Oct 20, 2026 Reza Saberi

Speech Acts in Multicultural Workplace Meetings: Institutional Roles, Meeting Purposes, and Pragmatic Realisation

This article looks at how speech acts are used in multicultural workplace meetings where English is the common language in a Finnish company. It uses Speech Act Theory to study 2,569 speech acts that were manually identified from ten meetings, which together have 57,616 words. The goal is to see how things like job roles, the purpose of the meeting, and who is allowed to speak affect the way people interact. The results show that different types of speech acts—such as assertives and directives—serve various purposes in the organization. These acts change depending on the speaker’s role, their knowledge, or perspective, and the speakers’ intended communicative functions. In the end, the article shows that speech acts are not simply fixed linguistic categories. Instead, they are flexible communicative resources that help participants accomplish workplace tasks in specific interactional contexts. Their use is formed by institutional roles, epistemic positions, and locally negotiated participation rights.

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Reza Saberi is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland, specializing in linguistics, workplace communication, intercultural collaboration and English as a lingua franca in organizations. His research focuses on speech acts and workplace interaction. Reza Saberi examines how professionals from linguistic and cultural backgrounds coordinate work negotiate decisions and build shared understanding in multicultural meetings. He draws on real-world data, aiming to generate insights that support more effective communication, collaboration and inclusion, in globally connected workplaces.