The conversation focuses on a study of adults with three languages ‘at play’ in their childhoods and lives today, exploring how visible racial differences from the mainstream, social power, emotions, and familial relationships continue to shape their use – or erasure – of their linguistic heritage.

Zozan’s book opens with a funny and touching account of how her own experiences as a person of “ambiguous ethnicity” shaped this research. We begin our interview on this topic. Zozan points out that the last Australian Census showed that 48.2% of the population has one or both parents born overseas. Yet, she argues, “our teachers and our education system are unprepared, perpetuating the power relations that reinforce injustice and inequality towards half of the population”.

Then we focus on what diversity feels like to her research participants and how “mixedness” or “hybridity” is not normalised, despite being common. We build on a point Zozan makes in her book, that throughout their daily lives the participants “have to position themselves because our [social and institutional] understanding of identity is narrow-mindedly focused on a single affiliation. […] While all participants are engaged in such strategic positioning, my findings emphasise that this can come at a great personal expense, something which is not sufficiently recognised by scholarly work in this field thus far.”

Dr Zozan Balci with her new book (Image credit: Zozan Balci)

We then delve into the emotions experienced and remembered by participants in relation to certain language practices in both childhood and more recent years, and the way these shape their habits of language choice and self-silencing. While negative emotional experiences have impacted on heritage language transmission and use, Zozan’s study shows how people who had distanced themselves from their heritage language – and its speakers – then changed: “it only [took] one loving person […] to reintroduce my participants to a long-lost interest in their heritage language”. We focus on this “message of hope” and then on another cause of hope, being the engaged results Zozan’s achieved when she redesigned a university classroom activity to un-teach a deficit mentality about heritage languages and identities.

Finally, we discuss Zozan and her team’s current “Say Our Name” project. This practically-oriented extension of Zozan’s research addresses one specific aspect of linguistic heritage and identity formation: the alienation experienced by people whose names are considered ‘tricky’ or ‘foreign’ in Anglo-centric contexts. The project has created practical guides now used by universities and corporations and the City of Sydney recently hosted a public premiere of the Say Our Names documentary. Soon, Zozan will be developing an iteration of the project with the University of Liverpool in the UK.

Follow Zozan Balci on LinkedIn. She’s also available for guest talks and happy to discuss via LinkedIn.

If you liked this episode, 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

ALEX: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m Alex Grey, and I’m a research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. My guest today is Dr. Zozan Balci, a colleague of mine at UTS. Zozan is an award-winning academic, a sociolinguist, and a social justice advocate. Zozan, welcome to the show.

ZOZAN: Hello, thank you for having me.

ALEX: A pleasure! Now, Zozan, you teach in the Social and Political Science program here at UTS, and I know you have a lot of teaching experience, but today we’ll focus on your sociolinguistics research. In particular, let’s talk about your new book. How exciting! It’s called Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, identity, and belonging in the lives of cultural in-betweeners. You’ve just published it with Routledge.

The first chapter is called A Day in the Life of the Ethnically Ambiguous, and you begin by talking about your own, as you put it, “ambiguous ethnicity”. So let’s start there. Tell us about how your own life shaped this research, and then who participated in the study that you designed.

ZOZAN: Yeah, thank you so much, and yes, “ethnically ambiguous” is kind of like the joke that I always introduce myself with. So, I was born and raised in Germany to immigrant parents, so although I’m German, I look Mediterranean. And so people mistake me from being from all sorts of places. I’ve been mistaken for pretty much everything but German at this point. So, you know, I personally grew up, in my house, we spoke 3 languages, so we spoke German, Italian, and Turkish, which is essentially how my family is made up. And, you know, this has kind of resulted in a bit of a… I’m gonna call it a lifelong identity crisis, because, you know, that’s a lot of cultures in one home.

And it also has played out in language quite interestingly, and I just kind of wanted to see with my study if others struggle with the same sort of thing, other people who are in this kind of environment, and I found that they do. And so in the book. I tell the stories of four people, all who have two ancestries in addition to the country they are born in, so there’s three languages at least at play. And all are visible minorities, so they… they don’t look like the mainstream culture in their… in the country where they were born. And all struggle having so many different cultures and languages to navigate. And, you know, it’s quite interesting, in some of the cases, the parents are from vastly different parts of the world, so the kid actually looks nothing like one of their parents.

So, one example is my participant, Claire. She has a Japanese mother and a Ugandan father, and so she speaks of the struggle of looking nothing like a Japanese person, so in her words, all people ever see is that she’s black.

And so there is some really heartbreaking stories about, you know, how challenging that is, growing up in Australia when you look nothing like your mum, and…You know, it’s also hard to assert your Japanese heritage when people look at you and don’t accept that you are half Japanese, even though she strongly identifies with it, for example. So, there are a couple of participants like that.

One of my participants, Kai, is probably the one I personally relate to the most. His mother is Greek, and his father is Swedish, and he looks very Mediterranean like me. So, he talks a lot about, you know, the guilt towards his heritage community, also internalized racism, and that is something I could probably personally very much relate to. So these are the kinds of stories that are in this book.

ALEX: They’re wonderful stories because you frame them in such a clear way that connects them to research and connects them to bigger ideas than just the personal experience of each participant, but it becomes very moving. These participants clearly have a great rapport with you. When Claire talks about speaking Japanese and the impact being a visible minority and visibly not Japanese, it seems, to other people, has on her. That’s incredibly touching, but also the effect that has on her mum, and her mum’s desire to pass on heritage language to Claire.

But the opening few pages are also, I have to say, really funny and interesting. They drew me in, I wanted to keep reading. So I’ll just add that in there to encourage listeners to go out and seek more of your voice after this podcast by reading the book.

Now, in this book, your intention, in your own words, is to explain what diversity feels like, and to normalize mixedness. And you point out that this is really important, pressing, in a place like Australia, but many places where our listeners will be around the world are similar. In Australia, about half the population are what we might call second-generation migrants, with at least one parent born overseas. And so you go on to say, this book aims to have a genuine conversation about what diversity and inclusion look like.

So, tell us more about what hybridity is. This is a concept you use for the, if you like, the sort of

embodied personal diversity of people, and what it feels like for your participants, and whether hybrid identities are recognised and included.

ZOZAN: Yeah, you know, it’s actually quite interesting, because when people hear that you’re culturally quite mixed, they kind of misunderstand what it’s like. So, you know, your mind doesn’t work in nationalities or languages, right? So in the case of my study, where three cultures or languages, are at play, you know, those… these participants don’t consider that they have three identities. Like, that is not how a mind works.

So rather, you are a person who has mixed it all up. So you don’t just think in one language, unless you have to. Like, for example, right now, I’m speaking to you in English, because I have to, but, you know, when I’m just chopping my vegetables and thinking about my day, I don’t think in only English. It’s a mix, in a single sentence, I would mix. If I speak to someone who can understand another language that I speak, I would probably mix those two. Like, it’s just… but I don’t do this, like, oh, let me mix two languages. Like, I’m not consciously doing that. And the same goes for behaviours or practices.

So, the way I kind of, you know, an analogy that I think you can use here, maybe to make it easier to understand, is if you think of, you know, say you have your 3 cultures, and there are 3 liquids, and so you pour them all in a cup and make a cocktail, right? So you mix them all up. And…

ZOZAN: you know, it’s… It’s very hard, then, to tell the individual flavour of this new cocktail now, right? It’s all mixed. But, you know, that’s not something that people understand. They want… they want the three liquids, the original liquids, what is in there? And often, you know, they will tell you that you probably ruined the drink by mixing them.

Laughter

ALEX: We laugh, but your participants have really experienced words to that effect, sure.

ZOZAN: Absolutely, and so, you know, you are often forced into a position, so you are forced to pretend you’re a different drink, because it’s very hard to, you know, separate the liquids once they have been mixed, right? And, you know, now I’m also Australian, so a dash of a new liquid has been mixed into it, you know, making the whole drink more refreshing, I think.

But, you know, unfortunately, most people still have very rigid ideas about identity, including our parents, right? So my parents cannot relate to my experience at all. They are not mixed. My teachers didn’t get it at school, right? Only people like me get it. But it’s important that we all kind of start thinking a little bit about what we’re asking people to do, because, you know.

when I went to school, for example, I could only be German, so I had to leave my other languages and my behaviours at home, because, you know, of assimilation, right? You need to assimilate to everybody else.

And then in my house with my parents, you need to leave the German outside, so it’s considered disrespectful if I say I’m German, right? So my parents would hate to hear this podcast, for example. Because to them, it’s like renouncing your heritage, right? So it’s about… you need to preserve what we have given you. And so you are kind of this person who’s like, well…

I don’t see it the way… I’m not three things. This is all me, and it’s actually people trying to over-analyse what kind of nationality this behaviour is, or this language is. In your head, you’re not actually doing that. You’re just one person who is a cocktail.

ALEX: That makes a lot of sense when you explain it, but in the findings, it becomes really clear that that’s actually very hard for people to assert as an identity. As you say, with parents, with teachers, with the public at large. You call it strategic positioning, the way people have to downplay, or almost ignore, or not show their language, or not show their other aspects of their… their different heritages, and that that can come at great personal expense.

And you point out that, in fact, while a lot of the research literature may celebrate this mixedness or this hybridity, the fact that it comes at personal expense and is difficult is not really acknowledged very much.

Now in this work you’re also drawing on some really foundational theories of language and power. So it’s not just about feeling bad or feeling excluded. The way people are able to mix their heritage languages and other aspects of their heritage, and the way they’re not able to comes within a power play and that draws really on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. I won’t delve really deeply into his theory of habitus, but I’ll quote this explanation of yours, which I loved: “the habitus can be understood as a linguistic coping mechanism, which is very much shaped by the structures around us. We develop language habits, whether within the same language or in multiple languages, which secure our best position or future in a particular market.”

And then really innovatively, you link the formation of these habits to our emotional experiences, drawing on the work of another theorist, Margaret Wetherall. Please talk us through how these theories help explain the way your participants pretended, as children, not to speak their heritage languages. This is just one aspect of how these emotions have influenced their… their behaviours, but I think many of our listeners will have done the same thing as children themselves, or relate now to knowing children who do this.

ZOZAN: Yeah, absolutely, and I think, you know, you almost need to go back to basics. Like, we use language to communicate, and we communicate to connect with others. You know, it’s a social need, it’s a human need to connect, to belong to a group, because we are social animals. So that’s actually the purpose of language, right?

But we also associate language with a cultural group. So, if the cultural group is well-regarded, so is their language, and vice versa. So, for example, here in Australia, obviously, English is highly regarded. And Arabic is not, for example, right? So this is a direct link to how we perceive the people of these cultures, right? So we’re comparing the dominant mainstream Anglo-Saxon cultural group versus Arabic in an era of really strong Islamophobia, right? So language is both this tool for communication, and it’s also this… this… this symbol of… of power, really. And so if the way you try to connect, so the… whichever language, you use, but also how you present yourself, if that results in a negative experience in disconnect, in fact, or feelings of rejection or inclusion, we will absolutely try and avoid doing that again. So we will try to connect… we will always try to connect in a way that is more successful to achieve inclusion and connection, right? So this is kind of like the theory simplified.

And obviously, you feel these experiences in your body, right? You feel shame, or you feel rejection, you feel loneliness, whatever it may be. And equally, on the bright side, you can feel happiness, you can feel, you know, togetherness, whatever it is, inclusion. So, this is kind of the emotional aspect, right? You feel… because this is a human feeling, the connection and disconnect. So, I think that sometimes we take that a bit out of our study of language. And I think we just need to bring that back a little bit, because it actually explained…explains then, how this plays out with language, so language being a key aspect.

You know, if you are told off for speaking a certain language in a certain context, or you’re being made fun of for speaking it, or something bad happens to you when you speak it, maybe you’re singled out, because you can speak something that others can’t. You will resent that language, and you won’t want to speak it again, and you will habitually almost censor yourself from speaking it, because you don’t want to feel like that again, right? So that’s kind of… and you don’t necessarily consciously do that. This is very important. I don’t mean that, like, you know, a 5-year-old is able to notice that about themselves. But typically, the rejecting a language, by and large, happens the first time a child leaves the home, in the sense of going to kindergarten or preschool, or somewhere that is not within the immediate family, where there’s almost, like, you’re being introduced to the mainstream culture in some systemic way, and you are meeting the mainstream culture there as well. So, you are with children, especially if you have an immigrant background, or your parents do, you’re meeting lots of children who don’t. And so this is your first becoming aware of being different, and so, of course, if you look differently already, that’s… that’s difficult. But then also, if you speak differently, that makes it extra difficult.

And so, you know, one of the examples, from the book that I think was just, it actually, when he did say it in the interview, I did tear up, so I want to share this one. And so this was, Kai, so just as a refresher, he is half Greek, half Swedish, and he grew up here in Australia. And so, at the time that he grew up there was still a lot of, sort of, discrimination, towards Greek people. That has probably tempered down a little bit since, but at the time, it was very acute still, where he grew up. And so, in a school assembly, he must have been in primary school, so fairly young, in front of the entire school, he was asked, singled out, and say, “hey, Kai, you… you speak Greek, right? How do you say hello in Greek?”

And he said, “I don’t know”.

And so when I had this interview, we paused for a second, and I said, “but you knew. You knew how to say hello in Greek”. And he’s like, “yes, I knew”. And I said, “well, why… why do you think you said you didn’t know?” And he said, “well, because they didn’t know, so if I don’t know, then I can be like them”.

And I think that is very heartbreaking, right? Because, especially here in Australia, there’s this idea that, you know, if you speak another language, if you are multilingual, that is almost un-Australian. You’re supposed to be this monolingual English speaker, right? That’s the norm, that’s the mainstream. So if you divert from that, that’s different, but especially if you speak a language where the cultural group is not well regarded, right? That positions you as, firstly, different, but also lower.

ZOZAN: Right? And so we can understand, again, he probably didn’t realize, as a 7-year-old, or whenever this was, what he was doing, consciously, but you can see this pattern, right? That’s why I’m saying it’s more a feeling than it is rational thought. The way your language practices develop is based on how your body feels in response to you using, like, language.

ALEX: And the fact that it’s such an embodied feeling comes out in your participants, who are now in their 20s and 30s, remembering in detail a number of these instances from way back in their childhood. I mean, the example of Kai jumped out at me too, the school assembly, because in the context, it might have seemed to the teachers that they were trying to celebrate his difference, to sort of reward him for knowing extra languages, but that’s not how it came across to him, because he’d already started experiencing the negative disconnection that that language caused.

Now that’s one example of negative feelings, but your study shows quite a number of how people in your study developed very negative feelings and distanced themselves from their heritage languages, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, or perhaps as children, consciously, but not knowing what a drastic impact it would have in the future on their ability to ever pick that language up again.

But then you say, this changed, and this is in adulthood usually, changed through relationships with people who they love and admire: “It only took one loving person to reintroduce my participants to a long-lost interest in the heritage language. I believe this is a message of hope.”

Well, I believe you, Zozan, when you say that’s a message of hope, so tell us more about that hope.

ZOZAN: Yeah, I mean, and again, it’s about connection, right? So, this is really at the forefront of everything. So, you know, if there is a person that you can connect with, that will somehow encourage you to rediscover what you have lost, then it’s actually… it can be reversed. It doesn’t mean that, you know, now you’re completely like, “yay, let me start speaking my language again”, or whatever. It’s not necessarily that, but, you know, it tempers down some of that self-hatred that you perhaps have, that guilt, whatever it is, so that you can actually deal with this illusion.

ZOZAN: a little bit more rationally. And, you know, a lot of participants, also, kind of talked about how they’re psyching themselves up to actually visit the country where their parent is from, because slowly, they can, you know, get to that place where they are able to do that, where that… where, you know, the realization that actually there’s nothing wrong with my heritage, it’s just I have been socialized to think that, because the people I have been trying to connect with couldn’t connect with me on that.

And so in the book, there’s a couple of such examples. So in the example of Claire, she, she met a friend at school who also is Black, and has sort of introduced her to this world that she didn’t know, whether it’s, you know, beauty tips for actually women like her, which of course she said was a struggle with a Japanese mother who didn’t know what to do with her hair, and all of those things, so little things like that, but also just, you know, embracing some of these things that… that she couldn’t actually seem to, sort of grasp in her home or in school. We have Kai, whose grandmother, so he loves his grandmother, she hardly raised him, and she developed dementia, and she forgot how to speak English as a result, so she could only speak Greek, so she kind of remembered only that. And so he was like, “well, I want to speak to my grandma”. So now I have to actually up the Greek, because otherwise I cannot communicate with her, and that would be a huge shame”. So you know, that connection is much stronger than everything else. Like, “I want to stay connected to grandma”. In another instance, you know, we had, father and daughter having a bit of a difficult relationship, as is so common in our teenage years, you know, we struggle. But so her dad then taught her how to drive, and they spend all these long hours, driving together, and he, in fact, is a taxi driver, so he showed her all the, you know, the tricks and the, you know, the shortcuts. And, you know, all this time, almost forced time spent together, kind of reconnected them, and, you know, now she’s much more open to, “hey, can you… can you tell me how I… how I can say this in Hungarian?” Or, you know, feeling excited about maybe visiting Hungary, for example.

So these are the kinds of stories, and so this is really important, because connection can just undo some of that traumatic stuff that happens earlier. And you’re quite right, it typically happens as an adult. It’s almost when you kind of have fully formed, and you can look at it a bit more rationally, and actually realize, you know, all of these experiences, it’s not because something’s wrong with me, but rather there’s a lack of understanding, or there are prejudices around me. That doesn’t make it, you know, they are wrong, and I’m okay, kind of feeling, yeah.

ALEX: Yeah, yeah.

ALEX: And you point out that it’s really, at least in your study, really clear that it’s this relationship, or a change in a relationship, that comes first, and then prompts that return to the heritage language, or that renewed passion for spending some time speaking it, or learning it.

And there had been debate in the literature as to whether it’s, you know, that you learn the language first and that enables connections, and you say, well, at least in your study, it seems to be the other way around, so maybe we really need to think of building those relationships first to enable people to want to, or to feel comfortable embracing that heritage language.

I guess, to that end, to try and help people come to that position of, you know, “it’s not me who’s wrong, there’s this world of prejudices or exclusions that are a problem”, you give the wonderful example of you yourself changing your classroom behaviours in the university subjects you teach to try and unteach the idea that heritage languages and identities are deficits. And when you tried it, this wasn’t your study, but it’s, you know, something you were doing because your own study encouraged you to go in this direction, you got such engaged student participation as a result. Can you please tell our listeners about that?

ZOZAN: Yeah, absolutely, and so this was based on an experience I had in my schooling. So I, as I mentioned, I went to school in Germany, and it is very common in Germany still to study Latin as a foreign language throughout high school, and so I was one of those poor people who had to do that.

ALEX: So was I, and you can imagine it was not as… not as common here in Australia.

ZOZAN: I, I… oh, God. It was tough, …But obviously, I speak Italian, so to me, often it was much easier to write my notes in Italian, because it’s almost the same word, right?

ZOZAN: So it just helps me learn that easier. So just in my notebook by myself, I used to write, you know, the Latin word and then the Italian word next to it, because, you know, it obviously makes it easier. Now, my teacher then came around and looked at my notes and said, “well, you have to do this in German”, and I’m like, “well, these are just my personal notes, I can do whatever I want”. And he’s like, “no, that’s an unfair advantage, you have to do it in German’, right? So I’m like, okay, great, so it’s an… it’s a problem at all other times, and all of a sudden, it’s an unfair advantage, so I just… I was not allowed to use my language, even though that was the better way to teach me, right? Like, I mean, that was my individual need as a student, that would have helped me.

So, I know that, obviously, you know, I teach in Sydney, it’s a very diverse student cohort, we have people from all over the place, we have international students, we have students whose first language isn’t English. And I know that many of them, especially if they grew up here and they’ve had this background, this, you know, their parents from elsewhere, they might have had similar experiences to me, whether it’s, you know, either being shamed in some shape or form, or actively forbidden, right?

And so I thought, okay, let me try and see what we can do with that. And so in my class, I then kind of started off with, does anyone here speak or understand another language? And I think it’s very important to say, speak or understand, because that firstly opens up this idea that, oh, okay, maybe the language that I silenced myself in. Typically you can still very much understand it, so I can barely say anything in Turkish, but I understand it quite well. And so, that’s not because I’m not linguistically gifted, it’s because of what I’ve done with it, right? And so, they will then raise their hand, and you can kind of… “what language is that?” And, you know, interestingly, obviously, you will find you speak 10, 15 languages in a classroom of 30 people, because it’s typically quite diverse.

So then we looked at, in this particular example, we looked at a political issue that was, happening at the time. I actually don’t remember what it was now. But I said to them….

ALEX: Hong Kong. I think it was….

