Journal of Sociolinguistics 20/3, 2016: 367–381

RESEARCH NOTE

Unequal Englishes in the Philippines

Ruanni Tupas and Aileen Salonga

National Institute of Education, Singapore and University of the Philippines

In this paper, we show how the notion of unequal Englishes can be deployed
as an alternative way of accounting for the global spread of English.
Through our data, we show how call-center agents in the Philippines
espouse conflicting ideologies in the workplace that invoke unequal
Englishes. On the one hand, they espouse ideologies of privilege by seeing
themselves as being able to exploit the resources of English in the
call-center workplace, thus celebrating themselves as proficient users of the
language. On the other hand, they also espouse ideologies of
delegitimization borne out of pressures to subscribe to American
Standard English and the belief in the inherent superiority of ‘native
speaker’ Englishes and their varieties. By mobilizing the paper towards
unpacking inequalities of Englishes as invoked in the statements of
call-center agents, we hope to contribute to critically engaged discussions
of the role of English in the world today.
Sa papel na ito, ipinapakita namin kung paanong ang nosyon ng
di-magkakapantay na Ingles (unequal Englishes) ay maaaring magamit
bilang alternatibong paraan upang maipaliwanag ang paglaganap ng Ingles
sa mundo. Sa pamamagitan ng nakuhang datos, naipapakita kung paano
tumatangkilik sa magkakatunggaling ideolohiya sa kanilang lugar ng
trabaho ang mga call center agents dito sa Pilipinas na siyang
nagpapalitaw ng di-magkakapantay na Ingles. Sa isang banda,
niyayakap nila ang mga ideolohiya ng pribilehiyo dahil nakikita nila
ang kanilang sarili na may kakayahang magamit ang Ingles sa kanilang
trabaho at kung gayon, naipagdiriwang nila ang kanilang sarili bilang
mahuhusay na tagagamit ng wikang ito. Sa kabilang banda naman,
niyayakap rin nila ang ideolohiya ng delehitimisasyon bunga ng
pangangailangang gumamit ng American Standard English, at sa
paniniwalang may likas na kataasan ang taal na mananalita ng Ingles
at ng mga barayti nito. Sa pamamagitan ng pagpapakilos nitong papel
tungo sa pagpapalabas ng di-magkakapantay na Ingles na mahihinuha sa
mga pahayag ng call center agents, ninanais naming makapag-ambag sa
mapanuri at nakalubog na pagtalakay sa gampanin ng Ingles sa mundo
ngayon. [Filipino]

