The conversation focuses on a study of adults with three languages ‘at play’ in their childhoods and lives today, exploring how visible racial differences from the mainstream, social power, emotions, and familial relationships continue to shape their use – or erasure – of their linguistic heritage.

Zozan’s book opens with a funny and touching account of how her own experiences as a person of “ambiguous ethnicity” shaped this research. We begin our interview on this topic. Zozan points out that the last Australian Census showed that 48.2% of the population has one or both parents born overseas. Yet, she argues, “our teachers and our education system are unprepared, perpetuating the power relations that reinforce injustice and inequality towards half of the population”.

Then we focus on what diversity feels like to her research participants and how “mixedness” or “hybridity” is not normalised, despite being common. We build on a point Zozan makes in her book, that throughout their daily lives the participants “have to position themselves because our [social and institutional] understanding of identity is narrow-mindedly focused on a single affiliation. […] While all participants are engaged in such strategic positioning, my findings emphasise that this can come at a great personal expense, something which is not sufficiently recognised by scholarly work in this field thus far.”

Dr Zozan Balci with her new book (Image credit: Zozan Balci)

We then delve into the emotions experienced and remembered by participants in relation to certain language practices in both childhood and more recent years, and the way these shape their habits of language choice and self-silencing. While negative emotional experiences have impacted on heritage language transmission and use, Zozan’s study shows how people who had distanced themselves from their heritage language – and its speakers – then changed: “it only [took] one loving person […] to reintroduce my participants to a long-lost interest in their heritage language”. We focus on this “message of hope” and then on another cause of hope, being the engaged results Zozan’s achieved when she redesigned a university classroom activity to un-teach a deficit mentality about heritage languages and identities.

Finally, we discuss Zozan and her team’s current “Say Our Name” project. This practically-oriented extension of Zozan’s research addresses one specific aspect of linguistic heritage and identity formation: the alienation experienced by people whose names are considered ‘tricky’ or ‘foreign’ in Anglo-centric contexts. The project has created practical guides now used by universities and corporations and the City of Sydney recently hosted a public premiere of the Say Our Names documentary. Soon, Zozan will be developing an iteration of the project with the University of Liverpool in the UK.

Follow Zozan Balci on LinkedIn. She’s also available for guest talks and happy to discuss via LinkedIn.

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Transcript

ALEX: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m Alex Grey, and I’m a research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. My guest today is Dr. Zozan Balci, a colleague of mine at UTS. Zozan is an award-winning academic, a sociolinguist, and a social justice advocate. Zozan, welcome to the show.

ZOZAN: Hello, thank you for having me.

ALEX: A pleasure! Now, Zozan, you teach in the Social and Political Science program here at UTS, and I know you have a lot of teaching experience, but today we’ll focus on your sociolinguistics research. In particular, let’s talk about your new book. How exciting! It’s called Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, identity, and belonging in the lives of cultural in-betweeners. You’ve just published it with Routledge.

The first chapter is called A Day in the Life of the Ethnically Ambiguous, and you begin by talking about your own, as you put it, “ambiguous ethnicity”. So let’s start there. Tell us about how your own life shaped this research, and then who participated in the study that you designed.

ZOZAN: Yeah, thank you so much, and yes, “ethnically ambiguous” is kind of like the joke that I always introduce myself with. So, I was born and raised in Germany to immigrant parents, so although I’m German, I look Mediterranean. And so people mistake me from being from all sorts of places. I’ve been mistaken for pretty much everything but German at this point. So, you know, I personally grew up, in my house, we spoke 3 languages, so we spoke German, Italian, and Turkish, which is essentially how my family is made up. And, you know, this has kind of resulted in a bit of a… I’m gonna call it a lifelong identity crisis, because, you know, that’s a lot of cultures in one home.

And it also has played out in language quite interestingly, and I just kind of wanted to see with my study if others struggle with the same sort of thing, other people who are in this kind of environment, and I found that they do. And so in the book. I tell the stories of four people, all who have two ancestries in addition to the country they are born in, so there’s three languages at least at play. And all are visible minorities, so they… they don’t look like the mainstream culture in their… in the country where they were born. And all struggle having so many different cultures and languages to navigate. And, you know, it’s quite interesting, in some of the cases, the parents are from vastly different parts of the world, so the kid actually looks nothing like one of their parents.

So, one example is my participant, Claire. She has a Japanese mother and a Ugandan father, and so she speaks of the struggle of looking nothing like a Japanese person, so in her words, all people ever see is that she’s black.

And so there is some really heartbreaking stories about, you know, how challenging that is, growing up in Australia when you look nothing like your mum, and…You know, it’s also hard to assert your Japanese heritage when people look at you and don’t accept that you are half Japanese, even though she strongly identifies with it, for example. So, there are a couple of participants like that.

One of my participants, Kai, is probably the one I personally relate to the most. His mother is Greek, and his father is Swedish, and he looks very Mediterranean like me. So, he talks a lot about, you know, the guilt towards his heritage community, also internalized racism, and that is something I could probably personally very much relate to. So these are the kinds of stories that are in this book.

ALEX: They’re wonderful stories because you frame them in such a clear way that connects them to research and connects them to bigger ideas than just the personal experience of each participant, but it becomes very moving. These participants clearly have a great rapport with you. When Claire talks about speaking Japanese and the impact being a visible minority and visibly not Japanese, it seems, to other people, has on her. That’s incredibly touching, but also the effect that has on her mum, and her mum’s desire to pass on heritage language to Claire.

But the opening few pages are also, I have to say, really funny and interesting. They drew me in, I wanted to keep reading. So I’ll just add that in there to encourage listeners to go out and seek more of your voice after this podcast by reading the book.

Now, in this book, your intention, in your own words, is to explain what diversity feels like, and to normalize mixedness. And you point out that this is really important, pressing, in a place like Australia, but many places where our listeners will be around the world are similar. In Australia, about half the population are what we might call second-generation migrants, with at least one parent born overseas. And so you go on to say, this book aims to have a genuine conversation about what diversity and inclusion look like.

So, tell us more about what hybridity is. This is a concept you use for the, if you like, the sort of

embodied personal diversity of people, and what it feels like for your participants, and whether hybrid identities are recognised and included.

ZOZAN: Yeah, you know, it’s actually quite interesting, because when people hear that you’re culturally quite mixed, they kind of misunderstand what it’s like. So, you know, your mind doesn’t work in nationalities or languages, right? So in the case of my study, where three cultures or languages, are at play, you know, those… these participants don’t consider that they have three identities. Like, that is not how a mind works.

So rather, you are a person who has mixed it all up. So you don’t just think in one language, unless you have to. Like, for example, right now, I’m speaking to you in English, because I have to, but, you know, when I’m just chopping my vegetables and thinking about my day, I don’t think in only English. It’s a mix, in a single sentence, I would mix. If I speak to someone who can understand another language that I speak, I would probably mix those two. Like, it’s just… but I don’t do this, like, oh, let me mix two languages. Like, I’m not consciously doing that. And the same goes for behaviours or practices.

So, the way I kind of, you know, an analogy that I think you can use here, maybe to make it easier to understand, is if you think of, you know, say you have your 3 cultures, and there are 3 liquids, and so you pour them all in a cup and make a cocktail, right? So you mix them all up. And…

ZOZAN: you know, it’s… It’s very hard, then, to tell the individual flavour of this new cocktail now, right? It’s all mixed. But, you know, that’s not something that people understand. They want… they want the three liquids, the original liquids, what is in there? And often, you know, they will tell you that you probably ruined the drink by mixing them.

