Tazin and Jia discuss crisis communication in a linguistically diverse world and a new book co-edited by Dr. Jia Li and Dr. Jie Zhang called Multilingual Crisis Communication that gives us insights into the lived experiences of linguistic minorities affected during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Multilingual Crisis Communication is the first book to explore the lived experiences of linguistic minorities in crisis-affected settings in the Global South, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. China has been selected as a case of inquiry for multilingual crisis communication because of its high level of linguistic diversity. Taking up critical sociopolitical approaches, this book conceptualizes multilingual crisis communication from three dimensions: identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.

Comprising eight main chapters, along with an introduction and an epilogue, this edited book is divided into three parts in terms of the demographic and social conditions of linguistic minorities, as indigenous, migrant, and those with communicative disabilities. This book brings together a range of critical perspectives of sociolinguistic scholars, language teachers, and public health workers. Each team of authors includes at least one member of the research community with many years of field work experience, and some of them belong to ethnic minorities. These studies can generate new insights for enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of multilingual crisis communication.

This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of multilingualism, intercultural communication, translation and interpreting studies, and public health policy.

This volume brings together 23 contributors and covers a range contexts in which crisis communication during the COVID19 pandemic has been investigated. Focusing on China owing to a high level of linguistic diversity, this book uses critical sociopolitical approaches, to identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.

Advance praise for the book

‘Setting a milestone in critical sociolinguistic and applied linguistic studies, this volume offers critical insights into overcoming communication barriers for linguistic minorities during crises, promoting social justice, and enhancing public health responses through inclusive, multimodal, and multilingual strategies. It also serves as testimonies of resilience, courage and kindness during the turbulent time’ (Professor Zhu Hua, Fellow of Academy of Social Sciences and Director of International Centre for Intercultural Studies, UCL, UK)

‘The global pandemic has brought to the fore the key role of multilingual communication in disasters and emergencies. This volume contains cutting edge ethnographic studies that address this seriously from the perspective of Chinese scholars and minoritized populations in China. A decisive contribution to the burgeoning field of multilingualism and critical sociolinguistics in times of crisis.’ (Professor Virginia Zavala, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Perú)

Related content

For related content, visit the Language on the Move Covid-19 Archives.

Transcript (coming soon)

(Image credit: RACGP)

The global impact of the coronavirus pandemic has reshaped societies worldwide, altering human interactions and perceptions of the world and brought unprecedented challenges, not only in terms of public health management but also in communication. Australia experienced low infection and mortality rates during the initial eight months of the pandemic compared to other regions. This success in containment has been attributed to rigorous testing, contact tracing, mandatory quarantine measures, and timely shutdowns, along with the advantageous geographical location of the country.

During this period, Australian news outlets played a crucial role in disseminating information and shaping public perceptions of the pandemic. This examination delves into the linguistic evolution of media coverage, shedding light on how risk communication strategies evolved over time. The linguistic choices in media coverage significantly influenced public response and adherence to health directives during the pandemic. The strategic changes in language helped stabilize public sentiment and enhance cooperation with health guidelines.

I conducted a study on Australian news outlets at Monash University during the peak of the pandemic. Utilizing the vital work of Mark Davies’ international corpus (Davies, 2019-), I created my own corpus, focusing on nationally recognized news outlets in Australia, such as The Age, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), and Channel 9. This resulted in a comprehensive collection from 18 outlets, comprising 5,969 articles and 961,390 words, covering the period from January to September 2020 (Munn, 2021). Articles from these sources were analyzed, focusing on key words used to frame aspects of the virus. The results of this analysis are detailed in this article.

Novel Coronavirus to COVID-19: the Linguistic Evolution

From ‘Deadly’ to ‘Wuhan’: Negative Connotations and Their Impact

When COVID-19 first became acknowledged by Australian news outlets in early January there was a noticeable use of the adjectives ‘deadly’ and ‘mysterious.’ While ‘deadly’ was quite apt in hindsight the use of negative adjectives is something the World Health Organization (WHO) heavily discourages as it can amplify undue fear in the wider public (2015). The changing and evolving information about the virus lead to a familiar pattern of different media sources reporting different and sometimes inflammatory perspectives that happened during the SARS and H1N1 outbreaks (Berry et al., 2007).

‘Wuhan’, the second-most occurring modifier, continues to exhibit a pattern of negative influence. Labelling the virus as the ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ not only implicates a specific geographical region but also inadvertently fosters discrimination against the Chinese community, contributing to a surge in racist incidents globally (Human Rights Watch, 2020).

Drawing from the research of Tang and Rundblad (2015) and WHO (2015), which emphasizes the significance of linguistic framing in risk communication, it becomes apparent that the language used in media reporting can influence public perceptions and behaviours. This observation underscores the importance of employing responsible language to mitigate fear and prevent stigmatization.

Standardization of Terms: The Introduction of ‘COVID-19’

In reaction to the growing negative connotations a new name was introduced by WHO in February 2020. COVID-19 (Corona VIrus Disease 2019) marked a pivotal moment in the risk communication of the virus. The new name was created using the guidelines presented in WHO’s “Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Disease” (2015).

This standardized nomenclature aimed to alleviate the negative connotations associated with ‘coronavirus’, thus promoting a more objective understanding of the disease and the data shows they were successful as ‘COVID-19’ showed no notable examples of the negative modifiers used with coronavirus.

The presence of the two names for the singular virus led to a spike of instances of ‘coronavirus COVID-19’ and ‘COVID-19 coronavirus’ the instances of both names used as modifiers for the other peaks in March after the introduction of ‘COVID-19’ in February. Over half of the instances of these occurrences were in the single month of March. There is a clear sense of interchangeability between the two terms that the Australian media grasped and communications to the wider public that ‘coronavirus’ and ‘COVID-19’ where the same thing, facilitating its widespread adoption.

By June, ‘COVID-19’ emerged as the preferred term, eclipsing ‘coronavirus’ in media discourse. This shift reflects a conscious effort to streamline communication and ensure consistency in messaging. This was not only the case in Australia, but Oxford English Dictionary also report the same result in their worldwide examination of words use relating to COVID-19 (Oxford English Dictionary, 2020).

Crisis Communication Narratives

Linguistic Framing: Proactive vs. Reactive

As the pandemic unfolded, media coverage shifted from solely focusing on the virus to addressing its broader societal impacts. The term ‘COVID-19’ was associated with proactive actions like understanding the cause, prevention efforts, and managing the ongoing challenges (cause, prevention, handling, etc.). In contrast, ‘coronavirus’ narratives often emphasized containment measures, warnings, and identifying hotspots (stop, warn, strain, epicentre, origin, etc.). These differing narratives reflected the multifaceted nature of the pandemic response, highlighting both proactive and reactive approaches to managing the crisis.

Handling Death

The differences in language usage between ‘coronavirus’ and ‘COVID-19’ regarding reporting on deaths attributed to the virus reveal contrasting narratives in media coverage. While ‘coronavirus’ often precedes mentions of ‘new cases’ and ‘more deaths’, emphasizing the novelty and severity of the virus. ‘COVID-19 ‘conveyed a sense of familiarity and normalization, omitting the need for such qualifiers. This distinction suggests that media outlets may unintentionally amplify fear and uncertainty when using ‘coronavirus’, while portraying ‘COVID-19’ as a manageable entity. Understanding these linguistic nuances is crucial for crafting effective risk communication strategies that promote informed decision-making and resilience among the public in navigating the ongoing challenges posed by the pandemic.

‘Fight’ against coronavirus vs ‘Battle’ against COVID-19

There were distinct linguistic nuances were observed in the portrayal of efforts to combat the virus. While both ‘fight’ and ‘battle’ were employed, ‘battle’ was exclusively associated with ‘COVID-19’, suggesting a more protracted struggle with no definitive endpoint in sight. The media viewed ‘coronavirus’ and ‘COVID-19’ as a fight, while only ‘COVID-19’ was a battle. Fighting coronavirus suggests a victory is possible, but the battle against COVID-19 has no clear victory in mind but just to struggle against the virus.

Linguistic Framing of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs)

Testing

The testing regime for COVID-19 emerged as a crucial strategy employed by the Australian government to curb the spread of the virus. Throughout the analyzed period, there was a discernible uptick in mentions of testing within the corpus, reflecting its increasing importance in public health discourse. Notably, spikes in discussions around testing coincided with the onset of the first and second waves of infections in Australia, underscoring its pivotal role in outbreak management.

