Friendship, humour and non-native language: Emotions and experiences of professional migrants to Australia

ABSTRACT

This article explores a particular consequence of migration, which is the need to make new friends in a new country. Migration scholars tend to ignore the process of making friends, when this can be a key challenge to integrating in a new society. We draw on semi-structured interviews with professional migrants to Australia, from a range of different countries, to explore how using non-native language impacted on new friendships. In particular, using the sociological lens of ‘facework’, we show how humour was used during new friendships with English speakers [Goffman, E. 1969. Where the Action Is: Three Essays. London: Allen Lane]. Non-native language confidence impacted on informal socialising because migrants encountered challenges using humour with new friends. This led to feelings of embarrassment, which had to be emotionally managed. Despite speaking good English, these non-native English language migrants can still face language challenges in informal settings. As the migrant's length of time in Australia increased, language confidence improved, however, there were still barriers when using humour. Whilst analysis is specific to Australia, given the increased numbers of professional migrants globally, further investigation is needed to explore if non-native English migrants to other similar cultures such as England, the USA, or Canada also experience such barriers to integration at local level.

KEYWORDS:

• Friendship
• professional migrants
• emotions
• English as an additional language
• language barriers
• humour

Acknowledgements

Both authors extend thanks to the participants for their time and insights, to the anonymous reviewers and to Lyn Dickens for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Determining where a migrant is ‘from’ is complicated because often people's life histories involve having parents from different nationalities, cultures and/or ethnicities, having lived in various places, speaking more than one language, having multiple citizenships and consequently having various allegiances. These multiple factors make it difficult to determine an ‘origin’ for some migrants.