Requesting at work: exploring the intercultural style hypothesis of German-English bilinguals

Abstract The goal of the present study is to explore bilinguals’ intercultural style of requesting in a workplace setting and thereby contribute to the understanding of bilingual pragmatic competence. The relatively unexplored intercultural style hypothesis suggests that bilinguals show a unique pragmatic pattern related to but distinct from the contact languages. German-English bilinguals in the U.S., Germans in Germany, and Americans in the U.S. completed an oral discourse completion task. The bilinguals were tested in German and English. The scenarios were situated at the workplace and controlled for social distance and power. Results revealed bi-directional influence from both languages and that bilinguals differentiated their request strategies depending on language, accentuating cross-linguistic differences and thereby asserting their intercultural identity. This suggests that the pragmatic competence of the German-English bilinguals consists in the awareness, realization, and preservation of perceived cross-linguistic contrasts. However, perception ratings revealed that bilinguals’ German requests were perceived as significantly less polite and less effective than their English requests, suggesting that pragmatic norms of German requests are undergoing language change.