While ‘positive tests’ remained consistently prominent, there was a notable anomaly in June, just preceding the second wave, where the frequency of ‘negative tests’ momentarily surpassed that of ‘positive tests.’ This anomaly highlights the dynamic nature of testing trends and suggests potential shifts in public health priorities or testing strategies during specific phases of the pandemic.

Lockdowns

The implementation of restrictions on the Australian public emerged as a crucial measure in controlling the spread of the virus, serving as the second major factor in virus containment. However, the timing and intensity of these restrictions displayed unexpected patterns, both preceding and following the two significant waves of COVID-19 cases in Australia, with ‘lockdown’ being most prevalent during infection peaks. During periods of easing restrictions, language referring to these measures became vaguer, reflecting a gradual relaxation of stringent policies, while during phases of enforcing restrictions, more specific terminology like ‘lockdown’ was employed, indicating a heightened urgency in response to escalating transmission rates.

Conclusion

The linguistic choices made by the Australian media in their coverage of COVID-19 significantly shaped public perceptions and actions in response to the pandemic. By moving from initial, fear-inducing language to more neutral and consistent terminology like ‘COVID-19,’ the media played a pivotal role in stabilizing public sentiment and enhancing adherence to health directives. This strategic linguistic transition underscores the profound impact of media language on public behavior during a health crisis. This observation sets the stage for further research and development of effective communication strategies. By optimizing the linguistic approach in media communication, the aim is to enhance public understanding and cooperation in emergency responses, ensuring that the gap between expert recommendations and public behavior is effectively bridged.

References

Anastasia Tsirtsakis. (2020, July 10). Australia’s COVID-19 response may have saved more than 16,000 lives. https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/australia-s-covid-19-response-may-have-saved-more

Berry, T. R., Wharf-Higgins, J., & Naylor, P. J. (2007). SARS Wars: An Examination of the Quantity and Construction of Health Information in the News Media. Health Communication, 21(1), 35–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410230701283322

Davies, M. (2019-). The Coronavirus Corpus. https://www.english-corpora.org/corona/

Gabriella Rundblad, & Chris Tang. (2015). When Safe Means ‘Dangerous’: A Corpus Investigation of Risk Communication in the Media. Applied Linguistics, 38(5), 666–687. https://academic.oup.com/applij/article-abstract/38/5/666/2952207?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Human Rights Watch. (2020, May 12). Covid-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide | Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide

Munn, C. (2021). What’s In a Name: A Corpus Analysis of Australian Media’s Naming Conventions and Risk Communication During the Coronavirus Pandemic [Masters]. Monash University.

Oxford English Dictionary. (2020, July 15). Using Corpora to Track the Language of Covid-19. Https://Public.Oed.Com/Blog/Using-Corpora-To-Track-The-Language-Of-Covid-19-Update-2/

Stanaway, F., Irwig, L. M., Teixeira‐Pinto, A., & Bell, K. J. (2021). COVID‐19: estimated number of deaths if Australia had experienced a similar outbreak to England and Wales. Medical Journal of Australia, 214(2), 95. https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.50909

World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), & Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). (2015). World Health Organization best practices for the naming of new human infectious diseases (World Health Organization, Ed.). World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-HSE-FOS-15.1

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

Enjoy the show!

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

References

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

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

Welcome to the New Books Network.

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

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

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

Welcome to the show, Rosemary.

Prof Salomone: Thank you for inviting me, Ingrid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dist Prof Piller: That’s unbelievable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Till next time!

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

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

Enjoy the show!

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

Transcript (added 30/04/2024)

(Image credit: Dr Michael Chesnut)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: A little colder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Till next time!

Hospital corridor, by Sadami Konchi ©

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Erin Mulpur about how hospitals can provide linguistic minority patients with access to interpreting services.

Erin holds a Master of Public Health and is the System Director at Houston Methodist Global Health Care Services in Houston, Texas, United States.

The conversation addresses the potential barriers to both communication and healthcare that linguistic minority patients may face in hospitals, as well as Erin’s 2021 paper Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic which details Houston Methodist Hospital’s innovative use of a particular language assistance technology during the first waves of Covid-19.

This episode is a natural extension of Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller’s chat with Dr Jim Hlavac, so be sure to listen to both episodes!

Enjoy the show!

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

Artwork

The artwork in this post is from Sadami Konchi’s hospital collection. To learn more about Sadami Konchi’s art visit her website or follow her on Instagram.

Surgery, by Sadami Konchi ©

Reference

Mulpur, E., & Turner, T. (2021). Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 23(5), 1126-1128. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-021-01251-2

Episode Transcript

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

My guest today is Erin Mulpur. Erin holds a Master of Public Health and is the System Director at Houston Methodist Global Health Care Services in Houston Texas, United States. Today we are going to talk in general about her work with hospital patients from non English-speaking backgrounds, and in particular about the 2021 paper that she co-authored with Travis Turner entitled “Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic”.

Welcome to the show, Erin. It’s lovely to have you.

Erin: Thank you so much, Brynn. I am delighted to be here today.

Brynn: So, can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself? How did you become interested in working with hospital patients from non-English speaking backgrounds, and what kind of work do you do now?

Erin: Absolutely. So, I originally grew up in Montana, a state in the US, and I actually grew up on an Indian reservation. It was the Flathead Indian reservation, so the Salish and Kootenai tribes both lived on that reservation. At a young age, I had a deep, deep desire, instilled by my family, to be respectful of all cultures, and also a deep understanding that language is such a vital part to people’s culture. It’s their voice, it’s how they articulate themselves in the world, and when there isn’t a shared language, then it’s really difficult to connect.

Nurse, by Sadami Konchi ©

And so, at a young age that is definitely something that was a part of my life. Moving on, I went to graduate school and, you know, went to undergrad and then to graduate school, and ended up getting my Masters in Public Health after spending some time in Uganda working for a government-run hospital in Iganga District. And again, this focus on wanting to deeply understand other cultures, be respectful of other cultures, and understanding that language is such a vital part of that – it really led me into this role at Houston Methodist, where I am now.

So, what I do at Houston Methodist, I’ve been here for about 10 years, and I oversee our Special Constituent Management Program and also our Global Patient Services Program. So, what that means is that we have patients who travel from over 70 countries from around the world, speak multiple different languages, and they are facilitated by an amazing team here at Houston Methodist that I have the privilege to work with every day. And my staff come from over 30 countries from around the world. They speak so many different languages, and it’s this beautiful, diverse scenery where we have the ability to take care of patients from different backgrounds, different cultures here at out hospital because they travel to Houston for care.

And we also oversee our Domestic Language Program. So, when you think about it from a healthcare perspective, when a physician walks into a room and he notices that a patient does not speak English, he or she is not thinking, “Is this patient traveling internationally, or is this patient a local patient from our community?”. So, our team, my team, has the privilege to take care of both of those patient populations here at this hospital.

And for those who may not know as much about Houston, TX, we are the fastest-growing diverse city in the United States. So, over 40% of people over the age of 5 speak another language than English in our city, and so when you think about that, over 140 languages are spoken in our city. And when we just looked at our data last year, over 70 languages are spoken just by patients at our hospital. So, it’s so, so important to think about language assistance and think about making sure that patients understand the care that they’re receiving, and that is what I’m doing today.

Treatment room, by Sadami Konchi ©

Brynn: That is fascinating, and what an amazing opportunity to do that kind of work. That’s incredible. So, can you tell us what are some common barriers that patients face if they don’t have a high level of English proficiency and seek treatment at an English-dominant hospital? And this could apply at Houston, but it could also apply to where I’m coming from in Sydney, Australia.

Erin: Absolutely. Absolutely, Brynn. I would say that everything can be a barrier, honestly. When you think about patients navigating a website to a hospital – is the website available in multiple languages? If the patient is calling the call centre to schedule an appointment, is that call centre offering language assistance? Are there options to push for Spanish or Arabic or Vietnamese? What is that infrastructure around language assistance? So, I can say that everything is a barrier if it’s not thought about and intentional to make sure that you’re opening access to everyone, not just English-speaking patients.

