This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double developments of two unfinished forces – rapidly progressing climate change and global economic investment – working simultaneously in tension and synergy. Neither process is linear or complete, but both are contradictory and open-ended.

This book traces the multiplicity of Cold Rush in the Finnish Arctic, a high-stakes ecological, economic, and political hotspot. It is a heterogeneous space, understood as indigenous land within local indigenous Sámi people politics, the last frontier from a colonial perspective, and a periphery under the modernist nation-state regime. It is now transforming into an economic hub under global capitalism, intensifying climate change and unforeseen geo-political changes.

Based on six years of ethnography, the book shows how people struggle, strategize, and profit from this ongoing, complex, and multidirectional change.

The author offers a new theoretical approach called critical assemblage analysis, which provides an alternative way of exploring the dynamics between language and society by examining the interaction between material, discursive, and affective dimensions of Cold Rush. The approach builds on previous work at the intersection of critical discourse analysis, critical sociolinguistics, nexus analysis and ethnography, but expands toward works by philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.

This book will be of interest to researchers on language, discourse, and sociolinguistics interested in engaging with social critique embedded in global capitalism and accelerating climate change; as well as researchers in the social and human sciences and natural sciences, who are increasingly aware of the fact that the theoretical and analytical move beyond the traditional dichotomies like language/society, nature/human and micro/macro is central to understanding today´s complex, intertwined social, political, economic and ecological processes.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Reference

Pietikäinen, S. (2024). Cold Rush: Critical Assemblage Analysis of a Heating Arctic. Palgrave Macmillan.

Additional resources

Cold Rush project website
“Language and tourism” on Language on the Move

Transcript (coming soon)

Language needs in the hospitality sector in Pallars Sobirà, Catalonia (Source: paddleinspain.com)

Multilingualism means business. The more foreign language skills are availalble to a company, the better it will be prepared to meet customers’ needs. In our globalized world, multilingualism is key and English is no longer enough. In this sense, companies are seeking to provide a better service by speaking other languages.

This phenomenon is even more important when it comes to the hospitality sector, as we found in our study about Language Needs in Tourism Enterprises in Pallars Sobirà, Catalonia (Cañas & Pérez, 2014). Our research focused on the linguistic strategies that tourism enterprises based in the region of Pallars Sobirà (Catalonia, Spain) follow in order to improve their services.

Globalization does not only occur in mass market destinations. It can also be perceived on a smaller scale in countries and regions off the beaten track. How can the owner of a small cottage in a rural area be linguistically prepared for the arrival of foreign tourists from distant countries? Language strategy is the answer.

In our research, we found that an overwhelming 78% of the participating companies are aware of the importance of multilingualism. This is not surprising as nowadays, the visitors to Pallars Sobirà are very diverse: in addition to domestic tourists from Spain, visitors include French, British, Israeli and Russians. According to statistics from the Pallars Sobirà Tourist Information Office Network, the region received nearly 13% international tourists in 2013.

Most tourists visit the region due to white-water rafting competitions. The region is famous for championships such as the Freestyle Spanish Cup or the Noguera Pallaresa International Rally.

In the hospitality industry, there is a general awareness of the scarcity of language skills and most of the companies do not at present have any language strategy – despite their high levels of awareness that such a strategy would be desirable, as mentioned above.

On the other hand, companies with an existing foreign language policy also admitted that they still need more foreign language training. Owners and managers reported that they had come across difficulties with foreign tourists due to this fact and, as a result, many believed they had lost business opportunities.

Regarding the promotional strategy, many companies revealed that their website is already displayed in foreign languages (English, French and German are the most common ones).

Although many companies have their website and promotional information adapted to foreign clients, they need to make an effort in terms of accuracy and correctness. Enterprises must present their best image and in order to have effective content authors need to know how to write for the web, and how to manage the process of text revision, validation and publication.

Accuracy was also an issue with the paper-based information displayed at the hotels, hostels or inns. Often, this was not user-friendly for foreign tourists, except for those companies in which the restaurant menu is provided in English (and even in Hebrew in some cases).

Companies such as the ones participating in our study need to develop their own language management strategy by selecting from a range of various language measures. How to start? Using local agents who speak the target language can be the first step in opening up a new and unknown market. Additionally, it is important that regional institutions invest in the implementation of policies focusing on language training and facilitate recruitment. An example can be found in the Generalitat de Catalunya Strategic Tourism Plan for Catalonia 2013-2016 in which training in language skills is described as one key component within the excellence programme.

Reference

Cañas, J. & Pérez, L. (2014). Language Needs in Tourism Enterprises in Pallars Sobirà, Catalonia. Creació i comercialització de productes turístics. Quaderns de recerca Escola Universitària Formatic Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.

Yangshuo’s West Street (Source: chinatravelca)

Tourism has been found to be beneficial for minority language maintenance in a number of contexts from around the world. For instance, Anand Torrents Alcaraz has recently shown here on Language on the Move that the growing tourism industry in the Pallars Sobirà region of the Spanish Pyrenees extends the range of uses of Pallarès, the local dialect of Catalan, beyond its traditional rural-agricultural domains. Similarly, PhD research by Yang Hongyan has demonstrated that the award of World Heritage status to the city of Lijiang in Yunnan province in China has provided a significant boost for the maintenance of the Naxi language (Yang 2013). However, it is not always the case that the local minority language benefits from the development of tourism in a minority area, as a fascinating case study of West Street in Yangshuo Town in the Guilin district of Guangxi Province in China demonstrates (Gao 2012).

Yangshuo was one of the first backpacker destinations to emerge in China and the frequency with which Yangshuo is featured in English-language travel reports is out of all proportion to its small size, as Xiaoxiao Chen found in her study of representations of Chinese people and languages in English-language newspaper travel writing (Chen 2013). Yangshuo is typically represented as “easy,” “accessible” and “English-speaking” to English-language audiences, as in the following example (quoted in Chen 2013, p. 207):

[Yangshuo] is the most accessible destination in China for independent foreign travelers, offering accommodation across all ranges, an eclectic array of restaurants with English menus and English-speaking tourism service providers.

