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For thousands of years, the K'iche' people have revered the golden kernels belonging to a plant known as
maize
. Their sacred stories tell of the first humans who were fashioned from the bread made from these kernels and who were given the gift of language. More recently, a new and very different kind of gold is present in the highlands. It is the multinational Goldcorp, Inc., which is based in Canada and operates mines throughout North and South America. Goldcorp is publically traded on the New York Stock Exchange. It has been given a license by the Guatemalan government to mine gold, silver, nickel, and other minerals from 23 square kilometers of K'iche' land.

A 20-hour drive northwest from Guatemala City through the Mayan regions of the lush Western Highlands leads to a town named Sipacapa. Most of the drive is on unpaved roads, winding through tropical vegetation – bananas, coffee, and cacao at lower altitudes, and the golden maize at the foggy higher altitudes. For the Sipacapa – who speak the K'iche' language called Sipakapense – the land is sacred, and they are fighting to protect it. Mayan communities in Guatemala have long protested mining on their land. In December, 2013, with the help of local
campesinos
, the Sipacapa set up two blockades on the Pan-American Highway, a vital thoroughfare connecting Guatemala with Mexico and the rest of the Americas. These blockades were specifically to stop Goldcorp, Inc.

At the same time, the Sipacapa fight to save their homeland from exploitation, they also fight to save their language from extinction. The two struggles are not unrelated. Sipakapense, like other K'iche' languages – Achi, Kaqchikel, and Tz'utujil among them – is intimately intertwined with the local ecosystem, with the hills, the dense fog that caps them, and the golden maize from which humankind was given life. Even the name of the language – K'iche' (‘many trees' <
k'i
‘many,'
che'
‘tree') – reflects this fact. Like most Mayan languages in Guatemala and Mexico, Sipakapense
is endangered. Knowing what to do about it, however, is no easier than knowing how to stop a multinational mining corporation with a federal mining license.

In this chapter, we look at the various ways languages around the world are endangered in light of present global economic conditions, and we highlight some of the measures being taken to preserve them.

To answer one of our guiding questions, Why does the current map of the linguistic world look the way it does?, we devoted Chapter 4 to considering the effects of the nation-state in shaping national and language borders. To answer another one of our guiding questions, How did it get to be that way?, we dug down into multiple historical layers: (i) in Chapter 10, the deep-time of the first dispersal of humans around the globe in the last 100,000 years; (ii) in Chapter 7, the near-prehistory expansion of the language stocks as people moved away from their homelands; and (iii) in Chapter 8, the historical colonizations that led to the pre-Columbian extents of most language families.

We now pose a new question: How is the current map of the linguistic world changing? Here, in Chapter 12, we turn our attention to a set of emergent economic and social forces operating beyond the borders of the nation-state, known by the popular cover term
globalization
. Globalization is not disconnected from the state formation and colonialism that preceded it. Indeed, globalization is possible only because of these earlier types of consolidation. It was surely furthered by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, which opened vast areas of the world previously closed to capital markets. The more recent liberalization of economic conditions in China has opened the gates of the last dam stopping the powerful flow of money around the world. And now we have planted both feet firmly back in the dynamics of Part II: The Effects of Power, although we never really left them.

At present, the economic and political forces of globalization appear to be transforming global relations in ways that seem to eclipse the conditions that gave rise to them. In other words, although the world has been globalizing since at least the end of the fifteenth century, there is something new and remarkably different about today's globalization. British sociologist Anthony Giddens, early on in the process, identified globalization to be “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (1990:64). Twenty years later, Belgian sociolinguistic J.M.E. Blommaert reaffirms that globalization is “new in intensity, scope, and scale” (2010:1).

