(Image credit: Australian Government, Study Australia)

In her 2007 ethnographic study of eight US law schools, Elizabeth Mertz traces the process through which law students learn to “think like a lawyer” in order to become one. She shows how this process is essentially about language: learning to think like a lawyer means adopting new ways of reading, writing and talking.

Crucially, Mertz demonstrates that underlying these processes is a set of linguistic ideologies – assumptions we make about language and how it should manifest in particular social contexts. For example, she identifies a practice in legal analysis and reasoning, as taught in these classrooms: the social characteristics and personal perspectives of people who appear in legal cases and problem questions are rendered irrelevant and made invisible, in favour of the legally relevant facts. Issues of morality and emotion are likewise pushed aside as unimportant.

As students undergo this transformative process of learning to think and speak like a lawyer, Mertz questions the effects this may have on how law students see the world, their ability to see social diversity and inequality and to identify and challenge issues of injustice in their future work.

But what about how students think about themselves? What if they personally face marginalization? And what of their diverse language repertoires? If thinking like a lawyer depends on speaking like one, what is this speech expected to sound like? And what impact does sounding differently have on one’s sense of professional identity and self-worth?

These were just some of the questions raised in my recent digital ethnographic research with students enrolled in a Graduate Diploma in Migration Law and Practice (GDMLP). This one-year university program is required for people who do not have an Australian legal qualification to become Registered Migration Agents (RMAs) and offer professional assistance to people applying for a visa in Australia. Unlike law degrees, which remain difficult to access for many, it has been estimated that at least half of the GDMLP cohort has English as a second language (L2), and perhaps even more are first generation migrants.

I attended online workshops during which students practiced their client interviewing skills through role-plays, observing this practical work and debriefing with them. I also conducted research interviews with students at various points during their study and after graduating, over a period of three years. To have immediate impact, I also offered my interdisciplinary expertise to enhance learning, presenting on various aspects of communication, and helping the teaching team to develop and refine learning materials (see Smith-Khan & Giles 2025).

In a new article, I share some of the ways students talk and think about their study, their future professional goals, their existing strengths, and the skills they wish to improve and how. The discussions brought up beliefs about language, closely tied to ideas about proficiency, professionalism and identity.

Bilingualism: optional benefit, real risk

While every participant who speaks multiple languages planned to use them in their future job, with at least some of their clients, there was a clear hierarchy in how different languages were valued, with English appearing at the apex as non-negotiable, and other languages more as optional extras (see also Piller & Gerber 2021).

Paolo*  The English level, I think it’s very very important too.

Laura   Yeah.

Paolo    I’m Italian, as I said before, I work with a lot of Italians, and they don’t speak English. And will have, a hundred percent sure that I will have a lot of consultations within Italian community. I will go to Italy to do seminars, and that will be in Italian.

Laura   Yeah.

Paolo    So in that way, if you think in that, in that way, you don’t need English, okay?

Laura   Yes.

Paolo    I mean, ‘I don’t need to have a very high English level, because my-, ‘I’m Chinese, I just talk in Mandarin, my consultation in Mandarin, my clients are in Mandarin.’ Okay. And it makes sense. But then you have to do applications in English, you have to study the uh legislation in English. So if the legislation, if you don’t understand properly the legislation, if you mixed up a word, all your translation in Chinese, or in Italian, or in any other language, won’t be, won’t be correct.

Okay? So it’s very, very important that they understand, the people that they want to become a migration agent, that they understand everything. [Paolo, interview 1/2, 2020]

On one level, this makes perfect sense: the work does indeed require close engagement with legal and institutional texts that are only available in English, and application forms required to be submitted to the Immigration Department only are allowed in English. However, this type of discourse also assumes bilingualism is a potential risk to English language proficiency: rather than acknowledging the crucial skills bilingual and multilingual people bring to this work, the fact that they speak more than one language is regarded as a threat to their English. This resembles political and institutional discourses in which the ‘monolingual mindset’ is evident, including in the language proficiency rules around becoming an RMA, and in other areas like skilled migration and university admission, where proficiency is assumed for some, but not for others (Smith-Khan 2021a; Piller & Bodis, 2023). Such discourses are also evident in public political debates about migration and registered migration agents (Smith-Khan 2021b).

‘Australian’ native speakers and language choice

Perceptions about identity are also closely connected with these types of ideologies. As L2 English speakers discuss their experiences and efforts to develop speaking skills in class and connect these evaluations with their future language practices and career plans.

Gemma: If you have poor communication you give them the impression you’re not professional. You probably have lots of knowledge in your mind but you just can’t express yourself properly, or too slow, or I don’t know. You’ve got to give them, the client the impression that oh no, you are professional. I can trust you. You can do the job for me. So I try to, the reason why I said um, um, the native English speaker is better, probably that’s just one side about um, they easily use language um, uh, like more vocabulary than us. We can’t use like beautiful words or whatever it is to express myself uh, precisely. So uh, that will give client the impression like, you not professional like I can’t trust you…. So, yes. So that’s why I said if I speak to Chinese, probably I’ll be more confident. They, they will, will feel less, um, less suspicious. I don’t know. Um, less, how will I say? Um, more trust on you than English-speaking people. [Gemma, interview 1/1, 2020]

Evaluations like these compare L2 English speakers’ skills vis-à-vis what they consider the ideal student and future RMA, an L1 English speaker, with implications for professional identity and future work plans. They also link general professional competence with language proficiency and oral fluency, something that again also comes up in the broader discourse (see Smith-Khan 2021b).

However, these ideologies extend even further, to national identity and moral worth.

Gemma: Yes, with my, one of my classmates… Uh, at the beginning it wasn’t very good. Oh, he’s local. He’s Australian. And he’s very, I feel he pick up very quickly and easily and then he has to put up with me because I have to think. And, you know, thinking probably slower than, than him and then speak slowly. Uh, yes so I find the difference and I try to, I just want to try to improve that by talking more [Gemma, interview 1/1, 2020].

In this encounter, Gemma evaluates herself in relation to an “Australian”, “local” L1-speaking classmate. Here, speaking and thinking are closely connected, and she comes out positioned as a burden in the interaction – something her classmate must “put up with” because of her slower thinking and speaking.

While such discourse is not surprising in this particular social and political context, it sits uneasily against the facts we have about Gemma’s personal and professional background, along with the direct linguistic data collected in the project. She came to Australia as a skilled migrant and was granted a permanent visa because of her professional qualifications. She has been an Australian citizen for over a decade, working as a civil servant in a professional role, in a regional Australian city, in a highly monolingual English office environment. Her English language proficiency is indisputably high. Yet her evaluation demonstrates the power of native-speaker and monolingual mindset ideologies about languages: her capability, her professionalism, and even her nationality become inferior and vulnerable to the point that she imagines herself as at best a burden, and at worst incapable of being trusted, for an L1 English speaking audience in this context (see Piller et al 2024).

Hard work, pushback and pragmatism

However, all is not lost for this group of aspiring migration practitioners. Both L1 and L2 English speakers heavily stressed the need to practice speaking and to study hard to continue to improve their professional skills. While this emphasises individual responsibility and creates an additional burden for L2 speakers, it still allows for a degree of agency and a sense of opportunity: developing professional skills and identity are not regarded as impossible.

At the same time, students also demonstrated a critical awareness of the broader social and political contexts, and what these mean for how people are (sometimes unfairly) evaluated. For example, one student pointed to the broader political context of migration and perceptions of migrants to make sense of how RMAs are perceived: if the government is “very anti-immigration”, it follows that RMAs would be seen as “unnecessary” or a “pain to deal with”, and it would be made difficult for them to enter the profession.

Another student pushed back against the apparent need for people to speak standard Australian English. Nitin explained how whether someone comes across as rude can be a matter of the listener’s perception. He was thus able to turn the spotlight onto the interlocutor, who may misjudge L2 speakers who “don’t have those little, nice touches” in their speech, rather than the “deficient” speaker, and at the same time claim an advantage over L1 interlocutors, as more compassionate and knowledgeable in interactions involving speakers of diverse language varieties or proficiency. However, Nitin still ends on a pragmatic note, related to his own lived reality:

Nitin: People, when I talked to the native speakers here, sometimes they’d think I’m talking rude. My colleagues said that on a few occasions, and I started thinking, what was rude in that? … So I adapted it over a period of about nine years. Now I know what to speak and what not to speak. [Nitin, interview 1/2, 2020]

Therefore, while it is clear that students may come to internalize linguistic ideologies that frame their language practices and repertoires as inferior or in need of ongoing improvement, there is still space to reclaim and challenge these ideologies. However, even while doing so, they must still navigate the very real and enduring practical effects such ideologies have within their social and professional contexts.

Note

*Participant names are pseudonyms.

References

Mertz, E. (2007). The language of law school: Learning to “think like a lawyer”. Oxford University Press.

Piller, I. & Bodis, A. (2024). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 53(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000689

Piller, I. & Gerber, L. (2021). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, (24)5, 622-635. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227

Piller, I. et al. (2024). Life in a New Language. Oxford University Press.

Smith-Khan, L. (2025, AOP). Language, culture and professional communication in migration law education, Language, Culture and Curriculum, https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2025.2481051

Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘Common language’ and proficiency tests: a critical examination of registration requirements for Australian registered migration agents. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 97–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2021.1900031

Smith-Khan, L. (2021b). Deficiencies and loopholes: Clashing discourses, problems and solutions in Australian migration advice regulation. Discourse & Society, 32(5), 598-621. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265211013113

Smith-Khan, L., & Giles, C. (2025, AOP). Improving client communication skills in migration law and practice education. Alternative Law Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X251314205

US flags (Image credit: Wikipedia)

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

Following on from Rosemary Salomone’s essay providing the historical and legal background, political anthropologist Gerald Roche today shows how the axing of language access service provision is an exercise in necropolitics – a use of power that leads to the suffering and death of certain groups of people.

***

On March 1st, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States of America. As a result, people are going to be harmed, and some will die.

