This episode also contains excerpts from a Wired YouTube video by dialect coaches Erik Singer and Eliza Simpson called Accent Expert Breaks Down Language Pet Peeves.

If you liked this episode, also check out Lingthusiasm’s episode about creaky voice called “Various vocal fold vibes”, Dr. Cate Madill’s piece in The Conversation entitled Keep an eye on vocal fry – it’s all about power, and the Multicultural Australian English project that Dr. White references (Multicultural Australian English: The New Voice of Sydney).

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

Transcript (added 19/12/2024)

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

Hannah is a postdoc researcher at Macquarie University in the Department of Linguistics. She completed her doctoral research last year in 2023 with a thesis entitled Creaky Voice in Australian English. Today we’re going to be discussing this research along with a 2023 paper that she co-authored entitled Convergence of Creaky Voice Use in Australian English.

This paper is also Chapter 5 of her thesis. The paper and the entirety of Hannah’s thesis examines the use of creaky voice or vocal fry in speech. Hannah, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

I’m so excited to talk to you.

Dr White: Thank you so much for having me. I’m also excited.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what made you decide to pursue a PhD in Linguistics?

Dr White: You might be able to tell from my accent that I am a Kiwi, a Kiwi linguist working here in Australia. I actually kind of fell into linguistics by accident. So I was doing my undergrad in French and German, and I went to Germany on exchange, and I took just on a whim, I took an undergraduate beginner English Linguistics course, and I realized this is what I want to do forever.

I fell in love immediately and came back and added a whole other major to my degree. So yeah, it was kind of by chance that I found linguistics. And in terms of doing a PhD, I just, I love research.

I love the idea of coming up with a hypothesis, designing an experiment to test it and finding like results that might kind of challenge. Ideas that you’ve like preconceptions that you have or yeah, just finding something new. So yeah, that’s kind of what drew me into doing the PhD and in linguistics.

Brynn: Did you go straight from undergrad into a PhD?

Dr White: No, I didn’t. I had a master’s step in between. So, I did that in Wellington.

Brynn: I was going to say, that is quite a leap if you did that!

Dr White: Absolutely not. I did my master’s looking at creaky voice as well. So, I looked at perceptions of creak and uptalk in New Zealand English.

Brynn: Well, let’s go ahead and start talking about that because I’m so excited to talk about creak and vocal fry and uptalk. So, your doctoral research investigated this thing called creaky voice. So, whether we realize it or not, we’ve all heard creaky voice, or as I said, is it sometimes called vocal fry.

So, tell us, what exactly is creaky voice? Why do people study it? And why did you decide to study it?

Dr White: Okay, so creaky voice is a very common kind of voice quality. Technically, if we want to get a little bit phonetics, it’s generally produced with quite a constricted glottis and vocal folds that are slack and compressed. They vibrate slowly and irregularly.

And this results in a very low-pitched, rough or pulse-like sound. You can think of it, often it’s described as kind of sounding like popcorn, like popping corn or a stick being dragged along a railing. They’re quite common analogies for the sound of creaky voice.

Why do people study it? I think that it’s something that people think that they know a lot about. And it’s talked about a lot.

But it’s actually kind of, there has been research on creak for a very long time, since the 60s. It’s gaining popularity at the moment. So, I think it’s a relatively new area of research that’s gaining a lot of popularity right now.

This could be to do with the fact that there’s a lot of media coverage around creaky voice or vocal fry.

Brynn: Because we should say that the probably most common example that we’ve all heard is Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, saying things like, that’s hot, like that, that like, uh, sound voice, yeah.

Dr White: The Valley Girl.

Brynn: Valley Girl, yes.

Dr White: My go-to examples, Britney Spears as well.

Brynn: Oh, absolutely.

Dr White: Yeah. So, a lot of this media coverage, it’s associated with women, right? But it’s also super negative.

So often it’s associated even in linguistic studies, perception studies, it’s associated with vapidness, uneducated, like stuck up, vain sort of persona. So, I think it’s really interesting to kind of, that’s what drew me into study, wanting to study it. I do it all the time.

I’m a real chronic creaker and I love the sound of it personally. So, I kind of just wanted to work out why people hate it so much and see if I can challenge that view of creak.

Brynn: Yeah, and it is true that we tend to associate it with, as you said, with vapidness. Do we have any idea of where that perception came from? Or was it just because it’s more these people that are in the limelight, younger women, the Kim Kardashians of the world, is it because we associate them with being vapid and that’s their type of speech, or do we know where that came from?

Dr White: I don’t know if there’s any research that’s kind of looked at where that association came from originally, but I would say, like just from my own perception, it probably is that association with these celebrities.

Brynn: And these celebrities that we are talking about are generally American, right? But in your thesis, you discuss creaky voice use in multicultural Sydney, Australia. And you write about how social meanings are expressed through the use of creaky voice.

So, can you tell us about that? Where you’re seeing creak come up in Australia? Maybe why you’re seeing it come up and what you saw during your research?

Dr White: I mean, creaky voice is used by everyone. It’s a really common feature. It’s used across the world in different languages.

It can even be used to change the meaning of words in some languages. So, it’s got this kind of phonemic use.

Brynn: Let’s hear what dialect coach Eric Singer has to say about creak changing meanings in other languages. This is from a video posted to YouTube from Wired and it’s called Accent Expert Breaks Down Language Pet Peeves. And we’ll hear more from Eric later in this episode.

Singer: So creaky voice actually has a linguistic function in some languages. In Danish, for example, the word un without any creak in your voice means she, but the word un means dog. So, you have to actually put that creak in and you can change the meaning of a word.

In Burmese, ka means shake and ka means attend on. You have to add creaky voice and it means something totally different. Otherwise, the syllable is exactly the same.

The Mexican language, Xalapa Mazatec, actually has a three-way contrast between modal voice, creaky voice and breathy voice. So, we can take the same syllable, ya, which with that tone means tree. But if I do it with breathy voice, ya, it means it carries.

And if I do it with creaky voice, ya, it means he wears. Same syllable.

Dr White: So, it’s not just this thing that is used by these celebrities in California. So, we know that it’s used by people in Australia, but no one’s really looked at it before. So, there are very, very few studies in Australian English on creaky voice.

So that’s kind of where I started from. The data we used in my thesis was from the Multicultural Australian English Project. So that was led by Professor Felicity Cox at Macquarie University.

And the data was collected from different schools and different areas of Sydney that are kind of highly populated by different kind of ethnic groups. So, we collected data that was conversational speech between these teenagers. And I looked at the creak.

So, we’ve been looking at lots and lots of different linguistic, phonetic aspects of the speech. But I specifically looked at the creak between these teenagers. And I think the really interesting thing that I found was that overall, the creak levels were really quite similar between the boys and the girls.

It wasn’t, I didn’t find an exceptional mass of creak in the girls’ speech compared to the boys.

Brynn: Which is fascinating, because we, honestly, until I started looking into this for this episode, or talking to you, I just assumed that women, girls would have more creak in their voice than men. And then I was reading your data and reading the paper, and I was blown away to find out, wait a minute, no, there’s actually not that much difference in the prevalence of it. So, what’s going on there?

Why do we assume that it’s girls and women?

Dr White: There’s a lot of research in this specific area at the moment. Part of my thesis, I actually did a perception study about, so looking at how people perceive creak in different voices. So, it was a creak identification task, and they heard creak in low-pitched male and female voices, and high-pitched male and female voices.

And it could be something to do with the low pitch of male speech, generally. Post-creak is such a low-pitched feature. It might be that it’s less noticeable in a male voice because it’s already at this baseline low, so there’s less of a contrast when the speaker goes into creak.

Whereas if you’ve got a female speaker with a relatively high-pitched voice, you might notice it a lot more when they go down into the low-pitched creak. So that could be something that’s influencing this perception of creak as a female feature.

Brynn: Let’s give our audience an example of that now. This is from a YouTube video posted by Wired and dialect coach Eric Singer, as well as fellow dialect coach Eliza Simpson. We’ll link to this in the show notes.

Singer: One thing it’s hard not to notice is that most of the time when people are complaining about vocal fry and uptalk, they’re complaining about women’s voices, and especially young women. And it’s not just women who do this. Let’s try our own experiment, shall we?

Let’s take one sentence, the first sentence from the Gettysburg Address. I’m going to do it with some creak in my voice. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Eliza, would you do the same?

Simpson: Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Singer: What did you think? Do you have different associations when you hear it from a male voice? Four score and seven years ago, than when you hear it from a female voice?

Simpson: Four score and seven years ago.

Brynn: We hear this creak in men’s voices, and we hear it in women’s voices. You mentioned that you were looking at multilingual Sydney. What did you discover about creak in multilingual populations?

Dr White: Yeah, so we, it was more, so the speakers that we were working with are all first language Australian English speakers. A lot of them had different kind of heritage languages, so either their parents spoke other languages at home, or they spoke other languages at home in addition to English. My research was more focused on the areas that the speakers lived in, so rather than their language backgrounds.

I think the most interesting thing we found was that the girls, so I said that there weren’t that many differences between gender, but the girls in Cabramatta or Fairfield area, so this is a largely Vietnamese background population, they actually crept significantly less than the boys in that area. So that was kind of an interesting finding.

And when we, like obviously we want to work out why that might be, so we had a look into the conversations of those girls, and we found that they were talking a lot about kind of cultural identity and cultural pride, and pride in the area as well.

So, talking about how they’re really proud of like how Asian the area is. And that they don’t want it to be whitewashed. So, we wondered whether for those girls, creak might be associated with some kind of white woman identity, and they were distancing themselves from that by not using as much creaky voice.

Brynn: Fascinating! Did you find out anything to do with the boys and why they, this more Vietnamese heritage language population, why they did use creak?

Did it have anything to do with ethnicity or cultural heritage or not? Or we don’t know yet?

Dr White: We don’t know yet. That’s something that needs to be looked into, but I did notice that they didn’t talk about the area in the same way. So it could be, yeah, it could just be the conversation didn’t come up, the topic didn’t come up, but it could also be like that relation to the area and their cultural identity is particularly linked to creaky voice for those girls.

Brynn: That’s absolutely fascinating. Did you find the opposite anywhere? Did you find that certain places had the girls creaking more than the boys?

Dr White: We did find that in Bankstown and in Parramatta, but we don’t know exactly why that is yet.

Brynn: It feels like there’s so much to do potentially with culture and the way that people want to be perceived, the way that they want to be seen. And I guess that could happen with choosing to adopt more creak or choosing not to adopt more creak.

Dr White: Yeah absolutely. It’s like a feature that’s available to them to express their identity for sure.

Brynn: And that brings us to something that you discuss in the 2023 paper that you co-authored called Communication Accommodation Theory and its relation to creaky voice. So, tell us what Communication Accommodation Theory is and how you and your co-authors saw it show up with creaky voice in this study about Australian teenagers.

Dr White: Communication Accommodation Theory is basically this idea that speakers express their attitudes towards one another by either changing their speech to become more similar to each other. So, if the attitudes towards each other are positive or diverging or becoming more different from each other, if these attitudes are potentially negative. So, this has been found with a lot of phonetic features such as the pronunciation of vowels or pitch.

So, speakers are being shown to converge or diverge from each other based on their attitudes or feelings towards each other. So, we wanted to look at this with creak because we had the conversational data there. Like it wasn’t, the data wasn’t collected with this in mind, but we thought it would be really interesting.

And we did find evidence that our Australian teenagers were converging in the use of creaky voice. So, over the course of the conversation, their levels of creak were becoming more similar to each other. We also found that overall, so we didn’t find an interaction between like convergence and gender, but we did find an overall finding of gender.

So that overall girls were more similar to each other in the use of creak than boys were. So, we think this might be some sort of social motivation based on research that’s shown that girls prefer to have a preference for fellow girls more than boys have a preference for solo boys. So, kind of a social motivation to converge.

Brynn: I’ve definitely seen that in research as well. And sometimes you’ll see sort of conflicting things. Sometimes studies will say, you know, oh yeah, girls and women, they always want to try to have that more like accommodative communication. They will socially converge more.

Other studies will say like, oh, we can’t really tell. But it is a fascinating area of research and trying to find out why, if it’s true, that girls and women do converge more.

Why is that? Do you have any personal thoughts on that?

Dr White: I wonder whether it’s like a social conditioning kind of thing. Yeah. That would be my gut instinct towards it.

Brynn: Tell me more about that. What do you mean by social conditioning?

Dr White: That girls, since we’re tiny children, we’re socially conditioned to be nice and to want to please people. It could be that that is coming through and the convergence.

Brynn: Yeah, and trying to show almost like in group, trying to say, hey, I’m one of you, let me into the group, sort of a thing. Yeah, which is so interesting.

What do you think the takeaway message is from your research into creaky voice?

What do the findings tell us about language, social groups, and especially in this case, the Australian English of teenagers? Because like we said before, I think a lot of times, creak is associated with the Americanisation of English, of language, sort of that West Coast Valley girl idea. So, what do we think that this all says about Australian English?

Dr White: I think it’s really hard to sum up a key takeaway from such an enormous part of my life.

Brynn: It’s like someone saying, like, tell me about the last five years in two sentences.

Dr White: Yeah, exactly. But I think my key takeaway from this is that creak is a super complicated linguistic feature. It’s more than just this thing that women do in America.

And the relationship between creak and gender is way more complicated than just, yeah, women do this thing, men don’t do it, or they do it less. So, it’s really important to consider like these other factors, other social factors, such as like language background or where the, like specifically in Sydney, where the speaker is, their identity as a speaker when we are looking at creak prevalence.

Brynn: I think that that’s the part of this research of yours and your co-authors that I found so interesting was this idea of creak being used or not used to show identity and not just gender identity, but also cultural identity, potentially heritage language identity, identity around where you live. So, I think that you’re right, it is more complicated than just saying, oh, don’t talk like that, you sound like a valley girl, you know?

Dr White: Exactly.

Brynn: There’s more about what it means to be a human in a social group in terms of creak than maybe we previously thought.

So, with that, what’s next for you? What are you working on now?

Are you continuing to study creak or are you onto something different? What’s next for you?

Dr White: I can’t stop studying creak. I’m obsessed.

Brynn: That’s fabulous!

Dr White: So, I’m actually currently working on an Apparent Time Study of creak.

Brynn: What does that mean?

Dr White: That is looking at, so we have this historical data that was collected from the Northern Beaches. So, kids, teenagers in the 90s interviews. And we have part of the Multicultural Australian English Project.

We collected data from the Northern Beaches. So, we’ve got these two groups from the same area, 30 years apart. And so, I’m looking at whether there’s been a shift in creak prevalence over that time, because people always say, you know, creak is becoming more popular, but we don’t have like that much firm empirical evidence that that’s the case.

So yeah, I thought it would be really interesting to see.

Brynn: Have you just started or do you have any findings that you can tell us about?

Dr White: I’ve just started. I’m coding the data currently. So yeah, watch the space.

Brynn: Watch the space because when you’re done and when you have some findings, I want to talk to you again, because to think that that’s what’s so interesting is examining it through time because you’re right, there’s so much that is in the media that goes around, especially talking about the export of American English and American ways of speaking.

I’ve talked in this podcast before about how even I as an American have been approached by Australians and they’ll talk about, you know, oh, we sound so American now. It’s because of all of the media and everything like that.

So, to actually be able to have some data to back that up would be incredible.

Dr White: Yeah, that’s really exciting stuff. I’m also going to Munich next year as part of the Humboldt Fellowship. So, I’ll be working with Professor Jonathan Harrington over there and looking at creak in German. That’s something that we don’t know very much about at all.

Brynn: Do we have many studies about Creek in languages other than English where it doesn’t denote another word?

Dr White: There are some, yeah, but it’s definitely, the field is definitely English-centric. So, it’ll be really interesting to see.

Brynn: That’s going to be so fun. I can’t wait to talk to you again. Well, Hannah, thank you so much for coming on today, and thank you to everyone for listening.

Dr White: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.

Brynn: And if you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast. Leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time.

Migration separates families

I am a second generation migrant from my mother’s side. When my grandfather migrated from the former Czechoslovakia to Australia after World War 2, only one member of his immediate family was a fellow survivor, his older brother. The brothers were desperate to get out of war-torn Europe and start a new life, but there was a catch. They weren’t able to go to the same place. While my grandfather received permission to emigrate with his young family to Sydney, his brother received the same from the United States. Despite already losing their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in the war, the brothers were unable to prevent losing each other. After they emigrated, although they wrote letters, and spoke on the phone very rarely, they never saw each other again.

Today in Australia where I live and work, cross-border communication is likely to be by phone, not letter and for the majority of migrants the greatest barrier to seeing family is likely to be economic. Many of the participants I spoke to for my research into mixed language couples living in Sydney frequently spoke to family members by phone, sometimes even daily. This is significantly more affordable now than it was fifty years ago. However, migrant families continue to be separated for many years and often permanently. The border closures during the pandemic were a very difficult period for migrants unable to travel to spend time with family, particularly aging parents and relatives. So how does communication maintain family ties across borders? And how can we as scholars engage with this topic, theoretically, methodologically and ethically?

A theory of communicative care

I was recently lucky enough to speak to Dr Lynnette Arnold about her new book on this topic, Living together across borders: communicative care in transnational Salvadorean families. In the book she describes how communicative care both sustains and resists dominating geo-political forces which maintain continued migration from El Salvador to the United States across multiple generations as solution to meeting the economic needs of the nation.

In the book Arnold details an analytical approach based on the concept of  communicative care. By this she means that the everyday communication which families engage in is an enactment of care, and that this care is “the most fundamental way that transnational families maintain collective intergenerational life in the face of continued, and seemingly endless, separation.” (p.6) She uses the term convivencia or living together, to describe the culturally specific practices she observed in her data collection with transnational Salvadoran families.

I found communicative care a particularly useful lens for examining the links between what are sometimes referred to as local or micro practices and processes and their connection to larger macro processes such as the economic and political systems governing nations. An example of this is the role of communication in maintaining the flow of global remittances which support the Salvadorean economy as well as the individual families. In this sense the book is a powerful tool for researchers who are interested in both a nuanced exploration of language practices in context and in the transformational power of research to speak back to hegemonic forces such as borders, global capitalism and neoliberalism.

Participants as researchers: researchers as participants

This study took a two stage approach to collecting the data. Starting with a lengthy ethnographic study of a village in El Salvador where she lived and worked as a young women, Arnold built up relationships with two transnational families. These families then formed the research participants for the second stage of the study, where four months worth of telephone conversations between migrant and non-migrant family members were recorded.

This stage centred the agency of the participants themselves by training them as data collectors of the recorded phone calls between transnational family members. In the interview, Dr Arnold discusses how she also employed research assistants from El Salvador who recognised the social identities – as well as the language varieties – of the research participants. This facilitated their contributions, both as accurate transcribers of the audio data but also as cultural informants in the data analysis process.

The ethics of working with migrants and language issues

For those of us working in the field of migration and language, how can we behave ethically in a space where there are profoundly unequal power relations, the stakes are high and global tensions continue to bubble around issues of migration, borders and citizenship? This is especially true for scholars like me, who are not first generation migrants themselves and thus speak from a relatively privileged position.

According to Arnold, we can start by asking what is language doing? How does it connect with the relational aspect of people’s lives and the geopolitical contexts they exist in? Thinking critically about the role of language in creating social reality allows us to become informed advocates for linguistic diversity. It enables us to think about issues of access, inclusion and ultimately social justice.

I’ll leave you with one example from the book’s conclusion which I found particularly compelling due to my own research interests into the links between language maintenance in migrant families and second language education. Arnold makes the point that one way we can support transnational families to maintain networks of communicative care is to change existing educational language policy “which all too often functions as a tool of state-sponsored family separation by pushing the children of migrants towards monolingualism in dominant languages like English” (p. 171). Instead of turning bilinguals into monolingual, language in education policy must be guided by what migrant families themselves need, which is the communicative resources to maintain ties across borders. This includes a recognition of the linguistic variety in migrant repertoires, which extend way beyond standard languages.

