Panel The Commodification of languages and speakers in late capitalism ‘The Sociolinguistics of Globalization: (De)centring and (de)standardization’ 3-6 June 2015 Hong Kong (original) (raw)
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It is the aim of this paper to examine the management of multilingualism in the Swiss healthcare industry and the negotiation of the oftentimes fluctuating and unstable value of linguistic resources in the care for medical tourists. Insights will be drawn from two research sites that are currently engaged in the care of international patients, a private medical clinic and spa I call Mountain Medical Resort as well as a public general hospital I call Lakeside Hospital. While both institutions offer to provide assistance and translation in a number of languages , this research primarily focuses on Russian as the language spoken by the largest share of medical tourists at both sites and in Switzerland as a whole. In particular, it is my aim to highlight how Russian as a linguistic resource is managed at Mountain Medical Resort and Lakeside Hospital to attend to visiting international patients. This will illustrate, which specific linguistic proficiencies are deemed valuable and how changes in market conditions and patient numbers have an impact on the commodity value of languages and that of Russian in particular. Here, it is the aim of this research to examine how, in which instances and under which conditions languages gain and may again lose a marketable value and how institutional policies react to that. This also implies to examine how the neoliberal transformation of healthcare is connected to the re-imagination of language as a commodified skill under current political-economic conditions. Exemplified by medical tourism as a key site of the global new economy and Russian as a potentially commodifiable linguistic resource, this will also leave us with broader implications on the changing regimes of value of languages and on the role of language in the neoliberal economy.
This paper examines the essential role played by language in the provision of services to facilitate interchanges between persons of different origins in order to enable not just the performance of these activities, but also to make it possible for the participants, who may not share cultural assumptions or values, to (re)negotiate their relations and identities. This is precisely a key sector in the new economies, and the way in which linguistic resources are managed by the multinational firms and other institutions of the developed world is reminiscent of colonial times, particularly in Spain. Within this frame, this paper focuses on the linguistic practices in some of these newly created institutional spaces in the service sector, particularly in settings where Spanish has a role to play. The analysis of linguistic policies and interactions shows how, depending on whether they concern public/private service-providers, participants mobilise their linguistic resources to (re) construct different relations and meanings within these varying institutional settings. The paper also examines how multilingualism is managed in these institutional encounters. In this context, tensions between the reproduction of a monolingual ideology of 'one state -one language' and the actual multilingual practices inevitably arise, making the unravelling of these new linguistic landscapes a challenge. It is the institutions, not the users, that decides how linguistic resources have to be managed, and several pieces of evidence of the lack of adaptation to user' s needs are supplied, which can be seen as part of an ethnocentric approach corresponding to the values of the host community. Such a sociolinguistic order shapes interaction and reinforces asymmetries. The analysis also shows the active involvement of social actors who can reproduce as well as challenge this sociolinguistic order.
Linguistic commodification in tourism
Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2012 in Switzerland, Catalonia and different zones of francophone Canada in sites related to heritage and cultural tourism, we argue that tourism, especially in multilingual peripheries, is a key site for a sociolinguistic exploration of the political economy of globalization. We link shifts in the role of language in tourism to shifts in phases of capitalism, focusing on the shift from industrial to late capitalism, and in particular on the effects of the commodification of authenticity. We examine the tensions this shift generates in ideologies and practices of language, concerned especially with defining the nature of the tourism product, its public and market, and the management of the tourism process. This results in an as yet unresolved destabilization of hitherto hegemonic discourses linking languages to cultures, identities, nations and States.
