The White House (Image credit: Zach Rudisin, Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: The Trump administration has recently declared English the official language of the USA while simultaneously cutting the provision of English language education services. This politicization of language and migration in the USA is being felt around the world.

To help our readers make sense of it all, we bring you a new occasional series devoted to the politics of language and migration.

We start with an essay by Professor Rosemary Salomone, the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. John’s University in New York City. Professor Salomone, an expert in Constitutional and Administrative Law, shows that longstanding efforts to make English the official language of the USA have always been “a solution in search of a problem.”

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English in the Crossfire of US Immigration: A Solution in Search of a Problem

Rosemary Salomone

Making English the official language of the US has once again reared its head, as it does periodically. This time it has gained legal footing in a novel and troubling way. It also bears more serious implications for American identity, democracy and justice than the unaware eye might see and that the country should not ignore.

Trump Executive Order

Amid a barrage of mandates, the Trump Administration has issued an executive order that unilaterally declares English the “official language” of the United States. It does not stop there. It also revokes a Clinton Administration executive order, operating for the past 25 years, that required language services for individuals who were not proficient in English.

The order briefly caught the attention of the media in a fast-paced news cycle. Yet its potentially wide-sweeping scope demands more thorough scrutiny and reflection for what it says and what it suggests about national identity, shared values, the democratic process and the role of language in a country with long immigrant roots. It also calls for vigilance that this is not a harbinger of more direct assaults to come on language rights. Subsequent reports of closing Department of Education offices in charge of bilingual education programs and foreign language studies clearly signal a move in that direction.

English and National Identity

German Translation of the Declaration of Independence

English has been the de facto official language of the United States for the past 250 years despite successive waves of immigration. Though the nation’s Founders were familiar with the worldview taking hold in Europe equating language and national identity, they also understood that they were embarking on a unique nation-building project grounded in a set of democratic ideals. As a “settler country” those shared ideals and not the English language have defined the US as a nation unlike France, for example, where the French language became intertwined with being a “citoyen” of the Republic.

In the early days of the American republic, the national government issued many official texts in French and German to accommodate new immigrants. Languages were also woven less officially into political life. Within days of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, a newspaper in Pennsylvania published a German translation to engage the large German speaking population in support of the independence movement. As John Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, noted in a letter to Noah Webster in 1831, geographic and social mobility, rather than public laws, would create “an identity of language through[out] the United States.” And so it has been.

The executive order distinguishes between a “national” and an “official” language. English has functioned well as the national language in government, the courts, schooling, the media and business. It has evolved that way through a maze of customs, institutions and policies that legitimize English throughout public life. It is the language spoken by most Americans. Over three-quarters (78.6 percent) of the population age five and older speaks English at home while only 8.3 percent speaks English “less than very well.” And so, by reasonable accounts, formally declaring it the official language after 250 years seems to be a solution without a problem unless the problem is immigration itself and unwarranted fears over national identity.

While benign on its face, at best the Trump order veers toward nationalism cloaked in the language of unity and efficiency. At worst it’s a thinly veiled expression of racism and xenophobia, narrowly shaping the collective sense of what it means to be American. Though less extreme in scope, its spirit conjures up uniform language laws in past autocratic regimes where language was weaponized against minority language speakers. Think of Spain under Franco and Italy under Mussolini where regional languages were outlawed.

Context and Timing

Context and timing matter. The order comes on the heels of the Trump Administration’s shutting down, within an eye-blink of the inauguration, the Spanish-language version of the White House website along with presidential accounts on social media. Reinstated throughout the Biden years, the website had first been removed in 2017 during the first Trump Administration.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump blasted former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is married to a Mexican-American, for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail. “He should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States,” Trump remarked, projecting what became an administration openly hostile to “foreigners” and the languages they speak. Against that history, the official English order now signals rejection of the nation’s large Spanish-speaking population and the anti-immigrant feelings their growing numbers have engendered.

The irony is that Trump, not unlike other politicians, has courted that population with Spanish language ads. With 58 million people in the United States speaking Spanish, political operatives understand that Spanish is the “language of politics.” But the “politics of language” is far more complicated. The 2024 Trump campaign ad repeating the words, “Que mala Kamala eres” (“How bad Kamala you are’) to the tune of a famous salsa song with the image of Trump dancing on the screen is hard to reconcile with his prior and subsequent actions as president.

The current shutdown of the Spanish-language website did not go unnoticed among public dignitaries in Spain. King Felipe VI described it as “striking.” The president of  the Instituto Cervantes, poet Luis Garcia Montero, called it a “humiliating” decision and took exception to Trump’s “arrogance” towards the Hispanic community. On the domestic front, the executive order raised even more pointed concerns among immigrant and Hispanic groups in the United States.