Reference

Arnold, L. (2024). Living Together Across Borders: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families. Oxford University Press.

Related content

Piller, I. (2018). Globalization between crime and piety. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/globalization-crime-piety/
Weiss, F. (2012). Christmas in Nicaragua. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/christmas-in-nicaragua/

Transcript

Hanna Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the move podcast, a channel on the new books network, my name is Hannah Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics and applied linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Lynette Arnold, Dr. Lynette Arnold is an assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and we’re going to talk about her new monograph living together across borders, communicative care in Transnational Salvadorian Families published by Oxford University Press. Welcome to the show. Lynette.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you so much. Hi, everybody! Ola.

Hanna Torsh: Can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book?

Lynnette Arnold: Sure! So my book, Living together across borders, explores how members of transnational families find ways to live together despite being separated across borders. The families I work with are from a small rural village in El Salvador, with migrant relatives living in urban locations across the United States. I am not Salvadoran. I do not have Salvadoran family members. So you might wonder, what is it? How did I get involved in this? And my interest in this topic really emerged from 2 different but interrelated personal experiences.

I spent 5 years living in El Salvador from 2,000 to 2,005 during the years when most people are in college. I was living in El Salvador, and this is a really eye opening experience, because I got to know many young people, my age, who had grown up during the Salvadoran Civil War that happened in the 19 eighties, and in getting to know them I learned a lot about the involvement of the Us. Government in perpetuating this 12 year conflict through immense financial support of the Salvadoran military and training Salvadoran soldiers in brutal, scorched Earth tactics. All of these, the ways that us support had really caused a lot of harm in El Salvador, and that was an eye opening experience for me to realize that this big gaping hole in my education as a Us. Citizen not understanding something so vital about my country’s history and involvement in the world.

So that was one inspiration was really to help my fellow citizens better understand the human impact of us foreign policy. Our involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War was a direct cause of the widespread emigration that El Salvador shows still today. And so that was kind of one piece was recognizing that I hadn’t learned these things and wanting to share them with my fellow citizens.

The second experience was sort of more deeply relational, and it has to do with the ways that the relationships I made in El Salvador continued. When I moved back to the United States to go to college. When I moved to the US. I stayed in contact with people in El Salvador through phone calls, and I suddenly found myself part of this transnational network of folks in El Salvador, their relatives here in the United States, who I had met in El Salvador, but who had since migrated, and I started to get really interested in what was happening in those phone calls and all the kinds of complicated things that people were working out on the phone across borders. At the same time, at that moment in my life I was navigating a kind of growing realization or separation from my own family of origin. I had left at that point permanently left the Christian Commune where I was raised, and where my family still lives, so I have a very different reason for separation. But I was navigating in my own life how to be family with people that I wasn’t living together with. And so, though I juxtaposing those 2 experiences, got me really interested in how people do family at a distance and the role of language? So that was really what brought me then to the topic of the book.

Hanna: That’s so fascinating. And just a quick follow up question. You know you talk about living there, living in this rural village at a time when sort of other people were at college. How was that experience of language learning for you at that age, in this very remote community, especially when we consider today how almost how difficult that experience is to have with the new affordances that we have in terms of technology and the reach of technology.

Lynnette Arnold: That’s such a great question. Yeah. So I went to El Salvador, knowing very little Spanish. I had been raised in a kind of bilingual culture with German. So I had German as kind of a heritage language, not for my family, but from my community growing up and understood a lot of German, but went to El Salvador, so I knew how to be bilingual. I didn’t know Spanish. I took 2 weeks of intensive one-on-one Spanish courses in the capital.

And I told the guy, the instructor like this is what’s going to happen. I’m going out to this rural village by myself for the next 4 months like I need to be able to survive in Spanish, and I had a dictionary, and I had a grammar workbook and then I went out into the village. I knew one other person in the country who spoke English, who I saw maybe twice the entire time that I was there. So it was really immersion. I was living with a family. I was trying to figure out how to, you know, support the English teacher who didn’t really speak English, you know, like all of these things while also learning the language. So I think obviously, having already been bilingual, helped me like my brain, knew how to learn language, knew that, like learning, the grammar was helpful, and that then I could be like, oh, that person just used the subjunctive! That’s what it sounds like in real life, you know. I remember having experiences like that.

I think the other thing that came out of that experience for me was that I was really learning the language and the culture at the same time. So it wasn’t that I was learning these abstract grammatical forms, but I was learning how to communicate in the language as a young woman, so that was the other, like the gendered, and age the fact that I was, you know, a Us. Citizen, a foreigner. All of those things I had to learn how to use Spanish in that very kind of accurate, contextual way. And still to this day, when I speak Spanish, I find myself realizing how much that has influenced the way that I speak Spanish today. People are not familiar with my accent. I have a very Salvadoran accent. The vocabulary that I’m most comfortable with is like about farms, and, you know, growing food and animals and raising children and not, you know, academic things. And I think that experience was certainly also influential in shaping my research trajectory and the project of this book, because it made me think a lot about the really close connection between language and culture and the sort of social work that language does.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, wonderful. I think a lot of our audience can resonate with that experience of finding their voice in another language, and having to learn how to be an identity in that language, and then perhaps shifting to another space, and having to then relearn how to be in that language.

So moving on to your book in your book, you talk about two really important concepts, and I’m interested in hearing what these mean. I think our audience would like to hear about them, too. So the 1st one is this idea of convivencia, or living together, and the other one is the idea of communicative care. Can you explain what these 2 concepts mean, and how you use them in your research and in the book.

Lynnette Arnold: Sure I’ll start with convivencia, because it’s the title of the book. So convivencia is two words; con together, and vivencia, live, so live together, made into one word in Spanish convivence as a noun form. It can be all these different things. It’s really a flexible word. People use it a lot when talking about social life. In El Salvador in general, it’s just a very high frequency word. Convivio is another related noun, that is a word for a gathering. Many different kinds of gatherings can be called convivios.

So, in addition to using the word convivencia a lot. People also spend a lot of time carving out opportunities for convivencia or living together what we might call at least an American lingo hanging out just spending time. So it’s a very common thing in rural Salvador culture to see people sitting around on the patio, kind of intermittently talking. Maybe somebody is doing some husking of corn or some other kind of work is happening. Children are in or out, in or out but that sort of spending time together, talking, hanging out, not doing a whole lot of anything is a really important part of the culture. Sometimes convivencia happens in more formal ways, like big gatherings for birthdays, or, you know, religious celebrations or things like that. But they can also be much more informal.

So when I this really sort of caught my attention in the context of the book project, because when I talk to members of transnational families both in El Salvador and in the United States. Many of them mentioned that they missed the ways that they used to convier with loved ones. So they missed that kind of living together when they were separated across borders. So I heard that truth coming out over and over in the interviews, but at the same time from my research perspective, I was seeing these families still doing a whole heck of a lot of conviviando. Even if they weren’t in the same place, they were still finding ways to live together. So I knew that from participating in the transnational networks that from sort of a research perspective, convivencia was still happening, but families were telling me that it looked different than it did when they lived together.

And so, as part of the kind of participating in these transnational phone conversations. I really started to realize that my intuition about where a lot of this living together was happening was that it was happening in these phone calls and these transnational conversations were a really crucial way that families were still able to live together when they couldn’t be in the same place. So that’s what really got me into thinking about what’s happening with this communication and communication away as a way of being together, living together when you’re separate.

So that seems like, if we want to put a label on it, we could call that the more Emic framing right the more the way that people in the community would understand what’s happening here. Convivencia is probably the label they would put on it. Communicative care is really my term and is kind of more informed by my theoretical considerations. I’m a scholar of language and communication, and I’m very interested in how language acts in the world and what language does. And at that time I had been thinking a lot about and reading a lot about feminist scholarship around care and feminist scholars, writing about care often describe it and define care as the labor or the work that we do to keep ourselves alive as a species. So it’s the work that allows individual and collective well-being and survival.

And I came to feel that what was happening in the conversations was families doing precisely that work through language? So I decided to come up with this idea of communicative care as a theoretical frame to capture what I what I thought the work was that was happening in the Conversations. I also wanted to label for the fact that I saw that care and communication were entangled in some very complex ways, and so I wanted a framework that could capture all of those different ways of entanglement. So I decided the communicative care would be a capacious way to talk about that.

Hanna: So just for our audience to understand, you have talked about those transnational phone calls. So maybe we could just take a step back and you could just describe the actual data that you work with in this book, so that so that we have a context for that.

Lynnette Arnold: The data that I’m working within the book primarily are recordings of transnational phone calls. So they are dyadic, mostly dyadic conversations between a person in the United States and a person in the El Salvador who are related to one another in some way. I have interviews and other kinds of ethnographic data that I use to sort of triangulate. These were conversations that were recorded over a 4 month  period. So in many cases I could track how something developed over time. The conversations involved, although they were dyadic, many different dyads within the family. So I could track how different dyads talked about different issues.

So that’s when I’m saying that the families are doing a lot of this conivencia, this living together through conversations, I was able to see that in recording, these phone calls and paying really close attention to what exactly they were doing when they were talking to each other on the phone and why they spent all of this, you know, effort, money and time to have these regular phone calls with one another.

So I felt the need for a framework, because I wanted something to capture the different ways that language and care were connected. So it was very clear to me that language is something that makes other kinds of care possible. So think about many kinds of care that we all engage in on, you know, part of our everyday lives. Language is absolutely central to those for these families. The money that immigrants send home is probably the form of care that most people associate with transnational families. That is not possible without communication. There’s a lot of communicative work that goes into making those remittances, those economic transfers happen. But beyond that I wanted to show. And I show in the in the book that language enacts care. Language is something that does itself do care work. It’s a way of maintaining and forging the kind of relational bedrock that is the foundation of all other kinds of care. So that was really important to me to draw that out. That language is not just facilitating other care, but that it is itself a kind of care. And then also, as we know, scholars of language know, language is always making meaning. So as it’s facilitating remittances. And as it’s enacting relational care, language is also a way that people. I used to create meetings about like what kinds of actions, when carried out, by which people count as care and which things don’t count? So all those things are sort of entangled and happening at the same time. So with a communicative care perspective, I was really trying to come up with a theoretical and analytical way to approach that and fully grapple with what was happening with this communication. And the book demonstrates ultimately that communicative care.

This approach really sheds light on how transnational families are able to forge convivencia and live together across borders, through language when they can’t be at the same place for many years at a time.

Hanna Torsh: One of the things that I found really fantastic about reading your work is that the approach you took to data collection, this very inclusive, very participant centered approach to data collection. Could you tell us a bit about how you approached the methodology in your work, and why?

Lynnette Arnold: Sure. And I want to answer this question in a way that will be helpful to emerging scholars who are maybe formulating their first research project or anybody embarking on a new research project. Because, as we know, things often don’t go to plan when we’re doing research. In fact, they often tend not to go to plan but really, if my research had gone to plan, I would not have the book that I have.

So that’s the kind of message here that things can go differently than you imagine, and still be great. So my project started off as a very traditional ethnographic. Sort of like an ethnography of communication. In that tradition I did a lot of participant observation in El Salvador and in the United States with family members, spending time in their homes, eating meals with them, hanging out on the weekends, trying to go to their workplaces, going to their schools. Just kind of spending time understanding what was happening in their lives. And then I conducted interviews with members of families in both countries. And I had that, you know, interview data that I recorded and started to analyze, and, you know, have some other work about narratives that were told in those interviews, for instance.

And then I was planning to do a longer stint in El Salvador of sort of more intensive ethnographic research, and really tracking what was happening. Over an intensive period of time in El Salvador. But then things beyond my control happened. Things got very dangerous in El Salvador. So this was in 2,014 which was a time when there was an intense spike in organized crime and gang violence, especially targeting young people. And there was a whole crisis of unaccompanied minors coming across the Us. Mexico border in relation to this and the area where I do. My research is kind of on a line between the territory of two gangs and got incredibly dangerous.

So my advisor felt like it was really unsafe for me to go back and spend a long time in El Salvador, and she was probably right. So I had to pivot and I decided to pivot to a project that was much more focused on the transnational communication.

So I ended up focusing on the phone calls and deciding to work with two extended families that I had. I knew the most members of and had the deepest relationships to. And I worked with them to record phone calls that they made across borders over a period of 4 months. I based on the interviews I had a sense of from the interviews how much people spent on phone calls per month, and I gave families this kind of stipend per month to cover the costs of the communication during the time that the recording was happening, and then I also hired research assistants in in each family. These were in both cases young people living in the United States because I was able to get to them and train them. So these were young people who were more tech savvy, who were literate and who crucially didn’t have tons of family obligations like they weren’t parents yet and so I was able to go visit them and train them in how to use the recording technology. I used a very, very simple earpiece recorder that you just held the phone up to. I had a little carrying thing for the recorder, so people could still walk around on their cell phones. These were all cell phone calls while having a little MP. 3 recorder on the kind of in their holster

And the family decided amongst themselves which calls to record. And then they didn’t necessarily have to pass all the recordings on to me. They could delete data if they wanted to. I still did delete some things that were passed on to me that I felt, especially when they were pertaining to people’s immigration situation. That I felt like legally, I didn’t want to be responsible for having that information. So I just deleted those recordings.

So that was the sample that I got was the things that families, you know felt okay about me having. And I was still surprised. You know they still felt very from my experience, participating in these networks, very authentic conversations. And there’s conflict. And there’s, you know, disagreements. There are things that happen in these calls. So I I would definitely say it’s not a entirely representative sample in that. Maybe, like the most extreme cases of conflict were not recorded, or whatever but I didn’t get the sense, either, that people were like consistently, always on their best behavior on these phone calls, for instance, it felt like they had. You know they were kind of in the habit of doing this.

Hanna: What did you then do with the with the recordings that you had. How did you go about analyzing that data?

Lynnette Arnold: Yeah. So this is another thing that many of us who do language research, you know, end up with hours and hours of recorded data, and we want to look at it closely, and it gets really overwhelming. So one thing I did that I learned from my undergraduate advisor, Mary Bucholz, was, instead of transcribing all my data. First, st I did a 1st pass of doing what’s called an in what she calls an index, which I think, is a good term. So you’re making a time stamped kind of account of what is happening every minute or so. 30 seconds, depending on how fast moving. The data is in the call, and that is a good way to listen through your data. And just what is in there, what’s happening. Get it in your head right in a way that maybe transcribing especially. This was obviously in the time before AI. But I know now lots of people are using AI to do a 1st pass on transcription. It’s not getting the data in your head in the same way. So working through an index is really good because it makes you start to see the patterns so indexing allowed me to do some qualitative sort of coding of what were some communicative patterns that I started to see what were. Think, what were things that people were doing over and over and over and over again? And decided to focus on transcribing, then, examples of those things that were happening a lot, and you’ll see if you read the book that there’s a chapter about greetings. That’s a thing that happens a lot in these phone calls. And by an example of greetings. There is a chapter about negotiating remittances which is also a thing that’s probably the thing that happens for most of the time.

And then there’s a chapter about remembering in conversations kind of reminiscing in conversations, which was one that I hadn’t, you know. It wasn’t 1 that I went in looking for necessarily but jumped out at me as something really powerful that was happening in these conversations. I was really fortunate.

During my graduate time, when I was collecting and preparing the data to be able to work with undergraduate research assistants. All of whom were Salvador of Salvadoran descent, which meant that they had the linguistic capability to understand this variety of Spanish I think at one time I tried to work with a Mexican descent student, and they were just like this. Spanish is so different from the Spanish that I’m familiar with. I don’t think I can transcribe this accurately. So it was a lovely, lovely opportunity to also extend mentoring towards you know, 1st generation largely Salvadoran American students who were an amazing help for me as well in doing the transcription, and they are all named in my acknowledgements.

Hanna Torsh: Excellent. Yeah, that’s that’s a real challenge for us here in Australia, because we are so linguistically diverse. Having that match with research support in terms of linguistic repertoire.

Lynnette Arnold: And I think even in doing the transcriptions we would meet to talk about the transcriptions. But our conversations would diverge just from the actual transcript. And they would say things like, Oh, my mom. Salvi, mom, this is a thing my mom does all the time. Or, you know, topics of conversations. They were all parts of, you know, transnational families as well. So it was really enriching, not just in the transcriptions, but also in helping me to recognize that what I had in my data was something that was broader than just the two families I was working with.

Hanna Torsh: In your book, you talk about the contradictory ways that digital communication has impacted on the families that you worked with, but also on transnational and cross border family communication generally. So could you tell us a bit about what you found out about these contradictions for your research participants, and any examples that you had would be also fascinating to hear.

Lynnette Arnold: I think there’s kind of a couple of possible answers here. And I think I’ll go with. There’s like a technology answer. And then there’s like a social life answer. And I think we maybe can do both. The technology answers that we often assume that like newer technology, more inclusive, like video technology is better and that people will default to using technologies that are more complete. So if families have access to video calling, they will use video calling, for instance, research with transnational families beyond mine. But just within the field of transnational family research has found that video calling can actually be very emotionally challenging and costly for people to engage in, and that sometimes people dis prefer, even if they have access to videos, that they prefer other forms of communication. So I argue in my work that for these families, phone calls are a real sweet spot. Because they don’t require as mo as much emotional investment. I mean, imagine yourself as a parent or as a family member separated from your loved one for years at a time. You see them on screen, and you see in real time that they’re different than they were when you were there with them. So it’s a real physical visceral reminder of the passing of time that you’re not together. On the phone that is a little bit more held at bay. But you still have the intimacy of somebody’s voice, and you can really hear all of those cues of emotion and all of those things that are so important, especially in the sort of delicate communication that families are doing often on the phone.

Phone calls are also very accessible. So I think that’s another thing to think about in terms of technology is like, and the family is who within the family can use a given technology and phone calls for the families I worked with were maximally inclusive because preliterate children can still talk on the phone and also in the families I worked with elders, and the families were often not literate or had very low literacy levels, and certainly did not have technological literacy to know how to navigate something more complex than a phone call. So phone calls were really a sweet spot, both kind of relationally and what they allowed but also because of their accessibility to everybody within the family. So talk a little bit about that in the book. Why, phone calls in this era of all polymedia. I felt the need to talk about that. It also had to do with the fact that smartphone technology hadn’t really entered El Salvador quite yet. Now it has but I still talk on the phone to my comrade. The mother of my goddaughter in the El Salvador we sell each other voice memos on Whatsapp. So you know again, you see that kind of preference for the voice communication over over video, even though it’s now more possible than it used to be.

And then there’s another answer that has to do with what digital communication affords for these families in terms of their relationships. So as I’ve been talking already, on the one hand, communication is absolutely vital. It’s the way that families are able to live together and sustain their relationships across border. It’s a means of emotional support. It forges the groundwork for this ongoing economic support like remittances. So it’s really positive things for families. But we also know from transnational family scholarship in general that digital communication for families can be really charged. It can lead to people feeling surveilled or micromanaged, especially children and women in families.

In my book, I found that kind of the the negative consequences or effects of digital communication were the ways that it perpetuated divides between migrants and non migrants within families. So if you think about a transnational family, you’ve got this big division of people living in different countries, and the migrants are perceived as those with access to more resources, and the non migrants as those with less access to resources who need help from their migrant. This is kind of a pretty broad generalization that holds for most transnational families, I think.

And what I found in my research was that this divide played out in communication, so that in family conversations there were very different communicative expectations placed on people depending on if they were migrants or non migrants. So, for instance, non migrants needed to learn that when they needed remittances they shouldn’t just ask. They shouldn’t just say, Hey, can you send me 100 bucks?

But they should tell these elaborate stories about family life in El Salvador, in which they would embed conversations of somebody else complaining to somebody else about needing money. So this very like indirect, layered way that people learned a very specific way of doing like a remittance request right?

And then, if you zoom out to think at the kind of macro level. This kind of communication is sustaining and shoring up migration right? It sustains the transnational family form. It keeps the remittances flowing so from a nation perspective, it makes migration succeed as an escape valve, as a means of generating revenue through migrant migrant remittances. Right? So in that those ways, we can see that the communication is really shoring up some inequalities right at the interpersonal and kind of the global level.

