Introduction

In today's globalised economy, people frequently move between jobs, crossing national, professional and linguistic boundaries in order to optimise their career opportunities. In turn, the increased mobility of workers results in the emergence of more dynamic workplace communities, in which people of diverse national, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds get together and interact. Because people spend a large amount of time in their workplaces, these constitute promising social and interactional contexts for investigating how language ideologies, group norms and various identities are negotiated, constructed and challenged through talk (Holmes et al. 2011; Marra and Angouri 2011). When moving between linguistic, national and professional spaces, workers are faced with the need to socialise into new groups and, therefore, to engage in a process of learning and adapting to different norms and expectations (Roberts 2010). Speaker's language resources, as well as their ability to conform to new norms for language use, can be crucial for successfully navigating their way into the community. Given that such norms exist at different societal, community and interactional levels (Holmes et al. 2011), the transition is a multilayered process for newcomers and ‘ old-timers’ alike.

Where newcomers are expected to adapt to shared ways of doing and speaking, existing group members may also be faced with changes to their established practices. They might show resistance to this change, if they perceive it as threatening power structures. Recent research into multilingualism at work provides evidence that established groups can feel threatened by the internationalisation processes of their company. In a case study involving multinational companies (MNCs) in the Czech Republic, Nekvapil and Sherman (2009, 2013) demonstrate that the local Czech staff members, who were predominantly blue-collar workers and less educated than international staff, expressed ambivalent feelings towards the expatriates. Similarly, in a study of a Danish company that had recently adopted English as its corporate language, Lønsman (2011) found that low-skilled Danish staff members showed resistance to the need to use English and created boundaries with international expatriates who did not learn the local language.