Linguistic diversity is a demographic reality, as Dr Alexandra Grey pointed out in her presentation

This week, Professor Lisa Lim and her colleagues from Sydney University’ School of Languages and Cultures brought together researchers from Sydney and Hong Kong to examine heritage languages in urban multilingual diaspora. The many diverse perspectives and research projects presented at the symposium served to reinforce the fact that, in Australia as elsewhere, linguistic diversity is a demographic reality.

At the same time, the presenters stressed that multilingualism and language learning are not widely valued. Language learning and maintenance are, by and large, considered private concerns that are the responsibility of families. By contrast, to society at large, they seem of limited benefit. At best, heritage languages are the object of benign neglect and haphazard policy efforts; at worst, they are actively suppressed.

How can we change that situation? Is the linguist’s conviction that linguistic diversity is inherently a good thing enough to make a claim on scarce societal resources to be devoted to language teaching and multilingual service provision?

The answer is patently no.

For us as linguists, this means that greater effort is needed to provide convincing answers as to why language teaching matters and why services should be provided in languages other than English (or the dominant language, to put it more generally). We can only do so if we highlight the social consequences of linguistic diversity. How do specific language regimes constrain or enable access to social goods such as education, employment, healthcare, or welfare?

Only where we can show that language loss is connected to social injustice or that language learning contributes to the social good, can we make legitimate claims on the body politic and lobby for changes in language policy.

Language is deeply intertwined with who we are, and the symposium’s focus on ancestry necessarily trained the eye on the family. Focusing on heritage means that we are likely to ask questions about our past and where we come from. However, as families and individuals we have responsibilities both to the past and the future.

Some Hong Kong parents prefer to speak English to their children, as Professor Virginia Yip has found

Parents strive to maintain ancestral languages so that children can communicate with grandparents and remain connected with their country of origin. At the same time, they are guided by future-oriented considerations, such as which languages can be expected to be most beneficial to children’s future careers. In Hong Kong, for instance, calculations of future benefit motivate parents to switch to English as family language.

The dichotomy between English and Chinese is artificial, of course, and bilingualism provides a ready means to honor families’ responsibilities both to the past and the future.

Bilingualism can be an attractive option for some families. At the same time, we also need to ask whether – in our desire to defend bilingualism against the monolingual mindset – we are not celebrating bilingual parenting a bit too enthusiastically, creating new barriers along the way. Bilingual parenting in the absence of strong institutional support, particularly in schools, is an uphill battle and one that requires significant resources to succeed.

There is an increasing body of evidence that parents want bilingualism for their children. However, wanting to raise bilingual children is not enough to do so. For us as researchers, this tension might mean that it is time to turn our attention away from battling the monolingual mindset to actually helping to build an infrastructure that makes bilingualism and language learning a realistic option for all parents, irrespective of whether they can afford to pay for private school attendance, are willing and able to give up their Saturdays for community school attendance, or decide to prioritize full-time parenting for maximum minority-language input over paid employment.

If we agree that bilingualism is not only the private responsibility of families but requires a whole-of-society commitment and effort, this inevitably raises the question of limited resources. In the Hong Kong example, the choice is not actually between English monolingualism and English-Chinese bilingualism but between Cantonese, Mandarin, English, a variety of combinations, and, for an increasing number of families, a wealth of other languages. In Australia, over 300 different languages are spoken.

Can and should we treat all these languages as equal when it comes to language teaching and multilingual service provision?

Linguists tend to shy away from the question of hierarchies – the equality of all languages is a fundamental tenet of our discipline. This means that, by and large, we are not very good at countering the obvious truth of the argument that it is impossible to treat all languages equally in schools and public service provision. I suggest we need to start asking some uncomfortable questions in order to be able to advocate for positive change.

Again, this means we need to shift our attention from language to social impact: what kinds of language policies have the most positive outcomes not in terms of language but in terms of social and family cohesion? In other words, we need a social justice approach to linguistic diversity.

