Chapter 2 uses one first-generation immigrant mother’s narrative as a basis to outline the language background of the family and to explore the construction and the characteristics of the bilingual space at home, as well as the history and the forces behind the shift of linguistic repertoire in the household during the early years of children who are speakers of Chinese as a heritage language.

This chapter is a study of the Swedish Tax Agency work with mottos and shows how the STA has increasingly legitimised their work with the Swedish taxpayers. It reveals how a tax administration has responded to contemporary politics, which tax compliance research has been applied, and its adaptation to contemporary trends in public organization, while paying attention to how taxpayers view them. It also shows how a tax administration adapts to societal change, and how the mottos over time convey messages about the importance of taxes for Swedish society and which types of individual – moral – behaviour are seen to constitute society. These fiscal mottos are thus imperative as they make, in Douglas Holmes’ words, ‘promises of a distinctive social order’, one where all taxpayers ought to be willing to pay their taxes due to society and trust that all other taxpayers are made to do the same.

Using empirical data from ACE and from a selection of Asian varieties of English, how local and regional cultural and pragmatic norms are realised in the English being used by Asian multilinguals will be illustrated. We also investigate whether there is empirical evidence for the idea that there is an ‘Asian’ way of communication which is marked or characterised by dialogue and consensus. In an earlier study (Kirkpatrick 2010), fifteen speaker and listener strategies were identified which were adopted by Asian multilinguals while using English as a lingua franca. These findings supported other findings using more European-based data, illustrating that English as a lingua franca is characterised by its speakers’ adoption of specific communicative strategies to ensure successful communication and the preservation of their fellow interlocutors’ face. It will be argued, however, that context is the crucial variable, as there are occasions when speakers, far from seeking to preserve the face of their fellow interlocutors, were happy to threaten their interlocutors’ face.