In the case of the Philippines, the government announced “enhanced community quarantine” in March 2020. As the strictest lockdown category, enhanced community quarantine prohibited intercity travel, the use of public transport, and non-essential activities for several months. In addition to curfews, local law enforcement and the military were deployed to establish checkpoints and enforce quarantine through disciplinary measures.

The lack of public transport in particular has greatly affected the ability of workers, including medical frontliners and other essential service providers to get to work.

It has widely been observed that the pandemic has exposed preexisting structural inequalities, including in many posts about the language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic here on Language on the Move. In the Philippines, the pandemic highlighted not only linguistic inequalities but also the lack of an appropriate public transport infrastructure and equal access to safe technologies of mobility.

Since 2014, my advocacy outside of academia has been pursuing initiatives related to inclusive mobility. As a bike commuter, I found myself taking part in communities of practice related to cycling. When the pandemic hit, cycling was my main means to undertake essential activities. The lockdown thus opened opportunities for me to document different locales and objects related to the cycling boom in the country.

In this piece, I look at several insights from my work gathered as a cycling advocate. Specifically, I argue that while the pandemic has accelerated the need for initiatives in inclusive mobility, cycling as an alternative in the Philippines opens opportunities for examining contested spaces and collective action which are mediated through language. I further argue in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for inclusive mobility is not only a struggle in the physical sense but also a communicative struggle, particularly in the hotly contested online space.

Language, Social Media, and Collective Action

The streets of Metro Manila have long been congested due to the large volume of vehicles that traverse its thoroughfares. Upon the declaration of enhanced community quarantine in early 2020, the use of bicycles became one viable option to remain mobile due to its affordability and ease of use.

However, the lack of infrastructure has led to accidents and even 19 cycling-related fatalities in the past year. As a response, social media have been used by advocacy groups and individuals to debate concerns over inclusive mobility.

An example provided comes from Twitter where the hashtag #bikelanesNOW trended at various times.

Nakaligtaan po yata ninyong bigyan ng puwang ang mga tinuturing nating #heroes na #frontliners: #healthworkers at essential workers, na mga #bikecommuters na din po ngayon. @MMDA #cycling #bikecommuting #bikelanes #bikelanesnow #protectedbikelanesnow #bikerslivesmatter #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/0v3BrmYBkA

— Mister E (@_mis_ter_e_) June 5, 2020

Translation: You seem to have forgotten to provide space for those whom he considers #heroes, our #frontliners: #healthworkers and essential workers, who are #bikecommuters now.

While the struggle for inclusive mobility stems from the need for safe spaces for cyclists, it is not without problems. For instance, incidents of gender related harassment have been reported among female cyclists during the quarantine period. In the tweet below shared by one political group, the Gabriela Women’s party invited bikers for a solidarity bicycle ride against misogyny and sexism. In the infographic embedded in the tweet, which uses a combination of Filipino and English, wordplay is deployed by combining kababaihan (womanhood) and the word bike to form the term “kabibike-ihan” referring to female cyclists.

On March 28 (Sunday), we will conquer the road and call for #SafeSpacesForAll & #ShareTheRoadWithHer by drawing the women sign on the map!

Join us as we raise our voices against misogyny and sexism! pic.twitter.com/wuTw2Wqk6r

— Gabriela Women's Party (@GabrielaWomenPL) March 20, 2021

Late in 2020, the government declared bike shops essential services. Since then, advocacy groups and bike shops have collaborated to create a primer for bike commuters. In this primer, which is written in Tagalog, information on safety measures before, during, and after bike rides are provided. Similar to grassroots movements in other countries that have promoted measures in addressing health concerns related to COVID-19, a combination of different languages and multimodal resources enhance the communication of meaning for the public. However, as of writing, the guide is limited to Tagalog and English language versions, while Cebuano and Hiligaynon are still in production. The limited number of languages where the guide appears reflects the current material challenge brought about by multilingualism.

Moving forward

Studying language in the era of globalization is primarily a study of inequality (Blommaert, 2010). As seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, the struggle for inclusive mobility is a material consequence that the public has engaged in a physical and virtual sense. That is, cyclists and advocacy groups do not only compete for asserting safe spaces for their daily travel needs but have engaged other stakeholders to consider the notion of sustainable cities as a major concern.

As the Philippines continues to struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic, cycling as a viable and safe alternative has come to the forefront of continuous conversations among different sectors of society where the public can genuinely participate and act in the hope of achieving authentic transformation.

Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

In this final post in the series, Claire Livesey shows that children from migrant and refugee families with limited English and limited computer access have been particularly negatively affected by remote learning. She argues that preparing for the needs of vulnerable families during emergencies needs to be incorporated into disaster preparedness.

***

Home-schooling during lockdown is really hard

(Image credit: Glen Carrie via Unsplash)

In mid-March this year, Australian schools began to close in response to the escalating Covid-19 pandemic. By early April, most schools had shifted to online learning, and families were faced with the new challenge of having to teach their kids at home.

For this research project, I recently asked a number of parents what it was like to home-school children during a global pandemic. Along with a few curses and tears, the majority offered the same response: “it’s hard. Really, really hard.”

It’s hard for students, separated from their peers and the comforts of routine. It’s hard for teachers, new to the joys of Zoom and having to adapt an enormous amount of material on the fly. It’s perhaps especially hard for parents and carers who suddenly find themselves thrust into the role of full-time educators.

How much harder, then, must this experience be for those whose first language is not English, now expected to help children with schoolwork delivered entirely through an unfamiliar medium? This has been the situation faced by many migrant families during the Covid-19 crisis (and the focus of a research project by the Language on the Move team for which findings are expected early in the New Year).

Home schooling information and linguistic barriers

For first-generation migrants and refugees, the challenges of home schooling are often compounded by language barriers. According to the 2016 census, the majority of Australian migrants speak a language other than English at home, and 17% of those who speak a language other than English are not proficient in English. This number is even higher for migrants entering Australia under refugee status, with nearly a third found to have low levels of spoken English.

For these families, communicating with schools about distance learning and Covid-19 can be highly problematic. When Australian schools closed in response to the virus, teachers and principals were having to relay changing government guidelines to parents on a daily basis. Official statements from the Department(s) of Education at this time contained complex, technical explanations of Covid safety protocols and changes to schooling procedures. Tasked with passing on this barrage of information, many schools sent out e-mails which were equally long, dense and often indecipherable (see also Tazin Abdullah’s research for the same problem with information overload faced by ELICOS students).

Understanding this type of communication requires a level of English literacy which is unrealistically high for many parents, and particularly so for those from non-English language backgrounds. As a result, many migrant parents have been unable to access ongoing communication from schools and government in regard to safety measures around Covid-19. This is a worrying finding during a crisis where, as Ingrid Piller has pointed out, every individual needs to have access to timely health information to ensure the safety of the community as a whole. A prediction borne out by the recent finding of the Victorian government that people born outside Australia were over-represented among Covid-19 infections by 20%.

Teaching in an unfamiliar language

Home schooling lessons present yet another linguistic hurdle for migrant families. Officially, parents in Australia were not expected to “teach” their children during lockdown home schooling, but rather to “guide, aid and facilitate” their learning. In reality, however, many of the materials being sent home by schools look very much like lesson plans, and require much more than casual supervision to implement.

Home schooling lessons have proven to be confusing and at times overwhelming for many migrant parents. Even with high levels of English proficiency, helping children with subjects such as maths can be a challenge due to the highly specific vocabulary required. For the 17% of Australian migrants who aren’t proficient in English, explaining complex concepts in an unfamiliar language poses an even greater challenge. Parents report feeling helpless at the prospect of having to decipher material at a primary or high school level, while they themselves are in the process of learning English.

(Image credit: Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash)

A lack of access to previously available translation services has compounded this problem. Despite considerable efforts by many schools to provide interpreters and translated materials, lockdown restrictions have made it difficult to give families the support they need. Refugee agencies also report that they are stretched to capacity due to current demand for interpreters. Many parents from refugee backgrounds have limited literacy skills in their own languages, and access to support services is particularly important to meet the demands of home learning.

Additional home schooling challenges for migrant families

A rapid research study by the University of Tasmania found that Australian children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds are at risk of long-term disadvantage from home schooling. The report shows significant disparity in levels of access to basic schooling equipment and services, with many vulnerable families lacking the physical space and resources to support home learning.

Of particular concern is the finding that many vulnerable Australian families still lack basic access to computers and reliable internet service. This includes a large proportion of recently arrived migrant and refugee families, whose access to technology is below the national average. A number of recent media reports highlight this issue, interviewing Australian migrants with no home computers, needing to share mobile phones in order to access online schoolwork.

This has serious implications for migrant families in the current pandemic. Students and parents rely on internet access to engage with schools and services. There has been some government recognition of this ongoing problem, with a ministerial briefing paper acknowledging that: “for many Australian families online home learning is not a practical option without additional resourcing”. Additional equipment such as computers and modems have reportedly been made available by the NSW Department of education, and in April the Victorian government announced a program to subsidise NBN connections for students in need.

Better disaster preparation needed

Digital inequality is an ongoing problem in Australia, and the current pandemic has merely highlighted the fact that many vulnerable groups are being left out of this mode of communication.

For migrant and refugee families, increased access to computers only solves half the problem. Digital literacy training is also necessary for parents to be able to navigate online learning programs, with the majority of home schooling material only accessible through platforms such as Google classroom. Targeted services such as interpreters and teaching assistants need to be made available to parents on a consistent basis, with strategies in place for future lockdowns and periods of home schooling.

Individual schools and community groups have gone to enormous lengths to assist migrant families throughout the pandemic, placing considerable strain on already limited resources and personnel. Responsibility for providing these services needs to be at a government level, however, and specifically targeted at vulnerable communities.

As a matter of national disaster preparedness – given the ongoing nature of the pandemic but also considering other future crises – there is an urgent need to ensure that families of all backgrounds are able to communicate with schools, and to prepare for future home schooling events.

Now is the time to take stock of the lessons learnt from the pandemic and incorporate the needs of migrant families into everyday schooling practices.

Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

Here, Kinza Afraz Abbasi shows how mismatched language choices and mismatched communication channels render public health communication in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province ineffective.

