Applied Linguistics 2014: 35/1: 63–81 ß Oxford University Press 2013

doi:10.1093/applin/amt003 Advance Access published on 12 April 2013

Covert Bilingualism and Symbolic

Competence: Analytical Reflections on
Negotiating Insider/Outsider Positionality
in Swedish Speech Situations

FRANCIS M. HULT

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Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
E-mail: Francis.Hult@englund.lu.se

Bilinguals often face the challenge of negotiating a range of insider/outsider

subject positions when interacting in transnational and intercultural settings.
This article takes up the concept of symbolic competence, the awareness of
socially situated symbolic resources and the ability to use them to shape inter-
actional contexts, to examine how the author, a Swedish–English bilingual,
manages this negotiation. Drawing on principles of the ethnography of commu-
nication in concert with the complementary discourse analytic perspective of
nexus analysis, ethnographic vignettes are analyzed to explore strategic lan-
guage choices the author made during specific speech situations in Sweden. It
is shown that the concealment of linguistic abilities, or covert bilingualism,
served as a resource to support the symbolic competence needed to facilitate
the presentation of self during social encounters while mitigating the ambiguity
of being simultaneously insider and outsider.

INTRODUCTION
The language choices of bilinguals in response to social situations are well
documented (e.g. Baetens Beardsmore 1986; Zentella 1997; Bhatia and
Ritchie 2008). Recently, Kramsch (2006, 2008) has proposed symbolic com-
petence as a concept that highlights how language users develop the commu-
nicative skills not only to respond to social situations but to shape the very
interactional contexts in which they engage with other interlocutors. This
article takes up the concept of symbolic competence with respect to bicultural
bilingual social interaction. Specifically, I use principles of ethnography of
communication (e.g. Hymes 1974; Saville-Troike 2003) in concert with the
complementary discourse analytic perspective of nexus analysis (e.g. Scollon
and Scollon 2004) to examine the ways in which my own bilingualism during
fieldwork in Sweden served strategic purposes in social interaction. In particu-
lar, I explore how the calculated concealment of my linguistic abilities, or
covert bilingualism (Sawyer 1978), served as a resource to support the sym-
bolic competence needed to navigate being a simultaneous insider/outsider—a
challenge bicultural bilingual individuals often face, both in everyday life and
64 COVERT BILINGUALISM AND SYMBOLIC COMPETENCE

as researchers, as they move across transnational spaces (e.g. Messerschmidt

1981; Altorki and El-Solh 1988; Grosjean 2008).
Following in the tradition of researcher reflection about interactions in the
field (e.g. Abu-Lughod 1988; Hornberger 1989; Todeva and Cenoz 2009), the
focus of this article is on the analysis of ethnographic vignettes (Erickson 1990;
Creese 2010) drawn from my own experiences during fieldwork. Although
some reflective accounts that offer scant theoretical insight or minimal trans-
ferability are justifiably criticized as little more than navel gazing (Pavlenko
2007), the purpose of the present study is to offer a principled analysis of
firsthand experiences with the process of linguistically navigating the dual

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role of insider and outsider in a way that may inform the work of future
bicultural bilingual researchers in similar positions. I begin with a discussion
about the nature of insider/outsider positionality and the role of symbolic
competence in negotiating it. Next, I offer a brief exposition of the ethno-
graphic and discourse analytic methods used here. I then turn to an analysis
of three ethnographic vignettes that illustrate how my bilingual symbolic com-
petence unfolded during everyday interactions.

INSIDER/OUTSIDER POSITIONALITY AND SYMBOLIC

COMPETENCE
The positionality of researchers with respect to their insider/outsider status has
received extensive attention among ethnographers (e.g. Messerschmidt 1981;
Altorki and El-Solh 1988; Headland Pike and Harris 1990). A central point of
discussion has concerned the methodological benefits and drawbacks of being
either an insider or an outsider in the context of one’s fieldwork (Aguilar
1981). Although it was once considered somewhat controversial, and a devi-
ation from the traditional ethnographic rite de passage of conducting research in
exotic locales, working in one’s ‘home’ culture has become quite common
(Messerschmidt 1981). While critics of insider research point to concerns
such as potential bias in favor of one’s own social group or blindness to prac-
tices that might be taken for granted, proponents argue that there may be
merits to being an insider, including the potential to gain access to a wide
range of social settings and the ability to understand subtle social and linguistic
cues (Aguilar 1981: 24–26; Bennett 1998: 625). Thus, it is useful to consider
both the cultural dimension of the insider/outsider position itself and the lin-
guistic dimension through which this position is negotiated.

Insider/outsider positionality
The distinction between insider and outsider is somewhat illusory. The dichot-
omy belies the complexity of negotiating multiple social identities across dif-
ferent settings and interlocutors by suggesting that one can have a singular
identity as simply insider or outsider (Aguilar 1981; Narayan 1993; Mullings
1999). For transnational and bicultural scholars, in particular, the concepts of
 F. M. HULT 65

’home’ and ’insider’ are not givens, as identity is not fully fixed to any par-
ticular place or social group (Cerroni-Long 1995: 6).
Accounts by ethnographers who have studied societies with which they
have a heritage connection demonstrate that one must negotiate being simul-
taneously an insider and an outsider. Abu-Lughod (1988), for example, writes
about being a ‘partial insider’ in the Egyptian setting in which she conducted
fieldwork. She explains that her Arab background allowed her to align herself
culturally and socially with her participants while at the same time she found
herself hiding details about her life in the United States to maintain that pos-
ition (Abu-Lughod 1988: 147–149). Similarly, Kondo (1986), a Japanese–

