Il plurilinguismo nel calcio come lavoro

Whilst they occupy an institutional position of authority, sports coaches permanently need to confirm their leadership on the players by acting in a specific expected and valued way. Within a multilingual as well as multicultural team in which language competences are not equally distributed amongst participants, language use strongly interferes in the construction of such legitimacy. Manifest language hesitation as well as unease could contradict the endorsement of an authoritarian role and its related expected conducts. This paper focuses on the coach-players tutoring relationship during training interactions observed in a multilingual Swiss national football team. It aims to shed light on how language use and code-switching are massively involved within trainer activities. Through some examples it is stressed that rather than setting obstacles to face-to-face communication, code-switching and bilingual speech tend to be used by the coach as resources for establishing a legitimate interactional position in front of the players. These resources aim at making situated roles salient, and contribute to avoid linguistic unease in specific interactional tasks.