This episode also contains excerpts from a Wired YouTube video by dialect coaches Erik Singer and Eliza Simpson called Accent Expert Breaks Down Language Pet Peeves.

If you liked this episode, also check out Lingthusiasm’s episode about creaky voice called “Various vocal fold vibes”, Dr. Cate Madill’s piece in The Conversation entitled Keep an eye on vocal fry – it’s all about power, and the Multicultural Australian English project that Dr. White references (Multicultural Australian English: The New Voice of Sydney).

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

Transcript (added 19/12/2024)

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

Hannah is a postdoc researcher at Macquarie University in the Department of Linguistics. She completed her doctoral research last year in 2023 with a thesis entitled Creaky Voice in Australian English. Today we’re going to be discussing this research along with a 2023 paper that she co-authored entitled Convergence of Creaky Voice Use in Australian English.

This paper is also Chapter 5 of her thesis. The paper and the entirety of Hannah’s thesis examines the use of creaky voice or vocal fry in speech. Hannah, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

I’m so excited to talk to you.

Dr White: Thank you so much for having me. I’m also excited.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what made you decide to pursue a PhD in Linguistics?

Dr White: You might be able to tell from my accent that I am a Kiwi, a Kiwi linguist working here in Australia. I actually kind of fell into linguistics by accident. So I was doing my undergrad in French and German, and I went to Germany on exchange, and I took just on a whim, I took an undergraduate beginner English Linguistics course, and I realized this is what I want to do forever.

I fell in love immediately and came back and added a whole other major to my degree. So yeah, it was kind of by chance that I found linguistics. And in terms of doing a PhD, I just, I love research.

I love the idea of coming up with a hypothesis, designing an experiment to test it and finding like results that might kind of challenge. Ideas that you’ve like preconceptions that you have or yeah, just finding something new. So yeah, that’s kind of what drew me into doing the PhD and in linguistics.

Brynn: Did you go straight from undergrad into a PhD?

Dr White: No, I didn’t. I had a master’s step in between. So, I did that in Wellington.

Brynn: I was going to say, that is quite a leap if you did that!

Dr White: Absolutely not. I did my master’s looking at creaky voice as well. So, I looked at perceptions of creak and uptalk in New Zealand English.

Brynn: Well, let’s go ahead and start talking about that because I’m so excited to talk about creak and vocal fry and uptalk. So, your doctoral research investigated this thing called creaky voice. So, whether we realize it or not, we’ve all heard creaky voice, or as I said, is it sometimes called vocal fry.

So, tell us, what exactly is creaky voice? Why do people study it? And why did you decide to study it?

Dr White: Okay, so creaky voice is a very common kind of voice quality. Technically, if we want to get a little bit phonetics, it’s generally produced with quite a constricted glottis and vocal folds that are slack and compressed. They vibrate slowly and irregularly.

And this results in a very low-pitched, rough or pulse-like sound. You can think of it, often it’s described as kind of sounding like popcorn, like popping corn or a stick being dragged along a railing. They’re quite common analogies for the sound of creaky voice.

Why do people study it? I think that it’s something that people think that they know a lot about. And it’s talked about a lot.

But it’s actually kind of, there has been research on creak for a very long time, since the 60s. It’s gaining popularity at the moment. So, I think it’s a relatively new area of research that’s gaining a lot of popularity right now.

This could be to do with the fact that there’s a lot of media coverage around creaky voice or vocal fry.

Brynn: Because we should say that the probably most common example that we’ve all heard is Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, saying things like, that’s hot, like that, that like, uh, sound voice, yeah.

Dr White: The Valley Girl.

Brynn: Valley Girl, yes.

Dr White: My go-to examples, Britney Spears as well.

Brynn: Oh, absolutely.

Dr White: Yeah. So, a lot of this media coverage, it’s associated with women, right? But it’s also super negative.

So often it’s associated even in linguistic studies, perception studies, it’s associated with vapidness, uneducated, like stuck up, vain sort of persona. So, I think it’s really interesting to kind of, that’s what drew me into study, wanting to study it. I do it all the time.

I’m a real chronic creaker and I love the sound of it personally. So, I kind of just wanted to work out why people hate it so much and see if I can challenge that view of creak.

Brynn: Yeah, and it is true that we tend to associate it with, as you said, with vapidness. Do we have any idea of where that perception came from? Or was it just because it’s more these people that are in the limelight, younger women, the Kim Kardashians of the world, is it because we associate them with being vapid and that’s their type of speech, or do we know where that came from?

Dr White: I don’t know if there’s any research that’s kind of looked at where that association came from originally, but I would say, like just from my own perception, it probably is that association with these celebrities.

Brynn: And these celebrities that we are talking about are generally American, right? But in your thesis, you discuss creaky voice use in multicultural Sydney, Australia. And you write about how social meanings are expressed through the use of creaky voice.

So, can you tell us about that? Where you’re seeing creak come up in Australia? Maybe why you’re seeing it come up and what you saw during your research?

Dr White: I mean, creaky voice is used by everyone. It’s a really common feature. It’s used across the world in different languages.

It can even be used to change the meaning of words in some languages. So, it’s got this kind of phonemic use.

Brynn: Let’s hear what dialect coach Eric Singer has to say about creak changing meanings in other languages. This is from a video posted to YouTube from Wired and it’s called Accent Expert Breaks Down Language Pet Peeves. And we’ll hear more from Eric later in this episode.

Singer: So creaky voice actually has a linguistic function in some languages. In Danish, for example, the word un without any creak in your voice means she, but the word un means dog. So, you have to actually put that creak in and you can change the meaning of a word.

In Burmese, ka means shake and ka means attend on. You have to add creaky voice and it means something totally different. Otherwise, the syllable is exactly the same.

The Mexican language, Xalapa Mazatec, actually has a three-way contrast between modal voice, creaky voice and breathy voice. So, we can take the same syllable, ya, which with that tone means tree. But if I do it with breathy voice, ya, it means it carries.

And if I do it with creaky voice, ya, it means he wears. Same syllable.

Dr White: So, it’s not just this thing that is used by these celebrities in California. So, we know that it’s used by people in Australia, but no one’s really looked at it before. So, there are very, very few studies in Australian English on creaky voice.

So that’s kind of where I started from. The data we used in my thesis was from the Multicultural Australian English Project. So that was led by Professor Felicity Cox at Macquarie University.

And the data was collected from different schools and different areas of Sydney that are kind of highly populated by different kind of ethnic groups. So, we collected data that was conversational speech between these teenagers. And I looked at the creak.

So, we’ve been looking at lots and lots of different linguistic, phonetic aspects of the speech. But I specifically looked at the creak between these teenagers. And I think the really interesting thing that I found was that overall, the creak levels were really quite similar between the boys and the girls.

It wasn’t, I didn’t find an exceptional mass of creak in the girls’ speech compared to the boys.

Brynn: Which is fascinating, because we, honestly, until I started looking into this for this episode, or talking to you, I just assumed that women, girls would have more creak in their voice than men. And then I was reading your data and reading the paper, and I was blown away to find out, wait a minute, no, there’s actually not that much difference in the prevalence of it. So, what’s going on there?

Why do we assume that it’s girls and women?

Dr White: There’s a lot of research in this specific area at the moment. Part of my thesis, I actually did a perception study about, so looking at how people perceive creak in different voices. So, it was a creak identification task, and they heard creak in low-pitched male and female voices, and high-pitched male and female voices.

And it could be something to do with the low pitch of male speech, generally. Post-creak is such a low-pitched feature. It might be that it’s less noticeable in a male voice because it’s already at this baseline low, so there’s less of a contrast when the speaker goes into creak.

Whereas if you’ve got a female speaker with a relatively high-pitched voice, you might notice it a lot more when they go down into the low-pitched creak. So that could be something that’s influencing this perception of creak as a female feature.

Brynn: Let’s give our audience an example of that now. This is from a YouTube video posted by Wired and dialect coach Eric Singer, as well as fellow dialect coach Eliza Simpson. We’ll link to this in the show notes.

Singer: One thing it’s hard not to notice is that most of the time when people are complaining about vocal fry and uptalk, they’re complaining about women’s voices, and especially young women. And it’s not just women who do this. Let’s try our own experiment, shall we?

Let’s take one sentence, the first sentence from the Gettysburg Address. I’m going to do it with some creak in my voice. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Eliza, would you do the same?

Simpson: Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Singer: What did you think? Do you have different associations when you hear it from a male voice? Four score and seven years ago, than when you hear it from a female voice?

Simpson: Four score and seven years ago.

Brynn: We hear this creak in men’s voices, and we hear it in women’s voices. You mentioned that you were looking at multilingual Sydney. What did you discover about creak in multilingual populations?

Dr White: Yeah, so we, it was more, so the speakers that we were working with are all first language Australian English speakers. A lot of them had different kind of heritage languages, so either their parents spoke other languages at home, or they spoke other languages at home in addition to English. My research was more focused on the areas that the speakers lived in, so rather than their language backgrounds.

I think the most interesting thing we found was that the girls, so I said that there weren’t that many differences between gender, but the girls in Cabramatta or Fairfield area, so this is a largely Vietnamese background population, they actually crept significantly less than the boys in that area. So that was kind of an interesting finding.

And when we, like obviously we want to work out why that might be, so we had a look into the conversations of those girls, and we found that they were talking a lot about kind of cultural identity and cultural pride, and pride in the area as well.

So, talking about how they’re really proud of like how Asian the area is. And that they don’t want it to be whitewashed. So, we wondered whether for those girls, creak might be associated with some kind of white woman identity, and they were distancing themselves from that by not using as much creaky voice.

Brynn: Fascinating! Did you find out anything to do with the boys and why they, this more Vietnamese heritage language population, why they did use creak?

Did it have anything to do with ethnicity or cultural heritage or not? Or we don’t know yet?

Dr White: We don’t know yet. That’s something that needs to be looked into, but I did notice that they didn’t talk about the area in the same way. So it could be, yeah, it could just be the conversation didn’t come up, the topic didn’t come up, but it could also be like that relation to the area and their cultural identity is particularly linked to creaky voice for those girls.

Brynn: That’s absolutely fascinating. Did you find the opposite anywhere? Did you find that certain places had the girls creaking more than the boys?

Dr White: We did find that in Bankstown and in Parramatta, but we don’t know exactly why that is yet.

Brynn: It feels like there’s so much to do potentially with culture and the way that people want to be perceived, the way that they want to be seen. And I guess that could happen with choosing to adopt more creak or choosing not to adopt more creak.

Dr White: Yeah absolutely. It’s like a feature that’s available to them to express their identity for sure.

Brynn: And that brings us to something that you discuss in the 2023 paper that you co-authored called Communication Accommodation Theory and its relation to creaky voice. So, tell us what Communication Accommodation Theory is and how you and your co-authors saw it show up with creaky voice in this study about Australian teenagers.

Dr White: Communication Accommodation Theory is basically this idea that speakers express their attitudes towards one another by either changing their speech to become more similar to each other. So, if the attitudes towards each other are positive or diverging or becoming more different from each other, if these attitudes are potentially negative. So, this has been found with a lot of phonetic features such as the pronunciation of vowels or pitch.

So, speakers are being shown to converge or diverge from each other based on their attitudes or feelings towards each other. So, we wanted to look at this with creak because we had the conversational data there. Like it wasn’t, the data wasn’t collected with this in mind, but we thought it would be really interesting.

And we did find evidence that our Australian teenagers were converging in the use of creaky voice. So, over the course of the conversation, their levels of creak were becoming more similar to each other. We also found that overall, so we didn’t find an interaction between like convergence and gender, but we did find an overall finding of gender.

So that overall girls were more similar to each other in the use of creak than boys were. So, we think this might be some sort of social motivation based on research that’s shown that girls prefer to have a preference for fellow girls more than boys have a preference for solo boys. So, kind of a social motivation to converge.

Brynn: I’ve definitely seen that in research as well. And sometimes you’ll see sort of conflicting things. Sometimes studies will say, you know, oh yeah, girls and women, they always want to try to have that more like accommodative communication. They will socially converge more.

Other studies will say like, oh, we can’t really tell. But it is a fascinating area of research and trying to find out why, if it’s true, that girls and women do converge more.

Why is that? Do you have any personal thoughts on that?

Dr White: I wonder whether it’s like a social conditioning kind of thing. Yeah. That would be my gut instinct towards it.

Brynn: Tell me more about that. What do you mean by social conditioning?

Dr White: That girls, since we’re tiny children, we’re socially conditioned to be nice and to want to please people. It could be that that is coming through and the convergence.

Brynn: Yeah, and trying to show almost like in group, trying to say, hey, I’m one of you, let me into the group, sort of a thing. Yeah, which is so interesting.

What do you think the takeaway message is from your research into creaky voice?

What do the findings tell us about language, social groups, and especially in this case, the Australian English of teenagers? Because like we said before, I think a lot of times, creak is associated with the Americanisation of English, of language, sort of that West Coast Valley girl idea. So, what do we think that this all says about Australian English?

Dr White: I think it’s really hard to sum up a key takeaway from such an enormous part of my life.

Brynn: It’s like someone saying, like, tell me about the last five years in two sentences.

