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In this case study we investigate the role of transnational networks and language brokering in labour migration within the European Union. By describing the working days of Estonians hired by a city maintenance company in Sweden, we demonstrate how language skills and network ties of a manager enable work migration in the local context. Most of the recruited workers belong to the manager's circle of family and friends. The manager is thus both capitalising on his social relationships and reinforcing a social support network in the receiving country for the individuals involved. The article promotes our understanding of the interface between migration, multilingualism, and language brokering in the understudied blue-collar workplaces and dissects the social and economic values of linguistic resources in work migration across the Baltic Sea. The data consist of ethnographic observations of daily work routines, video recordings of interaction, and interviews. (Labour migration, multilingualism, manual work, language broker)*

Labour mobility within the EU is particularly extensive in the construction sector, with sociolinguistic consequences for those working abroad and for the place of reception. In this article we analyze chains of directives at construction sites in Sweden, where Ukrainian, Polish and Swedish craftsmen work. The data consist of ethnographic observations and video-recorded conversations from two multilingual workplaces of different sizes. Conversation analysis is used for the analysis of particular instances of chains, and our observations allow for the discussion of the main characteristics of an institutional order for language choice based on interactional patterns that recur across time and space. The results demonstrate how chains contribute to an organization in which not everyone needs to talk to everyone else and where multilingual team leaders function as language brokers between project managers and workers. Interestingly, the institutional order of language choice is similar at the two workplaces, notwithstanding differences in size, temporality and spatiality. Arbetskraftspendlingen inom EU är särskilt stor inom byggsektorn med språkliga effekter både för den som söker arbete utomlands och för platsen för mottagandet. I den här artikeln analyseras kedjor av arbetsdirektiv på två byggarbetsplatser i Sverige där det arbetar svenska, polska respektive ukrainska hantverkare. Vi visar hur kedjorna bidrar till en organisation där alla inte behöver tala med alla och beskriver hur lagbasar för utländska team av arbetare får en nyckelroll genom dels sin flerspråkighet, dels kedjeformatet. Materialet består av etnografiska observationer och videoinspelade samtal från två flerspråkiga arbetsplatser av olika storlek, vilket möjliggör jämförelser av hur arbetet organiseras. I artikeln analyseras först enskilda kedjor med hjälp av samtalsanalys, sedan den övergripande institutionella ordning för språkval som framträder när mönstret återkommer över tid och rum. Intressant nog är den institutionella ordningen för språkval lika för byggarbetsplatserna, trots olikheter i storlek, temporalitet och spatialitet.

In this article we investigate the linguistic working life of manual workers who commute from Estonia for installation work at a large construction site in Sweden. Language use is analysed from the perspective of nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004), including the installers’ historical body, interaction order and discourses in place.The findings show that the workers have extensive experience of construction work in several countries and that they carry out their work without knowledge of Swedish. They are part of a professional Estonian team but work mainly alone and get all necessary instructions from their team leader in Estonian. The team leader coordinates their work but also functions as a language broker in the interactional order, using English as a lingua franca. Installation work is considered “language marginal”, and the dominating discourse in place assigns a higher value to the workers’ craftmanship, flexibility and efficiency than their competence in a specific language. The fact that work is carried out in a country where Swedish is the main language does not have any practical significance, neither for access to work nor for carrying out the work. Based on these findings, we conclude that the wide-spread metaphor “Swedish language as key to the labour market” relies upon a simplified understanding of language and labour market. https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-492983

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.

Nowadays, most universities have policies for internationalization, and in such policies, attention is increasingly given to internationalization as an aspect of students’ learning. However, there have so far been limited efforts to study how such student-centered internationalization can be carried out in practice. This article explores linkages between policy and practice, and it reports on a case study of how local policy goals of internationalization are carried out at the classroom level in a university in Sweden. Through fine-grained analyses of classroom interactions, it is demonstrated how a teacher and his students put policy goals into practice and what aspects stimulate them to do so. More generally, the results contribute to knowledge of how internationalization of higher education can be encouraged and practiced in local learning settings in the form of social actions and how it is carried out in a certain context at a certain time.

This chapter presents a study of the linguistic milieu that is generated when students from different parts of the world meet and interact in international university settings. The study is conducted in nominally English-medium courses at a Swedish university, and focuses on how students use Swedish and other non-authorised languages in addition to English. The multilingual characteristics of the milieu are exemplified and discussed, and it is demonstrated that the language of the surrounding society holds a special position. In the era of globalisation, universities are part of internationalisation processes, but yet situated in a local context marked by a certain history and specific linguistic resources.

As part of the internationalization of higher education, more and more European university courses are being taught in English. Exchanges between universities have grown, and students from different parts of the world now often study together. What does this international environment look like in linguistic terms? Do students and teaching staff speak only the course language English, or are other languages also used, and if so, in what situations and contexts? These questions are discussed on the basis of an ethnographic study of an English-medium university course in Sweden. Extended examples of interaction show that participants adapt their use of languages to place-bound needs and conditions, giving rise to local norms. The national language Swedish holds a special position, as the first language of the majority and the lecturer. The course language English is dominant as a de facto lingua franca, but local social and linguistic needs and conditions leave room for other languages as well. Overall, course participants orient to three competing principles of language use: (a) English as a lingua franca, (b) the speaker's orientation to her or his own language and (c) the special position of Swedish, as the first language of the majority and the lecturer.