Issued at a time of mass deportations, hyperbolic charges of immigrant criminality, attacks on “sanctuary” cities and states, and rising opposition to immigration in general, the new executive order will further divide rather than unite an already fractured nation. Fanning the flames of hostility toward anyone with a hint of foreignness, it can incite lasting feelings of inclusion and exclusion that cannot easily be undone.

Official Language Movement

The Trump order did not come from out of the blue. It is the product of years of advocacy at the federal and state levels promoting English to the exclusion of other languages. Proposals to make English the nation’s official language have been floating through Congress since 1981 when the late Senator Samuel I. Hayakawa (R. CA), a Canadian-born semanticist and former college president, introduced the English Language Amendment. Though the joint resolution died, it set a pattern for congressional proposals, some less draconian, all of which have stalled. The most recent attempt was in 2023 when then Senator J.D. Vance (R. Ohio) introduced the English Language Unity Act.

Hayakawa went on to form “U.S. English” in 1983. It calls itself the “largest non-partisan action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States.” It currently counts two million members nationwide. In 1986, its then executive director Gerda Bikales tellingly warned, “If anyone has to feel strange, it’s got to be the immigrant, until he learns English.”

The group’s website now celebrates the Trump order as “a tremendous step in the right direction,” a supposed antidote to the 350 languages spoken in the United States. Obviously that level of diversity can also be viewed as a positive unless “diversity” is totally ruled out of even the lexicon. Two other advocacy groups with similar missions subsequently joined the movement: English First and Pro English.

Defying Democratic Norms

The fruits of those efforts can be found in official English measures in 32 states. The earliest, from Nebraska, dates from 1920 in the wake of World War I when suspicion of foreigners and their languages reached unprecedented heights. By 1923, 23 states had passed laws mandating English as the sole language of instruction in public schools, some in private schools as well. With immigration quotas of the 1920s (lifted in the mid-1960s) diluting the “immigrant threat,” the official English movement didn’t seriously pick up again until the 1980s as the Spanish-speaking population grew more visible. The remaining Official English laws were largely adopted through the 2000s, the last in 2016 in West Virginia. Some of them, as in California and Arizona, were tied to popular backlash against public school bilingual programs serving Spanish-speaking children.

Some of these state laws were passed by a voter approved ballot measure, others by the state legislature. Some reside in the state constitution, others in state statutory law. Unlike the Trump order mandated by executive fiat, they all underwent wide discussion by the people or their elected representatives, which a measure of such high importance, especially with national reach, demands. And they can only be removed using a similar process, unlike an executive order subject to change by the mere stroke of a future presidential pen. This is not like naming the official state flower or bird, a mere gesture. The consequences are far more serious.

As official English supporters are quick to point out, upwards of 180 countries also have official languages, some more than one. Standing alone, that argument sounds convincing. In well-functioning democracies, however, those pronouncements are carved into the nation’s constitution from the beginning or by subsequent amendment, or they’ve been adopted by the national legislature, again through democratic deliberation. At times they’ve been triggered by a particular event. France added the French language to its constitution in 1992 for fear that English would threaten French national identity with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union. Exactly what is triggering the current move in the United States? The answer is quite transparent. It’s immigration.

Some countries, like Brazil and the Philippines, allow for regional languages. Other approaches are less formalized. In the Netherlands and Germany, the official language operates through the country’s administrative law. In Italy, though the Italian language is not officially recognized in the constitution, the courts have inferred constitutional status from protections expressly afforded linguistic minorities. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Australia and Argentina, the latter two also “settler countries,” recognize a de facto official language as the United States has done since its beginning.

Clinton Order Protections

While the official English declaration might mistakenly pass for mere symbolism, the revocation of the Clinton order quickly turns that notion on its head. Rather than “reinforce shared national values,” as the Trump order claims, revoking the Clinton order protections undermines a fundamental commitment to equal opportunity and dignity grounded in the Constitution and in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From that Act and its regulations prohibiting  discrimination on the basis of national origin, the Clinton Administration drew its authority, including using national origin as a proxy for language, to protect language rights. In an insidious twist, the Trump executive order uses language as a proxy for national origin, i.e. immigrant status, to pull back on those same protections.

The Clinton order, together with guidance documents issued by the Department of Justice, required federal agencies and other programs that receive federal funds to take “reasonable steps” to provide “meaningful access” to “information and services” for individuals who are not proficient in English. As advocates argue, removing those requirements opens the door for federal agencies and recipients of federal funds, including state and local governments, to deny critical language supports that assure access to medical treatment, social welfare services, education, voting rights, disaster relief, legal representation and even citizenship. In a virtual world of rampant disinformation, it is all the more essential that governments provide non-English speakers with information in emergencies, whether it’s the availability of vaccines during a flu pandemic or the need to evacuate during a flood or wildfire, as well as the facts they ordinarily need to participate in civil life.

