Image 1: Chinese and international brands in the most developed commercial area of Rongwo (Image credit: Giulia Cabras)

One of the most striking aspects that catches the attention of researchers or travelers visiting ethnic minority areas in Northwest China is the rapid growth of infrastructure, new buildings, and commercial activities. In Tibetan areas such as Amdo (Qinghai), regions that were once predominantly rural are now becoming increasingly urbanized, transforming into fully developed towns amidst valleys, mountains, and pasturelands. As urbanization expands, public signage plays a significant role in shaping the visual identity of these emerging urban spaces.

In this post, I will guide you through the town of Rongwo (Chinese: Longwu), its commercial signs, and how they reflect broader trends of urbanization and economic development. Located in the Rebgong (Chinese: Tongren) Tibetan Autonomous County in the Rma lho (Chinese: Huangnan) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Rongwo is undergoing rapid urbanization and migration. The town has a population of approximately 50,000, with Tibetans constituting the majority ethnic group; it also hosts Han, Hui, and Salar ethnic groups.

In Tibetan autonomous areas, the use of Tibetan in public spaces is legally mandated. However, there is often a significant gap between language policy, its implementation, and the benefits for minority languages.

Image 2 : The ice cream brand Mixue (Image credit: Giulia Cabras)

In response to the dominance of (Standard) Chinese monolingualism in Rongwo’s public spaces, local authorities introduced a series of regulations in 2017 aimed at promoting bilingualism in public signage (Regulations on Tibetan Language Work in Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture). A diachronic study of various types of public signs reveals that these measures have indeed contributed to an increase in bilingual signs in Rongwo (Wang, 2024: 196–220). Nonetheless, the study found also that, although both Chinese and Tibetan are present on signs, Chinese occupies a hierarchical position in terms of size and the amount of information provided. Exceptions to this hierarchy are observed in signs for businesses selling Buddhist religious objects, as well as in restaurants and hotels that emphasize a Tibetan connection.

While conducting research in the area, I noticed that variation in content and lexical choices across these signs reflect the products or services offered, which, in turn, highlight the different commercial trends shaping the town’s economic development.

Chinese brands and the standardization of space

Strolling through the streets of Rongwo, it is common to encounter numerous franchise shops primarily selling Chinese brands, especially in the more developed area of the city. The signage for these shops typically exhibits a similar visual organization in which the Tibetan language is smaller and marginalized.

Image 1 displays one of the main streets of Rongwo, where Chinese, written in both pinyin and characters, is significantly more visible than Tibetan. Without the small Tibetan language insertions, one might easily mistake this area for a city on the eastern coast or in central China, rather than a town at the edge of the Tibetan plateau.

Image 3: ‘Snow Ladies’ a clothing shop (top), and ‘Elegance of the Land of Snow’ a photo studio (bottom) (Image credit: Dorji Drolma)

A closer look reveals signs from well-known Chinese brands, such as Huawei and China Telecom, leaders in China’s telecommunications industry, as well as technology holdings and multinationals like Skyworth and Siemens. In some cases, such as with the Skyworth/Siemens sign, Tibetan is entirely absent.

In these cases, the content organization of the signs typically includes the Tibetan transliteration of the Chinese brand, along with a caption in Tibetan explaining the type of product or service being offered. This model is exemplified in Image 2 by the sign of a Chinese ice cream and iced tea chain store called ‘Honey snow iced city’ (蜜雪冰城 mixue bingcheng).

Conversely, the Tibetan version displays the transliteration of the Chinese name: མུས་ཞུའེ་ mus zhu’e (note that in the Amdo Tibetan dialect, mus is pronounced as [mi]). As discussed in another Language on the Move post, transliteration reflects only a semblance of bilingualism that ultimately results in the Chinese brand name being written in Tibetan.

The Tibetan content also includes the caption ‘sweet frozen drinks’ (འཁྱགས་བཟོས་བཏུང་རིགས་མངར་མོ་  ). This description in Tibetan clearly explains what the shop sells, whereas the Chinese expressions ‘honey snow’ and ‘iced city’ are more evocative and imaginative. It is noteworthy that the font of the Chinese name is creative (with character strokes designed to resemble water drops), while the Tibetan font is quite standard.

Local Tibetans I spoke with have varying perceptions and opinions regarding the content and lexical choices of these signs.

For some, a catchy and creative presentation is not important; what matters most is a clear description of the product or service offered. This clarity helps avoid misunderstandings, particularly for older generations, who are unfamiliar with the names of Chinese brands.

Image 4: A Tibetan restaurant displaying ceremonial scarves and the Kālacakra (wheel of time) on its door (Image credit: Dorji Drolma)

For others, the Tibetan content is perceived as too lengthy, complex, and unattractive. This opinion highlights a common challenge faced by minority languages competing with concise languages such as Chinese, a phenomenon also documented for the Uyghur language (Dwyer 2005: 28).

Signaling Tibetan identity

Rongwo is also home to local businesses, often related to restaurants, clothing, religious paraphernalia, and thangka art. In these shops, we observe a more balanced visual representation of Tibetan and Chinese, suggesting that making Tibetan more visible positively impacts their commercial activity. Moreover, Tibetan serves as the source language, as evidenced by terms that refer to Tibetan landscape and philosophical-religious tradition.

Some examples are shown in Image 3: ‘Elegance of the Land of Snow’, a photo studio (གངས་ལྗོངས་སྒེག་ཉམས་), a restaurant named after the rope used by kings to ascend to heaven (རྨུ་ཐག་), ‘Snow Ladies’, a clothing shop (ཁ་བ་བུ་མོ་), ‘Treasury of Zambala’, a clothing shop, named after the Buddist fortune god Zambala (ཛམ་དཀར་ གཏེར་མཛོད་).

Often, the signs display visual elements, such as ceremonial scarves, philosophical and religious symbols such as the wheel of time or the wish-fulfilling gem, and Tibetan greetings or blessings, as shown in Images 4 and 5.

Local Tibetans I spoke with expressed positive opinions about the choice of shop names and emphasized the growth of local Tibetan entrepreneurship in sectors such as accommodation, Tibetan food, clothing, and art, and  Buddhist items, contributing to the local community both culturally and economically. In this case, the Tibetan language can be seen as a form of linguistic capital, serving the dual purpose of ‘pride and profit’ (Duchêne and Heller, 2012): it emphasizes a sense of belonging to the ethnic group while also bringing economic benefits.

Language and urbanization: opportunities and challenges

Image 5: A Tibetan clothing shop featuring the norbu membar (wish-fulfilling gem) on the sign, with the blessing ‘May you be well’ (ཨོཾ་བདེ་ལེགས་སུ་གྱུར་ཅིག།) written on a red piece of paper above the door (Image credit: Giulia Cabras)

The linguistic landscape of Rongwo reflects the commercial development of the town, which appears to follow two contrasting directions.

One model of development is based on Chinese brands, and to a lesser extent, multinational companies, making towns in Tibetan areas indistinguishable from other cities in inner and coastal China. In this scenario, Tibetan is present primarily due to language regulations but remains marginalized in terms of size and content.

The other model is fueled by local or Tibetan entrepreneurship, where the Tibetan language and references to Tibetan cultural heritage play a role in shaping the nature of the business and enhancing its appeal.

The perceptions of local Tibetans regarding the content of commercial signs reveal both the opportunities and challenges that minority languages face, highlighting critical aspects of language policy and urban development.

In some instances, Tibetan is merely a transliteration of Chinese brands, and lacks the attractiveness expected from commercial signage. This demonstrates how even languages with an established literary tradition, such as Tibetan, struggle to compete with nationally promoted languages and standardized models of economic and urban development.

References

Duchêne Alexandre & Monica Heller (eds.). 2012. Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit. New York and Oxford: Routledge.
Dwyer, Arienne M. 2005. The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy, and Political Discourse. Policy Studies East-West Center Washington D.C.
Wang, Zixi. 2024. Contacts des langues dans le paysage linguistique scolaire. Regards sociolinguistiques et géo-sémiotiques sur l’Amdo (Qinghai). Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3.

Acknowledgement

This blog post was written as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project “(In)visibility of Multilingualism in Amdo Tibet”, funded by the European Union (Project 101106116). Project website: https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/invisibility-multilingualism-amdo/

Image from a university website

“An amazing student experience awaits you!” – “a multicultural vibrant experience” in a “stunning landscape” covered by “year-round sunshine.”

These phrases do not come from a tourist brochure, but the websites of Australian universities. They are accompanied by stunning images of urban or natural landscapes and aim to attract international students.

International education is often hailed as a way to keep economies growing as higher education has shifted towards a commercialized model. However, the efforts to increase enrolment numbers are also accompanied by worries that in the haste to attract more students, the admission requirements – in particular that of English language proficiency – are lowered.

