The compromised pragmatics of diversity

•Race/ethnically marked identities and languages emerge from chronotopically structured experience structured by inequality.•Identities and languages are thus neoliberally imagined as individual possessions that cast social actors as human capital.•Neoliberal discourses focus on marked identities ('diversity') and language in relation to market values ('value added').•At the same time, the inequalities shaping markedness of race/ethnic identity and minority languages do not disappear.•Thus, discourses about diversity and value-added languages do not address fundamental issues of inequality.

When languages or ethnic/racial identities are imagined as neoliberal objects in corporate, government, and educational discourses, their worth is imagined in terms of 'added value.' Yet they emerge from social formations embedded in inequalities, reflecting the interplay of markedness and unmarkedness. People experience them chronotopically, meaningful relative to specific times, places, and relationships. But once language and identity become quantifiable units of diversity, they become subject to rhetorical packaging that eliminates any experiential specificity. Disconnected from context, language and social identity become available for use in institutional promotion and branding. Yet, though marketed in relation to neoliberalized personal properties like skills, the marketing potential of linguistic or social diversity is always subject to compromise by the echo of lived experience.