“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

My banal cosmopolitan fridge magnets

In response to my post about the banal cosmopolitanism of multilingual welcome signs last week, a number of people suggested that they quite enjoy finding their language(s) in such signs. This made me think of the ways in which global linguistic hierarchies are being produced and reproduced through practices that ostensibly value multilingualism. Even being listed in such signage may be an index of privilege while the majority of the world’s languages and peoples are rendered invisible and speechless.

The fridge magnets in my house constitute a perfect example of banal cosmopolitanism: there is one in the shape of a rooster that says “Portugal” and “Macau Souvenir”; one that spells out “Abu Dhabi” (the model horse that used to be stuck under the name has come off); one that has a map of the North American West Coast and says “California – a view of the world”; there is one that says “New Zealand” and features four colorful kiwis; another one in the shape of the map of New York State that says “Ithaca of New York”; a round one with “Buddha Eyes” from “Nepal”, where “Nepal” is written in the Latin script but stylized in a way that looks vaguely like Devanagari; a doll-shaped one with Korean script and the English caption “hand made”; and then there are six magnets featuring a toy rabbit by the name of “Felix”, who plays with a globe, travels by plane and is placed against a bottle of “original American ketchup”.

“Letters from Felix: A little rabbit on a world tour” (Cover page, German edition)

The toy rabbit Felix is the main character in a series of German children’s books and animated films. The character has been immensely successful since it was first launched in 1994. Books in the series have been translated into 29 languages (which is highly unusual for German children’s books) and more than seven million copies have been sold worldwide. There is a feature-length movie and a huge range of Felix-branded merchandise including toys, lollies, reading glasses for children, travel accessories and much more. Since 2013 Felix has been an ambassador for the global charity SOS Children’s Villages.

In my house, we have a copy of one of the German-version books in the series, the well-read and much-loved Briefe von Felix: Ein kleiner Hase auf Weltreise (“Letters from Felix: A little rabbit on a world tour”). It is a prime example of banal cosmopolitanism: it presents the global sphere as mundane and socializes young children into the practice of tourism and international travel as normal.

It also presents the “world” of Felix’ “world tour” as an exclusively North-Atlantic world.

Felix’ letter from Paris

The plot is straightforward: it all starts with an airport scene and a family returning from their (obviously international but destination unspecified) summer holiday. Sophie, one of four children in the family, loses her toy rabbit Felix. After this sad end to the holidays, the new school year starts with a surprise: a letter from Felix. It turns out that the rabbit had ended up on the wrong flight and is now visiting London. The remainder of the book consists of the letters that Felix sends from his travels – in addition to London, he visits Paris, Rome, Cairo, Kenya and New York City. Each letter is read by the whole family and taken as an educational opportunity to learn more about each of Felix’ destinations. On December 06 – St Nicholas Day, when children in Germany get gifts – Felix comes back to Sophie with a suitcase full of souvenirs.

The book is highly multimodal: in addition to text and images, it also features airmailed letters that can be removed from their envelopes and read separately. The letters serve to connect the world of the German children as they go through the fall period between summer holidays and Christmas to the six international destinations visited by the toy rabbit.

In each letter, Felix proves to be a keen observer of language and culture and provides information about Paris, Rome, Cairo, Kenya and New York City that could be considered educational for children. One piece of information that children can take away from the book is that the world is multilingual; or, rather, that the Western world is multilingual. In other words, language is a topic of Felix’ letters from London, Paris, Rome and New York City but not of his letters from Cairo and Kenya.

The map of Felix’ “world” tour

In addition to these language fun facts, the letters from London, Paris, Rome and New York City also provide information about famous buildings and other tourist sights. Each letter then provides a learning opportunity for the family as Sophie asks her parents, grandma or aunt about further information, which they then look up in an encyclopedia, another book or even a photo album from previous travels. Through this kind of further research, Sophie, for instance, discovers that the “secret code” Felix refers to in his letter from Rome is actually Latin. Unlike her older brother who studies Latin in school, we learn that Sophie is too young to study Latin but that she really enjoys looking through her brother’s Latin textbook and looking at the images of ancient Roman buildings such as the Colosseum or the Pantheon.

