To read a FREE chapter about participants’ experiences with finding work head over to the Oxford University Press website.

We celebrated with a big launch party last Friday and there are some photos for absent friends to enjoy on the book page. There you can also find additional resources such as a blog post on the OUP website about data-sharing as community building or this one on the Australian Academy of the Humanities site about being treated as a migrant in Australia. Feel free to bookmark the page as we hope to keep track there of the life of the book.

Don’t forget if you order the book directly from Oxford University Press, the discount code is AAFLYG6.

If you are teaching a course related to language and migration, consider adopting the book. It includes a “How to use this book in teaching” section, which will make it easy to adopt. Contact Oxford University Press for an inspection copy. Book review editors can also request a review copy through the same link.

Transcript of Part 6 of the Life in a New Language podcast series (by Brynn Quick, added 05/08/2024)

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. Today’s episode is part of a series devoted to life in a new language.

Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, I’ll chat to each of the co-authors about their perspectives on writing the book.

Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experiences of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity-making in a new context are explored.

The research uncovers significant hardship, but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements. My guest today is Dr. Emily Farrell.

Emily earned her PhD from Macquarie University in 2008 with a thesis entitled Negotiating Identity, Discourses of Migration and Belonging. She completed a DAAD-supported postdoctoral fellowship in 2010, focused on language and the international artist community in Berlin. She began her career in publishing as the acquisitions editor for applied linguistics and sociolinguistics at DeGreuter, and has since worked in sales, business development, and in the commercial side of publishing for the MIT Press, and now as the global commercial director for open research at Taylor & Francis.

She was an early board member at UnLocal, a legal services and educational outreach organization that serves undocumented migrants in the New York City area, and also served on the board of the foundation for the Yonkers Public Library. At Taylor & Francis, she focuses on increasing access to research through support for both open access agreements and open research practices, including data sharing, as well as support for humanities and social sciences in particular.

Welcome to the show, Emily. It’s wonderful to have you with us today.

Dr. Farrell: Thanks so much, Brynn.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself, how you got into linguistics, and how you and your co-authors got the idea for the book, Life in a New Language?

Dr. Farrell: It’s great to think back along the trajectory and also to think about the six of us, and what brought us all together in the end to combine some of our research projects, and to work together, and the work we’ve done together over a lot of years.

For me personally, I, now long ago, left Australia for the US study, and when I came back to Australia after a few years in the US, after an undergraduate degree, I was more in English Literature and Music. I had the experience of living elsewhere, in some ways growing into a young adult in a different country, even though America, obviously the US, is an English speaking nation predominantly, that experience of going there at age 18, growing there, seeing myself in a different light, and in ways creating a new space for myself and identity, and then coming home and sort of drawing all those pieces together.

I’d become interested in language through that, and particularly that idea of how do you kind of create belonging for yourself in a new place as you grow across your lifespan. And when I got back to Australia, I actually started a master’s degree at Sydney with Ingrid Piller. She had not been at Sydney for a long time at that point.

I was teaching courses with a linguistic grounding in cross-cultural communication, and I was completely hooked once I started because it drew together all these things that had sort of been percolating, you know, the idea of identity creation, how language fits into that picture, how people assess each other and the biases people have based on the way that people sound, whether that accent’s within a, you know, whether it’s a Southern US accent versus a, you know, received pronunciation in the US, and all that kind of groundwork in closely linguistics. I think once you start to read all of that literature, really, I found it so captivating. And it sort of started to answer lots of questions for me about all these things that you get a hunch about, but it’s also, in what’s a way, so implicit, right?

Because it’s language, and you sort of take it for granted. And so being able to dive into that sociolinguistics and applied linguistics literature and starting to understand all that from a new perspective was just so captivating. And so, from there, it was at the time that Ingrid had just secured an ARC grant to look at people that had migrated to Australia and become highly proficient in English.

And so, I started on a research assistant with Ingrid and started my PhD on a related topic to that. So particularly looking at the cohort of highly proficient speakers and how they were navigating this sense of belonging and identity and how that connected to language.

Brynn: It’s so true, I think, that nothing radicalises us more than when we have to kind of leave what we know in our home country and, like you said, even if we go to another country where technically we speak the same language, all of a sudden you realise, oh, wait a minute, there is so much more to establishing a home for myself in this new place and to establishing this sense of belonging than just being able to speak the language.

You’re an Australian living in the US., I’m an American living in Australia, and I think we probably have both experienced that, and even before we started this recording, we were talking about how interesting it is that, you know, technically, yeah, we speak the same language, but we’ve both experienced having those cultural moments where just because we can technically understand each other, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy, and I love that that kind of was this through line for you because then when you were looking at this research where you were a research assistant, you were looking at these people who had high levels of proficiency in English.

So, technically, they can speak the language here, and yet there was still this sense of, but I’m not able to establish this sense of belonging maybe in the same way as someone who sounds like someone from this area.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, and I think that, you know, you do have all this privileging, obviously, depending on the sort of accent you have and obviously how audible you are, how visible you are as other in a place, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier as well, just seeing that again with my son, who’s six, and has a very strong American accent, bringing him back to Australia where he has an Australian passport and an American passport, and, you know, I am audibly Australian or, well, not all Americans, can I identify the accent to be honest?

Brynn: I’m sure many think you are British, yes.\

Dr. Farrell: That’s fine, I forgive them. But it’s also another point that was of interest to me in my research, which is our national boundaries and citizenship also sort of create these categories where people do and don’t fit. So just because you have a passport, does that make you feel like you’re able to sort of create an identity of belonging or how do you find these sort of in-between spaces?

So, you know, so often the people in my research were sort of, they talked quite a lot about accentedness, how they had been in Australia for, you know, 30 years were master’s degree holders, were incredibly accomplished, people who could sort of suddenly have this experience of being other just because someone would say to them, Oh, where do you come from? Because they would hear their accent. And it’s tricky because, you know, there is that weird power in such a banal question.

And you know, sometimes that felt really frustrating for people. But sometimes that also was, you know, I got to hear some of these amazing stories from people who were then able to kind of mobilise a much more powerful in-betweenness or transnational feeling, where they sort of felt, well, yes, you can hear I come from somewhere else, and I do come from somewhere else, but I also come from here. And that it doesn’t necessarily have to be either or in that way.

And that there is a lot more, you sort of can create a bigger space for yourself. But it’s sort of not always quite so easy, because there is kind of that, again, it’s that banal sort of everyday othering that might not seem so consequential for someone else because they’re asking a question that’s just, that seems simple. But for someone that’s asked that, oh, where do you come from?

Or, you know, what accent do I hear? You know, hearing that over and over again can feel really frustrating in your own sort of personal project of, you know, making a life for yourself somewhere else.

Brynn: And I’m sure both you and I have heard that question. I literally had that question asked of me last night. I had an Australian man say to me, and what accent do I detect?

And I wanted to say to him, I hear yours. I hear your Australian accent, you know?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah.

Brynn: You’ve gotten that in America too.

Dr. Farrell: For sure. And I do think you get that much more in English-dominant monolingual environments where people aren’t used to switching between languages. There’s just certain, you know, assumptions about what it is to sound a certain way, what counts as an accent.

That’s quite fascinating. I mean, it also, part of that kind of international, interesting kind of international basis is what drew me to the post-doctoral work that I did in Berlin, because you have this fascinating environment where, at least when I was there in 2009, for three years, it was still a pretty affordable place to live. And it was really, by that stage, you know, the wall had come down quite some time beforehand, I suppose, you know, 20 years before, but there was still this kind of sense of this emerging city and a real kind of very vibrant artistic community that was starting to sort of, people were talking about, like, people in New York, everybody kind of knows about New York or Berlin and sort of another hub for artists.

And so, there’s sort of a real international community there. But English still, there’s a real dominance of English in that environment. And a lot of people that have kind of moved, they’re not thinking about moving to Germany, but thinking about moving to this kind of international art city.

And just the way that language circulates and how people learn languages and which languages they’re speaking, which bits of what in different ways, in different spaces was so interesting to me, because a lot of the ways that people there were doing this sort of identity work and belonging work was much more about being able to be in a space where you could define yourself as an artist, whereas in New York, it’s really hard to balance paying the rent and also work on your artistic practice.

So these sorts of, all of that sort of the way, you know, all these pieces to me connect to this idea of you’re doing all this work of how do you find a job, how do you raise a family, but also how do you do this sort of your own work to feel like this is where you belong and, you know, how do you find your people and how do you make that space for yourself?

Brynn: Yeah, and that is a very central part of the research that you brought into this book, Life in a New Language. Can you tell us a little bit about your participants in the research that you did? You said that they had high levels of English proficiency, which is a little bit different from some of the other participants that we’ve discussed in this series that some of the other authors worked with.

What was that like? What did you see in your participants in having that high level of English, but maybe still seeking to build belonging and build a home?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, so the people that I spoke with during my research were all, they’d all migrated to Australia as adults. They had a mix of different amounts of English education before arriving in Australia. Most of them had migrated from Europe or South America and were already reasonably highly educated and then a good number of them got higher degrees once they got to Australia.

They were going through that process of learning English but were, and a good number of them were already reasonably proficient once they arrived in Australia. And it was a mix of reasons for migrating, a good number being sort of economic migration or a lot of actually there were a couple that had moved for a partner, they’d met an Australian and moved to see where that would go. And a lot of the people that had been in Australia the longest, I think, had already been here 30 years, I think it was the maximum.

Some had only been in Australia for a few years. But all of them were sort of in that process of setting their lives up or raising their families and were much more in that space of sort of how is it that you continue to kind of find community and belonging in a new language. And also how, you know, where you find ways to use the languages that you arrived with.

So, one of my favourite set of participants or a couple, I really felt very privileged speaking to this couple who had both, they had these fantastic stories of the way that they had met and the romantic story and their language use in Australia and their community building here, where they had both left Poland separately. I think, you know, we did in the space of a year or two of each other. And the man had left first and they’d both ended up in Denmark.

And I don’t think either of them had had much Danish before leaving Poland. She had moved with a daughter, very young daughter. They met because he was visiting a friend that was also in one of these living spaces.

They’d put people up, like early migrant housing. And he tells this fabulous, they sort of tell this story together, where he talks about how he sees her for the first time and he immediately thinks that she’s this incredible woman. And she, at the same time, is sort of telling their meeting story, sort of saying, oh, I thought he was crazy.

He was like, this guy just seen me and he’s trying to give me his phone number. And I was like, what’s this about? Some crazy man’s shown up and he’s just giving me his phone number.

He doesn’t even know. He probably does this for every girl. But then, you know, they sort of go on and then they went on a date and then, you know, end up married with another daughter.

And then ultimately, you know, many years later, they migrated to Australia with both daughters and raised a family here. And the way that they sort of tell that story with lots of humour, sort of teasing each other, like much love, but just kind of how language can weave through that narrative. And that once they got to Australia, you know, they have the elder daughter who is most comfortable in Danish but speaks highly proficient Polish and now English.

The younger daughter who grew up mostly in Danish. So, it’s sort of the way that the family then talks to each other. You know, you have the parents still speak to each other in Polish.

You know, the elder daughter often speaks in Danish. You know, so they have all these different languages that they’re using sort of over the dinner table, you know, in the ways that they kind of craft what it is to be a family in Australia, and then how they’re sort of finding their own seat and sort of continuing to live out their own practices that fit their family in Australia. And it’s just really amazing to hear just how complex, but also how people are able to sort of craft these spaces for themselves and to find ways to use and continue their own language repertoire when they’re here.

Brynn: And that’s something that we’ve heard from some of the other authors, too, is about this negotiation of family over the dinner table. You know, like these languages that get used in just the ways that the family as a unit interacts with each other. And it can be really broad with meaning, the different choices that are made for the languages.

And that’s just in your own house. That’s not even thinking about then what did the parents do when they leave the house to go to work? You know, what language choices are they making then?

Or what do the kids then do now that they’re in Australia and presumably going to an Australian school? What are those language choices? So, it’s really interesting that it can be as small as that nuclear family.

