The Commodification of Language: Conceptual Concerns and Empirical Manifestations 2020048384, 9780367464080, 9780367464073, 9781003028581

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The Commodification of Language

This volume seeks to add to our understanding of how language is constructed in late capitalist societies. Exploring the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of the so-called “commodification of language” and its relationship to the notion of linguistic capital, the authors examine recent research that offers implications for language policy and planning. Bringing together an international group of scholars, this collection includes chapters that address whether or not language can rightly be referred to as a commodity and, if so, under what circumstances. The different theoretical foundations of understanding language as a resource with exchange value – whether as commodity or capital – have practical implications for policy writ large. The implications of the “commodification of language” in more empirical terms are explored, both in terms of how it affects language as well as language policy at more micro levels. This includes more specific policy arenas such as language in education policy or family language policies as well as the implications for individual identity construction and linguistic communities. With a conclusion written by leading scholar David Block, this book is key reading for researchers and advanced students of critical sociolinguistics, language and economy, language and politics, language policy and linguistic anthropology within linguistics, applied linguistics, and language teacher education. John E. Petrovic is Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Technology Studies at The University of Alabama. He teaches in the areas of philosophy of education and educational policy, with focus on language policy in education. His recent books include A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education and Unschooling Critical Pedagogy, Unfixing Schools. Bedrettin Yazan is Associate Professor in the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies at The University of Texas at San Antonio. His research focuses on language teacher learning and identity, collaboration between ESL and content teachers, language policy and planning, and World Englishes. Methodologically he is interested in critical autoethnography, narrative inquiry, and qualitative case study.

Language, Society and Political Economy Series editor: David Block ICREA & Universitat Pompeu i Fabra

This series aims to publish broadly accessible monographs which directly address how theoretical frameworks in political economy can directly inform the critical analysis and discussion of language in society issues. Contributions to the series include extensive theoretical background, dealing with an aspect or area of political economy, before moving to an application of this theoretical discussion to a particular language in society issue. The series takes up the challenge of interdisciplinarity, linking scholarship in the social sciences in general (and political economy in particular) with the kinds of issues which language in society researchers have traditionally focused on. The series also aims to publish books by authors whose ideas fall outside the mainstream of language in society scholarship and by authors in parts of the world which have traditionally been underrepresented in relevant international journals and book series. Recent titles in the series: Language Textbooks in the Era of Neoliberalism Pau Bori Language and Neoliberal Governmentality Edited by Luisa Martín Rojo and Alfonso Del Percio The Commodification of Language Conceptual Concerns and Empirical Manifestations Edited by John E. Petrovic and Bedrettin Yazan Global English and Political Economy John P. O’Regan For more information on any of these and other titles, or to order, please go to www.routledge.com/Language-Society-and-Political-Economy/book-series/LSPE Additional resources for Language and Communication are available on the Routledge Language and Communication Portal: www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/languageandcommunication/

The Commodification of Language Conceptual Concerns and Empirical Manifestations

Edited by John E. Petrovic and Bedrettin Yazan

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, John E. Petrovic and Bedrettin Yazan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of John E. Petrovic and Bedrettin Yazan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Petrovic, John E., editor. | Yazan, Bedrettin, editor. Title: The commodification of language : conceptual concerns and empirical manifestations / edited by John E. Petrovic and Bedrettin Yazan. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Language, society and political economy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020048384 | ISBN 9780367464080 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367464073 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003028581 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages–Economic aspects. Classification: LCC P120.E27 C56 2021 | DDC 306.44–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048384 ISBN: 978-0-367-46408-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-46407-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02858-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction

vii viii xii 1

JOHN E. PETROVIC AND BEDRETTIN YAZAN

1 Confronting language fetishism in practice

7

WILLIAM SIMPSON AND JOHN P. O’REGAN

2 Language as instrument, resource, and maybe capital, but not commodity: A Marxian clarification

24

JOHN E. PETROVIC AND BEDRETTIN YAZAN

3 Language, context, and economic value: An interactionist approach

41

KENNETH MCGILL

4 Misconceptions of economics and political economy in sociolinguistic research

56

FRANÇOIS GRIN

5 Between voice and voices: Negotiating value among interpreters in Toronto

71

JULIE H. TAY AND SEBASTIAN MUTH

6 “A breathtaking English”: Negotiating what counts as distinctive linguistic capital at an elite international school near Barcelona

89

ANDREA SUNYOL

7 Language, ethnicity, and tourism in the making of a Himalayan Tamang village BAL KRISHNA SHARMA

108

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Contents

8 When linguistic capital isn’t enough: Personality development and English speakerhood as capital in India

127

KATY HIGHET AND ALFONSO DEL PERCIO

9 Ideologies of multilingualism as an investment and as a marketable commodity among Greek expat families in Luxembourg

144

NIKOS GOGONAS

10 Names as linguistic capital

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PETER K. W. TAN

11 Ideologies of French and commodification: What does meaning making imply for multilinguals in transnational times?

181

SYLVIE ROY AND JULIE S. BYRD CLARK

Coda: Issues arising around conceptual and empirical work on the commodification of language

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DAVID BLOCK

Index

212

Illustrations

Figures 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

Wall decorations at FIS FIS web advertisement FIS web advertisement The village of Gatlang Cultural performance in Gatlang Gatlang village in the tourism promotional material Homestay in Gatlang Hotel in Gatlang

99 100 100 112 114 118 119 120

Tables 8.1 Ways in which the NGO sought to inculcate certain bodily movements into the students 9.1 Participating families in the 2014 study 9.2 Participating families in the 2017 study 9.3 Research timeline 10.1 Changes in Kuala Lumpur street names since 1890 10.2 Specific and generic elements of Malaysian building names

136 150 150 152 173 175

Contributors

David Block is ICREA Research Professor in Sociolinguistics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He has published books, articles, and chapters on a variety of topics, adopting in recent years a Marxist perspective in his analysis of contemporary social phenomena. He is author of Political Economy and Sociolinguistics: Political Economy and Sociolinguistics: Neoliberalism, Inequality and Social Class (Bloomsbury, 2018), Post-truth and Political Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and Innovations and Challenges in Identity Research (Routledge, 2021). Julie S. Byrd Clark is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Education of Western University, Canada, specializing in the domains of sociolinguistics, bi/multilingual education, discourse analysis, ecological, and postmodern approaches for multilingual language teaching and learning in transnational times. As an ethnographer, sociolinguist, and teacher she uses innovative research methodologies in order to capture some of the complexities and representations of people’s social and linguistic practices in their everyday lives. Alfonso Del Percio is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics. His research deals with the intersection of language and political economy and focuses on language, migration, and governmentality, as well as the links between language, work, and social inequality. He is co-editor of Language, Education and Neoliberalism (with Mi-Cha Flubacher, Multilingual Matters, 2017) and of Language and Neoliberal Governmentality (with Luisa Martin Rojo, Routledge, 2019). Nikos Gogonas is Associate Lecturer in the Department of English at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His research interests lie in the field of Sociolinguistics with a focus on bi/multilingualism in homes, schools, and communities that have experienced diverse migration flows. His publications have appeared in journals such as Multilingua, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. He is an editorial board member of the Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices.

List of contributors

ix

François Grin is Full Professor of Economics at the University of Geneva, where he also teaches courses in the selection, design, and evaluation of language policies, and he has published widely on these topics. He has steered several large-scale interdisciplinary research projects, such as the European project MIME (Mobility and Inclusion in Multilingual Europe, 2014–2018), with 25 teams representing 11 disciplines. He is Editor-in-Chief of Language Problems and Language Planning. Katy Highet is a PhD student at UCL Institute of Education. She has a forthcoming chapter on the navigation of neoliberal discourses in an Indian NGO in a Routledge edited volume on language and neoliberalism (with Alfonso Del Percio) and was recently awarded the Braj B. Kachru award for the best student paper by the International Association of World Englishes. Her research interests lie in the intersection of language, social mobility, social stratification, and inequality. Kenneth McGill is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist working on language, labour, value, and the social state. His most recent ethnography is on basic income activism in Germany. He has also recently written about language and reification, as well as economic value as a representational phenomenon with pragmatic features. Sebastian Muth is a Lecturer in Business Discourse at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. His work is centred on the intersection between commodification and policy, and on ideologies of English and language policy in post-Soviet countries. His most recent research investigates the working lives of healthcare entrepreneurs within the medical tourism industry in Delhi, India. Prior to his appointment with Lancaster, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Multilingualism in Fribourg, Switzerland. John P. O’Regan is Professor of Critical Applied Linguistics at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. John specialises in English as a global language, intercultural communication, and critical discourse analysis, and has wide interests in political economy, critical social theory, and colonial history. He has published widely in applied linguistics and cultural studies. His latest book is Global English and Political Economy (2021) in the Routledge Language, Society and Political Economy series. John E. Petrovic is Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Technology Studies at The University of Alabama. He teaches in the areas of philosophy of education and educational policy, with a focus on language policy in education. His recent books include A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education (Multilingual Matters) and Unschooling Critical Pedagogy, Unfixing Schools (Peter Lang). Sylvie Roy is a Professor in Language and Literacy at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her expertise lies in

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List of contributors sociolinguistics, bilingual and multilingual education, ethnography, and discourse analysis. In 2020, she published a book called French Immersion Ideologies in Canada, which looks at how French and learning French is perceived by teachers, students, administrators, and parents in French immersion programmes.

Bal Krishna Sharma is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Idaho. For the last several years, he has been studying culture, representation, and the political economy of language from the perspectives of workers in the context of Nepal’s tourism industry. He investigates what English, other international languages, and minority languages mean for the workplace context in which commodification is a major driving force to shape communication. William Simpson is currently a Lecturer in English at the Tokyo University of Science. He has published work on ideologies of English in China, on language commodification in late capitalism, and ELT and Neoliberalism in Japan. He is currently working on a political economy of the eikaiwa English language teacher in the context of English conversational schools in Japan. His general research interests include critical applied linguistics, political economy, Marxism, dialectics, and the ELT Industry. Andrea Sunyol holds a PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In her ethnographic dissertation supervised by Dr Eva Codó, she analysed how internationality was socially constructed in elite schools that were undergoing processes of internationalization. She is senior teaching fellow at UCL Institute of Education. Her research is centred around the study of multilingualism and social inequality, more specifically in the role of language in the educational strategies and educational practices of dominant social classes. Peter K. W. Tan, since his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, has been Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore, where he teaches modules on the history of English, discourse, stylistics, and onomastics. His most recent research, appearing in various books and journals, has focused on the styling potentialities in language and especially in names as manifestations of identity, power, control, or resistance. Julie H. Tay is a Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting with the Department of Classical and Oriental Studies at City University of New York Hunter College. She is a PhD student in linguistics at Lancaster University, UK, currently investigating multilingual language-work practices among freelance interpreters in Toronto, Canada. Her work revolves around coloniality and commodification, the Native Speaker, and translatorial modalities between Chinese and English.

List of contributors

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Bedrettin Yazan is Associate Professor in the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies at The University of Texas at San Antonio. His research focuses on language teacher learning and identity, collaboration between ESL and content teachers, language policy and planning, and World Englishes. Methodologically he is interested in critical autoethnography, narrative inquiry, and qualitative case study.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the many people who helped us bring this exciting volume to fruition. First, we would like to thank our chapter contributors for their collegiality, professionalism, and collaboration in preparing these conceptual and empirical chapters which contribute to the scholarly conversations in the field of sociolinguistics. Second, we are grateful to David Block for his guidance and attentive support at every step of the process. Additionally, David’s thoughtful Coda chapter is a crucial feature of the volume that pushes us all toward dynamic engagement that will benefit our field. Third, we would like to thank Eleni Steck and Louisa Semlyen of Routledge/Taylor and Francis for their assistance from book proposal to production; it would not have seen such a timely publication without their efforts. Fourth, we thank Amon Neely for his thorough preparation of the index – a tedious task indeed. Finally, to the scholars who freely gave their time and expertise to review the chapters herein, we extend our gratitude: Suriati Abas, Adnan Ajsic, Jillian Cavanaugh, Maya Khemlani David, Gilles Grenier, Matt Kedzierski, Eric Ku, Aaron Kuntz, Irene Theodoropoulou, Ruanni Tupas, Meike Wernike, and Bengt Wickstrom.

Introduction John E. Petrovic and Bedrettin Yazan

A growing amount of scholarship in language policy and other sociolinguistic literatures over the past couple of decades explores what has been referred to as the commodification of language (cf. Cameron, 2000, 2005; Heller, 2002, 2003, 2010; Heller, Pujolar, & Duchêne, 2014; Rahman, 2009; Tan, 2008). This volume set out to explore the conceptual/theoretical underpinnings of the dominant approaches to understanding how language is constructed in late capitalist societies and hopefully presents a contribution to that literature in both its content and sequencing of chapters. The dominant orienting terms that scholars have utilized to explore how language is negotiated in late capitalism are “commodification” and “linguistic capital.” Several questions motivate this volume initially: What is the most productive way to theorize the way language is being constructed in late capitalism? For example, can language be a commodity? What is the difference between language as commodity and linguistic capital? There seem to be underdeveloped distinctions between language as commodity and language as resource, among others, including a problematic slippage from discussion of commodity to discussion of capital. Certainly, language produces benefit in some ways and can be, as Ruiz (1984) observed many years ago, treated as a “resource.” But is it a “consumable” resource? Can it be exchanged for wealth, converted into money? Such questions, connecting language to money and, therefore, value, have given rise to the idea that language is not just a resource generally but is, more specifically, a commodity.1 But as we (Petrovic & Yazan) argue in Chapter 2 of this volume, there seems to be a problematic conflation of terms. As one example in a recent volume, Boutet (2012) notes the extent to which languages are caught up in “processes of commodification” as well as “emerging as resources.” To the extent that different conceptualizations of language differently inform language policy and planning (and they do), it is crucial that they not be conflated but brought into productive dialogue. Upon teasing out conceptualizations of language, how does each inform language policy and construct language differently? Is it simply the case that Bourdieu’s linguistic capital reproduces a fictitious commodity, as suggested in Chapter 2? One response to the literature on the commodification of language has been to reject the notion that language is or can be a commodity (cf. Block, 2018; Holborow, 2018; McGill, 2013; Petrovic, 2019; Simpson & O’Regan, 2018).

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These responses have been offered through a fairly orthodox Marxian frame. In this volume, the first three chapters generally continue in this vein. Simpson and O’Regan (Chapter 1) build on Marx’s fetishism of the commodity to inform a notion of language as fetish. Petrovic and Yazan (Chapter 2) draw on Marx and Polanyi to argue that the notion of “capital” reproduces language as a “fictitious commodity.” McGill (Chapter 3) discusses that way that economic value exists in contextual and interactional terms to build on his earlier argument that language is not a commodity. The placement of these three chapters points to one of the premises with which this project began: The idea that there were two “camps” emerging: one in which language was presumed to be commodifiable and one in which language cannot be seen as a commodity. As we moved forward, it became clear that the notion of “camps” needed to be problematized. Indeed, if the idea of camps was facile, the idea of “two” camps was even more so. Here, Grin’s call for interdisciplinarity in Chapter 4 is well-taken. Grin has engaged the economic method to inform language policy issues. This, of course, follows from the Beckerian school of thought in which economics is used to inform an array of social issues beyond the purely pecuniary. In the end, Grin’s chapter goes completely against the grain of where we started. If the first three chapters provide a critique of the alleged “commodification of language,” Chapter 4 provides a critique of the critique. Here, we would like to destabilize the analogy of camp little further. On the one hand, a camp can refer to a group of people who hold certain ideals, doctrines, or ideologies, and sometimes rigidly so. On the other hand, a camp can also refer to temporary accommodation, a tent, for example. One does not need a key to a tent and can slip easily in and out, finding shelter in this one then that one. To make an analogy, the concept of commodity can take on different framings, it can be held in different tents, so to speak. (While not in these terms, David Block’s important Coda to the volume brings us back to this notion as inter and trans disciplinarity.) In this vein, a number of scholars rethink Marx’s notion of value through Bourdieu. In Chapter 5, for example, Tay and Muth draw on the notions of “capital” and “habitus.” While other aspects of the chapter add important levels of complexity, the use of Bourdieu is not new, but a reminder of the importance of slipping into other tents. Tay and Muth, arguably, make an important connection back to the Marxian notion of alienation when they conclude that “What gets commodified is not language per se but the worker’s packaging of self.” This temporary occupation of a given tent represents the dialogue that we intended to invoke in our juxtaposition of the different kinds of work represented in this volume through the sequencing that you see. We acknowledge that this risks modeling, and therefore reinscribing, a rigid encampment, even as we seek to promote temporary camping and dialogue. The authors of the more Marxist oriented chapters in this volume must and should engage not only in critique but grapple with the very important question that the targets of their critique raise: Is there no there there? The important work cited initially in this introduction as well as Chapters 5 through 11 of

Introduction 3 this volume reveal that there is something going on with language, with the way that we think about language, and how language gets called into being in particular kinds of ways within late capitalism. This may or may not be so different from the effects on language that occurred with the advent of print capitalism in the sixteenth century (cf. Anderson, 2006). However, it manifests in both similar and importantly different ways and, thus, may have different kinds of personal, linguistic, and cultural effects. It is the documentation of these effects to which the empirical chapters of this volume are dedicated. An overarching question of these chapters concerns how the structures, processes, and discourses of late capitalism affect the political, economic, and social construction of language and, concomitantly, language policy in general, language in education policy, family language policy, individual identity, and linguistic communities. Different theorizations demand further discussion to better capture what is happening in different sociolinguistic contexts. Determining if and how, for example, language becomes formulated as a commodity and/or linguistic capital has ramifications for communities, cultures, and identities (Agha, 2011). The individuals’ relationships with languages are shaped by the complex ways in which language is politico-economically positioned and treated in the current late capitalist regime. The empirical chapters (5–11) attend to such relationships in different contexts. For example, Roy and Byrd Clark (Chapter 11) analyze ethnographic data to investigate the ways in which multilingual individuals in Canada position French (as “symbolic and linguistic capital”) and English (as “commodity”) variably due to the historically constructed ideologies about both languages. In another multilingual context, Gogonas (Chapter 9) uses his data from Greek families in Luxembourg to discuss how family members assign differing values to multilingualism (Greek, Luxembourgish, French, German, English) as a form of linguistic capital in which to “invest.” In multilingual communities, the majority language of the host community is typically assigned more economic and social value, utility, and power in relation to the minority/minoritized languages (Caldas, 2012; Canagarajah, 2008; SmithChristmas, 2016). Such value, utility, and power impact multilingual (immigrant) families’ language policies at home for their children’s language development and thereby shape intergenerational language maintenance (Fishman, 1991). These policies are closely connected with the broader national language policies and language-in-education policies which are informed by the dominant politico-economic ideologies. Envisioning an economically steady future for their children, parents gravitate toward sacrificing home language for their children’s success in school, job market, and broader society (Curdt-Christiansen, 2009, 2016). Even when they justify the importance of the maintenance of their home languages, they tend to emphasize the profitability of multilingual identities in commercial discourses (Gogonas & Kirsch, 2018; Hua & Wei, 2016). In any case, their ideologies are closely tethered to the positioning and valorization of languages as marketable skillsets with certain economic value attached (Curdt-Christiansen, 2016; Gogonas & Kirsch, 2018). This kind of purposeful, economic decision-making certainly harkens back to the kind of analysis favored by Grin (Chapter 4).

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Similarly, the ideology of language as a marketable skillset is diffused and circulated in the language policies, language-in-education policies, and the practices of language policing that also entail late capitalist discourse when justifying the necessity and importance of teaching world languages and their use as media of instruction when delivering curricula (Brennan, 2018; Del Percio, 2018; Leeman & Martínez, 2007; Soto & Pérez-Milans, 2018). This justification becomes part of language ideologies which traverse and prevail across translocal contexts in an intertwined fashion with other politico-economic policies. For example, Sunyol (Chapter 6) explores how certain ways of using English are positioned as a desirable, marketable skillset “to sell the school and to sell [its] students” in schools’ language policing practices in Spain. Later in the book, Highet and Del Percio (Chapter 8) interrogate the ways in which an NGO (non-governmental organization) training program in India constructs English speakerhood as cultural capital that regulates “the students’ communicative conduct” and polices “their physicality and morality.” The problem is complexified as the cultures and identities, along with or disentangled from languages, are also commercially positioned and valorized as resources of added value (Budach, Roy, & Heller, 2003; da Silva, McLaughlin, & Richards, 2007; Fairclough, 2000; Shuang, 2012; Stroud & Wee, 2007). For instance, heritage tourism sites become a case in point in Sharma’s (Chapter 7) ethnographic study which shows the intertwined processes of the positioning of ethnic identities, cultures, and languages (Tamangs and English) for economic purposes. In Tan’s (Chapter 10) work, the value of languages as linguistic capital is variably conferred to languages in the practices of naming buildings in the linguistic landscapes of residential and commercial areas. But analyses of such positioning must not stop there. The presumed added value of speaking more than one language occludes neo-Marxist analyses that adding skills through education may not lead to higher wages by increasing human capital but rather by making workers more compliant for corporate control (Bowles & Gintis, 1975). Thus, to the extent that language itself is intimated as commodity (as opposed to the skills and labor power of the worker, cf. Holborow, 2015), such studies must take seriously and be re-read in light of the Marxian critiques that open this volume just as scholars of the latter must also continue to explain the processes and effects of the phenomenon that are so importantly detailed in the later chapters and dubbed, generally, “the commodification of language.”

Note 1 These concerns also trouble Ruiz’s language-as-resource orientation, as critiques have connected it to the perpetuation of the neoliberal status quo (Flores, 2017; Petrovic, 2005; Ricento, 2005), but it is also important to consider Ruiz’s (2010) response.

References Agha, A. (2011). Commodity registers. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 21(1), 22–53. Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities. Verso.

Introduction 5 Block, D. (2018). What is language commodification? In S. Breidbach, L. Kuster & B. Schmenk (Eds.), Sloganizations in language education discourse. Multilingual Matters. Boutet, J. (2012). Language workers: Emblematic figures of late capitalism. In A. Duchene & M. Heller (Eds.), Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit (pp. 217–229). Routledge. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1975). The problem with human capital theory – a Marxian critique. The American Economic Review, 74–82. Brennan, S. C. (2018). Advocating commodification: An ethnographic look at policing of Irish as a commercial asset. Language Policy, 17(2), 157–177. Budach, G., Roy, S., & Heller, M. (2003). Community and commodity in French Ontario. Language in Society, 32(5), 603–627. Caldas, S. (2012). Language policy in the family. The Cambridge handbook of language policy (pp. 351–373). Cambridge University Press. Cameron, D. (2000). Styling the worker: Gender and the commodification of language in the globalized service economy. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(3), 323–347. Cameron, D. (2005). Verbal hygiene. Routledge. Canagarajah, S. A. (2008). Language shift and the family: Questions from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(2), 143–176. Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2009). Invisible and visible language planning: Ideological factors in the family language policy of Chinese immigrant families in Quebec. Language Policy, 8(4), 351–375. Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2016). Conflicting language ideologies and contradictory language practices in Singaporean multilingual families. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7), 694–709. Da Silva, E., McLaughlin, M., & Richards, M. (2007). Bilingualism and the globalized new economy: The commodification of language and identity. In M. Heller (Ed.), Bilingualism: A social approach (pp. 183–206). Palgrave Macmillan. Del Percio, A. (2018). Engineering commodifiable workers: Language, migration and the governmentality of self. Language Policy, 17, 239–259. Fairclough, N. (2000). New labour, new language? Routledge. Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Multilingual Matters. Flores, N. (2017). From language-as-resource to language-as-struggle: Coke-ification of bilingual education. In M. Flubacher & A. Del Percio (Eds.), Language, education and neoliberalism, 62–81. Multilingual Matters. Gogonas, N., & Kirsch, C. (2018). “In this country my children are learning two of the most important languages in Europe”: Ideologies of language as a commodity among Greek migrant families in Luxembourg. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 21(4), 426–438. Heller, M. (2002). Globalization and the commodification of bilingualism in Canada. In D. Block & D. Cameron (Eds.), Globalization and the commodification of bilingualism in Canada (pp. 47–63). Routledge. Heller, M. (2003). Globilization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473–492. Heller, M. (2010). The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 101–114. Heller, M., Pujolar, J. & Duchêne, A. (2014). Linguistic commodification in tourism. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18, 539–566. Holborow, M. (2015). Language and neoliberalism. Routledge.

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Holborow, M. (2018). Language, commodification and labour: The relevance of Marx. Language Sciences, 70, 58–67. Hua, Z., & Wei, L. (2016). Transnational experience, aspiration and family language policy. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7), 655–666. Leeman, J., & Martínez, G. (2007). From identity to commodity: Ideologies of Spanish in Heritage language textbooks. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 4(1), 35–65. McGill, K. (2013). Political economy and language: A review of some recent literature. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 23, 196–213. Petrovic, J. E. (2005). The conservative restoration and neoliberal defenses of bilingual education. Language Policy, 4, 395–416. Petrovic, J. E. (2019). Alienation, language work, and the so-called commodification of language. In T. Ricento (Eds.), Language politics and policies: Perspectives from Canada and the United States (pp. 60–78). Cambridge University Press. Rahman, T. (2009). Language ideology, identity and the commodification of language in the call centers of Pakistan. Language in Society, 38(2), 233–258. Ricento, T. (2005). Problems with the “language as resource” discourse in the promotion of heritage languages in the USA. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(3), 348–368. Ruiz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal, 8(2), 15–34. Ruiz, R. (2010). Reorienting language-as-resource. In J. E. Petrovic (Ed.), International perspectives on bilingual education: Policy, practice, and controversy, 155–172. Information Age Publishing. Shuang, G. (2012). Commodification of place, consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a “global village” in rural China. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16(3), 336–357. Simpson, W., & O’Regan, J. P. (2018). Fetishism and the language commodity: A materialist critique. Language Sciences, 70, 155–166. Smith-Christmas, C. (2016). Family language policy: Maintaining an endangered language at home. Palgrave Macmillan. Soto, C., & Pérez-Milans, M. (2018). Language, neoliberalism, and the commodification of pedagogy. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18(5), 490–506. Stroud, C., & Wee, L. (2007). Consuming identities: Language planning and policy in Singaporean late modernity. Language Policy, 6(2), 253–279. Tan, P. K. W. (2008). The English language as a commodity in Malaysia: The view through the medium-of-instruction debate. In P. K. W. Tan & R. Rudby (Eds.), Language as commodity (pp. 106–121). Continuum.

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Confronting language fetishism in practice William Simpson and John P. O’Regan

Introduction The notion of fetishism, in the most general interpretation of the term, is one in which an object is afforded extra-natural properties, or is animated and brought to life as an agentive “thing”. In this sense, the notion of language as a fetish (Simpson & O’Regan, 2018; Simpson, 2018) imagines languages such as English as bearing all kinds of extra-linguistic properties: As a product or service (Singh & Han, 2008), as a commodity or resource which speakers exchange (Heller, 2016), as a mythical “thing” which does this or that to people (Pennycook, 2007), and even as a cause of social suffering (Piller & Cho, 2013; Piller, Takahashi, & Watanabe, 2010). What we offer in this chapter is a critical engagement with the notion of fetishism as it relates to a larger body of work on language, language policy, and political economy, in respect of language alienated and fetishised in standard forms; the recasting of language not as a social product, but as a form of legal property, owned and traded by individuals; and the necessity of fetishised forms of language in the functioning of the “free” market. We conclude by underscoring the notion of fetishism as consisting in illusions which exist not in theory, but in practice, and with a call for future research to examine the fetishism of languages in the practice of the market. We therefore argue that calls for policy to develop critical reflexive awareness in speakers, while certainly important, are not in themselves sufficient for moving beyond fetishistic notions of language.

Fetishism For Žižek (2008, 2012b, 2012a, 2019), drawing on Hegel, Marx, and figures from psycho-analysis such as Freud and Lacan, fetishism consists in structural effects being misrecognised as properties inherent to individual elements of structures in-themselves. He illustrates this with the Hegelian example of the relation between a King and his subjects involving: a certain misrecognition which concerns the relation between a structured network and one of its elements: what is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between elements, appears as an immediate

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William Simpson and John P. O’Regan property of one of the elements, as if the property also belongs to it outside its relation with other elements. […] Being a “king” is an effect of the network of social relations between a “king” and his “subjects”; but – and here is the fetishistic misrecognition – to the participants of this social bond, the relationship appears necessarily in an inverse form: they think that they are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already in himself, outside the relationship to his subjects, a king; as if the determination of “being a king” were a “natural” property of the person of a king. (Žižek, 2012a: 308–309, emphasis added)

However, what Marx’s notion of fetishism, illustrated most famously in his notion of the fetishism of the commodity (Marx, 1990), adds to such an analysis is the additional question of how fetishistic beliefs exist not only in the ideational realm of thought and belief, but are also necessarily reproduced through practice – necessary in the sense that they are a functioning part of how a system itself works and reproduces itself. To turn to the example of the commodity, rather than the value of a commodity understood as the result of a complex social organisation of production, commodities seem to embody value in and of themselves – they appear to us mysteriously as being tautologically worth what they are worth. Their prices seem to fluctuate up and down independent of the actions and desires of their human creators – in other words outside of social relations, and they do so even as we are well aware that they are the products of human, and not divine, work. Capital similarly seems imbued with a mystical quality, appearing to us as it does, as value which magically breeds more value. The point of fetishism which Marx emphasises however, is that such fetishism is not simply a distortion or illusory belief which can be rent asunder through critical introspection, or with a better or “correct” understanding of how things “really are”. Rather, it is about the beliefs or illusions which we follow, even as we know better, as it were. As Žižek puts it: “[W]e are fetishists in practice, not in theory” (2012a: 315). Just as recognising that money, in the form of paper, plastic, or digital numbers on a screen, is a token and does not itself hold any value in some sort of animistic sense, this does not prevent one from buying or selling in the market, or making a fetish out of money. It is not necessary for people to believe this or that about markets, commodities, or money, rather “the things themselves believe for them” (ibid.: 317, emphasis in original). Fetishism in this sense works. For example, though we do not believe in an inherent mystical property of money (whether metal, paper, or digitised representations thereof) to grow as if it were alive, the money in our savings accounts really does “grow”. It is fetishism in this sense of an illusion or erroneous belief that is spontaneously reproduced in practice but which simultaneously works nevertheless, that we wish to use in order to extend upon work which has dealt with the commodification of language and its implications for language policy.

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The fetishism of language in standard forms For Park and Wee, in their critique of English as a global language, English has undergone a certain reifying mystification, whereby “we come to see English as an entity, a thing with a boundary and fixed content that is identifiable and definable in a regular fashion” (J. S. Y. Park & Wee, 2012: 103). In tracing the emergence of ideologised “standard” English accents such as Received Pronunciation, and later Estuary English, their analysis explores how various forms of codification and prescriptive policymaking abstract away from language as a constantly shifting and emergent process, and lead to a construction of language as a finite and static object or “thing”. At points, their discussion runs along very similar lines to Marx’s notion of fetishism, in for example their concern to penetrate through a “mystification that leads us to believe in the autonomous nature of language” (ibid.: 104). Here, language as an “autonomous” fetish is no longer seen as part of the speaker’s practice but a thing that has its own internal rules and structure, which in turn is imbued with values such as “correctness”, [and where] the speaker is in a sense alienated from her own language. (ibid.: 109) Similarly, Ricento describes the notion of a fixed standard as a “myth”, which has led to the paradox whereby “students must go to school to ‘learn’ their native language” (2006, p. 20). In the terms of fetishism outlined above then, language as a structural effect – the composite social product of ongoing human activity – comes to exist outside of the social relations which produce it, as an alienated thing-in-itself, with its own “King-like” qualities (of normative grammar or correctness, for example) appearing not as man-made, but as natural and inherent to language as a thing-in-itself.

Fetishism and language ownership This notion of language as a fetishised thing-in-itself alienated away from its speakers is taken up in much work on language commodification, as Da Silva, McLaughlin, and Richards summarise: “[L]anguage, as a commodity, is no longer an inherent quality of certain individuals or something that individuals own, but something that is separate and external to their personhood” (2007: 185). What is of note here, in relation to processes of standardisation, are two distinct yet overlapping senses of alienated fetishised forms of language. First, there are the efforts of nation-states to standardise languages as a means of instituting gatekeeping controls upon rights of citizenship – efforts which have often been directed at masking or appearing to resolve contradictions within liberal nation states between democratic egalitarian ideals and unequal social realities (Heller & McElhinny, 2017). Second, there is language commodification as a process which is seen as “emblematic” of the new economy (Boutet, 2012), where the extension and

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intensification of the processes of capitalism more historically (i.e. enclosure of the commons, accumulation, commodification, etc.) has taken place, not within an entirely “new” historical political-economic period, but rather as part of capitalism’s latest evolving variegated form (Block, 2018). This is often referred to as neoliberalism or late capitalism. There is, however, a key distinction we wish to make between, on the one hand, the abstraction of language away from speakers into a standard form which they must then attain for the state’s purposes of establishing a citizenry and nation, and the notion of fetishising language as an alienable thing or “commodity” to be traded on the market, in terms of ownership. On the one hand, the learning of language as a means of maintaining nation states – of creating a citizenry which speaks an idealised form of language – presupposes language as a shared or communal “thing” which, though alienated away from its speakers, nevertheless, at least on the face of it, belongs to the nation, and to the constituted citizenry itself. This is even when it serves to obscure wider social inequality, as when class elites consolidate their own privileged position by promoting their own variety of language as the basis for the standard form. On the other hand, language in its “commodified” form comes to be seen in terms which harmonise with the notion of individual liberal property rights, that is, as a “thing” over which the possessor, as a juridical individual, has the rights of ownership, and the right to sell or exchange as she sees fit. Here, the notion of language as a skill – i.e. as part of the composite bundle of skills (Urciuoli, 2008) which commodified labour in the market trades for wages – comes to the fore. Indeed, some have described in detail the manner in which shifts from, and contradictions between, notions of language as a form of collective ethno-national identity on the one hand, and language as a thing individuals trade in the expectation of various forms of “profit” in the market on the other, occur (Duchêne & Heller, 2012). As Ricento has pointed out in reference to language and language policy more broadly, there is a fundamental mismatch between the notion of “language as a social phenomenon, spoken and written by communities of people, and the core of liberal political philosophy […] the essentialness of individual liberty and rights to satisfy the supposedly unquenchable acquisitive desires of individual human beings” (2015: 34), a notion which has become turbocharged under neoliberal regimes which view human development through the lens of individual competition within the market (Foucault, 2008). So far as the notion of language as a skill is concerned, there is an alienation of language into a fetishised form in a double sense. First, in the abstraction of language outside of the social relations of humans themselves as an autonomous thing-in-itself. And second, once such forms of language have been learnt, language takes on a second fetishised form, often in the guise of a credentialed qualification over which an individual can then claim a right of ownership, and fetishistically trade in the market as a commodified skill. Here, like money and its fetish value, the credential itself is treated as if it were the skill. It embodies the language which has been alienated away from speakers as a standard

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“thing”, so making it possible to “own” language as a competence and trade it on the market. However, while it is certainly possible for communally “owned” language to function in a wholly non-commodified manner (i.e. when understood as a property in common, rather than as something an individual may own and exchange with another), the forms of ownership discussed above – communal and individual – seldom exist as either/or categories, but rather co-exist. Proficiency in a standard linguistic code or “national language” often serves as a means of sorting and disaggregating individual speakers through what Bourdieu refers to as the profit of distinction (Bourdieu, 1984). This is the distinction accorded to those who can utilise the standard linguistic code proficiently, which distinguishes them from those who cannot. In the same vein, notions of global English as a supposedly neutral competence which is capable of acting as a great democratic leveller are deeply problematic (Bruthiaux, 2008; O’Regan, 2021; J. S. Y. Park & Wee, 2012; Pennycook, 2007, 2017), since “global English” is in practice widely utilised as a normative competence (Ives, 2010) which is the preserve of transnational cosmopolitan elites in the capitalist world-economy, against which any sense of “ownership” in common is amongst the more grotesque of fetish illusions, since most people in the world, if they have any competence in English, do not utilise it in a “proficient” normative form, but very often in highly situated and localised ways. In addition, the greater part of this imagined community does not “possess” either the alienated competence associated with the fetish normative form or the credential that stands in for it, such that what competence they do have is often rendered “worthless” and unsaleable. As Bourdieu puts it, “a language is worth what those who speak it are worth” (1977: 652), which is another way of saying that the fetish “value” and exceptionalism of a particular elite form of language lies in the inability of those who are socially and economically marginalised to speak it.

Language as property The exchange of fetishised representations of language on the market however, is more complicated than has thus far been suggested. Language carries with it considerable baggage in terms of identity, culture, politics, histories etc., which other forms of credentialed representations of skills or abilities might not. It is, for example, more common for claims of ownership of language to be made along ethno-national lines, than it would be for say the ownership of competences in maths or physics. It is also not uncommon for this in practice to translate into the circumvention of credentialed forms of language competence. For example, nationality and/or native speaker status often function as “proof” of proficiency in a language, which would otherwise need to be represented by some form of academic credential. With nationality, the credential can be provided by, for example, a birth certificate, a passport, or even certificated proof of schooling in the “native” context. The native-speaker credential may be accepted as following from these proofs. This credential can also be represented as well as reinforced in other ways, such as through observed habitus, ethnic

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appearance, and voice. There are then, distinct, overlapping, and often competing regimes of value within overlapping linguistic markets wherein speakers and their languages are simultaneously valued and devalued (Bourdieu, 1991; Kelly-Holmes, 2016; J. S. Y. Park & Wee, 2012). One’s linguistic “worth” is potentially measured by multiple, often contradictory, yardsticks. For example, where job advertisements state proficiency in English as a prerequisite, it is often the case that one can meet this condition either by being observed to be a native speaker of English, and therefore more or less unquestioningly accepted as one, or by having through a fetish credential a “native-like” or “native-level” competence in the language. While the first of these has more to do with who one is, or appears to be, often in terms of ethno-national identity, the second is more a case of what one has achieved, or better still, what one appears to have achieved – and relies on standardised representations of language proficiency in the form of credentials. There is something of a distinction, blurred though it may become in practice, between fetishised forms of language seen as part of one’s identity constructed along ethno-national-native-speakerist lines on the one hand, and those which are embodied in credentialed qualifications on the other. While the former, at least in principle, speaks to a certain level of exclusivity, and arguably hierarchy, in terms of native and non-native speakers as two mutually exclusive groups, the credentialed qualification is often constructed upon a foundation of apparent egalitarian meritocracy. While it is quite true that speakers may “pass” in and out of native speaker status (Holliday & Aboshiha, 2009) across linguistic markets, there nevertheless remains an underlying assumption that one is, or is not, a native speaker of a language rather than that one has become one, which by definition excludes others who have had to learn the language from legitimately claiming such status. Language fetishised in this sense is seen as a property of the speaker, in the sense that say being green, or the ability to photosynthesise are the properties of a leaf. Here, then, the notion of property refers to an imagined characteristic or trait of the speaker in-themselves – i.e. as a part of their nature. By way of contrast, credentialed qualifications are not seen as properties of speakers in the sense of their own inherent characteristics or nature, but rather as the property of the speaker in the legal sense – that is to say language as an external, alienable, objectified “thing” which a speaker comes to possess in the same manner as they might own real estate property, commodities, or money, and it is language fetishised as a property in this sense, which we focus on here. This is not to say that native-speaker status is not commodified or “cashed in on” in some sense – it often is. Our point is rather to focus on how in the credentialed form, language appears (and we stress “appears”) as an objective measurement of ability, expended effort, or achievement etc. of an individual. Such notions of fetishised language as an ownable property appear as universal and meritocratic, in the sense that they are imagined as being open to anyone (in contrast to native speaker status) and as such provide a neutral and objective way of differentiating individuals from one another, not least of all in the job market. However, as Bourdieu was often keen to point out, such forms of credentialed qualification are misrecognised (1991) as

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universal and meritocratic, in so far as certain quantities of cultural, social, symbolic, and financial capital are always necessary in order to gain access to the attainment of such qualifications in the first place, and that such educational distinctions are properties of the imagination rather than essential properties in themselves. Here the apparent egalitarianism of education functions as a disguise for the reproduction of social inequality (Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). This is the misrecognition of social inequality, and its uneven structural distribution of symbolic and material resources, as individual achievements or merits. Indeed, in relation to English, some have noted how social inequalities which always precede the attainment of linguistic skills and/or credentials, have resulted in an increasing English divide (Terasawa, 2016), where proficiency in English serves as a terrain on which class-based inequality is often constructed, and even exacerbated (Block, 2018). In the sense of structural and social effects appearing as the inherent qualities of individual elements (the merits or worth of individual people), there is much synergy between Bourdieu’s notion of misrecognition, Hegel’s relation of a King to his subjects, and Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism. There is of course an appearance of contradiction between value construed in terms of identity and community membership, and value construed by means of institutional practices such as the conferring of credentials. But these competing fetish conceptions of value are precisely what legitimate and obscure the real capitalist exploitation of human beings in labour markets that are referenced to language. In this sense, the apparent contradiction is not meant to be resolvable, since within diverse but related labour contexts of language they are “the surface process, beneath which, in the depths entirely different processes go on” (Marx, 1973: 247). On the one hand, they make possible the profit of distinction which is socially ascribed to native speakers globally while also simultaneously facilitating the processes of social hierarchisation which exist within the societies to which such speakers belong. On the other, they enable through the fetishistic universalism of neoliberal meritocracy the legitimation of credentialed competence in the normative form when native-speaker authentication is absent. In both processes, the worth of the language is still realised according to fetish perceptions of the worth of the speaker, in which there is the double fetish of the speaker as member of a community or national polity, and the speaker as being the most “qualified” to speak by having become credentialed in the normative form. In this sense, native speakers can simultaneously be community members but, by lacking sufficient capitals or credentials, also not qualified to speak. Even though nonnative speakers cannot become members of a formal native-speaker citizenry, they can do the next best thing by becoming “authenticated” as proficient users. But, as with having membership, it is possible to have credentials, but still not be qualified to speak, since the acceptance of an individual non-native speaker’s authenticity will be determined by the level of the credential. Those without any credentials are likely to be automatically discounted. But even for those with them, there are no guarantees, since their credential may be deemed not to be at a sufficiently advanced level to qualify them for recognition, and what eventual

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level is achieved will also be determined by the cultural, social, symbolic, and financial capital which they can bring with them. It therefore does not follow that having membership as a native speaker or having credentials as a nonnative speaker equates with an entitlement to speak. The loudest silence in the world is the silence which issues from the mouths of those who have no voice. The practices which legitimate this silencing are those which apply to the capitalist process of exchange, where what appears on the surface as a free exchange is in reality an opposite process, which by being other, “stands directly opposite exchange” (Marx, 1973: 275). In other words, it is a process of exploitation which masquerades as one of exchange, and it is this which enables the maintenance of the capitalist contradiction between language as a communal thing and language as an individual skill. It is this contradiction which explains how it is, for example, that native speaking language teachers are hired based on little more than their ascribed native speaker status, while non-native speaker teachers with credentialed qualifications in English and English language teaching are devalued (Canagarajah, 1999; Moussu & Llurda, 2008). They may each belong to the same “community of employees”, but their “credentials” are in practice fetishistically “valued” in different ways. Here, the credential of being a native speaker, which is conferred by means of the panoply of identity markers identified earlier – e.g. birth certificate, passport, school and university certificates, habitus, appearance, voice etc. – is socially accorded more value than the language proficiency and language teaching credentials of the non-native speaker teacher. This is an arbitrary and fictitious value. But it is then economised as a real value in respect of the payment each teacher receives for their labour time. Although the native speaker teacher can often attract higher wages, there are areas of English language teaching in which such native speaking status acts as the sole pre-requisite for employment, and as such deskills the practice of language teaching in “an industry that expects docile and inexperienced bodies [… where] nativeness enables quick access to jobs, but only to unskilled and temporary ones” (Codó, 2018: 448). However, it is important to keep in mind that in the labour market all valuations are reduced to the same homogenous measure – money. As this example illustrates, qualitative issues of value are ultimately subsumed by a universal monetary quantitative measure, which is determined by the ultimate worth of an individual’s labour. This is not a straightforward calculation because, as Holborow (2015, 2018b) points out, the monetary value an individual receives in exchange for their labour power is never reducible to the simple valuation of that individual’s capital or skills (linguistic or otherwise). Rather, it involves all manner of structural issues which affect the value of labour, including the position of strength or weakness labour as a class finds itself in (e.g. unionisation rights, a statutory minimum wage, welfare benefits, etc.), the supply and demand of labour, and the state of the economy more broadly. As we have pointed out however, the incredible complexity of the market, involving as it does the composite actions of billions of actors across the globe, makes grasping the structural effects upon an individual’s worth impossible to process as a whole. The notion of “skill” and

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meritocratic achievement here function as a “gap-filling fetish”, that is, as a means by which it is possible to make sense of the valuation of an individual’s labour power without ever being able to grasp the deep processual reality of that valuation in its entirety. Just as language is not the real world, but represents it, so concepts such as skill, fetish, and meritocracy stand in for complex processes which would otherwise be extremely difficult to describe, if not entirely indescribable. We are fetishists in practice, not in theory, because our daily comprehension of the world is a practical matter, not a theoretical one. If it were a theoretical one, we might spend enormous quantities of our time trying to work out how, for example, the tin of beans we are holding in our hand (i.e. the tin, label, ink for the label, and all of the tin’s contents) came to be, through all the hundreds and maybe even thousands of supply chains which put it there.

Fetishism and the freedom of the market Nevertheless, as we have emphasised, although fetishism, as a form of mystification or myth, is not a false consciousness, it is an essential self-submitting ideational misapprehension, or cognising “fantasy”, which is a functioning part of reality (Žižek, 2012a). The point we wish to make here is that it is necessary to go beyond the surface realm of thought and belief, beyond the necessary wilful misapprehension, to the material, and to the processes which exist in action, in the practices of everyday life. For many scholars of English as a global language the “value” of English often involves an ideologically loaded “promise” of pecuniary benefits to its would-be learners-cum-possessors, for whom it exists in perpetuity as a mirage-like holy grail (J. S. Y. Park, 2011; Piller et al., 2010). This is not to say that those who argue that language learning in many circumstances does indeed “pay” are wrong per se, but rather that its promises are often overstated, and more often than not work more to the advantage of capital, corporations, or other interests, than they do to the learner-workers who supposedly “own” such skills themselves (Holborow, 2015, 2018a; J. S. Y. Park, 2011). What would extend such ideological critiques is a greater understanding of how language as a fetishised autonomous force is placed outside of the real social relations of its human producers. Fetishism here does not imply a deluded misapprehension or ideological trickery, but rather emerges in market societies in the practice of everyday life. The point we re-emphasise here is that even if one can see through the fetishism of the market, money, or fetishised forms of language, these nevertheless really do control us, at least to an extent. We cannot simply will away money, the prices of commodities, standardised forms of language, or the regimes of value in various linguistic markets, and this remains true even if at a conscious level we understand them as structural effects of human activity rather than as autonomous things-in-themselves. Languages then, are not “falsely” imagined as bounded agentivised things, but “appear as what they are” (Marx, 1990: 166), as necessary illusions which are beyond our immediate control.

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In relation to labour skilled in particular languages for example, it has long been the case that the value of languages has waxed and waned out of the control of their possessors, with very real effects. In his notes on the commercial proletariat for example, Marx discusses the learning and teaching of languages, and the fluctuation of their value, in relation to the expansion of capitalism and education to the general population: [B]asic skills, knowledge of commerce and languages, etc., are produced ever more quickly, easily, generally and cheaply, the more the capitalist mode of production adapts teaching methods etc. to practical purposes. […] This also increases supply, and with it, competition. With a few exceptions, therefore, the labour-power of these people is devalued with the advance of capitalist production; their wages fall, whereas their working ability increases. (1991: 415) In a footnote at this point, Engels mentions Marx’s supplementary materials detailing how such workers see the value of their languages, and hence their labour-power, fluctuate independently of their will. He describes German clerks skilled in all commercial operations and in three or four languages, who are offering their services in vain in the City of London for a weekly wage of 25 shillings – well below the wage of a skilled mechanic. (ibid: 415) The point this raises is that, while it may be the case that ideological constructions of languages such as English serve the interests of some far more than others, and while speakers within all manner of linguistic markets come to value language in different ways, there nevertheless remains a phantom objectivity (Marx, 1990) to the value of languages, in the sense that large-scale structural developments such as the extension of education to the mass population, or the teaching of English as a de facto foreign or global language in much of the world, has an effect on the value of language skills in general through the supply and demand of labour-power skilled in particular ways, though perhaps in more nuanced and diverse and indeterminate ways than the law-like manner in which it is phrased in Marx’s notes above. There is need for some nuance to be added to the notion of ownership provided by Da Silva et al. in relation to commodified language, where language in the form of a thing “separate” and “external” to speakers, “is no longer […] something that individuals own” (2007: 185) – in the sense of commodified labour enjoying the liberal juridical rights of the individual in the market – that is to say that individuals claim the sole right to keep, trade, or do whatever they like with their “property”, fictitious or otherwise – speakers really do “own” these fetishised credentialed forms of language, and cannot be coerced – other than at the point of a gun – into selling their labour (of which their linguistic capacities or “skills” are a

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composite part) to another. In a capitalist market, one cannot appropriate the credentialed forms of language, or any other form of credentialed education for that matter, which others own, nor can people in such a market be forced to work in a manner akin to slavery (which does not mean that bondage conditions akin to slavery do not exist within capitalist society). Whether or not one accepts such credentialed tokens of language as unproblematically representative of what language really is, or should be, the ownership and exchange of such tokens on the labour market works in practice as if it really does, independent of one’s beliefs about language, education, or the market. However, at the same time as this, and as Marx (1990) was wont to point out, the market is not an arena free of coercion, but rather encompasses “freedom” in an ironic sense. While it is perfectly true to say that workers as embodiments of labour-power within the market are free to select to whom they wish to sell their labour, or even if they wish to sell their labour at all, they are at the same time also “free” of that which they need in order to sustain themselves (e.g. food, shelter, clothing), and are only able to acquire these necessaries of life by selling their labour in return for wages – in short, they must work in order to live. To return to the notion of fetishism, it is in Marx’s second ironic sense of “freedom” in the market by which language fetishised as a credentialed qualification functions not as an incorrect illusion or mystification, but for the reasons already given as a necessary illusion – as part of the functioning of the market system itself in practice. One can refuse to sell one’s labour on the market, and one can reject the learning of, or use of a normative form, or of a supposedly global language such as English; yet, unless one has access to significant independent means, the consequences of fully expressing one’s freedom in such a way could have serious consequences for one’s wellbeing or life prospects.

Fetishism in practice What a view of language as fetish highlights is not simply that reified objectifications of language proficiency, such as standardised tests like TOEIC, TOEFL, or IELTS, are themselves fetishised representations of language and/or linguistic proficiency, but rather that despite this, and despite the relatively common knowledge of a wide gap existing between credentialed qualifications and well-documented and theorised perceptions of language as a social product, such objectifications nevertheless function as the measure and representation of language(s), and of the language ability of individuals, and by extension also of the value of their possessors as commodified labour. Indeed, one does not need to have any particular degree of faith in such objectifications of language as adequately reflecting “real” language in order for the linguistic fetish to function in practice. For example, one finds, contradictorily, the coexistence of a widespread scepticism about the need for the English language in the day-to-day life of workers in South Korea with a linguistic rat-race or “frenzy” for English in a state of hyper-competition where no one dares to be left behind (J. Park, 2009; J. S. Y. Park, 2011; Piller & Cho, 2013; Piller et al., 2010). Moreover, that such credentialed tokens are only ever stand-ins rather than the real thing (i.e. they are not in and of themselves

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language) becomes explicit and transparent in many instances. For example, employers and employees alike often come to see the attainment of TOEIC scores not as representations of linguistic ability, but as a measure of one’s effort to learn or skill oneself, one’s intellectual ability, or one’s commitment to an employer (Kubota, 2011). Nevertheless, within such contexts, the drive for standardised proficiency tests such as TOEIC, continues apace, often in the full knowledge that proficiency in English is not always necessary for performing workplace functions (J. S. Y. Park, 2011). Elsewhere, Piller and Cho’s critique of the spread of English as a medium of instruction (hereafter MOI) in South Korean universities describes the nexus of private profit driven interests and educational and social policies enacted by the state, which recast educational activity in terms of competition at both the individual and the institutional level. Here, English becomes institutionalised as “a testable entity that is easy to quantify” (2013: 39), and which with regard to “mass-mediated university rankings […] is a highly cost-effective way to improve institutional standing because “English” is […] used as a quantifiable index of “globalization” (ibid.: 39). While Piller and Cho convincingly conclude that such “competition on the terrain of English is naturalised through the ideologies of neoliberal free-market fundamentalism” (ibid.: 39), what we might add to such conclusions is that, in addition to this ideological naturalisation, is the fetishistic mystification which emerges out of practice. What we draw attention to here, then, is the manner in which the adoption of English MOI “works”, in so far as the adoption of English MOI in these institutions has had a very real effect on the institutions themselves, both for those that were successfully able to distinguish themselves as “better” through the virtue of implementing English MOI, and by implication for those which “lost out” by not effectively being able to “globalise” relative to their competitors. Competition here, is not in any sense illusory, but very much a reality which is lived out, quite independently of subscription or resistance to a naturalised notion of humanity as a conglomerate of self-interested competing individuals.

Fetishism and the politics of recognition We think of our turn to the concept of fetishism as a development of, and engagement with, much of the work which we have discussed above. Amongst this work we view Park and Wee’s Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World (2012) as a significant and insightful contribution to this debate given its explicit focus on core notions such as capital, commodification, and especially value, in relation to language and language policy. Taking their cue from Pennycook, the task at hand for Park and Wee is to move beyond an understanding of “this ‘thing’ English that does or does not do things to and for people [and towards] the multiple investments that people bring to their acts, desires and performances in ‘English’” (Pennycook, 2007: 73, quoted in J. S. Y. Park & Wee, 2012: 106–107). In other words, to see the status, prestige, resistance to, desire for etc., English not as King-like

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properties of English in-itself, but as structural effects of the complex and often largely unconscious interrelations between a range of actors and structures. Their proposal for demystifying English as a global language in policy steers a course between what they term an accommodation-oriented policy which succumbs to dominant norms and interests and a reconfiguration-oriented policy. In doing so, they call for language policy “to provide for ways through which members of society may more openly engage in critically questioning the indexical processes by which standards come to be seen as valuable” (J. S. Y. Park & Wee, 2012: 171). This is a sentiment that we share, while also having a number of reservations regarding its efficacy and practicality. While Park and Wee repeatedly acknowledge the importance of macrostructural forces – they make it clear, for example, that inequality involves far more than just linguistic matters – the thrust of their work is mainly oriented to discursive rather than material matters. For example, in their discussion of Honey’s (1997) notion of a standard variety as that which is used by “educated” users of a language, they rightly point out the elitism within such a view, and how such conceptions serve to reproduce social inequality by advancing misrecognition. However, their proposed solution to this is not to call for a redistribution of the resources which have given elites privileged access to educational capital, but rather “to encourage and open up critical discussion about how standards come into being and how they come to be associated with particular images and values in society” (J. S. Y. Park & Wee, 2012: 172). As Block (2014, 2018) has described in relation to socio- and applied linguistic work more broadly, such calls, while undoubtedly of importance, appear more readily to address a politics of recognition than a politics of distribution (Fraser & Honneth, 2003), when what is properly needed is both. Park and Wee conclude by emphasising the transformative potential which lies in the recognition of the value of global English as constructed not by spectral fetishistic forces beyond human control, but in the real practices of human hands: [G]lobal English is not just a result of the confluence of macro forces, but is shaped and built through our own practice. And this point is important, because if it is our practice that constructs global English, it means that we have the power to transform it as well. [… O]ur critique of global English allows us to see through the monstrous complexity of global English and find a theoretical basis for transforming that market. (2012: 185) However, the question that fetishism poses is one which asks where the logical endpoint of such proposals, at least in isolation, will take us. If, as we have suggested earlier, we are fetishists in practice and not in theory, then how transformative might a “theoretical basis for transforming the market” really be? Sophisticated and thorough though their attempt to “see through the monstrous complexity” of global English and the market is, there are practical human limits to how far it is possible to go. What fetishism does in practice is

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to construct bridges across the spaces of our incomplete understanding in the face of a depthless reality which can never be grasped in full. We may attempt with all sincerity to trace back from any commodity all of the possibly thousands of networks involved in bringing it to our hands, and all of the forces at play in determining the price at which it is labelled, yet the complexity of such a task makes it a humanly impossible one to complete. Moreover, the capitalist marketplace as one which is reliant on the human activity of exchange could not tolerate an unfetishised market. So much time would be expended on pondering reality’s true extent that exchange would cease, circulation would grind to a halt, and capitalist human existence would come to an end. The fetish form may be a necessary illusion, but it is one which also too easily slides into the belief that the fetish reality is the real. It is an inescapable aspect of the capitalist human condition that, in everything we do, we participate in the fetishisation of the world, even when we know we are fetishising. The greatest challenge we face is not breaking the circuit of fetishistic practice and of blithely fetishising ourselves and the world into oblivion, for example through systemic debt, nuclear conflict, economic nationalism, or the total destruction of the natural world. These are not unmentionable or unknown taboos. They are already mainstream. But while there is greater consciousness, for the advocates of capital, and for many in the great exploited mass of humanity, our fetishistic beliefs in practice continue apace, as we proceed along a trajectory we know to be untenable, not least in the ecological sense (Žižek, 2017). In respect of global English, Park and Wee are right, that it is our practice which constructs it. But the solution to the problem which we face is not to find a theoretical basis for transforming the market, because it is not as if such a basis does not already exist. What is Marxism, after all, but precisely this? Even if Marxism does not appeal, there is still no shortage of theory, particularly of theory which is critical of the market, as any perusal of Bourdieu, Polanyi, Marcuse, Habermas, Bhaskar, or even Galbraith demonstrates. Deconstructing global English is nevertheless worthwhile. It is worthwhile for creating ideological and intellectual solidarity against the system, and for the necessary activity of recognition. But so long as the world-system and market is capitalist, recognition and the demystification of global English are likely to have a limited impact on fetishised understandings in a market in which all the members of that market are fetishising, and therefore also a limited impact on language policy. In the circumstances of our collective fetishism, an apocalyptic end to capitalism seems far easier to imagine than a peaceful and rational transition to an alternative form of socio-economic global organisation. But herein may lie our hope. For the multiple global crises we now face must at some near-term juncture force a collective focusing of minds, and of the minds towards meaningful change. Many have convincingly argued that a global bifurcation point is arriving in which the choice for the world and the peoples in it will either be a regressive anti-democratic authoritarianism or a progressive democratic humanitarianism (Wallerstein, 2013; Harvey, 2015). As we write, the forces of the former appear to be in the ideological ascendancy. But the reason they are there is because it is becoming ever more apparent that the capitalist world-system is

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becoming more systemically unstable – a topic which is unfortunately beyond the remit of this chapter (but see Arrighi, 2010; Wallerstein, Collins, Mann, Derlugian & Calhoun, 2013; Bhaskar, 2016, for indicative accounts). Due to this reality, it is also becoming more difficult for capitalism’s advocates to sustain the fetish illusion that it works, except by ever wilder and more aggressive appeals to the fetishisms of racism, nationalism, and masculinist misogyny. Fetishised language is also in this mix, since as any reader of this chapter will know, language has historically played a significant role in the promotion and maintenance of these bigotries. But inasmuch as language and English continue to be enmeshed with these bigotries, and with the capitalist market, so will the fetish constructions of language and of English also be sustained, and no amount of knowing that it is our practice which constructs them will lead to their transformation. What is required is more than recognition, more than good arguments, more than appeals to reason, and more than individuated resistances to the hegemony of standard forms. It will require theory. It will require action too. Collective, purposeful, and theoretically organised action against the capitalist market and the fetishism of value.

