Can you share about your work and your pro bono global initiative defending language rights?

Irene: Linguistic Justice® is my personal advocacy initiative. It was born during the early pandemic days in 2020 after I quit my job as an interpreter for the New York State Court System. During my time in the system I witnessed first-hand state violence against linguistic minorities who were trying to access justice, particularly how it impacted Indigenous peoples. Founding Linguistic Justice® was my response to that experience; it provided an outlet for my desire to use my skills working with linguistically marginalized communities, instead of enabling state violence against them.

Since then, I have worked hands-on with multiple grassroots organizations in the US looking to implement a language justice approach in their operations. I consult with those organizations to help them remove access barriers, provide meaningful language access, and encourage them to create effective multilingual participatory settings.

On the global front, The Spanish Group Pilot Initiative was my pro bono initiative and my shot at raising awareness of language rights and justice in spaces traditionally dominated by the English language. Rolled out through the Global Coalition for Language Rights (GCLR), it aimed to shine a light on language rights during the Global Language Advocacy Days (GLAD) volunteer initiatives in February 2024, themed “No Justice Without Language Rights”.

The initiative was launched in July 2023 through the Coalition’s social media platforms, and my main aims were two. First, to build a global community by providing participants with quality education and a safe space to share their diverse perspectives. And second, to disseminate our educational content about language rights and justice, in Spanish, from a global platform.

To structure the educational initiative, I developed a 7-month program to facilitate community development and targeted learning. A diverse and talented group of participants spanning seven countries engaged in non-traditional learning methods inspired by my background as a former attorney, my experience as a seasoned linguist, as well as my integration of restorative practice processes for developing social capital.

The overall success of the initiative stands as a testament to the need for serious investment in the advancement of language justice, including through fully funded multilingual community education programs like this one.

Can you share more about the handbook you developed as part of your pro bono initiative?

Irene: To conclude the pilot initiative, I authored and gathered the introductory language rights handbook titled ‘Queremos escuchar tu voz’ (or ‘We want to hear your voice’).

Throughout this resource, the term ‘voice’ is used in a figurative sense to emphasize the significance of individual language preference in shaping our identity and asserting our self-determination. I wanted to underscore that our ‘voice’ represents the power of communicative autonomy of each person: a fundamental aspect of our human dignity.

In a nutshell, this handbook is a call to action to catalyze support for language justice. It aims to tackle the prevalent collective unawareness surrounding language rights, striving to expand consciousness regarding these rights and, consequently, expand our collective capacity to create language justice. It is meant to provide vocabulary for anyone who wants to understand and articulate how people are disadvantaged as users of non-dominant languages.

What are you hoping to achieve with the first edition of this handbook?

Irene: Firstly, I am hoping that the pilot initiative, along with its resulting handbook, inspires future initiatives to foster community development through multilingual education about language rights.

We must acknowledge that people cannot advocate for rights they don’t know they have in the first place. Our language is intertwined with every facet of our lives, and withholding language rights from people profoundly impacts their lives, hindering their access to social structures: information, opportunities, critical services, education and justice. So, supporting communities in understanding their language rights is crucial to nurturing their self-determination and fostering their own advocacy efforts for those rights.

Secondly, I hope it facilitates a shift in perspective, recognizing linguistically marginalized communities as rights-holders.

When linguistically oppressed communities lack the capacity to articulate their experiences, those in power may not fully understand how pervasive language rights violations are. We have unaware people in positions of authority within our systems.

The result? Without understanding language rights and the impact language oppression has on our communities, efforts remain insufficient. Holding systems accountable is crucial, but supporting them with education on this topic is equally important to foster systemic change.

Those in a position of authority within systems—public and private institutions, policymakers, and the language access industry as a whole—need to better understand language rights, and the impact language oppression has in our communities, to be able to shift their perspective: from linguistic discrimination, half-hearted compliance and indifference, to awareness, inclusion and repair.

We must care for both of these needs seriously: from the bottom-up with our communities, and from within our social structures and its systems.

Can you share more about the content of this handbook?

Irene: This introductory resource provides a thorough examination of language rights on a global scale, encompassing their legal foundations in international humanitarian law, as well as the legal framework for language rights in the United States, including relevant jurisprudence.

Among its features are discussions of language rights theory and practice, guidance on filing national origin discrimination complaints before the US Federal government, and community insights aimed at advancing language justice for all people.

Irene Gotera, Linguistic Justice®

By amplifying the voices of the participating community in the pilot initiative, I also share our findings underscoring several key imperatives to create language justice:

• Promoting self-awareness and recognition of one’s own linguistic privileges.
• Fostering collective understanding of language rights.
• Making the resources like this handbook available and accessible to staff members of organizations serving linguistically diverse populations worldwide.
• Engaging in global dialogues on language oppression to cultivate the solidarity necessary to confront it.
• Proactively defending our language rights to enhance awareness of them.
• Urging states worldwide to enact legislation guaranteeing respect for language rights, recognizing that with language rights come corresponding obligations for compliance.

The handbook closes with my perspective on the connection between language rights and justice: to create language justice for all people, we all need to develop and apply a language rights-conscious lens. I’m hopeful that this resource could be a significant catalyst in fostering exactly that. Download it here.

There is no justice without language rights.

Flag for autism rights (Image credit: Deviantart)

In this post written for autism acceptance month, autistic anthropologist Gerald Roche discusses connections between the communication styles and life expectancy of autistic people, and encourages sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, and applied linguists to help work towards a better life for autistic people. 

Content warning: This post discusses suicide, sexual and physical violence, discrimination, and negative attitudes about autistic people. If you are in Australia and find this post distressing, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or chat online. Lifeline offers language support services. For non-urgent information about autism, call the Australian national autism helpline on 1300 308 699.

***

Hi I’m simply dying to speak to you! I have so much I want to tell you about being autistic because I’ve learned so much since I found out that I’m autistic. I’d love to tell you everything I know but that would probably take too long, so let me just tell you one thing about being autistic. Let me tell you why I went online and searched up “autism life expectancy” soon after I was diagnosed.    

Around that time, I’d just published an article examining how linguistic minoritization reduces life expectancy. To write that article, I’d been reading across literatures in the anthropology of violence, genocide studies, and critical public health for several years, learning about how different minoritized populations are subject to structural violence that produces a ‘slow death’ and reduces their chances of living a long, healthy life. This creates ‘death gaps’ in the social fabric, where the ultimate benefits of privilege are additional years of existence. So when I found out that I was autistic, I had a sense that I might be living in a death gap. And I was right. 

Autistic people in Australia, where I live, have a life expectancy 20 years below the national average. Similar findings have been produced elsewhere. Studies from the UK, USA, and Sweden all show that autistic people die alarmingly early. A recent study in The Lancet has suggested that the ‘death gap’ might be closer to 7 years, showing that the figures are still being debated. But, the pattern of severely reduced life expectancy seems clear. Why is this, and what does it have to do with language?      

First, it’s important to understand that differences in communication styles and preferences are central to how autistic people experience the world. Whilst autistic people don’t speak a different language from allistic (non-autistic) people, our communicative practices are vastly different from those of allistic people. The differences are found across multiple areas of language, including acquisition, gesture, pragmatics, lexicon, and preferred modalities. Failure to acknowledge, accept, and accommodate these communicative differences plays a crucial role in reducing autistic life expectancy. 

The most direct connection between autistic communication and premature death relates to health communication. Autistic people experience increased rates of multiple chronic health conditions, including physical health problems across all organ systems, as well as increased rates of multiple mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression. The impacts of all these health conditions is multiplied by failures to accommodate autistic communicative styles and preferences in healthcare settings. For example, one study from 2022 found that many autistic people struggle to make doctors’ appointments by phone (we generally have a strong preference against using phones), and then experience difficulties communicating with doctors, often feeling misunderstood. A 2023 study from Australia found that autistic people frequently felt that healthcare providers did not take their concerns seriously. These communication issues potentially result in delayed treatment, undiagnosed conditions, misdiagnosis, healthcare avoidance, and other problems that lead to poor health.  

Beyond issues of health communication, there are also more diffuse links between communication and the premature death of autistic people. To understand these, we need to think about autistic people as a minority group who experience “exclusion due to discrimination, stigma, and their perceived inferiority.” Since communication is part of what makes us different, it is also part of what makes autistic people vulnerable as a minority. 

Like other minoritized groups, autistic people experience personal and systemic discrimination from the dominant population. The press typically reports negatively on autistic people. Derogatory views of autistic people circulate openly online. Allistic people find us to be deceptive and lacking credibility, in part because of our ‘low quality and inaccurate’ facial expressions. They judge us as less likable, trustworthy, and attractive than allistic peers, and have reduced interest in pursuing social interactions with us. Even when allistic people express explicit positive views of autistic people, psychological testing shows that their behavior is guided more by their implicit negative views. Exposure to such bias and stigma is ‘constant’ for autistic people.

Rather than simply experiencing bias and stigma in the abstract, they manifest in our lives as violence. This begins in childhood, with autistic children experiencing much higher rates of multiple forms of violence than their allistic peers. This continues into adulthood, with autistic people experiencing higher rates of several forms of violence, including sexual harassment, stalking and harassment, sexual violence and physical violence, producing a condition known as poly-victimization. One recent study found that 99.6% of autistic adults had experienced at least one form of violence. Autistic women suffer disproportionately: in one study, nine out of ten autistic women reported being victims of sexual violence. Surrounded and overwhelmed by this violence, many autistic people normalize it as an inevitable part of our life, and even blame ourselves for it. 

Allistic people are able to target us for discrimination and violence in part because our communicative difference makes us visible to them. Perhaps not surprisingly then, many autistic people engage in ‘masking’ or ‘camouflaging’ – suppressing visible signs of autism, such as stimming, and changing our communicative practices to be more acceptable to allistics. However, this only defers the direct and immediate harm of allistic discrimination and violence. In the long term, masking is bad for our mental health, leading to higher levels of depression and anxiety, as well as lower self-esteem. It also contributes to autistic burnout, a debilitating condition characterized by “exhaustion, withdrawal, executive function problems and generally reduced functioning.” 

Masking, discrimination, and violence accumulate in a form of ‘minority stress’ in autistic people that results in “diminished well-being and heightened psychological distress.” In research carried out with other minoritized populations, the impact of such chronic stress on the body has been described as a ‘weathering’ that reduces overall immune function and leads to higher incidence and severity of disease. Chronic discrimination and violence thus harm autistic people both physiologically and psychologically. 

But perhaps the most distressing and tragic impact of this violence and discrimination is autistic people’s increased risk of suicide. Numerous studies show that autistic people are more likely to think about, attempt, and commit suicide; a 2023 meta-review of this literature concluded that “suicidality is highly prevalent” in the autistic population.

When I look at all this information as an autistic person, even though I’ve only learnt the statistics recently, none of it is particularly surprising. It more or less accords with my own lived experience. However, when I look at this information as a researcher, I am surprised: not so much by the information itself, but by who produced it and how. 

We are looking here at a population that is minoritized, in part, because of communicative differences. They are then subjected to discrimination and violence, with tragic outcomes. Despite the centrality of language to this situation, research in this area is led primarily by psychologists, with some speech therapists, a few sociologists, and the occasional anthropologist. The cluster of allied disciplines that look at language and communication in relation to social justice, including applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics, have so far had very little to say about this issue. 

It’s clear to me that our disciplines have a significant contribution to make here. We collectively know so much about the harms of language: slurs, labels, insults, jokes, and insidious discourses. We pay attention to the maldistribution of respect and resources to different language communities. We study how minoritization is produced and reproduced in everyday institutions, like schools, and how it enters into the most banal and intimate spaces and relations. We think carefully about how policy and practice stratify, exclude, and harm through and on the basis of language. And we also have plenty of ideas about what justice looks like, and the languages it uses. It therefore seems to me that we have an important part to play in conversations about what it really means to accept autistic people, and how to go about doing it. As a researcher, I know that we can, and as an autistic person, I hope that we will. Because right now, I’m dying to speak to you, and I wish that I wasn’t.    