Even as it’s a lifeline for these families. So both of those things are true at the same time. And I just want to kind of end by saying it isn’t the case that communication only re in reinscribes inequalities. There are. There are ways in which communication also opens up space for people to resist and create, create new ways of doing things.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, I’m I’m really keen to hear if you could tell us about some of the participants that you talk about in the book, and some examples of those ways of maybe either kind of perpetuating those inequalities or resisting those inequalities.

Lynnette Arnold: Yeah, I think I’ll go with the resisting examples, because they’re more interesting to me.

Hanna Torsh: Sure.

Lynnette Arnold: So one thing that’s really interesting about digital communication is that it opens up ways for young people to participate in family communication. So some transnational family research shows that young people are actually really get involved in family communication because they have to be the tech. And they’re let the tech help, you know, and then they’re there helping grandma with the laptop or whatever, and then they participate in the conversation. In my families, I found that the kind of a polymedia kind of situation where there were phone calls, but also other kinds of technology happening. Between family members opened up some conflict. So in this one case, some young men were being raised by their grandparents in El Salvador, and their dad was in the United States. He sent them a laptop. They opened Facebook accounts. They started messaging their dad on Facebook. Their grandparents are not literate. Their grandparents are not tech literate. They have no idea like what’s happening when their sons are on the laptop and so the sons use this kind of private channel of communication to complain to their dad about some stuff like teenagers do right.

Hanna Torsh: Yes, I do. Yes.

Lynnette Arnold: As they do and the dad was just hearing from them about this, and so then he called his parents, and, you know, kind of scolded them, taking his son’s word as like you know the truth rather than realizing that it was just kind of one perspective on what was happening. And this resulted in a lot of conflict within the family that then got resolved by multiple phone calls from multiple people, in which people then navigated and kind of smooth things over, and he eventually called and apologized to his mother for not understanding the situation more clearly. But so there there was a case where young people were using technology to kind of have more agency right in what’s going on in the family and try to pressure, you know, put some weight on the scales in terms of things coming out in the way that they wanted it to come out. The other example that I I like to talk about and think about is about gender. So we haven’t talked about gender yet, but it is a theme throughout the book. We know from feminist work that women around the world do the lion’s share of care in pretty much every context you can think of, and that is also true in communication.

I do have cases of men doing amazing communicative care work, a lot of like really touching emotional communication between men. So this is not to say that men are not doing the work. But one thing that I find is that women get asked to do kind of the most onerous tasks. So if a report about oh, the migrants sent money for the cornfield, and there was a flood, and all the corn seedlings died, and we need more money so that we can replant women get asked to have that conversation, even though agriculture isn’t traditionally feminine domain. But they get asked to kind of communicate that information and take on that less pleasant communicative burden. But what I found in some cases was that sometimes women were then using that that they were put in this kind of conduit position to migrants. They were using that to kind of carve out more space for themselves within family decision making. So in one instance, the father in El Salvador had sold one of the family’s cows. He had not consulted with his daughter, his eldest daughter, who lived with him in El Salvador about this decision, and she was kind of mad that he hadn’t consulted with him. But then he this was the same corn example. He needed her to talk to her brother in the United States, his son, and, you know, get some money for the corn so he came over at one night and asked her to do that the next time her brother called to ask him for more money so that they could replant I happened to be there when the brother called, and she didn’t say anything, but instead she told all about the cow, and how her brother had, how her dad had sold the cow without consulting with her, and how it was a poor decision and a waste of the family’s resources and blah blah, and that she should be consulted. So really getting a kind of word into the migrants. And then, when her Dad came back the next day to see what had happened. And what if the money was coming? She was like? Well, I didn’t tell him about it, because, you know, if I’m not consulted on things, I I can’t. You know I can’t communicate. So she really kind of used her. She was in this pivot Lynch kind of PIN position communicatively, and she used that to try to press for a like more decision, making power within the family in these kind of agricultural domains that traditionally, in traditional kind of salvadorange roles would not have been within her purview. So those are the kinds of things, and I think there were more of those things happening than I saw where people were using women especially. We’re using communication to do this kind of torquing in the mechanical sense of gender roles and kind of incrementally shifting things a little bit. So all that’s to say, I think that there are.

There were other ways to in which people were using communication to resist. So I in my, in my account, I wanted to kind of resist. One size fits all characterization of what was happening here, and really capture the complexity of communication as a wonderful lifeline for these families, but also as reproducing inequalities, and also maybe sometimes allowing for resistance, especially to gender them, and generational hierarchies within families.

Hanna Torsh: That’s wonderful. It’s a great example it kind of reminds me of also the the kind of dual role of women in households where they have to do the bulk of the domestic labor, but that also affords them a certain amount of power over some decisions. And so it’s often hard to for them to give it up, because that is then their only power traditionally, in the in those sorts of family situations. So I think that’s a yeah. And it’s really interesting, the way that intersects them with the digital world. And how the same sort of negotiations are taking place. So like, Okay, well, if this is my job, then I am going to try and carve out more agency for myself in a system where I have less agency, you know a patriarchal system. So yeah. Oh, look I I would love to talk more with you, but I am have to jump to my last question. And and and make it really open for you. I I think one of the one of the things that you talk about in your book is how you’re essentially interested in, in, as you say, providing a much more contradictory and nuanced picture of particularly transnational migrants when they have been traditionally particularly, you know, in in public discourse, cast as victims and and and really there’s been a lot of focus on the negative. So I guess I would like to ask you, you know, what? What did you? What are the key? Things that you would really like? The key findings. You would like emerging and established researchers in linguistic diversity and in transnational migrants, to take away from your wonderful book.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you. I’ll start with a linguistic diversity piece. And I just the I cannot say strongly enough that we cannot. We can’t study linguistic diversity without also be thinking, thinking about what language is doing. So linguistic diversity cannot be separated from the function of language. What people are doing with their communication and the context in which they’re doing those things really shape what linguistic diversity does and what it’s made of. So it’s really vital to think about. One of the main things that people are doing with their communication always is relational. They’re doing relational work of all kinds, with family members, with bosses, with everybody. Right? We’re constantly managing relationships through our language. And so we need to think about that. And also the kind of geopolitical context within which those relationships are playing out. So this may get to your question about language maintenance. Actually, because I wanted to talk here for a little bit about the children of migrants in the United States. So I noticed in my research that the children of migrants in the Us. Were largely excluded from transnational communication.

This was not the case for children in El Salvador, who participated quite actively in and were trained actively trained to participate in the transnational communication, as I show in my chapter on Greetings. That shows how kids learn even before they’re verbal. They’re taught how to do these greetings.

So why does that happen? Well? Linguistic diversity is part of an answer to the question. Relatives in El Salvador tended to perceive the children of migrants in the US as not being Spanish speakers, and therefore they perceived the language barrier that kept them from communicating with grandchildren, nieces, nephews.

Whatever the relationship was, there are, of course, language barrier issues here. There are educational issues at play. Many of the children in the United States did not have access to bilingual education in Spanish and English, and obviously the social dominance of English, certainly reduced Spanish fluency for some, at least, some of the children, but many of the children who were perceived in El Salvador as monolingual English speakers would actually be characterized as bilingual. They just didn’t speak Salvadoran Spanish. They spoke US Spanish, which is a variety of Spanish that has large has been in contact with English right for a long period of time. And so it’s grammar. Its vocabulary is shaped by English and so I think that the unfamiliarity of the children Spanish was perceived by some relatives in El Salvador and this dialect difference was perceived as a as a full on language, barrier, and led to to children being excluded.

So the linguistic causes of children’s kind of exclusion from family communication were really complicated. But it’s also important to recognize that their exclusion from this communication was also influenced by non linguistic, relational and structural issues. So when families envision their future generations down. You know they envision the future of continued emigration, of continuing. So today’s children in El Salvador are tomorrow’s future immigrants. And so it was really essential for children in El Salvador to be heavily socialized into being members of transnational and families to being committed to these cross border relationships, because they would then be the ones to carry those seeds with them. When they traveled the children of migrants are seen as kind of less predictable sustainers of transnational families like well, they just really weren’t sure what was going to happen with these kids.

They weren’t sure they were going to stay committed to the family, so they were less pro. Those relationships were less prioritized in the kind of communicative care work that families were sustaining across borders. The relationship with children in the in the Us. Just wasn’t a priority. Because of this way of thinking about right and this way of understanding their future makes a lot of sense from a geopolitical perspective. It’s heartbreaking.

But I think, unfortunately, realistic reading of the inequitable global distribution of resources, and that for families to get access to those resources. People are gonna have to keep migrating right? So what this example shows us is that the kind of linguistic, the relational, the geopolitical, are all like really tightly entwined with each other. So I just want this example to sort of be a call for us as researchers of linguistic diversity, to be able to think on all of these scales at once, and to think about their interconnections.

And for me, thinking about what language is doing in the world for people. What people are doing with their language is a way to get at that and the lens of care has been a really for me a very capacious lens that has allowed me to think about the relational and interpersonal and the geopolitical kind of within the same framework and their interrelationships. So that’s really my big takeaway for kind of language researchers. Is to think about what language is doing?

I think I have takeaways that are kind of more broad for people living in a global world, which is all of us. Now. And I think I want to especially speak to readers who may not themselves be migrant to listeners right who may not be migrants themselves may not be the children of migrants themselves. And just say that it’s really important for us to understand the lived experiences of migrants. They are so integral to maintaining our societies today. But their lives do not stop at our borders. You know they have connections that go, you know, far beyond what we can see in terms of what we think is happening with migrants and what their lives are like. So this is just kind of a call for all of us to think about, how can we establish relationships with the migrants that are in our communities? And start to think about? You know what’s happening in their lives? Beyond, you know, our immediate communities, our immediate national context.

To think about also the policies and that our governments are passing their foreign policy, their immigration policy, and how that’s affecting lots of people far beyond our national borders through these transnational family connections. So again, that’s kind of going full circle back to where I started of like wanting to educate us citizens about El Salvador. Just to say that there’s so much more that we need to be aware of as you know in thinking about migrants and the roles that they play in the world. And really, yeah, wanted to make sure that they ultimately, I think what I call for my book is that migrants? I want a world where people can have full self determination over how they choose to live as a family. And that is not true for most of us in today’s world. But it is really not true for transnational families. They do not necessarily want to live in 2 different countries for decades at a time, with no chance to visit each other. And so ultimately. That’s where I end. The book is just to say, like, What can we do? How can we work in our own individual ways? For a world in which people have more self determination over care in their own. Of all kinds, including communication.

Hanna Torsh: Oh, thank you so much. I think that’s such an important message and a a great place to finish, a great message to end with. The idea of self-determination for families. And yeah, absolutely reminding us that this we might find all of this very fascinating. But of course, this is not something that any family wants. It’s kind of decade, long separation. And I really love the idea of imploring non migrants to think about migrants, and to that idea of not finishing their lives, not ending at the borders. So yeah, thank you so much.

We’d like to thank you again for talking to us about your work. We will put a link in the blog to the book. Thanks everyone for listening to us today, and 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. Thanks. Again, Lynette.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure to talk to you today.

Hanna Torsh: Thank you until next time.

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

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

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

Transcript (added 09/09/2024)

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

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

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

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

Dr Cho: Oh, thank you for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s how I got into this research.

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

Is it exhausting to do that?

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

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

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

Brynn: Collapsed. Collapsed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: Exactly.

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

Brynn: Of course there is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: There’s actual words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: Oh, of course. Yes, absolutely.

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

Brynn: For 14 to 16 hours a day.

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

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

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

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

Brynn: Sure.

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

Brynn: Does it?

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

Brynn: Wow, that’s amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that didn’t go down well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: The men.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: That’s what’s so interesting.

Dr Cho: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Cho: Yes, yes.

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

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

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

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

Brynn: It’s like a formula.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: Which I’m extremely excited about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Till next time.

Have you ever wondered why Boomers’ well-meaning texts can be full of ellipses that make Millennials and Gen Z shudder?  Or why language evolves quickly on Twitter but not on Facebook?  What exactly is a “typographical tone of voice”, and why is it an essential part of our identities?  Gretchen answers these questions and more in this fascinating and highly readable book.  Whether you are a tech genius, a luddite, or something in between, Because Internet will take you on a journey into the world of language evolution via the internet of the past four decades.

Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.

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.

Update 07/03/2025: A Chinese translation of the transcript below is now available on The Nexus.

Transcript

Welcome to the New Books Network.

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

Gretchen has written a resident linguist column at The Toast and at Wired. She’s also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. Today we’re going to talk about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.

Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Gretchen, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me.

Brynn: To start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to wanting to understand more about the intersection between language and the internet?

Gretchen: I first got interested in linguistics when I was maybe 12 or 13. And I remember coming across a pop linguistics book on the shelf that was just written by someone who’d also written some other pop science books. And so, I picked it up and I was like, oh, this is sort of neat.

And I got about halfway through and I was, this is just so cool. Like, I can’t put this down. I can’t stop thinking about this. I need to ask for all of the pop linguistics books for birthdays and Christmases and these sorts of things. And like, this is what I’m going to go to university and study, like there’s a whole thing. You could become a whole linguist and do this and this stuff.

So, in many ways, writing a pop linguistics book was a return to that experience of pop linguistics books being the thing that got me into the rest of the linguistics. I think for why internet language specifically, like many linguists, I seem to have a little language analysing module in my brain that I can’t really turn it off. You get me down at the pub or something and we’re sitting here and we’re trying to have a nice conversation about the weather or something, but I’m also secretly analysing your vowels. That’s just what my brain is doing.

And so, I spend a lot of time online. I wanted to know what was going on because I kept seeing people doing things that seemed like they might be part of a bigger picture or bigger pattern. People write in to me or they tag me on social media and they’re like, ever since I read your book, I can’t stop analysing my text messages. Like I keep thinking about the punctuation that I’m using or like the emoji that people are picking. When does this turn off? And I’m like, I’m so sorry, you’re on this side now. You’re very welcome to the club.

Brynn: 100%, the type of experience that I’ve had as well, where you do, your brain just starts tick, tick, ticking along and you’re analysing everything that everybody is saying.

In Because Internet, one of the first things that you talk about is the idea of networks. And here you aren’t just referring to the internet. You discuss how our networks of friends, particularly in our teenage years, have a profound effect on how we use language. Can you talk to us about what linguists have discovered about the relationship between our social networks as teenagers and the types of language that we come to use as adults?

Gretchen: Many of the factors that we look at as linguists with respect to language are sort of your typical demographic variables. You know, things like age, gender, race, ethnicity, geography, where people are based. But these are sort of proxies for people who talk to each other more, also tend to talk more like each other.

And the easier way to study that, especially before you have the ability to say, okay, so and so is following so and so and so they must get this amount of information from them, is to say, well, all these kids attend the same high school, or all these people live in the same town, or all these people are around the same age or the same gender, and they live in the same area. And so therefore they’re probably going to be hanging out with each other. But we can get more fine-grained than that.

And some of the early work in this area was done in high schools. So, the linguist Penny Eckert embedded in a high school in the 1980s, and she distinguishes between these two social groups called jocks and burnouts. And these two groups of kids, even though many of them were from the same backgrounds or the same ranges of backgrounds, talked differently from each other based on the social attitudes that they were trying to embody.

So, in the case of the jocks and burnouts, the burnouts had a more local accent that was indexed with working class identity and sort of not aligning with the power structures of the school where you’re like, oh, the school’s going to let me become student council president. Like, that sounds great. No, it’s like, I don’t care about this school.

I’m going to drop out as soon as I can and I’m going to not do this. One of the quotes from that study is the, whether you say a sentence that I would say, the buses with the antennas on top. And there’s an example of it pronounced closer to how I would say the bosses with the antennas on top.

As that sort of like Great Lakes, Northern Cities pronunciation, which is a locally salient working-class identity in the area. And the burnouts were doing more of that pronunciation. This is getting at how do you personally identify and you can affect your accent, even if you’re not necessarily doing like, I’m going to front my A’s a bit, you know?

But you’re being like, I want to talk like these people because they’re cool. And I also want to wear the jeans that they’re wearing. And I also want to eat the food that they’re wearing or wear the backpack that they’re wearing or carry my backpack only on one shoulder because that’s what the cool kids are doing or whatever the locally salient variables are.

And some of those are linguistic. And there’s another study by a linguist named Mary Buchholz who looked at nerd girls in California because I had read this Jocks and Burnouts study and I was like, I don’t really know which one of these I am. And then I read the nerd girl study and I was like, I am entirely too called out by this.

Brynn: (laughs) You’re being sub-tweeted.

Gretchen: Yeah, I’m like, oh, okay, well. I did not grow up in California, I grew up in Canada, I still live in Canada. This sort of nerd, additional nerd group, which wasn’t participating in any of these cool variables and they were like, I’m going to pronounce things very, like hyper-articulately, I’m not going to drop any consonants and I’m going to make a lot of puns.

And I was like, how did you know? (laughs)

Brynn: (laughs) Why are you in my room? How can you hear what I’m saying?

Gretchen: These people like wordplay, oh, I see. So, this got me interested in, like, linguists have identified that there are social groups that are relevant, you know, before the Internet Day. But it was really hard to do this type of fine-grained social network analysis before the Internet made us all sort of digitise a lot of our relationships and make them explicit for other people to see.

So instead of being like, because if you want to do this sort of social network analysis, you can do it. What you do is you go into the high school and you ask every kid to list five or 10 of their friends and maybe in order of how close they are to them or something like that. And then you cross-reference all the lists.

And it sort of works in a high school, which is a relatively closed environment, where you assume that most of the kids are mostly friends with other kids in that high school. But when you get to adulthood, people stop having this sort of very consistent and predictable social trajectory. Because you can say, in a given area, all the 17-year-olds are going to be doing roughly the same thing in terms of being required to go to school.

Once you’re, and maybe even there’s an extent of, as higher education has become more ubiquitous, a lot of people are doing a university stage, although not everybody. But certainly, once you get to 25, all bets are off. So some people are moving to a different place, some people are taking up new hobbies, some people are becoming parents, some people are doing all of these sorts of things that can affect what language you use and how your language keeps shifting, but no longer in this consistent and predictable step-by-step way where you can say, okay, 13-year-olds are doing this and 17-year-olds are doing something different.

But if you look at clusters of interest groups – so there’s one study that I cited in Because Internet where they looked at people who had joined beer hobbyist message boards. They were talking to each other about beer tasting and all the different types of beer that they had. And there’s not obviously a consistent age that everybody is.

There’s not a consistent – other demographic factors that they are, but what they had in common was they were members of this beer group and they were learning the words to describe beer. Things like “aroma” or “S” for, I think it’s scent or something like this. Depending on when they joined the beer forum, they were using different terms, either the older term or the newer term based on when they joined the forum.

So, this is sort of a time-based effect, but it’s based on interest group rather than based on the sort of crude demographic factors of approximately, like here’s how all the 37-year-olds are talking. People do really different things with their lives at age 37. Like, people are in very different positions, but this is your first week on the beer forum versus you’ve been here for two years is like a different way of kind of slicing people according to their interests.

And then there was another study that some people did about networks on Twitter, where they classified people into networks based on who they were talking to. So, there’s sort of a book Twitter, or there’s like a parenting Twitter, or there’s like a sports Twitter or like tech Twitter. And these groups have skews that have some demographic factors in common.

So, you might get one group that’s like 60-40 men to women, and you might get another group that’s 60-40 in the other direction. So, there’s a demographic skew there, but it’s certainly not an absolute. What they found was that people tended to talk like other people in their cluster, more than they talked like an average member of their, I think they were using gender based on like inferred information from census information about names.

But also, it’s saying that the way that we talk has a lot to do with our choices and our friends and who we want to associate with. And not only, okay, you’re destined to talk this way because you’re like 24 and female. That’s a way of doing those statistics and trying to get at differences between social groups before we were able to do more fine-grained network analysis.