ZOZAN: The Hong Kong protests, maybe? This is a while ago. But you could do this with anything. Like, I mean, let’s say I want to do this on the, war in Ukraine, for example. You know, what is the reporting around that? So, importantly because the lesson was around political bias in news reporting, that’s why it’s important for this particular activity to pick a political issue, but you could pick something, obviously, much less confronting, if you want.

So I asked them to look at news reporting about this issue from the last week or so, and I said, if you can speak or read another language, or even listen to, say, a news report on video, have a look at what, around the world, the reporting on the same issue, how are different countries reporting on it, right? So we actually used these other languages. And it was so interesting, because obviously, once you have, you know, some people looking at, you know, obviously news from Australia, but then others news from around Europe, from around South America, from around Asia, you can absolutely see that the news reporting is different. The angles are different, what is being said, who is being biased, is different, right?

And so here we then, you know, this discussion was much richer than had I just said, okay, read news in English, or just from Australia, where, you know, we’re just gonna hear the same perspective. And so I’ve been trying as much as possible to always do that and allow my students to, you know, if you want to read a journal article for your paper from another from an author that didn’t write in English, please do, if that is helpful. You know what I mean? So, these are the kinds of things I try to bring into my classroom to kind of show them, “hey, this is an asset. You speaking another language is great. It opens another door to another culture, to another way of thinking and viewing the world. It’s not a bad thing. You should use it whenever you can.” And it has worked really well.

ALEX: Oh, I love it, and I love that it doesn’t put pressure on those people to then be perfect in their non-English language or languages either. The way you describe it in the book, the more people spoke, the more other students said, “oh, actually, I do understand a bit of this language”, or “oh yeah, I didn’t mention it before, but I also have these linguistic resources”, and everyone just feels more and more comfortable to bring everything to the table.

ALEX: The next question, I don’t know if we’ll edit it out or not, just depending on the time, but it does flow quite nicely from what you’ve just been discussing, so I’ll ask it, and you can answer it, and we’ll record it.

ALEX: So, Zozan, another way you’ve built on this project, which was originally your thesis, and then you’ve written in this wonderfully engaging book. You’ve then gone on since then to do a different related project that’s ended up with a documentary and a lot of practical applications. And I think listeners would love to hear about it. It’s a project called Say Our Names. You’re leading a team of researchers from various disciplines in this project, and it’s about challenging quote-unquote “tricky” or “foreign” names in Anglophone contexts. You’ve created some really practical guides for colleagues, which I’ve seen, and even directed a mini-documentary that showcases the lived experiences behind these names. It premiered a few months ago here in Sydney in collaboration with the City of Sydney Council. Can you tell us about this project in a nutshell, and what the public responses have been like now that your research is out there beyond the university?

ZOZAN: I know, the Say Our Names is a bit like the beast that cannot be contained for some reason, it’s really, blown up, but I think what made it so successful is because it is such an easy entryway into cultural competence, very much to, you know, speaking to the kinds of themes that are in the book. So as you know, my name, people find hard to pronounce. It really isn’t, but it is immediately foreign in most, in most places that I would go to. And I actually… my name is mispronounced so often that sometimes I don’t even know how to pronounce it correctly anymore. Like, I have to call my mum, reset my ear: “How do I say this again?”

And, you know, there’s obviously lots of people in Australia, around the world, who have this very same issue, right? So you have your name mispronounced, you have it not pronounced, because people are so scared to say it, it looks so wild to them, they just call you “you”, or just don’t refer to you at all. Or perhaps, they anglicize it, or they shorten it, and you know, it seems like a harmless thing to do, but actually, it’s sort of like, you know, it scratches the surface of a much bigger issue, right? So you have, again, this dominant culture, and so here in Australia, obviously, the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon culture with everybody else, right? And so English names we are totally fine with, but as soon as something is not English or not, you know, common European, it becomes a tricky thing, and it’s hard to say. And so you internalize that, as the person whose name that is, you internalize, my name is hard to say, my name is foreign.

And your name is the first thing you say to someone, right? You meet a new person, you say, “hi, my name is Zozan”. And… I mean…

ZOZAN: 90% of the time, either people will mispronounce it, or they will ask me more about it.

ZOZAN: And I tell this story, not in the documentary, but when I introduce the documentary. I tell the story about how I actually, a couple of years ago, this is quite, timely, I had podcast training, how to speak about my research in, for podcasts. The first task that we had to do in this training was explain our work, like, what kind of research are you, what is your research?

And I found… I got really stuck with that, like, I couldn’t put in writing what I do. And I’m a very chatty person, I normally have no trouble talking and, talking about myself, but for some reason, that seemed like an impossible task. I couldn’t… I had no idea how to say it. And I realized the reason why I don’t know how to say it is because I never, in a situation where people speak about their work, I never get past my name. People don’t want to hear about my name, sorry, my work, because they want to hear about my name.

So, you know, I say, hi, I’m Zozan at a networking event. And, “oh, what kind of name is it? Oh, where are you from? Oh, you know, what are your parents? Where are your parents from?” And you don’t actually get a chance to do what you came to do, which is, I would like to speak about my work, because I’d like an opportunity.

And so we realized this is quite important, and yes, of course, it’s adjacent to all of this work from the book. It’s, it’s, you know, your name is a lexical item as part of language, right? So we realized the need to… maybe this is an easy entry point to connect people. If we just show the importance of trying to get someone’s name right, how to ask, how to deal with your own discomfort of not knowing how to pronounce it and asking how to… to take off a little bit of the burden of the other person who’s continuously uncomfortable anyway, right?

And so, yeah, we, we, again, storytelling is my thing, so we, we had some focus groups, obviously where we could do a bit more, you know, what is your story, what is your experience, and also how would you like to be approached, right? This is very important. We don’t want to assume that, as researchers, you know, obviously I have my own ways and thoughts. But it was important, so we asked, and created this best practice guide that really came from community: “This is how people would like to be approached. This is what you can do”.

And then we also created this, little documentary. It’s… it’s really, really beautiful, I think, if I have to say so myself. But obviously it just shows the stories, it shows stories of what it… what the name means, because it is obviously part of your cultural heritage, how people have felt resentful towards their names, and ashamed of their names, in exactly the same way as people do with language in my book. So there were a lot of parallels.

And also what it means when people try to get it right, when there’s actually a person making an effort, because again, it’s about connection. Here’s someone who wants to connect with me, and who’s making the effort. So, of course, now I also want to make the effort, right? So it’s almost like this beautiful…

ZOZAN: Like, thank you for trying, and yes, I want to be your friend, let me help you. …

And so, yeah, and it went beyond UTS, it went citywide. I am… we have been receiving requests around Australia to come and screen it and hold a little panel. We’ve had panel discussions with people who are experts in this field. But also, I think what is important that we now brought in as well is Indigenous voices, because obviously there’s an erasure there of names and language that we also need to talk about in the Australian context. So, we’re doing a lot around that, and yeah, it’s been… it’s been the most practical application, I think, of my research so far.

ALEX: When I heard a panel talking about it, something I took away is just to be encouraged, you know, if you’re the person who’s asking, “how do you say your name?” You don’t have to get it right the first time, you don’t have to have just listened to it, and then you can immediately repeat it, because maybe it is an unusual name for you. You just have to be genuinely making an effort to learn, and to show that you want to connect, and that you want to get it right, and you want to ask the person how they want to be known. And that, I think, is just so important for people to keep in mind. It’s not a standard of immediate perfection, it’s a standard of attempting to genuinely respect and connect with people.

Before we wrap up, can you tell us what’s next for us, Zozan, and can we follow your work online, or even in person?

ZOZAN: Well, …

ZOZAN: Obviously, the book is available, you can buy it as an e-book, or obviously, if you’re really into hardback, you can do that too. Say Our Names is spreading far and wide. I’m taking it to Europe, at the end of the year. It will be, used in classrooms in the UK. I will be screening it at a conference in Paris, so there’s actually quite a bit of… because it’s obviously really relevant all around the world, right? We are more globalized, so very happy to do more screenings and introductions and panels. Obviously, a book tour is in the works … let’s see how we go with that, but, certainly around Sydney, and then perhaps also overseas. So I’m trying to spread the word, and, you know, I’m the kind of person who actually just wants to make an impact. I want to, you know, obviously it’s wonderful to do this research and dive into the literature and all of that, but, you know, I think I am quite proud of having translated it into something that is, you know, we have now in corporate offices our best practice guide on language and on names, and people are trying. And so, you know, I think that is the most rewarding thing, and that’s really something I want to keep working on.

ALEX: Thank you, and we’ll make sure we put your social media handles in the show notes. So thank you again, Zozan, and thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and of course, recommend the Language on the Move podcast if you can, and our partner, The New Books Network, recommend to your students, your colleagues, your friends. Until next time!

In this video, I discuss the example of bilingual signage in Nanning City, China. I ask who recognises the Zhuang language that’s found on some public signage there, and some of the varied responses which people – even Zhuang speakers – have had to it. Then I explain what this case study can tell us about multilingual signage policies more generally, and about language policy research. I hope this helps you teach Linguistics, or learn Linguistics, or even do your own ‘linguistic landscape’ research!

Related resources:

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’. Chapter 8 in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. (Full text available)

Grey, A. (2024) ‘Using A Lived Linguistic Landscape Approach for Socio-Legal Insight’, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies’ Methodological Musings Blog, Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

‘Language rights in a changing China: Brynn Quick in Conversation with Alexandra Grey’ Language on the Move Podcast, New Books Network (1 January 2025)

Transcript:

Alex and Kristen in the studio, 2024

[Opening screen shows text: Making Zhuang Language Visible, by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, 2024.]

[Narrated by Alexandra Grey:] In 2004, the local government in Nanning, a city in South China, began adding the Zhuang language to street-name signage to preserve Zhuang cultural heritage. The Zhuang language, which originated thousands of years ago in this region, had largely been overshadowed by Putonghua, a standard form of Mandarin Chinese and the official language of China.

However, the public response to this initiative, including from Zhuang speakers, was not as positive as intended. In this video, I will share insights from my research in the 2010s on Zhuang language policy, including a case study of its implementation and reception in Nanning.

China officially recognises the minority group called the Zhuangzu, who have traditionally lived in south-central China, particularly in the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region, where Nanning is the capital. There are millions of Zhuang speakers, but China has such a large national population that these Zhuang speakers constitute only a small minority.

The Zhuang language can hardly be read even by Zhuang speakers themselves. This is due to the inaccessibility of the Zhuang script; most people do not have access to formal or even informal ways of learning to read Zhuang. This has significant implications for the region’s linguistic landscape.

My research aimed to understand the impact of local language policy. I met with 63 Zhuang community leaders and Zhuang speakers for interviews, including interviews in which we walked and talked through the linguistic landscapes. I also found and analysed laws and policies about Zhuang language, from the national constitution down to local regulations. One important set of regulations were interim provisions introduced in 2004 and formalised in 2013 through which the local government added Zhuang script to street signs in Nanning.

This script these street names used was a Romanised version of Zhuang using the Latin alphabet, and it was always accompanied by Putonghua in both Chinese characters and its own alphabetic, Romanised form. The Zhuang script, which uses letters identical to English and also identical to Romanised Putonghua except for the additional letter ‘V’, was never displayed alone and was always in smaller font on the street name signs. In some cases, the signs contained additional information about nearby streets, but only in Putonghua.

In the broader linguistic landscape, these Zhuang street names were a visual whisper. Most public writing in Nanning is in Putonghua, with occasional English. Only a few public institutions, like the regional museum and library, have prominent bilingual signage that includes Zhuang. Otherwise, Zhuang is absent from common public texts such as road directions, commercial signage, transport maps, and safety notices.

From the community’s perspective, this new bilingual signage caused confusion. Newspaper reports from 2009 indicated Zhuang language was mistaken for misspelled Putonghua, leading to complaints. In my interviews, even some Zhuang speakers had been unaware of any Zhuang script in their environment, often mistaking it for English or Putonghua until it was pointed out to them, or until they started learning to read Zhuang as young adults, if they had that opportunity. Some were not aware that the Zhuang language could be written at all:

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

A university student interviewee: Because it is Pinyin script, no one pays it any regard, they can’t read it. In the recent past, people even thought it was English or [Putonghua] Pinyin, something of that nature, but it is not Pinyin, so they could not conceive of it being Zhuang script. 

Interviewer: Right. 

Another university student interviewee: To look at, it looks the same as English, I think.

In my article, I argue that the invisibility of the Zhuang script is partly because people need to learn to read it, even if they speak Zhuang. My research, which includes reports and census data in addition to the interviews, shows that access to learning Zhuang literacy is very low. Additionally, people are not accustomed to seeing Zhuang as a public language, or as a written language.

Why is this the case? Besides its limited presence in public spaces, Zhuang is also largely absent from educational settings and from the media. There was an irregular newspaper in Zhuang and a bilingual magazine in print when I began my study, but by the late 2010s, that magazine was only printed in Putonghua. This lack of exposure to written Zhuang in everyday life affects the recognition of written Zhuang, even when it is displayed in Nanning today.

Two key themes emerged from my participants’ reactions to Zhuang in the linguistic landscape. Some Zhuang people appreciated the Government’s effort to include and preserve their cultural heritage, but they doubted the policy’s effectiveness; since they couldn’t read the script themselves, they wondered how anyone else would learn anything about Zhuang language or culture from these bilingual signs. Others viewed the policy as tokenistic. They highlighted the lack of accessibility to the Zhuang script and the frequent errors in its display.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: But I’ve heard it’s often written wrongly.  

A community leader interviewee: That’s right, it’s often written wrong but no matter how erroneously those sorts of things are written there is no-one who can pick that out, because Guangxi people have no opportunity to receive a Zhuang script education; who can read and understand?

Another point of dissatisfaction was that the way Zhuang has been standardised, which has made it more similar to Han Chinese – more similar to Putonghua – which felt like a reminder of the marginalisation of Zhuang speaking people in Nanning.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Another student interviewee: This Zhuang writing, frankly, this grammar is in my view a really erroneous usage. It’s completely Hanified Zhuang language. Our Zhuang script must have as its goal opposing that, Guangxi’s so-called Standard Zhuang, which is not endorsed. It doesn’t stick to the grammar of our mother tongue, so we feel relatively disgusted.

For these readers, the bilingual Zhuang street names in the landscape were a visual reminder of other aspects of Zhuang language policy that they felt did not adequately support the language.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: So, when you see those signs, what do you think?

A community leader interviewee: It’s simply a joke, to use Chinese it’s “to hang up a sheep’s head and sell it as dog meat”, so it’s on the façade, but in their hearts there is no respect.

These perspectives suggest that efforts to include minority languages in public spaces can be perceived as futile or even offensive if the community cannot engage with the script. The Zhuang case study highlights the importance of accessibility and education, not only display, when policies are aiming to support minority languages, but it also highlights the importance of policy responding to the habits and expectations about that language which people will have already developed from childhood onwards from the way they experience the language being absent or devalued in all sorts of places and activities. People bring those habits and expectations and value structures with them into the linguistic landscape.

Broadening our perspective from Nanning to consider the policies for marginalised or minority languages in general, this case study challenges two common assumptions about display policies.

First, there’s the assumption that displaying a minority language increases its visibility in the linguistic landscape.

[Screen shows text: Is the Zhuang language on display in public actually visible as Zhuang?]

Second, there’s the belief that when a powerful entity, like the government, includes a minority language in public spaces, this symbolises the inclusion and valorisation of the speakers of that language, or more broadly the people who share that linguistic heritage.

[Screen shows text: Does the display of Zhuang language symbolise the inclusion of Zhuang speakers?]

These assumptions are foundational in linguistic landscape research, but this study encourages us to question them. The findings suggest that public display policies need to be integrated with other language policies to be effective. In the case of Zhuang, literacy and script policies undermined the efficacy of Zhuang language displays, making them almost invisible.

[Closing screen shows text:

Making Zhuang Language Visible, produced by Ed Media Team at the University of Technology Sydney, 2024.

Narrated by Dr Alexandra Grey.

Interviews dubbed by Kristen Martin.

Script by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, based on Grey (2021) Full text

Thanks to Dr Laura Smith-Khan for content consultation.

Thanks to Wei Baocheng for singing his translation of the song ‘Gaeu Heux Faex’ into Zhuang, from Qiao Yu and Lei Zhengbang’s 藤缠树. Full rendition at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WO0-biO5xJI ]

This book details a study of sign language brokering that is carried out by deaf and hearing people who grow up using sign language at home with deaf parents, known as heritage signers. Child language brokering (CLB) is a form of interpreting carried out informally by children, typically for migrant families. The study of sign language brokering has been largely absent from the emerging body of CLB literature. The book gives an overview of the international, multi-stage, mixed-method study employing an online survey, semi-structured interviews and visual methods, to explore the lived experiences of deaf parents and heritage signers. It will be of interest to practitioners and academics working with signing deaf communities and those who wish to pursue professional practice with deaf communities, as well as academics and students in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Intercultural Communication, Interpreting Studies and the Social Science of Childhood.

Summaries of Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families can be found in BSL, ISL, and International Sign.

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

Emily: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Emily Pacheco and I’m a Master of Research candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr Jemina Napier. Jemina is a professor in the School of Social Sciences, Language and Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work includes researching interpreting and translation, linguistic and cultural diversity, gender inequality and interpreting in academic professions, higher education and leadership, and sign language brokering.

Today we are going to talk in general about an area of study in linguistics known as child language brokering, and in particular about a 2021 book that Jemina wrote entitled Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families.

Jemina, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today!

Dr Napier: Thanks, Emily. Thanks for the invitation. It’s really a real privilege to be here.

Emily: Oh, thank you so much again! And just to start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself, how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to research sign language interpreting?

Dr Napier: Sure. So, I’m, as you can hear, I’m a hearing person, but I grew up in a multi-generational deaf family. So, there are four generations of deafness in my family. Going back from, in my generation, I have one cousin, but my parents, siblings, their cousins, my grandparents and also great-grandparents and several aunts and uncles.

So, I grew up with British Sign Language as my home language and grew up bilingually between British Sign Language (BSL) and English. So, I have the lived experience of child language brokering, which I know we’ll come back to, and began work as a professional sign language interpreter when I was very young, when they were just establishing the profession in the UK, sort of separating out interpreting from social work, support for deaf people.

So, I was in the very early stages of that professionalisation. So, I did my first paid interpreting job when I was 17, and there wasn’t any interpreter training available at that time. But then, so I started working and kind of learning on the job, if you like, but went to university to study sociology.

And then I was lucky enough to enrol in a master’s program in BSL interpreting, which was finally set up. So, I was already working as an interpreter, but then I did training and through that interpreting program, I discovered linguistics and thought, ooh, linguistics! This has been an interesting way to kind of analyse what we do as interpreters and have a better understanding of what we do as interpreters.

So, I applied for a scholarship to do my PhD, a Commonwealth scholarship, and that actually took me to Macquarie University, where you are, where I did my PhD in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, so I graduated with my PhD in 2002, and I looked at linguistic coping strategies of sign language interpreters when they work in university lectures.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, that’s fascinating and awesome to hear how you got that start in-from interpreting into linguistics, kind of similar to myself. And as you’ve mentioned, quite a bit of your work has to do with the sign language interpreting profession, but there is a form of non-professional interpreting that exists and it is sometimes known as child language brokering. So, could you explain what that term means and why it’s something that linguists study?

Dr Napier: Sure, so child language brokering is a term that was coined by Nigel Hall, I think, back in the late 80s, early 90s, but there’s been a real explosion of research in that area probably over the last decade or so, 10, 15 years. Initially, child language brokering research was done to understand the kind of brokering. So basically, child language brokering is a form of interpreting that children do for their parents.

So typically, originally, research has been focused on migrant parents or people who relocate to a different country, whether it’s as refugees, asylum seekers, or for work, for marriage. And if they have young children, often children, as we know, children tend to acquire languages more quickly than adults do, especially if they’re exposed to a new majority language. So, there’s been a whole plethora of research that’s focused on this interpreting that children do between their parents and other people.

So, whether it’s in hospitals, at the local shop, at the bank, all these interactions that their parents might have. And the reason that the term child language brokering was coined was to try and distinguish it from professional interpreting, because what children do, or young children, or young people do is, obviously they are still interpreting. So, you know, language A to language B and back again, but they’ve got more of a vested interest and they’re more involved in it.

And also, there’s a kind of cultural mediation aspect. So, children might take responsibility to explain more, or, you know, they understand what their parents do or don’t know, or family members do or don’t know. So, it’s actually kind of seen as a slightly broader task, if you like, than just the sort of nature of the interpreting and sort of mediation that professional interpreters do and are trained to do. Because they are typically, they remain more impartial than, you know, they’re there just to facilitate the communication and not give any opinions. Whereas, as you can imagine, children can give opinions, but also have power to decide what to interpret and not to interpret. So that’s kind of the broad reason why this term has been coined.

