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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 633

Part of Session 197: Urban multilingualism in a context of international mobility (Other abstracts in this session)

Communication: Language diversity in mixed teams and the intercultural asset: at the example of plurilingual practices at multicultural workplaces

Authors: Yanaprasart, Patchareerat
Submitted by: Yanaprasart, Patchareerat (University of Basel, Switzerland)

Quadrilingual Switzerland has long supported multilingualism for the purpose of internal ‘mutual understanding’. This enables a form of communication named «Swiss Model» (Kolde, 1981), ensuring that each citizen speaking in his own language can expect to be understood by his interlocutor of other different local languages. However, studies on language use at the workplaces have shown that social actors do not stick to their mother tongue, but they exploit their respective linguistic repertoires under the form of language mixing (Lüdi, 2007) to achieve communicative goals.

Albeit both forms of communication, ‘receptive multilingualism’ model (Werlen, 2007) and ‘multilanguaging’ (Makoni/Makoni, 2010), do not put single language norms at risk, neither challenge their symbolic status, they reduce expectations of other’s linguistic and cultural competence, and are thus regarded as problematic. As a consequence, in the eyes of large segments of the population, national languages are losing relevance by comparison with English (Cheshire & Moser, 1994), which is considered as a more efficient response to communications between language communities. Speakers seem to believe that using their different Englishes or Plurilingual English (Canagarajah 2009) can bring in intelligibility and effectiveness into intercultural communication, where mutual understanding also requires comprehension of one another’s cultural behavioral language patterns (Yanaprasart 2011, 2010; Yanaprasart/Fernandez 2011; Yanaprasart/Höchle/Lüdi, 2009) .

Addressing the question of to what extent and under which conditions is Plural English put in use alongside the Swiss national languages; this study allows highlighting the role that national languages play alongside the use of international language in multilingual and intercultural settings in the context of industry. If English, ‘the’ language of business is regularly used in the transmission of knowledge by providing access to information, significant differences occur in the process of knowledge construction, understanding and application. It is worth noting that the pretended ‘cultural’ neutrality of the lingua franca is disclaimed in our corpus. Understanding does not simply mean speaking the same language, but also understanding each other culturally, via the language (Lüdi, Höchle, Yanaprasart, forthcoming). That is, even when an interaction takes place in a lingua franca, an intercultural competence is needed for fully understanding the message (Bertaux 1997), for transforming the risk of misunderstandings into intersubjectivity.

This contribution is based on an EU project named “DYLAN” "Language dynamics and management of diversity" (Contract No. 028702) (Berthoud, 2008).

In the framework of our study, we adopted a mixed methods approach, collecting and analysing different types of data such as official documents, interviews with agents at different hierarchical levels, job ads, web sites, linguistic landscape, and tape recordings of multilingual and monolingual interaction at the workplace.

The terrains investigated include Switzerland based international companies, Swiss companies operating in all language regions, and companies working within a regional range in the multilingual and trinational Upper Rhine region (Lüdi ed. 2010).