Multilingualism at Work

Multilingualism at Work

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  • Author: Bernd Meyer
  • Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
  • ISBN: 902721929X
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 289

This volume focuses on work situations in Europe, North America and South-Africa, such as academic, medical and public sector, or business settings, in which participants have to make constant use of more than one language to cooperate with partners, clients, or colleagues. Central questions are how the social and linguistic organization of work is adapted to the necessity of using different languages and how multilingualism impinges on the communicative outcome of different types of discourse or genres. Thus, the authors are all interested in multilingual practices 'at work', which is to say how different forms of multilingual communication are managed, flexibly adjusted to, acquired, and/or improved in a given workplace setting that often calls for particular implicit or explicit language policies. Thus, this volume contributes to the study of workplace communication in a globalized world by drawing on different types of authentic data.


The Economics of the Multilingual Workplace

The Economics of the Multilingual Workplace

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  • Author: François Grin
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1136978283
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 242

This book proposes a path-breaking study of the economics of multilingualism at work, proposing a systematic approach to the identification and measurement of the ways in which language skills and economic performance are related. Using the instruments of economic investigation, but also explicitly relating the analysis to the approaches to multilingualism at work developed in the language sciences, this interdisciplinary book proposes a systematic, step-by-step exploration of the issue. Starting from a general identification of the linkages between multilingualism and processes of value creation, it reviews the contributions of linguistics and economics before developing a new economic model of production in which language is taken into account. Testing of the model using data from two countries provides quantitative estimations of the influence of multilingualism on economic processes, showing that foreign language skills can make a considerable contribution to a country’s GDP. These findings have significant implications for language policy and suggest strategies helping language planners to harness market forces for increased effectiveness. A technical appendix shows how the novel technical and statistical procedures developed in this study can be generalized, and applied wherever researchers or decision makers need to identify and measure the value of multilingualism.


Managing Plurilingual and Intercultural Practices in the Workplace

Managing Plurilingual and Intercultural Practices in the Workplace

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  • Author: Georges Lüdi
  • Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
  • ISBN: 9027266409
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 374

The contributions in this volume stem from different lines of research and represent both a continuation and an advancement of the European DYLAN project. The book addresses the meanings and implications of multilingualism and plurilingual repertoires as well as the ways in which cultural diversity is managed in companies and institutions in Switzerland. Characterised by official quadrilingualism, but also by new dimensions of multilingualism resulting from massive immigration, important workforce mobility and increasing globalisation, Switzerland offers an ideal laboratory for studying phenomena linked to multilingualism and cultural diversity. On the one hand, a special focus is put on the best practices of diversity management and language regimes with particular attention paid to the interplay between official languages and English, and to ways of leveraging diversity awareness, fostering cultural inclusiveness and enhancing intercultural learning in vocational education and training. On the other hand, the chapters examine at close range the way actors' plurilingual repertoires are developed and how their use is adapted to particular objectives and specific conditions. Being observed in several types of multilingual professional settings, the plurilingual strategies, including English as lingua franca, are particularly examined in terms of power relations and processes of inclusion or exclusion.


Domestic Workers Talk

Domestic Workers Talk

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  • Author: Kellie Gonçalves
  • Publisher: Channel View Publications
  • ISBN: 1800416776
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 124

Set in a multilingual cleaning company that serves Anglophone customers in the upper-(middle) class suburbs of New York City, this book presents an ethnographic study into power, language policy and communication from the perspectives of the Brazilian–American employer as well as the company’s Hispanophone and Lusophone employees. Power asymmetries in internal communication demonstrate the employer’s legitimated domination over her employees and her L1 Portuguese as a form of linguistic capital. Employees’ resourcefulness and multicompetence – rather than quantifiable levels of English-language proficiency – determine the extent to which they rely on language brokering to facilitate communication with their customers, directly impacting their agency. The book contributes to current debates on extra-linguistic modes of communication in multilingual settings and thematic analyses of care work, migration, communication and the role of English.


Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-collar Workplaces

Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-collar Workplaces

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  • Author: Kellie Gonçalves
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1000281000
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 244

This collection brings together global perspectives which critically examine the ways in which language as a resource is used and managed in myriad ways in various blue-collar workplace settings in today’s globalized economy. In focusing on blue-collar work environments, the book sheds further light on the informal processes through which top down language policies take place in different multilingual settings and the resultant asymmetrical power relations which emerge among employees and employers in such settings. Taking into account the latest debates on poststructuralist theories of language, the volume also extends its conceptualization of language to demonstrate the ways in which it extends to a wider range of multilingual and multimodal resources and communicative practices, all of which combine in unique and different ways toward constructing meaning in the workplace. The volume’s unique focus on such workplaces also showcases domains of work which have generally until now been less visible within existing research on language in the workplace and the subsequent methodological challenges that arise from studying them. Integrating a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, along with empirical data from a diverse range of blue-collar workplaces, this book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in critical sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, sociology, and linguistic anthropology.