There are direct and indirect reasons why this order will get people killed. Most directly, people will die as a result of this order because it will deny language access services to the more than 25 million people in the USA who need them. Apart from declaring English the USA’s official language, this order revokes Executive Order 13166 (August 11, 2000), which obliged US government agencies to provide language access services to people who need them.

Government agencies didn’t necessarily always fulfill their obligations under this order. But now, any motive they had to respect people’s language rights has been removed. Access to critical services will have life-threatening consequences in at least three arenas.

First, during natural disasters, such as fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, people require timely access to accurate information to have the best chance of survival. However, linguistic exclusion and discrimination are reproduced in how this information is provided to the public, resulting in what Shinya Uekusa calls ‘disaster linguicism’. Research during the recent LA wildfires by Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, showed that thousands of Asian Americans were denied access to disaster alerts and other information in their preferred language

Secondly, healthcare is another setting where language access is vital. When people’s language rights are respected in healthcare, they are more likely to use healthcare services, which are also more likely to be effective. When people’s language rights are violated, they are more likely to die in mass health incidents, such as pandemics. The individual consequences of linguistic exclusion can be seen in the case of Arquimedes Diaz, who called 911 after being shot, but was denied interpretation services for 10 minutes. Those crucial minutes were enough to leave him paralyzed. Any longer and he could have died.

A third area where people will be exposed to increased risk of death due to this executive order is the justice system. Sociolinguists such as Diana Eades, John Baugh, and many others have demonstrated that failures to account for linguistic differences lead to miscarriages of justice in police encounters, courtrooms, and elsewhere. This has life and death consequences particularly in the 27 states of the USA that still have the death penalty. However, we also need to take into account the fact that incarceration reduces life expectancy by 4 to 5 years, and that after incarceration, people experience twice the risk of death by suicide. Any miscarriage of justice on linguistic grounds that leads to imprisonment therefore has life and death consequences.

So, in disaster management, healthcare, and the justice system, the reduction or removal of language access services will directly expose people to harm and increased risk of death. There are also two additional, less direct ways that this order could lead to death.

First, we can look at the complex link between Trump’s official English order and death that particularly threatens Indigenous people. Trump’s order is almost certainly inspired by a law previously drafted by his vice-president, JD Vance: the English Language Unit Act of 2023. That proposed law included a clause stating that it could not limit Native Alaskan or Native American peoples’ use or preservation of their languages. The new order contains no such clause.

To understand why this is a problem and how it relates to death, we need to look more broadly at Trump’s record on Indigenous policy. During his first term, Trump carried out ‘continuous attacks’ on Indigenous communities, starting with a memo that reinstated construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Starting his second term, Trump signalled his hostility to Indigenous languages by using one of his first executive orders to wipe an Indigenous place name (Mount Denali) from the map. This prior hostility towards Indigenous communities, and Trump’s general austerity agenda, mean that Indigenous languages are likely to be underfunded during his second term. This will have life and death consequences, because decades of research has shown that language revitalization has health benefits, improves wellbeing, and reduces suicide rates.

Finally, Trump’s promotion of English and his hostility towards Indigenous peoples and languages should be viewed as part of a broader white supremacist agenda that has life and death implications for people of color. The push to make English the official language of the USA has always involved opposition to bilingualism, and often to specific languages: Jane Hill has noted how English-only movements often go hand-in-hand with efforts to limit the use and legitimacy of Spanish. These movements have gathered steam since the 1980s, and have consistently been associated with the right, and its more xenophobic, white-supremacist fringes: the linguistic fascists, as Geoffrey Pullum once memorably dubbed them.

Trump’s executive order effectively mainstreams the far-right linking of whiteness, English, and belonging in the USA. Asao Inoue has argued that the life-and-death consequences of this linkage start with the discursive circuits and communicative practices that shape judgments about whose language and life are considered valuable. But more directly, this order will legitimize the white supremacist practice of using perceived proficiency in English to target people for violence. We saw this in December 2024 in New York City when one person was killed, and another injured, after their attacker asked them if they spoke English. In another incident in July 2024, a man shot seven members of a family after telling them to “speak English” and “go back where they came from.” Trump’s official English order risks inciting similar acts of violence.

Taking all of this together, we can see that Trump’s executive order making English the official language of the USA will almost certainly harm people, and is also likely to lead to deaths. That’s why I think we need to take what I call a necropolitical approach to language – one that examines how language, death, and power intersect. A necropolitical approach demonstrates that designating English as the USA’s official language is not just a symbolic declaration, it is also, for some people, a death sentence.

Related content

In this episode of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast, Gerald Roche talks with Tazin Abdullah about his new book The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet. Gerald is also a regular contributor to Language on the Move and you can read more of his work here.

For more content related to multilingualism in crisis communication, head over to the Language-on-the-Move Covid-19 Archives.

Figure 1: Sarah (in black) and Anna (in purple) at Abrahamic Family House

As friends and fellow sociolinguists, we, Anna and Sarah, have discussed almost every topic under the sun (literally!) on our balmy afternoon walks in our home/second home of Abu Dhabi. However, one topic we hadn’t discussed until recently was languages used within religions. Our visit to the Abrahamic Family House on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island changed this (Figure 1).

Linguistic and semiotic harmony across religions

It’s not often that you see Arabic, Hebrew and English represented together in the same space, but that’s exactly what the Abrahamic Family House does. This cultural and religious centre contains a mosque, synagogue and church as places of worship, linked together by ‘the Forum’, a secular and yet multi-faith connecting space or third space. One of the first features you are drawn towards is the Forum’s water fountain, which highlights the importance of water as a symbol of purity and ablution in Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Figure 2: Trilingual signage at Abrahamic Family House (picture taken by authors)

All the top-down permanent signage in the Abrahamic Family House is trilingual (Arabic, English, Hebrew), and produced in such a way that the languages are equal in size and are represented on an even footing (Figure 2), with order of languages being alphabetical. This ethos mirrors the design of the mosque, church and synagogue themselves, which are represented equitably – with each building being a 30m x 30m square (Figure 3).

The numerological landscape also holds meaning in this space, with the number seven being significant in all three religions, and therefore represented in the architecture. The gardens add another dimension to the semiotic landscape, within serene courtyards dotted throughout as well as the central raised garden which links all three houses of worship. Here, olive trees are significant in all three religions and are planted throughout, again symbolizing the collective and shared history of the faiths, and with regional trees and plants also indicating the shared regional origin of all three religions.

Language choices for religious signs

Figure 3: The church, mosque and synagogue at the Abrahamic Family House (pictures taken by authors)

As we headed back to the Forum from the gardens, we witnessed an interesting lingua-cultural turn in relation to the signage in one of the darkened rooms. Each corner of the room was lit up in turn by a gobo, with a crescent representing Islam, a cross for Christianity, and a menorah symbolizing Judaism (Figure 4).

Where the crescent was, a verse from the Holy Quran was printed in English and Hebrew only (not Arabic), while where the cross was, a verse from the New Testament in the Bible was printed in Hebrew and Arabic. By the menorah, a verse from the Holy Torah was printed in Arabic and English, and not Hebrew. Some very interesting linguistic choices were made in this room. Here, the emphasis is on sharing values across linguistic groups. Multilingual linguistic landscapes here serve as a pedagogical tool for learning not only about languages, but in this case, religions too.

Abandonment of trilingual values on bottom-up and temporary signage

Figure 4: Religious gobos in the Forum (pictures taken by authors)

When looking at the temporary and bottom-up signage in the space, however, trilingual patterns wavered. For example, if you wanted to attend a sign language course which was being offered as part of the community outreach program, the story told was in Arabic and English, and not Hebrew. In the gift shop, while the main signage was in all three languages, the descriptions of the items were given in English only. Similarly, if you wanted to borrow an abaya to follow the dress code, the directions were given in English only. This reminds us of similar patterns found in Covid-scapes in Abu Dhabi, where bottom-up temporary signage tended to be in English only, in an otherwise bilingual linguistic landscape. Furthermore, the digital linguistic landscape seen via the website of the Abrahamic Family House, is bilingual (English and Arabic), with Hebrew not being a language option. Here, we see, as in other multilingual global contexts such as Canada, trilingual efforts are imbalanced across spaces.

The wall of intentions

Figure 5: Multilingual wall of intentions (picture taken by authors)

Having explored the three places of worship and experienced the immersive light show (Figure 4), we came across a wall of tessellating triangles, again speaking to the significance of the number three: three languages, three religions, and echoing the shape of the simple triangular fountains found throughout the complex. We quickly realized that the purpose of this ‘wall of intentions’ was for visitors to write their own messages of intention. From 120 messages on the wall, we could understand the 60 messages written in English, eight in French, five in German, four in Spanish and one in Italian. A further six were written in Arabic, 25 in East Asian languages, and 18 others which we have yet to fully translate. Pictures appeared on 24 of the messages in addition to text, with only one intention including a picture without words, which was three people holding hands together, symbolizing togetherness.

Of the 78 intentions we could understand, 11 of them referred to God and only one indicated a prayer of any kind. Love was mentioned in 24 intentions, sometimes more than once to emphasize it. Peace was mentioned in 22 intentions. Other sentiments expressed included luck (five times) and happiness (seven times). Intentions were sometimes made in general, other times for oneself, for example ‘to be stress-free’, while sometimes they were made for the world (ten times), and for family in general or specific family members (12 times) (Figure 5).

Figure 6: Our intention for further research (picture taken by authors)

Although the wall of intentions is temporary with today’s intentions being different from tomorrow’s, a major takeaway on the day we visited, October 21, 2024, was the focus on love, peace, the world, and family, rather than on religion itself. There is no doubt that further analysis which includes specific and detailed translations will reveal more nuanced truths, but that’s for another day. Suffice to say that there is a lot to get excited about in this multi-faith, multilingual and interculturally rich space. As our hand-written intention states (Figure 6), we plan to delve deeper into this rich landscape and add to the growing research on religious linguistic landscapes and semiotic religious landscapes in the Arab Gulf States and beyond.

Author bios:

Anna Dillon is an Associate Professor at Emirates College for Advanced Education in Abu Dhabi. She is a teacher educator in the UAE, and has research interests in early childhood education, teacher education, language and literacy education, multilingualism and translingualism in education and within families.

