ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |21 pages

Pride and Profit

Changing Discourses of Language, Capital and Nation-State

chapter |30 pages

Commodification of Pride and Resistance to Profit

Language Practices as Terrain of Struggle in a Swiss Football Stadium

chapter |23 pages

Literary Tourism

New Appropriations of Landscape and Territory in Catalonia 1

chapter |26 pages

Pride, Profit and Distinction

Negotiations Across Time and Space in Community Language Education

chapter |22 pages

Frontiers and Frenchness

Pride and Profit in the Production of Canada

chapter |24 pages

The Making of “Workers of the World”

Language and the Labor Brokerage State

chapter |23 pages

Language Workers

Emblematic Figures of Late Capitalism 1

chapter |31 pages

Silicon Valley Sociolinguistics?

Analyzing Language, Gender and Communities of Practice in the New Knowledge Economy 1