With current cutbacks in federal agency funding and staff, rising hostility toward immigrants, and the erosion of civil rights enforcement, one can reasonably foresee backsliding on any of those counts. One need only look at the current state of voting and reproductive rights to figure out where language supports may be heading when left to state discretion with no federal ropes to rein it in.

Multilingualism for All

The Trump order overlooks mounting evidence on the value of multilingualism for individuals and for the national economy. Language skills enhance employment opportunities and mobility for workers. Multilingual workers permit businesses to compete both locally and internationally for goods and services in an expanding global market

It takes us back to a time not so long ago when speaking a language other than English, except for the elite, was considered a deficit and not a personal asset and national resource. It belies both the multilingual richness of the United States and the fact that today’s immigrants are eager to learn English but with sufficient time, opportunity and support. They well understand its importance for upward mobility for themselves and for their children. That fact is self-evident. With English fast becoming the dominant lingua franca globally, parents worldwide are clamoring for schools to add  English to their children’s language repertoire and even paying out-of-pocket for private lessons.

Rather than issuing a flawed pronouncement on “official English,” the federal government would better spend its resources on adopting a comprehensive language policy that includes funding English language programs for all newcomers, along with trained translators and interpreters for critical services and civic participation, while supporting schools in developing bilingual literacy in their children. Today’s “American dream” should not preclude dreaming in more than one language. In fact, it should affirmatively encourage it for all.

In the meantime, the Trump order promises to provoke yet more litigation challenging denials in services under Title VI and the Constitution, burdening the overtaxed resources of immigrant advocacy groups and of the courts. Worst of all, it threatens to inflict irreparable harm on thousands of individuals and families struggling to build a new life while maintaining an important piece of the old.

It’s not the English language or national identity that need to be saved. It’s the democratic process, sense of justice and clear-eyed understanding of public policy now threatened by government acts like the official English executive order.

Related content

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Rosemary Salomone chats with Ingrid Piller about her book The Rise of English.

Losing their heritage language decreases the earning potential of 2nd-generation migrants

In most countries of immigration, linguistic diversity is by and large ignored by policy makers. If there are language-related policies, they take a deficit view of migrants and their children and focus on improving their English (or whatever the national language may be). Many people resent even the meagre efforts that states are making to help migrants and their children learn the dominant language, and ESL provision in schools is a ready target for funding cuts, as is currently the case in NSW. Going beyond ESL provision and investing into meaningful bilingual education that would enable migrant children to reach high levels of bilingual proficiency in both their heritage language and the dominant language are, by and large, unheard of. Usually, ensuring bilingual proficiency is the exclusive responsibility of parents and thus the usual vagaries of luck and privilege apply.

Bilingual provision in schools that would allow children to reach high levels of proficiency in two or more languages is widely seen as located in the “nice to have but expensive”-basket. In an environment where ESL provision is often considered expendable, bilingual provision may seem like utopian bells and whistles that we simply cannot afford. Linguists and educators have long pointed out the educational, cognitive and psycho-social benefits of bilingualism and have argued that achieving high-level proficiency in both the heritage language and the dominant language is good for the social fabric of a diverse society. However, such non-quantifiables without an immediate dollar-value usually cut no ice with hard-nosed budget planners and the proponents of bilingual education are mostly simply ignored as idealistic dreamers.

Well, it turns out the proponents of bilingual education have much more good economic sense than your average monolingual policy wonk.

A recent study by Orhan Agirdag published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism investigates the earnings of second generation migrants relative to their level of bilingual proficiency. Re-examining data from two large-scale longitudinal studies conducted between 1988 and 2003 in the USA, the author analysed the linguistic proficiency and earnings of 3,553 individuals. These individuals were either born to at least one migrant parent or came to the USA at a young age. In the early 2000s, they were in their mid-20s.

On the basis of participants’ self-reported proficiency data, the author identified three groups:

• High-level bilinguals, who had high levels of proficiency, crucially including the ability to read and write, in both English and their heritage language
• Low-level bilinguals, who had low levels of proficiency in both English and their heritage language
• English-dominant, who had high levels of proficiency in English but low levels of proficiency in their heritage language (or no proficiency at all)

No one will be surprised to learn that the English-dominant accounted for more than half of the participants, as that is what the US school system (as most others) is designed to achieve. With a bit over 20%, the numbers of low-level bilinguals are also unsurprising: these are the young adults who would have needed special ESL provision in school but presumably didn’t get it; while unsurprising, it is disturbing to see that more than 20% of migrant kids can go through their entire schooling career in the US without achieving adequate proficiency in English. The percentage of high-level bilinguals in the sample is very similar to that of low-level bilinguals (ca. 22%). These are the lucky kids who either lived within the catchment area of a bilingual immersion program or whose parents put in the effort of teach them how to read and write the heritage language after school and on the weekends.