And that’s what we see here at Houston Methodist, and that’s why we have created content that’s in multiple languages. That’s why we have our phone system that can be in multiple languages. We have so much infrastructure and technology because we know that if you don’t create that, then patients don’t have a voice.

Brynn: Absolutely, and I absolutely agree. And that brings us to your paper, “Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic”. This is a fascinating paper, and if anyone has the chance to read it, I would highly recommend. So, can you tell us a bit about something called the Vocera Smartbadge? What is that, and how was your hospital already using it before the Covid-19 pandemic struck?

Erin: Absolutely, so our nurses, prior to Covid, had what is referred to as a Vocera Smartbadge. The way that I would articulate that is that it’s like a smart walkie-talkie where you can dial in, you have the ability to ask the device to call other departments and other services, and so it was really leveraged and utilised amongst the clinical team for patient care. So, if the nurse was in a room, needed another nurse, she could push the button and she could say, “Dial this nurse in this other room”, and so it had that technology and was utilised in that way prior to Covid. It was really helpful because it allowed a hands-free way to care for patients, but also have the ability to connect with other people on the care team.

Brynn: And I think for those of us who’ve been in hospitals before, we’ve seen this happen with handheld phones. We’ve seen nurses be in hospital rooms and call each other on handheld phones, so from my understanding, the Vocera Smartbadge is really kind of that same idea, but, like you said, hands-free, and it’s more voice command, voice-activated.

Treatment, by Sadami Konchi ©

Erin: Absolutely, so it can attach to the lapel or a jacket, and you don’t have to dial anything, you can push a button and you can ask the Vocera device to call into a directory that has already been created.

Brynn: Exactly, and so your hospital, during Covid-19, was able to use the Vocera Smartbadge in a really novel way to provide language services to patients during the pandemic. Can you tell us how that happened and what you observed?

Erin: Absolutely, so unfortunately, with the Covid pandemic, here in the US and in many other countries, we had a limited supply of personal protective equipment. So, I currently have staff who provide in-person interpretation. So, you think about any time an in-person, someone needs to go into the room and provide in-person interpretation, they would have to don and doff gowns. So, with the limited supply of PPE, really the goal was to just use PPE for people who were physically clinically caring for the patient to keep them safe. So, it was really a difficult time to think about, “How are we going to provide language assistance and still keep with that value of ours and making sure that our patients understand the care they are receiving, but not have enough PPE for our in-person interpreters?”

So, what we ended up doing is we ended up integrating our technology around language assistance. Over the phone interpretation was then embedded within that Vocera device to where a nurse who was in PPE, speaking with a patient who was limited English proficient, would have the ability to dial in an over-the-phone interpreter and that patient would still be able to hear, from the nurse’s chest, to that patient to be able to understand the care that they’re receiving, and receive care in the language that is needed to them. That was something that we were able to do. We were able to stand that up fairly quickly because we already had the Vocera device in action and already utilised across our system. It made it really, really easy for us to be able to do it once we were able to accomplish that.

What we found during some of the waves during the Covid pandemic, a few of the surges of patients, there was a large Latino population that ended up receiving care at our hospital that were Spanish speaking. So, it came right in the nick of time, I would say, for us to be able to have that in-person, that interpretation provided by the nurse between the patient and the nurse.

Brynn: And that’s so important because, part of the research that I’ve been doing has been looking into the disparities, the health disparities between majority language speakers and linguistic minorities. We know that there was a larger Covid-19 mortality amongst linguistic minority patients. So, the fact that you were able to integrate this technology could have made the difference, literally, between life and death for patients. So, that is fantastic that that was able to happen.

Patient, by Sadami Konchi ©

You mentioned this, this is something that I found really interesting in your paper, was that concept of the voice coming from the person’s chest because the Vocera Smartbadge was located on the chest, so it was almost like that interpreting voice was coming from the healthcare provider which, as we know, can sometimes be something that is tricky to deal with. When there is this, especially over the phone interpreting, or video interpreting, is this idea of distance between the person who is trying to receive the healthcare and then the healthcare provider. So, the fact that it was literally coming from the healthcare provider’s chest, I think, made it that much more valuable.

Erin: Absolutely, no you’re absolutely right, Brynn. When talking with patients and, you know, hearing their experience with that, they understood the limited amount of PPE, and they also understood and felt that that connection with the nurse and having that voice be so close to the person’s heart, it allowed it to be more intimate than it otherwise has been in the past with some of the technology that has been created around language assistance.

Brynn: Absolutely, thank you. Sort of shifting gears a little bit, what do you feel is something that people, generally monolingual English-speaking or Americans or, even in my case, monolingual English-speaking Australians, I know I don’t sound Australian, I’m originally American, obviously. What do you think is something that those people get wrong when they think of people from non-English speaking backgrounds who seek treatment in predominantly English-speaking hospitals?

Erin: That’s a great question, Brynn, and I would have to say that there’s a tremendous amount of unconscious bias that can occur in a healthcare setting, and even outside of a healthcare setting. It persists in the world that we live in, and so that unconscious bias can impact the provider, it can impact the patient, and so what I would say is – have no assumptions. Be curious. Always be willing to learn something new.

So, as an example, in the role I’m in, I work with patients who are coming from the Middle East, and there are Muslim men who come to our hospital for care, and I know that I’m not to extend my hand. It’s a sign of respect in US culture to extend your hand and to shake someone else’s hand, but in other cultures it’s not necessarily seen as respectful. So, that is something that I have had to learn and implement into my life and my routine. That’s the piece around monolingual cultures, I think it’s important to draw no assumptions. To be curious, and to be open to learning. And, when you’re open to learning, you’re also open to making mistakes. Once you’ve made a mistake because, maybe you find out that you have unconscious bias that you’re not aware of, change. Adapt. Evolve. Learn. Continue to grow. Be curious about other cultures.

Brynn: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. In your opinion, what can hospitals do to ensure that linguistic minority patients can access care in a language they can understand?

Patient, by Sadami Konchi ©

Erin: I would say, Brynn, that depending on where these hospitals are located – I know that not all hospitals are looking at this data. Maybe some hospitals don’t even have data to look at. So, you know, in our system, we have an electronic medical health records system, and we utilise EPIC. We’re able to see, based on how that patient is flagged within EPIC, we’re able to see if they need language assistance or not. So, we’re able to see that data, and we’re able to implement solutions and structure and infrastructure and policies around that.

For other hospitals, maybe there are some hospitals that don’t have that kind of access to data, and so what I loved about your paper, Brynn, is that you’re looking at what is the community? What is the language of the community that you’re serving? If you don’t have the data within your hospital, expand to your population. What languages are spoken in your population? Those people are coming to your hospital for care. So, what language programs and language assistance do you need to set up to make sure that these patients feel seen and valued and heard? That is something that I think is so important.

And if you don’t have that expertise, it’s ok! There are consultants. There are different organisations, I mean we have a consulting arm to our operations as well. We have the ability to come in and advise, but be ok asking for support and expertise outside if you don’t have that infrastructure created, because, ultimately, what will happen in any hospital setting, is if a patient receives care that does not share the language of the provider, and they consent, or they end up having a surgery, and they have some sort of complication that they were not aware of, the legal risks and the lawsuits that come from patients not understanding their care are so grave for organisations. So, first and foremost, providing language assistance is just the right thing to do. It’s just the right thing to do. If that’s not convincing you enough, there are major financial risks if you do not provide language assistance to patients.

Brynn: 100%, absolutely. So, before we wrap up, can you tell us what’s next for you and your work? It sounds like you all are doing some truly amazing work at Houston Methodist, and I would just love to know where you go from here.

Erin: Yes, so as you can hear from my history, I am a bridge-builder. I like to bridge people to have access and resources and understanding. So, I love the idea of building bigger bridges in the future so more people have access to care, more people understand the care that they’re receiving. I also believe that when you look at healthcare right now, it’s being so rapidly disrupted. There’s so much technology that is being pushed into healthcare. You see so much artificial intelligence as well being utilised in healthcare. That is where I see language assistance going next, but it could be leveraged. I do think artificial intelligence will be leveraged in a healthcare setting in the future and even with language assistance in the future.

