Agency and Multilingualism in public health care: How practitioners draw on local experiences and encounters

Drawing on experiences of practitioners in the health care sector in Manchester, England, we demonstrate how, in an environment that is highly de-regulated and where there are often various options to manage encounters, power is not derived exclusively from institutional roles. Instead, language policy is appropriated, enacted, and implemented by a range of actors in different roles. We show how contextualised testimonials indicate how practitioners assume agency in negotiating key decision-making nodes in the institutional setting. Actors’ ability to take decisions and to navigate institutional provisions relies on local knowledge and personal experiences gained in the multilingual city.