Pragmatics in multilingual conversations in 6 Germanic tongues (and more!)
Pragmatics is the social lubricant that makes interactions run smoothly, but what does it look like in multilingual conversations? Since 2022 we have been teaching “Intercomprehension among Germanic languages.” In these courses, which cover basic Danish, Dutch, English, German, Norwegian and Swedish, participants also learn strategies to successfully communicate with speakers of other languages in multilingual situations.
In multilingual conversations, each conversant speaks their own mother tongue, so the conversation takes place in two languages. Our Intercomprehension (IC) courses cultivate students’ ability to effectively communicate in instances in which they do not share a common language, or in which they have only some passive knowledge of their interlocutor’s tongue. To do this, participants learn, and practice in role plays, selected strategies, which are scaffolded throughout the course.
We videotaped the multilingual roleplays students had to do as part of their final exam in the June 2023 edition of our IC Germanic languages course. Participants’ native languages were Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish. Specifically, they practice: negotiating meaning with their interlocutor, gauging the other’s comprehension, clarifying, and repairing misunderstandings – all while trying to comprehend the other’s utterances in an unknown language. Analyzing the videotapes provided interesting data on which pragmatic categories (besides gesturing) interlocutors used most frequently, while revealing that, for multilingual conversations, the traditional categories presented several sub-groups. We will outline the pragmatic skills necessary for smooth multilingual interactions, while videos will provide examples of pragmatics in practice within multilingual conversations.