However, catering to the international tourist market through the provision of English-language services is only one part of the success story of Yangshuo. Capitalising on its popularity with international tourists, Yangshuo began to strategically associate itself with English-speaking visitors in its marketing efforts directed at domestic tourists, as in the following strategy paper (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 343):

We should fully explore the opportunities of mixing Chinese with western cultures by strategically integrating more western elements into local Yangshuo culture.

As a consequence of this branding strategy, part of the attraction of Yangshuo for domestic tourists now is the presence of English in the linguistic landscape, as a tourism site points out (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 336f.):

Yangshuo has picturesque scenery and rich cultural heritage. The most famous is the ancient stone street, West Street, which has many craft shops, calligraphy and painting shops, hostels, cafés, bars, and Chinese kung fu houses. It is also the gathering place for the largest number of foreigners – more than twenty businesses are owned by foreigners. So the place is called the ‘Foreigner Street’. And since all the locals can speak foreign languages, it is also called the ‘Global Village’. Another attraction is the study and exchange of Chinese and foreign languages and cultures. Chinese people teach their foreign friends Chinese cultures including its language, calligraphy, taiji, cooking, chess; at the same time foreigners teach Chinese people their languages and cultures, so that both finish their ‘study abroad’ within a short time.

The presence of English in the local linguistic landscape is continuously stressed in marketing materials, such as this one from the Yangshuo Tourism Bureau (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 345f.):

Yangshuo is a good place to cure your ‘dumb English’ and ‘deaf English’. At West Street, you can always see West Street people talking in fluent English with western travelers for business or just having small talk. Even old grannies in their 70s or teenage kids can chat [Chinese original: 拉呱 lā guǎ] with ‘laowai’ [foreigners] in English. Many western travelers say they just feel no foreignness here. West Street is the largest ‘English Corner’ in China now.

One could assume that in this ‘culture- and language-rich’ tourist destination, local languages are also being strategically incorporated, particularly as Yangshuo is located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the home of the Zhuang ethnic minority. However, this is not the case. In contrast to the ubiquitous focus on English, the local language, Zhuang, the local dialect of Chinese, and other local minority languages present in Yangshuo (Yao, Hui, Miao, Tibetan, Dong and others) are systematically erased: their existence is simply never even mentioned in tourism materials about the area.

Even if the local dialect is mentioned, as in this blog post by a visitor to Yangshuo (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 348f.), it is to be denigrated as not locally appropriate:

You must hold a CET-4 certificate, with relatively fluent spoken English, because at West Street, or just at countryside farmhouses of Yangshuo, even an old grandma or an egg-seller from a rural family could surprise you with their amazing English and at least another foreign language. Next of course you should know Cantonese, kind of an official language here, ‘cause more than half of the xiăozī [=cool person; yuppie] are from Guangdong. The third comes Putonghua, better with Beijing accent. The local dialect just does not work there.

In contrast to Pallars Sobirà or Lijiang, in Yangshuo tourism has done nothing to improve the status of local minority languages. On the contrary, as English takes on the function of indexing not only the global but also the local identity of Yangshuo, it is English that becomes a marker of local authenticity in the global village.

References

Chen, Xiaoxiao. (2013). Opening China to the Tourist Gaze: Representations of Chinese People and Languages in Newspaper Travel Writing since the 1980s. PhD, Macquarie University.

Gao, Shuang (2012). Commodification of place, consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a ‘global village’ in rural China Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16 (3), 336-357 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2012.00534.x

Yang, Hongyan. (2012). Naxi, Chinese and English: Multilingualism in Lijiang. PhD, Macquarie University.

Actress Noemí Busquets as the wise yet naughty Esperanceta Gassia at the Ecomuseu de les Valls d’Àneu during the theatrical night visit to the ethnographic museum of Esterri d’ Àneu in Pallarès

When thinking of promoting tourism in a mountainous area of the Catalan Pyrenees it might seem as if using Pallarès, the local dialect of the Western Catalan type, with very specific vocabulary that visitors from other Catalan-speaking areas are not familiar with and which has been traditionally linked to rural and traditional lifestyles, would make little sense.

Nevertheless, much is to be gained by resorting to this local variety of the Catalan language in touristic activities in the area of Pallars Sobirà… why is that? Well, surprisingly, globalization is the answer.

One of the things that happen in the globalized touristic use of languages, according to authors such as Jaworski and Thurlow (2011) is the “commodification” and “recontextualization” of language. That means, language becomes a commodity in tourism … Aloha in Hawaii and Namaste in Nepal add authenticity to cultural visits, which is always a key asset in tourism. Beyond greetings and occasional language-learning through touristic “grazing” and “gazing”, though, tourism naturally creates new contexts for cultural phenomena and it currently values (oral) intangible heritage greatly. In fact, intangible heritage becomes visible precisely thanks to tourism. Pallarès is, in this sense, an intangible heritage of great value due to its connection to the authentic culture and territory of the Pyrenees.

According to dialectologists (Veny, 1993), Pallarès displays the marks of languages that were spoken before Catalan in the Pyrenees; mainly Basque, which vanished around the 8^th century AD due to the Romanization process, but which endured in “isolated” mountain valleys of the Pallars until the 10^th century, leaving a strong imprint on place names specially.

Mountain regions are ambivalent: either mountains and valleys “isolate”, or they “link” populations, villages, and cultures. So, when researching in order to assess the potential value of Pallarès in the promotion of the rich touristic offer of the Pallars Sobirà region (a land with prime adventure sports environment and unique cultural offers from Romanesque art to gastronomy) I asked cultural anthropologist and director of the Ecomuseu de les Valls d’Àneu Jordi Abella about this. Mr. Abella told me that “the villages of the Pyrenees in the 19^th century were already connected to European capital cities such as Madrid, Paris and Barcelona” and that too long a “good savage myth à la Rousseau had lived on to give a false romantic image of the Pyrenees” based on cultural purity due to isolation.