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368 SALONGA AND TUPAS

KEYWORDS: Unequal Englishes, politics of English, language attitudes

and ideologies, Philippine call centers

INTRODUCTION
The notion of world Englishes, according to Kachru and Nelson (2006: 1),
‘provides the major conceptual framework for a useful and reasoned
understanding of the spread and functions of the English language in global
contexts’. This paper, however, argues that the notion of unequal Englishes
provides for a more useful and reasoned understanding of the global presence
and spread of English. There has been much celebration of ‘Englishes’;
understandably so especially in postcolonial contexts where English continues
to generate much debate on its role in nation-building and national identity
formation. The pluralization of English, based on the assumption of equality
between Englishes, has been celebrated as part of the decolonization process
(Kachru 1986). As the prominent Filipino poet Gemino Abad (1997: 170) said,
‘English is now ours. We have colonized it too’. Despite such worthwhile
reframing of English, however, some Englishes are still more acceptable and
privileged than others, thus reaffirming different forms of inequality between
speakers of Englishes. The term unequal Englishes in our view alerts us to such
inequalities and how the different Englishes and the ideologies that they carry
are embedded in these inequalities. We will explain what this means in the
context of call centers in the country where Filipino agents make sense of
English and themselves as users of the language in the workplace. The
Philippines has overtaken India as the largest call-center outsourcing hub in
the world, and the Filipinos’ English language competence is identified as one
of the key reasons for its massive growth (Rai 2012; Srivastava 2010).
This paper is therefore mainly concerned with the ways in which statements
made by the call-center workers included in the study invoke unequal
Englishes. The focus is not on language practices, but on how the agents make
sense of these practices and themselves as English language users, revealing
conflicting social ideologies which, as mentioned earlier, point to inequalities of
Englishes. Questions about English linguistic inequality are not new (Bhatt
2010; Canagarajah 2002; Kubota 2012; Parakrama 1995; Pennycook 1994;
Ramanathan 2005), but there continues to be a need to focus on unequal
Englishes, rather than only on Englishes, when we investigate descriptions and
processes of the sociolinguistic dimensions of English language spread (Kubota
2012; Tupas 2010, 2015). Unequal Englishes, in this sense, follows the
trajectory of the spread of English today as cogently framed by Park and Wee
(2013): English is implicated in the processes of reproducing ideologies and
inequalities, but the new empire in the current global order does not have a
singular center as previously assumed (e.g. Phillipson 1992) which controls
the affairs and the future of the world. (Neo)imperialist ideologies and relations
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‘remain real’ (Park and Wee 2013: 5) – this is undeniable – but local networks
of actors and subjects and their ideologies complicate the picture of inequalities
of Englishes. The exercise of power through English ‘is embedded into the
material and symbolic relations on the local level’ (2013: 5).
So, how do the call-center workers make sense of English and themselves as
users of the language in the call center? Through our data, we show how
call-center workers espouse ideologies of privilege: they see themselves as being
able to exploit the resources of English in the call-center workplace, for
example by being ‘flexible’ (cf. Manalansan 2011) in their use of the language
depending on the variety of English spoken by the callers. They report being
able to change accents as part of doing their job efficiently; they consider and
celebrate themselves as proficient users of the language. Such flexibility, or the
ability to shift between different Englishes, is a claim of privilege: access to the
industry itself is a privilege available to a very small minority of Filipinos while
the vast majority, due to a confluence of socio-economic and educational
factors, is effectively denied the same access. However, we also show through
the same set of data how Filipino call-center workers espouse ideologies of
delegitimization borne out of pressures to subscribe to American Standard
English and the belief in the inherent superiority of ‘native speaker’ Englishes
and their varieties. Linguistic practice and training in the industry perpetuate
these beliefs such that the Filipino call-center workers view their own English
less positively than the so-called native varieties of English; in fact, they seem
to have internalized the view that as ‘non-native’ speakers of English, they are
less-than-ideal speakers of the language. These conflicting English language
ideologies which circulate within the call-center industry indeed invoke
unequal Englishes and are implicated in the highly stratified nature of English
language use both in the Philippines and transnationally (Lorente 2013;
Tollefson 1991; Tupas 2004).

THE PHILIPPINE OFFSHORE CALL CENTERS

The Philippine offshore call-center industry is billed as the country’s ‘sunshine
industry’ (Alava 2006: 1) because it has continued to grow and prosper despite
the global economic downturn. It is also considered one of the fastest growing
industries in the Philippines. Back in 2000, there were only two call centers in
the country. However, by 2004, 68 U.S.-based call centers had been
established (Friginal 2007). There are now over a thousand call centers in
the country that service not only the U.S. but other countries as well (see list at
http://www.callcenterdirectory.net/call-center-location/Philippines/directory-
2-page-1.html). Various industry reports also indicate that the industry
continues to prosper (IT and Business Process Association Philippines 2011;
Information and Communications Technology Office 2012).
The success of the industry is often attributed to the prevalent belief that
Filipinos have a high level of proficiency in English. However, while the
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industry promotes and boasts of the supposedly high level of English

proficiency among Filipinos, there is also an acknowledgement of the
shrinking pool of English speakers in the country who pass the call centers’
English requirement, resulting in very low hiring rates. For instance, Forey and
Lockwood (2007: 310) report that the call-center industry would receive:

400–500 applicants per week, and only 1–1.5% had a suitable standard of
English. A further 3–4% of applicants were what has become known in the
industry as ‘near-hires’, i.e. their English requires some development through
training courses before they are ready to serve native speaker customers, but
their proficiency levels are reasonable.