Sarah Hopkyns is a Lecturer at the University of St Andrews and a visiting research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Her research interests include language and identity, language policy and linguistic landscapes. Sarah is author of The Impact of Global English on Cultural Identities in the UAE (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of Linguistic Identities in the Arab Gulf States (Routledge, 2022).

(Image credit: Mana Akbarzadegan via Unsplash)

When Muhammad* applied for admission to a postgraduate degree at an Australian university, he was asked to show evidence of his English language proficiency. Acceptable evidence included achieving a specific score on a commercial language test such as IELTS or TOEFL. Muhammad was upset to discover that none of the following counted as acceptable evidence of his English language proficiency: that all his prior education had been through the medium of English, that he was employed as university lecturer in the English department of a university in Bangladesh, and that he had published fictional and non-fictional writing in English.

Marlene* from Germany also applied to a postgraduate degree at an Australian university. She hardly noticed that English language proficiency constituted an admission criterion. The fact that she had studied English as a Foreign Language at higher level for her high school certificate meant that proof of her English language requirement was waived. English had never been the medium of education in her prior education. Outside her English language classroom, she has no experience with public speaking in English, nor with academic writing in English.

By most counts, Muhammad would be considered a more proficient speaker of English than Marlene. Yet the English language proficiency requirements of the university they applied to constructed Muhammad’s English as problematic and Marlene’s English as above board.

How are such decisions made? Why do some applicants need to take a test while others do not?

How do universities decide whose English needs to be tested for admission?

In new research just published in Language in Society, Agnes Bodis and I examine the English language proficiency requirements of Australian universities to answer these questions.

Language testing is often assumed to be only relevant for language learners. But who is a learner and who is not? The stories of Muhammad and Marlene show that this is not a trivial question. What made Muhammad a learner and Marlene a speaker according to university regulations?

Everyone agrees that the old concepts of “native” and “non-native” speakers are no longer valid. Yet, implicitly, a distinction that is very similar to this binary is made every time someone is required to sit a language test.

(Image credit: Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu via Unsplash)

The language of those who are required to sit a test is subjected to scrutiny. Those who have the requirement waived get a free pass.

Inherent English versus tested English

English language requirements for university admission create a language binary between “inherent English” and “tested English.”

Inherent English is the language of those who are exempt from testing.

Australian universities grant exemptions based on a mélange of criteria related to citizenship, education, and heritage. For example, to be recognized as having an “English-speaking background” and hence not having to sit a test, one policy requires two pieces of evidence from two different sets: one needs to be a citizenship document (“birth certificate, passport, arrival documents to establish residency”) and the other a portfolio of documents providing evidence of schooling, work, and residency. Curiously, the latter may include utility bills, tax notices, and medical records, as well as a letter of reference from “a person with standing in the community.” Examples of such persons include “a school principal or teacher, doctor or pharmacist, a local manager, community leader, social worker or sporting coach who know the person’s family.” (quoted from Piller&Bodis, 2022)

How does any of this establish evidence of English language proficiency you might ask? Well, it doesn’t; but it shows that language proficiency assessments are never about language alone. Language assessments are always also about identity.

The deficient English of those who are required to have their English tested

Inherent English is about having the right citizenship, the right education, or the right heritage. Anyone who falls short on these criteria, is required to sit an English language test.

Whether English language proficiency will need to be evidenced by a score on a language test is determined through a process of elimination. Those who do not meet the specific citizenship, education, and heritage criteria are relegated to the left-over basket of those who need to be tested. This engulfs them in a deficit perspective, expressed in “not”-rules: “if you are not […], then “you will be required to demonstrate English language proficiency in the form of an English test.”

Tested English is completely different from inherent English: it is reduced to the pseudo-objectivity of a numerical score, and even comes with an expiry date.

My TOEFL test scores expired. I can no longer speak, write, or understand English.

— Hamza (@hamza_azhar) July 31, 2020

Binary Englishes map onto binary identities

These two types of English – inherent English and tested English – map onto two different speaker groups.

Inherent English is accorded to most domestic applicants, applicants with passports from some Anglophone countries, applicants with certain educational credentials (mostly IB graduates, but also some specific high school certificates, as in Marlene’s case), and a medley of heritage criteria.

Inherent English maps most closely on the identity of the white native-speaker citizen construct. But not quite: it becomes blurred by the inclusion of citizens from Black majority states in the Caribbean (who, in actual fact, rarely apply to study at Australian universities) or those with certain educational credentials from outside the Anglosphere.

While the identity of those who are deemed to inherently speak English becomes blurred, its Other is cast into clear relief: the Asian non-native speaker non-citizen.

Objective language proficiency without identity?

Language proficiency constructs are always both about language and identity. The field of language assessment has been striving for objectivity by rejecting the identity component and focusing solely on language.

Whose English should be tested before admission? (Image credit: Dom Fou via Unsplash)

University admission requirements share this pretense to objectivity. The objectification of tested language is achieved through a convoluted set of regulations that can be expected to stand up to any legal challenges as long as they are applied consistently. However, this objectification of language proficiency has not made the identity component disappear. On the contrary, identity remains baked into universities’ constructs of English language proficiency through citizenship, education, and heritage criteria.

Implications for inclusion

Universities regularly deplore individuals’ lived experiences of exclusion and divisions within their student body. A major division in Australian universities is between domestic and international students. Yet our research suggests that admission requirements contribute to maintaining the ways of seeing that undergird these exclusions. Universities could contribute to dismantling these binaries, first, by uncoupling citizenship and heritage criteria from the language proficiency construct, and, second, by conceptualizing academic language and communication as a gradient which requires ongoing development for all students.

To succeed after admission both Muhammad and Marlene, as all their peers, will need ongoing support to develop their academic literacies.

*These names are pseudonyms.

Reference

Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 1-23. doi:10.1017/S0047404522000689 [open access]

Also relevant

Bodis, A. (2017). International students and language: opportunity or threat? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/international-students-and-language-opportunity-or-threat/
Bodis, A. (2021). The discursive (mis) representation of English language proficiency: International students in the Australian media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(1), 37-64.
Bodis, A. (2021). ‘Double deficit’ and exclusion: Mediated language ideologies and international students’ multilingualism. Multilingua, 40(3), 367-392. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2019-0106
Piller, I. (2001). Who, if anyone, is a native speaker? Anglistik: Mitteilungen des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten, 12(2), 109-121.
Piller, I. (2002). Passing for a native speaker: identity and success in second language learning. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 6(2), 179-206. [full access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/how-do-universities-decide-whose-english-needs-to-be-tested-for-admission/feed/ 46 24633 https://languageonthemove.com/baraye-preposition-of-the-year/ https://languageonthemove.com/baraye-preposition-of-the-year/#comments Sun, 11 Dec 2022 22:46:29 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=24579 Prepositions are the unnoticed and underappreciated workhorses of language. They are “grammar words” that indicate relationships. Essentially, their job is to connect other words with bigger and more important meanings. Because their meanings are fairly general, prepositions rarely change, and they rarely move from one language to another.

Despite being ordinary and unremarkable, a little Persian preposition has caught international attention over the past three months: “baraye” (“برای”), which means “for, because of, for the sake of.”

What makes “baraye” special?

As you might have guessed, the sudden explosion of “baraye” onto the global stage is connected to the ongoing protest movement in Iran, and its brutal repression – similar to the stories of the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” and of pop stick paddle boats.

Baraye – the anthem of a freedom movement

“Baraye” is the title of a song by a young musician, Shervin Hajipour, released on his Instagram channel on September 28, 2022.

The lyrics of the song were compiled from tweets stating reasons why (“baraye”) tweeters are protesting and what they are protesting against (“baraye”) and protesting for (“baraye”): baraye dancing in the streets, baraye fear when kissing, baraye my sister, your sister, our sisters, and so on. The song culminates in “baraye woman, life, freedom, baraye azadi, baraye azadi.”

Shervin was imprisoned and forced to delete the song from his Instagram channel within 48 hours of its release. However, by then, the song had reportedly already been viewed 40 million times, and it had been posted and reposted on countless other platforms.

Initially restricted to Persian-speaking audiences inside and outside Iran, the song soon reached a global audience. How did that happen?

Baraye at protest rallies

First, the song made it from online spaces to the real world through global solidarity rallies. Played on large screens and over loudspeakers, soon protesters started to sing along, as in this example from Berlin.

Baraye covered by artists around the world

Second, more and more artists started to cover the song. One of the versions with the widest reach was sung by British rock band Coldplay during a performance in Buenos Aires, which was broadcast to 81 countries. Another major live performance by German-Iranian singer Sogand was broadcast on German national TV, where thousands of audience members were shown singing along to the final lines “baraye azadi.” Another popular performance is by a collective of some of the most prominent French artists.

It is not only celebrities who are covering the song. In a true testament to the song’s global inspiration, choirs have taken up “Baraye” for their performance projects. Students of a German high school, for instance, sang “Baraye” during their solidarity day with Iran on November 16. In a regional TV segment about their day of action, they were even shown practicing Persian pronunciation with a language teacher in preparation for the performance. Another version that has been widely shared on social media is the rendition by a choir in the small French town of Chalon-Sur-Saône.

The list could go and on. New cover versions are being released all the time, by artists from many parts of the globe. Only last week, a feminist art collective in Rojava released this haunting version.

Baraye in translation

Third, translation played an important role in making the Persian song accessible to global audiences. Many of the music videos floating around the Internet are fitted with subtitles in languages other than Persian. I’ve seen versions with English, French, German, Kurdish, Swedish, and Turkish subtitles. I’m sure there are lots more.

Beyond translated subtitles, the song has also inspired a wave of reinterpretations in other languages. Australian singer Shelley Segal has produced an English version. Other versions receiving a lot of attention include a Swedish version by pop star Carola Häggkvist, a German version by folk singers Lisa Wahlandt & Martin Kälberer, and a version in Iranian Sign Language by Maleehe Taherkhani. Again, the list could go on and on.

Baraye: the global struggle for freedom and justice

Slate Magazine has just declared that ““Baraye” is objectively the most important song of 2022.”

