Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Companies utilize Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) capabilities to outsource non-essential data-processing tasks offshore, often to multilingual speech communities such India, the Philippines, and Ghana. These outsourcing workspaces straddle the realms of material and immaterial production and they highlight language tensions in the age of globalization. Within host communities of outsourced work, workers migrate to cities and move with their linguistic resources. The workspaces and the digitized work done in them sanction English as the official language of work. Though English is sanctioned officially, workers, through their language options, behaviors, and preferences also index identities, attitudes, beliefs, and the power relations vis a vis linguistic selections. The interplay of multiple “local’ language options, identities and their intersections with English underscore the importance of researching questions about agency, variation, code boundaries, locality, and competence. Using data from an ethnographic study of one such space in Ghana this study highlights the complexities of the ties between language users, language uses, and the language of work in outsourcing workspaces that are embedded in multilingual communities. It demonstrates the material implications of language use in an exemplar case society. This research argues for a critical cosmopolitan orientation to multilingualism and advocates for exploring that orientation in language teaching and research.