References Arrighi, G. (2010). The long twentieth century: Money, power and the origins of our times. London: Verso. Bhaskar, R. (2016). Enlightened common sense: The philosophy of critical realism. London: Routledge. Block, D. (2014). Social class in applied linguistics. London: Routledge. Block, D. (2018). Political economy and sociolinguistics: Neoliberalism, inequality, and social class. London/New York: Bloomsbury publishing. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (vol. 16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. Oxon: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society, and culture (2nd edn). London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage. Boutet, J. (2012). Language workers: Emblematic figures of late capitalism. In A. Duchêne & M. Heller (Eds.), Language in late capitalism. Pride and profit (pp. 207–220). New York: Routledge. Bruthiaux, P. (2008). Dimensions of globalization and applied linguistics. In R. Rubdy & P. Tan (Eds.), Language as commodity: Global structures, local marketplaces (pp. 16–30). London/New York: Continuum. Canagarajah, S. (1999). Non-native educators in English language teaching. In G. Braine (Ed.), Interrogating the “native speaker fallacy”: Non-linguistic roots, non-pedagogical results (pp. 77–92). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Codó, E. (2018). The intersection of global mobility, lifestyle and ELT work: A critical examination of language instructors’ trajectories. Language & Intercultural Communication, 18 (4), 436–450. Retrieved from doi:10.1080/14708477.2018.1482905.

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Da Silva, E., McLaughlin, M., & Richards, M. (2007). Bilingualism and the globalized new economy: The commodification of language and identity. In M. Heller (Ed.), Bilingualism: A social approach (pp. 183–206). New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (Eds.) (2012). Language in late capitalism. Pride and profit. New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–9. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or recognition?: A political-philosophical exchange. London: Verso. Harvey, D. (2015). Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism. London: Profile Books. Heller, M. (2016). Treating language as an economic resource: Discourse, data and debate. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 139–156). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller, M., & McElhinny, B. (2017). Language, capitalism, colonialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Holborow, M. (2015). Language and neoliberalism. London/New York: Routledge. Holborow, M. (2018a). Language, commodification and labour: The relevance of Marx. Language Sciences, 1–10. Retrieved from doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2018.02.002. Holborow, M. (2018b). Language skills as human capital? Challenging the neoliberal frame. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18(5), 520–532. Retrieved from doi:10.1080/14708477.2018.1501846. Holliday, A., & Aboshiha, P. (2009). The denial of ideology in percetions of “Nonnative speaker” teachers. TESOL Quarterly, 43(4), 669–689. Honey, J. (1997). Language is power: The story of standard English and its enemies. London: Faber and Faber. Ives, P. (2010). Cosmopolitanism and global English: Language politics in globalization debates. Political Studies, 58(3), 516–535. Kelly-Holmes, H. (2016). Theorising the market in sociolinguistics. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 157–172). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kubota, R. (2011). Questioning linguistic instrumentalism: English, neoliberalism, and language tests in Japan. Linguistics and Education, 22(3), 248–260. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1990). Capital: Volume 1: A critique of political economy. London. Penguin Classics. Marx, K. (1991). Capital: Volume III. London: Penguin Classics. Moussu, L., & Llurda, E. (2008). Non-native English-speaking English language teachers: History and research. Language Teaching, 41(3), 315–348. O’Regan, J. P. (2021). Global English and political economy. London: Routledge. Park, J. (2009). “English fever” in South Korea. English Today, 25(1). Retrieved from doi:10.1017/S026607840900008X. Park, J. S. Y. (2011). The promise of English: Linguistic capital and the neoliberal worker in the South Korean job market. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 14(4), 443–455. Park, J. S.-Y., & Wee, L. (2012). Markets of English: Linguistic capital and language policy in a globalizing world. New York/London: Routledge.

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Pennycook, A. (2007). The myth of English as an international language. In S. Makoni & A. Pennycook (Eds.), Disinventing and reconstituting languages (pp. 90–115). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Pennycook, A. (2017). The cultural politics of English as an international language. Oxon/New York: Routledge. Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy. Language in Society, 42(1), 23–44. Retrieved from doi:10.1017/S0047404512000887. Piller, I., Takahashi, K., & Watanabe, Y. (2010). The dark side of TESOL: The hidden costs of the consumption of English. Cross-Cultural Studies, 20(August), 183–201. Ricento, T. (Ed.) (2006). An introduction to language policy. Malden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell. Ricento, T. (Ed.). (2015). Language policy & political economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simpson, W. (2018). Neoliberal fetishism: The language learner as homo œconomicus. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18(5), 507–519. Retrieved from doi:10.1080/14708477.2018.1501845. Simpson, W., & O’Regan, J. P. (2018). Fetishism and the language commodity: A materialist critique. Language Sciences – Special Issue, 70, 155–166. Singh, M., & Han, J. (2008). The commodification of English and the Bologna process: Global products and services, exchange mechanisms, and trans-national labour. In P. Tan & R. Rubdy (Eds.), Language as commodity: Global structures, local marketplaces (pp. 204–224). London/New York: Continuum. Terasawa, T. (2016). Has socioeconomic development reduced the English divide? A statistical analysis of access to English skills in Japan. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 4632(August), 1–15. Retrieved from doi:10.1080/ 01434632.2016.1221412. Urciuoli, B. (2008). Skills and selves in the new workplace. American Ethnologist, 35(2), 211–228. Retrieved from doi:10.1111/J.2008.1548-1425.00031.X. Wallerstein, I. (2013). Structural crisis or why capitalists may no longer find capitalism rewarding. In I. Wallerstein, R. Collins, M. Mann, G. Derlugian, & C. Calhoun (Eds.), Does capitalism have a future? (pp. 9–36). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallerstein, I., Collins, R., Mann, M., Derlugian, G., & Calhoun, C. (2013). Does capitalism have a future? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Žižek, S. (2008). The sublime object of ideology. London/New York: Verso. Žižek, S. (2012a). How did Marx invent the symptom? In S. Žižek (Ed.), Mapping ideology (pp. 296–331). London/New York: Verso. Žižek, S. (2012b). Introduction: The spectre of ideology. In S. Žižek (Ed.), Mapping ideology (pp. 1–33). London/New York: Verso. Žižek, S. (2017). The courage of hopelessness. London: Allen Lane. Žižek, S. (2019). The relevance of the communist manifesto. Cambridge: Polity.

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Language as instrument, resource, and maybe capital, but not commodity A Marxian clarification John E. Petrovic and Bedrettin Yazan

Introduction: Language as resource? In his original identification of three “orientations in language planning,” Ruiz (1984) defends the “language-as-resource” orientation over “language-as-right” and “language-as-problem.” In this defense, he asks, “In what way is language a resource?” (p. 27). While he does not answer the question directly, Ruiz points to areas in which language could be a resource (the “how” being largely taken for granted): Military preparedness, national security, foreign policy, business, and social and educational domains. In the social and educational domains, Ruiz is somewhat clearer on the “how,” noting, for example, the correlation between declining ACT test scores1 and decreased foreign language study as well as the correlation between improved conceptual skills and bilingualism. Presented as an “orientation” juxtaposed to language-as-problem and language-as-right, as intended by Ruiz, the construct of language-as-resource remains analytically useful. Interestingly, however, Ruiz never defines the term “resource” itself. But consider some common definitions available online. Wikipedia defines a resource as “a source or supply from which benefit is produced. Typically, resources are materials, energy, services, staff, knowledge, or other assets that are transformed to produce benefit and in the process may be consumed or made unavailable” (Wikipedia, n.d.). MerriamWebster defines a resource as “something that a country has and can use to increase its wealth” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Similarly, dictionary.com defines resources as “money, or any property that can be converted into money; assets” (Dictionary.com, n.d.). Is language a resource in these kinds of ways? Certainly, language produces benefit in some ways. But is it “consumable”? Can it be exchanged for wealth, converted into money? Such questions, connecting language to money and, therefore, value, have given rise to the idea that language is not just a resource generally but, more specifically, a commodity. Can language rightly be called a commodity that can be exchanged or might it more accurately be called an instrument, used as a tool in the need to gain or earn assets of a different kind? Here we begin to see the lack of precision in terms of what it means to say that language is a resource and the other ways in which resource might be conceptualized.

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In this chapter, we first employ a Marxian lens to reveal important imprecisions in the use of the terms applied to language – namely, instrument, resource, commodity, and capital – and trace them back to a fetishized notion of commodity. A number of authors intimate that language can be a commodity – largely through use of the expressions “commodification of language” or “language commodification” – without making any explicit declaration, even as they find this commodification problematic. The assumption that language can be a commodity and the concomitant use of the discourse of commodification leads to the co-optation of other terms, their meanings subsumed as commodity. Given this, it is necessary to reconstruct, through a Marxian analysis, “resource” as something different from a commodity. In fact, one growing school of thought questions the idea that language can be a commodity (McGill, 2013; Block, 2014, 2019; Petrovic, 2019) and that the real concern must be the exploitation of labor and the concomitant skill of language involved in language labors (Holborow, 2015, 2018; Petrovic, 2019). From this perspective, language – while not a commodity – is a resource and an instrument. Second, we note the slippage in the literature from commodity to capital. Capital, in the Bourdieuan sense that it tends to be used, is conceptualized as symbolic, but then gets wrongly co-opted as entailing exchange value; it becomes coterminous with commodity. The problem here is that the conflation of the terms presents an error of commission to the extent that, without the concomitant theory of value from Marx, said conflation occludes commodity as social relation and the alienation that results.

The so-called commodification of language The notion of commodity seems to be a source of the imprecisions noted above. For the most part, a Marxian understanding of commodity is not employed, and when alluded to it has not been carefully applied. For example, in a generative volume on “language as commodity,” Marx is cited only once in one chapter and only in a passing sense to point out that “the notion of commodification is of course not new and was developed by Engels and Marx in their Communist Manifesto” (Tan, 2008: 107). Of course, “commodification” is not a term that Marx and Engels employ in the Communist Manifesto and the notion of commodity is not thoroughly addressed by Marx until a decade later. More problematically the explanation turns Marx’s thorough explanation of commodity (mainly in Capital, vol. 1) completely on its head. Peter Tan (2008) explains that “one consequence of according a dominant position to capital is that all elements have to be accorded a value, and thereby turned into a commodity” (107). Tan does not explain how that value is accorded except by alluding to the invisible hand of a “linguistic market.” By this inverted explanation of value – in which value is accorded through the top-down process of a market – everything is always already a commodity. But this is a reification, an understanding of the commodity form that treats it as somehow originally independent and existing sans human creation. Such a reified understanding of

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commodity, as the example above suggests, not only ignores Marx’s bottom up labor theory of value but also fails to provide its own theory of value. It seems that value simply emerges from the linguistic market, wherein language is an economic resource. But, again, the claim that language is an economic resource is very different from claiming that language is a commodity – even as the terms get conflated in the literature. Commodification refers to the subordination of social forms to the logic of capitalism where objects, goods, services, and even people are treated without intrinsic worth but only as exchange values. This process of subordination is now said to apply also to language. Language is not a commodity Commodities are not the straightforward things that many authors seem to suggest, especially when they seem to refer back to received understandings of “resource,” as suggested previously. Instead, they represent complex social and material relations, created through the application of labor, and expressed through value. Naturally occurring things like air, water, and soil all have usevalue, but since they exist independent of our labor, they are use-values without having value. Thus, they should not be considered commodities and, as argued below, language falls roughly into this category, as a natural capacity.2 When humans apply labor to these naturally occurring things, they gain what Marx specifically refers to as social use-value, the material or symbolic uses to which an object (or service) can be put and which satisfy a human need and value for others. But even those things which satisfy a need, are a product of labor, and produce use-values for others, are not necessarily commodities. As Marx argues, “To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange” (Marx, 1977: 131). In other words, to meet the final condition of a commodity, the thing must be created for the purpose of exchange. When the object is exchanged, it gains exchange-value, ultimately represented by an object’s monetary value, which is not necessarily a reflection of its use-value. When a thing is produced for exchange, it gains its value not from its potential uses, but from its ability to be exchanged for other things. Similarly, the labor required to create the commodity also gains its value not from its usefulness, but from its potential for exchange. For Marx, people do not sell their labor, but their labor power. The former “[sets] in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of [the laborer’s] body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants” (Marx, 1977: 283). Labor, then, is the physical act of work. Labor power refers to both the mental and physical abilities that are required to produce any use-value; it is the mental and physical capacity for work. For a certain amount of time, laborers sell these capacities to their employer who then determines the ways in which to use them. Labor power, then, is the commodity of laborers. Based on this understanding, how should we understand language, why is it problematic to understand language as a commodity, and what does this

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discussion reveal about other ways of understanding language (e.g. as instrument or right)? Here, the claim that language is not a commodity seems to be rooted to some degree in the question of the ontological status of language. Of course, it has long been recognized that languages (e.g. Spanish, English, Chinese, Arabic) have no ontology (Fishman, 1977; Chomsky, 1986; Shohamy, 2006; Pennycook, 2006). In other words, there is no such thing as Spanish or English, but there are Spanishes and Englishes. Further, languages in contact transform each other. Languages are ever-changing. Somewhat differently, such claims about the ontology of language also seek, rightly, to problematize efforts toward standardization of Lx or Ly. Referring to them as “P-Languages,” these are what Chomsky dismisses as abstractions not worthy of study. This is so because they assume some Platonic ideal of language (hence the “P”), as if we can reach up into Plato’s linguistic cabinet and simply pull out the “form” of English or Japanese or Spanish. But the ontology of language important to our point refers to the natural human capacity for language. In Marx’s (1977) terms, this is one of the natural forces of the body. Chomsky (1986) refers to language as “a system of conditions deriving from the human biological endowment” (23). Language has ontology in this way. It is rooted not only in the kind of world we live in but also in our physical nature. If our position on the ontology of language is correct and language is part of our intrinsic nature, not coerced out of us but necessary within us, and that which satisfies a basic need of ours prior to any needs imposed externally upon us, then it appears that language does not satisfy the conditions of labor and as such cannot be a commodity. For labor is not involved in language, which is not a labored upon product but is instead a mental capacity to which a number of skills might be added and, therefore, is part of one’s labor power. In other words, language – just as “a man’s own limbs serve as the instruments of his labor” (Marx, 1977: 285) – is an instrument in the labor process, not a commodity. In addition to one’s labor power, the object, project, process, application, or service to which the labor power is applied via the instrument of that power is the commodity, not language itself. Labor may be applied in learning new linguistic skills, as in learning a particular discourse in a first language (e.g. speaking like a lawyer or writing like a journalist), learning a foreign or second language, learning a new accent, or following a script. Here, some authors correctly amend the “commodification of language,” referring, instead, to the “commodification of language as a skill” (cf. Park & Wee, 2012: 104). In other words, one’s labors result in a skill added to an existing natural capacity. What is involved in any exchange, then, is the selling of one’s labor power with an increased [linguistic] capacity, not language itself (Block, 2019; Holborow, 2015; McGill, 2013; Petrovic, 2019). In what is perhaps one of the stronger arguments made in defense of the idea of language as commodity, Irvine (1989) seeks to problematize the notion that linguistic signs influence but are not part of the marketplace. In this vein, Irvine points out the referential and indexical functions of language in the marketplace as well as the communicative economy. In the communicative economy, “verbal skills and performances are among the resources and activities forming a

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socioeconomic system” (Irvine, 1989: 255). We have no quarrel with these positions and, in fact, the last supports our basic argument above. Nevertheless, Irvine goes further to suggest that language itself can be an object of exchange, a commodity. In the interesting example of “gold,” it is the authority of the sign that gives the material element its value. In other words, some expert has declared that the thing presented to her is, in fact, gold. But, Irvine (1989) explains, “Although the appraisal of a piece of jewelry [seems to be a case where a verbal statement is the object of exchange],” this is only because “it is part of a longer series of transactions whose object is the jewelry, not the statement” (258). To provide an example where language is ostensibly the object of exchange, a commodity, Irvine turns to the Wolof culture.3 In this culture exists the practice of praise-singing in which it is the job of a member of a class of performers – griots – to verbally praise community leaders, upholding and enhancing the leader’s character through compliments and recitations of the prestige of their genealogy, among other things. Since the griots are paid for this service, it seems that language becomes the object of exchange. The problem with this conclusion is that Irvine herself repeatedly notes the importance of this practice as “performance” and “skill.” The performance (read: labor) is, then, the object of exchange even as it depends on linguistic skill (speaking like a lawyer or performing like a griot). Furthermore, Irvine notes that “The value of the performance depends in part on the gloriousness of the content” (262). In other words, it relies on knowledge which, as we will argue below, is also not commodifiable. Muddling the discourse The assumption that language is indeed or can be a commodity (cf. Boutet, 2012; Cameron, 2012; Duchêne, 2009; Heller, 2010a; Heller, 2010b; Pujolar, 2018; Rahmann, 2009) serves to confuse other ways of understanding language. As one such example, Monica Heller (2010a) explains, that “the recent interest in language as commodity points to a specific and emergent form of this exchange value” and that “the circulation of goods … now depends on the deployment of linguistic resources (for example, in some areas getting a job used to depend on physical strength, but now many jobs require communicative skills instead)” (102). Here the assumption is that language itself has exchange value. The confusion is then compounded by the terminological switch from commodity to resource – as if these are synonyms. Similarly, Park and Wee (2012), having correctly referred to “the commodification of language as a skill,” quickly lapse back into the claim that “English is seen as an economic resource, a commodity” (124, emphasis added). This equation is wrong, at least from a Marxian analysis. But the discourse gets muddled in other ways as well. Consider Tom Ricento’s (2005) argument that The explicit orientation of language-as-resource represented in [the texts analyzed by Ricento as supporting LAR orientation] presupposes that

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language can be valued as an asset, but the values attached to the asset (languages) and the purposes for which the assets will be used are pertinent only to the needs of the state. Here, the ideological construct of “language as instrument” to achieve various ends becomes relevant. (361) Here, language as resource collapses into language as instrument. In short, language is a resource because it is an instrument; it has instrumental value to be manipulated and used by the state when necessary, including use toward the purposes listed by Ruiz (1984). Language also has “instrumental value as a medium of communication” (356). Ricento (2005) is correct to suggest that a language can be a resource and an instrument simultaneously. But the terms are not synonymous. Thus, it might be more generative to consider the different versions of language-as-instrument that emerge here in terms of “value” rather than to simply conflate resource and instrument. On the one hand, resource and instrument here take on the common quality of use-value where the value of objects is not seen as ends-in-themselves but as means of achieving something else. In both cases – governmental exploitation and personal communicative use – language seems to have social use-value. Ricento’s (2005) overarching argument is that this serves to “perpetuate a view of language as instrument” (357). But, in so doing, his claim changes to note that resource and instrument are, now, not synonyms. Ricento juxtaposes the state’s controlling and external use of language to achieve national instrumental goals and the individual use of language as an identity marker, arguing that “the view promoted is of language as commodity, displaced from its historical situatedness, a tool to be developed for particular national interests” (357–358). However, similar to Heller (2010b), Ricento seems to be conceptualizing resource (now instrument) and commodity synonymously in his argument. He maintains that language offers “use value for others” or social usevalues in Marxian terms, but this does not make language a commodity; it is still an instrument. The equation of constructs (e.g. instrument, resource, capital, commodity) that have been used to theorize the situatedness of language within social, political, economic, and historical contexts might be explained through discursive formation in an enunciative network in which “commodification” plays a dominant, even hegemonic, role. Certainly, the discourse of neoliberalism or late capitalism plays such a role and informs received understandings of commodification. We view these constructs as part of “texts” that have been controlled by the dominant social systems. Theorizing “statements” in enunciative networks, Foucault (1972) explains the networked nature of statements synchronically and diachronically, which sums up his notion of intertextuality and bridges “texts and social systems” (Lemke, 1995, p. 25). Foucault (1972) notes:

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John E. Petrovic and Bedrettin Yazan [T]here is no statement in general, no free neutral, independent statement; but a statement always belongs to a sequence or a whole, always plays a role among other statements, deriving support from them and distinguishing itself from them: it is always a part of a network of statements, in which it has a role, however minimal it may be, to play. (99)

From this point of view, we maintain that the constructs, for which we seek conceptual clarity in this piece, are fluid and dynamic, that is, they continually go through discursive formation based on the established discursive practices of the network. These constructs are generated, circulated, and given variable meanings in relation to other constructs in the enunciative network regulated by the dominant social systems. Then, the interpretation of a construct is inseparable from the other constructs that have circulated in the field and intertwined with the construct in question as well as the impact of macro social systems. When we attempt to make sense of a statement such as “language is a commodity,” we need to know that it has emerged as part of the enunciative network of sociolinguistics and broader language studies which are “texts” produced within a certain social system. Then, we need to consider how this statement “deriv[es] support from” other coexisting and preceding statements with particular functions and roles, like “language is a resource,” and “distinguish[es] itself from them.” We cannot fully make sense of the argument of “language as commodity” without understanding the coexisting arguments like “language as resource,” “language as instrument,” and “language as (varying modes of) capital.” Problematically, the meanings of the latter understandings have developed not in equal relation to language as commodity which, as noted, has taken on a dominant role. In other words, there is a dominating discursive pattern represented in the language of commodification. Apropos to this, Martín-Rojo (2018) argues that there are two discourses – language as profit and personal enterprise – born of neoliberalism that treat language in economic terms. This is undoubtedly true. In addition, the language of commodification, while not derivative of neoliberalism is a product of neoliberalism – as a response to it. Even as a response and/or lens through which to view linguistic phenomena in critical ways, the discourse of commodification has certainly contributed to an array of imprecise readings of linguistic phenomena and the naming thereof. It is illustrative here that MartínRojo, à la Park and Wee (2012), refers to “the commodification of languages” and then claims that “linguistic skills are commodified” (551). As explained above, a Marxian analysis supports the latter claim while rejecting the former. Capital and commodity: Coterminous and fictitious The idea of the commodification of linguistic skills entails the fact that language is an embodied instrument of labor. Even as language may take on the characteristics of a commodity, such characteristics are more rightly understood as part and parcel of the commodification of labor, not language. Labor, however, is a

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fictitious commodity. “Fictitious” here means that such commodities, different from real commodities, cannot be regulated merely by the forces of supply and demand. Its commodification is regulated outside the market place. As Polanyi (1957), put it, “labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them” (72). Language, as part of the general intellect, is part and parcel of labor power and, therefore, is a fictitious commodity (Petrovic, 2019). In this section, we move to the notion of linguistic capital, concluding that it simply reproduces the fictitious commodity. The many previously cited sociolinguists working in this area tend to rely on Bourdieu’s work, especially his concepts of linguistic market/field and linguistic capital when theorizing language in late capitalist society. In Bourdieu’s (1986) conceptualization, capital is “accumulated labor” which is individually or collectively obtained and “enables [agents] to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor” (241). Capital is assigned value in the market and this value is regulated by those linguistic groups who have control over the market.4 Since language use or production is assigned a certain “value” variable in each linguistic “market,” language users have varying amounts of linguistic capital, which indicates their potential to generate the linguistic expressions for a specific “market” (Bourdieu, 1977). “[T]he constitution of a linguistic market creates the conditions for an objective competition in and through which the legitimate competence can function as linguistic capital, producing a profit of distinction on the occasion of each social exchange” (Bourdieu, 1991: 55). Bourdieu’s theorization was taken up to make sense of the hierarchization and social positioning of languages and their speakers as well as their spatio-temporal valuation and devaluation in the market, but this usage has not been free of conceptual ambiguity (see for critique Callinicos, 1999; Holborow, 2015; McGill, 2013; Petrovic, 2019). The research on so called commodification of language utilizes Bourdieu’s concept of capital to explain how language has been politico-economically repositioned in late capitalist societies, locally and globally (see Boutet, 2012; Heller, 2003; Park & Wee, 2012), representing a shift from “pride” to “profit” (Duchêne & Heller, 2012). This research seems to base the argumentation of language as commodity on Bourdieu’s work which, although influenced by Marx, never used the concept of commodity to describe language. Such argumentation usually involves a conflation of resource and commodity and a slippage from capital to commodity in the conceptualization of language. We maintain that capitalist processes have discursively assigned language some characteristics of a commodity to be regulated in the market, but this does not make language a commodity. Therefore, following Polanyi’s (1957) work, we believe language has become a fictitious commodity like labor, land, and money (Petrovic, 2019). Accepting Rossi-Landi’s (1983) argument about language construction could open up the possibility to conceive of the exchange value of language within a Marxian approach. Rossi-Landi asserts that since words and messages are not “natural,” creating language necessitates linguistic human work which involves the “production” of these words and messages in a Marxian sense. From this

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perspective, language has both use-value and exchange value. However, value is synonymous with meaning in this conceptualization, and individual language users can exchange meanings in the linguistic exchange market, not the economic market. Then, language becomes an obligation when viewed as a sedimentary process rather than a natural capacity. That is, language users are obliged to utilize their linguistic labor when producing and reproducing language because they are “employed by the society in which [they] are born” (Rossi-Landi, 1983: 63). Given this, if language is always already forced labor, why is narrowly forced linguistic labor in, for instance, call centers seen as problematic? Such moves from Marx and the notion of commodity to the notion of the linguistic market are more of a leap than it seems, precisely because Marx’s notion of commodity, while informative, does not apply. The linguistic market here owes not to Marx but to Bourdieu, which is then informed by his notion of capital. Of course, Bourdieu develops several notions of capital, one of which is economic capital, i.e. money itself. But, how does the conceptual limit Bourdieu should face from Marx inform understandings of language as capital in the literature in question? To address this, we must not only understand language as part of the general intellect, as noted previously, but we must also understand labor as a fictitious commodity, and intellectual labor similarly. As Polanyi (1957) argues, the rise of the market economy transformed not only the economic system but also human nature. Within the context of capitalism, labor – human activity holding use-value – was assigned an exchange value in the marketplace through a wage and it became a fictitious commodity. Furthermore, “labor is only another name for human activity which goes with life itself; land is another name for nature, which is not produced by man” (Polanyi, 1957: 72). Commodities are subjected to the relations of supply and demand since they are produced for sale, which means some commodities could be assigned less or no worth. When this commodification is applied to labor, disposing of labor as worthless, like a broken pencil, means “dispos[ing] of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ [sic]” in which case “human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation, through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation” (Polanyi, 1957: 73). This is a significant shortcoming in neoclassical economics because, as Polanyi (1957) continues, “no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions [i.e. labor as commodity]” (73). In order to sustain the crude fictions, there is the need for massive state intervention, despite capitalists’ faux complaints to the contrary, in the form of some redistribution (e.g. welfare). As Paton (2010) puts it, “the state upholds the specific social-property relations that create labour’s dependence on commodity markets for subsistence needs” (83). Such machinations within the system are necessary to maintain the compulsion to supply one’s labor as opposed to labor being controlled by demand. As such, labor is never completely commodified. Theorizing economy in different periods of capitalism, Marx and Polanyi did not discuss knowledge as commodity, but Jessop (2007) notes that Marx viewed

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the “general intellect” as something that cannot be commodified because it is not subject to the processes of appropriation or valorization. Of course, part of the argument ostensibly supporting commodification of language arguments is that economies are becoming exponentially dependent on knowledge and service. Relying on Polanyi’s approach, Jessop (2007) contends that knowledge is an aspect of man and it is not produced for sale in the information economy. This argument holds even as knowledge could be assigned a price. However, Jessop (2007) paraphrases Polanyi and points out that “while knowledge in the information economy has a price, it is not produced for sale but is simply a gift of [human] nature or another aspect of man” (117). We see important similarity between knowledge and language in that sense. That is, as individuals learn more language (new discourses, accents, and ways of expression) or languages (Arabic, Chinese, Wolof), they can gain more knowledge thanks to their natural capacity to do so. Hence, both language and knowledge orient, support, or inform individuals’ labor and become part and parcel of the fictitious commodity that is one’s labor. Returning to Bourdieu, his goal is to understand capital as something other than simply an epiphenomenon of the economy. However, he does argue that forms of capital other than economic capital are exchangeable for other forms of capital or symbolic power, including money/economic capital within a field or market. As Bourdieu (1986) argues, capital presents itself in “three fundamental guises” that are economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Economic capital is convertible into money and cultural capital (linguistic capital being a form thereof) “is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital” (243). So one’s symbolic capital (various awards or honors or other forms of recognition) could lead, say, to paid invitations to give speeches (economic capital). Certainly, language functions as a resource in this way, including as an economic resource, which we find unproblematic. However, it is in this so-called exchange that capital and commodity become problematically collapsed. Understanding language as capital in the Bourdieuan sense does not present a theory of value, à la Marx, and so the connection to language as commodity remains problematic. Furthermore, given Tan’s (2008) explanation already noted, the notion of (linguistic) capital seems to presume that everything, including language, is always already a commodity. Another way to read Bourdieu here is through his notion of habitus. Habitus functions within a field – a structured space of positions in which relations between people are affected or even determined by the different kinds of capital that individuals bring with them to the field. Just as neoliberalism as a cognitive frame affects the enunciative field, it functions similarly to affect one’s habitus, recreating human beings as entrepreneurial individuals, coercing that we take on marketable skills. Because of this, a field becomes a battle-field in which different people or groups of people struggle to have their capital (cultural, linguistic, symbolic) recognized and/or to have their capital remain the dominant form. The goal is to exploit one’s difference in the field so as to receive some “profit of distinction.” This is a way that language functions indexically. Just as with the notion of cultural capital, linguistic capital attempts to explain the role of

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arbitrary linguistic distinctions (“proper” English, for example) in defining positions in social space that vary in power and privilege and in locating individuals within those positions. In this game we are all complicit. Here Thompson (1991), in his introduction to Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power, identifies key presuppositions regarding the battle or game. He notes, “All participants must believe in the game they are playing and in the value of what is at stake in the struggles they are waging” (14). Thus, that speakers seek to acquire the dominant usage of language is “a function of the chances of access to the markets on which that usage has a value” (Bourdieu, 1991: 656). Speakers change their register in social circumstances, for example, to be seen as more polite or educated or wealthy. The notion that speakers can also change or adapt their language or add skills to it in order to gain economic capital (by getting a job, for example) begets the idea that language is a commodity now not in a Marxist sense but a Bourdieuan sense. It is not at all clear how such an understanding does not recreate linguistic capital as simply an epiphenomenon of the economy, which Bourdieu explicitly states is not his project. In the case of, for example, call centers, dominant languages often mark a marketable skill, inducing applicants to learn the dominant language or, speaking already the necessary language, to learn a particular accent, dominant variety of a given language, or, even, a contextually specific form of the language. But, it is not always dominant languages that are in demand as Heller, Pujolar, and Duchêne (2014) have demonstrated in the case of francophone tourism. In one case, that they describe from Canada, Acadian French is required for a site of cultural tourism. Regardless, what we see through Bourdieu (1977) is that “speakers change their linguistic register – and their room for manoeuvre depends on the extent of their command of all the linguistic resources available” (657). Of course, who need and need not engage in more or less of such change depends on power and one’s position in the structure of the linguistic market. But this does not negate the fact that speakers are adding linguistic skills to an existing capacity. Thus, it remains that labor power has value as a commodity, not language itself. In this way, Bourdieu, and those who apply the notion of capital in ways that mirror commodity, simply recreate the fictitious commodity.

The enunciative field and the error of commission Using Marx’s perspective of value in understanding language, we suggest three clarifications: (1) Language is not a commodity, but a fictitious commodity, because it does not have exchange value, and “capital,” to the extent that its understanding rests on commodification, must be seen similarly; (2) Language is a resource because it has naturally occurring use-value, and, because it not only requires but creates community(ies), it has social use-value, even as it does not entail labor; (3) Language is an instrument because, even as naturally occurring, language skills can be added to our natural capacity for language to increase the value of our labor power.

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There are important implications for the ways that we think about language policy and planning (LPP) entailed in these clarifications. Heller (2010a) importantly observes that in understanding language as commodity “struggles over social difference and social inequality on the terrain of language move away from political frames and toward economic ones” (102). This undermines arguments as to the importance of language in terms of identity, culture, personhood, etc. Arguably, when language was primarily conceptualized as having use-value but not exchange value, efforts toward equality (i.e. toward supporting language diversity) tended from various political framings, including identity politics, informed by notions of rights, equality, autonomy, self-respect, etc. (cf. Petrovic, 2015). This is, in fact, how something like linguistic human rights has been framed historically (cf. Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996) and continues as such (cf. Bale, 2016; Kymlicka, 2007; May, 2011; Wiley, Arias, Renn, & Bhalla, 2016). If language is seen as a commodity – the shift to the economic frame Heller notes – then its use-value (now its value as resource properly construed) may lose whatever little sway it held in the preservation of languages, at least as far as policy-makers are concerned. Understanding language as commodity then helps to ensconce as truism Joseph Magnet’s observation that “Languages can be maintained only to the extent that they are endowed with an economic value” (Magnet, 1990: 295). From this economistic framing, “it is the languages that matter most, not the people who speak them” (Ricento, 2005: 359). Even if the people do matter, they must still be beholding to economic interest to preserve their identity. In other words, some policy makers and language policy scholars (e.g. Magnet) reify extant capitalist social relations and suggest further that all things are already commodities. Now, the point of much of the literature on the so-called commodification of language is not to approach LPP from an economistic framing, but to challenge such framing as problematic. But the discursive shift here seems to be equally reductive, ignoring the fact that the inevitability of language makes it always already part of any exchange, especially in the information age. Furthermore, as regards discourse, moving analysis from Marx to Foucault (following MartínRojo, 2018) occludes the real problem: The hyper-instrumentalization of language (as labor) that results in alienation. Discursive analyses do not trace back to such Marxian notions. Even as Marx and Foucault would agree that individuals are products of games of power, the machinations of said power are very different.5 At the very least, any discursive analysis of the commodification of linguistic skills would necessarily need to be connected back to the extra-discursive base of Marx. Thus, it is important to deny that language can be a commodity. Here it is paramount to point out what the commodification of language, from a Marxian perspective, would really mean. In The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx discusses labor within capitalism as, external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and

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John E. Petrovic and Bedrettin Yazan mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind … his labor is not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. (Marx, 1844: 30)

These ideas are the foundation to his understanding of alienated labor; that workers are not only divorced from the products they create, but the processes of labor are processes of alienation. For language to be a commodity, it would require labor; labor that is necessarily created through such alienated processes, and we can imagine and observe instances where the labor involved in learning/performing language is quite alienating. Such instances seem to be at the heart of the language-as-right literature; that forcing students to learn and perform non-heritage languages is alienating. Language becomes external to the learner, self-denying, mortifies heritage language and culture, and is coerced. But notice that this occurs because we mistake language as a commodity, as something with exchange value, and that value must be produced. Neither the project of linguistic diversity nor the learning process should ever be about this and we undermine our own project when we make them so. Language has use-value like air and such use-value should undergird the purpose of learning it, be it a first or second language, as a resource. When we attempt to argue that language can be commodified, we are simultaneously saying that we, ourselves, can be commodified. This should push us to look at language momentarily beyond the cognitive frame of commodification, at which point language reappears not only in its original form as a use-value (read: resource) and part of the general intellect but also as instrument, i.e. economic resource. Understanding language as a fictitious commodity – whether we get to commodification through Marx or Bourdieu – can change how we engage with language phenomena and language policy in differently productive ways. First, it is not at all clear how concerned we should be that language is, in fact, as Park and Wee (2012) observe, “an economic resource [read: instrument in our terms] to be cultivated for material profit or acquired as a skill to be offered on the market” (125). While we should be concerned that the market drives what counts as linguistic capital in increasingly narrow ways (toward dominant languages such as English, for example), it has also opened up different kinds of linguistic spaces that have increased linguistic diversity. Thus, language as fictitious commodity sheds light on the hyper-instrumentalization of language that occludes its value as a resource, even as its instrumentalization may be less problematic. Second, we should understand that language, unlike real commodities, is always in excess of the market. Heller (2010b) explains that even in call centers, language workers respond to a wide variety of situations even as they must also follow a script. Surely, their language must also shift, more or less subtly. In other words, as Petrovic (2019) concludes, “What Heller describes here is, in fact, language as social practice and as authentic even when scripted” (71). Thus, instead of understanding the enclosure of language through commodification, we need to ask: What are the acts of linguistic

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resistance? How do these engage and change the market? How do they work to change what counts as linguistic capital? Another implication of understanding language as fictitious commodity is that language work, like other forms of labor power, must be viewed through the lens of alienation as process. Utilizing commodification as an analytical lens to understand language sidetracks us researchers from the essential problem of capitalist social structure: The alienation suffered by individuals in being compelled to sell their labor and time to contribute to the expansion of capitalists’ profit (cf. Holborow, 2018). Admittedly, here it is necessary to move from Polanyi and back to Marx because Marx’s notion of exploitation is key to understanding capitalism, not Polanyi’s weaker notion of commodification – even as it is key to understanding the fictitious commodity. Understanding language through commodification as opposed to exploitation/alienation is a key problem in the language as commodity literature. In fact, Block (2018) argues that language commodification scholars are really concerned about exploitation and alienation, but they do not equip themselves with the Marxist material they need. It is not at all clear to us that this is the case. While these concerns might be implicitly entangled, the primary and explicit thrust of the literature seems to be to problematize the instrumentalization of language that moves it away from its traditional function as a marker of identity. We see this entanglement of the concept of alienation actually at the center of Heller’s (2010a) discussion of language commodification, even though she does not name it. She argues that individuals’ language skills are treated and controlled like other systems of labor in factory contexts, based on Taylorist practices of work organization. Therefore, we argue that a fitting materialist analysis of capitalist social relations should attend to the examination of the alienation of laborers and the commodification of labor, instead of language, and processes of exploitation.6 The fact that language comes to resemble a commodity in the current neoliberal discourses is a prominent symptom of the actual problem of capitalism. The person doing the language work becomes just a language worker. Just as the commodity is reified – where humanly created social forms come to be seen as naturally occurring absolute objects or things – here the social form of the language worker is created. In other words, what occurs is the thingification of the person herself.

Notes 1 The ACT test is a standardized test developed by ACT, incorporated used for college admissions in the United States. ACT was originally an abbreviation of “American College Test,” but is now simply a stand-alone name. 2 Of course, language, unlike air and soil, does not itself exist outside social interaction. While the capacity is innate, like the ability of a bird to fly, its realization is not necessarily guaranteed. As Vološinov (1973) points out in his work toward a Marxist philosophy of language, “Two biological organisms – under purely natural conditions will not produce the fact of speech” (45). 3 The Wolof are the largest ethnic group in Senegal and a minority group in Gambia and Mauritania.

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4 This tends to be dominant linguistic groups who speak the dominant or standardized language of the given society. That language variety is supported institutionally. This is not to suggest that in some cases vernaculars or non-standardized languages might also hold such power. 5 Note, of course, that the very early Foucault explains madness as alienation in Mental Illness and Psychology, only to expurgate such Marxist understanding later from the same text. 6 This is not to suggest that there are not material effects on language itself. A historical materialist analysis would demonstrate the ways that material conditions and political power have shaped language and language practices, while simultaneously reinscribing class conditions. For example, graphization did not merely provide a written form a language. It reshaped oral vernaculars and became a standard against which they were compared.

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Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473–492. Heller, M. (2010a). The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 101–114. Heller, M. (2010b). Language as resource in the globalized new economy. In N. Coupland (Ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization (pp. 349–365). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Heller, M., Pujolar, J., & Duchêne, A. (2014). Linguistic commodification in tourism. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18, 539–566. Holborow, M. (2015). Language and neoliberalism. New York: Routledge. Holborow, M. (2018). Language, commodification and labour: The relevance of Marx. Language Sciences, 70, 58–67. Irvine, J. T. (1989). When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy. American Ethnologist, 16(2), 248–267. Jessop, B. (2007). Knowledge as a fictitious commodity: Insights and limits of a Polanyian perspective. In A. Bug˘ ra & K. Ag˘ artan (Eds.), Reading Karl Polanyi for the twenty-first century: Market economy as a political project (pp. 115–134). Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kymlicka, W. (2007). Multicultural odysseys: Navigating the new international politics of diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lemke, J. L. (1995). Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics. Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis. Magnet, J. (1990). Language rights as collective rights. In K. L. Adams & D. T. Brink (Eds.), Perspectives on official English: The campaign for English as the official language of the USA (pp. 293–299). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Martín Rojo, L. (2018). Neoliberalism and linguistic governmentality. In J. W. Tollefson & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language policy and planning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K. (1844). The economic and philosophic manuscripts. Available at: https://www.ma rxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf. Marx, K. (1977). Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. 1 (B. Fowkes, Trans.). New York: Vintage. May, S. (2011). Language rights: The Cinderella human right. Journal of Human Rights, 10, 265–289. McGill, K. (2013). Political economy and language: A review of some recent literature. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 23, 196–213. Merriam-Webster (n.d.). Definition of “resource.”https://www.merriam-webster.com/dic tionary/resource. Park, J. S., & Wee, L. (2012). Markets of English: Linguistic capital and language policy in a globalizing world. London and New York: Routledge. Paton, J. (2010). Labour as a (fictitious) commodity: Polanyi and the capitalist market economy. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 21(1), 77–88. Pennycook, A. (2006). Postmodernism in language policy. In T. Ricento (Ed.), An introduction to language policy: Theory and method (pp. 60–76). Oxford: Blackwell. Petrovic, J. E. (2015). A post-liberal approach to language policy in education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Petrovic, J. E. (2019). Alienation, language work, and the so-called commodification of language. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Language policy in Canada and the United States (pp. 60–77). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Phillipson, R., & Skutnabb‐Kangas, T. O. V. E. (1996). English only worldwide or language ecology? TESOL Quarterly, 30(3), 429–452. Polanyi, K. (1957). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Pujolar, J. (2018). Post-nationalism and language commodification. In J. W. Tollefson & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language policy and planning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rahmann, T. (2009). Language ideology, identity and the commodification of language in the call centers of Pakistan. Language in Society, 38(2), 233–258. Ricento, T. (2005). Problems with the language-as-resource discourse in the promotion of heritage languages in the USA. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(3), 348–368. Rossi-Landi, F. (1983). Language as work & trade. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Ruiz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal, 8(2), 15–34. Shohamy, E. (2006). Language policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches. London and New York: Routledge. Tan, P. K. W. (2008). The English language as a commodity in Malaysia: The view through the medium-of-instruction debate. In P. K. W. Tan & R. Rubdy (Eds.), Language as commodity (pp. 106–121). New York: Continuum. Thompson, J. B. (1991). Introduction. In P. Bourdieu, Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vološinov, V. N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language (L. Matejka & I. R. Titunik, Trans.). New York: Seminar Press. Wikipedia (n.d.). Definition of “resource.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource. Wiley, T. G., Arias, M. B., Renn, J., & Bhalla, S. (2016). Language and the fulfillment of the potential of all Americans. Commissioned paper for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Commission on Language Learning. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Retrieved from www.cal.org/resourcecenter/publications/aaasla nguage-fulfillment.

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Language, context, and economic value An interactionist approach Kenneth McGill

Scholars of language policy have long framed concerns about language education and revitalization in relation to economic value. In 1984, Richard Ruiz described a broad orientation toward language as resource (2017 [1984]: 24–27), contrasting it with orientations toward language as a problem and as a right. He returned to this notion in 2010, describing intrinsic (165) and extrinsic (157) facets of the resource orientation. Under the terms of this latter division, it is possible to both appreciate language as a good in its own right, and to maintain, in the words of one set of commentators, that “it is reasonable to advance multilingual education by making positive arguments about the economic value of minority languages provided that such arguments are tempered with the recognition of their intrinsic values as well” (Hult & Hornberger, 2016: 39). This explicit, albeit wary, acceptance of the economic value of minority languages can be seen as a response to challenges by John Petrovic, who warned against “a hijacking of educational policy to promote the technorationalist needs of the market” (2005: 407) and Thomas Ricento, who expresses a more blanket concern about instrumental approaches to minority language communities (2005: 364ff). Some have gone farther than Ruiz himself, taking an explicitly strategic stance toward the “language-as-resource” orientation insofar as it offers “a promising avenue for reshaping language attitudes across the social spectrum” (Johnson & Richards, 2017: 329). In this chapter, I would like to more closely examine the notion of the economic value of language, expanding on my earlier critique (McGill, 2013a) of arguments about the “commodification of language” (2013a: 197–200). While there are some who have at least tended to agree with this critique (Block, 2017; Holborow, 2018; Simpson & O’Regan, 2018; Petrovic, 2019), my effort here is not simply to reiterate it in a superficial manner, but instead to provide a clear account of economic value as it exists in contextual and interactional terms, thus providing the conceptual foundations of my claim that language is, in general, not a commodity. First and foremost, this means providing an account of economic laws as they exist in social contexts. It is only with such an account in hand that we can really assess whether a complex object such as “language” could possibly serve as an object of economic value – i.e. a commodity.

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The short version of my argument is that it is only possible to describe something as a commodity when its production is rationalized in relation to some economic law. What this means is not entirely simple, but suffice it to say that it is difficult to imagine a market in particular phonemes, words, utterances, or other linguistic forms. In spite of their own involvement in describing language as economically measurable (Budach, Roy, & Heller 2003: 604, Heller, 2003: 474), it has been objected by Monica Heller and Alexandre Duchêne that I think that a commodity is only such when it is “measured” by an analyst (Heller & Duchêne, 2016: 142). This latter claim is not correct. Particularly following the work of Karl Polanyi, I would reiterate that a commodity is something “that has been produced for sale on a market” (Block, 2001: 75, quoted in McGill, 2013a: 197), but add that the key point here is not that the thing in question is actually sold, but rather that it is produced under some rationalized constraints that can reasonably be said to do with economic laws. It is understandable how some scholars of language with little background studying markets have difficulty with this distinction – rationalized participation in the market is so often hypostatized and ideologically inflated that it is perhaps tempting to see it as an illusion altogether. Anyone who has seriously taken up this issue, however, will have to realize that this is simply not the case. There is indeed some reality to economic laws, thus to economic rationalization, and thus ultimately to the commodity form. The mere experience of something as valuable is not enough to constitute an economic law – as I will argue below, what we contend with here is a particular interactional form. In order to be perfectly clear about the theory behind my critique of the “commodification of language” argument, I attempt to lay out this form here. In terms of language policy, my ultimate conclusion is that there is quite a bit of sense in Ruiz’s characterization of distinct “orientations” toward language in the formation of language policy, but that there are strong grounds to doubt any characterization of language as something harboring “extrinsic” or economic value. Once we understand why the production of language is unlikely to be rationalized in relation to economic laws, we can see where this aspect of his argument at least tends to fail on practical grounds.

Preliminaries to theorizing economic value and economic laws in context It should be said, at the outset, that there have been considerable efforts to think about economic value and economic law within a qualitative framework. Perhaps most noteworthy here is the work of Polanyi, whose notion of an economy embedded within a larger social and cultural framework has since been developed in different ways by sociologists such as Mark Granovetter (1985) and Michel Callon (1998), as well as anthropologists such as James G. Carrier and Daniel Miller (Carrier & Miller, 1998). In spite of their differences with one another, Callon’s and Miller’s work has been particularly influential in economic anthropology, synthesizing a variety of insights into perspectives most closely associated with the notions of “performation” (Callon, 2006) and “virtualism” (Miller, 1998).

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What is not present in such work, however, is a clear presentation of how economic value or economic laws might function in distinctly interactional terms. Miller argues that both he and Callon “write in terms of frames and externalities” (2002: 223). Although the notion of “frame” he refers to is taken from the work of the renown interactional theorist Erving Goffman (see especially Callon, 1998), both Callon and Miller seem to think of framing as an almost metaphysical process – something that happens to things, rather than occurs between actors. This is particularly apparent in one commentator’s description of Callon’s concern with “separative technology” that allows objects to be “materially and conceptually disentangled from their context as discrete and transactable things” while preserving “buyers and sellers as individual socio-legal entities” (Slater, 2002: 238). Focusing on the complex construction of an external reality that includes economic laws, Callon and Miller seem to consider what framing might have to do with the specificities of interactional meaning – i.e. with signs that can be interpreted intersubjectively, and are thus achieved in and through interaction. By contrast, there are a series of publications within linguistic anthropology which do take a basically interactionalist perspective, one informed by Goffman along with Roman Jakobson, Dell Hymes, and others, and which are concerned with a variety of themes traditionally associated with economic value. Judith T. Irvine (1989) and Susan Gal (1989) have written broadly about language and political economy. Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma have sought to establish a “critical perspective on circulation” (2002: 192) by drawing from such concepts as indexicality and metalanguage. Although we disagree on the actual importance of Karl Marx’s work, Paul Kockelman (2006), Asif Agha (2011), and I (McGill, 2013b) might be said to have developed different semiotic models of what Marx referred to as the Warenform (commodity form – see 1976: ch. 3). Webb Keane has focused on the materiality of signs (2003), and Shalini Shankar and Jillian R. Cavanaugh have described a series of issues surrounding language and materiality (2012, 2017). More recently, I have put forward an account of language and reification (McGill, 2020) based largely on linguistic anthropological approaches to meaning. In general, these scholars have drawn from a variety of strands of research and theory. Semiotic categories are typically drawn directly from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1992, 1998), with Michael Silverstein’s retheorization of indexical signs in relation to metapragmatic function (1993) and indexical orders (2003) providing a particularly important point of reference. The broad discussion of linguistic context by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (1992), William Hanks’ theorization of referential practice (1990) and the description by Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs of the process of entextualization (1990) would also seem to inform all of the work in the preceding paragraph, as they will the following account. Noticeably, however, the linguistic anthropological literature (which in the meantime has come to focus more on signs in interaction than on language per se) lacks an attempt to address the phenomenon of economic laws. I hope that rectifying this will help to bridge a gap between our understanding of interaction in general and our understanding of economic phenomena.

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Law and semiotic analysis With the foregoing points of reference laid out, it is possible to move on to the analysis proper. As a preliminary matter, it is worthwhile to consider economic laws in some basic semiotic terms. One of the greatest strengths of the pragmatic version of semiotic theory offered by Peirce is that it allows us to take virtually anything that has significance as an object of analysis. This notably includes laws. For example, the fact that any instance of the word “desk” is used to signify a particular desk (whether real or hypothetical) involves a law-like semantic relationship between a sign and its object. We can take this law-like semantic relationship to itself be a sign, which is termed by Peirce a legisign – “a law which is a sign” (1998: 291). Although our conscious minds may not follow this path, any interpretation of a semantic term follows a course of semiosis from an actually existing sign (such as “desk”) to the legisign that is the basis for that sign’s semantic meaning. We thus consider a law as part of the course of interpretation, rather than as something that governs it from without. Because of their ultimately social nature, we can also consider objects of economic value to follow such a course. We encounter an object which has a value by virtue of an economic law, but this very relationship can be considered as part of a process of semiosis. This is crucial, since we will want to have some pragmatic approach to these laws, examining not just how they can allow for certain regularities – for example, that the price of a commodity goes up when its supply goes down – but how they, as laws, actually occur as contextually meaningful aspects of particular interactions. It is notable in this regard that contemporary academic economists do indeed generally treat economic laws as sui generis, rather than as contextual achievements of interaction. The attitude toward economic laws that I am taking is a particular one. On the one hand, I am trying to convey the sense that economic laws very much are real things – that they are, to use a famous turn of phrase, “social facts” (Durkheim, 1895). On the other hand, I am trying to convey that economic laws only occur in particular situations, and thus that they are never drawn from some essentially external or transcendent realm. Economic laws are situated in social reality. I would hope that some readers would find a resonance with this attitude, even if they do not find the rest of my argument appealing. At this juncture, it might be objected that, even if we accept that economic laws are contextual phenomenon, these laws are not “achieved” in anything like a neutral way, but can instead only be said to occur under what are ultimately artificial conditions – in a sense, that markets themselves are fictions fostered by some set of non-economic actors. In a famous case often used to justify Callon’s description of economic laws as “performated” (2006) entities, an auction house was built in the Fontanes-en-Sologne region of France in the 1980s (GarciaParpet, 2007). The preordained rules for the auction and even the design of the very building required a certain type of elaborate planning, such that the

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emergence of a market governed by laws of supply and demand could only be said to occur as a “performance” scripted in advance by government officials and other technocrats. Thus, economic laws appear to be less than real as a constituent of their immediate occurrence, and instead seem to originate from the social contexts in which they are scripted or imaginatively constructed (MacKenzie, Muniesa, & Siu, 2007). Miller makes a similar argument that academic economists and “other agents of abstract models such as audit and consultancy” (2002: 224) can be said to construct law-governed markets as virtual entities atop some set of more authentic social relationships. For Miller, moral relationships between actors provide the real context of social meanings, to include economic value. Thus, the laws that only apparently govern markets can be said to be strictly virtual manifestations of these relationships. As with Callon, there is a strong sense in Miller’s scholarship of an effort to expose or unmask the machinations of actors – especially technocratic actors – in the construction of markets. While I take these sorts of concerns about the technocratic control to be perfectly legitimate, and indeed would agree as a practical matter that markets never exist without being entangled in some specifically non-economic projects (see below), I do not think that any such concerns can be given pride of place in a pragmatic or semiotic analysis. Here is the bottom line: A market is present when the conditions for its existence are present, regardless of whether or not we might characterize these conditions as artificial or orchestrated.

Law, sign, and replication In the previous section, I tried to provide an initial orientation to the mere presence of economic laws as semiotic phenomena, and to contrast this with some other basic approaches. However, more needs to be said, in particular regarding the ramifications of Peirce’s legisign for this approach. A law is always realized in the form of a replica. For example, we take every instance of the word “desk” to somehow be a replica of the “same” word. In strictly material terms, of course, it is not the same, but our intuition of sameness is nonetheless very strong. In the case of written language, the semantic relationship declares that any formation of text that follows the basic diagrammatic requirements for the formation of the word (the doubled-back curve of “s,” the tilted arms of “k,” the fact that these two letters follow “d” and “e,” etc.) is a replica of every other one in spite of surface dissimilarities. When instances of the “same” word are handwritten, the fact of these surface dissimilarities may be particularly apparent. Even then, however, the law-like relationship of interpretation is maintained as long as the diagrammatic requirements of replication are maintained (see Short, 2007: 212ff for an excellent discussion in a more explicitly Peircian idiom). A law can, in this way, be said to involve a formal arrangement that underlies replication. Insofar as there are economic laws, we can consider commodities as replicas in Peirce’s sense. That commodities do tend to be replicas in some rather

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overt ways should be obvious to us. When one of us goes to the store to buy a can of tomatoes, we will likely go so far as to choose a particular style and a particular brand, but we are unlikely to want a particular can from the same production line. A standardized Warenkörper (“body of the commodity,” which for Marx was the contrasting category to the “commodity form” – 1976: ch. 3) is expected by consumers in part because they expect consistent qualities, but the fact that we can take two physically separate objects to be “the same” is also a signal of a more deep-seated process of replication. Surface dissimilarities for something like fresh produce will be more apparent, but the principle is still there – consumer goods always have multiple instances. After all, the price of a commodity can only be said to go “up” or “down” insofar as we take this sort of replication for granted. There is, however, a stronger sense in which any commodity is a replica of any other commodity. This is insofar as such commodities have value, and especially insofar as they can be traded for money. The facts that cans of tomatoes and stalks of celery are culinarily quite dissimilar does not change the fact that their specifically economic existence proceeds with respect to the same economic laws. Like all commodities, they can in the most general way be considered replicas of each other. Ordinary consumers in their role as ordinary consumers do not normally contemplate this fact, but it is apparent when we consider a statistic like gross national product as an estimate of all the commodity production in a single economy put together.