Singing “Baraye” is a way for the world to express its solidarity with the Iranian people and their struggle for freedom. Their struggle is our struggle, in a world where freedom is under threat everywhere. The most recent report on civil society by the German human rights organization “Brot für die Welt” shows that only 3% of the global population live in truly free societies. Another 8% live in societies with narrowed rights (Australia is in this category). The remaining 89% of the world’s population live in obstructed, repressed, and closed societies. Iranians find themselves in a closed society, along with over a quarter of the human population.

“Baraye” strikes a chord because we all need to ask ourselves what we are fighting against and fighting for on this broken planet that we share:

Baraye dancing in the street; Baraye fear while kissing; Baraye my sister, your sister, our sister; Baraye changing rotten minds.
Baraye shame of poverty; Baraye yearning for an ordinary life; Baraye the scavenger kid and his dreams; Baraye the command economy.
Baraye air pollution; Baraye dying trees; Baraye cheetahs going extinct; Baraye innocent, outlawed dogs.
Baraye the endless crying; Baraye the repeat of this moment; Baraye the smiling face; Baraye students; Baraye the future.
Baraye this forced paradise; Baraye the imprisoned intellectuals; Baraye Afghan kids; Baraye all the barayes.
Baraye all these empty slogans; Baraye the collapsing houses; Baraye peace; Baraye the sun after a long night.
Baraye the sleeping pills and insomnia; Baraye man, country, prosperity; Baraye the girl who wished she was a boy; Baraye woman, life, freedom.
Baraye freedom; Baraye azadi.

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.

Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

Here, Monica Neve explores the language requirements of registering a business as “COVID Safe” in New South Wales (NSW).

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(Image credit: NSW Government)

As restrictions rapidly increased during the beginning of Sydney’s lockdown in March 2020, the small yoga studio, which I had been attending for a number of years, closed its doors. Not just for the period of lockdown, but for good. Without students attending class and with no rent reduction in sight, the studio owner could no longer keep the business afloat. However, in June, with restrictions easing, a new yoga teacher took a leap of faith and reopened the studio.

When it reopened, the studio was identified as “COVID Safe” and sported the NSW “COVID Safe” logo that has by now become a ubiquitous sight in the business precincts of NSW.

For my research project, I wanted to discover how a business becomes “COVID Safe” and whether all businesses have an equal chance of being registered as COVID safe.

What is “COVID Safe”?

Under NSW Public Health Orders, COVID Safe registration is mandatory for hospitality venues (including cafes, bars and restaurants), gyms, and places of public worship. Penalties of up to $55,000 apply for businesses failing to comply.

Non-mandatory registration is encouraged for all other businesses.

The COVID-safe logo

COVID Safe registration requires the creation of a COVID safety plan in which businesses explain how hygiene and safety measures are being implemented on their premises. Once registered, businesses receive a digital COVID Safe logo for use on online platforms, as well as COVID Safe hygiene posters for display.

Language and literacy skills of NSW business owners

About a third of Australian small businesses are owned by migrants who speak a language other than English, according to the Migrant Small Business Report published by the insurer CGU.

While the English language proficiency of this cohort is unknown, it is reasonable to assume that some members of this group are among those 4% of the Australian population – or 800,000 to one million people – who do not speak English well or at all (Piller, 2020a).

It is also safe to assume that a number of business owners have low levels of literacy, as about 13.7% of the Australian adult population – or approximately 2.3 million people – possess literacy levels that equate to only elementary level schooling (OECD, 2012).

Seen against this background, COVID Safe registration for businesses in NSW is also a language and literacy hurdle, for some larger than others.

Registration as COVID safe business

To gain insight into the registration process, I followed all the steps on the website (stopping just short of the final step of application submission) and developed a COVID safety plan for an imaginary business, “Monica’s Café.” I also interviewed a small business owner who had undertaken registration.

Initially, registration seems relatively straight forward. It involves providing details of the business and developing a COVID safety plan related to wellbeing of staff and customers, physical distancing, hygiene and cleaning, and record keeping.

Sample COVID safety plans are available in English as well as Arabic, Simplified Mandarin, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese.

However, things get more complicated once you actually have to fill out the safety plan form.

Before you do, you need to work your way through the regulatory language surrounding registration, as in the following excerpt from the introductory COVID Safe registration statement:

“COVID-19 Safety Plans are comprehensive checklists designed by NSW Health and approved by the Chief Health Officer. The plans provide clear directions on how businesses and organisations should fulfil their obligations under Public Health Orders to minimise risk of transmission of COVID-19 on their premises.”

(Image credit: NSW Government)

Multisyllabic vocabulary such as comprehensive, obligations, transmission and premises, and long sentences demand a high level of English language proficiency. This is confirmed by the Flesch reading ease measure of 15, meaning this excerpt requires the reading skills of a university graduate.

The excerpt above is an example of regulatory language used in official health communication. This register – or type of language – is particularly difficult to understand for those with low levels of English language proficiency (Grey, 2020a; Grey, 2020b).

The difficulty of the overall guidelines and instructions renders the relative ease of the actual registration form void.

How can COVID safe registration be improved without compromising safety?

I suggest that the process of COVID-safe registration could be simplified and made more accessible to a readership with varying levels of English language proficiency and literacy through the implementation of the following improvements:

• Provision of simple, plain English and high-quality, comprehensive multilingual information
• Provision of English and multilingual safety plan blueprints that are easy to locate

More importantly, I suggest that communicating COVID safety online is not enough.

Providing alternative communication channels

In its current form, COVID Safe registration does not necessarily guarantee compliance. To achieve that, inspections of premises are needed.

Inspections would offer a good way of tailoring COVID safety to local needs, not only practically but also linguistically.

Inspections could be undertaken by multilingual officers. Inspections in language other than English (LOTE) would provide an opportunity to convey personalised LOTE advice relevant to a particular business. They would be a practical implementation of an approach that values NSW’s linguistic diversity as a resource.

References

Grey, A. (2020a, June 1). How to improve Australia’s public health messaging about Covid-19. Language on the Move.
Grey, A. (2020b). How do you find public health information in a language other than English. Submission to the Australian Senate’s Select Committee on COVID-19’s inquiry into the Australian Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Piller, I. (2020a, October 13). More on crisis communication in multilingual Australia. Language on the Move.

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The histories and everyday experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia are etched in the landscape, the waterways and the voices of those who can speak and understand ancestral Aboriginal languages. They also thrive in post-invasion contact varieties such as Kriol and Aboriginal English.

Researching Aboriginal English through yarning

When our sociolinguistic project into Aboriginal English in Nyungar country (southwest Western Australia) started in early 2019 little did we know how much our fieldwork would enrich us. The premise was simple: head out into metropolitan Perth, set up the cameras and talk to people. Then use those recordings to figure out how Aboriginal English is changing. But there were so many questions. What model of research would be favoured and why? How should we collect our data? Who should we approach? What would people talk about?

It would have been reasonable to follow existing practice in sociolinguistics. But the canonical methods of the field are mostly based on industrialised, Western cultures and societies. How could we ensure that different ways of knowing would be incorporated into the project? How could we move beyond the Eurocentric mainstream to “hear the voices” of people historically pushed to the margins?

Data collection in a Perth city park (Photo reproduced with permission)

To the rescue comes Glenys Collard, a Nyungar woman, a native speaker of Aboriginal English and an experienced language worker whose input into the project changed the research forever.

Instead of a sociolinguistic interview, our data collection tool of choice was “yarning” – an Indigenous cultural form of storytelling and conversation. This type of conversation and storytelling is highly dramatic, using much gesture, facial expression and variation in tone and volume. The lack of pre-defined questions in the “yarning” format allowed speakers to remain in control of what they wanted to share while the cameras were on.

Recruiting research participants through listening

Instead of institutions, we headed out to meet people in their homes. But there was a catch. A significant number of Aboriginal people are homeless. In 2016, for example, Aboriginal people made up 3.7% of the total population of Western Australia but accounted for a staggering 29.1% of the homeless population in the state.

Glenys Collard was adamant these people’s stories should be heard, too. She led us into the streets and parks they call home. She reached out to them, she explained what we were doing and why. The photo shows Glenys Collard and the four women we spoke to at a Perth City Park in mid-2019. Glenys explains what was special about yarning with these women:

These yorgas [women] were too deadly [great], they could spin a few good yarns and they took after yarnin flat out about who they was, what they been doin. It was deadly. Celeste talked to them and they already looked at me so I gave them the ok with my eyes and closed mouth. The four of them were Aboriginal English speakers. I don’t think another researcher would have chosen them to speak with because of the area and the other people who were there. They all had a yarn and they wanted to share so we stay an listen.

They wanted to speak to us because of Glenys. She made the research safe for them. At the end of the session, Celeste asked Glenys why people – both in the park and elsewhere – had been so keen to speak to us. Glenys replied: No one has ever listened to them before.

These feelings are echoed by Dr Chelsea Bond, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman and University of Queensland academic. Dr Bond explains that Australian society is founded on the non-existence of Indigenous people. She frames a lack of listening around police aggression. “Blackfellas are always speaking about police brutality – why aren’t people listening?”

Recording stories about police brutality and racism

Indeed, accounts of police brutality feature prominently in our collection. The corpus is replete with stories of racism and abuse.

Nita’s story stands out. We were outside a popular medical centre in downtown Perth when we saw her. Nita (a pseudonym) seemed upset, but she was keen to have a yarn so we set up the cameras. The microphones are on. Her twenty-something-year-old nephew is dead. Found dead at one of Perth’s private prisons. The police tells her and her family that her nephew killed himself. She and her family disagree: the bruises on his body indicate otherwise. She is sure her nephew was killed.

In another example, a prominent Aboriginal Perth leader spontaneously told us the story of a Nyungar woman who was evicted from her home in metropolitan Perth. When he arrived to try and stop the eviction, the woman’s heels were dug into the framework of the door, her little grannies (grandchildren) everywhere, police “by the mass”. He recalls seeing the police dragging the woman by the hair as her grannies looked on. He saw the Department of Child Protection officers take the woman’s grandchildren away.

