Language in Late Capitalism Pride and Profit [Paperback]

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.

1. Pride and profit: changing discourses of language, capital and nation-state Monica Heller and Alexandre Duch?ne2. Sociolinguistics regimes and the management of diversity Susan Gal  3. Commodification of pride and resistance to profit: language practices as terrain of struggle in a Swiss football stadium Alfonso Del Percio and Alexandre Duch?ne  4. Total Quality Language Revival Jacqueline Urla  5. Literary tourism: new appropriations of landscape and territory in Catalonia Joan Pujolar and Kathryn Jones 6. Pride, profit and distinction: negotiations across time and space in community language education Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese&lC1