Now which of these three groups do you think earned the most? According to the logic of the education system, it should be the English-dominant kids who fare best in the labour market. Well, they don’t!

High-level bilingualism was robustly associated with higher earnings of around $3,000 per year and the effect held even if other variables that are known to influence earnings were controlled for (e.g., gender, parental socio-economic status, educational achievement). The effect also held across language groups, even if some languages were more valuable than others (e.g., Chinese-Americans were found to earn more than other migrant groups but within the group of Chinese-Americans those with high-level bilingual proficiency earned more than those who were English-dominant or those who had low-level bilingual proficiency). Interestingly, when other variables were controlled, there was no earnings difference between those who were English-dominant and those who were low-level bilinguals.

Higher earnings of $3,000 per year when everything else is kept constant are a sizable effect. Additionally, the actual financial advantage of high-level bilingualism is likely to be higher due to indirect effects which are obscured by keeping other variables constant such as the link between high-level bilingualism and educational achievement (i.e. high-level bilinguals are more likely to achieve high levels of education and thus they have a compounded earnings advantage).

We all know that imposing English monolingualism on migrant children is bad for them educationally, cognitively and socio-psychologically. Thanks to Agirdag’s research, we now also know that it is bad for them economically. Beyond the economic disadvantage suffered by individuals who have been forced into linguistic assimilation, their linguistic assimilation through the education system is bad for the economy and thus for everyone: decreasing the earning potential of second-generation migrants through linguistic assimilation will, inter alia, lower the tax base and increase the demand for social services. Conversely, those who earn more, spend more.

Bilingualism has these earnings benefits because high-level bilinguals can access two labour markets: the mainstream labour market and the ethnic labour market. My guess is that the labour market advantages of high-level bilingualism are likely to further increase in the future: as the global economy becomes ever more connected, multilingual proficiencies will become ever more central to labour mobility.

In sum, bilingual education is good for the economy. It’s high time our leaders did their sums and showed some good business sense!

Orhan Agirdag (2013). The long-term effects of bilingualism on children of immigration: student bilingualism and future earnings International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2013.816264

Hiroshi Mikitani, Englishnization in Marketplace 3.0 (Source: gettyimages.co.uk)

The business and self-help section of my local Kinokuniya bookstore is currently featuring shelves and shelves of Marketplace 3.0: Rewriting the rules of borderless business by Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder and CEO of e-commerce giant Rakuten. I’m not a fan of books in the “how to improve your business” genre and mostly Marketplace 3.0 seems to be a (poorly written) run-of-the-mill text about empowering your business through KPIs. It is also the self-aggrandizing account of an egomaniac. However, the first chapter is absolutely unique to the genre as it is devoted to Rakuten’s language policy: entitled “Englishnization,” it describes how Mikitani decided in May 2010 from one day to the next, “without consulting anyone,” to change the company language from Japanese (and other national languages spoken in subsidiaries outside Japan) to English.

I had, of course, heard about the Rakuten English-Only language policy before in the media so I was keen to read the inside story and to learn what happened after the announcement. However, Mikitani tells the reader at length about his decision to introduce English but is rather coy about what happened next, particularly in the medium term. Mikitani imposed English so that communication within the company would be faster. Not surprising in a world where speed is money. But did it really work? Are they really faster at Rakuten because they speak English? Mikitani only says that the first board meeting after the introduction of English was twice as long as usual leaving the reader to assume that this slow-down was a one-off and communication has significantly sped up since.

How is communicating in English supposed to be faster than communicating in Japanese? To begin with, Mikitani argues that the need for linguistic mediation – translating and interpreting – falls away. Second, as employees gain confidence in English, they no longer send e-mails to the USA but pick up the phone and call. Finally, Mikitani believes that English communication is faster per se because it is supposed to be a more egalitarian language than Japanese and so employees are forced to stop prevaricating in the face of superiors.

“Englishnization” thus is a collection of more or less common language ideologies: linguistic diversity as a barrier to be overcome by an English-Only policy is a throw-back to the Tower of Babel myth and English as more direct is the stock-in-trade of popular forms of linguistic relativism.

So, how does such a radical language policy play out at Rakuten? Well, Mikitani is not saying. He says that Rakuten is much more widely known now because the English-Only policy caught the attention of the global media and even the Harvard Business School. But that is not really due to their English-Only policy per se but to a clever press release about it.

