Register Mismatch in a Job Interview
A young person from a community where the heritage language is spoken at home attends a job interview conducted partly in that language by an older interviewer from the same community. The candidate is fluent but learned the language mainly from peers and media. The interviewer uses formal honorific forms, indirect requests ('it would be good if we could hear your thoughts on teamwork'), and a proverb to open. The candidate responds in casual peer register, answers the indirect request literally by describing a team sport, and does not acknowledge the proverb. The interviewer later comments that the candidate 'lacks respect and doesn't understand the language properly'. The candidate is confused, believing they answered everything.
1. Diagnose the breakdown using register, politeness theory, and indirect speech act analysis.
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The breakdown is pragmatic, not grammatical. The interviewer shifts into a formal honorific register that signals a hierarchical, respectful frame; the candidate replies in peer casual register, which in this context reads as insufficient deference even though it is normal among friends. The indirect request ('it would be good if we could hear your thoughts on teamwork') is a conventional indirect speech act - an invitation to display reasoning, not a literal request for information. The candidate's literal answer about a sport shows failure to infer the intended illocutionary force, a classic cross-register pragmatic gap. The opening proverb is a phatic and framing device: acknowledging it signals cultural literacy and willingness to engage; ignoring it can be read as dismissing shared heritage. None of this is vocabulary deficiency; it is sociopragmatic knowledge - knowing which forms are appropriate to whom, and how indirectness carries meaning. The interviewer's judgement that the candidate 'doesn't understand the language' conflates register competence with linguistic competence.
2. Recommend how the candidate could prepare and how the interviewer or employer could make the process fairer, with reasoning.
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For the candidate: prepare by (1) learning the honorific and formal address system and practicing it in mock interviews with an older fluent speaker; (2) recognising indirect request patterns and rehearsing responses that address the underlying question (e.g. 'On teamwork, I would say…'); (3) learning to acknowledge framing moves such as proverbs with a brief respectful response, even if only 'thank you for that'. The reasoning is that these are learnable sociopragmatic strategies, not fixed traits. For the employer/interviewer: (1) separate language proficiency from register familiarity in assessment criteria, so a candidate is not failed for using peer register; (2) brief candidates on the interview format, including that formal register will be used; (3) consider that indirectness and proverbs may disadvantage candidates whose exposure was peer-based, and score content and reasoning alongside form. The fairness argument is that interviews test communicative competence in a specific register, and unless that register is signalled and taught, the test measures background, not ability.