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!

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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!

***

New Media is defined as the combination of traditional media, such as television, newspapers, radio with information and communication technology (ICT), such as smartphones, computers and the Internet, in all its forms (social networks, search engines etc.). When the new media emerged, information began to be considered as fast, omnipresent, economical, democratic and interactive, encouraging users to provide feedback, form a community and creatively participate in the creation of such content.

However, this wealth, that is access to information, is not distributed equally and the convergence of traditional and new media has not been everywhere completed. Poor communication infrastructure has halted the spread of information to more rural areas where the majority of people live. Particularly, access to health information, education and promotion, has been limited, even though it sometimes is the main factor for dealing with the spread of contagious diseases.

Such contexts are evident across Africa. Africa has a rich oral tradition. The transmission of knowledge, history and experience, especially in West Africa, occurs mainly through story-telling rather than written texts. This tradition guides social and human morals, gives people a sense of place and purpose, while at the same time, being a community activity, it educates children and passes on history, values and lessons.

virALLanguages as a bridge

The Internet could become the solution for this inequality in information sharing. However, according to Chhanabnai and Holt (2010), there are certain limitations: connectivity, IT literacy, cultural appropriateness, and accessibility. The virALLanguages project is trying to combat these limitations and make the Internet a bridge for endangered language communities around the world to achieve access to accurate and culturally appropriate information, while keeping in mind issues of connectivity and accessibility. The most evident examples of this come from piloting the project in Cameroon.

IT literacy

The virALLanguages library

In Cameroon, there is limited infrastructure in terms of education, and literacy, numeracy, and IT skills are limited (Mbaku, 2016: 150). The virALLanguages project contributes to overcoming these limitations, by enhancing IT skills of younger community members who take part in the project. Older members contributed by performing their role as storytellers who share knowledge with the community. Contributors learn how to document themselves and their language in an additional medium apart from community memory, that of the Internet. In the process, they also enhance their IT skills.

Accessibility and Connectivity

As much as possible, virALLanguages project materials (videos, audios and pictures) are available in various forms and media. An Internet Archive account is provided with the option to download the materials, from low to high quality, adapting to connectivity and accessibility, since the productions (even the videos!), can be shared as voice messages on WhatsApp, a popular and accessible option for Cameroonians.

Additionally, radio and television continue to be popular throughout Cameroon. Radio, in particular, remains the most important and most effective way of disseminating information (Mbaku, 2016: 173). For this reason, virALLanguages has reached out to local radio stations (like Radio Echos des Montagnes) adapting the recordings in languages spoken within the reach of these radio stations. Popular traditional and new media come together in the town crier, who opens this Babanki recording by Julius Viyoff and Godlove Zhuh.

In short, virALLanguages is located at the convergence of old and new media in Cameroon.

Cultural Appropriateness

The Babanki team, Julius Viyoff (right) and Godlove Zhuh

In oral traditions, information is perceived as reliable when it is demonstrated. This is possible in the virALLanguages project because of the use of video. In the Mundabli video, for example, the speaker demonstrates the adequate distance to be kept between individuals. In terms of cultural appropriateness, virALLanguages also encourages participants to share information in a culturally appropriate manner, in the local language and by choosing leaders or respected people of each community. This way the reliability of the message is underlined while at the same time oral tradition rituals are followed, with the community gathering in order to receive this important piece of information.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the inherent complexities of technology and developing country setting are significant obstacles to the fast transmission of Covid-19-related information materials. Against this background, the virALLanguages project hopes to contribute not only to the dissemination of public health information but also to community development. The technology used in the project is simple and local, it builds on what is already there, it involves users in the design, it strengthens the capacity to use, work with and develop effective ICTs, it introduces greater monitoring and evaluation, and, last but not least, encourages ongoing improvement of communication processes.

Reference

Mbaku, J.M. (2016). Cameroon, Republic of  (République du Cameroun). In Toyin F. and Jean-Jacques D. eds), Africa: an encyclopedia of culture and society. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

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Sociolinguistics needs to center Africa

Minority language maintenance and revitalization is a sub-discipline of sociolinguistics that I mostly stay away from. My discomfort with most of the research in that area stems from the fact that its moral appeal clashes with my own personal language trajectory. On the one hand, the idea that minority languages should be maintained and, if they have disappeared or are in danger of doing so, should be revitalized, has obvious moral appeal: it feels like the right thing to support. On the other hand, I myself have largely abandoned the language I consider my mother tongue, Bavarian, first for Standard German and later for English.

