In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Sara Hillman, Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and English at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University about Qatar’s multilingual ecology and its linguistic landscape. The focus is on the emergence of Chinese in Qatar amidst the interaction of multiple languages.

The conversation delves into the socio-political background that contextualizes the visibility of Chinese in Qatari public spaces and education. Sara explains the impact of diplomatic relations and economic interactions that impact cultural exchange and accompanying language use. She also tells us about the use of other languages in intercultural communication.

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

Reference

Panda (Image credit: J. Patrick Fischer, Wikipedia)

Hillman, S., & Zhao, J. (2025). ‘Panda diplomacy’ and the subtle rise of a Chinese language ecology in Qatar. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 46(1), 45-65.

Transcript (coming soon)

In this video, I discuss the example of bilingual signage in Nanning City, China. I ask who recognises the Zhuang language that’s found on some public signage there, and some of the varied responses which people – even Zhuang speakers – have had to it. Then I explain what this case study can tell us about multilingual signage policies more generally, and about language policy research. I hope this helps you teach Linguistics, or learn Linguistics, or even do your own ‘linguistic landscape’ research!

Related resources:

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’. Chapter 8 in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. (Full text available)

Grey, A. (2024) ‘Using A Lived Linguistic Landscape Approach for Socio-Legal Insight’, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies’ Methodological Musings Blog, Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

‘Language rights in a changing China: Brynn Quick in Conversation with Alexandra Grey’ Language on the Move Podcast, New Books Network (1 January 2025)

Transcript:

Alex and Kristen in the studio, 2024

[Opening screen shows text: Making Zhuang Language Visible, by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, 2024.]

[Narrated by Alexandra Grey:] In 2004, the local government in Nanning, a city in South China, began adding the Zhuang language to street-name signage to preserve Zhuang cultural heritage. The Zhuang language, which originated thousands of years ago in this region, had largely been overshadowed by Putonghua, a standard form of Mandarin Chinese and the official language of China.

However, the public response to this initiative, including from Zhuang speakers, was not as positive as intended. In this video, I will share insights from my research in the 2010s on Zhuang language policy, including a case study of its implementation and reception in Nanning.

China officially recognises the minority group called the Zhuangzu, who have traditionally lived in south-central China, particularly in the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region, where Nanning is the capital. There are millions of Zhuang speakers, but China has such a large national population that these Zhuang speakers constitute only a small minority.

The Zhuang language can hardly be read even by Zhuang speakers themselves. This is due to the inaccessibility of the Zhuang script; most people do not have access to formal or even informal ways of learning to read Zhuang. This has significant implications for the region’s linguistic landscape.

My research aimed to understand the impact of local language policy. I met with 63 Zhuang community leaders and Zhuang speakers for interviews, including interviews in which we walked and talked through the linguistic landscapes. I also found and analysed laws and policies about Zhuang language, from the national constitution down to local regulations. One important set of regulations were interim provisions introduced in 2004 and formalised in 2013 through which the local government added Zhuang script to street signs in Nanning.

This script these street names used was a Romanised version of Zhuang using the Latin alphabet, and it was always accompanied by Putonghua in both Chinese characters and its own alphabetic, Romanised form. The Zhuang script, which uses letters identical to English and also identical to Romanised Putonghua except for the additional letter ‘V’, was never displayed alone and was always in smaller font on the street name signs. In some cases, the signs contained additional information about nearby streets, but only in Putonghua.

In the broader linguistic landscape, these Zhuang street names were a visual whisper. Most public writing in Nanning is in Putonghua, with occasional English. Only a few public institutions, like the regional museum and library, have prominent bilingual signage that includes Zhuang. Otherwise, Zhuang is absent from common public texts such as road directions, commercial signage, transport maps, and safety notices.

From the community’s perspective, this new bilingual signage caused confusion. Newspaper reports from 2009 indicated Zhuang language was mistaken for misspelled Putonghua, leading to complaints. In my interviews, even some Zhuang speakers had been unaware of any Zhuang script in their environment, often mistaking it for English or Putonghua until it was pointed out to them, or until they started learning to read Zhuang as young adults, if they had that opportunity. Some were not aware that the Zhuang language could be written at all:

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

A university student interviewee: Because it is Pinyin script, no one pays it any regard, they can’t read it. In the recent past, people even thought it was English or [Putonghua] Pinyin, something of that nature, but it is not Pinyin, so they could not conceive of it being Zhuang script. 

Interviewer: Right. 

Another university student interviewee: To look at, it looks the same as English, I think.

In my article, I argue that the invisibility of the Zhuang script is partly because people need to learn to read it, even if they speak Zhuang. My research, which includes reports and census data in addition to the interviews, shows that access to learning Zhuang literacy is very low. Additionally, people are not accustomed to seeing Zhuang as a public language, or as a written language.

Why is this the case? Besides its limited presence in public spaces, Zhuang is also largely absent from educational settings and from the media. There was an irregular newspaper in Zhuang and a bilingual magazine in print when I began my study, but by the late 2010s, that magazine was only printed in Putonghua. This lack of exposure to written Zhuang in everyday life affects the recognition of written Zhuang, even when it is displayed in Nanning today.

Two key themes emerged from my participants’ reactions to Zhuang in the linguistic landscape. Some Zhuang people appreciated the Government’s effort to include and preserve their cultural heritage, but they doubted the policy’s effectiveness; since they couldn’t read the script themselves, they wondered how anyone else would learn anything about Zhuang language or culture from these bilingual signs. Others viewed the policy as tokenistic. They highlighted the lack of accessibility to the Zhuang script and the frequent errors in its display.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: But I’ve heard it’s often written wrongly.  

A community leader interviewee: That’s right, it’s often written wrong but no matter how erroneously those sorts of things are written there is no-one who can pick that out, because Guangxi people have no opportunity to receive a Zhuang script education; who can read and understand?

Another point of dissatisfaction was that the way Zhuang has been standardised, which has made it more similar to Han Chinese – more similar to Putonghua – which felt like a reminder of the marginalisation of Zhuang speaking people in Nanning.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Another student interviewee: This Zhuang writing, frankly, this grammar is in my view a really erroneous usage. It’s completely Hanified Zhuang language. Our Zhuang script must have as its goal opposing that, Guangxi’s so-called Standard Zhuang, which is not endorsed. It doesn’t stick to the grammar of our mother tongue, so we feel relatively disgusted.

For these readers, the bilingual Zhuang street names in the landscape were a visual reminder of other aspects of Zhuang language policy that they felt did not adequately support the language.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: So, when you see those signs, what do you think?

A community leader interviewee: It’s simply a joke, to use Chinese it’s “to hang up a sheep’s head and sell it as dog meat”, so it’s on the façade, but in their hearts there is no respect.

These perspectives suggest that efforts to include minority languages in public spaces can be perceived as futile or even offensive if the community cannot engage with the script. The Zhuang case study highlights the importance of accessibility and education, not only display, when policies are aiming to support minority languages, but it also highlights the importance of policy responding to the habits and expectations about that language which people will have already developed from childhood onwards from the way they experience the language being absent or devalued in all sorts of places and activities. People bring those habits and expectations and value structures with them into the linguistic landscape.

Broadening our perspective from Nanning to consider the policies for marginalised or minority languages in general, this case study challenges two common assumptions about display policies.

First, there’s the assumption that displaying a minority language increases its visibility in the linguistic landscape.

[Screen shows text: Is the Zhuang language on display in public actually visible as Zhuang?]

Second, there’s the belief that when a powerful entity, like the government, includes a minority language in public spaces, this symbolises the inclusion and valorisation of the speakers of that language, or more broadly the people who share that linguistic heritage.

[Screen shows text: Does the display of Zhuang language symbolise the inclusion of Zhuang speakers?]

These assumptions are foundational in linguistic landscape research, but this study encourages us to question them. The findings suggest that public display policies need to be integrated with other language policies to be effective. In the case of Zhuang, literacy and script policies undermined the efficacy of Zhuang language displays, making them almost invisible.

[Closing screen shows text:

Making Zhuang Language Visible, produced by Ed Media Team at the University of Technology Sydney, 2024.

Narrated by Dr Alexandra Grey.

Interviews dubbed by Kristen Martin.

Script by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, based on Grey (2021) Full text

Thanks to Dr Laura Smith-Khan for content consultation.

Thanks to Wei Baocheng for singing his translation of the song ‘Gaeu Heux Faex’ into Zhuang, from Qiao Yu and Lei Zhengbang’s 藤缠树. Full rendition at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WO0-biO5xJI ]

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

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

References

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

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

Welcome to the New Books Network.

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

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

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

Welcome to the show, Rosemary.

Prof Salomone: Thank you for inviting me, Ingrid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dist Prof Piller: That’s unbelievable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!

Brynn and Michael speak in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. The paper examines two examples of multilingualism in directive signs within Seoul, South Korea, in order to theorize what gives rise to multilingualism in directive signage while other signage remains monolingual.

Some papers and posts that are referenced in this episode include Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape of South Korea, Toiletology and the study of language ideologies, so if you liked this episode be sure to check those out!

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript (added 30/04/2024)

(Image credit: Dr Michael Chesnut)

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

My guest today is Dr Michael Chesnut. Michael is a Professor in the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication at Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea. His work includes researching second language writing, TESOL teacher development, curriculum theory, linguistic landscape research, and translingual academic publishing practices.

Today we are going to talk in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sunwgoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape.

Michael, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Chesnut: I’m so happy to be here and thank you for having me on today. It’s so exciting to get a chance to actually talk about a paper. This is such a rare opportunity. I’m just delighted to be here and share my thoughts.

Brynn: Wonderful! To start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to living and working in Korea?

Dr Chesnut: Sure! Well, I’ll start with the last question there. About 20 years ago, as a young person having graduated university and not too sure what I was going to do for a career or with the rest of my life, I decided to go abroad. I wanted to get out of Canada where I’m from. At the time, a lot of young people in Canada, especially new university graduates, were going to Korea for a year to teach English, come back with a little bit of money, pay off student loans and then carrying on with the rest of their lives.

So basically, I did that, and I had no interest in Korea. I had done a little bit of teaching and I liked it, so I also thought it would be a good opportunity to play with teaching and get some more experience. I applied all over the world, but I applied a lot in Korea because that’s where a lot of people were going. I didn’t get many job offers because I wasn’t particularly qualified, and then I got one offer in a small town in Korea. A few weeks later I got an offer from Siberia in Russia, but they were too late. So off to Korea I went, and it was interesting. It was really interesting to be in a new country, be immersed in a new language, have no idea what was going on. Teaching was quite interesting and challenging, and I really enjoyed that first year so I stayed in that same small town for a second year. After two years I was starting to get more interested in teaching and wanted to become better at what I was doing. I wanted to remain in Korea and better understand the world I found myself in.

So, I was very lucky and I found a position at a small university, and what was so wonderful was they had an MA TESOL program. So, I could teach there, doing all sorts of different classes, and pursue an MA in TESOL to actually learn better how to teach English. And what was really remarkable was that this particular program had a focus on critical pedagogy. Teaching not just as a replication of existing knowledge, not just sort of helping you know more so you could do a job, but teaching as a means to kind of give more power to students, let them make more informed choices, help them better understand why we’re learning something in particular, why we don’t look at certain other issues. And so that was a really wonderful two years. I enjoyed it. I did a small thesis on language learner identity, and I was really interested in continuing this journey, and that program was founded, or at least developed heavily, by a professor who had studied at Penn State. So really, through him, I had an opportunity to apply to Penn State in their College of Education doing a PhD in curriculum and instruction. The professors there mentored him, and some of the professors that he had mentored had come back to Korea too, so I was able to pursue further education through a PhD at Penn State. I went there and took a lot of classes in the Applied Linguistics Department, really found a second home there alongside curriculum and instruction in the College of Education. My goal was to always come back to Korea as quick as possible to do fieldwork.

So, my PhD dissertation was on foreign language teacher identity. The Americans, Canadians and others who come to Korea and teach English. It’s still a major area of research for me, and so all of that let me to come to Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in my department here, the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication, which is essentially an English interpretation and translation department going English and Korean. Here, I teach English and I do research as part of the university’s responsibilities as well, and so that’s my journey to being here now where I teach a lot of different classes. Some are language classes, some are world Englishes or digital media classes, all with this language focus. And I do research on different issues as well. So that’s kind of my story and who I am as a teacher and a researcher. So again, thanks so much for having me on to talk about all of this. It really is such a privilege to get a chance to talk about a paper. I’m so happy to be here!

Brynn: Oh, that’s excellent, I’m so glad. I’m so glad to be talking to you too, and that’s really interesting to think how differently your life might have gone if Siberia had answered just a couple weeks earlier and not been late.

Dr Chesnut: Oh absolutely, if it had just been slightly reversed – off to northern Russia in the early 2000s.

Brynn: A little colder.

Dr Chesnut: A little colder, different environment. Who knows how life could have turned out then, you know?

Brynn: Yeah, so let’s talk a bit about your work. Quite a bit of your work has to do with something called the linguistic landscape. Not everyone listening to us right now is a linguist, so can you explain what that term means and why it’s something that linguists study?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so even if you’re not a linguist or don’t have a particular interest in language, you encounter the linguistic landscape all the time. The linguistic landscape is essentially all the publicly displayed language or text you see around you. So, walking down the street you see street signs, shop fronts, billboards, movie posters – all of that is the linguistic landscape. All the different text and language you see around you. And that includes graffiti, those stickers you see stuck on telephone poles, or maybe on a utility panel on a back alley. It’s menus posted on restaurant walls.

