When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy

Abstract

The Boasian concern for the independence of linguistic form from race and culture similarly led many scholars to promote the autonomy of linguistics as a discipline and to turn their attention away from the political and economic conditions of speech. Although the Boasians and their descendants included major figures and schools who focused on relationships between language and culture, they did so largely by defining culture in terms of knowledge and ideas. This chapter lays that groundwork: it summarizes and compares some views of the relations between linguistic phenomena and economy. Language is a complex social fact that can be looked at from many angles, including the economic. The first kind of relation between language and economy is the most familiar one: linguistic signs denote objects, the natural world, and economic skills and activities. Second: much investigation remains to be done on just how language facilitates coordination of a social division of labor.

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