To read a FREE chapter about participants’ experiences with finding work head over to the Oxford University Press website.

We celebrated with a big launch party last Friday and there are some photos for absent friends to enjoy on the book page. There you can also find additional resources such as a blog post on the OUP website about data-sharing as community building or this one on the Australian Academy of the Humanities site about being treated as a migrant in Australia. Feel free to bookmark the page as we hope to keep track there of the life of the book.

Don’t forget if you order the book directly from Oxford University Press, the discount code is AAFLYG6.

If you are teaching a course related to language and migration, consider adopting the book. It includes a “How to use this book in teaching” section, which will make it easy to adopt. Contact Oxford University Press for an inspection copy. Book review editors can also request a review copy through the same link.

Transcript of Part 6 of the Life in a New Language podcast series (by Brynn Quick, added 05/08/2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Today’s episode is part of a series devoted to life in a new language.

Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, I’ll chat to each of the co-authors about their perspectives on writing the book.

Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experiences of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity-making in a new context are explored.

The research uncovers significant hardship, but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements. My guest today is Dr. Emily Farrell.

Emily earned her PhD from Macquarie University in 2008 with a thesis entitled Negotiating Identity, Discourses of Migration and Belonging. She completed a DAAD-supported postdoctoral fellowship in 2010, focused on language and the international artist community in Berlin. She began her career in publishing as the acquisitions editor for applied linguistics and sociolinguistics at DeGreuter, and has since worked in sales, business development, and in the commercial side of publishing for the MIT Press, and now as the global commercial director for open research at Taylor & Francis.

She was an early board member at UnLocal, a legal services and educational outreach organization that serves undocumented migrants in the New York City area, and also served on the board of the foundation for the Yonkers Public Library. At Taylor & Francis, she focuses on increasing access to research through support for both open access agreements and open research practices, including data sharing, as well as support for humanities and social sciences in particular.

Welcome to the show, Emily. It’s wonderful to have you with us today.

Dr. Farrell: Thanks so much, Brynn.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself, how you got into linguistics, and how you and your co-authors got the idea for the book, Life in a New Language?

Dr. Farrell: It’s great to think back along the trajectory and also to think about the six of us, and what brought us all together in the end to combine some of our research projects, and to work together, and the work we’ve done together over a lot of years.

For me personally, I, now long ago, left Australia for the US study, and when I came back to Australia after a few years in the US, after an undergraduate degree, I was more in English Literature and Music. I had the experience of living elsewhere, in some ways growing into a young adult in a different country, even though America, obviously the US, is an English speaking nation predominantly, that experience of going there at age 18, growing there, seeing myself in a different light, and in ways creating a new space for myself and identity, and then coming home and sort of drawing all those pieces together.

I’d become interested in language through that, and particularly that idea of how do you kind of create belonging for yourself in a new place as you grow across your lifespan. And when I got back to Australia, I actually started a master’s degree at Sydney with Ingrid Piller. She had not been at Sydney for a long time at that point.

I was teaching courses with a linguistic grounding in cross-cultural communication, and I was completely hooked once I started because it drew together all these things that had sort of been percolating, you know, the idea of identity creation, how language fits into that picture, how people assess each other and the biases people have based on the way that people sound, whether that accent’s within a, you know, whether it’s a Southern US accent versus a, you know, received pronunciation in the US, and all that kind of groundwork in closely linguistics. I think once you start to read all of that literature, really, I found it so captivating. And it sort of started to answer lots of questions for me about all these things that you get a hunch about, but it’s also, in what’s a way, so implicit, right?

Because it’s language, and you sort of take it for granted. And so being able to dive into that sociolinguistics and applied linguistics literature and starting to understand all that from a new perspective was just so captivating. And so, from there, it was at the time that Ingrid had just secured an ARC grant to look at people that had migrated to Australia and become highly proficient in English.

And so, I started on a research assistant with Ingrid and started my PhD on a related topic to that. So particularly looking at the cohort of highly proficient speakers and how they were navigating this sense of belonging and identity and how that connected to language.

Brynn: It’s so true, I think, that nothing radicalises us more than when we have to kind of leave what we know in our home country and, like you said, even if we go to another country where technically we speak the same language, all of a sudden you realise, oh, wait a minute, there is so much more to establishing a home for myself in this new place and to establishing this sense of belonging than just being able to speak the language.

You’re an Australian living in the US., I’m an American living in Australia, and I think we probably have both experienced that, and even before we started this recording, we were talking about how interesting it is that, you know, technically, yeah, we speak the same language, but we’ve both experienced having those cultural moments where just because we can technically understand each other, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy, and I love that that kind of was this through line for you because then when you were looking at this research where you were a research assistant, you were looking at these people who had high levels of proficiency in English.

So, technically, they can speak the language here, and yet there was still this sense of, but I’m not able to establish this sense of belonging maybe in the same way as someone who sounds like someone from this area.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, and I think that, you know, you do have all this privileging, obviously, depending on the sort of accent you have and obviously how audible you are, how visible you are as other in a place, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier as well, just seeing that again with my son, who’s six, and has a very strong American accent, bringing him back to Australia where he has an Australian passport and an American passport, and, you know, I am audibly Australian or, well, not all Americans, can I identify the accent to be honest?

Brynn: I’m sure many think you are British, yes.\

Dr. Farrell: That’s fine, I forgive them. But it’s also another point that was of interest to me in my research, which is our national boundaries and citizenship also sort of create these categories where people do and don’t fit. So just because you have a passport, does that make you feel like you’re able to sort of create an identity of belonging or how do you find these sort of in-between spaces?

So, you know, so often the people in my research were sort of, they talked quite a lot about accentedness, how they had been in Australia for, you know, 30 years were master’s degree holders, were incredibly accomplished, people who could sort of suddenly have this experience of being other just because someone would say to them, Oh, where do you come from? Because they would hear their accent. And it’s tricky because, you know, there is that weird power in such a banal question.

And you know, sometimes that felt really frustrating for people. But sometimes that also was, you know, I got to hear some of these amazing stories from people who were then able to kind of mobilise a much more powerful in-betweenness or transnational feeling, where they sort of felt, well, yes, you can hear I come from somewhere else, and I do come from somewhere else, but I also come from here. And that it doesn’t necessarily have to be either or in that way.

And that there is a lot more, you sort of can create a bigger space for yourself. But it’s sort of not always quite so easy, because there is kind of that, again, it’s that banal sort of everyday othering that might not seem so consequential for someone else because they’re asking a question that’s just, that seems simple. But for someone that’s asked that, oh, where do you come from?