ABSTRACT: The globalizing process, as well as the industries of tourism, rests on the needs of adopting a "lingua franca" in order for nations to understand each other. Historically, empires have interposed their own language as a sign of civilization, and education. What is equally important, ruling elite tried systematically to incorporate foreign language to distinguish themselves from lower classes. French aristocracy spoke Russian with fluency, while the British ruling elite was enthusiastic in speaking French. Roman aristocrats devoted serious resources to improve their Greek. The imposition of a lingua franca, no matter than its nature, divides the world in two parts, the native and the non-native speakers. This conceptual essay-review enumerated and analyzed a set of problems which revolve around the adoption of English as a global language in the constellations. We hold the thesis that tourism research replicates the same epistemological model originated in the economic-based paradigm, incorporating a business English grammar. Nowadays, English acts as a gatekeeper marking the radical selection in the papers quality. Echoing Dann and Gretzel, English has cemented a centralized form of production which excludes many other voices and knowledge while shaping the Anglophone hegemony over other idioms. The commercial-based vision is leading the epistemology of tourism to a gridlock very hard to reverse. We offer a diagnosis on a short study-case based on the CONICET repository and the ethical dilemmas around the paid-for journals and editorial rankings. The expansion of great publishers worldwide and the concentration of financial resources in Anglophone editorial in-house publishers have been successfully supported by English as a global tongue, locating English speaking scholars as the masters of a game where the non-English speakers will never win. The monolinguism, far from embracing universal theories, is ultimately ended to protect the dominant discourse orchestrated by the economic-centered theory. Keywords: Tourism Research, English, Epistemology, Hospitality. RESUMEN: El proceso de globalización, como así también la industria del turismo, ha descansado en la necesidad de adoptar un idioma como lengua franca con la finalidad última que las naciones puedan comunicarse entre sí. Los imperios, históricamente, han impuesto sus propias lenguas como un signo civilizatorio, pero lo que es más importante, en el mismo momento, sus respetivas elites adoptaban un idioma extranjero para distinguirse de la plebe. La aristocracia francesa adoptaba el ruso, a la vez que los británicos hablaban el francés con fluidez. Asimismo, los romanos no disimulaban su gusto por el griego. En este sentido, la imposición de un lenguaje común divide el mundo en dos, los nativos y los no nativos del idioma. En este ensayo discutimos las limitaciones y problemas que tiene la adopción del inglés como lengua franca dentro de los estudios turísticos. Nuestra tesis es que el inglés instrumentaliza una nueva epistemología centrada en el negocio y en una perspectiva económico-céntrica del turismo. En la actualidad, el inglés no solo es un problema para miles de investigadores no nativos, sino que funciona como el órgano de control de la calidad de los papers científicos en turismo. La discusión continúa la línea esbozada por Graham Dann y Ulrike Gretzel con un perfil crítico. Como estudio de caso final, exponemos los obstáculos del CONICET, organismo científico argentino para crear y sostener un repositorio digital con vistas a la publicación de trabajos científicos en revistas de categoría superior. El inglés como lengua franca deja a muchas otras veces sin posibilidad de ser oídas, al momento que alimenta la capacidad discursiva del mercado editorial, hoy monopolizado por los países angloparlantes. Palabras claves: Investigación Turística, Inglés, Epistemología, Hospitalidad.
Language, medical tourism and the enterprising self
Multilingua, 2020
This paper aims to demonstrate the implications of health mobility on language practices in the medical tourism industry in India and on the ways, language workers become entrepreneurs. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork that traces the trajectories of three former students of Russian, we highlight their future aspirations as language learners and entrepreneurs and show, how they attempt to capitalize on language skills and respond to changing conditions and patient movements within the structures, constraints and uncertainties of the linguistic market. Here, it is our aim to illustrate what it takes to become an enterprising and successful language worker and at the same time highlight their current positioning as emblematic yet subordinate figures within a fast-growing service industry in an emerging economy. We further demonstrate, how language skills not only become commodities to serve existing or future markets, but instead are recast as tools that can be strategically employ...
Elite Multilingualism. Discourses, practices, and debates
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2019
In the introduction to the special issue ‘Elite Multilingualism: Discourses, practices, and debates’, we focus on ‘elite multilingualism’ as a means to provide a window into the complex layers and nuances of today’s multilingual, mobile and global society. Our aims here are to provide an empirical and conceptual discussion of a growing language-centred elitism. We also aim to expand current scholarship on the construction, valuation and instrumentalisation of multilingualism, and its consequences for the formation of social boundaries and inequalities. We first discuss major concepts such as the notion of elite/ness and multilingualism, commodification, authenticity and hierarchies and the linguistic market in a global knowledge economy. We also discuss the critical sociolinguistic, discourse and ethnographic approaches that frame this special issue and go on to outline the diverse manifestations of elite multilingualism in different educational and social settings. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on the value of the concept of elite multilingualism as a social practice, and argue for the importance of examining the lived experience of multilinguals on the ground.
Peter Tan and Rani Rubdy, eds. 2008. Language As Commodity: Global Structures, Local Marketplaces
English World-Wide, 2010
Reviewed by Zhichang Xu This volume comprises an "Introduction" by Peter K. W. Tan and Rani Rubdy and 12 contributions, commissioned as chapters, primarily based on the original papers presented at a forum organized by the Singapore Association for Applied Linguistics (SAAL). The overarching theme of the volume is the exploration of the issues surrounding treating languages as commodities. In this volume, as stated in the "Preface", the editors and contributors "seek to engage with the issue of the articulation of language policies and positions in relation to the role and function these languages have in the context of particular communities" (p. xiv). The communities, regions and nation-states under investigation in this volume include Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, China, Africa's urban communities, young Londoners from South Asian backgrounds, and Australia. The languages involved in the contributions include English and its many regional varieties, Chinese and its dialects, a number of Asian languages, including Malay, Tamil, Filipino, Punjabi, Urdu, Japanese, and African languages, including Hausa, Igbo, Setswana, Yoruba, and Zulu. Dhir and Savage (2002: 1) claimed that "linguists have long attempted to assess the economic value of language as a commodity, but with little success"; however, this volume is a substantial attempt to view language as commodity with a focus on global social and economic structures and local marketplaces in Asia, Africa, certain parts of Europe and Australia. Indeed, many scholars (e.g. Dor 2004; Tam, Yip and Dissanayake 2002) in recent years view the current world as a site of contestation between the global and the local. Such contestation has given rise to a new term-"glocalism". On the one hand, global businesses tend to think globally but act locally, as they are "gradually abandoning not only the attempt to uncover the universal predictive laws of the market, but also the utopia of an 'international lingua franca' and are looking at ways to penetrate local markets in their own languages" (Dor 2004: 102). "Such a mind-set has also generated a new cultural phenomenon, in the sense that the global has to be concretized in the local" (Tam, Yip and Dissanayake 2002: xi). The commodification of language has been a popular theme in language studies in recent years. Gimenez (2001: 296) points out that "the commodification of socio-cultural products such as language, universities,
Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2003
The globalized new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many dierent ways (cf., e.g. Bauman 1997;). These include emerging tensions between State-based and corporate identities and language practices, between local, national and supra-national identities and language practices, and between hybridity and uniformity. Ethnolinguistic minorities provide a particularly revealing window into these processes. In this paper, I explore ways in which the globalized new economy has resulted in the commodi®cation of language and identity, sometimes separately, sometimes together. The paper is based on recent ethnographic, sociolinguistic research in francophone areas of Canada.
Globalization, the new economy, and the commodi®cation of language and identity
The globalized new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many dierent ways (cf., e.g. Bauman 1997;). These include emerging tensions between State-based and corporate identities and language practices, between local, national and supra-national identities and language practices, and between hybridity and uniformity. Ethnolinguistic minorities provide a particularly revealing window into these processes. In this paper, I explore ways in which the globalized new economy has resulted in the commodi®cation of language and identity, sometimes separately, sometimes together. The paper is based on recent ethnographic, sociolinguistic research in francophone areas of Canada.
The Commodification of Language
Annual Review of Anthropology, 2010
Although language can always be analyzed as a commodity, its salience as a resource with exchange value has increased with the growing importance of language in the globalized new economy under the political economic conditions of late capitalism. This review summarizes how and in which ways those conditions have a commodifying effect on language and focuses on contemporary tensions between ideologies and practices of language in the shift from modernity to late modernity. It describes some of these tensions in key sites: tourism, marketing, language teaching, translation, communications (especially call centers), and performance art.