Why aren’t people listening?

A young Aboriginal student we yarned with sums it up perfectly: “Someone who has grown up privileged cannot even fathom the idea of how we [Aboriginal people] might have grown up. It’s like a bad dream to them, like a nightmare. But that’s what we’ve lived, you know?”.

More than sociolinguistic samples

The voices in the stories we collected for our research are much more than high-quality linguistic samples of Aboriginal English. They are raw and real accounts of the community’s histories and everyday experiences. Our cross-cultural fieldwork allowed us to record the community’s voices using a culturally appropriate genre (yarning) and placing a community member, Glenys Collard, at the core. Her presence, experience and wisdom allowed us to move a step closer towards decolonising research into Aboriginal English. Importantly, her expertise allowed us to “hear the voices” of those rarely featured in sociolinguistic research.

Acknowledgement

This research is funded through a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) (DE DE170100493) and a 2019 Australian Linguistic Society Research Grant.

One of countless internet memes about crazy English spelling (Source: angmohdan.com)

During a dreary German winter in the 1980s, I would get up early each Friday morning, wrap myself up against the cold, and ride my bike in the morning darkness up “Gallows Hill Street”, where for many centuries the city’s court of justice had been located. My destination was a windowless underground classroom in a 1960s concrete building, where an “Advanced Dictation” class was taking place that was compulsory for all undergraduate students of English.

For 90 minutes each week, we would take dictation of some text, then swap the result of our labors with our neighbor, whose job it was to mark up the errors and tally them while the teacher wrote out the difficult words on the blackboard. Each week, this was an exercise in guessing and humiliation: for instance, how do you spell /ɪndaɪt/ when you hear it for the first time and have only the vaguest idea what it means? Most likely “indite”? Or is it spelled like “night” and “right” and hence “indight”? Or how about /teknɪklɪ/? To spell “technicly” seems obvious enough but wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

There are hundreds if not thousands such words in the English language that you need to know before you can spell them. Understanding the logic of the alphabet and the main sound-letter correspondences still leaves you with a long way to go when it comes to being able to read and write in English.

Most students in the class struggled and we all dreaded the final exam (I passed with a credit, which, by my standards, was disappointingly low).

A student in the class had dug up a quip by the Austrian linguist Mario Wandruszka, who had opined that “English spelling is an insult to the human intelligence.” Being teenagers, we all agreed with the statement and – in a classic case of sour grapes – consoled ourselves with the idea that not doing well in English dictation was in fact a badge of honor that demonstrated our superior intelligence.

Pope Gregory sending St Augustine to convert the people of England to Christianity in 597 (11th c manuscript, British Library)

In the years since, maybe in a case of Stockholm syndrome, I’ve come to adore English orthography. Today, I see it as an intricate system that contains within it the sediments of the innumerous contacts between different languages and cultures that make English such a fascinating language.

Adopting the Latin script

English writing had a design flaw from Day One: adopting the Latin alphabet, which is designed for the sound system of another language, Latin, to English was always going to be a problem – as has been proven innumerable times since the Latin alphabet has been adopted to more languages than any other script (as I explain in this lecture).

When the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain (ca. 400-700 CE), they brought with them not only their Germanic dialects but also their runic alphabet, which had been designed for the phonology of Germanic languages.

During Christianization the runic alphabet became associated with heathendom, and the Latin alphabet with Christianity. From 597 – the date of Augustine’s mission to Kent – Latin became the language of the new faith and, gradually, the alphabet of the Latin language began to be used to also write English.

Old English was a very different language from what it is today, and with the addition of a few letters, the match between sounds and letters was not too bad in those days, even if the problem of fewer letters than sounds has been a problem of English spelling since the beginning. The classical Latin alphabet had 23 letters, and three were added. These 26 letters now have to cover the 43 phonemes (19 vowels and 24 consonants) of modern English.

The last English king, King Harold, is killed during the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (Bayeux Tapestry)

So, the first story of language and culture contact encoded in English spelling is that of the contact between spoken Germanic dialects and the sophisticated literate world of Latin. It is also the story of adopting a new faith and the fundamental transformation of a culture this results in.

Mixing in French

Old English died in 1066. Although the name “English” suggests continuity, Old English is as different from English as we know it as, say, German or Norwegian.

This is because the Norman Conquest of 1066 brought Old English into intense contact with French. For centuries, a social divide separated English (the spoken peasant dialects) and French (the language of the upper classes, and the language of almost all writing in England during the period).

This medieval social-cum-linguistic divide is still vividly illustrated by Anglo-Saxon-origin terms for animals (e.g., pig, cow, sheep, deer) existing side-by-side with French-origin terms for the meat of those animals (e.g., pork, beef, mutton, venison). That the medieval division of labor was also an ethnolinguistic divide could not be clearer.

By the time “English” started to be used again in writing it was a fundamentally changed mixed language, and spelling conventions that made sense in a Germanic language co-existed, not always easily, with spelling conventions that made sense in French.

The printing press fossilizes spelling

As if all that language mixing was not enough to confuse English writing, the printing press, which was introduced to Britain by William Caxton in 1476, altered the relationship between speech and writing forever.

Caxton’s rant about linguistic diversity (from the Preface to his print of Eneydos)

The idea of orthography – that there is only one correct way to spell – was alien to the medieval mind. Spelling mirrored pronunciation closely and different scribes in different dialect areas spelled differently. Spelling was ultimately a matter of individual preference.

Printing changed that – not only because a standard was more convenient for printers but also because a uniform linguistic product could reach a larger market. Not surprisingly Caxton was one of the first to rail against linguistic diversity when he famously complained that “eggs” were called “egges” in some parts of England but “eyren” in others.

Standardization was born.

Initially, the idea of a standard language only applied to writing, and spoken English continued to be highly diverse.

What happens when spoken language continues to change but writing does not? They drift apart … and you end up with a spelling system that is more in tune with the pronunciation of 500 years ago than contemporary pronunciation. This is particularly true of English vowels whose pronunciation changed considerably between the 15^th and 18^th centuries in a process called the “Great Vowel Shift.”

The Great Vowel Shift and the stubborn conservatism of printing have created a rift between spoken and written English (Image credit: Wikipedia)

As a result, written and spoken English are today quite different beasts.

Is learning how to spell in English worth it?

Untold numbers of English language learners have, like myself, sweated to learn how to spell in English.

This task has been unnecessarily complicated by the false belief that we were learning an alphabetic script. Systematic letter-sound relationships are the foundation of English spelling but they are complemented by a significant logographic element, where letter combinations are systematically related to morphemes. The triple baggage of adopting an ill-suited alphabet, of mixing two languages and their internal logics, and of separating written from spoken language, has inserted a considerable logographic element (I explain this is in greater detail with the example of <s> as plural marker and <ce> as marker of word-final voiceless /s/ in non-inflected words in this lecture).

Logograms can only be acquired through patient practice, as any Chinese teacher will tell you. However, a knowledge of language history can help make sense of the logographic element. And it is certainly more motivating to understand English spelling in its socio-historical context instead of considering it “an insult to human intelligence.” The reward of learning how to spell is the kind of reading automaticity and speed that characterizes the proficient reader and that is the ultimate point of literacy.

What is your experience with learning or teaching English spelling? And how do you think digital technologies will change English spelling?

To explore further, view the lecture about the spread of the Latin alphabet that goes with this blog post:

Image 1: Infographic in Tagalog on ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection

Editor’s note: Timely and equitable access to information for linguistically diverse populations continues to be a major linguistic challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this latest contribution to our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis, Loy Lising introduces three grassroots initiatives to improve multilingual service provision in the Philippines. The call for contributions to the series continues to be open.

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The Philippines is a highly linguistically diverse country with Ethnologue listing 182 languages in use there. However, with Filipino as the constitutionally enshrined national language and English as the official second language, most of these languages are often relegated to the periphery when it comes to national activities. Their subordinate status has become salient with the COVID-19 pandemic, as it has become apparent that state public health information in Filipino and English fails to reach all the ethnolinguistic groups in the archipelago. Various NGOs and grassroots groups have stepped into the breach.

Since the initial case of COVID-19 in the Philippines in early February 2020, various grassroots-driven efforts have developed, and I, together with colleagues from the University of the Philippines, Kristina Gallego and Jesus Hernandez, are currently working to catalogue these and assess their effectiveness. As part of our ongoing investigation, we are surveying the availability of and access to COVID-19 information and prevention materials disseminated on social media since the lockdown of the capital region Metro Manila on 15 March 2020. In addition, we are interested in finding in what Philippine languages these materials are available. Our preliminary investigation has shown that insofar as COVID-19 infection prevention efforts in other Philippine languages are concerned, much of the work done are grassroots-generated rather than state-initiated, as in the following three examples.

Project #CAMPana

Through the Project #CAMPana of the College of Allied Medical Professions in the University of the Philippines, infographics on the prevention of the spread of COVID-19 were disseminated in various social media platforms immediately after the first occurrence of the virus in the country. One of these (Image 1) is an infographic for adults in Tagalog.

The infographic contains relevant information on the prevention of COVID-19 infection utilising a number of (non)linguistic modalities to make the information not only accessible but also interesting. These strategies include the use of images, colours, and mnemonics (in this image, LINIS). The Tagalog word linis means ‘clean’ or ‘being clean’ in English. In the image above, it is utilised as an easy-to-remember set of instructions to avoid contracting COVID-19: L is for linis (clean), I is for ilong (nose), N is for no, I is for iwasan (avoid), and S is for sabunin (to soap). The L instruction reminds readers to always clean frequently used objects; letter I instructs how to cover one’s nose and mouth when sneezing or coughing; letter N suggests refraining from touching one’s eyes, nose and mouth; letter I admonishes people to avoid crowded places; and S reminds readers to wash their hands or use sanitizers.

The other is an infographic for children available in eight Philippine languages: Tagalog, English, Cebuano, Ilonggo, Bikol, Iluko, Kapampangan, and Waray. Image 2 is an example in Cebuano.