This means that only five applicants out of 100 are deemed proficient enough
(or at least trainable to be proficient enough) in English to handle call-center
work. The profile of these five applicants implicates education, class, urbanity
and, of course, English language proficiency.
As it stands now, much of the academic literature on the use of English in
the Philippine call centers has focused on the discourse features of call-center
exchanges between the ‘non-native’ English-speaking agents and ‘native’
English-speaking customers, and the misunderstandings that arise largely
because of the cross-cultural nature of these exchanges (Forey and Lockwood
2007; Friginal 2007; Lockwood, Forey and Price 2008); it is largely not
concerned with the politics of English that underlies call-center talk, nor is it
concerned with the ideological and structuring role that English plays in the
call-center workplace. By mobilizing this paper towards unpacking inequalities
of Englishes as invoked in the statements of call-center agents, we hope to
contribute to a more critically engaged discussion of the role of English in the
world today through the lens of English in the call-center industry in the
Philippines.

THE FILIPINO CALL-CENTER WORKERS

The original study from which the call-center data in this paper are taken
attempts at providing an exhaustive analysis of key sociolinguistic practices in
the Philippine call-center workplace and the implications of such practices on
identity construction and possibilities for agency (see Salonga 2010). The
call-center data include extracts taken from interviews with 20 Filipino
call-center workers. The interviews were done from June 2007 to September
2008 and conducted in an informal, semi-structured manner, guided only by a
set of questions that were designed to be general enough so as not to lead the
respondents to particular kinds of answers. The questions centered on the
speech style used in call centers, and the respondents were asked about their
perceptions of the speech style and its value. Additional questions were asked
in cases where further insights were needed, and clarification of the questions
was given whenever the respondents requested it. As the interview data shows,
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the issue of English turned out to be the most frequently discussed, and the one
that often generated strong emotions.
The choice of interview data in the paper highlights the ways in which
call-center workers make sense of and understand their lived experiences with
English. It reveals how English is being negotiated by contemporary users of
the language, for whom it serves functions that are not always
complementary, and whose use of the language is often valued differentially.
What the choice of interview data therefore foregrounds are the workers’
ideologies about English and how these ideologies are indicative of wider
relations and hierarchies of power that constitute inequality. However, using
interview data has its limitations. Interviews, after all, are ‘situated
performances in and of themselves [. . .]. They are what a certain kind of
person tells another certain kind of person, in certain ways, under certain
conditions’ (Heller 2011: 44). As performances, they tend to affirm the
subjectivities that the respondents inhabit and give value to the practices
associated with these subjectivities. The sentiments in the interviews are
therefore not treated as absolute or conclusive; rather, they are assumed to
hold and convey certain attitudes toward English that draw on and also affirm
ideological structures about English and its use that have emerged not only in
the call-center workplace but also within conversations surrounding the global
spread of English. Thus, while the interview data cannot ascertain that the
reported practices do happen, they nevertheless point to dominant social
ideologies of language in the industry that invoke unequal Englishes. The
ideologies are seen as coming from a confluence of global and local
positionalities vis-a-vis the informants’ relationship with English. In addition,
the choice of which interview extracts to include in the paper has been guided
by the dominant ideologies about English that have emerged in all the
interviews and the clarity and fullness of expression with which these
ideologies have been articulated.
The majority of the respondents included in this paper are frontline
call-center workers, or more popularly, call-center agents or customer service
representatives (CSRs), and English language trainers and specialists who used
to be agents or CSRs (except one who was invited to join the industry
specifically as a language trainer). The industry prides itself in promoting
people from their own ranks, with the majority starting out as agents then
moving up. Many of the accounts handled by the respondents originate from
North America, although the respondents note that there is an expanding
customer base coming from other regions. The perceived widening of the
customer base is significant because it has bearing on how English is imagined
in the industry. The age range of the respondents is from twenty-one to thirty-
seven years old with the majority in their early- to mid-twenties. This age
range is representative of the industry, and is also important to note because it
is part of the construction of the call center as a global workplace with a
young, hip, and modern culture. The respondents all have a Bachelor’s degree
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(in English, Dentistry, Management, Tourism, Chemistry, among others)

