Introduction

In a promotional brochure used by a multinational corporation for advertising the services of its London based multilingual outbound call centre to prospective clients, it is stated that they ‘only use “native speakers”’ for calling any country worldwide and translating client-approved calling scripts. This assurance of using ‘native speakers’ in itself is perhaps not surprising given that not only do ‘notions like “native speaker” or “mother tongue” (...) have considerable ideological force (...)’ (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016: 26) but also because they are everyday categories the relevance and naturalness of which are regarded as self-evident for lay persons and outside post-modern sociolinguistics. However, the matter becomes more interesting and complicated when taking into account that the several agents of this particular call centre, which describes itself as speaking 300+ languages, stated during interviews that they liked this job because it allowed them to improve their knowledge of a foreign language. For example, Miguel a Spaniard from Argentina said:

Extract 1

(...) one of the greatest things about this job is that it gave me the opportunity to call in English as well, and I know that my first calls weren’t so good. As is they are now, for example, I really think that in the month and a half I improve a lot in English. Now I feel a lot more confident when I call in English. And that’s really good, that’s really, really good; it’s like to take a course in which you are being paid instead of paying. (Miguel, call centre agent)

A similar comment is made by Therese, who is from Sweden but is calling Germany and Austria:

Extract 2

I'm improving my German which is something that I really like (...) Maybe I have to do more German experience [calling in German] that I can, you know, have some reference, I can have the German experience in London.