Hanna and Prash discuss English language in higher education research and practice, in the understudied context of the South Pacific, and Prashneel’s new book, English Language-Mediated Settings and Educational Inequality: Language Policy Agendas in the South Pacific published by Routledge in 2025.

Transcript

Hanna: Welcome to the language on the move, podcast a channel on the new books network. My name is Dr. Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics and applied linguistics at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Prashneel Ravisan Goundar. Dr. Prashneel is an academic based in the graduate research School in the University of New England. His research interests span applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational linguistics. Today we’re going to talk about his new monograph, which will be published next month. English language, Mediated Settings and educational Inequalities published by Routledge. Welcome to the Show Presh.

Prash: Hi, Hanna, thank you for having me.

Hanna: It’s lovely that you could be here, and I really am really excited about introducing your work to our audience, so can you start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book.

Prash: Well, thanks personally to you for inviting me and reaching out. It’s always good to expand on your work and put yourself out of your comfort zone and rethink what you have done. So, the book obviously was part of my PhD. Thesis. But I’ll start just a little bit about myself.

So, I’m originally from Fiji. and I moved to Armidale, which is in the New England region in 2022 to complete my PhD. I’d started working on my PhD in Fiji, but because it was during the Covid period in 2020, and there were restrictions on travel and all of that, so I couldn’t move until mid of 2022, when things got a bit better. Back home back in Fiji I was an academic as well. I taught linguistics and applied linguistics courses for a decade or so. and part of what we had to do was we had to make sure that we upgraded our qualifications. We were given a timeline to do this upgrade, and I started looking at research topics.

Fijian streetscape (Image credit: Felix Colatanavanua via Wikipedia)

The way it kind of worked was the former Prime Minister of Fiji had gone into a function and had spoken at length about the English language problems that he had come across, and he had mentioned some of the civil servants, teachers or professionals who were writing emails. He noticed a lot of spelling mistakes, sentence structure errors, grammatical errors, and things like that. That’s when my my research skills kind of just picked up on this. And I started to think, well, he’s saying that. But does he have any form of data to back up his ideas? Or why have we come to that conclusion? Why is that the case? So that’s when I started to think aloud about this, and I thought this was going to be an interesting topic to investigate.

I sent research proposals over to a few universities, and that landed at UNE and my primary supervisor Finex Ndlovu he picked up on that, and he said, well, this looks like an interesting topic, but there would be other elements that I would like to add on to that. And that’s how I started working on my PhD which I finished in 2023. And that’s when we then started to see how the thesis could then be turned into a monograph and published as a book. So, I sent out the proposal to 2 publication houses and Routledge had sent it out for review, and they got back, and the review was very positive. And I thought, okay, now this is the time to start revising and reworking on how I can reach out to a wider audience who would be interested in this language, planning language policy, medium of instruction book. So that’s how it came about.

Hanna: Fantastic. Well, we’re glad that it did! It makes me feel like very old to think that you were doing this in Covid, because in my mind, Covid was just, you know, last year. But you’ve done so much since then, so I’d like to start in terms of delving into your book to focus on two of the things that I found really innovative and exciting about your research. And that is, of course, that it explores a really under-researched context. So that’s the first thing. And then the second thing is that it’s very participant centred. So, it really allows the participants to have a voice. Could you speak to those two aspects, or expand on them a little bit for our audience?

Prash: Absolutely, so if I did a quantitative study and just looked at a language test to see what the students were doing, or how they were coming into the university with a particular school, I think the study would not have been of merit in the sense that we are just looking at it from the statistics point of view. To just say, this is the level the students have entered the university, this is the level that they are leaving out from the University. What I wanted to go into was why they were at that particular level. What actually happened at the back end of it. And this is where the whole story about the Prime Minister comes into place is that something must have happened along the way for them to have a particular level of English when they entered a university, and that space was under researched.

Other researchers or scholars in Fiji had looked at primary school level of English, they had looked at high school level of English, or they had used interventions in those spaces, but they did not move on to the university and try to investigate. We have students who end up at the 3 main universities in Fiji where they all have English as the medium of instruction. But Fiji is so diverse. The linguistic background spans over 300 islands that we have, and you have students who would come from maritime schools who are very in rural areas. And then you have students who come from urban schools, and they enter the university. But for someone to just say, oh, well, you all come from schools. You should have the same level of English is very unfair. It’s an injustice, because that’s not how it works. So that’s the whole space that I really wanted to tap into and see what we could do to address these issues or what we could do to find out what these issues were, and that’s where the methodology came into place.

So I’ll tell you a funny story about this when I wrote the proposal, and I had sent it out to my supervisors, and I said, This is what I would like to do, and this is what I want to find out, and I remember them writing back to me and saying, Well, have you thought about how you’re going to give voice to the students. and that kind of put me into. Okay, how do I do that? So, I started again, looking at different methodologies. The most suitable one I found was grounded theory, methodology, and why it was suitable was it generates. The findings are centred with the data. So, the data actually generates the themes. The data actually brings about all the information that you could possibly gather. Then I started reading more about grounded theory, and then I noticed it was not used in the South Pacific context. When it came to language testing regimes, it wasn’t in that space. So, I said, okay, this is a new element. That’s coming into the picture and grounded theory, because it is of 3 different coding systems that go into its open coding, selective coding, and theoretical coding, these 3 different stages let the findings shine in their own spaces. Because you have this open coding where we had rural schools’ data. We had data about urban schools. We had data about tertiary institutions. And then we streamlined what we got from there into the selective coding space to look at. Okay, this is from, you know, these 3 streams. Then we grouped it to put rural schools and urban schools together. Whether it’d be primary schools or high schools. We put that information together. Then we moved on to getting the higher education data together as well. So, these were the new elements that kind of came about in the book. The methodology allows the participants to go on and speak about that information that they have.

So, we were able to have the total participants I had in the study which was 120, who did 2 language tests, one at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year. We had writing interventions that I used to give them feedback on how they were progressing. And then, when we looked at the data at the end again qe showed improvements, but then I still wanted to know what had happened. So, we chose 30 participants to have an interview, and they were all randomly selected. It wasn’t someone who has performed the best was selected, or people who were low. And then I started to talk to them about their background educational background in terms of their primary school and high school level of English. What had happened, and those findings then told us a whole new picture.

Recently, even last year, if Fiji has started looking at examination results, and they have tried to look at what’s happening, and they want to have an educational review. So, I recently wrote a newspaper article. and I explained in that review that it’s not just blaming the students and saying that we need to do this review because the students did not perform well or we need to do the review because the teachers are not doing their job. What are the elements that are contributing to the unsatisfactory level that the Ministry of Education or the Fijian Government is looking at? And so, I put my whole findings forward. And a lot of people sent me an email. And they said, yeah, it was spot on that these are the things that in reviews in previous years people have not considered, and they have just put a blame on somebody in that aspect. So yes, the voices that have come from the grounded theory methodology. Now, I’m trying to look at avenues where I can put this through…

Hanna: Yes, contribute your voice to the debate?

Prash: Yes, exactly.

Hanna: So you looked at a 120 students, you tested them at the beginning, and at the end of their first year at university. And then you interviewed 30 students. So, to kind of understand their experiences with English language, learning in all those diverse contexts.

Prash: Absolutely.

Hanna: It’s so relevant to other contexts in English language teaching all over the world where you do have this diversity of educational spaces, particularly in rural and regional areas, but also with you know, with diverse access to resources in all sorts of different spaces, like, even in the same city, you can have very diverse access to resources in the same educational contexts.

Prash: Yes, that’s so true.

Hanna: It’s important, and, as you say, that you are now introducing this into the political space is also so fascinating, and that it wasn’t there before is shocking. But it’s fantastic when you know your research has an impact or can have an impact. So, I guess for our audience, we’d really like to know a little bit more about what you found. So, my next question is, you talk about these different ways in which students in different parts of Fiji, in the primary system, and the high school system, too, I’m imagining, have this unequal access to essentially quality, English language, learning. Can you tell us a bit more about what your main findings were? What were some of the things that you found, and what were some of the main barriers. preventing equal access for all students to quality. English language learning, and teaching?

Prash: You have already mentioned, coming from same region schools, but they have different kind of access to resources. That’s exactly what we discovered in this particular project. So, I spoke to the students. One of the students told me, he came from a rural school. So, the two main islands in Fiji they have Viti Levu, and Vanua Levu. So, he came from one, and he said to me, he said. when I was in second grade, the library had 10 books. When I left the 8th grade to move to high school the library still had the same 10 books. There was no movement in the in the 6 or 7 years that the student was there, so I said there was no new books? He said, no. Ten books for 300 students who would have studied in that whole period. So if we are saying English should be improved, and it can be improved by reading. Well, do we have the resources to give to the students? You can’t just say read, read, but well, let’s look at our backyard. We don’t have those books to give.

Related to that the students told me, about what they found in their library. This is another student, but it’s related to what I just spoke about. The library only had books for upper primary. They didn’t have any books for lower primary. So, if you have students who are from one to four in those classes. They didn’t have books to look at, and it’s the same with other schools. People had books for lower primary, no books for upper primary students, or vice versa. In the high school context as well.

Students also told me that because they came from maritime schools or they came from rural schools there, what happens is they come from very small communities, and it’s so small that you kind of know everybody in the community. So, the students are also very familiar with the teacher who was teaching, so the teacher would not use English to teach English instead of using, you know, English to teach a reading of English class or a grammar of English class the teacher was using a vernacular. What led on from there was when this particular student she moved to high school. She said “I was in culture shock because all the students were speaking in English, and I’m coming from a rural primary school”, an island primary school, and she was so depressed she told me. She said she spent the first year of high school in isolation. She would sit under the tree and just try, and you know, be herself, or she would go to the library because she had no voice. She didn’t know how to communicate. There was a huge language barrier for her.

She wasn’t able to even have a simple conversation with the teacher to talk to the teacher, and I remember her telling me she said, I tried to go and talk to the teacher. I tried to make time to go into the teacher, but the teacher has so many classes. The teacher has so many students, she said. I couldn’t get through to talk to her on how I could improve my conversation skills, or in general, you know my skills in the English language. That was the other situation. A similar one. Another student said to me, she said, I didn’t care that we had to speak in English. I spoke in iTaukei, which is an indigenous Fijian language, she said. I spoke with people of other languages who would speak in English, but I had no words, so I would speak to them in the iTaukei language and just try and make a conversation. But it was hard. It was very hard. It was depressing, for some of the students. How would you go about solving this kind of issue?

So, what I do recommend in the book is that for the students who are coming from these schools, once we know that yes, they are having this kind of issue, we need to set up basic academic kind of skills training for these students so that we nurture them to then progress gradually into the class, and they don’t feel that isolation. They don’t feel that they cannot talk. And the other aspect about resources was very interesting. So, as I said, it’s always vice versa. You cannot have a balance in this. One of the students from a rural school said. which was, I found it a bit funny the way he explained it, he said “oh, well, we didn’t have a lot of resources.” This is a very rural school in Fiji, he said, “we only had seven laptops”, and I said to him, “seven laptops in a rural school. I think you were well in place”, you know. At the same time I spoke to another student who came from the same region but attended an urban school with no computer access. They didn’t have any Internet; they didn’t have any computer access. So, the distribution of resources is unequal here. So how do we look into that.

Another student told me, she spoke to someone who came from another urban school and she also attended an urban school. Sha said “we did not have the same textbook access, they had more textbooks than us, or they had more teaching and learning resources, such as charts. They had access to those things as well”. So, I noticed that students actually make this comparison when they are there in the same space. They do talk about all of these things. And yeah, these are different barriers that they have in trying to excel in exams, because in high schools as well, the medium instructions is in English. But if we don’t look at it right from the beginning when they come here. And that’s when you know the blame game starts. And in the last examination results that came out for Fiji they were 76% pass rate. And everybody was, why is it so low? Why is it? 76? But yes, you’re not looking at the circumstances that the students go through that the teachers go through. Because yes, you can say to the students, but then the teachers can also be like, well, be didn’t have the books to do this.

Another interesting issue is the shortage of teachers which has two aspects. One is a literal shortage. One student said they didn’t have an English teacher for two terms completely, because the teacher fell ill. Now there was no one to step in to look after these students for two terms, and it was an examination class to prepare for an external exam. So, in the third term they got a substitute teacher. But instead of learning, it was just rushing through to cover whatever they could cover to sit for the exam. Who can you point to in in that space? Well, should we say that the school would have had to make contact with the Ministry of Education to try and look for someone to come into this place should we point to the teacher and say, well, if you were unwell, you should have informed us in advance. Should you point to the head of department and say, why didn’t you have a contingency plan in place to get someone to cover that shift as well? It’s a whole structure, who do you kind of get into that space as well. So yeah, it was fascinating to listen to their stories.

Hanna: It’s so relevant as well, these structural educational issues. And they’re also often interconnected with issues around medium of instruction in lots of contexts. We could, we could talk about that for the whole podcast, but I want to move on to your monograph. You used a language testing tool to assess students at the beginning of the semester, and at the end of the year which hadn’t been used in in fact, I think you said it hadn’t been used in the region outside of Europe and the “global north”. The Common European Framework of Reference. So can you tell us a bit about why you chose that tool, and how you argue it should be used to better meet the needs of learners in the Fijian context, because it was developed in quite a different context, as we know.

Prash: That’s a very interesting question that you have asked, because a lot of people come back to me and say, oh, so how did you choose this or what made you think about this one? So, when we had conversations about this, I needed to have a tool that I could use to measure students at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year to check. So, what could work in that? So, I started to investigate language testing regimes, and the book covers all of these aspects about the history of all of those, and what I found was tests such as TOIC test, TOEFL test or IELTS test, Cambridge examination language tests, they all went back to the CEFR, which is the Common European Framework of Reference for languages. The CEFR was where all these other tests got ideas from, and they built onto that. So, I said, instead of using, let’s say, a TOEFL test to do the testing instead of looking at IELTS test to do the testing, why not look at how the CEFR can be used in this context. And then I understood that the CEFR has got so many different sorts of scales for different aspects.

So, if you’re looking at writing, my study looked at academic writing. It had about six different ways of looking at writing. And because it comes from because it comes from Europe it had gone through about 2,000 different descriptors before it was designed. And that’s when I said, okay, if there’s so many languages in Europe, and they have looked at 2,000 different descriptors to come up with this standard one. This could now be suitable for the Fijian context because of the different languages that are being used in this context. And what I found is you already alluded to is that in the South Pacific context that had not been used. The CEFR was very new in that aspect, and the IELTS test is an ongoing thing. So, in Fiji or in Australia the IELTS test is used generally for migration purposes for scholarship purposes. But that’s not what my target audience was my target audience was looking at higher education students and trying to align their educational needs. And this particular framework, the descriptor. So, there are 6 descriptors to this. A1 and A2 indicate that the students are basic users. And then you have B1 and B2, which say, the students are independent users. And then you have C1 and C2, which say, these students are proficient users. And that’s exactly what we wanted to find out from the student when they entered the university, what kind of user can we classify them into? And this really kind of matched into that. And when we it was so nicely utilized when we looked at it at the end of the year we found improvement they had made on the scales.

So, the 120 students who set the test at the beginning of the year, what I found was that 62 of them were at A1 level. And 49 of them were at A2 level. Both were at basic user levels. So, throughout the year, what we did was we had writing interventions for academic writing to improve this skill, because that’s the lower end of the scale, and we tried to see how we can improve on that. So, they had paragraph writing activities that they did. They had some rewriting activities. They worked on academic writing. There were three interventions, academic writing, essay, writing, that they did, and at the end of the year, when we checked how the cohort had done so from the 120, 12 of them moved from A1 to A2, but the significant change that came was 90 moved to B2. And then that’s becoming an independent user. Interestingly, 8 of them moved from A2 at the beginning of the year to C1 as proficient users. But of course, this is just to do with their writing skills. We’re not looking at anything else, so we can’t say, well, very brilliant. They are very proficient speakers. But no, no, we’re just looking at the writing part, so I don’t want to excite the audience too much.

Just to see it function in in that aspect was really something good that came about. So, I sent the book to the Deputy Prime Minister in Fiji, and he has written a blurb in the book as well, and it was good that it’s getting to people who make decisions to see where I can come in, and how I can contribute to that conversation as well.

Hanna: Congratulations! That is fantastic result, isn’t it, that the Deputy Prime Minister not only has read your book but has endorsed it.

Prash: Yes, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Hanna: So, my last question, which is for those of us who are, you know, interested in researching in this space for emergent researchers, for students, linguistics and applied linguistics, and also language teaching students. What is the kind of key findings that you would like us to take away from your exciting and wonderful new book?

Prash: So, I’m trying to share and not over share, so that readers would want to read the book, and I don’t want to give too much away. What I would say, is like the book has connected three different spaces. That is the higher education, language testing regimes, and the grounded theory methodology. So, it’s an interconnection of these three different things that have come about in this book and I think readers and emerging scholars or established scholars like yourself. The book will give you how grounded theory can be applied into language, education, research. When I started looking at grounded theory methodology, it was mostly used with clinical psychology, or it was used in the sciences to get their data. And I read through Urquhart’s book, Cathy Urquhart. She has got a fantastic book that looks at grounded theory methodology. And the book was my bible, because it showed you the steps that you need to do to arrive at the data, how you collect information, and then how you analyse and interpret the data.

One of the [thesis] examiners praised the methodology of the research and said that he didn’t think that theory could be utilized in this way in a language testing or language education, research, so to say, so that that I thought was a very good compliment. I think leaders will then be able to use that space as well, coming towards higher education because they have been findings of different spaces in that language, medium of instruction, language policy. And this here, this is trying to get the student to say, well, what do you think we can do to improve? Or what is the problem that you are facing at this particular juncture. and what I found with the the university students, the way they talked about coming into lectures, and not being able to understand the delivery of the lectures. They said we wanted to just leave everything and go out. We couldn’t process the kind of language that was coming through to us, and then to start writing that seemed a bit challenging for them.

However, one of the things that I think scholars will be happy to hear, I asked the students. I said, what did you think the language test that you did, what did you think about the academic writing interventions which I monitored throughout there. The students gave very honest feedback in that aspect. Some of them said it was very challenging, which is fine, because you want to know what they felt. Some of them said that they found it useful because each had a task that they had to do. And then, obviously, I was giving feedback to them on how they would improve on the next task, or that particular task. They found that very helpful. They said the writing in interventions they found it to be helpful because essentially academic skill, academic writing skills is not just a 1 1-year thing or not a one semester kind of thing. Students go on to the 3 year or 4-year program, but they need to be able to submit assignments. They need to know how they go about making an argument or supporting a discussion. So, this whole book kind of outlines how helpful this were to them.