And then you think about the way that language choices branch out from there.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, absolutely. What’s so beneficial about, I mean, what we’ve done with this book in drawing together these six different studies and covering a large period of time, 20 years, and also a large group of people, 130 people, we get all that really beautiful, sort of rich granularity of the stories you hear from people that do defy the sorts of stereotypes and assumptions that you have about what people actually do in their lives because so often, you know, even those of us who’ve spent a lot of time, you know, thinking critically and studying this specifically, you know, you’re taking in so much media, politics. It’s easy, I think, to sort of get detached from what it is to understand the real detail of lived experience.

And then it’s also incredibly challenging, I think, again, even for those of us who have our heads in this sort of work, to think about how you take that detail and try to bring it out to that more sort of policy level, to that more, the public space where these sorts of issues are politicised and flattened out and simplified in such ways that are really quite detrimental to the actual lives of people. And I think that when Ingrid was discussing the idea of drawing this study together into one book, what was so appealing to me was the fact that so often, when you think about ethnographic work, it is about that detail and that’s the importance of it, right? Is that you are able to sort of take a context for what it is, really listen to the people, the community that you’re working with and in.

But then I think all of us who have done this sort of work get to that point where it’s difficult to know how to try to have a greater impact. And I think that when you think about the real sort of applied part of applied linguistics, I think all of us want to see more of an influence on the broader discourse around language and migration or other sort of language use topics. And I think it’s really quite difficult to see how you make that impact and how you try to connect what you’re doing in that sort of granular way to the broader sort of ways of speaking across society.

And I think, you know, you sort of have things like census data which really just doesn’t give you that qualitative or detailed view. And in bringing together these six different studies, we have the hope that we make a bit of a step towards the ability to be able to say, look, this isn’t just one person’s or this small community’s experience. We can look across these different communities of people or different individual migrant experiences and draw from them together from this group of 130 people, very common threads that show us, I think, some direction for how we could shape policy, how we could shape education, how we could shape even individual interaction with people when you don’t ask where somebody comes from.

You know, there are certain things you can start to think about your own ways of approaching someone as a human in interaction that I think can have both on a small scale and then on a societal level a really big impact for positive change.

Brynn: And that’s why I think Life in a New Language is just such a groundbreaking book because as I’ve said in previous episodes, you do not have to be a linguist to read this book, to understand this book, to get a lot of meaning out of this book because it does show this really human experience that we all have when we are the new kid in a place, you know. And like we said earlier in this episode, it doesn’t even matter if you already speak the language of the place that you’re going to or in the case of your participants, you have a high level of proficiency. There is still so much that goes into being a migrant, and there’s still so much that you have to build into your life as a migrant that doesn’t necessarily come easily.

And that’s why I think bringing these six studies together, just like you said, so well, shows what we can do as individuals on an individual level is just have that human empathy for each other and then also can say, well, hey, look, we’re noticing these trends in finding work, in getting an education for kids. We’re seeing this through line in how we do family and how we negotiate language and family. And I think, like you said, that’s something that could be taken to that policy level so easily.

So that’s why I think the book is so fantastic. And speaking of that coming together with all of those six stories, I would love to hear about your experience in co-authoring with five other people and bringing those things together. And what I think is so interesting about your particular experience is that you were doing all of this from the other side of the world.

You were living in New York. I think it was four of the authors were living in New South Wales and then one was living on the other side of Australia. But you were the furthest away and you had a little baby at the time.

So, what was all of that like for you?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, so I was the spanner in the time zone works. For me, I had moved into publishing quite a number of years beforehand. So, we, I think, started discussing this book in 2018 when my son was six months old, I think, and around then, six, eight months old.

And so, I’d already been working in publishing for around eight, seven or eight years by then. It was really quite a joyous experience to be able to rejoin and revisit this research that I hadn’t really been working, I hadn’t worked with for quite a long time and to feel like there was still so much in there to draw out and draw together and, you know, and have the opportunity to work with five incredible other women who have done such brilliant work and to sort of see how we could fit our different projects together. Obviously, you know, we had Ingrid as the consistent, you know, the supervisor across all these projects, which I think gave us a huge benefit in already having a certain shared framework and viewpoint.

But even then, I mean, there was still so much to do for all of us to sort of go back to the research we’ve done, you know, some more recent and some older, and sort of go back right from the beginning, back to the transcripts, really read back through, you know, and I haven’t done that in quite a long time, and to really kind of view it again from this perspective of how are we drawing these together, what are the shared, you know, themes that we can bring out, how can we sort of make this most powerful and also most accessible, I would say, so to a broader readership. And, you know, I mean, certainly with six people, everybody works at a different pace, everybody’s juggling different commitments. No, I think that were it to have just been a single author, the book probably would have moved at a different pace, but we also managed to do it through a number of years of a pandemic and, you know, where I wasn’t able to come home, I hadn’t been able to get back to Australia for about three years.

So, you know, there was certainly not the same as sort of working on something on your own, but I think the benefits that you gain from bringing these projects together and the things that you can learn from, you know, the viewpoint of different co-authors, it’s been an incredible experience, at least from my perspective. I feel very lucky to have been part of it. And I think that what we have at the other end of these years of drawing it together is, you know, something greater than the separate parts, which is really, truly fabulous.

Brynn: And I think what’s very cool is that because your son was, you said, six, eight months old, at the time that you started, he’s now six years old, right? So, we have like this child that grew with the book, which is so cool. And also, you know, many of us in the research group that we have, Language on the Move, many of us are mums, and many of us are doing the juggle of the academic work and the raising of the family and trying to figure all of that out.

What was that like for you, especially being in that other time zone and juggling this new motherhood as well?

Dr. Farrell: You know, I think what’s so eye-opening about it is that you just sort of are able to, there’s obviously a lot to juggle, but at the same time, I think it helps you prioritize, it helps you sort of see what’s important. And for me, where I was often kind of working late into the evening and you have to turn the laptop off or at least shut it, shut it down, close the lid, you have to go and help with your nod, do your story time. You know, I think that that’s, it’s a really important kind of chance to look at what matters and also see that you can get a tremendous amount done, you just have to work out the ways to get the schedule right, I suppose.

And I mean, that’s all, again, saying that from a point where I have a very supportive partner and also that working with five other incredible authors who are also juggling their lives and incredible, the huge amount of work that everybody has on their plate, both family commitments and professionally, I think it’s a real, it’s a really good way to see how much you, it’s not a vulnerability to rely on a group and to have a network of support and that it’s so, so important to have that. And I think being able to see that strength in others and look at what people are managing and sort of how everybody supports each other and cheers everyone on. You know, I think it’s been, for me, having seen, I mean, I think we all see this in different ways, the sort of very competitive environment of academia.

I mean, I stepped outside of it, you know, working in publishing, but I’m certainly still very adjacent to it, very much adjacent to it. So, I see how difficult the job market is and, you know, I experienced that to some degree in sort of initially trying to apply for academic jobs, and that hasn’t gotten me better since I left academia. And I think that making sure that you’re able to find a really supportive network, just for mental health, honestly, and also for those moments where you lose belief in your own work or you get a job rejection or you maybe lose direction a little bit to have a supportive group that can remind you that, you know, what you can do and what you can achieve, I think can’t overstate the importance of that.

Brynn: And that really comes through in the book, in reading the book and knowing that the six of you did this together. It’s one of my favourite things about the book is that collaboration and that camaraderie. And as I’ve said to some of the other authors, it sets a great example for the rest of us in the Language on the Move research group who are kind of just starting this process because we have learned how to support each other in this academic field that can be really hard and it can be emotionally hard to get rejected, you know, in papers or publications or things like that.

But I love being able to work with each other. And I think that makes our research better when we’re able to collaborate like this as well. And you mentioned that you stepped outside of academia and went into publishing.

I would be really interested to hear what that’s like and sort of what you do now and what you’re up to these days and sort of the decision that led you into publishing and what it’s like. Because those of us in the beginning of this process, we’re on the other side. We’re trying to get our papers published.

We don’t know what it’s like to work on your side. So, I’d love to hear about it.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, I mean, that’s one of many fascinating parts that I still remember how much fear and worry I had about publishing as a PhD student. And then, you know, you get a very different perspective of it when you get on to the other side when you work for a publisher. And, you know, I used to do more frequently when I was an editor, I would do how to turn your dissertation into a book workshop and things like that and constantly sort of trying to encourage students or early career researchers.

So really, when you’re at a conference making an effort to talk to publishers, go up and talk to editors, hear what they’re looking for, ask them about what they expect in a book proposal or, you know, what their journals are like and get as much information as you can. Don’t be afraid. I mean, they’re there to try to, especially books acquisitions editors, you know, they’re looking for new projects.

They want to work with people. And so, you know, the more you can kind of mine out of people that work for publishers, the better. I think there’s a lot to learn there, especially because you do find at a lot of academic pressures that you have a lot of former PhDs or people with PhDs working in their field, acquiring books in their field.

So, yeah, I mean, I was drawn into publishing because I finished in 2008, 2009, right, as the job market crashed. And I had sort of been on the fence about a standard academic career. I adore teaching, but I wasn’t entirely sure that I was cut out for a really focused academic career in the ways that I sort of– when I looked around at the people that were really excelling and were really dedicated to their academic careers, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was sort of willing to give up.

It felt like to me when I looked at it, and I know that this isn’t the case for everybody, but I sort of looked and it felt like there were things I would have had to give up. I wasn’t willing to give up. The other thing was, frankly, from a personal point of view, and I know that people think about this, but I don’t know that people sort of voice it very often.

I had a partner who could only really work in a few cities, frankly. He works in the art world. I didn’t want to move to the middle of nowhere just for a job.

And I didn’t want to drag a partner who wouldn’t have any job prospects to a small town somewhere. And I didn’t feel that I was really competitive enough to get a job in a big city where so many people would be competing for jobs. And so I’d considered that maybe publishing might be a path.

And as luck would have it, when I was living in Berlin, I saw this job ad for an acquisition editor in books for applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. And I sort of felt, well, if that’s not my job, I don’t know what is. And was lucky enough to get it and that sort of started my career in publishing.

The other thing that I think is worth keeping in mind, and I have spoken to people that are sort of looking for perhaps non-academic careers after their PhD, is that a lot of people look only at editorial work in publishing. I started out as an editor and it was incredibly rewarding. It ended up that I got the chance to sort of stay connected to the field.

I got to go to a lot of conferences that I couldn’t afford to go to as a student. I got to meet lots of amazing people and speak to academics who I was sort of in awe of, because they’re, you know, knowing their research. But ultimately, I started to get more interested in kind of the bigger picture of publishing and, you know, the scholarly communication ecosystem and knowledge sharing and distribution.

What does that mean? How does it work? And at the core of that too is how does the business side of it work?

I mean, I think when you’re inside the sort of academic space, you can seem a bit, I don’t know, less appealing to sort of think about those sort of more commercial aspects. But I started to get drawn in trying to understand those parts and have moved from editorial into the commercial side and now working particularly with sort of open access business models. And it’s been a really interesting journey to sort of be able to take all of that academic knowledge and the experience in the research side and kind of consider, well, what does that mean for ultimately a sustainable knowledge distribution sharing landscape?

And how do we do as much good in that as we can? How do we make sure information scholarship is accessible to the broadest amount and broadest group of people? You know, what does that mean and how do you do it and all of that?

What does it mean infrastructurally? What does it mean, you know, what are all the gory details of that has become, you know, very interesting? So, I think, you know, I guess all of that to say, you know, it’s worth keeping an open mind and kind of looking across publishing.

That’s something that should be just outside of an academic career. And, you know, I’m always happy to talk to people about it, especially early career or students, early career researchers and students that are considering other pathways.

Brynn: Well, and I’m glad to know that people like you are out there doing that work because I think wanting to bring the research that we do and the knowledge that we in the academic world have to the broader public. That’s something that I feel really passionate about. I’m always advocating putting things into language that lay people can understand.

And I think that that’s really, really important. So, I’m really glad that that’s something that you’re doing.

