NSW Police (Image credit: Edwina Pickles, SMH)

Editor’s note: The Language on the Move team closely collaborates with the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN). To raise awareness of LLIRN and feature the research of its members, we are starting a new series about exciting new research in specific areas of language and law.

In this first post in the series, LLIRN founders and conveners Dr Alex Grey and Dr Laura Smith-Khan introduce the research of three early career researchers working on language, policing, and criminal justice.

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Alex Grey and Laura Smith-Khan

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The Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN) came into being in 2019, after an initial symposium involving a group of academics and students, mainly from Australian universities, whose research is interested in the various intersections of language and law. One of our key goals of the symposium was to learn more about each other’s work and create new opportunities to collaborate.

Since then, LLIRN has grown and we have organized and run a number of different initiatives, including multiple panels at conferences across both linguistics and law, a special issue that showcased the work of several of our (mainly early career) members, and a lively and growing mailing list.

Fast forward to 2024, our Listserv now includes members from at least 37 different countries, at diverse stages of their careers, working as academics, as language or legal professionals, and/or in policy or decision-making roles. However, as LLIRN convenors, we have felt that we still have much to learn about the members who make up the network, the expertise they have and their goals. This new blog series intends to address this gap: we want to learn (or “LLIRN”) more about each other, and to make our learning public so that others too can learn more about us.

Northern Territory Supreme Court (Image credit: Dietmar Rabich, Wikipedia)

In the first of this new series, we showcase LLIRN members, Alex Bowen, Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, and Dr Kate Steel, who are working in areas related to language, policing, and criminal justice.

Alex Bowen, University of Melbourne, Australia

Alex Bowen’s in-progress PhD looks at communication about criminal law and justice with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. His earlier research was about how police in the NT explain the right to silence in police interviews, producing the publications listed below.  He has previously practised criminal and commercial law.

Alex Bowen is interested more broadly in police interviewing, language in legal processes, interpreting and translation, how we understand and talk about law and justice interculturally, and how legal language is influenced by monolingual and colonial assumptions. He is interested in discussing these topics, especially with Indigenous scholars and practitioners, and developing interdisciplinary and intercultural resources for training and education. He may be available for peer review related to the above topics.

Recent publications

Bowen, A. (2019). ‘You don’t have to say anything’: Modality and consequences in conversations about the right to silence in the Northern Territory. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 39(3), 347–374.
Bowen, A. (2021). Explaining the right to silence under Anunga: 40 years of a policy about language. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 18–49.
Bowen, A. (2021). Intercultural translation of vague legal language: The right to silence in the Northern Territory of Australia. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies, 33(2), 308–340.
Bowen, A. (2021). “What you’ve got is a right to silence”: Paraphrasing the right to silence and the meaning of rights. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 28(1), 1–29.

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, University of Lincoln, UK

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida has experience conducting ethnographic and conversation analytic research in police and judicial settings. This has included research on police interviews with suspects in the UK, criminal hearings in Brazil and, more recently, International Criminal Court (ICC) trials, producing the publications listed below. He is currently working on a paper about the role of judges in witness examination at the ICC, focusing particularly on the tensions associated with their dual-role as both referee and truth-finder.  He lectures in Criminology.

International Criminal Court, The Hague (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Ferraz de Almeida is broadly interested in studying social interactions in any form of police or legal context and welcomes contact from researchers with similar interests.

Recent publications

Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Drew, P. (2020). The fabric of law-in-action: ‘formulating’ the suspect’s account during police interviews in England. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 27(1), 35-58.
Ferraz de Almeida, F. (2022). Two ways of spilling drink: The construction of offences as ‘accidental’ in police interviews with suspects. Discourse Studies, 24(2), 187-205.
D’hondt, S., Perez-Leon-Acevedo, J. P., Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Barrett, E. (2022). Evidence about Harm: Dual Status Victim Participant Testimony at the International Criminal Court and the Straitjacketing of Narratives about Suffering. Criminal Law Forum, 33, 191.
D’hondt, S., Pérez-León-Acevedo, J. P., Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Barrett, E. (2024). Trajectories of spirituality: Producing and assessing cultural evidence at the International Criminal Court. Language in Society, 1-22.
Ferraz de Almeida, F. (2024). Counter-Denunciations: How Suspects Blame Victims in Police Interviews for Low-Level Crimes. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 37, 119–137.

Dr Kate Steel, University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK

Dr Kate Steel’s PhD (2022) and continuing research explore interactions ‘at the scene’ between police first responders and victims of domestic abuse, producing the publication below. This work draws from police body-worn video footage within one force area in the England & Wales jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. This research responds to the typical simplification of the crucial role of communication at the scene is and its under-emphasis in official procedure for the first response to domestic abuse, at both local and national levels.

Dr Kate Steel is now working with another police force to develop language guidance specific to the policing context of domestic abuse first response.  She lectures in linguistics.

Recent publications

Aldridge, M., & Steel, K. (2022). The role of metaphor in police first response call-outs in cases of suspected domestic abuse. In I. Šeškauskienė (Ed.), Metaphor in Legal Discourse (224-241). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Available from https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9900169
Steel, K. (2023) “Can I have a look?”: The discursive management of victims’ personal space during police first response call-outs to domestic abuse incidents. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 37(2): 547-572.

What about you?

Do you work or research in an area related to criminal justice and language, or another area where language and law intersect? Join the LLIRN!

What other language and law topics would you like to learn about? Have your say on our next LLIRN “What’s new in language and law research?” blog post. Let us know in the comments or join the network and send us an email!

Upcoming events of interest in this area

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Dr Kate Steel will both be presenting their research in the coming months, including at the IAFLL European conference in Birmingham. Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida will also present at the Forensic Conversations in Criminal Justice Settings Symposium in Loughborough in September.

The logo on the side of the bus shelter

Latin at the bus stop

Recently, I was out for a walk when it started to rain. Seeking shelter in a nearby bus stop, I had time to look around, and I noticed something I had never noticed before although I must have seen it often: a Ku-Ring-Gai Council logo.

The logo is a circle of about 20 centimeters in diameter. It depicts two cartoon characters, one sitting, one standing, encircled by the words “KU-RING-GAI COUNCIL” and “SERVIENDO GUBERNO.”

The cartoon characters are presumably intended to depict two Aboriginal men of an earlier period. The drawing is crude, and the image seems retrograde, out of place, and just plain weird. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about some dumb schoolboy graffiti but about a high-quality official logo emblazoned into the plexiglass wall of a bus shelter.

I have been struggling to make sense of it since I first noticed it.

The main council logo (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The context

Ku-Ring-Gai Council is a local government area on Sydney’s North Shore. It has close to 120,000 inhabitants and happens to be Australia’s most socioeconomically privileged area.

The logo I noticed at the bus stop is not the main logo used by Ku-ring-gai Council but an older version. The current main logo depicts a stylized landscape.

However, the logo on the bus stop is not just a historical logo, either: it appears on bus stops of a certain age (less than 10 years old); it appears on signs for bushwalking trails; and it appears on the web.

So, we are dealing with a legacy logo that might be in the process of being phased out but is still imprinted on the landscape.

Indigenous Ku-ring-gai

Ever since I first came to Australia, I’ve liked the romanticism of the name “Ku-ring-gai”. It’s not only the name of a large council area, but also of a suburb where I lived for many years, and a national park I love to explore.

The O’Rourke Family Crest (Image credit: orourkerundle.com)

Like many non-Indigenous Australians, I was, for a long time, under the impression that “Ku-ring-gai” – or a version thereof – was the name of the original inhabitants of northern Sydney. The name made the area more “authentic” for me and seemed to connect the area where I live to its precolonial past.

Inevitably, it turned out to be a naïve fantasy.

A 2015 report by the Aboriginal Heritage Office showed that the term “Ku-ring-gai” was the 19^th century invention of a Scottish schoolteacher. The word may – or may not – have been used by some pre-colonial Indigenous people for – well, we don’t know what.

The report concludes:

It is unfortunate that the term Guringai has become widely known in northern Sydney and it is understandable that people wish to use it as it is convenient to have a single word to cover the language, tribe/nation, identity and culture of a region. However, it is based on a nineteenth century fiction and the AHO [Aboriginal Heritage Office] would argue that the use of the term Guringai or any of its various spellings such as Kuringgai is not warranted given its origin and previous use. It is not authentic to the area, it was coined by a non-Aboriginal person and it gives a misleading impression of the connectivity of some original clan boundaries. It is part of the story of this place that there is no certainty over tribal names, language groups or dreaming stories. To project the opposite is to continue this fiction. (p. 40)

On stolen land

Student uniforms get Latin mottos out into the streets (Image credit: Herald Sun)

Today, Indigenous people in the Ku-ring-gai area are most notable by their absence. The 2016 census recorded 0.2% Aboriginal inhabitants for Ku-ring-gai Council, well below the national average of 2.8%, and even well below the Greater Sydney average of 1.5%.

Why this is so can be summed up quickly: the Sydney area is where the British colonization of Australia began and the Sydney people bore the brunt of the initial invasion, including frontier violence, new diseases brought along by Europeans, and dispossession.

We live on stolen land here.

Still, this is not something polite people like to say and the Council website mutters incoherently about the absence of Indigenous people:

The arrival of Lt James Cook in 1770 devastated in what amounts to the blink of an eye an incomparable and ancient people.
Those not lost completely were altered as survivors gathered into new groups. Much of what we do know about Sydney’s clans must be gleaned from archaeological remains.
While there are some families who have identified links to original Sydney clans-people, very few traditional stories remain about the sites and landscapes of the Ku-ring-gai area.

Latin motto on a military honor roll (Image credit: Monuments Australia)

I also take these ramblings to be an interpretation of sorts of the stick figures in the logo: the mythical Indigenous cartoon characters suggest authenticity and belonging for non-Indigenous Australians.

In the same way that the current logo symbolizes nature and the land through stylized trees, the legacy logo does so through the depiction of stylized Aboriginal people.

“By serving, I rule!”

While the imagery projects an idyllic fantasy about belonging, the Latin motto accompanying the two Aboriginal cartoon characters in the logo is about power and possession.

The motto SERVIENDO GUBERNO is not accompanied by a translation. As the study of Latin has become exceedingly rare, I’m guessing that few people will be able to translate for themselves, and likely just ignore the motto.

For those who can be bothered, a now-defunct council website provides this explanation:

The Ku-ring-gai Council motto, ‘serviendo guberno’, means ‘I govern by serving’ and has been used by Council since 1928. It is included in the logo to reaffirm Council’s fundamental commitment to serving the community. (quoted from Friends of Ku-ring-gai Environment)

The logo of private boys’ school Scots College (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Mottos are notoriously ambiguous, and this is one possible interpretation. But it is not the full story. My translation is “By serving, I rule.”

What kind of service?

Let’s start with serviendo. The etymological connection with “service” is obvious but what kind of service? Just friendly customer service? Probably not.

The motto serviendo guberno has long been used in the coat-of-arms of a knightly Irish clan, the O’Rourkes, and is clearly associated with military service there. From armed service, the idea of service inherent in the motto later seems to have become broadened a bit to all forms of service that men render to the nation:

Since the demise of the Gaelic order O’Rourkes have continued to follow the proud tradition of serving their nation as soldiers, priests, teachers, civil servants and firefighters. (Another O’Rourke website)

The martial interpretation of serviendo is also backed up by its use in war memorials such as the Sandakan Memorial dedicated to members of the Australian and British armed forces who served in World War II in Borneo.

Who rules?

The Latin verb gubernare has obvious associations with “govern.” It can also mean “to direct, rule, guide.”

“Serviendo guberno” on a war memorial (Image credit: NSW War Memorial Register)

It is here used in the simple present first person singular: “I rule.”

Why would council identify as “I”? Surely, “we” or some agentless form would make much more sense.

One way to interpret the first-person singular is to put the motto into the mouth of the individual colonist, a white male subject. Alternatively, the “I” might be read as that of the sovereign; not the democratic sovereign of the people, of course, but the individual sovereign of the monarch – the Crown as the legitimizing force of colonization.

Why Latin?

Non-English monolingual signage is exceedingly rare in Australia. Where such signage appears, the language in question is often Latin.

In addition to Ku-ring-gai Council, many institutions have Latin mottos and slogans. All the following examples appear in Latin only, without translation. The translations in brackets are mine.

The Monuments Australia database shows many war memorials that include slogans such as “Quo fas et gloria ducunt” (“Where right and glory lead”) or “Pro patria” (“For the fatherland”).

“Masculinity is being enacted” says this school logo (my translation) (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Schools often have Latin mottos. And they really get Latin out into the street as school children sport the mottos on their backpacks, uniforms, and caps.

Examples include “Virile agitur” (“Masculinity is being enacted”), “Utinam patribus nostris digni simus” (“May we were worthy of our fathers”), or “vi et animo” (“with force and courage”).

Australian universities also have a thing for Latin phrases, from ANU’s “Naturam primum cognoscere rerum” (“To know the nature of things first”) to Sydney’s notoriously confusing “Sidere mens eadem mutato” (“The same spirit under different stars”).

Latin is supposedly a dead language. But there is probably more Latin signage in the Australian linguistic landscape than there is signage in any Indigenous language.

Like the cartoon characters in the center of the logo, the function of Latin in these mottos is symbolic. The Latin phrases emblazoned on Australia’s institutional linguistic landscape do not per se mean much: too few people know Latin for this to be the case; and some of the explanations, translations and interpretations provided on institutional websites are – linguistically speaking – pure fantasy.

The use of Latin is another way to anchor Australia’s whiteness in history. Latin symbolically links Australian institutions to European deep history, to a history that happened long before the colonization of Australia: classical antiquity, the Roman Empire, and medieval Christianity.

Marking white possession and belonging

Together, the Aboriginal cartoon characters and the incomprehensible Latin motto do two things in a place where both the presence of actual Indigenous people and any meaningful use of the Latin language is negligible. First, the mythical – in contrast to physical, material, or real – presence of Indigenous people offers non-Indigenous Australians a fantasy of belonging. Second, Latin provides the same illusion but in starker terms: not as a fuzzy feeling but as the legitimacy of possession. Together, they mask unbelonging and erase dispossession.

My thinking about the logo and Latin in the Australian linguistic landscape has greatly benefitted from Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. The author argues that the national belonging of non-Indigenous Australians is predicated on their willful forgetting of the fundamentals of their residence in this land: colonial conquest, racism, and the dispossession of Indigenous Australians.

Indigenous Australians can never forget or overlook the evidence of their dispossession. For non-Indigenous Australians it is easy to forget and not to notice – we have built a world that provides a fantasy of belonging while hiding the original theft.

Malinche mediating between the Spanish and the Americans (Source: Lienzo de Tlaxcala, mid 16th c)

We live in an age of crisis, as humanity confronts an ever-escalating climate and environmental disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a steep decline in social and political trust. How to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters presents a set of fundamental collective action problems. Collective action can only come about through communication. That’s why language and communication need to be written into robust disaster prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Social and linguistic exclusion go hand in hand

Those who bear the brunt of disasters are often the most marginalized members of society. One aspect of their marginalization is their linguistic exclusion. Linguistic exclusion can take many forms and the most pertinent language and communication barriers relate to:

• A mismatch between the language chosen for public communication and the language repertoires of the target audience
• A mismatch between the medium chosen for public communication and the literacy levels of the target audience
• A mismatch between the channels chosen for public communication and the channels accessible to the target audience

Where these mismatches pile up, as they often do, the result is, first, that excluded groups may lose out on vital information. Second, social fragmentation and loss of trust are likely to follow. These can deepen inequalities further and may result in a vicious circle working against constructive collection action.

Crisis communication in context

Language and communication are fundamental to both the problem and the solution of crises. Students in this year’s postgraduate unit about Literacies in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University undertook research projects to gain a better understanding of language as both problem and solution in the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of their research projects was devoted to water scarcity in India. Despite receiving good rainfall, lack of access to safe drinking water has reached crisis proportions in India. The problem is human-made and linked to a poor understanding not only of water conservation but wider political processes that impinge on water allocation, contamination, and over-exploitation.

Those most affected by water scarcity are poor rural women, for whom limited access to safe water intersects with low levels of literacy. Solving their water crisis thus must be embedded in participatory communication processes – in their language, communicated orally, and part of mutual, engaged face-to-face interactions.

This video by Hida Fathima Kassim, Ingrid Ulpen, Thi Tuyet Trang Tran, and Xiwen Chen sums up the students’ findings about water communications.

If you want to learn more how water scarcity has been made on the subcontinent, I’d recommend Mohsin Hamid’s novel How to get filthy rich in rising Asia. It illuminates how water has gone from fundamental elixir of life to capitalist commodity through the rags-to-riches story of a poor village boy rising to bottled water tycoon.

