Workplaces in the English Inner Circle

Most studies on multilingualism at work in the English inner circle have focused on immigrants for whom English is a second language. Hewitt (Reference Hewitt2008), who studied Polish, Chinese, and Kurdish entrepreneurs in London, found that other languages than English were used for most work-task and social purposes, while the use of English only was found at strategically important nodes, such as interaction with customers, suppliers, and banks. In a series of studies, Roberts explored problems facing immigrants at work in United Kingdom (Roberts, Reference Roberts2010, Reference Roberts, Candlin and Sarangi2011). After analyzing job interviews for low-paid jobs, these studies found that the demands of the selection interviews or assessment outstripped the language and interactional demands of the job and assessed language and communication skills that were not relevant to the job in question. Also, studies of promotion interviews showed the rhetorical and textual constraints on candidates’ performances. As immigrants did not manage to find the required “hybrid discourses of the selection interviews,” they “tended to be judged as either too emotional or too impersonal” (Roberts, Reference Roberts2010, p. 219).

From the perspective of workplace multilingualism in the southern hemisphere, Clyne's exploration of language practices in Australian environments should be mentioned. As Clyne (Reference Clyne1994) stated, for many migrant workers, contact is most frequent with those who share a first language (L1) other than that of the majority, that is, English. This general fact (e.g., Day, Reference Day and Crischel1992; Duff, Wong, & Early, Reference Duff, Wong and Early2000; Roberts, Reference Roberts2010) is later evidenced in Kovacs (Reference Kovacs2004), which concerned Finnish immigrants in Australia. Australian Finns working in the construction industry had the opportunity to use Finnish in their working hours, which meant that they did not lose their mother tongue as would have been expected. Other studies on multilingual workplaces in Australia and New Zealand are Grossi (Reference Grossi2011), Cooke, Brown, and Zhu (Reference Cooke, Brown and Zhu2007), and Holmes and Riddiford (Reference Holmes and Riddiford2010). In Holmes et al. (Reference Holmes, Marra and Vine2011), the researchers focused on leadership in contrasting “ethnicized” contexts in Maori and Pakeha/European workplaces (p. 25).

Turning next to the United States, a problem-oriented focus is found in Shih (Reference Shih2002). Shih, who studied African American and immigrant Latino low-skilled workers in the United States, found that employers’ negative attitudes towards these groups of people were connected to “their perception that the manageability and pliability of workers vary by race, nativity and gender” (p. 99). Also, Marlow and Giles (Reference Marlow and Giles2010) focused on problems, in this case related to language criticism. On the basis of a survey given to people in the U.S. state of Hawai'i, the researchers found that a majority of the people included in this survey had experienced language criticism, for instance, during employment. The evolving role of Spanish in Northwest Alabama is examined in Johnson (Reference Johnson2010). She attributed the growth of the Hispanic populations in this region to job prospects in the manufacturing, agricultural, and construction sectors. As she argued, Hispanic workers are seen as a labor force that will enable these sectors to stay competitive in today's international markets. In the counties studied, the English-speaking community is being exposed daily to the Spanish language and culture. The linguistic picture is further complicated by the fact that many of the immigrants are actually speakers of Mayan dialects but using Spanish as their lingua franca.

Other studies of workplaces in the United States have described how immigrants manage to learn strategies that make them able to cope with the daily communication at work. Bausser (Reference Bausser2000) tutored a French native, who was employed at a US branch of an international company, and made him improve his writing and English. Mednick Myles (Reference Mednick Myles2005) analyzed the communication experiences of engineering students, for whom English was as a second language, during their professional internships. Challenges revolved around conversational aspects, in particular how to use and understand colloquial and idiomatic language. Through interactive coparticipation and collaboration with English L1 speakers, the interns were able to improve their communicative skills. Omar (Reference Omar2010) examined the cultural experience of Arab American entrepreneurs who had settled in South Texas, and Collier (Reference Collier2010) studied four bilingual, immigrant women entrepreneurs. For these women both L1 and L2 use were crucial to their business success; L1 conversations consisted of largely private speech and directives, while L2 use consisted of the mastery of basic conversational openings and closings, as well as various rapport-building methods such as small talk and socially expanded talk. A real success story from a multilingual circuit-board manufacturing plant in California's Silicon Valley was presented in Kleifgen (Reference Kleifgen2001). Kleifgen's analysis of the interaction between a Vietnamese supervisor and a machine operator showed how the interactants creatively use a stripped-down version of Vietnamese and American English in a task-solving event in the workplace (cf. Roberts Reference Roberts2010).