Because globalization is ongoing, and no definitive theoretic perspective on it can yet exist, our speculation on the future of the linguistic map reformed by globalization will be undertaken in terms of the theoretical economic models of the immediate past. Economic theory during the twentieth century was dominated by two influential thinkers: the Englishman John Maynard Keynes in the first half of the century and the American Milton Friedman during the second half. Keynes is credited with influencing national economic policies that moved the West out of the Great Depression, past
the economic devastation of World War II, and into a period of economic expansion lasting through the 1970s. Keynesian economics is rooted in the notion of the mixed economy, one fueled predominately by a private sector tempered by the intervention of the State, when necessary. Government policy was necessary, in Keynes's view, because an unregulated private sector could lead to macroeconomic turbulence. Keynes was instrumental in setting up the World Bank, a United Nations institution designed to provide loans to the developing world, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was designed to facilitate a system of international payment among countries after World War II. Keynesian economics held sway in the West until the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States.

Beginning in the 1980s, government policies turned toward the thinking of the Chicago School of Economics, led by Milton Friedman who articulated a strong view of free markets with little intervention from the State. Friedman's neoliberalism, guided by the principle of the free market, dramatically reshaped the global economic scene. The three pillars of neoliberalism – free trade of goods and services, free circulation of capital, and freedom of investment – required the elimination of trade barriers and the liberalization of restrictions on international investment. Free trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Association (1994), and economic and monetary unions, such as the European Union (2000), are noteworthy examples. The result has been the integration of labor markets, the end of truly national economies, and the rise of what sociolinguist Monica Heller (2011) recognizes as the globalized new economy.

As neoliberal policies were enacted in domestic markets, the global market expanded, with several important consequences:

1. decreased regulation has increased the power of multinational corporations and has resulted in greater mobility of capital, labor, and production sites; offshoring (moving labor or operations to another country for cost advantages) and outsourcing (contracting a third party, often in another country to do work more cheaply) have become common business terms;
   
2. the role of the State in the economy has diminished; industries that were once public – from the airlines to electricity to telecommunications – have been privatized; and
   
3. as privatization shifted more power to the private sector, corporations have been given greater freedom and have amassed more power and wealth.
   

This last point is crucial. In 2012, Apple, Inc., maker of the popular iPods, iPads, and computers had a market value of US$460 billion, more than the entire gross domestic product of Sweden. Private corporations hold more sway than ever before and can make decisions more deftly than democratic states ever could. These decisions may well involve issues of language. To give but one example, in 2013 Tokyo-based Bridgestone Corporation, the world's largest maker of tires, announced it had adopted an official language: it is not Japanese, but English.

The globalized new economy has required increased coordination from a central source. The IMF and the World Bank – which began with much smaller aims – have stepped in to assume this role. These two institutions now perform surveillance on
national economies and set global economic guidelines. At present, 188 countries are members of the IMF. Increased economic coordination requires a certain amount of linguistic coordination. The official language of the IMF and the World Bank is English, with conferences held with simultaneous translation into Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish. The official languages of the World Trade Organization are English, French, and Spanish.

The effects of globalization are stark and pervasive. They can be seen, first, in the global circulation of cultural forms such as hip hop, which was created in the South Bronx in the 1970s and now flourishes in places like Mongolia and Malaysia. The effects have produced linguistic superdiversity in urban centers around the globe, such as New York, London, and Shanghai. Most importantly for this chapter, they have liberalized national markets, thereby mobilizing the individuals in those markets, with attendant effects on the language(s) they speak.

For India's newest state, Telangana, which was once a part of Andhra-Pradesh, the answer is: the Telanganese variety of Telugu, a Dravidian language, spoken there. Since the midtwentieth century, India's states have been created largely along linguistic lines, and so the Telanganans argued that their variety of Telugu was distinct enough to warrant a new state. Whether or not it is, is another story. Nevertheless, in 2013 they got their state, most likely on economic grounds: the city of Hyderabad, an affluent technology hub, is located there. Here is a version of the Golden Rule: those with the gold, rule. Clearly, the Telanganans have benefitted from the globalized new economy and Hyderabad's importance in it.

To India's north lies Nepal, a small landlocked country, with a very different relationship to the global liberalization of national markets. The Nepalese are the majority ethnic group, and they speak Nepali. What sets Nepal apart from its neighbors in South Asia – India, Myanmar, and Bhutan – is that it never fell under European colonial rule. As a result, the monarchy it established when the Nepalese Kingdom was formally declared in 1768 remained in place until 1990, when the country underwent its first democratic revolution. The colonial languages that impacted the rest of Asia – English, French, and Portuguese – therefore never had a significant impact on Nepal, whose closed economy and political system provided an unintended buffer around the Nepali language and the other 100 or so indigenous languages of the Kingdom.