Image 2: Infographic in Cebuano for children on ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection

The infographic presents similar information but utilises, quite ingeniously, a strategy that makes the information not only accessible and interesting but also relevant to and attractive for children. The image juxtaposes the evil COVID-19 virus ‘crown’ image with a child superhero known as ‘Super Bata’, similar to Susana Distancia in Mexico. This clever strategy appeals to the children’s imagination and enjoins them to see themselves as superheros if they follow the eight strategies outlined in the pamphlet.

Language Warriors PH

The second grassroots effort is an initiative of the Department of Linguistics of the University of the Philippines in Diliman. They have created a working group called Language Warriors PH that aims to connect community translators and ‘language warriors’ across the Philippines to ensure COVID-19 related information is disseminated in as many indigenous languages as possible. This is a crucial step to ensure that especially those who are in the periphery, socially and geographically, have access to crucial information. This volunteer group, as of their May 08 report, has collected 927 COVID-19 related materials across 70 Philippine languages, dialects, and sociolects. The translated information spans topics on physical and mental health, socio-economic support, news and current affairs, and other miscellaneous information. The volunteer translators who have done the work of translating COVID-19 related information for various ethnolinguistic groups, which LWPH collect and help disseminate, include teachers, language enthusiasts, national government staff, local government unit staff, and private organization members.

Reading, Early Grades, Art and Language Education (REGALE)

A third truly outstanding effort worth featuring is the community-generated dictionaries for children produced by the Reading, Early Grades, Art and Language Education (REGALE) cluster from the College of Education of the University of the Philippines. In their efforts to ensure that children are kept up-to-date with information related to COVID-19 and its prevention, they have produced thus far four dictionaries for children: one in English, one in Tagalog, one in Cebuano, and the most recent one in Surigaonon. These dictionaries are also accessible in Filipino Sign Language, the link of which is embedded in the dictionary. In addition, and more recently, REGALE also produced video clips to further engage children in COVID-19 discussions. The first of these is now available.

Is public health information reaching the Philippine’s ethnolinguistic minorities?

Public dissemination of information in a multilingual ecology that is inclusive of all ethnolinguistic groups is always challenging, particularly one that involves so many languages. In the Philippines, the predominant use of Filipino and English across a number of national domains has always been motivated by the privileged position these languages hold in the country’s national language policy. The necessity, however, of ensuring the dissemination of potentially life-saving information at a time of a pandemic to as many ethnolinguistic groups as possible cannot be overemphasised. Thus far, in the country, we have seen various grassroots efforts, as exemplified above, rise to the challenge in bridging the information gap. My colleagues and I hope that once our research is concluded, we will be able to emphasize the role of grassroots efforts in the production of public health information across the archipelago to be able to influence state policies to improve information dissemination in all the languages Filipinos use and understand.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for our full coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis.

Yucky worms or yummy treats?

When I arrived in the UK from Poland in 2004, I did not know that prawns even existed. During our first dubious encounter, I categorized the not-so-aesthetically-pleasing crustaceans as ‘worms’ and refused to look at them, let alone consider eating them. Today, I devour these ‘worms’, and when I do, it is an occasion for my British husband to remind me that, over the years he, my ‘culinary superior’ from Western Europe, has raised my ‘impoverished’ Eastern-European palate to a totally new level. Squid, scallops, mussels, avocado, pomegranate, seaweed, lamb, haggis, sushi, Indian, Thai are some of the foods I encountered only in my adulthood thanks to my migration to Britain and my transnational coupledom that followed.

Like all couples, transnational couples like to talk. Food, as an ethnic marker and thus fertile ground for stereotyping, is one of their favorite topics, as I discovered in my research with Polish-British couples.

Food talk allows transnational couples to negotiate their divergent socio-cultural practices and customs. Ingrid Piller, who extensively researched transnational families, observes that in any relationship partners always bring in their own habits stemming from their individual preferences or family traditions. This is also true of endogamous couples but in the case of partners raised in different countries, the potential for difference talk is greater.

This is not to say that transnational partners endlessly draw divisions between themselves, experiencing what is known as a ‘cultural clash’. Rather, difference talk in transnational relationships has been shown in a considerable body of research as a positive phenomenon, entailing skillful negotiation strategies. Piller (2002), for instance, demonstrates how partners in English-German couples tend to downplay their socio-cultural differences by directly negating them, drawing out similarities or appealing to shared cosmopolitan identities. In a similar fashion, Kellie Gonçalves’s (2012) study shows how Anglophone and Swiss German partners portray themselves as harmoniously combining their divergent socio-cultural repertoires, from which they derive shared hybrid identities.

Can you imagine anyone calling this Christmas carp an “ugly-looking fish”? (Image credit: mdr.de)

In my recent publication in the Journal of Sociolinguistics (Wilczek-Watson, 2018), I build on this research by discussing other forms of difference talk in transnational families, specifically in relation to food, both in everyday and celebratory contexts. The interactive practices listed above are also present in the data the article is based on – video-recorded meal-time conversations in five UK-based Polish-British families and audio-recorded interviews with them. However, this particular paper focuses on another recurrent discursive strategy emerging across these transnational families, namely ‘culinary othering’ – the family members’ acts of representing the food habits of their partner as different, somewhat strange, or even abnormal.

Drawing an imaginary division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, othering constitutes a form of social distancing from a given individual or a group. This practice can entail stereotyping, derogatory evaluations, and mockery of the Other, often in an attempt to achieve a positive self-presentation. Despite its undeniable negative potential, othering has also been examined as a form of bonding, for instance, in the context of gossiping interactions (Jaworski and Coupland, 2005), when the gossiping parties derive solidarity from their joint mockery aimed at third, absent parties. What if the target of othering is present and is also a member of your family?

In the food-related talk of Polish-British families in my study acts of othering seemed to function in a similar, unifying way. While the othered party was physically present and directly faced culinary mockery, both sides seemed to skillfully navigate through their difference talk, displaying a cooperative spirit. This was exhibited for example by indicating in various ways that a given comment should not be taken as stigmatising: by exaggerating stereotypical evaluations to the point of caricature, or by mitigating them, through joint laughter, reciprocated othering or even through provocation of further othering by the targeted side.

To illustrate, when comparing hospitality practices in Poland and Britain, a British partner stereotyped Polish hosts as over-hospitable and mocked their pretentious hosting with an imaginary quote:

‘Here’s the entire quantity of our cupboards on our table, that’s how great a host we are!’ (Extract 1, p.553).

Using this hypothetical utterance of the Other (Polish hosts) with a hyperbolic expression (entire), and additional stress (entire; great), the partner signaled to his Polish wife (and the Polish interviewer, myself) that his statement was exaggerated, and while it could be received as discriminatory, we (the target) accepted its humorous undertone. Moreover, the Polish partner reciprocated this othering, showing an uptake of the strategy adopted by her British husband. The conversation continued and othering occurred multiple times between the partners throughout the interview, for instance, in relation to:

• the aesthetics of certain dishes (‘Oh God, that’s an ugly-looking fish.’ – about a traditional Polish Christmas Eve dish, carp, Extract 4, p.560);
• the quality of Polish wedding reception foods (‘they were good they were nice but …, the focus was on volume, wasn’t it?’, Extract 5, p.562);

Polish Easter breakfast (Image credit: wikimedia.org)

In cases such as these, neither side seems to take offence. Similar instances of mutual mockery and stereotyping in relation to food habits of the other recur across the participating Polish-British families. Arguably, othering comes more frequently from British partners (perhaps due to the fact the couples reside in the UK and thus Polish cuisine being ‘foreign’, becomes exoticised), some of whom also mock:

• Polish Easter dishes as monotonous (‘everything with gherkin’, Extract 2, p.555);
• everyday eating habits of their Polish spouses (‘all my family find it absolutely astonishing that Kuba will get all that milk, fill it right to the brim and sprinkle cereal on top’, Extract 3, p.557).

Nevertheless, the Polish partners likewise stereotype British culinary practices, as in this example about British Easter traditions: ‘the only English tradition we have is chocolate isn’t it? chocolate Easter eggs’, Extract 2, p.555).

These interactions demonstrate the families’ well-developed skills in manoeuvring through sensitive difference talk. The partners’ communicative collaboration reflects and further shapes their common ground, showing how othering resembles ritual mockery, which can in fact neutralise potential tensions in these transnational relationships and foster the couples’ bonding.

The above findings are limited to the Polish-British families I studied. However, culinary othering and its unifying potential is not exclusive to these relationships. As food acts as a salient indicator of class, status, wealth, and individuality, culinary othering is likely to be common enough. Can you share your own examples?

Related content

• Do bilinguals express different emotions in different languages?
• Strolling in Barcelona with Sanskrit and Devanagari
• Beyond Harmony Day
• Language in the catfish war

References

Gonçalves, K. (2013). ‘Cooking lunch, that’s Swiss’: Constructing hybrid identities based on socio-cultural practices. Multilingua, 32: 527–547.
Jaworski, A. and J. Coupland. (2005). Othering in gossip: ‘You go out you have a laugh and you can pull yeah okay but like. . .’ Language in Society, 34: 667–694.
Piller, I. (2002). Bilingual Couples Talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wilczek-Watson, M. (2018). ‘Oh God, that’s an ugly looking fish’ – negotiating sociocultural distance in transnational families through culinary othering. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22: 5: 545–569.

New Zealand’s PM wants to raise her newborn daughter bilingually (Source: radionz)

New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, plans to raise her newborn daughter bilingually in Māori and English. Her desire for her child – and all New Zealand children – to grow up proficient in more than one language is not unusual in today’s world and echoes the desires of many Australian parents, too. A recent study of young Australian mothers found high levels of support for bilingual child rearing.

Mothers wanted to give their children “the gift of bilingualism” and spoke glowingly about the many advantages and benefits they hoped bilingualism would bestow on their children. They felt that proficiency in another language in addition to English would enrich their children’s future, that it would give them a career edge, and that it would allow them to travel overseas but also connect with diverse communities in Australia. Many also believed that bilingualism would give their children a cognitive advantage and they were aware of health benefits of bilingualism such as delayed onset of dementia.