Canada is unique in that some parts belong to the English inner circle, while other parts are French speaking. The bilingual context is reflected in LeBlanc (Reference LeBlanc2010), who presented the results of a study conducted in a bilingual (English-French) workplace in New Brunswick. LeBlanc focused on how speakers of the minority language, French, perceived their own language and that of others and looked at claims that language representations are intimately linked to language practice and also to linguistic insecurity.

Goldstein (Reference Goldstein1997) examined a bilingual workplace context (involving first-generation immigrants from Portugal) in Toronto. Goldstein's study explored the complexities of and the reasons for workers’ resistance to learning English, even when they accepted the economic advantages for themselves of doing so. Another study describing the complexity for immigrants in Canada is Matheux-Pelletier (Reference Matheux-Pelletier2007). This study focused on the language choice decision of female, working-class immigrants in an on-the-job training center specialized in industrial sewing in Montreal. Based on observations and interview data collected on site and with government officials, Matheux-Pelletier explored how Arabic and Bengali speakers use language to maintain or cross cultural boundaries. Fluency in French is considered essential for successful integration in Montreal. As the means for acquiring the language are clearly insufficient, mainstream society justifies the divided job market, arguing that getting a low-paying job is the best newcomers can achieve considering their limited language skills. Among immigrants, language boundaries are largely maintained, as workers overwhelmingly interact with members of their own linguistic group in a language other than French or English.

My last focus in this section is on multilingual workplaces in South Africa. Hill and van Zyl (Reference Hill and van Zyl2002) investigated the linguistic context of the engineering profession in the Witwatersrand, covering companies within the electrical, chemical, mining, and aeronautical fields. Focus groups, interviews, survey questionnaires, and observations were used to explore the practices of 58 engineering personnel, mainly young black engineers. The research found that English played an extremely important role in engineering practice in South Africa. English was used across a range of interactions and also for documentation, which meant that English appeared to be considered as the official language of engineering. Based on the site observations and interviews, however, Hill and van Zyl found that a more complex picture of workplace interaction emerged. Afrikaans and indigenous African languages were perceived by more than 40 % of those surveyed to be important languages in the workplace to “get the work done” (p. 23). Most young black engineers were multilingual, which was found to be a positive force for cooperation with workers who did not know English. Multilingualism was thus found to be a significant professional resource for the young engineers.

Workplaces in the English Outer and Expanding Circles in Asia

I now turn to studies that focus on workplace multilingualism in countries in Asia, which belong to the English outer or expanding circles. As this part of my overview shows, the issues dealt with in these areas mainly concern language demands and language testing and training.

Language demands are dealt with in several studies on Hong Kong, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. S. F. Li and Mead (Reference Li and Mead2000) reported on a study carried out in Hong Kong, the aim of which was to develop teaching and learning material for English courses for merchandisers in an international marketplace. Green and Evans (Reference Green and Evans2000) discussed data from a survey of the use of Chinese (Cantonese and Standard Written Chinese) and English in the professional workplace in Hong Kong. Results of this survey involving 1,475 respondents drawn from five key occupational sectors indicated that reading and writing in English are demanded frequently, but that English appears to play a less important role in spoken workplace communication. In informal situations but also in more formal ones, Cantonese is as likely to be used as English.

Also Kassim and Ali (Reference Kassim and Ali2010) reported on a survey, in this case of engineers in 10 multinational chemical companies in Malaysia. This survey showed that teleconferencing, networking for contacts and advice, and presenting new ideas and alternative strategies are important communicative events for engineers, and that fluency in English is important for those who wish to have a global career.

Call centers are a currently expanding domain where English is demanded (e.g., Friginal, Reference Friginal2007; Rahman, Reference Rahman2009). Hamp-Lyons and Lockwood (Reference Hamp-Lyons and Lockwood2009), who made a needs analysis of call centers in the Philippines, found that outsourced call centers complain of very poor recruitment because of poor English language ability.

