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

Enjoy the show!

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

References

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

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

Welcome to the New Books Network.

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

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

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

Welcome to the show, Rosemary.

Prof Salomone: Thank you for inviting me, Ingrid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dist Prof Piller: That’s unbelievable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Till next time!

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.

***

Don’t trust the British speaking English?

The cover story of The Guardian Weekly of 18 September 2020 has a portrayal of Boris Johnson’s back, with both hands behind him, one gripping a hammer, the other with his fingers crossed, and the caption ‘Promises, promises. What will Boris Johnson break next?’ European Union negotiators in dialogue with the British government have every reason to be concerned about whether Johnson can be trusted. British behaviour is probably no surprise to the head of the EU’s task force, Michel Barnier, a top EU and French government insider. The confrontation looks like yet another drama in a millennium of clashes between France and England, now in the form of a war of words. The words in question, for the British negotiators and doubtless for many of the Eurocrats involved, are English words. What is ironical is that the British are leaving the Union, whereas the English language is staying on.

How and why this is so requires an analysis of how the EU manages the multilingualism of its activities and functions in its key institutions and in links with the 27 member states. The way languages are used, and which languages are used, are key social and political issues in an international world.

The dream of ‘global Britain’ of Theresa May and Boris Johnson is the idea that the UK should join up with the old Commonwealth countries and the USA in an Anglosphere network that will replace membership of the EU. The Anglosphere idea is rooted in the assumption that those who speak English are simply superior to others. That an Anglosphere union of ‘English-speaking peoples’ will emerge is a post-imperial pipe dream that has entranced some influential British politicians for decades. In a speech at Harvard University in 1943, when Winston Churchill was awarded an honorary doctorate, he sketched out a plan for the post-Nazi world. The primary aim was to perpetuate British and American global dominance, with a ‘birthright’ to spread English worldwide. The promotion of ‘global English’ had been discussed at conferences on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930s.

Others see English differently.

“Perfidious Albion”

The British have been known in France for centuries as ‘Perfidious Albion’. Wikipédia in its French variant explains that Albion is an ancient way of referring to England, and defines the term as ‘acts relating to diplomatic manoeuvres, duplicity, treachery, and thereby of infidelity (vis-à-vis promises or assumed alliances made with other state-nations) by monarchs or governments of the United Kingdom (or of England prior to 1707) in their quest for egoistic interests.’

Perfidious Albion? (Image credit: thejournal.ie)

This French website provides a wealth of examples of British treachery from the time of Joan of Arc onwards. It refers to Nelson, the banishing of Napoleon to a remote island, incidents of imperial competition in the Middle East, and Winston Churchill’s decision to sink much of the French fleet on 3 July 1940 in the naval port near Oran in French Algeria, Mers-El-Kébir. Churchill acted when the French were allies but had just been overrun by Hitler’s troops. His purpose was to prevent any take-over of French warships by the Germans or the Italians. In addition to many vessels being wrecked, 1,297 French servicemen died.

Wikipedia in English also provides a wealth of examples of how Perfidious Albion has been used by enemies of the UK over several centuries, and recently in connection with Brexit. By contrast an online history course for British schoolchildren has a different understanding of the term: ‘Perfidious Albion is a term used by some people to describe the British Empire. It is a term that suggests that the British were deceitful and treacherous in their dealings as an Empire.’ This website states that the originator of the term was a French author, but fails to provide any examples of the way the term has been used in France or of French resentment of British behaviour.

President Charles de Gaulle rejected an application by the British to join the European Economic Community (as it then was) on 27 November 1967, after blocking an earlier attempt in 1963. The other five member states were keen for the UK to join, but they were not consulted by de Gaulle. At a press conference he stated that the UK would need to change drastically before it could be accepted. De Gaulle did not want the pound sterling complicating European economic integration, and rightly saw the risk of the UK serving as a bridgehead for US influence. This was a reasonable consideration, even if de Gaulle was doubtless well aware that the creation of the EU was as much a project of the US as of key Europeans. Among these the most influential was Jean Monnet, a banker who collaborated with the British and the Americans between the two world wars and was an influential adviser to Franklin Roosevelt during the war. American involvement in planning for Europe is described in Pascaline Winand’s book, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe.

De Gaulle had personal experience of Perfidious Albion, since he lived in exile in London from 1940 to 1943 as head of the Free French movement. Churchill considered de Gaulle ‘an enemy of Britain’, with a ‘messianic complex” and ‘dictatorial’ tendencies. Churchill’s hostile assessment was first made public when secret documents were released in 2000. Richard Norton-Taylor reported on this in ‘How Churchill plotted against “our bitter foe” ’ in The Guardian (5 January 2000). He reveals that Churchill conspired with President Roosevelt to prevent de Gaulle from leading French recovery in the final phase of the war or after it. The article concludes with stating that between the UK and France ‘tensions remain’. This is still the case in 2020. The French and some other Europeans will breathe a sigh of relief once the UK has gone, but its departure weakens both the EU and the UK.

Britain and the European Union

British disagreements about many EU policy issues with other EU countries are partly caused by the goals of European integration being deliberately left unclear. Unification has been a gradual process since 1955. For some the goal is an increasingly merged union and ultimately a federal United States of Europe; for others the EU should remain only an economic union, but it is already vastly more than that. The EU faces major challenges quite apart from Brexit: migration, member states not observing the rule of law, the messy interface between national and supranational interests, and the euro serving some countries better than others. A book by a distinguished American observer of EU affairs, John R. Gillingham, The EU. An obituary (2017, updated in 2018) argues strongly that the EU’s many weaknesses mean that it could disintegrate.

Those who thought that a British exit would rapidly lead to other countries following suit have been proven wrong.

Gillingham, an economic historian, basically recommends that the EU should become more like the USA. This fits well into an Anglosphere agenda, which I will return to. He complains that ‘Europe is governed today neither by its peoples nor by its ideals but by a bank board, but  tendentiously argues that ‘repair of the financial system ….will mean dropping ambitious EU reform plans in favour of American banking practices and accepting increased influence for US investors and financial methods’ (ibid., 239, 207).

This is almost as crude as when the US ambassador to Denmark stated at my university in 1997: ‘The most serious problem for the European Union is that it has so many languages, this preventing real integration and development of the Union’.

It was de Gaulle’s successor as president, Georges Pompidou, who agreed to the UK joining in 1973. This was on one condition, namely that all British staff in EEC institutions should be fluent in French. In Pompidou’s view, French was the language of Europe, and English the language of the Americas. This sample linguistic nationalism provides a glimpse of the complexity of managing multilingualism in the EU, in which in principle and in law all 24 EU languages have equal rights.

There was a witticism circulating during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. Ministers from many continental European countries have often been able to function in more than one language. The British by contrast were relentlessly monolingual. In Thatcher’s government only two of her Ministers had any proficiency in a foreign language. But these two were the ones who really could not be trusted because they were suspiciously interested in foreign cultures! A key factor influencing the outcome of the Brexit referendum vote is English insularity. A key factor influencing the Brexit vote was ignorance about how the EU functions.

The British vote to leave the EU can be seen as British perfidy vis-à-vis its European partners of 47 years. The perfidy reached new heights in September 2020, after three years of complicated negotiations on the terms of the UK’s departure and future relationship with the EU. Johnson’s government decided on legislation that was in breach of a legally binding treaty with the EU, one that he himself had negotiated and described at the time as ‘fantastic’. The legislation, the Internal Market Bill was passed by the House of Commons on 29 September 2020. Perfidious Albion of the crudest kind.

On 1 October 2020 the European Commission reacted by sending the UK a ‘letter of formal notice’ for breaching its obligations under the Withdrawal Agreement. This marks the beginning of an infringement process against the UK, since ‘Article 5 of the Withdrawal Agreement states that the European Union and the United Kingdom must take all appropriate measures to ensure the fulfillment of the obligations arising from the Withdrawal Agreement, and that they must refrain from any measures which could jeopardise the attainment of those objectives. Both parties are bound by the obligation to cooperate in good faith in carrying out the tasks stemming from the Withdrawal Agreement.’

Face to face negotiations on this issue failed to deter the UK from acting illegally. The British legislation is in conflict with the Protocol on Ireland / Northern Ireland, as Ursula von der Leyen stressed in her press statement of 1 October. Failure to react to the infringement notification and to comply with the UK’s obligations can result in the issue being referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which can impose heavy fines. The UK is still legally obliged to respect the Court’s decision.

One of the goals of Brexit was to escape this kind of control. However, the UK’s behaviour is undermining its international reputation as a country that respects the rule of law.

EU language policies

Language policy management in the EU system is complex and politically sensitive. Any analysis of it needs to be calibrated with language rights and language use in law and in practice, and the market forces that have propelled English forward over the past five decades. There are very different challenges for permanent employees of the European Commission, for Members of the European Parliament and their staff, for the activities of the European Council of Ministers, which brings together government ministers of the 27 member states, and for countless experts involved in negotiations on policy documents or budget implementation. The continuous production of policy documents and of the massive corpus of Eurolaw (the ‘acquis communautaire’), which overrides national law, and is published in parallel in 24 languages, in principle with the same semantic content in each of them, requires the world’s largest translation service. These activities are radically different from the management of speech in diverse institutional contexts, supported by extensive, flexible interpretation services.

The language of EU official documents is sui generis. It is screened by legal specialists as well as linguists. High-level negotiation on all of the many policy issues on which the EU legislates is dependent on the precision of every word in written texts, and the capacity to decode these, in all of the 24 languages. The written language is essentially a technical, bureaucratic, legalistic one for very specific purposes. It has to navigate the turbulent waters of maintaining linguistic diversity, and consistency in formulating EU principles. This is of major importance for citizens and for the representatives of all countries, since EU law takes precedence over national law. Unfortunately, the general public, and probably many British Members of Parliament, know little about the interface between national law and EU law, and the shared responsibility of all member states for the formulation and implementation of decisions and policies.

Blaming ‘Brussels’ for EU decisions and decrees is simply false, when each and every country has had a shared responsibility for these policies.

Use of one language rather than another is not merely a pragmatic choice. Seeing a language as purely instrumental, or as ideologically neutral matter, is false.  Choice of language reflects political choices and realities. A language is one particular way of understanding and shaping reality, drawing on a worldview that emerged in specific historical and cultural contexts. All languages change over time, as the variety of English worldwide demonstrates. All 24 EU languages are in both national and international use because of the way the EU operates.

When Finland joined the EU, it needed to translate the over 70,000 pages of Eurolaw into Finnish. They attempted to translate from the English version but could not understand it without consulting the French original.

One of the consequences of British EU membership has been a major change in the language policies of EU institutions. English has gradually since 1973 become the dominant in-house language of the European Commission, largely displacing French. In communications with the wider world, it is mostly English that is used. English has become the default language, and massively important in the conduct of EU affairs, not least when policies are initially conceptualised in English, and drafted in English. Proficiency in English therefore, whether used by a native speaker or by a well-qualified non-native speaker, delivers a strategic advantage to those who think in English and are able to use it optimally in speech or writing. Conversely, for those less proficient, English puts them at a disadvantage. English may not be fully understood, especially when native speakers do not adjust their discourse sensitively for an audience with diverse linguistic backgrounds. Speech in limited English, sometimes disparagingly described as ‘broken English’, can lead to misunderstandings or can complicate interaction. Whether any ‘Euro English’ has evolved, as has been claimed, is disputed, and seems improbable, in part because of the diversity of its users and of its contexts of use.

The triumph of English

Many factors have contributed to the expansion of English in Europe and worldwide. English is the dominant language of the USA, Hollywood, NATO, the UN, international finance, several countries, and many international organisations. Economic integration has strengthened English in continental Europe. It has also contributed to major investment in the UK by corporations from Japan, the USA, and continental Europe because the UK was part of the European common market with freedom of movement of goods, people, and capital. This investment is at risk once Brexit is completed if there is no agreement that suits both the EU and the UK. Industrial products, for instance vehicle or airplane parts, can typically cross borders many times before a finished product exists. Bailey’s Irish cream reportedly crosses the UK/Irish border six times during its production process. Even the pre-eminence of the City of London in finance has suffered because of Brexit.

“Uncle Sam Teaches the World”, Puck Magazine, 1899 (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Other factors influencing the expansion of English in continental Europe are geographical proximity, giving the learning of English pride of place in schools, and extensive use of it in higher education and research. Applications for research grants from the EU are invariably submitted in English (even if the regulations state that any of the 24 languages can be used!). Applications are also assessed by a variety of Europeans using English. This puts applicants and assessors whose primary research language is a Romance, Slav, or Finno-Ugric language, or Greek at a disadvantage. Since there is immense competition for such funds, the hegemony of English is consolidated in this way, and will not change once Brexit is finalised.

The expansion of English was not left to chance. US ‘philanthropic’ foundations invested significantly in academia in Europe from the 1920s onwards. The British and Americans have promoted English worldwide since the 1950s, as advocated by Churchill (and by political leaders in the UK and US over 200 years). Linguistic imperialism of this kind is well documented. When the iron curtain was removed, it was an explicit policy of successive British governments to expand the learning of English in former communist countries so as to make English the link language across the continent, and to marginalise Russian and German. French has been losing out to English for centuries, after losing wars with the British in North America, India, and Europe. Former French colonies in north and western Africa are also moving into using English. English is the dominant language of the African Union. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is modelled on the EU, has English as its sole official language.

Other key factors influencing the expansion of English can be related to what some term its soft power, the reputation of the BBC, prestigious universities, literature and culture from Shakespeare to the Beatles and Harry Potter, the Westminster parliamentary system, etc. Soft power in fact converts into major economic benefits, through fee-paying foreign students, cultural industries, and English language teaching. Almost the entire budget of the British Council, the para-statal body that promotes British interests and English in over 100 countries, is funded by its income from teaching English, testing proficiency, and educational consultancies. English is a billion dollar commodity.

That all of this will continue unchanged once Brexit has been completed is extremely unlikely. Detachment from continental Europe will affect commercial, political, educational, and cultural affairs in the UK negatively. A hard or no Brexit is a catastrophe for higher education as well as business in the UK. Much will depend on what sort of policies the British government will follow worldwide.

The Anglosphere – a policy or a chimera?

The idea of the “Anglosphere” is closely aligned with the former British Empire (1886 map)

The idea of an Anglosphere was first promoted in The Anglosphere challenge. Why the English-speaking nations will lead the way in the twenty-first century, a book written by a USA industrialist, James C. Bennett, in 2004. He defines the Anglosphere as meaning ‘the sharing of fundamental customs and values at the core of English-speaking cultures: individualism; rule of law; honoring of covenants; in general the high-trust characteristics described by Francis Fukujama in Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity; and the emphasis on freedom as a political and cultural value’.

With Boris Johnson in charge in the UK, trust is elusive. The idea that the rule of law and trusting others are uniquely Anglo-American traits is an insult to all other countries. The rule of law in British India served British rather than Indian interests, as described in Inglorious empire. What the British did to India, a book written by a senior UN diplomat, Shashi Tharoor.

Parliamentary systems in both the USA and the UK are less democratic than in countries with proportionate representation. They are also invidiously influenced by financial interests, by social media schemes, and by many abstaining from voting. In the EU the rule of law is a well-established key value, despite the varied historical roots and trajectories of member states. The rule of law is now monitored and reported on annually in each country.

The essential unifying bond between countries in the Anglosphere vision is the language. It is English which is the foundational glue that is seen as binding the people together, and expresses what Bennett sees as the particular virtues of ‘English-speaking countries’. English has been privileged in each of them. Major efforts were made to eliminate all other languages in these countries, using punitive legislative and educational measures, but with only partial success. The concept also occludes the reality of each country being multilingual, and English changing over time to meet local needs in each.

The myth of American exceptionalism, that the USA is a uniquely virtuous country, continues when Bennett writes ‘Increasingly during the past few centuries, the English-speaking world has been the pathfinder for all of humanity’ through the ‘first modern nation-state, the first liberal democratic state’. These are very dubious claims. Links between the UK and the USA have for centuries been close, albeit contentious, but were reinvigorated when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan orchestrated the launch of neoliberalism.

Bennett argues that the North American Free Trade Association, NAFTA, and the European Union are ‘of limited value at best, and at worst do harm when they attempt to homogenize nations with substantially different characteristics.’ His contention is that the British people have more in common with Americans than with continental Europeans, and that the media and internet are intensifying this convergence.

Detaching Britain from Europe

The idea of ‘detaching’ the UK from the EU has been pursued in several think tanks in the USA. Conferences on the Anglosphere were organised by the Hudson Institute in 1999 and 2000, with significant participation by leading British cultural conservatives. The third Anglosphere century. The English-speaking world in an era of transition is a tract written by Bennett and published by the Heritage Institute in 2007. It includes an Anglosphere agenda for the economic, political, and military integration of the UK and other ‘English-speaking countries’, possibly India and Singapore too, under USA leadership.

He advocates the merging of the United Kingdom with NAFTA and its detachment from Europe so that the British and US defence industries can integrate, and as in finance, function as a ‘seamless market’. This would strengthen the massive impact of the military expenditure of the US, and of the ‘Five eyes’ intelligence alliance that connects Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK to the US. Bennett propounds that ‘The past thirty years of British history have encompassed a period of political and cultural schizophrenia that has created ongoing unresolved tensions in its national life and identity’, the solution to which is an Anglosphere Network Commonwealth.

(Image credit: ArcGIS Storymap)

One thrust is to entrench English monolingualism.

Bennett recommends that ‘Multiculturalism and bilingualism should be abandoned, and assimilation and learning of English should become national policies’. This proposal dovetails with English-only policies that a number of states in the USA have introduced, whereas this policy has had little support at the national level. Insisting on monolingualism in the UK and Australia is a political no-brainer, even if many people in each country remain personally monolingual. Bennett seems to have forgotten the strength of French in Canada. The indigenous peoples in all these countries and their languages are ignored.

The deep historical roots in the UK of the notion of an Anglosphere are explored in depth in Shadows of empire. The Anglosphere in British politics, by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, published in 2018. A deep commitment to Anglo-American unity and to Anglosphere ideas can be traced across British cultural and political history in statements by Cecil Rhodes, Winston Churchill, Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher.

The book also analyses the way Anglosphere ideas are currently impacting on the British political scene. Several influential British politicians in the Conservative party are attracted by an Anglosphere vision. The main champion of Anglosphere ideas in the build-up to a referendum vote on Brexit of 23 June 216 was Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), but the Leave campaign made sure that Farage was left in the background. A lengthy book entitled All-out war. The full story of Brexit, written by Tim Shipman in 2017, never refers to the Anglosphere. The term has evidently not become established in political discourse or journalism.

There is little evidence of  the Anglosphere ideas appealing to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, and few of the other, less ‘white’ Commonwealth countries are contenders. The Anglosphere, and strengthening economic links with the UK has never been a priority in these countries, quite the opposite.

Championing Brexit

How the UK might benefit by leaving the EU was totally absent from the Brexit Leave campaign, other than fraudulent promises of financial relief and the claim that exiting would be a simple matter. The slogan ‘take back control’ is a meaningless notion in an interconnected world, as the negotiations on exiting have shown. Benefits of any kind have still not been clarified. The vision of a ‘global Britain’ is vacuous and ahistorical, but smacks of the idea of making the UK ‘great’ again.

The trio of British government Ministers appointed by Theresa May to negotiate Brexit with the EU all appear to have had neoimperial dreams: Liam Fox, the Minister for Foreign Trade, had a portrait of Cecil Rhodes in his office. David Davis had attended Anglosphere think tank events in the USA. Boris Johnson, when Foreign Secretary, had a bust of Winston Churchill in his. During a visit to Australia, he talked warmly of the Anglosphere. Later, as Prime Minister, Johnson nominated an unsuccessful former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, as an adviser on trade relations, a hugely controversial appointment.

Trust? (Image credit:
Jannes Van den wouwer, Unsplash)

Creating closer trade links with the USA has figured prominently in the policies of the governments of both Theresa May and Boris Johnson. They are extremely controversial because what is at stake is less stringent regulation of food products (chlorinated chicken, hormones in beef, etc.) and the prospect of the National Health Service being sold off to US corporate interests, despite health care being vastly more expensive in the US, and failing to serve a large section of the population. From what is known about ongoing negotiations, it appears that the UK government is covertly following an Anglosphere agenda. There is virtually no parliamentary control, and the general public have not being given any insight into what is in the transatlantic pipeline. The British NGO Global Justice Now has been following these negotiations carefully and campaigning against what it sees as ‘the corporate take-over of global health’.

The British Academy organized a conference on the Anglosphere on June 15-16, 2017. It brought together academics from several countries, but mainly from the UK, British Foreign Office staff, and James Bennett. Martin Kettle of The Guardian wrote about it under the title ‘Here is Britain’s new place in the world – on the sidelines’.

The myth of the Anglosphere alternative needs nailing. These ideas have old roots. They have shaped a lot of British thinking in different ways, not just on the right of politics, for at least 150 years. In their 2017 incarnation, however, they run into two immovable facts. First, UK trade with the Anglosphere nations has massively declined from its pre-1914 peak; realistically, the US is now the UK’s only significantly large Anglosphere trading partner. Second, the US has long treated bilateral trade deals as zero-sum games, played on US terms, even before the election of an ultra-nationalist president, never mind now.

English in the EU now and in the future

At no point since the accession to the EU of the UK, along with Ireland and Denmark, in 1973 has there been any official recognition of English having a privileged or superior status in the EU. The progressive expansion of its use over nearly half a century has resulted in a downgrading of the use of French, which was primus inter pares earlier, and German, as well as the marginalisation of all other languages.

There has been speculation about whether English will remain as the dominant language in EU institutions after Brexit. Both President Macron and the former President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, are on record as wanting French to regain its former dominant role. Some increase in the use of French is possible. At present any unclear English and French texts are submitted to a language revision before they are translated into other EU languages. Nearly all new policy statements as well as texts that ultimately will have the force of law are drafted initially in English. It therefore seems safe to predict that any downgrading of English within the EU system is very unlikely to occur. Not only because the Irish and Maltese (both formerly run by the British) will continue to function almost exclusively in English, as will many from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and individuals from other countries. The main reason is that EU employees from all parts of Europe have become accustomed to functioning in English. The hegemony of English has been internalised and accepted.

When addressing the media, senior EU staff increasingly make statements in English, even if in principle they could speak any of the other 23 official languages. This practice strengthens the idea of it being ‘natural’ to use English, even if this practice is in conflict with the principle of the EU as a multilingual organisation, and is a consequence of multiple hegemonic forces behind English.