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American woman conducting fieldwork in Japan, describes the suppression
of her American sense of self to foreground Japanese social practices that
would create co-membership with her host family. Even when conducting
research in a country where one was born and raised, it has been shown
that one must still navigate the position of researcher and interact in the po-
tentially unfamiliar social settings that are the focus of inquiry (Haniff 1985;
Shabbazi 2004; see also Messerschmidt 1981).
Researcher positionality, then, involves the negotiation of multiple identities
in relation to different people and social settings (Narayan 1993: 682).
Accordingly, one of the major challenges that researchers with some degree
of insider access face is managing the presentation of who they are and who
they are perceived to be (Aguilar 1981: 21; De Andrade 2000: 271).
Multilingual/multicultural researchers face specific challenges:
In environments where the boundaries of the distant and the prox-
imal, the past and the present, the real and the imagined become
blurred . . . multilingual exchanges require us to position ourselves
as researchers in much more multidimensional ways than is usually
done in applied linguistics. (Kramsch and Whiteside 2008: 667)
Navigating the tensions inherent in being simultaneously an insider and an
outsider requires adeptness in the ability to discursively shape the context of
interaction as well as one’s position within it, what Kramsch (2006) terms
‘symbolic competence’.

Symbolic competence and covert bilingualism

As Kramsch and Whiteside (2008: 664–667) explain, symbolic competence is
manifested in four major ways:
(i) Subject positioning: Understanding, inter alia, the identities, assump-
tions, emotions, and values locally indexed by different languages and
deploying a certain language to inhabit a particular subjectivity asso-
ciated with it.
(ii) Historicity: Using semiotic resources to invoke a community’s shared
understandings about the past thereby locating oneself and others
within real or imagined historical trajectories.
66 COVERT BILINGUALISM AND SYMBOLIC COMPETENCE

(iii) Creation of alternative realities: Discursively calling upon another tem-

poral or spatial scale of social organization to create a new context for a
moment of interaction so as to shift power relations among speakers.
(iv) Reframing: Manipulating social norms and expectations to influence
how interlocutors perceive the interactional context.
In sum, it is the ability of ‘social actors in multilingual settings . . . [to] play
with various linguistic codes and with the various spatial and temporal reson-
ances of these codes . . . [in order to] shape the very context in which the
language is learned and used’ (Kramsch and Whiteside 2008: 664). It involves
knowledge of language ecology, as deploying symbolic competence success-

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fully requires insight into how different languages or varieties are situated with
respect to each other in a social environment as well as how discourses about
them are situated in the minds of speakers (Haugen 1972: 325; Kramsch 2006:
251). This allows a multilingual to ‘operate between languages’ by drawing
strategically on different codes to invoke localized meanings in ways that struc-
ture relationships with others in any given situation (Kramsch 2008: 403). It is
through such situations that multilinguals negotiate different subject positions,
that is to say ‘the way in which the subject presents and represents itself dis-
cursively, psychologically, socially, and culturally through the use of symbolic
systems’ (Kramsch 2009: 20).
In the delicate process of navigating the dual position of insider and outsider,
symbolic competence plays a particularly salient role in ‘impression manage-
ment’ (Aguilar 1981: 21; Bromley 1993: 106–108). Bilinguals have access to
language choice as a resource for facilitating a mindful presentation of self for a
particular social circumstance. They may put up what Goffman (1959: 22)
refers to as a ‘front’, meaning ‘part of the individual’s performance which
regularly functions in a general or fixed fashion to define the situation for
those who observe the performance’. Choosing to use one language over an-
other is a way of deploying semiotic resources to mediate expectations about
who one is, something all interlocutors do through various semiotic practices
like wearing particular clothing or displaying badges of authority to ‘give off’ a
sense of self (Goffman 1959: 24).
For bilinguals, strategic language choice can be used to facilitate symbolic
competence. The need to reframe a situation by manipulating expectations so
as to claim a particular subject position may at times call for the use of covert
bilingualism (Sawyer 1978). Covert bilingualism involves ‘a socially imposed
attitudinal disposition to conceal one’s knowledge of a language’, often with
the purpose of appearing to be monolingual (Baetens Beardsmore 1986: 22; cf.
Sawyer 1978: 194).
Covert bilingualism is akin to the concept of ‘passing’ (e.g. Monzo and
Rueda 2009) in that foregrounding one language while concealing another
serves to present an image of the self that conceals an identity that may not
be socially advantageous in the context of interaction. Yet it is different, as
passing tends to be a performance by someone with a marginal or questionable
 F. M. HULT 67

claim to the trait in question. In her study of passing by advanced users of a

second language, for example, Piller (2002) shows that they may adopt stylized
ways of speaking that allow them to be perceived as unmarked individuals in
first encounters or to mask traces of their first language or national identity. In
addition, contrary to popular beliefs about passing, Piller points out that it is
more about creative, expert language use than subterfuge—a kind of inter-
actional accomplishment for highly proficient L2 users.
Covert bilingualism, on the other hand, might be characterized as calculated
non-performance. It is the concealment of knowledge and abilities in one’s
own language (Baetens Beardsmore 1986: 22). Unlike expert L2 users who pass

