In this post, Rizwan Ahmad and Shaikha Al-Hemaidi (Department of English Literature & Linguistics, Qatar University) examine the specific form this language panic takes in the Gulf countries, where Arabic is in close contact both with the languages of labor migrants from South and South-East Asia and with English as the language of globalization.

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Rizwan Ahmad and Shaikha Al-Hemaidi
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Is Arabic under threat in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries of Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, and the UAE, where the number of non-nationals exceeds the nationals? Do non-Arabs living in the GCC pose a threat to the Arabic language and Arab identity? These questions have been the subject of debates not only in the Arabic language media but also conferences and seminars. Since Arabic is a symbol of national identity in the GCC, it is understandable why Arabs may be concerned, but beyond the emotional rhetoric, do facts support the anxiety about the decline of Arabic?

Demographic changes after discovery of oil in GCC

The GCC countries have experienced an influx of migrant workers over the past few decades following the discovery of oil and gas. The massive economic and social projects undertaken by the GCC governments have further created needs for labor and skills that the local population cannot fulfil leading to reliance on temporary foreign labor. In the GCC, non-nationals outnumber the nationals, accounting for 52% of the total population. In the workforces, the percentage of non-nationals is even more pronounced reaching up to 95% in Qatar. While migration into the GCC has brought many benefits to the region, it has also given rise to concerns among the local population that the Arabic language and Arab identity are in danger.

Fear of decline of Arabic

GCC Flag (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In popular discussions, the perceived decline of Arabic is generally attributed to two factors. First, it is argued that the presence of non-Arab migrant population from South and Southeast Asia not only poses a threat to the structure and use of Arabic but also endangers the Arab identity of the youth. Al-Farajānī, a political thinker and a columnist, in an article published on Aljazeera in 2008 argued that the presence of Asians had negative cultural consequences, the most important of which is ifsād al-lughah al-‘Arabīyyah, ‘corruption of the Arabic language’.

In 2013, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Center for Language Planning and Policies, based in Saudi Arabia, organized a conference aimed at developing strategies to strengthen the Arabic language and identity against the backdrop of social, demographic, and economic changes in the GCC. On a panel, Dr. Lateefah Al-Najjar, a professor of Arabic at UAE University, presented a paper on the effects of the Asian workforce on the Arabic language in which she argued that Asian maids and drivers affect the language of children and recommended that the Asian workforce be replaced with Arabs and that the learning of Arabic be a condition of employment in the GCC.

A second source of anxiety comes from the presence of numerous English-medium schools and colleges in the region. In a report published in 2019 on the occasion of UN Arabic Language Day – celebrated annually on December 18 – it was argued that English was a threat to Arabic in the GCC in the same way as French endangers Arabic in Arabic-speaking countries in North Africa. According to another report published in the Economist, in 2022, the youth in the GCC uses English more than Arabic and the use of Arabic is becoming limited to the home domain.

English is literally on the move on the roads of the UAE (Image: Language on the Move)

Some scholarly studies have also argued that English medium schools and colleges in the GCC are a threat to Arabic and Arab identity. A similar fear of the decline of Arabic in the entire Arab World was the theme of a Pan-Arab conference entitled “The Arabic language is in danger: We are all partners in protecting it” held in the UAE in 2013 indicating that the purported decline of Arabic is not limited to the GCC.

Language policy changes in the GCC

The presence of large non-Arab populations has also led to communication problems between monolingual Arabs and non-Arabs. The governments of Qatar and UAE have started to use migrant languages in dealing with issues related to the workforce. At the same time, the concerns about the decline of Arabic have led the countries in the region, especially Qatar and UAE, with the largest foreign populations, to take measures aimed at protecting the Arabic language and identity. In the UAE, the Cabinet passed Resolution Number 21/2 in 2008 whereby all ministries, federal entities, and local government departments were required to use Arabic in all their official communications. In 2015, the Department of Economic Development of Dubai in the UAE issued violation tickets to 29 restaurants for not having their menus in Arabic in addition to not specifying the prices. Similarly, in 2019, Qatar passed the Law on Protection of the Arabic Language which regulates the use of Arabic and foreign languages and provides a fine up to 50,000 Qatari Riyal in case of non-compliance in some cases.

Language decline as proxy for social and political crises

A major shortcoming of the above reports, studies, and conferences is that no concrete evidence was provided to support the purported decline of Arabic. There is no linguistic evidence that Arabic spoken by young people in the GCC shows linguistic influences of their maids and drivers. They may have acquired some words, phrases, and sentences from their languages to communicate with them, which only suggests that their linguistic repertoire has been expanded. In fact, maids and drivers learn to communicate in Arabic with proficiency ranging from broken pidgin Arabic to native-like command. There is a need of systematic research based on empirical data to understand the linguistic effects of maids and drivers on the languages of host society.

Magazine ad for the University of Wollongong’s branch campus in Dubai (Image: Language on the Move)

Moreover, the discourse of the decline of Arabic is not limited to the GCC but covers the entire Arab World, as was the theme of the 2013 conference in the UAE. Yasir Suleiman, a sociolinguist who has written extensively on the Arabic language and identity describes the situation as one of language anxiety, which is less about language and more about social and political tensions and crises besetting the Arab world.

One major external factor that contributes to the anxiety is the presence of English in educational institutions. Another is the demographic changes that the discovery of oil and the massive modernization projects have brought to the GCC countries whereby non-nationals constitute a significant part of the Gulf social and cultural space. Suleiman argues that the discourse of decline of Arabic is a proxy for these social tensions whereby a defense of Arabic becomes a defense of the Arab social and moral order.

The issue of anxiety and fear notwithstanding, something concrete has appeared in the linguistic landscape of the GCC, and maybe even more broadly in the Arab World, which is that for the first time in their history, Arabs are becoming bilingual in their dialect and English.

Before the advent of English-medium international schools and universities, Arabs from the region would seek higher education in other Arab countries such as Egypt and Syria, where the medium of instruction was Arabic. Their level of education would be displayed in their knowledge and use of Standard Arabic.

By contrast, many GCC students today graduate from English-medium schools and international universities in Qatar and the UAE with a better command of English than Standard Arabic, especially in discussing professional issues.

This is part of the anxiety that English is encroaching upon the space of Arabic. However, we know bilingual people can command two languages equally proficiently and use each in its appropriate context. More research is needed to better understand usage patterns at home and in professional spaces. Census data, similar to those collected in bilingual Quebec in Canada could shed empirical light on what language(s) people use in different social domains such as the home, the workplace, or social gathering such as majlis. This might be more productive than the fear about the decline of Arabic that currently prevails.

Memorial for Kian Pirfalak at Isfahan University (Source: Twitter)

In the Name of the God of the Rainbow, let’s today think about bilingual double vision. Double vision is a condition where you see two images of the same thing. The two images can be separate from each other but, more often, one overlaps the other, blurring the boundaries.

“Azadi” and “Freedom”

Learning a new language creates a new way of seeing, overlapping previous ways of seeing. The Persian word for “freedom,” for instance, “آزادی” (“azadi”), begins with the first letter of the Perso-Arabic alphabet (آ) and ends with the last (ی). This feature makes it a very special word. It symbolizes that freedom is essential, in the same way that Christians say that God is the alpha and the omega – the first and last letter of the Greek alphabet – to indicate the comprehensiveness of God. Like the Christian God, آزادی is all-encompassing and includes everything else. In the case of آزادی, that “everything else” is life itself, as the آ and ی frame the word for “born”, “زاد” (“zad”).

Once you’ve learned Persian “آزادی”, English “freedom”, too, takes on a different tinge, and comes to be seen as essential to life itself.

The double vision created by “آزادی” and “freedom” exists on the level of the language system. In fact, you do not need any level of bilingual competence to appreciate that different languages provide different perspectives on the world, as ever-popular trivia lists of supposedly “untranslatable” words demonstrate (see, e.g., “203 most beautiful untranslatable words” or “28 untranslatable words from around the world”).

The more powerful double vision effects lie well beyond the language system. Becoming bilingual is not only, and maybe not even predominantly, about learning another language system but about joining another discourse community. And what discourse communities are concerned with and talk about can be wildly different, even in our globalized world.

Pop stick paddle boats carried at Sydney solidarity rally (Source: Twitter)

“Pop stick paddle boat” is another word for freedom

Let’s go back to “freedom.” Another Persian word for “freedom” is “قایق پارویی چوب بستنی” (“pop stick paddle boat”). I’m not kidding, even if no dictionary will tell you so. “Pop stick paddle boat” also means “life,” “justice,” “peace,” “future for our children,” “end oppression,” “stop killing innocents,” and “we mourn the death of a 10-year-old boy.”

“Pop stick paddle boat” took on all these meanings only a few days ago when 10-year-old Kian Pirfalak was shot dead by anti-riot police. Shortly after his death, a short home video emerged of Kian, proudly showing off a pop stick paddle boat he had built. In the video, he explains how the contraption works, starting his explanation with “in the name of God,” the conventional formula that often begins educational events in the Islamic Republic. In Islam, God has 100 names, and the name that Kian chooses in the video is “the God of the Rainbow.”

Kian’s tragic death and the joyful video of a little inventor have since imbued pop stick paddle boats with grief and hope. The devices and their paper boat variations have become features at protest rallies and have inspired protest songs and videos.

