Abstract
Recent Chinese trade expansion into many African countries has brought new communities of Chinese migrants into the region. In the “China Town” shopping centres established in the Western Cape, many employ African migrants as shop assistants. This study considers the notion of “language policy” as it is applied in developing a foundation for business communication in a setting where interactants have mutually unintelligible first languages and relatively low English lingua franca proficiency. Taking an ethnographic approach, this article investigates the linguistic diversity of such a market place where workers rely on English as the workplace language, developing patterns of language choice regarding which languages and styles occur in different kinds of conversational events and sequences. We focus first on the nature of the communicative practices in such a multilingual trading centre and, second, interpreting these observed practices, we indicate how an informal business language policy tacitly develops.
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