Dr. Farrell: What was so lovely about ultimately sort of getting to the conclusion of the book was that, no, we knew it from the beginning, but once we’d sort of written the book and we were kind of concluding and thinking about what it meant to have drawn all these studies together, we sort of ended up coming back to this notion of data sharing. And that’s become such a big topic in open access and sort of increasing open research practices. And it’s been such a big topic in hard sciences, where there’s been the sort of crisis of reproducibility and replicability in some of the more quantitative social sciences.

You know, there’s been a lot of discussion about that sort of thing and issues around research fraud and research transparency. It’s really only more recently where there’s been more of a discussion about, well, what does that mean for the humanities and social, more qualitative social scientists? And should we be sharing data?

How on earth can we share data? Do researchers in humanities even call what they have data? Should we be sort of forcing these frameworks on researchers from the outside, either as publishers or, you know, the sorts of mandates from funders to share data?

Obviously, you have funders like the Gates Foundation that have a data sharing policy, and others, you know, more and more of these mandates for sharing research. But, you know, have we done enough of the work in thinking about what that means for ethnographers in particular? Because especially if you haven’t built sharing into what you’ve done from the beginning, there are so many ways that it can feel very complex, not just personally from the point of view of, oh, I don’t know that I feel comfortable sharing all these, you know, field notes and so forth with other people, but also that they’re sort of not written to be read by anyone else, but also that there’s just so much context that’s not there just in the transcript or even in your field notes.

And so, part of what we ended up being able to explore a little bit is that we see the benefit of drawing these studies together, but we also saw the challenge of, you know, how on earth you do that. So, you know, how do you provide the context? How do you make sure that your notes and your transcriptions are read in the right ways and not taken without all of that extra detail?

So, you know, I think in some ways it’s something of a beginning of a journey to think about what data sharing truly means for ethnography and how we can really best draw on the huge benefits, I think, that we all saw this sharing, but also do it with the right amount of caution in kind of considering how we connect these pieces together and what it would mean for somebody else coming from the outside to use it. I mean, I think that’s also come up more and more in the last year with the explosion of large language models and AI and knowing that if we’re making this data available publicly, what does it mean if a ChatGPT, et cetera, is using that data to feed modelling without any broader context? How do we consider what that means and how we’re feeding that?

So I think it’s very topical and I think at least for me being so involved in open research from the publisher side of working very closely with libraries and some funders, considering what it means to actually be part of the research side of it, digging in and understanding in more detail what are the benefits but also the real challenges here and I think there’s a lot more thinking to be done there. So, I’m really hoping that out of this book, you know, we can continue to think about and work on ways that we can buffer and care for our data in the right way and care for the people that are that data when we’re talking about ethnographic work. So yeah, for me, I really hope in my professional life to continue to expand on what that means, even in things like how we talk about our own open data sharing policies for humanities and social sciences at Taylor and Francis. So, there’s so much more that can come out of this.

Brynn: And you’re right, it’s such a huge topic right now – data sharing, doing collaborative work, making sure that your data is available for reuse and reproducibility. And that’s what I think Life in a New Language does so well and is such a good ground breaker for that. Thank you for giving us that food for thought.

And on that note, thank you for being here today. We really appreciate it.

Dr. Farrell: Likewise, thanks Brynn. Thanks for all the fabulous questions and great conversation and yeah, looking forward to talking more.

Brynn: And thank you to everyone for listening. 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. Until next time!

In the conversation, we explore how the dominance of English has become more contested since the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in higher education and global knowledge production.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel 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

Novak Milić, J. 2024. 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University. Language on the Move Podcast.
Piller, I. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2022). Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua, 41(6), 639-662.
Salomone, R. C. (2021). The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language. Oxford University Press.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 30/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Professor Rosemary Salomone. Rosemary is the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. Johns University in New York, USA. Trained as a linguist and a lawyer, she’s an internationally-recognised expert and commentator on language rights, education law and policy, and comparative equality.

Rosemary is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She’s also a former faculty member of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, a lecturer in Harvard’s Institute for Educational Management, and a trustee of the State University of New York. She was awarded the 2023 Pavese prize in non-fiction for her most recent book, The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language.

Welcome to the show, Rosemary.

Prof Salomone: Thank you for inviting me, Ingrid.

Dist Prof Piller: It’s so great to have you and to be able to chat about The Rise of English. The Rise of English was first published in 2022 and has just been re-issued in paperback. The NY Times has described The Rise of English as “panoramic, endlessly fascinating and eye-opening”, and I totally have to agree. It’s an amazing book. Can you start us off by telling us what in the seemingly unstoppable rise of English has happened since the book was first published two years ago?

Prof Salomone: When I look back over those two years, I was looking for trends, you know, was there some theme running through language policy that indicated there were some new movements going on, if you will. Or was it just more of the same? I actually found both. In terms of themes I saw running through, for sure, were nationalism, immigration and a backlash against globalisation.

So, you saw that coming through in English-taught programs in universities, where the Nordic countries and the Netherlands were pushing back. They had been in the vanguard of offering English-taught programs, and then they started pushing back. Some of that was related to governments moving towards the right and hostile feelings toward immigration and linking internationalisation with immigration.

So, you saw, for example, Denmark limiting the number of English-taught courses in certain business subjects. They saw enrolments drop precipitously, particularly in STEM enrolments, and the business community started pushing back on it. Denmark, then, had to back-pedal because they realised they really did need these international students to come in. Many of these countries are suffering from declining demographics, and so they’re trying to balance this internationalisation and migration against the needs of labour and the global economy.

We see the Netherlands, right now, this week it’s been in the newspapers in the Netherlands, where there’s been proposed legislation to limit the number of courses taught in English. There was a real concern about the quality of education and accessibility for Dutch students, and whether the Dutch language itself was dying or being lost, so there was a proposal that was put forth by the minister of Education into their legislative body. That seems very likely to be adopted.

So, again, you see these Nordic countries where there was this connection between migration, internationalisation and a backlash against globalisation coming through in these very nationalistic environments.

What I saw also, which was interesting, was the use of English in diplomacy. I was tracking the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as he was giving speeches and addressing the British parliament in English, the US Congress in English. Progressively, he was more and more speaking English, and his English was, indeed, improving. But you could see the effect of it, that he was able to address these groups. He was speaking from the heart. He was asking them for aid, appealing to them, and he was doing it very directly in their language, and without the barrier of an interpreter. He was able to control the message better. It became more and more comfortable for him to do that.

I also saw it, which was interesting, in Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he visited NY. He has been pushing to have Hindi considered one of the official languages of the United Nations. So, he goes to address the United Nations, he speaks to them in Hindi to indicate the importance of his language, but then there’s a yoga event on the lawn of the United Nations. Now, there he has a rather young, progressive group of individuals. Some celebrities were there. And he speaks in English. So, you see this very strategic use of English being used by world leaders for diplomatic effect, for diplomatic purpose.

So, those were two of the trends that I saw, or novelties. There was also a rather interesting proposal in Italy, and again, Italy being a country where it’s become a much more conservative to the right government at this time. There was a legislative proposal that all education would have to be in Italian. Now, you understand that would be devastating for English-taught courses in the universities, and we see those growing more slowly than, certainly, in the Nordic countries. But we see Italy adopting many more English-taught courses because they also are suffering from declining demographics. And in order to attract young people from other countries to come in and stay, in order to keep their own students from leaving to take English-taught programs in other countries, the Italian universities realised that they have to move toward English-taught programs or courses. And yet, you had this proposal from the government saying that all education would have to be in Italian. There would even be fines imposed up to 5,000 euros to businesses that would use words like “deadline” or “blueprint”.

This is the sort of thing we’re accustomed to more seeing from France, from the Académie Française, but even their equivalent in Italy, the Academia della Crusca, they opposed the legislation. There was legislation proposing that English should be the official language of Italy. It’s all coming from these feelings of nationalism. So, Italy doesn’t have an official language in their constitution. Any references to an official or national language raises concerns about fascism because Mussolini imposed standard Italian on everybody, and there were so many regional varieties being spoken. So, again, that theme of nationalism, the pushback against globalisation, fears of internationalisation, that’s what I found in those two years.

Then, on the other side, there was much more young children in primary and secondary schools learning English as their second language throughout Europe and throughout the world. More and more, universities were offering English-taught courses. So, it seemed like English was really unstoppable, but then there were these other forces operating that I didn’t see originally trying to set it back.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I think that’s really one of the fascinating bits of your book, that it’s in many ways such a contradictory and conflicting story. I mean, throughout the 20^th century it seemed that there was this much more linear narrative of the rise of English. But in the 21^st century, it has become more complex and there’s this competition with other languages, as you’ve just pointed out. In diplomacy, multilingual people are English and their other language strategically. So, the story of competition between languages that is inherent in The Rise of English really also looms large in your book.

So, I thought maybe we can take this conversation now to Africa, which also plays a big role in your book, and focus on the competition between French, another European language, and English, and how it plays out there. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Prof Salomone: Well, there’s competition in the former French colonies, the francophone countries, with regard to English. France has had a rather tenuous relationship with those former colonies over the years. We see Morocco, very slowly, moving toward English. We see Algeria, I guess it was about 2 years ago, the minister of higher education announced that university courses would then be offered in English, that university instruction would be in English in Algeria. It made headlines in Morocco when the minister of education announced that children would be learning English beginning in the 3^rd grade.

In those countries, you have English competing with Arabic and with French. There was a study done by the British Council several years ago looking at about 1200 young Moroccans, asking them what they favoured in terms of a language. Well, they favoured English more than they did French or Arabic. They predicted a large number, a very large percentage, predicted that English would be the primary secondary language in Morocco within 5 years, meaning that it would push out French. Arabic being their primary language and English being their secondary language.

So, there is this competition in Africa within the francophone countries between French and English. But you also have China in Africa now. You have Russia in Africa now. You have Chinese Confucius institutes in Africa, and Africa has been much more willing to accept those institutions. Certainly, the US and some western European countries as well. They just don’t have the resources to provide those language programs on their own, and they’re not as concerned about the issues of academic freedom that certainly rose in the US where most of those programs have closed at this point. But you do have this competition between Chinese and English, and other languages within Africa.

And now Russia coming through, and Russia is sort of following the China playbook on language, and instituting language programs both online and in person in Russia. Russia has moved into the Sahel region where we’ve had those coups in recent years, and some of that has been provoked by Russian disinformation. So, here you have, again, the use of language in kind of a perverse way as well. There’s lots going on in Africa right now in terms of the competition for languages.

That said, I don’t think Chinese or Russian is going to replace English as a lingua franca throughout Africa. I think it is replacing French in many ways.

Dist Prof Piller: Interesting that you mention misinformation because it seems to me that a lot of the misinformation is actually also enabled by English. I’m wondering whether you have any thoughts on how the global spread of English is actually part of a lot of misinformation that’s coming out of Russia or wherever it’s coming from.

Prof Salomone: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting observation because of the internet and because of streaming. Because of all these media outlets and what we call fake news. The ability of people all over the world to access this information through English. You’re absolutely right, that English is in a way fomenting some of that or facilitating or enabling some of that disinformation as well. For sure.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it’s contradictory yet again. So, you’ve already mentioned Chinese, and China was also one of these countries after the pandemic, as the Nordic countries, where English became a bit more controversial and they are kind of pulling back on English in higher education a bit.

So, I thought let’s turn to higher education now because English is, of course, the global language, even if it’s not the language of teaching in all higher education, it’s certainly the language of academic publishing. It’s the language of knowledge-making. So can you maybe tell us a bit more about the role of English in international academia?

Prof Salomone: Well, it’s there for good and for bad. We can argue that there is a value of a common language so researchers can better collaborate. If you think of the Covid 19 vaccine that was produced between Pfizer, an American company, and BioNTech, a German company. Could that have been produced at such breakneck speed if those scientists couldn’t collaborate with each other and communicate with each other in a common language? So, you see there the benefit of having a common language.