Gatekeeping

Countries built on immigration are looking to recover the immigration loss caused by the pandemic years and the ensuing border restrictions. A new proposal to overhaul the Australian visa system has attracted attention as the country is forecast to grow by 715,000 from 2022 to 2024.

International students are affected, of course, as student visas and possible immigration pathways attached to students visas are discussed in the report. In particular, the English language requirements for admission into university courses are recommended to be raised from a “low base” of Band 5.5 on the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) to be able to meet the language demands of the labour market after graduation.

We have addressed this deficit approach to international students before. Recent research by Ingrid Piller and I on university admission requirements found that English language proficiency requirements maintain exclusionary practices of international students by setting up the binary categories of tested and ‘inherent’ English language proficiency (read more about it here).

But how do universities reconcile these two opposing forces of, on the one hand, needing to attract international students for commercial reasons, and on the other, setting up linguistic requirements as a gatekeeping mechanism?

An idealized lifestyle

To answer this question, in my recently published paper at Higher Education Research & Development, I turned to university websites. I wanted to explore what role language plays in the admission process caught between these two opposing forces. And how does it affect the communication of English language proficiency requirements to prospective international applicants. The analysis went beyond looking at content and text and included the multimodal features of the websites: naming and positioning of webpages, the visuals accompanying the texts and, of course, the language use of the English language proficiency requirement webpages.

Image from a university website

I found that the language use, which ranged from highly formal to conversational, references the authority of the law, thus adds objectivity and authority to the requirements. The paper provides an analysis of how the generic features of legal language use are applied to the educational context and interact with marketing discourses.

The visuals on these webpages create a different effect, though.

They serve to depict an idealized student lifestyle to which English language proficiency is a vehicle. The pictures and videos on the websites analysed depict students engaging in various social situations and leisure activities such as shopping, eating out or engaging in activities at the beach. The participants in these activities are depicted in engaging in intercultural situations (indexed by looks of various ethnicities) and enjoying each other’s company, communicating with ease.

In reality, these are activities international students report to struggle with because of social isolation or the difficulty to use English in everyday situations. These visuals of ‘success’ legitimize the English language proficiency requirements, where participants become role models or protagonists in a video footage.

What effect does this representation have on the concept of English language proficiency used as an admission requirement?

A simplified English language proficiency and an accessible student experience

Firstly, English language proficiency gets simplified through the objectivity of simple numerical scores and the authority of legal discourse. After all, if the university policy states that an IELTS Band 6 is  adequate to study in English and the students have this level, they should have no problem with their studies or socialization – a view commonly held.

At the same time, the website visuals communicate a desirable student experience. This is both a misrepresentation of the language proficiency needed for further studies, which in fact all students need to develop, not just internationals, and the realities of the international student experience.

As much as we would appreciate “year-round sunshine”, we need to acknowledge that the weather in Australia is more nuanced than that.

Likewise, university admission requirement communication should indicate that English language proficiency is not a fixed ‘product’ described by the applicant’s IELTS score but rather a process, and acknowledge that discipline-specific language proficiency may need to be developed by all students during their studies.

References

Bodis, A. (2023). Gatekeeping v. marketing: English language proficiency as a university admission requirement in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2023.2174082
Bodis, A. (2021). The discursive (mis) representation of English language proficiency: International students in the Australian media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(1), 37-64.
Bodis, A. (2021). ‘Double deficit’ and exclusion: Mediated language ideologies and international students’ multilingualism. Multilingua, 40(3), 367-392. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2019-0106
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000689

We kick off 2022 with a new episode in our Chats in Linguistic Diversity. In this episode, I speak with Professor Adam Jaworski about his research in language and mobility.

Language as resource to style a place

A languaged Christmas tree in an upmarket Sydney shopping mall

Adam is best known for his work on “linguascaping” – how languages, or bits of languages, are used to stylize a place. A welcome sign may index a tourist destination, artistic arrangements of word blocks like “love”, “peace”, or “joy” may index consumption and leisure spaces, multilingual signage may index a cosmopolitan space, and the absence of language may suggest the quiet luxury of the super-rich.

As these examples suggest, Adam’s focus, often in collaboration with his colleague Crispin Thurlow, has been on privileged mobilities: European tourists in West Africa, business class travelers, and those frequenting the consumption temples of our time, upmarket shopping malls.

Such research is vital to understanding the intersection between language and inequality, as Adam explains in our interview.

Privilege is the other side of the inequality coin, and a side that sociolinguists have often neglected.

English is safe and multilingualism is fun

The research of Adam and his associates has shown that English is often used to index a place as “safe”. However, the English that makes a place safe is not monolingual but plays with other languages or allusions to them. The English of consumption and leisure spaces is one that is shot through with bits and pieces of other languages – an umlaut here, a “bonjour” sign there, and a tourist going “xie xie” over there.

Code-crossing – switching into another language to signal symbolic change of speaker status or identity – thus becomes a sign of privilege, a way to have fun and to index one’s cosmopolitanism and global-mindedness.

Visual language displays have long marked a space as privileged, as in this cross-stitched sampler (Image credit: Nick Michael, Wikipedia)

Focusing visual language

Much of the language that makes a place consists of visual displays. These linguistic signs predominantly serve a decorative purpose, and Adam takes us back to Roman Jakobson and his theorization of the poetic function of language. According to Jakobson, the poetic function of language forces us to attend to the sign itself – the signifier – more than its meaning – the signified.

In today’s world with its ubiquity of signs, images, and other visual displays, it is easy to forget that the presence of signs for the sake of the sign itself has always been a display of power and privilege.

In short, our conversation is an invitation to carefully attend to mundane and everyday (bits of) language as an entry point into the big social questions of power, inequality, and social justice.

And, as always, academic questions do not come out of nowhere. That’s why the conversation is also a chance to hear from Adam about his career trajectory over the past 40 years.

If you want to dig deeper into Adam’s work, here are some suggested readings

Jaworski, A. (2015). Globalese: a new visual-linguistic register. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 217-235.
Jaworski, A. (2015). Word cities and language objects: ‘Love’ sculptures and signs as shifters. Linguistic Landscape, 1(1-2), 75-94.
Jaworski, A. (2019). X. Linguistic Landscape, 5(2), 115-141.
Jaworski, A. (2020). Multimodal writing: the avant-garde assemblage and other minimal texts. International Journal of Multilingualism, 17(3), 336-360.
Jaworski, A., & Lou, J. J. (2021). # wordswewear: mobile texts, expressive persons, and conviviality in urban spaces. Social Semiotics, 31(1), 108-135.
Jaworski, A., & Piller, I. (2008). Linguascaping Switzerland: language ideologies in tourism. In M. A. Locher & J. Strässler (Eds.), Standards and Norms in the English Language (pp. 301-321). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. (available for download here)
Jaworski, A., Thurlow, C., Lawson, S., & Ylänne-McEwen, V. (2003). The uses and representations of host languages in tourist destinations: A view from British TV holiday programmes. Language Awareness, 12(1), 5-29.Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2003). Communicating a global reach: Inflight magazines as a globalizing genre in tourism. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 579-606.
Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2006). The alchemy of the upwardly mobile: symbolic capital and the stylization of elites in frequent-flyer programmes. Discourse and Society, 17(1), 99-135.
Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2010). Tourism discourse: language and global mobility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

There is lots of related content on Language on the Move and this is small selection

Alcaraz, A. T. (2015). Strolling in Barcelona with Sanskrit and Devanāgarī.
Farrell, E. (2010). Visiting the Ausländerbehörde.
Grey, A. (2018). Do you ever wear language?
Hopkyns, S. (2020). Linguistic diversity and inclusion in the era of COVID-19.
Kalman, J. (2020). Signs of the times: Small media during Covid-19 in Mexico City.
Piller, I. (2010). Toiletology.
Piller, I. (2012). Money Talks.
Piller, I. (2013). Polish cemetery in Tehran.
Piller, I. (2017). More on banal cosmpolitanism.
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2021). COVID-safe travel between care and compliance.
Valdez, P. N. (2021). COVID-19 and the struggle for inclusive mobility.

“This is English”, a shop assistant told me.

Language is literally “on the move” in the writing on clothing. We’ve all seen it but may not have taken much notice. It deserves attention as an increasingly visible and fashionable type of “banal cosmopolitanism”, which “refers to mundane discourses that enact globalization in everyday life”.