except for one, whose highest qualification is a high school diploma. The
respondents have worked in the industry for varying periods of time: the
shortest period is 10 months and the longest is seven years. Of the 20
interviewed, 12 are male and eight are female. The gender distinction is
significant in certain identity construction efforts that have been explored in
other studies (Salonga 2010, 2015), but is not crucial in this paper. ‘Class’ and
‘educational background’ seem to be the more salient social categories
influencing the respondents’ ideologies about English in the workplace. The
ideologies are seen as coming from a confluence of global and local
positionalities vis-a-vis the informants’ relationship with English.

IDEOLOGIES OF PRIVILEGE: FLEXIBILITY WITH ENGLISHES

What is initially striking about the call-center agents’ view of English in the
call centers is the perceived flexibility with which the agents deploy their
English in the workplace. For example, Lloyd, a call-center agent, notes:

Sometimes I play with my accent, I use [a] British [accent], then the customer
would say, ‘Are you from Australia?’ Something like that. ‘No, I’m from the
Philippines.’ ‘I thought you’re from Australia ‘cause you sound Australian.’
Then there’s this customer who feels comfortable when he’s talking to me
because he [thinks] I’m an Englishman and he says, ‘You know, my father’s also
English.’

Lloyd continues to note that his enjoyment from the job comes from listening
to different accents. He says:

What I appreciate is that [. . .] I get to listen to a lot of different variations of the

accent. The interesting part is talking with Irish and Scottish people. It’s really
different, the way they say words. It’s like our style of pronouncing each syllable
of the words, but they still have the English accent though, which is very
different. I find it very interesting. It is actually fun.

Another informant, Josh, a language trainer, talks about how the English
language requirement does not pose much difficulty for him: ‘First of all, the
first accent that I learned growing up was British. I just learned the American
way of speaking after that. So, it’s easy for me.’ Whether or not Lloyd and Josh
can in fact switch between the different Englishes as they have so described is
not the main issue here. The point that is critical to make is that from Lloyd’s
and Josh’s accounts, performing different Englishes is possible and is
encouraged based on the positive value assigned to it by both agents.
Moreover, there is also an emerging perception in the call centers that the
face of English is changing because of changing global demands. The client or
customer base is said to be expanding, and with it, more varieties of English are

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needed and desired. Lloyd, for instance, explains that many call centers are
now venturing out of North America:

Because we’re catering to the global needs, we don’t only take calls from the U.S.
It’s actually worldwide. You can speak with people with thick British accents,
Welsh accents, with Arabic accents, with Indian accents, so we adjust in that
particular aspect. If you talk to a non-native English speaker, we adjust our
registers, we adjust our jargons. We speak slowly, and then we use very simple
terms. The pace is changed and then we have to rephrase a lot.

Karen, a team manager who used to be a call-center agent, confirms this

point by enumerating three types of accounts according to region – North
America, Europe and the Middle East, and Asia Pacific – and explains that each
type requires a particular manner of using English that is mostly dependent on
the English used in the region. Will, a language trainer, notes that even if the
call centers service North America alone, North America itself is composed of a
very diverse group of people, thus the need to address this reality as well:

Some call centers don’t want to be labeled as ‘it’s too American.’ They don’t want
to be labeled like that. They would always want to say that they are not only
entertaining the Americans because they are aware that in the United States, it’s
not just Americans. It’s actually a melting pot. There are so many cultures and
there are so many people there in the U.S. And that you should have to be able to
address everything.