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by virtue of their language learning achievement and may take pride in that
accomplishment (Piller 2002: 194), covert bilinguals are native speakers who
choose to keep their bilingual competence secret for situational or political
reasons (Baetens Beardsmore 1986: 22; Valdés 1988: 8). Since their language
use does not tend to exhibit phonological, syntactic, or lexical features that
would mark it as non-native (Sawyer 1978: 192), they tend to be historicized
into a specific subject position that is connected to understandings about the
enthnolinguistic group(s) associated with a particular language (Silverstein
2003: 540; Kramsch 2009: 20).
Acts of covert bilingualism, then, are about managing one’s subject position
through language choices. Although such concealment may appear disingenu-
ous at first blush, it is not necessarily malicious. Indeed, as Goffman (1959: 18,
1969: 12) points out, it is quite ordinary in the day-to-day presentation of self
that a speaker may use words or actions strategically to foreground or back-
ground certain perceptions about reality to facilitate favorable impressions by
an interlocutor (cf. Malone 1997: 145–146). In any specific interactional
moment, for bilinguals, foregrounding one language while concealing another
may facilitate the ability of others to locate one’s subject position in a plausible
locally situated historicity. Nonetheless, these are not neutral actions; there are
inherent power relationships. Choosing to conceal the ability to use one lan-
guage to present a monolingual subject position linked to another language is
an exercise in symbolic power (cf. Bourdieu 1991: 170). It is an attempt to
claim agency over the discursive construction of the self, to subvert an inter-
locutor’s control over one’s positionality (Goffman 1963: 145–148; Kramsch
2009: 8–9). Moreover, covert bilingualism may not be possible for all speakers.
It is a privileged strategy available to some proficient bilingual speakers, par-
ticularly when they are competent in one or more linguistic varieties spoken in
a particular local context, providing them added linguistic capital (Bourdieu
1991: 55–57, 64–65).
Despite the potentially salient role of covert bilingualism, it has received
little attention,1 particularly in literature addressing the dual insider/outsider
position, which has mainly focused on tensions related to ethnic and social
factors rather than on linguistic issues (cf. Aguilar 1981; Kondo 1986). With
this in mind, the present study explores ways in which covert bilingualism
functions as a linguistic resource for symbolic competence in insider/outsider
68 COVERT BILINGUALISM AND SYMBOLIC COMPETENCE

positionality through an examination of my own interactions in everyday

situations during fieldwork in Sweden.

INVESTIGATING INSIDER/OUTSIDER SYMBOLIC

COMPETENCE
This article stems from a larger ethnographic discourse analytic study of lan-
guage policy and urban multilingual spaces in the south of Sweden (Hult
2007). During the course of the study, my own language choices emerged as
a ‘rich point’, an unexpected turn of events that is initially not fully under-

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stood by the researcher (Agar 1996: 31). I found myself, in different contexts,
choosing to use either Swedish or English during a moment of interaction
without conscious reflection and began to wonder why one language
seemed instinctively like a better choice than another for any given speech
event. Accordingly, I began to take note of my choices and the sociolinguistic
and interactional circumstances in which I made them. I present here an eco-
logical analysis of these language choices, drawing on principles from ethnog-
raphy of communication (Hymes 1974) and nexus analysis (Scollon and
Scollon 2004), in an attempt to make sense of how they relate to the conflu-
ence of discourses from different scales of social organization that flow through
them (Blommaert 2005; Kramsch and Whiteside 2008; Hult 2010).
Hymes’ (1974) SPEAKING mnemonic has long proven useful as a heuristic
for teasing out the multiple sociolinguistic factors that converge in any par-
ticular moment of social interaction (e.g. Philipsen 1976; Hornberger 1989;
Winchatz and Kozin 2008). In short, it calls for attention to the following
(Hymes 1974: 53–62):
(S)etting and scene: the physical and psychological contexts, respectively
(P)articipants: who they are and their relationships to each other
(E)nds: goals and outcomes for the interaction
(A)ct sequence: syntagmatic relationships among speech acts and topics
(K)ey: the spirit or tone in which a speech act is performed
(I)nstrumentalities: the languages, varieties, styles, registers, and modal-
ities used
(N)orms: the social rules that guide interaction and the norms of inter-
pretation related to a community’s system of beliefs and expectations
(G)enres: categories of language use (e.g. lecture, prayer, or poem)

Inherent in the SPEAKING mnemonic is a multi-layered orientation that has

now come to be a hallmark of postmodern (applied) sociolinguistics (Blom-
maert 2007: 1–3; Kramsch and Whiteside 2008: 659–660). Every speech situ-
ation, event, and act is a moment of layered simultaneity in which social
histories with respect to each of the above eight dimensions coalesce at one
point in space and time (Hymes 1974: 51–53; Blommaert 2005: 126–131).
 F. M. HULT 69

Through ethnographic discourse analysis, the most relevant dimensions to a

specific moment of interaction can be determined and their discursive trajec-
tories mapped (Blommaert 2005: 142–156).
Although the mnemonic facilitates identifying relevant sociolinguistic
dimensions in a particular moment of interaction, in more recent work,
Scollon and Scollon (2004) have put forward nexus analysis as a way to ac-
count for how such sociolinguistic factors come together as dynamic discursive
processes. Specifically, they suggest that social action should be at the center of
inquiry, with the goal of analysis being to understand the circulating discourses
that condition how the social action unfolds (Scollon and Scollon 2004: 8–9).

