaging to refer to phenomena of the kind we earlier called multilingual speech.7 The contrast between the two conceptions of multilingualism helps to explain some of the contradictions observed at different levels. In all our terrains, actors and observers insist on the importance of single languages, and in particular of English. At the same time, the daily reality is experienced as highly multilingual. Is that really a contradiction? One could formulate the hypothesis that this apparent contradiction results from the transfer of the monolingual, nationstate ideology in the sense of the first conception of multilingualism to the

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world of business. A fine-grained analysis of the ways in which the lingua franca is used suggests however that, as we have seen, many uses of lingue franche are, by their nature, another form of multilanguaging. In other words, this concept is not just a ‘fashion word’ or part of a new theory of multilingualism. Rather, it espouses closely the practices observed. In this sense, the use of a lingua franca resulting from mixing resources of different kinds could be an asset as well, as is the case for multilingual speech in its more classical form, but only if the dynamics resulting from the underlying clash of cultures and value systems are not negated but rather exploited.

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Lüdi, G., Höchle, K. and Yanaprasart, P. (2010a), ‘Patterns of language in polyglossic urban areas and multilingual regions and institutions: a Swiss case study’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 205: 55–78. —(2010b), ‘Plurilingual practices at multilingual workplaces’, in B. Apfelbaum and B. Meyer (eds), Multilingualism at Work, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 211–34. Lüdi, G., Höchle, K., Steinbach, F. and Yanaprasart, P. (2012), ‘Stratégies d’inclusion et formes d’exclusion dans des interactions exolingues au travail’, in L. Mondada and L. Nussbaum (eds), Interactions cosmopolites: l’organisation de la participation plurilingu, Limoges: Lambert Lucas, 29–62. Lüdi, G., Höchle, K. and Yanaprasart, P. (forthcoming), ‘Multilingualism and diversity management in companies in the upper Rhine region’, in A.-C. Berthoud, F. Grin and G. Lüdi (eds), Exploring the Dynamics of Multilingualism. Results from the DYLAN Project, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lüdi, G. and Py, B. (2009), ‘To be or not to be … a plurilingual speaker’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 6(2): 154–67. Makoni, S. and Makoni, B. (2010), ‘Multilingual discourse on wheels and public English in Africa: a case for “vague linguistics”’, in J. Maybin and J. Swann (eds), The Routledge Companion to English Language Studies, London: Routledge, 258–70. Markaki, V. and Mondada, L. (2009), ‘Gérer le temps et la participation pendant l’exposé: contributions de l’analyse séquentielle et multimodale à la formation et au conseil de managers’, Bulletin VALS-ASLA, 90: 75–97. Markaki, V., Merlino, S., Mondada, L., Oloff, F. and Traverso, V. (2012), ‘Choix de langues et gestion de la participation dans des réunions internationales’, in L. Mondada and L. Nussbaum (eds), Interactions cosmopolites: l’organisation de la participation plurilingue, Limoges: Lambert Lucas. —(forthcoming), ‘Multilingual practices in professional settings: keeping the delicate balance between progressivity and intersubjectivity’, in A.-C. Berthoud., F. Grin and G. Lüdi (eds), Exploring the Dynamics of Multilingualism. Results from the DYLAN Project, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Martin, R. (1987), Langage et croyance, Bruxelles: Pierre Mardaga. Mauranen, A. and Ranta, E. (eds) (2009), English as a Lingua Franca. Studies and Findings, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Merlino, S. and Mondada, L. (forthcoming), ‘Identités fluides dans le travail interactionnel du traducteur improvisé’, in L. Greco, L. Mondada and P. Renaud (eds), Identités en Interaction, Paris: Ed. Faits de Langue. Moliner, P. and Guterman, M. (2004), ‘Dynamique des représentations et des explications dans une représentation sociale’, Papers on Social Representations, 13: 2.1–12 Mondada, L. (2001), ‘Pour une linguistique interactionnelle’, Marges linguistiques, 1: 142–62. —(2004), ‘Ways of “Doing Being Plurilingual” in international work meetings’, in R. Gardner and J. Wagner (eds), Second Language Conversations, London: Continuum, 27–60.

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—(2007), ‘Le code-switching pour l’organisation de la parole-en-interaction’, Journal of Language Contact. . —(2012), ‘L’organisation émergente des ressources multimodales dans l’interaction en lingua franca: entre progressivité et intersubjectivité’, Bulletin VALS-ASLA, 95: 97–121. Mondada, L. and Gajo, L. (2007), ‘Code-switching et organisation de la participation dans des espaces complexes de travail: une analyse séquentielle et multimodale, In Langues en contexte et en contact’, No. Spécial des Cahiers de l’ILSL, en hommage à Cecilia Serra, 23: 11–28. Mondada, L. and Nussbaum, L. (eds) (2012), Interactions cosmopolites: l’organisation de la participation plurilingue [Cosmopolitan interactions: the organisation of multilingual participation], Limoges: Lambert Lucas. Moore, D. and Castellotti, V. (eds) (2008), La compétence plurilingue: regards francophones, Berne: Peter Lang. Myers-Scotton, C. (1997), Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nisbett, R. E. (2003), The Geography of Thought. How Asians and Westerns Think Differently and Why, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Page, S. E. (2007), The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pekarek Doehler, S. (2005), ‘De la nature située des compétences en langue’, in J.-P. Bronckart, E. Bulea and M. Puoliot (eds), Repenser l’enseignement des langues: comment identifier et exploiter les compétences? Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 41–68. Pennycook, A. (2010), Language as a Social Practice. New York: Routledge. Petitjean, C. (2009), ‘Représentations linguistiques et plurilinguisme’, PhD Thesis, Faculté de Lettres, Institut des Sciences du Langage et de la Communication, Université de Neuchâtel, October 2009. Pfefferli, L. (2008), ‘Les compétences linguistiques des collaborateurs comme objet des stratégies linguistiques dans une entreprise suisse’, Master’s dissertation, Institut für Französische Sprach-und Literaturwissenschaft, Universität Basel. —(2010), ‘L’utilisation des langues dans une entreprise (suisse): les représentations sociales des acteurs’, in G. Lüdi (ed.), Le plurilinguisme au travail entre la philosophie de l’entreprise, les représentations des acteurs et les pratiques quotidiennes, Basel: Institut für Französische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, 107–31. Phipps, A. (2006), Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival (Tourism and Cultural Change), Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Py, B. (2004), ‘Pour une approche linguistique des représentations sociales’, Langages, 154: 6–19. Renaud, P., Taquechel, R. and Greco, L. (forthcoming), ‘From codeswitching to “languaging”: “Decision-making” in multilingual workplaces’, in A.-C. Berthoud, F.



