Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/4, 2003: 473±492

Globalization, the new economy,

and the commodi®cation of
language and identity

Monica Heller
University of Toronto, Canada

The globalized new economy is bound up with transformations of language and

identity in many di€erent ways (cf., e.g. Bauman 1997; Castells 2000; Giddens
1990). These include emerging tensions between State-based and corporate
identities and language practices, between local, national and supra-national
identities and language practices, and between hybridity and uniformity.
Ethnolinguistic minorities provide a particularly revealing window into these
processes. In this paper, I explore ways in which the globalized new economy
has resulted in the commodi®cation of language and identity, sometimes
separately, sometimes together. The paper is based on recent ethnographic,
sociolinguistic research in francophone areas of Canada.

KEYWORDS: Globalization, multilingualism, francophone Canada,

identity, commodi®cation, new economy

1. TOWARDS A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MULTILINGUALISM AND

SOCIAL CHANGE
The globalized new economy is bound up with transformations of language and
identity in many di€erent ways (cf., e.g. Bauman 1997; Castells 2000; Giddens
1990). These include emerging tensions between State-based and corporate
identities and language practices, between local, national and supra-national
identities and language practices, and between hybridity and uniformity. Here I
want to consider one particular zone of transformation, the domain of
ethnolinguistic minorities who have long been organized around political,
nationalist discourses centred on rights and boundaries. This particular
domain is revealing of broader processes, I believe, in a number of ways.
First, without an actual investment in a State, ethnolinguistic minorities feel
®rst, and possibly hardest, the attack on the nation-State that new circum-
stances represent. This is partly because the opposition to their statehood from
centralized states is suddenly weakened, but also, at the same time, their own
attempts at reproducing similar states become less likely. Second, at the same
time, by virtue of their minority status, they possess multilingual repertoires
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474 HELLER

whose value and role are directly implicated in globalization. Third, globaliza-
tion has opened up spaces for local organization, precisely the area where
ethnolinguistic minorities can best hope to exercise some control. Finally, the
reproduction of ethnolinguistic minority identity has generally been based on
economic as well as political marginalization, but the economic bases of social
and cultural reproduction are crumbling. Their situation therefore sheds some
light: on the changing role of the State versus that of the private sector or supra-
national polities, in relation to the shaping of identity; on the changing role of
monolingual and multilingual repertoires in the globalized new economy; on
tensions between local and global; and on the e€ect of economic change on the
construction of language, identity and the relationship between the two.
Indeed, many sectors of the globalized new economy are centred on
multilingual communication, and, despite widespread complaints about the
McDonaldization of the linguistic landscape, varied aspects of language and
identity have turned out to be important in some perhaps unexpected ways. In
this paper, I will explore, in particular, the ways in which the globalized new
economy has resulted in the commodi®cation of language and identity, some-
times separately, sometimes together. I will focus on some recent ethnographic,
sociolinguistic research in francophone areas of Canada, in particular those
areas where new economy businesses, like call centres and various tourism-
related service industries, are emerging out of the wreckage of the old economy,
which was based on heavy industry and primary resource exploitation.1 The
commodi®cation of language (which renders language amenable to rede®nition
as a measurable skill, as opposed to a talent, or an inalienable characteristic of
group members), as well as the simultaneous marketing of authenticity,
challenge State- and community-based systems of producing and distributing
linguistic resources, rede®ne the relationship between language and identity,
and produce new forms of competition and social selection (cf. Budach, Roy and
Heller in press; Heller and Labrie in press; Roy 2002).
What we are seeing then, in francophone Canada, is a shift from under-
standing language as being primarily a marker of ethnonational identity, to
understanding language as being a marketable commodity on its own,
distinct from identity. At the same time, we are seeing authenticity also
becoming commodi®ed (as opposed to being used as a marker for political
struggle), sometimes in the form of cultural products (music, crafts, dance, for
example), and often with no link to language. However, language often does
play a role in the management of these shifting relations between commodity
and authenticity, generally by being deployed as a means to control access to
the newly valuable resources being developed. This can be seen through
struggles over legitimacy (Bourdieu 1982), that is, over who has the legitimate
right to de®ne what counts as competence, as authenticity, as excellence, and
over who has the right to produce and distribute the resources of language
and identity.
While there is little work to date on such phenomena (but see Coupland
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COMMODIFICATION OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY 475

2003), what little there is points over and over again to the tensions between
commodity and authenticity, and the ways in which those questions are sites of
struggle over who gets to de®ne what counts as a legitimate identity, or what
counts as an excellent product. Le Menestrel (1999) discusses ways in which
Cajun identity (think jambalaya and the Cajun two-step) has been commodi®ed
in ways which wrest the control of the de®nition of acadjinite (acadieniteÂ?
cadieniteÂ? cadjiniteÂ? . . . ) away from people who count themselves ethnic
Cajuns, and far away from anything but the most symbolic mastery of Cajun
French. My own ®eldwork (conducted with a project colleague) in Louisiana,
however, points to the e€orts of middle-class Cajuns (and here the spelling
becomes another terrain of struggle), to recoup lost ground through the
revitalization of language via schooling, that is, by trying to regain what is
meant to count as authentic linguistic capital through institutionalized means,
in order to retain privileged control over the resources of Cajunness (and it is
probably not a coincidence that this movement is being led by a popular
musician, Zachary Richard). Kosianski and Loup (2002) point out that the use
of `traditional' crafts in the revitalization of local economies in Provence creates
an impossible dilemma, since the construction of the idea of a product which
has value in the tourist marketplace because it is `authentic' (in the sense of
being ± necessarily ®ctively ± constructed as linked to a timeless past),
simultaneously, and also necessarily, undermines their authenticity (because
that authenticity only has value as a commodity in the present; Coupland
2003). This process then gives rise to struggles over the role of locals versus
newcomers in the de®nition of what counts as a valuable product, and,
ultimately, over who gets to construct the idea of `Provence'. Bender (1999)
discusses the use of `authentic' cultural products to capitalize on the income-
generating potential of selling to tourists visiting the casinos of an Indian
reserve in the south-eastern United States. This again is a strategy aimed at
commodifying authenticity. She points out that one of the ways in which
authenticity is signalled is through the use of Cherokee labels and signs. This
strategy entails (as in Louisiana, Provence, and elsewhere) a degree of stan-
dardization which, by de®nition, is removed from the variability of what is
generally understood as authentic (non-institutionalized, organic, essentialized)
linguistic practice (cf. Ja€e 1999).
In these senses, new identities necessarily build on old ones (the value of
authenticity presupposes some ideology of essentialized ethnonationalism),
while the conditions of the market, which accords new value to formerly
stigmatized identities and products, require (visibly) inauthentic processes of
standardization and commodi®cation. This leaves room for struggle over who is
best placed to control the production and distribution of these products. Indeed,
there is room also for struggle over their form, since authenticity implies a
certain remove from the very market which gives them value, and the ability to
navigate between old and new itself becomes valuable. Which is more valuable:
the removed and authentic, or the new and hybrid; the authentic and
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476 HELLER