Dr White: Yeah, exactly. But I think my key takeaway from this is that creak is a super complicated linguistic feature. It’s more than just this thing that women do in America.

And the relationship between creak and gender is way more complicated than just, yeah, women do this thing, men don’t do it, or they do it less. So, it’s really important to consider like these other factors, other social factors, such as like language background or where the, like specifically in Sydney, where the speaker is, their identity as a speaker when we are looking at creak prevalence.

Brynn: I think that that’s the part of this research of yours and your co-authors that I found so interesting was this idea of creak being used or not used to show identity and not just gender identity, but also cultural identity, potentially heritage language identity, identity around where you live. So, I think that you’re right, it is more complicated than just saying, oh, don’t talk like that, you sound like a valley girl, you know?

Dr White: Exactly.

Brynn: There’s more about what it means to be a human in a social group in terms of creak than maybe we previously thought.

So, with that, what’s next for you? What are you working on now?

Are you continuing to study creak or are you onto something different? What’s next for you?

Dr White: I can’t stop studying creak. I’m obsessed.

Brynn: That’s fabulous!

Dr White: So, I’m actually currently working on an Apparent Time Study of creak.

Brynn: What does that mean?

Dr White: That is looking at, so we have this historical data that was collected from the Northern Beaches. So, kids, teenagers in the 90s interviews. And we have part of the Multicultural Australian English Project.

We collected data from the Northern Beaches. So, we’ve got these two groups from the same area, 30 years apart. And so, I’m looking at whether there’s been a shift in creak prevalence over that time, because people always say, you know, creak is becoming more popular, but we don’t have like that much firm empirical evidence that that’s the case.

So yeah, I thought it would be really interesting to see.

Brynn: Have you just started or do you have any findings that you can tell us about?

Dr White: I’ve just started. I’m coding the data currently. So yeah, watch the space.

Brynn: Watch the space because when you’re done and when you have some findings, I want to talk to you again, because to think that that’s what’s so interesting is examining it through time because you’re right, there’s so much that is in the media that goes around, especially talking about the export of American English and American ways of speaking.

I’ve talked in this podcast before about how even I as an American have been approached by Australians and they’ll talk about, you know, oh, we sound so American now. It’s because of all of the media and everything like that.

So, to actually be able to have some data to back that up would be incredible.

Dr White: Yeah, that’s really exciting stuff. I’m also going to Munich next year as part of the Humboldt Fellowship. So, I’ll be working with Professor Jonathan Harrington over there and looking at creak in German. That’s something that we don’t know very much about at all.

Brynn: Do we have many studies about Creek in languages other than English where it doesn’t denote another word?

Dr White: There are some, yeah, but it’s definitely, the field is definitely English-centric. So, it’ll be really interesting to see.

Brynn: That’s going to be so fun. I can’t wait to talk to you again. Well, Hannah, thank you so much for coming on today, and thank you to everyone for listening.

Dr White: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.

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

In the interview, Barbara reflects on the early years of her career as an American linguist in Australia in the 1970s, and how linguistics and language in Australia have changed since then.

The transcript was edited by Brynn Quick.

Update 23/09/2024: The audio is now available here or on your podcast app of choice.

***

Livia: So, you’re very difficult to google and to do background research on!

Barbara: Really?! Whenever I look myself up, I start finding me all over the place (laughs).

Livia: I did find a couple of things about you, like the fact that you had actually studied in Georgetown and Michigan, and that you came over to Sydney in the 1970s. Then I was astounded to find that you were the second linguist at University of Sydney. It was just you and Michael Halliday.

Barbara: Yes, but he only got there a couple of months before me. It was the birth of the Linguistics Department.

Livia: Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like when the field was so young?

Barbara: Well, I guess the answer to the story is that my husband got a job here. He’s a geographer, and we were in Vancouver at the time in Canada. He was teaching at Simon Fraser, and I was teaching at the University of British Columbia. We were both lucky, those were both just jobs for a year or two. I was writing my dissertation at that point.

So, we started applying, and he applied to the University of Sydney, and he got the job! And I applied, and I was told by a number of people at the University of British Columbia, linguists, that I didn’t have a chance. That there was no chance, it was only going to be one other person hired. And Michael, you know had a wife, Ruqaiya Hassan, and everybody was sure that Ruqaiya would get the other job. So, I didn’t have very much hope, but then I got the job!

I was just so amazed that I got the job, and I found out from Michael later that it turned out that the reason I got the job is, he was very interested in starting a department that would combine both systemics and Labovian kinds of sociolinguistics. He thought somehow we’d be able to mesh in an interesting kind of way, having different interests and different ways of configuring what the major issues were.

But we had great overlaps because I was just as interested in applied linguistics, and Michael certainly was and wanted to build a department up as a place for both theoretical and applied interests. So, it was that it was very exciting times for us when we did both get jobs at the same university which didn’t seem like that was going to be possible at all, but it was!

Livia: How long were you at Sydney for?

Barbara: Until I retired. It was my only place until I retired in 1980-something or 1990-something. I know I retired early because in those days women could retire at 55, so it was when I turned 55 that I retired. But after that is when I got more interested in working with a friend of mine in Louisiana, and we worked together for 10 or 12 years after that.

Livia: You’re also a female scholar who migrated to Australia. How did that shape your research or your role as a researcher?

Barbara: I don’t know that being a female shaped my research. I was much more interested in social issues. The time when I was doing my master’s and PhD were times of great upheaval with the anti-Vietnam war situation. I spent some time in my master’s degree working with Mexican children in California. I collected data there, and so it was more an interest in social issues.

I found the linguistics of theoretical people like Chomsky, for instance, very interesting. I found that the kinds of questions and the way he was doing linguistics was so different from writing grammars of language, for instance, which was the main thing that linguists were doing at that point, describing languages that hadn’t been described. I didn’t mind that either, but I was really taken in by the more political sides of things, and so when Labov first published his dissertation which was only when I was still at the master’s level, I just thought, Oh! This is what I want. This brings social issues and linguistics together.

I thought he was asking questions about how language changes, and I was very interested in that as a theoretical question. If it was going on before and it’s going on now, can you observe it changing? And when they came up with these nice statistical means and then the data necessary for using those statistical means to look at language changes, I found that theoretically exciting.

Livia: So, did you have a very big research team helping you when you first did the nearly 200 interviews in the Sydney?

Barbara: No, no, no! Not at all. I mean, that story is kind of funny. When I came here and it was only Michael and me, I had no idea about how the university worked. It was very different from American universities. I didn’t know how different it was. Michael was much more familiar with it I suspect because of his English background.

I came over here thinking, oh my gosh I have to get tenure because in America you have to get tenure within your first six years or else you’re going to go to some other university. And we had moved all around the world, my husband and I and my two little children. When we get to Sydney we thought, we’re just going to stay there. We’re not going to move at all. So, then I thought I’ve got to get busy, so I applied for a grant to do New York City all over again, except in Sydney.

That first year we collected the data from the Anglos. The Italians and the Greeks were in the third year. So, the first year Anne Snell and I collected all the data (chuckles) and made the preliminary transcripts. I think we had money for getting transcripts typed, and we had money for Anne and me to run around all over Sydney trying to get interviews with people. Then Anne and I sat together in my living room at the end of the data collection period just listening to the tapes and checking with each other if we were all hearing the same thing.

Then I found out afterwards that there is no such thing as tenure. If they hire you, they hire you, and they’re not going to think about getting rid of you. Oh! All that work I did! It was very funny.

It was when my supervisor from Georgetown, Roger Shuy, came over for participating in a conference. He said, “Barbara, I’m going to ask Michael how you’re doing.” And I said, “Ok.” He asked Michael did he think I’d get tenure, and Michael said something like, “I don’t know! I don’t think they do tenure here.” (laughs). Oh dear!

So anyway, I was working really hard. I thought I needed to, but I think I would’ve done it anyway. I definitely have no regrets. I’m glad we worked that hard, but it did mean coming home from teaching at the university – because most of the interviews were done at night, they were done after people had dinner – so Anne and I both got home, fed our families, turned around, got in a car and went off somewhere.

Livia: So, let’s talk about your data. You had a lot of data. I read a quote of yours somewhere where you said it was amazing how much variation there was, and that you were really excited about that.

I actually went to the Powerhouse Museum yesterday, and I looked at the Sydney Speaks app. I didn’t get all of the questions right! One of the teaching points in the app was that unless you live and grew up in Sydney, you’re not likely to get a lot of these right. So, for you, who didn’t grow up in Sydney, as an initial outsider, I’m sure the language variation would have been fascinating for you to learn about, as well as all the social aspects behind it. There are differences in society despite the classlessness that Australia prides itself in.

Barbara: Yeah, and again, you know, I came over here totally understanding that what I was seeing was social class. I mean it’s just social class as far as I’m concerned. It wasn’t that much different except certain ethnicities were different and all that sort of thing.

I looked for the sociology in it, and I though ok I’ll do like Labov did. He just found a sociologist, and he just used whatever categories the sociologist did! I found one tiny article from the University of New South Wales, and it just wasn’t that useful, so in a way I kind of had to figure out for myself what I thought. In the book I talk about how you come up against problems, like for example you have somebody who owns a milk bar, you know, in terms of the working class-or the middle class or whatever. So, you know, I think the class thing is fraught, and it’s still fraught today. It’s not well defined, though it’s better defined than it used to be.

Livia: And in general, there are ideas about the categories we imagine that people fall into. There are so many assumptions and myths out there.

Barbara: Absolutely, but then even when you decide that somebody is either Italian, Greek or Anglo, even those titles are complicated. Very many people didn’t like me using the term Anglo because they would rather be called Australians. That’s the way people were talking about it then, that there were Australians, Italians and Greeks.

But I remember one Scottish person said how insulted he was to be put in with the Anglos. I said well I suppose you are, come to think of it. So yeah, it was kind of fraught. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, to come in as a real foreigner, and not really knowing very much about Australia at all before we came and then trying to jump in to something like this.

I guess the thing that helped a lot is anybody who I hired were Australians, so they could um tell me when I was really going off the rails. I felt more comfortable with the Greeks and the Italians because they were foreigners like me, so they had different ways of understanding Australia as well.

Livia: That’s fascinating, especially considering in sociolinguistics at the moment that researcher positionality is a very big topic and having to justify your own positionality and reflect on your influence in the interview.

Barbara: Yes, but you know I don’t understand how we would ever do studies of other peoples if we only had ourselves to look at, that is if everybody else was just like you. First of all, I wouldn’t have found very many Americans of my particular background, so I think you have to be cautious about these things.

But what I also think is that when you do a kind of statistical analysis in the way that I did, and when you see the patterns that resolve, you think something is generating those patterns. It’s probably the social aspects as well as the linguistic aspects. You need to always be conscious of what you’re doing, as I was, with class. I knew I had no right to be assigning class to people because not even, you know, Marxists do that. Even though they believe in class, absolutely, they don’t go along classifying people. They talk about members of the working class, but it’s kind of a broad sweeping hand kind of thing.

So, in terms of picking up on the linguistic variable that I looked at, I really depended upon Mitchell and Delbridge and their work before me. So, we knew the vowels were very important in Australian English. If you look at Labov’s work, vowels are the most likely changing features of a language, and then of course certain consonants come up as well.

Livia: You just brought up Arthur Delbridge. Let’s talk a little bit about your colleagues over the years, particularly also the colleagues you’ve met through the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS). Could you maybe tell me a little bit about your involvement with the ALS?

Barbara: I’m sure that I attended some ALS meetings from whenever I got here to whenever I left! But I didn’t attend after I retired. I don’t recall going to too many meetings, but early on it was a small group of people, as you can imagine. It was Delbridge and I’m not sure who else, but Delbridge for sure was a major person in the early stage in getting the whole thing going as far as I know.

It was a small group of people, a very friendly group of people who got together. It was the first time that I saw a group of students or university people who were interested in Aboriginal languages because we didn’t really have that in Sydney at first until Michael Walsh joined the faculty. So, I realised that, at least among young people, there was really the enthusiasm for Australian linguistics.

The meetings were always held at some university. We always lived in the dormitories together, so it was, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner with a very friendly group of people. And there were good papers. You could listen to papers on Aboriginal languages, for instance, that I wasn’t getting from any other place, so that that was all very interesting.

When I first came here, John Bernard was very helpful to me, and I used his work as well on vowels in Australian English. Those were very fundamental. If I hadn’t had those as a base, I could not have done my work as quickly as I did, but because they’d worked on that for a long time, it was very helpful.

I also remember the systemics people, Jim Martin and Michael (Halliday), coming, and they had a harder time because I think there weren’t a sufficient number of them. There was Ruqaiya and Michael and Jim at first, but eventually, as you know, they got a sufficient number of people, and then they became very, very big.

Then it became the really, the major direction in the department. By the time I left, it was not the only direction. They would go on to certainly hire more people who are in sociolinguistics. Two or three different Americans came over to work, and others like Ingrid (Piller). So yeah, it’s expanded and now it’s a very different department from what it was when I was there.

The department was really small for those first ten or twelve years. We were very close. We used to plan weekends together where, you know, we’d go at the end of the year and we’d go off camping! We’d go somewhere together. The graduate students and the staff just did things together, and that was very nice. So, you made very warm relationships with many people who came from that era. Maybe it’s still the same way. It may still be wonderful.