Confronting crises throughout history

Ours is not the first generation confronting the destruction of our world, even if we might be the first to do so on a global scale. Disasters and crises are painfully evident to students of language and culture contact. Foundational moments in language history – for instance, the prehistoric spread of Indo-European across Eurasia, the emergence of English out of a series of invasions of the British Isles, or the dawn of English as a global language – all went hand in hand not only with the elimination of other languages but also the destruction and large-scale transformation of conquered civilizations.

How did former generations deal with such crises?

In another postgraduate unit in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University, Languages and Cultures in Contact, we sought answers to this question by exploring objects of language and culture context that bear witness to the crises precipitated by often violent language and cultural contact. One of our case study objects was chocolate.

Additionally, we traced the stories and experiences of some of the most engaged – whether voluntary or forced – linguistic and cultural mediators. One of our case studies was of the inhabitants of precolonial Sydney who had to face the disaster of British colonization. How did they deal with the havoc wreaked on their world?

We studied the example of the warrior Bennelong, who was kidnapped by the British with the perverse intention to convince him of their kindness and to teach him English. Initially forced into the role of mediator, Bennelong soon actively sought to establish kinship relationships that would bind the Australians and the British together in a set of mutual obligations.

While we do not have first-hand accounts from Bennelong and the other First Australians who had to become crisis communicators as they confronted the destruction of their world, some of their stories can be gleaned from the accounts of the conquerors, as Inga Clendinnen does in her historical ethnography Dancing with strangers:

Inga Clendinnen "Dancing with Strangers"

In this thread students @MQLinguistics read Clendinnen's historical #ethnography based on the diaries of the officers of the 1st fleet to learn about #InterculturalCommunication between British colonizers and Sydney's Indigenous people pic.twitter.com/dfm6DbHNU7

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) October 7, 2021

Women as linguistic and cultural mediators

Historical ethnography can also give us insights into the experiences of cultural mediators in the Americas. In precolonial American societies, women had long played roles as cultural mediators. Restoring peace after conflict and war was a role for which linguistically and spiritually gifted girls were trained for from a young age in some societies. The aim was that they would be able to act as interpreters and mediators by forging new kinship relationships and mutual obligations so as to minimize violence and suffering on both sides.

Some American societies tried to use this tried and tested approach to mediate inter-ethnic conflict in their encounters with the Spanish or British invaders, too. Some multilingual and multicultural women communicating at the frontline of the invasion crisis have gained ever-lasting fame and the names of Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea are still familiar today. These larger-than-life characters provide fascinating case studies in crisis communication on two levels: first, as intercultural communicators in their own right, and second, as the symbols of intercultural contact into which they were molded by later generations.

This video by Brynn Quick, Lydia Liu, and Vanessa Sanchez-Guayazan introduces these three women as misremembered linguistic interpreters and cultural ambassadors:

Preparing crisis communicators

In her book Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women as Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols, Rebecca K. Jager argues that the precolonial societies into which these women were born had processes and procedures in place to prepare for crises by identifying and training talented girls to become linguistic and cultural mediators.

Malinche, for example, received an elite rhetorical education through the medium of Nahuatl before being sent to live in a Mayan trading hub, from where she was given to the advancing Spanish. This way, she already was an experienced language learner and intercultural communicator by the time she became the interpreter, advisor, and lover of the Spanish commander, Hernán Cortés. In a sign of respect from both sides, the Spanish bestowed the honorific title Doña Marina on her, and the Americans used a honorific title in their language, Malintzin. From what we can gather from the historical record, it seems that Malinche genuinely believed that accommodation between the Americans and the Spanish might be possible, and that she was prepared to work towards bringing about a joint future.

To return to the present day, what processes and procedures do we have in place to prepare the next generation of crisis communicators? How could those processes and procedures be strengthened and improved?

Easter chocolates in the supermarket (Image credit: Wikimedia)

I’ve been thinking a lot about chocolate lately. Maybe because it is Easter and supermarkets in my part of the world are laden with chocolate products.

Chocolate is good to think with

Chocolate is good to think with – and I don’t mean just because chocolate is known to make our brains release endorphins, chemicals that make us feel good.

Chocolate is good to think with because it provides an easy-to-grasp explanation of the workings of global capitalism and the persistence of a colonial world order.

Global chocolate

The global chocolate industry is worth over 100 billion US$ per year. That wealth accumulation starts with the cultivation of the cacao bean and ends with the Easter egg melting in your mouth.

Cacao grows in tropical climates close to the equator. The world’s largest producer and exporter of cacao beans are two West African countries, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Together with Ecuador, Cameroon, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil, and Papua New Guinea they grow most of the world’s cacao.

Virgin forest cleared to make way for cacao plantation (Image credit: Peru Reports)

Cacao farming is a fast-growing plantation monoculture and a major factor in deforestation. 80% of Côte d’Ivoire’s rain forest, for instance, has in the past few decades been cut down to make way for cacao plantations.

Even though Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana dominate global cacao production, your Easter egg is not going to say “Made in Côte d’Ivoire” or “Made in Ghana.”

The label on your Easter egg is most likely to read “Made in Germany” because Germany is the world’s largest chocolate producer and exporter, followed by Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland.

Cacao – the raw product – is shipped from Africa to Europe to be transformed into the valuable chocolate.

The main consumers of chocolate are in North America and Europe. Over 10% of the world’s chocolate is eaten in USA alone, followed by Germany, France, United Kingdom, and Netherlands.

Per capita chocolate consumption in some of these countries is truly staggering. The average Swiss person, for instance, eats a whooping 8.8 kilos of chocolate per year. The thought alone is enough to give me constipation (although Australians are in no position to point fingers: each of us eats 4.9 kilos of chocolate per year).

The biggest multinational corporations running global chocolate are based in USA (Mars, Mondelēz, Hershey), Italy (Ferrero), Japan (Meiji, Ezaki Glico), Switzerland (Nestlé, Lindt & Sprüngli), UK (Pladis), and South Korea (Orion).

The back-breaking work of cacao production is done in the (supposedly former) colonies (Image credit: Insider)

The global division of labor could not be clearer: those who do the work and suffer the degradation of their environment are completely separated from those who grow rich on their exploitation and those who enjoy the fruits of their labor.

The chocolate profiteers and chocolate victims remain invisible

Despite the ubiquity of chocolate in supermarkets of the global north, few people know how the chocolate got there.

Most of us are ignorant of the money behind chocolate. Italy’s richest man, for instance, is Giovanni Ferrero, of the Nutella chocolate spread. Giovanni’s fortune is estimated to be 32 billion US$. By contrast, the average cacao farmer earns less than one US$ per day.

Now that we have the economics of global chocolate straight, let’s turn to language. The way we think about the word “chocolate” can tell us as much about language and culture contact, as it does about capitalism and colonialism.

“Chocolate” is a universal word

One of the most foundational ways to think about languages is to classify them into many different languages, each separate from the other.

From Afrikaans to Zulu, there are 6,000 languages or so. Each different from the other and each tied to a particular nation, ethnicity, or culture.

The word for “chocolate” and “cacao” in 56 languages (sourced from Google Translate; Latin alphabet used throughout for easy comparability)

Now consider the word for “chocolate” and “cacao” in those languages.

The table shows 56 translation equivalents of “chocolate” and “cacao”, all based on Google Translate, and all written in the Latin alphabet for easy comparability. One glance suffices to see that “chocolate” and “cacao” are essentially the same word in all these languages. There are pronunciation differences, for sure, but it is obvious that that is all there is.

Does it make sense to say that “cokollate” is an Albanian word, that “shukulata” is an Arabic word, that “tsokolate” is a Cebuano word, that “qiǎokèlì” is a Chinese word, that “chocolate” is an English word, that “Schokolade” is a German word, that “chokollis” is a Korean word, that “shoklat” is a Persian word, and that “ushokoledi” is a Zulu word?

Of course, each of these forms is adapted to the phonology of each language but it is equally clear that the most salient aspect of each of these words is not their difference but their similarity.

The German philological tradition has a term for these types of words that are pretty much identical across languages: wanderwort. Wanderwort literally means “wandering word” or “migrating word.” Such migrating words are “items that are borrowed from language to language, often through a long chain of intermediate languages” (Hock & Joseph, 2009, p. 484).

A textbook example for a wanderwort is “sugar” – another key ingredient in chocolate – which probably started out in Sanskrit as “śarkara” and moved westwards to become Persian “shakar,” Arabic “sukkar,” Greek “sákkharon,” and Spanish “azúcar.” The word did not stop with Spanish but hopped over to French “sucre”, Italian “zucchero”, German “Zucker”, and English “sugar.” The Greek version “sákkharon” took an additional route into Western Europe and also gave us English “saccharin”.

Migrating words – and there are many of them – remind us that the borders between languages are not fixed but highly porous. Language and culture contact is the norm, and has been the norm since time immemorial.

That is the first language lesson of chocolate.

Chocolate is a colonized word that has become universal

The overarching narrative of language contact and language spread in our time is of the triumph of English. Language – like everything else of value – supposedly emanates from the European centre to the rest of the world. Colonial languages are powerless and dying away in the face of the English juggernaut.

There is certainly some truth to this story but it is not the only story. An alternative story is encapsulated in the word for “chocolate”.

Precolonial Mesoamerican depiction of a marriage ceremony involving a drink of chocolate (Image credit: UC Davis Library)

The cacao bean has been cultivated in Mesoamerica and brewed into a chocolate drink for thousands of years. Accordingly, the words for “cacao” and “chocolate” have a long and varied history in the precolonial languages of the region (Dakin & Wichmann, 2000).

The migrating words for “cacao” and “chocolate” that we encounter today in (possibly?) all the world’s language is based on Nahuatl “kakáwa” and “čokola:tl.”

While colonial languages have certainly been spreading, individual words from colonized languages have been on the move, too. Some, like “kakáwa” and “čokola:tl” have made themselves at home universally.

Like “cacao” and “chocolate,” many universal words come from the world’s most threatened and minoritized languages.

Another iconic example is “kangaroo.” This universal word comes from Guugu Yimidhirr, an Australian language from Far North Queensland with less than 1,000 speakers.

The second language lesson of chocolate is that language spread is not a one-way street and colonized languages have also made their tracks around the globe.

Eurocentric etymologies

The Spanish conquest of the Americas brought the cacao bean and its preparation to the attention of Europeans.

The internet is full of claims that “Cortés was believed to have discovered chocolate during an expedition to the Americas” or that “Christopher Columbus discovered cacao beans after intercepting a trade ship on a journey to America and brought the beans back to Spain with him in 1502” (my emphasis).

Europeans have long lied to themselves about chocolate: this 17th century treatise depicts an Indian princess handing over chocolate to the higher-placed Poseidon, the ancient Greek god of the seas (Image credit: Internet Archive)

This is incorrect – like most “discoveries” of the colonial period and the so-called “Age of Discovery,” the existence of the cacao bean and its use in chocolate preparation was well-known to the Aztecs.

In today’s terms, what Cortés, Columbus, and all the other “discoverers” did might be called plagiarism or intellectual property theft.

Words like “cacao” and “chocolate” bear witness to that grand theft in the languages of the world.

Not surprisingly, the colonizers have tried to erase those linguistic tracks.

“Kangaroo” was for a long time thought to be “unknown” in any Australian language, and the idea was that Captain Cook and Joseph Banks somehow made up the word. Another apocryphal story had it that “kangaroo” actually means “I don’t know” in Guugu Yimidhirr. In this anecdote, local knowledge is completely erased while Cook and Banks come out as the heroic discoverers who made sense out of local ignorance.

It was not until 1980, when the publication of R.M.W. Dixon’s The languages of Australia finally settled the debate and confirmed something the Indigenous people of North Queensland had known all along: that the universal word “kangaroo” came from their language.

A similar obfuscation takes place when you look up the etymology for “chocolate” in English. English “chocolate” is said to derive from Spanish “chocolate” or French “chocolat.” The latter in turn derives from Spanish “chocolate,” and only in another step does it go back to Nahuatl “chocolatl.”

The etymology of the German “Schokolade” similarly highlights inner-European transmission by deriving German “Schokolade” from Dutch “chocolate,” which derives from Spanish “chocolate.” Nahuatl is only mentioned at the end of that list.

In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt writes that “an imperial tendency to see European culture emanating out to the colonial periphery from a self-generating center has obscured the constant movement of people and ideas in the other direction” (p. 88).

Amongst other things, colonialism has been a huge project of knowledge transfer from the colonized to the colonizers. The third language lesson of “chocolate” is to lay bare the big con that has made it look as if knowledge only travels in the other direction.

References

Dakin, K., & Wichmann, S. (2000). Cacao and chocolate: a Uto-Aztecan perspective. Ancient Mesoamerica, 11(1), 55-75.
Dixon, R. M. W. (1980). The Languages of Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hock, H. H., & Joseph, B. D. (2009). Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics (2nd rev ed.). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Pratt, M. L. (2008). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

***

The histories and everyday experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia are etched in the landscape, the waterways and the voices of those who can speak and understand ancestral Aboriginal languages. They also thrive in post-invasion contact varieties such as Kriol and Aboriginal English.

Researching Aboriginal English through yarning

When our sociolinguistic project into Aboriginal English in Nyungar country (southwest Western Australia) started in early 2019 little did we know how much our fieldwork would enrich us. The premise was simple: head out into metropolitan Perth, set up the cameras and talk to people. Then use those recordings to figure out how Aboriginal English is changing. But there were so many questions. What model of research would be favoured and why? How should we collect our data? Who should we approach? What would people talk about?

It would have been reasonable to follow existing practice in sociolinguistics. But the canonical methods of the field are mostly based on industrialised, Western cultures and societies. How could we ensure that different ways of knowing would be incorporated into the project? How could we move beyond the Eurocentric mainstream to “hear the voices” of people historically pushed to the margins?

Data collection in a Perth city park (Photo reproduced with permission)

To the rescue comes Glenys Collard, a Nyungar woman, a native speaker of Aboriginal English and an experienced language worker whose input into the project changed the research forever.

Instead of a sociolinguistic interview, our data collection tool of choice was “yarning” – an Indigenous cultural form of storytelling and conversation. This type of conversation and storytelling is highly dramatic, using much gesture, facial expression and variation in tone and volume. The lack of pre-defined questions in the “yarning” format allowed speakers to remain in control of what they wanted to share while the cameras were on.

Recruiting research participants through listening

Instead of institutions, we headed out to meet people in their homes. But there was a catch. A significant number of Aboriginal people are homeless. In 2016, for example, Aboriginal people made up 3.7% of the total population of Western Australia but accounted for a staggering 29.1% of the homeless population in the state.

Glenys Collard was adamant these people’s stories should be heard, too. She led us into the streets and parks they call home. She reached out to them, she explained what we were doing and why. The photo shows Glenys Collard and the four women we spoke to at a Perth City Park in mid-2019. Glenys explains what was special about yarning with these women:

These yorgas [women] were too deadly [great], they could spin a few good yarns and they took after yarnin flat out about who they was, what they been doin. It was deadly. Celeste talked to them and they already looked at me so I gave them the ok with my eyes and closed mouth. The four of them were Aboriginal English speakers. I don’t think another researcher would have chosen them to speak with because of the area and the other people who were there. They all had a yarn and they wanted to share so we stay an listen.

They wanted to speak to us because of Glenys. She made the research safe for them. At the end of the session, Celeste asked Glenys why people – both in the park and elsewhere – had been so keen to speak to us. Glenys replied: No one has ever listened to them before.

These feelings are echoed by Dr Chelsea Bond, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman and University of Queensland academic. Dr Bond explains that Australian society is founded on the non-existence of Indigenous people. She frames a lack of listening around police aggression. “Blackfellas are always speaking about police brutality – why aren’t people listening?”

Recording stories about police brutality and racism

Indeed, accounts of police brutality feature prominently in our collection. The corpus is replete with stories of racism and abuse.

Nita’s story stands out. We were outside a popular medical centre in downtown Perth when we saw her. Nita (a pseudonym) seemed upset, but she was keen to have a yarn so we set up the cameras. The microphones are on. Her twenty-something-year-old nephew is dead. Found dead at one of Perth’s private prisons. The police tells her and her family that her nephew killed himself. She and her family disagree: the bruises on his body indicate otherwise. She is sure her nephew was killed.

In another example, a prominent Aboriginal Perth leader spontaneously told us the story of a Nyungar woman who was evicted from her home in metropolitan Perth. When he arrived to try and stop the eviction, the woman’s heels were dug into the framework of the door, her little grannies (grandchildren) everywhere, police “by the mass”. He recalls seeing the police dragging the woman by the hair as her grannies looked on. He saw the Department of Child Protection officers take the woman’s grandchildren away.