When Ursula von der Leyen, as the incoming President of the Commission in 2019 presented her priorities to the European Parliament, her mission statement was delivered mainly in English, and made brief, token use of French and German. Her multilingual competence is impressive. Her prepared speeches in English are delivered lucidly and persuasively, whereas some of her colleagues, the other Commissioners, are incapacitated and unconvincing when they opt to use English. The same applies when Ministers from continental Europe feel an obligation to speak English even when their mother tongues are languages that are widely used internationally, such as French, Spanish and German.

Charles Michel, the European Council President, reads prepared statements fluently in English but with a strong French accent. Whether he can use English spontaneously and effectively in a negotiating context one is unable to judge, but it is more than likely that he sounds more competent in French.

After a meeting of the European Council on 1 and 2 October 2020, the results were presented in an 8-minute speech delivered by Ursula von Leyen, in English. The written version was available in English, French, and German. One would have expected the presentation of results to be presented by Charles Michel, the European Council president, but it was von Leyen, the Commission president who spoke. One wonders whether this was a tactical decision, simply because she sounds more professional in English. Michel stood silently beside her. In principle these two presidents, plus the president of the European Parliament, have the same status but distinct portfolios.

On 12 September 2020, when reporting on a Brexit meeting in London, the German Minister of Finance Olaf Scholz chose to use English. He was reporting on highly sensitive issues, including the effect of the British intention to renege on the treaty signed a year earlier with the EU. Scholz sounded hesitant and unconvincing in English, and would doubtless have been vastly more effective and informative in German.

In any case it is unreasonable and unfair to expect people from 27 continental European countries to be as effective in English as in their national languages. The problem for von Leyen, Michel, and Scholz is, as the German-Danish linguist Hartmut Haberland points out, that in such contexts there is in effect no choice. ‘You are damned if you speak English and you are damned if you don’t.

This is the true triumph of English language imperialism: leaving everybody with no alternative.’

Romano Prodi, when he was President of the European Commission, was interviewed by an American journalist on many aspects of European integration, and was asked about EU language policy. The journalist is reported in Newsweek (31 May 2004) as saying: ‘A unified Europe in which English, as it turns out, is the universal language?’ Prodi replied: ‘It will be broken English, but it will be English.’

Ursula von der Leyen, the current president of the European Commission, is highly proficient in English

Broken English is increasingly what we hear when continental Europeans choose to address the international media and public in English. Broken English is a derogatory term for use of the language that does not conform to correct native speaker use. It is not a term that is used in scholarly analysis of the language, but it has a long pedigree. It was used by Shakespeare in a scene in the play Henry V, when the English king is wooing a French princess who is a complete beginner in English. There is a comic scene in Act III in which a lot of French is spoken, with Katherine’s lady in attendance teaching her a few basic words. In Act V the triumphal King Henry tells the princess: ‘If you will love me soundly with your French heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue’. What follows is playful interaction on this theme, with Katherine accusing Henry of being ‘full of deceits’. Perfidious Albion?

Broken agreements in not so broken English

Boris Johnson’s government decided in September 2020 to renege on a major agreement with the EU, one enshrined in an international treaty. The decision is in defiance of the UN Convention on International Treaties, as many legal specialists have pointed out. Philippe Sands QC, a professor of international law at University College London: ‘Every international lawyer is familiar with the Vienna convention on the law of treaties, and its article 27, which reflects a general principle: “A party may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for its failure to perform a treaty” ’(cited in The Guardian 12 September 2020). Despite the draft legislation being severely criticized by senior judges and lawyers, it was approved in the House of Commons on 29 September 2020.

It thus appears possible that Johnson’s team of negotiators has been duplicitous throughout negotiations on a Brexit agreement with the EU. Have they been negotiating in good faith? Perfidious Albion once more? Their word is not their bond?

Michel Barnier, the ‘Head of Task Force for Negotiations with the United Kingdom’, has made a succession of official statements on the progress of the Brexit negotiations, and increasingly on the lack of progress. It is difficult to imagine anyone more competent than Michel Barnier to represent the EU. He is the epitome of French experience and competence, was a Commissioner in the EU for two five-year periods, with responsibility for trade and regional policies, and has held several ministerial posts in French governments, including one as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The EU’s position has been transparently clear throughout. The multilingual website on the negotiations is fully informative, whereas nothing comparable exists in the UK. The British have repeatedly been asked to specify what their position is on key issues, among them fishing rights, a level playing field for trade, and Irish border arrangements. This has been frustrating for the EU, as its position has always been that it is in the interests of both the UK and the EU’s 27 member states that the negotiations should reach an agreement.

Since Germany has the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2020, its role is of great importance. Germany’s presidency does not entail direct responsibility for Brexit negotiations, but Germany’s excellent multilingual website has comprehensive coverage of all significant issues, including Brexit.

The EU is drawing its own conclusions. An anonymous EU representative was cited in The Guardian Weekly, on 18 September 2020: ‘People say that state aid and fisheries are the biggest stumbling blocks to a deal. It isn’t. It is trust’.

It seems highly likely that the power behind Johnson’s throne is Dominic Cummings, the ‘Chief Adviser’ to the Prime Minister. He is widely seen as a modern day Svengali or Rasputin. This understanding tallies with a detailed study of the Brexit Leave campaign, which Cummings was the brain behind. The most important Leave slogan was the claim that the UK was sending 350£ million a week to Brussels. This was untrue. It was plastered on campaign buses and widely cited. This did not disturb Cummings, since what was important was ‘message discipline and consistency’. As reported in the Financial Times, Cummings had ‘a cynical understanding that it did not matter if what the campaign said was factually correct’. This is the man that many experienced political commentators see as deciding what Boris Johnson does.

Johnson’s government’s illegality has been denounced by 5 former British Prime Ministers. Many Conservative Members of Parliament, for whom the rule of law is a fundamental principle, are in despair. On the other hand, according to The Economist, and cited in Pankaj Mishra’s Bland fanatics. Liberals, race and empire, conservative politicians are people who ‘coast through life on “bluff rather than expertise”. They are mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers’ who engage in ‘egotistical and destructive behaviour’.

Mishra sees quitting the EU as similar to and as catastrophic as the British division of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 1921, and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, in both cases with appalling loss of life as a result.

The politics of English

In complex negotiations between the EU and the UK over the terms of a Brexit divorce agreement, every word counts. This presupposes that all are using the language or languages of negotiation in an optimal, honest way. The British use English, quite possibly a sophisticated form of native speaker communication which may be difficult for others to understand fully or to see through. Since very few British politicians have attained a high level of proficiency in a foreign language, it is highly likely that they do not adjust their language so that it is easier for foreigners to understand. EU representatives probably mainly speak English, with varying levels of both precision in speaking and in understanding the English of their interlocutors.

Michel Barnier probably mostly uses French, but has spoken English in some statements to the press, and when delivering a prepared speech in Ireland. The general public can only guess at how far language issues are complicating the negotiations, but the issue would need clarification. There is research evidence from universities where students from a variety of language backgrounds are studying in programmes in which English is the language of learning. They experience that people using English with a foreign accent are often clearer and easier to understand than native speakers of English. The same is probably true of politicians and eurocrats with a high level of proficiency in English.

The increase of the use of English in EU affairs has made it easier for the British to remain monolingual, whereas the EU has for many years been committed to making all its citizens able to function multilingually. My book on European language policy, published in 2003, English-only Europe? Challenging language policy, is a lengthy plea for member states to take language policy more seriously, so as to strengthen all European languages and to avoid an excessive focus on English.

The concluding sentence is: ‘If inaction on language policy in Europe continues, at the supranational and national levels, we may be heading for an American English-only Europe. Is that really what the citizens and leaders of Europe want?’

Brexit will significantly diminish British influence on how Europe evolves. This is in the interest of the USA, as think tanks in the USA and the key architect of Anglosphere, James Bennett, have indicated and doubtless worked for.

The book was recently updated and translated into French, entitled La domination de l’anglais: un défi pour l’Europe (The domination of English: a challenge for Europe). Part of this challenge is that many EU policies have strengthened English and simultaneously weakened other languages, in processes that can be seen as constituting linguistic imperialism.

Business leaders in the UK have repeatedly pleaded with Boris Johnson to ensure that businesses are not harmed by both a lack of clarity on an agreement with the EU and on the need to ensure an agreement. They have for years had the feeling that their needs were being neglected. The BBC reported on 26 June 2018, when Johnson was Foreign Secretary: ‘Asked about corporate concerns over a so-called hard Brexit, at an event for EU diplomats in London last week, Mr Johnson is reported to have replied: “Fuck business”. When challenged over what he was overheard saying, he did not deny it. Asked about this in the Commons, he said he may have ‘expressed scepticism about some of the views of those who profess to speak up for business’.

Johnson’s outstandingly perfidious remark ought to come back to haunt him, since the uncertainty for business remains, and has already had devastating consequences. The traffic jams of thousands of lorries clogging roads in Kent symbolize the utter incompetence of the British government. This is harming businesses, the British economy, lorry drivers of all nationalities, and the residents of Kent.

The government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis has been equally incompetent. In Posh boys. How English public schools ruin Britain Robert Verkaik shows how attendance at elite schools and Oxford University cuts the elite off from the rest of British society; it ‘divides society into winners and losers’. It produces politicians who are out of touch with ordinary people and unable to provide informed leadership. These are the people who are responsible for Brexit.

Why should anyone trust them?

Related content

• Cramer, R. 2018. From oil spill to Brexit.
• Piller, I. 2016. Have we just seen the beginning of the end of English?

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:

Dr Fadila Boutouchent during her guest lecture at Macquarie University

When she was in kindergarten, my oldest daughter came home one day talking about “our soldiers” who “went to war for us“. It was the Anzac Day history lesson, a day which commemorates Australia’s involvement in World War 1 and the loss of life which resulted. However, just who was that “us” supposed to be?

My daughter has past and present relatives from the (former) Austro-Hungarian, British and Ottoman empires. As is true of most Australians, during WW1 my daughter’s ancestors would have actually been on both sides of the battle. This made me particularly uncomfortable with the idea of pitching a unified “us” against “them”.

As a parent, I expect my school to utilize a curriculum which is inclusive, not exclusionary and divisive. In fact, most of the time, they do. This was the only time I could recall that our school had tapped into this way of thinking about culture and belonging.

Educational curricula are powerful sites for the construction of national identity.

How does that work in a diverse society? What happens to newcomers who may not fit the dominant imagined identity? How can schools fullfil their obligation to meet the needs of students of diverse backgrounds while still attempting to instill a shared sense of identity and belonging?

The research of Dr. Fadila Boutouchent (University of Regina, Canada) addresses these important and fascinating questions and asks how immigrant parents perceive their children’s education, particularly in Francophone schools, which have as a central role the maintenance and construction of a Canadian Francophone identity. As part of the Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University, Dr. Boutouchent presented her research on these schools in the small city of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada.

New Brunswick is a province with a bilingual language policy, which means that citizens have the right to access services in either French or English. In addition, New Brunswick prioritizes French-speaking immigrants, in order to maintain its Francophone community.

In the Canadian context, research into immigrant students has tended to focus on Anglophone schools which are in the majority, have more experience with and are better resourced to manage the needs of diverse students. In contrast, little is known about the experience of migrant children in Francophone educational contexts, which are managed by the Francophone community.

Bilingual welcome sign at the entrance to Moncton city (Source: Wikipedia)

So how do recent migrant families fit into this picture? Dr. Boutouchent and her team sought to understand how immigrant families perceive their children’s education before and after their arrival in Moncton, and how they are involved in their social and educational integration.