When Michael Walsh came, it was important for him to come because we were getting to look like we weren’t an “Australian” bunch of people, so when Michael came at least he legitimised us because he was working on Aboriginal languages. He was an Australian, so we all learned how to be Australian from Michael.

Livia: Whatever “Australian” means nowadays, right? (laughs)

Barbara: Yeah, whatever that means. Well, I think of myself as practically Australian now, but nobody else does, so (laughs) that’s just the way it is.

Livia: What’s it like for you walking around, say, Glebe now and hearing all the variation in Australian English? Do you get very excited when you hear people speaking?

Barbara: I don’t think I want to go and do another study, no! No, no. I still like to listen. I feel that there’s some things that I could have pursued, and perhaps I should’ve. I’ve always felt, I keep telling this to every sociolinguist I ever meet in Australia, and that is that somebody needs to study the Lebanese community. The Lebanese community is going to be very, very interesting, and of course if you don’t capture it really soon, you know, it will –

Livia: Has no one done that?

Barbara: No, not really. I know of no major study now. Maybe somebody’s done it a little bit here and there, but I think that would be fascinating to study, so I keep trying to urge people to study the Lebanese community.

Livia: That’s interesting because they’re a fairly recent migrant group but not that recent.

Barbara: No, not that recent. They were when I when I was doing my studies. The Greeks and the Italians were the major groups that anybody ever talked about, so when you were talking about migrants you meant the Greeks and the Italians. But the Lebanese were becoming a force, particularly if you were doing applied linguistic work. If you were working with the schools, the most recent group to migrate in large numbers were the Lebanese. So, I felt even then that I couldn’t face doing another major work like that again. But every time we did get a new sociolinguist, I told them that they should be studying the Lebanese community.

Livia: Too bad I’m nearly finished with my thesis (both laugh). But to take you back to the ALS conference days – what do you remember of those?

Barbara: Bearing in mind I haven’t been to a meeting in many years, what I recall of them is that most of the papers were interesting. I do recall the social aspects of it, getting together with groups of people who are linguists and just talking among yourselves. That, to me, is the best part about meetings all together. Unless it’s somebody who’s absolutely giving a paper right on what you’re interested because then you’re just kind of sitting there absorbing and thinking. But actually talking to people, especially because, as I said, we were a small group at that point, so it was very personal and interactional. That’s the main thing that I think about when I think about the ALS.

Livia: I’m always told when you go to conferences that it’s good to be criticised or challenged in your ideas, or that out of failure come new ideas. I’m just wondering whether you recall a time when that happened to you, that you were maybe challenged in your ideas but that actually ultimately took you in a direction that was more fruitful?

Barbara: I think people treated me very well, so I don’t recall any criticism. No, there was criticism when my book first came out, but it was well-intended. In those days we really didn’t do those things publicly. Everybody was incredibly polite to everyone else, so even if you did think, “oh that was a stupid paper,” you wouldn’t say it, and you wouldn’t embarrass somebody with it. I think you might challenge them later over coffee, but it was a very polite society at that time.

This was unlike some of the American things that you go to where you get somebody in the audience who is just dying to “get you”, you know? That kind of thing was not a nice feeling. People treated me very well, and I know now from looking back that I came over here like a bull in a china shop in the sense of who was I to be coming here and taking on such a big project, and taking it on with the manner and attitude that I had? I know this now because I’ve been here long enough to know how you feel about people who come here, and suddenly they know everything about anything. So, I think I probably stepped on a few toes, partly out of innocence.

One of the reasons I really like Chomsky is that he is argumentative, and I don’t mind a good argument. Not a personal one, not one that’s vindictive or whatever, but I think being strong about what you feel or arguing about what you think is controversial – I think that’s healthy for any field. You need to be able to say, you know, I have a different opinion about that, or I think something else is working here.

I got a really nice letter from John Bernard, for instance, who took me to task for a number of things. He wrote me a very long letter. I appreciated the fact that he had put in all that time to respond. I didn’t necessarily agree with him, but I understood where he was coming from. I guess what I like about John Bernard is that even after that he was always very friendly to me. I never had any problems with him, so I hope he never took whatever I said argumentatively to heart (laughs).

Livia: It’s important to have a good scholarly debate without being personal.

Barbara: Yeah, I think so too. But I can imagine I might have the same reaction if somebody came over and redid my work and they’d only been here three months, and I could say, “What would you know?!” (laughs)

You know, it is true that one of the things was the class issue, that I imposed this class issue. I don’t know that he said I imposed it, but he really did want to make the point that class wasn’t as significant in Australia, and he was still supporting the notion that it was a matter of choice, that you could choose. That was so alien to me, and it is still kind of alien to me.

I think people don’t choose the dialect they speak. I think they speak the dialect they’re brought up in, and that doesn’t mean I don’t think people can’t change their dialect. I think they can if they want to, if they move somewhere else or if they, you know, get a PhD and become professor of Physics or something. I think they can move up and down, up and down. I think that can happen, but it was the word “choose”, I think, that that bothered me a lot. I couldn’t see kids deciding, “oh I’m not going to speak like that anymore,” because they probably haven’t even heard anybody speak any other way except on television, and how much do we get from television? Or radio, or that kind of thing? I don’t think that much. But I just- I came in at that moment, I think, before a lot of people would understand that choosing isn’t probably the right word or the right conception of how dialect changes, that- that you decide to speak a different way. Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it! (chuckles)

Livia: Speaking of changes – you’ve been in Australian linguistics for a bit of a while. What are sort of the major changes that you’ve seen happening in the field?

Barbara: I can tell you about my department. There’s much more interest in descriptive language, grammatical description. That’s really very big in the Sydney department. What’s happening in the rest of the department, I’m just not familiar with.

The set up that Michael (Halliday) managed to create in the department is kind of there, but it has a very different flavour. It’s much more anthropological, what I would call anthropological linguistics. So, still interested in people, still interested in culture and language as well, and especially in studying the variety of languages. I think it’s probably a firmer basis for study than sociolinguistics, and even Michael’s kind of sociolinguistics works best, I think, if you’re a native speaker of the language. I mean, why else is it that we get so much work on English? Because it’s kind of an English-based theoretical position. When I go to meetings, I meet lots of people from Europe and various other places who are studying their own languages in a sociolinguistic manner. But anyway, I would be out of place, I think, in the department now because I’d be the only one doing that.

I’ve been going to the seminars this year, and they’re very interesting papers that are being given with a lot of really interesting and new (to me) people in the department. I know this honours student that I was telling you about, that I was mentoring this year. She is so enthusiastic, and yet there isn’t any real place in this department for her to pursue her work. She had to do a lot of work in figuring out how to collect data, how to interpret your own findings after you’ve done the statistical analysis, all that stuff. She had a real task ahead of her, and I’m glad to say that Catherine Travis has picked up some of my work with that.

I don’t know if you know, but I was about to get rid of all my tapes. I downsized about five years ago. I just decided I was going to downsize. I was not going to do any more research, so it was time to just clean up my house, and I came to those tapes that I had saved from all these years ago. I thought, ah I know somebody in the world would like to have these tapes eventually, but they were still on these little cassettes. They needed a lot of work done with them before they’d be useful to anybody anymore, so anyway she got in touch with me. I said to her, by the way if you have any interest at all in my tapes because I’m just about to ditch them – and she wrote back quickly, “Don’t! Don’t! I’ll be up-I’ll come up and pick them up!”. (laughs)

So, she did, and I’m so glad because she really is doing some great work down there. So, I hope my little honours student goes down there to finish her work because I think she’s so enthusiastic.

Livia: Coming back to Sydney Speaks – I was looking through the Sydney Speaks webpage and there seem to be quite a few projects that are reaching a wider population.

Barbara: Yes, there’s lots of stuff. They’re collecting more data. They seem to be interested in ethnic varieties of English, that sort of thing, so yeah! It’s a whole new revitalisation, I think, of the interest in ethnic varieties of English. There are so many new and large migrations that have happened since the Italians. I mean, the Italians and the Greeks – Leichhardt, for instance, it’s not there anymore. You can’t go there and see that whole row of Italian restaurants that you used to find. Now you go to buy your coffee where you’ve always been to buy your coffee, and it does not seem to be run by Italians anymore, that kind of thing. So yeah, no Greeks and Italians.

I think it’s probably the case that you need two generations. You need the parent generation and the teenager (more or less what I did) because I suspect by the time it gets to the third generation, it’s gone. They’re just Aussies, and they speak like Aussies, and you wouldn’t find anything very interesting. So, you’ve got to catch it when it’s there. Timing is everything.

Livia: Are you going to be attending the ALS conference in December? Are you able to make it?

Barbara: No, no, no. I’ve actually not been in linguistics for quite a while now. That’s why I was downsizing, and I had to face it that I hadn’t been doing anything, that’s it! Give it up! Yeah.

Livia: Well, given that the ALS would like some snippets, I was thinking – Are there any wishes you have for the linguistics society moving forward? For their 50^th anniversary?

Barbara: I’m interested in all of these people who are doing the dynamics of language. When I started looking up Catherine and looking up various others and I see all these people are doing something called the dynamics of language. So, what do they mean by that? Well, you know, I doubt they are all Labovians. I guess I’d love to see the group of them getting together in a discussion of just that. What are the dynamics of language that you’re focussing on? What kind of theoretical issues are there? Do you have overlapping goals, or do you have a single set of goals? Does dynamics actually mean language change as it is associated with historical linguistics? Or does it just mean socially dynamic, like other people picking up your language? Or just the use of language? Or how many people still speak Polish? Or is that the dynamics of language? I’d love to see what people are thinking about with the dynamics of language. It’s obviously got people very interested, whatever it is. That’s what I would like I would like to see a discussion of.

Livia: In that vein of wishing things – do you have any advice for PhD and honours students pursuing linguistics?

Barbara: Be passionate about something, and purse that. I was passionate myself for a long time when I did my bachelor’s degree. I knew I wanted to do English and it was all literature. I knew that what I really like is grammar, but I had never heard the word linguistics before. It wasn’t until I went to Ethiopia and I was teaching at Haile Selassie, the first university (now, Addis Ababa University), that I met a group of linguists who had come over there. And I thought oh, Linguistics! That’s what I want to be, you know? Then I really pursued that afterwards, but yeah, find your passion.

I had a very strong kind of social commitment to making a good society, and language is really kind of right in the middle of that.

That’s such an easy cliché, but because, as I said, when I started off, I had a very strong kind of social commitment to making a good society, and language is really kind of right in the middle of that. What I loved about sociolinguistics is that you could easily go in between the more sophisticated theoretical issues as well as being right on the ground and saying here are some problems that we’ve got. How can we think about these things? So, I did a lot of work with schools, and I think being able to interact with your community for me, not everybody, but for me, that was a very important thing.

Livia: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s interesting that language keeps coming up in the media. People are grasping how complex it is, and it has complex social meanings behind it. I mean, most recently we saw this in the citizenship debates of some of the politicians. There were politicians making fun of each other, saying I don’t sound Greek, but everyone always says where are you from, and now I’m the most Aussie in the room.

Barbara: Yeah, absolutely. No, that’s not true of me because I can go to David Jones tomorrow and get up to pay for my goods, and the people will think I’m an American tourist. They’ll ask me how I find Sydney. So, it isn’t true of me. Nobody has ever, ever said that I was an Aussie. (laughs)

Livia: I’ll ask you maybe one last reflective thing. Thinking back to when you first started and you were involved with all these linguists, particularly in the ALS, what advice would you give to yourself?

Barbara: I think, like I said before, it would be about time. I thought I needed to hit the ground running because my kids didn’t want to move to any other place. We didn’t want to move into any other place, so I had to hit the ground running and make sure that I could stay in this position, so that’s what I did. I think if I had known, “oh look, you know, you’re going to be here forever.” Just sort of do it calmly and carefully, and don’t step on any toes. My thing is, yes, take your time with something, but when you first start, you don’t know how much time you’ve got. Anyway, that’s just an excuse.

My thing is, yes, take your time with something, but when you first start, you don’t know how much time you’ve got

Livia: I can imagine. I mean, I’m in a very big department now at Macquarie, and so being particularly around as linguistics students, we’re socialised into the way the university works and what’s expected of us very quickly. But if you’re one of two in a linguistics department that would’ve been extremely confronting.

Barbara: Yes, and I mean it was hard enough for us to figure out everything with us, meaning Michael (Halliday) and me. Where are you going to be coming from? Where am I? He’s always an open sort of person. If you said, “oh I’m going to talk about this, that or the other thing,” he would never say anything negative. He was very open and so there wasn’t a lot of direction there either, so I just took my own direction in a hurry. (laughs)

Livia: And it’s still making waves today!

Barbara: Still making waves today!

Livia: Well, that’s it. It’s been nice! Was there anything else you wanted to add?

Barbara: I think I’ve said it all. (laughs)

References

For a full list see Barbara’s Google Scholar profile.

Horvath, B. M. (1985). Variation in Australian English: the sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge University Press.

Horvath, B. M. (1991). Finding a place in Sydney: migrants and language change. In S. Romaine (Ed.), Language in Australia (pp. 304-317). Cambridge University Press.