So that’s one of the things I could say. The other aspect that the students brought about was not only having teachers but having motivated and passionate teachers. That also really contributes to how the students perform in the class. And I mean, I don’t want to boast here, but I’ll tell you. I used to teach the academic English course many years ago, and I would have a lecture at eight o’clock, and there were 700 students in this class. One day I noticed the attendance would be 90%. There would be 90% students in the class. The students told me that, sir, the subject is very boring, but you make it so exciting that we show up. We want to know, and they would not feel sleepy in the class, because I would deliver the language academic English in such a way that it sorts of hit them, that why, they were in the class, or why they were doing that. So, I think if that filters down, or if that tickles down to primary school teachers or high school teachers, and they are that they know they don’t just there, because in a fortnight they’re going to be paid. They they’re there because they make a difference to the life of the student that it takes them. You know, from primary to high school, from high school to university, and it’s just going to be good in that aspect to look at it. So those are the key things.

Hanna: I think that’s fantastic place to end Prash! That’s so important. And I think it’s lovely also, for I know some of my students who are English language teachers or teachers in training will be listening to this. And I think that’s a really lovely point to end on which is that, yeah, it’s not just about having teachers, of course, although, of course, that is of paramount importance. But it’s about having passionate and motivated teachers. And that’s very impressive to get 700 students to turn up at 8 o’clock in the morning. I think that speaks. That’s a great compliment for any teacher.

Thanks again, Prash, and thanks very much to our audience for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the language on the move podcast because we talk about fantastic topics like this. And our partner, the new books network to your students, colleagues and friends until next time.

Find out more about these and other fascinating aspects of English in Korea in this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast. Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Jinhyun Cho about her 2017 book entitled English Language Ideologies in Korea.

English Language Ideologies in Korea critically examines the phenomenon of “English fever” in South Korea from both micro- and macro-perspectives. Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions: why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the ‘dreams’ and ‘realities’ associated with English in Korea?

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript (added 09/09/2024)

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

Jinhyun is a Senior Lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Program of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests are primarily in the field of sociolinguistics and sociolinguistics of translation and interpreting. Jinhyun’s research focuses on intersections between gender, language ideologies, neoliberalism, and intercultural communication across diverse social contexts, including Korea and Australia.

Jinhyun is the author of the 2021 book Intercultural Communication in Interpreting, Power and Choices, and she has authored numerous other publications for international journals. Today, we will be discussing her 2017 book English Language Ideologies in Korea. This book critically examines the phenomenon of English fever in South Korea from both micro and macro perspectives.

Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions. Why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the dreams and realities associated with English in Korea? Jinhyun, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Cho: Oh, thank you for having me.

Brynn: To start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to studying how people think about and view the English language within Korea?

Dr Cho: Sure. I was born in Korea and grew up there, and I spent almost 30 years of my life in Korea before moving to Australia. And I worked as an interpreter between English and Korean in Korea.

And I have to tell you this, and that I didn’t speak English at all until I finished university.

Brynn: I cannot believe that. When I read that in your book, that was an incredible revelation to me.

Dr Cho: It might sound interesting to you and to the listeners, but back then, and I know that was many years ago, the Korean education on English, it focused on grammar and reading. And there was no speaking element at all.

So, I never had a chance to learn how to speak English until I finished university. And I got my first job at a small company after university, which I didn’t enjoy at all. And I started wondering what else I could do.

And I knew that there was such a job as a translator and interpreter, because one of my friends at university, her brother was an English-Korean interpreter. And that looked so cool, instantly switching between English and Korean, and he was working for an established broadcasting company in Korea. So, I thought that, oh, that sounds so cool, and I want to be one of those people.

So, I enrolled in a coaching school designed to train people who wanted to be a translator and interpreter. And that, to provide more details on this, because it doesn’t exist outside Korea, I know that there’s some in Japan. So coaching schools, these schools train people to sit for exams to enter a graduate school that specializes in translation and interpreting.

So that’s how it works, because it’s so competitive to get into a graduate school, graduate schools for translation and interpreting. So, I enrolled in one of those coaching schools and studied English for 14, up to 16 hours a day, and for two years. And that’s how I successfully got into this best graduate school in Korea.

And so, I took it for granted, right? Because everybody in Korea wanted to be good at English and they wanted to learn English. So, I thought that I never questioned why I wanted to learn English so much.

And then revelation came to me when I moved to Australia. And here, English is so natural, right? And everybody is expected to speak English.

And if you don’t speak English, then there’s something wrong with you. Whereas in Korea, if you speak English well, then you’ll be instantly admired. So, I thought that the gap was so interesting and started wondering why I wanted to learn English so much.

And then that led to this research question, as you said, right? So why do people in Korea pursue English so feverishly? You know, so much so that there is this social phenomenon of English fever.

And that’s how I got into this research.

Brynn: And just you saying that you studied English for like 14 to 16 hours a day, I cannot imagine doing that in another language. That had to be exhausting. It does feel like almost feverish study.

Is it exhausting to do that?

Dr Cho: Feverish study, I think it’s a perfect description of how I studied. Oh, it was exhausting. A session at the coaching school, it started at 7 a.m. So, I got up at 5 a.m. You know, because it was very far from, you know, where I lived.

So, I took about more than an hour. So, I got there and then took the three-hour session. And after that, me and then other students in the class, we created a study group.

So, we studied there until like 5 p.m. And after that, I came home and did some exercise and had dinner and studied more English until I went to bed.

Brynn: Collapsed. Collapsed.

Dr Cho: Collapsed. That’s right. And I think I was so consumed with that.

And sometimes I went to bed with CNN on, and I’m hoping that I could, you know, soak in more English in sleep. So that’s how I studied then come to think of it, yes.

Brynn: Well, and that’s what’s so interesting about the book is that you introduce us to this idea of this English fever, but also just this huge drive to study English.

But what’s so interesting is that then you take us back in time and you show in one of the first chapters of the book, it talks about the history of the English language in Korea. And what I find so interesting about that is that there’s this very real beginning point of when English literally made landfall in Korea. And this was in 1882.

Take us through that history a little bit, just in brief, from the arrival of English through to the Korea that we know today from a global perspective.

Dr Cho: Yes, I mean, this was so fascinating. So, this is a discovery that I made during my PhD, at the beginning of my PhD. So, I didn’t plan to examine this from a historical perspective.

But while, you know, just like any other research, you make a discovery by accident. So, while I was collecting data, I found out that the beginning of translation and interpreting in Korea, it coincided with the arrival of English in Korea. And to provide you more background on this, so you said back in 1882, Korea, so Korea’s predecessor, the Joseon dynasty, the last dynasty of Korea, it was under precarious geopolitical situations.

So, it was surrounded by strong and ambitious neighbours, which included Japan, Russia and China, which had acted as Korea’s elder brother traditionally. So, China was like a protector of Korea. And Japan in particular was the most ambitious because Japan was the first country in Asia that introduced modern technologies and civilizations from the West, primarily from the UK.

So, you know, the geographical situation of Korea is a peninsula. And Japan wanted to occupy Korea so that it could advance into the mainland China and into the bigger continent. So, in order to curb Japanese ambition, China joined forces with the US.

And then that led to this first international treaty in Korea, Korea-U.S. Treaty. And back then, there was nobody who could speak English in Korea.

And naturally, that led to the establishment of the English-Korean Translation, sorry, English-Korean Translation and Interpreting School, which is Dongmunhag. So now, what is interesting here is that the beginning of English fever in Korea, it happened at both top government and grass roots levels. And then top government level, that means that the king of the dynasty, King Gojong, had absolute trust in the US.

Why? It’s because of this Good Offices Treaty that was established between the US and Korea. And let me read you the clause of the treaty.

“The Good Offices on being informed of the case, to bring about an amicable agreement, thus showing their friendly feelings between the two countries.” So, this is a mere legal requirement. It meant nothing to then U.S. President Roosevelt.

However, King Gojong of Korea, he interpreted this as unflinching commitment from the US to protect Korea. So, the king relied on the US literally like a child does for his father.

So that was the beginning of English Fever. And also, the beginning of the US as the most powerful and generous country in the world. So that was the perception of the US at that government level.

But at the grassroots level, Translation and Interpreting. So even before this first English Korean Translation and Interpreting School was established, translators and interpreters, there was such a job in Korea because Korea had a lot of trade and business relationships with China. So, translators and interpreters, although they belong to the middle class, they were very wealthy because by using their bilingual skills, they made a lot of money out of trade.

So, becoming a translator and interpreter in Korea, there was an opportunity to climb up the cost system. The cost system in Korea back then, it was so rigid. So, there was no way that you could transcend the class barriers.

So, for people who were at the lowest class, becoming a translator and interpreter, that was the only opportunity to transcend the class barriers. And now what’s really interesting about this government established translation and interpreting school is that students were accepted regardless of class backgrounds. As long as you are linguistically talented, everybody was accepted, right?

So that opened the door for people, commoners in Korea, to become, to belong to a higher class. And then there was more American missionaries in Korea.

There were a lot of American missionaries who arrived in Korea in the 19th century, and they established the schools to teach English. This is what I found so fascinating that the English simultaneously became the language of the US and the language of power, and also the tool for class mobility for commoners. And that’s how English gathered forces and became the language of mobility and the power in Korea.

So, from a global perspective, I think in contemporary Korea, of course, you would say that there’s no such thing as a caste system, but there’s no society that is classless. Right?

Brynn: Exactly.

Dr Cho: Yeah, we all pretend that there’s no class, but there is.

Brynn: Of course there is.

Dr Cho: Yes, that’s right. So, in Korea, the reason why people pursue English so much is the amount of capital that’s attached to English. So English, this is the key findings from my research, that the English constitutes all four capitals and identified by Bourdieu.

So, it’s an economic capital and a cultural capital, social capital and also symbolic capital.

Brynn: Which is amazing. And I think for people who maybe aren’t familiar with English in Korea, or even just the concept of how very powerful English is in the world right now, to think that just having a language gives you that much capital, that much power, that much social mobility. I think especially to monolingual English speakers, it’s kind of like, what? What do you mean? It’s just my language. It’s just English.

But it really is. And in your book, you also go through the wartime era, like with the American occupation in Korea, and how that then influenced English as well. Can you tell me about that a little bit?

Dr Cho: Yes, that’s when there was a watershed in the popularity of English, and more importantly, the images of the US in Korea. So, as you know, Korea was colonized by Japan, and Japan pulled out of Korea when the Second World War ended, the US-led bombing of Hiroshima. And then when Japan left, the US came in.

And so that was to help Korea to manage the transition, right, from the colonized country to become an independent country. And to Koreans, the fact that the colonization was ended by the US, right? And then that made them believe that the US was the most generous benefactor.

And so, US basically freed up Korea. And then people had this fantastic image about the US, and coincidentally, the meaning of the US in Korean. In Korean, the US is called Mi-guk, which is based on the Chinese name of the US, Maegaw, and that means beautiful country.

Brynn: What!? Oh, my goodness. Amazing. I’m going to refer to it as beautiful country from now on. (laughs)

Dr Cho: Yes, you are from the beautiful country. (laughs)

Brynn: The beautiful country, yeah. Oh, that’s amazing.

Dr Cho: Yes. So then, and then the US was established as the most beautiful and wonderful country in the world. And as the language of the US, you know, English represented the power.

And then I wrote in the book that the very first president of the US, you know, Seungman Lee, he was baptized by the US because he was anti-communist. And then, and then he himself studied English at an American missionary school in Korea and went to the US to study. And he was the first Korean who finished a PhD.

And then spent most of his life, you know, in the US. So, Seungman Lee identified himself as American with the US. So, in his book, Autobiography, you know, it reveals his identification of himself and with the US, the freedom, the spirit of freedom and democracy.

So, you know, that kind of ideology view, idealised view of a country, and if that image of the country and then associated images of the language have been accumulated throughout history, then it’s only natural for people to believe that that is true, right? So, the whole point here is that English fever in Korea is not a contemporary phenomenon. It has always existed throughout history, but not many people know about this historical background about English in the US.

Brynn: That is so interesting how just idealizing a certain country or a certain culture can have that knock-on effect to the language of that country or culture. And on that, you discuss in your book, these two groups of English speakers in Korea. And in Korean, they actually have their own terms in the Korean language.

So, we’ve got haewepa, and those are people who learned English while living or visiting abroad in English-dominant countries. And guknaepa, people who learn English as a foreign language within Korea. And the fact that these specific terms even exist might be surprising to people, because it was to me when I first read it, who aren’t familiar with English ideologies in Korea.

So, tell us about what these terms say about the socially constructed nature of linguistic insecurity and neo-liberal ideologies in Korea.

Dr Cho: Yes, again, I didn’t think that this is specific to Korea, right? And because it was natural that people refer to each other that all you are haewepa, because you learned English abroad. And then we are guknaepa, because we have never had a chance to go abroad to learn English.

But it was only after I came here, again, when I was discussing my research and when I told this to people and people were surprised, like you, what? Oh, is there such a term?

Brynn: There’s actual words.

Dr Cho: Yeah. It’s an actual word that is popular, you know, in Korea. So, I thought, oh, that’s so interesting.

And then I started wondering, maybe the fact that such a term exists, you know, that reveals that it works as distinction, you know, between those people who learned English abroad and then people who learned English within Korea. So, it’s not, it’s much more than the fact that, you know, certain people had a chance to learn abroad and the certain people didn’t. It really is about class distinction, that because in Korea and also in many countries, in many non-English speaking countries, having an opportunity to go to an advanced country, and a lot of advanced countries are English speaking, right?

And then go to those advanced countries to study, that itself works as a class marker, right? That your family has enough resources to support you. And also, back then in Korea, going abroad, it was not allowed, right?

Except that you are from certain classes such as diplomats, or from those top class, from the top class. So, I started wondering maybe being a heawepa itself, and overseas learners of English itself, it works as a marker of class. And then that naturally, the other group who never had a chance to learn English abroad, they feel inferior, right?

And then they are not confident about the English, which I observed at the graduate school. Because at the graduate school, and I was one of those guknaepa students, because I learned English at home, right? And whereas there were a lot of students who learned English as a child because of their father’s job, you know, as a diplomat or posting, the father was posted to an English-speaking country, you know, from this company.

And then I observed that this underlying feeling of inferiority among guknaepa students, domestic learners of English and including myself.

Brynn: Yeah. Did you feel that you had to work harder as a guknaepa than the other people?

Dr Cho: Yes. Yes. We often, you know, say some things like, oh, yeah, such and such, you know, a person, their pronunciation is excellent.

Okay. She sounds like British, or he sounds like American, or he sounds like a New Yorker, right? And because they learned English, you know, in those places, yeah, in the US, whereas we, there was no term that could define us.

And the thing about language learning is that, okay, you can learn grammar. I can’t generalize, but in general, right? And people who learn the foreign language as a child, then they tend to acquire better pronunciation.

And then those students who learned English at home, and in general, our pronunciation wasn’t as good as that of, you know, overseas learners of English. I think in itself was a significant source of insecurity for us, you know, who wanted to become top interpreters in Korea. And people do get impressed by good pronunciation.

Brynn: Oh, of course. Yes, absolutely.

Dr Cho: Yes. So that was a significant factor. And then that led us to study harder and harder.

Brynn: For 14 to 16 hours a day.

Dr Cho: And then of course, I didn’t know that it was part of neoliberal ideology. So, I worked under those dominant ideologies without knowing that I was influenced by the historical factors of Korea, as well as the contemporary ideology of neoliberalism.

Brynn: Exactly. And I can absolutely see how that would happen, where, like you said, just the fact that these names exist for these two people does signify sort of this larger story that’s going on, where we’re putting more power and emphasis into the people who do get that chance to go abroad, and who do get to go study, you know, because they do maybe have more money, they have more power already. So, they’re kind of already starting with that leg up, and that’s going to make the guknaepa people feel like they have to go even harder, and even higher.

And not only do we have these two groups of people kind of vying for power, there’s also an incredible part in your book that talks specifically about sort of these gender roles in translating and interpreting. So, there’s a part that talks specifically about Korean women who go into translating and interpreting work, and the factors that are related to gender that influence this. Can you tell us more about how these women view English and English related work, and how their language journeys construct gender norms and expectations?

Dr Cho: Sure. In Korea, back then – I mean, things have changed so much.

Brynn: Sure.

Dr Cho: So, these days, a lot of young Koreans, they don’t want to marry. And if they marry, they don’t want to have a child. And I’m not sure if you know this, but Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world.

Brynn: Does it?

Dr Cho: Yes, it’s less than 0.7%. That means only one out of three women has a child. That’s rock bottom.

Brynn: Wow, that’s amazing.

Dr Cho: Yes. However, there is still this social expectation that you have to marry, and then you have to have a child. And that completes your female biography.

If you are a single woman and a childless, then, well, you might be successful in terms of career, but the people, especially from older generations, they will say something about it.

Brynn: Sure. They’ll say, but you haven’t really lived up to the cultural expectations of what womanhood is.

Dr Cho: That’s right, exactly. So, when I conducted this research, that was in 2012. Right?

So, it was 12 years ago. And a lot of my participants, so there was a single participant, they were living under the marital pressure. You have to get married.

Brynn: You need to find a man. Go find a husband. (laughs)

Dr Cho: Yeah, go find a husband. And at the same time, these women, they wanted to have their own career. And some of them, they worked for companies like I did, and they realized there was a glass ceiling.

And there was only so much that women could do in a corporate setting, which is still true in contemporary Korea, because Korea has one of the lowest levels of female executives among the OECD countries. And so, the glass ceiling is so strong there. So as a woman, there’s a limit to how far you can go.

So, I think to these women, becoming a translator and interpreter, there was an opportunity for them to build their own career, free from corporate structures and gender biases and gender norms, and especially jobs relating to Korea. They have this international image, becoming a translator and interpreter. Oh, there are open-up opportunities to work for international companies, or like the UNESCO or the UN, or you can work for an international company based overseas, or you can do some job relating to language.

So, I think they saw learning English as an avenue to lead their own independent female biography. And that’s how they expressed their beliefs in English, you know, as a language that could change their life and free from the gender norms.

Brynn: And that echoes what we saw before with in, you know, the late 1800s and the early 1900s when Korean, I’m assuming more men at that point, were using English as their sort of ticket out and their ticket up that social ladder. And it’s amazing that you then see that happening over 100 years later, but with women this time.

Dr Cho: Oh, yes, oh, that’s a very good point, Brynn. So back then, and of course I, you know, don’t have time to explain everything, right? That is just to relating to that.

So, one of the distinctive points of the history of English in Korea is this phenomenon called New Women’s Movement. And that’s during the Japanese colonization. So, the New Women’s Movement that was inspired by burgeoning feminism in Japan first, and then that influenced Korea.

So those Korean women who were educated overseas in Japan, you know, primarily because Korea was a Japanese colony, and then they learned advanced concept of feminism and women’s rights. So when they went back to Korea, they lead this movement, New Women, literally. So new women, they distinguish themselves from old women, you know, which was, you know, typically a good wife and a wise mother.

Again, there is this Korean expression, “hyunmoo yangcheo”. Literally, again, that means good wife and wise mother. So, there was the female, there was a gender expectation.