Wearable text was certainly part of everyday life in Wuhan, China, where I lived the last half year. Alphabetic letters on a garment, in particular, jumped out from the wearer’s surrounding linguistic environment, which consisted mainly of Mandarin written in simplified characters, and standing out from the crowd may have been exactly the reason the wearer chose letter-emblazoned clothes. This was articulated by one garment itself, on a breast pocket I saw when I looked up from my noodles over a cafeteria table one lunchtime, which read: “Fascinating//CROSSD CULTURAL HERO//96”

The wearer of this textile text literally becomes more “fascinating” (or distinct, in Bourdieuian terms). Wearing “foreign” language is an archetypal example of the “consumption of spatially distant places, [and] signifiers of cultural diversity, and opening up of lifestyles to new experiential spaces and horizons”, which is how Adam Jaworski (2015, p. 220) describes banal cosmopolitanism.

Wearing language is a personal, but often banal, embodiment of cosmopolitanism and I am interested how distant places and cultures are transformed into graphics, printed onto textiles, bought and worn in China. Of all the scripts and languages I saw on clothing, the alphabetic script, and recognizably (if not always 100% correctly spelled) English words predominate.  Wearing English is vastly more popular than wearing any other foreign language in Wuhan, but also vastly more popular than wearing Mandarin. For months, I took note of what I saw on sale in shops and worn in classrooms, restaurants, buses and trains. When I saw a textile bearing a Chinese or other non-English text, I then kept a rough count of how many items of clothing bearing English I saw until I next came upon a Chinese or other non-English wearable text. Never were the numbers even close: I saw many more English-emblazoned clothes every day.

Scattered letters on a jacket

The types of textile texts I observed can be subdivided for analysis:

1. Brand names (both foreign and Chinese) and trade-marked slogans;
2. Stand-alone messages that are not readily connected to any one brand;
3. Decorative use of writing without forming words

English predominates

In all these categories, English was more popular than any other language, although I saw some Chinese, French, Russian, Latin (Carpe Diem and Veni, Vidi, Vici, so arguably English borrowings from Latin), a little Korean and Dutch, and some non-languages, which I will come back to. As one of my students observed, the language her peers wear is “usually English. It looks more fashionable. But some extremely popular [Chinese] characters will be printed on clothes”.

Even Chinese brand names were often written on clothing in Romanized pinyin script instead of characters. For example, the puzzling ZYGW and PNADA on clothes or the pinyin brand name YUYUANPAI on a suitcase. This practice clearly positions Chinese brands within an international fashion of alphabetic brand names and logos, even if these Chinese brands are targeting the domestic market.

Examples in the second category ranged from short messages like TRENDY, Woosh! or fashion to whole sentences. For example, I saw someone wearing shoes with this long phrase printed on them: “Lets be [obscured] YOUTHFUL [obscured] LEADING THE [obscured] MORE CONFIDEN [obscured]”.

Texts on shoes, especially long texts like the sentence above, are uncommon on shoes in English-dominant places I’ve been to, but a more common sight in China. Similarly, work attire and men’s formal attire would not normally carry text in Australia, but I saw, for example, a middle-aged man wearing a work blazer embroidered with Autumn on a high speed train to Wuhan. The unspoken conventions about wearable text are of course different across cultures, and part of constructing locally-meaningful divisions and prejudices. I argue that in China, the local symbolic power of foreign languages affects the conventions about which clothes are appropriate for bearing text. English, in particular, is desirable enough as a mark of distinction to break into new micro-spaces (like a shoe or a work blazer), whereas foreign languages have less symbolic power and would therefore be less fashionable – maybe even inappropriate – if printed on similar garments in an English-dominant country like Australia.

Examples in the second category (stand-alone messages) abound as the butt of jokes on the internet because of the preponderance of language-like but incorrect or nonsensical phrases. I could add a belt I saw for sale shouting NANAN!!!, an overcoat reading Courtesy to a lady is a gentleman’s and pyjamas emblazoned with Slaap lekkeri (Google tells me this might be slightly off Dutch for “sleep well”).

However, I have long been intrigued rather than amused by these: are clothing manufacturers keen to identify their products with international fashion/culture/language but unwilling to pay for English language work in the design process? Are such language services difficult for designers and manufacturers to access for some reason other than cost? That is, do wearable texts reveal unequal access to linguistic resources, rather than differing aesthetics?

I asked a shop keeper such questions when I saw a top with the lettering “ADD SHE SSR ESSEG” in a relatively expensive women’s clothing store, which had correct English on other garments. I asked the shop assistant what this said, and she responded that it was English. Aware of my disbelief, she starting picking a glued-on letter off and explaining they could all come off. I said the top made no sense in English and she responded that it looked good, though. In a contrasting example, the assistant at a smaller, cheaper shop informed me that she was aware that a nonsense textile text was not English but, even so, it was selling well.

With its irregular spelling this “Vivienne” on a pyjama top is difficult to read (and its meaning even less clear).

Language play

Do designers and manufacturers simply not care about language quality assurance because they can sell the clothes regardless of language errors or oddities, and at a better price than clothes without any words? Or is “bad English” actually the design goal?

Playing with language can make it even more eye-catching. The brand Yishion is widespread in China and is a good example of such multilingual play: Yi is the pinyin of the Mandarin for clothes, and is combined with the English word fashion.

Whole playful phrases are rarer but include fun examples such as a female student’s overcoat, which read “Words//Boys//Empty words”; in another example, also observed on campus, a female student was wearing a jacket, which announced in French “J’ai perdu//Ma veste” (“I have lost my jacket”).

Adding visual value

Some of these fashion choices may cause you to ask “did the wearer know what the text said, or even that the text was (or was not) English?” That is, what if some wearable texts are worn for aesthetic or price-point reasons, and not “read”? The third category allows us to look at this further, as these are texts without an explicit meaning such as the scattered letters on the coat in the image.

Even so, these texts still have an indexical meaning as symbols of “English”, i.e. international, global culture. That is, these texts highlight the re-purposing of language into visual design resources; it is precisely the stripping back of meaning that makes this archetypal banal cosmopolitanism. To have no lexical meaning to wearers and viewers, and no desire for it, represents the ultimate indicator of language as bearer not of any one ethno-national identity; but of global consumer identity.

In certain markets like China, “foreignized, visual-linguistic forms” (Jaworski 2015, p. 217) are a more saleable commodity than local languages. As the “fascinating crossd cultural hero 96” in the cafeteria explained to me, he did not know the meaning of the text on his jacket but bought it because it looked 《好酷》(“cool”). In other words, the medium is the message, and the message is membership in the global. Or, as one of my students sighed: “sometimes people use the letters just because they worship foreign things”.

And readers, please feel free to tweet us further examples under the hashtag #wear_language (@Lg_on_the_Move).

Related content

• Banal cosmopolitanism
• More on banal cosmopolitanism
• Is English a local language in Berlin?
• Banal nationalism and the internationalization of higher education
• Halloween mystery

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.

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a shopping mall in Munich, Germany

Have you recently seen a “welcome” sign? They constitute a strange genre: ever more ubiquitous on the one hand, yet utterly false and insincere – how can you be “greeted” by a piece of stuff? – on the other.

Whenever I see one of these “welcome” signs, I am reminded of an anecdote told by a colleague who had travelled in Japan in the 1970s: he had visited Japan for an academic conference and added a few days of sightseeing. For the latter, he had rented a car to drive around the countryside. It was the days before GPS and mobile phones and satellite tracking; all he had was an old-fashioned paper map. The map had all the place names in the Latin script while the signs he saw next to the road were all in Japanese. Illiterate in Japanese, he had no way of matching a name on the map with a name on a sign.

Sure enough, he got lost. Because some signs had the place name in both Japanese and Latin scripts, he just kept on driving in the hope of finding such a bilingual sign to regain his bearings. To his mounting frustration, the only non-Japanese signs he encountered for a long time said: “Welcome!” He knew he was “welcome” but he didn’t know where – or even what – it was he was welcomed to …

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a heritage village in Abu Dhabi, UAE

A similar story is unlikely to happen today. Not only because of the advent of GPS and Google maps but also because directional signage outside the Anglophone world and particularly in countries that do not use the Latin script has become bilingual and largely follows the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals. Article 14 stipulates that “The inscription of words on informative signs […] in countries not using the Latin alphabet shall be both in the national language and in the form of a transliteration into the Latin alphabet reproducing as closely as possible the pronunciation in the national language.” As more and more countries have become signatories mono-script directional signage outside the Latin-script world have largely become a thing of the past.

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a shopping mall in Los Angeles, California

In fact, it is not only directional signage that has become bi- or multilingual but the same is true of “welcome” signs, which must be one of the most multilingual genres on the planet.

Any self-respecting institution today says “welcome” multilingually in a show of banal cosmopolitanism.

