The website of Hohhot Baita International Airport provides information in Chinese and English but not in Mongolian

Update, Sept 16, 2020: A Mongolian translation of this blog post is now available here. Translated by Cholmon Khuanuud.

In April 2016, a Mongolian family missed their flight at Baita International Airport in Hohhot, the capital city of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), an autonomous region within China. People missing their flights happens all the time, of course, in every corner of the world. However, this mishap made national headlines and became symbolic of the struggle faced by speakers of small languages such as Mongolian vis-à-vis a large national language such as Chinese and global English. It demonstrates how even Mongolian, one of the official languages of IMAR, can be sacrificed to the discourses and practices of global English.

Let me relate the incident: an elderly woman from Shiliingol League (also spelled “Xilingol” in English) in mid-eastern Inner Mongolia required medical attention that was not available in her hometown and had to fly to Hohhot for the procedure. Her son and grandson accompanied her to provide support. Mother and son are both monolingual in Mongolian, the official language of IMAR (along with Chinese). The grandson, who brought this story to the attention of Mongols across the country, is bilingual in Mongolian and Chinese. None of the three speaks any English, a language that is irrelevant to people in Shiliingol League, as it is to people in many places around the world.

On their way back home from Hohhot to Shiliingol this family arrived at the airport in good time but missed their flight when they could not make it to the gate on time. As the grandson relates the story, they missed the flight for two reasons.

Map of Inner Mongolia (Source: TravelChinaGuide)

First, announcements at the airport were only provided in Chinese and English but not in Mongolian. This made it impossible for them to obtain timely information. When the Chinese announcement was made, the young man happened to use the bathroom. On his return, his grandmother told him that the loudspeaker had just chattered something in Chinese. A few seconds later, the English announcement for the flight was made but, naturally, they did not think it would be relevant to their flight within IMAR and they could not understand it anyways.

Second, by the time they realized their flight was being called up, an excessive security check caused them further delay. The grandmother was asked to remove her scarf and two layers of winter coats and was checked from head to toe. As no one else was subject to such excessive scrutiny except the old woman wearing minority dress, it is reasonable to assume that the family was the victim of racial profiling.

Realizing they had missed the last flight for the day was distressing, particularly as they had no idea how to spend the night with the sick elderly lady. They approached the service desk to ask for help. There, they received the following response, which infuriated the young man:

This is not Mongolia; this is Inner Mongolia. In Inner Mongolia we have to speak Chinese, it is our official language. Of course, English is also our official language. [my translation]

He has shared his frustration on social media:

After hearing this, my heart was struck as if by ice. It is unbearable. My Chinese is not good enough to argue with the service agent, although I know very clearly that Chinese is the national and official language, and Mongolian is the official language of Inner Mongolia together with Chinese. English is definitely not an official language. [my translation]

Then he continues:

This is my home but why does it look like the home of someone else? Is Britain my country? Is Britain my home? Why do we have to use English? Why can’t we have a service in Mongolian? [my translation]

The young man’s account was shared widely by Mongols, as was his anger. Luckily, IMAR’s Mongolian language regulation and guidelines actually stipulate the use of Mongolian in the public service: government offices and institutions have to be staffed by reasonable numbers of Mongolian and Chinese bilinguals, even if the story shows the gap between the language policy and its implementation (see also Grey, 2017, for another Chinese case study).

In the end, the story had a happy conclusion. The airport apologized to the family and reimbursed them. Even more importantly, Mongolian language announcements are now being offered at Hohhot’s Baita International Airport.