Cotextuality, law, and value In language, not all legisigns function in a semantic way. Grammar, for example, both has an obvious law-like character and is functionally distinct from semantic meaning. Nearly all English sentences, including this one, have a basic SVO (subject-verb-object) structure, although discerning that structure is not quite so simple as discerning the structure of the written word d-e-s-k. There is no precise formula for the immediately material surface appearance of a sentence. Indeed, the fact that one legisign – the one that constitutes SVO structure – can be said to emerge from so many apparently different replicas is quite remarkable and tells us that there is a complex nesting of multiple grammatical rules, not to speak of linguistic rules in general. Considered specifically in interactional and pragmatic terms, it tells us that there are quite complex forms of interactional context which allow us to interpret an English sentence as one among many English sentences. What particularly clearly comes to the fore here is entextualization – “the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit – a text – that can be lifted out of its interactional setting” (Bauman & Briggs, 1990: 73). A sentence is implicitly a text insofar as its grammar is compared to other sentences as cotexts. Indeed, we only ever encounter SVO structure through its replication across these cotexts. The linguistic anthropological maxim that “talk is … contextualized by other talk” (Duranti & Goodwin, 1992: 3) operates just as much for grammatical structure as it does

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for any more overtly cultural meaning. The most complex forms of replication clearly depend on achieved cotexts in order to succeed. In Michael Silverstein’s description (1993: 36), we are thus faced with a distinction between, first, the “nondifferentiated” use of context as something which includes forms of cotext within it, and, second, cotext as its own relatively unique principle of interpretation. While a cotext is always indeed a part of context, it is a textualized part of that context, and thus appears to be relatively distinct or representative of a distinct situation. Any interactional situation can be said to cohere insofar as it has its own context (i.e. its own connections to a larger world) but also insofar as that context includes particular sedimented cotexts (i.e. connections to other situations which themselves have connections to a larger world). Before moving on to discuss the interactional achievement of economic value, it is worth giving a simple example of what this means for a basically linguistic interaction. When I comment to a colleague on an early spring day that it is beautiful outside, the weather outside the building is an important part of our context. I might be aware, however, that this colleague is from Minnesota, where commenting on the weather after a long winter is an important form of small talk and follows specific parameters. Thus, our interaction involves both an immediately relevant context and some particular elements of context that are related to our interaction specifically as cotexts. My colleague who comes from California might be receptive to the same genre of small talk in a different way, since talk about substantial changes in weather is part of her adult life but not part of her upbringing or identity. The value of a commodity can be said to have a similar character. Simply calquing Duranti and Goodwin (1992), we might declare that “commodity transactions are contextualized by other commodity transactions.” This basic fact of cotextuality between transactions is crucial, since we will want to describe economic laws as something which occurs in and through a law-like achievement of situated involvements in multiple interrelated cotexts, rather than simply the lawlike achievement of some surface appearance. It is noticeable that commodity exchange is between things of equal value, one being money and the other being a commodity of some sort. It is also noticeable that these things are counters, in the sense that they take one another’s place in the course of the transaction. My desire to buy a can of tomatoes is thus related to a subsequent frame in which I plan to make a pasta sauce and a previous frame in which I have acquired some money. Likewise, the seller of the can of tomatoes has material knowledge of some previous transaction where the can was acquired (wholesale, in this case) and is likely to have a more or less formulated plan of what to do with proceeds from such sales (e.g. buy more inventory, pay workers, return profits to investors, etc.). Each side of the transaction is most intimately familiar with their own subsequent and projected future frames, but what is noticeable is that such frames are, in an important sense, rationalized together. The achievement of economic value means a very curious equivalence between, for example, my subsequent use of the item I have bought and the grocer’s subsequent

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spending of the money I paid. Both of these cotexts have been rationalized in relation to the same transaction. In material terms, it may be that I never actually use the can of tomatoes or that the grocer misplaces the money they have been paid – thus rationalization is not a guarantee that some sequence of material events unfolds, but rather simply that certain cotexts can be projected from the situation of transaction in a rational way. It is worth making a brief note about rationalization and specifically noneconomic contexts. When a previously purchased commodity is consumed in a domestic context, for example, that commodity might be shared among multiple actors. This does not involve economic relationships in any normal sense of the term. Nonetheless, the commodity value of the object involved is apparent because its purchase remains an important cotext of domestic consumption. In this way, participants in interaction can retain some sense of an object being a commodity, even when it does not function as a commodity in an immediate context. The much vaunted “breadwinner” role in domestic life might perhaps better be thought of as that of the “commodity winner” – the person whose role achievement is most dependent on the fact that the exacting rationalities of the market are evident through a cotextual link to domestic life. This picture gets more complex, but hopefully also more compelling, when we consider multiple people in the same market. Although I might not consciously reflect on this, the fact that other people have recently sought the “same” commodity as I has an effect on the price of that commodity. I might be particularly aware of this during some period of unusual shortage, and I may even reflect on the fact that my attempt to secure a commodity is related to other people’s similar attempts. Again, this sort of relationship clearly has ramifications for the way we approach non-economic contexts. Knowing, as consumers, that the things we value are also valued by others, and that our ability to secure them is related to their ability points us again to the cotextual presence of economic laws even in non-economic contexts. Similarly, we might think of a whole variety of situations – such as those within schools – as cotextual, in important ways, with various efforts to earn a wage. One interesting aspect of prices is the way that they index not only value as it is achieved in an ongoing transaction, but also as it is achieved in related transactions. Indeed, these related transactions do not even need to be for the “same” commodity, since both producers and consumers can construe different types or sub-types of commodities as substitutes for one another. Overall, any particular economic situation is constituted such that there are both legisigns, the replicas that serve as bearers of those legisigns, and a series of indexicals which allow value to emerge through cotextual relationships between situations. None of these, moreover, is an independent phenomenon. We cannot have the particular cotextual relationships that are characteristic of economic laws without replicas that function similarly as commodities across these contexts. Likewise, we cannot have replicas unless they are the replicas of something – in this case, not merely physical copies but also copies of the commodity form.

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Commodities, intersubjectivity, and market constitution It is worth stressing here that the practical upshot of all this is that economic value has a complex intersubjectivity constituted across pragmatically calibrated cotexts. Realizing the purchase or sale of a commodity means relating to other situational contexts in which others realize something similar. Although we can talk about valuing something in a specifically subjective way, this does not hold well when we are talking about economic value. Since we have so far used only simple hypothetical examples, it is particularly worthwhile to turn to a real case. Sara Brennan and Bernadette O’Rourke (2019) describe local civic organizations in southwestern Ireland who have suggested to nearby pub owners that their establishments use the Irish language in marketing to tourists, arguing for “‘bilingual signage, stationery, marketing, menus, [and] social media’ as a ‘simple’ and ‘cost-effective’ approach to ‘add [ing] value’ and ‘attract[ing] business’” (Brennan & O’Rourke, 2019: 17). The language used in such case is drawn from standard tokens of Irish described as the cúpla focal (few words). However, the description of the use of this language as “cost-effective” is an understatement – there does not appear to be any more cost involved in using the cúpla focal in marketing materials than there is in using the color green. If quasi-governmental agencies were to argue that green should be used across marketing materials in order to provide a cohesive sense of native Irishness to tourists, scholars would probably not attempt to argue that such cases involve the “commodification of color.” The association of Irishness with the color green is costless for anyone to produce (including a profit-seeking pub owner), and the same is true for tokens of the Irish language. With this being the case, Brennan and O’Rourke wisely and explicitly abstain from arguing that this case involves the commodification of Irish (12–13). In terms of the analysis offered here, we can say that there are no coordinate cotexts that would allow value to be achieved jointly by the tourists who enjoy seeing Irish on their menus and beer coasters and the pub owners who market using the cúpla focal. There are, for example, no cotexts in which the pub owners must pay to access the cúpla focal, and none in which they might put this resource to use specifically instead of using it in their promotional materials. It is true that Brennan and O’Rourke discuss Duchêne and Heller’s (2012) argument for the commodification of language as rhetorical background for their argument (Brennan & O’Rourke, 2019: 4ff) and declare themselves to be studying “the commodification of language” (11) in some broad way. However, they explicitly refuse to engage with this notion as an actual hypothesis to be used to explain an actual case. This is, unfortunately, a dubious intellectual strategy that feeds the notion that the commodification of language is a phenomenon which somehow exists in the background of “late capitalism” (Duchêne & Heller, 2012) but that does not require actual demonstration. Notwithstanding such problems with Brennan and O’Rourke’s presentation, we are left with the question of why the Irish language proponent organizations they study themselves describe the use of the cúpla focal as “add[ing] value.” It

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seems clear that they are describing something as having economic value in order to further a set of ends, which although clearly admirable, are nonetheless instrumental. This mix of instrumental goals and economistic rhetoric is captured quite well by the notion of reification (McGill, 2020). Regardless of whether or not one uses such a term, it seems clear that people can sometimes describe things, and indeed have a sense of things, as having economic value even when those things do not actually have economic value, and that indeed such occasions might follow a pattern worth naming and studying. In the more formal semiotic terms presented here, such cases can be thought of as involving actors who mention economic laws without actually making use of them in the production of meaning. What is lacking, then, is not just the relevant legisign, but also the whole series of replicas and indexicals which are co-constituted by that legisign’s use. Thus, although the cúpla focal is materialized in a commercial context, the commodity form and the typical indexical relationships which constitute economic value as a pragmatic phenomenon are not.

Power and the achievement of economic value Nothing in the foregoing helps us to characterize what power has to do with economic value. It seems worthwhile to note that both Callon’s (2006) theory of economic performation and Carrier and Miller’s (1998) theory of virtualism seem to build power into the core of those arguments. From an interactionist perspective, however, this seems to me counterproductive. When power does exist in interaction, we will want to be able to characterize it as something achieved in some particular interaction, rather than as the result of some process, such as performation or virtualization, which we assume to exist outside of particular interactional situations. The result is that we have to be able to find ways to characterize the shared achievement of economic value as it relates to some set of clearly non-economic contexts. Clearly, there is a problem if we confine ourselves to achieved contexts of commodity transaction, since these are instances of shared value in which the commodity form is taken as a given. However, none of the foregoing lends us any insight into how we could relate cotexts in which the achieved commodity form is central (and economic laws are thus immediately present as context to the relevant legisign) to other cotexts in which this is not the case. It seems to me that the key place to begin here is with a negative stipulation that fulfills some of the same functions as the Callon’s performation and Carrier and Miller’s virtualism arguments. This is that there are no causal cotexts for value. In standard economic theory, the supply of goods is presumed to originate with the desire of a consumer for goods and the desire of a producer for money. Under such an account, the only genuinely pragmatic calibration that occurs within a transaction involves the attempt to adequate one’s internal desires to market conditions (see, for a literally textbook example, Clayton, 2001: 86). To describe these desires as themselves in some way social, for example, would clearly take us outside of the ambit of academic economics as it

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is typically constituted. It does not, however, seem particularly difficult from the perspective of the kind of semiotic and interactionist theory already presented above. In Silverstein’s model of metapragmatic function, for example, indexical calibration between cotexts is assumed to be in some way mutual, even when only one such cotext involves a currently unfolding interaction. For example, my projective understanding about how small talk about the weather has functioned on previous occasions for my colleague from Minnesota informs my understanding of how small talk about the weather functions for us on particular occasions where we currently are in Connecticut, but it is also the case that the ongoing event in Connecticut places previous occasions in Minnesota in a new light. If we take seriously the notion that economic value is achieved in interactional contexts, what follows most consequentially from this sort of argumentation is an appreciation that there is always reciprocal calibration between economic and non-economic contexts. This is particularly noticeable if we consider a particularly modern paradox. On the one hand, it appears that states create markets by establishing institutional frameworks, such as are involved with the protection of private property and other legal standards. On the other hand, it appears that states – even those bygone ones known as “state socialist” – are deeply constrained by the functioning of markets. At the end of the day, of course, this is not a paradox at all, but simply a large-scale manifestation of the reciprocal calibration of indexical signs across functionally divergent cotexts. What we are left with, then, is an effort to understand how the cotextual organization of particular indexical signs can tell us about how interactional achievements can have both political and economic functions. It seems to me that there is much more that can be said here about the complex imbrication of economic value with what we might think of as non-economic contexts. In some sense, I take the foregoing as a preliminary analysis of real situations insofar as they involve commodities in variously direct and oblique ways. We do have enough, however, to provide some reasoning about why Ruiz’s initial (1984) account of language policy remains powerful. It does seem, because the achievement of the commodity form requires a particular cotextual organization, that there will be some relatively irreducible “orientations” toward policy, even in moments when one particular orientation is hegemonic. These orientations, however, are not reflections of actors actually participating in economic transactions versus non-economic interactions, but rather are indicative of forms of typical role inhabitance associated with these distinct cotextual arrangements. In Ruiz’s own terms, such orientations are “dispositions or predispositions that can be disembedded from policy statements” (2010: 157). To put the point succinctly: Governmental policies often construct actors as if they were economic agents even when they do not actually construct economic agents. The result is an implicit tendency among policy makers and advocates to construct policies as if they governed economic agents per se, rather than social persons. Of course, such constructions are bound to be partial and so we should expect oscillating orientations as actors take up and place down the relevant

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constructions. Translated into the pragmatics of interaction, what Ruiz seems to be suggesting is that the forms of role inhabitance typically projected by state policy are those of economic actors (“resource orientation”), legal actors (“rights orientation”), and disciplinary subjects (“problem orientation”). This seems at least to be a reasonable claim.

Conclusion: Language policy and “extrinsic value” The foregoing leaves us with the more detailed question of whether Ruiz’s claim about “extrinsic” value of language policy can reasonably be maintained. Here I remain quite skeptical. To describe the specifically economic value of language policy is not the same thing as to describe the typical presuppositions of role inhabitance involved in policy discourse. Rather, it is to show that there are functionally economic arrangements of cotext. Even if we take the interactional achievement of economic laws, rather than their apodictic application, as the basis for our approach, I do not see a reasonable route here. How can we locate these economic values, even if just to describe them? If we want to go further, and actually assign economic prices to the benefits of language maintenance and revitalization policies, how would we do this? Aside from make-work for economics PhDs (most of whom already seem to be doing quite well), what would be the point of such likely inconclusive work? Several paths of argumentation seem relevant here. To begin with, we have the question of cost. It is certainly the case that language revitalization and maintenance programs cost money. But to what benefit, in an economic transaction, can these costs reasonably be applied? There are many factors which go into learning a language, and there are certainly costs involved, but there are also a great number of factors, for example of social context, that matter greatly. It is hard to imagine how these factors can be disambiguated from those bearing economic costs. A rather dizzying problem is certainly suggested by the fact that language exists by virtue of its own legisigns, and that these legisigns and all the indexical signs which manifest alongside them would have to be effectively inserted into particular commodities, which in turn only exist by virtue of an entirely separate type of legisign. In this respect, Joshua Fishman is certainly correct (contra Ruiz) that “language is … an odd kind of resource for current cost-benefit theory to handle, precisely because of the difficulty in measuring or separating ‘it’ from other resources” (quoted in Ruiz, 2017 [1984]: 24). From an interactionist perspective, at least, it would appear to be that there is no discernible replica of the commodity form around which to describe the achievement of the economic value of language, and thus no reasonable account of the economic value of particular linguistic forms as commodities. Perhaps the solution for this conundrum – and I do think it is a conundrum, and not just a scholarly diversion – is to put forward a political discourse in which reasonable costs matter for reasonable goals. The “concern for statism” (Petrovic, 2014: 63) evinced in the scholarly discourse surrounding the rights orientation to language policy should be equalled, if not surpassed, by a

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“concern for economism.” To suggest that language revitalization and maintenance efforts should be justified in terms of “extrinsic” economic value seems to me most likely to encourage holding minority language communities hostage to toxic cost–benefit analyses in the course of budgetary politics. That resources should be used, even when they are not used in a discernibly economic way, would seem to require specifically substantive rationalizations. These rationalizations can, of course, be many and convoluted. They can also be quite simple – individual languages and dialects have intrinsic value, and it is primarily up to those who reasonably identify with such languages to describe the costs necessary to maintain those intrinsic values. Listening to people not just about who they are and how language exists as part of their culture, but indeed about the concrete resources they need to maintain the existence of that particular part of their cultural lives, even when net economic benefits associated with the use of these resources cannot be reasonably described, should be part of political practice for everyone.

References Agha, Asif (2011). Commodity registers. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 21(1), 22–53. Bauman, Richard & Charles L. Briggs (1990). Poetics and performances as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19(1), 59–88. Block, David (2017). What on earth is “language commodification”? In Barbara Schmenk, Stephen Breidbach, & Lutz Küster (Eds.), Sloganizations in language education discourse. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Block, Fred (2001). Introduction. In Karl Polanyi, The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time (pp. xviii–xxxviii). Boston: Beacon Press. Brennan, Sara & Bernadette O’Rourke (2019). Commercialising the cúpla focal: New speakers, language ownership, and the promotion of Irish as a business resource. Language in Society, 48(1), 125–145. Budach, Gabriele, Sylvie Roy, & Monica Heller (2003). Community and commodity in French Ontario. Language in Society, 32(5), 603–627. Callon, Michel (1998). The laws of the markets. Oxford: Blackwell. Callon, Michel (2006). What does it mean to say that economics is performative? CSI Working Papers Series, 5, 1–58. Carrier, James G. & Daniel Miller (1998). Virtualism: A new political economy. London: Routledge. Clayton, Gary (2001). Economics: Principles and practices. Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill. Duchêne, Alexandre & Monica Heller (Eds.) (2012). Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit. London: Routledge. Duranti, Alessandro & Charles Goodwin (Eds.) (1992). Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gal, Susan (1989). Language and political economy. Annual Review of Anthropology, 18(1), 345–367. Garcia-Parpet, Marie-France (2007). The social construction of a perfect market. In Donald A. MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, & Lucia Siu (Eds.), Do economists make markets?: On the performativity of economics (pp. 21–53). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Granovetter, Mark (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91(3), 481–510. Hanks, W. F. (1990). Referential practice: Language and lived space among the Maya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heller, Monica (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473–492. Heller, Monica & Alexandre Duchêne (2016). Treating language as an economic resource: Discourse, data and debate. In Nikolas Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 139–156). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.. Holborow, Marnie (2018). Language, commodification and labour: The relevance of Marx. Language Sciences, 70, 58–67. Hult, Francis M. & Nancy H. Hornberger (2016). Revisiting orientations in language planning: Problem, right, and resource as an analytical heuristic. The Bilingual Review/La revista bilingüe, 33(3), 30–49. Irvine, Judith T. (1989). When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy. American Ethnologist, 16(2), 248–267. Johnson, Janelle M. & Julia B. Richards (2017). Language orientations in Guatemala: Toward language as a resource? In Nancy H. Hornberger (Ed.), Honoring Richard Ruiz and his work on language planning and bilingual education (pp. 316–337). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Keane, Webb (2003). Semiotics and the social analysis of material things. Language and Communication, 23, 409–425. Kockelman, Paul (2006). A semiotic ontology of the commodity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 16(1), 76–102. Lee, Benjamin & Edward LiPuma (2002). Cultures of circulation: The imaginations of modernity. Public Culture, 14(1): 191–213. MacKenzie, Donald A., Fabian Muniesa, & Lucia Siu, eds. (2007). Do economists make markets?: On the performativity of economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marx, Karl (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy. London: Penguin. McGill, Kenneth (2013a). Political economy and language: A review of some recent literature. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 23(2), 196–213. McGill, Kenneth (2013b). No magic tricks: Commodity, empowerment, and the sale of StreetWise in Chicago. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 23(1), 1–20. McGill, Kenneth (2020). Language, labor and reification. Language Sciences, 80, 1–20. Available online: doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2020.101299. Miller, Daniel (1998). A theory of virtualism. In James G. Carrier & Daniel Miller (Eds.), Virtualism: A new political economy (pp. 187–215). London: Routledge. Miller, Daniel (2002). Turning Callon the right way up. Economy and Society, 31(2): 218–233. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1992). On a new list of categories. In Essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings (vol. 1) (pp. 1–10). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1998). Nomenclature and divisions of triadic relations, as far as they are determined. In Essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings (vol. 2) (pp. 289–299). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Petrovic, John E. (2005). The conservative restoration and neoliberal defenses of bilingual education. Language Policy, 4(4), 395–416. Petrovic, John E. (2014). A post-liberal approach to language policy in education. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

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Petrovic, John (2019). Alienation, language work and the so-called commodification of language. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Language politics and policies: Perspectives from Canada and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricento, Thomas (2005). Problems with the “language‐as‐resource” discourse in the promotion of heritage languages in the USA. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(3), 348–368. Ruiz, Richard (2010). Reorienting language-as-resource. In John Petrovic (Ed.), International perspectives on bilingual education: Policy, practice, and controversy (pp. 155–172). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Ruiz, Richard (2017 [1984]). Orientations in language planning. In Nancy H. Hornberger (Ed.), Honoring Richard Ruiz and his work on language planning and bilingual education (pp. 13–32). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Shankar, Salina & Jillian R. Cavanaugh (2012). Language and materiality in global capitalism. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 355–369. Shankar, Salina & Jillian R. Cavanaugh (2017). Toward a theory of language materiality: An introduction. In Language and materiality: Ethnographic and theoretical explorations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–28. Short, T. L. (2007). Peirce’s theory of signs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, Michael (1993). Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In John A. Lucy (Ed.), Reflexive language: Reported speech and metapragmatics (pp. 33–58). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, Michael (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication, 23(3–4), 193–229. Slater, Don (2002). From calculation to alienation: Disentangling economic abstractions. Economy and Society, 31(2), 234–249. Simpson, William & John P. O’Regan (2018). Fetishism and the language commodity: A materialist critique. Language Sciences, 70, 155–166.

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Misconceptions of economics and political economy in sociolinguistic research François Grin

Investigating linguistic diversity: Some epistemological requirements One of the most stimulating features of research about individual plurilingualism, societal multilingualism, and the more or less deliberate language policies developed to orient both, is that understanding the processes at hand in all their richness and complexity requires us to adopt an interdisciplinary mindset. This necessity directly flows from the research object itself, which we begin by delineating. For the purposes of this chapter, individual plurilingualism refers to the situation of a person who possesses skills in several languages, but not necessarily at the same level of proficiency. Societal multilingualism occurs when many different languages are used regularly in a given country, typically by different language communities, but residents themselves may or may not be plurilingual. No difference will be made in this chapter between language policy and language planning, and in line with much of the specialist literature, this chapter refers to language policy and planning (LPP; see e.g. Hornberger, 2006). LPP is just another type of public policy in the sense that it should meet certain criteria of effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness. Effectiveness means that the policy should impact social reality in the desired direction (rather than not at all – or even end up undermining the policy’s professed goals). Efficiency means that in this process, material and symbolic resources should be expended to maximum effect, or at least they should not be wasted. Fairness means that the resulting distribution of material and symbolic resources among citizens (and groups of citizens) should be in keeping with ethically based criteria of justice. In other words, and beyond its specific focus on language matters, LPP confronts citizens with the same challenges, in terms of the standards and processes applying in democratic societies, as any other policy. LPP may be overt or covert, explicit or implicit (Schiffman, 1996). It may address language corpus or language status and the respective enterprises are traditionally called corpus planning and status planning. 1 Corpus planning is aimed at the forms of language, including, for example, spelling reform, terminological innovation and implantation, choice of alphabet, etc. Status planning concerns the relative position of different languages, in particular the choice of language(s) used by

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the state in its internal operations, in external communication with residents, and in the provision of public services such as education. In many countries, this choice coincides with the status of “official language.” Plurilingualism, multilingualism, and LPP constitute a closely integrated thematic cluster that can be seen at the same time as part of the context and as an object of human action. In what follows, I sometimes refer to this cluster as our “linguistic environment” in order to avoid repetition.2 The “linguistic environment” changes constantly. At a given point in time in a particular place, it may be more or less diverse, and the principles that animate LPP (whose fundamental raison d’être, then, is to steer and possibly change our linguistic environment in accordance with democratically expressed goals) may be more or less “diversitist,” that is, more or less favorable to linguistic diversity (Grin, 2003). This linguistic environment provides a straightforward illustration of the fact that “problems do not come in disciplines,” as Nobel Prize laureate Gunnar Myrdal pointed out. Language is present in every facet of human experience, whether individual or collective, raising questions that span the full range of the social sciences and humanities. Understanding our linguistic environment is a task that concerns not only the language disciplines, but also political science, sociology, law, economics, psychology, education, communication, geography, and history. The questions at hand bear upon the many things we do with languages, in particular their learning, knowledge, and use, and they encompass not only practices, but also representations and discourse. On this view, it is not unreasonable to expect an interdisciplinary ethos to animate research on linguistic diversity in its manifold manifestations. This is not to say that this research must always and at every turn draw on a plurality of disciplines. In practice, interdisciplinary work usually builds on a given canonical discipline, which may be seen as a scholar’s scientific port of call, from which he or she ventures out to explore other academic territories and develop theoretical and empirical connections between disciplines.3 An interdisciplinary ethos, then, is compatible with conventional intra-disciplinary work and the resulting style of publications, provided the enterprise as a whole meets some epistemological requirements in the form of a certain degree of openness and flexibility. The latter are necessary to allow the possibility to connect analytically one’s findings with those put forward by approaches anchored in other disciplines. In this spirit of mutual complementarity, the challenge of interdisciplinarity becomes one of ensuring operationally viable conceptual and methodological cooperation (Grin et al., 2018). Some readers may object that the foregoing merely belabors the obvious. However, even with the best of intentions, practicing interdisciplinarity is easier said than done. Moreover, recent trends running through much of the social sciences suggest that this aspiration may not be universally shared. These trends are also in evidence in important segments of research on language and the linguistic environment. A full investigation of the origins, manifestations, and consequences of this problematic state of affairs would far exceed the scope of this chapter. Some of them are discussed in Schmenk, Breidbach, and Küster

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(2018), Edwards (2012), Grin (2018a, 2018b), Grin and Kraus (2018), and Pavlenko (2018) among others, and the deeper ills affecting the more general epistemological climate on which these trends feed have been discussed much earlier, e.g. in Sokal and Bricmont (1998) and Bouveresse (1999). In what follows, I shall focus on analytical errors that are frequently encountered in contemporary research on linguistic diversity and share a common trait, namely, that of harboring serious misconceptions of economic analysis. Such misconceptions arise with respect to both mainstream (a.k.a. neoclassical) economics and alternative – which does not mean incompatible – currents, such as socioeconomics and political economy, and they also turn up with respect to the Marxian perspective on economic processes. The next section is devoted to what I call “nominalism,” that is, the tendency to let oneself be waylaid by the (often erroneously assigned) negative connotations of some economic terms, with blithe disregard for their analytical meaning. I then address problems arising from what might be seen as the diametrically opposed stance, namely a form of possibly unwitting fascination with the analytical constructs of economics, and a resulting proclivity to import them inaccurately in the study of linguistic diversity. The penultimate section focuses on the question of “commodification,” in which the preceding errors are conflated, and for which an appeal to “political economy,” as distinct from mainstream economics, is insufficient justification. In the concluding section, I submit that practicing interdisciplinarity naturally brings us back to the traditional canons of scientific research.

Trivial nominalism For the purposes of this chapter, the term “nominalism” is not used in its standard philosophical sense inherited from mediaeval scholastics, where it refers to the notion that ideas and concepts have no existence outside of the terms used for them. In this chapter, I use the term “nominalism” to refer to a trivial logical error, namely a mix-up between the uncontrolled, vague, and often idiosyncratic connotations of a word on the one hand, and the reality that – as a result of mere convention – this word is intended to denote. Consider for example the following quote from Christian Laval, a sociologist who proposes, with the tools of his trade, to shed light on the intellectual roots of neoliberalism. His study begins with a massive non sequitur: “And man himself is transformed into a ‘consumable product’, as confirmed by formulations in use nowadays [such as] ‘human resources’ and ‘human capital’” (Laval, 2007: 12, my translation4). But this is merely proof by assertion, which obviously does not “confirm” anything of the sort. Laval seems totally unaware of the fact that the expression “human capital,” though popularized by the work of another Nobel Prize laureate, Gary Becker (1964), who was an avowed free marketeer, simply refers to knowledge and skills that humans may acquire and develop in all kinds of formal and informal ways. The reference to “capital” was useful to Becker because it enabled him to highlight a parallel with

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investment theory. Investing in physical and financial capital implies abstaining from the immediate consumption of some resources. In the same way, we may invest time, effort, and money in order to acquire new knowledge and extend our skills. Incidentally, such “investment” in no way implies particular greed or obsession with monetary returns. A person investing time, effort, and money to learn a foreign language, say, Russian, out of interest for Russian literature, will forgo various pleasures she could have enjoyed with her time, effort, and money. Instead of paying for evening language classes, the money could have been spent on various consumption goods; instead of being devoted to the painstaking learning of declensions, the same time could have been spent socializing at the local pub and nurturing friendships. Becker was one of the great theorists of the choices that people make under a set of constraints, and in the Beckerian approach to such choices, non-material or non-financial considerations are just as important as material and financial ones. In fact, the importance of these non-market dimensions is at the heart of one of Becker’s most important contributions, the household production function approach (Becker, 1976). Prima facie, we might worry that terms like “capital” and “investment” shoehorn actors’ agency in a particular kind of logic that derives from capitalism and the type of social relations that capitalism encourages. However, critics offended by the use of terms like “capital” and “investment” may simply replace them with presumably sin-free words like “skills” and “effort,” without this substitution altering the intended analytical meaning in any way. Such nominalism, which, across the social sciences and humanities, pervades numerous contributions claiming to offer clever critical analysis, is one of the most revealing symptoms of their appalling triteness. Let us also consider the routine indictment of “neoliberalism,” which large tracts of the critical sociolinguistics literature tend to characterize incorrectly, thereby demonstrating little concern for, or perhaps inadequate awareness of, its actual analytical meaning. This is regrettable, since such confusions are liable to impair what is otherwise penetrating sociolinguistic commentary. Sometimes, “neoliberalism” is equated with other villains, as in Heller, who writes that “liberal democratic industrial capitalism gave way in the 1980s and 1990s to what we call variously late capitalism, globalization, and neoliberalism” (2018: 37; italics in the original). However, this hasty lumping together of capitalism, globalization and neoliberalism, evidenced by the adverb “variously,” is problematic, since these are phenomenologically different realities. The first one, capitalism, is primarily a mode of socioeconomic organization resting on a broadly encompassing ideology of economics and society.5 The second, globalization, is a term covering a bewildering array of ongoing (and therefore hard to analyze) processes, rather than an ideology. As regards the third one, neoliberalism, it is both an ideology and a practice, and this ideology can be invoked in the design and implementation of specific economic policies that are much narrower and much more specific than “capitalism.” Putting it differently, “capitalism” is not necessarily of the “neoliberal” kind, as shown by the longstanding continental European tradition generally referred to as “social capitalism” or “Rhine capitalism”; more

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generally, various forms of non-neoliberal capitalism may be identified, generally with a more or less direct association with social democracy (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Barbier, 2013). The confusion often takes another, but related and more egregious, form (e.g. Holborow, 2015) in which apparently any use of mainstream economics analysis is inherently neoliberal (incidentally, Heath [2018: 2] observes that “the term ‘neoliberal’ functions as the most important piece of cryptonormative vocabulary in critical studies”). Let us therefore point out that neoliberalism bears no automatic relationship with “mainstream economics.” As an ideology, neoliberalism translates into a set of economic policies that typically include the four following recommendations: (i) a reduction in the role of the state in economic activity – possibly by way of privatization; (ii) less progressivity in the taxation of income; (iii) a generalized deregulation of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services; (iv) unfettered freedom in international trade – amounting to the rejection of any governmental control, immediately dismissed by neoliberals as “protectionism.” However, it is perfectly possible, as probably the vast majority of economists do (on this particular point, see e.g. Cahuc & Zylberberg, 2016), to produce research within the framework of mainstream economics, or to use mainstream economics as the analytical backbone for economic policy, without being neoliberal in terms of any of these issues.6 These economists, who still think that the free market is superior, in practically all respects, to centrally planned economies, have no problem with a strong involvement of the state in the economy (a far cry from any kind of laissez-faire); they largely approve the robust taxation of upper income brackets and demanding regulations in areas such as the environment, financial markets, or industrial relations; many of them maintain a healthy skepticism regarding the alleged net benefits of unrestricted international trade.

Misguided fascination Another type of misconception stems not from hostility towards economic analysis, but from what might be seen as the opposite stance, which suggests genuine interest for the phenomena that economics seeks to explain. However, this often implies revisiting some economic concepts, and this enterprise is not risk-free. The corresponding tradition, found in various currents in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, is in fact a long and distinguished one. An extensive discussion is available elsewhere (Grin, 2005), but a few examples about the perilous parallel between language and money will help to illustrate the problem. Let us begin with Coulmas (1992), who offers a rich historical overview, spanning several centuries, of the conceptual contact points between linguistic and economic questions. His investigation addresses what he calls the metaphor of exchange (my italics) and makes some intriguing points (sometimes made by earlier thinkers like Georg Simmel and Karl Bühler): First, that language and money respectively derive meaning and value from something other than their material

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substance; second, that the usefulness of language and money requires them both to be malleable, because language must lend itself to the production of any utterance, while money only becomes fully useful if it can serve for any purchase (within the confines of the law). Such considerations pave the way for a stimulating intellectual journey, but problems arise when mere metaphors are pressed into far more service than logical analysis can justify. The dangers of economic metaphors in sociolinguistics are perhaps most eloquently exemplified by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, who claims, in a boldly titled essay (Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato – “Language as work and market”), that a language community may be seen as “a sort of huge market in which words, expressions and messages circulate as commodities” (1968: 49). Alas, any actual connection is, at best, a tenuous one. Commodities may be traded on markets, but the nature of the operation has nothing to do with linguistic exchange; the duly Marxian reference to “circulation” may beguile some readers, but throwing in this term does not, in and of itself, establish a link with an economic process. Calvet (2002) fearlessly takes the analogy further, suggesting that in the same way as monetary currencies are more or less “convertible” (which is apparently intended to allude to the banal fact that exchange rates between currencies fluctuate, and that some currencies may see their price erode vis-à-vis others), languages are more or less “convertible” (by which he apparently means that some, being used more widely than others, have more “currency”). Such claims betray a serious confusion regarding the very notion not just of currencies, but of exchange itself. The type of exchange that occurs in linguistic communication (as typologized, for example, in Roman Jakobson’s “functions”) has received considerable attention in interactionist linguistics, including in the specialty of conversation analysis, which is often used as a tool in various ethnographic approaches to multilingualism. However, the “exchange” taking place in conversation simply has nothing to do with economic exchange on a market, whether in the non-monetized context of barter or in a monetized economy that uses a physical currency (or at least an accounting unit).7 Economic exchange implies that something is given up in return for something else: I give you my time and effort to work for you and in return, you pay me a wage; in this exchange, I give up a certain amount of time and energy while you give up a certain amount of money. The same applies when an object is traded for money. (Whether the exchange can be considered “fair” or not and in accordance with what criteria are perfectly valid questions, yet distinct.) Obviously, nothing of the sort occurs in conversation, as exemplified by the proffering of unsolicited advice, and summed up by the dictum that “talk is cheap.”8 The (prima facie appealing) confusion between language and monetary currency may have its origins in an inadequate understanding of the economic concepts of value – or, more precisely, of the competing theories on which they rest. Three main theories have been advanced, respectively associated with the names of David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and Léon Walras (see Mouchot, 1994). These theories essentially differ in the more or less subjective (as opposed to objective) character of “value,” as well as in their treatment of the tension between “exchange value” and

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“utility value” – a tension which, ultimately, only Walrasian theory appears to resolve, which probably explains why it underpins the overwhelming majority of modern mainstream economics. All three, however, confront us with the problem of the conventional dimensions involved in exchange. Accepting a certain amount of money from a buyer, in return for a good that I am giving up, implies a recognition of the convention that the means of payment (such as a banknote made of paper with no intrinsic value) is valuable, and that a similar convention will be acknowledged by a seller when, the following day, I will buy something from her and propose to pay for my purchase with the same banknote. The crucial importance of convention also turns up in structural linguistics, most evidently in Saussure’s work, whose centerpiece is the conventional nature of the link between signifier and signified (Gadet, 1990). Although we can agree that the role of convention in both cases makes for an intriguing coincidence and that this justifies further examination, no analytical equivalence between languages and currencies follows. Any attempt to make one remains, at best, rooted in metaphor. There is nothing shameful about metaphors, which are particularly useful as heuristic and pedagogical tools, but can only take us so far. Rossi-Landi’s (1968) notion of linguistic exchange as taking place on some sort of “market” has also been taken up by Bourdieu (1982), whose approach turns out to be just as metaphorical – and hence of equally limited relevance. Economically, there is little reason for talking about a “market” unless one can identify, if only in principle, a supply and a demand which can meet in a given analytical space, usually defined as a price-quantity space, in which they intersect. This also holds when the market is regulated by the state. There is, of course, nothing of the sort in Bourdieu’s work. No supply, no demand, no quantity, no price, no adjustment mechanism for supply and demand to meet, no equilibrium – and hence no market. Bourdieu’s constant invocation of the “profit” that may accrue to some actors on his “linguistic market” is equally devoid of any economic substance. One may rush to Bourdieu’s defense by claiming that, in this case, he never intended to abide by the canons of economic analysis or to use its analytical constructs, even if some of his oeuvre, like his earlier research on farmers in Kabylia, addresses questions with direct economic implications. Fine – but then, this begs the question of whether the Bourdieusian notion of “linguistic market” advances in any way our understanding of some process whereby language influences some economic process or variable, or vice versa. A magnanimous answer would be “perhaps just a little,” and some would say “not at all”: L’économie des échanges linguistiques is a brilliant sociological analysis, and Bourdieu’s deconstruction of the process in which conformity with accepted syntactical and phonological standards may be turned to advantage by those who master them is certainly illuminating, but it contains no economics. At most, it highlights the role of language in some sociological processes that are instrumental in the determination of socioeconomic status. The reality of such processes is not in doubt, and as Heller (2010: 102) has aptly put it, “how one speaks and writes is one basis for deciding one’s worth as a

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scholar, an employee, or a potential marriage partner.” But the notion that linguistic skills, in some form of other, may deliver advantage, how much, and through which economic mechanisms, is one that economists have been studying in much greater depth and with far more crispness, both theoretically and empirically, since the 1960s (Gazzola, Grin, & Wickström, 2016). The absence of economic content in Bourdieu’s work on language was pointed out long ago (Grin, 1994) and, needless to say, Bourdieu hardly registers, if at all, among the references quoted by authors in the sizable literature in language economics (Gazzola & Wickström, 2016). Nonetheless, all this bears repeating here because the Bourdieusian heritage is foundational for a segment of (critical) sociolinguistics concerned with the “commodification” of language, the question to which I now turn.

Imaginary commodification The indictment of an alleged drift, in language policy and planning, towards “commodification” is probably one of the most intriguing phenomena to have emerged in sociolinguistics since the 2000s. The notion of “commodification” is a theme that runs through Marxian economic analysis and resurfaces through the concepts of price and value. The fundamental problem with what Marx calls “commodity fetishism” is that it obscures the true nature and origins of value. Different commodities may carry a market price, and given commodities may find, “without appearing to have contributed to it in any way, their own value represented and fixed in the materiality of a commodity that exists next to them and apart from them” (Marx 1965 [1867]: 630, my translation). Gouverneur (1987: See in particular pp. 38–39) provides a helpful interpretation of this difficult Marxian idea by pointing out that whereas price, in neoclassical economics, is seen as the natural reflection of the confrontation of buyers’ and sellers’ respective valuations of a commodity, Marx’s theoretical stance is that it should be exposed as a notion that hides the reality of human labor as the true source of value. On this view, “commodification” serves to transform human labor into what is ostensibly presented as value. The concept of commodification may be extended in order to refer to a class of processes in which any good or service, including non-material, symbolic entities that were hitherto not considered economically “valuable” or tradable (or that did not ontologically need to carry a price), are given a price and can thus become the object of market (or quasi-market) exchange. In the case of language, commodification may then be seen as a process in which “language comes to be valued and sought for the economic profit it can bring through exchange in the market” (Park & Wee, 2012: 125). Needless to say, commodification is considered “Bad” in critical sociolinguistics, where considerable attention is devoted to it (see e.g. Del Percio, 2018; Duchêne & Heller, 2012; Heller, 2003, 2007, 2010; Park & Wee, 2012; Pujolar, 2018; and a whole theme issue of the journal Language Policy [17(2), May 2018]). However, it is far from clear that these authors’ concerns are justified.

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Let us first observe that proponents of the language commodification approach hardly ever anchor their analysis in the Marxian concept, as pointed out by Block (2018: 123–124). Yet even if one accepts the premise that the Marxian analysis does provide a relevant framework (a hypothesis that will not be discussed here), language, not being produced as such by a worker, and given the impossibility of separating the use of language from practically all production processes, simply cannot be considered a commodity in the sense of Marxian theory (ibid.; see also Block, 2018; McGill, 2013; Petrovic, 2019). Hence, there is no commodification taking place, and the use of the term in the literature dedicated to some alleged “commodification of language” ends up – again – being metaphorical, as explained by Simpson and O’Regan (2018: See e.g. pp. 158 ff.), much like the Bourdieusian perspective with which it usually claims direct lineage. The flimsiness of the link-up with Marxian thought is all the more surprising given that proponents of “language commodification,” not being able to present their approach as containing (mainstream) economic insights, fall back on the claim that they offer a “political economy” of language. But apart from the fact that the logical connection with Marxian political economy is still missing, they do not offer a non-Marxian political economy either. Political economy may be a broad church, with some currents closely aligned with the Marxian traditions and others not at all, but one necessary feature is some relevance to economic variables and processes (Zajac, 1996),9 which is absent from the “commodification” literature. The uncritical endorsement of the “linguistic commodification” perspective, espoused by a strand of literature that paradoxically presents itself as “critical,” causes problems going beyond the quasi-liturgical self-referentiality that is one of its immediately discernible hallmarks – in fact, few lines of discourse in plurilingualism, multilingualism, and LPP are as heavily formulaic. The more serious problem is that proponents of the commodification approach, who ultimately mean well, may end up exacerbating the very real socioeconomic ills that they decry. Nobody denies that “language-in-society” (to use the hyphenated expression credited to the famous sociolinguist Joshua Fishman) is closely intertwined with power, and this point is a recurring one across the full range of the social sciences and humanities (for an original discussion of language and power linked to a Marxian perspective, see Raffestin, 1980). Some languages are more or less overtly despised and their speakers marginalized. Access to employment and income may be predicated not merely on acquiring skills in a second or third language, but also on suppressing one’s linguistic traits, such as a nonstandard accent. There is no doubt that various forms of domination and material or symbolic violence crystallize around people’s linguistic attributes. Few commentators would disagree with the notion that ethical principles behoove us to correct injustice, and critics of “commodification” processes use the same moral compass. It stands to reason, then, that a flawed analysis is particularly problematic if it generates political pronouncements or policy recommendations that hamper the correction of injustice. The issue at hand, therefore, is not so

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much one of ideology as of analytical consistency. Unfortunately, hampering efforts made to redress linguistic wrongs is precisely what the indictment of alleged “language commodification” ends up doing. Consider the case of a language community who, in order to push back a process of attrition and exclusion from some domains like business and commerce, organizes in order to promote its language in advertising, corporate communication, etc. This is just what has been done in the case of the Gaillimh le Gaeilge (“Galway with Irish”) campaign in the 1990s.10 Let us concede, for the sake of the argument, that by recasting Irish as a language that can be used for commerce and that is not out of place in business communication, Gaillimh le Gaeilge brings about the “commodification” of Irish. The question is then: So what? If this strategy emerges from a democratic process, and if its distributive implications are fair, it is difficult to come up with any normative reason to complain. Let us also note that, in practice, the strategy does not reduce Irish to a “commodity,” since the campaign takes nothing away from Irish as a resource for individual identity and group identification, or as a language that can be used for all sorts of non-market activities. If, in addition, it proves effective and costeffective (and therefore represents a good way of allocating scarce resources to protect and promote a threatened language), there is little to object to from an allocative standpoint, and decrying commodification is pointless (Grin, 2018b). One may agree with Lenihan (2018), who notes that “this re-evaluation of minority languages may be seen simply as shortcuts to authenticity, goodwill, and commercial gain, and will not be valued as important aspects of people’s culture” (666; my emphasis). The point is well-taken, but as long as the members of the community, in particular minority language speakers themselves, have true agency in the process, the very existence of a problem is doubtful. If the only explicitly identified downside of this largely imaginary commodification is the mere risk that the above conflation may occur in the mind of some people, and given that this risk can be easily contained by reminders that language is “an important aspect of people’s culture,” there are simply no technical, political, moral, or ethical grounds (in terms of the philosopher Comte-Sponville’s “four orders”) for berating a community’s choice to promote its language in various arenas, including economic activity. Rather, the sanctimonious condemnation of some language promotion plans on the grounds that they rely on the alleged commodification of the language concerned objectively undermines the community’s efforts, and is nothing if not utterly paternalistic.11

Concluding remarks Good sociolinguistics matters because sociolinguistics provides some of the necessary ingredients in the selection, design, and evaluation of language policy; this point proceeds from the interdisciplinary openness that all LPP requires. Conversely, unconvincing sociolinguistic constructs may translate into problematic LPP, and language policy plans that rest on inadequate analytical constructs may end up having adverse results in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness.

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As we have seen in this chapter, some strands of sociolinguistic discourse betray a seriously misinformed understanding of economic concepts. Two observations emerge from our examination of these misconceptions of economics. The first is that such misconceptions turn up not only with respect to mainstream neoclassical economics, but also with respect to Marxian economics, despite the analytical differences between these two bodies of theory in terms of their interpretation of economic processes. The second is that the sociolinguistic discourses in which both types of misconceptions are most in evidence often drape themselves in the mantle of “political economy” despite the latter’s conspicuous absence from these contributions. Both observations suggest that what impedes the very necessary interdisciplinary work that should be carried out at the intersection of economics and sociolinguistics is not some kind of ideological incompatibility but, rather, insufficient mutual familiarity across disciplinary boundaries. This chapter has focused on problems that can be said to stem from an inadequate grasp of economics (Blaug, 1992; Hutchison, 1994). Among authors who harbor misconceptions of mainstream economics, few are aware that it views symbolic choices as no less important, analytically, than material or financial ones. Fewer still realize that the mainstream economic concept of rationality does not refer to the nature of a choice (substantive rationality) but to the process through which this choice is made (procedural rationality). Among those who misinterpret the Marxian concept of commodity and ignore the associated analysis of production and value, not many seem to appreciate the fact that merely denouncing (usually with inadequate theoretical and empirical elaboration) a situation that one considers unjust is not enough to deserve the label of “political economy.” A modicum of relevance with respect to economic processes is needed, also when the latter are not observed through the mainstream, neoclassical lens. This returns us to the point made at the outset: Interdisciplinarity is necessary, but it is not always easy. Adopting an interdisciplinary ethos implies the willingness to submit one’s dearly held theories and concepts to the challenge of cross-examination; interdisciplinarity is not compatible with self-referentiality and insularity. This endeavor requires criteria by which alternative propositions can be assessed, transcending disciplinary perspectives (let alone narrower schools of thought) as well as ideological preferences. But a set of criteria, in fact, does exist: It includes being aware that positive and normative statements, though not always easy to tease apart, do not have the same epistemological status; recognizing that some realities exist independently of our representations, even if the latter influence access to those realities; knowing the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition; accepting that an anecdote, edifying as it may appear, does not automatically reveal a general trend – isn’t it what we call the classic scientific method?

Notes 1 Some authors single out a third type, acquisition planning, which concerns the teaching of a language, while others, as we shall do here, consider acquisition planning a subset of status planning.

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2 The notion of “linguistic environment,” then, encompasses the sum total of the linguistic features of the context in which we live, and it goes well beyond its visual manifestations (e.g. public signage), which is often studied under the label of “linguistic landscape.” 3 This common strategy may also reflect the fact that academic institutions are notoriously ambivalent in their support for interdisciplinarity (Lyall, 2019). 4 In the original: “Et l’homme même est transformé en ‘produit consommable’ comme suffisent à l’attester les formules aujourd’hui en usage de ‘ressources humaines’ et de ‘capital humain.’” 5 Also note that the notion of “late capitalism,” another holdover from Marxism, has little traction with economists, because it is far from clear that the features that are supposed to distinguish it from “not-late” capitalism actually make a fundamental difference to the processes that economics and political economy are meant to explain. 6 On this matter, Holborow (2018: 523) takes to task a text by Grin and Vaillancourt (2012), claiming that this piece “reduce[s] decisions about language choice and use to functional or material gain considerations.” Holborow conveniently ignores the fact that on page two of this very text, Grin and Vaillancourt point out that “the goal of an economic perspective on multilingualism is not necessarily to ‘put a price’ on languages or to ‘reify’ them. Economists treat language in different, non-mutually exclusive ways, usually as a skill used for communication; or as a carrier of identity which may be the object of discrimination; or as a tool used and manipulated to acquire or retain power; etc. However, language itself is practically never treated as an ‘economic good,’ but rather as a factor used in the consumption or production of market or nonmarket, material or symbolic, commodities” (ibid: 2). 7 Although economic exchange with reference to some accounting unit and the presence of a specific, dedicated physical currency usually go together, this is not necessarily the case, as in ancient Egypt, which until the first millennium BC used an elaborate accounting system, but no corresponding coinage. 8 The whole discussion about the alleged “non-convertibility” of certain currencies also makes little sense for another reason, namely because all currencies can be traded against each other, even if exchange controls may drive a wedge between the black market and the official exchange rate. 9 See also the Political Economy Program of the US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) at https://www.nber.org/programs/pol/pol.html (consulted 3 June 2020). 10 See https://www.gleg.ie/?lang=en (consulted 13 April 2020). 11 Interestingly, the fieldwork examination of two other promotional programs for Irish (Brennan, 2018), despite having been undertaken with an explicitly “commodificationist” angle, ends up with a nuanced account that provides no grounds for condemning the deliberate link-up between the Irish language and its use in commerce.

References Barbier, Jean-Claude (2013). The road to social Europe. A contemporary approach to political cultures and diversity in Europe. London/New York: Routledge. Becker, Gary (1964). Human capital. New York: Columbia University Press. Becker, Gary (1976). The economic approach to human behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blaug, Mark (1992). The methodology of economics, or how economists explain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Block, David (2018). What on earth is “language commodification”? In B. Schmenk, S. Breidbach, & L. Küster (Eds.), Sloganizations in language education discourse (pp. 121–141). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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Bourdieu, Pierre (1982). Ce que parler veut dire. L’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Arthème Fayard. Bouveresse, Jacques (1999). Prodiges et vertiges de l’analogie. Paris: Raisons d’agir. Brennan, Sara C. (2018). Advocating commodification: An ethnographic look at the policing of Irish as a commercial asset, Language Policy, 17(2), 157–177. Cahuc, Pierre & Zylberberg, André (2016). Le négationnisme économique et comment s’en débarrasser. Paris: Flammarion. Calvet, Louis-Jean (2002). Le marché aux langues. Les effets linguistiques de la mondialisation. Paris: Plon. Comte-Sponville, André (2004). Le capitalisme est-il moral? Paris: Albin Michel. Coulmas, Florian (1992). Die Wirtschaft mit der Sprache. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Del Percio, Alfonso (2018). Turning language and communication into productive resources. Language policy and planning and multinational corporations (pp. 526–543). In J. W. Tollefson & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language policy and planning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duchêne, Alexandre & Heller, Monica (Eds.) (2012). Language in late capitalism. Pride and profit. London: Routledge. Durkheim, Emile (1895/1982). Rules of the sociological method. New York: The Free Press. Edwards, John (2012). Multilingualism: Understanding linguistic diversity. London: Continuum. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gadet, Françoise (1990). Saussure: une science de la langue. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Gazzola, Michele, Grin, François & Wickström, Bengt-Arne (2016). A concise bibliography of language economics. In M. Gazzola & B.-A. Wickström (Eds.), The economics of language policy (pp. 53–92). CESifo Series, Boston: MIT Press. Gazzola, Michele & Wickström, Bengt-Arne (Eds.) (2016). The economics of language policy. CESifo Series, Boston: MIT Press. Gouverneur, Jacques (1987). Manuel de théorie économique marxiste. Brussels: De Boeck Université. Grin, François (1994). The economics of language: Match or mismatch? International Political Science Review, 15, 27–44. Grin, François (2003). Diversity as paradigm, analytical device, and policy goal. In W. Kymlicka & A. Patten (Eds.), Language rights and political theory (pp. 169–188). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grin, François (2005). Économie et langue: de quelques équivoques, croisements et convergences, Sociolinguistica, 19, 1–12. Grin, François (2018a). Choosing concepts for sustainable diversity management policies. In Gillian Lane-Mercier, Denise Merkle, & Jane M. Koustas (Eds.), Minority languages, national languages, and official language policies (pp. 35–59). Kingston: McGill Queens University Press. Grin, François (2018b). On some fashionable terms in multilingualism research. Critical assessment and implications for language policy. In P. A. Kraus & F. Grin (Eds.), The politics of multilingualism. Europeanisation, globalisation and linguistic governance (pp. 247–274). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Grin, François, Conceição, M. Célio, Kraus, Peter, Marácz, László, Ozolina, Zaneta, Pokorn, Nike, & Pym, Anthony (Eds.) (2018). Mobility and inclusion in multilingual Europe. The MIME Vademecum. Geneva: www.mime-project.org/vademecum.

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Grin, François & Kraus, Peter A. (2018). The politics of multilingualism. General introduction and overview. In P. A. Kraus & F. Grin (Eds.), The politics of multilingualism. Europeanisation, globalisation and linguistic governance (pp. 1–16). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Grin, François & Vaillancourt, François (2012). Minority self-governance in economic perspective. In K. Gál (Ed.), Minority governance in Europe. LGI/ECMI Series on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues. Budapest: LGI Books, 73–86. Heath, Joseph (2018). The problem with “critical” studies, In Due Course, http:// induecourse.ca/the-problem-with-critical-studies, posted on January 26, 2018 (consulted 12 April 2020). Heller, Monica (2003). Globalization, the new economy and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473–492. Heller, Monica (2007). Bilingualism: A social approach. New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heller, Monica (2010). The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 101–114. Heller, Monica (2018). Socioeconomic junctures, theoretical shifts. A genealogy of policy and planning research. In J. W. Tollefson & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning (pp. 35–50). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holborow, Marnie (2015). Language and neoliberalism. New York: Routledge. Holborow, Marnie (2018). Language skill as human capital? Challenging the neoliberal frame. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18(5), 520–523. Hornberger, Nancy (2006). Frameworks and models in language policy and planning. In T. Ricento (Ed.), An introduction to language policy. Theory and method. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Hutchison, Terence (1994). The uses and abuses of economics. New York/London: Routledge. Laval, Christian (2007). L’homme économique. Essai sur les racines du néolibéralisme. Paris: Gallimard. Lenihan, Aoife (2018). Language policy and new media. An age of convergence culture. In J. W. Tollefson & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language policy and planning (pp. 654–674). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyall, Catherine (2019). Being an interdisciplinary academic. How institutions shape university careers. New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Marx, Karl (1965 [1867]). Le capital (livre premier). In Oeuvres. Économie, I. Paris: Gallimard (trans. from German by M. Rubel & L. Evrard). McGill, Kenneth (2013). Political economy and language: A review of some recent literature. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 23(2), 196–213. Mouchot, Claude (1994). Les théories de la valeur. Paris: Economica. Park, Joseph Sung-Yul & Wee, Lionel (2012). Markets of English: Linguistic capital and language policy in a globalizing world. London: Routledge. Pavlenko, Aneta (2018). Superdiversity and why it isn’t: Reflections on terminological innovation and academic branding. In B. Schmenk, S. Breidbach, & L. Küster (Eds.), Sloganizations in language education discourse. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Petrovic, John E. (2019). Alienation, language work, and the so-called commodification of language. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Language policy in Canada and the United States (pp. 60–77). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Pujolar, Joan (2018). Post-nationalism and language commodification. In J. W. Tollefson & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language policy and planning (pp. 485–504). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raffestin, Claude (1980). Pour une géographie du pouvoir. Paris: LITEC. Also available (2020) at https://books.openedition.org/enseditions/7627?lang=fr. Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio (1968). Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato. Milan: Bompiani. Schiffman, Harold F. (1996). Linguistic culture and language policy. London/New York: Routledge. Schmenk, Barbara, Breidbach, Stephan, & Küster, Lutz (Eds.) (2018). Sloganizations in language education discourse. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Simpson, William & O’Regan, John (2018). Fetishism and the language commodity: A materialist critique, Language Sciences, 70(5), doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2018.05.009. Sokal, Alan & Bricmont, Jean (1998). Impostures intellectuelles. Paris: Odile Jacob. Zajac, Edward E. (1996). Political economy of fairness. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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Between voice and voices Negotiating value among interpreters in Toronto Julie H. Tay and Sebastian Muth

Introduction Initially, no one in the group had ever heard of the word “commodification” and, as the concept was explained, there was no ready agreement as to whether commodification was a good or a bad thing for them. This group, which forms the basis of our research, is composed of 11 individuals who self-identify as “Chinese” or “Canadian Chinese” and, by their own accounts, have all discovered and built livelihoods around freelance interpreting, since relocating to Toronto, between 5 and 19 years ago. Drawing on ethnographic data obtained in the period March 2019 through February 2020, this chapter illustrates how the commodification of linguistic practice happens not only in the trading of one’s thingified attributes but also in the trajectories of the workers’ experience as lived and re-inscribed within a neoliberal, late-capitalist economy. Our data suggest that commodification in terms of the Marxian understanding of value as socially driven productivity is best understood in complementarity with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (1991), which returns the discussion to a focus on human agency, wherein the capital, or indeed cultural capital (1984) of individuals’ whole dispositions and complex posturing is brought to bear in their never-ending negotiation with the linguistic market and the underpinnings of policies and regulatory bodies. From this perspective, the chapter investigates how linguistic governmentality plays out in the livelihood of interpreters who literally serve as “vessels” of exchange value of their own bilingual dexterity at the same time as they embody the use-value of a whole enterprising personhood as part of an emerging entrepreneurial class. Here, we describe how individuals in capitalizing habitus would remold and assemble their skills and inherent attributes to both embrace and buttress hegemonic structures, while sustaining a sense of the autonomous self. Our research suggests that commodification of language work calls for a more dynamic view that accounts for the oscillating cost–benefit subject position of the worker, particularly a highly skilled worker, who – at once dispossessed and valorized – both supports and resists the dominant exploitative structures, holding fast to an uncommodified alterity. Specifically in the mechanical hard skills and knowledge-building around the work of interpreting, we find that verbal interpreters, while enabling the

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commodification of labor, are nonetheless propelled by the intrinsic power of what they proudly insist to be professional work; work that is about craft and control – the techne of the work (Marglin, 2011; Stern, 2006) – and, in this case, experienced moment-to-moment in the excellence and flow (Turner, 1974) of verbatim delivery. As such, we will argue that labor, while expended as an exchange-value commodity, does in fact leave some intrinsic value of work intact, and uncommodified in the process. In this chapter it becomes clear that linguistic practices are subject to complex power structures that enable their commodification in the fragmentation and re-packaging of the worker’s personhood (Boutet, 2012; Urciuoli, 2008; Petrovic, 2019), when the singular bilingual voice is tailored in specific ways to serve specific purposes at carefully organized events. At the same time, we see that the interpreter is sustained by her own enduring discourse and meaning making, her prideful ownership of craft, and of a voice that remains her own while she competes and conspires with others to build a thrivable existence. Understanding the ways in which different forms of knowledge and social practice are (re)imagined as forms of capital has been a central aspect in work on the political economy of language (Bourdieu, 1977, 1991; Gal, 1989, 1998; Irvine, 1989) and the commodification of languages and speakers in particular (Duchêne, 2009; Heller, 2003, 2010; Park, 2011; Tan & Rubdy, 2008). The attribution of value to language and communicative practices describes a fundamental shift in how we conceptualize language in late capitalist economies: Language becomes a central work tool and product and, as such, a key resource, a condition of possibility (Del Percio, Flubacher, & Duchêne, 2017), and a potential commodity to be capitalized in late-capitalist knowledge and service economies along the demands of the linguistic market. In this understanding, capital(ization) as a dynamic concept captures the new economic relations between the language worker and her bosses and clients in myriad capacities, as engines of profit that are substantively different from the classic rent and fixed-asset model. This is evident in the work of interpreters (and other freelancers) where the worker is not just commodified in the basic sense of extracted labor but actively invests in surplus value (in her own credentialing and professionalizing, in acquiring a car, the right software, and so on) – and, in this sense, is to be understood as both a commodified body, and a capitalizing (surplus-producing) project in her own imagining. Accordingly, commodity value can be attached to language and communication skills, and not least, the hard mechanical skills of interlingual interpreting, with individuals capitalizing on their specific competencies as multilingual professionals, and/or as authentic, local, knowledgeable, or cosmopolitan speakers, fashioning themselves to serve specific markets and consumers. Apart from appealing to a specific set of customers with specific expectations and desires, the commodity value of language also finds its expression – both at the institutional and personal level – as a strategic tool in performing complex work tasks, in accessing professional networks, in the management of multilingual resources, in establishing social and economic relations, or in negotiating assistance in order to (re-)enter the labor

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market (Cavanaugh, 2016; Del Percio, 2018; Duchêne, 2009; Flubacher & Yeung, 2016; Muth & Suryanarayan, 2020; Piller & Cho, 2013). This diffuse and ever-expansive positing of the autonomous self and one’s package of cultural attributes and linguistic practices is indicative of neoliberal economies, the rise of entrepreneurism within increasingly flexible work relations and, as such, is highly conditional and dependent on local, national, and transnational linguistic markets. Within these different regimes of linguistic value, any language or languages in combination and any linguistic and cultural bundling can potentially provide returns for speakers and in turn become the individual speaker’s investment in marketability. In that respect, neoliberal ideologies provide for new mechanisms of governmentality (Foucault, 1997; Martín Rojo & Del Percio, 2019; Inoue, 2007; Urla, 2019) as manifested in the conflation of training, certification, and hiring, and in the covert partnerships between governmental procurement and large service “providers” who in turn (often elusively) also provide training and/or certification. These systems of policy formulation, professional recognition, and quality management superscribe labor as much as they shape subjectivity through self-governing ideologies and practices that interpreters must internalize (Cameron, 2002; Del Percio, 2019; Inoue, 2007; Urciuoli & LaDousa, 2013; Urla, 2019).