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The major discourse cycles that mediate social action, they specify, are dis-
courses in place, the historical body, and the interaction order. Discourses in
place (DiP) are the wider circulating ideas that are materially and symbolically
co-present in the moment of interaction, the historical body (HB) cycle in-
cludes the beliefs and practices embodied in the individual based on personal
experience, and the interaction order (IO) represents the discourses that con-
strain or facilitate how interaction unfolds among interlocutors (Scollon and
Scollon 2004: 18–23; Scollon 2005: 472–475; see Hult 2009, 2010 for further
elaboration on the application of these analytical concepts in my work).
These three discourse cycles suggest a mechanism for discursively
tracing layered simultaneity in symbolic competence (Scollon and Scollon
2009: 289–292). Each of the cycles develop and flow along different scales of
space and time (Scollon and Scollon 2004: 167–170). The social histories of
particular discourses enter into synchronicity and become instantiated through
specific social actions which, in turn, (re)create discursive realities and particu-
lar subjectivities (Blommaert 2005: 128–129; Pietikäinen et al. 2008). Symbolic
competence involves the negotiation of this process in a particular social en-
vironment. As Kramsch (2008: 390) asserts,
language users have to navigate . . . complex encounters among
interlocutors with multiple language capacities and cultural imagin-
ations, and different social and political memories. Conversational
power comes less from knowing which communication strategy to
pull off at which point in the interaction than it does from choosing
which language to speak with whom, about what and for what
effect.
It is in this light that I analyze my own languages choices as social actions
of symbolic competence with respect to dual insider/outsider positionality,
teasing out the sociolinguistic factors relevant at the moment of action and
tracing the discourse cycles that facilitate navigating aspects of this position-
ality. My focus, in particular, is on ‘analytic narrative vignettes’ (Erickson
1990: 163–166) that are illustrative of the speech situations that occurred
throughout daily interactions during my fieldwork in Sweden. Following in
the tradition of ethnographic analytical writing, the excerpts presented here
are narrative expansions of initial fieldnotes made in situ (Emerson et al. 1995:
70 COVERT BILINGUALISM AND SYMBOLIC COMPETENCE

174–196). These vignettes are part and parcel of the ethnographic interpretive
process, facilitating reflective analysis of a researcher’s use of symbolic re-
sources and connections between lived experiences and the wider sociopoli-
tical issues embodied in them (Blackledge and Creese 2010: 103–104; Creese
2010: 149, 2011). It is to an examination of this that I now turn.

NAVIGATING SWEDISH SPEECH SITUATIONS AS AN

INSIDER/OUTSIDER
I grew up bilingual in a transnational Swedish–American family. My parents,

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who emigrated from Sweden to the United States shortly before I was born,
despite being proficient second language speakers of English, spoke only
Swedish in our home when I was a child. Throughout my youth, we would
spend extended periods each year in Sweden which, in retrospect, were ideal
sojourns for language socialization with my grandparents, who had little or no
competence in English, Swedish–English bilingual cousins and extended
family, and, perhaps most valuable for the sake of language acquisition,
Swedish-speaking peers. We also lived long-term in Sweden on two separate
occasions during my formative years, and I continued regular visits to Sweden
in adolescence and as an adult. Although I quickly became English-dominant
through living and going to school mainly in the United States, my regular
language socialization in Sweden has allowed me to maintain proficient bilin-
gualism as well as a strong sense of Swedish social and cultural affinity.
In Sweden, I spent most of my time in the southern region of Skåne, acquir-
ing the variety of Swedish known as skånska. This regional variety, mutually
intelligible with standard Swedish but distinctive in its phonology, prosody,
and certain lexical items, tends to be an index of being from Skåne (Lång
2002). It is not the variety taught in Swedish as a foreign language courses,
for example, nor would it be taught prescriptively in Swedish as a second
language courses (Norrby and Håkansson 2007).
When I set out in my late twenties to conduct fieldwork in the south of
Sweden, I was confident that my native-like skånsk Swedish2 would prove to
be a communicative asset, allowing me to blend in and affording me an in-
sider’s ethnographic perspective. One of my participants, who is also trained as
a Swedish language teacher, characterized my Swedish as sounding distinctly
local, and one of my colleagues at the university where I was working even
pinpointed my speech to my grandparents’ town nearby. My linguistic iden-
tity, as perceived by others, when I speak Swedish is a local one. As my time in
the field continued, however, I came to recognize that this seemingly local
linguistic identity was not unproblematic. In practice, my positionality shifted
in different moments of interaction, reflecting the fluidity of my biculturalism
and transnationality as well as the layered simultaneity of speech situations.
Swedish and English were aspects of my linguistic repertoire that I could draw
on to navigate dynamic presentations of self, foregrounding either insider or
 F. M. HULT 71

outsider aspects. The following vignettes illustrate how this took shape. The
first showcases a moment in which the relationship between language choice
and presentation of self became overt and salient for me. The remaining two
highlight the active and reflective management of this relationship, one por-
traying the potential perils of balancing the presentation of multiple selves and
the other characterizing the personal and interpersonal dimensions that inter-
sect when making language choices.