In this concept image of Hohhot Baita International Airport on the designer’s website, the predominance of white travelers is symbolic of the vision of the airport as a “global” rather than “home” space

“The discourses and practices of global English produce an orientation to the global at the expense of the local”, argues Ingrid Piller in her book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice (2016, p. 202). The incidence clearly demonstrates that the spread of English not just further subordinates the oppressed but also deprives them of their language rights on their own land, where they are, at least, the titular nationality. The presence of English in this Inner Mongolian airport gives this peripheral region which vies for investment and economic development an international and advanced outlook. The motivation and desire behind the replacement of Mongolian with English resembles what Bulag observes with relation to the replacement of the Mongolian administrative term aimag (盟, “league”) since the 1980s:

Cities have emerged as the centres where industrial miracles and ‘actions’ occur, pointing towards a future utopia, departing from Mao’s ideological ambivalence, and are represented in the media as an embodiment of modernity replete with much of the palette of global capitalist renderings of “modernity” and its radically persuasive imagery of the good life, progress and development. Such a modernity is what I will call alter/native modernity, that is, not just an alternative Chinese modernity, but one which hinges on altering the native Mongol cultural and political institutions and properties (Bulag, 2002, p. 198).

The presence of English instead of Mongolian at Hohhot airport shares so much similarity with the replacement of the “backward” Mongolian administrative names with modern capital-desiring cities. Or as Piller states, “the promotion of English is tied to an external orientation to development”, which ultimately serves only the interests of global and local elites.

However, in the context of Inner Mongolia, the promotion of English at the expense of Mongolian in public space does more than serve the interests of the small elite; it simultaneously delivers a severe blow to all Mongols. The public presence of Mongolian signifies the “remaining token degree of autonomy” (Bulag, 2002, p. 224) of Mongols; and the destruction of these remaining token means the loss of home. Or, as the young man in his account moans, it begins to look like someone else’s home.

Related content

Access explorations of the linguistic landscape at other airports here.

References

Bulag, U. E. (2002). From Yeke-juu league to Ordos municipality: settler colonialism and alter/native urbanization in Inner Mongolia. Provincial China, 7(2), 196-234. doi:10.1080/1326761032000176122

Grey, A. (2017). How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change. (PhD), Macquarie University.

Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

In the past weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to re-visit two quite different cities of whose linguistic landscapes I consider myself a longtime observer: Dubai and Munich. Both in Dubai and Munich, I was struck by the ever-increasing presence of Arabic (Munich) and Chinese (Dubai). In Munich, one can now see menus and shop signs in Arabic and much of the official signage at Munich Airport is trilingual in German, English and Arabic. Similarly, the presence of Chinese is expanding in Dubai through shop signs, store guides and service personnel wearing badges identifying them as Chinese speakers. Most intriguingly, in the airport lounges of both cities, I discovered glossy magazines in Arabic (Munich) and Chinese (Dubai) addressed at Arabic- and Chinese-speaking travellers respectively. Both the Chinese-language Luxos (subtitle: ‘Your guide to luxury’) and the Arabic-language Arab Traveler (subtitle: ‘Magazine for the Arabian Friends of Bavaria’) are high-end consumption guides with lots of ads for exclusive brands of jewelry, perfume, hotels, clothing or wellness interspersed with infomercials about boutique shopping and luxury consumption.

Neither Arabic in Munich nor Chinese in Dubai are likely language choices given the settlement and migration history of these cities. So, how come they are making their presence felt in such conspicuous ways in addition to the local language (German and Arabic respectively) and the international language English? The answer lies in the fact that Arabic and Chinese are the languages of the biggest tourist spenders in these places: Munich is popular with Gulf Arabs as a shopping and health destination and, according to this SZ report, the average Arab tourist spends 569 Euros per day in Munich. By comparison, the second-biggest spenders, Japanese tourists with 370 Euros per day, seem almost miserly and there are far fewer of them anyways.

Chinese tourists are to Dubai what Arab tourists are to Munich: the most lucrative group. According to one report, in 2011 300,000 Chinese tourists came to Dubai and their combined expenditure of USD 334 million made them the most valuable group of tourists.

In a consumer economy, language is a means to make a profit. As purchasing power shifts, so do language ideologies and English may be starting to encounter rivals after all.