Brynn: It’s so interesting when you think, like what you were saying, I like this idea of people in their social groups, kind of, especially in those young years, try on dialects or accents or ways of speaking kind in the same way that you do with your fashion when you’re in that same age. And how all of those sorts of series of tryings on affect then how you come to speak as an adult.

And something else that you discuss in the book is this concept of weak ties and strong ties when it comes to language. Can you tell me what do those terms mean? And you started to talk about gender. How can gender impact these ties?

Gretchen: So weak ties versus strong ties are originally from a paper by I think an economist named Mark Granovetter. And he talks about the piece, so strong ties are people that you know very well, you spend a lot of time with, and most crucially, they are also densely embedded into your social network. So, they know a lot of the same people as you do.

So, if you have a group of friends who all hang out with each other, so you’re friends with person A and person B, person A and B are also friends with each other, and so on and so forth. So, you have a group where everybody sort of knows each other. So, you could think of something like a class of students in the school, probably all sort of know each other, or group people at a workplace, maybe all sort of know each other.

A weak tie is someone who probably you don’t spend as much time with, but more crucially, you don’t have as many other connections in common. In linguistics, for example, I know a lot of linguists, but also, I know a lot of people who aren’t employed in linguistics, who don’t have a linguistics background because I also do media and journalism and all of this sort of stuff, pay attention to this world of academia. So, for a lot of those non-linguists that I know, if I go to a non-linguist conference, I’m maybe the only linguist there, I’m the only linguist they know.

And I’m a weak tie that to them that represents this whole open community to the field of linguistics. And conversely, when I go to a linguistics conference, I’m one of the few people there, sometimes the only person there who’s not an academic, for whom my primary network is not an academic one. And so, to the linguists at the linguistics conference, I am so this weak tie source of information to bridge this whole other field of people who are doing interesting things outside of academia.

And what Granovetter found was that people often tend to get jobs via weak ties. For example, you’re unlikely to get a job via your partner, because your partner and you probably know a lot of the same people because you probably socialise together. And so you’d probably know about it directly more than a person that you already know.

But you might get a job via somebody that you knew for a year or two, like 10 years ago, and you took one class together. And for them, it was like, an elective and they actually got a job in some other field. And now their field is hiring and they know all these people who you don’t know.

And one of those people is hiring. And so, they are sort of a bridge to a larger gateway. And it’s much more common to find a job via a weak tie than it is via a strong tie because weak ties have so many other people that they are strongly connected to or that maybe they’re weakly connected to that can like bring in additional information.

So, when it comes to language change, your strong ties, people that you have a lot of friends in common with, you probably already talk a lot like they do. Like, you’re more likely to pick up, to talk the way the people that you see all the time and that you have lots of friends in common with also talk like. But you’re more likely to linguistic innovations or to unfamiliar linguistic features, even if they’ve been around for a long time, but they’re new to you, via people that are weaker ties to you, precisely because they bring in this novel to your social network, because you’re not already densely connected with them.

There’s someone who did a statistical model of like, how do we account for linguistic innovation in terms of people talking to each other differently? And if you run a network analysis of everybody or strong ties, you don’t get any linguistic innovation because everyone’s all talking like each other.

And if you run a social network analysis where everyone is weak ties, like no one has this dense connection to each other, I think that everybody is weak ties is sort of like being in an airport. You don’t, there’s just a bunch of people there and you have this sort of transitory connection with them or being in like a tourist trap, like nobody’s sort of staying there and being there the whole time, getting to know people very well. Whereas a small town is more likely to be more dense ties because there’s only so many people and so you can all kind of get to know each other.

The same as a relatively closed community, like a high school or an elementary school, which is, especially if it’s fairly small, all the students might sort of recognize each other and have multiple ways of getting to know each other. So, if everybody’s weak ties, then there’s never any one thing that sort of catches on in trends because it’s just like you’re not in contact with each other enough to actually influence each other. If everybody’s strong ties, there’s just one thing that stays popular the whole time.

But if you have this mix of strong and weak ties, so let’s say I hear a new form from someone who I know is a weak tie, and then maybe I hear the same new form from someone else that I know is a weak tie, and I say, oh yeah, maybe I’m going to start using this, and then it can spread to my strong ties relatively easily, but I got it from my weaker ties. Or conversely, maybe I get something from one of my strong ties, but they got it from a weak tie. So, you have this sort of additional source of chaos. You know, a stranger comes to town, brings in the exciting words from, you know, the next village over kind of thing.

Brynn: What does gender have to do with that? Like, what do we know especially about younger girls and language development?

Gretchen: So, the traditional finding in sociolinguistics is that young women are on the vanguard of linguistic change and that, you know, this has been found over and over in a lot of studies. What we’re not quite sure about is why, and I think that in some places we could poke a little bit harder at what we mean by a network to try to get to some of that. So, another finding that seems to be found in social science is that women often have more friends on average than men, and so maybe this is more weak ties, more strong ties, more opportunities to find out what’s going on.

You know, other factors that women are still disproportionately child rearing, and so if you’re not spending time with children and you acquire a new form, but you don’t hang out with the next generation, it just doesn’t get passed on. So, it’s a bit of a dead end. So, there’s a variety of potential reasons, and I think that this is something that would really benefit from people doing a more fine-grained network analysis to figure out, like, maybe we could actually, maybe not all women have friends (laughs).

Brynn: We’re allowed to not have friends!

Gretchen: Victory for feminism! Maybe some men do have lots of friends. And so maybe if you did a more fine-grained network analysis, I don’t know anyone who’s done this study, but I’d love to hear about it if anyone does know it. If you did a more fine-grained analysis of like, do extroverts have, are they more likely to be on the, the vanguard of linguistics change, or people who list more friends when you ask them about their friends or something, more likely to be at the vanguard of linguistics change. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. And maybe gender has been this proxy variable for something else.

Brynn: That’s interesting, yeah.

Gretchen: Because like, I don’t feel like I trust a, I don’t feel like I want a biological explanation for this. I feel like it’s social. Probably a variable of something else, but we’d be very interested in trying to disentangle that in the same way that like age feels like it’s a proxy variable for like, are you at a consistent life stage?

The point at which age starts seeming a little bit less relevant to linguistic change is the point at which people stop doing exactly the same thing as all the other 17-year-olds. You know, if we had, if high school was five years longer or five years shorter, then we would probably find those things correlate with, you know, years in schooling, doing the same thing as other people your age, more than years in doing something else.

So yeah, like there’s a study on beer forums, but you could also do a study of like, like new parents end up learning a whole lot of words relating to, you know, all those different types of like, are you going to do sleep training? Are you going to do baby-led weaning?

Brynn: I just had some flashbacks to my own early days of parenting. And truly, when you join those forums, when you join those, especially online communities, your vocabulary shifts so fast and so hard.

Gretchen: And there’s these acronyms, like DD and DS, like darling daughter, darling son, DH, dear husband. And these have been around for like 20 plus years. These are not new acronyms. They’ve been documented to be old enough that I think some of the original like darling children could now become parents themselves. They’ve been around for a while, but they keep getting reinvented every few years because people become new parents in a cyclic fashion. And so, it’s got this kind of replacement aspect to it in terms of a population level.

But then you don’t stay in the forums once you like stop having young kids such that you’re really desperately looking for advice on how to get the baby to sleep.

Brynn: Exactly. It’s so interesting because you do. And just like any social group, I’m sure, all of that stuff comes in so fast. And it almost feels like within the span of a few weeks, a few months, your way of speaking, your way of writing, especially on these online forums, shifts so quickly to the point that you don’t really think about it all that hard, but it does. It makes a really big change.

And on that idea of shifting into writing, I’m not sure how old you are, but I’m an elder millennial, so I can vividly remember being a young teenager right at the advent of the internet as we know it today. And I remember the adults at that time absolutely freaking out about how we used abbreviations and slang online. And everyone seemed really concerned that my microgeneration’s language development was doomed because of this.

And something that you did in your book, which I loved, was explain how the era in which people came online or sort of joined these communities, if you will, makes a big difference to the type of language that they use when communicating online. So can you talk to us a little bit about that, about when we come online and the different eras of that?

Gretchen: There’s this wonderful paper by Crispin Thurlow, who’s not a linguist, I think he’s a sociologist or something in that field, analysing these sort of generational moral panics around how people talk about Internet language and kids using them. And the paper is analysing the sort of acronym era, which I also remember of like, oh no, the kids are going to only communicate in acronyms now. And there were all these hyperbolic media articles that were generally not citing examples of actual practice.

They were creating these constructive examples of acronyms that nobody ever used. Like they would include a sort of like a BTW or an LOL or something. And then they would invent all these sort of fanciful acronyms that no one had ever used for sort of useless purposes and just be like, this is what the kids are doing.

And I remember reading these and thinking, maybe I’m just not cool enough to know what these acronyms stand for. Actually, what they were was a moral panic and not this at all. And I saw this coming up again when it came to talking about emoji, which I think people have gotten a bit less moral panicky about now because, oh, look, we’ve had emoji for over 10 years and it’s been fine.

And the kids are still using words also. But there was this big sort of like, well, what if the kids are only going to communicate the little pictures and sort of all of the like adults –  there was this program on like American TV local news at some point where they were bringing up all of these random emoji. This one stands for drugs and none of them did was the thing. Like it was all like, you know, the hibiscus flower. And it’s like, no one’s ever used that.

Brynn: No one uses that.

Gretchen: No one uses that. And they included a couple of real examples of emoji that do have like a slang meaning, but they got the meanings wrong. Like it was just really some like middle-aged people in a boardroom making up what the teens do, or else some teens having a joke at the expense of adults, which I would not fault them for.

Brynn: Not at all. I applaud them.

Gretchen: Yeah, I applaud them for, you know, messing with some overly credulous adults. Just thinking about like, could we not be overly credulous about linguistic change?

I talked about five different groups of internet people, sort of waves of internet people. And I don’t think I can do them just as orally because it’s hard to summarize a list of five things. Everyone likes a list of three things. So please read this in the actual book.

Brynn: Yeah, please read the book.

Gretchen: But it’s been something that people keep contacting me about and saying like, I resonate with this because I’m like an old internet person, someone who was on the internet before it became mainstream or cool, or I am someone who joined the internet as part of that full mainstream wave, or I’m someone that’s like on the cusp between these two groups. Because of course some people are fall between the cracks of any particular group, but it’s useful to describe a few categories and let people sort themselves between them. Or someone who joined the internet after it was already super mainstream.

This is something that I think is kind of neat where people who joined the internet as part of that big mainstreamisation wave, and some of them joined with their friends and some of them joined sort of through their work, but they all were part of creating what the norms are for the internet and they all get so shocked by young people who don’t know how to write an email anymore, or young people who don’t know how to find file in a folder system. A lot of people have told me that their students don’t know how to find a file in a folder system because you don’t need to do it on a smartphone. And you used to need to know how to do things like that just to use a computer because computers used to be different.

I mean, in the early days of cars, in order to drive a car, you had to be like a mechanic because the cars would just stall so much and you had to know about your own carburettor and all of this sort of stuff. And these days, some people know how cars work but a lot of people can just drive a car and if the car goes wrong, they take it into a shop or they call roadside assistance or whatever, they just, someone else fixes it because the world has this fractal level of complexity and we don’t all have to know how every single complex system works. I don’t know, I just turned a light bulb on today and I don’t know actually properly how a light bulb works.

Right? And this is just how things happen. And when you abstract away certain levels of complexity, that makes it easier to do other things that used to be unimaginably complex because some of the other layers have gotten abstracted away. I don’t think it’s worth sort of doom and gloom about.

There has been, I remember a lot of hyperbole about the idea that some group of people somewhere, and it’s always like the teens, even though they’ve been saying this for 20 years and those teens are no longer teens, but they’re still the teens. But now it’s the current teens and they didn’t notice that this didn’t really happen for the other teens, that some group of kids was going to be so good at the internet and so good at technology that they were going to be quote unquote digital natives. No one was going to have to teach them anything because they were just going to learn it themselves.

Well, has this ever been true for any group of young people that they’ve just taught it themselves everything and they’ve had no need for mentorship? Absolutely not. There are certain skills that young people learn for sort of social reasons to communicate with each other.

And those skills might not need to be taught in schools the same way because they’re teaching each other certain types of skills. But if you want people to learn the kind of drier skills that are workplace related, somebody, whether it’s a parent or a teacher or like an internship counsellor or something, somebody is going to have to explain how to do this at some point because there’s a lot of things that workplaces want that you talking to your friends does not actually require.

Brynn: Exactly. And I do think that especially since I was a teenager and I can remember all of the grownups then saying, now you don’t even know how to look up like for a library book in the Dewey Decimal system, you don’t know how to go into those file cards or anything. And that became this point of the grownups saying like, look at the kids these days. But grownups have always been saying, look at the kids these days. And especially, especially in terms of language and the way that we talk.

Although I now have a bone to pick with Gen X and the Boomers, because one of my favourite chapters in your book is called the Typographical Tone of Voice. What is a typographical tone of voice? Why do Gen X and Boomers use so many ellipses when they type a message? And why do these ellipses scare me so much as an elder millennial?

Gretchen: The idea of typographical tone of voice is that aspects of the way that you type certain words can reflect how you’re intending that message to be read. So, whether it’s sort of slow or fast, loud or quiet, using a higher pitch or a lower pitch or sort of an increasing rising or falling pitch. And we have aspects of this in our conventional punctuation that’s used in things like edited books or long edited prose rather than social media posts.

You know, things like a question mark indicating a question mark intonation or an exclamation mark indicating that something is a bit louder and more excited perhaps. So, there are, or a period indicating the certain finality towards the end of a sentence. And so, this is sort of there in typography to some extent.

It’s there in punctuation and in capitalisation to a certain extent. Something that was apparent to people in the very early days of the Internet was that you could use things like all caps to indicate shouting. There was, well, so there was a period when all computers were entirely in all caps because memory was so expensive that there was no lowercase anywhere.

Shortly after that period, there was a period when suddenly now we have lower and uppercase, and people started using all caps to indicate shouting or emphasis or something being louder. And this one is pretty well known at this point. I think even most Boomers and so on are fairly aware that all caps indicate shouting.

Brynn: Hopefully.

Gretchen: Hopefully! But there was a period like 20 years ago when people weren’t aware, and there was all this sort of like, my boss types his emails in all caps, how do I explain to him that it’s like he’s shouting? Some of these sorts of things take off, and some of them don’t take off.

And there are, like, this has a level of, but this level of expressivity is important. I think that sometimes people compare modern day Internet writing to sort of the older eras of edited prose in books, which is a false comparison. We still have books, and books are actually, books now are actually quite a bit like books then, in terms of punctuation and capitalisation and sort of editorial trends and, like, spelling.

They haven’t changed that much, you know, Because Internet is written mostly in standard capitalization and punctuation except in a few places where I’m, like, preserving something from a quote or doing something for emphasis. What’s actually a better point of comparison is private and informal bits of writing that people did, like letters and postcards and diaries and even things like handwritten recipes or notes, you know, to-do lists that you sort of scribble by the phone. And a lot of these have similar features that we now think of as Internet features or text message features or social media features that used to be part of informal writing, but informal writing wasn’t very visible.

If you’re making, like, a sign on a telephone pole, you know, like, lost cat or, like, yard sale or something like this, like, that’s informal writing. People will sometimes post on social media, like, photos from, like, you know, a local shop or something where they’ve put up a sign that says, you know, we’ll be back in five minutes, this sort of handwritten sign. And these also sometimes have features that are like social media.

But a lot of these are handwritten. And so, in handwriting, if you want to convey emotion, you have resources like writing some letters bigger, literally bigger. You don’t have to read about font size, because you can just make them bigger on the page.

You can underline them. You can underline them a lot. This sort of makes more sense because you’re not just underlining something once to emphasise.

You can underline it like four or five times. And you can do things in other colours in a pretty easy way, because you just reach over for your other pen or for your crayon. Some of the archival scanned letters and so on that I was looking at for Because Internet that didn’t make it into the book had this gorgeous underlining like red crayon that’s really emphatic.

And people would draw little doodles in the margin sometimes because you have the whole page of paper, you have a pen, you can just put whatever you want on the page. In many ways, computers artificially constrained our abilities to do that kind of thing that we were already doing. If you are writing on your own website or in your own word document or whatever, yeah, you can change the fonts, you can change the colours, you can change the size of things.

But for a lot of early computers, you couldn’t necessarily do that in text-based chat type places. And even these days, a lot of social media sites really constrain what fonts you can use, what colours you can use, what size things can be, even whether you can put a link or not. These sites are constraining what people can do so that they’re aesthetically uniform.

But people keep wanting to express themselves. And so, we have to find other ways of doing that. And some of that is playing with the typographical resources we have already.

When I was writing Because Internet, this question of like, why do older people, and it’s not all older people, I want to specify, but why do some older people use these ellipses so much? What are they doing with that?

Brynn: What do they want us to think? What do they mean? Are they mad?

Gretchen: What do they mean? Are they passive aggressive? Yeah. This was one of the questions that I got the most from, especially sort of elder millennials and younger, that was asked of me when I was writing this. And so, I was like, I have to find the answer. What I did was start looking back at handwritten stuff.

What you find in older letters, and especially I was looking at postcards, because a postcard is sort of like an Instagram post, right? Like you have your picture on one side, and then you have your caption on the other side. A lot of older postcards that have been like scanned and digitized aren’t even that long.

And some of them, so there’s this book called Postcards from the Boys, which digitizes a whole bunch of postcards by the members of the Beatles. Three of the Beatles. You know, Paul McCartney, John Lenon, Ringo Starr, they all write in relatively standard ways.

But George Harrison writes with a lot of dot dot dots in his handwritten postcards. And when you, you know, he’ll write things like, you know, much love dot dot dot George and Olivia. And when you type that out, it looks like a text message from your aunt.

Brynn: It looks threatening is what it looks like!

Gretchen: This is the thing with expectations. Because the dot dot dot, one of its advantages is when we talk to each other, especially informally, we don’t talk in complete sentences. We have sort of sentence fragments. We have bits trailing off. We have this and this and this and this. And it’s very additive.

And if you look at a transcript of a podcast, it’ll be like, these people look so strange when they’re talking if it hasn’t been sort of edited into sentence form. But that’s just what all talk looks like. And formal writing has this sort of sentence-by-sentence structure.

But informal writing doesn’t necessarily have to do that. And so, when I asked older people, like I tried to ask them to reflect on their own usage, when I asked them why they would use the dot dot dot, they would say things like, well, it’s correct. The best I can get out of this is a dot dot dot doesn’t commit to whether the next statement is an entirely independent sentence, or whether it’s a clause that continues on from the next thing.

So, a period or a comma sort of commits to this is a full sentence, or this is only part of a sentence. But a dot dot dot, same with a dash, a lot of people also use a lot of dashes, can be used with either independent clauses or dependent clauses. And so, it splits the difference.

It means you don’t have to think about it in this informal writing. You can just do one of these things that doesn’t commit to this type of thing, especially when what you’re really worried about in your writing is what’s correct. And so, you’re trying to do something that doesn’t commit the error, quote unquote, of a comma splice.

So, you’re like, well, I’ll just use a dot dot dot because that’ll be fine. Because these types of punctuation don’t commit to whether or not it’s a full clause or not. And in something like a postcard, you don’t want to necessarily start a new line or something like that because you don’t have that much space. Like, space is at a premium. So, you need a relatively compact way of doing that. For younger people or for people who have been online longer and are more used to the conventions of informal writing in a digital space rather than a physical piece of paper.

So, in the digital space, a new line is free. It doesn’t take up more bytes than just a space. It’s the same amount of space.

So, a lot of people will use a line break or they’ll use a message break itself because you’ve got to send the text message and then send the next one. And the message itself is the break in between thoughts. And if you want to put a break in between them, you can use a new line in some context or you can just use like, here’s the next message break.

Those are relatively free these days. I mean, I remember the days when you were paying like 15 cents for a text message and you were really trying to cram as much as possible into them.

