ELF is the working language of multinational crisis management. In this professional context, successful communication is a prerequisite. The use of some other language potentially hinders shared situation awareness. We analyse four practices by which practitioners switch back to English and thereby resume shared access to a situation.
Multinational crisis management training is a professional context that prepares military and civilian staff to work in conflict operations (often led by the UN, NATO, EU, African Union) around the world. The working language for multinational crisis management is English as a lingua franca. The training includes exercises that realistically simulate real-life conflict situations. In the exercises, successful communication solves multidimensional and complex problems. The trainees – and future practitioners in crisis operations – come from different countries, and their English skills vary a lot. Nevertheless, they are expected to use English at all times, for the purposes of team building and maintaining continuous and uninterrupted shared situation awareness. It is common, however, that the used language is switched to some other language, mostly the speaker’s native tongue. In this talk, we identify and analyse interactional practices by which the used language is switched from some languageback toEnglish. The analysis builds on field work and a collection of video recordings in a multinational military staff in a brigade-level tactical operation centre (TOC) in the VIKING18 exercise. Methodologically we combine micro-level analysis of interaction – conversation analysis – with ethnography (observations, field notes and personal communication). We first offer an example that shows how the use of a language other than English can be seen to delay information sharing. We then analyse in detail four practices by which the used language is switched from some language back to English: a speaker self-switching to English, language mediation (Harjunpää 2017), a speaker using candidate understandings, and language crossing (Rampton 1995). We argue that, in multinational crisis management interaction, code-switching back to English can be seen as expected conduct that recovers interactional symmetry between the participants and resumes the participants’ access to a situation, thereby supporting the building and maintaining of shared situation awareness.