***

Editor’s note: Covid-19 has exposed fractures in the social and linguistic fabric in many contexts internationally, as we have been documenting in our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis since February. In our latest contribution, Martha Sif Karrebæk and Solvej Helleshøj Sørensen share a perspective from Denmark, where there have been obvious failures to communicate with linguistically diverse populations and, simultaneously, migrants have been scapegoated as disease carriers.

The special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a time of crisis”, which originally motivated the call for contributions to this series, has now been published and all the papers are available for free access.

***

Language ideological debates in Denmark

A Somali community worker hands out Covid-19 information pamphlets in Aarhus

In Denmark, as elsewhere, the COVID-pandemic has resulted in what is both an entirely new societal situation and an intensification of existing tensions and challenges, including issues associated with immigration.

The Prime Minister recently declared that all Danish citizens have received sufficient information about the virus: “The information is there and has been available for months, no one in Denmark can be in doubt about how to behave in relation to COVID-19.” The extent to which this statement is true is an open question. Rather than a description of an actual sociolinguistic fact, it must be understood as politically motivated.

Nobody knows how many residents have no or only a poor command of Danish. A 2018 report by the Ministry of Immigration and Integration estimated that between 7 and 30 percent of the 325,000 residents with non-Western backgrounds have difficulties reading and/or speaking Danish. Insufficient Danish skills are often regarded as intentional neglect and evidence of lack of willingness to “integrate” into society.

As language proficiency is widely seen as an individual issue, authorities rarely feel compelled to use any language other than Danish in official communications. Additionally, English is used in some official communications, but languages associated with (non-western) immigration are rare in public communication.

Outsourcing health communication to volunteers

As has been documented previously on Language on the Move, grassroots organisations and volunteers have played a large role in addressing the needs of linguistic minorities during the COVID-19 pandemic in many places. This is also the case in Denmark, where the state has been heavily reliant on non-governmental actors in disseminating Covid-19 related information across all communities.

We talked to the Head of Boligsocialnet, a collaboration between social housing associations and the association of Danish municipalities, Louise Buch Viftrup, who mentioned several reasons why civil society organisations (CSOs) take on the important informational tasks. For instance, they are quick to notice the needs in the community that they serve, they have employees on the ground to address them, and they can deliver at a higher speed than the authorities, who often operate with lengthy quality assurance procedures. Furthermore, community members tend to trust people that they already know which increases the rate of adherence to advice and guidelines.

Viftrup expressed satisfaction with the cooperation between the authorities and the CSOs in ensuring minority groups’ access to information regarding the pandemic.

Sådan ser informationspjecen fra Sundhedsstyrelsen ud på arabisk. (Foto: Sundhedsstyrelsen © sundhedsstyrelsen)

For example, the health authorities provided posters with pictograms and short texts describing the five key recommendations in fifteen different languages. These were displayed in social housing blocs with high concentrations of residents with immigrant backgrounds.

However, representatives of the residents quickly pointed out that these posters were insufficient in terms of information for non-Danish speaking groups. Volunteer networks within social housing blocs additionally use social media platforms such as Facebook and Whatsapp to disseminate live translations or summaries of government press conferences.

The volunteers also answered questions in minority languages in the connected Facebook-threads and on the phone. Further examples include a YouTuber known for his online Danish-classes for Arabic speakers who did a video with phrases related to the pandemic, and an interpreting agency offering free interpreting services.

On April 06, 2020, the Danish Refugee Council established a hotline in 25 different languages for questions regarding the pandemic. Both initiatives were taken in cooperation with different CSOs and received support from private foundations such as the Novo Nordisk Foundation, while national health authorities assisted with quality assurance. Eventually, the authorities additionally issued more detailed material in other languages to complement the original posters, but it was also suggested that the linguistic quality of this material was not always high.

From translating materials to communication strategies

As pointed out by Viftrup, the challenge consists not only in creating informative content in different languages, but also ensuring that it actually reaches its target groups. Here, local efforts as those cited, have played a crucial role as “role models” spread information to specific communities. And, there was a huge need for information, as Lise Dyhr, Senior Researcher in Family Medicine, University of Copenhagen, and Morten Sodemann, Clinical Professor at Odense University Hospital’s Migrant Health Clinic discovered.

Some of their patients were frightened by the empty streets, an initial lack of basic necessities in the super-markets, and the regular appearance of a line-up of authorities (PM and health officials) on television. Others experienced gaps between home country and diaspora news and the information they received from Danish sources. This led to distrust of the Danish media. Some did not dare to go out at all, and when the educational sector gradually re-opened, they did not see how it suddenly would be safe again to send their children to school, in particular as many work places were still closed.

Some professional interpreters saw their tasks expanding. Some of our research participants, interpreters employed by a hospital, were asked to make phone calls to screen non-Danish speaking patients scheduled for other appointments for COVID-19 symptoms using a questionnaire. Some interpreters felt overwhelmed by the new responsibilities, others experienced it as an easy transition into new aspects of their work. But these interpreters had the impression that the patients were overall well-informed about the pandemic, and they believed this to be due to efficient social networks and the internet.

Minorities are more vulnerable to infection

At the same time, as we have seen in many other countries, minority citizens have been and are still over-represented in the statistics of those infected with COVID-19. By May 07, those with a migration background accounted for 18% of infected citizens although they only constitute 9% of the total population. In the week of August 03 to August 09, 70% of the 756 individuals testing positive for COVID-19 had ethnic minority backgrounds.

The factors leading to increased vulnerability include a high percentage working in particularly exposed sectors (e.g., public transportation, service and health care sectors) and large families sharing small living spaces, as well as existing underlying health conditions in this demographic.

Scapegoating

Despite these obvious reasons, the statistical over-representation – and, not least, its public announcement – has led to hostility expressed by ethnic Danes.

As an example, after recent clusters of COVID-19 cases among non-ethnic Danes in the city of Aarhus, politicians were quick to address this, among them Pia Kjærsgaard, Member of Parliament for the Danish People’s Party, a national-conservative party. She called for “a close down of the ghettoes” and accused immigrants of not taking the pandemic seriously enough.

At the same time, members of the Somali community have reported an increase in harassment and discrimination. For example, a kindergarten asked for a negative COVID-19 test for the children of a Somali family, and a public transport company reporting received requests to take Somali drivers of their shifts.

Experiences such as these problematize the publication of data concerning the ethnic backgrounds of infected individuals. On the one hand, this data can expose community specific vulnerabilities such as the ones documented by the DIHR report and allow for targeted measures adapted to the needs of specific community. On the other hand, rather than addressing the underlying issues such as housing, working conditions, and access to information, specific immigrant groups are scapegoated as disease-carriers.

Pushing back on social media

There has been some resistance and efforts to reframe the debate on social media. At the initiative of the Danish-Somali advocacy group “Mediegruppen” (the Media group) the hashtags #SomalisSayNo (#Somalieresigerfra) and #NoToPublicShaming (#Nejtiludskamning) started trending. Members of “the Blue Stars”, a group of young Danes with Somali backgrounds who fight prejudices against Somalis, decried the public shaming of the community as a whole on television and expressed fears over possible future consequences.

#SomaliereSigerFra#NejTilUdskamning#dkpol
Vore demokratiske samfund bygger på pressefrihed, men denne frihed indebærer ansvarlighed. Vi vil derfor opfordre samtlige myndigheder, politikere og medier til at kæmpe for…https://t.co/YppTGiGSD8 pic.twitter.com/D32OD8W2Rw

— Mediegruppen (@mgfsdk) August 8, 2020

Furthermore, the Aarhus Somali taskforce wrote an open letter to the prime minister where they questioned the PMs statement that information had been available to all (cited in the beginning of this piece). After reviewing the Somali translations of the guidelines issued by the authorities, they found them to be mostly unintelligible, perhaps the result of a google translate effort.

Covid-19 as an opportunity to rethink linguistic diversity and social justice in Denmark?

The issue of reaching non-Danish speaking groups is not uniquely related to the Covid-19 pandemic; nor is the fact of preexisting anti-immigrant sentiments among segments of the population and their political representatives. The crisis has undeniably heightened the need for communication strategies across languages and communities and exposed its relevance to everybody, but in principle the issue is not new. Maybe the crisis will ultimately constitute an opportunity to reconsider the intersection of linguistic diversity and social justice in Danish society.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for the full Language on the Move coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. The special issue of Multilingua of 12 peer-reviewed research papers about “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis” is available here.

Akhlaq Ahmad at work on the mural in Shahdara for the ‘Delhi, I Love You’ project. (Image Credit: Delhi, I Love You)

On July 8, 2020, The Wire published an anonymous article by a young Indian Muslim. In it, the writer shares his painful experience of how, in the anti-Muslim Hindutva climate created by the right-wing BJP government, his identity has been reduced to his Muslim name. Despite the fact that he observes no Islamic practices and champions liberal views, his Hindu colleagues look at him with suspicion. On social media, he is often called a jihadi, an ISIS-sympathizer, and mulla, a slur, for speaking up for the rights of minorities, especially Muslims.

Fearing for his life, he has stopped saying in public salamwaleikum, the Muslim greeting in Urdu. He also instructed his kids not to call him abba, an Urdu word for ‘dad’. He even started tweaking his name, so that it does not sound Muslim.

While violence, including mob-lynching of Muslims and the anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi in February 2020, has been discussed, the symbolic violence against the Urdu language—a proxy for and target of hate and discrimination against Muslims—hasn’t. I use the term Urdu in a broader sense to encompass the language as well as names.

Consider Urdu personal names and cases of hatred and discrimination that revolve around the identities they reveal. It is worth noting that the  BJP government in the last few years has renamed many places containing Urdu/Muslim names with names that evoke Hindu history and culture.

Personal names are not simply a system of identification by which people differentiate one person from another; they are also carriers of cultural information, including the social identities of the bearers of the names. A study conducted in the USA found that white-sounding names such as Emily and Greg were more likely to get callbacks from employers than Black-sounding names Lakisha and Jamal. While some names in the US clearly indicate racial identity, others such as John and Michelle are non-discernable. By contrast, in India, most Muslim names are discernable as they draw largely upon Persian and Arabic sources as against Hindu names which are derived, among other sources, from Hindu traditions. Since Urdu names are signposts of the Muslim identity, they easily become instruments of hate and discrimination against Muslims.

In May 2015, a Muslim young man, Zeeshan, holding an MBA degree was denied a job by Hare Krishna Exports, a diamond company based in Mumbai, because of his religion. Less than fifteen minutes after he submitted his application online, Zeeshan received a shocking reply from the company: “We regret to inform you that we hire only non-Muslim candidates”. Clearly, the decision to reject his application was based on the candidate’s Urdu/Muslim name.

Other cases of discrimination based on Muslim names have surfaced recently in companies that deliver goods to people on their doors. On 24 April, 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Barkat Patel, a Muslim employee of Grofers, an online grocery store, went to deliver grocery to Ms. Chaturvedi at Jaya Park in Mumbai. But her father stopped her from taking the delivery. According to the report filed at the police station,  the father wanted to know the  name of the delivery guy first. Once he found out from the name that Barkat was Muslim, he refused to take it. Barkat recorded the whole exchange on his mobile phone and submitted it to the police.

Similar cases of discrimination were reported from Zomato and Swiggy, popular food delivery companies. On October 25, 2019, Swiggy lodged a complaint with a police station in Hyderabad stating that a customer refused to receive their food order because the delivery man was Muslim. Another case of discrimination was reported on August 1, 2019 in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. In this case, a customer Amit Shukla cancelled his Zomato delivery when he found out from the name Faiyaz that his delivery man was Muslim. What makes it even more reprehensible is that Shukla argued that this was part of his freedom of expression and religion guaranteed by the constitution.