Brynn: Oh, I do too.

Gretchen: But these days, you know, you can send as many texts as you want for free and you can send them on, you know, chat programs and things like that. Or somewhere like Twitter or Facebook or something, you can put a couple different line breaks in to like separate a few ideas if you want to do them in the same post. So, everybody is searching for this sort of neutral way of just separating thoughts a bit that doesn’t commit to this is a full sentence, this isn’t a full sentence, sort of whatever.

And for younger people, that’s the line break or the message break. That means that the period and the dot, dot, dot are sort of free to take on other interpretations. Because if you were just doing the neutral thing, the unremarkable thing, you’d just be using a line break or a message break, goes the logic of this group.

And so, if you’re putting a dot, dot, dot, or even in some context like a single period where a period isn’t necessary because you’ve just sent a new message, then that can indicate a certain amount of weight or a certain amount of pause or a certain amount of something left unsaid. A period, you sort of, canonically if you’re reading a declarative sentence, can indicate a falling intonation. And that falling intonation can be something like the difference between thank you, which I’m reading with sort of exclamation mark, like polite, cheerful intonation, versus thank you, where you’re like, oh no, is this sarcastic? Is there something going wrong?

And so, this is what the periods and the exclamation marks are conveying if you have line breaks and message breaks as your default separator. If you don’t have line breaks and message breaks as your default separator, you’re getting these other ones as a default separator and you’re not interpreting any additional tone.

I don’t want to say that one of these ways is right or wrong or that one of these ways is good or bad. I think it’s useful for people to be aware that there are two ways for this to be interpreted in both directions. The thing that I encounter from people who use the dot dot dot there are lots of contexts in which people still use periods all over the place if you’re sending a multi-sentence message.

But if you’re sending just thanks period as a single message, thanks.

Brynn: Oh, that scares me!

Gretchen: But what I hear from this older group, sort of a surprise that anybody could be reading in that much information into what they’re saying. A surprise that this is even possible. And so, this is a group that’s still saying something that I encountered a lot when I was writing Because Internet that the internet and writing is fundamentally incapable of conveying tone of voice.

And for this younger group, they’re like, absolutely not. I am conveying a lot of tone of voice in writing. And occasionally you get confused, but you sometimes get confused face to face as well.

And this older group is saying, no, it’s fundamentally impossible. Therefore, no one should ever be inferring anything about tone of voice based on how someone’s punctuating something, because this is just not what I’m trying to do. And you do have some, this is why I talk about sort of five generations of internet people and I don’t use the sort of like, you know, demographic categories of millennials or boomers in the same way, because people who have been on the internet for a long time before it was mainstream also have this understanding of typographical tone of voice and of conveying tone in writing because they’ve been doing it for even longer.

And many of them, you know, well, if you were getting on the internet in like the early bulletin board systems of the 1980s, you’re not 20 right now because time has elapsed. You know, they were a whole bunch of ages at the time, but they’ve all aged up together and still have, like these are the people who gave us the smiley face, like, come on, they were really trying to make it capable, being capable of doing stuff like this.

That is such a good point that it circles back to this idea of how long have you been online? What has your experience of either handwriting or typing messages online been? Kind of how did you come up in that age?

And like you said, I think it’s not that any one way is right or wrong. And I’m sure that Gen Zed or Gen Z, you know, looks at our text messages and says, oh my God, I can’t believe that they type that way, you know, and it’s going to keep doing that, which is normal.

I’ve been informed that reaction gifts are such a millennial thing.

Brynn: I know, I have too (laughs).

Gretchen: GIFs are really interesting because they were in in like the 90s and they sort of fell out in the 2000s and they came back in like the 2010s. So maybe there’s like a gift drought in the 2020s and they’ll be back in like the 30s as retro cool again. You never know, right?

Brynn: That’s going to be our era is the 2030s. The resurgence of the GIF. Exactly.

And you and your Lingthusiasm co-host Lauren have so many amazing Lingthusiasm episodes. And I want to encourage everyone to go check out Lingthusiasm. But especially in episode 34, you talk about Because Internet, and you also talk about emoji and gesture and things like that.

Before we wrap up, can you tell us a bit more about Lingthusiasm and maybe some of your favourite topics that you’ve done and why people should go check it out and start listening?

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. So, Lauren Gawne is my co-host on Lingthusiasm, and she’s an Australian linguist who I got to know via the internet as one does. She’s a specialist in gestures. So, she was the one who sort of talked me through the idea that emoji are like gesture in terms of how we use them with other linguistic resources rather than doing a lot of gestures all by themselves.

And sort of, you know, if you do that, it’s more like a fun game like charades rather than this sort of fully fledged linguistic system, which is something we’re looking for in addition to the tone of voice. So that episode, we’re talking about emoji and gestures in episode 34. We also did an episode very recently about orality and literacy and understanding oral cultures.

In this, I read an academic book by Walter J. Ong called Orality and Literacy, which is a really interesting book. And it was published in 1982. And there are a few parts that don’t quite stand up, but a lot of it is really, really interesting as far as its observations go. And I wish that I’d read this book before writing Because Internet. So, here’s your sort of esprit de scalier of like what I wish I also been able to say.

He talks about how in oral cultures, one of your primary issues that you’re trying to solve is like generational memory and transmitting useful and cultural and relevant information across generations, whether this is things like genealogies or cultural histories, but also just as simple as things that are like useful aphorisms to know. And so information becomes repeated in an oral culture because it’s in some sort of memorable unit. So you have something like A Stitch in Time Saves Nine, which rhymes, or you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make a drink, which has this sort of beautiful couplet structure, or Red Sky at Night Sailor’s Delight, kind of, Red Sky in the Morning Sailors Take Warning, which sometimes people say Farmer’s Delight or something like that instead, or Shepherd’s Delight, depending on how bucolic versus marine your region is, but it keeps the rhythm and the rhyme of the structure there, so that you can pass along this type of folk wisdom, because everything has to pass mind to mind, and so if it’s not memorable, it doesn’t get passed on.

What this means is that in an oral culture, you’re really trying to remember and transmit these, in many cases, very fixed phrases or these fixed templates that have a limited degree of variation, but are still very, very memorable. Things like proverbs and fairy tales that always have three sisters or three brothers or three common rules of three, and they have certain types of stock figures, a princess and a dragon and a witch, and these types of stock figures that can combine and recombine and become very memorable units. What was interesting to me to contrast this with was the Internet has this meme culture of things that keep getting remixed and recreated.

The earliest stages of meme culture, you know, the LOL cats that people cite that are now like very much vintage memes were passing around the same images. People would keep reuploading the same images of cats, and there were a few that really reoccurred. These days, memes have become a lot more oral in some ways, because it’s a repetition of the same thing.

Memes have become so much less oral and more written, because when you see a new meme going around, you can go look it up on Know Your Meme, you can find out what the template is, you can see a bunch of examples, and then the goal is to create your own riff. People in some cases encounter like several derivatives, but like if I go on Twitter or somewhere like that, and I see like one kind of weird tweet, I’m like, oh, that’s weird. And then if I see two tweets that are weird in the same way, I’m like, oh, new meme just dropped.

People can create riffs so much easier and can adapt new bits of cultural information to remix so much easier when we have reference materials, which are fundamentally a written culture thing. So, this idea that you have a Know Your Meme entry or Wikipedia page or like a Vox explainer about here’s how this meme works, and here it is explained for people who don’t get it, that is such a written culture thing to do. In oral culture, if you weren’t there, you have to be told this story by someone and you get it altered in the retelling.

You don’t get to just scroll back a couple of hours later and experience all the jokes just in the same order and you get to, and you’re not doing as much in terms of like creating your own versions immediately. You’re doing the retelling of the existing stuff, the retelling of the best of the existing stuff. Newer versions happen much more slowly because you can’t just go consume and digest the entire previous body of work.

It’s sort of a slower way of information transmission because people have to be physically there to say it. Yeah, I wish I’d sort of had more of that literature foundation in what oral culture is and how the information transmission happens there because I think that a lot of people sort of blithely say that the Internet is an oral culture, which it’s really not. It’s so written.

It’s got so many written features. And what is actually the case is that its domains of the human experience that used to be primarily oral are happening more in writing now, which is different from saying that the Internet is oral. It is, in fact, informal language becoming much more written than it used to be.

It’s sort of a slower way of information transmission because people have to be physically there to say it. Yeah, I wish I’d sort of had more of that literature foundation in what oral culture is and how the information transmission happens there because I think that a lot of people sort of blithely say that the Internet is an oral culture, which it’s really not. It’s so written.

It’s got so many written features. And what is actually the case is that its domains of the human experience that used to be primarily oral are happening more in writing now, which is different from saying that the Internet is oral. It is, in fact, informal language becoming much more written than it used to be.

Brynn: That’s so cool. But also, I look forward to your next book where you do get to incorporate all of those things.

Gretchen: Well, it’s not going to be Because Internet 2.0! I was joking for a while that maybe my second book would have to be called Despite Internet, how I wrote a book despite being distracted online.

Brynn: Yes, please. I would read that. Gretchen, thank you so much for your time today and thank you for chatting with me.

And there is so much of Because Internet that we didn’t cover today, like the rise of Emoji. We talked a little bit about meme culture, but also you have a whole section about the history of email etiquette. So, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to read the book and also be sure to subscribe to the Lingthusiasm podcast.

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me.

Brynn: Yeah, and if you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move podcast, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time!

Video available at Faculti: https://faculti.net/like-the-fish-not-in-water/

Editor’s note: Despite its diversity, Australia continues to be imagined as a White nation. In this post, which is also available as a 20-minute video, Donna Butorac explains how this idealized image of the White nation shapes the settlement trajectories of women migrants from Asia and Europe in different ways.

Teaching in Australia’s Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP)

I did research on language learning and identity among people who were studying in the Australian Adult Migrant English Program (we call it the AMEP for short), where I taught for 9 years. This is a federally funded and administered settlement English program that provides subsidised language classes for new migrants who have Beginner to Intermediate levels of English proficiency on arrival. The program is delivered by organisations that successfully bid for fixed-term contracts through a competitive tendering process, and historically it has most often been delivered by state-based post-secondary colleges of further education. However, during the time I was working at the AMEP we saw a successful move into the space by profit-seeking private sector organisations.

At the AMEP I often taught classes that were mostly made up of women and I developed a curiosity about what it was like to be them – to be sitting in that class, learning English in this context. I wondered how it made them feel about themselves and how it impacted their relationships and their sense of the future, of who they were and who they felt they could be in the world. This led me to design a study that was about language learning, identity and gendered subjectivity in the context of migration. I wanted to find out how developing a voice in English might impact a woman’s sense of self, her aspirations and also her key family relationships. I also wanted to understand how the way she was being constructed in Australian society might impact her aspirational sense of self and to compare this with her socialisation in her primary languages and country of origin.

An AMEP classroom (Image credit: Immigration Department)

English teaching in the AMEP for the labour market

The AMEP has been around in Australia since the late 1940s but it has evolved quite a bit over that time. Successive governments, whether they are conservative or centre-left, have always tied inward migration to economic development goals but in the time that I was working at the AMEP in the early 2000s, we saw this connection being more overtly expressed within the framing of the contract terms and in the design of the language courses we delivered. It was also expressed by politicians in their media statements and in their presentations to AMEP teachers and researchers. For example, one government spokesperson told us that new arrivals who had come from difficult circumstances were “very marketable in the workplace” because of their “willingness to do jobs that many Australians reject” (Andrew Robb, 2006) and another federal minister described the role of immigration as a “job-matching agency for the nation”, because “as Australians take up the skilled work opportunities available, shortages of labour in the service and regionally based industries will become more and more acute” (Chris Evans, 2008).

So, the government was increasingly seeing the AMEP as leading new migrants from “the airport to the workplace” (as another politician put it in 2007) and this put pressure on the settlement English programs to adopt this outcome as a goal for English language development. Remember that they have to bid every few years for a new contract, so they closely examine government messaging for clues as to how best to frame their programs in the next contract round so they can beat out the competition.

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

2nd: Lena from Russia
Lena realized her white privilege from observing casual racism and selective incivility towards Asian people at her new tennis club in Australia.
2/n pic.twitter.com/BqiinZX2Nl

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 8, 2023

An example of how this translated into program change while I was conducting my study of new migrant women was that some of the curriculum and assessment content was reframed to focus on gaining skills needed for applying for a job, doing a job interview or communicating in the workplace, and there was a strong emphasis placed on helping migrants decide on their future study and employment goals. Each student had to meet with a vocational guidance officer when they arrived and set up a learning plan. This plan was updated by teachers and vocational guidance officers over the course of their time at the AMEP and the students all met with the vocational guidance officer again when they were exiting the program.

Learning a language, when it’s framed like this, becomes a commodity to attain in order to achieve economic settlement goals rather than a way of seeking knowledge and personal growth and a sense of belonging through developing a voice in a new language and culture.

And the way that the migrant language learner is positioned in this kind of context is as someone who is deficient in English, rather than as someone who is an emergent bilingual or multilingual.

But there is no place in all of this where the deficiencies of the society or of the labour market are ever problematised or discussed.

So, for example, racism in the Australian labour market, which has been well attested in the research literature, is never discussed and new migrants are not given strategies for how to counter this. What is also not discussed is that Australia still has a persistent monolingual mindset, in spite of there being hundreds of languages spoken in the community. In this kind of context, people may be judged only for their proficiency in English, rather than for their combined language capital. But in the settlement English program, language learners are led to believe that if they develop English proficiency, they will be able to achieve their social and economic settlement goals. When they struggle to realise these goals even after they have achieved a good level of functional English, and this was the case for some of the women in my project, they may naturally assume that the failing is theirs, and that their English is not good enough, when it might actually be a failing of a prejudiced English monolingual labour market or an unwillingness of employers to adequately acknowledge the skills and qualifications that the person brings with them.

Doing a sociolinguistic ethnography in the AMEP

To realise my research goals, I carried out an ethnographic study of 9 women who had recently migrated from a range of countries and who were studying in an Intermediate level class in the AMEP. I wanted to research with them over an extended period during the early phase of their post-migration settlement because I wanted to find out if the development of their voice in English actually made changes in the way they saw themselves and their aspirations. There had been other interview studies done on language learning and identity following migration, but these had more often been a retrospective reflection on the process. I wanted to try to capture this as it was being experienced.

I used qualitative methods of inquiry and data collection and this included two semi-structured personal interviews with each woman at the beginning and end of a 22-month data collection period, and I held a series of focus groups in the first year of the project; I also gave them an essay task at the beginning and end of the data collection period, in which I asked them to write about their aspirations for the future. In the final interview, I gave each woman the same broad prompts I had given them in the first interview because I was curious to know if their ideas had changed over the intervening period, perhaps as a result of changes in their sense of self from learning and using English. I also asked them to keep an email journal of their experience of learning and using English and how they felt about their lives. Because they were emergent users of English, I had thought that they might find it easier to write in English than to speak it; however, I was proven very wrong because for the most part they didn’t really engage with the journal task but seemed happy to talk to me and to each other! So, I ended up covering this topic in a third personal interview that I set up in the middle of the data collection period.

What emerged from the first stage analysis of the raw data was that the impact of language learning on identity could be usefully organised into three domains where the self is both constructed and performed – the self in key family relationships, the self in wider social interactions, and the self in work. I analysed each of these domains to identify sub-themes related to language, race and gender that emerged from across the data set. I was exploring identity and language learning, but this was also a way in to understanding what it’s like to be someone who has undertaken transnational migration involving language change and who is trying to find inclusion and belonging in a new society.

Migrant trajectories to social inclusion

Michiko from Japan cultivated a unique English language learning and practice strategy: she set up stalls at flea markets. In addition to interaction opportunities, she also gained insights into everyday life in Australia, including casual racism …
13/n pic.twitter.com/HOlZy9HJHI

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 22, 2023

Social inclusion is a term that has been in use since the 1990s to convey ideas about the goal of creating pathways for economically marginalised people to achieve greater participation in society through employment. It is also used to refer to the inclusion of people from diverse cultures and languages within the mainstream in multiethnic societies. We might think of people who have migrated to a new society as being on trajectories of belonging and inclusion, where they might be on the social edges when they arrive, especially when the dominant language is not one they use well, but eventually the idea is that they will gain acceptance and inclusion and a sense of belonging within the mainstream of that society, in part through developing better competence in a dominant language.

What studies like mine have found is that this trajectory towards social inclusion is not always straightforward or complete for many migrants, often due to things a person may have little control over, like the way their race or their gender is viewed, or the way their language proficiency is judged, as a result of ideologies and prejudices within the receiving society.

Experiences of everyday racism shape pathways to inclusion

In my study I didn’t actually set out to explore race and prejudice but to explore the way a woman’s sense of self was being impacted by language learning in this cultural context; however, as I listened to the experiences of the women who participated in the study, both in interview and in conversation with each other, I realised that race was something I needed to discuss because it was a determiner of differences in the experiences and imaginings of inclusion and belonging that the women were reporting. For example, the women from European countries all expressed the realisation that they were just like everyone else because it seemed to them that most people in Australia came from families that had at some point in their history migrated from somewhere else.

These women felt despondent in the early settlement period about their English proficiency and how hard it was to communicate with others, but they could easily imagine becoming a part of the mainstream as their English improved. This kind of trajectory is normalised in the history of European migration to Australia and in the lives of the people they interacted with. So, the European women communicated a sense of optimism about their trajectories of inclusion and belonging in Australia. In contrast, the Asian women in the study did not express this kind of optimism about their settlement trajectories and they talked about the everyday racism that they and people they knew experienced, as well as what it was like trying to gain meaningful employment.

In the focus group discussions, some of the Asian women expressed the feeling that they might never achieve settlement success and might end up leaving Australia to have a better career. This really surprised the European women, who would say things like “But your English is really good; I don’t understand why you feel so hopeless about your future”.

Actually, one of the Asian women did end up going offshore, soon after the project ended, because she was offered a job with a global company that valued both of her languages, instead of just her English. In Australia, where only her English proficiency was being judged, she had constantly been rebuffed in the labour market and told that she needed to brush up on her English, which was functionally very good and certainly adequate to the jobs she was applying for. But offshore, she was being judged for her entire language capital, which included Japanese and English, and she was seen as a ‘fantastic bilingual’ as she described it.

When a migrant’s full language capital is being considered, as was the case with another Asian woman in the study, the employment outcome was quite different. This woman had migrated from China and she had a similar English proficiency to the woman I have just described, but when she began exploring professional employment opportunities she was immediately successful because the first company that interviewed her for a legal role was trying to build their client list in China and so they saw her as a bilingual, bi-cultural asset to the team instead of someone who was deficient in English. Actually, in the entire hiring process they never once commented on or asked about her English proficiency.

Tina from China already had two law degrees and experience as a corporate lawyer when she arrived in Australia, but she could only get work as a paralegal because her degrees were not recognized.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 20, 2023

Another finding from the study related to how new migrants might feel socially excluded by the language practices of locals. Some of the women in my study reported that in social situations with locals, for example at Church or with fellow students in post-secondary courses, locals in the group would speak in rapid colloquial English, using lots of idiomatic expressions, or they would speak to everyone else but never make eye contact with the women or speak to them. This practice made the women feel invisible, and it’s a fairly overt micro-aggression that excludes newcomers. Actually, this kind of experience was only reported by the Asian women in my study. But it seemed some of the European women were listening because towards the end of the project one of them told me in her final interview that she remembered what the Asian women had said about being made to feel invisible by locals and although she had never experienced this herself, she witnessed it with some Asian members of her tennis club that she played social games with. She had reflected on all this and she expressed a sense of her white privilege when she said to me “it’s nice to be beautiful white woman”.

Aside from these findings on race, there were really interesting findings on negotiating language use in key family relationships, and on how some women felt that they could express a different, more confident self in English than they could in their primary language.

