Plurilingualism as a resource for interculturality: an analysis of sport instruction interactions in Switzerland
Stefano Losa
This article presents a sociological analysis of code-switching and bilingual speech within multilingual sport training interactions (soccer) as they occur in the Swiss context and its intercultural landscape. Involving institutional hierarchy and complementary roles, these situations of interaction are analysed as social figurations (Elias, 1991a) in which mutual forms of dependence link a coach to the players (and vice versa). After introducing the figurational approach and showing the necessity to account for several dimensions of interdependence (functional, praxeologic and symbolic), a series of empirical cases are analyzed. The study highlights that code-switching and bilingual speech are, on the one hand, resources exploited by speakers to position each other. On the other hand, they vary according to what form of interdependence is most salient — one related to an interactional context or to a local discourse activity.
Keywords
instructional interactions; social figurations; code-switching.