In the 1990s, Nepal underwent a democratic revolution. For the first time, the country opened its doors to foreign investment and implemented economic liberalization policies that reformed the previously closed economy and promoted privatization. Nepal joined the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Multinational corporations based in both the East and the West poured in almost overnight. These developments in finance, trade, and investment opened the door to the world's emerging international lingua franca of business: English. After centuries of avoiding the encroachment of English taking place all around it, Nepal invited English in when it opened its doors to foreign investment. While colonialism took English to India, China, Malaysia, and Myanmar, the new globalized economy took it to Nepal.

Industries previously blocked or limited from operating in Nepal were introduced and expanded during the 1990s and 2000s. The tourist industry expanded particularly rapidly. Curious tourists the world over flocked to Nepal to witness the untouched beauty of the Himalayas, take a peek at Nepalese culture, and participate in so-called eco-tours. Because virtually no one outside of Nepal speaks Nepali, business catering to international tourists quickly adopted English as the industry language. English is now seen and heard throughout the capital city of Kathmandu, from the Internet cafes where tourists check their email to the restaurants where they eat, the hotels and hostels where they sleep, and the tour shops where they register for mountain hikes. Even in rural Nepal, where local languages other than Nepali are spoken, locals use English to sell souvenirs and traditional wares to tourists. For Nepalese seeking employment in the booming tourist industry, knowledge of English bestows an undeniable economic advantage.

English, Nepali, the local languages, and other international languages that enter the country through business and tourism can now be understood as being in competition with one another in Nepal. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has named this type of competition the
linguistic marketplace
. In his view, different language varieties accrue different market values in accordance with their perceived socio-economic value and the prestige of the social groups who speak them. Linguistic marketplaces are inherently unequal in two ways. First, within a given linguistic market, speakers hold differing amounts of linguistic capital, a type of cultural asset that affords social and economic benefits along the lines of economic capital (money). Just as economic capital provides access to social status and social mobility, so too does linguistic capital. It provides access to work, positions of prestige, and positive social evaluations. Second, not all language varieties are accorded the same value within the market. The language varieties associated with groups in power are positively valued, while those associated with powerless groups are not. Success in a given linguistic marketplace means having access to the power languages. In Nepal, this means that the aspirations of the emerging middle class are tied to English.

Although speakers are clamoring to learn English throughout much of the developing world, the effects of global markets on language are as unpredictable as the markets themselves. In Nepal, we observe several interesting effects of the globalized new economy on the language scene. First, the international labor market has pulled Nepalese citizens from Nepal. As a result, Nepali is now spoken in Nepalese emigrant communities in parts of the world such as the Mideast and Asia. This means that there are fewer young adult speakers of Nepali at home and therefore fewer people to actively transmit the language to children, the next generation of speakers who would otherwise keep the language going.

Second, Nepalese are aware of the threats that the globalized new economy poses to their language and culture, and they perceive the most acute threat to be toward the local languages rather than to Nepali. Therefore, more and more people report positive identification with indigenous ethnicities and the local languages, as opposed to Nepali. Census takers in 1991 found that the number of Nepalese reporting Nepali as their primary language decreased for the first time. The reason for the decrease in reporting owed not to an actual significant decrease in Nepali speakers but rather to an increase in people claiming an indigenous language.

The situation in Nepal forces us to resist facile simplifications about the relationship between the globalized new economy and language. Economic forces beyond the control of the individual invited English into the country, and this invitation will surely have a displacing effect on Nepal's languages. In this sense, we see economic policies now disrupting the local linguistic ecosystem in the ways that colonialism and religious missionaries did in other parts of the world. In fact, some people say globalization is colonialism by another name. At the same time, Nepalese are clamoring to learn English for its attachments to material and symbolic forms of capital. They want to be linked to the rest of the world as much as everybody else does.