Global Interns or Learners of Japanese?: American Interns’ Negotiation of Positioning Across Orders of Indexicality in Japanese Workplaces

ABSTRACT Amid Japan's internationalization efforts, foreign employees are positioned as global English‐speaking talent while simultaneously facing expectations to conform to Japanese linguacultural norms. This study examines how such tensions are negotiated through the narratives of two interns—one African American and one Vietnamese American—in Japanese workplaces. Building on sociolinguistic scholarship that conceptualizes orders of indexicality as dynamically layered in shaping the values of languages, this study provides a detailed account of how institutional, local, and global orders of indexicality are configured in specific workplace contexts and how these configurations shape foreign professionals’ negotiation of positioning through linguistic resources and identities. Narrative analysis of interviews with the interns and their Japanese coworkers, interns’ course assignments, and company online materials shows that English and Japanese acquire value through shifting configurations of orders of indexicality across industries, domains, and workplace and interactional settings: While English afforded both interns access to professional capital in international‐facing tasks, Japanese remained central to routine workplace interaction and professional legitimacy. Crucially, the linguistic resources and identities to which the interns oriented for positioning varied across these configurations. This study offers insights into the contingent nature of linguistic value and professional participation for foreign professionals.