Volume 44, Issue 4

Speakers may resort to different inferences and expectations in intercultural encounters. These expectations are influenced by speakers’ socialization processes in speech communities and networks, as well as by the local interactional demands and power dynamics in the communicative situation. While interactional sociolinguistic studies have unveiled intercultural mismatches in how contextualization asymmetries operate in the here-and-now of interaction, less attention has been given to speakers’ normative expectations of good and bad social encounters, as reflected in retrospective accounts of interactional experiences. This article uses critical discursive psychology to examine social interactional ideologies, as German and Chinese students (home and exchange students, respectively) reflect on their experiences in a virtual intercultural game. As an analytical tool, we use the notion of “interpretative repertoires,” i.e., culturally shared ways to construct generally recognizable versions of objects. Our analysis of reflection reports written by the game players shows repertoires addressing ideal behaviors and ideal group features, which tend to place the German students in a more favorable position than the Chinese students. We discuss how local and historical power dynamics are blended in the repertoires and point to the need to critically engage with the social interactional ideologies that exist – but often go unnoticed – in intercultural settings.

This paper looks at how a Finnish music trio and its audience managed to reconcile locality and globality during a Christmas concert streamed through Facebook Live amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. It does so as this pandemic forced the numerous and hugely popular Christmas concerts in Finland that are usually held in churches and other venues to move online, where musicians were now not just addressing local, Finnish-speaking listeners but a global audience. Specifically, I examine how both the musicians and the audience constructed this Christmas-at-home concert as a distinctly translocal event through adopting various multilingual practices that enabled them to experience local and global senses of identity and community. Using an online ethnographic perspective, which combines discourse-centred online ethnography with analytic autoethnography, I discuss transcripts of the musicians’ spoken discourse, written comments from the audience in Facebook Live’s chat, and excerpts from an interview with one of the musicians to showcase the translocality of digital communication; the translocality of Finnish culture; and the translocality of the Christmas and the Christmas-at-home experience in pandemic times.

The paper applies language management theory to study the interactions of international with local workers (simple management) and language policies (organised management) in 10 Czech video game studios. By longitudinally interviewing foreign game developers from Central-Eastern and Western Europe, as well as North and South America, I identified the languages they reportedly encountered and used in their jobs. I distinguished 3 categories: Czech-dominant studios, dominant language mix, and English-dominant studios. In the first category, the Czech language was said to be the language of studio communication and to serve as an instrument of exclusion and glass ceiling for internationals’ promotion. In the second category, language use divided between English, Czech, and other Slavic languages, resulting in more inclusionary work practices but, Slavic versus English linguistic clusters in informal communication. In the third category, English was the lingua franca but Czechs’ insufficient English proficiency was identified as an issue on the micro level. Overall, a dichotomous thinking about languages was problematised. While Czech as the dominant language was detrimental for the hiring of internationals, companies managed to include workers using Slavic languages other than Czech. Thus, English was not the only language of inclusion but a one of several language choices in Czech game companies.

The goal of the present study is to explore bilinguals’ intercultural style of requesting in a workplace setting and thereby contribute to the understanding of bilingual pragmatic competence. The relatively unexplored intercultural style hypothesis suggests that bilinguals show a unique pragmatic pattern related to but distinct from the contact languages. German-English bilinguals in the U.S., Germans in Germany, and Americans in the U.S. completed an oral discourse completion task. The bilinguals were tested in German and English. The scenarios were situated at the workplace and controlled for social distance and power. Results revealed bi-directional influence from both languages and that bilinguals differentiated their request strategies depending on language, accentuating cross-linguistic differences and thereby asserting their intercultural identity. This suggests that the pragmatic competence of the German-English bilinguals consists in the awareness, realization, and preservation of perceived cross-linguistic contrasts. However, perception ratings revealed that bilinguals’ German requests were perceived as significantly less polite and less effective than their English requests, suggesting that pragmatic norms of German requests are undergoing language change.

Research has shown that bilingual individuals might encode autobiographical memories in either their first language (L1) or their second language (L2), depending on the language spoken at the time of the event. Although language mixing is a common occurrence among multilingual speakers, previous studies have largely overlooked mixed memories – those encoded in both L1 and L2. The current study aims to bridge this research gap by analyzing a corpus of 1,297 memories (636 L1 memories, 357 L2 memories, and 305 mixed memories), with a particular focus on memory phenomenology, including factors such as vividness, emotional arousal, and personal significance. The statistical analysis revealed that mixed memories exhibited higher levels of emotional arousal and personal significance compared to memories encoded exclusively in L1 or L2. These findings underscore the unique status of mixed memories in the bilingual mind and emphasize the importance of adopting a heteroglossic approach to the study of bilingual autobiographical memory.