But when people talk about the linguistic landscape there’s often a real emphasis on multilingualism, on things that have more than one language. There are actually many different researchers who look at movie posters or different types of signs. People who study marketing, for example. But people who talk about the linguistic landscape are usually talking about text with more than one language. That’s where a lot of the focus, not all, but a lot of the focus is.

So, one reason to study this is just the general benefit of understanding something better. These signs are important. They’re an important means of communication, so it’s better to have a deeper understanding of how this communication works. Over the years I’ve heard some people, some linguists, say, “This is actually not real research. This is a hobby. This is someone going on holiday, taking a bunch of photographs, enjoying themselves, coming back and sharing these pictures.” But I’d push back on that and say there’s actually a lot of important communication occurring through multilingual signs. An emergency exit sign in multiple languages can be very important. Looking at movie posters and how they use different scripts or different fonts to mimic other languages or play with what they’re writing – that’s an interesting linguistic phenomenon. So, I think it’s worthwhile. And society does value better understanding this communication.

So that’s one general reason, but there’s a lot of specific reasons to examine the language on signs. Some involve determining the vitality or strength of a language in a particular place. So, walking down the street in a French speaking community in Canada – are there a lot of signs in French? That’s a quick and rough way to determine how strong a language is in a place, although there are very serious limits to examining language in that way because often language doesn’t come into signs. There can be a language spoken in a region, but for various reasons it doesn’t appear on signs. Likewise, there can be a place where a language is no longer spoken very much but it often appears on signs. So, people examine that.

People examine issues of language ideology, or the assumptions we make about language, the values we give to language. And then ask how those values and assumptions shape the language on signs. Maybe there are different varieties of a language, but only one appears on signs. So, then we can go in and look at how these assumptions and values are shaping the use of language on signs.

There are studies involving English as a lingua franca, where English sort of has this role as a general and shared means of communication among people who don’t speak English as a first language where the rules of English are determined by what is effective communication, rather than a standard that comes from the United States or the UK – so how does English work in a tourist destination where people are visiting from all over the world? People examine context like that.

There are a lot of different studies out there. English is a major topic in linguistic landscape research. Some people examine how English can be a symbol of cosmopolitanism, sophistication, style and a means of attracting consumers. People examine skinscapes, so multilingual tattoos and everything that happens when people get a tattoo that involves different languages or multiple languages. How languages are involved in the construction of public space. There’s been some great research on Israel and the use of Hebrew, Arabic and English to construct a particular place through those signs.

Studies on commodification – we can examine Little Italy or Chinatown and look at how language is deployed there, not necessarily reflecting how people speak in that place anymore, but as a means of commodifying and selling that place.

There are studies on how problems are addressed, maybe littering, garbage, public intoxication through multiple languages on signs addressing those problems.

There are questions about signs that come from authorities that seem to go down to the people – top-down signs – and the languages used in those signs, and languages that come from regular people. Signs posted by people about problems in their neighbourhood or a lost dog, and the languages used on those signs, and maybe the differences between those top-down/bottom-up signs.

There are studies on how the linguistic landscape can be used in teaching, and I’ve investigated this and used this in a lot of my classes. We can take pictures of signs into classrooms, into educational contexts, and use that to help people develop their language skills.

But ultimately, we’re looking at a lot of issues of what languages are present on signs. How are those languages being used? What shapes the presence and absence of different languages on signs? What larger issues in society impact and are impacted by the use of language on signs? Even now, maybe how the use of language on signs can challenge existing assumptions in society regarding language and more.

There are some really exciting developments occurring in different places in the world. There are some massive indigenous construction developments, housing developments in Canada. I’ve seen some pictures of those developments where they are using the language of that community on those signs. That’s really interesting. I’d love to read more about that.

Brynn: That sounds fascinating, and also excuse me now while I go google “linguistic skinscapes”. That sounds so cool! I’ve never heard of that as an area of study before. That’s awesome!

Dr Chesnut: It’s really fascinating. It’s not my area. I did a little research because I encountered one paper years ago, and then I did some more research and there have been some interesting developments in that area. So, there are people doing all sorts of interesting research in different areas, very exciting developments. And some of it is, I think, quite important. It could contribute to creating more productive communication in different ways.

Brynn:  I agree, and that’s a great explanation. And I think that in your explanation, you’re doing a great job of pushing back against those people who would say that this is maybe just a hobby or something just a tourist would do. And you’re right, it’s a really important part of the world that we all live in. So, on that, let’s talk about your 2022 paper From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. In the paper, you develop the concept of “multilingual commanding urgency”. What does “multilingual commanding urgency” mean, and how might it appear in the linguistic landscape?

Dr Chesnut: Sure. Well, why don’t I take us through a little example, something that occurred to me, and then we can explore it together and think about how multilingual commanding urgency kind of helps us understand what’s happening around us with some of the signs we see.

So, we can imagine that we’re at a ski resort in north America, and walking through this ski resort we see lots of different signs. A big welcome sign in English. Maybe a giant sign with the name of the place positioned so we can all take photographs with it, post them on Instagram. And lots of signs that are important – rest area here, ski hills that way. Maybe a sign, all in English, that says, “Only qualified skiers should go down these particular hills” – kind of a warning and informational sign to direct people how they should go depending on their level of skill.

As we walk around this ski resort, we see something different. We see a sign that says, “Do not feed the wildlife,” but this sign is also in Korean and Chinese. Looking around, we see that is the only sign that is in English, Korean and Chinese. So, we might start to wonder, “Why is this sign and this sign alone the only sign that is trilingual, incorporating Korean and Chinese, while all these other signs, some quite important, feature only English?” And multilingual commanding urgency is our attempt to conceptualise an answer to that question.

What we argue is that, often in the world, sign makers will, rightly or wrongly, have an idea about who is likely to violate the regulation posted on a sign. There are certain language communities believed to be potential violators of these particular regulations. And there’s a belief that, if this regulation is posted in the language of that community, it will reduce the enforcement burden of those authorities. And when those two conditions are met, there seems to be a greater urgency or effort or impetus to make that sign multilingual.

So, I would explain this imagined “Do not feed wildlife” sign as occurring because some sign maker, some authority within this resort, for some reason believes Korean-speaking guests and Chinese-speaking guests may be more likely to violate this regulation, and that if they post this message in those languages, it will resolve the situation, reduce the enforcement burden of the authorities.

Now that may be completely incorrect, but that may be the authorities’ belief. And this is an imagined scenario, but it is based on something I actually saw in North America at one point.

And we can see this in other places too. You can imagine walking through an airport, maybe an airport in Germany, and this one did happen to me very recently, and see many signs in German and English – “baggage claim area”, “gates 1-10” – all these different signs in English and German. But then you see a door, and it’s an emergency exit and it’s alarmed. If a member of the public opens the door, the alarm goes off, authorities have to rush in, people have to investigate and a lot of things occur. And that door sign has a warning, but not just in German and English, but also Arabic, Russian and Chinese. And this I saw in an airport in Germany. So, that would be explained, I believe, likely by this multilingual commanding urgency. Authorities have identified certain communities as likely to violate this regulation. They believe that if they put the sign in those languages, it will reduce their enforcement burden. The fewer times they have to rush to that emergency door, the better for them. And this creates an urgency, an impetus, to make signs multilingual.

So that’s multilingual commanding urgency. That’s what we conceptualised as the genesis of multilingualism in many of these signs. And there are a lot of examples in literature that don’t talk about multilingual commanding urgency that come from earlier studies but that were foundational. Examples of a “do not spit” sign in an airport in New Zealand – that sign was only in Chinese and Korean, not in English, and actually seemed to create a bit of a furor on social media. Signs in Hong Kong which include Tagalog prohibiting hawking. Signs in Hungarian in Toronto, Canada about a code of conduct requiring some behaviour for young people. So, we do see across literature lots of examples of this. So, this paper and this concept of multilingual commanding urgency are our attempt to explain and discuss this sort of pretty broad phenomena. Does that provide an explanation of this phenomenon?

Brynn: That’s a great answer, and it also makes me think of another space where I’ve seen these types of signs before here in Australia, and that’s in public restrooms. Public toilets. I do believe I’ve seen papers before and even on our research blog, the Language on the Move research blog, we’ve featured these stories before, where on the backs of the stalls, at least in the women’s toilets, there will be these signs about toilet etiquette, and it will only be in certain languages. So again, to your point, of these potential violators of these rules being identified, rightly or wrongly, by the higher up authorities, and then that being targeted through these specific languages.

And your paper looks at cases of multilingual commanding urgency in Seoul, Korea, and specifically two types of directive signs that you and your colleagues found during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: first, COVID-19-related “masks required” signs in subway stations, and second, signs prohibiting illegal garbage disposal in side streets. These might sound like totally unrelated signs at first, but your paper found a fascinating connection between them. Can you tell us what you discovered about which languages were used for these different types of signs?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so I’ll start by describing these two signs in detail a little bit. The first set of COVID-19 “masks required” signs were posted because, prior to their posting, there had been strong encouragement to wear masks on subways and public transportation, but as the pandemic developed, there was a regulation developed that required masks to be worn by everyone in subways and the subway station, on public transportation. So, suddenly there was this new regulation. On this day, everyone has to wear a mask, and all these signs appeared.

Now, these signs were very large. They covered pillars in subway stations. You could sit at the entrance of the subway station and see half a dozen to a dozen of them, just from one spot. And they were monolingual Korean, and they were large, multicoloured and everywhere.

But, shortly thereafter, in a matter of days, appeared much smaller signs, A4-sized. And these signs had the same general message. Not as much detail. The larger Korean-language signs had details about where to buy masks. Each sign at each station had a little additional information about the nearby convenience store or location about where you could buy masks. These were absent in the other signs, and these other signs, much smaller, a little bit less well-produced, had the same general message in English, Chinese and Japanese. So, they appeared after. And this was quite interesting to us. These two signs appearing together. That’s one set of signs that were really important to us.

The other set of signs – we actually didn’t collect these signs entirely during the pandemic. Images of these signs were collected earlier. These were signs prohibiting the disposal of garbage, basically “don’t letter”. And there’s kind of a sophisticated system in Korea for the disposal of household garbage. A lot of apartment complexes will have a recycling system. Individuals can go buy garbage bags. Payment goes into funding the trash disposal system. So, some people litter to avoid this or because it can be inconvenient or whatever. So, this is a major issue. A lot of people get upset by trash. You don’t want trash in front of your house, and so there’s a lot of district-level government signs about prohibiting the disposal of garbage.

And what we found was that, in certain districts, these signs included Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, English and certain signs only had Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese. No English. So that was quite interesting. And what’s also critical here is that Korean government signage rarely features Arabic and Vietnamese. Some English, some Chinese, but very rarely Arabic and Vietnamese. And very, very rarely on district-level signage. These are neighbourhood-level government signs. So, these were very unusual signs to see Vietnamese and Arabic being used in these ways.

And so, what happened was me and my co-authors – and my apologies for not mentioning Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim earlier, they are absolutely foundational to this whole project and they are continuing work on COVID-19 signs – but we decided to collect data from our daily routines during the COVID-19 pandemic, just to better understand how signs were being used regarding COVID-19. And as we collected data, we examined it and looked at it in different ways. We were really struck by these “masks required” signs and these additional small multilingual signs. And what was really striking was there were other mask signs, signs that were encouraging mask use more generally and often quite powerfully using fear or sometimes cuteness to encourage mask wearing. But they were monolingual Korean. So, we were trying to understand what led to the additional signs requiring people to wear masks in English, Chinese and Japanese.

So, we were viewing literature and we started to look deeper into the context of signage in Korea, and we found the examples in our already-collected data of these garbage signs. And we really thought this might be the same phenomenon in two different ways – in the COVID-19 “masks required” signs we’re finding English, Chinese and Japanese as the languages to speak to the general non-Korean foreign public. And in the signs about garbage using Vietnamese and Arabic, we have the language used to speak to the Arabic and Vietnamese-speaking communities in these districts. So, we found different examples that were both the result of what we believed to be the same phenomenon.

So, our analysis of the COVID-19 linguistic landscape is ongoing, but we found these examples and decided to share sort of a conceptual paper that used these two examples to really look deeply at what we termed “multilingual commanding urgency”, and what we were finding being discussed in the literature. We wanted to bring that all together in one paper, use these different examples to really understand this phenomenon, discuss it and expand on it. That’s what came together in our paper. So, we argue that these two very different signs are ultimately the product of a belief that certain language communities are likely to be violators of a certain regulation, and a belief that by sharing the sign, making the sign in a certain language, you can reach that community and lower the enforcement burden for the authorities. So that’s how this paper came about.

Brynn: And that’s so interesting because, like we said, we all, as just people who are walking around in the world, are going to see these signs, could potentially read these signs. But a really interesting point that you make in your paper is that, exactly this, that these types of signs have the potential to be “overread by passersby”. You point out that these people might not actually be able to read the languages on these signs, so maybe if there’s a monolingual French speaker walking around in that context, they might not be able to read the languages, but they may know what languages they are. They might be able to say, “Oh I can tell that’s Arabic” or “I can tell that’s Vietnamese”. So, what inferences and assumptions might these passersby, who have nothing to do with the government, then make about the communities that are being addressed through these very specific language choices with these directive signs?

