‘I’m sure at some point we’ll be switching’: planning and enacting an interview language policy with multilingual participants

Abstract

ABSTRACT When conducting interviews with multilinguals, researchers make (often invisible) decisions about the interview language(s). Whilst the research design may require a particular approach in some cases, linguists generally recommend giving participants a choice or interviewing them in their first language. There are ethical and methodological reasons for considering this, such as the implications for self-expression – including emotion communication – and therefore data generation and analysis. This paper offers methodological reflections about planning and conducting a research interview in which the researcher and participant knowingly share two languages, shining a light on the process of building linguistic flexibility into a study. The case study is an interview conducted in French and English, which explored a bilingual client's language use in psychotherapy. The paper gives practical insights into offering a choice of language(s) and planning for the possibility of a multilingual interview (i.e. code-switching). It considers how to mitigate language insecurities before illustrating how the interview language(s) may be negotiated in interaction. I argue for researchers to set clear interview language policies which foreground inclusivity, and show in the process that interviews can become multilingual exchanges, in which both interlocutors experience linguistic freedom.