Paul Sbertoli-Nielsen, University of Oslo; Dorothée Kraus, Tampere University
- Introduction
In this squib, we will sketch out some noticings from an ongoing collaboration building on the authors’ common background in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics (CA/IL) while converging our prior foci on, respectively, multilingual family interactions (Schulz-Budick, now Kraus, 2025) and language-/culture-specific routinizations of relational principles (Sbertoli-Nielsen, 2025ab). In our collaboration, we are exploring multilingual meaning making that draws on both language-/culture-specific resources and locally emerging practices. We explore such resources and practices in seven hours of naturally interactional data from four multilingual families living in Scandinavia, that were asked by one of the authors to film themselves during mealtimes (for more details on the data set, in German, see Schulz-Budick, 2025).
In the first stage of our collaboration, we are looking at one family’s use of the response particles mhm and m᷉m (see Section 2), as locally oriented to talk in, respectively, English and Norwegian (see Section 3). These particles are often confounded in conversation-analytical transcriptions of Norwegian, and could be assumed to be interchangeable across multilingual practices, especially if viewed from unitary translanguaging theory (see, e.g., Otheguy, Garcia & Reid, 2019). In our empirical exploration of multilingual family interactions, however, these particles seem to show order at most points (as mhm did for Sacks, 1964-1972/1992ab, Schegloff, 1982, and Jefferson, 1985). We are therefore interested in their affordances for CA/IL-based interrogations of translanguaging theory (cf. Auer, 2022).
In what follows, we will first touch on relevant CA/IL literature on response particles like mhm, generally and language-/culture-specifically, before briefly sketching out our socially and empirically embedded understanding of multilingual interaction. We will then present two exemplars from a family’s seemingly systematic use of mhm in English and m᷉m in Norwegian, before outlining directions of our ongoing work.
- Response particles and multilingual interaction
The response particle mhm has been studied by conversation analysts since the very beginning, mostly when doing continuer actions (Sacks 1964-1972/1992ab; Schegloff, 1982; Goodwin, 1986; Stivers, 2008; Mandelbaum, 2012; Zama & Robinson, 2016), but also noticing its falling pitch when doing acknowledgement (Jefferson, 1985; Gardner, 2001). It often appears in transcriptions of talk-in-interaction in English, as well as in German (see, e.g., Günthner, 1993), and it seems to also be used in languages as unrelated as Hungarian (Finno-Ugric), Arabic (Semitic) and Kakabe (Mokole, Niger-Congo family), as suggested by a computational overview by Dingemanse, Liesenfeld and Woensdregt (2022:163). In Norwegian, however, research by one of the authors on extensive conversational corpora show mhm to be relatively rare there, and suggests that we should perhaps consider its wide global spread an export from English (Sbertoli-Nielsen, 2023) similarly to what has happened with okay (see Betz et al., 2021).
Instead, a response particle that is almost ubiquitous in Norwegian talk-in-interaction, is m᷉m, pronounced with a high-low-high pitch wave as visualized below (extracted for Sbertoli-Nielsen, 2023, in Praat, Boersma & Weenink, 2023).
This pitch wave is known in the phonology of Norwegian as the East Norwegian ‘second tonal accent’ (see Kristoffersen, 2000). In Norwegian, every intonation phrase is pronounced with either the ‘first’ or the ‘second’ tonal accent, and the wave form of this m᷉m will be easily noticeable by participants as the latter. Despite often being confounded with mhm in transcriptions in Norwegian, recent and ongoing research by one of the authors suggests language-/culture-specific routinizations of their forms and actions. These routinizations appear to be largely carried forward and reproduced by the multilingual participants in our data.
In our exploration of multilingual interactions, we understand multilingualism as embedded in the participants’ holistic use of available interactional resources – linguistic, vocal, corporal, material – for making social actions recognizable for each other. Using such resources for doing certain actions can be routinized into social practices (Garfinkel, 1967; Schegloff, 1997; Schmidt and Deppermann, 2023) and can combine elements from different (language-/culture-specific) routinizations into locally emerged multilingual practices. In such multilingual practices, we understand participants as recipient designing their turns orienting to shared linguistic repertoires and still largely accommodating language-/culture-specific routinizations.
Our aims align with Auer’s (2022) in seeking to empirically interrogate and give nuance to current, unitary strands of translanguaging theory (like Otheguy, García & Reid, 2019), while recognizing social affordances of certain translanguaging pedagogies (cf. García & Sarroub, 2025:81). For both pedagogy and research, we are also informed and inspired by longitudinal conversation-analytic work on interactional competence in second languages (see, e.g., Skogmyr Marian & Pekarek Doehler, 2025).
- Mhm and m᷉m in one multilingual family’s dinners
The multilingual families in our data use linguistic resources from German-English-Swedish, Norwegian-German and Norwegian-English (see Schulz-Budick, 2025). In this squib, we will focus on the latter family, consisting for our present purposes of mother and daughter. This family lives in Norway and uses Norwegian and English at home on a daily basis, while having resources from several other languages in their repertoires (reported in interviews but unspecified here for purposes of anonymization). From their three recordings lasting, respectively, 33 minutes, 35 minutes and 52 minutes, we present two extracts below.