Dr Chesnut: So, this concept of “overreading signs” we borrowed from Philipp Angermeyer who has an amazing paper looking at Roma youth from Hungary in Toronto, Canada. Some youth centres and certain places started putting up signs in Hungarian, sort of codes of behaviour, to try and regulate what was perceived to be kind of inappropriate behaviour by these youth. He interviewed youth and authorities there. It’s an absolutely phenomenal paper. What he also pointed out was that these signs can be wrong. They used Google Translate to create the Hungarian, so in some cases it was really nonsensical. So, for these youth it was somewhat offensive, disheartening, disappointing to see not just signs about poor behaviour in a language directed to them, but also poor translations, signs they don’t even care enough to translate.

So, we’re discussing how, in general, these multilingual directive signs about bad behaviour can be overread potentially by anyone, sometimes even mistakenly, in a way that suggest certain communities might be responsible for this bad behaviour, engaging in this inappropriate behaviour or violating these regulations. So, if anyone is walking down the street and maybe you can read one language, maybe the dominant language is there, and you can read a sign saying something about disposal of pet waste, or smoking in an area you’re not supposed to smoke, and then you see it in certain languages that are very rarely used by authorities. It’s very easy to link those language speaking communities with this inappropriate behaviour, this aberrant behaviour.

So, that’s the concern, that these signs might reinforce larger public beliefs that certain communities are engaging in so-called bad behaviour, linking communities with problematic practices, and so really this could be having a negative effect on society, especially when languages are very rarely used in more general government or authoritative signage, or even more generally, and only used in these signs linked with bad behaviour. That’s the really problematic element.

Brynn: Yeah, it’s that perpetuation of a potential stereotype that exists within a community and, like you said, especially if it does come from that more governmental/district level position of power. Then that might perpetuate the stereotype even further.

You mentioned earlier that these particular trash signs came from a little earlier, but the paper was published in 2022. It’s now 2024 – have you seen any change in these types of signs in the intervening years? Are there still these “problem communities” that are being targeted through specific multilingual commanding urgency signs around Seoul?

Dr Chesnut: Well, there are certainly signs like this still about. There was an absolutely fantastic paper about a district with a large Chinese community in Seoul, and that paper had amazing examples, and kind of heartbreaking examples of signs only in Korean that request people to report others for bad behaviour, and then signs only in Chinese saying, “Don’t engage in problematic behaviour like public drunkenness and other inappropriate acts.” So certainly, this still exists now. That paper is from a little while ago too, so some of these signs might have changed.

And certainly, a lot of COVID signs have been taken down. Some remain. But I suspect these are long-enduring signs, metal signs posted on walls, so I suspect many of them are still up. I’ve seen signs that are ten years old. They remain for a long time. And I do want to point out that I think this is a kind of global phenomenon. I think signs like this can be found all over the world, so I wouldn’t single out any city or particular region, but I haven’t seen any major changes that way.

What I have seen that’s encouraging is that I’ve started to see some emergency signage that’s being made more multilingual, so we have a lot of emergency shelter signs and emergency shelters in Seoul. A lot of the time I’ve seen them in Korean, sometimes Korean-English and sometimes Korean-English-Chinese. But I recently saw one that had Korean, and that was the largest language by far. English was the second largest. Beneath that was Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese and Chinese. So, that I would not consider multilingual commanding urgency. That’s maybe a different type of language phenomenon, a different type of sign, and so there might be a move towards more multilingualism in general. That would certainly potentially lessen the potential for overreading certain directive signs. So, that would also be the policy I would advocate.

There is a need for signs directing people not to dispose of trash illegally, and if you want to reach out to a community then reach out in many ways. Not just through this directive signage but include that language on many different signs so it becomes less significant with this problematic directive. So, I do see some positive developments in more general multilingualism, but I think these signs do remain and I think they do have a purpose, so I hope there are some positive developments.

Since COVID I’ve also been out a lot less and I have family responsibilities these days that are new, so I’m collecting less general data and I don’t quite observe as much as I used to. So, I hope that’s a reasonable answer.

Brynn: It is, and what I love too about your paper and about this type of work into the linguistic landscape is that any person walking around in their own community, whether they’re here in Australia, whether they’re in Korea or Canada, they can pay attention to this, you know? You don’t have to be a scientist; you don’t have to be a linguist. Just notice. What do you see? Do you see multilingualism, kind of like you were saying in the context of everyone can read an emergency sign or subway rules, things like that? Or do you only see only very particular languages and therefore language communities being targeted with the signs? So, they are two quite different things.

And I love that it’s something where, once you’re aware of it, you can’t stop seeing. Ever since I read your paper, I now do that, where I just walk around and observe that in my own community.

And you said that you don’t maybe necessarily get to collect this type of data as much these days, but what is next for you and your work? What other research are you working on now?

Dr Chesnut: Our team, Sungwoo Kim and Nate Ming Curran and myself, we’re all still working on our COVID-19 linguistic landscape data, and this potentially could be lifetime work. There’s a lot there, and a lot more that can be done still.

So, right now we have a draft of a paper looking at English usage on authoritative government COVID-19 signage. What we’re looking at is how English is used in at least two very different ways. It’s used in one way for signs intended for a domestic Korean audience, and that’s very interesting to see English used for a Korean domestic audience for non-commercial purposes. It’s not marketing, it’s not cool English necessarily. It’s not trying to create a sense of cosmopolitanism. It’s trying to reinforce good public health behaviour, and we find English being used where the English text itself conveys information. The English has a meaning-making purpose. Not as a symbol, but information is bound into the text.

But it’s also being used as a symbol or a design feature or an emblematic element. It’s being used for Korean-English punning. It’s being used with Korean-English blends where there’s one message that switches between English and Korean to convey a particular message to the public, the Korean public. So, we’re very interested in how English is being used for public health messaging to a Korean audience.

And we’re also seeing English being used for a foreign non-Korean audience of visitors or residents. And what’s interesting there is that very often English is being used alongside Chinese or Japanese as a part of this broad multilingual communication strategy, and that kind of challenges the idea that English is this ultimate language, this lingua franca. That, in fact, it’s being used alongside other languages as part of this broad multilingual strategy except for particular foreign places where we do see monolingual English language signage in this Korean bilingual signage.

And sometimes, multilingualism that goes beyond Korean-English-Japanese-Chinese where there are six languages or eight languages in a particular foreign place. And we do find a few examples, especially early in the pandemic, where there is English that is difficult to understand, and we do want to address that too, and the Korean was actually a little bit odd too. So, it may be a result more of confusion earlier in the pandemic. The messages were unclear both in Korean and English, and that’s something that should be addressed too.

So, we’re looking at that, and we’ll continue looking at the linguistic landscape. We have a beginning of a paper looking at Chinese signage with the heavy concern of overreading, of how Chinese signage may have been overread during the COVID-19 pandemic in Korea. And we want to address how there was private sector signage that was very explicit. Basically, Chinese guests were not welcome. They were told not to enter certain restaurants or institutions. So, we want to address, or bring into academic discussion, the fact that these signs exist and that they were done bilingually in Korean and Chinese and that there are big issues there. That’s another project that’s probably further in the future.

We’ve already published another paper, it’s actually a blog that’s open access. Anyone can read it. It’s quite short. It looks at cuteness and fear in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape. What we saw was a lot of signage, a little bit from authoritative signage, but a lot of private sector signage. So, cafes and restaurants that had signs saying “please wear a mask” but they used a lot of cuteness. Little anime-like figures asking you, “please wear a mask for me”, or cartoon figures with their masks saying, “be like me”, that type of thing. So, there was a lot of cuteness deployed in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape, and we went to an online symposium for that, and then we shared it in a blog as part of that, so “Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape”. Google and you can find the blog and find all the entries there. It’s quite interesting.

And we also, in that piece, talked about fear. There were a few government posters that really strongly attempted to invoke fear. “Wear your proper COVID-19 mask, or you’ll end up wearing a respirator mask in the hospital.” Really strong invoking of fear there. And there were other messages as well, using fear this way.

And in the conference, it was quite interesting. There was a public health expert who joined the conference, and it was quite wonderful he was there. But he was surprised. He was from South Africa, and he said, “We could never use signs like this in our context. They’d be inappropriate. No one would respond to them positively.” But he was very eager to learn what could be done, how we can use signs to successfully promote good public health practices.

Unfortunately, this type of research doesn’t give an easy answer besides, I think, an answer saying that communicating in more languages in general, not specifically with a punitive message, is probably a good productive practice. But ultimately going deeper into that question would be an interesting long-term goal but would require very different research methods. So, maybe that’s something to think about in the future. There’s a lot to be done.

It would be wonderful to better understand communication through signs and other means of course, but I’m doing more research in signs, involving public health and emergencies and disasters and how those signs can be made in a way that is more productive and helpful, less damaging, less concerning in other ways, and better understand all these issues.

Unfortunately, the world remains a very dangerous place. Other events will occur, not exactly the same as the COVID-19 pandemic, but conflict, war, tsunamis, earthquakes – all these things can occur. All may require changing our behaviour as members of the public, and that can be shaped to some extent by these publicly displayed signs. Huge posters in the subway. Things on the bus. All manner of signs in an airport or any public institution. Private businesses, restaurants, cafes and more, all sharing signs that can inform the public about what to do in case of some unfortunate event, can maybe have a role in creating a better society to some extent.

So, we’re going to keep working on this, I think. There’s a lot more that could be done.

Brynn: It sounds like you said, it could be a lifetime worth of research. That’s so much to draw from. And like you said, it is something that I think we all have to take away from the COVID-19 pandemic, to kind of look back and say, “Alright, what did we not anticipate? What did we get wrong, and how can we better prepare in the future so that we can communicate better so that we can make sure that people from any language background can receive the information that they need in that type of a crisis?” So that sounds absolutely fascinating, and on that, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate it.

Dr Chesnut: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute delight. As I mentioned earlier, it is rare to get an opportunity to talk about a research paper, not a big book, not a big project, but just one paper. And this is a paper I’m quite fond of and a research project I find interesting. So, it has been a delight to get to talk with you. Thank you so much for all the wonderful and engaging questions. They really helped direct me and hopefully keep me on task. I really appreciate your guidance there.

And yes, hopefully this encourages more members of the public to keep an eye out for signs and look for those directive signs that are made multilingual in unusual ways. And for researchers out there, this is an exciting area to research. Don’t be afraid, I don’t think researchers are afraid, but this is a productive place to do research, and the more people examining this topic, the richer the discussions become. So, I’m always eager to find new people entering the field and discussing these topics.

Brynn: Excellent, so get out there and go look at some signs!

And thanks for listening, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!

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Jeffrey Gil and Minglei Wang

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Taiwan is promoting its linguistic and cultural diversity (Image source: Taiwan Today)

Taiwan faces a dire international environment manifested in a lack of formal diplomatic recognition and a serious threat to its existence from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Under these circumstances, Taiwan must communicate narratives and project images about itself to the international community in order to “increase Taiwan’s visibility and gather moral support”, especially from other democratic societies.

Taiwan has used language policy as one means of doing this, in particular by emphasising its democratic values and cultural heritage to highlight the differences between itself and the PRC. Examples can be seen in the Indigenous Language Development Act of 2017, which recognised indigenous languages as national languages and contained provisions to support and expand their development, teaching and use. The National Languages Development Act, passed in 2018, extended national language status to Holo (Southern Min variety of Chinese), Hakka (Kejia variety of Chinese) and Taiwanese Sign Language. It also aims to provide greater support for the use of these languages in education and society. According to Vickers and Lin (2022), an important purpose of such language policies is to portray Taiwan as “something more or other than simply a ‘Chinese’ society—that is, as a diverse, multicultural Asian democracy”.

In September 2021, Taiwan created the Taiwan Centre for Mandarin Learning (TCML) to teach and promote Mandarin abroad. We argue that the TCML initiative is also intended to enhance Taiwan’s international profile by distinguishing it from the PRC. Following a brief overview of the origins of the TCML, we focus on how Taiwan has attempted to contrast the TCML with the PRC’s Confucius Institutes (CIs), which have dominated the global promotion of Mandarin for the past two decades.

Establishment of the TCML

TCML promotional video

The TCML initiative is overseen by the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC), a cabinet-level agency under the Executive Yuan, that is responsible for facilitating exchanges and interactions between Taiwan and communities of ethnic Taiwanese and Chinese in foreign countries. There are currently 66 TCMLs in the world, with 54 in the US and 12 in Europe.  Taiwan aims to increase the number of TCMLs to 100 by 2025, with a concurrent goal to establish what it describes as an “international status of Taiwanese Chinese language teaching”.

The origins of the TCML lie in the launch of the Taiwan-US Education Initiative in December 2020. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on international education cooperation was signed between the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office and American Institute in Taiwan (AIT),^[1] specifying that this partnership:

is expected to enhance and expand existing Mandarin and English language opportunities in the United States and on Taiwan. The MOU also encourages the exploration of opportunities for Mandarin and English language teachers and resources to be deployed to language programs at U.S. universities and Taiwan educational institutions, and facilitates greater exchange between U.S. and Taiwan institutions on best practices.

To the Taiwanese government, this signalled US support in “emphasizing and consolidating Taiwan’s important role in providing Mandarin learning opportunities for students from the US and other countries”, hence motivating the TCML project.