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Grin and G. Lüdi (eds), Exploring the Dynamics of Multilingualism. Results from the DYLAN Project, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rosenberger, L. (2009), The Swiss English Hypothesis, Tübingen: Narr. Seidlhofer, B. (2010), ‘Giving VOICE to English as a Lingua Franca’, in R. Facchinetti, D. Crystal and B. Seidlhofer (eds), From International to Local English – and Back Again, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 147–63. Slobin, D. (1991), ‘Learning to think for speaking; native language, cognition, and rhetorical style’, Pragmatics, 1(1): 7–25. Stalder, P. (2010), Pratiques imaginées et images des pratiques plurilingues. Stratégies de communication dans les réunions en milieu professionnel international, Bern: Peter Lang. Thije, J. ten (ed.) (2007), Receptive multilingualism: linguistic analyses, language policies and didactic concepts, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Thije, J. ten and Zeevaert, L. (eds) (2008), Receptive Multilingualism. Linguistic analyses, language policies and didactic concepts. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Truchot, C. (1990), L’anglais dans le monde contemporain, Paris: Le Robert. Truchot, C. (ed.) (2009), ‘Sprachwahl in europäischen Unternehmen / Choix linguistiques dans les entreprises en Europe / Language choices in European companies’, Sociolinguistica, 23. Vollstedt, M. (2002), Sprachenplanung in der internen Kommunikation internationaler Unternehmen: Studien zur Umstellung der Unternehmenssprache auf das Englische. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.

Notes 1 Answering this question was the overarching aim of DYLAN, an integrated project funded in 2006–2011 under the European Union’s Sixth Framework Program, Priority 7, ‘Citizens and governance in a knowledge-based society’. The University of Basel was one of the 19 partners from 12 countries addressing the core issue of whether a European, knowledge-based society designed to ensure economic competitiveness and social cohesion can be created, and if so how, despite the fact that, following enlargement, the European Union is more diverse linguistically than ever before (see Berthoud et al. [2012 and forthcoming] and http://www. dylanproject.org for an overview). 2 We analysed fourteen interviews with twelve individuals (some interviews with multiple partners). 3 Approximately two hours of tape recording. 4 See also Halliday et al.’s (1970) concept of ‘ambilingualism’. 5 Translinguistic markers are phonetic, morphosyntactic and lexical elements in

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utterances in a given variety (La) perceived as belonging to another variety (Lb), regardless of their origin and nature. 6 Cf. García, 2008; Pennycook, 2010. ‘Languagers [are] people who move in the world in a way that allows the risk of stepping out of one’s habitual ways of speaking’ (Phipps, 2006). 7 The aim of the ‘multilanguaging approach’ is to ‘capture the dynamic and evolving relationship between English, other indigenous African languages and multiple open semiotic systems, from the point of view of the language users themselves’ (Makoni and Makoni, 2010: 258).

3

Language Choice and Participation Managementin International Work Meetings Vassiliki Markaki (University of Geneva: Haute Ecole de Santé ARC), Sara Merlino (University of Basel), Lorenza Mondada (University of Basel), Florence Oloff (University of Basel) and Véronique Traverso (ICAR Research Laboratory, University of Lyon and CNRS)

Introduction In international work meetings, professionals coming from different countries and with various linguistic and cultural backgrounds may get together in order to collaborate, negotiate, elaborate solutions or make decisions. Within this context, it is a crucial issue to know which languages are the most appropriate for the current activity, even though this might not always be explicitly discussed. Often, English is chosen as a lingua franca, while simultaneously being implemented in a hybrid and multilingual fashion (see Moore et al., in press, for educational contexts). Other alternative linguistic solutions might also be adopted, such as the concurrent use of several officially recognized languages (such as English, French and German in some European contexts), or the possibility of freely alternating between several languages spoken by the participants. Those choices and possibilities are reflexively articulated with the context as it is defined and established by the participants in social interaction (cf. Heritage, 1984); choices are configured and constrained by multiple considerations, which might be institutional, ideological or practical, but in return they also configure and categorize the type of context, institution or meeting (cf. Mondada, 2004). This chapter focuses on the way in which co-present parties in meetings manage language choice and treat it as raising problems of participation – in the sense that participants can orient to the fact that a given language choice may