The tears through which I have looked at these images have literally given me double vision. It is an apt metaphor for living a bilingual life. I’ll never look at a little boat nor a rainbow again without also seeing a murdered child and the Iranian struggle for freedom.

Related content:

Piller, Ingrid. (2022). “Women, life, freedom” – the slogan swimming against the global tide. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/women-life-freedom-the-slogan-swimming-against-the-global-tide/

Mis dos voces (Image credit: Rayon Verde)

Imagine this: you go out to a fast-food restaurant and order a burger. While you wait for your order to be filled, you anxiously hope that the server will get your order right and that the food in the bag will be exactly what you wanted. Sometimes, that is what happens, and you feel a great sense of accomplishment and gratitude. Other times, you get the extra hot sauce that burns your tongue and the chicken that your child refuses to eat. When that happens, you experience a sense of shame and guilt. Not even for a second do you entertain the thought of returning the incorrect order and asking for a substitute.

Sounds strange? Well, this is not someone with an anxiety disorder or a social phobia but an immigrant who does not (yet) speak the language of their new country (well). It is the story of one of the three Colombian and Mexican immigrant women in Canada featured in Mis Dos Voces (My Two Voices).

To read on, head to the Berlinale Forum website.

Image credit: Alexander Dummer via Unsplash

In the current crisis, when schools and childcare centres may be closed for long periods, many families have to make choices about work and childcare in new ways. In many households, mothers are finding that the burden of working and looking after children falls to them, while their husbands’ job, with its higher wage and lower flexibility, comes first. One writer has suggested that for women in the West, the pandemic has sent them back into the 1950s, when married women did not work outside the home.

This is not news to those of us looking at issues connected with women, work and the unpaid labour of childcare and the domestic sphere. In my work, I look at minority language transmission, through the lens of family language work, building on Toshie Okita’s book Invisible Work: Bilingualism, language choice and childrearing in intermarried families.

I started thinking about this topic while working as an English language teacher in Sydney in 2008. A student sought my advice on what language she should speak to her daughter. Her English-speaking husband wanted her to switch from speaking Thai to English, which she had been speaking to her daughter since birth. She wanted some “expert” advice to negotiate with her husband about the family’s language policy; I told her she was right to speak her language and she seemed happy with that.

But the episode stayed with me. Who wouldn’t want their child to grow up with two languages? And why would the husband ask his wife to stop speaking her strongest language to their child?

My resulting doctoral research draws on interviews with participants in 30 linguistically intermarried couples. Questions of what to do about children and language came up often. For mothers in particular, these questions were linked to a sense of primary responsibility for the child’s language development. Even, surprisingly, when they did not speak a second language themselves.

“And I never asked them to do it, it happened naturally”

In her book, Okita pointed out that many of the British husbands of Japanese migrant wives felt it was natural that their wives spoke to the children in Japanese, especially when their English was less proficient. The migrant mothers I spoke to in my research were highly accomplished multilinguals, which seemed to make the language choice both less clear-cut and more fraught. In fact, the majority of families reported that their kids were not actively bilingual. This was a source of great regret for those parents whose children could not effectively speak to family and friends in the first language of the migrant parent.

One exception was the family of Lucia and Marc, who had a sense of great pride that the kids spoke Spanish with each other, and not just with their Spanish-speaking mum:

And I never asked them to do it, it happened naturally and they always talk to each other in Spanish, of course they mix English words when they don’t have them, when they don’t have the Spanish word they, you know, insert the English word, but you know all the structure and the communication’s in Spanish. […] (Lucia)

Unlike many couples I spoke to, Lucia and Marc, were hopeful and positive about the idea of raising their kids with two languages. Perhaps Lucia’s positive attitude towards language mixing through language contact played a part in their approach. Related to this is the fact that Lucia, herself an English/Spanish bilingual from a young age, felt equipped for and was prepared to do the work of speaking Spanish to the children. For other migrant mums, working and integrating into a new country was enough to make the job of bilingual childrearing an ongoing and often insurmountable challenge.

All his friends said “oh my god, you’re not, your children aren’t speaking Polish”

The situation was different again for the English-speaking background mothers I interviewed, who were either monolingual or had become bilingual later in life, often without much formal education in the language. Despite this, they felt responsible for the presence (or absence) of the other language in their children’s lives.

They spoke about mothers-in-law sending books from overseas; about enrolling kids in language classes; about listening to music and watching television in other languages; and about the pressure they felt for their kids to be bilingual, as in this example from Michelle:

All his friends said “oh my god, you’re not, your children aren’t speaking Polish” and I would just say to them “that’s the whole, that’s why it’s called mother tongue, you generally, as a kid you generally spend more time with your mother” and so you know, um, I think that’s it.

Michelle argues against the pressure to raise her children bilingually by subscribing to a mother tongue ideology. Her mother tongue is English and so she feels she has done her duty. Other mothers talked about how they saw their role as encouraging their husbands to speak the language with the children, such as Megan:

My husband, he’s more than happy to read them books in Hindi but I have to be the instigator of everything (laughs). “Why don’t you sing them a song in Hindi? Why don’t you read them a book in Hindi?” (Megan)

This is similar to the findings of Piller and Gerber’s (2018) study of how parents conceptualised their children’s bilingualism in an online parenting forum. They found that English-speaking background mothers were the main contributors to the forum, and that their multilingual partners were often represented as failing in their duty to speak their language to the couple’s children.

This was echoed by the mothers in my research who, whether they had proficiency in the language or not, positioned their role in their children’s language education as a primary one. In contrast, many English-speaking background husbands saw their role as marginal, as supporting their bilingual wives’ efforts by sometimes just permitting the language in the home and tolerating the fact that this often left them excluded from conversations. They saw their wives, as speakers of the language, as the primary decision-makers around language choice in the home:

Hey look, I’m happy to help. If you’re trying to teach the baby something or talking to it in Serbian, teach me a couple of phrases like, “put that down, don’t do that […]”. (Jonathon)

In these examples, mothers are positioned as the parent who makes bilingualism in the home happen. This is not to say that fathers did not value bilingualism for their children, in fact almost all participants of the study were generally positive about bilingual childrearing. It just meant that they did not hold themselves as primarily responsible for it, even when the wives did not actually feel equipped to pass on the language. Thus, I argue that gender trumps language when it comes to bilingual childrearing.

Over the past thirty years there has been a welcome social shift in many places towards supporting families to pass on their indigenous or migrant languages in our transnational, globalised world. To better support families, researchers need to start paying attention to how social roles, such as motherhood, determine and shape family language policy experiences in very significant ways.

*This blogpost is based on chapter 5 of my new book on this and other topics to do with language in couples and families: Linguistic intermarriage in Australia: Between pride and shame, published by Palgrave Macmillan and available as an e-book and print edition.

References

Okita, T. (2002). Invisible work: Bilingualism, language choice, and childrearing in intermarried families. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227
Torsh, H. (2020). Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

In a world where public debates about refugees and asylum seekers often focus on whether they are telling the truth, it should probably come as no surprise that government processes for evaluating asylum claims emphasize assessing applicant credibility.

These credibility assessments have – rightly – attracted ample criticism from scholars across multiple disciplines for many years now. From the earliest critiques, scholarly commentary has acknowledged that the asylum process is a site of intercultural communication and suggested that many of the issues with credibility assessment relate to this. Credibility assessment guidance itself also acknowledges that asylum seekers have different social and cultural backgrounds to those of decision-makers and includes suggestions on how to accommodate these differences.

Focusing on communication makes sense, given that the indicators used to measure asylum seekers’ credibility generally relate to communication. These include evaluating asylum seekers on how consistently they communicate across various interactions and written texts (internal consistency), and how well their narrative aligns with officially preferred sources of knowledge relating to their home country and social group. Officials may also refer to the level of detail in their communication, and even to their demeanor, when explaining whether or not they find them credible.

In my doctoral research, I brought a fresh angle to scrutinizing these processes by critically examining the discourses about language, communication and diversity underlying the credibility assessment guidance provided to Australian officials reviewing refugee visa applications, as well as a collection of publicly available decisions. By conducting a critical discourse analysis I uncovered a set of problematic language myths on which these credibility assessments rely.

Language myth #1: Texts are produced by individuals in isolation

The first language myth is that individuals, in this case asylum seekers, can produce (written or spoken) texts alone. This false assumption leads to the idea that it is legitimate and possible to analyse and compare texts attributed to asylum seekers to determine whether their performance demonstrates credibility.

This is highly problematic because texts produced in the process of applying for asylum are closely dictated by legal and procedural requirements. They are also the product of the interaction of a variety of actors, such as the officials who ask questions and determine the conduct and content of interviews, legal advisors who sometimes speak and often write on behalf of their clients and offer them a range of advice on what to say and how. They may even be the products of multiple languages when interpreters are involved.

Language myth #2: A truthful narrator has one single story

The second language myth is that a truthful narrator will recount an event or other information consistently over time, and across different contexts. This false assumption leads to the idea that isolated fragments of text, removed from their original context, can provide evidence of deception.

For example, in my study, one applicant was judged to be lying because he told about an injury he had received to his ‘arm’ in one document and to his ‘shoulder’ in a later interaction. The applicant explained that he did not have access to an interpreter during the preparation of the earlier document and his English was not good enough to distinguish between these two body parts.