The only indicator of how English at Rakuten is going comes from the claim that 90% of employees had met the language test score required for their level within a year. The remaining 10% were excused because of the 2011 tsunami and given an extension. Personally, I’m guessing that most Rakuten employees had pretty good English to begin with and the few who hadn’t, well, they couldn’t do much about it. Language learning after all is time-consuming business.

That language learning takes time lies at the crux of evaluating a monolingual language policy: if you have a cohort of proficient speakers, then making them use the common language makes perfect sense but if you have to train them up first, then you are not only not speeding things up but slowing them down considerably. This point is unfortunately overlooked in many contemporary decisions to turn transnational institutions into English-Only institutions.

At a time when more and more transnational institutions, similarly to Rakuten, turn to English-Only an assessment of the effectiveness of the European Union’s multilingual provision is particularly timely. Having been committed to multilingual provision through translating and interpreting for many decades, the EU model is often dismissed as too costly and thus inefficient and unaffordable for other transnational organizations such as ASEAN.

Unfortunately, the dismissal of the EU’s multilingual language policy as costly and inefficient is wrong, as Gazzola and Grin explain in a new article in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics. They show that the EU’s language bill for translating and interpreting is Euro 1.1 billion per year. That may seem a lot until you see that this amounts to less than 1% of the EU’s annual budget of €147.2 billion. That means that the expenditure for the EU’s current multilingual language policy is €2.2 per person per year; about the price of a cup of coffee and clearly not so astronomical …

Despite this small amount, it is true that it would be even cheaper if the EU abolished all translating and interpreting and adopted an English-Only policy. Anyone advancing that argument has to bear in mind that the language costs would not be entirely eliminated because language services to make sure all those documents are well written and legally watertight would still be needed. Cost would shift from translators and interpreters to ghost-writers, copy-editors and proof-readers.

But the overall cost could still be brought down from one cup of coffee to say half a cup of coffee?

Well, no, actually not. Under an English-Only regime, most Europeans would be paying much, much more than the equivalent of a cup of coffee for linguistic provision. The British and the Irish would not be paying at all. Those 7% of continental Europeans who already speak “very good” English would not be paying, either. That leaves everyone else – around 80% of Europeans – out of pocket for English language learning if they wanted to exercise their democratic right to understand what is going on in the European parliament and to participate in the European project in any other way. The cost for those 80% of Europeans to bring their English up to scratch would be less for some (those who already have “good” or “modest” English) and astronomical for those adults who have no English – for all these individuals it would be much, much higher than is currently the case.

Turning language costs from a public expense to personal language learning expenses is, of course, totally unfair and undemocratic. Not only would it make participation in the European project contingent about an individual’s financial capacity to invest in language learning, it would also be unfair for continental vis-à-vis English native speakers in Ireland and the UK who would not have to invest in language learning. Already receiving huge language subsidies by everyone learning their language, they could completely withdraw from sharing the costs of linguistic provision in the EU.

Rakuten’s Englishnization includes a similar cost transfer from the company to employees: Mikitani made them learn English in their own time and at their own cost. Viewed this way, Englishnization is nothing more than a billionaire’s trick to socialize cost (language learning) to employees and privatise profits (derived from eliminating linguistic provision) to himself.

The evidence is clear: the EU’s multilingual provision is more cost-effective and fairer than an English-Only policy would be.

Every language policy maker in a multilingual environment should have a copy of Mazzola’s and Grin’s article on their desk.

Gazzola, M., & Grin, F. (2013). Is ELF more effective and fair than translation? An evaluation of the EU’s multilingual regime International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 23 (1), 93-107 DOI: 10.1111/ijal.12014

Carrie Chen’s successful chalk-and-talk method

In my previous post, I discussed the celebrity status of star teachers in Taiwan. Although their good looks and personality do play a key role in a star teacher’s popularity, this is only part of the story. These star teachers also possess the knowledge, skills and abilities to teach students in a way that helps them reach their goals. Interestingly, they usually do not employ the much-lauded Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach when they teach nor do they follow the monolingual English-Only Immersion Method. These teachers prefer to use more traditional and local approaches, such as grammar-translation and/or teacher-centered methods. This is due to the fact that the purpose of language teaching in cram schools is different.

In the case of star teachers, they are teaching in buxiban that are focused on assisting students with standardized exam preparation. The star teachers know that more traditional approaches to teaching are the best methods for helping students to pass standardized tests. Clearly, good teaching is context-dependent. It is impossible to separate English teaching methodology from the contexts in which it operates.

I will use the example of a highly successful star teacher, Carrie Chen, to demonstrate how a star teacher teaches their students. Let’s take for example Carrie’s approach to teaching English vocabulary.  Armed with only a blackboard and chalk, Carrie relies on her confidence, enthusiasm and teaching skills to motivate her students.

