L2 Journal

What makes multilingual exchanges hold is not a gifted speaker alone, but a listener who agrees to play. This article names that agreement symbolic reciprocity—the hearer’s willingness to share symbolic risk so that meaning and legitimacy are co‑produced rather than tested. Framing interaction through a cooperative‑game heuristic (without formal modeling) clarifies why equilibrium emerges when participants can do no better than meet halfway, and why “standard” norms so often shift the costs of convenience onto those coded as non‑standard. To render these dynamics visible, I treat scripted multilingual scenes in two contemporary films as analytic models: a mahjong table in Crazy Rich Asians (2018), where recognition emerges through a strategically chosen loss, and a Spanish‑language television interview in Selena (1997), where audience uptake—not perfect form—secures legitimacy over time. Read alongside ecological accounts of symbolic competence, these cases show that multilingual communication depends on the alignment of speaker risk and listener response. The article concludes with pedagogical and assessment implications that reframe listening as co‑production and redistribute the labor of understanding more equitably.