Language myth #3: Bilinguals are fully proficient in all their languages

The ‘arm’ vs ‘shoulder’ example brings us to yet another language myth that informs assessments of refugee credibility: officials’ poor understandings of bilingualism. The asylum seeker mentioned above had explained that he used the word ‘arm’ when putting together a statement with a migration lawyer with whom he spoke English, without the assistance of an interpreter, and this is why he had used this more general term rather than the more specific ‘shoulder’.

This claim is easy to accept when we have a nuanced understanding of what it means to be bilingual. Bilinguals usually have different levels of proficiency in their languages. Yet, decision makers usually expect bilinguals to have equal, complete fluency across all their languages. This often leads to the dismissal of explanations related to lack of access to interpreting.

This language myth makes it seem irrelevant whether an applicant communicated through a language they spoke well or not, or whether they had access to interpreting. Conveniently, this language myth provides an easy justification for decreasing public funding for language services.

Language myth #4: The decision maker is outside the interaction

Decision-makers themselves are important co-producers of the refugee narrative and of the official record of the asylum hearing. They ask the questions, and control who can speak and when. They draw on their own experiences and understandings of the world to make sense of asylum seekers’ stories. They also assess any explanations given for credibility-related concerns, drawing on their own beliefs about language in deciding how and whether to give these explanations weight.

Yet, their role in the interaction is routinely erased. Institutional guidance presents the decision-making process as one in which uniformity across different decision-makers is possible, and in which these individuals are able to set aside their “subjective beliefs”. This overlooks the inherently evaluative nature of these processes, discourages critical self-reflection and thus minimizes the decision-maker’s role in constructing asylum seeker credibility.

Language myth #5: Acknowledging intercultural communication ensures fairness

Credibility assessment guidance for refugee visa decision-makers explicitly acknowledges intercultural communication and scope for misunderstandings. However, a vague acknowledgement of intercultural communication may in fact reinforce language myths that entrench existing inequalities and disadvantage minority groups because they are hidden behind the label “intercultural communications”.

The language myths on which credibility assessment guidance is based undermine the fairness of these assessments. Asylum seekers are held responsible for texts whose production are beyond their individual control, variation between decision-makers is under-acknowledged, and the importance of interpreting and legal assistance minimized. Busting these myths challenges the credibility of credibility assessments themselves. To ensure fair processes, these types of assessments should play, at most, a minimal role within refugee decision-making processes. Too much is at stake to rely on inherently unfair assessments, especially in the face of insufficient legal assistance and antagonistic public discourse.

References

Smith-Khan, L. (2020). Why refugee visa credibility assessments lack credibility: A critical discourse analysis, (online, advance).
Smith-Khan, L. (2019a). Communicative resources and credibility in public discourse on refugees. Language in Society, 48(3), 403-427.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019b). Debating credibility: Refugees and rape in the media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 42(1), 4-36.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019c). Migration practitioners’ roles in communicating credible refugee claims. Alternative Law Journal (online, advance).
Smith-Khan, L. (2018). Contesting credibility in Australian refugee visa decision making and public discourse. (Doctor of Philosophy), Macquarie University.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017a). Different in the same way? Language, diversity and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law, 29(3), 389-416.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017b). Negotiating narratives, accessing asylum: Evaluating language policy as multi-level practice, beliefs and management. Multilingua, 36(1): 31-57.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017c). Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society, 28(5), 512-534.

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The Covid-19 pandemic has presented the world with a joint action problem like never before: how do you get close to eight billion people to wash their hands and keep their distance?

Mass participation is critical to the success of prevention and containment efforts. The most effective way to achieve mass mobilization continues to be through state action. But the fact that there are only around 200 nation states in the world but over 6,000 languages raises a conundrum: how can we ensure that everyone has access to timely high-quality information in their language?

For too long, state approaches to speakers of minority languages — whether indigenous or migrant — have ranged from benign neglect to forced assimilation. In order to gain access to the state and its institutions — education, health, welfare or the law — everyone was expected to speak the language of the state — English in the USA, French in France, Mandarin in China, and so on. As a result of such monolingual approaches, Spanish speakers in the USA, Arabic speakers in France, or dialect speakers in China have worse education, employment and health outcomes than their compatriots speaking the state language.

The Covid-19 crisis has brought such linguistic inequalities to the forefront as language barriers may compromise the timeliness and the quality at which public health information is accessible to everyone in the population.

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) dedicated information website on the novel coronavirus disease, for instance, is available in the six official UN languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. The information is directed at member states, who are tasked with localizing relevant information for their populations through their national health authorities.

States have taken a wide variety of approaches to the needs of their multilingual populations. Some states carry on with their staunchly monolingual communications unchanged. A White House directive to remove bilingual English-Spanish public health posters from US courtrooms is a case in point. Preliminary evidence from New York suggests that this approach has disastrous consequences for the Hispanic population, whose Covid-19 mortality rate far exceeds that of other groups. This comes as US health workers are left without adequate procedures and processes on how to deal with critically ill patients who do not speak English.

Putting measures for adequate multilingual communication in place during the height of an emergency of such proportions is next to impossible. Therefore, one of the many lessons we need to learn from this crisis is to include the reality of linguistic diversity into our normal procedures and processes, including disaster preparation.

An example of a country that has started to learn that lesson is China. When the outbreak first started in Hubei province, medical assistance teams from all over China were confronted with the fact that Standard Chinese and local dialects are mutually unintelligible, despite the fiction of one single Chinese language long maintained by the Chinese state. In the face of the crisis, the monolingual ideology was ditched and within 48 hours, a team of linguists from Beijing Language and Culture University created a Guidebook of Wuhan Dialect for Medical Assistance Teams, Audio Materials of Wuhan Dialect for Medical Assistance Teams, and The Handbook of Doctor-Patient Communication. Plans are now underway to include the needs of linguistically diverse populations into all levels of the Chinese national emergency preparation, response, and recovery plan.

In the past, the linguistic disadvantage of minority speakers could be ignored by the mainstream. The Covid-19 crisis has changed that. In a situation where the wellbeing of everyone depends on that of everyone else, ensuring equitable access to information irrespective of whether someone speaks the state language or not is in everyone’s best interest.

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Make sure to download the full free open-access digital pamphlet Perspectives on the Pandemic: International Social Science Thought Leaders Reflect on Covid-19 and read all the other essays, too:

#1 Bryan S. Turner, Is Covid-19 part of history’s eternal Dance Macabre?
#2 Ingrid Piller, Covid-19 forces us to take linguistic diversity seriously
#3 Gurminder K. Bhambra, Covid-19, Europe, inequality and global justice
#4 Bent Greve, Preparing welfare states in the age of Covid-19
#5 Jillian Rickly, An uncertain future for the tourism industry in the wake of Covid-19
#6 Stéphanie Walsh, Matthews Don’t confuse constraints with confinement during Covid-19
#7 Stephanie J. Nawyn, The social problems of protecting refugees during Covid-19
#8 Deborah Lupton, The need for urgent social research in a Covid-19 society
#9 Monika Büscher, A great mobility transformation
#10 Anthony Elliott, What future for postcoronavirus societies?
#11 Sharon Varney, Engaging with complexity — if not now, when?
#12 Robert van Krieken Covid-19 and the civilizing process

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Language and communication challenges of COVID-19

For the full list of posts related to language and communication challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis click here.

Dr Kerry Taylor-Leech researches early childhood education in an English-Samoan bilingual preschool

Early childhood is an important period in the physical, social, emotional, cognitive and linguistic development of a child. To support child development during that period, care for young children has been increasingly professionalized and moved out of the family and into preschools. Formal early childhood education, particularly in the year or two before entering primary, is widely considered to enhance school readiness. Overall, preschool is assumed to be beneficial for educational success.

But how does institutional childcare affect bilingual families? Most of what we know about early childhood bilingualism comes from research conducted with families where one or both parents are not only the main caregivers but also the main providers of linguistic input.

What happens to bilingual development when young children spend a significant amount of their time in institutional childcare is still an under-researched field. One reason it is under-researched is that it is rare. Where it does not exist and where childcare is through the medium of the dominant language we know that the minority language loses out early, even in institutions and contexts that ostensibly value diversity.

Against this background any form of bilingual childcare is to be welcomed. But how do they actually work?

Bilingual signage in the a’oga amata (Image credit: Kerry Taylor-Leech)

In this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity, Dr Kerry Taylor-Leech from Griffith University addressed precisely this question for an English-Samoan bilingual preschool program in Queensland. The preschool, or a’oga amata in Samoan, was established in 2018 in Logan City, and the researcher and her colleagues followed the children in the program for seven months.

Although designed as an early bilingual immersion program, English dominated as medium of communication. Samoan was mostly used symbolically: it was on display in the preschool’s linguistic landscape and was used to greet, thank and praise children.

Dr Taylor-Leech explained that the main reason for the relatively limited presence of Samoan was that not all children in the room were of Samoan heritage and even those who were did not necessarily speak the language. In fact, one mother reported that, as a result of attending the program, her four-year-old daughter was more proficient in Samoan than she was herself.

Parents valued the program very much. Even more than the language, they valued that their children were oriented to Samoan values of usitai, faaaloalo, alofa and tautua – obedience, respect, love and service. In addition to providing the children with a sense of cultural belonging and a positive affirmation of their Samoan identity, the program also succeeded in enhancing the children’s school readiness.

While the program was highly successful with regard to cultural affirmation and preparation for mainstream education, it was not so successful with regard to bilingual proficiency. Because English was the dominant language in the program, the children’s exposure to Samoan was ultimately limited. Furthermore, as the presenter explained, there was no program available that would continue to support Samoan after the children had transitioned to primary school.