Language learning and finding work

There are a number of conclusions related to language and race that come out of my study. For example, the way language proficiency is framed in the labour market impacts how successful new migrants are in achieving settlement goals through meaningful employment. As I’ve suggested, the Australian labour market is predominantly English monolingual, and this usually means that a migrant’s full language capital is not often considered when they are looking for work. However, in the few instances when their full language capital is being considered, this has the potential to greatly improve the settlement trajectory of new migrants and also to allow the economy to benefit from better utilising the qualifications and skills that migrants bring. It’s ironic really, because skilled migration is desired for Australia’s continued economic development and it makes up the largest proportion of the country’s annual migration intake, yet many people who come under that scheme struggle to find meaningful work in the fields they are qualified for, in part because of the way that ideologies about language and attitudes to race impact hiring practices.

One of the implications of these findings is that they can be used to develop the way that English language learning is framed within the settlement English program. In my experience, language learning was framed as the development of a kind of ideology-free, bounded lexico-grammatical system, and learners were encouraged to believe that developing proficiency in English was the key to social and economic inclusion.

Studies like mine have shown that this is not necessarily the case and their findings suggest that instead of framing learners as deficient speakers of English, we should be seeing them as emergent bi- or multilinguals, and we should be problematising interactions they have in the wider society and using an evidence-based approach to better inform language learners in the settlement English program about what to expect when they are looking for employment, and then we should be advising them on strategies for managing their entry into these important spaces of belonging and inclusion. Without this kind of approach, many new migrants end up blaming themselves for their lack of settlement success and the society as a whole denies itself the valuable contributions that could be made by its newest members.

Life in a New Language

Maria, a Chinese Brazilian, came to Australia via Japan. A savvy business woman and devout Christian, she told us she needed "many faces" to successfully navigate interactions, and foreground or background her multiple identities according to context
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 13, 2023

Many of the findings of my study are included in a forthcoming co-authored book from Oxford University Press called Life in a New Language. It’s a collaboration that sees data from six existing ethnographic studies of language learning and migration in Australia combined into a single large data set with over 100 participants. Sociolinguistic ethnography usually involves small data sets and rich data, but it is often considered to lack generalizability and rarely makes an impact outside specialist circles because it is widely dismissed as “anecdotal.” This book project marries depth with scale by combining and re-analysing data sets from these existing small-scale longitudinal ethnographic studies with the objective of making convincing conclusions about language learning and social inclusion, based on the premise that a larger qualitative data set increases the scope for generalisability. It represents something of an innovation in linguistic ethnography, as an after-the-fact multisite ethnographic study.

Life in a New Language will be published in June – watch this space for updates!

References

Butorac, D. (2011). Imagined Identity, Remembered Self: Settlement Language Learning and the Negotiation of Gendered Subjectivity (PhD). Macquarie University, Sydney. Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DButorac_PhD.pdf
Butorac, D. (2014). ‘Like the fish not in water’: How language and race mediate the social and economic inclusion of women migrants to Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 37(3), 234-248.
Piller, I., Bodis, A., Butorac, D., Cho, J., Cramer, R., Farrell, E., . . . Quick, B. (2023). Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into ‘Migration, Pathway to Nation Building’. Canberra: Parliament of Australia. Retrieved from https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8c0d9316-2281-4594-9c7b-079652683f54&subId=735264
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Tetteh, V. W. (2023). Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/scholarly-sisterhood-collaboration-is-our-academic-superpower/
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Williams Tetteh, V. (in press, 2024). Life in a new language. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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

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

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

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

Gender hierarchies parallel linguistic hierarchies

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

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

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

English on top

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

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

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

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

Language hierarchies in education-scapes

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

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

Looking at multilingual signage with new eyes

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

*** 

The Hani are one of the officially recognized ethnic minorities in China, and can also be found across the border in Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. Like other ethnic minorities in China, Hani people need to become bilingual in Putonghua proficiency for educational and social mobility. At the same time, ethnic minority languages are increasingly valorized in tourism and for China’s soft power project in its borderlands. Even so, the linguistic and social experiences of China’s minority speakers remain poorly understood. How do their linguistic proficiencies and life trajectories intersect? What are the affordances and constraints of using the minority language, the national language Chinese, and the global language English? Here, we examine the experiences of three Chinese Hani women from three different generations to explore these questions.

Hani folksongs bring comfort to older generation facing poverty and hardship

Hani woman singing Haba while weaving

Haba is a Hani folksong genre that was included by UNESCO in the world intangible cultural heritage in 2013. Official reports describe Haba as a men’s tradition. It is commonly assumed that only Hani men may sing Haba and win the respect and reputation it brings. This is not entirely true, as our research has found. Hani women sing Haba, too, as a daily practice of self-comfort. However, they do so without an audience. This may be particularly true of poor older Hani women without formal education.

Let’s consider the example of the Haba singing of Fang (a pseudonym). Fang is the aunt of the second author, Yongzhen. Yongzhen often hears her aunt singing Haba in private spaces. Fang’s Haba singing is full of lament and sorrow featuring narratives of the hardships and misfortunes of her life.

Born in 1966, as the oldest daughter in her poverty-stricken family, Fang’s life has been overshadowed by the pressure to bear a son. As a child, she did not have a chance to receive any formal education and so she remains monolingual in Hani and illiterate. At the age of 16, she was forced to marry a man who she had never met and who lived in an even more remote village. Shortly after, she gave birth to her first daughter. Over the next 20 years, she bore 13 daughters before the desired son was born when she was 40 years old.

Today, that son is her only surviving child, and Fang suffers from poor physical and mental health. Singing Haba is a way for her to digest her bitterness, to reduce her sorrow, and to comfort herself, as in this song (our translation):

I married you because I used to think that you would treat me well and live with me.
Now you don’t care for me and don’t even bother to talk to me.
However, I have delivered these children for you in your home.
How come you don’t talk to me properly?
I plant the land on my own.
Our children are born, and the land is planted.
I gave birth to our children. I don’ t want to leave them or abandon them.
The land is planted. I don’t want to leave it.
You often beat me, hit me with your fists and kick me with your legs.
I don’t want to stay here any longer.
I don’t want to eat at all. Neither do I want to drink.
I can only worry, about these children, this land.
I choose to endure the sufferings and stay.
But still you don’t treat me well, don’t talk to me properly.
In this house, I want to cry every time I pick my bowl and take my chopsticks.
This is not my home, but the home of others, your home.
I eat two meals a day, yet my belly is still empty.
The water I drink is never gulped down.
The threshold of this house is like a python by the river, lying in my way.
I dare not take a step in.
I don’t want to stay any longer.
I don’t want to eat another meal here.
A day here feels as long as a life time.
But I don’t want to abandon these children here and leave them once and for all.
I have no idea why you don’t care for me.
I can’t make up my mind just to leave.
My desire to leave has led my feet two steps forward.
But I still can’t leave.
But then you don’t care for me at all.
My desire to leave has taken three steps away from this home.
But I still can’t leave.
The dog never changes its heart to stay and guard the home.
It is the same with me and my children.
The deer in the wild does not wish to stay, either.
Upon consideration, I also decide to hold back and stay.

Hani becomes glamorous

In contrast to Fang’s mournful Haba, which can only be found in personal and private spaces, Hani pop music has been promoted by government institutions to enhance local tourism. Hani pop music is bouncy, joyful, and optimistic, and the famous Hani singer Mixian (米线) is one of its most famous exponents.

Mixian was also born into a poor Hani farming family in 1983. Her educational opportunities were slightly better than those of Fang and she received a primary education but had to stop school because her parents need her help with farm work (China’s nine-year-compulsory education was not implemented nationwide until 2001).

Like Fang, Mixian’s life was also transformed at the age of 16. However, in her case, she did not have to leave her family for marriage but for work, when she moved to a tourist-centered city and became a waitress. Soon, she combined waitressing with singing for tourists. During one of her restaurant performances, Mixian was discovered by Beijing Dazang Record Company.

Since then, Mixian’s has become a national celebrity. She has released several popular albums, which brought her much profit and fame. One of her most popular songs is “My Hani (Honey) Baby”, which is performed in three languages and combines ethnic and global elements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h8PXgZUdec

The song “My Hani Baby” distinguishes itself from other Chinese pop songs through the use of Hani language, English, and Putonghua, and the integration of ethnic and modern music styles. Although there are four singers who all identify themselves as ethnic minorities (Hani, Wa, Hui, and Yao), only Hani language appears in the text and is performed by Mixian. Mixian thus becomes a symbol of local ethnic identity while the three male singers perform the cool aspect of modernity by switching between English and Putonghua.

The theme of the song is one frequently found in pop music: romantic love. What is challenged is the traditional identity imposed upon Hani women who are not expected to marry for love, as exemplified in Fang’s story. The lyrics form a dialogue between Mixian and the three male singers, where the female character boldly expresses her romantic love, and the male character reciprocates.

Choosing the romantic theme and combining the ethnic language (Hani) with modern languages (English and Putonghua) have served to increase the popularity of this song. Whether it contributes to the emancipation of Hani women is another matter.

It is also worth noting that the commodification of the Hani language apparent in this successful pop song has not only helped Mixian establish her reputation but has also drawn public attention to the Hani language in China and beyond. One Chinese netizen liked “Hani Baby” so much that he started to learn the Hani language by searching for relevant materials and posting Hani scripts online. His posts in turn have become a learning resource for Hani people to acquire Hani literacy.

A new generation of educated multilingual Hani women

Yongzhen is both the second author and the third Hani woman we will now turn to. Born in 1999, receiving a 9-year-compulsory education was normal for Yongzhen, as it is for women of her generation from all over China. Her childhood was also shaped by rural poverty but in a way that is very different from previous generations. Like hundreds of millions of rural people from China’s underdeveloped western regions migrate, both her parents migrated to work in factories in Zhejiang and Guangdong.

Yongzhen introducing her bilingual translation project to university professors

As a result, Yongzhen became a left-behind child at an early age and was raised in a boarding school. Yongzhen distinguished herself by excelling in school and pursued her university dream. Her parents’ migration and labor experiences in developed cities were crucial in forming her ambition to pursue higher education and her parents have been unconditionally supportive of Yongzhen’s ambition.

Choosing English as her major was mainly driven by her parents’ aspiration to get a stable job working as an English teacher in the future. Now that she has been exposed to the Course of Language and Society with a particular focus on linguistic diversity, Yongzhen is motivated to become a new broker for Hani language and cultural heritage.

New Hani voices

When the Covid-19 pandemic was still prevalent last year, Yongzhen organized a team with three other ethnic minority female students to conduct a small project in their communities. They investigated how ethnic minority people in their hometowns might understand Putonghua-mediated public health information. Their findings are very similar to others conducted in minority-centered regions in China and featured in the Language on the Move Covid-19 archives.

Based on their research, Yongzhen and her teammates designed a bilingual app inspired by the national emergency language services. Their bilingual translation product has been recommended by the College of Foreign Languages at Yunnan University to participate in the national project targeting Chinese university students’ innovation and entrepreneurship.

Through the multilingual translation project, Yongzhen and her teammates developed their empathy towards their ethnic minority communities and learned of the importance of providing language service to linguistically diverse populations. Additionally, the have felt it their duty to become a voice for their peoples, especially ethnic minority women.

While writing up this study and having access to knowledge about linguistic diversity via Dr Li Jia’s course and the learning materials on Language on the Move, Yongzhen has come to understand how her aunt and other female Haba singers have been linguistically, economically, and culturally marginalized, and how the official and commercial discourses about the Hani people only reveal a partial truth while sometimes simultaneously erasing minority voices. As a multilingual and educated Hani woman, Yongzhen has developed a new faith devoting herself to the sociolinguistics of gendered trajectories of Chinese ethnic minority women for equal social participation.

In fact, it is a key feature of cancel culture that “to cancel” someone increases their notoriety. As a rule, their name and (mis)deeds gain more publicity; and whether there is such a thing as bad publicity continues to be an open question.

Contrast contemporary “cancel culture” with deeply entrenched long-standing cultural practices that systematically erase some people from the collective memory.

Because it is International Women’s Day, this blog post is dedicated to cancelled women.

What was the maiden name of your great-grandmother?

Do you know the birth names of your four great grandmothers? Chances are that you do not. In most European societies, women have traditionally taken their husband’s name on marriage. Many still do. Even in societies where women do not change their name when they marry, the father’s family name is usually bestowed on the children.

As a result, many people in western societies can trace their paternal ancestries back a couple of generations – simply through the surname. By contrast, maternal lines are quickly forgotten.

I don’t know the birth name of my great-grandmother (left) although the mitochondrial DNA in my body is 100% identical to hers (ca. 1914)

Only few people even know the birth names of their great-grandmothers.

Consider how incredibly strange the absence of that knowledge is! We share an eights of our DNA with each of these four women. If you are a woman yourself, your mitochondrial DNA, which is transferred unaltered from mother to daughter, is 100% identical to one of these four women. So, biologically, great-grandmothers are incredibly close. Yet, few of us stop to consider why we know next to nothing about these women and why even their birth names elude us.

Naming practices are a form of entrenched cancel culture that erase women from the genealogical record.

Did you know that James Douglas left something in your lady parts?

Let me restate the previous section: few women know the names of the mothers with who they share an identical mitochondrial DNA for more than two generations back.

While you grieve for those cancelled women, consider this: in medical terminology, one of your lady parts carries the name of a Scottish man from the 18^th century.

There is a cavity between the uterus and the bowel, which is commonly referred to as “Pouch of Douglas” in English. And the term has been adopted into most other languages. In Arabic, it is called “radabat dughlas”, in French “cul-de-sac de Douglas”, in German “Douglas-Raum”, in Japanese “dagurasu”, in Polish “zatoka douglasa”, or “fondo de saco de Douglas” in Spanish.

How did this name come about? Medicinenet.com has the answer: “the Scottish anatomist James Douglas (1675-1742) […] explored this region of the female body and left his name attached to at least 3 other structural features in the area.”

I feel enraged and grossed out no matter how often I read this explanation.

“Pouch of Douglas”

Douglas certainly made sure he would not get cancelled easily.

Maybe that was because he was part of a generation of men who cancelled a whole class of women and their knowledge: midwives.

Douglas worked at a time when the practice of medicine started to become a scientific discipline. In the process, medicine expanded its remit. Beyond diseases, pregnancy and childbirth also came under its purview. Douglas is usually hailed as one of the first anatomists to specialize in female reproductive organs.

That is only true, of course, if you discount any knowledge not derived through the scientific process. Midwives had had solid knowledge of female anatomy and the processes of pregnancy and childbirth for centuries.

Today, practitioners supporting women through pregnancy and childbirth come in two classes: midwives at the lower end of the professional hierarchy and gynecologists and obstetricians at the upper end. Most of the former are women, most of the latter are men.

So, after our cancelled mothers, let’s remember our cancelled midwives.

Women even get cancelled in favor of a necktie

Before you consider writing in that women have long stopped accepting their collective cancellation and that things are different today, do not bother. I am well aware that we have come a long way. I am also well aware that we still have a long way to go.

Coaster set of famous Croatians

The cancellation of women in matters big and small is a deeply entrenched and ongoing aspect of our culture. I am reminded of that daily by a set of coasters I have in my house. I received these as a gift in 2019.

The set of six coasters celebrate famous Croatians: there is Ivan Vučetić, Faust Vrančić, Eduard Slavoljub Penkala, Ruđer Bošković, and Nikola Tesla.

That is five men (that the concept of nationality did not really apply during their lifetime and that their status as “Croatian” may be debatable is a matter for another time).

Coasters customarily come in sets of six. Who do you think got the sixth slot?

Cvijeta Zuzorić maybe, who ran an influential Renaissance salon and wrote poetry in three languages? Or Paula Preradović, the composer of the Austrian national anthem? Or Savka Dabčević-Kučar, who in the 1960s became one of the world’s first female prime ministers?

Well, no – after five famous Croatian men, the sixth slot went to the famous Croatian necktie.

So, there you have it – even in this day and age, the achievements of women get cancelled in favor of some random object of men’s clothing.

Remembering cancelled women

My elegy for cancelled women could go on and on, and some other time I will write about the cancelled women of linguistics.

Today, just remember this: cultural processes do not rest on individual occurrences but on systematic patterns.

We certainly live in a cancel culture – but not because Dr Seuss did not get mentioned in a speech. We live in a cancel culture because whole groups of people are systematically erased from the historical record, from common knowledge, and from our societal consciousness.

Related Content

• Female academics and shamans face the same glass ceiling
• Why are there so few notable academic women?
• Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• Where does academic authority come from?
• Strange academic women
• What would you do?

Image credit: Alexander Dummer via Unsplash

In the current crisis, when schools and childcare centres may be closed for long periods, many families have to make choices about work and childcare in new ways. In many households, mothers are finding that the burden of working and looking after children falls to them, while their husbands’ job, with its higher wage and lower flexibility, comes first. One writer has suggested that for women in the West, the pandemic has sent them back into the 1950s, when married women did not work outside the home.

This is not news to those of us looking at issues connected with women, work and the unpaid labour of childcare and the domestic sphere. In my work, I look at minority language transmission, through the lens of family language work, building on Toshie Okita’s book Invisible Work: Bilingualism, language choice and childrearing in intermarried families.

I started thinking about this topic while working as an English language teacher in Sydney in 2008. A student sought my advice on what language she should speak to her daughter. Her English-speaking husband wanted her to switch from speaking Thai to English, which she had been speaking to her daughter since birth. She wanted some “expert” advice to negotiate with her husband about the family’s language policy; I told her she was right to speak her language and she seemed happy with that.

But the episode stayed with me. Who wouldn’t want their child to grow up with two languages? And why would the husband ask his wife to stop speaking her strongest language to their child?

My resulting doctoral research draws on interviews with participants in 30 linguistically intermarried couples. Questions of what to do about children and language came up often. For mothers in particular, these questions were linked to a sense of primary responsibility for the child’s language development. Even, surprisingly, when they did not speak a second language themselves.

“And I never asked them to do it, it happened naturally”

In her book, Okita pointed out that many of the British husbands of Japanese migrant wives felt it was natural that their wives spoke to the children in Japanese, especially when their English was less proficient. The migrant mothers I spoke to in my research were highly accomplished multilinguals, which seemed to make the language choice both less clear-cut and more fraught. In fact, the majority of families reported that their kids were not actively bilingual. This was a source of great regret for those parents whose children could not effectively speak to family and friends in the first language of the migrant parent.

One exception was the family of Lucia and Marc, who had a sense of great pride that the kids spoke Spanish with each other, and not just with their Spanish-speaking mum:

And I never asked them to do it, it happened naturally and they always talk to each other in Spanish, of course they mix English words when they don’t have them, when they don’t have the Spanish word they, you know, insert the English word, but you know all the structure and the communication’s in Spanish. […] (Lucia)

Unlike many couples I spoke to, Lucia and Marc, were hopeful and positive about the idea of raising their kids with two languages. Perhaps Lucia’s positive attitude towards language mixing through language contact played a part in their approach. Related to this is the fact that Lucia, herself an English/Spanish bilingual from a young age, felt equipped for and was prepared to do the work of speaking Spanish to the children. For other migrant mums, working and integrating into a new country was enough to make the job of bilingual childrearing an ongoing and often insurmountable challenge.

All his friends said “oh my god, you’re not, your children aren’t speaking Polish”

The situation was different again for the English-speaking background mothers I interviewed, who were either monolingual or had become bilingual later in life, often without much formal education in the language. Despite this, they felt responsible for the presence (or absence) of the other language in their children’s lives.

They spoke about mothers-in-law sending books from overseas; about enrolling kids in language classes; about listening to music and watching television in other languages; and about the pressure they felt for their kids to be bilingual, as in this example from Michelle:

All his friends said “oh my god, you’re not, your children aren’t speaking Polish” and I would just say to them “that’s the whole, that’s why it’s called mother tongue, you generally, as a kid you generally spend more time with your mother” and so you know, um, I think that’s it.

