Attendees of HISS2026 “Literacies for Social Participation” pose for a group photo in front of the Emigration Museum (Image credit: Language on the Move)

In this composite post, three of our international participants – Dr Yixi (Isabella) Qiu from Tongji University, and Tazin Abdullah and Brynn Quick from Macquarie University – reflect on their experiences during their time at the University of Hamburg.

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From Student to Speaker: Finding Epistemic Belonging in HISS

Dr Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, Tongji University

Language is always on the move, and so are we.

This July, I arrived in Hamburg for the first time. Yet the city did not feel entirely unfamiliar. I had already participated in the Hamburg International Summer School (HISS) twice, first as an online student participant and later as an online teaching assistant. This summer, I finally crossed the screen and entered the classroom as an invited speaker, leading a workshop on academic literacy and artificial intelligence.

Throughout my stay in Hamburg, one question stayed with me:

What makes someone feel that they belong in a multilingual community of knowledge?

Looking back, I do not think the answer lies in one defining moment. It emerged gradually through small encounters, conversations, and quiet acts of intellectual generosity that made me feel my questions mattered and my voice had a place.

Lines from the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken” misattributed to Walt Whitman in Emigration Museum display (Image credit: Language on the Move)

One of these moments took place during our visit to Hamburg’s Emigration Museum. As we walked through exhibitions on migration, ethnography, and colonial history, our conversations moved naturally between languages, histories, and perspectives. At one point, Professor Ingrid Piller noticed a citation error on one of the exhibition panels. What followed was not simply a discussion about an incorrect reference. It became a conversation about evidence and authority. What could easily have been ignored became an opportunity for collective inquiry: Who produces knowledge? Who is represented? What responsibilities do researchers have when knowledge enters the public sphere?

Perhaps this was what epistemic belonging felt like, not being given answers, but being invited to question how that knowledge had been produced, represented, and authorized.

The museums became spaces for dialogue rather than places to simply receive information. At the Museum am Rothenbaum – originally founded as a colonial museum of cultural history – conversations with fellow Language on the Move team members, including Vera Williams Tetteh, Tazin Abdullah, and Brynn Quick, invited us to reflect on colonial histories from different perspectives. Concepts such as epistemic justice and multilingual participation, which I had long encountered in my own research, became tangible through these shared conversations. They were more than analytical concepts for understanding others’ experiences. They became ways of interpreting my own participation in the multilingual encounters unfolding around me.

Answers to my question also emerged beyond lecture rooms and museums.

The museum ship Rickmer Rickmers, moored in Hamburg Harbor, with the Elbphilharmonie in the background. Hamburg has long been a place where people, languages, and ideas are on the move. (Image credit: Yixi Qiu)

Like many visitors, I quickly developed a habit of turning to generative AI in everyday life. AI helped me translate supermarket labels, understand product instructions, navigate public transport, and occasionally explore the history behind places that caught my attention. As I found myself reaching for AI almost automatically, I began to wonder whether this habit echoed what Professor Ingrid Gogolin has conceptualized as a monolingual habitus, shaping how I engaged with unfamiliar languages and places.

AI made Hamburg more accessible to me. I could understand the words and find my way around the city, yet feeling part of it depended on something more relational.

During our city walks, student organizers turned streets, buildings, and bridges into stories, introducing us to Hamburg’s Hanseatic history, multilingual heritage, and connections with the wider world. Gradually, my understanding of the city no longer depended only on translation. It grew through conversations, shared experiences, and the generosity of people who invited me into their ways of seeing the city. For example, learning to call the Elbphilharmonie “Elphi”, the local nickname Olga Vlasova, one of the student organizers, taught me, felt like a small act of participation rather than simply learning another name.

AI helped me gain access. People helped me participate.

Perhaps what stayed with me most throughout my stay in Hamburg was something I would describe as hidden hospitality. It appeared in ordinary moments: when several passersby stopped to ask whether I needed help with my luggage; when a stranger, seeing my confusion after a platform change, told me to follow her because she was also going to Lübeck; when a hotel staff member, instead of simply selling me a bottle of water, suggested that I could get one much cheaper at the nearby train station if I was not in a hurry; when someone switched into English to keep me in a conversation; or when a discussion continued long after class had ended. These moments were different. Some were practical, others linguistic or intellectual. Yet they shared something important: someone was making room for another person to participate. I began to think of this as a kind of everyday hospitality, often quiet and easily overlooked. But such gestures were not only about kindness. They also shaped who could access information, navigate unfamiliar spaces, make themselves understood, and participate on more equal terms. In this sense, everyday hospitality also had an epistemic dimension. It could soften, even if only momentarily, the inequalities of knowledge, language, and power that structure participation.

When such hospitality entered more explicitly into spaces of knowledge-making, through translation, explanation, listening, questioning, or simply taking another person’s perspective seriously, it created the conditions for epistemic belonging to grow. Through these repeated acts of hospitality and participation, knowledge began to feel less like an individual achievement and more like a collective journey.

Dr Yixi Qiu teaching a session on critical AI literacy at HISS2026 (Image credit: Language on the Move)

These reflections followed me into my workshop on academic literacy and AI, which built on Dr. Yevgeniya Yudytska’s introduction to critical AI literacy earlier that day. The workshop grew out of my ongoing research on AI-mediated academic writing, supported by the Shanghai Magnolia Pujiang Talent Program and the National Social Science Fund of China. Yet my journey in Hamburg encouraged me to take this work further by exploring it within a multilingual and multicultural space. The question, I came to realize, was not only how AI changes the ways we think and write across languages, but also how it reshapes who can participate in knowledge-making, how they participate, and whose voices are heard. Standing in front of the classroom brought this question into sharper focus. Our conversations moved beyond AI itself. Together, we explored questions of academic literacy, responsibility, multilingual trajectories, and knowledge construction, as well as what it means to write academically in collaboration with both humans and technologies.

I left Hamburg with more questions than answers, questions about multilingualism, AI, and social participation. Yet perhaps that uncertainty was, itself, part of the journey.

Epistemic belonging, I began to understand, is not about arriving at certainty, but about continuing to participate in a community where knowledge remains open to questioning and negotiation, and where new voices can enter and contribute.

My sincere thanks go to Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller for creating a space where epistemic belonging could grow, and to the organizing team, my fellow participants, and everyone who made this journey possible, a journey of growing confidence across languages, roles, and communities of knowledge.

HISS2026 reminded me that language is always on the move. And so is knowledge. And so are we.

***

HISS Highlights

Tazin Abdullah and Brynn Quick, Macquarie University

How are African literacies hidden in broad daylight? How did people in early modern Europe learn languages before these were standardized? How does AI actually work to produce plausible-sounding texts?

Participants of the doctoral symposium “Literacies for Social Participation” pose for a group photo (Image credit: Language on the Move)

These are some of the many fascinating questions explored during the Hamburg International Summer School (HISS) “Literacies for Social Participation”, which took place at the University of Hamburg over two weeks in July.

For the two of us, HISS provided an excellent opportunity to deepen our research and develop our networks as we head towards the final leg of our PhD journeys.

Thanks to the generous Postgraduate Research Funding (PGRF) from Macquarie University, we were able to travel to Hamburg and attend HISS along with a doctoral conference, also devoted to “Literacies for Social Participation.”

This very rewarding academic and personal experience was organized by the superb Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship team and hosted by the Literacy in Diversity Settings (LiDS) Research Center.

Now back in Sydney, we are very pleased to say that we achieved far beyond what we thought we would and have returned richer in knowledge and friendships. Here are the seven highlights from our time at the Hamburg International Summer School:

1. Purposeful human interactions. Summer School allowed us to meet, in person, colleagues whose work we had read or had previously only interacted with online. The great benefit of face-to-face settings stretched generously over two weeks is the space to spend quality time with our fellow researchers and learn from one another. In these settings, academic conversations are not restricted to one workshop or lecture but extend to multiple opportunities for exchanges that develop concepts and ideas. For example, our Humboldt Professorship team colleagues led us on a tour of Hamburg to places such as the Chilehaus and Speicherstadt, teaching us about the factors that have historically made it a city of both immigration and emigration. During the tour, we not only learned from these colleagues but got to know them better as well, and chats about all of our exciting research projects featured prominently along our walk.
2. Insight into diverse research contexts. We attended daily workshops and a series of presentations on cutting-edge research from around the world and from researchers at various stages in their academic journeys. The diversity of research contexts, data sources and methodologies in sociolinguistics laid out for us the possibilities to make our work relevant internationally. On full show was the truly multifaceted and inter-disciplinary nature of sociolinguistic inquiry – from teaching and learning in multilingual contexts in Canada, family language policy in Norway, linguistic landscape in the Croatian seaside to literacy challenges in Taiwan and much, much more.
3. Mentoring and feedback from senior academics. Currently at the final stages of our PhD journeys, we received priceless input from mentors who dedicated time to guide us on our data analyses and thesis writing. We were able to have multiple meetings with our mentors to discuss the work we have in common, and we set up future podcast recording dates with these mentors and other academics at HISS. Brynn even recorded one podcast episode with her mentor, so watch our Podcast space for that future episode!
4. Presentations. In addition, we had the opportunity to present our research at a doctoral symposium. During these presentations, we received feedback from professors from several universities around the world and we returned with copious notes. Imagine getting this level of attention in one place!
5. Brynn’s research highlight. Brynn really enjoyed hearing Dr. Nicole Marinaro’s lecture entitled Linguistic diversity and social participation in healthcare: overcoming communication barriers in the medical field. This lecture directly tied in to Brynn’s PhD research context where she has been investigating how Australian healthcare policies and organisations facilitate language support for patients with limited English proficiency. Dr. Marinaro offered a fascinating discussion on the European conventions regarding professional interpreters in healthcare, and Brynn was able to compare and contrast these conventions to those in Australia.
6. Tazin’s research highlight. Tazin was very inspired by the real-world impact of Dr. Martin Serif Derince’s research on the language use of the Kurdish community in Germany. Dr. Derince’s mentorship proved highly significant to Tazin’s research on the practical barriers faced by women from linguistically diverse communities when they try to access domestic violence information. Their discussions provided an excellent guide on how to present Tazin’s academic research in academic, policy, and community contexts, so that the results of the research reach appropriate audiences in a meaningful way and be of real benefit to women who may be subject to domestic violence.
7. 

   Fun at HISS2026: participants diving into the children’s exhibit at the Emigration Museum (Image credit: Yixi Qiu)

   Last but not least, networking over tours, coffees, lunches, dinners and dessert. It may sound like we were researching the culinary scene of Hamburg, but what the Summer School provided was a unique opportunity to socialize in a highly intellectual atmosphere. In the company of our colleagues, we were able to experience Hamburg through museums, exhibitions, and historical sites such as the The Emigration Museum – BallinStadt Hamburg and Museum am Rothenbaum Cultures and Arts of the World. On their own, these experiences are enriching. However, in the company of our fellow researchers and teachers, we engaged in discussions about sociolinguistics and literacy – we could see how our research connects to language in society from history to present. Of course, these were also copious opportunities to discuss future research collaborations.

Overall, the Hamburg International Summer School “Literacies for Social Participation” allowed us to make meaningful connections. It reminded us of the value of true academic friendships. We leave convinced, more than ever, that academia is not just about the formalities of exchanging information and knowledge. Our two weeks of academic companionship underlined the importance of professional and personal support to growing as academics and individuals. Our many exchanges reminded us that meaningful friendships are a combination of listening to the needs of others, applauding achievements, and guiding when necessary. We finished with a renewed and shared commitment for our research to contribute to society and to earnestly search for ways to have real-life impact in the world.

Editor’s note: The 111^th World Congress of Esperanto is currently taking place in the Austrian city of Graz. According to Austrian National TV, more than 1,100 attendees from 62 countries are attending the event to practice and celebrate the language, which was added to the list of Austria’s intangible cultural heritage only a few months ago.

After Poland and Croatia, Austria is only the third country in the world to recognize Esperanto as part of its intangible cultural heritage but the language is actually spoken worldwide, including by a thriving Esperanto community in Australia. They are proud to host the 112^th World Congress in Melbourne next year.

So, from Austria to Australia, this is a good opportunity to learn more about Esperanto. In this post, the Secretary of Esperanto NSW, Nicole Else, demystifies the language and promises a cool incentive: if you start learning Esperanto now, you’ll be ready to attend the 112^th World Congress in Melbourne next year.

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There is one language that is not often mentioned, but is used much more widely than most people assume. It is Esperanto. Even though its name sounds Spanish it has nothing to do with Spanish.

What are the origins of Esperanto?

Esperanto was developed over 100 years ago by Dr L. L. Zamenhof, an eye doctor from the multi-ethnic and multilingual city of Białystok, which was then part of the Russian Empire and is today in Poland. Confronted with inter-ethnic tensions, the young Zamenhof thought that a common language was needed to enhance intercultural understanding. He therefore intended Esperanto to be the language of world peace, and Esperanto literally means “the one who hopes”.

What makes Esperanto so easy to learn?

Zamenhof wanted his language to be easily learned, so he took out all the unnecessary difficulties that can be found in most other languages. The words come mainly from European languages like Latin, French, German, but interestingly the grammar is more similar to Chinese than to the inflectional European languages. The numbers in Esperanto work exactly in the same logical way as in Chinese and Japanese. For example in English it is not obvious what “twelve” means, but in Esperanto “12” is “dekdu”, that is “ten-two” – and that’s exactly how you say “12” in Chinese, too: you just use the word for the number 10 and then add the word for 2.

Another advantage is that the number of words that need to be memorized is much smaller than in other languages. Many people consider that a limitation and believe that you cannot fully express yourself in Esperanto or that it is suitable only for basic conversation. That’s not true at all. You can express yourself in Esperanto as well as in any other language.

Esperanto is a bit like Lego.

4th Esperanto World Congress, 1908 Dresden, including Klara und Ludwik Zamenhof (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

With a limited number of elements, you can make an infinity of words. Esperanto uses many prefixes and suffixes to build words. For instance, how do you say “hospital” in Esperanto? “sana” is an adjective that means “in good health”, “mal” is a prefix that means the opposite, therefore “sick” is “malsana”.  “ulo” is a suffix that means a person, therefore “malsanulo” is a sick person, “ejo” is a suffix that means “the place where”. Therefore “hospital” is “malsanulejo”. So you can see that where in English you have to memorize several different words, in Esperanto you just need to memorize one word and the prefixes and suffixes which you will be able to use in a wide range of words.

The spelling is phonetic, so you don’t have to worry about how to spell words.

And the grammar has rules that don’t have any exceptions at all! For example, if I take verbs: to make the present tense you replace the “i” of the base verb with “as”, for past tense you put “is”, and for future tense “os”. Therefore “I close” will be “mi fermas”, “I closed” is “mi fermis” and I suppose you can already guess what “mi fermos” means. There is not a single irregular verb. Just by reading this, you have already learned how to conjugate every single verb in Esperanto in those three tenses.

Is Esperanto artificial?

Esperanto is sometimes referred to as an “artificial” language, but for me it doesn’t feel artificial at all. Let me share a bit of my story: I grew up in France in a family where my parents and grandparents were all Esperanto speakers. Therefore, I learnt Esperanto as a young child. Through engaging with the Esperanto community and attending gatherings in various countries, I met my husband who is British, and gained many friends from all around the world, particularly Chile, Croatia, Japan, Hungary, and others.

You can learn more about people who learned Esperanto as their first language in this video.

Open embedded content from YouTube

And there is another way to look at the artificial-natural debate: one could say that Esperanto is more natural than English. If you listen to young children speak, they will naturally want to generalize rules and say “one mouse, two mouses”. In English they are not allowed to speak in that natural way, but in Esperanto they can.

Do we need Esperanto when everyone speaks English?

First, it is of course a myth that everyone speaks English. Millions do speak it, but the majority of the world’s population (about 80%) do not speak it or have only a very basic knowledge of English. Many people struggle a lot with English, and even many native speakers can’t spell it!

It is extremely time-consuming to learn English. This means that native English speakers have a ginormous advantage as they can express themselves with ease and don’t have to spend hundreds or even thousands of hours of their lives studying a language to be able to communicate internationally.

Is Esperanto too European?

Esperanto Place, Graz (Image credit: Wikipedia)

It is true that many Esperanto words come from European languages. At first glance it would seem fairer if at least one word would come from each of the 6,000 or so languages in the world, but that would be very impractical. This is a problem to which there is no perfectly fair solution. But why should Esperanto be held to an impossible standard? Some people seem to reject Esperanto precisely because it doesn’t meet this impossible standard of total fairness. It is true that a French person will learn Esperanto a bit faster than a Chinese person. But the important thing is that Asian people will learn Esperanto much faster than English. So, the use of Esperanto would be a big improvement even for people who don’t speak Romance, Germanic or Slavic languages.

Esperanto is a nice idea, but does anyone actually speak it?

While Esperanto is not yet used as a universal second language, there are enough Esperanto speakers to make its study worthwhile. I have met so many interesting people through Esperanto – for instance, my friends include an astronomy professor from Israel and a Croatian poet, neither of who I would have met without Esperanto.

Even though it seems to me that the world would be much fairer and it would save hundreds of hours to millions of people if Esperanto would be used as a neutral, easy-to-learn common language, it is not going to happen in the near feature. That doesn’t mean that it is useless to learn Esperanto now. I think speaking Esperanto has enriched my life, not financially, but by meeting people from many different cultures, countries, walks of life.

When you travel, you don’t have to rely on chance to find Esperanto speakers, because there are lists of people who are willing to meet you, show you around, or even let you stay at their place for free.

Koala souvenir with Esperanto flag (Image credit: Melburna Esperanto-Asocio)

There are lots of Esperanto gatherings, the biggest is the World Esperanto congress which is held once a year.

Start learning Esperanto now to attend the 112^th World Esperanto Congress in Melbourne

One way to learn Esperanto is to do a free online course at www.lernu.net or on the Duolingo website. If you are in Sydney, you can attend classes on Saturdays in Redfern. The teacher is originally from Korea, btw.

If you start learning Esperanto this year, you will be ready to fully enjoy the congress next year. There will be scientific talks, concerts, discussion groups, theatre, and much more. There might not be quite as many attendees as in Graz but hundreds of Esperanto speakers from around 50 different countries are expected to attend.

I am looking forward to the event very much. Will you be there too?

It will be a unique experience with no interpreters and people communicating on an equal (or nearly equal) footing.

In his book, Dr. Flores examines the ways that institutionalizing bilingual education in the post-Civil Rights Era in the United States has served to maintain rather than challenge racial hierarchies. He and Brynn discuss the lasting legacies of this institutionalization within neoliberal ideologies for Spanish-English bilingual education in the United States from the post WWII era to today.

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

Reference

Flores, N. (2024). Becoming the System: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of Bilingual Education in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197516812.001.0001

Related resources

Fillmore, N., Torsh, H., & Jakklom, Y. (2026). Childhood bilingualism is a gift; for some …. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/childhood-bilingualism-is-a-gift-for-some/
Lising, L. (2023). Translanguaging: Ofelia García in interview. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/translanguaging-ofelia-garcia-in-interview/
McKinney, E. (2019). No Child Left Behind: a study in unintended consequences. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/no-child-left-behind-a-study-in-unintended-consequences/
Piller, I. (2019). Bilingual children in preschool. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/bilingual-children-in-preschool/
Torsh, H. (2024). Community languages schools transforming education. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/community-languages-schools-transforming-education/

Transcript (coming soon)

These Australian students learning Indonesian are described as “executives of tomorrow”, whilst students who are already multilingual are framed as facing disadvantages or barriers to achievement. (Source: ABC News, Claire Lindsay)

Imagine four Australian children playing in a playground. Yu speaks Chinese and English, Jakob speaks Arabic and English, Molly, who is from the APY Lands, speaks Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Aboriginal English and, finally, James speaks English and is learning Japanese. All four children use or are learning multiple languages. But which child’s multilingualism is recognised, supported and celebrated by their school, their peers and society at large?

Our new research in the Journal of Sociolinguistics reveals how Australian news media systematically applies different ideological frameworks to each of these children’s language learning based on their racial positioning.

We analysed 85 news articles published between 2013 and 2024 across major Australian outlets like the ABC, Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph. We looked at how journalists frame children’s language learning and use. What we found was a systematic pattern of the same linguistic practices being valued entirely differently depending on whether the children involved were learning additional languages at school as enrichment or were already multilingual through their home and community languages – and critically, on their racial positioning.

