Language Learning as Linguistic Entrepreneurship: Implications for Language Education

Abstract

The growing emphasis on accountability, competitiveness, efficiency, and profit demonstrates how language education has been impacted by neoliberalism. To bring out the implications of neoliberalism on language education, we explore how language learning is increasingly constructed as a form of linguistic entrepreneurship, or an act of aligning with the moral imperative to strategically exploit language-related resources for enhancing one’s worth in the world. To critically examine the political conditions that promote such an ethical regime, we focus on how linguistic entrepreneurship can be indexed through two distinct aspects, the motivation for and the mode of language learning. We then discuss under what circumstances the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship might be invoked and what kind of contradictions this entails. We conclude by considering the implications for language policy and language education.