Or, you know, what accent do I hear? You know, hearing that over and over again can feel really frustrating in your own sort of personal project of, you know, making a life for yourself somewhere else.

Brynn: And I’m sure both you and I have heard that question. I literally had that question asked of me last night. I had an Australian man say to me, and what accent do I detect?

And I wanted to say to him, I hear yours. I hear your Australian accent, you know?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah.

Brynn: You’ve gotten that in America too.

Dr. Farrell: For sure. And I do think you get that much more in English-dominant monolingual environments where people aren’t used to switching between languages. There’s just certain, you know, assumptions about what it is to sound a certain way, what counts as an accent.

That’s quite fascinating. I mean, it also, part of that kind of international, interesting kind of international basis is what drew me to the post-doctoral work that I did in Berlin, because you have this fascinating environment where, at least when I was there in 2009, for three years, it was still a pretty affordable place to live. And it was really, by that stage, you know, the wall had come down quite some time beforehand, I suppose, you know, 20 years before, but there was still this kind of sense of this emerging city and a real kind of very vibrant artistic community that was starting to sort of, people were talking about, like, people in New York, everybody kind of knows about New York or Berlin and sort of another hub for artists.

And so, there’s sort of a real international community there. But English still, there’s a real dominance of English in that environment. And a lot of people that have kind of moved, they’re not thinking about moving to Germany, but thinking about moving to this kind of international art city.

And just the way that language circulates and how people learn languages and which languages they’re speaking, which bits of what in different ways, in different spaces was so interesting to me, because a lot of the ways that people there were doing this sort of identity work and belonging work was much more about being able to be in a space where you could define yourself as an artist, whereas in New York, it’s really hard to balance paying the rent and also work on your artistic practice.

So these sorts of, all of that sort of the way, you know, all these pieces to me connect to this idea of you’re doing all this work of how do you find a job, how do you raise a family, but also how do you do this sort of your own work to feel like this is where you belong and, you know, how do you find your people and how do you make that space for yourself?

Brynn: Yeah, and that is a very central part of the research that you brought into this book, Life in a New Language. Can you tell us a little bit about your participants in the research that you did? You said that they had high levels of English proficiency, which is a little bit different from some of the other participants that we’ve discussed in this series that some of the other authors worked with.

What was that like? What did you see in your participants in having that high level of English, but maybe still seeking to build belonging and build a home?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, so the people that I spoke with during my research were all, they’d all migrated to Australia as adults. They had a mix of different amounts of English education before arriving in Australia. Most of them had migrated from Europe or South America and were already reasonably highly educated and then a good number of them got higher degrees once they got to Australia.

They were going through that process of learning English but were, and a good number of them were already reasonably proficient once they arrived in Australia. And it was a mix of reasons for migrating, a good number being sort of economic migration or a lot of actually there were a couple that had moved for a partner, they’d met an Australian and moved to see where that would go. And a lot of the people that had been in Australia the longest, I think, had already been here 30 years, I think it was the maximum.

Some had only been in Australia for a few years. But all of them were sort of in that process of setting their lives up or raising their families and were much more in that space of sort of how is it that you continue to kind of find community and belonging in a new language. And also how, you know, where you find ways to use the languages that you arrived with.

So, one of my favourite set of participants or a couple, I really felt very privileged speaking to this couple who had both, they had these fantastic stories of the way that they had met and the romantic story and their language use in Australia and their community building here, where they had both left Poland separately. I think, you know, we did in the space of a year or two of each other. And the man had left first and they’d both ended up in Denmark.

And I don’t think either of them had had much Danish before leaving Poland. She had moved with a daughter, very young daughter. They met because he was visiting a friend that was also in one of these living spaces.

They’d put people up, like early migrant housing. And he tells this fabulous, they sort of tell this story together, where he talks about how he sees her for the first time and he immediately thinks that she’s this incredible woman. And she, at the same time, is sort of telling their meeting story, sort of saying, oh, I thought he was crazy.

He was like, this guy just seen me and he’s trying to give me his phone number. And I was like, what’s this about? Some crazy man’s shown up and he’s just giving me his phone number.

He doesn’t even know. He probably does this for every girl. But then, you know, they sort of go on and then they went on a date and then, you know, end up married with another daughter.

And then ultimately, you know, many years later, they migrated to Australia with both daughters and raised a family here. And the way that they sort of tell that story with lots of humour, sort of teasing each other, like much love, but just kind of how language can weave through that narrative. And that once they got to Australia, you know, they have the elder daughter who is most comfortable in Danish but speaks highly proficient Polish and now English.

The younger daughter who grew up mostly in Danish. So, it’s sort of the way that the family then talks to each other. You know, you have the parents still speak to each other in Polish.

You know, the elder daughter often speaks in Danish. You know, so they have all these different languages that they’re using sort of over the dinner table, you know, in the ways that they kind of craft what it is to be a family in Australia, and then how they’re sort of finding their own seat and sort of continuing to live out their own practices that fit their family in Australia. And it’s just really amazing to hear just how complex, but also how people are able to sort of craft these spaces for themselves and to find ways to use and continue their own language repertoire when they’re here.

Brynn: And that’s something that we’ve heard from some of the other authors, too, is about this negotiation of family over the dinner table. You know, like these languages that get used in just the ways that the family as a unit interacts with each other. And it can be really broad with meaning, the different choices that are made for the languages.

And that’s just in your own house. That’s not even thinking about then what did the parents do when they leave the house to go to work? You know, what language choices are they making then?

Or what do the kids then do now that they’re in Australia and presumably going to an Australian school? What are those language choices? So, it’s really interesting that it can be as small as that nuclear family.

And then you think about the way that language choices branch out from there.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, absolutely. What’s so beneficial about, I mean, what we’ve done with this book in drawing together these six different studies and covering a large period of time, 20 years, and also a large group of people, 130 people, we get all that really beautiful, sort of rich granularity of the stories you hear from people that do defy the sorts of stereotypes and assumptions that you have about what people actually do in their lives because so often, you know, even those of us who’ve spent a lot of time, you know, thinking critically and studying this specifically, you know, you’re taking in so much media, politics. It’s easy, I think, to sort of get detached from what it is to understand the real detail of lived experience.

And then it’s also incredibly challenging, I think, again, even for those of us who have our heads in this sort of work, to think about how you take that detail and try to bring it out to that more sort of policy level, to that more, the public space where these sorts of issues are politicised and flattened out and simplified in such ways that are really quite detrimental to the actual lives of people. And I think that when Ingrid was discussing the idea of drawing this study together into one book, what was so appealing to me was the fact that so often, when you think about ethnographic work, it is about that detail and that’s the importance of it, right? Is that you are able to sort of take a context for what it is, really listen to the people, the community that you’re working with and in.

