Language in Late Capitalism

Pride and Profit

Alexandre Duchêne, Monica Heller, Alexandre Duchêne, Monica Heller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415888592
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136581687
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book examines the ways in which our ideas about language and identity which used to be framed in national and political terms as a matter of rights and citizenship are increasingly recast in economic terms as a matter of added value. It argues that this discursive shift is connected to specific characteristics of the globalized new economy in what can be thought of as "late capitalism". Through ten ethnographic case studies, it demonstrates the complex ways in which older nationalist ideologies which invest language with value as a source of pride get bound up with newer neoliberal ideologies which invest language with value as a source of profit. The complex interaction between these modes of mobilizing linguistic resources challenges some of our ideas about globalization, hinting that we are in a period of intensification of modernity, in which the limits of the nation-State are stretched, but not (yet) undone. At the same time, this book argues, this intensification also calls into question modernist ways of looking at language and identity, requiring a more serious engagement with capitalism and how it constitutes symbolic (including linguistic) as well as material markets.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Pride and Profit: Changing Discourses of Language, Capital and Nation-State
• 2. Sociolinguistic Regimes and the Management of “Diversity”
• 3. Commodification of Pride and Resistance to Profit: Language Practices as Terrain of Struggle in a Swiss Football Stadium
• 4. “Total Quality Language Revival”
• 5. Literary Tourism: New Appropriations of Landscape and Territory in Catalonia
• 6. Pride, Profit and Distinction: Negotiations Across Time and Space in Community Language Education
• 7. War, Peace and Languages in the Canadian Navy
• 8. Frontiers and Frenchness: Pride and Profit in the Production of Canada
• 9. The Making of “Workers of the World”: Language and the Labor Brokerage State
• 10. Language Workers: Emblematic Figures of Late Capitalism
• 11. Silicon Valley Sociolinguistics?: Analyzing Language, Gender and Communities of Practice in the New Knowledge Economy
• Notes on Contributors
• Index