Why aren’t people listening?

A young Aboriginal student we yarned with sums it up perfectly: “Someone who has grown up privileged cannot even fathom the idea of how we [Aboriginal people] might have grown up. It’s like a bad dream to them, like a nightmare. But that’s what we’ve lived, you know?”.

More than sociolinguistic samples

The voices in the stories we collected for our research are much more than high-quality linguistic samples of Aboriginal English. They are raw and real accounts of the community’s histories and everyday experiences. Our cross-cultural fieldwork allowed us to record the community’s voices using a culturally appropriate genre (yarning) and placing a community member, Glenys Collard, at the core. Her presence, experience and wisdom allowed us to move a step closer towards decolonising research into Aboriginal English. Importantly, her expertise allowed us to “hear the voices” of those rarely featured in sociolinguistic research.

Acknowledgement

This research is funded through a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) (DE DE170100493) and a 2019 Australian Linguistic Society Research Grant.

Whether #writing was invented even more often is complicated because (1) incomplete record (2) unclear connections between writing systems (3) the history of writing is a colonial story

Side exploration: #Australian #Indigenous message stickshttps://t.co/ExI5ZcgOHe pic.twitter.com/sgLlWAAyWq

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 3, 2020

One of the reasons I don’t go into detail is that I’m not an expert and don’t know all that much about Australian Aboriginal Message Sticks myself. However, taking my Literacies unit online has offered the opportunity to create a lesson about them by bringing the world’s foremost expert on the subject, Dr Piers Kelly, right into my classroom.

Piers and I met up on Zoom and I brought along some of my burning questions: What does a message stick look like? What is its purpose, and how has the use of message sticks changed over time from the precolonial period via the late 19^th/early 20^th century and into the present? Why do we know so little about message sticks, and how has colonialism shaped our knowledge about message sticks? How did message sticks fit into the multilingual communication ecology of precolonial Australia? And, of course, the million-dollar question: are message sticks a form of writing?

To find out the answers to these questions, and more, listen to this audio-record of our conversation.

Context, context, context

One of the most intriguing points that Piers makes in the interview is that the symbols engraved on message sticks probably didn’t make sense on their own but only worked as part of the overall context: the symbols needed to be “read” together with the material of the stick itself, the identity of the messenger, and the context of reception.

This may seem unusual at first glance: as users of the alphabet we have come to see writing as one of the greatest abstractions of all, entirely independent of context. The key point of literacy seems to be the product – the text – that carries the information. Writing allows us to strip away all that seemingly irrelevant context.

This is certainly how Europeans approached message sticks: objects of sufficient interest to be collected but really quite unsophisticated if compared to the libraries full of books and huge monuments that other literate civilizations have produced. So, the message sticks got collected and put away in museums, and hardly anyone bothered to learn how they were used.

However, our ways of seeing literacy have changed and the idea that the most interesting aspect of literacy is not the written artifact but the way it is used has recently gained traction in Literacy Studies. The analytic focus is now on literacy events:

A key concept for the empirical study of ways of taking meaning from written sources across communities is that of literacy events: occasions in which written language is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes and strategies. […] In such literacy events, participants follow socially established rules for verbalizing what they know from and about the written material. Each community has rules for socially interacting and sharing knowledge in literacy events. (Heath, 1982, p. 50)

Let me describe a modern literacy event to you that has many similarities to the way message sticks were used:

Sydney Water Sample Bill

Once a day, five days a week, a representative of Australia Post rides their motorcycle through my suburban Sydney street. Outside each house, there is a letter box with a number on it and sometimes the postie puts an object into that box. If they put something into the letterbox in front of my house and I’m at home, I might get up from my desk and walk out to get it. Or I might put it off till later because, unless I’m expecting a delivery of some online purchase, the object they put into my mailbox is inevitably a bill.

In other words, the object is a piece of writing but I know its content without having even sighted it, let alone read it.

Once I collect the letter and see, for example, the logo of Sydney Water on the envelope, I know that it contains the quarterly water bill.

I don’t need to read the details of the bill: focusing on the amount due and the due date, the bill makes me take action. I will log onto my bank account and arrange payment. I then place a little check mark on the bill and file it away in some folder. Usually, arrival and payment of the water bill also leads to one or more family conversations about water consumption.

Now imagine aliens landing on earth and starting to collect mailed letters. Like the European colonizers of Australia, they might conclude that our writing systems was not particularly sophisticated because so much information was actually outside the writing symbols: part of the message is in the person of the messenger (if it’s not the postie but a teenager who stuffs something into my letterbox, I know it’s advertising); part of it is in its placement (if it’s a rolled object that’s thrown onto the driveway out of a running car, it’s the free local newspaper); part of it is in the design of the envelope (if it has the logo of the local council, it’s the council rates); part of it is in the colors (if the amount payable appears in red, payment is overdue); part of it is in a diagram; and so on and so forth.

They might also miss that the artifact itself is not particularly important. What matters is that the bill spurs the recipient into action (i.e. payment) and leads to a conversation about water consumption. Of course, they might also be more enlightened and take a holistic view and understand that the text is just a prop that enables us to do things with words.

Collection of message sticks in the Australian Museum, Sydney (Image credit: Joys of Museums)

Now, you might wish to argue that my comparison between message sticks and mailed bills is flawed because bills are only one text form among many genres that we use in our society.

That is true but it does not invalidate the point that the meaning of writing does not exclusively – or maybe not even predominantly? – reside in the symbols that make up the writing system, and in the selection from this system that is assembled into any given text. The context of use and the use event fundamentally shape the meaning of all writing.

Can you help demonstrate this point by adding a description of a literacy event you engage in? How does the context shape the meaning of the text? And what kind of action do you undertake with that text as prop?

Additional resources about Australian Message Sticks

1. Kelly, Piers. Ed. (2018). Australian Message Stick Database
2. Kelly, Piers. (2020). Australian message sticks: Old questions, new directions. Journal of Material Culture, 25(2), 133-152. Open access
3. Kelly, Piers. (2020). A very short reading guide to research on Australian message sticks

Reference

Heath, Shirley Brice. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11(1), 49-76.

Chats in Linguistic Diversity

Did you enjoy this conversation? It is the first in a series of Chats in Linguistic Diversity. In the past some of you may have enjoyed our Lectures in Linguistic Diversity at Macquarie University. Due to Covid-19, we’ve obviously had to put this lecture series on hold. We hope that our occasional podcast Chats in Linguistic Diversity will make up for these for the time being. Feel free to contact us with topic suggestions.

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick; added on 15/03/2024)

Dist Prof Piller: You’re listening to Chats in Linguistic Diversity, brought to you by Macquarie University and the Language on the Move network, hosted by Ingrid Piller.

My guest today is Dr Piers Kelly, an anthropologist and literature researcher from the University of New England in Armidale. Piers’ PhD is from the Australian National University in Canberra on Eskayan. Eskayan is the utopian language that was created over 100 years ago by a radical prophet in the southern Philippines. That sounds super-intriguing, but he’s also an expert of something even more intriguing, and that’s Aboriginal message sticks, and that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

Piers is the creator and editor of the Australian Message Stick Database, a digital repository of more than 1,100 message sticks and their associated metadata, and he’s the author of a fascinating new article that has just come out to the Journal of Material Culture. The article is called Australian message sticks: old questions, new directions. Welcome, Piers.

Dr Kelly: Thank you.

Dist Prof Piller: Piers, how did you get interested in message sticks?

Dr Kelly: Well, I heard somebody in Europe give a talk, and in the talk she mentioned Australian message sticks as a kind of comparative aside, and I thought to myself, “Well why don’t I know something about this?”, and it was shortly before I was about to start a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in in Germany in a lab that was looking at the evolution of graphic codes of all kinds. And it occurred to me that I was the only Australian at the institute at that time, and I should bring something Australian to the topic.

So, when I was back in Canberra, I contacted the National Museum of Australia that had some terrific message sticks. The museum was very helpful, and they agreed to photograph the 50 or so message sticks in their collection at no cost. And this became the basis to the database that you mentioned, and I also got some help from ((((((. And back in Germany, I began very slowly developing the database mostly by visiting European museums.

I was surprised by just how many message sticks are in those museums, particularly in Germany and the UK. And I didn’t start out with any big questions, just a kind of curiosity to learn a bit more than I did. And it was never really my main project when I was at the Max-Planck Institute. I was mostly working on writing systems and the question of how communities that are traditionally not literate, how they appropriate or re-invent writing systems for their own purposes. And now I’m still interested in that, but I’ve kind of put that question on pause for a while, and I’m focusing more deliberately on message sticks.

Dist Prof Piller: Can you describe a message stick? What actually is it?

Dr Kelly: It’s a hard question because a message stick can look like anything, but a very typical shape, if you like, if you can imagine a piece of polished wood that’s about 20cm long maybe. It’s tapered at one end, and sometimes it’s tapered at both ends. It can be more or less flattened like a ruler, or it can be cigar-shaped, and then it has markings along its surfaces. So, the most common markings are simple notches and lines, and you also get dots or stippling, but there can also be quite elaborate and iconic pictures. And some of them are so fine and small that they are only visible if you look very closely in bright lights. That’s been my struggle in a museum setting where it’s not always possible to get a bright light. So that’s the typical shape – a tapered, polished stick that’s marked with signs.

But then there’s quite a diversity across Australia. So, there’s a message stick from Mornington Island in the National Museum of Australia that’s a metre and a half long, which is huge. It’s painted and it has emu feathers fixed to one end, a beautiful object. And in the database, the smallest one that I came across is just over 5cm long. It’s tiny and wrapped up in possum fur twine and it’s from people of western NSW.

But one of the things that I found that complicates the question even further of what a message stick is supposed to look like is the fact that, in a tight spot, Aboriginal people could use other things as message sticks. So, there’s a wonderful example of the spear-thrower from Victoria that was repurposed as a message stick, and sadly it’s been lost in a fire.

Dist Prof Piller: Now that we know what a typical message stick looks like, what did Aboriginal people do with it? How were they used? What is the purpose? Maybe you can break this up for us – how were these message sticks used in pre-colonial times? How were they used in the late 19^th/early 20^th century? And how are they used today? Or are they used today?

Dr Kelly: They are still used today in a different way than they were used before. They are certainly still used today. The traditional way that message sticks were used in pre-colonial times follow the kind of set routine that, to my understanding, is reasonably consistent across Australia. It goes something like this: Someone wants to send a message to another person or to another community that is outside of their territorial jurisdiction. They appoint a messenger, who is usually a man, and then they go off and harvest a small piece of wood which they then begin carving in the presence of this appointed messenger. While they are carving it, they explain the content of the intended message and the meaning of individual signs carved on it. For example, it might be “It’s fine to hunt kangaroos. They’re plentiful. We need to coordinate people for the hunt”. So, the person who is the sender is making the stick and explaining the message.

Then the messenger takes the message stick and sets off towards the camp of the intended recipient or recipients. And what’s important to say is that his identity and purpose as a messenger is made really clear. So, the message stick is displayed publicly. It can be hung on the end of the spear, or inside a net bag. It can be tucked in a waist girdle or a headband. There are examples of message sticks, really small ones, that have in fact been stuck through the nose or through the septum, but the point is that everyone must be able to see it. And the messenger can kind of signal his role through things like body paint as well. Everyone needs to know that he has a message because there’s a strong protocol of “We’re not shooting the messenger” (or not spearing the messenger) because once he passes into country over which he doesn’t have traditional rights of access he would otherwise be placed in danger of being killed as a trespasser on the spot.

So, he crosses over a political boundary without harm and approaches the camp of the recipient and usually sits some distance away, so everyone can see him and that he means no harm and that he has this kind of ambassadorial mission, if you like. And then eventually he’ll perhaps be given food and be invited to approach the camp, and at this point he delivers the message stick to the recipient along with a verbal explanation of what it means, as it was conveyed to him by the original sender. This, again, is all still done very publicly. The recipient might then carve a message stick as a response, or simply give a verbal reply which the messenger then takes back home.

So that’s the kind of classical routine with variance around the place. Some groups did all of that but without a message stick at all. For example, the Diyari people of South Australia didn’t use message sticks, but they still did that routine, and the messengers for the Diyari were women, always women. Most elsewhere in Australia it’s almost always men.

This routine of the messenger, sender and recipient began to change with the establishment of the colony. The Aboriginal people began to take advantage of different forms of transport, like horses, carriages, steamers and so on. The motifs that appeared on message sticks were also influenced by new finds, introduced by settlers. There’s an example of a message stick with a representation of a police insignia, for example. There’s one I saw at the Pitt Rivers Museum that has playing cards inscribed on it. There’s a few from the Kimberley region that have intriguing representations of what look like letters of the Roman alphabet.

It’s also in this time that there are cases of non-indigenous people, settlers, learning how to make message sticks and then using them to communicate with indigenous communities. So there becomes this kind of hybrid technology. Then as the 19^th century wears on it seems more common for women to be sending message sticks, or to be messengers themselves, even in places where women traditionally didn’t do that. So, the system is getting shaken up by the expanding colonies, and it’s finding ways to adapt.

By the early 20^th century, message sticks are no longer widely used in that traditional routine that I outlined before except in the Top End, in places like Arnhem Land, Tiwi Island, which are places that are very interesting for my research. It continues there in some places until the 1970s. Meanwhile, in the rest of Australia, there’s the emergence of the new tradition of what I’ve called “Artistic Message Sticks” or replicated message sticks. This tradition coincides with the rise of commercial indigenous art production. So indigenous begin making message sticks specifically as objects for sale to settlers. And in some cases, they may look similar, or even identical, to the traditional message sticks, but they’re not invested with any communicative meaning. And this is a practice that continues in various forms today. In fact, a large number of the message sticks in museums come from this tradition.

Meanwhile, back in the Top End, where the traditional practice was continuing, we get the emergence of yet another practice which is about using message sticks in very high-profile, political negotiations with non-indigenous institutions. For example, the earliest example I have of this is a group in the Tiwi Islands. They sent a message stick to Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1951, and indigenous leaders from Acheron and Mornington Islands sent a joint message stick to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1974 to demand land rights. Bob Hawke got one in 1983. There was even a message stick tabled in the Senate in 2007. And last year you might have heard of a guy called Alwyn Doolan who’s an indigenous man from Queensland. He walked 8,000kms to deliver 3 message sticks to Scott Morrison who, in fact, refused them, which was kind of extraordinary.

So, this is a practice with kind of high-profile, political message sticks. It’s still going strong, and it’s very much a continuation of these earlier practices when message sticks could sometimes have a very strong diplomatic function. Late 19^th century ethnographies talk about message sticks being like a royal seal that authenticates the messenger and his message. And of course, one of the purposes, traditionally, was to solidify alliances. So, I think that’s a strong continuation of that, from a part of Australia where the tradition was very strong through the 20^th century.

What’s really different about the contemporary political use of message sticks is that they are almost being passed from an indigenous representative to a non-indigenous institution. Unlike the traditional routine, the sender and messenger are usually one in the same person. So, you make a message stick, and you carry it yourself to the Prime Minister or whoever else, so that’s an innovation.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s pretty shocking to hear, that the Prime Minister would actually refuse to accept a message stick. Unbelievable.

Dr Kelly: I was in contact with Alwyn Doolan at the time, and we were trying to together write something about this, but it was very hard because he had a smartphone but he was on the road so long. When he started out his journey, it was before the election, so this is how long his journey was. He arrived just in time for the results, so I wonder if it had have been Bill Shorten that had won the election, it might have been a different case. But it was a real missed opportunity, I think.

Dist Prof Piller: Indeed. And that kind of brings us to this question of why we actually know so little about message sticks. I have to tell you, the first I heard of message sticks was 2 years ago when I saw a tweet of yours about message sticks on Twitter. I believe this wasn’t the first time I actually saw message sticks because I had seen the Aboriginal collections of a number of the museums that house quite a few message sticks. I feel like I must have seen message sticks in museums before your tweet drew my attention to them. That, to me, in a sense, exemplifies that there is something going on with our lack of attention to them. Can you maybe explain why we know so little and also talk a bit about the lenses that have shaped our knowledge about message sticks.

Dr Kelly: Well, it’s interesting that all those museums are importing collections but, even so, you’re unlikely to have seen them on display. There’s quite a number of message sticks, but they’re all in storage. A few of them are on display in the local (German) library. But in the National Museum I’ve not seen them on display, South Australia maybe or maybe not, I’m not sure. It’s one of those curious things about museums. What you see is only a tiny fraction of what there is, and some of these things will never get seen unless someone asks to see them. They just sit there forever.