Of Canada and the immigrant freelancer In Toronto, the work of Chinese interpreters as an activity that is institutionally regulated and individually fragmented at the same time entails that the worker must constantly absorb knowledge (tips and tricks of the trade) and manage behavior along the demands of both regulators and the user-end marketplace, and altogether commit to a project of continuous improvement. As the first order of business, everyone must concertedly leverage their inherent assets of birth and upbringing. Indeed, all 11 informants may be considered part of an educated elite of the North American Chinese diaspora of Toronto: They describe themselves as Chinese by some denomination or another, as natives of Shanghai, Guangdong, Fujian, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., and, importantly for our purposes, all have been raised and educated primarily in the Chinese language while also being highly proficient in English from some years of tertiary (in two cases, also secondary) education in Canada, the United States, or the UK; furthermore, and notably, everyone in this group stressed that Canada (and Toronto) was a destination of choice in their decision to emigrate (for its clean air and strong social welfare system), and that freelance interpreting was a livelihood they had discovered and strategically prepared themselves for as a conscious practical decision to make it a whole or partial means of livelihood in their new found home. This group, aged 25 to 54 years old, first gravitated as a diffuse organic connectivity some six years ago and have since congregated during annual Lunar New Year gatherings and other festivities while sustaining a robust remote interaction year-round on social media. All 11 in the group as a point of

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pride describe themselves as not just bilingual but “professional” freelance interpreters, and nine derive all of their income from freelancing; one, who specifically applied for immigration under the “special professional class” after having worked some years as a technical college English teacher in China, is happy to juggle between freelancing and a full-time court interpreting job with the municipal government; and one who has worked freelance for nearly 20 years now also runs her own agency building upon her own strong direct-clientele as an escort interpreter, which puts her in a position to hire the other group members whenever she gets more bookings than she could fulfill herself. Details of the research site and the participants’ livelihood and worldviews will emerge from the larger narrative of this chapter. The linguistic market Canada’s population of 37.6 million is 73 percent white (predominantly monolingual in English) and manifests the sorts of co-naturalizing of race and language (Rosa & Flores, 2017) that is characteristic of western world postcolonial polities (or their satellites) and that rests largely on an ideology of mother-tongue governmentality (Pennycook, 2002). Canada’s unique bilingual policy accords special rights to English and French as the two official languages of the land while implicitly relegating all other languages to the margins as “nonofficial,” associating these with what the Canadian media/census dub the “visible minorities” – an explicitly racialized label for non-white, presumed first-generation immigrants lumped together. While race (white) and language (with reference to English–French bilingualism) are codified in the definition of “Canadian,” it is the monolingual English-speakers that predominate.1 Toronto thus illustrates an interplay of multilingual dispossession and entrepreneurialism where translating, interpreting, and, broadly speaking, language-centered services run on new forms of freewheeling, transient labor (Heller, 2010, Cameron, 2000) catering to every description of a human exchange market, and where the individual worker is indexed per language and assignment, and traded per fluctuating rates and fees and the varying urgency of the event at hand (Boutet, 2012; Duchêne, 2009). In this context, ultra-cost-efficient workers (Duchêne & Heller, 2012) billed simply as interpreters, or sometimes as guides, escorts, or combinations thereof, are poised daily to deliver what package of customized care that may best serve the moment and the myriad demands of the marketplace. While English remains the de facto language of public and civic discourse across the country, Toronto is home to 51 percent visible minorities – speakers of some 80 major unofficial languages with the top five identified as Asian, and the topmost Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese).2 Against this backdrop, our Chinese interpreters emerge as a new workforce with “Chinese” co-naturalized per personhood and language; very much a worldly wise cosmopolitan class, they are conscious of having become in less than two decades an essential solution to Canada’s multilingualism, here played out in the fact of a rapidly growing Chinese diaspora amidst monolingual Anglodom. In this context,

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however, Chinese interpreters remain on the margin, a minority nonetheless, relevant to official society only in terms of “Chinese” (the worker and the work), the paradox of a high-demand, yet marginalized commodity that would both fuel and undercut their burgeoning enterprise. The freelance community In a provocative article, “What Do Bosses Do?”, Stephen Marglin (1974) upset mainstream economists of the era as he proposed that social, political, and knowledge control rather than technical efficiency was the key rationale for capitalism. The point still holds and finds expression in the current neoliberal framework where interpreters engage in what is called freelance work that is strapped to the government constraints and engine of the capital (knowledge) reproduction, as in “training and sourcing [and] in the unpredictability of market developments” (Muth, 2018: 218). In Toronto, the Chinese interpreters describe themselves as being their own boss, but it is no accidental irony that none of them would have anyone to boss over and that, far from “free” (to price their labor or set a limit to how, when, and where they work), what seems free may only be the foregone choice to “go freelance,” which entails subscription to systems that in turn ensnare them in a never-ending narrative of opportunities and deliveries, with a vague sense that they get to determine their own fortune. Indeed, the participants in this study recognize that freelancing also means being fettered to Marglin’s real bosses – complex organizational (and hierarchical) structures that no one could fully understand, and with which everyone strives to comply. Between episteme and techne To ensure that workers freelance in specific, regulated ways, client organizations and language testing agencies converge to maintain a new knowledge industry around language services. While interpreting techne as in Marglin’s sense of an intuited and socially grounded practice (Marglin, 1996) remains very much a mystery to the average monolingual Canadian, both managerial “systems” and the articulation of governmentality (per codes, standards, procedures) (Inoue, 2007; Urla, 2019) control how this work is defined and measured, and, indeed, how bilinguals are to be professionalized into “interpreters” in the first place. In general, everyone in the group subscribes to this episteme of governmentality (Foucault, 1970; Marglin, 1996), largely encoded in job criteria, guidelines, codes of ethics, etc. There is a tacit recognition that interpreting in itself cannot be a liveable trade (as this is after all what one does free of charge to help relatives and neighbors) and so it is learning how to conduct oneself in the marketplace and participating in the prescriptives of delivery and the organization of work according to standards and regulations that altogether lend value, and that turn freelance “opportunities” into billable events.

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Governmentality Quite apart from the scores of large and mid-size companies spanning the globalized language service industry catering to all and any needs of Europe and North America, the Canadian interpreting sector is very much a local scene involving a handful of smallish agencies serving a few provincial and federal government bodies (e.g. the Ontario court systems, the medical board, the social services agencies)3 in the main. In turn the same institutional clients (in the interest of cost-cutting and faced with the diverse and unstable nature of language needs) find themselves relying on private agencies and non-profit or voluntary organizations to provide oversight, certification, technical equipment, or resources, or to conduct surveys, and such other instruments of reporting, in order to track what languages are in demand, and what events may legitimate the use of interpreters. And as a subtler if not more convoluted arrangement – by virtue of historical or special relations with government agencies – professional schools or organizations (whether private or non-profit) may contrive to train, certify, or otherwise professionalize the language worker. An aspiring entrant would quickly learn to navigate these structures (opportunities), very much conceived as a checklist of hurdles (application, registration, test-prepping, exam, etc.), weighing their respective use and exchange value. Meanwhile individual workers seek out and consult other more experienced freelancers and/or small agency owners forming such connectivity that may grow into informal alliances maintained on social media and mobile Apps. Here it is of notable interest that the imperative to build genuine social relations (or influence) around one’s work seems to override the inherent competitiveness of this economic condition. In the present study, members of the group keep up a lively democratic discourse on WeChat, a China-based instant messaging multi-platform. On a daily basis any group member is free to start (text or record) a conversation, pass along a work “assignment,” ask for directions as they enter a building, or get quick tips on terminology. Additionally, group members can praise, criticize, or bemoan anything, or post a video or comment to share; relevancy is maintained by natural selection as most posts receive no response while some topics may go on for days diverging in many directions, but recurrent themes emerge from this dynamic that suggests a separate episteme: From stories of trials and tribulations to looming fears and debates over professionalism and what it means to speak-to-industry – here is apparently another layer of legitimation for the Chinese interpreter. Across the global landscape of what is increasingly becoming a form of linguistic uberization (Ratajczak, 2018), language-centered service workers are co-opted into recasting deeply embedded attributes (of language, upbringing, culture, street savvy, etc.) as measurable, portable tools, or hard skills – that in turn assume added-value only as these skills are directed, promoted or overwritten by hegemonic regimes positioned to define the professional and the industry (Cameron, 2000; Duchêne, 2011). In Toronto, governmental bodies working in diffuse, tacit relations control the playing field where work, while piecemeal and irregular, is inextricably tied to specific settings (such as any given

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courthouse or hospital), and settings to schedules and expense accounts that are in turn rationalized per demand, per which language needed, when, where, and by whom (Cronin, 2003; Manolchev, 2020; Siltaoja, et. al, 2015). In particular, two such organizations are illustrated here. WAGO (as colloquially dubbed by the study group) is a governmental coalition of court services of Toronto and the larger Ontario area. Getting on WAGO’s registry is a popular (no cost) starter option for interpreters and all but one in the group had become (in their lingo) “WAGO accredited” early in their career. The process is a simple one consisting of a onepage application where the interpreter declares all information (with no documentary proof required) and thereupon is contacted to take a three-part exam. A WAGO-accredited interpreter is given a physical card/pass to access courthouses; and importantly, the interpreter’s profile is entered into the WAGO Registry of Freelance Court Interpreters where court clerks/ coordinators may search and hire whomever they find suited to the day’s needs. Here the nomenclature of “freelance” is critical: WAGO’s large register allows the courts to summon at any time any interpreter in any language as needed, paying for time served only, and not of course for the logistics or living needs that enable this open and perpetual on-call readiness on the part of the worker in the first place (McKercher, 2013). Meanwhile, the courts do also subcontract through a lowest bid system whereby a number of private (broker) agencies are given their daily language-indexed cases which they reassign from their own pool of interpreters who show up with or without WAGO accreditation. One of our participants, Pearl, elaborates as follows: WAGO don’t just work with one subcontract agency [but] have several in mind. However, it really depends on the coordinators from each [location]. For example, for OCH (Old City Hall – the court where Ben works), they call either Accu-Word or All Voice […] [and] they will have to pay higher [because] the agency pays higher to the interpreter. (February 2020) In this version of putting out, giant governmental clients maintain their own roster of interpreters as added bargaining power as they pit small businesses (agencies) against one another in a bidding system; in turn, agencies deploy interpreters and extract a cut of the fees. The interpreters are well aware of the arrangement, recognizing that while WAGO accreditation does not guarantee that they get called to the courts, it is having an official court pass to carry around that enhances their professional stature. Thus, instead of responding directly to the court, an interpreter so “accredited” is more likely to be called by the agencies, and ultimately freer to negotiate and pick any assignment (with the court or elsewhere) according to multiple indices on a given day – including higher rates, a closer location, or a familiar voice on the phone.

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Julie H. Tay and Sebastian Muth As Henry reasons, I stick with this place [the Traffic Court] because I know all the cases. [The] 9 am […] is going to be done in 20 minutes. This means, I can take two cases that morning: One here and another – 10 o’clock – at the family court. [I’m] done in 20 minutes and can bill for the first case 2 hours and walk over to the second job and there […] for 2–3 hours maybe, but I can bill for 4, or 5 if they break for lunch. So that’s how I get paid for a whole day but working only half the day. (August 2019)

And Ben says, “Anyone can get accredited by WAGO. It doesn’t mean much. […] WAGO-accredited means you have the court pass […] you are more credible” (October 2019). Thus, it appears that governmental structures provide the symbolic endorsement of what counts as an official interpreter and create the conditions for interpreting work but the same structures also enliven alternative undercurrents of value enabling workers to respond in other ways more amenable to their own logic of entrepreneurialism. PATI is a privately constituted, voluntary association of professional translators and interpreters based in Ontario that apparently “goes back a long way” (multiple participants, August 2019) as a French-only association. Today PATI is recognized as possibly the highest ranking if not the only legitimate certification authority for translators and interpreters in Canada and the power of this distinction appears to rest on the fuzziness of its status: No one is sure who’s in charge at PATI, if some government officials were on board, or if it was an old academic alliance; some interpreters worry that PATI certification keeps getting more expensive and if it is even valid outside of Ontario; some say PATI is licensed by the government, but how and whereof, none of the informants knew.4 On its website, PATI pointedly designates “Certified” as a “Chartered Title” for its own members only, but one finds out soon enough that membership is open to all working linguists through an arduous certification and endorsement process – much akin to the traditional guilds for lawyers and engineers – except that instead of university degrees and apprenticeships, a substantial fee-based schedule is built into the process. To start, the applicant pays about US$70 to have her resume, diplomas, and endorsements reviewed; in Step 2, and due to the fear of failing and losing money and time as one is required to wait a year to retake a test, the applicant usually pays over US$150 to take the Practice Test, and after that, another $160 to take the Entrance Exam; only upon passing this exam is the applicant invited to pay about $240 in order to take the Certification Exam. By all accounts, the passing rate is low and there is an additional fee of $100 plus to appeal in the case of a fail. Notably, appeal is limited to one-time only per exam, whereas the exams (which cost more) may be retaken without limitation. For those who pass, an annual maintenance fee of $250 is required to remain in good standing. As a relevant aside on a widely used “industry” blog, an anonymous interpreter shares this illuminating story about the process:

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I’ve just got back my results from PATI and they failed me miserably, with a 35% score. I honestly believe this is just a money-making machine […] you need to wait for over 4 months for the result […] I have 2 MAs and half a PhD in English (target language) […] and their conclusion was that I don’t have enough knowledge of the target language. Really? Next, they are asking another 150 dollars if I want to appeal.5 Two interpreters in our study group (Ben and Pearl) are “certified” as such, each having invested about US$700 in the process. As a parallel to WAGO, certification means being admitted as member and registered with the PATI directory where clients could search and book them, and (for translators) receiving a PATI seal – a rubber stamp – with which the member may visually “certify,” that is, stamp on a translated document and charge higher fees for the work. But unlike WAGO, whose sway lies in being one of Ontario’s largest procurers, PATI is neither client nor vendor, nor could it be considered a worker alliance or union by any definition. Instead, PATI is uniquely positioned as a governance instrument with respect to encoding, reproducing, and policing value: In making membership conditional on its own contrived certification process, PATI is able to produce quality assurance by virtue of representing its own roster of certified professionalized bilinguals; in turn, by maintaining an exclusive directory of its own certified members, PATI trains the marketplace to equate quality with PATI membership while giving members a sense of exclusive privilege as being certified and listed with PATI. Meanwhile, in the manner of how prestige clubs generally work, this value construction around PATI is further reinforced by non-members who sustain a discourse around the worth and fairness of the PATI process or in many cases aspire to become admitted as members themselves. Arguably PATI members get better paid jobs as most government offices recognize the organization as the default resource for “certified” translators/ interpreters. Ben, who was certified five years ago is dissatisfied with his returns on investment and believes PATI is not aggressive enough in promoting its brand. “The market does not understand that ‘certified’ means quality assurance,” he says [authors’ emphasis]. “PATI should do more to advertise on behalf of the members” (October 2019). Pearl, who just received her certification, explains that most interpreters don’t see the need to get “PATI certified” because “if the market is hot (like for Fuzhou or Taiwanese), you’ll get work no matter what and this is how you get experience and build credibility” (October 2019). As for the rest of the group, attitudes vary from resentment to reticence: Most interpreters see the very existence of PATI as a professional benchmark that can benefit all interpreters but find the certification itself too costly and time consuming. For those who are already making good money without it, the PATI seems like a false imposition that overshadows other pathways to professionalization. Rosalyn, who has obtained two other certificates from training schools says, “There are many different reasons why you don’t get [PATI] certified, why we don’t bother with it. It doesn’t mean we are not good enough” (February 2020).

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Of techne and stories Under an episteme of hierarchies and procedurals that drives the business of language services, the socio-cognitive performance of interpreting – what the interpreters call “the real work” – is fragmentized and expended as hard and/or soft skills all in one (Urciuoli, 2008): Now the worker capitalizes every measured moment for wage and in turn is wholly commodified; now it is not the one language or the other that becomes a commodity but the worker’s disposition of voice, posture, the dexterity of codeswitching, and perhaps even the shape of her eyes, that are dispensed as commodities, as these are sold specifically to purposes irrelevant to the worker herself. In such moments, to borrow Urciuoli’s phrasing, skills as “diffusely entextualized techniques [are] credited with […] measurable outcome” (ibid: 213). Meanwhile, and paradoxically, the interpreter’s labor, or rather its value as extracted wholesale, nonetheless remains work in the understanding of her experience – hard work, prideful and personal – from the rapid fire verbatim translation of the spoken word to the broader orchestration of linguistic-cultural acumen. This work that is artfully mechanical remains intact, and techne reigns. Despite controlling structures of episteme, the worker in the immediacy knows best – and there reclaims control and dignity – and it is in this way that techne, uncertified and inaccessible to managerialism, reassigns value to the trajectories of lived experience, specifically in the genuine practice and local knowledge that feed into what it means to be an interpreter. Giving voice to voices In a strictly market-driven sense, a language service worker may be said to exist only in strangers’ affairs, showing up as and when the need arises, and discarded the minute the event ends, her voice coming to life as it is called upon to conduit between multiple voices in the room. In Toronto, Chinese interpreters typically wake between 6 and 7 am daily in order to make their way to a morning assignment and then go on to a second or third location across the vast expanse of the city, easily covering 150 km on a given day; from one hearing or meeting to another – now at Small Claims (court), then on to St. Michael’s (hospital), followed by a parent–teacher conference – the interpreter assumes at each event anything from two to a dozen different voices (and many more points of view) – the judge’s, the lawyer’s or the witness’s, the doctor’s, the patient’s, the teenager’s, the receptionist’s, etc. Value in the work itself August 2019. James sits anonymously in the spectator area of the courtroom, glancing at his silent phone keeping “one ear open” as he waits. The room is sparsely filled with half a dozen people and no one pays attention to anyone else. At length he’s called to cross the bar, and now with his back to the

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audience and positioned at the bottom right point of a triangle layout 15 feet from the judge at the elevated center, and 15 feet from the prosecuting team across the room, the interpreter himself, shoulder to shoulder beside the NES (non-English speaker),6 is ready to begin. Suddenly, it is James’ voice that we hear echoing through the room, commuting between English and Mandarin and between the four or five voices that seem to go on forever. There is an unmistakable sense that James is in charge (albeit technically invisible as a nonparty), that the audience hangs on his every word, and that the whole motion of the event relies on him. In the mechanical momentum of conducting and revoicing multiple voices lockstep and non-stop, the interpreter in the full swing of this performance is in truth the only voice of value, and the only human agent in full control of the situation. As Liliana illustrates (December 2019): A year ago, I was feeling down and burned out, so to lift myself, I took notes on a case that I did that made me feel high. This was a home visit for the Aisling Discoveries program. I was just supposed to interpret for a simple Q and A between a case worker and the NES of an autistic child. In the middle of the interview, the child (about 3 or 4) came running to the mom with a yoghurt in hand, insisting that she opened it for him to eat. As the mom refused, the child continued to pester and argue, getting more and more angry. I leaned over to the SP immediately and interpreted in simultaneous mode for about four to five minutes. I could have just summarized what was going on but in this short moment, I don’t know why, I just thought interpreting every word would let the SP see the drama going on [authors’ emphasis]. I think she then understood the power of what I do. Afterwards, she said, “I must ask for you again next time.” As the worker’s singular voice both entwines and transcends the multiple voices being served, so performance – as in the masterful delivery or flow of techne – takes center-stage, and time as a mere determinant of how much one gets paid is diminished in that moment, and at any rate momentarily ceases to matter (Turner, 1974). “There being only 24 hours per day,” says Joyce (February 2020), “there is a limit to interpreters’ potential of making money” and so (as if in defiance) Joyce goes on to explain: When I interpret I am subconsciously trying to convey not just the explicit message, but the implicit meaning, the tone, voice, etc. For instance, if someone is speaking in an angry tone, I would most likely be mimicking the tone and, in so doing, raise my voice. Again, in recounting a counseling session, Rosalyn seems to relive the moment: In this one I was with the child and the social worker. The mom was on the phone and we could not see her. But I could hear she was very upset and didn’t believe her child really had anxiety disorder; she kept saying, “my

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Julie H. Tay and Sebastian Muth child is very happy and normal and no need for medication”; but the doctor kept insisting the patient must be medicated or else will get worse. No matter how the ES [English speaker] explained, the mom kept arguing and refusing the prescription, and she became more and more angry. I didn’t just translate the words; I expressed the tone and the emotions in her voice. Afterwards, the SP said to me, “Oh my god, you were great! I can see the mom’s face through your words” [Participant adds smiling emoji here]. (August 2019)

As these stories illustrate, the interpreter, as part of and apart from the order of affairs, thrives on her performance both lived and memorialized, or, indeed, on what may be quintessentially the “liminal” moments (Turner, 1974) of being, as here, the interpreter alone sustains “an internal logic” (ibid: 86), a dynamic trajectory that defies order and hierarchy, and not least, the passage of time and such other measures of capital value. The real voice When the group gets together, and members begin to exchange stories and argue over techniques, the often-heard refrain is, “You are invisible if you do your job well.” Apparently the statement represents not a lament but an affirmation, as if power lies in the secrecy of this work: As the event ends and the “voices” fall silent, it is the invisible interpreter (clocking out, as it were) who reclaims her own voice in a separate realm shared with other interpreters. Indeed, away from the work itself, the workers, as friends among friends, and translanguaging (Flynn & van Doorslaer, 2016) unscripted with no strings attached, would construct discursive, translational spaces (Cronin, 2003: 68). They rehash institutional dominant values in the full complexity of their multilingual habitus and recount often fraught and contradictory experiences. But despite these tensions they nonetheless sustain “a system of enduring dispositions” (Bourdieu, 1991; Inghillieri, 2014) that makes possible a continued livelihood. On pride and prestige August 2019. In her own voice, the Chinese interpreter is free to be at once cynical, proud, ambivalent, and earnest. “I don’t need them [the talking parties] to notice me; they just have to listen to me,” says Henry. “If they notice you too much, they will interfere.” And Rosalyn adds, laughingly, “When I interpret, my voice is not my voice. I consider myself a machine that delivers, and I prefer to mimic the source voice […] like I’m actually the speaker.” While praise is sometimes received, the interpreters do not rely on extraneous affirmation. Joyce says, “My parents think [interpreting] is not a stable job compared to being a teacher …[but] some of my friends at college think this is a fancy job as they were influenced by the movie The Interpreter,” she shrugs. The point is,

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“I’m excited when everything goes smoothly.” “Yes,” Liliana adds in Mandarin, “but only when I totally agree with the point of view of what is said and when I know I have perfectly transmitted the speaker’s thought [i.e. achieve a perfect linguistic equivalence in translatorial terms], and then you can tell the words resonate with the audience.” On the other hand, James, who is of the highest status in the group (as the only full-time Chinese court interpreter in City Hall), takes a grim, analytical view. “The sad reality [is] that interpretation is not taken seriously […] I feel least understood dealing with people who do not speak another language or [adding carefully] speak another language that is similar to English.” On the question of accent, he reflects matter of factly, “It’s a bit inconvenient when it happened a couple of times that some ‘native-speaker’ [participant’s own quotation marks] tried to correct my pronunciation, in what I consider to be an unnecessary way.” Here, in a strategic vein, Liliana observes, English accent is like handwriting at an exam. It’s not a problem if you are a bit off, but if it’s so far off that the grader can’t read, then you’re in trouble. Either you work on changing [it], or maybe, try to learn from the Indians who are so idiomatic with a thick accent, it doesn’t affect their clarity! Or if not, just switch to [written] translation [she laughs]. But the client’s positive feedback is not always important. As Steve puts it dryly, “No, it’s just a job.” On the other hand, Steve makes it a point to stay on top of his game, as he explains rather technically, “I read medical pamphlets [in English] for my patients […] I feel highly respected in most settings.” Not all about money While money looms large as a theme, talk revolves around competing, differential rates rather than actual earnings, and it is the specifics of fees per travel time per assignment as tallied against the interpreter’s actual work performance that really animate discussion. Here, the valorizing strategies range from stoic focus to intentional foul play. Henry offers, “Every day, I think about how much money I will make today. I think every dollar earned is every dollar gained. I don’t think about losses” (January 2020). Again, Joyce says, “I think this job is exchanging sweat and time for money. It can be very stressful” (January 2020). And everyone agrees, the rates are too low, as Liliana says, “the [agencies] compete to squeeze us. Occasionally if the client really cannot afford, I will say, let me do it for free. But I refuse to participate in the price war.” Steve rejoins here, “The market for Mandarin and Cantonese [is] over saturated plus the budget cuts from the government, the money [is] really low compared to what we do.” There is a pause here, and then someone chimes in, “But interpreting is an interesting job, we can learn a lot from this job.” Now, to this last point, everyone agrees as positive emojis begin streaming into the chatroom.

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Days would pass and WeChat is momentarily silent as the interpreters busy themselves with daily assignments. And then someone would start a new conversation, as in James’ comment: “[Today] I felt emotional and extremely sad after […] CAS took away [the] child and police arrested the mother” (February 2020). On a given day upon arrival at the scene, the language worker is typically greeted as “interpreter” and remains the nameless “interpreter” until the end, or, in this case, the Chinese interpreter, whereby the convenient racial-linguistic marker “Chinese” as a projection of the client (the lawyer, doctor, or the receptionist) serves to call out not the person but the person-type, or the hiredobject, an incorporation of personal attributes and prescribed functions that happens to serve the established order of the day. Yet, as evident in the foregone narrative, the interpreter’s own voice at some level always remains her own, and the work of interpreting ultimately defies order even as order is served; here, language workers would reclaim the subject position each in their own translational spaces, whether in managing other people’s voices, or in the after hours of work, reflecting or strategizing, laughing at themselves and contradicting each other, the workers would forge communitas (Turner, 1974), indeed, in a distinctly uncommodified mode, at once supporting and subverting the dominant market value of the day.

Conclusion There is an aphorism commonly heard in professional interpreting circles that “being bilingual is not enough to be an interpreter,” a refrain that often resonated among participants in this group. As we have seen, the work and enterprise of interpreting while predicated on hard interlingual skills is a complex and calculated arrangement that goes far beyond the simple, existential notion of being bilingual. In this chapter we have attempted to establish how Bourdieu’s habitus (1991) complements and completes the Marxian notion of value as “socially necessary” labor as we account for the centrality of human agency and techne and follow the complex trajectories of highly skilled and enterprising interpreters (Marglin, 1996). Here we see that the lived experience of the Chinese interpreter highlights the active agency (of choice, commitment, craft, and practice) that workers bring to bear in their encounter with the dominating structures of the freelance language industry in Canada. We see that interpreters are enterprising, prideful practitioners who leverage a dynamic habitus (Bourdieu, 1990) to both enable and buttress the exploitative conditions of their time. We see that forms of governmentality (Urla, 2019) in covert superscribed fashion support or promote the workers’ enterprise (through certification and other means of validation) and in turn workers are co-opted into subscription to the dominant ideologies of the New Economy. In embracing the never-ending dynamic of enhancing exchange value in the marketplace, individuals are ensnared by systems of valuation (praise, certification, influence, and so on), perhaps self-commodifying; they would make further investment into exploitative systems, expending and building

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cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984), frustrated and enlivened in turn. Meanwhile, as seen in PATI’s nebulous authority, the dominant regimes of value neither completely alienate the worker nor entirely dictate the terms of exchange or valuation. Rather, in a striking expression of Bourdieu’s habitus (1991), multilingual workers, through everyday performance of work and creative negotiation, do in fact circumvent or rehabilitate controlling regimes, feeding such regimes by their own participation (Urciuoli & LaDousa, 2013). Furthermore, in prideful honing and mastery of techne – from the lockstep verbatim precision to the complex posturing of wit or discretion – interpreters, while delivered as a “service-commodity” per itemized event, are nonetheless animated by the excellence, the techne, of their work and the rich trajectories of lived experience. The Chinese interpreter experience illustrates a vital but nonetheless marginalized community of freelancers whose livelihood is predicated on forms of governmentality that in many ways reflect the continued dispossession served by the extreme fragmentation of work life and the itinerant nature of scheduled “events” that only bring the worker into momentary focus – as a role-type indexed per language, priced, briefed, timed, and dismissed. More broadly speaking, this livelihood of interpreting in many ways reflects the workings of neoliberalism and the attendant policy implications for what is primarily a monolingual English-speaking Canada. The Chinese interpreter, we learn, is not the right type of bilingual (as Canada’s bilingual policy is effectively a political token reserved for its ethnic French citizens only). Meanwhile, the idea of a rising freelance professional class along with the boom of language services only stem from the (false) promise of multiculturalism (along with open immigration) co-inscribed with the unspoken and therefore (invidious) ideology of linguistic assimilation that translates into more monolinguals in need of interpreters. In this context of normalization and ordering (Baumann & Briggs, 2003: xv, 356), being Chinese means being a visible minority, officially defined as non-White, non-indigenous, and colored. For all practical purposes, apparently, the understanding is that visible minorities will eventually speak English, and English only. Accordingly, we learn through the Chinese interpreter’s trajectory that having a strong foreign “accent” in English can be equivalent to failing an exam. We learn too that in the power dynamic of Canada, the Chinese interpreter conduits between the SP as the (unmarked) English speaker-client in charge and the NES (non-English speaker) who would be “colored,” and typically in the lesser role of patient, child, suspect, the party distraught in one way or another. Interpreting service thus describes a neocoloniality of language as service arranged (and often tightly budgeted) by English-speaking institutions of power and begrudgingly dished out to the othered – the one in need or in trouble. This scheme of things ensures that systems of governance and public services that purport to give voice and equity (e.g. WAGO providing interpreters in 80 languages or more) are just as routinely discredited when interpreters are paid at the lowest rates possible, interrupted (whenever the judge decides to stop listening), when untrained staff swop or otherwise mix up interpreters per racial bundling (as all Asians speak Chinese), and when linguistic events conceived in a

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hierarchized roster of anonymous workers are decontextualized from the reality of speakers’ needs and lives (2003). Again, as WAGO and APTI illustrate, the regulatory, policing, and fee-seeking practices created through tacit partnerships of state with private, professional, or training organizations (Muth & Del Percio, 2018) to provide opportunities to interpreters also create barriers to the same opportunities while ensnaring individuals into precarious arrangements or costly cycles of self-improvement. Based on this research, we conclude that the use and exchange value of language intersect to make the commodification of linguistic practices tolerable and even thrivable for today’s freelance workers; meanwhile, in tracing the interpreters’ daily performance and the social and meta-discourse of their enterprise we note that language is not simply a thing of capital value but remains in complex ways uncommodified and integral to the worker’s voice – at once a bundle of tools, a thing sold, a conduit of connections, and an invisible, unquantifiable value. From this vantage point it would appear that the task of correcting the unfair and debilitating effects of governmentality in today’s neoliberal economics may best begin with fostering an atmosphere of trust and open engagement, returning real voice to the “othered” minorities and their interpreters, and re-centering multilingual voices in subject positions.

Notes 1 Canada Census 2016. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/ 98-200-x/2016010/98-200-x2016010-eng.cfm 2 Canada Census, 2016. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-631-x/11-631-x2019002-eng. htm 3 All names of organizations and individuals are pseudonyms. 4 The PATI website states somewhat tautologically that the Ontario government approved a PATI “Act” (unspecified what of) in 1989 reserving the title “certified” for PATI’s own members only. There is no other mention of government licensing or endorsement on the website. 5 The URL is suppressed to protect anonymity. 6 As a function of their professionalization, the participants typically refer to the “Chinese” subject in their work as the NES whereas the “English speaking party” is simply SP for “speaker,” underscoring the normative of English.

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Marglin, S. A. (1996). Farmers, seedsmen, and scientists: Systems of agriculture and systems of knowledge. In F. Apffel-Marglin and S. Marglin (Eds.), Decolonizing knowledge: From development to dialogue (pp. 185–248). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marglin, S. (2011). Losing touch: The cultural conditions of worker accommodation and resistance. Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martín Rojo, L., & Del Percio, A. (Eds.) (2019). Language and neoliberal governmentality. London: Routledge. McKercher, C. (2013). Precarious times, precarious work: A feminist political economy of freelance journalists in Canada and the United States. In C. Fuchs & M. Sandoval (Eds.), Critique, social media and the information society (pp. 219–230). New York: Routledge. Muth, S. (2018). “The ideal Russian speaker is no Russian”: Language commodification and its limits in medical tourism to Switzerland. Language Policy, 17(2), 217–237. Muth, S., & Del Percio, A. (2018). Policing for commodification: Turning communicative resources into commodities. Language Policy, 17(2), 129–135. Muth S., & Suryanarayan, N. (2020). Language, medical tourism and the enterprising self. Multilingua, 39(3), 321–342. Park, J- Y. (2011). The promise of English: Linguistic capital and the neoliberal worker in the South Korean job market. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 14 (4), 443–455. Pennycook, A. (2002). Mother tongue, governmentality, and protectionism. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 154, 11–28. Petrovic, J. E. (2019). Alienation, language work, and the so-called commodification of language. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Language policy in Canada and the United States (pp. 60–77). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy. Language in Society, 42(1), 23–44. Ratajczak, M. (2018). Language and value: The philosophy of language in the post-Operaist critique of contemporary capitalism. Language Sciences, 70. Rosa J., & Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 46, 621–647. Siltaoja, M., Malin, V., & Pyykkönen, M. (2015). “We are all responsible now”: Governmentality and responsibilized subjects in corporate social responsibility. Management Learning, 46(4), 444. Sterne, J. (2006). Communication as techné. In Shepherd, G., St. John, J., & Striphas, T. (Eds.) Communication as…Perspectives on Theory (pp 91–98). SAGE Publications. Tan, P. K. W., & Rubdy, R. (Eds.) (2008). Language as commodity: Global structures, local marketplaces. London: Continuum. Turner, V. (1974). Liminal to liminoid, in play, flow, and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology. Rice Institute pamphlet. Houston, TX: Rice University Studies. Urciuoli, B. (2008). Skills and selves in the new workplace. American Ethnologist, 35(2), 211–228. Urciuoli B., & LaDousa, C. (2013). Language management/labor. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 175–190. Urla, J. (2019). Governmentality and language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 48, 261–278.

6

“A breathtaking English” Negotiating what counts as distinctive linguistic capital at an elite international school near Barcelona Andrea Sunyol

Introduction: “None of you is English: DAF” Lluïsa was the head of the English department for upper secondary and Baccalaureate at Forum International School (FIS) when I interviewed her in December 2017. Her own children enrolled in the school when Forum was not an international school in 1999, and she liked it so much that she applied to become an English teacher there. She was from Sant Medir, the town near Barcelona (Spain) in which the school was located, but she had spent time in America. In the 18 years she had been working at Forum, the school had undergone deep transformations. Language programmes, and especially English, had become the focus of renovation since 2008, when the school embarked upon a process of internationalization right after the peak of the economic crisis. All of a sudden, English was put in the spotlight. The hopes for the success of the new business drive of the school resided mainly in providing distinctive English language courses, and spaces for increasing the exposure to English of the mostly local student population of FIS, many of whom chose the school precisely because of the increased presence of English (interview data). Being good enough at English, being placed in the right class groups, according to Lluïsa, became a source of anxiety for families and students, and being an English teacher, a nightmare. Having excellent English language skills became very quickly perceived as a free pass for a brilliant future. So much so, that it put the job of teaching English under great pressure at FIS, and I wanted to understand how and why this had happened. When we spoke, Lluïsa was still annoyed at a little joke by the two class representatives in their speech at the latest International Baccalaureate (IBDP) graduation ceremony. The girls, tongue-in-cheek, addressed a few words to each of their teachers. When it was the turn of their English language tutors, the students said they would miss “the listenings in their English lessons, in several English accents”. Lluïsa contextualized it for me: She always drew attention to diverse Englishes (Scottish, Welsh, Australian) when they were working with audio materials. The girls continued: “But our favourite [accent] will always be our teachers’.” “Admit it,” they added, “none of you is English.

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DAF.” Lluïsa had to explain to me what DAF meant: “directo al fracaso” [straight into failure]. The IBDP class reps’ speech in that graduation ceremony in 2017 was a bigger game changer for English at FIS than Lluïsa could anticipate as we were speaking. During the months that followed, I heard this anecdote again, retold by students and the other English teacher, Judit. When I interviewed her a few months later, as part of the interviews for my PhD thesis (Sunyol, 2019), she still had the face of the headmaster, and the held gasp of the audience at listening to this innocent joke, stuck in her mind. While opening her eyes with consternation, and almost in a whisper, she said: “Al Sr. Ermengol li va caure la cara de vergonya” [Mr Ermengol blushed with embarrassment] (interview data). The impact of this moment in everyone’s minds made me wonder about what it had meant, what had really happened in those few moments in which time stopped. What had the students done with their joke, and why had it taken this sense of gravity? Becoming international at FIS was a branding strategy to better position the school in an increasingly competitive education market (Sunyol, 2019). English was the star of their newly developed programmes, and the joke came as an amplified demolishing review. The students were devaluing one of the signature educational products of the school in front of a big audience of parents, teachers, and younger students, but also the school’s board. At the core of the complaint were nativeness and a “good accent” (Codó, 2020) as key features of top-quality English, which the school was apparently not providing. There was a before and after this graduation ceremony for English at FIS. During our conversation, Judit confided the latest news to me: “però ara és lo que et deia\ s”estan posant molt ferms amb el tema de que siguin nadius/ (.) ehm: (.) ara la Lluïsa que marxa:/ saps que marxa\ no/” [but now as I was saying\ they are becoming very strict with the thing of them being natives\ (.) ehm (.) now that Lluïsa is leaving:/ you know that she’s leaving\ right/] (interview data). Since the graduation episode, Judit says, the school has had an only native hiring policy, and a newly hired teacher, with less experience and fewer qualifications but American nonetheless, would occupy Lluïsa’s place as head of the English department. The person specification of current job vacancies at FIS confirms her rumour. This moment, and its consequences, will help me to highlight the tensions at play when constructing English language as a commodity, a resource with symbolic and material exchange value (Heller, 2010), at Forum international school, at a time when English is widely available to its students, and when the purposes for which they learn and use English seem to have become more ambitious. Students wish to access education and job markets in an increasingly interconnected world, and they believe they need distinctive language skills for that (Codó & Sunyol, 2019). At the same time, their lives are traversed by a multiplicity of language varieties and registers, which they use in multiple and fluid (Jaspers & Madsen, 2018) ways in their everyday interactions on a variety of platforms. Their exposure to English, and their modes of consumption of the language, go beyond the academic domains. As we have seen, their desires regarding English language teaching have become more and more demanding,

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and this contrasts with the creative ways in which students then incorporate this language into their everyday practices, in which they act as legitimate English language users – albeit not native – when they perform their own “international student”, “cosmopolitan”, “cool teenager” identities in the school, or in spaces like social media (see Sunyol, 2019 for a more detailed analysis of students’ Instagram practices). The graduation moment reveals the very strict preferences regarding which type of English families expect. It opens a window to explore how language policy is being made in the school, and what happens when education itself becomes commodified. Assuming the neoliberal, market-driven framework in which the school operates (Codó & Sunyol, 2019), this instance of consumer demand gives clues to the school as to how the “English” they produce can become more desirable, and thus more sellable, and valuable. The context of intensified marketization of education impacts directly on how and which language resources can be conceptualized as a commodity, as an object that the school produces and distributes, and that is exchanged and consumed, posing questions as to who the real language policy maker is. By analysing the business-oriented practices of policing undertaken by a number of stakeholders in the process of commodifying “English” (Muth & Del Percio, 2018; Brennan, 2018), I aim to illuminate some of the tensions regarding which “English” serves as a positional good and which “English” does not for dominant social groups; that is, which English can be “a vehicle for expressing superiority and perpetuating economic advantage” (Bunnell, 2010). Conceptually, then, my analysis is framed by Bourdieu’s notions of capital. Understanding language as part of the symbolic capital that individuals and specific social groups mobilize in markets as exchangeable forms of capital (Heller, 2010) allows me to explore how the institutional practices narrated in this chapter reflect the packaging and circulation of linguistic resources in the site, and are part of a process of negotiation and fight for privilege, for perpetuating the social order by a specific group of people. My analysis is grounded in critical sociolinguistic ethnography (Heller, 2008; Martín Rojo, 2010; Pérez-Milans et al., 2019), and it draws on ethnographic data generated between 2014 and 2017, when I conducted intensive fieldwork in two elite schools in the area of Barcelona that were in the process of becoming international. The data-set used in this chapter consists of fieldnotes from participant observations and conversations with teachers, students, and school managers; audio-recorded interviews with key participants; photographs of the school’s linguistic landscapes and school-generated audiovisual materials, web data and various school promotional materials. On this occasion I have focused on only one of the schools, Forum International School,1 the site where the process of packaging English as a commodity as part of a broader re-branding strategy was more explicit. This chapter, then, builds on previous work in the same context (Codó & Sunyol, 2019; Sunyol, 2017, 2019). I have used a combination of methodologies to analyse different types of data. In line with the epistemological framing of linguistic ethnography, I draw from interactional

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sociolinguistics (Goffman, 1983; Rampton, 2014) for interview recordings, and discourse and multimodal analysis (Kress & Van Leuwen, 2001) for written texts and visual materials. This chapter will illustrate with a particular case study the specific processes of language commodification taking place in such schools, which will contribute significant insights to ethnographic studies on processes of commodification of language in (and) education. It will specifically examine the nuances in the making of school language policy in highly marketized educational contexts. I shall begin by contextualizing Forum International School socially, geographically, and linguistically.

English language education at FIS Forum International School is a private, non-religious and coeducational school in the area of Barcelona, which was founded in 1989 as a Catalan school (Schools Guide, Sant Medir City Hall). From the start, the school charged exclusive fees and offered a number of educational extras, such as musical education and more extensive language programmes vis-à-vis other schools in the area (Interview data). Between 2008 and 2011 Forum became Forum International School. As part of an integral project of restructuring, in 2011 they incorporated a new management board with the mission to “internationalize” the school. In becoming “international”, Forum was acquired by a Venture Capital group, which has since kept investing in education, acquiring schools in other European and South-East Asian countries, and growing to become one of the largest international schools’ companies globally. Forum is a large school. In 2018 it had 1,580 students and 180 teachers. Most of the families are still of local origin – coming from neighbouring towns. However, since its transformation, the number of international students (those with at least one parent from abroad) has risen from 2 per cent (2008) to 15 per cent (2018). It caters for all educational stages, from nursery to baccalaureate. They offer the national curriculum of Catalonia, and the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP), which since 2011 has become one of their top programmes, and the school has started implementing IB primary and secondary curricula with the aim to become an IB continuum school (offering all the International Baccalaureate Organization curricula). This widespread programme, designed and commercialized by the IBO, legitimizes the international identity of the school. It situates the school in higher competitive positions in the local education market, it makes the school visible to transnationally mobile families, and it gives the school an edge of educational quality. Students and families coming from abroad expect to find some continuity with their previous IB studies in other countries, and an education in English, which they do not always find – at FIS, the IBDP is mostly taught in Spanish and Catalan. At the old Forum, English was already important. The school did more English lessons than most public and semi-private schools in the area well before internationalizing, to distinguish themselves from their competition.

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Since 2008, however, with the pressure to add value to their educational products, English and multilingualism became a priority. In order to increase students’ exposure to English, the school implemented English-medium instruction at primary and secondary levels. They also added a trilingual policy that made Catalan, Spanish, and English equally present in the curriculum. In practice this implied teaching 33 per cent of subjects in each language and issuing all official communications of the school in the three languages. They also designed an ambitious foreign languages programme which now includes French and German, like most schools in Catalonia, and also Mandarin Chinese (Codó & Sunyol, 2019). Over time, they enhanced their language learning programmes through liaising with language assistant providers; promoting stays abroad and student exchanges; and participating in activities like Model United Nations conferences. Since 2011 the school has also become an official language examining site in partnership with Cambridge, the Centre International d’Études Pedagogiques, which organizes DELF exams, the Goethe and the Confucius institutes. An important part of the development of the international profile of the school has also been hiring teachers with international profiles. Mr Ermengol, the headteacher, admitted to having a preference for recruiting professionals with a cosmopolitan outlook. He meant people who have lived and/or studied abroad, who speak foreign languages, and who have international connections, such as partners or relatives born in other countries (interview data). The ways in which in the last ten years the school has designed and adapted their language policies and programmes shows how multilingualism, and, more specifically, high levels of English proficiency, have become the ultimate skills of elite school students. Bae and Park (2019) discuss how parents’ anxieties about the future of their children have contributed to transforming English language learning into a matter of neoliberal anticipation, a key strategy of capital accumulation. Providing their children with a state-of-the-art English language education can be part of a project of good parenting. Since the 2008 economic crisis, discourses that associate English as an indispensable tool for social and geographical mobility have flourished. Across the globe, and Spain and Catalonia are no exception, countries with low GDP, and where English is not an official language, have strived to improve the English levels of their general population in order to make them a more exportable workforce in global markets (Resnik, 2016), but also in order to gain national competitiveness. Block (2018) also argues that in knowledge economies, the state benefits as much as the individual from having citizens who match the ideal of new forms of personhood, and English has become a key capital for that. In Spain and Catalonia, in light of the widely circulating discourses of lagging behind in education and the need to boost the country’s results in student assessment tests like PISA, policy makers have devoted themselves to the task of boosting the multilingual competency of their students (Alba et al., 2016; Codó & Patiño-Santos, 2018). The increased exposure to the language through social media and online cultural consumption may have had a big impact in the improvement of English language levels of the young population in Catalonia.

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This has been aided by the thorough implementation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes in public and semi-private schools, which have certainly made English more available to all students throughout the education system. However, as Codó (2020: 8) argues, these policies have further stretched the inequalities “associated with and produced by English” in the Catalan context. First, there is an unequal access to extracurricular English classes. But as I will show, the curricular English on offer also runs at different speeds. Private schools strive for distinction, as this chapter illustrates. FIS, for example, does not offer CLIL, but they “teach in English”, or they offer “English medium instruction” (FIS website data). The school has an organizational unit within the “internationalizing team” which is dedicated to language policy: The “multilingual coordinator”. Ms Bearne, an English language teacher, was hired to be the right hand of the headteacher. Her role has recently been renamed as “English immersion coordinator”. Her high rank role shows, on the one hand, the centrality of language in building the distinction strategies of the school. The changes in the label of her role show the recursive process of value making through forms of provision and learning objectives that their school language policies reflect. They have strived to make sure they offer more, the best English to their students (interview data). The analysis of this chapter will trace a few moments in the making of FIS English, of the construction of English as more valuable capital, a more expensive commodity. The unequal value of Englishes has been discussed by an extensive tradition of research into language policies in postcolonial settings (Tupas, 2015). Scholarship in sociolinguistic research (Cameron, 2012; Heller, 2003, 2010; Heller, Pujolar, & Duchêne, 2014; Holborow, 2015; Park & Wee, 2012) has focused on studying how language or communicative resources often become a “marketable commodity on its own” in globalized neoliberal economies. This case study shows how the language practices of different speaking bodies receive unequal exchange value based on whether they are perceived as being “authentic”, and thus as “highly competent, perfect speakers” or not, and it sheds light over who has the right to define what counts as competence, and to produce and distribute linguistic resources in the school.

Language and multilingualism as ideology The post-national era, and the social, cultural, and political changes of late modernity (Giddens, 1991), have had implications for how language has been approached in the diverse critical sociolinguistic disciplines. The conceptualization of language as a bounded system that belongs to a community and hence is the “expression” of the culture and tradition of a nation-state, as observed by Hobsbawm (1990), is in tension with more fluid understandings of language and multilingualism (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010) as we will see. The school, as part of the political project of nation-building in the frame of nation-states, has traditionally played a central role in processes of language standardization (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). It was devised to build value and status for certain fixed languages – and to devalue others (Bauman & Briggs, 2003; Heller, 2007; Rubdy,

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2015), to legitimize some and delegitimize others. Education has remained a site wherein “standard” practices have been consistently valued and where monolingual conceptualizations of languages as bounded systems have persisted. There prevail strong purist language ideologies in which learning a language, or speaking a language well, equates with being able to engage in non-hybrid practices that reproduce and follow scrupulously the rules of standard varieties, with no interference from any other language, and with no grammar “mistakes”. Such beliefs conceptualize languages as complete units, which is a pre-condition for the objectification of language. With this logic, language proficiency is measured in relation to an absolute, which can be certified and possessed – often as human capital (Holborow, 2015). In this ideological framework, native speakers are the perfect speakers of a language, inasmuch as they are its authentic “owners”, and possess in-depth knowledge of it and its cultural context. Following such conceptualizations of language, multilingualism becomes the sum of individual languages coexisting as separate, bounded entities. These ideological underpinnings have had – and still have – high currency in education. Multilingualism, understood as a form of linguistic diversity, only seems to be valued as “a set of parallel monolingualisms, preferably of Western European cut” (Jaspers & Madsen, 2018: 1; see also Heller, 2007; Moore, 2015). FIS, for example, quantifies at 33 per cent the amount of each official language – Catalan, Spanish, and English – being used as a medium of instruction. This conceptualization shows the establishment of boundaries between communicative practices that happen in different codes or fixed languages, revealing prevailing purist ideologies (Sunyol, 2019). Nørreby and Madsen (2018: 147) observe how international schools “are at once concerned with academic prestige and with multilingualism as a valuable resource”. “The question,” they ask, “is how this plays out linguistically. How do these concerns relate to the everyday management of linguistic purity and hybridity? And how are some forms of multilingualism or types of linguistic diversity possibly positioned as more valuable than others?” Approaching multilingualism from structuralist perspectives, which understand it from a “monolingual” point of view as the addition of individual languages, becomes problematic in certain spheres of institutional life (see Sunyol, 2019 for a further discussion on the management of linguistic diversity in international schools). However, this ideological framework becomes necessary in order to design and “stylize” elite multilingual repertoires as a human capital (Holborow, 2018), as a specific type of good that brings social or material capital (Bourdieu, 1984), and also “a sense of belonging, prestige, excellence, privilege and access” to specific social spaces to the social groups and individuals who can acquire them (Barakos & Selleck, 2019: 2).

English as a commodity in the linguistic market of education In order to commercialize language, as the vignette that opens this chapter shows, the school needs to regiment spaces and language practices. The following sections will illustrate the process by which language is objectified and

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English language programmes become semiotically constructed as “authentic”, and thus “more valuable” language learning experiences. The language being sold at the school is “better”, because it occurs in a natural environment, it is given an academic outlook, and its consumption as human capital is marketized as having high convertibility potential in education and job markets. The school also draws on the “unique”, “distinctive” contexts in which their “iconicized”, and “distinctive” language varieties or styles are learned. For example, students learn formal English, and they practise it in Model United Nations events abroad. The uniqueness of the authentic experience renders it more valuable: It is not accessible by everyone or everywhere. It is exclusive, just like the school itself and the conception of education it offers. The process of commodification of English at FIS, that is, the ways in which it is treated as exchangeable for symbolic capital or material goods (Heller, 2010), takes place against the backdrop of a permeating neoliberal ideology that marketizes everything (Holborow, 2015), but it also sets into play ideologies of human capital, by which multilingualism and English are measurable, and thus certifiable, and marketable skills which are treated as economic assets in educational and labour markets (Holborow, 2018). But giving language the quality of an object, of a “thing” (Block, 2017; Shankar & Cavanaugh, 2012), as pointed out above, is also informed by language ideologies of purity, and by ideologies valuing authority or ethnic authenticity (Heller & Duchêne, 2012; Urciuoli & LaDousa, 2013; Woolard, 1989). In contexts like FIS, the rule of “profit” and economicized views of language, which are informed by what Bourdieu (1984) described as distinction practices, coexist and are deeply intertwined with views of pride, which are the basis upon which language value is built, as we have seen at the beginning of this chapter. The idea that international schoolteachers have to become “authentic” language workers is reinforced by glamorized views on nativeness. This chapter, however, shows how authentic varieties become commodified only if they can count as a technical skill, if they can pass as convertible capital in the job and education market (Cameron, 2000). The school retains and exercises control over the production and distribution of linguistic resources among students and teachers, and over processes of value making for specific languages and varieties, and speakers (Urciuoli, 2008; Allan, 2013). As the school does semiotic work to build up market value for the language commodities they sell, other language practices (and their speaking bodies) become devalued. In line with Jaspers and Madsen (2018), and with the observations of Blommaert and Rampton (2011), “complexity”, “hybridity”, “impurity”, and other linguistic features that are common in contemporary language practices (Blommaert, 2015) are not highly valued in this context. Hybridity and non-target languages are erased from front-stage practices like teaching, or in class contributions. The following section will illustrate how the school is in a constant process of establishing new regimes of value – for specific forms of language learning, for specific language varieties and styles of speaking – in response to the rules of the market – scarcity, supply, and demand. As the school market becomes more

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competitive, FIS needs to revamp the multilingual programmes they offer. The way in which the Mandarin Chinese programme grew to become compulsory until late primary education for all students, and to have extra-curricular course options is a good example of this (Codó & Sunyol, 2019). However, it is in the packaging of their English language programme where these processes are more stressed. In the following section I will analyse key moments of language policy making which show the recursive processes of commodification taking place regarding English. These are all instances where key institutional actors negotiate what forms of English should be taught and promoted in the school. The voices I portray, that of the headmaster, his board, English language teachers, and IBDP students, are only part of the polyphony that makes FIS as an institution. Other voices have been reflected in my previous work, but for the purpose of this chapter I have selected the moments during my observations and in interviews in which they engaged with the making of a “good” English.

Manufacturing FIS English English as an object Since the school began internationalizing in 2008, language became “a thing”. Sometimes, especially at the beginning of my fieldwork, if I did not have any class observation programmed, I would sit in the staff room and write my fieldnotes for the day. During these moments I witnessed and noted down bits of conversations like the following: No digas nada de lenguas, están todo el dia hablando de lenguas, no estáis hasta el moño ya de eso/ [do not say anything about languages\ they are talking about languages all the time\ are you not fed up with it yet/]. Two primary school teachers were debating what to say about the school to a journalist who was recording a promotional video of it. In this short extract, one of them was saying how she was exhausted with the “languages” talk that had become, in the opinion of many, omnipresent in the school. The first part of my analysis is this intensification of “language talk” that came with the making of the new International school. With the internationalizing process, languages seemed to have become the headteacher’s obsession. During more than two years of observations, I too, like the teacher, witnessed how languages, and especially English, were put at the centre of discourses on education on many occasions. The headteacher’s welcome letter to the school community addresses its central role: Learning English is fundamental for the academic and professional future of young people today. We want our students to become citizens of the world who are open to change. For this reason we encourage their active

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This excerpt shows how the role of languages at the school is described as “fundamental” to develop academic and professional futures. The acquisition of English is associated with becoming “citizens of the world who are open to change”; English understood as a form of human capital that gives access to developing specific forms of personhood. Learning English is presented as a way of “maximizing opportunity”. The excerpt also shows how the school co-opts these widely circulating discourses on the English language to frame and justify the language programmes they offer. They facilitate contexts for language learning which happen outside the classroom, already indicating an intention to package language programmes in distinctive ways. And they provide a kind of English that can be “officially” certified externally by globally recognized entities such as the British Council, or Cambridge English Assessment. They reproduce widespread beliefs on how languages are better learned, and which language forms are more legitimate than others. The legitimacy of testing institutions relies on ideologies of language ownership and authenticity, which are associated with Britishness. The discursive elaboration of English at FIS often seeks to demonstrate that their language programmes are carefully crafted, and of superior quality or value. The methodological approach they sell, labelled as English language immersion, also became essential for the repackaging of English at FIS. It became singularized and iconicized in the school’s promotional materials, from banners in their websites to newspaper ads and posters. We have explored elsewhere (Codó, Sunyol, & McDaid, 2019) how immersion is packaged as a marker of quality. Recreating an environment of immersion involves a natural, early exposure to the language, and this requires constructing engineered bounded environments that allow students to learn it by osmosis from legitimate speakers. The introductory vignette at the beginning of this chapter has already shown how, in this exclusive school, not any English works for distinction. Dora, a generalist nursery teacher who after 2008 became one of the first “English speaking” nursery tutors in one of these supposed spaces of immersion, observed how in the transition to becoming international, the school realized that they had to offer “something more” to families (interview data). To the minds of the administrators, the school needed to upgrade and advertise their multilingual programmes to please their clientele. When the new headteacher of FIS was set with the goal of internationalizing the school, he aimed to transform the institutional culture by making internationality “very experiential” (interview data). This meant that internationality, and its new, matching language policy, with an intensified presence of English, had to become breathable

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by wandering around the school. The making of FIS English involved packaging an old commodity, English, in new ways, to make both the school and the language products it offered more desirable to students and families, and to distinguish FIS English from the English programmes being sold in other schools in the area. For that purpose, banalized imagery portraying the correspondence between a language and a flag became ubiquitous in the school’s landscapes, making a statement as to what traits define the school’s English (Figure 6.1). The wall decoration in Figure 6.1 shows three of the foreign languages taught in the school. English occupies a bigger portion of the wall and is semiotically constructed as belonging to a specific national territory (the UK) and to the people of that territory. At FIS, such banalized representations of language and iconicization of territories thingify language and construct it as a luxury object, because of its traits (authentic, native-like, and therefore of higher quality), but also, and most importantly, because of its exclusivity. The scarcity of native or native-like English language teachers in the education market gives FIS students access to a type of English that is not available to the many. Not all the schools in the area are able to offer “the English experience”, and this makes it a rare, even more desirable one. The school, because it is private, has a higher degree of flexibility over recruitment and, in general, over the manufacturing process of the English they sell.