But artificial intelligence will never take away from human connection. It will never take away from in-person interpretation and from a person being seen, heard and valued by a person who physically is there with them and is able to speak their language. But when you think about the amount of care that patients receive at a hospital – there’s nurses rounding on them, physicians rounding on them, specialists, respiratory therapists, occupational therapists – there’s all sorts of people that are part of the clinical care team that help that patient while they’re here. Being able to allow them access to multimodalities for language assistance just means that that patient is getting as much language assistance as they can while they’re at our hospital. So, I do see the bridge getting bigger and wider in the future, and I see technology being a big part of that. And that is really where we are looking in the future here at Houston Methodist.

Brynn: And I love that idea of, yes, there’s absolutely a place for these technologies that we’re seeing expanding and developing, but that, at the core, we as humans still need other humans. We need that human connection and interaction that human interpreting can provide.

With that said, Erin, thank you so much for speaking with us today. We really appreciate it, and I feel like our listeners have learned a lot. Thank you.

Erin: Wonderful, thank you so much, Brynn, it has been such a pleasure connecting today.

Network of networks

Although the Next Generation Literacies network is only 3 years old, it is embedded in a series of much older and more long-standing collaborations.

As a network of networks, the Next Generation Literacies network has brought together not only individual researchers but three research teams, namely the Literacy in Diversity Settings Research Center based at Hamburg University, the Multilingual Innovation Research Team based at Fudan University and Language on the Move Research Group, based at Macquarie University.

The broad international character of the Next Generation Literacies Network with its bases in Australia, Germany, and China, and including individual members from every continent and from countries across the Global North and South is truly unique and an achievement we can be rightly proud of.

As such, I believe that the Next Generation Literacies Network will leave at least three legacies, related to the new knowledge we have created, to the research capacity we have built, and to the research community we have created.

Focusing linguistic diversity and social participation

The Next Generation Literacies Network is very much a child of the Covid-19 pandemic. Professors Ingrid Gogolin, Sílvia Melo-Pfeiffer, Yongyan Zheng, and I wrote the funding application in 2020 and the funding period was from 2021-2023.

The pandemic forced us to do things differently right from the start and affected all aspects of our work.

In terms of research content, for a research network devoted to linguistic diversity and social participation, it was only natural that many members would turn their attention to the exclusion of linguistic minorities from public service communication.

Some of the internationally leading research into the intersection of linguistic diversity and emergency communication took place within the auspices of the Next Generation Literacies Network, such as the Language on the Move Covid-19 Archives, where we started to explore the lived experience of migrants, indigenous people, and international students from February 2020 onwards or the special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a time of crisis” edited by network members professors Zhang Jie from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, Li Jia from Yunnan University in Kunming, and myself.

We showed how the the Covid-19 pandemic had exposed language barriers in societies around the world. It became obvious that the fact of linguistic diversity had not been incorporated systematically into emergency preparation and crisis planning.

As a result, the effectiveness of the pandemic response suffered, and linguistic minorities everywhere struggled to access timely high-quality information. The consequences of widespread language and communication failures have been felt most heavily by the most marginalized groups, with the mortality rates of migrant and indigenous populations exceeding those of linguistically dominant populations in every context where such data were collected.

In short, the pandemic has demonstrated that the intersection between linguistic diversity and social participation is vital to ensuring social cohesion, fair and equitable enjoyment of human rights, and the well-being of all. As such, going forward, the research focus of our network will only gain in importance.

A strong legacy of capacity building

The Next Generation Literacies Network will also leave a strong legacy in terms of capacity building. Academia is a global enterprise but one where information flows are from the Anglophone world to the rest, and from the Global North to the Global South. Members of our network have played a key role in challenging those inequities and asymmetries in our field.

An example comes from the Next Generation Literacies virtual doctoral summer schools under the theme “Linguistic Diversity, Education, and Social Participation,” which we have run each year since 2021. These summer schools brought together students from across the world and from many countries, particularly in the Global South. We successfully piloted a multilingual and multimodal model of an international co-learning community facilitated by remote learning technologies.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all those network members who readily volunteered their time and expertise so that students could attend the event for free.

If we want to challenge the linguistic and epistemic exclusion of peripheral multilingual scholars from global knowledge production, we need events such as these and networks such as ours: networks that enable, provide linguistic and epistemic brokerage, and help scaffold participation in academia, as a community of practice, as Zhang Jie, Li Jia and myself showed in a positive case study.

“Ideas can only be useful if they come alive in many minds.”

Let me now move on to the third legacy I want to talk about, community building. I’m talking about a humanistic way of day doing research together, in interaction and communion.

When we did the research for “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production” we framed epistemic justice within the evidence of research metrics – essentially, we asked who gets published and who gets cited, and we showed how disproportionately both these metrics are skewed towards scholars based in the Anglophone world and in the Global North.

Yet, the last few years have shown that such metrics are quickly becoming completely meaningless as academics write more than they read – a strange inversion in literacy practices Deborah Brandt noticed already back in 2014. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and other automated writing technologies have further taken off the brakes. Texts – including academic texts – are now being produced on an industrial scale just for the sake of textual outputs, as opposed to sharing knowledge and ideas. A condition Matthew Kirschenbaumer has famously called the looming textocalypse.

Of course, knowledge and ideas that only exist digitally bypassing the human mind are completely useless. To be useful, research must go hand in hand with community building and here, too, the Next Generation Literacies Network leaves a strong legacy.

For me personally, a recent highlight project combining original research, capacity and community building has been Life in a new language. Life in a new language is a co-authored book project, which will come out from Oxford University Press this year.

Life in a new language asks what it is like to learn a new language as an adult in real life. The project builds on ethnographic research with 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries on all continents. The research spans a period of almost 20 years between 2000 and 2020.

By sharing and re-using data from 130 participants from across 6 separate ethnographic studies, we were able to cover a wide range of themes in a single analysis.

Our methodological approach germinated within the Language on the Move research team and has been inspired by open science principles, the desire to share our data, and pool our existing resources to paint a bigger picture of language and migration.

Life in a new language is both a research product and a research process. The process with its multilingual collaboration across different levels of academic experience and its focus on data sharing and reuse is what I want to highlight here. It is an example of the kind of research and publishing community of practice that has been fostered with the framework of the Next Generation Literacies network.

We’ve had a lot of fun in the past 3 years, as this photo from our first in-person network meeting at Macquarie University in June 2023 shows. And fun matters because it inspires us to do better research and be better researcher together.

As Alexander von Humboldt reminds us, “Ideas can only be useful if they come alive in many minds.” And that is what the Next Generation Literacies network has achieved and what our legacy will be as we head into the next phase of our network.

Auslan interpreter Stephen Nicholson gained prominence in Tasmania during Covid (Image credit: The Advocate)

When you think about Australia’s linguistic diversity, which languages come to mind?

Based on the nation’s most prominent social discourses, it is likely you first think of Australian English, the Australian Aboriginal languages, and our vast collection of migrant languages. One native Australian language that receives little attention though, is Auslan, Australia’s main sign language. Our Deaf community have a rich and interesting linguistic and cultural heritage, which traces back as far as our hearing community’s, but despite this, Auslan is often neglected from the social spotlight, and left forgotten amid the rest of Australia’s voices.

History

Auslan was developed from the signed languages brought to Australia by the first settlers and convicts, particularly British Sign Language and Irish Sign Language. The first deaf convict to introduce a European sign language into Australia was Elizabeth Steel, who arrived in 1790 on the Second Fleet. Interestingly though, the name “Auslan” was only coined relatively recently in the 1980s, when the language gained more social attention.

The latest census revealed that over 16,000 Australians use Auslan as their primary language, with the number of users growing considerably over time. The 2021 census was the first to accurately capture Auslan’s prevalence in the country, as previously ‘Auslan’ was not identified as an option to select in the “languages other than English used at home” question. A large number of Auslan users were not aware that they could nominate Auslan as an “other language,” meaning the statistics did not reflect the language’s real pervasiveness.

The number of Auslan users recorded in the census has been steadily increasing (Image credit: DeafConnect)

In 2021, Auslan was used as the prompt language for the “other” category, so the census question read:

Does (person) use a language other than English at home?

If other, for example, Auslan, please write here.

The previous lack of recognition of Auslan in the census is quite surprising, considering the Deaf community have always existed in Australia – and even now, in its home country, Auslan is still considered an “other” language. This is one example of how the Australian Deaf community have historically been socially disadvantaged and overlooked. A lack of social awareness and inclusive social structures has meant that Auslan users have had to fight for their acceptance and rights, and this struggle continues even today.