In short, like New Zealand’s PM, the mothers in the study aspired to raise their children with English and another language for many good reasons. There was another similarity: while they knew what they wanted, they did not quite know how to achieve their goal. Like Ardern they confided that, while they were sure they wanted their children to learn English and another language, they found it difficult to figure out “how that will happen.”

The main difficulties with raising bilingual children in Australia – as in any English-dominant society – can be traced back to the overbearing role of English. The dominance of English makes bilingual parenting extra hard for a number of reasons.

To begin with, Australians often have relatively low levels of proficiency in another language and this can lead to deep insecurities. How do you do “being a competent parent” while fighting insecurities whether your pronunciation is good enough or struggling to find the right word?

Second, you may want bilingualism for your child. But you also want your child to be well adjusted, to make friends easily and to do well in school. English is the indispensable means to achieve these goals. So, you may suffer from a niggling doubt that the other language may detract from your child’s English.

By focusing on the other language in the home, do you inadvertently jeopardize your child’s academic success or their friendship groups? Research shows that this is not true but it can certainly seem that way when your child throws a tantrum in the supermarket and everyone stares at you as you try to calm her down in another language.

Third, contemporary parenting is difficult and fraught with anxieties at the best of times. Bottle or breast? Disposable or cloth nappy? Soccer or cricket? The number of decisions we have to make seems endless and each decision seems to index whether we are a good parent or a parenting fail.

Questions of language choice and language practices add a whole other dimension to the complexities of modern parenting: When should you start which language? Who should speak which language to the child? Is it ok to mix languages? The list goes on and on. Parents not only need to figure out answers to these questions, they also need to live their answers out on a daily basis.

Furthermore, parenting is not something that we do in isolation. Mums and dads may not arrive at the same answers. When one partner is deeply committed to bilingual parenting and the other is not, that can easily put a strain on the relationship. Many couples know that mundane questions like whose turn it is to do the dishes can easily escalate into a fight when everyone is tired and juggling too many responsibilities. Now imagine such daily problems amplified by debates over whose turn it is to read the bedtime story in the other language or whose fault it is that the bedtime story in the other language is always the same because there are only two books in that language in the local library.

The parents of New Zealand’s “First Baby” want to raise their daughter bilingually because they recognize that bilingualism is important in today’s world – just like Australian parents. They do not quite know how to do it and they will undoubtedly struggle turning their aspiration into a reality as their daughter grows up and starts to have her own ideas about bilingualism. Having to make language decisions part and parcel of all the mundane parenting and family decisions that we all make all the time will be a challenge – just as it is for Australian parents.

But that is where the similarity ends.

New Zealand parents do not have to face the challenges of raising their children bilingually alone – in contrast to Australian parents. We all know that it takes a village to raise a child. Parents need the support of the wider community. This holds even more so when it comes to bilingual parenting. Specifically, bilingual families need institutional support, particularly from schools, in order to thrive.

New Zealand’s te kōhanga reo or “language nests” are preschools that operate through the medium of Māori and have been highly successful in supporting bilingual proficiencies in Māori and English. Additionally, there are now plans to make bilingual education in Māori and English universally available in all public schools by 2025.

In Australia, our policy makers have so far ignored the aspirations of an ever-growing number of families for meaningful language education that fosters high levels of linguistic proficiency in English and another language. In fact, the overbearing role of English in academic achievement often means that schools actively conspire against the wishes of families. As a result, those best able to raise bilingual children in Australia are those who have the means to afford specialized private schools, extended overseas holidays or bilingual nannies.

When will our leaders end the disconnect between families’ linguistic aspirations and the education system? When will we see an all-of-society effort to help put the bilingual proficiencies needed to thrive in the 21^st century within the reach of all?

Reference

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [if you do not have institutional access, you may download an open access version here. The number of OA downloads is limited, so, institutional users, make sure to leave this link for readers without institutional access … An OA pre-publication version is available here].

This story was authored by Antra Kalnins and first published at Macquarie University’s The Lighthouse. It is reproduced here with permission.

***

If the question in the headline makes you flinch a little, you’re not alone. As the popularity of social media – and its associated ‘cyberspeak’ language forms – continues to grow, there is concern that sites like Twitter and Facebook are leading to a ‘dumbing down’ of the English language. Actor Ralph Fiennes even went so far as to say Twitter was the reason why today’s drama students struggle to understand Shakespearean texts.

But while new technology has unquestionably given rise to new types of language use, we shouldn’t be so quick to judge social media against Shakespeare, according to Ingrid Piller, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie and editor of Language on the Move, a sociolinguistics research site focusing on multilingualism, language learning and intercultural communication.

“If we measure social media language use, which has characteristics of both spoken and written language and is relatively informal, with the yardstick of formal written language, the impression may arise that the language is being degraded,” said Professor Piller.

“But it’s like complaining that apples don’t taste like pears.”

“It’s important we don’t confuse the medium through which we communicate with the level of formality we use to communicate.”

The good news is that most of us are actually very good at switching between levels of formality. So there’s no reason why your tweeting teen can’t also knock out a fantastic formal job application letter.

“Unless a person has a specific impairment, they will always adapt their language to the context,” Professor Piller said.

“That includes adapting our level of formality to suit the person we are talking to, the situation or medium we are in, and the purpose we are trying to achieve.”

And while sites like Twitter might see someone using shorter words and abbreviations to fit their message into the required 140 characters, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have mastery of a wide range of multisyllabic words.

“Social media use is relatively irrelevant to the size of a person’s vocabulary,” Professor Piller said.

“Rather, it’s a function of the education they have received and is also associated with specialist knowledge – for example a doctor might use ‘fracture’ instead of ‘break’.”

Piller argues that online communities can, in fact, provide good opportunities for language learners to actually increase their vocabulary.

“This is particularly true of international students who may not have easy access to offline communities outside the classroom,” she said.

As for those who pine for the pre-social media days when people spoke ‘proper’ English, Piller suggests adjusting our expectations and embracing the fact that wherever there is rapid social, economic, cultural or technological change, there will be accompanying language change.

“No living person uses English as it was used in the 16th century, or even in the same way as their grandparents did,” she said.

“Furthermore, no one speaks the standard language – or what we imagine to be the standard language – at least, not all the time. Language change and linguistic diversity are a fundamental fact of life.”

Language choice in bilingual couples as habit (excerpt from Piller, 2002, p. 137)

In my research with bilingual couples, habit emerged as one of the main reasons for a couple’s language choice. Partners from different language backgrounds met through the medium of a particular language and fell in love through a particular language. Once they had established a relationship through that language, it became a relatively fixed habit.

This means that entering a couple relationship was a moment of linguistic habit formation. At the same time, it was also a moment of drastic linguistic habit change, at least for one partner. At least one partner had to change their habitual language from one language (usually their native language) to another (usually an additional language).

The question of habit formation is an important one in language learning research. Around the world, education systems invest enormous sums of money into language teaching but the outcomes in terms of getting students to actually speak the language(s) they are learning outside the classroom are often unclear.

Efforts to revive Irish Gaelic provide a well-known example. In the Republic of Ireland, Gaelic is part of the compulsory curriculum of primary and secondary school students. Even so, only around 40% of the population reported in the 2016 census that they could speak Irish. However, when asked whether they actually did so, only 1.7% of the population reported that they regularly used Irish. So, knowing Gaelic and using Gaelic are clearly two different things.

The explanation for this pattern is simple: habit. Studying a language gives learners a new tool. But to actually use that tool on a regular basis outside the classroom requires a change of linguistic habit. In other words, language knowledge needs to be activated.

For the native German speakers in my bilingual couples research, falling in love and establishing a couple relationship with a native English speaker provided such a transformative moment that allowed them to activate the English they had studied throughout their schooling. (The converse pattern was much rarer as native English speakers rarely had studied German and so no basis for a linguistic change of habit existed).

Other than linguistic intermarriage, what transformative moments are there across the life course when people might change from one habitual language to another?

Professor Maite Puigdevall during her guest lecture at Macquarie University

This is the question Professor Maite Puigdevall (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain) addressed in her inaugural lecture in linguistic diversity at Macquarie University. Professor Puigdevall and her colleagues use the Catalan word muda (“change, transformation”) to refer to such biographical junctures where a linguistic change of habit is likely. They have identified six such transformative junctures across the life course:

• Primary school
• High school
• University
• Workplace entry
• Couple formation
• Becoming a parent

At each such juncture, a person starts to move in new circles, make new friends and establish new networks. Establishing oneself in such a new way may lead to all kinds of changes and new habits and a switch in the habitual language may be one such transformation.

Professor Puigdevall and her colleagues have used the muda concept particularly in relation to minoritized languages such as Catalan, Basque or Gaelic. At each juncture, such languages acquire “new speakers” (as opposed to the ever-shrinking number of heritage speakers). However, the life-course approach they propose has at least two implications for language policy elsewhere, too, including Australia.

First, language learning is a long-term investment. Results should not be expected immediately but are more likely to accrue later in life. A good reminder that the old adage non scolae sed vitae discimus (“we learn not for school but for life”) holds for language learning, too, and that we should vigorously contest the “languages are useless” argument that we so often hear, particularly in the Anglosphere.

Second, an investment in language education in school will pay off most when it is complemented by other policy interventions in favor of a particular language. For instance, in comparative research related to Catalan, Basque and Gaelic, Professor Puigdevall and her colleagues found that a significant inducement to turn Catalan into a habitual language was constituted by the bilingual (Catalan, Spanish) language requirement present for employment in the civil service in Catalonia.

Professor Puigdevall’s lecture inspired us to focus on moments in the life-course where bilingual proficiencies may be turned into bilingual habits. What new things will we learn in our next lecture in linguistic diversity when Dr Sabine Little (Sheffield University, UK) asks what we inherit when we inherit a language?

References

Piller, I. (2002). Bilingual couples talk: the discursive construction of hybridity. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Puigdevall, M., Walsh, J., Amorrortu, E., & Ortega, A. (2018). ‘I’ll be one of them’: linguistic mudes and new speakers in three minority language contexts. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 39(5), 445-457. doi:10.1080/01434632.2018.1429453
Pujolar, J., & Puigdevall, M. (2015). Linguistic mudes: How to become a new speaker in Catalonia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231, 167-187.

