This article analyzes multilingual practices in interactions inside European Union (EU) institutions. On the basis of our fieldwork conducted in EU organizational spaces throughout 2009, we explore different types of communication in order to illustrate how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and officials at the European Commission practice and perform multilingualism in their everyday work. In our theoretical and methodological framework, we draw on existent sociolinguistic ethnographical research into organizations and interactions, and integrate a multilevel (macro) contextual and sequential (micro) analysis of manifold data (observations, field notes, recordings of official and semi-official meetings, interviews, etc.). In this way, a continuum of context-dependent multilingual practices becomes apparent, which are characterized by different patterns of language choice and which serve a range of both manifest and latent functions. By applying the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), the intricacies of the increasingly complex phenomenon of multilingualism in transnational-organizational spaces, which are frequently characterized by diverse power-related and other asymmetries of communication, can be adequately coped with. (Code-switching, multilingualism, power, institutional spaces, European Union, ethnography, discourse-historical approach, critical discourse studies)*

This article presents an analysis of a slang variety, called oxtšit, as it is described and used by a cohort of gay men in Israel. Unlike many previous analyses of gay slang, I argue that the men described do not use the variety to help construct and affirm an alternative gay identity, but rather that they use it as a form of in-group mockery through which normative and nonnormative articulations of Israeli gay male sexuality are delineated. It is suggested that this discussion has implications for sociolinguistic understandings of “groupness” more broadly, and particularly the relationship between macro-level social categories (like “gay”) and individual lived experience. (Gay slang, Israel, vari-directional voicing, identity/alterity)*

This article deals with the organization of multilingual meetings, considering the interplay of multimodal resources constituting their interactional order. Using Conversation Analysis, it explores the mobilization of multimodal and multilingual resources by the participants in order to make possible, sustain, and change participation within a meeting. Moreover, it focuses on language choice as a situated and embodied achievement.

The article's empirical contribution is a detailed analysis of a single case, an episode within a meeting in which several radical changes occur concerning language, participation, interactional space, and the categorization of the participants. The analysis explores the systematic organizational features characterizing the meeting before and after change, showing the embodied practices enabling a participant who was silent, sitting in the last row of the room, not speaking the language of the meeting, to become a recognized expert, thus changing the language of the meeting and reorganizing the opportunities to participate. (Conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, meetings, multilingualism, participation, multimodality, language choice, categorization, identity)*

This study explores a type of language play among a community of improvisational theater (improv) performers, focusing on their strategic deployment of texts in interactions collected backstage while the troupe prepares for performance. Building on the work of Bauman & Briggs (1990), I adopt a process approach to the analysis of intertextuality, suggesting that community-specific ways of using entextualization, decontextualization, and recontextualization add to the work that has been done on intertextuality, given that it is not merely what texts are used but crucially how they are reshaped that can serve an important social function or the why of intertextuality—in this case explored in the context of member socialization. (Intertextuality, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, improvisational theater, improv)*

Enfield's The anatomy of meaning is a pathbreaking exploration of multimodal communication based on Lao video recordings and fieldwork. Of special interest is his notion of composites, through which he addresses the question of cross-modal integration—how it is that signs in different modalities cohere, speech and gesture being his focus. For whom, to what degree, and through what means do composites coalesce? Does this notion denote a kind of cross-modal orderliness or the achievement of orderliness—perhaps through heuristics and inference-making? As I detail the book's engagement with this issue and compare it with others—especially recent discussions of “textuality” in linguistic anthropology and older structuralist approaches to behavioral events—I suggest that Enfield's notion is best viewed as a methodological operator. It is a notion that performs a kind of methodological displacement, pushing against an entrenched logocentrism while spurring us to view communicative events as multiplex, cross-modal assemblages. (Multi-modal, cross-modal, gesture, interaction, video, Lao)