It should be noted that deaf people existed in Australia long before the Europeans arrived, and Aboriginal communities had their own signed languages. These languages are still in use today and deserve recognition, but are less prevalent than Auslan.

Recognition

One major period for Auslan’s recognition was in 1981, which was the International Year of Disabled Persons. In Australia, this year fostered pride in Deaf culture and heightened the social status of Auslan users. This newfound acceptance led to the first signing classes being offered in TAFEs, which gave hearing Australians the opportunity to connect with the Deaf community. In reality, these classes mostly taught signed English rather than Auslan, but nevertheless, it promoted recognition of signed languages as legitimate forms of communication. This significant year also inspired publication of the first Auslan dictionary.

Auslan interpreter Mikey Webb interprets at a music festival (Photo courtesy of Auslan Stage Left)

Unfortunately though, Auslan users are still far from equal in Australia today. I recently read an eye-opening article about the discrimination against sign language users in Australian juries. Currently, Auslan users are excluded from jury duty because there are no provisions in place that allow interpreters to sit with the jury. Researchers have found no linguistic evidence to justify their omission, which means Australia is in violation of its human rights obligations by treating Auslan users unequally. Their unfair exclusion in such a high status domain is significant, as it reifies flawed ideologies about the deficiency of signed languages, and only serves to block Auslan users from achieving equal status.

On a more positive note, if you were in Australia during the pandemic, you may remember that many of the official media announcements featured an Auslan interpreter. This sudden nation-wide uptake of interpreters was significant, as it marked recognition of the Deaf community and highlighted the need for accessible information for Auslan users. It brought attention to the fact that, previously, there had been a language barrier in place for Auslan users in the context of media announcements. This acknowledgement and increased visibility of the language has boosted the number of Australians wanting to learn Auslan, which is hopefully another step towards reaching equality and cross-cultural understanding.

This year, the NSW government announced that an Auslan syllabus will be introduced into the state’s schools in 2026. This comes as a response to Auslan’s recognition during the pandemic, as well as the state’s shortage of interpreters. This change has the power to shift the perspectives of the next generation towards a more inclusive, culturally-sensitive mindset, giving the Australian Deaf community hope for a better future.

Take-Home

It is clear that Australia still has a long way to go to support its Deaf community, however, it seems that progress is slowly happening. Deaf Australians have been limited for hundreds of years by a society that was not designed to include them, but the nation’s shifting attitude offers potential for better outcomes. To my fellow linguists, I encourage you to learn more about Auslan’s history, and to consider how signed languages might play a part in your own linguistic endeavours. Without increased awareness and solidarity, how can we expect to build a nation where everyone’s voices are heard?

Any wicked problem is an occasion for different people to have different reasonable but often incompatible ideas about how to approach it. Chief Health Officers might properly emphasize health-related aspects of the problem, whereas Chief Executive Officers of major firms might emphasize aspects of the problem relevant to the economy.

Both these takes (and others) are reasonable and yet they are potentially incompatible; the economy can’t be both open (to protect it) and closed (to slow the spread of disease). Each approach would be only partially successful in addressing the overall problem; each approach leaves a nasty remainder. Wicked problems don’t have sweet spot solutions.

What seems to have happened in Australia is that these two, and other, perspectives were politically mediated, so that Chief Health Officers didn’t get as much as they would have liked, but neither did CEOs. If there was no sweet spot, at least it seemed to be possible to avoid the bitterest spots; there was a partial “solution” on which otherwise differently-minded participants converged … and it was compromise between those with different perspectives that made this possible.

Social Media

Another set of ideas involves the rise of internet facilitated social media platforms that enable individuals to say to many others whatever they choose.

Social media form an archipelago (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The social media landscape is an archipelago, with islands of intensely intercommunicating participants separated by large gaps across which communication is fitful and low-fidelity, indeed often grossly distorted.

These islands are created by a convergence of basic human psychology and social media tools.

The psychology is that we like to be in groups whose members share our thinking and feeling (cf. social comparison theory, à la Leon Festinger.) The social media tools – of likes, shares, and follows – make it easy for us to join such groups.

Importantly, these islands of the like-minded often quickly become echo chambers, where (think QAnon) participants drive each other to more extreme versions of the thoughts they share and to greater degrees of orthodoxy in their thinking.

Again, the psychology is simple. Membership is conditional upon the alignment of a person’s thinking with the thinking characteristic of the group. If a new member has reservations about the group’s characteristic thinking – for example because they recognise that there are multiple perspectives and that the focal problem for the group is, in fact, a wicked problem – they might opt out, but, if not, they will need to silence their reservations in order to be comfortable, psychologically, in their membership (this is dissonance reduction à la Festinger) … indeed, in order to avoid being driven out. Once reservations are silenced all around, it becomes a race to the bottom, with various members competing with one another to express their commitment to the group.

What happens when wicked problems encounter social media echo chambers?

The Epistemological Crisis

Because a wicked problem has only partial solutions, we’re all, inevitably, going to have to decide which aspect is important to us and which we’re going to treat as unhappy remainders of our chosen approach.

What’s different with the rise of social media is that we can now find insulated and uncurated space, where everyone agrees with us about which approach to a wicked problem is better and where the game within that space is to ignore the unpleasant side-effects of the socially preferred approach and to enforce orthodoxy about this preference within the group.

And this explains what we plainly witness, namely, the polarisation of “discussion” on social media platforms where a self-stirring group which has one preferred approach to a wicked problem demonizes other also self-stirring groups which have other approaches to this problem, despite the possibility that none of these approaches is an unreasonable one and that all of them represent only partial “solutions”. Each group could be seeing an aspect that’s relevant to the problem, but they’re not able to acknowledge that the other groups might also be seeing aspects that are relevant, because what the other groups are seeing are aspects that they have had to discount, for dissonance reduction, as bad consequences of their own favored approach.

The inhabitants of each such echo chamber just ignore the inhabitants of others or, worse still, exchange insults across the gaps that separate them. Indeed, there are polarisation entrepreneurs working the social media to demonise those outside any given echo chamber as morally depraved, or perhaps craven (“sheeple” is a word that’s been used), or so befuddled by “fake news” that it would be pointless and immoral to engage with them.

These are the mechanisms that have given us the epistemological crisis of contemporary culture, manifested, for example, in science scepticism, distrust of experts, intolerance, fundamentalism, authoritarianism, populism, polarisation, erosion of civility, and an unwillingness to engage in constructive discussion or to compromise with “others”.

What’s the alternative to such mutual assured demonisation?

The Principle of Civility

Whenever we encounter people whose views are different from our own, we should attribute to them as much wisdom, knowledge, and good judgment as we’d like them to attribute to us. The Golden Rule, in other words. We don’t assume, from the bare fact of their disagreeing with us, that our interlocutors are stupid or ignorant or evil. More importantly, we try to consider not just what they believe but how they came to believe as they do. This crucially involves listening to them.

And perhaps, by listening, we discover that, though we wouldn’t have, indeed didn’t, think things through the same way they did, they nevertheless did think things through … and maybe even in a way that makes sense to us. In some cases, we will indeed “get it” why they believe what they do. In some cases, we will perhaps see aspects of the issue that we, through social comparison and dissonance reduction mechanisms, or maybe just from perspectival effects, didn’t initially see.

And when we execute civility in this sense, we don’t demonize our “opponents”; we humanize them. And, crucially, we make it easier for them to humanize us; perhaps our civility will be reciprocated. And when that does happen, we can, together, create a space where we’re interested in each other … where we’re not just trying to score points or to win favor with our own in-group. Where we’re trying to expand the circle of our fellows to include rather than exclude those who aren’t just like us, in order, if we’re lucky, to build a compromise between us … a solution that gives each of us some, but unavoidably not all, of what we’re looking for.

Civility requires discipline. There are social comparison and dissonance reduction mechanisms that we need to be aware of and to rein in if we are to exercise civility. It also requires institutional settings in which different points of view can be brought together. But it’s by exercising this discipline in such settings that we can engineer compromises as an alternative to the war of all against all that increasingly constitutes our cultural situation.

Figure 1: Notice at village turn back point (Weibo screenshot)

There has been ongoing international debate over China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the specific language and semiotic resources used in China to enforce local measures to contain the pandemic require further assessment.