But yes, I don’t really know why there is so little written about message sticks. I was worried when I started out on this research area, that maybe they’re not that interesting in the end, maybe that’s why. And that’s certainly not true, it turns out. And it could have something to do with the fact that they don’t enter into the historical, public record until the 1870s. On the whole, settlers didn’t notice that this was going on, that indigenous people were communicating in this way. By the time they clocked onto it in the 1880s and 1890s, message stick communication was already entering into sharp decline across most of Australia. The colonies had expanded almost everywhere. There were, of course, restrictions placed on the movement and activities of indigenous people. Nonetheless, there was a strong wave of interest in message sticks from the 1880s through to the early 1900s. This kind of 30-year period is when most of the message sticks in museums today entered the collection.

But it’s also a period that coincides with the high watermark of social evolutionist theory in Europe, America and Australia. This idea that all human societies could be ranked on a continuum from “savagery” to “civilisation”. The aim of archaeological practice and anthropology was to go and look for those diagnostic markers that told you where a given society was on an evolutionary scale. The most important criterion in this model for attaining a civilisation was that you have writing. That was the crowning technology because it allowed records to be made and writing literally brought a society into history essentially. Indigenous people around the world were considered to be ahistorical or prehistorical because they didn’t have writing. They were kind of seen as representative of earlier phases of European prehistory. It’s important to recognise that this social evolution theory was not a fringe theory at the time. They were paradigmatic, and even critics of the theory who critiqued the model still took the premiss for granted. So very much hegemonic. Aboriginal people in Australia, in this framework, were placed on the lowest rung in that evolutionary scale on the basis of things like an absence of pottery, an absence of metallurgy and, of course, writing.

But then a German anthropologist by the name of Adolf Bastian got wind of message sticks in Cooktown when he was there in the 1880s. It was just as he was about to catch a boat home, and he talks about being so excited that he was debating whether he should miss his steamer in order to find out more about message sticks. He didn’t miss his boat, but in the few hours that he had he found an Aboriginal trooper who volunteered to make a message stick for him and to explain how it worked. And Bastian started thinking, “Hang on, this looks pretty much like writing. And if that’s the case, we really need to re-think what we understand civilisation to be”.

And this preceded a lot of discussion in various scholarly forums about message sticks, what they were. The well-known anthropologist AW Howard sent a questionnaire to settlers all over the country and asked, “Well what do you know about message sticks?”. Then he compiled and summarised the responses, and it led to a debate among settler scholars in a few journals about whether message sticks represented writing. It was framed as a debate, but really the hypothesis that message sticks represented some kind of language was always set up as a straw man – “Well, there are some people who maintain the view that message sticks are writing, but this is ludicrous because of x, y and z”. The consensus position was really that message sticks were largely meaningless and that all the real information was carried in the verbal exchange, and the message stick was really only a kind of token of authentication or a prompt to help the messenger remember the message. At the same time though, the very same people admitted that the signs on message sticks potentially had conventionalised semantic values. They even went so far as to identify them and gloss these meanings in these objects.

So, there was a contradiction at the heart of what settler scholars were doing, and I think it comes down to the fact that they were approaching message sticks from a very Euro-centric perspective that kind of admitted that the only significant or real graphic code out there was writing, something that modelled the sounds of language. If you did anything else with visual signs it was just a kind of noise or decoration. And I think this was a real missed opportunity because after having “solved the question” of what message sticks were, the research energy really waned. Tragically, collectors decided at this point that there was no need to make any effort to consult message stick makers, to understand what the objects were intended to mean. Collecting institutions are filled with message sticks that have ultra-detailed physical descriptions, you know, it’s 16.5cm long, it’s made out of this kind of timber, here’s the Latin name, it has fine cross-hatching, but nothing about who made it or what its intended meaning was. Sometimes not even where it’s from, or you get a label like “Western Australia” which is not very helpful. This is why I think the very best descriptions of message sticks were made before this prejudice took hold. So, settlers and ethnographers like Bastian were open minded about the possibilities, so they recorded much more detail, assuming everything to be relevant.

But after deciding that message sticks were not that interesting because they were not writing, we get these very extraordinary events cropping up in the archives and newspapers and so on. Accounts of message sticks that are successfully interpreted without a messenger, so there is no verbal message that is going alongside them. There are cases of messengers who died on their mission, but the message stick is recovered and then read. A bishop in the NT even conducted a kind of experiment where he was asked to deliver a message stick with a verbal message from Darwin to Daly Waters, and he decided, as an experiment, to withhold the verbal message and just hand over the stick to the recipient. And the recipient of the message took it and accurately read it. He correctly read it as a request for headbands and boomerangs, and he correctly identified the sender too.

Indigenous people also started sending them through the post, for example. There was one that I love that was sent by an indigenous soldier serving in WWII which got intercepted by the military censor, and it was released without censorship, which I think is glorious. Of course, no one would have been able to read it in the censorship office, I assume, let alone the enemy, whoever that was. So, it’s clear that these message sticks were doing something communicative. They’re not just redundant tokens or prompts for memory. I think the short answer to your question of why we know so little about them is that, very early on, message stick communication was mischaracterised, which derailed research. This is why we have ended up with so little, I think, in the way of substantial knowledge.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it’s so sad and such a loss. Do we actually have a chance of ever finding out more about message sticks and their use in precolonial times? Or do we just need to go, “Oh well, unfortunately these settlers had the wrong idea, and not only did they not leave us any information, but they also messed up the practice, so it’s just lost”?

Dr Kelly: No, I think there is a chance. Certainly, there are about 150 or so message sticks that are reasonably well-described, where we get some detail about the context, the message. In very rare cases, we get the original transcription of the original language of the verbal message. We know where, we know when, we even have individual motifs that are glossed in even rarer cases. So that’s good. That’s one way to approach the question. There’s also, I mean some of my work up north is where message sticks were used quite recently, so there are people alive today who can still make a message stick, who can interpret a message stick, who can talk about message sticks. There are very few, I could probably count them on one hand, that I know of.

But as for finding out, going back before 1788, that’s a challenge. There are no message sticks, really, that are recovered from archaeological sites, which is not unusual because Australian climates and soils are not kind to things that are made of wood. There are very few wooden objects that turn up in Australian archaeology and even fewer that pre-date colonisation. There’s possibly one from a cave in Arnhem Land, but it’s perhaps not a message stick. I haven’t examined it yet.

To turn the clock back to before 1788 without recourse to archaeology, my clues that I’m hoping to be able to work on are firstly distribution, so figuring out where message sticks are traditionally used, and where they are not. So, we do have documentation, and maps can be powerful because they reveal patterns that otherwise weren’t obvious, so that’s something I’m trying to work on now. And connected to that process of figuring out the distribution, I’m looking at words for “message stick” in various Australian languages. I’ve only got about 60 so far, but I hope that this information will tell us something about contact and diffusion and inheritance and other wonderful things that historical linguistics can do on that lexical level.

And lastly, it’s a bit of a moon-shot, but I’m looking into oral histories. So I’ve been interviewing senior knowledge-holders in the Top End about their memories and stories that have been passed down to them. And this history is sometimes quite recent and sometimes potentially quite ancient. There are terrific stories that are nursed as temporal markers in the story. It’s not always easy to establish whether they relate to pre-colonial or post-colonial events. And I have one story, but I really need to work on this, so it’s a challenge.

Dist Prof Piller: Wow. You’ve just mentioned that you are looking at the different words for “message stick” in the different Australian languages. One of the hypotheses that you mention in your article is actually that message sticks may also have been used as a means of communication across linguistic boundaries. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about linguistic diversity and multilingualism in pre-colonial Australia.

Dr Kelly: Yeah, I mean that’s interesting too because I’ve just been looking at the words. I’ve been going back to that recently, and there are words for “message stick” that co-lexify often with words for other things, like “stick” or “wood” or whatever. But then, up in the Top End and in parts of the Kimberly and far north Queensland, the word for “message stick” is mark which is, I’m pretty positive, a borrowing from Creole, in parts of Australia where Creole isn’t really used as much. So, I’m just thinking about this. Why would you have a borrowed term, especially in places where the tradition in strong? It points to this kind of multilingual environment. And also, the fact that these are mobile objects. They are moving across territories where different languages are spoken. So, it presents another challenge, I think.

We do know that message sticks were certainly used across linguistic boundaries to the extent that language boundaries coincided to a greater or lesser degree with political boundaries, so that point where you must not cross unless you had permission. So, what this means is that the original verbal message might have been communicated to the messenger in one language, and then that messenger may have passed on the message to its recipient in another language. We have to bear in mind, of course, that we know indigenous communities were and still are highly multilingual. Multilingualism is not and never has been a barrier to communication. On the contrary, languages multiply your capacity for communication. They give you a bigger repertoire.

Having said that, I’m interested in the extent to which message sticks might have been used as an additional semiotic resource alongside language, alongside things like body paint and gesture. One thing that 19^th century ethnographers universally believed was that message sticks had an authenticating function and a pneumonic function. It authenticated your role as a messenger, it authenticated the message, and it helped you remember what the message was. And I think the authentication is real, but I don’t think they really had a pneumonic function because the messages that we have that are all recorded, that are documented, are all very short. At most, they amount to about 6 lines of text when you write it out, and traditionally Aboriginal people could and still can recall song cycles that went all day long. So, I think it comes from a mentality to assume that we can’t remember anything unless it’s written down.

What I think is more likely is that message sticks are about mutual reinforcement, so they reinforce and authenticate the oral message, but the oral message also reinforces and authenticates the message stick. So, if you’re delivering a message into a community with a different language, I can imagine that precisely because the message sticks are not linked to a specific language, they have the capacity to kind of mutually reinforce the message even across language boundaries. So that’s the way I’m thinking about it at the moment, keeping in mind that these are multilingual communities so those resources are there to communicate. But I wonder then, what is a message stick doing when all these other things are available to help handle the message in a particular way.

Dist Prof Piller: That brings us, really, to the million-dollar question – Are message sticks a form of writing? How are they related to other writing systems?

Dr Kelly: I think that’s a really great question. It’s worth revisiting that question because, of course, 130 years ago people were asking it. But we can revisit it, I think, from a less Eurocentric, or a less literacy-centric perspective. A standard definition of writing is that it is a system of visual signs that models some kind of linguistic structure. Usually what it models is phonology, so that’s why we talk about writing systems as being phonographic. They are coding for and reproducing salient sounds of language. But a writing system can also sometimes model morphology but in a more limited way. So we can call that process logographic or morphographic. An ampersand, for example, models the English word “and”, but it will also stand for counterpart words for “and” in other languages like und in German or et in French because it’s not latching on to a phonetic signal. It’s simply standing in for a word.

On the whole, message sticks don’t do anything like this. The signs on them convey meaning, but they are not phonographic or logographic on the whole. So, two people, interpreting the same message stick, will not come up with the same form of words. There are potential logographs on some message sticks. For example, some message sticks have signatures on them (what amount to signatures) that identify the messenger or even the recipient with specific emblems. There is an amazing message stick from Victoria, sadly it’s lost, we have a sketch of it. It has a rebus on it in the form of a picture of a hand, and the word “hand” in that language, spoken near Wannamal, is munya which is also the local word for “meeting”. This is very much writing according to the strictest definition of it because you’re drawing attention to the sound of the word by referencing a homophone.

But it’s clear from commentary that explanations produced by Aboriginal message stick makers and messengers that this is not a principle that’s generally at work in the production of motifs. But if message sticks are not, on the whole, writing as we understand the term then I don’t know how to account for these cases when message sticks were interpreted with accuracy without the benefit of a verbal message to gloss it, those cases where we don’t have a messenger. This is a central puzzle in my research.

I do have a few inklings, though. Certainly, when it comes to the most traditional or classical message sticks, there is only a finite range of themes that a message stick can actually be about. Most commonly it will be an invitation to ceremony. That’s the number one message – a young man’s initiation or a funeral, for example. These are the kind of ceremonies that involve large groups of people that are communicated about with message sticks. This is right across Australia. Then you get message sticks that are for coordinating hunting, you get declarations of war, requests for political alliances, you get requests for items, especially tradeable or luxury items of value. Sometimes you get a kind of a news bulletin, and so on.

So, if you’re seeing a messenger approach, you already perhaps have an idea about what the likely message will be on the basis of probability. The messenger could be painted up in a particular way, for example covered in pipeclay for mourning, so that gives you a good guess that it’s probably about a funeral. I’ve seen message sticks that have got pipeclay on them with fingerprints of the pipeclay, so it makes me imagine that the messenger was covered in pipeclay and that this has rubbed off onto the stick. Then the message itself will be from a specific named individual to another specific individual, and when you know who that person is and their relationship to the recipient, this again contains the possible topics. So, when my dad calls me and I see his number pop up on my phone, it’s often about fixing his computer, you know? I can pretty much guess, as soon as I see his number that’s probably what the topic is going to be. If my brother calls me, well that topic of communication is less likely. It could be a number of other things. And in Aboriginal Australia, we know kinship and social categories can regulate the kinds of things you can talk about as well as the way you’re expected to talk about them. There are expectations, in other words, based on the identity of the sender and recipient and their entire relationship. In many Aboriginal societies, as we know, the whole universe is divided along kinship or social category lines.

So, the kind of timber that’s selected for the message stick might be meaningful in terms of what it’s pointing to in the world, or rather who it’s pointing to in the world. So, in some of the fieldwork I did in Arnhem Land, message stick makers have used, for example, wood from paper bark tree. I asked about it and they said, “It’s soft wood, so it’s really easy to work”. On another occasion they produced a message stick from salvaged timber because we couldn’t get a 4-wheel drive, so we found some salvaged timber that was lying around the backyard and probably just an off-cut from construction. So, the point is with everything I’ve said so far is that, even before we get to the signs, even before we get to the motifs, there is already a pretty well-constrained frame of reference.

When it comes to the signs themselves, they can be quite basic and abstract. I mentioned notches and lines and dots. Nothing that jumps out at you as being pregnant with deep meaning. They can be quite multi-valer too, so a notch is often a person but it can also be a place. It can be a countable object. It can be an element in a narrative. A large part of my work is to try to identify signs and meanings and figure out what general class of information is being coded where. What’s being talked about in the verbal message, what’s recorded on the stick, and what’s entirely unspoken and implicit in these exchanges.

So, to sum up, I think a message stick can achieve results that are very like writing without actually being writing. You could make the case that the signs have, to some extent, semantic value but not language-specific linguistic value. When it comes to looking at how message sticks relate to other systems, I think it’s important to understand writing or language-based writing as just one kind of conventionalised visual code that’s out there in the world. There are many others, like Andean string quipus that are knotted cords once used in the Incan empire for quite complex accounting and administration. There are lots of symbol systems in west Africa and indigenous North America for recording information, sometimes ritual related, and I like to get a sense of where message sticks sit in that whole spectrum.

There are those who make the case that we need to come up with a bigger, more inclusive definition of writing. I actually don’t agree with it. I think the definition of writing being a representation of spoken language is a good one. It’s well-grounded. It’s the connotations that we need to challenge. Thinking in terms of decolonisation, I worry about well-intentioned moves to try to award prestige to a cultural practice on the basis of its underlying or superficial similarity to a western or European model. Instead, I think, let’s decentre writing in literacy as somehow being preeminent. Let’s accept and value that there are other ways to communicate with signs, with visual signs that are perfectly adequate. These should be defined on their own terms, not just in relation to writing. You want to compare, but you also don’t want to centre the colonial metric, if you like.

Dist Prof Piller: These are all such difficult and important questions to discuss. We could go on all day because this is so fascinating, but I’m very mindful that I’ve already taken quite a lot of your time. Before I let you go, if someone has been listening to this and gets really interested in this and wants to learn more, where can people go if they want to learn more about message sticks? Is there a way for anyone to actually join the research?

Dr Kelly: Yes! Yes to all of that. The best way to start is to google the Australian message stick database and click around. Down the bottom of the screen there’s a little map. You can click around and find what’s in your area from parts of Australia that you’re interested in or where you might be from. If you live in Australia, most towns will have a local cultural centre or keeping place where you might be lucky enough to see a message stick, and you can maybe join a locally led, indigenously led research on the ground. At the moment, I’m hoping to work with Aboriginal artists from in and around Armidale, NSW to reconstruct traditional techniques for carving message sticks. I’m really looking forward to that. Starting locally is always a great idea.

The fact that there hasn’t been very much written about message sticks is disappointing but that means there is very little that you have to read to be fully up to date. I have an annotated pdf online called “A Very Short Reading Guide to Research on Australian Message Sticks” which is just a beginner’s guide to get you started. There are endless topics in this area, so if you’re interested in pursuing research topics don’t hesitate to get directly in touch with me. I can point you further into the right direction, especially if you’re perhaps doing a Masters topic or an Honours topic I’m very happy to help there.