Ordering pizza
Another Swedish–English bilingual, Stig, and I decided to go out for pizza

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one summer evening. On entering the pizzeria, we walked up to the counter
and examined the menu posted on the wall. We discussed what we’d like to
have as toppings on our pizzas. It was a vigorous debate, in English, about
meat and vegetarian options. At one critical moment, there was uncertainty
about whether pepperoni is a meat or vegetable topping. Why was it listed
under vegetables? It seemed absurd to me; everyone knows pepperoni is
made from meat. I turned to the pizza guy and asked him, in Swedish,
why pepperoni is listed under vegetable toppings. He jerked back slightly,
and he quickly looked me over. He responded, seemingly annoyed as sug-
gested by his squinted facial expression, by pointing to a plastic container of
what appeared to be hot peppers and curtly explained, in Swedish, that this
is pepperoni. After completing our deliberations over pizza toppings, we
each proceeded to order our pizzas in Swedish, yielding a quizzical look
from the pizza guy.
Moments of social transgression often bring into relief norms and expectations
about behavior (Saville-Troike 2003: 123). Situational code-switching, like the
kind I was engaging in here, is common practice among bilinguals, yet my
switch from English to Swedish—my overt bilingualism—was disconcerting to
the pizza guy, even evoking a physical response when he first heard me use
Swedish. Thus, the situation in this pizzeria illustrates how language choice
began to emerge as a rich point in the field, a phenomenon of significance to
social interaction that a researcher observes or experiences yet remains fuzzy,
thereby requiring more attention to bring it into focus through an analytical
lens (Agar 1996: 31).
Deconstructing the episode, three social actions are salient with respect to
interpreting the implications of language choice: (i) using English during the
initial conversation, (ii) using Swedish when inquiring about the pepperoni,
and (iii) the physical response by the pizza guy. The physical response is the
pivotal action that contextualizes the other two. Although Stig3 and I treated
them as two independent speech events, governed by the interaction orders
(IOs)4 of conversation and service encounter with the respective ends (E) of
deliberation and ordering, they were, in fact, temporally connected through
an act sequence (A). Though not an intended interlocutor during the ini-
tial conversation in English, the pizza guy was nonetheless an over-hearer
(Irvine 1996: 135). Thus, rather than two separate speech events, it was one
72 COVERT BILINGUALISM AND SYMBOLIC COMPETENCE

event which included a broader end to which Stig and I did not carefully
attend: the presentation of self. With respect to symbolic competence, the
relationship between historicity and subject positioning became foregrounded
in this situation (Kramsch and Whiteside 2008: 664–665). We did not actively
attend to the presentation of our selves. Instead, we projected different subject
positions that evoked contradictory imagined historical trajectories about who
we were.
Stig, with whom I had developed the interpersonal norm of speaking English
rather than Swedish, is a highly proficient user of English whose speech re-
flects Swedish phonological transfer. Accordingly, coupled with my use of

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American English, the dominant discourse in place (DiP) during the initial
conversation, for an over-hearer, was ‘local guiding tourist from the United
States’. My subject position, engendered by this discourse, became problematic
when I switched to Swedish. The veil of English was pierced, leading to dis-
cursive dissonance, as signaled by the moment of physical reaction, and ap-
parent unease with the multiplicity of my identity. My native use of the local
variety of Swedish brought a new discourse into place, two Swedes ordering
pizza, which was incongruent with the previous DiP, destabilizing my subject
position. The legitimacy of this new Swedish identity was only made more
suspect by my lack of situated knowledge that pepperoni are hot peppers. My
overt code-switching, originally deployed as the situational use of different
instrumentalities (I) to serve particular ends, ultimately and inadvertently
took on an emblematic function (cf. Zentella 1997: 101). This led to confusion
and, perhaps, even suspicion about my identity, with the pizza guy quite lit-
erally looking me over to figure out who I was.
Although we did manage to order pizzas (neither of us chose pepperoni),
this episode exemplifies unsuccessful symbolic competence. As Kramsch and
Whiteside (2008: 665) explain, bilinguals who demonstrate a high degree of
symbolic competence ‘have a heightened awareness of the embodied nature of
language and the sedimented emotions associated with the use of a given
language’. In this instance, I did not switch codes with such awareness.
Although either of the speech events might have been considered satisfactory
independently, taken together they seem to have violated expectations about
paradigmatic–syntagmatic relationships, specifically my selection of instru-
mentalities across the act sequence (Hymes 1974: 150). This seemed to con-
tribute to creating an uncomfortable key (K), and it had direct consequences
on my subject positioning.
Often ‘different languages position their speakers in different symbolic
spaces’ (Kramsch and Whiteside 2008: 664). Here, however, my native use
of two different languages positioned me in two spaces at the same time, which
can be socially problematic. Bilinguals, especially those who might sound
like monolingual native speakers, are sometimes met with skepticism and
suspicion (Lambert 1967: 105; Pavlenko 2006: 2–5; Grosjean 2010: 64–65).
This stems, perhaps, from a social preoccupation with authenticity and the
(il)legitimacy of multiple linguistic identities (Anzaldúa 1999: 80–81;
 F. M. HULT 73

Grosjean 2008: 218–220). Code-switching under these circumstances, that is in

the absence of a clear historicity within which to locate the speaker’s bilin-
gualism and social position, may become problematic.
In this pizzeria situation, I switched codes without considering how these
wider sociopolitical factors might become DiPs that would mediate my subject
position. On his part, the pizza guy may have felt, even if unintentionally, as
though he were the recipient of linguistic mischief, further contributing to the
uncomfortable key. In this way, underdeveloped symbolic competence has the
potential to result unwittingly in mild forms of symbolic violence by engen-
dering uneasiness and differential power relationships among interlocutors

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(Bourdieu 1991: 51).
In all, this vignette illustrates that the nature of symbolic competence tran-
scends the ability to use a language proficiently; it is an awareness of and the
ability to manage circulating discourses about languages and interaction to
accomplish an ecologically valid presentation of self with respect to one’s inter-
locutors (Kramsch 2006). Indeed, symbolic competence need not involve the
overt display of proficient bilingualism. It may just as often involve, as the
following two vignettes show, concealing linguistic abilities.

