Establishing rapport with Punjabi-English bilinguals: L1 vs. dominance

ABSTRACT

This study tested whether Punjabi-English bilinguals feel a stronger rapport with another bilingual stranger when communicating in L1 Punjabi or their dominant L2 English. Some previous studies have shown greater emotional reactions to a dominant language. We predicted that participants would feel more comfortable speaking their dominant language. Participants completed an origami task via Zoom with a confederate while communicating in English and Punjabi trials. The task was done in both languages and the order of languages was randomly assigned. Surprisingly, participants rated the Punjabi interactions more comfortable than the English interactions. Rapport was not correlated with proficiency in either language. One possible interpretation of these results is that communicating in the L1 elicits feelings of belongingness to a community, resulting in greater feelings of comfort. Future studies can test whether these results generalise to real-life interactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Rapport
• immigrants
• minority language
• belongingness

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (IG 435-2018-0044). A big thank you to Gurishar Dhami for her help in playing the role of confederate.

Data availability

The data concerning rapport (and gender) are publicly available at DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/GFQMW

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number 435-2018-0044].