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*. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Language in Society editor Jenny Cheshire for their helpful comments on the article. All remaining errors are my own.
INTRODUCTION
With Americanized English the common tongue for much of the industrialized world, knowing a second language might seem as useless as learning Morse code. However, executive recruiters and hiring personnel say North Americans who speak Spanish can do far more than chat up Latino receptionists. Bilingual skills help job seekers land work. They can lead to key assignments and pay raises. In some cases, they may even be a job requirement. -Dan Woog (Monster.com)
The quote above, from a popular employment website, exemplifies a framing of multilingualism as human capital. The author represents bilingualism in Spanish and English as an investment in knowledge and skills that can provide advantages and benefits on the labor market, reflecting a discourse of multilingualism as a form of economic advantage, a discourse that has become increasingly dominant in contemporary society (Heller & Duchêne 2012). As Heller & Duchêne (2016) note, although this discourse is common and potentially rhetorically effective, it does not necessarily reflect the economic realities of how linguistic repertoires are valued. It is thus worth examining in detail whether representations of multilingualism as human capital reflect economic realities, or whether such discourse might instead obscure a more complex situation.
In this article, I consider the case of Spanish-English bilingualism in the United States and whether, as is suggested by the quote above, it yields advantages on the labor market, what those advantages might be, and for whom they might accrue. First, I consider past research examining demand and returns for Spanish-English bilingualism on the US labor market. I argue that findings from existing literature cannot be readily explained merely by conceptualizing multilingualism as human capital. Rather, I suggest that it is also important to attend to the ideologies that underpin employers' valuations of language skills. Specifically, I argue for a need to consider the ways raciolinguistic ideology (Flores & Rosa 2015; Rosa & Flores 2017) may assign value to linguistic repetoires not primarily on the basis of their communicative utility but rather with respect to the...