Bilingual childcare by Dr Victoria Benz (Multilingual Matters, 2017)

To me, the bilingual development – or rather lack thereof – in this Queensland a’oga amata sounded uncannily similar to that in the Sydney-based English-German bilingual childcare center studied by Victoria Benz. This researcher observed a number of asymmetries between the two languages – with regard to teaching practices, material resources and student proficiencies – all of which resulted in the predominance of English in this ostensibly bilingual childcare center.

If you are up-to-date with your 2019 Language on the Move Reading Challenge, you will have read the full study, the gripping sociolinguistic ethnography Bilingual Childcare: Hitches, Hurdles and Hopes, in May.

Dr Benz also found that the predominance of English was further assured by the policy environment and the attitudes of parents and teachers. Unwittingly, these meant that the two languages were pitted against each other. Even more problematically, the goals of developing bilingual proficiency and ensuring school readiness were conceptualized as in conflict with each other because when we talk about “literacy” in Australia we mean “literacy in English” and in English only.

That school readiness and bilingual proficiency are currently conceived as incompatible was also confirmed in another study investigating parental attitudes towards bilingual childrearing conducted by Livia Gerber and myself.

As long as our education system is based on an artificial tension between bilingualism and educational success, it is hard to see how even the most well-intentioned bilingual early childhood programs can actually support the aspirations of bilingual families.

References

Benz, Victoria. 2017a. Bilingual Childcare: Hitches, Hurdles and Hopes. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Benz, Victoria. 2017b. Bilingual parenting in the early years. Language on the Move
Piller, Ingrid. 2015. Paying lip-service to diversity. Language on the Move
Piller, Ingrid, and Livia Gerber. 2018. “Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
Vaá, Unasa LF. 2009. “Samoan custom and human rights: An indigenous view.” Victoria U. Wellington L. Rev. 40:237

President George W. Bush signs the “No Child Left Behind” act in 2002 (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In 2001, the United States government responded to the apparent lack of quality education in the country by passing Public Law 107 – 110, also known as “No Child Left Behind”. Its purpose was “to improve educational achievement by assessing student progress through standardized testing, mandating curricular reforms, and improving teacher quality” (Mangual Figueroa, 2013, p. 333). Section 3202 of the law states that Limited English Proficient (LEP) students should be able to “meet the same rigorous standards for academic achievement as all children are expected to meet, including meeting challenging State academic content and student academic achievement standards” (No Child Left Behind [NCLB], 2002, p. 283). While the intentions seemed honorable, unfortunately the policy neglected to recognize relevant second language acquisition research into how the needs of emergent bilinguals may differ considerably from the needs of mainstream students.

The “No Child Left Behind” educational policy arose during the George W. Bush administration in the United States as a piece of legislation aimed at improving low achieving schools across the country. After continued reports of poor test scores from students across the country compared to other countries around the world, the United States developed an educational policy that was supposed to encourage and incentivize schools to revise their instructional methods so as to promote higher tests scores. Initially, this might sound beneficial for all students, but the policy failed to acknowledge students’ diverse language backgrounds.

How did the policy affect English language learners?

Researchers in the field of TESOL were frustrated with the lack of attention the NCLB policy paid to evidence for the amount of time it takes students to learn a language and the specific needs of students learning such language that will be used for instruction and assessment. NCLB completely neglected the research on how it can take four to seven years for students to acquire an English proficiency sufficient for academic performance that will truly reflect their knowledge (Crawford, 2004).

NCLB’s focus on accountability disrupted ESL classrooms because teachers and school administrators were financially pressured into valuing test preparation over communicative skills building. As schools were expected to show growth and improvement in scores each year, ESL students were not given enough time to cultivate an understanding of the English language sufficient to demonstrate their content knowledge.

How did the policy affect ESL teachers?

A second unintended outcome of the NCLB policy affected teachers of English language learners. Within the NCLB Act, there was a section that discussed the necessary qualifications required for teachers. However, it only focused on the teachers of “core academic subjects” defined as “English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography” (NCLB, 2002, p. 534).

In other words, the policy overlooked the same requirements for ESL teachers, even though the policy is supposed to serve English language learners in particular.

The idea was that improved teacher qualifications would increase the overall quality of education that all students receive, including those with limited English language proficiency. Unfortunately, “this failure to acknowledge ESL as a subject in which teachers must be highly qualified effectively denies its value and status as curriculum ‘content’ and reinforces the common assumption that teaching English language learners requires little more than a set of pedagogical modifications applied to other content areas” (Harper, De Jong, & Platt, 2008, p. 271).

How did the policy affect bilingual programs?

Yet another unintended consequence of the NCLB policy was that support that had previously been in place for bilingual language programs diminished after the passage of the act. Whereas previous improvements to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) included explicit support for bilingual education, the 2002 document hardly mentioned it. That means that with the introduction of NCLB, English language learners were cut off from explicit support for developing their native language as well as English.

This flies in the face of the agreement among linguists and educators that “development and maintenance of a child’s first language is critically important to his or her psychological, linguistic, and cognitive well-being” (Cummins and Swain, 1986, p. 97).

The root of the problem here was that NCLB placed such a high level of pressure to succeed on the tests given in English that schools and teachers were discouraged from helping students develop their native language. Again, even though the language within the act suggests flexibility and inclusion, the emphasis on accountability throughout the document severely limited the attention that could be given to individual students and their specific needs.

Deficit views and unintended consequences

NCLB obviously places little or no importance on multiculturalism and multilingualism as resources for the classroom and for the nation more broadly. Regrettably, the NCLB policy approached language education through the perspective that speakers of other languages come to the classroom with deficits rather than valuable experiences and knowledge that can add to the overall learning experience in the classroom. In practice, this kind of policy marginalizes students labeled as ‘LEP’ – not only because the label itself can be considered demeaning. By ignoring relevant research in language learning, linguistics and education, the NCLB policy – despite its stated aims to raise standards – effectively further disadvantaged already marginalized students and the educators who serve them.

Related content

• Ten lessons from the Bridging Language Barriers symposium
• Educational success through bilingual education
• Children of the harvest: schooling, class and race
• Refugee children left behind as eagle lands on the moon
• Long-term English language learners
• Schooling challenges of multilingual children
• Is there such a thing as postmodern bilingual education?
• The language that cannot speak its name
• Building bridges through multilingual schooling: a mother-tongue pilot in East Timor is showing the way
• Can ESL teachers help in maintaining the home language?
• Providing bilingual education since 1689

References

Cummins, J., & Swain, M. (1986). Bilingualism in education: Aspects of theory, research and practice. London: Longman.

Harper, Candace A., De Jong, Ester J., & Platt, Elizabeth J. (2008). Marginalizing English as a Second Language Teacher Expertise: The Exclusionary Consequence of “No Child Left Behind“. Language Policy, 7(3), 267-284.

Students in a Tibetan-medium school in Kathmandu study for their exams. By knowing the number and age of speakers of a particular language, policy makers can better plan for their inclusion as the medium or subject of instruction in early education.

The 21st of February marked International Mother Language day, an annual UNESCO Heritage Day that celebrates linguistic diversity and multilingualism around the world. This year’s International Mother Language Day has particular importance, as 2019 has been marked as the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages.

Most estimates place the total number of languages in the world at around 7,000. Calculating the number of languages in a given country or region is important for both linguists and policy makers (as well as a host of other professions) for many reasons. By knowing the numbers of speakers of a particular language, policy makers can more effectively plan for linguistically-inclusive public communication and administration, consider the role of different languages as the medium or subject of instruction in education systems, and direct efforts for language preservation and revitalisation.

However, while empirical data on other social characteristics is usually readily available or easy to collect, data on language has often proved more difficult to enumerate. This post will explore how the question, the context, and the response all provide room for subjective interpretation and can lead to vastly different figures for the number of languages in a single country: Nepal.

Nepal

The small South Asian nation of Nepal boasts huge linguistic diversity relative to its geographic, economic, and population size. Inhabitants of modern-day Nepal were historically made up of hundreds of distinct groups of people with different cultures, languages, and leaders, who were only united under a single ruler in 1768. Topographical barriers like the great mountains of the Himalayas and the sweeping plains of the lowland Terai region meant that many languages developed in relative isolation.

Nepal has collected language data through regular decennial censuses for the last 60 years. Yet within this relatively short period, various censuses and other independent linguistic surveys have returned different tallies for the number of languages present in Nepal. Estimates have ranged from as few as 17 in the 1971 census, to 123 languages in the most recent census of 2011, to an estimate of over 140 in a 2005 linguistic survey, as shown in the table:

Data from Central Bureau of Statistics, Malla, Toba, and Noonan quoted in Yadava, Y. (2014). Language Use in Nepal. In Central Bureau of Statistics. Population Monograph of Nepal Volume II: Social Demography. (pp. 51-53) and from Ethnologue 13th – 15th, and 21st Editions. Retrieved February 15, 2019, from https://www.ethnologue.com/archive

While it’s true that language, and language use, shifts naturally over time due to factors such as generational change, revitalisation efforts, or migration, the radical differences between estimates in Nepal over just sixty years suggests something more complicated is at play.

While many census or survey questions can be answered objectively and impartially, others, such as questions on mother tongue, language use, ethnicity, or religion, require the respondent to make a subjective judgement. In Nepal, as elsewhere, the wording of the question, the wider social and political context within which the question is asked, and the respondents outlook and ideology towards language, have all influenced efforts to calculate the country’s languages.

