Four Women, Two Codes and One (Crowded) Floor: the Joint Construction of a Bilingual Collaborative Floor

Abstract

This chapter extends the scope of research on gender and spoken interaction in two directions. First, it expands it into the context of older generation Austrian Jewish refugees residing in London. Second, it extends it to bilingual speech. The aim of this study is to establish whether the features of spontaneous interaction that have been identified as characteristics of women’s friendship talk by Coates (1996), among others, are also employed by women from a different and so far unexplored cultural, linguistic, ethnic background. If a (gendered) interactional style can be identified in my data, I will examine whether this type of spoken interaction leads to similar interactional outcomes as identified by Coates (1996), i.e. using a bilingual collaborative floor as a way of ‘doing’ friendship.