She begins her class (in the video 05:20) by saying the supposedly longest word in the dictionary, ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.’ She then writes it down quickly on the board to demonstrate her vocabulary expertise. This way she contends that English becomes fun and easy if students study with her saying and they won’t forget the content she teaches them.

Carrie employs a highly traditional and nowadays unconventional method of English teaching, i.e. no teaching aids and teacher centered. She uses Mandarin Chinese as the medium of instruction and the main focus of teaching is employing techniques (association, cognates, comparison …) to help students memorize English vocabulary. Using a combination of her witty humor, off-color jokes and personal anecdotes to make English vocabulary memorable rather than just being a bunch of syllables and sounds strung together.

For example, she makes fun of foreigners who do not know how to pronounce ‘謝謝 – xie xie (thank you)’ and ‘不謝 – bu xie (you are welcome)” in Mandarin Chinese correctly, instead they might say ‘shit shit (xie xie)’ and ‘bullshit (bu xie)’ to Taiwanese people. An off-color joke she used in the video described above is her strategy to memorize the word ‘phenomenon:’ she explains that ‘phe’ means a female elephant or a fat girl. If a girl is fat, ‘no’ ‘men’ are interested in being ‘on’ her. Hence an easy way to memorize the spelling of ‘phenomeon’ as ‘phe no men on.’

During a speech at a National Taiwan University, Carrie listed some keys to being a successful buxiban English teacher including: a smart and neat appearance, good command of English, and devotion and enthusiasm. She continues by emphasizing the need for encouraging students and remaining positive at all the times and incorporating humor and active learning techniques to motivate and sustain students interest.

The test-oriented method used in buxiban is not exotic or fancy. The secret lies in the way the star teachers conducts the class. The celebrity status of star teachers and their popularity does seem to be skin deep. Without their looks these teachers would not be able to pull in the students into the buxiban. Still, it is interesting to note, that although a lot of their popularity is premised on their good looks and charisma, many of these teachers do in fact know how to teach English very well. If they don’t teach well, their looks will not be enough to keep them their job and star status.

The quality of their teaching methods is reflected in the high scores their students achieve on the standardized tests given for admission into high schools or universities.

In contemporary Western democracies, references to blood relationships as a basis for national belonging have become distasteful to everyone except the far-right fringe. However, that doesn’t mean that the idea of privileged access to the nation has gone away – it has just gone underground and, in the process, become more fractured.

Instead, language has become the new boundary marker of who is in and who is out.

One way to turn language into a legitimate-sounding boundary marker is to hype the incidence of residents who do not speak English and to malign them as linguistic freeloaders, as Deborah Cameron shows with reference to the UK.

An article in the most recent issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics explores how members of the US Congress tackle the same problem. The researcher, Nicholas Subtirelu (who blogs at Linguistic Pulse) used a combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to analyse the 2006 congressional debate concerning the re-authorization of a portion of the Voting Rights Act, which mandates that election materials need to be printed in languages other than English in districts where population thresholds of other-language speakers are reached. This provision is referred to as “Section 203.” First enacted in 1965 to eliminate the disenfranchisement of non-English speakers, it has been controversial ever since and therefore needs to be regularly extended by congress. The most recent extension occurred in 2006 and it is the congressional debate that occurred on that occasion that forms the corpus for analysis.

It is particularly speakers who argue against the extension of the provision – many of them well-known for their anti-immigration stances – who need to rhetorically navigate the tension between English as a marker of national identity but not a marker of ethnicity. As a result, they work hard to construct English as a marker not of ethnic belonging but of civic belonging.

An example comes from the chairman of US English, Mauro Mujica, who was invited to testify. In his testimony he extolls speaking English as a form of civic and patriotic virtue:

When a person steps into a voting booth, he or she is exercising the highest civic duty. Yet, at that very moment the government sends a signal that English is not really necessary to join our National political conversation. Ironically, this message will not be sent to the Spanish speaker in Burlington, Vermont or the Chinese speaker in Wichita, Kansas. It will be sent only to those who live in high enough language concentrations to trigger Section 203’s requirements. In short, it will be sent to the very immigrants who are likely to live in linguistic enclaves where an English-optional lifestyle is a real possibility. (Quoted in Subtirelu 2013, p. 54)

Doing your civic duty means engaging in the life of your community and contributing to the common good: volunteer fire-fighters are often seen as the ideal example of doing your civic duty. Volunteer fire-fighting, like most other forms of civic participation, occurs on the local level, “in linguistic enclaves where an English-optional lifestyle is a real possibility,” if you will.