The researchers interviewed 14 parents of families who had migrated from Africa or the Caribbean between 3-10 years prior and whose children were enrolled in Francophone schools. They found that there were some key issues for immigrant parents across the group.

The first was that immigrant parents felt they were not informed about the school system before arriving in Moncton. In particular, they did not know about the existence of Francophone schools. This group of parents was mostly highly educated and had very high expectations of their children’s educational success. Although they had trusted that the school would be good quality because it was in a developed country, some were disappointed, and one mother even said she would have liked to teach her daughter at home if she had been able to.

These issues of quality were at times compounded by language. The local variety of French is quite distinct. The Acadian French identity is historically very strong, and is marked by an accent which may be difficult for newcomers. This is similar to my own research on adult migrants in linguistic intermarriage who reported that they had unexpected problems with the Australian English accent on arrival.

The Chiac slogan “Right Fiers!” (“Right proud!”) has caused controversy (Source: cbc.ca)

We know from the previous lectures in the series that children’s willingness to speak different languages changes over time and that schooling is a key time for the formation of language habits. A particular challenge for immigrant children in Moncton is constituted by the fact that local youths speak a variety called Chiac, a mixture of French and English. Francophone migrants raised with standard French found Chiac incomprehensible and alienating.

One participant reported that her son began to stay inside during break times because he could not understand or speak to his fellow students.

If you can’t speak to other kids, how can you feel like you belong?

Parents also reported that their children experienced bullying and racism, and that the schools were not always well-equipped to manage the needs of refugee children who were not at the same educational level as their peers. They also regarded the lack of inclusive, multi-ethnic content in the curriculum as a problem.

There are no easy answers as to how to balance the educational and linguistic needs of newcomers with those of old-timers, but a good first step is to listen to the voices of those who are living the encounter. Small cities, like small schools, have the advantage that the distances between people and institutions are smaller, making both problems and solutions more visible. This also means that change is potentially easier to implement.

Dr. Boutouchent finished her lecture by making the case that Moncton is a site where Francophone schools could become “spaces for intercultural communication and nourish a culture of understanding and acceptance”. That sounds like a goal which all schools and parents could agree on.

Reference:

Benimmas, A., Boutouchent, F., & Kamano, L. (2017). Relationship Between School and Immigrant Families in French-Language Minority Communities in Moncton, New Brunswick: Parents’ Perceptions of Their Children’s Integration. In G. Tibe Bonifacio & J. L. Drolet (Eds.), Canadian Perspectives on Immigration in Small Cities (pp. 235-253). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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

The national language is the mother tongue of the vast majority of citizens in most European states (Source: Josu Amezaga, MQ Lecture, 22-11-2017)

Last week, Professor Josu Amezaga from the University of the Basque Country, Spain, visited Macquarie University to speak about minority languages: what they are and why they should be given space in the ongoing conversation about linguistic diversity.

Participating in this seminar was a timely opportunity as I embark on my PhD journey. I realized that it is one thing to read books and theses arguing about different forms of linguistic inequalities and yet another to engage in an academic debate. Coming from the Philippines, which is home to 187 languages, according to Ethnologue, I went into this seminar hoping to better understand the value – or lack of value – of these belittled languages.

Focusing on European languages, Professor Amezaga traced the historical roots of the monolingual paradigm to the French Revolution. The one-language-one-nation ideology that became prominent during that period saw some 28 French languages relegated to the position of patois or minority languages. The French revolutionaries were keen to ensure that all citizens shared a common language. Instead of considering bilingualism or a lingua franca—as is the case in the Philippines—they went about eliminating all competitors of French. This hostile policy towards minority languages was set out in Abbé Grégoire’s 1794 treatise entitled “Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser la langue française” (“Report on the necessity and means of annihilating the dialects and of making the French Language universal”).

This shows that minority languages are not necessarily the languages of a numerical minority. Rather they are languages that are subject to active processes of minoritization. While the term “minority language” suggests having small numbers of speakers, the term “minoritized language” is more accurate as it draws our attention to processes of language subordination and to the unequal power relationships that often pertain between “minority” and “majority”.

By contrast, citizens of the Philippines have many different mother tongues (Source: http://www.csun.edu/~lan56728/majorlanguages.htm)

In Europe, processes of linguistic suppression were so successful that by the second half of the 20^th century most European nations were highly monolingual, with the vast majority of citizens speaking the national language as their sole mother tongue. However, globalization and migration of recent decades have thrown this high level of state-engineered monolingualism into disarray.

Many European states have reacted to this “linguistic threat” with new efforts at renationalization, as can be seen in the introduction of language testing for citizenship. Between 1998 and 2015, the number of European states requiring a language test from prospective citizens rose from 6 to 25.

Interestingly, this push to test the language proficiency of immigrants further helps to cement the minoritized position of indigenous minority languages: language testing in France, for instance, is done in French rather than in Basque, despite the fact that the latter is today recognized as an official regional minority language of France.

At the same time, globalization and migration have also pushed language ideologies in the opposite direction, contesting the monolingual one-nation-one-language ideology and giving new legitimacy to minoritized languages. Professor Amezaga showed striking evidence of this trend with TV signals: while around 1,000 TV signals from English-speaking countries reach non-English-speaking territories, 900 signals in languages other than English reach the US. The former is evidence that the media are agents of linguistic homogenization and the latter is evidence that the media are agents of linguistic diversification.

Professor Amezaga’s guest lecture focused on minoritized languages in Europe and the global North more generally. Reflecting on how these insights relate to my home country, the Philippines, it may seem that in this highly multilingual country processes of linguistic homogenization have not been an issue. However, that would be misleading. Our own version of the one-language-one-nation ideology could be called “two-languages-one-nation ideology”: English and Filipino are positioned side-by-side as an essential aspect of the bilingual identity of Filipinos. As a result, the Philippines’ other languages are similarly subject to minoritization.

Furthermore, the challenge posed by globalization and migration to the linguistic status quo of the Philippines does not come from immigration but emigration. Going overseas, primarily for work, has become a viable and even desirable option for many Filipinos, who perceive international labor opportunities as an economic panacea. Consequently, over 10 million Filipinos are estimated to be working or living overseas today. This number is nearly 300% more than the first wave of Filipino migrants in the 1970s, when the overseas employment program was launched. With Filipino migrants now gaining more ground as “workers of the world,” it is worth examining the language component of occupations where they are employed to see how their linguistic repertoire – borne out of a two-languages-one-nation ideology and differential valuing of minority languages – intersects with the language ideologies of destination societies.

Reference

The slides from Professor Amezaga’s lecture are available for download here.

“The English” migrated to their “ancestral homeland” in the first few centuries of the Common Era (Source: Wikipedia)

“Indigenous languages” and “immigrant languages” are much discussed in language policy research, but surprisingly little time is spent actually defining those terms. In general, “indigenous” tends to encompass two features: a long heritage in a place; and some form of contemporary disadvantage, usually associated with prior colonisation/invasion. But those criteria are seldom explicated.

An example comes from Nancy Hornberger (1998). She compares the languages of “indigenous groups” and “immigrants”, and efforts to protect these languages – focusing principally on education. But no space is given to defining “indigenous groups”, or indeed “immigrants”. And these blurry defining criteria mean that the two are not clearly distinguished. From here some wrinkles open up, and people can get trapped inside those (more on that later).

Now compare popular articulations of indigeneity. The English (to pick a completely random example) like to see themselves as immemorially Anglo-Saxon (see Reynolds 1985), but try telling that to the sixth-century Britons being shoved westward by waves of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Franks (who were themselves later shoved around by the Vikings, and so on). The Anglo-Saxons were once invaders, but at some point in the popular consciousness became indigenous. At which meeting was that agreed?

As I noted above, “indigenous” is not just historically significant. It relates to present-day disadvantage (by no means limited to language). This is perhaps why “indigenous” is less frequently used in European countries, whose homegrown ethnolinguistic minorities might be marginalised but not as acutely as the indigenous people of the always delightfully euphemistic “New World” – who drag behind them nasty histories of dispossession, and carry on top of them desperate social exclusion in the present (relative poverty, disproportionate incarceration, shorter life expectancy, etc.).

There are, then, deeply political resonances behind the mobilisation of a term like “indigenous”.

“Indigenous” European Minority Languages (Source: Barbier Traductions)

Now consider a piece of governmental language policy, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. For “indigenous” it prefers “autochthonous”, and for “immigrant” it uses “allochthonous”. Autochthonous languages are defined vaguely as “traditionally used within a given territory of a State”, while the latter, the “languages of migrants”, are excluded from the Charter’s remit. Here we come closer to defining and distinguishing “indigenous” and “immigrant”, but not much closer.

Perhaps the clearest deconstruction of indigeneity is Anthea Fraser Gupta’s book chapter, ‘Privileging Indigeneity’ (1997). She pertinently asserts that “groups do not remain discrete, but merge, especially through marriage. Migration, language shift, and intermarriage are long established human practices. They have not stopped. It is dangerous to solidify this fluidity into policy.” This throws things into sharp relief: if “traditionally used” is a definition of indigeneity, then how long, in years, is “traditional”?

Consider Hindi in the UK. It’s a minority language with a centuries-long tradition, but happens to be associated with an ethnic group whose migration is ongoing, not ancient history.

Of course, Hindi is not a minority language everywhere, but what about, say, Potwari in the UK, ‘traditionally’ spoken in Pakistan but a minority language there and everywhere else too.

What’s that? Not traditionally spoken in the UK? Oh, sorry.

Gupta’s 1997 chapter has never been followed up substantially, or even cited more than a few times – mostly pretty superficial citations too (judge for yourself: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=14790778410856718429). One other useful contribution comes from Lionel Wee. In his book Language Without Rights, he argues that “the communicative needs of immigrants cannot be appropriately addressed by … the collective right of an ethnic minority group to a heritage language. … In this regard, the traditional notion of language rights will need to be recast as an individual’s communicative right to be heard and understood” (2010: 143). This is the beginning of a much needed fundamental debate in language policy research. (Sadly this point of Wee’s is something of a diamond in the rough; his book is otherwise not very good – see my rather scratchy review here.)

But this rabbit hole gets deeper. What about languages that are not only associated with migrants, but that don’t even have an intuitive ethnolinguistic heritage or a long history?

“Le nouchi ivoirien, une langue à défendre!” (Source: http://www.lebabi.net/actualite-abidjan/le-nouchi-ivoirien-une-langue-a-defendre-14233.html)

Take the creole Nouchi, in the Ivory Coast, arising in the 1980s through contact between French and various Ivorian languages. Nouchi is indigenously Ivorian but has no obvious ethnic pedigree. It arose because street traders, itinerant workers, and others in the Ivorian grey economy – who didn’t share a common language – needed to communicate. From a rich mix of diverse people striking deals, talking shop, agreeing, disagreeing, socialising, eating, dancing and falling in love, came about a more distinctive set of words, phrases, and grammatical features. This story of language genesis is as old as human speech itself. And in the worldwide context of overwhelming language death, Nouchi could be celebrated as a new indigenous minority language.

So is it celebrated? Not quite. Although a vibrant feature of Ivorian popular (sub-)culture, Nouchi is typically looked down on by mainstream media and other guardians of all that is right and good in the world, as broken French and/or a subversive subaltern code. That even includes minority language sympathisers. In a book-length discussion of Ivorian minority languages, Ettien Koffi (2012) mentions Nouchi only once (p. 207) and then only as a kind of curiosity. (See my somewhat irritable review of Koffi’s book here.)