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increase or diminish participation for some or all co-present group members. Choosing one language rather than another is approached here as a members’ problem (in an ethnomethodological sense), and as a decision the participants make themselves, in situ and within their courses of action, displaying the way in which they orient to its local consequences, and how they justify and legitimize it. In this sense, choosing English or several co-existing or even alternating languages does not per se have a positive or negative value in terms of participation, adequacy or efficiency. Rather, those choices have a situated value that depends on the specific formats of participation, on locally recognized skills, and on how the interaction is organized. In order to explore this link between language choice and participation systematically, in this chapter we focus on a particular and recurrent phenomenon, the announcement of a language change. An announcement projecting a language change can be formulated as: ‘Now we will switch into English so that you can participate.’ Within the conversation analysis framework, we analyse these announcements by taking into account the sequential position in which they occur, their format, the way in which they are addressed to a sub-group or to the group as a whole, and the specific action they accomplish. We will also look at how the group receives the announcement, its effects on the participation framework, as well as the categorizations that ensue from it. This chapter therefore highlights the mutual configuration between language choice and participation framework. Although the study of code-switching in interaction looks back on an important tradition (see for instance Gumperz, 1982; Auer, 1998; Wei, 2002, 2005), these studies have mainly worked on informal settings and ordinary conversations. Code-switching in institutional and professional settings has been investigated much less, and the same applies to research about the articulations between code-switching, the organization of participation and the categorization of participants. Our analyses are based on several video- and audio-recorded corpora1 of international work meetings. These video data call for reflection not only on the linguistic dimension of participation frameworks and language switches, but more broadly on their multimodal organization; the embodied organization of code-switching has hardly ever been investigated, and embodied participation (Goodwin, 2000; Goodwin and Goodwin, 2004, Markaki and Mondada, 2012) remains largely understudied, as well as the way in which participation exploits and is distributed within specific interactional spaces (Veronesi, 2007; Mondada, 2009, 2012; Mondada and Schmitt, 2010; Hausendorf, Mondada and Schmitt, 2012). This chapter shows that multimodal details are crucial if we



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aim to understand the relation between multilingualism and participation as occasioned, contingent and emergent dynamics.

Participation at stake Following Goffman’s work (1981), participation frameworks have been investigated in different ways, focusing either on structures of participation that are characteristic of certain activity formats, or on dynamics of participation linked to the sequential organization of interaction. Goffmanian frames can indeed be understood in a way that emphasizes their stable and permanent nature – alluding to their institutional character – or in a way that focuses on their constant dynamics and indexicality (cf. Traverso, 1997, 2004). Following the latter perspective, Goodwin and Goodwin (2004; Goodwin, 2007) tackle participation as an eminently flexible phenomenon, in constant transformation and constantly embodied in the detailed organization of turns at talk. Participation is adjusted step by step, during emerging turns and actions. Here, the stability of the participation framework is not to be taken for granted: frameworks are situated interactional accomplishments. Goodwin and Goodwin (2004) show the close connection between the organization of participation and the organization of turns at talk: participation is constantly reorganized by the formatting of the next action – within a reflexive relation between the participation framework and sequential organization. In this chapter, we are interested in the variability of participation frameworks, and in their interplay with the ways in which participants themselves organize the next action and, more generally, the activity, by also taking into account the embodied organization of their visible bodily orientations and the ways in which they occupy space (Mondada, 2012). We also focus on the participants’ orientation to the multicultural or multilingual nature of the setting while presenting specific slots in which their turn may be heard (or not), and in which speaking is possible, difficult or facilitated. In other words, the multilingual context of the encounter triggers a degree of attentiveness towards the formatting of the action, thus having different implications for a heterogeneous audience – who can be relevantly categorized as ‘monolingual’, ‘bilingual’, ‘speaking the language of the place where the enterprise HQ is located’, or even ‘speaking the language of the enterprises’ founders and managers’, etc. These choices underlying this formatting are made explicit, and their accountability – both their intelligibility and their legitimacy – is discussed as well.

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Analyses are confronted with several levels of complexity, such as the explicit discussion of participation and its mention as an emic category, the actual (re) configuration of the participation framework during the unfolding of the interaction and across language choice, and the attempts to structure the meeting in a more or less permanent way by linguistic decisions that are presented as having various temporal scopes (being valid for the entire meeting or just for parts of it). In other words, participation and language choice can be topicalized but also just implemented in action; they can also be announced, imposed and prescribed, without always constraining action in the way that was anticipated. Participation frameworks are organized according to categories made locally relevant (Sacks, 1972); in a conference, a ‘speaker’ faces an ‘audience’. However, the former may distinguish, within the latter, particular categories that s/he might address, or make other categories relevant while s/he speaks. In international work meetings, the chairman does not exclusively treat the audience as a single party, but as groups of partners and colleagues having different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, as well as different levels of knowledge and experience. The orientation towards linguistics skills assigned to a specific co-participant does indeed represent a particular type of categor­ ization (Mondada, 1999), which is expressed by specific language choices formatting the details of the turn. A dilemma may ensue from these choices; if a particular language is chosen to facilitate the participation of a particular group, it may make another group’s participation more difficult (Mondada, 2012). Furthermore, these choices can be presented as homogeneous and stable, while constantly adjusting to the contingencies of the emergent interactional organization. In other words, they can be implemented within a large variety of dynamic interactional conducts, and they may also encounter some resistance from some co-participants.