uncommercialized (indeed, usually poor and stigmatized) or the commodi®ed

and valuable?
In order to grasp this complexity, it is necessary to understand the local
political economy of linguistic and cultural resources, that is, the ways in which
those resources (and the value attributed to them) are tied to situated economic
and political conditions (Heller 2002). How resources are distributed, what the
source of their value is, and how actors are positioned with respect to them, are
all relevant dimensions of an analysis of the relationship of language and
identity to the globalized new economy. In the next section, I will provide some
background on the kinds of political and economic shifts experienced in
francophone Canada, and in particular in Acadie and Ontario, the two major
areas where francophones reside outside of Quebec, and a brief discussion of
some of the forms that the commodi®cation of language and identity are taking.
I will then discuss in greater detail two kinds of sites, where di€erent aspects of
the processes examined here are unfolding. The ®rst is the area of heritage
tourism, where it is primarily authenticity that is commodi®ed, and the second
is the area of call centres, where language is at the centre of commodi®cation
processes.

2. ECONOMIC BASES OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL REPRODUCTION IN

FRANCOPHONE CANADA
The overview here is necessarily oversimpli®ed. However, on the whole, the
basis of reproduction of Franco-Canadian identity has historically resided in
political marginalization, and possibly more importantly, ethnolinguistic eco-
nomic strati®cation. Francophones have historically been overrepresented in
activities related to primary resource extraction (agriculture, the lumber
industry, mining, ®shing) and industrial labour, as well as in work using
related skills, such as construction, and maintenance and repair (as roofers,
electricians, plumbers, builders, etc.). The eÂlite was concentrated ®rst in the
Catholic Church and Church-educated members of the liberal professions, later
in a State-trained professional group working with an emerging number of
entrepreneurs.
The work of this later form of the eÂlite, beginning in the 1960s, laid the
groundwork for the development of francophone institutions, notably in
education, which formed a new basis for social and cultural reproduction as
well as a labour market for francophones. It also provided for some upward
mobility, at least for some members of the population, for increasing integration
into national and international networks, and increased value accorded to
French as a means of access to those networks and institutions. Indeed, this
process can be seen as sowing the seeds of the commodi®cation of French, as
middle-class francophones and anglophones began to compete for access to the
resources of French-English bilingualism (Heller 1999; Makropoulos 2000).
Anglophones tended to see those resources as purely linguistic skills (although
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COMMODIFICATION OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY 477

some legitimized their interest through an appeal to the construction of a

Canadian bilingual identity), while francophones tended to insist on the
importance of authenticity as a guarantor of the quality of those skills. The
francophone working class remained (and remains) concerned about its access
to valued forms of both French and English.
The following example provides a view on fairly typical positionings of those
who see language mainly as a skill. The parents interviewed send their children
to a French-language minority school in Toronto. They speak English at home
and at work; indeed, the father, of anglophone background, speaks little French.
The mother is from a family with francophone roots in another province, but
she herself has spoken little French since her early childhood. They live in a
comfortable residential neighbourhood, the father works in a bank, and the
mother has a part-time job. In the interview, the parents explain their choice of
schooling for their children in several ways: they legitimate it in terms of the
mother's background and a nationalist ideology in which Canada is to be
construed as a bilingual country. But they speak most about the value not only
of bilingualism, but of multilingualism more generally, in the context of the
globalized new economy.
Example 1: Interview, parents with children in French-language minority schools,
Toronto (1993)
Mother: ( . . . ) I think I probably put more emphasis on the French, I think, with
Sandra. Being the eldest I think you just push it a little bit more
Monica: do you speak French to her usually?
Mother: no, not much
Monica: why was that important to you with her, why is it important?
Mother: that she speaks French? I guess because of my French roots, number one
Father: it's a bilingual country too
Mother: I think it's such an asset to have another language, I mean I probably didn't
realize that until I moved to Toronto, I probably think that even more now
that when I see people speak three or four languages
Father: yeah maybe what should be now that your French is there good because we
are a two language country, so that was good, for me it is worthwhile to
have that, and I think that from that now we say, here how about Spanish,
because of the North-South free trade how about Chinese or something like
that because there's going to be big markets, you know, it would be nice to
have this go on to a third or fourth language
Mother: I just think of it as being another thing that a person has, I mean, you could
take another subject, so why not know another language, I just think it is an
asset