And initially a lot of research was done by psychologists, like educational psychologists, child development psychologists looking at the impact of brokering on children, whether they know there’s sort of parentification, reverse parenting roles, and so on. But over the last 10, 15 years, more linguists and interpreting study scholars have become interested in it because of understanding more about bilingualism, how brokering can be an asset. It can be a cognitive asset for children to develop bilingual skills and actually utilise their bilingual skills. That they develop empathy probably from a younger age because they’re thinking about, well, who I’m interpreting for and what they need. And then linguists now and interpreting study scholars are more interested in looking at the act of brokering, just understanding more about the act of brokering itself. So not just the kind of emotional, psychological, cognitive effect, but actually just as a languaging practice. How, as you’ve said, I’ve done a lot of research on professional interpreting in different contexts like health, legal, education and so on. But child language brokering is a masked interpreting practice. And so, it helps us to understand interpreting needs, you know, where access needs are paramount and maybe not being provided by professional interpreters, but also just as a languaging practice in itself, it’s interesting to see how children manage, and young people manage those practices.

Emily: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating as a language broker myself growing up, I just think the act of brokering is something that needs a lot more research, right? So, it’s great to talk about this today. And thank you so much for defining what child language brokering is. A lot of people don’t know what’s the difference between that and interpreting. Aren’t you, isn’t it just kids interpreting?

So, I really appreciate that. And to move on to the next question, we can talk about your book, your 2021 book, Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families. In the book, you apply the concept of child language brokering to heritage signers in deaf-hearing families. So, what does sign language brokering mean and how might it appear as a language practice in deaf-hearing families?

Dr Napier: Sure, thanks. So just to start off with why I became interested in this, because I often used to be told, oh, you must have interpreted for your parents all your life and you must have been an interpreter all your life. And I used to say no, I used to say no, I’ve not interpreted all my life. Because I never felt that – interpreting wasn’t something that was imposed upon me by my parents. So, it was never something that I was required to do. And so, I always used to deny that and say no, it’s not true.

But then once I had my daughter, she was very young, she was only about 2 or 3, and I actually discovered her interpreting or brokering for my mother when she was watching TV once and the captions weren’t working or something, there was a cartoon on. And so, she was telling my mother what they were saying on the TV. And my mum said to me, I didn’t ask her to do that. And so, it piqued my interest. And I thought, hold on a minute. I realised that actually that’s exactly the kind of thing that I did when I was young, because when I was young, we didn’t have captions, we didn’t have video relay services, we didn’t have professional interpreting services.

So of course I did interpret for my parents, but because it didn’t feel like an imposition, I didn’t think of it in that way. And so, I started, so it piqued my interest, and I realised that I did that. So, I did do that. I did broker when I was a child. I did help my parents, but it was not from being asked, it was because I offered. And so, I started reading around and I discovered the early work on child language brokering and realised, I was like, this is it. This is actually, this captures what it was that I did and from my lived experience. And then I realised that there was no research on it. There was one seminal book that was published in 1994 by Paul Preston, where he did an extensive study with heritage signers, which is the term I prefer rather than children of deaf adults. And there’s a whole other reason for that. We might come on to later. And so, he did his study with heritage signers and touched on their experiences of interpreting or brokering for their parents, but he was focusing more on their sense of identity and linguistic and cultural identity.

So, he did touch on it. But apart from that, there was nothing. And there’s some anecdotal things here and there, but there was really nothing, no substantial empirical research anyway. So, I decided to do this. And so, I coined it sign language brokering because I felt it was important to distinguish between the child language brokering practices that might manifest in families that had deaf and hearing members, whether that was hearing children with deaf parents. And if you think about my family, there were lots of different deaf and hearing people in my family. And most of the hearing people could sign, but other families don’t have that makeup necessarily. So basically, I set out to explore what the parallels were. So, what the similarities and differences were between child language brokering, which has been identified as happening in a whole range of settings.

And even though there are lots of taboos around, you know, using your child as an interpreter or as a broker, we know it still happens. The research shows that it happens, and it happens everywhere and regularly. So, because I was able to draw on that data, I was able to replicate some of that and say, okay, well, let’s look at then how this happens in deaf-hearing families and is sign language brokering the same as child language brokering and what the synergies are and perhaps what the differences are as well.

So, what I found essentially is that, yes, sign language brokering happens in exactly the same way as child language brokering. It happens everywhere, it happens regularly, but it’s actually quite complex and quite nuanced as a languaging practice when you consider the different perspectives of the people that are involved.

Emily: I think it’s fascinating because, like you mentioned earlier, from child language brokering, typically the context is on migrant families, right? And in deaf-hearing families, you don’t always have that migrant aspect, but there is still brokering happening. I think that’s really, really interesting.

Dr Napier: And just add to, yeah, on that point is that many deaf parents might well be very bilingual, you know, in written English. And some parents might choose to speak at times, but for them it’s about accessing and participating in the world around them, which is not accessible because they can’t hear. Annelies Kusters and Maartje De Meulder, who are two deaf scholars, have coined the term sensorial asymmetries, that’s it. Sensorial asymmetries, because they were saying that even though a deaf person could be professionally qualified, professionally educated, you know, very bilingual, multilingual even, in sign languages and written languages, but they can’t access what’s going on around them. And they, you know, many people use different strategies, like, you know, gesturing and writing notes and all that kind of thing. But when you’re getting into quite complex conversations, then there’s some kind of access is needed through interpreters or whatever.

So, I think that’s one of the slight differences is that people might have competence. So, for example, in the UK context where I live now, deaf parents might well be very competent in English, but they still, their children are still brokers for them. And that’s where it becomes really complex and nuanced.

Emily: Yeah, and in your book, you present data from three stages of the four-stage project you did. And stage one utilised international survey across several countries. Stage two involved interviews conducted in Australia. And then stage three applied group interviews in England using vignette and visual methods. Can you explain what vignette and visual methods are and tell us a bit more about the innovative methods you used in stage three, as well as what ethical considerations were needed to work with signing communities?

Dr Napier: Sure. Yeah, that’s a very big question. (laughs)

Emily: I know. (laughs)

Dr Napier: I started off at stage one. Again, I think, I just to give context, I think which is important. So, stage one was the survey, which I actually adapted from a survey that had been done with child language brokers with Latino children in schools in America.

So, I adapted the survey so that it was more culturally sort of specific to deaf communities to get a picture of, okay, is this happening where it’s happening? And then that confirmed that it did. And then I went on to do follow up interviews for people who’d responded to the survey and who lived in Australia, which is where I was living at the time, who were willing to sort of delve a bit deeper and talk about their responses.

And then I did in stage three, when I was back in the UK, I did these focus group interviews with deaf parents and with young children. So up until that point, I’d only been interacting with or collected data from people who were 16 plus. And then I did interviews with some teenage, a couple of teenagers who are sort of 14, 15.

So, once I did the workshops in the UK, we had a workshop that was facilitated by a deaf parent. So, I worked with Deaf Parenting UK, an organisation here. So, I had a deaf parent facilitate a focus group with deaf parents. And then I facilitated a group with young heritage signers, and they were aged from 5 to 15. So, I really wanted to use visual methods because I wanted to engage the children in talking about what they were doing. And I wanted to do something equivalent for the parents.

So, I did a lot of reading around about visual methods and understanding that visual methods are a really great way to engage deaf communities as well as visual language users. And so, I ended up using art elicitation method. So, I asked after talking to children about what we mean by brokering and asking them if they do it, then I asked them to draw pictures and to represent what they did.

And then with the parents, the equivalent was how do you feel about when your child brokers for you? How does that make you feel? And I had photos, pre-existing photos, which were spread out on the floor, and they could pick them up and then talk about why that photo represented for them, how they were feeling.

But another component was the vignette methods where there was actually a video, it went, a video that went viral. I think it was around 2010, I think, at this little girl called Laura in America and she was signing a Christmas Carol, a Christmas concert, and it went viral because the mother posted the video on YouTube saying, oh, isn’t my little girl cute? And all of these people were saying, well, she shouldn’t have been doing that, there should have been an interpreter, and they shouldn’t have asked her to do that. And then the parents were like, hold on a minute, we didn’t ask her to do that, she did it herself. And it turns out that there was actually a professional interpreter there, it’s just that the girl, she was wanting to engage with her parents, and she was doing it for them, and she was very funny. So, I showed that video and asked the parents and the children to respond to that because vignette methodology is a way to present a case which might resonate but gives people a bit of distance.

So rather than saying, I do this, or asking them, do you do this, you can present a case study and then they can talk about their response to it, what they think about it, what they feel about it and then if they’re comfortable, then they can start to say, yes, actually, I do that too, or no, I never would do that and this is why, or I have done that but I wouldn’t do it now. So, it gives you a chance to respond to something, but you can kind of create a bit of distance from your own personal experience if it makes you uncomfortable. So, I used that video as one example and I also created a couple of case studies, written case studies, which I showed and talked through, which were again adapted from case studies that had been used in child language brokering studies with spoken language, in spoken language families, migrant families. So again, because I wanted to be able to have that point of comparison across the different child language brokering and sign language brokering.

The second part of your question was about ethics. And so, I think there are two key things there. One is about working with deaf people, using visual methods and thinking about how you make sure that informed consent is received. So, I made sure that all of my consent forms were available in British Sign Language. Everything was conducted in British Sign Language with the deaf parents. And I brought in a deaf parent so that they would perhaps feel more comfortable talking about some potentially sensitive issues with rather than someone who is a child of deaf parents, but also had to be sensitive to children, thinking about how do we get consent for the children? So, I had to ask parents for their agreement to have the children involved. Also had to ask the children as well about if they understood what they were being asked to do. And I tried to make it as fun as possible, but it was really interesting to see there was a definitely different engagement from the 5-year-olds compared to the 15-year-olds. And the 5-year-olds got bored quite quickly. Yeah, there’s the Sign Language Linguistic Society having a terms of reference for doing research with deaf communities and signing deaf communities and around involvement of deaf researchers, making sure that information is available in sign language, the consent is received and so on. So, I was very careful about adhering to those guidelines.

Emily: I loved reading about your methodology in your book and seeing the visual methods. I thought that was so interesting. And I loved seeing the drawings that you put. And most of the drawings were of children drawing about interpreting at McDonald’s. It’s pretty funny just at the drive-thru, ordering food. I loved seeing that. That was a nice different perspective that I hadn’t seen in brokering research so far. So, I really enjoyed reading about that.

Dr Napier: Thank you.

Emily: And then a really interesting theme you discuss in your book is shame resilience. You point out strategies used by deaf parents and heritage signers that normalise brokering in their families. What are some examples of direct stigma and courtesy stigma? And how did brokering overcome shame in your study?

Dr Napier: Yeah, and thanks for that question. So, Erving Goffman came up with the terms direct and courtesy stigma or indirect stigma. And I drew on another theory of shame resilience and shame web. I can’t remember the name of the author now off the top of my head, but from cognitive psychology and developmental psychology. And I really liked Goffman’s framing of stigma because so when direct stigma basically is when you experience stigma directly that you’re discriminated against directly because someone perceives you as being inferior in some way. So, for deaf people, typically that’s people making fun of them signing, perhaps making fun of the way their voices sound and using derogatory language such as deaf and dumb and just being, quite cruel. And so that would be like, so deaf parents potentially could experience direct stigma.

So, children who have deaf parents could experience courtesy stigma or indirect stigma. So, they see people making fun of their parents teasing their parents, being cruel towards their parents. But also, they can also experience direct stigma as well because a child might be bullied because they have deaf parents or teased because they have deaf parents at school. So, children, heritage signers can experience both. And in my book as well, I should also clarify that I did collect data with deaf and hearing heritage signers who have deaf parents because most research talks about children who have deaf parents as, because 90% of deaf parents typically have hearing children. But I wanted to make sure that I collected data from deaf people as well, because some deaf heritage signers also talk about similar experiences of brokering for their own deaf parents for lots of different reasons. So of course, you’ve got that kind of complexity then of the fact that you can experience direct or courtesy stigma. And what I found in my data from talking to the parents and from young brokers and older brokers is that often brokering is a way, is a form of shame resilience.

So rather than, some of them acknowledge that they did feel shame if they witnessed some kind of bullying or experienced bullying or witnessed teasing or cruelty towards their parents. But they often talked about the fact that they wanted to overcome that and kind of move towards shame rather than back away from it. So actually, kind of confront it almost. And brokering was a way to do that because they could stand up in front of people. And if people were like, I don’t understand what you’re saying, then the child would step in and broker and say, I can tell you what they’re saying. This is fine. My parents not an idiot. And they saw that as a way to almost like take control, not take control, but to support and help and mitigate against that kind of stigma. And the parents also commented on how it was very nuanced for them. It created a lot of tensions for them because parents often talked about the fact that they want to be independent. They don’t want their children to help them, but they appreciate that there’s times when perhaps there’s no other option. And also, they can see that sometimes the child’s pride in wanting to help, wanting to do that. And so, they don’t want to say no because they don’t want to diminish what their child is trying to do for them.

So, there’s kind of a tension there between I don’t really need your help, but I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me, and I want to support you to do that. So that was a very, really strong theme that came out through all of the interviews.

Emily: Yeah, and it’s super interesting to hear the perspective of deaf parents. That’s not really widely researched yet either. And this brokering act, what parents think and feel. So, thank you for explaining a bit more about that, about that shame resilience. I thought that was really, really interesting. And as I’ve mentioned briefly, I am a heritage signer, so both my parents are deaf, and I also am a sign language interpreter who’s now focusing more on linguistics. But just from my own lived experience, I believe your project really has lasting impacts on understanding sign language brokering as a languaging practice. So how does studying sign language brokering raise awareness for signing deaf-hearing families, their experiences with schoolteachers, health professionals, and even opportunities for heritage signers to become professional interpreters and translators?

Dr Napier: Yeah, thanks. As you’ll know, having read the book that the last chapter, I talked very specifically about the implications for these different groups. So not only for theoretical implications, but for parents and other professionals who come into contact with their parents. And I think the key things there are that, because I think child language brokering has been a taboo subject for a really long time. So, I think there was a kind of pendulum swing. When sign language interpreting was professionalised, there was a definite rhetoric, a definite kind of discourse in deaf communities saying, you should not be using your children as interpreters. You don’t need to. We have professional interpreters now. And there was, and I mentioned it in the book, there was actually a whole campaign from a video relay interpreting company in the United States, where they showed a video of a girl talking about how she used to missed school because she used to go to interpret for her parents. And they were saying, you don’t need to do this now. We have this company, we have this video interpreting, you don’t need to do this. So, they actually kind of really perpetuated that discourse.

And what was happening from my point of view is that people then didn’t talk about it. They masked, they was like, no, no, no, I don’t ask my children to interpret. But then through this research, we found that, okay, yes, they do, they broker, but it’s nuanced. I keep using the term nuanced because I think it’s really important because it’s not cut and dry. It’s not, they either, they do, or they don’t. So, okay, yes, sometimes they do and in certain circumstances, and there’s a reasoning behind it, and then there are mixed feelings about that on both sides.

So, I think it’s really important to raise awareness amongst deaf families or deaf parents of mixed hearing families that brokering is actually a normative practice in mixed deaf hearing families and that it’s okay to recognise it and talk about it and not say, no, you shouldn’t be doing that, but also not saying, yes, you should be doing it all the time either. It’s about finding a way to kind of identify, because in one of the chapters in my book, I talk about children’s need to feel helpful and want to cooperate, and that’s natural for kids to do, and they help with chores. So, this is a natural instinct for children as they grow up developmentally. So, for parents to lock that down actually could have an impact, a negative impact on children. So, I think it’s really important for families to have an awareness of what this means, why it happens, the different perspectives that are involved. So, I’ve given various presentations to deaf parent groups and CODA organisations about these findings.

But I think it’s also important to raise awareness amongst professionals like teachers. So, for example, if parents go to parent-teacher night or they bump into a teacher in the school playground, what’s appropriate? So, okay, if the bump into the teacher in school playground and the child turns around and offers to broker a brief conversation with the teacher, okay. So the child has offered, but for the teacher to think through what it means, it means if they say to little Jenny, can you interpret for your mom for me, what that imposition might feel like, both for the mother and for the child, and also not to expect that when you’re having quite detailed conversations with parents, that, I mean, I used to, I interpreted for my parents’ evenings when I was young, because we didn’t have interpreters available back then, but we don’t need, we shouldn’t need to do that now, but we know it still happens, especially in regional or rural areas where there might not be interpreters, but there shouldn’t be an expectation that the children do it. So, they should bring in professional interpreters for some things and then also recognise when it might be appropriate to say to the child, yes, okay, you want to tell me what your mum’s saying? Great, tell me what your mum’s saying, because it’s actually about recognising their bilingualism or their multilingualism and fostering that and making their pride in that.

And so I did another study with a group of people involved in mental health and healthcare research, and we interviewed 11 heritage signers here in the UK, specifically about whether they are a broker in healthcare context, and I was shocked that, I mean, we collected this data in 2017, 18, just before COVID, and all of them said, yes, I regularly interpret for one of my parents in a GP appointment, which, and I live in the UK, where there are very well-established, well-funded healthcare interpreting services, so it shouldn’t be needed, but it still happens. So it’s about educating professionals that they can book professional interpreters, there are mechanisms to book interpreters, and so if a deaf person turns up with their child, don’t just ask the child to interpret, especially if you’re giving a diagnosis and then the child is interpreting for health issues, and how’s that kind of transference and how that makes them feel, especially if it’s quite serious. So, we really need to raise awareness amongst professionals that come into contact.

And it’s the same applies to child language brokering, with migrant parents to speak other languages. It’s the same principle, is that you should be bringing your professional interpreters in these kinds of interactions. But acknowledging that it’s okay, if you come out to the waiting room and the kid says, hey, the doctor says your name has been called, fine. So, it’s all relative, really, isn’t it?

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And if I could just get you to touch a bit on heritage signers becoming professional interpreters and translators, do you think brokering provides an opportunity to do so? If you could talk a bit about that.

Dr Napier: Absolutely, I published an article about that based on the first survey that I did in 2017, where a lot of the people who responded to the survey and they were made a lot of open comments, like getting the opportunity to provide open comments. And they talked about their brokering experiences being a pathway for them into sign language, professional sign language interpreting. You might feel like this, I know, I certainly feel like this, because I realised it was something I was good at, and I enjoyed. And then when there was the opportunity there to become an interpreter, I followed it. I didn’t even, when I was a kid, I didn’t even know interpreting was a thing, a professional thing that you couldn’t do. Because it wasn’t really, I had never seen examples of it when I was young, very much.

So yeah, talking to people now that are professional interpreters, a lot of them will say, well, yeah, it was a natural process for me. And some said they kind of fell into it by accident because they were kind of pushed into it or they were strongly encouraged by parents or family members. And they didn’t really know what else to do. So, they were like, well, this is something I know that I’m good at. I can wave my hands around, I can sign. And then some talked about making conscious decision that this is something I want to do. And especially for younger generations, they could seek out interpreter training programs. And it tends to be the older ones that kind of fell into it because there wasn’t any training and it was just like, oh, you’re bilingual. We need someone you know. But interestingly, with the younger kids I’ve spoken to, professional interpreting is much more widely available. Some of them were saying, I think only about a third of them in all the interviews and things I did said that they were thinking about interpreting as a career. Others weren’t, but some of them were quite young. And I know that they might change their mind later on. So, there’s definitely a connection, a strong connection there. But interestingly, when we look at other research I’ve done in the last couple of years, looking at diversity and representation in the sign language interpreting profession, we found that numbers of heritage signers who do work as professional interpreters is quite low. And it’s probably gone, in the UK, it’s gone up from about 10% to about 30%, primarily because we have a lot more deaf interpreters now, deaf practitioners who, interestingly, a lot of deaf practitioners are heritage signers. Proportionately, there are more deaf interpreters who are heritage signers than hearing interpreters. So, I’ve actually been saying, well, we need to be thinking about how we try and actively recruit heritage signers into the profession, because maybe they’re not getting that message that it is something that they can do. So, I think we still have a bit more work to do in that area, I think.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think for myself, for me, I always loved brokering, growing up, or interpreting as I knew it then, that I did enjoy it, I wanted to help, I loved signing, working with signing communities, people, and so I just, I wanted to become an interpreter so bad. So, for me, I actively sought it out, but a lot of other friends that have deaf parents or people I know in the community are like, I know that’s not for me, but I don’t know if they fully understand what it means to be an interpreter, or what it looks like and all those things. So, I definitely, more work is needed to be done there and kind of the promotion, recruitment or education, I guess, maybe. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And just to kind of bring our conversation to a close, my last question for you is, what is next for you in your work? What other research are you working on now?

Dr Napier: Yeah, thanks. So, I’m actually just submitted a book proposal. So, I’m planning on writing another book, which focuses on data that I have previously collected, but I just had too much data for the last book.

So, this is going to be a smaller manuscript, hopefully, but actually draws on, kind of replicates the study that was done by Valdes and Angelelli and others in the US, probably about 20 years ago now, but they actually asked young Latino children to broker a meeting between a parent and a teacher. So, what I’ve done is replicated that study, but I’ve done it with sign language brokers all hearing with a deaf parent and meeting a teacher. And so, I’ve adapted the methodology slightly.