“Banal cosmopolitanism” is based off the much better-known concept of “banal nationalism”, a frequent topic here on Language on the Move. Banal nationalism refers to the mundane discourses – flags, maps, national references, etc. – that enact national belonging in everyday life. Similarly, banal cosmopolitanism refers to mundane discourses that enact globalization in everyday life. Banal cosmopolitanism is apparent in the “mediatization and consumption of spatially distant places, signifiers of cultural diversity, and opening up of lifestyles to new experiential spaces and horizons” (Jaworski, 2015, p. 220).

One linguistic form that banal cosmopolitanism may take is the excessive use of new letterforms, punctuation marks, diacritics, and tittles, as Adam Jaworski shows in a 2015 paper entitled “Globalese.” Their use, particularly in brand and shop names, serves to create “novel, foreignized, visual-linguistic forms increasingly detached from their ‘original’ ethno-national languages” (p. 217). Detached from their national and local linguistic context, they point to somewhere else, somewhere in the realm of the global.

English “Welcome” graffiti in Ramsar, Iran

Multilingual “welcome” signs are another such mundane index of globalization and banal cosmopolitanism. Multilingual “welcome” signs feature prominently in consumption spaces – as the examples from shopping malls show and tourist destinations show. However, they are not exclusive to those and are increasingly popular also in universities and similar institutional spaces that want to mark themselves as internationalized, diverse and inclusive.

That all this indexing of cosmopolitanism is indeed “banal” and only runs skin deep is best exemplified by those multilingual “welcome” signs that get one or more of their versions wrong. And I don’t mean home-made signs in developing countries that get their English spelling wrong. What I mean are huge signs professionally produced on durable materials that scream “welcome” in dozens of languages – certainly more languages than the designers of the sign could master or could be bothered to verify the translation for.

The versions that go wrong most frequently are those that use right-to-left scripts.

Multilingual “Welcome” sign, University of Limerick, Ireland

If a designer gets the Arabic and Persian translation of “Welcome” from Google Translate and then copies and pastes it into a selection of other translations, their word processor is likely to re-order the letters from left to right; as happened in this sign at the University of Limerick.

As a result of this linguistically-uninformed process, the Persian version, for instance, which should be “خوش آمدید” is scrambled to read something like the equivalent of “emoclew”; a line later (2^nd before last), half of the word, “آمدید” has been repeated, leaving a truncated version similar to “come”; again scrambled to actually spell something like “emoc”.

Examples such as these are not at all rare: in a previous post, we featured an apron that combines both banal nationalism and banal cosmopolitanism in one item and where the Arabic version of “Australia” is spelled backwards.

So who are the recipients of these multilingual “welcome” signs? The signs are intended to send a message of cosmopolitanism, internationalization, diversity and inclusion – but it’s a message that is intended for the dominant population so that they can feel good about themselves. If a reader were not to speak English, the multilingual “welcome” featured here are just as useful as they were to the driver lost in the Japan. And if you are a reader of one of the languages that come in the garbled version, it’s adding insult to injury.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that the University of Limerick’s “Welcome” sign was intended to welcome members of an international conference devoted to multilingualism. That was incorrect. Attendees of that conference posed beneath the banner and shared it on social media – that’s how I came across the image – but the banner was not associated with the conference.

Reference

Jaworski, A. (2015). Globalese: A New Visual-Linguistic Register. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 217-235. doi: 10.1080/10350330.2015.1010317

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone wants to be a winner in the dating game; but it doesn’t always work that way …

A 2015 article in the New York Post argued that mobile dating apps, such as Tinder and its many clones, are ultimately ‘tearing society apart’ by drastically changing the way young single adults in Western society seek and pursue romantic and sexual partners.

A recent study by Mitchell Hobbs, Stephen Owen and Livia Gerber (2016) asks whether that assessment is really true. The project explores the experiences of dating app users and investigates how the technology has influenced their sexual practices and views on romantic ideals and long-term relationships.

Offline desires, online realities

Meeting sexual and romantic partners specifically through dating apps has four characteristics: First, users are able to engage in casual, one-off or short-term, sexual encounters without engaging in any further social interaction. Second, dating apps allow users to broaden their romantic networks, extending beyond their existing social networks. Thirdly, dating apps are an efficient means of connecting with several potential partners at the same time. And, fourth, the emergence of dating apps has perpetuated a culture in which communication is increasingly focused around self-presentation and self-commodification.

The latter characteristic in particular may generate a sense of anxiety and frustration around the need to create a successful profile.

Self-presentation in the dating game

Mobile dating apps were initially designed as a type of game to take the stress and emotional investment out of dating. The tactile functionality of the app, combined with users’ photo-based profiles resembles a virtual stack of cards: Profiles are presented like playing cards, and the user can swipe left on the screen to ‘dislike’ or swipe right to ‘like’ a profile. These profiles are only shown once – swiping left to ‘dislike’ therefore eliminates these profiles from the ‘game’. Mutual right swipes result in a ‘match’ and only then can communication be initiated. Successful tindering is therefore in part measured by the amount of matches one obtains, as one of our participants explained:

Yeah when you get matched it’s like ooh! That’s quite cool, that’s the fun part and that’s also probably quite the addictive part of it as well, I’d imagine. And yeah it’s obviously good for good feelings.

Despite this elation of getting a match, many – particularly male – participants expressed a sense of frustration over their lack of success (i.e. their lack of matches) when using dating apps, indicating that dating apps may be perpetuating the exact anxiety they were designed to eliminate:

Tinder is purely based on looks. It’s a numbers’ game essentially. It’s swipe how many times you want. Um so I don’t personally like it still as a primary means of finding a relationship.

Engagement with the ‘game’ creates a level of anxiety that appears to stem from not gaining access to the smorgasbord of potential sexual and romantic partners theoretically available through dating apps. As another male participant remarked:

Everyone is copping a root but me.

In the online sphere, unattractive men have less chances at winning mutual matches, creating a sense that the average-looking guy is missing out on the dating game:

The 10% of highly attractive people fucking all the time make the rest of us feel bad.

In an offline context, ‘average-looking’ guys might be able to harness their interpersonal and communication skills instead:

I’m not suited to this app. I’m trying to find the right phrase but like the profiles that you think would get like high likes because of certain things they put in isn’t really me and I don’t try and do it. I also just think I’m more traditional in so far as I like to bump into someone at a bar or room across- eyes across a room that’s how I actually connect with people because I think half of meeting someone the fun is body language like reading little bits of body language.

In sum, how to present oneself in the best possible light online is a major concern for the users of dating apps. Whilst some participants felt that they are not suited to mobile dating apps due to a lack of successful self-presentation strategies, others engage in self-commodification in an attempt to increase their dating app success.

Self-commodification in the Tinder game

Self-commodification becomes an essential part of designing one’s profile. One interviewee described how he helped his friend to improve his Tinder profile:

So I ask ‘Can I look at your profile and can I change it for you?’ So I get him a different picture and I make his profile his ‘buyer’ – he didn’t have a buyer. I made his profile a buyer, and said ‘You can always go back’ and it blew up! It was almost like in the movies.

Users have the option of adding additional information or captions (referred to here as a ‘buyer’ and elsewhere as ‘digital pick-up line’) to their profiles. While some profiles strategically communicate very little, some male participants reported feeling put off by long digital pick-up lines:

So most of the time apparently it’s just a highly sexualised or very blunt statement of intentions. Um there are funny ones. But um and then some like you see some girls will put- um have like a really long thing, really long statement about fun-loving. Everyone in the world apparently is fun-loving. Oh god. Worst, most overused statement I’ve ever- but anyway [sighs] um the- at the very end of these monstrous spiels sometimes they’ll write ‘say orange if you’ve read this.’ And so you’re expected if you match, the first thing you say to them is orange to show that you’ve actually read through it.

In general, men appear to be less particular about whom they swipe right on in an attempt to increase their chances of gaining a match. However, these swipes do not always result in the kind of match the users were looking for, as another participant indicated:

He was frustrated cause of like five matches he’d had in the last two weeks four of them turned out to be prostitutes. The thing that made him so angry was that one of them actually talked to him for a whole week before she told him her rates.

In sum, male participants reported many frustrations related to looking for love on the move: getting a match was not actually ‘as easy as play’ – and even if they got matches, they were not always the kind of match they desired.

Changing communication strategies for the sexual marketplace

Dating apps certainly do not take the stress out of trying to find love, sex and romance. On the contrary, they may be creating new anxieties around online communication strategies. Male users, in particular, expressed frustration over the need to brand themselves as desirable commodities in the sexual marketplace. If dating apps are indeed ‘tearing society apart’ it is not because they result in everyone having casual sex all the time but because they create many more desires than they can fullfil.

If you like this post, you might also like

• No Sex for Generation On-the-Move
• Language shift and phone sex
• To English with love

Reference

Hobbs, M., Owen, S., & Gerber, L. (2016). Liquid love? Dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy Journal of Sociology DOI: 10.1177/1440783316662718

A preview of my draft chapter about “language in the ethnocratic, corporate and mobile city” of Dubai is now available here.