Such perspectives have long been present in education, which (in areas
where francophones are a minority) has over the last forty years been the main
site of distribution of French and francophone identity. As such, education is a
site of struggle over who gets to count as francophone and what gets to count as
speaking French, both between the francophone eÂlite and the working class,
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478 HELLER

and between francophones and anglophones (and increasingly, immigrants of

other language backgrounds as well). However, these perspectives were most
visible in areas ®rst touched by social change, in the cities and among the
educated eÂlite, for the most part. They were much less present in the so-called
bastions traditionnels of francophone Canada, the areas understood as most
authentic, but also the most economically marginalized. It is change in those
areas, now in full swing, that is at the heart of the processes I want to focus on
here.2
These bastions of authentic francophone identity are all areas based on
primary resource extraction or industry. They are regions like the north-east
corner of New Brunswick, or the Acadian villages on the Cape Breton coast,
where the vast majority of the population were Acadians involved in the cod
®shery (the men on the boats, the women in the processing plants); like north-
eastern Ontario, where mining and lumber were the backbone of the economy;
or small towns in southern Ontario or south-eastern New Brunswick, where
francophones migrated from the coast, the north or Quebec, to work in factories
and live in francophone neighbourhoods organized around a French Catholic
church.
And then, in the 1980s and early 1990s, disaster struck. Heavy industry
around the world restructured as part of a general move to economies based on
service and information (Castells 2000). There were massive layo€s, and
industrial work itself was reorganized in ways which tend to foreground
communication and the development of discrete and measurable skills (Gee,
Hull and Lankshear 1996), which increase connections with branches located
at greater distances, and which include workforces with varying linguistic
repertoires. Migration, especially in Ontario, a€ected the nature of the work-
force. The cod ®shery was closed to preserve stock, throwing ®shing commu-
nities into crisis. Government began to withdraw from its role in welfare
provision, insisting on greater degrees of privatization and accountability.
Municipal, provincial and national levels of government have all oriented to a
variety of forms of local or regional economic development in response, as have
community organizations of di€erent kinds. In the 1990s and in recent years, a
range of types of institutional and individual actors have moved to ®nd new
bases for community development, and therefore social and cultural repro-
duction of francophone identity. These e€orts have largely been of three kinds:
(1) capitalizing on the restructuring of old economic activities; (2) investing in
activities which capitalize on authentic cultural products in the context of an
increasing interest worldwide in heritage tourism (Craik 1997) and authentic
cultural products; and (3) investing in service and communications activities
which capitalize on the bilingual skills and willingness to work for low wages of
the recently economically displaced minority francophone population.
The ®rst scenario can be illustrated through the restructuring of the ®shing
industry of north-eastern New Brunswick. Shortly after the cod ®shery closed, a
Japanese market opened up for snow crab (their traditional sources had been
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COMMODIFICATION OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY 479

exhausted and they were looking for new ones). The few ®shermen who were
able to amass enough capital to invest in retooling for the much more
expensive, but also more lucrative, venture of crabbing were able to do well
in the change, but the rest of the ®shing population was excluded. This has
resulted in the development of new class divisions and class con¯icts in the
region. I will focus here, however, on the second and third scenarios, partly
because my data is better for them, but also partly because they are the ones
which seem to be central to emerging struggles over language and identity. It is
in those zones that language and identity count, and are intimately tied to the
production and distribution of the resources now at the heart of reconstructed
economies.

3. CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC PRODUCTS IN FRANCOPHONE CANADA

We have been investigating several sites of transformation which correspond to
the second and third scenarios, in Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick, Prince
Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. I provide here an overview of these sites in
order to provide a context for the more detailed data presented in the following
sections. Each site had its speci®cities of course; nonetheless, it is important to
understand how those speci®cities relate to a broader pattern of change which
emerges across our sites.
The tourism-related scenarios (see also Roy and GeÂlinas in press) include a
federal government initiative to develop a pan-Canadian francophone heritage
tourism `corridor' (Comite national de deÂveloppement des ressources humaines
de la francophonie canadienne 2003), which meets up with local initiatives to
develop such attractions and services as:
. open-air museums which are reconstructions of original French colonizing
settlements of the 17th or 18th centuries (and which employ local residents
as costumed bilingual guides);
. community festivals featuring authentic products or images;
. open-air dramatic enactments of francophone histories or legends;
. gastronomic and/or organic food tours which invest local products with
regional identity;
. listings of places to eat, stay or engage in leisure activities where services are
available in French.
We have been investigating one site devoted primarily to the production of an
authentic Acadian product, and which pro®ts both from regional tourism and
the internet for its marketing and distribution (mainly to Americans). Authentic
products also turn up, of course, in tourism-focused activities, for example in
museum shops or restaurants, kiosks at festivals, and so on. I will focus below
on a second tourism-related site, the preparation of a community festival in
central Ontario, focused on francophone heritage.
The service and communication sites we have investigated, or are currently
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480 HELLER

investigating, include two call centres, one in Ontario and one in New
Brunswick. Both are call centres for large companies serving all of North
America. They are located in areas which have a bilingual population, and
where government has deliberately set out to attract such companies in order to
revitalize sagging economies. (We are also investigating an international
biotechnology company and a multimedia site, which are less directly connected
to the argument here.)
In order to illustrate the processes discussed here, I will focus on two
communities in what is referred to as the `Centre-Sud' of Ontario, that is, the
region covering the middle and into parts of the southern regions of Ontario,
Canada's richest and most populous province. These communities represent
some important dimensions of the Canadian francophone minority experience.
One is a small city, undergoing massive economic restructuring from depend-
ence on heavy industry to the new service economy. The other is a semi-rural
area with a history of mixed agriculture and light industry, undergoing a
similar shift to an economy based on tourism and services.
The data I will discuss were collected over the period from 1997 to the
present, in a series of projects aimed at understanding shifts in the ideology and
practice of what it means to be francophone in Canada, and the discursive and
material struggles involved in those shifts, under conditions of social, economic
and political change (see Heller and Labrie in press). In the ®rst phase of the
project (1996±2000), we interviewed leaders and members of francophone
associations and institutions in Ontario, New Brunswick and Prince Edward
Island, as well as francophone community members who did not participate in
those associations and institutions, for a total of over 400 interviews. We also
collected documents produced by those associations and institutions for public
or internal circulation (pamphlets, advertising, newspapers, meeting agendas,
mission statements, etc.), recorded radio and television shows, and recorded or
observed a number of meetings. We have about 150 recordings of: radio and
television shows; a series of meetings of one community cultural centre in the
second site described below over the course of two years; meetings of ®ve school
councils across Ontario over the course of one year; a three-day Ontario
provincial consultation; the annual meeting of a provincial association; and
other similar association meetings.
Since 2001, we have been focusing on the new economy sites described
above, not only in Ontario and Acadie (the population base of francophone
communities outside Quebec), but also in Quebec and Alberta. This has entailed:

