This paper looks into the complexity of claiming professional roles and shows how employees use linguistic ‘competence’ to claim situated positions of power. We draw on data from a multilingual kitchen and close the paper by proposing a model for the study of multilingualism in the workplace.
Workplace sociolinguistic research has repeatedly shown the barriers migrants face when they transition to a new national/professional context. Limited proficiency in the local (majority) language, in particular, often places migrant employees in precarious positions, making them dependent on colleagues with skills in the local language and affects job mobility. In contrast, those who are perceived to be linguistically ‘competent’ are also seen to be professionally ‘competent’, which results in upward visibility and faster career progression. While sociolinguistic research typically focuses on gatekeeping events and processes of exclusion from the ‘majority’ to the ‘minority’, in this paper we look into the complexity of claiming professional roles and show how employees use ‘competence’ to claim situated positions of power vertically (management) and horizontally (peers). We illustrate our core arguments through data from a multilingual kitchen and show how work environments can become “battlegrounds” between employees competing for access to decision centres. Even though kitchens are highly hierarchical work environments, our data shows that professional roles are negotiated in situ, and that the management of language repertoires allows some employees to bypass formal hierarchical constraints whilst other voices are silenced. The paper draws on a corpus of 18 hours of interactional and interview data collected from a Finnish restaurant with an international workforce from six different countries. We focus on one employee ‘Ibou’ and show how linguistic capital allows him to claim positions of power in his workplace and how, at times, these are contested by his peers. In line with the panel aim, we attempt to go beyond describing gatekeeping and processes of exclusion; instead we close the paper by proposing a model for the study of multilingualism in the workplace and propose directions for further research.