Examinations of the linguistic landscape of Dubai are a regular feature of Language on the Move and Dubai is in many ways an ideal city to interrogate many of the concerns that animate contemporary sociolinguistics such as mobility, “superdiversity” or commodification. Dubai is widely seen as a utopian superlative city and a model exemplum of contemporary cities as sites of heightened linguistic and cultural diversity and resulting multicultural conviviality. However, real life is inevitably more complex than the utopian vision and the chapter examines what forms of urban linguistic practices are enabled or disenabled by racial anxieties and ethnolinguistic hierarchies on the one hand and the classed ability to consume on the other.

Dubai: the image of a utopian contemporary city of superdiversity and multicultural conviviality

The first part of the chapter provides an overview of Dubai as a non-liberal modern city-state with a neoliberal free-market economy and comprised of a highly mobile and strictly stratified population. The second part then hones in on the linguistic tensions and dilemmas that can be observed in the ethnocratic, corporate and mobile city: dilemmas related to various forms of Arabic variously associated with the weight of tradition, economic dominance, transnational media and youth practices; tensions between English, as the language of globalization and modernity, and Arabic, the official national language; and, finally, the complexities of lingua franca use and the use of Dubai’s languages other than Arabic and English.

The chapter identifies three contributions that the study of Dubai can make to urban sociolinguistics:

1. Dubai is hierarchically organized in the extreme. However, it carries its social inequality on its sleeve so to speak. The structures of inequality in similarly affluent cities tend to be less obvious. To examine how linguistic diversity serves to constitute social inequality remains a central task of sociolinguistics.
2. Dubai is an unabashedly materialistic place. The same is true of most cities in the world where neoliberal market ideologies have elevated economic concerns above all else. The linguistic habitus of the flexible entrepreneurial urbanite often sits uneasily with practices and ideologies that sustain themselves from other ideological sources such as national, ethnic or religious identities. Sociolinguistics can help to illuminate how these ideological tensions produce and reproduce belonging and affiliation but also exclusion and disaffection. As the growing chasm in cities everywhere between the haves and the have-nots is widely misrecognized as a clash of cultures, this is a task of some urgency.
3. Dubai is extremely diverse. However, this “super-diversity” rarely translates into strong networks across ethnolinguistic boundaries. Instead, “parallel social lives involving public tolerance, yet little meaningful interaction, are the norm” (Coles & Walsh, 2010, p. 1322). Yet multilingual and intercultural interactions do take place in the workplace, in malls or in housing complexes. Many of these interactions may indeed be superficial and fleeting; what makes them “meaningful” from a sociolinguistic perspective is not so much how sustained they are but whether they reinforce or challenge existing linguistic and cultural stereotypes and hierarchies. Therefore, urban sociolinguistics will have to continue to be based in institutional ethnographies to understand language in the hierarchical, commodified and mobile spaces that make up the city.

I hope that the chapter will make a worthwhile and enjoyable read for both sociolinguists and lovers of Dubai.

Piller, I. (2016). Dubai: Language in the ethnocratic, corporate and mobile city. In: Smakman, D. and P. Heinrich. Eds. In preparation. Metrolinguistics: Urban Language Ecologies around the World. Routledge.

A monument near Baganuur (Outer Mongolia) with an inscription of poem “My Native Land” by Natsagdorj (Source: Wikipedia)

In the middle school Mongolian textbooks there is a well-known text called “Huuchin Huu” (“A young man fallen behind the times”) written by the famous Mongolian writer D. Natsagdorj. Most of us still remember how it starts:

Hudeegin baidal shaltar boltar, chagin ularil oroo bosgo …

(“The rural village is messy and shabby, the society is full of ups and downs…”)

I was impressed by the author’s ironic way of describing a Mongolian young man who was caught in the sudden change of rural life and in the end saw a light under an ‘upside-down’ big metal pot during the Mongolian revolution in the 1920s.

Recently, one of my friends sent a short story called “Suljeen Huu” (“A young man living in the Internet”) written by an online writer, whose pseudonym name is Tatar, in which he describes a phone-addicted young man in a Mongolian village in the same ironic way by employing almost the same sentence structures as those in “Huuchin Huu.”

It starts like this (the full text is available here):

WeChat version of “Huuchin Huu”

Suljiyen ne baidal uimeen shoogaan tai, suruglegsen humus eniyed tai haniad tai. Haaltai Google haxiltai Facebook uruu haya nig hoyar hun herem haraiju orona … gar chenegin haluun yilqi nuur ood nil geju hums in setgel  ig bohinduulna… barimjiya abiya gi urbuulen hurbuulen xinjigseer uder sarig uliruulna… boljoo doyan Mongol soyol ba Mongolchuud in garh jam, delhei dahini hugjiltin tohai hedun mur bichije… nig urloo gi barana.

(Life on the internet is full of noise and hustles, the crowds are smiling and coughing… looking at one or two guys jumping out of the ‘wall’ and wandering on Facebook and Google occasionally… the heat from phone battery flowing to his face and his heart is wistfully wondering… surfing and thinking about the online debate about standard Mongolian implementation, writing and boasting in heaps and bounds from time to time….) [my translation]

The parody focuses on the young man’s “wide knowledge” including others’ secret affairs, the prize money won by celebrity wrestlers, online medicine, the “deteriorating” quality of Mongolian women, and the politics of “hateful” Japan and “evil” America. Off the Internet, this young man leads a reckless yet aimless life: in the winter he plays Mah-jong, and goes bathing in the banner centre; in the summer he frequents fairs in various towns and banners, drinks with “table girls” and sings songs about the wide open grasslands.

This satire shines a critical spotlight on a life characterized by limited information, declining morality, enjoyment of drinking and partying, pursuit of cars and beauties, and boasting about the great Mongols of the past. It shows the dark side of a society under tremendous transformation that can be found in many small towns across Inner Mongolia.

Mongol-related headlines on WeChat

Let us look at some “detours” taken by Mongolians in the north eastern part of Inner Mongolia. Marois (2006) notes that former herders today live in sedentary house as their Chinese counterparts in this area. But they arrange their houses differently from Chinese villagers and engage in different occupancy practices. They keep their ger (“tent”) next to their house and move seasonally to graze their cattle on fertile pasture. Inside the settled-down house the honorific zone is kept at the back of the room as it is in the ger, and they locate the hearth in the room immediately behind the door. This is due to the fact that for Mongolians the fire is a purifying element. By contrast, Han villagers would locate the kitchen and the fire at the back of the house.

Marois (2006) argues that the adoption of sedentary life, fixed dwellings and other material objects are not enough to say that the herders have become sinicized. While making choices from a variety of objects modernity offers the herders, they take detours to make their choices suit their own needs and to express their distinctiveness.

The author Tatar very vividly tells about the life of young Mongolian village men. It is very hard for such men to find a wife, particularly if they do not own an apartment or a car.

But I also want to stress the adaptation made by the herders as they embrace modernity thrust upon them by the nation state and globalization. For instance, an increasing number of villagers in my hometown are buying cars and using WeChat now. The cars have increased the frequency of visits between relatives and friends, and some of them formed a WeChat Mongolian song competition group of over 100 people across several Mongolian villages.

Administrative map of Inner Mongolia (Source: Inner Mongolia News)

I therefore favour the term “cultural strategizing” (Silverberg, 2007) – instead of “cultural borrowing” – to explain the processes of social change that can be observed in the lives of Mongols. The emphasis on cultural strategizing is predicated on multifaceted dialogic interactions between local and global, between tradition and modernity.

Instead of wasting their lives on the Internet, contemporary Mongols also strategically use the Internet to commodify their culture and in search of profit. On sites such as 蒙古丽人 (“Mongol beauty”), 蒙古圈 (“Mongol circle”) or Onoodor (“Today”), Mongol photography is intended to lure tourists to Inner Mongolia. Traditional costumes and Mongolian girls and women are becoming something to be gazed at, and the herder with his sheep is parading before online users.

The virtual space also allows young Mongols to experience a sense of symbolic connection with their community and a form of ethnic identity, even if one that is entwined with the manipulation of markets.

Online Mongols are beautiful and glamorous people, with an amazing homeland and culture. By contrast, mundane news such as the dropping price of lamb, the harsh weather with summer droughts and winter storms, or the high levels of pollution are rare.

The Mongols’ nostalgic imaginings and pride related to the beauty of traditional life or pristine scenic spots divert their attention from many of the realities of their circumstances.

Social media “recreate” Mongolian lives for their followers, though cloaked ones.