Laughter

ALEX: We laugh, but your participants have really experienced words to that effect, sure.

ZOZAN: Absolutely, and so, you know, you are often forced into a position, so you are forced to pretend you’re a different drink, because it’s very hard to, you know, separate the liquids once they have been mixed, right? And, you know, now I’m also Australian, so a dash of a new liquid has been mixed into it, you know, making the whole drink more refreshing, I think.

But, you know, unfortunately, most people still have very rigid ideas about identity, including our parents, right? So my parents cannot relate to my experience at all. They are not mixed. My teachers didn’t get it at school, right? Only people like me get it. But it’s important that we all kind of start thinking a little bit about what we’re asking people to do, because, you know.

when I went to school, for example, I could only be German, so I had to leave my other languages and my behaviours at home, because, you know, of assimilation, right? You need to assimilate to everybody else.

And then in my house with my parents, you need to leave the German outside, so it’s considered disrespectful if I say I’m German, right? So my parents would hate to hear this podcast, for example. Because to them, it’s like renouncing your heritage, right? So it’s about… you need to preserve what we have given you. And so you are kind of this person who’s like, well…

I don’t see it the way… I’m not three things. This is all me, and it’s actually people trying to over-analyse what kind of nationality this behaviour is, or this language is. In your head, you’re not actually doing that. You’re just one person who is a cocktail.

ALEX: That makes a lot of sense when you explain it, but in the findings, it becomes really clear that that’s actually very hard for people to assert as an identity. As you say, with parents, with teachers, with the public at large. You call it strategic positioning, the way people have to downplay, or almost ignore, or not show their language, or not show their other aspects of their… their different heritages, and that that can come at great personal expense.

And you point out that, in fact, while a lot of the research literature may celebrate this mixedness or this hybridity, the fact that it comes at personal expense and is difficult is not really acknowledged very much.

Now in this work you’re also drawing on some really foundational theories of language and power. So it’s not just about feeling bad or feeling excluded. The way people are able to mix their heritage languages and other aspects of their heritage, and the way they’re not able to comes within a power play and that draws really on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. I won’t delve really deeply into his theory of habitus, but I’ll quote this explanation of yours, which I loved: “the habitus can be understood as a linguistic coping mechanism, which is very much shaped by the structures around us. We develop language habits, whether within the same language or in multiple languages, which secure our best position or future in a particular market.”

And then really innovatively, you link the formation of these habits to our emotional experiences, drawing on the work of another theorist, Margaret Wetherall. Please talk us through how these theories help explain the way your participants pretended, as children, not to speak their heritage languages. This is just one aspect of how these emotions have influenced their… their behaviours, but I think many of our listeners will have done the same thing as children themselves, or relate now to knowing children who do this.

ZOZAN: Yeah, absolutely, and I think, you know, you almost need to go back to basics. Like, we use language to communicate, and we communicate to connect with others. You know, it’s a social need, it’s a human need to connect, to belong to a group, because we are social animals. So that’s actually the purpose of language, right?

But we also associate language with a cultural group. So, if the cultural group is well-regarded, so is their language, and vice versa. So, for example, here in Australia, obviously, English is highly regarded. And Arabic is not, for example, right? So this is a direct link to how we perceive the people of these cultures, right? So we’re comparing the dominant mainstream Anglo-Saxon cultural group versus Arabic in an era of really strong Islamophobia, right? So language is both this tool for communication, and it’s also this… this… this symbol of… of power, really. And so if the way you try to connect, so the… whichever language, you use, but also how you present yourself, if that results in a negative experience in disconnect, in fact, or feelings of rejection or inclusion, we will absolutely try and avoid doing that again. So we will try to connect… we will always try to connect in a way that is more successful to achieve inclusion and connection, right? So this is kind of like the theory simplified.

And obviously, you feel these experiences in your body, right? You feel shame, or you feel rejection, you feel loneliness, whatever it may be. And equally, on the bright side, you can feel happiness, you can feel, you know, togetherness, whatever it is, inclusion. So, this is kind of the emotional aspect, right? You feel… because this is a human feeling, the connection and disconnect. So, I think that sometimes we take that a bit out of our study of language. And I think we just need to bring that back a little bit, because it actually explained…explains then, how this plays out with language, so language being a key aspect.

You know, if you are told off for speaking a certain language in a certain context, or you’re being made fun of for speaking it, or something bad happens to you when you speak it, maybe you’re singled out, because you can speak something that others can’t. You will resent that language, and you won’t want to speak it again, and you will habitually almost censor yourself from speaking it, because you don’t want to feel like that again, right? So that’s kind of… and you don’t necessarily consciously do that. This is very important. I don’t mean that, like, you know, a 5-year-old is able to notice that about themselves. But typically, the rejecting a language, by and large, happens the first time a child leaves the home, in the sense of going to kindergarten or preschool, or somewhere that is not within the immediate family, where there’s almost, like, you’re being introduced to the mainstream culture in some systemic way, and you are meeting the mainstream culture there as well. So, you are with children, especially if you have an immigrant background, or your parents do, you’re meeting lots of children who don’t. And so this is your first becoming aware of being different, and so, of course, if you look differently already, that’s… that’s difficult. But then also, if you speak differently, that makes it extra difficult.

And so, you know, one of the examples, from the book that I think was just, it actually, when he did say it in the interview, I did tear up, so I want to share this one. And so this was, Kai, so just as a refresher, he is half Greek, half Swedish, and he grew up here in Australia. And so, at the time that he grew up there was still a lot of, sort of, discrimination, towards Greek people. That has probably tempered down a little bit since, but at the time, it was very acute still, where he grew up. And so, in a school assembly, he must have been in primary school, so fairly young, in front of the entire school, he was asked, singled out, and say, “hey, Kai, you… you speak Greek, right? How do you say hello in Greek?”

And he said, “I don’t know”.

And so when I had this interview, we paused for a second, and I said, “but you knew. You knew how to say hello in Greek”. And he’s like, “yes, I knew”. And I said, “well, why… why do you think you said you didn’t know?” And he said, “well, because they didn’t know, so if I don’t know, then I can be like them”.

And I think that is very heartbreaking, right? Because, especially here in Australia, there’s this idea that, you know, if you speak another language, if you are multilingual, that is almost un-Australian. You’re supposed to be this monolingual English speaker, right? That’s the norm, that’s the mainstream. So if you divert from that, that’s different, but especially if you speak a language where the cultural group is not well regarded, right? That positions you as, firstly, different, but also lower.

ZOZAN: Right? And so we can understand, again, he probably didn’t realize, as a 7-year-old, or whenever this was, what he was doing, consciously, but you can see this pattern, right? That’s why I’m saying it’s more a feeling than it is rational thought. The way your language practices develop is based on how your body feels in response to you using, like, language.

ALEX: And the fact that it’s such an embodied feeling comes out in your participants, who are now in their 20s and 30s, remembering in detail a number of these instances from way back in their childhood. I mean, the example of Kai jumped out at me too, the school assembly, because in the context, it might have seemed to the teachers that they were trying to celebrate his difference, to sort of reward him for knowing extra languages, but that’s not how it came across to him, because he’d already started experiencing the negative disconnection that that language caused.

Now that’s one example of negative feelings, but your study shows quite a number of how people in your study developed very negative feelings and distanced themselves from their heritage languages, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, or perhaps as children, consciously, but not knowing what a drastic impact it would have in the future on their ability to ever pick that language up again.