Fieldwork in international work settings International meetings are an interesting setting for observing multilingualism in interaction and the way in which it can be treated as an advantage or an obstacle to participation (see Mondada and Nussbaum, 2012). The interactional organization of meetings is a research topic for an increasing number of studies (specifically in sociolinguistics – see Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris, 1997; Holmes and Marra, 2004; and in conversation analysis – see Boden, 1994; Ford, 2008; Asmuss and Svennevig, 2009). More specifically, research focuses



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more and more on multilingual meetings (Lüdi, this volume; Mondada, 2004; Poncini, 2007; Lüdi et al., 2010; Markaki et al., 2010; Markaki and Mondada, 2012). In this context, language choices are one possible resource for accomplishing professional tasks (for ‘task-related’ formats and resources see Drew and Heritage, 1992); at the same time, they might also raise issues of identity, participation, ideology and politics. Research on multilingual meetings shows that they are characterized by a set of complementary tensions. On the one hand, multilingualism in meetings is characterized by its ‘non-problematicity’, i.e. participants with widely divergent language competences treat those as relatively transparent, orienting towards the local and situated establishment of a ‘shared discourse’ and towards the ‘neutrality’ of the language they use (especially in lingua franca interactions; Jordan and Fuller, 1975). For instance, Firth (1996) shows how participants apply ‘let it pass’ or ‘make it normal’ strategies in order to preserve the interactional order and progress in the activity, without marking the heterogeneous skills of their co-participants as something relevant. On the other hand, multilingualism can be treated as having a structuring impact on the activity, either as a source of creativity, or as slowing down and limiting the activity. In this case, participants orient towards language choices as having important consequences for the course of the meeting. The diversity of multilingual solutions adopted during these meetings – code-switching, exchanges where everybody speaks his/her language, choice of a lingua franca, occasional and informal translations, etc. – take into account those tensions (Mondada, 2012). This produces a situated negotiated arrangement of linguistic resources that are locally considered as available, and which merge into textual, artefactual and material resources (PowerPoint presentations, documents, graphics, etc.) that are mobilized during the meeting. In this respect, language choice is not simply determined by the contextual features of the setting, but is always negotiated and methodically implemented (in Garfinkel’s sense, 1967). For instance, even though English is often defined as the participants’ common language for interacting, other languages may be used, either for methodically organizing different concurrent activities or for managing courses of inserted actions (e.g. Mondada, 2007). Thus, language choices in international work meetings are never to be taken for granted; even if they have been previously planned and announced in consultations, agendas or even regulations, and even if they have been announced at the opening of the meeting, they remain a local practical accomplishment. They are methodically managed by the participants orienting towards their

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structuring effects on the work in progress. In this chapter, we tackle these issues by focusing on the ways in which participants handle locally emerging problems related to multilingualism through their turns at talk and their visible conduct. The excerpts we analyse are taken from videotaped meetings of large groups in different settings (see endnote 1). The analysis focuses on the (re)negotiation of language choices in a particular sequential environment, i.e. during transitions from one activity to another. What the settings investigated have in common is that the meetings are not routine ones; they take place once or once a year, participants do not always know each other, or they only meet each other during a meeting lasting one or several days. As there are no routine solutions to the multilingual problems arising in this type of meeting, particularly explicit forms of negotiation emerge and become observable to the analyst.

Language choices and their renegotiation during transitions and after changes in the participation framework Choosing the language to be used during a meeting represents a practical decision that arises for all participants at different moments of the interaction. The first crucial moment for language choice is the opening of the encounter (Schegloff, 1968); this is a sequential moment in which the kinds of activity that will be achieved in the exchange are projected, in which issues concerning the entire meeting are addressed, and in which participants mutually adjust to and define the context within which they are meant to interact. At that precise moment, the language(s) spoken during the meeting can be managed tacitly (e.g. by using it/them during greetings or the initial utterances of the meeting) or, in contrast, explicitly topicalized and discussed. Interestingly, explicit negotiations of language choices during the opening may be associated with the discussion of issues concerning participation (Mondada, 2004). However, in several meetings of our corpus, we can observe that even if language choice has been fixed and decided on in the opening, participants may at any moment suggest its renegotiation. This non-definitive nature of language choice, even when it is brought up as a formal decision by the hierarchy, shows that this choice is a situated practical accomplishment that has to be implemented and achieved again and again in order to be maintained. This characteristic is not only visible during openings, but also at other sequential moments, where language choice is discussed again and explicitly



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renegotiated. These explicit renegotiations of language choice have a systematic sequential feature in common: they happen in specific positions, during moments of transition from one activity to another, between one point and another of the agenda, in the shift from a working session to a break. These transitions correspond to sequential positions where changes in the participation framework occur, notably when some participants who were concerned about a particular language choice leave the meeting. They are explicitly pointed to and exploited in order to renegotiate language choice. All the excerpts studied in this contribution concern language changes that occur at these transitional moments. Their analysis aims at exploring their systematic organisation. The first excerpts show how the absence, the return or the departure of particular participants during transitional moments can be foregrounded in order to invite a switch to French or back to English. While, in these cases, the negotiation of language choice is comparably consensual, the last excerpt emphasizes that language choice can give rise to conflicts between participants.