Horvath, B. M., & Horvath, R. J. (2001). A multilocality study of a sound change in progress: The case of /l/ vocalization in New Zealand and Australian English. Language Variation and Change, 13, 37–57.

Horvath, B. M., & Sankoff, D. (1987). Delimiting the Sydney Speech Community. Language in Society, 16(2), 179-204.

Mitchell, A. G., & Delbridge, A. (1965). The pronunciation of English in Australia. Angus and Robertson.

Mitchell, A. G., & Delbridge, A. (1965). The speech of Australian adolescents. Angus and Robertson.

Our newest PhD, Dr Shiva Motaghi Tabari (3rd from left)

The Language on the Move team is proud to announce another freshly-minted PhD in our midst! Dr Shiva Motaghi Tabari graduated from Macquarie University yesterday and was awarded her PhD for a thesis about “Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families“. The thesis is available for open access via our PhD Hall of Fame. Congratulations, Shiva!

Abstract

The process of migration to and settlement in a new country entails linguistic, cultural and identity changes and adjustments. These changes and adjustments at an individual level are related to changes and adjustments in the family. This thesis offers a qualitative exploration of such changes and adjustments in migrant families in Australia by focusing on their language learning and use processes.

Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the study draws on concepts from family studies, particularly the notion of ‘bidirectionality’, as well as sociocultural theories related to second language acquisition within the poststructuralist paradigm. The emphasis is on the ways in which language learning and use in the family relates to wider social and political contexts and language ideologies.

Data for the study come from semi-structured in-depth interviews with nineteen migrant families of Persian background in Australia, including thirty-three parents and twenty-one children.

Overall, the findings of the study show that language socialisation processes within the family in migration contexts are complex and intricately interwoven with parental and child language beliefs and attitudes, which in turn are influenced by language ideologies and attitudes prevalent in the wider society.

Specifically, the research addresses four research questions. First, parents’ experiences of language learning and use before migration are examined. Findings demonstrate how participants’ multiple desires for English learning were socially shaped, and how they invested into English language learning at different points in time, particularly with the prospect of an imagined future in Australia and upward socioeconomic mobility. Second, parents’ experiences of language learning and use after migration are explored. Findings suggest that under the influence of ideological forces in the wider society, particularly those related to the ‘native/non-native speaker’ dichotomy, learners may perpetually be perceived, by themselves and by others, as deficient language speakers and peripheral members in the new society.

After analysing parental language learning and use experiences, children’s experiences of language learning and use are examined. Children’s English language learning trajectories are diverse and relate to the degrees of English competence and the age of participants at the time of arrival. Children exercise their agency in different ways to learn the new language and to become a legitimate member in their new communities of practice. Finally, the thesis explores how parents’ and children’s language learning and use intersect. Language ideologies and the imbalanced values attributed to languages along with inequitable power relations determine the conditions under which parents struggle to achieve bilingual outcomes both for themselves and for their children.

Overall, the study argues for a holistic approach to investigations of language socialisation processes in migrant families and problematises the ways in which language beliefs, attitudes, and practices of parents and their children are shaped by the wider social and ideological context. The study has multiple implications for both adult and child language learning, parent-child interactions in migration contexts, and Australian migration studies.

Advances in sociolinguistic knowledge

Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families advances sociolinguistic knowledge in at least three distinct ways:

Conceptually, the focus on bidirectionality in language learning is highly innovative given that language learning continues to be widely seen as something the individual undertakes. Usually, where language learning directions are considered, they are seen to flow from teacher to student or from parent to child. By examining how families engage in language learning as a group and by also considering child influences on parental language learning the thesis breaks new ground conceptually.

Methodologically, the holistic approach to data collection from children and parents, both individually and in groups, extends qualitative interview-based research to include an interactional dimension that is often missing from this kind of approach.

Sociologically, the research advances our knowledge of Persian-speaking skilled migrants to Australia, an emerging but rapidly growing community. By examining pre- and post-migration language learning experiences the thesis illuminates the ideological and practical bases for the language learning trajectories of this group once they have settled in Australia.

“You have the right to remain silent” (Source: Tumblr)

“You have the right to remain silent” is an expression familiar to many English speakers. But what is involved in understanding this right in police interviews, as well as the consequences of waiving the right? Extensive research on comprehension of this and other rights delivered to suspects shows that even native speakers of English do not always understand their rights. The problems are even greater for non-native speakers of English who may be able to conduct basic transactions but do not understand legal terms or complex sentences.

Widespread concerns about communication of rights – including the right to silence – to non-native speakers of English in police interviews have led to the development and release of guidelines by the international Communication of Rights Group (CoRG). The group, co-convened by Diana Eades and Aneta Pavlenko, comprises 21 linguists, psychologists, lawyers and interpreters in Australia, England and Wales and the US.

The “Guidelines for communicating rights to non-native speakers of English in Australia, England and Wales, and the USA” are available here.

Drawing on the research and on our collective experience of working with non-native speakers of English in legal settings, the group articulated seven recommendations for how the police can better communicate rights to non-native speakers of English. The group hopes that the Guidelines will contribute to a better understanding of difficulties for non-native speakers of English in police interviews, and result in moves to better protect the rights of these suspects and afford them equal treatment in the law.

These recommendations include development of standardised wording in plain English, standardised translations in other languages, access to an interpreter, and adoption of an “in-your-own-words” comprehension check in which suspects are asked to explain each right in their own words. If they have difficulties restating the rights in their own words in English, the interview should be terminated until a professional interpreter, with expertise in legal interpreting, is brought in.

In addition to the 2000-word Guidelines, the document provides an appendix of relevant linguistic and psychology research.

The document is being widely circulated to judicial officers, lawyers and police officers, and associations to which they belong.

Some initial responses are very positive, with one Australian judge saying that she “will be referring to [it] often”.

We are also asking professional organisations in linguistics, psychology and linguistics to endorse the Guidelines. The first endorsement has come from the Executive Committee of the American Association of Applied Linguistics, and the document will go to a membership vote at the Association’s conference in April 2016. Other professional organisations invited to endorse the document include the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, the Australian Linguistics Society, and the International Association of Forensic Linguists.

There is no copyright on this Guidelines document, and we welcome its dissemination to any interested people or organisations.

Further reading:

Two cases provide exemplification of the issues being addressed by the Guidelines:

• Aneta Pavlenko discusses a US case in which she gave evidence here.
• The judicial decision in an Australian case which included evidence from Diana Eades and David Moore is available here.

“How bad is your cultural cringe?” (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed)

Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o.
Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname?
(laughter)
Keith: Do I get three goes?
(Keith, Australian, in a relationship with Lisa from Germany)

Despite the increasing value of multilingualism in a globalised world, English-speaking countries such as Australia remain stubbornly monolingual. At the same time the benefits of speaking more than one language are regularly touted in public discourse. My research investigates how speakers of Australian English with a partner from a non-English-speaking background feel about their linguistic repertoires. Embarrassment, as in the example above from Keith (all names are pseudonyms), comes up a lot. So does inferiority. Because of their low proficiency in foreign languages (often as a consequence of their poor quality or limited language learning experiences in formal education) these participants feel they are bad language learners. This response seems to be one way of engaging with and mitigating their own privilege as native speakers of the powerful global language, English, compared to their partners who learned English as an additional language.

“It’s my deficiency”: being a bad language learner

And I I think I was completely in awe of that the fact that she could speak so many different languages freely, and a little bit jealous, and at the beginning was a bit more kind of definite about trying to learn German, um and I think the whole experience intimidated me cause I think I’m the kind of person who if they don’t pick something up really quickly kind of just gives up very quickly (…) (Keith)

For Lisa and Keith, Keith’s first and Lisa’s second language, English, has been the language of their relationship. Keith sees Lisa’s language skills as impressive while blaming himself for his own inability to learn German. He feels that Lisa “probably speaks better English than most native English speakers in Australia”. While Lisa learnt languages formally in her school education as a child and young adult, Keith faces all the frustration of learning another language as an adult.

In his own education Keith’s choices were limited. Although he comes from an Italian migrant background, Italian was not available at his public school in inner Sydney in the 1990s. He decided to take Latin instead, but he dropped it after junior high school when he lost interest in his schooling. He has done no further foreign language study in contrast to Lisa, who studied four languages over many years in her schooling in Germany. So when it comes to saying Keith’s Italian surname their pronunciation reflects their differing language learning trajectories:

Hanna: And how are you at pronouncing Keith’s last name (laughs)?

Lisa: I am tempted to pronounce it Italian which then nobody understands (laughs).

Keith: She- like I’m reading out a, a pizza on the pizza menu from our local pizzeria and she makes fun of my Italian accent. You know like quattro formaggi, she’s like (puts on a strong Australian accent) quattro formaggi. ‘Cause she speaks Italian, you know, these fucking Europeans!

(laughter)

In Keith’s comment about his partner’s Italian pronunciation of his Italian surname we could read humorous disparagement of her ability to pronounce it in the Italian way; in Australia foreign names are usually anglicised or pronounced in an English way. Both his lack of educational opportunity to study Italian and his Anglicized pronunciation cause him in that moment to position himself as a (monolingual) Australian in opposition to (multilingual) Europeans.

Stephen, from Australia, who is married to Christina from Argentina feels similarly critical of his own poor Spanish skills. He describes his attempts to learn Spanish as “a token effort”, says he “hasn’t got an ear for languages” and it dismissive of his own attempts to learn Spanish:

Hanna: You said you’re the odd one out; how do you feel…

Stephen: No, not at all, because uh because I recognise that it’s my deficiency in not having had the time to devote to learning a language. Now, I I make the standard joke I have 50 words of [unclear] of Spanish that I know. I work very hard and uh it’s a standing family joke (…)

In fact, Stephen studied Spanish at night, has a Spanish speaking community in Sydney and has two children who are bilingual. He also regularly visits Argentina and has frequent Argentine house guests. Spanish is a regular feature in his life. In the interview he also says that learning Spanish is “a commitment I’ve probably made and haven’t fulfilled” and feels he is a “handicapped Aussie” compared to his multilingual relations.

Another participant, Amy, has a strikingly similar evaluation of her own language skills. When I asked her why she was interested in talking to me about language she said:

Well, I suppose, I suppose it’s just there and I suppose for me it’s that I’ve got to learn more Spanish (…) And I went to lessons and I started learning and I was enthusiastic because we were going to Columbia, but as soon as we came back from Columbia I was just like that’s it, I’m just not interested anymore. And I learnt that I’m not a good language learner(…) (Amy, in a relationship with German from Columbia)

Amy’s language learning experiences at school were typical for my participants. In twelve years of state school education all she studied was ten weeks each of Italian, German and French in her seventh school year. In contrast, she praises her partner for his excellent English language skills which he acquired in Columbia from the “movies and music” he consumed from their powerful northern neighbour.

A new kind of language cringe

It seems these participants characterise their persistent monolingualism as a personal failing, a source of embarrassment, a source of language cringe. In Australia language cringe is a child of the cultural cringe. It has traditionally been associated with being embarrassed about speaking Australian English, rather than the more highly valued British English of the mother country. However, in my research I have found a new form of language cringe, related to monolinguals who speak the most valuable global language compared to multilinguals who are non-native speakers. This kind of language cringe contradicts the idea that a native speaker will always be “better” than a non-native speaker through an acknowledgment of the level of skill and knowledge which come with learning an additional language to a high proficiency.

This is most obvious when it comes to accent, because language cringe views an Australian native accent as lower value than (some) non-native accents. Lisa points out that she found the Australian accent strange on first hearing.

Lisa: I just remember the first Australian I ever met in my life (…) we started talking in English and I just thought who the fuck is this person? (laughter) It sounded so outlandish I’d never heard that before.

When I asked Keith about what kind of accent he would like his daughter to have, he reluctantly admitted that he wanted hers to be more “international”. Stephen points out that on first travelling to the United States with his wife, the locals “struggled” with his “obvious Australian accent” while she “was much more readily understood”. The implicit high value of a native accent is challenged by the transferability of a more international non-native accent.

Understanding and being able to explain the grammar of a language is another site where language cringe manifests itself. Paul, from Sydney, met Sara from Spain while travelling around South America. He was quickly hired as an English teacher because he was a native speaker. But it was Sara who taught him enough English grammar to make it through the first lesson.

(…) when Sara and I first met I needed to get some work and we were in Chile, um I just before I arrived to Chile we’d split up for a few weeks on the way to. and I’d asked Sara can you hand out a few CVs to English schools when we get there, or when you get there, which she did and I basically arrived and there was a job waiting for me which was perfect. But I’d never taught, I’d never thought about English I had no idea [Sara laughs]. and so the very first lesson I had to do (…) and uh [laughs] they, you know, the school said uh here’s the book this is Headway, this is what you’re using, they’re up to page thirty two or whatever. I opened it up and it was the present perfect and I looked at it and I was like what’s the present perfect, what’s a past participle and Sara sat down and taught me. (Paul, my emphasis)

Sara also spoke four languages to, at that time, Paul’s one. Although Sara is the one with the multilingual skills, Paul was seen by the language school as a better language user because he is a native speaker.

