Comments on: “Speak English or Die!”

By: Grace

Grace — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 01:12:11 +0000

Thank you, Ingrid, for the insightful post. Taking public transportation is a common experience to international students. Lots of linguistic phenomena can also be observed there. Just a few days ago while I was riding on a bus from a Sydney suburb into the city, a middle aged man hopped on the bus and was talking loudly and incessantly on his phone. He was using English and filling his every sentence with numerous F words. I never heard so many curses in my whole life. Feeling extremely annoyed, I was also observing other people’s reaction. Annoyed, frowning their eye brows, and some changing to seats far away. But no one dared to say anything for the whole twenty five minutes before I got off the bus. I think people were tolerating not because he was speaking English but because he seemed violent and vicious. A lot of times foreign tourists or international students seem very meek and vulnerable, so they often have no choice but to silently tolerate harsh verbal abuse throwing at them, although everyone knows very well what good manner really means.

By: Margaret S.

Margaret S. — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 23:25:25 +0000

Coincidentally, I just saw another example of what appears to be the same thing shortly after reading your post. The Argentinean shopper accused of shoplifting can be seen in the photo – she has long blonde hair and is white. Surely the profiling that targeted her was linguistic, not racial, just as in your example.

By: Hanna Torsh

Hanna Torsh — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 22:44:03 +0000

Race and racism have been made visible (although obviously not always) by protest movements and activists who continue to call out racism using the language and frameworks which have been developed by other activists throughout the last century. Another way of thinking about it is that racism is no longer seen as “natural”. It seems like language is still not visible in this way, so when discrimination and hate are triggered by linguistic difference it is seen as racism in an Australian context. That linguistic difference is invisible and seen as simply an extension of racial difference, means that the problems experienced by those who are linguistically different from the mainstream can also be invisible. Problems like accent discrimination, feeling scared or ashamed to use some languages, not knowing local slang to much more serious barriers to communication like ones own language not being recognised as a “real” language. I think that one of the real contributions to the research that needs to made is to make language visible, so that these kinds of problems can be named and understood by a much wider audience and thus more easily solved.

P.S I would love to know more about how to de-naturalise linguistic difference and discrimination – anyone have any great reading tips?

By: Kimie Takahashi 高橋君江

Kimie Takahashi 高橋君江 — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 07:27:45 +0000

While I was doing fieldwork with Japanese women in Sydney, they repeatedly told me that they hated speaking Japanese in public, particularly on public transport. They’d been frowned upon by other passengers and they knew very well what the other passengers’ gaze on them meant. No doubt that many from linguistically diverse backgrounds have had a similar experience, but such linguistic intolerance has never been discussed explicitly. It seems that the discourse of bilingualism as impolite and of “you speak our language in our country” continues to prevail in public at the expense of freedom of language choice (in a supposedly multicultural, democratic society). There is no quick fix for this, of course, but the government needs to take foreign language education more seriously as a way forward to creating a inclusive society where people of all kinds do not have to fear and watch over their shoulders when speaking in their own language.