Have you ever listened to a language you don’t know and thought you recognized a word—only to realize later that you were completely mistaken? Our ears play tricks on us.

A while ago, I ran a small experiment with my German students. I played them two short sentences in Czech, my native language, and asked them to transcribe what they heard. The results were fascinating.

For example, about 90% of the forty students wrote down the Czech word malí [maliː] ‘small’ as mani [maniː]. To me, this seems puzzling—there is no n in the word! But for my students, the Czech l-sound somehow resembled the German n-sound. None of the Czech speakers I consulted ever had this impression.

This little classroom experiment shows something important: we don’t all hear sounds the same way. Our ears—or better said, our brains—are tuned by the language(s) we grow up with.

Why do we hear differently?

Image 1: Oscillogram and spectrogram of the Italian words papa ‘Pope’ and pappa ‘porridge’

Long before we speak, we are already great language users. Research shows that newborn babies can already distinguish speech sounds from noises. Even more surprisingly, they are able to recognize the rhythm of their native language from a non-native one before birth.

After birth, infants are surrounded daily by an enormous amount of speech input. Step by step, they build categories for the sounds of their native language. Up until around 8 to 12 months they can distinguish nearly all of the world’s speech sounds, even those that never appear in their environment.

A Japanese baby, for example, can hear the difference between r and l just as well as American or German babies can. But this ability does not last. As children grow, their brains focus on the categories that matter in their own language and ignore the rest—like the difference between r and l. This is why many Japanese adults often find it notoriously difficult to distinguish the two consonants in languages like English. What was once easy for the baby can become very challenging for the adult.

We perceive foreign languages through native filters

Learning the sound system of a language doesn’t stop with vowels and consonants. It also includes rhythm and intonation. And even for individual sounds like a or o, it’s not only about how you articulate them but also how long you hold them. This brings us to segmental quantity, or length. It refers to the use of duration (short vs. long) of vowels or consonants to distinguish lexical meaning. Quantity shows remarkable cross-linguistic variation.

The case of long consonants in Italian

Image 2: Soundproof cabins at the Free University of Berlin (left) and University of Helsinki (right)

What feels natural in one language may not exist in another. Take Italian. It belongs to just 3.3% of the world’s languages that distinguish short from long consonants (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996).

This contrast appears in more than 1,800 Italian words, such as papa /ˈpapa/ ‘Pope’ versus pappa /ˈpapːa/ ‘porridge’ (Image 1). To be understood and to speak well, learners must get long consonants (called geminates) right—although it can be very challenging (e.g., Altmann et al. 2012).

Cross-linguistic differences in learners

In our project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language”, we examine how Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish learners acquire this feature.

The selection of these languages is not random. They all handle consonant length differently. German, for example, has no consonant length but contrasts short and long vowels in stressed syllables (e.g., Stadt [ʃtat] ‘city’ vs. Staat [ʃtaːt] ‘state’). Czech, like German, distinguishes vowel length, but unlike German, it does so in both stressed and unstressed syllables (e.g., nosí [ˈnosiː] ‘(s/he) carries’ vs. nosy [ˈnosɪ] ‘noses’). Finnish is the most similar to Italian, since it has both vowel and consonant length (e.g., muta [ˈmutɑ] ‘mud’ vs. mutta [ˈmutːɑ] ‘but’). And finally, Spanish has no length contrasts at all.

This diversity allows us to test how a learner’s native language shapes the way they hear and produce length in Italian.

How good are learners at perceiving length in Italian?

In a laboratory setting (Image 2) and by means of a perception experiment, we tested and compared 20 Czech, 20 Finnish, 20 German, and 20 Spanish learners of Italian.

We used 45 short nonsense words that followed Italian spelling and sound rules but had no meaning. Each word had two versions, differing only in whether a consonant was short or long (e.g., sàpolo vs. sàppolo; milèta vs. millèta).

The words covered different consonants and stress positions and were recorded by a native Italian speaker. In every trial, participants had to answer the question: “Does the audio pair you hear belong to the same or different word?”

What we found

Image 3: Learner accuracy in perceiving Italian consonant length in comparison to native listeners

First language has great impact! Finnish learners, whose native system is closest to Italian, were the most accurate in hearing the difference between short and long consonants.

Czech learners followed, while German and Spanish learners struggled more (Image 3). Other factors also played a role. Learners heard contrasts more easily when the crucial sound appeared in stressed syllables, and some consonants were easier to notice than others.

Proficiency helped too—advanced learners did much better than beginners.

However, it is unexpected that the German group scored lower than the Spanish group—sometimes research simply surprises us!

Many factors could explain this, since every learner has their own story. Things like previous language experience, weekly study time, exposure to Italian, time spent in Italy, Italian friends, motivation, and personal talent can all play a role.

