Learning a new language in order to increase one’s chances on the labour market has become a commonplace strategy, as it appears when glancing through journal articles on this topic and with such headlines emerging as the following: ‘Want to Boost Your Salary? Try Learning German’, 1 ‘Money, dream jobs, a better brain: why everyone should learn a second language’, 2 or ‘Learn a Language, Get a Raise’. 3 The message seems clear: What one has to do in order to find the perfect job and/or earn (more) money is to learn another language. In other words, learning a language is seen as a potentially rewarding return on investment . This opinion is widespread. European citizens, for example, seem to be convinced that knowing foreign languages has a positive impact on their chances of finding a better job, both in their own country and abroad (European Commission 2012, as referred to in Araújo et al. 2015, p. 12). This conviction concurs with the ‘Barcelona Objective 2002’ (European Council 2002), according to which pupils should learn at least two foreign languages at school. While this objective propelled multilingual policies into the limelight of education, it was motivated particularly by the idea that a multilingual population would be of economic benefit for the European Union, most importantly in the form of a productive workforce on a global market (see also Studer et al. 2007). Language learning and language competences are thus reconfigured in terms of ‘investment ’, that is, individual, institutional, or societal investments in terms of financial resources, time, and energy for the development of language competences that (ideally) can be turned into economic profit (Duchêne 2016).
Against the backdrop of this discourse, we argue that the conversion of investment into profit is far from coming about automatically for everyone or for every language. We wonder, for example, what happens to migrants and their multilingual competences , especially when evaluated against competences in the locally dominant language? As it happens, any linguistic competence is valued every so often against competences in the local language , marking speakers as competent or deficient, irrespective of their overall linguistic repertoire. Moreover, while it is difficult to assess concisely the importance of language competences for individual professional success stories, it seems informative to contextualise the question of conversion potential of language competences in the framework of unemployment—especially in comparison with other factors such as personal networks , professional qualifications , and soft skills . After all, unemployment is one of these exemplary moments where the potential conversion is highly contested and put to proof. The proposed correlation of language investment , employability , and professional success thus warrants a critical and empirical investigation in relation to the complex social, political, and economic process through which languages become valued, recognised, or ignored. It is our aim to provide such an investigation in this book. For this, we will raise the following empirical question: Under which conditions, in which contexts, and for whom does language investment actually constitute a key element for employability? Starting from this question, we will investigate the possibility, limits, and effects of what is considered ‘language investment ’, especially with regard to employability. For this aim, we turn to the specific context of the public employment service in the bilingual canton of Fribourg in Switzerland. The institutional framework of the public employment service provides a specific lens onto the complex of language investment and employability . In drawing on this specific case, we propose to rethink language investment and employability in political economic terms, that is, in a perspective that understands individuals as embedded in specific socio-political, economic, and institutional structures, which have to be integrated in research (see also Duchêne 2016).
1.1 Language Investment and Employability: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective
Seeing language investment and employability as the two core concepts for this study, we deem it appropriate to introduce the two concepts before turning to discuss how they relate to each other in the current public discourse. Both ‘investment’ and ‘employability’ have gained traction over the last few years in public and political discourse, hence becoming keywords in their own right, that is, as significant in two senses: as ‘binding words in certain activities and their interpretation’ and as ‘indicative words in certain forms of thought’ (Williams 1983, p. 15). When we approach such terms (as investment or employability) as keywords, ‘definitions’ as proposed in dictionaries or textbooks are understood once again as indexical of and contexualised in the current political economy, its power structures, and ‘particular formations of meaning’ (Williams 1983, p. 15). In the following, we will unpack these two terms separately in trying to understand what general meaning they entail, embedding our approach in the research tradition of critical sociolinguistics , but also drawing on work in interactional sociolinguistics , linguistic anthropology , the sociology of work , and other relevant disciplines.
1.1.1 Language Investment
The economic underpinnings of the concept ‘investment’ become evident when considering its general and most basic meaning to invest time, money, or some other resource with the expectation of benefits, that is, of a certain return on investment (see Coen and Eisner 1987 for a detailed description of the term from an economic perspective). The decision to invest is always made with the idea that it will pay off in the future and refigures the object of investment as something—or someone—with a certain potential. This is also central to human capital theory , according to which cost and benefit of investment is a fixed component in education policies (for example, Becker 1993 for how investment is conceptualised in human capital theory). From this perspective, language competences become human capital per se, that is, ‘individual knowledge components’, or skills (for example, Urciuoli 2008, for a critique). Actually, it appears as though language can be considered as two different forms of skills: as belonging to ‘soft skills ’, when communicative competences are at stake (in this case, often labelled as ‘communicative skills’)—or as belonging to ‘hard skills’, when a certain level of language competence is demanded for a certain position.
Yet, in directly (and critically) addressing the work of Becker (for example, 1993), Bourdieu argues (1986, pp. 243–244) that human capital theory (and ‘commonsense view’) sees ‘success or failure as an effect of natural aptitudes’. While also correlating such success (or failure) with monetary investments, ‘they [human capital theorists] are unaware that ability or talent is itself the product of an investment of time and cultural capital ’ (Bourdieu 1986, p. 244). In that, such a human capital perspective remains in a sphere of economic calculation and speculation without taking into account the different forms of capital an individual might have to their disposition. While Bourdieu is focusing on the context of school and academic success and failure, we propose to adopt his understanding of capital when discussing the processes of language investment in the context of the public employment service . According to Bourdieu (for example, 1986, p. 243), we need to differentiate between economic capital (that is, ‘immediately and directly convertible into money’) and c...