By contrast to these four cities, Cairo and Kenya are represented differently.

Felix’ souvenirs: stickers – to represent fridge magnets? – for banal cosmopolitanism to colonize yet another space

In the letter from Cairo there is no mention of Arabic or contemporary life in Egypt; rather Felix visits the pyramids and it almost seems as if he had travelled back in time to the age of the pharaohs. The sense of time travel is reinforced through the fact that Sophie’s additional research is not undertaken through conversations with other family members and books but through a visit to the museum where there is a show entitled “ÄGYPTEN – ein vergangenes Königreich” (“Egypt – a bygone kingdom”). Further related learning is achieved by building a Lego pyramid.

Kenya – the only destination that is identified as a country rather than a city – has neither language nor culture: in fact, it seems empty of people. Felix only observes animals: elephants, zebras and lions; and to do further research about Kenya, Sophie visits the zoo.

There can be no doubt that the playful integration of multilingualism in this book is valuable for young children: they learn that there are many different languages in the world, that linguistic diversity is intriguing and that speaking different languages is enjoyable and pleasurable. It’s an important message.

However, the fact that the message of the pleasure of language learning and multilingualism is restricted to European languages also carries another message: that Egyptians and Kenyans do not have languages that are intriguing and worth paying attention to. In fact, along with their languages, the people of Africa are neither heard nor seen: for all the reader learns in the book, they may not even exist.

Felix’ “world tour” reminds us that the world of banal cosmopolitanism is not flat, as many globalization pundits would have us believe. It’s a hierarchy where even being listed can be a privilege.

Related content

• Banal cosmopolitanism
• What makes foreigner weird? A quick guide to orientalism
• Chapter Two “Linguistic Diversity and Stratification” of Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

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

In early August, Stephen Miller, advisor to the US president, got involved in a heated confrontation with a reporter from CNN following the announcement of a new immigration-reform bill. The ‘Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy’ or RAISE Act, which is being supported by the White House, seeks to replace the current immigration system with a merit-based one, and in so doing prioritizes people with, among other things, a high level of English-language proficiency. The reporter, Jim Acosta, asked Miller how the bill squared with the ideals of the poem engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty – ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses’ – and particularly, whether the stipulation about English proficiency was a means of ‘trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country’. Did it not have the effect of favouring people from Great Britain and Australia, while excluding others? Miller’s short-tempered response was to accuse Acosta of promoting the needs of immigrants above those of hard-working Americans, and in so doing, harbouring a ‘cosmopolitan bias’.

It’s this notion of ‘cosmopolitan bias’ which tells us almost as much about the politics of diversity in contemporary society as the policies which explicitly support a monocultural view of the nation do. The provision about language proficiency in the RAISE Act is part of the apparatus of a very standard national language ideology – the idea that (in this case) English is a fundamental part of the country’s cultural-political identity, and that linguistic diversity stands opposed to the integrity of this identity. Its inclusion in the act should come as no surprise given the ‘English only’ stance that Trump has previously voiced. For example, during the primaries he scolded his rival Jeb Bush for code-switching, insisting that ‘This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish’.

But what’s of equal interest is how the broader discourse of diversity is also being framed in these comments. The word ‘cosmopolitan’ when used here by Miller is a near synonym of the right’s other go-to insult, ‘elite’, and an antonym of ‘nationalist’. The political idea of cosmopolitanism is of humankind existing as a single community with shared moral values, in which people from different backgrounds (including different nation-states) can co-exist based on mutual respect, and despite different cultural, political or religious backgrounds. As such it stands in opposition to a belief in the primacy of the traditions and ideals of the nation. In the cosmopolitan equation, shared values are a stronger bond than the arbitrariness of shared inhabitancy of a nation.

