ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 takes a fine-grained approach to analysing multilingual conversations to explore how people use their languages in different situations. Methods from linguistics are used to analyse language choice in conversations line-by-line. A receptive multilingual conversation between Nancy Ngalmindjalmag and her husband, Richard Dhangalangal, is compared to recordings of Nancy Ngalmindjalmag in conversation with other people, to show how she uses her languages differently depending on the situation and who she is speaking to. As Eckert and Labov (2017) observe, studying how a single person’s language use varies across interlocutors and settings is a valuable method for understanding language in society. Examining Nancy’s language use, we see how code-switching, an alternative to receptive multilingualism, is also part of everyday language use at Warruwi. The chapter also considers studies of receptive multilingualism around the world and the challenge that receptive multilingualism presents to the notion of linguistic accommodation.