So, what I’ve done is I’ve brought in a range of different people. So, I have a professional interpreter who’s not a heritage signer. I have professional interpreters who are heritage signers. And then I have adult heritage signers who don’t work as interpreters. And then two young teenage heritage signers who obviously are not working as interpreters. And I get them all each, I’ve got each of them to interpret or to broker the same interactions. So, the teacher and the parent repeated the same interaction 7 times. So, I’m writing, I’m doing the analysis on that data now and writing that up. So, I’m hoping that book will come out. It’ll probably be 2026 by the time it comes out, I think. So that’s my kind of major, major focus at the moment. So alongside, I’m still doing research on professional sign language interpreting in other contexts. We’re just wrapping up a project on interpreting in Mental Health Act assessments and how mental health professionals work collaboratively with interpreters in that context. Because it was obviously such a high stakes context. So, I’ve had a few publications coming out of that, but I’m still loving the sign language brokering research. So, I plan to continue on that path.

Emily: Yeah, that’s awesome. I’m so looking forward to that book coming out. That sounds like really exciting to read. And something that I’ve always thought is the dream to do is to do that kind of data collection and that kind of method. So, I’m really looking forward to that. Those are all the questions that I had for you today. Anything else you want to add before we go?

Dr Napier: I think it’s probably worth just making the point because I alluded to it earlier on about why I don’t use the term Coda, which is very common. So, Coda stands for child of Deaf adults. And there’s a whole section in my book where I talk about why I don’t use that.

Historically, I think that I kind of moved away, if you like, from that term because I felt that there was a lot of quite paternalistic views of deaf people and their capacity and a kind of an assumption that Codas experienced a lot of imposition as children, you know, and had ruined childhoods or spoiled childhoods because they had a lot of responsibility. And I didn’t have that experience. So, I didn’t want to associate myself with that kind of terminology. I also felt like, well, I’m not a child and my parents aren’t just adults to me, they’re my parents. So, I never quite felt comfortable with using child of deaf adults. So, I coined the term people from deaf families because I also felt it was important to recognise deaf people that grow up in deaf families can also have very similar experiences to hearing kids growing up. And also, to recognise that there are partners or extended family members or people that might have deaf grandparents, but not parents who also have very similar experiences. So, I started to use the term people from deaf families. And then when I was writing my book and came across the concept of heritage speakers and then so, and then a few people have started to talk about this notion of heritage signers. And I really liked that. It really spoke to me a lot more. It’s actually, because I wanted to focus on the use of sign language and the fact that these people growing up, they’re using sign language as their home language, which is different from the majority language that they’re surrounded by.

And actually, it was a heritage language for them. So that’s why I wanted to recognise. But one other area potentially for future research is also acknowledging that a lot of children who do grow up with deaf parents who are hearing don’t necessarily develop fluent sign language skills. And there’s a whole range of reasons for that. And I’ve done some research with Annelies Kusters and Maartje De Meulder on family language policy in deaf-hearing families and who speaks when they speak or sign, who decides, all that kind of stuff. So that’s a whole other area of research around children who have deaf parents, because you can’t assume that everyone necessarily is a heritage signer. So, I just kind of wanted to make that qualification as well.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely, thank you so much for adding that. I think that’s important to mention as well. And I encourage everyone, if this conversation was interesting to you, to go read Jemina’s book, Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families. And I’m looking forward to your next book coming out for sure.

So, thank you again, Jemina, and thanks for joining everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time!

For some images of Ibrar’s work, check out the Sino-Muslim Literacies Project.

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.

Related content

Ma, Y. (2020). Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic? Language on the Move

Akhmedova, M., & Ahmad, R. (2024). Why Are Uzbek Youth Learning Arabic? Language on the Move

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

International migration is at an all-time high as ever more people move across national borders for work or study, in search of refuge or adventure. Regardless of their motivations and whether they intend their moves to be temporary or permanent, all transnational migrants face the challenge of re-building their lives in a different cultural and linguistic context, far away from family and friends, and the everyday routines of their previous lives. Established populations in destination countries may treat migrants with benign neglect at best and outright hostility at worst.

How then do migrants make a new life?

To answer that question, Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Shiva Motaghi Tabari, with a focus on parenting in migration.

Use promo code AAFLYG6 for a discount when you purchase from Oxford University Press.

Advance praise

“This volume breaks new ground by focusing on Doings: a group of diverse researchers collaboratively doing close listening and looking over 20 years, as adult immigrants to Australia engage in doing life, things, words, family, and work in a new language. The result is not only new understandings of the participants’ self-making, but also the making of a new research trajectory that focuses not simply on the learning of a language, but on humanity doing life in language.” (Ofelia García, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

“This is a moving book that represents the voices of migrants on their challenges and successes across different kinds of boundaries. It embodies impersonal structural and geopolitical pressures as negotiated in the dreams and aspirations of migrants. The authors share findings from decades-long separate research projects to develop richer insights, as a model for data sharing and ethical research.” (Suresh Canagarajah, Pennsylvania State University)

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 05/07/2024)

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 at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Today’s episode is part of a series devoted to Life in a New Language.

Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, I’ll chat to each of the co-authors about their perspective.

Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

My guest today is Shiva Motaghi Tabari.

Shiva is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and a fellow member of the Language on the Move research team. Her research interests lie in second language learning and teaching, intercultural communication, language and migration, and family language policy and home language maintenance in migration contexts.

Shiva completed her PhD in Linguistics at Macquarie University on the topic of Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families. The thesis examined the intersection of parental language learning with child language learning in Iranian migrants to Australia. The thesis won the Australian Linguistic Society’s 2017 Michael Clyne Award.

Shiva, welcome to the show and thank you so much for being here today.

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Thanks, Brynn. It’s great to be here.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you and your colleagues got the idea for Life in a New Language?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Actually, my journey into the realm of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics began during my doctoral studies at Macquarie University. My research interests have always revolved around the intricate dynamics of language learning, multilingualism and intercultural communication, particularly in the context of migration. The idea for Life in a New Language actually emerged from a kind of deep-seated curiosity about the experiences of adult transnational migrants as they navigate the complexities of settling into a new linguistic and cultural environment.

The concept originated during our discussions on how language plays a critical role in the integration process for migrants. We as a group realised that there was a need for a deeper understanding of how learning a new language impacts migrants’ daily lives, their identities and their overall settlement experiences. And for my part, drawing from my background as an academic and a research fellow, coupled with the rich ethnographic data collected by myself and my esteemed colleagues, we embarked on a mission to shed light on these often-overlooked narratives, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and the triumphs faced by migrants in their linguistic journeys.

And this book, in fact, is sequel to Ingrid Piller’s acclaimed Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. It builds on years of ethnographic research with over 100 migrants from diverse backgrounds. And each of us brought unique insights from our respective fields.

And together we aim to present a holistic view of the language experiences of migrants.

Brynn: All of the co-authors came together with all of their different data and their different participants. And like you said, many of this happened over the course of many, many years. And so Life in a New Language, the book, is all about the reuse of this ethnographic data. Can you tell us about the original research project that your contribution is based on?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: My contribution is based on my PhD research, which focused on bi-directional language learning in migrant families. This research involved in-depth ethnographic work with migrant families in Australia, where I examined how both parents and children navigate the language learning process and the impact this has on their identities and daily interactions. The original research provided rich, nuanced insights into the complexities of language and migration.

In fact, I spent a good amount of time with these families, observing their everyday lives, conducting interviews and participating in their community activities. And this kind of approach allowed me to capture the multifaceted ways in which language learning intersects with their social and cultural integration. So, the insights from this research actually formed the foundation for my contributions to the book and particularly in highlighting the dynamic and reciprocal nature of language learning within migrant families.

Yeah, so it’s actually the foundation and my contribution and the contribution of other group members, my colleagues, spans over a decade of in-depth exploration of the language learning and settlement experiences of migrants to Australia.

Brynn: Your particular research, it had to do with Persian-speaking Iranian migrants. Is that correct?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: That’s correct.

Brynn: And that’s where you are originally from. So, what did that feel like for you to be talking to these migrants in this context? What did you bring from your own background that you found reflected in these migrants’ experiences?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Oh, yes. So there are so numerous commonalities among the migrants from diverse backgrounds, including Persians, actually. This kind of research revealed fascinating insights into the ways in which migration reshapes family dynamics and relationships.

And this is something that I experienced myself when I immigrated to Australia around two decades ago. And how, kind of like many participants, the experience of settling into a new country means renegotiation of familial roles and responsibilities in light of the new social and cultural context. So, we as a group, I mean, those of us who focus on familial relationships in our research, we observed a spectrum of experiences from participants who found strength and resilience through familial bonds to those who grappled with the challenges of maintaining cohesion in the face of, you know, linguistic and cultural barriers.

Brynn: That’s so interesting because in the book that really comes through. It’s really evident that so many migrants and not just from any one particular language background, but from many language backgrounds and many different countries face that shift in family dynamics when they migrate here to Australia.

So, one of the big themes that came up in your particular contribution to the research was the role that language plays in mediating family interactions. Can you tell us more about that and what you found with your participants?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Absolutely. So, one theme that was repeatedly coming up in the research was the pivotal role of language in mediating family interactions, as you mentioned, with language learning serving as both a catalyst for connection and a barrier to communication. That was really interesting.

And another finding related to transforming parent-child in relationships and how parents need to make language choices and how these choices may change family dynamics, like as we may know, children’s oral proficiency in everyday language can quickly become indistinguishable from that of their native-born peers. So, while children make progress in terms of fluency, parents continue to struggle with everyday language and their formal and academic English may well have been far ahead that of their children. But their oral displays were lacking as it was revealed in my research, for example.

So, this discrepancy began to undermine parent-child relationships as children began to feel linguistically superior to their parents. And the key point is that the family transformations as we were talking about and as we’ve discussed in our research do not take place in a vacuum. They are deeply shaped by the exclusions and inclusions migrant families experience in their new society.

So overall, the findings show the complex interplay between language identity and family life in the context of migration in Australia as I did my research.

Brynn: That would be so frustrating. I’m thinking as a parent myself, if I was having this almost battle in my own mind about how I communicate with my child, and those would be really complex feelings of feeling like I wasn’t good enough or I wasn’t speaking my new language well enough, and like you said, but then seeing my child become more and more and more fluent. Did any of your participants talk about their feelings related to that?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Oh, yes, heaps actually, it was a very kind of common answer to this question, particularly for Persians who come from a background that parental authority is a thing for them, and they were worried about the upbringing of their kids on how to make language choices, because on the one hand, they wanted to advance their own language, I mean, conversational language in the new society, and on the other hand, they were worried about using the language of the society, which is English, obviously, at home as a way of practicing their own linguistic skills at home will affect their kids’ home language.

But at the same time, at some point when the kids were advancing in their conversational language, as I mentioned, they felt kind of superior to their parents. And this kind of feeling was very common among the parents who said, we really want to maintain our heritage language because we are feeling that if, for example, one of the parents said, you know, the kid keeps correcting me when I’m speaking, and I have a feeling that if she keeps doing that, then she will think that I’m a weak kind of parent and in other fields as well, in other areas as well, and I will lose my credit as a parent.

And so, it’s better to keep our heritage language as the means of communication with our kids to avoid this kind of relationship or reversal kind of roles in the family.

Brynn: That would be such a hard power dynamic to have to negotiate because, like I said, it is hard enough to be a parent and negotiate power dynamics between you and your kids, but then to throw in language, and especially if these parents also want their kids to develop English because they realize that it is important for living in Australia. I myself, when I used to teach English as a second language to adults, I would often get my adult students say to me, I won’t speak English with my kids because of that exact point that you just made, because my kids correct me, and I understand that they speak English, quote, better than I do, but I just don’t want to be corrected by my own kids, and I completely understand that.

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Absolutely, absolutely. And something that came up as well, in addition to this kind of fear, was the mixed messages or mixed advice, kind of, that the parents got from the society. Some educators would recommend them to use the home language only, and some said, oh no, just use English, because your kid needs to improve their English skills and this was something that parents seemed a bit confused in the beginning, once they arrived and once they just wanted to make language choices, what to do, what not to do.

And this was something very common as well, that it shows that there is something in the educational system that lacks probably, that needs to be worked on to support migrant families on how to deal with these kind of choices and how to maintain that kind of familial bonds at the same time have the linguistic support that they need.

Brynn: Yeah, and that makes sense that they would be getting those mixed messages because I don’t think that we, as a society, have agreed upon what is the, quote, best way to do bilingualism or multilingualism within a family. In your personal opinion, what do you think that we in Australia could do to make that transition easier for these parents, to make it easier for them to make these language choices for their own families?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: As we all know, the journey of migration is full of challenges and improving the situation for new migrants and new families actually requires a kind of multifaceted approach. Of course, there are undoubtedly avenues for improvement to facilitate smoother transition for new migrants, specifically parents and children. Well, I think one key aspect is the kind of provision of comprehensive language support services that cater to the diverse linguistic needs of migrants, which includes not only language instruction, but also access to resources for language maintenance and development within familial and community settings.

It’s really important to encourage families regarding their heritage language maintenance and providing resources. And also fostering inclusive and welcoming environments is really important. The kind of welcoming environments that celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity that can mitigate the feelings of isolation and promote social integration, both for adults and children.

So, some sort of policy initiatives that aim at addressing systemic barriers to employment, to education, to social participation. These are all crucial for creating equitable opportunities for migrants to thrive in their new homes. I believe that one key avenue for improvement, I think, goes through the education system and how our kids, our children, feel safe and secure and happy and proud to have come from a background that has provided them with kind of additional worldviews, additional culture and linguistic skills, in addition to the societal language and the dominant culture.

So that’s the way that I think the education system should have some policy strategies in place for our kids to make them feel secure and happy about this kind of, you know, linguistic skills that they bring from their home countries.

Brynn: That’s a great point that we can kind of as community members do everything that we can to make people feel included, to encourage linguistic diversity and to encourage family languages. But you’re right that there needs to be something that’s a bit more top down in the governmental policies in education because that’s such a huge part of any child’s life and they spend so much time there. So that’s a really great answer. Thank you.

Shifting gears a little bit, I’d love to ask you about your actual experience in writing this book, Life in a New Language. Co-authoring this monograph with five other people, six of you total, had to have been complicated, especially because it was largely written during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Can you tell me what were the ups and downs of the writing process? What was that like to co-author with so many people?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Actually, for me, this kind of, this collaboration was wonderful. So, collaborating with diverse team of authors certainly to me was an immensely rewarding experience. And one of the kind of major upsides I could say was the wealth of perspectives and expertise that each member brought to the table.

Clearly, like every other project, there are some challenges, particularly our research fell during the period of COVID, as you mentioned. And there were some challenges, if you want to call it challenge actually. So, it was just like coordinating schedules or, I don’t know, like navigating different opinions.

So we wanted to make sure that there is a good kind of, I mean, coherence across multiple chapters, how we could achieve that. But nonetheless, our shared commitment to producing a comprehensive and impactful kind of work kept us motivated and focused throughout the writing process, I would say. So ultimately, I would say this kind of collaboration and the collaborative nature of our work allowed us to produce this book that I think reflects by itself the collective insights and contributions of my amazing colleagues.

Brynn: And that’s what I think is so interesting about this particular book, is that it brings so many different types of people together in the stories, because you really feel as a reader that you’re getting a deep insight into migrant perspectives from all different cultures, all different language backgrounds, so you can see what’s different for certain people, but also the themes that keep coming up for migrants of all kinds. And I agree that the co-authorship is a really interesting and unique aspect to this book.

Before we wrap up, can you tell me what’s next for you? What are you working on now? What’s your next project? What are you up to?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Currently, apart from my academic roles, I’m cooperating with some not-for-profit organizations as well, actually working on new projects. The projects that explore the language needs and challenges faced by kind of more vulnerable group of people in our community from coming from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds in health sector. You know, overall, my goal is to continue contributing to the ongoing dialogue about multilingualism and diversity.

And I would love to put theories into practice in real life. I love to see tangible results and if I can have any kind of positive impacts on the lives of people. And I would love to focus on promoting equity, understanding and social change as much as I can.

Brynn: Well, you’ve certainly started to do that with this book. That is very evident in Life in a New Language, so thank you to you. Thank you to your co-authors. And thank you so much for talking to me today, Shiva. I appreciate it.

Dr Motaghi Tabari: It was great to be here. And thank you for having me here. Thanks for it.

Brynn: 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. Until next time.

You may have seen the movie, CODA, which portrays the experience of a hearing teenager that has a Deaf family. A Coda, a child of Deaf adults, is an identity that represents the experience of having Deaf parents. Jessica showcases a perspective that is not widely discussed, which is the perspective of a Goda, a grandchild of Deaf adults. Her memoir explains the navigation of Deaf and hearing cultures in Australia with grandparents who migrated from the UK. The House With All The Lights On highlights and discusses themes around oralism, language deprivation, Deafness and music, and more!

The House With All The Lights On explores linguistic and cultural dynamics within Deaf-hearing families. Jessica shares her experience having Deaf grandparents and navigating the cultural borderline between Deaf and hearing cultures. It is a wonderful memoir about family, the complexities of identity, and linguistic diversity.

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.

Transcript

Emily: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Emily Pacheco, and I’m a Master of Research candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr Jessica Kirkness. Jessica is an author, researcher, and teacher of nonfiction writing at Macquarie University. Her work includes researching the value of life writing and creative nonfiction in animating the hearing line: the invisible boundary between Deaf and hearing cultures. As a Goda, spelled G-O-D-A, which stands for a grandchild of deaf adults, she writes about deafness, disability, and family.

Today we are going to talk in general about linguistic diversity in Deaf-hearing families, and in particular about a 2023 novel that Jessica wrote entitled The House With All The Lights On.

Jessica, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Kirkness: Thanks so much for having me, Emily.

Emily: It’s wonderful to have you here! And so just to start off, could you tell our listeners a bit about yourself? What led you to undertake your PhD in life writing and Deaf studies?

Dr Kirkness: Well, I guess family and love, which sounds trite, but I grew up in a house next door to my grandparents, so it was sort of a dual occupancy household where my grandparents lived in a granny flat on one side of the property and then my family, my mum, dad, brother and sister and I were in the main house. And so, I grew up with Deaf people all around me.

So, my grandparents had a huge hand in my upbringing, and they always hosted really lively Deaf parties and gatherings where I was around sign language and Deaf culture. And I guess naturally I was fascinated by that, I suppose, and just the you know, it was at once kind of part of my everyday life but also a point of intrigue and so when I got really into writing, particularly telling true stories, so creative nonfiction and life writing, I started to dabble with telling stories about my family and my upbringing and I wrote this little essay in an undergraduate course at Macquarie actually. (Emily and Dr Kirkness laugh) Which was called Telling True Stories, and I had this wonderful tutor who encouraged me to keep going. So, I wrote this 3,000-word essay, which then became a series of essays which then became a book.

So it was, also part of the PhD that I wrote. So, this was really investigating this idea of the hearing line that you mentioned in your opening, this boundary, this kind of cultural borderline that exists between Deaf and hearing cultures and again, I was really obviously invested in that having been sitting at that threshold, at that boundary for much of my life and thinking about how I embodied hearingness, how I enacted hearingness as a, as an identity and that was something that I came to in my studies and that was quite radical.

I’d always sort of understood my grandparents to be marked as different and other and that they had a cultural and linguistic background that was their own that they were that you know they identified as part of a cultural and linguistic minority group. And I had a relatively sound understanding of that, but when I started doing my PhD research and I found a lot of Deaf studies material, was doing a lot of research, I was kind of floored by the idea that hearing culture exists and that there are hearing ways of understanding the world and being in the world and it was this real sort of Aha! sort of a moment where it was like, yes, that’s so true! There are particular idiosyncrasies that I have that that show me to be a hearing person that I’m very auditory and that I, you know, I like listening to lectures and podcasts, for example, and I, learn about the world through through that particular sense, whereas my grandparents were very, very visual people and very tactile as well. So, sign language is obviously a kind of a spatial and visual language and so they used their bodies and to communicate but they were also highly sensitive to anything visual unfolding before them. And I really wanted to write about that and that kind of the boundary, the borderlines between our cultures, the ways that we were both similar, I suppose, but then and different in a way that was really important.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, I love that. I absolutely love everything you just said. (Emily laughs) I think it is really, fascinating because you know, I myself, I have Deaf parents which we’ll talk about a bit later in the interview, but, you know, being raised by Deaf people like you were in your childhood being raised by your grandparents where they were very present in your childhood. You have a moment where you’re like, oh, like my ability to hear has influenced the way I function as a human, right?And so, people, there is a Deaf culture and I think people kind of are like, oh, what does that mean?Like, isn’t it just a language difference or a linguistic thing? But no, that visual language, that visual nature really shapes the Deaf community and certain things that are important, that maybe hearing people are perplexed by or don’t kind of relate to and that’s always fascinating to talk about and discuss I think for sure that people don’t realize they have the label as hearing, you know, that Deaf people refer to them as hearing and they may refer to the Deaf as Deaf but that is the thing, that is that difference, that boundary of difference which I think is really interesting that you talked about so thank you for that great kind of introduction.