The same fate has befallen Tsotsitaal in South Africa, another recently born creole “including elements of Zulu and Afrikaans … from the working class outskirts and townships of Johannesburg … used by (would-be) gangsters and rebellious township youth. … [L]anguages like Tsotstitaal are not legitimated … and their speakers are marginalized” (Stroud & Heugh 2004: 202).

Dynamic urban vernaculars also have a tendency to change and transform much more quickly than older languages. That is of course part of the appeal for their speakers, but another reason for indifference among those who prefer languages to sit still.

No maps exist for emergent “indigenous” languages (Source: Sueddeutsche)

This kind of sneering at emergent contact-based vernaculars is common elsewhere, for example Rinkeby Swedish (Milani & Jonsson 2012), Kiezdeutsch (Wiese 2015), and Multicultural London English (Kerswill 2013, 2014) – even though, like “indigenous languages”, these are also used by minorities, spoken nowhere else on earth, and associated with poor, marginalised ethnic groups. Because they lack an identifiable ethnic lineage, and because they arose in the grubby dirt of modern cosmopolitanism – not the sacred dust of bygone ages – they paw at the lowest rung of the linguistic hierarchy.

This is perhaps the biggest problem for poorly defined terms like “indigenous” and “immigrant”: people get caught in the wrinkles between them. Speakers of emergent vernaculars are so distained they don’t even get a term of their own.

So the meaning of “indigenous” in language policy is complex, seldom explicitly defined, and even more rarely problematised. But whatever its meaning, it clearly isn’t just “us what was here first”. That in turn begs the more important question for “immigrants”: if the Anglo-Saxons ultimately became indigenous, then how long will others take to qualify? How many centuries do you have to be around? Why not decide, in years, how long it takes to be counted as indigenous, traditional, autochthonous, etc.? I hope it’s clear that I’m sketching a rather large red herring. The answer is neither possible nor desirable.

Perhaps a better solution would be to balance consideration of indigeneity with other factors, not least socioeconomic disadvantage. “Indigeneity” as currently discussed is still important: historically unjust land grabs followed by centuries of being disgracefully screwed over – continuing into the present – still need redress. But combining this with a broader focus on material wellbeing could yield greater parity with speakers of “immigrant languages”, and even of emergent vernaculars.

“[A] frequent critique of language endangerment discourse is that it displaces concerns with speakers on to a concern with languages” (Heller & Duchêne 2007: 4–5). In the wider social sciences, debate crackles and sparks over whether the “cultural turn” has over-interpreted inequality as culturally driven, stealing attention away from social class and other structural barriers (e.g. Crompton 2008: 43–44). That kind of debate in language policy is well overdue. Since her 1998 article (cited earlier), Nancy Hornberger and others have managed to dislodge the constrained focus on education in promoting minority languages. Surely the next advance should be to get beyond “indigenous”/“immigrant” as the prime categorisation, even to get beyond languages as such (an unsettling thought for a linguist), and to consider more fully the lives of the people who speak them.

Related posts: The diversity of the Other, Inventing languages.

References

Crompton, Rosemary. 2008. Class and stratification. Bristol: Polity Press.

Gupta, Anthea Fraser. 2002. Privileging indigeneity. In John M. Kirk & Dónall P. Ó Baoill (eds.), Language Planning and Education: Linguistic Issues in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona. 290-299. [Pre-print available: http://anthea.id.au/papers/belfast.pdf.]

Heller, Monica & Alexandre Duchêne. 2007. Discourses of endangerment: sociolinguistics, globalization and social order. In A. Duchêne & M. Heller (eds.), Discourses of endangerment: Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages. London: Continuum. 1–13.

Hornberger, Nancy. 1998. Language policy, language education, language rights: Indigenous, immigrant, and international perspectives. Language in Society 27(4): 439–458.

Kerswill, Paul. 2013. Identity, ethnicity and place: the construction of youth language in London. In P. Auer et al. (eds.), Space in Language and Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter. 128–164.

Kerswill, Paul. 2014. The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: the discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.), Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin: De Gruyter. 428–455.

Koffi, Ettien. 2012. Paradigm Shift in Language Planning and Policy: Game-theoretic Solutions. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Milani, Tommaso M. & Rickard Jonsson. 2012. Who’s Afraid of Rinkeby Swedish? Stylization, Complicity, Resistance. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22(1): 44–63.

Stroud, Christopher & Kathleen Heugh. 2004. Lingusitic human rights and linguistic citizenship. In Jane Freeland & Donna Patrick (eds.), Language Rights and Language Survival: Sociolinguistic and Sociocultural Perspectives. Manchester: St. Jerome. 191–218.

Wiese, H. (2015). “This migrants’ babble is not a German dialect!”: The interaction of standard language ideology and ‘us’/‘them’ dichotomies in the public discourse on a multiethnolect. Language in Society 44(3), 341-368. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404515000226

Auburn parking ticket (left: quadrilingual on back; right: city logo on front)

In Australia with its persistent monolingual mindset coming across any kind of official institutional multilingual communication always feels like a minor triumph. And that’s how I felt when I recently went to park my car at a Sydney parking garage and the machine at the gate spit out this multilingual parking ticket. In German, English, Italian and French, the ticket says:

Please do not leave the ticket in the car. Please take care not to fold or bring ticket in contact with direct heat. Please note that the parking conditions in operation are displayed within the car park.

European readers will be familiar with this kind of parking ticket. It is produced by Designa, a parking management company headquartered in Germany and I think I received identical parking tickets during visits to Europe. I cannot be sure because I never pay much attention to the text on parking tickets. Receiving a multilingual parking ticket in Australia, however, immediately caught my attention because I had never ever encountered a parking ticket with anything other than text in English only.

Is this quadrilingual parking ticket a sign that the ideology of official English monolingualism that blithely ignores Australian multilingual realities is starting to crack? I don’t think so.

Let me tell you about the context of the parking garage where I received the ticket.

The parking garage is located in the Sydney suburb of Auburn and is operated by the Auburn City Council. Throughout Sydney, Auburn is known as an immigrant suburb with a highly diverse, predominantly Muslim, population of Middle Eastern origin. Consequently, Auburn’s city motto is “Many Cultures, One Community.”

The iconic status of Auburn as a migrant and Muslim suburb is best evidenced by the fact that the acclaimed TV police series East West 101 is set there. The series plays on the global conflict between East and West as well as the local opposition between Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs and its poorer western suburbs with their migrant populations.

Consequently, linguistically, Auburn is a fascinating place, too. According to Australian Census data from 2011, only 13.5% of Auburn households are monolingual in English (for all of Sydney that figure is 72.5% and for all of Australia it is 76.8%). Conversely, at 84.8% the number of bi- and multilingual households in Auburn is exceptionally high in comparison to the rest of Sydney (24.5%) and Australia (20.4%).

In fact, more people in Auburn speak Arabic at home than English. The table shows the top languages other than English.

Table 1: Auburn’s Main Languages (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011 Census)

The fact that many of Auburn’s residents come from the Middle East is easily legible in the streetscape: Auburn is home to Australia’s largest mosque; many women wear some form of hijab; restaurants feature predominantly Afghan, Lebanese, Persian or Turkish cuisine; and commercial signage in Arabic, Persian and Turkish abounds.

So, how does the German-English-Italian-French parking ticket fit into the linguistic landscape of Auburn?

Well, it does not. According to the 2011 census, 19 Auburn residents claimed to speak French at home; 15 German; and 245 Italian. So, the choice of languages on the parking tickets is obviously not locally motivated; if it were, I would have marvelled at an Arabic-English-Turkish-Chinese quadrilingual parking ticket.

The language on a parking ticket may seem banal, mundane, not worthy of further attention. However, language choice on such mundane texts is important because it is not only an expression of what is “normal” – conforms to the norm – but also shapes our expectations of normalcy. The usual monolingual English parking tickets contribute to normalizing Australia as a monolingual English space. A German-English-Italian-French parking ticket sets up the dominant languages of Europe as the norm. In each case, there is a mismatch between the norm and actual multilingual realities. In each case, the effect is to devalue the actual languages of Australia and make them seem “foreign” and “strange.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mariko Watanabe and Ingrid Piller celebrate their reunion at Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

This post is also available in pdf-format. Click here.

In early July, YM Fashion’s CEO Mariko Watanabe flew in from Tokyo to Bangkok. She was scheduled to meet Ingrid Piller, who, on the way back from the Middle East to Australia, also just arrived in Bangkok to deliver a plenary speech at the H.I.S. Research and Industry Forum on Linguistic Diversity and Tourism in Amazing Thailand at Assumption University.

Mariko and Ingrid first met in Tokyo back in 2010 when YM Fashion Co., Ltd. became an official supporter of Language on the Move. Collaboration between the fashion industry and academics is unique, originating from the company’s increasing interest in the role of language and communication in their global business operation.

The day after the Forum, the CEO and the sociolinguist celebrated the success of the event in Chit Lom, one of Bangkok’s most fashionable neighbourhoods. Their conversation soon turned to YM Fashion’s first overseas venture in Thailand, which began some 26 years ago and was a trail-blazing endeavour in Japanese-Thai joint ventures.

In 2012, Thailand overtook the US for the first time and ranked second, after China, as the most desired destination for international joint ventures by Japanese companies (Japan External Trade Organization, 2013). At the time of Mariko’s first visit in the 1980s, however, the situation was quite different and only a handful of large-sized Japanese companies had manufacturing operations in Thailand. Mariko says “Bangkok back then was a small touristy city without much of its skyscrapers, glamorous shopping centers and the Skytrains. During the rainy season, it once took us three days by taxi to get to the airport.”

Japanese Business on the Move

The survey points at an assumption that has long been present in the minds of the Japanese – to succeed overseas you need English. In the context of global business, the Japanese language is often considered as useless because, in the mentality of many Japanese companies, it is assumed to be only spoken by the Japanese in Japan. The trajectory of Mariko’s company in Thailand, however, is a story that not only challenges this myth but also highlights the importance of setting aside pre-conceptions about linguistic deficits and of embracing cultural and linguistic diversity.

Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

Mariko established YM Fashion in Tokyo in 1979 with her husband Isamu Watanabe and their long-time friend Yasuko Hayata. Ten years later, YM Fashion International Thailand was set up in 1990 with a young Thai partner. At the time of the launch of their business in Bangkok, none of the founders or their staff spoke English or Thai on a functional level. How did a Japanese medium-sized fashion retail company manage to find a local contact, secure a partnership, hire and train employees, and grow to operate a 7,000sqm factory with 400 employees and 10 retail shops in central Bangkok today? Mariko explains that the opportunity to expand YM Fashion and develop its trademark brand Yaccomaricard in Thailand originally came through an informal international network of hippies in the late 1980s. And their story in Thailand is a story of languages on the move, beginning with a business proposal from unlikely collaborators.

Hippie Connections

Back in the 1980s in Tokyo, two German internationalists, Guy and Helga Pachet, were producing European-style baby clothes at home. After a long trip around the world in the 60s and the 70s, the couple had settled in Tokyo where their first baby was born. As their home-made European children’s clothes gained popularity in their local area, they wanted to commercialise their production. They turned to their friend Mariko to explore collaborative business opportunities.