. interviews with management and sta€ in each site, usually about 15 per site,
with the exception of the New Brunswick call centre, which involved about
10 managers and 20 sta€ members;
. recording of meetings, notably, the monthly planning meetings of the
community festival discussed below, over the course of one year;
. in one call centre, the observation of work through `job-shadowing' of about
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COMMODIFICATION OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY 481

25 employees for periods of about 2 hours each (the recordings of their

interactions on the phone will be made available to us in the course of the
project);
. interviews with sta€ and members of about ten federal and provincial
agencies;
. observation on-site for a range of periods depending on the site ± the
community festival has entailed observation of meetings and of the three-
day festival itself in 2002;
. the 2003 festival which had not yet been held at the time this article was
completed;
. one call centre which was the site of a four-month daily ethnography in
2000;
. another call centre which involved a total of four weeks observation of work
and training;
. collecting documents ± in-house call centre training documents and instruc-
tion manuals, as well as the in-house publication, a weekly community
newspaper, websites of two federally sponsored agencies, advertising, the
website, and meeting agendas and minutes of the community festival.
This work is still in progress.

3.1 From manual labour to the skilling of talk

The ®rst community I will discuss emerged out of the industrialization of
southern Ontario, beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, and
with a second boom in the period following World War II. In both periods of
expansion of heavy industry, labour was recruited either from outside Canada
(from Italy, Poland, Hungary, Croatia) or from francophone communities in
Quebec. The town developed ethnic strati®cation (anglophone owners and
managers, francophone and immigrant workers) and residential segregation,
in which parishes and neighbourhood schools served important functions of
social and cultural reproduction, including the persistence of ethnolinguistic
identities and practices. In the 1970s, the francophone community, increas-
ingly well-educated, was caught up in a nationwide political mobilization, in
which language and ethnonational identity were constructed within a dis-
course of political rights. Language was valued as a symbol of identity and
belonging, and therefore of exclusion and inclusion with regard to an organic
community.
In the 1980s the community su€ered the fate of much of the heavily
industrialized belt around the Great Lakes, with extensive computerization,
the shift of plants to the Third World where labour is cheaper, and other forms
of restructuring, resulting in massive job loss. By the 1990s, the community
was looking to rebuild its economy, this time on the basis of two areas of the
new service economy: communications and tourism. The region invested in the
laying of ®bre optic cable, to support communications, and the call centre
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482 HELLER

industry in particular. It set aside land and enacted zoning regulations

favourable to such companies.
Example 2 is drawn from a text produced by the municipal council; it is
intended to attract employers whose main concern with regard to the labour
pool is no longer their capacity for manual work, but rather their com-
munication skills. For the ®rst time in the community's history, the multi-
lingualism of the population becomes something to sell, in conjunction with its
technological infrastructure.
Example 2: Public relations text, municipality in southern Ontario, early 1990s (data
collected by Sylvie Roy)
(The city) is not just heavy metal any more. (The city) is poised to challenge winds of
technology as they breathe life into a new world economy based upon rivers of
information through its call centre facilities. An old hand at capitalizing upon
waterways of opportunity, (the city) is perfectly positioned geographically to be
Canada's high-tech alternative. ( . . . ) Fifteen percent of (the city's) population is
English/French bilingual and many are multilingual, with Italian being the third
predominant language spoken. The bene®ts of this francophone and ethnic
presence are not lost on any employer doing business in French-speaking Canadian
communities or in a global marketplace.
Example 3 is drawn from an interview with a manager in one of the area's
burgeoning industries, a call centre serving all of Canada and parts of the United
States. She indicates the importance of bilingual skills for the representatives,
that is, the people who actually work the telephones (and who, of course, while
crucial to the functioning of the call centre, are at the bottom of the hierarchy).
Example 3: Interview, Madeleine Peirce,3 1998 (call centre, municipality in southern
Ontario)
( . . . ) very large base of French-speaking employees in our customer services areas
speci®cally ( . . . ) on est treÁs heureux d'eÃtre aÁ W. parce que, aÁ coÃteÂ, aÁ cause de (name) as a
city, does compete with, you know, Moncton, Fredericton, and so on and so forth in
trying to attract new business in the area. So, that's a real competitive issue there.
There is a lot of many many bene®ts to being in (name). Especially the language. We
are one of the biggest call centers in Canada ( . . . ) English is absolutely needed for
every single transaction in every single job. So that one is like the baseline. But we
also need French spoken, and also French written in some areas for a certain
percentage of our customer interactions. So, we currently have a very very large
base of French-speaking employees in our customer services areas speci®cally ( . . . ) on
est treÁs heureux d'eÃtre aÁ (name) parce que, aÁ coÃteÂ, aÁ cause de speÂci®quement le coÃteÂ
francophone de (name), c'est treÁs important pour notre entreprise.
(. . . . We are very happy to be in (name) because besides because . . . . We are very
happy to be in (name) because besides because speci®cally the francophone aspect of
(name), it is very important for our company.)
In general, the people we interviewed in this town were thrilled at the
importance suddenly given to their linguistic resources. When we asked about
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COMMODIFICATION OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY 483