And they rejected the old gender norm to establish themselves as a model, like a new model for Korean women. And they, they consumed English and also Western civilization, right, to import Western ideologies and also to become Westernized. So, when the movement first started, it received a lot of support, including people, the Korean male intellectuals, because of the Korean male intellectuals, educating the populace, you know, under the colonisation.

It was one way to achieve independence. However, as the New Women’s Movement gathered forces, the new intellectuals, they started, they turned their back against them, because they didn’t want women to be too strong.

Brynn: You can get powerful, but only to a certain point, and then we’re going to stop you, right?

Dr Cho: Yes, exactly. That’s what happened. And I mean, also those new women, the leaders, and there was, you know, Korea was an extremely conservative country, and it still is, you know, to some extent, but they, you know, believed in free love and free sex, right?

And that didn’t go down well.

Brynn: That wouldn’t have gone down well with the powerful men. No, no, no. And obviously, we cannot talk about gender roles, especially of women, without talking about beauty standards.

And something that many women all over the world can relate to is the idea of unrealistic beauty standards that society sets on us. And your book discusses how these female interpreters and translators actually have to perform what you call aesthetic labour because they’re under pressure to not only be amazing in English, but also to look beautiful in order to compete with others in the translating and interpreting market. Tell us about that.

Dr Cho: Yes. It was a very interesting discovery. At the end of my research, I observed this phenomenon in Korea, which was called good-looking interpreter.

It was a social phenomenon and frequently featured in Korea that they had this capture of a good-looking female interpreter in action. And they said, Oh, such a such person, she’s one of those good-looking interpreters. And I was thinking, this is very interesting.

Why suddenly good-looking interpreters? And if you are familiar with Korea, you would know that there’s social pressure on good looks. And it’s not just for women, for men too.

Korea, it has obsession with beauty. And at first, I thought that maybe it’s part of that. And then as I had conversations, with the participants, I realised that the interpreting market in Korea, it was becoming saturated.

And because the number of schools specialising in translation and interpreting, it increased and that there were more graduates who specialised in English translation and interpreting. And then more and more people had opportunities to go abroad. After the Korean government lifted the ban on going abroad, and more and more people went abroad to learn English and study it.

And so, there were more English speakers in Korea. So, one way to distinguish language professionals from those people who could speak English, but not to the extent that they could translate and interpret. For female interpreters, I found out that it was beauty.

And the more beautiful you are, then the better chances you might get, especially if you are a freelance interpreter. Why? Because a lot of interpreters in Korea, they work for males.

So, the market itself, it gives an illusion that it’s a female dominant profession, because a lot of language workers are females. However, who do they work for? The males.

Brynn: The men.

Dr Cho: Yeah, the men. They are the top executives of companies, and they have important positions in industries. Therefore, it’s the men who hire female interpreters.

And very interestingly, a look was an important factor. And one of those ads that I collected as part of the data, it specifically said that a woman of a certain height, it said that it has to be over a certain height of 163cm or 165cm. And what’s the height to do with the language work?

So that itself, it demonstrates the male expectations of language work and language workers. And hence the term aesthetic labour is not just about language, but it’s also about how you look.

Brynn: Which is just mind-boggling to me to think that somebody could, like you had to, study for 14 to 16 hours a day for years to do all of this really difficult mental and intellectual work. And then to get to a point where someone then says to you, but you also have to conform to beauty standards, that just feels galling, you know? But you don’t see that happening with men at the same rate in Korea, or do you? What do you think?

Well, there was only one male participant. So, and then that person, he had a different motivation to learn English. So, I haven’t had an opportunity, you know, to observe if the same rule applies to men.

But, you know, if you just look at the gender dynamics of the industry, then it speaks itself, right? And it’s a male-dominated, it’s a female, yes, it is a female-dominated profession. However, the industry itself is controlled by men.

Brynn: That’s what’s so interesting.

Dr Cho: Yes.

Brynn: And something that you talk about is, yes, it’s female-dominated, but that also means that because they are freelance workers, they don’t always have consistent work. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dr Cho: Oh, yes, sure. In Korea, the interpreting industry is very different, you know, from, we are in Australia, right, in Australia, and in English-speaking countries, because in English-speaking countries, community interpreting is the mainstream interpreting. So, community interpreting, it refers to the type of interpreting that helps migrants who are not fluent in the societal language, right?

So non-English-speaking migrants who have trouble accessing health care, education, or government assistance, then they need language support. So, translators and interpreters in Australia and in other migrant-receiving countries, they are community interpreters, because they serve communities. Whereas in Korea, Korea is becoming multicultural, because there are a lot more migrants, especially from Southeast Asia.

However, traditionally, Korea is ethnically, it has this belief that Korea is an ethnically homogeneous country. Therefore, the type of interpreting there is not community interpreting. There is community interpreting, but it’s not the mainstream interpreting.

So, the mainstream interpreting is simultaneous interpreting. If you are not familiar with interpreting, you might have seen the image of interpreters working in booths, right? And then speaking into the microphone, interpreting the speech of this prominent political figure, President Obama, giving a speech at the United Nations, or interpreters working for companies.

And because there are a lot of big companies in Korea, like Samsung and Hyundai, and those companies, they have trade relations with businesses overseas. So to deal with the business transactions in English, because English is a global language, then they need a translator and interpreter. So therefore, a lot of interpreters in Korea, they work for businesses or for governments, and either they work for companies on a fixed-term contract or they freelance.

So, when they freelance, again, their clients, they are coming from those industries, government officials or they are top-ranking businessmen. So when you work for these people who have power, then what are the criteria that they are looking at when they hire an interpreter? So again, it’s a gendered question.

Brynn: Yeah, absolutely. And that means that even though this profession of interpreting is so glamorized and, you know, these, especially the women, study for so long, they might have to perform this aesthetic labour, but they might get hired and not have this work all the time. It’s just sort of when these companies need it.

And that means that their own financial income is not going to be consistent, which is just so fascinating to think how glamorized the profession is, but then the reality is, but we’re not always going to have a consistent good income.

Dr Cho: I think that’s the illusion about freelancing jobs. People think that they can be free to build their own career, but when you’re in the industry, you are not controlled. You don’t understand, right?

And then you are literally working for these people at the top. So, therefore, being a freelancer comes with a significant amount of insecurity, feelings of insecurity, financial, and also its feelings, because you don’t know when your next job will be. You might be unemployed for how long or how many months, and that’s why they keep pushing themselves to accept more jobs and to enhance individual competitiveness.

Brynn: Yes, that’s exactly it. It’s that always enhance that competitiveness, look better than anyone else just to try to get those jobs.

Dr Cho: Yes, yes.

Brynn: And this book was published in 2017, and you said that a lot of your work came from 2012. It’s now 2024. Where do you see the future of English language translating and interpreting going in Korea?

Is the profession still ultra-competitive and wrapped up in language ideologies, or do you see it changing in any way?

Dr Cho: I think the profession itself is still very competitive. And then it’s regarded as one of those highly professional jobs. However, because of AI, it’s a very big question.

You know, it’s sometimes said in media that it’s one of the first jobs that might be replaced by AI. Yes, but I don’t see it coming yet because, you know, myself, I have done a lot of experiment with the AI translation and I’m not interpreting. But yes, AI works well for certain type of translation such as legal documents, because the legal documents, there is a template, right?

Brynn: It’s like a formula.

Dr Cho: Yeah, that’s right. So, if you have, if AI has a lot of databases to work out the structure, then it does quite a good job. However, for other types of jobs, and as you know, in language, the hidden meanings of language in humans do a far better job at capturing those meanings. Capturing the nuance of human communication and emotion.

And then, so the AI is still, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of AI. But it’ll be interesting to see how things will change, because the profession itself, especially translation, there has been this prediction that a lot of translators will become post-editors. That means that the AI will do draft translation, and the human translators will review the draft translation done by AI.

And that is already happening in Korea. For example, Netflix, I understand that it does a lot of translation. It’s done by AI, machine translation.

But for interpreting, I think people still feel uncomfortable, right? It’s not natural, speaking to a machine, maybe young generation might not. But people, they prefer to have face to face conversation.

So, for interpreting, I think there is a long way to go.

Brynn: And that is interesting that maybe for, and we should specify for maybe people who don’t know, translating means the written language, literally translating from one language to another, whereas interpreting is for spoken or signed languages. And like you said, that’s often in person. It can be simultaneous or it can be consecutive.

And what about for you? What’s next for you and your work and teaching at Macquarie and research? What do you have coming up?

Dr Cho: Oh, well, in line with this conversation, so I’m working on my third monograph, and it’s about healthcare interpreting in Australia.

Brynn: Which I’m extremely excited about.

Dr Cho: Yes, yes, I can see that. So, I’m approaching healthcare interpreting in Australia again, from a historical and a contemporary perspective, and from a critical social linguistic perspective. Because the contrast in terms of English between Australia and Korea, and that always made me wonder, that why is English so natural in Australia?

I’m asking the question, and people might find that, you know, what a pointless question, because Australia is an English-speaking country. But we know that it’s a multilingual country, and over 300 languages are spoken in Australia. But the English has become so dominant, and then again, so how the historical dominance of English, how has it shaped people’s perspectives on other languages, represented by translation and interpreting, and also their perspectives on other language speakers, represented by interpreters, and how English monolingualism, so how does that impact interpreting?

So, from a historical perspective, again, again, in any societies, and it’s not just Korea and Australia, but in any societies, the very first foreign encounter, it generates interpreting, right? Therefore, interpreting is a birthplace of foreign intercultural communication. So that’s how I see it.

Brynn: That’s going to be fascinating. I cannot wait to read that, because as you know, that’s a lot very similar to research that I am conducting. So, we’re going to have to have another chat sometime soon after that’s done and do another episode.

Well, thank you so much, Jinhyun, for coming on and for talking to me today.

Dr Cho: No worries, I really enjoyed it. I hope that the listeners will enjoy it too.

Brynn: I think they absolutely will. And thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time.

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

Enjoy the show!

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

References

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

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

Welcome to the New Books Network.

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

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

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

Welcome to the show, Rosemary.

Prof Salomone: Thank you for inviting me, Ingrid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dist Prof Piller: That’s unbelievable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Till next time!

Handed my MA dissertation in four years ago on this day. This article by Piller and Takahashi, "A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market" from @Lg_on_the_Move, directly inspired my dissertation and my subsequent PhD research. https://t.co/4i3gjY3UqJ

— Dr Owen Minns (@OTMinns) September 24, 2019

Teaching English in Japan

Even before I set foot in Japan, being a white, university-educated male from England gave me access to jobs at commercial language schools and teaching programs like the JET Program. The first school I taught at, a commercial language school (Eikaiwa in Japanese), advertised itself as a British English school. The company’s adverts featured pictures of young, white, smartly dressed teachers reflecting the trends identified by Piller and Takahashi. I later taught at a private high school where being a British passport holder was one of the requirements for employment. In this school, the foreign teachers were collectively addressed as “natives” by the Japanese teachers, and we had an ambivalent position in the school despite prominently featuring on the school’s website and at open days.

While being white, British, and male gave me privileged mobility to gain stable employment in Japan, both my employers offered little or no encouragement for Japanese learning. This meant that after 6 years of teaching in Japan, I developed a bittersweet relationship with Japanese, characterised by periods of both engagement and non-engagement with learning Japanese.

After returning to the UK to study for a master’s, reading Piller and Takahashi’s work connected many of the dots I had felt while in Japan. Throughout my time in Japan, I met teachers with varying Japanese proficiency levels. There were constant discussions about the need to speak Japanese and even some tension between teachers about their Japanese levels, but there was little institutional support for Japanese learning. Reading about the ideologies identified by Piller and Takahashi on learners led me to wonder how these forces influenced teachers in Japan when they were learning Japanese, so I made this goal of my Ph.D. research.

My research

Poster for an English language school in Japan (Image credit: Shinshin50)

I researched how two groups, newly arrived and long-term teachers learned Japanese. For the newly arrived teachers, 9 took part in a 6-month diary study in which they wrote weekly diaries about their Japanese language learning and participated in monthly interviews. For the long-term teachers, I interviewed 13 teachers who had made lives in Japan about their Japanese language learning histories.

The newly arrived teachers had to self-direct their learning while trying to find their position in the classroom, the school, and Japan. The newly arrived teachers found it challenging to develop consistent learning routines. While they had access to countless online self-study learning resources and approaches, they struggled to consistently use these resources and find appropriate face-to-face Japanese classes. One teacher felt she had to choose between her own mental well-being and Japanese learning, while other newly arrived teachers found managing Japanese learning alongside working and living in Japan caused them stress and mental health issues.

The long-term teachers also experienced trouble regulating Japanese language learning on a long-term basis. Some teachers were able to build long-term learning approaches that combined Japanese study with involvement with local communities, while others experienced more fluctuating Japanese learning, interspersing periods of engaged learning with periods of disengagement. Finding opportunities to use Japanese was a struggle for both groups of teachers as building connections with Japanese people depended on introductions from employers, connections teachers had before they arrived in Japan, or the areas they were placed in.

The deep impact of the desire for English in Japan on the lives of these foreign teachers could be seen in the lives of long-term foreign teachers in Japan. Often these teachers used English in romantic relationships, with one male teacher describing how marrying an English-speaking foreigner was seen as a way out of Japanese society by Japanese women. Due to the enduring desire for English in Japan, many long-term teachers with children in my study used English with their children to transfer their linguistic capital of being a native English speaker to their children. As they became long-term residents of Japan, the value of studying for academic and teaching qualifications that would help advance in their English teaching careers often trumped the symbolic capital Japanese learning gave them.

The key for both groups of teachers to sustaining Japanese learning and use was facilitative communities and individuals to use Japanese with. These individuals and communities often modified their Japanese and encouraged English teachers to learn and use Japanese. They were found within local areas, workplaces, and community groups. They invested in these teachers as Japanese speakers despite ideologies that saw foreign English teachers as short-term visitors to Japan and foreigners as deficient Japanese speakers. The depth and sustainability of each teacher’s Japanese engagement was strongly impacted by whether a learner had access to individuals and groups willing to invest in them as Japanese speakers.

The Future

Given the recent increases in migration to Japan, the importance of providing opportunities for migrants to learn Japanese will only increase in the coming years. Despite this, 70% of Japanese learning programs in Japan outside of the higher education sector are taught by community volunteers, many of whom do not have formal teaching qualifications. One recent study of Japanese foreign language programs in Tokyo found that in one large central ward of Tokyo, the lack of community-based classes meant that: “In 2020, Shibuya reported 10,597 foreign residents; if all of these residents want to complete the ward-sponsored courses, it would take more than 100 years”. Due to the “desire” of Japanese people to learn English, foreign English teachers will no doubt continue to live and work in Japan. Some teachers like me and the participants in my research in Japan will build lives in Japan. It remains to be seen whether there are the learning resources to meet the needs of migrants in Japan.

Being “the desired”

While being “the desired” in Japan gives English teachers “privileged mobility” to access jobs in Japan, the Japanese learning of the teachers in my study was dependent on each teacher’s own agency, their access to facilitative individuals and communities in Japan, and their ability to deal with the stress of learning Japanese while living and working in Japan. Being the “desired” for their English within Japan influenced the teachers in three significant ways: it mediated their access to communities of practice in which to use Japanese, it dictated the support English teachers had for their Japanese learning, and how English teachers and broader Japanese society valued Japanese learning.

One unintended consequence of my research was that it forced me to examine my relationship with Japanese learning and using Japanese. Examining how these teachers learned and used Japanese made me re-evaluate and change my approach to learning Japanese. These changes have allowed me to engage more with learning and using Japanese.

While I outlined some of the broader conclusions of my PhD here, because of the large amount of data I collected, there are even more insights to come from my research in the future.

References

Hatasa, Y. and Watanabe, T. (2017). Japanese as a Second Language Assessment in Japan: Current Issues and Future Directions. Language Assessment Quarterly, 14(3), pp.192-212. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2017.1351565
Lee, S. J., & Niiya, M. (2021). Migrant oriented Japanese language programs in Tokyo: A qualitative study about language policy and language learners. Migration and Language Education, 2(1), 17–33. https://doi.org/10.29140/mle.v2n1.489
Minns, O. T. (2021). The teacher as a learner: English teachers learning Japanese in Japan [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Anglia Ruskin University. Available at: https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/707748
Piller, I., & Takahashi, K., 2006. A passion for English: Desire and the language market. In A. Pavlenko (ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, pp. 59 – 83.
Takahashi, K., 2013. Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

This episode’s conversation centers around Dr Peterson’s 2020 book Making Sense of “Bad English,” which is available open access. The book discusses how the notions of “good” versus “bad” English came about, and some of the consequences of these views of language.

The book is a must-use for teachers and professors who introduce their students to sociolinguistics as it contains discussion questions at the end of each chapter as well as recommendations for further reading. However, you don’t have to be a Linguistics student to enjoy this book. Making Sense of “Bad English” is for anyone who has ever wondered how it’s possible to have so many different varieties of one language, what the Standard Language Ideology has to do with Santa Clause, and why English spelling is so chaotic.

Enjoy the show!

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

If you like this episode, be sure to check out more Language on the Move resources about language ideologies here!

Episode Transcript

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

My guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Peterson. Elizabeth is a Senior University Lecturer in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

Today we are going to talk in general about her research into language ideologies, and in particular about her 2020 book entitled “Making Sense of ‘Bad English'”.

Elizabeth, welcome to the show, we’re so happy to have you here with us today.

Dr Peterson: Thank you for inviting me. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Brynn: Can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself? How did you become interested in linguistics in general and language ideologies in particular? And on that note, what exactly is a language ideology?

Dr Peterson: Ok, well, I’ll start with your first question, and a little bit about myself. I’m an American migrant to Finland. I’ve lived here for about 20 years. I did my PhD in the United States, and I live in a home with 3 languages – Finnish, Swedish and English. Finnish, of course, is the de facto and also the constitutional majority language in Finland, but Swedish is a constitutional language with about 300,000 speakers, and my family fits into that category. So, language is all around. You know, I’m a strong advocate of multilingualism, and those are the principles that we try to espouse in our home as well. Practice what you preach.

Brynn: I absolutely agree. In my house, we have not so much languages, we have two dialects. We have American English and Australian English. So, not so much the language spectrum but we definitely have words where we’ll say them and ask each other, “What do you mean by that? I don’t know that word.” Still, 15 years on in this multi-dialectal relationship.

Dr Peterson: Isn’t that incredible?

Brynn: I know, right? Can you tell us, for people who might not know, what is a language ideology? What do we mean when we say language ideology as linguists?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, well let’s start with what an ideology is. An ideology, at its most basic sense, means a belief that you have. So, there are many really good definitions of language ideology that are coming out of anthropology, pretty much, and then we kind of borrowed all of that into sociolinguistics. So, an ideology is a belief, therefore a language ideology is a belief about language. A really deep-seated belief. And this is a basic definition that comes from somebody like Michael Silverstein, for example.

There are many definitions that I like. I’ll kind of keep it brief today so it doesn’t turn into a classroom lecture. Nobody’s interested in that.