But then you say, this changed, and this is in adulthood usually, changed through relationships with people who they love and admire: “It only took one loving person to reintroduce my participants to a long-lost interest in the heritage language. I believe this is a message of hope.”

Well, I believe you, Zozan, when you say that’s a message of hope, so tell us more about that hope.

ZOZAN: Yeah, I mean, and again, it’s about connection, right? So, this is really at the forefront of everything. So, you know, if there is a person that you can connect with, that will somehow encourage you to rediscover what you have lost, then it’s actually… it can be reversed. It doesn’t mean that, you know, now you’re completely like, “yay, let me start speaking my language again”, or whatever. It’s not necessarily that, but, you know, it tempers down some of that self-hatred that you perhaps have, that guilt, whatever it is, so that you can actually deal with this illusion.

ZOZAN: a little bit more rationally. And, you know, a lot of participants, also, kind of talked about how they’re psyching themselves up to actually visit the country where their parent is from, because slowly, they can, you know, get to that place where they are able to do that, where that… where, you know, the realization that actually there’s nothing wrong with my heritage, it’s just I have been socialized to think that, because the people I have been trying to connect with couldn’t connect with me on that.

And so in the book, there’s a couple of such examples. So in the example of Claire, she, she met a friend at school who also is Black, and has sort of introduced her to this world that she didn’t know, whether it’s, you know, beauty tips for actually women like her, which of course she said was a struggle with a Japanese mother who didn’t know what to do with her hair, and all of those things, so little things like that, but also just, you know, embracing some of these things that… that she couldn’t actually seem to, sort of grasp in her home or in school. We have Kai, whose grandmother, so he loves his grandmother, she hardly raised him, and she developed dementia, and she forgot how to speak English as a result, so she could only speak Greek, so she kind of remembered only that. And so he was like, “well, I want to speak to my grandma”. So now I have to actually up the Greek, because otherwise I cannot communicate with her, and that would be a huge shame”. So you know, that connection is much stronger than everything else. Like, “I want to stay connected to grandma”. In another instance, you know, we had, father and daughter having a bit of a difficult relationship, as is so common in our teenage years, you know, we struggle. But so her dad then taught her how to drive, and they spend all these long hours, driving together, and he, in fact, is a taxi driver, so he showed her all the, you know, the tricks and the, you know, the shortcuts. And, you know, all this time, almost forced time spent together, kind of reconnected them, and, you know, now she’s much more open to, “hey, can you… can you tell me how I… how I can say this in Hungarian?” Or, you know, feeling excited about maybe visiting Hungary, for example.

So these are the kinds of stories, and so this is really important, because connection can just undo some of that traumatic stuff that happens earlier. And you’re quite right, it typically happens as an adult. It’s almost when you kind of have fully formed, and you can look at it a bit more rationally, and actually realize, you know, all of these experiences, it’s not because something’s wrong with me, but rather there’s a lack of understanding, or there are prejudices around me. That doesn’t make it, you know, they are wrong, and I’m okay, kind of feeling, yeah.

ALEX: Yeah, yeah.

ALEX: And you point out that it’s really, at least in your study, really clear that it’s this relationship, or a change in a relationship, that comes first, and then prompts that return to the heritage language, or that renewed passion for spending some time speaking it, or learning it.

And there had been debate in the literature as to whether it’s, you know, that you learn the language first and that enables connections, and you say, well, at least in your study, it seems to be the other way around, so maybe we really need to think of building those relationships first to enable people to want to, or to feel comfortable embracing that heritage language.

I guess, to that end, to try and help people come to that position of, you know, “it’s not me who’s wrong, there’s this world of prejudices or exclusions that are a problem”, you give the wonderful example of you yourself changing your classroom behaviours in the university subjects you teach to try and unteach the idea that heritage languages and identities are deficits. And when you tried it, this wasn’t your study, but it’s, you know, something you were doing because your own study encouraged you to go in this direction, you got such engaged student participation as a result. Can you please tell our listeners about that?

ZOZAN: Yeah, absolutely, and so this was based on an experience I had in my schooling. So I, as I mentioned, I went to school in Germany, and it is very common in Germany still to study Latin as a foreign language throughout high school, and so I was one of those poor people who had to do that.

ALEX: So was I, and you can imagine it was not as… not as common here in Australia.

ZOZAN: I, I… oh, God. It was tough, …But obviously, I speak Italian, so to me, often it was much easier to write my notes in Italian, because it’s almost the same word, right?

ZOZAN: So it just helps me learn that easier. So just in my notebook by myself, I used to write, you know, the Latin word and then the Italian word next to it, because, you know, it obviously makes it easier. Now, my teacher then came around and looked at my notes and said, “well, you have to do this in German”, and I’m like, “well, these are just my personal notes, I can do whatever I want”. And he’s like, “no, that’s an unfair advantage, you have to do it in German’, right? So I’m like, okay, great, so it’s an… it’s a problem at all other times, and all of a sudden, it’s an unfair advantage, so I just… I was not allowed to use my language, even though that was the better way to teach me, right? Like, I mean, that was my individual need as a student, that would have helped me.

So, I know that, obviously, you know, I teach in Sydney, it’s a very diverse student cohort, we have people from all over the place, we have international students, we have students whose first language isn’t English. And I know that many of them, especially if they grew up here and they’ve had this background, this, you know, their parents from elsewhere, they might have had similar experiences to me, whether it’s, you know, either being shamed in some shape or form, or actively forbidden, right?

And so I thought, okay, let me try and see what we can do with that. And so in my class, I then kind of started off with, does anyone here speak or understand another language? And I think it’s very important to say, speak or understand, because that firstly opens up this idea that, oh, okay, maybe the language that I silenced myself in. Typically you can still very much understand it, so I can barely say anything in Turkish, but I understand it quite well. And so, that’s not because I’m not linguistically gifted, it’s because of what I’ve done with it, right? And so, they will then raise their hand, and you can kind of… “what language is that?” And, you know, interestingly, obviously, you will find you speak 10, 15 languages in a classroom of 30 people, because it’s typically quite diverse.

So then we looked at, in this particular example, we looked at a political issue that was, happening at the time. I actually don’t remember what it was now. But I said to them….

ALEX: Hong Kong. I think it was….

ZOZAN: The Hong Kong protests, maybe? This is a while ago. But you could do this with anything. Like, I mean, let’s say I want to do this on the, war in Ukraine, for example. You know, what is the reporting around that? So, importantly because the lesson was around political bias in news reporting, that’s why it’s important for this particular activity to pick a political issue, but you could pick something, obviously, much less confronting, if you want.

So I asked them to look at news reporting about this issue from the last week or so, and I said, if you can speak or read another language, or even listen to, say, a news report on video, have a look at what, around the world, the reporting on the same issue, how are different countries reporting on it, right? So we actually used these other languages. And it was so interesting, because obviously, once you have, you know, some people looking at, you know, obviously news from Australia, but then others news from around Europe, from around South America, from around Asia, you can absolutely see that the news reporting is different. The angles are different, what is being said, who is being biased, is different, right?

And so here we then, you know, this discussion was much richer than had I just said, okay, read news in English, or just from Australia, where, you know, we’re just gonna hear the same perspective. And so I’ve been trying as much as possible to always do that and allow my students to, you know, if you want to read a journal article for your paper from another from an author that didn’t write in English, please do, if that is helpful. You know what I mean? So, these are the kinds of things I try to bring into my classroom to kind of show them, “hey, this is an asset. You speaking another language is great. It opens another door to another culture, to another way of thinking and viewing the world. It’s not a bad thing. You should use it whenever you can.” And it has worked really well.