our perception that French-English bilingualism, in fact, at most only gave

people privileged access to poorly paid, non-unionized and mainly dead-end jobs
(upward mobility in call centres is limited and middle management tends to be
unilingual in English), this was generally acknowledged to be true, but
relatively unimportant given current alternatives. That is, it was held to be
better than unemployment, better than having to leave the community, and in
many ways was providing better working conditions than labour in heavy
industry (which in any case presented far fewer opportunities for employment
than it had in the past).
The following is an extract from an interview with AmeÂlie Gagnon, a young
woman from the community who worked at the time as a manager in one of the
town's main hotels. She had earlier talked about how French was stigmatized in
her youth, when most of the town's francophones worked as factory labour.
Now, she says, things are di€erent, both because of the call centre industry, and
because of the opportunities provided by the growing tourism industry. French-
English bilingualism, she says, has a value which it lacked in her youth, and
which she fears young people have not yet quite grasped, so rapid has been the
change.

Example 4: Interview, AmeÂlie Gagnon (hotel business), 1998

On voulait rester dans le, en l'environnement francËais parce qu'on avait plusieurs employeÂs
comme je dis . . . Et aussi parce qu'on fait des forfaits aÁ QueÂbec . . . ahm, on voulait garder les
francophones, ahm, la clienteÁle francophone ici dans la reÂgion ( . . . ) y a une partie laÁ qu'i
veulent deÂvelopper pour, euh, les call centres. Alors, j'espeÁre que cËa va continuer . . . encore
on a plusieurs, t'sais tous les Francophones aÁ (l'eÂcole secondaire), cËa va leur donner une
opportunite pour, euhm, un emploi bilingue ( . . . ) je trouve que i(ls) devraient faire plus de
publicite aÁ les jeunes pour leur dire comment important que cËa l'est pour garder leur langue
bilingue parce que y a beaucoup de chance pour eux- autres pour l'avenir.
(We wanted to stay in the, in the French environment because we had many
employees, like I say . . . And also because we do package deals in Quebec . . . um,
we wanted to keep the francophones, um the francophone clienteÁle here in the region
( . . . ) there are some who want to develop for uh call centres so I hope that . . . will
continue again we have many y'know all the francophones at (the high school), that
will give them an opportunity for uh a bilingual job ( . . . ) I think they should do more
PR with young people to tell them how important it is to keep their bilingual language
because there are many possibilities for them for the future.)

In this town, it is not so much authenticity that is at issue, as it is the value of

linguistic skills for speci®c service-related jobs. It is also understood by many as
being a means of preserving the French language and identity, possibly a more
ecient and meaningful one than the political work done in the past. However,
call centres maximize their client base by hiring bilingual representatives who
can serve both English- and French-speakers (and ideally, eventually, Spanish-
speakers). The tourist industry wants to be able to cater to French-speakers who
tend to come into the region anyway for tourism related to natural attractions
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484 HELLER

and a growing agro-tourism sector, or to attract those who avoid the region
because they feel insecure in English. It is language that becomes the key
commodity. Employers see the local French-language high school, founded in
the 1970s in a wave of political activism, as a key source for recruitment of
bilingual labour. Whether students coming out of the region's immersion
schools can compete for the area's bilingual jobs, indeed whether or not they
want to, given the limited career opportunities attached to them, remains to be
seen. Whether call centres will play a role in the reproduction of a local
francophone identity linked to an authentic and traditional past is another
question, especially since French-speaking immigrants who master a more
standard variety of French are beginning to compete for the same jobs.
Indeed, as Roy (2002) has pointed out, it is not even clear whether or not the
bilingual skills of local francophones correspond to what the service industry
requests, given the highly varied, and sometimes extremely normative, expecta-
tions of the clienteÁle, and the `image' the company in question is trying to
project through the voices of its service-providers. The vernacular bilingualism
of the local community is the guarantee perhaps of the authenticity of its skills,
but it also deviates from dominant expectations regarding the importance of
separating French and English clearly, and of mastering standard varieties of
both languages. Those whose marginalization once granted them the then-
dubious privilege of bilingualism may now ®nd themselves forced out of the new
market in which bilingualism, but of a di€erent kind, is now newly valued.
Similar ®ndings are emerging in the New Brunswick call centres (New
Brunswick also deliberately set out to create the infrastructure for the call
centre industry; the two localities mentioned in Example 3 as competitor zones
are located in that province). The operators are mainly bilingual Acadians,
while management is made up of anglophones, most of whom have come in
from other sectors of the company. Working one's way up is not a common
scenario; employees say they can aim for lateral movement, either from one
sector of the call centre to another, or within the local call centre industry.
Turnover is indeed high, and most operators are young women, either with
limited post-secondary education, or working part-time as they put themselves
through university.
These bilingual voice operators actually master a wide range of linguistic
varieties. While they say that monolingual francophones, especially those from
Quebec, complain about their French, we noted a tendency to standardize their
performance when on the lines. Most anglicized their names when speaking
English on the phone, and some even made up entirely new names for
themselves (it should be noted that the operators were encouraged where
possible to maintain the illusion of being at the particular branch for which
service was being requested, whether that be in Montreal, Vancouver or Dallas).
O‚ine, however, to each other and to their immediate supervisors, they spoke
chiac, the local (and historically stigmatized) variety,4 as well as English. Here
we may be witnessing the use of language to claim privileged access on the part
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COMMODIFICATION OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY 485