Taking a raciolinguistic perspective

In order to examine the relationships between race and language, we took a raciolinguistic perspective. This means we asked how language and race are co-constructed, that is, how language constructs notions of race and how constructions of race influence ideas about language. A raciolinguistic perspective helps us understand why certain linguistic practices (like speaking multiple languages) are celebrated as enriching for some speakers whilst being constructed as deficient for others.

‘Future-proofing’ privileged children vs ‘barriers’ for racialised children

Once we applied this perspective it became clear that there were patterns in the ways different groups of children were represented in our corpus. Perhaps the most striking pattern in our data was the overwhelming association between white, monolingual children’s language learning and neoliberal ideologies of competitive advantage. When media coverage discusses additional language learning for white Australian children, it consistently frames this through economic benefit and cognitive advantage. Languages become “currencies of the new world order”, and children learning them are positioned as “executives of tomorrow”.

In this framing, the articles promote how learning Mandarin, Japanese, or French will “future-proof” privileged children, give them a “competitive advantage”, and provide “opportunities” for advancement. The cognitive benefits of bilingualism are repeatedly emphasised, and language learning is constructed as an optional enrichment; a “gift” parents can give their children to enhance their already secure position in society.

But for children who are already multilingual, the framing shifts dramatically. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who speak Indigenous languages, or children from migrant backgrounds who speak languages like Arabic, Vietnamese, or Punjabi at home, the media coverage is very different. Rather than celebrating their existing multilingualism, articles construct their home languages as “barriers” to learning, obstacles to academic achievement, or problems requiring intervention.

The contrast can be seen in the language used to describe the impact of being a multilingual. For example, one article proclaims the “big impact” that learning another language can have on (implicitly white) children’s educational success. Meanwhile, another headline states there is “no advantage to being multilingual”, referring to a study of students who speak languages other than English at home, predominantly from Indigenous and migrant families. For multilingual Indigenous children in remote contexts, their languages are framed as “barriers” to NAPLAN performance”, with calls to prioritise English “for the benefit of their future employment opportunities”.

A father teaches his children Punjabi at home. Despite Punjabi being one of the largest community languages in Australia, it received minimal media attention in our corpus (only 2 articles) (Source: ABC Central Victoria, Larissa Romensky)

We see that same linguistic practice – multilingualism – is simultaneously an advantage to be gained and a deficit to be overcome, depending entirely on the racial positioning of the child.

Suspicion and securitisation

However, for some racialised communities, particularly Chinese and Arabic-speaking children, media coverage goes beyond deficit framing to active suspicion. Whilst Mandarin learning for white children is promoted as economically advantageous (“the language of the future”), Chinese community language schools serving heritage learners are constructed as potential sites of foreign influence and indoctrination.

For example, headlines warn of “Aussie schoolkids indoctrinated by CCP propaganda” and discuss the “infiltration of the Chinese Communist Party into the NSW public school system”. The same language positioned as valuable for white children becomes threatening when associated with Chinese heritage learners, with articles questioning students’ loyalty: “children will easily grow into a Beijing sympathiser in a conflict situation between Australia and China”.

Similarly, when an early childhood centre in Queensland introduced Arabic through the federally funded Early Language Learning Australia (ELLA) program (the same program celebrated in other articles for teaching Chinese, Japanese, and French to white Australian children), they faced such hostility and threats that the program was discontinued. Rather than framing this as a racist incident, the article normalised the backlash, reporting that “the family understands the sensitivity around offering children language by the way of Arabic”.

Rights for some, but not for all

Beyond these patterns of celebration and suspicion, one additional pattern emerged in our data. Coverage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages frequently employed linguistic human rights discourse, framing language use and education as fundamental, inalienable rights. However, the dynamics of how this rights-based framing operates within Australia’s settler-colonial context are complex and raise important questions about sovereignty and recognition. We explore this pattern in depth in our full article.

Why this matters

Our findings reveal that Australian media doesn’t just report on childhood multilingualism – it actively constructs and maintains linguistic inequalities through racialised framings. The same linguistic practices are valued entirely differently based on children’s racial positioning.

Our research matters because media discourses shape public attitudes, which in turn influence policy and practice.

Our full article, Big Impact or No Advantage? Raciolinguistic Framings in Australian Media Coverage of Young People’s Multilingualism, is now available in the Journal of Sociolinguistics.

The question we’re left with is not whether Australian media upholds raciolinguistic ideologies (our data shows it clearly does) but rather: how can we, as linguists, educators, and activists, from our various positionalities, challenge and reframe these ideologies to advocate for more linguistically just approaches to childhood multilingualism in Australia?

Reference

Fillmore, N., Torsh, H., & Jakklom, Y. (2026). Big Impact or No Advantage? Raciolinguistic Framings in Australian Media Coverage of Young People’s Multilingualism. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 30(2). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.70005

NSW Coat of Arms (Image credit: Floodstreet, via Wikipedia)

Update 07/07/2026: After receiving 105 endorsements, we handed in our submission by the deadline. The Committee’s usual practice is to accept and publish submissions, and we have therefore removed the previous version of our submission. Once the NSW Parliament publishes our submission, we will link to it, as the version of record.

***

The New South Wales (NSW) Parliament is currently holding an inquiry into the Human Rights Bill 2025. The Bill proposes to establish a statutory human rights framework for NSW (for non-Australian readers, this is the state of which Sydney is the capital city).  You can find more information about the Bill here.

Some members of our team have put together a short submission advocating for the inclusion of provisions that help ensure that people with limited English language proficiency are able to access and enjoy their human rights on an equal basis with others.

Our key recommendation is to include a clause that safeguards the rights of people with limited English language proficiency because, in the NSW (and Australian) context, access to many human rights remains substantially contingent on English language proficiency.

Great Minds in Despair examines the long-term effects of the forced migration of neuroscientists from the German lands in the 20th century on scientific and medical cultures in North America, and on the researchers themselves. The book traces the lives and careers of approximately 400 German-speaking doctors, scientists, and researchers over two generations. It is a fascinating read that anyone interested in migration, science history, Nazi Germany, transatlantic relations, Jewish Studies, and much more should read.

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

Reference

Stahnisch, F. W. (2025). Great Minds in Despair: The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Transcript

Ingrid: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller and my guest today is Professor Frank Stahnisch.

Frank is Professor of the History of Medicine and Healthcare at the University of Calgary in Canada.

Frank’s interests include the historical relationship between the neurosciences and the philosophy of the mind, and the relationship between clinical neuroscience and public mental health.

Today, we want to talk about Frank’s new book, Great Minds in Despair, the forced migration of German-speaking neuroscientists to North America, 1933-1989, published by McGill Queen’s University Press in 2025.

Welcome to the show, Frank!

Frank: Thank you for having me.

Ingrid: Look, I’ll come right out and start by saying that Great Minds in Despair is an amazing book that anyone interested in migration, science history, Nazi Germany, transatlantic relations, Jewish studies, and much more should read.

The book examines the long-term effects of the forced migration of neuroscientists from the German lands in the 20th century on scientific and medical cultures in North America, and on the researchers themselves.

The book traces the lives and careers of approximately 400 German-speaking doctors, scientists, and researchers over two generations. These migrants found themselves in unfamiliar settings in Canada and in the United States, yet they helped to build the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, clinical psychology, and the cognitive sciences while also rebuilding their own lives.

In many ways, the concerns of Great Minds in Despair are similar to those of my own book, Life in a New Language, which examines the settlement experiences of a diverse group of migrants to Australia in the 21st century. When I saw Great Minds in Despair in the catalog, I knew that I had to get you on the show, Frank.

So, can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself and how your own identity as a German migrant in North America has shaped your research?

Frank: Absolutely. And it’s a pleasure to be on the show and to talk about my book, Great Minds in Despair.

I’m originally from Germany myself. I have been trained at the Universities of Frankfurt, Free University and Humboldt University in Berlin, with two stints, one in Scotland for a year and one in France. And have been educated both in medicine and in the humanities and did my dissertation in the history of medicine after having finished those both areas.

In terms of my own identity in that way, I was educated into the field of neurology and the neurosciences. Also started my residency at the Charite in Berlin. And my interest in the history of neuroscience was actually piqued by its absence in the educational canons of the time.

This has completely changed these days. The history and philosophy of neuroscience is well established. But in the 1980s, yes, some books existed. Jacobson’s Foundations of Neuroscience, for example, would be one, but not so many.

It was a burgeoning field, an opportunity to work in, and that’s why I believe I moved into it.

The other observation was to realize that the active clinical and basic neuroscientists themselves didn’t know a lot about the history of neurology, psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, et cetera. And I found that quite puzzling, given the major contributions that the German-speaking world had made to this field of medicine, biology, the life sciences in the past; and in particular also the history of Jewish contributions to neurology and psychiatry, as you will find exposed in the book, how many individuals there were and how important they were for the development of the field.

And then of course, my own migration story, which I actually don’t even regard as a migration story, because it was planned as a research visit to North America to just get to the archives of those individuals who had come. And that was enabled by a Feodor Lynen scholarship by the Humboldt Foundation in Germany and just developed into being here, living in Canada, building connections with the North American medical and science community, and receiving a job and remaining. But that was very far from being pre-planned. It just so worked out. So in a certain way, a migration by proxy, if you like.

Ingrid: Well, the participants or the people in your book didn’t expect to migrate either, I think.

So maybe let’s now focus on those very people. Who were they? Who left? Why did they leave? Why did they leave Austria, Germany, German-speaking parts of Central Europe?

Frank: Yes, I think that’s a very important question.

And I probably would like to answer it from a Canadian perspective, that I think so often in North America, the arrival of immigrants is being perceived as the most normal thing to happen.

Both Canada and the United States are being built on migrants in their colonial settler histories, of course. And they have also seen throughout a plus history that there were ups and downs, waves of immigrants arriving. And here was, in quotation marks, just another wave in the 1930s and 1940s, seeing all these Jewish, as they were perceived, immigrants arriving, although not all of them were Jewish.

For my particular story, some of the beginning point, in a certain way, was the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service in Germany, which was inaugurated on April 7th, 1933, so really early on after the Nazis had taken over power in Germany at the time, as it were.

But this was also directed at all those who criticized Nazi politics and philosophies. So, incorporated also humanists, socialists, communists. There’s some overlap, of course, with the cultural Jewish community. But the numbers that we’ve seen are probably between 70-80% Jewish individuals as being defined by the Nazis, often not as they self-identified; and 20% socialists and communists, and then about 10% others, whether they were individuals who had been in the US on a fellowship and realized there was this political change back in Germany and later after the Anschluss in Austria as well, or there were family reasons for the migration and everyone and the whole world was overwhelmed by the political changes as they happened.

And for my specific cohort of about 400 individuals that we could identify, I should say we were surprised actually to find so many individuals. Previous research by Strauss and Roeder, for example, in their encyclopedia of emigres, they didn’t list as many individuals in medicine overall, and neurology and psychiatry in particular. So that was quite an astonishing finding, and that these individuals were often such important contributors to the development of the field in neuroscience and psychiatry, as you mentioned earlier on.

So in that way, they had to leave because they lost their positions back in Germany, later in Austria, as professors, but also as leading physicians in municipal hospitals because the law applied also to the breadth of the civil service. And since many hospitals and community health centers were also under the jurisdiction of the civil service in Germany, it meant they were ousted from these positions as well.

Most of them could no longer continue with their professional work in healthcare, academic work, teaching, administration in the healthcare field, or even in the area of editing and mere writing. So their whole basis was destroyed for their self-identity and work positioning that they had before. And that’s why they left in various steps, some directly to North America, and some first moving to other Western European countries and then arriving later in Canada or the United States. Right, so these refugees have been trained in specific forms of neuroscience, psychology, psychiatrists, a particular academic zeitgeist related to neurodegenerative diseases.

Ingrid: Can you tell us a bit more about this academic background and these views of mental health meant at the time?

Frank: Yes, it’s a very important question. When particularly seen from this side of the Atlantic, how were these individuals perceived? And there was a certain form of being foreign, being a stranger to a more utilitarian, capitalist, empirically driven healthcare system in both Canada and the United States. And here individuals arrived who had this multifaceted form of education, as you’ve just mentioned, Ingrid, and that wasn’t fully compatible with the North American landscape. I think I want to pinpoint two major differences, one being that a field existed within medicine that’s almost untranslatable with the notion of Nervenheilkunde in German, that comprised both psychiatric, neurological, pathological forms of education, and individuals going into those fields, students, postgraduate trainees, wouldn’t even know at the beginning where they would end up. So, someone with an interest in neurology might end up in clinical psychiatry, or someone perhaps being more drawn to psychiatry would even become a neuropathologist in the end. So that was a peculiarity of the German style of research, and I’ve explored that in a previous book, A New Field in Mind (2020, McGill Queens), looking at that particular paradigm of education, perhaps a holistic form of education.

And then the other perspective was the having that background, a baggage of education that allowed for so many opportunities, also set them up, in quotation marks, in a positive way, in a resilient way to actually find out niches in which they could work. Like these days, it was very hard to find academic work. And when we think about neurology, it was even harder.

Neurology at the time was a discipline that couldn’t offer patients very much. It was really good in diagnostics, but it had a very limited repertoire of therapeutic options.

And this all happened after the Great Depression in North America, so no one was waiting for these individuals to arrive. And unfortunately, it also meant they were competing with North American-trained doctors and researchers for the few positions available. And particularly during the later 1930s, beginning of the Second World War, that meant there weren’t a lot of positions. Positions needed to be in a certain way created by these arriving emigres, and that’s often what they did. Whether they first went into internal medicine, whether they first went into areas of psychology, a field that was only just emerging, in a stronger way in North America. That’s where they could bring their educational background. And individuals such as Robert Weil, for example, a psychiatrist in Canada, not so well known in Central Europe, was one of the first actually designing residency training programs in clinical psychiatry in Atlantic Canada.

And out of these, a new community of clinical psychiatrists emerged. So I really want to underscore, despite all the despair that often accompanied that migration process, that they also had enormous resources that they could put to work in rebuilding their careers and lives in North America.

Ingrid: And that’s something that comes out really nicely in your book, actually, that these people built a whole new discipline, in a sense, and created these transatlantic new knowledges and new structures, which is very amazing. Before we get to that, I just wanted to one moment keep back with their lived experience of reestablishing themselves. I mean, you’ve already mentioned it wasn’t an easy journey.

And of course, we know that today for migrants as well, jobs are difficult to come by. And it’s often even harder for migrants to reestablish themselves. And particularly for highly educated migrants. So, I was wondering whether you could speak a bit more about the structural barriers that these people experienced, how they overcame them, and how their experiences compared to the challenges faced by other highly educated professionals from the same cohort, including, you know, medical doctors in other specializations.

Frank: Yes, that’s a very important question and it certainly breaks down into a myriad of sub-questions, not only of academic interest, of day-to-day reality to these individuals. And that’s not too different from forced migrants these days, whether out of political or environmental or gender reasons.

On a structural level, I think what immediately comes to mind were administrative problems, the introduction of affidavits in the United States, for example, the introduction of quota systems so that only so many could arrive in a given year. And that would mean a certain form of competition with other non-academic forced migrants at the time. The necessity for down payments that needed to be made to support those arriving, together with affidavits, letters of support, so more of a form of in-kind support of these individuals, sometimes resources needed to be found. So, it was necessary to either organize themselves or find foundations and aid associations who would step in and provide necessary funds, provide some living opportunities, accommodation in the very first months of their arrival, sometimes even years.

And then the increasing challenge of needing to get relicensed. At the beginning of the 1930s, it was much easier because in the general area of medicine, particularly on the East Coast in the US, to a certain degree in Canada too, there were some opportunities that could be filled.

The emigres had to somewhat leave their field from neurology and go, for example, into family medicine or gynecology or pediatrics and would find some open positions there. But soon, those positions were filled and we’re not seeing somewhat a further onward migration into the Midwest or the Pacific region. And that meant they were kind of all together in places like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., you name them, and relicensing requirements by the medical boards of the individual states, then in a certain way, quotation marks fought back against these competitors on the medical marketplace. I think this is something that really needs to be underscored, how difficult that would have been to arrive later, or for women who had been bearing the brunt in a certain way of supporting their families, their spouses, their partners in the first years, now having difficulty in getting into the job market because the relicensing schemes were now in place, or had to make a decision to move further into Western states in the US case, or after the Second World War in Canada when the new university had been created.

So, in that way, there were structural barriers, but I also want to briefly emphasize that there were psychological barriers.

And one individual that I find really encompasses this is William G. Niederland, the neuropsychiatrist who became world famous for having introduced the notion of the survivor syndrome, because when he was examining Holocaust survivors, also for compensation claims in Germany for the German embassy in New York, he was realizing that some of the academic, well-trained survivors he was caring for were really shocked and bound by their own thought processes, realizing they had survived because they had such a good education, or they had been successful in finding a position because of their background, whereas others in their same cohort who had not had that background, even had very different and often very difficult experiences.

And that even became a form of psychological stress, if you want, in creating psychosomatic forms of infirmaries and diseases. And I think it’s an element of the whole psychological realities of migration that’s often not much talked about. And Niederland, because of his professional interests, and then increasingly becoming an expert in relation to Holocaust-connected pathologies and disorders, he really brought it to the fore that not all of the emigres were alike and that some were enormously suffering from the observations they were making and the self-identity and realization, becoming conscious about their position as refugees in North America.

Ingrid: And you’ve also already mentioned gender, and I just wanted to briefly follow up on that. Maybe you could tell us a bit more about how gender influenced the trajectories of these people, and particularly maybe the story of one of the women in your book.

Frank: Absolutely. So there is two chapters that are specifically dedicated to specific groups among the émigré neuroscientists, broadly understood. Chapter 6 is looking at the question of age, arriving old versus arriving young. And Chapter 8 is about women, gender, and the academic workforce in the neurosciences.

Although Germany was generally very late in comparison to Switzerland and interestingly enough, Turkey and Europe, in allowing females to study at medical schools, during the Weimar Period, a lot of catching up was in fact done. Numbers based on Johanna Blecker‘s pioneering work on women education in the 1920s and 1930s are supporting that by the end of the 1920s, around 30% of the medical doctors were now females, trained at German-speaking medical schools, which is quite a strong sub-cohort when one thinks generally about the field of émigré physicians and medical scientists in neuroscience.

This was certainly one of the areas, if we include psychiatry, where a lot of the female physicians were working. And what is also interesting with the eugenics-minded perspectives of the Weimar Republic still, the public health field that was burgeoning, and new areas of psychiatry, clinically-oriented psychoanalysis, for example. We’re also seeing many leading individuals in this area being females.

I want to emphasize Herta Riese, for example, who, in Frankfurt am Main, was the director of a social medicine department. This was a municipal department. It was engaged in reproductive health, in marriage counseling, in what was called at the time racial hygiene and public health, also community health. So, she had a leading position, and her husband was a professor of neurology, Walther Riese.

So, this would be a professional couple who arrived after quite a tumultuous process of migration. They first went to France. Then France was overrun by the Wehrmacht. They were fleeing to Spain, and from Spain were arriving in the United States. And later were working in Richmond, Virginia.

While Walther Riese, who was fairly well known for his neurological work and work related to insurance problems, almost immediately could continue with neuropathological and neuroanatomical work in Virginia, that was fairly difficult for Herta.

Not the same institutions were existing. Public health boards across North America were often relatively loosely organized institutions, relying on individual family practitioners, pediatricians, psychiatrists, to join forces, but there weren’t those centers as they existed during the Weimar Republic back in Germany.

So Herta had to completely reinvent herself, first of all, supporting also her husband, which is a fairly typical story at the time, then running into relicensing problems, as I’ve mentioned earlier, and finally creating in this rather southern state, a position for herself by first working as a librarian in a local community library in which she kind of reinvented a form of a public health center that was here geared towards the black community. So, on the margins of the educational system in a certain way, caring for individuals who were marginalized as well.

And perhaps here also her socialist bend that she had in Weimar Germany also came to pass in that she was seeing that these individuals were underserved and that the medical system didn’t provide sufficiently for them.

And with all her organizational talent, the educational background she had, and also the experiences and decision-making in building a center. She was fairly successful in the 1950s and early 60s, to create also a child development education and research center. And that all out of a community library, which is extraordinary.

So, the connection between great minds being successful, but also in despair and putting the two together in a fruitful way, I thought in many of these cases was absolutely mind-blowing.