But then I think all of us who have done this sort of work get to that point where it’s difficult to know how to try to have a greater impact. And I think that when you think about the real sort of applied part of applied linguistics, I think all of us want to see more of an influence on the broader discourse around language and migration or other sort of language use topics. And I think it’s really quite difficult to see how you make that impact and how you try to connect what you’re doing in that sort of granular way to the broader sort of ways of speaking across society.

And I think, you know, you sort of have things like census data which really just doesn’t give you that qualitative or detailed view. And in bringing together these six different studies, we have the hope that we make a bit of a step towards the ability to be able to say, look, this isn’t just one person’s or this small community’s experience. We can look across these different communities of people or different individual migrant experiences and draw from them together from this group of 130 people, very common threads that show us, I think, some direction for how we could shape policy, how we could shape education, how we could shape even individual interaction with people when you don’t ask where somebody comes from.

You know, there are certain things you can start to think about your own ways of approaching someone as a human in interaction that I think can have both on a small scale and then on a societal level a really big impact for positive change.

Brynn: And that’s why I think Life in a New Language is just such a groundbreaking book because as I’ve said in previous episodes, you do not have to be a linguist to read this book, to understand this book, to get a lot of meaning out of this book because it does show this really human experience that we all have when we are the new kid in a place, you know. And like we said earlier in this episode, it doesn’t even matter if you already speak the language of the place that you’re going to or in the case of your participants, you have a high level of proficiency. There is still so much that goes into being a migrant, and there’s still so much that you have to build into your life as a migrant that doesn’t necessarily come easily.

And that’s why I think bringing these six studies together, just like you said, so well, shows what we can do as individuals on an individual level is just have that human empathy for each other and then also can say, well, hey, look, we’re noticing these trends in finding work, in getting an education for kids. We’re seeing this through line in how we do family and how we negotiate language and family. And I think, like you said, that’s something that could be taken to that policy level so easily.

So that’s why I think the book is so fantastic. And speaking of that coming together with all of those six stories, I would love to hear about your experience in co-authoring with five other people and bringing those things together. And what I think is so interesting about your particular experience is that you were doing all of this from the other side of the world.

You were living in New York. I think it was four of the authors were living in New South Wales and then one was living on the other side of Australia. But you were the furthest away and you had a little baby at the time.

So, what was all of that like for you?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, so I was the spanner in the time zone works. For me, I had moved into publishing quite a number of years beforehand. So, we, I think, started discussing this book in 2018 when my son was six months old, I think, and around then, six, eight months old.

And so, I’d already been working in publishing for around eight, seven or eight years by then. It was really quite a joyous experience to be able to rejoin and revisit this research that I hadn’t really been working, I hadn’t worked with for quite a long time and to feel like there was still so much in there to draw out and draw together and, you know, and have the opportunity to work with five incredible other women who have done such brilliant work and to sort of see how we could fit our different projects together. Obviously, you know, we had Ingrid as the consistent, you know, the supervisor across all these projects, which I think gave us a huge benefit in already having a certain shared framework and viewpoint.

But even then, I mean, there was still so much to do for all of us to sort of go back to the research we’ve done, you know, some more recent and some older, and sort of go back right from the beginning, back to the transcripts, really read back through, you know, and I haven’t done that in quite a long time, and to really kind of view it again from this perspective of how are we drawing these together, what are the shared, you know, themes that we can bring out, how can we sort of make this most powerful and also most accessible, I would say, so to a broader readership. And, you know, I mean, certainly with six people, everybody works at a different pace, everybody’s juggling different commitments. No, I think that were it to have just been a single author, the book probably would have moved at a different pace, but we also managed to do it through a number of years of a pandemic and, you know, where I wasn’t able to come home, I hadn’t been able to get back to Australia for about three years.

So, you know, there was certainly not the same as sort of working on something on your own, but I think the benefits that you gain from bringing these projects together and the things that you can learn from, you know, the viewpoint of different co-authors, it’s been an incredible experience, at least from my perspective. I feel very lucky to have been part of it. And I think that what we have at the other end of these years of drawing it together is, you know, something greater than the separate parts, which is really, truly fabulous.

Brynn: And I think what’s very cool is that because your son was, you said, six, eight months old, at the time that you started, he’s now six years old, right? So, we have like this child that grew with the book, which is so cool. And also, you know, many of us in the research group that we have, Language on the Move, many of us are mums, and many of us are doing the juggle of the academic work and the raising of the family and trying to figure all of that out.

What was that like for you, especially being in that other time zone and juggling this new motherhood as well?

Dr. Farrell: You know, I think what’s so eye-opening about it is that you just sort of are able to, there’s obviously a lot to juggle, but at the same time, I think it helps you prioritize, it helps you sort of see what’s important. And for me, where I was often kind of working late into the evening and you have to turn the laptop off or at least shut it, shut it down, close the lid, you have to go and help with your nod, do your story time. You know, I think that that’s, it’s a really important kind of chance to look at what matters and also see that you can get a tremendous amount done, you just have to work out the ways to get the schedule right, I suppose.

And I mean, that’s all, again, saying that from a point where I have a very supportive partner and also that working with five other incredible authors who are also juggling their lives and incredible, the huge amount of work that everybody has on their plate, both family commitments and professionally, I think it’s a real, it’s a really good way to see how much you, it’s not a vulnerability to rely on a group and to have a network of support and that it’s so, so important to have that. And I think being able to see that strength in others and look at what people are managing and sort of how everybody supports each other and cheers everyone on. You know, I think it’s been, for me, having seen, I mean, I think we all see this in different ways, the sort of very competitive environment of academia.

I mean, I stepped outside of it, you know, working in publishing, but I’m certainly still very adjacent to it, very much adjacent to it. So, I see how difficult the job market is and, you know, I experienced that to some degree in sort of initially trying to apply for academic jobs, and that hasn’t gotten me better since I left academia. And I think that making sure that you’re able to find a really supportive network, just for mental health, honestly, and also for those moments where you lose belief in your own work or you get a job rejection or you maybe lose direction a little bit to have a supportive group that can remind you that, you know, what you can do and what you can achieve, I think can’t overstate the importance of that.

Brynn: And that really comes through in the book, in reading the book and knowing that the six of you did this together. It’s one of my favourite things about the book is that collaboration and that camaraderie. And as I’ve said to some of the other authors, it sets a great example for the rest of us in the Language on the Move research group who are kind of just starting this process because we have learned how to support each other in this academic field that can be really hard and it can be emotionally hard to get rejected, you know, in papers or publications or things like that.