But then again, you also see all the downsides of it, particularly in academia. It used to be, when I would attend conferences in Europe, that you would get a headset, that there would be interpreters. That doesn’t exist any longer. Most often, those conferences may be in the national language and in English. Maybe. But very often they’re just in English. So, it really does put non-native English speakers, those who are not fluent or proficient in English, not necessarily just native speakers, it does put them at a disadvantage in terms of the ease with which they can present their scholarship. Do they have humour? Do they understand the nuances of the language? It forecloses them from networking opportunities as well if they don’t speak English proficiently. It forecloses them certainly from publishing opportunities. It used to be “publish or perish”, but now it’s “publish in English or perish”. In order to have your scholarship published in an academic or well-respected academic journal, you have to write it in English.

I bring that point up in the book. It really puts younger faculty or researchers at a disadvantage. They may not have the economic means to hire someone to do the editing on it, whereas those who do have the economic means can get that outside help. This is a booming business of editing scholarship and refining the English of scholarship. So, you see that there are some serious inequities built into the rise of English in academia.

Dist Prof Piller: You’ve got this law background as well. Do you have any thoughts on what we can do to enhance fairness? You’ve just raised all the issues and laid them out quite clearly, but what can we do to improve equity and fairness in global knowledge-making?

Prof Salomone: In a legal sense, I don’t think there’s much we can do. But I think pf Philippe Van Parjis and his proposals. He believes very strongly in English and the utility and value of English as a common language, but he understands (being a political philosopher and economist) on the other hand the limitations of it. How can we build more equity? Should there be a tax imposed on countries that have high levels of English? That money would go to other countries where there’s not a high proficiency in English in order to gain proficiency. I don’t see that being workable. I don’t see how that can occur.

I think it’s just, at this point, unfortunate. I don’t see any legal way, or even a policy way, out of it. English has become just so dominant. The interesting question I find, though, in talking to other people about this, and people in other countries, as to whether English really belongs to us, to the Australians and Canadians and Brits and Americans. Does it belong to us any longer? Or does it belong to the world? Has it become neutral? Is it just utilitarian? Just a tool, a pragmatic tool for communication that’s kind of unleashed from British colonialism or American imperialism or American soft power in Hollywood.

I think that’s easier for those of us who are anglophones to say, “Yeah, sure, I think it’s neutrual.” But I’m not sure that, for other people, it’s really neutral. I think it does carry all that baggage for better or worse.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, true, and I guess even on the individual level. Things like, you mentioned earlier, that networking is so much more difficult in a language in which you are not entirely confident. Or even if you have high levels of proficiency, you might not be the one to joke easily or have that confidence. So, there are challenges at all kinds of levels.

Personally, I am also quite interested in individual mentoring approaches and co-publishing. I think there is a responsibility that we as people who are in established anglophone academia have to co-author or collaborate with people who are struggling with their English and to support peripheral scholars to come into these networks as more central members.

Prof Salomone: I think that’s a really interesting suggestion. I really do. Should there be some of us coordinating this? Should there be some movement, if you will, for those of us who are strong in English to mentor professors who are not, or to collaborate or to coauthor pieces with them? I think that’s really an interesting suggestion. I do. And I wonder what the vehicle could be for instituting a project of that sort. I have to give it some thought. What networks you or I belong to, seriously, to raise that.

Dist Prof Piller: For us, the Language on the Move network has been a little network where we collaborate, and we have lots of people, particularly PhD students, who come to Australia as international students and then return to their countries of origin to teach there. We continue to collaborate, so we’ve built, at a very small level in our field of applied sociolinguistics, a kind of international collaboration network. We’ve tried to co-publish in English, but also then translate some of the publications into other languages for more national or regional dissemination.

That brings me to my next question, actually, to the anglosphere. We’ve talked about English in the non-anglosphere, the countries that are not traditionally considered the owners of English. But, of course, the dominance of English, the hegemony of English, also does something to English in the US, in Australia, in the UK, and to the speakers there. We mostly see that kind of as an advantage, I think. That’s how we’ve discussed it here.

But there is also this other dark side. There is a real complacency about other languages in the anglosphere – like, “If I speak English, I don’t really need another language because I’m able to get around wherever I am on this globe.” We see that in the dwindling numbers of students who enrol in languages programs, the disestablishment of languages at all kinds of universities. Every couple of months we have the news that this or that university in the US, in Australia, in Britain, is establishing their language programs.

I’d like to hear how you view these developments and how we can push back.

Prof Salomone: It’s so short-sighted. It really is very short-sighted. It’s myopic. English cannot do it all. It just can’t. And there is a value to speaking other languages other than the human flourishing that many of us experienced in learning other languages when we were young at the university or whatever. That seems to have gone by the wayside. People don’t talk about it anymore. It really is unfortunate.

Just the joy of reading a classic in the original, or the joy of watching a movie in the original. I’ve tried it. I’ve tried a little experiment of my own of reading a book in English that was translated from Italian, then reading the book in Italian, then watching the movie version, the Hollywood movie version of the book, which was totally perverted (the book). I realised that it just lost so much in the translation. Even the best of translators, and it really is an art form and I totally respect them, even the best of translators – you’re not reading the original. So, there is that sense of human flourishing that we don’t talk about anymore.

Multinational corporations – a large percentage of businesses are done through a cocktail of different languages, so it really does give you a leg up in the job world. In the US there is this slow-moving interest toward offering dual-language immersion programs where you have half the student population (in the public schools) are native speakers of Spanish, Chinese, French, whatever. The other are native speakers of English. And you put the kids together, half the day in one language and half the day in another. What’s motivating the English-speaking parents here is the value of languages in the global economy. They’re not concerned about their children reading Dante in the original, or Moliere in the original. They’re interested in their children having a leg up in the global economy, so they’re becoming more and more popular in the US within public school districts.

So, you have that value in terms of job opportunities. We saw during the pandemic the need for multilingual speakers to deal with immigrant communities, you know, to explain to them what the health hazards were, whether it was in hospitals or social welfare agencies. There was a critical need for speakers of other languages, and some of them were relying on Google Translate or software translation. But even Google Translate – the state of California posted a disclaimer on their website that you cannot rely totally on the translation of Google Translate. It didn’t have necessarily 100% accuracy.

We know that artificial intelligence is getting much more sophisticated. As I was writing the book over those 7 years, I didn’t know Afrikaans. I didn’t know Dutch. I didn’t know Hindi. So, I had to rely on translation software, and it became more and more accurate as the years went on. BUT….but…. you lose lots of nuance there. You lose the human element. Very often, translation or interpretation is needed in a crisis situation, whether it be in foreign affairs diplomatically, or in a health crisis. Can you rely on artificial intelligence in that critical kind of moment where you really do need the understanding of nuance and sensitivity toward the human situation?

So, I think we are really short sighted in not understanding the value of other languages. Just this week it’s come up in newspapers here in the US that our Department of Defense has dropped 13 what we call flagship programs at universities. These were federally funded programs that provided funds for university students for 4 years to learn a critical language – Chinese, Arabic, Russian. They dropped 13 of them, ok? Five of them being Chinese programs.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s unbelievable.

Prof Salomone: What are they thinking? What are they thinking? That this should be a high priority for the federal government, to be training our young people in speaking Chinese and where they would have a study abroad opportunity in either mainland China or Taiwan. Thirteen of them were dropped, and 5 of them were Chinese programs.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I mean that’s just stupid and heartbreaking. And shocking to hear.

I want to get back to what you’ve just said about AI in a second but, before we do, you’ve mentioned the dual language programs in the US and that parents and their children are there to enhance their careers and for economic reasons.

But I have to pull out one of my favourite bits from your book, and that was the information that the most bilingual state in many ways, or the one that has the most bilingual programs is Utah. That’s related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and how they want to be missionaries. I really enjoyed reading that. I’ve met lots of young Americans in various places who speak the language beautifully. Maybe you can tell us a bit about one of these other impulses, why people actually learn languages. The missionary impulse and this particular church.

Prof Salomone: When I thought of what states or localities should I select to flesh out these dual language programs, I chose California because that was a dramatic turnaround where bilingual programs were just about dead several decades ago. What that did, effectively, was mobilise the support for language programs to the point where they could turn that legislation around through a popular referendum. So that was just a dramatic turnaround.

I looked at Utah because Utah has just such a high number of dual language programs and was really in the forefront of these programs because you had the support of a governor, a senator, of somebody within the educational establishment. But it was all done because of a particular religious population there that values languages. They train their young people there in Utah and then send them out on a mission.

But what it has done, it’s been a boon for industry in Utah. Multinational companies are looking to move into Utah because you do have this linguistic infrastructure that’s already there.

In NY City, what I found really interesting, was the French community, this bottoms up, grassroots community of mothers who were looking for an affordable alternative to bilingual education for their children. (Then they went) to the NY City Board of Education to a particular principal whose mother was French, and so she was very sympathetic. But also, she had declining enrolments in her school, so she was very eager to welcome a larger population. That school has so changed that community in Brookly. You walk down Court Street, which is the main street there. Loads of French cafes. French restaurants. People on the street speaking French. It changed the community. It became a focal point for the community. French mass at the local Catholic church. The French population has never been politically active in NY City at all, but because of their efforts and with the support of the French Embassy as well, other language groups within NY City started saying, “We could have that as well”. So, you see a proliferation of dual language programs across the city in all kinds of languages.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. The importance of these flagship programs. And if you’ll allow me, I’ll just plug another of our podcast episodes here. We recently spoke with Dr Jasna Novac Milić, about the Croatian studies program here at Macquarie University. It’s one of the few Croatian studies programs outside of Croatia. And, like you’ve just said for this French school in Brooklyn, it’s got such a flagship role and it’s also so inspirational to other language communities when they see what you can build in terms of structures from primary education through secondary up to the tertiary level. So yeah, these programs are really, really important.

Prof Salomone: I was speaking in the UK last week, and a woman came up to me afterwards and said, “My grandson attends a dual language program in California. He’s 9 years old, and he speaks Spanish fluently.” And I said, “Well I admire his parents for having the good sense to enrol him in that program.”

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. I think we really need to think about the rise of English within bi and multilingual ecologies. It’s not just about English, right? This is not English doing away with other languages. We really need to keep thinking about how we can make the best use of this international lingua franca while also supporting all these multilingual ecologies. All these languages have different roles for different people, and that’s sort of the positive side of it.

Before we wrap up now, I wanted to ask you on your thoughts on the future of English. Will we really, you know, will English keep rising? Or will not another language come along but will language tech and generative AI and automated translation be the end of any kind of natural language hegemony?

Prof Salomone: Or any kind of natural language communication at all! We don’t know. We just don’t know where AI is going to take us. And it’s developing by the nanosecond. Yesterday I viewed audios that one of my colleagues at the law school has been a partner on where they took the oral arguments from the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education which was the racial desegregation case from 1954. Now it’s the anniversary.

They recreated the voices of the justices of what they would have sounded like. They took the transcript, the written transcript, and converted it into an audio using artificial intelligence. So, they just took audios of the justices speaking in other contexts so that they could get a sense of their voice and then transposed it onto this written transcript and created what would have been, could have been, the oral arguments in the case. I mean, who would have thought? And it sounded convincing. It sounded convincing. These were bots speaking, not the real justices. So, we have no idea.

We need human communication. We will. We’re not going to have machines communicating with each other. Not in our lifetimes. So, as a language of human communication, I think English is going to steadily increase. Not this huge trajectory that we’ve seen in the past 20 years. It’s really gone quite high. It’s not going to level off. I think it’s going to slowly increase as we see more young people learning English in schools and colleges. More of these English talk programs at universities. So, more and more people are speaking English than ever before, and that will continue.

Will it be the lingua franca forever? Don’t know. If I had to think of any language that could possibly replace it, it would be Spanish because it is a language that’s spoken on 5 major continents. But I don’t see that happening in a long time. I think English, as a dominant lingua franca, is here to stay for quite some time.

Will we see more pushback against it? Possibly. A couple of years ago I didn’t foresee the pushback that I’m seeing now. Certainly, in a country like the Netherlands or Denmark, I never could have predicted that. Or the kind of radical legislation coming out of Italy. I couldn’t have predicted that. Or the incursion of Russia into Africa. Couldn’t have foreseen that. The world is in such constant flux, and the global politics are really in such constant flux that I don’t think we’re capable of foreseeing how English is going to intermix here.