In a way, both isolation and globalization are forces at play here: isolation is evidenced by the fact that Basque lived on for 200 years in the Pallars; and globalization is evidenced by the fact that people changed to a common language – Catalan – which they could use at fairs and for trading.

Poster of the theater and dance festival “Esbaiola’t” in Esterri d’Àneu. The verb “esbaiolar-se” is unknown in other varieties of Catalan and means “to clear one’s mind” as well as “to clear up the mists (weather)”

Catalonia as a whole is going through what some have called a “thirst for history” (Toledano Gonzàlez, 2004). Catalans are more inclined to consume and discover more about their own culture at the current history-defining moment in which a Catalan vote for self-determination is being discussed. This creates a context that naturally invites greater use of Pallarès as Actress Noemí Busquets (who plays the role of a Pallarès-speaking witch-like wise and wacky lady that confronts local and global values during the night visits to the Eco Museum of the village of Esterri d’Àneu) emphasises: “now I feel that it (Pallarès) is better appreciated by visitors”.  And the fact is that 63% of the visitors coming to the Pallars region are from Catalonia (Boyra & Fusté, 2013), and mostly from the metropolitan area of Barcelona. What is it that Pallarès can offer them?

When in 1913, the philologist Pompeu Fabra wrote the Orthographic Rules of Catalan and later on the General Dictionary of Catalan Language (1931), he based them on the Eastern Catalan dialect – the one spoken in Barcelona – and left aside most vocabulary of other dialects and almost completely ignored Pallarès. Now, as a consequence of this, people coming to the Pallars get surprised by Pallarès. While queuing up at a grocery shop in the beautiful village of Esterri d’Àneu, a spontaneous conversation on dialectology started: a woman shared that when she got married to her Pallarès husband and moved to his village, her mother-in-law once asked her to fetch the “llosa”. “Llosa” in Catalan means “stone slab”; so, she continued “I was hoping that the stone slab wouldn’t be too heavy”. To her relief she later found out that “llosa” in Pallarès means “ladle”.

Pallarès brings back to Catalan-speaking visitors, a richness of vocabulary that they would otherwise ignore. When I asked Yolanda Mas, tourism specialist of the city hall of Sort (the capital of the Pallars Sobirà) what she thought of promoting Pallarès through tourism, she said that “it is an endangered resource that we should definitely invest in”. Nowadays, the visitors to the Pallars Sobirà are very diverse; from French and English to Spanish, Israeli and Russians; so the linguascape of the Pallars might become even more complex soon, and while offering touristic activities in Hebrew or Russian may respond to the economic need of the moment, offering activities in Pallarès Catalan in addition to activities in Standard Catalan and other languages, will be proof that “identity sells” while being at the same time a necessary expression of authentic identity.

References
Boyra, J. & Fusté, F. (2013). Anàlisi dels instruments d’ordenació i dels recursos territorials i l’activitat turística a la comarca del Pallars Sobirà GREPAT/ Escola Universitària Formatic Barna, Barcelona

Fabra, P. (1913). Normes ortogràfiques. Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona.

Fabra, P. (1931). Diccionari general de la llengua catalana. Llibreria Catalònia, Barcelona.

Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (2010). Language and the Globalizing Habitus of Tourism: Towards a sociolingüístics of Fleeting Relationships (From: Handbook of Language and Globalization, edited by Coupland, N.) Wiley- Blackwell Publishing ltd. West Sussex, UK.

Toledano Gonzàlez, L. (2004). Atles del Turisme a Catalunya mapa nacional dels recursos turísitics intangibles. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona- Grup de Recerca Consolidat Manuscrits / Generalitat de Catalunya.

Torrents, A. (2014). La variant dialectal pallaresa com a bé immaterial de la marca de turisme cultural “Pallars”. Creació i comercialització de productes turístics. Quaderns de recerca Escola Universitària Formatic Barna, Barcelona.

Veny, J. (1993). Els parlars catalans (Síntesi de dialectologia) Editorial Moll, Mallorca.

English textbook used at the non-Government school

“I take a bilingual approach, so you might not understand some parts of my class. But I hope you’ll enjoy it.” Dressed in a blue traditional dress, a tall middle-aged Burmese teacher explained her teaching approach to me in the beginning of her class on English at a non-government tertiary school.

The school is located some 40 minute taxi ride away from downtown Yangon, the former capital city of Myanmar. Facing the class of some 50 students from various ethnic backgrounds, she began her class by taking attendance, and then started instructing her students to work on the section on Iceland as a tourist destination in their textbook Travelling.

I have never been to Iceland, and I’m not sure how many of these students are ever going to visit the Nordic country, but looking around the class, I saw all students glued to their textbook. Seeing the recent developments in the country, teaching English for tourism is important indeed.

As Myanmar moves towards further democratization, the country is rapidly emerging as an attractive travel destination. Compared to my first visit to Myanmar two years ago, I saw more Western tourists out and about in the city with a local tour-guide this time. In addition, touted as the ‘last frontier in ASEAN’ by international investors, Myanmar has also seen a rapid increase in the number of business travellers from all over the world. At the same time, the country is taking many measures to encourage tourism. These include visas on arrival and the presence of stylish brand new Toyota Tourist Police cars. In contrast to the much older-looking ‘normal’ police cars these seem to create some sense of safety for tourists. Apart from me, there were several European tourists taking photos of the Tourist Police cars.

Tourist Police cars in Yangon

English proficiency is crucial for the young generation to gain employment in the emerging tourist market. Apart from careers in tourism, English is also seen as an important educational qualification. As Dr. Thein Lwin (2011, p. 12) explains, recent years have seen an unprecedented popularity of English in this former British colony where English proficiencies “lead to economic advantages, help in dealing with the outside world, and improve prospects of study abroad and employment.”