Managing native speaker privilege

Like Keith, Paul is impressed by his wife’s linguistic skills but he also recognises that because of the privilege of the English native speaker Sara’s multilingualism may be less valued. Rather than being embarrassed about his own failings as an individual language user Paul draws attention to the wider failings of the native speaker ideology in terms of its tenuous relation to actual knowledge about language as a system or teaching expertise. Paul acknowledges his partner’s linguistic superiority and the inherent injustice of an employment situation where he benefitted from a discriminatory language ideology because he is a native speaker.

For my other participants it may be that their conception of their own language skills as inferior in relation to the linguistic repertoire of their partners is their way to manage the inequalities brought about by this privilege. Recognising their own limited linguistic repertoire and casting it as a personal failing may be a way to tip the scales back in favour of the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual partner.

Voice of China Sydney 2015, Program Booklet

It’s a weeknight at the Sydney Town Hall, an ornate 19^th century building in the city centre. Almost everyone bustling in the entryway is of Chinese extraction, except the ushers (and me). They’re all ages, and as I pour inside with them I hear Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, and a little English. There are posters and flyers using simplified and traditional Chinese characters alongside English text. These scripts are not in-text translations but code-switching sentences working together within each ad to sell Australian Ugg boots or New Zealand throat lozenges. The ticket I hold and the banners on stage are also multilingual. They read “The Voice of China 中国好声音 澳大利亚招募站 Season 4 Australia Audition”. The tickets were free and ‘sold out’ days before this event. It’s the final audition – in a live concert format – for the upcoming season of a popular reality TV franchise, based on ‘Voice of Holland’, and available on a subscription channel in Australia. This is the first season of ‘Voice of China’ in which ‘Overseas Chinese’ can compete for the chance to be ‘The Australian Contender’ and flown to mainland China to film the series.

In-Group, Ethnicity and Language

The Town Hall this night is clearly a space where people operate within “multi-sited transnational social fields encompassing those who leave and those who stay behind”, as Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller (2004, p. 1003) have put it. These sociologists posit that migrants may simultaneously assimilate into a host society and maintain enduring ties to those sharing their ethnic identity, “pivoting” between the two. This is a useful lens through which to regard the event. What is most interesting with ‘Voice of China’ is the use of language to extend who counts as “those who leave”. The contestants have not necessarily actually left China, many are originally from Australia. Maybe their parents, or even their grandparents, once migrated. The audition’s winner [SPOILER ALERT!] is one of the few contestants without a Chinese first name: Leon Lee, a university music student from Sydney.

As these contestants pivot towards China – particularly through their use of Putonghua-Mandarin – so too does the Chinese community pivot towards the diaspora through the vehicle of this show, both by holding these Australian auditions at all and by incorporating Cantonese and Australian English. Together, the singers, hosts, judges and audience are constructing a transnational social field that incorporates both Australia and China; Sydney is not simply a city in Australia but an Asian migration hub located in reference to Beijing. All the fans sitting around me, who might watch other ‘Voice of China’ events in virtual spaces – online and on international pay TV – while living in Sydney, demonstrate the layers of place in one geographic space.

The use of language also reveals interesting dynamics in who counts as having a shared ethnic identity. In an adjustment invisible to the audience, one contestant did not perform in his first language, the Kam-Tai language Zhuang, which is an official ethnic minority language in China. The show’s producers had said he could choose only English, Mandarin or Cantonese songs.

There is a normative equivalence of language and ethnicity being reproduced here. The way in which language features associated with Mandarin, Cantonese and Chinese minority languages “index” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011) Chinese-ness (or do not index it) is shown to be more complicated as the auditions unfurl. It is a linguistic manifestation of a recurrent normative tension over what features are identified with the Zhonghua Minzu. On one hand, Chinese minority languages and common Chinese-heritage dialects in Australia such as Hokkien and Hakka are totally absent from stage. On the other, Cantonese, although it is officially deemed a dialect not a minority language, is used by the hosts, contestants and judges. Despite Cantonese’s status, until recently it, rather than Mandarin, was the language identified as “Chinese” in Australia. Cantonese is also the Chinese language historically strongest in Hong Kong, and after all it’s a Hong Kong station (TVB) organising and presenting these auditions. Cantonese is given equivalent official status in the Town Hall show, with hosting duties meticulously shared between a Mandarin speaking man and a Cantonese-speaking woman.

But there’s still an observable norm of language dominance. When Jessica and Deborah Kwong, two Melbourne sisters, use Cantonese to introduce themselves in their pre-recorded video, then sing a live duet in English, a judge doesn’t hesitate to give all his feedback in Mandarin. They nod as he speaks. It’s only when the next judge takes his turn that the girls ask to switch to “Guangdonghua” (Guangdong Speech, a colloquial name for Cantonese) that we all realise the sisters didn’t understand the first judge. There’s laughter all round, and the judges pledge to ask all future contestants which language they’d prefer. For all the deliberate announcements in Cantonese, not being fluent in Mandarin is not ‘normal’ in this context.

Leon Lee sings a lovely, English-language mash-up of rap, R&B and John Lennon’s Yesterday, ending with a modest xiexie (‘thank you’ in Mandarin). True to their recent pledge, the judges ask if they can comment in Mandarin. Leon explains – in Mandarin – that he speaks it imperfectly but understands it, and the judges proceed.

Only one contestant sings in Cantonese in the round, although many more speak Cantonese in their videos. Their practice again reveals the language expected by ‘Voice of China’s mainland producers and viewers. (While a Hong Kong station produces the auditions, it’s a mainland Chinese station, ZJTV, that produces and airs the series.) Sydney, being oriented to China but not actually in China, is a space where different linguistic norms can apply and so we get a slightly uncomfortable, simultaneous centralization and marginalization of Cantonese.

Translocal and Global

In addition to the associations between language and Chinese identity, tonight’s language practices happen under conditions of globalization. The singers at once use features associated with American English to link to the global scripts of reality TV song contests, and Australian-accented English to localize themselves. Their use of Mandarin can be understood as an additional attempt to localize, to differentiate from the global English language, global pop culture and global TV media.

Some contestants take on American accents in singing English-language songs, including Gaga’s Paparazzi, or employ the style of Anglo Pop music by inserting “yeah yeah yeah” into Mandarin songs. The judges also use features associated with American English – “Dude, your range is incredible,” says one judge – which functions to harmonise the show with the “international” American style of reality TV. However, when the contestants speak English to thank the crowd, they have unabashed Australian accents.

The contestant I’ve come to support, Wei Baocheng, linguistically localises in a different way. He makes his rendition of ‘The Sound of Silence’ more Australian than the American original not through accent but through prosody in his laconic rendition. The judges employ some translanguaging to describe it as “hen[很] laid back” and “hen[很] ’Strayan”. Hen is the Mandarin word for ‘very’, and ’Strayan is a jocular, colloquial term for “Australian”.

Localization is also achieved through song choice, amongst other things. For example, contestant Wang Chen sings the yearning rock ballad “Beijing, Beijing”, popular in China in recent years (and already on Voice of China in 2012). The pathos with which he performs it reinforces that, for him, Sydney Town Hall is oriented to China. Wang is singing about a city at the imagined heart of the community he (and the producers) imagine the audience to be.

Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. (2011). Language and Superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2), 1-22.

Levitt, P., & Schiller, N. (2006). Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society1 International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1002-1039 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken (Source: quotesnpoems.com)

It is not unusual for bilingual parents to experience a sense of bewilderment when it comes to language choice in the family. When raising a child in a language different from the one parents were socialised into, old truths and certainties quickly disappear. Studying language choice in migrant families, Pavlenko (2004) found that parents’ confusion can be related to language ideologies that see the first language as the language of emotions and the second language as the language of detachment. Consequently, parents are often torn between speaking their first language because it is supposed to enhance the emotional connection with their children and speaking the second language because it is supposed to be the language of the new country.

This sense of bewilderment is often expressed by Iranian migrant parents to Australia who I interviewed for my ongoing doctoral research into bidirectional language learning in migrant families. Mina and Mahmoud (all names are pseudonyms), for instance, adopted a monolingual Persian-only policy with their primary-school-aged daughter, but, at the same time, speak about their intention ‘to change the plan’:

مینا: چون اصولا در خانه قانون کردیم که همه فارسی حرف بزنیم.

محمود: فکر کنم برای improve زبان فارسی‌اش [دخترمان] خیلی عالی بود، ولی برای ما نه، از نظر انگلیسی خیلی و اتفاقا اخیرا ما=

مینا: =تصمیم گرفتیم تغییر بدیم این برنامه را.

محمود:مطمئنا من زبان انگلیسیم در حدی نیست که بخواهم خیلی ازاحساساتم را به زبان انگلیسی به خوبی الان بیان کنم براش.

مینا: من فکر می‌کنم قدری برایم سخت است بخوام switch کنم، تو خونه انگلیسی حرف بزنم.

Mina: Because, basically, we have set a rule at home that everyone should speak in Persian.

Mahmoud: I think it was excellent for [our daughter’s] Persian language improvement, but not for us, in terms of English, and in fact, recently we=

Mina: =we’ve decided to change this plan.

Mahmoud: Certainly my English is not at a level so that I would want to express many of my emotions to her in English as well as I am doing now [in Persian].

Mina: I think it’s a bit hard for me if I want to switch into, talk in English at home.

Like many parents in Pavlenko’s (2004) study, Mina and Mahmoud construct Persian as the ‘language of emotion’; their preferred language choice to ensure an intimate parent-child relationship. While this discourse reflects the perceptions of many parents, some parents may use their second language for various reasons such as making closer connections with their children or to be in control of the situation, as in Farhad and Farah’s case.

فرهاد: من کاری که کردم، دلیل اینکه من گفتم توی خارج از خونه، یا حداقل، تو خونه شاید اوایل یه زمان خاصی باهاشون [بچه هام] انگلیسی حرف بزنم، همین بود، بخاطر اینکه نمیخواستم از دنیای اینها فاصله بگیرم. میخواستم، همانطور که خب فارسی، اینا که خب حله، انگلیسی هم هست. بدونم اینا چی میگن، حرفاشون چیه.

فرح: ما خودمون را به اونا نزدیک میکنیم در عین حال سعی می‌کنیم که از اونطرف هم اینا رو بکشیم سمت خودمان.

Farhad: What I did, the reason that I said that I spoke English with [my children] outside the home, or at least, at certain times at home when we first came, was this, because I didn’t want to distance myself from their world. I wanted, similar to Persian, well, which is ok, there is also English. I wanted to know what they were saying, what they were talking about.

Farah: We make ourselves closer to them, while, at the same time, trying to attract them towards us.

Nevertheless, I could feel a sense of hesitation – if not to say guilt – about using English with his children in Farhad’s talk. This sense of hesitation can also be inferred when he tries to rationalise his use of English at home, and to redress its ‘unacceptability’ by stressing ‘at certain times when we first came’. This uncertainty about parental language choice, is often increased when parents receive contradictory advice, particularly from those who are deemed to be ‘experts’, such as educators, pediatricians, or speech pathologists. The excerpts below illustrate instances of this kind of advice given to parents.

رامین: اول که اومدیم همه به ما می‌گفتند در خانه انگلیسی صحبت کنید. من واقعیتش یک مدت دچار تردید شده بودم که واقعا باید این کار را بکنیم یا نه. بعد به این نتیجه رسیدم، “نه”.

Ramin: When we first came, everybody told us to speak English at home. Honestly, I began to feel dubious about it for a while, whether to do it, really, or not. Then I came to the conclusion that, ‘no’.

 

آذر: اوایل که آمدیم معلم امیر خیلی تأکید می‌کرد امیر در منزل انگلیسی صحبت کنیم، بعد من به او گفتم شاید خیلی نتوانیم با او انگلیسی حرف بزنیم ولی سعی می‌کنیم امیر را لغت یاد بدهیم.

Azar: When we first came, Amir’s teacher emphasised so much that we should talk in English with him at home. Later I told her that maybe we would not be able to speak that much English with him, but we would try to teach Amir more [English] words.

 

ایمان: ما حتی یک سری مشاوره گرفتیم، نزدیک مدرسه، که رفتیم principal مدرسه را دیدیم. ما حتی ازش پرسیدیم که ما چکار کنیم. گفت “اصلاً شما به انگلیسی این کاری نداشته باشید. شما تا میتونید فارسی را باهاش کار کنید.” گفت “شما انگلیسی‌اش را به ما بسپرید، شما باهاش فارسی.”

Iman: We even sought some advice, close to school, when we went and saw the school principal. We even asked her what to do. She said, ‘Don’t worry about her English. You work on Persian with her as much as you can.’ She said, ‘Leave her English to us, you use Persian with her.’

In multilingual contexts, such either-or propositions undergirded by monolingual ideologies oversimplify the reality of multilingual existence in the emotion-laden context of family interactions where members have more than one linguistic resource at their disposal. A reality which is depicted by Emad, a father for whom family multilingualism is not a new experience that came with migration. Emad had himself grown up with multiple languages back in Iran.