This is clearly anathema to nationalists, for whom love of country and its citizens is paramount, and for whom the president is the a priori figurehead for this, and thus deserving of an unquestioning loyalty. ‘Cosmopolitan’, on the other hand, implies an inbuilt scepticism of this ideal, and by extension, for the nationalists, a lack of patriotism.

According to Jeff Greenfield in Politico, one of the reasons why ‘cosmopolitan’ is a particularly loaded term in this context is that it was ‘key to an attempt by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to purge the culture of dissident voices’. Cosmopolitanism and diversity for Stalin were synonymous with criticism, and for this reason seen as a direct threat to his power. Greenfield sees the traces of a similar undercurrent in Trump’s message. The “American First” mantra is a way for his administration to enforce its own ideology while at the same time labelling any dissent as anti-patriotic. By this logic, simply speaking a ‘foreign’ language can be categorised as an act of dissent.

And it’s here that the ‘bias’ element of Stephen Miller’s term comes in. There’s an interesting rhetorical sleight-of-hand in the way he’s structuring his argument. In effect, by complaining of bias, what he’s doing is trying to appropriate the concept of diversity for his own side. He’s accusing his opponents of themselves taking a closed view of issues; suggesting that it’s journalists such as Acosta who are intolerant of different opinions, and are in effect the ones arguing for a monoculture. And the monoculture they’re arguing for is cosmopolitanism.

This is a common strategy amongst the alt-right. For example, James Damore, who was recently fired by Google for his sexist critique of the company’s diversity policies, subtitled his memo ‘How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion’. He’s since gone on to complain of the way that today’s mainstream culture ‘tries to silence any dissenting views’. His rather convoluted argument is that mainstream culture is fine with diversity as long as it’s the sort of diversity that it itself promotes; but that diverse views such as his (which, as it happens, are an attack on this mainstream notion of diversity) are censored – thus proving that there’s a hypocritical bias in the culture!

In many ways it’s a similar pattern to what happened in the ‘fake news’ debate. In that case, initial concerns about how media (both social and traditional) was sifting out the experience of diversity in society (by creating ‘filter bubbles’), and thus preventing people from being exposed to a broad range of opinions and values, got hijacked by assertions of bias in the ‘mainstream’ media from the Trump camp. ‘Fake news’ went, within a few months, from being the phenomenon of how the circulation of fabricated stories and highly-partisan opinions get circulated in society, to a blanket insult for anything the president and his supporters disagreed with.

The singular national language ideology is, of course, vastly out of line with the reality of the linguistic identity of the US. For a start, over 50 million people in the US now speak Spanish – which means it has more Spanish speakers than Spain. And, as research into multilingualism across the globe has been highlighting in recent years, the norm in all societies is variety, diversity and a mixed use of resources – so much so that many sociolinguists are advocating a change in the vocabulary we use to describe people’s language practices, so that the idea of discrete national languages no longer operates as the default.

But the concept of ‘diversity’ that’s being demonised in the discourse from Miller and associates is not just a diversity of cultural values and practices (symbolised, in the argument with Acosta, by language). It’s also a diversity of opinions and perspectives. And demonising this thus becomes a way of re-categorizing open debate as dissent. A way of undermining the importance of critical thinking in favour of an obedient devotion to ex cathedra assertion.

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”.

Rashid al-Din Monument in Soltaniyeh, Iran (Source: Wikipedia)

Recently, I signed a contract for a revised second edition of my 2011 book Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction to be published in 2017. One way in which I am planning to extend the book is to have a greater focus on cultural mediators. What are the stories, experiences and practices of people who act as brokers between languages and cultures?

In some cases, people are pushed into the role of cultural mediators out of necessity, as is the case with child cultural and linguistic mediators. Others take on the roles of cultural brokers as an act of public service. In an age when most of our own political leaders seem to be more inclined towards erecting new borders, strengthening old ones and tearing down bridges, it is instructive to consider the case of two 13^th century statesmen whose friendship helped to connect east and west Asia: the Mongol Bolad and the Persian Rashid al-Din.