Dist Prof Piller: Thanks so much, Piers, and we’ll make sure to actually put up all those links together with this particular podcast and make them available. Thank you very much for your time, and good luck with your research.

Dr Kelly: Not at all, thank you very much.

The Phoenician abjad – the ancestor of almost all scripts in use today (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Today, literacy has become near universal with the global literacy rate around 85 percent. Even the minority who remain illiterate are likely to be aware of the existence of written language (and their exclusion from its benefits). Mass literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of humanity and dates from the 19^th century, with literacy rates steadily increasing over the past 200 years. Before then, literacy was restricted to a tiny elite in those societies where literacy existed and there were many societies that were not familiar with written language at all.

Can you image living in a society that does not have any writing? Why and how would anyone in such a society invent writing?

Inventing writing by imitation

Most writing systems that have been invented through the ages took inspiration from another writing system: the Latin alphabet was inspired by the Greek alphabet; the Greek alphabet was inspired by the Phoenician abjad; the Phoenician abjad was inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs. In another line of transmission, the Phoenician abjad (which, with the exception of the Chinese script, is the ancestor of all writing systems in use today) also inspired the Old Hebrew script (ca. 1000 BCE), which inspired the Aramaic script, which inspired the Syriac script (ca. 500 CE), which inspired the Sogdian script, which inspired the Uighur script (ca. 800 CE), which inspired the Mongolian script (1200 CE).

The details of most of these relationships of inspiration and imitation are lost in history and must be credited to anonymous traders, missionaries, or soldiers. Individual inventors of a writing system are rare exceptions, such as King Sejong, who invented the Korean script. King Sejong took inspiration from the Chinese script.

Creating a new writing system for a language by drawing on an existing model from another language, as King Sejong did for Korean, is undoubtedly an enormous achievement. However, it pales in comparison to the achievement of those inventors who created writing from scratch, at a time when writing did not exist anywhere else in their known world.

Why was writing invented?

Proto-Cuneiform tablet, ca. 3000 BCE (Image credit: Metmuseum)

Living in a highly literate society, it is tempting to imagine that those first inventors wanted to write down stories and transmit them to posterity. Unfortunately, you’d be mistaken. The transmission of stories worked really well orally. Our ancestors had much better memories than we have (and how literacy has affected our brains is another story), as is evidenced from the great epics or the extensive Aboriginal Dreamtime stories that were transmitted orally over thousands of years.

This means that in a preliterate society no one had any need to write down the knowledge that was encoded in stories, myths, legends, or genealogies. And we can be sure that no one just thought one day, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could write down spoken language?”

Writing is a technology that emerged together with urbanization. The first city states constituted a new form of social organization that created specific problems of record keeping: how to account for the surplus created by agriculture and trade, and the activities it resulted in. As humans founded city states and empires, practical problems such as these arose: How much arable land is there? How many heads of cattle can be kept on a particular plot of land? How much tax should be extracted from a farming household of a particular composition? How can we be sure that Farmer So-and-so has already paid his taxes and does not just say they paid? How many slaves need to be captured to build a new temple? How many soldiers need to be kept in the army to protect the city, and how much provisions and equipment will they need to invade the next city down the river and incorporate it into one’s kingdom?

Not necessarily pretty questions that inspired writing invention! Writing was not invented for some lofty intellectual pursuits but as a technology of power. Writing was invented as a means of record keeping. It is an information technology that emerged in the domains of state administration and bureaucracy, trade and commerce, and religion.

Early writing had little to do with language and everything to do with keeping a quantitative record of something. Think of it this way: our writing-inventing ancestors needed spreadsheets. It was only over time that these “spreadsheets” became writing: a visual form of language associated with a particular spoken language.

Who invented writing?

In fact, not all “spreadsheet systems” became fully-fledged writing systems. So, who invented writing? The answer you’re probably familiar with is: the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia. That’s true but it’s not the whole story because writing was invented multiple times, in response to social developments similar to those I outlined above.

Mayan glyphs (Image credit: Ancient History Encyclopedia)

To the best of our knowledge, writing was invented independently at least three times: Sumerian cuneiform in Mesopotamia (ca. 3400 BCE), Chinese characters in China (ca. 1200 BCE) and Mayan glyphs in Mesoamerica (ca. 300 BCE). Of these, only the Chinese script is an unbroken living tradition.

I’m saying “at least three times” because it may well have been more often. Our knowledge is limited in three ways.

First, the archeological record is incomplete and only the most durable early writing (pressed in clay or chiseled in stone) has survived while the record for less durable materials (drawn on paper, velum or bark in natural colors, scratched in bone) has disintegrated and only accidental fragments may or may not have survived.

Second, the relationship between different writing systems is unclear. For instance, there is debate whether Egyptian hieroglyphs (the earliest of which date back to ca. 3250 BCE) constitute an independent invention or were inspired by Sumerian cuneiform. Similar uncertainties exist related to the Indus Valley script (ca. 2600 BCE) or Linear B from the island of Crete in Greece (ca. 1450 BCE).

Third, the history of writing has largely been written by Europeans and is embedded in colonial epistemologies. This limits our knowledge in various ways.

These limitations are well illustrated by our scant knowledge of Mayan writing. To begin with very little research efforts are dedicated to that striking writing system, which only survives in a small number of stone inscriptions and four book manuscripts. This small number is not only due to natural degradation but is the result of active destruction by the Spanish colonizers. “We burned them all”, as Bishop Diego de Landa reported in 1566. Not only the products of Mayan writing were destroyed but transmission was suppressed and eventually knowledge of Mayan writing disappeared.

Deciphering ancient scripts became a European passion in the 18^th and 19^th century. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822 and the German scholars Karsten Niebuhr Georg Friedrich Grotefend deciphered Sumerian cuneiform in 1837. These developments created a lot of excitement and working on ancient documents became all the range in certain academic circles. However, interest in Mayan glyphs remained limited. Partly this was due to the fact that documents written in that script were far less accessible to European scholars than Middle Eastern documents. But it was also due to the fact that – in yet another colonial way of seeing – they thought the glyphs weren’t really a script and just some non-linguistic code. Mayan glyphs were only deciphered in the late 20^th century by US scholar David Stuart, drawing on work by Russian scholars Yuri Knorosov and Tatiana Proskouriakoff.

In the end, not even a topic as seemingly straightforward as the invention of writing has a single story.

Want to learn more?

If you want to find out how our clever ancestors turned their “spreadsheet proto-writing” into visual language, head over to Youtube to listen to my lecture about “The invention of writing” (36:23 mins)

If you don’t have that kind of time, “The invention of writing” also exists as a Twitter thread.

Listen up, boys and girls, because I'm going to tell you the story of the greatest inventors of all times: the inventors of #writing

Can you imagine a world without writing? No writing on screens, no writing on paper, no writing on stone, no writing on clay tables, nothing … pic.twitter.com/9SDjQWONeh

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 3, 2020

Although the content of these three versions is largely the same and although all three versions have the same author, myself, the “story” changes even within these narrow parameters of identical topic and author. Can you spot the differences? How does content and presentation change across the written, spoken, and digital formats? And, with it, how does your learning experience and response change? What are the affordances and limitations of each medium?

Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not … they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb – that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail – the bravery, even, of the lions.

Achebe’s story illustrates that reading is a powerful mind-altering technology: at its best, reading allows us to leave our own selves behind and see the world through someone else’s eyes. For example, reading Achebe’s novel Things fall apart enabled me to experience the world through the perspective of a 19th century Igbo tribesman. Stepping out from our own identity and into someone else’s place in this way extends us in multiple ways. It increases our capacity for empathy and our understanding of the breadth and diversity of human experience.

However, as Achebe points out, there is a dark side to reading as a shaper of minds and identities: stories that never feature people like ourselves or only depict them as negative stereotypes – as “stupid and ugly” – are deeply alienating.

People who have learned to see themselves exclusively through the eyes of others are easily controlled. All regimes of domination make use of these forms of mind control by restricting the circulation of stories.

The annals of colonialism are full of these attempts at mind control via control over literacy. Some are of breathtaking barbarity, such as the burning of the Mayan books by the Spanish conquerors. The destruction of the flourishing and advanced Mesoamerican civilizations was so complete that today few people even know that the precolonial Mayans had developed a writing system and were recording their scientific knowledge, particularly of astronomy, in books.

Destroying the books of the Mayans – and thus consigning their writing system and their knowledge to oblivion – paved the way for the colonizers to re-invent the colonized as an abject people without history and independent identity whose “agony, travail and bravery” remains untold, unnoticed, even unimaginable.

Excerpt from the Dresden Codex, one of only 4 surviving Mayan books (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The technologies of the 16^th century made the destruction of the Mayan codices a relatively straightforward undertaking. As Bishop de Landa states, “we burned them all.” And when he says “all”, he literally meant “all”. Today, only four Mayan codices are known to survive. To add insult to injury, none of these are (easily) accessible to the descendants of the Mayas. Three are located in European libraries in Dresden, Madrid, and Paris, and the fourth in the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City.

Burning books has always been a crude way to control minds. Keeping the stories of the lions out of circulation has always been a more efficient and subtle strategy.

For a long time, the possibility of resistance to mind control via keeping stories out of circulation was severely curtailed by technology. Even when Achebe decided that he would become a writer to tell the story of colonized Nigerians in the middle of the 20^th century, getting his stories published was incredibly difficult. There was no African publishing house and, in fact, not even a typing service. He had to entrust the hand-written copy of his first novel – and the only copy in existence – to international mail and send it all the way to London so that it could be typed up for manuscript submission to a publishing house.

We have come a long way since then. Postcolonial literatures have established themselves, women writers have entered the canons, and, in many contexts, the dominated have found ways to not only tell their own stories in their own words but also to get them published. New technologies are lowering the barriers to circulating the stories of the lions to ever larger audiences.

Do you find yourself in the books you read? And do you make an effort to seek out the stories of those who are different from you?

References

Achebe, C. (1958). Things fall apart. London: Heinemann.
Brooks, J. (1994). Chinua Achebe, The Art of Fiction No. 139. Paris Review. Retrieved from https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1720/chinua-achebe-the-art-of-fiction-no-139-chinua-achebe
Landa, D. (ca. 1566) Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. Retrieved from https://www.wayeb.org/download/resources/landa.pdf

Native and non-native teachers at Lord Harris’ School, Royapett, Madras, 1865 (Source: British Library)

For some time now, a debate has been raging in TESOL about the relative merits of native and non-native speakers as English language teachers. While many people in the field are critical of the continued dominance of native speakers as “ideal” teachers, proposals for change have largely been ineffectual.

True, job ads asking for “native speakers” are now widely considered discriminatory and the relative strengths of both groups are spruiked at conferences. However, none of this has much changed the fact that institutions, students and parents, by and large, continue to prefer TESOL teachers who they consider to be native speakers; that such teachers are oftentimes paid more and hired into more secure employment; and that teachers considered non-native are regularly subject to micro-aggressions such as having their expertise called into question.

Is there a more effective way to overcome native speaker hegemony other than to educate people about the native speaker fallacy?

Absolutely. It has been done before. The following object lesson of native speaker subordination comes from an unlikely source, namely the British Empire and specifically the East India Company.

Persian – India’s power code

To understand this case study, a bit of historical context is required: when the British brought the Indian subcontinent under colonial control, they displaced an existing state, the Mughal Empire. The Mughals’ state language was Persian. In the 18^th century, when the British rapidly expanded and consolidated their possessions on the subcontinent, Persian had been India’s written language, its power code and its lingua franca for over three centuries. In other words, Persian was the Moghuls’ “technology of governance” (Fisher, 2012, pp. 328f.).

Officer of the East India Company being coached in Persian by a private tutor (Source: Massey & Massey, 1968, p. 473)

In order to rule India, it was therefore essential to know Persian. And Indians knew Persian. Britons did not.

As the East India Company tightened its grip on India, it approached this problem gradually by first replacing Indian speakers of Persian with British speakers of Persian and, further down the track, replacing Persian with English as the language of the state. It is the first step in this process that concerns us here: how did the East India Company go about replacing Indians with Britons as privileged knowers of Persian?

Establishing a Persian language teaching industry

Initially, British colonial officials who wanted to learn Persian (or any other Indian language) were largely left to their own devices and such language study was a matter of private enterprise. Many hired Indian language teachers as private tutors.

Gradually, Persian language learning became more formalized and dedicated language training institutes were established. The most important of these were Fort William College in Calcutta, and, back home in Britain, Haileybury Imperial Service College and Addiscombe Military Seminary. These institutes all opened in the first decade of the 19^th century.

Since the 18^th century, Persian-speaking Indian elites had increasingly shifted from working for the Mughal Empire and its ever smaller and more fragmented successor states to accepting employment from the British. For many of them this meant becoming language teachers.

In India, teaching was a highly respected profession and Indian teachers of Persian initially assumed a high-status position vis-à-vis their British students. They were in a bull market, or so it must have seemed: Persian language teaching became ever more widespread and profitable, not only in the colony, but also in Britain, where middle-class families clamoured for an education that would ensure their sons’ future in lucrative colonial positions. Just how profitable the teaching of Indian languages was can be seen from the autobiography of one such language teacher, Lutfullah:

I regularly held the profession of a teacher of the Persian, Hindustani, Arabic, and Marathi languages to the new comers from England, from time to time, and place to place, as their duty obliged and caprice induced them to go. Upwards of one hundred pupils studied with me during the above period, and none of my scholars returned unlaureled from the Government examination committees. I have a book of most flattering certificates in my possession, and I may say that I was better off than many by following this profession. (Lutfullah, 1858, p. 139)

Haileybury College (Source: Wikipedia)

In the colonial logic of the assumed inferiority of the colonized, high-status Indian language teachers with a good income soon became the targets of envy and efforts to undermine them got underway. Returned colonial officials, in particular, wanted teaching positions for themselves rather than see them occupied by Indians. Given their clout and connections, many of them managed to be recruited into Persian language teaching positions in the new imperial training institutes. That their language competence was sometimes almost non-existent did not matter.

The Professor of Oriental Literature at Addiscombe, for instance, was one John Shakespear, who not only drew a professorial salary but supplemented his income by publishing numerous textbooks and teaching aids. His most successful textbook was one of the earliest grammars of Urdu, A Grammar of the Hindustani Language. First published in 1813, it was reprinted and re-issued in new editions for almost half a century. The above-mentioned Lutfullah met Shakespear during his visit to England in 1844 and describes his encounter as follows:

[I] had the honour of being introduced to three men of learning, viz., John Shakespear, the author of the Hindustani Dictionary […]. Knowing the first-named gentleman to be the author of a book in our language, I addressed to him a very complimentary long sentence in my own language. But, alas! I found that he could not understand me, nor could he utter a word in that language in which he had composed several very useful books. (Lutfullah, 1858, p. 389)

Subordinating native speakers

The above example can leave no doubt that the linguistic qualifications of Indians were superior to those of British language teachers. Even so, the former were excluded almost entirely from the enterprise of Persian language teaching, well before that enterprise was abandoned entirely in favour of making Indians learn English.

Addiscombe Military Seminary, c. 1859 (Source: Wikipedia)

The subordination of native speaker teachers was achieved in two ways, namely through arguments related to teacher identity and through a reorganization of language teaching.

The arguments related to teacher identity basically stated that Muslim men were unfit to teach Christian boys and young men. The board of Haileybury College, for instance, decided in 1816 that “the linguistic advantages of having a ‘native speaker’ teach British students was outweighed by the alleged disruption these Muslim Indian men had on the students’ moral education” (Fisher, 2012, p. 344). As in other language training institutions, Indian teachers were replaced with British teachers.

Reorganization of language teaching meant that Indian ways of language teaching (through the study of literature) were devalued in favour of British ways of language teaching (through the study of grammars and dictionaries). While the former approach requires a high level of language competence of the teacher, the latter does not.

Furthermore, Indian teachers were reframed as specialists in pronunciation, and pronunciation as a language skill was marginalized. Instead of hiring them into teacher roles, Indian teachers were offered positions as drill masters and teaching assistants of British teachers. The latter were fashioned as experts both in methods of language teaching and in the grammar skills that were now considered the essential test of language competence.

By the 1840s, all Indian language teachers had been removed from imperial language training institutes and the newly established university chairs in Persian, Arabic and other oriental languages all went to Britons. Any Indian language teachers who remained in Britain were relegated to the private tutoring market, which was shrinking, too, as a knowledge of Persian and other Indian languages became increasingly irrelevant to pursuing a career in the colonies.