Indeed, many students I met at the school mentioned above said that they are planning to apply for a scholarship to study abroad. Many scholarship programs are available but all require high English proficiency. One student, from Shan State, has set his heart on studying in neighbouring Thailand, and if he succeeds, he’d be the first person from his village to study for a master’s degree abroad. At this stage, for him and his aspiring classmates, their future success depends largely on English.

Many local teachers teach English bilingually, as the teacher I mentioned in the introduction, and the focus is on practical English, English for tourism, for instance. It is obvious that learning English is serious business in Yangon. However, not all teachers seem to realize that.

For instance, one student, Elizabeth (pseudonym), told me about a visiting professor from the US. Assuming that volunteer teachers are welcome in a country where English language education is being taken so seriously, I said “Oh that’s great!” I also knew that Elizabeth was an admirer of the US – she had studied in the US for one year on a scholarship in 2013, and she said she was aspiring to go back there to pursue a master’s degree in business.

She hesitantly replied, however, “Well… actually no so great”. The reason – the US professor’s teaching approach didn’t match their sense of identity as adult learners of English:

We didn’t like her class because … she treated us like children. She gave us children’s books to read, and like, we are adults, but she asked us to sing songs, and we were like, what the he-!?

Elizabeth continued to explain how the professor asked them to sing Christmas songs, which they didn’t want to, but “we didn’t want to be impolite, so we sang along those stupid songs and did everything she asked us to do” she said, half-smiling and half making a face.

Elizabeth’s story reminded me of a similar experience I had when I was studying at a two-year college of English in Tokyo back in the 1990s.

In our second year, we had a new teacher from the US, a fresh university graduate, to teach literature. The textbook she chose for us was Mother Goose. While some of my classmates found it useful to learn “American culture”, the majority erupted in anger. In the second week, we told her at the beginning of class that we were offended by her choice of Mother Goose. I remember one frustrated classmate telling her off, “You think we are children?!” What she didn’t know was the fact that many of my classmates could have easily gone to a four-year university but chose this immersion school to master English for the purpose of career development and further education. Just like the students I met in Yangon, English was not some kind of fun hobby but serious business for us.

Our American teacher was lucky. She learned, even if the hard way, that selecting learning materials requires knowing her students’ sense of identity and their aspirations. By contrast, the professor teaching at Elizabeth’s school seems to have gone home without realising how her teaching materials may have been offensive to some of her students. Whether they become tour guides or office workers or English teachers or continue to study overseas, reading American children’s books and learning how to sing Christmas songs may have some use but it also runs the risk of hurting adult students’ dignity.

Of course, whether more practical textbooks like Travelling are preferable to children’s books depends on the context in which learning takes place. Children’s books or songs can be very useful for adults learning a new language but learning materials need to match the students’ aspirations, and their purpose needs to be clearly explained to them.

This is all language teaching 101, and the current English language teaching boom in Myanmar shows that there are many opportunities to put high-quality English language teaching it into practice.

Ad for ‘English for travel’ classes ( www.gaba.co.jp/ad)

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to Jim Thompson’s special sales at BITEC in Bang Na, a short train ride from central Bangkok. The special shuttle bus waiting at the station for bargain hunters was full of Japanese JT fans, and I struck up a conversation with an elderly Japanese couple. As they looked ‘non-tourist’ and at ease with the surroundings, I first thought that they were retirees living in Thailand. It turned out that they were actually tourists, and the main aim of their trip was to stay at the newly-opened prestigious Okura Hotel. They were enjoying the hotel, but “we actually prefer the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. We stay there every time we come to Thailand”. Curious about “every time”, I asked how many times they’d visited. They looked unsure, replying “We’ve lost count…”. Finally, they figured that, since their first trip some 20 years ago, the husband, a retired real estate sales manager, had visited about 30 times, and his wife, a retired bank worker, over 40 times!

Seeing my disbelief, Mrs. Tanaka (pseudonym) enthusiastically explained how easy and pleasurable each of their visits had been. They quickly added that neither of them could speak English or Thai, but they have never had a serious problem or unpleasant experience. They love Thai culture and for Mrs. Tanaka, “Bangkok has become home”. Before we parted, they also talked about their wish to move to Thailand permanently, but that would happen, they explained, only after they had fully fulfilled their duty to farewell Mr. Tanaka’s elderly mother, who is 100 years old.

Although they claimed that they can’t speak any English, it’s probably the case that they can communicate in English to some extent. After all, they were able to get to the sales venue by themselves by using the BTS Skytrain where information signs are mostly in Thai and English. At the same time, their multiple trips to Thailand and their sense of belonging to the country despite their claimed lack of English or the local language, challenge the discourse of トラベル/旅行英会話 (English for Travel Purposes), a multimillion-dollar branch of the huge English teaching industry in Japan.

Compared to English for Academic Purposes, the king of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Travel Purposes (ETP) has received less scholarly attention. But ETP provides an amazing variety of courses and materials and has a strong hold on the psyche of many Japanese. What we find in cyberspace, for example, are countless numbers of ETP-related publications, websites of private language schools, vocational schools and universities that offer ETP courses, free and paid online lessons, seminars conducted by major travel agencies, websites run by travel English experts and enthusiasts, etc. Many 英会話学校 (English conversation schools) such as the three major schools, AEON, ECC and Gaba, offer ETP courses, and the discourse in the ads of these three schools is strikingly similar: ETP courses are for people who wish to make their overseas trip more enjoyable.

Gaba, for instance, recommends their ETP course for those who desire to (1) travel alone, (2) travel without guidebooks and (3) communicate with local people. Furthermore, ECC teacher Mika Fukube explains that ‘good English’ rather than ‘broken English’ will get tourists better service overseas:

海外旅行先でのホテルやレストランなどではブロークンな英語ではなく、しっかりとした英会話を話すことで、より良いサービスが提供されます.  (If you can communicate in proper English, not in broken English, you will be able to receive good service at hotels and restaurants in your destination.) [my translation]

Then, how much and how long does a tourist need to invest in getting that better, service-winning English? AEON offers a one-year ETP course and charges JPY118,440 for a weekly group lesson (plus the registration fee of JPY 30,000 and possibly extra for textbooks), while Gaba’s one-on-one course over 8 months is pricier with JPY437,850 for 60 lessons (plus JPY 18,900 for textbooks).