Herat and McLoughlin (Reference Herat, McLoughlin, Kelly-Holmes and Mautner2010) analyzed 330 advertisements for jobs in the commercial sector in Sri Lanka. The authors found that English was being privileged and used ideologically to evaluate the suitability of the applicant for the job. Overtly, the employers seemed to downplay the importance of English, claiming the need for good communication skills rather than fluency in English. Covertly, however, employers held an elitist view with regard to English. In the studied sector, a perceived link seemed to exist between an applicant's competence in English and his or her other capabilities, which among other things led to a strengthening of the role of English on the job market.

Language training is dealt with in two recent interesting studies, which I have chosen to report on in some detail. Lorente (Reference Lorente, Kelly-Holmes and Mautner2010) examined how maid agencies in Singapore turn English into an instrument to commodify migrant women for jobs as domestic workers. As of 2004, there were an estimated 140,000 “foreign maids” in Singapore, the majority of who were Filipinos and Indonesians (p. 45). The agencies were found to stylize the discursive practices of migrant women—their registers and repertoires, speech forms, styles, and genres—in a way that could be said to reify their subordinate and servile positions in the Singaporean society. Lorente concluded that this stylization of the domestic workers’ English language skills, in accordance with the perceived demands of employers and the social position of the women, “produce[s] and reinforce[s] the marginalized, restricted, and highly regulated boundaries of foreign domestic work in Singapore” (p. 55).

Cowie (Reference Cowie, Kelly-Holmes and Mautner2010) studied the accent training industry in India. Accent training has sprung up in tandem with call centers in major Indian cities. New employees are routinely required to undergo several weeks of accent training and customer care training. Cowie analyzed how accent training is imagined and realized as a commercial activity by international call centers on the one hand, and local business partners and their employees on the other. In order to create a force of native-sounding agents, outsourcers look to the ideal of a global so-called neutral accent, an Indian prestige accent. Local trainers promote this abstraction. Cowie concluded that although the employees may share that interest in a local prestige accent, back in the call center they may be rewarded for their ability to accommodate to a native-speaker accent.

In the English expanding circle in Asia, language testing and language course development are dealt with in several studies. Cowling (Reference Cowling2007) studied a large Japanese industrial firm with the purpose to develop English language intensive courses. Choi (Reference Choi2003), who examined large private exporting industries in South Korea, found that 73% of the population seeking employment were screened for their English language skills, prior to being hired; moreover, over 90% of the companies continued to test them during employment.

Park (Reference Park2011) found a critical perspective on English language testing in South Korea. Since the 1990s, different modes of English language testing have emerged as popular means for evaluating job applicants for Korean corporations, which were constantly upgrading the criteria for good English. Park claimed that the evaluation of linguistic competence is always a matter of social and ideological interpretation, and that the fulfillment of the promise of English is constantly deferred.

Multilingualism in Transnational Companies in Asia, South America, and Africa

Workplace interaction has also been studied with a focus on multilingual interaction in global businesses in Asia, South America, and Africa. An early study of English lingua franca communication in international settings is found in Pan et al. (Reference Pan, Scollon and Scollon2002). Palmer-Silveira et al. (Reference Palmer-Silveira, Ruiz-Garrido and Fortanet-Gómez2006) explored English in intercultural and international business communication. Bilbow (Reference Bilbow1997, Reference Bilbow2002) recorded meetings in a large transnational airline corporation in Hong Kong, where the participants came from different cultural and language groups. Bilbow argued that there are significant differences between Western and Chinese interactional behavior in business meetings. Nair-Venugopal (Reference Nair-Venugopal2001) recorded presentations by and interactions between trainer and trainees in two Malaysian companies in order to explore how different varieties of Malaysian English (ME) were used. The findings show that ME and other ways of speaking in these Malaysian corporate business contexts contrast with the norms of standard English usage. Miller (Reference Miller and Spencer-Oatey2000) recorded interaction involving American and Japanese coworkers at two advertising agencies in Tokyo. Gimenez (Reference Gimenez2002) examined communication via faxes and emails between an Argentinean subsidiary and its European head office. Pullin (Reference Pullin2010) explored small talk in English lingua franca business communication in an international setting. Virkkula-Raeisaenen (Reference Virkkula-Raeisaenen2010) explored interaction between a group of Finnish and Chinese business professionals at a multilingual meeting in a small company in Finland. Poppi (Reference Poppi2011) analyzed emails written by Chinese and Japanese employees of a freight-forwarding company that had adopted English as a corporate language. Tanaka (Reference Tanaka2011) focused on naturally occurring business interaction between Japanese entrepreneurs and Indian business practitioners.

