Shifting multilingual strategies in a Flemish public healthcare service

Abstract

AbstractThis paper addresses the challenges service providers are facing amidst growing ethnolinguistic diversity in a neoliberal climate. We focus on the public service provider Kind & Gezin (K&G), the agency that monitors the wellbeing of young children on behalf of the Flemish authorities in Belgium. We demonstrate that the organisation has taken various multilingual measures that go against the government’s preference for monolingual service provision. This is particularly the case for ‘bottom-up’ bilingual practices, where bilingual family support workers and medical staff developed bilingual routines in service provision, much in line with the ‘client-centered communication’ which K&G professes. Whereas these practices were initially endorsed by K&G’s management, a further diversification of K&G’s clientele, along with budgetary restrictions, prompted management to restrict these practices and explore alternative ways of providing multilingual services that do not require the recruitment of extra staff. Drawing on ethnographic data we explore the rationale underlying the organisation’s decision to restrict its multilingual policy and the way this decision is influenced by neoliberal principles which foreground effectiveness, efficiency, flexibility and entrepreneurialism. We conclude that the policy shift leads to ideological reconceptualisations of ‘language’ and ‘language difference’ that sit uncomfortably with the reality of language-discordant service encounters, as well as to redefinitions of the professional identity of bilingual family support workers.