All in all, the ETP business in Japan thrives on promoting the idea of English as a magical tool to make overseas travel safer, more fun and meaningful.

The flip side of the discourse, however, works to instil a profound sense of anxiety and helplessness in prospective travellers as travelling overseas without English emerges as hard and dangerous, if not impossible. I’ve lost count of the Japanese people I’ve met, who shyly or anxiously claimed “I’m scared of going overseas because I can’t speak English.”

None of this linguistic burden, anxiety or any sense of exclusion was evident in my hour-long conversation with the Tanakas. They marveled at the land of smiles and all things Thai – its people, food and cultures – that are found alongside the wide variety of Japanese signs, products and services to which they can turn should the need arise.

Bangkok was recently named the world’s third top tourism destination for 2012, after London and Paris. Hedrick-Wong, MasterCard Worldwide’s global economic advisor, pointed out Bangkok’s “tolerant culture” as the winning aspect. In light of the Tanakas’ experience, Bangkok obviously offers more than ‘cultural tolerance’. It is a multilingual city where an elderly Japanese couple are able to enjoy their stay on their own, to have meaningful contact with the locals, and to be highly mobile, all without that so-called ‘service-winning proper’ English.

Indeed, the discourse of ETP makes little sense in the ‘real’ Bangkok as an overseas tourism destination; its linguistic landscape and multilingual service provisions help to make visitors welcome and demonstrate that in contemporary Asia you can get fantastic service without English.

One of the beauties of the report is how the book is iconic of its content. The front cover is quintilingual in English, French, German, Italian and Romansh although the English title obviously overshadows the subtitle in the four national languages. About two thirds of the 240-page report is presented quadrilingually in the four national languages, followed by an English translation, which is printed on green paper. So, the design makes it easy to navigate between the national languages and English. Within the national languages section, the languages are mingling nicely rather than being segregated into separate sections. However, a thumb index makes it possible to go straight to a particular language if you so wish. The thumb index for German is almost a solid line, indicating that there is a lot of German used throughout; the indexes for French and Italian are more like a dotted line, and the index for Romansh consists only of three dots, iconic of the minority status of that language.

Overall, the report provides a wealth of findings around three key research questions: how does Swiss multilingualism work? What are the current linguistic competences of the Swiss population? What should the linguistic competences of the Swiss population be in the future and how can we plan for those? There is such a wealth of findings that I’ll blog about some of the 26 projects individually in the near future. For now, I’ll focus on the six key issues highlighted by the editor as emerging from the national project:

1. How multilingualism works: projects devoted to institutional multilingualism in contexts such as the Swiss army or tourism businesses (as in our project) highlight people’s pragmatism and flexibility in relation to the multilingual realities in which they find themselves. Of course, institutional pragmatism and flexibility is only possible if there are a certain number of multilingual individuals in the institution. However, institutions do not do much to promote individual multilingualism and to offer systematic language training. So, one of the report’s recommendations is for institutions to acknowledge individual multilingualism more as a resource and to remunerate it accordingly and also for the provision of more systematic language training.
2. Learning languages: language learning needs to happen in school and there are a range of challenges to make language education more effective. These range from questions around which languages should be introduced when and other language-in-education policy issues to more classroom oriented questions such as language teaching methods. A number of projects, for instance, highlighted the importance of resourcing language teaching properly as shallow learning results in quick forgetting, and so is largely a wasted effort.
3. English: the role of English is as hot a topic in Switzerland as elsewhere and the report’s pragmatism is refreshing: English is here to stay and a central facet of the Swiss linguistic landscape, as it is globally, but English is not enough. For Switzerland, at least, the future continues to be multilingual.
4. Standard- and non-standard varieties: German-speaking Swiss often quip that Standard German is their first foreign language. However, NFP56 research has shown that the majority population is largely unaffected by this difference between Swiss and standard German varieties. The people who have trouble to master the standard, both in German-speaking and Francophone Switzerland are those with a migration background pointing to the need to improve educational opportunities for migrant populations.
5. Linguistic minorities: the indigenous minority languages of Italian and Romansh have traditionally enjoyed equality before the law, even if not outside the institutions of the state. While the challenge to ensure equal opportunities for the speakers of the indigenous minority languages remains to some degree, the much larger challenge that has emerged in recent years is the one to ensure equal opportunities for the “new” minorities that have resulted from the migrations of the past decades. The report is adamant that there is often a double standard that views the maintenance of indigenous minority languages as desirable but views the same maintenance as a failure of “integration” when it comes to non-indigenous minorities. However, research projects in the NFP56 also found that migrant languages are maintained well in Switzerland, even in the 3^rd generation, and most of the projects highlighted the importance of acknowledging and supporting their maintenance in the interest of Swiss society as a whole.
6. Multilingual media: somewhat surprisingly the media were found to be far behind the country’s multilingual reality with most media catering narrowly to what they see as their linguistic clientele.

Ultimately, the linguistic challenges of Switzerland are those of every contemporary society. The Swiss are fortunate in that they have been thinking about how to make societal multilingualism work for the common good for much longer than pretty much everyone else. Switzerland is also fortunate in that their politicians had the good sense to initiate and fund a national research project that will form the basis of future language policy. Everyone involved in language policy, language-in-education policy, the sociolinguistics of multilingualism and language learning has a lot to learn from NFP56! If you only read one sociolinguistics book this year, make it Do you speak Swiss?

Walter Haas (Ed.) (2010). Do you speak Swiss? Sprachenvielfalt und Sprachkompetenz in der Schweiz. Nationales Forschungsprogramm NFP 56 NZZ Libro

When I left the restaurant, I saw the same men smoking outside, while the women waited behind them. There were also two children, aged between 8 to 10, trying to sell bunches of roses to the smokers. Disturbed while enjoying his after-dinner cigarette, one of the men yelled at the children, “人生そんなに甘くないんだよ！ま、わかんねーか、ははは [Life is not that easy! Well, you don’t understand, do you? ha ha ha].” The children were showing no sign of discouragement. As I walked away glaring at the man, he was turning his back to the young flower sellers, as an indication of “No more communication and get lost.”