And so, to talk about your memoir, in particular, The House With All The Lights On, definitely resonated with me as a Coda which is spelled C-O-D-A, a child of Deaf adults for those who might not be familiar with that term. So could you explain the meaning behind the title and other deaf-friendly technologies that you discuss in chapter 3, kind of those cultural things that might be different, people might not be aware of.

Dr Kirkness: Absolutely. So I think, just as preamble, I think a lot of people are surprised to learn that there is a vibrant Deaf culture and that we tend to understand in our culture deafness as a medical problem as something that needs to be fixed and every time I brought a new person home, a new friend or a partner, for example, I always had to navigate that threshold where there was some languagebrokering, there might be some interpreting, people tended not to be able to understand my grandparents voices.And so there was a lot of sort of cultural bridging that I was doing in those moments. And I was always astounded that people weren’t sure.They were very uncertain about how to communicate first of all, but also like, oh, there is a Deaf culture?And so, it felt to me like there was a real need to write a story that came from a Deafcultural space. But to be a sort of a facilitator or that cultural bridge so that I could allow hearing people an insight into the kind of the richness of Deaf culture and language.

But The House With All The Lights On really refers to the idea of literally light being in the house all the time. So, my grandparents needed to have conversations with the lights on because without the light one cannot see. (Emily and Dr Kirkness laugh) And so you can’t read lips. You can’t also read sign language. So, the house was always awash with light and so my grandmother had a million and one lamps on of an evening and she was quite frightened of the dark, because it was, I think it was just very, it took away her ability to understand the world and so darkness had a very different meaning for her I think than it did for me.

And so, the house was always full of light, but also there’s a sort of double meaning here in that sign language is often referred to as the language of light and Deaf people are often referred to as the people of the eye. And so, this kind of light and visual sort of phenomenon was something that I wanted to tease out and flag in the book, which is why the book is called The House With All The Lights On.

Emily: Yeah, I think that’s great. And certainly, sometimes people when they find out I have Deaf parents they will say oh it must be so quiet in your house, and I think that’s not the case either you know sometimes people have these assumptions but just the importance of light like you said. And The House With All The Lights On I just love that visual I think myself, so I wanted you to kind of highlight that in our interview as well.

I really enjoyed reading about the different language practices as well in your family. So could you maybe explain how your grandparents’ upbringing influenced their language and what communication looked like in your family in particular.

Dr Kirkness: Yeah, so communication was a really mixed bag in my family, and I guess for some sort of, a potted history, I suppose. Sign language was banned in many educational contexts for much of the 19th and 20th century. So, my grandparents went to schools where they were encouraged to speak and to lip read and they had a lot of speech therapy and things like that as a vital part of their education. And this was all part of a practice called oralism. And this was basically a pedagogy that encouraged children, not just encouraged, did in fact force them to speak and use auditory kind of practices. If, possible if the, if the child had any residual hearing as well. And that had left a real mark on my grandparents, and I think that they grow up, grew up, acutely aware that they were different. And that their language was not celebrated or encouraged, certainly not when they were in “hearing spaces”, and so there was a real self-consciousness that they developed. Signing in public was something that was quite difficult for them at times. They were always really aware of people staring, sometimes just out of pure curiosity, which was fine, but I think it after a while it would grate, but also people saying unkind things, or being punished at school for signing, for example.

So back in the days of oralism, children had their hands tied behind their backs. They were beaten, they were caned, they were called animals, monkeys, apes for using their native language, which is incredibly sad. But that kind of perception that speech is and and verbal language is better than signed language has been something that I think a lot of Deaf communities have had to contend with over the last several 100 years. And so that really, I think influenced the way that they felt within themselves.

So, they could be quite shy and protective about sign language and where they would sign. So, at home they would sign to one another, and they would sign with their Deaf friends and when we were very small, my siblings and my cousins and I, we would use fingerspelling, which is a, a manual way of representing the alphabet. And we did that for clarification purposes, and we knew very basic signs. So, food, home, more, chocolate, the things that we would want to ask for, the kind of the basics of communication, I suppose. But there was a limit, I think, to how we were able to communicate with one another. And once we went to school and, I actually went to a signing bilingual preschool. So, I was taught to sign at preschool, and it was a sort of I think they called it reverse integration where there were hearing and Deaf kids present and so there was a bilingual educational program and I really loved that, and my brother went to the same one. My sister actually missed out because of mum’s work.

But we, we all knew how to communicate at that basic level, but then there was just this big gap once we went to school. Signing fell to the wayside, and it was something that we, communication was something that we always had to work on. You know, it was never seamless. It was never easy. It wasn’t a thing that we took for granted. But I think as with many families with Deaf members a lot of us didn’t know how to sign fluently and that was something that I learned later in life. So even though I could always use, do the basics, my grandfather went blind in one eye later in his life and that meant that lip reading was incredibly difficult for him and was no longer a solution for us. And so, I put myself through multiple Auslan courses and got myself accredited, which was great. But it also, I guess it really enabled us to have a more meaningful relationship. It was a really beautiful thing to learn, but also a wonderful way of connecting to my grandfather in the last sort of decade of his life. And that was a really radical thing for the both of us and, and something that I still really treasure being able to, to sign with my grandmother now. That’s a real gift.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people don’t know what oralism means and thank you for explaining that and also how recent those practices were still in place I’m from the US and so that practice is not really as common anymore, but it was for even the early stages of my parents’ education. So, it’s just recently that signed languages around the world have finally been celebrated and cherished like you said for the cultural values they have and that importance there, but it was something that was kind of, you know, something you did in secret and not in public. So, I think people often don’t realize that experience of Deaf people like your grandparents and how that does influence the language practices your family had, but that’s awesome that you, you know, got to take formal Auslan courses and have that, you know, opportunity. So, thank you for sharing a bit of that story.

And if we can kind of shift now to talk about, in chapter 14 of your book, you discuss the misconceptions around cochlear implants, which are also known as CIs, and maybe the clashes that exist there with Deaf culture. So, I personally was shocked to read the comparison of the implantation rates. So, in the US, it being 59% of profoundly deaf babies receive CIs. While, in Australia, it is as high as 98% for candidates under the age of 2. So, can you tell us more about the misconceptions you’ve researched around CIs and how Deaf communities are responding to technology?

Dr Kirkness: So, I think, on that question of technology, there are lots of technologies that my grandparents did use, they were not implanted with cochlear implants and there’s a long history there that I will go into.But the technologies that were in their house were things like a doorbell that had a flashing light system, and that was connected to the main electrical system in the house.And so, when there was a caller at the door, they’d ring the, press the button and all the lights in the house would flash.There were also alarm clocks that had light functions where they would flash or vibrate and things like that.So, there were all those kinds of technologies too, but one particular technology that is quite, has been quite controversial in the Deaf community has been cochlear implants and they are an Australian invention, so, Graeme Clark pioneered these devices, and they were developed in Australia.

And so that’s one of the reasons that Australian children in particular have a very high uptake of them. And I think the, the comparison with the US is a really interesting one because we have different health systems. And so, there’s, I guess, limited access for potentially to cochlear implants in the US. I think here they’re there are rebates and sort of government incentives that allow children to be implanted at a young age. But they have been without their controversy.

So, I think back in the eighties when they were really becoming, when the public were becoming aware of them a lot of hearing people saw them as a medical miracle and it, you know, they were the bionic ear and it was fantastic and they were going to be this panacea, you know, it’s gonna fix deafness, it’s going to cure deafness. But that is antithetical to what Deaf people believe about their own state of being, that deafness is part of what makes them, them. And that they belong to a linguistic and cultural minority group and though they absolutely understand and, and experience barriers, cultural barriers and barriers with access to information, they don’t always have interpreting when it’s needed. There are, you know, all sorts of kind of barriers that Deaf people are confronting. Nevertheless, deafness and their, language and their close-knit communities and the kind of incredible, close-knit community that Deaf people have is rich and wonderful and they they don’t want to be cured and so that was a real point of tension I think between medical ways of understanding deafness and cultural ways of understanding deafness.

And so, these devices have been seen as a form of eugenics, you know, to eradicate the scourge of deafness and people have used that kind of really loaded language and there is also a long history of eugenics, and you know Deaf people being killed and exterminated in World War 2 and you know this is a really sensitive issue. But I think nowadays people have a more nuanced perhaps take on cochlear implants. There are many culturally proud Deaf people that still want to give their children cochlear implants so that they have access to the world of sound, but they want them to be raised as culturally and linguistically kind of bilingual I suppose, you know, bicultural, bilingual, so that they have access to the Deaf world from a young age but also have access to the hearing world.

So, I think it’s a really complicated thing, but they have been, you know, there’s been protests over the years about cochlear implants. And also, just challenging this idea that once you fit a child with a cochlear implant that they are hearing because they’re not that device gets switched off or taken off at the end of the day and that child remains deaf and there are lots of kind of challenging factors to understand and audiologists have their work cut out for them here. You have to learn to hear with a hearing device, whether it’s a cochlear implant or a hearing aid. And that takes a lot of investment. It takes a lot of investment from the child that’s being fitted with the device, but also from the parents, a lot of speech therapy and audiological training, you know, this is an improving technology, it’s improving all the time, but it’s not the same as hearing and that child, that person once they grow up will still be deaf.

So, I think a lot of a lot of culturally Deaf people really advocate for the use of bilingualism and giving a child access to sign language from a young age because there is that period where it’s incredibly exhausting to get used to the device and there’s a lot of arguments about fitting a child very early so that they have access to language. But there’s also another argument to be made that giving that child any language, whether it’s wherever you come from, I guess in Australia it’s probably spoken English, or whether it’s sign language, you just have to give them something so that you avoid that problem of language deprivation. So, there’s lots of conversation around this, but yeah, that’s, I guess, a little bit of the history of the (Dr Kirkness laughs)-

Emily: I know, I know it’s a loaded question, hey, and it’s definitely something the Deaf community still, is discussing and you know, audiologists do have their work cut out for them, I agree, but I think it is important to bring to the forefront like the voice and opinion of the Deaf community regarding these devices. And so, people are aware, you know, that it’s not as easy as, oh, like now you can hear and that’s, there’s a lot of work that goes into this. I think that’s important to mention. Yeah.

Dr Kirkness: Yeah, exhausting work, you know, really exhausting.

Emily: And in your novel as well, you also discuss the language barriers, which you kind of mentioned a bit so far in the interview, language barriers that you witnessed your grandparents face. And in particular, you share a few stories about the barriers your grandfather faced in hospital. So, in my personal experience I have done a fair bit of language brokering for my parents but what was it like for you to witness the language barriers and you having access to both Auslan and English in those situations?

Dr Kirkness: I think, I open the book with a passage about the moment I had to tell my grandfather he was going to die, that he was quite unwell for the last years of his life and he was rushed to emergency having had a, I don’t know if it was a heart attack, but a heart failure, he was in organ failure and there was nothing more that the doctors could do for him at that time. And he just regained consciousness and there was no interpreter available. And so, I ended up being the one to tell him that there were no more medical interventions possible. And that was a really difficult conversation to have. Not one I imagined having. And one that I, I had because I wanted to spare my mother and my uncle from having to be in that position. And I think Codas often do a lot of that language brokering as you, as you would well know and I, I think that in that moment they really wanted to be family members and they didn’t want to be a conduit for that information, particularly that information. And so that ended up coming to me and it also made sense I think because I had the skills to be able to do so and in a way it was a privilege, but it’s that double-edged sword, I think, of, of having that intimacy with a family member, and delivering such awful news, and being able to break it gently and in a way that I would like him to be treated. I suppose, you know, being able to choose the words is a sort of privilege. But also, an incredibly huge responsibility that weighed on me and I would have loved to be a family member in those moments too.

And I think his experience in hospital was, I’m going to say traumatizing and I don’t say that lightly, it was really awful to feel that he didn’t receive adequate care during his time in hospital. At various hospitals throughout Sydney, the language barriers were so profound that we didn’t feel safe to leave him on his own at any time. And so, we developed a roster so that someone would be with him to be his advocate. We, my mother would write handwritten signs and stick them on the walls with communication tips, you know, things like make sure you tap Grandpa on the shoulder to get his attention before speaking. You can’t yell, yelling will just distort your lip patterns and will mean he can’t understand you. You know, raising your voice does nothing in fact and it’s just confusing. So, there were lots of things like that, that we tried to put in place and there were some end-of-life meetings that we had at the hospital where we had an interpreter present and that was wonderful, but there were lots of moments throughout the day where, you know, an interpreter can’t shadow your loved one, 24/7. That’s just not possible.

So, there were many times that we turned up and and grandpa had had procedures without having informed consent being taken and that was very distressing for him and very distressing for us to witness and we would arrive first thing in the morning with things having been done overnight. And just grandpa having no understanding of them whatsoever. And so there was a lot of sort of calming and pacifying that we had to do for him in those moments. And it was very, very difficult. And in palliative care spaces as well, just that kind of communication breakdown and the lack of cultural awareness and lack of Deaf awareness and this is a really hard systemic thing you know, there’s not a lot of Deaf awareness in the world and you know, medical practitioners are not given a lot of training in this if at all. They might have a couple of hours in a lecture about hearing loss, not about deafness and certainly not about cultural Deafness. And so, you know, and then there’s all the other kind of structural systemic issues within hospitals themselves that I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for, but it was very very difficult to watch a loved one be so alone and so unsupported in that, in that space.

Emily: Yeah, I’m sorry to hear your family had to go through, you know, a traumatizing experience for your grandfather and for you as family members to see that happen to someone you cared about so deeply and people don’t always realize that sometimes in those instances having an interpreter is a luxury almost like you said you know, because there’s interpreter shortages in the US and inAustralia from what I’ve heard for Auslan interpreters, there is a desperate need for more people to become professional Auslan interpreters.And so, when you do get one because they’re very busy and these instances typically in medical situations are last minute or not always planned far in advance, like to book someone in can be, you know, a miracle.(Emily laughs)So, to speak, but we, I wish it wouldn’t be that way, you know, that, hospitals would have a better system and it is a systemic thing like you mentioned and then, families are impacted by that when they should be just thinking about their loved one and caring for them as a family member and not as a language broker or interpreter and so. Yeah, I think it is a huge systemic issue.So, thank you for discussing that and your personal experience. And I really do hope doctors and medical professionals really get that Deafness training because Deaf people exist and they’re gonna be their patients one day.It’s not an if chance there are Deaf people that exist and it’s important to recognize them as part of the population that they’re going to be servicing and giving care to, right?

To switch gears a bit again to discuss some of your fieldwork that you did for your PhD. It was fascinating to read the chapters where you describe doing your fieldwork for your PhD in England. You discuss oralism, Deaf education, Deaf musicians, and how diverse the experiences of the Deaf community are. So could you tell us a bit about how Deaf communities might be misunderstood by hearing society; some people might even be confused by me saying there are Deaf musicians. So, if you want to talk a bit about that.

Dr Kirkness:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I had the great pleasure of going to the UK because my grandparents were raised in the UK and they moved to Australia when I was one years old, one year old, (Dr Kirkness laughs) when I was an infant. And they were from the UK originally and went to schools for the deaf in the UK and so I got to go to both of their schools, which was really incredible, and I got to stay on site at Mary Hare Grammar School where my grandmother went to school, and they have this incredible music program which is initially what sparked my interest. I also am quite musical myself. I grew up performing a lot at school in plays and musicals and singing and playing piano. They were things that I did regularly and I actually had a little keyboard in my grandparents’ home when I was a child and I would come over to their granny flat and I would play on the keyboard and write songs and Nanny, my grandmother, would come and bring me little cups of pineapple juice because I told her that it was good for singing (Dr Kirkness laughs) and she would watch me play on on the piano, the keyboard and she would ask me about music and she was really interested in what I was doing. And then I sort of reached a point in my adolescence where I felt it was this illicit thing that I was really interested in music, and I started hiding it away from my grandparents. I felt this guilt that this was a hearing activity that I was participating in, and I thought that, you know, my grandparents can’t have any access to that world or to that particular cultural practice. So, I best keep it from them.

And so later on when I started doing some research around deafness and music, I realised in fact that I’ve been really quick to make an assumption there and in fact there are many people who are interested in music, many Deaf people who are interested in music and even perform and play professionally as deaf musicians, they might also identify as being culturally Deaf and they might also use sign language, but they’re really they love music as a language and as a phenomenon that is not just an auditory phenomenon. It’s something that is felt in the body, something that exists on a piece of paper, you know, a written score where they’re interpreting a piece of music on the page where there’s a sort of imaginative process and even in some cases with the musicians I spoke to a kind of synesthesia where all these kind of senses are kind of overlaid on one another in different sort of sensory pathways, neural pathways, in the ways that they understand music. And that was fascinating to me, and I was really, really pleased to work with an organization called Music and the Deaf, which are the only organization of their kind as far as I’m aware in the world, and they’re based in Yorkshire in the UK. And they do all sorts of work with deaf children and introduce them, particularly to rhythm and then they move on to pitched instruments and some of these kids have cochlear implants or hearing aids and so they have some auditory perception of music but there’s also that sort of embodied aspect I was talking about and one musician in particular his name’s Sean, he would talk about taking his shoes off when he plays trumpet so he can feel the drum so when he’s playing in a group he would take his shoes off so he’d feel the vibrations and keep time in that way. And he had this really interesting sort of perfect pitch and a way of locating pitch within his body. I think he talked about F sharp being his nose and F natural being in his lips or something like that. It was really, really interesting to hear his take and along with a lot of the other musicians.

I also came to realize that my grandparents were not just interested in me playing the piano because I was playing the piano, they were really fascinated by music in the world too and my grandfather in fact loved musicals and all of his favourite movies were musicals. He loved the sound of music and when my mom was a little girl she actually before captions existed, she actually transcribed the entire film including the songs by hand and my grandfather had a handbook that he would put on his lap as he was watching the film so he could move between the screen and the paper. And he just loved it. He loved the kind of the spectacle of music, performed music, especially dance and things like that. My grandmother loved dance. A lot of rhythmic things, marching bands, my grandfather loved marching bands, The Last Night of the Proms and the the Military Tattoo as well. He was fascinated by that and also things like Songs of Praise. There’s a BBC program called Songs of Praise, which is sort of a, it’s a religious program, but there’s a choir that sings and my grandmother was fascinated by faces in the ways that they would be animated when singing. So, there were all these visual elements that I was suddenly privy to as I started unpicking that assumption that I had that, oh well, music belongs in the hearing world. But in fact, just like sound, Deaf people have an understanding of sound. It’s just not an auditory one all of the time. It’s something that they feel through vibrations. It’s something that they identify with mouth movements and shapes and all sorts of other ways of apprehending the world. Yeah, and I guess that was linked in with this idea of the hearing line that music for me was this kind of threshold. So, there are, I mean, it’s not always adopted in Deaf culture. Sometimes it is seen as a kind of, belonging to the hearing world and almost as a normalising force. There are some people for whom music is just not for them. They say, I’m Deaf, music just that doesn’t appeal to me, it’s not my thing, but there are equally people for whom, music is for them. And I think that was really interesting to consider.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely can resonate with what you’re saying and, you know, my parents, they love music, you know, (Emily laughs) like you’re saying, certain Deaf people in the community do like want to be a part of that, you know, musical experience and I’ve taken my mom to like heavy metal concerts and she loves it! (Dr Kirkness laughs) Like it’s a great experience. Everyone should take their Deaf parents, their Deaf family to a heavy metal concert a lot of the vibration and being close up to the speaker, the spectacle it is, right? And the feelings that you feel in an environment like that, I think it’s awesome! So yeah, I loved reading about that in your book. And kind of to bring our interview to a close, what is next for you and your work? What other research are you working on now? If you could tell us a bit about that.

Dr Kirkness: Yeah, so another memoir actually that I’m working on, and I’m really fascinated with you know ideas around the body and so I’m interested in health and disability and embodiment and all those things. So, the next book I’m writing is actually about sudden illness and I had, it’s a personal story, so it’s about my lived experience being a carer for someone who had a very kind of cataclysmic life changing event. He had a sudden cardiac arrest in his sleep when he was very, very young and I was the first person to find him. So, I’m really writing about you know, what happens to that person who has that kind of life-altering moment, but also what happens to the people around that individual, what happens to the witness and to the to the carer and the people who provide that network of care.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, fascinating. I can’t wait to read your next memoir!

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

Till next time!

The conversation addresses community and heritage language schooling research and practice, and our guest’s long history of important language policy research and activism, as well as the interconnections between the two.

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.

