37.3234, Confs: More Visible, Less Spoken? Commodification, Heritagization and Exodiglossia of Minority Languages (France)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3234. Thu Oct 08 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3234, Confs: More Visible, Less Spoken? Commodification, Heritagization and Exodiglossia of Minority Languages (France)

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Date: 07-Oct-2026
From: Sébastien Quenot [QUENOT_S at univ-corse.fr]
Subject: More Visible, Less Spoken? Commodification, Heritagization and Exodiglossia of Minority Languages


More Visible, Less Spoken? Commodification, Heritagization and
Exodiglossia of Minority Languages

Date: 04-Mar-2027 - 05-Mar-2027
Location: CORTI, France
Contact: Pierre-Joseph Paganelli
Contact Email: PAGANELLI_P1 at univ-corse.fr
Meeting URL: https://chaire-unesco.universita.corsica/

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis;
Language Documentation; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics
Subject Language(s): Basque (eus, basq1248)
                     Breton (bre, bret1244)
                     Catalan (cat, stan1289)
                     Corsican (cos, cors1241)
                     Occitan (post 1500) (oci, occi1239)

Submission Deadline: 30-Nov-2026

Rationale:
Less spoken than they have ever been, many minority languages of
Europe and the Mediterranean have probably never been so visible in
public space. Corsican, which UNESCO classifies as an endangered
language (Moseley, 2010) and whose family transmission was largely
interrupted over the course of the twentieth century (Branca and
Sorba, 2023; Quenot, 2020, 2026), now appears on shop signs, labels,
beer and cosmetics brands, clothing, stadium stands, university and
local-authority signage, and even in tourism promotion campaigns.
Comparable configurations have been described for Occitan (Alén
Garabato and Boyer, 2020), Breton (Blackwood, 2011), Basque (Cenoz and
Gorter, 2006), Balearic Catalan (Bruyèl-Olmedo and Juan-Garau, 2015),
Irish (Brennan, 2018; Moriarty, 2014) and Sámi (Pietikäinen and
Kelly-Holmes, 2011). Long erased from schools, administration and
public space (Gal and Irvine, 2019), stigmatized along with their
speakers (Blanchet, 2019), and kept in an invisibility that is itself
a form of misrecognition (Honneth, 2005), these languages are
returning to it less as means of communication than as signs: signs of
origin, authenticity, terroir and belonging.
Critical sociolinguistics has described this shift in terms of
commodification. After the sociology of language had conceived of
linguistic exchanges as a market (Bourdieu, 1982), research on the new
economy showed that language and identity become exchangeable
resources endowed with added value (Duchêne, 2021; Heller, 2003,
2010), and that minority movements now oscillate between a discourse
of pride, inherited from nationalisms, and a discourse of profit
(Duchêne and Heller, 2012). Tourism is a privileged site for these
processes (Heller, Jaworski et al., 2014; Heller, Pujolar et al.,
2014; Jaworski and Thurlow, 2023), as are the peripheries where “small
languages” find themselves caught up in new economic circumstances
(Pietikäinen et al., 2016). For Corsican, Jaffe (2019) analyzed the
language as caught in a nexus of pride and profit, and Colonna and
Villa-Perez (2024) compared these dynamics in Corsica and Apulia. A
competing reading sees in the commercial presence of Occitan a series
of “glottopolitical micro-acts” resisting language shift (Alén
Garabato and Boyer, 2020). The same fact, the commercial display of a
minoritized language, is thus given two opposite valences: resistance
to language shift, or a new form of it.
The conference proposes to reread this commodification as a process of
heritagization. The making of heritage proceeds through the selection,
qualification and exhibition of objects held to be inherited
(Davallon, 2006; Heinich, 2009), under the authority of a heritage
discourse that sets their legitimate uses (Smith, 2006). The
Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage
recognizes language “as a vehicle” of this heritage (UNESCO, 2003), a
category whose implementation has opened up a vast field of
controversy (Bortolotto, 2011). The Cantu in paghjella, a secular and
liturgical oral tradition of Corsica sung in Corsican, has been
inscribed since 2009 on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in
Need of Urgent Safeguarding (UNESCO, 2009). The economy of enrichment,
which derives its value from the past, from narrative and from the
crisis of modernity (Boltanski and Esquerre, 2017), offers a framework
for thinking about the encounter between these two logics: when the
market names, labels, authenticates and stages a language, it
constitutes it as an inherited good, as heritage. Is this
market-driven heritagization a lever for revitalization, through the
new legitimacy it confers and the familiarity it sustains? Or does it
freeze the language, reduce it to an identity marker and folklorize