The establishment of the TCML was also facilitated by the US and Europe’s change of stance on the PRC’s dominating role in spreading Mandarin, as manifested in the shutdown of CIs. The CI project has caused concerns about its influence on teaching and research on China, the propagation of the Chinese government’s views, censorship on sensitive issues, and potential spying activities due to their links to the Chinese government and physical location on university campuses. Compounded by worsening relations between the PRC and the US and Europe, which generally hold an unfavourable image of China due to the country’s domestic and international behaviour, these concerns triggered the termination of CIs. The US, for example, has so far terminated 89 out of 122 CIs, while 19 CIs have been shut down across France, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.

TCML promotional poster

This subsequently leads to opportunities for Taiwan to fill the demand gap for Mandarin learning in the US and Europe, where TCMLs have thus far been established. It is in this sense that the inauguration of the TCML project is situated in a geopolitically competitive environment.

Framing the TCML: Mandarin with Taiwanese Characteristics

The TCML’s website highlights Taiwan’s intention to use the TCML to champion such values as “freedom, diversity, academic freedom, and freedom of speech”, which, in the eyes of the Taiwanese government, “form Taiwan’s key competitiveness” in the world. They have constructed a contrast between the TCML and CIs, although Taiwanese officials and directors of TCMLs have been reluctant to directly admit such a strategic orientation.

When commenting on the purpose of launching the TCML project, Tong Zhenyuan, former Chairman of OCAC, explained that:

we are not competing with Confucius Institutes, which are restricted by the American government and even driven out of the US. We, Taiwan, are collaborating with the US government to promote Mandarin teaching and learning on a different level, and we are confident in this situation to gain more support from America’s mainstream society, as we share the same values with the US.

Despite this, Tong emphasised at the inauguration of a TCML in Irvine, California that the aim of the centre was to provide a language learning environment that values “freedom and democracy while respecting cultural diversity” and this was “something that Confucius Institutes can simply not compete with”.

In a similar vein, Li Wenxiong, member of the OCAC, further elaborated that:

it is obvious that Confucius Institutes are basically used by the Chinese government to spread its communist ideology. I think Taiwan, most importantly, conducts teaching activities in a more open, democratic, and free manner, hence facilitating its educational approach into mainstream society as much as possible.

Kou Huifeng, director of the TCML in Silicon Valley, also held that the distinction between the TCML and CI was that “we have a free and open learning environment”. As Kou further noted, “we don’t compete [with CIs], what we do is to hope to let overseas non-Chinese have free choices [when learning Mandarin]”.

Another facet of diversity: Taiwan was the 1st country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage (Image source: 360info)

This image of Taiwan as a provider of Mandarin language education is also displayed in the TCML’s promotional videos. One such video features several students expressing positive views of studying Mandarin in Taiwan. For instance, an American student said that “when you’re in a free country, which you’re able to express your own feelings and ideas, the Internet is not restricted, which makes studying easier”. Another student from the US shared that “in Taiwan, I’ve never run into any freedom of speech problems”. Likewise, an Israeli interviewee pointed out that there were “so-called sensitive issues” associated with her previous experience learning Mandarin which she had not experienced Taiwan. A Swiss/German learner even argued that Taiwan “is pretty much the only choice you have right now to study Chinese”, as “there is not much choice if you want to study Chinese in a free environment without having to be afraid for being arrested”.

This is not to say that the TCML is free of political constraints. The OCAC’s requirement that teachers employed by TCMLs “must not hold passports from Mainland China, Hong Kong or Macau” is similar to the PRC’s request that language instructors hired at CIs are not allowed to practice certain religious beliefs, such as Falun Gong. Furthermore, there appears to be political intervention from the Taiwanese government in some of the TCML’s media engagement. As reported by Nikkei Asia, a previously arranged interview with staff at a TCML in Heidelberg “was cancelled on short notice after a senior official in Taiwan intervened”.

Conclusion

The TCML has been conceived and portrayed as an alternative to the CIs. From the Taiwanese government’s perspective, emphasising values of democracy and freedom as the foundation for the TCML is a means through which Taiwan can compete with the PRC for the hearts and minds of Mandarin learners. The activities and reception of the TCML need to be further explored to determine whether this initiative will be successful in improving Taiwan’s international environment.

Acknowledgement

Our research project on the TCML is supported by the Flinders University College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) Research Grant Scheme.

Jeffrey Gil

Jeffrey Gil is a Senior Lecturer in TESOL at Flinders University. He has also taught English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and Applied Linguistics courses at universities in China. His main research interests are English as a global language, English language education policy and planning in Asian contexts and the use and status of Chinese in the world. He has published widely on these topics. He is also the author of two books, Soft power and the worldwide promotion of Chinese language learning: The Confucius Institute project (Multilingual Matters, 2017) and The rise of Chinese as a global language: Prospects and obstacles (Palgrave, 2021), and co-editor of Exploring language in global contexts (Routledge, 2022).

Minglei Wang

Minglei Wang is a Ph.D. candidate and research assistant at Flinders University. His research topic is related to Chinese cultural diplomacy, with a specific focus on the China Cultural Centre. Minglei also holds an M.A. in Culture, Communication and Globalization from Aalborg University, Denmark.

[1] The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office is a de facto embassy or consulate of the Republic of China (Taiwan), established in certain countries that have formal diplomatic relations with the PRC. The US does not formally recognise Taiwan as a sovereign country but conducts unofficial relations with it through the AIT, which effectively functions as its de facto embassy in Taiwan.

教堂的中文 标识在 悉尼的 语言景观 中越来 越突出 在以英 语占绝 对主体 地位的 语言 环境中 这些 双语 的标 识是 引人 注目的 更何况 汉语 并非 基督 教的 传统 语言 教堂中英双语标志的使用预示着澳大利亚华人皈依基督教的比例成增长趋势。

新书的第十三章探讨了中国的新移民皈依基督教的经历 揭示了宗教皈依 移民定居和语言学习相互关联 我们 （Yining Wang 和 Ingrid Piller 对中国移民信仰转变的研究兴趣并非仅仅源于教堂的双语标志 更多是受到参与Yining博士课题的中国家庭的启发。 在31个参与课题的中国家庭中 有8个家庭是来澳后皈依基督教的 其它的家庭或多或少表达过对基督教的兴趣或者参与过基督教的活动

基督教之所以在这些中国家庭中广受欢迎和关注 和这些为人父母者在澳州教养子女时碰到的困难和心中的迷惘息息相关 许多参与者既不想沿袭中国式的“虎爸虎妈”的教育理念 同时他们也不觉得西方的育儿方式多有吸引力 他们经常在自己的社交群里面分享一些负面的育儿故事 比如说某些失控的中国孩子 已经完全脱离了中国的价值观，这些孩子学业失败抑或沉迷于毒品或滥交 因此 加入教会经常被认为是一种折衷的方式，即可以相对轻松的教养孩子 又可以引导下一代树立良好的价值观，走上有意义的人生之路

一份关于澳大利亚生活中多语使用 宗教信仰和精神依托的论文集征稿为我们提供了一个机会 我们得以探讨宗教皈依与移民定居之间的交叉点 在此 我们采访了七位来自中国的第一代移民 记录了他们移民前的对宗教的态度 移民后的皈依之旅 以及基督教在他们语言学习 定居生活和育儿经历中的所起的作用。

移民的危机

参与者均在中国受过高等教育，持有学士、硕士或博士学位。在移民之前，他们都曾在学术界、工程界、金融界、IT界和医学界拥有一席之地。移民后，绝大部分都经历了职业生涯的下行。

受访者在中国时都有稳定的职业和收入，来澳后突然发现很难找到专业对口的工作。职业的下行带来的不仅是经济收入的不稳定，还滋生了巨大的心里落差，导致自信心的缺乏，以及对自己的否定，而这一切都与语言障碍息息相关。当他们难以在公众面前重塑自己职场的成功时，生存的危机感油然而生，生活和职业的双重压力使其对婚姻质量和亲子关系也产生了负面地影响。

一位参与者很精辟地总结了移民给其生活带来的创伤，她说：“我们那时真的是心力交瘁，情感和身体上大崩溃。”移民带来的生存危机让这个群体开始在宗教信仰中寻求新的出路，七名参与者中的六名用了同样的词汇来描述当时的心境：“人的尽头应该就是神的开始。”

皈依–人生的重建

正如参与者直言不讳地承认，他们参与教会活动最初的动机并非寻求耶稣，而是希望在困境中能在这个新的国家寻求些许实实在在地帮助，比如说能够建立新的朋友圈，获得更多的人脉，从而弥补因移民而带来的社会资源的缺失。

参与者们都非常肯定他们在教会中所获得的帮助，尤其是他们在教会群体中所建立的相互信任、相互支持的情谊，这在很大程度上弥补了她们远离家人和失去了曾经的社交群体的遗憾。一位参与者明确地将她的教堂定义为家庭，她说：“我去教会的目的不是为了参加活动。教会是我的家。我每周都要回家去看望我的兄弟姐妹们。”

当然，要融于教会这个新群体，需要接受最初与他们格格不入的信仰，首先他们得相信神是一个无所不能的存在。这种信仰需要他们与当初坚定的无神论和科学的世界观彻底决裂。

总的来说，最初参与者们去教会是为了寻求实际帮助来应对他们所遇到的生存危机，结果导致参与者的社交群体和信仰系统发生了根本性的转变。参与者们反复强调，他们的新信仰导致了他们“生命的彻底翻转”。

移民–多重身份的混合体

到2020年采访时为止，这些参与者受洗后的平均时间已超过十年。这意味着，他们最初的移民困境和随后的信仰转变已经过去多年，他们有充足的时间来塑造自己新的身份，他们也非常认可自身的多重新身份（如中英双语使用者和华裔澳大利亚人）。

多语言实践是这些移民宗教活动的核心组成部分。参与者发现，在宗教活动中，不同语言的使用及其风格带给他们不一样的感触。对他们而言，中英两种语言都推动着他们信仰的转变，他们的双重身份也因此而融合。

对参与者来说，移民的成功最终是达成了民族身份、语言身份和宗教身份的融合，即达到语言使用、民族认同和信仰体系的一体化。这种融合使这些一代移民为自己在澳大利亚找到一个舒适的空间。然而，让下一代继承这样一种积极的混合身份则似乎更为困难。

移民和育儿

如上所述，这篇关于宗教皈依，移民定居和语言学习的研究是来自于之前语言传承的课题。此项关于中国移民的课题——和其它对各类移民群体的研究一样——发现语言传承的最终结果是英语成为第二代移民的强势语言。 虽然一部分第二代移民也许可以流畅地用汉语交流，但第二代的汉语识字水平总体较低。

移民父母和他们的孩子在语言能力上的差异可能会导致“中国父母”和“澳大利亚孩子”之间的话语鸿沟。比如，参与者家庭普遍认为澳大利亚的个人主义文化对中国式的父母权威构成了巨大威胁。他们觉得基督教可以给孩子输入客观的道德依据，从而弥合了这一差距。那就是，基督教义为这些参与者向第二代灌输中国价值提供了理论依据。

给非宗教组织的建议

我们的研究为如何促进移民融入当地社会提供了三个重要经验。

第一，我们注意到移民经历容易引发生存危机。这种危机是由经济的不稳定、社会地位的丧失、移民初期的语言障碍、在另一种文化中如何应对婚姻困境和教养子女的挑战等因素造成的。这些种种问题其实与新移民社交圈的缺失紧密相关，远离至亲好友原本让人深感不安，而不安定的情绪很可能使日常问题进一步升级（例如，停电时怎么办，应该呼叫谁？孩子生病了不知如何向学校请假怎么办？），并将其提升到个人危机级别。教会团体为解决这些生活问题提供的具体支持无异于雪中送炭。当然，教堂提供的最重要的帮助是将新移民纳入新的社会群体。我们认为，所有移民，如论他们是什么宗教背景，都应该获得当地社会的关爱和支持，包括帮助他们重建新的社会链接，这对于移居初期尤其重要。

第二，从长远来看，参与英汉双语和双文化实践能更好地促使移民融入社会，将自己的语言文化带入新的社会生活让这些新移民觉得被接受。教会的双语活动非常务实，只要核心教义不受影响，教会愿意并且身体力行地将基督教和中国的文化习惯结合在一起。这种语言和文化的融合显著促进了新入会者的长期语言学习、移居的稳定过渡和全面融入澳大利亚社会。基督教会对双语活动的推行与澳洲中小学、大学和工作场所等非教会机构的语言行为形成了显著的对比，后者继续实行在他们的单语习惯，一切以英语为主体。

第三，教养子女是具有挑战性的，对于移民尤其如此。如何保护下一代免受伤害，发挥他们的潜力，并引导他们树立正确的道德观并实现其人生价值，这一切都是移民父母的焦虑所在，因为他们不仅要跨越代际差距，还要跨越语言和文化差距。本章所记录的这些中国家庭在子女教育中的迷惘和挑战表明，澳大利亚的学校显然未能帮助这些移民家庭跨越差距，减轻焦虑。这种失败有两个层面：首先，它反映了澳大利亚的教育对语言传承的忽视，这使得许多二代移民没有能力参与父母的社会生活、了解他们的世界观并或与他们进行深度的会话。其次，这也表明学校未能有效地和非英语背景的父母沟通，这意味着父母对孩子在学校的状况缺乏了解，从而引起他们对子女教育现状的担忧和恐惧。因此，促进移民家庭的语言传承和增强家校沟通对于社会和谐至关重要。

References

Piller, Ingrid. (2021). What can churches teach us about migrant inclusion? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/what-can-churches-teach-us-about-migrant-inclusion/
Wang, Yining, & Piller, Ingrid. (2022). Christian bilingual practices and hybrid identities as vehicles of migrant integration. In Robyn Moloney & Shenouda Mansour (Eds.), Language and Spirit: exploring languages, religion and spirituality in Australia today (pp. 307-326). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

How does one become an applied linguist?