I don’t know what he meant to say with his comment of “you don’t understand!” Was he referring to the children’s ability to understand Japanese or the general harshness of life? (If the latter, he’s clearly completely wrong). Either way, I found his comment disturbing but also demonstrative of a common phenomenon associated with intercultural communication. In an intercultural context where people assume that their language is not understood, they can potentially say something very hurtful or immoral, that they would not have otherwise said. They believe they can get away with it because their meanings won’t be understood, and hence they won’t risk a negative assessment of their personality or potential retaliation. The absence of a shared ‘language’ and ‘culture’ in intercultural contexts then becomes some kind of license to insult, without consequence. This is a false assumption, of course. Receivers of hurtful comments do very often understand them through other channels of communication, be it body language, facial expression, and tone of voice, just as we can very often understand warmth and friendliness of individuals, with whom we do not share a common language. The man’s comment was a regrettable example of this assumption, embedded in the immorality of his laughter at the vulnerable and his lack of concern for small children working on the street close to midnight.

I am not suggesting he should have bought the flowers, as this is generally considered as a factor that keeps child labour an attractive option for helpless or abusive adults. But several questions come to mind: Would he have acted the same manner if the children were Japanese or in the company of someone with Japanese proficiency who could defend them? Did the other men remain silent because they thought the kids didn’t understand Japanese or did not want to spoil the fun night with the women? The children, however, perfectly got the message – they are not wanted and treated like dirt – even without any proficiency in Japanese. Some forms of communication work perfectly well in the absence of a shared language.

Additionally, a multiplicity of languages is inscribed in the stones of Persepolis. The Tachara, another central monument is described as a “museum of the history of calligraphy” in the guide books. There are the cuneiform texts of Old Persian, the Pahlavi texts of Middle Persian, and from the Buyids to the Qajars, a number of dynasties have immortalized themselves in the Arabic script of Modern Persian. European visitors of the 19^th and early 20^th century also had their names chiseled into the ancient stone, in what could probably described as aristocratic graffiti. I’ve taken pictures of the names of British, French, German and US visitors who chiseled stuff like “F.W. Graf Schulenburg 1926.19 – Gesandter – 30.1931.” I suppose it means that Graf Schulenburg was the German ambassador to Iran between 1926 and 1931. Furthermore, modern additions to the ancient structures include large glass plates in front of the monuments which add captions in Persian and English.

While many languages have been added to the monuments of Persepolis over its 3,000 years of existence, even more have been taken away. The first destroyer was Alexander, who is known in the West as “the Great” and in the East simply as “the Macedonian.” Alexander’s troops burnt Persepolis to the ground and made it part of the Greek empire. One of the many things that were lost in the fire was the original name of Persepolis, which today is known internationally by its Greek name. Many centuries later, when the Sasanid Persian empire fell to the advancing Arabs, the semiotics of Persepolis changed yet again with the Arabs destroying the faces of the people in the sculptures and the faces of many animals, too. The next despoilers were the British, who removed many of the monuments in the 19^th century. Today, the British Museum holds a much larger collection of the Persepolis monuments than Persepolis and the National Museum in Tehran combined. As I listened to the tour guides today and the comments of the visitors, it became obvious that the memory of all three violations are still kept alive and that neither the Greeks, the Arabs nor the British have been forgiven.

I’ve come away from Persepolis with the sense that as sociolinguists we should be paying more attention to history and that the stones can teach us a lot about linguistic diversity and how it can be a force both for harmony and advancement as well as conflict and destruction.

Isfahan University

Even a casual observer of the linguistic landscape in Iran will have to conclude that Iranians have a collective fetish for English. Almost all public signage is bilingual in English and Persian, even in cases where it is hard to imagine an English-speaking audience for a sign (e.g., ATMs that only accept Iranian cards; it’s impossible to use international bank and credit cards in Iran). Participants at the Language-on-the-Move workshop at the University of Tehran told me that English has two broad meanings in Iran: on the one hand, it is seen as a passport to higher education (passing an English test is a prerequisite to many university courses and English is part of the general education component of all university courses) and it is seen as a passport to the wider world outside Iran and strongly associated with going abroad.

The fetish for English is such that it renders other languages, both indigenous and foreign, all but invisible. This welcome banner from the University of Isfahan’s Faculty of Foreign Languages is a case in point. While languages other than English, including Arabic, Armenian, French, and German, are taught in the faculty, I couldn’t see a trace of those languages in the faculty’s spaces I visited. I heard some Arabic in communal prayer before my lecture.

Naghsh-e Jahan, Isfahan

By contrast, the shopkeepers and street vendors on Isfahan’s main tourist attraction, Naghsh-e Jahan, seem to have a more realistic idea on which linguistic side their bread is buttered. When I spent a few hours there yesterday, I was repeatedly accosted in German. Although my husband had warned me not to engage in conversations with hawkers, I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to find out more about their language use. I spoke to some highly proficient German speakers who all claimed that they had learnt their German “here on the square.” One explained to me in impeccable German that “my colleagues and I, we all speak many languages. Wherever the tourists come from. German, French, Spanish, Japanese. But German is number one.” He may have added the last bit of information to please me although shop windows such as the one in the second picture confirm the importance of the German custom to the bazaaris. The idiomatic translation of “Wir beraten Sie gern” is probably “Happy to serve you” although the literal translation is “We’ll be happy to advise you” and speaks of a somewhat more sophisticated shopping interaction.

I don’t have figures for international tourist arrivals to Iran at hand but few tourists come from the major English-speaking countries for obvious reasons. The tourist service workers who I asked where their international customers came from would mention Arabs, Germans and other continental Europeans, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. In the hotel where I’m staying I’ve noticed visitors from China, Germany, Greece, Korea, the Netherlands, and Turkey. The hotel however does not seem to provide services in any of these languages, nor do museums or tourist information offices. These all focus on English although I’ve seen tour guides, maps and coffee table books in French, German and Italian in book stores.