Absence of an English-speaking participant and momentary suspension of the need to speak English The renegotiation of language choice is sensitive to the specific opportunities offered by the sequential moment when it occurs in interaction. This is particularly the case during the transition between two presentations. In this position, language choice can legitimately be re-discussed with regard to modifications of the participation framework that emerge and become visible at that moment. The following excerpt has been taken from a day-long meeting of the communication department staff of a multinational’s headquarters, based in a big French city. The meeting aims to assess the results of the previous year. English has been chosen, with some contestation, as the working language (even though the meeting is being held in France and has a majority of French speakers) because of some participants not speaking French. We join the action as an English-speaking participant, Ronny (RON), suggests switching from English to French, as the department’s boss and chairman of the meeting, Pascal (PAS), continues the meeting after the lunch break in English, although another English-speaking participant is now absent. During that opening, several participants had objected to the chairman’s decision to have the meeting in English, while the latter defended this choice by pointing out that two Englishspeaking participants were present.

page format), please use the same width – otherwise you will loose excerpts have the same proportions (and thus the same character’s size 50  

Multilingual Encounters in Europe’s Institutional Spaces

Ex.1 1(VAX (VAX - 15018PM1ora002303) Ex. – 15018PM1ora002303) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

PAS

pas pas ron RON pas fig. cor pas PAS pas ron

10 11 RON 12

pas

pas 13 LYN 14 RON 15 XXX pas 16 ron 17 JUL 18 RON 19 XXX 20 RON 21 JES 22 INE 23 JUL?

24

pas ron jac

ron fig. 25 RON 26 JAC 27 JES 28 XXX 29 PAS 30 INE pas jac

an:d an:d the- (.) the goal is clearly for us to understand/ (0.4) eh (.) why/ (0.6) today/ (0.4) the decision was taken/ (.) to create/ *(.) °and to: to: to: use this approach *...gaze twd group, alternating from left to right-> x::\° (0.9) okay/ (0.2)*(0.3)+(0.3) -----*...gazes at COR--> +..lifts hand--> pas*cal/# *...hands laser pointer to COR-> #fig1 £(0.2)*(0.2)* £...gazes at RON--> --->*gazes at RON* *y+eh/+ *,,,withdraws laser pointer, turns to RON->l. 23 ->+,,,,lowers hand+ (.) si on parle*en anglais que pour moi/ (m:-) if we speak*in english only for me (m:-) *.....walks twd RON--------> (0.5)* -->* *] *] [°(on peut)°] [°(we can)°] [°mhm:\ ] mhm/° *..smiles------> (0.2)+(0.1) >>PAS+...looks at his watch--> ah [oui/ oh [yes [vous [avez:\& [you [have:& [xxx/ &[jus[que:+(.)*TROIS:-\ [(.)%S-(.) QUInze] heu:res\ &[ un[til:+(.)*THREE:- [(.)%S-(.) FIFteen] o'clock [ ¬hing hehe ((to JAC))> &[rO- rO:nny/ ] [comme vous voulez\] [as you want] [ [ *steps forward -----------> is back/ (.) as:/ (.) ((lau[ghter)) [ %o*kay/ * ->*gaze STE* %turns to STE -->l.57 (0.3) [he/he\he\ [*but don’t worry steven is going& [*s:teven *gets back in a frontal position, gaze twd group -> &to lea:ve/ in:\ *half *an hour/ * ---------------->*gaze STE*gaze watch* [HA HA HA HA he he he [*so we will switch/ *gaze twd STE ------> * ---------------->* ha/ ha/ *(0.4) *gaze twd group to the left & right --> we will switch in english/ *fo:r half an hour/ (0.4) er::& *steps back ----------------> &[::\ (but it was asked to be in) english\& [(we also have) in french &*(0.6)*we will start again *stands in the middle of the room --> *lifts arms & keeps hand lifted --> ---turned to the back -------------------> %by::\ (0.2) euh: the presenta*tion% ----------------------------->*turns twd NAB >%,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,% f- (0.3) of: [euh\ (.)]*nabilah/*& [nabilah\] *points to NAB* &*(0.5) *about KnowOrg/ (0.6) as:/ *turns around, retracts arm,,,* (0.4) i think it's cru:ci[al:/ (0.5)&

57 PAS pas



58

jac pas jac

59 60 KHI pas 61 PAS pas 62 63 XXX 64 PAS 65

 

&*(0.6)*we will start again *stands in the middle of the room --> *lifts arms & keeps hand lifted --> ---turned to the back -------------------> Language Choice andthe Participation Management %by::\ (0.2) euh: presenta*tion% ----------------------------->*turns twd NAB >%,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,% f- (0.3) of: [euh\ (.)]*nabilah/*& [nabilah\] *points to NAB* &*(0.5) *about KnowOrg/ (0.6) as:/ *turns around, retracts arm,,,* (0.4) i think it's cru:ci[al:/ (0.5)& [know:org &that (.) all of us (h)understand what is KnowOrg/

