What does language commodification do for language teachers? Exploring imaginations of Taiwanese Mandarin as a commodity in the online gig economy

Language commodification has emerged as a prominent field of inquiry for studying how languages are transformed into marketable commodities within the globalized economy. In this contribution, I argue that the discussions have become overly concerned with theoretical technicalities, revealing more about how we, in our professional capacity as researchers, think about language commodification than how our participants imagine language as a commodity and are affected by these imaginations. By conceptualizing language commodification as a language ideological process that is spatiotemporally structured, I conduct an emic exploration of commodity imaginations and their consequences in the context of online Mandarin teaching. While ideologically commodifying Taiwanese Mandarin allows the twelve interviewed Taiwanese teachers to situate themselves on the market in a way that makes sense of their linguistic repertoires, past experiences and personal convictions, it also raises concerns about their status as speakers of a non-dominant Mandarin variety, leading to material and ideological challenges thus far underexplored in the literature.