Unpacking the “language” of low-end globalization

Abstract Unlike high-end globalization, the global flows of people and goods (e.g., between global-South nations) constitute a major type of low-end globalization. Such low-end globalization results in mobility, superdiversity, and grassroots multilingualism. Boasting many international tourists and traders, Bangkok is a dynamic trade, business, and tourism hub and multilingual contact zone. This study explores the sociolinguistic aspect of grass-roots communication emerging from the author’s ethnographic observations of two malls in central Bangkok that orient towards foreign tourists/traders: the MBK center (with many Middle Easterners) and Indra Square (with many Nepali-Burmese salespeople and Indian/South Asian buyers). The study illustrates the dynamic, flexible, pragmatic, and embodied nature of grass-roots communication as jugaad, where various multimodal and multisemiotic means are strategically deployed as meaning-making resources. These include using named languages (e.g., English, Arabic, and Hindi), translanguaging (e.g., Hinglish), and using calculator, Google translate, and gestures. This study contributes to scholarship in (grassroots) multilingualism in our superdiverse societies in the 21st century beyond the elitist use of language (e.g., using perfect English). This study argues that while English remains important overall as lingua franca, other languages (e.g., Arabic and Hindi) also carry important capital in the linguistic market as far as low-end globalization is concerned