Chapter 3 Language and Political Economy Alfonso Del Percio, Mi- Cha Flubacher, and Alexandre Duchêne Introduction This chapter aims to reveal how the investigation of language and political economy enables us to gain a complex understanding of what Dell Hymes (1974) considered to be the main objective of sociolinguistic research, namely the origins and foundations of inequality among speakers. To do so, we deine language as a resource that, under certain political-economic conditions, can be exchanged for other symbolic or mate- rial resources (Heller, 2001, 2010). Political economy is then conceptualized as the tech- nologies and processes governing the valuation of resources as well as their production, circulation, and consumption within a given place and at a speciic moment in time (Browning and Kilmister, 2006; Williams, 1977; McElhinny 2015). We therefore con- sider the investigation of the ield of language and political economy as an inquiry into the way language emerges as a key site of possibility/impossibility where speakers can gain access to the valuation as well as to the production, distribution, and consumption of symbolic and material resources (Bourdieu, 1977; Gal, 1989). Indeed, examining the alliance between language and political economy means focusing on the material and historical conditions of language and locating linguistic processes in larger societal sys- tems of inequality and diference (Philips, 2004). While not explicitly positioning himself in the ield of language and political econ- omy, the social dialectologist William Labov (1972) was among the irst researchers to document how linguistic features correlate with a speaker’s position (in terms of gender, class, race, and ethnicity) in a given social structure. Indeed, in his examination of the varieties of English in New York City department stores, Labov demonstrated that the phonological variable (r) is a social diferentiator in all levels of the city’s speech. He