Figure 6.1 Wall decorations at FIS.

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The making of “better English”: Language as an experience The discourses in the previous section all seem to point to a more experiencebased learning, thus less bounded to the classroom, which is key in constructing the strategies of distinction vis-à-vis the Englishes and the language programmes of other public, semi-private and private schools. The second part of analysis focuses on how what counts as “good English programmes” is part of a recursive process of establishing value. FIS places importance on creating the right environment for multilingual learning. These two banners (Figures 6.2 and 6.3) were on the homepage of the school’s website between 2016 and 2017 and told their audiences how the school was different from – and better than – their competition. In both messages, English is an important element of the school’s selling line, but there is a progression regarding how it is conceptualized. Figure 6.2 conveys a more extensive language programme vis-à-vis the schools who only “begin to learn English”. FIS state that their students learn more languages. Implicit in their message is the idea that their students do not just “begin to learn” English, but they gain a more in-depth knowledge of the language. The banner shows how only the language FIS sell is presented as a form of symbolic capital that will be convertible into specific forms of citizenship that the school, imbued with globalist rhetoric, regards as highly desirable. The second banner (Figure 6.3) reinforces the association between language and distinction (Bourdieu, 1984):

Figure 6.2 FIS web advertisement.

Figure 6.3 FIS web advertisement.

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“We don’t settle for the minimum.” The classroom-bound teaching practices of other schools are morally penalized by the red crosses. They teach a type of learning which only gets students to pass their tests. At FIS, however, English language is learned experientially, and is at the core of their educational offer, as the phrase “we live and breathe English” and also the top position on the list suggest. English is part of the experiences the school facilitates to their students; it exists in the context naturally. Exchanges and geographical mobility are also part of the experiential design with which the school packages their English language programme, and they are all regarded as key to social reproduction, to “achieving one’s dreams”. DAF English vs breathtaking English: Which English is commodifiable now? The data instances that I have portrayed point at two types of English coexisting in the school: An aspirational one, which is constructed as a true, authentic, alive, high-quality English, which transcends the classroom and gives access to social and geographical mobility; and a DAF English, which is delivered by nonlegitimate users of the language and supposedly projects students (and teachers) in the opposite direction. It is constructed as “bad” English. This third part of my analysis shows the tensions and contradictions that emerge when the social actors try to navigate these categories. Lluïsa explains how with the arrival of “internationality” the general English level of FIS students has “savagely” improved. Only a few years earlier, hardly any students would take the First Certificate Exam on leaving the school after finishing their baccalaureate, and now students sit the advanced version at age 15 (CAE). Lluïsa says that “the new language policies have improved students’ overall comprehension and pronunciation” and she selfcorrects, “not pronunciation\ sorry\ accent\”. “You can have an exceptional pronunciation and a very strong Spanish accent for example\ it is curious to see how they [students] can imitate accents very easily\”. According to her, FIS students have trained their ears and been exposed to a “correct” English. Nonaccented English is what counts as good English. To her, the obsession for having native English language teachers is absurd because they do not necessarily have the knowledge of grammar, or training as foreign language teachers. Native-like English teachers should be able to do it all. However, as she talks about her students’ participation at MUN conferences she recognizes that some of her students’ “competitors” are from totally English or American schools, and “they speak to you in a breathtaking English\ (.) we are really great\ but THEY are:\ I mean: they are like natives\”. They have “imposing” Englishes. Lluïsa’s discourse reveals the tensions existing in the school between the English being distributed in the classroom, her own English, and the breathtaking, native-like English to which everyone seems to aspire, but which can only be learned in “truly” American or English schools, from legitimate speakers, and in very specific conditions, as the opening vignette of this chapter shows.

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Apart from the rep students’ practices of regimentation we have seen regarding their teachers’ inability to pass as native speakers (Piller, 2002), there are countless moments in the language classroom that illuminate coexisting processes taking place at FIS. There are underlying language ideologies that value “pure” practices which denote a complete knowledge of standard languages. This does not only regard accents, but also patterns of language use. Students are asked to speak English at all times and are encouraged to avoid deploying other linguistic resources. In the following extract, Martí, an IBDP student, tries to explain, drawing on his full language repertoire, that they are made fun of for being teenagers: MAR: They call us “pavos”\ JUD: Martí\ (.) can you speak

English/ I don’t know how you translate it\ but I will say “a turkey”/ JUD: a TURKEY/ MAR: que nos dicen pavos [they call us teenyboppers] MAR:

(All laugh) In order to count as capital, the actual language needs to be deployed in clearly distinct units, as Judit, the teacher, asks Martí to do, and students need to master registers and levels of formality. Not doing so has consequences. Guillem, a classmate of Martí’s, lost his chair role at an MUN event because he told a prying classmate: “It’s not [sic] of your business,” when she was enquiring into why he would miss classes for a week. According to Lluïsa, the answer was not only grammatically incorrect, but also extremely rude and inappropriate in the context of the classroom. Guillem’s lack of mastery of grammar and registers made Lluïsa reconsider his suitability for the post.

Discussion and conclusions This chapter has shown that in globalized late-modern societies English is no longer a mere school subject. The level of scrutiny of parents, students, and headteachers reveals how distinction has become a predominant way of thinking about language. Sociolinguistic research in recent decades shows how it is increasingly seen as a positional resource, as capital. In increasingly marketized societies, business-like run educational institutions are a fertile ground for the commodification of language. Language programmes such as the English language education that FIS offers become a product which has to be tradable in different arenas (the job market, education, but also in social media when it comes to performing specific social personas). We have seen how the school actively tries to create demand for and develop niche, value-added products by adding the key symbolic capital that matters to their customers. This can be more exposure to the English language, or English spoken by authentic “native speakers”, or a focus on specific registers and forms. However, there are

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tensions emerging from the ways in which the concrete demands for a specific type of English (authentic/with an authentic accent, for example) are created and materialized. The ethnographic data in this chapter further illustrates how the languages that are commodifiable, that is, which are used as capital and which contribute to sell the school and to sell FIS students are mostly English, and the other foreign languages to a lesser extent. Codó and Sunyol (2019) explore how Mandarin is made to become an elite multilingual resource. English, as we have seen, operates in a similar way. In the last five years there has been a gradual shaping of the English language programmes in order to make them a better fit for selling in a rapidly changing context. The ways in which native teachers, who are perceived to have better accents and to produce more authentic and transversal (across registers) language practices than non-native teachers, are suddenly (even more) glorified, and become normative, shows how the school seeks to develop and maximize the value of their products by adding symbolic capital (Heller, 2010). The school opens up niche markets and symbolic forms of added value where existing markets are saturated (Heller, 2010). This chapter shows a process of production of a linguistic product – how it is packaged, advertised, distributed, exchanged, and consumed. English at FIS is designed, moulded as an object, and it mutates quickly to adapt to changing circumstances, and in order to meet the needs, desires, and demands of the market in which the school operates. We see how the “thingification” or “objectification” of English (Block, 2017) is a necessary precondition for it to be commercialized. “English” at FIS, however, remains an abstract entity, which goes beyond the curation of teacher profiles – and thus, the commodified speaking bodies, who are ultimately the deliverers or distributors of the product. It also encompasses the creation of an English atmosphere by placing the language in the most prominent spaces of the landscapes of the school (Sunyol, 2019): Public speeches, theatre plays, their website, and their advertising campaigns. In exploring how international students consume, use, and make sense of language, focusing in and assigning value only to named languages becomes problematic. The desire of investing only in highly valued forms of linguistic capital may respond to the demands of parents who have carefully devised family language policies, which are often informed by broader societal ideologies on languages, and on what constitutes good parenting (Bae & Park, 2019; King & Fogle, 2008). Taking children to an international school and buying “better English” for them may be a way of procuring for one’s children “better” development and chances of social reproduction (Jaspers, 2014). As consumers, they contribute to creating a demand for certain types of language, and for certain types of policies. The story of how “better English” is made at FIS may well be a story of how language in Education Policy is a collective effort. Which English counts as a commodity is shaped and reshaped through the numerous moments of institutional life in which actors express their desires, but also their reservations. However, some views, and some voices, are more amplified than others. The reaction to the opening vignette of this chapter shows how the institution opts for a language as resource, or commodity strategy to

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planning, ignoring more inclusive practices and views in which students and English teachers engage, as the data show. The school, then, plays a decisive role in legitimizing certain varieties over others by giving them recognition as they render them sellable, and worthy of desire. As Barakos and Selleck (2019) outline, associating desires of language capitalization with social and economic status contributes to reproducing the status quo in terms of social inequality and language choice. While the school seeks to police and regiment the spaces allowed for each language (Sunyol, 2019), it is missing the opportunity to value and thus promote the already existing ways in which English has naturally blended in the language practices of its students. Teachers resist and contest the devaluation of their profiles. IBDP “languagers” (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010) disrupt the rules of fixity (Jaspers & Madsen, 2018). They play with indexical stereotypes to negotiate who they are. They proudly mock both their “impure” Catalan and Spanish, and incorporate with irony the refined registers they learn for their essay writing. They juggle teenage slang with “higher” standardized forms of both Catalan and Spanish, their Netflix English and their MUN (Model United Nations) English, and they create their own slang. They are language “omnivores” (Friedman, 2012) who constantly cross the borders of what is expected by the institution but can also abide by the rules of fixed “multilingualism” laid down by the school when required. Their uses, however, get devalued and penalize them in the classroom, where they can be perceived as “rude”, as lacking in knowledge, as not worthy enough to publicly represent the school in academic events. Not taking into account more fluid visions of language, and the existing views that challenge the native-speaker supremacy has consequences for teachers and students, and for the institution.

Note 1 This ethnography was carried out as part of the APINGLO-Cat project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICCIN, ref. FFI2014–54179-C2–1-P), of which Dr Eva Codó was Principal Investigator. My doctoral research was supported by an FI–DGR grant (AGAUR) and the European Social Fund. The schools and participants are not referred to by their original names to preserve their anonymity. I would like to thank them for allowing me to access their worlds. I would also like to thank Iris Milán and Daniel Pujol for their help with data transcription. I am also deeply thankful to Jessica McDaid for her generous collaboration at various stages of this research. This chapter has also benefited from regular discussions with Peter Browning and Katy Highet. I am most grateful to Eva Codó for her rich and insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their useful comments. Any remaining flaws are my own.

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Language, ethnicity, and tourism in the making of a Himalayan Tamang village Bal Krishna Sharma

Introduction Sociolinguistics and applied linguistics scholarship has shown that recent developments in the political economy have led to the commodification of language both as a communication tool as well as a material to be exchanged in the late capitalist market (Duchêne & Heller, 2012; Park & Wee, 2012; Shankar & Cavanaugh, 2012). The role of language in tourism has received a substantial piece of pie in this discussion (e.g. Gao, 2012; Heller, Pujolar, & Duchêne, 2014; Sharma, 2018). Heller and Duchêne (2016) and Pietikäinen (2014), in the contexts of French-speaking Canada, Switzerland, and Sámiland respectively, have shown how the conceptualization of language has changed from a marker of ethnolinguistic identity to an economic resource. According to these scholars, this is a historical shift triggered by the practices and ideologies of the tourism market where identities and languages go through the commodification process. Meanwhile, several scholars have drawn our attention to this theorization of language and expressed concerns if and under what conditions we can say that a language is commodified in its various domains of use including tourism (e.g. Block, 2017; Holborow, 2018; McGill, 2013; Petrovic, 2019; Simpson & O’Regan, 2018). The chapter builds on the conceptualization of language commodification proposed by Heller and Duchêne (2016). Following the authors, language functions as an economic resource under the late capitalist market in two major ways. First, language is a sellable tool of communication through which tourism destinations turn into commodities. Tourism workers’ employability depends partly on the language and communication skills that are valued in the market. In addition, linguistic resources, such as language signs, are used to brand the authenticity of tourism destinations. Second, language functions as an added value to mark a cultural authenticity in the tourism market. Cultural artifacts and performances as the markers of such authenticity have an enhanced commodity value when the language element is added to them. Framing language commodification within this conceptualization, this chapter studies heritage tourism in the context of indigenous ethnicity. It focuses on a Tamang village in the Himalayas, Nepal and examines language as a political and an economic

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resource. The village is a site where discourses about ethnolinguistic identity have undergone noticeable changes in both economic and political realms in the turn of the new century. The chapter attends to some fundamental questions that I consider, following Heller and Duchêne (2016), to be important in understanding the role of language in the commodification process: What exactly is commodified under what conditions? What other symbolic and material resources are convertible and valued as resources, where and for what purposes? Overall, the chapter makes a case that individuals from marginalized ethnic communities in tourism destinations utilize language and other semiotic-material resources as they negotiate their position, often in an ambivalent way, in the rapidly transforming political and economic environment. The chapter shows that spaces of tourism are venues not only for the commodification of identities for material benefits but are also occasions to legitimize ethnolinguistic distinction to achieve political ends. These findings have implications in understanding covert language policy (Shohamy, 2006) of individuals and communities regarding what languages to speak and teach and to what end. Since 2014, I have gathered the data mainly through ethnographic documentation in tourism sites, interviews with tourism workers and villagers, print and online promotional materials, and visual signs that promote tourism destinations (see Sharma, 2020a, 2020b, for further details). I will begin with a historical overview of how ethnicity has been understood in Nepali politics and tourism with a particular emphasis on marginalized communities.

Ethnicity as a resource in politics and tourism in Nepal Discourses about ethnicity in the past have influenced and been shaped by local politics and the global tourism markets in Nepal. It is not that the market has turned the political dimension of ethnicity in Nepal obsolete or weaker, as reported in other contexts (e.g. Duchêne & Heller, 2016), but with the growing prominence of political movements, indigenous peoples have been more assertive in valuing their identities by enacting them in different spaces, tourism being one. By observing these changes, we can trace a remarkable similarity between identity politics and the commodification of ethnic heritage as both give rise to the objectification of identity (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2009; Shneiderman, 2015). To briefly put ethnicity in Nepal’s political context, the state discouraged any form of activism based on ethnic lines until the end of the past century. Ethnic activism was considered a threat to the unity of the state (Tamang, 2009). After the restoration of democracy in 1990, ethnic organizations included a politicized notion of territory. Since then, Nepali activists and political parties have deployed the term adibasi as an approximation of the English term “indigenous” or adibasi janajati 1 to mean “indigenous nationalities.” The janajati movement included a variety of ethnic groups, social organizations, and political parties, mostly consisting of people from communities who speak Tibeto-Burman languages. This movement has opposed the representation of Nepali nationalism as a unified

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entity characterized by high caste Hindu values and practices, arguing that such a representation downplays or eliminates cultural differences in Nepal (Lawoti, 2010). Hangen (2007), in this regard, writes: The indigenous nationalities movement aims to increase the social, economic and political power of these people, revive their religions, and languages, and cultures, and end the dominance of the high caste Hindus. The movement has constructed a collective identity for this heterogeneous group as indigenous nationalities, enabling these people to take action to define and resolve their common problems. (viii) The janajati movement advocated for multiplicities of identities by looking within the marginalized communities’ history and traditions that could be used as symbols of ethnic cohesion around which their identity could be reimagined and mobilized (Hangen, 2007). As a result, the movement encouraged individuals from indigenous communities to embrace their previously despised ethnic characterizations and reinterpret them with positive attributes (Lawoti, 2010). Several ethnicity-based organizations campaigned vigorously for a federal structure of government with ethnic autonomy. The most notable success came when the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), which had been engaged in armed insurgency since 1996, declared nine autonomous provinces as the future republic of Nepal in their political agenda (Tamang, 2009). Politics of recognition is a crucial tool through which indigenous nationalities assert their worth and identity (Shneiderman, 2015). The janajati movement has largely contributed to this identity recognition by transforming the dominant political discourse, creating awareness of ethnic issues in society, and pressuring the state into addressing ethnic inequality (Hangen & Lawoti, 2013). The 2011 Census identified 125 caste/ethnic groups and 123 languages in Nepal. Nepali, which is spoken by 44.6 percent of the total population, is constitutionally recognized as the working “official language” of the country. In the new constitution promulgated in 2015, all the indigenous languages have been recognized as the “languages of the nation.” Likewise, English is increasingly making inroads as a dominant language of education (Giri, 2010; Sah, 2020). Although the primacy of Nepali as a lingua franca is objectively uncontested and unchallenged, there is a growing indigenous activism and pressure towards reclaiming indigenous languages and identities (Phyak, 2016). Indigenous communities and social organizations have strategically deployed their heritage languages as valid tools to represent their ethnic identities as countable entities with an objective existence (Hangen, 2007). The activism has given rise to the objectification of ethnicity in concrete cultural and linguistic terms. As Comaroff and Comaroff (2009) argue, the objectification of identity appears “to have produced new sensibility, an explicitly new awareness of its essence, its affective, material, and expressive potential” (2). The self-objectification of ethnic identities has taken place through cultural performances, such as singing and dancing, in which language plays a key role. Such performances not only showcase the

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communities’ supposedly distinct identities but also produce alternative narratives that counter the dominant identities (Stirr, 2010). Historically speaking, regarding Nepali tourism, although ethnicity and heritage are not the major part of travelers’ experience in Nepal, they have been important ingredients added to adventure, cultural, and wildlife tourisms. When mountaineering expeditions became increasingly popular in the 1950s and 1960s, Westerners came into contact with the Sherpa ethnic community in the Himalayas, who primarily assisted mountaineers in their capacity of porters and guides. Since then, ethnic Sherpas have been stereotypically characterized with such personal qualities as loyalty, cheerfulness, bravery, and stoicism even in the face of appalling mountaineering hardships – qualities deemed increasingly hard to find in Western societies (Fisher, 2004; Ortner, 1999). In this process, Lim (2008) argues that Sherpas see themselves through the eyes of Westerners and the images the latter have constructed of them. Due to the prominence of the Sherpa ethnic identity in the tourism market, and its potential economic benefits, individuals from non-Sherpa ethnic backgrounds sometimes projected their ethnic identities as Sherpas (Adams, 1996). While adventure tourism held the main attraction in the past, Nepal Tourism Board and other tourism stakeholders deployed ethnic communities at destinations to turn these adventure experiences into cultural experiences for tourists. At the turn of the new century, new trekking trails and travel destinations were introduced and named after ethnic minorities, for example, Chepang Hill Trek, Limbu Cultural Trail, and Ghale Gaun Homestay Trekking. Activities such as cultural performances and homestays hosted by ethnolinguistic minorities at destinations have become an added experience for tourists to consume the Other. Nepal Tourism Board’s promotional materials about the new trekking trails projected the marginalized Other as an object of authentic experience while also reinforcing the state ideology of unity within diversity. Likewise, market-oriented travel agents and tour guides offer a more exotic image of these ethnic communities. People from ethnic communities at destinations perform self-objectifying songs and dances for economic gain.

Research context: The village of Gatlang The data come from my ongoing linguistic ethnography in the village of Gatlang located in the Tamang Heritage Train in the Himalayas in Nepal. The village has around 400 households with a total population of approximately 2,000 (see Figure 7.1). The residents in this area are ethnically Tamang2 who speak the Tamang language and the Tibetan language. They have a close attachment with the elements of their natural landscape, such as mountains, land, and plants (Kunwar & Pandey, 2014). The main source of living is a subsistence economy based on crops such as beans, potatoes, maize, and millet. A small number of villagers rely on the growing tourism industry through restaurants, homestays, cheese factories, and carpets industries. In 2014, an estimated 1,500 tourists traveled through Gatlang (Doran, 2016).

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Figure 7.1 The village of Gatlang.

Several researchers have noted that Tamangs have experienced historical discrimination both from the state and the tourism industry. By the high caste Hindus, Tamangs were classified in the enslavable “alcohol drinking” and “beef-eating” category near the bottom of the caste hierarchy (Höfer, 1979). These dietary practices are strictly prohibited from a traditional Hindu religious point of view. Tamangs have also been variously labeled as “Bhote” or “Bhotiya” (people from Tibet), somewhat othering and derogatory terms, by the same group, and in the national law in the past (Lim, 2008). The discriminatory treatment by the state led to a long history of exclusion of Tamangs from political and economic opportunities (Tamang, 2009). Likewise, the tourism industry has had a considerable influence on how Tamangs have self-identified in the past. Anthropologists report that ethnic Tamangs in particular were mostly discriminated against because Sherpas occupied the high paying guiding job while Tamangs took the less prestigious porter position (Ortner, 1999). Lim (2008) notes that Tamangs occasionally passed as Sherpas, the desired ethnicity, in order to participate in the tourism economy mainly sustained by Western tourists. Gatlang is considered an ideal destination for travelers who look for spaces and peoples less affected by the facilities and infrastructures of modernity. This image represents the perception of indigenous people as untouched, exotic and isolated, but above all authentic, as they are generally fictionalized (Cohen, 1993). In addition, the rural Himalayan region has been able to attract foreign tourists and ethnographers who mainly look for an ideal of an old Tibet, framed by the Tibetan Government in exile’s representations of what was supposedly lost. Tourists are most likely to have heard that this part of Nepal maintains old Tibetan traditions that were not destroyed by the Chinese occupation, including forms of Buddhist and Bon cultures. Due to visa restrictions to Tibet for

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foreigners by the Chinese government, many travelers visit regions in the Nepali Himalayas in order to experience Tibetanness (Moran, 2004).

The making of the Tamang village: Language, semiotics, and material resources Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) geosemiotics provide a heuristic tool in this chapter to understand the nexus between human interactions, visual signs, and the semiotics of the place. These concepts are useful in making sense of how linguistic and other semiotic resources are deployed by local Tamangs in the making of the village of Gatlang. Following Blommaert (2013), I believe that ethnography from a historical perspective is important to understand the social construction of space. Broadly speaking, the villagers, particularly those involved in tourism, produce discourses of what Deleuze and Guattari (1977) refer to as territorialization and deterritorialization. Briefly, territorialization is the linking of place with language, culture, and human activity associated with place, and deterritorialization is the lack of such link (Higgins, 2017). Deterritorialization is often accompanied by reterritorialization, a process by which signs and materials find new ordering in the given space. These terms help to interrogate the ideologies underpinning discourses about ethnolinguistic identity and commodification in relation to politics and economy.

Indigenous language and the discourses of territorialization Ethnic heritage and language are tools to generate discourses about the territorialization of the Tamang space. Such discourses are part of an economic activity in tourism and simultaneously a resource for political activism. The interaction order that is analyzed to make this point is drawn from ethnographic observation of a heritage cultural show for tourists in Gatlang and follow up interviews with its performers. Interaction order, following Scollon and Scollon (2003), constitutes a variety of resources by which individuals take up social positions in relation to others who are present in the given setting, for example, tourists and performers in this study. The performers presented traditional Tamang songs and dances for the villagers on special religious occasions. Once Gatlang started receiving tourists, from 2003, they started showcasing their culture for them. This performance shows a new commodity value added to the otherwise linguistic and cultural practices performed for internal members of the community. As part of my ethnographic fieldwork in 2014, I accompanied a Tamang tour guide for a week and attended a show. The audience included seven tourists: Three American, two French, one Polish, and one Israeli. The performers wore traditional Tamang attires (Figure 7.2). One person held a tungna – a small, guitar-like musical instrument indigenous to ethnic Tamangs. The tourist guide was the only person who could speak English and all other locals spoke Tamang, Tibetan, and Nepali. The guide used Tamang while talking to the

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Figure 7.2 Cultural performance in Gatlang.

performers. Before the show started, the guide greeted the visitors and introduced to them in English the members of the performing group. The guests were offered a khada – a piece of special fabric used to welcome them in Himalayan Buddhist traditions. They then were provided with locally brewed raksi (alcohol). Standing in separate groups of men and women, the performers sang a song in Tibetan. And then, sitting on the floor, they sang another song in the Tamang language. The second song included a fragment of expression from the Nepali language “bhedako un jasto” (like sheep wool), and this was the only expression I could understand as a native speaker of the Nepali language – the most dominant language in Nepal. The guide then translated the song to the audience. Welcome to Tamang Heritage Trail. Tashi deley. And ah: because tourists came to Gatlang. They are – these are very happy you know. It’s ah: normally they – alcohol this raksi you know. For tourists you know this is ah: special food – special (.) drink you know. This is ah: this is from barley – from barley. From millet. From not rice. But homemade yeah. The song said. And ah: so there’s – saying – sing you know. akash bata ke udi ayo means (.) from the sky you know (.) that is the fly you know. Ah: you know full moon. The full moon and (.) there’s ah: ah: in full moon you know full moon. Moon came you know. This excerpt shows that the guide welcomes the visitors to the village and to the event by using “welcome” in English and “Tashi deley” in Tibetan. The English greeting is aimed at building rapport with the audience. He mentions that the performance contained a song that expresses happiness of locals in

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welcoming their guests. The song used mixed codes from Tibetan, Tamang, and Nepali. The Tibetan and Tamang words and expressions in the songs, the guide later mentioned, indicated place-indexing language and cultural practices in the Himalayas. The guide frames local alcohol as a “special food,” and indicates that this drink is made from such locally grown staples as barley and millet, not from rice (rice does not grow in high altitude places like Gatlang). He also notes that the alcoholic drink is “homemade” as opposed to factoryproduced. Homemade raksi, barley, and millet all speak of locality and authentic Tamang tradition for the visitors and the locals alike. Then the guide proceeds to translate a section of the song in Nepali into English for tourists: “akash bata ke udi ayo means ….” All these communicative practices together construct Gatlang as an authentic space of belonging for the Tamangs and of consumption for the tourists. In this interaction order, language is but one important element of the commodified experience created for tourists. The performers display their ethnic identities and stances through language, semiotic tools, material objects, and embodied choices. These resources index particular ways of being in and belonging to the Tamang community. Coupland and Coupland (2014) aptly note that the linguistic tokens together with other multimodal resources serve as authenticating resources in touristic encounters. Whether a language in combination with other semiotic and material resources is part of the commodification process depends on the space and the scale of use (Blommaert, 2010). This means a particular language may have a specific value in one space and its value may change in another space. For example, the indigenous Tamang and Tibetan languages are part of mundane social interactions for the Tamangs of Gatlang. However, their values shift to an economic resource in the context of tourism performance. I had the opportunity to interview members of the performing team after the show. Overall, I found that their performance for tourists was largely motivated by their desire for a recognition of their cultures, materials, and identities that constitute the Tamang territory of Gatlang. Several interviewees took pride in their ethnic identity as distinctly different from other people in Nepal. This distinction creates an essentialist category of “we Tamang” versus “other Nepalis.” They displayed a sense of pride in that the village has been able to preserve Tamang tradition while the same tradition has changed more drastically in other places mainly due to urbanization. The particular pride for the villagers was the semiotics of the place (Scollon & Scollon, 2003): “the built environment along with the ‘natural’ landscape within which the action takes place” (9). The houses, beautifully located in the lap of the Himalayas, had walls made from rocks and roofs from wooden planks (see Figure 7.1). The performers told me that they wanted to preserve that heritage both as a marker of their identity as well as an object of attraction for visitors.3 This response shows that tourism attractions often carry conservative images with their supposedly natural and racially unpolluted character (Edensor, 2002).

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While the display of the language-embedded cultural show is clearly a part of an economic activity to commodify Tamang heritage, this perspective shows only a partial picture of the value of the language. These authenticating practices in tourism are part and parcel of what Tamang (2009) considers as territorial consciousness of the Tamangs as part of political activism. Tamang (2009) argues that the consciousness is generated by contemporary activism in Nepal through reproducing some dominant historical materials and by regenerating local narratives. The political discourses in the turn of the century recognized Tamsaling (the land of Tamangs) region as one among other ethnic territories in Nepal. The songs and the dances performed for tourists together convey important meaning in Tamang culture that connects the land to its deities as well as evokes people’s spiritual relationships both with each other and with their territory (Tamang, 2009). Critical territorial consciousness, as Stahelin (2017) argues, can be used as a political strategy of representation and recognition for subjugated classes engaging in radical place-making within exploited territories. The performance is an important political tool to recognize the historical and contemporary existence of the Tamang land. As the villagers of Gatlang situate ethnicity within the nexus between the tourism market and national politics, they have started experiencing new tensions. These were particularly evident at the turn of the century when their village became a new tourism destination. They have ambivalence toward tradition and transformation as a result of tourism. This brings us to the important question of whether the preservation of tradition for tourism comes at the cost of economic development of the place, and vice versa. The village was considered to have preserved wilderness and heritage for the outsiders. Buddhist tradition, illiteracy, and rurality were framed as essential ingredients in promotional materials to brand Gatlang as a place untouched by globalization. Meanwhile, tourism was seen as a major factor contributing to the economic development of the region. Tamangs in general are found to have a high degree of language loyalty (Thokar, 2008) compared with other ethnic groups in the country but economic development accompanied by urbanization has presented a threat to that situation. The following response from a Tamang woman summarizes the tension that the villagers experienced about tourism, development, and English: Tamang culture has changed dramatically in areas close to Kathmandu. I am proud that our culture in Gatlang is unique, our wooden houses are traditional and preserved for generations. Our children speak Tamang and Tibetan. It’s our culture and tradition that have attracted tourists to the village. When the children go to boarding schools to learn English a lot them forget their Tamang. They speak Nepali and English instead. In another village, many fathers and mothers are sending their children to the cities. When the children come home during holidays, parents find it surprising that their kids have become different. This situation scares me.

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Overall, in this section, I have shown that tourism is the space where bounded images of the territory are produced, distributed, and consumed. Language, semiotic resources, and material elements play an important role in the making of such territorial spaces. In addition to the economic aspect, the resources have a political dimension to them. The multimodal performance has become a venue for producing the discourses of Tamang territoriality as part of ethnic activism. It is also through this objectification and commodification that a greater political consciousness can be achieved. Ethnicity this way can serve as “rhetorical weaponry” (MacCannell, 1992) within tourism to draw attention to marginalization and may encourage visitors to re-evaluate their perceptions of ethnic groups (Hitchcock, 1999).

English and the discourses of deterritorialization In this section, I focus on the discourses of deterritorialization in the village by analyzing the semiotics of the visual signs: “the ways in which pictures (signs, images, graphics, texts, photographs, paintings, and all of the other combinations of these and others) are produced as meaningful wholes for visual interpretation” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003: 8). Then I complement the analysis with interviews with the villagers. These discourses deterritorialize Gatlang beyond a Tamang-speaking space and by the same token reterritorialize it as a commodified tourism destination. They also transform the village from a local to a global space and from a traditional Tamang geographical place to a new space characterized by hybrid multilingualism. In the village, there were hardly any signs written in the local languages, Tamang and Tibetan. There were several signs in the country’s official language, Nepali, on house and school walls that carried important information from the government. For example, one sign read िववाह, २० पिछ (Marriage, after 20 years). There were several similar posters in Nepali hung on walls to discourage early marriage and encourage low birth rates. These “top-down signs,” following Ben-Rafael et al.’s (2006) terminology, created by the state, aim to raise mass literacy and awareness among the residents. The use of Nepali reterritorializes the village as part of the Nepali state positioned in a less developed region. Likewise, the use of and desire for English deterritorialize the village beyond a Tamang-speaking space and simultaneously reterritorialize it as a commodified tourism destination (Figure 7.3). The chronotropic value of the signs as interpreted by Pietikäinen (2014) is a relevant point of reference to construe the meaning of the images in Figure 7.3. The images have multiple temporal dimensions which work together to position the sign and the village at the crossroads of the past and the future. The heritage and cultural elements and events highlighted in the image, such as the Tamang attire, the Buddhist temple, and the holy lake, Parbati Kunda, take us to the past. They remind the audience of the historical value of the Tamang resources. Meanwhile, the use of English in the promotional material and the objectification and commodification of only a few aspects of Tamang life point to the desired future trajectory of the

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Figure 7.3 Gatlang village in the tourism promotional material.

meaning of the sign. These choices orient to the activities and experiences for tourists. The discursive production of space using English is an important element of the capitalist market, which problematizes a bounded and homogenous understanding of space only as a Tamang-speaking territory. Instead, it is the space where various ideologies of language are produced and negotiated for their co-existence (Moriarty, 2014). Similarly, Figure 7.4 is used as a communicative tool to inform tourists of homestay services available in the region. Homestay activities in Gatlang are based on the ideologies of difference. The Tamang village stands as a space of originality and tradition and shows something exotic to outsiders. English functions as an important tool to mediate the village with the desired experience of tourists. All tourists visiting this area are not necessarily English speakers. I met several trekkers on the way who spoke languages other than English, such as Russian, Hebrew, and French. However, the signs construct English as a global tourism language. The use of English signs to brand Gatlang as an exotic place for homestay is a direct outcome of the community-level effort for the economic development of the region. When the Tamang Heritage Trail was recognized as a tourist attraction in 2003, homestay was considered a key experience for prospective tourists. Acharya and Halpenny (2013), in the context of Nepal, note that wellmanaged homestays are considered an appropriate alternative tourism product as the idea “celebrates the remoteness of the country, and its wilderness,

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Figure 7.4 Homestay in Gatlang.

traditionalism and mysticism” (80). Homestay programs, however, can be considered a double-edged sword in terms of how they function between traditional authenticity and neoliberal globalization. While these programs are designed to offer experience of Tamang tradition frozen in time and space, the English language used in public signs and restaurant menus and the truncated English spoken by the hotel employees apparently question this imagery. I noticed that several hotels and homestay programs highlighted the availability of Western-seat toilets, in contrast to local squat toilets, so that tourists would feel at home while still experiencing the Other. The success of homestays, therefore, may come at the cost of diminished authenticity, the raison d’être of such programs. Nonetheless, indigenous communities in several parts of the world continue to respond to tourist desire for novelty and authenticity by commodifying their homes and offering homestay experiences that deliver glimpses of rural life (Kontogeorgopoulos, Churyen, & Duangsaeng, 2015). I was told that there were two hotels in the village. These hotels provided employment to nine people. And, there were a few weaving factories that produced crafts and fabric from local products, mainly aimed at tourists. The image in Figure 7.5, which hung on the wall inside one of the hotels, highlights the important experiences and services for tourists. In the background, behind the text in English, is the image of the village nestled in a hilly landscape. Also included is a picture of Tamang men and women taking part in a cultural performance. The English text highlights “organic and locally produced ingredients” as part of the unique experience offered to visitors. The hotel is named after a mountain peak that is not far from the village. The use of a local Tamang name for the peak Paldor combines with the rest of the words in English and shows the shifting value of the name of the natural landscape in the realm of tourism; from

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Figure 7.5 Hotel in Gatlang.

a mundane context to the context of market. The name itself is considered to be a resource in the authentication process of the tourism experience. This again can be seen as one of the elements of globalization processes where resources move from their original space to a mediated space for an economic purpose (Blommaert, 2010). In these new spaces, the newly emplaced resources may no longer

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carry the original meaning but gain new meaning, often in complex semiotic forms (Pietikäinen, 2014). It is the semiotics of the place (Scollon & Scollon 2003) that is commodified with other elements, using the tool of a global language. During the interviews, the villagers noted the market value of English for various purposes. The only government-sponsored public school in the village followed Nepali as the medium of instruction – and this language was questioned by many for two reasons. First, Nepali was a second or a third language for the Tamang children, and the space in the classroom did not recognize the usefulness of the local language in the curricular materials and instruction. Second, the tourism industry in the area had generated a considerable degree of desire in parents and children to learn English. There was no private school to offer education in English. Some villagers had sent their children to Kathmandu or Syaphru (the closest town, roughly a five-hour walk from their village). A parent mentioned: I do not want to be too critical about the public school, but we are not happy with the school. There is no good education. Now more than one hundred children are studying in boarding schools in various cities. They are staying in hostels, sir. Now, several people in our village want to start a boarding school. In places where tourism is an important part of the local economy, English occupies further importance to mediate people’s imagination and economic opportunities that result from learning the language (Petrie & Darragh, 2018). The following interview excerpt from a Tamang parent represents the desire of many villagers: [Pointing out to another village across the hill], everyone speaks English there. I’ve heard that even a buffalo speaks English there [laughs]. These people earn a lot of money from tourists. Their village is better developed and this is possible because of tourism. They have boarding schools. They have more jobs. Many of our boys go to that village for jobs. Several people who performed for tourists had a poignant tone when I asked them about their desire for English. A man in the group lamented: We became old without learning English and without seeing the outside world. We’ll be rotten here. I wanted to work as a guide but I do not speak English. No English means no guiding job. I do not want to work as a porter. I do not want to raise my children without English. The man uses the first-person inclusive pronoun “we” to include the members in the group who did not speak English. He recognizes the value of English not only as a tool needed to find a job in Gatlang but as a resource to see the “outside world.” The imagined relationship between English and spatial

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mobility might have been invoked in local Tamangs’ lives possibly because of the Tamang tour guide’s access to social and material world outside. The guide’s Facebook pages showed that he had been on two different trips to Western European countries. He mentioned to me that the trips and the tours were financially sponsored by his tourist “friends” from these countries. Quite ironically, the guide seemed to have enjoyed a significant amount of time as a tourist while his former guests worked as guides for him. All these images arguably developed an impression in local Tamangs to consider their own lives as “rotten.” Overall, the villagers of Gatlang, including those who work for tourists, associate English competence with numerous images and imaginations that transcend the space beyond a part of Tamsaling. English, in combination with a variety of semiotic signs and material elements, functions as a resource to reterritorialize and transform the ethnic village into a translocal space of touristic consumption. Gatlang’s shift to a new form of hybrid, multilingual space characterizes the spectrum of fixity and fluidity (Otsuji & Pennycook 2010) – where fixity refers to the use of fixed categories tied to language and identity, and fluidity describes the ways that communicative practices are under constant (re)formation depending on the semiotic resources and the material practices of actors.

Conclusion The chapter has responded to some sociolinguistic concerns regarding language commodification: What exactly is commodified under what historical conditions and to what end? (Heller & Duchêne, 2016). The findings have shown that language and the semiotics of signs and place are deployed as resources to territorialize, deterritorialize, and reterritorialize the Himalayan village in the context of heritage tourism. In so doing, the chapter has raised four key points. First, ethnic identities and the language of Tamangs are objects of public display for economic purposes for outsiders. The indigenous language plays an important part of the economic activity within the realm of heritage tourism. Second, these elements are simultaneously used as resources to construct a distinct ethnic identity in the local geo-political context. Tourism provides a venue for ethnolinguistic minorities to deploy the resources in order to claim their political rights. Third, English functions as an important discursive tool to objectify and commodify the less tangible part of the Tamang culture. The villagers in Gatlang regard competency in English as a necessary tool for their social and spatial mobility and for connecting themselves to the world outside the village. Overall, the (de/re)territorializing discourses show ambivalence among the villagers toward tradition, tourism, and English. While they consider it important to keep their heritage intact so that they can preserve their ethnolinguistic uniqueness, which they perceive is desired by tourists, they also express a desire for transformation by educating their children in English, by building roads, and by coming out of their village life. And, quite ironically, they want to achieve this transformation with the help of tourism.

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The findings shed light on understanding language policy at the grassroots level. Recent scholarship on language policy has focused on the implicit and covert ways of creating policies by individuals and communities. Shohamy (2006) argues that various mechanisms such as signboards, restaurant menus, and medium language in school function as covert language policies. This view shifts the understanding of language policy as government regulations to a more practice-based sociopolitical phenomenon. By analyzing various semiotic signs, we gain insights into how everyday language practices reproduce and entextualize language policies (Hult, 2018). The visual semiotics in the village of Gatlang inform us of what languages may be used in public spaces and how they may be used. These signs construe English as a tourism lingua franca, despite the fact that not all tourists who visit the site speak English. Economic opportunities offered by tourism are indicative of covert language policies that appear to have shaped the desire of many parents to educate their children in English-medium schools. As a result, as some villagers indicated earlier, there are cases of language shift from Tamang to Nepali and English, which may question the authenticity of the Tamsaling space and ethnolinguistic vitality among Tamang speakers. These discourses are indicative of larger shifts in terms of the role of English in language-in-education policies in Nepal. Giri (2010), Phyak (2016), and Sah (2020), among several other scholars, have produced significant scholarship documenting the impact of neoliberal policy in Nepal’s education. Private schools have endorsed, through various channels, English-medium education as synonymous to quality education, largely motivated by the ideology of “linguistic instrumentalism” (Wee, 2003). English-medium instruction has emerged as a basis of distinction between public and private schools and as symbolic capital among students and parents. Tourism covertly serves as a powerful tool to promote English-medium instruction policy in school due to the language’s perceived utilitarian value in the market.

Notes 1 The National Foundation for the Development of Indigenous Nationalities defines adibasi janajati as “a tribe or community having its own mother language and traditional rites and customs, distinct cultural identity, distinct social structure and written or unwritten history” (2003: 7, http://www.nfdin.gov.np/eng). 2 The term Tamang consists of two words – Ta means horse and Mang means rider or trader. Historically, Tamangs are believed to have involved in the business of horse trading or riding. Note that Tamang has at least three meanings: An ethnic group, the traditional language spoken by the group, and a family name. Tamangs as an ethnic group constitute the largest indigenous people in Nepal. They live in the hilly areas immediately around the Kathmandu Valley and in areas bordering Tibet in the Himalayas. 3 After a 7.8 earthquake hit Gatlang in April 2015, most of these houses collapsed. The houses are now being reconstructed, and a report is not yet available to what extent Gatlang will be able to preserve its traditional architecture.

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References Acharya, B. P., & Halpenny, E. A. (2013). Homestays as an alternative tourism product for sustainable community development: A case study of women-managed tourism product in rural Nepal. Tourism Planning & Development, 10(4), 367–387. Adams, V. (1996). Tigers of the snow and other virtual Sherpas: An ethnography of Himalayan encounters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ben-Rafael, E., Shohamy, E., Hasan Amara, M., & Trumper-Hecht, N. (2006). Linguistic landscape as symbolic construction of the public space: The case of Israel. International Journal of Multilingualism, 3(1), 7–30. Block, D. (2017). What on earth is “language commodification”? In S. Breidbach, L. Küster, & B. Schmenk (Eds.), Sloganizations in language education discourse (pp. 121–141). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2013). Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes: Chronicles of complexity. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Cohen, E. (1993). The heterogeneization of a tourist art. Annals of Tourism Research, 20 (1), 138–163. Comaroff, J. L., & Comaroff, J. (2009). Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Coupland, B., & Coupland, N. (2014). The authenticating discourses of mining heritage tourism in Cornwall and Wales. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(4), 495–517. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1977). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. New York, NY: Viking. Doran, K. R. (2016). Preserving cultural heritage and creating economic stability after the Nepal earthquake. IK: Other Ways of Knowing, 2, 85–94. Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (Eds.). (2012). Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit. New York, NY: Routledge. Edensor, T. (2002). Tourists at the Taj Mahal: Walking and gazing. In S. Taylor (Ed.), Ethnographic research: A reader (pp. 161–186). London: Sage. Fisher, J. F. (2004). Sherpa culture and the tourist torrent. In Sharon Bohn Gmelch (Ed.), Tourists and tourism: A reader (pp. 373–388). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Gao, S. (2012). Commodification of place, consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a “global village” in rural China. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16(3), 336–357. Giri, R. A. (2010). Cultural anarchism: The consequences of privileging languages in Nepal. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 31(1), 87–100. Hangen, S. (2007). Creating a “new Nepal”: The ethnic dimension. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington. Hangen, S., & Lawoti, M. (2013). Introduction. In M. Lawoti & S. I. Hangen (Eds.), Nationalism and ethnic conflict in Nepal: Identities and mobilization after 1990 (pp. 5–34). London: Routledge. Heller, M., & Duchêne, A. (2016). Treating language as an economic resource: Discourse, data and debate. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 139–156). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller, M., Pujolar, J., & Duchêne, A. (2014). Linguistic commodification in tourism. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(4), 539–566.

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Higgins, C. (2017). Space, place, and language. In S. Canagarajah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp. 102–116). New York, NY: Routledge. Hitchcock, M. (1999). Tourism and ethnicity: Situational perspectives. The International Journal of Tourism Research, 1(1), 17. Höfer, A. (1979). The caste hierarchy and the state in Nepal. A study of the Muluki Ain of 1854. Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Wagner. Holborow, M. (2018). Language, commodification and labour: The relevance of Marx. Language Sciences, 70, 58–67. Hult, F. (2018). Language policy and planning and linguistic landscapes. In J. Tollefson & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), Oxford handbook of language policy and planning (pp. 333–351). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kontogeorgopoulos, N., Churyen, A., & Duangsaeng, V. (2015). Homestay tourism and the commercialization of the rural home in Thailand. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 20(1), 29–50. Kunwar, R. R., & Pandey, C. (2014). Tamang heritage trail: A study of Gatlang village in Rasuwa District of Nepal. The Gaze: Journal of Tourism and Hospitality, 6, 1–41. Lawoti, M. (2010). State consolidation and marginalization: Historical roots of contemporary exclusion in Nepal. Studies in Nepali History and Society, 15(1), 73–110. Lim, F. K. G. (2008). Imagining the good life: Negotiating culture and development in Nepal Himalaya. Leiden and Boston: BRILL. MacCannell, D. (1992). Empty meeting grounds: The tourist papers. London and New York: Routledge. McGill, K. (2013). Political economy and language: A review of some recent literature. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 23(2), 196–213. Moran, P. (2004). Buddhism observed: Travellers, exiles and Tibetan Dharma in Kathmandu. New York and London: Routledge. Moriarty, M. (2014). Contesting language ideologies in the linguistic landscape of an Irish tourist town. International Journal of Bilingualism, 18(5), 464–477. Ortner, S. B. (1999). Life and death on Mount Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan mountaineering. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3), 240–254. Park, J. S.-Y., & Wee, L. (2012). Markets of English: Linguistic capital and language policy in a globalizing world. New York, NY: Routledge. Petrie, G. M., & Darragh, J. J. (2018). Desiring English in Southwestern Nicaragua. Curriculum Inquiry, 48(4), 454–474. Petrovic, J. (2019). Alienation, language work, and so-called commodification of language. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Language politics and policies: Perspectives from Canada and the United States (pp. 60–77). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phyak, P. (2016). Local-global tension in ideological construction of English language policy in Nepal. In R. Kirkpatrick (Ed.), English language education policy in Asia (pp. 199–217). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Pietikäinen, S. (2014). Spatial interaction in Sámiland: Regulative and transitory chronotopes in the dynamic multilingual landscape of an indigenous Sámi village. International Journal of Bilingualism, 18(5), 478–490. Sah, P. K. (2020). Reproduction of nationalist and neoliberal ideologies in Nepal’s language and literacy policies. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, doi:10.1080/ 02188791.2020.1751063

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Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2003). Discourses in place: Language in the material world. New York, NY: Routledge. Shankar, S., & Cavanaugh, J. R. (2012). Language and materiality in global capitalism. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 355–369. Sharma, B. K. (2018). Training workers for intercultural communication in tourism. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18, 408–423. Sharma, B. K. (2020a). Reflexivity in applied linguistics research in the tourism workplace. Applied Linguistics, doi:10.1093/applin/amz067. Sharma, B. K. (2020b). Negotiating power in tourist-guide communication in guided village tour. Journal of Sociolinguistics, doi:10.1111/josl.12446. Shneiderman, S. (2015). Rituals of ethnicity: Thangmi identities between Nepal and India. Pennsylvania, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Shohamy, E. (2006). Language policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches. New York, NY: Routledge. Simpson, W., & O’Regan, J. (2018). Fetishism and the language commodity – a materialist critique. Language Sciences, 70, 155–166. Stahelin, N. (2017). Spatializing environmental education: Critical territorial consciousness and radical place-making in public schooling. The Journal of Environmental Education, 48(4), 260–269. Stirr, A. (2010). Singing dialogic space into being: Communist language and democratic hopes at a radio Nepal dohori competition. Studies in Nepali History and Society, 15(2), 297–330. Tamang, M. S. (2009). Tamang activism, history, and territorial consciousness. In D. N. Gellner (Ed.), Ethnic activism and civil society in South Asia (pp. 269–290). New Delhi, India: Sage. Thokar, R. (2008). Tamang: A sociolinguistic scenario. Nepalese Linguistics, 23, 391–407. Wee, L. (2003). Linguistic instrumentalism in Singapore. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 24(3), 211–224.

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When linguistic capital isn’t enough Personality development and English speakerhood as capital in India Katy Highet and Alfonso Del Percio

Since the colonial occupation of India, what we have come to call “English” has consistently been considered a linguistic capital that, for those mastering its legitimate forms, paves the path to success (Proctor, 2014). In colonial and postcolonial India, however, English remained in the hands of an elite few, those who acted as go-betweens for the Raj and the public, and later those who took charge of forming the newly independent nation (Ramanathan, 2015). Since the liberal reforms of the 1990s which opened up the economy to both foreign and private investment (Fernandes, 2006), India has witnessed the mushrooming of cheaper English schools and coaching centres, as well the development of educational NGOs (non-governmental organizations), some of which have explicit goals of providing free English training in order to empower and emancipate students who suffer from caste, class, and gender based stratification. While English has long been perceived in India as a tool of modernization and progress (Proctor, 2014), neoliberal discourses have exacerbated its representation as a neutral, international language of mobility and development for everybody (Park, 2011). Similar to many other settings around the world, students covet English as the “key to material success in the modern world” (Park, 2011: 443), and join such courses with hopes of acquiring the linguistic capital they perceive necessary to increase their job prospects and social prestige. Underpinning this investment is the idea that English is “the only thing holding people back from enjoying the benefits of globalization: Upward mobility, better jobs, social betterment, and movement into a ‘better’ culture” (Proctor, 2014: 307). Such an ideology, scholars note, is based, fundamentally, on a discourse of profit which is propagated by international agencies, local governments, and educational actors – a discourse which in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics has recently been the object of commentary and critique (Duchêne & Heller, 2012; Muth & Suryanarayan, 2020) – and which understands language as a resource that can be exchanged in a globalized market that values (certain) linguistic skills. In this chapter, we produce an ethnographic account of how the celebration of English as a vector of social mobility and personal success affects both students and teachers in India and has consequences for the ways individuals understand their own subjectivity, their learning practice, and their place in what they have learned to see as the modern world. The analysis offered draws

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on ethnographic data generated between 2018 and 2019 in one branch of an educational, non-profit NGO with multiple branches across North India, as part of a larger project exploring discourses of English and social mobility in Delhi. The institution seeks to alleviate poverty and combat the issue of underemployment in India by providing a yearlong, free of cost, training programme in English and personality development for “disadvantaged students” over the age of 15. The NGO is a non-profit organization, run by an expat Indian philanthropist, for whom the pressing issue is the wide-scale underemployment and lack of access to opportunity for youth in Delhi. English education is perceived to be the most effective way to counteract this and assist students on the path to professional jobs. The ethnographic analysis presented draws on thick descriptions of classroom observations at one particular branch, formal and informal interviews with students and staff, as well as textual artefacts collected from the centre and from their online and offline promotional material and curricula. This data will allow us to offer insights about the logics and rationales underpinning policies and programmes, such as the ones provided by the NGO in which Katy has conducted fieldwork, and at the same time interrogate the uptake of these programmes and the discourses of English and aspirations of success that they mobilize. In particular, it will allow us to document the emergence of an educational endeavour that seeks to provide students not only with linguistic capital, but equally with “soft skills” that are deemed essential for the labour market. Acquiring English, we will show, does not only entail the regulation of one’s communicative conduct (also see Blommaert et al., 2009; Foucault, 2007; Flubacher & Del Percio, 2017), but involves work on one’s personality, morality, and body so that language policy in educational settings and policing of speaking subjects become part of a larger biopolitical practice which aims to turn individuals into new subjects who are fit for modernity and contemporary capitalism. On the one hand then, we argue, this demonstrates the inculcation of a neoliberal subjectivity (Martin-Rojo & Del Percio, 2019) through English as the students learn to conduct their own selves according to principles of human capital accumulation, and invest in the acquisition of English and soft skills in the hope that their continuous actions towards a better future will eventually be compensated with some forms of symbolic or monetary returns that may, or may not come (see Tabiola & Lorente, 2017 and Duchêne & Daveluy, 2015 for language learning as a speculative investment). On the other hand, we claim that beyond the neoliberal ethos that shapes the NGO’s approach, what the students seek to acquire, and what the NGO seeks to inculcate, is not only English as cultural capital that can be (speculatively) converted into job opportunities, but also an English that “goes beyond being a skill, experienced as it is as an agent of transformation” (Jayadeva, 2018: 606), which thus implies an acquisition of a whole host of extra-linguistic capital. This associated capital is, as we will demonstrate, tied to regimes of value that are imbricated in colonialism as well as the caste and class systems. Importantly, we argue, they are not only perceived as accessible uniquely through English – and thus as a natural

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result of acquiring the language – but they are also framed as fundamental in allowing students to “cash in” on their English capital. Without these associated valorized behaviours, English as linguistic capital loses its value. Finally, this analysis will allow us to claim that neoliberal self-projects mediated by NGOs in India, such as the one studied by Katy, are only able to make an impression on people and their senses of selves because they are imposed upon a population that, through histories of colonial encounters and patronizing modernization, has learned to identify in the West, and especially in what is imagined to be English culture, an ethically, morally, and racially superior model of being and seeing the world. This not only comes with the promise of modernity and aspirations of mobility for those able to imitate the model, but also justifies and normalizes social stratification within Indian society.

English and personality development English instruction is not the only form of training provided by the NGO. In promotional material, they outline five key areas of focus for students, namely: Soft and non-cognitive skills, English language skills, lifelong learning through MOOCs (massive online open courses), mentoring, and career guidance. Indeed, in a conversation with the CEO, he expressed trepidation about the myth of the panacea of English for social mobility. While he asserted that English was a crucial component in providing opportunities to disadvantaged students – and the primary reason for student enrolment – he explained that the NGO strives to offer them much more, by training them in skills that will help them secure professional jobs upon completion of the course. English, he relayed, is only one third of what we do. The design of the curriculum puts heavy emphasis on job training, with multiple opportunities for students to practise CV writing, interviews and skill-development specifically for the workplace. According to the facilitators, these additional skills – often referred to under the umbrella term “personality development” – are not offered to students anywhere else. Amir, a facilitator who had been educated in government schools and had been a student at the NGO himself, demonstrated his frustration with the public education system, claiming that not only did it fail to provide students with what he calls “adequate levels of English”, but it also failed to show students how to showcase their “personality”. It is clear, then, that these additional skills and personality development, alongside English, are perceived to be essential for the students’ prosperity. It is important here to look more closely at the term “personality development”. It encompasses a wide range of what are often termed “soft skills”, many of which – growth mindset, lifelong learning, discipline, perseverance – were the topic of entire lessons, and thus are not seen as additional to the language acquisition but become a fundamental part thereof, as the language is accessed through such lessons. These “soft skills”, peppered throughout NGO documentation and frequently cited by students, become part of a register (Agha, 2003) that students learn to adopt in class as a means for them to “fit in”. In her analysis of “skills”

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discourses, Urciuoli (2008) draws on Williams’ (1977) notion of keywords to demonstrate the semantic vagueness of such “soft skills” words. That is, they can shift in meaning depending on how they cluster, and thus are deployed strategically in order to display social alignments. As such, by learning and adopting this skills register, students are able to align themselves with the image of a “good” student who will work hard to improve themself. In her ethnographic exploration of “Personality Development and Enhancement” training for the middle classes in Delhi, McGuire argues that the professionalism produced by these courses is “distinctly neoliberal in nature, characterized by a culture of enterprise in which disciplined self-government appears paramount” (2013: 110). Against a backdrop of liberalization – a series of liberal reforms implemented by the Indian government at the end of the twentieth century – a “new middle class” has emerged, one which is not only associated with relative wealth, but also with “more intangible qualities, including self-discipline and entrepreneurial ambition” (ibid: 110, see also Fernandes, 2006; Gooptu, 2013; Bhatia & Priya, 2018). For McGuire, these exercises in personality development are also class-based: They offer young Indians a path to construct “enterprising, new middle-class selves” (2013: 113), which are not only linked to wealth and consumption practices but also to their ability to enact a certain self in particular urban spaces, where purchasing coffee “is not so much an economic transaction or a demonstration of taste as it is a bodily performance of competency – a spatial practice – which signals belonging within a particular social geography marked as aspirational” (ibid). In order to successfully navigate certain urban spaces (malls, coffee shops), young Indians must adopt particular bodily dispositions. In this way, personality development as constructed in these courses is an attempt to inculcate a new habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), attuned to certain urban spaces. Such spaces require particular practices in order to claim “belonging” (or even to be allowed access (Brosius, 2010)) from the smooth handling of the escalator and an engagement with shop employees that differs from market interactions, to the simple decision of whether or not to attempt to “brave the gaze of the [security] guards” at the entrance (McGuire, 2013; see also Brosius, 2010). Being in such spaces requires one to master practices of belonging in aspirational spaces. Personality development is thus an attempt to retrain the habitus: It is a neoliberal selfproject, certainly, but one that is specifically invested in the production of a certain type of middle class which is the product not only of contemporary capitalism but, as we will see, longer histories of colonialism too.