The Question

The first way in which respondents may be influenced in their reporting of language is the wording of the question itself. Subtle differences in the terminology, phrasing, or layout can change the way a question is interpreted and answered.

The 2011 Census in Nepal included one question on language (Yadava 2014, p. 52):

Looking closely at this question, there are several possible ways respondents could have been influenced in the responses they provided.

Firstly, the terminology itself may have induced certain responses. Nepal’s Central Bureau of Statistics opted to use the term “mother tongue” (मातृभाषा /mātr̥bhāṣā/ in Nepali) in the 2011 Census, over alternatives such as “main language”, “usual language”, “home language”, etc.

For some people, these terms could be considered synonyms as they elicit the same response. For example, an Australian, living in Australia, of British-heritage parents, would answer “English” in all three situations. For others, the response may be different based on the subtly different slant of each term. For example, a child of a Vietnamese immigrant mother in Montreal who first learned Vietnamese (the “mother tongue”), but uses mostly French when interacting with the Canadian father and local friends (the “home language”), and speaks English to colleagues in a multinational workplace (the “usual language”).

In his chapter in the ground-breaking book Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses’, Arel (2002) refers to this as different “language situations”. Canada is one of the few countries that attempts to collect data on all three possible language situations in its surveys – most countries, including Australia and Nepal, only ask about one or two potential language situations. By focusing on the “mother tongue” of the respondent, ignoring other potential terms such as “usual” or “home” language, the 2011 Census elicited a certain response from respondents.

Though the 2011 Census in Nepal did also request respondents to provide another language as their “second language”, no further definition or guidance was given to clarify what was meant by “second language”. Given that the majority of respondents (56%) who chose to answer this question listed the national language, Nepali, as their second language, it is likely that many took this as an opportunity to assert their knowledge of the language of social mobility.

Another potential challenge is the layout of the census form itself. In 2011, a single space was provided for each part of the question, forgoing the possibility of more than one language being spoken in favour of simpler enumeration, indicating a bias towards mono- or bilingualism in a country where multilingualism is common, if not the norm.

A young woman from the Thulung ethno-linguistic group of far-eastern Nepal proudly poses in traditional wear during a language documentation workshop in Solukhumbu district

In 2011, the response format was open-ended, with no list of languages to choose from. This led to confusion between duplicate, indistinct, or unknown languages that was ultimately resolved by grouping some 21,000 responses into a single ‘other’ category, and another 47,000 as ‘non-responses’ (Yadava, 2014) – potentially missing smaller, lesser known or documented languages.

Conversely, in 1981, the census question around language provided a list of the five largest, most dominant languages and a catch-all ‘other’ category, reflecting the wider socio-political context at the time, as we will see soon. It is likely that the inherent bias contained in this question influenced the way people responded.

The Context

Quantifying the number of languages in a country or region can also be influenced by the prevailing political, social, and cultural climate. As Sebba (2017) aptly puts it when describing the inclusion of a language question in the 2011 British Census: “inevitably, questions about language are asked within a social and historical context which both constrains the possible answers and motivates respondents to select certain answers rather than others from those available, in accordance with prevailing ideologies about (among others) nation, ethnicity and language. The act of census-taking (…) is always politically and ideologically charged.”

The relatively low number of languages reported in Nepal’s early censuses were undoubtedly influenced by the assimilation policies in place at the time, and the generally higher levels of social exclusion. From 1962 to 1990, under a political system known as “Panchayat” and controlled by an authoritarian monarchy, the state viewed linguistic, gender, ethnic, and spiritual diversity as barriers to be overcome in the pursuit of a ‘unified’, ‘modern’ Nepal. Cultural ‘unity’ was projected as essential to nation-building and the maintenance of independence. The relatively low number of languages reported in the 1962, 1971, 1981, and 1991 Census reflected the widespread restrictions on cultural and linguistic expression that the Nepali population was experiencing during these years.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, the Maoist ‘People’s War’ raged against the monarchy, promising greater representation to minority caste, ethnic, linguistic, and gender groups. The decade-long civil war was linked to the populations’ growing awareness of social and cultural inequalities that had persisted for generations. The substantial increase in the number of languages reported in the 1996 Census, and all censuses thereafter, was therefore a manifestation of the wider phenomenon of ethno-linguistic awakening.

Since the conclusion of the civil war, the Government of Nepal (which today includes a majority of Maoist and Communist party members) has for the most part promoted linguistic diversity and harmony – for example, the 2015 Constitution declares that ‘all languages spoken in Nepal’ are to be considered national languages, and has opened the doors for individual provinces to declare their own official languages as part of the new federal structure – which is reflected in the 2011 Census results.

The Response

Arel (2002, p. 106) argues that in responding to questions around language, respondents can take a ‘forward looking’ or ‘backwards looking’ stance in providing their response. Arel points to the Belgium census of 1947 as an example of this, when many Flemish citizens provided “forward looking” responses by identifying French, as the language they wished their children would use in order to move up in social status.

Tibetan, also known as Bhot, is still spoken as the mother tongue of around 4,445 first, second, and third generation Tibetan refugees in Nepal

Many respondents in Nepal appear to be providing ‘backwards looking’ responses in the 2011 Census. A ‘backwards looking’ response is one that reflects the language of one’s parents or ancestors, regardless of the individual’s actual knowledge or regular use of the language. ‘Backwards looking’ responses may be politically or ideologically driven – the lack of knowledge of one’s ancestors’ language being seen as a temporary state brought about by authoritarian state policies – or simply a nostalgic and sentimental nod to historical or cultural roots.

Nepal’s 2011 Census data reported that there was 1,424 people who speak Tilung as their mother tongue. The Language Commission of Nepal, through their own local-level surveys and consultations, found there to be only two fluent speakers of Tilung. Other members of the wider ethnic group reported Tilung as their mother tongue despite not speaking more than a handful of isolated words, thus displaying a ‘backwards looking’ approach in their responses. The Language Commission has received many anecdotal reports of other languages similarly being over-represented in Census results due to ‘backwards looking’ reporting of cultural heritage versus the language most often or most fluently spoken. And while there are still living speakers of a language, as with Tilung, correcting this practice would not necessarily change the total number of languages present; but knowing the precise number of speakers of a language allows government to better target language documentation and preservation efforts, particularly in a resource-strained context like Nepal. A language with 1,424 speakers might be considered only ‘threatened’, but with two elderly speakers it is ‘almost extinct’ (see Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale).

Looking forward

Regardless of the precise number of languages reported, Nepal is and always has been a multilingual and multicultural country. Nepal is already planning for the 2021 Census, and by further refining its Census protocol and considering the various ways the socio-political context and personal ideologies may influence responses, the Government of Nepal will be able to better plan and implement linguistically-inclusive policies for its citizens.

References

Arel, D. (2002). Language categories in censuses: backward- or forward-looking? In D. I. Kertzer & D. Arel (Eds.), Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (p. 97). Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bennett, L. (2005, December). Gender, Caste and Ethnic Exclusion in Nepal: Following the Policy Process from Analysis to Action. (p. 7) Paper presented at the New Frontiers of Social Policy Conference, Arusha, Tanzania.

Sebba, M. (2017). Awkward questions: language issues in the 2011 census in England. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2017.1342651

Yadava, Y. (2014). Language Use in Nepal. In Central Bureau of Statistics. Population Monograph of Nepal Volume II: Social Demography. Central Bureau of Statistics.

Reading is emotive, linked to storytelling and interaction, to intergenerational communication, and identity development. While not all reading is related to books, books do indeed feature in a significant number of stories families tell me about their reading.

But how do you get hold of the books you know and cherish when you live in a country where your language is not widely spoken? How do you maintain some sort of equilibrium in the availability of reading resources, and how do you take the step from “reading together” to “child learning to read (and enjoying to do so!) in the home language”, when formal schooling is stacked against that goal?

The answers are, of course, different for different families, depending on many factors, such as availability of heritage language schools, script and syntax of the home language, etc. But there is one thing that helps all families – the availability of reading material. And while reading material goes beyond books, they remain the one resource parents are most likely to turn to, with 64% of families using them on a daily or near-daily basis.

How can we access books for our children, books which are interesting, motivating, and relevant? Not all languages have equally vibrant publishing industries, of course: in some languages, there is virtually no track record of children’s publishing, for reasons of financial viability, a lack of children’s authors, or lack of infrastructure.

If families are locally connected, books may be swapped and borrowed, increasing access, but let’s face it – keeping your multilingual child in books corresponding to all their languages is a complicated, and potentially expensive, business.

When, as part of a recent research project funded by the UK Literacy Association, I began working with families to explore how children engaged in multilingual reading over extended periods of time, the status of the language became a topic of discussion. English books are written into the school’s “read at home” diary, English books can be found in the library, English books can be discussed with friends, teachers, etc., and English literature and story-telling events are accessible to the public. The tide, as is so often the case, is relentlessly anglophone.

The families’ experiences sparked a series of public engagement events around multilingual storytelling – the first with PhD students from the University of Sheffield, the follow-ups with participation from Sheffield’s heritage language schools, and, increasingly, volunteering parents. A loose schedule would allow for a new language every half hour or so, with impromptu readings taking place in-between. The last event, held in March in Sheffield Children’s Library, was so well-attended that the library was at full capacity.