However, names don’t always correspond with social-religious identities. Some Hindu names of Persian or Arabic origin bear similarities with Urdu/Muslim name. In absence of other visual cues e.g. outfit or facial looks, such names could miscommunicate the identities of the bearers of the names. This is exactly what happened when a 23-old young Hindu man named Sahil was lynched by some Hindus in Maujpur in Delhi. Although the police denies the claim, Sahil’s parents, Sunil and Suneeta, both believe that their son was killed because he was mistaken for a Muslim who had entered a Hindu neighborhood. Suneeta expressed her regret at naming him Sahil, “I wouldn’t have named him Sahil had I known that it would turn out to be the cause of his death”. The incident that led to Sahil’s killing is worth mentioning. Sahil was at home when he found out that some of his friends had a brawl in Gali Number 5 in Maujpur, Delhi. When he rushed to the spot to resolve the issue the residents of the neighborhood asked his name. On knowing that his name was Sahil, the crowd turned to him and thrashed him severely. He died on his way to the hospital.

In another case, a Muslim man’s nickname, which did not sound Muslim, actually saved him. On May 19, 2016, as part of beautification of Delhi, Akhlaq Ahmad, an Indian artist who holds a degree in fine arts, and Swen Simon, a French artist, were writing an Urdu couplet on a wall in Shahdara, Delhi. Some members of the right-wing RSS gathered there and asked them to stop writing the couplet in Urdu and threatened them with dire consequences if they didn’t. They said, “ …they could bear anything, but not the Urdu script” They snatched the artists’ paintbrushes and smudged the Urdu writing on the wall. In an interview, the Muslim artist, said, “…I said my name is Shabbu [his nick name] and they assumed I was Shambhu, a Hindu. So, they turned their ire towards my French colleague, Swen Simon, asking him to pay me my wages and go back to Lahore”.

This exception only proves the rule. The cases of Sahil and Akhlaq/Sabbu are both of some kind of miscommunication based on Muslim names. The action that led to the loss of Sahil’s life and saved Akhlaq’s is based on the ideology of hate and discrimination against Muslims as manifested from their names.

The fear of uttering Urdu names, greetings, or words in public is increasing among Muslims in north India. In response to the anonymous article with which I opened this piece, Rana Safvi, a Muslim writer tweeted that she also avoids saying salaam, Muslim greeting, in public.

Although Akhlaq had a sigh of relief because his non-Muslim-sounding name saved him, the stories of Zeeshan, Barkat, Sahil, and Faiyaz, clearly show how ideologies of hate and discrimination can be routed through personal names, labels over which we as bearers of the names have little control.

Discrimination based on names are just be a tip of the iceberg of a larger systemic process of exclusion and marginalization of Muslims in India. A democracy worthy of its name cannot allow names to be the ground of discrimination against its own citizens in whose very name it rules.

Related content

• Stereotyped names as a barrier to workplace entry
• What’s in a name?
• Behind a name
• Names on the move: Ghanaian names in the diaspora

The official WHO name of the disease

I am a citizen of Wuhan. Like millions of other Wuhan residents who now live in a state of fear and anxiety, the first thing I do when I wake up every morning is to check the latest news of the coronavirus epidemic.

In December 2019, a month before the Spring Festival holiday, an unknown coronavirus broke out and rapidly spread in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, China. This virus is a new strain of coronavirus that has not been previously identified in humans.  Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002. Compared to the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003, the novel coronavirus has a lower mortality rate but seems to be spreading much faster. It took almost four months for SARS to spread to 1,000 people, but the novel coronavirus infected more than 1,200 people in just 25 days. On January 19, 2020, the first exported case of this virus was discovered in Guangdong Province, hundreds of miles from Wuhan. Just three days later, on January 22, 23 provinces across the country had confirmed cases. So far, around 80,000 people from 29 countries have been infected with the virus and more than 2,000 have died.

Facing the complicated and severe epidemic situation, China has taken drastic measures to limit the spread of the virus. On January 23, Wuhan – a city of 14 million inhabitants and about 5 million migrants – was put in lockdown. All transport – airplanes, subways, buses, and trains – have been suspended. Private cars are no longer permitted to be driven on the streets without a special permit. All citizens are required to stay at home to avoid cross infection. A virus has silenced a bustling city. A few days later, 13 cities in Hubei Province with a total population of 56 million people were locked down. 31 provincial-level regions in China all activated top-level emergency responses to the coronavirus. These measures are without precedent, not only in China but perhaps in the whole history of humankind.

On January 30, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. And on February 11, the WHO announced an official name for the disease, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (abbreviated “COVID-19”).

Anti-Chinese caricature in Jyllands Posten

If I did not live in the epicenter of the disease, I probably would not give much thought to the naming of a new disease. As it is, I am forced to reflect how much harm the inappropriate naming of infectious diseases can do to certain groups.

In recent years, the world has seen the emergence of several new human infectious diseases. These diseases are often given common names outside the scientific community for everyday communication. Inappropriate disease names, once established, are difficult to change and can bring serious negative impacts and harms to individuals and communities. Therefore, it is important that an appropriate name is assigned to a newly identified human disease by whoever first reports it.

In response to such concerns, WHO developed a set of standard best practices for the naming of new human infectious diseases in 2015. In this guideline, the WHO advises against using place names, human names, or animal names for naming new infectious diseases with the aim of “minimising unnecessary negative impact of disease names on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare, and avoid causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.”

Anti-Asian headline in Courrier Picard

According to these guidelines, disease names such as Ebola, Zika, swine flu, Rift Valley fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or monkeypox are all problematic. The use of place name for a disease should be avoided as they can stigmatise entire regions or ethnic groups. For example, the Ebola River of Congo or the Zika Forest of Uganda, where the Ebola and Zika diseases were first identified, are now inevitably linked to these diseases in the public imagination.

The use of animal species in names such as “swine flu” (officially known as “H1N1”) has had unintentional negative economic and social impacts by stigmatising the pork industry, even though this disease is being spread by people rather than pigs. (See related post on the “Danish boar fence”)

People’s names, usually the scientists who identified the disease, may also be inappropriate as are “terms that incite undue fear” such as “unknown” or “fatal.” “We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals,” the WHO says in its guidelines.

Before the announcement of the official name, COVID19, by the WHO, “Wuhan virus” or “China virus” were widely used (and continue to be used) for the disease by some foreign media.

Anti-Chinese headline in Der Spiegel

At a time when China is mobilising all resources to fight COVID-19, fear and discrimination spread rapidly outside China through these stigmatized names. Jyllands Posten, a Danish broadsheet paper, for example, published a cartoon of the Chinese national flag where the five stars were replaced with virus-like figures. In response to China’s protest, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded that “we have freedom of expression in Denmark – also to draw.”

An increase in racial stereotyping of Chinese in particular and Asians in general over the novel coronavirus can be seen in the media of other Western countries, too. The French newspaper Le Courrier Picard used inflammatory headlines including “Alerte jaune” (Yellow alert) and “Le peril jaune?” (Yellow peril?), stigmatising all Asian people as virus. Der Spiegel, a German magazine, featured a man wearing a red hoody, protective masks, goggles and earphones, with a giant headline “Coronavirus – Made in China.” And the US Wall Street Journal published an article with racist overtones under the headline, “China is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” humiliating China’s subordination to Western countries in the 19^th Century and marking down the prospect of the Chinese economy.

These biased media reports not only constitute racial stereotyping but undoubtedly contribute to racial discrimination experienced by Chinese and Asians in these countries.

This anti-Chinese racism has now gone well beyond the media. As of February 20, Amazon allows individual businesses to openly sell T-shirts, hoodies, cups and other products imprinted with the insulting slogan “coronavirus made in China” on its English mall.

Anti-Chinese merchandise on Amazon

Even more outrageously Chinese students and migrants have been racially vilified and attacked because of their nationality and race. On January 30, for instance, a Chinese postgraduate student was attacked by three local people in Sheffield, UK, for wearing a mask to protect herself and others from COVID-19. In the US, racist attacks against Asians are said to be spreading faster than the virus. In Australia, Chinese restaurants are struggling to survive as their customer numbers have plummeted.

The list of examples of anti-Chinese racism could go on and on.

Facing deadly infectious diseases, it is, of course, normal that we feel scared or anxious. However, racism and any act of discrimination driven by such fear is completely unacceptable. As Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said, the coronavirus is a public health event, not a matter of ethnicity or nationality, “Even though the virus started in Wuhan, it doesn’t respect nationality or race. It does not check your passport before it goes into your body. Anybody can be infected.”

A virus does not have a nationality, ethnicity or a race. Discrimination can be the most dangerous virus.

I studied in Australia for six years. In a sense, I have been educated in the West. Personally, I truly appreciate the pursuit of freedom of speech in Western countries and agree that this may be something the Chinese government needs to work on. But, the premise of freedom of speech is not to infringe upon the rights and dignity of others. While the Chinese people are suffering from this calamity and are united as one in combating this “war without smoke,” attacking the country and its people in the name of “freedom of speech” is undoubtedly a retrogression of human civilization.

Epidemics have been rampant throughout human history, and they have often caused devastation. It is the responsibility of us all to ensure that there is no stigma associated with any infectious disease, and the unnecessary and unhelpful profiling of individuals based on nationality or race.

Fighting the novel coronavirus, as we do here, is protecting both China and the world. On behalf of millions of ordinary people living in Wuhan, I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to the international community who has given us valuable moral and material support. China is not fighting alone. We believe “winter will eventually pass, and spring is sure to come.”

Unpublished manuscripts from the estate of Hans Natonek (Source: Arts in exile)

On International Women’s Day I explored why female academics publish less than their male peers. Academic journal submissions by female economics researchers face greater scrutiny and take longer to get published, as a study by Erin Hengel has found. Successful women learn to anticipate greater scrutiny than their male peers and eventually write better; a quality improvement that comes at the expense of quantity.

The data for Hengel’s study come from published journal articles and that constitutes a limitation because publication is the exception rather than the rule: the majority of submissions – both for academic and non-academic publication – are rejected.

Systematic knowledge of rejected authorship is extremely scarce. Rejection is ostensibly based on the quality of a manuscript; but it is reasonable to assume that the identity of the author also plays a role and that female, non-white or working-class authors are more likely to have their manuscripts rejected.

A study of the archives of the US trade publisher Houghton Mifflin sheds light on this question. The researcher, Yuliya Komska, examines the relationship between indicators of foreignness and manuscript rejection during the period of World War II. The period lends itself to this kind of examination as many of the European refugees arriving in the USA during that time were intellectuals and had been writers back home. Most of them failed miserably in their attempts to reestablish their careers in a new country and through a new language, as I previously showed with reference to the Bavarian exile Oskar Maria Graf.

Komska presents some stark figures: during the period under examination Houghton Mifflin received anywhere between 150 and 300 manuscript submissions per month but signed up only one or two of these. In other words, the rejection rate was above 99%. Rejection was for the same reasons that manuscripts get rejected today: they were poorly written, they were dull, they were not timely or they did not fit with the publisher’s list.

However, as the researcher shows, quality had an accent. What does that mean? Komska defines “accented writing” as narrative themes and writing styles that were perceived as unmarketable.

First and foremost among accented writing were indicators of foreignness. A whole body of work that never saw publication were accounts of the anti-Jewish pogroms of the early 20^th century in the Russian empire and of the migration experiences of the refugees these produced. Editors and reviewers routinely denigrated such migration stories as “painfully Jewish, dull, not our book,” “monotonously tragic and so completely unrelieved by anything humorous or un-Jewish” or “a screwball book by a screwball Russian” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 285f.).