This invites the question of how one becomes an applied linguist. As Grabe (2010) explains, it is unclear “what training (and what duration of training) might be most appropriate” to become an applied linguist (p. 44). Despite some interest in this question, such as Ellis’ (2016) edited collection of the life histories of several prominent applied linguists, this question has not been thoroughly explored.

Here I want to reflect on my academic background and how it has influenced my research and work.

Applied Linguistics with a Chinese focus

My first degree was a Bachelor of Arts in Languages and Applied Linguistics, with a major in Chinese language. Throughout this degree I also took Asian studies courses, including Chinese history and politics. This created an interest in how political, economic, cultural and social developments at the local, national and global levels are connected to language-based issues involving China. Inspired by this, I wrote my PhD dissertation on China’s language situation. It explored the changing use and status of English in China; the growing importance of the Chinese language in the world; and the potential impact of English on China’s ethnic minority languages. In more recent times, I have also become interested in how the Chinese government promotes Chinese language and culture abroad, especially through Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms.

China through the lens of languageIn this sense, my studies of Chinese history and politics gave important context to language-based issues and informed my understanding of them. But it is language-based issues that have always been the central focus of my research. For example, knowledge of China’s domestic political situation and its relations with the rest of the world are necessary for me to understand the changing use and status of English in China, while knowledge of China’s reemergence as a great power is necessary for understanding the promotion of Chinese language and culture abroad. In other words, I see China through the lens of language in my research. Hult (2010) refers to this approach as an angle, or a way of investigating the world through the theme of language.

Language in Asian Studies

My studies also gave me another perspective on language, that of language as a way of doing research. In Asian studies, language is often seen as a technique or tool for studying something else, such as history, politics or economics, and proficiency in one or more Asian languages is considered essential for researchers (see, for example, the discussion in Davis, 2015; Milner, 1999 and Platt, 2006). The necessity and utility of language for accessing academic and media sources was clearly emphasised to me, particularly at the postgraduate level. So too was the importance of fieldwork, which in my case has involved often involved travel to China to talk to teachers, students, and scholars among others. I have found this an invaluable way to understand how language-based issues are experienced by the people directly involved in them.

Applying applied linguistics

This has in turn led to a desire to resolve, or at least propose solutions to, such language-based issues. I have, for example, suggested how universities might better manage Confucius Institutes and proposed principles for how teachers can deal with the dilemmas of teaching English in a globalising world. This is what Bygate (2004, 2005) refers to as the pragmatic nature of applied linguistics – it is not just about describing language-based issues but also about developing, implementing and evaluating appropriate responses to them. I don’t claim to have had any great impact, but the goal of doing so has been important.

Engagement with language-based issues involving China has also been a feature of my working life. My first full-time teaching position was at Jilin University in Changchun, China, where I taught English language courses to undergraduates and applied linguistics courses to postgraduates. This experience shaped and informed my views on English language education in China and the role of English in Chinese society more broadly.

Shortly afterwards, I gained a position in ESOL/TESOL at Flinders University, where I design, teach, and administer TESOL courses. Like many academics, I endeavour to connect my research to my teaching. In the course English as a Global Language, I include discussions of the impact of English on Chinese language and culture, while in Language Assessment in TESOL I discuss the washback effect of English language tests like the College English Test (CET) and Test for English Majors (TEM). Where possible I also assign students readings from Chinese authors across my courses.

I hope this brief personal reflection will spark further discussion of how one comes to be an applied linguist and what it means to be an applied linguist working on language issues involving China.

References

Brumfit, C. (1997). How applied linguistics is the same as any other science. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7(1), 86-94.
Bygate, M. (2004). Some current trends in applied linguistics: Towards a generic view. AILA Review, 17(1), 6-22.
Bygate, M. (2005). Applied linguistics: A pragmatic discipline, a generic discipline? Applied Linguistics, 26(4), 568-581.
Davis, D. R. (2015). Three principles for an Asian humanities: Care first … learn from … connect histories. The Journal of Asian Studies, 74(1), 43-67.
Ellis, R. (Ed.). (2016). Becoming and being an applied linguist: The life histories of some applied linguists. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Grabe, W. (2010) Applied linguistics: A twenty-first-century discipline. In R.B. Kaplan (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of applied linguistics (2nd ed.) (pp. 34-44). Oxford University Press.
Hult, F. M. (2010). Theme-based research in the transdisciplinary field of educational linguistics. In F. M. Hult (Ed.), Directions and prospects for educational linguistics (pp. 19-32). Springer.
Milner, A. (1999). Approaching Asia, and Asian studies, in Australia. Asian Studies Review, 23(2), 193-203.
Platt, M. (2006). The academic’s new clothes: the cult of theory versus the cultivation of language in Southeast Asian studies. In C. Chou & V. Houben (Eds.), Southeast Asian studies: Debates and new directions (pp. 86-101). International Institute for Asian Studies The Netherlands/Institute for Southeast Asian Studies Singapore.

Figure 1: Bilingual Squamish and English placard in West Vancouver’s Park Royal shopping village

As the Covid-19 pandemic heads toward its third year, with the Omicron variant in full swing, there is an ongoing need to reflect on language practices in multilingual contexts.

During my spring/summer 2021 research sabbatical in my West Vancouver home, I observed signs of the pandemic in every public space. As a sociolinguist, my ‘process of noticing’ centered around ‘language in use’ and social context. While the representation of multilingualism in globalized spaces is important to explore in ordinary times, Covid-induced disruptions to habituated social practices and familiarized communication patterns have shone a spotlight on linguistic diversity, access, inclusion, and social justice.

The City of Worlds – linguistic diversity in West Vancouver

Figure 2: Bilingual (English and Persian) bakery sign with monolingual (English) Covid-19 signs

Metro Vancouver, in which West Vancouver is one of its 21 municipalities, has many nicknames such as ‘Hollywood North’, ‘Lotusland’, ‘Raincouver’, ‘City of Glass’ and ‘City of Worlds’. The latter is perhaps the most apt owing not only to the area’s geographical diversity but also its highly multicultural and multilingual ecology. In West Vancouver, 41 percent of its population are immigrants. The two most commonly spoken languages other than English are Chinese and Persian with approximately 34 percent of recent immigrants to West Vancouver coming from China and 22 percent coming from Iran.

While English dominates West Vancouver’s linguistic landscape, languages other than English can also be seen, particularly in ‘sticky places’ or spaces which evoke feelings of cultural belonging and emotions such as ethnic grocery stores, cafes, or clubs. Bilingual signs in Canada’s two official languages, French and English, are also commonly seen in Federal spaces such as post offices or in national parks.

Initiatives to revitalize indigenous languages such as Squamish/Skwxwú7mesh have led to further representation of linguistic diversity on some street signs and on placards (Figure 1).

Linguistic diversity on Covid signage lagging behind

Despite the presence of languages other than English on a variety of non-Covid signage, when observing the proliferation of Covid signage in the pandemic’s second year, linguistic diversity was notably limited. For example, Covid signage in a Persian bakery (Figure 2) is monolingual (English only) despite the fact that non-Covid signage is bilingual (English and Persian).

Figure 3: Monolingual (English only) municipality-produced Covid-19 sign

In public spaces such as Ambleside Park, which runs parallel to West Vancouver’s seawall, municipality-produced Covid signage is in English only, with the use of local wildlife incorporated into signs, as seen by the eagle’s wingspan symbolizing the required two-meter social distancing rules (Figure 3). The use of wildlife to localize Covid social distancing signage has also been found in other areas of North America such as bear images in North Vancouver, ravens in the Yukon, and alligators in Florida. While such signage promotes inclusion of other living beings in the community, extensions to other languages are not evident.

Bilingual and trilingual Covid signs are rare, and consist of either Federal government-produced English/French signage such as the sign in transit on a Canada Post/Poste Canada van (Figure 4) or parts of English signs having been translated by community members as in library signage.

Figure 4: Bilingual (English and French) sign on a Canada Post/Poste Canada van

Even though only part of the large English Covid poster in the West Vancouver Memorial Library has been translated into Chinese and Persian (Figure 5), this translation effort stands out as important not only for accessing information in languages other than English but also for reinforcing spaces of belonging for linguistic minorities. To develop this practice further, the full poster could be translated rather than only the top part and attention could be given to making the languages on bilingual or trilingual signage equal in size and prominence. While some of the symbols used on the English poster communicate the message effectively without the need for words, other symbols are more ambiguous.

The right to write: Covid-19 care and resistance

More common than bilingual or trilingual Covid signs in West Vancouver are handmade artifacts indirectly related to Covid, containing symbols together with English slogans, known as ‘language objects’. While people in many places around the world displayed pictures of rainbows and hearts in their windows or on front doors, West Vancouverites tended to create signs of care, solidarity and hope in public spaces rather than in private homes. Slogans such as ‘smile’, ‘love’, ‘you’re the best’ appeared on objects in the environment, like stones or trees. The ‘language objects’ in Figure 6 serve no informational or utilitarian purpose, rather they portray messages of care, hope, positivity and solidarity during difficult times.

Figure 5: Trilingual signage (English, Chinese, and Persian) at the West Vancouver Memorial Library

Such language objects were monolingual (English only) with symbols such as hearts and smiles.

Another way in which the public interacted with the linguistic landscape of West Vancouver, was through grassroots homemade signs in the form of monolingual (English only) posters taped to trees, lamp posts or walls in public places. Such posters tended to voice political or philosophical viewpoints on the pandemic, as seen in Figure 7.

Concerns for freedom were expressed openly by ‘talking back to the linguistic landscape’, whereby residents felt they had the ‘right to write’ in public spaces. Such voices of resistance to Covid-related safety measures and restrictions seen in the West Vancouver linguistic landscape stood in sharp contrast the Covid linguistic landscapes in Abu Dhabi (where I had spent the first year of the pandemic) in which signs of resistance to Covid safety rules were notably absent.

Toward Covid signage accurately reflecting multilingual ecologies

Figure 6: Language objects in Ambleside Park showing care, positivity, and solidarity

In studies conducted during the onset of the pandemic in 2020, lack of access to information in minority languages was reported in a wide variety of international contexts. Those not proficient in the dominant language of a given context were often found to be excluded from receiving safety information in public spaces.

During the onset of the pandemic, the immediate need for swift assemblance of safety signage led sign-makers to use the linguistic resources they had at hand, often resulting in English being the default choice. However, a year later, Covid signage remains heavily skewed in favor of monolingual signage in dominant languages such as English, in the case of West Vancouver. Only federal Covid signs are bilingual (English and French), and there appear to be few efforts by community members to translate English Covid signs into commonly spoken languages.

Figure 7: Monolingual (English only) grassroots sign voicing resistance to Covid-19 restrictions

For inclusivity goals to be better met, language on signage needs to match languages spoken in specific speech communities. Especially during a crisis, the importance of addressing the mismatch between the language chosen for public communication and the language repertoires of the target audience is amplified with regard to safety as well as a sense of belonging and value during difficult times.

Lessons learned from the pandemic’s first two years include the need for language on Covid signage to accurately reflect multilingual ecologies in highly diverse contexts for greater safety, care, and inclusion, especially amidst current Omicron concerns.

More on Covid-19 crisis communication

Keep up with all our Covid-19 crisis communication coverage on the Language on the Move Covid-19 archives.

The South China-Laos-Thailand region with the new railway line (Source: South China Morning Post)

Language learning through watching films and playing videogames is a new trend. This kind of informal language learning differs significantly from language learning in the classroom or in immersion contexts.

Language learning through media brings new languages to the fore that have not been widely learned in the past, and it is particularly marginalized speakers of peripheral languages for whom media provide new language learning opportunities.

Here, I will illustrate mediated language learning with the example of the Thai language learning by two groups of people marginalized in China: international students from Laos and ethnic minority youths with a Zhuang background. Both Lao and Zhuang are minor peripheral languages in the global linguistic order. And both are closely related to the Thai language.

My account here draws on the work of my students Tingjiang Ge (葛婷江), Yifan Man (满怡帆), and Xinyao Li (李欣瑶).

Students from Laos learning Chinese through Thai

Some of Van’s favorite Thai-medium Chinese dramas on her mobile

Laos is a land-locked country surrounded by China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. The recently opened railway from its capital, Vientiane, to Kunming in China will transform it from land-locked to land-linked, as part of China’s ambitious 5,500-km trans-Asia railway. This material link between Laos and China is further reinforced by an increasing number of scholarships awarded to students from Laos to study in China.

However, despite needing to achieve Chinese language proficiency at HSK-4 level for admission, many students from Laos still lack the Chinese proficiency needed to thrive in their subject learning.

To overcome these difficulties, many of them turn to Thai for their Chinese language learning. Sounds counterintuitive? Well, it is not.

To begin with, Thai is an easy language for Lao students because the two languages are mutually intelligible, there are only slight differences in the scripts of the two languages, and Thai media play a prominent role in Laos.

Second, there are many Chinese language learning resources for Thai speakers but few for Lao speakers.

Combine these two facts and it is obvious how Thai can facilitate Chinese language learning for students from Laos. Thai allows them to use translation apps to check the meaning of Chinese vocabulary, to use textbooks aimed at Thai learners of Chinese, and – the most popular option – to watch Chinese dramas with Thai subtitles.