I was hoping that with the streaming of movies, that more people would become interested in foreign languages because there are so many movies being produced on Netflix. So many of those movies are produced in other countries, in other languages. But, you know, there’s dubbing. So, people just turn on the dubbing and would rather listen to the dubbed voices than listen to the original or make any effort to understand the original. I think that’s unfortunate. Part of it is us. Part of it is anglophones ourselves. Seeing English as being just the possibility of doing everything with it.

But English will continue. It will be our lingua franca for a while.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I agree. Obviously, you can never predict the future, but I think there are interesting questions to be raised, particularly in terms of how the bulk of text and garbage that is being put out by digital technologies now, how that actually will overwhelm communication in a sense.

One sense that I get from my students, many of whom are from Asia, many of them are very multilingual, is that English is completely normal. You have to have English in the same way you need to know how to read and write. But what they’re interested in is actually learning other languages. You spoke about Netflix. Korean is super popular with K-pop and Korean drama and whatnot. Really, all kinds of different languages being learned. So, I do see a great diversification actually. It seems to me that English has become so basic. You need it, no doubt about it. But what’s really interesting seems to be more and more other languages, other skills, other frontiers. It’s an exciting time to think about language.

Prof Salomone: Well (Korean) is the one language where enrolments are on the rise in the United States. Because of K-pop. Totally. It’s the only language where enrolments are going up. So, it gives you a sense of the soft power, the power of soft power.

Dist Prof Piller: Well, thank you so much, Rosemary. It’s been really fantastic and really informative. Everyone, go and read The Rise of English. It’s such a rich book and so many interesting panoramic views as we said earlier.

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!

This book offers a highly readable, concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversies, and the role of the social and political context in shaping their ideas and methods.

In the conversation we focus on the national aspects of the story of modern linguistics: the emergence of the discipline in 19^th century Germany and the passing of the baton to make it an American science in the 20^th century.

James also shares the story of writing the book and how it grew out of the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast he hosts.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel 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.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 12/04/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr James McElvenny. James, is that how you pronounce your name?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that is how I pronounce my name, but I actually do like to encourage varying pronunciations because I think that will give philologists something to do after I die.

Dist Prof Piller: (laughs) Fantastic, so we’ll try another pronunciation like “Mackelveeney”.

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that’s perfect.

Dist Prof Piller: Dr McElvenny, or James, let’s just do it like that – James is a linguist and an intellectual historian at the University of Siegen in Germany. He is the author of “A History of Modern Linguistics” and also of “Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism”. He also hosts the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast.

Today we are going to talk about his new book, “A History of Modern Linguistics”, which has just come out from Edinburgh University Press. Welcome to the show, James.

Dr McElvenny: Thanks for having me on.

Dist Prof Piller: James, can you start us off by telling us how you got to write a “A History of Modern Linguistics”? Aren’t there enough histories of linguistics already?

Dr McElvenny: There are plenty of histories of linguistics. So, what happened is I was doing a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, and I was teaching their course in the history of linguistics while I was there, and the Linguistics editor at Edinburgh University Press came to me. I had already published my first book with them, and the Linguistics editor said that they would like a text book in the history of linguistics for their linguistics series. So, I thought, “Gee, that should be relatively easy. I can just base it on the course I’ve been teaching.”

And I also long had had the ambition of doing a podcast, so I thought that I might be able to imitate Peter Adamson who does the podcast “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps”, and he’s produced books with Oxford University Press based on that podcast. So, I thought, “I could just turn my lectures into a podcast, and I could turn the podcast into a book.”

It didn’t turn out to be quite as simple as that. So, moving from one text type to another, in my experience, was actually quite complicated. Podcasts have their own format and affordances, which I had to adapt my lectures to. And then turning that into a book was also a huge amount of work to make it into a coherent written text. But it’s done now, so… (laughs).

Dist Prof Piller: And it’s eminently readable, I really enjoyed reading the book so much. I think the process you’ve just described of trying out the text with your students and then turning it into a podcast and then turning it into the book really shows in the readability of the book. So, I enjoyed that immensely.

Dr McElvenny: I’m glad you think so.

Dist Prof Piller: Tell us – how did you actually choose where to begin and where to end, because it’s not a history of the longue durée from the Greek and Sanskrit grammarians to the present day. It’s actually a much narrower project. So, can you tell us about the beginning and the end?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so it’s meant to be a history specifically of disciplinary linguistics. By that I mean this modern discipline of linguistics that we study at universities. So, I think that there’s a great deal of value in a longue durée history of linguistics which is the modes that most histories that have previously been published are written in. They go back to ancient Greece and follow things through the medieval period and the early modern period, right up to the modern era.

That’s very good, but it’s more of a sort of old-fashioned history of ideas kind of approach. And I think there are some problems with that, like it sort of is based on the assumption that there are facts about the nature of language and that we’ve discovered them and that it’s a story of simple progress of us building on what has happened in the past. Of course, we do know a lot of things about language that are the direct result of the research that we do today at universities, but we’ve also forgotten a lot of what has come before. We also have, as university researchers in linguistics departments, we also have a very specific perspective on language. There is much, much more that could be said.

So, I think that it can be problematic to assimilate everything that has come before to say that that is all a prelude to what we do now. All of those things that have come before need to be understood on their own terms. Each of those need their own book, and they have their own books. So, I thought I would start when this modern discipline starts. And I don’t say that nothing came before. I actually do refer back to things that came before when they’re relevant to what is happening in the modern discipline. But I do place a boundary there and say, “This is when the modern discipline starts”. And I say that it’s around the beginning of the 19^th century when modern research universities came into being, the first of those being the University of Berlin, and linguistics as a modern university discipline started to develop.

As for the end point, well that has its own story as well. I actually wanted to come much closer to the present, but I also wanted to get the book finished before my funding ran out. This is one of the contingencies of being a researcher in modern linguistics. So, I decided to end it with WWII where there’s a major shift that the sort of centre of gravity of linguistics as a discipline, and of lots of other university disciplines, shifted from Europe to America. There’s the beginnings of that shift in the book, so I talk about figures like Bloomfield and Sapir, and the so-called American Structuralists, but I don’t venture into the sort of Cold War period when America became preeminent.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and look, I think that makes a whole lot of sense, even if it was sort of an extraneous reason. So, you just stated that essentially the book starts with the foundation of the modern research university in Germany in Berlin University. I’d still like to go one little step before that because your book actually starts with Sir William Jones and the discovery, if you will, of the Indo-European language family. Can you tell us a bit about Sir William Jones and why you started there and what was novel about his work?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean I think it’s easy to over-emphasise the role of Sir William Jones. So, this is the traditional fable of how modern Linguistics came into being. So, I repeat it in the book, but I mark it as the traditional fable. I mention that as soon as Linguistics started to form as a discipline, people started writing histories of Linguistics, and this story that started to develop that there was Sir William Jones and then Schlegel and Bop and then Grimm, and so I repeat it, like I rehearse this story because this is designed as an introduction to the history of Linguistics so that people are aware that this is the traditional narrative.

But at the same time, I try to poke holes in it. So, Sir William Jones is well known because he was a British judge in Calcutta and was very interested in philology. In fact, he probably went to India to pursue his philological interests. He studied Sanskrit, and he gave a famous address where he pointed out the similarities between Sanskrit and ancient Greek and Latin and said that this must mean that they came from a common ancestor. Then this has sort of been taken as the beginning of historical comparative Linguistics.

But if you actually read Sir William Jones’ address, you immediately see that this is not modern Linguistics as we understand it. The framework that he’s putting this genealogical narrative into is actually a Biblical framework. He’s talking about the sons of Noah spreading across the Earth, and that’s how he identifies the families of languages in the world today. So, it’s a sort of medieval hangover.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I really like that idea of the medieval hangover as you put it, and that still we have medieval ideas baked into modern Linguistics. So, let’s then go from William Jones to the German foundations of modern Linguistics. Essentially, you are telling a story of a national discipline that’s grounded in two nations, if you will. The beginnings in Germany in the 19^th century and then the passing of the baton, if you will, to the United States in the 20^th century.

So, why Germany? What was going on in Germany at the time that provided this fertile ground for the creation of this new discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, above all it’s the creation of the research university which is in no small part an achievement of Humboldt, Wilhelm Humboldt, who was himself very interested in language and made sure that professorships in language were represented in the new research university in Berlin and brought Bop to Berlin to pursue his comparative approach to grammar.

But there’s also a broader social and political context which comes out very clearly in the story of Grimm of German nationalism, of trying to show that people who speak German are a unified national group. This is before the days of Germany as a political unit, so it was a project to try and raise German national consciousness as a way of forging a political unity, and also to create a history for the German nation because the great rivals of the Germans at this time, the French, could trace their own intellectual history back to classical Rome, back to the ancient world, whereas the Germans had nothing. They just had barbarians as their ancestors.

But through historical comparative Linguistics, you could show that the Germans actually belonged to this bigger Indo-European family, you know, that links them up with Sanskrit, an even older, more prestigious tradition as was understood in 19^th century Europe.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. So, can you maybe talk us through some of the key linguistic ideas about what’s new in language now? So, if we start with, you’ve mentioned Bop and Grimm – what’s key for Bop and Grimm and maybe the neogrammarians?

Dr McElvenny: Ok, what’s key? Well, the key methodological breakthroughs that they made – so Bop went through the meticulous task of comparing in excruciating detail the conjugational forms across the European languages, and thereby provided a basis of reconstructing to the ancestor that they could have come from. So, instead of talking in sort of general terms about similarity, you could actually show in detail what the ancestral forms would have looked like.

And then Grimm is usually credited with establishing the principles of sound laws, so showing how specific sounds have changed historically over time.

Dist Prof Piller: And I guess this methodological innovation really was new in a sense and was not necessarily well-received by all the key players at the time. Many people sort of thought that Bop in particular was really pedantic. You cite this nice little limerick of sorts about how he’s really a pedant. So, what’s the tradition against which Linguistics established itself as this very formal and very narrow discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so I mean these grammatical tasks, or these details of grammar that people like Bop were interested in that form the basis of comparative grammar were traditionally considered just to be something that you had to know about in order to read texts in an ancient language. The real task was understanding the culture and the literature that is written in these ancient languages and not to obsess about the grammatical forms.

But Bop, for the first time, spearheaded this tradition where grammar becomes the really important thing. You can make your entire career just out of comparing forms, and the literature, what is actually written in the language, is completely irrelevant. Or is of secondary importance.

I think it’s probably fair to say that this is something that characterises Linguistics as a discipline, that Linguistics as a discipline has this sort of fetishisation of form, by which I mean that Linguists want something that their discipline is about. They want an object that they study that is different from what everyone else has. The traditional philologists have literature and culture and so on.

But the linguists have the language itself. They have the grammar. They have the forms. So it’s all about separating the form off. This is what Bop has done, and then with the neogrammarians who you mentioned, they turn this into an art that the sound laws of how languages change become THE key thing. That’s what it’s all about.

Then even if you move into the structuralist era, you could understand Saussure’s distinction between la langue and la parole as being a further manifestation of this desire to hive off language as a special thing that linguists study themselves. La langue is the formal system of the language –

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and it’s an imagined system, right? I mean, he claims or posits this exists and parole is not interesting, but really –

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean it is controversial whether Saussure thought that there could never be any – whether Saussure thought that parole was not interesting at all as a scientific object, but definitely he is usually understood as saying la langue is where all the action is.

Dist Prof Piller: So your book covers these 200 years of intellectual history. There are 15 chapters, and we don’t really have time to go into all of them, but I think you’ve told us very nicely about the German context and where this obsession with form really starts. Let’s maybe jump close to the end of your story, but not quite to the end, not quite to structuralism which is the logical conclusion of the formal obsession. But one step before Sapir and Whorf.

One thing that I’ve noticed, I mean obviously not for the first time, but it’s very clear that the history of modern Linguistics is the history of monolingualism, of national languages, and that there really, because of the way it got started, there really is no interest in language contact and multilingualism and linguistic diversity.