عماد: می‌دانید یک نکته است که در فارسی و انگلیسی- خواهرم که با او هم انگلیسی صحبت می‌کردیم و هم فارسی، بعضی وقت‌ها می‌خواستیم احساساتمان را خیلی دقیق بگوییم. بعضی وقت‌ها مجبور می‌شدیم، با هم صحبت می‌کردیم، من یادمه با خواهر برادرم فارسی صحبت میکردیم. می‌گفتیم این چیزی که می‌خواهم بگویم، آن حرف دل من است، این کلمه است که در ترکی هست که در فارسی نیست، یا در انگلیسی هست که در این دوتا زبان نیست. می‌خواهیم بگوییم بعضی وقت‌ها آن کلمات کمک می‌کند که آدم اون اصل حسش رو خود را درست بیان کند.

Emad: You know, there is a point that in Persian and English- with my sister who we spoke in English and Persian, sometimes we wanted to express our feelings very precisely. Sometimes we had to, when we spoke together, I remember that we spoke Persian with my sister and brother. We said that what I want to say, that is the word of my heart, it is this word which exists in Turkish, but not in Persian, or that, it exists in English but not in those two languages. What I mean to say is that sometimes those words help you express precisely the spirit of your emotions.

Emad is one of the parent participants who embrace the fact that a multiplicity of languages can be developed as resources to convey emotions. Therefore, while recognising the different context of his child’s English learning to that of his own, Emad allows a natural flow of emotional communication by his child.

عماد: مثلا، اونروز به مادرش میگفتش که، مامانش رو صدا کرد شب میگفت،‘!Just give me a hug’ مثلا این احساسش را داشت بیان می‌کرد. ولی، خب، احساس میکنم، ما فکر می‌کردیم که این احساس، در واقع، با یک زبان native دارد ساخته می‌شود نه با یک زبان مصنوعی که ما یاد گرفتیم.

Emad: For instance, [our daughter] was saying to her mother the other day, she called her mum at night and said, ‘Just give me a hug!’ She was, for instance, expressing her emotions. But, well, I feel, we thought that, in fact, this emotion is being made through a native language, not through an artificial one that we learnt.

All in all, the emotional primacy of the first language is a reality in migrant families. However, at the same time, the development of ‘emotional multilingualism’ is another reality that needs to be acknowledged. In migration contexts parents may be particularly concerned about maintaining emotional ties with their children. As migrant families become socialized into a new society, the relationship between language and emotions is bound to change.  The dilemma of which language to choose may well be the product of a monolingual mindset that unnecessarily denies the reality of families’ linguistic and emotional growth.

Pavlenko, A. (2004). ‘Stop Doing That, Ia Komu Skazala!’: Language Choice and Emotions in Parent—Child Communication Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 25 (2-3), 179-203 DOI: 10.1080/01434630408666528

2012 workshop on ‘Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion in Australia’ at Macquarie University

How does language intersect with social inclusion in contemporary Australia? Do social inclusion policies address linguistic diversity? What do we know about the relationship between linguistic diversity and inclusion in schools, workplaces and higher education? It is questions such as these that a special issue of the  Australian Review of Applied Linguistics devoted to Linguistic diversity and social inclusion in Australia addresses. Guest-edited by Ingrid Piller, the special issue brings together selected presentations from the 2012 Macquarie University workshop devoted to the same topic.

Please find abstracts of the articles in the collection below. All the contributions in the special issue are available for open access through the National Library of Australia.

Linguistic diversity and social inclusion in Australia

Ingrid Piller

This editorial introduction orients the reader to current public debates and the state of research with regard to the intersection of linguistic diversity and social inclusion in contemporary Australia. These are characterised by a persistent lack of attention to the consequences of linguistic diversity for our social organisation. The editorial introduction serves to frame the five original research articles that comprise this special issue and identifies the key challenges that linguistic diversity presents for a fair and just social order. These challenges run as red threads through all the articles in this issue and include the persistent monolingual mindset which results in a pervasive language blindness and an inability to even identify language as an obstacle to inclusion. Furthermore, where language is recognised as an obstacle to inclusion this usually takes the form of assuming that an individual suffers from a lack of English language proficiency. Improving English language proficiency is then prescribed as a panacea for inclusion. However, on close examination that belief in itself can constitute a form of exclusion with detrimental effects both on language learning and equal opportunity.

Language and social inclusion: Unexplored aspects of intercultural communication

Simon Musgrave, Julie Bradshaw

Social inclusion policy in Australia has largely ignored key issues of communication for linguistic minorities, across communities and with the mainstream community. In the (now disbanded) Social Inclusion Board’s reports (e.g., Social Inclusion Unit, 2009), the emphasis is on the economic aspects of inclusion, while little attention has been paid to questions of language and culture. Assimilatory aspects of policy are foregrounded, and language is mainly mentioned in relation to the provision of classes in English as a Second Language. There is some recognition of linguistic diversity but the implications of this for inclusion and intercultural communication are not developed. Australian society can now be characterised as super-diverse, containing numerous ethnic groups each with multiple and different affiliations. We argue that a social inclusion policy that supports such linguistic and cultural diversity needs an evidence-based approach to the role of language and we evaluate existing policy approaches to linguistic and cultural diversity in Australia to assess whether inclusion is construed primarily in terms of enhancing intercultural communication, or of assimilation to the mainstream.

Dodgy data, language invisibility and the implications for social inclusion: A critical analysis of indigenous student language data in Queensland schools

Sally Dixon, Denise Angelo

As part of the ‘Bridging the Language Gap’ project undertaken with 86 State and Catholic schools across Queensland, the language competencies of Indigenous students have been found to be ‘invisible’ in several key and self-reinforcing ways in school system data. A proliferation of inaccurate, illogical and incomplete data exists about students’ home languages and their status as English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D) learners in schools. This is strongly suggestive of the fact that ‘language’ is not perceived by school systems as a significant operative variable in student performance, not even in the current education climate of data-driven improvement. Moreover, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), the annual standardised testing regime, does not collect relevant information on students’ language repertoires and levels of proficiency in Standard Australian English (SAE). Indigenous students who are over-represented in NAPLAN under-performance data are targeted through ‘Closing the Gap’ for interventions to raise their literacy and numeracy achievements (in SAE). However, Indigenous students who are EAL/D learners cannot be disaggregated by system data from their counterparts already fluent in SAE. Reasons behind such profound language invisibility are discussed, as well as the implications for social inclusion of Indigenous students in education.

‘Like the fish not in water’: How language and race mediate the social and economic inclusion of women migrants to Australia

Donna Butorac

Learning English is an important aspect of post-migration settlement in Australia, and new migrants with beginner to intermediate proficiency are strongly encouraged to attend government-subsidised English language classes. Underpinning the framing and delivery of these classes is a commitment to the discursive construction of Australia as an English-monolingual nation state, in which increased English proficiency will lead to new migrants gaining employment, thereby achieving an important benchmark of successful inclusion in Australian society. The assumption that English language acquisition leads to social and economic inclusion is not challenged within the settlement English program, and the language learner is seen as linguistically deficient in English, rather than as an emerging bi- or multilingual. Moreover, the ways that race, as well as gender, mediate both language learning and social inclusion are never problematised. This paper is based on data from a longitudinal ethnography that examines subjectivity in three interactional domains – family, society and work – in order to explore how language, race and gender impact on the post-migration settlement trajectories and sense of social inclusion of women migrants to Australia.

Working it out: Migrants’ perspectives of social inclusion in the workplace

George Major, Agnes Terraschke, Emily Major, Charlotte Setijadi

This paper explores the concept of social inclusion from the perspective of recent migrants, from language backgrounds other than English, at work in Australia. We adopt an understanding of social inclusion that acknowledges the importance of economic independence, while also considering migrants’ feelings of connectedness at work and their sense of belonging. Based on qualitative interviews with migrants collected two years apart, we explore the ways language and language practices can lead to feelings of inclusion or exclusion at work. The data suggests that migrants who felt included at work often had colleagues and/or bosses who actively supported and encouraged them in learning new skills, and made an effort to connect with them through small talk. In contrast, participants who felt excluded were unable to fully participate in work activities and/or workplace interaction because of limitations they or others placed upon them based on their English proficiency. We suggest that social inclusion, as it relates to employment, can also encompass different things for different people. For some, a sense of belonging is not promoted solely by having work or the ability to connect with colleagues, but also by obtaining employment of a type and level commensurate with their pre-migration status.

Writing feedback as an exclusionary practice in higher education

Grace Chu-Lin Chang

This ethnographic research probes into feedback on academic writing received by Taiwanese students in Australian higher education institutions, and examines whether the feedback received helped students to participate in the written discourse of academic communities. Academic writing dominates the academic life of students in Australia and is the key measure of their academic performance. This can be problematic for international students who speak English as an additional language and who are expected to acquire academic literacies in English ‘by doing’. As a social practice, academic writing depends on participation in dialogue for students to be included in the community of academia. However, the findings show that few participants received any useful feedback. Some assignments were never returned; in other cases, the hand-written feedback was illegible, and often included only overly general comments that puzzled the participants. As a result, the learning process came to an end once the students handed in their assignments; feedback failed to promote further learning related to content, and particularly to academic writing. The article highlights the few instances where participants received helpful feedback that was accessible and constructive, and which can be considered best practice for the promotion of academic literacy.

Australia in Asia (Source: unitingworld.org.au)

Since starting a PhD in February in a different field to my previous work, I’ve been running a weekly alert with the words “language” and “Australia” to see what was around. That’s when I discovered a key theme in linguistics in public discourse in Australia, and that is the need for “Asia literacy”.

“Australia must boost Asian language learning!”

Almost every week since February there has been an article, mostly in an Australian media source but also, as in the heading above, from the country’s Asian neighbours in Indonesia and India, lamenting Australia’s declining enrolments in Asian languages. Other headlines read: “Australia needs to break out of language cocoon”, “Loss of Indonesian expertise poses security risk” , “Australia lagging in learning a second language”, “Foreign Affairs staff have a French accent”, “Australia should send Hindi-speaking diplomats to India: Expert”,  “Asian literacy critical to children” , “In the right place but lost for words”. This media attention is the result of the commission and imminent release of the Australian Government’s White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century. Furthermore, significant political figures such as the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his deputy Julie Bishop have made their commitment to Asian language learning public in the last twelve months (“Asian Language Should be Mandatory for Australian Schoolchildren Julie Bishop Says”, “Abbott Accuses Government of Playing Class War Card”).

The same old story

But on closer inspection it seems that this theme is not new. In his book The Politics of Language in Australia Ozolins notes that Asian literacy was first considered a problem by the Australian Ambassador to Japan, Alan Watt, in the 1950s. He was clearly before his time as it was not until the 1990s that the then Labour government committed to Asian languages in the form of the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools (NALSAS) program. This was then discontinued by the Howard government two years before the funding was supposed to run out. The Rudd/Gillard government reinvented the program as the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Scheme (NALSS) from 2008 to 20012. Both programs focused on four ‘strategic’ languages, namely Mandarin, Indonesian, Korean and Japanese, and the rationale for choosing these languages came directly from figures from the Department of Trade, rather than from numbers of speakers in the community.

Who are the Australians who need to learn Asian languages?

So it seems that suggesting Australians learn another language, and particularly an Asian language, in order to increase our job skills (note the continued focus on the diplomatic service in the headlines above) has a lot of currency in our public discourse today and indeed over the last sixty years. But who are the imagined language learners here? When the numbers of students studying Mandarin is referred to in the debate, there is often reference to the fact that many of them come from a Chinese ethnic background, as though this dilutes the strength of the numbers (e.g., “Australians Falling Behind in Asian Language Education”). Can it be that these young people, whose “ethnic” background should in no way lead us to assume any knowledge of Mandarin, given the diversity of languages in China as well as the diversity of language practices in migrant homes , do not “count” as normal Australians in the debate?

“Ethnic” Asians do not count

Indeed, despite the fact that NALSAS and its successor mention drawing on the considerable population of speakers of the four strategic languages as potential language learners, as Susana Eisenchlas  and others have pointed out here on Language on the Move, often this group is seen as a problem for language learning. When Ms Bishop is quoted as saying “It would be a brilliant form of soft diplomacy if we had a large body of people in Australia who were able to speak an Asian language,” my immediate response is that, “Actually, we do! … but they are clearly not the Australians you have in mind!”

Rather than acknowledging the linguistic diversity in Australia (as evidenced by the 2011 census results), this imagined group of learners are homogenous in their English-speaking  (Anglo-Celtic?) Australianness . Rather than seeing it as a tale of failure to provide bilingual education for a diverse population, the comments on imagined learners in the Asian literacy debate construct a world of learning which is uni-directional; from the Australian classroom outwards to the world of foreign diplomacy. And rather than building on and supporting the use of these four languages (and others) in many thousands of Australian families, this approach values these skills so little they are not even a salient part of the debate. For those who genuinely believe in more language education in Australia, we must start by acknowledging, appreciating and supporting the diversity of potential language learners themselves, rather than harking back to a mythical White monoculture which masks our true diversity.

Gunbalanya School in West Arnhem Land (Source: abc.net.au)

Last week, the results of the 2012 National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) were published. As has been the case since NAPLAN was first introduced in Australia in 2008, the Northern Territory (NT) has, once again, underperformed dramatically. More than 30% of Year 3 students in the Territory perform below the national minimum standard in Reading, Writing, Spelling and Numeracy. For Grammar and Punctuation the number of NT students performing below the national minimum standard is close to 40%. Across Australia as a whole, these numbers are between 5-7%.

