This edited volume expands our understanding of language commodification (LC) by focusing on several multilingual contexts through different social, methodological, and theoretical lenses, examining LC as a local political tool for maintaining economic and/or cultural identity. Several themes central to LC are discussed, including sociopolitical motivations for changes in LC, language policy (LP) success as linked to specific ideological narratives, de jure LPs versus de facto sociolinguistic realities, LPs as stratifying and unequally favoring linguistic communities, and the relative influence of local and international LC on LPs.
Paul Bruthiau (Ch. 1) highlights how applied linguists approach globalization, mainly portraying it as negative and linked to homogenization and assimilation, while its economic dimensions are often overshadowed or completely ignored. Acknowledging these dimensions, Bruthiau claims, might lead to different assessments of globalization. Chs. 2–5 focus on multilingual, multiethnic Singapore. First, offering a holistic picture of Singaporean LC and LP, Lionel Wee examines the socioeconomic and political factors behind linguistic instrumentalism and LPs. Wee describes a shift wherein mother tongues, traditionally holding cultural value and separating ethnic groups, are unequally recommodified as valuable to highlight conflicts between LP and non-Chinese communities' choice of Mandarin over ethnic mother-tongue training. Lubna Alsagoff next documents how language value changes, examining the historical development of Malay LP and LC, contrastively framed as an ethnic, national, and religious language.
Chung Huang Hoon explains the failure of Singapore's Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) as linked to the instrumental linguistic value Singlish holds as a local lingua franca, even though using Singlish gives Singaporeans unequal participation in globalization. Considering the role of input on acquisition, Ng Bee Chin then explores continued obstacles to the SGEM, given parents' pragmatic motivations to use languages they are not fully fluent in with their children.
Chs. 6–10 move beyond Singapore to explore sociolinguistically heterogeneous contexts in Asia and Africa. T. Ruanni F. Tupas discusses hierarchical LC in the Philippines as inextricably tied to global Filipino migrant labor and the government's role as a migration manager. Peter Tan explores how economic and identity narratives are unequally used to justify LP changes between the phase-out and subsequent reintroduction of English-medium education in Malaysia. Rani Rubdy then highlights how local LPs and LC ideologies are situated within a multifaceted complex of factors that collectively reinforce Indian socioeconomic divisions, while Agnes S. L. Lam & Wenfeng Wang explore the de facto reality behind Chinese LPs, wherein presumed bilingualism is instead commonly realized as tri/multilingualism, especially for minority speakers. In Ch. 10, which concludes the regional survey, Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu suggests that African LPs reincarnate colonialization as globalization and fail to commodify African languages because they are not tightly coupled with economic gain.
In the final two chapters, David Block (Ch. 11) first reorients readers by stepping back from framings of language shift as negative, presenting particular narratives that are ambivalent about the cultural, personal, and pragmatic effects of language loss. Finally, Michael Singh & Jinghe Han (Ch. 12) discuss the commodification of English training, which has led, in Australia, to LPs that value first-world, inner-circle varieties over World English varieties.