Participating in elections, too, is a civic duty – as it is a civic right. However, in contrast to volunteer fire-fighting, voting requires participation not in a local community but in an imagined community. Promoting English as a civic duty only makes sense if you delink civic participation from the local and tie it exclusively to the national level.

In the process, it is not only the meaning of speaking English that is transformed but also the meaning of civic participation. From being inextricably linked to participation in the real life of a real community, it becomes individualized. This is particularly clear in those arguments that contrast “good” immigrants with their opposites. The following example is a case in point. Here a “good” individual immigrant from Russia who does his duty because he speaks “good” English is contrasted with the community of Chinatown. Chinatown residents are implicitly coded as shirkers who fail to do their linguistic and national duty.

I just recently came from San Francisco. I was in Chinatown, and we talk about the enclaves. On my way to the airport I rode with a Russian immigrant who spoke probably as good English as I, though with an accent. And I asked him about Chinatown and he said they don’t speak English there. You can’t live there unless you are Chinese. And in walking in the streets, I heard all the young Chinese students speaking Chinese. That may work in San Francisco, but that would not work in Iowa. In order to participate in the community, you must speak English. (Quoted in Subtirelu 2013, p. 53)

The example is patently absurd: an obviously existing community group is exhorted “to participate in the community.”

It is exactly these kinds of absurdities that result from trying to argue that discriminating on the basis of language is not discriminatory.

Subtirelu, N. (2013). ‘English… it’s part of our blood’: Ideologies of language and nation in United States Congressional discourse Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17 (1), 37-65 DOI: 10.1111/josl.12016

Multiculturalism in Australia: Should it be seen but not heard? (Source: det.wa.edu.au)

Australia has embraced multiculturalism as official national policy since the 1970s. Interestingly, the most recent incarnation of the policy, called  ‘The People of Australia’ embraces multiculturalism without embracing multilingualism. In this post I want to explore what it means to celebrate multiculturalism and Australia’s cultural diversity without equally embracing multilingualism.

I will begin by sharing two experiences from multicultural events I recently attended.‎

Vignette 1

In September, I attended the 2012 Minister’s Awards for Excellence in Student Achievement (Community Language Schools). The award is intended to celebrate and honour the achievements of students studying in a community school in NSW. The ceremony was very special for me and my family because my daughter was one of 130 awardees for her achievements in Persian.

The awardees and their families came from a wide variety of linguistic backgrounds and I am sure all felt as pleased as we did that our efforts were being recognized. Maintaining a minority language involves a lot of effort not only on the part of the student but also of the extended family: we give up our Saturdays and travel long distances just so that our children can study their heritage language. The recognition of these efforts and sacrifices was going to be a joyous event!

However, this sense of gratification was marred by an exclusively monolingual ceremony! No one had bothered to bear in mind that the extended families of a group of heritage language learners might not enjoy an English-only ceremony. A number of uncomfortable moments resulted. For instance, the audience was specifically asked, in English, to hold their applause until the end. In view of the fact that there were 130 awardees, that request was perfectly reasonable except that not all of the enthusiastic grandparents from various backgrounds understood the English-Only code of behaviour. The result was an atmosphere of discomfiture resulting from discordant applauding here and there after individual children were called. There were visible nudges and sidelong looks at those who didn’t comply, presumably because they had not understood.

If non-English speakers are made to feel inadequate and judged at an event specifically designed to celebrate linguistic diversity, what does that say about the general value of linguistic diversity in this country?

Vignette 2

The 2012 Minister’s Awards for Excellence in Student Achievement (Community Language Schools) was not the first time that I experienced this sense of cynicism in multicultural but monolingual events. During a government-sponsored public forum to discuss issues faced by migrant families English was the only medium of communication, too. It was excruciating for me to watch one of the panelists, a second-generation family counselor, who was visibly embarrassed when her father was called from among the audience by the host to share his migration experiences. It seemed that host had not been aware that the old man’s English was limited because when he started to speak in halting but comprehensible English she was visibly annoyed. It was then painful to see how the host cunningly interrupted the speaker and took away the microphone in mid-turn!

Multiculturalism without multilingualism

The indirect message of both these multicultural events is that the languages of Australia’s non-English-speaking population are unworthy of attention and unintelligible. The message is clear: Australia may be multicultural but it is not multilingual. English is the one and only language of our multicultural society.

Indeed, so powerful is this message that even speakers from non-English-speaking backgrounds look down upon their less proficient peers. Instead of creating multilingual spaces we demand that everyone assimilate to one language. As my examples demonstrate a multicultural event without multilingualism is inclusive in name and on the level of rhetoric only. Without an embrace of multilingual practices, our multiculturalism is bound to remain an exclusive one.

