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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 431

Part of General Poster Session (Other abstracts in this session)

The city as a site for language commodification

Authors: Duchêne, Alexandre; Flubacher, Mi-Cha
Submitted by: Flubacher, Mi-Cha (University of Teacher Education/University of Fribourg, Switzerland)

The bilingual Swiss city Biel/Bienne is known as the “city of communication”. Over the last ten years, it has attracted a variety of companies in the communication sector, ranging from ICT firms and software developers to call centres. This economic shift away from heavy industry towards the provision of services was a conscious move on the part of the city’s administration. Far from random, the transformation of the city’s economic activity is typical of the political economy of late modernity, where communication has taken on a central role and language skills have become an important resource.

The branding of Biel/Bienne as the “city of communication” has to be situated in these developments. Not only has the city actively sought to attract companies from the communication sector to open up business, it has done so, successfully, by promoting its most valuable resource: The city’s bilingual population, competent in both French and (Swiss) German. Especially call centres targeting the trilingual market of Switzerland (German, French and Italian) are looking for multilingual speakers (so-called agents) in order to maximize managerial profit by employing one person with several language skills instead of several people proficient in only one language.

In our poster we will contextualise the economic shift of the city and explain its conditions of possibility by going back in history. However, we will also turn to the present by drawing on data from an ethnographic study (2010-2011) of a call centre in Biel/Bienne. Recordings and (participant) observation of interactions, trainings, quality management, etc. inform our analysis; qualitative interviews add a second dimension. We will visualise extracts of this data to discuss three relevant points: 1) How languages are used on a daily basis in a multilingual economic environment and thus become an economic resource, 2) how agents come to terms with their working conditions, and 3) how the individual and social consequences of the “city of communication” can be interpreted. Our poster contributes to the discussion of whether the commodification of multilingualism as typical of late modernity also implies a real valorisation of the multilingual speakers and their work.