of legitimate-because-authentic bilinguals to jobs which are the major source of

employment in the region for people with their skills, especially since the
company recently expanded into English-speaking parts of North America
and began hiring a number of monolingual English-speaking operators (cf.
Boudreau 2003).
The call centre industry very clearly places a premium on language as a skill.
As with many new economy settings, employees are encouraged to feel part of a
team, and to standardize behaviour in line with a corporate image for which
they are nonetheless individually responsible (Cameron 2000; Gee, Hull and
Lankshear 1996). At the same time, they are asked to accommodate to clients;
this explicitly includes speaking the client's language of choice, and presumably
also includes accommodating to his or her variety or style (hence the concern
about QueÂbeÂcois complaints about the `quality' of Acadian or Franco-Ontarian
French). All these pressures point in the direction of standardized, schooled
French, albeit in the context of jobs aimed at workers who will accept low pay
and few bene®ts. Francite (a kind of conceptual version of what `Frenchness'
might mean) here is not marketable, despite the impression from the commun-
ity side that these are jobs which will place a value on their language and keep
their children at home. It may be useful in the local struggles over the scarce
resources of bilingual (or any) jobs, struggles which pit bilingual anglophones
and immigrants against local francophones, or which may also begin to lay the
basis of alliances on the grounds of language which undo older ethnonational
allegiances.

3.2 Authenticity as essence and as commodity

The second community I wish to present is located a few hours' drive north of
Toronto. The very ®rst francophones in the area were members of the lay and
clerical colonizing mission of New France, although that presence was relatively
short-lived. Other francophones arrived along with MeÂtis (people of mixed
French and aboriginal origin) and aboriginal peoples as part of a British military
installation in the early 19th century, but today's community is descended
mainly from successive mid-19th century waves of settlers from Quebec.
The community, surrounded by English-speakers, was based principally on
agriculture, supplemented by lumber and ®shing.
The community has a long history of mobilization with regard to its de®nition
of itself and the construction of its social organization. As elsewhere, that
de®nition focused on ethnolinguistic identity. Recently, however, that de®nition
has begun to shift, and the value of language and identity as commodities has
begun to emerge. To a much greater extent than in the community in southern
Ontario discussed above, however, identity is part of the package.
The political economic basis of the shift begins with development of a
highway system and the industrialization of agriculture in the 1960s. Small
family farms became unsustainable, so a few families bought out others; even
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486 HELLER

more were bought out by a multinational processor, and people went to work in
the industrialized cities closer or farther from home. Others established small
companies to service the growing summer cottage tourist community (made up
mainly of city people who bought up lakeside land previously of no interest
to farmers). Members of the local francophone eÂlite and educated outsiders
provided sta€ for local francophone institutions, notably, after about 1980, in
education.
But recently, government support for minority institutions has waned, or has
focused on job creation and services rather than on the maintenance of
language and identity as major goals. The local economy su€ered from the
closing of a number of small industrial plants in a version of the same crisis that
hit southern Ontario in the 1980s. The local eÂlite, mobilized around and
through a community cultural centre, began to respond in the mid 1990s,
through a reorientation of its work, away from the preservation of the essence of
the francophone community and towards community economic development.
However, as we shall see, this shift nonetheless places a value on authenticity as
a valued commodity, and may play a role in the regulation of new resources.
The ®rst structural change we have noted was the creation in 1999 of an
entirely new organization, related to, but at arm's length from, the existing
cultural centre. The following extract, from the local French-language
newspaper, introduces the new organization to the community:
Example 5: Extract from an article from a local newspaper, central Ontario (January
2000), regarding a new community non-pro®t organization
(Le mandat de l'organisme est le) deÂveloppement de biens et de services novateurs et la
creÂation d'entreprises et d'emplois qui montrent la valeur ajouteÂe des francophones et des
bilingues de la (reÂgion) ouÁ l'on re¯eÁte leur impact consideÂrable sur la vitalite de la
reÂgion.
( (The mission of the organization is the) development of innovative goods and
services and the creation of business and of jobs which demonstrate the added
value of the francophones and the bilinguals of (the region) in which is re¯ected their
considerable impact on the vitality of the region.)

Several aspects of this extract are worth commenting on. First, there is the
introduction of the notion of goods, services and job creation as central elements
of the organization's goals. Second, there is the use of the term `added value' to
describe the labour force. Third, while it is not explicitly stated, the character-
ization of this labour force as `francophone and bilingual', places an emphasis
on the language skills of that population. Finally, while earlier modernist
nationalist discourses would have constructed bilinguals as already on the
path to assimilation, and therefore a problem for the maintenance of the
community, this text includes them as part of what is to be considered `added
value'.5
This has an impact on the very de®nition of who is to count as a francophone.
Around the time the article discussed above appeared, the cultural centre began
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COMMODIFICATION OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY 487

revising its mandate towards the provision of services, a revision which also
entailed revisiting the de®nition of its population, from people who are repres-
ented to people who are its clienteÁle. In the spring of 2000, the centre circulated
a document for consultation which contained proposed de®nitions along these
lines, and a speci®c de®nition of whom it would consider `francophone' (and
therefore legitimately part of the centre's concerns):
Example 6: Extract from a list of keywords and their de®nitions in a consultation
document produced by the francophone community centre (central Ontario, 2000)
Francophone: (une personne) qui parle habituellement le francËais, au moins dans certaines
circonstances de la communication, comme langue premieÁre ou seconde; comme groupe: dans
lequel le francËais est pratique en tant que langue maternelle, ocielle ou veÂhiculaire (meÃme si
les individus ne parlent pas tous le francËais)
Francophone: (a person) who usually (habitually) speaks French, at least in certain
communicative circumstances, as a ®rst or a second language; as a group: in which
French is used as mother tongue, as ocial language or as common language of
communication (even if the individuals do not all speak French)