Obtaining a keycard
I needed to obtain a university keycard to access computer labs and other
locked spaces as well as to receive faculty copy machine privileges at the
library. I was directed to one of the building managers to obtain it. Once
again, I found myself using English rather than Swedish when asking him
about how to get my card. I thought that my status as a visiting lecturer
would make more sense to him, if I spoke English. He would have thought it
was odd for me to be a visiting lecturer from the next town over. I was afraid
that using my local Skåne dialect would make my request for the access card
seem less legitimate. Speaking English felt like a better fit with my title, and
it helped me avoid the need to explain in any great detail what my back-
ground is and why I’m here. I had no trouble conducting this business in
English and the building manager didn’t either so everything seemed fine.
As it turned out, I had to wait a few days for the card. When I
returned, I was met by an assistant manager who was standing outside
the office. I had intended to continue using English to keep up my identity
as a visitor. ‘Tjäna,’ he said, greeting me in Swedish. Without thinking
about it, I immediately responded with my own greeting in Swedish. He
went on to tell me that the manager wasn’t there today. I felt right away
that my cover was blown! My carefully managed identity just got poten-
tially more complicated. Now there were two people who work in the same
office who have two very different visions of me: one sees me as a visitor and
the other as a local. Now I was afraid of losing face with the manager
should he find out I really speak Swedish. Would he be offended? What
would happen if I come back to the office and find the manager and the
assistant manager there at the same time!?
74 COVERT BILINGUALISM AND SYMBOLIC COMPETENCE

Freely switching between English and Swedish, as in the pizzeria situation,

could often be socially problematic. In some instances, the ends (E) of an
encounter became derailed by questions about my identity. Switching from
English to Swedish would pique curiosities about how an American came to
speak native-like Swedish. Switching from Swedish to English would spark
questions about how I gained such a precise American accent. In response, I
would end up recounting tales of my transnational upbringing to complete
strangers, sometimes long and sometimes short, depending on how satisfied
my interlocutors were with my story. Although I was happy to discuss my
personal history with participants, colleagues, and friends who were curious,

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explicitly justifying my multiple identities in daily encounters became taxing.
Accordingly, I became increasingly aware of the need to be strategic about
language choices in order to draw upon symbolic competence to manage my
social position more deliberately, as I attempted to do in the two situations
described in this vignette.
I began to recognize that there were times when it would be socially advan-
tageous to conceal my bilingualism in order to take up a monolingual posture
that would suggest a more plausible historicity appropriate for a particular
situation at hand (Kramsch 2006: 251). Here, in terms of symbolic compe-
tence, the use of reframing to create alternative realities is of particular salience
(Kramsch and Whiteside 2008: 666). When it came time to interact with the
building manager to obtain my access card, I considered the instrumentalities
(I) at my disposal that could be used to reframe the context in a manner that
would locate me in an appropriate social reality.
I predicted, based on experiences with different instances of my identity
being questioned, which had now become part of my historical body (HB),
that it would be discursively incongruent to speak a variety of Swedish that
would situate me geographically in the neighboring town, while at the same
time claiming a position as an international visiting lecturer. Rather than use
Swedish and allow for the possibility of invoking competing discourses in place
(DiPs), that is to say local insider and foreign visitor, I decided to use English
exclusively to foreground only the discourse of foreign visitor. This choice was
made possible by the norms (N) of the interaction order (IO) for this sort of
administrative support, which was offered routinely in both Swedish and
English at this international university. I was, as such, able to leverage my
linguistic capital to gain symbolic power in this encounter (Bourdieu 1991: 75;
Kramsch 2009: 189–190). My strategy was, at least in this moment, successful,
as I was able to achieve the interactional end of requesting my access card and
the symbolic end of framing my identity in a way that allowed my interlocutor
to envision a legitimate historicity that did not need to be questioned. We thus
co-constructed a social reality. Actively managing multiple identities, however,
is a juggling act.
In the unguarded moment when I subsequently encountered the assistant
building manager, my identity shifted. Although the setting was the same,
there was a change in scene (S), or psychological space. In the context of
 F. M. HULT 75

the IO of a casual conversation, years of intuition as a Swedish speaker became

more salient in my HB than recent experiences with the strategic management
of language choices. When prompted in Swedish, I responded in kind, inad-
vertently invoking the very DiP that I had successfully concealed a few days
earlier. Since the assistant manager had never met me and was unaware of my
role at the university, however, I was able to continue performing a local
identity using only Swedish, once again concealing my bilingualism and pos-
itioning myself in relation to a historicity that would be plausible in the
moment thereby evoking a new alternative reality from the one co-con-
structed with the manager. It quickly dawned on me, though, that these

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two independently credible realities could collide across time in the space of
the building manager’s office. My monolingual bluff could be called. I recog-
nized, in this instant, that my strategic use of instrumentalities involved a
covert element that was central to navigating bilingual symbolic competence.
As Kramsch (2008: 402) states, ‘the ability to shape the multilingual game in
which one invests, that is, the ability to manipulate the conventional cate-
gories and societal norms of truthfulness, legitimacy, seriousness, and origin-
ality and the ability to reframe human thought and action’ are crucial. In these
two situations, I used the instrumentalities at my disposal successfully to shape
two different truths thereby manipulating the conventional categories in
which I could be placed and the perceived legitimacy of my concomitant
identities. The potential for an unintentional sense of linguistic betrayal or
uneasiness, as in the pizza vignette, was present here as well (cf. Bourdieu
1991: 51–52). Had my two identities intersected in a joint encounter with both
interlocutors, it might have resulted in reproach. I never did meet both the
manager and the assistant manager at the same time so my two distinct covert
linguistic identities remained in tact.
Most of the interactions in which I made calculated choices about instru-
mentalities were not fraught with these interpersonal intrigues; however, as
the third and final vignette illustrates, they were nonetheless strategic and
covert.

