“It’s cheaper to hire Filipinos and they’re great English speakers”: A raciolinguistic approach to labor migration in the United Arab Emirates
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.71028/jescs.v4i1.191Kata Kunci:
Filipinos, United Arab Emirates, linguistic capital, raciolinguistics, racial capitalAbstrak
Labour migration to the United Arab Emirates is racialized which manifests in the type of work, salaries, and benefits of the employees in the country. With more than 200 nationalities and spoken languages, English is the lingua franca in the global cosmopolitan UAE. With that, Filipinos both have a linguistic and racial capital in the country as they are ethnically stereotyped as fluent English speakers and are often assigned to the frontlines of their employment environments, may it be as store cashiers, office lobby attendants, call center workers, and other service-related jobs. While they do have a relative linguistic and racial capital, their position is still situated in the lower socioeconomic strata of the UAE due to their Asian identity. From a raciolinguistic perspective, this paper investigates the linguistic capital of Filipinos in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The data in this paper is derived from a larger two-year critical sociolinguistic ethnography within the Filipino community, part of which interviewed human resource managers and middle management employees in UAE companies. This study argues that raciolinguistic ideologies are extended to discourses on neoliberal labor migration as experienced by Filipino migrant workers who are treated as “cheap but fluent English speakers.
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