Fort William College (Source: Navrang India)

Who is to be master?

As is obvious from this brief account, the battle between Indians and Britons over who was a better teacher of Indian languages was fought on linguistic terrain only on the surface. Some of the British 19^th century superstars of oriental language teaching such as John Shakespear obviously had serious linguistic deficits. That did not keep them from becoming privileged knowers of colonial languages. A holistic knowledge of the language, cultural competence and conversational fluency were all devalued in favour of a focus on methods and a narrow understanding of language proficiency as grammatical mastery.

Ironically, once Persian was out of the way as the power code of India and the global English language teaching enterprise got underway, the rules of the game were re-written yet again. What we consider desirable linguistic competence today is to a significant degree shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of the new privileged language knowers, native speakers of English.

References

Eastwick, E. B. (Ed.) (1858). Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohamedan Gentleman; and the transactions with his fellow-creatures; interspersed with remarks on the habits, customs, and character of the people with whom he had to deal. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Fisher, M. H. (2012). Teaching Persian as an Imperial Language in India and in England during the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries. In B. Spooner & W. L. Hanaway (Eds.), Literacy in the Persianate world : writing and the social order (pp. 328-358). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Massey, R., & Massey, J. (1968). Lutfullah in London, 1844. History Today, 18(7), 473-479.

Students at the German-Chinese College, ca. 1910 (Source: German Federal Archives)

The dichotomy of East and West is a recent phenomenon and associated with European industrialization. Yet, it is difficult to escape this dichotomy in contemporary thought, where orientalism continues to inform debates inside and outside the academy. The increasing construction of an opposition between East and West – rather than a view of Eurasia as a complex whole – can be dated back to the 19^th century, as social anthropologist Chris Hann explains in this 12-minute lecture.

Even when the divergence between East and West materialized in colonial contexts, it was by no means straightforward and clear-cut. Instead, the discursive construction of East and West was polyvocal and dialogical. A good example of these shifting discourses can be found in the fluctuation in European views of China. Since the Middle Ages, European views of China veered between Sinophilia and Sinophobia, as the historian George Steinmetz explains in his study of German colonialism, The Devil’s Handwriting, a summary of which is available here on Language on the Move.

In the 16^th and 17^th century China emerged as a highly positive model in European discourse. The Jesuits, who were the first Europeans to spend extended periods there and to seriously engage with China, described China as a stable state governed by learned men, the mandarins, in the manner of Platonists. They found a lot to admire in China: the practical philosophy of Confucianism as well as Chinese politeness, medicine and language. During that period, the Chinese were rarely regarded in racial terms. If they were, they were usually considered white. In short, Chinese civilization was viewed as equal to European civilization and in some respects, even as superior.

With increasing European colonial expansion, this changed from the late 18^th century onwards and another – negative – discourse began to emerge. The rise of Sinophobia was an “intradiscursive response to Sinophilia” (Steinmetz, 2008, p. 388). In this discourse, the traditional stability of the Chinese state came to be seen as stagnant, despotic and the sign of a decaying nation. The learnedness and politeness of mandarins became a time-wasting pretension. The Chinese state exam for the selection of mandarins was no longer seen as a meritorious system but was now perceived as breeding imitation and copying. Confucianism was demoted from admired philosophy to false religion. And, last but not least, the Chinese became racialized as “the yellow race”, which was considered semi-barbarian and half-civilized.

Opening ceremony of the German-Chinese College, Qingdao, 1909 (Source: German Federal Archives)

These opposing discourses and the polyvocality inherent in interweaving discourses shaped a distinct native policy in the German colony of Qingdao. For a general overview of the colony, see Ingrid Piller’s summary of The Devil’s Handwriting.

The forces of Sinophobia were resounding at the dawn of colonization and during the first periods of segregationist German native policy in Qingdao (1897-1904). However, the precolonial discourse of Sinophilia had never fully retreated from the scene and it resurfaced again after 1905 in German Qingdao. Against this resurgence, German-Chinese cultural exchange emerged in the second phase of the colony (1905-1914), which can best be described as “an open-ended joint cultural program” (Steinmetz, 2008, p. 487). A key expression of this joint cultural program was the German Chinese College.

It was one of the stated goals of the German Chinese College to share the best of the two cultures.

At the school’s opening ceremony in 1909, speakers from both sides endorsed the idea of combining the best of their two cultures. A toast was raised to the Chinese emperor, the “national anthem” of the Qing Empire was sung, and the school’s German director proclaimed that “all of the cultural peoples [Kulturvölker] are linked by a common bond” and should “share their discoveries.” Here the Chinese were unambiguously (re)inscribed into the dominant pole of the German racial-anthropological binary. The imperial German and late Qing dynasty flags flew side by side in front of one of the school’s provisional buildings. (Steinmetz, 2008, pp. 486f.)

The German colony has left its traces in photos displayed on the wall of a Qingdao backpacker hotel (Photo: Gegentuul Baioud, 2012)

One of the men who pushed forward this cultural syncretism was Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930). Wilhelm was a colonial officer who lived in China for 25 years and became a renowned Sinologist in Germany after World War I. His cultural hybridity was admired by many and Carl Jung lauded him as a “mind which created a bridge between East and West and gave to the Occident the precious heritage of a culture thousands of years old” (quoted in Steinmetz, 2008, p. 505).

In sum, European representations of the Chinese were highly polyvocal and linked to different forms of cultural syntheses.

This raises an important question for our conceptualization of Orientalism. Can a universal concept of Orientalism explain the diverse representation of non-Europeans by Europeans and the subsequent multiple forms of cultural engagement ranging from clashes to cooperation? To put it differently, is there one orientalism or are there many orientalisms? To reflect on the multiplicity of the discursive space that has put East and West in opposition is crucial for mutual understanding and transcending this artificial binary.

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Sociolinguistics needs to center Africa

Minority language maintenance and revitalization is a sub-discipline of sociolinguistics that I mostly stay away from. My discomfort with most of the research in that area stems from the fact that its moral appeal clashes with my own personal language trajectory. On the one hand, the idea that minority languages should be maintained and, if they have disappeared or are in danger of doing so, should be revitalized, has obvious moral appeal: it feels like the right thing to support. On the other hand, I myself have largely abandoned the language I consider my mother tongue, Bavarian, first for Standard German and later for English.

Such personal trajectories seem to have little place in the literature related to language maintenance and revitalization, where minority speakers largely seem like the hapless victims of national or global linguistic domination. The tensions between ancestral and aspirational identities that minority speakers must negotiate seem relatively invisible to academics who publish in dominant languages about why and how minority languages should be maintained.

Vernacular Palaver, the book I read in April for the Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge, has given me new tools to think about this conundrum.

I picked up Vernacular Palaver by Moradewun Adejunmobi in the category “a book about language on the move that is written by an author who is neither male nor white.” Following on from my March reading about the relationship between European ethnographic writing and colonial polices, I was interested to read more about colonial linguistics and I was specifically hoping to read the work of a black African female sociolinguist. That in itself turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined because the experts in African sociolinguistics who I can think of off the top of my head are white men, black men and white women – in this order.

I certainly do not claim specialist knowledge of African sociolinguistics and I may well be mistaken but, to my shame, I could not think of a single sociolinguistics book written by a black woman from Africa. It seems I am not alone because when I went through the list of references of a couple of my favorite books and browsed the library shelves, I found … nothing. It was only when I leaved through the Multilingual Matters catalog that I came across Vernacular Palaver by Moradewun Adejunmobi.

Vernacular Palaver turned out to be an amazing book and a real gem to find. It examines the ways in which “the local” is imagined in and through non-native languages in West Africa. But it is not only about West Africa. As I said at the beginning, I found it eye-opening with regard to universal dilemmas related to multilingualism and the linguistic challenges of globalization.

From my March reading I had learned how obsessed European colonizers were with “the rule of difference”. The rule of difference refers to the colonial “assumption of an unbridgeable difference between themselves and their subjects and of the ineradicable inferiority of the colonized” (Steinmetz, 2008, p. 36). Vernacular Palaver relates the rule of difference to language policy and argues that support for mother tongues and insistence on vernacular education and cultural production may well be a colonial project.

Chapter 1 deals with colonial discourses about African languages and shows that, contrary to expectation, European colonizers readily embraced African vernaculars. British colonial policy, in particular, endorsed the use of the mother tongue in education. Like Steinmetz’ German colonial officials, their policies were guided by the ethnographic writings of missionaries, anthropologists and assorted other European travelers and explorers. These all favored the use of the mother tongue by Africans and were opposed to Africans using non-native languages.

They saw African languages as attributes of “true Africans.” By contrast, multilingual non-tribal, urban and educated Africans were considered “unnatural” and objects either of pity or distrust. In other words, insistence on the primacy of the African mother tongue became the linguistic expression of the rule of difference. And in this dualistic world, “the vocation of Europe was modernity; that of the African, the past” (Adejunmobi, 2004, p. 8).

Africa-centered multilingual “welcome” sign at the Hamburg Museum of Anthropology

Africans themselves, of course, could have little doubt about the obvious necessity to speak multiple languages. Indeed, most introductions to sociolinguistics mention a combination of repertoires in local, national and international languages as the typical pattern of African multilingualism.

While the extent of African multilingualism was not always apparent to Europeans, many European “experts” felt that Africans were misguided in their language learning desires, particularly when it came to European languages. An Austrian professor of linguistic anthropology, for instance, wrote in 1930: “It would be undesirable to comply with any unwise wishes the natives themselves may express in favor of adding European languages to the school curriculum” (quoted in Adejunmobi, 2004, p. 11; the whole pamphlet entitled “The use of the vernacular in education in Africa” is available via jstor).

Ultimately, widespread learning of European languages by Africans was, of course, the inevitable consequence of colonialism.

However, the fact that Europeans had been the staunchest advocates of African mother tongues for Africans had consequences for the ways in which these languages were thought and talked about. With regard to academic research about language in Africa, these consequences are felt to this day and resulted in a peculiar dynamic: Europeans developed the theories and wrote the publications while Africans provided the data.

In short, the European promotion of African mother tongues – well-meaning and laudable as it may have been in many cases – was part and parcel of colonial discourses and policies whose central aim was the political, social and economic subordination of Africans.

Anti-colonial resistance therefore included contesting European discourses of Africa. The most effective way to mount that challenge in most cases was through the medium of English or French.

Africans do not use European languages as a result of some sort of misguided identification with their colonizers but for their own ends, as Adedjunmobi goes on to show in a series of case studies. The use of European languages allows new imaginations of the local: in literature, a modern (pan-)African identity has emerged precisely through English and French rather than through mother tongues (Chapter 2). In Nigerian videos, English has become associated with discourses of economic advancement and the dream of getting rich (Chapter 3). In Ivorian romance novels, French enables discourses of modernity and materialism (Chapter 4). Paradoxically, localization in these romances is achieved through the promotion of traditional African femininity.

Finally, language learning is a means to construct aspirational migratory identities (Chapter 5). Chapter 5 explores the promotion of languages of wider communication in charismatic churches and thus comes full circle in a sense: the faithful increasingly leave Anglican and Catholic congregations operating in mother tongues for charismatic congregations operating in English or French and promising global mobility as part of the Christian message. A neat illustration of this turning of the tables comes from the pastor of an English-medium charismatic church in Accra. In an interview with the researcher, he “derided the work of a European couple, who, in his words, had wasted several years simply learning a local vernacular, when all the while they could have been ‘preaching the gospel’ using English or Twi” (Adejunmobi, 2004, p. 201, n. 27).

In sum, languages of wider communication have a stronger appeal than mother tongues for people who “seek additional memberships in sodalities forged on the basis of shared aspirations rather than that of shared origins” (Adejunmobi, 2004, p. 205)

My very short summary here does by no means justice to Vernacular Palaver, which should be compulsory reading for anyone who is interested in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, globalization and migration.

That I did not know about this important book, which was published already back in 2004, causes me embarrassment. Sadly, I am not alone in my ignorance. According to Google Scholar, Vernacular Palaver has been cited only 57 times. Comparable books in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, globalization and migration based in Europe or North America rack up many hundreds or even thousands of citations.

This pattern serves as a vivid illustration of the very point made by Vernacular Palaver: sociolinguistic research set in Africa is seen as specific and only specialists in African languages pay attention.

A while ago I wrote that multilingualism researchers who only see their field through an Anglo-centric lens are doing something wrong. I extend that to say that if your list of references – in any field – is heavily weighted towards white male researchers, it is not because these people do all the best work. It is because you have not looked carefully and you are actively ignoring important research.

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge is a good way to start getting out of our bubble and discover more of the amazing world of linguistic diversity. So keep up the good work and happy reading! Don’t forget to share your progress. If you tweet about it and mention @lg_on_the_move, you’ll be in the running for our monthly draw of a copy of Intercultural Communication. The April winner will shortly be announced on Twitter.

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Ethnography as the “devil’s handwriting”

The Devil’s Handwriting takes its title from the memoir of Paul Rohrbach (1869-1956), a German travel writer and colonial official. The memoir, published in 1953, when the Third Reich provided an ineluctable prism on the German colonial empire (1884-1918), advances the idea of a satanic mode of writing: travel writing such as that produced by the young Rohrbach about Africa and China had laid the basis for the evil of colonialism. Steinmetz makes this idea the central hypothesis of his fascinating inquiry and finds a close relationship between ethnographic representations and colonial policies. This may seem unsurprising and harks back to Edward Said’s dictum “from travelers’ tales […] colonies were created” (Orientalism, p. 117).

What is surprising is the many different forms of colonial policy and practice that The Devil’s Handwriting reveals. Even in the relatively short-lived and comparatively small German colonial empire, colonial governance was highly variable. That variation cannot be explained by socioeconomic or materialist theories, as Steinmetz shows with reference to three specific colonies: Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), Samoa and Qingdao (in Shandong province). Each of these held a distinct and very different place in the European imagination prior to colonization.

Abject and devious savages

Ovaherero in chains, 1904 (Source: Der Spiegel)

Precolonial accounts of the people of Southwest Africa were extremely negative and represented them as sub-human savages. One 19^th century German explorer, for instance, described the Khoikhoi as “bizarre red people” of “pronounced ugliness” with an “animal-like clicking language” (p. 154). The Germans did not invent these tropes of African abject savagery but fell back on the accounts of earlier European travelers. Already in 1612, for instance, a British official had described the Khoikhoi as “brute and savage, without religion, without language, without laws or government, without manners or humanity, and last of all without apparel” (p. 81; spelling adapted to modern English).

By the time the German colonial state arrived in Southwest Africa in the late 19^th century, these negative representations of Africans as abject savages had become entrenched in the minds of Europeans. Additionally, these previous encounters added another dimension, namely that of deviousness, shiftiness and insincere cunning. The Cape Colony, which had been under European (first Dutch, then British) rule since the late 17^th century, had brought numerous Europeans – traders, settlers, explorers, soldiers and missionaries – to Southern Africa. 19^th century German arrivals felt that contact with these earlier Europeans had served to corrupt the locals even further. One travel writer opined that “contact with civilization seems to make the savage more savage” (p. 156).

The military leadership of Southwest Africa, 1905 (Source: Der Spiegel)

In this perverted logic, conversion to Christianity was seen to make the natives “worse” rather than “better”. One missionary, for instance, wrote in a letter: “According to many whites it is much easier to interact with a pagan who has had no contact, or very little, with the mission than with the baptized ones. […] In many cases this is sadly often true” (p. 121, fn. 195)

These entrenched negative perceptions of Africans – as abject savages who had been further degraded through contact with Europeans – largely precluded any kind of engagement with them, as is particularly obvious from the fact that Europeans rarely attempted to learn local languages. In fact, many considered African languages unlearnable. The Khoikhoi language was variously described as similar to the “clucking of turkeys”, the “screaming of cocks” or to the sound of farting. This “apishly [rather] than articulately sounded” “incomprehensible” language kept frustrating Europeans:

But while Europeans expressed frustration at being unable to learn the local tongue, Khoikhoi picked up English or Dutch very quickly. Europeans seemed incapable of reaching the obvious conclusion that the locals had more linguistic talent than their foreign visitors. (p. 82)

The Europeans’ staunch belief in their own superiority meant that they wanted to transform Africans. Their assumption that communication and meaningful interaction were difficult, if not impossible, meant that they considered force and violence the preferred mode of engagement. Consequently, colonial policy aimed to seize the land and livestock of local populations in order to turn them into a “deracinated, atomized proletariat” (p. 203). Where locals resisted, extreme violence was readily used, as in the 1904 “Annihilation Order”, which ushered in the 20^th century’s first genocide, of the Ovaherero.

