LANGUAGE AS LABOR

IN the commodification of language in migratory and nonmigratory contexts, it is necessary to be cognizant of the fact that the use of language itself can be the actual performance of labor. Language is a skill, and the ability to use language fluently and accurately to perform certain tasks is a valued one. Language use and production can thus be the actual performance of work. And that is one of the reasons language is being commodified.

In a recent paper, I found it necessary to categorize work in relation to language use, particularly in how reliant it is upon language use for the job to be completed. The first category is what I call "language-concentrated work." These are professions and occupations that are all about language use, production and modeling. Needless to say, these professions and occupations require high-level and above-average language skills and proficiency, as these jobs are usually exemplars of good language use in society. This category includes linguists, language teachers, interpreters and translators, and journalists.

The second category is a rather small one. In fact, most people would probably not immediately realize that these professions and occupations use a great deal of language. In this category, I include office clerks, in whose work language production is necessary for business meetings and correspondence, and child carers, in whose work language modeling is given to the children under their care. These jobs do not need language in all of their tasks, as their main responsibility is not necessarily to produce and model language, but they actually do in quite a number of their tasks. This category is thus called "language-supplemental work."

The third category can be called "interaction-reliant work," primarily because they do not exactly require the skillful use of language, not necessarily the precise and artistic language needed in teaching and publishing. But they do need language, as well as nonlinguistic cues, to interact. As such, a certain command of a language is necessary, but just enough for communication. Examples under this category would include health care providers, storekeepers, and tourism and hospitality workers.

Of course, all jobs would, at one point, use language, but there are those that would not be language- or communication-oriented, like housekeeping, dressmaking and food processing. There is almost no communicative interaction in doing these tasks, and they can be accomplished even with very low language proficiency.

These three categories, therefore, are more likely to have language requirements before employment could be given to interested job applicants. It goes without saying that the first category requires the highest level of language proficiency, and the third would not need that high a level.

Language is thus a capital and commodity in rendering labor, and such is true in transnational work. While not all jobs would require high levels of language proficiency, certainly language skills, once learned, could be useful in putting oneself in a much better position than the rest. Simply put, someone who speaks a language much better than another could get a better job than the one who does not. As in the Philippine context, someone judged as a good English speaker could get better jobs than someone who is not. The Philippine government has, time and again, underscored the importance of English language proficiency in giving Filipinos an edge over other nationalities in transnational work. This is true.

Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is one of the leading scholars on English in the Philippines and is also doing pioneering work on language in the context of migration. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics — at age 23 — from De La Salle University. He has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland and Singapore. He serves as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. He is presently an associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan.

2024-06-29T16:16:28Z dg43tfdfdgfd