Language switching in multilingual meetings - language proficiency and progressivity of interaction
Keywords:
language switching, language proficiency, meeting interaction, multilingualism, work-related language, progressivityAbstract
Over recent decades, Finnish working life has become increasingly multilingual: in addition to Finnish and Swedish, employees use e.g. English and various migrant languages. The constantly diversifying language situation has led to challenges in workplace interaction, since employees do not share the same linguistic resources nor are they necessarily competent in all working languages. In this article, we investigate how employees exploit their multilingual work environment in order to secure the progress of the interaction. We focus on moments in which employees switch from one language to another. Our data consist of video-recorded meetings in a cultural organisation in Finland. The most common languages used in the meetings are Finnish and Russian. Our method is ethnomethodological conversation analysis; we study the language switches in situ as microlevel practices in interaction. The language switches explored in this article follow problems of progressivity of interaction, including problems of speech production, misunderstandings and inadequate displays of recipiency. On the one hand, we examine how and in which situations the participants switch to their own stronger language and, on the other hand, what features contribute to the switch to the stronger language of the recipient. By switching language according to the local circumstantial details of the interaction, the employees secure the progress of the meeting and ensure that all employees may fully participate in the meeting interaction.