2014 exhibition of (pre)colonial South Pacific photos at the Hamburg Museum of Anthropology entitled “A view of paradise”

Noble savages

In hindsight, the Ovaherero Genocide is often read as a precursor to the Holocaust and an indicator that German colonialism was exceptionally brutal and destructive. Steinmetz, however, contends that this argument suffers from a methodological error, namely the lack of comparison with other national cases. It is not his aim to compare German colonialism with the colonialism of other European nations although he does point out in passing similarities of the Ovaherero Genocide with the extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines and the Queensland Frontier Wars between 1840 and 1897. Steinmetz advances the comparative case “intranationally” with reference to two other German colonies, Samoa and Qingdao. Although these were part of the German colonial empire at the same time as Southwest Africa, colonialism played out quite differently there.

European ideas about Samoa, as of the South Pacific generally, were rather different to those they had of African. Like Africans, Samoans were portrayed as inferior savages. However, in contrast to Africans, Samoans were considered beautiful, noble and virtuous and were thought to live in paradise in harmony with nature.

German enthrallment with Samoans coupled with their belief in racial hierarchies produced some absurd ideological maneuvers. For instance, when German settlers in 1934 (by which time Samoa was a colony of New Zealand) formed a chapter of the Nazi party, they duly made a case that Samoas were “Aryans”. Crazy as that may seem, Samoans were not the only ones whose “race” kept changing in European eyes:

One of the most absurd aspects of European discussions of “race” during the nineteenth century is the way in which certain populations “changed color” as their relative standing within comparative ethnographic discourse shifted. Thus, the Witbooi changed from black to yellow after 1894 […] and the Chinese changed from white to yellow over the course of the nineteenth century. Samoans underwent a process of racial lightening, becoming more like the early image of Tahitians – who themselves began to seem swarthier to Europeans as they lost their charm.” (p. 302)

“Looking into paradise” was not innocent: “scientific” photography in physical anthropology, Samoa, ca. 1875 (held in the collection of the Hamburg Anthropology Museum)

In short, by the late 19^th century, Samoa had become paradise in the European imagination. Therefore, the aim of colonial policy was not to change Samoans but – to the contrary – to keep them in their supposed paradisiacal state. To achieve that the use of explicit force was rarely considered and the idea was that the colonial state would offer a firm paternal hand. In contrast to Southwest Africa, where the possibility of learning local languages did not seem to enter the minds of Europeans, it did in Samoa. The colony was governed through the medium of Samoan and, to a lesser degree, English. Colonial officials periodically responded to reprimands from Berlin and pointed out that the use of German in the South Pacific was not practical. The two German colonial governors (Samoa was a German colony for only 14 years) both became proficient Samoan speakers, adopted Samoan titles and styled themselves as traditional Samoan chiefs. Their identification with the colony was such that one of them declared himself to be Polynesian when he was no longer in office.

An advanced civilization

Just to be clear, it is not Steinmetz’ intention to argue that Samoan colonialism was “good”. All colonialism involves subjugation and exploitation, and Samoa was no exception. In fact, he trains his eye not on the colonized but the colonizers and his argument revolves around one of the perennial problems of intercultural communication: the ways in which stereotypes inform action. While European stereotypes about Africans and Samoans were relatively consistent, this was not the case with China.

China had been known to Europeans since the Middle Ages and hence there was significant variability in the ways it was represented in ethnographic writing. From early vague views of a fabled land emerged a highly positive representation starting with the 16^th century Jesuits of China as a well-ordered advanced society that was superior to Europe. These discourses of Sinophilia were in the 19^th century complemented with yet another, now negative, strand of representations of Chinese as members of an inferior race. While negative views started to gain currency, the earlier positive representations never died out entirely and so discourses about China were always much more poly-vocal than was the case with Africa and the South Pacific.

The transformation of Sinophilia into Sinophobia was, of course, tied to colonial expansion at the time and another emerging idea was “that China was ‘crying aloud for foreign conquest’” (p. 389). The Germans particularly coveted a colonial port similar to what the British had with Hong Kong and so they annexed Qingdao on the east coast in 1897. The first couple of years of colonial rule saw a focus on aggressive segregation between the colonizers and the colonized. However, this hostile approach did not last long, not least because colonial officials from the military were increasingly replaced with administrators who had a background in Chinese studies or had previously worked as translators and interpreters.

Many of the Qingdao colonial officials were graduates of the Oriental Languages Department at the University of Berlin, a language-training institute with the mission to prepare graduates for the foreign service. Graduates achieved high levels of proficiency in Chinese and imbibed a spirit of Sinophilia. Putting these men in charge of colonial policy resulted in “a program of rapprochement, syncretism, and exchange between two civilizations conceptualized as different but relatively equal in value” (p. 470).

Another legacy of German colonialism: Tsingtao Beer. The brewery, which was founded in 1903, is today a major tourist attraction (Source: Wikipedia)

A bilingual high school and college were founded with the aim to orient Chinese elites towards Germany. The high school employed Chinese teachers to teach Chinese, math, physics and chemistry, and German teachers to teach German and history. In contrast to colonial schools elsewhere, there was no religious instruction and Christian holidays were not observed. The college similarly aimed at an equilibrium between German and Chinese elements and offered a mixed curriculum. Institutions such as these and the colonial policies they were based on “took for granted that China was an advanced civilization on a level equal to that of Europe. Opening these floodgates within a colonial context pointed beyond European claims to sovereignty and supremacy, beyond colonialism” (p. 534).

Beyond colonialism?

German colonialism ended with Germany’s defeat in World War I and its unconditional surrender. This did not mean independence for its colonies but a change in occupying power. Southwest Africa was assigned to South Africa, Samoa to New Zealand and Qingdao came under Japanese occupation.

The afterlife of German colonialism is highly variable, too. Discussions with Namibia over reparations and a formal apology are ongoing although, as Steinmetz points out, the economic structures created by colonialism remain in place, with 30% of all Namibian farms owned by Germans or their descendants. In Samoa, German colonialism seems largely forgotten or, at least, not a matter of public debate; and Qingdao is capitalizing on its German heritage by having it turned into a tourist attraction.

Overall, The Devil’s Handwriting is a brilliant historical study of a key question in intercultural communication: how are discourses of culture related to practices in intercultural engagement? My brief overview here cannot do justice to the wealth of detail it offers but anyone interested in history, colonialism and intercultural communication will enjoy this book. Another highly recommended!

Happy reading! And don’t forget to share your progress. If you tweet about it and mention @lg_on_the_move, you’ll be in the running for our monthly draw of a copy of Intercultural Communication. The March winner has been announced on Twitter:

Each month we celebrate the #Language-on-the-Move community by gifting a copy of Ingrid Piller's "Intercultural Communication" @EdinburghUP to one of our interactive followers. The March winner is @KhawlaBadwan. Who will get lucky in April? pic.twitter.com/0liU8J2EyD

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 1, 2018

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Secure the Soul examines Christian practices of self-transformation in five spaces of globalization: high security prisons, reality TV shows, offshore call centers, child sponsorship programs, and Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. One key participant, Mateo, who has been in and out of all these institutional spaces, provides the narrative arc of the book. Mateo is introduced early in the book as an iconic type of a particular global person: a Guatemalan child migrant who is “illegal” in Los Angeles, becomes involved in drugs and organized crime, and, as a young adult is deported back to Guatemala, where he gets stuck between belonging and non-belonging:

Mateo, […] was not tall, but he was obviously strong. He had broad shoulders, a thick neck, and a sturdy back. He could be mistaken for an athlete, a boxer perhaps, were it not for his gait. He walked like a gangsta. This is his word, not mine. He walked a little slower, a little more stridently than the average Guatemalan. Mateo had a kind of swagger that made him stand out. He knew it, and he liked it. The bald head, the baggy jeans, and the tattoos peeking out from under his collar—it all signaled a certain kind of time spent in the States. His stunted Spanish was also a tell. Mateo was not from Guatemala. Everyone knew as much. But, of course, he was. Everyone knew that, too. (O’Neill, 2015, p. 2f.)

Language – “his stunted Spanish” – is a key signal of Mateo’s identity as someone who got caught up in the specific global circuits that link Guatemala and the USA.

A very short history of Guatemala

The territory that today constitutes Guatemala was sucked into the vortex of globalization in 1511 with the conquista, the Spanish colonization of Latin America. After more than 300 years, Guatemala gained independence from Spain in the 19^th century. By that time, its agricultural exploitation by multinational companies based in the US was in full swing. By the mid-20^th century, United Fruit was the largest landowner and employer in Guatemala. As the interests of United Fruit would have been jeopardized by an attempted modest land reform by a democratically elected government in 1954, the United States intervened. The coup d’état plunged Guatemala into more than three decades of a genocidal civil war. Today, Guatemala is officially at peace but is the most violent non-combat zone on earth. It is also still in the clutches of an exploitative globalization for which Guatemala is nothing but a way station: in 2011, 84% of all cocaine produced for the US market passed through Guatemala.

Many have sought to escape this hell by migrating north. However, while Guatemalan bananas and drugs are welcome there, its people are not. Caught up in the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror”, deportation back to Guatemala has soared since the beginning of the 21^st century.

Language and global crime

Guatemala’s civil war pushed tens of thousands of refugees into poor neighbourhoods of Los Angeles in the 1980s (along with El Salvadorians, Hondurans and Nicaraguans). In these harsh circumstances, their children quickly became involved in gangs and two transnational criminal organizations, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, gained strength from the 1990s onwards. From modest beginnings in Los Angeles, these gangs have now gone global. One step in their globalization was the US policy of deporting migrants with a conviction.

These deportees met minimum life chances, a complete lack of social services, and a glut of weapons left over from the region’s civil wars. And, as men and women born in Central America but oftentimes raised in the United States, the youngest of these deportees did not speak Spanish fluently; they had no close family ties and no viable life chances but gang life. (O’Neill, 2015, p. 15)

Call center signage, Guatemala (Source: O’Neill, 2015, p. 107)

Lack of proficiency in Spanish is one of many factors that further limits the opportunities of deportees back in Guatemala and pushes them into gangs. Conversely, their proficiency in English is another. However, their proficiency in English sometimes becomes profitable in other ways.

Language and global service work

In addition to organized crime, a sector that has been growing in Guatemala is call center work. Off-shoring call center work to India or the Philippines has increasingly given way to “near-shoring”. In this process, the work is still outsourced to a low-wage country but one that is in the same time zone and has greater “cultural affinity.” Linguistically, deportees make ideal call center workers. Having learned English “not just in LA public schools but also in the U.S. prison system or while shuttling product from Los Angeles to Las Vegas” (p. 99), their English accents are ideal to maintain the illusion that the US customer is actually speaking to a US service agent.

At the same time, their habitus constitutes a problem. The fact that their bodies are full of tattoos remains invisible in call center work but addiction, problems with punctuality and following tedious scripts, or anger in the face of customer abuse were more difficult to hide. Call centers attempt to manage employee’s habitus through Protestant Christian piety mixed with corporate maxims. In most cases, this was not enough to keep employees on the job, off the streets and out of drugs for long. As long as the deportees came rolling back in, this was no problem for management, though:

Instead they troll the airports looking for more talent. “The ones that we fight for are the mojados [wetbacks],” the director of human resources admitted. “They are the most valuable here. Because they have perfect English. Perfect. We can place them in any account. We find them in the airport.” (O’Neill, 2015, p. 116)

Prisoner transport vehicle, Guatemala (Source: O’Neill, 2015, p. 35)

Language and global Christianity

The language of Protestant self-improvement permeates the sites in which the deportees circulate. Without material resources or any vision for social change, North American Christian piety is the sole means through which a destitute population comes to be governed. These global communications readily descend into farce, as is the case in the child sponsorship program, where US sponsors commit to a monthly contribution of US$35 to the education of a Guatemalan child. Additionally, sponsors are encouraged to enter into an exchange of letters with “their” child. These exchanges end up producing highly disparate texts, as the head of one child sponsorship NGO explained:

“It was ridiculous,” the director of child sponsorship complained. “Sponsors would write these wonderful letters. They’d write about their life and their hobbies. And then they’d get a letter back from a fourteen-year-old kid who should know how to write, and all it says is, ‘Dear sponsor. I love you. Love, your sponsor child.’” These scrawny efforts suggested ungracious subjects. (O’Neill, 2015, p. 136)

The idea behind the letter exchange is that it would help the sponsored child find god, show them they are loved, and, ultimately, prevent them from getting into drugs and crime. However, for children growing up in a Guatemalan slum keeping up a correspondence with middle-class North Americans constituted an almost impossible task. In the end, NGOs coach the children how to write letters following templates. Unsurprisingly, the content becomes entirely fictional in the process.

Ethnography of language on the move

Secure the Soul is a brilliant ethnography of Christian piety as a form of soft security. It also offers instructive glimpses into the ways in which language has become enmeshed in global circuits of crime, service work and security efforts. Highly recommended!

Full reference:

O’Neill, K. L. (2015). Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Those of you who are after recommendations for ethnographies located more centrally in sociolinguistics, here are some of my favourites:

• Codo, E. (2008). Immigration and Bureaucratic Control: Language Practices in Public Administration. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Duchêne, A. (2009). Ideologies across Nations: The Construction of Linguistic Minorities at the United Nations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Farr, M. (2006). Rancheros in Chicagoacán: Language and Identity in a Transnational Community. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
• Heller, M. (2006). Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography (2nd ed.). London: Continuum.
• Hoffman, K. E. (2008). We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Martín Rojo, L. (2010). Constructing Inequality in Multilingual Classrooms. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Prendergast, C. (2008). Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Sabaté i Dalmau, M. (2014). Migrant Communication Enterprises: Regimentation and Resistance. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
• Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Oxford: Blackwell.

Happy reading! And don’t forget to share your progress. If you tweet about it and mention @lg_on_the_move, you’ll be in the running for our monthly draw of a copy of Intercultural Communication. The February winner will be announced on Twitter shortly.

A comment on last week’s post “Literacy – the power code” questions this ubiquitous connection between literacy and competence, and asks about other ways of learning: what about the son of a shoe-maker who learns by observation and participation? Or the daughter of a carpenter who is similarly apprenticed into the trade? Even without literacy, are they not competent and educated?

They sure are! There can be no doubt that it is possible to achieve an education, to become competent and to gain wisdom by learning from your elders and without engaging in literacy-mediated learning.

However, in a world that has a literacy fetish, as ours does, this kind of education and knowledge becomes devalued. Where knowledge and competence associated with literacy are highly valued, knowledge and competence associated with traditional ways are simultaneously discounted.

In fact, the elevation of literacy-associated knowledge over other forms of knowledge has long been a part of colonial projects.

Consider the ways we think about our relationship to the land on which we live: you might live on a plot of land or in a house and take good care of it; you might make sure it is maintained well and is a good place to live; you might tend to the plants and animals who live there; and you might make sure it will be a good place to live that provides shelter and food not only for yourself but also for your children and generations to come.

To be able to do that surely makes you a competent person and a wise and good human being. But what if you do all that but don’t hold a title to the land? If you don’t have a piece of writing that says this plot of land and this house is yours? You might not be able to do any of these good things and, even if you do, your efforts will not be much valued by society.

Now let’s consider the opposite case: you hold a title to a plot of land – i.e. you have a piece of writing that says the land is yours – and you go about destroying the land: you despoil its natural resources, exterminate the plants and animals, poison the water and generally ruin it, also for your neighbors and for those who come after you. While this sounds despicable, it happens all the time and, by and large, as a society we approve of such practices because there is that piece of paper that confers ownership and all kinds of associated property rights.

Our contemporary belief in the power of a piece of writing – the title deed – devalues all other ways of relating to the land on which we live, as is well-illustrated by the idea of terra nullius: the idea that, prior to European settlement, Australia was “a land belonging to no one”.

Terra nullius became one of the legal and moral justifications for the British colonization of Australia: the assumption was that the continent had not belonged to anyone until Europeans “found” it. While Aboriginal people had obviously lived in Australia prior to 1788, they were not seen as having a right to the land between Governor Bourke’s 1835 proclamation of terra nullius and the first successful native title claim in the Mabo case of 1992.

One of the indicators why Aboriginal people supposedly did not have a right to their land lay in the fact that they did not have any written ownership records or title deeds. Instead of recording their ownership of the land in written title deeds, Aboriginal Australians had a spiritual relationship to the land which they communicated through stories and songs, as the Papunya School Book of Country and History explains:

When the Tjulkura [= white people] came to Australia, they did not recognise that, between them, different groups of Aboriginal people owned all the continent. Because there were no pieces of paper saying which people belonged to which country, white people decided that the land was terra nullius. […] The Tjulkura did not understand that Aboriginal people had been recording their ownership of their country in songs, stories, dances and paintings since the time when law began.