English is personality development While the underlying process of what some have called neoliberal governmentality (see e.g. Martin-Rojo, 2019) is clearly present in the way the NGO strives to shape students into “bundles of skills” (Urciuoli, 2008), to leave the analysis here would be to overlook another important element. That is, alongside the neoliberally informed notion of personality development training, there is equally a conflation

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of “English” with “personality (development)”, a notion which was repeatedly offered by participants. Rupal, a facilitator who had previously attended the NGO as a student herself, recalled what she had learnt through the process: There were many things like what’s the meaning of diversity/ what’s the meaning of integrity/ ok and I got to know that there is something called group discussion and there are some rules/ do’s and don’ts of group discussion/ I didn’t know that how to talk to somebody […] now I know the way how to talk with somebody/ how can we interact people/ how can we invite people in our conversation with making facial expression/ eye contact/ using intonation/ so there are many factors which if you ask somebody who doesn’t know English they’ll say it’s just grammar thing like if you know grammar you can speak English/ but they really don’t know that only grammar doesn’t work. She recognizes that the NGO had provided her with much more than access to the language – glossed here as “only grammar”. She claims that it has also instilled in her a variety of “skills” that range from how to use the body and the voice, to “values” such as appreciating diversity and “qualities” such as integrity. What Rupal reports having learnt is indeed what the NGO hopes to achieve. And yet, there is a slight but important difference in how Rupal has perceived this process. While the NGO’s promotional material implies that it offers English alongside these other “skills”, for Rupal, these two notions are inherently linked. These skills are not only collocated with English, but they are a crucial part of speaking English: “only grammar doesn’t work”. Of course, this is partially linked to Hymes’ (1972) communicative competence, wherein the acquisition of a language requires an understanding of communicative norms along with what is traditionally understood as language learning. Yet, communicative competence does not encompass the moral dimensions that, as we demonstrate later, these students see as an integral part of speaking English, which, as Bourdieu’s habitus concept suggests (see e.g. Bourdieu, 1990), links speaking not only to culture but also to a socially stratified ethics of being. Indeed, when posed with a similar question, Amir expressed this rather explicitly: Personality development is English ok [laughs] so just everything related with personality development is English so /yeah English/ first here we are teaching personality development/ but at the end people are not coming here for personality development/ people come here for English and then they learn personality development right/ so it’s English that attracts them/ English is the reason why they are here/ ok if I tell them that ok English is gone/ now we teach [in Hindi] how to stand/ how to sit/ how to talk with you know foreigner/ why would they come [laughs] there’s no benefit. Again, English and personality development are not only collocated, but are arguably even considered to be the same thing. Personality development

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without English is an absurd idea, indicated both by Amir’s laugh and his claim that nobody would attend if English were to be removed from the curriculum. He continues: I feel personality development starts with English in our country/ ok that’s called personality development/ if you speak in English that’s called personality […] nobody says that you need to work on your Hindi or you need to speak very good intellectual sort of way in Hindi […] the personality development is all about English first. Personality development, according to Amir, does not exist as a concept for other languages. Amir laughs again as he struggles to recall the Hindi term for personality development, stating that “nobody knows it in Hindi anyway”. For Amir, English is personality. It is important to note that “personality” does not seem to be understood here as idiomatic characteristics: It is rather improbable that he believes that no other language than English allows a person to be a distinctive individual. Rather, personality seems to be used here by Amir – and, as we will see, by the students – as a euphemism for “appropriate” conduct, for an expected way of behaving. As such, while we can certainly see that the personality development training is underscored by a neoliberal ethos, there is simultaneously a direct link to what the English language is imagined to represent, meaning that the students are not only being shaped to become entrepreneurial selves, but they are also becoming English speakers, which requires much more than learning the language. It is a process that requires learning how to do English speakerhood, a particular personhood, that is, “contingent, performable behaviors effectively linked to social personae for some determinate population” which “index the persona (or social image) of the one performing them” and which are oriented to at “sociohistorical scales” (Agha, 2011: 172–173). In one interview with Sakshi, a student who had almost completed the yearlong course, she was asked if she would have attended if the course had been delivered in Hindi. She frowned and laughed at the question, as if the answer was obvious, then stated: It’s not benefit for us because the family always teach us/ because the first school is our family and they always teach us how to deal and how to improve your personality and how to live in a city and how to live […] but English is the thing like/ this is not our language/ [if] I want to learn any other’s language we have to learn their er/ how to act like this/ and how to body language/ how to behave/ behaviour […] so I think that’s why they come here/ if they will teach in Hindi (laughs) everybody will not come here. Like Amir, the mere thought of such a course in Hindi was laughable. In the way Sakshi frames her language learning, she and other students have already learned how to behave and “improve [our] personality” in Hindi, but by attending the NGO she hopes to learn how to behave in this new language.

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When asked why the NGO teaches personality development if the students already learn it at home she replied, “the family always saying in Hindi/ but whenever you speak in English your body language and your behaviour also become different”. The two languages are associated, here, with entirely different ways of being in the world. Personality development is thus the development of an English speaking “personality” or, better, “subjectivity”, that they perceive to be inaccessible and unthinkable in another language. It would be uncautious to assume that this English speaking personality that they are aspiring for is a form of whiteness and westernness. In the next section we will demonstrate that what they are aiming for, and what these training activities seem to offer, is an upper caste/class model, that certainly involves desires for and performances of whiteness (both in a physical and a metaphorical sense), but that is also linked to colonial constructs of Indian eliteness and aspirations of upwards mobility within the Indian social structure.

Transforming the self So what, exactly, does this English-speaking “personality” consist of? Across multiple conversations, it became clear that students perceived themselves to have undergone a transformation by becoming English speakers, and that this transformation was understood to stem from the language itself. As one student stated in class in response to a discussion on the importance of English, “it makes us different from what we were earlier”. Rather than simply equating English speakers with certain characteristics, the students actively desire and acquire the performance of certain behaviours that they believe to be a necessary, or even resultant, part of being an English speaker. It is critical at this point to explore in more detail precisely what these “behaviours” are, and how the NGO instils them. While conscious that such a division invokes Cartesian dualism, given how the informants too tended to build upon such a framework, we will nevertheless address these in two sections: morality and the body. Morality The belief in the power of English to foster positive moral change in individuals was a common narrative among the students. In an interview with one student, Sakshi, a university graduate who dreamt of returning to her village in Uttar Pradesh to open an English language school, she made persistent references to English as a “polite” language. While no specific examples were given for why English is perceived to be so “polite” (aside from its “sweet sound”), this was a frequent claim made by students as well as by Indians outside of the NGO. These sensuous qualities of softness and sweetness (Gal, 2013) which informants projected onto English were heavily contrasted with those of the local Hindi dialect spoken in the area around the branch, as students recounted how “city boys and girls” think their way of speaking is “rude”. The inferred “politeness” of English becomes iconic (Irvine & Gal, 2000) of the identity of

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English speakers and, importantly, does so in such a way that the contingent, historical, and conventional nature of the connection between English, English speakers, and “politeness” is overlooked and normalized. This iconization is so deeply unquestioned that the participants, on multiple occasions, identified the language itself as the sole impetus for transforming moral behaviour. In an anecdote recounted by Amir, he expressed frustration over an incident where he had bought a fashionable new backpack, and had taken it with him when meeting his friends. The only one of his friendship group to comment on his “cool bag” – or indeed, in other examples, his Marvel jacket, a new haircut, or a meal of fried prawns that he had made – was his English-speaking friend. The others, he sighed, “they see that this is something new but they don’t say it”. For Amir, this was an inherent difference between “good-mannered” English speakers and the “negativity” of those who don’t speak English, who will only comment in order to criticize – a trait which, he claimed, was quintessentially Indian: “we invented this”. Later in the conversation, when asked to elaborate further on how English ostensibly instilled such “qualities” in its speakers, he explained: You know it’s sort of like manners for us/ how to say thank you/ how to say sorry how to say/ you know/ excuse me/ and thinking about other people/ considering other people that they also live in the same world where we live right/ so when you learn English you learn all these very/ what do you call/ ground level things right. English, then, is perceived to enact positive transformations (Jayadeva, 2018) on the speaker via its inculcation of “manners” and compassion (“considering other people”), in ways that echo the embedding of certain values through the teaching of interactional norms in colonial language education (Lorente, 2017). Indeed, to return to Sakshi, part of her reasoning for wanting to open an English language school in her village was a desire to “change their thinking”, specifically with respect to oppressive gender norms for women. According to her logic, by teaching them English they will “improve themselves” and change their “narrow-minded thinking”. In doing this, Sakshi draws on the trope of the “un-enlightened” rural-dwellers, thus equating the village with “backwards” thinking and the city with progressiveness, indicative of enlightenment and colonial ideologies (Heller & McElhinny, 2017) of modernity, in which a duality is posited of the city as “civilized” and the village as disordered (Kaviraj, 1997). This was an image that she herself believed she was fighting against by being an English-speaking “village girl”. Yet, in doing so, she reproduces the hegemonic position of English that marks it as superior because of its associations with modernity, and thus erases any potential for non-English speakers to stake any claims to progressiveness or forward-thinking (or indeed, to critique the meaning and implications of such terms). Such a depiction also reinforces the ideological representation of the “enlightened” educated English-speaking classes who have ostensibly abandoned the oppressive patriarchal and caste

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systems, or what M. S. S. Pandian terms “the demands of an Indian upper caste modernity to hide and at once practise caste” (2002: 1740) whereby “the language of caste is delegitimized in the modern public domain” (Mosse, 2019: 10) while it nevertheless persists in practice. In other words, caste may go unmentioned in certain English-speaking circles, but practices of hierarchy (whether they are rooted in caste ideology or other forms of stratification) are far from non-existent. Language is one way in which such inequality claims justification – Pandian’s “caste by other means” (2002: 1735) – and is much easier to swallow. The non-English speaker in the extracts presented above works as an inverted mirror image of the English speaker. Where the English speaker is polite, has manners, is open-minded and progressive, the non-English speaker is ill mannered, negative, backward, and regressively attached to oppressive hierarchies. Such dichotomies are clearly rooted in colonial practices that, as Bhatia and Priya argue, are part and parcel of the inculcation of Western ideas of professionalism in the Indian workplace (2018). McGuire equally notes the explicit aim of some PDE programmes, such as the ones documented here, to “remove Indianisms”, with reference to stereotypical “cultural” aspects that are incompatible with Western modes of being a professional, such as lax time management and obligation to family over work (2013: 117), which echoes similar conversations that took place in the NGO. This is not simply an association of English with certain valorized qualities but rather a designation of the types of moral behaviours that are compatible with the image of the English speaker; behaviours which carry a form of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1992). Such behaviours can be understood as “idealized social types” (Catedral & Djuraeva, 2018: 505) or “moralized behavioral scripts” (Blommaert, 2018: 49) that include both linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour and which have clear colonial and, as we will demonstrate in what follows, class-based roots. Importantly, rather than recognizing that these are collocated, explicitly learnt “scripts” that are an integral part of successfully performing English speakerhood, they appear to the participants to be natural results – a “natural and automatic accompaniment” (Jayadeva, 2018: 596) – from mere exposure to the language, thus further normalizing the ideological associations and discursively shaping English as an “agent of transformation” (ibid). The body The transformative aspects of speaking English encompass not only moral behaviour but equally the body, evident in the explicit focus in the NGO on posture, facial expressions, presentability, and hygiene (see also McGuire, 2013). These concepts, we argue, while seemingly neutral, are often terms that, upon inspection, enclose veiled references to race, class, and caste. That is to say, to look “presentable” or to have “good hygiene” or even to move the body in particular ways is to index a certain type of personhood. In a group discussion of private schools, one student (who, like other students and the facilitator, had herself attended a government school) stated that “they [private school

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students] look smart”, to which the facilitator added “yes, by looking also we find out this person is from private”. When we bear in mind the tendency to correlate private education with English education (an association that is indicative of ideological erasure as there are some private Hindi-medium schools (LaDousa, 2014)), we can infer from this that the students are able to tell “by looking” if a person has been educated in a private, English-medium school. One can “spot” an English speaker before they open their mouth. Regulation of the body was a focal element of the curriculum in the NGO. Table 8.1, copied from a student’s workbook (student’s writing in italics), demonstrates the ways in which the NGO sought to inculcate certain bodily movements into the students. Table 8.1 Ways in which the NGO sought to inculcate certain bodily movements into the students C. Do’s and Don’ts – (POSTURE, GESTURES, FACIAL EXPRESSIONS, EYE CONTACT, WORD STRESS, TONE, PITCH, AND VOLUME) Do’s We should We should We should opinion We should

Don’ts sit with proper manners make eye contact raise hand before give our

We should not sit cross with arms and legs We should not loud speak

come on the time

The importance placed on these bodily movements and actions was repeatedly emphasized in class, often in ways that associated these behaviours with the speaking of English. In a mentor session (in which students near completion of the course are paired with newer students to provide mentoring support), the mentorstudent asked the facilitator to give her pointers on what the mentee-student needed the most help with: [teacher name] tell me about her/ any problems her problem/ like she is unable to frame sentence/ she is unable to give facial expressions MENTOR: you cannot give facial expressions! MENTEE: (laughs) no FACILITATOR: same face she has everywhere/ whether she is happy or sad or MENTOR: I found many facial expressions FACILITATOR: in class I don’t get MENTEE: because I speak but I feel not ha-// er hesitation/ but after that/ I speak in class I feel hesitation (laughs) MENTOR: she is speaking/ she is speaking FACILITATOR: means especially like she doesn’t have a smile on her face/ like the normal kind of smiling is not there/ I talk/ you talk/ we are smiling// she doesn’t smile MENTOR:

FACILITATOR:

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The problem identified with this particular student is not only linguistic (“She is unable to frame sentence”) but also, and more importantly given how it becomes the main topic of the exchange, her ability to do “the normal kind of smiling”. Despite the attempt by the mentee to explain this through the hesitation and anxiety that she feels in class due to her comparatively weaker competency in the language, she is still criticized for not smiling. When the mentor points out that the mentee is indeed speaking, the facilitator ignores the comment and continues to comment on her lack of smile: We see, then, how the mentee’s speech is irrelevant if she is not performing the expected bodily behaviour alongside it. There is, of course, a gendered, affective dimension to this interaction, indicative of the expectations of the workplaces that these students are imagined to possibly enter on completion of the course (service providers), where women are frequently called upon to perform emotional labour as part of their job (Heller & McElhinny, 2017: 246; Cameron, 2000). But, following Ahmed (2010) and Lorente (2017), we also argue that this injunction to display happiness is also part of a more general moral order which stigmatizes unhappiness and any sort of behaviour that is perceived as challenging processes of subordination and oppression. Paradoxically, then, the imperative of smiling that is imagined to be linked to English speakerhood, instead of leading to possibilities of mobility and emancipation (processes that are linked to the persona that English speakerhood represents) rather reinforces experiences of docility and situations of subordination. Alongside the regulation of bodily behaviour there is also an explicit attempt from the NGO to inculcate notions of self-presentation and bodily care. In Pathak’s interrogation of the notion of “presentability” in India, the body becomes the site of expression of a “global Indian identity”, which, although “rooted in the social position of the middle classes, specifically urban middle-class professionals”, becomes an ideal to be consumed by those outside of the social group (2014: 323). Drawing on Bourdieu (1986), she describes presentability as embodied cultural capital, and thus as “a source of power, rooted in cultural hegemony – which, through its advantages for employment and marriageability, can produce economic and social power” (ibid). Students in the NGO are repeatedly exhorted to pay attention to their presentability. From the first of the five English-teaching workbooks designed by the NGO that the students progress across over the course of the year, the concept of hygiene figures prominently, transforming to the arguably less loaded notion of “grooming” towards the fourth and fifth book. Exercises such as “Hygiene check” required the students to reflect upon their own washing habits at home but also their “hygiene practices” in public space: “How often do you pick your teeth/nose/ears in public?” Considering that this course is aimed at students over the age of 15, and, indeed, the majority of the students who participated in the study were aged between 17 and 50, the inclusion of such lessons is an infantilizing act – a common colonial practice (McElhinny, 2005) – as there is an implicit assumption that such practices need to be taught to what are, in practice, classes of adults, a

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large number of whom are parents themselves. If the NGO deems such “basic” hygiene education necessary, there is an assumption that students may not be practising them at home, thus positioning the target audience of the NGO as potentially unhygienic, and reproducing harmful paternalist discourses about the poor that echo the colonial technologies of subordination and discipline via health care interventions that both rationalized the colonial project and created “racialized hierarchies”, and which were often intensified further for the “lower classes” (McElhinny, 2005: 185). Indeed, concepts of hygiene are polemical in India and perhaps more politically loaded than anywhere else, given the historical conditions under which they have been mobilized. Many scholars have demonstrated how shifting understandings of hygiene emerged from colonial governance (Fernandes, 2006; Kaviraj, 1997) and orientalist discourses (Said, 1995), from models “concerned with maintaining caste order and purity” (Doron, 2016:727), from modernist conceptualizations of civic responsibility (ibid; see also Doron & Raja, 2015; Prasad, 2015) and, more recently, as part of maintaining or aspiring to a middle-class identity (Fernandes, 2006). While hygiene may appear a self-evident, innocuous concept, Doron (2016) draws on the growing incitement (largely present on social media) for civic action that has accompanied the government’s Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign to make a critical point. Although, as he writes, “the alternative future of clean Indian cities, imagined and enacted in the present by the cumulative efforts of youth across India, is laudable”, it is imperative to interrogate what is considered “unclean”. Referring to the situation as a “hygiene war”, he states: “[T]he victor could declare other usages of public space and regimes of value over what is considered public space and what is seen as ‘dirt’ (for example, Un-Hindu, gendered, or class-based), and then potentially follow through with a physical campaign of ‘cleansing’” (737–738). This has further implications for who is considered a legitimate citizen, who forms part of the “useless”, “threatening” “population” (Brosius, 2010: 128), and who can make a hegemonic claim to represent the “public interest”.1 While we are not inferring that this is the intention of the NGO, the emphasis placed on hygiene in classes draws attention to what Doron terms a middle-class anxiety of cleanliness (2016), as well as to the modes of disciplining subjects that have been inherited from colonialism, which, albeit perhaps not intentionally, inform the NGO’s practice. Through its training programme, it aims to produce students who are not only physically “clean” in their bodies, but also responsible civic citizens who clean up after themselves, and, notably, who use “clean language”: A poster drawn by students reads “I keep by body fresh and clean, I clean up after myself, I use clean language, I clean up my mistakes”. Once again, the intricate weaving together of language and non-linguistic action becomes clear. English speakers are “clean” in their body, their behaviour, and their language. In conversation with Amir one morning, he remarked on how he is increasingly seeing more children speaking English from birth in India. He recounts an anecdote where he saw a young girl being accompanied home from school by a (presumed2 non-English speaking) maid

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and her son. While the maid and the son proceeded to walk through a muddy section of the road, the young girl shouted – in English – “I am not going from that dirty way. I’ll go from the clean way”. Similarly, in an interview with Dev, a member of staff at the hostel where Katy stayed, she asked him to describe English speakers in India. His choice of example was revealing, as he mentions not only a specific “body language” but also their purported intolerance for “dirt”: They have even the body language and when they speak it’s like [puts on “educated Indian” accent] no no no I would not go there/ oh it’s so YUCKY or it’s so DIRTY [laughs] or something like this/ but a normal person will be like oh it’s bad/ it’s ok/ it’s ok/ we can just go from the other side it’s fine [laughs]. In this imagined scenario the English speaker refuses to walk through a dirty space. The “normal person” in the scenario also chooses not to walk there but, importantly, they do not pass comment or express disgust; they do not perform their affective reaction to dirt. The English speakers as imagined by Dev and as observed by Amir, however, do. The point here is certainly not to imply that those who speak English necessarily do have a lower tolerance for areas deemed to be dirty; the point is that they are recurrently constructed as doing so. Indeed, as Ahmed writes, through such emotional responses to objects and others, “surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others” (2004: 10). These affective orientations – disgust, for example – are deeply political and historical, working “to shape the contours of space by affecting relations of proximity and distance between bodies” (2006: 3), thus upholding power structures. In the NGO, the ways in which these bodily behaviours are framed often use seemingly neutral qualifiers such as “proper” or “normal” (for example, the “proper manners” referred to in the student textbook), indicating that there is indeed a morally right and normal way to behave. Yet, what counts as “proper” or “normal” is political and mediated by ideology and history. “Proper” here, then, becomes a euphemism for behaviour that accords with the value systems of the dominant. In other words, while the NGO course may indeed be an exercise in the cultivation of a neoliberal self, it is also an exercise in the cultivation of cultural capital associated with a certain group of English speakers, an imagined ideal built on the exclusionary practices (Fernandes, 2006) of the middle classes and Indian upper castes.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have drawn on ethnographic data collected within the framework of an NGO training programme for “disadvantaged” students in India to unpack the ways English is made sense of and invested in by both students and teachers. We have shown that, for these informants, investing in the forms of cultural capital that English speakerhood represents in India involves not

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only the acquisition of specific communicative skills that are imagined to be convertible in the job market. Investing also involves a transformation of the speaker’s entire persona, which requires not only an active regulation of the students’ communicative conduct, but also a constant policing of their physicality and morality. To be sure, this regulation of behaviour (both moral and bodily) that we have documented in this contribution is exemplary of forms of policing and self-policing (Foucault, 2007) that are emblematic of neoliberal governmentality (Martin-Rojo & Del Percio, 2019). Yet, as we have sought to demonstrate, these are not only consistent with the interpellation of the neoliberal self, but are also, importantly, rooted in circulating colonial images of the quintessential English-speaker – one modelled on the dispositions, hygiene practices, performances, and value-systems of those with whom English has long been associated: the British, and the dominant classes and castes. For people on the ground, to “cash in” on one’s English capital requires extra-linguistic behaviours that distance oneself from those associated with the lower castes and classes. Ironically, English speakerhood makes claims to a progressive modernity by ostensibly eschewing “narrow-mindedness” and oppressive structures, while simultaneously upholding and normalizing processes of stratification that endow English speakers with a “justified” supremacy that emanates from their perceived behavioural and moral superiority. Now, the question that remains open is the extent to which these students are able to capitalize on their bodily transformation, i.e. to convert the acquired cultural capital into the social and economic life to which they are aspiring. We know that getting socialized into English speakerhood allows students to be employed in service work such as a job at a local McDonalds. We also know that this employment often comes with forms of social and economic comfort and stability (including, possibly, a stable salary, sick pay, and a pension) that for many of them do make a difference. Whether this social mobility experienced by these individuals will in the long term lead to the transformation of social structure in India, i.e. to a destabilization of class and caste structures that position entire groups of people at the margins of society and exclude them from benefiting from the modernization of India, remains to be seen. What we can say is that these training programmes feed into an aspiration of mobility that exists in large sections of Indian society and are alimented by new and old language in education policies promising empowerment and success; that is, forms of hope for a better life that represent a fertile ground for colonial technologies of power and subordination to continue operating on colonized bodies and justify the making of difference and subordination. For those of us who are involved in the making and legitimization of those policies, the account offered in this contribution should make us cautious about what language in education policies are and what they do with people, about the agendas that they serve, and the promises of unpredictable individual and societal success that they mediate and help inculcate into people’s minds and souls.

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Notes 1 Indeed, at the time of writing, the violence that has erupted across Delhi following the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act is indicative of these tensions. 2 This was Amir’s assumption, and while he is likely to be correct, the fact that he was able to make an assumption of both the language abilities and occupation of the woman is indicative of who does and does not “look” like an English speaker in India.

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Ideologies of multilingualism as an investment and as a marketable commodity among Greek expat families in Luxembourg Nikos Gogonas

Introduction The economic crisis that hit Greece in 2008 resulted in a big wave of emigration. According to Pratsinakis, Hatziprokopiou, and King (2017), in the six-year period from 2010 to 2015, more than 610,000 people are estimated to have left Greece, accounting for approximately 6 per cent of the total population. The majority emigrated to Northwestern Europe and Canada (Panagiotopoulou et al., 2019). Luxembourg has emerged as a popular destination for Greek immigrants in the last years (Gogonas, 2019). The country has a long history of migration and official trilingualism in French, German, and Luxembourgish. Its trilingual education system leaves little space for languages other than the official three (French, German, Luxembourgish) other than the world language English, which is taught as a foreign language in all secondary schools. Moreover, according to Weber (2009), in the Luxembourgish educational system a strong standard language ideology is at play along with an ideology of deficiency whereby only the use of standard French, German, and Luxembourgish and native like proficiency in the respective languages are valorized. In this sense, the educational system promotes a “standard triple monolingualism plus English” model while multilingual competence in migrant repertoires and non-standard registers is not legitimated (Weber, 2009; Horner, 2011). The present chapter reports on an ethnographic study on Family Language Policy (Spolsky, 2004; Curdt-Christiansen, 2009) among Greek expat families in Luxembourg (Gogonas & Kirsch, 2016; Kirsch & Gogonas, 2018; Gogonas, 2019). By drawing on data from three Greek expat families, it explores parents’ ideologies with regard to multilingualism and the ways in which these ideologies affect the parents’ language management and language practices in the family context.

Family Language Policy Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 10, 11) define Language Policy as “a body of ideas, laws, regulations, rules and practices intended to achieve the planned language change in the society, group or system”. The field of Language Policy (or language planning) initially focused on issues such as language standardization

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(Haugen, 1959) or language problems in former colonial nations (Fishman, Ferguson, & Dasgupta, 1968; Rubin, Jernudd, & DasGupta, 1977). However, over the last few years, the combination of elements from critical theory (cf. Habermas, Giddens, Foucault) with an ecology of languages approach has led to the formulation of a new Language Policy framework (Ricento, 2000). According to Shohamy (2008: 364), Spolsky’s model (2004), especially, introduces a broader concept of language policy, one that incorporates ideology, ecology and management, arguing for a complex relationship among these components. Spolsky (2004: 5) distinguished three components in the language policy of a speech community: [I]ts language practices; the habitual pattern of selecting among the varieties that make up its linguistic repertoire; its language beliefs or ideology; the beliefs about language and language use; and any specific efforts to modify or influence that practice by any kind of language intervention, planning or management. Spolsky (2004) maintained that, as in any other social unit, language policy at the family level may be analysed with reference to language ideology, practice, and management. Irvine (1989: 255) defined language ideology as the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests. She argues that the study of language needs to be framed in terms of the economic conditions that constrain the possibilities for making meaning and social relations. Political and economic conditions underlie ideologies of language and therefore help explain why certain linguistic forms and practices play the role they do in the production and reproduction of the social order and of the moral order that legitimates it (Irvine, ibid.). Ideologies of language are not about language alone, but are always socially situated and tied to questions of identity and power in societies (Woolard, 1998). Language ideologies are often seen as the driving force of language policy as language ideologies are based on the perceived value, power, and utility of various languages (Curdt-Christiansen, 2009). For this reason, understanding what language ideologies underlie parenting practices and how these ideologies are formed is of primary concern to family language policy research (King, Fogle, & Logan-Terry, 2008). Moreover, language ideologies are shaped by various factors, such as the majority community’s policies on minority language learning (Spolsky, 2012); the dominant discourse on bilingualism promoted by official and unofficial sources such as the media (CurdtChristiansen, 2009; King & Fogle, 2006); the potential benefits of bilingualism/ multilingualism (Edwards, 2004); culture-specific notions of what makes a “good” or “bad” parent, mother, or father (King et al., 2008); parental expectations, which refer to “the beliefs and goals that parents have for their children’s multilingual development and educational outcomes” (Curdt-Christiansen, 2009; Kirsch, 2012). It should be noted that these factors are interrelated and may simultaneously exert influence on individual persons’ belief systems at varying degrees across time and space. In addition, they may or may not be congruent

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with the state policy in terms of what language should be maintained, what language provides access to advanced economic development, and what language serves political interests and should be allowed in public domains (CurdtChristiansen, 2009). The present chapter, drawing on the framework of Family Language Policy and on the theory of language commodification (Tan & Rudby, 2008; Heller, 2010; Heller & Duchêne, 2016), discusses how neoliberal ideologies of viewing language(s) shape parents’ family language policies with particular reference to expat Greek families in Luxembourg.

The commodification of language Duchêne and Heller’s (2012) concepts of “pride” and “profit” help explain why people wish to maintain or develop particular languages. The notion of “pride” relates language to cultural or national belonging while the notion of “profit” views language as an economic element, such as a source of added value. With the onset of the age of late capitalism within the globalized new economy (Giddens, 1991; Appadurai, 1996; Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996; Pujolar, 2007), the neoliberal ideology places commodities at the centre of “its social world” (Holborow, 2015: 31). In this context, languages are increasingly seen both as a source of profit and as a means to maximize profit. Duchêne and Heller (2012) also indicate that in the context of capitalism language is treated less like a source of pride, as was the case in the context of older nationalist ideologies, and more like a source of profit. This is due to the influence of neoliberal ideology on modern economies, which dictates that the main goal of national language policies should be to “maximize economic advantage in a hypercompetitive new world order” (Cameron, 2012: 353). According to Heller (2003: 474), the commodification of language refers to the process of “language being rendered amenable to redefinition as a measurable skill” and consequently, “the understanding of language being a marketable commodity on its own”. The recent interest in language as commodity requires explanation on two levels (Heller, 2010). One level relates to the extent to which forms of exchange (standardized language for jobs, for example) have started being treated as directly exchangeable for material goods and, especially, for money. The other level concerns the extent to which the circulation of goods increasingly depends on the deployment of linguistic resources (for example, in some areas getting a job used to depend on physical strength, but now many jobs require communicative skills instead). In this sense, it appears here that commodification is a process by and through which objects that were previously unsellable – in this case, language – are becoming sellable (Block, 2017). Heller (2010) analyses the role of language as a commodity in niche markets such as tourism, marketing and advertising, language teaching, translation, international call centres and performance art. In terms of the call centre industry in francophone Canada, Heller (2003: 483) mentions how language has been commodified through the intentional “hiring of bilingual representatives in a bid to maximize the client base”. Consequently, “language in the call centre

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industry is considered a skill” (Heller 2003: 485) – a skill used by potential employees to sell themselves, and a skill used by employers to service their diverse customer base. The commodification of language and the concept of linguistic markets, where linguistic resources acquire value and are exchanged for profit, have been theorized in depth mainly in relation to standard French and standard English (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu & Thompson, 1991; Cameron, 2012; Heller, 2003, 2011; Duchêne & Heller, 2012; Silverstein, 1996). However, there are increasingly studies showing that varieties other than standard English and French can also be commodified. In their study of the linguistic landscape of Washington DC’s Chinatown, Leeman and Modan (2009) explore how minority languages with other multimodal design elements in the built environment are commodified and, together, used to sell the city. Using primarily signage from Washington DC’s Chinatown, Leeman and Modan (2009) focus on how the material manifestations of language in urban cities are influenced by extra-linguistic phenomena such as political and economic interests. On a similar note, using linguistic landscape images from two rural communities in the Northern Cape, South Africa, Banda and Mokwena (2019) show how indigenous African languages and localized English are entangled as commodities – whether used independently or in hybridized form – for the sale of various goods and services. The study shows that the commodification of the languages and hybridized forms speaks to semiotic choices of local authorship of signage and to the influence of local communities’ languaging practices.

Language as an “investment” The concept of language commodification is not as recent as is believed. As early as 1986 Bourdieu pointed out, in his definition of linguistic capital, that languages as well as their acquisition, have their price, which reflects their value as a commodity in a given socioeconomic context. Bourdieu (1977) defines linguistic capital as the capacity to produce speech for a particular market, from which linguistic competence derives its value and, like other tradable goods, this speech has an economic exchange value (651). And even though linguistic capital and the power hierarchies it exemplifies mainly refer to variations within a certain language, this concept is valuable when examining how knowledge of other languages can provide benefits such as prestige and access to social and economic opportunities in national and global markets. Linguistic capital is only one form of embodied cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1977). Cultural capital encompasses forms of knowledge; skill; education; any advantages a person has which confer them power and a higher status in society. It is when they are “perceived and recognized as legitimate” (Bourdieu, 1987: 4) that they become symbolic capital. Thus, immigrant parents’ family language policies should also be discussed in the light of Norton’s (2000, 2013) concept of “investment”. Norton refers to investment as a construct that articulates the socially and historically mediated

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relationship of learners to language, education, identity, and community. Drawing on Bourdieu’s critical perspective, she claims that learners invest in a language because it will help them acquire a wider range of resources, which will in turn increase the value of their cultural capital and social power (Norton, 2000, 2013). The construct of investment recognizes language learning as a social practice whereby learners exercise agency by investing in what they deem enriches their capital and expands their identity options and their access to diverse communities, real or imagined (Early & Norton, 2012). In the present study, as we will see, this agency is exercised by parents who wish their children to enrich their capital and expand their identity options.

Representations of multilingualism in Luxembourg Luxembourg is frequently portrayed as the country of the EU that fosters multilingualism par excellence (Horner, 2011). The 1984 language law recognized Luxembourgish, French, and German as the country’s official languages. Furthermore, the educational system has a long history of valuing multilingualism as a “resource”. The Education Act of 1843 introduced mandatory instruction in French alongside German in primary schools (Weber, 2009). The teaching of Luxembourgish was introduced in 1912. While Luxembourgish is equated with the “home language”, German and French (and increasingly English) are viewed as sources of linguistic capital. Official discourses have constructed multilingualism at a national level as a symbolic pillar of national cohesion and at a personal level as a valuable asset in that it is “a commodity with obvious exchange value on the job market” (Horner & Weber, 2008: 120). Learners develop a valuable and marketable multilingual repertoire. However, Horner (2011) maintains that societal multilingualism constitutes a problem, especially if it breaks away from the specifically prescribed trilingual (plus English) paradigm. According to Tavares (2017: 317), in Luxembourg there is an elitist perspective of multilingualism expressed, for example, by “celebrating” the official trilingualism (French, German, and Luxembourgish) and the increasing use of English while partially neglecting the multilingual repertoires of certain migrants, such as the Lusophones who are associated with low-paid jobs. Multilingualism in Luxembourgish, German, French, and English (as well as high literacy skills) is necessary in order to get a state job. A good mastery of German or French and English is relevant in banks. The importance of competence in Luxembourgish has increased, and some transborder workers from the neighbouring countries have begun to attend Luxembourgish language courses in order to increase their employment opportunities in Luxembourg (Gogonas & Kirsch, 2016). As I will show later, the Greek parents in this study perceive migration to Luxembourg as an educational investment for their children. They aspire that their children will become multilingual like the Luxembourgers and they want them to master English, among other languages, as well as to know Greek.

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Methodology The present chapter reports on two studies that took place in Luxembourg. The first study pertaining to the research project “Family Language Policies among Greek migrants in Luxembourg” was conducted with four families in 2014 when the author was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg. It was funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche (see also Gogonas & Kirsch, 2016; Kirsch & Gogonas, 2018). The results shown here refer to three families. A follow-up study took place in 2017 and investigated motives for migration and global competence among two of the above-mentioned families (see Gogonas, 2019). The purpose of the second study was to invite the parents of two of these families to revisit their migratory project to Luxembourg, to evaluate their decision to migrate, and to examine their degree of global competence. In order to collect in-depth data and to understand language ideologies from an insider’s perspective, I adopted a qualitative methodology and opted for a small sample. The small sample and the quality and density of the data enhance the validity of the fine-grained, in-depth inquiry.

Participating families The participants were chosen according to the following criteria: (a) families where both parents were born and raised in Greece; (b) families with children attending state Luxembourgish schools; (c) families with a different length of residence in Luxembourg. The overall aim was to compare the “established” and “new” families. The participants were recruited from the Greek community in Luxembourg and the Greek complementary1 school. This chapter focuses on three families, an “established” one living in Luxembourg for 9 years and two “new” families who arrived in Luxembourg approximately 15 months before the study was conducted. Table 9.1 provides an overview of the three families in the 2014 study. Two of the families took part in the follow-up study in 2017. These are shown in Table 9.2. The Alexopoulos family have a daughter, Katerina, who attends school in Luxembourg (all participants are given pseudonyms), and a son who studies at university in Germany. Katerina was born in Luxembourg. The mother, Fani, came to Luxembourg in 2005, following her husband, Stefanos, who took up a job offer at NATO. She studied German language and literature in Greece and holds an MA in educational management from a British university as well as an MA in teaching German as a foreign language from a Greek university. In Greece, she worked as a secondary school teacher and teacher-trainer. In Luxembourg, she works as a teacher of Modern Greek for interpreters at private language school. The Roussos family have three daughters, Eleni, Alexandra, and Ariadne. The two younger girls attend primary school while the eldest girl attends a technical secondary school. Their mother Maria is unemployed. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Greek culture. Her last jobs in Greece were in administration and service sectors. Her husband, Ioannis, studied hotel management in Switzerland and decided to

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Table 9.1 Participating families in the 2014 study Alexopoulos family

Roussos family

Pappas family

Parents’ names and ages Children’s names and ages

Stefanos, 56 and Fani, 53 Nikos, 19 Katerina, 9

Kostas, 37 and Sofia, 37 Hector, 7 Thomas, 5.5

Time in Luxembourg Parents’ education

9 years

Maria, 40 and Ioannis, 46 Eleni, 8 Alexandra, 11 Ariadne, 13 16 months

Kostas: Technical University Sofia: Post-secondary vocational school

Parents’ occupations

Stefanos: Official in an international organization Fani: Language teacher at the European Parliament

Maria: University degree Ioannis: Post-secondary vocational education Ioannis: Hotel employee Maria: Unemployed

Master’s degrees

15 months

Kostas: IT specialist European Parliament Sofia: Graphics designer at a company

Table 9.2 Participating families in the 2017 study

Parents’ names and ages Children’s names and ages Time in Luxembourg Parents’ education

Parents’ occupations

Roussos family

Pappas family

Maria, 43 and Ioannis, 49

Kostas 43, and Sofia, 43

Eleni, 11 Alexandra, 14 Ariadne, 17 4 years and 4 months Maria: University degree Ioannis: Post-secondary vocational education Ioannis: Hotel employee Maria: Unemployed

Hector, 10 Thomas, 8.5 4 years and 3 months Kostas: Technical University Sofia: Post-secondary vocational school Kostas: IT specialist European Parliament Sofia: Graphics designer at a company

come to Luxembourg after securing a job at a hotel. He came to Luxembourg in November 2012 and his family joined him seven months later, in June 2013. The Pappas family came to Luxembourg in July 2013. They have two sons, Hector and Thomas, both born in Greece. Sofia, the mother, studied graphics and worked in a graphic arts workshop in Athens. At the beginning of the fieldwork she was unemployed but after one year she found employment as a

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graphics designer. Her husband, Kostas, used to work as an IT specialist at a Greek Telecommunications Company. He currently works as an IT external collaborator at the European Parliament in Luxembourg.

Data collection and analysis Methods of data collection in the 2014 study included participant observation, informal conversations, and interviews with parents and children over a period of eight months (see Research Timeline, Table 9.3). The topics of discussion revolved around the parents’ reflections on their attempts to expand their linguistic repertoire in Luxembourg through attending language classes in German, French, or Luxembourgish and the progress of their children at school. All interviews were conducted in Greek and lasted between 45 and 60 minutes. On various occasions, collaborative ethnography was employed: Parents and children audio/video-recorded routine family interactions. For example, all three families audio-recorded conversations at the dinner table while the father of the Pappas family video-recorded sessions in which he was helping his elder son with his German homework. In the subsequent meetings they explained the recordings, which contextualized the data. Finally, the data included field notes and other documents (e.g. pictures taken during the home visits and emails from parents). In the second study data were collected through semi-structured interviews, which were carried out in Greek and lasted between 60 and 120 minutes. The use of Greek, as well as the fact that the interviewer and the interviewees had all recently migrated to Luxembourg, facilitated the development of a good rapport (Kirsch & Gogonas 2016). The current chapter draws on interview data from both studies (2014 and 2017). The tables below present a timeline for the research. The data presented in this chapter are drawn from 600 minutes of transcribed interviews. The data analysis followed the grounded theory paradigm (Bernard & Ryan, 1998; Charmaz, 2006; Corbin & Strauss, 2008): The data were reviewed, coded, and thematically analysed according to the common issues and patterns that emerged. The themes included awareness of the socioeconomic and political context, beliefs regarding the value of languages, reasons for learning languages, ways of developing languages. These themes were recurrent in the interviews of each family and helped me identify similarities and differences between the families.

Findings: Parents investing in language learning Parents from all three families view their children’s trilingual education in Luxembourg as an investment. According to Ioannis (Roussos family), the highquality education system was the main reason why he wanted his family to join him in Luxembourg. He could have supported his family financially from Luxembourg, while the latter remained in Greece. In the following excerpt, Ioannis explains why he chose a state school rather than the European school for his

Roussos family Pappas family

Study 2

Interview with Fani and Stefanos Interview with Ioannis Home observation

Nov 2014

Interview with both parents Interview with both parents

Feb 2017

Interview with Maria Interview with Kostas

Roussos family

Pappas family

Interview with Fani

Oct 2014

Alexopoulos family

Study 1

Table 9.3 Research timeline

1st selfvideo recording

2nd selfaudio recording 1st audiorecording 2nd selfvideo recording

Interview with Fani

1st selfaudio recording Home observation Interview with Sofia

Feb 2015

Jan 2015

Dec 2014

April 2015

2nd audio recording 1st audiorecording

March 2015 3rd selfaudiorecording Interview with Maria Interview with Kostas

Interview with Ioannis Interview with Kostas

Interview with Fani

May 2015

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daughters. State Luxembourgish schools are trilingual. Pre-primary education is in Luxembourgish and primary education is carried out in German, while French is introduced as a second language at the end of the second year. European schools, founded to cater to the needs of EU civil servants operate “mother-tongue” sections in EU languages. Accordingly, those Greek parents who choose the European School send their children to the Greek section. In the following quote Ioannis explains the reasons why he opted for the trilingual, Luxembourgish school for his children instead: As soon as I arrived here alone, I checked the European schools out and I came to the conclusion that my children would go to Luxembourgish school. Because, if they learn Luxembourgish, French and German then they will be able to talk to anybody. But if they remain within a “Greek circle” they will do some courses in other languages with international kids but this is not enough for me. My children are learning two of the most important languages of Europe; French and German, and on top of that, if we were in Greece it would cost us a lot of money. (Ioannis, interview in 2014) In the above quote, Ioannis clearly refers to language ideologies prevalent in Greece with regard to the “value” and “hierarchy” of languages. Western European languages are highly valorized in the Greek context, in contrast for example with the languages of the neighbouring Balkan countries (Petraki, 2019). The most commonly taught languages in Greek schools are English, and French or German. However, Greece stands out as the European country with the strongest perceptions that out of school classes are the most effective way for children to learn a language (Petraki, 2019). Thus, Greek parents generally spend a lot of money on tuition fees to Private Language Schools (frontistiria) to ensure a good quality foreign language education for their children; hence, Ioannis’s comment above that “in Greece it would cost them a lot of money”. His wife, Maria, expresses similar views: Receiving trilingual education in the “important languages” of Europe is an important toolkit for the children’s future academic and employment plans: Apart from the fact that the European School is expensive, I don’t think it would be of any use for them, as we live in Europe and we have a future here, I think they can learn more useful things than the Greek language or the subjects they would learn at a Greek school. (Maria, interview in 2014) In the above quote Maria indirectly makes a statement about the fact that the family’s migration in Luxembourg (or “Europe”) does not have a temporary character. Since the family does not envision returning to Greece, attending the European School (Greek section) is not going to be useful for them. They need

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to master multilingualism in “European” languages, something that is offered by state Luxembourgish schools. Kostas (Pappas family) is equally happy about his two sons attending a state school. He believes that the knowledge of Luxembourgish and the immersion in the local culture will help his sons integrate. In addition, he argues that learning new languages helps them develop the essential skill of “adaptability”, which prepares them for the international job market: For me, the key is “adaptability” and this is a skill they are learning through growing up here. If they have to learn Chinese at some point in their lives because they found a good job opportunity, they will be able to do so and they won’t hesitate. (Kostas, interview in 2017) In other words, Kostas believes that, despite the fact that his children have to receive education in languages they do not know (Luxembourgish and German), it is still worthwhile as the process of acquiring these languages will teach them “adaptability”, a key skill in Kostas’s opinion. In the same vein, Fani appreciates the trilingual Luxembourgish education system for opening up a lot of options to her daughter. Born in Luxembourg, Katerina is fluent in Luxembourgish and German. Her parents have noticed that she is “talented for languages” and, therefore, they would like her to learn “as many languages as possible” in line with her likely future professional needs. The following quote by the father, Stefanos, is quite telling as Stefanos goes so far as to consider that his daughter’s linguistic repertoire consisting of five languages (including Greek) is a “minimum”: I consider these three (Luxembourgish, German, French) as a minimum basis. Actually it should be German, French, English, Luxembourgish as minimum and from then on she should also learn additional languages. […] If she is to study in France, I’d rather her French was stronger. For example if she wants to study law, France has a different law system from Germany. (Stefanos, interview in 2014) In the excerpt above, Stefanos voices his high expectations regarding Katerina’s future career and aspires to build on her already rich linguistic repertoire by adding even more languages. The above discussion indicates that Greek parents’ choices of type of school chime with their views regarding multilingualism. All three families decided to send their children to trilingual, Luxembourgish schools hoping that the children will develop good multilingual skills in “important languages”, and this is an opportunity that is offered for free in Luxembourg. These languages will in turn help their children embark on successful careers. In this sense linguistic skills appear to be a commodity for the parents of our sample. In other words, it is a “good” with exchange value in the European and international job market.

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Furthermore, parents seem to view their children’s education in a multilingual context as an investment. According to Ioannis, if the children were to attend the Greek section of the European school they would remain within the constraints of a “Greek circle”. In contrast, by having access to diverse communities and by learning “important languages” in addition to Greek, the children may enrich their capital and expand their identity options. The following section illustrates that the parents also wish their children to develop skills in English on top of learning Luxembourgish, German, and French at school.

The prominence of English The prominence of English comes up very strikingly in the data. All three families believe their children need to learn English above all, and, as we will see later, one of the families considers sending their daughter to a non-Luxembourgish school as state Luxembourgish schools do not offer English as a subject to students before the age of 14. When asked whether he would like his sons to learn English, Kostas is adamant. He expresses strong views in favour of learning English as he believes that a “European citizen” needs to have excellent English skills. He views himself as a “European citizen” and a “citizen of the world”, and has the same aspirations for his sons, even if this means putting pressure on them: If we would like to think of Hector as a “European citizen”, then both Luxembourgish and Greek are useless. He could manage with English in both countries realistically talking […] For English, I am going to insist. It is the only language that I am going to put pressure on them to learn. I can see how English has helped me to work here, and in other places, it gives you this flexibility. So if I see that they react to learning English, there I am going to press them. (Kostas, interview in 2015) In the above quote we clearly see the ideologies of commodification and investment. Kostas states clearly that “English helps you work”, thus denoting that English has exchange value in the job market. At the same time, it enables those who speak it to gain membership to the “European citizens’” community. On a similar note, Ioannis links the mastery of English to his daughters’ future “prospects”. Asked whether he would prefer that his daughters attend English or Greek classes, he explains: “I would put it [the emphasis] on English, I would think practically. Because we have to think of their prospects. They would need English even if they went to Greece” (Ioannis, interview in 2014). In Ioannis’s quote we also see the ideology of language (English in this case) as a commodity. So, Ioannis believes that he has to think in terms of the practical benefits to be derived from language learning. In this sense, knowing English is more beneficial as it can guarantee a career anywhere in the world.

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In the Alexopoulos family, Fani and Stefanos’s language planning for Katerina puts English to the forefront as well. Instead of Greek language classes at the complementary school, Katerina had English private lessons in the year the data were recorded (school year 2014–15). In the following quote Fani makes a clear reference to the reasons why English is so important for her daughter “to compete in the workplace”, thus echoing an ideology of commodification: This year, English took the place of Greek so there’s no time for Greek. We have hired a very good English language teacher who gives her lessons privately at home. I can’t deprive my child of the knowledge of English. I don’t believe that there is a single parent out there who thinks that his/her child would compete in the workplace and in society without knowing English. (Fani, interview in 2015) However, in an interview in May 2015, Fani confessed that she was having feelings of guilt because Katerina had not been attending Greek classes. She explained that another reason for her not attending the Greek complementary school in 2014–15 had to do with the distant location of the school as well as with the level of Greek taught there: It was too easy for Katerina, as it was mainly addressed to children of mixed marriages with less competence in Greek than she had. Parental involvement in Katerina’s language education includes alternating summer schools in England and France in order to provide her with opportunities to improve her French and English. When they take her to the cinema, they choose films in the original English version with French subtitles so that she can practise listening. As they feel that the Luxembourgish system does not support English as much as they wish for, they have already decided to send Katerina in three years’ time to the only secondary school that offers the International Baccalaureate in English.

Maintaining Greek: “Pride” or “profit”? The parents’ reasons for the maintenance of Greek are related to Duchêne and Heller’s (2012) notions of “pride” and “profit”. Most of the parents in this study believe maintenance of Greek is important for reasons of identity but at the same time consider knowledge of Greek an asset with exchange value. In the Alexopoulos family there is a disagreement between the two parents as regards the maintenance and development of Greek. Stefanos does not believe that Katerina should receive tuition in Greek and he claims that exposure to Greek at home is adequate for the time being (interview in November 2014). Moreover, he believes that Greek might be useful for a possible translator or interpreter career: What are your thoughts about Katerina’s Greek skills? What she knows in Greek is enough as she is learning from us … Then it will depend on her job. If she decides to become a translator she will be able to improve her Greek in a very short period of time.

RESEARCHER: STEFANOS:

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So are you more neutral with regard to her improving Greek? You see it only in terms of jobs etc.? STEFANOS: Exactly. (Stefanos, interview in 2014) RESEARCHER:

In the quote above, Stefanos is stressing the “profit” of Greek language maintenance. His wife Fani, on the other hand, feels that maintenance of Greek is crucial for Katerina’s identity and makes serious efforts to transmit Greek to her. She provides her with reading material (e.g. novels) in Greek and makes sure she spends time every summer in Greece in order to practise speaking the language with relatives there. As mentioned in the previous section, in an interview in May she expressed guilt for not sending Katerina to the Greek complementary school in the school year 2014–15. However, she mentioned that she was going to make amends for it in the school year 2015–16 as she had already found a very good Greek tutor for Katerina. Maria and Ioannis Roussos appear to be particularly keen with regard to Greek language maintenance. Although the girls are fluent Greek users as they moved to Luxembourg 15 months prior to the start of the study, at the ages of 7, 10, and 12, the parents send the girls to the Greek complementary school. They consider Greek as an inextricable part of the girls’ identity, but like Stefanos they also perceive Greek as an extra asset of instrumental value and link it to tangible qualifications in the form of language certificates. Using utilitarian arguments, they try to persuade the girls, who are less keen on attending Greek classes. But this year none of them wanted to attend the Greek mother tongue classes. None. RESEARCHER: Did they say why? M: What do I need mother tongue school for? I know Greek. And also: what I need Greek for? Who will I speak it with? We live here now, and we don’t think we’re going to return to Greece. RESEARCHER: What do you say to that? M: I tell them it’s not right, you may need it one day, like my eldest one who sat Greek exams last year and got the B2 certificate at a university in Germany. She got it with top grade. (Maria, interview in 2017) M:

The excerpt above is indicative of these Greek parents’ deep-seated belief that foreign language instruction equals foreign language certification (Dendrinos, Karavas, & Zouganelli, 2013). According to Petraki (2019), certification is an important part of foreign language education in Greece and there also appears to be a connection between certification and learner identity, and by extension learner investment. Petraki (2019) refers to this concept as the commodification of language through the “objectification of cultural capital in the form of academic qualifications” (22).

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Kostas and Sofia Pappas are the only parents who do not send their children to Greek language classes as they want to place the emphasis on the development of German literacy. Sofia explains: [Sending them to Greek complementary school] won’t happen before two years from now, because I would like Thomas to finish the first grade of primary school first so that he also gets a good grounding in German, like his elder brother. After that, the two boys might enroll in Greek classes. I see that Hector confuses the alphabet. When he wants to write something he always starts writing in German because he feels more confident, but then he gets confused and uses some Greek letters instead of Latin. He uses a Latin “m”, for example, instead of [the Greek] “μ”. This makes me think that he’d better grasp German first, and then he will also deal with Greek. (Sofia, interview in 2015) This excerpt illustrates Sofia’s perception that the process of becoming literate in Greek may impede the children’s writing skills in German. As a result, the parents prefer to delay Greek classes. Kostas and Sofia aspire for their children to study at university. Kostas imagines enrolling his children at the European school, for example, in the Greek section. If the children graduate from this school then they could study at a Greek university. It would be important, therefore, to develop the children’s skills in Greek, including literacy. Kostas teaches the children Greek through games such as riddles or hangman, and reads stories in Greek to them. The parents have considered finding a private tutor as well as sending the children to the Greek complementary school once both master literacy in German. Literacy in German is a priority for them as high skills in German will enable the children to be admitted to a college preparatory secondary school, or lycee classique in Luxembourg. From the foregoing discussion it appears that the Pappas language planning is focused on the children’s acquisition of cultural and symbolic capital through tertiary education. Ideally, they would like their children to be admitted to a prestigious lycee classique or college prep school in Luxembourg, for which a high level of literacy in German will be required. Therefore, being informed by an ideology of “strict language separation”, perceiving that languages need to be learned in sequence, each one kept separate from the others, they defer the development of Greek skills for the sake of German. The parents have a plan B in case the children do not manage to muster the necessary German language skills to achieve their goal. The alternative plan is to study at a Greek university, through attending the European school. Therefore, knowledge of Greek would be a “profit” as it could function as a “safety net” so that children are admitted to university one way or another. In the parents’ perception, both German and Greek function as levers which can help their children pursue higher studies and a career.

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Concluding discussion This chapter has looked at the construct of Language Policy at the level of the family (Spolsky, 2004, 2012). It examines parents’ language ideologies, the reasons why the latter are informed, and the ways in which they impinge on parents’ language management in the family. It appears that the parents have ideologies of language commodification and investment. All the Greek parents in this study actively invest in their children’s language learning. They expect their children to achieve high academic standards and are involved in the children’s school and educational lives. The parents hold strong beliefs regarding the significance of hegemonic, “standard” languages such as French, German, and English and they actively invest in the development of skills in these languages. These ideologies chime with the language policy enacted by the Luxembourgish state whereby multilingualism in certain languages only is valued. Parents wish to develop Greek skills among their children but the development of Greek is not prioritized because it breaks away from the specifically prescribed trilingual (plus English) paradigm. Earlier generations of Greek migrants in the diaspora used to take efforts to maintain Greek for reasons of national identity, or “pride”. Paulston (1986), for example, found that the Greek community of Pittsburgh, United States, maintained the Greek language for four generations, breaking thus the “three generation rule” in the United States, noted by researchers such as Fishman (1966), Veltman (1983), and Paulston (1986). Similarly, in the Australian context, Greeks viewed the heritage language as a core value for their identity and were committed to its maintenance (Smolicz & Secombe, 1988; Smolicz, Secombe, & Hudson, 2001). At the beginning of the twenty-first century they displayed the strongest degree of ethnolinguistic vitality of all ethnic groups in Australia (Tamis, 2005, 2009). Greek immigrants in Germany were found to be a highly language-maintenance-oriented group (Chatzidaki, 1996). The Greek parents in the present study are more likely to view Greek through a commodifying lens: It constitutes an “extra linguistic asset”, which may lead to the accumulation of “symbolic capital” through language certificates, access to higher education, or to a career with languages. In this vein, they do not value the knowledge of Luxembourgish either as “it is irrelevant for the international job market” (Gogonas & Kirsch, 2016). The parents in this study envision a “global citizen” model for their children and thus their family language policy is carried out in a “visionary, hence neoliberally responsible, manner” (Codó & Sunyol, 2019: 15). The study aims to add to our understanding of the factors affecting parents’ language policies in contexts of migration in the current times of increased mobility. Earlier groups of migrants used to transmit the heritage language and culture to the next generations for reasons of “pride”. The neoliberal ideology prevailing in all spheres of public life including education are responsible for this change in attitude among various migrant communities such as the Greeks abroad. The implications of the study for language policies in Luxembourg chime with Weber’s (2009) plea for a shift in the cultural models underlying the

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Luxembourgish educational system from “triple plus monolingual competence” to “multilingual competence”. This would involve a change from the ideology of deficiency in which only the standard language and native-like proficiency are valorized to one of ability and achievement, where all language varieties are built upon. Such a shift is deemed necessary in educational systems elsewhere as well, for effective language education in times of superdiversity.

Note 1 The Greek complementary school in Luxembourg was established in 1978. It is run by the Ministry of Education, Research and Religion in Greece and the Coordinating office for Greek-language education in Western Europe, based in Brussels. The aims of the school are to develop receptive and productive Greek language skills and nurture the Greek identity through the teaching of elements of culture, history, geography, and mythology (Kirsch, 2019: 204–205). The Greek teacher of the complementary school introduced me to the families who participated in the study as their children attended the school.

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10 Names as linguistic capital Peter K. W. Tan

Discourses of late capitalism Terms like the linguistic capital or the linguistic market place by Bourdieu have become commonplace in sociolinguistics. In the milieu of capitalistic societies today, those terms are eagerly lapped up, and the impression given sometimes is that this is a sign of the times we are in when many things are seen through the eyes of commerce. However, these are not new notions. Bourdieu himself quotes the nineteenth-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, for instance. Language forms a kind of wealth, which all can make use of at once without causing any diminution of the store, and which thus admits a complete community of enjoyment; for all, freely participating in the general treasure, unconsciously aid in its preservation. (Comte, 1875–77, vol. 2: 213, quoted in Bourdieu, 1991: 43) The labels wealth, store, and treasure applied to language (and specifically particular varieties of language, or individual languages as opposed to other languages) encourage us to think of language as a kind of capital. We understand that we are using a metaphor when we describe language as capital. If we follow through Bourdieu’s discussion, we will accept that this capital can come through official recognition or through (quasi) legislation so that these varieties or languages have “symbolic domination” (Bourdieu, 1991: 50) and this “dominant competence [in the varieties or languages] functions as linguistic capital, securing a profit of distinction in its relation to other competences” (56), and “groups which possess that competence are able to impose it as the only legitimate one in the formal markets (the fashionable, educational, political and administrative markets) and in most of the linguistic interactions in which they are involved” (56–57). What should be clear at this stage is that we are operating with an extended metaphor in order to grapple with the fact that various varieties and languages are unequal in the community – or that they are assigned different values in the linguistic market place, with the most valuable language gaining symbolic dominance.

Names as linguistic capital 165 It therefore also follows that these language varieties and languages can also be considered commodities in the same vein. I use Appadurai’s definition of commodities being “objects of economic value” (1986: 3) arising out of the desire to possess them which gives rise to an exchange value. Languages are thus seen to “constitute a saleable commodity with regard to business and marketing, whilst for the clients they represent an investment in cultural capital which can then be exchanged within the global labour market” (Rassool, 2007: 148). It should be apparent then that my use of the notion of the linguistic capital and of language as commodity departs from the classical treatment of commodity by Adam Smith or Karl Marx. Simpson and O’Regan (2018) make the point that in the treatments of language as commodity, there is, for instance, no understanding of a commodity arising out of congealed or embodied labour, so that “language appears as a commodity, but is not a commodity” (2018: 156). Language is not a materialist entity, and therefore the terms commodity and capital are not used in the purist sense. However, I see the description of language in these terms as being useful because it helps us consider how different languages and varieties are valued differently by different bodies and individuals. It also presents us with a useful way of describing how languages operate in the world in a more instrumentalist fashion, more so than in earlier historical periods. As mentioned earlier, I do not suggest that according value to particular languages is a new thing; only that this way of treating languages is much more taken for granted now. This chapter focuses on the conferment of value to particular languages from a basket of available languages, and that this can be deduced by examining names employed in a built-up environment such as the city. I will also suggest that namers are agents of language planning in a broad sense, and that these agents can value languages in line with official policies or subvert these policies (Tan, 2011, 2019). The act of language planning necessarily involves the conferment of value to particular languages or varieties in the Bourdieusian sense.

Language planning and policy as investing value to names I adopt a broad definition of language planning and policy (LPP) and consider it to be about the design of language or the design of language(s) in society. If the concern is about a single language, the language planner is trying to convince users that the design seen in a form or variety of the language is worthy of emulation. If the concern is about language(s) within societies or within communities of practice (Eckert & Wenger, 2005), the language planner is trying to persuade members of the community that, in the overall design of their community, a particular language or variety represents their identity more effectively. I have departed from normal LPP terminology here, but I am describing what are normally christened corpus planning, acquisition planning, and status planning. See, for instance, Hornberger (2006).

