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Background: Psychotherapy is constituted through language. Due to voluntary migration or forced mobility, many people do not have access to therapy in their first language (L1). How multilingual clients manage their languages in therapy is an issue many therapists need to address in their practice. Psychotherapy is about trauma, emotions and identity, and when a multilingual client chooses a particular language, it may influence their emotional expression, cause a cultural misunderstanding, and a distorted presentation of who they are. Aims: In this study, we investigated how clients perceive psychotherapy in a foreign language (LX). We also aimed to provide psychotherapists with more insights into the effect of language choices on the course and outcome of therapy. Methods: We conducted 30 semi‐structured interviews with multilingual clients who had experience with therapy in LX. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. Findings: The data revealed that there is not one correlation between language and emotion, and that different backgrounds may lead to different preferences for the language of therapy; for some, LX may be preferred because it provides emotional distance necessary for discussing past trauma; for others, LX feels inadequate for expressing themselves fully. Conclusions: Our data suggest that there is a need for multilingual psychotherapists to learn more about their clients' linguistic and cultural profiles and how they play a role in emotion communication to facilitate a smoother therapeutic process and a more beneficial outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review aimed at presenting the findings of 19 original studies that were published in the period from 2000 to 2022 in order to outline the current state of the art in the field of emotion communication (i.e., expressing and interpreting emotions) in multilingual psychotherapy. This analysis involves in particular the studies that investigate multilingual phenomena (e.g., code‐switching and language‐mixing) that occur during psychotherapeutic sessions when client and therapist can speak more than one language, as well as the articles that research emotion communication in this multilingual setting. With this in mind, the articles selected for this review are divided into two main categories: linguistic phenomena in multilingual psychotherapy and emotion communication in multilingual psychotherapy. Results of the studies in the current analysis reveal that code‐switching remains one of the main linguistic phenomena that arises in the area of multilingual psychotherapy. Switching languages in therapy tends to be considered as beneficial for both client and therapist. Besides, findings suggest a connection between speaking L1/LX and one's identity (e.g., feeling different depending on the language). Additionally, studies that investigate emotion communication in multilingual psychotherapy show that an individual's first language (L1) is predominantly viewed as more emotionally charged than their language(s) learned later in life (LX). However, some studies also demonstrate that the relationship between L1 and LX is more fluid and context‐dependent than it has traditionally been regarded. Propositions are given for future research in the field of emotion communication in multilingual psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study of four Mexican-American fourth grade children in a Spanish-English bilingual classroom, language choice is shown to be a mechanism for constructing social identity. While all four children use both English and Spanish to perform their identities, the diversity of their social identities leads them to use the same linguistic resources in a variety of ways. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses show how specific language choices may be tied to societal norms to index pre-existing identity categories, most saliently ethnicity and nationality; yet frequently specific language choices are used to construct identities in which gender,friendship ties, and classroom roles are focal aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the colloquial uses of 'like' as a discourse marker with the goal of specifying its discourse functions including semantic pragmatic and socio-pragmatic aspects of meaning. Factors that give rise to variation in rates of like use in different interviews; Revelation that data for this study were collected as part of a larger project on the use of discourse markers in interviews and in naturally occurring conversation by both native and non-native English speakers; Two main functions of like.

This research analyzes the discourse marker (DM) use of native speakers and non-native speakers in two speech contexts, interviews and conversations. The findings indicate that native speakers use oh and well more in the conversation data, a difference which is also found in the non-native speaker data. The native speakers use like and y'know more frequently in the interview data, but the non-native speakers do not show a difference in the use of these markers across contexts. Instead, non-native speaker dis-course is characterized by formulaic use of some DMs and an overall lower rate of DM occurrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different discourse markers (DMs) have been argued to have different levels of pragmatic detachability, based on whether they are lexical and content-oriented or nonlexical and operational in nature (Matras 1998). DMs that are nonlexical and operational in nature are claimed by Matras to be high in the pragmatic-detachability hierarchy and thus can be borrowed more easily in language contact. The present study addresses this claim with data from Pennsylvania German (PG) and analyzes discourse markers of both German and English origin. The findings support the claims about pragmatic detachability as a motivation for borrowing of DMs. The DMs well and so, which are highly pragmatically detachable, have been borrowed into PG and do not have German-origin counterparts. The DMs y'know and but, which rank somewhat lower on the pragmatic-detachability scale, have also been borrowed but are used in variation with their German-origin counterparts. Finally, the German-origin DMs ja and mol, which have no English counterparts, are still in use but are infrequent in these data. These DMs are very low on the pragmatic-detachability scale, indicating that not only borrowing but also loss may be controlled by the principle of pragmatic detachability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]