When linguistic capital isn’t enough. Personality development and English speakerhood as capital in India
Loading...
Authors
Author (Corporation)
Publication date
2021
Typ of student thesis
Course of study
Collections
Type
04A - Book part
Editors
Editor (Corporation)
Supervisor
Parent work
The commodification of language. Conceptual concerns and empirical manifestations
Special issue
DOI of the original publication
Link
Series
Series number
Volume
Issue / Number
Pages / Duration
127-143
Patent number
Publisher / Publishing institution
Routledge
Place of publication / Event location
London
Edition
Version
Programming language
Assignee
Practice partner / Client
Abstract
Discourses of development, as well as popular understandings, hold that access to education in English is essential for alleviating inequality. As such, since the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, India has witnessed a boom in not only private English coaching, but also NGO educational institutions. However, drawing on ethnographic data from an English and soft-skills training NGO in Delhi, this chapter argues that the conceptualization of linguistic capital does not fully capture how students invest in English in the hope of achieving future success. Besides the speculative capital (Tabiola & Lorente, 2017) that the language represents, and the shaping of neoliberal subjectivities through soft-skill training (Urciuoli, 2008; Allan, 2013) and “personality development”, students equally invest in the cultural capital of English speakerhood, that is, the “doing” and “being” of an English speaker, a notion deeply intertwined with class and caste, and which extends to encompass students’ bodies and “personalities”.
Keywords
Event
Exhibition start date
Exhibition end date
Conference start date
Conference end date
Date of the last check
ISBN
978-0-367-46408-0
978-0-367-46407-3
978-1-003-02858-1
978-0-367-46407-3
978-1-003-02858-1
ISSN
Language
English
Created during FHNW affiliation
No
Strategic action fields FHNW
Publication status
Published
Review
Expert editing/editorial review
Open access category
Closed
License
Citation
Highet, K., & Del Percio, A. (2021). When linguistic capital isn’t enough. Personality development and English speakerhood as capital in India. In J. E. Petrovic & B. Yazan (Eds.), The commodification of language. Conceptual concerns and empirical manifestations (pp. 127–143). Routledge. https://irf.fhnw.ch/handle/11654/48400