Around 40% of students enrolled in NT schools are indigenous. Across Australia as a whole, that number is 4%.

Putting two and two together, it won’t be long before we’ll see yet another highly politicised debate about aboriginal education. Conservatives will blame ‘underperforming schools’ and progressives will blame ‘systemic socio-economic disadvantage.’ As usual, both sides will be right and wrong in their own ways and after a while the failure of aboriginal education in this country will be shelved as too intractable for yet another year.

Meanwhile, few will stop to consider that NAPLAN doesn’t actually tell us anything about literacy and numeracy achievements in remote NT schools because NAPLAN is a test designed and standardized for first language speakers of English while English is a second language (ESL) across remote NT locations.

Those who do recognize the fact that aboriginal children are being tested in an additional language on a test designed for first language speakers usually dismiss that problem as minor, as, for instance, Indigenous Education 2012 does. The authors of that report argue that language is not an issue because it is not an issue for migrant children for whom English also constitutes an additional language. Indeed, the difference between migrant ESL test takers and first language test takers seems to be only 1 or 2 percentage points on average, with many ESL students outperforming their mother tongue peers.

A recent article in the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics explores the fallacies of the argument that language does not matter in low literacy and numeracy achievements in the NT. The authors, Gillian Wigglesworth, Jane Simpson and Deborah Loakes, argue that there are a number of linguistic challenges faced by aboriginal students in remote locations when it comes to literacy and numeracy assessment in English.

First, most ESL kids in cities grow up in suburbs where English is the language of wider communication. School is thus rarely the only domain where they are exposed to English. This is different in remote communities: English is often exclusive to the school.

Second, most migrants come from literate backgrounds where education is highly valued. This is usually not the case in remote indigenous communities.

Third, the problems inherent in speaking two clearly distinct languages are much easier to recognize and to address than the problems inherent in speaking a different language that is not recognized as such. While aboriginal languages have become relatively rare, most indigenous people in remote locations now speak Kriol. Creoles spoken in Australia differ widely but most have English as the lexifier language and are structurally based in an indigenous language. Australian creoles thus often sound like English but may, for example, not have subject-verb agreement nor distinguish singular and plural. When examining Year 3 NAPLAN sample tests, the researchers identified many linguistic problems that would have made the test misleading to a Kriol speaker.

As an example they examine the spelling test item: “We jumpt on the trampoline.” Test takers have to correct the underlined item. Leaving aside the fact that presenting an incorrect item to a learner is highly problematic in itself, test takers would need to identify that “jumpt” is in the past tense and that the final [t] sound is therefore graphically represented as <ed>. However, past tense in Australian creoles would usually be realized as bin jamp. This spelling item is thus testing grammatical knowledge that Kriol speakers are unlikely to have.

The problem is compounded by the fact that ear infections are extremely high in remote indigenous communities and about 70% of all children there are affected by some form of hearing loss. Final stops such as [t] are extremely difficult to hear with high frequency hearing loss.

The problem is also compounded by the fact that the reading passages in the test are littered with cultural concepts quite alien to the experience of children in remote Australia. The sample tests examined by Wigglesworth, Simpson and Loakes are populated by cinemas, paperboys, picket fences, letter boxes and parking meters – none of which exist in remote communities.

In sum, the researchers demonstrate that the NAPLAN test is linguistically and culturally problematic for creole-speaking children in remote communities. A standardized test designed for first-language speakers of English will always fail second-language speakers who are not even recognized as such.

In contrast to all the big problems bedevilling aboriginal education in this country, the language problem is actually relatively easy to fix: bilingual education with the use of the mother tongue in the early years of schooling and simultaneous systematic instruction in English as an additional language work well in minority contexts elsewhere. And, of course, tests designed for the actual population of test takers rather than an imaginary monolingual mother tongue speaker of Standard English.

Gillian Wigglesworth, Jane Simpson, & Deborah Loakes (2011). NAPLAN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENTS FOR INDIGENOUS CHILDREN IN REMOTE COMMUNITIES: ISSUES AND PROBLEMS Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 34 (3), 320-343.
Available for open access here.

Postnatal depression (Source: rcpsych.ac.uk)

Last week I was interviewed for a publication intended to showcase the achievements of women in research. When the interviewer, Meryl Hancock, asked me about the biggest challenge I had faced in my career, I answered “motherhood’ without any hesitation. In a career where you need to work 150% to succeed, having a child is always going to be a challenge. Facing that challenge as a migrant mother without access to a support network of extended family is twice as hard. Indeed, the only time I’ve ever been seriously homesick was right after my daughter was born. Sleep-deprived and pained by a stitched-up perineum I wanted nothing more than to be holed up in my parents’ house for a while and to be pampered by my mother. Instead, I was marking essays while breastfeeding baby …

Even so, I was lucky: I had a healthy child, a secure job with flexible hours, a supportive partner, and a good network. Not everyone is so lucky and the combination of two deep human experiences, migration and motherhood, poses a major settlement and mental health challenge. In Western countries, the majority of new mothers experience some form of ‘baby blues’ and around 20% are estimated to be affected by post-natal depression (PND). It is widely assumed that these numbers are higher in migrant mothers.

Does being of non-English-speaking background really affect your mental health in a migration context? A 2005 study by Cordia Chu was designed to examine exactly that question with reference to Chinese mothers in Brisbane, Queensland.

To begin with, cross-cultural comparative studies have shown that PND is virtually unknown in China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan. New mothers get tso yueh-tzu (special treatment during the postpartum month) and are typically expected to stay in bed for a month, they are given special strengthening foods to eat, and they are relieved of all household chores during that period. The idea is for them to regain their health but also to be rewarded for the effort of producing a child.

However, while PND is virtually non-existent in Chinese mothers in China, its incidence in Chinese migrant mothers in Australia is higher than in the general population.

Chu (2005) argues that the occurrence of PND in Chinese migrant mothers is an outcome of the intersection of the quality of their support network, employment issues and financial problems, and feelings of isolation. She demonstrates this in an interview study with three different groups of Chinese migrants, who had had babies in the past three years in Brisbane, Queensland. The key variable was their country of origin (PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan).

That country-of-origin variable translates into a number of additional differences as the migration circumstances of each group differ. As a group, the Chinese in Australia are highly educated (see also ‘Human Capital on the Move’) and have mostly been admitted as skilled or business migrants. However, while most PRC migrants came initially as tertiary students or skilled migrants, most migrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan were admitted as professionals and business owners. In addition to their human capital they thus usually also brought financial capital to Australia.

At the time of the study in the late 1990s, all three groups were more likely to be unemployed or underemployed than the general population, as is still the case today. Despite the fact that PRC migrants were the most highly educated group of the three, they were most likely to work in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs and thus experienced the greatest downward occupational mobility.

Another difference between the three groups was that Hong Kong- and Taiwan-related community organizations were abundant in Brisbane: of 21 Chinese religious and voluntary associations operating at the time of the study, nine serviced Taiwanese only, five Hong Kong-born only, five were open to all Chinese (including those from South-East Asia) and only one catered exclusively to migrants from the PRC.

This lack of voluntary associations combined with our network analysis showed that there was far less availability of social support, access to information and services, recreational and networking activities for the PRC migrants than for those from Taiwan and Hong Kong (Chu 2005, p. 44).

Eleven out of 30 interviewees (10 in each group) reported experiencing symptoms of PND. Six of these originated from the PRC. Ten of these cited lack of social support as their main problem – a problem that the women who did not experience symptoms of PND were able to circumvent by bringing their mothers out to Australia during the postpartum period or by going back home to give birth. Both these options of securing family support were costly and thus open only to the financially secure participants, mostly from Hong Kong and Taiwan in the study.

Financial concerns also were the base of whether women could choose to become housewives after the birth of their child or not. Six each of the women from Hong Kong and Taiwan chose to become stay-at-home mums and not return to paid work. None of these reported symptoms of PND. By contrast, becoming a housewife was not an option for any of the women from the PRC, who said they needed to accept paid employment to survive. Unsurprisingly, all of them reported various degrees of stress and fatigue as a result of being in paid employment while also caring for a young baby.

Despite the fact that they were in paid employment (often assumed to be closely linked to higher levels of English proficiency in the literature), the PRC-born women, and also those from Taiwan, reported that they were not confident enough in their English to use it in health communication. Consequently, they had to seek out Chinese-speaking (Western-style; i.e. not traditional Chinese health practitioners) to obtain care for themselves and their babies. Given the limited availability of Chinese-speaking surgeries, this meant long travel and waiting times and was thus another source of stress.

Finally, the women who reported symptoms of PND were also less likely to be aware of support services available to them and thus failed to access mainstream services such as antenatal classes or mother-and-baby groups.

So, is there a link between English language proficiency and PND in migrant women? As is usually the case, the link is not direct but mediated by other – and usually less conspicuous – factors such as financial security and community networks in this case. For financially secure women from Taiwan who could bring their mothers to Queensland to help them, who had the choice to become stay-at-home moms and who had access to Taiwanese networks for support and information, English did not matter. By contrast, for PRC-born women who were struggling financially and did not have a wide community network, their lack of English proficiency (or their lack of confidence in their English proficiency) became another source of stress and anxiety (e.g., having to accept work they were overqualified for; having to spend long hours attending a Chinese-speaking surgery). At the same time, lack of English made finding solutions to these problems even more difficult for them.

Chu, Cordia M. Y. (2005). Postnatal Experience and Health Needs of Chinese Migrant Women in Brisbane, Australia Ethnicity and health, 10 (1), 33-56 DOI: 10.1080/1355785052000323029

Plaque commemorating the work of migrants in the construction of the Mundaring Weir

In response to my blog post about the disparity between educational qualifications and employment outcomes faced by select country of origin groups in Australia, Val Colic-Peisker reminded me that there is also a more optimistic way of looking at the intersection between ethnicity and class in Australia: one that foregrounds social transformations over the past half-century that have led to the decoupling of ‘non-Anglo identity’ with ‘working class.’ Australia today has something that few other countries have been equally successful in achieving: a linguistically and culturally diverse middle class.

The plaque in the picture commemorates the construction of the Mundaring Weir, one of Australia’s iconic post-war construction projects. When I visited the Mundaring Weir in 2008, I took the picture because of the poignant reference to the professors labouring on the construction site. It felt like a reminder of my good fortune to have arrived in Australia at a different time where migration did not necessarily mean having to swap academia for a construction site.

In the post-war period, almost all migrants from continental Europe ended up in Australia’s working class, irrespective of their pre-migration qualifications and experience. As a result, what emerged in post-war Australia was an almost complete overlap between being of non-English-speaking background (NESB) and being working class.

This overlap has started to fracture since the 1980s. Sydney’s affluent North Shore suburb Wahroonga provides an example: according to the 2011 census, Wahroonga residents have a weekly median personal income of AUD789 (in comparison to the Australia average of AUD577). 36.7% of Wahroonga residents are overseas born (more than the national average of 30.2%). The top countries of origin for the overseas-born residents of Wahroonga are England, South Africa, China, New Zealand and India. 22.1% of Wahroonga residents speak a language other than English at home (slightly less than the national average of 23.2%) and the top languages are Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Hindi and Persian (all of which are more frequent in Wahroonga than the national average). In sum, Wahroonga residents, as a sample of affluent Australia, are a diverse group and around 20% of them are NESB migrants.

As such Wahroonga is reflective of the growing multicultural middle class in Australia. According to Colic-Peisker (2011), the contemporary multicultural middle class feeds from two sources: the second generation and skilled migrants.

The second generation, i.e. the Australia-born and/or Australia-educated children of NESB migrants are educational high achievers and achieve significantly higher educational levels than both their migrant parents and their third (or more) generation peers. The sons and daughters not only of the post-war migrants from continental Europe but also of the early Asian migrants from the 1970s onwards have by now entered the workforce and have become one group that makes up the multicultural middle class.

Furthermore, the make-up of migrants themselves has changed. Since the introduction of the points test in 1979, the largest group of permanent entrants are in the skilled migration category. That means that they have high levels of educational qualifications and work experience and – even if they end up being employed below their level – still mostly join the Australian middle classes.

The table shows the percentage of the tertiary-educated, the percentage of those in professional employment and the median personal income for selected country of origin groups. Recent migrant groups are quite obviously more likely to be tertiary-educated and to be employed in professional roles than the old and intermediary birthplace groups and the Australia-born. As a consequence, the median personal income of some NESB groups is higher than the national average. The group with the highest median income are the Malaysia-born, followed by the Sri Lanka-, India-, Philippines- and Singapore-born.

(Source: Colic-Peisker 2011, p. 575)

Of course, another way of looking at it is that most NESB groups have lower incomes than the national average despite the fact that they include up to three times more tertiary-educated people than the national average.

That disparity notwithstanding, it is obvious that the Australian middle-class is indeed culturally and linguistically diverse and that the nexus between NESB and working class has been broken in this country.