As a Chinese person living overseas, I have become aware of disturbing narratives around the coronavirus pandemic through my engagement with Weibo. In this post, I report my observations of selected COVID-related signs created by local authorities in China. These grassroots COVID-19 linguistic landscapes, I argue, suggest creative language use but convey exclusionary ideologies.

Roadblocks and fear

A key feature of COVID-19 linguistic landscapes in local rural communities in China is the use of linguistic and semiotic resources drawn from the immediate environment where such signs are placed. An example is Figure 1, which shows a sign stuck on a blackboard placed in the middle of the road. The sign reads:

亲情告示
各位父老乡亲，疫情依然严重，防控期间严禁出门，严守规矩，我们这没有雷神山，没有火神山，没有钟南山，只有抬上山！大家尽量别出去，别出去，别出去！别让大家的努力前功尽弃！！！
Kind Notice
Dear elders, relatives, and fellow villagers, since the pandemic is still severe, going out is strictly forbidden and rigid adherence to the rules are expected during the prevention and control period. There is no Leishenshan (Thunder God Hill Hospital), nor Huoshenshan (Fire God Hill Hospital), nor Zhong Nanshan (Pulmonary Specialist), but Taishangshan (lifting the bodies up the hill). Everyone please don’t go out, don’t go out, don’t go out! Don’t let all our efforts end up in vain! [my translation]

This sign was posted by the villagers’ committee in an early attempt to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. The word play of the last syllable 山([ʂan]) in Leishenshan, Huoshenshan, Zhong Nanshan, and Taishangshan adds playfulness and strength to the message.

For background: Thunder God Hill Hospital and Fire God Hill Hospital were temporary hospitals used specifically to treat COVID-19 patients in Wuhan. The construction of these hospitals was completed within just two weeks during the early outbreak of the coronavirus. Zhong Nanshan is a widely trusted infectious disease expert who won acclamation for coordinating diagnosis and treatment efforts during the SARS outbreak in 2008.

Figure 2. Red banner addressing village returnees (Weibo screenshot)

Villages obviously have none of these resources.

Due to the lack of hospital facilities and medical experts in this rural area, ‘Taishangshan’ is intended as a joke but also as a warning to villagers of the potentially lethal outcome of getting infected with COVID-19 – up the hill is a grave for those who might not survive. More importantly, the notice not only enforces the stay-at-home order linguistically but, positioned at the middle of the road, the blackboard on which the notice was stuck and the bamboo pole at the back physically act as a barricade restricting the mobility of people attempting to go to and from the village.

At the same time, this sign not only serves to warn and protect but may also ignite fear and prompt more extreme measures to segregate the healthy from the infected because of the implied gravity of the pandemic.

Red banners and defamatory discourses

There is also a particular genre of signs that single out members of the overseas Chinese community and portray them as the ‘culprits’ in spreading the coronavirus. These signs are situated within a broader discourse around returning overseas Chinese who fail to comply with quarantine regulations after entry into China. After countless reproductions in the online space, the debate quickly escalated into hate speech targeting all returnees.

Figure 2 illustrates an extreme example of this narrative. The image depicts a red banner which blatantly states “带病回村 不孝子孙”, meaning “returning village with disease, what an unfilial child you are”. This denigrating statement not only employs a rhythmic rhetorical device (村 [tsʰʊən] and 孙 [sʊən]) but also conjures the potential breach of filial piety – a core cultural and moral value in Confucianism and a powerful social norm in the governance of compact rural communities with their inherited patriarchal clan social system and close ties between parents and children – to warn against the movement of travellers.

Figure 3. A ‘Positive Building’ blocked by green fences (Weibo screenshot)

Red banners represent a specific genre of ideological propaganda that can be found in both cities and rural villages, although their political connotation has often given way to pragmatic usage in modern Chinese society. This disheartening message suggests a flat rejection of returning villagers from overseas and internal migrants from other provinces by characterising them as infectious and unfilial. It also discourages those who are worried about becoming the target of criticism from travelling because there is a slight chance that they might be infected and contagious yet asymptomatic during the incubation period.

A viral phrase that was part of this discourse asserts that “家乡建设你不在，万里投毒你最快” (You were absent in the hometown’s construction, but now you are travelling from afar and spreading poison most swiftly), again blaming overseas Chinese returnees for spreading the virus even though only a few members of this group were reportedly disobedient with relevant preventative procedures.

Building fences and symbolic deterrence

Such exclusionary ideologies continued to be reproduced in the recent Shanghai lockdown, starting in March 2022. As Figure 3 shows, fences were installed around the entrances to residential buildings. This type of ‘hard quarantine’ was often implemented by street or neighbourhood committees to segregate ‘lockdown zones’ (residential areas with reported positive cases) or ‘positive buildings’, as per municipal policy requirements. These fences were not made of sturdy materials, however, and did not appear to be strong or tall enough to prevent genuine rule-breakers and were more likely serving as a symbolic deterrence to residents and visitors.

For ‘controlled zones’ (other areas in communities or towns where lockdown zones are located) and ‘precautionary zones’ (areas outside lockdown zones and controlled zones), other forms of fencing were observed. Figure 4 shows the use of road fences bearing the notice “安全生产，文明施工” (Safe production, Civilised construction). This represents the appropriation of a sign from a construction site to a new context — COVID prevention and control (Curtin, 2015).

Figure 4. A ‘controlled zone’ blocked by road fences (Weibo screenshot)

Unlike the green ones, these fences were not fixed to the ground, and their portability allowed people some mobility. In a sense, the types of material objects employed as passage blockers are suggestive of allowable human movement and thus the severity of restriction. The emplacement of language in this physical environment (in front of a residential building) not only deprives the text of its original meaning but also endows it with a sarcastic perlocutionary effect, as ‘civilised’ contradicts the stringent COVID restriction measures in the broader context. It should be noted that, as I was writing this blog post, the Shanghai lockdown was lifted (on 1 June), and the removal of these fences soon followed.

In summary, I have discussed some examples of grassroots COVID signs that were created using a variety of linguistic and semiotic resources drawn from the local surroundings. These roadblocks, red banners, and building fences have illustrated the creative uses of languages including word play, rhetorical device and perlocutionary effect. Meanwhile, they constitute the COVID-19 linguistic landscape and bear witness to the proliferation of fear, defamation, and exclusion in this ongoing battle against the coronavirus.

Reference

Curtin, M. L. (2015). Creativity in polyscriptal typographies in the linguistic landscape of Taipei. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 236–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2015.1010315

Related content

For extended coverage of the COVID-19 linguistic landscape, check out our COVID-19 archives at https://languageonthemove.com/covid-19/

Top-10 countries producing linguistics research (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

US- and UK-based scholars dominate linguistics

Global academic knowledge production is dominated by the Anglosphere. In Linguistics, for example, scholars based in the USA and UK produce more academic publications than scholars from the next eight top-10 countries combined. Not only do American and British scholars produce a lot more linguistics research than everybody else, their work is also much more influential as the comparatively high h-indexes of linguists from these countries indicate.

55% of the 100 most cited scholars under each of the keywords “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” with a Google Scholar profile are affiliated with a US or UK institution.[i] To put this figure in perspective: the population of the USA and UK together accounts for 5.12% of the global total. In other words, linguists from these two countries are massively overrepresented among the thought leaders in our field.

By contrast, not a single applied linguist or sociolinguist based at a university in Mainland China is among the 100 most highly cited scholars in “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics.” To put this figure in perspective: China accounts for 18.47% of the global population.

Challenging the Anglophone publication monopoly

Where the world’s most cited Applied Linguists and Sociolinguists are based, according to Google Scholar

For multilingual scholars, i.e. those with English as an additional language in their repertoire, particularly if they are based outside the Anglosphere, the stats above can be pretty demoralizing. Publication in “top-tier” journals and impact metrics have become central to hiring, promotion, and funding decisions in the neoliberal academy worldwide. Yet, despite the meritocratic rhetoric, the playing field is obviously far from level and multilingual scholars based in global peripheries labor “under a heavy mountain.”

The burden is intensified by the fact that academic publishing can very much look like a black box. While advice on how to get published abounds, what is missing are positive case-studies that showcase experiences of multilingual peripheral scholars challenging their linguistic and epistemic exclusion.