In our case, German learners had spent fewer hours per week learning Italian and had less experience studying or staying in Italy. Immersion—the experience of being surrounded by a language in real-life settings—seems a plausible factor behind their performance.

Why perception matters in language learning?

Why does pappa sometimes turn into papa in the ears of Italian learners? Because we all hear foreign languages through the features we are familiar with.

Our experiment showed that perception is difficult—but it can be improved. The key is to notice what is different and to train your ears. This means: Pronunciation training must start with perception (e.g., Colantoni et al. 2021).

In the end, learning a language is not just about new words—it’s about learning to hear differently.

References

Altmann, H.; Berger, I., & B. Braun (2012). Asymmetries in the perception of non-native consonantal and vocalic contrasts. Second Language Research 28(4), 387–413.
Colantoni, L., Escudero, P., Marrero-Aguiar, V., & J. Steele (2021). Evidence-based design principles for Spanish pronunciation teaching. Frontiers in Communication, 6, 639889.
Ladefoged, P., & I. Maddieson (1996). The sounds of the world’s languages. Oxford: Blackwell.

Acknowledgement

This blog post was written as part of the DFG-project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language: Czech, Finnish, German and Spanish learners in contrast”, funded by the German Research Foundation (Project number 521229214) and executed at the Free University of Berlin. Project website: https://italiangeminates-project.com/

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks to Massimiliano Canzanella, a Neapolitan language activist.

The conversation delves into the history of the Neapolitan language and the interplay of culture, race, and national identity that have contributed to the oppression of the language and its speakers. Massimiliano also discusses his own journey as a language activist and the movement to preserve Neapolitan, including his novels, Set Your Soul To It and You Don’t Say, which were the first ever to be written entirely in Neapolitan (and also available in English translation).

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

Transcript (coming soon)

Panoramic view of Naples (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Supermarket in Naples (Image credit: Marco Santello)

A key part of the experience of migration is not being in full control of one’s circumstances and doings. In this episode, Ingrid Piller speaks with Marco Santello about his research with Gambian migrants in Italy. The focus is on Marco’s recent article in Language in Society about migrant experiences of constraints and suffering.

This article explores one underestimated aspect of language in migration settings, namely the experience of not being in full control of circumstances and doings. Recent linguistic research often highlights transcendence of boundaries through migration and celebrates the fluidity and hybridity of multilingualism. By contrast, Santello argues that this discourse neglects migrants’ experiences of constraints and suffering. He sees limitations not just as structural inequalities resulting from macro-social pressures that migrants have to navigate, but focusses on the lived experience of constraint at the individual level.

The study is based on fieldwork with Lamin (pseudonym), a young man from Gambia in Italy. Instead of asking the conventional question how language learning unfolds, the researcher was interested to understand why Lamin had not learnt to speak Italian to any significant degree.

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

Call for papers

Marco is currently guest-editing a special issues of Language and Intercultural Communication devoted to “Constrained Multilingualism.” The Call for Papers is available here (abstracts accepted until Nov 21, 2024)

Reference

Santello, M. (2024). Constraints, suffering, and surfacing repertoires among Gambian migrants in Italy. Language in Society, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404524000423

Related content

Piller, I. (2016). Portrait of a linguistic shirker. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/portrait-of-a-linguistic-shirker/
Piller, I. (2016). The real problem with linguistic shirkers. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/the-real-problem-with-linguistic-shirkers/

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 18/10/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller and I’m distinguished professor of applied linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Marco Santello.

Marco is a researcher in multilingualism at the University of Turin in Italy. Marco has a PhD from the University of Sydney in Australia and has held academic positions at the University of Warwick in the UK, at Monash University in Melbourne, and at the University of Leeds where he taught intercultural competence. Marco’s research interests revolve around the intersections between language and migration.

Welcome to the show, Marco.

Santello: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Piller: Marco, so your current research is with African migrants to Italy, and maybe you could start us off by telling us about your research project and the approach you’re taking.

Santello: Yes, that’s right. So, my research at the moment is with migrants from Africa to Italy, and in particular with the group of these migrants, those that come from Gambia, which is a small country in the west of Africa. So, it’s a country which is basically enclosed within Senegal.

It’s only three million people live there, more or less. And that’s a group of migrants that is quite common, actually, in Italy, that I was able to come across. And I thought of being interested in.

The way the project unfolded is due to, first of all, my reading of certain authors in particular, Michel Destot. And so, first of all, I did some kind of academic intellectual work, if you will, on his understanding of everyday life, action in everyday life, and how important are constraints for his understanding of creativity and action within the space of action, indeed. So, this kind of idea that very many people operate within a specific space of action, and don’t have quite the possibility of going beyond it in so many ways.

