Volume 2020, Issue 262 - Special Issue: Language, Inequality and Global Care Work, Issue Editors: Kellie Gonçalves and Anne Schluter

In this article I analyze artifacts that teach domestic Spanish, a register of the language meant to facilitate communication between Anglo employers and their Spanish-speaking employees. Comprising a limited range of features, including imperatives, second-person pronouns, and lexical items, domestic Spanish provides its users with a means to overcome the “language barrier” that often characterizes relationships in the domestic sphere. Drawing on the concepts of raciolinguistic ideologies and indexical field, I show how domestic Spanish ultimately works to maintain asymmetrical relationships by constricting the range of social meanings that its use can activate; I also shed light on the ambivalent and often conflicting notions among employers about the Spanish language and its speakers. My analysis lays bare the possible disjuncture between the intention of those who use domestic Spanish and the effect it may have on the relationships that it mediates – a disjuncture that enables its speakers to misrecognize their efforts as benevolent, ignoring the ways that language functions in practices of racial discrimination and social control.

The current study is carried out in an ethnically diverse three-semester vocational adult education programme in Sweden for those who aspire to register as assistant nurses. The data is based on field notes taken during participant observations and video-recordings of the classroom interaction in a course on dementia care in the autumn of 2014. In Sweden, care work is framed by the goals stated in The Swedish Social Services Act, which is to promote the elderly’s right to self-determination and independence. In the class in which this study was carried out, this policy informed the teaching of “good” communication practices. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the strategies taught in school that embody this policy come into conflict with the seemingly unavoidable dilemmas experienced by trainee students on the work floor. We analyse two examples of teachers acting out hypothetical scenes for the purpose of modeling proper caregiver conduct in dealing with frail, powerless individuals with dementia. The students’ descriptions of their own conduct in managing challenging resident behaviour are thereby considered as accountable actions. The article brings into focus the complexity of the power relations and institutional asymmetries at play concerning the teaching situation in training classes for care workers.

Drawing from a larger ethnographic study, the current article examines, through interactional sociolinguistics, interview and observation data related to English-language tutorials between two employers and their domestic workers’ daughters in two households in Kolkata. The post-colonial, South Asian context represents a site in which such scholarship has been underrepresented (see Mills and Mullany’s 2011 Language, gender and feminism ). The focus of analysis is two-fold: it evaluates the existing power structures between participants, and it assesses the degree to which widespread Indian discourses about the upward mobility of English (see Graddol’s 2010 “English Next India”, published online by the British Council) are relevant to the current setting. In terms of power structures, legitimated domination (see Grillo’s 1989 Dominant languages ) of the employer over her domestic worker emerges as a salient theme; however, affective attachment (adapted from Hardt’s 1999 article “Affective labor”, published in Boundary ; McDowell and Dyson’s 2011 article “The other side of the knowledge economy: ‘Reproductive’ employment and affective labours in Oxford”, published in Environment and Planning ) and reciprocal dependencies help to both reinforce and diminish the severity of the power asymmetry. With respect to the applicability of popular Indian discourses that equate English-language proficiency with upward mobility, the study finds little evidence of their relevance to the current context in which the subordinate positioning of gender intersects with social class to compound its constraining influence.

Many people in developing countries are faced with a dilemma. If they stay at home, their children are kept in poverty with no prospects of a better future; if they become migrant workers, they will suffer long-term separation from their families. This article focuses on one of the weakest groups in the global economy: domestic migrant workers. It draws on a corpus of more than 400 narratives recorded at a church shelter in Hong Kong and among migrant worker returnees in rural Indonesia and the Philippines. In sharing sessions, migrant women share their experiences of working for abusive employers, and the article analyses how language is used to include and exclude. The women tell how their employers construct them as “incompetent” and “stupid” because they do not speak Chinese. However, faced by repression and marginalisation, the women use their superior English language skills to get back at their employers and momentarily gain the upper hand. Drawing on ideologies of language as the theoretical concept, the article provides a discourse analysis of selected excerpts focusing on language competence and identity construction.