Wedding party in Horqin, Tongliao, Inner Mongolia (Source: Xinhuanet)

The question then is how to play out their identities in their desired symbolically cloaked communities? Maybe attending one of the popular Mongolian weddings to “feel” more Mongolness is not a bad idea; at least our Internet boy can leave his phone for a moment and take a walk in another symbol-cluttered event. He might meet his soul mate dressed in traditional costume.

References

Marois, A. (2006). The Squaring of the Circle: Remarks on Identiy and Change from the Study of a Mongol-Han Community in Hulun Buir, Inner Mongolia. Mongolian Studies: Journal of the Mongolia Society, 28, 75-86.

Silverberg, M. R. (2007). Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Berkeley: University of California Press.

‘Luxury permanent’ Mongolian yurt for sale on Alibaba

Last week when I saw in my friends’ Wechat group an advertisement for delicately made Mongolian yurts, I thought of an article I had read earlier written by Mongolian scholar Naran Bilik. In his paper about urbanized Mongolians Bilik writes:

In the Inner Mongolian region, emotional discourse and collectivism are welded together by events and inventions of the past, as well as by regular cultural activities. […] To be modern means to rebel against or modify a tradition that legitimizes the ethnicity previously taken for granted. If the gap between modernism and traditionalism, which is often translated into one between practicality and emotion, can be bridged, it is by symbolisms that overlap, touch upon, invent, or transpose reality. However, this sort of reconciliation is bound to be short-lived, situational, superficial, and manipulable (Bilik 1998, pp. 53-54).

The bridging of traditional symbols and commodification is indeed situational, relatively superficial and easily manipulable for different interests, but not necessarily short-lived. I kept visiting my friends’ Wechat group, and I found notices in traditional Mongolian script (Mongol Bichig) about looking for a sheepherder, about renting grassland, and also about selling camels. There are also advertisements for teaching how to play the Mongolian horse-head string instrument, and notices about an evening class for Mongolian costume making.

Ad for teaching how to play the Mongolian horse-head string instrument

The enthusiasm for learning a traditional musical instrument, the lack of tailors due to the increasing popularity of Mongolian costumes, and those very artistically made Mongolian furniture items and yurts confirm Naran Bilik’s argument: the gap between practicality and emotion is bridged by the reinvention or transformation of ethnic symbols.

However, in this case the reinvented symbols are also a commodity with high symbolic and material value, as Trine Brox, a scholar from Copenhagen University, explains with reference to a Tibetan market in Chengdu. In that market, Tibetans and Han Chinese meet to buy and sell ethnic minority products (Brox, 2015).

Since the mid-1980s the Chinese central government has embraced a more lenient and tolerant policy concerning religion and this has allowed a revival of Tibetan Buddhism. And Tibetan businessmen began to trade in religious commodities and set up shops in Chengdu, where they sell stone beads, ceremonial scarfs, Buddha statues, carpets, etc. to the Tibetans, Chinese and foreign tourists.

Brox speculates at the end of her article whether we are witnessing the transformation of the minzu (‘ethnicity’) categorization from a political collective identity to an economic collective identity. While she does not suggest any de-politicization of ethnic identity, she speculates that markets may be the future of ethnic culture.

Even if a market does have the potential to provide ethnic groups with a new form of ethnic collectivity, the reality will be replete with contradictions resulting from the tension between ethnic culture, on the one hand, and national and global structures, on the other hand. These tensions will leave particular Mongolian and other ethnic identities more fuzzy and shaky, but Mongolian identity will undoubtedly endure the ‘modernization’ process, as it is reinvented or reinterpreted (Bilik & Burjgin, 2003).

WeChat containing Mongolian script

Let us look at the advertisement written in traditional Mongolian script on Wechat: Mongolian script is very eye-catching because it is surrounded by other information that is predominantly in Chinese. In this case, the traditional Mongolian script is not only telling us the content of the advertisement, but also, more importantly, acting as an advertising image. In other words, the symbolic or emotional meaning of the script outweighs its practical purpose. Of course, it also demonstrates who is excluded and included, given that there is no Chinese translation provided.

The traditional scripts, the Mongolian yurts or the costumes are indeed commoditized for diverse interests, but their dynamic interaction with Mongolians’ identity and their role in both compliance with and resistance to inescapable structures should not be neglected.

So when ethnic culture and identity meet the market and go through the process of commodification, we cannot simply assume that the ethnic identity or traditional culture is undermined in the ‘modernization’ or that they are in opposition to commodification. What future research should focus on is the interaction between ethnic practices and overarching structures and influences from modernization, or globalization.

References

Bilik, N. (1998). Language Education, Intellectuals and Symbolic Representation: Being an Urban Mongolian in a New Configuration of Social Evolution. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 4(1-2), 47-67. doi: 10.1080/13537119808428528

Bilik, N., & Burjgin, J. (2003). Contemporary Mongolian Population Distribution, Migration, Cultural Change and Identity. Armonk, N.Y.: Armonk, N.Y. : M.E. Sharpe.

Brox, T. (2015). Tibetan minzu market: the intersection of ethnicity and commodity Asian Ethnicity, 1-21 DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2015.1013175

A locutorio shop front in Barcelona (Source: El Periodico)

There is now a well-established body of work exploring the language work provided by service workers in call centres and tourist businesses. By contrast, the multilingual language work provided by migrants for migrants in multiethnic service enterprises has rarely been the focus of sociolinguistic attention. A recent book by Maria Sabaté i Dalmau, Migrant Communication Enterprises published by Multilingual Matters, fills this gap with an ethnographic inquiry into the language practices in a locutorio, a call shop, in Barcelona. A locutorio offers all kinds of telecommunication services such as billed calls in booths, the sale of top-ups for mobiles, fax services, internet access and international money transfers.

The locutorio the research is based on also served as meeting point for working class Spaniards and migrants, both documented and undocumented, from a variety of countries of origin. Beyond the sale of telecommunication services, the locutorio thus provided access to information, a place to hang out and it even served as the ‘public’ toilet for homeless people in the neighbourhood, mostly undocumented men from West Africa.

The locutorio was part of a chain of similar call shops owned by a Pakistani venture capitalist whose aim was to make a profit rather than provide social services for Barcelona’s marginalized. It was his employee Naeem, who was in charge of running the locutorio, who ended up caught between more than one rock and more than one hard place. Naeem was a fellow Pakistani hired by the owner in Pakistan two years before the fieldwork began. Naeem’s position was legal as a temporary resident but in order to achieve permanent residency in Spain he needed another two years of proven work, which left him vulnerable to exploitation by the owner. He worked twelve hours per day, seven days a week, for a meagre salary of less than Euro 800 per month. Naeem’s job consisted of opening the locutorio in the morning and closing it at night. He would start with booting up the computers and getting all the equipment to run. During the day, his duties consisted of assisting and charging customers, and making various phone calls (to his boss; to call card distributors; to the money transfer agency etc.). Additionally, he was in charge of maintaining the premises, including sweeping the floors, removing garbage and cleaning the toilets.

Much of this work is obviously language work and Naeem had to operate in a complex sociolinguistic environment. In addition to a range of varieties of Spanish – from Standard Peninsular Spanish via various Latin American varieties to a range of second language varieties – this included Catalan, English, Urdu, Punjabi, and Moroccan Arabic in various spoken and written constellations and used by clients with variable levels of proficiencies, including proficiencies in the use of telecommunication services. In this highly diverse environment, communication was rigidly regimented by the meters on the machine where communication was paid for by the minute.

Unsurprisingly, misunderstandings and communication break-downs were common. On top of all that, Naeem had to deal with customers who tried to cheat him (the balance of each financial irregularity was deducted from his meagre salary) and who abused and insulted him. Working in a highly constrained yet super-diverse environment left little room for personal autonomy and, only in his late twenties, Naeem was suffering from eating disorders, compulsive smoking, chronic fatigue and anxiety attacks.

The researcher concludes that locutorio language workers constitute “a voiceless army of multilingual mediators” (p. 170) whose multilingualism is not only a site of language work but also a site of linguistic exploitation.

Migrant Communication Enterprises offers a rich migrant-centred ethnographic account of a prototypical enterprise of the 21^st century. If this blog post has piqued your interest and this is your area of research expertise, you might want to review the book for Multilingua. If so, please get in touch with a short description of your expertise.

Maria Sabaté i Dalmau (2014). Migrant Communication Enterprises: Regimentation and Resistance Multilingual Matters

Yangshuo’s West Street (Source: chinatravelca)

Tourism has been found to be beneficial for minority language maintenance in a number of contexts from around the world. For instance, Anand Torrents Alcaraz has recently shown here on Language on the Move that the growing tourism industry in the Pallars Sobirà region of the Spanish Pyrenees extends the range of uses of Pallarès, the local dialect of Catalan, beyond its traditional rural-agricultural domains. Similarly, PhD research by Yang Hongyan has demonstrated that the award of World Heritage status to the city of Lijiang in Yunnan province in China has provided a significant boost for the maintenance of the Naxi language (Yang 2013). However, it is not always the case that the local minority language benefits from the development of tourism in a minority area, as a fascinating case study of West Street in Yangshuo Town in the Guilin district of Guangxi Province in China demonstrates (Gao 2012).