Such personal trajectories seem to have little place in the literature related to language maintenance and revitalization, where minority speakers largely seem like the hapless victims of national or global linguistic domination. The tensions between ancestral and aspirational identities that minority speakers must negotiate seem relatively invisible to academics who publish in dominant languages about why and how minority languages should be maintained.

Vernacular Palaver, the book I read in April for the Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge, has given me new tools to think about this conundrum.

I picked up Vernacular Palaver by Moradewun Adejunmobi in the category “a book about language on the move that is written by an author who is neither male nor white.” Following on from my March reading about the relationship between European ethnographic writing and colonial polices, I was interested to read more about colonial linguistics and I was specifically hoping to read the work of a black African female sociolinguist. That in itself turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined because the experts in African sociolinguistics who I can think of off the top of my head are white men, black men and white women – in this order.

I certainly do not claim specialist knowledge of African sociolinguistics and I may well be mistaken but, to my shame, I could not think of a single sociolinguistics book written by a black woman from Africa. It seems I am not alone because when I went through the list of references of a couple of my favorite books and browsed the library shelves, I found … nothing. It was only when I leaved through the Multilingual Matters catalog that I came across Vernacular Palaver by Moradewun Adejunmobi.

Vernacular Palaver turned out to be an amazing book and a real gem to find. It examines the ways in which “the local” is imagined in and through non-native languages in West Africa. But it is not only about West Africa. As I said at the beginning, I found it eye-opening with regard to universal dilemmas related to multilingualism and the linguistic challenges of globalization.

From my March reading I had learned how obsessed European colonizers were with “the rule of difference”. The rule of difference refers to the colonial “assumption of an unbridgeable difference between themselves and their subjects and of the ineradicable inferiority of the colonized” (Steinmetz, 2008, p. 36). Vernacular Palaver relates the rule of difference to language policy and argues that support for mother tongues and insistence on vernacular education and cultural production may well be a colonial project.

Chapter 1 deals with colonial discourses about African languages and shows that, contrary to expectation, European colonizers readily embraced African vernaculars. British colonial policy, in particular, endorsed the use of the mother tongue in education. Like Steinmetz’ German colonial officials, their policies were guided by the ethnographic writings of missionaries, anthropologists and assorted other European travelers and explorers. These all favored the use of the mother tongue by Africans and were opposed to Africans using non-native languages.

They saw African languages as attributes of “true Africans.” By contrast, multilingual non-tribal, urban and educated Africans were considered “unnatural” and objects either of pity or distrust. In other words, insistence on the primacy of the African mother tongue became the linguistic expression of the rule of difference. And in this dualistic world, “the vocation of Europe was modernity; that of the African, the past” (Adejunmobi, 2004, p. 8).

Africa-centered multilingual “welcome” sign at the Hamburg Museum of Anthropology

Africans themselves, of course, could have little doubt about the obvious necessity to speak multiple languages. Indeed, most introductions to sociolinguistics mention a combination of repertoires in local, national and international languages as the typical pattern of African multilingualism.

While the extent of African multilingualism was not always apparent to Europeans, many European “experts” felt that Africans were misguided in their language learning desires, particularly when it came to European languages. An Austrian professor of linguistic anthropology, for instance, wrote in 1930: “It would be undesirable to comply with any unwise wishes the natives themselves may express in favor of adding European languages to the school curriculum” (quoted in Adejunmobi, 2004, p. 11; the whole pamphlet entitled “The use of the vernacular in education in Africa” is available via jstor).

Ultimately, widespread learning of European languages by Africans was, of course, the inevitable consequence of colonialism.

However, the fact that Europeans had been the staunchest advocates of African mother tongues for Africans had consequences for the ways in which these languages were thought and talked about. With regard to academic research about language in Africa, these consequences are felt to this day and resulted in a peculiar dynamic: Europeans developed the theories and wrote the publications while Africans provided the data.

In short, the European promotion of African mother tongues – well-meaning and laudable as it may have been in many cases – was part and parcel of colonial discourses and policies whose central aim was the political, social and economic subordination of Africans.