And on the other hand, migrants have always been at the centre of my attention. I’ve been a migrant myself, travelled, as you were saying before, and lived in different countries. And it’s also been challenging for me at times.

So that’s always been some kind of an interest. At the same time, I was, I always worked in, with multilingualism. And so, from an academic perspective, that’s what prompted me to do a PhD and then to work with migrants afterwards.

And but also in my personal life, I’m just simply dedicating some of my free time to volunteering for new migrants and that I’ve been doing.

Piller: Maybe you can tell us a bit about that intersection between your volunteering and what your volunteering involves and how this relates to your research project.

Santello: Yeah, that’s right. Listen, it’s, you know, I’m a researcher, but I’m also a person. So, the, it just makes me happy really to be surrounded by foreigners.

And it, I volunteer for a couple of NGOs. One of these provide shelter and support to migrants near Padua. And this is something that just I wanted to do and I started doing.

And I didn’t have much of an idea other than I can support them with their linguistic needs. And they were really, the NGOs, they were really telling me, you know, we would need this, would you be happy to do this? Would you be happy to do that?

For example, meeting one to one with people or supporting some small classes. And it’s something I simply did. That was it really.

But then when I thought about this, and this kind of idea that we don’t know for sure constraints that people experience as they migrate, immediately I thought about the possibility of, you know, getting in touch with the NGO and see if they had anything to do, if they thought that was a good idea. Because in my research, I always try to start from the needs that might be coming from the field. So, if of course, on one side, as I was saying, I’m doing some kind of, you know, reading as a researcher, at the same time, you know, what matters to me is really that somehow, I’m connected to people and they were really enthusiastic about it.

And at the very beginning, I remember, I wanted to focus on people who had just arrived. Because that was my idea, and that’s also the kind of people that I was meeting in these kinds of volunteering activities. But then they told me, why don’t you instead talk to these Gambians?

Because they’ve been in Italy for a much longer time, and then probably have much more to say. And honestly, they don’t speak much Italian, some of them. And we don’t know exactly what happens there.

And I also thought to myself, actually, it is very interesting as a question, like why after years, you are not able to easily have a conversation. Some of them, of course, do have conversations in Italian, some of them really don’t, they struggle. So it was an interesting question.

And that kind of linked back again to this kind of idea that we focus a lot on the resourcefulness of migrants, but sometimes there is just something that happens and it doesn’t seem to be working as well as perhaps we would hope for or think about. So that was the whole reason.

Piller: So, what did you actually find in terms of why is it that they take such a long time to learn Italian? I mean, it is a really interesting question. And particularly with Africans, I mean, we know that there is a lot of language learning going on on the continent and people are often very, very multilingual and sort of learn languages easily.

And then we suddenly find that once they come to the global north, to Europe, same in Australia. We’ve just seen that in this new research that we’ve published, Life in a New Language, that actually then all of a sudden learning English becomes really difficult in all these everyday language learning skills that they brought along no longer seem to work. So, what did you find?

Santello: Yeah, I mean, listen, with this particular study that I published called Constraints, suffering, and surfacing repertoires among Gambian migrants in Italy, what I found was that there’s a level where there’s an impossibility to practice spoken Italian because of lack of an environment which is conducive to it. So people working in jobs that don’t require much interaction, and also not having a circle of people with whom they can speak Italian. And that was one of the constraints.

Another constraint that people brought up is the lack of classroom instruction available to them. So, in the specific case of these migrants that I met, the NGO provides some support from volunteers. But it’s a kind of a support which is quite limited in terms of hours, for obvious reasons.

Whereas there might be other schools in other places. But what Lamin, the specific migrant, my main informant for the study reported, it was that he tried to call the local school, but nobody replied. So, he assumed there was no space for that to happen.

And that doesn’t mean of course, that he doesn’t speak any Italian or he can’t communicate at all. But that he feels the need or the willingness to advance in certain aspects. And Lam also showed me a notebook filled with exercises.

And you could see the effort that was there in terms of the learning. But from the spoken perspective, there was a kind of limitation that he was experiencing. So we really see, we touch concretely through his experiences, the range of constraints that he experiences, particularly in terms of the environment.

Piller: Can you tell us a bit more about Lamin? Just introduce him as a person?

Santello: Absolutely. So, Lamin is a migrant, of course it’s a pseudonym, a migrant who moved to Italy six years ago. So, we’re talking about a migrant who has been in the country for a long time.

He comes from Gambia, as you were saying, and he speaks English fluently. Now, I usually have these exchanges in English, and it was important for him, particularly that he could speak English with me, because of course he’s extremely proficient, so he’s able really to make himself understood. He also speaks Mandinka.

That’s his main language, as he describes it. But then he also speaks Wolof, and bits and pieces of other languages. indeed, that was one aspect that came up through my research, which was the progressive surfacing of linguistic repertoires and interactions.