Rashid al-Din

Of the two, Rashid al-Din is today the better-known; as the author of the Jāme’ al-Tawārikh (“Universal History”) he is credited with having been “the first world historian” (Boyle 1971).

Rashid al-Din was born around 1250 CE into a Jewish family in Hamadān in north-west Iran. At the age of twenty-one or thirty (different accounts exist in different sources; see Kamola 2012), he converted to Islam and around the same time he entered the service of the then-ruler of Iran, the Il-Khan Abaqa (1265-81) as court physician. Under Abaqa’s grandson Il-Khan Ghazan (1295-1304) Rashid al-Din became vizier, one of the most influential roles in the state. Rashid al-Din also served Ghazan’s son and successor Öljeitü (1304-16). After Öljeitü’s death he became the victim of a court intrigue and was put to death in 1317, when he was around seventy years old.

During his long career he served his kings in many capacities: as physician, head of the royal household, military and general adviser, the mastermind of far-reaching fiscal and agricultural reforms, and, through his writing, as chief ideologue and propagandist of the Il-Khanids. In short, Rashid al-Din was a powerbroker, who did very well for himself and the realm he served:

He had become the owner of vast estates in every corner of the Il-Khan’s realm: orchards and vineyards in Azerbaijan, date-palm plantations in Southern Iraq, arable land in Western Anatolia. The administration of the state was almost a private monopoly of his family: of his fourteen sons eight were governors of provinces, including the whole of Western Iran, Georgia, Iraq and the greater part of what is now Turkey. Immense sums were at his disposal for expenditure on public and private enterprises. (Boyle 1971, p. 20)

Portrait of Kublai Khan (Source: Wikipedia)

Bolad

Thousands of miles to the east, Bolad’s career was very similar to that of Rashid al-Din: Bolad was about ten years older than Rashid al-Din and born around 1240 somewhere in Mongolia. His father was a man named Jürki, a member of the Dörben, a Mongolian tribe, who had submitted to Genghis Khan in 1204. Jürki quickly rose through the ranks of the imperial guard. In addition to his military distinction as a “Commander of a Hundred in the Personal Thousand” of Genghis Khan, he also became a ba’ruchi (“cook”) in the imperial household. While “cook” may not sound like much of a rank, in the Mongolian system this household position carried great prestige and showed close personal ties with the ruler (Allsen 1996, p. 8).

As a result of his father’s position, little Bolad was assigned to the service of Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai Khan at age eight or nine. His education included the military arts and Chinese language and civilization. Bolad, too, forged a distinguished administrative career at the Yuan court. As he grew older, his duties and assignments included formulating court ceremonies, educating young Mongolians who entered the imperial service, and organizing the “Censorate,” the investigative arm of government. He became Head of the Bureau of Agriculture, which he helped establish; took on the role of Vice-Commissioner of Military Affairs; and headed a major anti-corruption investigation. His diverse appointments close to the centre of power at Kublai Khan’s court earned him the Chinese title chengxiang, “chancellor.”

In the spring of 1283, Bolad was appointed Kublai Khan’s ambassador to the Il-Khanids. The journey from Kublai Khan’s capital Khanbaliq (Dadu; modern Beijing) to the Il-Khan’s court in Tabriz took more than one year and Bolad and his embassy arrived in late 1284. He was supposed to return to China in 1285 but hostile forces made it impossible for a man of his rank to travel. He therefore stayed in Iran for the final twenty-eight years of his life. In addition to the role of ambassador, Bolad there assumed the role of chief advisor to the Il-Khan. During Öljeitü’s reign he became third minister and was in charge of logistics during a number of military campaigns. Active until well into his seventies, Bolad died in 1313 while he was in command of the northern garrisons.

Like Rashid al-Din, Bolad was a power broker. He distinguished himself not only at one but at two courts. Like Rashid al-Din, Bolad and his family, too, acquired significant wealth in their service to the Mongolian empire.

