This paper aims to demonstrate the implications of health mobility
on language practices in the medical tourism industry in India and on the
ways, language workers become entrepreneurs. Drawing from ethnographic
fieldwork that traces the trajectories of three former students of Russian, we
highlight their future aspirations as language learners and entrepreneurs and
show, how they attempt to capitalize on language skills and respond to
changing conditions and patient movements within the structures, constraints
and uncertainties of the linguistic market. Here, it is our aim to
illustrate what it takes to become an enterprising and successful language
worker and at the same time highlight their current positioning as emblematic
yet subordinate figures within a fast-growing service industry in an
emerging economy. We further demonstrate, how language skills not only
become commodities to serve existing or future markets, but instead are
recast as tools that can be strategically employed to secure recognition and
access to prestigious and lucrative professional networks. In doing so, this
paper illustrates how linguistic value is produced in a service industry that to
date only received little attention in sociolinguistic research.