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This article analyses the discursive construction of mobile, multilingual humanitarian workers at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from a critical sociolinguistic perspective. In the light of fluctuating linguistic requirements and needs, I focus on the trajectories of ICRC delegates as a window onto the different values attributed to language resources and investments before and during humanitarian work. The data analysed include interviews with three (former) delegates complemented by institutional documents. The ICRC requirement for major languages including English and French goes hand in hand with recent personality profiling in relation to ‘international experience’ (understood as geographical mobility), which is closely connected to cosmopolitan discourses of openness to other cultures and languages. The three delegates mobilised the trope of ‘interest’ in other cultures and languages in connection to their transnational families. Simultaneously, they expanded their linguistic repertoires during their missions, often ‘bits and pieces’ of local languages, to respond to unplanned linguistic needs in the field and to manage interpreters in ways that reinforce power relationships. I argue that linguistic investment in non-strategic languages like Kurdish during humanitarian missions seldom translates into economic capital, but it is converted into symbolic capital indexing their professional mobility and flexible, entrepreneurial speakerhood.