The context: the Yuan and Il-Khanid courts

Expansion of the Mongolian Empire, 1206-1294 (Source: Wikipedia)

Rashid al-Din and Bolad obviously met and became friends at the Il-Khanid court. But what was the broader context of their encounter?

After the death of Möngke Khan, a brother of Kublai Khan’s, in 1259, the unity of the Mongolian empire Genghis Khan had forged was permanently broken and the descendants of Genghis Khan fell into various succession wars. Kublai Khan held strong in Yuan China. The Il-Khanid line in Iran, founded by his brother Hülegü, formally acknowledged Kublai Khan’s sovereignty. Between these two allies, the Genghizid lines in Central Asia and Russia established various autonomous regional khanates, including the famous Golden Horde. These were at various times allied in various ways, at war with each other in various ways, and, particularly relevant here, often at war with China and Iran.

As nomadic aristocracy ruling two realms with a settled agrarian population and ancient civilizations, the Yuan in China and the Il-Khanids in Iran faced similar sets of issues: how would nomadic warriors be able to rule these complex agrarian societies?

Kublai Khan understood early that he would need Chinese support. His own Chinese language skills were not strong and he relied on interpreters in interactions with Chinese advisors (Fuchs 1946). However, he did seek out Chinese advisors and, more importantly, initiated the bilingual and bicultural education of young Mongolian courtiers such as Bolad. Bolad developed an intercultural disposition and “his frequent and active support for the recommendations of the emperor’s Han advisers indicates that he found much to admire in Chinese civilization” (Allsen 1996, p. 9).

Map of the Il-Khanate, 1256-1353 (Source: Wikipedia)

It is unclear when and how Bolad learned Persian but on his long trip to Iran and for the first few years there, he was accompanied by an interpreter, a Syriac Christian in the employ of the Mongols, who is known in Chinese sources as Aixue (愛薛) and in Persian sources as Isa kelemchi (“Jesus the interpreter”) (Takahashi 2014, p. 43).

The actual linguistic repertoire of Aixue/Isa kelemchi is uncertain; and that is an indicator of the linguistic situation in the Il-Khanate, which was even more complex than that at the Yuan court.

The preferred languages of Il-Khan Ghazan, for instance, were Mongolian and Turkish. Additionally, he happily spoke Persian and Arabic with his courtiers. Furthermore, he reportedly understood Hindi, Kashmiri, Tibetan, Khitai, Frankish “and other languages” (Amitai-Preiss 1996, p. 27).

Rashid Al-Din wrote in Persian, Arabic and Hebrew; from his style, it can be assumed that he also had some knowledge of at least Mongolian, Turkish and Chinese (Findley 2004, p. 92).

In sum, the nomadic Mongolian conquerors, whose strengths was military, needed to integrate their culture with that of the ancient settled civilizations of China and Iran in order to maintain the empires they had gained. They did so by fostering a new class of cultural brokers. These could either be drawn from the Mongolian population and raised bilingually and biculturally, as in Bolad’s case; or recruited from the local population, as in Rashid al-Din’s case. The latter must have been far more numerous because the nomads obviously did not end up imposing their language and culture on China nor Iran.

Fusion of East and West

The World History of Rashid al-Din, Exhibition of the Edinburgh manuscript

Bolad and Rashid al-Din ended up not “only” mediating between the nomad conquerors and the settled societies they came to rule, but their friendship is an example of the deep connections between east and west Asia that were forged during that time:

Their friendship was, without question, a crucial link in the overall exchange process, for Rashid al-Din, a man of varied intellectual interests and tremendous energy, was one of the very few individuals among the Mongols’ sedentary subjects who fully appreciated and systematically exploited the cultural possibilities created by the empire. (Allsen, 1996, p. 12)

The Jāme’ al-Tawārikh presents the culmination of their interactions. These chronicles were the first-ever attempt to write a world history and include information about the Muslim dynasties, the Indians, Jews, Franks, Chinese, Turks, and Mongols. Much of what is today known about the history of Central Asia up to the 13^th century comes from the Jāme’ al-Tawārikh. This could not have been achieved without extensive collaboration, and Rashid al-Din says about Bolad that he had no rival “in knowledge of the genealogies of the Turkish tribes and the events of their history, especially that of the Mongols” (quoted from Allsen 1996, p. 13).

