Browsing by Author "Thompson, Miche Chanelle"
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- ItemMultilingualism in the workplace : communicative practices between store owners and assistants in Chinese shops in Cape Town(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-12) Thompson, Miche Chanelle; Anthonissen, Christine; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Since the introduction of representative government in 1994, South Africa has seen a significant influx of Asian and African migrant workers, and their presence in South Africa has become part of the diverse population of most towns and cities. Most of these newcomers find employment in the informal sector, doing unskilled labour in areas such as construction, transport, agriculture, domestic work, hospitality or, as is particularly relevant to this study, various forms of trade. One community that has become well-known for success in establishing such trade occupations and managing them profitably, is the one of Chinese origin. This is illustrated in the sizable number of new informal shopping centres in South Africa settled specifically by groups of Chinese traders, known as China Towns. The established pattern is that these traders employ African migrants or local unemployed people as shop assistants. This makes China Town a multilingual and multicultural hub, no matter where it is located. The study reported here investigates patterns and strategies of business communication in a China Town centre near Cape Town in the Western Cape. The variety of first languages of the various role players, predominantly Mandarin Chinese among shop owners, and Lingala, French, Swahili, Edu, and isiXhosa among shop assistants, emphasises the communicative dependence of this community on a lingua franca. In conformity with the rest of South Africa, this community relies on English as a workplace language, even though they speak different “Englishes” with varying levels of proficiency. The study therefore undertakes to explicate the ways store owners of Chinese migrant origin and their store assistants of African migrant origin draw on their linguistic repertoires to communicate in the workplace where English is the lingua franca. This study is a Linguistic Ethnography in which Conversation Analysis, Discourse Analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis are used to obtain different and integrated perspectives on informal workplace communication. To analyse the intersection between language and the social context within which the communication occurs, this study draws on Gumperz’s (2001) Interactional Sociolinguistic approach to the analysis of discourse and conversation. This approach is significantly contextual and focuses on “situations of speaking” by using ethnographic methods of inquiry. Conversation analysis addresses the micro-specifics of how participants conduct workplace communication; and discourse analysis is used to interrogate the forms and strategies of talk that “articulate” the power relations between shop owners and assistants. Through audio-recorded spoken interaction of the participants throughout the work day as the primary source of data, aligned with field notes and observations, this study illustrates the creative forms of language that emerge in a grassroots multilingual workplace. Communication between the shop owners and their assistants is shown to portray the kind of language contact phenomena that typically develop in informal workplaces where there is an apparent need for a common trade language. Specifically, the study illustrates the forms of language and the communicative strategies that develop in a communicative context where various non-mutually intelligible languages are present.