Families of different language backgrounds stayed well beyond “their own language time”, listening to stories in Lithuanian, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and many more. A monolingual English-speaking father stated: “I’d never heard Punjabi before – it’s a beautiful language”, while one mother exclaimed “this is the first time my daughter has heard her language in a public context, outside the immediate family”.

After the event, the library’s bilingual picture book shelf was decimated. There was clearly a need for more books, more stories, in more languages – what to do?

When I asked whether the library would be willing to open a multilingual section in the children’s library, the answer was an immediate yes. Funding, however, was a problem: in the UK, libraries have been under immense financial pressure, many have closed.

What the library could do was to host a pilot of 500 multilingual books, providing space, staffing, cataloguing, etc. The books themselves had to be provided. We put out calls to the community, asking for book donations. Through Twitter and email, I approached authors and publishers, asking them for “spare” translated copies – when a publisher sells translation rights, they (and the author) typically receive a number of translated copies. We offered to give these copies a new home, and a number of wonderful publishers and authors agreed, giving the library boxes and boxes of brand-new editions. Heritage language schools organised book collections among parents. Over the summer holidays, a #bringabookhome hashtag on Twitter encouraged people to buy a children’s book from the country they were on holiday in and then to donate it to the library after their return.

The result, as one can imagine, is not a perfectly balanced library. Certain books are more easily to get hold of than others, picture books have a higher representation than chapter books, and certain languages are disproportionately represented. Nevertheless, the side effect of a “community-built” library is that it gathers momentum along the way – if you have worked to help make something happen, you have a vested interest in its survival. And so, Sheffield’s multilingual library is very much a community effort, a fitting tribute to the “City of Sanctuary”.

The multilingual library has received further support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council: as part of the Open Worlds Research Initiative’s Cross-Language Dynamics strand. The funding enables a research strand alongside the pilot, facilitating both qualitative and quantitative data collection on how families engage with the library, and an accompanying reward scheme. One of the project outcomes will be a clear set of guidelines, hints and tips for other libraries seeking to run similar projects – these should be available in the first half of 2019.

Related content

• In search of myself
• Are we killing the joy of reading?
• Multiculturalism alive and well in Austria

References

Little, S. (2018, Online First) ‘”Is there an app for that?” Exploring games and apps among heritage language families’. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2018.1502776 (Gold Open Access)

Little, S. (2017, Online First) ‘Whose heritage? What inheritance?: Conceptualising Family Language Identities’. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, DOI:10.1080/13670050.2017.1348463 (Gold Open Access)

Professor Peter Siemund, Hamburg University, during his guest lecture at Macquarie University

It is easy to assume that bilinguals are better at adding another language to their repertoire. But is that always true?

Evidence from English language learning in multilingual classrooms in Europe

School children in European countries such as Germany all study English as a foreign language as part of their education. Most of these school children will be monolingual in German but an increasing number speaks a language other than German at home. How do these students’ monolingual repertoires in German or bilingual repertoires in German and another language affect their learning of English?

This is the question explored by Professor Peter Siemund from Hamburg University in his lecture in the Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University.

Professor Siemund started out by identifying a paradox of multilingualism research: multilingualism is often thought to be an advantage for both cognitive development and learning, but, at the same time, cross-linguistic influence research shows that speaking more languages often leads to more negative interference in the learning of subsequent languages.

For instance, he cited research (Lorenz, 2018) that found that Turkish and Russian monolingual learners of English were able to get the meaning of the English progressive aspect right 100% of the time. In contrast, German-Turkish and German-Russian bilinguals only got it right about as frequently as monolingual German speakers. It seems obvious that transfer from German, which has no progressive aspect, negatively affected the English language learning of these bilinguals. So in this case, bilingualism did not help but hinder when it came to this particular grammatical feature of English language learning.

Different languages, different findings

In another study described by Professor Siemund the relationship between reading comprehension scores in German and another language on the one hand and test scores in English on the other were examined. It was found that German comprehension skills correlated with English test performance for German-Russian bilinguals but not for German-Turkish bilinguals. This highlights the fact that bilingualism is not a unitary phenomenon and is different depending on which languages are involved.

The trade-off between linguistic accuracy and fluency (Source: Peter Siemund)

Accuracy versus flexibility

It is not only bilingualism that is not a unitary phenomenon but the same is true of language learning. What do we mean when we say that someone is a good language learner?

One relevant dimension is linguistic accuracy; another is linguistic fluency. In my own experience as a language learner and teacher, learners who are more accurate are often less fluent, while those who are more fluent often sacrifice accuracy.

This was also the conclusion reached by Professor Siemund, who argued that there is a trade-off between accuracy and flexibility. While monolinguals might be more accurate, plurilinguals might be more flexible. He closed by suggesting that bi-and trilingualism might be equilibrious points where accuracy and flexibility are most likely to be in balance.

What do these findings mean for advocacy?

For those of us who are interested in advocating for the rights of migrant language speakers, it can be tricky to talk about the disadvantages of being bilingual or multilingual. It is a balancing act between supporting linguistic diversity and fighting against the discrimination experienced by speakers of minority languages. Supporting linguistic diversity in the abstract sometimes overshadows the fact that some kinds of bi/multilingualism are clearly more equal than others. In fact we already know that being multilingual can be disadvantageous in education and at work, whether it’s for minority language-speaking children who are unable to access education in their first language and standardised tests which discriminate against them or migrants whose linguistic repertoires are problematized in the workplace.

Maybe we need to reframe the question: instead of asking what the advantages or disadvantages of bi- and multilingualism might be, we should ask how we can help ensure equality of opportunity regardless of linguistic repertoire, as Ingrid Piller does in her recent book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice.

References

Lorenz, E. (2018). “One day a father and his son going fishing on the Lake”: A study on the use of the progressive aspect of monolingual and bilingual learners of English. In Bonnet, A. and P. Siemund (eds.) Foreign Languages in Multilingual Classrooms (pp. 331–357). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice: an introduction to applied sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

New Zealand’s PM wants to raise her newborn daughter bilingually (Source: radionz)

New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, plans to raise her newborn daughter bilingually in Māori and English. Her desire for her child – and all New Zealand children – to grow up proficient in more than one language is not unusual in today’s world and echoes the desires of many Australian parents, too. A recent study of young Australian mothers found high levels of support for bilingual child rearing.

Mothers wanted to give their children “the gift of bilingualism” and spoke glowingly about the many advantages and benefits they hoped bilingualism would bestow on their children. They felt that proficiency in another language in addition to English would enrich their children’s future, that it would give them a career edge, and that it would allow them to travel overseas but also connect with diverse communities in Australia. Many also believed that bilingualism would give their children a cognitive advantage and they were aware of health benefits of bilingualism such as delayed onset of dementia.

In short, like New Zealand’s PM, the mothers in the study aspired to raise their children with English and another language for many good reasons. There was another similarity: while they knew what they wanted, they did not quite know how to achieve their goal. Like Ardern they confided that, while they were sure they wanted their children to learn English and another language, they found it difficult to figure out “how that will happen.”

The main difficulties with raising bilingual children in Australia – as in any English-dominant society – can be traced back to the overbearing role of English. The dominance of English makes bilingual parenting extra hard for a number of reasons.

To begin with, Australians often have relatively low levels of proficiency in another language and this can lead to deep insecurities. How do you do “being a competent parent” while fighting insecurities whether your pronunciation is good enough or struggling to find the right word?

Second, you may want bilingualism for your child. But you also want your child to be well adjusted, to make friends easily and to do well in school. English is the indispensable means to achieve these goals. So, you may suffer from a niggling doubt that the other language may detract from your child’s English.

By focusing on the other language in the home, do you inadvertently jeopardize your child’s academic success or their friendship groups? Research shows that this is not true but it can certainly seem that way when your child throws a tantrum in the supermarket and everyone stares at you as you try to calm her down in another language.

Third, contemporary parenting is difficult and fraught with anxieties at the best of times. Bottle or breast? Disposable or cloth nappy? Soccer or cricket? The number of decisions we have to make seems endless and each decision seems to index whether we are a good parent or a parenting fail.

Questions of language choice and language practices add a whole other dimension to the complexities of modern parenting: When should you start which language? Who should speak which language to the child? Is it ok to mix languages? The list goes on and on. Parents not only need to figure out answers to these questions, they also need to live their answers out on a daily basis.

Furthermore, parenting is not something that we do in isolation. Mums and dads may not arrive at the same answers. When one partner is deeply committed to bilingual parenting and the other is not, that can easily put a strain on the relationship. Many couples know that mundane questions like whose turn it is to do the dishes can easily escalate into a fight when everyone is tired and juggling too many responsibilities. Now imagine such daily problems amplified by debates over whose turn it is to read the bedtime story in the other language or whose fault it is that the bedtime story in the other language is always the same because there are only two books in that language in the local library.

The parents of New Zealand’s “First Baby” want to raise their daughter bilingually because they recognize that bilingualism is important in today’s world – just like Australian parents. They do not quite know how to do it and they will undoubtedly struggle turning their aspiration into a reality as their daughter grows up and starts to have her own ideas about bilingualism. Having to make language decisions part and parcel of all the mundane parenting and family decisions that we all make all the time will be a challenge – just as it is for Australian parents.

But that is where the similarity ends.

