Volume 40, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Multilingualism, language education, and linguistic entrepreneurship: Critical perspectives; Guest Editors: Peter I. De Costa, Joseph Sung-Yul Park and Lionel Wee

This introduction builds on De Costa et al.’s (2016], [2019) notion of linguistic entrepreneurship, which is defined as “the act of aligning with the moral imperative to strategically exploit language-related resources for enhancing one’s worth in the world” (2016: 696). The four empirical studies and two critical commentaries that constitute this special issue explain the relevance of this construct and explore how it is instantiated in a range of formal and informal educational contexts across the world. Specifically, we explain how linguistic entrepreneurship serves as a unique and innovative contribution to the existing body of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and language policy research on neoliberalism.

Although Singapore schools are English-medium, Mandarin is a compulsory subject for students of Chinese heritage. As young Singaporeans increasingly speak English at home, the required study of Mandarin has become a source of anxiety for families. Mandarin ‘enrichment centers’, which provide supplementary language classes, leverage this anxiety in various ways, from promising top exam results to highlighting non-traditional pedagogical approaches. This analysis draws on data from the websites of 14 such centers, focusing on how these programs position learners in relation to the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship (De Costa et al. 2016). We identify three broad classes of enrichment center: Traditional, Modern Traditional, and Anti-Traditional, each offering distinct imaginings of the learner as linguistic entrepreneur. Traditional centers highlight academic achievement, promising ‘exam-focused’ strategies to optimize school performance. Modern Traditional centers, in contrast, frame enrichment as an elite lifestyle choice, emphasizing exclusivity and luxury. Finally, Anti-Traditional centers distance themselves from conventional pedagogy, and invoke notions of holistic, experiential learning. Across these categories, we observe a common discourse of Mandarin learning as a character-building struggle, in which centers provide unique resources enabling learners to survive the Singapore education system and emerge as ideal neoliberal subjects who have maximized their potential.

Global flows of migration to South Korea bring a new challenge of how to negotiate the identities of migrants. Unlike other reported cases that reframe the value of migrants’ first language as part of contingent practices of diversity management, the South Korean government has responded to this challenge by explicitly reframing so-called damunhwa mothers (foreign women married to Korean men) as bilingual workers, imagining them as self-governed, autonomous workers whose linguistic capital can be mobilized for the betterment of South Korean society. The government’s adoption of linguistic entrepreneurship and ethnocentric nationalism becomes particularly salient in this process. This paper studies how four damunhwa mothers respond to this new bilingual worker identity as promoted in the bilingual policy texts. We examine the ways in which they negotiate their bilingual worker identities by echoing the government’s new linguistic nationalism and linguistic entrepreneurship on the one hand, and by problematizing the insecure job markets, stratified linguistic needs, lack of systematic training for bilingual instructors, and native Korean’s misunderstanding of their new roles on the other. Finally, we discuss the implications of Korea’s bilingual policy, elaborating on the significance of linguistic entrepreneurship in language policy planning and practice and calling for more reflective accounts of ecological and translingual policy implementation in Korea.

This article explores how the ideologies of neoliberal linguistic entrepreneurship have created ethical tensions and contentious affects among Indigenous communities in promoting multilingualism and multilingual education. Taking the case of Nepal, our goal is to show how imperatives and characteristics that are articulated as key parts of neoliberalism are systematically perpetuated and appropriated in language education policies and discourses. We draw our data from interviews, ethnographic observation and instructional practices in the classroom. The article makes two major claims regarding how the neoliberal ideology of linguistic entrepreneurship has shaped the perceptions and practices of Indigenous peoples in a rapidly transforming society. First, it shows that the promotion of the English language in education should be understood as a key element of neoliberal educational entrepreneurship that considers education as a profit-making entity. And, second, the ideology of linguistic entrepreneurship is an embodiment of a broader neoliberal atmosphere to create an affective regime by which the feelings of collective identity and Indigenous language activism are trivialized and the affects that are perceived to empower a neoliberal subject are promoted. The new affective regime eventually contributes to translating the global dominance of English into a medium of instruction policy at the local level and supports English medium education as a market commodity.

The global spread of English has made it the dominant language in academic publishing (Hyland, Ken. 2015. Academic Publishing: Issues and Challenges in the Construction of Knowledge . Oxford: Oxford University Press). Influenced by enterprise culture, scholars from peripheral non-Western countries face mounting pressure to publish in English (Curry, Marry Jane & Theresa Lillis (eds.). 2017. Global academic publishing: Policies, perspectives and pedagogies . Bristol, UK: Multilingual matters). The English academic publishing industry has also ballooned in China (Tian, Mei, Yan Su & Xin Ru. 2016. Perish or publish in China: Pressures on young Chinese scholars to publish in internationally indexed journals. Publications 4(2). 9.). In response to the Chinese government’s commitment to developing world-class universities and disciplines to enhance the internationalization of its higher education system, local Chinese scholars are increasingly encouraged to produce research that has international impact, as well as to engage in international academic exchange and cooperation arrangements (Li, Yongyan & Guangwei Hu. 2018. Collaborating with management academics in a new economy: Benefits and challenges. Publications 6. 1–17). In seeking academic collaboration, a growing number of Chinese academics have participated in visiting scholar programs offered by western-based universities. In light of this emergent phenomenon, this study explores how Chinese visiting scholars, driven by an ethical imperative to enhance human capital at “neoliberal universities” (Holborow, Marnie. 2013. Applied linguistics in the neoliberal university: Ideological keywords and social agency. Applied Linguistics Review 4(2). 229–257), exploited language-related resources available to them to succeed in English academic publishing. Data, which include in-depth interviews, social media posts, journals, resumes and manuscripts that were in press at academic journals, were collected from two Chinese professors who took part in a one-year visiting scholar program in the U.S. university. Our findings revealed that under the mounting expectations to publish in English-dominated SSCI journals, our focal participants enacted linguistic entrepreneurial practices.

The impact of neoliberalism on language education has recently attracted scholars' attention. Linguistic entrepreneurship is a conceptual lens through which neoliberal implications for language learning and use can be investigated. This commentary offers comments on common threads of themes running through the four articles in this special issue. While neoliberal ideas provide people with hopes and desires to socioeconomically succeed through management of their linguistic resources, the neoliberal system reproduces inequalities for language learners, teachers, and users as well as for multiple languages. However, the perceived superior status of English that often serves as the foundation for linguistic entrepreneurship is considered to be a social imagination, given the complexity of global geopolitics and the multiple directions of global human mobility. Also, the neoliberal engagement with linguistic entrepreneurship-such as commodified language learning or writing in English for academic publication-often deviates from the genuine aims of learning and research. Such deviation also applies to our own scholarly activities. This recognition encourages us to explore how subversive actions can be made possible for not only language learners/users but also researchers ourselves.

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.