Related content

• Ten lessons from the Bridging Linguistic Barriers Symposium

Multilingual Hong Kong (Katherine Chen and Gray Carper, 2005-2007)

During our visit to Hong Kong, Kimie and I met Katherine Chen, who introduced us to a sociolinguistic film she has co-produced: Multilingual Hong Kong. The film provides fascinating insights into the linguistic landscape of Hong Kong, into Cantonese-English bilingualism and into bilingual language use more generally.

The premise is simple: Katherine is filmed asking Hong Kong pedestrians to translate a commonly code-mixed sentence – “Today I must present a project.” – into Cantonese only. Most of the teenagers and young adults she speaks to are scratching their heads because they can’t do it or break down giggling because the Cantonese equivalents they come up with are too formal, too far off the mark or simply sound funny to them.

All too soon it becomes clear to the viewer that the interviewees have a hard time using” pure” Cantonese, i.e. saying the sentence without resorting to English loanwords for “present” and, particularly, “project.”. However, when asked what they think of code-switching a fair number of them say that it’s bad, that it’s a sign of laziness, that it’s disgusting or that it’s a sign that a person cannot speak proper Cantonese nor proper English.

Other interviewees, however, celebrate their code-switching and code-mixing and say it’s an expression of their Hong Kong identity. One interviewee even says that mixing Cantonese and English increases her levels of happiness!

A counterpoint to these translation efforts and beliefs about code-mixing of ordinary Hong Kong pedestrians is provided in interviews with Hong Kong linguists. One of them is Agnes Lam and she sums up code-mixing with a beautiful metaphor: mixing Cantonese and English is like wearing jade jewellery with foreign clothes.

Multilingual Hong Kong constitutes fascinating viewing for anyone interested in language and culture and in beliefs about bilingualism and practices of bilingualism in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

I would also like to strongly recommend the film as an ideal teaching resource to anyone teaching in sociolinguistics, bilingualism, language and culture, World Englishes, Asian Studies and related areas.

Running time of Multilingual Hong Kong is 30 minutes. A 4-minute preview of the initial segment is available here. The whole film is available through Yuefilms or by contacting Katherine Chen.

Professor Adam Jaworski and intercultural communication students at the University of Hong Kong

It is one of the joys of having written a book like Intercultural Communication that readers like to meet the author and last week I had the opportunity to meet a group of undergraduate students at the University of Hong Kong who had been using the book in Professor Adam Jaworski’s class on intercultural communication. The students had prepared a list of questions they wanted to ask me and I learnt as much as they did.

The question I enjoyed the most started with the observation that my book was very different from what the students had expected in an intercultural communication text. Therefore, they wanted to know why my book is so different from other titles in intercultural communication.

There are many ways to answer this question and one of the most obvious is that my book is written from a different position than most other textbooks in intercultural communication, most of which emanate from communication and management studies at US universities. It’s written by a linguist and thus pays more attention to the role of language in intercultural communication and it’s written by a multilingual migrant who doesn’t find value in reproducing cultural stereotypes but examining their functions in context. Readers of the book will recall that my main point throughout is that much research in the field needs to be reconceptualised to address the fundamental research question “Who makes culture relevant to whom in which context for which purposes?”

In the book I’ve been critical of some of the existing literatures in intercultural communication, which – with their reproduction of widely-held stereotypes about particular national cultures – often seem to be nothing more than yet another exercise in banal nationalism. Thus, banal nationalism figured heavily in the questions, too, and one of them was whether I thought patriotic education was a form of banal or “hot” nationalism?

At that point, I had to turn the tables and ask questions myself because I had only the vaguest idea what “patriotic education” might mean. It turned out that patriotic education was a hot topic for the students because of the planned introduction of a new curriculum of civic studies in primary schools. That plan had drawn mass protests in September this year because the curriculum was widely perceived as undemocratic and as telling history only from the point of view of the People’s Republic of China. Following the protests, the plan was suspended and the new patriotic education curriculum is now voluntary rather than compulsory.

After the explanation, the question was back to me: What did I think of patriotic education? Well, history if always told from a particular standpoint and it’s usually the position of those in power. Under British rule, history lessons in Hong Kong apparently ended in the early 1800s, conveniently before the Opium Wars and the annexation of the island.