it, offering a reified form of belonging that makes linguistic
competence unnecessary?
Linguistic landscapes are a privileged vantage point from which to
observe this movement from diglossia to exodiglossia. Since Landry and
Bourhis’s (1997) seminal article, which made them an indicator of
ethnolinguistic vitality, their study has paid constant attention to
minority languages (Cenoz and Gorter, 2006; Gorter and Cenoz, 2023;
Gorter et al., 2012), Mediterranean cities (Blackwood and Tufi, 2015),
tourist spaces (Bruyèl-Olmedo, 2025; Moriarty, 2014) and
commodification (Leeman and Modan, 2009). Several notions describe the
use of a language for what it connotes rather than for what it
communicates: language display (Eastman and Stein, 1993), linguistic
fetish (Kelly-Holmes, 2014), display bilingualism (Coupland, 2012),
post-vernacularity (Shandler, 2006). Most studies, however, measure
presence, frequency or salience, and rarely what the language does in
the space where it is displayed. Yet visibility and vitality may
diverge over long periods.
The concept of exodiglossia was proposed to name this divergence
(Quenot, 2023, 2026, forthcoming). It refers to the sociolinguistic
regime of a language historically spoken in a territory, whose
vernacular transmission has been broken and which struggles for
recognition have turned into an emblem, without that recognition
necessarily leading to official status or to a binding language
policy. In this regime, the display of the language in public space is
maintained or extended, while the acts performed in it remain
confined, outside activist, confraternal and heritage settings, to
naming, expression and the coloring of the linguistic landscape. The
operation that produces this distribution, illocutionary assignment,
allocates the language to acts that honor (naming, greeting,
celebrating, authenticating) and excludes it from acts that bind
(prescribing, prohibiting, contracting, instituting). Diachronic
surveys in Corsica, the Balearic Islands, Malta, Sicily, Cyprus, Crete
and Djerba suggest that legal obligation sets the floor for naming
without setting the ceiling for enunciation.
The concept belongs to the critical tradition that reframed diglossia
(Ferguson, 1959; Fishman, 1967) as a conflict (Aracil, 1982; Gardy and
Lafont, 1981; Ninyoles, 1969) and as a glottopolitical object (Guespin
and Marcellesi, 1986). It extends the Corsican sociolinguistics
founded by Jean-Baptiste Marcellesi, who developed the notion of
polynomic language (Marcellesi, 2003), and the work on language
ideologies and diglossic shifts in Corsica (Colonna, 2013; Jaffe,
1999; Thiers, 1989). It also stands at the crossroads of two readings
usually held to be opposed. The first, materialist, grasps domination
in its material production: from commodity fetishism, whereby a social
relation takes the form of a relation between things (Marx,
1867/1993), to reification, which extends the commodity form into
consciousness itself (Lukács, 1923/1960), and on to exosomatization,
whereby knowledge is externalized into technical supports at the risk
of its proletarianization (Stiegler, 2009, 2018). Exodiglossia offers
a specifically linguistic figure of this process: the language passes
from the bodies that speak it to the signs, labels and screens that
display it. The second reading, which Castoriadis (1975) set against
historical materialism, makes the social imaginary the source of
institutions: the objects that carry the language derive their value
from the imaginary significations invested in them. Every exodiglossic
apparatus thus produces a material culture grounded in an imaginary of
linguistic and cultural identity, in which the language belongs to the
instituted imaginary rather than to the instituting imaginary.
Exodiglossia consequently shifts the unit of analysis from the domain
of use to the speech act itself (Austin, 1962; Bourdieu, 1975). The
conference puts this concept up for discussion.
This divergence directly challenges the evaluation of language
policies and the measurement of vitality. The reference instruments,
from the GIDS scale (Fishman, 1991) to the nine factors of the
Language Vitality and Endangerment framework (UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert
Group on Endangered Languages, 2003), and from the Atlas of the
World’s Languages in Danger (Moseley, 2010) to the EGIDS scale (Simons
and Lewis, 2013), the LEI index (Lee and Van Way, 2016) and the
European EuLaViBar barometer (Laakso et al., 2016), account for
speaker numbers, transmission, domains of use, attitudes and policies.
To our knowledge, none of them systematically distinguishes, in public
space, between the display of a language and the class of acts
performed in it. A policy evaluated on visibility therefore risks
achieving nothing but visibility, since measurement instruments are
not neutral: they act upon the worlds they describe (Espeland and
Sauder, 2007; Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2004; Urla, 1993). Language
policy evaluation, as equipped by the economics of language (Grin,