Ingrid: Absolutely. Yeah, so many inspiring stories and absolutely Herta Riese is one of those. And so maybe we can actually move on to this general point that you are making that we’re not just focusing on the migrants or this permanent migrantization of people who at one point had to move from one place to another, but that your focus is really on what you term “bilateral knowledge transfer.”

Maybe you can tell us a bit more about how this process unfolded, including through return migration after the war.

Frank: Fascinating question. I think generally from a migration studies perspective, as you’ve emphasized, Ingrid, and also for me, having a background in history and philosophy of science, in looking somewhat at the more general epistemological questions, so related to knowledge generation, knowledge distribution, and also changes in the system and state of knowledge of the time.

And I love the emphasis not to migrantize those individuals because they themselves often didn’t migrantize them themselves.

Yes, they came from Germany or Austria or Poland and other central European areas. But they first of all had their self-identity as being physicians or scientists, or they had their cultural self-identities first, but not so much being refugees. And that perhaps also sets them a little bit apart because of their professional and educational background. They were in this, in quotation marks, privileged position when they arrived.

Bilateral knowledge transfer, I think this spans a longer horizon, beginning with Germany’s lead in the sciences and in scholarship from the end of the 19^th century into the 20^th century, when already a lot of postgraduate trainees from North America had come to Germany.

In the field of neuroscience, for example, the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich was a hotbed of research at the time, one of the leading centers worldwide. And there were literally hundreds of North Americans already before the Second World War who had participated in the research activities. And I think we shouldn’t downplay those personal relations. They were really important. They were also important in terms of involving the German scientists on the international scene.

They were individually important for language learning because some major protagonists in the field, I’m thinking of Otto Loewi, for example, in neurochemistry and synapse research, they had these prior stints in North America or in Britain. They had learned sufficient amounts of English that then later helped them. As well as the emotional and social components, having had these connections prior through research periods abroad or international exchanges during conferences and workshops.

So that, of course, meant some of the knowledge in Germany traveled over to North America. But knowledge also came back with some of the postgraduate trainees or visiting professors from North America who moved to Germany. And that process, thankfully, didn’t stop during the Second World War. It became, of course, much more difficult.

But also, those connections were important to rebuild the landscape after when the Second World War was lost by Germany and the Axis powers, the connection still existed.

Maybe surprising to think that after all that happened in the context, broader context of the Holocaust, that some form of rebuilding academic interactions was possible.

And from a North American perspective, I think I would like to highlight the example of the Rockefeller Foundation, which at the time was one of the international founding agencies for biomedical research after the Second World War.

This role was taken over by the National Institutes of Health. They were actually looking at who they had supported during the Weimar Republic, and they were going back to these individuals and were asking if they could help with rebuilding the connections, which, of course, also many Nazi-tainted individuals were a part of. Nevertheless, on the basic level, it allowed for some form of exchange. It, for example, allowed some trainees, younger individuals from Germany or Austria to get part of their education and postgraduate training in North America as well.

And then there is, as we’ve alluded to, also various levels of re-migration. And that’s why I also took the timeline from 1933 to 1989, the end of the Cold War, to also have a perspective on the second generation, either those who as really young individuals, perhaps with high school training or being born in North America. The cultural background played into a receptiveness to European ideas.

And then we have individuals who were absolutely intentional in connecting those relationships.

I want to emphasize Lothar B. Kalinowsky, who introduced electroshock therapy in psychiatry in North America. He re-migrated and became a continuing visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin, and thus also enabling his students from Berlin to come to North America.

Or Max Delbrück, who some might particularly see in the area of biochemistry. There is the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin these days, a major research center and institution. But for about one-and-a-half decades, he had worked on problems of the axon of nerves from a biochemical perspective. So in a certain way, was also familiar with the neurosciences.

And he became a major player in designing exchange programs through his contacts in Cologne with the Max Planck Institute for Human Genetics. So this was kind of an intentional form.

There are others, too, to rebuild the scientific landscape. And I think, to me, this also represents an area of hope. One thinks so often our academic communities are disrupted by forms of war, political violence, many other influences. That it is the system of science, medicine and learning that also tries to rebuild itself. And it’s reliant on human relationships. And we so often disregard or overlook how important these human connections actually are.

Ingrid: Yeah, thank you so much. I think that’s such an important message and maybe a beautiful closing word, actually, the importance of human connections – both in our research, in our work and also in the life stories of these people.

But still, before I let you go, can you maybe just quickly tell us what’s next for your research?

Frank: Yeah, thank you, Ingrid, and for allowing me to share what I’m currently working on. So I’ve completely moved into a new project right now. During my research and scholarship leave that I’m on at the moment at Dartmouth College in the US, I’m working on a project with the working title, The Quest for Holism and Integration, Healing, Wellness and Complementary Medicine, which might sound like a fully different area of research, but there is certainly areas, some areas of overlap.

The question of bilateral knowledge transfer in the field of integrative medicine or complementary medicine between Europe and North America, back and forth. The element of holistic education, as we’ve seen in some of the immigrant neuroscientists, played also a huge role in that field as well.

And then the whole area around culture and medicine. That indeed, where we grow up and how we’re educated, whether it’s medicine or linguistics, psychology, also shapes the way how we’re seeing things. And that might have to do with why we’re seeing this early development of naturopathy, homeopathy, and alternative medicine in the German-speaking world.

I just want to emphasize the doctors of osteopathy that are perfect family physicians in the United States, in a certain way, not seen as such, even north of the border in Canada, and certainly not in Europe.

So, there is a lot to be said about where we come from historically, what our living realities have been, and also our educational systems for either allowing or not allowing a form of integration in medicine.

And that’s what I’m writing on, what I’m researching at the moment. So, give me a few more years to come, that this may come to fruition in another book.

Ingrid: That sounds amazing. And also right up our alley re Intercultural Communication. So once the next book is out, we’ll have you on the show again.

For now, I’d like to thank you so much for your time, Frank! Thanks for listening, everyone.

If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast, and our partner, the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time.

(Image credit: Sofatutor via Unsplash)

Are you a family based in Australia using a language other than English at home?

Researchers from UNSW would like to talk to you about your and your child’s experiences related to your home language use.

We are particularly interested in your family’s home language practices, the use of technology, your language in public spaces (such as restaurants and shops), and how your multilingualism has influenced your child’s language learning.

Participation involves collecting a diary for a couple of weeks and attending an informal online or in-person interview (participant’s choice). For more information, please contact Dr. Ana Sofia Bruzon (Postdoctoral Research Fellow) or Dr. Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani (Research Officer)

The chief investigators are Associate Professor Anikó Hatoss and Professor Louise Ravelli.

Participation in this research is voluntary and can be withdrawn at any time.

This research has the approval of the Human Research Ethics Committee at UNSW.

Tazin and Oludamini talk about how English is used to express concepts that originate from onto-epistemic perspectives that are not historically associated with the English language. They discuss his 2019 article “Islam in English,” which he co-authored with Dr. Mohammed Rustom. They also speak about his book of poetry called The Book of Clouds.

The conversation considers how the distinctive philosophical and metaphysical concepts associated with Islam collide with the use of English as a result of the global dominance of English. Tazin and Oludamini discuss how he has used his research and knowledge of historical religious thought to express these concepts in his English-language poetry.

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

References

Ogunnaike, O. (2024). The Book of Clouds. Fons Vitae of Kentucky.

Ogunnaike, O., & Rustom, M. (2019). Islam in English. American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 36(2), 102-111.

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Abdullah, T. (2023). New ways to answer old questions about Ramadan. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/new-ways-to-answer-old-questions-about-ramadan/
Abdullah, T. (2024). How did Arabic get on that sign? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/how-did-arabic-get-on-that-sign/
Amir, A. (2024). Happy Ramadan from London. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/happy-ramadan-from-london/
Hillman, S., Kannan, A., & Tizon, T. (2025). From “Howdy” to “Hayakom”: A shifting university linguascape. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/from-howdy-to-hayakom-a-shifting-university-linguascape/
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2023). Lent, language, and faith work. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/lent-language-and-faith-work/

Transcript

Tazin: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Tazin Abdullah, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Oludamani Ogunnaike.

Oludamini is Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. His research examines the philosophical and artistic dimensions of post-colonial, colonial, and pre-colonial Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa. Oludamini’s recent projects focus on poetry, poetic knowledge, decolonial thought, and praxis.

On this episode, we will do something quite interesting that I have not previously done with a guest. We will talk about Oludamani’s work from two very different genres. We will find out about his article, Islam in English, which he co-authored with Dr. Mohammed Rustom, and then about his recent book of poetry called The Book of Clouds.

Our listeners may wonder, of course, what the connection is. I am going to quote Joshua Fishman, a pioneer in the field of sociolinguistics, who wrote: “I feel strongly that there is more ‘out there’ (even more to the sociology of language) than science can grasp, and I have a personal need for poets, artists, mystics and philosophers too for a deeper understanding of all that puzzles me.” In that spirit, my conversation today with Oludamini will venture into what more is out there to understand about language use in religious contexts.

Oludamini, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today!

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Tazin: To begin with, can you tell us a bit about yourself, your research, and how you came to be interested in linguistic expressions relating to religions, and then, of course, Islam?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, so I think this, first started…my undergrad degree was actually in cognitive neuroscience. And I worked in a lab that, uh…was the lab that developed this Implicit Association Test, which I’m not sure if you’ve… people have seen before, it’s like a sorting task that you use. And they were gathering data on people from around the world, testing them in different languages, but usually they would test people in, like, India in English, right, because they had the…

And so, I was also majoring in African Studies, and so I had to do something that would combine cognitive neuroscience and African studies. So I was like, alright, I can take this implicit association test to, West Africa, maybe, and test people there. And I was testing… I initially did a short little run where I, like, tested people in Nigeria in English and Senegal in French.

But then I was like, oh, I wonder if it’s going to be different for the same person if you switch languages. Most of the people I was interacting with there were bilingual, trilingual, quadrilingual, and I was wondering if the associations we were measuring between different linguistic concepts would be different if we changed languages.

So, my undergrad thesis was precisely about this. It measured, took the Implicit Association test to Morocco, and to Arabic-French bilinguals. And then in the US did it with Spanish, English bilinguals, and found the same person, same exact test, but you switch the language, and you get very different, scores. So I kind of, in undergrad, I’d been interested in these issues of the relationship between language and thought and affect for a while.

Then, in grad school, I moved on to work in religious studies, particularly African religions, and just spent a ton of time translating things. A ton of them trying to learn, Arabic and improve my knowledge of Yoruba. And, um, studied a few other languages along the way, to a little bit Persian and Bamana, and, yeah, I just spent so much time translating and thinking about… If you spend time, a lot of time reading texts, particularly poetry and sometimes religious texts in another language, you are acutely aware of how much is changed and transformed in translation. And so this really got me thinking, even in another way, about the relationship between language and thought. And because most of what I study is Islam on the African continent, a lot of this had to do with expressions of Islam in Arabic, in African languages, but then also in English and French. A lot of Africans, myself included, my father included, have English or other European languages as a mother tongue.

In addition to all the cool patois and creoles and pidgins and things like that…that we speak, and a lot of the debates and discussions about, political, religious, intellectual, philosophical matters aren’t just taking place in academic English. They’re taking place in pidgin English, they’re taking place in Yoruba, they’re taking place in Arabic, in Hausa, and all of these different linguistic registers. So that’s kind of how I got into it.

Tazin: Oh gosh, that’s fascinating! And in your article, Islam in English, you note that, owing to the global dominance of English, Muslims worldwide use English, but the majority of English speakers do not… are not Muslim. So, you know, when you think of an English speaker, you don’t think of a Muslim.

And, you know, when we hear and we see Muslims speaking English in movies or the media, we do see the framing and the social identities associated with Muslims – the problematic stereotypes, you know, terrorists, oppressors, etc. In everyday lives, people make assumptions about Muslims who speak English. But your work does not so much focus on Muslims speaking in English. It talks about Islam expressed in English. What is the difference? And what do you mean when you say Islam in English?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ll start, kind of, where you started. I think there are a lot more… we think about the large number of English speakers in Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, especially who are Muslim. There are a lot more Muslims who speak English on a daily basis than a lot of people think. But as you said, you know, people don’t think of English as an Islamic language. Even though there is a kind of Muslim English, which is one of the things we kind of talk about a little bit in the…If you say, I have never come across or seen in anything published in the 20th century…the terms ablution, circumambulation, outside of a Muslim context. There are certain…as well as, you know, interesting things Muslims do with Arabic and other languages in their English. But what I was really interested in this article was kind of two things. How Islamic, Islamic, Quranic, worldviews are being expressed in English, And then how that is necessarily transforming the English language, even as the English language is transforming and having an effect on those, ideas, expressions. So that was… that’s one, this kind of connection between language and thought.

And then the other one, kind of drawing on the example of the Han Kitab in China,

which was this major translation of… a very creative translation of works of Islamic philosophy and mysticism and other texts into Chinese. But it wasn’t just a straightforward translation, because you’re translating into a new conceptual vocabulary, developing a new conceptual vocabulary. So having…having Islam… in English, being the…the creation in English of new categories that correspond to Islamic categories, but also are legible and accessible to contemporary English speakers, who are growing up with different idioms, different frames of reference, different metaphors, all of those different things.

Because it’s one thing to have footnotes explaining, let’s say, a metaphor in Arabic or Persian. It’s quite another thing to creatively translate that to another metaphor that will work in a similar way for contemporary English speakers. And so those are the kind of two things…how that we’re kind of, trying to talk about how to…transform English to express, Islamic ideas, concepts for which there’s sometimes not a good equivalent or translation in English. And then the other one is how to make these terms, ideas, worldview, accessible to English speakers. They’re related, but they’re slightly different. And that’s kind of what the two parts of the article are about.

Tazin: You also highlight that, English carries with it the markers of many historical and contemporary ideologies, understandably those associated with Europe. Despite its worldwide dominance, English is neither a neutral nor a universalizing language. For example, you know, you noted that colonialism finds expression in our everyday and literary expressions of English. How does this make translation of Islamic concepts problematic? Can concepts just be translated by picking out, you know, English words?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: I mean, yeah, you can do that, that’s kind of the plug-and-chug…

Tazin: What happens, yeah!

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: model, that’s, you know, that’s what often happens, but I think to do good translations, you have to really understand the language, the history of the etymology of the words, and as, yeah, as you’re saying, the English language, like every other language, carries with it its whole accumulated history of terms, metaphors that people use, which they’ve even forgotten what the original metaphor referred to, but we just use it. There’s a great scene in the autobiography of Malcolm X, both the book and the movie, where he goes through the dictionary, looks at everything black.

Everything black is bad, sinful, this, that, that. And then white, pure, holy, righteous, this, all of these, all of these associations. That’s just one very obvious example of the different associations. That different terms, different words, different images, different concepts will have. But English language bears all of these, because English is a wild language. Like, it’s, you know, you’ve got Greek, you’ve got Latin, you’ve got, you know, Saxon, Anglo-Saxon stuff, Germanic, and then…With the colonial things, you get things from Urdu, and then you’re getting things from Arabic, and you get… it’s just… it’s a wild language with all kinds of different things, and because it was really, like, a kind of trade pirate language for a while, it just… it picked up a lot of interesting things and structure, so it has…it has a lot of these… I forget who said language is like an amber, which carries all of these things that got stuck in it. And so English has a lot of these heritages. The issue…

Tazin: I like your categorization of English as a wild language.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, yeah, it’s a… it’s a really…

And it’s… we don’t really… I mean, we have the Oxford English Dictionary, we don’t have anything like the Académie Française, you know, that’s really regulating English very, you know, very tightly, we don’t have…tremendously old traditions of English philology and, like they do in Arabic and other traditions. So it’s a… it’s an interesting kind of language. But the…um…because of this, you can’t just immediately translate, okay, prayer, for example. In Arabic, you have salat and dua.

You translate them both as prayer? They’re very different things in Arabic.

Very different things you do with your body, very different kinds of prayer, but…in English, okay, that’s prayer. Okay, maybe we say petitionary prayer, but how do you translate salat?

I run into this all the time when I translate poems, and it’s like, Allahumma Salli Alah or Sallahu Alika

May God… what is Salli here? God pray on the Prophet? God bless the Prophet? God…

What are… this… there’s not, there’s not really an exact…term. Even the English bless is a really fascinating word. It comes from this old…I think Germanic route, which you put blood from a sacrifice on something, and that’s… you put a kind of sacred quality on that. But then that gets transformed to its Christian meaning, and then… So, these translations are not a simple plug-and-chug, one-to-one. The…the terms… very rarely can you just do the kind of flashcard thing. Just replace one word with another one. Because the words are different, the concepts are different, the linguistic and conceptual universes that they belong to are different. So you have to be creative.

There’s no way around, being creative in some way, and finding ways to make it make sense to an Anglophone audience. And oftentimes, as you’ll see in other Islamic languages, where there’s not such a easy translation, they’ll just keep the Arabic word. Let’s say if they’re translating from Arabic. Right, so languages that a lot of Muslims have spoken for a long time, you will see lots of Arabic loanwords in there, particularly related to religious things, or related to the Qur’an, where there’s often not an equivalent. But where there are equivalents, you’ll find people use both words. So, like, in Persian and Urdu and things like that, people will say, Khuda Hafez or Allah Hafez, right? Khuda was close enough.

That’s, you know, it has a kind of coexistence, along that… along those lines. Yeah, so this… I don’t think you can translate concepts just by picking out English words. You can pick out an English word. And then, through its usage, you know, you pay, alright, I’m gonna use this English word for this, let’s say, Arabic word. And then through the way in which you use it, you can actually transform the usage of that, the meaning of that word in English. So, William Chittick is a kind of master of this in his translations. He has a very strict translation policy in which if he’s translating a word from Arabic, he will use the same English word or if, you know, a word derived from the same root, you’ll use a variant of that English word in the exact same way. So that English word then starts behaving in his translations like the Arabic word, not like the English word that it, you know, originally referred to.

And like I mentioned earlier, you can kind of already see this with ablution. I’m sure there are other people who talk about it. Use the term ablution and write about ablution, but the only time I’ve seen ablution, you know, in my life is Wudu, as a translation of Wudu.

Tazin: Yes, it’s not used in any other context except the Muslim context.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: that I’ve come across. I’m sure there are other contexts, but, you know.

Tazin: Context words used, yes, but in English, yes.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: In my experience of English, that’s, you know, I’ve only ever seen it as a translation of Wudu. I’ve only ever seen circumambulation as a translation of Tawaf. And so the Arabic uses of those words are now, you know, at least in my English circle, my idiolect, determining the, they’re determining the range, the role that those words play in English.

Tazin: And just for our listeners, ablution is the ritual purification before prayer for Muslims, and Tawaf that you referred to is the circumambulation, which is also the only way I’ve ever.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah.

Tazin: Around the Kaaba that Muslims perform, and it is very interesting how it’s so difficult to actually get those words out, out in English. So how… how can you make English speak Islam, and Islam speak English?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, this is a question. So I was… I tried to, kind of, Islam… Islam speaking English. I’ll start with English speaking Islam.

If English speaking Islam is… you have a form of English, whether it’s in academic articles, treatises, poetry, not books, creative works, whatever, just people on the corner talking. That expresses fluently an Islamic kind of worldview – Weltanschauung. And it’s not one thing, but it does have certain principles, and those are informed by the Qur’an and the hadith, and then the tradition. That’s… that’s past those things. And so, this has been the case with, Islamic languages all throughout history, all throughout the world. Islam comes to a place, usually the language that people speak there, especially the Muslims there

transforms under the influence of the Qur’an, under the influence of poetry, under the influence of translations of the Qur’an, of poetry, of hadith, of other things, in khutbahs, in lessons, in things like that. And it starts to transform the language in.

Tazin: And Oludamani, may I ask you, in the spirit of this conversation, for our listeners, would you translate khutbah and hadith? Because our listeners may actually not know.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, yeah…sorry, sorry.

Tazin: You have slipped into your Arabic terms.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Khutbah is, to give a rough translation, like a kind of Friday sermon. It’s something that the Imam, the person who’s leading the Friday prayers, it’s kind of like a sermon that they’ll give right before the prayers.

And a hadith is a saying or tradition about the Prophet Muhammad. Usually it’s something that he said or did, recorded in a narration that’s then passed down through a chain of transmission. Yeah, so that’s…

Tazin: And two excellent examples of how… of the complexity of trying to express.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Exactly.