Reference

Cruickshank, K., Lo Bianco, J., & Wahlin, M. (Eds.). (2023). Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges, and Teaching Practices. Taylor & Francis.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 29/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dr Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

I’m very pleased today to say that my guest is Joseph Lo Bianco, a foundational figure in linguistics here in Australia. I could say many things, but I will introduce him as Professor of Language and Literacy Education at Melbourne University. Today, we’re going to talk about his new book, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. It was co-edited with Ken Cruickshank and Merryl Wahlin and published by Routledge.

Welcome to the show, Jo!

Prof Lo Bianco: Thank you very much, Hanna.

Dr Torsh: Now, for those who don’t know your very impressive body of work or, perhaps, are new to this field, could you just start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Prof Lo Bianco: Ok, well thank you for the invitation. I’ve recently retired from the position at the University of Melbourne in Australia which I’d had for 20 years. Prior to that and even during that period of time at the university, I worked in language policy studies. I started off my academic life as an economist. I was very interested in the integration of migrant populations, particularly migrant women.

I worked in that focus of work in Victoria. But I became less interested in it when it started not to focus on culture and not provide any kind of focus on people’s language. I retrained as a language person and educator and linguist, and then I became slightly uninterested with the descriptive tendencies of a lot of linguistics. I’ve always really been interested in public action probably more than anything. So, I started to research policy around language. I became actively involved in those things myself directly.

Then, during the late 1970s, early 1980s in Melbourne, Victoria and other places, I was very involved in activism around these things. There were some political changes which meant that I was invited to put my money where my mouth was. I was basically demanding that governments do better for minority populations and they said, “Well, let’s see what you would do.” So, I was invited to draft policies. I did write these, and I became extremely interested in the traction of ideas.

The policies were accepted. The National Policy on Languages in 1987 was the peak. Really, it was the first multilingual policy, some people say the first one ever anywhere, but certainly in English speaking settings. Then I became very heavily involved in the implementation of this. I developed a very acute interest in problems of making change real. This moved me away from academic research considerations. I had always loved research, but you can’t do so many things at once. So, I became very actively involved in that.

Because the policy was adopted by government and launched and funded, there was a lot of interest in it internationally, and the early successes that we had. Languages started to boom. We had extraordinary growth in research and interest in translation and interpreting and in the approach that we took in the policy, which was comprehensive.

Most policies, if you look at them, on language tend to be just the policy on behalf of the official dominant language of a country. Country X protects Language Y. That’s typically what language policies do. Or they tend to be some concession to a minority population, but they don’t go very far.

We were trying to do very ambitious things, you know. Think about public discourse, how people spoke to each other, inclusion of minorities, social cohesion, but also justice and rights questions. Naturally, a lot of opposition grew up against this from people who didn’t like what we were trying to do. So, the politics of language became my life, really, for many years.

Then, because of what we were doing, it got noticed by people like Joshua Fishman in the United States, who invited me over there. I’ve never done what I promised him I would do, actually. At one point he said I really should document this as an experiential process, and I will do that in my retirement at some point as a reflection on how to do language policy from the inside. Even though language policy is something that is studied by applied language scholars, they still tend to theorise it a lot. So, its practicality is lost, I think, and I want to reinject that.

But anyway, this was noticed around the world, and I got lots and lots of invitations to work in different places, including with international organisations like UNESCO and UNICEF and the Council of Europe. So, I started to do assignments on invitation in Southeast Asia – Samoa, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu. And in South Asia – Sri Lanka for the World Bank, Myanmar for UNICEF and other Southeast Asian settings. Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines. I went to many assignments in Europe.

So, this has been my career since then, working on practical language policy things, which always raise questions of literacy and language study but also the linguistics of these problems. Who describes what language is? How do they do them? What happens with the work that linguists do? How does it get taken up or not get taken up within practical contexts? That became my obsession.

Recently, we’ve just submitted for publication a book on Tunisia that I’ve done with a colleague. We’ve looked at language, ideological discourses. Arabic, French, the two kinds of Arabic, English and Berber and other language issues there. So, it became a kind of reverberating set of discussions. I’ve had a very wonderful career of working all around the world in different settings on practical problems.

In some places, we’ve produced significant change. In Thailand, we produced the first language policy in that country that wasn’t just about the protection of the national language. In Myanmar, we did 45 public discourses around language rights for minority populations, the learning of the main language by minority populations, which is often also a grievance. This kind of thing. I did a trilingual policy in Sri Lanka in 1999 and submitted this and worked with the President’s office on the implementation on it. Then it got thwarted by conflicts there.

So, I’ve had this wonderful opportunity and in this part of my career I want to think about putting down some reflections on this experience.

Dr Torsh: Oh, thank you. That’s so interesting. I’m thrilled to hear that you’re going to write a reflection about that process of putting together the National Policy on Languages because that’s something that continues to be important in the work of myself and other scholars in Australia, so that’s really exciting.

Ok, but we’re here to talk about your new book at the moment, so congratulations on that new edited book. Before we talk about it, the book is called, as I said, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. For our listeners who aren’t really across the community languages sector in Australia, could you just give us a brief overview of it? Obviously, it’s also connected to your own policy activism, and how did that happen? How did it come about that it was established in Australia, and how has it changed? How has the policy focus and the sector changed since that time?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it’s a long and convoluted story, and I can only tell a tiny fraction of it. Suffice to say that in really nearly every society that I’ve worked in, I’ve visited and worked with community language schools in Nagoya in Japan, these kinds of processes of a community generating institutional structures to support and maintain and transmit their languages to their children is really universal.

In some cases in some societies, it’s heavily repressed, and in other societies they’re actually encouraged. But the phenomenon is practically global, I would say, and it tends to be ignored. Most of what focuses the attention of researchers in relation to language education is mainstream or official or dominant schooling. We’ve had this third sector, you might call it, third sector schools. The two sectors other than that are the public government school and then the independent or private schools, and in Australia there are large Catholic school sectors. So, they’re the two other sectors and then you have these parttime schools in the main, although some of them are also full time, that are schools whose primary purpose is the transmission of language and culture to immigrant children, but also increasingly indigenous children in our society.

Now, traveling around the world and the kind of work that I’ve done that I described before, I noticed at meetings and other places there would be community representatives, or even academics who would come and say, “Look, I’m working with Chinese schools in Malaysia” or something or other. And that can be mainstream government schools or that can be the parttime schools.

So, with Ken and Merryl we decided that we would hold an international conference to try and do some proper comparative work. This had never really been done. And we had this very successful conference in Sydney, much affected by Covid and restrictions on travel, but nevertheless it was a very successful conference. And we realised there’s a huge unaddressed agenda there, well we suspected that. So, we thought we’d produce a volume that started to map out the territory. There’s a little bit of a taxonomy that I started to produce in my own chapter, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done into this.

But also, what needs to be both theorised and then developed in a practical way, is what do we want of these schools? If we’re adopting a pluralist position where we believe in language rights, what role would we hope for these schools? Then, in practical terms, what could be done?

Now, in my policy work, right back to the really early 1980s, late 1970s, I worked for government in Victoria. We promoted all sorts of things like cooperation and integration between these schools. Sometimes these schools use the premises of a mainstream school on a weekend or after hours. So, we used to do very practical things. We did this in 1981, you know, facilitating the writing up of contracts, of meetings between the two sectors. Often, the teachers are not trained, or they can be trained teachers in another system but it’s not recognised here. We would facilitate collaboration.

You can imagine the kinds of problems that would be there of a practical nature. Of people not understanding each other, even mistrust. Sometimes much worse things than that. All of these things were there and in spades, which is a colloquialism of saying in large quantity. So, we started to do lots of facilitation of this.

In 1982, actually from your university, Macquarie University in Sydney, Professor Marlene Norst, who has sadly passed away, she was commissioned partly from some of the pressure we had been putting on the federal government, to do a survey of these schools as a preparation to some kind of systemic support for them. She produced a wonderful report (which) unfortunately got repressed by forces who didn’t want this report. It wasn’t just a survey. She produced a really interesting guide to what could be done. She went beyond the brief in a very helpful way.

There’s always resistance to any kind of progress. We know this. Unfortunately, her work got marginalised. But I promote it a lot because I liked her a lot. She was a good scholar and tried to do a great thing, but it’s got ignored.

I took that up in my 1987 National Policy on Languages and promoted it, and we got some extra funding for these schools, so they started to be incorporated into the system. So, this is what we wanted to do in the book, is to think, “Well, what do other societies do? Are they marginalised? Are they given municipal level support, but not state or federal government support, depending on the governance structures in different countries? Are they actively repressed? Are they underground schools?”. This happens in very repressive systems. This can be very dangerous to the lives, actually, of people, to engage in this kind of activity. So, I think there’s a call for solidarity with people who struggle against repression, but also to learn from systems where more substantial work is done.

In some systems, government and public education, or mainstream schooling, only supports prestige foreign languages and these community languages tend to be marginalised and they might get some token support or acknowledgement or given a license to continue to teach, but they’re not actually encouraged. And all the community language teaching and language maintenance, as distinct from second language learning, would happen only in those marginal settings.

Well, in Australia and many other countries in the world we have a much more integrated approach. Our mainstream schools teach multiple languages, including many community languages. Many students study the language at school, at mainstream school, that they might also study in an after-hours system. So, I think, and we can go onto this with another question, but I think we need to think imaginatively and in a future-oriented way about cleaning up this mess, as it were.

Having principles that start from a different basis, not a toleration basis, but a basis of learning, for having a different way in which all of these – I mean, children just have one brain. The learning goes on in that same one brain, and if that one brain is shopped around different systemic structures, those structures ought to get their act together rather than the child and the family having to continually have to adjust to different forms of provision.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, great, thank you. I think for those who are outside of the sector and aren’t that aware of it, can you just explain what that discontinuity actually can look like for those who haven’t experienced it?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it can look like a child studying whatever language it happens to be, let’s say Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, in a school in Sydney during the week. They might do a one- or two-hour program during the week, so it’s not a huge commitment of time. And then, because their family might come from Malaysia and be an ethnic Chinese family but they might not speak modern standard Chinese, or Mandarin, in their home, the child goes to a Saturday morning school run by the community, or an after-hours school two days a week. And sometimes that after-hours teaching happens in the same physical premises as the week program.

Now, there’s a lot of issues here. One of them is about the coherence of the pedagogies that are used in the two places and the wastefulness of the lack of any collaboration between the two systems. Wouldn’t it be much better if it were possible for this to be maybe not seamless, that would be an ideal aspiration, but at least less jagged and disruptive if it were coordinated in some way, pedagogically as well as in other ways. If there were shared knowledge among the different teachers about individual children.

It would have to start from a child’s focused look and also be informed by good pedagogical language learning processes and also of the affordances. Different systems afford different possibilities. Imagine a highly literate mother tongue speaker teaching on a Saturday or Sunday but who isn’t necessarily a trained teacher. This might be a perfect input for colloquial, continuous communicative language. Then you might have a more structured grammar-centred approach in the school system. These are just some ideas that I’ve had that we could work on, and we’ve put them into action in some places.

But I feel like systems, governments, run away from this. It seems to them like an immense problem, a very messy problem. But as I argue in my chapter in the book and at the talk I gave at the conference, I think they’re going to have to deal with this at some point because of the radical changes that are happening in the world of communication and learning anyway that are going to overwhelm all these structures. We’re going to be forced to think about these things differently. I always think if you can predict a change happening, prepare for it. Start talking about it. Get intellectuals in to start theorising what’s involved. Literacy scholars have got a lot to contribute here, and people who think about the semiotics about the representation of language with communities.

I love partnerships which involve these kinds of interactions. I’ve always found them very productive, and I’ve always tried to set them up. That’s what we did in Myanmar (with) all those dialogues.

Sticking with the community language schools which, in some countries, I have to clarify, are called heritage language schools, or heritage languages, and I and other people have resisted that encroachment of that terminology here. Not because it’s bad terminology but because typically in English, I think, “heritage” has a connotation of something that’s in the past, like a heritage façade of a building. Or the heritage which might be the historical memory of a community. I’m not saying that it’s inevitable that it has that connotation, but I think it often does. Whereas a “community language” suggests that it’s something that is present and vibrant and vital within an existing alive community now. So, I’ve preferred it from that point of view.

In the book, we say “community/heritage” because obviously other people use the other terminology. And of course, we can inject new meaning into terms. We don’t have to be defeated by past ways in which words work. So anyway, there’s that kind of issue there.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, that’s great, thank you. I’m now rethinking my use of “heritage language” in my own work, so that’s great to think about that.

I’m really interested in this argument that you make in your chapter, as you said, about changes in our understanding of what literacy is. So, you have a chapter in the book which is based on a talk that you did at the conference. The chapter, which introduces the volume, is called “Community/Heritage Language Schools Transforming Education: Beyond complementary, more than integration”. And you’ve already said systems need to grapple with this idea that you can’t have these two sectors not talking to each other, that it’s not in the interest of the learner. You argue that in part because of this idea of the way we understand literacy is changing as a result of technology, of the fourth industrial revolution.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that, for our listeners? I realise they have to go read the chapter, but just a little bit of a summary for them, to draw them in?

Prof Lo Bianco: It’s an immense topic, of course. If you look at any organisation that has worked in literacy for a long time, you can’t fail to notice that they have adjusted their definition of what it is. One organisation whose definitions I have studied is UNESCO. Of course, they are a very important organisation in this because when they were founded, from the very beginning, they were given the world mandate I would call it for kind of a global agenda for literacy in the world. That’s how I’ve described it in a publication.

If we look at how they understood literacy in the late 40s, early 1950s, and compare it to how they understand literacy today, it’s cheese and chalk. Two very, very different notions. Teachers and researchers have done this. I mean, there have been many movements in this. One of the most important ones was the new literacy studies of the 1990s which started to inject social understandings of literacy and move away from a pure and psychometric or cognitivist approach. Of course, it’s moved on even a lot since then.

So, what we know is that what is taken to be literacy has expanded beyond simple capacity to read and write a language to multiple other dimensions of what’s involved in being a literate person in a society that penalises people who are not literate. This is the really important social consequence of this, that we have the social cost. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is. The social cost of low literacy even understood in traditional ways of understanding literacy is very, very high. There is a high risk of unemployment. It’s no accident that a really high proportion of prisoners in jails are low literate people. There are multiple explanations of this. It’s not a predictor, it’s a consequence of the social punishment.

I’m very committed to this because both of my parents were very low literate people. Neither of them had any serious formal education. And yet, they were both very intelligent people. So, we can’t make any kind of connection between intelligence. This is an enormous discourse, and I’ll just leave it planted there, but what I did want to say about this is that what’s changed in our understanding about literacies from the 50s to now has been this social dimension.

What’s changing increasingly now is a massive technological injection in which multimodality is the principal characteristic of literacy. I mean, anything we do online cannot be reduced to language-centred semiotics. It involves manipulation of multiple semiotic resources that are not just linguistic anymore. Colour, movement, image – there’s any number of things that go into a very complex meaning-making practice. This is going to continue to accelerate in what some people call literacy 4.0. My colleague Professor Lesley Farrell at the university uses that term. (This) mirrors industry 4.0, the 4^th industrial revolution, which is not just computers but artificial intelligence beyond computing as a practice that people are in charge of. It’s absurd in a way, to call them machines anymore, but machines which learn and can learn independently generate their own kind of knowledge and then project that into the space of meaning. So, we’ve got something really radical going on. That’s going to change how language works.

I think one of the reasons we have a crisis in language study today, and this is very true, sadly in English speaking or dominant countries in particular. We have the biggest struggle for language teaching and learning that we’ve had for many years. People misunderstand the technologies as obviating the need for language study. That’s because they’re very reductionist about what’s involved. People used to take literacy in this very reductionist simple way. They take language to be very reductionist, and they tend to think it’s just basic communication. So, we can inject that stuff with voice retrieval. You can ask your little pen to say something in Japanese and you’ll hand that to someone and it’ll say “good morning” in Japanese.

This is completely possible. It exists. There are very sophisticated technologies that will even do lip syncing, so that you’ll look like you’re speaking the language when you take a video of yourself speaking German or Italian or whatever it happens to be. So, this is going to be a battle that we have, to persuade administrators and other people that language learning is not this. This is forms of communication. Let’s welcome them. Let’s adopt them. Let’s embrace them. We can’t deny them. They’re there. They’re going to grow. Elon Musk wants to inject probes or whatever they are, implants in people’s brains. All of these things are going on at a very rapid rate, and some of them might be ethically very, very questionable. But I can’t see any way that they’re going to be stopped or slowed down until we get on top of what they mean for people.

So, we have to understand them. What they mean is that people’s learning will be occurring in places other than in schooling. It will be self-generated and generated by outside forces including machines. It’s going to be massively challenging to everything that curriculums, official curriculums, require and prescribe in schooling.

This is going to create, I think, for indigenous populations, and especially for dispersed, small populations – I worked with the Tigrinya community in Melbourne many years ago with a very small population in Melbourne but who had other members in Brazil and in Africa and in Italy and other places. You can aggregate numbers in communities with the technologies that you can’t do otherwise very easily. So, there are multiple benefits that we can point to. Individualisation, aggregation, personalisation, learner control and pacing. There’s lots of pedagogical impact that a learner can govern in this.

The challenge for schooling is absolutely foundational, almost existential I would say. Therefore, we have to embrace it. In my chapter, and I only just make a small dent into the problem, we have to think about a new way to imagine learning and start from there. The school systems that currently are the principal institutional ways of delivering learning have to be redone, and they have to be seamless. Teachers have to be managers of the educational experiences of learners. That’s how I call them. Rather than the exclusive input to the learner. So, they have to understand the principles of the acquisition of language knowledge.

I see a bigger role for professional language specialists in this, to interact with practitioners directly, but also curriculum writers and others. We have to rethink these things. And then communities who own community or heritage language schools and who are the repositories of the communication in these languages, you know, the Arabic, Tamil, Vietnamese and Greek in Sydney and everywhere else in Australia and other countries. A large part of what’s involved in learning is interaction with speakers, so we have to make sure that there’s seamless connection there.

So, I’m just touching on the outlier of this, but that’s what I’m trying to do with this, is to get people to imagine more creatively, pushing ahead, but not that far. These things are imaginable within a decade. Many of them exist now. Instantaneous translation, voice to script, I mean all of these things challenge all the separations we’ve ever had. What is literacy going to be when it’s possible to have no division between spoken language, signed language and their representation in a written form or some other form?

They’re really important questions to ask and to be asked by people who are interested in multilingualism.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so much to think about. And I guess this kind of question that you sort of answered, but I want to make sure I understood and maybe you can elaborate a little bit. For mainstream teachers, this is the question you pose at the end of your chapter and that somebody asked you, and I really was interested in this. What can mainstream teachers do in order to support the learning of community languages? It sounds like you’re saying they are also a really important part of this process, of this existential crisis that we’re seeing in education when it comes to both language and literacy and what they mean.

Prof Lo Bianco: I’m often asked this question by mainstream teachers when I give talks. As I said before possibly, I’m speaking to Indonesian teachers in Victoria tomorrow. One of the anticipated questions is exactly this even though their specialist teachers of Indonesian are mainstream teachers.

When you look at students who drop out of language programs – I did a study once in the western suburbs of Melbourne in working class schools. I interviewed and discussed and did subjectivity analysis with large numbers of kids. I published it in a book in 2013 out of Multilingual Matters. One of the things that we found (is that we) classified students according to whether they were going to continue or drop language study. We classified them as “waverers” or “committed” kids and then we worked heavily with the waverers to think about what was it that was going on in their minds.

One of the things that came up repeatedly is something that mainstream teachers have got an enormous amount of influence on, and not just the language teacher. That is the attitude or ideology that is attached to the practice of language teaching and learning.

We found that lots of students had imbibed a negative, sometimes quite racist construction of what they were engaged in. This was not coming from the language teacher. This was coming from systemic imagery and systemic, often not even openly, hostile – anyone who’s had children or raised children or been around children, little children I mean, knows quickly that they are semiotic sponges. They pick up signals from multiple sources. They know when something is half-hearted. In the book I called it half-heartedness. When schools are just half-hearted about something, kids get it. They know it’s less important than something else. You’re not actively saying that learning Japanese or Italian, the two languages in that particular volume, is less important than doing something else like sport. But I see the way the school is arranged, and I can work out that’s exactly what you’re doing. One of the girls I interviewed said this to me. She said, “They don’t really, really mean it. We can tell. So why are they pretending?”. So this is something mainstream teachers can do, be enthusiastic supporters.

I helped introduce a CLIL program in a Japanese school where the boys, it was a boys’ school in this particular case, had had a mostly grammatical or formal syllabus. They were doing fine. And as soon as the Japanese teacher started to teach content that was about the Fukushima earthquake, really interesting material in which the kids had to research online and the teacher had to teach technical language ahead of time so they could manage to read these complex texts and stuff like that, the first thing that happens is pushback from the mainstream teachers. Oh, geography, that’s my space. Or, oh science and physics, that’s my space. You’re just the language teacher. That was all resolved beautifully when the teachers understood that the purpose of the CLIL was for the language teacher to enrich the content in the Japanese program. It wasn’t the exclusive teaching of the science or geography. Then they started to see the benefit of additional focus on the content they were teaching as specialists. So, the collaboration was brought about.