Using the library

I needed help navigating the library, in particular learning the procedures
for checking out materials, accessing computer terminals, making photoco-
pies, and locating shelving sections in the stacks. After approaching the
information counter, I asked for help in English. Since this seemed like
knowledge a local, and certainly a university researcher, should already
have, I chose to use English. I could have used Swedish, but I felt it would
be easier if I seemed foreign to her. A visiting American could be legitim-
ately unaware of these basic features of the library, but it would seem
strange for a university-educated local to be. By sticking to English I avoided
having to explain why, as an adult, I was so curiously ignorant about how
the library works. The librarian seemed perfectly comfortable using English
to help me, and I sidestepped the embarrassment of appearing like an
76 COVERT BILINGUALISM AND SYMBOLIC COMPETENCE

ignorant Swedish adult (in favor of an ignorant visitor, which somehow

seemed more palatable to me).
Although I am a native bilingual speaker of Swedish, I did not always have the
social or cultural competence for every activity in which I engaged. With re-
spect to symbolic competence, covert bilingualism served as a compensation
strategy because it mitigated potential social consequences in such moments by
allowing me to (re)frame the interactional context and take up favorable sub-
ject positions that could be more easily identified with a personal historical
trajectory plausible to my interlocutors (Kramsch 2008: 390; Kramsch and
Whiteside 2008: 664–666). As in this library situation, such mitigation was

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as much about self-image as it was about projecting an outward identity for
others.
Recent experiences using Swedish to communicate limitations in my social
competence, for instance apologizing for taking an incorrect bus route, had
become part of my historical body (HB) during the first two months of field-
work. Ignorance and gaffes on my part, when perceived as being committed by
a local insider due to my language use, tended to be met with frustration,
annoyance, or anger. Accordingly, by using English in this library situation,
which would require some time to explain and demonstrate basic procedures
to me, I (re)framed the event to gain the benefits of a key (K) of helpfulness
rather than potential scorn or irritation.
My selective use of instrumentalities (I) here served both interpersonal and
intrapersonal ends (E) in the management of symbolic competence. As
Pavlenko (2006: 27) notes, ‘bicultural bilinguals may exhibit different verbal
behaviors in their two languages and may be perceived differently by their
interlocutors . . . the two languages may be linked to different linguistic reper-
toires, cultural scripts, frames of expectation, autobiographic memories, and
levels of proficiency and emotionality’. Interpersonally, my use of English, as
in the previous vignette with the building manager and his assistant, drew on
discourses in (DiPs) about foreignness, allowing the librarian and me to follow
the cultural script of a helpful local assisting a hapless outsider. A correspond-
ing frame of expectation was foregrounded in which my lack of knowledge
about the workings of the library could be positioned as legitimate. The inter-
action, in turn, proceeded smoothly without being derailed by questions about
my identity or exasperation on the part of my interlocutor.
Intrapersonally, using English while concealing Swedish allowed me to
regulate my emotionality and manage my self-image. On a basic level, my
language choice allowed me to avoid the potential tension, anxiety, or embar-
rassment I might feel if the librarian treated me as a clueless local. Moreover,
being socially incompetent was not congruent with my self-image as a capable
adult who could perform a wide range of social functions appropriately, some-
thing I could do as an American in the United States but not fully as a Swede in
Sweden. Using English here, and in similar instances, allowed me to disasso-
ciate myself momentarily from being Swedish and the related feelings of
 F. M. HULT 77

momentary ineptitude. Instead, I drew comfort from being perceived in such

instances as an American outsider who did not need to be ill at ease as a
neophyte in certain Swedish domains. Thus, selective use of instrumentalities
became part of the symbolic competence that helped me navigate both the
interactional and the internal aspects of reconciling my dual position as insider
and outsider.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Bicultural bilinguals are faced with choices about their cultural allegiances; like

