Linguistic Capital: A Rogue Concept?

1
Linguistic Capital A Rogue Concept?

• Martyn Hammersley
• CHDL/CREET

2
An Early Citing

• Writing about Karl Krauss work, Kafka suggests
  that it principally consists of Yiddish German
  mauscheln? no one can mauscheln like Kraus,
  although in this German-Jewish world of writing
  hardly anyone can do anything else. It
  consists of boisterously or secretively or even
  masochistically appropriating foreign capital,
  something not earned, but stolen . This is not
  to say anything against mauscheln in itself it
  is fine. It is an organic compound of bookish
  German and pantomime. (Kafka 1929)
• ? Anti-semitic term, one meaning of which is
  mumbling.

3
A Recent Commentary on Kafka

• Butler (20115) refers to the long and
  curious tradition of praise for Kafkas pure
  German. She comments so although Kafka was
  certainly Czech and Jewish, it seems this is
  superseded by his written German, which is
  apparently the most pure . She notes that,
  given Angela Merkels recent announcement of the
  failure of multiculturalism, admonishing new
  immigrants for failing to speak German correctly,
  Kafka could be a model of the successful
  immigrant. Does this mean he has stolen, earned,
  or purchased the required linguistic capital?

4
Linguistic Capital as a Liminal Concept or
Boundary Object

• It straddles the borders between the study of
  language and other disciplines, notably sociology
  and education. As Beasley-Murray remarks, it
  crosses anxiously controlled disciplinary
  borders (2000101)
• Of course, the concept of capital comes
  originally from economics an appeal to a high
  status social science?
• All the disciplines concerned are internally
  diverse, so potentially complex liminalities.

5
Conflict or Cooperation among Intellectual Fields?

• It is reasonable to believe that certain
  educational problems could be handled more
  successfully if educational researchers had a
  clearer understanding of the sociolinguistic
  forces at work in schools and classrooms (Stubbs
  198323)
• The division between linguistics and sociology
  is unfortunate and deleterious to both
  disciplines (Bourdieu in Wacquant 198947)

6
Some Problem Contexts

• Academic literacy/literacies in the university
  differences in background result in some students
  struggling and being judged to require remedial
  help because they lack the necessary linguistic
  capital. Is this justified?
• A meritocratic concern with social mobility
  differences in linguistic capability produce
  inequalities in educational achievement, and
  thereby in occupational destination - lack of the
  required linguistic capital causes relative
  failure?

7
The Case of Academic Literacies

• As is increasingly common in applied
  linguistics, academic literacies breaches the
  boundaries of a number of disciplines and
  subdisciplines (e.g. sociolinguistics,
  anthropology, linguistic anthropology).
• (Lillis and Scott 2007a3)
• The study of academic literacies is located at
  the juncture of research/theory and strategic
  application (Lillis and Scott 2007b20).

8
Bourdieus problem context

• How does the dominant class reproduce its
  dominant position within contemporary France?
• It reproduces its position across generations by
  turning its wealth into cultural (including
  linguistic) capital, inherited by its children,
  who can turn this into educational credentials,
  and then cash these for lucrative occupational
  positions.
• Furthermore, in this manner class domination is
  legitimated as the product of natural abilities
  plus effort, in other words as meritocratic.

9
Bourdieus Forms of Capital

• Physical Symbolic
• (i.e. financial) Social
• Embodied Objective Institutionalised
• Cultural Cultural Cultural
• Capital Capital Capital
• (Knowledge (Books, (Credentials)
• and skills) art works, etc)

10
Bourdieu on Linguistic Capital in the University

• Constrained to write in a badly understood
  and poorly mastered language, many students
  try to call up and reinstate the tropes, schemas
  or words which to them distinguish professorial
  language. Irrationally and irrelevantly, with an
  obstinacy that we might too easily mistake for
  servility, they seek to reproduce this discourse
  in a way which recalls the simplifications,
  corruptions and logical re-workings that
  linguists encounter in creolized languages
  (19944).

11
Linguistic Capital

• The capacity to speak particular languages.
• Linguistic attributes accent, dialect, etc.
• Capability in particular language forms, oral
  and/or written, appropriate to particular
  purposes.

12
A Plethora of Capitals

• Linguistic capital is only one of many
  phrases currently in use that distinguish
  varieties of capital.
• These include human, material, physical,
  cultural, social, scholastic, moral, ethnic,
  gender, urban, rural, subcultural, intellectual,
  informational, scientific, bodily, and spiritual
  capital.
• Sociologists have begun referring to virtually
  every feature of life as a form of capital
• (Baron and Hannan 19941122)

13
Capital as a Metaphor

• Linguistic capital and cultural capital are,
  of course, metaphors though Bourdieu denied this
  (Beasley-Murray 2000101).
• Some of the complexities of the concept arise
  from this fact, as well as from what Lynne
  Cameron (2002) has highlighted as the two-way
  interaction between the source of a metaphor
  and its application in a new context.
• However, even in its original disciplinary
  context the concept of capital is by no means
  straightforward in meaning.