In contrast with the other families in the data set, the mother and daughter explicitly decide in each of their three recordings which language to use (for a discussion of family language policies, see Bloch 2024). Once the language has been decided, the participants largely adhere to these decisions throughout the recordings. Accommodating the language decided on, their adherence to language-/culture-specific routinizations appear to hold true down to the level of response particle phonology, as represented by the extracts below (transcribed according to Jefferson, 2004, and Mondada, 2014, 2024, adapted).
In extract 1, the daughter (Kid) works in line 1-2 to establish a common reference on a certain TV series, in what is later analyzable as a pre-announcement (Terasaki, 1976/2004). The mother (Mom), meanwhile, bites into a pizza slice before responding with our focal phenomenon mhm in line 3:
Extract 1: Family dinner in English 08:10
1 KID ¤by the way. *>you know,<†* (0.3) *
mom ¤bites into pizza slice †gz tw kid->
kid *…………*LH up->*to RH holdng pizza slice->
2 KID *keeping up with the kardashians%
kid *fingrs moving on her slice->> %fig.1
3 MOM ¤(0.3) ±mhm,¤
¤bites off ¤chews
kid ±gz tw MOM->
4 KID you †know •the stepdad bruce•
mom †gz dwn->
mom •……………..•puts down slice on plate
5 MOM †yeah.†¤
mom †…..†gz tw KID
¤chews
The daughter treats this mhm as a confirmation and/or go-ahead by, in line 4, immediately moving on to another, more specific person reference within that domain. Our interest here is the mother’s choice of particle in her locally situated design oriented towards talk in English, as tentatively representative of a majority of such cases noticed in the data (ongoing collecting and analysis), and in contrast to designs oriented to talk in Norwegian as represented by extract 2 below.
In extract 2, the mother provides a temporal locator (cf. Jefferson, 1978:222) contrasting her experience from prior talk by emphasizing eg ‘I’ (line 1), and does an assertion about certain languages on TV (line 2). To this, her daughter responds with our focal phenomenon m᷉m in line 3:
Extract 2: Family dinner in Norwegian 09:46
1 MOM ¤†±∆.h m du vet når ↑eg var ±∆liten±∆%
m you know when ↑I was a kid
¤†head on Hs, gz tw KID-> %fig.2
kid ±∆hd&gz dwn-> ±∆…..±∆hd&gz tw MOM, chewing->
2 MOM så på-†± på teve så var det *±∆mye †*<svensk og dansk>
then on- on TV there was a lot of Swedish and Danish
†gz fw-> †gz tw KID->
kid ±gz t crispbread in RH ±∆hd&gz tw soup bowl->
kid *…….*RH dips crispbread in soup->
3 KID * (.) m᷉m *(.)
*RH tw mouth *puts crispbread in mouth
4 MOM ±∆fordi ±∆(.) det var bare ein tevekanal i heile Norge,
because there was only one TV-channel in all of Norway,
kid ±∆……±∆hd&gz tw MOM
We see the daughter’s m᷉m in this position as ambivalent: It could acknowledge her mother’s assertion and/or treat the mother’s turn as incomplete and as having projected continuation into further talk (for clearer action clusters of m᷉m, see Sbertoli-Nielsen, 2023, 2025b). After a microsilence while the daughter puts crispbread in her mouth, the mother does another turn-constructional unit in line 4, moving into what seems to develop (after the extract) as ambivalent between an account and a telling.
Again, our interest is the daughter’s choice of particle in her locally situated design, here an m᷉m oriented towards talk in Norwegian. This particle too is tentatively representative of a majority of such cases noticed in the data, used when the participants speak Norwegian but not when speaking English. We see these designs as phonologically sensitive, granular accommodations to the language of their sequential environments.
- Ongoing directions
Observing the aforementioned data from multilingual families, we are in the process of making collections (cf. Clift & Raymond, 2018) of mhm and m᷉m, and analyzing them in their local situatedness. Our impression so far is – as we have tentatively suggested here – that there are systematicities in their designs vis-à-vis the language used in their sequential environments. We find such potential systematicity especially interesting as a starting point for CA/IL-based, empirical interrogations of the elsewhere influential unitary translanguaging theory (Otheguy, Garcia & Reid, 2019), from which one might infer that such particles would float somewhat freely across multilingual practices. Since these particle practices are more often acquired ‘in the wild’ than from normative, educational institutions, documenting them as relatively orderly and language-/culture-specifically routinized may strengthen the perspective put forth by Auer (2022: 127) that ‘languages’ are socially constructed not only by linguistic authorities but by multilingual speakers themselves. For our ongoing work in this direction, we would appreciate any helpful comments and suggestions from members of the ISCA community.
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