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identity performances more generally, these are not absolute or permanent
decisions, but adaptations to dynamic social circumstances (Grosjean 2008:
214–220). Insider and outsider positionality is fluid, contingent on the context
of any particular moment of interaction (Mullings 1999: 340). As these
vignettes illustrate, learning to negotiate across these positions involves the
development of symbolic competence, which, while facilitated by (socio)lin-
guistic competence, cannot be reduced to proficient language use (Kramsch
2006). Indeed, as shown here, it may often involve strategically not displaying
proficiency in a particular language.
The symbolic competence needed to manage aspects of insider/outsider posi-
tionality in my case involved drawing on social, temporal, and spatial dis-
courses to make language choices, especially in the form of covert
bilingualism, in order to claim a legitimate subjectivity from the repertoire of
identities that might be possible in a particular moment. This demonstrates
how symbolic competence involves tapping into the layered simultaneity of
everyday interactions (Blommaert 2005: 126; Kramsch and Whiteside 2008:
659). Interlocutors discursively ‘recreate environments from other scales of
space and time’ (Kramsch and Whiteside 2008: 666). The choices I had in
each situation, English and/or Swedish, were made possible by virtue of
being situated in what Bennett (1998: 620) refers to as ‘global space’—in
these instances, localized instantiations of the globalization of English in the
context of Sweden.
Since the middle of the 20th century, the English language has been in-
creasingly gaining prominence in Sweden (e.g. Svartvik 1999: 211). As
Blommaert avers, ‘the way in which such globalized varieties enter into
local environments is by a reordering of the locally available repertoires’
(2003: 608). The successful performance of a particular linguistic identity, as
in the second and third vignettes, depended on my awareness of the ways in
which the English language has come to be (re)structured in Sweden, includ-
ing the norms of interaction and the symbolic impact of its use in specific
settings and domains.
The ability to choose English at all in any of these encounters, it must be
pointed out, reverberates with issues of power associated with English as a
globalized language and the sense of legitimacy, assumed by me and ostensibly
by my interlocutors, that it could be used for mundane encounters in Sweden
78 COVERT BILINGUALISM AND SYMBOLIC COMPETENCE

(cf. Phillipson 2003: 140). With respect to the sociopolitics of language, one
might consider the impact of choosing English during any encounter when the
local language could be used instead. Doing so may reinforce beliefs about the
entitlement of English speakers to use this language when it suits their inter-
ests thereby contributing to the reproduction of English linguistic dominance
(cf. Bourdieu 1991: 69).
At the same time, as shown in the first vignette, openly displaying bilingual
proficiency was not always socially advantageous in situations where it pro-
jected ambiguous or contradictory social positions. Kramsch and Whiteside
(2008: 668) suggest that ‘our symbolic survival is contingent on framing reality

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in the way required by the moment, and on being able to enter the game with
both full involvement and full detachment’. The use of covert bilingualism
facilitated the need to frame reality by projecting a specific subject position
with a related historicity that would be plausible in a particular interactional
context. Moreover, strategic control over the choice of instrumentalities
allowed me to reconcile the seemingly contradictory need for both ‘full in-
volvement and full detachment’ during social interaction. Involvement came
from using the code that would most likely lead to acceptance from my inter-
locutors and the interactional or material ends I sought to achieve, such as
receiving a keycard or avoiding questions about my personal bicultural/bilin-
gual background. Detachment came from assessing social situations, calculat-
ing the symbolic impact of choosing different codes, and then using the chosen
code to ‘enter the game’ and play it.
Although the strategic presentation of self, whether through language
choices or other symbolic means, is a normal part of everyday interaction
(Goffman 1959: 18; 1969: 12), it is not value-free. In this sense, complete
detachment may not be entirely possible. Decisions to deploy covert bilingual-
ism are intertwined with potential ethical issues such as the potential for dif-
ferential power relationships, as suggested in the first vignette and, latently, in
the second vignette. Although the instances presented here were not high
stakes interactions, they still highlight that awareness of the social conse-
quences of one’s linguistic behavior is a component that must be considered
as part of the development of symbolic competence. Understanding the avail-
able range of discourses and historicities with which one can be linguistically
indexed in a particular social situation needs to include sensitivity to how
others might interpret the act of covert bilingualism itself.
Symbolic competence, thus, is highly contextualized and ‘distributed’
(Kramsch and Whiteside 2008: 664), as it is accomplished together with
other interlocutors and depends on one’s ability to understand the sociopoli-
tical contexts in which one encounters those interlocutors. Yet, as I have
shown here, it is also fundamentally about personal agency and claiming own-
ership over one’s social positioning. As such, the kind of introspective tack I
have taken here may be especially useful for understanding how individuals
experience symbolic competence because it offers a window into a person’s
engagement with the linguistic presentation of self, including strategic and
 F. M. HULT 79

emotional aspects of language learning and use that one might not glean from
other methods (Pavlenko 2007: 164). Such insight also adds to a robust under-
standing of the nature of symbolic competence by showing through specific
cases how this phenomenon takes shape in particular social settings.
The present study, for instance, lends support to the notion that ‘it is not
sufficient for learners to know how to communicate meanings . . . [t]hey need a
much more sophisticated competence in the manipulation of symbolic sys-
tems’ (Kramsch 2006: 251). My analysis here demonstrates that it is useful
in this regard to remember that we are all lifelong language learners, even with
respect to our ‘own’ languages. Strengthening symbolic competence is a cru-

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cial component of developing one’s (multilingual) communicative competence
over the lifespan.
Although I have been using Swedish and English together for most of my
life, reflective experiences such as the ones presented here have allowed me to
learn new ways of deploying linguistic resources to achieve social and symbolic
ends more adeptly. Indeed, I would offer that the study of my own experiences
suggests that conscious language awareness and introspection are central to
the development of symbolic competence, as they allow us to confront tacit
assumptions about both our sociolinguistic circumstances and our own linguis-
tic abilities so that we can act more deliberately when navigating the social
world.

NOTES
1. For exceptions see Jacobson (1985) and
McCullough (1978), who touch on the
concept in educational settings, as well
as Caldas and Caron-Caldas (1999),
who consider children in home,
school, and community domains. See
also Valdés (1988: 8) who suggests the
idea of ‘secret bilingualism’ among
second-generation students.
2. In what follows, I will use Swedish to
refer to my use of the skånsk variety of
Swedish.
3. A pseudonym.
4. For ease of reading, I include the acro-
nym only upon first mention of an ana-
lytical concept with respect to each
vignette.

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