What the extracts above show is that there has been an expanding,
diversifying customer base, thus the need to accommodate – and perform – a
wider array of desirable Englishes. The agents suggest that the Philippine call
centers are a rich and productive – and not to mention, enabling – space in
terms of the presence and growth of various Englishes. The agents report
flexibility between many Englishes depending on the specific demands of each
call, with the industry seemingly encouraging other varieties of English in the
world for as long as they are tied with efficient call management. Equipping
agents with these other varieties should only lead to the expansion of their
linguistic repertoire, with all of its attendant benefits. For the agents,
performing linguistic flexibility is a source of pride and privilege, one reason
why they have been able to access the world of the call center in the first place.
As mentioned earlier, the Filipino agents constitute only around five percent of
the total number of applicants who attempted employment in the industry; this
low success rate can be explained through the lens of education and class. Sara
clearly articulates this point:

You have to admit, really, the middle class to the well off, they’re the ones who
actually get to watch cable, or they’re the ones who get to buy dictionaries and
encyclopedias for their kids, or the quality of education that they get, you know,
everything just works for them. So, for example, even if [they] didn’t graduate

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from college – a lot of call centers do welcome undergrads – their high school
education probably came from Ateneo, La Salle Greenhills, or even Miriam
[exclusive private schools in the Philippines]. They survive and thrive in the
contact center industry. They grew up with computers. They grew up with all of
the cable channels available to you and they are very comfortable with the
language. That’s an edge right there.

So, how does this privilege relate to the call-center agents’ claim of flexibility
with English? We can address this question by historicizing the stratification of
different Englishes in the country. In the 1970s, at the time when Gonzalez
(1976) proclaimed the Filipinos’ linguistic and cultural emancipation from the
vestiges of American imperialism, Philippine education was being
re-engineered as the center of training for cheap labor as part of the country’s
restructuring towards the export-driven industrialization of the economy
(Tollefson 1991). Thus, in the process, the multi-tiered labor force resulted in
not one but many ‘proficiencies in English [which] were ordered accordingly’
(Lorente 2013: 193), with the most lowly-skilled graduates requiring only a
basic level of English. Years later, the stratifying infrastructures of the
Philippine economy, established partly through the schools, have similarly
firmly stratified English language use in the country, leading Sibayan and
Gonzalez (1996: 163) to propose five major varieties of English in the country.
These are the Englishes of:
1. minimally functionally literate Filipinos (which would be very much
mixed with local languages);
2. Filipino overseas contract workers;
3. white-collar workers;
4. those who come from the middle and upper-middle class; and
5. intellectuals.
The first three varieties constitute the ‘vast majority’ (1996: 163) of Filipinos,
but in the academic literature what constitutes ‘Philippine English’ is limited
only to the ‘educated’ variety or that which is used by the small Filipino elite
(Bautista 2000; Tupas 2001). Call-center workers draw upon this ‘educated’
variety to position themselves ideologically as agentive or empowered
individuals who can creatively manipulate the English language to secure
their place in the workplace.
Similarly, Bautista (1982, 1996) proposes three gendered but class-driven
sub-varieties of Philippine English:

• Yaya (‘nanny’) English;

• bar girl English (spoken then around the vicinity of American bases in the
country); and
• colegiala English (spoken by female students enrolled in expensive and
private Catholic schools).

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These three-tiered varieties of Philippine English have taken on even more

contemporary forms as the Philippines continues to produce new ‘servants of
globalization’ (Parre~nas 2001) or ‘workers of the world’ (Lorente 2012) in
transnational contexts. This refers to how the different varieties of Philippine
English are implicated in unequal global structures of relations where
countries like the Philippines (for example, and more specifically, the call-
center industry) are positioned marginally and unjustly in the competition
for new forms of capital in the world. Thus, according to Tinio (2013), Yaya
English has transformed into the English of Filipino domestic helpers around
the world, bar girl English into the English of Filipina entertainers, especially
in Japan, and colegiala English (English of expensive private-school girls) into
call-center English or the English of Filipinos in the outsourcing industry.
The point to highlight here and in the preceding paragraph is that the
English used by Filipino call-center workers is a privileged and ‘educated’
variety of English which has given the workers access to the material
privileges of call-center work in the first place. It is through the enabling
structures of English language use that the Filipino agents are able to
construct themselves as flexible and creative users of English in the
workplace.