***

English-Only COVID-19 signage in a school in KPK (Image credit: Express Tribune)

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), one of the four provinces of Pakistan, it is widely believed that polio vaccination is a Western plot to make children infertile in their childhood with the aim to control Muslim population growth. As a result of this belief, health clinics have been torched and health care workers killed. Polio, almost eradicated elsewhere, remains a health threat in the province.

What happens in a situation such as this – where mistrust between the population and public health services is rampant – when a new public health disaster such as the COVID-19 pandemic strikes?

There is wide agreement that Pakistan’s response to the pandemic has not been effective and that the country is now in a lethal second wave.

In my research project, I set out to discover what the government has done to inform the public about the dangers of the virus and about measures to stop the spread of the virus.

The linguistic situation in KPK

KPK is located in the northwest of Pakistan and shares a border with Afghanistan. The largest ethnic group in the province are the Pashtuns, who are comprised of many tribes and clans. Tribes are independent to govern themselves and most of the population live in rural areas. In addition to Pashto, Hazara, Hindko, Kohistani, Torwali, Baluchi, Persian, and other languages are spoken in the province.

This linguistically and culturally diverse rural population of around 35 million people has a literacy rate of 50%. In some tribal areas the literacy rate is as low as 9%.

Those who are fortunate to have learned how to read and write will have done so in a language that is not native to the province, Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.

In addition to Urdu, English also enters the picture because it is a co-official language of Pakistan.

English dominates official COVID-19 communication

English has, in fact, been the preferred language of communicating official information about COVID-19. Pakistan’s official COVID-19 website is entirely in English.

The government of KPK has followed the lead of the national government and also communicated most official information in English.

I explored a number of official websites and social media feeds and determined the language of communication was almost always English, with some Urdu communications, mostly on social media. I could not discover any use at all of Pashto, or any of the other languages of KPK.

Few people follow official government information

Equally noteworthy as the mismatched language choice is the lack of attention that official government communications receive.

The official Twitter account of Pakistan’s Ministry of National Health Services, for instance, has 29,400 followers. In other words, out of a population of 212.2 million, a minuscule 0.013 percent follow official health information on Twitter.

With 1,771,291 followers, their Facebook page is slightly more popular but still under 1% of the population.

The follower numbers of the official Facebook page of the KPK government are equally dismal: 11,544 followers out of a population of 35 million, or 0.03% of the population.

Given the dismal state of telecommunications in the province and the low literacy rates, these figures are not surprising.

Private TV channels broadcasting in local languages

The COVID-19 messages of the Pashto-language TV channel AVT Khyber are in English

TV is popular in KPK and many private channels broadcast in Pashto, Saraiki, Hindko, and other languages.

Unfortunately, the information related to COVID-19 broadcast on these channels seems to be in English, too, as I discovered when researching COVID-19 messages on the Pashto-language channel AVT Khyber.

Their COVID-19 messages are directly copied from the English language messages of the World Health Organization without any adaptation or localization.

Mismatched communication costs lives

In my research I identified three key communication mismatches:

• Information is made available through the medium of English and, to a lesser degree, Urdu to a population who largely lacks proficiency in either of these languages.
• Information is made available through the written medium to a population who has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world.
• Information is made available online in a context where telecommunications infrastructure is widely lacking.

Given these mismatches, is it surprising that people in KPK do not believe that COVID-19 is real? And that it is yet another plot – by the government, by the West – to oppress and exploit them?

Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

Here, Yudha Hidayat shows that the over-reliance on written communication channels in rural Indonesia has resulted in a stark lack of information about how to prevent the spread of the virus.

***

Official COVID-19 information

The information gap between urban Australia and rural Indonesia

When the COVID-19 pandemic really took off in March 2020, I called my parents, who live in a village in West Nusa Tenggara (WNT) province. I asked them how the people in my village were preparing themselves to stem the spread of the virus.

Their shocking response was that they had no idea what to do.

I explained the health protocol in detail and sent money so that villagers could buy face masks. That was all I could do while I was far away from home.

For this research, I explore how it is possible that a community is not aware of COVID-19 prevention measures. How could my parents not know what to do? It is true that they do not own smartphones and do not have internet access but they do watch a lot of TV.

Unlike most people in my village, I am a literate and educated man. Having a strong internet connection in Australia, I can access a wide range of information from different sources in English and Indonesian.

Here, I argue that the pandemic has exposed global inequalities in information delivery and that local governments need to take local communication seriously in the fight against the disease.

How COVID-19 prevention information was delivered in WNT province

The local government has relied heavily on its official website and social media as the primary tools for delivering Covid-19-related information.

Official COVID-19 information

The official website is updated weekly and provides infection lists. The website also includes a long health protocol, and provides flyers, graphics, tables, and figures. All this information is only available in Indonesian with some English words and phrases mixed in, such as “social distancing”, “lockdown”, and “contact tracing”.

Monolingual information in a multilingual context

The reliance on the Indonesian language, as the only language used for this essential information, ignores the diversity of multilingual citizens.

WNT province comprises two main islands, namely Lombok and Sumbawa, and tens of small islands. The majority of the people in this province are from three ethnic groups, namely Sasak, Bima, and Sumbawa. Each of these groups has its own language including various dialects and at least nine other languages are spoken in the province, including Bajo, Balinese, Bugis, Javanese, Madura, Makasar, Mandarin Ampenan, and Melayu.

Given low levels of education in the province, the Indonesian language proficiency of many of these speakers of other languages will not be sufficient to fully understand the public health information provided to them.

Digital written communication in a low-literacy and low-technology context

The reliance on written text and on online delivery is also problematic.

According to data from the Ministry of Education and Culture of Indonesia (2019) WNT has a low overall literacy index (i.e., 33.64). Furthermore, only a small number of citizens use digital technology to access written materials (20.48), and reading is a habit for only a minority (38.17). Another indicator shows that 12.41% of the population of WNT are illiterate.

All these facts make it clear that COVID-19-related information provided only through the written medium on a website is out of the reach of many citizens.

English loan words exacerbate the problem

The use of foreign terms, tables, and figures on the website exacerbates these problems further.

Even among those who are proficient in Indonesian and have access to the internet, not everyone will understand English. The high level of English loanwords thus acts as a further barrier.

Infection numbers remain high throughout Indonesia

The same is true for the ability to interpret tables and figures.

What can be done?

As I have shown, vital information related to COVID-19 is provided in a way that makes it inaccessible to many in WNT. Although it is true that Covid-19-related reporting can also be found on TV and in newspapers, neither of these channels address the problems of illiterate people and/or those who live in remote areas.

It is obviously impossible to lift the literacy levels of a populations during a crisis or to catch up on telecommunications infrastructure. But that does not mean that public health information cannot be communicated effectively.

The alternative method that I propose is to utilise the oral method as an additional communication channel, as has been done successfully in Taiwan (Chen, 2020). The infrastructure exists as every neighborhood has a leader (‘Ketua RT’) who could be trained and tasked with providing COVID-19 information in this manner.

Oral communication could utilize the loudspeakers of mosques and temples that are readily available in every neighborhood. Oral announcements over loudspeakers are plausible since they can easily be delivered in local languages and are accessible regardless of literacy level and internet access.

This would not only help curb the spread of the virus but also accord local people the dignity and respect they deserve.

Reference

Chen, C-M. (2020). Public health messages about Covid-19 prevention in multilingual Taiwan. Multilingua, 39 (5), 597-606.

The Language on the Move team is here to help!

After the Language on the Move Reading Challenges of 2018, 2019, and 2020, this is the fourth time we are running the Language on the Move Reading Challenge.

This year, we have created a monthly calendar of reading recommendations to keep you company throughout the year.

As was the case previously, the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021 is designed to encourage broad reading in the discipline and beyond, and to make linguistics reading fun. Anyone with an interest in the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life can join.

Throughout the year, make sure to watch out for in-depth reviews and interactive conversations related to each reading, both here on this site and over on Twitter @lg_on_the_move.

Enjoy the recommendations from our team and feel free to add your own recommendations in the comment section below! We are interested in any good reads illuminating the intersection of language and social life.

January

Hanna Torsh recommends The Sydney Language by Jakelin Troy (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2019, 2^nd ed.).

“Jakelin Troy documents the language of the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Sydney Region, which no longer has any speakers. Drawing on historical sources, the book provides a classic example of language contact and intercultural communication. Shadows of those encounters between Aboriginal people and colonizers continue to exist in the vocabulary of Australian English. “Waratah” is a good example. The flower to which it refers is the name of the NSW floral emblem and of a major rugby team.”

February

Pia Tenedero recommends Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain (Crown Publishing, 2012).

“I like having Reading Group via Zoom because I feel more confident to express myself in this digital platform than in our face-to-face meetings – possibly an indication of my introvert side. This is partly why Susan Cain’s exploration of communication styles and the stereotypes linked to them appeals to me. There is a dominant belief that the ideal self, successful students, model employees, or the best leaders enjoy the spotlight, act quickly, and talk fast, aloud, and a lot. Extroversion is also perceived as a “Western” communication style. As a result, those who do not fit the pattern are oftentimes viewed through a deficit lens, as I have found in my research with globalized accountants in the Philippines.”

March

Vera Williams Tetteh recommends Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa by Nwando Achebe (Ohio University Press, 2020).

“In 2009, I gifted Ingrid (Piller) a glossy catalogue celebrating 50 years of Ghanaian history. She was puzzled at this short time span and asked where all the history before that was. Not having an answer at the time, I have become an avid reader of African history since. Nwando Achebe provides a brilliant African-centred history of women in leadership roles on the continent during pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial times. The book opens with my most favourite African proverb – “Until the lions have their own historians, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” and, throughout, addresses the question: whose histories, whose stories, whose archives?”

April

Loy Lising recommends Challenging the Myth of Monolingual Corpora edited by Arja Nurmi, Tanja Rutten, and Paivi Pahta (Brill, 2017).

“This book addresses how the monolingual mindset pervades even the discipline of linguistics itself, specifically the sub-discipline of corpus linguistics. The monolingual mindset manifests in the compilation, annotation, and use of corpora, and multilingual practices are converted into monolingual corpora at each of these levels. As one of the contributors to the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English, I am concerned that any non-English data in that corpus are either marked as <indig>, if they are in a local language, or <foreign>, if they are in Spanish. The book offers many helpful lenses through which to query these practices and to consider how non-English elements could be better incorporated so that they can serve as meaningful evidence of language contact and language change.”

May

Madiha Neelam recommends Language Policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches by Elana Shohamy (Routledge, 2006).

“This book inspires me to think more deeply about how language can serve as a means of control and categorisation. Shohamy explains how perceptions of language as a limited entity, governed by fixed boundaries, and strict rules of correctness make language amenable to manipulation for political, social, and economic purposes. Language tests, in particular, are powerful tools of control and social categorisation.”

June

Samar Al-Khalil recommends Neoliberalism and English Language Education Policies in the Arabian Gulf by Osman Z. Barnawi (Routledge, 2017).

“Barnawi shows how education in the Gulf region is changing as societies move from oil-based to knowledge-based economies. In this context, education has become entirely subject to the needs of the job market and economic agendas. This has resulted in a series of tensions as this form of neoliberal and globalized education comes into conflict with Islamic values and Arab identities. The book helps me to think more critically about the broader socioeconomic context in which my research about the promotional discourses of private English language teaching institutes in Saudi Arabia is embedded.”

July

Shiva Motaghi-Tabari recommends Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia edited by Anita Heiss (Black Inc., 2018).

“Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is an anthology of fifty short life stories written by Aboriginal people from all walks of life and spanning a variety of generations and regions. It is a compilation of diverse voices and perspectives which have identity, culture, and racism at their core. One of the themes that stands out throughout the book is the contributors’ struggles to understand their identity, and to find a sense of belonging and acceptance. The book enriched my own learning and understanding about Indigenous people in many ways, and I would recommend the book particularly to migrants to Australia, who can too easily avoid confronting Australia’s colonial history and the ongoing struggles of its First Nations people.”

August

Alexandra Grey recommends Language Investment and Employability: The Uneven Distribution of Resources in the Public Employment Service by Mi-Cha Flubacher, Alexandre Duchêne and Renata Coray (Palgrave, 2018).

“This book reports on a 9-month institutional ethnography inside various offices of Switzerland’s public employment service across the officially French-German bilingual Canton of Fribourg. It is a brilliant example of an institutional ethnography. The study demonstrates that language policy research should not always take a specific official language policy as its starting point. Instead, it is important for researchers to look at sites and processes where both overt and covert language policy is made and applied without taking on the official guise of ‘a policy about language’. Here, the rules, official policies and official discourses are, on their face, about eligibility for state assistance and employability, but the study shows how language practices, migration histories, and language repertoires are constructed within them.”

September

Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends Home advantage: social class and parental intervention in elementary education by Annette Lareau (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, 2^nd ed).

“Working-class families want their children to succeed in school, just like middle-class families, but they are not endowed with the same resources. Lareau shows that social class has a powerful impact on educational success; that is, parental involvement in schooling correlates strongly to children’s educational attainment. For working-class families, school and family life are strictly separated. By contrast, school and family life are interconnected for middle class families. Parental possession and activation of cultural resources yields social and educational profits for middle class children, which results in the strong connection between social class and educational outcomes. The book challenges me to think more deeply about how the class-school relationship is complicated when linguistic difference and migrant status also come into play. Schools should help fill the gap by providing inclusive multilingual information.”

October

Jinhyun Cho recommends Language and Symbolic Power by Pierre Bourdieu (Polity, 1992).

“I have read this book numerous times and treat it as my sociolinguistic bible. I continue to find new perspectives and insights into the relationship between language and society at each reading. By shifting the focus from language per se to its situatedness in complex social relations, Bourdieu’s theory of language as capital works seamlessly in the theorisation of linguistic markets, in which a price is formed on language, and censorship operates in order to distinguish legitimate language from other varieties. Although Bourdieu’s theory was formed in the French context of the 2^nd half of the 20^th century, it has been foundational to my own research related to translation and interpreting in contemporary South Korea, where English serves as a key instrument of distinction.”

November

Tazin Abdullah recommends Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia by Samia Khatun (University of Queensland Press, 2019).

“Much of the narrative surrounding Australian immigrants posits migration as a recent phenomenon. Australianama (“The book of Australia”), in contrast, is a refreshing insight into the historic connection immigrants have had with land and people. Khatun traces the South Asian Muslim presence in Australia using literature in South Asian languages and stories found in Aboriginal accounts. She explains, convincingly, that an understanding of immigrant history is found not in languages associated with European/colonial knowledge systems, but within the literature of immigrant and Aboriginal languages. The stories that Khatun unearths definitively illustrate the influence of historical, social and cultural factors that produce the linguistic representation of immigrants. I thoroughly enjoyed this fresh perspective on the story of Australia.”

December

Ingrid Piller recommends The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns edited by Dohra Ahmad and with a foreword by Edwidge Danticat (Penguin, 2019).

“I’ve probably learned more about language – and life in general, I might add – from literature than from linguistics. And this anthology offers a kaleidoscope of the many facets in which language is entwined in the experience of migration. Ahmad has brought together a brilliant collection of migrant literature with pieces focused on the experience of leaving home, arriving in a destination, and creating, or trying to create, a new home. Although the US and UK still loom large among the destinations, Ahmad has made a huge effort to include a wide variety of origins and destinations. Another strength of the anthology is that, in addition to some well-known names, it features many newer writers who have not yet been widely anthologized – I’ve discovered a number of authors to add to my favorite writers list.”

A herder guards the Mongolian script (Image credit: Ayin)

As the danger of life-threatening Covid-19 has subsided, Mongols in Inner Mongolia, a region of northern China, have faced a new threat: losing their bilingual schools. In the words of a community member: “in Spring we were afraid that we would die from Covid-19, now Autumn comes and we are afraid that we may become extinct”.

Two forms of bilingual education

To understand these fears, one needs to understand bilingual education in Inner Mongolia.

In brief, there are two different modes of bilingual education in Inner Mongolia. The established mode of bilingual education over the last 73 years has been: school subjects taught in Mongolian; plus a Chinese language and literacy course from Grade 2; plus an English language and literacy course from Grade 3. What worries Mongols is the new mode of bilingual education, which involves the gradual replacement of Mongolian-medium teaching with Chinese-medium teaching across all school subjects. In the new mode, this Chinese-medium education will be complemented by a Mongolian language and literature course. This is dubbed a second type of bilingual education but it is, in essence, monolingual, Chinese-medium education.

According to a document released on August 26, 2020, from this September the Chinese language and literacy textbook used in Inner Mongolia’s bilingual schools is going to be replaced with the national Chinese language textbook. It’s also going to be introduced a year earlier, from Grade 1. This national textbook is also used in Chinese-medium schools and is much more demanding than the one currently used in Mongolian schools. This means that children whose mother tongue is Mongolian have to learn the same content as their Chinese-mother-tongue peers, and will be evaluated in direct comparison to them.

Another subtle change is in the course name: the Chinese language and literature textbook (in Chinese: 汉语文) assumes a new name, Language and Literature (in Chinese: “语文”) while the new Mongolian language and literature textbook is “Mongolian Language and Literature” (in Mongolian “mongol hel bichig”), whereas it was previously simply called Language and Literature (in Mongolian “hel bichig”) in Mongolian schools. That is, the marked version is now the Mongolian course, no longer the Chinese course.

Some Mongols have compared this name swapping to “the step-father taking the place of the father.”

The new model jeopardizes Mongolian educational achievement

This reform poses several problems.

The famous Mongolian poem “I am a Mongol” is written on a blackboard (Source: WeChat post reminiscing and mourning the impending loss of the mother tongue)

First, are Mongolian-mother-tongue children able to learn the new, and much more difficult, Chinese language and literature syllabus at this new pace, while they simultaneously learn to read and write their own language, Mongolian, from Grade 1? How will the reform increase students’ study load?

Second, what kind of national university entrance exam will be designed for those Mongolian students?

Here let me explain briefly how students from Mongolian high schools currently participate in the national university entrance exams. Broadly speaking, the national exams across subjects are written and administered in Chinese, but the exams are also translated into Mongolian for Mongolian test-takers. For instance, maths, history, politics or chemistry are examined across the nation using the same tests, except that they are translated into Mongolian for students coming from Inner Mongolia’s bilingual high schools. There is also provision in the rules for these tests to be translated into five other official minority languages, e.g. Korean, depending on demand.

Every year around 12,000 students from Mongolian bilingual schools sit translated national university entrance tests in Inner Mongolia.

There is a compulsory language component of the university entrance exam across the nation, and what differs most for Inner Mongolia’s Mongolian exam takers is this component. Their ‘foreign language’, i.e. Chinese language and literature, comprises 70% of the score, and their English language test result counts for 30%.

So what kind of Chinese language test is now going to be used for minority Mongolian students’ university entrance exam? The announcements and documents so far do not answer this important question. Surely, Mongolian students cannot compete with Chinese-mother-tongue students and the imposition of the same Chinese language test will further disadvantage Mongolian students.

Language shift in education will push Mongolian to the brink

The Mongolian language is already fragile and has entered the early stages of endangerment. In today’s Inner Mongolia, less than 40% of Mongol parents choose Mongolian bilingual schools for their children; the rest enroll their children in mainstream Chinese schools. In such circumstances, this reform pushes already emaciated Mongolian language and culture further towards the abyss of extinction within the Chinese borders.

“Save the Mother Tongue!” Protest sign against the reform on a delivery bike

Language shift in education is known around the world, and elsewhere in China, to be a major push in a wider shift away from using a minority language at home or transmitting it to younger generations at all.

The nourishment of bilingual education

Personally, I have been nourished by the well-established bilingual education system in Inner Mongolia. When I was in Grade 4, my parents sent me to a boarding school which was around three hours’ drive from my home, over a muddy, pebble-paved country road. Even though I was intimidated by the new environment when I first arrived – most people on the street and in other public spaces spoke Chinese – this bilingual school, with its Mongolian-speaking teachers, classmates and dorm mates acted as a safe haven.

This bilingual school was the mediator for the ten-year old me to transition to new urban settings and to be socialized as both an ethnic Mongol and Chinese citizen. The importance of local, co-ethnic teachers and educational environments for the well-being of minority or Indigenous children has been proven in many studies around the world.

By contrast, the poignancy and tragedy of how a mainstream educational system can fail children from non-mainstream language backgrounds, from the start, is nowhere more heart-wrenchingly illustrated than in the documentary “In My Blood It Runs” about Indigenous children at school in Australia’s Northern Territory. If the original bilingual education system is smoldered and buried underground we will see the birth of numerous minority children who follow in the footsteps of 10-year old Arrernte boy, Dujuan – the main character in the above documentary – and totter precariously on the edge of two worlds.

Established Mongolian bilingual education has proved itself

The 73-year-journey traversed by the established bilingual education system, where all classes are taught in the medium of Mongolian, and alongside that Chinese and English are taught as single subjects, has proved that this is a mature system and suitable to the situation of bilingual Mongols in Inner Mongolia.

Numerous scientists, writers, artists, translators, teachers, other essential workers and “model citizens” have grown and blossomed thanks to the environment of bilingual education. Moreover, this year, several Mongolian bilingual high school graduates gained admission to top universities such as Beijing University and Tongji University, and they outperformed their Chinese-medium-education peers in Inner Mongolia.

In addition, the current bilingual mode of education in Inner Mongolia has facilitated inter-ethnic relations and the unity of the multi-ethnic people on the northern frontier of China. But once the established mode of bilingual education in Inner Mongolia is destroyed, the change will be irreversible. This is already clear from a historical analogy: Buryat Mongols (a Mongolian minority within the Soviet Union) failed in their attempt to revive their schools and language in the 1980s, even with the backing of Soviet policy-makers who had realized their mistakes in eradicating bilingual education the 1960s (Chakars 2014).

A dark future for China’s minorities based on the Western model

If history and political education/morality subjects are taught through the medium of Chinese from 2021 onward in Mongolian schools, the rest of the curriculum will soon shift too. Then in a few years’ time Mongolian teachers, textbook translators, publishers, writers and a host of others who are involved in industries related to Mongolian language, culture, and education will lose their livelihoods. I anticipate that this will be followed by the shrinkage and eventual disappearance of Mongolian media such as TV and digital media, which are currently thriving.

If all the courses shift to Chinese-medium instruction, the university entrance exam will soon follow suite and policy makers will simply adopt nation-wide Chinese tests for all Mongolian students in a few years. If this happens, Mongolian students cannot compete against millions of Chinese high school graduates in the world’s most competitive university entrance test, which will certainly further marginalize and systemically exclude young Mongols from higher education and the job market. It will exclude them in a way similar to the exclusion of minorities in the West, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia. As such, the internal colonization of ethnic Mongols will reach its epitome and Mongolian language and culture will be wiped out in China.

Mongolian teachers’ protest sign against the education reform in central Inner Mongolia, 28 August, 2020

Concomitantly the production of large numbers of unemployed, poor, institutionally discriminated and marginalized minorities including Mongols in coming decades will plague China with many unforeseen sociopolitical and economic problems. This dire consequence has obviously been brushed aside by the group of eminent Chinese scholars Ma Rong, Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe, who boldly proposed a Second Generation of Ethnic Policies (第二代民族政策) to solve ethnic “problems” by aggressively assimilating minorities (Leibold 2012). They envisioned the “melting pot” (大熔炉) formula of the West, in particular USA, as the ultimate “solution” to the ethnic “problems” of China, even though China’s native minorities are drastically different from diasporic immigrants in America (for further details, see Elliott 2015).

China’s ethnic policies have certainly taken a drastic turn in recent years, and this has sent shock waves through the “less-famous” ethnic minorities such as the Mongols, Koreans, and those in less visible areas such as Gansu, Jilin, Liaoning, and Qinghai. What are the consequences of bringing such tribulations onto the very groups that China has held up as “model minorities”, including the Mongols? Who gains most from this rash move? Indeed, up until now, many Mongolian speakers have identified as Chinese people, and there is no need to suppress a non-existent ethnic separatism by abolishing bilingual schooling. What is the point of destroying the Mongolian language and culture that is already staggering toward the brink of extinction and to whose speakers barely anyone pays any attention?

Opposing the new medium of instruction

At present, despite their tenuous position, Mongols are fighting against the reform. In particular, they were devastated by the secret implementation of the second category of “bilingual” education mode, which violates the national Constitution, Ethnic Minority Law and Education Law as well as the Mongolian Language Act and its Regulations.

It is this surreptitious and illegal way of implementing reform that spurred Mongols in Inner Mongolia, but also outside China in Japan and Europe, to protest against it within the framework of law. In fact, from June this year the “rumor” of cancelling the first category of bilingual education surfaced and has been simmering in Inner Mongolia, yet many Mongols didn’t take it seriously as there were no official documents. It was only a week before the commencement of the new semester on Sept 1, that documents were released by the Inner Mongolia Education Bureau. Now, Mongolian parents have been actively campaigning against the reform and are refusing to send their children back to school. However, teachers and public servants are silenced and threatened with the possibility of losing their jobs if they were to speak out. For other Mongols the phantasmagoric memory of the Cultural Revolution is revisiting them and has locked their tongue. Yet others take their mourning and frustration to social media spaces despite the constant disappearance of what they post.

The goal of the on-going protests in Inner Mongolia is not to reject the content of the new national curriculum, rather it is to abort the attempt to teach it all through the medium of Chinese. Mongols hope to translate the new textbooks into Mongolian and teach them in the medium of their own language, as they have been doing for the last 73 years. Thus, our aim is to maintain the original bilingual model of education, which ensures the maintenance of the Mongolian language and facilitates the multi-ethnic Chinese nation’s progress and stability in the long-term.

References

Chakars, Melissa. 2014. The socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia. Budapest: Central European University Press.
Elliott, Mark. 2015. The Case of the Missing Indigene: Debate Over a “Second-Generation” Ethnic Policy. The China Journal (73): 186-213,308.
Leibold, James. 2012. Toward A Second Generation of Ethnic Policies? China Brief 12 (13)

Related content

• Schooling challenges of multilingual children
• What do migrant parents expect from schools?
• No child left behind: a study in unintended consequences
• Bilingual children in preschool
• Ten lessons from the Bridging Language Barriers Symposium
• The language that cannot speak its name
• Educational success through bilingual education
• Paying lip-service to diversity
• Dodgy data and language misdiagnosis
• Sink-or-swim for international students
• Educational outcomes of migrant children
• Bilingualism: Bane or Boon?
• Providing bilingual education since 1689

Q: What makes a #text credible, trustworthy and authoritative?

Many people think it's the quality of #discourse: that some ways of using #language make text more believable

Certainly true BUT: world leaders may talk complete nonsense and still command authority and get elected pic.twitter.com/zTsgJcvD0A

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

Some of the pre-textual resources that give #authority to #discourse are listed by Smith-Khan (2019)

1. Linguistic capital
2. Material resources
3. Identity privilege
4. Platform privilegehttps://t.co/DMS2IAXmMb pic.twitter.com/8yxn8hknVc

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

2. Material resources: if you bring your text to market on a well-designed website with stable URL, it is accorded greater #credibility than a handwritten note on a torn piece of paper

(Examples from Smith-Khan, 2019) pic.twitter.com/3nGGZbQXZs

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

4. Platform privilege: look no further than #Twitter: number of followers and retweets are widely considered markers of #authority …

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

Citation rates serve as a measure of #academic #authority

Irrespective how groundbreaking and innovative the #research, publications in #languages other than #English attract few citations#English = #authority (research)https://t.co/6pOAjeVHda

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

Same is true of #white scholars: they are more likely to be cited and accorded #authority#race #research #AcademicTwitter https://t.co/qIBG7Kb7FA

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

"When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are #free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some #power, then your job is to #empower somebody else." (Toni Morrison)#academia #research pic.twitter.com/aUISjtXJqK

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

Special thanks to @fonolog @Neerlandistiek, who blogged this paper almost immediately when it was published.

What a generous #authority boost! Hartelijk bedankt!https://t.co/0tpTe4uVLU

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

Professor Katrijn Maryns explains the linguistic transformations that turn “undocumented migrants” into “genuine” or “bogus refugees”

Language is the inescapable medium through which we live our lives. Access to social goods such as education, employment or community participation occurs through the medium of a particular language. However, all too often we take language for granted and its social role is obscured. One context that exemplifies both the power of language and its invisibility is the asylum determination procedure.

The asylum determination procedure is designed to distinguish between “genuine” refugees – migrants who should be granted asylum because of a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries – and economic migrants.

Katrijn Maryns, Professor of Translation, Interpretation and Communication at Ghent University, illuminated the linguistic challenges inherent in the Belgian asylum determination procedure during her recent visit to Sydney, where she attended the inaugural “Language and Law” symposium at Sydney University (organized by Alexandra Grey and Laura Smith-Khan) and delivered the first Lecture in Linguistic Diversity of 2019 at Macquarie University. Professor Maryns showed that the determination that distinguishes between “genuine” refugees and economic migrants is essentially a linguistic process. Language is central to producing the asylum seeker’s story in interview with an asylum officer; and the officer’s report of the asylum seeker’s story ultimately forms the basis for the decision.

In this process, meaning is transformed from one language to another, from one person to another, and from the spoken interview to the written report. These multiple transformations are highly complex but their complexity is obscured in the definite binary outcome of acceptance or rejection.

Asylum seekers are mostly talked about in numbers. Sociolinguistic ethnography illuminates the processes behind the numbers (Image credit: Europarl)

So much can go wrong, as Case 1, an excerpt from the asylum interview of a soft-spoken young woman from Sudan illustrates. The woman (in the excerpt represented as “AS” for “asylum seeker”) explained that a man had aided her escape from Juba by stating “one man .. carry me . help me …” (l. 20). The Belgian asylum officer (“AO”) misheard “carry me” as “Karimi” and her report – which entered the file and became the version of record of the asylum seeker’s story – stated “A man named Karimi helped me.”

Although the final written report (in Dutch) is written in the first person – as if it were the authentic voice of the asylum seeker – it is obviously highly mediated and undergoes a series of linguistic transformations to arrive at its final form.

Could the “carry me – Karimi” misunderstandings have been avoided if an interpreter had been used? Maybe.

However, before the question of interpreter use can even be entertained, a determination of the asylum seeker’s language must be made by the asylum officer. Asylum seekers often have complex linguistic repertoires that are not easily summed up under one single language name. The complexity of the linguistic repertoires of people on the move clashes with the monolingual assumptions of a neat match between national origin and a named language that typically guides European asylum procedures.

Case 1 (Source: Katrijn Maryns, Guest lecture, Macquarie University, 02-04-2019)

This clash between factual complexity of linguistic repertoires and the bureaucratic drive to simplify means that even something as seemingly simple as determining the language in which an interview should be conducted is not simple at all. For instance, in another example (Case 2), Professor Maryns introduced us to a Belgian asylum officer, who was keen to get the interview done in English.

Given that English is the official language of Sierra Leone, the country of origin of the asylum seeker she was interviewing, this does not seem like such an unreasonable idea. It only becomes unreasonable when one knows that proficiency in English in Sierra Leone, as in many other postcolonial countries with English as an official language, is closely tied to formal education. The asylum seeker tried to explain that much to the officer when she said “I no go to school” (l. 4).

In a testament to the power differential inherent in the interview situation, the officer waves away that objection and makes the asylum seeker “sign” (indicate by cross or circle) that she’s happy to conduct the interview in English.

The asylum interview is a high stakes situation: for asylum seekers, matters of life and death may ride on it. Most of the time, all they have to succeed in this effort is their story: they must tell a credible story, in a plausible linguistic form, in a plausible genre, and of a plausible content. However, what is plausible to the European asylum bureaucracy may be vastly different from the story an asylum seeker can tell with the resources at her or his disposal.

Case 2 (Source: Katrijn Maryns, Keynote lecture, Sydney University, 01-04-2019)

In short, the asylum interview places extremely high linguistic demands on the asylum seeker while severely curtailing the possibilities for the production of a credible story.

Further reading

• Maryns, K. (2005). Monolingual language ideologies and code choice in the Belgian asylum procedure. Language & Communication, 25(3), 299-314.
• Maryns, K. (2006). The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian Asylum Procedure. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
• Maryns, K. (2013a). Disclosure and (re)performance of gender‐based evidence in an interpreter‐mediated asylum interview. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(5), 661-686.
• Maryns, K. (2013b). Procedures without borders: The language-ideological anchorage of legal-administrative procedures in translocal institutional settings. Language in Society, 42(1), 71-92.
• Maryns, K. (2015). The use of English as ad hoc institutional standard in the Belgian asylum interview. Applied Linguistics, 38(5), 737-758.

Related content

• Forgotten and invisible? The legal protection of refugees with disabilities
• Are we all different in the same way?
• Telling stories? Credibility in asylum interviews
• Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Don’t know what “jurisdictional error” means? Some people’s future depends on it

Multilingual advice provided by the Administrate Review Tribunal

Countries in the Global North have developed increasingly sophisticated and complex processes to assess the claims of people seeking asylum. One key challenge is that asylum seekers often have little more than their story to offer up to support their claims. This means that deciding whether or not their stories are credible has become a fundamental step in the assessment process.

Yet the settings in which these decisions are made are emotionally charged and government officials and asylum seekers often have very different experiences, cultures and languages. So it is unsurprising that credibility assessment processes have attracted a lot of scrutiny, with scholars from a range of disciplines offering cautions and suggestions for improvement. Many of these revolve around issues related to cultural and linguistic diversity – communicating a story of persecution in a foreign institution is hardly straightforward. It involves transforming a complex and unique life experience into a neatly ordered refugee narrative that meets the expectations of the government department and the individual tasked with making the decision. A large body of research tells us of the many difficulties with communicating through an interpreter in such settings, or using a second or third language, or a language variety different to that spoken by the official. The official may have completely different life experiences or cultural expectations to that of the asylum seeker, which may make their story appear unrealistic or unbelievable. Officials may also look at asylum seekers’ demeanour to assess their honesty, despite the overwhelming body of research warning against the reliability of such assessments.

In Australia, the Immigration Department (currently known as the Department of Immigration and Border Protection) has recognised the challenges created by the cultural and linguistic diversity of those participating in asylum procedures and has taken steps to address these in its guidance documents. In my article, ‘Different in the same way?: Language, diversity and refugee credibility’ (Smith-Khan 2017a), I look closely at the Australian guidelines on credibility assessment in refugee appeals and consider how they incorporate diversity. I argue that while they acknowledge the need to accommodate applicants with different languages and cultures, there are some dangers arising from the discourse developed in this guidance. In fact, the language used in the guidelines frames applicants as different and largely ignores the decision maker’s own difference or subjectivity. Again and again, they remind us of the applicants’ social and cultural background. Their culture becomes an immutable feature of who they are – something which will inevitably influence their behaviour and way of thinking. While on its own, this may seem a reasonable warning, this contrasts with how the decision makers are presented. The guidelines instruct them:

What is capable of being believed is not to be determined according to the Member’s subjective belief or gut feeling about whether an applicant is telling the truth or not. A Member should focus on what is objectively or reasonably believable in the circumstances.

The officials’ neutrality is reinforced by what they are called in the Guidelines. They are referred to as ‘members’ – i.e. institutional and societal insiders (contrasting sharply with asylum seekers who are ‘applicants’, outsiders waiting to be allowed in). Even more frequently though, they are named ‘the Tribunal’. Thus they take on the ultimate neutrality: by taking the name of the institution they represent, we are to believe that any one decision maker is no different from any other. Therefore, unlike the applicants who are tied to their culture and other social attributes, decision makers are expected to be able to attain objectivity (I discuss this in greater detail in another article (Smith-Khan 2017b. See also my blog post here).

This discourse creates difficulties in two different ways. First, because applicants are repeatedly linked to their social and cultural grouping, they are denied individual idiosyncrasies and quirks. They are expected to behave in ways that are standard to the particular groups to which they are assumed to belong. Where their actions or choices clash with the decision maker’s expectations of someone from this group, they may lose their credibility.

Second, the decision makers’ assumed ability to be objective means they are not encouraged to be self-reflexive, especially in regards to how their own background may influence how they decide what is reasonable or expected behaviour in those they are assessing.

The body in charge of processing asylum appeals in Australia, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) (which took over from the separate Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) in 2015), publishes a selection of its (anonymised) decisions online. From these I selected a corpus of decisions that dealt extensively with credibility. From this corpus I identified two decisions in which diversity was a key issue that arose in assessing credibility.

From my analysis, I discovered that the applicants (and their legal advisers) attempted to point to their cultural and linguistic diversity to overcome issues of inconsistency and plausibility raised by the decision makers. They used arguments pointing to sociolinguistic factors to explain inconsistencies in their descriptions of events. For example, an applicant whose claim revolved around his homosexuality explained how he felt uncomfortable sharing details of his sexual encounters in front of a female interpreter from his country of origin. And an Egyptian applicant noted how his choice of words had been affected by the lack of an interpreter when preparing a written statement, meaning he used a general term (‘arm’) instead of a more specific one (‘shoulder’).

The applicants addressed plausibility concerns in a similar way, pointing to cultural and social factors to explain why their reported actions were not implausible. For example, the homosexual applicant was questioned over his ‘failure to attempt to meet other homosexuals’ for a number of years after arriving in Australia as a student. He explained that he was new in the country, busy with study, had to work to support himself, did not speak English well and was afraid to go out at night, following a spate of attacks on Indian international students.

These types of explanations were mostly dismissed. D’hondt (2009) describes a similar situation in the Belgian criminal justice system. Culture attaches only to the minority participants, yet it is the professionals who retain the power to apply culture in their assessments. He explains:

Categorizing the defendant as a cultural other…prompts the defense attorney to invoke specialist knowledge about the defendant which is not accessible to the defendant him/herself…These attorney-initiated culturizations mobilize common-sense understandings of ‘culture’ (which lack a clearly defined legal status…), without posing a threat to the judiciary’s self-representation as ‘empty’.

In the asylum context, the decision maker is the specialist, entitled to decide what is reasonable behaviour from a person of the applicant’s background. Further, references to accommodating diversity in the Guidelines revolve around issues of communication within the appeal hearing and the applicant’s knowledge, rather than their past behaviour. Although applicants may attempt to mobilize diversity-based arguments to defend themselves, the power remains with the decision maker to determine whether or not to accept such arguments.

The way diversity is constructed in the Guidelines, and then reflected in these decisions demonstrates some of the key concerns put forward in research on intercultural communication. While policy guidelines may seek to sensitize officials to accommodate diversity, such texts may present diversity in such a way as to actually reinforce hierarchical, power asymmetrical structures. Diversity discourse may frame only certain participants as being diverse – e.g. the subjective, culturally and socially influenced applicants vs the objective, neutral decision makers. This can have the effect of ‘othering’ the minority participants and essentializing them into simple categories, while re-entrenching the ‘normal’ and ‘neutral’ status of the mainstream. Difference becomes a fixed and overwhelming attribute that attaches to society’s others and overrides their individuality. This was exemplified in the decision-making in my analysis, most especially in the assessment of the homosexual applicant’s behaviour. It is hard to imagine that a heterosexual person would be misbelieved for their ‘failure’ to date or form a relationship upon arriving in a new country. While the applicant drew on arguments about his social position, cultural and linguistic background, and financial situation, these attributes seemed to be eclipsed by his sexuality. Because this was the key element of his identity for the purpose of the credibility assessment, it seemed that his behaviour was expected to reflect this above all other aspects of who he was. It was the decision maker’s own conceptualization of reasonable behaviour for a young homosexual man against which he was measured – he was expected to actively search out a partner. The plausibility of alternative actions being rejected means that the applicant was denied the privilege of a more complex identity, as an individual with myriad experiences and motivations.

While asylum bodies have come a long way in developing assessment processes, this research demonstrates that challenges remain. Diversity may be acknowledged, but this does not mean that all persons are considered different in the same way. We need to continue to interrogate the way we discuss and present difference and reflect on the effects this has on those who have most to lose in the process.

Related content

• Laura Smith-Khan, Telling stories? Credibility in asylum interviews
• Laura Smith-Khan, Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Ingrid Piller, The diversity of the other

References

D’hondt S (2009) Others on trial: The construction of cultural otherness in Belgian first instance criminal hearings. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 806-828.
Smith-Khan L (2017a) Different in the same way? Language, diversity and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/eex038
Smith-Khan L (2017b) Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926517710989

King Sejong the Great (1397-1450) (Image source: Wikipedia)

Today, South Koreans celebrate Hangul Day. Hangul Day is a national holiday to celebrate the Korean script. I am not aware of any other national holiday anywhere else to celebrate a particular script (except for the North Koreans who also have a national day to celebrate the Korean script but they call it Chosŏn’gŭl Day and celebrate on January 15). What is so special about the Korean script that it gets a national holiday in both Koreas you might ask?

There is actually a good reason: the invention of Hangul is not only a major linguistic achievement but also of significant social importance.

Hangul was invented by King Sejong the Great who lived from 1397 to 1450 CE and was the fourth king of Korea’s Joseon dynasty (1392–1910).

As a small nation, Korea at the time was overshadowed by its powerful Chinese neighbor which was styled as “elder brother”. As is often the case in such relationships, and is still true today, powerful nations not only rule over less powerful ones but they also come to be seen as providing the standard of all fashion, culture and knowledge. As today, subaltern people are apt to misrecognize the language and culture of the powerful as an intrinsic feature of their power. The hegemonic nation comes to be seen as the source of knowledge and local ways are often denigrated and dismissed as lacking value. Same old story back in 14^th-century Korea:

China was considered the source of all culture and learning. The Korean elite therefore thought it natural that becoming literate meant learning the Chinese language: everything worth reading was written in Chinese. (Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 193)

Despite all the Chinese learning, not all was well in the kingdom of Korea; in fact, it was a rather backward place. Unlike many feudals, King Sejong was not content with living the good life at the expense of his subjects. On the contrary, committed to serving the good of his nation, he wanted to improve his country and better the lot of all Koreans. In addition to being the king, he had a lot going for him: he had received an excellent education (through the medium of Chinese, of course), he was bilingual in Korean and Chinese and he was an immensely talented scholar with wide-ranging interests. All his reading and writing obviously was in Chinese but Chinese publications were the only game in town.

One of King Sejong’s interests was related to agriculture, an area with obvious potential to improve the lot of Koreans: the growing population needed food. So, he started numerous scientific and technological projects to help increase agricultural production. However, all the agricultural knowledge of the time was based on Chinese climatic conditions and he realized that existing knowledge could not just be taken holus-bolus from China but needed to be adapted to Korean conditions. He saw the need for localization, if you will. One example of such a localization measure was the development of a specifically Korean agricultural calendar to determine sowing and harvesting times that were ideal for the Korean peninsula.

Another example of his wisdom in adapting Chinese knowledge to the Korean situation related to medicine where he commissioned a medical encyclopedia that focused on native Korean herbs and remedies and described their uses and where to find them.

King Sejong also was interested in jurisprudence:

Throughout his reign he showed a passion for justice, working to improve prison conditions, set fairer sentencing standards, implement proper procedures for autopsies, protect slaves from being lynched, punish corrupt officials, set up an appeals process for capital crimes, and limit torture. Nevertheless, one problem continued to vex the king: the litigation process was carried out in Chinese. Were the accused able to adequately defend themselves in a foreign language? Sejong doubted it. (Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 195)

The basic consonant signs of the Korean alphabet representing their pronunciation (Source: Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 198)

The justice system was not the only area where King Sejong discovered that all his reform attempts continually ran into a language barrier: whether it was agriculture, medicine, law or any other area of life: dissemination of knowledge, development and progress were stymied by the fact that only a tiny minority of Koreans could read. As mentioned above, all writing was in Chinese and Chinese literacy was restricted to a tiny elite. The vast majority of Koreans had no access to all the knowledge that was available. Teaching everyone how to read and write in Chinese was obviously not practical.

King Sejong concluded that, in order to achieve broad dissemination of knowledge, Korean needed a writing system of its own; not one based on Chinese but one that was based on Korean and easy to learn.

He started to look around for ways to develop a script for Korean. In addition to Chinese, he was able to study Japanese, Jurchen and Mongolian scripts. While these syllabary-based scripts provided some inspiration, it must be considered a stroke of genius that he figured out the difference between consonants and vowels – characteristic of alphabetic writing – by himself. In a next step, he divided the consonants into groups according to their place of articulation – another impressive feat in the absence of any phonetic models.

Having identified the phonetic characteristics of the sounds of Korean, he devised signs that represent pronunciations. This is in contrast to all other writing systems where signs initially started out as ideograms representing objects. At the danger of overusing the expression “stroke of genius” – that’s precisely what it was!

The new script was published in early October 1446 and the preface, written in Chinese, states:

The speech sounds of our country’s language are different from those of the Middle Kingdom and are not communicable with the Chinese characters. Therefore, when my beloved simple people want to say something, many of them are unable to express their feelings. Feeling compassion for this I have newly designed twenty-eight letters, only wishing to have everyone easily learn and use them conveniently every day. (Quoted from Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 204)

Korean consonant letters. Easy to learn, right? Even if you’ll need to allow for some more time to learn the vowels, too … (Source: Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 198)

Maybe unsurprisingly, the Korean elite hardly welcomed the new script. They probably saw the threat it posed to their monopoly on learning and education. In any case, they did not like it and the script was widely denigrated as “morning script” (because it was so easy it could be learnt in a morning) or even as “women’s script” (because it was so easy even women could learn it …)

Wise King Sejong did not risk a fight and did not impose the exclusive use of Hangul. As a result, Korean elites let the script slip into oblivion after his death and it almost did not survive the Japanese invasions of the 16^th century, which devastated the country.

In fact, history has hardly been kind to Korea; and in 1945, after the ravishes of wars and colonization, the illiteracy rate in the country stood at close to 80 percent. Hangul played a key role in turning these figures around and the illiteracy rate in both Koreas is today close to zero: testament to the continued relevance of the vision of a centuries-old wise ruler intent on serving the common good.

The story of Hangul presents an inspiring case study in the ways in which language arrangements can form obstacles to progress and social justice and the ways in which these can be overcome. For details on the story of Hangul, read Chapter 11 “King Sejong’s One-Man Renaissance” of Gnanadesikan (2009), on whose account I have drawn here. For a general discussion of the relationship between linguistic diversity and social justice, see Piller (2016) – today and tomorrow is your last chance to tweet about #linguisticdiversity and enter our draw for a copy of the book.

References

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2009). The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

My call to use language shaming as a lens through which to explore processes of language subordination, domination and (de)valorization struck a chord at the conference and I have since received a number of emails asking for the write-up of my lecture. The slides that accompanied the lecture can be downloaded here and conceptually the lecture was based on Chapters 3 and 7 of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. Additionally, I’ve decided to start a mini-series devoted to explorations in language shaming here on Language on the Move. What follows is the first entry in this series.

#ICMLXVI @rejadam Dr Robert Adam emphasising the concept of "language shaming" (re: Prof Ingrid Piller) pic.twitter.com/O5GOgQWDPP

— efsli (@efsli) August 29, 2017

A persistent theme in linguistic diversity is that some ways of using language are heard or seen as indices of laziness, stupidity and backwardness. Speakers of non-standard varieties and particularly migrant speakers are often denigrated in this way.

Teachers may well be amongst the worst offenders when it comes to making migrant students feel inferior. For instance, a sociolinguistic ethnography with Burmese migrant students in a high school in Southwest China by Li Jia provides numerous instances of language shaming. The focus of the research was on the language learning and educational experiences of students from Myanmar who had come to China for their high school education. Many of these students had a Chinese background and most had studied Chinese as an additional language for a number of years prior to coming to China. Even so, their Chinese was different from the Chinese of local students: there were the usual accent differences and additionally there were significant differences in literacy: the Burmese students had had far less opportunities to practice Chinese literacy than the students who had been educated in China throughout their entire school career. Furthermore, they had usually been instructed in traditional Chinese characters and they had learnt to use pinyin according to a different transliteration system.

Chemistry presentation by Year 11 student (Source: Li, 2017, p. 234)

These observable linguistic differences were mostly seen in terms of deficit and often became the focus of student-teacher interactions as in the following example, where a migrant Year 11 student was required to deliver an oral presentation in his Chemistry class. The topic of the presentation was about the weather and specifically temperature fluctuations and cold spells. When the student had finished his presentation and the teacher provided feedback, the feedback had nothing to do with the content of the presentation. Instead, the chemistry teacher focused on the student’s language. He pointed out some unfortunate vocabulary choices made by the students as well as spelling mistakes. The teacher summed up his assessment of the student’s Chemistry presentation as follows:

你看都是高二的学生了，寒潮的潮字都不会写。

Look, you are already a Year 11 student and how come you can’t even write the word “spell”? [as in “cold spell”; “tide”] (Quoted from Li, Jia. 2017, p. 234)

The comment focusses on the language of the presentation instead of the content and denigrates the student by linking the spelling mistake to his age – a typical example of language shaming.

This kind of language shaming is detrimental to the student in at least two ways: first, the student is obviously humiliated and his personal worth is being questioned in highlighting that his Chinese language proficiency is substandard for his age cohort (and ignoring that he is not a first language speaker of Chinese but a Chinese language learner). Second, the focus on language instead of content deprives the student of a learning opportunity.

That means that language shaming has the pernicious effect of not only denigrating students’ language proficiency but also jeopardizing their overall educational success, including achievement in the subject area. Language shaming thus serves to instill the very “stupidity” is claims to diagnose.

Poster with the school’s hair style regulations (Source: Li, 2017, p. 179)

Being scolded for the way they spoke Chinese was but one of the ways in which the students were subjected to a deficit discourse. It was also other aspects of their bodies and behaviors that were subject to criticism: they were often seen as not conforming to the strict dress code of the school or as lazy and careless with the tasks assigned to them. During classroom observations it became obvious that teachers sometimes spent up to half the lesson “criticizing Burmese students who did not obey the school rules” (Li, 2017, p. 248).

While one isolated incidence of the kind that occurred in the Chemistry lesson may be easy to write off, for the migrant students in the study such incidences of language shaming were regular occurrences; and it was their regularity that left deep psychological scars, as another student confided in the researcher:

我8岁来中国学习汉语，一开始什么都不明白, 真的很想回家，特别是老师骂，大姐姐欺负我的时候，感觉真的很无助。 […]

I came to China to learn Chinese at the age of 8. At the beginning, I didn’t understand anything, and I was missing home very much especially when I was scolded by my teachers and bullied by older students I really felt helpless. (Quoted from Li, Jia. 2017, p. 148)

Like all systems of oppression, language subordination has a psychological component, and shame is a key mechanism that leads oppressed people to accept their oppression: sociologists consider shame as a key aspect of poverty as it leads poor people to accept that their poverty is their own fault and to accept that the rich deserve to be rich. Similarly, theorists of racial and colonial oppression have long noted a psychological component where those who are subject to racism and colonialism may come to accept their oppression as justified because an inferiority complex has been instilled in them.

The examples of language shaming offered here come under the guise of teaching and must be considered a key tool in the arsenal of social reproduction. A first step in breaking their power is to call them out for what they are.

Make sure not to miss out on future installments in the series “Explorations in language shaming” and subscribe to our alerts in the bottom right corner of this page.

References

Kaufman, G. (1996). The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-Based Syndromes (2nd ed.). New York: Springer.

Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD), Macquarie University. Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/LI_Jia_Social_reproduction_and_migrant_education.pdf

Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. [for your chance to win a copy, tweet about #linguisticdiversity by Oct 10; details of the draw here] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/explorations-in-language-shaming/feed/ 36 20607 https://languageonthemove.com/2017-baal-book-prize/ https://languageonthemove.com/2017-baal-book-prize/#comments Mon, 04 Sep 2017 03:05:10 +0000 http://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=20564 Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice has won the 2017 annual book prize of the British Association of Applied Linguistics.

Although I wasn’t able to attend the conference and award ceremony in person, my inbox has been filling up with congratulatory notes since the announcement of the prize last Thursday. I’m deeply grateful to all well-wishers and it is a good reminder that – although there is only one named author – the idea of individual achievement is a way of seeing particular to our time and culture.

In addition to the work of the author, there are the obvious contributions such as academic sources: these I referenced and attributed, as is common academic practice. There are also the obvious debts of gratitude that any author incurs: to teachers, students, colleagues, friends and family. These I thanked in the “Acknowledgements” section of the book although I actually had to say that they are too numerous to mention individually because any list of individual “thankees” was bound to leave out many more names than I could include.

Beyond these obvious contributions, there is a more fundamental sense in which individual and group achievement are intertwined, as I explained in another book, Bilingual Couples Talk. There, I pointed out that, in the Native American languages of the Pacific North-West, there is no equivalent for the English words “author” or “composer”. This is a tidbit of linguistic information I discovered from listening to music by the rock band Song Catchers. During their performances, the musicians explain that words and tunes are there in the community to be caught. They argue that music is not “composed” by an individual but “captured” from existing tunes. We can think about research and writing in the same way: a book is not only “authored” by an individual but presents a collection of words and ideas that circulate in a community. It is therefore good to see when a particular “catch” resonates with the community from which it springs: the fact that Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice has won both the 2017 BAAL Book Prize and the 2017 Prose Award in the Language and Linguistics category suggests it does.

The key idea of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice is that understanding and addressing linguistic disadvantage must be a central facet of the social justice agenda of our time, characterized as it is by heightened migration and globalization and their blow-backs, heightened xenophobia and nationalism.

Language is an important aspect of our social position and the way we use language – be it in speech, in writing, or in new media – can open or close doors. For sociolinguists this is, in fact, old news. It has long been known that speakers of non-standard varieties are frequently deprived of equal opportunities. However, our understanding of the relationship between language and inequality in the highly linguistically diverse societies of the early 21^st century is less systematic. Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice aimed to fill that gap and to provide an overview of contemporary research into the intersection between linguistic diversity and social justice.

The second aim of the book was to put linguistic diversity on the map of contemporary social justice debates. Engagement with social justice focuses principally on disadvantage and discrimination related to gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion and age. It is extremely rare for “language” to feature as a basis on which individuals, communities or nations may be excluded. However, if we do not understand how linguistic diversity intersects with social justice and if we are unable to even recognize disadvantage and discrimination on the basis of language, we will not be able to work towards positive change.

Social justice has been thought of as the master virtue that undergirds all others since ancient times. In The Republic Plato put forward a view of justice as being fundamental to all other virtues, arguing that it is only by overcoming institutional injustice that it will be possible for other social and individual virtues to flourish. The understanding of social justice adopted in Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice draws on the work of the philosopher Nancy Fraser and conceives of social justice as constituted along three dimensions, namely, economic redistribution, cultural recognition and political representation. The book therefore pursues three principal lines of inquiry: First, an exploration of the relationship between linguistic diversity and economic inequality; second, an exploration of the relationship between linguistic diversity and cultural domination; and, third, an exploration of the relationship between linguistic diversity and imparity of political participation.

The focus is on linguistic diversity and injustice – how linguistic diversity relates to economic inequality, cultural domination and imparity of political participation – because our ideas about justice are formed by the experience of injustice. This is a pragmatic approach that is not concerned with “perfect justice” or “transcendental justice” but is focused on seeking solutions and exploring alternatives to existing problems and injustices.

To read more, make sure to look up Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. If you don’t have your own copy yet, there is a chance to win one, as we’ll celebrate the award of the 2017 BAAL Book Prize to Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice with a Twitter give-away: original tweets including the hashtag #linguisticdiversity published between now and October 09 will enter into a draw for two copies. So, go and get tweeting about the relationship between linguistic diversity and social justice! Follow @Lg_on_the_Move

However, existing research suggests that despite aiming at objectivity, credibility assessments raise a plethora of issues. They are conducted in settings that involve intercultural communication, the use of interpreters, and power inequalities. Limited access to quality legal assistance can also undermine applicants’ ability to put forward a strong case, in the language expected by the institutions tasked with processing their claims. Elsewhere, I have explored how the various participants involved in applications and appeals each play a role in co-constructing the refugee narrative (Smith-Khan 2017a). Yet often, this co-construction is not readily acknowledged in decision-making procedures, placing too much responsibility on the asylum seeker.

In my new article, Telling Stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals (Smith-Khan, 2017b), I critically analyse the official text guiding credibility assessment in the Australian merit review process, and a corpus of published asylum review decisions. Studies involving critical discourse analysis encourage us to reflect on how the linguistic choices made in texts both reflect and perpetuate certain beliefs. Following Van Leeuwen (1996), I adopt a ‘socio-semantic’ approach to explore how these texts present the different social actors. I reflect on the beliefs behind these presentations, as well as considering the effects the resulting discourse may have on asylum decision-making.

The naming conventions in the Migration and Refugee Division Guidelines on the Assessment of Credibility are particularly striking. Calling the decision-makers ‘Members’ and ‘the Tribunal’, the Guidelines reflect legal language conventions. They position the decision-makers as insiders, taking on the identity of the institution itself. These terms represent and reinforce a belief that decision-makers are capable of neutrality and objectivity, each one expected to act and think in a uniform way, capable of setting aside their individual subjectivity. In contrast, the Guidelines present asylum seekers as subjective ‘applicants’, with multiple references to how they are affected by their social and cultural background. Multiple references are made to the ‘applicant’s account’ and the applicant presenting evidence, reinforcing the belief that it is the applicant who tells the refugee narrative, rather than it being co-constructed by all those involved in the process, with the final, official version being written by the decision-maker (I present a more detailed analysis of the way diversity is dealt with in these texts in another article (Smith-Khan, forthcoming)). Further, there are few references to other participants involved in asylum applications and appeals, such as legal advisers and interpreters. This has the effect of downplaying the role these participants play in helping to construct the refugee narrative, and the many ways in which they may affect the applicants’ credibility in the process.

Analysing my corpus of 27 review decisions, I note that the decision-makers vary in their way of presenting these same social actors, although in general, their approaches reflect those adopted in the Guidelines. For example, a majority of the decision-makers refer to themselves as ‘The Tribunal’, with only a few referring to themselves in the first person. Similarly to the Guidelines, many decision-makers make scant reference to the role played by interpreters and legal advisers. In some cases it is not even clear whether the applicant used English, or whether they had any legal assistance or not.

I argue that the corpus reveals some key challenges for credibility assessments. Firstly, the variations amongst different decision-makers indicates that far from being uniform, they are individuals who each have their own approach to reporting their hearings and sharing their decisions. The minimal references to interpreting, language choice and legal assistance create the impression that these factors are not important in how applicants construct their refugee stories and create and defend their credibility. Further, the decision-maker’s position as objective receiver of information suggests that self-reflection is not encouraged. Overall, this means that when applicants attempt to explain credibility issues such as inconsistency or vagueness by referring to the roles other participants play in shaping their narratives, their arguments are largely ineffective.

The discursive roles assigned to each of the actors involved in these processes suggest that there remains a need to scrutinise credibility assessment processes (and the texts that govern them). It is only through acknowledging and seeking to address the structural challenges and power asymmetries hidden by such discourse that we can improve processes to ensure the best possible outcomes for those seeking our protection.

Related content

• Laura Smith-Khan, Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Laura Smith-Khan, Discrimination by any other name: Language tests and racist migration policy in Australia
• Laura Smith-Khan, Don’t know what “jurisdictional error” means? Some people’s future depends on it
• Laura Smith-Khan, We all have a culture, we all speak a language: the Australian legal system discusses diversity

References

• Smith-Khan L (2017a) Negotiating narratives, accessing asylum: Evaluating language policy as multi-level practice, beliefs and management. Multilingua 36: 31-57.
• Smith-Khan L (2017b) Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society.
• Smith-Khan L (Forthcoming) Different in the same way? Language, diversity and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law.
• Van Leeuwen T (1996) The representation of social actors. In: Caldas-Coulthard CR and Coulthard M (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, pp. 32-70.

Churchill Square Shopping Mall, Brighton, UK (Source: Wikipedia)

In a shopping mall in the city of Brighton, UK, a tourist was arrested on terrorism charges last week for taking a selfie video. Surely, taking selfies in a shopping mall is such a part of contemporary culture that the act itself wouldn’t raise an eyebrow? What was different in the case of this tourist and this selfie? Well, the protagonist of the selfie did not speak English. According to a Daily Mail article, this is how the selfie-taking tourist aroused suspicion:

A Sussex Police spokesman said they were called by security staff after they ‘had challenged a 38-year-old London man who was filming on his mobile phone and recording in a foreign language’. The spokesman added: ‘They were concerned about his motives and he was reported to be acting strangely.’

What “foreign language” do you guess the tourist was speaking? Are you picturing tourists from France or Germany, where the holiday season has just started? Or tourists from China or Japan, who are globally stereotyped as excessive image takers? It’s unlikely that you do, and it’s unlikely that a tourist recording a selfie in any of these languages would have attracted the suspicions of a Brighton security guard.

The suspicious language – you guessed it – was Arabic. The tourist, Nasser Al-Ansari, a 38-year-old London resident and Kuwait native, was recording a Snapchat message for his friends back home. The man was released after three hours, and his side of the story is described in the Daily Mail as follows:

The former banker, who has lived in London since 2013, said: ‘It was a very horrible experience and unacceptable to happen without any specific reason or suspicion.’ ‘It is absurd. It is not something I would expect when visiting somewhere in the UK.’ He added: ‘I was very understanding and I said to them “I know it was a foreign language and my race is a factor but please be fair”. ‘I think there is a thin line between being safe and going over-the-top and this time I think they went a little over-the-top.’

According to the police, it was the “foreign language” spoken by Mr Al-Ansari that was suspicious; he himself links language and race in trying to explain why he was targeted; and some social media commentators, also raised his religion as a factor. One blogger, for instance, went with the headline “Muslim tourist takes selfie in Brighton, arrested on terrorism offences.”

We have often discussed the relationship between linguistic and racial discrimination here on Language on the Move (e.g., ‘Race to teach English;’ ‘Linguistic discrimination at work;’ ‘Shopping while bilingual can make you sick;’ or ‘Racism without racists’). But what about the relationship between language and religion when it comes to exclusion in multicultural societies characterized by linguistic and religious pluralism? How is linguistic and religious difference related to social inequality?

A recent article by the sociologist Rogers Brubaker offers a framework for thinking systematically about the ways in which linguistic and religious difference structure inequality in contemporary liberal democracies. The author identifies four domains where difference may be turned into inequality: the political and institutional domain; the economic domain; the cultural and symbolic domain; and the domain of informal social relationships.

In the political and institutional domain language is inescapable but modern liberal states are relatively neutral vis-à-vis religion. In fact, religious discrimination is widely prohibited where linguistic discrimination is seen as perfectly legitimate. Think, for instance, of citizenship testing: many liberal democracies require a language test in the national language as a precondition of naturalization while no similar religious tests currently exist in liberal democracies; and would widely be considered abhorrent.

Furthermore, in addition to explicit linguistic discrimination in favor of the national language(s), there is the inescapable fact that institutions operate exclusively in one language (or in some cases a small set of legitimate languages): this constitutes, eo ipso, a massive advantage for speakers of the institutional language and a massive disadvantage for people who do not speak the institutional language or do not speak it well.

In the economic domain similar considerations apply: proficiency in the language in which an economic activity occurs is a precondition for participation in that economic activity in a way that religion is not. Speakers of an economically powerful language enjoy an economic advantage because they do not have to invest in learning that language. Furthermore, language learning is a complex – and hence costly – undertaking that may make it difficult to acquire the kind of linguistic proficiency that has high economic value. By contrast, membership in a powerful religion is usually not as directly economically useful as language proficiency is. Furthermore, joining a powerful religion requires a smaller investment. For instance, it is much easier for a non-Christian to convert to Christianity than it is for a non-native speaker of English to acquire high-level proficiency in English.

The cultural and symbolic domain works differently. This domain includes all the discursive and symbolic processes through which respect, prestige, honor – in short symbolic value – is conferred. Here, language is less affected than religion because the “content” of a language is much thinner than that of a religion. That means that negative stereotypes about language tend to be relatively mild in comparison to negative stereotypes about religion. While many people object to the specific tenets of a particular religion, very few people object to the specific grammatical structures or means of expression of a particular language. For instance, the widespread stigmatization of Islam in contemporary media discourses simply has no equivalent in negative stereotypes about any language.

Informal social relationships also have a significant bearing on inequality, and can work through exclusion and through inclusion. Processes of social exclusion may disadvantage members of certain religions or speakers of certain languages. Examples include differential treatment of minorities on the rental market or attacks against minorities on public transport. Both members of religious minorities and speakers of minority languages are vulnerable to such “everyday exclusions.” Of course, a language may be stereotypically associated with a particular religion – as is the case with Arabic and Islam – and in such cases it is impossible to disentangle language and religion as the immediate cause of an experience such as that of Mr Al-Ansari anyways.

Informal social relationships also mediate inequality through inclusion in that social circles tend to form around shared identities; and social networks, friendship circles or marriage opportunities are often based on shared identities. Again, religion and language work differently here. Preferences for religion-internal networks is dogma in some religions while preferences for the formation of language-internal networks tend to be much weaker.

In sum, linguistic and religious difference both translate into social inequality in diverse societies but they do so in clearly distinct ways:

The major sources of religious inequality derive from religion’s thicker cultural, normative and political content, while the major sources of linguistic inequality come from the pervasiveness of language and from the increasingly and inescapably ‘languaged’ nature of political, economic and cultural life in the modern world. (Brubaker 2014, p. 23)

Brubaker, R. (2014). Linguistic and Religious Pluralism: Between Difference and Inequality Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41 (1), 3-32 DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2014.925391

Children of migrant cotton field workers from Oklahoma (Source: Library of Congress)

I’ve just come across a fascinating article about the schooling of migrant children during the Great Depression era in the US West Coast states. The authors, Paul Theobald and Rubén Donato, tell a fascinating tale of the manipulation of schooling as an efficient way to perpetuate class relationships. By comparing two groups of rural migrants the article also offers an illuminating analysis of the intersections of class and ethnicity. The two groups are external migrants from Mexico and internal migrants from the dust bowl of the Great Plains states. The latter group came to be collectively known by the disparaging term ‘Okies,’ and is epitomized by the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.

In California, schooling for Mexicans had developed in the 19^th century in a way that systematically segregated Mexican children although Mexicans were not included in the legal provisions for segregation that applied to Asians, Blacks and Native Americans. In 1920, for instance, eighty percent of all Mexican children attended separate ‘Mexican schools’ or ‘Mexican classrooms.’ The justification for segregation was that Mexican students were ‘problem students’: they were stereotyped as slow learners with a language problem and un-American habits and values. Their racial status was also frequently debated and there were a number of efforts to have Mexicans classified as ‘Indian,’ which would have legalized their segregation.

Efforts to legalize the segregation of Mexicans were never successful and so their segregation was achieved through other means such as the construction of ‘Mexican’ schools, the gerrymandering of school attendance zones, and internal segregation through tracking. Segregation coupled with the irregular attendance of families who were seasonal agricultural workers resulted in very early dropout, and most Mexican children left school without having learnt how to read and write.

‘Fruit tramp’ family from Texas, 1935 (Source: Library of Congress)

In the early 1930s around 250,000 Mexicans, including US citizens, were deported to Mexico. This created a labor void, which desperate dust bowl migrants were eager to fill. Like Mexicans, Okies were despised because of their poverty and the burden they were seen to place on the taxpayer. In contrast to Mexicans, there was no readily-available ideology that would justify their segregation: they were white and English-speaking.

Okies disrupted the logic of agricultural work and segregation in California because here were white Americans doing ‘non-white’ work. This meant that the ‘inferior’ ethnicity of agricultural workers could no longer be used to justify their low wages and abominable working conditions. Theoretically, there were two options to deal with this dilemma:

Either the conditions and circumstances of agricultural labor would have to improve to meet white standards, or the Okies would have to be shown to be as inferior as Mexican migrants. Regrettably, there was (and is) no place like school for defining inferiority. (Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 34)

Although race and language were not available as rationales for segregation, the low quality of schooling in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas was. A 1939 survey found that ten percent of Okie migrant children were as far as four years behind their non-mobile Californian peers. Another twenty percent were three years behind and forty percent were two years behind. As a result school authorities felt compelled to institute ‘special’ classes for Okie children.

The result was the same as it was for Mexican children: poor attendance, early drop-out and dismal outcomes. A contemporary account explains the inferiority complex schooling instilled in Okie children:

Year by year, as they grow older, the embarrassment of their ignorance increases; held back sometimes four and five grades, when they enter new schools tall youths of 13 are out of place in classes with small-fry of 7. Bashful at their own backwardness and ashamed of their clothes or “foreign” accent, they stand out as easy targets for the venomed barbs of their richer and settled schoolmates. “He’s from the country camp, that’s what they said of my child on the school ground. Don’t you see how it hurts?” one transient mother explained. (Quoted in Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 35)

Okie child camping in Imperial Valley, California (Source: Library of Congress)

That the low quality of schooling in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas was nothing but a pretext for segregation is most apparent from the experience of children from the states of the northern Plains. Dust bowl migrants from the Dakotas entered predominantly Oregon and Washington. These two states had no history of segregation because agriculture was not yet industrialized and therefore there were few Mexican (or Asian) agricultural workers. Furthermore, the schooling system in the Dakotas was superior to that of Oregon and Washington. Even so, segregated schooling for Okie children developed in the Pacific Northwest, too.

The authors conclude that schooling during the period was designed to perpetuate the subordination of agricultural labor. When language and ethnicity fell away as ways to legitimize the processing of Mexican children into cheap labor, other legitimation strategies such as ‘educational backwardness’ were found.

It is also worth noting that the animosity towards Mexicans and Okies during the Great Depression was justified with their poverty, with the fact that they were a drain on the public purse. However, the segregated schooling instituted for these two groups was a more expensive educational option than integration would have been. Segregation involved the provision of separate buildings and the hiring of extra teachers.

If the maintenance of a docile, inexpensive labor system required social distance between the children of property owners and the children of harvest laborers, then a slightly inflated budget at the local school was, seemingly, a small price to pay. (Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 36)

It is also instructive to consider what happened after the Great Depression and the Second World War: Okies were integrated into the mainstream and took up jobs in production and industry. In fact, today even the term ‘Okie’ itself has disappeared as a social category. By contrast, Mexicans were forced back into agriculture and segregated schooling for Mexicans continued into the 1960s.

California pea pickers returning to camp after a day’s work in the field, near Santa Clara, California (Source: Library of Congress)

The class position of Okies took precedence over ethnicity during a time of economic crisis. However, when the crisis was over, Okies were not barred from class mobility in the same way that Mexicans were. This means that class in the United States is most restrictive when it is defined by ethnicity. But in whichever way class is circumscribed, schooling plays a crucial role in legitimizing class inequality because the basic principles of school finance, educational objectives and student evaluation are defined by those in power.

The authors conclude by asking what the enduring lessons of migrant schooling during the Great Depression might be:

Rural schools can either play the traditional role of agent in the solution of the legitimation crisis of the state, or they can begin to work to expose the unethical nature of America’s treatment of the countryside. (Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 43)

Theobald, P., & Donato, R. (1990). Children of the harvest: The schooling of dust bowl and Mexican migrants during the depression era Peabody Journal of Education, 67 (4), 29-45 DOI: 10.1080/01619569009538699