Tazin: these concepts in English.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Because a khutbah is like, let’s say, a Protestant sermon or a homily. In some ways, but it’s also not in other ways. The genre’s different, you know, you gotta sit down in the middle, different formulas, it’s much shorter than… if you go to a Nigerian church, those sermons go on for a very long time, it’s not like the…It’s a different, it’s a different kind of genre, but close enough. So these, these…the expressions of these ideas, this worldview, these ways of being, of imagining and speaking about the world, really come into English, and they… they necessarily transform the English. The English then comes to speak Islam.

So if you can speak in a way about… and oftentimes this will come from having loan words, like khutbah, like, you know, like zakat, for example. One word I know a lot of, at least in my circles, Muslims don’t translate zakat. I’ve never said to anybody, oh, I gotta pay my poor tithe.

Tazin: Poor tax!

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, I’ve got to pay my poor tax, or I’ve got to pay my… no, I’ve got to pay my zakat, because the translations are too… feel too clumsy. And so, I think of this as kind of…I think it was Wade Davis who said something like, language is like a forest, and the usages are like paths that people have cut through. And so as, Muslims, but not just Muslims, other people speaking about Islam, cut a path through the forest of English, trying to express these notions. And just like a path in the forest, that path gets influenced by the terrain that’s already there, even as you are shaping that terrain as well. So that’s Islam speaking English. That’s… or, yeah, that’s Islam speaking English.

I think I thought, I’m hoping I didn’t get it.

Tazin: No, no, no, that’s beautiful, and it’s actually a perfect, segue to my next question, where I was going to talk about…um…I was going to read a small excerpt from your book of poetry, the Book of Clouds. And as I was explaining to our listeners, I chose this because it’s so great to see this connection between your academic research and then your literary work. Your book is a beautiful articulation of the ideas you introduce in your article, and in your book, you express very significant Islamic concepts, but in English.

And I chose a little excerpt from your poem “The Wine Odes”, where you write:

This life’s too hard to live sober
so drink and try to die a drunk
For heaven’s but a hangover
for those who drink from your mouth’s cup

My question, as would be, you know, the question of many others – wine, drinking, hangover, how is this Islam expressed in English?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, good, good, good question.

So, yeah, this, this can be… if you are not familiar with, traditions of Arabic and really broader Islamic and Islamicate poetry, this sounds blasphemous, maybe. And that’s… that’s part of the point, but…the… there’s a very, very long tradition, from the earliest days of Islam of, I guess you could call them mystics or spiritual people, speaking about the remembrance of God, love of God, the experience of love and remembrance of God, being in the presence of God, in terms of wine.

And this kind of has Qur’anic precedent. The Qur’an talks about the Sharabun Tahurun, the pure wine that people drink in paradise. So, down here, you’re not supposed to drink wine. Up in paradise, no problem.

And so… And I teach my students about the Islamic poetic tradition, I like to say that, especially Sufi poetry, this kind of mystical poetry, it’s always speaking in three dimensions. It’s speaking about things on the macrocosmic level, out there in the world, you know, so a cup of wine. On the microcosmic dimension, things inside of you, the feeling of intoxication, from… could be remembering God, feeling in love, states of meditation and intimacy with God, and then the metacosmic, with God or in paradise, you know, this…this, wine. So when they’re speaking about wine, they’re using it as a symbol and a metaphor, but for the Sufis in particular, the real wine is the wine of paradise.

The wine down here is just a reflection… the, you know, the stuff you make from grapes is just a reflection of…that higher reality. So Ibn al-Farid is probably the most famous, influential Arabic mystical poet has a very famous poem where he says,

شربنا على ذكر الحبيب مدامة
سكرنا بها من قبل أن يخلق الكرم

(Sharabna ‘ala dhikril habibi mudamatan
Sakirna biha min qabli an yukhlaqal karmu)

We drank a wine in remembrance of the beloved.
We were drunk with it before the vine was even created.

So, it’s like, just letting you know, I’m not talking about the… the grape stuff.

Tazin: I was gonna say!

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, so, but… I mean, I…But he’s talking about drunkenness.

So this… this life’s too hard to live sober. You can’t live without love. Try to live without remembering God, or try to live without love. It’s too hard. It’s too hard. Most of us couldn’t make it a day, I think. So drink and try to die drunk. Ibn al-Farid and lots of others, Hafez, even Rumi, say things like this, so, you know, remember God, be in love, fall in love, and try to die, try to die to yourself, to your ego, try to experience that, in… don’t stop, keep going. Keep going so far in love that you… that you lose yourself.

For heaven’s but a hangover for those who drink from your mouth’s cup. So this is a famous kind of saying in Sufism that you seek the gardener, not the garden. That paradise is often called, in Arabic, Al Jannah, which means the garden. So, you don’t want paradise just for the…the wine and the good stuff there. What you’re really seeking is… is God, is the Beloved. So, heaven’s just but a hangover. And also, heaven is the result of… if you do a lot of the Sufi-style drinking down here, a lot of remembrance of God, a lot of loving God down here, then heaven’s just a hangover of that. And what you really want is the drink from the beloved’s mouth cup, which is a kind of standard image in Arabic and Persian, for kissing. And, yeah, so if you… if you are fortunate enough to have that kind of intimacy with… with God, Heaven’s kind of a hangover.

Yeah, so that’s… it’s a… it was an attempt to express in English, in meter, in rhyme, slant rhyme, at least. The ethos, a lot of the ideas, some of the images, even some of the jokes that you find in Arabic poetry, Persian poetry, Urdu poetry, Turkish poetry, Hausa poetry, Swahili poetry, kind of…Javanese poetry. Almost everywhere, every language, Islamic language, a language that has a lot of… a lot of Muslim speakers for a long time, that has a poetic tradition, I see images like this. So, I was trying to do something like that in English in a way that didn’t sound corny.

Tazin: Well, it sounds beautiful, and I think it’s an excellent example of what we were talking about, is that, you know, the use of language that is familiar to us in English to express a concept that comes from Islam, and you’ve done that so beautifully. And, you know, I would like to ask, especially, you know, in the current… the two things in the current context. One is, of course, migration, with so many Muslims coming to English-dominant countries, where we are interacting. You know, I myself am a Muslim, come from a Muslim immigrant family, right, where we’ve had to interact with English in different ways. And that’s the story of many, many, many Muslim immigrants. And, of course, the onset of AI, where you have these plugins, where you have words just put into machines and coming out. What, you know, as a sociolinguist myself, and for those interested in language use, what can we glean from your work? In English-dominant societies, where English use is tied to socially ascribed identities, how do all these varied speakers of English lay claim to their chosen representation?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, my favorite, analysis of this actually comes not from the, my studies of Islam but from my studies of Yoruba, Yoruba linguistics, and. So Wole Soyinka is our most famous, Nobel Prize-winning author. And one of the, he actually just passed away. I was kind of, almost like an uncle of mine, Biodun Jeyifo, who was a great scholar of Wole Soyinka and comparative literature.

And he called what Soyinka’s English – Big English. He called it Oguntoyinbo. It would take a long time to explain what Oguntoyinbo, but it… the name Oguntoyinbo means…Ogun, who’s the Orisha, the kind of god of iron war in traditional Yoruba language, is equal to the Oyinbo, is equal to the foreigner, is equal to the European. And he said, what Soyinka did with English was he made it it’s his own. And he did things in the language that surpassed what even the supposed owner of the language ever could have imagined doing in it. And what… he quoted one review that was an Irish… I think it was an Irish…reviewer who reviewed one of Soyinka’s plays and said, Wole Soyinka is waking up the napping English language to its kind of magical and metaphysical possibilities inherent in the language, which we’ve forgotten since Spencer or things like that. But, Uncle BJ, as I called him, Jeyifo said. he’s not just waking up the napping English language and taking it back somewhere for the sake of Englishmen and English women, but rather he’s taking it to places that people have never imagined before. Based on his, in Soyinka’s case, his mastery of the Yoruba language. He was growing up steeped in, a lot of beautiful Yoruba oratory traditions. He then brings that to English and transforms and does things in English that you couldn’t imagine doing before.

Because it’s something that’s just ordinary in Yoruba playing with tonalities, or a long string of alliterations, or something like that. He brings it to English, and wow, it’s fireworks! But it’s something that is kind of unprecedented. So this, this is what I think, it’s hard because of, relationships of power, relationships of prejudice, and, and these kinds of things. But people who are sensitive or who have the good sense to appreciate the tremendous gift that people who are coming into English Bring with them. They’re bringing a tremendous gift, they’re enriching and enlivening the English language with new vocabulary, new idioms, new phrases, all of these things. When the language stops growing and adding new phrases, new words, and things, it’s dead. That’s when it’s… that’s when it’s dead. Now, it’s not like everything new that is added is great, you know, there’s a process, you know, usually if it’s…If it speaks to people, if it fills a need in some way, it’ll catch on, and if it doesn’t, it’ll fall by the wayside. How many new words Shakespeare credited with just coming up with himself? English is alive and, you know, fertile and bubbling. Then, and, you know, got a little stultified, and I think now with this wave of people coming in from all over the world, bringing all these different languages… I mean, there’s so many, so many new phrases get added to the OED every year from, let’s say, like, Nigerian English. So, like, “next tomorrow” has been added. And I think also, I didn’t even know this was in Nigerianism, Ember months. So the Ember months are those at the end of the… do you say this in Australia, too? No? No? No? Ember months are…

Tazin: What, you mean the autumn months? Is that what you’re…

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Well, so it’s, it’s the months of the year that end in Ember. September, November.

Tazin: Oh, right, sorry, sorry.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: But it also has big… but it, you know, it also has that, like, an embers, like the, you know, the end of a fire. Yes. So it just, it works perfectly. So, Nigerian English, they call it the ember months, you know, from September onward, those are the ember months.

Tazin: We won’t have that in the Southern Hemisphere, because that’s when it starts to get warm for us.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: It’ll be the opposite, it would be the opposite. But it’s the end of the end of the year, right? So it’s the, you know, just if the year is a fire, as it goes out, you have the embers. But so all of these things are being added to the language, and Islam and Muslims are adding so much. I mean, our poetic traditions have influenced English for hundreds of years. From the Transcendentalists all the way back to probably the sonnet form itself, which was developed in Sicily, probably as, under the influence of the Arabic Ghazal tradition. So, our languages and our literatures in the Islamic world have been influencing English for a very long time, indirectly, and now, English gets the benefit from direct infusion of energy, new concepts, metaphors, and things like that.

In fact, it’s almost like the King James Bible brought a lot of Hebraisms. Things from Hebrew into English, like Song of Songs, Holy of Holies. That’s a construction that you find in Semitic languages. And then, you know, it was brought into Latin, and then from there into English. And that made beautiful English. And now, too, we’re having things… we’re getting infusion of all kinds of different possibilities that can make for a really beautiful and dynamic English. If we can get over some of the narrow prejudices, racial, cultural, otherwise, that close people off to experiencing, things like that.

Tazin: What a wonderful, you know, thought to leave this with – that English is enriched by all the contributions that people from around the world and from different traditions make to it. So, thank you for that. That’s really wonderful. My final question to you is, what is next for you and your work? What other research projects are you working on now?

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, so I’m finishing up a book. Well, I sent it to the press, but I’m sure I’ll have corrections and things on, Layla poetry, poetry about the figure of Layla in a particular North African Sufi order, mystical order, called the Shadhiliya. So, Layla is this, kind of the Arab or OG Romeo and Juliet. Layla is the Juliet’s. Her name means night, or technically intoxication, and her Majnoon, a young man named Qais, fell in love with her and became Majnoon, which means crazy. He’s usually known as Majnun Leila.

And so the Sufi tradition, or this particular Sufi tradition, whenever they want to talk about the divine essence, that which is beyond language, they very often turn to writing poetry about Layla to talk about that which is beyond speech. So the book’s an attempt to figure out what’s going on here, why are they using poetry about Layla to eff the ineffable? What is it about poetry, and what is it about this kind of genre of poetry in particular that makes it, felicitous, for that kind of thing?

Yeah, and I’m still trying to write Qasidas and Ghazals in English. Qasida is a kind of long… tends to be longer, monorhyme, form, and the Ghazal is, a kind of shorter, poetic form with its own rules, but, yeah, I really love writing them, and yeah, I continue to write them, and maybe there’ll be another collection of poetry, in a few years, Insha’Allah.

Tazin: That’s wonderful, and thank you for your time today, and we look forward, actually, to reading more of your work.

Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Thank you so much, this was really fascinating. Appreciate you. Thanks.

Tazin: And thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time.

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

Reference

Betancor-Falcon, S. (2025). Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 44(6), 647-662. https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2025.2486831

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Derince, M. Ş. (2026). Kurdish Heritage Language Education

Transcript

Emily: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Emily Pacheco and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is a Dr Santiago Betancor Falcón. Santiago is a lecturer at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. He holds a PhD in critical sociolinguistics and critical pedagogy. In addition to his PhD focus, his research interests also include applied linguistics, minoritised languages, autonomous language learning, and pedagogical innovation.

Today we are going to talk in general about minoritised languages, and in particular about a 2025 paper that Santiago wrote entitled, “Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain”. Santiago, a warm welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Santiago: Thank you for having me.

Emily: Absolutely. So, to start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist and educator?

Santiago: Well, I mean, I started studying languages when I was 18. That is when I entered college, and I haven’t stopped ever since. Over the years, I’ve studied many different languages, and you know, taking part in countless language exchanges with people from all over the world.

So, teaching languages sort of comes quite naturally to me. I also genuinely enjoy sharing my passion for languages, which is why I feel like this job suits me well.

And then, on how I became a sociolinguist, well, I’ve always enjoyed learning languages on my own, I’m a big autodidact. And I also really, I’m also really interested in politics and philosophy. So, I ended up doing my PhD on the politics of autonomous language learning. You see, there I mixed the two, I mean, all of my interest, all of my interest, really. And actually, I defended my thesis last December, so I’m quite happy about that.

Emily: Yeah, congratulations. Yeah, that was, so now we’re recording this in April. So just a few months ago, that’s awesome. Congratulations.

Santiago: Thank you.

Emily: Yeah, nice. So, it’s nice to hear about a bit of your intersections and your interest there,

how they’re kind of interconnected in your research. So, to kind of start our discussion today about your work and kind of what you researched in your PhD, can you tell us a bit about what language activism is?

Santiago: Okay, so language activism is any kind of activism or advocacy that aims to resist linguistic injustice. And when I say linguistic injustice, I also mean any kind of injustice that may be linked to language. It can be racism, classism, gender inequality, anything, anything really.

However, I mean, it’s true that in my research, I have mainly focused on trying to find solutions

to linguistic injustice in language education. And most recently, I’ve been theorizing autonomous learning as a form of language activism. Because I mean, I do believe that studying languages by yourself can be a way of, I mean, a way to fight for social justice. This can be particularly useful, I mean, this approach for revitalizing minoritized languages and supporting the respective speaking communities.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And kind of in line with that and what you’re saying on, you know, learning a language by yourself, it kind of goes to our next question and minoritized languages and why it may be challenging for people to learn a minoritized language. If you could talk a bit about that as well.

Roma migrations (Image credit: Romaní ćhib: Centro de documentación y promoción de la Lengua Romaní)

Santiago: Sure. Well, it depends on what kind of minoritized language we talk about, right? Because each language presents its own challenges. If you study, let’s say, Catalan, Basque, Irish, I mean, then these may not be too hard since the, I mean, those have institutional support and there are a lot of materials available online. There is also lots of content you can consume, videos, written materials, maybe like in those languages, I just mentioned, maybe even they have a literary canon, right? You can be all day reading in those languages. However, my interest has been mostly languages that are really in a dire situation, okay? Those can be, those can be very, very hard to learn for a variety of reasons.

I mean, the first one is that if the language is mainly oral and non-standardized, then you will probably have very few written materials you can work with and you will probably have to deal with enormous, enormous dialectal diversity, which sounds like fun for us linguists but in reality, you know, that complicates things to the average learner. Also, if there is no standard language or standard spelling system, then the speaking community probably doesn’t even know how to write in their own language. So, they probably just improvise and that means that you need to get used to that, right? You need probably, you will have to learn how to write or say the same word in many different ways, depending on the dialect or, of the person you are talking to, or the particular way they go about writing, right? So, it really depends on the person. You know, languages like Tamazight, right? For example, it can be very challenging because there are very few available resources and there are so many dialects that, I mean, you often don’t even know what to study, especially when you are self-studying, right? If you are learning directly from the community, well, you learn the way they speak, right? But if you are studying by yourself, you have to make choices and yeah, it’s very hard. You never know if what you are learning is something that the community will actually understand. It can be very confusing, what else? Also, I mean, if there is not much content in the language, you know, it may be hard to stay motivated, okay? Because this is not like French or Japanese that you can just learn the language perfectly by consuming content. You don’t even need to talk to people in real life to just, you know, consume content and learn it on your own. But you know, with minoritized languages, it’s different. You have to work with whatever you can get your hands on and, you know, you need to make the most of it. Also, you know, it often happens that the content and resources you do find, those may not be appropriate for your level, or you find them uninteresting. So, you know, that can, I mean, that’s a bummer, really. You know, finally, something to keep in mind is that when you learn a minoritized language and you start engaging with the community, you’re probably going to have to learn about and deal with the generational intergenerational trauma that’s linked to that language. Because, I mean, you know, you don’t become minoritized through hugs and kisses, right? Instead, minoritized-minoritized-minoritized-minoritized, what, sorry, I’m still learning over, after so many years. Instead, I mean, linguistic minoritization can be a, and often is a very violent process. Okay, for example, I’ve studied Neapolitan for many years, and this is a very stigmatized language. And its speakers have also suffered a lot of racism, classism, you name it, all kinds of violence, really. So, they tend to have a very low self-esteem in regards to their language. They think that, for example, in the case of Neapolitan, they think that it’s not a real language. I mean, in Italy language discrimination is a huge problem. Anything other than Italian is called a dialetto, right, like a patois, like dialect, not a “real language”. So, if you speak a regional language, that means that you’re poor, rural, uneducated, yada yada. So, you know, you go very excited to talk to them, because you love the language, you want to get to know people, and then they may react in a weird way, or they even ask you, why do you even learn our language, right, like what’s the point? I wouldn’t learn it, right, so that can be very, very discouraging when you learn about the situations.

And I mean, I could be all day telling you anecdotes of this kind that I’ve had in different languages. But yeah, you have to deal with the sociolinguistic situation of the language in the community. You also need to face the injustices, those speaking communities suffer, which is precisely why I believe that self-studying a language can lead to activism.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, that’s a great point to highlight about the sociolinguistic situation of a language and how that can influence, you know, the learning experience, even though people may think it’s great, we’re learning more minoritized languages, but then the speakers or users

of those languages, you know, may have some feelings and experiences that, you know,

are important to acknowledge and be considerate of when you’re learning a minoritized language.

And that greatly leads us into your paper that we’re going to discuss today, specifically

your 2025 paper entitled, “Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain”.

And so, in this paper, you conceptualize autonomous language learning as activism, as you’ve

mentioned a bit already, and specifically within the context of learning Romani in your paper,

among the Spanish Roma community.

So, can you tell us a bit about Romani revitalization efforts in the Spanish Roma community in particular?

Santiago: Sure. Well, the first thing to understand is that Roma have been living in Spain for over 600 years. And they used to speak their own language, Rromani ćhib, the Romani language, but due to centuries of systemic discrimination, persecution, and even genocidal attempts, they slowly stopped passing the language down to the new generations. And even nowadays, antigypsyism is one, I would say, it’s one of the most extreme forms of racism in Europe. We often talk about racism against other ethnicities, and we are very aware that that’s not okay. But for what I see, especially in Eastern Europe, but really all around the world, people feel very comfortable attacking Roma people, and it’s just abhorrent.

So, over the centuries, the language deteriorated over time. First, it became a creole of Romani and another dominant language, so let’s say Romani and Spanish, but could also be Romani and Portuguese and Spanish, Catalan, Basque, etc. So, this creole sort of works. We call it a para-Romani variety. You get the grammar of the dominant language, let’s say Spanish. And then to that, the grammar you apply Romani vocabulary, so that’s how the mix works. And then it progressively, you know, this para-Romani, this creole, progressively got so diluted that nowadays Spanish Roma have only have a limited Romani lexicon that they may throw in when speaking Spanish, Catalan, or other languages.