2003), and the critique of endangerment discourses (Duchêne and
Heller, 2007) invite a fresh look at these questions, just as the
International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032) reaches its
midpoint. In dialogue with UNESCO Chairs and bodies working on
endangered, minority and Indigenous languages, the conference aims to
formulate proposals for a revision of UNESCO’s instruments for
assessing language vitality.
Three dimensions will receive particular attention. First, the staging
of authenticity, which the sociology of tourism has conceptualized as
staged authenticity (MacCannell, 1973), as negotiated through
commodification (Cohen, 1988) or as experienced in an existential mode
(Wang, 1999), and which sociolinguistics has problematized as an
ideological construct (Coupland, 2003), linked to the anonymity of
dominant languages (Woolard, 2016). Second, emotional commodities:
when authenticity, nostalgia and belonging become consumer goods
(Illouz, 2019), the minority language is sold less as a competence
than as an affect, raising the question of whether it produces
consumers rather than speakers, through a process of reification
rather than revernacularization (Branca, 2021). Finally, cultural
tourism, whose promise to promote minority languages and cultures runs
up against the tourist gaze (Urry and Larsen, 2011) and the production
of a culture for tourists (Picard, 1992), and whose effects on
linguistic density and on the vitality of endangered languages remain
poorly understood.
While Corsica is the starting point for this reflection, the
conference is open to all minority, minoritized or Indigenous
languages of Europe, the Mediterranean and beyond, as well as to
non-standard varieties and to state languages that, in touristified
spaces, face competition from international languages. Comparative
approaches are particularly welcome. Although addressed primarily to
sociolinguists, the call is also open to linguistic anthropology, the
sociology of culture and tourism, heritage studies, language law and
the economics of language, provided that contributions engage with
sociolinguistics. Round tables will also bring together, by
invitation, non-academic stakeholders: designers, local and regional
authorities, public language offices and tourism professionals. This
dialogue between research and society reflects a vision of
sociolinguistics working with and for society, fully committed to
serving its territory (Sorba, 2022).
The conference is organized by the UNESCO Chair “Devenirs en
Méditerranée” of the Università di Corsica Pasquale Paoli and the CNRS
research unit UMR 6240 LISA, as part of the ATLAS strand
(Accompagnement et Transfert pour L’Aménagement Sociolinguistique –
Support and Transfer for Sociolinguistic Planning) of the Tourism’Lab
for cultural industries of the PIA UNITI program, and in connection
with the HERMES project (HERitage in the Making: Emerging Strategies,
France 2030), led by Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, which supports the
emergence of new forms of heritage, including linguistic heritage.
Thematic strands
Strand 1. Exodiglossia: a concept for sociolinguistics?
This strand welcomes theoretical and epistemological contributions
that discuss, test or challenge the concept, and situate it among
neighboring notions: diglossia and conflict, glottopolitics,
post-vernacularity, linguistic fetish, symbolic ethnicity (Gans,
1979), banal nationalism (Billig, 1995), folklorization and
terroirization.
 - Diglossia, conflict, exodiglossia: is exodiglossia a post-diglossic
stage?
 - Can the speech act become the unit of analysis for linguistic
landscapes and vitality?
 - Under what conditions does a displayed language cease to be
exodiglossic: new speakers (Branca, 2025, 2026), legal obligation,
effective recognition?
 - What counterexamples, what competing readings, from glottopolitical
micro-acts to market-driven revitalization?
 - Does the concept hold beyond minoritized languages, for state
languages facing English in tourist spaces?
Strand 2. Changing linguistic landscapes: from invisibilization to
display
This strand focuses on diachrony and method: how can the appearance,
displacement or withdrawal of minority languages in public space be
documented over time, and with what tools?
 - Diachronic surveys: retrospective imagery, photographic archives,
repeated surveys along fixed transects.
 - Digital linguistic landscapes: platforms, social media, booking
sites, online reviews.
 - Commercial onomastics, business registers, brands and shop signs.
 - Toponymy, odonymy and public signage: who names, who prescribes?
 - Senders, genres and functions, from presence to act: coding
schemes, inter-coder reliability, corpus comparability.
 - Soundscapes: languages heard and languages shown.
Strand 3. The staging of authenticity
This strand examines the regimes of authenticity that govern the
display of minority languages and the settings in which it takes
place.
 - Authenticity and anonymity: what linguistic authorities for
minoritized languages?