A look into the black box of academic publishing

In a new article titled “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production,” which has just been published in Multilingua, my colleagues Jenny Zhang, Jia Li and I provide precisely such a positive case study.

As regular readers of Language on the Move will remember, in 2020, we co-edited a special issue of the highly-ranked international sociolinguistics journal Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis.” To the best of our knowledge, this was the first concentrated effort in English to address the language and communication challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. The special issue centered on research from the Chinese world.

The special issue has been widely read and is already well cited. In addition to its topical exploration, it also constitutes a contribution to intercultural dialogue in applied and sociolinguistics.

US and UK linguistics research has an overwhelming impact on the field (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

Reflecting on the process that led to the publication of the special issue, we felt that it contained several lessons for linguistic and epistemic justice in our field. In “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production” we make those lessons explicit in the form of a collaborative autoethnography that illuminates the process behind the product.

In the article, we reflect on enabling personal and academic networks, textual scaffolding, and linguistic and epistemic brokerage. And we have three take-home messages.

Against the center vision of “global” academic knowledge

The dominant vision of linguistic research is solely focused on the central circuit of academic knowledge production. Efforts at global knowledge transfer almost always move outward from this central circuit. In this vision, sharing center knowledge with the periphery is considered transformational. By contrast, Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis demonstrated that some of the most exciting developments in contemporary applied sociolinguistics, such as the development of Chinese emergency language services, are located outside the center.

Knowledge flows in many directions and many circuits. Engaging with multi-directionality and multi-scalarity requires the kind of networks and teamwork we were able to bring to bear.

For community building and an ethics of care

Within circuits of knowledge production, peripheral multilingual knowledge producers are assigned seemingly perpetual status as international students, academic novices, visiting scholars, junior partners, and interlopers in center institutions. These positionings ultimately preclude deep engagement.

At this conference in Wuhan in 2012, we had no idea our friendship would lead to joint research on COVID-19 communication in 2020

The foundation of our joint work goes beyond academic collaboration and is based on longstanding personal friendship. We consider recognition of the affective dimensions of knowledge production and the importance of ethical relationships of care vital to the decolonization of knowledge.

Confronting privilege

Jenny, Li Jia, and I each write from different points in our career and from different points of inclusion and exclusion in various centers and peripheries. The same is true for all academics and each of us has a responsibility to center questions of linguistic and epistemic justice in whichever position we may find ourselves.

For us, this has involved building and engaging with various networks, collaborating across borders and generations, creating publication opportunities, and volunteering our time and expertise to act as linguistic and epistemic brokers.

Reference

To read our collaborative autoethnography about linguistic and epistemic justice in global academic publishing in full head over to Multilingua:

Piller, Ingrid, Zhang, Jie, & Li, Jia. 2022. Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua. [free access]

Piller, Ingrid. Can we make intercultural communication less Anglo- and Eurocentric? Reflections on linguistic and epistemic justice. Keynote lecture at Re-Thinking Interculturalism, The Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR) Europa Congress, May19-21, 2022

[i] As of April 17, 2021. This includes some duplicates as scholars who appear both under “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” were counted in each category.

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

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

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

The City of Worlds – linguistic diversity in West Vancouver

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

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

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

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

Linguistic diversity on Covid signage lagging behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

The right to write: Covid-19 care and resistance

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

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

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

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

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

Toward Covid signage accurately reflecting multilingual ecologies

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Covid-19 crisis communication

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

An area under “total lockdown” (Image credit: rappler.com)

Lockdowns everywhere

The lockdown discourse has become ubiquitous, especially in current affairs and social media. In fact, ‘lockdown’ and ‘quarantine’ have been designated word of the year 2020 by Collins and Cambridge dictionaries, respectively.

Talk about restrictions on travel, curfew, and onsite capacity limits are particularly salient in countries that, unfortunately, continue to battle waves of the modern-day virus that does not even need to be named. The word ‘pandemic’ used in the present context has become synonymous to the still-evolving COVID-19 virus that started plaguing the world in early 2020.

Less straightforward, however, is the nuanced vocabulary that has been created around the notion of lockdown.

What does “lockdown” mean?

Different nation-state governments have developed their own nomenclatures for public health safety protocols.

In the Philippines, the Department of Health introduced the phrase ‘community quarantine’ (CQ) to refer to area-specific mobility restrictions intended to reduce virus transmission.

Depending on the severity of cases in different parts of the archipelagic state, the government may differentially impose four levels of CQ—enhanced CQ, modified enhanced CQ, general CQ, or modified general CQ. The lowest level is termed ‘new normal’ which is defined as the situation where, with significant reduction in the threat of virus transmission, only minimum public health standards will remain enforced. This, however, still involves practicing new routines and habits, such as mask wearing and avoiding large gatherings.

Using these terminologies and understanding what they mean were part of my adjustment since managing to fly back to Manila just when restrictions were beginning to tighten in Sydney.

You need a solid level of English and literacy to understand these lockdown rules and alert levels

The effectiveness of these protocols and their implementation, however, has been questioned in light of the still increasing number of reported new cases of COVID-19 infection (Pajaron & Vasquez, 2021).

The latest response by the Department of Health is to introduce new quarantine vocabulary: ‘granular lockdown’ which refers to micro-level quarantine for critical areas that have a surge in COVID-19 cases.  Beginning September 16, 2021, 57 areas in the National Capital Region were put under granular lockdown. This means individuals staying in houses, residential buildings, streets, blocks, villages, or barangays that have been identified as ‘critical areas’ are forced to strictly stay indoors for 14 consecutive days. As affected households absolutely cannot leave their residence, the local government units and social welfare department are in charge of sending them food, and military officials are stationed in the areas to ensure compliance.

Along with this new quarantine protocol is a new five-level alert system, which provisionally takes the place of the CQs. A description of the activities that are (dis)allowed in each level is provided by explainers circulated in social media. Information campaign tools, like the ones in the image, however, do not necessarily guarantee public comprehension or compliance.

Are Filipinos deliberately breaking the rules?

Indubitably, the construction of such public health protocols and nomenclature is necessary. But it is difficult to perceive their effectiveness in light of the continued spread of the virus.

This persistent problem has been blamed partly on people who allegedly, deliberately ignore the rules. Colloquially labelled pasaway [naughty], this group of delinquents includes those living below the poverty line, who need to fend for themselves on a daily basis in order to survive. Between August 21 and September 15, 2021 alone, the Philippine National Police reported 224,626 violators in Metro Manila and 1,153,833 in the nearby provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal.

These monitored lockdown violations rival the reported statistics of new COVID-19 cases and is publicly chastised with threats of brute force. Such negative, even violent discourse is seen as further enlarging the power wielded by the government over the public that is imagined as uncooperative, irresponsible, and needing more discipline (Hapal, 2021).

An area under granular lockdown (Image credit: Philippine News Agency)

Whether it is true that more than a million Filipinos are deliberate delinquents is highly debatable. But an even more serious question is—What happens to violators? Reports say curfew violators have been arrested, locked up in dog cages, left to suffer the intense heat of the midday sun, and threatened or actually shot dead. The severity of punishment for non-compliance raises questions of human rights—Does violating public health rules justify violation of people’s basic human rights?

At the same time, it raises an important concern on the comprehensibility of regulations because comprehension precedes compliance. In other words, is it right to punish people for not following policies, which they cannot understand in the first place?

The gap between policy and compliance

Without intending to diminish the value of civil obedience, I argue that the problem of ambiguity in pandemic regulations represents a critical gap between policy and compliance.

As Professor Lawrence Solan of Brooklyn Law School explained in the 1^st International Conference on Forensic Linguistics (organized by the University of Santo Tomas – English Department on 18 September 2021), the seemingly simple pattern of reading the law and then obeying it is actually not that simple because it is not always easy to understand what policy requires. This issue presents an argument for the localized translation of public health information.

While multilingual health information materials have been deployed in the Philippines at the beginning of the pandemic, there is less known about the multilingual translation of lockdown policies, which are largely in English, as shown in the sample explainers.

Harsh punishments for non-compliance with lockdown rules (Image credit: Human Rights Watch)

Globally, the effect of linguistic ambiguity in pandemic regulations include what Professor Richard Powell of Nihon University reported as ‘pandemic confusion’ and ‘alert fatigue.’ As also experienced in France, Australia, the US, among others, shifting and ambiguous lockdown rules are successfully engendering confusion, making compliance extra challenging globally.