And even that, right, this is already a dialect, this is a Spanish dialect. But even those few words they still remember, those are being eroded as well. So, you know, this process is what we call linguicide, okay. This is that, I mean, that is the murder of a language. And in this case, we could also say a partial ethnocide, since many parts of their cultural, their culture were killed along with the language.

However, the good news is that the language is very much alive abroad, and now many Spanish Roma are reclaiming their heritage language through autonomous and collective study.

Emily: Yeah, that is good news. That’s great news. And that’s what we’re here to talk about as well. And I think it’s good to see the efforts that have been happening there to revitalize the language, which is hopefully that can be applied to other language communities as well.

And so, in your paper, specifically, you present some qualitative data you collected

through interviews with Spanish Roma autodidacts.

So, could you share your experience conducting the interviews and tell us a bit about your participants even?

Santiago: Sure. And something maybe I haven’t mentioned is that they are autodidacts because they have no institutional support. So that’s why it’s grassroots activism, precisely because of that.

And now to answer your question, I mean, the first thing to understand is that a significant number of Roma people around the world, okay, Romani people, see the Romani language as a closed practice. Okay, meaning that they don’t want outsiders to learn it. And for the most part, they don’t teach it. In my case, everything I know about the language comes from materials created by Romani people and from Roma who, you know, they just trusted me and were willing to share their cultural language and knowledge with me. And for that I’m forever grateful.

Now, during my own self-learning of the language, I got to know quite a few wonderful Roma from all around the world. But specifically, especially from Spain, who, you know, people who had learned their language on their own, and were also teaching it too, teaching it to other Roma. In fact, the people I interview, the Roma I interview in my paper, they are all very important people within their communities. So, you know, they have a lot of interesting things to say. So, you know, when I asked them if they wanted to share their story, they loved the idea. And anyone who reads the article and the interviews will see that they are amazing people and their activism is truly an example for many other communities facing language endangerment and other forms of oppression.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely could feel that when I was reading your paper and there’s a lot of really good quotes from participants, based on the situation there and what they’re doing.

And so, to talk a bit more about that from your findings, it’s really interesting to see the autonomous learning and collective learning that occurred for your participants.

So, what were some of the learning strategies that they enacted and how did this shape their learning experience?

Santiago: Well, I mean, they had to work, I mean, they have, they had to work with very few materials, especially before the internet was even a thing. So, for example, some would look for, I mean, they would look for texts with translations, and they would study them non-stop. I mean, they didn’t have anything else. Also, they befriended Roma from other countries, and they would ask them questions. So, these people, you know, they couldn’t talk every day, especially before the internet, right? They would send letters and stuff like that. So, they would act as sort of mentors, but not really teachers. And, you know, over the years, little by little, they created their own materials. And as their level got better, they started interacting more and more with Romani speakers from abroad, especially on social media that really helped. And they would practice everything they had learned during their self-study with those speakers. Again, this was a very slow process. It took them years. And the beautiful thing is that once they learned it, once they learned the language, they started teaching other Spanish Roma how to speak it. So, you see, so that’s activism, right? Self-reclaiming your stolen language and then helping the community to also reclaim it. I think that’s powerful, very powerful.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, in your paper, you talk a bit about that sense of community, the impacts of that.

And so, my next question kind of is along those lines. And there was a quote from one of your participants that I thought really resonated with this question that I’ll read out for our listeners.

So, this participant says, “My circle started to expand; I began to meet and interact with Roma people from all over Europe. I’ve travelled practically from east to west. I have friends who are like family in every country. Borders have started to fade for me. The language has made me much more international, giving me a sense of belonging to a group that’s even broader than when . . . Back then, it was just Spain, you know? Now I realise [romanipen] is not just European, but global. My sense of ethnic belonging has opened to a much broader culture . . .”

So, you know, that quote can really show the psychological impact of studying Romani among the Spanish Roma learners, that sense of community again, the impacts of that, if you want to speak a bit more about that.

Santiago: I mean, yeah, they love their language and they cherish, they cherish it.

Again, language is one of the most important identity markers a community has. So, when you recover that, it means the world to you. Also, the great thing about learning Romani in particular is that it is spoken all across Europe, Russia, the Middle East and even the Americas. So, it really opened them up to a whole new world. And I mean, he said it very eloquently.

Also, other Roma explained to me in the article that this has been a process of self-discovery that has brought them a strong sense of dignity and love for who they are and their people. I mean, I think that’s fantastic. We need more of that, especially today. I mean, nowadays we still have a lot of antigypsyism. And so, you see, they are, by learning the language, they are not just reclaiming their heritage language, improving their mental health even as you mentioned. But they are also resisting ongoing discrimination, ongoing attempts to basically force assimilation, right? They are resisting forced assimilation. So, I think that’s also very powerful.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do agree. And kind of, you know, you’ve been saying this throughout the conversation, but could you tell us a bit more about how self-learning Romani can be political and considered socio-political activism in particular?

Santiago: Again, whether you look at it individually or collectively, reclaiming the language doesn’t just strengthen people’s sense of belonging and self-esteem. It is a political act, and a very meaningful one. And I think that since we are not Roma, rather than just only talking about them, I would like to take this opportunity to just, you know, answer your question by reading one of the quotations from the interviews. And in that way, as you did earlier, in that way, we can use this platform to amplify their voices. Regarding your question on why they consider this a form of language activism, they consider their learning as language activism. One of the participants said, and I quote, “Spain has the obligation to make it possible for us to relearn our language since they were the ones who took it from us! Especially here in Spain, we’ve gone through 600 years of repression, from the attempts to genocide us, to the royal decrees banning our language. So, now, reclaiming the language is a totally rebellious, defiant act—a real statement!”.

And then he goes on about his, his and their goals, he says, “Our goals could be many: there’s the personal and collective fulfilment of recovering something important that was forcibly taken from us . . . And then, to also send a message to the government, ‘look, you had a responsibility, because of the historical debt you have with us, to support this . . . But see? We did it without you!’. They gave millions to the Catalans and the Basques, but what about us? As always, we did it on our own—without the help you should be giving us.  ‘We can handle this ourselves, you know? We’re rebuilding what you tried to destroy’”.

End of the quote.

Emily: Yeah, that’s really well said. And I think, you know, throughout this conversation about the Spanish Roma in particular, you can see a lot of the resilience to self-learning and, you know, that they have succeeded in their efforts and they’re going to try to revitalize the language. But the optimist in me hopes that one day they will have institutional support and the success of, you know, what they’re doing in their community will translate to future efforts. What do you think about that?

Santiago: Well, actually, that’s very important and they do acknowledge the importance of institutional support. You know, in general, Roma people, because of systemic racism and discrimination, they are very… They basically don’t trust non-Roma for very good reasons, right?

But they acknowledge that at some point, if this keeps growing at some point, I mean, they are also Spanish nationals, right? They have rights. And one of those rights should be the protection of their heritage. So eventually, hopefully, that will happen. There will be a transition to a more, you know, towards a standardized version of the language that can be taught in schools. Hopefully, in the future, that will happen. The problem is that right now, institutions, they tend to… They don’t really care. They are cynical about their… their supposed… I mean, their so-called support for the language and the community. So, what they explain in the interviews is that oftentimes institutions and ONGs even… They just try to, you know, to look like they’re progressive and they care and whatnot. But in reality, what they’re doing is using Roma for their own political gain and, you know, improving their self-image. So, so far, because that’s a situation, rampant antigypsyism and institutional indifference and also systemic discrimination.

Because that’s the situation that’s why they have to rely mostly on individual and collective activism. And they acknowledge… they acknowledge themselves that their own activism has been more successful and impactful than anything that any institution so far has done.

So, yeah, they are resistant.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing a bit more of that situation with us and giving us some of these insights we’ve talked about today. It’s been really, really good. And just to wrap up our conversation today is, what is next for you and your work? Is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience today?

Santiago: Well, I mean, first of all, I encourage the audience to go read the full article.

I really think that what Roma shared with me in those interviews has enormous value.

Well, right now, I continue doing research on minoritized languages, such as Neapolitan and Tamazight. But, you know, I would love to keep learning Romani and do more research, especially in collaboration with Roma researchers. So, if there’s anyone out there who maybe needs help in any way or wants to work with me, please do reach out.

And to finish, I’d like to also encourage the audience to study languages and, you know, to use them as a way to make the world a better place. And that’s it.

As we say in Romani, te aven baxtale, sastipen thaj mestepen. I wish you all good health and freedom.

Emily: Thank you so much. That was lovely Santiago. Yeah, I definitely will put your LinkedIn or your contact in our show notes that go out with the Language on the Move blog and the transcript there. And so, if anyone is interested to collaborate, that would be great, that we could have a collaboration or connection come from this podcast episode. But yeah, thanks again, Santiago. This has been great. And thanks for joining everyone.

Santiago: Yes, thank you.

Emily: If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!

This book explores creative uses of social media for informal language learning. It focuses on the underexplored area of how informal language learning adapts to technological innovations in two multimodal media-sharing platforms: TikTok and Instagram.

Drawing on ecological perspectives of language learning and spatial understandings of digital technology and learning, the research reported in this book unpacks how social media technologies are used for language learning. It presents insights from a dual-level qualitative methodological design: a comparative study of public online data of social media posts collected from TikTok and Instagram, and a multiple case study based on ethnographic narrative data gathered from participants’ journal entries, stimulated recall interviews, and social media posts. This book reveals the dynamic landscape of digital language learning that is being integrated into learners’ everyday lives through multimodal content creation and networking.

This book enriches readers’ understanding of social media’s role in language learning, and offers pedagogical strategies for teachers to integrate newer technologies and multimodal materials into language classrooms to enhance students’ learning experiences.

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

Reference

Lee, Y. J. (2025). Social Media and Language Learning: Using TikTok and Instagram. Taylor & Francis.

Related content

Bruzon, A. S. (2025). Why “critical” use of AI in education might mean refusal. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/why-critical-use-of-ai-in-education-might-mean-refusal/
Quick, B. (2025). Researching Language and Digital Communication, with Christian Ilbury. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/researching-language-and-digital-communication/
Quick, B. (2025). Teaching International Students, with Agnes Bodis and Jing Fang. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/teaching-international-students/
Rillera Kempster, J. (2025). Centering people in technology-mediated communication. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/centering-people-in-technology-mediated-communication/

Transcript (added 02/06/2026)

BRYNN: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Yeong Ju Lee.

Yeong Ju is an academic in the Department of Linguistics and the School of Education at Macquarie University. Her research interests include digital language learning and teaching with a focus on digital literacy, multimodality, digital spaces, social media, and AI. Today, Yeong Ju and I will be discussing her 2026 book, Social Media and Language Learning, Using TikTok and Instagram, published by Routledge.

Yeong Ju, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today. At the very beginning of your book, you write, “This book explores language learners’ creative uses of social media for informal language learning, that is not for formal institutional and instructional purposes.” Talk to us about the difference between learning a language formally versus informally, and what got you interested in studying this contrast.

YEONG JU LEE: Formal learning is usually like the traditional concept of language learning. So usually classroom-based, structured, curriculum-based, and usually teacher-led and assessment-driven. Whereas informal language learning is self-directed, everyday activities, and it includes resources like social media, digital platforms like video games and VR.

They’re not usually designed to be used as teaching materials. So, it’s not designed for learning, it’s more for recreational social purposes. So actually, everything started during COVID time when everybody was at home, right?

So, I just realized that everybody was doing a lot of social media things. And then I think that was the time when TikTok kind of made a huge hit, huge success over the world. So, people doing different trends all over the world that try to copy what other people do, right?

So, I just realized that people are doing a lot of creative content creation. And then at that time also I was interested in, okay, what’s going on in TikTok? And I started using it.

And I realized that, okay, there is a lot of language learning going on, right? So, I think at this point, we have to define what learning is, but it’s more like learning acquisition, like awareness of language used on TikTok or social media, right? So, I just realized that people do engage language used on social media, and they do exchange, so language exchange as well.

And then people like to comment on there about their digital content, things like that. So, I felt that, okay, so at that time, now it’s a bit different time. At that time, I felt like institutional spaces kind of shifted to everyday digital spaces and learners actually use and propose social media.

They’re not designed for language learning, for their own language learning spaces. And I observed interactions and participation of those users. And I see that this is multimodal.

This is multimodal communication. This is how people communicate in digital spaces. And language use and learning can occur in that area.

So that’s how I started. That’s how I started my PhD degree on social media, focusing on Instagram and TikTok, trying to approach to more younger generations.

BRYNN: With you talking about social media, and especially TikTok during COVID, I feel like that just gave me flashbacks that I kind of hadn’t thought about in a while. Like, do you remember during the beginning of COVID when we would see people doing duets and people from all different parts of the world doing these dance trends because they were all stuck inside? So, you’re right that that was really a time period where there was this huge boom of TikTok and this huge shift into the digital world because we kind of had to shift into the digital world.

YEONG JU LEE: But it’s a bit different time now that we don’t have to shift into the digital time because COVID is not around anymore. So, but then I think ever since that, like people kind of learned that we can use the digital spaces more actively. So now I realize that learners, they use social media within their daily lives.

So, it’s embedded within their lives. So social media use and learning through social media are embedded within their lives.

BRYNN: Well, and that brings me to my next question because when we talk about learning another language, we often discuss the idea of this word affordances. So, in our sphere, an affordance is essentially how a particular language learning tactic allows or doesn’t allow us to learn. So, what did you find are the affordances of language learning on these social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok?

And how do these affordances differ from affordances offered by a more traditional classroom learning environment?

YEONG JU LEE: So, affordances refer to what technologies enable or promote learners to do. And social media affordances, for example, we have multimodality that we can use text, video, audio, images, we have also instant access. So, we have like search features or algorithmic discovery.

We just open the phone, right? And then we just scroll down and it’s immediate. It’s immediate.

Like we don’t even have to actually do anything. So, like as if like social media actually have prepared something for us, right? And then once you start searching something like algorithm just starts working, right?

So, it’s all like depending on how you design your language learning spaces. So, if you search like, let’s say Korean, then algorithm will show you Korean content. And there’s interaction, there’s like comments and feedback people share.

And it’s all global participation, everyone in the globe. But the differences between TikTok and Instagram that I’ve realized that like depends on how people use them. So, TikTok, for example, when it comes to language learning, people often use it for pronunciation or speaking practice, because it’s a short form video.

That’s how the videos can demonstrate. Instagram, people often use it for grammar explanation, vocabulary, visual explanations, and like using the carousel learning post, where there you can post many images in one post. But then I actually Instagram does have video sharing format as well.

So, it’s quite different ways of interpreting the social media platform use. So, I think it’s when it comes to affordances, technologies are there, features are there. It depends on the users, how they perceive them, how they act upon them.

So, because even the technologies and features are there, if you don’t recognize them, if you don’t utilize them for your own ways, they are just there and you don’t get to use them. Compared to classroom, so classroom I believe it’s more structured. However, it may have a bit limited interactional patterns unless teachers intentionally put some engaging activities, but there are some limits depending on the classroom size, especially if it’s a large class, it’s quite limited when it comes to organizing engaging activities.

However, social media as we said, it’s spontaneous, it’s very immediate, and it’s very learner-driven, like user-driven, right? So, you can actually design your social media platform in a way that you want. So, your TikTok and your TikTok main page might be different from my TikTok main page, right?

So, depending on you and it’s very multimodal learning. So, you can use videos, images, texts, anything, just very multimodal and actively engaging with such multimodal elements.

BRYNN: And do you think that it’s that multimodality that maybe a traditional classroom is lacking in?

YEONG JU LEE: I guess that it’s more, I think there is a multimodality within the classroom of traditional classroom as well. Like, for example, like teacher talking, students talking with peers and group activity. Maybe like they have like fun activities, roam around the classroom as well.

However, social media, I think it’s a bit in a different way. So, it has a bit of less pressure and less organized, less organized and less teacher led. So, it’s depending on the learner, I guess that learner can actually decide the degree of multimodality as well.

So, if they want to include more, if they want to include less, it depends on them.

BRYNN: And that’s a good point that these learners, because of these affordances, they maybe have a bit more agency than they would in a traditional classroom. And this is a big theme that you identified in your data, was that language learners really appreciated this ability to have more agency through learning via Instagram and TikTok. So why do you think learners’ sense of agency was so important to your participants, but to learners in general?

And how did these social media platforms allow for this agency in ways that other learning methods might not?

YEONG JU LEE: Learner agency is learners’ control or manage their learning, and it’s up to the learners’ motivation. So, like motivation, autonomy, personalized learning path, that’s all important for agency, right? But I guess that for my participants, they were really interested in learning English.

They wanted to improve their English to live in Australia, so their agency was really strong. Their agency was really strong. So, they started following language creators, and they started save useful posts, and they replay videos, and they tried to like copy and mimic what the other Australians actually sound, and they tried to create their own content.

But this case is for those who have strong agency. But that’s the point of using social media, because social media are not designed for learning. So, people mostly use social media for their social and recreational purposes.

For those who don’t want to use social media, they can’t use social media, because it’s not designed for learning. So, you must actually exercise your agency to utilize the affordances and feature opportunities in social media. And I guess in general, agency is important in like not just social media, but in just general in your learning, right?

Because like motivated students usually have a higher level of proficiency or performance. And it’s motivation and confidence, and it’s kind of drives your learning all the way, because it’s a lifelong journey, right? So, it’s the agency that initiates your learning, and then it’s the agency that makes you continue your learning.

So, agency is important, I guess, in general, not just about social media.

BRYNN: I kind of want to go back to something that you mentioned before, which was, and you just talked about the idea of confidence in a learner. And a few questions ago, you had mentioned something about learners maybe not feeling as much pressure when they’re learning English or language through something like social media. Do you think that, because I honestly hadn’t really thought about that before, that people would potentially feel that intense scrutiny or that pressure in a traditional classroom environment, and that maybe learning through something like TikTok or Instagram is less pressure because you’re on your own?

Like you said, you are creating your own algorithm. You’re seeing what you want to see. Do you feel like the idea of a learner having less pressure on them is something that drew your participants to social media?

YEONG JU LEE: Yes. I think one of my participants might be a very good example for this. He emphasized that he’s a very introverted person.

It’s his word. He said, I’m a very introverted person. I don’t know what to do because that was probably just one month or two months after he arrived in Australia.

He said he’s very introverted. He doesn’t know how to approach people.

He doesn’t know how to explore Australia. But he really was motivated to improve his English. He really was motivated to leave and stay in Australia.

However, he got so much pressure and so much stress in the classroom. Nothing wrong with teachers or peers. It’s just the pressure that’s giving him that you have to perform well.

Because he also mentioned that he’s from a country and culture, where making mistakes is not really allowed. And then I told him, have you ever used TikTok or Instagram, social media? Just do whatever you want.

I didn’t really ask him what to do either. And then he just explored and he came back to me, this is crazy, this is amazing, because he started following these Australian creators and just picked up these daily life expressions. Daily life expressions like feeling like, I feel under the weather, for example.

Those expressions he never had to come across before. And then he just, I think one week, two weeks, he was just using the social media just by himself, just scrolling down, looking into the content and maybe picked up some vocabulary and expressions. And then one day, he felt that maybe I’m confident enough to say a word.

And then he used those expressions with his peers in the classroom with his teacher. And then also he just went to like a restaurant or cafe and then tried to like use expressions that he learned from the prank videos and like fun videos on TikTok. And then he said, this game is so much confidence.

That’s how that’s the one good example of using social media. And I think people may think about the intellectual depth when it comes to social media. Maybe it’s a surface level learning.

Maybe for some learners, yes, because it’s very short form video platform, but for learners who actually are in need, in need of that level of learning that works. And I think intellectual depth also depends on how you actually use that content. Do you maybe just scroll down that content and just like, just consume it?

Or do you actually maybe try to listen to it and then try to listen to it again and again, try to maybe copy the pronunciation or accent? Or do you maybe search in like Google Dictionary or ChatGPT to look for other definitions or examples that like maybe even like practical examples that you might be using in your daily life. So that’s the intellectual depth.

So, the learning in digital space, it doesn’t end in one space. It’s cross-platform language learning and it’s the connection between digital and physical spaces. So, you maybe pick up one vocabulary or expression from TikTok and that may end of your learning.

And we can kind of criticize where is the intellectual depth, where it’s learning, is it actually learning? However, for those students who have a strong agency, strong motivation, that person might explore the definition in Google Dictionary, as for examples in the Wikipedia, for example, or maybe even go to like ChatGPT and then say, can you maybe give some examples that are situations that I can use the expressions, or maybe can we do role play with the voice feature with ChatGPT? So that’s where we can discuss the intellectual depth of using different digital spaces.

