Multilingual chance encounters between unacquainted people in public space

It is a common occurrence for people to spontaneously strike up a conversation with unknown others in public places. In such first-contact situations, one fundamental issue hovering over the early moments of interaction concerns language choice. Especially in multilingual environments, a generic practical problem for previously unacquainted people is having to find out what the available and adequate language options are for the encounter, and establishing here and now what shared linguistic resources they can rely on so that each party can communicate competently, for all practical purposes. Such impromptu public interactions, which have thus far largely evaded systematic interactional analysis, present a perspicuous site for investigating the practices through which language choice is locally negotiated and invite examination of how individuals mobilize their multiple linguistic and embodied resources as they engage in interaction. It is these moments of language contact, their characteristics and interactional organization, that are the focus of this dissertation.

Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA), and making use of video recordings collected across a range of multilingual public places in French-, German-, and Italian-speaking Switzerland, the dissertation examines how multilingual chance encounters between previously unacquainted people are organized in naturally-occurring interaction. Chance encounters between people with differing linguistic competencies and preferences for language use are a quotidian part of public social life, and a closer look into their emergence provides an opportunity to highlight that, far from being pre-determined, language choice is a contingent, in-situ interactional achievement. The dissertation describes in detail some of the local practices through which coincidentally co-present persons who have never met before spontaneously move into interaction in a variety of public settings, display to each other their preferences for language use and (lack of) linguistic competencies, recipient-design language choice, and request and offer help in the face of emerging language-related difficulties. The analyses report on how previously unknown individuals—during the nascent moments of their chance encounter—emergently discover the linguistic options they have for efficiently engaging in interaction, and interactionally negotiate a mode of language use that they deem adequate for whatever it is they are doing. These options can range from the choice of one shared language-of-interaction to the exclusion of others (Chapters 4 and 5); to multilingual modes of interaction in which speakers alternate languages during sequences of language negotiation (Chapter 5); to third-party mediated interactions involving ad hoc language brokers (Chapter 6); to conversations in which participants practice receptive multilingualism by each speaking a different language (Chapter 7).

Taken together, the dissertation has distinctive empirical and conceptual contributions to make to research both within and outside of EMCA. It contributes to a praxeological approach to language choice and multilingualism-in-interaction, and explores the intersections between research into multilingual practices, an EMCA approach to the sequential, embodied, and categorial organization of openings, and a Goffman-inspired take on interaction between “strangers” in public places.