Language and Culture at Work

Language and Culture at Work

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  • Author: Stephanie Schnurr
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis
  • ISBN: 1134892314
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 169

This book provides an overview of the complex role that culture plays in workplace contexts. In eight chapters, the authors cover the core aspects of culture at work from making decisions and negotiating power to gender and identity. Drawing on insights from a range of studies, they propose a new integrated framework for researching culture at work from a sociolinguistic perspective, and they apply it to the significant corpus of authentic workplace data they have collected from numerous settings in the UK, Hong Kong and New Zealand. This is key reading for researchers and recommended for advanced students of workplace and intercultural communication, sociolinguistics and discourse studies.


Indigenous Multilingualism at Warruwi

Indigenous Multilingualism at Warruwi

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  • Author: Ruth Singer
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis
  • ISBN: 100082988X
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 199

This book is an exploration of the role of language at Warruwi Community, a remote Indigenous settlement in northern Australia. It explores how language use and people’s ideas about language are embedded in contemporary Indigenous life there. Using an ethnographic approach, the book examines what language at Warruwi means in the context of the history of the community, ongoing social and political changes and the continuing importance of ancestral traditions. Children growing up at Warruwi still learn to speak many small Indigenous languages. This is remarkable not just in the Australian context, where many Indigenous languages are no longer spoken, but around the world as this kind of multilingualism in small languages persists only in a few remaining pockets. The way that people use many languages in their daily life at Warruwi reveals how high levels of linguistic diversity can be maintained in a small community. This detailed study of the creation of linguistic diversity is relevant to sociolinguistics, linguistic typology, historical linguistics and evolutionary linguistics. More generally, this book is for linguists, anthropologists and anyone with an interest in contemporary Australian Indigenous lives.


The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism

The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism

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  • Author: Carolyn McKinney
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis
  • ISBN: 1000931978
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 711

The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism provides a comprehensive survey of the field of multilingualism for a global readership and an overview of the research which situates multilingualism in its social, cultural and political context. This fully revised edition not only updates several of the original chapters but introduces many new ones that enrich contemporary debates in the burgeoning field of multilingualism. With a decolonial perspective and including leading new and established contributors from different regions of the globe, the handbook offers a critical overview of the interdisciplinary field of multilingualism, providing a range of central themes, key debates and research sites for a global readership. Chapters address the profound epistemological and ontological challenges and shifts produced since the first edition in 2012. The handbook includes an introduction, five parts with 28 chapters and an afterword. The chapters are structured around sub-themes, such as Coloniality and Multilingualism, Concepts and Theories in Multilingualism, and Multilingualism and Education. This ground-breaking text is a crucial resource for researchers, scholars and postgraduate students interested in multilingualism from areas such as sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, anthropology and education.


Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Multilingualism in Professional Contexts

Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Multilingualism in Professional Contexts

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  • Author: Philippe Lecomte
  • Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
  • ISBN: 1789906784
  • Category : Business & Economics
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 251

This book provides readers with the latest research on the dynamics of language and language diversity in professional contexts. Bringing together novel findings from a range of disciplines, it challenges practitioners and management scholars to question the conventional understanding of language as words with stable meanings, an assumption which treats language as a tool that can be managed by language policies that ‘standardize’ language. Each of the contributions is designed to recognize the strides that have been made in the past two decades in research on language and languages in organizational settings while addressing remaining blind spots and emerging issues. Particular attention is given to multilingualism, sociolinguistic approaches to language in the workplace, migration challenges, critical perspectives on the power of language use and the management of organizations as dialogical, discursive spaces.


The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism

The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism

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  • Author: Marilyn Martin-Jones
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1136578137
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 576

The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism provides a comprehensive survey of the field of multilingualism for a global readership, and an overview of the research which situates multilingualism in its social, cultural and political context. The handbook includes an introduction and five sections with thirty two chapters by leading international contributors. The introduction charts the changing landscape of social and ethnographic research on multilingualism (theory, methods and research sites) and it foregrounds key contemporary debates. Chapters are structured around sub-headings such as: early developments, key issues related to theory and method, new research directions. This handbook offers an authoritative guide to shifts over time in thinking about multilingualism as well as providing an overview of the range of contemporary themes, debates and research sites. The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism is the ideal resource for postgraduate students of multilingualism, as well as those studying education and anthropology.