Language investment in the trajectories of mobile, multilingual humanitarian workers

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the discursive construction of mobile, multilingual humanitarian workers at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from a critical sociolinguistic perspective. In the light of fluctuating linguistic requirements and needs, I focus on the trajectories of ICRC delegates as a window onto the different values attributed to language resources and investments before and during humanitarian work. The data analysed include interviews with three (former) delegates complemented by institutional documents. The ICRC requirement for major languages including English and French goes hand in hand with recent personality profiling in relation to ‘international experience’ (understood as geographical mobility), which is closely connected to cosmopolitan discourses of openness to other cultures and languages. The three delegates mobilised the trope of ‘interest’ in other cultures and languages in connection to their transnational families. Simultaneously, they expanded their linguistic repertoires during their missions, often ‘bits and pieces’ of local languages, to respond to unplanned linguistic needs in the field and to manage interpreters in ways that reinforce power relationships. I argue that linguistic investment in non-strategic languages like Kurdish during humanitarian missions seldom translates into economic capital, but it is converted into symbolic capital indexing their professional mobility and flexible, entrepreneurial speakerhood.

KEYWORDS:

• International organisations
• mobile workers
• humanitarianism
• linguistic investment
• sociolinguistic trajectories
• multilingualism

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to all the humanitarians who have helped me to understand their careers at the ICRC. Many thanks to the two anonymous reviewers, Maria Sabaté-Dalmau and Véronica Pájaro for their feedback on previous versions of this article. All remaining errors are mine. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the positioning of the ICRC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Maria Rosa Garrido http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9391-3885

Notes

1 My translation from: ‘l’investissement langagier est également soumis à des processus de légitimation qui permettent et limitent la possibilité et la reconnaissance de cet investissement, ceci en fonction de ce qui compte comme locuteur légitime dans un espace donné’.

2 All the names in this article are pseudonyms and the informants’ identities have been anonymized to the greatest extent possible in this article.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been possible thanks to a Swiss Excellence Scholarship for Foreign Scholars (2015.0317) at the University of Fribourg.