Mariko initially turned down their proposal. Communication was a problem. Guy spoke German, French and English but had very little Japanese at the time. Mariko and her staff couldn’t speak English, let alone German or French.

Mariko: “I didn’t think it would be possible to work together if they couldn’t speak Japanese. I asked him to learn Japanese first. I promised that, in the meantime, we would try to learn English. But he learned Japanese better and faster than I ever learned English [laughs].”

As Guy quickly taught himself Japanese, the couple and YM Fashion began collaborating, and soon their new brand, Annya and Besna, became a hit among fashion-conscious mothers in the upmarket town of Denenchofu, Tokyo. As sales increased, the need to secure a production site devoted to Annya and Besna emerged. The couple decided to turn to their old hippie connections in Bangkok, Thailand.

Passion for Success

From left: Mariko Watanabe, Helga and Guy Pachet, and Punsuri Revirava in Yawara, Bangkok, 1989

In 1989, the Pachets and Mariko flew to Bangkok to meet Punsuri Revirava, whom they knew from their travels during their hippie years. The three parties, the Pachets, YM Fashion and Punsuri, co-founded a company, Clair Moda. Punsuri, who is Chinese-Thai, provided a manufacturing site within her family-owned shop house and initially secured six seamstresses for the production. Mariko was responsible for teaching the six young Thai women how to sew and produce clothes that would satisfy the desires and tastes of highly discerning Japanese consumers. She recalls that in terms of language, training the Thai workers was not a problem.

Mariko: “I couldn’t speak Thai, and these girls are from rural areas in Thailand, so they could speak neither English nor Japanese. Basically I taught these girls everything by using Japanese and through body language. These women still work for us today, and 26 years on at our factory, they have become leaders and teach apprentices how to sew using Japanese technical terms.”

A year later, YM Fashion bought out Clair Moda in order to set up YM Fashion International Thailand. That was also when they invited a young Thai woman, Ichaya Khamala, to come on board as co-owner and CEO. Under Thai business law, a foreign company must have a Thai partner who maintains a significant share in the company. While majoring in Business Studies with a minor in Japanese at Thammasat University, Ichaya had worked as a part-time interpreter for Mariko in the previous year. 22-year-old Ichaya had limited work experience and no experience whatsoever in running a company. Mariko recalls that it was unheard of for a Japanese company to partner with a fresh university graduate, and a woman to boot. However, she had no hesitation:

Mariko: “What she had instead of experience was language proficiencies in Thai, Japanese and English and a passion for business success in her country on the verge of an economic boom. She had so much passion and desire to learn and grow with us.”

As their collaboration began, Mariko taught Ichaya everything she knew about production and business management, and for all these years, Japanese has remained the language of their transnational partnership. From the beginning, Mariko not only instructed Ichaya how to do business, but also helped her improve her spoken and written Japanese.

At the same time, all the YM Fashion employees who have been transferred from Japan to Thailand to oversee the production are required to undertake a three-month intensive course in Thai immediately upon their arrival. As Mariko explains: “How can Japanese managers win the heart of their Thai workers if they can’t speak Thai?”

Global Expansion and Family

The day before the Forum: Sei and Mariko Watanabe select outfits for Ingrid’s keynote speech at Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

On her trip to Bangkok this time, Mariko was accompanied by her daughter, Sei Watanabe. Together with her younger brother Kari, Sei established YM Fashion UK in 1997 and managed the operation until her return to Japan in 2012. The siblings will take over YM Fashion in Japan in the near future as Mariko and Isamu ready themselves for retirement. As the mother of a young girl herself, Ingrid asked Mariko how she had managed to raise her children while building a successful fashion company and expanding overseas.

Mariko explained that she always took her children along on her business trips, letting them directly experience culture and language of other countries so that they would develop a deep appreciation for diversity. It was also important for Mariko and Isamu to raise their children multilingually:

Mariko: “After the war, we wanted to study English, but English education in Japan was really inadequate at that time. Early on in our overseas ventures, we did everything we could to succeed without English, but we always thought that our children must learn English AND other important languages to thrive even more in the 21^st century.”

Starting with English as a second language, their children went on to also learn French and Thai. While making sure their children learnt English is unsurprising, the insistence on French and Thai, too, is unusual. Mariko argues that French is the language of global fashion and continues to be important in international business negotiations and Thai is the language of their close partner and first overseas expansion.

Not only did Mariko work to instil an appreciation of cultural and linguistic diversity in her own children but she’s also committed to ensure that the children of production workers have similar opportunities. The nursery school that is located within the Thai production site, was established to cater for the young children of workers. The nursery teaches not only Thai but also English and the library provides children’s books in different languages.

Over her long career Mariko has remained a passionate internationalist: “We live in Japan, we live in Asia and we live in the world. Our perspective is global.” She never let herself be held back by the limited opportunities available to women of her generation: where she lacked language resources, she responded with flexibility by drawing on Japanese, her passion for fashion, her commitment to capacity building in Thailand and the common humanity that binds us all.

Carrying on the legacy of the pioneering founders, the next generation of YM Fashion – Sei, Kari and Ichaya – are equipped not only with many more language resources, but also an appreciation of linguistic and cultural diversity characteristic of the 21^st century business world in which they operate.

____

MARIKO WATANABE | Founder and CEO of YM Fashion Co., Ltd, Japan

Mariko Watanabe

Mariko was born in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1938. Having studied at the Kuwasawa Design Institute in 1957, Mariko worked as a freelance buyer, importing second-hand clothes to Japan, and later opened a vintage European clothes shop in Keio Limone Harajuku in 1975.

Mariko launched a new women’s brand, Yaccomaricard, with Yasuko Hayata and Isamu Watanabe in 1977 and established YM Fashion Co., Ltd. in 1979.

Having celebrated its 35^th anniversary in 2012, YM Fashion today has 24 direct shops and 120 wholesale shops in Japan, 11 direct shops in the UK and Thailand, and 42 wholesale shops in Europe and the US.

 

Polish refugee section of the Catholic cemetery in Tehran

When Kimie Takahashi and myself interviewed participants for Japanese on the Move, our video exhibition of transnational life-stories, one of our interviewees, artist Mayu Kanamori, asked to conduct the interview in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery, where she wanted to show us the final resting place of the first known Japanese settler in Australia. Mayu raised a number of questions about the spiritual belonging of transnationals and about ‘death on the move.’ I was reminded of that conversation with Mayu during my visit to Tehran’s Christian Doulab Cemetery.

Death far from home

The Polish section occupies about three quarters of the Catholic cemetery and constitutes the final resting place of almost 2,000 men, women and children who died in Tehran between 1942-1945.

The story of the Poles lying in Iranian soil is one of the less well-known tragedies of World War II. As part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact what was then Eastern Poland (and is today part of Belarus and Ukraine) was annexed by the Soviets in 1939. Around 1.5 million Poles were deported from the area to camps in Siberia. The vast majority of these died in the following months under horrific circumstances. Only around 250,000 of the deported Poles are known to have survived in Siberia. The survivors were released in 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union so that they could join in the war effort against the Nazis. However, many of these survivors chose to flee instead and around 115,000 managed to reach Allied-occupied Iran.

Two of the headstones in the Polish refugee section

Making it to Iran was like reaching the Promised Land for the evacuees, as one of them recalls in her memoirs:

Exhausted by hard labor, disease and starvation – barely recognizable as human beings – we disembarked at the port of Pahlavi [present-day Bandar-e Anzali]. There, we knelt down together in our thousands along the sandy shoreline to kiss the soil of Persia. We had escaped Siberia and were free at last. We had reached our longed-for Promised Land. (quoted from Ryszard Antolak, “Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942.” ParsTimes)

For a few years, the Polish community flourished in Tehran:

Something more than food and clothing are necessary for the human spirit to survive and grow. Art and Culture are antibodies to feelings of despondency and decay, and within a few months of their arrival, the exiles had set up their own theatres, art galleries, study circles, and radio stations all over the city. Artists and craftsmen began to give exhibitions. Polish newspapers began to spring up; and restaurants began to display Polish flags on the streets.

Among the organizations formed to care for the educational and cultural needs of the exiles was the influential Institute of Iranian Studies begun by a small group of Polish academicians. In three years from 1943 to 1945 this group published three scholarly volumes and scores of other articles on Polish-Iranian affairs. (Ryszard Antolak, “Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942.” ParsTimes)

Memorial stone at the center of the Polish refugee section: French-Persian plaque (the Polish version is on the other side of the monument)

However, death was ever-present in this group of weakened survivors, as the Catholic cemetery in Doulab vividly demonstrates. Each of the small 1,869 refugee graves (see here for a map of the cemetery) has an identical headstone inscribed with a number, the Polish abbreviation ‘S.P.’ (‘swietej pamieci,’ ‘in memory of’), a name, the year of birth and the year of death, and the Latin abbreviation ‘R.I.P.’ (‘requiescat in pace,’ ‘may s/he rest in peace’).

In the center of the Polish refugee section are two memorial stones, one with a trilingual inscription in Polish, French and Persian and the other bilingual in Polish and English. The trilingual one is roughly similar in the three languages and the Polish version reads as follows:

PAMIECI /WYGNANCOW/POLSKICH /KTORZY /W DRODZE DO OJCZYZNY /W BOGU SPOCZELI /NA WIEKI. 1942-1944

To the memory of the Polish exiles who, on their return journey to their homeland, found the peace of God, 1942-1944 (my translation from the French and Persian inscriptions)

The English version of the bilingual memorial stone, which looks more recent than the trilingual one, is similar in content but provides more detail and reads as follows:

IN COMMEMORATION /OF THOUSANDS /OF POLES THE SOLDIERS /OF THE POLISH ARMY /IN THE EAST /OF GENERAL /WLADYSLAW ANDERS /AND CIVILIANS /THE FORMER /PRISONERS OF WAR /AND CAPTIVES /OF THE SOVIET CAMPS /WHO DIED IN 1942 /ON THE WAY /TO THEIR HOMELAND /PEACE TO THEIR MEMORY

As it so happens, the inscriptions on both these monuments are historically incorrect: the Polish refugees were not on their way “to their homeland” because – also in Tehran in 1943 but worlds away from the refugees – Churchill and Roosevelt conceded what had been Eastern Poland to Stalin’s USSR and the remainder of Poland to the Soviet sphere of influence.

Death in a new home

One of the tombstones of the Poles who settled in Tehran. The mixed name shows that Yanina Kaganowska married into a Persian family

For the majority of the survivors, their stay in Iran was temporary and they later resettled in the UK, the Americas, Africa and Australasia. However, some also chose to stay and to rebuild their shattered lives in Iran as is evidenced by the graves in the far corner of the Polish section. There, a number of larger and personalized tombstones have been erected to the memory of people born in Poland who died in Tehran as recently as 2002. Most of these commemorate women who married Iranian men as is evidenced by their Persian surnames.

I looked at these graves with mixed feelings: on the one hand, their personalized details, the fact that they were commemorating much older people than the refugee graves, and the names in which Polish and Persian have become mixed speak of lives lived fully in a new home. On the other hand, they are all single graves and the Iranian husbands and families of these women thus must lie elsewhere (maybe in Tehran’s huge Behest-e Zahra Cemetery, where the city’s Muslims find their final resting place). The fact that none of these graves are family graves – despite the fact that the women obviously had new families in Iran – speaks to the fact that faith and nation continue to divide in death those who were joined in life.