Sapir and Whorf are actually credited with being interested in linguistic diversity. That was actually very important to them, and also drawing on Boaz. So maybe can you tell us a bit about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in quotation marks for everyone who can’t see us. How is that sort of close to the end of your story?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, sure. I’ll quickly say too on the topic of 15 chapters – yeah so there are 15 chapters with content that tell the story, and then an introduction and a conclusion. But I think saying 15 chapters sort of misrepresents the style of the book because it makes it sound like it’s a gigantic tome, but it’s actually a really short book. It’s like, 200 pages, and the chapters are really short. It’s made to be very snappy.

Dist Prof Piller: And it is snappy! It’s really very readable. Sorry to kind of create an impression as this being – I mean I guess we can’t really cover all of these developments here in our conversation.

Dr McElvenny: On the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, yeah, and linguistic diversity, I mean this is a very interesting question. It depends a little bit on what you mean by linguistic diversity, but perhaps what you’re getting at with Sapir and Whorf is this interest in indigenous languages of America and other parts of the world. So, indigenous as opposed to the written standardised languages familiar from the European countries, and that is definitely something they were interested in.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is well known, and you put it in inverted commas because neither Sapir nor Whorf formulated a hypothesis in the sense of something that could be tested, like something could be tested with experiments.

Dist Prof Piller: Could you maybe just tell our audience how the name came about? So, neither of these two men ever claimed that they had formulated a hypothesis, and still that’s all we can think of now. I mean, it’s one of the most well known linguistic facts, if you will, outside the academy.

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, the first attestation of the term as far as I’m aware, in print, comes from Harry Hoijer, who had been a student of Sapir’s from the 1950s, so after both Sapir and Whorf had died. Hoijer used the term in the context of a conference that he had convened on the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, so on the idea that there’s some sort of connection between language and thought, or perhaps that even language influences thought.

Sapir and Whorf didn’t formulate a hypothesis as such, but they definitely wrote lots of things about the interplay between language and thought. Whorf perhaps more so. I think one of the most, well there’s a few interesting things that can be said about the background to both Sapir and Whorf’s ideas on linguistic relativity as you could also describe it. One is that there is a German tradition which Sapir was directly in touch with, and Boaz as well who was Sapir’s doctoral supervisor and mentor. This goes back to Humboldt and so on, and that’s also something I talk about in the book.

But there’s also a contemporary context for Sapir emphasising linguistic relativity, that language creates a worldview and shapes how we see the world, and Whorf too for that matter. This contemporary context is there was a lot of discussion on a political level on propaganda in the period between WWI and WWII. This was the era in which totalitarianism arose in central Europe and eastern Europe as well. There was a feeling that propaganda often had a linguistic basis, that it was a deliberate abuse of language to shape the way people think, to sort of brainwash them.

This finds an expression also in the philosophy of the period, so in early analytic philosophy or in the earliest works that fed into what later became analytic philosophy of people like Bertrand Russell, but even Wittgenstein, you can see this discourse that we need to purify language in order to be able to think clearly and logically. So, this is what motivated Russell’s Logical Atomism. He says this as much in his scholarly writings but also in his popular writings where he’s presenting his ideas.

And there was a whole ecosystem of popular books, so like The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards, which forms the basis, or is one of the major works that I talk about in my first book Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism. But also Korzybski with General Semantics, and so on. There’s a whole heap of these.

So, I think that it’s fair to say that Sapir in emphasising linguistic relativity was picking up on this discourse, and you can find Sapir also directly referring to this discourse of how language can be abused to brainwash people. I believe that Sapir was picking up on this discourse and using it as a justification for doing linguistic scholarship. So, Sapir says by studying diverse languages, so languages that have a very different structure from the familiar European languages, such as the indigenous languages of America, we can get a completely different view on the world. We can see how what we assume to be a fact is just an illusion created by our language. This also comes out very clearly in Whorf’s writings, and Whorf is perhaps more explicit about it too.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I was fascinated by how you describe that. Partly the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a form of language critique, and of course that feeds into another key tension that runs through modern Linguistics, the tension between descriptivism and prescriptivism and whether we just describe language or we actually engage with the meanings of language.

Before we end, I’d like to quickly draw one other kind of dichotomy or tension that also comes out really nicely in your book, and that is sort of the establishment of Linguistics as a scientific discipline, and the ambition to be scientific, but at the same time the constant undercurrent of all kinds of romantic ideas. There is the German Romanticism but also the romanticisation of ancient India for instance, so that’s a big topic. Or then Whorf and his spiritual world view.

So, can you maybe talk about this tension a bit more as Linguistics as a science, but Linguistics also as a romantic philosophy or the spiritual undercurrents?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, definitely. This is actually a topic that is much broader than disciplinary Linguistics itself. It has to do with what is considered in this period from the 19^th century to the present, what is considered legitimate scholarship and what is considered science.

So, the English word “science” generally only refers to natural science. We make a clear distinction between the sciences in the sense of the natural sciences and the humanities. I can’t really think if there’s a superordinate term that would cover both of those. I don’t know in English; I don’t think so. Scholarship?

Dist Prof Piller: Hmm, “research”?

Dr McElvenny: Research, yeah, research perhaps. But in the European context, like Wissenschaft, can also be, it can be Geisteswissenschaften, Naturwissenschaft – well do they have their own methods? And do they have their own objects of study? Or are they both two different manifestations of the same thing? This is a debate that ran throughout the 19^th century and influenced Linguistics.

So, by the end of the century, well, if we start at the beginning of the century, the Humboldtian university was very much oriented towards the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften. They were the more important ones, and the natural sciences were considered to be less prestigious. But as the century bore on, the natural sciences could show all sorts of amazing discoveries in fundamental physics in chemistry, and all sorts of really interesting and useful applications of these discoveries in the development of technology – so electricity and new medicines and new chemicals that were synthesised and so on.

So, the natural sciences grew in prestige during the 19^th century, and by the 1880s this became a bit of a sticking point for the humanities, and in Linguistics there was this question of whether Linguistics should orient itself towards the natural sciences or whether it should claim its own special method as one of the humanities. The neogrammarians, of course, were very strongly on the natural science end of this debate with their emphasis on sound laws, saying that these are a kind of natural law.

But critics of the neogrammarians, people like Schuchardt, were saying that that doesn’t make any sense, that the sound laws are not like natural laws because they have limited applicability. They only work in a single language or a single dialect, and they only work for a certain period of time. They go to completion, so they can’t be equated to things like the law of gravity, which applies everywhere in the universe. So, someone like Schuchardt argued it’s just trying to grasp at the prestige, incorrectly, of the natural sciences by importing this to Linguistics.

I say that this came to a head in the 1880s, but it was already building up through the century. Schleicher, another figure who I talk about in the book, in mid-century was already going down this path where the debate was more in terms of materialism, as I described in the book, which is more a debate about whether laws of matter, like laws of physics, tell us everything we need to know about the world, or whether there is a special world of the soul or world of the mind that exists separately from this.

This debate continued after this period. It didn’t end in the 19^th century, but it’s probably fair to say that the model that has won out in Linguistics is very much a scientistic model that wants to orient Linguistics as a discipline to a sort of natural scientific conception of the world.

Dist Prof Piller: One question maybe. So, for a sociolinguist like myself, one thing that is very noticeable in your history is that there really was no place in the story of the birth of modern Linguistics, there was no place for linguistic diversity. There was no place for language contact. There was no place for multilingualism and all those kinds of things that weren’t clearly tied to “one nation, one language”, if you will.

So, can you maybe talk a bit about this history that is not there and how that got back into Linguistics again? Or how it was written out?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I think it was written out because of this form fetishism, of this obsession with the language as the object of study that is an entity in its own right, and the job of the linguist is to describe its grammar and so on. Because if you make the language into the thing that you are studying, then there’s no space for speakers. It’s not about people speaking language, it’s about this abstract thing that exists independently of them.

But even in the 19^th century, you know, I talk about William Dwight Whitney. Even William Dwight Whitney in the mid 19^th century started to talk about diversity in texts, so he still had a philological method where he was analysing written texts, but he looked at the distribution of different sounds in the texts. He produced tables and calculated statistically how sound was distributed, not using the sophisticated statistical methods that we know today, but still talking in terms of percentages and using that to describe tendencies in the development of languages. On a theoretical level he also talked about the individual speaking subject and how people interacting with each other in language will influence each other, and how an individual might innovate a change, but then it has to be ratified by the speech community to become part of the language.

There were other figures as well into the latter half of the 19^th century who talked about the speaking subject and their place in the community of speakers. But it is definitely true that this was a minority, an oppositional position that you could take in studying language because the default position in Linguistics was to talk about the language as an abstract thing.

The introduction of modern sociolinguistics, or the advent of modern sociolinguistics, is probably, I think it’s fair to say, a phenomenon mostly of the post WWII era. So, it definitely has roots that go back earlier than that, but as a sub-discipline in its own right it’s a post WWII thing. So, you’ll have to wait for volume II of the book to be able to find out about that.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s brilliant. So is that what’s next for you, James? Volume II? Post World War?

Dr McElvenny: Well, if I get funding, yes. (laughs)

Dist Prof Piller: Brilliant. So looking forward to that and very much hope you’ll get the funding. Thanks again, James.

Thank you 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.

Until next time!

Challenge yourself to read one book in each category! Our team have compiled an exciting list of suggestions.

January: Literature produced on the move

Ingrid Piller recommends the other side of hope.

The other side of hope is a UK-based literary magazine edited by refugees and immigrants. Publishing one print and one online issue per year, the magazine offers a smorgasbord of short stories, poems, novel extracts, non-fiction writing, and book reviews from a highly diverse group of writers. Many of the works deal with linguistic diversity and the challenges of language learning. The most recent issue contains two poems that will show you new dimensions of English as a lingua franca, and phonetics in a diverse world.

February: A book about open access

Emily Farrell recommends Open Access by Peter Suber.

How do we broaden the readership of our research, increase impact and trust in science? Open access and open research have become a vital part of the answer to this question. If you’re interested in getting a better understanding of the basics of open access, there’s no better place to start than Peter Suber’s succinct, but detailed, overview Open Access. Suber, Senior Advisor on Open Access (Harvard Library) and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project (the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society) is an authority on the topic. Although the book is over 10 years old, it remains relevant and Suber continues to update and supplement the book here.

March: A book about language on the move in cyberspace

Because Internet is out in paperback TOMORROW (for ordering-via-the-internet purposes, that's practically today)

Same bright yellow cover, now with 10x more nice quotes from people

Get it for anyone you communicate with online: https://t.co/YOl6jNrVZG pic.twitter.com/O7cL47cSxQ

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) July 20, 2020

Brynn Quick recommends Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch.

Have you ever wondered why Boomers’ well-meaning texts can be full of ellipses that make Millennials and Gen Z shudder?  Or why language evolves quickly on Twitter but not on Facebook?  What exactly is a “typographical tone of voice”, and why is it an essential part of our identities?  Gretchen answers these questions and more in this fascinating and highly readable 2019 book.  Whether you are a tech genius, a luddite, or something in between, Because Internet will take you on a journey into the world of language evolution via the internet of the past four decades.

April: A book about language on the move in a language other than English

Hanna Torsh recommends Warum Deutsch bellt und Französisch schnurrt [Why German barks and French purrs] by François Conrad.

This is a light-hearted and engaging exploration of the sounds of German in comparison to other languages of central Europe. The book describes the European travels of a young German student and his dog, Horst and Strumpf, as they meet up with multilingual friends in five countries and attempt to puzzle out the main phonological differences between their national languages. This he does at the behest of his friend Konrad, a linguist and researcher who knows the answers but wants his friend to work it out for himself.

May: A book about linguistic diversity in the workplace

Jean Cho and Madiha Neelam recommend Communication that Counts: Language Practice and Ideology in Globalized Accounting by Pia Tenedero.

