The Commodification of Language; edited by John E. Petrovic and Bedrettin Yazan Format: Royal (156 × 234 mm); Style: A; Font: Sabon; Dir: C:/Users/IS6557/Desktop/TOCL/9780367464080_text.3d; Created: 29/12/2020 @ 13:53:32 7 Language, ethnicity, and tourism in the making of a Himalayan Tamang village Bal Krishna Sharma Introduction Sociolinguistics and applied linguistics scholarship has shown that recent developments in the political economy have led to the commodification of lan- guage both as a communication tool as well as a material to be exchanged in the late capitalist market (Duchêne & Heller, 2012; Park & Wee, 2012; Shankar & Cavanaugh, 2012). The role of language in tourism has received a substantial piece of pie in this discussion (e.g. Gao, 2012; Heller, Pujolar, & Duchêne, 2014; Sharma, 2018). Heller and Duchêne (2016) and Pietikäinen (2014), in the contexts of French-speaking Canada, Switzerland, and Sámiland respectively, have shown how the conceptualization of language has changed from a marker of ethnolinguistic identity to an economic resource. According to these scholars, this is a historical shift triggered by the practices and ideologies of the tourism market where identities and languages go through the commodification process. Meanwhile, several scholars have drawn our attention to this theorization of language and expressed concerns if and under what conditions we can say that a language is commodified in its various domains of use including tourism (e.g. Block, 2017; Holborow, 2018; McGill, 2013; Petrovic, 2019; Simpson & O’Regan, 2018). The chapter builds on the conceptualization of language commodification proposed by Heller and Duchêne (2016). Following the authors, language func- tions as an economic resource under the late capitalist market in two major ways. First, language is a sellable tool of communication through which tourism destinations turn into commodities. Tourism workers’ employability depends partly on the language and communication skills that are valued in the market. In addition, linguistic resources, such as language signs, are used to brand the authenticity of tourism destinations. Second, language functions as an added value to mark a cultural authenticity in the tourism market. Cultural artifacts and performances as the markers of such authenticity have an enhanced com- modity value when the language element is added to them. Framing language commodification within this conceptualization, this chapter studies heritage tourism in the context of indigenous ethnicity. It focuses on a Tamang village in the Himalayas, Nepal and examines language as a political and an economic T&F PROOFS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION