***

Adéṣínà Ayẹni [@yobamoodua] to Gerald Roche [@GJosephRoche] (2 Feb 2022): I will surely love to be a part of the global day. But one question, can I contribute in my language in place of English?

Gerald: My heart sank as I read this message on Twitter. I’d been messaging people all day, promoting Global Language Advocacy Day (GLAD22), the first ever global event dedicated to raising awareness about language rights. I was really proud to be part of this event, but reading this message suddenly filled me with doubt. Although I had assumed and hoped that people would use whatever language they wanted in participating in the day, I hadn’t really made that clear in how I communicated.

Claire: I responded to Gerald’s plea for personal stories of multilingualism for GLAD22, and in so doing, drew from my English resources to concretise the dialogue with Gerald, as a mediator to his (and my) followers. I wrote about my experiences as a multilingual that began with learning German. But, I wrote it in English to attend to the monolingual question-answer framework implicit in the Twitter reply function. This framework mimics social interactions, particularly in institutional settings, to see a dominant speaker lead a discussion towards certain personal, political and institutional aims. Interactants (like me) know that they are cut-off from doing this if we deviate from the lingua franca, limiting our combined reach. Thus, the replying function alone is structured by a monolingual bias.

***

In this piece, we interrogate the exchange that followed the question above to explore how I (Gerald) endeavored to uphold the language rights that are at the centre of our combined work with GLAD22 and the Global Coalition for Language Rights (GCLR). We interrogate the options made available by social platforms like Twitter and make suggestions for multilingual frameworks for communication that might be upheld in our future language rights work.

GCLR is a relatively young organization. It emerged in the early days of the pandemic when a group of organizations, based mostly in Europe and North America, came together to discuss the promotion of language rights. Founding members and co-chairs of the coalition were mostly representatives of non-governmental organizations and professional translation services. Membership in the coalition grew substantially throughout 2021, as GCLR expanded to include individual academics, activists, and advocates. The changing composition of the coalition, and its increasing size, began to see us nurture our definition of ‘global’ and its articulation through GLAD22.

For GCLR, being global means not just getting the message out as widely as possible, but also being as inclusive as possible, and working in a way that responds to the diverse challenges facing language rights advocates around the world. This global inclusion creates solidarity so we can act together, lending our support to those who face greater risks in their own advocacy.

The first GLAD22 used the phrase ‘language rights are human rights’ to nurture such solidarity. Modeled on Language Advocacy Day, GLAD22 aimed to raise awareness of the need to defend language rights, and to expand our network of solidarity, thus strengthening our capacity to work together in defense of language rights.

There were several approaches via social media to facilitate multilingual discussions but the majority of the engagement came through English language dialogue, which is where the question via Twitter was located.

A Twitter Exchange 

I (Gerald) responded to the request to participate in languages other than English with an enthusiastic ‘yes’. What followed was a post in Yorùbá, featuring a banner image with the phrase ‘Ẹ̀TỌ́ ỌMỌNÌYÀN NI Ẹ̀TỌ́ SÍ ÈDÈ’,—‘language rights are human rights’—alongside the GLAD22 hashtag.

Òní tí í ṣ'ọjọ́ kejìlélógún, oṣù Èrèlé ọdún; 22-02-2022 ni Àyájọ́ Ọjọ́ Àgbàwí fún Èdè Àgbáyé, àkọ́kọ́ irú ẹ̀ lágbàáyé. A ya ọjọ́ òní sọ́tọ̀ fún ìgbàsọ̀ láárí ẹ̀tọ́ èdè ẹni.
Àkórí tí 2022 ni Ẹ̀TỌ́ ỌMỌNÌYÀN NI Ẹ̀TỌ́ SÍ ÈDÈ.#GLAD22 #YORUBA #ETOSIEDE pic.twitter.com/wJbX3bSJtE

— ỌMỌ YOÒBÁ (@yobamoodua) February 22, 2022

The post featured a long thread covering existing language challenges in Nigeria and suggestions for improvement. Priorities included refocusing policy concerns for Indigenous languages as well as prioritizing Indigenous languages in the home and in education.

It received several likes and retweets, including by Gerald to his followers. This is important because Gerald’s actions demonstrated not only that he supported participation in Yorùbá, but also his institutional alignment. Other members of GCLR also engaged with the post, and in doing so, advocated for multilingual participation.

Later in the day, one of Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s mutuals, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (커라 투버순) [@kolatubosun], called out for a language rights group in Nigeria. Several of the key points of the first post were highlighted, especially those that pressure the government for language policy changes. This post was liked by several more users, who commented with their support for the group.

We need a language rights group in Nigeria. An organisation dedicated solely to advancing the rights of its languages. That supports language revitalisation and commits funds to supporting efforts in that direction; pressures government and policymakers on relevant issues, etc

— Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (커라 투버순) (@kolatubosun) February 23, 2022

This Twitter exchange provides some opportunities to ascertain the impact of Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s  multilingual interaction on the language rights values of GCLR and GLAD22. With the GLAD22 affiliation, users communicated their local barriers to language rights. They assembled to develop solidarity and organizing potential.

Importantly, these interactions were in contexts that GCLR has not yet managed to reach. As one observer pointed out on the day, GCLR had organized ‘no activities in or relating to Africa’ as part of the day. Thus, Gerald’s response helped catalyze meaningful discussion for Indigenous languages with strategies for implementation and, possibly, movement towards local organizing in Nigeria.

What if GCLR has real fit and capacity to do more? What if multilingual frameworks for communication were modeled by GCLR for use within platforms like Twitter, and beyond?

Initiating Multiple Moderators 

GCLR might mobilize the Twitter responses shown in this post, and others, to recruit them as moderators for future Global Language Advocacy Days. A series of starting points, methods for moderating in and to multiple languages might be developed amongst members.

These could include reaching out to key educational and government institutions listed in Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s post, to nominate individuals from their institution to speak on their behalf on the day within a nominated social media platform. GCLR members could act as moderators of these discussions in their languages, accumulating new communication hubs across several languages for GLAD23. These hubs could be observed to grow insight around multilingual designs for communication that may eventually be adopted by global north-based moderators such as us.

GCLR has the culture and capacity to do this. Throughout 2021, the coalition participated in a number of larger events, such as International Translation Day and RightsCon. Members’ presentations discussed the importance of language rights as a means of realizing linguistic justice, particularly in the digital realm. GCLR made this information available in as many languages as possible. We feel that it is a natural next step for GCLR to grow its member base meaningfully and initiate multiple moderators across several languages in GLAD23.

Redesigning Multilingual Frameworks for Communication

GCLR is also well-placed to improve decolonizing and multilingual frameworks for communication. Let’s say that Gerald offered to co-author a post with Adéṣínà Ayẹni that would be a thread between English and Yorùbá, linking with Australian and African institutions with power and reach. Such a post may invite comments in both languages (and varieties) that either moderator could respond to.

Such a post may invite language practices such as codeswitching to enter the dialogue because of an ease of intelligibility by the moderators. Users may draw from English resources creatively and as a tool for reaching wide audiences, defined by personal choices rather than monolingual biases. Such frameworks for communication may invite new language practices that emerge in digital spaces but rarely in English-dominated zones.

These frameworks go beyond the otherwise profit-driven knowledge generation in social media discourses as they redesign more socially and linguistically equitable interactions online.

There is great scope for testing such frameworks within Global Language Advocacy Day. On Twitter, the #GLAD22 hashtag received nearly 60,000 impressions with individuals contributing stories, ideas, and resources and language-focused organizations participating including the Linguistics Society of New Zealand, the PEN Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee, Cultural Survival, Tehlike Altındaki Diller, Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, and Hausa Language Hub.

Prefiguring Linguistic Justice

GCLR upheld language rights within several aspects of its communication in GLAD22, leading to 13 events in 6 countries in Asia, the Pacific, Europe, and North America and to the support of new debates such as those in Nigeria. We published about language rights issues in the UK and Bangladesh; New Zealand, Japan, the UK, Ireland and the USA, Australia, and Myanmar, organized a social media campaign on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and received attention in the media, such as this article in Kronos News that was published in English and Turkish. However, as advocates for language rights, we must discern ‘how’ we do this within the limited and often monolingual platforms that we are offered online.

We are currently working to create a set of multilingual principles and practices for the organization, which we aim to have in place before we begin planning Global Language Advocacy Day 2023. Doing so is part of the coalition’s prefigurative practices, i.e., those based on the idea that we should try to ‘create the sought-after forms of justice in the process of achieving structural transformation: to prefigure the world one wants to build.’

This work is also part of evolving organizational strategies in the coalition, which include the formation of working groups, modeled on processes that were used in the Occupy movement (among other contexts). These groups come together to undertake a specific task, without supervision, and then once that task is done, they dissolve. One of these working groups will develop the coalition’s multilingual principles and practices, which will undoubtedly evolve over time, while others address discrete issues raised by coalition members.

If you would like to be part of these language rights activities, and help to prefigure and work towards a world of greater linguistic justice, then we invite you to join us. Contribute your passion, ideas, and labor, your solidarity and commitment, to realizing our mission of language rights for all.

A restaurant sign featuring both Tibetan and Chinese, in a village where the Tibetan residents speak Ngandehua, one of Tibet’s minority languages (Image: Gerald Roche)

As elsewhere in High Asia, minority languages in Tibet are the first victims of international tensions.

During the recent UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) periodic review of China, a total of twelve countries raised the issue of Tibet. In their response, the Chinese delegation devoted two minutes to discussing Tibet (begins 2:33:39), and half that time was spent talking about the Tibetan language.

Interestingly, none of the countries that raised the issue of Tibet explicitly referred to language. Why, then, did the Chinese delegation draw attention to this issue?

In part it is because they consider addressing language issues a key success in China’s program for Tibet. In white papers on Tibet in 2015 (April and September), 2011, and 1992, China has repeatedly boasted of its successful provision of language rights for Tibetans.

But, language has also been a significant aspect of Tibetan grievances and international scrutiny, particularly in the last decade. Students have protested against changes to bilingual education several times since 2010. Many of the 154 self-immolators in Tibet expressed fears regarding the fate of the Tibetan language. And most recently, the imprisonment of language advocate Tashi Wangchuk brought condemnation from the international community, including from within the UN.

China therefore had good reason to focus on language issues in its response during the UNHRC periodic review.

China’s discussion of language issues focused on the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR)—despite the fact that most Tibetans in China live outside it. They described efforts to translate official documents and media into Tibetan, the successful digital encoding of the Tibetan script, and the implementation of a bilingual education system in Mandarin and Tibetan.

It is unclear if these measures actually constitute an effective offset to the aggressive promotion of Mandarin. For example, Tibetans are currently deeply concerned about the increasing presence of Chinese loanwords in Tibetan, considering it evidence of more systematic imbalances between the two languages. However, even if these measures are effective in protecting Tibetan, they completely fail to protect other languages of the region.

For example, the non-Tibetan Monpa and Lhoba peoples of the TAR speak several languages. Although China is keen to draw attention to their Tibetan bilingual education program in the TAR, the languages of the Monpa and Lhoba people are completely excluded from schools. They instead receive education in Tibetan and Chinese, bringing with it all the well-known detriments of being denied mother tongue education.

Furthermore, not all Tibetans in the TAR use Tibetan as their first language. Linguists are still recognizing previously un-described languages in the region. There is also a growing community of Tibetan Sign Language users. Neither group is catered for by bilingual education policies that focus only on Tibetan and Chinese.

If we widen the scope to include Tibetans outside the TAR, the significance of this exclusion grows. Tibetans within China speak at least 26 distinct non-Tibetan languages, none of which are recognized by the state. A total lack of state protections for these languages is leading to language loss—all these languages are now being replaced by Tibetan or Chinese.

It is also worth pointing out that whether or not Tibetan itself is a single language is not a trivial question. Although sharing a common written language, the spoken forms of Tibetan are highly divergent. Some linguists classify ‘the Tibetan language’ in China into up to 16 languages. Comprehension between these spoken languages is low. Bilingual education policies that ignore this diversity also ignore the important role that comprehension plays in the classroom.

The response of the Chinese delegate at the UN periodic review, therefore, was missing the point. Promoting a single language is an inadequate measure to protect the rights of a multilingual population. In fact, promoting the Tibetan language in many cases impinges upon linguistic rights. This is the case not only of non-Tibetan populations such as the Monpa and Lhoba, but also for Tibetans who do not speak Tibetan, or primarily use a signed language.

Unfortunately, Chinese policy-makers are not alone in missing this point. Although international organizations that advocate for Tibet frequently focus on language issues, they consistently refer to Tibetans as an homogenous population with a single language. Like the Chinese state, they tend to ignore languages when talking about language rights.

The International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), for example, expends significant effort on their website explaining that the Tibetan language is not Chinese. And despite the fact that ICT has campaigned for Tibetan’s language rights, including within the UN, this has always overlooked the region’s linguistic diversity. The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, meanwhile, has published two reports focusing on language in education. Both these reports, in 2003 and 2007, focus only on a single Tibetan language.

Representatives of the Chinese state, and the international community of Tibet advocates, therefore, find themselves curiously united on this issue. Despite their obvious open disagreements, both agree that Tibetans speak only a single language. They therefore continue to debate linguistic rights in ways that erase and exclude Tibet’s minority languages.

This erasure and exclusion matters. It perpetuates the impression that some languages, like Tibetan, deserve rights, whilst others do not. And yet a commitment to the idea of rights involves a commitment to the equality of all people regardless of their language.

If China really wants to fulfill its constitutional promise to respect the rights of ethnic minorities, it needs to support all their languages, not just a few carefully chosen ones. And if the international community wants to hold China accountable for their failures to respect minority rights, we need to stop replicating their erasure of linguistic diversity, and focus attention on Tibet’s most vulnerable populations.

Related content

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• Educating Burmese migrant students in China
• Is English stealing the home of Mongolian?
• Debating language standardization
• Explorations in language shaming
• Access denied
• Gaining a green thumb for grassroots language activism
• Crossing borders or carrying borders?
• English in the global village
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After we completed our fieldwork, we were fortunate to obtain additional funding; first, to travel to New York to share our findings at the United Nations; and second, to bring together our findings in the first book to be published on this topic: The Legal Protection of Refugees with Disabilities has just been published.

For me personally, this project was a unique opportunity as a young researcher – I was able to gain invaluable experience designing, coordinating and carrying out fieldwork across six different countries, with a variety of people, in a variety of languages. I learned many valuable lessons which have hopefully helped me grow as a researcher and contributed to my capabilities as a PhD candidate.

But what does this project, which centres around international human rights law, have to do with language or sociolinguistics? While this research is officially within a very different field, I have still identified so many points of crossover, or ways of thinking, that have really helped each of my research fields.

Article 1 of the CRPD states:

Persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.

Laura during fieldwork in Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda, 2013

Instead of placing the focus on the individual, the CRPD, both in Article 1 and throughout the remainder of its provisions, places the onus on societies. It forces us to think about the way our physical, social and legal structures differentially impact the various individuals who come into contact with them. For me, this critical reflection is also key to my growth as a sociolinguistics researcher.

For example, it may be easy to blame migrants for the various challenges they face: not being able to get a high-paying job, or having difficulty at school. But is this really about their individual ‘flaws’, or not trying hard enough, or does it have more to do with the legal, social, political and linguistic structures in our societies, which impact us all differently, advantaging some more than others?

In Chapter 6 of our book, for example, we discuss how a lack of work rights in many displacement settings greatly increased the risk of acquiring a disability, as refugees may be forced into exploitative and unregulated work.

Aside from legal status issues, language barriers played a significant role in access to a range of services – including gaining the knowledge that services existed in the first place. A comparison between the Syrian refugee populations in Turkey and Jordan provides an apt example: most Syrians in Jordan were able to communicate directly with locals, and even those who used Sign Language were more likely to find someone with whom they could communicate – Jordanian and Syrian Sign Language are mutually intelligible, and those literate in Arabic could also use written text to communicate. This obviously facilitated service provision, and access to work and education. By contrast, in Turkey, despite the government making very clear and concerted efforts to assist the Syrians there, language barriers created significant challenges in every aspect of life and access to services.

A refugee-run business in Za’atari Refugee Camp, Jordan, 2014

In places like Malaysia and Indonesia, although there were local disability rights organisations doing important work to advocate for greater inclusion, the invisibility of refugees living in their community, along with language barriers, meant that refugees largely missed out on benefiting from these groups. When we interviewed participants from Myanmar, the interpreters (themselves refugees) explained that they could not even translate ‘human rights’ as it was a completely unfamiliar concept – and we soon gave up asking. This contrasted with the situation in Uganda, where many of the refugees we met with had participated in programmes aimed at improving their rights, and when we spoke with them they were well versed in the ‘language’ of the CRPD and the concepts and rights it promotes.

Prolonged displacement situations are pertinent examples of how these types of linguistic barriers can play out quite differently over time depending on the particular structures in place in the host country. For example, in Malaysia, where young refugees have no access to the education system, their development of literacy and language skills is limited to what is offered by refugee volunteers. These classes are usually conducted in the language of the refugee group, and a range of barriers exist for children with disabilities, given the location of these ‘schools’ – in high-rise apartments, up narrow staircases – and the types of facilities they have – volunteer teachers with limited training, no assistance for those who need extra help, limited access to basic assistive technology like glasses or hearing aids. This understandably limits integration within the host society, and in any future country of resettlement, and the likelihood of being able to participate in the workforce in the future.

In contrast, in Uganda, where refugees are officially welcomed and permitted to settle permanently in the country, refugee children have the right to access local schools, and, in the case of a number of children who were deaf or hard of hearing who we met in camps in the south of the country, they may even be able to access specialised education, where needed.

In each setting, age-based policies that limited specific types of assistance to children (under 18 years) meant that those who had had disruptions due to their experiences as refugees or living through conflict situations may simply age out of opportunities that locals would have been able to access as soon as the need arose, following a ‘normal’ timeline.

It is unsurprising that these different levels of access would lead to different opportunities to participate in the host society, in both the short and long term, and very different experiences of what it means to have a disability. These experiences have reinforced for me the fundamental importance for social justice that we continue to question the way social, political and legal structures – and the beliefs and attitudes that underlie them – can impact on participation for the diverse individuals who make up our communities.

Reference

Crock, Mary, Laura Smith-Khan, Ron McCallum, and Ben Saul. 2017. The Legal Protection of Refugees with Disabilities: Forgotten and Invisible? Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Access the eBook and read the first chapter for free.

Images copyright of Mary Crock/University of Sydney.

The challenges of providing equitable services in linguistically diverse societies

A few years ago, emergency service provision to speakers of languages other than English in Australia came under scrutiny when an Afghan woman tried to call the police but did not receive any assistance a few days before she was murdered by her husband. The domestic violence victim called 000 – the national telephone emergency service – twice but, in both cases, she hung up before the operator could bring a telephone interpreter into the conversation. The trial judge was scathing of multilingual service provision in her sentencing:

Then on 1 November 2007 your wife made two calls to triple 000 in the early hours of the morning seeking police assistance. It is most unfortunate and an indictment on our society that no assistance was forthcoming, as a result of a very disappointing reaction by the telephone operator, to your wife’s inability to speak English, in anything other than a broken English manner. (“R V Azizi,” 2010, p. §11)

Providing emergency services in linguistically heterogeneous environments is not an easy task. In Australia, as elsewhere, calls from callers who cannot make themselves understood in English are re-routed to the national telephone interpreter service. Negotiating for an interpreter service and then waiting for the interpreter to come online in an emergency is time-consuming and stressful. As Raymond (2014) found in a study of Spanish calls to the US emergency telephone service, sending a call through to the telephone interpreting service more than doubled the response time and thus was often resisted by the operator because that additional time could make the difference between life and death in an acute emergency.

Given the time it takes to re-route an emergency call through the telephone interpreting service, it is perhaps not surprising that the domestic violence victim mentioned above became impatient or was forced to abandon her call for help before she could actually communicate with the police. What is surprising is that no attempt was made to call her back and no police car was dispatched to her place of residence despite her two failed attempts to call emergency services.

Domestic violence is a well-recognized problem in Australia and there is a network of formal support services available to women who find themselves in danger. However, these formal support services operate exclusively in English and gaining access in another language remains difficult. As an examination of the barriers faced by migrant women in accessing legal services in NSW put it, persons who do not speak English well in Australia are “a long way from equal.” Cases like these challenge us to rethink linguistic arrangements in linguistically diverse contexts in order to make access to emergency services – and social services more generally – more equitable. It may be tempting to think that this is too tall an order and that ensuring equitable access in any language other than the nationally dominant language is too difficult.

Not so! In the above-mentioned study of Spanish-language calls in the USA, transfer of a Spanish-speaking caller to the telephone interpreting service almost doubled the response time and thus was highly inefficient. However, the situation was different in cases where bilingual operators were available in the same call center. In such cases, a Spanish emergency call was immediately transferred to a bilingual operator and the response time was virtually unaffected. So, a way to provide effective multilingual services would be to hire multilingual telephone operators who can handle calls in the dominant language and one or more other languages.

Now here is the rub: in the city where the researcher recorded the bulk of his data no single bilingual operator who spoke Spanish was on the staff. When one knows about the demographic profile of that city, the absence of English-Spanish bilingual emergency telephone operators becomes almost unbelievable: the city where the research took place is located in the US Southwest and at the time of data collection in 2010 more than 50% of the city’s population were of Hispanic/Latino origin. This information turns the assumption that monolingual emergency services are natural and normal on its head: only employing monolingual English-speaking emergency telephone operators in such a bilingual context almost seems perversely designed to prevent fair and equitable access. I am not for a moment suggesting that monolingual emergency services are the result of some sort of conspiracy. They are not. They are an expression of our collective failure of imagination: a failure to recognize that linguistic diversity poses an equity problem and a failure to imagine that we can change our social linguistic arrangements in ways that make them more equitable and just.

Raymond, Chase Wesley (2014). Negotiating Entitlement to Language: Calling 911 without English
Language in Society, 43 (1), 33-59 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404513000869

When are immigrant linguistic and cultural rights tolerable? (Source: demotix.com)

Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University presents

Questioning Tolerance: When Are Immigrant Linguistic and Cultural Rights Tolerable?

When: Friday, November 08, 12:00-1:00pm

Where: Macquarie University, E6A 102 Theatrette

Presenter: Professor François Grin, University of Geneva

Abstract: When the linguistic and cultural rights of immigrants are addressed in the perspective of policy analysis, the effectiveness of provisions that give substance to these rights (instead of normative considerations regarding the appropriateness of such rights) is a crucial aspect of public policy. Among the factors that influence the effectiveness of such provisions is the latter’s endorsement by members of the majority. A common assumption in this regard is that this will tend to be the case if the majority displays tolerant attitudes. However, closer examination of the concept of tolerance, as well as of the ways in which this concept is used in various disciplines, suggests that though necessary, it is not sufficient to map the sociological terrain on which majority-minority relations unfold. In this lecture, we begin by revisiting the received notion of tolerance and propose to combine it with the less usual notion of tolerability. After discussing the theoretical implications of this hypothesis, I present its operationalisation through a questionnaire taken by over 43,000 young Swiss men. Results using this data set confirms the existence of tolerability (as distinct from the traditional notion of tolerance), as a condition of toleration viewed as a social practice, and enables us to examine the dimensions in terms of which tolerability is structured.

About the presenter

After a PhD in economics in Geneva, François Grin has worked at the University of Montréal and the University of Washington (Seattle), and served as Deputy Director of the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI) in Flensburg (Germany), and later as Deputy Director of the Education Research Unit of the Geneva Department of Education. He is currently full Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting (FTI) at the University of Geneva, as well as visiting professor at the University of Lugano, where he teaches the management of linguistic and cultural diversity. He is currently on sabbatical leave in Australia, working on a language economics project in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in South Australia, and visiting at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne.

François Grin has specialised in language economics, education economics, and policy evaluation in these areas, with particular emphasis on minority groups. He is the author of numerous publications, has carried out major projects for scientific research agencies and international organisations (Council of Europe, European Commission, World Bank Institute, Agence universitaire de la francophonie), and has advised various national and regional authorities on language and education policy issues. He is the current President of the Délégation à la langue française (DLF) for Switzerland.

While the report identifies entrenched hostility towards Muslims in contemporary Australia, the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils identifies Muslims as among the most disadvantaged Australians:

[…] one of the most disadvantaged communities in Australia is the Muslim community, many of whom are newly arrived from war ravaged parts of the world, some with little or no English language skills. (p. 72)

Paranoid fear of the religious and linguistic other is nothing new in Australian society, as Robert Hughes explains in The Fatal Shore. In the very first years of the colony, a division between English-speaking Protestants and Gaelic-speaking Catholics emerged where nothing more than having a conversation in Gaelic could become a punishable offense. In 1793, for instance, just five years after the beginning of the European occupation of Australia, two Irishmen, Maurice Fitzgerald and Paddy Galvin, were sentenced to 300 lashes each for nothing more than the following deposition by Hester Stroud, an illiterate English convict:

From what she saw of the Irishmen being in small parties in the Camp of Toongaby and by their walking about together and talking very earnestly in Irish, deponent verily believes they were intent on something improper. (Quoted from The Fatal Shore, p. 188)

Many of the Irish convicts shipped out to Australia in the late 18^th and early 19^th century would not have spoken any other language than Gaelic. As Catholic rebels against the British colonization of Ireland, they were under blanket suspicion in the colony, too. The chief Anglican clergyman of NSW at the time, Samuel Marsden, offered this assessment of Catholics:

Their minds being destitute of every principle of religion and morality render them capable of perpetrating the most nefarious acts in cold blood. As they never appear to reflect upon consequences but to be always alive to rebellion and mischief, they are very dangerous members of society. (ibid, p. 188)

Today Catholics have of course entered the Australian mainstream. In fact, as the AHRC report also shows, Catholics are now the largest denomination in Australia accounting for 25.8% of the population, followed by Anglicans and those without a religion with 18.7% each. The similarity between the paranoid fear of Catholics in the early colony and the contemporary paranoia about Muslims should give us pause to reflect. We’ve come such a long way from the dark days of “the fatal shore” that surely we should be able to learn the lessons of history and overcome the paranoid fear of the supposed strangers in our midst.

The Encyclopedia of the Muslim World has a good overview if you want to brush up your knowledge about Kyrgyzstan. However, even after reading this monograph, I haven’t been able to figure out what exactly distinguishes a Kyrgyz from an Uzbek. They certainly look alike to the degree that saying a given person is Kyrgyz or Uzbek makes them so, as this chilling account from a blogger on Global Voices shows:

… he called me and asked: “…so, no one is going to help us?” I wouldn’t wish this to anyone. I felt myself like a dog….I met them near the tuberculosis clinic. I took the driving wheel and shouted to everyone that he’s a Kyrgyz. With difficulties we managed to get him out of the district. On the street there were about 20 soldiers and behind them a crowd of young and not so young people of the Kyrgyz ethnicity. I don’t know what to do.

Amnesty International also report ethnicity as a matter of “claiming”:

Eyewitnesses have reported that groups of armed civilians, mostly young men claiming to be Kyrgyz, were roaming the streets of Osh, targeting districts of the city inhabited mainly by Uzbeks shooting at civilians, setting shops and houses on fire and looting private property. (my emphasis)

So, they hate each other with a vengeance but it’s not easily possible to say who is who?! Maybe that’s where accent comes in handy, just as it did in biblical times:

The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan River opposite Ephraim. Whenever an Ephraimite fugitive said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he said, “No,” then they said to him, “Say ‘Shibboleth!’” If he said, “Sibboleth” (and could not pronounce the word correctly), they grabbed him and executed him right there at the fords of the Jordan. On that day forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell dead. (Book of Judges, 12: 5-6)

The varieties of the Kyrgyz and Uzbek languages spoken in the Ferghana Valley seem to be mutually intelligible, which would leave ample scope for “shibboleths.”

Just as with the Bihari speakers of Urdu, the invention of ethnicity and language in the Ferghana Valley has largely been a product of colonial intervention: in Tsarist times, both groups (and some others) were lumped together as “Turks.” Soviet policy than made a distinction between “settled Turks” and “nomadic Turks” – the former were to be collectively known as “Uzbeks” and the latter went by a range of tribal names, including “Kipchak-Uzbeks” for those who are today “Kyrgyz.”

It’s all very confusing and to determine the “precise” meaning of “Kyrgyz” and “Uzbek” seems to be a bottomless-pit problem. However, the upshot is that the colonial re-definition of a social distinction (nomad vs. settled) as an ethnic distinction (which intersected in some way with the social distinction) in conjunction with the colonial creation of arbitrary boundaries (just as the British carved up India, Stalin carved up the Ferghana Valley between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) has created a recipe for mayhem and bloodshed.

This recipe is now readily available to corrupt politicians and criminals of all sorts if and when they choose to mobilize for their own purposes. Right now, the best hope for the people in Southern Kyrgyzstan seems to be more colonial intervention in the form of Russian peace-keepers. In the long term, all humanity will all have to look for ways to put the evil genies of ethnic and linguistic division back into the bottle.

Reza’s family, too, got caught up in the turmoil. When he was four, Reza witnessed his uncle being killed for being a Bihari – in the eyes of many Bangladeshis, an exponent of Pakistani domination. However, unlike other Biharis, who have come to be known as “stranded Pakistanis,” Reza’s family managed to flee to Pakistan in 1971.

In Bangladesh, Urdu-speakers such as the Biharis were living symbols of Pakistani domination. In Pakistan, their Bihari-accented Urdu marked them as unwelcome refugees from the East. One of Reza’s earliest memories is of his family being outsiders because they were Urdu speakers in East-Pakistan. However, his outsider status did not change after their move to West-Pakistan.When he started school in Karachi, his peers would often make fun of him and his Bihari accent. To be called a “Bihari” became a daily insult. To this day, Reza remembers running home crying after being teased as “Bihari.” This linguistic bullying had a devastating effect on Reza. He began to avoid socializing and internalized the belief that he and his family were inferior while the speakers of “good” or “unaccented” Urdu were superior. As a Bihari it seemed there was no place to be – unwelcome and abused both in the East and the West.

Soon, Reza transformed himself into a speaker of “unaccented” Urdu, who spoke the same as everyone else in Karachi. As a matter of fact, this dominant accent of Urdu is a mix of the accents of Punjabi, Pashto, Balochi and Sindhi. It was a different story with Reza’s parents. They never quite managed to acquire this new accent, which was far removed from the Urdu spoken in India, where they had grown up. In order to hide his Bihari identity, Reza avoided introducing his parents to others and started to keep a distance from his family.

Reza soon learnt that an even more effective way to gain respect was to transform himself not only into a Karachi-accented speaker of Urdu but an English speaker. He went to an English-medium school and Reza idolized his teachers, who seemed to speak English fluently. Reza, like everyone else, thought those English speakers were educated, enlightened and modern. They were real human beings, and those who could not speak English somehow seemed less than human. Eventually, Reza completed a Bachelor’s degree in English followed by a Master’s degree in English Literature and English Linguistics. By now he had thoroughly escaped his Bihari identity and was “making it” in the world. He pretended to be so in love with English that he spoke it all the time, and he finally got the respect that he had been denied in his childhood.

Even so, and despite all his qualifications, achievements and upward social mobility, he is haunted by the fear that a trace of that Bihari accent might suddenly surface in his speech and expose him as a fraud. He never tells anyone that he was born in East-Pakistan and he makes every effort to keep his children away from the Bihari community. He has deliberately left many good people behind only because of the fact that his association with them would expose him as a Bihari. Above all, he cannot afford to lose any more family members by becoming a member of minority speakers in Pakistan. Despite the massive bloodshed stemming initially from the partition of India and later the creation of Bangladesh, the state of Pakistan still promotes monolingualism in multilingual Pakistan.

Reza’s linguistic trajectory is deeply enmeshed with the upheavals of the 20^th century. A question that bothers him most often is this: Can people do nothing more than strive to escape the prison of their language or is there a way to tear down the prison walls?

Ms Rahimi, who spoke little English and communicated through an interpreter, had told a family violence officer and a health worker that she wanted to leave the marriage, but that she felt powerless, unsupported and fearful. (quoted from another newspaper article about the case)

So, the victim had sought help on at least three different occasions (family violence officer; health worker; telephone emergency service) – domestic violence help that is readily available in this country. However, she failed to gain access to the help she sought (and clearly needed as her murder tragically evidences). She failed to gain access to such help because her English was not good enough for that purpose.

The comments on the SunHerald site mostly offer an easy answer: she should have learnt English! I was rather shocked to find that – seemingly a world away – a report about a multilingual domestic violence hotline in Seattle, USA, draws exactly the same kind of hateful comments: the general tenor of the posted comments there, too, is that, rather than providing multilingual services, migrants should learn enough English so that they don’t need those services. Unfortunately, all of us in language teaching know that it’s not that easy and that the injunction to learn English can be completely meaningless, as it obviously was in Ms Rahimi’s case, who seems to have struggled on so many domestic fronts that attending English classes probably simply figured fairly low on her needs pyramid: when you are struggling to survive, a long-term investment such as language learning tends to be low on the list of priorities even if it has the potential to one day make your life easier – or even save your life!

Equal access to services, including police protection, is a fundamental human right and how to ensure equal access for speakers of other languages and speakers with limited proficiency in the dominant language is a fundamental human rights challenge of our time. A survey of the interrelationship between human rights and multilingualism is available from our resources section. In this paper, which will be published later this year in a new Handbook of Sociolinguistics, Kimie and I argue for a language‐ and communication‐focused approach to migrants’ human rights as they cross international borders and settle outside their countries of origin.

While language learning is centrally important, often there just isn’t the time or the ability; and in order to ensure equality of access, multilingual provision of services seems to be the only option. In the real world, there are many limits to that option – the availability of multilingual staff being a central one as we show with a number of case studies. However, even as we acknowledge the practical difficulties, at least we need to recognize that multilingual provision is the goal – rather than allowing the monolingual mindset to keep language as the last bastion of “legitimate” victim blaming.

Piller, Ingrid, & Takahashi, Kimie (2010). Language, Migration, and Human Rights Wodak, Ruth, Paul Kerswill and Barbara Johnstone. Eds. Handbook of Sociolinguistics. London: Sage

Apparently, the freedom to try and learn languages other than English is not one of the freedoms they enjoy so much in The Land of the Free …

An internet portal for German lawyers reports that a woman from Croatia, a long-term resident of Germany, who has for many years worked as a cleaner for a public swimming pool, sued her employer because the employer had over a number of years repeatedly pressured her to attend German classes because they blamed her for “repeated communication problems with colleagues, supervisors and customers.” The court ruled that such pressure did not constitute discrimination as the comments were not motivated by a background characteristic of the plaintiff but by her lack of linguistic competence and the court added that the plaintiff should “give up her resistance to the language of the country.”

The case doesn’t seem to have been reported widely in the media but comments on one such report seem to mostly see the ruling as an expression of common sense: commentators there argue that if she doesn’t speak German, she should learn it; and anyways she should consider herself lucky to have a job! The court, too, seems to have based their judgment more on “common sense” than linguistic expertise. While I don’t have any information about the case beyond the media report, and I don’t know anything about the specific circumstances of the case, I do wonder whether the court considered any of the following:

• A person’s linguistic repertoire is a relatively stable trait; language proficiency often fossilizes at a particular level and progress beyond that level can be very difficult; the ability to learn new languages generally decreases with age, and many other factors such as aptitude or opportunity may conspire to make improving language proficiency near impossible. It’s entirely possible that a full-time cleaner, an older worker who, according to the report, also suffers from severe health problems, and who is as likely as any woman to have to work a “second shift” at home, just does not have any time nor the energy left to devote to language classes.
• And why should she? The next question is whether her work involves any language work? I.e. is any part of her work of a linguistic nature? If she is not (partly) remunerated for using language, her linguistic proficiency is of no concern to her employer. As far as I know, swimming pool cleaning doesn’t involve much talking or writing. Imagine an employer pressured an overweight office worker to take fitness classes – would “common sense” also dictate that the employee is not being harassed? Boutet (2008) provides a great overview of the role of language in various types of work.
• What expertise do both the employer and the court have to determine the plaintiff’s level of language proficiency? Probably none and the report does not indicate that any expert testimony was sought. As I’ve said before, assessment of the linguistic proficiency of second language speakers somehow is a free-for-all.
• When misunderstandings occur in communication, it’s rarely only the fault of one person – that’s why speakers and listeners usually share the communicative burden. However, we also know from studies such as Lindemann (2002) that, as soon as native and non-native speakers are involved, native speakers oftentimes opt out of sharing the communicative burden and place the responsibility for ensuring communicative success exclusively on the shoulders of non-native speakers. A double whammy! So, it’s not only the level of linguistic proficiency of the non-native speaker that causes problems, it’s also that native speakers refuse to tango … yet, the employer most likely would never have dreamt of advising the plaintiff’s colleagues to undergo intercultural communication and awareness training.

The most comprehensive resource on linguistic discrimination at work continues to be Rosina Lippi-Green’s 1997 book English with an accent. Next week’s 4th International Seminar Series of the AILA Research Network “Language and Migration” is held in Fribourg, Switzerland, and devoted to Language, Migration and Labor. Linguistic discrimination is likely to figure prominently!

Boutet, Josiane (2008). La vie verbale au travail: Des manufactures aux centres d’appels [Language at work: from manufacturing to call centers] Paris: Octares

LINDEMANN, S. (2002). Listening with an attitude: A model of native-speaker comprehension of non-native speakers in the United States Language in Society, 31 (03) DOI: 10.1017/S0047404502020286

Harraga derives from the root hrag ‘burn’ and could thus be translated as ‘the burners.’ The burn is an act of travelling, specifically illegal crossings from North Africa to Europe. A harrag is therefore a “person who metaphorically burns himself or herself, that is, one who disregards his or her own self and undertakes the trip to “make it to Europe” even at the risk of death” (p. 232). Harraga is the plural of harrag and anyone vaguely interested in current affairs knows that at any point in time over the past decade or so there have been a fair number of harraga waiting in North African ports to make the crossing to Europe, circulating in Europe with various types of official status but very often without any legal status at all, sans papiers ‘undocumented,’ or in the process of being deported back to Africa. The BBC has a factsheet which provides a quick overview of Africa-to-Europe migration and the Boston Globe has a moving photo documentary.

There are many different harraga and Hannoum’s ethnography is with a group whose “burning” is particularly poignant: children. “The harraga of Tangier” the title refers to are street children, far away from home, waiting to burn.

They are already immigrants, in exile (ghurba) in a city with a strong sense of identity. The people of Tangier view themselves as superior, “people of the North” (awlad al-shamal). They have a clearly distinctive accent. The rest, in their view, are people of the inside, the interior, al-dakhil, considered by and large a land of “hicks” (a’rubiya). […] if an average Moroccan is looked at as an outsider in Tangier, how would those children be looked at, given their triple status as poor, a’rubiya, and harraga? (p. 232f.)

The way they burn is as stowaways, mostly by crawling under trucks as they stop at a red light before entering the port. Some of the children attempting to burn are as young as six years old: at an age when the fortunate children of the world still have their hands held when crossing the street, the harraga of Tangier attempt intercontinental journeys hidden under a truck. The author quotes a Moroccan policeman as saying “Twenty children burn every day. We catch and return seventeen of them” (p. 238). Those who make it to Algeciras, the Spanish port 14 kilometers away from Tangier, get caught there and deported although some of the these child harraga had made it as far as Amsterdam before being deported back to Morocco. Most of them had burnt many times.

Formal education obviously has a very limited reach with these children and only one of the children Hannoum spoke to had made it to second grade. Sadly, education does not even hold a promise for these children. One of them asks Hannoum: “What have those who went to school gained? Have you not seen educated people and doctors who are unable to find a job? Have you not seen them protesting and asking for employment?” (p. 233) The only hope for these wretched of the earth is actually to go elsewhere. Their dreams are modest and clearly shaped by a tourism economy: “I want at least to learn Spanish and come back and work as a waiter in Tangier” one of them says (p. 241). Bigger dreams include to be able to keep clean, to dress well, to have money, to own a car, to find a girl. It is modest dreams such as these that children are burning for. No wonder they see themselves engulfed by quhra.

Misery is not a good translation of quhra. Quhra means total poverty, owning nothing. But it can also mean the profound feeling of being completely squeezed by misery to the point of despair and utter hopelessness. Quhra is defeating. It also wounds one’s dignity, often fatally. (p. 238)

You may have wondered when I’ll finally get round to the Christmas message of my post – well, there is none. At a time when much intercultural communication is constituted by a kind of material striptease of consumption that “the West” broadcasts to “the rest” and when “The Festive Season” is nothing more than an annual spike in this orgy of consumption, it just seemed fitting to spare a thought for the burning spectators.

Reference

Abdelmajid Hannoum (2009). The Harraga of Tangier Encounters: an international journal for the study of culture and society, 231-246

Many native speakers take it upon themselves to judge the English of people who don’t speak their brand of English. In the case of migrants to Australia this is most often to point out some deficiency: the judgment that someone’s English isn’t good enough has become a key facet of social exclusion and the judgment is used to keep migrants out of jobs or keep them in jobs below their qualifications. In fact, migrants, and particularly refugees, have become so firmly associated with “poor English” in the public imagination that having good English is now being used in the media to judge whether a refugee is “genuine” or not. I’m talking about the spokesman for the asylum seekers who were stuck on the Oceanic Viking until a few days ago. Both the fact that he is using an English name (Alex) instead of his “real” name and the fact that he is “well-spoken” and speaks “English with an American accent” have been held against him and have been used to discredit him. This is from an ABC interview:

MARK COLVIN: And the High Commissioner also said, I’ll quote “Alex’s accent is quite a distinct American accent. It is not the accent of a Sri Lankan Tamil”.
ALEX: Does the Sri Lankan High Commissioner feel that people in Sri Lanka don’t have American accents or British accents? Is there not international schools in Sri Lanka? Is there not people that do accent training for call centres and various other customer care services?
MARK COLVIN: So you trained in a call centre?
ALEX: Pardon me? I was trained in a call centre for an American call centre.

Alex himself has apparently been as surprised as I am that his high level of English proficiency could come to discredit his claim to refugee status:

[Alex] has expressed surprise over the fact that how his American accent English could become a reason for the rejection of his refugee plea. “Just because I speak English, and I was educated in an American boys mission school in my home town, and then I finished my BA, and then I finished my MBA in India, so does that mean I am not a refugee?

“We are facing genocide in Sri Lanka — it’s not about whether you are educated or not educated. Just the fact that you are Tamil, […]

A true Catch 22 story: call center operators all over the world as well as many migrants to Australia have to change their names to make it in an English-speaking world; similarly, they have to adjust their accents so that they sound less “foreign” to their far-away call-center customers or close-by employers.

Around the world learning English comes with the promise of social advancement and inclusion in the mythical “West” – just to be told “Ooops, overshot the mark, you’re too good to be genuine.”