Abstract
This chapter discusses principles and concepts that underpin the construction of a sociolinguistic market in an age of globalisation. This metaphorical market is located in societies and speech communities. It significantly affects how language is perceived and what language is seen as valuable or not. It also influences the positionality of individuals in relation to how they project themselves in and through language. This chapter engages with conceptual constructs such as ‘the power to impose reception’, ‘political dominance’ and ‘the price of language’ (Bourdieu in Social Science Information 16: 645–668, 1977); the relationship between the core and the periphery (Wallerstein in Comparative Studies in Society and History 16: 387–415, 1974); the ‘exchange value’ (Heller in Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 101–114, 2010); and ‘linguistic stratification’ (Piller in Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice, Oxford University Press, 2016). These concepts are instrumental to theorising and conceptualising the metaphorical sociolinguistic market.
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Chapter Summary
In this chapter, I explained the principles underlying the sociolinguistic market and how it is socio-politically regulated during talk and interaction. This metaphorical market is configured through power dynamics. However, this does not mean that the market is pre-determined and that individuals have no room for agency and manoeuvre. While individuals’ agency is possible, it requires two types of linguistic competence: socio-pragmatic competence and communicative relativity. It also requires embracing a liquid understanding of identity so that individuals are able to strategically engage with the different interactional events they find themselves in. Indeed, language continues to be a site for struggle and a medium through which this struggle is enacted and actualised.
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Badwan, K. (2021). Language and the Sociolinguistic Market. In: Language in a Globalised World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77087-7_3
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