Colic-Peisker, Val (2011). A New Era in Australian Multiculturalism? From Working-Class
“Ethnics” To a “Multicultural Middle-Class” International Migration Review, 45 (3), 562-587 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2011.00858.x

Dr Butorac (middle) and her supervisors, Prof Piller and Dr Takahashi

The Language-on-the-Move team is delighted that the 2012 Michael Clyne Prize has been awarded to one of our supervision group, Dr Donna Butorac, who graduated from Macquarie University last year.

Following a very generous contribution by Michael Clyne and also funded by donations in Michael’s honour, the annual Michael Clyne Prize has been established for the best postgraduate research thesis in the area of immigrant bilingualism and language contact in Australia. The Michael Clyne Prize is jointly administered by the Australian Linguistic Society and the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia. A list of past recipients is available here.

Donna was awarded the 2012 Michael Clyne Prize for her thesis Imagined Identity, Remembered Self: Settlement Language Learning and the Negotiation of Gendered Subjectivity. The full text of the thesis can be accessed here.

The thesis is an ethnographic study exploring the impact of English language learning on gendered subjectivity, specifically in the context of transnational migration. With interactions spanning a twenty-two month period, it follows the language learning and settlement trajectories of a group of nine recent women migrants to Australia. The resulting analysis is based on a large corpus of narrative data derived from personal interviews, discussion groups, email journals, blogs, and personal communication. Adopting a critical, feminist approach, the study foregrounds the reported experience of migrant women in order to understand how coming into voice in English impacts a learner’s sense of self and settlement aspirations. Examining data from three interactional domains, corresponding to the experience of subjectivity in family, society and work, the analysis looks at issues related to language, race, and gender that impacted the participants’ settlement trajectories. It finds that the impact of attitudes to race and gender subjectivities in Australia, and the ways that migration is a gendered process, are deeply involved in the impact that learning English has on aspiration and selfhood in this context.

In addition, the study explores the way that identity is articulated in both theory and practice, ultimately proposing an inclusive approach, one that aims to advance the theorisation of identity in sociolinguistics by accommodating a poststructuralist multiplicity alongside the individual’s perception of a core self.

This is an outstanding doctoral thesis. It makes an original contribution to scholarship across several areas, including sociolinguistics, studies of gender, studies of culture and identity, and more broadly migration studies. […] It also makes a genuine contribution to its stated goal of promoting social justice. (Examiner)

Donna’s higher degree research was supported by a Macquarie University Excellence Scholarship and she was supervised by Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi.

Salvador Dali, Gestalt

As members of the Language-on-the-Move community know, I was the lucky guest of Ingrid at Macquarie last Wednesday and then the theme of her blog posting. As a reciprocal gift to thank her and the Language-on-the-Move community, I undertook to post this blog, a commentary on some points the blog and the occasion sparked in me. That’s in fact the most important revelation I have to share: that a mere 842-word text could be so resonant. What can it tell us about language that it allows the miracle of communication to keep happening?

Many blogs I’ve read on this site report feelings of pain and anger triggered by encounters through language. The feelings are real, not to be minimised. Yet language can hurt like this because it can touch so subtly and deeply. We’re all driven by a powerful urge to overcome both difference and indifference. Language can perform this miracle. That’s why we study it.

Ingrid’s blog, this and others, shows a ms-tress at work, using language in such marvellous ways that we can all learn from her example why we want to study and understand it.

Her brief blog, produced within a day of the encounter, captured a 3-hour conversation, and distilled an interview out of it I didn’t realise had happened. Afterwards I didn’t feel I’d been mugged by a manipulative word-thief, just in the presence of a brilliant listener and strategist, who could co-construct a beautiful text from what she heard without ever misrepresenting me. That’s so good!

Behind the blog is swirling, enabling cyberspace. Some people lament this new technology. Ingrid uses it creatively, in ways that illuminate how language itself works, and what it may become in the future.

This meeting happened partly because I noticed Ingrid’s contribution on an email list we both belong to. I followed that up to find her wonderful posts, so fresh, interweaving personal and academic interests so well that I felt I already knew her before we met. I arranged to meet her by phone and email. In between the arrangement and the encounter she too did her cyberwork, layering my 21^st century self onto an earlier pre-electronic self.

In trying to understand for myself what made Ingrid’s blog so great, so brief yet resonant, I tried counting. 14 links in an 842-word blog, one link every 60 words. It makes this a multidimensional text of the cyber age: perfect English syntax overlaid by a gestalt structure formed by the links. They shadow this brief text with another larger one, existing in a different time, space and mode.

I use the German word gestalt here, from a language Ingrid speaks fluently and which I have only rudimentary knowledge of. In spite of that fact I use it, not because I claim to know it better than Ingrid, but because this word and the great tradition in psychology built around it is so important for me. This loan word means more to me than most English words I use in this blog. If even fragments from another language can change the gestalt of a first language, how much richer will be the linguistic universe of bi-lingual and tri-lingual speakers?

I keep returning to the paradoxical theme of difference. Ingrid notes that ‘at different times and in different countries, Bob and myself entered Linguistics precisely to be repelled by its disciplinarity’. She could have added language, gender and other qualities to the differences.

Yet difference works in strange ways. Somehow apparent difference makes common meanings deeper. Binocular vision gives depth to objects, in this case to language and disciplinarity.

I was fascinated with the productive play of difference and sameness in Shiva’s blog. I was struck by how a microscopic difference created such a huge social chasm, against a background where massive commonalities and differences remained invisible and inactive. But Shiva’s response was creative, triggered into deeper understanding of ‘cap’ than the receptionist would ever attain. He (his gender was doubtless part of the dynamics of the exchange) unthinkingly replicated a small socio-phonetic change. Shiva came to understand all this and more, and wrote about it in flawless, eloquent English. Out of a difference weighted with discrimination she generated difference on the other side of the scale. English isn’t a fixed target language, which all first-language speakers hit and all others miss. On the contrary, its essential dynamic nature can only be understood by thoughtful second-language speakers.

So back to my actual encounter with Ingrid, and another lesson I learned. In fact she’s a better speaker of English than I am, and also a much better speaker of German than me. Languages aren’t a zero-sum game. Yet in the play of over-stated differences and unrecognised similarities in paradoxical packages, I find it exhilarating how often and how profoundly human communication triumphs over all these barriers.

This was a conversation I had in the reception area of a storage company on one of my first days in Australia back in 2008. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary ‘cap’ can refer to (a) ‘a head covering,’ (b) ‘a natural cover or top,’ (c) ‘something that serves as a cover or protection,’ (d) ‘an overlaying or covering structure,’ (e) ‘a paper or metal container holding an explosive charge,’ (f) ‘an upper limit,’ (g) ‘the symbol ∩ indicating the intersection of two sets’ or (h) ‘a cluster of molecules or chemical groups bound to one end or a region of a cell, virus, or molecule.’ While I may not have had all these definitions at the top of my head, as someone who had studied English as a foreign language in Iran for many years, the general thrust of all these meanings of ‘cap’ was clear to me. The problem was that none of these meanings of ‘cap’ seemed to make sense in the context in which I found myself.

While I was frantically trying to figure out in my mind what I was supposed to help myself to, the receptionist noticed my incomprehension and beckoned me to follow him into a corner where there was a coffee machine. He pointed at the coffee machine and slowly started to explain that this was a coffee machine, that coffee was a beverage, that it was nice, and that Australians liked to drink coffee, and that there were different types, and that a cappuccino was particularly nice because it had a frothy top.

As it dawned on me that in the receptionist’s variety of English ‘cap’ had nothing to do with ‘coverings’ of any kind but was short for ‘cappuccino,’ I was mortified. The receptionist had thought my lack of comprehension was a sign not of a linguistic problem but of my ignorance and backwardness. I was so offended that anyone would think a sophisticated Tehrani like myself didn’t know about coffee! How dare he be so ignorant, insular and condescending?! Even so, I could not confront him. Fuming inside, I meekly accepted my bitterest-ever cappuccino. I took all the blame to myself for not having adequate English to have a smooth communication with ‘a native speaker’.

Intercultural communication over coffee (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

 
This humiliating encounter made me question the many years of English language learning I had been engaged in since my early childhood. Despite all my best efforts of many years and the investment of my parents, here I was in Australia incapable of effortlessly and gracefully accepting a cup of coffee without being taken for a barbarian. It all seemed extremely unfair and in the past four years I’ve often experienced a nagging feeling of jealousy that my English was still deficient despite all my striving while ‘native speakers’ could have it all – and without the least bit of effort!

I have also come to realise that ‘English,’ like all languages, is dynamic and subject to change and that even ‘native English speakers’ encounter new words every now and then and miscommunicate in unfamiliar contexts. This realisation has been one step towards healing my tarnished linguistic confidence.

Trying to extend myself and to understand my in-between position better, I undertook a postgraduate course in Cross-Cultural Communication, where most of the teaching and reading I was exposed to stressed cultural differences as the source of miscommunication in intercultural communication. This has been an ongoing source of puzzlement for me: in theory, it made perfect sense that Australian and Persians, for instance, had different cultural values and orientations and so, of course, there would be problems when they meet. In practice, however, none of the miscommunication I have experienced in Australia seems to have anything to do with culture. My humiliation at the hands of the receptionist had nothing to do with the fact that Persians prefer indirectness and elaborate politeness routines where Australians are direct and to the point. On the contrary, as far as culture was concerned, this was a misunderstanding between two coffee lovers, i.e. culturally similar people.

Despite the fact that I now hold an MA in Cross-Cultural Communication, my feelings of English deficiency together with a lack of real cultural differences has remained a brainteaser until a short while ago when I read Ingrid Piller’s new book Intercultural Communication and there the explanation leapt out at me from Chapter 10: when misunderstandings in intercultural communication are derived from linguistic problems, they are often unfairly attributed to cultural issues as soon as it comes to “English-language learners, particularly if their proficiency is more than just basic” (Piller, 2011, p. 147).

So, my English is the proud result of my efforts, and Australians and Persians are pretty similar. It’s just that newcomers and old-timers in this country find themselves in positions of unequal power (or legitimacy) which they like to dress up as cultural differences.

Iranian coffee culture, by the way, dates back to the 9^th century!

This is not the first time that I (who watches TV very rarely) have wondered about the ways in which subtitles work to make speakers sound (or, rather, look) not only unintelligible but also deficient and illegitimate. Earlier this year, for instance, the advertising block during the evening news ended with a preview of a show about migration, in which a migrant engineer from Colombia spoke about her experiences of settlement in Australia. She had lived in Australia for a number of years so it’s probably unsurprising that I found her Spanish-accented English perfectly intelligible. Nonetheless, it was subtitled. Shortly after, there was a news item about soccer violence in Glasgow which included an interview with a Scottish publican. Even with context clues, I had a hard time trying to make out what he was saying. However, this time, there weren’t any subtitles to help.

In yet another example, in August 2010, the evening news featured a report about the 2010 Pakistan floods as well as one about the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. For the former, senior members of Pakistan’s army and civil defense forces were interviewed in English. In my perception, their educated English sounded a bit stilted but perfectly intelligible. It was subtitled. For the Hurricane Katrina report, ordinary New Orleans residents were interviewed. Their broad Southern American English was difficult for me to understand but – you guessed it! – there were no subtitles.

Is it possible that I am so out of touch with my speech community that I find accents that no one else understands intelligible and that I find accents unintelligible that everyone else understands? Possible, yes, but unlikely. The fact is that most Australians, just as myself, are likely to have more exposure to Australian English with a Spanish accent than to Glaswegian, or to an educated Commonwealth accent from Pakistan than a Southern drawl.

Subtitling varieties of English (as opposed to foreign languages) is thus a matter of ideology and identity construction as much as a matter of intelligibility. In the examples I have described here, the pattern is obvious: native speakers of English are presumed to be universally intelligible on Australian TV, even if theirs is a distant and obscure dialect. The speech of non-native speakers, by contrast, is presented as problematic and unintelligible even if they speak educated Standard English.

Familiarity with an accent is a key aspect of intelligibility. So, if the more familiar varieties are subtitled while less familiar ones are not, subtitling is clearly an exercise in linguistic subordination (a fact that hasn’t escaped the comedians behind this 2003 Skithouse sketch). Familiarity not only improves intelligibility but also influences attitudes towards speakers positively, as Eisenchlas and Tsurutani demonstrate in a recent matched-guise study. Participants, who were native speakers of Australian English, rated a speaker with Spanish-accented English as the most competent out of speakers of six different varieties of accented English (including standard Australian English) and a speaker with Japanese-accented English as the most attractive speaker. The researchers explain these rather surprising findings as a result of the fact that their participants are foreign language students. Consequently, they make this recommendation for a more equitable and harmonious multicultural society:

employment of non-native speakers within the education system and the introduction of compulsory foreign language study into school curricula will help to broaden people’s perceptions of foreign accented speech from an early age when world views are formed. (p. 234)

Additionally, the media also have an important role to play. All my examples above come from SBS, the broadcaster tasked with “reflecting the multicultural spirit of our own community.” Surely, that includes not branding familiar accents as exotic and illegitimate by subtitling them.

Susana A. Eisenchlas, Chiharu Tsurutani (2011). YOU SOUND ATTRACTIVE! PERCEPTIONS OF ACCENTED ENGLISH IN A MULTILINGUAL ENVIRONMENT Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 34 (2), 216-236