Piecing together the ‘workplace multilingualism’ jigsaw puzzle

Zhu Hua

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Multilingual Education and Policy Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies

Abstract

Why multilingualism in the workplace, and why now?Once upon a time people used to associate multilingualism in the workplace with two typical scenarios: large multinational corporations where geographically mobile, urban-oriented, highly skilled and elite professionals and managerial staff worked across national boundaries and operated in and out of different languages, or some seedy sweat factory where socially insecure, often uneducated, low-paid 'immigrants' struggled to make a living in their home languages and/or the language of the host country.The meaning of multilingualism to the people involved in the two scenarios could not be more different!Nowadays, however, multilingualism permeates every section of society and impacts on our everyday life in an unprecedented way, for better or worse.It is common in the workplace, a space where people not only work in roles defined in their contracts, but also come into contact with others of different interests and different status such as employee, manager, work contact, customer, visitor, etc.Yet multilingualism in the workplace is different from multilingualism at home or in other domains of social life.It has more direct, yet entangled, economic and social implications and serves interactional purposes which can be at any point on the continuum of goal-orientation and relationship-building.Multilingualism in the workplace is both a policy issue for managers and those in positions of power to control the workplace, and an interactional issue for the individuals working in the specific context.These features of multilingualism in the workplace have indeed made research in this area not only practically relevant, but also theoretically significant and challenging at the same time.

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References

1989A Social Psychologist Discovers Chicago Sociology 2014Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism, and Education 2010The Commodification of Language 2009English as a lingua franca: interpretations and attitudes 2006Signaling and preventing misunderstanding in English as lingua franca communication 2011The Economics of the Multilingual Workplace 2014Researching Identity and Interculturality 2014Doing collegiality and keeping control at work: small talk in government departments 1

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2016Managing Language Diversity in the Workplace: Between ‘One Language Fits All' and ‘Multilingual Model in Action'2018“English as corporate language” in the multilingual reality of multinational companies 2018“English is the language of business”: An exploration of language ideologies in two European corporate contexts 2015English as a Lingua Franca: Descriptions, Domains and Applications 2020The dynamics of privilege: How employees of a multinational corporation construct and contest the privileging effects of English proficiency

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