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15 results

  • 6 - Treating language as an economic resource: Discourse, data and debate

  • from Part II - Language, markets and materiality
  • Edited by Nikolas Coupland, University of Wales College of Cardiff
  • Book:
    Sociolinguistics
    Published online:
    05 June 2016
    Print publication:
    20 June 2016, pp 139-156

  • Summary

    Can language be a commodity?

    In recent years, along with other colleagues, we have developed arguments that language is increasingly treated as a commodity in late capitalism (Tan and Rubdy 2008; Heller 2010; Duchêne and Heller 2012; Park and Wee 2012). This argument has been the subject of three major types of critique: The first comes from linguistic minority theorists, the second from the field of “language economics,” and the third from Marxist approaches to language and commodification. We begin by briefly summarizing our argument and by making explicit the assumptions behind it, specifically those that orient us to the material we discuss in ways which differ from those of our critics (rendering straightforward ‘debate’ actually quite difficult). We conclude with a discussion of how the consideration of whether language (or, as we prefer to say, communicative resources) can be commodified opens questions for further research.

    We should begin by saying that one thing that frequently arises as an issue in these debates is what idea of language underlies them. We draw on Bourdieu (1982) to argue that language can be understood as a social practice that consists of circulating communicative resources. Those resources are modes of meaning-making that include social organization and therefore lie at the heart of the ways in which the social, cultural, political, and economic are inherently intertwined. Having said that, we need to recognize that the processes of commodification we claim to observe usually are based on a quite different idea of what language is; namely, they draw on the idea of language as an autonomous system that can be constructed both as an emblem of authentic identity and as a technical skill – an idea that crystallized around industrial capitalism and its connection to the nation-state (Heller 2007). Our critics, as we shall see, themselves grapple with the question of the ontological status of language, albeit not necessarily from the same position as each other or from the position that we authors adopt.

    The next section details how our ideas about linguistic commodification emerged in an attempt to account for phenomena we saw emerging as we were looking at something else.

  • Sociolinguistics: Theory

  • Monica Heller
  • Journal:
    Annual Review of Applied Linguistics / Volume 5 / March 1984
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    26 February 2009, pp. 46-58

  • In 1980, in this journal, Joshua Fishman presented the major theoretical issue in sociolinguistics as being the link between microsociolinguistic and macrosociolinguistic processes. In 1984 that is still the case, although the issue is receiving more explicit attention than it did four years ago.

    There are two branches of sociolinguistics which approach this issue in different ways. These two branches are interactionist and variationist sociolinguistics. Interactionist sociolinguistics is principally interested in what language use can tell us about social processes, and therefore a central concern is the social meaning of language use. Variationist sociolinguistics is interested in accounting for linguistic variation and change, at least partly as a product of the social distribution of language varieties. It is, therefore, less concerned with meaning as process, and more concerned with the interaction of linguistic and social systems; in this view the significance of language is mainly symbolic. In this review, I will discuss the contributions of these branches to the problem of the relationship between microsociolinguistics and macrosociolinguistics, as well as the theoretical problems peculiar to each branch.

  • 7 - Bilingualism

  • Edited by Christine Jourdan, Concordia University, Montréal, Kevin Tuite, Université de Montréal
  • Book:
    Language, Culture, and Society
    Published online:
    16 November 2009
    Print publication:
    11 May 2006, pp 156-167

  • Summary

    Why worry about bilingualism?

    The first question that needs to be asked in a book like this is why this chapter is here at all. How did it come to pass that a concept like “bilingualism” got constituted as an area of enquiry for ethnolinguistics? I will begin here with a consideration of that question as one that is fundamentally about language ideologies, and then go on in the rest of the chapter to explore some of the specific questions that flowed, in my view necessarily, from an understanding of languages as being whole, bounded objects tied to whole bounded social and political units like ethnic groups, nations or states. Bilingualism (a term I will use here to cover multilingualism as well) is an affront to this idea, or at best a puzzle needing to be solved. As a result, academic work on the subject has tended to focus on explorations of the way bilingualism tests our ideas either of language or of social and political categories. One set of questions addresses whether or not bilingualism challenges linguistic theories linked to the idea of language as autonomous and whole; another examines the relationship between bilingualism and the construction of categories like ethnicity, or the nation (or the nation-State), understood as homogeneous and bounded entities, as well as with related categories or concepts, such as community or identity, all of which are central to ethnolinguistic enquiry.

  • Community and commodity in French Ontario

  • GABRIELE BUDACH, SYLVIE ROY, MONICA HELLER
  • Journal:
    Language in Society / Volume 32 / Issue 5 / November 2003
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 January 2004, pp. 603-627
    Print publication:
    November 2003

  • Linguistic minority movements have long adopted dominant discourses linking language and community. Analysis of two sites of discursive production in francophone Canada (literacy centers and a call center workplace in Ontario) shows that current socioeconomic changes challenge those discourses. Language and community are uncoupled and redefined as commodities with exchange value in the globalized market for services and information. “Community” serves mainly to legitimize struggles for privileged access to newly commodified linguistic and cultural resources.