BRYNN: Well, and it’s a really good point that not every language lesson needs to have intellectual depth because-

YEONG JU LEE: That’s also a good point.

BRYNN: Because it’s just as important, like you were saying, for a learner to gain enough everyday phrases and words that they feel comfortable enough to go approach people in a shop, in a cafe, whatever, and start to use the language. And then little by little, they’ll get more and more and more confident and then they can go into more, you know, “intellectual depth”.

YEONG JU LEE: Right. So like, I think there was a time people were really interested in using gaming or music, and maybe even play some movies in the classroom. That was all for that.

That was all for fun activities to make students be interested in more and more. Be confident, be motivated, so that when students have motivation and confidence, they can do something else. That’s all the sparks.

BRYNN: Some of the… Because my second language is Spanish, and so some of the phrases in Spanish that I remember most are from when I learned them by watching a movie in class, you know, or by listening to a song in class. So, you’re right that videos on social media, any type of social media, can encourage our learners, and that’s what every teacher wants anyway, for the learners to feel encouraged.

And another theme that emerged from your data was the idea of transnational collaboration while learning, which I thought was so interesting, especially in this case, while learning English. So, in the book, you describe how the comment sections of language-related posts would be full of learners from all over the world asking questions and seeking feedback. Why do you think this participatory element is so important to language learners who are reacting in the comment sections?

YEONG JU LEE: In traditional classroom learning, it’s important to participate. So, teacher and students, it’s two ways. So, teacher may deliver the knowledge, but it’s the students, up to students who participate, try to transfer that knowledge into their own, right?

So that’s what’s happening in TikTok as well. So maybe one creator post like multi-modal content in their post, and then other people comment on their section. Maybe those people just like, maybe they didn’t have to, like they could just scroll down and move on, right?

But they instead comment, which means that there was a curiosity, there was interest, there was a little bit of motivation of learning further, right? So, it’s very global interaction spaces, and all the people, all the speakers of different languages, they gather in one space. So, it’s a multilingual communication, people from different countries, and it’s also interesting when someone posts, they also like to comment each other.

So, commenters, they like to comment each other, and then they like to solve the problem together. So maybe one person asks a question, but then other commenter actually answer that. So, it’s very interesting dynamics in the comment section.

Also, they like to ask for clarification of pronunciation vocabulary. So, is that how you say? Is this correct?

Can I use this expression in this situation? Things like, so is it a bit rude, or is it appropriate to use in my work context? Things like this.

They like to have a clarification. So learning and social media is on your own. So, there’s no teacher, right?

That’s why I think they seek for clarification. Like, am I understanding correctly? Can I use this in my life?

So that’s what was happening in comment. And I think TikTok is just interesting. For example, it has its own feature of promoting interaction, like Duet, for example.

So, it actually made a feature called Duet, encouraging users to respond to another person’s post directly just by clicking one icon. So, this platform is actually designed to interact. And while interacting, we learn.

We absolutely learn through interacting.

And that’s the same for Classroom as well.

BRYNN: Well, and that, I think, is a really good point because I’ve taught English before. And I think any language teacher especially knows that in a classroom, because I taught adults, in a classroom, you’re going to have some students who are so ready to participate and are so ready to speak. They’re ready to go up to the whiteboard, you know, with a whiteboard marker.

And they’re ready to make mistakes in front of you, the teacher, and also their classroom peers. But like you said, there are also going to be students in the classroom who are not okay with making a mistake in front of other people. And they don’t necessarily want to ask a question that they really want to know the answer to because they’re afraid of maybe looking foolish or being wrong.

And so that’s why I thought that the point that you made about the comments section is so important because that’s almost a way for those students who feel a bit too nervous to make these mistakes in class, to seek clarification, to ask questions, and to be able to get their questions answered.

YEONG JU LEE: So, I think for classroom, it depends on how the lesson is designed. Of course, teachers will look into individuals’ learning needs and interests. It’s really hard for teachers and for students as well to make the classroom that satisfy everyone’s needs, right?

So, there will be people who are very motivated, they’re very outgoing, they like to participate and ask questions. They’re also students who are a bit less motivated in doing in that way.

BRYNN: And they’re maybe more introverted.

YEONG JU LEE: Yeah, that’s right. But then good thing about social media or any other digital space that you can use on your own is you can do on your own, at your pace, whatever you want.

And with a little bit more anonymity as well.

If you’re more active, actually, you might create your own content. But if you’re less active, you might just, you don’t create your own content, but you rather look at other people’s content and maybe comment there and go to other platforms like dictionary, Google dictionary or AI, just to explore your own ways of learning. It depends on individuals.

BRYNN: Yes, that’s right. You’ve got your choice. Exactly. And so, on that, in chapter four of the book, you write, quote, students frequently use the search feature on Instagram and TikTok to quickly find linguistic information on new words and expressions they encountered in real-life interactions. This helped them to overcome language barriers and to build confidence, to use new vocabulary while engaging in in-place interactions, end quote.

So, kind of what we were just talking about. And I think that anyone who has tried to learn a new language knows this feeling of encountering words and phrases in the wild and wanting to know their meanings and usages right away. And 4,000 years ago, back in my day, when I was learning Spanish, all I had access to were paper dictionaries, like no phones with internet yet.

So, I had to really ask Spanish speakers to define new words and phrases for me when I heard them. And like we were just talking about, this meant having to overcome feeling embarrassed about how much I didn’t know, and I had to be okay with making lots of mistakes in front of people. And so, kind of what we were just saying, I think that you described these learners appreciating, some of the learners appreciating the ability to be more anonymous about their language questions.

And did they find that they didn’t really have to ask people for clarification because they could just find their answers online? And if they did like being anonymous in this social media space, what might that mean for language teachers and learners who are in traditional classrooms?

YEONG JU LEE: Actually, my participants, their main purpose was using social media or any kinds of resources to assist their language learning. They want to use them in real life. That was the purpose.

Their purpose is, I want to improve my English so I can speak with my friends, and I speak with teachers and speak with Australians in Australia to stay and live in Australia. So, I think none of them actually wanted to just stay within digital spaces. So, like I said, now we live in a world where digital and physical spaces are just interconnected.

BRYNN: They are intertwined. It’s not just like, we already have long passed the time when we had to open the laptop to access the digital space. We live in digital space.

YEONG JU LEE: Yeah, it’s connected, it’s intertwined. So, when they hear some words that they were confusing, they just open their phone and then just search something, and then they would get definitions and examples. And the one good thing about social media is it’s very quick.

So, you could just see how it’s actually used in their practical and real life. And then when you actually encounter such real life in your life, you can use that. So that’s how they use search feature for seeking for clarification of what they encounter in their life.

And then actually the interaction happened vice versa. So, they see something on social media, and then they try to use that in their daily life as well. But obviously, like I said, social media is not designed for learning.

It’s not designed for education. It’s not also designed for language learning, right? So, when it comes to the social media content, is it accurate?

Like accuracy, it’s also up to users, right? So, like I said, some of my participants, they would explore different platforms, like including Google Dictionary, or ChatGPT. And some of them actually ask teachers for clarification as well, ask peers for discussion of to seek for clarification.

All these learning processes, right? But social media content definitely needs the clarification of accuracy because it’s designed for recreational purpose. So, some of the content might be leading to inaccurate use of language.

So, in such cases, yes, they need to. Actually, one of my participants, I found it very cute, but I think it was very stressful situation for her. She saw this TikTok video and then she learned that you have to say, “chill”, to calm down the situation when everybody was a bit like, you know.

BRYNN: But that’s very informal.

YEONG JU LEE: Yeah, that’s very informal because that’s what’s happening on social media, right? So, it’s informal language use and conversational language use. However, she learned that and then she used it to her teacher.

When her teacher was a bit upset, and then teacher was apparently mad, right? But however, teacher, she explained that during the lunch break, again, this is how I learned, and maybe it was a bit inappropriate, and then teacher actually had a further explanation of how chill should be used, and what’s the alternative expression that she could use in the classroom, right? And she told me that it was a bit stressful, but she also told me that after a week or so, she kind of thought of it, and then she realized that that’s her learning, right?

She now realized that something that she’s seen in social media, maybe she would look for more research, more explanations or examples. So, she learned that, okay, social media is really good because it’s giving me different expressions and vocabulary that I can use in my life because it’s very informal, very conversational and communicative.

It’s very useful. However, maybe those are the expressions that I might use with my friends more. And if there is anything that I’m not clear on, I can use other digital resources and even I can ask my teacher for clarification.

That’s whole learning process. How amazing is that, right? That she realized that experience.

BRYNN: And you’re right that that is a lesson in and of itself. That is language learning in and of itself. I mean, any of us who have learned another language, we’ve all made those mistakes before.

YEONG JU LEE: And also, she mentioned that, okay, that’s the one way of using the social media TikTok that is made in daily lives. But she also found that there are some teachers on social media. There are some teachers who upload teaching content, which is more appropriate because those teachers intentionally make that social media account and intentionally upload teaching account to teach and deliver the knowledge to students.

So, she follows some of the Australian English teachers and learned the more formal ways of language use as well. So, there are different ways of using social media.

BRYNN: And that means, like you said, that it’s up to each individual learner to check and to seek clarification. And you mentioned a little bit about, you know, ChatGPT as well, and how the learners have to check to make sure that what ChatGPT is saying is correct. Because we know that it is not always correct.

YEONG JU LEE: We’re talking about social media platforms, so maybe we focus on learning from social media, but there are people who learn from AI first. So maybe ChatGPT might be the first place where they access the knowledge. And are you, like those students, will they stop there or will they continue to explore further?

BRYNN: That brings me to my last question for you. Where do you see the future of language learning and teaching headed in this age of learning through social media or AI or these other digital ways of learning?

YEONG JU LEE: So, I think we live in a digital era with the AI as well. I think we’re at the time that we can’t really avoid. But as teachers, we guide students to use them effectively, ethically, and more appropriately.

I think that’s our job. Because even if we say, don’t use AI for these, like all these black points, and use AI only for these, all these black points, the same goes to social media. We actually don’t know whether students follow our instruction or not.

So, we try to guide them to use them more effective way, an ethical way, and instead of telling them what to do and what not to do, we actually try to include activities in using such technologies within our classroom, and so that students actually get exposed to effective and ethical ways of using. Students have more experience, more and more of using it more ethical way. Students will learn how to use ethical way, because giving them the list of what to do and what not to do, that’s not enough anymore, and that’s same for social media and AI as well.

That’s what we have to do in our education as teachers. Also, when it comes to social media ban in Australia, social media is banned for our children. My point of, like my whole this entire work, including this book, it’s not about promoting the social media platforms, but it’s about recognizing the realities of learners, the digital era that we live in, and try to engage with them critically and ethically.

For the primary classroom, for example, we would get the idea, take the idea of multimodal content and bring that into the classroom. It’s not like teachers or students have to make Instagram account or TikTok account. It’s not like they have to interact within that platform.

We got the idea from these platforms, and we take advantage from that idea to make our classroom more engaging and more multimodal. So that’s the whole point of this work, and I think same goes to AI as well.

BRYNN: I like that final thought of take what is good, take what learners seem to really be responding to, which is that multimodality, potentially that anonymity for the people who feel more introverted or scared, and making sure that teachers in real classroom environments know about these things that learners want as well, because then the teachers can bring those lessons into their classrooms and, like you said, tailor their lessons more for these students.

YEONG JU LEE: So, instead of downloading TikTok or Instagram, because we’ve already got the idea from those platforms, then maybe just a group of students, they would film their own videos in playground, in like corner of the classroom. And maybe like corner of the classroom can be like flower shop, cafe. And then they would like do role play of barista and customer like try to order coffee.

And that’s the practice of ordering coffee in English, for example. So, you can kind of mimic the environment of the digital platforms in your classroom, in your school. It can be outside in the playground as well.

You can do something fun for engaging for students. And that can be fun and engaging at the same time, educational as well.

BRYNN: Excellent. Well, thank you so much again, Yeong Ju. Thank you for speaking to us today.

YEONG JU LEE: Thank you very much for having me.

BRYNN: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time.

How interpreting drains the bilingual mind

Simultaneous interpreting is often described as one of the most cognitively demanding language activities humans perform. Interpreters must listen to a rapidly unfolding speech in one language while almost instantly reformulating it in another—accurately, fluently, and without the luxury of pauses. This constant overlap of listening, remembering, and speaking places extraordinary demands on the brain.

A new study on Chinese–English bilinguals helps clarify what this pressure means in cognitive terms. The findings suggest that even a brief session of simultaneous interpreting can temporarily drain working memory, a core mental resource, reducing the brain’s ability to benefit from immediate practice.

Working memory, working hard

Working memory is the brain’s mental “scratchpad.” It allows us to briefly hold information in mind, manipulate it, and integrate it with other inputs. You rely on it when remembering a phone number long enough to dial it, following multi-step instructions, or holding the beginning of a sentence in mind while reading the end.

For interpreters, working memory is indispensable. They must comprehend incoming words, track meaning, reorganize syntax, and produce speech—all while more input keeps arriving. The system is under constant pressure.

The long-standing assumption in interpreting research has been that this intense mental juggling taxes working memory heavily. Yet most evidence so far has been indirect, based on brain imaging, pupil dilation, or comparisons between trained interpreters and non-interpreters. What has been missing is a clear causal test: does interpreting itself immediately affect working memory performance?

Putting the question to the test

The research design (Image credit: Chou et al., 2026)

To answer this, we recruited 50 Chinese–English bilinguals enrolled in a master’s program in translation and interpreting. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group spent ten minutes performing simultaneous interpreting from Chinese (their first language) into English. The other group completed a control task: listening to the same speech and answering comprehension questions afterward. Crucially, everyone completed a series of cognitive tests both before and immediately after the task, namely:

• A working memory task that measured how well participants could remember and integrate visual information.
• A classic Stroop task to assess inhibitory control.
• Verbal fluency tasks to measure how easily people could retrieve words.

Because the working memory test was non-verbal, it avoided confounding language proficiency with memory performance. And because it was administered right before and right after the interpreting or listening task, the researchers could isolate the immediate effects of cognitive exertion.

The key finding: interpreting blocks learning gains

Here is where things get interesting. Participants in the control group—those who only listened and answered questions—showed a clear improvement in working memory accuracy the second time they took the test. This is a well-known practice effect: people often get better simply by repeating a task.

Conversely, the interpreting group did not show this improvement. After interpreting, their working memory performance stayed flat. They did not get worse—but they also did not benefit from practice. In other words, simultaneous interpreting seemed to block the normal learning-related boost that appeared in the control group.

Importantly, this effect emerged only in the most demanding version of the working memory task—the one that required integrating multiple features at once. A simpler memory condition showed no such difference. This pattern suggests that interpreting does not drain working memory across the board. Instead, it selectively interferes with high-load, integration-heavy processes—the very kind that interpreters rely on most.

What about other cognitive skills?

The results (Image credit: Chou et al., 2026)

If interpreting is so demanding, does it also affect other executive functions, like inhibition or verbal fluency? In the present study, it did not. Performance on the Stroop task and the fluency tests improved slightly from pre- to post-task in both groups, regardless of whether participants had interpreted or just listened. There were no interpreting-specific costs.

This selectivity matters. It shows that simultaneous interpreting does not simply “wear out” the brain in a general way. Instead, it targets specific cognitive systems—particularly working memory mechanisms involved in binding and integration.

Implications understanding interpreting and cognition at large

These findings help reconcile two seemingly contradictory ideas about interpreting. On the one hand, experienced interpreters often show long-term advantages in working memory compared to other bilinguals. On the other hand, interpreting feels exhausting, and professionals are advised not to interpret for more than 20–30 minutes at a time. The new results are compatible with both observations.

In the short term, interpreting can temporarily deplete working memory resources, preventing immediate gains from practice. Over the long term, however, repeated exposure to this intense demand may strengthen the system, much like strenuous exercise builds muscle—after recovery. This “use it, drain it, then build it” dynamic offers a more nuanced picture of how cognitive skills adapt to extreme language use.

The study also speaks to a broader issue in psychology: how mental effort affects learning. Cognitive exertion paradigms—where performance is measured before and after a demanding task—have been used to study self-control, emotion regulation, and learning. Applying this approach to bilingual language use shows how specific real-world activities can selectively tax particular mental systems. In this case, interpreting didn’t cause a dramatic drop in performance. Instead, it quietly erased a benefit that others enjoyed. That subtlety may explain why cognitive fatigue is so easy to underestimate—and so hard to measure without careful experimental design.

Further questions and a takeaway

Several questions remain unanswered. Would longer interpreting sessions produce stronger or longer-lasting effects? Do professional interpreters show faster recovery? Can targeted training or breaks reduce working memory depletion? Answering these questions could have practical implications for interpreter training, scheduling, and well-being. More broadly, they could help us understand how the brain copes with extreme multitasking in everyday life.

Overall, the takeaway is clear: simultaneous interpreting places a unique and immediate strain on working memory. Even when performance does not visibly collapse, the cognitive system is working at full stretch—sometimes too stretched to learn in the moment. That invisible cost may be the price of making communication flow seamlessly across languages.

Reference

Chou, I., Birba, A., Hu, J., Muñoz, E., Kwon, G., & García, A. M. (2026). Working memory exertion after simultaneous interpreting in bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728925100898

Author bios

Dr. Adolfo M. García. Adolfo García is Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Center (UdeSA, Argentina), Senior Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute (UCSF, US), and Associate Researcher at Universidad de Santiago de Chile. He is also co-founder of Include, a global network for crosslinguistic research on brain health; and creator of TELL, a speech testing app. He has obtained funds from the National Institutes of Health (US), the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Swiss National Science Foundation. He has authored over 200 publications and offered 350 presentations. His science communication milestones include two TED talks and featured articles in Scientific American and Le Monde. His contributions have been recognized by the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires and the Alzheimer’s Association, and by Harvard’s Ig Nobel award, the Early Career Award from the Society for the Neurobiology of Language, and the UpLink Top Innovator Award from the World Economic Forum.

Dr. Agustina Birba. Agustina Birba is a cognitive neuroscientist specialized in neurolinguistics, neuroimaging, and non-invasive brain stimulation. She obtained her PhD from the University of Buenos Aires and completed postdoctoral training through multiple competitive international fellowships and grants across institutions in Chile, Spain, the United States, Switzerland, and China. Her research investigates the neurocognitive, neurophysiological, and neuroanatomical bases of language and social cognition in both healthy individuals and clinical populations with neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. She teaches across undergraduate and graduate programs in Argentina, Colombia, and Spain, and has authored over 50 publications in leading journals.

Prof. Edinson Muñoz. Edinson Muñoz is Director of the Interdisciplinary Experimental Research Program in Communication and Cognition and of the Department of Linguistics and Literature, both at the School of Humanities of Universidad de Santiago de Chile. His work focuses on cognitive linguistics, contrastive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics, with an emphasis on bilingualism and language assessment in neurodegenerative conditions. His multiple papers have appeared in journals like Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Perspectives, International Journal of Bilingualism, and Neurobiology of Aging.

Dr. Isabelle Chou. Isabelle CHOU joined the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures (Sichuan University, China) as is Research Professor in 2025. From 2021 to 2025 she worked as Dean of the Translation Department at University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Her research interests center on empirical and experimental studies focuses on cognitive process in translation and interpreting, translation process/product interface, corpus-based translation and interpreting studies. Her research can be found in numerous journals, including Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Target, Lingua, and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Monument to Yuri Knorosov, and his cat Asya (Image credit: Yodigo via Wikipedia)

The story goes that physicist Jack Hetherington was going to submit a paper to Physical Review Letters in 1975. When told that he would need to change the academic “we” to “I” throughout or add a co-author, he chose to invent one, his Siamese cat Chester (sired by Willard). And, for legitimacy, he added two more initials, F.D. (for Felis domesticus).

When I mentioned this bizarre story to the mathematician in my family, I was surprised to learn that, actually, the most famous cat co-authorship story is not in the natural sciences but our very own discipline, linguistics!

Yuri Knorozov, the Soviet linguist who deciphered the Mayan glyphs, took so much inspiration from his cat Asya that he considered her as co-author but the editors of his papers kept removing her name prior to publication.

