Free Markets: Language, Commodification, and Art

"It's Fluent in Every Language" (Visa)

"Any time, Anywhere, Any Language" (MasterCard)

"Sell Your Language at Any Price" (Rainer Ganahl)

In our times, when basically anything can be commodified--including human livers and tongues--we are confronted with the following question: Are languages commodities, or do they resist commodification?

Commodification is a process in which something enters freely or is coerced into a relationship of exchange, a transaction enabled by an instrument of payment within a relatively short period of time. Parties in this exchange identify themselves as owners. Assuming that language is primarily a mode of verbal exchange and interaction, I would like to ask the following questions: Can an author, a linguist, a state, a nation, or even a transnational company own an entire single language or even groups of languages? Can spoken languages be copyrighted as computer languages are copyrighted? Clearly, the answer to both these questions is no. As with cloud formations, languages cannot be owned. In spite of the fact that clouds develop in specific areas that are geographically and legally defined by ownership, they cannot be owned, purchased, sold, or stocked. One can commodify oxygen and stabilize or destabilize climate conditions within a confined space--think of climate and cloud machines--but one cannot turn cloud formations into a commodity as such. ¹ It is the same with language: words, sentences, texts, and books are endlessly produced, copyrighted, bought, and sold, but you cannot own a language as such, since language is a sort of "atmosphere" in which words are produced. Of course, to push this reasoning even further, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein there are only language "games" and there is no language as such. ² There are recent indications that perhaps these games can be commodified, sold, and translated in the same way that both cities and nations are about to begin selling their water resources. ³ One case in point is that the corporate world has been registering ("trademarking") more and more sentences taken from common speech--for example, Nike's "Just do it," Apple's "Think different," and Microsoft's "Where do you want to go today?"

In spite of being impossible to own, many people try to claim, influence, control, and appropriate languages. States and state-funded organizations that use or are otherwise connected to a language are typically eager to instrumentalize it as well. But no single language can be reduced to a nation's property. So-called national languages are rarely, if ever, confined to state borders. At the end of the eighteenth century, the creation of national languages became integral to the process of political and ideological formation--and of modernization--in Europe. ⁴ For instance, in France a common language was imposed on the totality of a claimed territory--and yet only 33 percent of the population spoke French at the eve of the French Revolution in 1789. ⁵ And in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Germany, a common language was "discovered" and used for official and political administration. This common language then legitimized the demands for the creation of a united political body called Germany. Within colonial contexts, language policies functioned the same way: the imposition of new regimes, new economies, and new labor conditions also came with new tongues, new speakers, new languages, new religions, and new laws. The problem in these cases was often not so much the learning of the colonial language but the unlearning of the local languages. It took many decades for colonized countries to unlearn their original languages and to adapt to their new colonial language. And for their part, colonizers were only interested in local languages for administrative purposes, cultural exploitation, and more efficient governance. The postcolonial situation has forced languages to move and wander along with people, information, labor, capital, war, diseases, gods, religions, fashions, and raw and refined materials.

Although people cannot own languages, they may know, use, and learn them. Everybody knows at least one language...