Another kind of nutshell definition that I like comes from the linguist James Milroy who says that it’s common-sense views about language. So, these are things that we kind of don’t question, and we just think that it’s always been there, that this is just the way it is, and therefore it makes it really, really difficult to turn that around and present it back to people in a way where they’re willing to go, “Oh! So, you mean that might not be an absolute truth? That this is just what I think?”.

So, truth, of course, is a really negotiable concept. Just because it’s what people think doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s complicated. That’s what we need to present back to people, that this is much more complicated than what they might think, and also link it to concepts and realities like language discrimination. They might not be able to make that link on their own, so that’s one thing we can do as linguists, is to make that link for them.

Brynn: That is such a good point that there really is that link between language ideologies and discrimination.

Dr Peterson: And it’s not a weak link, it’s a strong link!

Brynn: 100%, exactly. Exactly. And kind of on that note, one of the first things that we as sociolinguists learn is something called the Three Circles Model, proposed by Braj Kachru. That’s one of those Sociolinguistics 101 things that we learn. But not everyone that’s currently listening to us is a sociolinguist, so can you tell us what the Three Circles Model is and what it has to do with how people perceive different varieties of English?

Dr Peterson: Sure, and maybe I can start a little bit by just talking a little bit about who Braj Kachru was. He was from the Subcontinent. He was from Kashmir originally. He just died a few years ago. He grew up in a colonial setting speaking English as a second language. His idea with creating that model was to empower people from settings like that and not keep putting them down and saying that their English was somehow substandard or a learner variety or whatever, so it was a way of him taking ownership for people who come from that kind of demographic or geographical setting with a colonial history.

Anyway, I’ve presented this so many times in class. So, if you could visualise with me, if you will, 3 concentric circles. It looks like a bullseye with 3 circles, right? Kachru’s idea was that the Inner Circle, and that’s what he actually called it, the inner circle, is comprised of people who live in geographical territories where English is, you could consider it the mother tongue or native language for the vast majority of the population. And English is used in all domains, most domains anyway – family, maybe there’s always some exceptions, we all live in multilingual societies, that’s just the reality.

But anyway, you can see what I mean. It’s mostly English. And furthermore, the way English got to places that are included in that Inner Circle are places where we had settler colonialism. And that’s a key distinction there. It tends to be white people who came from Europe and brought the English language with them. They took over, settled there, and became dominant in many ways. So, this is what happened in Australia, this is what happened in the United States.

Furthermore, these people from the Inner Circle, because of the history that they have, they have the power in today’s world, and it’s been like this for many decades now, people would even say centuries, that they have power over the English language. There’s this sense that it really “belongs” to them, so we call this the “norm-providing” circle as well. I’m from the United States. Brynn, you’re from the United States. We have the privilege of being able to tell other people, “Oh, this is how you should speak English. Speak English like me.” So, we get jobs in Japan and Korea and stuff like that and nobody really questions it. It’s just like, “Oh, yeah, you’re the native speaker, you know everything about the language.” That’s the Inner Circle.

Let’s now contrast that with the Outer Circle. So, picture the ring, we’re moving on. There’s the next ring in the bullseye. That’s the Outer Circle, and these are places that have a colonial history. So, here we’re talking about real overt multilingualism, where English is an additional language which is usually formally acquired. That means they learn it in a classroom, sometimes from a very early age, but more often than not the home language is something different. Or there might even be 2 or 3 home languages. So, the Outer Circle is really characterised by strong multilingualism.

But English is considered this elite language that is learned in formal contexts, and it’s associated with, sort of this colonial history. So, power coming that way. Even though we wouldn’t necessarily consider this a “learner” variety because it’s so ingrained and it’s been there for so many centuries in some cases, there’s still this tension that, ok, do we look to the UK or the US to tell us how to use this English? And there’s a real divide that way. In some places they are looking for that model and in other Outer Circle settings it’s very much like, “Yeah, we got this, thanks. Thanks for giving us English. It’s our now. Just back off.”

Brynn: Exactly. I love that explanation, and I know that there is this real, like you said, tension between the circles that are in that bullseye, and this idea of “Who ‘owns’ English, and who does English belong to?”. Especially since it has become such a powerful language in the world.

Dr Peterson: Absolutely. There’s still one more circle, if I could just briefly mention that, Brynn. And that’s the Expanding Circle, so that’s the outside ring. It’s called the Expanding Circle because that’s where a lot of the action is.

So, the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle, those populations tend to stay pretty stable. I didn’t give any examples of Outer Circle varieties, I just realised that. Here we’re talking about places like Nigeria, India, Pakistan.

In the Expanding Circle we’re talking about the rest of the world. Those are folks who learned English as a foreign language, and even that is such a, kind of, nebulous, confusing concept in today’s world. Because here I am in Finland, and I tell you what, English doesn’t feel that foreign here in a lot of settings anymore. So, these labels, I really want to emphasise that they are not fixed. That’s actually one very big criticism of this model, that we have these labels in this way and understanding English. But it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story.

Brynn: Exactly. And that’s such a big point for us all to consider, that it’s not fixed. And it often feels like it’s becoming even more rapidly not fixed in this globalised world.

Dr Peterson: Absolutely, it’s all over the place. There have been several subsequent models, and I know some people consider this model a little bit old fashioned, but for this exact book what I wanted to do was set up this tension between these kinds of settings. I liked it more for, I guess you could say, a heuristic device, to just get people to think.

One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is because, as a migrant to Finland and to Europe, it became very evident to me that there was this complete disconnect in many ways between what people in the Inner Circle think about English and what people in a setting like Finland think about English. I wanted to connect those dots for people about the ideologies in particular. So, this concept of the Three Circles Model became a way to do that.

Brynn: Absolutely, I absolutely agree. And, continuing on that, a lot of people who do speak English as their first and often only language, so the people in that Inner Circle that you were talking about, they might not be aware of something that’s called the Standard Language Ideology. Can you talk to us about what a Standard Language Ideology is, and in this case particularly in regard to English, and how it might manifest? What I love is that in this book you talk about what this ideology has to do with Santa Clause. Can you tell us about that?

Dr Peterson: Oh yeah, sure, thanks for that! I love that there’s a fan of the Santa Clause metaphor in the book. I wanted to make an analogy, so I chose Santa Clause. Let’s get to that in a moment. First, I’ll answer the first part of your question about Standard Language Ideology.

So, we talked about language ideology as basically just being deep-seated beliefs or common sense, everyday views about what language is and not really questioning what those beliefs are. So, a Standard Language Ideology means that people don’t question the standard. They kind of have this idea that it’s always been there. It’s kind of funny, as if it would have been some kind of divine origins, that it’s got some kind of supernatural force, that it’s always been there, intact and beautiful.

In the book, what I really wanted to point out was that we have these standard varieties of English which have cultural, historical, and social prestige in many ways. But it’s nowhere near the whole story. It’s only one variety of English, or some would say there are several standards. There’s a different standard in Australia than there is in the US, for example. Or different standards, even, plural.

But people who really, really espouse to this standard language culture, they tend to think that is the whole language. There is nothing else. And, when it comes to English in particular, come on! This is a language with, what, 1.5, 2 billion speakers in the world? The estimates vary a lot because we have to first define what it means to speak English, but that’s a different story. Do you really want to tell me that a language with up to 2 billion people has one variety and that’s a standard? Come on, you know? But people think it’s the only valid standard, and that’s what we should all be aiming to achieve. We should all talk like that. How boring that would be if everyone in fact did that!

It’s interesting and a little bit sad actually, to think about how English got to this status through exploitation and colonisation and so on. But what we have now is this treasure trove of varieties, and to try to think that we should all be speaking the same way and using English in one way – oh, how boring! How terrible! No, no, there is so much diversity, and you can celebrate that diversity, but that’s not enough. We need to also recognise that there are these divisions. I use the term linguistic discrimination about these different varieties. I kind of got ahead of myself, but I really wanted to emphasise that there are actual drawbacks and challenges to having this language ideology.

You asked in particular about the Santa Clause analogy that I used in the book. Thanks for bringing that up, and I will tell you that this was a contentious topic when I was proposing the book because the reviewers for the book were other academics, other linguists, of course. This book proposal was reviewed by 14 people if I remember right, something like that. A large majority of them said, “Really? You want to write about Santa Clause in a linguistics book?”. But I tell you what, Brynn, this was a book where I swallowed my academic ego because this book is for students. It’s for people who don’t know about Linguistics. I really wanted to bring it to a level that everyday people could understand and it would resonate. If I haven’t done that, then I haven’t done my job here.

So, I thought long and hard about what could be an analogy. So, you’re talking about, I think it’s Chapter 3 or Chapter 2 even. Anyway, I wanted to show that what we consider now as “standard” English actually has a birthplace in time and that what we consider the “standard” is man-made. It’s not divine. I use these words like there’s this idea that it’s divine and nobody can touch it. It’s this sacred thing. But it’s literally man-made, and I really do mean man-made, because it’s been the people in power, the people who have the most social power who have decided how we should speak, what’s considered correct, and it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of logical sense but it’s that way because they said it should be that way, these rules that we adhere to in Standard English.

So, I went back to any language that has a standardised variety, it’s always connected to having a written variety in that language, a written language. So, I took the history back to the printing press in the 1400s in London. I started there, and then went on about how spelling became fixed and so on and so on. And this is the same trajectory for any language that has a standard variety.

Anyway, I did the same kind of, let’s go back in history, because for me as a person from the US and somebody who comes from a Christian background, Christmas and Santa Clause – these kinds of things that we celebrate as families, they’re seen in the same way as, “Well, this is just what we do. It means so much, and this is our truth.” I compared it to folklore, actually, in the book. I have some nice quotes in there from folklore. We believe it because we think it’s the way it’s always been, but in fact, you can trace the thread back, and that’s what I did.

It was really fun research to go back and realise, “Oh, you mean our contemporary conception of Santa Clause only dates to the 1800s in New York City? What?!”. The red suit, the reindeer, all that, it literally dates back to one poem – “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”. Then it just exploded, just like the idea of a standard language ideology. So, getting students to make that connection, to realise that these are man-made phenomenon, and therefore they are not fixed. They are not divine, and we can do something about it. We don’t have to just accept this. We can question this. We can mold this ourselves.

Brynn: And that’s what I loved about the Santa ideology. And I loved how, in the book, as you said, it really is such a resource for not just students but teachers. Professors. Anyone who is teaching undergrad, or an intro to sociolinguistics course. And in the book, when you talk about the Santa Clause story, and how that then became the standard because of that poem, you also say, “And if this particular folklore doesn’t apply to you and your culture or to the standard language that you’re thinking of, think of anything else.” Because we all have these types of stories in any culture that then take off and become the “norm” that we all, like you said, don’t question.

Dr Peterson: I was concerned that that would be too Western-centric, and even the Christian overtones there with this Christmas thing. But in the end, I went with it. Thanks for bringing that up because I definitely don’t want to be exclusionary in any way. The same kind of concept could be applied to how you celebrate weddings or any kind of ritual. Any kind of holiday. Doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim or Jewish or whatever. Or any kind of social group or lifestyle that maybe you’re a part of.

Brynn: Anything where it feels like it’s just “always been”.

Dr Peterson: Exactly, that’s the point.

Brynn: I like that you just brought up the idea of us getting a Standard Language Ideology particularly when a language becomes written. In the book you do take care to point out that there are so many languages in the world that are not written, that are oral languages.

You have, I wrote it down, a quote in the book, and it says, “Indeed, there is a common fallacy that the ‘best’ speakers of English should speak English like it is written…In other words, a written form of a language is a prerequisite for standardization, which in turn is a prerequisite for prescriptivism about language.” I just think that’s such a valuable thing to keep in mind, especially when we talk about prescriptivism and people saying, “Well you can’t say xyz because it’s not written like that.” But in the book, you do really take care to point out that there are so many languages that aren’t written and therefore don’t go through this standardisation process.

Dr Peterson: It’s really ridiculous that if you look at English spelling, and I think I say that in the book as well, that, “Really? You want me to pronounce this like it’s written? Are you sure?!”. English spelling is so chaotic. It was such a chaotic process really. It was so haphazard. I think it’s quite funny, actually, I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but the idea that being able to spell in English is a sign of intelligence and there’s these spelling been and everything? That means you can memorise really well, but there is no logic. There is no logic in English spelling. None.

Brynn: 100%. My background before I re-entered academia was as a teacher of English as a second or foreign language. And I often told my students, “Do not be upset that you’re not remembering how to spell these things. Remember that English is basically 4 languages standing on top of each other wearing a trench coat and it makes no sense. So definitely don’t feel bad if you can’t spell these absolutely bananas words in English.” They make no sense, I agree.

And kind of on that idea, thinking about people who are coming from those sort of Outer Circles, your book has a section called, “When ‘bad’ really means ‘foreign’”. Can you tell us about how and why people perceive someone’s English to be ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ and the deeper implications behind that judgment?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, great question, Brynn. I love this question. So, one thing that we know from a lot of research on sociolinguistics and language ideologies and also a connected area called language attitudes is that when we are judging other people’s languages, we’re putting ourselves in a position of superiority. We’re saying, “You need to be more like me.” It might be so hard to admit that, but if you tear back the layers or, like you just mentioned, you take off the trench coat, that’s what it is at its core.

So, the way we use language is such a beautiful manifestation of who we are as people. And it tells all these social cues, you know, within seconds of hearing somebody’s voice. Research backs me up on this. You are doing statistics in your brain. You’re thinking, “Where is this person from? How old are they? What’s their gender? How educated are they? What kind of work do they do?”. It’s incredible, but you’re mapping onto the templates in your head all this information about people.

So, what this means, if you peel back the layers, we’re taking one of these beautiful, beautiful things we have as humans, not only to express our thoughts and contents of what we do, but who we are as people. When you’re judging somebody’s language because they sound foreign, maybe because they sound like they might be Native American or African American or whatever, all this information, a young person, a woman, whatever, that you’re actually judging that person. If you then take it further and say, “You’re a young girl and you shouldn’t talk like this,” you’re actually not saying something about the language, but you’re saying something about young girls and your biases towards them. So that’s a really important point to make, that when we say somebody’s “talking wrong” we might think we’re doing them a favour, like, “Oh, let me help you,” but what you’re really saying is, “I’m judging you as a person, and I don’t think that you’re good enough.” That’s the core message there.

You asked specifically about people who are foreign, so here we’re talking about people who speak English with an accent that clearly marks them as speaking English as a second language. So, ok, what did I just talk about? What we’re doing is we’re saying, “Oh, you’re not one of us.” It’s xenophobic, really. It’s racist. And we cushion that by saying, “Oh, but I’m trying to help you”.

I think there are different ways of helping people, and when I teach in the class, I call it “giving someone the hand linguistically. As a migrant myself in Finland, I feel this very deeply. My Finnish clearly marks me as a foreigner. Sometimes people literally do give you the hand when you try to speak Finnish, and it feels so bad.

There’s this famous line from this American comedy, Modern Family, with Sophia Vergara. And she has this famous line, “You have NO idea how smart I am in Spanish!”. And that’s how it is, like please recognise that this is a whole person in their native language. Instead of putting that person down and saying, “Why can’t you speak proper English?”, maybe this person speaks Punjabi and Hindi and you don’t even know what else. Like, let’s respect that and the fact that they’re trying to communicate with you in your mother tongue. Let’s applaud that instead of making the person feel terrible about it. So, that’s what it comes down to. It becomes a form of xenophobia and colonialism in your own setting, like, “You don’t speak English right, let me tell you.”

Brynn: Yes, absolutely. That has so much impact, I think, on the field that I came from, which is teaching English as a second or foreign language. In my experience, because I would teach adults, I would often get students who would ask me for advice on “accent reduction”. They would say, “Can I go to a class to reduce my accent?”, and I would always tell them no because I have an accent in my second language, which is Spanish, because of the muscles in my mouth. Because of the way that I was raised speaking English, these were the inputs that I got at such an early age, and I don’t want to take away the accent that marks me as who I am. There is nothing wrong with having “an accent” because every single one of us has an accent.

Something I heard once from someone, and I wish I could remember who said this because I would love to attribute this to them, is that it’s important that when you talk to someone, if you recognise that they are speaking your language as an additional language, so maybe that’s not the language that they were raised with, when you hear their accent think about how their mother sang lullabies to them as a baby, and how they learned their language starting that way. They learned how to move their mouth listening to their mother sing to them. The muscles in their mouth formed that way, and that’s what eventually leads to an accent. And there’s nothing wrong with that. All it shows is that we’ve been taught language by the people who cared for us.

Dr Peterson: Yeah, I think that’s a really beautiful way to look at that.

Brynn: I’ll have to find out who said that, and I will tell you. So let’s talk about some of the factors that influence language. Your book discusses several explanations posited for the existence of distinct dialects of English. What are those, in brief, explanations and how do they combine in ways that cause us to make judgments about someone’s use of a language, in this case English?

Dr Peterson: I’ll maybe answer the last part of the question first. What causes us to make judgments – like I just said, it assumes a position of power and authority. Like, “Oh, I’m so important and I think I’m better than you, so I think I have the right to tell you how you should be speaking.” Something as innate, as essential to the human condition as language. Let me just tell you how you should be doing that. You’re doing it wrong. It has the risk of cutting to the very heart of somebody. Like you just said, the lullabies that your parents sing to you, and then somebody at school or in different more formal settings outside the home say, “The way you talk at home is wrong.” What does that do to a child or a person, when you rip away at this very intimate and core part of somebody’s identity? It can be very potentially damaging to people, and I think it’s time that we faced that reality.

You asked about some of the explanations, and the reason I included this chapter in the book where I talked about these explanations was because I had spent so much time in the previous chapters talking about why there’s a standard variety and what it means and what are the drawbacks of that, what are the reasons why languages have a standard.

But I wanted to make it clear, you know, if there’s so much push for us all to be speaking some kind of standard variety, then why do we have so much variation? Why don’t dialects die out? And they never will because we’re very different as people. It was a difficult mental exercise, and I know there could be many other explanations, but the explanations that I thought long and hard about and ultimately wrote in the book were 3 different areas.

The first is what I call access and isolation. I talk about prestige, particularly what has been called covert prestige. That means, like, in-group prestige. It might not be prestigious at different levels of society, especially formal, top-down levels of society. I think this is actually the most important, this third concept which is identity and group identity. These factors, as you pointed out in your question, they interact in many ways.

I come from the setting of the US. The examples that I have in the book draw largely from the US, so I’ll stick with those examples. In the United States, we no longer have official segregation, not official, but there is definitely de facto segregation. You see this in pretty much every major US city, and the situation does not improve. You have really start differences. You can literally cross the street – I used to live in Washington DC –

Brynn: I did too!

Dr Peterson: Oh, that’s interesting! So, you know this, you remember this. Did you ever go to Southeast? I never went there once.

Brynn: I never went there, but I know that area, and you’re absolutely right. The difference between just two streets – one street and the street next to it – was stark.

