Mother Tongue Influence and Global English: Creating “Neutral” Elites in Delhi's Business Processing Outsourcing Industry

Abstract

Mother tongue influence (MTI) is a widely used yet often underdefined term in India's business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. “Mother tongue” is an unavoidable, yet fraught political category linked to sovereignty, education, region, and ethnicity. Yet in the BPO industry, workers are expected to sound “global” with no identifiable regional “mother tongue” accent. Trainers in the BPO industry have responded to this challenge by working to remove workers’ MTI—and to remove workers with excessive MTI from the industry altogether. This paper argues that MTI gets used in the BPO industry to justify the erasure of both speech and speakers without overtly identifying the systemic privileging of upper-caste, elite, urban varieties of English and their speakers. Regional and ethnic affiliations are treated as intrinsic properties of persons and speech through “mother tongue,” while socially privileged accent trainers are able to claim their own global unmarkedness.