But with more deliberate and glaring social injustices tied to the discourse of compliance, the current situation of the Philippines demonstrates how policy ambiguity can be (ab)used as a power tool and can reinforce inequalities (Kurnosov & Varfolomeeva, 2020), especially those related to differences in the ability to comprehend constantly changing lockdown names and guidelines.

References

Hapal, K. (2021). The Philippines’ COVID-19 response: Securitising the pandemic and disciplining the pasaway. Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 40(2), 224-244. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1868103421994261
Kurnosov, D., & Varfolomeeva, A. (2020). Constructing the not-so-new normal: Ambiguity and familiarity in governmental regulations of intimacies during the pandemic. Anthropology in Action, 27(2), 28. doi:https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270204
Pajaron, M. C., & Vasquez, G. N. A. (2021). Re: How effective is community quarantine in the Philippines? A quasi-experimental analysis. Message posted to http://hdl.handle.net/10419/230315

Image credit: Chris Montgomery via Unsplash

Language plays a central role in legal settings. The way linguistic diversity is conceptualized and accommodated can affect access to justice in a myriad ways and there is a plethora of linguistic scholarship to show that. Yet a growing concern among researchers working in this area is that this scholarship may not always reach the right audiences to have as much of a real-world impact as it could or should have.

But how do we make our research more accessible to those who are in a position to improve the design and implementation of law, procedure, and policy? For myself and collaborators like Dr Alexandra Grey, and members of our Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network, our recent efforts have been multi-pronged, involving everything from preparing individual submissions to relevant government inquiries and reviews, through publishing and guest editing in legal journals, to presenting at law conferences.

However, as pioneering law and language scholar Diana Eades recently observed, effecting change in this area is like water dropping on stone: it is a long-term process.

Therefore, it is just as important to reach future lawyers and law- and policy-makers. As a teacher based in a law faculty, 2020 created a unique opportunity for me to work on integrating linguistics research into my law teaching.

In this post, I report back on the way in which I integrated my research expertise – in linguistics and beyond – into my teaching. I first provide some background on the teaching context, and explain what I did to integrate linguistics (and other) scholarship into my teaching during the changes that occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, I will share the feedback I received about the learning materials I developed and critically reflect on possible next steps.

Ethics Law and Justice in 2020

Since beginning as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 2019, I’ve had the opportunity to teach in a core subject, Ethics Law and Justice (ELJ), which provides (usually) first-year law students with the opportunity to learn about lawyers’ professional practice rules, reflect on ethical legal practice, and on access to justice in legal settings. My Fellowship research project involves exploring the beliefs and practices of a particular group of practitioners – migration agents – and specifically how they and their clients navigate access to justice through their interactions. More broadly, my research is interested in linguistic diversity as a factor for access to justice. As a core subject, all law students must complete ELJ, creating an excellent opportunity for me to reach a large number of potential future legal practitioners at an early stage in their study.

In March 2020, in response to the global spread of Covid-19, UTS made the decision to shift classes online. For ELJ, we shifted to using Blackboard, Zoom and Microsoft Teams, with individual teachers being responsible for the particular timing, structure and medium for their individual seminar groups. A significant change was the way we divided up delivery of the subject content. Each teacher became responsible for preparing a pre-recorded lecture, in the form of an audio-narrated Powerpoint presentation, for one or two weeks of the semester’s material, that would be accessible for the whole ELJ cohort to watch, rather than each individual teacher preparing and presenting the entire semester’s content individually for their groups. The teachers could then focus more energy into designing and conducting the interactive learning components of their individual seminars, and students could watch lecture-type content before (or after!) their live seminar.

Integrating research into law teaching

For me, this meant that I had the opportunity to update the learning materials to reach the whole cohort of over 300 students. I was responsible for the part of the subject exploring social and cultural factors that can affect access to justice, with pre-existing material mentioning refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, Indigenous people, and disability. There was also a little content on language considerations, with some discussion questions about whether students had ever communicated using an interpreter before, and the Local Court Bench Book’s section on interpreters was included as a reading resource.

While still covering the same topics as usual, I redesigned the lecture content to integrate a range of new considerations and explanations, beyond what had been provided previously. These incorporated my and others’ scholarship from my various areas of research interest, including studies on asylum seekers and refugees, language and cultural concerns in legal settings. Some of this research I also added as additional readings, choosing blog posts rather than traditional research outputs to maximize accessibility and engagement for students. Similarly, I added a video resource (Aboriginal Interpreter Service), along with an explanation and instructions, to provide another engaging source that exemplified in practice some of the relevant linguistic and cultural concerns.

Where to next?

Autumn 2020 provided an opportunity for me to integrate my research experience and expertise into my teaching, and the feedback I received overall show promise. Personally, I believe that making these changes also motivated me as a teacher: not only could I share knowledge and do my best to present this in accessible ways for students, I was also able to demonstrate my passion and enthusiasm for these areas.

Most importantly, I was able to raise awareness about language and communication among the next generation of lawyers.

However, like some of my colleagues, I suspect that the remaining challenge is mainly one of delivery rather than content, especially in the context of remote learning. In future, the key way I’d like to refine my approach is to do more to integrate innovative learning technologies. While I am confident and passionate about the content, it is equally important to reflect carefully on how I share my knowledge, and ensure that it is accessible, relatable and engaging. In fact, when teaching topics that are all about optimal communication and equal participation, I’d go so far as to say that this is absolutely essential!

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

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

Social and linguistic exclusion go hand in hand

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

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

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

Crisis communication in context

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

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

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

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

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

Confronting crises throughout history

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

How did former generations deal with such crises?

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

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

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

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

Inga Clendinnen "Dancing with Strangers"

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

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

Women as linguistic and cultural mediators

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

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

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

Preparing crisis communicators

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

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

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

21 Masters and PhD students from 9 countries attended the Hamburg International Summer School 2021 devoted to “Language Diversity, Education, and Social Participation”

How do train stations across Europe deal with the linguistic diversity of travelers? How does Kazakhstan educate the 140 linguistic minority group within its borders? What are China’s foreign language learning policies?

These are just a few of the questions addressed during the Hamburg International Summer School 2021 devoted to “Language Diversity, Education, and Social Participation”.

In cooperation with Macquarie University in Sydney and Fudan University in Shanghai, Universität Hamburg organized the Hamburg International Summer School (HISS) 2021 “Language Diversity, Education, and Social Participation” in July this year.

The summer school “Language Diversity, Education, and Social Participation” provided a unique opportunity to engage with the topic of language diversity and its social consequences. University teachers from Sydney, Shanghai, Indianapolis, Brussels, Strasbourg, and Hamburg worked with 21 students from 9 countries. Each multilingual student spoke at least 4 languages and some as many as 9.

Key topics related to societal and individual multilingualism, language development and language education in multilingual contexts, linguistic diversity in formal and informal institutional contexts, and language learning motivation in East Asia.

Unfortunately, the global Covid-19 pandemic made it impossible for us to meet in person. Therefore, the summer school ran in a virtual format and included online lectures, synchronous online classes, and regular informal meetings.

Trying to register for COVID-19 vaccination in Australia, Germany, or Serbia with limited or no proficiency in the national language?

At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic also provided the context in which to explore questions of education and social participation in linguistically diverse societies. All participants undertook group research projects devoted to the language challenges of the pandemic. Drawing on resources available in the Language on the Move COVID-19 archives, they produced videos about their findings, as in this example. Here, participants Catharina Weiss, Sun Jung Joo, and Ivana Nikolic examined official vaccination registration websites in Australia, Germany, and Serbia to see how accessible they are to residents with limited or no proficiency in English, German, or Serbian.

Their findings in a nutshell: without English, German, or Serbian, you might not be able to register for vaccination in these countries. View their full report here:

The Hamburg International Summer School 2021 devoted to “Language Diversity, Education, and Social Participation” was part of the Next Generation Network “Social participation across generations in linguistically diverse societies – risks  and chances in times of crises”.

*** 

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

Hani folksongs bring comfort to older generation facing poverty and hardship

Hani woman singing Haba while weaving

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

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

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

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

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

Hani becomes glamorous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new generation of educated multilingual Hani women

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

Yongzhen introducing her bilingual translation project to university professors

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

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

New Hani voices

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

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

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

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