Dr Peterson: And that’s in the nation’s capital. It’s just so grim and so stark, like you said. So, this access and isolation, and by access what I mean is access to socioeconomic factors like, I talked in the book about housing, education. So, this is de facto segregation. It goes on and it ties to socioeconomic status.

So, if you look at statistics from the United States, I believe it was John Law who said that this is pretty much in any developed society, we see the same kind of trend. Very unfortunate trends, that race and ethnicity tend to be intertwined with a lower socioeconomic status and less socioeconomic advantage. You might have the idea from the outside looking in of, “Well, why don’t you just better yourselves? Why don’t you just pick up and move on?” But how do you do that if you have this extreme cycle of poverty and disadvantage and this is your everyday life? It takes money, it takes ties to the outside world. It takes support to be able to pick up and leave. I think it’s quite shocking, actually, to have to acknowledge how isolated certain speech communities really are, even in the middle of a big city like Washington DC.

Then this obviously ties into these factors like prestige. If your day-to-day life is the people around you, you know, your family, your friends who live in this community with you, there are of course going to be norms of linguistic prestige within that community itself that are very specific to that community because that’s the day-to-day reality. It has nothing to do with what’s happening in rooms where there’s important white people or whatever, whichever way you want to envision it. This, in turn, of course, leads to an enormous sense of identity about who we are.

So, you can really see how these 3 factors can intertwine. I thought these were quite important factors. Of course, there might be others. I would be happy to hear what other people would think would be some of the major reasons for why such extremely non-mainstream or non-standardised varieties continue to exist. But the key reason that keeps coming out again and again is because they mean so much to the people who speak them. They’re such a huge part of the identity, and why would you possibly want to take that away? It tells the story of who they are, and who their parents were, and so on.

Brynn: And who sang them lullabies, exactly.

Dr Peterson: Yeah, and who sang them lullabies.

Brynn: Exactly, and on that, thinking about this idea of standardisation and especially English – in the past 25 years, English has truly kind of exploded. It’s often been referred to as a lingua franca in today’s world. What is a lingua franca, for people who might not know, and what does this view of English have to do with the way that, kind of as we were talking about before, English as a second or a foreign language has been or is taught?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, ok, great question, and this certainly ties in with your previous career. A lingua franca means some kind of a vehicular language, a language that you try to use to find common ground when you don’t share a mother tongue or maybe even a second language. In today’s work, this has become English because English is just there.

I talked earlier about how Finland is an officially bilingual country, constitutionally bilingual. You might be shocked to find out that it’s increasingly common for Swedish speakers and Finnish speakers here in Finland to speak English with each other. I understand that the same thing is happening to Belgium as well, another officially bilingual country, trilingual actually. So yeah, multilingual Europe, there we go. Does it really mean just speaking English in addition to the other languages? But anyway, that’s what English as a lingua franca is. It means that English has emerged as this language that people can use as a medium of communication when there is no other logical choice available.

You asked how it compares to English as a second language or a foreign language, and it does differ in very important ways. One of the things that I really appreciate, we call this the ELF movement, not to be confused with small people, or people from Lord of the Rings or whatever.

So, we do call it ELF, and it stands for English as a Lingua Franca, and it differs in its ideology very, very much from second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. In English as a Lingua Franca, the principle is that it’s something that people have. You’re a user of English as a Lingua Franca, an ELF speaker, but you’re not an ELF learner. It’s not something that is, “Ok, you need to do this and this and this to speak it well.” That’s more tied up with the principles of English as a second language.

But English as a lingua franca, the principles are that people have their language background. You might be a German speaker and then you speak English as an additional language, and you meet somebody from, I don’t know, Taiwan. Then they merge, and each one will bring characteristics from their mother tongue, and it’s not seen as being error-based.

I remember studying second language acquisition when I was in graduate school in the United States. There were all these error-based models and, you know, here’s the native speaker norm, and let’s compare it. The second language speaker got this wrong and this wrong and this wrong. We were always talking about mistakes and errors, and it was a really prescriptivist view is what we would call that.

But with English as lingua franca, it’s just “look, this is what this person brings in and this is what this person brings in,” and somehow, they manage. I really appreciate that the ELF research is trying to celebrate what a success story this tends to be. You think of it as bringing out the goodness in people. People want to communicate, so they’re trying to find common ground. They’re trying to understand each other, and nobody’s really in a position of authority.

Another thing that characterises ELF conversations is that native speakers like you or me, we wouldn’t necessarily have an advantage. We would be another ELF speaker, and we wouldn’t be able to say, “Oh, well I speak English right. You should gravitate towards me.” The research shows that very often, people who are using English as a lingua franca, they understand each other, especially if they have a shared language background, they understand each other certainly better than they would understand someone from Glasgow or Aberdeen or, you know, inner Baltimore or whatever.

Brynn: Or Outback, Australia. Yes, exactly. That is what is so interesting to me, especially coming from a background of teaching English as a second and sometimes I taught as a foreign language, and just seeing the ways that people naturally were able to understand each other. It was almost like watching language evolve in real time. I think that’s just so fascinating and, like you said, that’s something to really be celebrated because, as humans we’re able to do that. And how awesome is that? And, like you said, it’s not about prescriptivism or errors, it’s about saying, “Wow, look at them! We can communicate with each other and potentially make something new.”

Dr Peterson: It’s about ownership, and it’s important to point out that we as lecturers, as scientists, as teachers of English, we’re victim to our own ideologies. And that’s an ideology that just did a complete pivot.

Brynn: It really is. I’d like to ask you the following question because I ask this to other guests that we have on the show. What do you feel is something that generally monolingual English speakers get wrong, just kind of in general, when they think about people from non-English speaking backgrounds who learn to speak English?

Dr Peterson: This ties in with something we talked about before – giving somebody the hand. We tend to associate language with thought, and this is what a lot of people who are interested in linguistics as lay people, they really think that there’s this widespread popular belief that we think through language. So, therefore, if somebody has a learner way of speaking English, we somehow think that they’re not a whole person or that they’re maybe kind of stupid or they can’t think straight. That’s so belittling. Do you see what I mean? That if, you know, this person can’t speak my language correctly, if somebody really has that standard language ideology, they think English should only be spoken this way, and then here’s somebody who’s trying to communicate and use English that they’ve learned later in life. That you might not value what that person has to say and just think that this person has no credibility, this person’s stupid. They can’t even speak. Not recognising that this person has a rich linguistic repertoire. Everybody has a full language capability in their mother tongue. I think that’s something really important.

What else could I say? I think that, very often, because of these ideologies that native speakers have, people from the inner circle, they don’t question the English language in the same way that people do who have acquired it later in life or through different means. So, we have all kinds of inaccurate things that we believe about the English language in particular that just don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Like, when I’ve been visiting North Carolina, that’s what I wrote this book actually, it was wonderful. Somebody there told me that, “Did you know that they speak like Shakespeare here in the Appalachian Mountains?”, and I was like, no they don’t. “Yeah, they do! There’s these communities there and they speak Shakespeare’s English there because it’s so isolated!”. Nah. So just these folk ideas that say a lot, but they don’t necessarily say truths about language. Those are always interesting to hear.

I think we touched on something previously as well when we talked about English as a lingua franca, and that is that standard English would somehow be logical or superior or easier to understand. That’s not the case either, as we’ve discussed, not necessarily true, that those are just other varieties that have more social prestige for some people. That’s the only thing that makes them special. Those are the important things that come to my mind.

Brynn: Honestly, I agree. And I think it’s worth coming back to that image of the four languages standing on top of each other in a trench coat when we think about people who do learn English, especially later in life. Truly, English, when we think about it, is just such a hodgepodge of other languages, of other influences. You can see the history that has happened within English, and to expect people to be able to do all of that as they learn English, to be able to do everything “correctly”, when we think about how difficult English can be – you’re right, it’s not fair and it demeans them as a whole person.

Dr Peterson: And have you noticed as well that sometimes you get the feeling that it’s never enough? The carrot is dangled ever higher. Ok, you can do that, but you still don’t sound like this person.

Even as native speakers, we’re forced to kind of achieve this impossible target, and native speakers can certainly have those insecurities. Studies from Americans showing, “Oh I don’t speak good English, they speak better English in Britain.” I mentioned that in Chapter 1 of the book. This insecurity that even somebody who has English as their mother tongue, this is what standard language ideology does to people.

Brynn: Exactly, and before we wrap up, I could talk to you forever but I guess we do have to wrap up eventually. Can you tell us what’s next for you and your work?

Dr Peterson: Yeah! I love this question. I’m really excited to tell you about a project that I’ve had for a few months now which is called Language Awareness and Ideologies in Finland. It’s funded by the Kone Foundation which is a private foundation based in Finland. Even in Australia, though, you might see lifts and escalators made by this company.

We have this project funded by them, and you could say that this book was really a stepping stone for me, and we certainly see this movement in linguistics, and sociolinguistics in particular. And you folks there, you’re doing such wonderful work. Anyway, the Kone Foundation is “make the world a better place”, and I love that. The way our project runs is we want to make the world a better place through language.

We’re working on addressing the tension and the fear that people feel in Finland about the Finnish language being at risk because of the input of English. This is a real fear with these language communities here in Europe and elsewhere, of course. We’re dealing with this in Finland. I have some brilliant postdocs, a PhD researcher, and one thing that makes our project stand out is that we have a dedicated science communicator, a public relations person, who is making that liaison between our science and the public. We’re hearing more and more about how we need to do this, build in social impact.

So yeah, we’re getting going with the project and it’s really exciting to have that. As I said before, just pointing out the richness of English is not enough. It’s time to redress the social injustices. I feel like we’re part of a larger movement. There’s lots of folks in the US, Australia and so on who are really trying to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak, with our science and making the world a better place through language. So that’s what’s up. Get out of the lab and out of the ivory tower and talk to people! Get our message out there, what we have known about language for decades.

I also have a new book on the topic. It’s called “English in the Nordic Countries”. That’s open access. It’s an anthology, so chapters that are talking about this tension and these challenges that the Nordic countries in particular seem to feel is such a problem now, how do we protect Icelandic, how do we protect Danish and so on, when English is making such inroads into all these different levels of society. So that’s what I’ve been up to. Lots of exciting stuff. It’s so fun to be a linguist!

Brynn: That sounds absolutely fascinating! I cannot wait to follow your work and to just kind of see how you keep going. It sounds wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here, and it’s just been an absolute delight to talk to you.

Dr Peterson: I feel the same way. Thank you so much for inviting me.

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

Till next time!

Figure 1: Multilingual sign in Abu Dhabi with power disparities indicated through order and size of text

In the critically acclaimed Barbie movie, released in cinemas in mid-2023, Barbie and Ken depart from their fictional utopia of Barbie Land for the ‘real world’ of California, USA. When they arrive, they are very much outsiders observing their environment with new eyes.

It does not take long for a strong message to sink in: their new urban landscape reflects power dynamics between groups of people.

White men dominate, from appearing on banknotes, being carved into mountains, and holding the lion’s share of high-powered and lucrative positions. Ken thus believes it will be easy for him to find a job as he fits the profile of ‘the powerful’ based on race and gender alone. Barbie, on the other hand, finds her identity as a strong, independent, and ambitious woman suddenly out of sync with her surroundings and social interactions. Their reflexive positioning, or the way they view their own identities, shifts according to interactive positioning, or the way they are viewed by others, which in turn is influenced by societal norms and the social construction of reality.

Gender hierarchies parallel linguistic hierarchies

Upon leaving my local independent cinema in the Cotswold town of Chipping Norton on a rainy July day, I contemplated, in particular, one of the many strong messages embedded in the movie. This was the direct interconnectedness of semiotic landscapes, symbolic power, and identities. While the movie focused on challenging the dominance of the patriarchy in society, as a sociolinguist, the parallels with language hierarchies leapt out, particularly in relation to the omnipresence of English, or linguistic imperialism, in many global contexts.

Figure 2: Inclusion of Musqueam on signage at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

In a similar way to Barbie and Ken’s experience of gendered power dynamics being all-encompassing, in multilingual settings, the languages we see in public places not only impact language ideologies and linguistic hierarchies but also affect levels of belonging in a space. In linguistically diverse cities across the globe such as Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) or Vancouver, Canada, official language(s) and English as a global language tend to dominate. While there may be attempts to ‘welcome’ speakers of other languages, such attempts often fall short of true inclusion. For example, greetings in as many languages as will fit onto a sign can often be seen outside tourist attractions and money exchange stores. However, meaningful and balanced multilingualism on signage in public spaces is less common.

English on top

While select second or third languages are strategically included in ‘sticky places’ or spaces which evoke feelings of cultural belonging such as ethnic grocery stores, cafes and restaurants, or where linguistic minorities gather, such multilingual signage is often skewed in favour of dominant languages such as English.

Linguistic hierarchies, in this sense, not only relate to lack of second or third languages but also the order of languages, size, and amount of text. For example, the inclusion of bilingual Indigenous language / English books in Canadian stores is a positive move toward representation and decolonization but at present these books represent a tiny portion of stock sold in stores and they are usually displayed as a special feature.

Figure 3: Dominance of English on signage at an EMI university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

In Abu Dhabi, the inclusion of three languages for a social distancing sign related to the COVID pandemic also sends a message about linguistic hierarchies by placing English at the top, Arabic second, and Filipino (in smaller print) at the bottom (Figure 1). Here power disparities which relate to language and social position (many nannies in the UAE are from the Philippines, whereas the English and Arabic text is directed at parents) can be seen in the linguistic landscape in terms of ordering and size of text.

Language hierarchies in education-scapes

Particularly in English-medium education in multilingual university settings, which are on the rise globally, English-only or English-dominated signage and language objects tend to overshadow not only instruction but also education-scapes, or the linguistic and semiotic landscapes of educational settings. To take Canadian universities as an example, efforts to include Indigenous languages in education-scapes have been made from the east coast to the west coast, in Cape Breton and Vancouver (Figure 2).

Such initiatives are important in terms of decolonizing education-scapes. However, the representation of languages on many Canadian campuses, which host linguistically diverse student populations, is heavily weighted in favour of monolingual English practices. In the Arab Gulf cities of Abu Dhabi, UAE and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, English-medium universities, bilingual (English/ Arabic) signage shares space with many monolingual (English only) signs, sending out a message about the symbolic power of English in these settings (Figure 3). Even when the target readers’ first language is Arabic, as in the case of signs about Islamic dress codes (Figure 3), the chosen language for the text is still English.

Looking at multilingual signage with new eyes

If we imagine that ‘new eyes’ were viewing these global multilingual cities, what message would be received? Similar to Barbie and Ken’s perception of patriarchal dominance and power in California, English-dominated landscapes send out a message about which languages, and speakers, are valued or devalued in a space. In this sense, issues of access, inclusion and belonging, not only relate to gender and race, but also language use and linguistic identities. As Nicholas (2023) states, a main take away from the Barbie movie is that ‘hierarchy and rigid gender benefits nobody’. Through a language lens, greater thought and planning needs to be given to ensuring neither metaphorical ‘Barbies’ nor ‘Kens’ feel excluded, under-represented, or devalued in the real world’s linguistic and semiotic landscapes.

***

‘The Glory’, a Korean drama, has ranked the top among the ten most watched TV and films since its release on March 10, 2023 on Netflix. The Glory has received 1.82 billion views on Weibo, the second largest Chinese social media platform at the time of writing this blog. Chinese youths, the largest group of Weibo members, are enthusiastic about discussing the plot, sharing their memes about this drama, and picking up popular terms for fandom communication.

Over the past two decades, Korean cultural products such as dramas, movies, music and dance, food, cosmetics etc. have gained worldwide popularity, and the global spread of Korean culture is known as Hallyu or Korean Wave (한류). Hallyu has been promoted by the South Korean government as cultural diplomacy and soft power projection since the 1997 financial crisis. The global promotion of Hallyu turns out to be a huge success. There are about 51.74 million population in South Korea, but the number of Hallyu community members reaches over 156 million people across the globe. China constitutes over half of the fan community with over 86 million.

As Hallyu emerges as a global cultural consumption among young people particularly in China, learning Korean has rapidly carved out a niche market for China’s youth to craft their subjectivities and produce bundles of skills. Mr. Bin He, a postgraduate student at Yunnan University under the supervision of Professor Jia Li, has conducted an ethnography with four Chinese university students on how relevant practices and discourses socialize Chinese youths to align themselves with learning Korean through self-study and out of class channels.

Even though China has the largest number of students learning English as a compulsory course, Chinese youths do not necessarily see English as the only source for empowerment and upward mobility. Chinese students who are economically and linguistically under-privileged find it more useful and easier to learn to speak ‘small languages’ (as we previously discussed here and here). This is exactly what happened to Bin’s participants who major in English but found it more desirable and promising to invest into learning Korean and dreamed of taking up Korean-related jobs.

Performing cool posture

Chinese youths develop their initial incentive to learn Korean because of their desire to get close to their Korean idols and their orientation to be part of a Korean-oriented consumption style. The digitization between China and South Korea facilitates such transnational communication. By subscribing to a paid app (about 5 $) per month, Chinese youths can get in contact with their Korean idols by listening to their voices or reading their updates online on a daily basis. They also choose to spend about 20$ collecting a Korean album imported from South Korea to show their distinct cultural taste.

Ming’s Weibo post

Their affective attachment to the Hallyu community gets closer through their interactions with other Hallyu fans on public and private social media platforms. Ming, one of Bin’s participants, has been learning Korean by himself for over six years. Like many Hallyu fans, Ming has developed basic Korean proficiency by watching Korean dramas and variety shows and listening to Korean songs. To test his Korean proficiency and to enhance his reading competence, Ming took up a volunteer job translating Korean idols’ stories into Chinese on Weibo for Chinese fans to keep updated with their idols. In addition to being recognized as a legitimate member of the Hallyu community because of his Korean proficiency, Ming also likes to share his consumption of Korean lifestyle on Weibo.

The screenshot captures Ming’s enjoyment with his friends drinking 참이슬 (“Chamisul”), the most popular brand of Korean liquor that frequently appears in Korean dramas, TV series, and variety shows. 참이슬 is recontextualized as symbolic source styling himself as someone cool and authentic. Using English ‘talk with’ indicates both modernity and the imagined engagement with the Korean world as Ming told us in interview: “感觉喝着烧酒，仿佛喝着烧酒就置身于韩剧中。” (“I feel like drinking soju, it’s like I’m physically in a Korean drama while drinking soju.”)

Consuming desire

Longing is one of the most featured themes in Korean dramas. The filming locations of hit Korean dramas are often promoted as must-go destinations for Chinese tourists travelling to South Korea. For Chinese youths who are living and studying in China, love stories constitute an important part of their romantic imagination as reported by Fang, a Chinese female university student: “想去首尔学习生活，去看看电视剧里出现的各种场景。” (“I dream of studying and living in Seoul. I want to visit the featured locations that appear in Korean dramas.”