Writing with a foreign accent was not only the product of the author’s migration experience but also their class background, as Komska shows by comparing the reception of the refugees from Russia in the early 20th century to that of the refugees from the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. This new cohort of displaced authors, mostly German-speaking Jews, were more likely to come from bourgeois backgrounds than their Yiddish- and Russian-speaking predecessors of a generation earlier. In response to the submissions of this new group of migrant authors “racist remarks receded” (Komska, 2017, p. 287).

Hans Natonek, for instance, had been one of the foremost literary critics of Weimar Germany and head of the feuilleton of Neue Leipziger Zeitung, a major national newspaper, when he arrived in the USA in 1941 after an almost decade-long odyssey from one European refuge to another. He submitted a memoir of his refugee experience and was described by reviewers as a “nice human being with a good clear intelligence” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 288). Even so, he was still rejected by Houghton Mifflin but received a contract for his autobiography In search of myself from another publisher.

In search of myself describes the author’s struggles with reestablishing himself through the medium of the English language in a language that shows no traces of that struggle. The reason for that is that the book is a translation of Natonek’s German original. When migrant manuscripts were favorably considered, translations seem to have been preferred over English-language publications with an accent, i.e. manuscripts that showed traces of late language learning. Describing an author as “not yet at home in the English language” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 288) meant rejection.

Refugees’ “broken English” could cancel out even the most extensive cultural capital, as was the case with the Mann family. While Houghton Mifflin did sign on a number of books by Erika and Klaus Mann, they rejected a manuscript by Golo Mann because of its “German overtone” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 289).

Incidentally, concerns with accented writing were not restricted to migrant writing but also extended to the presence of dialects and other non-standard forms of English, which were also viewed negatively.

The researcher concludes that “it was accents – wide-ranging, all-pervasive, far-reaching – more than language or languages per se that worried Houghton Mifflin the most” (Komska, 2017, p. 292). This trade press did not so much enforce monolingualism – manuscripts in languages other than English could be translated after all – as it homogenized linguistic, ethnic and class differences into one single “native” white middle-class idiom.

Reference

Komska, Y. (2017). Trade Publisher Archives: Repositories of Monolingualism? Race, Language, and Rejected Refugee Manuscripts in the Age of Total War. Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 53(3), 275-296.

Click on this image to view video about the role of English and local languages in the educational experiences of Aboriginal children in remote communities

Editor’s Note: March 21 is Harmony Day in Australia, coinciding with the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. On this occasion we examine how beliefs that Aboriginal languages are “nice to have” but basically useless in the “real” world of work and education disadvantage Aboriginal people in remote communities. Our contributor Brendan Kavanagh explores this linguistic disadvantage in employment in the text below, and in education in this video.

***

In a 2007 article in The Australian, Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson put forward six policy recommendations pertaining to Aboriginal languages. He identified such languages as “inherently valuable as part of the country’s rich heritage” and “the primary words by which the Australian land and seascape is named and described.” However, Pearson argued for a “separate domain within indigenous communities for cultural and linguistic education from the Western education domain”, reasoning that “the primary purpose of schools is for our children to obtain a mainstream, Western education.”

This dichotomy is often established: local language is for the home; English is for the outside world. One is for culture; the other is for jobs. Such a perspective has pervaded the debate over bilingual education in remote Aboriginal schools since the mid-1970s, with early bilingual programmes established on the principles of connecting with one’s heritage and identity, as well as recognising and upholding basic Indigenous rights.

Conversely, the case for English-speaking classrooms draws upon the economic argument, positioning English as the pathway toward real jobs in the broader Australian workplace – an argument that supports the current four hours of mandatory English-only classes in all Northern Territory schools, as I explain in this 10-minute video about the schooling experiences of aboriginal children in remote communities. The assumption is that for an Aboriginal school-leaver, finding their way in the world means leaving their land, family, language and culture to pursue “real” opportunities within urban mainstream Australia. This perception is perpetuated in a policy report, which goes so far as to label local Indigenous identified positions, such as Aboriginal Health Workers, Assistant Teachers and Aboriginal Community Police Officers, as “pretend jobs” that lack equivalent positions in mainstream Australia. Drawing equivalencies to an “apartheid” system, the report paints their existence as a politically correct excuse for hiring Aboriginal people into inferior positions that lack the level of education required of nurses, teachers and police officers.

While it is true that such positions are not identical to mainstream positions, this is because the roles require a different and unique set of knowledge and skills, without which a community school, clinic or police station cannot operate. These include an understanding of the community’s social structure, appropriate cultural practices that do not offend the client, and, most importantly, the ability to communicate information in the vernacular. Such specialist skills cannot be learnt by outsiders through a mainstream education model.

Health clinic in a remote NT community (Source: ABC)

The role of an Aboriginal Health Worker is a pertinent example. Statistics show that in remote Indigenous communities, 55% of adults are smokers and the average person consumes 24% of their sugar intake from soft drinks, a rate which is twice that of the non-Indigenous population. Hearing and vision problems are also prevalent among children due to lack of basic access to hygiene. The expensive solution is to treat the problems at the symptom by flying in qualified specialists to treat diabetes, lung cancer, otitis media and trachoma. This option can require high wages, travel allowance and expensive chartered flights. Nevertheless, it is potentially ineffective, as many community members require a level of trust before they are willing to attend a medical appointment.

The most efficient and effective method is to treat the problem at the cause. Using language skills, an Aboriginal Health Worker can develop local health messages to convince people to give up smoking, eat healthier and wash their children’s ears and eyes. They can convince patients to attend appointments, and with enough training, can interpret complex medical jargon. These skills can be essential for suicide prevention, promoting sexual health and providing other vital health messages such as how to prevent lead poisoning by hunting with steel bullets instead of lead ones. Over the long term, Aboriginal Health Workers save money and, more importantly, save lives.

An Aboriginal Teacher’s Assistant is fundamental to a community’s future. Teaching roles in communities are often temporary stepping stones for graduate teachers with limited experience and no exposure to Indigenous culture, as I show in the video . In such a system, where there is a cultural risk to both the teacher and the students, it is vital that the Teacher’s Assistants act as cultural brokers. Their ability to communicate culturally appropriate content into the vernacular helps to deliver educational outcomes that an Aboriginal community actually wants. A study with 1,000 participants across remote Australia found that Aboriginal community members preferred educational outcomes to focus on “learning the local language” and “being strong in both worlds”, more than such mainstream goals as “economic participation”.

Aboriginal Community Police Officers (ACPO) arguably play the most crucial role, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners accounted for over a quarter (27% or 10,596 prisoners) of the total Australian prisoner population in 2016. An ACPO’s ability to speak in local language opens a channel of communication between community members and law enforcement, allowing them to understand the law, cooperate with the law and follow the law. As active participants of the legal system, they will view law enforcement as a useful means of strengthening the community by maintaining traditional culture through social order. Without this channel of communication, law enforcement is more likely to be viewed as a form of imperialism enforced by foreigners who speak a different language and lack an understanding of existing social structures. Keeping people on the right side of the law saves money, as the cost of imprisonment is approximately $305 per person per day, a figure that greatly exceeds the cost of hiring an ACPO.

These are just a few of the real jobs in which language skills are essential in the workforce. The cashiers at the local store are the only staff members who can communicate directly with clients to meet their needs. The artists at the art centre communicate their culture to the outside world, which in turn generates a real income. Aboriginal rangers can develop environmental health messages for their fellow community members to look after country.

Yet English literacy based on NAPLAN testing is our primary determinant for Aboriginal educational outcomes, as exemplified in the 2017 Closing the Gap Report, and argued in the above-mentioned 2012 Indigenous education report as part of its criticism of Indigenous identified positions. But studies have shown NAPLAN to be a linguistically and culturally inappropriate measure of achievement in remote Indigenous schools, filled with reading activities that present irrelevant and unfamiliar contexts, such as “going to the cinema” or “delivering newspapers”. Reading exercises rarely reflect the context of working in a community position, so rather than labelling Indigenous positions as “pretend jobs”, the argument could be made that the tests represent “pretend learning”.

The idea that local languages are irrelevant to the workplace is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the English-speaking workplace only sustains itself because local people are not skilled into positions of management. While it is true that language is important for preserving cultural identity, we should also argue that it is an essential tool for operating in the local economy. School curricula should not sideline language as a superfluous add-on, but embed it into student career paths in health, law, education, commerce and all other fields that are relevant to building a strong community.

Participation and success rate of Chief Investigators in ARC Discovery Projects 2018 by gender and career age (Source: ARC)

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day and we will therefore look at the gender productivity gap in academia.

Last year I was fortunate to receive an Australian Research Council Discovery grant to investigate everyday intercultural communication. That means I was one of 1,894 female chief investigators funded under Australia’s national research flagship program. At the same time, 5,011 male chief investigators received funding under the scheme. In other words, the gender ratio is 27:73.

Does that mean that the selection process is discriminating against women? No, definitely not, because the success rate of female applicants was with 20.3% higher than the male success rate of 18.4%.

The figures show that female researchers are significantly less likely to apply for research funding in the first place. Writing grant applications and obtaining research funding is essential for academic career success. The fact that women are less likely to apply for and obtain grants is mirrored in the academic gender gap. Women predominate at the lowest rungs of the academic career ladder and at Lecturer B level (the usual post-doctoral entry level for continuing academic positions) we are close to parity. However, the picture changes dramatically at associate and full professor levels, where only 32% were female in 2016. (For global figures on women in academia, see here)

Some of the reasons for women’s stunted careers have long been obvious and we hardly need to mention that combining motherhood and a demanding career is tough. But the obvious does not explain the gender productivity gap: female doctors see fewer patients than male doctors, female real estate agents list fewer properties than male real estate agents and, as we saw above, female academics submit fewer grant applications.

This is not the end of the conundrum: patients of female doctors are less likely to die, properties listed by female agents sell at higher prices, and, as we saw above, female researchers are more likely to write successful grant applications. In sum, in a range of fields, equally placed women perform lower than men on quantitative measures but perform higher than men on qualitative measures.

Academic publishing provides another case in point: female researchers publish less than their male peers but what they publish is much more readable and better written, as economics researcher Erin Hengel has found.

Examining peer-reviewed articles published in the top-ranking economics journals, the researcher concludes that female-authored papers are better written than male-authored papers, and that the gap is particularly stark when it comes to senior academics. Female economists write increasingly clearly over the course of their career while the writing of their male peers does not perceptibly improve.

The readability of an English text is the result of syntactic and word choices such as the ratio of long sentences, passive voice, multi-syllabic and rare words. Measurement of readability can be automated and MS Word now has two common automated tests of readability, the Flesh-Kincaid Readability Tests, built in. Applying these and some other readability measures to more than 9,000 published articles – both before and after peer review – Hengel demonstrates far better writing quality by female academics.

However, writing well has a price: it takes more time.

Hengel shows that female academics learn to pay this price because their papers are subject to much greater scrutiny. Editors and peer reviewers impose tougher standards on women. This is evident from the fact that female-authored economics papers take around six months more to go through the review process than male-authored papers.

As a result, female academics come to experience peer review as a much tougher process and those who progress on the career ladder adjust their expectations about what is required. That means they invest more and more effort prior to submission and the quality of their submissions rises. Their male colleagues have no such feedback loop and remain blissfully ignorant of the fact their writing may be difficult to read.

The overall effect of this quantity-quality trade-off is to disguise discrimination as “personal choice.” The discrimination, bias and tougher standards that explain the gender productivity gap remain hidden, unacknowledged and unaddressed.