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The whole phenomenon is also scaleable in that it is possible to carry out LPP in relation to a whole nation, or to a city, or indeed to a family. In the same way, agents of language planning who are their implementers operate at different levels. Haarmann (1990), for instance, discusses different levels of agency from the macro to the micro level: The government, agencies, pressure groups, and individual language users. With LPP being available at different levels and being implemented by different agents, the potential is great for complexities and even contradictions. Added to this, top-level policies themselves might change over time, but low-level policies might not have kept up with the former. McCarty (2013), for instance, gives the example of inconsistencies seen in relation to Native American language education legislation in the United States: If we assume a federal commitment to eradicate Indigenous languages, as articulated in more than two centuries of federal Indian policy …, how do we explain the federally sponsored development and dissemination of Native-language textbooks during the 1940s? How do the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act and the 1990/1992 Native American Languages Act square with the English-only requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001? (44) The site of LPP activity is very often that of education and educational issues such as the medium of instruction, or the revitalization of languages. I diverge from these studies by choosing to look at names as the locus of LPP. In this, I am taking the cue from work done in the study of the linguistic landscape (Landry & Bourhis, 1997) or the semiotic landscape (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010), where the built-up environment is seen to be inscribed with language and where the representation of particular languages can be linked to ethnolinguistic vitality of the group thus indexed through these languages – certainly in the case of Landry and Bourhis’s work. They distinguish between the “informative function” (the semantic content of the sign) and the “symbolic function” of signs (what the language employed signals about the speakers of the language, and therefore also the status or value of the language). Since their landmark work, however, scholars have moved on to consider how the languages in the linguistic/semiotic landscape could represent other things apart from ethnolinguistic vitality. Landry and Bourhis also make the distinction between topdown signs provided by the government or agencies linked to the government, on the one hand, and bottom-up signs provided by commercial enterprises, on the other. Top-down signs generally reflect the linguistic priorities of LPP whereas bottom-up signs might reflect other priorities. Much of the work has also been informed by the work by Scollon and Scollon on geosemiotics or “the study of the social meaning of the material placement of signs in the world” (2003: 110). They accord different priorities to the languages represented in signs depending on their size and placement. The language that

Names as linguistic capital 167 occupies most space on a sign is deemed to be the most important language. If languages are ordered vertically, the topmost language has priority status. If the languages are written left to right, and they are arranged horizontally, the leftmost language has priority status. We can therefore glean the value accorded to particular languages through examining placement. In this chapter, I have made the jump from examining language on signs in the built-up environment to examining names in the built-up environment. This is a justifiable jump because names are heavily represented on signs and these names on signs centrally identify places – districts, streets, parks, and buildings. Bourdieu certainly sees naming as a political act in that “there is no social agent who does not aspire, as far as his circumstances permit, to have the power to name and to create the world through naming” (1991: 105). Here, Bourdieu uses “naming” in a broad fashion and associates naming with performativity, such as the acts of gossiping, slandering, or commending. I would argue that the official namings that will form the focus of this chapter will then represent naming and performativity par excellence. Acts of official naming are no less acts of world creation. Puzey and Kostanski, in their introduction to a volume on names and naming, underline the fact that “as names can represent identities, the silencing of a name or promotion of a preferred name can speak volumes for cultural politics” (2016: xx). They see this approach as fitting into the critical study of onomastics. Our examination of official naming can therefore be seen to contribute to critical onomastics, and names may be seen as a display of symbolic capital, Bourdieusian fashion. In this chapter I specifically focus on two contrastive kinds of names in the Malaysian environment to illustrate the multiple agents in LPP and the complex valuation of languages: The street names found in the capital Kuala Lumpur as an example of a top-down naming enterprise; and names of residential buildings in Malaysia as an example of a bottom-up naming enterprise.

The Malaysian sociolinguistic context Malaysia is a multi-ethnic and multilingual nation. Ethnicity looms large in discussions related to the population of Malaysia partly because of policies by the government to support particular individuals on the basis of ethnicity. The main distinction is between groups labelled Bumiputera or Bumiputra (from Sanskrit, meaning “sons of the soil”, to refer to indigenous groups) and the groups that are non-Bumiputera. Each ethnic group is associated with a traditional linguistic repertoire. At this juncture, it might be worth our while to pause on the ethnonym (name of an ethnic group) Bumiputera because it exemplifies clearly how naming can be a political act that confers status. Although the term was used in the early twentieth century (Ismail, 2004; Siddique & Suryadinata, 1981–82), the term was employed in a limited fashion until after the formation of Malaysia in 1963, and even then initially there was no clear definition of the term. The term does not appear in the 1957 Constitution. The first prime minister, Tunku

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Abdul Rahman, initially said “since it had no legal meaning, anyone was entitled to call himself ‘bumiputera’ … for that matter those Chinese and Indians who have been born here for several generations, are entitled to call themselves ‘bumiputera’” (Parliamentary Debates, 1965). Since then, the term has been appropriated and defined to exclude the Chinese and Indians. The 2010 Malaysian census indicates a resident population of 28.3 million. Of the citizens, there are 14.2 million (50.1 per cent) Malays, 3.3 million (11.8 per cent) other Bumiputeras, 6.4 million (22.6 per cent) Chinese, 1.9 million (6.7 per cent) Indians, and 0.2 million (0.7 per cent) Others. (“Indian” is used loosely to refer to anyone of South Asian extraction.) There are also 2.3 million (8.2 per cent) non-citizens (Department of Statistics, Malaysia, 2011). The population distribution shows much regional variation. For instance, the distribution for Kuala Lumpur is 40.5 per cent Malays, 1.0 per cent other Bumiputeras, 39.1 per cent Chinese, 9.3 per cent Indians, 0.6 per cent Others, and 9.4 per cent non-citizens (Department of Statistics, Malaysia, 2011): There is a higher representation of the Chinese. The only language accorded the status of official language, of all the languages spoken in Malaysia, is Malay. A key LPP document is Article 152 of the Constitution, which states that: (1) The national language shall be the Malay language and shall be in such script as Parliament may by law provide: Provided that – (a) no person shall be prohibited or prevented from using (otherwise than for official purposes), or from teaching or learning, any other language; and (b) nothing in this Clause shall prejudice the right of the Federal Government or of any State Government to preserve and sustain the use and study of the language of any other community in the Federation. (Constitution of Malaysia, 1957) The Malay language is accorded symbolic capital and is seen as representing all Malaysians regardless of ethnicity. Also interesting is 1(b). With its reference to “the language of any other community” is the assumption that each language is linked to a community, and that Malay itself is linked to a community (as other languages are linked to “other” communities), and the assumption is that the Malay language is linked to the ethnic Malay community. Therein, therefore, lies the tension: Is it a language associated with the nation or the community? This has been seen played out in the name in Malay; at a stage immediately after independence, it was called Bahasa Kebangsaan (“National Language”), then Bahasa Malaysia (“Malaysian”), and it has since vacillated between the latter and Bahasa Melayu (“the Malay language”). In informal English, the problem is sometimes avoided by just saying Bahasa (“language”), as in “How good is your Bahasa?” In a study involving 365 boys aged 15 and 16 in the city of Ipoh in West Malaysia, Lim (2008) noticed that the language choice depended largely on ethnicity. He also highlighted the use of mixed codes, with a matrix language

Names as linguistic capital 169 and another language; he uses the formulation “majority X less Y” to mean “mainly X, but with Y also incorporated into it”. The main language choice for intra and intergroup interaction amongst Malay adolescents in this setting is Malay and majority Malay less English variety. For the Chinese adolescents, Cantonese, English, majority Cantonese less English and majority English less Cantonese code-switch are their main language choices while the main language choices for the Indian adolescents are Tamil, English, majority Tamil less English and majority English less Tamil. (163) These are all Malaysian adolescents. All of them have Malay as part of their linguistic repertoire, as the education system requires all pupils to learn the language, and Malay is the medium of instruction for all state secondary schools; all the pupils were then attending such a school. Yet Malay is never the language of choice for Chinese adolescents and Indian adolescents. All this points towards Malay as indexing Malay identity rather than Malaysian identity. If there is a language shift, it appears to be towards English, rather than Malay, a point also raised by Lee et al. (2010). The lack of acculturation of the Chinese and Indians is linked to their reaction against the pedestalisation of Malay ethnicity and the vigour of Malay ethnonationalism (see Albury, 2018: 2–4). David and Govindasamy (2005), in their discussion about the medium of instruction issues in Malaysia, make a telling comment about Malay and English in relation to attachment and therefore also identification: Although the non-Malays had accepted Malay as the national language and had always recognized it as the lingua franca of the country and the region, they had not developed any sentimental attachments for the language as they had for English. (134) A respected commentator on the Malaysian language situation, Asmah Haji Omar concurs that English holds a significant position in Malaysia despite its lack of official status, and calls it a second language in the Malaysian context. In September 1967, English was ostensibly no longer an official language in Malaya. However, it continued to play the role of an official language in certain situations: in the drafting of the country’s laws, in the law courts, in the drafting of rules and regulations in government institutions, in certain professions such as medicine, dentistry, engineering, accountancy, banking and other financial sectors, and in business. In education, although Malay had become the main medium of education, English was set up as the second language of Malaysia …. It is because of the importance of English in such domains that English has been termed a second language in

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The language situation in Malaysia is therefore a complex one with multiple languages generally associated with particular ethnic communities; and the national language, Malay, continues to have strong ethnic links. The language that seems to transcend ethnic association is English. Based on the comments of researchers above, it is clear that it continues to be employed by Malaysians, and that English is not seen as a “colonial language” or a language associated with the English or the British. It is also not clearly associated with any single community in the way that the other Malaysian languages are, and might therefore be perceived as being neutral. The priority of Malay is generally evident from the policies and rules about signs. The policy as stated in Manan et al. (2015) is given below: (1) The national language shall be used for all advertisements whether by itself or together with any other language; (2) If the national language is used with any other language in an advertisement, the words in the national language shall be – (a) 30% larger than the other language in measurement; (b) prominently displayed and (c) grammatically correct. (35) Despite this, Manan et al. (2015) point out that English is the most prominent language found in unofficial signs in Kuala Lumpur, and their conclusion is that “the English language wields enormous value as is viewed as valuable social capital”; their respondents accord English “a higher economic and transactional value” (44). They also suggest that the language plays a “moderating” role as it is perceived as neutral between the various ethnic communities and is accessible to foreigners.

Data for this study The first category of names that I would like to examine, with respect to how name can demonstrate linguistic capital, is that of street names. This will represent the top-down name as provided by powerful political bodies, and is often congruent with LPP statements in the form of legislation or official statements. I then contrast this with residential building names in Malaysia, as these buildings will have been, or are being, developed privately as commercial enterprises. I suggest that these names also demonstrate linguistic capital as the name will form part of the marketing strategy of these companies. This will represent the bottom-up name that might be congruent with LPP statements, but will need to be balanced with the marketing strategies of these companies. For this study to be manageable, it would seem sensible to just examine a significant set of street names in Malaysia. I propose to examine a limited

Names as linguistic capital 171 number of streets from the capital Kuala Lumpur, the largest city in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur street names have also received more LPP attention for this reason (Tan, 2019). I focus on 34 street names for which name plates were ordered just before 1890. The advantage of using these names is that clear data and historical maps (survey maps from throughout the twentieth century) are available from the National Archives of Singapore, and the names can be traced longitudinally even as the statuses of various languages have changed historically. The data for building names were obtained from a reasonably comprehensive site called “The Malaysia Condo Directory”. I did not make a selection of names here, but simply used all the names found in that directory.

Street name changes As mentioned above, I will focus only on the street names in central Kuala Lumpur. A recently published volume documenting the street names of Kuala Lumpur (Isa & Kaur, 2015) has attracted general interest in Kuala Lumpur street names. The naming authority here is the Federal Territories Committee on Geographical Names. The guidelines published by the National Authority on Geographical Names (Jawatankuasa Kebangsaan Nama Geografi, 2005) affirm the status of the Malay language in names – the 4th Principle: Official Language (5) – although some leeway is given for names derived from other languages. I have previously given some account of Kuala Lumpur street name changes (Tan, 2019), and will reiterate some of the key points here, but with a different focus. The history of Kuala Lumpur has been given good coverage by British civil servant and also “Orientalist” John Michael Gullick (1983). Kuala Lumpur is the national capital and commercial centre of Malaysia, and was founded only as recently as 1857 by Chinese tin prospectors exploring the upper reaches of the Klang River. Kuala Lumpur was part of the state of Selangor until it was carved out to become a federal territory in 1974. This means that it was under the jurisdiction of the Malay sultan of Selangor. Internal disputes between Chinese miners and Malays caused the Sultan to ask for help from the British in 1874, and Selangor became a British Protectorate in 1895, so that it was effectively under British control (except during the period of the Japanese Occupation from 1942 to 1945) until Independence in 1957. What should be clear is that Kuala Lumpur has come under different regimes with different priorities in terms of language and ethnolinguistic groups to be represented. We have no information about street names in the initial stages when it was a village run by the Chinese. We can only assume that, when the British administration adapted the street names given by the Chinese, they also then added more of their own. We also have no information about street names during the period of Japanese Occupation, but we can perhaps take the cue from Singapore. A street map from 1943 in the National Archives of Singapore showed the existing names unchanged but rendered in the Japanese katakana

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script. After the Japanese Occupation, street names reverted to the names prior to it. The period after Independence in 1957 saw most street names undergoing some form of change. The earliest document on street names in the National Archives is the Public Works Department’s requisition of enamelled plates for street names from Glasgow in 1889–1890 (Isa & Kaur, 2015: 6–7). These are all streets in the town centre. Table 10.1 indicates the changes that have occurred since 1890. Each name is given language codes (E: English; M: Malay; C: Chinese; Port: Portuguese) and a name type code (ass: associative; com: commemorative; des: descriptive; dir: directional; unk: unknown). The 1890 names seem fairly evenly distributed in terms of name type: Associative names (names mentioning items associated with the street, e.g. Market Street, n=12), commemorative names (names commemorating people or events, e.g. Klyne Street, n=11) and directional names (names referring to possible destinations, e.g. Petaling Street, n=9; Petaling is a place name, and so Petaling Street is the street to travel on to get to Petaling). Descriptive names (names that describe the street, e.g. High Street, n=2) were less common. The naming appears to be largely pragmatic rather than ideological, and points towards its origin as a Chinese mining village, with an eye towards profit. Streets were named after landmarks like the market, or after where they led, for example, to the tin mines at Petaling. The commemorative names obviously came in during the British administration. Street names have a standard structure consisting of generic and specific elements. It is the language of the generic element that provides us with the base language of the street name. In the 1890 street names, all the generics were in English (street, road), with the exception of Jalan Raja with the Malay generic jalan. The specific elements demonstrate more of a linguistic mix. Where there were common nouns (e.g. church, theatre) or adjectives (e.g. high), they were generally in English. I contend that proper nouns can be associated with particular languages based on their conformity to phonological (and possibly orthographic) tendencies in particular languages. I therefore see, in the specific elements, a good representation of English (n=17) and Malay (n=13), and the occasional Chinese (n=2) Dutch (n=1) and Portuguese (n=1). English specifics are generally associative or commemorative in nature, whereas many Malay specifics are directional in nature. The local government, as an agent of LPP, clearly presented English as a language to be valued, with its high representation in the generic and specific elements in street names. The significant presence of Malay in the specific elements suggest an acknowledgement of the Malay-speaking environment around Kuala Lumpur. Come Independence in 1957, all English generics were replaced with Malay generics, jalan and lebuh. English common nouns and adjectives were simply translated into Malay (and so Church Street became Jalan Gereja). Most commemorative names were left untouched. In 1971 the Sultan of Selangor

Names as linguistic capital 173 Table 10.1 Changes in Kuala Lumpur street names since 1890 Street name in 1890

Intermediate name

Current name

Ampang Road ME, dir

Jalan Ampang MM, dir

Ampang Street ME, dir

Lebuh Ampang MM, dir

Barrack Road EE, ass

Jalan Tangsi MM, unk

Batu Road ME, dir

Jalan Batu MM, dir

Cecil Street EE, com Church Street EE, ass

Jalan Cecil ME, com

Clarke Street EE, com

Jalan Belanda 1 MM, unk Jalan Silang MM, des

Jalan MM, Jalan MM, Jalan

Jalan Tun Tijah MM, com

Jalan Masjid India MM, ass

Cross Street EE, des Damansara Road ME, dir Dickson Street EE, com Gombak Road ME, ass High Street EE, des Hill Street EE, com

Mahkamah Tinggi ass Tun Tan Siew Sin com Damansara MM, dir

Jalan Raja MM, dir Jalan Bandar MM, des

Hokien Street CE, ass Holland Road EE, com

Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman MM, com Jalan Hang Lekir MM, com Jalan Gereja MM, ass

Jalan Tun H S Lee MC, com (expunged) (expunged)

Johore Street ME, ass

Jalan Mahkamah Tinggi MM, ass (expunged)

Jalan Raja MM, dir

Jalan Raja MM, dir

Java Street MM, ass

Klyne Street DutchE, com

Jalan Belanda MM, unk

Mountbatten Road EE, com Jalan Mountbatten ME, com Jalan Klyne MDutch, com

Jalan Tun Perak MM, com

Jalan Hang Lekiu MM, com

Macao Street PortE, ass

(expunged)

Malacca Street ME, ass

Jalan Melaka MM, ass

Malay Street EE, ass

Jalan Melayu MM, ass

Market Street EE, ass

Leboh Pasar Besar MM, ass

Pahang Road ME, dir

Jalan Pahang MM, dir

Petaling Street ME, dir

Jalan Petaling MM, dir

Pudu Road ME, dir

Jalan Pudu MM, dir

Pudu Street ME, dir

Lebuh Pudu MM, dir

Rathborne Street EE, com Rodger Steet EE, com

(expunged) Jalan Rodger ME, com

Jalan Hang Kasturi MM, com (Continued )

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Table 10.1 (Cont.) Street name in 1890

Intermediate name

Current name

Station Street EE, ass

Jalan Balai Polis MM, ass

Sultan Street EE, com

Jalan Sultan MM, com

Theatre Street EE, ass

Jalan Panggung MM, ass

Weld Street EE, com

(expunged)

Yap Ah Loy Street CE, com

Jalan Yap Ah Loy MC, com

announced that all foreign names in street names would be replaced with local names. The Prime Minister echoed those views (Teh, 2019); and so Jalan Campbell (named after the British adviser to the Sultan of Johor) became Jalan Dang Wangi (named after a fifteenth-century Malay handmaiden). Names that appeared foreign such as Klyne also fell victim to this change. (Klyne was actually a member of the local Eurasian community.) As a result of these changes, English appears to have suffered total erasure (Yeh, 2013) from this set of street names. It should be added that away from the centre there are some street names with English commemorative names such as Jalan Eaton. Some new streets named after residential or commercial buildings might still have English specifics; a case in point is Jalan Capsquare, named after Capital Square, a luxury residential tower and shopping centre.

Building names We turn our attention now to current building names. There is no point making a comparison with a pre-Independence period because shared residential buildings are a relatively new phenomenon. These are generally known as condos, a shortened version of condominiums, in Malaysia. They have been developed privately and therefore fit into the bottom-up category of naming. I used the condos listed in the “Malaysia Condo Directory” in the Dot Property Malaysia website in October 2019 where there were 183 projects listed. These were all condos with names, located mainly in Kuala Lumpur, and also in various parts of the states of Selangor, Johor, and Penang. These are of course some of the most built-up areas of Malaysia. Building names, in common with street names, often contain a specific element and a generic element. Typical generic elements are residence(s), condominium, and suites; they could also be in the form of words describing the type of building (city for a large development, or tower), the shape of the building (arc or square) and the landscape (garden(s) or hills). It has recently also become popular to shun the more descriptive generic label but instead use the definite article the (perhaps in imitation of hotels like the Ritz or the Hilton).

Names as linguistic capital 175 A third possible element is a locative element included at the end; this is typically a district (e.g. Ampang or Cheras, both districts in Kuala Lumpur); the “at sign” @ is often placed before the locative element. And finally a numeric element could be included, typically at the end. The number could refer to the phase of development or the building number on the street. The only element that is obligatory is the specific element. Here are some examples of the names in the various formats: Cerrado (specific only) Parkhill Residence (specific + generic) The Establishment (generic the + specific) Impiana Hills Cheras (specific + generic + locative) Petalz Residences @ Old Klang Road (specific + generic + locative with @) 28 Dutamas (numeric + specific) I shall focus on the specific and generic elements only in my discussion, as the specific element is the obligatory element, and the generic element is typically present, found in 62.8 per cent of the names. The locative and numeric elements are less typical features, found in 28.4 per cent and 11.5 per cent of the names respectively. The specific element can, in the majority of cases, be assigned to specific languages, often derived from the lexicon and onomasticon of particular languages (e.g. Parkhill or Madge from English; Idaman from Malay), although there might be creative spelling employed (e.g. Leafz for leaves, and Skyz for skies). I have grouped words from Romance languages together as it was not always possible to determine if the word was Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese, as in the case for Arte. There are also names where the linguistic provenance is unclear or where there is some kind of linguistic mixing (e.g. Alcoris, Imperia, Impiana, Verticas). Table 10.2 summarizes the information about the specific and generic elements. The huge majority of the generic elements are in English. As I mentioned earlier in relation to street names, I consider the generic element to mark out

Table 10.2 Specific and generic elements of Malaysian building names

English Malay Romance language Indian languages Arabic Indeterminate or mixed language Total

Specific element

Generic element

85 (46.4%) 31 (16.9%) 17 (9.3%) 2 (1.1%) 1 (0.5%) 47 (25.7%) 183

112 (97.4%) 2 (1.7%) 1 (0.9%) 0 0 0 115

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the base language of the name. This immediately makes the names of residential buildings contrast with the current street names. There is more variation in the case of specific elements. The names are still most likely to be from English, but there are also a significant number of names that are from Malay and Romance languages. That fact that Malay has been employed in the context of Malaysia is not surprising as it is Malaysia’s sole official language, and perhaps what is surprising is its underrepresentation at 16.9 per cent. What is surprising is the presence of names derived from Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French). With the exception of Portuguese, these languages are not historically significant in Malaysia; Malacca was a Portuguese territory for 130 years in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Coluzzi (2017) notes the presence of Italian in the linguistic landscape of Kuala Lumpur. Romance languages have also been noted in the naming of residential buildings in Hong Kong: The use of French, Spanish and Italian (or Italian-sounding) names … does not seem at all random in the areas of greatest affluence …. These languages, being associated with some of the most powerful, Western-European nations and popular tourist destinations …, connote not only wealth but also … “high” culture, sophisticated, good taste and design, and a relaxed lifestyle. (Jaworski & Yeung, 2010: 165)

Discussion What we see in our examination of street names and building names in Malaysia is an apparent contradiction in apparent value or “symbolic dominance” of the Malay, English, and Romance languages. On the basis of the language of the generic elements of the names, Malay is clearly presented as the neutral taken-for-granted language for street names, whereas English serves this function for building names; furthermore, Romance languages have also been introduced into the linguistic landscape through building names. How can we explain such a situation? First, we have noted the contrast between top-down and bottom-up signs (Landry & Bourhis, 1997), and therefore also top-down and bottom-up names. Top-down names come from government agencies who are therefore agents of LPP in support of the government’s language policies including legal guidelines pertaining to the national language. These signal the value of the Malay language as one which unites the multi-ethnic population of Malaysia. Second, we have noted the tension in the perception of the status of Malay. The constitution assumes Malay as the language representing Malaysians. Elsewhere, others (David & Govindasamy, 2005; Lim, 2008) have noted that Malay is seen as indexing the Malay, rather than the Malaysian, community, and for that reason it is not a neutral language. Manan et al. (2015) make this

Names as linguistic capital 177 point when discussing the linguistic landscape of Kuala Lumpur. English is seen as fulfilling this function of the neutral language. Third, there is a much higher non-Malay representation in private enterprise. Ratuva (2013) notes that, despite years of preferential treatment given to Malays, “In 2009 not a single Bumiputera company was listed in the top 10 firms, although five of these were GLCs [government linked companies], three were Chinese-owned and one Indian-owned” (217). The difference can therefore be partly explained by the namers coming from different backgrounds. Fourth, the notion of the market place and commercial enterprise is more overt in the realm of building names. This is not to say that there is no element of marketisation in relation to street names. Of course the agents of LPP are trying to promote and sell an image of Malaysia unified under a common language to citizens, non-citizens, and tourists; if they do not buy into this vision, there is however no financial loss to the city council, as it were. This is different in building projects where developers need to promote their products; the name is part and parcel for what building developers are trying to sell. It becomes understandable therefore that Italian and other Romance languages that have little standing in Malaysian history have been commandeered into the vision of the product to be sold. If the middle classes are now familiar with Italian designer labels – Prada, Gucci, Versace and the like - with their connotations of status and quality, it is a small leap to imagine that employing Italian in building names can suggest status and quality as well. English too could well carry some of these connotations. Another point to note is that the buyers could also be non-Malaysians; I have noted 8.2 per cent of the population being noncitizens in the 2010 census. English is the language to address non-citizens. Romance languages (and language) seem have acquired Bourdieu’s “symbolic domination”, indexing quality, status and therefore desirability in Malaysia. Another way of explaining this is to think of these languages being fetishized. I have discussed Bourdieu’s notion of languages having symbolic domination. There is still the assumption that languages that have this symbolic domination still participate in Landry and Bourhis’s “informative function”. Is it possible for the symbolic function to completely overwhelm the informative function? I suggest it can in the context of names from Romance languages: It is sufficient for developers that potential buyers know that a name is, say, Italian, rather than for them to understand the word. This informative function being overwhelmed by the symbolic function has indeed been anticipated by Marx. He calls this fetishization and defines it as “the capacity of creating [symbolic] value – a value greater than it contains” (Marx, 1894), leading to a situation of “form without content” (Marx, 1894). In other words, “form or symbolic meaning take precedence over content or utility” (Kelly-Holmes, 2014: 139). From this point of view Italian has been employed only for its symbolic meaning. This would also account for the made-up names that might also sound vaguely Italian such as Elevia or Imperia. Fifth, the modernist assumption of a clear link between language and nation, or language and community, could well be challenged by the postmodernist

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turn in LPP scholarship and practice. Within postmodernist thought these links between language and ethnicity, territory or nationhood, are seen as exhibiting the fallacious assumption of essentialism: That a particular language is essential to one’s ethnic, territorial, or national identity. Instead, postmodernist accounts see language choices as emergent from social interaction. The British sociolinguist Maher (2005) talks about the “principle of Cool”, for instance. “Cool” is seen as postethnic: “Cool puts ‘ethnicity’ in quotation marks. Cool sees the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. Cool is the antithesis of the Whorfian doctrine. Cool actively disengages the naturalistic linkage between ethnicity and language” (91). Why must the Chinese language be associated with Chinese ethnicity? What is wrong with an ethnic Chinese person identifying with English or Italian? The state is obviously not able to dismantle constitutional and other legal statements about language and is bound to the modernist, as opposed to postmodernist, links between language and nation or community. Commercial enterprises are more open to the postmodernist zeitgeist. Does the postmodernist approach contradict the Bourdieusian perspective? I would say that the choice of which language to accord value to has been democratised, and there has been a broadening out of languages that qualify for “symbolic domination”. The examination of names in Malaysia shows us divergent naming practices within the built-up environment. I have highlighted how the symbolic capital accrued to Malay, English, or Romance languages differs depending on name category. Names are a useful phenomenon to explore in investigations about linguistic capital.

References Albury, N. J. (2018). Linguistic landscape and metalinguistic talk about societal multilingualism. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1–17. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1452894 Appadurai, A. (1986). Commodity and the politics of value. In Arjun Appadurai (Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 3–63). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power, translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Coluzzi, P. (2017). Italian in the linguistic landscape of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(2), 109–123. Comte, A. (1875–77). System of positive polity, 4 vols. London: Longmans Green & Co. Constitution of Malaysia (1957). Retrieved 17 December 2019 from http://www.comm onlii.org/my/legis/const/1957/12.html. David, M. Khemlani, & S. Govindasamy (2005). Negotiating a language policy for Malaysia: Local demand for affirmative action versus challenges from globalization. In A. S Canagarajah (Ed.), Reclaiming the local in language policy and practice (pp. 123–146). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). Department of Statistics, Malaysia (2011). Population distribution and basic demographic characteristics report 2010 (updated 8 May 2011). Retrieved 17 December 2019 from www.dosm.gov.my.

Names as linguistic capital 179 Dot Property Malaysia (n.d.). Malaysia condo directory. Retrieved 17 October 2019 from https://www.dotproperty.com.my/condos/all. Eckert, P., & E. Wenger (2005). Communities of practice in sociolinguistics: What is the role of power in sociolinguistic variation?, Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(4), 582–589. Gullick, J. M. (1983). The story of Kuala Lumpur (1857–1939). Petaling Jaya: Eastern Universities Press. Haarmann, H. (1990). Language planning in the light of a general theory of language: A methodological framework. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 86, 103–126. Hornberger, N. (2006). Frameworks and models in language policy and planning research. In Thomas Ricento (Ed.), An introduction to language policy: Theory and method (pp. 24–41). Oxford: Blackwell. Isa, M., & M. Kaur (2015). Kuala Lumpur street names. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. Ismail, A. R. H. (2004). Bumiputera (Bumiputra). In K. G.Ooi (Ed.), Southeast Asia: A historical encyclopedia, from Angkor Wat to East Timor (p. 287). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio. Jawatankuasa Kebangsaan Nama Geografi [National Committee on Geographical Names] (2005). Garis panduan penentuan nama geografi [Guidelines for determining geographical names]. Malaysia: Jabatan Ukur dan Pemetaan Malaysia [Department of Survey and Mapping, Malaysia]. Jaworski, A., & C. Thurlow (2010). Introducing semiotic landscapes. In A. Jaworski & C. Thurlow (Eds.), Semiotic landscapes: Text, space, globalization (pp. 1–40). London: Continuum. Jaworski, A., & S. Yeung (2010). Life in the Garden of Eden: The naming and imagery of residential Hong Kong. In E. Shohamy, E. Ben-Rafael, & M. Barni (Eds.), Linguistic landscape in the city (pp. 153–181). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kelly-Holmes, H. (2014). Linguistic fetish: The sociolinguistics of visual multilingualism. In David Machin (Ed.), Visual communication (pp. 135–151). Berlin: De Gruyter. Landry, R., & R. Y. Bourhis (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality an empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(1), 23–49. Lee, S. K., K. S. Lee, F. F. Wong, & A. Ya’acob (2010). The English language and its impact on identities of multilingual Malaysian undergraduates. GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies, 10(1), 87–101. Lim, C. C. (2008). Language choices of Malaysian youths: A case study. Unpublished Masters of Linguistics dissertation, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Maher, J. C. (2005). Metroethnicity, language, and the principle of Cool. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2005(175–176), 83–102. Manan, S. A., M. K. David, F. P. Dumanig, & K. Naqeebullah (2015). Politics, economics and identity: Mapping the linguistic landscape of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. International Journal of Multilingualism, 12(1), 31–50. Marx, K. (1894). Capital volume III: The process of capitalist production as a whole (ch 24). Retrieved 30 December 2019 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1894-c3/ch27.htm. McCarty, T. L. (2013). Language planning and policy in Native America: History, theory, praxis. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Omar, A. H. (2012). Pragmatics of maintaining English in Malaysia’s education system. In Ee Ling Low & Azirah Hashim (Eds.), English in Southeast Asia: Features, policy and language in use (pp. 155–174). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Parliamentary Debates (1965). Dewan Ra’ayat (House of Representatives) official report (13 November 1965). Second session of the Second Parliament of Malaysia, vol. II, session 1965–1966 (cols 2467–2476). Kuala Lumpur: GPO. Puzey, G., & L. Kostanski (2016). Trends in onomastics: An introduction. In G. Puzey & L. Kostanski (Eds.), Names and naming: People, places, perceptions and power (pp. xiii–xxiv). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Rassool, N. (2007). Global issues in language, education and development: Perspectives from postcolonial countries. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ratuva, S. (2013). Politics of preferential development: Trans-global study of affirmative action and ethnic conflict in Fiji, Malaysia and South Africa. Canberra: ANU E Press. Scollon, R., & S. W. Scollon (2003). Discourses in place: Language in the material world. London: Routledge. Siddique, S., & L. Suryadinata (1981–82). Bumiputra and pribumi: Economic nationalism (indiginism) in Malaysia and Indonesia. Pacific Affairs, 54(4Winter): 662–687. Simpson, W., & J. P. O’Regan (2018). Fetishism and the language commodity: A materialist critique. Language Sciences, 70, 155–166. Tan, P. K. W. (2011). Subversive engineering: Building names in Singapore. In Standley D. Brunn (Ed.), Engineering earth: The impacts of megaengineering projects (pp. 1997–2011). Dordrecht: Springer). Tan, P. K. W. (2019). Challenges to nationalism in language planning: Street names in Malaysia. In Gregory Paul Glasgow & Jeremie Bouchard (Eds.), Researching agency in language policy and planning (pp. 61–83). New York: Routledge. Teh, A. L. S. (2019). How KL’s streets got their names. New Straits Times, 21 October 2019. Retrieved 20 December 2019 from https://www.nst.com.my/news/nation. Yeh, T-T. (2013). “Erased place names” and nation-building: A case study of Singaporean toponyms. Asia-Pacific Research Forum, 59, 119–156.

11 Ideologies of French and commodification What does meaning making imply for multilinguals in transnational times? Sylvie Roy and Julie S. Byrd Clark Introduction Canada has two Official languages, French and English. These languages were chosen because of the first two European groups that came to Canada and settled on the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit land and territories.1 These two European groups established themselves and lived together for centuries. Nevertheless, there has been a longstanding relationship of inequality existing between them in terms of who would make the decisions concerning which languages would dominate the political and economic spheres and who had the right to educate their children in the languages of their choice. It was in the 1960s that the Prime Minister at the time, Lester B. Pearson, recommended a study called the “Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963)” in order to look into bilingualism in Canada. The Commission was a response to French Canadians in Québec (a majority French-speaking province situated in Eastern Canada) who were asking for the protection of their language and culture, and, in addition, to participate fully in political and economic decisions of the country. One result from the Commission was the Official Languages Act (1969; 1988), which mandated that English and French would be the Official languages of the country. The Commission proposed a partnership model that gave equal and balanced participation of Francophones2 and Anglophones at the upper echelons of bureaucracy at the federal level, ensuring that both groups could work in their own language (Turgeon & Gagnon, 2015). In addition, the government of Canada (federal government) would support the use and learning of English and French for groups in all provinces where numbers were sufficient to provide education in the respective languages. The Official Languages Act is key in promoting the learning of French for Francophones outside Québec, and English for Anglophones in Québec. Language policies in Canada related to English and French allow Francophones and Anglophones to have linguistic rights where they reside and opportunities for Francophone children to attend French (considered French as first language) language schools in provinces where English is dominant. In addition to the official bilingualism policy there were also debates on multiculturalism within a bilingual framework which would allow ethnocultural pluralism to exist in Canada, and some

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believed that it allowed social integration for all Canadians while others thought that it was used to make ethnic groups adhere to the bilingual goals (of French and English) (see Haque, 2012, for a detailed discussion). These are the language policies in Canada that support Francophones and Anglophones and allow groups who speak other languages to be free to use their languages in their communities (but there is no financial support for them at the federal level). Around the same time as the official bilingualism policy was put in place, several studies were done at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, which indicated that learning a second language would confer some cognitive advantages to monolingual children (Lambert & Tucker, 1972; Genesee, 1987). During this era of changes, some English-speaking parents in St.-Lambert, Québec in an Englishspeaking School Board were concerned that French as a second language classes – with usually 30–40 minutes of instruction in French per day – were not providing adequate hours of French for their children to become bilingual (English–French). Therefore, they proposed a French immersion program to the English School Board which became successful all over the country (Gibson & Roy, 2015). According to Genesee (1987), one of the goals of French immersion was to improve relations between French Québecers and English speakers, to help break down the “two solitudes.” French immersion was initially proposed, then grew very fast, and became a worldwide example for countries around the world (Smala, Bergas & Lingard, 2013; Tedick, Christian & Williams Fortune, 2011; De Courcy, 2005). Even with the promotion of Official languages in the country, in addition to the language policy at the Federal level, the use and learning of French as a second language in Canada has always been seen as an ideological endeavor. Francophones, especially from Québec, often try to keep their language as a representation of their community, as their language is their culture, and they try to maintain control over how French is used and is being spoken (Roy, 2020). Although Anglophones may wish to learn French (Roy, 2010), they have encountered difficulties in accessing the ethno-linguistic community of French speakers and in being seen as legitimate speakers of French. In more recent years, adding to the mix are multilinguals who wish to learn French and English while keeping their other languages. English is easier to access but they have difficulties accessing French as a second language programs as they are often told to learn English first; this is especially true of new immigrants in Ontario (Arnett & Mady, 2013). A multilingual, for our purposes, is someone who can use two or more languages separately or together for particular purposes with different individuals at varying degrees, in certain contexts (Byrd Clark & Roy, 2017; Roy & Byrd Clark, 2018). Furthermore, we understand multilingualism as having complex specific semiotic resources. These resources comprise concrete accents, language varieties, registers, genres, and modalities (Blommaert, 2010). Such a conceptualization reflects the evolving and dynamic relationship between languages as well as the ways in which people use and negotiate identities and meanings through language. Languages, in this sense, are always mixed, hybrid, and drawing on multiple resources (Byrd Clark, 2012; Pennycook, 2010).

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In this chapter, we present how languages are seen and learned and how multilinguals understand and make meaning of their multilingual position vis-à-vis the official bilingualism discourse, especially French, in addition to their linguistic repertoires. We also discuss which language has more value than others, which ones are seen as a commodity, and which ones are more symbolic and represent a cultural capital to acquire in order to be Canadian. Therefore, we pose the following questions: How do multilinguals make meaning of their linguistic repertoires in their day-to-day lives, and what is the place of French in that meaning making? Which languages are more valued and why in transnational times? In the following, we present the context of both provinces, and in addition our theoretical framing to explain why and how we are interpreting our data in a certain way to explain the meaning making of multilingual linguistic repertoires and the place of French (and other languages) in the participants’ lives. After the methodology, we explain concepts such as commodification of languages and linguistic capital and show why and how they are still present in discourses but require further reflection and consideration for policy makers in Canada.

Context Learning French in Canada for most students consists of attending a French as a second language class, taught as a subject for 30–40 minutes per day in English-speaking schools. There are also French immersion programs that consist of learning French in a content-based program through subjects such as French Language Arts, mathematics, social studies, and sciences. French immersion programs could be located in the same school as an English program (dualstream schools). Francophone schools (Écoles de langue française) are schools that serve Francophone populations in all provinces. These schools are for children of parents that speak French as a first language or for those who are eligible under the Official Languages Act definitions. Alberta and Ontario, the two provinces that we will talk about in this chapter, are officially English-speaking provinces. Many parents in Alberta, a Western province, were excited about the opportunities from French immersion schools and several of them worked hard to establish the program in the province in the 1970s. The Canadian Parents for French association contributed to successfully implementing the programs in all provinces (Gibson & Roy, 2015). Before that, French was allowed in the school system only for a few hours per day (Hayday, 2005). Francophones in the province benefited then from French immersion, especially in rural settings. Parents would send their children to French immersion because they did not have French schools as directed by the Official Languages Act. The government in Alberta was and still is reticent to allocate special attention to French because of political tension, and the fact that they have strong ethno-linguistic communities other than French in the province. In addition, at the beginning of the 2000s, Spanish gained a lot of momentum in the province, which impacted how the population viewed French

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and the reasons why students are learning Spanish instead of French. Several bilingual Spanish schools opened their doors and offered an alternative to parents who did not want to send their children to French. Alberta is the only province that offers alternative bilingual programs in languages other than French such as Spanish, German, and Mandarin. In Ontario, French immersion is also offered in parallel with Francophone (French as a First Language) schools. Being in Eastern Canada, close to Québec and the seat of the federal government, Ontario has had more success with French programming than Alberta. In addition, the number of students learning French is higher in Ontario. It is mandatory for all students in grades 4–9 to study French, and they are required to pass their grade 9 French class for their high school diploma. In sum, there are various programs for French offered across the country, starting at different grade levels, such as Early immersion, Middle Immersion, and Late Immersion (Rebuffot & Lyster, 1996), in addition to Francophone schools, usually called Écoles de langue française. Immersion programs (with different languages) have also been implemented and successfully reviewed in other countries based on the models originated in Canadian schools (Kristmanson & Dicks, 2014).

Theoretical framing and methodology Our theoretical framing is based on transcultural flows “where cultural forms move, change and are reused to fashion new identities in diverse contexts” and where the linguistic and cultural flows are reorganized locally (Pennycook, 2007: 6), and transdisciplinary approaches (Byrd Clark, 2016; Douglas Fir Group, 2016), that represent the social variation and in-between-ness and/or the crossing between disciplines, literacies, modalities, languages, codes, contexts, learning environments, and social backgrounds. In order to provide a richer and more detailed account of what languages mean for our participants, we felt it was critical to draw upon ethnographic techniques (Blommaert, 2010; Verschueren, 2012; Byrd Clark, 2008, 2009) for our methodology. Our data collection consists of interviews, virtual online discussions, classroom observations, and documentation from different sources. Interviews are particularly important in capturing our participants’ life trajectories and social positioning in addition to glimpsing their beliefs, values, and ideologies, which help us to understand what they do and for what reasons. Classroom observations are at the heart of ethnography, where we can observe how our participants use the language and what they say about their language practices. For this chapter, we have selected some of the samples from our work with student teachers, administrators, students, and teachers in Calgary, Alberta, and London, Ontario. In combining our research studies, we have over 100 participants but have chosen nine participants’ discursive samples which best represent the majority of participants, and which capture some of the complexities of being “multilingual” and learning languages in Canada. Finally, for our data analysis, we used an interpretivist approach (does not accept “reality”

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at face value; acknowledges the subjective nature of interpretation). As reflexive researchers, we acknowledge our different ways of interpreting as well as how our interpretations are based upon our experiences (Byrd Clark & Roy, forthcoming; Byrd Clark, 2020). That said, we had many conversations about our ways of interpreting the data. At the same time, each presented different dimensions or angles to consider which, in the end, not only reflected an essentialist, more fixed ideological language-as-a-commodity discourse, but more importantly a polyphonic, multilingual analysis of the data providing a more indepth and transdisciplinary account. Interviews were recorded and transcribed to highlight themes and important passages, which link with the research question of how multilinguals make sense of their linguistic repertoires in addition to French in their lives and which languages are more valued and why. Our data was then coded according to recurring themes and discursive patterns.

Linguistic capital, commodification, and ideologies Linguistic capital refers to the way that language skills are seen as valuable and productive, worthy of learning and teaching, and how people could use those skills to access jobs or other resources where languages are needed. Looking at languages as a product (Heller, 2011), and as a linguistic capital to be acquired, means that language can be a measurable asset which provides return on investment. Commodification of languages means then that languages and language varieties are seen as other tradeable commodities, which have “an economic exchange value” (Cameron, 2012, p. 352) in the linguistic market. There are several works on commodification of French in Canada (Budach, Roy & Heller, 2003; Heller, 2011). Heller explains how Francophone communities in Ontario redefined themselves in the global economy. Her studies brought her and various team members to different sites where Francophones found ways to attract new markets by selling products and artifacts of the “real” Francophone culture and identity in tourism industry (Moïse, McLaughin, Roy & White, 2006) or by entering the “language industry” such as call centers (Roy, 2003) and translation where language skills are a commodity, especially in urban settings where bilingualism is higher. Another example from Montréal, situated in a majority Francophone province, demonstrates that Francophones gain from using English but Anglophones do not have any advantage as such for using French. Speakers of other languages also profited by using one of the Official languages but English was more useful for the labor market compared with French (Grenier & Nadeau, 2016). The commodification of French, i.e. using French as an asset, is not indispensable because, as Heller (2011) states: Commodification disconnects language from identity and therefore destabilizes the logic of ethno-nationalist politics, which require them to be intertwined. At the same time, the value of commodified resources depends on the legitimacy of the nation whose authenticity those resources represent. (p. 150)

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Linguistic capital could then be nothing but a mirage of added-value and constitute a symbolic capital for those who are trying to access resources and power, yet ultimately are unable to access them because the “rules” change, and their linguistic capital will only allow them to access some markets and not others. For Holborow (2018, p. 522), social barriers and discrimination, in addition to recession, altered this idea of using language skills as an asset to access employability and put the neoliberalism ideology in question (which is also the case for our participants, as demonstrated later). Looking at language policies related to French, or more precisely at bilingualism (acquisition of French and English in Canada), connects bilingualism to the global economy, but language as a resource will often benefit the majority speakers (in our case, Anglophones benefit from learning French or Spanish in Alberta, as we see later) compared with the minority speakers of a language, and allow racial inequalities to persist (Flores, 2017). For the purpose of our discussion in this chapter, we consider that French and bilingualism in Canada have shifted from a language of identity to an opportunity to acquire resources for Anglophones and multilinguals. However, as we can see in the next section, ideologies related to French which indicate that French belongs to a specific group (depending on which group we are talking about) restrains “others” from acquiring the resources in the neoliberal context. Allophones3 (as the homogeneous category has been commonly used) complicate the issue and problematize the argument of language as a commodity because they use their languages in different ways. It is not only English for this and French for that, but many other linguistic repertoires for different situations. Language is central to economic activities, as shown by different examples in Heller (2011). Bilingualism might represent added value and possibly a few dollars more for some work. However, language is then seen as a technical skill that needs to be mastered and measured. Language is more than a skill or a talent, it is a terrain of social difference and inequality where individuals and groups compete for jobs and markets. If language is a form of capital such that different linguistic repertoires are valued (Bourdieu, 1982), there will be struggles over who controls the production and distribution of resources, who controls their value, and how relations of power are established. This is where the critique of French immersion bilingualism (or mostly French) is strongest. It is the Francophone communities that define who is allowed to speak or use French in a certain way. This means that those learning French are expected to speak it well, without mistakes or obtaining an accent, and as close as possible to that of the native speakers’ competency (Roy, 2020). There is also the symbolic value of language that Bourdieu (1977) called “distinction,” which allows one to have prestige and status over others. For example, Appelt (2017) discovered that the parents in Alberta would send their children to Spanish school for different reasons; one of them was to be different from others who chose to send their children to French immersion.

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Language then is central to the process of categorization. Without the “right” linguistic capital, one does not gain access to the spaces where resources are produced and shared. Acquiring the right (“legitimate,” in Bourdieu’s terms) kind of linguistic capital is hard on two counts: first you have to work your way into the spaces where that socialization can happen, and second you have to let yourself, and be allowed to, be re-socialized in ways that allow for demonstrations of profound mastery. This is risky: you may never be accepted as a legitimate speaker, those who control the linguistic resource can always change the rules again, and those you leave behind may punish you for betraying them. (Heller, 2011, p. 38) This is where language ideologies play a role. What we believe and what we think is legitimate are based on our assumptions that “this is the way it should be.” If we believe that French should be used in a certain way (and someone will always let you know which way is the best), we create inequality regarding something that does not exist but is invented by some social actors who have more power. Language ideologies are the hegemonic ways in which we see languages, their use, and as Verschueren (2012) mentioned, any basic pattern of meaning of frame of interpretation bearing on or involved in (an) aspect(s) of social “reality” (in particular in the realm of social relations in the public sphere), felt to be commonsensical, and often functioning in a normative way. (p. 10) Language ideologies also represent: Another, related way to impose national identities is through educational policies that decide which languages are to be employed – and thus legitimized – in the public school system. Recent research has clearly documented the interpenetration of the ideological with the local, in institutional, nationalist, and political dimensions. When a language is symbolically linked to national identity, the bureaucratic nation-state faced with a multilingual population may exhibit “monolingualising tendencies.” (Blackledge, 2008, p. 32) In Canada, language ideologies are reflected in ideas such as: “English should be learned first,” “French belongs to Francophones,” and “multilinguals should learn French and English to be considered ‘Canadians’ while keeping their first language as an identity component and to connect with their families” (Roy, 2020). These are the links between commodification of language, linguistic

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capital, distinction, and ideologies. When French immersion students wish to learn French and attend French immersion, they believe that they are acquiring a certain form of distinction and linguistic capital. However, and even if French could become a commodity to be “sold,” they would not have the cultural aspects of the language which, for Francophones, is crucial when learning French. Those ideologies of being able to learn French and knowing the culture are still very strong. If a person plans to use their French to access a job, there will be someone to evaluate their French and decide that it is not good enough because they should speak French with a high competency like native speakers do (and decide) – as we will see in the data presented later. Multilinguals are caught in between those ideological discourses as we can see in the next section where we present some of the discourses from our participants in order to answer our questions: How do multilinguals make meaning of their linguistic repertoires (French in particular) and what are the values of languages in transnational times? In the following, we present data from different students in French immersion schools in Alberta who are learning French and English, while having a language at home, and the reasons why they are learning French.

Official languages and becoming Canadian Like many children of immigrants, Colin,4 a Chinese student in an Alberta secondary school, wishes to learn French and English because they are Canada’s Official languages. He calls himself bilingual rather than multilingual because, although he understands Chinese, he cannot speak it. He used to go to Chinese Saturday school when he was young. In the next excerpt, he explains why he wants to learn languages and become bilingual (Chinese student, secondary French immersion school, interview, 2008, Alberta): Why did you choose to come to French immersion? Actually it had a lot to do with my job because I could make a lot more money, I think, if I’m bilingual, with a job. And I’m also planning to move to Montréal because my dad lived there for 20 years. So I’d kind of want to experience it too because it seems like a cool place. Yes, that’s about it. And also because they’re the two Official languages of Canada and it would be kind of cool to be bilingual. AUTHOR 1: Do you speak another language already? COLIN: I used to speak Chinese but when I started learning French, I started losing my Chinese. Right now I can understand but I can’t speak. SYLVIE: COLIN:

Colin wants to be bilingual for job opportunities, which for him represent a linguistic capital to be acquired for his future, and he considers his bilingualism as a commodity because he could make more money knowing both languages. His bilingualism would be important if he moves to Montréal, Québec, but not as much in Alberta where he resides, which demonstrates that the value of his

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bilingualism would be in a context where he could use it. Several parents in Alberta mentioned that learning French is more beneficial for brain development and cognitive achievement than for employment. It is a linguistic and symbolic capital but it is rarely used in Alberta to promote access to jobs. Several multilinguals perceive that they are losing something when they add to their linguistic repertoires instead of gaining additional knowledge and capital for their future. Colin uses his Chinese at home, but bilingualism seems to be the best way to go to obtain resources. The Official languages discourse is strong. If one is bilingual, it will be easier to find a job, especially in Eastern Canada (Ontario but not Alberta). A mother of a grade 5 student interviewed a few years later (2012) in French immersion in Alberta mentioned the same ideas. They speak Farsi at home but English and French would be beneficial for her if they move back to Ontario to work for the Federal government. Her son, Adam, has the same discourse regarding the Official languages and the need to learn them both (Elementary French immersion student who speaks Farsi, English, and French, interview, 2012, Alberta): If you had to choose, would you go to English? If your parents said tomorrow, okay, next year you can go to school in English. ADAM: No, I’ll choose French again because I want um to speak more French and like boost it up a, a little. SYLVIE: Okay, and how do you think you can do that? ADAM: Um, um p—in the I, practice uh writing in French and reading in French, all that. SYLVIE: So you want to boost it up, you want to improve it. How can you improve a language? ADAM: Just speak uh you have to like speak the language more. SYLVIE:

Adam wants to continue to learn French even if he has the opportunity to go to an English-speaking only school. At one point during his interview, he did mention that he needs to learn both Official languages for jobs in the future. However, he prefers English and he is using it all the time at the school. We observed him several times and we can confirm that English was his preferred language with which he is more at ease. He also says later on that Farsi is the language of home for him and French is just another language. The “boost it up” notion in this excerpt brings us to the ideologies related to French: In order to be able to be called bilingual in Canada and to access jobs opportunities, one has to “master” the language in addition to learning the culture of the language. Even if students would like to learn French and English for additional skills and access job opportunities, their French is often not considered good enough (Roy, 2020). This example demonstrates that multilinguals who are learning French do it for a linguistic capital for their future. However, when it is time to use their language skills for jobs, they encounter some hurdles, especially French immersion students who are often told that their French is not good enough. In the next section, we look at a future teacher in Alberta. She learned

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French to become a teacher but she knows that her French might never be up to the standard that Francophones expect, which comes from a long time ago when Francophones had to fight for their language and culture. As for her partner who speaks Spanish, learning English has a different feel from learning French.

Languages as a commodity In Alberta, English and Spanish are commodities as they, in different ways, are used to access job markets. French is also a commodity when a speaker becomes a teacher. But there are always some parameters of what is needed and accepted for those languages. In the next excerpt, a student teacher, Rita, from Calgary, who is learning French, demonstrates the difference between learning French for herself and learning English for her Spanish partner. In this excerpt, we wish to demonstrate that the Spanish boyfriend learned English when he came to Canada in order to continue to work in his field. His level of English is not high compared with what Rita needs to acquire when learning French in order to become a French teacher (interview, student teacher in Alberta, 2019). R:

Most people in Alberta will not get enough practice to reach that level, and French culture has a bit of a stereotype and reputation of not being welcoming to non-native speakers. To a certain extent, that is a stereotype, and I do not always encounter that, but there is some degree of truth to that. I do think that other linguistic communities are easier to integrate into. I do consider myself bilingual. I know I do have to fight other people’s opinions in order to consider myself … I consider myself bilingual, but I am not exactly happy with the level of my language. I do not think you have to be perfectly bilingual to get there. My partner is not a native English speaker. He is the model for what people need to do to learn. He got here four years ago, and Spanish is his native language. He comes from a tech background and had read in English because everything always comes out in English first in the tech world, but he had never spoken in English. […] My grammar in French is way better than his English, but I do not feel he is a second language speaker, because there has never been an understanding barrier. And I think of all the times I was fixated on my grammar in French, I could have been correcting all day. But it is not a barrier. I would consider him bilingual, and some ways he is less bilingual than I am. But, French is a bit unique, that is you want to consider yourself bilingual, you know deep down that there are a lot of French speakers who would disagree and actually tell you that […] not think it is a matter of individual people, it is a matter of language culture and language attitudes that go back hundreds of years. Now that I have the historical background, I now know where it comes from and makes it less inclined to take it personally, but more inclined to expect it. Things that have been part of my culture for 100–200 years are pretty ingrained in me.

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This excerpt from a future teacher demonstrates how French still comprises many ideas that are difficult to change. The Official Discourses, the fact that French “belongs” to a specific linguistic community, make it difficult for learners of French to acquire some linguistic capital for the future. Rita does use French as a commodity because she will become a French teacher and will be paid for it but her French might be good enough only for French immersion, not for Francophone schools. Unless you are highly competent in French, like Rita, who tries to practice the most she can, linguistic capital in French can be difficult to attain. Fortunately for Rita, she understands how ideologies are connected to French, and have been for generations, and how she should navigate her language learning to become the best teacher possible. However, with the sentence “He is the model for what people need to do to learn” for her boyfriend who is a Spanish speaker learning English, she shows how one should be able to learn English and use it to access resources and job opportunities, but there is always a cost to pay if English is not learned without an accent. Even when someone is bilingual and multilingual, English seems to be the language to learn first because it is the language of the family and learning it early will allow no accent. As this Chinese student mentioned during her interview, her parents had issues in finding a job when they moved to Alberta, and your friends who have accents in English might also have some issues (interview, French as a second language, Alberta, 2016): So, we were like there till I was four and a half before we moved here so I don’t remember much about that period after we moved here, I think we lived in downtown for about a year in an apartment complex because my parents are both engineers so the problem with immigration occurs like if their English isn’t good enough then obvious their skills aren’t necessarily accounted for. So, they had a bit difficulty finding jobs at first, so yeah, that was we lived in downtown for about a year. But eventually, they did, you know learn English and they got jobs that were sort of in their profession […] But for myself, it was always, like I know Chinese and we live in Canada so knowing French and English is obviously a benefit and I don’t know, I just want to like learn French […] SYLVIE: Is that a problem to have a Chinese accent in English? ALICIA: I don’t know if it’s really a problem, I think it’s just an indicator that you don’t pick up the language as quickly because I feel like when you pick it up when you’re younger, you don’t have as much of an accent when you speak it, so yeah. SYLVIE: What do you think there’s a, there would be a difference when they try to find a job? ALICIA: With an accent? SYLVIE: The same person with the same kind of background but one learns English later, you learn when you were young? ALICIA: Yeah, honestly, I feel like that could. ALICIA:

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Spanish in Alberta has received a lot of attention in the past 20 years. It is a plus, valued by Anglophones who wish to learn a language for job opportunities in oil and gas. Spanish has more value than French for the following reasons: Albertans prefer the Spanish 50–50 bilingual program to make sure that their children learn English too and they want their children to have English without an accent. Anglophones who put their children in Spanish bilingual schools are afraid that in French immersion they will not learn English. Another reason is that they prefer Spanish to French because of the ideologies and strong stigma related to some varieties of French. In the following, a principal in a French immersion school, Heather, mentioned how her family chose Spanish instead of French (interview, principal, 2013, Alberta): So, you have two children. Did you put them in French immersion? I did not. I really wanted to put my son in French immersion in kindergarten. I thought it would really suit him well, and my husband disagreed, and now looking back at it, he’s not even sure why he disagreed. It was something about it at the time. He didn’t feel it would be a good fit for our son or he felt that it would be stressful for him, and in fact, our son has always hated school, so it’s hard to know, would it have been some added stress or an added bonus, but anyways … . SYLVIE: Your husband doesn’t speak any other languages? HEATHER: No, he doesn’t, but he’s actually from New Brunswick [a province in the Canadian Maritimes] and grew up playing with Francophones who spoke French, and he spoke a little bit of French with those students, and when he took French formally in classes, those teachers were very critical and demeaning of the French that the New Brunswick Francophones were speaking, so if you asked them what does this mean, like for example mothers saying to their kids “pêche-toi, pêche-toi” [rather than “dépêchetoi” = hurry up], what does this mean? And the teachers would say: “that is not French, that is something else, that is not French.” SYLVIE: That’s why he didn’t want to … [unintelligible]. HEATHER: He found that irritating that the teachers were saying that the language that was spoken in his neighborhood was not a language. SYLVIE:

HEATHER:

This parent, and principal of a French immersion school, decided to put her children in Spanish instead of French because French has too much ideological baggage, as one of the Alberta participants who put her children in Spanish said “any language, except French” in addition to a principal in a Spanish bilingual school in Alberta interviewed in 2017 (Richard, principal, interview 2017, Alberta): R:

I think there’s a bit of that Western alienation piece, and part of the entrepreneurial piece of the history of the province of Alberta, and the development of oil, has been exploration in countries, um, like Venezuela, for example, or, or Texas, the southern United States and where Spanish is deemed to be the language of business … more so than French.

