Marketing International Fellowship: Foreign-language Learning in Japan and the US

Chad Nilep

Abstract for paper presented at
American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting
Washington, DC
November 28-December 2, 2007

Recent work on language and globalization (e.g. Cameron 2000, Heller 2003) discusses individual, corporate, and State-based language and identity practices, and conflicting values among them. This paper contributes to that discussion a view of group identity practices and ideologies developed in the course of foreign-language learning.

LEX Language Project / Hippo Family Club is a transnational organization with headquarters in Tokyo, Boston, and elsewhere. Dedicated to the motto, "Anyone can speak seven languages," the club sells products and organizes members into local chapters where they practice Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. Members are invited to join in a transnational 'family', while being catered to as individual 'fellows'. Drawing on participant observation in Osaka and Massachusetts, and analysis of spoken and written discourse, this paper explores how LEX / Hippo promotes itself to potential new fellows, and the ways that fellows position themselves and one another within the Hippo "family".

Hippo Family Club invites individuals to join a transnational family and achieve multilingual competence without the need for study, teachers, or school hierarchy. This corporate master-narrative is reflected in individual members' discourses, as fellows in both Osaka and Massachusetts proclaim themselves to be part of a global society, while still maintaining elite local positions. At the same time, Hippo discourses are sufficiently broad to be realized differently in each site, in ways consistent with local ideologies. These locally-appropriate ideologies are examined in discourses from members in each site.

Chad Nilep is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and editor of Colorado Research in Linguistics. He can be reached at:Chad.Nilep@Colorado.edu.