‘The growing neoliberalisation of language politics as a self-governing practice of social groups and individuals operates simultaneously with the current revival, if not defence, of nationalism across many European contexts and the concomitant changing powers of the nation state’ (5–6). Barakos’ book provides a timely case study on this coupling between neoliberalism and the resurgence of nationalism. The phenomenon is critically examined through the interactions between the governmental language policy and corporate language policies on the revitalisation of Welsh, shedding light on the ideological and practical tensions emerging from the Wales government's statutory-led approach vis-à-vis the global economic machine.
The study is guided by a rigorous framework based on the discourse-historical approach developed within the broad field of critical discourse studies (chapter 3). With this historically informed critical approach, the study examines the governmental and corporate language policy texts (referred to as mechanisms), the ideologies of bilingualism between English and Welsh materialised in the policy documents, and the practices developed within corporates in response to the governmental policy. The analysis centres on a selected collection of governmental and corporate language policy documents, a quantitative online survey on company policy and practices, and a set of interviews with company managers. Against the backdrop of a detailed historical review of the language policy in Wales (chapter 2), Barakos reveals through the analysis a trajectory of conceptual shift from the revitalisation of Welsh as a project fighting for language survival to a programme informed by nationalistic values in the governmental language policy, which transformed into a discourse of harnessing market value of the language in the corporate language policy (143).
The book unveils the tensions within this trend of conceptual transformation. First, the Welsh-English bilingual policies across the governmental and corporate domains are predicated upon an idealised vision of a ‘fully bilingual’ population having equally high competence in Welsh and English and can thus choose freely between using the two (146). This creates a dilemma in which, on the one hand, corporates hope to promote use in, and open up access to, both Welsh and English under this ideal of ‘parallel monolingualism’ (146); on the other hand, their bilingual policy has to be constrained in scope due to lack of Welsh-speaking staff and cost considerations (chapters 5 and 6). Second, while some companies may continue to see the promotion of Welsh as beneficial (e.g. in brand-building) or imperative (e.g. in practicing corporate social responsibility) despite these practical constraints, some others view it as inducing ineffective cost and burden in an English-dominant global market (chapter 7). This latter point suggests that the inequality between Welsh and English is not situated only within the language policy between Wales and the UK, but also the global linguistic marketplace.
By illuminating these tensions, this case study on corporate language policy in Wales brings further implications beyond the immediate object of Welsh-English bilingualism. It highlights the critical position of corporates as actors mediating between (inter)national and local language policies, caught between linguistic revitalisation and commodification, purism and instrumentalism, and nationalism and neoliberalism.