Becoming a producer of Chinese-themed Thai language content

The story of Van is particularly impressive. Like many of her Lao peers, Van gave up her university study in Laos and came to China to seek a more profitable future. The aspiration of most international students from Laos is to return to Laos after their studies in China, and to find a steady job in a Chinese company there.

One of the main characters in Van’s Chinese-themed Thai-language novel

Van’s aspiration is different: she wants to become an entrepreneurial writer producing Chinese-themed novels for the Thai market.

Since she was very young, Van has loved reading Thai novels and watching Thai dramas. This also exposed her to many novels and dramas translated from Chinese into Thai, long before she even started to learn Chinese.

As her knowledge of Chinese language and culture has blossomed, she has started to write her own fiction. Van’s writing has strong elements of Chinese fantasy and romance but is written in Thai. The reason she has chosen Thai instead of Lao as the medium of her writing lies in the larger size of the Thai-language market and the greater technological sophistication of the Thai-medium online space.

Through her years of exposure to different transnational social media, Van today markets her writing on all major Thai-medium reading apps and has already gained a loyal following of over 2,000 Thai readers.

Chinese students learning Thai through Zhuang

Thai media content is not only attractive to youths from Laos but also those from China. It is particularly the Boys’ Love genre that is hugely popular. While negative attitudes towards same-sex relationships and queer identities persist in China, the opposite is true in Thailand. The Boys’ Love genre centers on romantic relationships between male characters. Thai media thus introduce Chinese youths to a broader range of gender and sexual identities and help to promote gender and sexual diversity. A good example for the popularity of the genre comes from the Boys’ Love actor Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana, also known as Saint, who has over 1.1 million Chinese followers on Weibo,

A scene from “I told sunset about you” – its potential as a language learning resource is obvious

Ban, a Zhuang minority student from Funing, a border town in Yunnan between China and Vietnam, is one of those Chinese fans of Thai dramas. When she started to watch Thai dramas as a teenager out of curiosity for the “exotic” culture of Thailand, she was surprised to discover that the Thai language is quite similar to Zhuang.

This similarity – coupled with the informal exposure through her prolific drama watching – led her to quickly develop proficiency in Thai.

Her proficiency in Thai proved a huge asset when Ban graduated from university and could not find a job suited to her degree in business administration. It was her Thai that helped her secure a position and she now works as a business translator for an international company in Guangzhou.

Transnational Thai media

The popularity of Thai dramas in China has not been lost on Thai producers. Boys’ Love dramas increasingly include Chinese content to reach further into the huge and profitable Chinese market.

A student from the China-Laos Friendship Nongping Primary School on the Lane Xang EMU train of the China-Laos Railway (Source: Xinhuanet)

The drama “I Told Sunset about You” is a case in point. The plot centers on the romance between two boys preparing for university admission by taking Chinese language classes. The story is driven by their joint language learning focusing on key words all involving the Chinese word 心 (xin; “heart”).

This plot is not particularly far-fetched as the Chinese language has indeed become a commodity in Thailand that may help individuals to gain upward mobility in study and at work. Aspects of Thai culture and Chinese language meld to produce a new form of consumer product that may generate profit.

Strengthening transnational relationships

The opening of the Laos-China segment of the trans-Asian railroad constitutes a major milestone for transnational connections between China, Laos, Thailand, and, eventually, beyond. These connections are mostly seen in economic and geopolitical terms. The links that individuals build through linguistic and cultural consumption are too often overlooked.

The concept of language learning for academic or employment advance is no longer sufficient to understand young language learners’ learning experiences. The language desire that is evident in the research presented here deserves further attention to capture how young and marginalized people without much linguistic capital in valuable languages like English and Chinese might be included in the regional integration between China and ASEAN.

The heroic EDG esports winning team of League of Legends

Chinese esports team Edward Gaming, or EDG for short, has just won the first ever Leagues of Legend (LoL) world championship. This is exciting news not only for esports fans but also for those interested in linguistic and cultural diversity.

Video gaming is a billion-dollar industry that has received a significant boost by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, international gaming revenue reached over USD 173 billion and this figure is expected to be double by 2026. 40% of this revenue is generated in China alone. China also has the largest number of gamers (650 million). In fact, out of 3.24 billion gamers internationally, 1.48 billion are based in Asia.

But do the language choices on video games match Asian markets and player demographics?

My students at Yunnan University, Chang Zhou (常州)， Hao Guorong (郝国荣)，Yang Dongqi (杨东祺)，Zhang Can (张灿)，Fu Decai (符德才), and Luo Jihang (罗纪航) set out to answer this question.

Gaming is dominated by English

Despite the emergence of Asia as a giant gaming market, global video games continue to be dominated by English-mediated communication. It accounts for close to 40% of all language choices in gaming, followed by Chinese (21%), and Russian (11%). Another 26 languages have some representation but the percentages are minuscule.

Languages used in video gaming (Source: Steam)

The dominance of English is problematic for players who do not speak English and Chinese players regularly mount “我们需要中文” (“We need Chinese!”) campaigns.

Multilingualism increases revenue

Games that are available in multiple languages generate more revenue, as can be exemplified with the Metro games.

Metro 2033, Metro Last Light Redux and Metro Exodus are a series of first-person shooter games based on a novel by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. Released in 2014, the game was initially available only in seven European languages, namely English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Ukrainian. The interface and the subtitles – but not audio – were additionally available in Czech, Dutch, and Polish.

Asian players campaigned for the inclusion of Asian languages and in 2019 Chinese (both in simplified and traditional forms), Korean, Japanese, and Portuguese were added (while Dutch was deleted). This linguistic expansion brought a huge increase in player numbers.

Language patches

While Metro shows the benefits of increasing language choice, many video developers continue to focus on English as the assumed ideal means of international communication.

In such cases, Chinese players have to mobilize other resources to participate in English-mediated gaming. “汉化补丁” (Chinese language patches) are one way to get around the language constraint.

However, these Chinese language patches are not without problems. For one thing, not all language patches are free and thus increase the cost of gaming. Second, the installation of Chinese language patches tends to slow down the Internet connection, which can be very frustrating.

The low quality of the translation of patches is another problem and often the Chinese translations does not make any sense at all.

Game vloggers

Given the low quality of many translations, Chinese players turn to Chinese game vloggers who broadcast themselves while playing. These vloggers share tips and tricks on how to play the game, and are often famous for their skill in a particular game.

Genshi Impact

While Chinese game vloggers can help to overcome the language barrier, having to go through them to play the game delays enjoyment. And delayed entertainment is decidedly uncool in the gaming world.

From lucrative industry to soft power construction

Seeing the huge profits to be made in Asia, more and more game developers come to follow the market and include Asian languages. Money talks, after all. At the same time, more and more games are actually designed in Asia.

China is not only home to the world’s largest number of players but has also become the game design capital of the world. In particular, China is leading the development of mobile video games that can be played by China’s 882 million smartphone users.

In 2020, China’s largest gaming company, Tencent, generated USD 7.1 billion revenue through its game Honor of Kings alone. Tencent also has full control of the League of Legends – the world championship of which is currently creating so much interest.

These games not only generate huge revenue but have also emerged as a medium for constructing Asian culture as a form of global cultural capital. For example, Genshi Impact, which has been developed by a company in Shanghai and combines both Japanese and Chinese elements, has been distributed to over 140 countries and is considered the most successful Chinese mobile game abroad.

The success of Genshi Impact suggests that global audiences are ready for gaming content based on Asian cultures. In gaming, linguistic and cultural change is in the air!

*** 

The Hani are one of the officially recognized ethnic minorities in China, and can also be found across the border in Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. Like other ethnic minorities in China, Hani people need to become bilingual in Putonghua proficiency for educational and social mobility. At the same time, ethnic minority languages are increasingly valorized in tourism and for China’s soft power project in its borderlands. Even so, the linguistic and social experiences of China’s minority speakers remain poorly understood. How do their linguistic proficiencies and life trajectories intersect? What are the affordances and constraints of using the minority language, the national language Chinese, and the global language English? Here, we examine the experiences of three Chinese Hani women from three different generations to explore these questions.

Hani folksongs bring comfort to older generation facing poverty and hardship

Hani woman singing Haba while weaving

Haba is a Hani folksong genre that was included by UNESCO in the world intangible cultural heritage in 2013. Official reports describe Haba as a men’s tradition. It is commonly assumed that only Hani men may sing Haba and win the respect and reputation it brings. This is not entirely true, as our research has found. Hani women sing Haba, too, as a daily practice of self-comfort. However, they do so without an audience. This may be particularly true of poor older Hani women without formal education.

Let’s consider the example of the Haba singing of Fang (a pseudonym). Fang is the aunt of the second author, Yongzhen. Yongzhen often hears her aunt singing Haba in private spaces. Fang’s Haba singing is full of lament and sorrow featuring narratives of the hardships and misfortunes of her life.

Born in 1966, as the oldest daughter in her poverty-stricken family, Fang’s life has been overshadowed by the pressure to bear a son. As a child, she did not have a chance to receive any formal education and so she remains monolingual in Hani and illiterate. At the age of 16, she was forced to marry a man who she had never met and who lived in an even more remote village. Shortly after, she gave birth to her first daughter. Over the next 20 years, she bore 13 daughters before the desired son was born when she was 40 years old.

Today, that son is her only surviving child, and Fang suffers from poor physical and mental health. Singing Haba is a way for her to digest her bitterness, to reduce her sorrow, and to comfort herself, as in this song (our translation):

I married you because I used to think that you would treat me well and live with me.
Now you don’t care for me and don’t even bother to talk to me.
However, I have delivered these children for you in your home.
How come you don’t talk to me properly?
I plant the land on my own.
Our children are born, and the land is planted.
I gave birth to our children. I don’ t want to leave them or abandon them.
The land is planted. I don’t want to leave it.
You often beat me, hit me with your fists and kick me with your legs.
I don’t want to stay here any longer.
I don’t want to eat at all. Neither do I want to drink.
I can only worry, about these children, this land.
I choose to endure the sufferings and stay.
But still you don’t treat me well, don’t talk to me properly.
In this house, I want to cry every time I pick my bowl and take my chopsticks.
This is not my home, but the home of others, your home.
I eat two meals a day, yet my belly is still empty.
The water I drink is never gulped down.
The threshold of this house is like a python by the river, lying in my way.
I dare not take a step in.
I don’t want to stay any longer.
I don’t want to eat another meal here.
A day here feels as long as a life time.
But I don’t want to abandon these children here and leave them once and for all.
I have no idea why you don’t care for me.
I can’t make up my mind just to leave.
My desire to leave has led my feet two steps forward.
But I still can’t leave.
But then you don’t care for me at all.
My desire to leave has taken three steps away from this home.
But I still can’t leave.
The dog never changes its heart to stay and guard the home.
It is the same with me and my children.
The deer in the wild does not wish to stay, either.
Upon consideration, I also decide to hold back and stay.

Hani becomes glamorous

In contrast to Fang’s mournful Haba, which can only be found in personal and private spaces, Hani pop music has been promoted by government institutions to enhance local tourism. Hani pop music is bouncy, joyful, and optimistic, and the famous Hani singer Mixian (米线) is one of its most famous exponents.

Mixian was also born into a poor Hani farming family in 1983. Her educational opportunities were slightly better than those of Fang and she received a primary education but had to stop school because her parents need her help with farm work (China’s nine-year-compulsory education was not implemented nationwide until 2001).

Like Fang, Mixian’s life was also transformed at the age of 16. However, in her case, she did not have to leave her family for marriage but for work, when she moved to a tourist-centered city and became a waitress. Soon, she combined waitressing with singing for tourists. During one of her restaurant performances, Mixian was discovered by Beijing Dazang Record Company.

Since then, Mixian’s has become a national celebrity. She has released several popular albums, which brought her much profit and fame. One of her most popular songs is “My Hani (Honey) Baby”, which is performed in three languages and combines ethnic and global elements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h8PXgZUdec

The song “My Hani Baby” distinguishes itself from other Chinese pop songs through the use of Hani language, English, and Putonghua, and the integration of ethnic and modern music styles. Although there are four singers who all identify themselves as ethnic minorities (Hani, Wa, Hui, and Yao), only Hani language appears in the text and is performed by Mixian. Mixian thus becomes a symbol of local ethnic identity while the three male singers perform the cool aspect of modernity by switching between English and Putonghua.

The theme of the song is one frequently found in pop music: romantic love. What is challenged is the traditional identity imposed upon Hani women who are not expected to marry for love, as exemplified in Fang’s story. The lyrics form a dialogue between Mixian and the three male singers, where the female character boldly expresses her romantic love, and the male character reciprocates.

Choosing the romantic theme and combining the ethnic language (Hani) with modern languages (English and Putonghua) have served to increase the popularity of this song. Whether it contributes to the emancipation of Hani women is another matter.

It is also worth noting that the commodification of the Hani language apparent in this successful pop song has not only helped Mixian establish her reputation but has also drawn public attention to the Hani language in China and beyond. One Chinese netizen liked “Hani Baby” so much that he started to learn the Hani language by searching for relevant materials and posting Hani scripts online. His posts in turn have become a learning resource for Hani people to acquire Hani literacy.