These conversations between the mainstream and specialist language teachers are essential. Mainstream language teachers can either choose to be an innocent bystander, an active supporter or at least an encourager. Again, it’s this same one mind that these children have. One mind, one heart that gets shipped around to different classes. The multiple messages that they pick up about the choices they need to make are significant. So that’s something I would say in relation to that question.

Dr Torsh: Great, thank you. Yeah, I know that study well. I’ve used it in my own research. It’s fantastic. I think that it’s really helpful to teachers, and I know we have education students who listen to the podcast, so really helpful to know what they can do.

That was really my last question, but before we wrap up, I just want to know – you’ve talked a little bit about your next project on Tunisia, which is a fascinating context. I’m excited to hear about that. What else is up next for you?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, that one’s in press, or it’s under review. I’m working with a dear colleague in Sri Lanka. I’ve lived and worked in Sri Lanka, and my colleague and I are putting together a volume on bilingual education there. Bilingual education means, typically, English plus either Sinhala or Tamil. That’s a project that will come out next year. I’ve got a book coming out with some colleagues from Hong Kong Uni on supporting learners of Chinese. There’s a lot of other work. I’m much less efficient than I used to be because of illness and old age, both of which have made me slow down.

But I really, really want to go back into the theory of language change and deliberate language change. Language always changes. Everyone knows that language is a dynamic process and changes. But language policy and planning is deliberate language change, and even deliberate language change can happen unconsciously. But planned deliberate language change, which is what I call language policy, and as I said, Joshua Fishman, when I first met him, said that I should document this, a kind of insider account of policy writing, and that’s what I want to devote some time to.

But unfortunately, I was trained as an academic in an era in which you made a distance between yourself as a scholar and the subject matter. I know I haven’t done that for years, but that’s still my predilection. I have to overcome that a great deal to speak personally in this way in writing. I need to do that. That’s something I ought to do. I’ve got a huge amount of documents from, like, 45 years of engagement in language policy, agitation and writing and stuff, and criticism.

You can’t just criticise if you want to – I mean, a lot of language scholarship is dominated by a critical disposition these days, especially sociolinguistics. That’s been important to uncover and expose a lot of injustices and hierarchies in the world. But I don’t think we should overstate the agentive power of our disciplines to really affect change. You have to engage with processes of concrete change, and you have to not set aside criticism, but make criticism productive. I find that, unfortunately, a lot of critical scholarship, maybe not a lot, some critical scholarship is not so productive. If you want to be productive, you have to engage with people whose views are different from your own. You have to compromise on things. You have to find conceptual categories that unite differences.

When I was working in Myanmar and south of Thailand where there’s been a conflict for many years in which language and script and bilingualism are implicated, it’s really really indispensable. It’s not just a methodological, I think it’s an ethical requirement to adopt a different set of understandings and practices. Criticism is something that has to be understood as being particular to some purposes and not others. So, I do think that there’s too much mindless criticism. Too much of a disposition to begin activity with a critical air.

Having said that, I don’t want to be assumed to be anti-critical. Criticism is critical to civil life, to decent life, to social improvement. I just think that there are moments of productive participation in shared creation of new things in which criticism can be a problem. I’ve seen that to very bad effect. I’ve seen it from people who have been trained just in the critical tradition who don’t know when to stop.

So that’s something I’d like to do. I’m going to think about that a lot. I haven’t written enough about that. I read other people’s writing on this and I’ve learned from it, but I feel as someone who has tried to write language policies and be engaged with concrete productive change and not just analysis or critique, that that’s something I want to think about more carefully.

Dr Torsh: Oh, that’s a really wonderful place to end, I think, on that. What do we do beyond criticism, especially for emerging scholars and research students? So, fantastic. Fantastic.

Look, I would love to keep going, but I have to wrap up. So, thanks again, Jo! Thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend our Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!

Broadly speaking, Croatian Studies in Australia attracts three groups of students: first, children and grandchildren of immigrants from former Yugoslavia who learned the language at home and want to study it formally to develop higher levels of proficiency, including academic literacies; second, students with a heritage connection who did not learn the language in the home but want to develop some level of proficiency to connect with extended family, also on visits back to Croatia; and third, a small but growing number of students, with no heritage connection who have developed an interest in Croatian for various reasons. The latter include mature age students who take up the challenge of learning another language later in life for reasons of personal interest and intellectual development.

Dr Jasna Novak Milić in the Croatian Studies Centre Library at Macquarie University

Croatian is a fascinating language in many ways and so the conversation is also a springboard to speak about language politics and language naming, both back in Croatia/former Yugoslavia and in the diaspora. Croatian speakers first came to Australia in the early 20th century but mass migration from former Yugoslavia was a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century.

The Croatian Studies program at Macquarie University developed in this context and during Australia’s decisive turn to multiculturalism from the 1980s onward. The Croatian Studies Centre today enjoys strong community support through the Croatian Studies Foundation and is also benefitting from the commitment of the Croatian state, a member of the European Union, to the Croatian diaspora.

Beyond the specifics of Croatian language learning, our conversation also turned to broader issues related to “small” languages in Australian higher education, and why the availability of languages programs in higher education is critical for heritage language maintenance.

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.

Related resources

• About the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie University
• Study Croatian at Macquarie University
• “Easy Croatian” Podcast” hosted by Dr Jasna Novak Milić on SBS
• Keynote lecture by Dr Jasna Novak Milić, “Why Australia needs Croatian Studies“
• Petition to save Croatian, German, Greek, Italian, and Russian at Macquarie University

Alia Amir’s grandfather with his three daughters, ca. 1950 (Copyright: Alia Amir)

I admire people, who, on the move, maintain and transfer their heritage languages to the next generations. By “maintain,” I mean the transfer of spoken language or as a boli (Mahboob, 2023).

In our family, our generation has grappled with the challenges of preserving all of our languages, and unfortunately, we have not succeeded in passing down all these languages to the next generation.

Multilingual Kashmiri ancestries

My paternal grandfather Shams-ud-Din was born in Srinagar in Kashmir, and raised in a Kashmiri-speaking family, shortly after the Great Famine of India (1876-1878) under British Crown rule and after Jang-e-Azadi (the War of Independence) (1857), also referred to as “Mutiny” from the British Raj’s and coloniser’s perspective and language.

The Great Famine of India itself, during the Crown rule, not only took the lives of millions of people but also caused mass displacements and internal migrations. This era did not only result in an astounding loss of life, but also came to have long-lasting consequences for health. Recent research shows that the British Raj era heightened the risk of diabetes in South Asians, a testament to the complex and extensive consequences of historical episodes.

Even though my initial childhood years were spent with my grandfather, I am not aware of the extent of his formal education. Vivid in my fond memories of him, however, remain his proficiency in several languages. He was well-versed in writing English, Persian and Urdu, accompanied by the eloquence of his bolis, Kashmiri and Punjabi. A brief part of his life was spent in service of the Empire’s machinery, the British Hindustani Police. Despite that, I recall the fervor in his stories about the resistance against the angrez rulers.

My paternal grandmother, Rehmat, was also a Kashmiri, however, her Kashmiriness manifested slightly differently from my grandfather’s. Her story, and subsequently my story and my linguistic skills, are also entrenched in the environmental, socio-historic events and linguistic ecology of the region. Her family, along with numerous others, were among the migrants from Kashmir to the-then unified Punjab, specifically Lahore, colloquially referred to as the province’s heart, during a famine in the seventeenth century under the Company Raj.

Among these migrant Kashmiris was Allama Iqbal, one of the foremost poets and philosophers of the region. He wrote in Urdu (also called Hindustani at that time), Persian, English, and German, while he was a lecturer of Arabic. Also fluent in Punjabi, one of the major languages of Sialkot city, where his ancestors settled, Allama Iqbal’s second and third generations (as well his predecessors) can be regarded as fully assimilated into Punjabi culture and language. It highlights a poignant contrast – the loss of one language, and the gain of another, a reminder of the pulsating progression of cultural and linguistic identities.

South Asian diglossia

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris exemplify how diglossia functioned in multilingual communities. Pakistan and other South Asian nations similarly encapsulate traits of diglossic countries. In the case of South Asia and Pakistan, the notion of one language or one ethnic group is rendered a myth, just as the assumption that one nation necessitates one language. Based on this assumption, in linguistic communities such as the Kashmiris, it remains a challenge to pinpoint a single language that represents all of them. This monoethnic perspective, however, is rooted in Eurocentric global North discourses and epistemologies which does not capture the nuanced realities of bilingual communities (Bagga-Gupta et al., 2017).

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris also showcase that the purposes of languages in one’s repertoire can be different, and those uses do not necessarily need to confirm imperial language categorizations. For instance, consider the Punjabi language in present-day Pakistan (and in the context of British Hindustan). Even though it is a written language as well, it has never been used as a medium of instruction or even taught as a compulsory subject in schools. Its absence in primary, secondary and higher education does not mean it is endangered in any form. Take the example of ‘Pasoori,’ a Punjabi song from Pakistan that garnered 696 million views and was the most searched song on Google in 2022. This not only showcases the song’s immense popularity but also underscores the idea that languages can thrive in various forms and modalities.

New bolis in migration

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris also exemplify that language shift occurs in diasporic communities when the connection between the homeland and the migrants is weakened. Language shift means that when communities settle in new lands, new varieties will become part of the repertoire.

Fast forward to 2024, I find myself incapable of being able to speak all the bolis of my grandparents. I have lost two of my heritage bolis. Similarly, my children cannot speak all the bolis of their grandparents. Triple migrations and moving from one place to another have left us leaving one language for another; however, we still carry some of the mannerisms of our bolis in other languages – our Kashmiri-Pakistaniness manifests in English, Urdu, Swedish, and a mixture of all the above! We perform our identities through new vehicles, in new mediums, new bolis.

My autoethnographic account, my story, my loss of language is similar to some of those who are on the move and from those whose ancestors are forced to leave whether it is because of colonization, famine, family reunification, forced persecution, or fear.

My deep admiration extends to those who successfully maintain and pass on more than one heritage language in all modalities. I have strived to break free from the confines of limiting language competence within Euro-centric epistemologies and linguistic standardization ideals, recognizing their inherent written language bias (Linell, 2004) and the promotion of the notion of one language for one linguistic community. On the contrary, I argue that linguistic communities transcend beyond the geographical boundaries of nation states, provinces, regions, or clans.

Within the broad landscape of linguistic theories and epistemologies that conceptualize the multilingual competence of communities within the former British Raj, there emerges a pivotal challenge deserving attention: Euro-centric epistemologies and theorization fall short of accurately labelling and describing both individual and societal multilingualism. This challenge becomes vividly apparent in my family’s diglossia, where the interchange between two distinct linguistic varieties mirrors the diverse language practices found in both Pakistani society and its diaspora.

Attendees at “Linguistic Inclusion Today” workshop pose for a group photo

There is only one Australian university that has a program in Croatian Studies: Macquarie University. A few weeks ago, the University proposed to disestablish this program, along with four other language programs, citing low enrollment numbers, expected advances in language technologies that would make language learning redundant, and a strategic shift to generic cultural competence focused on Asia.

Against this background, we explored the role of languages in Australian higher education at last week’s Linguistic Inclusion Today workshop.

In a powerful keynote the director of the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie, Dr Jasna Novak Milić, explored the role of Croatian Studies in Australia.

The lecture clearly identifies the academic, community, and socio-cultural benefits of a “small” languages program in Australian higher education. Since its founding in 1983, Croatian Studies at Macquarie has built a strong model for a university language program that is closely integrated with the Croatian community in Australia and also has deep international ties.

The curricular and funding model created by Croatian Studies at Macquarie University provides excellent language education in a language that is both learned as heritage and international language. Additionally, it also has the potential to serve as a template of a successful university-community partnership for other languages within Australia’s multicultural fabric.

Ultimately, the question is not why we need a Croatian Studies program at an Australian university. The answer to that question is abundantly clear. The real question should be why we would consider destroying something that is so valuable to so many people.

Child at annual Mongolian Festival (Naadam) in Sydney (Image credit: What’s On)

Maintaining their heritage language is paramount for migrants internationally as language is not just a communication tool. It carries our culture, tradition, beliefs and identity. Therefore, passing our language on to our descendants is a crucial responsibility.

Living up to that responsibility can be difficult in countries such as Australia, where a monolingual mindset prevails. Small languages of emergent communities, such as Mongolian, face particular challenges.

The Mongolian language

There are 8.4 million Mongolian speakers in the world. Only 3.4 million of them live in Mongolia. A larger number of 4.1 million Mongolian speakers live in Inner Mongolia.

You might wonder what the difference between Mongolia and Inner Mongolia is. Mongolia is an independent country located between China and Russia, while neighboring Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region within China. These contiguous heartlands of the Mongolians were separated in the course of the 20^th century.

The separation had linguistic consequences, too: in Mongolia, Mongolian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet but in Inner Mongolia the traditional Mongolian script is still in use.

SBS hosts a Mongolian channel

Mongolian in Australia

The separation also has consequences in the diaspora: only Mongolians from Mongolia are captured in statistics, but the number of Mongolians from Inner Mongolia are not captured, as they are Chinese nationals.

According to the Embassy of Mongolia, approximately 25,000 citizens of Mongolia currently live in Australia. I am one of them.

In addition to being an immigrant from Mongolia, I am also the mother of a 3-year-old boy.

Despite my commitment to raising him bilingually, my son is currently English-dominant, and the same is true of my nephew, and other children in my social circle.

The perspective of Mongolian migrant mothers

To find out more, and motivated by a study of parents’ emotional investment into their children’s heritage language learning, I interviewed five migrant mothers from Mongolia about their children’s proficiency in English and Mongolian. Between them, the five mothers had ten children, who have been living in Australia for 6 months to 6 years.

This is what I found:

• Preschool children regularly mix English and Mongolian, and, by and large, do not distinguish between English and Mongolian words.
• Primary school children are all English-dominant. This is particularly true when it comes to reading and writing. All six children in this age group read and write English well, but only two of them had any literacy at all in Mongolian.
• As children grow older, their oral proficiency in Mongolian declines. They only speak Mongolian to their parents, they hesitate and search for words, and some have completely lost their productive abilities.
• The only fluent Mongolian speaker among the children is a 5-year-old recent arrival, who is quickly learning English and seems to be in the process of transitioning to English dominance since starting childcare a few months ago.

Children in traditional costume at annual Mongolian Festival (Naadam) in Sydney (Image credit: What’s On)

Although this was a small-scale informal study, the trend is clear: second-generation Mongolians in Australia are not developing their Mongolian. In fact, they are rapidly losing it once they enter formal schooling.

How can we preserve Mongolian in the second generation?

Research suggests that there are many things migrant parents can do to support the bilingual development and heritage language maintenance of their children, such as sending children to bilingual schools, attending community schools, speaking only the heritage language at home, or engaging in heritage language literacy practices, such as joint book reading or use of social media with family back home.

These are all great strategies. But they are extra difficult for speakers of small, under-resourced languages such as Mongolian. For instance, there is only one Mongolian community language school at preschool and primary level available in NSW and the community languages directory of the State Library of NSW does not hold a single entry in Mongolian.

While the need to maintain Mongolian into the next generation is keenly felt in our community, the path to achieving this goal is less clear. To preserve Mongolian, we need to find new ways to support our next generation to acquire it.

Related content

• Mongolian language
• Multilingual families

Join us on Thursday, December 14, at Macquarie University for a workshop to explore Linguistic Inclusion Today.

The aim of the workshop is to take stock of the state of linguistic inclusion in Australia, as we see ever-increasing linguistic diversity clashing with the continued monolingual hegemony of English. Following our CfP, we have put together an exciting program of keynote lectures and panels focusing on multilingual practices and policies in families, schools, healthcare settings, and government.

The workshop includes a special symposium focusing on the situation of languages in Australian Higher Education. Languages programs at Australian universities operate under the ever-looming threat of cuts to small programs, a threat that has gained new currency due to the rise of automated translation and generative AI.

The symposium “Languages in Australian Higher Education” can be attended as part of the full-day workshop or as a standalone option. For background reading on declining language learning opportunities in Australian higher education, see this new article by Svetlana Printcev over at SBS.

Program

9:00-9:15 Welcome
9:15-10:15 Keynote: Alexandra Grey, Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia (Chair: Yixi Isabella Qiu) (view abstract)
10:15-10:30 Break
10:30-12:00 Panel, Multilingualism in Australian Families (Chair: Hanna Torsh) (view abstracts)

• Speaker 1: Priyanka Bose, Conceptualisation of family and language practice in family language policy research on migrants
• Speaker 2: Sithembinkosi Dube, Bringing emerging African languages into the social inclusion agenda
• Speaker 3: Undarmaa Munkhbayar, Heritage Language Maintenance in the Mongolian Community in Australia
• Speaker 4: Emily Pacheco, Sign language maintenance among children of migrant Deaf adults in the diaspora
• Speaker 5: Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani, Constructing transnational family language policy through translanguaging

12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:00 Keynote: Trang Nguyen, Language Policy and Individual Voices: Introducing “Individual Language Policy” (Chair: Jinhyun Cho) (view abstract)
2:00-2:15 Break
2:15-3:45 Panel, Language Polices for Inclusion in the 21^st Century (Chair: Loy Lising) (view abstracts)

• Speaker 6: Jie Zhang, Between vulnerability and agency: crisis communication with Deaf communities in Wuhan during the Covid pandemic
• Speaker 7: Brynn Quick, How are language barriers bridged in hospitals?
• Speaker 8: Natalie Skinner, Cultural and linguistic diversity in children with a disability affecting their communication
• Speaker 9: Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, Navigating epistemic injustice
• Speaker 10: Tazin Abdullah, Citizen science: inclusive practices in data collection

3:45-4:00 Break
4:00-5:30 Symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education

• Keynote: Jasna Novak Milic, Language Preservation and Identity: The Story of Croatian Studies in Australia (view abstract)
• Chair: Ingrid Piller
• Discussants: Antonia Rubino, Mark Matic, Jane Hanley
• Zoom host: Agnes Bodis

5:30-7:30 Reception

Registration

Attendance is free but spaces are strictly limited so register asap to avoid disappointment.

There are three attendance options:

• Full day (register here) [sold out]
• Only symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education, and Reception (register here) [sold out]
• Virtual attendance at only symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education (register here)

Abstracts, Keynotes

Dr Alexandra Grey, UTS, Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia

This presentation reports on my 2018-2021 investigation into ‘Good Governance in Multilingual Urban Australia’. That project included three studies: an audit of NSW legislation and policy that does (not) provide a framework for decision-making and standards of multilingual government communications (undertaken with A Severin); a case study of such communication outputs from the NSW government, across portfolios (undertaken with A Severin); and a case study of multilingualism in public Covid-19 communications from NSW and Commonwealth governments.

The Covid case study also includes an analytic review of international human rights about language and health, as well as the commentary of international organizations as to how to take a rights-based approach to pandemic communications in order to fulfill certain international law obligations upon Australia (and other nations). That review found new expectations emerging that governments’ multilingual health communications be not merely partially available, but rather produced without (unreasonable) linguistic discrimination; with minority communities’ involvement at preparatory stages; strategic planning; and an eye to effectiveness. In explaining what more effective communication could entail, I advocate assessing government communications’ Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Adaptability — that is, the ‘Four As’ recognized by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and crisis communications scholars.

In this keynote at Macquarie University’s Workshop on conceptual and methodological challenges in linguistic inclusion, I will explain my interdisciplinary methodology, present the key findings of each of these three studies, and draw them together by inquiring whether developments in governments’ public communications during the pandemic have given Australia any lasting improvements in the linguistic and social inclusion. The research leads to a novel suggestion for 3 Rs of response to recurrent problems in governments reaching, and including, linguistically diverse publics: (further) Research; Redesigning online communications; and Rights-based Regulation (or Standard Setting). I will end with a reflection on the path ahead for researchers by noting how three studies have each also given rise to an awareness of ‘dead-ends’ and a need for government-partnered research in this space.

Dr Trang Nguyen, Melbourne University, Language Policy and Individual Voices: Introducing “Individual Language Policy”

Language policy often refers to regulations and rules made by governmental or institutional bodies to determine and influence the use of languages in a society or community. Such a common understanding of the term may lead to an impression among the public and authorities that language policy making should be the task of officials and governors rather than ordinary people, thus potentially creating conceptual challenges in incorporating individual voices into the policy making process. Recognising that there is also a language policy at an individual level, which is a critical part of higher-layer language policies and a link of the complex language policy circle, may contribute to addressing these conceptual challenges.