Fang’s post

As someone who was born and brought up in the hinterland, Fang has grown up with the imagination of the sea, and the sea is often depicted as semiotic potential for romance in Korean dramas. Fang expressed her sense of attachment to 갯마을 차차차 (Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha), a romantic story in a small coastal village. She posted a moment on her Chinese social media in Korean: “아~듣기만 해도 바다 냄새 맡은 것 같애” (“Wow～ Just listening [to the song in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha] I feel like the smell of the sea”).

Fang’s sense of enjoyment and desire is also expressed by her semiotic and linguistic choices. Using tilde ‘～’ after ‘wow’ (아) emphasizes her desire and longing. The choice of using Korean indexes her sense of feeling distinct and unique compared to her Chinese peers who might understand English but who are unlikely to be able to read Korean.

Crafting a niche in learning Korean

Ad for Korean online classes

Both Ming and Fang started to learn Korean online through various apps after they had been exposed to Hallyu for some time. Their desire to seriously invest in learning Korean took a clearer form when they saw an ad for online classes:

Why learn a small language
Korean

• The most accessible second foreign language. You will be surrounded by Korean from the moment you turn on your app.

• There are about 70% of Chinese words in Korean. Korean is the language that sounds like ancient Chinese. Chinese students learning Korean do not start from zero.

• Cheap tuition fee for overseas study. The best choice for the working-class family.

• Advanced educational system with the combination of the East and the West and world-leading IT shipping industry, mass communication, e-sports etc. All of these advantages can provide Korean learners with more opportunities.

In contrast to the way Chinese youths learn English, learning Korean has been discursively constructed as ‘accessible’, ‘easy’, ‘affordable’ and ‘advanced’. This promotion discourse is particularly attractive to those who cannot afford to travel to Western countries and who are fed up with the exam-driven learning style in English. As confessed by Ming, “我就是不知道为什么我对好莱坞电影、美剧不感兴趣，我想可能是讨厌英语总是考试吧” (“I just don’t know why I didn’t have any interest in watching Hollywood movies or American TV series. I guess it’s because I was tired of taking English exam.”)

Feeling cosmopolitan

After two years of formal training at a language school, Ming decided to take the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK), and pursue her master’s degree in South Korea after her graduation from an English department in China. When she prepared her application documents, she worked as an English tutor for a Korean family where she taught two children English in Korean. Because of her capacity in Korean, Fang was able to communicate with the Korean mother about her children’s English performance, which in turn facilitated her Korean oracy. Over two years, Fang used the money she earned by working as an English teacher to pay for her Korean language test and tuition fee for Ewha Womans University.

Fang’s chat

In September 2022, Fang started her postgraduate study online due to the restricted travel policy and the Covid-19 pandemic. Fang was eager to go to South Korea and socialize with local people to fulfill her Korean dream. While doing her online classes, she liked to share with her WeChat friends her Korean learning experiences.

The image in Fang’s chat shows the official promotion image of her Korean university with the blooming cherry flowers and one of its famous buildings. By re-posting this world-famous university, Fang also displays her privileged access to advanced education in Seoul, a cosmopolitan city with all her imagination for study and lifestyle in South Korea, as commented by her post “나한테 이게 학교아냐 자유다” (“To me, this is not only a school but also freedom.”) It is worth noting that Fang’s choice of studying in South Korea is partly due to her unwillingness to follow a planned life trajectory by working as an English teacher in her hometown like her peers. Despite her parents’ disagreement with her decision, Fang gave up working as an English teacher and chose to take the risk of investing into an unknown future with Korean.

Becoming entrepreneurial

Apart from desire and cosmopolitanism, Hallyu also displays a strong embodiment of neoliberal discourse upon individuals. Both Ming and Fang have been nurtured by entrepreneurial discourses while exposing themselves to Hallyu. Self-entrepreneurial ethos prevails in many Korean songs, books, and movies. Growing up with Hallyu for over 10 years, Chinese fans have witnessed the ups-and-downs of their idols and have been encouraged by their positive and never-give-up spirits, as Ming shared: “一直喜欢她(Taeyeon),我能从她身上看到许多积极的能量，情绪低落的时候，我就会听听她的歌或是刷刷她舞台表演的视频。” (“I’ve been one of Taeyeon’s fans. I can sense her positive power. When I’m feeling down, I would like to listen to her songs or watch her dancing performance.”)

Ming recalled his struggling experiences when he prepared for his postgraduate entrance exam. For over a year, Ming had to fight alone given that most of his classmates decided to look for a job and very few people including his parents understood his emotional struggles. By listening to Taeyon’s songs, Ming felt understood and comforted. Ming drew strength from witnessing Taeyon’s confrontation with suicide. Taeyon’s re-fashioning herself as someone overcoming her depression became a mental power for Ming to draw from in his own struggles in a competitive and stressful society.

Fang’s post about her Korean readings

Self-regulated and self-enterprising discourses are often circulated on Fang’s social media. Apart from signing up for a gym club and following a healthy lifestyle, Fang also likes to share her reflection on reading Korean novels. The caption about the images of the books she’s reading says: “One section a day; 43 days to finish the book; a story book on life experiences for the youth.”

By purchasing imported reading materials from South Korea, Fang said that she could kill two birds with one stone: enhancing her Korean reading capacity while enriching her life experiences. The philosophical statements of life experiences in the book are mainly self-enterprising and self-driven as indicated by her underlined notes like “너에게 주어지는 기대에 합당한 자기관리를 시작해” (“Start taking care of yourself and meet your expectations”) or “값진 자아 반성 시간” (“the valuable time of self-reflection”).

Navigating between freedom and precarity

Language learning in the digital economy is not problem free. Despite their aspiration to manage their life trajectory through neoliberal promises, Chinese youths find themselves constantly navigating between their desired freedom and structural constraints.

One of the problems that hinder their desire to invest in learning Korean is their lack of time. Chinese youths keep their strong connection with Hallyu but they find it hard to keep learning Korean as learning a language requires consistent and systematic devotion. As English majors at university, they are kept busy by taking exams and getting various certificates to enhance their employment prospects. Two of Bin’s participants imagined that they would have more time for themselves to pick up Korean after they started to work as English teachers in future.

For those who squeeze time and save money to take the TOPIK, their devotion to learning Korean may suffer from anti-Hallyu sentiments due to the diplomatic disputes between China and South Korea. Over the past three decades, the surge of Hallyu has also coincided with several waves of anti-Hallyu movements in China. Ming’s diligence and persistence in learning Korean is not recognized but misunderstood by populist nationalists as “媚韩” (literally, “flattering South Korea”), meaning betraying China and showing allegiance to South Korea.

Publicity shot of Korean star Taeyeon

For Fang who is receiving her master’s degree in South Korea, she is confronted with high living expenses in Seoul and thinking of returning to China to settle down. However, when it comes to her future employment prospect in China, Fang seems to lack of confidence. For one thing, she does not think she can compete against ethnic Korean Chinese for a job position in teaching Korean to Chinese students. For another, her master’s degree in TKSOL is not as desirable as an English major to secure an English teaching position.

By the time of writing up this blog, two of Bin’s participants had to give up learning Korean because of their overwhelming workload and new identity as English teachers. Only Fang and Ming still kept learning Korean. As noted, Fang is doing her master’s degree in South Korea, and Ming has just got a job offer from a Chinese multinational automotive subsidiary targeting the South Korean market. After several months of training, Ming will be sent to South Korea to work for this Chinese company in South Korea.

This study has provided a nuanced understanding of Chinese youths’ Korean language learning experiences in the context of emerging Asian pop culture and digitization. Chinese youths’ learning of Korean is not driven by pragmatic pursuits or academic pressures, but largely rooted in their desire to be part of the Hallyu community. Growing up with Hallyu and learning Korean opened up new spatial and affective imaginations for them to capitalize on their performance and cultural consumption that traverse national boundaries in our digital age. Despite having access to Hallyu and learning Korean through new technological affordances, their pursuit of Korean-related subjectivities gets inculcated with the affective facets of language learning activities rooted in the neoliberal logic of self-management, human capital development and surging populist nationalism.

Related content

Li, J. (2020). Foreign language learning for minority empowerment? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/foreign-language-learning-for-minority-empowerment/
Li, J. (2021). Esports are the new linguistic and cultural frontier. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/esports-are-the-new-linguistic-and-cultural-frontier/
Li, J. (2021). Peripheral language learners and the romance of Thai. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/peripheral-language-learners-and-the-romance-of-thai/
Ma, Y. (2020). Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/empowerment-of-chinese-muslim-women-through-arabic/

Multilingual responses are common during the special liturgies of Lent

Many people celebrated Easter with chocolate bunny treats and by enjoying the long weekend. But not as many know the religious significance of this celebration, which is regarded in the Catholic faith as even bigger than Christmas!

What makes Easter extra special is the commemoration of Jesus Christ’s resurrection three days after dying in the hands of Roman soldiers and religious leaders over 2,000 years ago. His rising from death gives hope to his followers that they, too, one day will transition to eternal life.

Christians prepared for this great feast for 40 days, the season of Lent. For Catholics, this is an important time of prayer and fasting, somewhat similar to the observance of Ramadan by our Islamic sisters and brothers. An important difference is the reason for the Lenten fast.

Catholics are exhorted to take up some form of sacrifice, like abstaining from meat on Fridays, saving the money they would usually spend on their favorite fast food to give to the poor, or not using Facebook for 40 days and dedicate scrolling time to prayer. These practices of self-restraint, contemplation, and almsgiving are acts of solidarity with the passion and death of Jesus Christ, the central figure of the Christian faith. Jesus Christ’s free choice to embrace an unjust sentence and lay down his own innocent life to free the sinful is the standard of true love that is the centerpiece of the Christian Gospel. This very important season in the Christian tradition culminates in the Sacred Triduum, the three days leading to Easter Sunday, which are called Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Black Saturday.

In places that are deeply Catholic in number and devotion like the Philippines, Vietnam, and Argentina, these three days are very eventful for priests and priests-in-training (seminarians) as they perform various functions to provide more spiritual support to lay Catholics through sacraments and practices of piety. They preside at longer, elaborate liturgical celebrations and hear more confessions from the lay faithful.

Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle leads the commemoration of the Lord’s Passion at Manila Cathedral (Photo by Maria Tan/Rappler)

As an active Catholic myself, I especially appreciate how the Holy Week liturgies are not only more solemn and musical but also more beautifully multilingual. In my Parish, the celebrations are mainly in English but with a modicum of Greek, Hebrew, and Tagalog. For instance, we say “Kyrie Eleison” where outside of Lent, we would typically say “Lord, have mercy.” Our Parish Priest gives very passionate homilies where he sometimes mentions Hebrew words like “Mashiach” in place of the more familiar “Messiah.” During communion (the most solemn part of the Mass), the choir sings beautiful songs of repentance, like “Maging Akin Muli” [Be Mine Again]. In other churches in Manila, we also hear other Philippine languages, like Cebuano, incorporated in the liturgical responses or songs.

There seems to be something about Lent that loosens the multilingual tongue and opens the sacred space to accommodate linguistic diversity more than we usually do at any other time of the year. Of course, this openness to other languages is not new in the Catholic Church. After the Second Vatican Council, it became more common practice to use the mother tongue of the community for Mass, which traditionally was said in monolingual Latin (Bennett, 2018).

But the story is a bit different for priests and seminarians from non-English speaking backgrounds who celebrate Catholic liturgies in places like the US, the UK, and Australia, which are still largely Anglophone despite the growing multiculturality and multilingualism of the population. In these Global North countries, religious workers from the Global South are expected to speak in English, the assumed heart language of the community. One can only imagine how challenging it must be for this group of adult migrants to deliver profound yet relatable homilies in this second or foreign language before native speakers who look to them for spiritual inspiration and guidance.

Father Harold Camonias is a missionary priest from the Philippines working in Australia

This untold story is what I set out to uncover in my qualitative study about the English language learning experiences in Australia of Catholic missionaries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. How do they learn English in Australia? What are their struggles as adult language learners? What ideologies do they hold about language learning and languages? (Tenedero, 2023)

These questions were answered thanks to seven Catholic missionaries from non-English speaking backgrounds. Originally from Argentina, Ghana, Madagascar, and Vietnam, these were active members of a big international Catholic missionary society, which sponsored their coming to Australia to complete some English language courses as part of their preparation for missionary work.

Overall, the findings of this new study provide evidence that English language learning Catholic missionaries from the Global South are a distinct Community of Practice. More than the average adult language learner, they are highly invested in learning English fueled by their mostly positive beliefs about English and language learning in general, as well as their imagined future selves. The research also gives a glimpse of how the view of English as language of global affordance has the potential to revise or extend novice missionaries’ vision of themselves as users of English. While learning the language for religious work, they also open themselves to alternative pathways to become global language workers.

This new study demonstrates that language in faith contexts serves evangelical and pastoral purposes, as in multilingual Lenten liturgies. At the same time, language could serve other non-religious aspirations of missionaries. This further demonstrates that while people shape language, it, too, has power to (re)shape us, our practices, the way we see ourselves, and our hopes.

References

Bennett, B. P. (2018). Sacred languages of the world: An introduction. Wiley.
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2023). Learning English for faith work: The Australian experience of non-Anglophone Catholic missionaries. Journal of Language, Identity & Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2023.2181813

International Women’s Day is a great opportunity to share news about the book and reflect on the strength of women’s academic collaborations.

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Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Vera Williams Tetteh

***

Life in a new language

Life in a new language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years.

The aim is to understand the dual challenge of learning a new language while living one’s life through the medium of that language. This is a challenge that remains poorly understood and non-migrants tend to underestimate its severity and the hardships involved.

1. There is the shock of finding oneself in a new linguistic environment where you may not understand much of what is going on around you, while all the time being cognizant of the fact that not understanding what is going on may have acute repercussions for your wellbeing.
2. There is the difficulty of finding work that will not only pay the bills but also sustain your ambitions and self-worth. Most participants took years to recapture their careers, many never did.
3. To improve proficiency in the new language, migrants need to interact in the new language, a task that is made difficult by the frequent absence of interlocutors willing to indulge newcomers, a lack of common topics, and the pervasiveness of misunderstandings. Misunderstandings may go on to reverberate through future interactions as each misunderstanding leads to a loss of confidence that needs to be reclaimed over time.
4. Migration intrudes even into the most intimate domains of life and alters family roles and relationships. It is not only that familial obligations and duties are redistributed but also that new family tasks emerge. Prominent among these are new ways of parenting, including setting an—implicit or explicit—family language policy, and managing child language learning of both new and heritage languages. As children usually learn the new language faster, the potential impact of their superior (oral) proficiency on parental authority can become another tribulation for adult migrants.
5. Migration continues to be imagined as a point of difference from the idealized sedentary mainstream population of their destination. This difference often marks those with a migration history as perpetual outsiders to their new society. Difference may be audible in their ways of speaking and visible where they are differently racialized. Experiences of Othering, exclusion, discrimination, and racism based on such differences create another level of adversity, as migrants need to cope with micro-aggressions, invalidations, insults, and sometimes even assaults.
6. Migration severs the self into a before and after. As pre-migration habits and identities have disappeared, new selves with a new sense of belonging, home, and community need to be fashioned.

Through the voices of our participants, we document the magnitude and anatomy of these challenges. Understanding them leads to an appreciation of migrants’ courage, perseverance, and resilience.

Ethnographic data-sharing and re-use

The research behind Life in a new language was conducted over a period of more than 20 years in six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies. For this book project, we revisited those six projects, shared our data, and re-analyzed them to answer questions about language learning, employment, interaction, parenting, experiences with racism, and sense of belonging.

Our methodological approach was inspired by open science principles and the desire to share our data and to pool our existing resources to be able to paint a bigger picture of language and migration. While most researchers now accept the value of data sharing and reuse, implementation and practice remain patchy, particularly when it comes to qualitative data in the humanities and social sciences. In ethnographic research, data sharing and reuse is in its infancy as researchers struggle with questions on what open research might even mean for them and how to implement FAIR principles, i.e., making their data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. These problems are compounded by time pressures and the absence of tried and tested workflows for reanalyzing and bringing to publication shared datasets.

During one of our rare in-person writing workshops

As such, Life in a new language ventures into unchartered methodological territory. We explain the academic motivations, affordances and limitations we encountered in the book. Here, we want to share a more personal story.

The story behind the book

Life in a new language is co-authored by six academic women, who have collaborated over an extended period as members of the Language on the Move research team. Donna, Emily, Shiva, and Vera conducted their PhD research under Ingrid’s supervision, and Loy was mentored by Ingrid as an early career researcher.

As such, Life in a new language shows what can be done with linguistic ethnography and provides a working model for how to combine existing small datasets into larger longitudinal studies of a social phenomenon or practice. It also provides a framework for supervising academics and their doctoral students to create a research and publishing community of practice that connects separate higher degree research projects under a single, post-award project umbrella. Similarly, our study provides a model for early career and experienced scholars to work together to create and analyze big datasets from qualitative methods of inquiry.

Life in a new language is personal in yet another way. For the six of us, the intersection of language learning and settlement is not only an academic research topic. Beyond our academic expertise, we share with our participants the experience of being migrant speakers. Like our participants, our group of authors reflects the diversity of 21^st century Australia. All of us are settlers on Indigenous land. We or our ancestors have come to Australia from Germany, Ghana, Iran, Ireland, the Philippines, and Yugoslavia. Those four of us who came to Australia as adults share with our participants the experience of settling in a new country through the medium of a new language. Our experience as English language teachers and teacher trainers also informs our account. We hope that the way we have pooled our lived experiences in a unique intercultural team to write this book will add richness and depth to our account.

Meet each of the 130 migrants in our book over the next months in a serialized Twitter thread

First up: Katja from Poland
Katja’s engineering degree was not recognized in Australia. She retrained as a beautician. Tremendous skills loss for herself and our society
1/n https://t.co/ehvPDznp6f

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 7, 2023

Good things really do take time

Data collection on the first project to feed into our analysis started in 2000, but the idea for the book and the reanalysis of previously collected datasets started to take shape in 2018, just around the time one of us had a baby. Seeing this little person ready to start school now, has been the yardstick for how long it has taken us to turn a brilliant idea into a completed manuscript.

We not only got derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but we also discovered that writing a truly co-authored book with a team of six authors, who are not even co-located, is more challenging than anticipated. It is also much more rewarding and fun.

We learned that the principles of open science can be best brought to life through the spirit of collaboration, engagement, dialogue, and friendship that guided our endeavor. And we warmly recommend collaborative writing to all academic women this International Women’s Day because pooling strengths can better keep us all afloat.

What’s next?

We hope we have whetted your appetite for Life in a new language. The academic publication process is a protracted one and we will share key dates here on Language on the Move as they come to hand.

For now, people in Sydney might want to pencil our International Symposium on Bilingualism workshop devoted to the project into their diaries. For everyone else, we have started a Twitter series @lg_on_the_move, where you can meet one of each of our 130 participants per day while we count down to publication.