Hengel’s research neatly explains the gender productivity paradox in academia. Additionally, it does much more: it provides a way to think about how those who experience repeated discrimination and biased feedback adapt to those experiences. Hengel controls for native speaker status and does not address intersectional disadvantage but native speaker status and ethnicity certainly stack the odds further. A study with the counter-intuitive finding that non-native speakers write more clearly than native speakers certainly points in that direction.

This International Women’s Day, academic women still have to be better to achieve the same measure of success as their male colleagues. Another helpful way to think about the #pressforprogress challenge is to turn the tables and make privilege visible (as a recent Guardian op-ed did beautifully with a thought experiment imagining the career of Boris Johnson if he were a black woman).

Reference

Hengel, E. (2017). Publishing while Female. Are women held to higher standards? Evidence from peer review. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.17548

Related IWD content

• 2013, Migrant women’s empowerment in the city
• 2012, Strange Academic women

My call to use language shaming as a lens through which to explore processes of language subordination, domination and (de)valorization struck a chord at the conference and I have since received a number of emails asking for the write-up of my lecture. The slides that accompanied the lecture can be downloaded here and conceptually the lecture was based on Chapters 3 and 7 of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. Additionally, I’ve decided to start a mini-series devoted to explorations in language shaming here on Language on the Move. What follows is the first entry in this series.

#ICMLXVI @rejadam Dr Robert Adam emphasising the concept of "language shaming" (re: Prof Ingrid Piller) pic.twitter.com/O5GOgQWDPP

— efsli (@efsli) August 29, 2017

A persistent theme in linguistic diversity is that some ways of using language are heard or seen as indices of laziness, stupidity and backwardness. Speakers of non-standard varieties and particularly migrant speakers are often denigrated in this way.

Teachers may well be amongst the worst offenders when it comes to making migrant students feel inferior. For instance, a sociolinguistic ethnography with Burmese migrant students in a high school in Southwest China by Li Jia provides numerous instances of language shaming. The focus of the research was on the language learning and educational experiences of students from Myanmar who had come to China for their high school education. Many of these students had a Chinese background and most had studied Chinese as an additional language for a number of years prior to coming to China. Even so, their Chinese was different from the Chinese of local students: there were the usual accent differences and additionally there were significant differences in literacy: the Burmese students had had far less opportunities to practice Chinese literacy than the students who had been educated in China throughout their entire school career. Furthermore, they had usually been instructed in traditional Chinese characters and they had learnt to use pinyin according to a different transliteration system.

Chemistry presentation by Year 11 student (Source: Li, 2017, p. 234)

These observable linguistic differences were mostly seen in terms of deficit and often became the focus of student-teacher interactions as in the following example, where a migrant Year 11 student was required to deliver an oral presentation in his Chemistry class. The topic of the presentation was about the weather and specifically temperature fluctuations and cold spells. When the student had finished his presentation and the teacher provided feedback, the feedback had nothing to do with the content of the presentation. Instead, the chemistry teacher focused on the student’s language. He pointed out some unfortunate vocabulary choices made by the students as well as spelling mistakes. The teacher summed up his assessment of the student’s Chemistry presentation as follows:

你看都是高二的学生了，寒潮的潮字都不会写。

Look, you are already a Year 11 student and how come you can’t even write the word “spell”? [as in “cold spell”; “tide”] (Quoted from Li, Jia. 2017, p. 234)

The comment focusses on the language of the presentation instead of the content and denigrates the student by linking the spelling mistake to his age – a typical example of language shaming.

This kind of language shaming is detrimental to the student in at least two ways: first, the student is obviously humiliated and his personal worth is being questioned in highlighting that his Chinese language proficiency is substandard for his age cohort (and ignoring that he is not a first language speaker of Chinese but a Chinese language learner). Second, the focus on language instead of content deprives the student of a learning opportunity.

That means that language shaming has the pernicious effect of not only denigrating students’ language proficiency but also jeopardizing their overall educational success, including achievement in the subject area. Language shaming thus serves to instill the very “stupidity” is claims to diagnose.

Poster with the school’s hair style regulations (Source: Li, 2017, p. 179)

Being scolded for the way they spoke Chinese was but one of the ways in which the students were subjected to a deficit discourse. It was also other aspects of their bodies and behaviors that were subject to criticism: they were often seen as not conforming to the strict dress code of the school or as lazy and careless with the tasks assigned to them. During classroom observations it became obvious that teachers sometimes spent up to half the lesson “criticizing Burmese students who did not obey the school rules” (Li, 2017, p. 248).

While one isolated incidence of the kind that occurred in the Chemistry lesson may be easy to write off, for the migrant students in the study such incidences of language shaming were regular occurrences; and it was their regularity that left deep psychological scars, as another student confided in the researcher:

我8岁来中国学习汉语，一开始什么都不明白, 真的很想回家，特别是老师骂，大姐姐欺负我的时候，感觉真的很无助。 […]

I came to China to learn Chinese at the age of 8. At the beginning, I didn’t understand anything, and I was missing home very much especially when I was scolded by my teachers and bullied by older students I really felt helpless. (Quoted from Li, Jia. 2017, p. 148)

Like all systems of oppression, language subordination has a psychological component, and shame is a key mechanism that leads oppressed people to accept their oppression: sociologists consider shame as a key aspect of poverty as it leads poor people to accept that their poverty is their own fault and to accept that the rich deserve to be rich. Similarly, theorists of racial and colonial oppression have long noted a psychological component where those who are subject to racism and colonialism may come to accept their oppression as justified because an inferiority complex has been instilled in them.

The examples of language shaming offered here come under the guise of teaching and must be considered a key tool in the arsenal of social reproduction. A first step in breaking their power is to call them out for what they are.

Make sure not to miss out on future installments in the series “Explorations in language shaming” and subscribe to our alerts in the bottom right corner of this page.

References

Kaufman, G. (1996). The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-Based Syndromes (2nd ed.). New York: Springer.

Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD), Macquarie University. Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/LI_Jia_Social_reproduction_and_migrant_education.pdf

Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. [for your chance to win a copy, tweet about #linguisticdiversity by Oct 10; details of the draw here] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/explorations-in-language-shaming/feed/ 36 20607 https://languageonthemove.com/2017-baal-book-prize/ https://languageonthemove.com/2017-baal-book-prize/#comments Mon, 04 Sep 2017 03:05:10 +0000 http://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=20564 Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice has won the 2017 annual book prize of the British Association of Applied Linguistics.

Although I wasn’t able to attend the conference and award ceremony in person, my inbox has been filling up with congratulatory notes since the announcement of the prize last Thursday. I’m deeply grateful to all well-wishers and it is a good reminder that – although there is only one named author – the idea of individual achievement is a way of seeing particular to our time and culture.

In addition to the work of the author, there are the obvious contributions such as academic sources: these I referenced and attributed, as is common academic practice. There are also the obvious debts of gratitude that any author incurs: to teachers, students, colleagues, friends and family. These I thanked in the “Acknowledgements” section of the book although I actually had to say that they are too numerous to mention individually because any list of individual “thankees” was bound to leave out many more names than I could include.

Beyond these obvious contributions, there is a more fundamental sense in which individual and group achievement are intertwined, as I explained in another book, Bilingual Couples Talk. There, I pointed out that, in the Native American languages of the Pacific North-West, there is no equivalent for the English words “author” or “composer”. This is a tidbit of linguistic information I discovered from listening to music by the rock band Song Catchers. During their performances, the musicians explain that words and tunes are there in the community to be caught. They argue that music is not “composed” by an individual but “captured” from existing tunes. We can think about research and writing in the same way: a book is not only “authored” by an individual but presents a collection of words and ideas that circulate in a community. It is therefore good to see when a particular “catch” resonates with the community from which it springs: the fact that Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice has won both the 2017 BAAL Book Prize and the 2017 Prose Award in the Language and Linguistics category suggests it does.

The key idea of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice is that understanding and addressing linguistic disadvantage must be a central facet of the social justice agenda of our time, characterized as it is by heightened migration and globalization and their blow-backs, heightened xenophobia and nationalism.

Language is an important aspect of our social position and the way we use language – be it in speech, in writing, or in new media – can open or close doors. For sociolinguists this is, in fact, old news. It has long been known that speakers of non-standard varieties are frequently deprived of equal opportunities. However, our understanding of the relationship between language and inequality in the highly linguistically diverse societies of the early 21^st century is less systematic. Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice aimed to fill that gap and to provide an overview of contemporary research into the intersection between linguistic diversity and social justice.

The second aim of the book was to put linguistic diversity on the map of contemporary social justice debates. Engagement with social justice focuses principally on disadvantage and discrimination related to gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion and age. It is extremely rare for “language” to feature as a basis on which individuals, communities or nations may be excluded. However, if we do not understand how linguistic diversity intersects with social justice and if we are unable to even recognize disadvantage and discrimination on the basis of language, we will not be able to work towards positive change.

Social justice has been thought of as the master virtue that undergirds all others since ancient times. In The Republic Plato put forward a view of justice as being fundamental to all other virtues, arguing that it is only by overcoming institutional injustice that it will be possible for other social and individual virtues to flourish. The understanding of social justice adopted in Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice draws on the work of the philosopher Nancy Fraser and conceives of social justice as constituted along three dimensions, namely, economic redistribution, cultural recognition and political representation. The book therefore pursues three principal lines of inquiry: First, an exploration of the relationship between linguistic diversity and economic inequality; second, an exploration of the relationship between linguistic diversity and cultural domination; and, third, an exploration of the relationship between linguistic diversity and imparity of political participation.

The focus is on linguistic diversity and injustice – how linguistic diversity relates to economic inequality, cultural domination and imparity of political participation – because our ideas about justice are formed by the experience of injustice. This is a pragmatic approach that is not concerned with “perfect justice” or “transcendental justice” but is focused on seeking solutions and exploring alternatives to existing problems and injustices.

To read more, make sure to look up Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. If you don’t have your own copy yet, there is a chance to win one, as we’ll celebrate the award of the 2017 BAAL Book Prize to Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice with a Twitter give-away: original tweets including the hashtag #linguisticdiversity published between now and October 09 will enter into a draw for two copies. So, go and get tweeting about the relationship between linguistic diversity and social justice! Follow @Lg_on_the_Move

NAIDOC Week 2017 Logo

Every year, the first week of July marks NAIDOC Week – a time to celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and recognise the achievements of first Australians. The 2017 NAIDOC theme is “Our Languages Matter”, a reference to the importance of languages to Aboriginal culture and identity.

The fact that Aboriginal languages matter barely needs explaining. All Aboriginal languages have been threatened by the European colonization of Australia and discriminatory government policies. Despite this, Aboriginal communities have worked hard to maintain and revive their languages. Today around one third of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children speak an Indigenous language, with even higher rates in remote areas. Yet, speakers of Aboriginal languages are often forgotten or ignored by policy makers, educational institutions and other services.

Take the Northern Territory (NT) for example, which has some of the largest groups of Aboriginal language speakers in Australia. Over the last 40 years, the NT Government has swayed to the differing (and often ill-informed) opinions on bilingual education. Devlin, Disbray and Devlin (2017) give a thorough chronology of these events which I will summarise here to demonstrate the issue. Throughout I have also sought out the views of Aboriginal authors, as the research on Aboriginal issues is too often dominated by ‘white’ colonial voices.

Bilingual education for Aboriginal students in the NT was first introduced in 1973, influenced by emerging international theories about bilingual education, and with the aim of “recognising and supporting the culture and language of the children and communities who speak those languages” (Devlin, Disbray & Devlin, 2017, p.49). Aboriginal teachers worked alongside non-Aboriginal teachers to develop teaching materials and resources, and this approach was soon producing results, with many schools reporting that bilingually educated Aboriginal students were outperforming Aboriginal students who were taught in English only.