Anti-colonial resistance therefore included contesting European discourses of Africa. The most effective way to mount that challenge in most cases was through the medium of English or French.

Africans do not use European languages as a result of some sort of misguided identification with their colonizers but for their own ends, as Adedjunmobi goes on to show in a series of case studies. The use of European languages allows new imaginations of the local: in literature, a modern (pan-)African identity has emerged precisely through English and French rather than through mother tongues (Chapter 2). In Nigerian videos, English has become associated with discourses of economic advancement and the dream of getting rich (Chapter 3). In Ivorian romance novels, French enables discourses of modernity and materialism (Chapter 4). Paradoxically, localization in these romances is achieved through the promotion of traditional African femininity.

Finally, language learning is a means to construct aspirational migratory identities (Chapter 5). Chapter 5 explores the promotion of languages of wider communication in charismatic churches and thus comes full circle in a sense: the faithful increasingly leave Anglican and Catholic congregations operating in mother tongues for charismatic congregations operating in English or French and promising global mobility as part of the Christian message. A neat illustration of this turning of the tables comes from the pastor of an English-medium charismatic church in Accra. In an interview with the researcher, he “derided the work of a European couple, who, in his words, had wasted several years simply learning a local vernacular, when all the while they could have been ‘preaching the gospel’ using English or Twi” (Adejunmobi, 2004, p. 201, n. 27).

In sum, languages of wider communication have a stronger appeal than mother tongues for people who “seek additional memberships in sodalities forged on the basis of shared aspirations rather than that of shared origins” (Adejunmobi, 2004, p. 205)

My very short summary here does by no means justice to Vernacular Palaver, which should be compulsory reading for anyone who is interested in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, globalization and migration.

That I did not know about this important book, which was published already back in 2004, causes me embarrassment. Sadly, I am not alone in my ignorance. According to Google Scholar, Vernacular Palaver has been cited only 57 times. Comparable books in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, globalization and migration based in Europe or North America rack up many hundreds or even thousands of citations.

This pattern serves as a vivid illustration of the very point made by Vernacular Palaver: sociolinguistic research set in Africa is seen as specific and only specialists in African languages pay attention.

A while ago I wrote that multilingualism researchers who only see their field through an Anglo-centric lens are doing something wrong. I extend that to say that if your list of references – in any field – is heavily weighted towards white male researchers, it is not because these people do all the best work. It is because you have not looked carefully and you are actively ignoring important research.

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge is a good way to start getting out of our bubble and discover more of the amazing world of linguistic diversity. So keep up the good work and happy reading! Don’t forget to share your progress. If you tweet about it and mention @lg_on_the_move, you’ll be in the running for our monthly draw of a copy of Intercultural Communication. The April winner will shortly be announced on Twitter.

Related content, Reading Challenge

• The devil’s handwriting
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Ethnography as the “devil’s handwriting”

The Devil’s Handwriting takes its title from the memoir of Paul Rohrbach (1869-1956), a German travel writer and colonial official. The memoir, published in 1953, when the Third Reich provided an ineluctable prism on the German colonial empire (1884-1918), advances the idea of a satanic mode of writing: travel writing such as that produced by the young Rohrbach about Africa and China had laid the basis for the evil of colonialism. Steinmetz makes this idea the central hypothesis of his fascinating inquiry and finds a close relationship between ethnographic representations and colonial policies. This may seem unsurprising and harks back to Edward Said’s dictum “from travelers’ tales […] colonies were created” (Orientalism, p. 117).

What is surprising is the many different forms of colonial policy and practice that The Devil’s Handwriting reveals. Even in the relatively short-lived and comparatively small German colonial empire, colonial governance was highly variable. That variation cannot be explained by socioeconomic or materialist theories, as Steinmetz shows with reference to three specific colonies: Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), Samoa and Qingdao (in Shandong province). Each of these held a distinct and very different place in the European imagination prior to colonization.

Abject and devious savages

Ovaherero in chains, 1904 (Source: Der Spiegel)

Precolonial accounts of the people of Southwest Africa were extremely negative and represented them as sub-human savages. One 19^th century German explorer, for instance, described the Khoikhoi as “bizarre red people” of “pronounced ugliness” with an “animal-like clicking language” (p. 154). The Germans did not invent these tropes of African abject savagery but fell back on the accounts of earlier European travelers. Already in 1612, for instance, a British official had described the Khoikhoi as “brute and savage, without religion, without language, without laws or government, without manners or humanity, and last of all without apparel” (p. 81; spelling adapted to modern English).