14
A Brief History of the Concept of Capital in
Economics

• The commercial model
• Capital as financial resource.
• Investment loaning finance for a future
  monetary return.
• The production model
• Factors of production labour, land and
  capital.
• Investment production redirected to create
  capital rather than consumption goods, thereby
  increasing future production.

15
Human Capital

• Human capital knowledge and skills whose
  deployment brings a future financial return
• Individuals invest in themselves through
  acquiring knowledge and skills that can
  subsequently be cashed in the employment market.
• Countries invest in their populations by
  providing various levels and kinds of education,
  thereby boosting their future national income.
• Economists are preoccupied with calculating the
  rate of return on various kinds of educational
  investment, on the part of individuals and
  governments.

16
Issues

• Land versus capital is there investment?
• Is capital functionally specific, or is it a
  generalised means of exchange or power?
• Can and should linguistic capital be equalised?
  If linguistic capabilities are positional goods
  (Hirsch 1977) they cannot be equalised.
• Is linguistic capital arbitrary in value?
• Can Linguistics, Sociology, Psychology, or any
  other academic discipline determine the value of
  particular cultures or languages, or the value of
  specific cultural or linguistic features?

17
Three Explanatory Options

• Certain sorts of linguistic capability are
  essential
• For particular levels of intellectual
  development cultural deprivation.
• For the intellectual demands of those sorts of
  activity that became central as a result of
  modernisation in societies a process that may
  or may not be viewed as uniquely realising human
  ideals cultural disadvantage.
• For high status to be awarded in terms of the
  arbitrary culture of the dominant class
  cultural domination.

18
Distinct Policy Implications

1. Cultural deprivation Equity requires equal
   access to the linguistic capabilities required
   for high level intellectual development.
2. Cultural disadvantage Equity requires equal
   access to the capabilities demanded by high level
   intellectual labour in modern societies.
3. Cultural domination Equity requires equal
   representation within the education system, and
   society at large, for different cultures and for
   the linguistic capabilities associated with them.
   But socio-economic revolution required?

19
A Fundamental Ambiguity in Bourdieus work?

• Bourdieu The only thing I share with
  neomarginalist economists are the words.
  (Waquant 198942) Not quite!
• Is all linguistic and cultural difference
  arbitrary? In what sense? (Moore 2004454)
• Are some kinds of linguistic and cultural
  capability of functional value? What might this
  mean?

20
A Critique of Philippe Sollers and Tel Quel

• not literature, still less the avant-garde, but
  the imitation of literature, and of the
  avant-garde
• the pretence of being a writer, or a
  philosopher, or a linguist, or all of those at
  once, without being any of them or knowing
  anything about all that
• when one knows the tune of culture but not the
  words, when one only knows how to mimic the
  gestures of the great writer
• (Bourdieu 199811-12)

21
Bourdieus Own Use of Linguistic Capital

• Bourdieus discursive style can be
  interpreted as a strategy designed to bolster
  his own academic distinction
• Idiosyncratic usages and neologisms allied to
  frequently repetitive, long sentences with a
  host of sub-clauses, discursive detours
• The same linguistic and presentational devices
  which he identifies in academic discourse in
  general are conspicuously present in his own
  work (Jenkins 1992pp169, 9, and 171)

22
A Proposed Solution

• Sociology, linguistics, sociolinguistics,
  psychology, etc are academic disciplines
  concerned with describing and explaining. They
  can document disparities between varieties of
  language used within and outside of educational
  institutions the consequences of variations in
  linguistic repertoire and perhaps even the
  effects on the acquisition of particular
  socio-cognitive skills. But they cannot
  legitimately go beyond this to evaluate
  linguistic varieties as superior/inferior, nor
  even declare them to be of equal value.

23
More Generally

• Academic disciplines cannot claim authority in
  making evaluations of the phenomena they study.
  In other words, they cannot provide a practical
  perspective on the world, political or otherwise,
  not even a critique.
• Nor should they portray evaluation as
  arbitrary.
• They must suspend any interest in making
  value-judgments about the phenomena they study,
  and use values only so as to determine what is
  worth investigating and what is relevant to an
  investigation.

24
Coda

• This does not mean that academic disciplines can,
  or should attempt to be, value-free in some
  absolute sense. Indeed, they cannot operate
  without researchers making evaluative judgments
  about how best to pursue them, including about
  better and worse linguistic forms in writing
  research reports.
• Indeed, it is in precisely these terms that I
  have been evaluating the concept of linguistic
  capital, and the metaphorical use of the notion
  of capital more generally.

25
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26
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