Inter alia, Bolad translated information from a now-lost Mongolian source, the Altan Debter (“Golden Book”). Access to the Altan Debter was forbidden to non-Mongols, and Rashid al-Din even describes how their collaboration proceeded in this case: Bolad, who, as a high-ranking Mongol, had access to the Altan Debter, would extract the desired information and then, “in the morning before taking up administrative chores,” dictate the Persian translation of the desired passages to Rashid al-Din (Allsen 1996, p. 13).

Il-Khan Hülegü and his queen, Doquz Khatun, a Syriac Christian, as depicted in a Jami’ al-Tawarikh manuscript (Source: Wikipedia)

Given the wide-ranging interests and experiences of the two men, it is not surprising that their collaboration was not restricted to history but took in many other fields, too. Principal among these is agriculture. Rashid al-Din also produced an agricultural text (Āthār va ahyā’; “Monuments and animals”), which shows considerable Chinese influence (see Allsen 1996, pp. 14ff. for details). During this time an agricultural model farm was also established in Tabriz and, on Ghazan’s orders, new strains of seeds were solicited from China and India. While the details of these cross-fertilizations have been lost in the shifting sands of time, it “can be asserted with confidence that a considerable body of information on Chinese agriculture was transmitted to Iran and that Bolad was the principal conduit” (Allsen 1996, p. 15).

The two men also collaborated in the introduction of paper money to Iran (which would have necessitated knowledge of block-printing, only available in China at the time); the translation of medicinal treatises and the implementation of aspects of Chinese medicine in the Tabriz hospital Rashid al-Din had founded; and, of course, food. Rashid al-Din, in fact, developed such a taste for the delights of Chinese cuisine that he had a Chinese chef recruited for his household.

The mountains between India and China, depicted in a Jami’ al-Tawarikh manuscript (Source: Wikipedia)

The intense friendship of Bolad and Rashid al-Din is the story of a meeting of like-minded individuals who came together across what might seem a vast chasm of cultural difference. Their wide-ranging interests and intercultural dispositions allowed them to contribute extensively – and deeply – to the fusion of Asian cultures. The results were new heights of achievement in various spheres of life, as Basil Gray, the keeper of Oriental antiquities at the British Museum between 1946 and 1969, has argued with reference to painting:

The paradox which results from a survey of the history of painting in Persia before the Mongol invasions, is that it had not yet achieved the expressive and imaginative force which was to give it its special and unique quality only after it had come in contact with Chinese drawing. This is the agent which seems to have freed the Persian genius from its subordination to the other arts of the book by a mysterious catalysis. […] The “house style” of Rashidiya [the scriptorium in Tabriz founded by Rashid al-Din] is the most thoroughgoing example of Chinese artistic penetration into Iran. In it there is not simply a question of Chinese motifs, but radical adoption of the Chinese vision. [quoted from Robinson 1980, p. 212]

That the East-West fusion enabled by the Mongolian empire was not a one-way street is best exemplified by Bolad’s name: born into a high-ranking Mongolian family, the child was given a Persian name. “Bolad” is the Mongolian version of Persian pulād (“steel”).

References

Allsen, T. T. (1996). Biography of a Cultural Broker, Bolad Ch’eng-Hsiang in China and Iran. In J. Raby & T. Fitzherbert (Eds.), The Court of the Il-Khans, 1290-1340 (pp. 7-22). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Amitai-Preiss, R. (1996). New Material from the Mamluk Sources for the Biography of Rashid Al-Din. In J. Raby & T. Fitzherbert (Eds.), The Court of the Il-Khans, 1290-1340 (pp. 23-37). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Boyle, J. (1971). Rashīd al-Dīn: The First World Historian Iran, 9, 19-26 DOI: 10.2307/4300435

Findley, C. V. (2004). The Turks in World History. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fuchs, W. (1946). Analecta: Zur mongolischen Uebersetzungsliteratur der Yuan-Zeit. Monumenta Serica, 11, 33-64.