By the time the German colonial state arrived in Southwest Africa in the late 19^th century, these negative representations of Africans as abject savages had become entrenched in the minds of Europeans. Additionally, these previous encounters added another dimension, namely that of deviousness, shiftiness and insincere cunning. The Cape Colony, which had been under European (first Dutch, then British) rule since the late 17^th century, had brought numerous Europeans – traders, settlers, explorers, soldiers and missionaries – to Southern Africa. 19^th century German arrivals felt that contact with these earlier Europeans had served to corrupt the locals even further. One travel writer opined that “contact with civilization seems to make the savage more savage” (p. 156).

The military leadership of Southwest Africa, 1905 (Source: Der Spiegel)

In this perverted logic, conversion to Christianity was seen to make the natives “worse” rather than “better”. One missionary, for instance, wrote in a letter: “According to many whites it is much easier to interact with a pagan who has had no contact, or very little, with the mission than with the baptized ones. […] In many cases this is sadly often true” (p. 121, fn. 195)

These entrenched negative perceptions of Africans – as abject savages who had been further degraded through contact with Europeans – largely precluded any kind of engagement with them, as is particularly obvious from the fact that Europeans rarely attempted to learn local languages. In fact, many considered African languages unlearnable. The Khoikhoi language was variously described as similar to the “clucking of turkeys”, the “screaming of cocks” or to the sound of farting. This “apishly [rather] than articulately sounded” “incomprehensible” language kept frustrating Europeans:

But while Europeans expressed frustration at being unable to learn the local tongue, Khoikhoi picked up English or Dutch very quickly. Europeans seemed incapable of reaching the obvious conclusion that the locals had more linguistic talent than their foreign visitors. (p. 82)

The Europeans’ staunch belief in their own superiority meant that they wanted to transform Africans. Their assumption that communication and meaningful interaction were difficult, if not impossible, meant that they considered force and violence the preferred mode of engagement. Consequently, colonial policy aimed to seize the land and livestock of local populations in order to turn them into a “deracinated, atomized proletariat” (p. 203). Where locals resisted, extreme violence was readily used, as in the 1904 “Annihilation Order”, which ushered in the 20^th century’s first genocide, of the Ovaherero.

2014 exhibition of (pre)colonial South Pacific photos at the Hamburg Museum of Anthropology entitled “A view of paradise”

Noble savages

In hindsight, the Ovaherero Genocide is often read as a precursor to the Holocaust and an indicator that German colonialism was exceptionally brutal and destructive. Steinmetz, however, contends that this argument suffers from a methodological error, namely the lack of comparison with other national cases. It is not his aim to compare German colonialism with the colonialism of other European nations although he does point out in passing similarities of the Ovaherero Genocide with the extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines and the Queensland Frontier Wars between 1840 and 1897. Steinmetz advances the comparative case “intranationally” with reference to two other German colonies, Samoa and Qingdao. Although these were part of the German colonial empire at the same time as Southwest Africa, colonialism played out quite differently there.

European ideas about Samoa, as of the South Pacific generally, were rather different to those they had of African. Like Africans, Samoans were portrayed as inferior savages. However, in contrast to Africans, Samoans were considered beautiful, noble and virtuous and were thought to live in paradise in harmony with nature.

German enthrallment with Samoans coupled with their belief in racial hierarchies produced some absurd ideological maneuvers. For instance, when German settlers in 1934 (by which time Samoa was a colony of New Zealand) formed a chapter of the Nazi party, they duly made a case that Samoas were “Aryans”. Crazy as that may seem, Samoans were not the only ones whose “race” kept changing in European eyes:

One of the most absurd aspects of European discussions of “race” during the nineteenth century is the way in which certain populations “changed color” as their relative standing within comparative ethnographic discourse shifted. Thus, the Witbooi changed from black to yellow after 1894 […] and the Chinese changed from white to yellow over the course of the nineteenth century. Samoans underwent a process of racial lightening, becoming more like the early image of Tahitians – who themselves began to seem swarthier to Europeans as they lost their charm.” (p. 302)