As an outsider, it’s not my place to comment on a particular version of history. However, as a global citizen it strikes me that all nationalist education poorly prepares young people for the challenges they are facing today: the big issues of our time, particularly environmental destruction in all its forms, are not national but global. As the slogan goes: Think globally, act locally!

With many thanks to all the students and colleagues I met in Hong Kong for all the local yet global conversations we had! I’ll be looking forward to coming back, particularly to conduct the workshop I had to cancel because Cathay Pacific left me stranded in Wuhan for 24 hours.

Postnatal depression (Source: rcpsych.ac.uk)

Last week I was interviewed for a publication intended to showcase the achievements of women in research. When the interviewer, Meryl Hancock, asked me about the biggest challenge I had faced in my career, I answered “motherhood’ without any hesitation. In a career where you need to work 150% to succeed, having a child is always going to be a challenge. Facing that challenge as a migrant mother without access to a support network of extended family is twice as hard. Indeed, the only time I’ve ever been seriously homesick was right after my daughter was born. Sleep-deprived and pained by a stitched-up perineum I wanted nothing more than to be holed up in my parents’ house for a while and to be pampered by my mother. Instead, I was marking essays while breastfeeding baby …

Even so, I was lucky: I had a healthy child, a secure job with flexible hours, a supportive partner, and a good network. Not everyone is so lucky and the combination of two deep human experiences, migration and motherhood, poses a major settlement and mental health challenge. In Western countries, the majority of new mothers experience some form of ‘baby blues’ and around 20% are estimated to be affected by post-natal depression (PND). It is widely assumed that these numbers are higher in migrant mothers.

Does being of non-English-speaking background really affect your mental health in a migration context? A 2005 study by Cordia Chu was designed to examine exactly that question with reference to Chinese mothers in Brisbane, Queensland.

To begin with, cross-cultural comparative studies have shown that PND is virtually unknown in China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan. New mothers get tso yueh-tzu (special treatment during the postpartum month) and are typically expected to stay in bed for a month, they are given special strengthening foods to eat, and they are relieved of all household chores during that period. The idea is for them to regain their health but also to be rewarded for the effort of producing a child.

However, while PND is virtually non-existent in Chinese mothers in China, its incidence in Chinese migrant mothers in Australia is higher than in the general population.

Chu (2005) argues that the occurrence of PND in Chinese migrant mothers is an outcome of the intersection of the quality of their support network, employment issues and financial problems, and feelings of isolation. She demonstrates this in an interview study with three different groups of Chinese migrants, who had had babies in the past three years in Brisbane, Queensland. The key variable was their country of origin (PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan).

That country-of-origin variable translates into a number of additional differences as the migration circumstances of each group differ. As a group, the Chinese in Australia are highly educated (see also ‘Human Capital on the Move’) and have mostly been admitted as skilled or business migrants. However, while most PRC migrants came initially as tertiary students or skilled migrants, most migrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan were admitted as professionals and business owners. In addition to their human capital they thus usually also brought financial capital to Australia.

At the time of the study in the late 1990s, all three groups were more likely to be unemployed or underemployed than the general population, as is still the case today. Despite the fact that PRC migrants were the most highly educated group of the three, they were most likely to work in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs and thus experienced the greatest downward occupational mobility.

Another difference between the three groups was that Hong Kong- and Taiwan-related community organizations were abundant in Brisbane: of 21 Chinese religious and voluntary associations operating at the time of the study, nine serviced Taiwanese only, five Hong Kong-born only, five were open to all Chinese (including those from South-East Asia) and only one catered exclusively to migrants from the PRC.

This lack of voluntary associations combined with our network analysis showed that there was far less availability of social support, access to information and services, recreational and networking activities for the PRC migrants than for those from Taiwan and Hong Kong (Chu 2005, p. 44).

Eleven out of 30 interviewees (10 in each group) reported experiencing symptoms of PND. Six of these originated from the PRC. Ten of these cited lack of social support as their main problem – a problem that the women who did not experience symptoms of PND were able to circumvent by bringing their mothers out to Australia during the postpartum period or by going back home to give birth. Both these options of securing family support were costly and thus open only to the financially secure participants, mostly from Hong Kong and Taiwan in the study.