Parceling up the dead

French flag marking a little girl as French national

The divisions of faith are made concrete in the architecture of the Doulab cemetery complex, a feature that is, of course, not unique to Iran’s cemeteries. To begin with, Tehran’s dead Christians are physically separated from the city’s Muslims and Jews, who have their own cemeteries elsewhere. Second, even within the Christian complex the various denominations are divided into their own separate compounds: the Catholic cemetery is separated by large walls from the adjoining Armenian and Russian cemeteries (the so-called ‘Russian’ cemetery seems to house all non-Armenian and/or non-Iranian Orthodox Christians).

Divisions of nation of origin also continue to persist within the Catholic cemetery. Although widely known as ‘Polish cemetery’ because such a large number of Poles are lying there, the cemetery was started in 1855 with a mausoleum for Dr. Louis André Ernest Cloquet, a Frenchman who died prematurely while serving as personal physician to the Shah. The memorial to this Catholic was placed close to – but outside of – the Armenian cemetery. Since then Catholics from most European countries have also found their final resting place there and the cemetery’s sections are more or less clearly divided into national sections.

The banal nationalism of death is most obvious in the cases of the French and Italian dead who lie in Doulab: their embassies have taken the trouble of placing little metal French or Italian flags at the foot of each French or Italian grave.

This tombstone could be located anywhere in Germany. There is nothing in the inscription that suggests that Franz Sänger actually lies in Tehran

While such flags are absent from the graves of other nationals lying in Doulab, the language of the tombstones is in most cases the language of the country of birth. None of the German graves I visited, for instance, shows any sign that the person lying there must have lived a transnational life and must, to a smaller or larger degree, have been part of the fabric not only of German but also Iranian society during their lives. The inscriptions on the tombstones bear no traces of a life partly lived in Iran: for all that the inscriptions suggest, the graves might have been located in Germany.

How could a tombstone inscription suggest a transnational life? At the Doulab cemetery, I saw two options: a multilingual inscription or a lingua franca inscription.

A multilingual inscription is exemplified by the Polish, French and Persian trilingual memorial discussed above. On individual tombstones in the Catholic section multilingual inscriptions are rare and, unless I overlooked something, absent from the graves of Europeans. The few that I noticed are bilingual in various combinations of Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, French, Persian and Russian. In some cases, it was impossible to identify the languages other than to say that the inscriptions were both in the Latin and Arabic scripts.

A bilingual tombstone in French and Assyrian is suggestive of the complex life that Paul Sarmas must have led

While monolingual tombstones predominate in the Catholic section, over in the Orthodox section the situation is different and tombstones inscribed in multiple languages and scripts – Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Georgian, Greek, Latin and Russian – are more frequent there.

As regards lingua franca inscriptions, I consider an inscription as lingua franca if the tombstone is inscribed in a language other than a/the language of the country of origin of the deceased or a language of Iran (in practice, in this case, that means Armenian, Assyrian and Persian). The most frequent lingua franca by far is French and one final surprise was the absence of English in this international space: other than in the Polish-English bilingual memorial mentioned above, there was only one single tombstone inscribed in English:

ANNA MARIA VAN /DEN BRINK-LECKE /BORN HOLLAND 19.10.1914 /DIED TEHERAN 13.9.1970 /MAY GOD REJOICE HER SOUL

The nationality of the deceased is listed as German in the cemetery’s registry, a country where she was neither born nor died, further illustrating the complexity of transnational life and death.

Where the spirit rests

Keeping the dead within the boundaries imagined by the living: the gate to the walled-in Catholic section of the Doulab Cemetery Complex

Dying away from ‘home’ is often invested with special sadness. According to an overview of Polish cemeteries in Iran, a number of the commemorative plaques in other Polish burial sites in Iran stress the fact that these people died “on foreign soil.” There is indeed a deep sense of sadness and loss emanating from the refugee graves. However, that is because of the evil that cut short the lives of the people who lie there and that made the circumstances of their final years so horrific.

By contrast, the graves of those Poles who had decided to stay on in Tehran after the war and to rebuild their lives there and those of the other foreign-born lying there did not move me in this way. What is striking about those is the desire of the living to inscribe the boundaries of faith, nation and language even on those who obviously led lives that transcended those very boundaries.

Constructing language learning as global choice on melale.ir

Persian version of Vahid Parvaresh, “Supermarket Language Learning”; translated by Behnam Keimasi (بهنام کیماسی)

در ایران، همانند بسیار دیگری از کشورها، دولت به صورت مرسوم نقش پررنگی در عرصه یادگیری زبان دوم ایفا نموده است و امتیاز انحصاری سیاست گذاری های رسمی را در دست دارد. در این زمینه، یک سیاست رسمی کلی که وزارت آموزش و پرورش آن را تدوین و تنظیم نموده است، معرفی زبان انگلیسی (و عربی) به دانش آموزان پس از رسیدن به سن 11 سالگی می باشد. هر چند این سیاست، آن گونه که از این مصاحبه کوتاه اما آشکار کننده با معاون وزیر آموزش و پرورش بر می آید، هم اکنون در حال بازنگری می باشد. طبق گفته های معاون وزیر، سیاست جدید به مدارس دولتی اجازه می دهد تا زبان های خارجی (نه تنها انگلیسی و عربی، بلکه فرانسوی و آلمانی) را در قالب “بسته های سوپرمارکتی” گوناگون به دانش آموزان پیشنهاد دهند تا آنها بتوانند هر زبانی را که بیشتر دوست دارند انتخاب نمایند. علاوه بر این، سیاست جدید به دانش آموزان این اجازه را می دهد تا بسیار زودتر از 11 یا 12 سالگی به “انتخاب زبانی که دوست دارند” بپردازند. این حقیقت که وزارت آموزش و پرورش ایران تصمیم گرفته است تا از سیاست زبان خارجی سفت وسخت خود در راستای اجرای یک سیاست انعطاف پذیر تر دست بکشد، قابل توجه است.

اما چه چیزی می تواند موجب این تغییر باشد؟ یا به عبارتی دیگر، چه اتفاقی افتاده است که وزارت آموزش و پرورش را بر آن داشته است تا سیاستِ زبانِ خارجی خود که همواره تنها شامل زبان های انگلیسی و عربی بوده است را بازنگری کند؟ مصاحبه پاسخی قطعی ارائه نمی کند اما نگاهی موشکافانه تر به سیاست های اجرا شده در مدارس غیر دولتی در فهم موضوع به ما کمک می کند.

در ایران نابردباریِ مرسوم در خصوص تنوع زبانی – همین حقیقت که آموزش زبان های خارجی محدود به زبان های انگلیسی و عربی شده است – با سیاست های زبانی که بخش خصوصی اعمال می کند، همخوانی ندارد. مدارسی که به بخش خصوصی تعلق دارند، خیلی وقت است که به آموزش زبان های فرانسوی، آلمانی و انگلیسی به کودکان، اغلب از سن 5 سالگی، پرداخته اند. نتیجه این آموزش، بازاری رقابتی نه تنها برای زبان انگلیسی که برای زبان های فرانسوی و آلمانی بوده که با نابردباریِ مرتبط با تنوع زبانی در تضاد است. بدین گونه بخش آموزش خصوصی شکل های جدیدی از کالای زبانی را پدید می آورد؛ حقیقتی که مسائل پیچیده ای را در رابطه با تغییر تعادلِ میانِ سیاست های زبانی دولتی و خصوصی به وجود می آورد.

علاوه بر این، اینترنت فضای بزرگ و تقریبا غیرقابل کنترلی را برای مدارس خصوصی جهت استفاده از بسته های آموزشی زبان فراهم می آورد.  ملل یکی از چنین وب سایت هایی است که متعلق به یک مدرسه خصوصی با نام ملل می باشد. هدف ادعایی مدرسه تشویق دوزبانگی از طریق روش موضوع محور می باشد. مجموعه آموزشی ملل آموزش زبان های انگلیسی و فرانسوی را فراهم آورده است. در این محیط، شکل های کاملا انعطاف پذیرِ آموزش زبان ارائه می شود تا پاسخگوی نیازهای گوناگون مشتریان باشد. به عنوان مثال، در این مجموعه یادگیری زبان فرانسوی (در ایران!) طبق سیاست های وضع شده توسط اتحادیه اروپا ممکن است. بنابراین بسته های آموزشی زبان در شکل ها و اندازه های گوناگون ارائه می شوند آن چنان که گویی وارد یک سوپرمارکت بسیار بزرگ زبانی شده اید.

به طور کلی، این که دولت تصمیم گرفته تا سیاست های مرتبط با زبان خارجی سابق خود را اصلاح کند به نظر پاسخی به تغییرات ایجاد شده در روش هایی است که از طریق آن هم دانش آموزان و هم والدین در جریانِ گفتمانِ آموزشِ زبانِ بخشِ خصوصی قرار گرفته اند؛ جایی که آنها به مصرف کننده تبدیل شده اند. بسته های سوپرمارکتی نه تنها در بخش خصوصی که هم اکنون در بخش آموزش عمومی نیز به این مصرف کنندگان پیشنهاد می شود. در این روند، سیاست گذاری مربوط به زبان های خارجیِ مرسوم و ریشه دار نیز همسویِ “انتظاراتِ جهانی” می شود.

برچسب ها: زبان عربی، مصرف، زبان انگلیسی به عنوان زبان جهانی، زبان فرانسوی، جهانی شدن، ایران، آموزش زبان، سیاست زبانی.

Constructing language learning as global choice on melale.ir

In Iran, as in many other countries, the state has traditionally been a very powerful actor in the field of second language learning and has the monopoly of formal policy making. In this context, a general official policy formulated by the Ministry of Education has been to introduce English (and Arabic) to students no sooner than when they are 11 years old. However, this policy is currently under review as revealed in this short but illuminating interview with Iran’s Vice Minister for Education. According to the vice minister, the new policy allows state-run schools to offer foreign languages (not only English and Arabic but also French and German) in various “supermarket packages” so that students can “choose” whatever language they like more. Further to this, the new policy allows students to “choose the language they like” much earlier than when they are 11 or 12 years old. The fact that the Iranian Ministry of Education has finally decided to abandon its sacrosanct foreign language policy in favour of a more flexible policy is significant.

What could be the cause of this radical shift? Or to put it differently, what has happened that has finally convinced the Ministry of Education to modify its foreign language policies which had always been aimed at English and Arabic only? The interview does not reveal a definitive answer but a close look at language policies implemented by private, non-state-run schools provides a clue.

In Iran the traditional intolerance of the state of linguistic variation – the very fact that the teaching of foreign languages is geared toward English and Arabic – is not matched by the politics of language that operate in the globalized, private sector. Schools that belong to the private sector have long taught French, German and English as foreign languages, often aimed at children as young as 5. The outcome of this has been a competitive market not just of English but also of French and German which defies the state’s traditional intolerance of linguistic diversity. The private education sector thus creates new forms of linguistic commodification; a fact that raises quite complex issues related to the shifting balance between state and private language policies.

What is more, the Internet provides these private schools with a wide and virtually uncontrolled space for language learning packages. Melale.ir is one such website that belongs to a private school named melal (“nations”). The purported aim of the school is to encourage bilingualism through content learning and the target audiences are elementary and secondary students. Melal provides instruction in English and French, among others.

In this environment, highly flexible forms of language learning are offered to cater to diverse customer needs. For example, it is possible to learn French (in Iran!) according to the policies set by the European Union. Language learning packages thus come in all shapes and sizes as if you have entered a giant linguistic supermarket.

