Abstract
Abstract In this article we investigate spoken professional interaction at construction sites in Sweden, where workers from Poland, Ukraine and Estonia are temporarily employed as carpenters, ground workers and kitchen installers. We study how the workers use resources associated with different languages and how these resources are mobilized along with embodied resources for meaning-making. The analysis aims at investigating what social space the workers construct by going between or beyond different linguistic structures, as defined in the theory of translanguaging. The study is based on Linguistic Ethnography and Conversation Analysis is used for close analysis. We focus on instances of translanguaging, such as Swedish-sounding institutionalized keywords, practices of receptive multilingualism and the search for communicative overlaps in repertoires. The findings from busy construction sites show that the stratifying aspect gives some workers a voice in the organization, while others remain silent. Hence, it is primarily professionals functioning as team leaders, who talk to different occupational categories and use resources associated with different languages. The data provide an opportunity to investigate the theory of translanguaging and its transformative power in relation to professional settings that are linguistically diverse, but also strictly hierarchical.
Highlights
In this article we investigate spoken professional interaction at construction sites in Sweden, where workers from Poland, Ukraine and Estonia are temporarily employed as carpenters, ground workers and kitchen installers
We focus on instances of translanguaging, such as Swedish-sounding institutionalized keywords, practices of receptive multilingualism and the search for communicative overlaps in repertoires
It is primarily professionals functioning as team leaders, who talk to different occupational categories and use resources associated with different languages
Summary
Contemporary ways of organizing global economy have promoted a multilingual working life, due to increased mobility and work migration (Gonçalves and Kelly-Holmes 2020a). A repertoire is an accumulation of all linguistic and semiotic resources at a speakers’ disposal (Busch 2012) and it is acquired over the course of a life trajectory, as individuals “take on board bits of any language available in strategically diverse ways in order to achieve a (localized) communicative function” (Spotti and Blommaert 2017: 172) In professional settings, such as construction sites, repertoires are related to the professional register, i.e., linguistic resources are socially organized in relation to the specific aims and tasks relevant for the profession (Pennycook 2018). Communication is subordinated to manual work and most professional tasks are solved with minimal verbal interaction Another important difference is that construction sites tend to lack explicit language policies, which are customary at schools. We will chronicle similar multilingual and multisemiotic occasions, arguing that they provide an opportunity to develop the theory of translanguaging spaces in the blue-collar professions
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