57

While Pascal is positioning himself once again in the middle of the room and   making some steps towards the group, he announces the continuation of the meeting and a change in the programme (‘we changed’, 29, the first-person   plural hinting at the collective character of these decisions). This announcement is disrupted by hesitations and pauses, during which Pascal looks at the   document he is holding (28–30) and which projects the continuation of the activity. Pascal then starts a new turn-constructional unit (‘we will’, 31) that seems to project a clarification of the new agenda. But it is soon abandoned, as Pascal now provides some information about a colleague’s departure and another colleague’s return (35–6). This last piece of information triggers some reactions among the participants, notably laughter, which is further emphasized by Pascal’s turn continuation in line 38 (not very audible, but clearly uttered with a ‘smiley’ voice). Jacques self-selects (41) and repeats once more the first part of his previous utterance (cf. 9–11 and 20–1, ‘especially for steven/’). Pascal, after a glance at Jacques (41), looks at Steven and utters an ‘okay’ with rising intonation (42), looking for collective approval of the reason for the language switch. Then he reverts to a head-on position, facing the group. In the following turns (45, 47, 49, 53–5), Pascal returns to the issue of the duration of the language switch (which had already been introduced at the beginning, line 7). He explains that Steven will again leave the meeting in about thirty minutes – which triggers some laughter among his colleagues, especially Ronny (48) – and that English will thus be used only during this period of time. In this way, not only does Pascal delimit the use of English, but also displays that he has taken his colleagues’ resistance into account (‘but don’t worry’, 45). This is confirmed by some laughter in response to the announcement of Steven’s return and his upcoming departure. This sequence of language negotiation is closed by the introduction of the next speaker, Nabilah, and her presentation (57–65). In the following turns (omitted), Pascal insists on the importance of the software Nabilah is going to present (‘KnowOrg’) and insists that the entire group should learn how to use it. The transcription starts again a few moments later, when Pascal hands the

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floor to Nabilah (NAB); while making a move towards her, he says her name and hands her the laser pointer:

Ex.2d2d (VAX_15018_pm2_dre_3629_3945_nabilah) Ex. (VAX_15018_pm2_dre_3629_3945_nabilah) COM 106 PAS

((40 lines omitted) et i:n english and i:n english 107 (0.6) 108 NAB °in english:\° 109 INE °in english\ (.) [(yes)° 110 NAB [je vais faire de temps Ex. 2d (VAX_15018_pm2_dre_3629_3945_nabilah) i’m going to do from time 111 en temps des °switchs°/ to time some °switches° ((40 omitted) 112 COM PAS >>tu lines peux faire des switchs si tu veux [mais:/>you make switches if you want [but:>tu peux faire des switchs si tu veux [mais:/>you makeAlthough switches yourms want [but: At that moment, Steven, whotwd/ previously several times in a ste $lifts hand$   more or fig. less indirect manner without#fig3 even intervening, self-selects (117, Fig. 3.3): 119 STE &in french because you kno:w 120 i'$m ve[ry familiar with KnowOrg Ex. (VAX_15018_pm2_dre_3629_3945_nabilah) Ex.2e2e (VAX_15018_pm2_dre_3629_3945_nabilah) ste ,,$ 121 PAS [NO NO/ no:][no(t)\ steven/ 117 [AH/ [Ω [((LAU]GH[TER))->(Ω*during (0.3) bu#$t- (0.4)$ it could be& 122 STE 3.2s) 118 NAB XXX [°ah oui°/ 123 [Ω*Ω [°oh yes° nab Ωpoints to STE----------Ω nab Ωturns twd/ gazes at*moves STE --------> pas closer to first row, twd AUR ste $lifts hand$ 124 KHI? [yes yes yes\ fig. #fig3 119 STE &in french because you kno:w 120 i'$m ve[ry familiar with KnowOrg ste ,,$ 121 PAS [NO NO/ no:][no(t)\ steven/ 122 [((LAU]GH[TER))->(Ω*during 3.2s) 123 NAB [Ω*Ω nab Ωpoints to STE----------Ω pas *moves closer to first row, twd AUR 124 KHI? [yes yes yes\

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Figure 3.3 STE lifts his hand and self-selects; some participants start looking in his direction

After the resumption of the language-choice negotiation, initiated by Nabilah’s comments and Pascal’s response, Steven introduces in English the possibility of switching back to French (‘it could be in french’, 117, 119). The reason he gives is not related to his language skills, but to his knowledge of the topic presented by Nabilah (‘because you kno:w i’m very familiar with KnowOrg’, 119–20). By doing so, he does not explicitly question either the personal and minority character of the use of English (which is done ‘especially for steven’), or the consequences that the use of French would have for him (his exclusion from the participation framework). However, by justifying this kind of exclusion with his knowledge of the current topic, he raises an argument that aligns with the majority’s resistance to the use of English. Pascal firmly opposes this suggestion (121), which generates some laughter, including from Nabilah. The previous excerpts, taken from the same meeting, show the recurrent nature of the renegotiation of the decision to speak English. They also display that transitional moments between activities offer a privileged position for re-discussing language choice. Moreover, this example shows that these renegotiations are retrospectively and/or prospectively based on a modification of the participation framework. In the following excerpt, we will show that these sequential features are not limited to the meeting we have studied up to now. They can be identified in other corpora, showing the systematic and structural characteristics of the phenomenon investigated here.

‘We can speak Arabic by the way’: situated alternatives to English The following extract documents a new occurrence of code-switching, which also occurs during a transition involving a change in the participation framework.

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It is drawn from an international meeting, held in Damascus, during which experts from Europe, the Maghreb and the Middle East discuss issues of sustainability associated with the practices of the hammam. The participants are preparing for the next meeting that is going to take place in the afternoon, with the female inhabitants of the neighbourhood of the hammam. At the beginning of the extract, a modification of the participation framework occurs with the departure of the two leaders, Ingrid (ING) and Rania (RAN), who go to make photocopies.

