Domestic workers talk. Language use and social practices in a multilingual workplace By KellieGonçalves and Anne AmblerSchluter (Ed.), Bristol: Multilingual Matters. 2024 xv + 146 pp.

Home is “the place where communication and the informal market economy meet,” explain Gonçalves and Schluter (2024, p. 9). Despite “home” having been identified as an important site for sociolinguistic research (e.g., “Language ideologies compared: Metaphors of public/private,” Susan Gal, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2005: 23–37), it has received less scholarly attention until recently. Domestic workers' talk hinges at the interface of the private (i.e., home) and public (i.e., workplace) spheres, a context further complicated by the multilingual entailments of the global care chain. This monograph constitutes an important addition to the growing body of research addressing language, home, and work. Chapter 1 sets out the heart of the study: a multilingual cleaning company run by an American-Brazilian woman in the state of New Jersey, USA. The authors address the geographical proximity between particular New Jersey neighborhoods, which allows migrants living in ethnolinguistic enclaves to access higher-paid work in upper-middle-class English-speaking suburbs. Chapter 1 provides crucial details about these neighborhoods, drawing on recent data about income and language proficiency, which serve to support the authors' later claims about the significance of social class and language brokering. The authors also address the importance of these issues within the sociopolitical and historical context of the 20th century, during which time a dramatic increase in female workplace participation led to a rising demand for domestic workers in traditionally female sectors (e.g., cleaning, cooking, and childcare). This, in turn, has contributed to the global care chain of transnational labor migration that underpins the functioning of countries such as the USA. The authors highlight how this demand for domestic work and the reliance on migrant labor have presented opportunities for enterprising individuals in the host countries, and they contend that such entrepreneurial success may be dependent on the individual's unique combination of emotional intelligence and intercultural and multilingual skills. The book focuses on one particular example of such an entrepreneur: Magda, the American-Brazilian multilingual owner of the cleaning company “Shine.” Chapter 3 provides extensive detail on Magda, with a biographical sketch and an account of her own trajectory as a migrant and female domestic worker in the United States. In Chapter 3, the authors assess Magda's (micro) management style according to five features of emotional intelligence and her skills relating to multilingual language brokering and intercultural mediation. Other chapters in the book explore themes emerging from research on the Shine employees and the business clientele over an extended 10-year period. For example, Chapter 4 provides an exploration of the nuances relating to language and power in the context of blue-collar work and migration, and in particular the notion of “decapitalization” (i.e., the devaluation of a migrant's linguistic capital in school and work, p. 81). The authors explain that the Portuguese ethnic enclave in New Jersey generates its own cultural capital, which heightens the appeal of businesses like Shine and contributes to a loyal customer base (p. 85). The cultural capital functions in tandem with the social capital of the Portuguese neighborhood network, which supports a reliable employee recruitment base and results in economic capital: a stable and above-average income for Shine employees. Shine employees attest to the value of the Portuguese language, often over and above the languages that are normally and ostensibly more highly valued in the USA, such as English and Spanish. The “Portuguese-centricity” (p. 94) of the neighborhood means that Portuguese—a language spoken by migrants to the USA—does not face the decapitalization that heritage languages often experience. Instead, the authors identify instances of “horizontal assimilation” (Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian connections and the myth of cultural purity, Vijay Prashad, Beacon Press, 2001), whereby migrants (e.g., from Ecuador) orient to an ethnolinguistically different diaspora group (i.e., the Portuguese community) that has power within this particular locale (p. 98). This orientation leads to cases where some migrants learn Portuguese rather than English. Chapter 5 moves beyond a focus on language to other multimodal forms of communication that are used by domestic workers at Shine. Drawing on notions such as “multicompetence,” the authors argue that object manipulation and gestures become codified ways of surmounting linguistic obstacles in a context where the workers and the clientele do not share a common language. Such examples of practiced multimodal communication help to underscore the authors' argument that, in the context of domestic work, multiple creative solutions emerge, allowing workers to bypass fluency in the dominant language (English). Indeed, it is proficiency in Portuguese that is central to the workers' ability to obtain and retain employment at Shine. Also, the fact that the workers are (or become) reasonably proficient in Portuguese and adept at multimodal communication—but not English—leads the authors to conclude that communication ability should be conceived “as a broader set of skills than mere dominant-language proficiency” (p. 113). Perhaps many readers will be most interested in Chapter 2, which introduces the authors' creative mixed methodological approach. This includes, first and foremost, a “multi-sited,” “mobile,” “critical,” and “post-critical” ethnography (p. 33). Specifically, the authors use participant observation, shadowing, field notes, survey responses, interviews, and discourse/content analysis of relevant texts. Research was undertaken over a period of 10 years, which provided the authors ample opportunity to monitor developments at Shine. Crucially, the authors situate themselves with respect to both the New Jersey context and relevant research participants. The authors have status as both “insiders” and “outsiders” (p. 36). One of the authors has a close familial relationship with Magda, was briefly employed at Shine, has maintained contact with Magda and the employees, and has occasionally participated in this “community of practice” (p. 115). Reflections on the methodology are expanded upon in the conclusion (Chapter 6), where the authors also reflect on a major theme throughout the analysis: the complex relationship between language and power in blue-collar settings. The book constitutes an important contribution to the field of language and (domestic) work, especially considering the difficulties in accessing sites like that of Shine. It is also highly readable and accessible even to readers new to this area. This is a short volume consisting of only six chapters, of which three focus on research findings. More senior researchers may wish to see additional detail, since the complexity of the research design, the number of participants, and the extended 10-year research period presumably produced a richness of data and findings beyond that which is included in the book. One notable absence appears to be an exploration of the precarity of domestic work. While the authors describe some of their participants as “vulnerable” (e.g., p. 30), they did not explore how such vulnerability (e.g., the undocumented status of some workers, which is mentioned only in passing, e.g., pp. 30, 104) is addressed within the context of Shine. Although precarity and vulnerability are not discussed in detail, the authors do portray the actors and participants in this understudied context with great compassion. The volume finishes by recounting the closure of Shine, the retirement of Magda, and the onward trajectories of some of the employees featured in the book. It serves as an important reminder of the human element at the heart of the study of language. Specifically, the focus on domestic workers' talk matters because of the individuals who develop complex and creative communicative means, enabling them to interact harmoniously both within and beyond the domestic workplace.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.