From these studies of workplace discourse involving English lingua franca, I turn to some studies on other languages: Japanese, Arabic, Turkish, and Portuguese. O'Connell (Reference O'Connell2006) reported on a survey of Australian expatriates working in business organizations in Japan. The results of this survey, which included responses from 12 Australian expatriates and their Japanese coworkers, showed that the higher their level of Japanese proficiency, the more conscious the Australians were of the need to converge to a Japanese style of communication in order to achieve smooth workplace communication and the more willing they were to do so. L2 proficiency was thus seen to be an integral part of cultural intelligence. Baoueb (Reference Baoueb2009) presented a study on code-switching between Arabic and French in Tunisian business companies. The case study, based on recorded data of conversations, observations, interviews, and a questionnaire, investigated the variety of languages chosen in two Tunisian businesses, focusing mainly on the social constraints of Arabic, French, and English. Moreover, it revealed the complex linguistic situation in terms of the different motivations for code-switching between in-group members and also with foreign colleagues and clients. Akar (Reference Akar2002), who collected data comprising memoranda and fax messages in Turkish and English produced by Turkish business practitioners in four companies, analyzed macro contextual factors that influence the forms and functions of written texts in the two languages. Pereira (Reference Pereira, Gouveia, Silvestre and Azuga2004) reported on a study of Portuguese and Brazilian businessmen, where not language per se but cultural differences, that is, different relations to collectivism versus individualism, became salient.

Many studies described how transnational companies work smoothly in spite of the varied backgrounds of their staff. Other studies, however, reported on problems due to misunderstandings and cultural mismatches. Spencer-Oatey and Xing (Reference Spencer-Oatey, Xing, House and Rehbein2004) focused on misunderstandings and displeasures in Chinese-British business interactions, and Grieve (Reference Grieve2010) reported on cultural differences in conversational structure and the expression of apology in German and Australian workplace telephone discourse. Charles and Marschan-Piekkari (Reference Charles and Marschan-Piekkari2002), who studied a Finland-based transnational corporation, found that interviews carried out with staff globally revealed problems not only for nonnative speakers but also for native speakers of English. Briguglio (Reference Briguglio2005), who reported on a study of international business communication in English, found that emails and faxes were difficult due to the amount of abbreviations and lack of cues that are not present in other forms of communication. Angouri & Harwood (Reference Angouri and Harwood2008) studied written communication in three transnational companies, with headquarters in Greece, Denmark, and Japan, that work together in a consortium. Although the participants broadly worked with the same genres of written documents, the form of these documents varied according to the local context, audience, and purpose. Writers therefore faced difficulty when they made the transition from writing for one community of practice to writing for another.

D. Li (Reference Li and Auer2007), in a discussion of problems with mergers at a general level, made the following claims: “At the institutional level, where the workforce is made up of staff coming from multilingual and multicultural backgrounds, communication—both linguistic and intercultural—problems are to be expected. Problems of this kind are especially acute when business conglomerates originate from very different ‘languacultures’ (Agar, Reference Agar1994, p. 58) and merge into still bigger transnational enterprises” (pp. 430–431).

Interaction Between English Lingua Franca Users and Native English Speakers

Following these studies on workplace settings where all participants turn to English as a lingua franca, I will mention some analyses of problems related to interaction that also involve native English speakers. Jämtelid (Reference Jämtelid2002) reported on interviews with people involved in text production at different levels of the Swedish Electrolux group. Electrolux had chosen English as its official corporate language. However, there was a widespread belief among managers and staff at the time that native speakers of English found their corporate English poor. The director of corporate communications described the difficulty facing English lingua franca speakers in contexts where some participants are English native speakers and stressed the necessity for Scandinavians and others to speak up even if their English was bad: “Then of course the corporate language is quite clearly ‘bad English.’ Otherwise, you easily end up with only Americans, Brits and well-educated Swedes talking at meetings, while Germans and Italians remain silent. What happens, rather, is that we deliberately avoid difficult words, and that people shouldn't feel ashamed at all if they use bad grammar in an internal memo in English” (p. 44; my translation).