ALEX: Oh, I love it, and I love that it doesn’t put pressure on those people to then be perfect in their non-English language or languages either. The way you describe it in the book, the more people spoke, the more other students said, “oh, actually, I do understand a bit of this language”, or “oh yeah, I didn’t mention it before, but I also have these linguistic resources”, and everyone just feels more and more comfortable to bring everything to the table.

ALEX: The next question, I don’t know if we’ll edit it out or not, just depending on the time, but it does flow quite nicely from what you’ve just been discussing, so I’ll ask it, and you can answer it, and we’ll record it.

ALEX: So, Zozan, another way you’ve built on this project, which was originally your thesis, and then you’ve written in this wonderfully engaging book. You’ve then gone on since then to do a different related project that’s ended up with a documentary and a lot of practical applications. And I think listeners would love to hear about it. It’s a project called Say Our Names. You’re leading a team of researchers from various disciplines in this project, and it’s about challenging quote-unquote “tricky” or “foreign” names in Anglophone contexts. You’ve created some really practical guides for colleagues, which I’ve seen, and even directed a mini-documentary that showcases the lived experiences behind these names. It premiered a few months ago here in Sydney in collaboration with the City of Sydney Council. Can you tell us about this project in a nutshell, and what the public responses have been like now that your research is out there beyond the university?

ZOZAN: I know, the Say Our Names is a bit like the beast that cannot be contained for some reason, it’s really, blown up, but I think what made it so successful is because it is such an easy entryway into cultural competence, very much to, you know, speaking to the kinds of themes that are in the book. So as you know, my name, people find hard to pronounce. It really isn’t, but it is immediately foreign in most, in most places that I would go to. And I actually… my name is mispronounced so often that sometimes I don’t even know how to pronounce it correctly anymore. Like, I have to call my mum, reset my ear: “How do I say this again?”

And, you know, there’s obviously lots of people in Australia, around the world, who have this very same issue, right? So you have your name mispronounced, you have it not pronounced, because people are so scared to say it, it looks so wild to them, they just call you “you”, or just don’t refer to you at all. Or perhaps, they anglicize it, or they shorten it, and you know, it seems like a harmless thing to do, but actually, it’s sort of like, you know, it scratches the surface of a much bigger issue, right? So you have, again, this dominant culture, and so here in Australia, obviously, the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon culture with everybody else, right? And so English names we are totally fine with, but as soon as something is not English or not, you know, common European, it becomes a tricky thing, and it’s hard to say. And so you internalize that, as the person whose name that is, you internalize, my name is hard to say, my name is foreign.

And your name is the first thing you say to someone, right? You meet a new person, you say, “hi, my name is Zozan”. And… I mean…

ZOZAN: 90% of the time, either people will mispronounce it, or they will ask me more about it.

ZOZAN: And I tell this story, not in the documentary, but when I introduce the documentary. I tell the story about how I actually, a couple of years ago, this is quite, timely, I had podcast training, how to speak about my research in, for podcasts. The first task that we had to do in this training was explain our work, like, what kind of research are you, what is your research?

And I found… I got really stuck with that, like, I couldn’t put in writing what I do. And I’m a very chatty person, I normally have no trouble talking and, talking about myself, but for some reason, that seemed like an impossible task. I couldn’t… I had no idea how to say it. And I realized the reason why I don’t know how to say it is because I never, in a situation where people speak about their work, I never get past my name. People don’t want to hear about my name, sorry, my work, because they want to hear about my name.

So, you know, I say, hi, I’m Zozan at a networking event. And, “oh, what kind of name is it? Oh, where are you from? Oh, you know, what are your parents? Where are your parents from?” And you don’t actually get a chance to do what you came to do, which is, I would like to speak about my work, because I’d like an opportunity.

And so we realized this is quite important, and yes, of course, it’s adjacent to all of this work from the book. It’s, it’s, you know, your name is a lexical item as part of language, right? So we realized the need to… maybe this is an easy entry point to connect people. If we just show the importance of trying to get someone’s name right, how to ask, how to deal with your own discomfort of not knowing how to pronounce it and asking how to… to take off a little bit of the burden of the other person who’s continuously uncomfortable anyway, right?

And so, yeah, we, we, again, storytelling is my thing, so we, we had some focus groups, obviously where we could do a bit more, you know, what is your story, what is your experience, and also how would you like to be approached, right? This is very important. We don’t want to assume that, as researchers, you know, obviously I have my own ways and thoughts. But it was important, so we asked, and created this best practice guide that really came from community: “This is how people would like to be approached. This is what you can do”.

And then we also created this, little documentary. It’s… it’s really, really beautiful, I think, if I have to say so myself. But obviously it just shows the stories, it shows stories of what it… what the name means, because it is obviously part of your cultural heritage, how people have felt resentful towards their names, and ashamed of their names, in exactly the same way as people do with language in my book. So there were a lot of parallels.

And also what it means when people try to get it right, when there’s actually a person making an effort, because again, it’s about connection. Here’s someone who wants to connect with me, and who’s making the effort. So, of course, now I also want to make the effort, right? So it’s almost like this beautiful…

ZOZAN: Like, thank you for trying, and yes, I want to be your friend, let me help you. …

And so, yeah, and it went beyond UTS, it went citywide. I am… we have been receiving requests around Australia to come and screen it and hold a little panel. We’ve had panel discussions with people who are experts in this field. But also, I think what is important that we now brought in as well is Indigenous voices, because obviously there’s an erasure there of names and language that we also need to talk about in the Australian context. So, we’re doing a lot around that, and yeah, it’s been… it’s been the most practical application, I think, of my research so far.

ALEX: When I heard a panel talking about it, something I took away is just to be encouraged, you know, if you’re the person who’s asking, “how do you say your name?” You don’t have to get it right the first time, you don’t have to have just listened to it, and then you can immediately repeat it, because maybe it is an unusual name for you. You just have to be genuinely making an effort to learn, and to show that you want to connect, and that you want to get it right, and you want to ask the person how they want to be known. And that, I think, is just so important for people to keep in mind. It’s not a standard of immediate perfection, it’s a standard of attempting to genuinely respect and connect with people.

Before we wrap up, can you tell us what’s next for us, Zozan, and can we follow your work online, or even in person?

ZOZAN: Well, …

ZOZAN: Obviously, the book is available, you can buy it as an e-book, or obviously, if you’re really into hardback, you can do that too. Say Our Names is spreading far and wide. I’m taking it to Europe, at the end of the year. It will be, used in classrooms in the UK. I will be screening it at a conference in Paris, so there’s actually quite a bit of… because it’s obviously really relevant all around the world, right? We are more globalized, so very happy to do more screenings and introductions and panels. Obviously, a book tour is in the works … let’s see how we go with that, but, certainly around Sydney, and then perhaps also overseas. So I’m trying to spread the word, and, you know, I’m the kind of person who actually just wants to make an impact. I want to, you know, obviously it’s wonderful to do this research and dive into the literature and all of that, but, you know, I think I am quite proud of having translated it into something that is, you know, we have now in corporate offices our best practice guide on language and on names, and people are trying. And so, you know, I think that is the most rewarding thing, and that’s really something I want to keep working on.

ALEX: Thank you, and we’ll make sure we put your social media handles in the show notes. So thank you again, Zozan, and thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and of course, recommend the Language on the Move podcast if you can, and our partner, The New Books Network, recommend to your students, your colleagues, your friends. Until next time!