Communication that counts demystifies a persistent stereotype that accountants are only good with numbers and bad with communication. With the accounting industry in the Philippines, a major exporter of human resources in Global South thanks to English language proficiency, as a key site of examination, this thought-provoking book challenges the conventional approaches to communication skills of accountants as lacking and deficient by exploring what counts as good communication and why. Written from a Global South Perspective, the book provides deep insights into the taken-for-granted communication “standards”, opening up a new perspective on the power of language ideologies in English-speaking workplaces and beyond. (Jean Cho)

The book examines the language and communication practices and ideologies in the field of accounting in the context of the Philippines. The author examines prevailing perspectives on “communication” and examines how these views are shaped in the accounting industry from the perspective of the Global South. The author also analyses the concept of “good communication” in the field of globalized accounting. The book is an excellent and practical example of how good communication is perceived globally and works in a real-world context, with the Philippines, which is a world leader in offshore accounting, rightly chosen as the research site. (Madiha Neelam)

For more information see “Language that counts.”

June: A book about linguistic diversity in the family

Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame by Hanna Torsh.

This book investigates linguistically intermarried couples’ language attitudes and practices in a migration context, specifically in Sydney, Australia. The monograph sets out to explore how ideologies influence family language policy in linguistic intermarriage and the attitudes towards languages other than English (LOTEs) from the perspective of the English-speaking partner (ESP). The author exposes the gendered nature of language work as an intrinsic part of motherhood. She compellingly argues that the linguistically intermarried couple is a “site where celebratory discourses of multilingualism meet exclusionary approaches to linguistic diversity” (p.1), as she could identify both pride and shame regarding LOTEs.

July: Take a break and read something completely different

Ingrid Piller recommends Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

Year after year I have watched the administrative dimensions of my job increase. Teaching used to be about knowing your content, deliver it in an engaging way, and examining students for graduation. Now, teaching also involves strategy development, performance targets, quality audits, program reviews, student evaluations, performance appraisals, and what not. Graeber explains this state of affairs as the “bullshitization” of work and explores its harm to individuals and societies.

August: A book about linguistic diversity in history

Vera Williams Tetteh recommends Sheroes of the Haitian Revolution, written by Bayyinah Bello with illustrations by Kervin Andre.

This book portrays ‘our story’ – stories of ten women of African descent who played key roles in the Haitian Revolution against European colonisers but who are often rendered invisible in ‘his story’ directed accounts. The book inserts these sheroes’ stories to boldly rectify some of the injustice served when women and their feats get systematically erased from ‘his story’ books. The book also profiles a collection of the women’s words while offering glimpses into ‘our story’ inscribed feminine brilliance, bravery, tenacity and the courage of the women which centuries on, live after them. For instance, it tells the fascinating story of Empress Felicite, including her active role in the writing of child protection clauses into the Imperial Constitution of 1805, as well as her Soup Joumou, a Haitian Independence Soup tradition she initiated which is observed yearly from 1^st to 7^th January. A great read!

September: An ethnography of linguistic diversity

Gegentuul Baioud recommends Mongolian Sound Worlds edited by Jennifer C. Post, Sunmin Yoon, and Charlotte D’Evelyn.

Scholars from different fields have written about the lifeways, diverse identities, histories, political economy, languages, and cultures of Mongols in the last few decades. But there is one lens through which we can gain a glimpse of how all these dimensions work together. That is Mongolian music-making. Mongolian Sound Worlds, edited by Jennifer C. Post, Sunmin Yoon, and Charlotte D’Evelyn vividly weaves all these threads together into a multicolored tapestry. The first part “Landscapes and soundscapes” focuses on how music-making constitutes place-making and memory-making and how musical practices shape and are shaped by changing lifeways. The second part, “Ethnicity and diversity”, explores how music-making practices constitutes a site to negotiate sub-ethnic group identities, gender, and cultural hierarchies. The third part, “Material and social history” introduces musical instruments from the perspectives of their makers and performers. The fourth part, “Heritage and globalization” deals with the key question of how Mongolian music-making has evolved in response to nationalization and globalization processes. The book Mongolian Sound Worlds is a compelling contribution to the fields of ethnomusicology, sociolinguistics, Inner Asia studies, heritage studies, and folklore studies.

October: A book about gendered multilingualism

Jean Cho recommends Muslim Women as Speakers of English by Madiha Neelam.

This book makes the voices of perhaps one of the most under-represented groups heard – Muslim immigrant women who speak English as their second language. The book demystifies the negative images of Muslim women, particularly those associated with English language proficiency, by exploring the intersections between language ideologies, gender and race. It innovatively exposes the covert operation of language ideologies as a tool to oppress minority groups through which to maintain the interest of the dominant. This important book opens up a critical perspective on the power of language ideologies in English-speaking countries and beyond.

November: A book about language workers

Pia Tenedero recommends Intercultural communication in interpreting: power and choices by Jean Cho.

This book opens with an unsettling vignette that gives a glimpse of the hidden linguistic-cum-moral dilemmas that professional interpreters navigate. Real-life narratives of these under-recognized intercultural communicators form the core of this book, viewed through cultural lenses that highlight tensions in their language work across differential linguistic and cultural contexts. In these highly complex communication scenarios, a big question is how to balance the norms of professional interpretation and the interpreter’s agency in order to communicate not just accurate messages but, perhaps more importantly, compassion. The stories of Jean’s fellow interpreters in Australia, Korea, and Japan provide readers a critical point of reflection—What would you do if you were the interpreter?

December: A book about language and globalization

Ingrid Piller recommends Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters.

I’m old enough to remember a time when the concept of “mental health” was not widely known outside psychiatric circles. Now, of course, we live in a mental health epidemic. Watters traces how Americans brought anorexia to Hong Kong, PTSD to Sri Lanka, schizophrenia to Zanzibar, and depression to Japan. None of these are strictly contagious diseases yet rampant individualism, commercialization, and the Western superiority complex have spread them like wildfire – all the while ignoring local idioms of distress and indigenous ways of coping with life’s traumas.

Happy Reading!

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

Top-10 countries producing linguistics research (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

US- and UK-based scholars dominate linguistics

Global academic knowledge production is dominated by the Anglosphere. In Linguistics, for example, scholars based in the USA and UK produce more academic publications than scholars from the next eight top-10 countries combined. Not only do American and British scholars produce a lot more linguistics research than everybody else, their work is also much more influential as the comparatively high h-indexes of linguists from these countries indicate.

55% of the 100 most cited scholars under each of the keywords “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” with a Google Scholar profile are affiliated with a US or UK institution.[i] To put this figure in perspective: the population of the USA and UK together accounts for 5.12% of the global total. In other words, linguists from these two countries are massively overrepresented among the thought leaders in our field.

By contrast, not a single applied linguist or sociolinguist based at a university in Mainland China is among the 100 most highly cited scholars in “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics.” To put this figure in perspective: China accounts for 18.47% of the global population.

Challenging the Anglophone publication monopoly

Where the world’s most cited Applied Linguists and Sociolinguists are based, according to Google Scholar

For multilingual scholars, i.e. those with English as an additional language in their repertoire, particularly if they are based outside the Anglosphere, the stats above can be pretty demoralizing. Publication in “top-tier” journals and impact metrics have become central to hiring, promotion, and funding decisions in the neoliberal academy worldwide. Yet, despite the meritocratic rhetoric, the playing field is obviously far from level and multilingual scholars based in global peripheries labor “under a heavy mountain.”

The burden is intensified by the fact that academic publishing can very much look like a black box. While advice on how to get published abounds, what is missing are positive case-studies that showcase experiences of multilingual peripheral scholars challenging their linguistic and epistemic exclusion.

A look into the black box of academic publishing

In a new article titled “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production,” which has just been published in Multilingua, my colleagues Jenny Zhang, Jia Li and I provide precisely such a positive case study.

As regular readers of Language on the Move will remember, in 2020, we co-edited a special issue of the highly-ranked international sociolinguistics journal Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis.” To the best of our knowledge, this was the first concentrated effort in English to address the language and communication challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. The special issue centered on research from the Chinese world.

The special issue has been widely read and is already well cited. In addition to its topical exploration, it also constitutes a contribution to intercultural dialogue in applied and sociolinguistics.

US and UK linguistics research has an overwhelming impact on the field (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

Reflecting on the process that led to the publication of the special issue, we felt that it contained several lessons for linguistic and epistemic justice in our field. In “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production” we make those lessons explicit in the form of a collaborative autoethnography that illuminates the process behind the product.

In the article, we reflect on enabling personal and academic networks, textual scaffolding, and linguistic and epistemic brokerage. And we have three take-home messages.

Against the center vision of “global” academic knowledge

The dominant vision of linguistic research is solely focused on the central circuit of academic knowledge production. Efforts at global knowledge transfer almost always move outward from this central circuit. In this vision, sharing center knowledge with the periphery is considered transformational. By contrast, Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis demonstrated that some of the most exciting developments in contemporary applied sociolinguistics, such as the development of Chinese emergency language services, are located outside the center.

Knowledge flows in many directions and many circuits. Engaging with multi-directionality and multi-scalarity requires the kind of networks and teamwork we were able to bring to bear.

For community building and an ethics of care

Within circuits of knowledge production, peripheral multilingual knowledge producers are assigned seemingly perpetual status as international students, academic novices, visiting scholars, junior partners, and interlopers in center institutions. These positionings ultimately preclude deep engagement.

At this conference in Wuhan in 2012, we had no idea our friendship would lead to joint research on COVID-19 communication in 2020

The foundation of our joint work goes beyond academic collaboration and is based on longstanding personal friendship. We consider recognition of the affective dimensions of knowledge production and the importance of ethical relationships of care vital to the decolonization of knowledge.

Confronting privilege

Jenny, Li Jia, and I each write from different points in our career and from different points of inclusion and exclusion in various centers and peripheries. The same is true for all academics and each of us has a responsibility to center questions of linguistic and epistemic justice in whichever position we may find ourselves.

For us, this has involved building and engaging with various networks, collaborating across borders and generations, creating publication opportunities, and volunteering our time and expertise to act as linguistic and epistemic brokers.

Reference

To read our collaborative autoethnography about linguistic and epistemic justice in global academic publishing in full head over to Multilingua:

Piller, Ingrid, Zhang, Jie, & Li, Jia. 2022. Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua. [free access]

Piller, Ingrid. Can we make intercultural communication less Anglo- and Eurocentric? Reflections on linguistic and epistemic justice. Keynote lecture at Re-Thinking Interculturalism, The Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR) Europa Congress, May19-21, 2022

[i] As of April 17, 2021. This includes some duplicates as scholars who appear both under “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” were counted in each category.

(Image credit: John Schaidler via Unsplash)

The Next Generation Literacies international research network hosts a free 2-day research symposium devoted to language diversity and participation across generations and contexts.

When: December 10 and 11, 2021
Where: online (register your attendance here)
Who: Researchers in education and language in social life

Language diversity is a feature of all contemporary differentiated societies around the globe. Due to migration, globalization and new communication technologies, individuals need to cope with and be able to use multiple languages in order to actively participate in society. This symposium contextualizes the potential of multiliteracy throughout an individuals’ lifespan in multiple contexts (academia, education, home and workplace). The symposium looks at the development and support of multiliteracy in the family, educational pathways, and integration in the work place. More specifically, the talks give insight into how families use digital media and how professionals in school deal with and foster multiliteracy. Across the lifespan, as individuals get older, multilingual skills may become an asset for professional success, including in academic settings.

