This paper focuses on the ways an institution of the new economy--a tourism call centre in Switzerland--markets, manages and performs multilingual services. In particular, it explores the ways multilingualism operates as a strategic and managerial tool within tourism call centres and how the institutional regulation of language practices…

This paper reports the findings of a survey of 100 mothers of Chinese children aged between 6 and 36 months from middle to upper-middle socio-economic backgrounds in Penang, Malaysia. The findings include the language backgrounds of these mothers, their contextual uses of multiple languages and their language choices with their children. Through…

Most analyses of the sociolinguistic aspects of immigration focus on contexts where a single language is official and widely used. In bilingual Catalonia, newly arriving immigrants find themselves in a situation where the administration seeks to treat Catalan as a fully functional public language while large sectors of the local population still…

This paper documents the new trend towards a first-language-first multilingual model in formal education in three former French colonies of West Africa, namely Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. It compares the sociolinguistic situations, the conditions of the development of multilingual education and the achievements of mother-tongue-medium education…

The current educational context in many English speaking countries is one where literacy is understood to be essentially monolingual in orientation; that is, an understanding of literacy around a single common language, with the emphasis on identifying universal, normative "standards" and "benchmarks", such as the…

This paper aims to show that the development of multilingualism in the world has reached a point where, in terms of scale and significance, it is comparable with and assimilable to politico-economic aspects of globalisation, global mobility and "postmodern" modes of thinking. The paper situates multilingualism in its relationship with the most…

This paper draws on complexity theory and post-modern sociolinguistics to explore how an ecological approach to language data can illuminate aspects of language use in multilingual environments. We first examine transcripts of exchanges taking place among multilingual individuals in multicultural settings. We briefly review what conversation and…

English has become the "lingua franca" of international exchanges. This is reflected in sociolinguistic studies of linguistic landscape (LL) which tackle the coexistence of English with local languages (e.g. Backhaus, 2007; Cenoz & Gorter, 2006; Edelman, 2006), on occasion oppressed (e.g. Nino-Murcia, 2003). However, there is little…

Work in two distinct disciplines, urban geography and sociolinguistics, readily points out the multiethnic and multilingual character of metropolitan areas. However, there is still demand for studies which establish the language structure of modern cities. For the purposes of this pilot study, we focus on the Detroit Metropolitan Area (DMA),…

This paper examines the links between language, social difference and political domination in the practices of parental school choice at the heart of a global city, Vancouver. Vancouver is a highly diverse city, especially in terms of language. Its inner city is replete with multiple languages whose exchange values are not equal. In this context,…

The language situation in the Malaysian Chinese community has undergone great changes in the past century. This paper aims to account for such changes in the framework of sociolinguistic realignment, which is both descriptive and predictive. The triglossic situation in the colonial period (1859-1957) is described; with the support of a language…

This article explores the compensatory strategies used by two Indonesian children who experienced first language attrition when acquiring English in the English-speaking environment. They use compensatory strategies to compensate for their lack of competence in first language. They employ both interlingual strategies and discourse strategies when…

Although Germany has experienced net in-migration for the past five decades, this fact has only recently been officially acknowledged. Furthermore, Germany is marked by a general monolingual self-concept very much attached to the idea of a nation-state with one homogeneous language. However, in large urban areas of Germany about 35 per cent of the…

Linguistic imperialism, linguistic hegemony and linguistic cosmopolitanism are broad and contrasting conceptualizations of linguistic globalization that are frequently, if implicitly, invoked in the literature, both academic and non-academic, on language practices and perceptions in the call center industry. I begin with outlining each of these…

In the last two decades, scholars in discourse studies and sociolinguistics have shown considerable interest in how identity is encoded in discourses across various facets of life such as academia, home, politics and workplace. By adopting an ethnographic-style approach, this study shows how students in a Ghanaian university construct their…