New Zealand parents do not have to face the challenges of raising their children bilingually alone – in contrast to Australian parents. We all know that it takes a village to raise a child. Parents need the support of the wider community. This holds even more so when it comes to bilingual parenting. Specifically, bilingual families need institutional support, particularly from schools, in order to thrive.

New Zealand’s te kōhanga reo or “language nests” are preschools that operate through the medium of Māori and have been highly successful in supporting bilingual proficiencies in Māori and English. Additionally, there are now plans to make bilingual education in Māori and English universally available in all public schools by 2025.

In Australia, our policy makers have so far ignored the aspirations of an ever-growing number of families for meaningful language education that fosters high levels of linguistic proficiency in English and another language. In fact, the overbearing role of English in academic achievement often means that schools actively conspire against the wishes of families. As a result, those best able to raise bilingual children in Australia are those who have the means to afford specialized private schools, extended overseas holidays or bilingual nannies.

When will our leaders end the disconnect between families’ linguistic aspirations and the education system? When will we see an all-of-society effort to help put the bilingual proficiencies needed to thrive in the 21^st century within the reach of all?

Reference

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [if you do not have institutional access, you may download an open access version here. The number of OA downloads is limited, so, institutional users, make sure to leave this link for readers without institutional access … An OA pre-publication version is available here].

Dr Sabine Little during her guest lecture at Macquarie University

When my daughter was five years old, she one day solemnly informed me that, from now on, she was no longer going to speak German because it was not good for her health. “German hurts my throat”, she explained. The statement showed astute phonetic and psychological judgement. She had identified the kind of argument that would carry weight with her parents (in a way that “I don’t like German” or “Everyone else speaks English” might not have).

My response was to explain the basics of articulation to her and to conclude my explanation with the assertion that, because German is more guttural than English, German-speaking kids get to eat more lollies than English-speaking kids do. For the time being, that was the end of that attempt to change our family language.

For bilingual children, the early primary years are a common point of linguistic rebellion. At that time the dominant language starts to make its weight felt through the school and children begin to see their family from the outside for the first time in their lives. The combined discovery of a stronger language and of social difference may lead them to reject the home language.

For parents, children’s linguistic rebellion can be profoundly confusing and challenging.

A common experience is for bilingual children to ask their parents not to speak the home language in public, in the school or in front of their friends. For many parents such a request can be deeply hurtful. It may feel like a rejection not only of the language but also of the parent who speaks the language.

As a parent, how do you respond to that? Do you respect your child’s wishes, even if it may come at the cost of language loss? Do you insist on the home language because you know that eventually the child will be grateful for the bilingual proficiencies you have instilled in them? Do you force them to follow your choices because you believe that the home language is an important aspect of your identity and their identity? Do you give in sometimes and stand firm on other occasions?

There are probably as many variations on the answer to these questions as there are families, and it is always helpful to learn from the experiences of other families.

How would you feel about inheriting this vase? (Source: veniceclayartists.com)

The research of Dr Sabine Little (Sheffield University, UK) addresses precisely such questions and asks how bilingual parents and children jointly negotiate language policies in the family. As part of the Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University, Dr Little conceptualized the home language as heritage language and likened it to “Great Aunt Edna’s vase”.

When Great-Aunt Edna passes on and leaves her treasured vase to her nephew, all kinds of scenarios are possible. He may have exactly the same taste and love the vase because it is a fantastic vase. He may not care much for the vase but treasure it because it reminds him of his love for Great-Aunt Edna. He may care neither for the vase nor Great-Aunt Edna, and therefore let the vase gather dust in a corner. Or he may find the vase so atrocious that he wants nothing to do with it and gives it away. A further complicating factor may be other members of his family who have their own views and preferences about the vase.

In short, the inherited vase may be a source of pride, guilt, conflict or disregard. Not all of these emotions may be talked about openly: some people love kitschy vases but may be ashamed to admit that; others may hate them but are afraid to be judged disrespectful of Great-Aunt Edna.

It is easy to see that a vase can be a complicated inheritance. Now imagine how complicated things can get when the inheritance is not an object but a language.

In her research with 212 bilingual families in the UK, Dr Little found that parents often failed to talk about these complicated feelings with their children. If conflicting emotions around language choice were left to fester, this could easily turn language into a battleground for the family and a source of tensions between parents and children.

In fact, attempting to raise children bilingually may not only impact on the parent-child relationship but can also put a strain on the couple relationship, as Livia Gerber and I found in new research just published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

In data from an online discussion forum about bilingual parenting, we found that mothers were much more invested in their children’s bilingualism than fathers. Mothers often perceived fathers as uncooperative or incompetent obstacles to enacting a bilingual family policy.

Taken together, both pieces of research warn of the dangers of letting language choice become a source of tension in the family.

One way to overcome such problems is to keep renegotiating language choice with children as they grow up. Dr Little recommends talking as much about language choice and the home language as in the home language.

That is certainly sound advice.

Connecting this research with the research about linguistic habit formation by Professor Maite Puigdevall we heard about in a previous lecture in the series suggests that there is another possibility, too: the transition to primary school is a key moment when linguistic habits are subject to change. What may seem like rebellion on the part of the child may in fact be the overwhelming influence of a new world with its new habits. It is not so much that they rebel against the home language but that the dominant language is taking them over.

Acknowledging the force of habit can be another way to escape the impossible choice of letting go of the home language or turning the home language into an ongoing source of tension. As so often in life, the road to success is through the formation of good habits.

Instilling good bilingual habits in their children is, of course, not something parents can do on their own. In addition to strong home language habits in the family, they will need the support of the community. Home language support in the school is ideal and lobbying for home language support in the school may be one of the most effective ways in which parents can support their children’s bilingualism.

Where school support for the home language is not feasible, it is important to seek out other forms of community support. After all, it takes a village to raise a child. Parenting cannot be done alone but needs community support, and this is even more so the case when it comes to bilingual parenting.

References

Little, S. (2017). Whose heritage? What inheritance?: conceptualising family language identities. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-15. doi:10.1080/13670050.2017.1348463

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [if you do not have institutional access, you may download an open access version here. The number of OA downloads is limited, so, institutional users, make sure to leave this link for readers without institutional access … An OA pre-publication version is available here].

These umbrellas quickly became the trademark of ISB11, and could be spotted all over Limerick – and beyond!

In June this year, I was fortunate to attend the 11^th International Symposium of Bilingualism (ISB) at the University of Limerick, Ireland (11-15 June). Since its initiation in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1997, ISB has been held bi-annually in eight different nations and become the premier conference for scholarly debate on multilingualism. This year marked ISB’s 20^th anniversary, attracting over 950 delegates from 65 countries to give papers, posters and colloquia on topics devoted to the overarching theme ‘Bilingualism, Multilingualism and the New Speaker’. The ‘new speaker’ paradigm primarily evolved from studies on language revitalisation, yet it has also come to refer to migrant and transnational language learners. This extension of the paradigm is intended to call the binary categorisation of native versus non-native language users into question (Smith-Christmas et al., 2018).

The conference theme invited scholarly debates on bi- and multilingual speakers’ language learning trajectories and experiences, and how these are shaped by individuals’ beliefs towards their new speech communities.

Abstracts of the presentations can be found in the conference brochure.

I attended ISB11 on an invitation to present my on-going PhD research on the language learning, leisure and work experiences of German backpackers in Australia as part of a panel on ‘Entrepreneurial visions of the self: language teaching and learning under neoliberal conditions’. This panel was chaired by Martina Zimmermann (University of Teacher Education Lucerne) and Sebastian Muth (University of Fribourg), with Cécile Vigouroux (Simon Fraser University) as discussant.

The panel comprised of three papers.

Firstly, Sebastian Muth spoke about the language learning trajectories of students in the Department of Slavonic Languages of a public university in India. As India’s medical tourism industry seeks to accommodate patients from the former Soviet Union, there is a growing demand for Russian-speaking interpreters and so-called medical facilitators. This ethnographic study explored how the demand for language work is reinforcing social inequalities in India. Unlike more prestigious Western European language subjects, Russian Studies has no entry requirements, therefore attracting students from lower middle-class backgrounds. Muth concluded that there are growing tensions between language learners’ desires to capitalise on their language skills, and the realities of finding work in the neoliberal service economy.

Secondly, Martina Zimmermann described her multi-sited ethnography exploring how mobile students, who cross Switzerland’s language borders to attend university, envisage their multilingual repertoires as future assets. These beliefs are reinforced by the Swiss higher education system who market “multilingualism” in their promotional materials. Zimmermann compared these individual and institutional discourses, arguing that these multilingual assets form a shared, yet unchallenged vision of a future in which these repertoires may no longer translate into the imagined outcomes.

Lastly, my paper asked how German backpackers in Australia negotiate language learning opportunities whilst working and travelling. The working holiday has become increasingly commercialised as a meaningful gap year opportunity that facilitates language learning and enhances a CV. An investigation of bottom-up discourses suggests that young Germans’ desires to capitalise on their English language skills in the future clashes with the experiences of their current selves on the road. When engaging in leisure travel, they mainly encounter other German speakers rather than “more desirable” interlocutors. Work is therefore seen as an opportunity for more sustained naturalistic exposure to English. However, backpackers are often faced with communication barriers associated with Australian English. How they speak about navigating these dilemmas can be considered a key site where they construct neoliberal personhood.