IDEOLOGIES OF DELEGITIMIZATION: THE POWER OF AMERICAN

STANDARD ENGLISH
Nevertheless, while there is something to celebrate in the creativity and agency
of Filipino call-center agents’ use of English, the agents report being perpetually
confronted with the power of American Standard English and the native
speaker in everyday practice; for example, through belief in the intrinsic
superiority of ‘native’ varieties of English, especially American Standard
English. For example, Eric, below, realizes that working in the call center has
reminded him that he does not speak ‘perfect English’, even though he has
initially expressed pride in his good command of English:

It’s just you learn that there are lots of things that you don’t really know yet
about the language, like you realize you still have speech errors, and it’s really
humbling to realize that you don’t have perfect English yet.

For Eric, ‘perfect English’ refers to perfecting the sounds of American English
like the distinction between the short and long vowels, thus idealizing it even if
Americans themselves ‘do not all speak English in the same way’ (Kretzschmar
2010: 96). Will, on the other hand, refers to this ‘imperfect’ English as
‘Filipinisms’ or localized uses of English which agents are asked to avoid.
According to him, Philippine English phrases like ‘for a while’ and ‘open the
lights’ are labelled ‘wrong’ or ‘bad English’. Indeed, he continues to note that
there are some trainers who would:

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really laugh at the mistakes of the people when it comes to pronunciation, they
have become pedantic. They have become very picky when it comes to
pronunciation. They pick on slight pronunciation errors, although [they’re] still
understandable [. . .]. It’s like you’re teaching them how to speak but then they
don’t have their own voice. It’s just when it comes to working, they have to
pretend that they’re someone else.

Lloyd, who believes that he can shift from one variety of English to another
without much difficulty (as mentioned earlier), also complains about how
being a ‘non-native’ speaker of English is deemed as a handicap, although this
perception is perpetuated through the agents’ direct contact with customers:

There are really customers who would make you feel like you do not deserve
speaking that language [English]. I’m not a native speaker, sometimes I commit
lapses, and sometimes it really makes you feel that you are different from them
[customers]. They get to that point that they really had to say it, ‘Okay, I’ll
repeat.’ There are those markers that [are] really belittling of your personality.

Thus, while call-center agents construct call centers as rich sites for the
performance and celebration of English linguistic flexibility, their social
ideologies also point firmly to the legitimacy of American Standard English
and, in the process, the delegitimization of their own use(s) of English. While
relatively privileged within Philippine society, the Filipino workers and their
English are essentially not valued by their ‘native’-speaking English customers.
To use the words of Lorente (2013), many Filipino call-center agents are ‘in
the grip’ of American Standard English. Note how many of these agents believe
that they can shuttle between many Englishes and identities to perform their
daily work successfully; yet, the liberating and emancipatory potential of these
linguistic and cultural transformations is also cut off by these agents’ own
feelings of insecurity and apprehension about how their use of English is
judged, which sometimes also leads to verbal and emotional abuse being
experienced by the workers. While the call centers open up opportunities for
Filipinos who speak different varieties of English, these varieties are in fact
unequally valued and positioned in the workplace. Whether speaking with
‘distinctive Philippine English’ (Bolton 2010: 554), approximating ‘to a
‘native-like’ command of English’ (2010: 557), or shifting between ‘global’
varieties, the Filipino agents’ English at work continues to be judged against
the yardstick of the American Standard English ideology. How and why does
this happen?
One gatekeeping measure that can perpetuate the (American) standard
English ideology in call centers is the deeply entrenched training system within
the industry. It is well documented that call-center agents in the offshore
context are trained to produce the ‘right’ sounds and the corresponding social
and cultural knowledge that the industry deems to correspond to these sounds
(Cowie 2007; Lomibao 2007; Mirchandani 2008, 2012; Mirchandani and