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Spanish is a language that has value in the marketplace, especially in countries that sell oil and gas and have connections with Alberta. Parents will put their children in Spanish bilingual schools instead of French for that reason but also for historical reasons, as we mentioned earlier where Alberta is always reluctant to give special attention to French (Hayday, 2015). He added later on: R:

I think for me growing up in Alberta, there was an element of negativity toward French? They’re forcing French on us, and, it wasn’t that my parents were that way, but it was just present in the, in the society.

This principal was there in the 1970s when French immersion programs became prominent in Canada and in Alberta. These last two discourses provide examples of how the idea of choosing languages other than French in Alberta is related to the historical relationship of people in Alberta with French. In addition, they are also doing some business with the South. Spanish then is a more valuable skill to acquire for these parents, who send their children to Spanish schools even if their children do not actually learn the language at a high enough competency to allow them to access these jobs. According to Appelt (2017), Spanish is more a language of “distinction” for parents because they don’t want to learn French as everyone is doing it. We have to note that native speakers of Spanish are not welcome in those schools because their level of Spanish is too high. Spanish as a commodity is only for English speakers (Anglophones), which introduces the notion of discrimination, as noted earlier (Holborow, 2018).

Languages as identities While French still has many challenges from an ideological view, and Spanish is gaining momentum in bilingual schools, other multilinguals will say that they want to be bilingual with French and English, but will also use their other language to communicate with their friends and family (interview with a student teacher, 2014, Ontario). So, why did you want to learn French? What got you interested? You know I wanted to study French because it was so cool, so sophisticated, you know? All the fashion, great food, and style … And like, I wanted to be Canadian because that’s what, how people see us, as a bilingual country. It was very important for me and my family to be real Canadians, my parents came at a time when they were looked down upon for not speaking proper English, so I’m grateful for growing up here, and also to have the opportunity to learn French. And I want people to see me as a bilingual Canadian.

JULIE:

ROSALINA:

French for Rosalina is something special; distinctive, in addition to being a linguistic capital that will allow her to become part of the Canadian “imagined”

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bilingual community, because for her being a “real” Canadian represents being bilingual French–English. French/English bilingualism also allows the student to imagine having an equal footing with other Canadians, and the right to take some ownership of being able to claim a Canadian identity. Like French, English also has to be spoken with no accent or in a “proper” way, as we saw with Alicia. This discursive sample unveils the notion that linguistic capital will be important as long as the speakers use the proper language and English or French will be a commodity only if the variety that the speakers use is what the market demands. The example from Rosa allows us to demonstrate that becoming a teacher will be possible as long as she continues to practice her French. Having a French immersion accent in French might not be as valuable for the Québec market which really wants and requires people to speak like “them.” Rosa can work in French immersion schools in Alberta but would probably not be hired in Québec with her English accent.

Complex positionings of multilinguals Multilinguals, as mentioned earlier, problematize some of the official bilingualism discourse and cause some contradictions to commodification processes of language learning (by that, we mean interrupt for whom the classes were originally intended and for which purposes), particularly with some of their complex positionings. Multilinguals are still lower numbered in French immersion schools and French as a second language classes in Canada but more and more are becoming the next generation of teachers. These excerpts come from the Ontario French language teacher education program (interview, 2014, Ontario). In my French immersion program, like the entire program, Grade 9–12, I was the only Asian in the program. The other kids called me “Monsieur Chang or Monsieur Wang” … they were playful but it was offensive. Even in my Master’s classes, you know you walk in, and I guess I’ve gotten used to that, but you know they say, “Oh, you speak French?” So being Asian and pursuing French is kind of not the norm here. CHRISTOPHER: Well … I’m not sure how I identify these days. I’m British, originally from the UK, ah, I taught in La Réunion and in France for the past four years, and met my wife who is from Montréal … and now live in Ontario, Canada … most of the time, people think I’m from France, they don’t know that I’m British, until I switch to English. And it’s quite funny to see their reactions … I think it’s safer actually if they think I’m French! [laughs]. BRAD:

These two examples represent the future of multilinguals learning French, having English, and having other languages at home. They demonstrate some of the complex identities and positionings of student teachers in French as well as how social difference is constructed (they don’t look or sound French, nor English). Both samples challenge traditional boundaries of who or what gets recognized as an authentic, legitimate speaker of French, though at varied

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degrees. At the same time, we can see some of the messages (and discourses) and ways that others have positioned both Brad and Christopher. Brad is of Korean origin, so being called Monsieur Wang/Chang is not only offensive for being stigmatized or represented as being the only Asian in class, but also for being positioned as Chinese rather than Korean (as if they are the same). Christopher seems to experience more ease with his complex positionings, however, he jokes at the end when saying that “it’s safer if they think I’m French!” and goes on to recount how people threw garbage at him and his wife while driving in Montréal, Québec with Ontario license plates (with the paradox being that his wife is from Montréal). So being seen as French is perhaps cool in Ontario for Christopher, but perhaps takes on a different value in Québec, when driving with Ontario license plates.

Discussion and implications for language policy As our excerpts show, English is a definite commodity for all of our participants, especially if one starts to learn the language early and has no accent. Spanish in Alberta might replace French as a commodity because of the markets available in South America for Albertans. French in both provinces is considered as a commodity only for those who have been able to master the idealized variety of the language that is needed in specific markets like being a French teacher (see examples from both provinces). Even then, the commodification of French changes depending on the context and who does or does not accept the variety of French at hand. In the end, French for multilinguals holds value not only as a commodity, an imagined linguistic capital, but also as a resource that could possibly allow them to re-invest in their home language(s)/identities. By learning French and attending French immersion programs, or learning French as a second language, they reflect on their other languages and who they are as multilinguals. With the continued marketization of education and rise and value of the scientific method (positivism and post-positivism) when it comes to learning and teaching languages, it is imperative to understand what language commodification means, and why it is significant, but more importantly why we need to gain a critical awareness of it, as we go forward with policies on Canadian bilingualism, in this case. Commodification of languages and identities opens up both possibilities and constraints for different social actors – at a time when languages and language learning are geared solely to the purpose of “getting a job” or possessing a promising investment, product, or linguistic capital for upward social mobility, and in many spaces are no longer being taught or learned to develop critical intercultural awareness, empathy (e.g. what it means to be/become something “other,” or live in someone else’s shoes), or communicating in alternative ways. But the problem, which our data illuminates here, is this: If we continue to look at languages and identities as sheer commodities, then we limit ourselves to seeing people and languages in narrowly defined fixed, essentialist, static social categories with enumerated unidimensional ways of being, doing, and thinking. In other words, we continue to perpetuate these

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static, imagined, socially constructed nationalist identities and idealized native speaker proficiency and competence. Multilinguals, in this sense, are investing in these commodities just as other Canadians, but at the same time their own complex positionings, social realities, and language use challenge such political binaries (Anglophone and Francophone, the two solitudes). Canadian language policy needs to address, broaden, and include these diversities in official educational policies, rather than continue to reproduce nationalist political solutions from the 1960s and 1970s (language-nation state ideology, see Hobsbawm, 1990), which no longer reflect the social realities of today’s youth. By critically engaging commodification of languages, we can rethink and re-imagine what bilingual education and multilingualism could look like for Canadians in contemporary times.

Conclusion In this chapter, we showed how ideologies of French found in discourses are connected to the social, political, and historical views of being bilingual in Canada. Multilinguals are stuck in the middle with discourses on language policies, the idea that English is important for the future, and that French belongs to Francophones. If we go back to our question – how do multilinguals make meaning of their linguistic repertoires in their day-to-day lives and which languages have the most values – it depends. It depends on where multilinguals are, what they can do with their languages, and how ideologies connected to their repertoires are framing their day-to-day practices. Multilinguals are often confined between those ideological discourses, either seen as being bilingual with French and English or part of one of the two, with their other language rarely seen as valuable other than within their families because they are still connected to their parents’ homeland (which is often seen still as one land, one culture, one language and identity). We also see that there is an in-between-ness that exists between the multilingual students’ ideological positioning, and the need for more transdisciplinary approaches to language learning and teaching that would increase critical, reflexive awareness of some of the contradictions, instabilities, and complexities of these seemingly strong, attached, fixed ideological notions about languages, people, and cultures. We need to be able to see the multidimensionality of how and why we engage with language(s) in the ways that we do –and what might start out as a commodity, an investment, may shift in a different context or with another interlocutor, and become something else.

Notes 1 In 2019, the Official Languages Act was revised: https://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/en/publica tions/other/2019/modernizing-ola-recommendations and Indigenous Languages Act: “The Indigenous Languages Act, which is intended to support the reclamation, revitalization, maintaining and strengthening of Indigenous languages in Canada received

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Royal Assent on June 21, 2019” (https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campa igns/celebrate-indigenous-languages/legislation.html). 2 Francophones and Anglophones are the traditional terms when talking about native speakers of French and English in different provinces. Most Francophones reside in Québec. 3 The term “allophone” has been contested by one of the authors, as it simplifies and appears to homogenize a very diverse and complex group of learners, putting them all together under one neatly socially constructed category. We feel the term “multilingual” is more appropriate, in that it focuses on the complex, heterogeneous ways people use language (what they do with language) rather than simply as unidimensional language users (see Byrd Clark, 2012). 4 All names are changed to preserve confidentiality.

References Appelt, L. (2017). Public Spanish bilingual schools in Calgary, Alberta: A case study of parent and student perspectives and expectations. A doctoral dissertation, University of Calgary. Arnett, K., & Mady, C. (2013). Minority populations in Canadian second language education. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Blackledge, A. (2008). Language ecology and language ideology. In N. H. Hornberger (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and education (pp. 2923–2936). Boston: Springer. Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1982). Ce que parler veut dire. Paris: Fayard. Budach, G., Roy, S., & Heller, M. (2003). Community and commodity in French Ontario. Language in Society, 32(5), 603–628. Byrd Clark, J. S. (2008). So, why do you want to teach French? Representations of multilingualism and language investment through a reflexive critical sociolinguistic ethnography. Education and Ethnography, 3(1), 1–16. Byrd Clark, J. S. (2009). Multilingualism, citizenship, and identity: Voices of youth and symbolic investments in an urban, globalized world. London: Continuum. Byrd Clark, J. S. (2012). Heterogeneity and a sociolinguistics of multilingualism: Reconfiguring French language pedagogy. Language and Linguistics Compass Blackwell Online Journal, 6(3), 143–161. (Invited/Commissioned submission.) Byrd Clark, J. S. (2016). Transdisciplinary approaches for language learning and teaching in transnational times. L2 Journal, 4, 3–19. Byrd Clark, J. S. (2020). Reflexivity and criticality in language and intercultural communication. In Jackson, J. (Ed.), The Routledge international handbook of language and intercultural communication, vol. 2. London: Routledge. Byrd Clark, J., & Roy, S. (2017 Competition). French immersion for new social realities. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant, awarded for 2018–2023. Byrd Clark, J. S., & Roy, S. (forthcoming). Multilingual research for new social realities: Towards a transdisciplinary approach. In Holmes, P., Reynolds, J., & Ganassin, S. (Eds.), The politics of researching multilingually. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Cameron, D. (2012). The commodification of language: English as a global commodity. In T. Nevalainen & E. Traugott (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English (pp. 352–364). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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De Courcy, M. (2005). Policy challenges for bilingual immersion education in Australia: Literacy and language choices for users of Aboriginal languages, Auslan and Italian. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 8, 178–187. Douglas Fir Group (2016). A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. The Modern Language Journal, 100, 19–47. Flores, N. (2017). From language-as-resource to language-as-struggle: Resisting the cokeification of bilingual education. In M.-C. Flubacher & A. Del Percio (Eds.), Language, Education and Neoliberalism (pp. 62–81). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Genesee, F. (1987). Learning through two languages: Studies in immersion and bilingual education. Cambridge, MA: Newbury House Publishers. Gibson, J., & Roy, S. (2015). Canadian Parents for French: How a grassroots organization has contributed to the advancement of Canada’s Official Languages Policy. Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education, 3(2), 218–240. Grenier, G., & Nadeau, S. (2016). English and the lingua franca and the economic value of other languages: The case of the language of work in the Montreal labour market. In M. Gazzola & B.-A. Wickström (Eds.), The economics of language policy (pp. 267–312). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haque, E. (2012). Multiculturalism within a bilingual framework. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hayday, M. (2005). Bilingual today, united tomorrow. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press. Hayday, M. (2015). So they want us to learn French. Promoting and opposing Bilingualism in English-Speaking Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Heller, M. (2011) Paths to post-nationalism. A critical ethnography of language and identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1990). Nations and nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holborow, M. (2018). Language skills as human capital? Challenging the neoliberal frame, Language and Intercultural Communication, 18 (5), 520–532. Kristmanson, P., & Dicks, J. (2014). Looking in the one-way mirror. Reflections on the changing face(s) of immersion in North America and beyond. In D. J. Tedick & S. Bjorklund (Eds.), Language Immersion Education. A Research Agenda for 2015 and Beyond. Special Issue in the Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education, 2(2), 273–287. Lambert, W. E., & Tucker, G. R. (1972). Bilingual Education of Children: The St. Lambert Experiment. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers. Moïse, C., McLaughin, M., Roy, S., & White, C. (2006). Le tourisme patrimonial: la commercialisation de l’identité franco-canadienne et ses enjeux langagiers. Langage & Société, 118, 85–108. Paris. December. Pennycook, A. (2007). Global Englishes and transcultural flow. London, New York: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. London: Routledge. Rebuffot, J., & Lyster, R. (1996). L’immersion au Canada: contextes, effets et pédagogie. In E. Jürgen (Ed.), De la polyphonie à la symphonie. Méthodes, théories et faits de la recherche pluridisciplinaire sur le français au Canada (pp. 277–294). Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Roy, S. (2003). La mondialisation et la nouvelle économie: un centre d’appels dans le Sud de l’Ontario. In M. Heller & N. Labrie (Eds.), Discours et identités: la francité canadienne

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entre modernité et mondialisation (pp. 365–399). Brussels: Cortil-Wodon, Éditions modulaires européennes. Roy, S. (2010). Not truly, not entirely … pas comme francophones. Canadian Journal of Education: Special Issue on Language, Identity and Educational Policies, 33(3), 541–563. Roy, S. (2020). French immersion ideologies in Canada. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Roy, S., & Byrd Clark, J. (2018). Les identités multiples des jeunes Canadiens. Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language, and Diversity (J-BILD), 2(2), 103–117. Smala, S., Bergas, J., & Lingard, B. (2013). Languages, cultural capital and school choice: Distinction and second-language immersion programs. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34, 373–391. Tedick, D. J., Christian, D., & Williams Fortune, T. (Eds.) (2011). Immersion education: Practices, policies, possibilities. Toronto: Multilingual Matters. Turgeon, L., & Gagnon, A. G. (2015). Bureaucratic language regimes in multilingual states: Comparing Belgium and Canada. In L. Cardinal & S. K. Sonntag (Eds.), State traditions and language regimes (pp. 119–136). Montreal, Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Verschueren, J. (2012). Ideology in language use: Pragmatic guidelines for empirical research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Coda Issues arising around conceptual and empirical work on the commodification of language David Block

Background: Where do I fit it? I come to the task of writing the coda for this collection as someone who just over a decade ago began to think about the use of “commodification” with reference to languages, ideas about language, language policy, and language practices. Initially, I followed the general approach that was becoming the norm in sociolinguistics, as found in the work of Monica Heller and a long list of other scholars, some of whom, such as Alexandre Duchêne and Joan Pujolar, have collaborated with her directly in research and publications based on the concept (e.g. Heller, Pujolar & Duchêne, 2014). Thus in a 2010 publication, I wrote: [T]he commodification of language means a shift from a valuing of language for its basic communicative function and more emotive associations – national identity, cultural identity, the authentic spirit of a people and so on – to valuing it for what is means in the globalized, deregulated, hypercompetitive, post-industrial “new work order” in which we now live …. In other words, it means a shift from language as use-value to language as exchange-value. (Block, 2010: 294–295) However, at about the time I was writing these words, I had begun to read Marx (and Engels) extensively, and from there, Marxist scholars who have written about the world in which we live over the past century and a half (From Vladimir Lenin and Antonio Gramsci to Ellen Meiksins Wood and David Harvey). My reading of Marx and derived scholarship led me to question the definition of language commodification above, not least my (in retrospect) blithe citing of use-value and exchange-value at the end. As a result, I began work on a paper on this topic. Some of my early ideas generated in this effort appear in a section of chapter 4 of the book Social Class in Applied Linguistics (Block, 2014: 135–138), There, after a short and partial presentation of Marx’s views on commodities, I introduced questions as follows:

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[I]f, as Marx argues, “every commodity owes its usefulness to itself” and, for example, “[w]heat … serves as an article of food” (Marx, 1904: 34–35), what does language “serve as an article of”, if it is a commodity? And then when we move from use value to exchange value, we see, following Marx, that “as an exchange value, a commodity is always regarded as a result” (Marx, 1904: 34–35) with a value commensurate with the cost of its production. What then is the cost of production of language as commodity? Or are we talking about an instance of language use and not language in its entirety (whatever that might mean), as a commodity? (Block, 2014: 137) These questions and others were addressed in more depth in a paper I wrote at about the same time and then delivered at the conference “Sloganizations in Language Education Discourse,” held at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in May 2014. Papers from this conference, mine included, were eventually published in a volume edited by Schmenk, Breidbach, and Küster (2019; see Block, 2019). In principle, I do not have anything to add to that paper except to say that my views on the matter remain pretty much the same and they align, in broad terms and to varying degrees, with those expressed in the first four chapters of this volume by Will Simpson and John O’Regan, John Petrovic and Bedrettin Yazan, Ken McGill, and François Grin, to which I now turn.

Critiques of “language commodification” (or “commodification of language”) in this volume and what they mean to me In the first three chapters of this volume (Simpson & O’Regan, Petrovic & Yazan, and McGill), the authors suggest that there is a lack of engagement with Marxist political economy in mainstream sociolinguistics. They note that while Marxist terminology is often invoked (e.g. “capital,” “use-value,” and “exchange-value”) and there is a critique of neoliberal policies and practices that is roughly consistent with the views of contemporary Marxists such as Harvey (e.g. 2014), there is a near total lack of explicit discussion of Marxist thought. In their attempt to rectify the situation, they focus on distinct though interrelated ideas and concepts. Simpson and O’Regan elaborate a critical discussion of fetishism based in Marxist thought (e.g. Marx, 1858 [1973], 1867 [1990]; Žižek, 2012), which allows them to examine scenarios in which the phenomenon occurs. In this regard, they focus on standard varieties of languages as fetishized entities; language as the property of its users and as tradable in markets; and the placement of language outside individuals’ social relations, “as a fetishized autonomous force” (Simpson & O’Regan, this volume: 15). Fetishism also figures in Petrovic and Yazan’s chapter, in which the authors draw on the notion of language as resource (Ruiz, 1984) in their discussion of different framings of language in sociolinguistics research (and especially, language policy research). Citing Marx (1867 [1990], but also Polanyi (1944 [2001]), they argue that language is a “fictitious” commodity, not a real

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commodity, given that it cannot be regulated merely by market forces such as supply and demand; it has social value as part of community building; and it neither requires nor constitutes labour, even if language can be considered a skill that can increase labour power. Meanwhile, McGill also draws on Marx and Polanyi and references Ruiz’s notion of language as resource, as he delves into the notion of language having value, doing so from a Peircean semiotic perspective. Consistent with the arguments developed in the previous two chapters, he concludes that “there are strong grounds to doubt any characterization of language as something harboring ‘extrinsic’ or economic value” (McGill, this volume: 42). Finally, Grin’s contribution is equally critical, although his interests lie not in Marxist political economy but in the field of Economics, where he situates himself as a scholar: Grin researches the economics of language, focusing on areas such as language policy and multilingualism in the workplace. For him, there is a lack of respect for and understanding of the basic principles of both Economics and Political Economy (as overlapping though differentiable fields of inquiry) that permeates contemporary sociolinguistics. I think the authors of these first four chapters of the book have a point about many sociolinguists’ lack of background in the field of inquiry that purportedly is the baseline for their research. In effect, they are asking sociolinguists who frame their research as political economic in outlook to provide more argumentation showing that this is indeed the case, including the clarification of the key concepts and constructs that they employ. I see something of a parallel here between what Simpson, O’Regan, Petrovic, Yazan, McGill, and Grin propose and Bruno Latour’s dissections of scientific research in practice – “science in action” – going back some four decades ago (see Latour, 1987). Among other things, Latour suggested that one’s entry into the world of research (or “science”) is best done “through the backdoor of science in the making, not through the more grandiose entrance of ready-made science” (Latour, 1987: 4). In my view, and using a degree of poetic licence, I think this amounts to a call for reversing a common tendency in academic circles to take shortcuts in the development of argument, whereby, in effect, the researcher/scholar tells the reader or listener “I do not need to explain this because it has already been explained previously by X and Y, whom I cite here,” a statement which ultimately amounts to saying “you know what I mean.” To make sense of this kind of behaviour by researchers, Latour borrowed the term “black-box” from the field of cybernetics. A black box is a single window through which an idea or a theory is presented to and grasped by an observer, reader, or listener of academic production. This window could be an acronym, a formula, or an image, or it could be an often-cited excerpt from a classic publication, or even just a term (by now everyone knows what it is). A good example in sociolinguistics is the idea that Hymes’s notion of “communicative competence” (e.g. Hymes, 1972) definitively sent Chomskyan generative grammar to the dustbin of history with regard to how one should understand language.1 The entirety of the academic activity that has contributed to and

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supports a black box (in the case of Hymes’s communicative competence, the massive amount of theoretical work and empirical studies comprising research traditions and paradigms that shaped his thinking) is obscured by the fact that most observers, readers, and listeners will take for granted (for proven) what they are presented with. They will accept, without question, that Hymes’s communicative competence is superior to Chomsky’s linguistic competence. What is more, the act of black boxing serves to strengthen the black boxed element itself (in this case, Hymes’s notion of communicative competence), especially where and when it passes unquestioned.2 The invocation of a black box is a forward-looking act, as it allows researchers to get on with what they really want to discuss without getting bogged down with explaining the essence and origin of what is being black boxed. Not asking or answering questions and, in effect, moving on, is an example of what Latour calls “positive modalities,” that is acts of communication “which lead a statement away from its conditions of production, making it solid enough to render some other consequences necessary” (Latour, 1987: 23). This is what occurs when a term like commodification is used with no overt clarification of what it means or, more importantly, any of the conceptual, evidential and argumentative antecedents leading to its status as a black box. As McGill explains in his chapter, there is “the notion that the commodification of language is a phenomenon which somehow exists in the background of ‘late capitalism’ (Duchêne & Heller, 2012) but that does not require actual demonstration” (McGill, this volume: 49). The user takes it as “solid” and moves to put it to use in, for example, the analysis of data. In marked contrast to “positive modalities,” “negative modalities” involve the asking and answering of questions about what is behind or what underlies the black box, and above all conducting a conceptual archaeology of it. Such actions “lead a statement in the other direction towards its conditions of production” and may lead to an understanding of how and “why it is solid or weak instead of using it to render some other consequences more necessary” (ibid). Of course, leading a statement “in the other direction …” takes time and effort, and it is obviously the case that no one has the time or the means to read everything ever written on a given topic. However, I do think that many scholars could do better in this regard, enacting negative modalities – as we see in the first four chapters in this volume – more than they do at present. We appear to be in a situation in which, as Grin notes, sociolinguists “often drape themselves in the mantle of ‘political economy’ despite the latter’s conspicuous absence from these contributions” (Grin, this volume: 66).3 However, none of this means that research which is not preceded by some kind of theoretical discussion of commodification before using it as a construct is in some way lacking in interest. Far from it. On those occasions when I have critiqued the understandings and uses of language commodification contained in many sociolinguistics publications, I have always found that the actual research being carried out is well designed and executed and that the results are highly compelling to anyone interested in how language has mediated changes

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occurring in society over the past four decades as a result of the globally dominant neoliberal worldview.4 In the next section I discuss the seven remaining chapters in this volume, in which the authors have written about empirical studies carried out to explore the effects of neoliberalism on the lives of individuals, with language as a resource with economic value and language as a marketable skill being centrepieces in all of them.

The value of language as a resource, or language as a marketable skill The chapters authored by Julie H. Tay and Sebastian Muth, Andrea Sunyol, Bal Krishna Sharma, Katy Highet and Alfonso Del Percio, Nikos Gogonas, Peter K. W. Tan, and Sylvie Roy and Julie Byrd Clark all involve the exploration of the value of language as resource and language as a marketable skill through data collected in ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Canada (two chapters), India, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Nepal, and Spain. In Chapter 5, Tay and Muth draw on interviews with 11 Chinese interpreters in Canada to explore in detail how skilling up for the job market inevitably impacts these individuals’ habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) as they “embody the use-value of a whole enterprising personhood as part of an emerging entrepreneurial class” (Tay & Muth, this volume: 71). In Chapter 6, Sunyol draws on her extensive ethnography of an international school in Barcelona, highlighting how teachers and students negotiate their way to distinction (Bourdieu, 1984) and legitimate subject positionings through their “multiple and fluid” (Jaspers & Madsen, 2018) uses of three languages – English, Catalan, and Spanish. Chapter 7 moves to heritage tourism in a Himalayan village, as Sharma explores, via indepth fieldwork, how a village is repositioned – “territorialized” and “deterritorialized,” and then “reterritorialized” (Higgins, 2017) and how, through uses of language and a range of other semiotic modes (as well as cultural artefacts), tourist trade workers and the tourist site itself are constantly subjected to valuing mechanisms. In Chapter 8, Highet and Del Percio examine in detail how teachers and students on an NGO (non-governmental organization) training programme for “disadvantaged” students in India make sense of and invest time and effort into the learning of English. The latter becomes not only a communicative skill in a highly competitive job market, but also the transformative mediator of what Martin-Rojo and Del Percio elsewhere call the “autonomous, self-responsible and entrepreneurial subjects, that can achieve freedom, independence and success if only they are willing to subject themselves to the … ethics imposed by neoliberalism” (Martin-Rojo & Del Percio, 2020: 19). In Chapter 9, Gogonas also draws on fieldwork involving three sets of parents heading up Greek families living in Luxembourg, as he examines their family language policies (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997) and language ideologies (Woolard, 1998). Following Norton (2013), Gogonas notes how the families invest in the country’s official multilingualism (Luxembourgish, German, and French), the conservation of Greek, and above all the learning of English. In Chapter 10, Tan takes us to multilingual/multi-ethnic Malaysia, where he

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frames the naming of places (districts, streets, parks, and buildings) as performative, status-conferring, and political (Bourdieu, 1991). Here, the decisions taken to name streets (a “top down” official government language policy with Malay as exclusive language) and residential buildings (a “bottom up,” private language policy where English is the most-used language) reflect underlying language ideologies and situation in which “form or symbolic meaning takes precedence over content or utility” (Kelly-Holmes, 2014: 139). Finally, in Chapter 11, Roy and Byrd Clark examine the complex views that Canadians have about their multilingual repertoires and the respective roles of French and English. Multilinguals learn French for symbolic and identity-related reasons, while they learn English for practical reasons, such as improving their employment prospects, which leads them to express their concern that in the midst of the linguistic complexity that one finds on the ground, many Canadians essentialize the languages in their lives, such that they may be understood, either in nationalist terms, as integral to one’s national identity, or in instrumentalist terms, as useful in the job market. In all these chapters we see key notions relevant to multilingual being in the early twenty-first century. One such notion is that multilingualism has come to be a valued skill in a job market in which communication is progressively more important (Tan’s chapter on naming is the only chapter that does not refer to this development).5 Language as commodity is invoked (and in some cases explained) in all of the chapters, with the exception of Highet and Del Percio (who do not use the term). However, with a view to avoiding a resuscitation of the critiques contained in Chapters 1–4 and concentrating on what I see as the essence of what is going on the Chapters 5–11, I would say that all authors in this book share a common view: That in neoliberal times, we have seen, as Bonnie Urciuoli explains, the rise of a “skills discourse,” in which “social acts are cast in a transactional or entrepreneurial frame and actors’ segmented selves are recast as assemblages of productive elements, as bundles of skills” (Urciuoli, 2008: 224). For Urciuoli, these “bundles of skills” can be conceived of as “commodities,” but only “insofar as they are aspects of productive labor with market value: as aspects of self that enhance their possessors’ worth on the labor market and as products” (ibid). As I note elsewhere (Block, 2014), to speak of a “bundle of skills,” in which language figures along with other attributes, abilities, and competences, is not the same as treating language in isolation and then claiming it is a “commodity.” Thus, Urciuoli’s account of language in neoliberal times is, on the whole, consistent with Marx’s notion of commodified labour power, and apart from capturing the aforementioned view of language today, it moves us beyond the pro-or-con language commodification debate.

The language planning and policy angle Another aspect of Chapters 5–11 that I found interesting is how they offer dynamic examples of language planning and policy (LPP) in action, understood according to two key principles: A multi-componential ontology and an

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interdisciplinary epistemology. I discuss these two principles in turn in this, the final section of this coda. With regard to a multi-componential ontology for LPP, Bernard Spolsky (2004, 2019) has, over the years, developed a useful approach that is based on three key interrelated components: (1) language practices, that is, the choices and uses of multilingual resources across contexts, organized in scalar fashion, from the immediate and local to the global and supranational; (2) language beliefs, which are derived from broader language ideologies that apply to communication repertoires – “the collection of ways in which individuals use language and other means of communication (gestures, dress, posture, accessories) to function effectively in the multiple communities in which they participate” (Rymes, 2014: 290); and (3) management, which is about the ways that individuals, groups, and institutions take action to shape the practices and beliefs in context. In his most recent work, Spolsky (2019) has added “language activists” to the list of the actors engaging in management. These activists may not have the real power to effect change in the immediate term, but they may be able to do so in the long term. Spolsky has also emphasized in his recent work that management includes “self-management,” which he describes as “an extremely important aspect of the development and modification of the language repertoire of individual speakers,” adding that “[i]t depends ultimately on a recognition by speakers of their own lack of proficiency to operate in a needed or desirable linguistic environment, and may also be the result of external advocacy or management” (Spolsky, 2019: 327). In Chapters 5–11, we see the different ontologies that Spolsky proposes being addressed. There is, thus, reference to ideologies and beliefs impacting on language practices, which in turn may be seen as policy. A good example can be found in Chapter 8 by Highet and Del Percio, where they explain that the celebration of English as a vector of social mobility and personal success affects both students and teachers in India and has consequences for the ways individuals understand their own subjectivity, their learning practice, and their place in what they have learned to see as the modern world. (Highet & Del Percio, this volume: 127) In addition, while management is covered in some of these chapters as top down activity (see especially Chapter 10 by Tan), it is also portrayed in terms of as Spolsky’s “self-management,” as when Chinese interpreters in Canada make decisions about the direction of their professional activity (Tay & Muth) or Greek family heads make decisions hierarchizing language in their lives and their children’s lives (Gogonas). In addition, many of the informants cited in the chapters may be seen as “language activists” in their own right, as they creatively draw on their multilingual repertoires and lay the groundwork for emerging polices going forward into the future. Thus, with reference to her student informants in an international school, Sunyol writes of

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the creative ways in which [they] … incorporate [English] … into their everyday practices, in which they act as legitimate English language users – albeit not native – when they perform their own “international student”, “cosmopolitan”, “cool teenager” identities in the school, or in spaces like the social media. (Sunyol, this volume: 91)

Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity With regard to the second key principle of LPP cited above, an interdisciplinary epistemology, we have the idea that LPP researchers need not only to be versed in linguistics, policy studies and education, but also in current developments in a long list of social science disciplines, including anthropology, communication studies, economics, human geography, social theory, sociology, and political economy. In Chapter 4, Grin refers to an “interdisciplinary mindset” and an “interdisciplinary ethos,” noting that “interdisciplinary work usually builds on a given canonical discipline, which may be seen as a scholar’s scientific port of call, from which he or she ventures out to explore other academic territories and develop theoretical and empirical connections between disciplines” (Grin, this volume: 57; italics in original). Grin’s view of interdisciplinarity is consistent with that found in general discussions of the topic, where it is seen as a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession. [Interdisciplinarity] draws on disciplinary perspectives and integrates their insights through construction of a more comprehensive perspective. (Klein & Newell, 1997: 393–394) In this sense, interdisciplinarity stands in marked contrast to disciplinarity full stop, or what might be termed “mono-disciplinarity”: Disciplinarity is about mono-discipline, which represents specialization in isolation. One person may, in fact, study biology and handle it well without the need for knowledge about physics or psychology. In fact, if we write a list of sciences, from left to right: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology … we perceive them logically connected in a horizontal, not vertical, manner. (Max-Neef, 2005: 6) Issues related to LPP, and indeed language in society research more generally, are no doubt complex and merit research that is interdisciplinary and not mono-disciplinary. The key question then becomes how researchers branch out to disciplines beyond their putative base disciplines (even if we should always be wary of the notion that disciplines can be invoked in such a

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compartmentalized way). In the issues explored in this volume, from the metacritiques of the use of “commodification” in Chapters 1–4, to the ethnographic work focusing on language policy in action in Chapters 7–11, there is, in evidence, Grin’s interdisciplinary mentality and interdisciplinary ethos, born of the necessity imposed by the complexity of the issues, phenomena, and events being examined. This is fine as far as it goes, but reading work on disciplinarity (mono-, multi-, inter-, and so on), I see that what is perhaps a missing component here is the inclusion of stakeholders’ perspectives more explicitly in research. This applies more obviously to Chapters 5–11, where the stakeholders are non-academics, but it raises the interesting prospect of meta-critique, such as that found in Chapters 1–4, involving data collection with cited academics as stakeholders. In any case, working more collaboratively, and even intimately, with stakeholders means a move beyond interdisciplinary research to what has been termed transdisciplinary research, defined as follows: Transdisciplinary research occurs when researchers collaborate with stakeholders from outside the academic world. Knowledge from outside the academic world, as well as stakeholder values, is integrated with academic knowledge. Together, these insights determine what problem is studied and how this is done, and which interventions are selected to address the problem. (Rutting et al., 2016: 32)6 This raises the ante in LPP research, and indeed all sociolinguistic research focusing on the transformations of language in neoliberal times. Working in an interdisciplinary way, incorporating thinking from a range of disciplines, is essential. However, it needs to be extensive and complete and not superficial and partial. Beyond this, the transdisciplinary mentality and ethos also need to be in evidence. Among other things, transdisciplinarity might provide a way to resolve the issue of whether or not language can be a “commodity” by starting with what stakeholders believe are the issues, phenomena, and events that merit research. In a sense, this takes us back to where debates about research in the social sciences were in the 1980s, when there was much written about the “emic” and the “etic.”7 Perhaps this dichotomy constitutes a black box that is sometimes cited, often not, but always implicit in the design, execution, and reporting of research. What is needed, then, is a move towards negative modality, that is, a reopening of the window to see once again, or even for the first time, what it was all about.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank John Gray, John Petrovic, and Bedrettin Yazan for their helpful and encouraging comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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Notes 1 Just so we are clear, the offensive element in Chomsky’s view of linguistics is captured well in the following oft-cited sentence from his book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax: Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance. (Chomsky, 1965: 3) We can then contrast this view with Hymes’s: We have then to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others. (Hymes, 1972: 277) 2 As John Gray (personal communication) points out, there are Marxist black boxes as well. However, at least as regards critiques of the use of “commodification” in sociolinguistics, they do not seem to be prevalent as authors applying Marx to the concept tend to unpack and explain in detail the provenance of their ideas. 3 I have made this very point elsewhere in some detail (e.g. Block, 2014, 2018), as have authors such as Paul Bruthiaux (2008), Tom Ricento (2015), and John Petrovic (2019). With specific reference to LPP scholars, Ricento has written of their “lack of sophistication in political economy” and how this “impacts their ability to critically address the effects of neoliberal economic policies on the status and utility of both global languages such as English, and non-global languages that could play an important role in local economic and social development in low-income countries” (Ricento, 2015: 27). 4 This is a perspective which has engendered (and still engenders) the policies and practices that have led the world to current situation of ever-increasing inequality, environmental destruction, the “post-truth,” “alternative facts” informational universe, and a general environment of permanent crisis and emergency (Zabala, 2020). 5 Here I should insert the caveat that for the vast majority of human beings in employment around the world (the global proletariat), language does not figure as important. I am thinking here of the industrial plants in China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Northern Mexico, and other parts of the world, where work is done in the Dickensian conditions outlined in Engels’s The Condition of the English Working Class over a century and a half ago. In my view, it is ethnocentric to believe otherwise. Language may be more important today in some sectors of the economy than it was previously, but one should not get carried away. The vast majority of the workers of the world are not doing “language labour” on the job. 6 It should be noted that Roy and Byrd-Clark do actually describe their research as “transdisciplinary.” However, they refer to research that “represent[s] the social variation and in-between-ness and/or the crossing between disciplines, literacies, modalities, languages, codes, contexts, learning environments, and social backgrounds” (Roy & Byrd-Clark, this volume: 196), which seems to be more a question of content and not

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more extensive and profound collaboration with stakeholders at all stages of the research, which is in evidence in the definition provided by Rutting et al. (2016). 7 The anthropologist Kenneth Pike (1967) famously coined these terms, analogically derived from the phonemic/phonetic distinction in linguistics: Emic referring to the insider’s perspective, knowledge, language, behaviour, and so on, and etic referring to the outsider’s perspective, knowledge, language, behaviour, and so on.

References Block, D. (2010). Globalization and language teaching. In Coupland, N. (Ed.), Handbook of language and globalisation (pp. 287–304). Oxford: Blackwell. Block, D. (2014). Social class in applied linguistics. London: Routledge. Block, D. (2018). Political economy and sociolinguistics: Neoliberalism, inequality and social class. London: Bloomsbury. Block, D. (2019). What on earth is “language commodification”?. In B. Schmenk, S. Breidbach, & L. Küster (Eds.), Sloganization in language education discourse: Conceptual thinking in the age of academic marketization (pp. 121–141). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchange. Social Science Information, 16 (6), 645–668. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bruthiaux, P. (2008). Dimensions of globalization and applied linguistics. In P. Tan and R. Rubdy (Eds.), Language as commodity: Global structures, local marketplaces (pp. 1–30). London: Continuum. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (Eds.) (2012). Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit. London: Routledge. Engels, F. (1845 [2009]). The condition of the working class in England. Oxford: Oxford Classics. Heller, M., Pujolar, J., & Duchêne, A. (2014). Linguistic commodification in tourism. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(4), 539–566. Higgins, C. (2017). Space, place, and language. In S. Canagarajah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp. 102–116). New York: Routledge. Hymes, D. (1972). “On communicative competence”. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected readings (pp. 269–293). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jaspers, J., & Madsen, L. M. (2018). Fixity and fluidity in sociolinguistic theory and practice. In J. Jaspers & L. M. Madsen (Eds.), Critical perspectives on linguistic fixity and fluidity: Languagised lives (pp. 1–26). London: Routledge. Johnson, D. C. (2013). Language policy. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave McMillan. Kaplan, R., & Baldauf, R. (1997). Language planning. From practice to theory. London: Multilingual Matters. Kelly-Holmes, H. (2014). Linguistic fetish: The sociolinguistics of visual multilingualism. In D. Machin (Ed.), Visual communication (pp. 135–151). Berlin: De Gruyter. Klein, J. T., & Newell, W. (1997). Advancing interdisciplinary studies. In J. G. Gaff & J. Ratcliff (Eds.), Handbook of the undergraduate curriculum (pp. 393–394). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Latour, B. (1987) Science in action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Martin-Rojo, L., & Del Percio, A. (2020). Neoliberalism, language and governmentality. In L. Martin-Rojo & A. Del Percio (Eds.), Language and neoliberal governmentality (pp. 1–25). London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1858 [1973]). Grundrisse: Introduction to the critique of political economy. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Marx, K. (1867 [1990]). Capital: Volume 1: A critique of political economy. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Max-Neef, M. A. (2005). Commentary. Foundations of transdisciplinarity. Ecological Economics, 53, 5–16. Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation. New York: Multilingual Matters. Petrovic, J. (2019). Alienation, language work, and the so-called commodification of language. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Language politics and policies: Perspectives from Canada and the United States (pp. 60–77). New York: Cambridge University Press. Pike, K. L. (1967). Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior. The Hague: Mouton. Polanyi, K. (1944 [2001]). The great transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ricento, T. (2015). Political economy and English as a “global” language. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Language policy and political economy: English in a global context. (pp. 27–47). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruiz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal, 8(2), 15–34. Rutting, L., Post, G., Keestra, M., de Roo, M., Blad, S., & de Greef, L. (2016). Interdisciplinarity. In S. Menken & M. Keestra (Eds.), An introduction to interdisciplinary Research: Theory and practice (pp. 31–33). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Rymes, B. (2014). Communicative repertoire. In C. Leung & B. V. Street (Eds.), The Routledge companion to English studies (pp. 287–301). London: Routledge. Schmenk, B., Breidbach, S., & Küster, L. (Eds.) (2019). Sloganization in language education discourse: Conceptual thinking in the age of academic marketization. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Spolsky, B. (2004). Language policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spolsky, B. (2019). A modified and enriched theory of language policy (and management). Language Policy, 18(3), 323–338. Tollefson, J. W. (2013). Language policy in a time of crisis and transformation. In J. W. Tollefson (Ed.), Language policies in education: Critical approaches (pp. 11–34). New York, NY: Routledge. Urciuoli, B. (2008). Skills and selves in the new workplace. American Ethnologist, 35(2), 211–228. Woolard, K. (1998). Introduction: Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In B. Schieffelin, K. Woolard, & P. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory (pp. 3–47). New York: Oxford University Press. Zabala, S. (2020). Being at large: Freedom in the age of alternative facts. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Žižek, S. (2012). How did Marx invent the symptom. In S. Žižek (Ed.), Mapping ideology (pp. 296–331). London: Verso.

Index

acquisition planning 66n1, 165 added-value 76, 186 adibasi janajati 109–10, 123n1 alienation 2, 35–7; of laborers 37; of language 10; as process 36–7 applied linguistics 60, 108, 127 authenticity 13, 65, 96, 98, 108, 119, 123, 185 Bahasa Kebangsaan 168 bilingualism 24, 145, 182–3, 186, 188–9, 194–5; Canadian 195; English-French 74, 194; official discourse 194; official policy 181–2 body language 132, 133, 139 Bourdieu, P. 1, 2, 11–13, 25, 31–4, 36, 85 Bumiputera/Bumiputra 167–8, 177 Cambridge English Assessment 98 Canadian Parents for French association 183 Capital: cultural 4, 33, 71, 85, 128, 135, 137, 139–40, 147–8, 157, 165, 183; economic 32–4; human 4, 58, 95–6, 98, 128–9; linguistic 3, 4, 31, 33–37, 102–3, 127–9, 147–8, 164–5, 170, 178, 183, 18–9, 191, 19–25, 205; social 33, 59, 170; symbolic 159, 168 capitalism 16, 20–1, 26, 32, 35, 37, 75, 146; contemporary 128–9; late capitalism 1, 3, 10, 29, 49, 59, 146, 164, 203; non-neoliberal 60; print 3; Rhine 59; social 59 capitalist: late capitalist 4, 31; market 17, 20–1; marketplace 20; social relations 35, 37; society 17 Chinese diaspora 73–4

codeswitching 80 colonialism 128, 130, 138 commodification 29, 109; of color 49; of English 96; of ethnicity 109; of French 185, 195; of identities 109; of labor 72; of language i, 1–2, 25, 27, 30, 33, 35, 37, 49, 63, 146–7, 157,185, 187, 195, 200–1, 203; of linguistic practice 71, 86; linguistic skills 30, 35 commodified 10–12, 16–17, 33, 36, 72, 96, 103, 108, 147; body 72; education 91; labor power 205; language 108, 185; resources 185; tourism 117; resources 185 commodity 3, 10, 20, 24–9, 32, 34, 41, 44, 46–8, 50, 64, 75, 80, 91, 94, 103, 108, 147, 165, 185, 188, 201–2; definition 165; language as i, 1, 9–10, 25–31, 33–7, 90, 103, 108, 146, 165, 185, 190, 205, 208; English as 90–1, 95, 155, 195; exchange 47; exchange-value 72; of fetishism 8, 13, 63; fictitious 30–4, 36–7; form 51; French as 191, 194–5; labor power; linguistic skills 185; market 32; Marxian concept of 66; real 31, 36; service 85; Spanish as 193; strategy 103; transactions 47; value of language 72 Communicative: competence 131; conduct 16, 128, 140; practices 72, 95, 115, 122 Communist Manifesto 25 communitas 84 consumers 46, 48, 72, 103 Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) 94 corpus planning 56, 165 cotexts 46–7, 51 cúpla focal 49–50

Index discursive 19, 98; analysis 35; formation 29–30; patterns 30, 185; practices 30; production 118; sample 184, 194; tool 122; transnational space 82 economic(s): laws 41–8, 50, 52; nationalism 20; neoclassical 32, 58, 63–6; neoliberal 86; rationalization 42; resource 115; value 2–3, 35, 41–5, 47, 49–53, 202, 204; value of language 41, 52 economy: global 185–6; Marxist political 201–2; New Economy 84; political 108; tourism 112 Education Assistance Act (1990/1992) 166 emic 208, 209n7 English 3–4, 7, 9, 11; as commodity 28, 90–1, 95; as cultural capital 128; as global language 9, 15–16, 19, 118, 123; immersion 98; as linguistic capital 3, 129; as object 97 entextualization 43, 46 episteme 76, 80; of governmentality 75 ethnic activism 109, 117 ethnocultural pluralism 181 ethnographic 61, 71, 91, 113, 127, 130, 184, 204, 208; analysis 128; community 182–3; ethnolinguistic 7, 111, 122–3, 159, 171; community 182–3; identity 108–9 113; minority 111; vitality 123, 159, 166 etic 208, 209n7 exchange value i, 25–6, 28, 31–2, 35–6, 61, 71–2, 76, 84, 86, 90, 94, 147–8, 154–6, 165, 185, 200–1 exploitation 13, 14, 37; governmental 29; of labor 25 Extra-linguistic/Extra linguistic: asset 159; behaviors 140; capital 128; phenomena 147 extrinsic 41–2 Family Language Policy (FLP) 144–6, 149, 159 fetish 201; language as 2, 7–21; linguistic 17 fetishism 7–9; collective 20; commodity 2, 63; of language 7 fetishistic: beliefs 8, 20; forces 19; misrecognition 8; mystification 18; notions of language 7; practice 20; universalism 13

213

fetishized: commodity 25; language 7, 9–12, 20–1, 24, 177 Forum International School (FIS) 89, 90, 92, 94, 95–103 freelance 71, 73–5, 77, 84–6 French 3, 34, 74, 78, 85, 93, 108, 113, 144, 147–8, 151, 153–5, 156, 159, 164, 176, 181–96, 204–5 general intellect 31–3, 36 German 3, 16, 93, 144, 148–9, 151, 153–5, 157–8, 184, 204 globalization 18, 59, 116, 119–20, 127 governmentality 74, 76, 84–86; episteme 75; linguistic 71; neoliberal 130, 140 Greek 3, 144, 148–9, 151, 153–60, 204, 206; as linguistic capital 3 griot 28 habitus: 2, 11, 33, 71, 82, 84, 130, 131, 204 hegemonic 187; English 134; language 159; orientation 51, regimes 76; structures 71 hegemony 21; cultural 137 hygiene 135; checks 137; hygiene war 138; practices 137, 140 identity 35, 37, 47, 65; ethnolinguistic 108; ethno-national 10, 12; international 92; national 159, 178, 187, 200, 217; politics 35 ideology: commodification 156; of deficiency 144, 160; economics and society 59; governmentality 74; language 4, 155, 187; linguistic instrumentalism 85, 123; nation state 196; neoliberal 186; standard 144; strict language separation 158; unity 111 immersion programs: French 183–4, 193, 195 indexicality 41 Indian Self-Determination Act (1975) 166 Indigenous 109, 112–13, 115, 119, 123, 167; activism 110; ethnicity 108; languages 110, 113, 122, 166; nationalities 109–10 interdisciplinarity ii, 2, 57–8, 66, 207 International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) 92, 97, 102 investment 59, 147–8; concept 147; educational 148; ideology of 155; language learning 128; language 147, 159; theory 59

214

Index

Janajati movement 109–10 Japanese Occupation 171–2 knowledge 75; as commodity 32; economy 93; industry 75 labor: accumulated 31; as commodity 27, 34; linguistic 32; power 4, 14–17, 26–7, 31, 34, 37, 202, 205; language: acquisition 129; as capital 30, 32–3, 164; capitalization 104; choice 67n6, 104; colonial 170; commodification of i, 1, 8, 9, 25, 27, 30, 37, 41, 49, 64, 65, 71, 72, 92, 102, 108, 146, 147; as commodity i, 1, 9–10, 25–31, 33–7, 90, 103, 146, 165, 185, 190, 205, 208; as competence 11; conceptualizations of 31, 94, 108; construction 31; corpus 56; as cost effective 49; in education 135; as fetish 2, 7–21, 177; as fictitious commodity 34, 36–7; global 9, 15–16, 19, 118, 121, 123; hierarchy of 153; as identity 29; of identity 186; ideologies 102, 145, 149, 153, 159, 187, 204–6; ideology 4, 95–6, 98, 118, 144, 153, 155; as instrument 29–30, 34, 36; instrumentation of 35–6; as labor 35; learning 96, 132, 145, 151, 155; as linguistic capital 4, see capital; loyalty 116; maintenance 3, 52, 157, 159; management 144, 159; metalanguage 41, 43; nation state ideology 196; national 168–70; needs 145; neocoloniality 85; as obligation 32; official 57, 74, 93, 110, 168–9, 171, 176; omnivores 104; phenomena 10, 36; place-indexing 115; policy 1–4, 7–8, 10, 18–20, 36, 41–2, 51–2, 56, 91–2, 94, 96–8, 101, 103, 109, 128, 144–6, 159, 182; policy and planning see language policy and planning (LPP); practices 17, 36, 38, 95, 104, 123, 144; as problem 24, 41; as product 17; proficiency 14, 17, 95, 144; as profit 30; as property 11; as resource 4, 24, 26, 28–30, 34, 36, 41, 52, 103, 109, 124, 127; as right 24, 36, 41; Romance 175–6; signs 108; as skill 10, 14, 27–8; skills 16, 37, 89–90; as social practice 17, 36; in-society ii, 64, 207; standard 159–60; standardization 94; status 56; status planning 56; as system 95; talk 97; of Tamangs 122; teaching 14, 90, 146; tourism 118; unofficial 74; value 16, 96, 153, 165;

vitalization 42, 53; as work and market 61 Language Policy and Planning (LPP) 1, 3, 8, 10, 19–20, 34–6, 41–2, 51–2, 56, 63, 65, 91–8, 109, 123, 144–5, 159, 195–6, 202–8 legisign 44–6 lingua franca: English as 123; Malay as 169; Nepali as 110 Linguistic i, 19, 27, 31, 34, 42, 47, 52, 60–1, 64–5, 80, 83, 85, 110–11, 115, 137–8, 172, 175; ability 18; anthropology i, 43, 46; applied 19, 127; assimilation 85; behavior 135; capital 1, 3–4, 14, 30–1, 33, 34, 36–7, 127–9, 147, 148 164, 170, 178, 185–90, 193–5, 205; code 11; commodification 64; communities i, 3, 190–1; competence 147, 203; complexity 205; diversity 36, 56–8, 95; environment 57, 67n2, 206, 209n1; ethnography 91; events 85; exchange 62; extra-linguistic behavior 140; fetish 17; forms 42, 52, 145; governmentality 71; groups 31; human rights 35; instrumentalism 123; labor 32; landscape 4, 166, 176–7; market 12, 15–16, 25–6, 28, 31–2, 34, 62–3, 71–2, 74, 147, 164, 185; phenomena 30, 147; practices 71–3, 86, 113; product 103; production 46; proficiency 17; register 34; relationships 145; repertoire 145, 151, 154, 167, 169, 183, 185–6, 189, 196; resources 28, 91, 96, 102, 108, 113, 146, 187; rights 181; rules 46; skills 13–14, 16, 27–8, 30, 35, 63, 127, 154; theory 209n1; uberization 76; value 73 Luxembourg 3, 144, 146, 148–51, 153–4, 157–60, 204; Luxembourgish 144, 148–9, 151, 153–5, 159–60, 204 Lycee classique 158 maintenance: language 3, 52; of Greek language 156–7, 159 Malaysia 167, 168–71, 174, 176–8, 204; Bahasa Kebangsaan 168; Bahasa Malaysia 168; Malay 168–72, 174; Malaysia Condo Directory 171, 174 market 7–8, 10–11, 19, 20, 31, 36, 41–2, 44, 45, 48–51, 61–3, 75, 79–80, 83, 90–3, 95–6, 99, 103, 108–9, 120–1, 123, 127, 146, 177, 186, 194–5, 201–2; capitalist 17, 21, 118; economy 32; free 18, 60; job 12, 102, 140, 148, 154–5, 159, 190, 204–5; labor/labour 13–14, 17,

Index 128, 165, 185, 205; late capitalist 108; linguistic 12, 15–16, 25–6, 31–2, 34, 62, 71–4, 147, 164, 185; tourism 108, 111, 116 Marx, K. 8, 25, 31–2, 36, 61, 63, 165, 177, 200 Marxian see Marxism Marxism 2, 20, 25, 28, 31, 35, 63–4, 66, 84; analysis 99; circulation 61; commodification 71; concept of commodity 32, 66; economic analysis 63; economics 66; labor theory of value 26; perspective on economic processes 58; phantom objectivity 16; resource 25 Marxist 2, 4, 20, 200–1; commodity 34; exploitation 37; fetishism 8–9, 13, 17, 201; labour power 205; materialism 16; political economy 201–2; scholars 200; terminology 201; thought 201; value 2, 29 medium of instruction (MOI) 18, 95, 121, 166, 169 metapragmatic function 43, 51 minority language 3, 41, 53, 65, 147; learning 145 misrecognition 7; Bourdieuan 13; fetishistic 8; of social inequality 13 modalities182–3, 203 multiculturalism 85, 181 multilingual 1, 74, 86, 103, 122, 167, 183, 188, 191, 205; analysis of data 185; children 148; competence 93, 144, 160; development 145; education 41; learning 100, 184; population 187; programmes 97–8; repertoires 95, 148, 183, 206; resources 72, 95,103, 206; skills 154; student 196; workers 85 multilingualism 56, 93–6, 104, 145, 154; as investment 155; as resource 148 naming 4, 50, 167, 171–2, 174, 205; enterprise 167; official 167; performativity 167; of phenomena 30; as political act 167; practices 178 National Authority on Geographical Names 171 National Foundation for the Development of Indigenous Nationalities 123n1 Native American Languages Acts (1990/1992) 166 neoliberal 10, 13, 49, 59–60, 71, 73, 75, 91, 93–4, 123, 127–30, 132, 139–40, 146, 159, 186, 201, 204–5, 208–9; discourses 127; economics 86;

215

free-market fundamentalism 18; globalization 119; governmentality 130; ideologies 96 neoliberalism 10, 29–30, 33, 58–60, 85, 186, 204 nominalism 58 non-English speakers (NES) 81, 85, 134–35, 138 non-governmental agency (NGO) 127–8, 131, 133, 135–9 non-native speaker 12–14, 190 objectification 110–11, 117, 157; of cultural capital; of language 95 Official language 57, 74, 93, 95, 110, 117, 148, 168–9, 171, 176, 181–2, 185 Official Languages Act 181, 183, 196 ontology of language 27 PATI 78–9, 85 performation 42, 44 phenomena 4, 10, 43–4, 48, 50, 60–1, 63, 166, 174, 178, 201, 203, 208; economic 43; extra-linguistic 147; language 36; linguistic 30; semiotic 45; sociopolitical 123 place-indexing language 115 platonic ideal of language (P-Languages) 27 policy: accommodation oriented 19; bilingual 74; bilingualism 181–2; Canadian language 74, 85, 196; discourse 52; economic 60; educational 41; formulation 73; language 1–4, 7–8, 10, 18–20, 36, 41–2, 51–2, 56, 91–2, 94, 96–8, 101, 103, 109, 128, 144–6, 159, 182; language policy and planning see Language Policy and Planning (LPP); policymaker 35, 52; reconfiguration oriented 19 political: discourse 52, 110, 116; political economy ii, 19, 43, 58, 64, 66–7, 72, 108, 201–3, 207, 209 politics 109; budgetary 53; of distribution 19; ethno-nationalistic 185; identity 35; of recognition 18–19, 110 power 3, 27, 35, 50, 65, 77–8, 82, 85, 110, 133, 137, 139–40, 145, 147–8, 167, 186, 206; intrinsic 72; symbolic 33–4 pride 146, 156, 159 principle of “Cool” 178 profit 10, 146–7, 156–8, 172; discourse of 127; of distinction 11, 13, 31, 33, 164; rule of profit 96

216

Index

property 7, 8, 10, 16, 32 protectionism 60 racialized hierarchies 138 racial-linguistic marker 84 reciprocal calibration 51 regimes of value 12, 15, 85, 96, 128, 138 Registry of Freelance Court Interpreters 77–9 reification 25, 43, 50 replica 45–6, 48, 50, 52 replication 45–7 resource orientation 41, 52; extrinsic 41–2; intrinsic 41–2 revitalization 41, 52–3, 166 Romance languages 175–178 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963) 181 self-commodifying 84 self-objectification 110 semiotic 43–4, 50–51, 96, 99, 109, 113, 115, 147, 202, 204; analysis 44–5; capitalism 59; forms 121; geosemiotic 113, 166; landscape 166; phenomena 45; place 121; power 148; resources 109, 113, 115, 117, 122, 182; signs 122–3; theory 44; types 135 sociolinguistics 65–6, 108, 127, 164, 200–3, 209n2, 212–15; interactional 92; literature 59, 63

standardization 27, 94, 144 status planning 56, 66n1, 165 supply and demand 14, 16, 31–2, 45, 62, 96, 202 Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign 138 symbolic domination 64, 164, 177, 178 Tamangs 4, 112–13, 115–16, 122–3 techne 72, 75, 80–1, 84–5 territorialization 113, 117, 122, 204 thingification 37, 99, 103 transcultural flows 184 transdisciplinarity 207–8 translanguaging 82 translational spaces 82, 84 trilingual(ism) 93, 144, 148, 151, 153–4, 159; as investment 151 uncommodified 71–2, 86 unofficial languages 74 use-value 5, 26, 29, 32, 34–6, 200–1, 204 utility value 62 virtualism 42, 50, 84 visible minority 85 WAGO 77, 79, 85–6: accreditation 77; Registry of Freelance Court Interpreters 77 Warenform 41, 43 Warenkörper 4