Processes and practices of enregisterment of business English, participation and power in a multilingual workplace

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate micro-level processes and practices involved in “a progressive phase of enregisterment” of business English in an interaction in a multilingual workplace context. Enregisterment refers to a social process through which the form and values of a repertoire are being recognized as distinctive from the rest of the language (Agha, 2007). Drawing on recent sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological insights into language as repertoire in the context of globalization, this paper is a case study of a Finnish engineer’s repertoire and practices in a multilingual meeting. With a novel application of enregisterment to the study of business practices, this paper contributes to current research in both sociolinguistics and business English by arguing that the achievement of shared understanding in business is not a matter of overall proficiency in English but of an overall competence to use particular, context-specific bits of a communicative repertoire, which consists of language, gestures and other resources.