  • John Edwards (ed.), Language in Canada. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi, 504.

  • Monica Heller
  • Journal:
    Language in Society / Volume 29 / Issue 2 / April 2000
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 April 2000, pp. 297-299
    Print publication:
    April 2000

  • This volume is meant as a companion piece to three previous volumes published by Cambridge on language in various parts of the English-speaking world (the volume on the United States, edited by Charles Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath, appeared in 1981, followed in 1984 by one on the British Isles edited by Peter Trudgill, and in 1991 by a volume on Australia edited by Suzanne Romaine). This collection contains 26 short articles, divided into three sets. The first set attempts to provide an overview of sociolinguistic issues in Canada from historical, demographic, and policy perspectives. The second set treats aboriginal languages and the two official languages, French and English; this set includes two articles on language teaching – restricted, however, to the teaching of international languages, mainly as first languages, and to the teaching of French as a second language through immersion methods. The third set offers language profiles of each of Canada's ten provinces, as well as of its two (now three) territories. The organization of the book is meant to provide different angles on sociolinguistic issues in Canada, but unfortunately the result too often is that material is either repeated or consistently left out.

  • 8 - Code-switching and the politics of language

    • By Monica Heller, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), Toronto
  • Edited by Lesley Milroy, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Pieter Muysken, Universiteit van Amsterdam
  • Book:
    One Speaker, Two Languages
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    17 August 1995, pp 158-174

  • Summary

    It's not always how you play the game, it's how you use the rules

    Introduction

    In 1977, the government of the province of Quebec passed Bill 101, a law to affirm and support French as the official and dominant language of the province. This law was a key element in Francophones' strategy to overcome two centuries of domination by English-speakers, and it touched on many domains, notably government, education and the workplace. Among other things, it required practitioners of certain professions (such as pharmacy, nursing, engineering) to demonstrate adequate knowledge of French in order to be licensed to practice. For some, this meant passing tests of French proficiency created and administered by the government.

    In 1978, an English-speaking gentleman arrived at the office where these tests were administered and presented himself at the front desk, where the receptionist was chatting in French with a co-worker. He asked the receptionist, ‘Could you tell me where the French test is?’ The receptionist responded in French, ‘Pardon?’ The man repeated his request in English, ‘Could you tell me where the French test is?’ The receptionist asked, ‘En français?’ The man replied, ‘I have the right to be addressed in English by the government of Quebec according to Bill 101.’ The receptionist turned to her colleague and asked, ‘Qu'est-ce qu'il dit?’ (‘What's he saying?’). In the end, both parties won: the man got his information without having to speak French, and the receptionist was able to show him the right direction without having to speak English.

  • Language choice, social institutions, and symbolic domination

  • Monica Heller
  • Journal:
    Language in Society / Volume 24 / Issue 3 / June 1995
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 February 2009, pp. 373-405
    Print publication:
    June 1995

  • The study of language choice and code-switching can illuminate the ways in which, through language, social institutions with ethnolinguistically diverse staff and clients exercise symbolic domination. Using the example of French-language minority education in Ontario (Canada), this article examines the ways in which ethnic and institutional relations of power overlap or crosscut, forming constraints which have paradoxical effects. In an analysis of two classrooms, it is shown how an ideology of institutional monolingualism is supported or undermined by program structure, curriculum content, and the social organization of turn-taking, and how individuals use language choices and code-switching to collaborate with or resist these arrangements. The effect of these processes is to contain paradoxes and to produce new relations of power within the school. (Symbolic domination, choice of language, code-switching, French/English language contact, social institutions, Canada)

  • 7 - Negotiations of language choice in Montreal

  • Edited by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Language and Social Identity
    Published online:
    24 November 2009
    Print publication:
    20 January 1983, pp 108-118

  • Summary

    Something strange is going on in Montreal. Every encounter between strangers, however casually, especially in public places but by no means exclusively, has become a political act. Buying a pair of socks has become problematic, as witnessed by the following article from The Montreal Star of January 26, 1978, reporting one person's frustration:

    The other day I walked into a department store and had a conversation which made me feel foolish. It was also frustrating … It's the kind of conversation I have an awful lot nowadays … The conversation always goes something like this:

    I walk up to the counter, intent on buying some socks. “Bonjour,” says the woman behind the counter, smiling. “Est-ce que je peux vous aider?” “Oui,” I smile back. “Je voudrais acheter des bas comme ca.” I point to some socks on display in the showcase. “En beige, s'il vous plaît.” “Yes, of course, Madame,” she responds in English. “What size?” “Er …” I pause, “nine and a half, please.”

    Our transaction continues smoothly and I thank her and leave the store. But inwardly, the whole time this pleasant bilingual woman is fishing my socks out of the showcase and putting them in a bag and taking the money, I am cursing. Dammit, I want to say. […]