Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies

Many linguistic minorities have shifted in the last few years from producing political discourses appealing to rights within State structures, to economic discourses focused on the "added value" of minority languages (although universalizing discourses of human rights are also of increasing importance). In this talk I will focus on one example of such a shift, based on fieldwork in francophone Canada, showing how changing political economic conditions (in particular, a shift to the globalized tertiary-sector new economy) are linked to new practices, new legitimizing discourses, and struggles over how to define who counts as a francophone, what counts as bilingualism, and what counts as French, as well as over who gets to decide. These struggles involve the commodification of language and of authenticity, and debates over the role of both in the legitimizing of different positions in the emergent discursive struggle.