A new generation of educated multilingual Hani women

Yongzhen is both the second author and the third Hani woman we will now turn to. Born in 1999, receiving a 9-year-compulsory education was normal for Yongzhen, as it is for women of her generation from all over China. Her childhood was also shaped by rural poverty but in a way that is very different from previous generations. Like hundreds of millions of rural people from China’s underdeveloped western regions migrate, both her parents migrated to work in factories in Zhejiang and Guangdong.

Yongzhen introducing her bilingual translation project to university professors

As a result, Yongzhen became a left-behind child at an early age and was raised in a boarding school. Yongzhen distinguished herself by excelling in school and pursued her university dream. Her parents’ migration and labor experiences in developed cities were crucial in forming her ambition to pursue higher education and her parents have been unconditionally supportive of Yongzhen’s ambition.

Choosing English as her major was mainly driven by her parents’ aspiration to get a stable job working as an English teacher in the future. Now that she has been exposed to the Course of Language and Society with a particular focus on linguistic diversity, Yongzhen is motivated to become a new broker for Hani language and cultural heritage.

New Hani voices

When the Covid-19 pandemic was still prevalent last year, Yongzhen organized a team with three other ethnic minority female students to conduct a small project in their communities. They investigated how ethnic minority people in their hometowns might understand Putonghua-mediated public health information. Their findings are very similar to others conducted in minority-centered regions in China and featured in the Language on the Move Covid-19 archives.

Based on their research, Yongzhen and her teammates designed a bilingual app inspired by the national emergency language services. Their bilingual translation product has been recommended by the College of Foreign Languages at Yunnan University to participate in the national project targeting Chinese university students’ innovation and entrepreneurship.

Through the multilingual translation project, Yongzhen and her teammates developed their empathy towards their ethnic minority communities and learned of the importance of providing language service to linguistically diverse populations. Additionally, the have felt it their duty to become a voice for their peoples, especially ethnic minority women.

While writing up this study and having access to knowledge about linguistic diversity via Dr Li Jia’s course and the learning materials on Language on the Move, Yongzhen has come to understand how her aunt and other female Haba singers have been linguistically, economically, and culturally marginalized, and how the official and commercial discourses about the Hani people only reveal a partial truth while sometimes simultaneously erasing minority voices. As a multilingual and educated Hani woman, Yongzhen has developed a new faith devoting herself to the sociolinguistics of gendered trajectories of Chinese ethnic minority women for equal social participation.

In a new book chapter, Yining Wang and I explore the conversion experiences of a group of first-generation migrants from China. Our interest in the intersection between conversion, settlement, and language learning was not only raised by bilingual church signs but also by the fact that many of the Chinese families in Yining’s PhD research about heritage language maintenance were interested in Christianity. Eight of the 31 participating families had converted to Christianity since coming to Australia and others professed an interest and occasionally attended church.

The reason Christianity was such a popular topic among these families was that many participants struggled with parenting in Australia. They did not want to raise their children in the strict and uncompromising Chinese ways they had been raised themselves, but they did not find western parenting appealing, either. They regularly shared horror stories of out-of-control westernized children who failed academically or had slid into drug addiction and promiscuity. Against this background, joining a church was frequently pondered as a middle path that might allow parenting that is both relaxed and emotionally connected yet guiding the next generation on a path to good morals and a fulfilled life.

A call for papers for a book about multilingualism, religion, and spirituality in Australian life provided us with an opportunity to explore the intersection between conversion and settlement further. We interviewed seven first-generation migrants from China about their pre-migration religious beliefs, their post-migration conversion journeys, and the role of Christianity in their language learning, settlement, and parenting experiences.

Arrival crises

The participants are highly educated and hold at least a Bachelors’ degree, which they obtained in China. Prior to migration, all of them had worked in professional roles in academia, engineering, finance, IT, and medicine. After migration, all experienced downward occupational mobility.

The transition from enjoying stable professional careers in China to their inability to find employment at their level in Australia came as a deep shock for the participants. Their economic insecurity was compounded by an attendant loss of status and self-confidence, strongly related to the language barrier, which made them feel incompetent. Their inability to re-establish themselves as highly successful competent adults in public turned into an existential crisis through the ways in which this affected their marriages and their relationships with their children.

One participant summed up the trauma of migration by saying: “We felt broken, both emotionally and physically.” The existential crisis of migration constituted the beginning of their religious seeking. Six of the seven participants used the exact same phrase to describe the situation in which they found themselves during their early time in Australia: “人的尽头” (rén de jìntóu; literally “the end of humans”; “ultimate hopelessness”). And where human capacity ends, the divine begins, as they went on to say: “神的开始” (shén de kāishǐ; “the start of God”).

Conversion as turning point

Spiritual seeking was not the primary purpose of turning to church, as the participants freely admitted. What they sought initially was practical support in the crises they experienced by making new friends that could fill in for the networks they had lost through migration.

The practical assistance offered by the church community helped to build up a supportive and trusting relationship that could partly compensate for the loss of family and friendship networks in migration. One participant explicitly framed her church as family: “I don’t go to church to attend activities. The church is my home. And I go home every week to see my family.”

Gaining entry into this new community, of course, involved accepting beliefs that were, initially at least, alien to them – most notably belief in the existence of a transcendental deity. Such a belief constituted a complete break with their strong socialization into atheism and the scientific worldview.

Overall, what started out as a search for practical support to face the existential crisis of migration resulted in a radical transformation of the participants’ social networks and belief systems. In the vocabulary of their new faith, participants repeatedly stressed that their new beliefs had led to “生命的翻转” (shēngmìng de fānzhuăn; “complete life transformation”).

Hybrid identities

At the time of the interviews in 2020, the average time since baptism had been more than ten years This means that not only the crisis of initial settlement but also the period of transformation through conversion was well in the past. Participants had had time to consolidate their new identities, and they had become comfortable in new hybrid identities as Chinese-English bilinguals and Chinese Australians.

Multilingual practices were central to their new faith. Participants had discovered that different languages and styles touched them differently. In the same way that both languages contributed to their spiritual development, their dual identities became fused, too.

For the participants, successful migration was ultimately a fusion of different national, linguistic, and religious identities; an integration of languages, national identities, and belief systems. This integration allowed the participants to find a comfortable space for themselves as first generation migrants in Australia. However, grounding the next generation in such a positive hybrid identity was more complicated.

Migrant parenting

As mentioned above, our study of conversion, settlement, and language learning developed out of a study investigating heritage language maintenance. That study – like many others with many different migrant groups – found that English dominance of the second generation is the most frequent heritage language learning outcome. While oral proficiency may be more variable, Chinese literacy levels were consistently low in the second generation.

These differences in linguistic repertoires between migrant parents and their children may result in discursive gaps between “Chinese parents” and “Australian children.”

Partly due to different linguistic repertoires, participants perceived Australia’s individualistic culture as constituting a formidable threat to their parental authority. They felt that Christianity allowed them to bridge this gap by providing an objective source of moral reference. Ironically, Christianity thus provided the participants with the vocabulary to instill what they considered Chinese values in the second generation.

Lessons for secular institutions

Our study holds three key lessons for migrant integration into secular institutions.

First, we noted that the experience of migration triggered an existential crisis for the participants. This crisis arose from a combination of economic insecurity, loss of status, the initial language barrier, marital difficulties, and parenting challenges. These migration traumas were closely connected to the loss of social networks in migration. The absence of family and friendship networks itself was deeply unsettling. Furthermore, it could escalate relatively mundane problems (e.g., who to call in the case of a power outage; how to send a sick note to school) and elevate them to personal crisis level. Church groups provided instrumental support to address these problems. This included a host of practical matters but, most importantly, the creation of new social networks. We would argue that in a secular society practical settlement support and human fellowship through new network building should be accessible to all migrants, irrespective of whether they accept a new belief system or not. To this end the provision of culturally-sensitive migrant support services particularly in the initial settlement phase is of paramount importance.

Second, in the long-term, participants thrived by engaging in English-Chinese bilingual and bicultural practices. Being able to draw on both their languages and cultures, and bringing them together in a holistic hybrid fusion made them feel settled and comfortable. The Christian congregations they attended were pragmatic about the use of bilingual repertoires. They also readily combined Christian and Chinese ways of doing things, as long as core doctrine was not affected. This linguistic and cultural syncretism significantly contributed to participants’ long-term language learning, settlement, and overall integration into Australian society. This constitutes a significant contrast between these Christian churches and secular institutions such as schools, universities, and workplaces. The latter continue to implement exclusive English-only practices ingrained in their monolingual habitus.

Third, all parenting is challenging and migrant parenting maybe even more so. How to guide the next generation to keep them save from harm, to fulfil their potential, and to lead ethical lives contributing to the common good can be an enormous source of anxiety for migrant parents as they navigate not only generational but also linguistic and cultural gaps. The parenting experiences documented here show a clear failure on the part of Australian schools to minimize those gaps. This failure is twofold: first, it relates to the well-documented inability of the Australian school system to support the language learning aspirations of heritage language learners. This means that the second generation, by and large, does not have the capacity to deeply engage with the discourse worlds that shaped their parents’ socialization, world views, and values.

Second, it relates to weaknesses in institutional communication with parents from non-English-speaking backgrounds. This means that parents lack a good understanding of their children’s Australian education. This may give rise to fears of and anxieties about the education their children are receiving. In the interest of social cohesion, it is vital to overcome these barriers by improving heritage language education and home-school communication.

To read the full study, access this open-access preprint:

Wang, Y. & I. Piller. (in press, 2022). Christian bilingual practices and hybrid identities as vehicles of migrant integration. In Moloney, R., Mansour, S., & J. Troy. Eds. Language and Spirit: exploring languages, religion and spirituality in Australia today. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

This lecture – delivered as a keynote at the 2021 Approaches to Migration, Language, and Identity conference – offers another way to learn about the relationship between conversion, settlement, and language learning:

Related posts

Grey, A. 2018. The triumph of completing a PhD
Grey, A. 2017. How do language rights affect minority languages in China?
In interview: Alex Grey with Melanie Fernando

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Editor’s note: There is a Chinese saying that two heads are better than one (三个臭皮匠赛过一个诸葛亮). This proverb emphasizes both collective wisdom and the value of grassroots work. At its best, teaching is both. In this mini-series, Dr LI Jia and Ms LV Yong, Yunnan University, share how teaching about linguistic diversity has changed their understanding of linguistic diversity. Specifically, they summarize the findings of 77 small research projects undertaken by their undergraduate students. These research projects provide insight into the multifaceted and dynamic language experiences of Chinese youth from Yunnan province, a highly diverse border region in the southwest of China. Following on from their recent posts about the revalorization of Chinese dialects and the changing role of minority languages in Yunnan, this final post in the series focuses on the learning of foreign languages other than English in China.

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Yunnan as a link between China and Southeast Asia

Yunnan province in China’s southwest shares over 4,000 kilometers of borderline with Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. Because of its geopolitical advantage and China’s regional expansion project, Yunnan is constructed as a window linking China to Myanmar and other Southeast Asian countries (see detailed discussion of the linguistic consequences of the geopolitical position of Yunnan here and here). In the emerging discourse of China’s engagement with its neighbouring countries, Yunnan has seized the opportunity and actively developed its cooperation Southeast and South Asian countries on all levels.

In education, for instance, over 80% of international students in Yunnan are from Southeast Asia and South Asia.

The increasing number and scale of non-English foreign language programs is unprecedented and largely geopolitically motivated. Yunnan University, for instance, has established ten foreign language degree programs in languages of Southeast Asia and South Asia only within the past seven years. This bi-directional flow of international students learning Chinese and Chinese students learning Southeast Asian and South Asian languages constitutes a new approach in foreign language education in China, which is very different to the approach of metropolitan cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Learning Burmese as extension of family capital

The study by Yang Hongli (杨洪黎) has offered some interesting learning experiences of a Chinese female student majoring in Burmese. Being brought up in Yingjiang, a border town in Yunnan, this Chinese student was able to speak simple Burmese language for daily communication with her parents before entering university. Her Burmese proficiency is mainly associated with the fact that she has a Burmese mother and a Chinese father, and both of her parents have been involved in the jade trade and crossing the border for decades. While studying at university, this student reports that “缅语越学越有成就感，越学越有自信” (“the longer I study Burmese, the more I feel accomplished and the more I feel confident”). As one of the top students in her class, she is often set up as an example in pronunciation, oral communication, and academic achievement. Despite undertaking her Burmese studies in Yunnan, this student does not feel inferior to other Chinese peers from elite universities in Beijing and Shanghai because her university has a one-year-exchange program with Yangon University, the top university in Myanmar and her excellent oral performance in the national Burmese language competition also proves her competence over other Burmese majors in China.

Learning English as burden

Li Jia with Dai and Shan students in a Yunnan primary school

This student, however, feels quite stressed when asked about her English proficiency. In the interview she confessed that her English is poor because she has not passed CET-4 (College English Test Band-4). Without this certificate, she is afraid that her future job prospects might be affected. Similar to this Burmese learner’s story, a Thai major also reported her different language learning experiences in English and in Thai to Bai Qiongfang (白琼芳）.

This Thai learner used to study English in her first year, but due to her lack of interest and unsatisfactory performance in English, she decided to transfer to major in Thai. Another important reason to shift to study Thai is because of her ethnic identity as Dai. As a Dai speaker, she can understand 40% of Thai language because of the shared linguistic and cultural background.