“Looking into paradise” was not innocent: “scientific” photography in physical anthropology, Samoa, ca. 1875 (held in the collection of the Hamburg Anthropology Museum)

In short, by the late 19^th century, Samoa had become paradise in the European imagination. Therefore, the aim of colonial policy was not to change Samoans but – to the contrary – to keep them in their supposed paradisiacal state. To achieve that the use of explicit force was rarely considered and the idea was that the colonial state would offer a firm paternal hand. In contrast to Southwest Africa, where the possibility of learning local languages did not seem to enter the minds of Europeans, it did in Samoa. The colony was governed through the medium of Samoan and, to a lesser degree, English. Colonial officials periodically responded to reprimands from Berlin and pointed out that the use of German in the South Pacific was not practical. The two German colonial governors (Samoa was a German colony for only 14 years) both became proficient Samoan speakers, adopted Samoan titles and styled themselves as traditional Samoan chiefs. Their identification with the colony was such that one of them declared himself to be Polynesian when he was no longer in office.

An advanced civilization

Just to be clear, it is not Steinmetz’ intention to argue that Samoan colonialism was “good”. All colonialism involves subjugation and exploitation, and Samoa was no exception. In fact, he trains his eye not on the colonized but the colonizers and his argument revolves around one of the perennial problems of intercultural communication: the ways in which stereotypes inform action. While European stereotypes about Africans and Samoans were relatively consistent, this was not the case with China.

China had been known to Europeans since the Middle Ages and hence there was significant variability in the ways it was represented in ethnographic writing. From early vague views of a fabled land emerged a highly positive representation starting with the 16^th century Jesuits of China as a well-ordered advanced society that was superior to Europe. These discourses of Sinophilia were in the 19^th century complemented with yet another, now negative, strand of representations of Chinese as members of an inferior race. While negative views started to gain currency, the earlier positive representations never died out entirely and so discourses about China were always much more poly-vocal than was the case with Africa and the South Pacific.

The transformation of Sinophilia into Sinophobia was, of course, tied to colonial expansion at the time and another emerging idea was “that China was ‘crying aloud for foreign conquest’” (p. 389). The Germans particularly coveted a colonial port similar to what the British had with Hong Kong and so they annexed Qingdao on the east coast in 1897. The first couple of years of colonial rule saw a focus on aggressive segregation between the colonizers and the colonized. However, this hostile approach did not last long, not least because colonial officials from the military were increasingly replaced with administrators who had a background in Chinese studies or had previously worked as translators and interpreters.

Many of the Qingdao colonial officials were graduates of the Oriental Languages Department at the University of Berlin, a language-training institute with the mission to prepare graduates for the foreign service. Graduates achieved high levels of proficiency in Chinese and imbibed a spirit of Sinophilia. Putting these men in charge of colonial policy resulted in “a program of rapprochement, syncretism, and exchange between two civilizations conceptualized as different but relatively equal in value” (p. 470).

Another legacy of German colonialism: Tsingtao Beer. The brewery, which was founded in 1903, is today a major tourist attraction (Source: Wikipedia)

A bilingual high school and college were founded with the aim to orient Chinese elites towards Germany. The high school employed Chinese teachers to teach Chinese, math, physics and chemistry, and German teachers to teach German and history. In contrast to colonial schools elsewhere, there was no religious instruction and Christian holidays were not observed. The college similarly aimed at an equilibrium between German and Chinese elements and offered a mixed curriculum. Institutions such as these and the colonial policies they were based on “took for granted that China was an advanced civilization on a level equal to that of Europe. Opening these floodgates within a colonial context pointed beyond European claims to sovereignty and supremacy, beyond colonialism” (p. 534).

Beyond colonialism?

German colonialism ended with Germany’s defeat in World War I and its unconditional surrender. This did not mean independence for its colonies but a change in occupying power. Southwest Africa was assigned to South Africa, Samoa to New Zealand and Qingdao came under Japanese occupation.

The afterlife of German colonialism is highly variable, too. Discussions with Namibia over reparations and a formal apology are ongoing although, as Steinmetz points out, the economic structures created by colonialism remain in place, with 30% of all Namibian farms owned by Germans or their descendants. In Samoa, German colonialism seems largely forgotten or, at least, not a matter of public debate; and Qingdao is capitalizing on its German heritage by having it turned into a tourist attraction.