As everywhere, English in Iran spreads as a market commodity. However, I am reminded that the global linguistic market is not a free market but one where English is heavily subsidized and other languages face stiff tariffs and trade barriers.

The billboard is in fact an ad for Swiss Tourism – I know the characteristic red, the emblem with the Swiss Cross inside an edelweiss and the slogan “get natural” all too well from a research project into the linguistic and communicative challenges faced by the Swiss tourism industry I conducted a few years ago. The billboard is in Hakone because apparently the railway I was travelling on, Hakone Tozan Railway, is a sister railway of Rhätische Bahn.

No sooner had I got over my surprise of finding myself staring at the Swiss Alps instead of Mt Fuji, I found myself in front of the Cafe St Moritz. There is some serious devotion to Graubünden/Grischun in Hakone! The Cafe St Moritz was also liberally displaying the Swiss flag, including on its tables. Banal nationalism again, of course, but with the imagery of another nation! The menu of the Cafe St Moritz, by contrast, doesn’t seem to be Swiss-inspired. Hot dogs must probably be considered un-Swiss

Advertising takes cultural symbols and images from one place and uses them in another to create authenticity. The use of national imagery from elsewhere in marketing coffee-shops, restaurants, food and drink (and all manner of other products and services) is a feature of contemporary symbolic landscapes the world over.

My first reaction to finding Switzerland in Hakone was one of dismay: I felt like I’d stumbled upon yet another non-space of globalization where globally circulating images make one place exactly like another and Hakone becomes Disentis/Mustér, and Disentis/Mustér becomes Hakone. However, on reflection and after reading up on gaikoku mura (“foreign villages”), country-themed theme parks, I have changed my mind: if local tourism can create an exotic tourism experience, then that is a much more sustainable way of travelling. Why would you make a long and tedious journey to travel all the way to Switzerland and create a huge carbon footprint if you can experience Switzerland 70 min outside downtown Tokyo? And considering that it’s entirely possible that in the meantime some marketeer has come up with a Japanese theme for St Moritz …

I know the area and the people well and, as a matter of fact, only a few months ago I spent time in Lijiang collecting data for my PhD research (which deals with practices and ideologies of multilingualism and language learning among the Naxi). The Naxi people I know bear little resemblance to the caricature presented in “Game of Love, Chinese Style.”

Let me introduce you to Jinfang HE and Xinwan HE (both are pseudonyms). Jinfang and Xinwan are friends of mine from Baisha. They are a typical Naxi peasant couple and their ancestors have lived in Baisha for generations on their self-sufficient farm. Both are extremely hardworking, as subsistence farmers have to be. Jinfang usually does most of the farm work in the field and all household work. Xinwan, her husband, drives a mini-bus operating between Baisha’s ancient town and Lijiang city (18 minutes one-way) during the tourism season (usually from April to November). During the off-peak season, he sometimes offers private car charter services to business men from Baisha who need to make a deal in Lijiang city. Jinfang and Xinwan live in a typical Naxi-style house and from the outside it may look “timeless.” However, look closer and you will see that except for the wooden doors and windows carved with traditional Naxi patterns, the interior of the home is very modern and they have the same electric appliances and furniture we usually find in the houses of the Han or westerners. There isn’t much difference there.

However, the local economy does depend on the image of authentic timelessness that the tourists come to see. In 1997, Lijiang’s old town was declared a UNESCO’s World Cultural Heritage site. This site includes three ancient towns, Dayan (大研古镇), Baisha (白沙古镇) and Suhe (束河古镇). A lot of effort goes into keeping their ancient looks and old beauty! The historic stone pavements, wooden houses and small bridges, and the streams flowing through the streets and lanes do indeed form a very beautiful landscape.

In Dayan, Baisha or Suhe, the locals, particularly older people, are used to being a tourist picture motif. If you ask permission to take a photo of them, they will unanimously say: “I/We am/are old and ugly, why do you want to take photos for me?” with their friendly smiling faces – it’s part of the spiel and comes with being a living tourist attraction. The ladies in this photo with their healthy smiles all said to me they were old and ugly before posing for the photo …

I imagine that being asked to pose for a photo also happened to Dr. HE and that he graciously obliged. Although it really is a shame that the author of “Game of Love, Chinese Style” apparently has no idea who the old man in the white coat in his picture is. Dr. HE is 86 years old and that’s presumably why he gets featured in the picture but what is really important – and not mentioned at all – is that he is a famous Chinese herbal doctor. Dr. HE has cured many people with cancer from home and abroad. As a matter of fact, he also speaks very fluent English!

Now let me get to the heart of the article, the Mosuo custom of the walking marriage. To begin with, the occupations of my Mosuo friends vary a lot and I know a Mosuo doctor, a university teacher, a tourist guide and more than one researcher. Walking marriage (走婚), also called A Zhu Hun (阿注婚) or A Xia Hun (阿夏婚), is the marriage practice among Mosuo people ONLY (Mosuo  are considered a branch of the Naxi ethnic minority but have been campaigning for independent status for a long time), not for all Naxi. When Mosuo girls/A Xia (阿夏) or boys/A Zhu (阿注) reach puberty, they will get an adult ceremony and girls will from then on be called A Xia and have their own A Xia Fang (bedroom). When A Xia loves A Zhu, A Zhu will ask a witness to ceremoniously go to A Xia’s home with gifts for everyone in the family to ask for A Xia’s mum’s and uncles’ permission to be A Zhu. There are three forms of walking marriage, the most popular one is that A Zhu visits his A Xia at night only and goes back to his home at dawn, the other two forms include that A Zhu will stay in A Xia’s home (阿注定居婚) or A Xia will go to stay in A Zhu’s home (阿夏异居婚). But the latter two are not popular in the local area. Mosuo people have their own values and standards in sex and morality. A Xia and A Zhu respect each other and bear responsibility for each other. The walking marriage is not an arranged marriage and so love plays a very important role in continuing the A Xia-A Zhu relationship. Until they have children, there is some freedom to change to a new A Xia or A Zhu if they find they no longer love each other. However, after they have children, they generally can’t change to a new A Xia or A Zhu.

The way it used to be was that when a child was born, the child would live in the mother’s home and the uncles would take on the responsibility of educating the child. However, the paternal grandmother would come and visit the new baby with gifts for everyone in A Xia’s big family. A Zhu was not allowed to bring the baby back to his home but he would hold a dinner party and invite the seniors in the family and neighbors to show he is the father of the baby and he shoulders his part of the responsibility to raise the child even though mother and father don’t live together in the same household. However, nowadays more and more Mosuo people melt into the mainstream society and give up the walking marriage in favour of the official marriage system.

If anyone needs further evidence that the ethnic minorities of Yunnan are not stuck in a time-warp, look it up on a map. Yunnan is in Southwest China and constitutes the most convenient international passageway to access southeast and south Asia by land. The area is developing rapidly as a centre in the Greater Mekong sub-regional economic zone. It’s hard not to see traces of modernization there. The only ones who are stuck in a time-warp are those travel writers who fail to see how rapidly the lives of the ethnic minorities of Yunnan are modernizing!

Game of love, Chinese style.

Nowhere is the persistence of Orientalist ways of viewing the non-Western Other so obvious than in tourism brochures, as I was reminded when reading an article titled “Game of Love, Chinese Style” in the most recent issue of the Australian travel magazine Arrivals and Departures.

When I saw the title “Game of Love, Chinese Style” on the front page, I was intrigued. What sort of “game of love” could be labeled as “Chinese style”? The subheading provides more detail: “Undisturbed by modernity, China’s matriarchal Naxi minority exist in a rare time-warped world.” The destination featured in the article, Baisha, is a small town in China’s southwest province Yunnan and home of the Naxi ethnic minority. The way it is presented, however, makes Baisha an icon of China as a whole: forever old and trapped in a timeless world cut off from modernity.

The article centers on the custom of the “walking marriage,” which supposedly means that “men never marry and women wear the pants.” “Walking marriage” is actually a custom of the Mosuo, an ethnic group related to the Naxi and often presented as the only matriarchal society in the world. In this tradition men and women never leave the maternal household and men visit their female partners only at night. Children born of such relationships stay with the mother’s extended family. The practice of the “walking marriage” is a major difference between the Mosuo and the Naxi. However, the author is apparently unaware of this when he says “Naxi and Mosuo women are expected to take the lead in the game of love.”

According to the article, in Naxi society, women do most of the work while men are regarded as “slovenly.” The source for this characterization turns out to be a non-Naxi and a former school teacher from Yunnan’s capital Kunming. If the author had done any research, why did he need to source this comment from an outsider and an urban intellectual? More condescending and contemptuous quotes follow: 50% of Naxi men are judged to be lazy “like a pig” by the same school-teacher.

Only towards the end of the article does the author acknowledge that “male Naxi elders are renowned calligraphers, gardeners and skilled musicians.” Their musical collectives are said to be “famous for the “three olds”: old men (few players are under 80 years of age), old instruments and old songs.”

Oldness and timelessness thus are the overarching themes running through the text and the photos. For instance, the reader is also introduced to an old man who claims himself to be “old and ugly” but whom the author considers a “handsome octogenarian” who “in many ways typifies China’s humble beauty.” All the images of “loose cotton pants,” “1950s Mao jacket,” “an angel-hair tobacco pipe” and “his wispy silver beard” are echoed in the photos. It is not only the people featured in the article who are old, the city of Baisha is old, too: “a town virtually unchanged since the 11^th century;” a place where “old is good, old is beautiful, and old is something to be treasured;” and the home of a “time-locked culture.”

Although the article is about the matriarchal Naxi group, women are back-grounded in the text and pictures. Although there is the titillating piece of information that Naxi women “take the lead in the game of love,” they certainly don’t have a prominent position anywhere in the text or the pictures.

The image of Baisha as a whole is represented as a showcase of people and things that exist unchanged forever. Being taken out of the context of “rapidly modernizing China,” the timeless image of Baisha is thus more about the author’s fantasies than Baisha’s realities, one of which is that its matriarchal customs are unavoidably being challenged by modernization – including tourism. For instance, the custom of the “walking marriage” has actually become an excuse for the emergence of a red light district catering to tourists. Strangely enough, this sort of change, among other changes that are brought about by tourism to Mosuo Naxi, is absent from this article. The absence of all traces of modernization in Baisha matches the Western tourism imagery of China and the East at large. This Occidental construction of the Orient is best understood with reference to Said’s concept of Orientalism. It is grounded in Western dominance and authority over the East which has in turn produced a stereotypical Oriental image that can hardly be subverted. It is no wonder that China, despite its accelerating pace of modernization, remains “the ageless reign” in travel writing.

Everywhere in Switzerland the number of prostitutes and relevant establishments increased in 2005. In Zurich, for example, the number of prostitutes has risen by almost 20% since 2003; in Basel a new brothel opened on average every two weeks in 2005. For the whole of Switzerland, the profits of the sex industry are estimated to be around CHF 3.2 billion per annum. (Bundesamt für Polizei, 2006; my translation)

These numbers are provided by the Federal Police and they just confirm the pervasiveness of the sex industry. Outlets of the sex industry enjoy a higher visibility in Swiss cities than churches, and they are immensely more frequent than mosques with minarets, of which there are only four in the whole of Switzerland.

In the referendum last week 57% of Swiss citizens voted for a ban on building minarets because they apparently don’t fit with the traditional Christian character of the country. Seeing that no one is even considering a ban on building brothels, sex shops and other such establishments, I can only conclude that these fit just fine with the traditional cityscapes of European Christianity … as does intolerance, discrimination and bigotry.