The academic intrigues behind the decipherment of Mayan glyphs – after their near-complete destruction during colonization – are for another day. Now, I let you get on with Rami’s examination of the disembodied communications between between the authors of prohibition signs and graffiti.

***

In this work we observe the semiotic aftermath of an apparent strife between trespassers and the deontic sign authority connected to an abandoned industrial complex.

Introduction

This essay is a reflection on observations on the signage around an abandoned industrial complex in southern Finland. What started as a simple interest on the choice of signs to ward off people turned into something more complex as the year went on and we started to pay attention to the dynamic nature of sign posting and other semiotic actions.

The abandoned industrial complex in question seems to be a popular spot for graffiti work and urban exploration. This creates tensions since the owners of the complex wish to discourage trespassers, presumably for reasons of liability and property damage. This has given rise to a sort of dialogue that happens through the addition of new forbidding signs on the one hand, and graffiti or other transgressive actions on the other.

Besides fitting in the general area of linguistic landscapes, we feel that this ties to the work of Karlander (2019), in particular. Karlander discusses their topic through the lens of graffiti and its removal by “the anti-graffiti regime”. Even though we do not discuss here graffiti erasure specifically, we feel that there is in play a similar back-and-forth interaction where the effects of behavior seen as transgressive are acted upon.  Inspired by Karlander, we refer to the two sides of the dialogue transpiring here as “the trespassers” and “the anti-trespassing regime”.

We find it fascinating that even though neither “the trespassers” nor “the anti-trespassing regime” are individuals, nor presumably even permanent or stable groups of people, we still naturally conceptualize the dynamic events here as a dialogue. We acknowledge that the anthropomorphising of such vague groups into distinct actors might be colouring our reading of the events here.

The first observations

Figure 1: PRIVATE AREA No loitering, Spring 2024 (Image credit: Rami Luisto)

We started to pay attention to the signage in the spring of 2024. Figure 1 shows a standard “PRIVATE AREA No Loitering” sign outside the complex (literally, “Asiaton oleskelu kielletty” might be translated as “No hanging around unless you have reasonable business here”). The sign is attached to a worn-down fence, and in the background we can see a partial justification for the sign in the form of a graffiti.

We used to walk by the complex on a roughly weekly basis, and started to pay attention to these signs more and more starting from 2024. We have no images prior to the spring of 2024, but based on various streetview imagery there seems to be no signs nor graffiti on October 2022, while in August 2023 we already see the sign in Figure 1 and some graffiti as well.

A commanding tone appears

Figure 2: “No trespassing”, Summer 2024 (Image credit: Rami Luisto)

In the Summer of 2024, things escalated a bit. In Figure 2 we see not only a new sign, but also a fresh piece of graffiti on a building wall, and on the right a clearly fixed hole in the chain-link fence. Note how the new sign is a lot more “aggressive” than the previous one with this one having pa ictorial component of someone actively holding up a hand to stop the addressee. The text says “No trespassing”, though the literal translation from Finnish would be “No through-going”, which we find amusing since the fence shows signs of repair after someone having literally gone through it.

Here Figure 2 feels like a static moment reflecting a dynamical event, again similarly to what is discussed by Karlander. More trespassing and transgressions have occurred, and the reaction from the anti-trespassing regime has been to fix the hole and add a more strongly forbidding sign. Several more such signs were posted on the fence surrounding the complex, all of them having the more directly forbidding pictorial symbol, and then variations on texts like “No trespassers” / “No loitering” / “No unauthorized personnel”.

Figure 3: “No unauthorized people”, June and August 2024 (Image credit: Rami Luisto)

The reaction to these signs was quite swift. In a few months some of the new signs had already been defaced or tagged, presumably to challenge the authority of the signs and the anti-trespassing regime; see Figure 3. We also note that for someone who wishes to send a signal through the medium of graffiti, a chain link fence is a very challenging canvas. It surely can be painted, but the result might not be very visible. A sign attached on the fence, however, immediately affords painting as a flat surface. And thus in this case a sign from the deontic sign authority is the very thing that enables a countersign to be created.

From commands to warnings

Figure 4: Four signs from late 2024 to 2025. Clockwise from top left: “Beware of danger”, “Dangerous building might collapse”, “Mortal danger, beware of objects falling from above”, “Mortal danger” (Image credit: Rami Luisto)

Soon after the escalation of the messages, the strategy of the anti-trespassing regime seemed to change a bit. Figure 4 shows various signs that appeared between the Fall of 2024 and the Fall of 2025. They were usually placed close to “No trespassing” signs, and this part of their function was probably to augment their effect. But they also focused very much on warning instead of forbidding. In particular, the focus seemed to shift more towards explaining why the restrictions are in effect.

Are they a sign of a more polite approach with an explanatory undertone? “Please don’t trespass here as the place is hazardous and we don’t want you to get hurt.” Or are they a veiled threat? “I can’t actually threaten you with direct violence, but if you come here then this inanimate building might cause you direct bodily harm.” Perhaps it is both?

The dialogue continues

Figure 5: The dialogue continues, Fall 2025 (Image credit: Rami Luisto)

The “discussion” between the trespassers and the anti-trespassing authority has not stopped. Some more recent observations can be found in Figure 5. These are from a corner somewhat less visible to the nearest streets that seems to be favoured for transgressive entry. There is evidence of repeated penetration of the fence, followed by fixing the hole with a piece of plywood. We also find a very strongly disfigured prohibition sign next to a fresh hole in the fence, again clearly sending a message to the anti-trespassing regime.

We also note here that just like graffiti can be hard to completely remove, fixing a chain link fence without leaving a clear trace is more or less impossible. And to quote Karlander:

An attempt at erasure – failed or not – will accentuate the transgressiveness and undesirability of graffiti in the space where the attempt was enacted.

Reference

Karlander, D. (2019). A semiotics of nonexistence? Erasure and erased writing under anti-graffiti regimes. Linguistic Landscape, 5(2), 198-216.

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Bilingual writers and corpus analysis is one of the first to represent the usage of bilingual writers in both their languages, offering insight into language corpora as extremely valuable tools in contemporary applied linguistics research, and in turn, into how much of the world’s population operate daily.

This book discusses one of the first examples of a bilingual writer corpus, the Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC), which includes writing by hundreds of students in two languages, with additional information about the writers and the texts. The result is a rich resource for research in multilingual use and learning of language. The book takes the reader through the design and use of such a corpus and illustrates the potential of this type of corpus with detailed studies that show how assessment, vocabulary, and discourse work across two very different languages.

This volume will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, and educators in bilingualism, plurilingualism, language education, corpus design, and natural language processing.

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

References

Palfreyman, D. M., & Habash, N. (2023). Bilingual writers and corpus analysis. Routledge.
Mehrsprachigkeitsentwicklung im Zeitverlauf (MEZ)
Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC)

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Grey, A. (2025). Legal Corpus Linguistics
Palfreyman, D. (2021). Designing and using a bilingual writer corpus
Piller, I. (2009). Fostering multiliteracies: 1st conference day
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Watharow, A., Bednarek, M., & Potts, A. (2023). Labelling people with disability in Australian newspapers

Transcript (coming soon)

Es fi: ‘Broken’ Arabic in the Gulf

Screenshot from a Omar-Jamsheid TikTok video

When you walk through the streets of any Gulf country, you may hear a language that is neither Arabic nor English but a mix of Arabic, English, and words from migrant languages. This is a grammatically simplified form of Arabic that emerged as a contact language to solve the problem of communication between the Arabic-speaking locals and the migrant workers. Arabs refer to the language as arabi mukassar, ‘broken Arabic’. This language is also used among non-Arabs who do not share a common language, for example between a Malayalam-speaking Indian and his Bangladeshi co-worker.

Pidgin as a contact language

In linguistic studies, this form of communication is called pidgin. Historically pidgins have emerged during the colonial expansions between the colonizers speaking English, French, and Spanish and the native people. For example, Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Petit Nègre in West Africa, and Butler English in South Asia. An important characteristic of a pidgin is that it is not spoken natively by anyone. Key linguistic features of a pidgin are its reduced grammar, for example, lack of distinction between the present and past tense, masculine and feminine gender, etc. and a limited vocabulary.

Gulf Pidgin Arabic: Evolution and Transformation

Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA) is widely spoken in the oil rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states of Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, KSA, and Oman. It emerged as a contact language between Arabic-speaking Gulf nationals and the large numbers of migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia, who came to the GCC speaking a plethora of languages unrelated to Arabic. According to a statistic, the number of non-Arabs in the GCC exceeds 50%. Given the large numbers of non-Arabs in the GCC, it is not surprising to hear GPA spoken widely.

GPA shows several simplified linguistic features typical of a pidgin. Andrei Avram, among other scholars, notes that many sounds of Arabic spoken in the GCC are either substituted or lost in GPA. For example, the ‘emphatic’ voiceless stop /ṭ/ <ط>, ‘emphatic’ voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ṣ/ <ص>, and the voiceless velar fricative / <ح>are replaced with /t/, /s/, and /h/ respectively. Avram further notes that in GPA, articles, prepositions, tense markers, and subordinate clauses are frequently omitted.

GPA has been present in the traditional media long before the rise of social media during the last decade. From the early 1990s through 2000s, GPA appeared in Kuwaiti theatres, Saudi television comedy programs, often in the portrayals of South Asian blue-collar workers. In the Saudi TV series Tash Ma Tash (1998), a Saudi actor plays a character of an Indian driver who speaks this form of pidgin. One recurrent utterance in the series is es fī, “what’s wrong?”. The ‘sh’ in the Arabic word ‘esh’ ‘what’ is replaced with /s/ in the GPA. This utterance is stylized and exaggerated as part of a parodic performance of a migrant language, where linguistic limitation itself becomes the object of humor.

GPA as a Tool in Entertainment and Commercialization

Screenshot from a Saifuldin Instagram video

GPA in recent years has now gone beyond communication. Many Arabic-speaking content creators on social media use features of GPA, often in exaggerated or stylized ways, to produce comedy videos for an Arab audience. Similarly, small businesses have now started to use GPA in marketing to make their advertisements catchier and more appealing. We show these new functions through an analysis of videos of Omar Al-Muraisi, a Yemeni Arab content creator based in the UAE and those of Saifuldin a Bangladeshi worker living in Qatar. Omar Al-Muraisi, with over 2.2 million followers on TikTok, produces funny videos using GPA, in which he plays the dual characters of Jamsheid, a Pakistani worker, and an Arab living in the Gulf. He (through Jamsheid) speaks an exaggerated form of GPA often showing exaggerated negative behaviors and personality traits associated with fictionalized GPA speakers from South Asia.

In a TikTok video, Omar, the Arab, is sitting on a chair sipping tea when he sees Jamsheid, wearing a Pakistani outfit, getting ready to pray. He asks ‘are you going to pray?’ to which Jamsheid in an angry tone replies that of course he is going to pray; he is not Aladdin getting ready to fly. Jamshed continues his outburst with questions like where do you want me to fly? This direction or that direction? Omar, the Arab, is portrayed as calm and respectful in his tone and demeanor. Omar through Jamsheid, pronounces yitīr, ‘he flies’ substituting the sound /ṭ/ <ط> with /t/ <ت>. Omar, also uses syntactic features typical of GPA, for example, he says ana yisīr dākhil ḥammām ‘I go inside bathroom’ omitting the definite article, preposition, and tense marker.

Jamsheid is presented as a man who is always angry and ready to pick a fight. Regardless of what he is told or asked, the character consistently responds in an angry voice, raised pitch, and emphatic gestures, creating the impression of an unnecessarily angry man. Anger becomes a key performative strategy through which comedy is created, reinforcing GPA as a stylized register associated with heightened affect rather than a resource for communication in a situation where the interactants do not share a language. In other videos, Jamsheid is portrayed as ‘dumb’, ‘aggressive’, ‘illogical’, and ‘ignorant’. While many Arabs find these portrayals funny, they may contribute to the creation and reinforcements of stereotypes in the popular media about speakers of GPA and lead to their further marginalization.

By contrast, Saifuldin, a Bangladeshi working in Qatar, uses GPA, which is how he is likely to speak, for commercials. His videos typically feature him advertising for restaurants, gyms, and other service-related products. What is interesting is that his videos promote relatively expensive products targeting upper middle class rich clients, mostly Arabic-speaking Qataris and other Arabs. Clearly, the use of GPA is not for communication but for attracting clients, who see GPA as funny making it catchy and attractive. An example of this is a video in which he promotes a perfume brand called eighty-eight, which is described as “a luxurious fragrance blending elegance and sophistication” available in high-end malls such as Al-Hazm and West Walk. He uses the GPA incorporating Gulf proverbs and culturally resonant expressions to connect with his audience. His speech in this video moves beyond basic transactional language, drawing on locally understood phrases to describe the perfume and appeal of the products while situating himself within the host community.

GPA between mockery and commercialization

This pragmatic use of GPA demonstrates how migrant speakers can leverage linguistic resources to participate in local cultural practices and communicative routines, illustrating a functional dimension of GPA that contrasts with stylized performances found in comedic skits.

Figure 3: Saifuldin using GPA in a promotional video for a perfume shop

In contrast with the “funny” videos, advertisements tend to present GPA as engaging, relatable, and effective in connecting with Arab audiences. It shows that GPA, which was once seen as a broken language used for communication between people who do not share Arabic or English is now used across diverse contexts such as humor and marketing.

The use of GPA for comedy with undertones of negative stereotypes of GPA speakers, such as low status and aggressiveness may become normalized hiding the elements of inequality and marginalization of the GPA speakers. Several research on mock language show the role of humour in shaping public attitudes, and sentiments toward marginalized groups (Calhan, 2010; Santa Ana, 2009).

When combined, these examples demonstrate the variety of ways in which Gulf Pidgin Arabic is used in Gulf media, ranging from stylized, performative representations in humorous content to practical, communicative use in everyday situations. While use of GPA by creators like Omar Al-Muraisi shows how it is used for humor with undertones of negative stereotypes Saifuldin’s videos show how the stigmatized GPA can be simultaneously used for commercial purposes in marketing products.  The variety of functions of GPA shows its complexity in the sociolinguistic landscape of the GCC, and more studies are needed to uncover the multifaceted social and cultural meanings of the ‘broken’ Arabic.

References

Quick, B., & Piller, I. (2026). Hospital practices for determining patient language proficiency: A systematic review. Australian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 9, 103359. https://doi.org/10.29140/ajal.2026.103359
Quick, B., Piller, I., & Lising, L. (2025). The (un)imagined work of determining patients’ English language proficiency. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2025.2594462

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Transcript

Emily: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Emily Pacheco and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is a fellow linguistics PhD candidate at Macquarie, a familiar voice to many of our listeners, co-producer and frequent host of this podcast, Brynn Quick!

Hospital reception area (Image credit: Eriel Ezequiel Reyes via Unsplash)

Brynn, an American-Australian, holds a Master of Applied Linguistics and a Master of Research from Macquarie University. In her current PhD candidature, she is investigating how language barriers are bridged between patients and staff in Australian healthcare contexts. Her linguistic interests are many and varied, and include sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, sociophonetics and historical linguistics, particularly the history of English.

Today we are going to talk in general about language policies in healthcare, and in particular about a recently published 2025 paper that Brynn wrote entitled, “The (un)imagined work of determining patients’ English language proficiency”.

Brynn, a warm welcome to the show, and thank you so much for being on the other side of this interview today!

Brynn: Thanks so much, Emily. It feels weird, but also really exciting to be in the guest seat today.

Emily: Yeah, I’m thrilled to be able to interview you! And so, Brynn, our listeners may have learned a bit about you already through your other podcast episodes that you’ve hosted, but I would love it if you could tell us a bit more about yourself and how you decided to pursue a PhD in linguistics.

Brynn: So, I, um, am what we call a mature age student, and I like to refer to myself as a geriatric PhD candidate. I’m 41. Um, and I’m in my second year of my PhD candidature, so my journey to my PhD was not linear, uh, like it is for maybe a lot of other younger people, such as yourself, when you’re doing this, um, in your 20s.

So, I got my undergraduate degree in 2007, um, in America, and I did a double major. One of my majors was Spanish, which like, makes sense. And then the other major was theatre, so I’m a trained actor, uh, actually. And, so I did that, then I graduated right into the global financial crisis, or in America, as we tend to refer to it ‘the recession’, um, of ‘07- ‘08. I had gone to become a teacher in Spain. I had travelled to Spain, I got my, um, CELTA certificate, so it’s the Cambridge English Language Teaching to Adults certificate there. Um, and then I became an English teacher to adults in Spain, worked there for a while, And, um, loved it. So, travelled around to different corporations in Madrid, and taught in corporations, basically, like, business English.

Um, but then I came back to the States, and all of a sudden, jobs were nowhere to be seen. I did work at an English language school for a while, um, both as a teacher and then as a director. And that was in the Washington, D.C. area. Then, my husband and I decided to move to Australia for a year. I worked as, like, a student services officer, in another English language school here. Then went back to the States for 5 years, and that’s when I left, um, the workforce and had my kids. And I was a stay-at-home mom with them, um, for many years, and then it wasn’t until we moved back here to Australia in 2017, um, that it was, like, in the next year or so, my kids were old enough that they were either in school or daycare, at least part-time, and I thought, like, I really miss working, I miss teaching, um, I’d really like to go back into it, and so I kind of had to start again. I started from scratch.

I had to re-enter school, and I got my graduate certificate in TESOL, so teaching English as a Second Language through Macquarie. And then COVID hit, and I was trying to work during COVID, and also homeschool my kids, and I think any parent listening to this probably, like, shudders when they think back to that time, because it was really, really hard. And that was in 2020, and I realized, like, mmm, I don’t think this is gonna end in 2020. I bet we’re gonna have another lockdown. And I can’t try to work from home and homeschool at the same time, so I decided to go get a master’s degree, and so that’s what I did.

And then I kind of went from there, you know, got my first master’s, um, through Macquarie. That went on to become a Master of Research, and then that led into the PhD. Um, I just really fell in love with linguistics as a field, and especially sociolinguistics. And whenever anyone asks me, like, oh, okay, what is linguistics? What do you do? And I and, you know, of course, I’m sure you’ve gotten this before, how many languages do you speak? And I’ll say, like, well, two, but, um, that parts not important. The important thing is, is that I’m doing sociolinguistics, so I talk and learn about how culture influences language, and how language influences culture. And so that’s what I really enjoy doing. Um, and so that’s what’s taken me here.

If you had asked me when I was in my 20s, you know, are you gonna go get a PhD one day? That was never, ever a thought in my mind. So, um, hopefully that can help anybody who is a mature age, student like me, uh, who might be thinking, oh no, I left it too long, I waited too long, I can’t believe I’m doing this in my middle age. It’s something that we all, when we come to a PhD, I think we all have to get there in our own time, and I’m glad that I got there now.

Emily: Yeah, that’s a lovely story, Brynn. Thanks for sharing, and of course, I’m biased and very thankful that your paths or your journey led you to Macquarie, and um, you’re a great addition to our team and our PhD candidates’ group, and I can’t imagine it without you, so, I think that’s very lovely. So, um, and it also was funny, like, you know, people say, like, oh, you’re doing linguistics, how many languages do you speak? I get that all the time, and I always say, oh, I actually do sign language, and they’re like, oh! So um, yeah.

Brynn: Right. They don’t realize, like, that’s part of it as well. Yep, so it’s a huge field, and we’ve all got our big subdivisions, and little cliques within it, yeah.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, to start to shift to the talk today about, uh, your paper, just to foreground our discussion about it, could you explain what work-as-imagined and work-as-done means?

Brynn: Yes, so, this is, um, today we’re obviously talking about my first paper out of my PhD. So, um, I’m doing what’s called a thesis by publication. I know you’re doing that too. And this is different to a traditional thesis by monograph. So, I think when a lot of people think of a PhD, they think of, oh, you’ve got to write a huge book. And that is typically what people have done, historically, and that huge book is called a monograph. But in the past few years, it’s become more and more common for people to do this thesis-by-publication, because as we all know, um, a lot of our metrics, uh, are determined by how many papers we get published in journals. And so, this is my first paper out of the PhD, and it’s the first paper I’ve ever published ever. So that’s very exciting.

Emily: Very exciting! Congratulations again!