Persian version of my blog post about English as the non-language of globalization.
Translated by Niloufar Behrooz (نیلوفر بهروز)

(نوشتار شماره ٢ در مجموعه نوشتار های کوتاه درباره ی نشانه های چند زبانه)

اغلب تابلوهایی كه در مكان هایِ عمومیِ حالِ حاضر يافت می شوند جنبه ی تجاری دارند. اين نوعی روشِ تبليغات است و انتخابِ لغات در تابلوهایِ تجاری از جمله اسامیِ مغازه ها و فروشگاه ها به خوبی بيانگر ارزشهایِ مرتبط با يك زبان خاص مي باشد. هدف اصلی اين است كه معنایِ ضمنیِ نامِ فروشگاه به گونه ای باشد كه مشتری های زيادی را جذب كند. از يك چشم اندازِ چند زبانه، نشانه هایِ جالب آن هایی هستند که در آن ها از زبانی غير از زبانِ پیش فرض – زبانِ رسمي يك مكانِ خاص – استفاده شده باشد. در بيشتر دنيایِ غيرِ انگليسی زبان علامت هایِ انگليسی البته باعث مباهاتِ آن مكان شده وانگليسی به طور گسترده ای با مفاهيمی چون نوين گری، پيشرفت، جهانی سازی و مصرف گرايی پيوند خورده است. در حالی كه زبانهای غير انگليسی غالبا نشانگر كليشه های قومی هستند، انگليسی نشانگر يك كليشه یِ اجتماعی است (همان طور كه با شرح جزئيات در اين مقاله به آن پرداخته ام). اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی قرار نيست همان طور كه  فرانسوی یا ايتاليايی برای آغشتنِ یک داد وستدِ اقتصادی به رنگ و بویِ فرانسوی و ايتاليايی مورد استفاده قرار می گیرد، يكسری كيفيتِ بريتانيايی و آمريكايیِ کلیشه ای را تبليغ كند.

ارتباط زبان انگليسی با مصرف گرايی به طور كامل در تابلویِ اين فروشگاه در فرودگاهِ مونيخ مشخص شده است. مونيخ پايتختِ باواريا يكي از ايالات ساختار فدرال آلمان است. لغتِ آلمانیِ موردِ استفاده برای باواريا بايرن (Bayern) است و بخش اول Bay-ern دقيقا مثل كلمه یِ انگليسیِ Buy (خريدن) تلفظ مي شود. اسم ِ فروشگاه نوعی معمایِ لفظی ِ به تمامِ معناست. رنگ ملی باواريا، يعني آبي، در پس زمينه یِ لوزی شکلِ تابلو روابط ملی (گرایانه) را تقویت می کند. به عنوان كسی كه در باواريا بزرگ شده، با پيش فرضی از نماد ملی كه در بچگی به من القا شده بود، عكس العملِ ناخودآگاهِ من اما نسبت به اين تابلو از نوع وحشت و رنجش بود.

زبان انگليسی در اين تابلو به وضوح هيچ گونه ارتباطی با هيچ كشور انگليسی زبانی ندارد، بلكه انگليسی را به نمادِ ملیِ ناحیه ای غيرِ انگليسی زبان، يعنی باواريا، پيوند مي دهد و مردمِ آن ناحیه را به عنوان يك هدف مصرفی عرضه مي كند. کالاهایِ موجود در اين فروشگاه از انواعِ سوغات به شمار مي آيند، سوغاتِ باواريايي، آلمانی، اروپايی، فرودگاهی، كريسمسی ( من اين عكس را نوامبر سال پيش گرفتم) و چيزهای ديگری كه تنها برایِ خريده شدن آن جا هستند. بخريد!

مثل بسياری از فرودگاه های ديگر، انگليسی اين مكان را به نا-فضایی برای مصرف ِ مفرط، گردشِ مفرط و نماد هایِ ملیِ مفرط تبديل می سازد. انگليسی زبانِ جهانی سازی است؛ در این شکی نیست اما جهاني سازیِ هيچ-چيز، همان طور که جورج ریتزر به ما می گوید! آيا اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی زبانِ هيچ-چيز است؟ نا-افرادی در نا-مکانی سرگرم ِ خریدنِ نا-چیزهایی در نا-برخوردهایِ تجاری و با استفاده از یک نا-زبان؟

References

Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

Ritzer, G. (2007). The globalization of nothing 2 Thousand Oaks, CA, & London: Sage.

Space challenged Shinjuku, Tokyo (September 2010): Photo by Kimie Takahashi

Tokyo is getting more and more linguistically diverse every time I go back there. During this trip, I was really amazed by how efficiently and elegantly Tokyo does multilingual signs, particularly on trains and at stations. And I wasn’t the only one to notice! Ingrid Piller’s and my observations contradict the prevalent view that it is hard to travel in Japan because Japanese can’t speak English or there are not enough English signs. One comment in response to Multilingual Tokyo also expressed the opinion that there is only so much space for multilingual signs. In this post, I’m going to bust these stereotypes and show that multilingual signs can be done elegantly using some examples from space-challenged Tokyo!

To begin with, in Tokyo, with 35 to 39 million people on the move from one place to another every day, electronic signage provides the answer. It is everywhere and so well designed! Ride one of the metro lines in Tokyo and you are bound to find electronic information (as in the photos below). First, information on the electronic signage above the doors on this train appears entirely in Japanese kanji (Picture 1), and then the name of the next station in green changes to hiragana (Picture 2 – great for kanji-challenged people like myself) and then to Roman characters (Picture 3). The name of the next station is back in kanji in Picture 4, but the other station names in black and connecting train lines to these stations are now in Roman characters. In Picture 5, the name of the next station changes to hiragana and the other station names remain in Roman characters and pretty much everything gets displayed in Roman characters in Picture 6. The prohibition against the use of mobile phones (Picture 7) appears bilingually (Picture 8), and as your train approaches to the station, the warning for the opening doors appears in Japanese (Picture 9) and English (Picture 10)!

According to their website, JR (the Japan Railway Company) is even switching from bilingual (Japanese and English) language services to quadrilingual services. They have started to offer, for instance, the website, signage within the stations, Information Centers and the Infoline (a telephone-based service) in four languages (Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean).

Airport Limousine, too, is now thoroughly multilingual in the provision of their services (see pictures below), not only with their electronic signage at Limousine stops, but also information online and on the bus.

There are many more examples (I’ve taken more than 1,500 pictures in two weeks!), but the above certainly busts the persistent, monolingual myth about Japan, or at least Tokyo’s transport systems. Some parts of the city, of course, remain monolingual in Japanese, but in light of what we see in Tokyo today it is amazing that discourses of monolingual Japan or how funny Japanese English is still circulate. It is only recently that the Japanese Government launched its tourism campaign, Yokoso! Japan. It seems that the campaign has contributed to raising awareness of the importance of non-Japanese language services among government officials and business representatives. Coming from Sydney, where non-English signs on trains and busses are a rarity (including the train to our international airport as we reported in the Sydney Morning Herald) and having seen too many half-hearted, unprofessional signages in non-local languages in other tourist places, I take my hat off to Tokyo. If you take customer service and safety seriously in a metropolitan city and a tourism destination, you can never underestimate the importance of language provisions.

Overall, the increasing number of multilingual signs in general and the elegant and efficient ways in which these signs are displayed is a sign that Tokyo is a thriving international city and a great tourism destination.

Despite the fact that around 30% of Sydneysiders speak a language other than English at home and the fact that Sydney aspires to be a top international tourist destination, official signage – directions, prohibitions, warnings, street names etc. – are in English only. By contrast, pretty much all such signage I’ve seen in Tokyo during the past week was at least bilingual in Japanese and English. A fair number were not only bilingual but quadrilingual in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean as this direction sign at Shinjuku Station. To put this in perspective, only around 250,000 of Tokyo’s 35 million residents are non-Japanese – less than 1% of the population (as I learnt from the poster below).

