The increasing growth of foreign immigration to Spain has changed the communicative reality of various types of institutions. Civil servants, doctors, teachers, social workers and all sorts of service providers face new communicative challenges in their daily professional practice. The changing face and voice of their clientele calls into question habitualised forms of service delivery based on the homogeneity of practices and worldviews (Moyer and Martín Rojo 2007). In this paper, we undertake a comparative study of the multilingual practices observed in two service contexts dealing with transnational migrants in Barcelona: a state legalisation office and a free legal advice service offered by a non-profit organisation. We use various types of interactional, observational and textual data. Our theoretical standpoint is that of critical sociolinguistics (Blommaert 2003; Heller 2007). We problematise the role of language in social life and try to shed light on the ways in which linguistic practices are deeply implicated in processes of stratification and social exclusion. The analysis of our data shows that, in spite of their different social missions and grounding ideologies, the two institutions examined reproduce hegemonic stances towards service communication which problematise multilingualism and ignore the exclusionary effects that overlooking communication-related matters have for certain groups of migrants. Both organisations assume Spanish to be the normal, logical and natural language of communication and neglect the need for more fluid and unproblematising forms of multilingual practice.

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AbstractThis paper investigates the fluctuating value of Arabic when constructed as a linguistic resource for multilingual, “languaged” workers in a counselling centre for refugees in Austria and in an international humanitarian agency operating in ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. Drawing on a variety of ethnographic data (observations, interviews and documents), our analyses of the institutionalised division of labour and of workers’ narrative positioning show how workers in both organisations discursively construct this linguistic resource as being of ambivalent value in their positioning vis-à-vis their colleagues, for their careers and in work interactions. Stratifying and empowerment effects are interwoven in the varying and coexisting values of Arabic.

This article analyses the labour and social trajectories of seven multilingual and well-educated young men from Africa in the Barcelona area (Catalonia, Spain) over a 5-year period. Our data consist of life history interviews combined with ethnographic observations in a settlement non-governmental organisation (NGO). We adopt a critical sociolinguistic perspective on language and mobility which underlines the time-space dimension of migrants' emplacement and understands the value of global languages in relation to socio-economic and linguistic normativity regimes. Our findings suggest that English does not play a role in the local emplacement of these migrants, with the exceptions of the dwindling NGO sector and tourism in Barcelona. However, it indexes their transnational flows, connections and orientations. We argue that the 'ideologies of integration' of the NGOs examined background migrants' global language capitals while funnelling them into the non-qualified labour market. These agencies draw on tabula-rasa discourses that delanguage and, more generally, deskill migrants. In the current crisis, they have adopted new discourses of migration as a learning opportunity to gain experience, make contacts and learn skills. In the absence of paid work, voluntary labour is construed as intensive language practice and an opportunity to expand migrants' networks.