Brynn: Thank you. Thank you! So, for this paper, what I was doing, um, it’s kind of like part one of this sort of two-part process. So, my PhD is looking at how do healthcare organizations, so, I’m really looking at the organization itself, how do they ensure language access for limited English proficiency, or LEP patients in the context of, like, Australia, where everything is done in English, right? So, as I was thinking about, okay, how do I do this? I knew that I wanted to look at the actual policies that are on the books. I wanted to see, okay, what are people, quote, supposed to do within a healthcare organization to ensure that these LEP patients, um, get access to things like interpreters or translated documents, and because I feel like we need to start there. We need to see, alright, what are we supposed to be doing, right? So, I was able to find this framework that’s called work-as-imagined, versus work-as-done.

So this is a framework that’s often used to analyse the work that people do in the fields of human ergonomics, so, like, thinking about how people actually work, um, for anyone who ever read the book Cheaper by the Dozen, which I loved as a kid, it takes place in, I think it was, like, the 19…30s or 40s, and, um, the dad in that book I think he, uh, studies human ergonomics. So it’s, like, efficiency of work. How do people work? How do people get things done, kind of like on a factory floor, right? So, this framework is used there, but also, it’s been more and more used in healthcare, which, when I read that, I was like, well, that’s weird. Those seem like two totally separate fields of work, right? But the way that this works in healthcare is, um, it’s used to analyse clinical work in terms of what is, like, supposed to happen over the course of patient care, and then what actually happens.

So, um, let me give you an example. So, there’s a book called Resilient Healthcare Volume 2, um, and it’s edited by several people, and one of the people is Erik Hollnagel, um, and he’s one of the most prolific scholars of work-as-imagined versus work-as-done in healthcare. And in this book, he asks us to imagine this scenario, like, this imaginary scenario, to kind of get the picture. So, the scenario is…A hospital has a policy that all newly admitted patients must have a blood draw with routine blood tests, and this blood draw is to be done by a nurse. Okay, fine, that sounds pretty logical. However, in this scenario, no nurse is supposed to draw blood from an admitted patient until an order is made by a doctor, and a label is already printed and ready to be put onto the vial of blood. However, at this hospital, the nurses often ignore this official policy and draw blood from a patient as soon as they’re admitted, so they’re not waiting for the doctor’s order. And this is because the nurses know that the doctor will request this eventually, so they feel that drawing the blood immediately and having it waiting for when the order does actually come through is a time-saving measure. Even to the point that they kind of unofficially teach new nurses to do this, when the new nurses first start working at the hospital. And so, as the reader, we might ask ourselves, well, why is the hospital policy written so that the doctor has to request the blood draw before the blood can be taken. And, you know, maybe we’re thinking that based on the nurse’s workaround, the policy was written without taking into account the long wait times that actually happen between the patient being admitted, the doctor seeing the patient, the doctor requesting the blood draw, the label being printed, and then finally the actual drawing of blood. So, this is exactly what happens, when work-as-imagined, or what policymakers imagine a work environment and work itself to be, comes up against work-as-done, or how people actually do work based on environmental constraints.

So, the way that I like to explain this in sort of my elevator pitch is to think of, like, expectations versus reality. We’ve probably all seen those, uh, memes online, where you see, like, a really pretty cake, and it’ll say, like, expectations, and then you see a picture right next to it, and it’s, like, reality. And it’s, like, the cake that someone has tried to make, but it’s all smushed, and it looks weird, you know? So, this is kind of what work-as-imagined versus work-as-done is. And that’s not to say that always you know, policy is completely not in touch with how work is actually done. But that does happen quite a bit. And so, I wanted to use this framework to see, okay, in Australia and New South Wales and Sydney in particular, what do these healthcare policies say? What are patients who have limited English proficiency, what are they supposed to be able to access? Who is supposed to give them this access, this language access, and how, versus…What actually happens? So, this paper is the first part that shows us the imagined work, what the policies say should happen. The paper that I’m currently writing is about what actually happens.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, that’s very, that’s a nice, um, setup there, and uh, thank you for explaining that, the framework you’ve used, and um, the meme reference was really good, and it is, you know, it’s a great way to get across what exactly you’re looking at.

So, as you’ve mentioned in this paper particularly, we’re talking about your first paper, um, you’re presenting an analysis of these healthcare policies that relate to the linguistic diversity in Australia, but you find they employ a monolingual logic, and within this multilingual reality. Could you tell us a bit more about, you’ve hinted a little bit, but a bit more about the policies you collected specifically in your data, and how your study is a methodology that we would call a policy ethnography, and tell us a bit more about that, if you could?

Brynn: Yes, so I looked at, um, several different policies, 13 in total, um, and I wanted to make sure that I was looking at policies that came from the four different levels of governance within Australia. So that’s federal, New South Wales state, because that’s the state that we live in, or that I live in, and local health district policies, so, like, each, within a state, it’ll be divided into local health districts, and so each of those local health districts might be slightly different from each other. Um, and then finally, the fourth level is institutional policies. So, I am looking at an entire health network, which I have given the pseudonym Blue Meadow Health, um, and it’s a private health organization in Sydney.

Um, and so I’m looking at policies from all four of those levels, but importantly, the most important sort of overarching policy here is called the Australian Charter of Healthcare Rights. And this charter lays out what patients, any patient within a health system in Australia, should expect from their healthcare encounter, basically. And one of the rights that is guaranteed under the Charter is the right to information. And so, that is then what I based my selection of other policies on, was like, okay, what other policies are there that are guaranteeing a patient the right to information? And how are they saying that people who don’t have English can get that information? So, what I did was I analysed these 13 different policies, and I kind of did this in a linear way. And I did this by asking who do the policies say should assess a patient’s language, English language proficiency before or during a medical encounter? How should a patient’s English language proficiency be assessed in order to determine if they need something like an interpreter. And what guidance is provided to healthcare staff to determine whether communication is successful at any point in the consultation process. Um, and so that’s basically how I coded all of the policies. And that’s how I determined how they were supposed to address a limited English proficiency patients’ needs.

Emily: Um, and as part of that, in your paper, you explain a bit about process mapping as a method of analysis, and so could you explain how you applied that method to your data, and maybe take us through that process itself? That would be great.

Brynn: Yeah, so, um, this is a concept called process mapping. It comes from, um, Debono et al., 2019. And that’s basically where this idea of a linear process of a policy is analysed, in order to describe how the policy is to be enacted on, based on how these policies imagine work to happen.

So again, sort of this overarching theme of, like, what is the work, the actual work, that goes into ensuring that LEP patients get language access, that get care, that, where they can understand what’s being said. So basically, it’s, it sounds fancier than it is. It’s essentially what I just said, where we’re talking about, okay, so, who is supposed to do this work? How is this work supposed to get done? And what is the end result of this communicative work supposed to be? And to me, this was really important because I feel, based on the work that I did with my Master of Research, where I was also looking at some similar things, that we have a lot of really great research that has been done about why do doctors and nurses maybe not use interpreters that much with their patients? Or, we have research about why patients do or do not prefer to use interpreters, like, professional interpreters versus family interpreters, um, within the healthcare context.

But what we really don’t have much of is sort of this nitty-gritty, maybe it sounds boring, but I really like it. Um, this nitty-gritty stuff about, okay, well, how is the work actually getting done? What is the workflow supposed to be? If a patient needs an interpreter, how do I, as a healthcare staff member, actually go about figuring that out, arranging for the interpreter, making it all happen within the course of my workflow. Because we all have jobs, where we have to get things done during the course of a busy day, and for me, I think that this is a really interesting angle to look at this really huge area of research. Because if we don’t know what this actual process is, then we can’t see where maybe the lines of defence are failing and people aren’t getting interpreters.

Emily: And a part of that, you know, we say to get an interpreter, okay, but before you even get an interpreter, someone has to assess, right? Does this person need an interpreter if someone doesn’t request one, or advocate for one? Um, so in your paper, you also talk about, I think it’s really interesting to see who is supposed to do this assessment of a patient’s English language proficiency. And as part of that, you did find some patient work, and you also talked a little bit about how healthcare practitioners are supposed to do this maybe as well, so if you could tell us a bit about that, who’s assessing the need for an interpreter, and how do they do that?

Brynn: Yeah, so according to policy, really, what the policies all say is, hey, patients, if you need an interpreter, like, if you don’t have much English and you need an interpreter, make sure that you tell us, the healthcare organization. Which, again, okay. So, this is where the concept of, you asked earlier about monolingual logic, this is where the concept of monolingual logic comes into play. So, I’m getting this idea of monolingual logic from work that’s been done by Piller, Bruzon, Torsh, and then earlier, the concept of the monolingual habitus, which comes from Ingrid Gogolin. And in the monolingual habitus, which we in Australia, um, often conceptualize as the monolingual mindset, which was proposed by Clyne. But the monolingual habitus means that there are these policies, or these work environments, that come from this logic, or this setup, of somebody who maybe doesn’t understand how languages work, and how multilingualism works. So, when Ingrid Gogolin came up with this concept, she came up with it in the realm of education, so, like, primary, high school, things like that. And she was looking at how multilingual kids were able to access education when they maybe didn’t have the language of the educational institution, right? So, then we kind of narrow down this idea of monolingual habitus into a subsection monolingual logic, which to me, in this case, is saying, okay, so these policies are saying that, hey, patient, if you need an interpreter, come tell us. But we, anybody who has another language knows that when you learn another language, it’s not that easy to then be able to go up to an institution, which is what healthcare is, and say, hi, I don’t speak this language, I need an interpreter. But overwhelmingly, that’s what these policies say. So, the policies will say things like, if you need an interpreter, speak to our staff. If you would like an interpreter, ask a staff member to organize one for you.

But the thing is, the monolingual logic about this is that all of these policies are written in English, so the people who need to know this information, likely cannot access this information because it’s in English. Now, the charter that I was talking about before, um, was translated into, I believe it’s, like, 32 community languages. But it’s only one page, and it’s just kind of bullet point information. It’s not the real substantial information that somebody might need if they’re trying to interact with the healthcare system. And so, you really, if you’re a patient, who has the right to access information that you can understand about your own health, but you don’t have the ability to go up to, or call, or email someone from a healthcare organization to say, hey, I need an interpreter, in English, then you’re not gonna get one.

The policies also say things like, oh, hey, not a problem, we get it, you can download this, I need an interpreter card from a website, and you can, like, present it, because it’s supposed to be in two different languages. But, you know, again, this is, this comes back to sort of an organizational problem, because when I clicked on the link that would have taken me to that card, there was no page. It was, like, 404, error, page not found, you know, so, so again, it’s like they’re saying, yes, yes, we want you to be able to access language and language supports, but we’re not putting in the work necessary to get you there.

Um, something else that the policy said was that even though the patient is supposed to go tell, the, you know, staff that they need an interpreter, that it is the healthcare practitioner’s, quote, responsibility. This kept coming up a lot in the policies. That health practitioners are responsible for assessing a patient’s need for an interpreter and arranging for an interpreter to assist them. So, it was very weird. It’s like, okay, so there are these two different messages that are being sent by policy. Who is supposed to do this work? And again, this comes back to this is actual work that has to get done. This is the stuff that happens throughout the course of the day, that somebody needs to think about as actual work that people are doing. And if we’re going to be saying to healthcare practitioners, hey, you need to be responsible for this, that’s fine, but then we need to give them the tools to actually know how a patient is supposed to be assessed, because the policies later go on to say, uh, okay, you know, healthcare practitioners, if you want to know how to assess a patient’s language, uh, English language capabilities, just, uh, determine if they can speak English. And it’s like…No, that doesn’t make any sense. Um, you know, again, maybe according to a monolingual logic, that does make sense for someone who maybe doesn’t have a lot of experience with assessing language or understanding how, sometimes, when we have another language, we can speak conversationally, um, to somebody. But, if you throw us into a healthcare situation where they’re using complicated medical jargon that you’ve never learned, um, when you might be in a heightened state of emotion, things might feel very high stakes. You know, our ability to then use that other language goes down. Um, and so that’s why it becomes important to get somebody like a professional interpreter. And so, if policies just say, well, figure out if they can speak English. Okay, but you have to tell us how to do that, and that’s what really doesn’t exist in these policies.

Emily: Yeah, that’s, um… That’s a bit crazy to think about. It’s a huge, like, it’s a huge part of getting an interpreter, but how, and who’s responsible, and to keep talking about that, let’s discuss who’s missing from these policies, the medical receptionist. I think it’s interesting you keep saying staff or the policies say staff. And in a medical building, in a hospital, in a clinic, staff could mean so many things. Um, so let’s talk about medical receptionists and how and why they’re an important part of the process that we’ve been discussing so far, and what are the impacts of their work.

Brynn: So, this is, and I keep saying to everyone, I’m like, I will die on this hill. Um, I am so, I really want us to talk about medical receptionists, because we really do not have much research into the role that they play in being part of this journey that a patient goes on throughout a medical system, and it really is a system, right? The healthcare system, it’s like a big machine, and I think we, any of us who have ever been through the healthcare system, whether it’s here in Australia or anywhere else, you know, it’s often… it’s very easy to feel lost in that machine, you know? You feel like you’re just sort of a number, you don’t necessarily feel like you know, the healthcare organization in general is taking care of you. And you know, we’ve made a lot of medical advancements in the last hundred or so years. I’m very thankful for that, and if we get to have longer, better lives because it’s a bit of a machine, I understand that there is that trade-off.

But the thing is, medical receptionists are generally a patient’s first point of contact with a healthcare organization. Think about any time that you’ve had to call, whether this is your GP, or a specialist, or a hospital, and you’ve needed to make an appointment, who’s the first person that you talk to? A medical receptionist. If you go to be admitted to hospital, chances are, the very first people that you see are the admissions department, or, you know, receptionists at that front desk. So, what I really learned from my Master of Research, which was a systematic literature review of 50 different current studies, that were looking at linguistic diversity within the healthcare context, was that all the time, I kept hearing about staff. Staff. Medical staff, front desk staff, receptionists. And so, I was like, well, wait a minute, it seems like these medical receptionists are playing a big role in this patient’s journey. But why don’t we know much about them? Why don’t we know what they do or don’t do in order to get an interpreter for a patient, or what happens if somebody calls them to make an appointment, and the receptionist can tell that the person has a limited English proficiency, what do they do?

So, this is exactly what my research goes into in the second part. Um, so you had asked earlier about what a policy ethnography is. And this is where this comes into play. So, a policy ethnography is where it’s kind of the combination of the two words. We look at policies. So, like, what I did for this paper, sort of an audit of policies. But then we combine that with the work-as-done portion, which is conducting interviews, in my case, with medical receptionists. So, I did that as well. Um, so that I could ask them, okay, what do you do? How do you manage linguistic diversity when you’re also doing 500,000 other things? Like, you know, making sure that patients have appointments and sending emails and taking calls, and you know, dealing with clients or customers or patients that are upset, you know, a lot goes into their day, so, in this policy part, this also, like you said, kept coming up, where it would, the policies were directing patients to go, quote, talk to staff. And inevitably, what that meant was go talk to a medical receptionist, because that’s who your, the patients are going to see in that patient-facing role.

And some of the policies, one in particular, even says look, yes, healthcare practitioners are responsible for making sure that a patient gets an interpreter if they need them, but in reality, medical receptionists are often the ones who need to do this. So, they should be trained as well. But that was it. That’s all they said. And so, the paper that I’m writing now is all about how medical receptionists make these decisions, and sort of spoiler alert, it really does come down to medical receptionists. They are the ones who are really making decisions about whether a patient is going to get a professional interpreter or not. And so, I think that they are really this missing key in the healthcare machine. They’re like a missing cog in the part of the wheel that we just haven’t explored that much, and I think that if we do, we’re gonna find out a lot more about how language access actually works.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, it’s fascinating, and it really seems like you’ve uncovered a really important piece of the puzzle that may have been overlooked. And that is really necessary to take a closer look at.

And so, throughout this conversation, we’ve talked about the policies, how you’ve analysed them, kind of who’s doing what. And so, let’s say, you know, someone does request an interpreter, or someone thinks, oh, this person needs an interpreter. They get the interpreter, can you tell us how the policies you looked at define, okay, now effective communication is happening, or is it happening between patients with limited English proficiency and their healthcare providers, how are they determining that in these policies?

Brynn: Well, that was one of my biggest moments where I, like, gasped out loud when I was reading these policies, was because I did, I really wanted to know, alright, fine. We’re getting an interpreter, or we’re not getting an interpreter for limited English proficiency patients. What is the outcome? So again, it goes back to that, like, process mapping. What is the outcome that we want from this? And ostensibly, the outcome is communication, right? We want the, um, we want the healthcare provider to be able to feel comfortable communicating with the patient, and vice versa. We want the patient to be able to get as much healthcare information as they would get if they were getting the care in their preferred language, right? But what was incredible was that all of these policies define communication with adjectives, and that was it. Nothing else.

So, they were like, well, we want to make sure that there’s, quote, effective communication, or, quote, clear communication, or quote, good communication. And I was reading it, and I was like, but what does that mean, you know? What does that mean, especially when we’re talking about people, the healthcare providers and the patients, who are potentially coming from not only different language backgrounds, but different cultural backgrounds, because that healthcare communication can look extremely different in different cultures, right? There’s something that’s quite common, which in certain cultures, if somebody, especially, like, an elderly relative, if they are given, like, a terminal diagnosis. So let’s say that somebody, um, you know, 80-year-old grandmother has terminal cancer, in certain cultures, it is very common to, for the doctor to not tell that patient oh, you have terminal cancer, because it’s considered to be kinder to not give that information, and to not stress the person out. And so what we see is that this will happen sometimes, even in a healthcare context where, you know, it’s happening in, like, a large GP or a large hospital, where this communication won’t get conveyed, to a person, because If the healthcare provider is coming from, like, you know, an Australian English background, they are saying to the patient, like, yep, you are terminal, you’re going to die, you’ve got cancer, but let’s say that, like, the patient’s family member is there acting as the interpreter, from their perspective, that is not culturally correct, and so sometimes they will then choose not to interpret that information as the family member to their elderly grandmother, they will just say, you know, oh, you’ve got pneumonia, please take this medicine, you’ll feel better, you know. And so, so that’s why we have to have a more robust concept of communication. And we have to consider communication, multilingually and multiculturally. We have to have this known to not just healthcare providers, but all parts of staff, including medical receptionists, that there are these differences in communication that will happen. And so, we need to decide what is it that we expect all patients, regardless of language background, what information do we want them to get? And what information are we okay with being left up to different cultural interpretations or preferences.

Emily: Yeah, thank you so much, Brynn, for taking us through your first paper, and I think, you know, this study definitely, um, has impacts and benefits for everyone to improve the healthcare system, to make it, uh, to have more, quote, effective communication, uh, can benefit all not just people who are multilingual or multicultural.

So, to wrap up our conversation today, I would love to ask, what is next for you in your work? Is there anything else you want to share with our audience today?

Brynn: So, like I said, I’m working on the second paper now, and this paper is going to be about how medical receptionists make decisions around whether or not they’re going to use or allow the use of an ad hoc interpreter, which is, like, this family member that I was talking about, that will often accompany a patient, and the family member speaks English to a higher proficiency level than the patient. So sometimes, healthcare professionals, they will say, oh, that’s fine, you be the interpreter. And there are lots of thoughts and feelings about that in the literature and in different studies. Um, some people say, yep, that’s totally fine. Some people say, nope, that’s never okay. So, what I want to know is what are the medical receptionist’s decision-making processes like? And what is guiding their decision-making processes as to whether a person can use an ad hoc interpreter, or call for a professional interpreter, or choose not to have an interpreter at all. Um, so that’s this paper, and then the paper after that will be about how these medical receptionists that I interviewed discuss using Google Translate when they talk to patients. Which is going to be really interesting.

And then, uh, like I said, with the thesis by publication, yes, you publish papers, but then you have to write, like, linking chapters and a big literature review, so that’s gonna be my life for the next, uh, year and a half, is just all of this writing. But it’s really interesting to see how it all comes together, how these sort of separate papers can all come together to sort of paint one big picture about what’s going on in healthcare right now, and I do hope that it will contribute to allowing for more language access for lots of different people. And helping medical receptionists to incorporate this into their already extremely busy workflows. I really want us to, like, think about the medical receptionists, you know, really consider what this is like for them, and make it as easy as possible on them, so that that knock-on effect translates to the patients.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you again, Brynn! This has been great. Um, I really appreciated the chance to get to interview today, you today, and hear all about the exciting work that you’re doing. So, uh, thank you for agreeing to join the interview!

Brynn: Thank you, Emily. Thanks for letting me be in this seat.

Emily: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. Um, and thanks for joining, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!