Ex.3a3a (Hammam) Ex. (Hammam) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

ING ?? KHE DOR ING RAN MAJ AFA DOR AFA

13 LEA 14 DOR 15 16 MAJ 17

 

we do that// and/ (.) you enjoy a break// (0.4) eu::hm ((lau[ghs)) [(we can xx) on the issue yes xx here is [coffee/ tea/ (0.4) self yourself [xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx[xxxx [thank you ((laughs)) (0.6) fī ʃāj u-qahwa u-xx[xxxxxx[xxxxxxxx there is tea and coffee and xx[xxxxxx[xxxxxxxx [hm [laʔ qahwa tāni mā [no another coffee q darʃ [(.) °mā qdarʃ° I can't [(.) °I can't° [xxxxx (0.6)

At the beginning of the excerpt, all continue to speak the language of the   session until then, English. Ingrid suggests a pause during their absence (1) and   Rania proposes some drinks (7). Then they leave. The departure of these two participants occasions both a break and a renegotiation of the working language.   Afaf (AFA) code-switches by proposing drinks in Arabic (12). The sequential   location of this alternation suggests that Arabic is proposed here as the language of the pause. It is not plausible that Afaf cares about any participants’ diffi   culty in understanding English, since English has been used until that point. Repeating in Arabic what Rania has proposed in English sets up and confirms   the change of activity. Dora (DOR) aligns with this use of Arabic when she turns   the offer of coffee (14–15) and immediately reintroduces the work activity down (18):

     



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Ex.3b3b (Hammam) Ex. (Hammam) 18 DOR 19 AFA 20 DOR 21 AFA 22 DOR 23 AFA 24 25 MAJ 26 27 AFA 28 ?? 29 DOR 30 31 AFA? 32 33 DOR 34 AFA 35 MAJ 36 AFA? 37 38 DOR 39 AFA 40 41 AFA 42 DOR 43 44 AFA 45 MAJ 46 NAH? 47 LEA 48 ?? 49 LEA 50 51 DOR 52 53 NAH 54 DOR 55 56

 

qu’est ce que vous pensez (.) [comment est-ce& what do you think (.) [how do we [°xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx& &qu’on le fait:: on l'utilise] ce temps aujourd’hui& &make:: we use ] the time today& &xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ] &[avec les::: &[with the::: [((to MAJ, low voice)) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (0.6) ʔā:h yes (0.7) ((laughs)) xxx[xx [betkalami fransāwi/ [you speak French/ (0.4) laʔ no (0.4) ʔā:h ye:s laʔ (0.6) χodi rāhtek no (0.6) please al-koll betkalemū [fransāwi/ everybody speaks [French/ [((laughs)) (3.0) homa t-talata [betthese three [spe[hasēthom ḍāʕū [I felt then lost (0.8) māuu-Ingrid u-ø:: Rān[ja it is that- and Ingrid and Ran[ia [laʔ Ingrid mā ʕrafʃ [no Ingrid I don't know (0.4) °btetkalem [frānsawi/° (0.4) °she speaks [French/° [I think/ (sorry) xx no:n no: °non° °no° .tsk .tsk pas trop/ not that much (0.5) °hm° (1.0) so [we can [x ʔeh raʔjəәko/ (.) [what do you think (.) ʔəәnna l-mafrūḍ nəәnaqʃo maʕ l-setāt dih l-nahār dah that we must discuss with these women today (0.7)

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Dora’s switch to French is done in a question, which is addressed to the whole group and anticipates a response, possibly in French. Overlapping with this question, Majid (MAJ) and Afaf continue talking in Arabic in an aside; they speak in a lower voice, adopting a joking tone (see their laughter). As nobody answers Dora’s question, she asks Afaf (line 29), in Arabic, if she speaks French, and Majid asks if everybody speaks French (35). These exchanges last until line 50, and this permits clarifying that neither Afaf nor Ingrid speaks French. After a pause (50), two participants start the interaction again, in two different languages. Nahed starts in English (53). Line 54, in an overlap, Dora takes the floor in Arabic and repeats what she has already said in French (line 18). Among these exchanges, we see how the participants’ skills are revealed in a progressive manner. From that point on, and until line 84, a series of exchanges in Arabic takes place on the details of the impending meeting with the women of the neighbourhood, and specifically on the topics that should be discussed with them. At the end of these exchanges and the transition to the next point, a new negotiation of the working language takes place: Ex. 3c (Hammam)

Ex. 3c (Hammam) 84 DOR 85 86 KHE 87 DOR 88 89 AFA 90 DOR

91 92 ?? 93 DOR

hada kullu tsaʔalū all that has been asked (0.3) hm\ fa/- on doit dire quelque chose de- de swe must say something nouv[eau/ alors/ new[/ then/ [ʔāh bəәdna ʃī Ʒdīd [yes we want something new ʔāh (0.5) ḥa-nətkallem ʕarabi/ (.) yes (0.5) we will speak Arabic (.) ḥaḍrəәtek bəәtefhami ʕarabi n’est-ce pas/ you understand Arabic don't you °naʕam betḥki ʕarabi° °yes she speaks Arabic° hm

  begins to recapitulate in Arabic (84). A pause and a new continuer follow Dora her turn. She proceeds, while code-switching again; in line 87, after having   started in Arabic, with the marker ‘fa’ (‘so’), she alternates to French and says thatEx. they3d must find new questions for the women. Afaf ’s turn, line 89, is inter(Hammam) esting because it repeats in Arabic what Dora has just said in French (‘oui on KHE chose déjàdeça va êtreItune prise (0.6) de contact/ on not veut95quelque nouveau’). cannot be ade: translation (since Afaf does first it will be an initial (0.6) contact/ we know butfaire it is the formulation by(0.6) Afaf ofʔawalan the conclusion of what has 96 French), va connaissance (1.6) et ensuite 97 98

