Advocating commodification: an ethnographic look at the policing of Irish as a commercial asset

Sara C Brennan

doi:10.1007/s10993-017-9438-2

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two towns in the Republic of Ireland, this article explores the local negotiation, endorsement, and contestation of two community-level Irish language advocacy organizations’ attempts to regulate the use of Irish in business by mobilizing discourses of language commodification to position Irish as a commercial asset. I focus in particular on how local merchants’ positioning in relation to the promoted commodification of Irish articulates with the interplay of these policing efforts with the legacy of national language policy in Ireland. In the two towns, the State’s revitalization policy concerning the compulsory teaching of Irish in the national education system seemed to generate opportunities for encouraging merchant participation: the organizations’ emphasis on a mostly visual form of commercial Irish helped local merchants with bad memories of learning the language to circumvent them and those with more positive recollections to capitalize on them. In relation to the State’s language maintenance policy based on geographically demarcating Ireland’s traditionally Irish-speaking areas, each town’s distance from these regions seemed to influence local merchants’ endorsement of or resistance to the organizations’ attempts to promote the commodification of Irish. This discussion of the localized mobilization of widely circulating commodification discourses to convince business owners and managers of the added value of Irish thus highlights both the opportunities and challenges involved in situated efforts to police language for commodification.

Highlights

In their comparative study of language policing in minority language media contexts, Kelly-Holmes et al (2009) examine how institutionally-led language policies oriented towards the modern conception of homogenous speech communities and a parallel-monolingualism understanding of multilingualism (Heller 2006) co-exist with the contemporary emergence of more heteroglossic and polycentric language policing on the ground
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two towns in the Republic of Ireland, this article explores the local negotiation, endorsement, and contestation of two community-level Irish language advocacy organizations’ attempts to regulate the use of Irish in business by mobilizing discourses of language commodification to position Irish as a commercial asset
The two communitylevel Irish language advocacy organizations that will be the focus of this article both attempt to police the use of Irish within their local business communities by mobilizing the discourses of language commodification that have grown increasingly prominent worldwide under the politico-economic conditions of globalized late capitalism (Duchene and Heller 2012)

Summary

Introduction

In their comparative study of language policing in minority language media contexts, Kelly-Holmes et al (2009) examine how institutionally-led language policies oriented towards the modern conception of homogenous speech communities and a parallel-monolingualism understanding of multilingualism (Heller 2006) co-exist with the contemporary emergence of more heteroglossic and polycentric language policing on the ground. Drawing on semistructured interviews with the staff of AthMorG and BaileRuaG and with business owners, managers, and employees in Athmore and Ballyroe, combined with fieldnotes from participant observation and less formal interactions with local merchants, the following analyses will explore the tensions and opportunities generated by the co-existence of these policing practices promoting discourses of commodification with the legacy of national language policy in Ireland.

Results

Conclusion