But I love being able to work with each other. And I think that makes our research better when we’re able to collaborate like this as well. And you mentioned that you stepped outside of academia and went into publishing.

I would be really interested to hear what that’s like and sort of what you do now and what you’re up to these days and sort of the decision that led you into publishing and what it’s like. Because those of us in the beginning of this process, we’re on the other side. We’re trying to get our papers published.

We don’t know what it’s like to work on your side. So, I’d love to hear about it.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, I mean, that’s one of many fascinating parts that I still remember how much fear and worry I had about publishing as a PhD student. And then, you know, you get a very different perspective of it when you get on to the other side when you work for a publisher. And, you know, I used to do more frequently when I was an editor, I would do how to turn your dissertation into a book workshop and things like that and constantly sort of trying to encourage students or early career researchers.

So really, when you’re at a conference making an effort to talk to publishers, go up and talk to editors, hear what they’re looking for, ask them about what they expect in a book proposal or, you know, what their journals are like and get as much information as you can. Don’t be afraid. I mean, they’re there to try to, especially books acquisitions editors, you know, they’re looking for new projects.

They want to work with people. And so, you know, the more you can kind of mine out of people that work for publishers, the better. I think there’s a lot to learn there, especially because you do find at a lot of academic pressures that you have a lot of former PhDs or people with PhDs working in their field, acquiring books in their field.

So, yeah, I mean, I was drawn into publishing because I finished in 2008, 2009, right, as the job market crashed. And I had sort of been on the fence about a standard academic career. I adore teaching, but I wasn’t entirely sure that I was cut out for a really focused academic career in the ways that I sort of– when I looked around at the people that were really excelling and were really dedicated to their academic careers, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was sort of willing to give up.

It felt like to me when I looked at it, and I know that this isn’t the case for everybody, but I sort of looked and it felt like there were things I would have had to give up. I wasn’t willing to give up. The other thing was, frankly, from a personal point of view, and I know that people think about this, but I don’t know that people sort of voice it very often.

I had a partner who could only really work in a few cities, frankly. He works in the art world. I didn’t want to move to the middle of nowhere just for a job.

And I didn’t want to drag a partner who wouldn’t have any job prospects to a small town somewhere. And I didn’t feel that I was really competitive enough to get a job in a big city where so many people would be competing for jobs. And so I’d considered that maybe publishing might be a path.

And as luck would have it, when I was living in Berlin, I saw this job ad for an acquisition editor in books for applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. And I sort of felt, well, if that’s not my job, I don’t know what is. And was lucky enough to get it and that sort of started my career in publishing.

The other thing that I think is worth keeping in mind, and I have spoken to people that are sort of looking for perhaps non-academic careers after their PhD, is that a lot of people look only at editorial work in publishing. I started out as an editor and it was incredibly rewarding. It ended up that I got the chance to sort of stay connected to the field.

I got to go to a lot of conferences that I couldn’t afford to go to as a student. I got to meet lots of amazing people and speak to academics who I was sort of in awe of, because they’re, you know, knowing their research. But ultimately, I started to get more interested in kind of the bigger picture of publishing and, you know, the scholarly communication ecosystem and knowledge sharing and distribution.

What does that mean? How does it work? And at the core of that too is how does the business side of it work?

I mean, I think when you’re inside the sort of academic space, you can seem a bit, I don’t know, less appealing to sort of think about those sort of more commercial aspects. But I started to get drawn in trying to understand those parts and have moved from editorial into the commercial side and now working particularly with sort of open access business models. And it’s been a really interesting journey to sort of be able to take all of that academic knowledge and the experience in the research side and kind of consider, well, what does that mean for ultimately a sustainable knowledge distribution sharing landscape?

And how do we do as much good in that as we can? How do we make sure information scholarship is accessible to the broadest amount and broadest group of people? You know, what does that mean and how do you do it and all of that?

What does it mean infrastructurally? What does it mean, you know, what are all the gory details of that has become, you know, very interesting? So, I think, you know, I guess all of that to say, you know, it’s worth keeping an open mind and kind of looking across publishing.

That’s something that should be just outside of an academic career. And, you know, I’m always happy to talk to people about it, especially early career or students, early career researchers and students that are considering other pathways.

Brynn: Well, and I’m glad to know that people like you are out there doing that work because I think wanting to bring the research that we do and the knowledge that we in the academic world have to the broader public. That’s something that I feel really passionate about. I’m always advocating putting things into language that lay people can understand.

And I think that that’s really, really important. So, I’m really glad that that’s something that you’re doing.

Dr. Farrell: What was so lovely about ultimately sort of getting to the conclusion of the book was that, no, we knew it from the beginning, but once we’d sort of written the book and we were kind of concluding and thinking about what it meant to have drawn all these studies together, we sort of ended up coming back to this notion of data sharing. And that’s become such a big topic in open access and sort of increasing open research practices. And it’s been such a big topic in hard sciences, where there’s been the sort of crisis of reproducibility and replicability in some of the more quantitative social sciences.

You know, there’s been a lot of discussion about that sort of thing and issues around research fraud and research transparency. It’s really only more recently where there’s been more of a discussion about, well, what does that mean for the humanities and social, more qualitative social scientists? And should we be sharing data?

How on earth can we share data? Do researchers in humanities even call what they have data? Should we be sort of forcing these frameworks on researchers from the outside, either as publishers or, you know, the sorts of mandates from funders to share data?

Obviously, you have funders like the Gates Foundation that have a data sharing policy, and others, you know, more and more of these mandates for sharing research. But, you know, have we done enough of the work in thinking about what that means for ethnographers in particular? Because especially if you haven’t built sharing into what you’ve done from the beginning, there are so many ways that it can feel very complex, not just personally from the point of view of, oh, I don’t know that I feel comfortable sharing all these, you know, field notes and so forth with other people, but also that they’re sort of not written to be read by anyone else, but also that there’s just so much context that’s not there just in the transcript or even in your field notes.

And so, part of what we ended up being able to explore a little bit is that we see the benefit of drawing these studies together, but we also saw the challenge of, you know, how on earth you do that. So, you know, how do you provide the context? How do you make sure that your notes and your transcriptions are read in the right ways and not taken without all of that extra detail?

So, you know, I think in some ways it’s something of a beginning of a journey to think about what data sharing truly means for ethnography and how we can really best draw on the huge benefits, I think, that we all saw this sharing, but also do it with the right amount of caution in kind of considering how we connect these pieces together and what it would mean for somebody else coming from the outside to use it. I mean, I think that’s also come up more and more in the last year with the explosion of large language models and AI and knowing that if we’re making this data available publicly, what does it mean if a ChatGPT, et cetera, is using that data to feed modelling without any broader context? How do we consider what that means and how we’re feeding that?

