Browsing by Subject "työkieli"

The purpose of this thesis was to disclose the current views of Finnish and English language use and development in a multiculturalising Finnish service industry company from its personnel and their views of the future changes in the use of working languages. The research is topical as the foreign workforce in the industry keeps growing and the Finnish population is becoming more multilingual. So far there has been little research on the working languages of Finnish companies, as the research has mainly focused on multinational companies. The aim of the thesis is to find prevailing differences of views about the meaning of languages in multilingual working life from a phenomenographic point of view. Views have been outlined to the themes of everyday work, foreign language development and future working language. The language choices in work situations are studied from the perspectives of language skill development and situations of communication. In the study, seven people from four different organizational areas were interviewed: workers, supervisors, manager-level supervisors, and a member of the training team. The interview material was analyzed with phenomenographic methods using the Atlas.ti software. The results of the thesis show that there are regional differences in the importance of languages in everyday work within the service industry company. In work communities, the choice of language was based on the language skills shared by the members of the community. In situations where the employee did not have sufficient skills in the Finnish language, communication was facilitated by common languages of the work community. The respondents felt that the importance of the English language in the company will increase as the share of foreign workforce in the industry increases. The employees saw the importance of English language skills increasing at the supervisor level, but at the same time they also felt that the use of the English language acted as a slowing factor for foreign workers' learning of the Finnish language in everyday work.