Overall, The Devil’s Handwriting is a brilliant historical study of a key question in intercultural communication: how are discourses of culture related to practices in intercultural engagement? My brief overview here cannot do justice to the wealth of detail it offers but anyone interested in history, colonialism and intercultural communication will enjoy this book. Another highly recommended!

Happy reading! And don’t forget to share your progress. If you tweet about it and mention @lg_on_the_move, you’ll be in the running for our monthly draw of a copy of Intercultural Communication. The March winner has been announced on Twitter:

Each month we celebrate the #Language-on-the-Move community by gifting a copy of Ingrid Piller's "Intercultural Communication" @EdinburghUP to one of our interactive followers. The March winner is @KhawlaBadwan. Who will get lucky in April? pic.twitter.com/0liU8J2EyD

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 1, 2018

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Should ‘helping with English’ be part of the brief of humanitarian aid workers? (Source: helpage.org)

Over a few years of involvement in the aid sector in Asia, I became aware that aid workers turn their noses up at ‘English work’. Managers for my Australian government volunteering program encouraged us not to be sucked in to being human dictionaries while on NGO postings. In China, where I was, there was a bristling critique because USA’s Peace Corps volunteers were “only” sent to teach English: ‘How linguistically imperialist!’, we thought.

However, our local colleagues at NGOs and so called ‘development-sector’ government agencies often made requests of us native English speakers: to talk English with them, proofread and draft reports, apply for grants, translate the organisation’s website, help with overseas university applications and tutor their friends’ children. This sparked complaints like ‘I feel like I’m here mostly to translate’ and ‘I’m doing proofreading and admin tasks which I don’t see as capacity building’.

It sure is frustrating to move overseas and find you are expected to provide little but ‘white face time’ in your job. But is English language aid underrated?

Discounting ‘English work’ doesn’t happen because aid workers are haughty. These people have professional training in fields like environmental science or public health and believe they were hired to contribute in those areas. Moreover, many native English speakers recognize that they have no professional language teaching experience. Most aid workers are conscientious global citizens, wary of being language imperialists. But these ‘good reasons’ are misconceived, I argue.

Wrong Skills

Without teacher training, you are a less-than-ideal candidate to teach, no question. But in the regions I’m talking about, learners seldom get to select from a smorgasbord of English-speaking trained teachers and native English-speaking non-teachers. Even the Peace Corps receive some teacher training and teach in impoverished areas where TESOL staff-members are otherwise in short supply. Moreover, when learning a new language, important learning is done beyond the classroom and after childhood: for instance, between aid workers and their adult colleagues. Psychologist Vygotsky showed peer group learning with ‘more knowledgeable others’ was a productive part of language acquisition, with no teacher needed. Modelling grammatical and pragmatically-appropriate language provides useful input for learners. In short, helping colleagues with their English tasks or even just conversing can be valuable for their language learning and is within any English speaker’s ability. 

Imperialism?

In many countries, people see access to a native English speaker as a boon. Why not give communities what they think would assist their upward mobility? The contribution to informal, out-of-classroom English learning these native speakers provide is something their colleagues and communities may find even more valuable than the specific aid project, especially as the expense, scarcity and systemic preference given to children’s classes make formal language learning inaccessible to many adolescents and adults who want it.

As Kamwangamalu (2013, p. 328) notes of Africa – and I’ve found this in China, too – ‘stakeholders reject their own indigenous languages […] because they consider them insignificant and of no practical value in the linguistic marketplace.’ In this, local stakeholders are not wrong; English is indisputably of greatest value in many markets. Many (including me) would say this is evidence of linguistic hegemony and non-native English speakers are complicit in their own linguistic domination by prioritising English, embracing the coloniser’s model of the world. Even so, is it an incoming English speaker’s place to decide to attack hegemony by refusing to help people proofread?

Often, English is the language of power and funding, particularly for international aid, and non-elites may well perceive English as a resource monopolized by elites to preserve their status. For instance, Ghanaians ‘expressed the view that using the vernacular as an instructional medium was a subtle strategy employed by the elite to perpetuate communities’ marginalization from mainstream society’ (Mfum-Mensah 2005, p. 80).

