Can language be commodified? Toward a Marxist theory of language commodification

ABSTRACT This article begins with an overview of the literature on language commodification and the Marxist critiques of this concept. I argue that, while these critiques have raised pertinent issues surrounding the concept of language commodification, they are limited by their reliance on Karl Polanyi’s notion of fictitious commodification, which suggests that entities like land, labor, money and, likewise, language cannot be commodities because they have not been produced to be sold in the market. Drawing on Nancy Fraser, who suggests that fictitious commodities are different from regular commodities not because of their ontological status but because of the role they play in maintaining the conditions of possibility for human life, I try to reorient the debate on language commodification by proposing a new theoretical understanding of this term, grounded in a Marxist approach to language as a social, historical and ideological practice.