Yangshuo was one of the first backpacker destinations to emerge in China and the frequency with which Yangshuo is featured in English-language travel reports is out of all proportion to its small size, as Xiaoxiao Chen found in her study of representations of Chinese people and languages in English-language newspaper travel writing (Chen 2013). Yangshuo is typically represented as “easy,” “accessible” and “English-speaking” to English-language audiences, as in the following example (quoted in Chen 2013, p. 207):

[Yangshuo] is the most accessible destination in China for independent foreign travelers, offering accommodation across all ranges, an eclectic array of restaurants with English menus and English-speaking tourism service providers.

However, catering to the international tourist market through the provision of English-language services is only one part of the success story of Yangshuo. Capitalising on its popularity with international tourists, Yangshuo began to strategically associate itself with English-speaking visitors in its marketing efforts directed at domestic tourists, as in the following strategy paper (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 343):

We should fully explore the opportunities of mixing Chinese with western cultures by strategically integrating more western elements into local Yangshuo culture.

As a consequence of this branding strategy, part of the attraction of Yangshuo for domestic tourists now is the presence of English in the linguistic landscape, as a tourism site points out (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 336f.):

Yangshuo has picturesque scenery and rich cultural heritage. The most famous is the ancient stone street, West Street, which has many craft shops, calligraphy and painting shops, hostels, cafés, bars, and Chinese kung fu houses. It is also the gathering place for the largest number of foreigners – more than twenty businesses are owned by foreigners. So the place is called the ‘Foreigner Street’. And since all the locals can speak foreign languages, it is also called the ‘Global Village’. Another attraction is the study and exchange of Chinese and foreign languages and cultures. Chinese people teach their foreign friends Chinese cultures including its language, calligraphy, taiji, cooking, chess; at the same time foreigners teach Chinese people their languages and cultures, so that both finish their ‘study abroad’ within a short time.

The presence of English in the local linguistic landscape is continuously stressed in marketing materials, such as this one from the Yangshuo Tourism Bureau (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 345f.):

Yangshuo is a good place to cure your ‘dumb English’ and ‘deaf English’. At West Street, you can always see West Street people talking in fluent English with western travelers for business or just having small talk. Even old grannies in their 70s or teenage kids can chat [Chinese original: 拉呱 lā guǎ] with ‘laowai’ [foreigners] in English. Many western travelers say they just feel no foreignness here. West Street is the largest ‘English Corner’ in China now.

One could assume that in this ‘culture- and language-rich’ tourist destination, local languages are also being strategically incorporated, particularly as Yangshuo is located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the home of the Zhuang ethnic minority. However, this is not the case. In contrast to the ubiquitous focus on English, the local language, Zhuang, the local dialect of Chinese, and other local minority languages present in Yangshuo (Yao, Hui, Miao, Tibetan, Dong and others) are systematically erased: their existence is simply never even mentioned in tourism materials about the area.

Even if the local dialect is mentioned, as in this blog post by a visitor to Yangshuo (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 348f.), it is to be denigrated as not locally appropriate:

You must hold a CET-4 certificate, with relatively fluent spoken English, because at West Street, or just at countryside farmhouses of Yangshuo, even an old grandma or an egg-seller from a rural family could surprise you with their amazing English and at least another foreign language. Next of course you should know Cantonese, kind of an official language here, ‘cause more than half of the xiăozī [=cool person; yuppie] are from Guangdong. The third comes Putonghua, better with Beijing accent. The local dialect just does not work there.

In contrast to Pallars Sobirà or Lijiang, in Yangshuo tourism has done nothing to improve the status of local minority languages. On the contrary, as English takes on the function of indexing not only the global but also the local identity of Yangshuo, it is English that becomes a marker of local authenticity in the global village.

References

Chen, Xiaoxiao. (2013). Opening China to the Tourist Gaze: Representations of Chinese People and Languages in Newspaper Travel Writing since the 1980s. PhD, Macquarie University.

Gao, Shuang (2012). Commodification of place, consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a ‘global village’ in rural China Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16 (3), 336-357 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2012.00534.x

Yang, Hongyan. (2012). Naxi, Chinese and English: Multilingualism in Lijiang. PhD, Macquarie University.

Actress Noemí Busquets as the wise yet naughty Esperanceta Gassia at the Ecomuseu de les Valls d’Àneu during the theatrical night visit to the ethnographic museum of Esterri d’ Àneu in Pallarès

When thinking of promoting tourism in a mountainous area of the Catalan Pyrenees it might seem as if using Pallarès, the local dialect of the Western Catalan type, with very specific vocabulary that visitors from other Catalan-speaking areas are not familiar with and which has been traditionally linked to rural and traditional lifestyles, would make little sense.

Nevertheless, much is to be gained by resorting to this local variety of the Catalan language in touristic activities in the area of Pallars Sobirà… why is that? Well, surprisingly, globalization is the answer.

One of the things that happen in the globalized touristic use of languages, according to authors such as Jaworski and Thurlow (2011) is the “commodification” and “recontextualization” of language. That means, language becomes a commodity in tourism … Aloha in Hawaii and Namaste in Nepal add authenticity to cultural visits, which is always a key asset in tourism. Beyond greetings and occasional language-learning through touristic “grazing” and “gazing”, though, tourism naturally creates new contexts for cultural phenomena and it currently values (oral) intangible heritage greatly. In fact, intangible heritage becomes visible precisely thanks to tourism. Pallarès is, in this sense, an intangible heritage of great value due to its connection to the authentic culture and territory of the Pyrenees.

According to dialectologists (Veny, 1993), Pallarès displays the marks of languages that were spoken before Catalan in the Pyrenees; mainly Basque, which vanished around the 8^th century AD due to the Romanization process, but which endured in “isolated” mountain valleys of the Pallars until the 10^th century, leaving a strong imprint on place names specially.

Mountain regions are ambivalent: either mountains and valleys “isolate”, or they “link” populations, villages, and cultures. So, when researching in order to assess the potential value of Pallarès in the promotion of the rich touristic offer of the Pallars Sobirà region (a land with prime adventure sports environment and unique cultural offers from Romanesque art to gastronomy) I asked cultural anthropologist and director of the Ecomuseu de les Valls d’Àneu Jordi Abella about this. Mr. Abella told me that “the villages of the Pyrenees in the 19^th century were already connected to European capital cities such as Madrid, Paris and Barcelona” and that too long a “good savage myth à la Rousseau had lived on to give a false romantic image of the Pyrenees” based on cultural purity due to isolation.

In a way, both isolation and globalization are forces at play here: isolation is evidenced by the fact that Basque lived on for 200 years in the Pallars; and globalization is evidenced by the fact that people changed to a common language – Catalan – which they could use at fairs and for trading.

Poster of the theater and dance festival “Esbaiola’t” in Esterri d’Àneu. The verb “esbaiolar-se” is unknown in other varieties of Catalan and means “to clear one’s mind” as well as “to clear up the mists (weather)”

Catalonia as a whole is going through what some have called a “thirst for history” (Toledano Gonzàlez, 2004). Catalans are more inclined to consume and discover more about their own culture at the current history-defining moment in which a Catalan vote for self-determination is being discussed. This creates a context that naturally invites greater use of Pallarès as Actress Noemí Busquets (who plays the role of a Pallarès-speaking witch-like wise and wacky lady that confronts local and global values during the night visits to the Eco Museum of the village of Esterri d’Àneu) emphasises: “now I feel that it (Pallarès) is better appreciated by visitors”.  And the fact is that 63% of the visitors coming to the Pallars region are from Catalonia (Boyra & Fusté, 2013), and mostly from the metropolitan area of Barcelona. What is it that Pallarès can offer them?

When in 1913, the philologist Pompeu Fabra wrote the Orthographic Rules of Catalan and later on the General Dictionary of Catalan Language (1931), he based them on the Eastern Catalan dialect – the one spoken in Barcelona – and left aside most vocabulary of other dialects and almost completely ignored Pallarès. Now, as a consequence of this, people coming to the Pallars get surprised by Pallarès. While queuing up at a grocery shop in the beautiful village of Esterri d’Àneu, a spontaneous conversation on dialectology started: a woman shared that when she got married to her Pallarès husband and moved to his village, her mother-in-law once asked her to fetch the “llosa”. “Llosa” in Catalan means “stone slab”; so, she continued “I was hoping that the stone slab wouldn’t be too heavy”. To her relief she later found out that “llosa” in Pallarès means “ladle”.