The theme of #LIW2018 is “Find yourself in a Library”. The book I read in the category “a memoir of an adult migrant and language learner” describes exactly that: a refugee in search of his past and his future. The public library is one place where this refugee finds solace:

It has become my habit to gather together a small store of provisions, some biscuits, chocolate, an apple or two, and repair each morning to the reading room of the Public Library. There I lose myself in long dead time and not rouse until the shrill, too early summons of the closing bell. This way of living is extremely economical. […] I have discovered that a moderate hunger increases both sensibility and concentration. It is not a new idea. Since the times of the monkish visionaries fasting has been the essential preliminary to revelation. The library is my monastery. (Natonek, 1943, p. 124)

The author, Hans Natonek (1892-1963), was a refugee from the Nazis and the public library he refers to is in Manhattan. Hans Natonek arrived in New York in 1941 after having been on the run for almost a decade. One of the foremost literary critics of Weimar Germany and a well-known social critic and author, Natonek had fled Germany for his native Prague in 1934. As the Nazis conquered more and more of Europe, he had to flee again; first to Paris, then Marseille, which became a trap for many refugees as the Vichy regime handed them back to the Nazis. Natonek escaped and managed to cross the Pyrenees into Spain and was finally granted a US visa in Lisbon.

Hans Natonek and Anne Grünwald in Arizona, 1950s (Source: Arts in exile)

By the time Natonek arrived in New York shortly before his 50^th birthday, the loss of his previous existence and the long years of constant danger and insecurity had taken their toll: “Flight softens the morale. To escape is to arrive nowhere. Escape is a negative, a fallacious rescue. Every fighter knows that. We are all fighters.” (p. 68)

In his memoir In search of myself published in 1943, Natonek asks what his refugee status means for his identity: he considers himself cut off both from his past and his future. His former language and identity have become meaningless and he feels disconnected from the language and identity options valued in his new environment.

For a writer, professional identity and language are inextricably linked and both have been taken from him: “A writer! Am I still one in point of actual fact? Tell me, then. What is a writer without a language and without a past? He is a mechanical absurdity, a piano without strings.” (p. 17)

Natonek tries hard to reinvent himself in English, even as he bemoans the difficulty of doing so at the age of 50.

I love my own mother tongue, but I recognize with sadness that separated from the soil in which it roots it must wither. It cannot be artificially maintained. The mother language does not transport nor grow nor bloom under alien skies. It is, at best, no more than a memory to be used on occasion to recall a friendship or another life. (p. 158)

Unfortunately, Natonek discovers that the growth of his English is in no way proportionate to the withering away of his native German and his beloved French. In fact, despite all his strenuous efforts to improve his English, he had to write In search of myself in German and leave the translation to his publisher.

It is not only the loss of German that throws Natonek out of balance. It is also the loss of prestige and professional standing. In America Natonek discovers a thoroughly materialistic culture that has no patience for intellectual pursuits. While he tries hard to adapt, he cannot get himself to accept the prevailing “jobism” as he calls it. He feels that everyone expects him to move on, find a job, make money and be happy; but Natonek insists on his right to grieve for his lost life and for his home engulfed by disaster.

They are unanimous in exhorting us to bend every effort toward the rapid adaptation of the American point of view. Waste no time in dalliance, they advise. Get busy. Forget the past. Embrace the new. It is the only way to demonstrate a decent gratitude. I am not exactly clear why I so stubbornly oppose this theory of rapid adaptation linked to the theme of gratitude for rescue and asylum. My soul rebels against it as a child rebels against forced feeding. An approach to living, a point of view on life, cannot be changed as abruptly as a lantern slide. I am not one of those worms which may be cut in two and go on living. Life flows like a blood stream from the past, through the present, into the future, and what a man is, is the result of what he has been. (p. 95)

In America, Natonek finds, work that is not profitable counts for nothing. While he is refused a small loan that would enable him to concentrate on finishing his book manuscript, he is offered a loan to start a small business. Bitterly, he scoffs: “Apparently there were too few beauty parlors, too many books.” (p. 157)

Some healing ultimately comes from books and he rediscovers a part of himself when he finds that the New York Public Library actually holds copies of the books he had published before having had to flee Germany. Even more astonishing to him, the library also holds a copy of a book written by his grandfather:

Beyond the handful of my own poor records I saw a single card. It bore my grandfather’s name. It was as though he spoke to me in love and confidence from out the past. (pp. 125f)

In search of myself is a moving account of the refugee experience. Its poignant message of loss and destruction but also the healing power of ideas is as important today as it was in 1943.

Given how topical the search for language and identity is in our time, I would wish the book a new generation of readers. Unfortunately, the book has been out of print for a long time. No copy is held in any Australian library and none seems to be on sale even in the vast world of e-commerce.

I had resigned myself to not being able to get my hands on the book when I discovered that Google had apparently digitized the book in 2007. So, I asked Macquarie University Library to trace the digital version for me. Amazingly, they got me an actual copy through interlibrary loan instead.

Being able to hold this wartime copy (“There are many more words on each page than would be desirable in normal times; margins have been reduced and no space has been wasted between chapters.”) in my hands has been a privilege I am grateful for. And that is another reason why #LIW2018 matters and why we all need to appreciate and support our libraries – for ourselves and all the other seekers who find solace there. #findyourself

Further reading

Reading challenge

• In search of a language and an identity
• One orientalism or many orientalisms?
• Why are you not citing any African female expert?
• The devil’s handwriting
• Globalization between crime and piety
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

Libraries

• Getting published while foreign
• Are we killing the joy of reading?
• Serendipity, Cyberspace, and the Tactility of Documents
• Bitter gifts: migrants’ exclusive inclusion
• Multiculturalism alive and well in Austria
• Herder: an explainer for linguists
• Barbarous multilingual devil worshippers

U.S. Vice President Pence ignores NASA “DO NOT TOUCH” sign. Would anyone else get away with such illiterate behavior?

“Literacy” is one of those words that everyone uses as a technical term but that is actually really hard to pin down. When I asked the new students in my “Literacies” unit last week what they thought “literacy” meant, they came up with quite a variety of definitions.

The most popular definition of “literacy” was that it is simply a cover term for “reading and writing”. That understanding of literacy contrasts with spoken language. Closely related to this first understanding of literacy is a second of literacy as “the ability to read and write.” Students with a background in language teaching readily referenced the “four skills” – speaking, listening, reading and writing – that make up language proficiency.

The latter understanding of literacy has spawned a significant expansion of the use of “literacy”: today, “literacy” is no longer exclusively about language but may be used to refer to all kinds of knowledge and competences: financial literacy, computer literacy, digital literacy, media literacy, news literacy, environmental literacy, ethics literacy, health literacy, spiritual literacy, artistic literacy, emotional literacy, etc. etc. While the connection with written language is more obvious in some of these literacies than in others, the reason for the extension of the meaning of “literacy” to “competence” is clear: in the contemporary world, the acquisition of most competences is mediated through the written word and at least some reading and writing is involved in the vast majority of learning.

The multiple meanings of “literacy” from “written language” via “ability to use written language” to “all kinds of language-mediated competences” make the link with social practices obvious and give us yet another perspective on literacy: literacy is a way to do things with words. Literacy practices are intricately linked to the way we manage our social affairs and organize our social lives. In short, literacy is a tool of power.

While some people like to pretend that literacy is a neutral technology and that “the ability to read and write” will be equally beneficial to everyone and have the same consequences for any individual and in any society, nothing could be further from the truth.

One simple way to start thinking about the power relationships inherent in literacy practices is to consider its semantic field. A semantic field is constituted by all the words in a language that relate to a particular subject. In English, the key terms in the semantic field “literacy” are obviously “reading” and “writing”. Both words have Germanic roots: “read” derives from Old English “rædan”, which meant “to advise, counsel, persuade; discuss, deliberate; rule, guide.” Its German cognate is “raten”, which means both “to advise, counsel, guide” but also “to guess.” So, reading was associated with thought and cognition early on.

“Write” derives from Old English “writan” meaning “to carve, scratch.” Well, writing started out as a way to scratch marks on bone, bark or clay, or to carve them in stone or wood. So, it’s not surprising that the word for “write” originally meant something like “to carve or scratch” in many languages. Latin “scribere” is no exception.

You may wonder why I’m bringing up Latin here. Well, it is not to show off my classical education but to draw attention to the fact that – apart from basic “read” and “write” – most English words in the “literacy” field are actually derived from Latin.

The Latin verb “scribere” has given us “ascribe”, “describe”, “inscribe”, “prescribe” and “proscribe”, to name a few. The latter two in particular point to the fact that the written word is closely connected to the enactment of power: so close, in fact, that the written word may be equal to the law. The expression “the writ runs” makes this connection obvious: where a particular written language is used, a particular law applies.

English words that make the power of literacy obvious are usually derived from Latin (and, of course, “literacy” itself is another example). This demonstrates the strong hold that not only the written language per se but Latin writing in particular had over Europe for almost two millennia. Latin was the language of the law and the language of religion – two domains that took a long time to separate from each other. The close association of writing with religion is also obvious from the word “scripture” – where a word for “writing” generally has come to stand specifically for religious writing.

There are many other fascinating associations to explore in the semantic field of “literacy” but I’ll close with an example from German, which makes a neat point about the fact that the relationship between written and spoken language is also a power relationship in itself. The German word “Schriftsprache” literally translates as “written language” but specifically refers to the standard language. The expression “nach der Schrift sprechen” (“to speak according to writing”) means to not use a regionally marked dialect but to speak the national language in a standard manner.

As linguists we like to insist on the primacy of speech but “nach der Schrift sprechen” reminds us that power usually runs in the opposite direction and, in literate societies, the power code is either written or writing-based speech.

What does the semantic field for “literacy” look like in your language? What is the etymology of the translation equivalents of “read and write” or of “literacy”? And what do they tell us about literacy as a social practice embedded in relationships of power?

Reference

Details of the vice-presidential transgression in the image are available in this Time article.