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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 438

Part of Session 125: The legitimate speaker in a transforming political economy (Other abstracts in this session)

Multilingualism in the workplace: from ethno-nationalism to post-nationalism

Authors: Pujolar, Joan
Submitted by: Pujolar, Joan (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain)

In this presentation, I shall examine how young Catalans construct their relationship to languages as they enter the labor market. I will show that the beginning of their working life marks a significant shift in the way they manage their linguistic repertoire and in how their construct their own relationship to the languages they speak. I characterize this shift as one from ethno-nationalism to post-nationalism because, in the work context, they consider that language choice must be understood as a professional issue subject to the demands of corporate and market conditions. From this perspective, a neoliberal linguistic ethos emerges that is consistent with the demands of transnational organizations that construct language as an individual skill that enables the mobility of the workforce, the organization of production and the adaptation to different local markets from a global perspective.
The analysis will be based on a qualitative corpus of 24 in-depth interviews and 15 group discussions with respondents aged between 16 and 35 of varying profiles in terms of sex, education and area of residence (Barcelona city as opposed to the rest). Participants were queried to provide life histories with a focus on how they learned and used the various languages of their repertoire, particularly how they adopted the use of Catalan or Spanish when this was not their family or first language. The study identified specific junctures where subjects reorganized their linguistic repertoire: when entering primary school, secondary school, the university, the job market, when creating a new family and when they had children (if they did). We named these changes as linguistic “mudes”, a Catalan term refering to (often reversible) variations in social performance. The job market juncture was clearly where most “mudes” took place, as many individuals abandoned functional monolingualism and ceased to construct linguistic issues in terms of identity to allow new considerations to come in, such as the need to display availability to use different languages.
Most research participants were Catalan-born or had followed the Catalan education system from an early age. This means that, for all of them, either Catalan or Spanish (or both) was the language first learned at home and they had learned and used both languages at school. However, despite the fact that most people do display a good bilingual competence from an early age, and Catalan speakers apparently switch to Spanish more easily, childhood and adolescence, with its conventional antagonisms around language, race, ethnicity, class and gender, had brought many to avoid or resist the use of the “other” language with friends or relatives. For many, this changed as they moved to the workplace, the moment where adolescent antagonisms got gradually forgotten and individuals developed an interest to construct language as a skill rather than use it as a boundary marker. From this perspective, we detected significant variations having to do with class, study level and the market position of the various workplaces.