In the 1980s and 90s, however, political opinions against bilingual education and in favour of English-only teaching gained greater attention, under the guise of it being better for children’s futures, yet clearly coming from a monolingual ideology that ignored the positive results of bilingual schools. The NT education department responded by, at first, rewriting the goals of bilingual education to have a focus on learning English, and then later, in 1998, under the pressure of funding cuts, phasing out bilingual education altogether. While it is true that servicing the needs of the many Aboriginal language groups in the NT is more costly than a ‘one size fits all’ English-as-a-second-language (ESL) program, it fails to take into account the savings associated with higher student engagement, better educational outcomes and, as a result, greater employment opportunities.

NT Intervention area (Source: http://everydayracism-au.tumblr.com/)

As funding cuts rolled out across the territory, the NT government was heavily criticised for failing to properly consult with schools, parents and communities, with protests and petitions happening around the nation. Unfortunately, the influence of the monolingual Anglophone mainstream proved to be stronger, and with it the belief that teaching in English was the best way to improve the students’ English skills.

Towards the late 2000s, two major events caused the NT government to tighten the reins on bilingual education even further. The Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 (better known as the NT Intervention) legislated a series of changes to government services which ultimately took decision-making and control of out of the hands of Aboriginal communities and into those of government. Thomas (2017) links this shifting of power to subsequent policies that then took community control away from education. After all, bilingual education was based on a model of self-determination for Aboriginal communities, so, as the NT government took steps to remove self-determination, the suppression of Aboriginal languages in education followed.

The second event was the beginning of a new national literacy and numeracy test known as NAPLAN, which, despite many early concerns that it was biased against students in remote settings (Piller, 2016), was rolled out to schools all over Australia. As educational experts predicted, the first round of results found that students in remote parts of the NT could not compete on these tests, which was quickly labelled as ‘underperformance’. The NT government responded with further attacks on bilingual education in 2009, this time implementing the rule that the first four hours of every school day must be conducted in English.

Source: treatyrepublic.net

These forms of schooling, which Piller refers to as ‘submersion education’, often have long term detrimental effects on the children who are not only trying to learn the language, but also the content of the lessons. It can be a stressful and demotivating experience for children, with lowered attendance being one of the first indicators that schooling is not meeting their needs. By 2011, a number of NT schools were reporting large drops in attendance following the implementation of the new policy.

Submersion education can also have lasting effects on children’s linguistic identities and the status of their home languages. Most Aboriginal languages are highly endangered (of the 250+ languages that once existed in Australia, only 120 are still spoken in some way, and only 13 are considered strong), and compulsory education in English is partly to blame for this. If children are led to believe that their home languages hold no value, they may forfeit the use of their languages for English. Yalmay Yunupingu, a teacher in the NT who teaches in both Yolngu Matha (a group of languages of the Yolngu people) and English, speaks of the importance of children receiving an education that balances English with their home language:

“The decision to make English the only important language in our schools will only make the situation for our young people worse as they struggle to be proud Yolngu in a world that is making them feel that their culture is bad, unimportant and irrelevant” (Yunupingu, 2010, p. 25)

Yunupingu goes on to say that, if forced to teach in English, her students will not understand what she is saying, potentially becoming bored and misbehaving, and ultimately missing out on learning.

Despite insistence from governments that they are working to ‘close the gap on Indigenous disadvantage’, policies like the ‘first four hours in English’ only serve the interests of those who want to further suppress Aboriginal cultures and promote a monolingual society. Yingiya Mark Guyula, a NT politician (quoted in Thomas, 2017), states “that gap grows when Yolngu children are forced into English-only schools, taught in a language they do not speak or hear in their community”. Williams (2011) goes even further to say that forced teaching and learning in English not only contradicts the federal government’s promises to Aboriginal people but “it strikes at the very heart of all that we Indigenous peoples claim in the name of reconciliation, and what the international and national literature clearly asserts regarding the dreadful risks of Indigenous language and culture loss” (p. 120).

While discussing the topic of this paper with a colleague of mine who is a Gomeroi Aboriginal woman, I made reference to the NAIDOC theme “Our Languages Matter” but straight away realised how strange it was for me, a non-Aboriginal person, to say ‘our languages’ in reference to Aboriginal languages. My colleague was quick to point out: Aboriginal languages are the first languages of this country, so as Australians, they should matter to all of us. All Australians have a role to play in making sure that Aboriginal languages are appropriately respected and that they can be used by the communities who have a connection to them.

References

Devlin, B. C., Disbray, S. & Devlin, N. R. F. (2017). History of bilingual education in the northern territory: People, programs and policies. Singapore: Springer Singapore.

Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice: An introduction to applied sociolinguistics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Yunupingu, Y. (2010). Bilingual works. Australian Educator, 66, Winter 2010, 24-25.

“Good people make a good country” by Addo Tetteh

As I am trying to finalize the manuscript for the second revised edition of my 2011 book Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction, I’ve been finding it hard to concentrate and not to be sucked into despair at the US election outcome. 2016 has not been a good year for intercultural understanding as ever more barriers between people have been put up and fortified while bridges and connections are being torn down.

As unscrupulous media and politicians stoke ethnic and racial fear and hatred for their personal gain, it is the weakest members of society who suffer most.

A recent survey of more than 10,000 Australians, for instance, found stark differences in the experiences of discrimination by various groups, as evidenced by responses to the question ‘Have you experienced discrimination because of your skin colour, ethnic origin or religion over the last 12 months?’

• Third-generation Australians and overseas-born from English-speaking backgrounds (ESB) were least likely to have experienced discrimination in the last 12 months (ca. 15%)
• Overseas-born from non-English speaking-backgrounds (NESB) were more likely to have experienced discrimination (39%); but within the NESB group, there was significant variation:
  • Only 11-22% of those from Europe reported having experienced discrimination.
  • Within the Asia-born, there was a much larger range with only 15% of Afghanistan-born reporting discrimination but 55% of the South Korea-born.
  • The highest level of discrimination was reported by the Africa-born (54% on average) and particularly those from South Sudan (77%), Zimbabwe (76%) and Kenya (67%).

‘What form did the discrimination take?’ (Markus 2016, p. 65)

Most of the experiences of discrimination occurred in interactions where people were made to feel excluded or where they were verbally abused, as the table shows. While ‘made to feel like don’t belong’ may sound relatively mild, nothing could be further from the truth. Qualitative descriptions of what it means to be ‘made to feel like don’t belong’ gathered in focus group interviews are harrowing, as in the excerpt where a young man from South Sudan sums up his experience as ‘makes it hell.’

Being made to feel ‘like hell’ (Markus 2016, p. 63)

The young men from South Sudan in the focus group live in Sydney’s diverse western suburbs and specifically locate their experiences of exclusion in Sydney’s affluent and predominantly white northern suburbs. They are no exception in the report and many immigrant participants tied their alienation to specific spaces, as in these examples:

• It’s weird … when you go to really white places.
• If I have to go to … the city or … somewhere that is … white, … like white-dominated Australia…. I would feel … a bit off. I would feel like, ‘Oh my god, they’re looking at me. They’re looking at me. What is she doing here?’
• They look at you like you’re an alien … Everyone was just like… ‘What are you doing in this area?’ (Quoted from Markus 2016, p. 58)

Conversely, spaces where diversity was the norm had the opposite effect and interviewees reported a sense of belonging to a place just because it was ‘diverse’:

• I used to live in …Berala. Berala’s kind of Auburn City Council. In this area … it’s like very multicultural, like I could see [the] Arab base, mostly, and then like Asians, and then even Sudanese. There’s a lot of Sudanese here. So it’s very multicultural. I feel like I fit in here, because it’s so multicultural.
• I’ve got a lot of friends who come from the affluent side of Melbourne and they come from old Australian money and to them, I am like this foreign being because I’m half Asian, I’m half European, but born here. … When I’m in Broadmeadows I’m just normal.

These examples confirm at the level of personal experience what recent elections statistics (here in Australia and, more famously, in the Brexit referendum and yesterday’s US elections) tell us: that these societies are deeply divided: the anger of rural and deindustrialized communities cut adrift by neoliberal globalization is readily harnessed against the more concrete scapegoat of minorities, particularly if people have little experience with diversity.

Against this context, opportunities for everyday mundane connections that allow people to engage beyond the stereotypes can become a crucial means to overcome division and exclusion. That this is not just a pious hope is demonstrated in Vera W. Tetteh’s research with African migrants in Australia. There we meet Timothy, a man in his early 30s from Sudan, who lives in rural NSW. According to census statistics, 90% of the inhabitants of the town where he lives are Australia-born and the largest groups of non-Australia-born have migrated from the UK, New Zealand and South Africa (in this order). So, the town is a ‘white space’ if you will and is certainly significantly less diverse than is true for the NSW average, where only 68% of the population are Australia-born.

However, in contrast to many other Africans who the researcher met in the course of her research, Timothy, who only completed primary education in Sudan and whose self-assessed English is ‘not good’, is gainfully employed and working happily for a car parts manufacturer. His employment success is the direct result of a mundane relationship where two people were able to connect beyond mediated stereotypes of the racial other.

As Timothy recounts it, one of his white Australian neighbours, Mark (both names are pseudonyms), accosted him one day and asked why Africans didn’t work and relied on welfare. That Africans are ‘dole bludgers’ and ‘welfare cheats’ is a racist stereotype many Australians are familiar with from the media and extremist political groups. In fact, it was not only Mark who had been exposed to the stereotype but Timothy, too. However, instead of hunkering down in the face of his neighbour’s racism, Timothy set about educating Mark and appealed to the ‘typical Australian’ sense of a fair go:

And then one day I will stay here and then he ask me, he say why you you Africa you stay at home and receive money from Centrelink [=Australia’s social welfare office], you don’t want the job. I tell him no because not like that, we need a job but here it’s difficult for us because we are, some people put the application and then they tell me call you back, and nothing. If you apply for [Name of abattoir] they call you immediately. Why? (quoted from Tetteh 2015, p. 267)

It turned out that Mark had his heart in the right place and could learn to see beyond the racist stereotype. What Timothy tried to tell him – that Africans faced discrimination on the job market and only abattoir work was readily available to them – made sense to him. A few days later he showed up at Timothy’s door with an application form and recommended him to the car parts factory, where they have been colleagues since.

At a time when stereotypes divide us ever more deeply and the temptation to retreat into our own in-group bubbles is great, Timothy’s and Mark’s story reminds us of the power of ordinary people and our mundane everyday interactions as a force for good.

Related content

• Voices of African-Australian Youths
• Language, Education and Settlement: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography on, with, and for Africans in Australia
• Cultural brokering

References

Markus, A. (2016). Australians Today: The Australia@2015 Scanlon Foundation Survey Scanlon Foundation.

Tetteh, V. W. (2015). Language, Education and Settlement: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography on, with, and for Africans in Australia PhD, Macquarie University

Australia: The White Man’s Land (Source: NLA)

Australia has a proud national narrative of migration and multiculturalism. It also has an equally prevalent history of exclusionary and discriminatory migration policy. Perhaps the most famous is its “White Australia Policy”, which sought to restrict the migration of “non-European” people. While the Australian government still uses language tests for a variety of visas, the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 implemented a race- and colour-based approach through what is perhaps Australia’s most infamous language policy. Section 3 (a) of the Act prohibited the immigration of:

Any person who when asked to do so by an officer fails to write out at dictation and sign in the presence of an officer a passage of fifty words in length in an European language directed by the officer.

This law was used, up until 1958, to restrict the migration of “undesirable” people, including anyone who was visibly non-white. This was achieved by the immigration official choosing a language which they expected would be unknown to the would-be migrant.