***

The Covid-19 pandemic has presented the world with a joint action problem like never before: how do you get close to eight billion people to wash their hands and keep their distance?

Mass participation is critical to the success of prevention and containment efforts. The most effective way to achieve mass mobilization continues to be through state action. But the fact that there are only around 200 nation states in the world but over 6,000 languages raises a conundrum: how can we ensure that everyone has access to timely high-quality information in their language?

For too long, state approaches to speakers of minority languages — whether indigenous or migrant — have ranged from benign neglect to forced assimilation. In order to gain access to the state and its institutions — education, health, welfare or the law — everyone was expected to speak the language of the state — English in the USA, French in France, Mandarin in China, and so on. As a result of such monolingual approaches, Spanish speakers in the USA, Arabic speakers in France, or dialect speakers in China have worse education, employment and health outcomes than their compatriots speaking the state language.

The Covid-19 crisis has brought such linguistic inequalities to the forefront as language barriers may compromise the timeliness and the quality at which public health information is accessible to everyone in the population.

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) dedicated information website on the novel coronavirus disease, for instance, is available in the six official UN languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. The information is directed at member states, who are tasked with localizing relevant information for their populations through their national health authorities.

States have taken a wide variety of approaches to the needs of their multilingual populations. Some states carry on with their staunchly monolingual communications unchanged. A White House directive to remove bilingual English-Spanish public health posters from US courtrooms is a case in point. Preliminary evidence from New York suggests that this approach has disastrous consequences for the Hispanic population, whose Covid-19 mortality rate far exceeds that of other groups. This comes as US health workers are left without adequate procedures and processes on how to deal with critically ill patients who do not speak English.

Putting measures for adequate multilingual communication in place during the height of an emergency of such proportions is next to impossible. Therefore, one of the many lessons we need to learn from this crisis is to include the reality of linguistic diversity into our normal procedures and processes, including disaster preparation.

An example of a country that has started to learn that lesson is China. When the outbreak first started in Hubei province, medical assistance teams from all over China were confronted with the fact that Standard Chinese and local dialects are mutually unintelligible, despite the fiction of one single Chinese language long maintained by the Chinese state. In the face of the crisis, the monolingual ideology was ditched and within 48 hours, a team of linguists from Beijing Language and Culture University created a Guidebook of Wuhan Dialect for Medical Assistance Teams, Audio Materials of Wuhan Dialect for Medical Assistance Teams, and The Handbook of Doctor-Patient Communication. Plans are now underway to include the needs of linguistically diverse populations into all levels of the Chinese national emergency preparation, response, and recovery plan.

In the past, the linguistic disadvantage of minority speakers could be ignored by the mainstream. The Covid-19 crisis has changed that. In a situation where the wellbeing of everyone depends on that of everyone else, ensuring equitable access to information irrespective of whether someone speaks the state language or not is in everyone’s best interest.

***

Make sure to download the full free open-access digital pamphlet Perspectives on the Pandemic: International Social Science Thought Leaders Reflect on Covid-19 and read all the other essays, too:

#1 Bryan S. Turner, Is Covid-19 part of history’s eternal Dance Macabre?
#2 Ingrid Piller, Covid-19 forces us to take linguistic diversity seriously
#3 Gurminder K. Bhambra, Covid-19, Europe, inequality and global justice
#4 Bent Greve, Preparing welfare states in the age of Covid-19
#5 Jillian Rickly, An uncertain future for the tourism industry in the wake of Covid-19
#6 Stéphanie Walsh, Matthews Don’t confuse constraints with confinement during Covid-19
#7 Stephanie J. Nawyn, The social problems of protecting refugees during Covid-19
#8 Deborah Lupton, The need for urgent social research in a Covid-19 society
#9 Monika Büscher, A great mobility transformation
#10 Anthony Elliott, What future for postcoronavirus societies?
#11 Sharon Varney, Engaging with complexity — if not now, when?
#12 Robert van Krieken Covid-19 and the civilizing process

***

Language and communication challenges of COVID-19

For the full list of posts related to language and communication challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis click here.

A restaurant sign featuring both Tibetan and Chinese, in a village where the Tibetan residents speak Ngandehua, one of Tibet’s minority languages (Image: Gerald Roche)

As elsewhere in High Asia, minority languages in Tibet are the first victims of international tensions.

During the recent UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) periodic review of China, a total of twelve countries raised the issue of Tibet. In their response, the Chinese delegation devoted two minutes to discussing Tibet (begins 2:33:39), and half that time was spent talking about the Tibetan language.

Interestingly, none of the countries that raised the issue of Tibet explicitly referred to language. Why, then, did the Chinese delegation draw attention to this issue?

In part it is because they consider addressing language issues a key success in China’s program for Tibet. In white papers on Tibet in 2015 (April and September), 2011, and 1992, China has repeatedly boasted of its successful provision of language rights for Tibetans.

But, language has also been a significant aspect of Tibetan grievances and international scrutiny, particularly in the last decade. Students have protested against changes to bilingual education several times since 2010. Many of the 154 self-immolators in Tibet expressed fears regarding the fate of the Tibetan language. And most recently, the imprisonment of language advocate Tashi Wangchuk brought condemnation from the international community, including from within the UN.

China therefore had good reason to focus on language issues in its response during the UNHRC periodic review.

China’s discussion of language issues focused on the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR)—despite the fact that most Tibetans in China live outside it. They described efforts to translate official documents and media into Tibetan, the successful digital encoding of the Tibetan script, and the implementation of a bilingual education system in Mandarin and Tibetan.

It is unclear if these measures actually constitute an effective offset to the aggressive promotion of Mandarin. For example, Tibetans are currently deeply concerned about the increasing presence of Chinese loanwords in Tibetan, considering it evidence of more systematic imbalances between the two languages. However, even if these measures are effective in protecting Tibetan, they completely fail to protect other languages of the region.

For example, the non-Tibetan Monpa and Lhoba peoples of the TAR speak several languages. Although China is keen to draw attention to their Tibetan bilingual education program in the TAR, the languages of the Monpa and Lhoba people are completely excluded from schools. They instead receive education in Tibetan and Chinese, bringing with it all the well-known detriments of being denied mother tongue education.

Furthermore, not all Tibetans in the TAR use Tibetan as their first language. Linguists are still recognizing previously un-described languages in the region. There is also a growing community of Tibetan Sign Language users. Neither group is catered for by bilingual education policies that focus only on Tibetan and Chinese.

If we widen the scope to include Tibetans outside the TAR, the significance of this exclusion grows. Tibetans within China speak at least 26 distinct non-Tibetan languages, none of which are recognized by the state. A total lack of state protections for these languages is leading to language loss—all these languages are now being replaced by Tibetan or Chinese.

It is also worth pointing out that whether or not Tibetan itself is a single language is not a trivial question. Although sharing a common written language, the spoken forms of Tibetan are highly divergent. Some linguists classify ‘the Tibetan language’ in China into up to 16 languages. Comprehension between these spoken languages is low. Bilingual education policies that ignore this diversity also ignore the important role that comprehension plays in the classroom.

The response of the Chinese delegate at the UN periodic review, therefore, was missing the point. Promoting a single language is an inadequate measure to protect the rights of a multilingual population. In fact, promoting the Tibetan language in many cases impinges upon linguistic rights. This is the case not only of non-Tibetan populations such as the Monpa and Lhoba, but also for Tibetans who do not speak Tibetan, or primarily use a signed language.

