The linguistic market for English in Bangladesh

A large body of work has investigated the presence of English and its teaching and learning in the developing world where English is used as a second/foreign language. While this work has provided plausible explanations for the global spread of English as well as its uptake by education policy-makers and communities, there has been limited research on, in Bourdieu's (1991, p. 44) terms, the “economic and social conditions of the acquisition of the legitimate competence” in English. This paper draws on Bourdieu's concepts of linguistic market and linguistic capital to illustrate differential proficiency outcomes for different market actors affiliated with different education markets in Bangladesh. Although Bourdieu focused on the notion of a “unified market” with reference to the dominant or official language, investigating English as a second or foreign language requires exploring multiple markets of English in the polity. Drawing on a diversified understanding of the context of language policy and planning, these markets are located at the national and subnational levels. I argue that while macro-level policy-makers have been guided by “linguistic communism” in introducing English for all, it is actually market forces that determine, to a large extent, who attains linguistic competence and whose competence is likely to be transformed into linguistic capital.