“Which variables matter to customers in call centre speech?”

I will be drafting an ESRC open grant proposal to further my work on call centres. The next stage of this work requires a large scale perception project in order to determine which Indian English variables listeners (“customers”) are able to perceive, and what attitudes are linked to these perceptions. This application has been held up by a lack of suitable collaborators, but I have now had an opportunity to meet potential collaborators at the Sociolinguistics of Call Centres Workshop at the Sociolinguistics Symposium (June 2016), in particular researchers on call centres in the Philippines (Gail Forey, HK Polytechnic and Eric Friginal, Georgia State University). I am also collaborating with researchers on intelligibility in Asian Englishes, such Robert Fuchs (BUHK). In 2017 I will spend time working with co-investigators on the grant application and in September 2017 I will attend the Customer Contact Expo in London to develop opportunities to disseminate the work.