Related International Women’s Day content

• 2021, Remembering cancelled women
• 2020, Female academics and shamans face the same glass ceiling
• 2019, Why are there so few notable academic women?
• 2018, Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• 2013, Migrant women’s empowerment in the city
• 2012, Strange Academic women

This part of their professional identity is largely hidden for at least two reasons. First, most of their communication work is done virtually and, in some cases, from home, as in the experience of home-based offshore accountants. These professionals have been managing the communication challenges (including feelings of isolation) linked to working from home long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced other office workers across the globe to work remotely. Second, the prevailing occupational stereotype tags them as good with numbers but bad with words, along with the stigma of being boring, grey, and introverted to a fault, as popularly depicted in media.

The perennial shaming of accountants’ linguistic competence motivated my linguistic ethnographic study of this occupational group. Using critical discourse analysis and the sociolinguistic lens of performance, I examined how students in top accounting schools in Metro Manila are trained to communicate for the globalized workplace and how they communicate on the job as onshore and offshore accountants. This project offers some novel threads in ongoing discussions about the linguistic experience of workers in the rapidly expanding, highly multicultural and multilingual offshoring industry in Global South countries like India and the Philippines.

My research builds on current understandings of these number-centric workers theoretically and methodologically. In terms of theory, I argue that since ‘good communication’ is a social construct that is rhetorically and interactionally reproduced in academia and the profession, labelling accountants as ‘poor communicators’ should not be treated as fact. Rather, as in other stereotypes tied to different social groups, it should be interrogated. While previous studies have predominantly explored how accountants are ‘poor communicators,’ I take a step back and ask: Where and how is this idea of ‘accountants as poor communicators’ deployed, by whom, and for what reasons? In terms of method, my study demonstrates how examining together (rather than separately) the education and work domains can help provide a big-picture understanding of how language practice and ideologies are (re)produced and (re)shaped across the entire field continuity—from formal education to hiring to employment. This approach has revealed that the echoing of the deficit discourse that highlights curricular and competence gaps of accounting schools and accounting practitioners is a very limited and limiting view of Global South accountants and their globalized work.

I briefly present some of my PhD thesis findings in my 3MT. But for a more detailed and exciting discussion about this special group of language workers, you may check out my new monograph, Communication that Counts: Language Practice and Ideology in Globalized Accounting. It is the latest title in the “Language at Work” series of Multilingual Matters lined up for release in December 2022. You may want to take advantage of the generous discount offered until the end of the year by using the code: CCLPIGA75 when you place your order through the publisher’s website.

About the book

To date, communication research in accounting has largely focused on the competencies that define what constitutes ‘effective communication’. Highly perception-based, skills-focused and Global North-centric, existing research tends to echo the skills deficit discourse which overemphasizes the role of the higher education system in developing students’ work-relevant communication skills. This book investigates dominant views about communication and interrogates what shapes these views in the accounting field from a Global South perspective, exploring the idea of ‘good communication’ in the globalized accounting field. Taking the occupational stereotype of shy employees who are good with numbers but bad with words as its starting point, this book examines language and communication practices and ideologies in accounting education and work in the Philippines. As an emerging global leader in offshore accounting, the Philippines is an ideal context for an exploration of multilingual, multimodal and transnational workplace communication.

What others are saying about the book

This book is a welcome addition to the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) materials in the field of accounting. It explores the way students and professionals in accounting communicate and emphasizes the importance of well-defined relationships and effective communication in globalized accounting work. The volume is one of only a handful of resources ever produced focusing on ESP in accounting and in the context of the Philippines. (Marilu Rañosa-Madrunio, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, The Philippines)

Tenedero comprehensively and carefully traces how ideologies about languages and effective communication are mobilized in the field of globalized accounting – from the Philippine classrooms where communication skills are part of the accounting curriculum to the workplaces where offshore and onshore accounting services are offered. A must read for understanding what counts as communication and how communication counts in work where language is seemingly marginal. (Beatriz P. Lorente, University of Bern, Switzerland)

Reference

Tenedero, Pia Patricia P. (2022). Communication that Counts: Language Practice and Ideology in Globalized Accounting. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon interviewing unidentified Yanomami people

Editor’s note: How do researchers in anthropology and sociology deal with linguistic diversity? Do they learn the language(s) of the people they work with or do they hire interpreters? Turns out that they are quite naive about language and do neither systematically, as new research by Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky shows. How to make good decisions about language choice and language mediation in fieldwork needs to become part of research training.

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Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky

***

We have surveyed field researchers in sociology and anthropology programs in the United States and found only limited proficiency in field languages, accompanied by a widespread reliance on translators and interpreters. The scholars, therefore, did not dispense with translators as early-twentieth century anthropologists called for (Mead, 1939); instead, they dispensed with the myth of linguistic fluency. At the same time, results indicate disparities in the use of vernacular and translation services in the post-colonial societies and haphazard ‘hiring’ patterns of interpreters that cause ethical and methodological concerns.

The imaginary anthropologist is a fluent polyglot; the real anthropologist is too time-poor to learn another language

When you think about an anthropologist, what stereotypes do you imagine?  Maybe a gaunt Englishman wearing a pith helmet with a copy of African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1940) stuffed in his back pocket? Our imaginary anthropologist is, of course, fluent in a language at risk of extinction, learned during years of field research while living with an endangered community.

Perhaps your image of a sociologist is quite different. You might conjure a scholar working in an urban setting in their home country, which of course is in one of the complex industrial societies. They are studying social problems using their native language with locals who also speak the same tongue.

The shape of today’s societies however, as well as forms of field research challenge those effigies. Anthropologists cannot permit themselves the ‘luxury’ of spending years within a single community, being involved in many projects and teaching duties at home institutions. Sociologists, on the other hand, now work in culturally diverse settings and face the same issues as anthropologists a century ago.

Experience with Fieldwork Translation by Discipline

Yet, the scholarly associations and method textbooks are virtually mum on the problem of language, translation and interpreting in field research. To the contrary, a blatant disregard for translation services is noticeable in some discussions, that – righteously – attempt to reclaim the status of research assistants: “Research assistants play a vital role in the research process, often acting as more than just [! – exclamation and bold added] translators or interpreters.” (Dean & Stevano 2016)

We surveyed US-based scholars about their language practices

That is why we surveyed US-based scholars from anthropology and sociology programs. We analyzed 913 answers that provided insights into our respondents’ linguistic capabilities and their experiences conducting research in over 180 countries and interacting with over 400 languages. A more extensive presentation of the results may be found in our article published by Multilingua (Sepielak, Wladyka & Yaworsky 2022).

We discovered that in only 24% of the field sites with languages other than English present did scholars assess that they had professional (or higher) fluency. In almost 60% of cases, our respondents interacted with languages in which they reported a proficiency at or below a limited working level.

It would seem it’s not all bad news with 75% of respondents reporting fluency in at least one fieldwork language. However, they were typically fluent in languages derived from the colonizers, such as French and Spanish, but rarely in languages from the colonized.

Social science researchers are “getting by”

It is then worth noting that most anthropologists and sociologists were getting by at times like everybody else, using interpreters and translators, or conducting research using the English language. ‘Only’ 54.1% of the sociologists in our sample ever collaborated with a translator compared to 68.9% of anthropologists.

Translation and interpreting are often rendered invisible

Example: #interpreter was literally erased from this photo of meeting between Iran's Rouhani and Malaysia' Mahathir in media coverage #xl8 https://t.co/RIcNpy38t2 pic.twitter.com/aNCCivzY0F

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 30, 2020

It would, however, be spurious to claim that American sociologists had less need for translators due to their linguistic proficiency. It is rather due to the traditional research interests exposing anthropologists to an increased number of languages and geographies. In comparison, sociologists frequently work in the US and regions like Western Europe where one could claim to “get by” with English.

One could ask how can this reality diverge so significantly from the ideal of language fluency and dismissal of interpreters pushed by generations of authoritative field scholars?

Is English proficiency really the superpower of today’s social scientists?

English is the language superpower of the world (Piller, 2022). And our thematic analysis indicates that researchers turn to this ‘superpower’ quite often. This is due to a variety of circumstances hampering the acquisition of fluency in another language, such as short-term studies, multi-sited fieldwork, international collaborative research, or studies of communities with multiple co-existing languages. While the global popularity of English appears as one of the deterrents to mastering field languages among scholars, one should also note that Indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Tlapanec and thousands of others are virtually extinct from academic curricula in the US.

Anthropologists, in particular, may be wary about revealing these linguistic deficiencies due to the fear it might undermine their ethnographic authority. They will be mindful of Margaret Mead’s fieldwork being criticized as ‘superficial’ in part due to her linguistics deficiencies (see Freeman 1983) or Napoleon Chagnon wasting months analyzing the fictitious and scatological “names” of Yanomamo villagers presented to him by amused tribesmen (see Chagnon 1992), mold current beliefs of scholars?

Paying lip-service to the importance of linguistic proficiency does make fluent researchers

Well, it would seem so, with 81% of our respondents perceiving knowledge of local language as important and 95% agreeing that knowing the vernacular enriches the understanding of “local knowledge”.  They also agreed that researchers who don’t speak the vernacular miss important data and have less control over the study. A clear example of detachment between the persisting ethos and contemporary practice reported in previous paragraphs.

The invisible translators and interpreters of social science

In this context, the question about what this heavy reliance on translators means for Western representations of post-colonial societies, persists as well. How do scholars perceive its effect on the research process? For one, most respondents agreed that translators help in gaining access to data and that scholars with foreign-language deficiencies should collaborate with them. Nevertheless, concerning was a trend of haphazardly “hiring” persons that interpret (including research assistants, spouses, colleagues, representatives of local institutions) driven by cost and convenience. This widespread practice carries a series of ethical, methodological, and even security risks rarely considered during methods training.

To that end, field researchers did not dispense with translators as early 20^th century anthropologists called for, instead, they dispensed with the sleight of hand of linguistic fluency. This state of affairs should at the very minimum deserve greater attention in current methodological and ethical discussions regarding fieldwork and collaboration with interpreters.

To read the full article

Sepielak, K., Wladyka, D. & Yaworsky, W. (2022). Language proficiency and use of interpreters/translators in fieldwork: a survey of US-based anthropologists and sociologists. Multilingua. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2022-0071

Related content

Laihonen, Petteri. (2020). Do concepts and methods have ethics? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/do-concepts-and-methods-have-ethics/
Piller, Ingrid. (2016). Herder – an explainer for linguists. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/herder-an-explainer-for-linguists/
Piller, Ingrid. (2021). The interpreting profession in ancient Egypt. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/the-interpreting-profession-in-ancient-egypt/
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/how-to-challenge-anglocentricity-in-academic-publishing/

References

Chagnon, Napoleon. 1992. Yanomamo: The last days of Eden. New York: Harvest Books.
Deane, K. & Stevano, S. 2016. Towards a political economy of the use of research assistants: reflections from fieldwork in Tanzania and Mozambique. Qualitative Research, 16(2). 213-228.
Fortes, Meyer, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.). 1940. African Political Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freeman, Derek. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mead, Margaret. 1939. Native languages as fieldwork tools. American Anthropologist 41(2): 189–205.
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). “Women, life, freedom” – the slogan swimming against the global tide. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/women-life-freedom-the-slogan-swimming-against-the-global-tide/

“Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” banner displayed by Bayern Munich soccer fans (Image credit: Archie Rhind-Tutt)

Some recent images from around the globe: protest rally in Rome with a banner featuring the slogan “donna vita libertà” (“woman, life, freedom”); cover of the French newspaper Libération with the bilingual Persian-French headline “زن زندگی آزادی/femme, vie, liberté” (“woman, life, freedom”); fans at a match between two major German soccer teams holding a banner with the Kurdish slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” (“woman, life, freedom”); video of feminist protesters in Chile chanting in Persian and Spanish “zan, zendegi, azadi; mujer, vida, libertad” (“woman, life, freedom”); poster for a rally in Bilbao, in the Spanish Basque Country, with the bilingual Kurdish-Basque headline “jin jiyan azadi/emakume, bizitza, askatsuna” (“woman, life, freedom”).

The list could go on: in a few hours of internet search, I compiled a 100+ corpus of the slogan used on banners, posters, billboards, graffiti, in digital art, chants, and as hashtag – in 23 different languages. Since a few days ago, the slogan even has a Wikipedia entry, currently in English, Persian, and Kurdish.

That a protest slogan from outside the Anglosphere is spreading globally and multilingually is highly unusual. So, let’s explore the story of the slogan that is travelling against the global linguistic current!

International slogans

The word “slogan” comes from the Scottish Gaelic word “sluagh-ghairm”, which mean “battle cry”. Essentially, slogans are linguistic tools of mass mobilization. This means that the limits of a language are the limits of mobilization. For many mass movements – those devoted to local issues or those with national ideologies – this is not a problem. But movements that seek to mobilize across linguistic boundaries face a challenge.

“Woman, life, freedom” – bilingual English-Persian billboard display, Piccadilly Circus, London (Image credit: Xanyar)

The international workers’ movement has dealt with the linguistic problem of global mass mobilization through translation. One of the globally most recognizable slogans – “Workers of the world, unite!” – is a translation of a German original (“Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch!”) and the Wikipedia entry for the slogan lists around 50 additional versions in other languages.

With the global spread of English, some slogans, particularly commercial ones, have taken a different route. Instead of translating slogans into all the languages of target markets, the English version is used internationally. Famous examples include Nike’s “Just do it”, Apple’s “Think different”, or Uniqlo’s “Made for all.”

A spin-off of “Made for all” can be found on the “Peace for all” t-shirt range, Uniqlo’s charity sale range. The example illustrates how commercial and political slogans have come to shade into each other under the hegemony of English. One of the many global roles of English is that it has also become the language of choice of global mobilization. Political slogans from the Anglosphere spread readily across linguistic borders, too. “Black Lives Matter” and “Me too” offer powerful recent examples.

Non-English slogans in the global arena

While “Black Lives Matter” and “Me too” readily captured the imagination of masses outside the USA, it is difficult to think of a non-English slogan that achieved any level of international recognition in recent decades.

The slogans of major protest movements have certainly been widely translated into English: for example, one of the main slogans of the Arab Spring, “الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام”, often appeared on banners as “the people demand removal of the regime”; or the main slogan of the Hong Kong Uprising “光復香港，時代革命” was often accompanied by “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.”

The function of these English translations, however, was not so much mobilization of non-Arabic-speaking or non-Chinese-speaking groups. Instead, their function was to draw international attention to these movements.

Kurdish origins of “Women, life, freedom”

The Kurdish slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” has been around for about 20 years. It is closely associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a socialist armed guerilla movement operating in the Kurdish-majority areas of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Women’s liberation has been a cornerstone of the ideology of the PKK, and the slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” speaks to a radical commitment to women’s liberation (“jin”), ecology (“jiyan”), and against state oppression (“azadî”).

"Jin, jiyan, azadî" comes from militant, anti-system women. It's a universal slogan – but it mustn't be stolen by the dominant liberal power system.

JIN cannot rely on capitalism and the state.
JIYAN means being against all war and arms trade.
AZADÎ is opposing colonialism.

— Dilar Dirik (@Dlrdrk1) October 1, 2022

The slogan first attracted a larger audience outside Kurdistan in the mid-2010s when a PKK-affiliated all-female militia unit in the Syrian civil war, YPJ, was part of the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish region, Rojava.

The YPJ was the subject of various documentaries and attracted some outside support, particularly in the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. And that is how the slogan began to spread. It could now be found in Kurdish and English as the title of a 2017 photo essay, in Kurdish and Italian as a book title and on the banner of a 2017 protest march in Rome, in Kurdish on a mural in Vienna, in Kurdish, German, English, and Turkish in a 2014 tweet, in Kurdish, English, German, French, and Turkish in a 2019 art exhibition, and in Kurdish and French in the 2018 movie “Les filles du soleil” (“Girls of the sun”).

“Women, life, freedom” extends from Kurdish to Persian

The internationalization of the slogan in the 2010s kept it firmly associated with the Kurdish struggle for self-determination. The traditional homeland of the Kurdish people is spread out over Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and in all these countries Kurds have faced various levels of oppression since the end of the First World War.

Persian-French bilingual version on the newspaper cover of “Libération”

With the recent exception of the autonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq, the Kurdish language is largely excluded from public life in the Kurdish areas and is not taught in schools. The linguistic oppression of Kurdish has been most extreme in Turkey, where it was even prohibited to be spoken in the home and could not even be named.

The situation of the Kurds in Iran is somewhat different from the other three main countries due to strong ethnolinguistic and cultural ties between the Kurds and other peoples of Iran. Kurdish and Persian belong to the same language family and share many similarities, in contrast to the majority languages of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria (Turkish and Arabic).

It is against this background that the transformation of the slogan from Kurdish to Persian must be understood: Kurdish “ژن ژیان ئازادی/jin, jiyan, azadî” and Persian “زن زندگی آزادی/zan, zendegi, azadi” share obvious similarities. The words for “woman” (ژن/jin, زن/zan) and “life” (ژیان/jiyan, زندگی/zendegi) are etymologically related across the two languages, and the word for “freedom” (ئازادی/azadî, آزادی/azadi) is the same in both languages.

The catalyst for the adoption of the slogan in Persian was the death of a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody in Tehran on September 16, 2022. “Women, life, freedom” became the battle cry of a movement against state oppression in Iran and beyond.

Transformations in the global linguistic hierarchy

The global linguistic hierarchy can be understood as a pyramid: the vast majority of languages play no official role anywhere in the world and, as peripheral languages, are relegated to the home and community. Above this large layer sits a smaller layer of a few hundred central languages with an official role in a nation state. On top of the hierarchy sit one single language only, English, the hyper-central language of globalization.

English is exceptional because it can be used for home, national, and international communication. English can fulfill all the linguistic needs of a speaker, and an English speaker may never have to learn another language.

Multilingual version as digital art (Source: H_Rafatnejad)

Speakers of a peripheral language, by contrast, cannot afford to remain monolingual. To get an education, to communicate nationally and internationally, they have to learn other languages.

The same is true for slogans. An English slogan can mobilize locally, nationally, and internationally.

Neither a Kurdish nor a Persian slogan offers such affordances. Peripheral to the global language system, Kurdish slogans can only mobilize locally. For national mobilization, they need to be translated into a language higher up in the hierarchy, Persian in this case. And for international mobilization, it needs to be translated yet again, first and foremost “up” into English, but also laterally into other languages.

Content worth listening to

The global linguistic hierarchy is not only about form (which language?) but also about content (what matters?).

Content in English is widely considered worth paying attention to, as is evidenced by translation statistics: English is the source language of the overwhelming majority of translations in the world. It is the source language of 1,266,110 translated documents recorded by UNICEF. The second most frequent source language is French, and it is far behind with 226,123 translations.

Content translated from Persian is minuscule in comparison although it still ranks as the 34^th most frequent source language with 3,041 documents. There are no statistics for Kurdish – translations from that language are so rare.