What is particularly striking when looking at the law is that there is no explicit mention of the discriminatory way in which it would be implemented. This is even clearer when compared with the laws that proceeded it, such as the Coloured Races Restriction Bills (passed in various parts of Australia) and the Chinese Act 1881 (Victoria). Debates in Parliament in the lead-up to the Act’s creation indicate that the test would not apply to “qualified European immigrants” and that officers were to intentionally choose a language that the unwanted immigrants would not know (Crock & Berg 2011). Yet, there was clearly a desire to present the legislation itself in a much more neutral form than previous statute, balancing the need for diplomacy with Asia against ongoing white-centrism (Mason 2014).

Shohamy (2006) introduces the idea of hidden or “de facto” language policies that accompany official policy. In the case of the Immigration Restriction Act, it is clear that while the official policy (as presented in the law) seems to be aimed solely at the need for immigrants to speak a European language in this new “European” country, the way the Act was implemented indicated that covert policy hinged less on issues of language and much more on race. Thus the language test here is used politically, as a “two-edged sword” made to include some, at the exclusion of others (McNamara 2012).

In some cases, the White Australia Policy separated the Asian spouses and children of Australian citizens, sometimes leading to public outcry and successful lobbying by their local communities. For example, in the 1940s, the Jacobs, an Indonesian family, fled Australia after the arrival of the Japanese military in their home region. After Samuel Jacob died in an accident, Annie, his wife, and children were left stranded. When the war ended and the Australian government sought to expel Asian evacuees, Annie and her children were desperate to stay and fought their repatriation. An Australian citizen, Jack O’Keefe took the family in and married Annie. The Immigration Department denied that this gave the family any rights to reside in Australia, and insisted that they must be repatriated. It was only thanks to significant lobbying from the local community, and with the assistance of media support, that the O’Keefes successfully challenged the application of the White Australia policy in the High Court.

Directions for applying the dictation test (Source: NAA)

In other cases the policy was used against persons who were deemed unworthy of citizenship on apparently moral grounds, as was the case for Mabel Freer. Born in India, Freer was a white, English-speaking British subject, who was coming to Australia to marry her Australian lover, who intended to divorce his first wife. Her lover’s family were unhappy about the impending divorce and must have been well-connected within the government, because Freer was made to do the dictation test in Italian to prevent her from remaining in Australia.

However, the case that caught the public’s attention more than any other involved the application of the dictation test on an educated, white European, for clearly political reasons. In 1934, Egon Kisch, a communist writer and activist, came to Australia to speak at a series of anti-Fascism rallies. Following instructions from the British secret service, the Australian government sought to deport him by using the dictation test. Although Kisch was literate in several European languages, including English, he was made to do the dictation test in Scottish Gaelic, so that he would fail. In this highly publicized case, Kisch and his supporters challenged the use of the test in the High Court. Kisch was ultimately successful, but only because the Court ruled that Scottish Gaelic was not a European language for the purposes of the Act (Mason 2014).

Over time, the language of the Parliament changed. By the 1950s, the public seemed to have less of a taste for policy that was explicitly racist in its aims and language. Yet, once again, the way law was implemented maintained its race-based focus, simply operating in an increasingly covert manner. Previously classified (confidential) government communications, stored in the Australian National Archives, show that while the official language of migration policy becomes more progressive over time, the covert policy may take some time to catch up. The language of private Immigration Department communications in the 1950s remained very much the same as it had been in the past.

One particularly interesting case is that of would-be migrants, the Ioannou family from Greece.  In a de-classified 1955 memorandum to the Minister, the Acting Secretary, A. L. Nutt sets out the “behind-the-scenes” policy in clearly race-based terms. The Ioannou family’s application had been rejected “because the husband was dark skinned” and there was some concern that this could cause controversy, if it meant that the policy was publicly viewed at restricting Europeans on the grounds of colour.

Nutt responded:

In years gone by it used to be the practice to refer quite openly…to the “coloured” races and the preference for “white” people. Since the war, with growing awareness both here and in Asia, we have, of course, dropped such terms from our official vocabulary and we speak of “non-Europeans” or, where suitable, “Asians”.

This change in terms was not, however…accompanied by any corresponding change in policy which has continued to be that a person who, whether by cast of feature or by the colour of his skin or by mode of living, is not readily “assimilable” here, should not be admitted for permanent residence. The implicit assumption is that Australians would regard a very dark-skinned person as being “non-European” just as much as they would a person who has the cast of features of a negro or Chinese.

Egon Erwin Kisch in Australia (Source: Wikipedia)

Nutt also draws support from contemporary media discourse, which had criticised the arrival of ships “carrying very dark Cypriots, Lebanese and Greeks”. He then goes on to argue that suitable European-ness is connected closely to whiteness, explaining that the policy is that “anyone who in appearance shows any marked departure from the ‘white’ European type, should be refused entry… even though they and their families may have lived in Europe for generations”. He notes that since applicants are not generally provided with reasons for rejection, there was no need to mention the colour bar, “whatever suspicion our individual decisions may arouse”.

This communication raises two important issues. Firstly, the giving of reasons may provide some ground upon which to challenge migration decisions. Having said that, the earlier lesson of the dictation test shows that legal mechanisms can be used for ulterior reasons. Further, while reasons are more commonly given now, applicants for a number of visas even today have no right to reasons (for example, family-sponsored humanitarian visas). Secondly, this is a clear example of how publicly available law and policy may depart significantly from the confidential instructions given to officials. Decisions may appear to align closely with official policy, however there may be other guidance or influence at play which external investigators can only guess at.

While noting the general advances in official migration law and policy over time, we should ask what the “hidden policy” is today. And just as Nutt suggests back in 1955, in many cases we can only rely on “whatever suspicion individual decisions may arouse”, especially given the concerted lack of transparency in parts of the current regime. It is possible that much will remain guess work, until such time when some future researchers will have access to the de-classified files from 2015 and have their turn to – perhaps – experience shock at the covert policies behind our current migration regime.

References

Crock, M. & Berg, L. (2011). Immigration, Refugees and Forced Migration: Law, policy and practice in Australia, Annandale: The Federation Press.

Mason, K. (2014). The saga of Egon Kisch and the White Australia Policy. Bar News: The Journal of the New South Wales Bar Association, (Summer), 64-67.

McNamara, T. (2012). Language Assessments as Shibboleths: A Poststructuralist Perspective Applied Linguistics, 33 (5), 564-581 DOI: 10.1093/applin/ams052

Shohamy, E. (2006). Language Policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches, London & New York: Routledge.

Churchill Square Shopping Mall, Brighton, UK (Source: Wikipedia)

In a shopping mall in the city of Brighton, UK, a tourist was arrested on terrorism charges last week for taking a selfie video. Surely, taking selfies in a shopping mall is such a part of contemporary culture that the act itself wouldn’t raise an eyebrow? What was different in the case of this tourist and this selfie? Well, the protagonist of the selfie did not speak English. According to a Daily Mail article, this is how the selfie-taking tourist aroused suspicion:

A Sussex Police spokesman said they were called by security staff after they ‘had challenged a 38-year-old London man who was filming on his mobile phone and recording in a foreign language’. The spokesman added: ‘They were concerned about his motives and he was reported to be acting strangely.’

What “foreign language” do you guess the tourist was speaking? Are you picturing tourists from France or Germany, where the holiday season has just started? Or tourists from China or Japan, who are globally stereotyped as excessive image takers? It’s unlikely that you do, and it’s unlikely that a tourist recording a selfie in any of these languages would have attracted the suspicions of a Brighton security guard.

The suspicious language – you guessed it – was Arabic. The tourist, Nasser Al-Ansari, a 38-year-old London resident and Kuwait native, was recording a Snapchat message for his friends back home. The man was released after three hours, and his side of the story is described in the Daily Mail as follows:

The former banker, who has lived in London since 2013, said: ‘It was a very horrible experience and unacceptable to happen without any specific reason or suspicion.’ ‘It is absurd. It is not something I would expect when visiting somewhere in the UK.’ He added: ‘I was very understanding and I said to them “I know it was a foreign language and my race is a factor but please be fair”. ‘I think there is a thin line between being safe and going over-the-top and this time I think they went a little over-the-top.’

According to the police, it was the “foreign language” spoken by Mr Al-Ansari that was suspicious; he himself links language and race in trying to explain why he was targeted; and some social media commentators, also raised his religion as a factor. One blogger, for instance, went with the headline “Muslim tourist takes selfie in Brighton, arrested on terrorism offences.”

We have often discussed the relationship between linguistic and racial discrimination here on Language on the Move (e.g., ‘Race to teach English;’ ‘Linguistic discrimination at work;’ ‘Shopping while bilingual can make you sick;’ or ‘Racism without racists’). But what about the relationship between language and religion when it comes to exclusion in multicultural societies characterized by linguistic and religious pluralism? How is linguistic and religious difference related to social inequality?

A recent article by the sociologist Rogers Brubaker offers a framework for thinking systematically about the ways in which linguistic and religious difference structure inequality in contemporary liberal democracies. The author identifies four domains where difference may be turned into inequality: the political and institutional domain; the economic domain; the cultural and symbolic domain; and the domain of informal social relationships.

In the political and institutional domain language is inescapable but modern liberal states are relatively neutral vis-à-vis religion. In fact, religious discrimination is widely prohibited where linguistic discrimination is seen as perfectly legitimate. Think, for instance, of citizenship testing: many liberal democracies require a language test in the national language as a precondition of naturalization while no similar religious tests currently exist in liberal democracies; and would widely be considered abhorrent.

Furthermore, in addition to explicit linguistic discrimination in favor of the national language(s), there is the inescapable fact that institutions operate exclusively in one language (or in some cases a small set of legitimate languages): this constitutes, eo ipso, a massive advantage for speakers of the institutional language and a massive disadvantage for people who do not speak the institutional language or do not speak it well.

In the economic domain similar considerations apply: proficiency in the language in which an economic activity occurs is a precondition for participation in that economic activity in a way that religion is not. Speakers of an economically powerful language enjoy an economic advantage because they do not have to invest in learning that language. Furthermore, language learning is a complex – and hence costly – undertaking that may make it difficult to acquire the kind of linguistic proficiency that has high economic value. By contrast, membership in a powerful religion is usually not as directly economically useful as language proficiency is. Furthermore, joining a powerful religion requires a smaller investment. For instance, it is much easier for a non-Christian to convert to Christianity than it is for a non-native speaker of English to acquire high-level proficiency in English.

The cultural and symbolic domain works differently. This domain includes all the discursive and symbolic processes through which respect, prestige, honor – in short symbolic value – is conferred. Here, language is less affected than religion because the “content” of a language is much thinner than that of a religion. That means that negative stereotypes about language tend to be relatively mild in comparison to negative stereotypes about religion. While many people object to the specific tenets of a particular religion, very few people object to the specific grammatical structures or means of expression of a particular language. For instance, the widespread stigmatization of Islam in contemporary media discourses simply has no equivalent in negative stereotypes about any language.

Informal social relationships also have a significant bearing on inequality, and can work through exclusion and through inclusion. Processes of social exclusion may disadvantage members of certain religions or speakers of certain languages. Examples include differential treatment of minorities on the rental market or attacks against minorities on public transport. Both members of religious minorities and speakers of minority languages are vulnerable to such “everyday exclusions.” Of course, a language may be stereotypically associated with a particular religion – as is the case with Arabic and Islam – and in such cases it is impossible to disentangle language and religion as the immediate cause of an experience such as that of Mr Al-Ansari anyways.

Informal social relationships also mediate inequality through inclusion in that social circles tend to form around shared identities; and social networks, friendship circles or marriage opportunities are often based on shared identities. Again, religion and language work differently here. Preferences for religion-internal networks is dogma in some religions while preferences for the formation of language-internal networks tend to be much weaker.

