ABSTRACT
This chapter describes multilingual practices in BELF (English as lingua franca in business) contexts, in particular in one BELF meeting. It addresses two main themes in relation to the methodology of describing spoken (ELF) interactions: long-term implications of corpus design for corpus-based studies and principles of micro-diachronic analysis. With regard to corpus design, the chapter reviews how non-*English speech is represented in the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) and discusses the research potential (as well as limitations) that the VOICE mark-up, transcription practice and part-of-speech tagging have for the study of multilingual practices. Having provided a general overview of non-*English elements in professional meetings in VOICE, the chapter examines the emergence of situational multilingual practices in one long BELF meeting. Contributing to ongoing research on Transient International Groups (TIGs), the chapter describes in detail how the participants of a bilateral TIG gradually develop their own ‘multilingual etiquette’. In the case of the meeting examined, this primarily involves the increasing use of L1 side sequences by the two parties. In order to make this gradual development and ongoing processes of accommodation visible empirically, the chapter makes use of conversational, holistic and novel micro-diachronic tools for data visualization and analysis.