Cross-border minorities learning Thai for additive identities

As China is increasingly promoting non-English foreign languages, Thai has become one of the most popular foreign languages in Yunnan and the spread of Thai social media also shapes Chinese young people’s desire to learn Thai. Due to the similarity between her mother tongue and Thai, this Thai learner has proved her competence in her class when she just started to learn Thai compared to other Chinese classmates who have to struggle from zero knowledge. It is interesting to note that her competence in Thai also shapes her curiosity and desire to maintain her ethnic identity. By working with her teacher on a project, she is running an official account on introducing the cultural practices of both Dai and Thai people. In fact, the increasing interest in speaking ethnic minority languages like Dai is not limited to grassroots efforts but also observed from top down approach in the shifting context of China’s geoeconomic and geopolitical conditions, as we shared in the previous post.

The studies mentioned above are mainly based on our students’ observations and lived experiences. An in-depth and longitudinal study is needed in future in order to understand how the shifting meanings of speaking “small languages” like Thai and Burmese might contribute to more equitable access to social resources. Whether the valorization of these foreign languages will fulfill the career aspirations of their speakers in education and at work also remains an open question.

While having abundant linguistic and cultural resources in Yunnan, we should not exaggerate the idea of multicultural prosperity. As we pointed out in the previous post, only a very small number of ethnic minority students can overcome the linguistic and social barriers to be accepted into university. English still constitutes a huge barrier for their access to equal education especially in remote and minority-centered regions of Yunnan. In order to fulfill minority people’s aspirations, a more diversified foreign language educational policy needs to be adopted. Rather than using English as the only foreign subject, Southeast Asian languages such as Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Laotian should be established to make use of the local linguistic resources and to empower young people’s upward mobility in the borderlands.

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Editor’s note: There is a Chinese saying that two heads are better than one (三个臭皮匠赛过一个诸葛亮). This proverb emphasizes both collective wisdom and the value of grassroots work. At its best, teaching is both. In this mini-series, Dr LI Jia and Ms LV Yong, Yunnan University, share how teaching about linguistic diversity has changed their understanding of linguistic diversity. Specifically, they summarize the findings of 77 small research projects undertaken by their undergraduate students. These research projects provide insight into the multifaceted and dynamic language experiences of Chinese youth from Yunnan province, a highly diverse border region in the southwest of China. Following on from their recent post about the revalorization of Chinese dialects, the second article of this 3-part series explores the state of minority languages in China.

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Maoduoli candy from Yunnan is a huge success. Its name means “bright boy” in the Dai language.

Yunnan province is one of the most linguistically diverse provinces in China. It also ranks near the bottom for degree of socioeconomic development in China. With China’s rapid development in the world economy, Yunnan is seeking to capitalize on its linguistic and cultural heritage to integrate itself into China’s regional expansion. Tourism is one of the three pillar industries in Yunnan, and offers associated business opportunities related to minority languages.

Ethnic minority people’s languages and their cultural products increasingly come to be seen as a form of capital to boost the local economy.

This is apparent in the names and images of local foods, as Xiong Qingqing (熊青青) has found. Xiong finds that ethnic minority languages transcribed in Mandarin scripts can create exotic and authentic feelings among Chinese customers who are keen to purchase these commodities. Maoduoli (猫哆哩) is such a case in point: this snack made from local fruit is named after a word from the Dai language, where “Maoduoli” means “bright boy”. Since it was first sold online in 2011, Maoduoli has gained such nationwide popularity that there was a significant rise in its Baidu index from 300 to 2500 within half a year.

Ethnic minority people lack interest in maintaining their heritage languages

The commodification of ethnic minority languages has been studied by many scholars both in China and the world. Some of our students are ethnic minorities themselves, but what they have observed is quite different from the official discourse of celebrating diversity via tourism. Their studies indicate that ethnic minority people themselves do not have much confidence in maintaining their heritage languages.

Wang Liping’s (王丽萍) study is based on the language practices of Bai people from Heqing, Yunnan. Despite the tourist discourse in promoting Bai language and cultural products, the local Bai people see it as challenging to revitalize their heritage language. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, the Bai language in Heqing has no written script and Bai people do not have any religious belief or other strong ideological desire to maintain their cultural practices.

Second, Heqing’s geographical location between two popular tourist destinations (Dali and Lijiang) have actually sped up the loss of Bai. This is due to the fact that more and more translocal migrants settle down in Heqing and marry locals. In the process, Putonghua replaces Bai as the medium for family and wider communication.

Third, many local Bai people migrate to more developed cities in the east of China for better prospects.

Finally, despite the discursive valorization of Bai as a commodity, the language has not been legitimized in the mainstream educational system.

For all these reasons, Bai people do not find it worthwhile to pass Bai on to their younger generation. Instead, the prefer to invest in Putonghua and English. According to Wang’s study with Bai people of different age groups, young people between 7 and 18 have only receptive but no productive knowledge of Bai language, even though they live in a Bai-centered region.

Constructing ethnic minority language as soft power

Despite the lack of interest in minority language maintenance on the part of minority groups, local governments are keen to promote these languages by displaying ethnic minority language signage at tourist destinations (see also Yang Hongyan’s study) and other public spaces. Such top-down approaches to revitalizing ethnic minority languages and cultural practices become more prominent in Yunnan’s border regions such as 西双版纳 (Xishuangbana; see map), a Dai-centered city bordering Myanmar and Laos.

Bai Qiongfang’s (白琼芳) analysis of official documents about the promotion of Dai and Dai culture indicates that Xishuangbanna is becoming a window targeting its neigbouring countries where there are many cross-border ethnic groups living on both sides of the border and sharing a similar language and culture.

Dai people constitute the majority in Xishuangbanna. The Dai are called Shan in Myanmar, and Dai language is also similar to Laotian, the national language of Laos. Given its geopolitical importance, Dai language is not only promoted as commodity but more importantly as “soft power of the borderland”. By making use of digital information technologies and social media transmission, the quality of spreading Dai language and culture has been greatly enhanced, and many national projects and funding supports have been granted to revitalize Dai language and culture via TV/radio/movies and by compiling Dai textbooks and a dictionary.

The local government has even initiated a new policy requiring local leaders and civilians to wear ethnic minority clothes and accessories for at least two days a week.

The increasing visibility of minority languages and cultural practices in China and across its border constitutes a new perspective on China’s language practices in which ethnic minority languages are part of China’s soft power projection, revitalization of the local economy and reinforcement of minority groups’ cultural confidence. However, it remains to be seen whether the discourse of constructing ethnic minority languages as commodity and symbolic identity is actually beneficial to ethnic minorities and does not create more tensions and discontinuities within ethnic minorities and cross-border groups.

Despite the discourse of embracing diversity and having abundant linguistic and cultural resources in Yunnan, we should not exaggerate the idea of multicultural prosperity.

Based on our decades of teaching experience, we are well aware that only a very small number of ethnic minority students can overcome the linguistic and social barriers to being accepted into university. English still constitutes a huge barrier for their access to equal education especially in remote and minority-centered regions of Yunnan. An in-depth and longitudinal study is needed in future in order to understand how ethnic minority students might get empowered through education and at work. What our students Zhu Ziying (朱子莹), Li Jincheng(李锦程), Liu Zongtuo(刘宗拓),Bi Yanming(毕砚茗) and Li Jia have been doing in recent months and in the years to come is to investigate how language shapes the educational and employment trajectories of Yi ethnic minority students and hopefully our study might contribute to the linguistic diversity at the borderlands.

In the next and final part of this series, we’ll focus more on these cross-border languages and explore foreign language learning of languages other than English in China.

Related content

• Baioud, Gegentuul, Will education reform wipe out Mongolian language and culture?
• Grey, Alexandra, How do language rights affect minority languages in China?
• Li, Jia and Lv, Yong, Power to Fangyan!
• Ma, Yuanmeng, Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic?
• Piller, Ingrid, Access denied

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Editor’s note: There is a Chinese saying that two heads are better than one (三个臭皮匠赛过一个诸葛亮). This proverb emphasizes both collective wisdom and the value of grassroots work. At its best, teaching is both. In this mini-series, Dr LI Jia and Ms LV Yong, Yunnan University, share how teaching about linguistic diversity has changed their understanding of linguistic diversity. Specifically, they summarize the findings of 77 small research projects undertaken by their undergraduate students. These research projects provide insight into the multifaceted and dynamic language experiences of Chinese youths from Yunnan province, a highly diverse border region in the southwest of China. In the first article of this 3-part series, we learn how Chinese dialects (“fangyan”) are increasingly valorized as an expression of distinctive identity and as a profitable commodity.

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(Source: Language Atlas of China, Wikipedia)

Fangyan (方言) is usually translated as “dialect” into English, meaning a variety of Mandarin. 70% of China’s 1.4 billion people speak eight different types of Mandarin and only a small number of these speak standard Mandarin, or Putonghua, as their mother tongue. Speaking Fangyan has long been associated with social stereotypes such as lack of education and low-class status. However, such negative indexicality of speaking Fangyan has been challenged by the COVID-19 outbreak and by the emerging circulation of diverse social media online.

Fangyan as an index of authenticity and authority

Speaking Fangyan is increasingly considered as an index of authenticity and a source of authority. This can be observed in an increasing number of Chinese movies, songs, TV series and other entertainment programs. In 2019, the animated movie “Ne Zha”, for instance, raked in over 4.6 billion yuan at the box office. Sichuan Fangyan was used right at the beginning of the film to indicate the main character Ne Zha’s origin from Sichuan.

The choice of Fangyan not only brings our attention to history but also returns to the lived experiences of contemporary people.

This is confirmed by student Shi Lihua’s (施利华) interview with the director Zhou Jueyu, whose work “Sleepless in Licang” won the first prize for the second Asian Micro Film Festival held in Lincang, a border city between China and Myanmar. In her study, Shi describes that “the grassroots story in Lincang Fangyan captures the theme of facing setbacks in life, moving forward bravely, living with a smile and ultimately achieving success”.

The emotional attachment to speaking Fangyan is also confirmed by Li Jie’s (李杰) observation on the daily circulation of short-video platforms. Easy access to Fangyan via short-video APPs provides hundreds of millions of Chinese migrant workers and students with a space for connection and psychological comfort.

Fangyan as a source of success and knowledge dissemination

Poster of the “1.3 Billion Decibel” show

Fangyan is also promoted as a source of success and knowledge dissemination by celebrities and academic scholars via different social media. The “1.3 Billion Decibel” music competition, for example, was established in 2016 and has become the most popular music TV show promoting Fangyan via singing contests across 32 Chinese provinces and regions. By combining Fangyan with popular songs, Chinese grassroots singers’ creativity and talents have been acknowledged by wider audiences and the value of speaking Fangyan has been revitalized among diverse populations in China.

Besides, some Chinese linguists have made use of online resources to highlight the historical relevance of and knowledge inheritance from Fangyan.

According to Li Jie’s analysis of video posts on TikTok by Ruan Guijun from Wuhan University, Fangyan contains rich resources for exploring Chinese proverbs, riddles and other civilizational knowledge. Fangyan as historical reference has been promoted via the form of “the Fangyan Poem Contest” to celebrate the International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019. Based on Li Jie’s study, Chinese audiences are aware of the historical connection between Fangyan and ancient poems. It is through reading Chinese ancient poems that Fangyan instead of Putonghua is constructed as legitimate medium of classical and advanced Chinese literary works. In the process, respect towards Fangyan is also revitalized.

Fangyan as commodified capital

The choice of using Fangyan to advertise China’s high-tech commodities such as Huawei mobile phone has also proven a great success. According to Zhao Yang’s (赵洋) analysis of Chinese netizens’ comments, Fangyan embedded in a giant high-tech company not only enhances Fangyan speakers’ confidence towards their mother tongue, but also indicates Huawei’s innovation and willingness to include linguistic diversity other than Putonghua and English. As such, Fangyan becomes one of the branding resources for advertisements and constitutes a selling point to attract potential customers from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Fangyan as a commodity is also apparent on social media. In Li Jie’s analysis of online celebrities, speaking Fangyan does not reduce but attract millions of followers and significant sums of money for advertising products. 多语和毛毛姐 (name of short video owner), for example, speaks Guizhou Fangyan and has become one of the most popular celebrities with over 33 million followers in China.

Speaking Fangyan is not only confined to Chinese people. Many foreigners living and working in China have come to realize the value of speaking Fangyan. Speaking Fangyan can construct their identity as a 中国通 (China expert) for newly arrived foreigners and as cross-cultural communicator for introducing Chinese local practices.

Yan Wenzhen’s (闫文珍) study with foreigners speaking Chinese Fangyan contributes an interesting language practice which is often overlooked, if not ignored, by the mainstream educational discourse. In her study, Yan has exemplified how foreigners make use of TikTok and Fangyan to display their local knowledge and attract followers. 伊博, for instance, is an African man living in Shenyang, northeast of China. Speaking Shenyang Fangyan and capturing foreigners’ linguistic and cultural challenges living in their local community has helped him win over 6 million followers. Behind this number follows his social reputation and material rewards.

The studies of our students are mainly based on their observations and lived experiences. They chose to research Fangyan because none of them speak Putonghua as their mother tongue and they all have to take a Putonghua proficiency test to prove their ability, which will in turn impact their job prospects. All of our students, and ourselves included, have our own problems in speaking “perfect” Putonghua. However, access to learning about linguistic diversity and online resources undoubtedly provides us with a third space to reconstruct our connection with Fangyan in the tensions between power and social justice.

In the next part of this series, we’ll move beyond Chinese to consider yet another aspect of China’s linguistic diversity: ethnic minority languages and their changing role.