In sum, linguistic and religious difference both translate into social inequality in diverse societies but they do so in clearly distinct ways:

The major sources of religious inequality derive from religion’s thicker cultural, normative and political content, while the major sources of linguistic inequality come from the pervasiveness of language and from the increasingly and inescapably ‘languaged’ nature of political, economic and cultural life in the modern world. (Brubaker 2014, p. 23)

Brubaker, R. (2014). Linguistic and Religious Pluralism: Between Difference and Inequality Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41 (1), 3-32 DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2014.925391

“How bad is your cultural cringe?” (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed)

Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o.
Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname?
(laughter)
Keith: Do I get three goes?
(Keith, Australian, in a relationship with Lisa from Germany)

Despite the increasing value of multilingualism in a globalised world, English-speaking countries such as Australia remain stubbornly monolingual. At the same time the benefits of speaking more than one language are regularly touted in public discourse. My research investigates how speakers of Australian English with a partner from a non-English-speaking background feel about their linguistic repertoires. Embarrassment, as in the example above from Keith (all names are pseudonyms), comes up a lot. So does inferiority. Because of their low proficiency in foreign languages (often as a consequence of their poor quality or limited language learning experiences in formal education) these participants feel they are bad language learners. This response seems to be one way of engaging with and mitigating their own privilege as native speakers of the powerful global language, English, compared to their partners who learned English as an additional language.

“It’s my deficiency”: being a bad language learner

And I I think I was completely in awe of that the fact that she could speak so many different languages freely, and a little bit jealous, and at the beginning was a bit more kind of definite about trying to learn German, um and I think the whole experience intimidated me cause I think I’m the kind of person who if they don’t pick something up really quickly kind of just gives up very quickly (…) (Keith)

For Lisa and Keith, Keith’s first and Lisa’s second language, English, has been the language of their relationship. Keith sees Lisa’s language skills as impressive while blaming himself for his own inability to learn German. He feels that Lisa “probably speaks better English than most native English speakers in Australia”. While Lisa learnt languages formally in her school education as a child and young adult, Keith faces all the frustration of learning another language as an adult.

In his own education Keith’s choices were limited. Although he comes from an Italian migrant background, Italian was not available at his public school in inner Sydney in the 1990s. He decided to take Latin instead, but he dropped it after junior high school when he lost interest in his schooling. He has done no further foreign language study in contrast to Lisa, who studied four languages over many years in her schooling in Germany. So when it comes to saying Keith’s Italian surname their pronunciation reflects their differing language learning trajectories:

Hanna: And how are you at pronouncing Keith’s last name (laughs)?

Lisa: I am tempted to pronounce it Italian which then nobody understands (laughs).

Keith: She- like I’m reading out a, a pizza on the pizza menu from our local pizzeria and she makes fun of my Italian accent. You know like quattro formaggi, she’s like (puts on a strong Australian accent) quattro formaggi. ‘Cause she speaks Italian, you know, these fucking Europeans!

(laughter)

In Keith’s comment about his partner’s Italian pronunciation of his Italian surname we could read humorous disparagement of her ability to pronounce it in the Italian way; in Australia foreign names are usually anglicised or pronounced in an English way. Both his lack of educational opportunity to study Italian and his Anglicized pronunciation cause him in that moment to position himself as a (monolingual) Australian in opposition to (multilingual) Europeans.

Stephen, from Australia, who is married to Christina from Argentina feels similarly critical of his own poor Spanish skills. He describes his attempts to learn Spanish as “a token effort”, says he “hasn’t got an ear for languages” and it dismissive of his own attempts to learn Spanish:

Hanna: You said you’re the odd one out; how do you feel…

Stephen: No, not at all, because uh because I recognise that it’s my deficiency in not having had the time to devote to learning a language. Now, I I make the standard joke I have 50 words of [unclear] of Spanish that I know. I work very hard and uh it’s a standing family joke (…)

In fact, Stephen studied Spanish at night, has a Spanish speaking community in Sydney and has two children who are bilingual. He also regularly visits Argentina and has frequent Argentine house guests. Spanish is a regular feature in his life. In the interview he also says that learning Spanish is “a commitment I’ve probably made and haven’t fulfilled” and feels he is a “handicapped Aussie” compared to his multilingual relations.

Another participant, Amy, has a strikingly similar evaluation of her own language skills. When I asked her why she was interested in talking to me about language she said:

Well, I suppose, I suppose it’s just there and I suppose for me it’s that I’ve got to learn more Spanish (…) And I went to lessons and I started learning and I was enthusiastic because we were going to Columbia, but as soon as we came back from Columbia I was just like that’s it, I’m just not interested anymore. And I learnt that I’m not a good language learner(…) (Amy, in a relationship with German from Columbia)

Amy’s language learning experiences at school were typical for my participants. In twelve years of state school education all she studied was ten weeks each of Italian, German and French in her seventh school year. In contrast, she praises her partner for his excellent English language skills which he acquired in Columbia from the “movies and music” he consumed from their powerful northern neighbour.

A new kind of language cringe

It seems these participants characterise their persistent monolingualism as a personal failing, a source of embarrassment, a source of language cringe. In Australia language cringe is a child of the cultural cringe. It has traditionally been associated with being embarrassed about speaking Australian English, rather than the more highly valued British English of the mother country. However, in my research I have found a new form of language cringe, related to monolinguals who speak the most valuable global language compared to multilinguals who are non-native speakers. This kind of language cringe contradicts the idea that a native speaker will always be “better” than a non-native speaker through an acknowledgment of the level of skill and knowledge which come with learning an additional language to a high proficiency.

This is most obvious when it comes to accent, because language cringe views an Australian native accent as lower value than (some) non-native accents. Lisa points out that she found the Australian accent strange on first hearing.

Lisa: I just remember the first Australian I ever met in my life (…) we started talking in English and I just thought who the fuck is this person? (laughter) It sounded so outlandish I’d never heard that before.

When I asked Keith about what kind of accent he would like his daughter to have, he reluctantly admitted that he wanted hers to be more “international”. Stephen points out that on first travelling to the United States with his wife, the locals “struggled” with his “obvious Australian accent” while she “was much more readily understood”. The implicit high value of a native accent is challenged by the transferability of a more international non-native accent.

Understanding and being able to explain the grammar of a language is another site where language cringe manifests itself. Paul, from Sydney, met Sara from Spain while travelling around South America. He was quickly hired as an English teacher because he was a native speaker. But it was Sara who taught him enough English grammar to make it through the first lesson.

(…) when Sara and I first met I needed to get some work and we were in Chile, um I just before I arrived to Chile we’d split up for a few weeks on the way to. and I’d asked Sara can you hand out a few CVs to English schools when we get there, or when you get there, which she did and I basically arrived and there was a job waiting for me which was perfect. But I’d never taught, I’d never thought about English I had no idea [Sara laughs]. and so the very first lesson I had to do (…) and uh [laughs] they, you know, the school said uh here’s the book this is Headway, this is what you’re using, they’re up to page thirty two or whatever. I opened it up and it was the present perfect and I looked at it and I was like what’s the present perfect, what’s a past participle and Sara sat down and taught me. (Paul, my emphasis)

Sara also spoke four languages to, at that time, Paul’s one. Although Sara is the one with the multilingual skills, Paul was seen by the language school as a better language user because he is a native speaker.

Managing native speaker privilege

Like Keith, Paul is impressed by his wife’s linguistic skills but he also recognises that because of the privilege of the English native speaker Sara’s multilingualism may be less valued. Rather than being embarrassed about his own failings as an individual language user Paul draws attention to the wider failings of the native speaker ideology in terms of its tenuous relation to actual knowledge about language as a system or teaching expertise. Paul acknowledges his partner’s linguistic superiority and the inherent injustice of an employment situation where he benefitted from a discriminatory language ideology because he is a native speaker.

For my other participants it may be that their conception of their own language skills as inferior in relation to the linguistic repertoire of their partners is their way to manage the inequalities brought about by this privilege. Recognising their own limited linguistic repertoire and casting it as a personal failing may be a way to tip the scales back in favour of the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual partner.

“Speak English or Die!” Vilification on a Melbourne bus caught on camera

About a year ago, a video of a language-related altercation on a Melbourne bus was widely reported in the media and went viral on social media. The video and associated reports document the following sequence of events: Three French tourists, white women in their 20s, sat at the back of a late-night bus and sang a French song. This annoyed an Australian woman of similar age and racial appearance who began to shout “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie.” Another bus passenger then told the French women to “speak English or die.” From around there, the video starts and shows a quickly escalating ugly scene dominated by a middle-aged white Australian male pushing a pram with a baby and with a bewildered four- or five-year-old kid in tow: the man is ranting abuse at the French women, including grotesque violent threats. After he gets off the bus, the window closest to the French women is smashed, presumably by something he throws.

The video is a shocking example of mob hysteria and continues to exert viewers, as the ongoing discussions on social media demonstrate (at the time of writing, the latest of over 28,000 youtube comments had only been posted ten hours earlier).

What interests me is the way in which the incident has become labelled as “racist” in the media, where it has been described as “racist abuse,” “racist bus attack,” “racist rant,” or “racist violent bus abuse.”

However, the incident was obviously not triggered by race but by language, as the Sydney Morning Herald was one of the few to recognize with their headline “’Speak English or die’ – terror on a suburban bus.”

Once the abusive rant is underway, most of the swears uttered are sexist insults (the c-word figures prominently as does ‘bitch’) and most of the threats of violence are also specifically of sexist violence such as the threat to cut off the woman’s breasts. The only explicitly racist label used by the main agitator is ‘ding,’ which according to the Macquarie Dictionary is a derogatory term for Italian migrants used in Western Australia. Some contributors add that the term is used in Melbourne, too, and that it is sometimes extended to other southern and central European migrants, particularly Greeks and Yugoslavs.

In sum, the abuse is triggered by language and is mostly expressed in sexist terms. Even so, what the public sees is racism. There is no doubt that racism was an important part of the event: in addition to the use of ‘ding’ in the main speech act, another white middle-aged male bus passenger, seemingly taking his cue from the main abuser, starts to rant against black people. His tirade is not addressed at the French girls but the person who took the video on his mobile phone, stand-up comedian Mike Nayna, whose parents are from the Maledives and the Netherlands and who describes himself as “brown” while the media were a bit more coy describing him as having “light-brown skin.”

Where it gets really confusing is in the fact that all the reports I have read identify one of the French women, Fanny Desaintjores, as the target of the “racial abuse.” By contrast, the evidence suggests that Desaintjores became the target of abuse because of her linguistic difference and her vilification took mostly the form of sexist insults. The expression of linguistic and sexist prejudice against Desaintjores then ‘licensed’ the expression of racial insults to Nayna in a bigoted melange where various prejudices fed off each other.

Does my insistence on distinguishing linguistic, sexist and racist prejudice matter? At one level, it doesn’t because bigotry usually comes as a package. However, at another level, the distinction I am making is highly important: the injunction to “speak English” is ubiquitous in Australian society and expressing intolerance against linguistic diversity in this way is not usually seen as problematic. On the contrary, telling someone to speak English may even be seen as an expression of good manners.

As the Melbourne incident shows, all kinds of intolerance feed off each other. Expressing linguistic intolerance is ‘cheap’ – it can be expressed without even being recognized as intolerance. By contrast, it is much more ‘costly’ to come straight out with sexist or racist abuse – everyone recognizes these as discriminatory and there are social sanctions against vilification. Would the man on the Melbourne bus have racially insulted Nayna if he hadn’t felt the expression of racial intolerance was ok because other bus passengers were also expressing intolerance? Unlikely.

While linguistic intolerance may be expressed where racial intolerance is sanctioned, the two must be recognised as connected, with linguistic intolerance becoming both a pretext for racial intolerance and enabling its expression.

It is worth remembering Ovid’s injunction in Remedia Amoris: Principiis obsta. Sero medicina parata, cum mala per longas convaluere moras. (‘Resist beginnings! It is too late to intervene when evil has grown strong through delay.’)