Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit

by Alexandre Duchene (Editor), Monica Heller (Editor)

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.

Genres: Linguistics

280 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2011

Reviews

[Isaberu · Rating 4 out of 5]

While some chapters where extremely interesting and insightful, I felt that others, while still interesting and well constructed, were not sufficiently related to the overall theme of 'pride and profit in language'. I felt this particularly reading some of the last ones. Still overall a good compilation of articles on critical sociolinguistics. Planning to re read some of them to properly digest all the information.

[Mai · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have serious concerns about the group of sociolinguists /linguistic anthropologists who group themselves under the "critical sociolinguistics" umbrella. They seem to do more social/critical theory than actual linguistics. You don't have to use quantitative methods to be called a linguist or sociolinguist but statistics is so useful and important that I can't fathom not using it while doing linguistics like these people. Of course, just because you have one or 2 gloss-over-able tables in your article doesn't mean you're more scientific and rigorous, tons of people add meaningless tables and statistics that contribute nothing to the deeping of the understanding of the subject. BUT the fact that most of these "critical sociolinguists" don't use quantitative methods (very often) makes me raise an eyebrow.

That being said, some of the ethnographies are very interesting. However, I'm concerned with how these researchers mobilize Bourdieu in this collection and elsewhere. The notion of linguistic market is mentioned 3 times only in this collection but among the critical sociolinguistics group it is taken for granted that Bourdieu is one of their big heritages. If his articles on language are cited abundantly in these researchers' works, I think it's fair to say that the way they understand and mobilize Bourdieu's theory is confined to very surface ideas and notions some of which are re-interpreted in a completely different way. Basically, despite what they say, I don't think they're very Bourdieusian and their understanding and application of his theory are just very shallow and not good, which is the case for most researchers from the English speaking world, by the way. But I have to give some props to them, I think they do good ethnographies, always very interesting and well written, especially Duchene and Heller. They're not bad at analyzing a situation, not bad qualitative researchers/ethnographers at all, but the theorization suffers deeply from lack of quantitaive methods and therefore goes in every direction without much of a leg to stand on. Like at this point, you're doing social/critical theory, not science but again, the ethnographies are good.

[Mike Mena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not one weak article in this collection. Powerfully illustrative book for linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics alike.