This part of their professional identity is largely hidden for at least two reasons. First, most of their communication work is done virtually and, in some cases, from home, as in the experience of home-based offshore accountants. These professionals have been managing the communication challenges (including feelings of isolation) linked to working from home long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced other office workers across the globe to work remotely. Second, the prevailing occupational stereotype tags them as good with numbers but bad with words, along with the stigma of being boring, grey, and introverted to a fault, as popularly depicted in media.

The perennial shaming of accountants’ linguistic competence motivated my linguistic ethnographic study of this occupational group. Using critical discourse analysis and the sociolinguistic lens of performance, I examined how students in top accounting schools in Metro Manila are trained to communicate for the globalized workplace and how they communicate on the job as onshore and offshore accountants. This project offers some novel threads in ongoing discussions about the linguistic experience of workers in the rapidly expanding, highly multicultural and multilingual offshoring industry in Global South countries like India and the Philippines.

My research builds on current understandings of these number-centric workers theoretically and methodologically. In terms of theory, I argue that since ‘good communication’ is a social construct that is rhetorically and interactionally reproduced in academia and the profession, labelling accountants as ‘poor communicators’ should not be treated as fact. Rather, as in other stereotypes tied to different social groups, it should be interrogated. While previous studies have predominantly explored how accountants are ‘poor communicators,’ I take a step back and ask: Where and how is this idea of ‘accountants as poor communicators’ deployed, by whom, and for what reasons? In terms of method, my study demonstrates how examining together (rather than separately) the education and work domains can help provide a big-picture understanding of how language practice and ideologies are (re)produced and (re)shaped across the entire field continuity—from formal education to hiring to employment. This approach has revealed that the echoing of the deficit discourse that highlights curricular and competence gaps of accounting schools and accounting practitioners is a very limited and limiting view of Global South accountants and their globalized work.

I briefly present some of my PhD thesis findings in my 3MT. But for a more detailed and exciting discussion about this special group of language workers, you may check out my new monograph, Communication that Counts: Language Practice and Ideology in Globalized Accounting. It is the latest title in the “Language at Work” series of Multilingual Matters lined up for release in December 2022. You may want to take advantage of the generous discount offered until the end of the year by using the code: CCLPIGA75 when you place your order through the publisher’s website.

About the book

To date, communication research in accounting has largely focused on the competencies that define what constitutes ‘effective communication’. Highly perception-based, skills-focused and Global North-centric, existing research tends to echo the skills deficit discourse which overemphasizes the role of the higher education system in developing students’ work-relevant communication skills. This book investigates dominant views about communication and interrogates what shapes these views in the accounting field from a Global South perspective, exploring the idea of ‘good communication’ in the globalized accounting field. Taking the occupational stereotype of shy employees who are good with numbers but bad with words as its starting point, this book examines language and communication practices and ideologies in accounting education and work in the Philippines. As an emerging global leader in offshore accounting, the Philippines is an ideal context for an exploration of multilingual, multimodal and transnational workplace communication.

What others are saying about the book

This book is a welcome addition to the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) materials in the field of accounting. It explores the way students and professionals in accounting communicate and emphasizes the importance of well-defined relationships and effective communication in globalized accounting work. The volume is one of only a handful of resources ever produced focusing on ESP in accounting and in the context of the Philippines. (Marilu Rañosa-Madrunio, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, The Philippines)

Tenedero comprehensively and carefully traces how ideologies about languages and effective communication are mobilized in the field of globalized accounting – from the Philippine classrooms where communication skills are part of the accounting curriculum to the workplaces where offshore and onshore accounting services are offered. A must read for understanding what counts as communication and how communication counts in work where language is seemingly marginal. (Beatriz P. Lorente, University of Bern, Switzerland)

Reference

Tenedero, Pia Patricia P. (2022). Communication that Counts: Language Practice and Ideology in Globalized Accounting. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Muslim women praying in a Minquan mosque

While everyone knows that China is now the second largest economy in the world, few people realize that there are still over five million people living in poverty in the country. The majority of China’s poor live in its multilingual and multicultural peripheral regions.

Therefore, as part of its efforts to eradicate poverty, the Chinese government has implemented the nationwide project to promote Putonghua as a form of linguistic capital. This promotion of Putonghua – along with widespread English language learning – from above has been widely discussed and researched by Chinese sociolinguists (see, for instance, these PhD theses available right here on Language on the Move: Grey, 2017, Li, 2017, Yang, 2013, Zhang, 2011).

However, what seems to have been largely overlooked is language learning of other languages from below and the empowerment it can bring, as I learned in my research into Arabic language learning in Minquan, a Muslim-centered and poverty-stricken region.

Socioeconomic and demographic features of Minquan

Located in the far east of Henan Province, central China, Minquan County has a population of 870,000. The vast majority of these are farmers. Because the ever more frequent droughts have rendered production of the main crops of maize, cotton, peanuts, and wheat unstable, an increasing number of young people are leaving Minquan for China’s big developed cities in search of better opportunities.

Education and literacy levels in Minquan are low in comparison with the rest of China and only two third of teenagers in Minquan continue their studies beyond compulsory junior high school education.

Another feature of Minquan is its sizable Hui ethnic minority, whose members are Muslim. In Minquan it is common for local people to exchange greetings in Arabic and for the women to wear colorful hijabs. Five times a day, the streets echo with the Muslim call to prayer chanted slowly and sonorously in Arabic over the audio systems of the local mosques.

Arabic as a way out for Minquan’s Muslim women

The Hui ethnic group do not have their own language but speak Chinese. However, in recent years, I have observed an increasing trend for local people to study Arabic, the holy language of Islam, not only for religious purposes but also for material profit. For my graduation research project at Yunnan University, I probed the Arabic language learning experiences of three Muslim women from Minquan. All three participants, two of whom are my relatives, were born and raised in Muslim families in Minquan. Their mother tongue is Chinese and they all started to study Arabic formally in their teens.

Their reasons for Arabic language study were initially due to their limited opportunities.

The youngest participant, Ma Lifang (all names are pseudonyms) is a 19-year-old high-school graduate, who has studied Arabic in a mosque since 2018. After failing the gaokao (the national university entrance exam), she followed an imam’s recommendation to learn Arabic in order to maintain her education and with an eye to a profitable future through Arabic as experienced by Ma Zhenyi (32) and Ma Xiangling (39).

Ma Zhenyi is an entrepreneur who now runs her own translation and interpreting company in Yiwu, the world largest wholesale market. Despite her excellent academic performance in junior high school and her desire to continue her studies, she was denied the opportunity of receiving a high school education because of her family’s poverty. The traditionally low expectations on Muslim women in her community also played a role. While she did not have the courage at age 15 to oppose her parents when it came to high school, she found a way to convince them to let her study Arabic in the mosque:

别人都一直说，都是建议让我跟爸爸妈妈讲（我想学），然后当时也没那么大的勇气。因为我姐姐她也想去学习，但是爸妈没同意，就没学成。我也没有那么大的勇气去说。后来越学越感兴趣，越学越感兴趣。然后，就鼓起勇气说。
Others kept telling me, suggesting that I should tell my parents (I want to study), but I didn’t have the courage. My older sister also meant to study, but my dad and mom refused and she could not. I just didn’t have the courage. Later Arabic interested me more and more, I had to be brave enough to tell them. (Interview with Ma Zhenyi)

Perhaps it was Ma Zhenyi’s talent in memorizing Arabic verses that contributed to her success; or the fact that her older sister could share the family’s financial burden so that Ma Zhenyi could have the chance of further study for a couple of years. Either way, while seeking her spiritual asylum in the holy language of Islam, Ma Zhenyi could continue to study and build her dream for the future.

Middle-Eastern buyer checking cargo with seller in Yiwu (Image credit: promotional video for Yiwu)

Her excellent performance together with her deep faith next launched her to another opportunity to continue her Islamic and Arabic studies in Xi’an, one of China’s largest cities and the capital of Shaanxi Province. At that stage, she won a scholarship to go to Egypt for further Arabic study. There, she met her husband and when both of them returned to China, they settled in Yiwu, where they first took up Arabic translation and interpreting jobs and eventually opened their own translation company in 2012.

Ma Xiangling (39) also works as an Arabic-Chinese translator and interpreter in Yiwu. Like Ma Zhenyi, she was denied a senior high school education after graduating from junior high school in 1998. She was sent to learn Arabic at a local mosque-based school instead. At the time, she did not expect any material rewards from learning Arabic at all. She simply followed the local expectation of being a good Muslim woman in the hope that she might assist her future husband and educate their child in the faith. Upon graduation, she got married but almost immediately found herself engulfed in constant domestic violence. Over many years, Ma Xiangling’s life was torn to pieces as her only financial support was her tormenting husband. She finally managed to regain her freedom through a painful divorce. In 2014, with the help of friends doing business in Yiwu, she revived her Arabic language skills and migrated to Yiwu to work as translator there.

Self-transformation through Arabic

Confronting their disadvantages in age, gender and poverty, these three women turned to Arabic as a way out.

All three women started to learn Arabic as a low-cost study option when they failed to progress in the Chinese public educational system. Their parents believed that learning Arabic would increase their daughters’ marriage prospects by making them good assistants to their future husbands serving the faith. The value of speaking Arabic as a profitable commodity in the new contexts of China’s global expansion was not obvious to my participants until they embarked on their journey and seriously invested in learning Arabic. Nevertheless, their Arabic skills have shaped a brand new life vision for them.

Ma Xiangling’s social media post in Chinese and Arabic about destiny (my English translation)

Their years of investment into Arabic have transformed their identities from poor subjugated Muslim women into independent and enterprising individuals. Despite failing to gain admission to a Chinese university, Ma Lifang, for instance, now even considers PhD study within her reach:

有的(课本）都是北大的什么的… 还有那种全阿语的.都是老师们从国外给带来的。好多老师也是从国外的毕业，还有博士学位。
Some (textbooks) are from Peking University, and some are written in Arabic, imported from abroad. Many teachers graduated from abroad, some with PhD degree. (Interview with Ma Lifang)

When asked what she wanted to do with her life, Ma Lifang readily talked about several options, such as taking up a translation job in China’s booming export industry or going abroad for higher education, just like her teachers.

Ma Zhenyi has experienced the transformational career that Ma Lifang anticipates. Learning Arabic has expanded her life trajectory from a poor village girl first to the big city of Xi’an and from there to Egypt. The level of Arabic language proficiency she gained there, enabled her to work as an interpreter and translator in Yiwu, and later to establish her own business there.

Business opportunities related to Arabic are plentiful, as she explained to me:

大概有目前来说有102个国家的人来这里(义乌)进行购物。其中呢大概有40到50个国家，大概了50%左右是以阿拉伯语为沟通媒介的……我现在接触的这些人啊，多数都是在40以上的。年龄40以上的人并没有意识到他们需要学英语你知道吗。
There are foreign businessmen from 102 countries coming to Yiwu to purchase commodities. 40 or 50 countries out of 102, about 50% of foreigners use Arabic for communication…the majority of my foreign customers are over 40 years old. You know, people over 40 are not aware of the necessity to speak English. (Interview with Ma Zhenyi)

Although Ma Xiangling’s career has been less stellar, Arabic has transformed her, too, into an economically and spiritually independent woman supporting herself and her family. In January 2020, her family (her parents and her disabled son) was able to move into a newly built two-storey house.

Tensions and contradictions of Arabic

Despite their empowerment, Arabic is not a panacea and all three women face tensions and contradictions embedded in wider structural constraints that are beyond their control.

Reflecting on the profits Arabic has brought to her, Ma Zhenyi, for instance strongly feels the tension between its material and spiritual rewards. While she is grateful for the material rewards that learning Arabic has brought her, she also finds herself in a constant state of dilemma between her entrepreneurial identity as a successful businesswoman and her sense of guilt at not having enough time for prayer and reading Quran, or for mothering her school-aged daughter.

The gendered market also impacts their opportunities to invest in their future, as Arabic language practices are more gendered than those of many other languages. Ma Xiangling explained that women can only go so far with Arabic. While they might be able to secure a translation job in Yiwu or elsewhere in China, their opportunities to work abroad or even travel for business are heavily constrained, particularly when it comes to major Arabic-speaking trading partners like Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Ma Xiangling’s reflections on working abroad must be understood against the emerging oversupply of Arabic speakers in China as Chinese universities have begun to actively promote non-English foreign languages. As a middle-aged woman without a degree, Arabic proficiency alone is no longer enough to make her feel confident about her future.

Arabic as a third space

Arabic has become a significant foreign language for China’s relationship with the Middle East. However, for the women in my study, it is much more than that. Arabic also functions as a way out, as a reachable escape route for Muslim women who have been trapped in the cage of poverty and religion.

Reciting Arabic verses as a child, reading the Holy Quran as a teenager, and eventually translating for Sino-Middle East trade as adults, Chinese Muslim women from less-developed areas have turned the Arabic language into a third space where they can continue their education, obtain career success, and achieve emancipation in their daily lives. In Minquan, this impoverished corner of the world, Arabic provides both a spiritual asylum and financial independence. It frees and awakens Muslim women tormented by misogyny and poverty.

After quoting to me the Hadith “all men are brothers”, Ma Zhenyi added what has been missing from there: “and women are sisters.”

References

Grey, A. (2017). How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Yang, H. (2012). Naxi, Chinese and English: Multilingualism in Lijiang. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Zhang, J. (2011). Language Policy and Planning for the 2008 Beijing Olympics: An Investigation of the Discursive Construction of an Olympic City and a Global Population. (PhD), Macquarie University.

The project team at a partners meeting in Leeuwarden, Netherlands

Europe recently experienced a dramatic influx of refugees. By the end of 2015, the European Union as a whole had received over 1.2 million first-time asylum claims (IOM, 2015). A small but significant sub-group of these people on the move are highly qualified professionals – doctors, architects, lawyers, teachers, engineers – who often find themselves in low-skilled, minimum-wage jobs for which they are over-qualified. Their skill sets and professional experience often count for little, as host countries in an alarming number of cases fail to utilise the potential of much sought-after qualified personnel. The integration of these highly-skilled individuals into the labour market is crucial in order to avoid their long-term dependency and marginalization, and to create a positive image in the eyes of the public.

Against this backdrop the ‘Critical Skills for Life and Work’ project (2017-2019), funded by the European Union’s flagship research programme Erasmus+, sought to identify and articulate the profession-relevant communicative, interactional and intercultural needs of highly-skilled refugees, which would enable them to find employment in a professional domain for which they are qualified.

The multinational consortium was led by Newcastle University in the UK in partnership with the University of Graz in Austria, Fryske Academy in the Netherlands, and Action Foundation, a Newcastle-based refugee charity.

Trialling workshop in the Netherlands

The team’s ultimate aim was to design and implement effective training tools for enhancing the professional intercultural communicative competence (PICC) of highly-skilled refugees and the language teachers who work with them. The four project partners worked with a number of highly-skilled refugees and migrants, and with teachers across the UK, Austria and the Netherlands to co-create a set of resources that can be useful in a diversity of European contexts. The result was an online toolkit for teachers and learners.

The toolkit was developed as part of a two-stage collaborative process.

In stage one (research stage) the team investigated in detail the lives and experiences of people who had successfully made the transition from refugee status back into the professional sphere. This was done through ethnographic interviews (‘success stories’) which sought to discover exactly how these people had made the transition, what had helped them, what had hindered them, and what they could pass on to others like them by way of advice. Additionally, focus groups were held with learners and teachers in the different locations, to gauge current provision and their needs in relation to developing PICC.

Findings from this stage pointed to the importance of agency, resilience, self-motivation, as well as language and intercultural communication skills.

Structure of the toolkit

In stage two (co-production), the team worked closely with local refugees and volunteer language teachers to develop learning and teaching materials. These were then piloted and trialled through a series of workshops and multiplier events with different target groups, including agencies working with skilled refugees, teaching organisations such as colleges of further and higher education, and relevant employers and employment agencies. The aim was to create a model which can be extended to other contexts.

The final version of the toolkit was launched at the project conference on 21^st June 2019.

The toolkit offers two modules:

Module A: Teaching professional intercultural communicative competence
Module B: Professional intercultural communicative competence for work and life

Each module consists of five parallel units: (1) context & background, (2) finding a job, (3) applying for a job, (4) being interviewed and, (5) starting a job. Each unit includes a set of activities designed for classroom use (for teachers) or for self-study (learners). All activities relate to the development of PICC. Supplementary materials and extension tasks are included at the end of each unit.

The units are self-standing to allow teachers and learners to choose units and activities depending on their own specific needs and circumstances.

From a linguistic perspective, the toolkit is built around the assumption that refugee and migrant professionals will have some linguistic capital. The primary aim of the toolkit is to develop PICC, as opposed to linguistic proficiency in any specific ‘target language’. Using all their plurilingual resources, learners might engage with input in one language and generate meaning in contextually appropriate ways.

The toolkit is available to download for free on the project website (http://cslw.eu/). Relevant sections of the toolkit have been translated and localised into German and Dutch, and the team are hoping to provide further translations and different language versions in due course.

Follow our updates on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cslwproject/ or find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/critical-skills-for-life-and-work/

Reference

IOM (2015). Global migration trend factsheet. Retrieved from http://gmdac.iom.int/global-migration-trends-factsheet

Images of glamorous interpreters in the recent Chinese movie “Les Interprètes” (Source: dramafever.com)

I recently volunteered to give a presentation on the profession of translation and interpreting as a parent helper for a community worker series at my son’s primary school in suburban Sydney. To make my presentation entertaining for little kids, I showed them how to interpret simultaneously between English and Korean. The children were just fascinated by instant language conversions and kept asking me to show them more. While I was delighted by the enthusiastic responses from the kids, one question occurred to me afterwards: how many parents in Australia would be happy if their child wanted to become a translator or interpreter?

Let’s consider the following two real stories: in the 1990s, an Anglo-Canadian boy who wanted to become an interpreter had to give up his dream because his parents wanted their son to pursue a “better” profession. On the other side of the planet, a Korean girl with the same dream was warned by her parents that she was “too ordinary” to become an interpreter; her parents believed only extraordinary people could make an interpreter. The former is my husband’s story, and the latter is mine.

Why is there such a contrast in terms of parental reactions to children who wish to become an interpreter? One way of examining this question is to consider the relationship between the status of language workers and the status of a second language in a society. In Korea, English is highly valued as a commodity, and this phenomenon is known as yeongeo yeolpung or “English fever”. Due to a high level of prestige attached to English, English-Korean interpreters are admired as master English speakers who are often glamourized in Korean media. Popular images of interpreters are cosmopolitan multilinguals working at international conferences for high-ranking officials or business tycoons as circulated in local media.

On the other hand, the societal valorization of translators and interpreters in Australia and other Anglophone countries remains very low. Translators and interpreters are associated with low-paid casual work that offers little chance for career progression. The low profile of the profession in Australia is strongly related to the societal recognition of languages other than English (LOTE). Despite Australia’s purported pride in multiculturalism, LOTEs have always remained on the periphery in its symbolic and practical values. While LOTEs are gradually gaining recognition particularly among middle-class parents primarily for instrumental purposes, their status as the “other” languages spoken by “other” people – immigrant Australians from non-Anglophone backgrounds – suggests that the status of language workers is perhaps determined by the status of LOTEs as well as the people and communities who they serve. Examining the status of language workers is, therefore, a good prism through which to understand the sociolinguistics of bilingualism.

If you are still not convinced, ask yourself this question: would you be happy if your child wanted to become an interpreter?

Further Reading

To learn more about English fever and the experiences of interpreters in South Korea, check out this article:

Cho, J. (2015). Sleepless in Seoul: Neoliberalism, English fever, and linguistic insecurity among Korean interpreters Multilingua, 34 (5), 687-710 DOI: 10.1515/multi-2013-0047

Success levels of different candidate groups in job interviews for low-skilled jobs (Source: Roberts 2013, p. 89)

A common explanation for the un- and underemployment of migrants is that their English is not good enough. Despite the overuse of this explanation, we do, in fact, not have a particularly clear idea what “good English” for a particular job might mean. In some cases, the proficiency expectations placed on job candidates are clearly out of step with the language requirements of a particular job, as I have shown before. So, when it comes to migrants’ access to the job market, English language proficiency is both over-used as explanation and under-specified as to what the actual requirements might be.

New research by Celia Roberts (2013) goes some way to fill this gap. The researcher and her associates recorded job interviews in Britain for low-skilled (and low-paid) work such as stacking shelves, packing factory products or delivering parcels. For this kind of work employers hold “assessment days” and interview large numbers of people with a view to taking on most of those who have applied. Around 70% of white and non-white British-born applicants are hired for these jobs (see Figure; ‘EM’ stands for ‘ethnic minority’). However, for applicants born abroad, the picture looks radically different: despite the fact that they are more qualified, less than half are hired.

What is going on here? Surely, language proficiency is almost completely irrelevant to being able to stack shelves, package products or deliver parcels?

I have previously argued that discrimination on the basis of language proficiency can serve as a proxy for racial discrimination but, in the present context, this explanation doesn’t make sense, either: if racist structures were to blame, they would presumably funnel migrants into low-skilled low-paid work rather than exclude them from that particular segment of the labour market. So, what is going on?

To begin with, Roberts (2013) explains that interviewers are guided by principles of equal opportunities and diversity management, and are perfectly aware that a good command of English is irrelevant to stacking shelves and similar monotonous and repetitive jobs.

What they are looking for is evidence that applicants will be able to cope with repetition, monotony and boredom, and evidence that they are reflexive flexible individuals who will be capable of managing their own boredom. How can you demonstrate that? By telling a good story! Candidates were expected to tell a vivid story of how they had worked in a boring job before and, ideally, inject a bit of humour. For instance, one candidate, who the interviewers really liked, told the panel about how he had once painted the “giant walls” of a warehouse in one colour for three weeks. He closed by joking that painting the ceiling in a different colour was “a bit of pleasure” because it broke the routine.

In another example a successful candidate reflected on how he had coped previously when working a job consisting of “complete mind numbingly same repetitive stuff” by reflecting on how he would not “turn your brain on” and chat with co-workers while drilling and gluing a little piece of equipment onto another piece of equipment.

Both these (white British-born) successful candidates drew on the well-known Labovian structure for Anglo narratives (abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, evaluation, coda). As it so happens, this structure coincides with the structure of the evaluation form the interviewers have to fill in. That form is organized in a “STAR structure” where they are asked to record the candidate’s responses to Situation, Task, Action, and Result. Thus, “the normative Anglo narrative and the institution’s bureaucratic assessment form map on to each other precisely” (Roberts, 2013, p. 87).

Candidates who produced stories about coping with monotonous work and who were able to reflect on the experience in order to project a credible, competent and flexible personality did well during the interview, and interviews could become quite informal and friendly. This opened further spaces for the candidate to present themselves as having “the right kind of personality.”

By contrast, migrants often didn’t know what to make of questions such as “what would you tell me is the advantage of a repetitive job?” When they failed to produce an extended response, the interview usually became much more difficult: the interviewers became more controlling of the candidate’s talk and turns; there was more negativity and interviewers became less helpful and sympathetic; and the interviewers aligned more with formal participation roles and the interview became more formal and more institutionalized. Such conduct was a response to the candidate’s failure to produce the expected kind of discourse, but, crucially, it also served to make the interview much more difficult for them.

In sum, migrant candidates did fail because of language. However, it was not their accent, or their grammar, or their ability to produce “Standard English.” What mattered was the ability to “play a language game:” to tell a story that would project the candidate as the kind of person who was not only willing to do monotonous work but who was also sufficiently self-organized and self-aware to reflect on how they would manage the boredom inherent in such jobs.

The selection interview requires both bureaucratically processible talk and a vivid social performance, subtly blended together to produce a credible and persuasive self which aligns with the ideal worker in the new capitalist workplace. Small interactional differences and difficulties feed into larger scale judgements and institutional orders which, in turn, press down on individual decision making. (Roberts, 2013, p. 91f.)

The production of such a hybrid discourse is not easily practiced, particularly for those who are unemployed or employed in an ethnic job market. While the applicant’s competence and personality is assessed on the basis of how they talk, the linguistic and cultural nature of the assessment remains, in fact, unacknowledged and invisible.
Roberts, Celia (2013). The Gatekeeping of Babel: Job Interviews and the Linguistic Penalty A. Duchêne, M. Moyer & C. Roberts (Eds.), Language, Migration and Social Inequalities: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 81-94

Losing their heritage language decreases the earning potential of 2nd-generation migrants

In most countries of immigration, linguistic diversity is by and large ignored by policy makers. If there are language-related policies, they take a deficit view of migrants and their children and focus on improving their English (or whatever the national language may be). Many people resent even the meagre efforts that states are making to help migrants and their children learn the dominant language, and ESL provision in schools is a ready target for funding cuts, as is currently the case in NSW. Going beyond ESL provision and investing into meaningful bilingual education that would enable migrant children to reach high levels of bilingual proficiency in both their heritage language and the dominant language are, by and large, unheard of. Usually, ensuring bilingual proficiency is the exclusive responsibility of parents and thus the usual vagaries of luck and privilege apply.

Bilingual provision in schools that would allow children to reach high levels of proficiency in two or more languages is widely seen as located in the “nice to have but expensive”-basket. In an environment where ESL provision is often considered expendable, bilingual provision may seem like utopian bells and whistles that we simply cannot afford. Linguists and educators have long pointed out the educational, cognitive and psycho-social benefits of bilingualism and have argued that achieving high-level proficiency in both the heritage language and the dominant language is good for the social fabric of a diverse society. However, such non-quantifiables without an immediate dollar-value usually cut no ice with hard-nosed budget planners and the proponents of bilingual education are mostly simply ignored as idealistic dreamers.

Well, it turns out the proponents of bilingual education have much more good economic sense than your average monolingual policy wonk.

A recent study by Orhan Agirdag published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism investigates the earnings of second generation migrants relative to their level of bilingual proficiency. Re-examining data from two large-scale longitudinal studies conducted between 1988 and 2003 in the USA, the author analysed the linguistic proficiency and earnings of 3,553 individuals. These individuals were either born to at least one migrant parent or came to the USA at a young age. In the early 2000s, they were in their mid-20s.

On the basis of participants’ self-reported proficiency data, the author identified three groups:

• High-level bilinguals, who had high levels of proficiency, crucially including the ability to read and write, in both English and their heritage language
• Low-level bilinguals, who had low levels of proficiency in both English and their heritage language
• English-dominant, who had high levels of proficiency in English but low levels of proficiency in their heritage language (or no proficiency at all)

No one will be surprised to learn that the English-dominant accounted for more than half of the participants, as that is what the US school system (as most others) is designed to achieve. With a bit over 20%, the numbers of low-level bilinguals are also unsurprising: these are the young adults who would have needed special ESL provision in school but presumably didn’t get it; while unsurprising, it is disturbing to see that more than 20% of migrant kids can go through their entire schooling career in the US without achieving adequate proficiency in English. The percentage of high-level bilinguals in the sample is very similar to that of low-level bilinguals (ca. 22%). These are the lucky kids who either lived within the catchment area of a bilingual immersion program or whose parents put in the effort of teach them how to read and write the heritage language after school and on the weekends.

Now which of these three groups do you think earned the most? According to the logic of the education system, it should be the English-dominant kids who fare best in the labour market. Well, they don’t!

High-level bilingualism was robustly associated with higher earnings of around $3,000 per year and the effect held even if other variables that are known to influence earnings were controlled for (e.g., gender, parental socio-economic status, educational achievement). The effect also held across language groups, even if some languages were more valuable than others (e.g., Chinese-Americans were found to earn more than other migrant groups but within the group of Chinese-Americans those with high-level bilingual proficiency earned more than those who were English-dominant or those who had low-level bilingual proficiency). Interestingly, when other variables were controlled, there was no earnings difference between those who were English-dominant and those who were low-level bilinguals.

Higher earnings of $3,000 per year when everything else is kept constant are a sizable effect. Additionally, the actual financial advantage of high-level bilingualism is likely to be higher due to indirect effects which are obscured by keeping other variables constant such as the link between high-level bilingualism and educational achievement (i.e. high-level bilinguals are more likely to achieve high levels of education and thus they have a compounded earnings advantage).

We all know that imposing English monolingualism on migrant children is bad for them educationally, cognitively and socio-psychologically. Thanks to Agirdag’s research, we now also know that it is bad for them economically. Beyond the economic disadvantage suffered by individuals who have been forced into linguistic assimilation, their linguistic assimilation through the education system is bad for the economy and thus for everyone: decreasing the earning potential of second-generation migrants through linguistic assimilation will, inter alia, lower the tax base and increase the demand for social services. Conversely, those who earn more, spend more.

Bilingualism has these earnings benefits because high-level bilinguals can access two labour markets: the mainstream labour market and the ethnic labour market. My guess is that the labour market advantages of high-level bilingualism are likely to further increase in the future: as the global economy becomes ever more connected, multilingual proficiencies will become ever more central to labour mobility.

In sum, bilingual education is good for the economy. It’s high time our leaders did their sums and showed some good business sense!

Orhan Agirdag (2013). The long-term effects of bilingualism on children of immigration: student bilingualism and future earnings International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2013.816264

Different languages for different jobs in this Los Angeles restaurant

Are there language requirements for working in restaurants in Los Angeles? These two employment signs that I saw in the window of a sushi restaurant near UCLA suggests that you need English to wait tables and Spanish to work in the kitchen.

On the left, the English sign says ‘Experienced servers! Full or Part Time, Inquire Within’. On the right, the Spanish sign seeks ‘amigo con experiensia en cocina japonesa’ (‘friend^** with experience in Japanese cooking/cuisine’).

It makes sense for the sign about servers to be in English. English is the predominant language in the United States, and this restaurant is located in a largely white and Persian neighbourhood. Servers would have to be able to communicate in English to do their job adequately. But why is the second sign in Spanish? Is knowledge of Spanish necessary to work in the kitchen?

Language and labour market segmentation

By posting the ad for the kitchen job in Spanish and the server job in English, the restaurant is making a statement about the hierarchy of race, language, and nativity in the Los Angeles restaurant workforce. Restaurant worker advocacy group ROC United has found that in the US, white and native-born workers tend to be hired for better-paid positions in the ‘front of the house’ (areas where employees interact with customers), while immigrants and people of colour tend to work in low-pay, hazardous jobs in the back of the house.

The choice of language in these employment ads suggests that the restaurant owners expect back of the house workers to be Spanish-speaking immigrants. In Los Angeles, Mexican and Central American immigrants, many of whom are undocumented, are concentrated in back of the house jobs. This ethnic/racial niching extends even to restaurants in non-Latin American immigrant communities. Chinese restaurants in the dense Chinese ‘ethnoburbs’ to the east of the city will hire Mexican and Central American dishwashers and bussers, for example. The Los Angeles location of Ding Tai Fung, the Taiwan-based dumpling chain, has Latino kitchen workers wrapping their famous Shanghainese soup dumplings.

Speaking Spanish is not a requirement for working in the restaurant kitchen in the way that speaking English is a requirement for working as a server. Front of the house employees are expected to know enough English to do the type of linguistically complex performance that customers expect. While communication is important in the back of the house, one does not need to be fluent in English or Spanish to wash plates or wrap dumplings. That is part of the reason why one sees so many linguistically isolated immigrants in restaurant kitchen jobs.

Thinking sociologically about this, though, perhaps speaking Spanish is a requirement for back of the house work in Los Angeles. Waldinger (1998) suggests that as immigrants of a particular group get concentrated in particular sectors of particular industries, employers prefer not to hire workers from other groups because they have trouble fitting in:

‘Because of the language barrier, there are two jobs here (for blacks), if they are unskilled: shipping and sweeping the floor’. ‘Unless the blacks speak Spanish’, noted one furniture manufacturer, ‘we have a major problem’; another reported that language was an issue, not so much for management, but for ‘blacks dealing with Hispanics’; a third, who emphasized the need for cooperation and communication, went on to tell us that ‘the fact that our workforce is homogenous’ – they were all Mexican – ‘helps towards this communication’. Explaining why it was ‘difficult to hire blacks when you have a predominantly Hispanic workforce’, a hotel manager pointed to ‘discomfort with Latino influence. They don’t understand the language’.

Employers’ stereotypes of Latin American workers and hiring within migrants’ social networks compounds the effects of this implicit language requirement. Social and linguistic barriers to employment initiated a path dependent process by which more immigrants of a similar cultural and linguistic background came to be employed in the same types of jobs. The result is a workforce that is highly stratified by race, ethnicity, class, and language. Spanish-speaking immigrants occupy the bottom rung of the ladder, even in restaurants operated by  other non-white immigrants.

Note 1: The use of ‘amigo’ (friend) in the Spanish sign is an example of what Hill calls ‘mock Spanish’, a racist and racializing parody of Spanish in the Southwest. Used among non-Spanish speakers, ‘amigo’ refers specifically to men of Latin American origin. For example, someone who does not speak Spanish may call a Latin American origin man over by calling out, ‘Hey, amigo!’ (The feminine ‘amiga’ is not as common.) Though ‘amigo’ is definitely a holdover from mock Spanish, taken as a whole, the sign seems to be a genuine attempt at communication in Spanish with Spanish speakers. Hill argues that mock Spanish is generally used for comedic effect among native English speaking whites. However, other ethnic groups have also adopted it, using it to distance themselves discursively from Latin American immigrants, who are situated near the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
Waldinger, Roger (1998). The Language of Work in an Immigrant Metropolis Journal des anthropologues (72-73)

Africa Town, Guangzhou (Source: ChinaSmack)

What does an urban middle-class male university graduate from Conakry, the capital of Guinea, have in common with a peasant woman with little education from a village in Sichuan? Well, both are caught up in the processes of globalization and find themselves as semi-legal migrants with limited resources in Guangzhou’s Africa Town. “Africa Town” is the name of two suburbs in Guangzhou where the largest community of Africans in Asia resides. According to this photo essay on ChinaSmack, there were around 20,000 Africans registered there in 2011. The number of Africans estimated to come there for short business visits and those without a legal status was assumed to be about ten times that number.

Africans come to Guangzhou to trade: at one end of the spectrum there is the so-called “luggage bag trade,” which involves an African community pooling their financial resources. A member of the group then travels to China and purchases as many goods as possible. These are then shipped back home and sold on for a profit. At the other end of the spectrum of African traders in Guangzhou are more established people who run their own shops, catering to bulk buyers, including the luggage bag traders.

The retailers of Africa Town do not only include Africans but also rural Chinese migrants whose status is as semi-legal as that of their African peers if they don’t have an urban hukou (residence permit) for Guangzhou.

It is in this “marginal space in a peripheral country” (Han 2013, p. 95), that Huamei Han, a sociolinguistic ethnographer, met Ibrahim, the university graduate from Conakry, and Laura, the villager from Sichuan, as part of her project to study multilingualism in this high-contact situation.

English, as the global language of business, plays an in important role in Africa Town. So does Mandarin as the national language. Additionally, Cantonese, the local language and a number of other Chinese vernaculars are widely used in Africa Town, as are a number of African languages, including colonial languages such as French. So, there are a lot of codes being used in Africa Town but the preeminent power codes are English and Mandarin.

However, access to formal instruction in these power codes is rare and African Towners have to find other ways to learn whatever they can of these languages. As a result a contact variety, which locals call “Chinglish,” has developed. According to Han (2013, p. 88) this kind of “Chinglish” (not to be confused with unidiomatic Chinese English signage Westerns like to make fun of) is characterized by simple English vocabulary and sentence structures, repetition of key words, the mixing of Mandarin expressions, and the influence of Chinese syntax.

Africa Town, Guangzhou (Source: ChinaSmack)

It is this variety that Ibrahim mostly used, in addition to French, Susu, Pular, Mandinka and Arabic. However, his impressive multilingual repertoire was of relatively limited value without access to Chinese, as he explained to the researcher:

“Some factory they speak no French, they speak no English. So no Chinese, no business!” (p. 90).

However, immediate financial pressures in conjunction with a restrictive visa regime meant that his dream to attend formal Chinese language classes was beyond his grasp.

Laura, by contrast, felt she needed English to extend her business opportunities. However, formal English language instruction was out of her reach, too. Instead, she mobilized personal relationships and networks to acquire English, including the pursuit of transnational romantic relationships.

As Han points out, globalization is often conceived as associated with “elite multilingualism” where “the global person” is supposed to be highly proficient in standard varieties of the languages involved. However, access to these power codes depends upon economic capital: in order to study a language formally, you need to have money, time and legal status.

The inhabitants of African Town who Han spoke to had none of these and their structural marginalization thus also resulted in their linguistic marginalization. Even so, their informal language learning – the grassroots multilingualism of the inhabitants of Africa Town – is locally meaningful and enables their livelihoods in this space characterized by “globalization from below.”

Han, Huamei (2013). Individual Grassroots Multilingualism in Africa Town in Guangzhou: The Role of States in Globalization International Multilingual Research Journal, 7, 83-97

I was curious to find out whether the emergence of a new industry (nail care) and the transnational domination of that industry by a specific ethnic group (Vietnamese) had anything to do with language? Sure has, as I’ve learnt from a 2011 article in the International Migration Review (Eckstein & Nguyen, 2011).

Migrants often find that lack of proficiency in the local language is a barrier to workplace entry in their field and/or at the level at which they are qualified. They also often find that they can’t wait around till their language has improved sufficiently before having to make a living. The Vietnamese leaving Vietnam in the 1970s were no exception to this.

Linguistic barriers to employment are highest in the professions, where usually (part of) the qualifications and training process needs to be re-done and/or certifying and registration exams need to be undertaken in the local language. That’s why migrant lawyers are rare. Linguistic barriers to employment are lowest for self-employment in areas with little state regulation. That’s why migrant-owned corner stores are frequent.

Within a particular industry, the same rules apply. Let’s take the beauty industry: if you are a cosmetic surgeon and want to move to another country, chances are you’ll never work as a cosmetic surgeon again. Depending on where you are from and how your previous qualifications are assessed, you are facing years of re-training, qualifying exams in the new language and other hurdles to re-gain your license to practice in the new country. At the other end of the beauty industry, you’ll find nail technicians: to practice as a nail technician in Australia, for instance, you don’t need any formal qualifications whatsoever. Limited proficiency in English thus poses no or only a minor obstacle to workplace entry as a nail technician. However, speaking Vietnamese might confer an advantage, as I’ll explain now.

In the 1970s, the family of a former commander in the South Vietnamese Navy found that there were few opportunities for them and fellow Vietnamese refugees in California. Like many others in a similar position, they tried their luck in all kinds of ways and opened a beauty school, the Advance Beauty College (ABC) in Garden Grove, CA, an area aka ‘Little Saigon.’ They taught in Vietnamese and after a short course, students could go and start their own nail salon. Many of them did because in addition to the lack of linguistic barriers, the financial investment was low, too.

At that time, nail salons hardly existed and manicures and pedicures were a preserve of the rich and famous. However, the emergent supply of Vietnamese nail technicians and nail salons meant that manicures and pedicures suddenly came into the reach of Californian women of lesser means.

Vietnamese nails-only shops revolutionized manicuring in much the same manner that McDonalds revolutionized inexpensive, fast food service. Like McDonalds, the nails-only shops appealed to busy Americans who wanted quick, dependable service, when convenient to their schedules, and who were content with the provisioning of the service in an impersonal manner. (p. 654)

Vietnamese entrepreneurs thus did not fill an existing market but created a new one. Once established, this market spread easily through franchises. Regal Nails, located within Walmarts, for instance, was founded by a first-generation Vietnamese, as was the Australian market leader, Professionails.

Once established, linguistic necessity became a virtue for Vietnamese nail entrepreneurs, as ethnic networks ensured a continuing supply of first-generation workers with few other options. As such the continuation of the business model depends on continuing emigration from Vietnam because with better education and bilingualism, the second-generation does not need to rely on their ethnic ties and have many other employment options.

As I’ve explained it was the absence of regulation combined with the availability of training in Vietnamese that made California that birthplace of the Vietnamese creation and subsequent domination of the nail care industry. Furthermore, when the State of California introduced licensing exams for nail technicians in the 1990s, there was the option to take the certifying exams in Vietnamese. Thus, the Californian state chose, in this instance, not to erect a linguistic barrier to employment for its Vietnamese-speaking citizens.

Once established, and as the nail care industry expanded beyond California, across the USA and, later, went global, Vietnamese domination had the effect of excluding non-Vietnamese from the industry so that today lack of proficiency in English is rarely a barrier to becoming a nail technician but lack of Vietnamese does constitute such a barrier. As the industry transnationalized, it moved back to Vietnam and many nail technicians now train there before emigrating and have jobs already lined up before they even leave the country.

In case any of our non-Vietnamese readers are inclined to feel jealous, consider that it is only the continued ‘Vietnamization’ of the supply chain that makes your cheap manicures and pedicures possible.

[…] they work in the least skilled, least revenue-generating segment of the beauty industry. Most typically, when Vietnamese entrepreneurs expand their business involvements they do so by opening additional salons of the same sort, not by diversifying their beauty care offerings to include those that are most profitable. Similarly, nail technicians do not invest in additional training to qualify for the better paying jobs in the beauty industry. Vietnamese, accordingly, are creating conditions that work against their own longer-term interests. They are fueling intra-ethnic competition that is likely to drive down their earnings, unless they further increase demand for their services. (p. 666)

Eckstein S, & Nguyen TN (2011). The making and transnationalization of an ethnic niche: Vietnamese manicurists. The International migration review, 45 (3), 639-74 PMID: 22171362

In the past weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to re-visit two quite different cities of whose linguistic landscapes I consider myself a longtime observer: Dubai and Munich. Both in Dubai and Munich, I was struck by the ever-increasing presence of Arabic (Munich) and Chinese (Dubai). In Munich, one can now see menus and shop signs in Arabic and much of the official signage at Munich Airport is trilingual in German, English and Arabic. Similarly, the presence of Chinese is expanding in Dubai through shop signs, store guides and service personnel wearing badges identifying them as Chinese speakers. Most intriguingly, in the airport lounges of both cities, I discovered glossy magazines in Arabic (Munich) and Chinese (Dubai) addressed at Arabic- and Chinese-speaking travellers respectively. Both the Chinese-language Luxos (subtitle: ‘Your guide to luxury’) and the Arabic-language Arab Traveler (subtitle: ‘Magazine for the Arabian Friends of Bavaria’) are high-end consumption guides with lots of ads for exclusive brands of jewelry, perfume, hotels, clothing or wellness interspersed with infomercials about boutique shopping and luxury consumption.

Neither Arabic in Munich nor Chinese in Dubai are likely language choices given the settlement and migration history of these cities. So, how come they are making their presence felt in such conspicuous ways in addition to the local language (German and Arabic respectively) and the international language English? The answer lies in the fact that Arabic and Chinese are the languages of the biggest tourist spenders in these places: Munich is popular with Gulf Arabs as a shopping and health destination and, according to this SZ report, the average Arab tourist spends 569 Euros per day in Munich. By comparison, the second-biggest spenders, Japanese tourists with 370 Euros per day, seem almost miserly and there are far fewer of them anyways.

Chinese tourists are to Dubai what Arab tourists are to Munich: the most lucrative group. According to one report, in 2011 300,000 Chinese tourists came to Dubai and their combined expenditure of USD 334 million made them the most valuable group of tourists.

In a consumer economy, language is a means to make a profit. As purchasing power shifts, so do language ideologies and English may be starting to encounter rivals after all.

Now google ‘foreign languages crisis’ or similar search terms and you will get more newspaper articles arguing that language learning is in dire straits in Australia, UK, or the USA than you are likely to have the time to read. They all predict economic decline, an inability to compete and cultural isolation because of the fact that schools in these countries by and large fail abysmally when it comes to language learning. If that’s the case, why don’t they put their money where their mouth is? Could it be that staunch English monolingualism is actually the more economically rational strategy for these countries?

Let’s see what non-English speaking countries are doing. South Korea, for example: in 2009, roughly 40% of that country’s public education budget went towards English language education. The Hankook Ilbo article stating this figure doesn’t say what that means in absolutes and I’ve extrapolated around USD 12 billion as follows: in 2009, South Korea’s GDP was USD 834,060,000,000 and in 2002 (the most recent figure I could find on the internet), they spent 3.8% of their GDP on education. A national annual investment of around USD 12 billion for foreign language learning is HUGE! Now add to that an additional private investment of KRW 1.5 trillion (around USD 13 billion). A nation of less than 50 million inhabitants spending USD 25 billion per annum on English language learning is an average expenditure of more than USD500 per person per year on English language learning. Wow!

So, language learning costs big bucks! Add the opportunity cost of devoting a lot of time and energy to language learning (i.e. you can’t spend the money nor the time and effort on other things that might be equally or even more useful) and it’s easy to see why Australia, the UK and the USA don’t go in for language learning: it’s not in their national interest as long as they can get away with making everyone else learn English. Robert Phillipson (2008) puts it this way:

Building on research in Switzerland and worldwide, François Grin (2005) was commissioned by a French educational research institution to investigate the impact of the current dominance of English in education. He calculates quantifiable privileged market effects, communication savings effects, language learning savings effects (i.e., not needing to invest so much in foreign language learning), alternative human capital investment effects (e.g., school time being used for other purposes), and legitimacy and rhetorical effects. The research led Grin to conclude that continental countries are transferring to the United Kingdom and Ireland at least Euro 10 billion per annum, and more probably about Euro 16–17 billion a year. The amounts involved completely dwarf the British EU budget rebate of Euro 5 billion annually that has been a source of friction between the United Kingdom and its partners. The finding is likely to be politically explosive, as this covert British financial benefit is at the expense of its partners. It is also incompatible with the EU commitment to all European children acquiring competence in two foreign languages. It shows that European education is skewed in fundamentally inequitable ways. It indicates that laissez faire in the international linguistic marketplace gives unfair advantages to native speakers of English not only in cross-cultural interaction but also in the workings of the market. The commodification of English has massive implications. Grin (2004) has also calculated that the U.S. economy saves $19 billion p.a. by not needing to spend time and effort in formal schooling on learning foreign languages. (p. 28)

Basically, monolinguals get a free ride at the expense of everyone who invests in language learning!

Writing this blog post I came across a fascinating ‘visual economics’ site ‘how countries spend their money.’ Take a look! It’s illuminating to see at a glance what percentages of their GDP countries spend on military, health and education. The map made me wonder whether we can do something similar for the costs of (English) language learning here on Language-on-the-Move? Everyone could help by sending links to reports, newspaper articles etc. with figures about language costs in their country/state similar to the Hankook Ilbo one I cited above. Here’s a Language-on-the-Move challenge – get cracking!

Reference
Phillipson, R. (2008). THE LINGUISTIC IMPERIALISM OF NEOLIBERAL EMPIRE. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 5 (1), 1-43 DOI: 10.1080/15427580701696886

Japanese stop sign

The current global orthodoxy holds that learning English is good: individuals who know English are supposed to have an advantage in the job market and countries with large English-learning populations are supposed to be “developing” and “modernizing.” Critical sociolinguists have, of course, for a long time pointed out that it doesn’t quite work like that. They tend to argue that, while the spread of English has certainly made things easier for international elites, it has also served to exacerbate internal inequalities within many countries. However, even within the critical camp, I’ve never come across the argument that, in some circumstances, a competitive advantage may actually result from NOT knowing English. So, you can imagine my surprise when I discovered precisely this in the facts put forward in a recent article about the global spread of temping agencies (Coe, Johns, Ward, 2012).

The article investigates the global spread of transnational staffing corporations. With the international rise of neoliberal workplace relations and the widespread demise of regular work over the past decades, temping firms have become a lucrative market internationally. Globally, the temporary staffing market is worth many billions of dollars, with the USA, the UK and Japan being the three largest national markets. This huge market is firmly in the hands of a relatively small number of transnational corporations all of which originate in the USA or Western Europe. In 2008, the three largest players internationally were Adecco, Manpower and Randstad. Adecco, which originates in Switzerland, generated 30.2 billion USD in foreign revenue (97% of its total) by operating in 59 countries. Manpower, which originates in the USA, generated 19.6 billion USD in foreign revenue (91% of its total) by operating in 82 countries. Randstad, which originates in the Netherlands, generated 18.2 billion USD in foreign revenue (78% of its total) by operating in 50 countries. So, temporary staffing is big business; big global business.

In this context, the Japanese temporary staffing market (worth 14.7 billion USD in 2008) constitutes an anomaly: it is not dominated by transnational corporations but by national ones. Coe et al. investigate why the big global players have failed to significantly penetrate the world’s fastest-growing and third-most lucrative market. They argue that transnational staffing corporations have failed in Japan on three levels: gaining market entry; gaining business once established; and securing business on an ongoing basis. On each level, language and culture played a role. In terms of gaining market entry, transnationals have no advantage if they start from scratch (“greenfield entry”) because national competitors are well-established. As one interviewee explained:

They might think that Japan is a very big market, but it is a not new market … it is different here. This is not an English speaking country and it has a long history, and a very different culture.

Failing greenfield entry, acquisitions of domestic companies are the other key strategy to gain international market entry. Acquisitions strategies, too, haven’t been going well in an industry heavily dependent on services and communications. The success of a temping agency depends heavily on its good relationships with the companies they are sending workers to and with the actual workers on their books. As it turns out, expatriate managers, who are typically installed in acquisitions and direct subsidiaries, simply aren’t as good at developing and maintaining these relationships than their Japanese counterparts. Most clients of a temping agency in Japan prefer to do business with a Japanese person.

The way multinational staffing corporations thrive internationally is by entering into global contracts with other multinational corporations (e.g., Staffing Company A has a global contract with Hospitality Company B to supply all their cleaning staff globally). However, that strategy does not work well in the Japanese market, either. Apart from the fact that there are relatively fewer transnational corporations operating in Japan to begin with, even if a global contract is in place, the lack of local networks meant that transnational companies often could not actually fulfill their global contract in Japan, as another interviewee explains:

There is a problem with global contracts because Japan is not an English-speaking country. So, when the foreign company A has a global contract with Manpower … for instance Pasona [=2nd largest national temping agency] has been doing the staffing for company A, but because of the global contract they have to switch to Manpower, but Manpower cannot find the 200 skilled English speakers that they need. So, a company might have a global contract, but they might not be able to switch from Pasona to Manpower.

In an industry such as temporary staffing, where the “service” (i.e. supply of workers) is “produced” and “consumed” locally, it is hard to see what transnational companies can actually add in value to the ways in which the service is rendered. On the contrary, they lack a crucial ingredient that their Japanese competitors have: an emphasis on building long-term relationships and trust between clients and companies.

The authors conclude that, as Japanese clients value long-term relationships and trust over universal branding and globally uniform business practices, there are obvious limits to the expansion potential of multinational corporations. Looking at it differently, NOT speaking English actually grants national operators in the temporary staffing industry in the Japanese market with a competitive edge. I wonder whether it wouldn’t be possible to discover many similar cases from around the world if we just started to look beyond the global hype and to undertake actual cost-benefit analyses of the global spread of English?

NEIL M. COE, JENNIFER JOHNS AND KEVIN WARD (2012). Limits to expansion: transnational corporations and territorial embeddedness in the Japanese temporary staffing market Global Networks, 12 (1), 1-26

Language in the catfish war

I’ve just read False Economy and in addition to learning many new intriguing things about economic history, I’ve also learnt that the catfish war, was, inter alia, fought on the terrain of language. Never heard about the catfish war?! The catfish war is a trade war between the USA and Vietnam, which started in the mid-1990s and in which US catfish producers lobbied for trade barriers and tariffs be imposed on Vietnamese catfish imports.

Initially, US catfish lobbyists delivered a heavy blow to Vietnamese catfish producers when they convinced US lawmakers to implement a law that banned imported catfish from being called “catfish.” Both the US and Vietnamese fish are in the same order of Siluriformes but in different families.

However, their joy didn’t last long because the Vietnamese retaliated by rebranding their catfish as basa. “Basa” is simply the Vietnamese word for the fish in question. First they didn’t have a coherent strategy and so other names also proliferated, including tra, bocourti, panga and swai. Panga, which is mostly used in Europe, derives from the Latin family name Pangasiidae. Basa and tra are different subfamilies – basa is technically known as Pangasius bocourti (hence the trade name bocourti) and tra is technically known as Pangasius hypophthalmus. The Vietnamese word for Pangasius hypophthalmus is tra and the Thai word for it is swai (hence the trade names tra and swai).

It was all very confusing (it took me a good two hours of internet research to figure this all out), particularly as basa is used internationally for both Pangasius bocourti and Pangasius hypophthalmus, and the same is true for panga in Europe. However, since 2010 Vietnam has instituted legislation to label all basa and tra for export consistently as basa.

The Vietnamese strategy of market differentiation worked. In the past decade, basa has come to be seen as an imported premium product and has been doing well in a range of export markets, including the USA. Consequently, US catfish lobbyists changed their strategy: they went to lobby for basa to be treated as a “like product” – i.e. completely reversing their earlier strategy which had been to argue that Vietnamese catfish was different from American catfish. They were successful again and Vietnamese basa has been subjected to heavy import tariffs.

As a discussion paper by the Center for International Management and Development Antwerp explains, the catfish war has transformed Vietnamese aquaculture: export markets have diversified beyond the USA, basa and tra are now being farmed in large agribusinesses, who have the means to innovate and to impose quality controls and to produce to international standards (another strategy in the catfish war has been to allege the inferior quality of Asian catfish and aquaculture).

The catfish war is not the only trade war fought on the terrain on language. Trade names have significant implications for competitiveness and consumer protection, particularly in the seafood business where new species continue to be bred and where the final product on the supermarket shelf has often undergone substantial technological intervention and transformation from animal to food.

The catfish war continues. US catfish producers have recently released a new catfish product, specially filleted premium catfish, under the car-name-like trade name Delacata. However, by now both US and Vietnamese catfish producers are more worried about competition from China than from each other.

In the meantime, if you ask Australian fish-and-chip vendors what kind of fish they use and where it comes from, they tell you: “Dunno! It comes in a box” Do you know what your food is and where it comes from?

I can only speak Pashto

ABC News yesterday broke a whistleblower report that US army interpreters deployed in Afghanistan often don’t speak the local languages. ABC News reports that up to a quarter of the interpreters hired by a private provider, Mission Essential Personnel, failed basic language tests.

Click on the picture, to watch one such interpreting episode unfold: a Pashto-speaking villager in effect offers to cooperate with US troops but the interpreter makes up an entirely different scenario with the Americans eventually walking away and cursing the villager. No wonder they don’t get anywhere winning the hearts and minds of the locals!

A Christian Science Monitor report has some examples of the damage caused by incompetent interpreters: in one case, misinterpreted directions resulted in a misdirected mortar attack on the wrong spot. The entire livestock of a village was killed in that attack; US troops paid compensation to the villagers. In another example, a request for shooting illumination flares was misinterpreted as a request for a mortar attack, which resulted in an unspecified number of casualties.

The reasons for these disasters are manifold: to begin with, war interpreting is a lucrative business both for the interpreters on the ground but even more so for corporations such as Mission Essential Personnel. Second, Afghanistan is a multilingual country and apparently someone hired as a Dari interpreter may well be then assigned to interpret in a Pashto- or Baluchi-speaking part of the country. Third, army interpreters are often uneducated and inexperienced young men as the more senior interpreters opt for more secure employment with the UN or NGOs in Kabul. One of the interpreters interviewed for the Christian Science Monitor report, for instance, tells how he learnt English by selling cigarettes to soldiers outside Bagram Airbase. He was only 16 when someone asked him whether he spoke Dari and Pashto. He said “yes” and, voila, he had a new job as army interpreter.

Would anyone have given him a job as, say, an accountant? “Hey, are you good at maths?” “Yes!” “Beaut! I’ve got a job for you as an army account.” Wouldn’t happen because everyone understands the need for accountants to be properly trained, qualified and to have substantial experience for a high-stakes role. By contrast, decision makers in the US army are seemingly so naive about language and communication skills that they think nothing of putting the lives of civilians and soldiers, indeed the entire outcome of the operation, into the hands of untrained, unqualified and inexperienced interpreters. Just another reason to Rethink Afghanistan!

The level of public debate about these corporate language policies is amazing and is characterized by two contradictory positions: pro and contra English-as-an-official-language at work in Japan. From the perspective of Nissan, Rakuten and Uniqlo, English is obviously the language of globalisation, an indispensable tool to increase their competitiveness in the global market. Mikitani asked rhetorically: “If our workers can’t speak English, like those workers in Europe, how can we compete in the global world?” It makes perfect sense to many debaters, and some are even suggesting that it is an opportunity to consider adopting English as the national language.

Not everyone is so enthusiastic, of course, and the other side of the debate is led by scholars such as Masaki Oda and Tatsuru Uchida. Uchida is concerned that the English-Only approach would demoralise workers and have a negative impact on the overall quality of the workforce. The English-as-corporate-language policy might create an environment where competent workers without English competence are being marginalised or even dismissed from their jobs, while incompetent workers with good English proficiency are being promoted.

The strongest criticism, however, has emerged not from academia but from within the corporate world. Takanobu Ito, the CEO of Japan’s giant carmaker Honda has labeled the imposition of the use of English in workplaces within Japan simply as “stupid.” He argues that to be competitive in the global market really means to be strategically flexible in all areas, including language use. As a successful corporate leader with ample international experience, Ito’s words, too, carry a lot of weight with the public. As soon as he made his statement, uncountable tweets and blog posts gave a thumbs-up to Ito’s stance with a common expression of “ホンダ△” (Honda △ – the triangle symbolizes the upward status of Honda).

Those opposed to the imposition of English as the corporate language within Japan complain that Uniqlo and Rakuten are now focusing less on the needs of their Japanese workers and customers. The idea that Japanese workers would converse in English among themselves in shops in Japan has predictably drawn a lot of ridicule as in this example:

妻が「今日から我が家の公用語を英語とする」と宣言した。これは怖い。楽天やユニクロ以上の怖さだよ。俺はもうずっと黙っているしかないな。(My wife just declared “We will adopt English as our official family language from today”. I’m scared. This is scarier than Rakuten and Uniqlo. I will just have to remain silent from now on).

I chuckled at this tweet but cannot help wondering whether the fear to be condemned to silence in English is not very real for some of the workers at the companies with English as their official language.

So far, the two sides of the debate are still battling it out and it remains to be seen who will win the argument. However, one winner has already emerged: the English language teaching industry. English-as-corporate-language policies may well turn out to be an unexpected savior for the industry with its shrinking market share.

English-Only at Bon Secours

From what I read, there is a nursing shortage in the Global North. From North America to Japan and from Europe to the Gulf countries, rich societies suffer from a “care deficit,” which they fill by importing – mostly female – labor from the global South. I have published about the intersection of language, gender and global care chains before (check out our resources section on “Language, Migration and Social Justice”).

If there is a nursing shortage in a country like the USA, it’s hard to understand why a US hospital, Bon Secours Hospital in Baltimore, would choose to fire four nurses from the Philippines for no other reason than that they spoke Tagalog during lunch break. Current management theory suggests that it’s a good idea to minimize staff turnover and to try and hang-on to talent when you have it, particularly in an area with a shortage of qualified workers. So, how come four nurses get dismissed, without warning, for no other reasons than that they spoke a bit of Tagalog? Not even on the job but during break-time, and, for all I can gather from the media reports not even a Tagalog-only conversation but Tagalog-words mixed into an English conversation.

Indeed, when the four nurses filed a discrimination complaint, their lawyer argued that the lack of guidelines in the hospital’s English-Only rule made it impossible to abide by:

All it takes is just one word. That can be a greeting, a remark or even the name of a Filipino dish. Based on this rule, you could say bagoong (a fish sauce) and lose your job.

According to the lawyer, the hospital could not actually cite specific instances where or when the alleged violations of their English-Only rule had taken place. Huh?! How come an organization that claims to have “respect, justice, integrity, stewardship, innovation, compassion, quality and growth” as their core values can suspend all of these, and plain common sense to boot, in dismissing four employees without good documentation and due course? Not to mention that it’s economically irrational to dismiss health workers for no good reason when there is a shortage of them.

English-Only rules are born of ignorance and bigotry and they breed more of the same. It’s sad to see that the idea of English-Only was obviously so powerful at Bon Secours Baltimore that it suspended all other considerations.

As an afterthought, I can’t help wondering about the wisdom of throwing English-Only stones when you sit in a Bon-Secours-glasshouse …

Piller, Ingrid, & Takahashi, Kimie (2011). At the intersection of gender, language and transnationalism Nik Coupland. Ed. Handbook of Language and Globalisation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 540-554