World Englishes and international call centres

• Main Author: Bolton, Kingsley
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Language::English
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/93718; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/38383
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Call centres (or telephone ‘contact centres’) of various kinds have become an increasing fact of life for many people in Europe, North America and other developed economies. Although telephone contact centres may be dated back to the 1960s and 1970s in the US, their intrusion into the lives of British and US consumers has grown exponentially since the 1980s. Since the early 2000s, however, a significant number of call centre operations have been outsourced to such destinations as India and the Philippines, thereby raising a number of issues relating to language and globalisation and the politics of English as an international language.