The discourse of the edge: marginal advantage, positioning and linguistic entrepreneurship
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Joseph Lo Bianco
Abstract
This contribution discusses some links between the linguistics and the economics of the spirit of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism. Whether it is individuals or various social groupings, or even entire societies, a review of policies promoting self-investment in language ability links to a neoliberal economic and political ethos of competition, advantage, meritocracy, innovation and risk-taking; and thereby instantiates an essentially exchange and profit based understanding of communication. The depth and persistence of policy attaching personal and commodified gain to language merges with moral character judgements. I discuss four Asian studies of linguistic entrepreneurship, extracting common elements and differences, and then discuss the project of Asian engagement and language study in Australia. Applying the lens of linguistic entrepreneurship to Australia’s promotion of Asian languages reveals an entire project of national re-formation to foster integration into Asian regional economic and geopolitical arrangements. Much of this national project has been premised on reformulating core purposes of language study around the advantaging of individuals and the nation within an ethos of market competition. Australia’s ambition of national integration into Asia has achieved national consensus, reversing a long history of repudiation of the nation’s Asian geography, yet there are still persisting ideas of orientalism. This is particularly exposed in relation to how Asian Australians’ language skills are treated. Minority language maintenance of Asian languages has been construed as problematic, while Anglo-Australian learners’ acquisition of key trade languages of Asia is celebrated and admired. One result of this is that a considerable part of Australia’s Asia literacy project is in tension with its avowed aim of multiculturalism, which would value all language skills, those of maintenance as much as those of new learning.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Why linguistic entrepreneurship?
- “Our graduates will have the edge”: Linguistic entrepreneurship and the discourse of Mandarin enrichment centers in Singapore
- “We contribute to the development of South Korea”: Bilingual womanhood and politics of bilingual policy in South Korea
- Regimes of linguistic entrepreneurship: neoliberalism, the entanglement of language ideologies and affective regime in language education policy
- Problematizing enterprise culture in global academic publishing: Linguistic entrepreneurship through the lens of two Chinese visiting scholars in a U.S. university
- Linguistic entrepreneurship: Common threads and a critical response
- The discourse of the edge: marginal advantage, positioning and linguistic entrepreneurship
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Why linguistic entrepreneurship?
- “Our graduates will have the edge”: Linguistic entrepreneurship and the discourse of Mandarin enrichment centers in Singapore
- “We contribute to the development of South Korea”: Bilingual womanhood and politics of bilingual policy in South Korea
- Regimes of linguistic entrepreneurship: neoliberalism, the entanglement of language ideologies and affective regime in language education policy
- Problematizing enterprise culture in global academic publishing: Linguistic entrepreneurship through the lens of two Chinese visiting scholars in a U.S. university
- Linguistic entrepreneurship: Common threads and a critical response
- The discourse of the edge: marginal advantage, positioning and linguistic entrepreneurship
