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This paper draws on the KINSA project (The Communicative Situation of Immigrants at Swedish Workplaces), which aimed to identify communicative factors that have a positive impact on the integration of second language speakers in the workplace and in their immediate work team. The focus here is on humour and swearing as strategies for doing collegiality and for building and maintaining good relations between co-workers. The article presents data from five second language speakers, permanently employed industrial or office workers in a major Swedish company. Theoretically and methodologically, the paper has its basis in discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication. By means of fieldwork, a large body of empirical data was collected, comprising detailed field notes, audio and video recordings of naturally occurring talk, and texts processed and produced by participants. The analysis of the data shows that metalinguistic and metacultural awareness and performance of relational communicative acts among the participants appear to have helped to facilitate and consolidate integration in the workplace and the immediate work team. To foster good relations at work, the five participants make strategic use of jokes, compliments, narratives, swearing and greetings. In this article the use of jokes and swearing is highlighted. It closes by making a case for future research in the area of integration in the workplace through relational communication, especially among second language speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to analyse how humour and narratives about humour are used in a natural group of adults with Asperger’s syndrome. Narratives about humour and use of humour in the group are analysed from a discursive psychological perspective, informed by insights from both disability studies and critical autism studies. The setting of the research is ethnographic fieldwork in an educational setting in Sweden. In the paper, I show the use of three storylines among a natural group of people with autism (PWA) when talking about humour: the storyline of humourless PWA that dominates within Swedish society; and two alternatives, a storyline of alternative humour among PWA and another storyline in line with the social model of disability, of neurotypical humour or disabling humour. When invoking these two alternative storylines, PWA challenge both the humourlessness storyline and the lack of social accessibility within mainstream neurotypical settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the joking relationships among the Scandinavian countries, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Based on joke collections from books, the Internet and other sources, we find that Danes tell jokes about the Norwegians and Swedes, while Norwegians and Swedes tell jokes about each other, but not about the Danes. In general, the Danes tell jokes in which the butt, or object, of the jokes is a stupid Norwegian or a Swede whose values differ from those of the Danes. The Norwegians and the Swedes tell jokes in which the object is stupid - either a Norwegian or a Swede. The different values/stupid characterizations can be found in other contexts. The character of the jokes can be explained in part by the countries' respective national habitus, as they have been shaped by the types of conflictual and co-operative relationships among the countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]