Unfortunately, Chinese policy-makers are not alone in missing this point. Although international organizations that advocate for Tibet frequently focus on language issues, they consistently refer to Tibetans as an homogenous population with a single language. Like the Chinese state, they tend to ignore languages when talking about language rights.

The International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), for example, expends significant effort on their website explaining that the Tibetan language is not Chinese. And despite the fact that ICT has campaigned for Tibetan’s language rights, including within the UN, this has always overlooked the region’s linguistic diversity. The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, meanwhile, has published two reports focusing on language in education. Both these reports, in 2003 and 2007, focus only on a single Tibetan language.

Representatives of the Chinese state, and the international community of Tibet advocates, therefore, find themselves curiously united on this issue. Despite their obvious open disagreements, both agree that Tibetans speak only a single language. They therefore continue to debate linguistic rights in ways that erase and exclude Tibet’s minority languages.

This erasure and exclusion matters. It perpetuates the impression that some languages, like Tibetan, deserve rights, whilst others do not. And yet a commitment to the idea of rights involves a commitment to the equality of all people regardless of their language.

If China really wants to fulfill its constitutional promise to respect the rights of ethnic minorities, it needs to support all their languages, not just a few carefully chosen ones. And if the international community wants to hold China accountable for their failures to respect minority rights, we need to stop replicating their erasure of linguistic diversity, and focus attention on Tibet’s most vulnerable populations.

Related content

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• Educating Burmese migrant students in China
• Is English stealing the home of Mongolian?
• Debating language standardization
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Map of European languages (Source: SB Language Maps)

Invitation to public seminar about “Minority Languages” at Macquarie University

What: Minority languages: what are we talking about? And why are we talking about it now?
When: Wednesday, November 22, 12:00-2:00pm
Where: Macquarie University Y3A 211 Tute Rm (10HA)
Who: Professor Josu Amezaga, University of the Basque Country

Abstract: Minority (or minoritized) languages can be defined as languages historically excluded from the nation-state. Following the French Revolution, which imposed the need of a common and unique language on the French state, many countries applied the “one-language-one-nation” pattern and, in the process, minoritized numerous languages. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, many countries almost seemed to have reached this monolingual ideal. However, in recent decades major changes in mediated communications together with growing migration flows have called this state of affairs into question as minority languages – both “old” and “new” – reassert themselves. At the same time, the reemergence of linguistic diversity has provoked state reactions in the form of new re-nationalization policies focused around language.

In my presentation I will first explain what minoritization of languages means. Then I will show how changes in communication and migration flows have affected the linguistic landscape of Western societies. The focus will be on commonalities and points of difference between regional and immigrant minority languages. Finally, I will discuss why minority languages should be addressed not only as a matter of cultural heritage but also a need for the future. This will lead me to close with some questions about the monolingual paradigm.

Bio blurb: Josu Amezaga is Professor in the Department of Audio-Visual Communication and Advertising at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. After completing his Ph.D. in Sociology about Basque culture, he started researching Basque language and media, from where he moved to a more comprehensive view of minority languages in media and as identity tools. This interest has led him to immigrant languages, as yet another type of minority languages. Currently, he is a visiting professor at Charles Sturt University.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previous research into media discourses surrounding refugees and asylum seekers has shown that these groups are regularly dehumanised through homogenising discourses, and portrayed as a threat to the host societies (e.g. Baker & McEnery, 2005; Gabrielatos & Baker, 2008; Khosravinik, 2009; Sulaiman-Hill, Thompson, Afsar, & Hodliffe, 2011). Refugee arrivals also are referred to in metaphors comparing refugees to movement of water (flooding, pouring, or streaming over borders; camps or centres overflowing) or pestilence (swarms of refugees), which contribute to an image of these groups not as individuals seeking asylum but as some kind of uncontrolled and unpredictable force of nature.

In New Zealand the general view is that our media report issues surrounding refugees and asylum seekers in a fairly benevolent manner compared with other countries, which may have something to do with New Zealand’s geographical distance from most refugee migration. However, this isn’t to say that underlying ideologies in local media discourses don’t recreate and reinforce taken-for-granted narratives that deny power and self-determination to refugees and asylum seekers.

I explored these discourses in New Zealand’s three most widely-read newspapers, The New Zealand Herald, The Dominion Post, and The Press (Greenbank, 2014). Articles were collected from the months leading up to general elections in 2005, 2008 and 2011. I chose these periods to best capture the recognised patterns of increased attention towards refugees, as this group, and immigration generally, are particularly politicised in the months surrounding national elections.

The themes and attitudes associated with a particular word can be revealed by observing the types of lexical items that it commonly appears with or near it – that word’s ‘aura of meaning’, also known as semantic prosody. Put simply, common collocates of a word can become part of its meaning.

I found that the concepts of refugee and asylum seeker are frequently linked to words associated with politics (e.g. political, policies, nations), foreign countries (e.g. Iraq, Nauru, Palestine, Assyrian) and violence (e.g. terrorism, terrorist, conflict) in these articles, particularly when compared to a general corpus of New Zealand newspaper articles. These kinds of associations together can result in an overall negative semantic prosody of refugees as problematic, non-local victims of violence.

Refugees were also afforded much less voice that non-refugee voices in these articles, in terms of number of words attributed through direct quote or paraphrase. Furthermore, the content of quotes and paraphrases often allowed refugees to express gratitude or helplessness, while the technicalities and practicalities of the situation were left to non-refugee ‘experts’ to describe. For example, in a 2014 article from The New Zealand Herald, an eleven-year-old spokesperson for the family is ascribed the following quote:

“Mum wants to say thank you to all those people and may God bless them”

Following from this, a Public Health Nurse is given the role of explaining what goods were donated to the family, and how they will be helpful:

“They have never had a drier before. They didn’t have a toaster. The curtains are very thin, so warm thermal curtains will be awesome. The trailer of firewood — that’s how they heat the house.”

Refugee ‘issues’ are presented here as matters for ‘experts’ to deal with, while refugee voices were largely confined to affective roles, expressing emotion, gratitude and despair. This kind of limited or selective reporting of voice can be a strategy of ‘othering’ certain groups. Othering of refugees can and does occur in other ways in the articles. This may be done through associations of refugee status with crime, as can be seen in the following two excerpts:

A 22-year-old Syrian man, Mohammad Shanar Ryad, a former commando and recent refugee, has been arrested over the murder.

Dahir Noor Shire, 37, who came to New Zealand as a Somali refugee in 1999, gave evidence in his own defence before a jury in Wellington District Court yesterday.

These two men, both accused of crimes, have both their ethnicity and former refugee status explicitly mentioned. Ethnic and refugee-related qualifiers, when repeatedly used in the context of articles about crime, expose an ideology which correlates criminal activity with refugees, and goes some way to actually attributing the crime to refugeehood.

Emphasising positive differences can also result in othering of a given group from a presumed ingroup, as this may fetishise the apparent differences, bestowing exotic or otherworldly attributes to that group. This can be seen in the excerpt below describing a funeral:

Women in headscarves wailed yesterday morning as Eman Jani Hurmiz was carried into the Ancient Church of the East in Strathmore.

This kind of phrasing throughout the article creates the feeling of an exotic spectacle of otherness, using distance to bestow mystery and reverence. Despite perhaps being benevolently enacted, this positive othering still imagines an outgroup whose observed differences from society exclude those groups from that society by implication, affecting their ability to fully participate as members of their community.