So I think it’s very topical and I think at least for me being so involved in open research from the publisher side of working very closely with libraries and some funders, considering what it means to actually be part of the research side of it, digging in and understanding in more detail what are the benefits but also the real challenges here and I think there’s a lot more thinking to be done there. So, I’m really hoping that out of this book, you know, we can continue to think about and work on ways that we can buffer and care for our data in the right way and care for the people that are that data when we’re talking about ethnographic work. So yeah, for me, I really hope in my professional life to continue to expand on what that means, even in things like how we talk about our own open data sharing policies for humanities and social sciences at Taylor and Francis. So, there’s so much more that can come out of this.

Brynn: And you’re right, it’s such a huge topic right now – data sharing, doing collaborative work, making sure that your data is available for reuse and reproducibility. And that’s what I think Life in a New Language does so well and is such a good ground breaker for that. Thank you for giving us that food for thought.

And on that note, thank you for being here today. We really appreciate it.

Dr. Farrell: Likewise, thanks Brynn. Thanks for all the fabulous questions and great conversation and yeah, looking forward to talking more.

Brynn: And thank you to everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network to your students, colleagues and friends. Until next time!

Australia Day Parade Melboure (Image credit: Mitchell Luo on Unsplash)

In October 2020, the Australian government outlined budgetary plans to create language requirements for migrant partners seeking to remain in the country permanently. They would now need a ‘functional’ level of English and make a ‘reasonable’ effort to learn English. A ‘reasonable’ effort would mean undertaking over 500 hours of (free) English classes over five years or pass an English test.

In this post, I outline the issues arising from this proposal informed by my previous relevant research in the UK.

The social dimension of language testing

Language testing and assessment, especially in relation to immigration and settlement, cannot be extricated from their social foundations and the prevailing political debates that contribute to their introduction.

In Australia language tests have long been used to distinguish between desirable and undesirable immigrants and citizens. The notorious Dictation Test implemented under the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 as part of the White Australia Policy, for instance, was administered to undesired arrivals and, in the form of a dictation test in a random European language, was almost impossible to pass.

I argue that the current migrant partner measures provide new iterations of this legacy under the guise of  “integration.”

The British experience with an English language test for partner visas

Perhaps the British context, where similar measures have been in place since 2012, may provide clues as to what the social consequences of the proposed policy might be. My comparison here is based on research I conducted between 2014 and 2016 as part of a research team for an ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) funded project at the University of Leicester on the British citizenship test process.

In the UK, those seeking to re-unite with a non-EU partner must first demonstrate that they can earn a minimum salary of 18,000GBP per year. The partner must also pass an English test prior to arrival in the UK. This requirement obviously predominantly affects non-white families, as EU migrants and those from an English-dominant country such as Australia or the US are exempt from the requirement.

The English language test is highly onerous

Language testing prior to arrival in the UK is expensive and time-consuming. The testing process alone delays family reunification because gaining access to test centres can be arduous. In many countries, simply taking the test involves traveling to towns and cities far away from home. This generates costs on top of the exam fee and involves losses that accrue through time off work, as I show in Khan (2020).

Migrant language testing and assessment create borders

Whether through language testing or classes, injunctions are placed on migrants backed by legal and linguistic authority to regulate their access to rights and resources based on their language proficiency. These borders can extend the jurisdiction outside territories, as is the case in the UK, or enforced within them as is the case with the newly proposed measures in Australia. It also means that testers, institutions and teachers are on the front line of ‘border-work’ in implementing the measures.

Whether through territorially externalised borders or internalised bordering, the new Australian language requirements also create borders for families within families. The new proposals provide linguistic borders which replace existing recourse to rights and resources with conditionality. This is a key element of bordering practices and means the ‘assessed’ must fulfil the conditions to be ‘believed’ by the state and should they fail, they remain outside the border vulnerable to the harms caused by further exclusion.

Language tests for migration purposes discriminate against women

In our research on citizenship tests with over 150 participants we found consistently that those most negatively affected were women, usually mothers, from non-European countries. These women struggle to pass the test because they lack the means to improve their English while often dealing with childcare and domestic duties. This therefore demonstrates the intersectional nature in which language testing for migration purposes can exacerbate inequalities among those who are supposed to most benefit.

Language tests for family reunification are discriminatory

The new proposals are discriminatory in several intersecting ways. Firstly, the introduction of English language requirements immediately makes it more onerous for those from non-English dominant countries and becomes a racist proxy. Secondly, the time and expenses required, particularly in not being able to access the job market in the meantime, affects migrants in terms of socioeconomic means and class. Thirdly, women who are juggling several forms of care roles struggle the most. This is all before taking into consideration the role of literacy and level of education. All in all, the new language requirements are likely to exacerbate existing inequalities rather than eradicate them.

Everything that's wrong with the new #English #language requirement for a partner visa to #Australia

Explainer in short thread https://t.co/KN6WBENxTP

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) October 7, 2020

Reference

Khan, Kamran. (2020). Raciolinguistic border-making and the elasticity of assessment and believeability in the UK citizenship process. Ethnicities, 1468796820971441. doi:10.1177/1468796820971441

Related content

Faine, Miriam (2020). English language proficiency and national cohesion. Language on the Move.

Miriam’s mother arrived as a refugee in New Zealand in 1939. She still remembers the kindness her family was shown.

Like many other Western countries, Australia is currently grappling with the global wave of refugees, together with the threat of terrorism. Although the Australian government has managed a very successful immigration and settlement program since the 1940s, the current conservative government and their supporters in the media, and especially the Minister for Immigration, Peter Dutton, have linked the risk of terrorism with new immigrant and refugee communities. A recent government policy change outlined in a document called ‘Strengthening the Test for Australian Citizenship’ proposes tough new barriers to achieving Australian citizenship, including an English level of IELTS Band 6.

Mr Dutton claims that “The Australian public wants to see an increase in the English language requirement, they want to see people meet Australian laws and Australian values”. However, there has been widespread opposition across the community to the changes in the English language requirement and the opposition Australian Labour Party has decided to oppose them, too.

There is no evidence that introducing more rigorous language testing and raising the bar for citizenship will support the successful integration or English language learning of immigrants or refugees; rather it may achieve the contrary. The language hurdles to citizenship proposed by Mr Dutton are unrealistic and overcoming them will be unachievable for many adults who arrive in Australia under different visa classes.  This policy will inevitably lead to two classes of permanent Australian residents, one of them an underclass without access to the privileges of citizenship.  Is this what the Australian government wants?