Here again, people who earlier would have been excluded from the group are
included, and language skills are given greater importance than ethnic ties.
However, the political economy of the region creates some ambiguity around
the valuing of language skills versus the valuing of authenticity. Certainly some
of the job-creation schemes in this area resemble the service-oriented ones in
other parts of the province (and, for that matter, in other parts of the country).
This part of Ontario is handicapped by the lack of technological infrastructure,
however, and by its location o€ the major communications routes. It has
therefore invested to a greater extent in tourism, given the area's history, and
the region's natural resources.
The main new initiatives which have developed have been in the area of
heritage tourism. There are several reasons for this. One has to do with the
strength of the older ideology of community, and of the ways in which the
community organized itself to reproduce it. While many of the conditions for
the reproduction of the ideology of authentic community are shifting, the
ideology itself remains, and we ®nd aspects of it taken up and reformulated
under the new conditions of commodi®cation. A major such aspect is the idea,
expressed frequently by local organizers of a new community festival, of the
festival serving mainly as an `eÂleÂment rassembleur de la communauteÂ' (an
element to bring the community together), and secondarily as a means to
attract outsiders. Another is that there is no existing francophone clienteÁle for
tourism; the natural attractions of the region exist also in Quebec, and those
who are closest are not francophone. A reason has to be found to draw
francophones, and speci®cally them, there, to that speci®c place. Finally,
heritage tourism provides local francophones with a specialized niche in the
tourist market of the region, a means of competing with anglophones and
indigenous groups. Heritage tourism combines the value of the authentic
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488 HELLER

community with the development of a unique francophone product, of unique

interest to francophones, and under francophone control.
The ®rst expression of such an interest in heritage tourism can be found on a
website set up in 2000 by a provincial organization devoted to the preservation
of the Franco-Ontarian patrimony. While the organization was not in the ®rst
instance concerned with the use of patrimony for the tourism industry, it
quickly became clear that that was a possibility. The organization set up a
website containing several `routes' in di€erent parts of the province, explaining
the francophone heritage dimensions of each region. The one for this region,
written by a local writer and historian, includes the following extract:
Example 7: Website text concerning heritage tourism (2000)
La reÂgion peut se vanter d'eÃtre le berceau de la civilisation francËaise en Ontario ( . . . ) Les
liens commerciaux et militaires entre les FrancËais et les Ouendats s'intensi®eÁrent surtout
avec la creÂation de la mission ( . . . ) en 1639. ( . . . ) Une premieÁre vague de colons
francophones permanents, composeÂe des voyageurs Canadiens francËais et MeÂtis, arriva en
1828, pour prendre les terres le long de la baie ( . . . ) AÁ compter de 1840, d'autres
Canadiens francËais, encourageÂs par le cure ( . . . ), se succeÂdeÁrent en trois vagues pour
coloniser des terres ( . . . ) Selon la leÂgende du loup de (la localiteÂ), baseÂe sur un fait
historique, et raconteÂe sous forme de pieÁce et ensuite de reÂcit publie par le cure (nom) en
1955, les premiers groupes de colons francophones et leurs descendants vivaient isoleÂs les
uns des autres. Vers 1900, un loup mysteÂrieux se mit aÁ terroriser les habitants de la reÂgion
en faisant d'importants ravages. La crainte du loup et les e€orts pour le vaincre ®nirent par
rallier les francophones, jusqu'alors diviseÂs, aÁ une cause commune. C'est (nom), un borgne,
qui, en eÂvoquant l'aide du ciel, reÂussit en®n aÁ abattre la beÃte posseÂdeÂe.
(The region can boast of being the cradle of French civilization in Ontario ( . . . )
Commercial and military links between the French and the Wendats intensi®ed
especially with the creation of a mission ( . . . ) in 1639. (. . .) A ®rst wave of
permanent francophone colonizers, composed of French Canadian voyageurs and
MeÂtis, arrived in 1828, to take possession of lands along the bay ( . . . ) As of 1840,
other French Canadians, encouraged by the parish priest ( . . . ), succeeded each other
in three waves of colonization of the land ( . . . ) According to the legend of the wolf of
(place name), based on historic fact, and told in the form of a play and then later in a
text published by Father (name) in 1955, the ®rst groups of francophone colonizers
and their descendants lived isolated from one another. Around 1900, a mysterious
wolf began to terrorize the inhabitants and caused serious damage. The fear of the
wolf and e€orts to overcome it ended up rallying the francophones who had hitherto
been divided to a common cause. It was (name), a one-eyed man, who, calling for
help from Heaven, was ®nally able to kill the possessed beast.)

This text lays out the authenticity of the community: its unbroken and, for
Canada, lengthy history, its ties to the aboriginal population and to the land. It
introduces an element of legend, an attractive dimension to local heritage, which
is not only colourful but which also points to the ability of the community to pull
together under hard conditions, and to overcome serious threats (a general theme
of the story of linguistic minority survival). This legend has, in turn, been taken up
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COMMODIFICATION OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY 489

locally as the theme of the annual summer festival mentioned above, the ®rst of
which was held in the summer of 2002 (and in which the wolf, the symbol of
the festival, is understood as the eÂleÂment rassembleur of the legend).
In some ways, this attention to authenticity has the attraction of permitting
access to the group for people who understand themselves to be aliated, but
who no longer speak French. It allows those who do speak French to control
local resources nonetheless, since the organization of heritage tourism activities,
and indeed the workings of major local francophone organizations, do continue
to unfold in French. And the language remains a marketable asset in and of
itself.
This region, then, shows how current conditions can lead to the commodi-
®cation of both language and identity, separately and together, in ways which
take up some of the elements of older discourses of identity, but in a radically
changed frame. Bringing the community together in this new framework
inevitably also exposes it to new relations with outsiders, as service-providers
or producers of commodities. At the same time, it brings the community into the
newly developing national network of francophone community development,
and that network's links to francophone communities not only in Quebec, but
also notably in Europe. This raises tensions regarding the extent to which the
image of the community to be constructed should correspond most to the vision
of its leadership, of its inhabitants, or its clients and patrons, at the same time as
it o€ers new opportunities to reconstruct a community threatened by political
and economic change.

4. LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, COMMODIFICATION AND AUTHENTICITY

Both cases discussed here illustrate some of the tensions raised at the outset of
this paper. The ethnonational consciousness built up through years of social,
cultural and political resistance, now serves as a basis for economic mobiliza-
tion, but places francophones as (possibly) privileged owners of bilingual
resources within the range of in¯uence of corporate aliation pressures.
Corporate culture places its own contradictory pressures on the de®nition of
what is to count as valuable linguistic resources: it is unsure whether to value
the authenticity of its workers' language skills, or to search for the standardized
forms better suited to new forms of corporate control and more in line with
corporate, `professional' image. These pressures in turn expose francophones to
competition from speakers who possess bilingual resources acquired through
schooling, rather than through membership in a minority community, whether
immigrants from other French-speaking parts of the world (notably former
French colonies) or local anglophones. This process is part of the tension
between local solidarities and transnational aliations. The very globalization
processes which bring outsiders into competition with insiders also open up the
economic opportunities which attribute value to bilingual linguistic resources,
since it is all about serving a national and international market. They also
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490 HELLER

highlight tensions between the hybridity which is a mark of being able to

navigate across the di€erent realms of corporate markets (a voice operator
named Isabelle can be [izñ'bEl] or ['IzöbEl] ), and the uniformity of the image
corporations wish to project. These are the tensions between the hybrid
bilingualism which is the hallmark of minority francophones and the bounded
monolingual-type performances they are usually asked to perform.
Tourism and, more generally, globalized markets for authentic cultural
products, provide a di€erent alternative for restructuring the economic basis
of francophone communities. Here the tension is not so much between national
and corporate identity as it is between political and economic bases for
imagining community. This particular economy also raises tensions between
local and supra-local aliations, since the local is what is marketed, but it is also
what has value principally within supra-local networks, and partly because of
its translocal and even transnational resonances (tourists from France are
encouraged to visit their long-lost Canadian cousins; musicians from Louisiana
and New Brunswick meet up at traditional music festivals in Europe, where they
encounter groups singing in Welsh to Cajun rhythms, or more traditional
musicians from Brittany or Corsica; Acadians from Canada, the U.S., Britain
and France hold major congresses built around shared genealogy, history and
culture). It also expresses the tension between the pure and the hybrid, as seen
in tensions within realms of art over what is understood as pure and authentic
and unchanging, versus deliberate attempts to mix traditional elements with
elements from elsewhere and other times, or in tourism over where to draw the
line between the authentic experience and user-friendliness (Yarymowich
2003). Finally, it is a zone of tension between the State and other forms of
aliation, as the State attempts to regulate community development, providing
resources but also demanding accountability, and insisting on criteria of access
to its resources which privilege national bilingual networks and performances
over any other form of imagining community.
This is of course not the ®rst time that identity and language have become
terrains of struggle, of contradiction and ambiguity. One might almost say that
that is what they are for. Nonetheless, the globalized new economy presents
speci®c constraints, both obstacles and opportunities, which present new
opportunities for the development of the idea of local ethnolinguistic community,
while asking for its radical transformation.

NOTES
1. The data on which this paper is based are drawn from a series of research projects funded
bythe Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which I thank along
with my co-principal investigators, collaborators and assistants on the projects, at the
University of Toronto, the Universite de Moncton, the Universite de MontreÂal, the
University of Calgary, the Universite d'Avignon and the J. W. Goethe-UniversitaÈt
Frankfurt/Main (since 1996, at various times, these have included Annette Boudreau,

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COMMODIFICATION OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY 491

Gabriele Budach, Gabriella Djerrahian, Lise Dubois, JuÈrgen Erfurt, Chantal GeÂlinas,
Marcel Grimard, SteÂphane Guitard, Emmanuel Kahn, Normand Labrie, Patricia
Lamarre, SteÂphanie Lamarre, MeÂlanie Leblanc-CoÃteÂ, Roger Lozon, Mireille McLaugh-
lin, Deirdre Meintel, Claudine MoõÈse, Carsten Quell, Sylvie Roy, Chantal White, Maia
Yarymowich and Natalie Zur Nedden). I want to particularly acknowledge the role of
Sylvie Roy, a former research assistant and current collaborator on the projects, who
collected much of the data regarding one of the communities discussed in detail here.
I would also like to thank Nikolas Coupland, Allan Bell, Claudine MoõÈse, Sylvie Roy
and an anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
2. Our data also include other sites in Ontario and Quebec relevant to the new pro®le of
francophone Canada, including a multinational biotechnology company, a non-
pro®t organization involved in the promotion of environmentally sound fair trade
and other environmentally sound practices, and an organization involved in the arts
and culture. These sites are less directly connected to the francophone heartland,
although they likely represent the kinds of activities francophones will increasingly
be involved in. They will not be discussed directly here.
3. All names of individuals and places have been changed.
4. As with any variety, it is dicult to provide a clear and uncontroversial de®nition. It
is certainly a contact variety, with a fair amount of English lexis, as well as non-
standard French lexis and syntax, some inherited from the period of 17th and 18th
century French colonization. It is also an urban working-class variety, characteristic
of the industrialized south-east of New Brunswick.
5. This term is one found echoed across francophone Canada, at federal, provincial and
local levels. For example, the English-language version of a pamphlet produced by
the Ontario section of the federally funded (and therefore bilingual) Comite national
de deÂveloppement des ressources humaines de la francophonie canadienne (National
Committee for Canadian Francophonie Human Resources Development) includes as
one of the sector's goals: `Promote the added value of Francophones in economic
development'. The same terminology turns up in Alberta in an interview with a
representative of a provincial francophone economic association which has ties to
the Alberta sector of the national committee (Roy and GeÂlinas in press), and has
turned up elsewhere in our data across the country.

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Address correspondence to:

Monica Heller
CREFO
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto
252 Bloor Street West
Toronto
Ontario M5S 1V6
Canada
mheller@oise.utoronto.ca
# Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003