Whether or not we oppose English’s dominance ideologically, it is beneficial to proofread co-workers’ donor reports, make templates for the office and attend events to speak for the organisation or those it assists, in English. The more co-worker inclusion in these activities, the better. That oft-encountered request to help a friend-of-a-friend with a personal English task should likewise be accepted, because language competencies can function as collective resources. Indeed, many linguists now advocate studying ‘actual linguistic, communicative, semiotic resources’ rather than ‘languages’ (Blommaert, 2010, p. 102). English resources can benefit networks rather than merely individuals. In expanding the networks around English resources, inequality and elitism is reduced.   

Both national politics and international development are ‘Fields’ (Bourdieu 1991). English is both economically and symbolically valuable in these Fields. Native English speakers – especially professionals doing aid volunteering – have an ability to use professional-register English at less expense (a Bourdieuian ‘Habitus’).  So it’s efficient for them to do tasks requiring professional English. Importantly, this is not short term efficiency at the expense of long term efficiency; helping out with English tasks now doesn’t preclude co-workers’ language acquisition in the longer term. Rather, it can play a part in their improvement so the ‘cost’ of professional English for colleagues will decrease over time. English-speaking aid workers, in doing ‘English work’, can improve their hosts’ access to material support and their ability to be heard in international forums.

The benefit of mobility of individuals, of organisations and across community networks is hard to weigh against the detriment of linguistic imperialism, but this weighing up should not be shirked, and nor should the ‘English work’ involved.

References

Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, Polity.

Kamwangamalu, N. M. (2013). Effects of policy on English-medium instruction in Africa. World Englishes, 32 (3), 325-337 DOI: 10.1111/weng.12034

Mfum-Mensah, O. (2005). The impact of colonial and postcolonial Ghanian language policies on vernacular use in two northern Ghanaian communities. Comparative Education 41 (1), 71-85.

Africa Town, Guangzhou (Source: ChinaSmack)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Africa Town, Guangzhou (Source: ChinaSmack)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The deskilling of skilled migrants is not unique to Australia but also a feature of Canada’s skilled migration program. In a recent article, “Survival Employment,” Gillian Creese and Brandy Wiebe look beyond the statistics of migrant un- and underemployment. The researchers interviewed 61 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Vancouver to uncover their experiences of re-entering the labor market post-migration. Most of their interviewees were tertiary-educated, most of them came from Anglophone countries and had been educated in English, and most of them had pre-migration professional experience. And they had one more thing in common: post-migration, they were mostly long-term underemployed:

Their educational credentials and experience in Africa went unrecognized; their ‘‘African-English’’ accents posed additional barriers to many types of employment; and their additional Canadian education often failed to translate into the expected occupational rewards. (p. 9)

Deskilling plays out differently for men and women because the labor market is not only racialized but also gendered. Men don’t have their qualifications and experience recognized but there are still jobs for them in the production sector and other blue collar work. Women’s qualifications and experiences aren’t recognized, either, but, unlike their male counterparts, they don’t even have access to blue collar work (which is reserved for men – personally, I’ve never seen a female taxi driver other than on TV …). At the same time, they don’t have access to the lower rungs of the feminized Canadian labor market such as retail and service work, either, because they don’t “look and sound right” for customer-service. All that is left to the women is cleaning work and some light manufacturing. Consequently, they invested more heavily into continuing education, usually at a lower level than warranted by existing credentials and experience, and following the gendered advice of settlement agencies, which pushed them into care work.

What is the point of having a skilled migration program if the labor market works to transform people who entered the country as “skilled migrants” into “uneducated Africans” once they are landed immigrants?! One of the interviewees, Lwanzo from Zimbabwe, sums up her experience of education and migration in this way:

When you are coming here, they say they cannot accept people who are not educated. They are accepting people who are educated, and when they come here, they treat them like uneducated people. What’s the use? Why not take people who are not educated then, if what you want are janitors, you know. Bring people who are janitors then, who’ll do that job gladly. Because I know people from home wouldn’t go to school if they came here to work as janitors. Janitors would do that job very gladly. But I’ll not do that happily. I will not do it happily. I’ll complain, you know. (p. 12)