In sum, the media discourses that combine semantic prosody, othering, and disparity in voice attribution together make a compelling argument for denial of power to refugees in these representations. The taken-for-granted and out-of-sight discursive processes depict refugees as othered victims, associated with crime and danger, as well as exoticism and helplessness.

Of course, the intentions of the writers of these articles may be honourable. By definition, refugees have experienced adversity, and representing groups as traumatised victims can draw much needed attention to their plight. At the same time, even if benevolently enacted, employing these prevalent discourses of helplessness and othering can have negative real-world consequences for the ways in which the mainstream views refugees, suggesting they are incapable of helping themselves, and impeding full participation in society.

It’s important to recognise ordinary refugee perspectives that are not associated with trauma or suffering, and to consider refugee views and contributions in discourses that concern them. Given the way that all language use generally, and media discourse specifically, reproduce and transform society, re-framing of refugees and asylum seekers in this manner could contribute to addressing the inequalities currently maintained by the mainstream media. Instead of being framed using linguistic strategies that suggest victimhood, refugees and asylum seekers could perhaps better be framed as capable, resilient people who have overcome adversity, who have resisted and freed themselves from oppressive or dangerous situations.

Related content

• Agnes Bodis, Who is a real refugee?
• Laura Smith-Khan, Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Ingrid Piller, The real problem with linguistic shirkers
• Laura Smith-Khan, We all have a culture, we all speak a language: the Australian legal system discusses diversity
• Ingrid Piller, Bitter gifts: migrants’ exclusive inclusion
• Ingrid Piller, Children as language brokers

References

Baker, P., & McEnery, T. (2005). A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts. Journal of Language and Politics, 4(2), 197–226.

Gabrielatos, C., & Baker, P. (2008). Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding – A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press 1996-2005. Journal of English Linguistics, 36(1), 5–38.

Greenbank, E. (2014). Othering and Voice: How media framing denies refugees integration opportunities. Communication Journal of New Zealand, 14(1), 35–58.

Khosravinik, M. (2009). The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers during the Balkan conflict (1999) and the British general election (2005). Discourse & Society, 20(4), 477–498.

Sulaiman-Hill, C. M. R., Thompson, S. C., Afsar, R., & Hodliffe, T. L. (2011). Changing Images of Refugees: A Comparative Analysis of Australian and New Zealand Print Media 1998-2008. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 9(4), 345–366.

But what if you are also Deaf or Hard of Hearing? You don’t fit in the ‘Hearing’ world or the ‘Deaf’ world. You can’t quite fit into your own family or community, either, because of your hearing loss and in the wider world you face multiple communication and language barriers. Where do you fit then? How do you manage your multiple identities?

This is what I sought to find out.

My name is Ayah and I am an Australian Lebanese-Muslim woman with a hearing impairment. I was born and raised in Australia, and growing up I have faced many challenges due to both my ethnicity and my hearing loss. My hearing loss added another barrier I have had to face, not only in the wider Australian community but in the Lebanese-Muslim community as well. There is a lack of support, understanding and awareness about hearing loss, and other disabilities, in the Lebanese-Muslim community, and a lack of understanding and acceptance of Islam, and other ethnic minority backgrounds, in Australia, including in the Deaf community.

I want to close that gap.

The intersection of fitting into these different categories related to gender, culture, religion and disability meant I have faced a unique, complex and silent experience of trying to find out who I am and where I fit. My journey of self-discovery and passion to understand the world around me led me to pursue a degree and career as a Social Researcher.

Last year, as a requirement of my Social Research and Policy Degree at the University of New South Wales, I devoted my honours research to this topic. My thesis explored the identities and lived experiences of Australian Lebanese-Muslim women with hearing impairment and investigated if they perceive their hearing loss as a ‘blessing’ or a ‘curse’. This thesis also aimed to raise awareness and break the strong cultural stigma associated with hearing loss in the Lebanese-Muslim community, as well as contribute to the wider discourse about diversity in the Deaf community.

As a researcher with these multiple identities myself, I used auto-ethnography to incorporate my own reflections and insights into the study. Auto-ethnography is a theoretical and methodological approach where ‘researchers use themselves as their own primary research subject’ (Butz & Besio 2009, p. 1665). Within this framework, I also used data from my Facebook page Silent Signs, where I share my experiences and observations in different community settings.

Additionally, I conducted semi-structured interviews with eight women living in Sydney, who also identified as Australian, Lebanese and Muslim women with a hearing impairment. Recruitment, preparing and conducting the interviews were a fundamental part of my research. Numerous challenges emerged due to language and communication barriers; reflecting the lived experiences of these women. For example, consent forms were offered in English and Arabic, a sign language interpreter was hired for three of the interviews and, due to my own hearing loss, assistance was needed with transcribing the interviews. I even made a video in Auslan (Australian sign language) to recruit participants and this proved to be a successful way of approaching and connecting with these women. You can view the video here.

Numerous themes and results emerged from my research and the key findings can be summarized as follows:

• Most of the women regard Auslan as their primary language.
• The majority of participants identified themselves by their hearing-loss identity first, followed by their identity as a ‘Muslim’ which was in the top two responses. Most of the women who chose the ‘Muslim’ identity stressed that religion allowed them to cope with all the different challenges they faced and to even perceive their hearing loss as a blessing from God. Many gave thanks and the Arabic phrase ‘Alhamdulillah’ (which translates as ‘All praise belongs to God’) was used numerous times by different women.
• All women in the study faced different identity challenges such as conflicts between their ‘Muslim’, ‘Deaf’ and other identities. Navigating their ‘Lebanese’, ‘Australian’ and ‘Woman’ identities also included other identities such as being a ‘Mother’, ‘Wife’ or ‘Student’.
• The women’s experiences and stories also showed that strong cultural stigma, barriers to communication, isolation in the family and a lack of accessibility in the community served to produce hearing loss as a ‘curse’.

Of course, my thesis has obvious limitations, including a very narrow sample. More expansive research will be needed not only to highlight diversity in deaf discourse but to also close the anecdotal gap between Islam and disability. I look forward to expanding on my honours thesis and conducting further research to meet these research desiderata.

At the moment, I am working at Advance Diversity Services on a research project about the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and accessibility for people from different ethnic backgrounds. I also volunteer with MuslimCare Australia where I run a “Muslim Deaf Group” to raise awareness and provide support for other people like myself.

I recently collaborated with the Muslim Deaf Association Sydney on a Ramadan project where we encouraged people to sign “Ramadan Mubarak” in Auslan and send in their videos. You can see the final video here.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions at Silent Signs.

Ramadan Mubarak!

Language Lovers Blogging Competition 2017

If you liked this post, don’t forget to vote for Language on the Move in the 2017 Language Lovers blogging competition over at the ba.bla voting page! Voting closes on June 06.

References

Butz, D., & Besio, K. (2009). Autoethnography Geography Compass, 3 (5), 1660-1674 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00279.x

Wehbe, A., (2016), ‘Blessing or a Curse? Exploring the Identity and Lived Experiences of Australian, Lebanese, Muslim Women with a Hearing Impairment’, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

The national character stereotypes of intercultural communication advice are completely mono-dimensional and not inflected by any other aspects of their identities. They are presented as free of class, gender, ethnicity, regional background, personal traits or any other individuating aspects of their being. Much intercultural communication advice is so obviously lacking in common sense – people obviously are rarely, if ever, stick figure representatives of national stereotypes – that it is intriguing to consider why the genre is so successful and continues to flourish.