Michelle argues against the pressure to raise her children bilingually by subscribing to a mother tongue ideology. Her mother tongue is English and so she feels she has done her duty. Other mothers talked about how they saw their role as encouraging their husbands to speak the language with the children, such as Megan:

My husband, he’s more than happy to read them books in Hindi but I have to be the instigator of everything (laughs). “Why don’t you sing them a song in Hindi? Why don’t you read them a book in Hindi?” (Megan)

This is similar to the findings of Piller and Gerber’s (2018) study of how parents conceptualised their children’s bilingualism in an online parenting forum. They found that English-speaking background mothers were the main contributors to the forum, and that their multilingual partners were often represented as failing in their duty to speak their language to the couple’s children.

This was echoed by the mothers in my research who, whether they had proficiency in the language or not, positioned their role in their children’s language education as a primary one. In contrast, many English-speaking background husbands saw their role as marginal, as supporting their bilingual wives’ efforts by sometimes just permitting the language in the home and tolerating the fact that this often left them excluded from conversations. They saw their wives, as speakers of the language, as the primary decision-makers around language choice in the home:

Hey look, I’m happy to help. If you’re trying to teach the baby something or talking to it in Serbian, teach me a couple of phrases like, “put that down, don’t do that […]”. (Jonathon)

In these examples, mothers are positioned as the parent who makes bilingualism in the home happen. This is not to say that fathers did not value bilingualism for their children, in fact almost all participants of the study were generally positive about bilingual childrearing. It just meant that they did not hold themselves as primarily responsible for it, even when the wives did not actually feel equipped to pass on the language. Thus, I argue that gender trumps language when it comes to bilingual childrearing.

Over the past thirty years there has been a welcome social shift in many places towards supporting families to pass on their indigenous or migrant languages in our transnational, globalised world. To better support families, researchers need to start paying attention to how social roles, such as motherhood, determine and shape family language policy experiences in very significant ways.

*This blogpost is based on chapter 5 of my new book on this and other topics to do with language in couples and families: Linguistic intermarriage in Australia: Between pride and shame, published by Palgrave Macmillan and available as an e-book and print edition.

References

Okita, T. (2002). Invisible work: Bilingualism, language choice, and childrearing in intermarried families. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227
Torsh, H. (2020). Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Muslim women praying in a Minquan mosque

While everyone knows that China is now the second largest economy in the world, few people realize that there are still over five million people living in poverty in the country. The majority of China’s poor live in its multilingual and multicultural peripheral regions.

Therefore, as part of its efforts to eradicate poverty, the Chinese government has implemented the nationwide project to promote Putonghua as a form of linguistic capital. This promotion of Putonghua – along with widespread English language learning – from above has been widely discussed and researched by Chinese sociolinguists (see, for instance, these PhD theses available right here on Language on the Move: Grey, 2017, Li, 2017, Yang, 2013, Zhang, 2011).

However, what seems to have been largely overlooked is language learning of other languages from below and the empowerment it can bring, as I learned in my research into Arabic language learning in Minquan, a Muslim-centered and poverty-stricken region.

Socioeconomic and demographic features of Minquan

Located in the far east of Henan Province, central China, Minquan County has a population of 870,000. The vast majority of these are farmers. Because the ever more frequent droughts have rendered production of the main crops of maize, cotton, peanuts, and wheat unstable, an increasing number of young people are leaving Minquan for China’s big developed cities in search of better opportunities.

Education and literacy levels in Minquan are low in comparison with the rest of China and only two third of teenagers in Minquan continue their studies beyond compulsory junior high school education.

Another feature of Minquan is its sizable Hui ethnic minority, whose members are Muslim. In Minquan it is common for local people to exchange greetings in Arabic and for the women to wear colorful hijabs. Five times a day, the streets echo with the Muslim call to prayer chanted slowly and sonorously in Arabic over the audio systems of the local mosques.

Arabic as a way out for Minquan’s Muslim women

The Hui ethnic group do not have their own language but speak Chinese. However, in recent years, I have observed an increasing trend for local people to study Arabic, the holy language of Islam, not only for religious purposes but also for material profit. For my graduation research project at Yunnan University, I probed the Arabic language learning experiences of three Muslim women from Minquan. All three participants, two of whom are my relatives, were born and raised in Muslim families in Minquan. Their mother tongue is Chinese and they all started to study Arabic formally in their teens.

Their reasons for Arabic language study were initially due to their limited opportunities.

The youngest participant, Ma Lifang (all names are pseudonyms) is a 19-year-old high-school graduate, who has studied Arabic in a mosque since 2018. After failing the gaokao (the national university entrance exam), she followed an imam’s recommendation to learn Arabic in order to maintain her education and with an eye to a profitable future through Arabic as experienced by Ma Zhenyi (32) and Ma Xiangling (39).

Ma Zhenyi is an entrepreneur who now runs her own translation and interpreting company in Yiwu, the world largest wholesale market. Despite her excellent academic performance in junior high school and her desire to continue her studies, she was denied the opportunity of receiving a high school education because of her family’s poverty. The traditionally low expectations on Muslim women in her community also played a role. While she did not have the courage at age 15 to oppose her parents when it came to high school, she found a way to convince them to let her study Arabic in the mosque:

别人都一直说，都是建议让我跟爸爸妈妈讲（我想学），然后当时也没那么大的勇气。因为我姐姐她也想去学习，但是爸妈没同意，就没学成。我也没有那么大的勇气去说。后来越学越感兴趣，越学越感兴趣。然后，就鼓起勇气说。
Others kept telling me, suggesting that I should tell my parents (I want to study), but I didn’t have the courage. My older sister also meant to study, but my dad and mom refused and she could not. I just didn’t have the courage. Later Arabic interested me more and more, I had to be brave enough to tell them. (Interview with Ma Zhenyi)

Perhaps it was Ma Zhenyi’s talent in memorizing Arabic verses that contributed to her success; or the fact that her older sister could share the family’s financial burden so that Ma Zhenyi could have the chance of further study for a couple of years. Either way, while seeking her spiritual asylum in the holy language of Islam, Ma Zhenyi could continue to study and build her dream for the future.

Middle-Eastern buyer checking cargo with seller in Yiwu (Image credit: promotional video for Yiwu)

Her excellent performance together with her deep faith next launched her to another opportunity to continue her Islamic and Arabic studies in Xi’an, one of China’s largest cities and the capital of Shaanxi Province. At that stage, she won a scholarship to go to Egypt for further Arabic study. There, she met her husband and when both of them returned to China, they settled in Yiwu, where they first took up Arabic translation and interpreting jobs and eventually opened their own translation company in 2012.

Ma Xiangling (39) also works as an Arabic-Chinese translator and interpreter in Yiwu. Like Ma Zhenyi, she was denied a senior high school education after graduating from junior high school in 1998. She was sent to learn Arabic at a local mosque-based school instead. At the time, she did not expect any material rewards from learning Arabic at all. She simply followed the local expectation of being a good Muslim woman in the hope that she might assist her future husband and educate their child in the faith. Upon graduation, she got married but almost immediately found herself engulfed in constant domestic violence. Over many years, Ma Xiangling’s life was torn to pieces as her only financial support was her tormenting husband. She finally managed to regain her freedom through a painful divorce. In 2014, with the help of friends doing business in Yiwu, she revived her Arabic language skills and migrated to Yiwu to work as translator there.

Self-transformation through Arabic

Confronting their disadvantages in age, gender and poverty, these three women turned to Arabic as a way out.

All three women started to learn Arabic as a low-cost study option when they failed to progress in the Chinese public educational system. Their parents believed that learning Arabic would increase their daughters’ marriage prospects by making them good assistants to their future husbands serving the faith. The value of speaking Arabic as a profitable commodity in the new contexts of China’s global expansion was not obvious to my participants until they embarked on their journey and seriously invested in learning Arabic. Nevertheless, their Arabic skills have shaped a brand new life vision for them.

Ma Xiangling’s social media post in Chinese and Arabic about destiny (my English translation)

Their years of investment into Arabic have transformed their identities from poor subjugated Muslim women into independent and enterprising individuals. Despite failing to gain admission to a Chinese university, Ma Lifang, for instance, now even considers PhD study within her reach:

有的(课本）都是北大的什么的… 还有那种全阿语的.都是老师们从国外给带来的。好多老师也是从国外的毕业，还有博士学位。
Some (textbooks) are from Peking University, and some are written in Arabic, imported from abroad. Many teachers graduated from abroad, some with PhD degree. (Interview with Ma Lifang)

When asked what she wanted to do with her life, Ma Lifang readily talked about several options, such as taking up a translation job in China’s booming export industry or going abroad for higher education, just like her teachers.

Ma Zhenyi has experienced the transformational career that Ma Lifang anticipates. Learning Arabic has expanded her life trajectory from a poor village girl first to the big city of Xi’an and from there to Egypt. The level of Arabic language proficiency she gained there, enabled her to work as an interpreter and translator in Yiwu, and later to establish her own business there.

Business opportunities related to Arabic are plentiful, as she explained to me:

大概有目前来说有102个国家的人来这里(义乌)进行购物。其中呢大概有40到50个国家，大概了50%左右是以阿拉伯语为沟通媒介的……我现在接触的这些人啊，多数都是在40以上的。年龄40以上的人并没有意识到他们需要学英语你知道吗。
There are foreign businessmen from 102 countries coming to Yiwu to purchase commodities. 40 or 50 countries out of 102, about 50% of foreigners use Arabic for communication…the majority of my foreign customers are over 40 years old. You know, people over 40 are not aware of the necessity to speak English. (Interview with Ma Zhenyi)

Although Ma Xiangling’s career has been less stellar, Arabic has transformed her, too, into an economically and spiritually independent woman supporting herself and her family. In January 2020, her family (her parents and her disabled son) was able to move into a newly built two-storey house.

Tensions and contradictions of Arabic

Despite their empowerment, Arabic is not a panacea and all three women face tensions and contradictions embedded in wider structural constraints that are beyond their control.

Reflecting on the profits Arabic has brought to her, Ma Zhenyi, for instance strongly feels the tension between its material and spiritual rewards. While she is grateful for the material rewards that learning Arabic has brought her, she also finds herself in a constant state of dilemma between her entrepreneurial identity as a successful businesswoman and her sense of guilt at not having enough time for prayer and reading Quran, or for mothering her school-aged daughter.

The gendered market also impacts their opportunities to invest in their future, as Arabic language practices are more gendered than those of many other languages. Ma Xiangling explained that women can only go so far with Arabic. While they might be able to secure a translation job in Yiwu or elsewhere in China, their opportunities to work abroad or even travel for business are heavily constrained, particularly when it comes to major Arabic-speaking trading partners like Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Ma Xiangling’s reflections on working abroad must be understood against the emerging oversupply of Arabic speakers in China as Chinese universities have begun to actively promote non-English foreign languages. As a middle-aged woman without a degree, Arabic proficiency alone is no longer enough to make her feel confident about her future.

Arabic as a third space

Arabic has become a significant foreign language for China’s relationship with the Middle East. However, for the women in my study, it is much more than that. Arabic also functions as a way out, as a reachable escape route for Muslim women who have been trapped in the cage of poverty and religion.

Reciting Arabic verses as a child, reading the Holy Quran as a teenager, and eventually translating for Sino-Middle East trade as adults, Chinese Muslim women from less-developed areas have turned the Arabic language into a third space where they can continue their education, obtain career success, and achieve emancipation in their daily lives. In Minquan, this impoverished corner of the world, Arabic provides both a spiritual asylum and financial independence. It frees and awakens Muslim women tormented by misogyny and poverty.

After quoting to me the Hadith “all men are brothers”, Ma Zhenyi added what has been missing from there: “and women are sisters.”

References

Grey, A. (2017). How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Yang, H. (2012). Naxi, Chinese and English: Multilingualism in Lijiang. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Zhang, J. (2011). Language Policy and Planning for the 2008 Beijing Olympics: An Investigation of the Discursive Construction of an Olympic City and a Global Population. (PhD), Macquarie University.

In academia, for instance, we often hear that women have made substantial gains in recent years and now account for close to half of all faculty members in universities. But you know where those gains have been made? In untenured positions, casual positions, and positions below the Senior Lecturer level. According to Inside Higher Education, the rate of full professors – the ultimate prize on the academic career ladder – has remained steady at around 15% of all faculty members in the past twenty years. Only around 9% of women who become academic staff members achieve full professor status – that’s not counting all the PhDs who do not ever become academic staff members in the first place. And even if a woman achieves full professor status, she can expect to earn less than her male peers.

If you think that’s bad, look outside academia:

white men make up more than 80% of Congress, 78% of state political executives, 75% of state legislators, 84% of mayors of the top 100 cities, 85% of corporate executive officers, 100% of CEOs of Wall Street firms, 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 73% of tenured professors, 64% of newsroom staffers, 97% of heads of venture capital firms, 90% of tech jobs in Silicon Valley, 97% of owners of television and radio licenses, 87% of police departments and 68% of U.S. Circuit Court Judges (Feagin & Ducey, 2017, p. 2)

In addition to these indicators of formal power, it’s also worth thinking about informal power. In academia, informal power results from reputation and “impact.” If you google “most famous linguists”, for instance, you get Noam Chomsky at number one (no surprise there), and then Pier Paolo Pasolini, Anthony Burgess (why?!), Al-Biruni, Larry Wall (the creator of the PERL programming language), Leone Battista Alberti, Steven Pinker, J.R.R. Tolkien, Edward Sapir, and Mikhail Bakhtin as the top ten.

While the definition of “linguist” used by ranker.com is, well, “interesting” and while I was surprised to see that the list is somewhat less Anglo-centric than one might have expected, the list is certainly male.

Incidentally, the first woman to appear on the list is Carol Chomsky at #18. Good on her but up until now I did not even know that the wife of Noam Chomsky was a linguist, too. And this gives us a first indication where female power – formal or informal – comes from: rare as it is, female power most often accrues to women who are associated with powerful men.

The top ten linguists according to Google Scholar (which only ranks those with a Google Scholar profile) are also exclusively male and, now, white and Anglophone: George Lakoff, MAK Halliday, James Paul Gee, Steven Pinker (the only one on both lists), Stephen C. Levinson, Ray Jackendoff, Douglas Biber, JR Martin, Dan Jurafsky, and Harald Baayen. Anna Wierzbicka is the first woman at #11 – just a little too late to show her on the first page of search results …

In this day and age, this continued male dominance is puzzling, seeing that men and women are formally equal in most societies around the globe, and have been so for a while. Continued white male dominance is particularly puzzling in western academia, which has embraced a rhetoric of gender and racial equality. In fact, valuing diversity is high on the mission statements of most universities. Despite all this, the rise of white women to power has been painfully slow and that of women of color even more so (in the USA, 3.5% of full professors are Asian women, 2.6% Latinas, and 1.6% Black women).

A comparison with shamanism might provide an explanation.

Just like academia has its hierarchy of casual tutors, postdocs, associate lecturers, assistant professors, senior lecturers, associate professors, readers, full professors, and distinguished professors, shamanism recognizes a hierarchy formally marked through initiation and progression rituals.

Also like academia, shamanism embraces an egalitarian rhetoric and, theoretically, male and female shamans have an equal chance to reach the most powerful shamanic rank of zaarin or duurisah. In fact, it is widely assumed that women are spiritually more talented than men and connect to the spirit world more easily, as Manduhai Buyandelger describes in Tragic Spirits, an ethnography of shamanism in Mongolia.

Even so – and that’s the final parallel with academia – male shamans progress to the highest ranks and female shamans don’t:

The [shamans] who had achieved the highest rank were almost exclusively male, whereas a disproportionate number of female shamans were stuck somewhere in the middle, having performed only three or four shanars [=initiation and progression rituals] out of the seven needed to reach the [top] title of duurisah. (Buyandelger, 2013, p. 172)

The careers of female shamans stall for a variety of reasons. To understand those, one must keep in mind that achieving the highest rank in any career is expensive, labor-intensive and time-consuming.

To start a career – be it as academic or as shaman – certainly requires individual talent and gift but it also requires a material investment: access to higher education in one case, access to performance spaces, shamanic paraphernalia, and livestock in the latter.

To advance their careers, shamans need to gain followers. This is achieved particularly through travel and hosting.

By travelling, shamans learn more about the spirit world and also expand their networks. However, travel is easier for men than for women. The latter are tied down by care obligations at home and, if they travel, the threat of sexual violence is ever present.

Hosting ceremonies and after-ceremony parties is another way for shamans to further their careers. Again, hosting is easier for men than for women. The powerful male shamans featured in Tragic Spirits controlled large rural households: that meant space to stage a performance for large numbers of people, the material resources to host them, and the support cast to have them well looked after.

Female shamans, by contrast, might only have access to a tiny apartment where few guests could be accommodated; they might not have the financial resources to acquire provisions; and they were dependent on their husbands and in-laws for permission to host guests. Even with permission, they might face the double burden of staging a ceremony and looking after their guests’ well-being.

Like shamanic careers, academic careers are advanced by mobility and performance. Like for shamanic women, mobility and performance raise conundrums for academic women, as they often bring professional and personal lives in conflict.

To succeed as a shaman – and, I would venture, in any career – professional and personal lives have to be in harmony, as Buyandelger (2013, p. 190) explains:

In order to achieve the status of a full-fledged shaman and then to maintain that status successfully and continuously, a person must be free from daily household and family duties while still receiving services and benefits from their family members and utilizing the domestic space and the household money. To some extent, a shaman, whether male or female, needs a “wife” – a virtuous and nurturing individual who is versed in shamanic knowledge and who voluntarily structures her life around the unpredictable life of a shaman.

It is, of course, not difficult to guess that male shamans are much more likely to have a “wife” in their lives than female shamans.

Not only are female shamans less likely to have a “wife” in their lives, there is something else in the professional-personal tension that holds them back. In order to be successful in any career, professional expertise is not enough. To reach the top of your career, you also need the right kind of personality.

What the right kind of personality is differs for men and women. Top shamans need a spotless reputation. For women that includes marriage and motherhood. However, marriage and motherhood then become precisely the personal obstacles that make shamanic advancement difficult.

Even if in slightly different forms, the double bind that pits professional proficiency against gender proficiency is the principle obstacle to the advancement of women to top positions in any field.

Furthermore, in order to succeed, the conflict between professional and personal success that many women experience must be silenced. There are no heroic narratives of overcoming challenges resulting from not having a “wife”, and women’s stories about such challenges sound disfluent and whining. To articulate the conflict between the professional and the personal is to admit failure and, hence, constitutes a career obstacle.

Ultimately, as long as institutions claim gender neutrality it will always only be a minority of women who advance to positions of power:

The conflict between the public expectations that female shamans can become as powerful as male shamans and society’s unwillingness to recognize the concrete obstacles that limit women’s quest for power results in a double disadvantage for female shamans. (Buyandelger, 2013. p. 200)

Just substitute “academic” for “shaman”!

References

Buyandelger, M. (2013). Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Feagin, J. R., & Ducey, K. (2017). Elite White Men Ruling: Who, What, When, Where, and How. London: Routledge.

Related Content

• Why are there so few notable academic women?
• Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• Where does academic authority come from?
• Strange academic women
• What would you do?

Goose Lizzy Fountain, Goettingen: in a city full of memorials to notable men, the most prominent memorial to a woman is to a generic peasant girl

March 08 is International Women’s Day. Therefore, we will explore gender aspects of academic excellence in a loose series throughout this month.

In January, I was invited to speak at the University of Göttingen. It was my first visit ever to this famous German university and the city that is built around it. For those who don’t know it, one way to think about Göttingen is as the German equivalent of Oxford or Cambridge.

Göttingen is steeped in academic excellence: the university boasts 45 Nobel Prize winners, and wandering through the city and looking at all the names on the commemorative plaques that indicate where a famous person lived or studied is nothing less than awe inspiring. Anyone who has ever used a Bunsen Burner, figured out a Gaussian Normal Distribution, or tried to understand Planck’s Constant has engaged with knowledge created in Göttingen.

Wandering through the city and being wowed by all the big names, it did not take me long to notice that all these names seemed to belong to men. In fact, the only memorial to a woman I saw on my (admittedly not very extensive) walk was not to a pioneering thinker but to a generic peasant girl, Goose Lizzy.