The research that was assembled in the panel highlights how language is envisioned as a future asset and career-shaping skill across various contexts: from interpreters in India’s growing medical tourism industry, via Swiss university students, to working holidaymakers in Australia. Across these contexts, individuals share a sense of responsibility for their own social and economic future successes through the acquisition of particular forms of bi- and multilingualism. Whilst some language learners must engage in these forms of bi- and multilingualism through necessity, others may take a more laissez-faire approach to acquiring language competencies for their envisioned futures.

As the year draws to a close, and we are all reflecting on our achievements, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Martina and Sebastian for inviting me to participate on this inspiring panel. As my first international conference, ISB11 marks a significant milestone in my PhD journey.

The 12^th International Symposium of Bilingualism will be held 24 – 28 June 2019 at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Reference

Smith-Christmas, C., Ó Murchadha, N. P., Horsby, M., & Moriarty, M. (2018) (Eds.). New speakers of minority languages: Linguistic ideologies and practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

King Sejong the Great (1397-1450) (Image source: Wikipedia)

Today, South Koreans celebrate Hangul Day. Hangul Day is a national holiday to celebrate the Korean script. I am not aware of any other national holiday anywhere else to celebrate a particular script (except for the North Koreans who also have a national day to celebrate the Korean script but they call it Chosŏn’gŭl Day and celebrate on January 15). What is so special about the Korean script that it gets a national holiday in both Koreas you might ask?

There is actually a good reason: the invention of Hangul is not only a major linguistic achievement but also of significant social importance.

Hangul was invented by King Sejong the Great who lived from 1397 to 1450 CE and was the fourth king of Korea’s Joseon dynasty (1392–1910).

As a small nation, Korea at the time was overshadowed by its powerful Chinese neighbor which was styled as “elder brother”. As is often the case in such relationships, and is still true today, powerful nations not only rule over less powerful ones but they also come to be seen as providing the standard of all fashion, culture and knowledge. As today, subaltern people are apt to misrecognize the language and culture of the powerful as an intrinsic feature of their power. The hegemonic nation comes to be seen as the source of knowledge and local ways are often denigrated and dismissed as lacking value. Same old story back in 14^th-century Korea:

China was considered the source of all culture and learning. The Korean elite therefore thought it natural that becoming literate meant learning the Chinese language: everything worth reading was written in Chinese. (Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 193)

Despite all the Chinese learning, not all was well in the kingdom of Korea; in fact, it was a rather backward place. Unlike many feudals, King Sejong was not content with living the good life at the expense of his subjects. On the contrary, committed to serving the good of his nation, he wanted to improve his country and better the lot of all Koreans. In addition to being the king, he had a lot going for him: he had received an excellent education (through the medium of Chinese, of course), he was bilingual in Korean and Chinese and he was an immensely talented scholar with wide-ranging interests. All his reading and writing obviously was in Chinese but Chinese publications were the only game in town.

One of King Sejong’s interests was related to agriculture, an area with obvious potential to improve the lot of Koreans: the growing population needed food. So, he started numerous scientific and technological projects to help increase agricultural production. However, all the agricultural knowledge of the time was based on Chinese climatic conditions and he realized that existing knowledge could not just be taken holus-bolus from China but needed to be adapted to Korean conditions. He saw the need for localization, if you will. One example of such a localization measure was the development of a specifically Korean agricultural calendar to determine sowing and harvesting times that were ideal for the Korean peninsula.

Another example of his wisdom in adapting Chinese knowledge to the Korean situation related to medicine where he commissioned a medical encyclopedia that focused on native Korean herbs and remedies and described their uses and where to find them.

King Sejong also was interested in jurisprudence:

Throughout his reign he showed a passion for justice, working to improve prison conditions, set fairer sentencing standards, implement proper procedures for autopsies, protect slaves from being lynched, punish corrupt officials, set up an appeals process for capital crimes, and limit torture. Nevertheless, one problem continued to vex the king: the litigation process was carried out in Chinese. Were the accused able to adequately defend themselves in a foreign language? Sejong doubted it. (Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 195)

The basic consonant signs of the Korean alphabet representing their pronunciation (Source: Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 198)

The justice system was not the only area where King Sejong discovered that all his reform attempts continually ran into a language barrier: whether it was agriculture, medicine, law or any other area of life: dissemination of knowledge, development and progress were stymied by the fact that only a tiny minority of Koreans could read. As mentioned above, all writing was in Chinese and Chinese literacy was restricted to a tiny elite. The vast majority of Koreans had no access to all the knowledge that was available. Teaching everyone how to read and write in Chinese was obviously not practical.

King Sejong concluded that, in order to achieve broad dissemination of knowledge, Korean needed a writing system of its own; not one based on Chinese but one that was based on Korean and easy to learn.

He started to look around for ways to develop a script for Korean. In addition to Chinese, he was able to study Japanese, Jurchen and Mongolian scripts. While these syllabary-based scripts provided some inspiration, it must be considered a stroke of genius that he figured out the difference between consonants and vowels – characteristic of alphabetic writing – by himself. In a next step, he divided the consonants into groups according to their place of articulation – another impressive feat in the absence of any phonetic models.

Having identified the phonetic characteristics of the sounds of Korean, he devised signs that represent pronunciations. This is in contrast to all other writing systems where signs initially started out as ideograms representing objects. At the danger of overusing the expression “stroke of genius” – that’s precisely what it was!

The new script was published in early October 1446 and the preface, written in Chinese, states:

The speech sounds of our country’s language are different from those of the Middle Kingdom and are not communicable with the Chinese characters. Therefore, when my beloved simple people want to say something, many of them are unable to express their feelings. Feeling compassion for this I have newly designed twenty-eight letters, only wishing to have everyone easily learn and use them conveniently every day. (Quoted from Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 204)

Korean consonant letters. Easy to learn, right? Even if you’ll need to allow for some more time to learn the vowels, too … (Source: Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 198)

Maybe unsurprisingly, the Korean elite hardly welcomed the new script. They probably saw the threat it posed to their monopoly on learning and education. In any case, they did not like it and the script was widely denigrated as “morning script” (because it was so easy it could be learnt in a morning) or even as “women’s script” (because it was so easy even women could learn it …)

Wise King Sejong did not risk a fight and did not impose the exclusive use of Hangul. As a result, Korean elites let the script slip into oblivion after his death and it almost did not survive the Japanese invasions of the 16^th century, which devastated the country.

In fact, history has hardly been kind to Korea; and in 1945, after the ravishes of wars and colonization, the illiteracy rate in the country stood at close to 80 percent. Hangul played a key role in turning these figures around and the illiteracy rate in both Koreas is today close to zero: testament to the continued relevance of the vision of a centuries-old wise ruler intent on serving the common good.

The story of Hangul presents an inspiring case study in the ways in which language arrangements can form obstacles to progress and social justice and the ways in which these can be overcome. For details on the story of Hangul, read Chapter 11 “King Sejong’s One-Man Renaissance” of Gnanadesikan (2009), on whose account I have drawn here. For a general discussion of the relationship between linguistic diversity and social justice, see Piller (2016) – today and tomorrow is your last chance to tweet about #linguisticdiversity and enter our draw for a copy of the book.

References

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2009). The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

The initial impetus for the book was sparked by my own language journey. At the age of 23, I decided to become an English-Korean interpreter, a glamorous bilingual, who would be respected for her English language proficiency in Korea caught in the phenomenon of “English fever”.

However, after many years of hard work, when I had finally achieved the dream of becoming a professional interpreter, I found myself perplexed and puzzled as a gap emerged between the pre-held dreams and the realities in the field.

And that’s where English language ideologies in Korea: Interpreting the past and present starts: the book critically examines the contrast between dreams and realities of English in the context of “English fever” in Korea from both historical and contemporary perspectives. It explores two overarching questions: why is English so popular in Korea? And, why, despite the enormous popularity of English, is there such a gap between the promises and realities of English?

In order to explore the first question of why English is so heatedly pursued in Korea, I conducted historical analyses of the development of English in Korea with English-Korean translation and interpreting as a key site of inquiry. The historical relevance of English-Korean translation and interpreting is well illustrated in the fact that English arrived in Korea for the first time in the late 19^th century in order to educate English-Korean translators and interpreters. English was important for the embattled Korean government of the time as they actively tried to strengthen relationships with the U.S. in order to curb its ambitious neighbours with predatory designs. Korea’s continued economic, political, and security dependence on the U.S. throughout the modern era has added more power and prestige to English, which has evolved to serve as a form of cultural, economic, social, and symbolic capital with class mobility as a key driver.

The second question of why there is such a gap between dreams and realities in English is examined from the perspective of contemporary English-Korean translators and interpreters, who represent the most engaged and professional learners of English in Korea. The social reputation of the profession as perfect English speakers and glamorous cosmopolitans provides an ideal site to explore the contrast between expectations and experiences in English, which was investigated from multiple perspectives including commodification, gender, and neoliberalism. Internal conflicts relating to English language learning and use are illustrated through interview data analyses, in which the aspect of English as an ideological construct shaping and shaped by speakers’ internalized beliefs in and hopes about the language is highlighted.

By exploring the gap between dreams and realities in English, I endeavoured to make sense of what appears to be an irrational pursuit of English in Korean society. Making huge sacrifices to learn the language only seems a “rational” act in Korea because English has been firmly established as a language of power and prestige as documented and explored in English language ideologies in Korea: Interpreting the past and present. It is my hope that the book highlights the importance of examining local particularities involved in the construction of particular ideologies of English, which is often approached from the monolithic perspective of “English as a global language”.