Pallarès brings back to Catalan-speaking visitors, a richness of vocabulary that they would otherwise ignore. When I asked Yolanda Mas, tourism specialist of the city hall of Sort (the capital of the Pallars Sobirà) what she thought of promoting Pallarès through tourism, she said that “it is an endangered resource that we should definitely invest in”. Nowadays, the visitors to the Pallars Sobirà are very diverse; from French and English to Spanish, Israeli and Russians; so the linguascape of the Pallars might become even more complex soon, and while offering touristic activities in Hebrew or Russian may respond to the economic need of the moment, offering activities in Pallarès Catalan in addition to activities in Standard Catalan and other languages, will be proof that “identity sells” while being at the same time a necessary expression of authentic identity.

References
Boyra, J. & Fusté, F. (2013). Anàlisi dels instruments d’ordenació i dels recursos territorials i l’activitat turística a la comarca del Pallars Sobirà GREPAT/ Escola Universitària Formatic Barna, Barcelona

Fabra, P. (1913). Normes ortogràfiques. Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona.

Fabra, P. (1931). Diccionari general de la llengua catalana. Llibreria Catalònia, Barcelona.

Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (2010). Language and the Globalizing Habitus of Tourism: Towards a sociolingüístics of Fleeting Relationships (From: Handbook of Language and Globalization, edited by Coupland, N.) Wiley- Blackwell Publishing ltd. West Sussex, UK.

Toledano Gonzàlez, L. (2004). Atles del Turisme a Catalunya mapa nacional dels recursos turísitics intangibles. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona- Grup de Recerca Consolidat Manuscrits / Generalitat de Catalunya.

Torrents, A. (2014). La variant dialectal pallaresa com a bé immaterial de la marca de turisme cultural “Pallars”. Creació i comercialització de productes turístics. Quaderns de recerca Escola Universitària Formatic Barna, Barcelona.

Veny, J. (1993). Els parlars catalans (Síntesi de dialectologia) Editorial Moll, Mallorca.

Business card promoting private English tuition

In Iran, as in many other countries around the globe, the craze for learning English has been on the rise. This tendency is attributed to, inter alia, the country’s rather young population who need the language for various purposes such as furthering education abroad, immigration or trade. As a consequence, all kinds of English teaching have become big business. While the majority of learners of English attend private English language institutes, private tutoring, too, has mushroomed in the past few years.

In the past few months, I have been collecting marketing materials for private English language tuition in Isfahan. While well-established language institutes usually rely on local newspapers, magazines or TV channels to promote their English classes, individual language tutors choose less expensive methods of advertising. The main promotional method is the distribution of brochures, fliers and business cards.

Despite the low costs associated with their production, these advertising materials can easily be distributed among target audiences which often include those who need a certain score on standardized tests such as TOEFL or IELTS in a rather short period of time. Business cards are usually personally distributed among tutors’ networks. Additionally, they are also found in the city’s language bookshops. Brochures and fliers are found in all kinds of public spaces frequented by young people.

A close look at such marketing materials enables us to explore social issues embedded in the discourse of the private TESOL industry in Iran today. In my corpus of more than 100 marketing materials for private tutoring, the following ideologies of English language learning can be found:

• Learning English is associated with personal success. One business card, for instance, has the Persian mottoدانش زبان انگلیسی قدرت دنیای امروز است  on the front and the English translation “English knowledge is power” on the back.
• The ideal tutor is a person who has the experience of living in an English-speaking country, usually in Australia, Canada and the UK. Another business card, for example, describes the tutor as a person who has lived in Australia for five years (٥ سال زندگی در استرالیا) and uses the slogan Learn English from one who has lived in an English-speaking country.
• The ideal tutor is linked to an international organisation. Examples of such organizations, which are typically included in brackets after the tutor’s name, include “TEFL Canada”, “British Council” and “ETS”.
• English learners come in distinct groups based on age, gender or occupation. One example promotes semi-private English classes for housewives (انگلیسی برای خانمهای خانه دار), who, as the description on the flier reveals, “are usually free in the morning and are able to attend English classes.” In this context the English language is dividable into different packages which are separately accessible. Other examples includeانگلیسی برای کودکان  (English for children), انگلیسی برای نوجوانان (English for teenagers), انگلیسی برای توریست ها (English for tourists) andانگلیسی برای تجار  (English for businessmen), to name a few. No information is provided about the course content and the name of the course corresponds to the social role of the target group (e.g., ‘housewives’).

Overall, the unprecedented demand for English has caused English tutors in Iran, as in many other countries in the world, to compete for students. In this respect, English language tutors are driven by the competition for profit and English language learning is thus marketed in specific ways. As my corpus shows, private tutors typically use a variety of strategies in order to be deemed legitimate and meritorious. It appears that in this context the quest for a better tutor (as a form of identity) has long replaced the identification of practices designed to address the complexity of language learning.

Who profits from an early start in English language learning?

不要讓你的孩子輸在起跑點上 (Don’t let your children lose out at the starting point.) is one of the most popular slogans whenever English education in Taiwan is discussed. The notion that, when it comes to English language learning, younger is better, is widely accepted by Taiwanese people.

As a result, Taiwanese children are compelled to learn English as early as possible. In 2004 Taiwan’s Ministry of Education mandated all public elementary schools should start English courses from Grade 3 but the majority of schools actually begin to teach English in the first grade. Some private language schools even offer all-English programs for toddlers as young as one-year-old. Thus, there can be no doubt that both the public and private sectors subscribe to the argument that English should be taught at an early age.

The belief in the importance of an early start in English is widely promoted by private language schools, as in this video clip, which likens young children to the earth in which English is planted like a seed. The short text in Mandarin Chinese introducing the video explains the principle as follows:

埋下一顆種籽

教育，在孩子的心裡埋下一顆種籽

在往後的人生中發芽、抽枝，

終至成為綠葉成蔭的大樹。

自然而然的讓語言活起來！

 

Plant a seed

Education (English) – plant a seed in children’s minds.

It will germinate and eventually it will grow into a big tree with large green leaves.

Let language grow naturally! (My translation.)

This text implies that age is the critical factor in successful English language learning  as an early start will enable “natural mastery” of English. One of the central themes of the commercial is the repeated assertion that children have an extraordinary ability to learn English and that they will acquire English naturally through English-Only immersion methods taught by native English-speaking teachers. The video also suggests that English can be learned in a “joyful” way at an early age in the school’s playful learning environment and that this “natural method” will achieve extremely positive outcomes.

The commercial drives this point home with testimonials by parents interspersed throughout the video: they claim that their children became “more confident”, “more active” and “more opened-minded” through learning English. Reaffirming points made by the parents are native English-speaking teachers basically promising that Taiwanese children will see the whole world differently as English will give them a global perspective. The overarching concepts of the text and video are that English should be learned at an early age and in doing so English learning will transform Taiwanese children into “global” individuals.

As mentioned earlier, although public schools officially start teaching English from 3^rd grade, the language school market pressures Taiwanese parents to send their pre-school children to language schools to get a head start. Language schools market English language learning to mirror first language acquisition. In other words, age is considered the primary determinant in successful English language learning. This directly links to the widespread belief that there is a critical period in language learning and that children are better second language learners.

However, there are many studies that contradict the premise of “the earlier, the better.” There is ample evidence to suggest that language learners who have a firm foundation in their native language, in this case Chinese, will fare better in second language learning. Nonetheless, in Taiwan there is no shortage of over-eager parents sending their children to language schools or bilingual kindergartens to obtain an English education at a very young age. Given the English learning hype they are prepared to ignore the possibility that their children might be disadvantaged eventually for being deprived of basic knowledge in their first language.

Furthermore, even when Taiwanese English learners begin at an early age, they rarely exhibit perfect mastery of English. In reality, age is only one of the many factors that contribute to an individual’s language learning. Second language or foreign language acquisition involves a number of complex learner variables, such as student motivation, attitudes towards learning, learning styles, aptitude, conditions for English teaching and learning and the goals of English education. Furthermore, these are all embedded in the broader political, social, economic and teaching contexts.

The aim of an earlier start for English is assumed to lead to modernization and internationalization in Taiwan but before achieving this lofty ideal English creates an unequal relationship among the people in contemporary Taiwanese society.

In light of the evidence that an early start in English is not necessarily beneficial and may have negative consequences even for the individual and in light of the heavy social cost of Taiwan’s English craze, Taiwan may need to re-evaluate its current beliefs and think about restructuring its failing English learning system. Just because children start early, does not mean they will reach the finish line faster. In fact, when it comes to English language learning, there is no absolute finish line …