Day 1: Friday, December 10, 08:00 am – 12:15 am CEST

08:00 – 08:45 am CEST, Keynote lecture

Laura Smith-Khan, University of Technology Sydney, Believe it or not: Linguistic diversity and credibility in asylum procedures

09:00 – 09:55 am CEST, Network meeting (by invitation only)

10:00 – 11:00 am CEST, Session 1 “Inclusion in academic publishing”

• Ingrid Piller, Macquarie University, Does the language of publication change research content?
• Yongyan Zheng, Fudan University, You’ve got to keep above the water not to drown: The translingual journey of a multilingual scholar’s academic publishing practices

11:15 – 12:15 am CEST, Session 2 “Access to the work place”

• Lucy Taksa, Centre for Workforce Futures, Macquarie Business School, Language diversity and access to the workplace: reflecting on different forms of communication and approaches to teaching and learning
• Eva Markowsky & Miriam Beblo, Universität Hamburg, Multiple languages and their return on the labor market

Day 2: Saturday, December 11, 12:00 am – 02:00 pm CEST

12:00 – 1:00 pm CEST, Session 1 “Empowering vulnerable groups in education”

• Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer, Universität Hamburg, Coping with the dynamics of language and inequality in a primary school in Germany
• Josh Prada, Indiana University, Translanguaging as a pedagogy of empowerment: insight from a composition course for bilingual Latinxs in a US university

1:00 – 2:00 pm CEST, Session 2 “Multilingual potential across the life span”

• Ingrid Gogolin, Universität Hamburg, Yes, they can! Development of multiliteracy in secondary education
• Jannis Androutsopoulos, Universität Hamburg, Digital polycentricity and diasporic connectivity: engagement in multilingual families

Please register your attendance here.

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The push towards making research free and open to read, in all its parts and forms, from data sets to published output, is a big topic in scholarly communication. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the attitudes and experiences of researchers in language and society when it comes to open research. A new survey is designed to change that.

(Image credit: James Sutton, via Unsplash)

Why is open research important?

The majority of research published with academic publishers remains available only by purchase or subscription, primarily either by an individual researcher or through an institutional library. This significantly limits access.

Open research goes right to the heart of the scholarly mission. After all, scholarship is committed “to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges” (Draft Recommendations of the MIT Task Force on Open Access).

This obviously involves increasing the ability of anyone, anywhere, to read the results and output of scholarly research. For that to happen, research has to be accessible.

When research is open and free to read, it is more visible, potentially more discoverable, and allows researchers internationally to discuss, cooperate, and collaborate. There is a general consensus that open research is more widely read and, as a consequence, more highly cited (Piwowar, et al, 2018).

Another reason relates to equity and inclusion. Making scholarly work free to read removes one barrier to access for those who cannot afford to pay themselves, or work for an institution who cannot cover the costs.

Despite the obvious advantages of open research, the case for it is not clear-cut.

Open access is confusing

It is fair to say that scholars feel increasingly overwhelmed by the constantly changing open research landscape.

Institutions and funding bodies demand that research results are made available openly, but the constraints on which outlet is acceptable is often unclear. There is often a lack of transparency around who pays the price to cover open access publication and what that price is.

In addition to the financial cost is the additional work. It is not always clear whether an open access publication will receive the same level of shepherding, editing, and proofreading from the publisher as a traditional publication or whether the burden is on the author. Some publishers are clear that this is the case, others are less transparent. Some sit in between. Language Science Press, for example, who offer cost-free, open access and peer reviewed publishing, require competency in LaTex for manuscript preparation, or the availability of student assistants who do.

(Image credit: Emily Morter, via Unsplash)

This lack of consistent approach leads to a continued suspicion that an open access publication is less prestigious. This is of particular concern where we are in an ever more competitive job market and every publication choice weighs heavily in the tenure and promotion process. Can early career researchers risk prioritizing open access, if it means choosing a publication with a less prestigious press or a lower impact factor journal? Are more established scholars making choices to publish open access that will help their younger colleagues chose this pathway, too?

Is open access the opposite of academic capitalism?

Open access can be seen, in part, as push back against the consolidation of power, function, and wealth of a small number of large commercial publishers. To engage these commercial entities in a process that will ensure they increase their open access offerings, large institutional and national library consortia are increasingly leveraging their power. Organizations in the US and Germany, for example, have signed agreements on behalf of researchers to enable easier and cheaper access to academic publications.

Some scholars, such as those from the scholar-led or radical open access movements, argue that we should refrain entirely from publishing texts with commercial publishers or in publications that are pay-walled and cost money to read.

Predatory publishing

Digital publishing and open access has also led to a dramatic increase in predatory and fraudulent publishers. It can be incredibly difficult to distinguish legitimate open access publishing entities from predatory ones.

There have been attempts to monitor and list predatory publishers and journals, for example Beall’s List, but these have not been without controversy. The endeavor of creating lists of bad actors can also seem Sisyphean, as the rate at which dubious publishers and conference organizers appear happens with incredible speed. There is research that indicates that “for the most part, young and inexperienced researchers from developing countries” are the ones most susceptible to the entreaties of these publishers (see also Demir, 2018).

Which brings us to our survey!

As mentioned above, we’ve put this survey together to help us better understand the challenges and opportunities relating to open access publishing in sociolinguistics and related disciplines.

The survey includes some basic demographic data gathering: where people are located, what positions they hold, where they completed their doctoral work, and what particular area of research they work in. We include these questions in order to better understand if there are geographical differences or variation depending on seniority. We’ve also included some questions relating to technology and social media in order to understand how researchers are using these channels to promote their work. We also include some definitional questions: Open access, open science, open research, and open data are all part of a range of related yet different concepts. We would like to know what framework people are using when they say ‘open access’.

The questionnaire covers a range of questions relating to researchers’ current practices and future plans. If researchers are publishing open access, how are they funding those publications? We also want to know whether those that have published open access have experienced different approaches from the publisher on aspects of manuscript preparation like copy-editing and proofreading.

We are also interested in understanding whether researchers in our field are being compelled by funding bodies or institutional policies to make their work open. Finally, we’d like to know whether researchers see the practice of making work freely readable as being part of an effort to distribute knowledge more equitably.

Why should you take the survey?

Research on open access publishing practices points to a need for a more detailed understanding of what is happening at a disciplinary and sub-disciplinary level. And while many researchers in sub-disciplines that focus on the nexus between language and society care about the impact of their research beyond their small disciplinary bubble, there are still substantial gaps in our knowledge.

Through the survey, we want to get a clearer picture of attitudes towards and experiences with open research in sociolinguistics and related disciplines.

With our combined research, teaching, and publishing experience, the three of us feel that the first step is to understand the open research landscape in language and society. From there, we hope that more can be done to propel open research forward.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

Approaches, frameworks, methodologies, and research designs have consequences for research ethics. Here I will discuss some things I have learned in my career as a fieldworker and researcher mainly while meeting minority language speakers in remote places and while trying to formulate practical relevance of my research for the wider public. I will specifically address the perception of research by research participants,  and the ethics of interviewing and other methods. I will close by sharing my take on researcher activism.

What’s in it for research participants?

All research should ideally benefit the researched communities and individuals in some meaningful and sensible way.

In general, participants have been happy to discuss language issues with me, some have even considered the interviews as an opportunity to tell their life stories to somebody and to have it recorded. Others mentioned, that, as a linguistic minority, they  have been “forgotten”. Participating in research felt like a good way to them to place their lives or their village on the map.

Petteri with research participants during fieldwork (Photo by Karina Tímár)

To meet my participants’ expectations, I have found it especially important to publish and present results not only in dominant languages and academic forums but also in the local language(s) and in accessible forums: in my case that has meant Hungarian and open access journals. Research published in English is largely irrelevant to my participants as it is mastered only by few of them.

In short, I consider it an important part of research(er) ethics to practice multilingual research multilingually (see Piller 2016 on the critique of doing research on multilingualism monolingually).

Beyond the research interview

In my dissertation, I provided detailed analyses on the constraints of the research interview as an ‘objective’ research tool by pointing out that the views on language produced in an interview are co-constructed by the interviewee and the interviewer. This helped me to see the research participants and researchers as equal partners in the production of information and knowledge, and my dissertation work made me very critical also towards objectivizing stances to research interviews. For example, certain things are often mentioned (or not and in a certain way) by an ‘informant’ only because they were asked (or not) by the researcher (in a certain way).

Most importantly, however it turned my attention to research ethics of treating the people we study as equal research participants, not merely as ‘informants’.

During my post-doctoral project (2011—2013), I became interested in the study of linguistic landscapes. The study of linguistic landscapes, or visual semiotics represents a turn “from spoken, face-to-face discourses to the representations of that interaction order in images and signs” (Scollon & Wong Scollon 2003: 82). In my current project (2016–2021), my fieldwork and data generation has also been focused on visual methods.

Originally developed to minimize the impact that researchers have on shaping the data, these methods have the potential to address the basic challenge research interviews have: interviewing appears to put the researcher in a dominant position.

Practicing inclusive research

Taking the concerns of research participant’s positionality and agency vis-a-vis the researcher seriously is a cornerstone of inclusive research. In my current project, I employed a local research assistant, who has been a significant help in building shared interest with the participants and partner institutions.

Revitalization program teachers have come to see our research as beneficial, especially due to the use of digital visual methods, which have provided examples of pedagogical experiments. To take one example: we have carried out iMovie projects with children, where the children’s first video recorded their villages and self-selected topics at home with an iPad provided by the project. Then they edited iMovies with the iPads during a revitalization class and finally showed the final recordings to other children, researchers, parents, and teachers.

Fieldwork projects, such as the iMovie project have served my research aims to gain analysable data through visual methods and thus getting access to participant language views and language practices.

Teachers’ views of research may have been changed as well: some more experienced teachers mentioned that previous research has not been similarly rewarding and that it had been difficult to engage the children in activities such as filling out questionnaires and surveys. In our case, they could see an immediate benefit for the program in the heightened student motivation to use the revitalization language.

Should researchers be activists?

To address this question, I need to begin by reflecting on my analytical framework, the study of language ideologies. I define language ideologies broadly as common linkages between language and non-linguistic phenomena in a given community. In the study of language ideologies I follow, it is a basic assumption that no idea or view about language comes from nowhere. As Silverstein (1998:124) explains:

We might consider our descriptive analytic perspective […] as a species of social-constructionist realism or naturalism about language and its matrix in the sociocultural realm: it recognizes the reflexive entailments for its own praxis, that it will find no absolute Archimedian place to stand – not in absolute “Truth”, nor in absolute “Reality” nor even in absolute deterministic or computable mental or social “Functional Process”. Analysis of ideological factuality is, perforce, relativistic in the best scientific (not scientistic) sense.

From an ”activist” approach, we could investigate how inequality is constructed through language ideologies and then show how such language ideologies are untrue, or “bad” representations of reality or how ideology is produced by “false consciousness” (as argued by Marx, see Blommaert 2006). Such an interpretation of ideology as a distortion of reality performed in order to naturalize a questionable political ideology, has been embraced by certain strands of Critical Discourse Analysis, where the analyses thus examine different linguistic forms and processes of twisting the truth (e.g., the use of metaphors to mislead interpretation, see Reisigl & Wodak 2001).

However, the activist goal of “speaking truth to power” is not an aim shared by researchers in linguistic anthropology, since language ideologies are everywhere and due to the lack of the “Archimedian place” mentioned by Silverstein above, they are false or true according to the perspective we choose or premise we follow (see also Gal, 2002).

To conclude, our research participants and their communities should benefit from the research. To reach this goal, my approach has been to focus on inclusive ethnography and methods of data collection that provide meaningful activities, events and discussions for the research participants and participating institutions. I have focused on examples of best practices, and at the same time remained critical by not trying to pretend that I can speak truth to power.

Finally, a goal for every study should also be to help people understand why research in general is needed and beneficial for people outside of academia.

References

Blommaert, J. 2006. Language Ideology. In Brown, K. (ed). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. Second edition, vol. 6. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 510-521.
Gal, S. 2002. Language Ideologies and Linguistic Diversity: Where Culture Meets Power. A magyar nyelv idegenben. Keresztes, L. & S. Maticsák (eds.). Debrecen: Debreceni Egyetem, 197-204.
Nind M. 2014. What is inclusive research? London: Bloomsbury.
Piller, I. 2016. Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 11(1), 25–33.
Reisigl, M. & R. Wodak 2001. Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetoric’s of Racism and Anti-Semitism. London: Routledge.
Scollon, R. & Wong Scollon, S. 2003. Discourses in place. Routledge: London.
Silverstein, M. 1998. The Uses and Utility of Ideology: A Commentary. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Schieffelin, B., K. Woolard & P. Kroskrity eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 123-148.