Chapter 2

Analysing bilingual talk

Shifting focus from monolingual to multilingual talk within conversation analysis has offered new, radically social and post-cognitivist understandings of bilingualism, especially through the empirical study of language alternation. This chapter presents some central ideas in the literature on language alternation and traces the emergence and development of the organisational approach. This prioritises a participant perspective, whereby bilinguals mobilise their linguistic resources to organise their actions in mundane and institutional settings. While languaging rather than the linguistic concept of “language” is advocated to capture the nature of bilingual talk, extending the analysis to include multimodal aspects of social interaction is put forward as a promising direction for future inquiry.