It is beyond question that English is the national language of Australia but we also need to recognize that Australia is characterized by high levels of linguistic diversity: Many current Australian citizens (including some indigenous ones) are not proficient or even competent in the national language.

In spite of this, successful contemporary democracies including Australia have flourished because of the contribution of diverse immigrants and, of course, the contributions of their children.

The evidence of Australia’s successful 70-year-old immigration program shows that such a new English language test is not necessary.  Many Australian citizens originating from non-Anglophone countries would never have passed the proposed test and may still not have ‘proficient’ English after many years in Australia. Yet their hard work – and their brain power – have built modern Australia, and this has not been impeded by their less than perfect grasp of English.

They and their children will remember that this government, by imputation, has discounted that contribution.

People with limited English have successfully participated and still do participate in workplaces and communities.  We should not conflate formal education with life skills, as the independent Senator Jacqui Lambie has argued in the Australian parliament. The millions of migrants and refugees who built post-war Australia learnt their English through immersion in communities and workplaces that afforded opportunities for participation and inclusion; as they used to say out at the Ford motor car factory in Broadmeadows in Melbourne: ‘we didn’t learn English but we learnt to speak Ford’.

Rather than making full inclusion in the Australian community provisional on first knowing English, the sociolinguistic evidence shows it is the other way round: newcomers learn English through participation in the Australian workforce and community when and were they are welcomed, appreciated and involved. And Australia does have a proud record in this regard.

Lack of education and the challenges of adult language learning are reasons why many current Australian citizens are not fluent in English after many years living and working here, including those who have attended English language classes.  In spite of this, their dedication to Australia is, or should be, beyond question. Learning a language formally as an adult is a difficult process, as many of us have experienced.  It is particularly difficult if a learner has limited education in his or her own countries, because of poverty, or war, or displacement.

When Prime Minister Turnbull claims that imposing the test is ‘doing people a favour’ he has not understood that when migrants and refugees fail to acquire English, it is not for want of trying. Most are eager to learn English and willingly attend ESL classes. But adult second language learning does not progress at a steady pace from zero to proficient, even when learners have high levels of motivation and convenient tuition available.  Rather, individual learners ‘stabilise’ at different points along the continuum, very often before reaching the kind of ‘proficiency’ measured by level 6 of the proposed test (International English Language Testing System or IELTS).

IELTS Band 6 requires English skills far beyond those required for everyday participation in the wider community; essay writing for example. IELTS (including the ‘general’ IELTS) was designed to test formal ‘school’ English skills, and therefore discriminates against migrants with limited education, such as refugees and humanitarian arrivals. It also discriminates against women who have missed out on basic schooling due to gender discrimination or poverty in their country of origin.

It seems highly likely that many applicants for citizenship would fail the proposed test.  In fact, many Australians  – including citizens by birth – would not succeed in reaching this level yet have sufficient language skills for social engagement and employment. Its validity in the context of citizenship testing is therefore highly questionable.

In effect, the government is proposing that immigrants and refugees from non-English speaking countries demonstrate mastery of English far beyond that required in everyday life and intends to link such a level of English to the assessment of who is a desirable citizen. The implications of the proposed change for our understanding of what is means to be Australian and what kind of country Australia is are highly disturbing.  Multiculturalism, a policy that has served Australia well for two generations, is now apparently no longer an Australian value.

Condemned to consume

My migration newsfeed in the past few weeks has been dominated by news about the Syrian refugee crisis and the various European and international responses. But there have also been two other noteworthy migration news: one relates to the changing face of immigration to Canada as increasingly highly educated migrants are admitted and the other relates to revelations that the Australian 7-Eleven convenience stores systematically exploit international students and other temporary visa holders.

How do these various news hang together?

“Traditional” immigration countries such as Australia and Canada have a relatively small refugee intake in comparison to their various work migration schemes. While the former dominate the news, the latter dominate the numbers. According to ABS data, the net immigration to Australia, in the financial year 2013-14, for instance, was over 212,000 people; humanitarian entrants accounted for only around six percent of these. So, maybe unusually internationally, Australia accepts far more “economic migrants” than “refugees.”

The rationale for this selection is that skilled and well-educated migrants, who fill labour shortages, are good for the economy; while refugees are a “burden” on the economy. One of the many complexities that this dichotomy overlooks is, of course, that refugees are often likely to be skilled and well-educated, too.

Let’s ignore that detail for the moment and ask whether migrants’ skills and education necessarily lead to social inclusion.

Social inclusion is a notoriously difficult concept to define. Despite frequent references to social inclusion in contemporary national and international policies, there is actually a notable lack of consensus as to what constitutes social inclusion. Most commentators see the promotion of economic well-being as constituting the core of social inclusion. However, the contributors to two recent collections devoted to “Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion” that I (co)edited for the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics found it necessary to go beyond the economic core meaning of social inclusion to also include a wider meaning of social inclusion as a sense of community participation and belonging. The contributors showed that inclusion is a multifaceted phenomenon and linguistically diverse populations may well be included on one level but excluded on another.

Recent research with Soviet Jewish migrants to Germany offers a highly pertinent discussion. The researcher, Sveta Roberman, undertook a year-long ethnographic project to examine the migration and settlement experiences of this group. She developed the concept of “inclusive exclusion” in response to the following observation:

I kept sensing a peculiar atmosphere, intangible and hard to describe, that pervades the lives of many, an aura of dissatisfaction and restlessness that borders on—or has become—apathy and resignation, articulated in an often-expressed sentiment: “We are kind of existing here, not really living.” (Roberman 2015, p. 744)

It’s an observation that resonates with a lot of the research into the language learning and settlement experiences of adult migrants conducted with very different origin groups by my students and myself here in Australia.

The people Roberman conducted her research with are Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union, mostly from Russia and Ukraine, who settled in Germany in the 1990s and early 2000s. About 220,000 Soviet Jews were admitted during that period. For the re-unified Germany, accepting substantial numbers of Jewish migrants was yet another step on the long road of atonement for the Holocaust. It was hoped that these migrants would contribute to a revival of Jewish cultural and religious life in Germany.

“Germany of all places?!” (Source: Jewish Museum Frankfurt)

Around 80% of these migrants were tertiary-educated and had established professional careers in the Soviet Union. Most of them were secular and, because “Jew” was an ethnic and not a religious category in the Soviet Union, only about a third of these migrants ended up joining Jewish religious communities in Germany. In fact, in contrast to Soviet Jews migrating to Israel or the USA, those coming to Germany were probably least motivated by ideological reasons. Roberman’s participants did not hesitate to explain that they had migrated for economic reasons, in search of a better life.