In this talk, I will introduce the concept “individual language policy” which I built in reference to a combination of language policy theories in an attempt to attract attention to such a language policy at an individual level. I suggest that individual language policy is a kind of implicit policy that individuals discursively define and apply to themselves in their daily language behaviours under the influence of external forces and higher-level language policies in the environments where they are living. Individual language policy comprises three main components: practised language policy (guiding language practices), perceived language policy (informing language beliefs), and negotiated language policy (directing language management) (Nguyen, 2022). Individual language policy does not stand independent of other-level language policies, but can be considered as the first step on the path to the outcomes of the top-down policies (Grin, 2003). In our advocacy for policy change towards language inclusion and justice, we should, therefore, emphasise the importance of individual language speakers and their individual language policy, as “it is at the individual level that the success or failure of a language policy is finally revealed” (Spolsky, 2022, p.x).

Dr Jasna Novak Milić, Macquarie University, Language Preservation and Identity: The Story of Croatian Studies in Australia

Among the approximately 200,000 Croats believed to reside in Australia, a significant majority have undergone assimilation, with English often serving as their primary functional language. When the largest wave of Croatian immigrants arrived in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s, the struggle for linguistic identity accompanied them. This struggle led to the recognition of the Croatian language in Australia as early as 1979, well before the declaration of Croatian independence in 1991. Subsequently, ethnic schools were established, and in the 1980s, Croatian language courses were introduced at the high school level. In 1983, Macquarie University launched the study of Croatian language and culture, a program through which several thousand students have passed over its four decades of existence. Initially funded by the Croatian community in Australia, this program began receiving financial support from the government of the Republic of Croatia about two decades ago. This support reflects the recognition of the program’s significance in preserving the language and community identity. However, within the predominantly monolingual mindset, the future of Croatian Studies in Australia faces renewed uncertainty.

Abstracts, Multilingualism in Australian Families

Priyanka Bose, UNSW, Conceptualisation of family and language practice in family language policy research on migrants

Family language policy (FLP) is increasingly recognised as a distinct domain of language policy concerned with the family as an arena of language policy formulation and implementation. While FLP is a relatively new research area, its conceptualisation of family and language practice requires re-examination due to social changes and technological developments, including the expansion of digital communication within families and the rise of globally dispersed families, a product of global migration and transnationalism. In this systematic review of migrant FLP research, we investigate how the notions of family and language practice are conceptualised in research. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, we identified a total of 163 articles for analysis. Our analysis reveals that the majority of studies were conducted in nuclear families, i.e., those consisting of a father, a mother, and one or more children. Studies also tend to conceptualise the family as fixed and physically located in one place. Paradoxically, around half of the studies acknowledge the presence of geographically dispersed family relations, but this does not necessarily affect their conceptualisation of what comprises a family. Language practice was conceptualised as physical and face-to-face communication in 51% of instances, with only 11% incorporating an analysis of digital communications. Based on our review, we recommend that FLP researchers researching migrant families reconceptualise the family as geographically dispersed and language practice as digital and multimodal when necessary. Such a reconceptualisation will help researchers understand the hitherto underexamined contributions of dispersed family members and multimodal digital
communications in migrant FLP.

Sithembinkosi Dube, MQ/UNSW, Bringing emerging African languages into the social inclusion agenda

When compared to other English-speaking nations, Australia is regarded as a leader in the provision of community language services (Edwards, 2004). Since the initial establishment of ethnic language schools, the government understood that community languages are critical for the equitable delivery of major community services (health, justice & social services). However, the current structures and policies for community language schools are blind to the smaller communities with emerging languages, thus undermining the social inclusion agenda (Piller & Takahashi, 2011). This talk will highlight how LangDentity, an online Shona-Ndebele Community school, is overcoming these hurdles to maintain Zimbabwean heritage languages.

Undarmaa Munkhbayar, MQ, Heritage Language Maintenance in the Mongolian Community in Australia

Maintaining heritage languages is of paramount importance to immigrants all over the world as the language is not just a communication tool. It carries our culture, tradition, belief, and identity. Australia is ideologically monolingual, yet factually multilingual and numerous minority languages exist here. Based on a small interview study with Mongolian families in Sydney, it was found that English is the main language of Mongolian children and parents struggle to support the heritage language. Sending children to Mongolian language community schools, opting for Mongolian language in the home, investing in extra tutoring sessions, joint reading, and perusing video contents can facilitate the preservation of Mongolian into the second generation.

Emily Pacheco, MQ, Sign language maintenance among children of migrant Deaf adults in the diaspora

About 90% of Deaf parents’ children are born hearing. Culturally, these individuals identify as Codas: Children of Deaf Adult(s). The linguistic practices of Codas have been minimally explored in sociolinguistics research. An aspect of this research is child language brokering (CLB), from which sign language brokering (SLB) emerged. This project aims to draw from these two concepts to investigate the experiences of children of migrant Deaf adults (Comdas). Through a scoping review and semi-structured interviews, data will be collected and later analysed through thematic analysis. By uncovering the experiences Comdas have towards SLB, this project hopes to highlight an often-overlooked population of sign language users in heritage language maintenance research.

Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani, UNSW, Constructing transnational family language policy through translanguaging

This study investigates the roles of home and school in constructing translanguaging spaces among Indonesian transnational families in Australia using an ecological approach to language policy. Data were collected from recordings of naturally occurring conversations, interviews, and diaries, and also interviews with teachers who teach the children of participant families. Preliminary evidence suggests that translanguaging serves as a means for transnational families to fight for epistemic inclusion in a context where monolingualism is prevalent and where their perspectives are often disregarded.

Abstracts, Language Polices for Inclusion in the 21^st Century

Jie Zhang, ZUEL/MQ, Between vulnerability and agency: crisis communication with Deaf communities in Wuhan during the Covid pandemic

Previous studies have demonstrated that deaf people are an underserved vulnerable community before, during, and after emergencies. At the same time, deaf people can also mobilize their agency to produce linguistically and culturally appropriate information and services to deaf communities in the absence of accessible crisis communication provided by the government, and even participate in crisis management. Adopting a community-based participatory approach to research, the study involves researchers and community members as equal partners in the research process. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this study describes the needs of and barriers faced by deaf people during the 76-day lockdown after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2020 as perceived by a group of deaf volunteers, and how the deaf volunteers collaborated with the Wuhan Deaf Association, other civil groups, community workers, volunteers, medical staff, and psychological consultant to respond to deaf people’s needs. The study shows that challenges faced by deaf people include barriers to accessing information and aids, barriers to communication with stakeholders, as well as compound disadvantages caused by communication barriers. Deaf volunteers, apart from providing emergency services tailored to specific needs of deaf communities, helped empower ‘vulnerable’ deaf people in emergency responses and resilience building, and effectively raised the awareness of accessible communication among stakeholders and the public. The study demonstrates the critical role of deaf volunteers, who are highly motivated, fully aware of the needs of deaf people, well-networked both within the deaf community and with the broader community, in providing a bridge between stakeholders and deaf communities. Therefore, the study calls for a shift from a top-down emergency management approach in which emergency management organizations provide special services for deaf people to a participatory and inclusive approach that actively involves deaf people in designing and implementing plans tailored to specific needs of deaf communities in emergency settings.

Brynn Quick, MQ, How are language barriers bridged in hospitals?

This presentation explores how hospitals communicate multilingually to bridge language barriers experienced by linguistic minority patients by asking how hospital staff assess a linguistic minority patient’s language proficiency and identify the need for a multilingual communication strategy. It also examines the language support strategies that hospitals use to communicate with these patients. This is done through a systematic literature review of 50 studies. The findings show that current literature most often examines spoken language barriers bridged through interpreters. The problems identified with consistent interpreting service provision relate to time constraints and inconsistencies in procedures related to assessing a patient’s linguistic proficiency.

Natalie Skinner, MQ, Cultural and linguistic diversity in children with a disability affecting their communication

Communication disability is not typically included in discussion and research around linguistic inclusion. For children with a disability affecting their communication, there is a significant lack of research on cultural and linguistic diversity that can be used to guide the development and delivery of speech pathology services. Services incorporate language technologies, including Alternative and Augmentative Communication systems, that facilitate social participation. Interviews were conducted with 23 speech pathologists across Australia, exploring provision of appropriate services for children with a communication disability, in families who speak a language other than English. While cultural and linguistic diversity is acknowledged and valued, English is pervasive in services and associated resources.

Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, Fudan U/UNSW, Navigating epistemic injustice

Informed by the perspective of “epistemic (in)justice” and “epistemic agency”, this study explored how multilingual teachers and students negotiate a more epistemologically effective and equal access to knowledge negotiation in an EMI program in a Chinese university. A variety of data were collected in the study, including lesson recordings, multilingual notes, reflective journals, and stimulated recalls, to understand how the transnational teachers and students as epistemic agents negotiate disciplinary concepts and engage in knowledge co-construction to express silenced voices, countering epistemic oppression and enhancing participation.

Tazin Abdullah, MQ, Citizen science: inclusive practices in data collection

The field of sociolinguistics has seen an emerging method of data collection known as Citizen Science (CS), whereby members of the public are enlisted to collect data. The utilization of CS allows for large volumes of data collection and enables researchers to tap into the diverse sociolinguistic knowledge of the participants. This paper discusses the innovative use of CS in a Linguistic Landscape study, in which specific groups of participants were engaged to take photographs of signs that were used for analysis. The study notes how the utilization of CS acknowledges diversity and offers an approach to build inclusivity into sociolinguistc methodologies.

When: Thursday, December 14, 2023, full day
Where: Macquarie University
Keynote speakers:
Dr Alexandra Grey, University of Technology Sydney
Dr Trang Nguyen, University of Melbourne

What: Despite the ever-increasing linguistic diversity of Australian society, our institutions continue to be organized as monolingual spaces. This creates barriers to full and equitable social participation for those who do not speak English, do not speak it well, or have low levels of (English) literacy. At this point in time, research into language barriers to education, work, healthcare, law, and all aspects of social life faces at least three intertwined conceptual and methodological challenges, which this workshop is designed to explore:

1. Emerging languages: some of the fastest-growing communities in Australia include speakers of under-served, under-resourced, and non-standardized languages. This raises significant challenges for the provision of language services, from translation and interpreting to heritage language maintenance and community schooling.
2. Language technologies: the past few years have seen an explosion in assistive language technologies from automated translation via multilingual chatbots to digital diasporas. These technologies offer fresh opportunities for linguistic inclusion while also creating new barriers for linguistically minoritized populations.
3. Epistemic justice: the open science movement challenges us to rethink the research life cycle from design to dissemination. Co-design, data-sharing, multilingual team research, big data, and citizen science are some of the issues reshaping how we approach linguistic diversity and social participation.

The workshop is designed to be highly interactive and we are particularly interested in hearing from HDR candidates and early career researchers working in these areas. We have a small number of short presenter slots (10-15 minutes) on our panels. To have your abstract considered for presentation, submit here by Monday, November 06.

Attendance is free.

The latest Australian census results show that the top 3 “country of birth” categories that grew the most between 2016 and 2021 were Nepal, India, and Pakistan. Those top 2 countries are predominantly Hindu and this has contributed to Hinduism’s phenomenal growth in Australia since the turn of the millennium. Hindu migrants are generally young, with a median age of 31 years, meaning it is likely they will be raising Hindu children in this country.

Hinduism’s rise is most visibly reflected in the colourful facades of temples appearing in our major cities. My new book explores this growing Hindu community through changes occurring within a long-established Australian temple:

மொழி, மத வேறுபாடுகளை கையாளும் நடைமுறை: ஆஸ்திரேலியாவில் ஒரு தமிழ் இந்து கோவில்
Negotiating linguistic and religious diversity: A Tamil Hindu Temple in Australia

In the temple, where I conducted a linguistic ethnography, there is a surprising level of diversity in language, culture and religious beliefs. On one particular day, there were 14 languages other than English being spoken in the canteen area. The most common were Tamil, Gujarati, and Hindi. The Tamil language was to be expected because the temple was established by mainly Sri Lankan Tamil migrants to venerate a Tamil Hindu god and to be a site for the celebration and transmission of Tamil culture.

However the influx of migrants from the Indian subcontinent has meant that the temple’s devotees are becoming increasingly diverse in their linguistic and religio-cultural practices. This then challenges the temple’s identity and conduct as a Tamil space.

In the context of English-dominant, monolingual-mindset Australia the temple founders saw it as crucial that a safe space for Tamil was created to keep the Tamil language and culture alive for future generations. This goal was particularly urgent because minority languages and religions have been marginalised for decades in Sri Lanka (where I’m from), most evident in the long civil war that involved the persecution of Tamil people, language and culture on a large scale. What you’re hearing in the news today, about the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, is closely linked to this issue, because unworthy and corrupt national leaders have used ethnicity, religion and language as tools to divide the population and maintain power.

Devotees inside the temple (Image from Perera, 2023 © Routledge)

When it comes to passing Hinduism onto future generations, the temple runs a Sunday faith school for children and the language policy is for Tamil-medium lessons. It’s a small school in terms of student numbers but it is an important opportunity for young Tamils to meet with peers and to work out what the Hindu religion means for them in a largely (although diminishing) Christian society. Sitting in on these classes I observed rich translingual practices in how the students deployed mainly Tamil and English language features in the expression of their Tamil pride and their evolving religious beliefs. I was impressed with the students’ confidence in their identities. However, those Hindu children who did not have a Tamil-language background – either being of a different ethnolinguistic group or being Tamil but not having the opportunity to learn it in Australia – were inadvertently excluded from the classes based on the school’s language policy.

So this is the dilemma for migrant hubs like Hindu temples which become sites of diversity. Tough decisions about which languages to uphold in the practice of religion and in religious education mean that some groups do not have the same opportunities for linguistic and cultural expression in the temple. External pressures like homeland language politics and war and the dominance of English language in Australia makes these decisions more complex. The temple strives to be an oasis for all Hindu migrants as they make new homes in Australia, to be a site of belonging and identity development for future generations, but finding a way to cater for all language preferences is an ongoing concern.

My book details the challenges encapsulated in the reality of what we celebrate as Australia’s linguistic and religious diversity. Importantly this book also highlights the critical role of migrant religious institutions as sites for maintenance of language and culture in addition to faith. In this way, these institutions offer significant support to migrants so that they can move confidently in broader Australian multicultural society.

Reference

Perera, N. (2023). Negotiating linguistic and religious diversity: A Tamil Hindu Temple in Australia. Routledge. [Flier with 20% Discount Code available here]

Related content

Piller, Ingrid. (2021). What can churches teach us about migrant inclusion? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/what-can-churches-teach-us-about-migrant-inclusion/

(Image credit: Sandy Millar via Unsplash)

Are you a family who speaks Spanish at home? Do you have a school-aged child between 5 and 8 years of age? Are you raising your children without extended family in Australia, and have you been in the country for at least 3 years?

Researchers from Macquarie University would like to talk to you about your parenting experiences as they relate to Spanish language maintenance. We are particularly interested in your family’s home language practices, the use of technology, ties with family abroad, and how your multilingualism has influenced your child’s language learning trajectory.

Participation involves attending an informal online or in-person interview. For more information, please contact the researcher, Ana Sofia Bruzon.

Participation in this research is voluntary and can be withdrawn at any time. This research has the approval of the Human Research Ethics Committee at Macquarie University.

***

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

“What stops Australia from doing something like Sweden has done to promote multilingualism? Is it too hard to implement mother tongue instruction in the education system of Australia?”

These questions about language education planning in Australia (where I was born and grew up) and Sweden (where I became a researcher and now live and work) were asked during an online conversation I got involved with after a conference (#ICCHLE21) organized by the Sydney Institute for Community Languages Education (Sydney University). As the questions relate directly to the topic of my Phd research, they engaged me, to say the least!

Multilingualism is a fact of life

In our globalized world, many people speak languages in addition to the official language(s) of the country they live in. Different terms , for example “home language” “heritage language” even “native language”, are used in different contexts to describe these languages and the forms of education that may exist to promote their development.

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

In Sweden they are labelled “mother tongues”, and education to promote their development is called Mother Tongue Instruction (hereafter MTI). In Australia the term “community language” is well-established, but terms “first” and “background” language are also used, specifically in the Australian National Curriculum. There are a range of different approaches to the study of community, first, or background languages in Australia.

Is Sweden really better at promoting multilingualism?

So why did the person who asked the questions above think that the Swedish model of MTI might be better for promoting multilingualism in Australia than the range of approaches that currently exist? In my thesis I argued that organizational, ideological and classroom factors impact on the opportunities for the development of multilingualism that the different models offered. Unpacking the organizational and ideological factors can help answer the questions.

How does Mother Tongue Instruction (MTI) in Sweden work?

In Sweden, since the Home Language Reform in 1977, students from primary to upper-secondary school have been entitled to apply for MTI in any language other than Swedish that they speak at home. If the student has basic proficiency in the language, more than five students in the local area apply for it and a teacher is available, the school is required to organize MTI in that language.

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

National funding for MTI is administered by local municipalities, who collaborate with schools in the organization of MTI and who employ many of the 6,183 mother tongue teachers who work in Swedish schools. While teacher education is not mandatory for MTI teachers, there are a range of teacher education programmes and professional development courses offered at universities throughout the country that prepare and support MTI teachers for their work.

MTI has a syllabus, and grades in the subject at the end of lower-secondary school can boost the scores that give students eligibility to upper-secondary school programmes. During the academic year 2020-2021, 150 languages were taught through MTI in Swedish schools.

Mother tongue instruction (MTI) within a strong policy framework

Sweden’s system, offering MTI through the national school system, is relatively unique. Although other countries may have some form of support for the maintenance and development of languages other than the national languages, there is no other country where the right to study mother tongues that are different from the national languages, is offered such strong legal protection.

Community language schools in Australia

Education in first, background or community languages in Australia is organized quite differently. It is possible to study five languages as background or first languages through the school system. Education in the other 295 or so languages spoken in Australia is organized through the community language school network.

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

Community language schools have existed in Australia since 1857 and are located in most large cities and some smaller towns throughout the country. Each state has a different approach to organizing community language education. See for example how different the systems in the Victorian School of Languages is from Queensland. New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania have their own systems as well.

While many community language teachers have tertiary qualification, not infrequently in education, they often receive only symbolic payment or work voluntarily. Most community language schools hold lessons on weekends or after school hours, and it is not always possible for all students at community language schools to gain certification or formal recognition of their community language studies.

Community language schools are disconnected from mainstream schooling

Education in community languages in Australia thus usually takes place outside the mainstream school system, is concentrated in larger cities, run by volunteers and not always recognized by the formal education system. These organizational factors can impact negatively on equality of access (for bilinguals living in remote regions) and on student motivation.

It all comes down to language ideologies and policy frameworks

So how do ideological factors impact on the promotion of multilingualism in Sweden and Australia? Language ideologies are not about truth but rather are “beliefs, feelings and conceptions about language that are socially shared and relate language and society in a dialectical fashion” (Piller, 2015). Language ideologies are thus socially situated and dynamic.

Sweden underwent a political and social transformation in the 1970s, throwing off anything associated with the “old assimilationist Sweden” and embracing the vision of “the new Sweden” (modern and pluralistic). It has been argued that it is partly because these ideas were so powerful at a community and political levels that an educational reform as radical as The Home Language Reform, a reform that politicians from every party were committed to, was possible (Hyltenstam & Milani, 2012).

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

Collaborations between researchers, activists, social scientists, and officials were instrumental in transforming attitudes in Sweden concerning the value of education in all languages (Wickström, 2015). As Sweden’s policies on mother tongue instruction have traditionally been influenced more by the academic field than the political field, it is clear that language ideologies held by policymakers in Sweden have been influenced by researchers, community members and collaborations between them, leading to the Home Language Reform of 1977 and the establishment of mother tongue instruction.

Australia’s monolingual mindset remains a barrier

In Australia, a major hindrance to funding and giving equal access to the study of a wider range of languages other than English is a very particular set of beliefs about language that researchers have called, the monolingual mindset. This is a deep-rooted, widespread belief that “Standard Australian English” is the most important language and that being monolingual is common and expected.

There is a lot of research that discusses the negative impact of the monolingual mindset on language learning and use and multilingual identity in Australia. However, policy makers do not appear to have engaged with this research, or if they have, they have not had the political means to enact legislation that would make the study of community languages more widely accessible.

Two diverse societies with different approaches to multilingualism

Although Sweden today is not socially or ideologically the same place as it was in the 1970s and there is no longer unanimous support in the Swedish parliament for MTI, the number of students who study the subject has increased steadily since its introduction. Almost one-third of the student population (Table 8A) in the compulsory school was eligible for the subject in the 2020/2021 academic year. MTI thus remains an important, elective subject in the Swedish curriculum, part of a national and systematic approach to language education.

Australia is also home to many people who speak languages in addition to English. The person who asked the questions at the beginning of this blogpost and many researchers as well believe that a national, systemic approach to education in community languages would benefit these individuals, their families, and the Australian community.

So what is stopping Australia from doing something like Sweden then? To answer this, I ask another question: Are Australian policymakers ready to listen to and collaborate with their multilingual citizens and researchers? Until they are, an Australian version of the Home Language Reform is still a way off.