I only had a few hours in Göttingen; and so later I went to check out the Wikipedia list of famous members of the University of Göttingen. There are a breath-taking 637 notable academics on that list, starting with the founder of paleo-biology Othenio Abel and ending with the polymath Thomas Young. The latter, incidentally, was the first to propose an international phonetic alphabet, which he appended to his 1796 medical dissertation “so as not to leave these pages blank”.

Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer is not on the list (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

So how many women are there among all these great thinkers, pioneering discoverers and trailblazing researchers? A paltry 23. An unbelievable 3.61 percent.

Can it be true that academic excellence in women is so rare?

The list includes current and former academics. So the lack of opportunity faced by women until the second half of the 20^th century might be one explanation. Indeed, 14 out of the 23 women on the list are still alive today. The first woman on the list (in terms of her birthday) is the mathematician Emmy Noether, who was born in 1882.

In Germany, women gained the formal right to study at university only in 1908 although various exceptions had been made before then. If women couldn’t go to university, they obviously had no opportunity to demonstrate academic excellence.

Sofja Kowalewskaja is not on the list (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

That’s not the full explanation, though, as the case of Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer shows. Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer is NOT on the Wikipedia list of notable members of the University of Göttingen. And yet, Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer was the second woman ever to be awarded a PhD at a German university – Göttingen, in fact – in 1787.

The daughter of Professor August Ludwig von Schlözer – whose name is on the list – her education was the result of a bet her father had waged that women’s brains could be equal to men’s if properly trained. She therefore had the best private tutors and learned to speak ten languages (in addition to German, these were Dutch, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Spanish, and Swedish). By age 17, Professor Schlözer considered his daughter ready for university. Dorothea was not allowed to enroll, however. To humor her influential father, she was permitted to undertake a private examination at the conclusion of which the PhD was awarded.

This concluded the experiment – the bet was presumably won – and Dorothea was duly married off. Father and daughter went on to co-author a book about the Russian economy. Incidentally, Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer also became the first German woman to take a double name including both her husband’s and father’s names.

Surely, Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer’s achievements merit her inclusion in the list. Why is she not there? Because of the technicality that she was not enrolled?

Charlotte von Siebold is not on the list (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Well, Charlotte von Siebold, who was enrolled as an auditor and who is commonly regarded as the first modern German female gynecologist, is not there, either. The same is true of another three trailblazing academic women, who all received their PhDs in Göttingen: the mathematician Sofja Kowalewskaja (1874), the chemist Julia Lermontowa (1874) and the physicist Margaret Maltby (1895).

That I can identify five notable academic women affiliated with the University of Göttingen who have not made it onto the Wikipedia list of notable members more or less off the top of my head puts the outrageously low number of women on the list in a somewhat different light: their absence is not only the result of the historical exclusion of women but of contemporary ignorance.

Margaret Maltby is not on the list (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

The fact that women are less likely to be considered notable, even today, was strikingly illustrated last year when Donna Strickland won the 2018 Physics Nobel Prize. At the time of the award, Donna Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page. Someone had attempted to build a Wikipedia page for her in May 2018 (about half a year before the award) but the submission had been rejected by a Wikipedia moderator on the grounds that “this submission’s references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article.” The male joint winner, Gérard Mourou, had had a Wikipedia entry since 2005 …

That there have been more notable men than women throughout history is the result of centuries of patriarchal domination. That we do not know about the achievements of many female thinkers, researchers and scientists is the result of the ongoing dismissal of women’s contributions. Even today, female achievement is ignored and judged by different standards. The latter in turn cements the perception that academic excellence is a male prerogative.

Julia Lermontova is not on the list (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

If you’d like to make a difference this International Women’s Day, why not get onto Wikipedia and add Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer, Charlotte von Siebold, Sofja Kowalewskaja, Julia Lermontowa and Margaret Maltby to the list of notable members of the University of Göttingen? Or curate the page of a notable yet overlooked woman?

Related content

• Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• Strange Academic women

Further reading

Bazely, D. 2018. Why Nobel winner Donna Strickland didn’t have a Wikipedia page. Washington Post

Cecco, L. 2018. Female Nobel prize winner deemed not important enough for Wikipedia entry. Guardian

Participation and success rate of Chief Investigators in ARC Discovery Projects 2018 by gender and career age (Source: ARC)

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day and we will therefore look at the gender productivity gap in academia.

Last year I was fortunate to receive an Australian Research Council Discovery grant to investigate everyday intercultural communication. That means I was one of 1,894 female chief investigators funded under Australia’s national research flagship program. At the same time, 5,011 male chief investigators received funding under the scheme. In other words, the gender ratio is 27:73.

Does that mean that the selection process is discriminating against women? No, definitely not, because the success rate of female applicants was with 20.3% higher than the male success rate of 18.4%.

The figures show that female researchers are significantly less likely to apply for research funding in the first place. Writing grant applications and obtaining research funding is essential for academic career success. The fact that women are less likely to apply for and obtain grants is mirrored in the academic gender gap. Women predominate at the lowest rungs of the academic career ladder and at Lecturer B level (the usual post-doctoral entry level for continuing academic positions) we are close to parity. However, the picture changes dramatically at associate and full professor levels, where only 32% were female in 2016. (For global figures on women in academia, see here)

Some of the reasons for women’s stunted careers have long been obvious and we hardly need to mention that combining motherhood and a demanding career is tough. But the obvious does not explain the gender productivity gap: female doctors see fewer patients than male doctors, female real estate agents list fewer properties than male real estate agents and, as we saw above, female academics submit fewer grant applications.

This is not the end of the conundrum: patients of female doctors are less likely to die, properties listed by female agents sell at higher prices, and, as we saw above, female researchers are more likely to write successful grant applications. In sum, in a range of fields, equally placed women perform lower than men on quantitative measures but perform higher than men on qualitative measures.

Academic publishing provides another case in point: female researchers publish less than their male peers but what they publish is much more readable and better written, as economics researcher Erin Hengel has found.

Examining peer-reviewed articles published in the top-ranking economics journals, the researcher concludes that female-authored papers are better written than male-authored papers, and that the gap is particularly stark when it comes to senior academics. Female economists write increasingly clearly over the course of their career while the writing of their male peers does not perceptibly improve.

The readability of an English text is the result of syntactic and word choices such as the ratio of long sentences, passive voice, multi-syllabic and rare words. Measurement of readability can be automated and MS Word now has two common automated tests of readability, the Flesh-Kincaid Readability Tests, built in. Applying these and some other readability measures to more than 9,000 published articles – both before and after peer review – Hengel demonstrates far better writing quality by female academics.

However, writing well has a price: it takes more time.

Hengel shows that female academics learn to pay this price because their papers are subject to much greater scrutiny. Editors and peer reviewers impose tougher standards on women. This is evident from the fact that female-authored economics papers take around six months more to go through the review process than male-authored papers.

As a result, female academics come to experience peer review as a much tougher process and those who progress on the career ladder adjust their expectations about what is required. That means they invest more and more effort prior to submission and the quality of their submissions rises. Their male colleagues have no such feedback loop and remain blissfully ignorant of the fact their writing may be difficult to read.

The overall effect of this quantity-quality trade-off is to disguise discrimination as “personal choice.” The discrimination, bias and tougher standards that explain the gender productivity gap remain hidden, unacknowledged and unaddressed.

Hengel’s research neatly explains the gender productivity paradox in academia. Additionally, it does much more: it provides a way to think about how those who experience repeated discrimination and biased feedback adapt to those experiences. Hengel controls for native speaker status and does not address intersectional disadvantage but native speaker status and ethnicity certainly stack the odds further. A study with the counter-intuitive finding that non-native speakers write more clearly than native speakers certainly points in that direction.

This International Women’s Day, academic women still have to be better to achieve the same measure of success as their male colleagues. Another helpful way to think about the #pressforprogress challenge is to turn the tables and make privilege visible (as a recent Guardian op-ed did beautifully with a thought experiment imagining the career of Boris Johnson if he were a black woman).

Reference

Hengel, E. (2017). Publishing while Female. Are women held to higher standards? Evidence from peer review. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.17548

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The initial impetus for the book was sparked by my own language journey. At the age of 23, I decided to become an English-Korean interpreter, a glamorous bilingual, who would be respected for her English language proficiency in Korea caught in the phenomenon of “English fever”.

However, after many years of hard work, when I had finally achieved the dream of becoming a professional interpreter, I found myself perplexed and puzzled as a gap emerged between the pre-held dreams and the realities in the field.

And that’s where English language ideologies in Korea: Interpreting the past and present starts: the book critically examines the contrast between dreams and realities of English in the context of “English fever” in Korea from both historical and contemporary perspectives. It explores two overarching questions: why is English so popular in Korea? And, why, despite the enormous popularity of English, is there such a gap between the promises and realities of English?

In order to explore the first question of why English is so heatedly pursued in Korea, I conducted historical analyses of the development of English in Korea with English-Korean translation and interpreting as a key site of inquiry. The historical relevance of English-Korean translation and interpreting is well illustrated in the fact that English arrived in Korea for the first time in the late 19^th century in order to educate English-Korean translators and interpreters. English was important for the embattled Korean government of the time as they actively tried to strengthen relationships with the U.S. in order to curb its ambitious neighbours with predatory designs. Korea’s continued economic, political, and security dependence on the U.S. throughout the modern era has added more power and prestige to English, which has evolved to serve as a form of cultural, economic, social, and symbolic capital with class mobility as a key driver.

The second question of why there is such a gap between dreams and realities in English is examined from the perspective of contemporary English-Korean translators and interpreters, who represent the most engaged and professional learners of English in Korea. The social reputation of the profession as perfect English speakers and glamorous cosmopolitans provides an ideal site to explore the contrast between expectations and experiences in English, which was investigated from multiple perspectives including commodification, gender, and neoliberalism. Internal conflicts relating to English language learning and use are illustrated through interview data analyses, in which the aspect of English as an ideological construct shaping and shaped by speakers’ internalized beliefs in and hopes about the language is highlighted.

By exploring the gap between dreams and realities in English, I endeavoured to make sense of what appears to be an irrational pursuit of English in Korean society. Making huge sacrifices to learn the language only seems a “rational” act in Korea because English has been firmly established as a language of power and prestige as documented and explored in English language ideologies in Korea: Interpreting the past and present. It is my hope that the book highlights the importance of examining local particularities involved in the construction of particular ideologies of English, which is often approached from the monolithic perspective of “English as a global language”.

Everyone wants to be a winner in the dating game; but it doesn’t always work that way …

A 2015 article in the New York Post argued that mobile dating apps, such as Tinder and its many clones, are ultimately ‘tearing society apart’ by drastically changing the way young single adults in Western society seek and pursue romantic and sexual partners.

A recent study by Mitchell Hobbs, Stephen Owen and Livia Gerber (2016) asks whether that assessment is really true. The project explores the experiences of dating app users and investigates how the technology has influenced their sexual practices and views on romantic ideals and long-term relationships.

Offline desires, online realities

Meeting sexual and romantic partners specifically through dating apps has four characteristics: First, users are able to engage in casual, one-off or short-term, sexual encounters without engaging in any further social interaction. Second, dating apps allow users to broaden their romantic networks, extending beyond their existing social networks. Thirdly, dating apps are an efficient means of connecting with several potential partners at the same time. And, fourth, the emergence of dating apps has perpetuated a culture in which communication is increasingly focused around self-presentation and self-commodification.

The latter characteristic in particular may generate a sense of anxiety and frustration around the need to create a successful profile.

Self-presentation in the dating game

Mobile dating apps were initially designed as a type of game to take the stress and emotional investment out of dating. The tactile functionality of the app, combined with users’ photo-based profiles resembles a virtual stack of cards: Profiles are presented like playing cards, and the user can swipe left on the screen to ‘dislike’ or swipe right to ‘like’ a profile. These profiles are only shown once – swiping left to ‘dislike’ therefore eliminates these profiles from the ‘game’. Mutual right swipes result in a ‘match’ and only then can communication be initiated. Successful tindering is therefore in part measured by the amount of matches one obtains, as one of our participants explained:

Yeah when you get matched it’s like ooh! That’s quite cool, that’s the fun part and that’s also probably quite the addictive part of it as well, I’d imagine. And yeah it’s obviously good for good feelings.

Despite this elation of getting a match, many – particularly male – participants expressed a sense of frustration over their lack of success (i.e. their lack of matches) when using dating apps, indicating that dating apps may be perpetuating the exact anxiety they were designed to eliminate:

Tinder is purely based on looks. It’s a numbers’ game essentially. It’s swipe how many times you want. Um so I don’t personally like it still as a primary means of finding a relationship.

Engagement with the ‘game’ creates a level of anxiety that appears to stem from not gaining access to the smorgasbord of potential sexual and romantic partners theoretically available through dating apps. As another male participant remarked:

Everyone is copping a root but me.

In the online sphere, unattractive men have less chances at winning mutual matches, creating a sense that the average-looking guy is missing out on the dating game:

The 10% of highly attractive people fucking all the time make the rest of us feel bad.

In an offline context, ‘average-looking’ guys might be able to harness their interpersonal and communication skills instead:

I’m not suited to this app. I’m trying to find the right phrase but like the profiles that you think would get like high likes because of certain things they put in isn’t really me and I don’t try and do it. I also just think I’m more traditional in so far as I like to bump into someone at a bar or room across- eyes across a room that’s how I actually connect with people because I think half of meeting someone the fun is body language like reading little bits of body language.

In sum, how to present oneself in the best possible light online is a major concern for the users of dating apps. Whilst some participants felt that they are not suited to mobile dating apps due to a lack of successful self-presentation strategies, others engage in self-commodification in an attempt to increase their dating app success.

Self-commodification in the Tinder game

Self-commodification becomes an essential part of designing one’s profile. One interviewee described how he helped his friend to improve his Tinder profile:

So I ask ‘Can I look at your profile and can I change it for you?’ So I get him a different picture and I make his profile his ‘buyer’ – he didn’t have a buyer. I made his profile a buyer, and said ‘You can always go back’ and it blew up! It was almost like in the movies.

Users have the option of adding additional information or captions (referred to here as a ‘buyer’ and elsewhere as ‘digital pick-up line’) to their profiles. While some profiles strategically communicate very little, some male participants reported feeling put off by long digital pick-up lines:

So most of the time apparently it’s just a highly sexualised or very blunt statement of intentions. Um there are funny ones. But um and then some like you see some girls will put- um have like a really long thing, really long statement about fun-loving. Everyone in the world apparently is fun-loving. Oh god. Worst, most overused statement I’ve ever- but anyway [sighs] um the- at the very end of these monstrous spiels sometimes they’ll write ‘say orange if you’ve read this.’ And so you’re expected if you match, the first thing you say to them is orange to show that you’ve actually read through it.

In general, men appear to be less particular about whom they swipe right on in an attempt to increase their chances of gaining a match. However, these swipes do not always result in the kind of match the users were looking for, as another participant indicated:

He was frustrated cause of like five matches he’d had in the last two weeks four of them turned out to be prostitutes. The thing that made him so angry was that one of them actually talked to him for a whole week before she told him her rates.

In sum, male participants reported many frustrations related to looking for love on the move: getting a match was not actually ‘as easy as play’ – and even if they got matches, they were not always the kind of match they desired.

Changing communication strategies for the sexual marketplace

Dating apps certainly do not take the stress out of trying to find love, sex and romance. On the contrary, they may be creating new anxieties around online communication strategies. Male users, in particular, expressed frustration over the need to brand themselves as desirable commodities in the sexual marketplace. If dating apps are indeed ‘tearing society apart’ it is not because they result in everyone having casual sex all the time but because they create many more desires than they can fullfil.

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Reference

Hobbs, M., Owen, S., & Gerber, L. (2016). Liquid love? Dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy Journal of Sociology DOI: 10.1177/1440783316662718

Jinhyun Cho was awarded her PhD for her thesis about “Interpreting English language ideologies in Korea: dreams vs. realities”

Many people around the world dream of learning English. The pursuit of English is rarely only, or even predominantly, about language learning: it’s about self-improvement, self-transformation and the aspiration to live a better life. Unsurprisingly, with English as with anything else in life, dreams and realities do not always match. Recent PhD research conducted by Jinhyun Cho at Macquarie University examines this gap between dreams and realities of English in the national context of South Korea and for one of the most intensely engaged groups of English language learners, namely female translators and interpreters.

The thesis is now available for open-access downloaded and can be accessed here.

This research explores English language ideologies in Korea in relation to the recent phenomenon of “English fever” or yeongeo yeolpung, which refers to the frenzied pursuit of English as valued language capital among Koreans. The popularity of English in Korea has recently attracted significant scholarly attention in sociolinguistics. Despite a growing body of research on the issue of English in Korean society, the question of how the promises of English translate into lived experiences and life course trajectories remains underexplored.

Based on a multi-method qualitative approach, the study draws on three sets of data through which to present a holistic picture of the tensions between dreams and realities in relation to English in Korea: historical textual data, media discourses, and one-on-one interviews with 32 English-Korean translators and interpreters.

Historical textual data are used to trace the genealogy of English in Korea since the late 19^th century via Japanese colonization, the post-independence period and industrialization, to government-led globalization campaigns. The English language ideologies identified through the historical periodisation serve as a baseline for the analyses at macro as well as micro levels.

Contemporary English language ideologies are then elucidated through media discourse analyses of news items related to English-medium lectures in higher education in order to examine how dreams about English are sustained and how such dreams contrast with actual classroom experiences.

In order to understand the uptake of these macro-level language ideologies by individuals, interview data from translators and interpreters as the most engaged group of English language learners are then examined. This includes an exploration of the ways in which individual pursuits of linguistic perfectionism reinforce linguistic insecurity in relation to dominant neoliberal discourses of desirable language speakers. Disparities between dreams and realities in English as experienced by the participants are examined from a gender perspective to show that the pursuit of translation and interpreting is a gendered career choice in relation to societal norms of females. Particular attention is paid to the recent media phenomenon of “good-looking interpreters.” The analysis demonstrates how English has been remoulded as an embodied capital in which aesthetic qualities of speakers can enhance the value of English.

The findings of this study highlight the multiplicity and evolutionary nature of English language ideologies. The historical documentation of the development of English suggests English as multiple forms of capital – cultural, economic, political, social and symbolic – with class mobility as a key driver. In addition to the earlier meanings of English, the micro-level investigations illustrate more diverse aspects of English as a gendered tool to achieve desirable female biographies, as an instrument to enhance individual competitiveness, and as added value to personal aesthetics. While such diverse ideologies attached to English testify to the enormous value attached to English and possibly answer the question as to why English is so popular in Korea, the examination of media discourses about English-medium lectures reveals the use of English as a tool to sustain existing societal structures that advantage the already powerful conservative media. Combined with the constant mediatisation of the benefits of English, neoliberal influences on English in which achieving linguistic perfectionism is presented as real and feasible further contribute to masking the sustained gap between dreams and realities in English. As people blame themselves for lacking individual commitment to the mastery of English as celebrated in popular neoliberal personhood, the substantial costs of the pursuit of English remain hidden, which in turn drives more people to pursuing English and further fuels “English fever”.

Overall, the research illuminates historical, mediatized and gendered aspects of English as an ideological construct. The study has implications for future research and stakeholders, particularly as related to the need to rethink English as a global language, the diversification of English language ideologies in gender, and the potential of translation and interpreting for interdisciplinary research.

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References

Cho, J. (2012). Campus in English or campus in shock? English Today, 28 (02), 18-25 DOI: 10.1017/S026607841200020X
Cho, J. (2015). Sleepless in Seoul: Neoliberalism, English fever, and linguistic insecurity among Korean interpreters Multilingua DOI: 10.1515/multi-2013-0047
Cho, J. (2016). Interpreting English Language Ideologies in Korea: Dreams Vs. Realities. (PhD), Macquarie University. Retrieved from http://minerva.mq.edu.au:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/mq:60718 [open access to full thesis]
Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy Language in Society, 42 (01), 23-44 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887 [open access to full article]