Overall, that the state has decided to modify its former foreign language policies seems to be a response to the changes in the ways that both students and parents are positioned in private sector discourses of language learning. There, they have been turned into language-learners-as-consumers. These consumers are offered supermarket packages of foreign languages, now not only in the private sector but also in public education. In the process, a traditional, deep-rooted foreign language policy becomes transformed in line with “globalized expectations.”

Herzberg am Harz, the Esperanto City (Source: Der Spiegel)

The rural Bavarian high school I attended in the late 70s and early 80s had two international exchanges going, one with a school in Britain and another one with a school in France. The two exchanges differed in many ways. To begin with, the British exchange was much more popular than the French one. Almost everyone wanted to go on the exchange program with the British school because English was compulsory for everyone from the first year of high school and everyone thought, then as now, that English was useful, cool, etc. By contrast, French started only two years later and there was a choice between French and Latin. So, fewer students were eligible to go on the French exchange and those who went were much more committed to French.

I went on the exchange with the British school when I was 11 years old. Together with a friend, I stayed with a local family for a few weeks, went to the school but into a separate language program, along with everyone else from my school, and had an afternoon and weekend program with activities and sightseeing. My home-stay family was nice but I found the food so horrible that I felt hungry for most of the time I spent in Britain. Having kids on language exchange provided a supplementary income to my host family and so having kids from continental Europe was quite normal to them and they actually put me in touch with a student from Spain, who had stayed with them a few weeks before me, and with whom I established a pen-pal relationship for a couple years. Back home, I wrote a few letters to my British host family and sent them Christmas cards for a few years but they never responded and we soon lost contact.

We didn’t really establish much contact with any of the British kids and they never reciprocated the annual visits that our school paid them.

My friends’ experiences on the British exchange were similar to mine. However, the French exchange (on which I never went because I chose Latin as 2^nd foreign language and started French only quite late as 3^rd foreign language) was different. Students also stayed with host families but attended real classes in addition to dedicated French lessons. Furthermore, it was not only the German kids who went visiting but students from the French partner school regularly came to visit our school as well.

My sister’s French ‘exchange sister’, for instance, came to spend time with our family a few times as a teenager, too, and they are in contact to this very day, having established a lasting relationship that started with a school exchange.

The general point of all this is that different languages enable quantitatively and qualitatively different relationships. English in this case resulted in many but relatively weak relationships while French resulted in fewer but more reciprocal, multi-faceted and stronger relationships.

Indeed, looking at it from the perspective of the English speakers it would seem that they are just so swamped with everyone wanting to learn their language that it’s hard to develop any real interest in English language learners. My daughter’s elementary school here in Sydney has an exchange relationship with a school in South Korea similar to the one my German school had with Britain. Each year, 3-5 Korean students show up for a term and everyone is really nice and welcoming and inclusive, as far as I can see, but no one would even dream of reciprocating their language learning, their culture learning, their visits, or simply show any interest in anything Korean.

So what does all that have to do with Esperanto?

Today 125 years ago, on July 26, 1887, Dr L.L. Zamenhof published the first textbook, Unua Libro, for the international auxiliary language he had invented. While Esperanto is no doubt the most successful international language ever constructed, most people look at it as a slightly crazy idea and if asked to assess its usefulness as an international language few people would consider it very useful. Indeed, in the 2012 Eurobarometer Report ‘Europeans and their Languages’ (about which I wrote last week) 67% of Europeans considered English the most useful language and no one even asked them about Esperanto.

However, the idea that English is highly useful as an international language and Esperanto is for the lunatic fringe only holds if you look at it in the abstract. It’s obvious that theoretically English will enable a learner to speak too many more people and do more things and establish more relationships. However, locally it may be a different story, as it is in the central German town Herzberg am Harz. Herzberg is officially bilingual in German and Esperanto and calls itself la Esperanto-urbo (the Esperanto city).

All schools in Herzberg am Harz teach Esperanto, public signage and much service is bilingual, and the town specializes in Esperanto-related tourism ranging from language classes, holiday camps to hosting Esperanto-related conferences. And many tourists simply enjoy visiting Herzberg to practice their Esperanto. The town is partnered with Góra in Poland and the two places have established a strong partnership which they conduct in Esperanto.

In sum, tiny provincial Herzberg has established a national and international profile for itself through its commitment to Esperanto (read an interesting article about Esperanto in Herzberg in the magazine Der Spiegel; in German).

The power of smaller languages

Esperanto works well for the people of Herzberg and Góra because of the high level of commitment to the language exhibited by its speakers. It may be the language of a very small group of people but these people are highly committed not only to their language but also to internationalism. And that’s exactly what makes Esperanto more powerful for its speakers than English: where English speakers are indifferent, Esperanto speakers want to establish strong, multi-faceted and reciprocal international relationships.

My introductory example proves the same point: despite the fact that 56% of Germans speak English but only 14% speak French (and 39% of French speak English but only 6% speak German), the French-German relationship is usually seen as at the heart of the European Union and the European idea and it is certainly as strong as the quantitatively much more impressive relationships of France and Germany with Britain and the USA.

Mehrsprachige Buecher – multilingual books – ketabhaye chand zabane

The release of the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011 Census of Population data is an invitation to reflect on the composition of society, as the figures make official the realities we have been living since the previous census in 2006. The 2011 census, released in June 2012, reveals that Australia is a strong target of migration, as almost 6 million migrants born in over 200 countries live now in the country. Moreover, Australia has one of the highest proportions of overseas-born residents (27%), third highest behind Singapore (41.5%) and Hong Kong (39%). While migrants from English speaking countries (e.g., UK, New Zealand) are still the largest group of overseas born residents, 19% of the population over 5 years of age speaks languages other than English at home. The Census also shows a shift in the composition of migrants and refugees, with a dramatic increase in African, Middle Eastern and Indian new arrivals.

One of the results of the migration program is the large number of young children for whom English is a second language. While mastery of the English language by migrant children is undoubtedly a crucial aim, it is still to be noted that languages other than English are neglected in the Australian education system. This impacts on second and third generation migrants, as can be seen from high percentages of language attrition rates revealed by the Census (see also Clyne, 2001,  Lo Bianco, 2003).

The lack of institutional support is particularly noteworthy in the area of literacy skills in minority languages. There are very few opportunities, other than classes offered by Community Language Schools in a limited number of languages, for parents wishing to raise their children bilingually, to ensure that their children become literate in their native language(s), or to maintain literacy in the home language if the process of literacy development has been interrupted by migration.

There is ample research that shows that writing is the most fragile skill in linguistic minority situations, as it is not needed in daily life and needs constant use or practice for its maintenance (Clyne et al., 1997,  Oriyama, 2011). Over time, the lack of institutional support results in what has been termed “kitchen” languages, impoverished varieties of community languages that serve mostly oral communication needs around restricted topics. This situation entails a loss of potential economic opportunities for the country as few people develop the advanced language skills required to operate successfully in the international arena. Moreover, insufficient support for home languages deprives children of the recognised educational, social and affective advantages associated with biliteracy (see Bialystok, 2001 for a thorough overview), and can hinder intergenerational cohesion within families and communities.

Paradoxically, given Australia’s dependence on international trade[1] and its often repeated desire to be accepted as part of the Asian Pacific group of nations (e.g., Keating, 2000), the call is made periodically to enhance the role of languages in the curriculum and improve their teaching. However, when it comes to public debate and educational language policy and planning for languages other than English, there is no clear and consistent conceptualisation of how these languages are viewed.

In a classic article, Ruiz (1984) discusses three main policy orientations to language: language as a right, language as a problem, and language as a resource. Although Ruiz was reflecting on the US and Canada, this distinction is pertinent to the Australian context and provides a useful framework for analysis. In Australia, not all language groups have the opportunity to be included in the school curriculum.

When it comes to languages other than English, a clear distinction is made between modern foreign languages, indigenous languages, and migrant/community languages (Lo Bianco, 2003). Only a few “foreign” languages are seen as resources and thus, when it comes to justify the selection of particular languages in the education system, justifications are worded either in relation to the high cultural achievements of the target cultures (e.g., French and German) or to economic and geopolitical national imperatives (e.g., Chinese and Japanese). Most of the languages spoken in Australia however are not seen in this light. Except for the few languages that at different times attracted strong financial support from foreign governments or institutions (e.g., Korean and Italian), ‘migrant/community’ languages are seen as a problem, hindering assimilation into the dominant culture and potentially polarising society. Lo Bianco poignantly summarises the situation noting that in Australia, languages spoken ‘in other countries’ and divorced from daily life are seen as valuable skills. In contrast,

when the languages are less foreign, when emotional attachment and mastery may be high, their study, public use, and maintenance ‘threaten civilisation’. No longer a skill but sedition. (2000: 99).

And Cummins (2005: 586), in a statement that could perfectly apply to Australia, characterises the current situation as a

bizarre scenario of schools successfully transforming fluent speakers of foreign languages into monolingual English speakers, at the same time as they struggle, largely unsuccessfully, to transform English monolingual students into foreign language speakers.

Granted, the great diversity of population, and the variety of languages spoken in Australia, as identified in the 2011 Census, make it difficult to address the educational needs of this culturally and linguistically diverse sector of the population. Ideological and practical considerations further complicate the issue as assimilationist policy orientations call into question the value of diverting resources from the mainstream education system into community languages. Even when the political willingness exists, there are obvious limitations in terms of materials, curricula and teaching expertise in such a varied range of languages. This is a challenge that most plurilingual societies would no doubt face.

In order to explore strategies to develop and promote literacy and discuss the cost of illiteracy in home Languages we are organising a workshop titled ‘Multilingualism and Literacy’ to be held at the 19^th International Congress of Linguists in Geneva, 21-27 July 2013. The workshop description and call for papers – still open until 15 August 2012 – are available here.

The organizers, Susana Eisenchlas, Diana Guillemin and Andrea Schalley, hope that the workshop will generate a much needed debate.

Note

This post was co-authored by Susana Eisenchlas, Diana Guillemin and Andrea Schalley.

References

Bialystok, E. 2001. Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clyne, M., Fernandez, S., Chen, I.M., and Summo-O’Connell, R. 1997. Background Speakers: Diversity and its Management in LOTE Programs. ACT: Language Australia.

Clyne, M. 2001. Can the shift from immigrant languages be reversed in Australia? In Can Threatened Languages be Saved? Reversing Language Shift Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective, ed. J. A. Fishman, 364-391. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.

Cummins, J. 2005. A Proposal for Action: Strategies for Recognizing Heritage Language Competence as a Learning Resource within the Mainstream Classroom. The Modern Language Journal 89:585-592.

Keating, P.J. 2000. Engagement: Australia Faces the Asia-Pacific. Sydney: Macmillan.

Lo Bianco, J. 2000. Multiliteracies and multilingualism. In Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, eds. B. Cope and M. Kalantzis, 92-105. South Yarra: Macmillan.

Lo Bianco, J. 2003. A site for debate, negotiation and contest of national identity: Language policy in Australia. In Guide for the development of language education policies in Europe: From linguistic diversity to plurilingual education. Strasbourg: Language Policy Division DG IV – Directorate of School, Out-of-School and Higher Education Council of Europe.

Oriyama, K. 2011. The effects of the sociocultural context on heritage language literacy: Japanese-English bilingual children in Sydney. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 14:653-681.

Ruiz, R. 1984. Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal 8:15-34.