To Europeans, knowledge recorded in and transmitted via “songs, stories, dances and paintings” seemed primitive and barbaric: in short, worthless.

That only literacy-mediated knowledge has value is, in this case, obviously a self-serving fallacy. However, it is easy to overlook this fallacy in our literacy-obsessed world. Imagine if we routinely thought about the human relationship to the earth not as one of ownership but as one of custodianship. Maybe some of the ecological disasters of our time could have been avoided if we were not so fixated on the power of written documents to establish knowledge and competence? And if we were less keen to discard and ignore all other forms of knowledge?

Can you think of other examples where forms of knowledge and learning that are not mediated through literacy are being devalued in favor of knowledge and learning that are associated with literate practices?

Further reading

If you want to read more about the colonization of Australia as a project that has partly been about imposing British ways of seeing and discarding Aboriginal ways of seeing, you might want to check out Chapter 3 of the newly released second edition of Intercultural Communication. A flier with a discount code is available here.

“The English” migrated to their “ancestral homeland” in the first few centuries of the Common Era (Source: Wikipedia)

“Indigenous languages” and “immigrant languages” are much discussed in language policy research, but surprisingly little time is spent actually defining those terms. In general, “indigenous” tends to encompass two features: a long heritage in a place; and some form of contemporary disadvantage, usually associated with prior colonisation/invasion. But those criteria are seldom explicated.

An example comes from Nancy Hornberger (1998). She compares the languages of “indigenous groups” and “immigrants”, and efforts to protect these languages – focusing principally on education. But no space is given to defining “indigenous groups”, or indeed “immigrants”. And these blurry defining criteria mean that the two are not clearly distinguished. From here some wrinkles open up, and people can get trapped inside those (more on that later).

Now compare popular articulations of indigeneity. The English (to pick a completely random example) like to see themselves as immemorially Anglo-Saxon (see Reynolds 1985), but try telling that to the sixth-century Britons being shoved westward by waves of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Franks (who were themselves later shoved around by the Vikings, and so on). The Anglo-Saxons were once invaders, but at some point in the popular consciousness became indigenous. At which meeting was that agreed?

As I noted above, “indigenous” is not just historically significant. It relates to present-day disadvantage (by no means limited to language). This is perhaps why “indigenous” is less frequently used in European countries, whose homegrown ethnolinguistic minorities might be marginalised but not as acutely as the indigenous people of the always delightfully euphemistic “New World” – who drag behind them nasty histories of dispossession, and carry on top of them desperate social exclusion in the present (relative poverty, disproportionate incarceration, shorter life expectancy, etc.).

There are, then, deeply political resonances behind the mobilisation of a term like “indigenous”.

“Indigenous” European Minority Languages (Source: Barbier Traductions)

Now consider a piece of governmental language policy, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. For “indigenous” it prefers “autochthonous”, and for “immigrant” it uses “allochthonous”. Autochthonous languages are defined vaguely as “traditionally used within a given territory of a State”, while the latter, the “languages of migrants”, are excluded from the Charter’s remit. Here we come closer to defining and distinguishing “indigenous” and “immigrant”, but not much closer.

Perhaps the clearest deconstruction of indigeneity is Anthea Fraser Gupta’s book chapter, ‘Privileging Indigeneity’ (1997). She pertinently asserts that “groups do not remain discrete, but merge, especially through marriage. Migration, language shift, and intermarriage are long established human practices. They have not stopped. It is dangerous to solidify this fluidity into policy.” This throws things into sharp relief: if “traditionally used” is a definition of indigeneity, then how long, in years, is “traditional”?

Consider Hindi in the UK. It’s a minority language with a centuries-long tradition, but happens to be associated with an ethnic group whose migration is ongoing, not ancient history.

Of course, Hindi is not a minority language everywhere, but what about, say, Potwari in the UK, ‘traditionally’ spoken in Pakistan but a minority language there and everywhere else too.

What’s that? Not traditionally spoken in the UK? Oh, sorry.

Gupta’s 1997 chapter has never been followed up substantially, or even cited more than a few times – mostly pretty superficial citations too (judge for yourself: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=14790778410856718429). One other useful contribution comes from Lionel Wee. In his book Language Without Rights, he argues that “the communicative needs of immigrants cannot be appropriately addressed by … the collective right of an ethnic minority group to a heritage language. … In this regard, the traditional notion of language rights will need to be recast as an individual’s communicative right to be heard and understood” (2010: 143). This is the beginning of a much needed fundamental debate in language policy research. (Sadly this point of Wee’s is something of a diamond in the rough; his book is otherwise not very good – see my rather scratchy review here.)

But this rabbit hole gets deeper. What about languages that are not only associated with migrants, but that don’t even have an intuitive ethnolinguistic heritage or a long history?

“Le nouchi ivoirien, une langue à défendre!” (Source: http://www.lebabi.net/actualite-abidjan/le-nouchi-ivoirien-une-langue-a-defendre-14233.html)

Take the creole Nouchi, in the Ivory Coast, arising in the 1980s through contact between French and various Ivorian languages. Nouchi is indigenously Ivorian but has no obvious ethnic pedigree. It arose because street traders, itinerant workers, and others in the Ivorian grey economy – who didn’t share a common language – needed to communicate. From a rich mix of diverse people striking deals, talking shop, agreeing, disagreeing, socialising, eating, dancing and falling in love, came about a more distinctive set of words, phrases, and grammatical features. This story of language genesis is as old as human speech itself. And in the worldwide context of overwhelming language death, Nouchi could be celebrated as a new indigenous minority language.

So is it celebrated? Not quite. Although a vibrant feature of Ivorian popular (sub-)culture, Nouchi is typically looked down on by mainstream media and other guardians of all that is right and good in the world, as broken French and/or a subversive subaltern code. That even includes minority language sympathisers. In a book-length discussion of Ivorian minority languages, Ettien Koffi (2012) mentions Nouchi only once (p. 207) and then only as a kind of curiosity. (See my somewhat irritable review of Koffi’s book here.)

The same fate has befallen Tsotsitaal in South Africa, another recently born creole “including elements of Zulu and Afrikaans … from the working class outskirts and townships of Johannesburg … used by (would-be) gangsters and rebellious township youth. … [L]anguages like Tsotstitaal are not legitimated … and their speakers are marginalized” (Stroud & Heugh 2004: 202).

Dynamic urban vernaculars also have a tendency to change and transform much more quickly than older languages. That is of course part of the appeal for their speakers, but another reason for indifference among those who prefer languages to sit still.

No maps exist for emergent “indigenous” languages (Source: Sueddeutsche)

This kind of sneering at emergent contact-based vernaculars is common elsewhere, for example Rinkeby Swedish (Milani & Jonsson 2012), Kiezdeutsch (Wiese 2015), and Multicultural London English (Kerswill 2013, 2014) – even though, like “indigenous languages”, these are also used by minorities, spoken nowhere else on earth, and associated with poor, marginalised ethnic groups. Because they lack an identifiable ethnic lineage, and because they arose in the grubby dirt of modern cosmopolitanism – not the sacred dust of bygone ages – they paw at the lowest rung of the linguistic hierarchy.

This is perhaps the biggest problem for poorly defined terms like “indigenous” and “immigrant”: people get caught in the wrinkles between them. Speakers of emergent vernaculars are so distained they don’t even get a term of their own.

So the meaning of “indigenous” in language policy is complex, seldom explicitly defined, and even more rarely problematised. But whatever its meaning, it clearly isn’t just “us what was here first”. That in turn begs the more important question for “immigrants”: if the Anglo-Saxons ultimately became indigenous, then how long will others take to qualify? How many centuries do you have to be around? Why not decide, in years, how long it takes to be counted as indigenous, traditional, autochthonous, etc.? I hope it’s clear that I’m sketching a rather large red herring. The answer is neither possible nor desirable.

Perhaps a better solution would be to balance consideration of indigeneity with other factors, not least socioeconomic disadvantage. “Indigeneity” as currently discussed is still important: historically unjust land grabs followed by centuries of being disgracefully screwed over – continuing into the present – still need redress. But combining this with a broader focus on material wellbeing could yield greater parity with speakers of “immigrant languages”, and even of emergent vernaculars.

“[A] frequent critique of language endangerment discourse is that it displaces concerns with speakers on to a concern with languages” (Heller & Duchêne 2007: 4–5). In the wider social sciences, debate crackles and sparks over whether the “cultural turn” has over-interpreted inequality as culturally driven, stealing attention away from social class and other structural barriers (e.g. Crompton 2008: 43–44). That kind of debate in language policy is well overdue. Since her 1998 article (cited earlier), Nancy Hornberger and others have managed to dislodge the constrained focus on education in promoting minority languages. Surely the next advance should be to get beyond “indigenous”/“immigrant” as the prime categorisation, even to get beyond languages as such (an unsettling thought for a linguist), and to consider more fully the lives of the people who speak them.

Related posts: The diversity of the Other, Inventing languages.

References

Crompton, Rosemary. 2008. Class and stratification. Bristol: Polity Press.

Gupta, Anthea Fraser. 2002. Privileging indigeneity. In John M. Kirk & Dónall P. Ó Baoill (eds.), Language Planning and Education: Linguistic Issues in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona. 290-299. [Pre-print available: http://anthea.id.au/papers/belfast.pdf.]

Heller, Monica & Alexandre Duchêne. 2007. Discourses of endangerment: sociolinguistics, globalization and social order. In A. Duchêne & M. Heller (eds.), Discourses of endangerment: Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages. London: Continuum. 1–13.

Hornberger, Nancy. 1998. Language policy, language education, language rights: Indigenous, immigrant, and international perspectives. Language in Society 27(4): 439–458.

Kerswill, Paul. 2013. Identity, ethnicity and place: the construction of youth language in London. In P. Auer et al. (eds.), Space in Language and Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter. 128–164.

Kerswill, Paul. 2014. The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: the discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.), Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin: De Gruyter. 428–455.

Koffi, Ettien. 2012. Paradigm Shift in Language Planning and Policy: Game-theoretic Solutions. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Milani, Tommaso M. & Rickard Jonsson. 2012. Who’s Afraid of Rinkeby Swedish? Stylization, Complicity, Resistance. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22(1): 44–63.

Stroud, Christopher & Kathleen Heugh. 2004. Lingusitic human rights and linguistic citizenship. In Jane Freeland & Donna Patrick (eds.), Language Rights and Language Survival: Sociolinguistic and Sociocultural Perspectives. Manchester: St. Jerome. 191–218.

Wiese, H. (2015). “This migrants’ babble is not a German dialect!”: The interaction of standard language ideology and ‘us’/‘them’ dichotomies in the public discourse on a multiethnolect. Language in Society 44(3), 341-368. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404515000226

Promoting the University of Bolton’s Ras Al-Khaimah branch campus on the streets of Ajman

The other day I was stuck in traffic in Ajman, one of the smaller of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and one that has to do without Abu Dhabi’s and Dubai’s global glitz. Imagine my surprise when a car painted in the Union Jack came into view! I’ve been stuck in traffic in many parts of the world and I’ve got a sizable collection of pictures of cars decorated with flag stickers, images of flags or actual flags. This car, however, is, I think, the only one I’ve ever seen that was completely painted as a flag. The status of the little car as an island of Britishness moving in a sea of mundane Middle Eastern traffic was further enhanced by the fact that it had its steering wheel on the right-hand side: just like in Britain, but unlike every other car in the UAE.

So what do you think this car was advertising? Surely, the British state is not desperate enough for some good PR to send little cars painted with the Union Jack out onto the streets of the Middle East?

Well, the mystery was revealed when the car’s rear window came into view. The car was an ad for higher education! Specifically, it was advertising for the University of Bolton and the slogan on the rear window reads “Get a UK degree/At The First British University/in Ras Al Khaimah, U.A.E.”

Never heard of the University of Bolton? Well, it’s an institution in the Manchester metropolitan region and its main claim to fame is that it has consistently ranked last in league tables of British universities.

In 2008, the University of Bolton opened a branch campus in Ras Al-Khaimah, the northern-most and least-developed emirate. Initially, the university’s low ranking at home caused some raised eyebrows but the branch campus now seems to be doing well and enrollment rose from an initial 100 students to 300 in 2010.

Not favored with oil wealth nor tourist attractions, Ras Al-Khaimah has tried to turn itself into a higher education hub in the last couple of years by “enticing and luring” American and British colleges and institutions into opening branch campuses in their free trade zone. However, since the spectacular failure of George Mason University’s branch campus in Ras Al-Khaimah after only three years in 2009, the enticing and luring may have become a bit more difficult.

Despite the fact that many international branch campuses have ended in a fiasco (in addition to the George Mason University withdrawal from Ras Al-Khaimah, Australian readers will be familiar with the debacles of the University of New South Wales in Singapore or the University of Southern Queensland in Dubai), branch campuses continue to be a popular internationalization strategy and the number of international branch campuses reached 200 in 2012, up from only 82 in 2006; a remarkable growth figure of around 150% in little more than half a decade.

According to a 2012 report, the largest number of international branch campuses originate from the UK and about a quarter of all international branch campuses are located in the UAE. However, the scene is quickly diversifying. In addition to the UK, Australia and the USA have long tried to be big players in franchising their higher education institutions overseas. They are now joined by other European countries, particularly France and Germany, as well as emerging source countries, particularly India, Iran and Malaysia.

The destination countries of international branch campuses, too, are diversifying away from the Gulf States with the largest growth now in Asia, particularly China and Thailand. Africa, too, is starting to attract international branch campuses, with some already set up such as the Iranian Islamic Azad University in Tanzania and many others, originating particularly from China and Malaysia, in the planning stage.

Preston University campus in Ajman

So, what drives the extraordinary growth of international branch campuses? Sadly, it’s not the search for knowledge nor the desire to provide more equitable access to higher education. According to Altbach and Knight (2007) the primary motivation to establish an international branch campus is the desire to make a profit. This is particularly obvious with for-profit universities and includes a fair number of shady degree mills such as Preston University originating from Pakistan.

Making money is, of course, also attractive to traditional not-for-profit universities starved of public funding and that’s obviously where institutions such as the University of Bolton come in.

As far as non-financial motives for the establishment of international branch campuses are concerned, Altbach and Knight (2007) identify access provision and demand absorption as more and more young people want to attend higher education, particularly in countries that may be ill-equipped to meet that demand. Additionally, they note that internationalization is in itself highly valued in higher education. Indeed, an international orientation has long been a central aspect of the academic habitus (see also my recent discussion here) and university rankings have recently served as an additional incentive to internationalize.

Students, by contrast, are attracted to branch campuses for reasons of convenience, as Wilkins et al. (2012) argue. Based on a survey of students studying at an international branch campus in the UAE, they found that students chose to study on the branch campus rather than the main campus because it was cheaper and closer to home and because they preferred the life-style of the UAE over that in Australia, the UK or USA.

Magazine ad for the University of Wollongong’s branch campus in Dubai

Wilkins et al.’s (2012) research questions did not include any that related to the motivation to study at a branch campus rather than a local university but a significant number of respondents mentioned that “foreign universities have best reputation in UAE” (p. 426). Indeed, country reputation is the unique selling proposition evident in the University-of-Bolton advertising car. Advertising for other international branch campuses in the UAE also relies heavily on the reputation of the Western country where the university is headquartered, as is evident in this magazine ad for the Dubai campus of the Australian University of Wollongong.

Like many others, I find the subjection of education to the profit motif objectionable. Indeed, senior administrators of not-for-profit British universities are loath to admit a profit motive underlying their institution’s establishment of international branch campuses, as Healey (2013) discovered. The administrators this researcher interviewed preferred to talk about their non-commercial motives such as the desire to internationalize and to contribute to global development through education, etc.

However, even if profit were not the main motivation why universities set up international branch campuses, I’m still troubled by the vexing association between quality higher education and the franchised university. Isn’t higher education diminished for all of us if the university becomes nothing more than yet another expression of banal nationalism and neocolonial imagery?

Altbach, P., & Knight, J. (2007). The Internationalization of Higher Education: Motivations and Realities Journal of Studies in International Education, 11 (3-4), 290-305 DOI: 10.1177/1028315307303542
Healey, N. (2013). “Why do English Universities really Franchise Degrees to Overseas Providers?” Higher Education Quarterly: n/a-n/a.
Wilkins, S., Balakrishnan, M., & Huisman, J. (2011). Student Choice in Higher Education: Motivations for Choosing to Study at an International Branch Campus Journal of Studies in International Education, 16 (5), 413-433 DOI: 10.1177/1028315311429002