Common ground and conviviality: Indonesians doing togetherness in Japan

Abstract

While Humanities and Social Science scholars have a long history of trying to understand how people from different backgrounds get along (i.e. to be convivial), typically this work misses much of the work carried out in sociolinguistics and related areas. In building upon work on common ground, small talk, and conviviality, this paper examines how a group of Indonesian students living in Japan go about practicing conviviality. I show how repetition and tiny response tokens are used to build common ground. I argue that this practice is key to building convivial relations amongst this group and that this type of interactional work helps open the possibility of future interactions, some of which are tied with the need to build and maintain support networks in Japan.