This context seems ideal to examine the social inclusion of migrants: a highly-educated migrant group, a high degree of cultural similarity between migrants and hosts, and public desire on the part of the destination society to embrace this particular migrant group.

A migration fairy-tale? Not quite.

In the way social inclusion is usually conceived as economic participation and cultural recognition, Roberman’s participants had little to complain:

When speaking about their encounters with the host country, my interviewees were not troubled by their economic situation; they felt secure and protected in that sphere of their lives. Neither did they complain about the lack of possibilities for the articulation of their Russian or Jewish identities: the former could be practiced at the range of Russian cultural centers, clubs, and libraries, while the latter could be actualized and maintained within Jewish communal centers and organizations. Even the constraint they faced in political participation, because many immigrants lacked full citizenship, was hardly an issue for my interviewees. (Roberman 2015, p. 747)

Migration had enabled the participants to partake of Western economic affluence, they had received significant, though not always full, legal and political citizenship rights, and, as a group, cultural recognition.

So what was missing? Access to regular, stable and meaningful employment.

Participants who, at the time of migration, were in their mid-30s or older found it extremely difficult to find employment commensurate with their education, skills and experience. This was not for lack of trying. Participants were deeply influenced by the Soviet work ethos and extremely resourceful in their attempts to find work. The German state also helped with the provision of language and training courses and a suite of short-term work and internship programs designed to help migrants transition into full-time regular employment.

Except they didn’t.

The usual intangible barriers of accent, non-recognition of overseas qualifications, lack of local experience, etc. that we have often discussed here on Language on the Move applied in this case, too. Age discrimination was another factor. Middle-aged participants in the study ended up trying to secure stable employment for years. During that time they were supported by welfare and a range of casual short-term jobs, including state-sponsored employment schemes.

Olga, a qualified and experienced teacher, for instance, arrived in Germany when she was 40 years old. Her qualifications were not recognized and she was involved in various re-training schemes. She also held various casual jobs as an attendant in an aged-care home and as a social worker. When she turned 50 without having achieved regular standard employment, she was officially “removed” from the labour market and declared an “early retiree.”

Being unable to find regular employment meant that the participants struggled to construct a coherent life-story and to see meaning in their migration, as was the case for Olga:

I was sitting in her apartment as she tried to compose a coherent narrative of the 10-year period of her life in Germany. But that seemed to be an unachievable task: the flow of her life narrative stopped at the point of emigration. What followed were fragmented facts that she resisted bringing together into a meaningful story, seeing little achievement or sense in her 10-year migration experience. (Roberman 2015, p. 752)

Another participant, Mark, who had been a cameraman in Kiev and was 53 years old when he arrived in Germany had given up looking for work after six years and lived on welfare. He said, “Once I had some objectives in life, I aspired to something, I had some plans, […] Today, I wake up in the morning, and I have one and the same question to ask myself: what do I do today?” (quoted in Roberman 2015, p. 754).

Sveta Roberman, Sweet Burdens (SUNY Press, 2015)

Like others in his situation, he filled his life with surfing the internet, watching TV, attending doctor’s appointments and, above all, shopping. Some developed elaborate routes to stretch out daily grocery shopping, others threw themselves into the pursuit of specials and sales. While these activities fill time, in the long run they breed a deep sense of isolation and loneliness. Being an anonymous shopper trapped them in the position of social strangers.

At one level, consumption spaces are some of the least discriminatory spaces imaginable; one participant made this point with regard to language proficiency:

One does not need language in the supermarket. The system is itself interested to sell you the thing, and the system finds its way to do it; they succeed in selling it to you in any way. It does not matter what language you speak. (quoted in Roberman 2015, p. 756)

At the same time, this participant makes the point that consumption spaces are spaces of extreme dislocation. In the supermarket or shopping mall it does not matter who you are. In fact, it does not even matter that you are there. Being reduced to filling their time with consumption resulted in a sharp feeling of невостребованность: “uselessness,” “redundancy,” like unclaimed luggage. One participant compared her situation to that of cows who are allowed to graze on lush green pastures but nobody bothers to come and milk them.

In short, participants were free to consume: they had achieved a comfortable and economically secure existence through their migration. However, their access to resources of real value – stable and meaningful work – was constrained. In this context, the freedom to consume condemned them to consume. Consumption did not result in a sense of dignity and self-worth, it did not allow them to forge coherent positive life-stories and it did not provide them with a sense of belonging. While included economically, legally and culturally, their participation is ultimately constrained – a condition Roberman calls “exclusive inclusion.”

Our economic system is characterised by overproduction and there is the regular need to dispose of surplus goods. Consequently, even relatively poor members of affluent consumer societies, such as Roberman’s irregularly employed and/or welfare-dependent interviewees, are readily included in the sphere of consumption. By contrast, stable and regular employment is in short supply. Exclusion from this scare and valuable resource continues to be a powerful way to reproduce social hierarchies. Disadvantaged groups of local people may be similarly excluded but migrants are particularly vulnerable on post-industrial labour markets and to the unemployment, underemployment and exploitation that go for “flexibility.” As Roberman (2015, p. 759f.) concludes:

Exclusive inclusion is a much more civilized, camouflaged form of exclusion. It seems to be mild. But, in spite of its apparent mildness, exclusive inclusion, which limits access to social resources of real value and to participation in the arenas of social recognition and belonging, is no less destructive in the ways it undermines the excluded individual’s world, threatens humanness, and strains the social fabric as a whole.

References

Piller, I. (2014). Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion in Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 37(3), 190-197.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2011). Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 14(4), 371 – 381.

Roberman, S. (2015). Not to Be Hungry Is Not Enough: An Insight Into Contours of Inclusion and Exclusion in Affluent Western Societies Sociological Forum, 30 (3), 743-763 DOI: 10.1111/socf.12190

Further reading

Zwanzig Jahre Jüdische Zuwanderung nach Deutschland. (2009, 2009-09-22). Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland.

Ferguson, A., & Toft, K. (2015, 2015-09-02). 7-Eleven: The Price of Convenience. ABC Four Corners.

Goldmann, A., & Krauss, M. (2015, 2015-01-21). Weniger Jüdische Zuwanderer im Jahr 2013. Jüdische Allgemeine.

Ortiz, A. (2015, 2015-09-08). Increasingly Mobile and Educated: The Future of Canadian Immigration. World Education News and Reviews.

Shcherbatova, S., & Plessentin, U. (2013, 2013-11-18). Zuwanderung und Selbstfindung: Die Jüdischen Gemeinden im Wiedervereinten Deutschland. Heinrich Böll Stiftung: Migrationspolitisches Portal.