If Tokyo’s official signage can be inclusive of the languages of less than 1% of the population, why can’t Sydney’s official signage attempt to be inclusive of the languages of 30% of the population? Chinese speakers alone constitute a much larger segment of the population than all non-Japanese speakers in Tokyo combined …

Not surprisingly many of the Japanese tourists in our study of language challenges faced by the Australian tourism industry commented that simply adding multilingual signage at Sydney’s international airport, for instance, could easily improve passenger flow at that airport. They obviously speak from experience. Seeing the usual crowds, queues and general chaos that greeted me in the arrivals hall when I arrived back home yesterday, I can only say it’s high time we started to pay attention to international best practice!

The lovers of English poetry among you will recall how the phrase “Betreten verboten” (“No trespassing”) encapsulates his alienation from Berlin and his longing for his English home for Rupert Brooke. Prohibition signs – signs that tell us what not to do– have become much more widespread in the century that has passed since Brooke noticed them on German lawns. This is due to a proliferation of spaces in which people who can no longer be expected to share the same set of norms congregate and circulate (airports, for instance, are a prime space where prohibition signs appear). At the same time, we also have seen a proliferation of rules and these rules often differ across spaces that even one single urban person might frequent in the course of their daily activities (e.g., the increase in smoking bans).

I have a hunch that prohibition signs are more likely to be multilingual than other types of signs (and I’m expecting that my students’ assignment will throw some light on whether that hunch bears out in Sydney’s suburbs). My hunch is based on the fact that humans often take a dim view of “the other” and tend to expect outsiders to be less compliant than insiders. As evidence for my hypothesis I have collected signs such as the one above. This hexalingual sign appears in the canteen of a Soviet-style hotel in Prague. The management of this budget hotel is clearly worried that guests might take the opportunity of the buffet-style breakfast to fill their lunchboxes, too. One thing that the sign obviously does is to mark the hotel as budget accommodation and to position its guests as cheapskates. What’s more, the language choices on the sign clearly address cheapskates of particular linguistic backgrounds. When I stayed in that hotel, most guests were Czechs, Germans and Russians, and it is entirely possible that the six languages represented are the languages of the majority of guests, and including any more languages would not have been useful (nor practical; as it is, the sign is huge).

While the language choices in the above sign in a multilingual tourist destination in the heart of Europe don’t single out a particular group as likely offenders, this sign does. I found this little flier in a hotel room in Sydney. I have a large collection of signage in Australian hotel rooms and they are mostly monolingual in English. In the minority of multilingual hotel room signage, Chinese figures rarely. This sign is thus exceptional in its bilingualism, its language choice, and even in the fact that Chinese appears above English. Clearly, someone is trying very hard to send a message to Chinese guests. When I stayed in that hotel, there were no Chinese guests present. The sign thus does double duty: not only does it alert guests to the prohibition against smoking, it also positions Chinese guests as likely offenders! The non-smoking sign below from a New Zealand train does exactly the same thing: again, we find a bilingual sign in a context dominated by monolingual signage. Again, the other language, Japanese in this case, stands out not only because of the choice itself but also because of its design (this time it’s not the position but the size and color).

Proponents of multilingualism often like to think that bi- and multilingualism per se are better than monolingualism, and that multilingual signs by their very nature are more inclusive than monolingual ones. Not so! It all depends on the context! While these signs include Chinese and Japanese readers as potential recipients of the message, they exclude them from “polite society” by singling them out as likely offenders.

Much of the signage that can be found in contemporary public spaces is commercial. It is a form of advertising, and language choice in commercial signage such as shop names is a good indicator of the values associated with a particular language. The basic idea is that the connotations of the shop name are such that they will attract potential customers. From a multilingual perspective, the interesting signs are those where a language other than the default choice – the official language of a particular place – is used. In much of the non-English-speaking world, English signs, of course, hold pride of place and English has come to be widely associated with modernity, progress, globalization and consumption. Whereas languages other than English mostly index ethnic stereotypes, English indexes a social stereotype (as I discussed in detail in this review article). What that means is that English is not used to conjure up some archetypal American or British quality in the same way that French or Italian are used to imbue a business with some stereotypical French-ness or Italian-ness.

