Text trajectories in a multilingual call centre: The linguistic ethnography of a calling script, Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies

Call centres have been widely criticised as standardized workplaces, and the imposition of calling scripts is often characterised as dehumanizing and deskilling. But these accounts lack close analysis of how scripts are actually produced, taken up and used by call centre workers, and they are generally locked into dualistic analyses of control and resistance. In contrast, this paper combines long-term ethnography with transcontextual analysis of the production, circulation and uptake of calling scripts. This reveals a good deal of collective and individual agency in processes of text-adaptation, and produces a rather more nuanced picture of work in a call centre

Sociolinguistic Citizenship

Purpose: This paper introduces Stroud’s ‘Linguistic Citizenship’, a concept committed to democratic participation, to voice, to the heterogeneity of linguistic resources and to the political value of sociolinguistic understanding. Approach: It first outlines Linguistic Citizenship’s links with the ethnographic sociolinguistics inspired by Hymes, and then turns to language and language education in England.  Findings: The discourses of language and citizenship currently dominating the UK are very much at odds with Stroud’s conception, but the sociolinguistic citizenship outlined by Stroud is very well suited to the multilingualism of everyday urban life, and it complements a range of relatively small, independently funded educational initiatives promoting similar values. Their efforts are currently constrained by issues of scale and sustainability, although there was a period from the 1960s to the 80s when sociolinguistic citizenship was addressed within English state schooling. Practical implications: Sociolinguistic citizenship may at present find its most sustainable support in the collaboration between universities and not-for-pr

Working papers for a more open academy

What contribution can working papers (WPs) make to a more open academy, and where do they stand in current debates about Open Science? They used to provide speedier publication and feedback as well as cost-free/low-cost access, but with the availability of digital repositories like PURE or ResearchGate, do WPs still have a role? To answer these questions, this paper refers to Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies (WPULL; www.wpull.org). It argues that WPs can play a significant role community-building around shared interests, and within an overarching commitment to deliberative, dialogical reasoning, WPs can be more flexible in genre and audience than a journal, and more responsive to circumambient situations and events – key qualities if applied linguistics focuses on ‘real-world problems’ that require the attention of a variety of stakeholders. Building on a principled understanding of knowledge-making as a situated cultural practice, WPs can be open and reflexive about their geo-historical grounding, provide a view of academic work ‘in the round’ rather than just in its highly styled end-products, and make a low-tech contribution to intellectual decolonisation. Where a standardising universalist model of Open Access might see working papers as sloppy and elitist vehicles for self-promotion, the case of WPULL argues for the substantial contribution that WPs can make to a vigorous and more open economy of knowledge

Incorporating translation into sociolinguistic research: translation policy in an international non-governmental organisation

This article explores aspects of translation, multilingualism and language policy in the field of transnational civil society. By focusing on translation policies at Amnesty International, an international non-governmental organisation that performs a key role in global governance, this article seeks to contribute to a globalisation-sensitive sociolinguistics. It argues that combining a sociolinguistic approach, more precisely linguistic ethnography, with translation studies leads to an increased understanding of the language practices under study. Furthermore, the article calls for more interdisciplinary research, stating that there is a space for sociolinguistics and translation studies to contribute to research in international relations and development studies by highlighting the role of multilingualism and challenging the traditionally powerful position of English in transnational civil society

Appeals to semiotic registers in ethno-metapragmatic accounts of variation

Discussions of folklinguistic accounts of language use are frequently focused on dismissing them because of their limitations. As a result, not a lot is written regarding how such accounts are done and how they ‘work’. This article examines how folklinguistic evaluations are achieved in interaction, particularly through appeals to semiotic registers (Agha 2007). It describes how in explaining their beliefs regarding linguistic variation, speakers frequently produce voicings with varying transparency. These rely on understandings of the social world and bring large collections of linguistic resources into play. They offer rich insights if analytic attention is given to their details because even when evaluating a single variant, whole ways of speaking, and even being, may be utilized. The paper explores in turn how analysis reveals the inseparability of variants, understandings of context and audience, the relationship between linguistic forms and social types, and the performance of social types via the evaluation of semiotic resources. In each section, discussion is grounded in extracts from interviews on Australian English with speakers of this variety of English. Cumulatively they show the primacy of semiotic registers in ethno-metapragmatic accounts.N/

African Linguistics in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the Nordic Countries

Non peer reviewe