Sveta Roberman recently also published a book about the larger study, which, if the Google preview is anything to go by, is even more fascinating:

Roberman, S. (2015). Sweet Burdens: Welfare and Communality among Russian Jews in Germany. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Speak English, people! says British politician Ed Miliband (Source: msn.com)

Every ten years the UK government conducts a census, which every British resident is obliged by law to take part in. The last one happened in 2011, and the results are now in the process of being released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The 2011 census contained a section on language. Respondents were asked to name their main language, and those who named a language other than English or Welsh were also asked to indicate how well they spoke English—very well, well, not well, or not at all. This question about English proficiency had not been asked before, and its inclusion was a sign of the political times. In the last few years, politicians have become obsessed with promoting the English language as a symbol of ‘Britishness’. All the mainstream political parties now deploy a kind of rhetoric in which speaking English is a patriotic duty, while not speaking it is a threat to national unity and ‘social cohesion’.

In many countries this sort of rhetoric has a long history, but in Britain, for various reasons, it does not. For one thing, the modern UK is a union of four historic nations: there is no single British national identity, and no single language that all Britons have always spoken. English only became the majority language of some parts of the UK in the 20^th century, and it has never been given ‘official’ status in law. Nor, until recently, has its status featured prominently on the mainstream political agenda. The only politicians who consistently raised the subject were representatives of the Celtic nationalist parties, whose concern was not the status of English but the rights of Britain’s Welsh and Gaelic-speaking minorities. Elsewhere in British politics, the feeling was quite strong that what languages people spoke was not the business of the state.

But around the turn of the millennium this began to change. Two main developments prompted the shift: on one hand, increasing popular concern about rising numbers of immigrants, and on the other, increasing anxiety about the threat of radical Islam. This was seen not only as an external threat, but also as an internal one, especially after the ‘7/7’ bombings that killed more than 50 people in London in July 2005. Unlike the 9/11 attackers in the US, the 7/7 bombers were native rather than foreign: most were of Pakistani ancestry, but they were born and bred in Britain. Attention began to focus on the problem of the ‘home grown terrorist’, prototypically imagined as a young male Muslim who had been radicalized because he wasn’t properly integrated into British society.

In 2006, in response to these concerns, the Labour administration created a new department for ‘communities and local government’, whose remit included responsibility for promoting better integration or ‘social cohesion’. It soon became clear that what this actually meant was attacking the ideology of multiculturalism, and removing whatever structures had supported it in practice. And multilingualism, the linguistic correlate of multiculturalism, was one of the easiest and most obvious targets.

In 2008, after a security report announced that multiculturalism was making Britain ‘a soft touch for terrorists’, the minister in charge of the department for communities made a speech castigating local councils for translating material into community languages. This, she suggested, was ghettoizing minorities, giving them no incentive to bother learning English, and so preventing them from integrating with the majority. We all knew where that would lead: ultimately, it was implied, it would lead to more suicide bombings on London underground trains. (Though inconveniently for this theory, the 7/7 bombers did speak English like the natives they were; they even left martyrdom videos in Yorkshire-accented English.)

Since 2008, a steady stream of this kind of rhetoric from politicians and in the media has created a new ‘folk devil’: the immigrant, or member of an established minority ethnic group, who doesn’t speak English and can’t be bothered to learn it. This figure is blamed for all kinds of things: for sending non-English-speaking children to school where they will hold the natives’ children back; for demanding translation and interpreting services that cost the taxpayer millions; for putting up signs in shops that make the natives feel excluded; for fragmenting our communities and threatening our security. Our main political parties have vied with each other to whip up anxiety and resentment which they can then address by taking punitive action against linguistic shirkers and freeloaders.

Labour’s main contribution when they were in power was to ‘reform’ the immigration laws to reflect the new importance accorded to speaking English. First they brought in a citizenship test that has to be taken in ‘a recognized British language’ (aka English—in theory you could do it in Welsh or Gaelic, but Home Office statistics suggest that no one ever does), and then they tightened the English language requirements for those needing work or family visas. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government which came to power in 2010 continued the demonizing process. In 2011, the Tory communities minister Eric Pickles declared it unacceptable for anyone to leave a British school unable to ‘speak English like a native’: young people who fell short of that ideal were making themselves, he said, ‘an unemployable subclass’. Which was rich, considering that unemployment among 16-22 year-olds was running at about 20%–large numbers of young people couldn’t get jobs whatever languages they did or didn’t speak, because there were no jobs.

The Labour Party, now in opposition, has evidently decided that their best strategy is to be even tougher on this issue than the Tories. In December 2012 the party leader Ed Miliband made a speech outlining Labour’s future policy on ‘social integration’. ‘We should start’, he said, ‘with language’. He went on to announce that a future Labour government will cut back further on resources for translation and interpreting, make immigrant parents sign ‘home-school agreements’ underlining their responsibility for ensuring their children speak English, and bring in English proficiency tests for any public sector worker whose job involves talking to members of the public.

Banging on about the importance of English, and the menace of the immigrant who can’t/won’t speak it, is now such a political commonplace, a week scarcely passes without some politician or other making a speech or a comment on the subject. And so far, no one (apart from academics like myself, whose opinions may safely be dismissed as ivory tower nonsense) has challenged the basic presuppositions of this discourse. But the census, whose findings on language were released a couple of weeks ago, has provided what I’m hoping will be some usable ammunition.

If you read about these findings in the media you will probably wonder what I’m talking about, since the reporting was mostly framed by the very presuppositions I’ve just been criticizing. The press and the national TV channels all went with the same story: ‘Polish now Britain’s second language’. In the right wing press, another popular story was ‘22% of households in London contain no one who has English as their main language’. But if you go to the ONS website and take a look at their facts and figures, you may well conclude that the most significant finding is not how many British residents speak Polish, it’s how few of them don’t speak any English.

According to the census data, English in 2011 was the declared main language of 92% of British residents over the age of 3 (around 50 million people). Of the 8% who named another main language, 80% (3.3 million) reported speaking English well or very well. 726,000 said they did speak English but not well, and 138,000 said they spoke no English. The ONS has done the maths: those with limited or no proficiency in English are 1.6% of the British population; those with no proficiency are less than 0.5% of the population. (And that figure must include pre-school children and people who had only just arrived in Britain at the time of the census.)

So, the UK government’s attempt to ascertain the scale of the problem they’ve been talking about incessantly for the past five years has revealed that they’ve been making a mountain out of a molehill—or to put it another way, manufacturing a moral panic. It’s ugly, it’s shameful, and it’s time for it to stop.