This study aims to explain how language plays a significant role in improving the performance of regional development banks in Indonesia. The method used was qualitative with a questionnaire instrument involving 6 regional development banks in Indonesia. Some of the main findings are 24 statements were found, 19 of which fall into 5 categories,…

This study investigates the impact of customer willingness to communicate in a second language on the development of employee language skills, with employee oral communication aspiration as a mediator. Additionally, it explores the moderating roles of customer retention management and consumer brand relationship quality in these relationships. The…

This paper discusses how persons of multicultural backgrounds describe in interviews their everyday experiences when using Finnish. The focus is on categories of linguistic (non)belonging described in interview interactions. The data consist of 23 single and pair interviews of 33 informants in total and come from two interview datasets. Data are…

Almost every upper- and middle-class family in Saudi Arabia has a foreign housemaid who does the housework and takes care of the children. This study aims to find out whether foreign housemaids have an impact on children's acquisition of Arabic, the children's first language. Surveys with 300 mothers with children under the age of six revealed…

This study examines service encounters in Saudi Arabia from a pragmatic perspective. Its aim is to investigate the possible impact of perceived cultural distance between customers and service providers on pragmatic choices. It specifically examines how Saudi customers construct their service encounters when talking to service providers of the same…

Questions surrounding mobility and migration are often connected to matters of language, citizenship, socio-economic status and class that are inherently unequal between developed and less-developed nation states. Scholars of geography and demographics have conceptualized both internal and external/international migration with "push" and…

This case study describes the use of Critical Ethnographic Narrative Analysis as a methodological approach for understanding why South African domestic workers are taking English language courses in Gauteng, South Africa. More explicitly, a main research question seeks to be answered: Why, in a multilingual society that seemingly promotes…

This article investigates the covert language policy and micro-language planning practices of one female Brazilian-American entrepreneur, Magda, within her multilingual cleaning company. Because Magda is plurilingual (Spolsky in "Language policy." Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004), she is able to draw on her metalinguistic…

This paper aims to demonstrate the implications of health mobility on language practices in the medical tourism industry in India and on the ways, language workers become entrepreneurs. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork that traces the trajectories of three former students of Russian, we highlight their future aspirations as language learners…

Rating scale design and development for testing speaking is generally conducted using one of two approaches: the measurement-driven approach or the performance data-driven approach. The measurement-driven approach prioritizes the ordering of descriptors onto a single scale. Meaning is derived from the scaling methodology and the agreement of…

This article compares data from service encounters conducted in person and over the telephone in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the in-person phase, the author and 8 fieldworkers entered businesses and initiated conversations with Latino service providers in Spanish, noting the language of response. The rate of non-reciprocal…

This article explores variation in address in contemporary Swedish in Sweden-Swedish and Finland-Swedish. The research is part of a large-scale Australian project on changes in the address systems of French, German and Swedish. The present article focuses on results from 72 social network interviews conducted in Sweden (Gothenburg) and Finland…