Seen against the global linguistic hierarchy, the story of “ژن ژیان ئازادی/jin, jiyan, azadî” and “زن زندگی آزادی/zan, zendegi, azadi” is quite miraculous: the slogan has been swimming against the global linguistic tide. It is meaningful to audiences around the globe who have been using it both in the original language and in translation.

Official coronation portrait (Image credit: Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2015)

The Queen and the English language are both unique within their categories. The Queen enjoyed special social status among humans through a complex combination of exceptional legal standing, imperial power, accumulated wealth, and sophisticated celebrity cult. The same is true of English: it is different from any other language in terms of reach, clout, and popularity.

English has more speakers than any other language

English today is said to have around 1.5 billion speakers, close to 20% of the global population. Even if counting speaker numbers is notoriously tricky, that’s a lot more than any other language in history. If we were to include everyone with basic proficiency, 1.5 billion is a substantial undercount.

But it is not the large number of speakers that makes English exceptional. After all, Chinese is not far behind with 1.1 billion speakers.

What makes English categorically different from Chinese is the relationship between first and second language speakers. The overwhelming majority of Chinese speakers live in Greater China and speak Chinese as their mother tongue.

By contrast, only a minority of ca. 370 million English speakers live in the United Kingdom and its settler colonies (most notably the USA but also Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa).

The vast majority of English speakers live outside the Anglosphere: some in former exploitation colonies of the UK or USA (e.g., India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Bangladesh, Ghana), and others in countries with no special ties to the Anglosphere where English is learned as a foreign language (e.g., China, Germany, France, Japan, Russia).

In short, what makes English exceptional among languages is twofold: it is widely used outside the heartlands of the Anglosphere, and it is learned as an additional language by countless multitudes across the globe.

The most spoken languages worldwide, 2022 (Source: Statista)

English is more powerful than any other language

A language does not have power per se. It derives its power from the people and institutions it is associated with. And English has been associated with some of the most powerful people and institutions of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries.

The British Empire was the largest empire in human history, covering 35.5 million km² in 1920 (when it was at its largest), or more than a quarter of the world’s land mass. Even after the decline of the British Empire, English got a second imperial boost due to US global domination.

English is not only associated with powerful states but almost all international organizations have English as their working language (sometimes along with a few other languages), from Amnesty International to the World Trade Organization. Even organizations far removed from the Anglosphere have adopted an English Only policy, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The political might of English is accompanied by economic clout. Most of the world’s most powerful corporations are headquartered in the USA, and even those that are not have been adopting English as their corporate language.

The world’s richest people speak English, too: 8 of the world’s 10 richest people are based in the USA, and the other two (one in France, one in India) undoubtedly also have English in their repertoires.

The examples could go on and on to illustrate that English is spoken in most of the world’s halls of power. That creates an effect that sociologists call “misrecognition”. Power comes from control over military, economic, or political resources; not from language. However, because English is so consistently associated with high power, it becomes “misrecognized” as a source of power.

And because everyone wants a piece of the cake, everyone wants to learn English so that they, too, can reap the successes it seems to confer.

Countries with largest numbers of English speakers

English is more hegemonic than any other language

Misrecognition is closely tied to another exceptional characteristic of English: it dominates through the ideas associated with it. English is stereotypically associated with the best in almost any field of human endeavor.

Most languages are associated with cultural stereotypes, beliefs, ideas, and emotions. Unlike the specific and relatively narrow cultural stereotypes associated with other languages (e.g., “French sounds romantic”), ideas about English are highly versatile: it is the language of modernity itself.

English is seen as the language of Hollywood media glitz and glamour, the language of freedom and liberal democracy, or the language of science and technology. Indeed, the cultural versatility of English is so great that it not only serves as the language of global capitalism but can also appear as its antagonist: the language of resistance.

One important way in which the hegemony of English is maintained is through the pomp and pageantry of the British monarchy. We are currently seeing global media saturation coverage. Its effect is not only to create a cultural, emotional, aspirational, and personally-felt connection with the Queen but with everything she stands for, including the English language.

The future of English

Although the role of the Queen is highly exceptional, her passing reminds us that the role was filled by an ordinary human being. It is likely that the next incumbent will be less capable at arresting the decline of the British monarchy. The role is likely to become less special, with a reduced realm and against the continuing diversification of celebrity cults.

The passing of the Queen has unleashed a global media frenzy, which also reinforces the hegemony of English (Image credit: sohu.com)

It might take longer for English to see a diminished status. In the past, imperial languages such as Latin and Persian survived the empires that spread them by hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

At the same time, the fate of English now rests to a significant degree with the language policies of countries outside the Anglosphere. And these might change as beliefs about the importance of the language change. For instance, if China were to curtail the role of English language proficiency for university entrance, this could send speaker numbers plummeting quite quickly.

The role of English is no longer solely in the hands of the Anglosphere.

Related content

To explore further how English went from peripheral peasant tongue to global superspreader language, and what its meteoric rise means, head over to this guest lecture I delivered at Yunnan University, Kunming, China) on Sept 28, 2021.

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

US- and UK-based scholars dominate linguistics

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

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

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

Challenging the Anglophone publication monopoly

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

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

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

A look into the black box of academic publishing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Against the center vision of “global” academic knowledge

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

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

For community building and an ethics of care

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

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

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

Confronting privilege

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

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

Reference

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

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

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

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

***

Adéṣínà Ayẹni [@yobamoodua] to Gerald Roche [@GJosephRoche] (2 Feb 2022): I will surely love to be a part of the global day. But one question, can I contribute in my language in place of English?

Gerald: My heart sank as I read this message on Twitter. I’d been messaging people all day, promoting Global Language Advocacy Day (GLAD22), the first ever global event dedicated to raising awareness about language rights. I was really proud to be part of this event, but reading this message suddenly filled me with doubt. Although I had assumed and hoped that people would use whatever language they wanted in participating in the day, I hadn’t really made that clear in how I communicated.

Claire: I responded to Gerald’s plea for personal stories of multilingualism for GLAD22, and in so doing, drew from my English resources to concretise the dialogue with Gerald, as a mediator to his (and my) followers. I wrote about my experiences as a multilingual that began with learning German. But, I wrote it in English to attend to the monolingual question-answer framework implicit in the Twitter reply function. This framework mimics social interactions, particularly in institutional settings, to see a dominant speaker lead a discussion towards certain personal, political and institutional aims. Interactants (like me) know that they are cut-off from doing this if we deviate from the lingua franca, limiting our combined reach. Thus, the replying function alone is structured by a monolingual bias.

***

In this piece, we interrogate the exchange that followed the question above to explore how I (Gerald) endeavored to uphold the language rights that are at the centre of our combined work with GLAD22 and the Global Coalition for Language Rights (GCLR). We interrogate the options made available by social platforms like Twitter and make suggestions for multilingual frameworks for communication that might be upheld in our future language rights work.

GCLR is a relatively young organization. It emerged in the early days of the pandemic when a group of organizations, based mostly in Europe and North America, came together to discuss the promotion of language rights. Founding members and co-chairs of the coalition were mostly representatives of non-governmental organizations and professional translation services. Membership in the coalition grew substantially throughout 2021, as GCLR expanded to include individual academics, activists, and advocates. The changing composition of the coalition, and its increasing size, began to see us nurture our definition of ‘global’ and its articulation through GLAD22.

For GCLR, being global means not just getting the message out as widely as possible, but also being as inclusive as possible, and working in a way that responds to the diverse challenges facing language rights advocates around the world. This global inclusion creates solidarity so we can act together, lending our support to those who face greater risks in their own advocacy.

The first GLAD22 used the phrase ‘language rights are human rights’ to nurture such solidarity. Modeled on Language Advocacy Day, GLAD22 aimed to raise awareness of the need to defend language rights, and to expand our network of solidarity, thus strengthening our capacity to work together in defense of language rights.

There were several approaches via social media to facilitate multilingual discussions but the majority of the engagement came through English language dialogue, which is where the question via Twitter was located.

A Twitter Exchange 

I (Gerald) responded to the request to participate in languages other than English with an enthusiastic ‘yes’. What followed was a post in Yorùbá, featuring a banner image with the phrase ‘Ẹ̀TỌ́ ỌMỌNÌYÀN NI Ẹ̀TỌ́ SÍ ÈDÈ’,—‘language rights are human rights’—alongside the GLAD22 hashtag.

Òní tí í ṣ'ọjọ́ kejìlélógún, oṣù Èrèlé ọdún; 22-02-2022 ni Àyájọ́ Ọjọ́ Àgbàwí fún Èdè Àgbáyé, àkọ́kọ́ irú ẹ̀ lágbàáyé. A ya ọjọ́ òní sọ́tọ̀ fún ìgbàsọ̀ láárí ẹ̀tọ́ èdè ẹni.
Àkórí tí 2022 ni Ẹ̀TỌ́ ỌMỌNÌYÀN NI Ẹ̀TỌ́ SÍ ÈDÈ.#GLAD22 #YORUBA #ETOSIEDE pic.twitter.com/wJbX3bSJtE

— ỌMỌ YOÒBÁ (@yobamoodua) February 22, 2022

The post featured a long thread covering existing language challenges in Nigeria and suggestions for improvement. Priorities included refocusing policy concerns for Indigenous languages as well as prioritizing Indigenous languages in the home and in education.

It received several likes and retweets, including by Gerald to his followers. This is important because Gerald’s actions demonstrated not only that he supported participation in Yorùbá, but also his institutional alignment. Other members of GCLR also engaged with the post, and in doing so, advocated for multilingual participation.

Later in the day, one of Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s mutuals, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (커라 투버순) [@kolatubosun], called out for a language rights group in Nigeria. Several of the key points of the first post were highlighted, especially those that pressure the government for language policy changes. This post was liked by several more users, who commented with their support for the group.

We need a language rights group in Nigeria. An organisation dedicated solely to advancing the rights of its languages. That supports language revitalisation and commits funds to supporting efforts in that direction; pressures government and policymakers on relevant issues, etc

— Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (커라 투버순) (@kolatubosun) February 23, 2022

This Twitter exchange provides some opportunities to ascertain the impact of Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s  multilingual interaction on the language rights values of GCLR and GLAD22. With the GLAD22 affiliation, users communicated their local barriers to language rights. They assembled to develop solidarity and organizing potential.

Importantly, these interactions were in contexts that GCLR has not yet managed to reach. As one observer pointed out on the day, GCLR had organized ‘no activities in or relating to Africa’ as part of the day. Thus, Gerald’s response helped catalyze meaningful discussion for Indigenous languages with strategies for implementation and, possibly, movement towards local organizing in Nigeria.

What if GCLR has real fit and capacity to do more? What if multilingual frameworks for communication were modeled by GCLR for use within platforms like Twitter, and beyond?

Initiating Multiple Moderators 

GCLR might mobilize the Twitter responses shown in this post, and others, to recruit them as moderators for future Global Language Advocacy Days. A series of starting points, methods for moderating in and to multiple languages might be developed amongst members.

These could include reaching out to key educational and government institutions listed in Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s post, to nominate individuals from their institution to speak on their behalf on the day within a nominated social media platform. GCLR members could act as moderators of these discussions in their languages, accumulating new communication hubs across several languages for GLAD23. These hubs could be observed to grow insight around multilingual designs for communication that may eventually be adopted by global north-based moderators such as us.

GCLR has the culture and capacity to do this. Throughout 2021, the coalition participated in a number of larger events, such as International Translation Day and RightsCon. Members’ presentations discussed the importance of language rights as a means of realizing linguistic justice, particularly in the digital realm. GCLR made this information available in as many languages as possible. We feel that it is a natural next step for GCLR to grow its member base meaningfully and initiate multiple moderators across several languages in GLAD23.

Redesigning Multilingual Frameworks for Communication

GCLR is also well-placed to improve decolonizing and multilingual frameworks for communication. Let’s say that Gerald offered to co-author a post with Adéṣínà Ayẹni that would be a thread between English and Yorùbá, linking with Australian and African institutions with power and reach. Such a post may invite comments in both languages (and varieties) that either moderator could respond to.

Such a post may invite language practices such as codeswitching to enter the dialogue because of an ease of intelligibility by the moderators. Users may draw from English resources creatively and as a tool for reaching wide audiences, defined by personal choices rather than monolingual biases. Such frameworks for communication may invite new language practices that emerge in digital spaces but rarely in English-dominated zones.

These frameworks go beyond the otherwise profit-driven knowledge generation in social media discourses as they redesign more socially and linguistically equitable interactions online.

There is great scope for testing such frameworks within Global Language Advocacy Day. On Twitter, the #GLAD22 hashtag received nearly 60,000 impressions with individuals contributing stories, ideas, and resources and language-focused organizations participating including the Linguistics Society of New Zealand, the PEN Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee, Cultural Survival, Tehlike Altındaki Diller, Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, and Hausa Language Hub.

Prefiguring Linguistic Justice

GCLR upheld language rights within several aspects of its communication in GLAD22, leading to 13 events in 6 countries in Asia, the Pacific, Europe, and North America and to the support of new debates such as those in Nigeria. We published about language rights issues in the UK and Bangladesh; New Zealand, Japan, the UK, Ireland and the USA, Australia, and Myanmar, organized a social media campaign on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and received attention in the media, such as this article in Kronos News that was published in English and Turkish. However, as advocates for language rights, we must discern ‘how’ we do this within the limited and often monolingual platforms that we are offered online.

We are currently working to create a set of multilingual principles and practices for the organization, which we aim to have in place before we begin planning Global Language Advocacy Day 2023. Doing so is part of the coalition’s prefigurative practices, i.e., those based on the idea that we should try to ‘create the sought-after forms of justice in the process of achieving structural transformation: to prefigure the world one wants to build.’

This work is also part of evolving organizational strategies in the coalition, which include the formation of working groups, modeled on processes that were used in the Occupy movement (among other contexts). These groups come together to undertake a specific task, without supervision, and then once that task is done, they dissolve. One of these working groups will develop the coalition’s multilingual principles and practices, which will undoubtedly evolve over time, while others address discrete issues raised by coalition members.

If you would like to be part of these language rights activities, and help to prefigure and work towards a world of greater linguistic justice, then we invite you to join us. Contribute your passion, ideas, and labor, your solidarity and commitment, to realizing our mission of language rights for all.

How does one become an applied linguist?

This invites the question of how one becomes an applied linguist. As Grabe (2010) explains, it is unclear “what training (and what duration of training) might be most appropriate” to become an applied linguist (p. 44). Despite some interest in this question, such as Ellis’ (2016) edited collection of the life histories of several prominent applied linguists, this question has not been thoroughly explored.

Here I want to reflect on my academic background and how it has influenced my research and work.

Applied Linguistics with a Chinese focus

My first degree was a Bachelor of Arts in Languages and Applied Linguistics, with a major in Chinese language. Throughout this degree I also took Asian studies courses, including Chinese history and politics. This created an interest in how political, economic, cultural and social developments at the local, national and global levels are connected to language-based issues involving China. Inspired by this, I wrote my PhD dissertation on China’s language situation. It explored the changing use and status of English in China; the growing importance of the Chinese language in the world; and the potential impact of English on China’s ethnic minority languages. In more recent times, I have also become interested in how the Chinese government promotes Chinese language and culture abroad, especially through Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms.

China through the lens of languageIn this sense, my studies of Chinese history and politics gave important context to language-based issues and informed my understanding of them. But it is language-based issues that have always been the central focus of my research. For example, knowledge of China’s domestic political situation and its relations with the rest of the world are necessary for me to understand the changing use and status of English in China, while knowledge of China’s reemergence as a great power is necessary for understanding the promotion of Chinese language and culture abroad. In other words, I see China through the lens of language in my research. Hult (2010) refers to this approach as an angle, or a way of investigating the world through the theme of language.

Language in Asian Studies

My studies also gave me another perspective on language, that of language as a way of doing research. In Asian studies, language is often seen as a technique or tool for studying something else, such as history, politics or economics, and proficiency in one or more Asian languages is considered essential for researchers (see, for example, the discussion in Davis, 2015; Milner, 1999 and Platt, 2006). The necessity and utility of language for accessing academic and media sources was clearly emphasised to me, particularly at the postgraduate level. So too was the importance of fieldwork, which in my case has involved often involved travel to China to talk to teachers, students, and scholars among others. I have found this an invaluable way to understand how language-based issues are experienced by the people directly involved in them.

Applying applied linguistics

This has in turn led to a desire to resolve, or at least propose solutions to, such language-based issues. I have, for example, suggested how universities might better manage Confucius Institutes and proposed principles for how teachers can deal with the dilemmas of teaching English in a globalising world. This is what Bygate (2004, 2005) refers to as the pragmatic nature of applied linguistics – it is not just about describing language-based issues but also about developing, implementing and evaluating appropriate responses to them. I don’t claim to have had any great impact, but the goal of doing so has been important.

Engagement with language-based issues involving China has also been a feature of my working life. My first full-time teaching position was at Jilin University in Changchun, China, where I taught English language courses to undergraduates and applied linguistics courses to postgraduates. This experience shaped and informed my views on English language education in China and the role of English in Chinese society more broadly.

Shortly afterwards, I gained a position in ESOL/TESOL at Flinders University, where I design, teach, and administer TESOL courses. Like many academics, I endeavour to connect my research to my teaching. In the course English as a Global Language, I include discussions of the impact of English on Chinese language and culture, while in Language Assessment in TESOL I discuss the washback effect of English language tests like the College English Test (CET) and Test for English Majors (TEM). Where possible I also assign students readings from Chinese authors across my courses.

I hope this brief personal reflection will spark further discussion of how one comes to be an applied linguist and what it means to be an applied linguist working on language issues involving China.

References

Brumfit, C. (1997). How applied linguistics is the same as any other science. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7(1), 86-94.
Bygate, M. (2004). Some current trends in applied linguistics: Towards a generic view. AILA Review, 17(1), 6-22.
Bygate, M. (2005). Applied linguistics: A pragmatic discipline, a generic discipline? Applied Linguistics, 26(4), 568-581.
Davis, D. R. (2015). Three principles for an Asian humanities: Care first … learn from … connect histories. The Journal of Asian Studies, 74(1), 43-67.
Ellis, R. (Ed.). (2016). Becoming and being an applied linguist: The life histories of some applied linguists. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Grabe, W. (2010) Applied linguistics: A twenty-first-century discipline. In R.B. Kaplan (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of applied linguistics (2nd ed.) (pp. 34-44). Oxford University Press.
Hult, F. M. (2010). Theme-based research in the transdisciplinary field of educational linguistics. In F. M. Hult (Ed.), Directions and prospects for educational linguistics (pp. 19-32). Springer.
Milner, A. (1999). Approaching Asia, and Asian studies, in Australia. Asian Studies Review, 23(2), 193-203.
Platt, M. (2006). The academic’s new clothes: the cult of theory versus the cultivation of language in Southeast Asian studies. In C. Chou & V. Houben (Eds.), Southeast Asian studies: Debates and new directions (pp. 86-101). International Institute for Asian Studies The Netherlands/Institute for Southeast Asian Studies Singapore.