While "economic forces" are often cited as being a key cause of language loss, there is very little research that explores this link in detail. This work, based on policy analysis and ethnographic data, addresses this deficit. It examines how neoliberalism, the dominant economic orthodoxy of recent decades, has impacted the vitality of Irish in the Republic of Ireland since 2008. Drawing on concepts well established in public policy studies, but not prominent in the subfield of language policy, the neoliberalisation of Irish-language support measures is charted, including the disproportionately severe budget cuts they received. It is argued that neoliberalism’s antipathy towards social planning and redistributive economic policies meant that supports for Irish were inevitably hit especially hard in an era of austerity. Ethnographic data from Irish-speaking communities reinforce this point and illustrate how macro-level economic disruptions can affect language use at the micro-level. Labour market transformations, emigration and the dismantling of community institutions are documented, along with many related developments, thereby highlighting an issue of relevance to communities around the world, the fundamental tension between neoliberalism and language revitalisation efforts.

While "economic forces" are often cited as being a key cause of language loss, there is very little research that explores this link in detail. This work, based on policy analysis and ethnographic data, addresses this deficit. It examines how neoliberalism, the dominant economic orthodoxy of recent decades, has impacted the vitality of Irish in the Republic of Ireland since 2008. Drawing on concepts well established in public policy studies, but not prominent in the subfield of language policy, the neoliberalisation of Irish-language support measures is charted, including the disproportionately severe budget cuts they received. It is argued that neoliberalism’s antipathy towards social planning and redistributive economic policies meant that supports for Irish were inevitably hit especially hard in an era of austerity. Ethnographic data from Irish-speaking communities reinforce this point and illustrate how macro-level economic disruptions can affect language use at the micro-level. Labour market transformations, emigration and the dismantling of community institutions are documented, along with many related developments, thereby highlighting an issue of relevance to communities around the world, the fundamental tension between neoliberalism and language revitalisation efforts.

This book responds to recent criticisms that the research and theorization of multilingualism on the part of applied linguists are in collusion with neoliberal policies and economic interests. While acknowledging that neoliberal agencies can appropriate diverse languages and language practices, including resources and dispositions theorized by scholars of multilingualism, it argues that a distinction must be made between the different language ideologies informing communicative practices. Those of neoliberal agencies are motivated by distinct ideological orientations that diverge from the theorization of multilingual practices by critical applied linguists. In addressing this issue, the book draws on the author’s empirical research on skilled migration to demonstrate how sub-Saharan African professionals in English-dominant workplaces in the UK, USA, Australia, and South Africa resist the neoliberal communicative expectations and employ alternate practices informed by critical dispositions. These practices have the potential to transform neoliberal orientations on material development. The book labels the latter as informed by a postcolonial language ideology, to distinguish them from those of neoliberalism. While neoliberal agencies approach languages as being instrumental for profit-making purposes, the author’s informants focus on the synergy between languages to generate new meanings and norms, which are strategically negotiated in pursuit of ethical interests, inclusive interactions, and holistic ecological development. As such, the book clearly illustrates that the way critical scholars and multilinguals relate to language diversity is different from the way neoliberal policies and agencies use multilingualism for their own purposes.

Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.

This edited volume presents an empirical account of how neoliberal ideas are adopted on the ground by different actors in different educational settings, from bilingual education in the US, to migrant work programmes in Italy, to minority language teaching in Mexico. It examines language and education as objects of neoliberalization and as powerful tools and sites through which ideological principles underpinning neoliberal societies and economies are (re)produced and maintained (and with that, inequality and exclusion). This book aims to produce a complex understanding of how neoliberal rationalities are articulated within locally anchored and historical regimes of knowledge on language, education and society.

Against a background of the ongoing crisis of global capitalism and the fracturing of the neoliberal project, this book provides a detailed account of the ways in which language is profoundly imbricated in the neoliberalising of the fabric of social life. With chapters from a cast list of international scholars covering topics such as the commodification of education and language, unemployment, and the governmentality of the self, and discussion chapters from Monica Heller and Jackie Urla bringing the various strands together, the book ultimately helps us to understand how language is part of political economy and the everyday making and remaking of society and individuals. It provides both a theoretical framework and a significant methodological "tool-box" to critically detect, understand, and resist the impact of neoliberalism on everyday social spheres, particularly in relation to language. Presenting richly empirical studies that expand our understanding of how neoliberalism as a regime of truth and as a practice of governance performs within the terrain of language, this book is an essential resource for researchers and graduate students in English language, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and related areas.