 - Folklorization, terroirization, labels and charters: language as a
certificate of origin.
 - Festivals, rituals, song, confraternities: protected positions of
enunciation?
 - Language performances in tourist reception, service and
entertainment.
 - Standard, variation, polynomy (Marcellesi, 2003; Sorba, 2019; Sorba
and Branca, 2026): which language is staged, and by whom?
Strand 4. Emotional commodities
This strand examines the minority language as an affective resource
embedded in goods, brands and experiences.
 - Language in design, advertising, packaging, fashion, cosmetics,
beer, sport and music.
 - Nostalgia, pride, rootedness, belonging: what the minority language
sells.
 - Consuming the language without speaking it: can consumers become
speakers?
 - Designers, creative industries, and the graphic and typographic
shaping of minority languages.
 - Political economy of value: who captures the added value of the
language, and what returns to its transmission?
Strand 5. Cultural tourism and language economies
This strand examines the reciprocal effects of tourism and minority
languages, from the seasonality of language use to destination
strategies.
 - Touristification, seasonality and linguistic density: the effects
of tourism on language use and transmission.
 - Place marketing, destination brands, tourist offices.
 - Language work and language skills in tourism and hospitality
occupations.
 - Cultural, literary and linguistic tourism: language as product and
as experience.
 - Social acceptability of tourism and language claims.
Strand 6. Evaluating language policies, measuring vitality: towards a
revision of UNESCO frameworks
This strand, which prepares the conference’s proposals, focuses on
assessment instruments and their effects.
 - What do existing instruments measure: GIDS, the 2003 UNESCO
framework, the Atlas, EGIDS, LEI, EuLaViBar, national and regional
sociolinguistic surveys?
 - Distinguishing display from use, naming from enunciation, speakers
from types of speakers (Branca, 2026; Grinevald and Bert, 2011): which
indicators, which scales?
 - Status, official recognition, obligation: what law does to language
use.
 - Charters, labels, bilingual signage plans: assessing their actual
effects.
 - Reactivity of indicators: does a policy evaluated on visibility
achieve only visibility?
 - Minority languages and Indigenous languages in the International
Decade of Indigenous Languages: what methodological convergences?
 - Anticipating language futures: projections, scenarios and futures
literacy (Miller, 2018).
Formats and Languages:
Two formats are offered:
 - individual paper: a twenty-minute presentation followed by ten
minutes of discussion;
 - thematic panel: three or four papers built around a common
question, with a discussant (ninety minutes).
Early-career researchers, doctoral and postdoctoral, are strongly
encouraged to submit a proposal.
Papers may be presented in the language of the speaker’s choice. To
foster mutual intelligibility, the slides should, where possible, be
written in a language other than that of the presentation.
Submission Guidelines:
Proposals, written in Corsican, French or English, should include:
 - a title and the strand to which the proposal relates;
 - an abstract of no more than 2,500 characters including spaces,
excluding references, presenting the research question, the field site
or corpus, the method and the results obtained or expected;
 - five keywords and five bibliographical references;
 - the intended language of presentation;
 - in a separate file: name, position, institution, research unit,
email address and a five-line biographical note.
Panel proposals should also include a rationale of no more than 2,500
characters and the list of speakers with their biographies.
Each proposal will undergo double-blind review by two members of the
scientific committee, on the basis of its relevance to the call, its
theoretical and methodological rigor, the originality of its data and
its comparative scope.
Proposals should be sent no later than November 30, 2026 to:
chaire.unesco at univ-corse.fr.
Timeline:
 - Call for papers released: October 1, 2026
 - Proposal submission deadline: November 30, 2026
 - Notification of authors: December 18, 2026
 - Final program: January 15, 2027
 - Registration closes: February 1, 2027
 - Conference: March 4–5, 2027, Corti
 - Submission of papers for publication: June 30, 2027
Publication:
A selection of contributions will be published following double-blind
peer review.
Practical Information:
 - Venue: Università di Corsica Pasquale Paoli, Corti (Mariani campus,
Immersive Room).
 - Registration: free of charge.
 - Contact: paganelli_P1 at univ-corse.fr, pedinielli_s at univ-corse.fr
Organization and scientific direction:
Sébastien Quenot, Full Professor, Università di Corsica Pasquale
Paoli, UMR CNRS 6240 LISA, holder of the UNESCO Chair “Devenirs en
Méditerranée”.
For the full list of scientific committee and organizing commitee
members, see the conference website.



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