Financial concerns also were the base of whether women could choose to become housewives after the birth of their child or not. Six each of the women from Hong Kong and Taiwan chose to become stay-at-home mums and not return to paid work. None of these reported symptoms of PND. By contrast, becoming a housewife was not an option for any of the women from the PRC, who said they needed to accept paid employment to survive. Unsurprisingly, all of them reported various degrees of stress and fatigue as a result of being in paid employment while also caring for a young baby.

Despite the fact that they were in paid employment (often assumed to be closely linked to higher levels of English proficiency in the literature), the PRC-born women, and also those from Taiwan, reported that they were not confident enough in their English to use it in health communication. Consequently, they had to seek out Chinese-speaking (Western-style; i.e. not traditional Chinese health practitioners) to obtain care for themselves and their babies. Given the limited availability of Chinese-speaking surgeries, this meant long travel and waiting times and was thus another source of stress.

Finally, the women who reported symptoms of PND were also less likely to be aware of support services available to them and thus failed to access mainstream services such as antenatal classes or mother-and-baby groups.

So, is there a link between English language proficiency and PND in migrant women? As is usually the case, the link is not direct but mediated by other – and usually less conspicuous – factors such as financial security and community networks in this case. For financially secure women from Taiwan who could bring their mothers to Queensland to help them, who had the choice to become stay-at-home moms and who had access to Taiwanese networks for support and information, English did not matter. By contrast, for PRC-born women who were struggling financially and did not have a wide community network, their lack of English proficiency (or their lack of confidence in their English proficiency) became another source of stress and anxiety (e.g., having to accept work they were overqualified for; having to spend long hours attending a Chinese-speaking surgery). At the same time, lack of English made finding solutions to these problems even more difficult for them.

Chu, Cordia M. Y. (2005). Postnatal Experience and Health Needs of Chinese Migrant Women in Brisbane, Australia Ethnicity and health, 10 (1), 33-56 DOI: 10.1080/1355785052000323029

Why am I telling this story of bureaucratic tedium? Because no one ever made an explicit policy decision that research publications in languages other than English are less desirable than those in English. However, mundane bureaucratic practices – such as making record entry for a publication in a language other than English more difficult – conspire to have exactly that policy effect. In this way many decisions that seem to have nothing to do with language end up as implicit language policy decisions – the fact that English-language journals dominate the academic rankings is another example from academic publishing.

This point about the naturalization of English as the language of choice in international academia is well-made in a case study of a language controversy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) published in the Journal of Education Policy. The author, Po King Choi, shows how a far-reaching language policy decision – to teach a larger share of courses in English – was initially not made as a policy decision at all but through a series of internal notices, directives and instructions at various levels of bureaucracy.

CUHK used to be the only university in Hong Kong with Chinese as the principal medium of instruction. It was originally intended to take the students from Chinese-medium secondary schools, and it was also meant to place a high value on the promotion and development of Chinese culture and of Sino-Western exchanges. In 2005, a significant increase in the use of English as the medium of instruction resulted in a language controversy and, eventually, a language policy that accorded English a much higher status than had previously been the case.

Po King Choi explores how the expansion of English was naturalized through a simple equation between English and internationalization. CUHK administration put forward an argument where “English” was equated with “internationalization,” “academic excellence” and “career success.” The author explains the fallacy inherent in this argument with a metaphor: in the same way that water doesn’t start to flow if all you do is install a tap without having the plumbing in place, you don’t get excellence by simply switching the language of instruction.

[T]he CU administration insisted on using English because the use of English served as a useful label, a sign indicating that this was a first class university. There was no need to demonstrate or to explain how the use of English would give rise to a cosmopolitan mind-set or ‘international vision.’ In the market where higher education is bought and sold as a commodity, more for its exchange than its use value, […] (p. 245)

Anyone interested in how English spreads in higher education by piggy-backing on the spread of academic capitalism needs to read this paper.

Choi, P. (2010). ‘Weep for Chinese university’: a case study of English hegemony and academic capitalism in higher education in Hong Kong Journal of Education Policy, 25 (2), 233-252 DOI: 10.1080/02680930903443886