Multilingual Communication Practices in Dutch Warehouses

Talk by Bianca Dijkstra (University of Groningen).

In Europe, international truck drivers need to navigate through diverse (linguistic) landscapes to keep the supply chain intact. In the multilingual contact zones they encounter along their way they need to be versatile and make the most out of their linguistic resources or ‘Individual Multilingual Repertoire’ (IMR) (Pitzl, 2016, p. 298). In this presentation I will specifically look at a case from my ethnographic fieldwork which illustrates how Polish truck drivers and Dutch logistics professionals use various communicative modes to get their job done.