Bilingual kids are more resilient

October is Mental Health month here in New South Wales. The campaign runs under the slogan “Celebrate, connect, grow” and includes some fantastic tips how to look after your mental health. The key point is to build strong relationships and to engage in activities that give us purpose and meaning. One thing that’s often overlooked in the mental health literature is the fact that these things are done through language: the languages you speak (or don’t speak) determine who you can build strong relationships with and which activities you can engage in.

That’s where bilingualism comes in: a bilingual person can build strong relationships within more than one community. That migrants to Australia need to learn English to build those relationships and to engage in a broad range of activities is a no-brainer. If you are stuck in an abusive marriage and don’t know where to turn for help because you don’t speak English that’s obviously not a good place to be in.

However, as a nation we are so focussed on English language learning that we easily forget that other languages are important, too. If a child can’t communicate with their grandparents because they’ve never learnt the family’s heritage language, then that also poses a mental health risk. Or if you can never have an adult conversation with your parents because you haven’t learnt their language and their English isn’t good enough for a difficult conversation, that’s going to make both children and parents feel isolated and disconnected.

In a multicultural society bilingualism is an essential ingredient of mental health. A recent study tracking the development of anxiety disorders and behavioural problems among Asian-American kids from kindergarten to Grade 5 (Han and Huang 2010) confirms that. Problem behaviours increased for all children during that period but they increased least in those who were balanced bilinguals and in those who were dominant in the language other than English. Those who were monolingual in English or English-dominant experienced a faster growth rate in mental health problems and those who were monolingual in a language other than English experienced the highest growth rate.

The fact that not speaking English in the USA (or here in Australia) is not good for personal well-being is obvious and requires little explanation. However, the fact that bilinguals fare better than monolingual English speakers flies in the face of current educational practice, which is to mainstream migrant children into English as quickly as possible. At the same time, we shouldn’t be surprised: bilingual children get the best of both worlds and in addition to building relationships through school, they also have access to additional social and cultural resources in their community.

The evidence is clear: Monolingualism is a risk factor for poor behavioural and emotional outcomes in the early school years. Clearly, schools need to nurture bilingualism, not just English, for all to be able to lead healthy and productive lives and to strengthen the social and economic fabric of our society.

Want to learn more about bilingual education? Join me tomorrow for a public lecture at the German International School Sydney in Terrey Hills.

Wen-Jui Han, & Chien-Chung Huang (2010). The Forgotten Treasure: Bilingualism and Asian Children’s Emotional and Behavioral Health American Journal of Public Health, 100 (5), 831-839 DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2009.174219

English-Only at Bon Secours

From what I read, there is a nursing shortage in the Global North. From North America to Japan and from Europe to the Gulf countries, rich societies suffer from a “care deficit,” which they fill by importing – mostly female – labor from the global South. I have published about the intersection of language, gender and global care chains before (check out our resources section on “Language, Migration and Social Justice”).

If there is a nursing shortage in a country like the USA, it’s hard to understand why a US hospital, Bon Secours Hospital in Baltimore, would choose to fire four nurses from the Philippines for no other reason than that they spoke Tagalog during lunch break. Current management theory suggests that it’s a good idea to minimize staff turnover and to try and hang-on to talent when you have it, particularly in an area with a shortage of qualified workers. So, how come four nurses get dismissed, without warning, for no other reasons than that they spoke a bit of Tagalog? Not even on the job but during break-time, and, for all I can gather from the media reports not even a Tagalog-only conversation but Tagalog-words mixed into an English conversation.

Indeed, when the four nurses filed a discrimination complaint, their lawyer argued that the lack of guidelines in the hospital’s English-Only rule made it impossible to abide by:

All it takes is just one word. That can be a greeting, a remark or even the name of a Filipino dish. Based on this rule, you could say bagoong (a fish sauce) and lose your job.

According to the lawyer, the hospital could not actually cite specific instances where or when the alleged violations of their English-Only rule had taken place. Huh?! How come an organization that claims to have “respect, justice, integrity, stewardship, innovation, compassion, quality and growth” as their core values can suspend all of these, and plain common sense to boot, in dismissing four employees without good documentation and due course? Not to mention that it’s economically irrational to dismiss health workers for no good reason when there is a shortage of them.

English-Only rules are born of ignorance and bigotry and they breed more of the same. It’s sad to see that the idea of English-Only was obviously so powerful at Bon Secours Baltimore that it suspended all other considerations.

As an afterthought, I can’t help wondering about the wisdom of throwing English-Only stones when you sit in a Bon-Secours-glasshouse …

Piller, Ingrid, & Takahashi, Kimie (2011). At the intersection of gender, language and transnationalism Nik Coupland. Ed. Handbook of Language and Globalisation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 540-554