The association of English with consumerism is perfectly encapsulated in this shop sign at Munich airport. Munich is the capital of Bavaria, one of the states in Germany’s federal structure. The German word for “Bavaria” is “Bayern” and the first syllable of “Bay-ern” is pronounced just like English “buy.” The shop name “Buyern” is thus a neat word play. Bavaria’s national color blue against the background of the national rhombus pattern reinforce the national association. As someone who grew up in Bavaria and had a certain reference for the national symbolism instilled in my childhood, my gut reaction to this sign was one of dismay and offense.

English in this sign clearly bears no relationship whatsoever to any English-speaking country. Rather, it associates English with the national symbolism of a non-English-speaking country, Bavaria, and presents that nation as an object of consumption. The products for sale in this shop are all kinds of souvenirs: Bavarian souvenirs, German souvenirs, European souvenirs, airport souvenirs, Christmas souvenirs (I took the picture in November last year) and other stuff whose only purpose it is to be bought. Buy!

English makes this place – just like pretty much any other airport – a non-space of gratuitous consumption, gratuitous travel, and gratuitous national imagery. English is the language of globalization, that’s for sure; but it’s the globalization of nothing, as George Ritzer tells us. Does that make English the language of nothing? Non-people in non-places buying non-things in non-service encounters and using a non-language?!

Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

Ritzer, G. (2007). The globalization of nothing 2 Thousand Oaks, CA, & London: Sage

Apparently, the freedom to try and learn languages other than English is not one of the freedoms they enjoy so much in The Land of the Free …

I no longer get updates from KLM but now this. I was trying to book a flight with Etihad online and it seems the designers of the form had an urgent need to determine the gender of the traveler without making them tick a box for “female”/ “male.” Ok, fair enough, I can accept that; although one of the beauties of having a PhD as a female in this world is that I get away with not having to reveal my marital status through the use of “Miss,” “Ms” or “Mrs” when filling in forms. What really ticks me off in this form is that you don’t get a choice for the gender of “professor” but that this illustrious title only comes in the Mr-flavor. It’s hard to believe that there would be fewer female professors flying than brigadiers, captains, colonels, generals, shaikhas and sheikhs. And how come the airline doesn’t need to know the sex of brigadiers, captains, colonels and generals? There may be few female brigadiers, captains, colonels and generals but surely if they are allowed to have a gender-neutral term of address, doctors and professors are entitled to the same.

In the end, I clicked on “Prof. (Mr)” although, seeing that the gender was wrong, I was tempted to go for something equally false and a bit more exotic such as “shaikha” as the term by which I wish to be addressed by airline personnel …

One of the sad effects of a certain form of English management-speak spreading to every corner of the globe is that it sucks the life out of the language as Don Watson noted so eloquently in Death Sentence. What do we make of a discipline such as psychology if “negative,” “neutral” and “positive’ are the height of sophistication with which to reflect on “moods”? On a recent flight to Australia, the cabin crew advised us shortly before landing that anyone “feeling unwell” should report to a flight attendant. I felt very unwell after 14 hours sitting in the same uncomfortable spot and I’m pretty sure everyone on the plane felt similarly “unwell.” No one reported to a flight attendant maybe because everyone knew that they were after flu symptoms. However, the guy two rows in front of me who had been coughing and sneezing for 14 hours didn’t report either – and I can’t blame him: if no one else of the other passengers who were clearly also “unwell” with swollen feet, queasy stomachs, stiff necks etc. felt it necessary to report their “unwellness” why should he report his?

All this leads to the question whether the person who wrote the announcement (it was clearly read off and I’d heard it before) was “in a positive mood” when they wrote this useless statement or whether it’s just that so many writers suffer from an impoverished vocabulary?