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Maitra 2007; Poster 2007). As reported by the respondents, to achieve both

the required accent and cultural fluency, call-center workers undergo accent
‘neutralization’ and diction training, and lessons on American (or British to a
lesser extent) geography and culture (Lomibao 2007; Salonga 2010). Both the
explicit and implicit message propagated by the training system is that ‘[t]his
(American) accent is the scarce good, the salable commodity, which enables
the CSRs to cross linguistic boundaries and, if successfully deployed, even pass
as native speakers of English’ (Rahman 2009: 238). Broadly speaking, the
training system perpetuates what Blommaert (2009) calls a ‘market of
accents’ which sells a package of success in the globalized world with
‘American accent, personal happiness and confidence, smooth and efficient
communication with Americans, job satisfaction, business opportunities and
money’ (2009: 252). In turn, this message suggests that English in the call
center is oriented towards American Standard English. The Filipino agents
carve out creative and empowering spaces where they can perform many
potentially desirable Englishes to their own advantage, yet the fact that they
speak supposedly on the edges of the standard relegates them to a position of
weakness vis-a-vis ‘native speakers’ of English. ‘English users in the
Philippines,’ according to Tope (2008: 266), ‘remain beholden to the
standard.’

CONCLUSION
The data above show how the social ideologies of English and its use in the call
center are both empowering and disempowering. As part of a transnational
workforce, call-center workers in the Philippines derive cultural and economic
capital from their perceived ability to produce desirable or marketable English,
and they are able to do it because of locally enabling conditions which have
allowed their ‘educated’ and ‘privileged’ subjectivities to flourish in the
workplace. Their ‘Philippine English’ is the ‘educated’ variety of English in the
Philippines (see again, Bautista 2000; Tupas 2001), a privileged variety that
allows this small group of winners in the industry to navigate the system
successfully. At the same time, the workers also exhibit an inferiority complex
as their English – the ‘educated’ Philippine English – falls on the edges of the
standard. The workers note that they have to always contend with the fact
that their English is never treated as equal with the ‘standard’ varieties such as
American Standard English and British Standard English. Yes, Philippine
English is part of a group of World Englishes, but more appropriately it is
actually part of what McArthur (2001: 10) calls a ‘federation of unequals.’
Unequal Englishes are imbricated in the processes of reproducing inequalities
responsible for the spread of English. They facilitate the use of cheap
transnational Filipino labor through a marketable and globally
comprehensible English for the accumulation of new capital, while
reproducing locally shaped class relations.
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The pluralization and diversification of global English due to globalization

has gained greater traction because of the emergence of new economic
infrastructures (the global expansion of the outsourcing industry, for example)
in which the accumulation of capital through cheaper labor and highly
regulative work policies continues. Greater attention to call-center
communication in the context of research on Englishes is a welcome
development, but if we do not engage directly with issues concerning the
ideologies and systemic inequalities that surround the everyday life of
call-center work, we may miss out on the complex texture of language use
in the workplace.
This paper hopes to contribute to greater sensitivity to material and symbolic
inequalities through social ideologies which connect agents among themselves,
between them and the dynamics of transnational work, between them and
their customers, and between them and those who have been denied access to
their world. Indeed, globalization has bound different peoples of the world
together through the Englishes they speak, but the bigger picture is that
ideologies about Englishes and the people who speak them remind us that
pluralizing, indigenizing, or localizing the English language does not
necessarily lead to freedom and liberation.

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Address correspondence to:

Aileen Salonga
Department of English and Comparative Literature
College of Arts and Letters, Pavilion 1120
Palma Hall
University of the Philippines
Diliman
Quezon City 1101
Philippines
aosalonga@yahoo.com

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd