‘That’s not what the dictionary says!’, the pedant bleats.

‘Ah’, retorts the wise linguist, ‘but a dictionary is simply a record of usage, not a rule book’.

Fun fact by the way:

The earliest English dictionaries in the early 1600s, like Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, didn’t actually list all the words, only the most difficult ones, including the rush of words being borrowed into English from French, Latin and Greek – which were much more scientifically and culturally interesting back then than boring old backwater English.

Dictionaries change

Contemporary dictionaries do change their definitions, as language itself changes. Take the English words shall and will, which used to occupy very different territories (for example shall typically appeared before ‘I’ and ‘we’, will after other grammatical subjects) but nowadays will has largely usurped shall. That’s just natural language change, and the Cambridge English Dictionary now marks shall as ‘old-fashioned’. Will is hot; shall is not.

And this is still happening today. In 2019, a petition was launched for the Oxford English Dictionary to update its definition of ‘woman’, to remove various sexist wording and to include “examples representative of minorities, for example, a transgender woman, a lesbian woman, etc.”. This caused quite a stir at the time, but the dictionary folk did what they always do – investigated changing language usage.

The Cambridge Dictionary moved first, adding an entry to its definition ‘an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth’. The OED has also moved but rather more circumspectly, simply adding an example of usage under its definition, ‘Having trans women involved added so much to the breadth of understanding what it means to be a woman.’ In this case we’re witnessing dictionaries catching up in real time, at different paces. But they do catch up. That’s their job, not telling us how to speak proper!

‘Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of ‘woman’, updated to be transgender-inclusive’

Prescriptivists and descriptivists

In academic parlance, those who wish language would just sit still and behave itself are prescriptivists. They prescribe how language should be used (just as your doctor prescribes the medicines you should take).

Linguists, by contrast, are descriptivists, simply describing language as it is actually used without passing judgement.

Or are they?

And/or, do they have to always be?

Naming no names, I have heard unguarded comments from professional linguists, irked by this or that slang term their teenage offspring come out with. Linguists are humans, and they live in human society that is full of that kind of sneering. Some of it slips through. But strictly speaking this is very much the faux pas, and might provoke a subtle change of subject at the conference dinner table.

Quotative like

A widely discussed example from recent decades is a new use of like to quote someone (‘He was like, I don’t care!’). I reviewed and modelled the research into this new ‘quotative like’, which showed teenagers leading the innovation. This new usage quickly ruffled pedant feathers far and wide. Indeed, many schoolteachers heavy-handedly banned its use under the pretence of reinforcing standard literacy. ‘You’ll never get a job speaking like that!’ etc. etc.

But the linguistic research told another story. Quotative like was doing something very special, and more importantly something previously unavailable in English. It allowed you to relate what someone said, but without claiming those were the precise words they used. Compare ‘He was like, I don’t care’ and ‘He said, I don’t care’. The first is a less explicit claim that he said exactly that, simply that he said something like that.

It’s actually a very efficient and strategic conversational device; and linguists sprung to its defence as a novel and intriguing innovation. For those few linguists who continued to privately grumble about it, and other youth lingo, eyebrows were increasingly raised.

A strip in the webcomic XKCD about research on quotative like

Evasive so

But other linguistic innovations garner more divided opinion among linguists, particularly some quirks of politicians, corporate bigwigs, and other denizens of elite circles. A widely discussed example which gained pace in the early 2010s is the use of the word so to begin a sentence. Historically a rather dull grammatical bolt simply plugging together chunks of sentences, this unassuming two-letter word has been promoted to higher tasks in recent years, much to the dismay of the pedants. As a 2015 NPR article notes,

Many of the complaints about sentences beginning with “so” are triggered by a specific use of the word that’s genuinely new. It’s the “so” that you hear from people who can’t answer a question without first bringing you up to speed on the backstory. I go to the Apple Store and ask the guy at the Genius Bar why my laptop is running slow. He starts by saying, “So, Macs have two kinds of disk permissions …”

British journalist and BBC radio presenter John Humprys long marshalled opinion against this use of so. Indeed his listeners frequently echoed the same grumble. Others went on the defensive, urging that so has been used to begin sentences for centuries.

But that defense somewhat misses an important nuance of this irritation. The new usage here is not simply beginning a sentence, but beginning a reply to a question, especially a challenging question, often with something that is not really an answer at all, and often uttered by someone in a position of power, who really should know the answer.

A famous example of that little nuance was a 2015 New York Times interview of Mark Zuckerberg in which he gibbered out some bizarrely rambling answers to very straightforward questions, for example what his new toy ‘Creative Labs’ was supposed to be. Simple question. Define the product. He responded:

So Facebook is not one thing. On desktop where we grew up, the mode that made the most sense was to have a website, and to have different ways of sharing built as features within a website. So when we ported to mobile, that’s where we started — this one big blue app that approximated the desktop presence.

But I think on mobile, people want different things. Ease of access is so important. So is having the ability to control which things you get notifications for. And the real estate is so small. In mobile there’s a big premium on creating single-purpose first-class experiences.

So what we’re doing with Creative Labs is basically unbundling the big blue app.

This spectacularly circuitous response not only patronised a professional journalist and their audience – who might just understand what a website is – but it also did something more sinister. It shirked responsibility and accountability; it kicked up a cloud of corporate haze when a simple product definition was required.

Slippery circuitousness, after all, is an important corporate skill, whether you’re not answering a journalist or not answering a Senate committee.

One reactionary pedant, Bernard Lamb, President of the Queen’s English Society, retorted of this new so: “It’s not being used as a conjunction to join things up, which is how it should be used. … It’s just carelessness, it doesn’t have any meaning when used this way.”

But he was wrong. It does have meaning, just in a new and rather more sinister way.

Doing bad things with words

‘So’, as it’s used here and in other such corporate media interviews (‘How can you justify this kind of oil spill?’ – ‘So oil spills are uncommon and we work very hard to prevent…’) is doing a huge amount of ultimately rather grubby work. Its former career as a conjunction (‘X happened so Y happened’) conditions us to see logical relevance between X and Y. Zuck and other corporate and political bigwigs use this to their advantage, to imply relevance when there is none.

And in the process, in a small but important way, that adds to their aura of elite untouchability.

Powerful people using language to trick their audiences is of course not new. Classical rhetoric gives us the term paradiastole, when a reply to a question turns a negative into a positive, or otherwise deflects and diffracts the focus of the question. (Socrates famously hated political rhetoric, inspiring his student Plato similarly.) Reply-initial so could simply be the new rhetorical kid on the block, the latest ruse in a very long tradition of ruses to distract from not having a good answer, or having one but wanting to avoid it.

Statues of Plato (left) and Socrates (right) by Leonidas Drosis at the Academy of Athens (Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0)

And this brings us to where linguists might get justifiably annoyed, more so than at their teenage kids’ slang.

If a linguistic innovation is achieving something sinister, then perhaps it’s ok to hate on it. Linguists, after all, are not simply interested in sanctifying any and all words as precious gems. Linguists skillfully dissect other language use that is more obviously doing bad things – racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic, and other discriminatory discourse.

Calling out nefarious language is ok

Laying bare when a linguistic innovation is doing something sinister, calling it out for what it is, can simply be an extension of that same important critical insight.

Funnily enough, that reply-initial so has actually been picked up by media training organisations. Corporate elites are always carefully groomed on their language, and since this particular innovation has picked up so much ire, it is now carefully ironed out. You may be hearing it less nowadays as a result.

You’ll still hear ‘I was like…’ though, because teenagers don’t have spin doctors to manage their comms, nor are they interested in fooling the public to buy their widgets or vote for them. Their interest is in being cool, as it should be.

So, criticising linguistic innovations does have its place when there are more shady forces at work. It’s like the principle in comedy that a joke is funny as long as it’s ‘punching up’, i.e. poking fun at those higher on the social ladder. As soon as the jokes begin ‘punching down’, mocking those who are already looked down upon without a comedian piling in, then it’s veering towards criticism.

New words can be fun and useful, or they can hide other more nefarious intentions. For the latter, linguists should feel comfortable punching up. It’s part of the job, alongside calling out more obviously discriminatory language. Linguists are ideally placed to pick those apart – celebrating the grammatically ingenious irreverence of teens while also throwing tomatoes at sneaky elites. So there.

The Bainu social media platform in China

Bainu was founded by two young Mongols in 2015 and now it is the only surviving Mongolian language social media platform in China. A 2015 news report claims that there are around 400,000 registered users although that number has shrunk significantly since the government’s crackdown on Mongols’ protests against the 2020 bilingual education reform.

Although many subjects cannot be discussed openly on Bainu, one topic has never stopped attracting Mongols’ unwavering attention: the “purely” linguistic matters which include but are not limited to Mongolian grammar, spelling, translation, standardization, and regional dialects. Perhaps it is precisely because of the strict policing of social media spaces that seemingly “professional, innocuous, and apolitical” discussions of language proliferate there.

This map briefly settled the debate over “sheep meat” vs “sheep’s meat”

Big debate: “sheep meat” or “sheep’s meat”?

A long-running debate has been over whether it is honin mah (literally “sheep meat”) or honin-ii mah (“sheep’s meat”). To support their respective arguments users post pages from their old middle school grammar textbooks or carry out surveys among speakers from different regions. Recently, the debate was briefly settled (it has now flared up again) when one Bainu user, to the awe of many, triumphantly posted a self-made language map.

This map at least temporarily resolved the question that has intrigued, excited, and frustrated Bainu users for months. The map maker, having attributed the differences in expressions to regional differences, did not forget to settle another long-lasting debate, too: whether it is “putting on a hat” or “wearing a hat”. According to the map, the regions with red shade are areas where “sheep meat” and “putting on a hat” are commonly used, while the rest say “sheep’s meat” and “wear a hat.”

Translation debates

Apart from grammatical problems and dialect differences, the translation of new terms is another field of battle where foes and friends are made. In June 2020, the question of how to translate “emoji” into Mongolian sparked a spirited debate. Some advocated for a native Mongolian word while others supported charaiin ilerel, which is a word-for-word translation from Chinese: 表情 (“facial expression”). Yet others have adopted an internationalist stance and have chosen emoji. My observation over the year 2021 suggests that emoji seems to be winning out among Bainuers.

But not all terms are controversial as shown in their almost unanimous approval of translating “barbecue” into shorlog, or the terms translated by the volunteer translation group anabapa, mostly comprised of Bainu users (see “brake light” image).

Why do metalinguistic discussions proliferate on social media?

Emoji on Bainu

You might wonder why Bainu has become a key platform where metalinguistic discussions proliferate or why users are so keen to translate new terms to replace the common Chinese loans in Inner Mongolia, or to what extent these Mongolian translations are successful.

You can find an answer in a new study of Mongolian linguistic purism discourse on Bainu by myself and my co-author Cholmon Khuanuud. In the study, we situate purist discourses in the sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic context of Inner Mongolia. We show that the weakened autonomy of minority Mongols compounded by the spread of market economy, and China’s drive to build a nation essentially following the “one people, one language (Mandarin Chinese)” model exerts tremendous pressure on the maintenance of Mongolian language. This produces linguistic anxiety, and it underpins purist discourses saturating mediatized spaces such as Bainu.

“Mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss

We find that, apart from translating new terms, another two key purification strategies are prominent in Bainu. First, as with language activists in many other minoritized communities, Mongol purists construct “mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss, including the loss of land, culture, political rights, racial “purity,” and language over the last seven decades. By doing so, they stigmatize “mixed” speech forms, raise awareness about ethnolinguistic boundaries, and invoke historical experiences.

What is noteworthy is that the explicit association of the losses experienced by minority Mongols with mixed language has almost disappeared since the 2020 reform for fear of punishment.

Another widely used purification strategy is to faithfully transcribe “mixed” everyday speech and post it on Bainu. In particular, by positioning the transcribed “mixed” speech vis-à-vis the “pure and correct” Mongolian, purists banish the “mixed” speech to the realm of non-language.

In the context of Inner Mongolia, the stigmatizing power garnered by the orthographic representation of “mixed” Mongolian also has to do with the highly-ideologized classical (vertical) Mongolian script. This traditional script has been retained in Inner Mongolia while abandoned in the country of Mongolia for the Cyrillic script in the 1940s. Clearly, the purists’ transcription of “deviant and impure speech” through the medium of a valued classical Mongolian script enhances the shaming effect.

To learn more, including how the transnational status of Mongolian language influences purist discourses, who exactly Bainu users are, what “wooden Mongolian” is, or how technology impacts minority language ideology and practices or vice versa, our article has just been published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics – it is open access so feel free to click through to the journal!

Reference

Baioud, Gegentuul, & Khuanuud, Cholmon. Linguistic purism as resistance to colonization. Journal of Sociolinguistics, n/a(n/a). doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12548 [available open access]

Related content

Baioud, Gegentuul. (2020). Fighting Covid-19 with folklore.  Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/fighting-covid-19-with-folklore/
Baioud, Gegentuul. (2020). Will education reform wipe out Mongolian language and culture?  Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/will-education-reform-wipe-out-mongolian-language-and-culture/
Piller, Ingrid. (2017). Anatomy of language shaming.  Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/anatomy-of-language-shaming/
Piller, Ingrid. (2017). Explorations in language shaming.  Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/explorations-in-language-shaming/

(Image credit: Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino)

August is celebrated in the Philippines as Buwan ng Wika (language month).

This celebration began in 1946, shortly after the then Philippine President Manuel Quezon declared Tagalog as the basis for the creation of a national language (later termed Filipino). Initially, the annual events celebrated the unification of the archipelago of 183 languages through the national language. More recently, the focus has been on recognizing and celebrating the many languages of the Philippines.

This year’s theme declares Filipino at mga Wikang Katutubo sa Dekolonisasyon ng Pag-iisip ng mga Pilipino (Filipino and other Indigenous languages for the decolonization of the Filipino people’s way of thinking). This theme is an extension of UNESCO’s declaration of 2019 as the Year of Indigenous Languages and points to the upcoming decade of action for the world’s Indigenous Peoples and Languages.

The Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) in Australia, particularly it’s SBS Filipino segment, also celebrates Buwan ng Wika. It’s a way to pay homage to Filipino migrants in Australia.

For this year’s Buwan ng Wika, I have been interviewed by Nikki Alfonso-Gregorio about naming practices in the Philippines. You can listen to the interview here.

Before colonization, only given names were common and surnames were not formalized. These given names were based on nature, and cultural and spiritual beliefs. This is still true of given names today, although other themes have been added, including those that reflect love of God, love of family, love of literature and the entertainment industry, and love for creativity.

Family names arrived in the Philippines with the Claveria decree of 1849, which required Filipinos to adopt family names. To learn more, head over to the SBS website.

***

Don’t trust the British speaking English?

The cover story of The Guardian Weekly of 18 September 2020 has a portrayal of Boris Johnson’s back, with both hands behind him, one gripping a hammer, the other with his fingers crossed, and the caption ‘Promises, promises. What will Boris Johnson break next?’ European Union negotiators in dialogue with the British government have every reason to be concerned about whether Johnson can be trusted. British behaviour is probably no surprise to the head of the EU’s task force, Michel Barnier, a top EU and French government insider. The confrontation looks like yet another drama in a millennium of clashes between France and England, now in the form of a war of words. The words in question, for the British negotiators and doubtless for many of the Eurocrats involved, are English words. What is ironical is that the British are leaving the Union, whereas the English language is staying on.

How and why this is so requires an analysis of how the EU manages the multilingualism of its activities and functions in its key institutions and in links with the 27 member states. The way languages are used, and which languages are used, are key social and political issues in an international world.

The dream of ‘global Britain’ of Theresa May and Boris Johnson is the idea that the UK should join up with the old Commonwealth countries and the USA in an Anglosphere network that will replace membership of the EU. The Anglosphere idea is rooted in the assumption that those who speak English are simply superior to others. That an Anglosphere union of ‘English-speaking peoples’ will emerge is a post-imperial pipe dream that has entranced some influential British politicians for decades. In a speech at Harvard University in 1943, when Winston Churchill was awarded an honorary doctorate, he sketched out a plan for the post-Nazi world. The primary aim was to perpetuate British and American global dominance, with a ‘birthright’ to spread English worldwide. The promotion of ‘global English’ had been discussed at conferences on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930s.

Others see English differently.

“Perfidious Albion”

The British have been known in France for centuries as ‘Perfidious Albion’. Wikipédia in its French variant explains that Albion is an ancient way of referring to England, and defines the term as ‘acts relating to diplomatic manoeuvres, duplicity, treachery, and thereby of infidelity (vis-à-vis promises or assumed alliances made with other state-nations) by monarchs or governments of the United Kingdom (or of England prior to 1707) in their quest for egoistic interests.’

Perfidious Albion? (Image credit: thejournal.ie)

This French website provides a wealth of examples of British treachery from the time of Joan of Arc onwards. It refers to Nelson, the banishing of Napoleon to a remote island, incidents of imperial competition in the Middle East, and Winston Churchill’s decision to sink much of the French fleet on 3 July 1940 in the naval port near Oran in French Algeria, Mers-El-Kébir. Churchill acted when the French were allies but had just been overrun by Hitler’s troops. His purpose was to prevent any take-over of French warships by the Germans or the Italians. In addition to many vessels being wrecked, 1,297 French servicemen died.

Wikipedia in English also provides a wealth of examples of how Perfidious Albion has been used by enemies of the UK over several centuries, and recently in connection with Brexit. By contrast an online history course for British schoolchildren has a different understanding of the term: ‘Perfidious Albion is a term used by some people to describe the British Empire. It is a term that suggests that the British were deceitful and treacherous in their dealings as an Empire.’ This website states that the originator of the term was a French author, but fails to provide any examples of the way the term has been used in France or of French resentment of British behaviour.

President Charles de Gaulle rejected an application by the British to join the European Economic Community (as it then was) on 27 November 1967, after blocking an earlier attempt in 1963. The other five member states were keen for the UK to join, but they were not consulted by de Gaulle. At a press conference he stated that the UK would need to change drastically before it could be accepted. De Gaulle did not want the pound sterling complicating European economic integration, and rightly saw the risk of the UK serving as a bridgehead for US influence. This was a reasonable consideration, even if de Gaulle was doubtless well aware that the creation of the EU was as much a project of the US as of key Europeans. Among these the most influential was Jean Monnet, a banker who collaborated with the British and the Americans between the two world wars and was an influential adviser to Franklin Roosevelt during the war. American involvement in planning for Europe is described in Pascaline Winand’s book, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe.

De Gaulle had personal experience of Perfidious Albion, since he lived in exile in London from 1940 to 1943 as head of the Free French movement. Churchill considered de Gaulle ‘an enemy of Britain’, with a ‘messianic complex” and ‘dictatorial’ tendencies. Churchill’s hostile assessment was first made public when secret documents were released in 2000. Richard Norton-Taylor reported on this in ‘How Churchill plotted against “our bitter foe” ’ in The Guardian (5 January 2000). He reveals that Churchill conspired with President Roosevelt to prevent de Gaulle from leading French recovery in the final phase of the war or after it. The article concludes with stating that between the UK and France ‘tensions remain’. This is still the case in 2020. The French and some other Europeans will breathe a sigh of relief once the UK has gone, but its departure weakens both the EU and the UK.

Britain and the European Union

British disagreements about many EU policy issues with other EU countries are partly caused by the goals of European integration being deliberately left unclear. Unification has been a gradual process since 1955. For some the goal is an increasingly merged union and ultimately a federal United States of Europe; for others the EU should remain only an economic union, but it is already vastly more than that. The EU faces major challenges quite apart from Brexit: migration, member states not observing the rule of law, the messy interface between national and supranational interests, and the euro serving some countries better than others. A book by a distinguished American observer of EU affairs, John R. Gillingham, The EU. An obituary (2017, updated in 2018) argues strongly that the EU’s many weaknesses mean that it could disintegrate.

Those who thought that a British exit would rapidly lead to other countries following suit have been proven wrong.

Gillingham, an economic historian, basically recommends that the EU should become more like the USA. This fits well into an Anglosphere agenda, which I will return to. He complains that ‘Europe is governed today neither by its peoples nor by its ideals but by a bank board, but  tendentiously argues that ‘repair of the financial system ….will mean dropping ambitious EU reform plans in favour of American banking practices and accepting increased influence for US investors and financial methods’ (ibid., 239, 207).

This is almost as crude as when the US ambassador to Denmark stated at my university in 1997: ‘The most serious problem for the European Union is that it has so many languages, this preventing real integration and development of the Union’.

It was de Gaulle’s successor as president, Georges Pompidou, who agreed to the UK joining in 1973. This was on one condition, namely that all British staff in EEC institutions should be fluent in French. In Pompidou’s view, French was the language of Europe, and English the language of the Americas. This sample linguistic nationalism provides a glimpse of the complexity of managing multilingualism in the EU, in which in principle and in law all 24 EU languages have equal rights.

There was a witticism circulating during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. Ministers from many continental European countries have often been able to function in more than one language. The British by contrast were relentlessly monolingual. In Thatcher’s government only two of her Ministers had any proficiency in a foreign language. But these two were the ones who really could not be trusted because they were suspiciously interested in foreign cultures! A key factor influencing the outcome of the Brexit referendum vote is English insularity. A key factor influencing the Brexit vote was ignorance about how the EU functions.

The British vote to leave the EU can be seen as British perfidy vis-à-vis its European partners of 47 years. The perfidy reached new heights in September 2020, after three years of complicated negotiations on the terms of the UK’s departure and future relationship with the EU. Johnson’s government decided on legislation that was in breach of a legally binding treaty with the EU, one that he himself had negotiated and described at the time as ‘fantastic’. The legislation, the Internal Market Bill was passed by the House of Commons on 29 September 2020. Perfidious Albion of the crudest kind.

On 1 October 2020 the European Commission reacted by sending the UK a ‘letter of formal notice’ for breaching its obligations under the Withdrawal Agreement. This marks the beginning of an infringement process against the UK, since ‘Article 5 of the Withdrawal Agreement states that the European Union and the United Kingdom must take all appropriate measures to ensure the fulfillment of the obligations arising from the Withdrawal Agreement, and that they must refrain from any measures which could jeopardise the attainment of those objectives. Both parties are bound by the obligation to cooperate in good faith in carrying out the tasks stemming from the Withdrawal Agreement.’

Face to face negotiations on this issue failed to deter the UK from acting illegally. The British legislation is in conflict with the Protocol on Ireland / Northern Ireland, as Ursula von der Leyen stressed in her press statement of 1 October. Failure to react to the infringement notification and to comply with the UK’s obligations can result in the issue being referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which can impose heavy fines. The UK is still legally obliged to respect the Court’s decision.

One of the goals of Brexit was to escape this kind of control. However, the UK’s behaviour is undermining its international reputation as a country that respects the rule of law.

EU language policies

Language policy management in the EU system is complex and politically sensitive. Any analysis of it needs to be calibrated with language rights and language use in law and in practice, and the market forces that have propelled English forward over the past five decades. There are very different challenges for permanent employees of the European Commission, for Members of the European Parliament and their staff, for the activities of the European Council of Ministers, which brings together government ministers of the 27 member states, and for countless experts involved in negotiations on policy documents or budget implementation. The continuous production of policy documents and of the massive corpus of Eurolaw (the ‘acquis communautaire’), which overrides national law, and is published in parallel in 24 languages, in principle with the same semantic content in each of them, requires the world’s largest translation service. These activities are radically different from the management of speech in diverse institutional contexts, supported by extensive, flexible interpretation services.

The language of EU official documents is sui generis. It is screened by legal specialists as well as linguists. High-level negotiation on all of the many policy issues on which the EU legislates is dependent on the precision of every word in written texts, and the capacity to decode these, in all of the 24 languages. The written language is essentially a technical, bureaucratic, legalistic one for very specific purposes. It has to navigate the turbulent waters of maintaining linguistic diversity, and consistency in formulating EU principles. This is of major importance for citizens and for the representatives of all countries, since EU law takes precedence over national law. Unfortunately, the general public, and probably many British Members of Parliament, know little about the interface between national law and EU law, and the shared responsibility of all member states for the formulation and implementation of decisions and policies.

Blaming ‘Brussels’ for EU decisions and decrees is simply false, when each and every country has had a shared responsibility for these policies.

Use of one language rather than another is not merely a pragmatic choice. Seeing a language as purely instrumental, or as ideologically neutral matter, is false.  Choice of language reflects political choices and realities. A language is one particular way of understanding and shaping reality, drawing on a worldview that emerged in specific historical and cultural contexts. All languages change over time, as the variety of English worldwide demonstrates. All 24 EU languages are in both national and international use because of the way the EU operates.

When Finland joined the EU, it needed to translate the over 70,000 pages of Eurolaw into Finnish. They attempted to translate from the English version but could not understand it without consulting the French original.

One of the consequences of British EU membership has been a major change in the language policies of EU institutions. English has gradually since 1973 become the dominant in-house language of the European Commission, largely displacing French. In communications with the wider world, it is mostly English that is used. English has become the default language, and massively important in the conduct of EU affairs, not least when policies are initially conceptualised in English, and drafted in English. Proficiency in English therefore, whether used by a native speaker or by a well-qualified non-native speaker, delivers a strategic advantage to those who think in English and are able to use it optimally in speech or writing. Conversely, for those less proficient, English puts them at a disadvantage. English may not be fully understood, especially when native speakers do not adjust their discourse sensitively for an audience with diverse linguistic backgrounds. Speech in limited English, sometimes disparagingly described as ‘broken English’, can lead to misunderstandings or can complicate interaction. Whether any ‘Euro English’ has evolved, as has been claimed, is disputed, and seems improbable, in part because of the diversity of its users and of its contexts of use.

The triumph of English

Many factors have contributed to the expansion of English in Europe and worldwide. English is the dominant language of the USA, Hollywood, NATO, the UN, international finance, several countries, and many international organisations. Economic integration has strengthened English in continental Europe. It has also contributed to major investment in the UK by corporations from Japan, the USA, and continental Europe because the UK was part of the European common market with freedom of movement of goods, people, and capital. This investment is at risk once Brexit is completed if there is no agreement that suits both the EU and the UK. Industrial products, for instance vehicle or airplane parts, can typically cross borders many times before a finished product exists. Bailey’s Irish cream reportedly crosses the UK/Irish border six times during its production process. Even the pre-eminence of the City of London in finance has suffered because of Brexit.

“Uncle Sam Teaches the World”, Puck Magazine, 1899 (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Other factors influencing the expansion of English in continental Europe are geographical proximity, giving the learning of English pride of place in schools, and extensive use of it in higher education and research. Applications for research grants from the EU are invariably submitted in English (even if the regulations state that any of the 24 languages can be used!). Applications are also assessed by a variety of Europeans using English. This puts applicants and assessors whose primary research language is a Romance, Slav, or Finno-Ugric language, or Greek at a disadvantage. Since there is immense competition for such funds, the hegemony of English is consolidated in this way, and will not change once Brexit is finalised.

The expansion of English was not left to chance. US ‘philanthropic’ foundations invested significantly in academia in Europe from the 1920s onwards. The British and Americans have promoted English worldwide since the 1950s, as advocated by Churchill (and by political leaders in the UK and US over 200 years). Linguistic imperialism of this kind is well documented. When the iron curtain was removed, it was an explicit policy of successive British governments to expand the learning of English in former communist countries so as to make English the link language across the continent, and to marginalise Russian and German. French has been losing out to English for centuries, after losing wars with the British in North America, India, and Europe. Former French colonies in north and western Africa are also moving into using English. English is the dominant language of the African Union. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is modelled on the EU, has English as its sole official language.

Other key factors influencing the expansion of English can be related to what some term its soft power, the reputation of the BBC, prestigious universities, literature and culture from Shakespeare to the Beatles and Harry Potter, the Westminster parliamentary system, etc. Soft power in fact converts into major economic benefits, through fee-paying foreign students, cultural industries, and English language teaching. Almost the entire budget of the British Council, the para-statal body that promotes British interests and English in over 100 countries, is funded by its income from teaching English, testing proficiency, and educational consultancies. English is a billion dollar commodity.

That all of this will continue unchanged once Brexit has been completed is extremely unlikely. Detachment from continental Europe will affect commercial, political, educational, and cultural affairs in the UK negatively. A hard or no Brexit is a catastrophe for higher education as well as business in the UK. Much will depend on what sort of policies the British government will follow worldwide.

The Anglosphere – a policy or a chimera?

The idea of the “Anglosphere” is closely aligned with the former British Empire (1886 map)

The idea of an Anglosphere was first promoted in The Anglosphere challenge. Why the English-speaking nations will lead the way in the twenty-first century, a book written by a USA industrialist, James C. Bennett, in 2004. He defines the Anglosphere as meaning ‘the sharing of fundamental customs and values at the core of English-speaking cultures: individualism; rule of law; honoring of covenants; in general the high-trust characteristics described by Francis Fukujama in Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity; and the emphasis on freedom as a political and cultural value’.

With Boris Johnson in charge in the UK, trust is elusive. The idea that the rule of law and trusting others are uniquely Anglo-American traits is an insult to all other countries. The rule of law in British India served British rather than Indian interests, as described in Inglorious empire. What the British did to India, a book written by a senior UN diplomat, Shashi Tharoor.

Parliamentary systems in both the USA and the UK are less democratic than in countries with proportionate representation. They are also invidiously influenced by financial interests, by social media schemes, and by many abstaining from voting. In the EU the rule of law is a well-established key value, despite the varied historical roots and trajectories of member states. The rule of law is now monitored and reported on annually in each country.

The essential unifying bond between countries in the Anglosphere vision is the language. It is English which is the foundational glue that is seen as binding the people together, and expresses what Bennett sees as the particular virtues of ‘English-speaking countries’. English has been privileged in each of them. Major efforts were made to eliminate all other languages in these countries, using punitive legislative and educational measures, but with only partial success. The concept also occludes the reality of each country being multilingual, and English changing over time to meet local needs in each.

The myth of American exceptionalism, that the USA is a uniquely virtuous country, continues when Bennett writes ‘Increasingly during the past few centuries, the English-speaking world has been the pathfinder for all of humanity’ through the ‘first modern nation-state, the first liberal democratic state’. These are very dubious claims. Links between the UK and the USA have for centuries been close, albeit contentious, but were reinvigorated when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan orchestrated the launch of neoliberalism.

Bennett argues that the North American Free Trade Association, NAFTA, and the European Union are ‘of limited value at best, and at worst do harm when they attempt to homogenize nations with substantially different characteristics.’ His contention is that the British people have more in common with Americans than with continental Europeans, and that the media and internet are intensifying this convergence.

Detaching Britain from Europe

The idea of ‘detaching’ the UK from the EU has been pursued in several think tanks in the USA. Conferences on the Anglosphere were organised by the Hudson Institute in 1999 and 2000, with significant participation by leading British cultural conservatives. The third Anglosphere century. The English-speaking world in an era of transition is a tract written by Bennett and published by the Heritage Institute in 2007. It includes an Anglosphere agenda for the economic, political, and military integration of the UK and other ‘English-speaking countries’, possibly India and Singapore too, under USA leadership.

He advocates the merging of the United Kingdom with NAFTA and its detachment from Europe so that the British and US defence industries can integrate, and as in finance, function as a ‘seamless market’. This would strengthen the massive impact of the military expenditure of the US, and of the ‘Five eyes’ intelligence alliance that connects Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK to the US. Bennett propounds that ‘The past thirty years of British history have encompassed a period of political and cultural schizophrenia that has created ongoing unresolved tensions in its national life and identity’, the solution to which is an Anglosphere Network Commonwealth.

(Image credit: ArcGIS Storymap)

One thrust is to entrench English monolingualism.

Bennett recommends that ‘Multiculturalism and bilingualism should be abandoned, and assimilation and learning of English should become national policies’. This proposal dovetails with English-only policies that a number of states in the USA have introduced, whereas this policy has had little support at the national level. Insisting on monolingualism in the UK and Australia is a political no-brainer, even if many people in each country remain personally monolingual. Bennett seems to have forgotten the strength of French in Canada. The indigenous peoples in all these countries and their languages are ignored.

The deep historical roots in the UK of the notion of an Anglosphere are explored in depth in Shadows of empire. The Anglosphere in British politics, by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, published in 2018. A deep commitment to Anglo-American unity and to Anglosphere ideas can be traced across British cultural and political history in statements by Cecil Rhodes, Winston Churchill, Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher.

The book also analyses the way Anglosphere ideas are currently impacting on the British political scene. Several influential British politicians in the Conservative party are attracted by an Anglosphere vision. The main champion of Anglosphere ideas in the build-up to a referendum vote on Brexit of 23 June 216 was Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), but the Leave campaign made sure that Farage was left in the background. A lengthy book entitled All-out war. The full story of Brexit, written by Tim Shipman in 2017, never refers to the Anglosphere. The term has evidently not become established in political discourse or journalism.

There is little evidence of  the Anglosphere ideas appealing to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, and few of the other, less ‘white’ Commonwealth countries are contenders. The Anglosphere, and strengthening economic links with the UK has never been a priority in these countries, quite the opposite.

Championing Brexit

How the UK might benefit by leaving the EU was totally absent from the Brexit Leave campaign, other than fraudulent promises of financial relief and the claim that exiting would be a simple matter. The slogan ‘take back control’ is a meaningless notion in an interconnected world, as the negotiations on exiting have shown. Benefits of any kind have still not been clarified. The vision of a ‘global Britain’ is vacuous and ahistorical, but smacks of the idea of making the UK ‘great’ again.

The trio of British government Ministers appointed by Theresa May to negotiate Brexit with the EU all appear to have had neoimperial dreams: Liam Fox, the Minister for Foreign Trade, had a portrait of Cecil Rhodes in his office. David Davis had attended Anglosphere think tank events in the USA. Boris Johnson, when Foreign Secretary, had a bust of Winston Churchill in his. During a visit to Australia, he talked warmly of the Anglosphere. Later, as Prime Minister, Johnson nominated an unsuccessful former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, as an adviser on trade relations, a hugely controversial appointment.

Trust? (Image credit:
Jannes Van den wouwer, Unsplash)

Creating closer trade links with the USA has figured prominently in the policies of the governments of both Theresa May and Boris Johnson. They are extremely controversial because what is at stake is less stringent regulation of food products (chlorinated chicken, hormones in beef, etc.) and the prospect of the National Health Service being sold off to US corporate interests, despite health care being vastly more expensive in the US, and failing to serve a large section of the population. From what is known about ongoing negotiations, it appears that the UK government is covertly following an Anglosphere agenda. There is virtually no parliamentary control, and the general public have not being given any insight into what is in the transatlantic pipeline. The British NGO Global Justice Now has been following these negotiations carefully and campaigning against what it sees as ‘the corporate take-over of global health’.

The British Academy organized a conference on the Anglosphere on June 15-16, 2017. It brought together academics from several countries, but mainly from the UK, British Foreign Office staff, and James Bennett. Martin Kettle of The Guardian wrote about it under the title ‘Here is Britain’s new place in the world – on the sidelines’.

The myth of the Anglosphere alternative needs nailing. These ideas have old roots. They have shaped a lot of British thinking in different ways, not just on the right of politics, for at least 150 years. In their 2017 incarnation, however, they run into two immovable facts. First, UK trade with the Anglosphere nations has massively declined from its pre-1914 peak; realistically, the US is now the UK’s only significantly large Anglosphere trading partner. Second, the US has long treated bilateral trade deals as zero-sum games, played on US terms, even before the election of an ultra-nationalist president, never mind now.

English in the EU now and in the future

At no point since the accession to the EU of the UK, along with Ireland and Denmark, in 1973 has there been any official recognition of English having a privileged or superior status in the EU. The progressive expansion of its use over nearly half a century has resulted in a downgrading of the use of French, which was primus inter pares earlier, and German, as well as the marginalisation of all other languages.

There has been speculation about whether English will remain as the dominant language in EU institutions after Brexit. Both President Macron and the former President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, are on record as wanting French to regain its former dominant role. Some increase in the use of French is possible. At present any unclear English and French texts are submitted to a language revision before they are translated into other EU languages. Nearly all new policy statements as well as texts that ultimately will have the force of law are drafted initially in English. It therefore seems safe to predict that any downgrading of English within the EU system is very unlikely to occur. Not only because the Irish and Maltese (both formerly run by the British) will continue to function almost exclusively in English, as will many from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and individuals from other countries. The main reason is that EU employees from all parts of Europe have become accustomed to functioning in English. The hegemony of English has been internalised and accepted.

When addressing the media, senior EU staff increasingly make statements in English, even if in principle they could speak any of the other 23 official languages. This practice strengthens the idea of it being ‘natural’ to use English, even if this practice is in conflict with the principle of the EU as a multilingual organisation, and is a consequence of multiple hegemonic forces behind English.

When Ursula von der Leyen, as the incoming President of the Commission in 2019 presented her priorities to the European Parliament, her mission statement was delivered mainly in English, and made brief, token use of French and German. Her multilingual competence is impressive. Her prepared speeches in English are delivered lucidly and persuasively, whereas some of her colleagues, the other Commissioners, are incapacitated and unconvincing when they opt to use English. The same applies when Ministers from continental Europe feel an obligation to speak English even when their mother tongues are languages that are widely used internationally, such as French, Spanish and German.

Charles Michel, the European Council President, reads prepared statements fluently in English but with a strong French accent. Whether he can use English spontaneously and effectively in a negotiating context one is unable to judge, but it is more than likely that he sounds more competent in French.

After a meeting of the European Council on 1 and 2 October 2020, the results were presented in an 8-minute speech delivered by Ursula von Leyen, in English. The written version was available in English, French, and German. One would have expected the presentation of results to be presented by Charles Michel, the European Council president, but it was von Leyen, the Commission president who spoke. One wonders whether this was a tactical decision, simply because she sounds more professional in English. Michel stood silently beside her. In principle these two presidents, plus the president of the European Parliament, have the same status but distinct portfolios.

On 12 September 2020, when reporting on a Brexit meeting in London, the German Minister of Finance Olaf Scholz chose to use English. He was reporting on highly sensitive issues, including the effect of the British intention to renege on the treaty signed a year earlier with the EU. Scholz sounded hesitant and unconvincing in English, and would doubtless have been vastly more effective and informative in German.

In any case it is unreasonable and unfair to expect people from 27 continental European countries to be as effective in English as in their national languages. The problem for von Leyen, Michel, and Scholz is, as the German-Danish linguist Hartmut Haberland points out, that in such contexts there is in effect no choice. ‘You are damned if you speak English and you are damned if you don’t.

This is the true triumph of English language imperialism: leaving everybody with no alternative.’

Romano Prodi, when he was President of the European Commission, was interviewed by an American journalist on many aspects of European integration, and was asked about EU language policy. The journalist is reported in Newsweek (31 May 2004) as saying: ‘A unified Europe in which English, as it turns out, is the universal language?’ Prodi replied: ‘It will be broken English, but it will be English.’

Ursula von der Leyen, the current president of the European Commission, is highly proficient in English

Broken English is increasingly what we hear when continental Europeans choose to address the international media and public in English. Broken English is a derogatory term for use of the language that does not conform to correct native speaker use. It is not a term that is used in scholarly analysis of the language, but it has a long pedigree. It was used by Shakespeare in a scene in the play Henry V, when the English king is wooing a French princess who is a complete beginner in English. There is a comic scene in Act III in which a lot of French is spoken, with Katherine’s lady in attendance teaching her a few basic words. In Act V the triumphal King Henry tells the princess: ‘If you will love me soundly with your French heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue’. What follows is playful interaction on this theme, with Katherine accusing Henry of being ‘full of deceits’. Perfidious Albion?

Broken agreements in not so broken English

Boris Johnson’s government decided in September 2020 to renege on a major agreement with the EU, one enshrined in an international treaty. The decision is in defiance of the UN Convention on International Treaties, as many legal specialists have pointed out. Philippe Sands QC, a professor of international law at University College London: ‘Every international lawyer is familiar with the Vienna convention on the law of treaties, and its article 27, which reflects a general principle: “A party may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for its failure to perform a treaty” ’(cited in The Guardian 12 September 2020). Despite the draft legislation being severely criticized by senior judges and lawyers, it was approved in the House of Commons on 29 September 2020.

It thus appears possible that Johnson’s team of negotiators has been duplicitous throughout negotiations on a Brexit agreement with the EU. Have they been negotiating in good faith? Perfidious Albion once more? Their word is not their bond?

Michel Barnier, the ‘Head of Task Force for Negotiations with the United Kingdom’, has made a succession of official statements on the progress of the Brexit negotiations, and increasingly on the lack of progress. It is difficult to imagine anyone more competent than Michel Barnier to represent the EU. He is the epitome of French experience and competence, was a Commissioner in the EU for two five-year periods, with responsibility for trade and regional policies, and has held several ministerial posts in French governments, including one as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The EU’s position has been transparently clear throughout. The multilingual website on the negotiations is fully informative, whereas nothing comparable exists in the UK. The British have repeatedly been asked to specify what their position is on key issues, among them fishing rights, a level playing field for trade, and Irish border arrangements. This has been frustrating for the EU, as its position has always been that it is in the interests of both the UK and the EU’s 27 member states that the negotiations should reach an agreement.

Since Germany has the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2020, its role is of great importance. Germany’s presidency does not entail direct responsibility for Brexit negotiations, but Germany’s excellent multilingual website has comprehensive coverage of all significant issues, including Brexit.

The EU is drawing its own conclusions. An anonymous EU representative was cited in The Guardian Weekly, on 18 September 2020: ‘People say that state aid and fisheries are the biggest stumbling blocks to a deal. It isn’t. It is trust’.

It seems highly likely that the power behind Johnson’s throne is Dominic Cummings, the ‘Chief Adviser’ to the Prime Minister. He is widely seen as a modern day Svengali or Rasputin. This understanding tallies with a detailed study of the Brexit Leave campaign, which Cummings was the brain behind. The most important Leave slogan was the claim that the UK was sending 350£ million a week to Brussels. This was untrue. It was plastered on campaign buses and widely cited. This did not disturb Cummings, since what was important was ‘message discipline and consistency’. As reported in the Financial Times, Cummings had ‘a cynical understanding that it did not matter if what the campaign said was factually correct’. This is the man that many experienced political commentators see as deciding what Boris Johnson does.

Johnson’s government’s illegality has been denounced by 5 former British Prime Ministers. Many Conservative Members of Parliament, for whom the rule of law is a fundamental principle, are in despair. On the other hand, according to The Economist, and cited in Pankaj Mishra’s Bland fanatics. Liberals, race and empire, conservative politicians are people who ‘coast through life on “bluff rather than expertise”. They are mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers’ who engage in ‘egotistical and destructive behaviour’.

Mishra sees quitting the EU as similar to and as catastrophic as the British division of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 1921, and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, in both cases with appalling loss of life as a result.

The politics of English

In complex negotiations between the EU and the UK over the terms of a Brexit divorce agreement, every word counts. This presupposes that all are using the language or languages of negotiation in an optimal, honest way. The British use English, quite possibly a sophisticated form of native speaker communication which may be difficult for others to understand fully or to see through. Since very few British politicians have attained a high level of proficiency in a foreign language, it is highly likely that they do not adjust their language so that it is easier for foreigners to understand. EU representatives probably mainly speak English, with varying levels of both precision in speaking and in understanding the English of their interlocutors.

Michel Barnier probably mostly uses French, but has spoken English in some statements to the press, and when delivering a prepared speech in Ireland. The general public can only guess at how far language issues are complicating the negotiations, but the issue would need clarification. There is research evidence from universities where students from a variety of language backgrounds are studying in programmes in which English is the language of learning. They experience that people using English with a foreign accent are often clearer and easier to understand than native speakers of English. The same is probably true of politicians and eurocrats with a high level of proficiency in English.

The increase of the use of English in EU affairs has made it easier for the British to remain monolingual, whereas the EU has for many years been committed to making all its citizens able to function multilingually. My book on European language policy, published in 2003, English-only Europe? Challenging language policy, is a lengthy plea for member states to take language policy more seriously, so as to strengthen all European languages and to avoid an excessive focus on English.

The concluding sentence is: ‘If inaction on language policy in Europe continues, at the supranational and national levels, we may be heading for an American English-only Europe. Is that really what the citizens and leaders of Europe want?’

Brexit will significantly diminish British influence on how Europe evolves. This is in the interest of the USA, as think tanks in the USA and the key architect of Anglosphere, James Bennett, have indicated and doubtless worked for.

The book was recently updated and translated into French, entitled La domination de l’anglais: un défi pour l’Europe (The domination of English: a challenge for Europe). Part of this challenge is that many EU policies have strengthened English and simultaneously weakened other languages, in processes that can be seen as constituting linguistic imperialism.

Business leaders in the UK have repeatedly pleaded with Boris Johnson to ensure that businesses are not harmed by both a lack of clarity on an agreement with the EU and on the need to ensure an agreement. They have for years had the feeling that their needs were being neglected. The BBC reported on 26 June 2018, when Johnson was Foreign Secretary: ‘Asked about corporate concerns over a so-called hard Brexit, at an event for EU diplomats in London last week, Mr Johnson is reported to have replied: “Fuck business”. When challenged over what he was overheard saying, he did not deny it. Asked about this in the Commons, he said he may have ‘expressed scepticism about some of the views of those who profess to speak up for business’.

Johnson’s outstandingly perfidious remark ought to come back to haunt him, since the uncertainty for business remains, and has already had devastating consequences. The traffic jams of thousands of lorries clogging roads in Kent symbolize the utter incompetence of the British government. This is harming businesses, the British economy, lorry drivers of all nationalities, and the residents of Kent.

The government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis has been equally incompetent. In Posh boys. How English public schools ruin Britain Robert Verkaik shows how attendance at elite schools and Oxford University cuts the elite off from the rest of British society; it ‘divides society into winners and losers’. It produces politicians who are out of touch with ordinary people and unable to provide informed leadership. These are the people who are responsible for Brexit.

Why should anyone trust them?

Related content

• Cramer, R. 2018. From oil spill to Brexit.
• Piller, I. 2016. Have we just seen the beginning of the end of English?

Akhlaq Ahmad at work on the mural in Shahdara for the ‘Delhi, I Love You’ project. (Image Credit: Delhi, I Love You)

On July 8, 2020, The Wire published an anonymous article by a young Indian Muslim. In it, the writer shares his painful experience of how, in the anti-Muslim Hindutva climate created by the right-wing BJP government, his identity has been reduced to his Muslim name. Despite the fact that he observes no Islamic practices and champions liberal views, his Hindu colleagues look at him with suspicion. On social media, he is often called a jihadi, an ISIS-sympathizer, and mulla, a slur, for speaking up for the rights of minorities, especially Muslims.

Fearing for his life, he has stopped saying in public salamwaleikum, the Muslim greeting in Urdu. He also instructed his kids not to call him abba, an Urdu word for ‘dad’. He even started tweaking his name, so that it does not sound Muslim.

While violence, including mob-lynching of Muslims and the anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi in February 2020, has been discussed, the symbolic violence against the Urdu language—a proxy for and target of hate and discrimination against Muslims—hasn’t. I use the term Urdu in a broader sense to encompass the language as well as names.

Consider Urdu personal names and cases of hatred and discrimination that revolve around the identities they reveal. It is worth noting that the  BJP government in the last few years has renamed many places containing Urdu/Muslim names with names that evoke Hindu history and culture.

Personal names are not simply a system of identification by which people differentiate one person from another; they are also carriers of cultural information, including the social identities of the bearers of the names. A study conducted in the USA found that white-sounding names such as Emily and Greg were more likely to get callbacks from employers than Black-sounding names Lakisha and Jamal. While some names in the US clearly indicate racial identity, others such as John and Michelle are non-discernable. By contrast, in India, most Muslim names are discernable as they draw largely upon Persian and Arabic sources as against Hindu names which are derived, among other sources, from Hindu traditions. Since Urdu names are signposts of the Muslim identity, they easily become instruments of hate and discrimination against Muslims.

In May 2015, a Muslim young man, Zeeshan, holding an MBA degree was denied a job by Hare Krishna Exports, a diamond company based in Mumbai, because of his religion. Less than fifteen minutes after he submitted his application online, Zeeshan received a shocking reply from the company: “We regret to inform you that we hire only non-Muslim candidates”. Clearly, the decision to reject his application was based on the candidate’s Urdu/Muslim name.

Other cases of discrimination based on Muslim names have surfaced recently in companies that deliver goods to people on their doors. On 24 April, 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Barkat Patel, a Muslim employee of Grofers, an online grocery store, went to deliver grocery to Ms. Chaturvedi at Jaya Park in Mumbai. But her father stopped her from taking the delivery. According to the report filed at the police station,  the father wanted to know the  name of the delivery guy first. Once he found out from the name that Barkat was Muslim, he refused to take it. Barkat recorded the whole exchange on his mobile phone and submitted it to the police.

Similar cases of discrimination were reported from Zomato and Swiggy, popular food delivery companies. On October 25, 2019, Swiggy lodged a complaint with a police station in Hyderabad stating that a customer refused to receive their food order because the delivery man was Muslim. Another case of discrimination was reported on August 1, 2019 in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. In this case, a customer Amit Shukla cancelled his Zomato delivery when he found out from the name Faiyaz that his delivery man was Muslim. What makes it even more reprehensible is that Shukla argued that this was part of his freedom of expression and religion guaranteed by the constitution.

However, names don’t always correspond with social-religious identities. Some Hindu names of Persian or Arabic origin bear similarities with Urdu/Muslim name. In absence of other visual cues e.g. outfit or facial looks, such names could miscommunicate the identities of the bearers of the names. This is exactly what happened when a 23-old young Hindu man named Sahil was lynched by some Hindus in Maujpur in Delhi. Although the police denies the claim, Sahil’s parents, Sunil and Suneeta, both believe that their son was killed because he was mistaken for a Muslim who had entered a Hindu neighborhood. Suneeta expressed her regret at naming him Sahil, “I wouldn’t have named him Sahil had I known that it would turn out to be the cause of his death”. The incident that led to Sahil’s killing is worth mentioning. Sahil was at home when he found out that some of his friends had a brawl in Gali Number 5 in Maujpur, Delhi. When he rushed to the spot to resolve the issue the residents of the neighborhood asked his name. On knowing that his name was Sahil, the crowd turned to him and thrashed him severely. He died on his way to the hospital.

In another case, a Muslim man’s nickname, which did not sound Muslim, actually saved him. On May 19, 2016, as part of beautification of Delhi, Akhlaq Ahmad, an Indian artist who holds a degree in fine arts, and Swen Simon, a French artist, were writing an Urdu couplet on a wall in Shahdara, Delhi. Some members of the right-wing RSS gathered there and asked them to stop writing the couplet in Urdu and threatened them with dire consequences if they didn’t. They said, “ …they could bear anything, but not the Urdu script” They snatched the artists’ paintbrushes and smudged the Urdu writing on the wall. In an interview, the Muslim artist, said, “…I said my name is Shabbu [his nick name] and they assumed I was Shambhu, a Hindu. So, they turned their ire towards my French colleague, Swen Simon, asking him to pay me my wages and go back to Lahore”.

This exception only proves the rule. The cases of Sahil and Akhlaq/Sabbu are both of some kind of miscommunication based on Muslim names. The action that led to the loss of Sahil’s life and saved Akhlaq’s is based on the ideology of hate and discrimination against Muslims as manifested from their names.

The fear of uttering Urdu names, greetings, or words in public is increasing among Muslims in north India. In response to the anonymous article with which I opened this piece, Rana Safvi, a Muslim writer tweeted that she also avoids saying salaam, Muslim greeting, in public.

Although Akhlaq had a sigh of relief because his non-Muslim-sounding name saved him, the stories of Zeeshan, Barkat, Sahil, and Faiyaz, clearly show how ideologies of hate and discrimination can be routed through personal names, labels over which we as bearers of the names have little control.

Discrimination based on names are just be a tip of the iceberg of a larger systemic process of exclusion and marginalization of Muslims in India. A democracy worthy of its name cannot allow names to be the ground of discrimination against its own citizens in whose very name it rules.

Related content

• Stereotyped names as a barrier to workplace entry
• What’s in a name?
• Behind a name
• Names on the move: Ghanaian names in the diaspora

Manus Hospital often treats refugees (Image credit: ABC News, Natalie Whiting)

A growing body of literature across multiple disciplines attests to the importance of credibility in the bureaucratic processes for assessing refugee claims. This includes in my own research, exploring the experiences asylum seekers have in these processes, the published reasons of decision-makers and the guidelines aimed at managing their assessments.

However, this focus on whether we should believe people who seek asylum is also popular in media reporting and political discourse. For instance, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton recently commented that some refugees on Nauru who had fallen pregnant as a result of rape were “trying it on” by seeking medical transfer to Australia via new “medevac” legislation.

This comment is not exceptional but rather part of an ongoing commentary on similar cases. The 2015 “debate” involving “Abyan” (a pseudonym), a Somali refugee living in Nauru, was an earlier case that attracted heavy media coverage, and formed the basis of a case study included in my doctoral research and recently published in the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics and Language in Society.

Abyan was living in the small island nation of Nauru as part of the Australian government’s policy to exclude boat arrivals from being able to seek asylum in Australia. As part of this regime, she had been detained in a detention centre, had her refugee status claim assessed and was then relocated to open accommodation on the island. She approached medical services when she became unwell and when they discovered she was pregnant, she reported that she had been raped. After some delay, Australian authorities arranged for her to be transferred to Australia to access adequate medical assistance and potentially have a termination. After less than a week in Australia, the authorities returned her to Nauru via chartered jet, without her having had the termination, presumably to avoid legal action to prevent her removal.

The ministerial statement

These events and their repercussions were highly reported in the media. My analysis of a corpus of Australian journal articles from this period found that most reporting centred on what was presented as a “debate”, with the then Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, and Abyan as the two main participants. Their competing versions of the events often drew on two key documents: a media release from the Minister and a handwritten note from Abyan that was circulated by Australian advocates. Whose version of events readers should believe seemed closely tied to determining who could be considered the most credible speaker.

However, the way this reporting presented these and other key actors was problematic. By presenting Abyan primarily as a speaker and decision-maker the reporting gave the impression that she was somehow an equal individual debate participant, pitted against the Immigration Minister. This was aptly demonstrated by reporting reframing Abyan’s statement as her claiming that the Immigration Minister had lied, for instance by suggesting she said that his “description of events – backed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull – were false”.

I was troubled by the impression that was created by this “debate” as it appeared to ignore serious structural inequality and individual differences between the two supposed key participants. Could Abyan really have had an equal opportunity to present her side of events and be believed? This led me to more closely examine how communicative resources impact the way different social actors are able to communicate and present credible identities to their audience. In this analysis, I argued that far from being equal participants, the Immigration Minister and Abyan had unequal communicative resources on four different levels.

Abyan’s statement

First, they had different linguistic resources at their disposal to present an argument or version of reality that would be convincing and believable to their audience. I noted, for example, how the Minister’s press release used agent-free passive structures that backgrounded government or individual responsibility for Abyan’s movements to and from Nauru, thus distancing her traumatic experiences from government policy. These structures were largely replicated across the media reporting, suggesting their influence on the broader public discourse. In comparison, Abyan’s handwritten note entailed a series of reasonably basic structures sharing her experiences. English is not Abyan’s first language, and reporting suggests that her ability in English may be even more limited than the language in the note, meaning it may have been composed by somebody assisting her. This obviously limits the linguistic choices she had to engage in the “debate”.

Inextricably intertwined with their linguistic resources are the two actors’ identity resources: the way their language is heard and evaluated depends on how their audience perceives their speech and which version of events is accepted as truth. While the Immigration Minister and/or his policies may not be well liked by all Australians, he has a verifiable identity in the form of his name and history, and titles that mark him as an institutional insider: he is a Member of Parliament and Hon. (honourable). Abyan, on the other hand, is relatively anonymous: the public knows very little about her other than her age, gender and nationality. The elements of her experiences that are known do not necessarily lend support to her credibility: as both a refugee and as a woman who has experienced sexual violence, she falls into identity categories that are known to systematically attract discussion about their credibility.

The two also had obvious different material resources. The Minister’s communication was shared digitally, on an official institutional website with a stable URL, with government header, conventional font and formatting. This contrasts with Abyan’s handwritten note that appears on a page torn from a journal, dated 25^th December, and photographed sitting on a wooden table top. While the document resembles the genre of an asylum application statement, setting out her experience, this ironically may index a contested version of events, given that such applications attract credibility assessment, and its deviation from the expected norms of typed and printed forms may further harm its reception.

Finally and crucially, the difference in resources between the two speakers in most obvious when we consider the respective platform resources they have from which they can communicate. The Immigration Minister has ample opportunities to directly communicate with the broader community and media, through a number of means. A count of the larger corpus collected for this project identified at least eighteen occasions over a one-month period in which the Immigration Minister and his senior colleagues, including the Prime Minister, publicly commented on the case, including in radio and television interviews, official press statements and in Parliament.

Abyan’s platform is very different. The public have access to one handwritten note, provided to the media by Australian lawyers. For Abyan and other refugees and asylum seekers in Nauru and Manus Island (PNG) due to Australian policy, this very policy greatly limits the access they have to the Australian media and vice versa. The Government of Nauru has implemented changes to its visa regime to almost universally restrict Australian media from travelling to Nauru in recent years. The Australian Government has also legislated to limit those professionals who do have the opportunity to interact with refugees from being able to speak out publicly about their treatment, with penalties of up to two years’ imprisonment for breaches.

Behrouz Boochani received the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for his book about his experiences in Australian offshore refugee detention (Image Credit: ABC News)

This final point perhaps most vividly demonstrates the way in which those with power to control the dominant discourse seek to preserve this control. In this case, explicit legal and policy measures are implemented to control how journalists can access information about refugees and the refugees’ own ability to speak out via the media. This restricts challenges to the government’s preferred version of events – not only in the specific case of Abyan, but also in how this and other experiences contribute to the broader ongoing discourse on refugees and refugee-related policy.

However, discourse and its creation are never static. Those who have access to social media either directly or with the assistance of language brokers present a challenge to these types of efforts to control the dominant discourse. For example, an increasing number of refugees and asylum seekers self-advocate through platforms like Twitter, such as in the recent case of Saudi refugee, Rahaf Mohammed, who successfully attracted international attention and support when she was stranded in Thailand on her way to seek asylum in Australia. For some, having access to technology has also facilitated publishing in traditional media. This is the case for Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian refugee in Papua New Guinea, who frequently comments in the media regarding refugee rights, and wrote and published a book sharing his experiences, via messages written by smartphone, and has now been awarded one of Australia’s most prestigious literary prizes.

Still, even as potential platforms change, looking closely at the full range of communicative resources of individual actors helps uncover inequalities: not everyone has access to social media, or has the specific linguistic and communicative skills needed to advocate within a particular area, to a particular audience. The rise of social-media-based self-advocacy therefore presents an opportunity for a closer examination of the ways in which communicative resources are harnessed through non-traditional platforms, whose resources are most valuable in these areas and the implications this has for challenging dominant discourses.

References

Smith-Khan, L. (2018). Contesting credibility in Australian refugee visa decision making and public discourse. (Doctor of Philosophy), Macquarie University.
Smith-Khan, L. (2016). Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews. Language on the Move
Smith-Khan, L. (2019a). Communicative resources and credibility in public discourse on refugees. Language in Society, 48(3), 403-427.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019b). Debating credibility: Refugees and rape in the media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 42(1), 4-36.

Linguistic diversity is a demographic reality, as Dr Alexandra Grey pointed out in her presentation

This week, Professor Lisa Lim and her colleagues from Sydney University’ School of Languages and Cultures brought together researchers from Sydney and Hong Kong to examine heritage languages in urban multilingual diaspora. The many diverse perspectives and research projects presented at the symposium served to reinforce the fact that, in Australia as elsewhere, linguistic diversity is a demographic reality.

At the same time, the presenters stressed that multilingualism and language learning are not widely valued. Language learning and maintenance are, by and large, considered private concerns that are the responsibility of families. By contrast, to society at large, they seem of limited benefit. At best, heritage languages are the object of benign neglect and haphazard policy efforts; at worst, they are actively suppressed.

How can we change that situation? Is the linguist’s conviction that linguistic diversity is inherently a good thing enough to make a claim on scarce societal resources to be devoted to language teaching and multilingual service provision?

The answer is patently no.

For us as linguists, this means that greater effort is needed to provide convincing answers as to why language teaching matters and why services should be provided in languages other than English (or the dominant language, to put it more generally). We can only do so if we highlight the social consequences of linguistic diversity. How do specific language regimes constrain or enable access to social goods such as education, employment, healthcare, or welfare?

Only where we can show that language loss is connected to social injustice or that language learning contributes to the social good, can we make legitimate claims on the body politic and lobby for changes in language policy.

Language is deeply intertwined with who we are, and the symposium’s focus on ancestry necessarily trained the eye on the family. Focusing on heritage means that we are likely to ask questions about our past and where we come from. However, as families and individuals we have responsibilities both to the past and the future.

Some Hong Kong parents prefer to speak English to their children, as Professor Virginia Yip has found

Parents strive to maintain ancestral languages so that children can communicate with grandparents and remain connected with their country of origin. At the same time, they are guided by future-oriented considerations, such as which languages can be expected to be most beneficial to children’s future careers. In Hong Kong, for instance, calculations of future benefit motivate parents to switch to English as family language.

The dichotomy between English and Chinese is artificial, of course, and bilingualism provides a ready means to honor families’ responsibilities both to the past and the future.

Bilingualism can be an attractive option for some families. At the same time, we also need to ask whether – in our desire to defend bilingualism against the monolingual mindset – we are not celebrating bilingual parenting a bit too enthusiastically, creating new barriers along the way. Bilingual parenting in the absence of strong institutional support, particularly in schools, is an uphill battle and one that requires significant resources to succeed.

There is an increasing body of evidence that parents want bilingualism for their children. However, wanting to raise bilingual children is not enough to do so. For us as researchers, this tension might mean that it is time to turn our attention away from battling the monolingual mindset to actually helping to build an infrastructure that makes bilingualism and language learning a realistic option for all parents, irrespective of whether they can afford to pay for private school attendance, are willing and able to give up their Saturdays for community school attendance, or decide to prioritize full-time parenting for maximum minority-language input over paid employment.

If we agree that bilingualism is not only the private responsibility of families but requires a whole-of-society commitment and effort, this inevitably raises the question of limited resources. In the Hong Kong example, the choice is not actually between English monolingualism and English-Chinese bilingualism but between Cantonese, Mandarin, English, a variety of combinations, and, for an increasing number of families, a wealth of other languages. In Australia, over 300 different languages are spoken.

Can and should we treat all these languages as equal when it comes to language teaching and multilingual service provision?

Linguists tend to shy away from the question of hierarchies – the equality of all languages is a fundamental tenet of our discipline. This means that, by and large, we are not very good at countering the obvious truth of the argument that it is impossible to treat all languages equally in schools and public service provision. I suggest we need to start asking some uncomfortable questions in order to be able to advocate for positive change.

Again, this means we need to shift our attention from language to social impact: what kinds of language policies have the most positive outcomes not in terms of language but in terms of social and family cohesion? In other words, we need a social justice approach to linguistic diversity.

Related content

• Ten lessons from the Bridging Linguistic Barriers Symposium

Students in a Tibetan-medium school in Kathmandu study for their exams. By knowing the number and age of speakers of a particular language, policy makers can better plan for their inclusion as the medium or subject of instruction in early education.

The 21st of February marked International Mother Language day, an annual UNESCO Heritage Day that celebrates linguistic diversity and multilingualism around the world. This year’s International Mother Language Day has particular importance, as 2019 has been marked as the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages.

Most estimates place the total number of languages in the world at around 7,000. Calculating the number of languages in a given country or region is important for both linguists and policy makers (as well as a host of other professions) for many reasons. By knowing the numbers of speakers of a particular language, policy makers can more effectively plan for linguistically-inclusive public communication and administration, consider the role of different languages as the medium or subject of instruction in education systems, and direct efforts for language preservation and revitalisation.

However, while empirical data on other social characteristics is usually readily available or easy to collect, data on language has often proved more difficult to enumerate. This post will explore how the question, the context, and the response all provide room for subjective interpretation and can lead to vastly different figures for the number of languages in a single country: Nepal.

Nepal

The small South Asian nation of Nepal boasts huge linguistic diversity relative to its geographic, economic, and population size. Inhabitants of modern-day Nepal were historically made up of hundreds of distinct groups of people with different cultures, languages, and leaders, who were only united under a single ruler in 1768. Topographical barriers like the great mountains of the Himalayas and the sweeping plains of the lowland Terai region meant that many languages developed in relative isolation.

Nepal has collected language data through regular decennial censuses for the last 60 years. Yet within this relatively short period, various censuses and other independent linguistic surveys have returned different tallies for the number of languages present in Nepal. Estimates have ranged from as few as 17 in the 1971 census, to 123 languages in the most recent census of 2011, to an estimate of over 140 in a 2005 linguistic survey, as shown in the table:

Data from Central Bureau of Statistics, Malla, Toba, and Noonan quoted in Yadava, Y. (2014). Language Use in Nepal. In Central Bureau of Statistics. Population Monograph of Nepal Volume II: Social Demography. (pp. 51-53) and from Ethnologue 13th – 15th, and 21st Editions. Retrieved February 15, 2019, from https://www.ethnologue.com/archive

While it’s true that language, and language use, shifts naturally over time due to factors such as generational change, revitalisation efforts, or migration, the radical differences between estimates in Nepal over just sixty years suggests something more complicated is at play.

While many census or survey questions can be answered objectively and impartially, others, such as questions on mother tongue, language use, ethnicity, or religion, require the respondent to make a subjective judgement. In Nepal, as elsewhere, the wording of the question, the wider social and political context within which the question is asked, and the respondents outlook and ideology towards language, have all influenced efforts to calculate the country’s languages.

The Question

The first way in which respondents may be influenced in their reporting of language is the wording of the question itself. Subtle differences in the terminology, phrasing, or layout can change the way a question is interpreted and answered.

The 2011 Census in Nepal included one question on language (Yadava 2014, p. 52):

Looking closely at this question, there are several possible ways respondents could have been influenced in the responses they provided.

Firstly, the terminology itself may have induced certain responses. Nepal’s Central Bureau of Statistics opted to use the term “mother tongue” (मातृभाषा /mātr̥bhāṣā/ in Nepali) in the 2011 Census, over alternatives such as “main language”, “usual language”, “home language”, etc.

For some people, these terms could be considered synonyms as they elicit the same response. For example, an Australian, living in Australia, of British-heritage parents, would answer “English” in all three situations. For others, the response may be different based on the subtly different slant of each term. For example, a child of a Vietnamese immigrant mother in Montreal who first learned Vietnamese (the “mother tongue”), but uses mostly French when interacting with the Canadian father and local friends (the “home language”), and speaks English to colleagues in a multinational workplace (the “usual language”).

In his chapter in the ground-breaking book Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses’, Arel (2002) refers to this as different “language situations”. Canada is one of the few countries that attempts to collect data on all three possible language situations in its surveys – most countries, including Australia and Nepal, only ask about one or two potential language situations. By focusing on the “mother tongue” of the respondent, ignoring other potential terms such as “usual” or “home” language, the 2011 Census elicited a certain response from respondents.

Though the 2011 Census in Nepal did also request respondents to provide another language as their “second language”, no further definition or guidance was given to clarify what was meant by “second language”. Given that the majority of respondents (56%) who chose to answer this question listed the national language, Nepali, as their second language, it is likely that many took this as an opportunity to assert their knowledge of the language of social mobility.

Another potential challenge is the layout of the census form itself. In 2011, a single space was provided for each part of the question, forgoing the possibility of more than one language being spoken in favour of simpler enumeration, indicating a bias towards mono- or bilingualism in a country where multilingualism is common, if not the norm.

A young woman from the Thulung ethno-linguistic group of far-eastern Nepal proudly poses in traditional wear during a language documentation workshop in Solukhumbu district

In 2011, the response format was open-ended, with no list of languages to choose from. This led to confusion between duplicate, indistinct, or unknown languages that was ultimately resolved by grouping some 21,000 responses into a single ‘other’ category, and another 47,000 as ‘non-responses’ (Yadava, 2014) – potentially missing smaller, lesser known or documented languages.

Conversely, in 1981, the census question around language provided a list of the five largest, most dominant languages and a catch-all ‘other’ category, reflecting the wider socio-political context at the time, as we will see soon. It is likely that the inherent bias contained in this question influenced the way people responded.

The Context

Quantifying the number of languages in a country or region can also be influenced by the prevailing political, social, and cultural climate. As Sebba (2017) aptly puts it when describing the inclusion of a language question in the 2011 British Census: “inevitably, questions about language are asked within a social and historical context which both constrains the possible answers and motivates respondents to select certain answers rather than others from those available, in accordance with prevailing ideologies about (among others) nation, ethnicity and language. The act of census-taking (…) is always politically and ideologically charged.”

The relatively low number of languages reported in Nepal’s early censuses were undoubtedly influenced by the assimilation policies in place at the time, and the generally higher levels of social exclusion. From 1962 to 1990, under a political system known as “Panchayat” and controlled by an authoritarian monarchy, the state viewed linguistic, gender, ethnic, and spiritual diversity as barriers to be overcome in the pursuit of a ‘unified’, ‘modern’ Nepal. Cultural ‘unity’ was projected as essential to nation-building and the maintenance of independence. The relatively low number of languages reported in the 1962, 1971, 1981, and 1991 Census reflected the widespread restrictions on cultural and linguistic expression that the Nepali population was experiencing during these years.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, the Maoist ‘People’s War’ raged against the monarchy, promising greater representation to minority caste, ethnic, linguistic, and gender groups. The decade-long civil war was linked to the populations’ growing awareness of social and cultural inequalities that had persisted for generations. The substantial increase in the number of languages reported in the 1996 Census, and all censuses thereafter, was therefore a manifestation of the wider phenomenon of ethno-linguistic awakening.

Since the conclusion of the civil war, the Government of Nepal (which today includes a majority of Maoist and Communist party members) has for the most part promoted linguistic diversity and harmony – for example, the 2015 Constitution declares that ‘all languages spoken in Nepal’ are to be considered national languages, and has opened the doors for individual provinces to declare their own official languages as part of the new federal structure – which is reflected in the 2011 Census results.

The Response

Arel (2002, p. 106) argues that in responding to questions around language, respondents can take a ‘forward looking’ or ‘backwards looking’ stance in providing their response. Arel points to the Belgium census of 1947 as an example of this, when many Flemish citizens provided “forward looking” responses by identifying French, as the language they wished their children would use in order to move up in social status.

Tibetan, also known as Bhot, is still spoken as the mother tongue of around 4,445 first, second, and third generation Tibetan refugees in Nepal

Many respondents in Nepal appear to be providing ‘backwards looking’ responses in the 2011 Census. A ‘backwards looking’ response is one that reflects the language of one’s parents or ancestors, regardless of the individual’s actual knowledge or regular use of the language. ‘Backwards looking’ responses may be politically or ideologically driven – the lack of knowledge of one’s ancestors’ language being seen as a temporary state brought about by authoritarian state policies – or simply a nostalgic and sentimental nod to historical or cultural roots.

Nepal’s 2011 Census data reported that there was 1,424 people who speak Tilung as their mother tongue. The Language Commission of Nepal, through their own local-level surveys and consultations, found there to be only two fluent speakers of Tilung. Other members of the wider ethnic group reported Tilung as their mother tongue despite not speaking more than a handful of isolated words, thus displaying a ‘backwards looking’ approach in their responses. The Language Commission has received many anecdotal reports of other languages similarly being over-represented in Census results due to ‘backwards looking’ reporting of cultural heritage versus the language most often or most fluently spoken. And while there are still living speakers of a language, as with Tilung, correcting this practice would not necessarily change the total number of languages present; but knowing the precise number of speakers of a language allows government to better target language documentation and preservation efforts, particularly in a resource-strained context like Nepal. A language with 1,424 speakers might be considered only ‘threatened’, but with two elderly speakers it is ‘almost extinct’ (see Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale).

Looking forward

Regardless of the precise number of languages reported, Nepal is and always has been a multilingual and multicultural country. Nepal is already planning for the 2021 Census, and by further refining its Census protocol and considering the various ways the socio-political context and personal ideologies may influence responses, the Government of Nepal will be able to better plan and implement linguistically-inclusive policies for its citizens.

References

Arel, D. (2002). Language categories in censuses: backward- or forward-looking? In D. I. Kertzer & D. Arel (Eds.), Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (p. 97). Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bennett, L. (2005, December). Gender, Caste and Ethnic Exclusion in Nepal: Following the Policy Process from Analysis to Action. (p. 7) Paper presented at the New Frontiers of Social Policy Conference, Arusha, Tanzania.

Sebba, M. (2017). Awkward questions: language issues in the 2011 census in England. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2017.1342651

Yadava, Y. (2014). Language Use in Nepal. In Central Bureau of Statistics. Population Monograph of Nepal Volume II: Social Demography. Central Bureau of Statistics.

Alexandra Grey proudly holding the physical product of her PhD research

My university will shortly require only a digital copy of each PhD after it has been examined and awarded, but luckily I snuck into the tail-end of the hard copy era. I say ‘lucky’ because my hard copy of my own hard work is a lovely, and hefty, thing to hold. And I’m not the only one who wants to hold it; having a physical final product has been meaningful to friends and family who buoyed me through the last four years.

When I collected the hard-bound copies I thought, ‘my work is complete’. Complete enough to celebrate, at any rate! My Language on the Move colleagues have warmly marked the milestone. But while the PhD is over the research doesn’t feel finished. I am still drawn to the subject of my thesis – how China’s minority languages policies operate today – because of (rather than despite) my years researching it. For the thesis, I chose a quote from Heller as my opening epigraph:

The globalised new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many different ways … Ethnolinguistic minorities provide a particularly revealing window into these processes. (Heller, 2003, p. 473)

These different transformations are ongoing; this window remains. So, I remain curious about sociolinguistics in the Sinosphere (and much else in the Sinosphere besides). Every time I write up a paper from the thesis I think up further questions to investigate. I’m working out how to share the findings with my generous participants and collaborators. And I’m preparing to return to China later in 2017 for a different project (on English and the globalisation of university education).

The thesis is not only relevant to linguists but also to Sinologists and political scientists. It’s an ethnography of language policy; that is, it’s about the lived experiences of state practices regarding a minority language. Rather than merely analysing what the minority language polices say, or what language practices everyday people have, it combines these angles. This makes for a lot of ground to cover, so I took a case study of just one language, Zhuang, the language of China’s largest official minority group, a group who have autonomous sub-national government over the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region. The thesis investigates what language ideologies are produced and reproduced in official language rights discourses and policies, and how social actors receive, resist or reproduce these.

Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica)

The research takes an ethnographic approach and draws on interviews with over sixty participants, texts collected from public linguistic landscapes, fieldwork observations and a corpus of Chinese laws, policies and official policy commentaries.

The analysis commences with a critical examination of the procedures of Zhuang language governance, finding that the language policy framework neither empowers Zhuang speakers nor the institutions tasked with governing Zhuang because authority for language governance is fractured and responsiveness to changing conditions is limited. Furthermore, the Zhuang language governance framework entrenches the normative position of a ‘developmentalist’ ideology under which Zhuang is constructed as of low value. Next, the analysis follows Zhuang language policy along its trajectory into practice. The thesis examines how language policy is implemented at different levels of government, and how Zhuang language governance is understood and experienced by social actors, concentrating on two key mechanisms of language policy: first, the regulation of language displayed in public space; and, second, the regulation of language in education.

With regard to public space, the thesis examines a municipal legislative intervention under which Zhuang has been added to public signage. It finds that Zhuang language is rarely displayed outside areas under Zhuang autonomous regional government, and that even within these areas Zhuang is almost exclusively displayed on government signage. The thesis then extends the linguistic landscape approach, analysing the various ‘readings’ of Zhuang landscape texts by viewers, including some who negatively evaluate the signage as tokenistic and many who simply do not ‘see’ the displays of Zhuang. This is one of the more surprising findings: it’s so easy to assume (as a policy-maker, an academic or a passer-by) that a bilingual street sign will be read and used by bilingual viewers who speak that language, that it will be seen as bilingual, that it will be seen at all. As my research discovered, these are not well founded assumptions.

Bilingual and triscriptual street sign in Nanning, GZAR

Finally, the thesis examines education policy under which Zhuang is introduced as a study subject at a limited number of universities after its near-total exclusion from primary and particularly secondary schooling. It finds that students who – against social norms and values – choose to study Zhuang at university nevertheless largely adopt the language ideologies of the pre-tertiary schooling system, namely the belief that Zhuang is not an educated person’s language and not useful for socio-economic mobility.

Overall, the study finds that Zhuang language rights and policies, despite being powerful official discourses, do not challenge the ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. Moreover, although language rights and policies create an ethno-linguistically divided and hierarchic social order seemingly against the interests of Zhuang speakers, Zhuang speakers may nevertheless value the Zhuang identity discursively created and invested with authority by this framework.

I’m now looking forward to reworking my doctoral research for publication, touching base with Zhuang participants, and getting started on my post-doctoral journey.

Alexandra Grey’s PhD thesis, “How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change” (Macquarie University, 2017) can be accessed through our PhD Hall of Fame.

Reference

Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473-492.

But so far nobody has really said anything about all this, perhaps because the technology seems so distantly futuristic. It really isn’t though. It’s basically here already. There is some way left to go, and right now the market is still more hype than reality. So I’ll start by reviewing where we actually are now, then I’ll join the dots from there to everyone being seamlessly equipped with reliable, universal live translation. Then I’ll think through what that might mean for the field of language rights.

First is the question of reliability. Computer translation has long been a bit of a clichéd joke – accidentally translating your holiday request for a medium spiced latté into an insult about the barista’s mother. Computers can do the basics, but only humans get all the nuances right. Right? Well, that’s changing.

Current machine translation is not yet as good as humans, especially between very dissimilar languages. A recent university study of Korean-English translation, pitting various translation programs against a fleshy rival, came out decisively in favour of us air-breathers. But the programs still averaged around one-third accuracy. That’s pretty good. Meanwhile another recent controlled test, comparing the accuracy of automated translation tools, concludes that “new technologies of neural and adaptive translation are not just hype, but provide substantial improvements in machine translation quality”.

Technology is promising seamlessly connected reliable universal live translation (Source: gadgetguy.com.au)

A recent article in The Economist shows incremental improvements to accuracy over recent decades. Translation is increasing in accuracy more quickly than ever, fuelled by advances in artificial intelligence, neural networks, and machine learning – essentially computers learning on their own, not waiting for frail humans to gradually program them during waking hours and between meals. Computers can now independently chew over vast databases of natural language, compare common patterns, and refine their own algorithms – see for example this pre-review academic paper outlining the Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) system. The more data that goes in, the more accurate it becomes. A recent update to Google Translate in November 2016 improved the system “more in a single leap than we’ve seen in the last ten years combined”.

So, highly reliable real-time automated translation doesn’t seem such a distant mirage.

And importantly, since it’s learning from spontaneous human input, it’s not just consulting dictionary-like formal grammars and vocabulary, but rather the way people really speak and write. This is not just good news for speakers of different languages but also of different non-standard dialects. The computer doesn’t care if you speak proper! It only cares if you speak in a way that’s approximately comparable to how other people have spoken.

This kind of live translation is going mobile too, thanks to clever phone apps like Speak & Translate, or Google Translate. Point your phone at the Ristorante Italiano, and on the screen you’ll see an Italian Restaurant – not just as blocky subtitles but as text that actually overlays the text on the sign in front of you, as if the sign were written in your language.

The next piece of the puzzle is voice recognition. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I remember my dad using auto-dictation. And. Painstakingly. Reading. Out. Each. Word. But again, times have changed. The Economist article I cited earlier also reviews recent leaps forward in voice recognition, to work with unfamiliar voices and rapid speech.

Combining that with live translation gives you Skype’s new real-time translator. Search online for videos of that, and once you get past the slick corporate promotional videos you should find examples of multilingual friends taking it for a spin. Their reactions tend to range between impressed, confused and amused, so there’s room for improvement. But as I noted above, a lot of time, effort and money is being pumped into this. Expect further big advances, soon.

And again, this technology is going mobile. With apps like Google Translate you can speak into your phone, and an automated voice will speak a translation aloud. As that gets more accurate, it’ll be easier and easier to have reasonably natural conversations between languages.

But… translating your voice isn’t much use when there’s lots of other noise around. Technology has two answers here. Firstly, noise filtering techniques are improving (Kirch & Zhu 2016), and are the focus of much innovative energy – search Google Scholar for ‘voice audio noise’ and you’ll find a flurry of recent patents. Secondly, machine lip reading is advancing rapidly too: comparing human sounds with their corresponding mouth movements – so-called ‘visemes’. Your phone can’t hear you? No problem if it can at least see you (and phones needn’t limit themselves to the puny smear of light that us squinting humans rely on).

Artificial Intelligence is being applied here too, similarly outpacing clunky mammalian programmers clicking away one key at a time.

If voice recognition is improving, what about voice production? That Economist article I mentioned notes the application of machine learning to understand pronunciation. That in turn points to a future auto-translator that not only translates your words but could even mimic your actual voice.

The next piece I’ll put into the mix is perhaps the weirdest. We’ve all seen dubbed movies where the actors’ lips don’t match the translation. Pretty soon, that mismatch will disappear. Enter Face2Face, a computer algorithm developed by researchers at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and Stanford University. It works by filming someone making facial expressions, and then dynamically mapping those expressions onto a moving face in a video, in real-time. The absolutely bizarre result is the ability to force anyone in any video to assume any facial expression you wish, including mouthing out different words.

Useful in movies for now, but think about the likely direction of the technology. The research I noted above on ‘visemes’ could straightforwardly lead to a database of mouth movements needed for all human sounds. A computer could then artificially map facial expressions onto a moving video – that is, onto your face, as you speak into your phone or webcam.

Of course, you’d still have to speak through a device. That’s a bit awkward. But that leads me to the last piece of this increasingly futuristic (but, as I’m trying to convince you, not that futuristic!) puzzle: Augmented Reality.

Watch this 2016 TED talk demonstrating a current AR headset, and think about how that could combine with live audio translation and Face2Face. Just think it through. You could meet someone speaking an unfamiliar language; the headset could translate their voice while also augmenting their moving face; and you would hear and see them speaking your language.

Factory worker uses Google Glass on the assembly line (Source: NPR)

You’d look a bit weird with that thing strapped to your head; but there are already more compact AR headsets, like Google Glass – already in everyday use by many factory workers to flash up details of products in front of them. Apple is making plenty of noises about moving into AR. So is Facebook. Wearing clunky glasses is still pretty awkward, and uncool – probably why they never caught on outside factories – but in 2016 a patent was filed for a tiny AR implant that fits inside your eyeball. Who might have filed that patent? Surprise surprise: Google.

Then there are recent advances in data storage and miniaturised processing power, for example a technique to write data to single atoms (Natterer et al. 2017), and the newly created ‘LI-RAM’ microchips promising supercomputer-like power inside tiny devices. In-ear technology is already available, of course. So what if that unwieldy headset was instead little more than a glint in your eye and a bud in your ear, Black Mirror style? Not so awkward anymore. And if it featured reliable live translation and Face2Face, suddenly Babel disintegrates completely in a puff of pixelated smoke.

This is the ‘singularity’ I mentioned at the start, the merging of wobbly human parts with synthetic improvements. This is predicted in the next few decades, and is currently the subject of active venture capital. The market research firm Global Market Insights predicts a $165bn market in AR by 2024.

My point is that, once you imagine all these pieces of nascent technology floating around and rapidly improving, their journey into a single new gadget doesn’t seem remotely unlikely. And you know what rampant neoliberal capitalism really likes? New gadgets!

So, that’s part 1, the gadgetry. I give it ten years before live, unnoticeable, automated translation between anyone anywhere is utterly trivial. Ok, let’s be really cautious: twenty years. Now on to part 2: what does all this mean for how we currently think about language rights?

We move now from the field of technology, into the academic sphere of sociolinguistics and political philosophy. In broad terms, the field of language rights has three overarching aims that relate to speakers of lesser-used minority languages:

• To pursue basic freedoms by preventing discrimination on the basis of the language you speak.
• Beyond basic freedoms, to create a world in which speakers of minority languages aren’t alienated from normal life. This means ensuring accessibility of services in different languages. That can also mean training people to speak minority languages, to aid communication.
• Promoting languages as important and valuable goods in themselves, emblems of cultural diversity, with a value that transcends their material benefit to particular groups.

These three broad goals are referred to by François Grin, respectively, as “negative rights”, “positive rights”, and a “third pillar … [which] cannot be understood strictly in terms of rights” (2003:84). If these are the current aims of language rights, let’s relate each one to the technological leaps outlined above.

In this future scenario, negative rights are essentially no longer relevant. Speak whatever language you like! Outright language bans tend to be based on chauvinistic nationalism and the jealous wish to hear nothing but the One True Language all around (and that One language has a funny tendency to be different in each country). Even the most ardent linguistic nationalist could simply set their translator to filter everything into beige monolingual monotony. Best of all, they could do it without bothering anyone.

Positive rights would be trivially easy to achieve, but only if all languages are included in the translation database. This then would be a new area of debate for language rights: ensuring inclusion of minority languages. That actually leads on pretty smoothly from current debates about inclusion of minority languages in education and civic life. Remember though: machine learning has the potential to make that process a lot cheaper and quicker, so it could be less burdensome than current debates over manual translation.

If all that were made a reality, then minority language speakers need never feel isolated or excluded again. Just like the majority language speakers I mentioned under negative rights, so too could minority language speakers translate everyone into their language.

The same applies to speakers of non-standard vernaculars. I pointed out earlier that machine learning works on natural input, not standard language. Your translation device could translate into any language variety you like. In fact, since your device would understand your own language patterns and your own voice best of all, it could even make everyone sound exactly like you.

As I noted above, positive rights currently also involves training other people in minority languages, so that minority language speakers can interact seamlessly with different organisations. That would change in this future scenario, if minority language speakers could hear, see and speak their language all around them at the flick of a (virtual) switch. There would be no need for anyone to be trained in minority languages, at least not to lift barriers faced by their speakers.

And this of course cuts both ways. Universal translation removes the need to bother learning ‘majority’ languages or standard varieties. It’s immaterial, if the technology enables us to understand one another regardless of the actual noises coming out of our faces.

So what about the “third pillar”? Celebrating languages as goods in themselves, regardless of whether that necessarily delivers material benefits. Actually, this one more or less gets a free pass. Even if we can all understand each other, if languages still have some other transcending value, then that’s not affected by the sorts of material barriers or benefits that concern negative and positive rights. Included within this is learning a language for personal or emotional rewards – for example this touching recent article about a First Nations Canadian learning her heritage language despite its deathbed status, or this account of a similar effort in Singapore. That rationale could continue unchanged.

The third pillar is not just something that affects individuals. The third pillar is a mainstay of many governmental policies to revitalise minority languages as important bearers of culture and heritage, above and beyond material benefits they might bring. That motivation may endure, just without the need for anyone to learn the language who didn’t really want to.

But what about achieving literacy in the first place? It doesn’t help being part cyborg and translating all the text that surrounds you if you can’t understand writing at all. Achieving literacy is easiest in your first language, so surely there remains a need for provision in minority languages, at least in terms of teaching? Well not necessarily; not if each child could simply see learning materials augmented to appear in their language, while their teacher’s voice could be auto-translated too, even to sound like one of their parents. There may come a day when there is no need to translate textbooks or train teachers in minority languages; it could all be virtually delegated.

And as I noted above, that means you can learn to read in any dialect. That in turn means the imperative to approximate any kind of standard dialect begins to fade from view. That has massive implications for other areas of language rights in relation to language standardisation and ‘correct’ language.

Technologically enhanced character in “Black Mirror: The Entire History of You”

Peering further into the future (though perhaps not very much further), there lies the possibility of your little translation gadget no longer relying on you wobbling your gooey speech organs at all. It could just read your thoughts directly. Again, this is not science fiction but a predictable advance of existing technology. It is already possible to read basic yes/no responses with electrodes mounted on a head cap (Chaudhary et al. 2017). One neurologist went further and surgically implanted electrodes on his brain, then recorded which neurons fired up as he spoke certain sounds, words and phrases. He had to remove the electrodes after a few weeks for safety reasons; and ethical approval has not yet been granted for wider testing. Nevertheless, his preliminary results suggest clear potential. Vaunted tech maestro Elon Musk has caught the scent, and launched a company, Neuralink, dedicated to the brain-machine merger. Hot on Musk’s heels, Facebook has announced similar plans. The potential end point of this tech is word-free communication, where written and spoken language are seen as mere quaint extravagances.

But wait a minute. This talk of ubiquitous live translation is all very nice, but not everyone gets the latest gadgets for Christmas. Rampant neoliberal capitalism loves new gadgets, but it also seems to love stark and growing socioeconomic inequalities. It also loves those gadgets to improve so fast that, even when disadvantaged folks get hold of them, there’s already a better model for those higher up the global elite food chain.

Still, if this is true of gadgets then it’s also true of public funding for literacy programmes and provision of services in minority languages. So today’s arguments about funding for minority language literacy programmes could be tomorrow’s arguments about equitable rollout of translation gadgets.

That might seem beyond the largesse of governments, but think about the internet. Only two decades ago it was a rather exclusive luxury; but today it’s the subject of huge government subsidy, philanthropic investment in poorer countries, and even a UN resolution.

Certainly, there would be stark inequalities in the access to AR translation technologies; but it seems unlikely that the response would be simply not to support greater access to them, just continuing to support old-fashioned literacy programmes. How would that look, while the global elite lorded over them the ability to understand all humanity? One kind of inequality (to literacy and availability of services) would be replaced by another (to live translation), but both would be addressed by very similar politics.

So, equal access to live translation could be just another new area for the field of language rights.

Reprising the three goals of language rights outlined above, negative and positive rights could in time be subsumed and transformed into debate over access to translation technologies. Meanwhile the “third pillar” could remain largely intact, though constrained to language learning as a meaningful and rewarding leisure pursuit, not urging others to learn minority languages for reasons of accessibility.

Overall then, the future may be very different; but then in other ways, the more things change the more they may stay the same. The gradual global push to equalise global internet access is bearing fruit. If the same happened with live translation facilities, the inequalities I just outlined could be overcome in time.

Given the pace of technological improvements, and the steady spread of access to other technologies, how long will it really be before we all simply and instantly comprehend each other? There will no doubt be decades of teething troubles, and people would still find plenty of ways to misunderstand each other and start fights, just as speakers of the same language do now. But there is reason for optimism in a future of worldwide mutual understanding, with freedom to speak how you like, and nobody coercing anyone else to speak a certain way. If any of those positive outcomes are possible, then I for one welcome our robot overlords.

References

Chaudhary U, Xia B, Silvoni S, Cohen LG, & Birbaumer N (2017). Brain-Computer Interface-Based Communication in the Completely Locked-In State. PLoS biology, 15 (1) PMID: 28141803

Grin, F. 2003. Language Policy Evaluation and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jones, Carwyn. 2015. Letter to David Melding AM ‘Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister: Meeting on 13 March 2015’. www.senedd.assembly.wales/documents/s44696/CSFM402-15ptn2.pdf

Kirch, Nicole & Na Zhu. 2016. A discourse on the effectiveness of digital filters at removing noise from audio. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 139, 2225. https://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4950680

Natterer, Fabian D., Kai Yang, William Paul, Philip Willke, Taeyoung Choi, Thomas Greber, Andreas J. Heinrich & Christopher P. Lutz. 2017. Reading and writing single-atom magnets. Nature 543: 226–228. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature21371

Sayers, D. 2016. Exploring the enigma of Welsh language policy (or, How to pursue impact on a shoestring). In R. Lawson & D. Sayers (eds.), Sociolinguistic Research: Application and Impact. London: Routledge. 195–214. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415748520/

The Sociolinguistic Economy of Berlin

Imagine you want to study language diversity as a phenomenon of contemporary society. Where do you start? You can, for example, ask teachers to count the number of languages that are spoken by their pupils (as has been done for, e.g., Hamburg, see Fürstenau et al. 2003, and for London, see Baker & Eversley 2000). While this is useful for practical purposes, like designing local school curricula, and for knowing which languages are spoken in which areas, it is less helpful for understanding why some places are more diverse than others – and it is often simply taken for granted that cities are the best places to document and study diversity.

But why actually is it that cities seem to be more diverse than other places? Even more basic, what actually is a city? And what does urban diversity tell us with regards to the links between language, social relations, and transnational social structures? In sociology and cultural anthropology, cities have been described as related to economic practices (Sennett 2005, Urry and Gregory 1985), and it is argued that cities have a central role in the global economy (Sassen 1994). Cities are constitutive of global economic relations and are themselves an effect of economic practices. In simpler terms: people who want to earn money oftentimes go to cities to find jobs and other people decide to locate companies where they hope to find a suitable workforce, favourable economic conditions and enough people to buy what they offer. The whole scenario may, of course, change in the future due to online work and online sale but so far, the places where economic value is produced also affect what is considered as social value – things and practices (including linguistic ones!) associated with New York, for example, are cooler than those from the countryside. At the same time, where wealth is produced, many less well-paid jobs are created to cater for the needs of those who earn a lot – who employ cleaning staff and nannies, eat in restaurants, and go to late night shops (see also Sassen 1994). The more poorly-paid workers tend to reside in places further away from the city centre where rent is cheaper and often come from places in the world where living conditions are even less favourable. To cut a long story short, local and global economic conditions have an effect on socio-spatial relations, in micro and in macro terms, and are therefore relevant for language as a social practice, for linguistic prestige and for language diversity. And, indeed, cities are interesting (even if not the only) social and spatial entities to study this.

To explore these questions around language diversity in the city, Britta Schneider, Theresa Heyd and Ferdinand von Mengden from Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, have organised a symposium that delves into the linguistic situation of one city: Berlin.

The Sociolinguistic Economy of Berlin takes place on 30^th September and 1^st of October 2016 and we are pleased to invite you to attend. The symposium includes contributions on traditional and recent dialectal diversity, new and old migrant multilingualisms, as well as emerging linguistic élites in the city, a combination that inspires to conceive of and compare languages in their local but transnationally conditioned socio-economic embeddedness. Additionally, we have invited scholars whose theoretical expertise will help to explore the topic on a more abstract level, including Monica Heller and Barbara Johnstone.

Berlin as a city to study language diversity is compelling – its history as a divided place sheds light on the role of the political-economic system in shaping conditions of language diversity. There are still-felt effects of the Berlin Wall, such as local dialectal repertoires in German and specific formations of ethnic patterning, both differing in eastern and western parts of the city. This makes visible that diversity is no ʻnaturalʼ effect of a city, but caused by market conditions and political systems. It furthermore shows that we can observe not only demographic shifts but also the durability of some social discourses. Finally, we can contrast the cosmopolitanism of some social spheres (e.g., Berlin’s Anglophone hipster culture) with anti-cosmopolitan moves of linguistic gatekeeping that erupt in contexts of urban power struggles such as gentrification, the tourism industry, in education and in job market accessibility.

Taken together, the symposium brings insight into language diversity under conditions of globalised economic relations and histories in local places, in exploring diversity beyond methodological nationalism and in understanding the city as one potential lens through which we can understand such phenomena.

References

Baker, Philip & John Eversley. 2000. Multilingual Capital: The Languages of London’s Schoolchildren and their Relevance to Economic, Social and Educational Policies. London: Battlebridge.

Fürstenau, Sara, Ingrid Gogolin & Kutlay Yagmur. 2003. Mehrsprachigkeit in Hamburg. Münster: Waxmann.

Sassen, Saskia. 1994. Cities in a World Economy. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press.

Sennett, Richard. 2005. Capitalism and the City. Future City, ed. by S. Read, J. Rosemann & J.v. Eldijk, 114-24. London: Spon Press.

Urry, John & Derek Gregory. 1985. Social Relations and Spatial Structures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Annastacia Palaszczuk and members of her family (Source: Couriermail)

Would Kirk Douglas be a Hollywood legend if he had kept his birth name Issur Danielovitch? Would Bob Dylan have achieved global fame if he had kept his birth name Robert Zimmerman? Would the current Australian treasurer Joe Hockey have had an equally successful political career if his father had not anglicized the family surname from Hokeidonian to Hockey? It is, of course, impossible to know the answer to these questions but it is fair to assume that the answer to these questions is ‘not likely.’

Anglicizing stigmatized ethnic names is often considered typical of an earlier era of immigration when assimilation prevailed. In The American Language (first published in 1919) H. L. Mencken famously observed that European immigrants were likely to give up their distinctive names in America for ‘protective coloration’ in order to escape ‘linguistic hostility’ and ‘social enmity:’

[…] more important than this purely linguistic hostility, there is a deeper social enmity, and it urges the immigrant to change his name with even greater force. For a hundred years past all the heaviest and most degrading labor of the United States has been done by successive armies of foreigners, and so a concept of inferiority has come to be attached to mere foreignness. […] This disdain tends to pursue an immigrant with extraordinary rancor when he bears a name that is unmistakably foreign and hence difficult to the native, and open to his crude burlesque. Moreover, the general feeling penetrates the man himself, particularly if he be ignorant, and he comes to believe that his name is not only a handicap, but also intrinsically discreditable – that it wars subtly upon his worth and integrity. […] The immigrant, in a time of extraordinary suspicion and difficulty, tried to get rid of at least one handicap. (Mencken 1919, p. 280)

A recent comparison of the earnings of European immigrants to the USA in the 1930s who did or did not Americanize their names has found that a name change during that period was indeed associated with earnings’ gains of at least 14% (Biavaschi et al., 2013).

But is all this of purely historical interest? How do ethnic names fare today after decades of multiculturalism and in a so-called age of super-diversity?

One thing that contemporary research has shown is that ethnic names continue to constitute a barrier at the point of entry into the job market; i.e. job applicants with ethnic names are less likely to receive a response or be invited for interview than candidates with non-ethnic names. For instance, a 2009 Australian study found that fictitious job applicants with Chinese, Middle Eastern and Indigenous names were less likely to be called back than those with identical CVs but Italian names. Fictitious candidates with Anglo-Saxon names had the highest call-back rate (Booth et al. 2009). A similar Western Australian study comparing accountant job applicants with Middle Eastern and Anglo-Saxon names reached similar conclusions (Pinkerton 2013) as did a German study with Turkish and German names (Schneider 2014).

Conversely, changing an ethnic name continues to pay off for some migrant groups as a 2009 Swedish study found: Middle Eastern and Slavic migrants to Sweden who changed their names in the 1990s obtained a substantial increase in labour earnings over similarly qualified migrants from the same origin groups who did not change their name to a Swedish or neutral name (a ‘neutral’ name is one that is not particularly associated with any particular ethnic or national group) (Arai & Skogman Thoursie, 2009).

These studies all focus on the point of entry into the labour market but we do not know much about how ethnic personal names are talked about in everyday life. Do ethnic personal names continue to matter for those who have established themselves? Do ethnic personal names attract disdain, rancor, enmity or crude burlesque in this day and age?

Questions such as these are usually difficult to research systematically but recent events in Australian politics have provided a perfect corpus of reactions to a non-Anglicized and strongly ethnic name, namely the Polish name Palaszczuk.

Annastacia Palaszczuk is a third-generation Australian who was thrown into the national spotlight last weekend as the leader of Queensland’s Australian Labour Party (ALP) and, in an unexpected election outcome, as the likely future state premier of Queensland.

To begin with, Annastacia Palaszczuk is living proof that it is possible to be successful in Australian politics with a non-Anglo name. She has held her electorate, the seat of Inala, a suburb of Brisbane, since 2006, and the name Palaszczuk must be a bit of household name there because Annastacia’s father Henry Palaszczuk preceded his daughter as the member for Inala and held the seat from 1992 to 2006.

However, outside Inala and certainly outside Queensland, Annastacia Palaszczuk was relatively unknown until last Saturday. In social media, her name became an immediate topic of comments and discussion. These comments provide us with a window into the discursive construction of belonging in contemporary Australia’s multicultural society and I hope someone will analyse this precious corpus systematically. A few preliminary observations include the following.

Difficulty

The predominant theme that emerged was around the difficulty of the name as in the following examples:

Might have to learn how to pronounce Palaszczuk at this rate. #qldvotes

— Tanya Ashworth (@ordinarytanya) January 31, 2015

The whole of Queensland just realised they’re going to have to learn to spell their new Premier’s name. #qldvotes

— Wes Mountain (@therevmountain) January 31, 2015

Solutions to the problem of pronouncing or spelling a difficult name were also offered, such as the following mnemonic or the suggestion to use a nickname instead:

Loved @GrahamPerrettMP spelling lesson 4 name of poss next Qld Premier: It is 'PALA, Sydney Zoo, Canberra Zoo UK' #qldvotes @AnnastaciaMP

— OzLabourStart (@OzLabourStart) January 31, 2015

@therevmountain it's Queensland. They will give her a nickname

— ChristopherPatterson (@Christo45046444) January 31, 2015

Most of the comments related to the difficulty of the Palaszczuk name are good-humoured and self-deprecating. At the same time, the very fact that the name and its difficulty is topicalized points to the fact that for these commentators the name is still remarkable and noteworthy as one that does not index a ‘normal’ or ‘default’ imagined Australian identity. That legitimate belonging is tied to the name becomes even clearer in comments that exaggerate the difficulty of the name through intentional misspellings, silly syllable counts or suggestions that it will be impossible to learn:

Wow! 25 days ago I didn't know the ALP had a leader. #QldVotes #Annastaciawho?

— Nathan Kneen (@nathankneen) January 31, 2015

And then there are the passive-aggressive comments about her name such as this one:

Cate: Dear Annastacia Palaszczuk,

Can we call you Anna? or do you prefer AP? (Couriermail)

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

While comments such as the above are concerned with belonging in Australia, another theme can be observed around authenticity and the fact that the name is not pronounced in the original Polish fashion. Annastacia and her family apparently pronounce their name /ˌpælǝ’ʒeɪ/, as do the Australian media. Commentators were quick to exhort ‘us’ (i.e. the Australian public) or Annastacia herself to learn how to pronounce her name ‘correctly:’

Let's learn to say it properly. Correct Polish pronunciation of @annastaciaMP Palaszczuk's name is Pa-wa-shchook, not Pallashay. #qldvotes

— Marcus Kuczynski (@cuscus1) February 1, 2015

@AnnastaciaMP Just checked the polish pronunciation guide. Your last name is pronounced "Pala-Chook" you ain't fooling any1! #Fail #qldvotes

— Mitch (@HEELAussie) February 2, 2015

Wendy2: Well you don’t pronounce her name Pala-shay to begin with. Why does everyone do that? Has the media been given notes telling them to pronounce it that way? Palaszczuk being a Polish name would be pronounced Palaz-chook. I can’t imagine why Ms. Palaszczuk would not want to use the traditional pronounciation of her family name, some may even suggest a sort of cultural cringe. It makes me think of Keeping Up Appearances’ snobbish character Hyancinth Bucket who insisted on her surname being pronounced Bouquet. How facile and false. (Couriermail)

What’s in a name?

We’ve come a long way since H. L. Mencken’s time when having a non-Anglo name laid migrants open to rancour, disdain, enmity and crude burlesque. Or have we?

Annastacia Palaszczuk and her father have been successful in Queensland politics since 1992. So, after taking the entry barrier, clearly a lot is possible for bearers of a non-Anglo name. At the same time, the chatter about Annastacia Palaszczuk’s name that could be observed on social media in the last few days also demonstrates that a non-Anglo name continues to ‘raise difficulties’ in contemporary Australia. Beyond being remarkable and noteworthy, such names also continue to be the target of cheap jokes and insults.

The latter seem to come more frequently from anonymous commentators in the comments’ sections of newspapers than from identifiable tweeters. This would suggest that there are two forms of stigma now: having a strong ethnic name continues to carry some stigma but openly questioning the legitimacy of its bearer now attracts stigma, too.

Arai, M., & Skogman Thoursie, P. (2009). Renouncing Personal Names: An Empirical Examination of Surname Change and Earnings Journal of Labor Economics, 27 (1), 127-147 DOI: 10.1086/593964

Hutatma Smarak (Martyrs’s Memorial) on Flora Square in Mumbai constructed in the memory of 106 people killed during the agitation for the creation of Unified Maharashtra. The two individuals in the monument represent the worker and the farmer.

Language politics in India

Language politics as identity-based politics has been a subject of major political concern in post independence India. Real or perceived injustice to a linguistic community has been a major driver of language politics. Part XVII of the Indian Constitution deals with the official language of the Union, Commission and Committee on Official language, regional languages, the language of the Supreme Court and the High Courts, provisions related to medium of instruction etc.

India was reorganized on a linguistic basis after protracted struggles in many parts of the country and Maharashtra is one such state. After the reorganization, constitutional provisions about regional languages had to be implemented putting in place elaborate mechanisms of language planning. That created an atmosphere that was conducive to the proactive engagement with language development. By contrast the absence of such mechanisms has put regional languages in serious difficulty.

Language policy and politics in Maharashtra

The protracted struggle led by the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (a fragile alliance of Non Congress parties) resulted in the creation of unified Maharashtra in May 1960. Participation of the cultural representatives of the subaltern class like Shahirs (ballad singers) and other folk singers was quite impressive. Participation of Non Maharashtrians and condemnation of violence gave legitimacy to the movement. Although the Samiti leadership had talked about the development of Marathi language and culture and employment issues of the Marathi speaking people, they could not evolve a comprehensive agenda for the same. The split in the Samiti after the creation of the state created a political vacuum as far as pursuing the language agenda was concerned. After taking over the responsibility as the Chief Minister of Unified Maharashtra in May 1960, Yashwantrao Chavan spelled out his vision for the development of the state and development of the Marathi language. He also expressed the need to run the administration of the Maharashtra state in Marathi language instead of English. Chavan established a number of relevant institutions such as Bhasha Sanchalanalay. (Directorate of Languages), Sahitya ani Sanskruti Mandal (Board for Literature and Culture), Vishwakosh Nirmiti Mandal (Board for Marathi Encyclopedia) and Vidyapeeth Grantha Nirmiti Mandal (Board for the Creation of University Level Reference Books). The Maharashtra Official Languages Act 1964 was passed in 1965. Although it was touted to be a tool for the empowerment of the Marathi Language, it did not work because there was no deadline by which the entire business of the administration would have to be transacted in Marathi and because there was a decided lack of commitment from the political elite and there was no punitive action against errant bureaucrats.

It was against this background that Bal Thackeray and his associates formed Shivsena Party in 1966 to fight against the perceived injustice against the Marathi speaking people in Maharashtra and especially in the city of Mumbai. The declining importance of Maharashtrians in the political economy of the city of Mumbai was a matter of serious concern even before the arrival of Shivsena. Through campaigns such as the campaign for Marathi signboards on shops and other establishments, or the campaign for renaming the city of Bombay as Mumbai, the campaign for the use of Marathi in the business of the government and judiciary, Shivsena tried to pressure the government about the use of Marathi.

Despite its many successes, Shivsena has never attempted to prepare a strategic note or action plan about the enhanced use of Marathi in administration. In fact, Shivsena shifted emphasis from Marathi Manoos to Hindujan (from the politics of Marathi language to politics of Hindu Religion) during the 1980s. However, in the absence of a parallel organization taking up the language agenda, Shivsena still monopolized the Marathi mind space.

In 2006, another party, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), was split off Shivsena by Raj Thackeray with the objective of curbing the political influence of migrants, of making the teaching of the Marathi language compulsory in all schools in Maharashtra and of insisting on Marathi language and Marathi sign-boards everywhere. Currently the party appears to have run out of steam. In 2009, in the first ever state assembly election that the party fought, the party won 13 assembly seats. However, in the recent election held in October 2014, the party could win only one assembly seat. Shivsena and MNS are the only political parties to have built their politics almost entirely on the Marathi agenda.

Furthermore various civil society organizations have also been working on the issues of Marathi language and culture. However, many of them have confused literary development and language development. These organizations have used various instruments to pursue their agenda like writing letters to the editor, petitions to the government and semi-government authorities, collaborating with likeminded organizations to sensitize people over language issues, seeking information under the Right to Information Act about the use or non-use of Marathi in various domains and using this information as a tool for campaigning, lobbying political parties and their students units, trade unions wings and providing them inputs and proactive use of the media. However, such smaller, local and low cost initiatives have limited space for success because they can handle limited issues at a time, professional strategizing is missing, joining a political party may compromise their autonomy and, most importantly, penetrating the political system and bringing about macro policy changes without actual political participation is difficult.

Marathikaaran: A new politics of Marathi

Therefore a new politics of Marathi that is a product of a matrix of Marathi language, culture and the economic and political aspirations of the Marathi speaking people is imperative. This politics is slowly emerging out of a vacuum created by the failure of language based politics of Shivsena and MNS and caste based politics of various factions of the Dalit (Depressed Communities) political parties. It can be described as Marathikaran. It aims at:

• Implementation of constitutional provisions regarding the empowerment of Indian languages (in this case the empowerment of Marathi)
• Implementation of various provisions regarding the development of Marathi that have been enacted since the creation of Maharashtra
• Developing suitable institutional mechanisms for the promotion of Marathi language and culture
• Enhancing the collaboration between the government and non government institutions for developing a comprehensive plan for the development of Marathi language and culture
• Evolving a constructive, substantive framework for the development of Marathi

Mere state initiatives or interventions cannot ensure the development of a language. However, it must be noted that nowhere in the contemporary world have languages survived or flourished without state help. The establishment of a separate department for the development of Marathi Language within the Government of Maharashtra has begun the process of language planning. However, the initiative can succeed only when a comprehensive department evolves which would include sub units working on Marathi as medium of instruction and the expansion of Marathi education, encouraging the use of Marathi in central government as well as private establishments, looking after the use of Marathi in the judiciary , looking after learning Marathi language, looking after the use of Marathi in computers and information and communication technology, dealing with the employment of the Marathi youth and looking after Maharashtrians staying in other parts of India as well as in other countries of the world.

There is increasing awareness among linguists and activists on two issues: that it is not possible to protect Indian languages unless they are linked with the economic opportunities of its speakers and that it is possible to engage with globalization using the very tools that it has created in digital communication. Consensus on usage and ownership of the language, redesigning the federal balance of power are the prerequisites of this politics.

This tweet says: “CSU issues correction: its proposal was translated into German incorrectly”

Germany is currently witnessing a delightful language ideological farce. It all started when the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) party proposed last Friday that migrants needed to speak German not only in public but also at home. By way of background: the conservative CSU only operates in the southern state of Bavaria, where it has been the sole party in government for most of the time since 1945. On the federal level, the CSU is in a permanent coalition with its sister party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The CSU thus currently forms the Bavarian state government and is a member of the coalition that forms the current federal government. Generally, the national perception is that of these two conservative parties, the CSU is the one that is more conservative, more provincial, more parochial and less modern.

One immediate reaction to the CSU proposal that migrants should speak German at home was that the language of the home is clearly none of the business of the state. The Secretary General of the CDU, for instance, tweeted: whether people speak Latin, Klingon or Hessian at home is no one’s business but their own.

Ich finde ja, es geht die Politik nichts an, ob ich zu Hause lateinisch, klingonisch oder hessisch rede.

— Peter Tauber (@petertauber) December 5, 2014

By choosing a dead language, an invented language, and a dialect as examples, Peter Tauber draws attention to a far more complex linguistic situation than the CSU must have had in mind. One of these complexities that immediately hit the comments and responses on social media is related to the fact that Bavarian identity is strongly connected to the Bavarian dialect, which is well-maintained and not always easy to understand by other Germans. Being a dialect speaker has typically been a prerequisite for a successful political career in Bavaria (i.e. in the CSU). Consequently, many social media commentators have been drawing attention to the fact that CSU politicians and the citizens they represent are unlikely to speak German at home. In a typical example, a tweeter asks whether Bavarian can even be considered German:

The party of the only part of Germany where people don't speak German wants to force Immigrants to do so at home! http://t.co/Fp8DtWRni4

— Dirk Matten (@dirkmatten) December 7, 2014

The social media debate has also been used as an opportunity to tweet in Bavarian. In the following example a tweeter writes in Bavarian and asks in a pretend-stupid manner (a characteristic of Bavarian humour) whether he still has permission to speak Bavarian:

Derf i jetz dahoam noh bairisch redn oda wos? #csu #weltfremd

— The Jöcker (@chrisjoecker) December 8, 2014

Irrespective of whether politicians speak dialect or the standard, they frequently can be caught saying things that make no sense whatsoever and links to videos of CSU politicians stumbling through speeches that seem to lack all grammar, coherence or sense have also been making the rounds:

Jetzt mit Hashtag: Man hatte es schon fast vergessen, das exzellente Deutsch der CSU. #YallaCSU. https://t.co/bTeIV19KV3

— Deniz Yücel (@Besser_Deniz) December 7, 2014

Another layer of absurdity is added by the fact that the CSU sees itself as being representative not only of Bavaria but also of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, who have settled in Bavaria since 1945 and are sometimes referred to by CSU politicians as “the fourth Bavarian tribe.” The claim of these ethnic Germans to German citizenship rests on the fact that they have maintained the German language and culture outside the German-speaking countries, often in the face of adversity, over centuries. So, obviously, when it comes to ethnic Germans, speaking a language other than the national language at home has been considered a good thing.

The modern complexities of a diverse globalized society are even more striking. Commentators have been pointing to these in all kinds of ways; for instance, by drawing attention to hipster Berlin families who speak English at home in order to raise their children bilingually:

Prenzlauer-Berg-Eltern in Aufregung: Dürfen sie mit ihren Kindern zuhause kein Englisch mehr sprechen? #YallaCSU

— Philip Meinhold (@Philip_Meinhold) December 6, 2014

Others have raised the practice of watching foreign-language movies on TV as one that would be inconsistent with the proposal:

Kommt schon mal vor dass ich fremdsprachige filme gucke usw, hoffentlich bekommt die csu davon nichts mit! #YallaCSU

— Laura (@awwwkid) December 9, 2014

The complexity of what it means to “be German” and to “speak German” today is best expressed by the Twitter hashtag #yallaCSU. The hybrid based on Arabic yalla (“let’s go!”) has been trending on German Twitter:

"Trending Germany:05:26 AM CET"
1. #halligalli
2. #DagiVSTimo
3. #askBrudis
4. #Bibibeitaff
5. #YallaCSU
6. Weihnachten

— TrendieDE – Trends (@TrendieDE) December 9, 2014

#yallaCSU brings together tweets that are critical of the CSU proposal and most express their views in an ironic fashion. The overall point is that Germany is a modern multicultural society where it is not linguistic diversity that is out of place but old-fashioned ideas about linguistic and ethnic uniformity such as those expressed by the CSU:

Danke CSU! Wir haben wirklich ein Integrationsproblem: aber wie integrieren wir Euch nur in unser modernes, buntes Deutschland?!? #YallaCSU

— Karimatun (@KarimaELO) December 9, 2014

By now the CSU proposal has hit the international media – it has been covered by the New York Times, the BBC, the Lebanese An Nahar and others. What has drawn this attention is not so much the retrograde proposal of a relatively obscure and – in the global scheme of things – minor political party but the response of a mature multilingual and multicultural society. I found following the #yallaCSU tweets not only immensely entertaining and informative about language ideologies in contemporary Germany but, above all, heartening: in Germany, at least, monolingualism and monoculturalism are fighting a rear-guard battle.

This is not the first time that I (who watches TV very rarely) have wondered about the ways in which subtitles work to make speakers sound (or, rather, look) not only unintelligible but also deficient and illegitimate. Earlier this year, for instance, the advertising block during the evening news ended with a preview of a show about migration, in which a migrant engineer from Colombia spoke about her experiences of settlement in Australia. She had lived in Australia for a number of years so it’s probably unsurprising that I found her Spanish-accented English perfectly intelligible. Nonetheless, it was subtitled. Shortly after, there was a news item about soccer violence in Glasgow which included an interview with a Scottish publican. Even with context clues, I had a hard time trying to make out what he was saying. However, this time, there weren’t any subtitles to help.

In yet another example, in August 2010, the evening news featured a report about the 2010 Pakistan floods as well as one about the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. For the former, senior members of Pakistan’s army and civil defense forces were interviewed in English. In my perception, their educated English sounded a bit stilted but perfectly intelligible. It was subtitled. For the Hurricane Katrina report, ordinary New Orleans residents were interviewed. Their broad Southern American English was difficult for me to understand but – you guessed it! – there were no subtitles.

Is it possible that I am so out of touch with my speech community that I find accents that no one else understands intelligible and that I find accents unintelligible that everyone else understands? Possible, yes, but unlikely. The fact is that most Australians, just as myself, are likely to have more exposure to Australian English with a Spanish accent than to Glaswegian, or to an educated Commonwealth accent from Pakistan than a Southern drawl.

Subtitling varieties of English (as opposed to foreign languages) is thus a matter of ideology and identity construction as much as a matter of intelligibility. In the examples I have described here, the pattern is obvious: native speakers of English are presumed to be universally intelligible on Australian TV, even if theirs is a distant and obscure dialect. The speech of non-native speakers, by contrast, is presented as problematic and unintelligible even if they speak educated Standard English.

Familiarity with an accent is a key aspect of intelligibility. So, if the more familiar varieties are subtitled while less familiar ones are not, subtitling is clearly an exercise in linguistic subordination (a fact that hasn’t escaped the comedians behind this 2003 Skithouse sketch). Familiarity not only improves intelligibility but also influences attitudes towards speakers positively, as Eisenchlas and Tsurutani demonstrate in a recent matched-guise study. Participants, who were native speakers of Australian English, rated a speaker with Spanish-accented English as the most competent out of speakers of six different varieties of accented English (including standard Australian English) and a speaker with Japanese-accented English as the most attractive speaker. The researchers explain these rather surprising findings as a result of the fact that their participants are foreign language students. Consequently, they make this recommendation for a more equitable and harmonious multicultural society:

employment of non-native speakers within the education system and the introduction of compulsory foreign language study into school curricula will help to broaden people’s perceptions of foreign accented speech from an early age when world views are formed. (p. 234)

Additionally, the media also have an important role to play. All my examples above come from SBS, the broadcaster tasked with “reflecting the multicultural spirit of our own community.” Surely, that includes not branding familiar accents as exotic and illegitimate by subtitling them.

Susana A. Eisenchlas, Chiharu Tsurutani (2011). YOU SOUND ATTRACTIVE! PERCEPTIONS OF ACCENTED ENGLISH IN A MULTILINGUAL ENVIRONMENT Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 34 (2), 216-236

The Encyclopedia of the Muslim World has a good overview if you want to brush up your knowledge about Kyrgyzstan. However, even after reading this monograph, I haven’t been able to figure out what exactly distinguishes a Kyrgyz from an Uzbek. They certainly look alike to the degree that saying a given person is Kyrgyz or Uzbek makes them so, as this chilling account from a blogger on Global Voices shows:

… he called me and asked: “…so, no one is going to help us?” I wouldn’t wish this to anyone. I felt myself like a dog….I met them near the tuberculosis clinic. I took the driving wheel and shouted to everyone that he’s a Kyrgyz. With difficulties we managed to get him out of the district. On the street there were about 20 soldiers and behind them a crowd of young and not so young people of the Kyrgyz ethnicity. I don’t know what to do.

Amnesty International also report ethnicity as a matter of “claiming”:

Eyewitnesses have reported that groups of armed civilians, mostly young men claiming to be Kyrgyz, were roaming the streets of Osh, targeting districts of the city inhabited mainly by Uzbeks shooting at civilians, setting shops and houses on fire and looting private property. (my emphasis)

So, they hate each other with a vengeance but it’s not easily possible to say who is who?! Maybe that’s where accent comes in handy, just as it did in biblical times:

The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan River opposite Ephraim. Whenever an Ephraimite fugitive said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he said, “No,” then they said to him, “Say ‘Shibboleth!’” If he said, “Sibboleth” (and could not pronounce the word correctly), they grabbed him and executed him right there at the fords of the Jordan. On that day forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell dead. (Book of Judges, 12: 5-6)

The varieties of the Kyrgyz and Uzbek languages spoken in the Ferghana Valley seem to be mutually intelligible, which would leave ample scope for “shibboleths.”

Just as with the Bihari speakers of Urdu, the invention of ethnicity and language in the Ferghana Valley has largely been a product of colonial intervention: in Tsarist times, both groups (and some others) were lumped together as “Turks.” Soviet policy than made a distinction between “settled Turks” and “nomadic Turks” – the former were to be collectively known as “Uzbeks” and the latter went by a range of tribal names, including “Kipchak-Uzbeks” for those who are today “Kyrgyz.”

It’s all very confusing and to determine the “precise” meaning of “Kyrgyz” and “Uzbek” seems to be a bottomless-pit problem. However, the upshot is that the colonial re-definition of a social distinction (nomad vs. settled) as an ethnic distinction (which intersected in some way with the social distinction) in conjunction with the colonial creation of arbitrary boundaries (just as the British carved up India, Stalin carved up the Ferghana Valley between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) has created a recipe for mayhem and bloodshed.

This recipe is now readily available to corrupt politicians and criminals of all sorts if and when they choose to mobilize for their own purposes. Right now, the best hope for the people in Southern Kyrgyzstan seems to be more colonial intervention in the form of Russian peace-keepers. In the long term, all humanity will all have to look for ways to put the evil genies of ethnic and linguistic division back into the bottle.