The human capital assumptions underlying skilled migration are obviously flawed if job openings are mostly in unskilled areas and skilled migrants need to be deskilled in order to participate in the labor market. Creese and Wiebe further demonstrate that the neo-liberal reduction of government agencies to little more than “job clubs and resume services” also serves to push migrants immediately into “survival work” – as against the focus of an earlier era on building bridges to adequate post-migration employment. Finally, as I have also argued repeatedly (e.g., here and here), using “accent” and “local experience” as pretexts for exclusion from desirable employment has become the new face of racism without racists. Ultimately, while there may well be no individual people who can be accused of bad faith, these factors conspire to turn skilled migration in many cases into a broken promise. As a result, the interviewees in this study lost not only economically in terms of low wages, insecurity and unemployment but also in terms of their dignity and respect.

Creese, G., & Wiebe, B. (2009). ‘Survival Employment’: Gender and Deskilling among African Immigrants in Canada International Migration DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2435.2009.00531.x

Harraga derives from the root hrag ‘burn’ and could thus be translated as ‘the burners.’ The burn is an act of travelling, specifically illegal crossings from North Africa to Europe. A harrag is therefore a “person who metaphorically burns himself or herself, that is, one who disregards his or her own self and undertakes the trip to “make it to Europe” even at the risk of death” (p. 232). Harraga is the plural of harrag and anyone vaguely interested in current affairs knows that at any point in time over the past decade or so there have been a fair number of harraga waiting in North African ports to make the crossing to Europe, circulating in Europe with various types of official status but very often without any legal status at all, sans papiers ‘undocumented,’ or in the process of being deported back to Africa. The BBC has a factsheet which provides a quick overview of Africa-to-Europe migration and the Boston Globe has a moving photo documentary.

There are many different harraga and Hannoum’s ethnography is with a group whose “burning” is particularly poignant: children. “The harraga of Tangier” the title refers to are street children, far away from home, waiting to burn.

They are already immigrants, in exile (ghurba) in a city with a strong sense of identity. The people of Tangier view themselves as superior, “people of the North” (awlad al-shamal). They have a clearly distinctive accent. The rest, in their view, are people of the inside, the interior, al-dakhil, considered by and large a land of “hicks” (a’rubiya). […] if an average Moroccan is looked at as an outsider in Tangier, how would those children be looked at, given their triple status as poor, a’rubiya, and harraga? (p. 232f.)

The way they burn is as stowaways, mostly by crawling under trucks as they stop at a red light before entering the port. Some of the children attempting to burn are as young as six years old: at an age when the fortunate children of the world still have their hands held when crossing the street, the harraga of Tangier attempt intercontinental journeys hidden under a truck. The author quotes a Moroccan policeman as saying “Twenty children burn every day. We catch and return seventeen of them” (p. 238). Those who make it to Algeciras, the Spanish port 14 kilometers away from Tangier, get caught there and deported although some of the these child harraga had made it as far as Amsterdam before being deported back to Morocco. Most of them had burnt many times.

Formal education obviously has a very limited reach with these children and only one of the children Hannoum spoke to had made it to second grade. Sadly, education does not even hold a promise for these children. One of them asks Hannoum: “What have those who went to school gained? Have you not seen educated people and doctors who are unable to find a job? Have you not seen them protesting and asking for employment?” (p. 233) The only hope for these wretched of the earth is actually to go elsewhere. Their dreams are modest and clearly shaped by a tourism economy: “I want at least to learn Spanish and come back and work as a waiter in Tangier” one of them says (p. 241). Bigger dreams include to be able to keep clean, to dress well, to have money, to own a car, to find a girl. It is modest dreams such as these that children are burning for. No wonder they see themselves engulfed by quhra.

Misery is not a good translation of quhra. Quhra means total poverty, owning nothing. But it can also mean the profound feeling of being completely squeezed by misery to the point of despair and utter hopelessness. Quhra is defeating. It also wounds one’s dignity, often fatally. (p. 238)

You may have wondered when I’ll finally get round to the Christmas message of my post – well, there is none. At a time when much intercultural communication is constituted by a kind of material striptease of consumption that “the West” broadcasts to “the rest” and when “The Festive Season” is nothing more than an annual spike in this orgy of consumption, it just seemed fitting to spare a thought for the burning spectators.

Reference

Abdelmajid Hannoum (2009). The Harraga of Tangier Encounters: an international journal for the study of culture and society, 231-246