Abstract
Abstract This paper aims to demonstrate the implications of health mobility on language practices in the medical tourism industry in India and on the ways, language workers become entrepreneurs. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork that traces the trajectories of three former students of Russian, we highlight their future aspirations as language learners and entrepreneurs and show, how they attempt to capitalize on language skills and respond to changing conditions and patient movements within the structures, constraints and uncertainties of the linguistic market. Here, it is our aim to illustrate what it takes to become an enterprising and successful language worker and at the same time highlight their current positioning as emblematic yet subordinate figures within a fast-growing service industry in an emerging economy. We further demonstrate, how language skills not only become commodities to serve existing or future markets, but instead are recast as tools that can be strategically employed to secure recognition and access to prestigious and lucrative professional networks. In doing so, this paper illustrates how linguistic value is produced in a service industry that to date only received little attention in sociolinguistic research.
Highlights
In a time when low standards and ineffectiveness of medical care continue to have devastating consequences on patients in India and beyond (Kruk et al 2018), the growing prominence of medical tourism and the availability of medical services across borders is indicative of larger structures of inequalities that frequently deny access to fundamental services such as healthcare or education
This characterizes the wider context of this paper that aims to demonstrate the implications of this form of health mobility on language practices in the medical tourism industry in India and on the ways, language workers become entrepreneurs who set out to capitalize on their language skills in the care for medical tourists
Cultivating one’s linguistic knowledge emerged as a central element of interpreting, consulting- and brokering work in the Delhi medical tourism industry
Summary
In a time when low standards and ineffectiveness of medical care continue to have devastating consequences on patients in India and beyond (Kruk et al 2018), the growing prominence of medical tourism and the availability of medical services across borders is indicative of larger structures of inequalities that frequently deny access to fundamental services such as healthcare or education. Multilingual repertoires come into view as indispensable tools that ensure market expansion and the creation of professional networks in current and future healthcare markets (Connell 2013; Muth 2017, 2018). This characterizes the wider context of this paper that aims to demonstrate the implications of this form of health mobility on language practices in the medical tourism industry in India and on the ways, language workers become entrepreneurs who set out to capitalize on their language skills in the care for medical tourists. This paper illustrates how linguistic value is produced in a service industry that to date only received little attention in sociolinguistic research
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