Abstract
The paper describes how service encounters in a multilingual institution such as the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano are opened. 86 interactions are analysed. The analysis shows how the multilingual environment in which participants move is actually treated as an interactional resource to select a single preferred language for the exchange, which usually corresponds to the L1 of the service seeker approaching the information desk. Interactions observed were conducted in Italian, German, English and South-Tyrolean German. The paper looks at the sequential deployment of the opening sequence and at the instances of code-switching observed in the corpus.