When Franklin (Reference Franklin, Kotthoff and Spenser-Oatey2007) interviewed German and British managers who worked together in a newly established German-British company, he found that the German managers mentioned the native English speakers’ lack of lingua franca skills as a perceived difficulty:

Workplaces With Workforce Diversity: The Case of Sweden

All over the world, there are workplaces where some employees, mostly minorities, migrants, or unskilled guest workers, have to use their second, third, or fourth language at work. From the perspective of language users, there is indeed a difference between regions where the majority language is a global language and those where the majority speak a less widely spread language. We know that individuals who migrate to English-speaking countries have often learned English at school in their countries of origin. In parts of the world, where less widely spread languages are spoken, immigrants meet both a new country and a new language. For them, learning the majority language becomes a part of their adjustment to a new country and culture (Gunnarsson, Reference Gunnarsson2005).

With this as a background, I will discuss some results of a research project that I directed at Uppsala University in Sweden. Using a similar design based in interactional sociolinguistics, we studied the communicative situation of immigrants at two Swedish workplaces: a large hospital and a major Swedish company, which focuses on power and automation technologies (Gunnarsson, Reference Gunnarsson2009a; Andersson, Reference Andersson2010; Nelson, Reference Nelson2010). The first phase of the project work involved interviews with a fairly large number of immigrants, 18 at each workplace. The immigrants came from different parts of the world and had migrated to Sweden as adults. They had permanent jobs, though in different positions: At the hospital, the study included doctors, nurses, midwives, and cleaners; and at the company, office staff, that is, engineers, and factory floor workers. They were all L2 users at work; that is, both Swedish and English were foreign languages for them. The second phase involved case studies, five at each workplace. The employees were shadowed during a week, and data related to their workplace communication were collected.

In this section, I will focus on a few results related to the language situation at the two working environments. At the hospital, communication with lay people—patients and relatives—forms an important part of the daily work of the medically trained staff, which means that the majority language of the local community, Swedish, is the dominant language in their work. In addition, the doctors interviewed reported that English is used in their research and in writing articles for publication. Some of the nurses also said that every now and then they use their mother tongue at work, for example, when they act as interpreters between patients and doctors. The communicative situation for the cleaners at the hospital is very different from that of the medically skilled staff. When interviewed, the cleaners said that Swedish is used when they speak to their managers, to hospital staff they meet when cleaning their areas, and to other cleaners when they do not have a common mother tongue. Many of the cleaners have very poor skills in Swedish, and since they mainly interact with others from the same countries, they do not get much practice in Swedish, so their proficiency hardly improves, according to the managers who were interviewed.

In the company, communication is mainly directed to professionals, that is, to colleagues linked to the same workplace or within the same organization or to other professionals. As the workplace studied belongs to a large, transnational company for which English is the corporate language, the language practices are of a diglossic nature. English is used as a lingua franca for external purposes, for instance, in written correspondence with colleagues in other countries and in meetings with external professionals, while the local majority language, Swedish, is used for internal purposes and in the daily spoken interaction with colleagues.

From the point of view of language, a clear divide exists between engineers and factory floor workers. When the engineers were asked about the languages they used at work, one third said that they mainly use Swedish, one third that they mainly use English, and one third that they use English and Swedish to an equal extent. All claimed that they write English more often than they speak it. Two thirds of the engineers also said that they have used their mother tongues at work, for example, when they have been involved in guiding and taking care of groups and representatives from foreign countries. All factory floor workers interviewed, however, said that Swedish is the main language they use at work. Although they said that they come into contact with English texts, they did not claim to read them, and only one third of the factory workers said that they have used their mother tongues at the workplace.

The communicative situations for the employees interviewed are thus different at the hospital and at the company, and also within each environment. As I mentioned above, all informants have permanent jobs, and they also seem to be able to perform their assigned tasks. Their position at work and the tasks they are given correspond to their linguistic competence and communicative skills. Lack of language skills therefore hinders promotion in both environments: at the hospital good Swedish is necessary for a career, and at the company both English and Swedish are required. In the company, good writing skills are also important for promotion. We thus find that language knowledge creates a divide between those who master the corporate language and those who do not, and also between those who master the majority language and those who do not.