AFA

99

??

will introduce ourselves (0.6) first (1.6) and then euh p[ff [°bəәtəәhki faransi/° [°you speak French/° °ah°



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Ex. 3c (Hammam) gone before (it is necessary to find new things to discuss, different from those that have already been dealt with). The location of the turn, and the fact that it 84 DOR hada kullu tsaʔalū starts with ‘oui’,all suggests formulates that that has she been asked what was entailed by ‘fa’ in Dora’s 85 (0.3) turn, although she does not understand it. The marker gives her cues to the fact 86 KHE hm\ that87Dora conclusion to what has been said, DOR is offering fa/- aon doit dire quelque chose de-and deshe does the same swe must say something thing, and comes to the same conclusion. Thus, the utterance is collaborative 88 nouv[eau/ alors/ new[/But, then/ as well as converging. at the same time, it also works as a sort of repair of 89 AFA [ʔāh bəәdna ʃī Ʒdīd the language choice;[yes Afaf we reminds of the want (Dora?) something newnecessity of using Arabic as 90 DOR ʔāh (0.5) ḥa-nətkallem ʕarabi/ (.)notice that Dora indeed soon as Dora has switched to French again. And we can yes (0.5) we will speak Arabic (.) interprets Afaf ’sḥaḍrəәtek point in that way, since she makes the choice 91 bəәtefhami ʕarabi n’est-ce pas/of Arabic explicit you understand Arabic don't you (90–91), while worrying about another participant understanding this language 92 ?? °naʕam betḥki ʕarabi° °yes shedoes speaks Arabic° from the Arab world, Léa). (probably the one who not originate 93 DOR hm We can then consider that the working language has been locally re-negotiated between the two participants. After having tried French, they have now decided   that Arabic will be used. After this choice, Kheira (KHE) takes the floor in the following way:   Ex. 3d (Hammam)

Ex. 3d (Hammam) 95

KHE

96 97 98

AFA

99 ?? 100 MAJ 101 KHE 102 103 DOR 104 KHE 105 DOR 106 KHE 107 108 109 110 111

?? LEA AFA KHE

112 113 DOR 114 115 KHE

déjà ça va être une prise de: (0.6) de contact/ on first it will be an initial (0.6) contact/ we va faire connaissance (0.6) ʔawalan (1.6) et ensuite will introduce ourselves (0.6) first (1.6) and then euh p[ff [°bəәtəәhki faransi/° [°you speak French/° °ah° °°(baṣīṭ) (.) bəәfham°° °°(a little bit) (.) I understand°° bon ici on a eu:h un ḥammām (0.5) on a déjà quelques well here we have eu:h a hammam (0.5) we already have élé[ments some elements [nəәḥna nəәqder nəәtkallem ʕarabi ʕala fəәkra[(.) ku-& [we can speak Arabic in fact [(.) all-& [c`qui est& [what is& &kullena nefham ʕarabi] &all of us understand Arabic] &bien c’est que:::] non moi j` parle français\ &good is that:::] no for me I speak French\ ((lau[ghs)) [((laughs, 1.6)) ((laughs)) ((lau[ghs)) xx express [parce qu’on m’a empêché d` parler français [because I've been prevented from speaking French >perhaps >>raises head and gazes twd XAV ------------------> être bien>ça serait peut être>it would perhaps+smiles+ buT$ .h (0.3) EUh/: (.) >>$h- have you understood/$

11 12 13 66 14 15 16 17 18

xav XXX XAV XXX XAV

19 20 xav 21 22 23 TIE 24 MAR 25 XAV xav fre 26 MAR 27 XAV xav fre 28 FRE

buT$ .h (0.3) EUh/: (.) >>$h- have you understood/$ sur $euh::(0.4) sur ce qui se dit/ (0.4) il y a about$er:: (0.4) about what is said (0.4) it is ---->$right hand supports chin------------> up and lifts hand ----->l.25 des fortes chances que l- que la personne highly possible that t- that the one [qui $p- prendra des [notes [who $w- will take [notes [ben oui/ mais °c'est ça quoi° [well yeah but °that's it exactly° [*oui je sais [bien& [*yes i know [that& [euh: voilà [er: that's it ---->$smiles increasingly------------------> *lifts finger--------> &mais: [ça me paraît important [euh: &but: [to me it seems important [er: [*$YEs:/ -------->$leans forward------------->> -------->* [okay could it be

Before starting her presentation, Marie looks for someone who could possibly take notes. In a parenthetical remark, she topicalizes her language choice (2). By using French, Marie displays her preference for this language. By confirming this   choice with the presenter of the meeting, she nevertheless treats it as not being taken for granted, thereby simultaneously admitting possible alternative   choices. Xavier simply approves with a slight nod (2–3). Thus, Marie carries on her search for a secretary. In a series of recyclings and turn extensions, she progressively transforms a hesitant offer into an assertive suggestion, not to say into advice stressed by her terminal smile. Xavier ratifies this second suggestion more explicitly than the first (‘yes’, 7; ‘vE:ry good idea’, 10). Nevertheless, he does so in English, addressing the non-French speakers in the group with a question (‘buT .h (0.3) >>h- have you understood/so I/>m- my my/but if you use english>°very good°