‘And then we summarise in English for the others’: The lived experience of the multilingual workplace
-
Jo Angouri
and
Marlene Miglbauer
Abstract
In multinational corporate companies, multilingualism is often a daily reality for employees and the negotiation of language practices for work and social purposes, a routine. Despite the role of English as a lingua franca, the linguistic ecology of modern workplaces is dynamic, rich and diverse. While English is often used for communication between a company’s headquarters and its subsidiaries, language choice is dynamically negotiated between the interactants in informal meetings and everyday interactions in the workplace. Against this backdrop, the article discusses the lived experience of the multinational workplace. We draw on interview data with 40 employees in senior and junior management posts in 12 companies situated in Croatia, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Sweden and the UK where English is the official corporate language. Special attention is paid to the employees’ perceptions of the role of languages in their daily work life. We focus here on three discourses that have emerged from the analysis of our data: multilingualism and the use of English, multilingualism and cosmpolitanism, and challenges and expectations of multilingualism. Our findings show that the employees draw on a range of linguistic resources in order to manage their work-related interactions, and dominant ideologies in relation to language use come to the fore. We close the article by focusing on the profile of the ‘global’ employee and the impact of the ‘modern’ workplace on the working realities of the participants.
©2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Multilingualism in the workplace: Language practices in multilingual contexts
- Articles
- Multilingualism in European workplaces
- Language, employment, and settlement: Temporary meat workers in Australia
- Whose parallellingualism? Overt and covert ideologies in Danish university language policies
- Linguistic diversity in the international workplace: Language ideologies and processes of exclusion
- ‘It’s pretty simple and in Greek …’: Global and local languages in the Greek corporate setting
- ‘And then we summarise in English for the others’: The lived experience of the multilingual workplace
- ‘You need help as usual, do you?’: Joking and swearing for collegiality in a Swedish workplace
- Bridging language barriers in multilingual care encounters
- Piecing together the ‘workplace multilingualism’ jigsaw puzzle
- Book Reviews
- Book reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Multilingualism in the workplace: Language practices in multilingual contexts
- Articles
- Multilingualism in European workplaces
- Language, employment, and settlement: Temporary meat workers in Australia
- Whose parallellingualism? Overt and covert ideologies in Danish university language policies
- Linguistic diversity in the international workplace: Language ideologies and processes of exclusion
- ‘It’s pretty simple and in Greek …’: Global and local languages in the Greek corporate setting
- ‘And then we summarise in English for the others’: The lived experience of the multilingual workplace
- ‘You need help as usual, do you?’: Joking and swearing for collegiality in a Swedish workplace
- Bridging language barriers in multilingual care encounters
- Piecing together the ‘workplace multilingualism’ jigsaw puzzle
- Book Reviews
- Book reviews
