ABSTRACT
Customer call center services in the US and other English-speaking countries have been outsourced to strategic nations such as the Philippines and India since the early 1990s, essentially to lower operational costs in how these call centers are maintained. This chapter highlights emerging patterns of language as used by Filipino call center representatives as they support their customers/callers from the US. From the first call center company established by US-owned Accenture Group in 1992, the call center industry in the Philippines has become one of the major drivers of the country’s once sluggish economy, now making it one of the fastest-growing economies in the Asian region. The chapter utilizes corpus analysis to describe some of the prominent linguistic characteristics of Filipino call center agents’ discourse in English. Politeness in spoken interaction, covering a range of contexts and speaker demographics, has been enthusiastically explored by linguists over the past several years.
