Communication strategies in multilingual teams: Practice, Ideal Situations, Optimisation

Nowadays in modern international football teams players and coaches from various cultural backgrounds who speak different mother tongues come together. To guarantee the success of their teams, clubs have to develop strategies and structures enabling smooth communication within the team despite language (and also cultural) barriers. The Football Research Group of the University of Innsbruck aims to examine and analyse these strategies in the project “Communication strategies in multilingual teams: Practice, Ideal Situations, Optimisation”. The first part of the project focuses on multilingual teams in Austria.  Later, the strategies of several other European teams will also be investigated. In this context two questions are relevant:

1) Which strategies and structures have been developed by clubs to enable successful communication in multinational teams? 2) How can these strategies be optimised, in order to   and facilitate and speed up the integration of foreign football players into a team? Parts of the project have already been already granted funding by the University of Innsbruck (Action Swarovski) and by Austrian-Czech Co-operation (in co-operation with the University of Brno). Co-operation partners at the University of Brno are Alena Podhorna (Romance Philology) and Jan Chovanec (English Philology).

 

Publication:

Chovanec, Jan / Podhorná-Polická, Alena (2009): Multilingualism in football teams: Methodology of fieldwork. In: Language and Literature. European landmarks of identity 5/1, 186–196