Kamola, S. (2012). The Mongol Īlkhāns and Their Vizier Rashīd Al-Dīn. Iranian Studies, 45(5), 717-721. doi: 10.1080/00210862.2012.702557

Robinson, B. W. (1980). Rashid Al-Din’s World History: The Significance of the Miniatures. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 112(2), 212-222.

Takahashi, H. (2014). Syriac as a Vehicle for Transmission of Knowledge across Borders of Empires Horizons, 5(1), 29-52.

(British) people ask, “Are you from Japan?,” so I say, “Yes, I am from Tokyo.” Then they really like it! They ask lots of questions… They want to know about the Japanese hair style and kimono, temples, how to use traditional wrapping cloth that we don’t even use now… They worship us. In their fantasy, they want to believe we wear kimono usually and serve tea nicely.

They seem to know Japanese culture through the media… geisha in kimono, Pokémon, advanced technologies… I came here (London) to become modern and independent, not a traditional Japanese woman. But Western men like traditional images of Japanese women, and they expect traditional Japanese women when meeting us.

The overall interest in, or fascination with, the appeal of uniquely Japanese culture in touch with tradition signifies the modern West’s desire to be cosmopolitan by intermixing with Japanese otherness in their capacity and willingness to take pleasure from the transnational cultural exchange. The representation of Japan in the Western popular imagination is paradoxical and complex; the Western fear of Japanese corporations, economic power and powerful masculine nationalism by which Japan is seen as a site of potential threat, but on the other hand, the Western attraction to an orientalist fantasy and subservient object of desire which is constructed through the West’s sexualization and feminization of Japanese culture.

If multicultural diversity is celebrated in a cosmopolitan vision of the world, Japan could stand for a distinctive, albeit ambiguous, positioning within reciprocal recognition. Cosmopolitanism, as a relational and dialogic term, operates within the contexts of encounters, favorable or unfavorable, inclusive or exclusive, thereby a cosmopolitan possibility may emerge or not. Such interplay may generate a situated, but characteristically thin cosmopolitanism; even while women denounced and repudiated Japan’s traditional masculine culture, they become more attached to the place called home with its cultural particularities yet simultaneously embracing pleasure from the interactions with the modern West, however in contradictory and implicitly forced ways with struggles in the language of paradox.

They are interested in traditional Japanese culture I don’t even know about. This is a surprising discovery. I have to learn to explain to them.

In Japan, I was not Japanese. I was liberal, against old traditions. I preferred the Western world and imagined changing my self through the media… I just imagine through the media but cannot act. I am becoming more Japanese while living abroad… There is no reason to change or become like them. Being distinctively Japanese is an advantage.

The Western worship of traditional Japanese otherness, often seen as accidental knowledge to many women on the move, can impact upon and interplay with how women come to redefine a new subject position. The fluidity of conceptions of identity and change were once powerfully imagined through the Western media and occidental longings in their homeland, while mobilizing the scope to act beyond localized contexts. However, the actual interactions, discursive and communicative encounters with the West re-contextualize such imagined cosmopolitan identification and precariously expose, or impose to some extent, a fixed categorical distinction of Japaneseness.

Why be a woman of the world? The motivational reasons, which would allow for the possibility of cosmopolitan subjectivity and the determination to act on it, depend on what distinction and what gain is to be made, to what end. Far from a robust cosmopolitan projection, a self-determined reaction to how best to act from the learning of cosmopolitan knowledge rather foregrounds a national self in the distinctiveness of cultural difference, representing Japaneseness even more strongly than before (“becoming more Japanese”) in the relational experience of the transnational field.