I suspect it is due to a mismatch between what intercultural communication advice says it does and what it actually does. Ostensibly, intercultural communication advice aims to teach readers better communication skills and to make them more aware of difference and diversity. However, the genre actually does a lot of additional discursive work: it sustains the nation as a key category, presents national belonging as overriding any other aspects of identity, and, consequently, renders other aspects of identity invisible – in short, intercultural communication advice constitutes a prime example of banal nationalism.

The term ‘banal nationalism’ was introduced by the social psychologist Michael Billig ‘to cover the ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced’ (Billig, 1995, p. 6).

Many people think of nationalism as extremism. However, Billig points out that nationalism is the endemic condition of established nation states, that it is enacted and re-enacted daily in many mundane, almost unnoticeable, hence ‘banal’, ways. It is these banal forms of nationalism that lead people to identify with a nation. Examples of banal nationalism are everywhere although they often go unnoticed. Typically, the discourses of banal nationalism emanate directly from state institutions. They are then taken up by non-state actors and become enmeshed with a range of discourses that at first glance have nothing to do with nationalism at all, such as intercultural communication advice.

Page from Persian primer: reading passage ‘We are the children of Iran’

The discourses of banal nationalism are often embedded in the practices of state institutions. Schooling is a prime example of the way in which children are socialised into a national identity. It is school where we become members of the nation and where we are taught to think of ourselves as nationals. The Pledge of Allegiance in many public schools in the USA is an oft-quoted example. On the other side of the world, in Australia, many public schools hold a weekly assembly, where the school community comes together to listen to a speech, watch a performance or be part of an award ceremony. The joint singing of the national anthem plays a central part in the school assembly. In yet another example, Indonesian public schools conduct a flag-raising event every Monday morning and also on every 17th of the month (in commemoration of the national Independence Day, which is celebrated on 17 August).

In addition to ceremonial activities such as these, the socialisation into the nation is also part of teaching content in many schools around the world: there are the lyrics of national poems that are used to teach students how to read and write, the national anthem that is taught in music and recital lessons, the focus of much history teaching on national history, or the valorisation of the national language as the only legitimate medium of educational activities.

Banal nationalism on a cornflakes box

Schooling is widely controlled by the state and the fact that it is used as a vehicle to socialise students into the nation is maybe not particularly surprising. However, the discourses of banal nationalism also emanate from less likely sources. Billig’s (1995) example of the daily weather forecast on TV is a particularly convincing one: the daily weather forecast is usually presented against an image of the national map – as if national borders were meaningful to weather patterns. Banal nationalism in sports has also been widely studied: sporting competitions are typically framed as national competitions and most spectators are more likely to support co-national competitors on the basis of their nationality rather than using criteria such as sportsmanship or elegance of the game.

Yet another domain of banal nationalism can be found in consumer advertising, where national imagery is used to create positive associations with a product or service or consumption in general. At the same time, the use of national imagery in consumer advertising increases the presence of national imagery in the mundane spaces of everyday life and thereby continually reinforces the message of national belonging. The discourses of banal nationalism that come associated with consumer advertising have come to pervade our private lives.

Associating products with national imagery is a widely used marketing strategy in Australia, just as it is in many other countries (click here for examples of a car painted in the Union Jack, French on cookies or UAE-themed coffee and cake). Through everyday items such as the cornflakes box in the image, national symbols enter mundane everyday spaces such as supermarket shelves and the breakfast table in our homes. They keep circulating in those spaces as constant small reminders of national identity.

National identity is a discursive construction – a highly pervasive one but a construction nonetheless. This point is basic to most of the contemporary social sciences but it continues to elude the literature on intercultural communication, where national identity tends to be treated as a given. In the end, intercultural communication advice is nothing but yet another instance of banal nationalism, a discourse that reinforces readers’ sense of national belonging rather than one that leads them to genuinely engage with difference and diversity.

References
Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction (2nd ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Presenters and members of the organizing team at the Bridging Language Barriers Symposium

Last week the Language-on-the-Move team at Macquarie University was fortunate to host a delegation of education researchers from Hamburg University. Our visitors included Professor Ingrid Gogolin, Professor Drorit Lengyel, Dr Tobias Schroedler and PhD candidate Hanne Brandt. The aim of the visit was to engage Australian and German research perspectives on multilingual education and to work towards closer academic collaboration.

The highlight of the visit of the Hamburg team was the Bridging Language Barriers Symposium on March 16, where the German research perspectives offered by our colleagues from Hamburg University were complemented with Australian perspectives offered by colleagues from the Australian Catholic University, Australian National University, Deakin University, Macquarie University, Monash University, Sydney University and the University of New South Wales. Over 70 attendees from various institutions in Sydney and as far afield as Brisbane and Melbourne joined us for an exciting day.

In the virtual world, we had a lively conversation going on Twitter under the hashtag #LOTM2017, which reached 27,346 accounts and 93,066 impressions. If you missed the conversation, Alexandra Grey has selected the most informative tweets under the #LOTM2017 hashtag and curated them on Storify.

There are many lessons from the Bridging Language Barriers Symposium that will help the Hamburg and Macquarie teams and all the researchers involved in the symposium to advance their research collaboration in multilingual education. These are the Top Ten:

10 lessons from the Bridging Language Barriers Symposium

1. A language barrier occurs where linguistic diversity results in unequal access to social goods, including education, employment, health, welfare, the law and political and community participation.
2. Language barriers are largely linked to migration. Waves of migration occur in peaks and troughs. Immigration-highs tend to trigger short-term activism which dies down as migrant numbers decline. The lack of a sustained policy response to migration – including related language barriers – means that the wheel keeps being reinvented to the detriment of equal opportunities in a diverse society.
3. Bridging language barriers in education is not so much about language learning but about the role of languages in learning.
4. Janus-faced attitudes to linguistic diversity – celebration of linguistic diversity in the abstract and deficit views of actual multilingual speakers – continue to hamper effective approaches to bridging language barriers.
5. Widespread confusion between ‘language’ and ‘ethnicity’ (or ‘migrant background’ or ‘native/non-native speaker’) has resulted in a relative lack of policy-relevant data about the language repertoires of children in schools; the same is true of institutions generally.
6. To overcome language barriers to educational success all language resources and aspirations of children and their families need to be supported: home languages, the language of schooling, and foreign languages.
7. Both in Australia and Germany, educational policy focuses almost exclusively on supporting the language of schooling (English in Australia, German in Germany) and home languages are largely ignored. In the worst case, they are actively suppressed; in the best case, they suffer from benign neglect. Consistent efforts to promote home languages continue to be the exception that proves the rule.
8. There is currently a more concerted research and policy effort to support home languages in the education system in Germany, where – in contrast to Australia – foreign language learning is also a key plank of education.
9. Both in Australia and Germany, teachers, particularly non-language teachers, are relatively poorly prepared to deal productively with linguistic diversity in the classroom. The integration of modules on linguistic diversity in all teacher training program is essential.
10. New technologies hold considerable potential to create better resources for multilingual learners but their development is subject to economic and ideological constraints.

Related posts:

• Program of Bridging Language Barriers Symposium
• Abstracts of Bridging Language Barriers Symposium
• Sketches of presenters at Bridging Language Barriers Symposium by illustrator Sadami Konchi (external link)
• Twitter feed of Bridging Language Barriers Symposium curated on Storify by Alexandra Grey (external link)
• How do language barriers come about?
• Building bridges through multilingual schooling: a mother-tongue pilot in East Timor is showing the way
• ‘I’m not listening to you!’ Interacting in a linguistically diverse society

More related content to come in the following weeks so watch this space and the #LOTM2017 hashtag!