This workshop aims to explore the ways in which capitalist transformations, in particular the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism, have impacted the politics of language and the value allocated to languages and their speakers. We aim to move beyond common and acritical assumptions about capitalism and language that tend to take them for granted, without sufficiently interrogating their historical development, their heterogeneous manifestations in time and space, or their complicated interrelationship. A focus on capitalism enables a historical and empirical investigation of the intrinsic link between language and the political economy while also opening the field to exploring (1) the various ways that states, across different capitalist periods, engage in regulating and policing citizenship through language (education and immigration policies, language “academies”); (2) the impact of shifting modes of production and consumption on the value allocated to languages and speakers (labor forces, global consumers, etc.); (3) the role of (post)colonial economic relations and competitive linguistic regimes in the making of subaltern speaking subjects; (4) alternative political economic models and their linguistic imagination (i.e. counter-linguistic-imperialist movements, international auxiliary languages, etc.); and (5) the role of language (linguistic competence, bundles of skills, linguistic ideologies) in the uneven circulation of people, goods, and knowledge. All these issues will be carefully examined during the workshop by placing a particular focus on Francophonie, Hispanofonia, and Lusofonia. We understand these labels not purely as descriptors of geographic areas but as a set of practices and discursive formations that index historical relations – especially (post)colonial contexts – and power relations connected to fluctuating political and economic interests. The focus on these areas in particular reveals a terrain that lends itself neatly to cross-historical, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic analysis.