So, what both me and him made apparent at the very beginning, in terms of the languages we speak, was not what actually unfolded during the exchanges. So, by talking about constraints, we were able to bring up bits and pieces of our repertoires. For example, for him, in Italy, it is very important to speak Wolof, because Wolof allows him to communicate also with Senegalese.

The Senegalese are very numerous in Italy, in a long-standing community, many more than the Gambians. Many people in Gambia speak Wolof as well. But at the very beginning, he did not make that apparent to me that he spoke Wolof.

Now you would think such an important language for his life would have been apparent to him straight away. But this is not surprising at all that bits and pieces of our experiences and our speaker would also become apparent in conversation. The same goes to me.

When I explained to him that I’ve lived in Norway, then immediately brought up the fact that he spoke a little bit of Swedish. So, he said a few sentences to me, which was very important because I wasn’t expecting myself, as I was saying, I’m a person, I’m a researcher. So, it immediately brought some kind of emotional reaction on me, very positive.

Hearing this language, I wasn’t expecting to hear it in the shelter in Padua. So yeah, so he’s a multilingual, that’s for sure. And he has lived in the south and in the centre of Italy, going through different camps and also living in the streets.

So as a homeless person and was now living in Padua in the shelter, working in a local factory and trying really to settle in Italy in many ways. So, and when I when I introduce myself to the group, he was immediately very, very keen on telling me about his experiences and so on and so forth.

So, another thing that I want to be an opportunity for him to practice Italian or not, not really?

In this specific case, I don’t think so. In this specific case, I think that for him, it was really important to make his experiences known. And one aspect also that came out of my study was the fact that he was also trying to convey to me that his experience is not like an isolated experience.

That is something that is shared among several migrants. For example, when he was talking about the fact that he arrived in Italy, but some people didn’t because he crossed the Mediterranean. And it’s a very dangerous road as a road and route, really.

As he was putting it, he was really kind of representing it as a collective experience because it is. It’s not just him. There are many, many people taking that boat and trying to cross the Mediterranean.

The same goes for being homeless. So, he was really talking about this in the plural. And conveying the idea that people suffer.

And that’s one of the aspects that I wanted really to include in my article because I sensed that something that he wanted me to communicate. And even though this suffering is not strictly related to language, I thought it was a very good idea to insert it in many ways as part of the data. Because it was, I felt that it was important for him.

And it was important for me to be faithful to what I was given. And so, whilst, of course, every time we do research, particularly this type of research where the researcher is highly involved because again, it’s a kind of ethnographic and it’s a participation of US researchers, he at the same time, for me, was important to do justice as much as possible to what he was giving me. So even though it was something that wasn’t related strictly to language, I wanted for it to be inserted in the research so that again, I did something that I thought was faithful to what he was telling me.

Piller: Yeah, I think we’re both sort of interested in how language actually shapes your life, and the lived experience of language learning and language as a part of life. So, I thought that was really, really important and just so interesting to also for him to have that desire. I mean, again, that we see that a lot in our research as well, that sometimes participants really have this expectation that if they speak to a researcher, we’ll be able to, I don’t know, bring their experiences to the proper authorities, to the attention of people who can actually make a difference in their lives, and I sometimes find that really hard to deal with actually, because I think there is a bit of an expectation that by talking to someone who is in a fairly privileged position as a researcher or who they perceive to be as influential, even if we aren’t really socially influential.

That has a positive aspect or a positive consequence for themselves, but really for the larger structures under which they labor. As you say, he often wanted to make explicit to you that this was not only his experience but that suffering is sort of an endemic condition, I guess. So how did you deal with that expectation?

Santello: Yeah, listen, I don’t tell him, I’m going to solve your problems, etc. I’m just telling him, we don’t know these things, we just don’t know. My job as a researcher is to try and understand them with your help.

What I’m doing is simply trying to understand what’s going on, but I don’t have any power to change policy or anything like this. On the other hand, of course, it is a way for him to take these experiences in another place so that other people are aware of, for example, the constraints he experienced, or the suffering, or the deprivation, and so on and so forth.

And of course, also the sheer fact that we could have this conversation in English, as I was saying to you, at the moment in Italy, my position is within English. And for him, this was very important. And so, I was really, and it was something really united us because just the possibility for him to articulate himself the way he wanted to was key.

And that again tells us something about the importance of the resourcefulness of migrants and of multilinguals more generally, in being able to use different linguistic resources to make meaning. However, as I was also trying to explain in my article, very often we focus on the resourcefulness only from below saying that there’s a kind of a freedom of fluidity, etc. And that somehow by being multilingual, almost automatically, if you will, we will be able to advance or at least to be oppositional to some kind of a given system.

Whereas I didn’t necessarily find that in my research. In the sense that it’s not that by being multilingual, you’re automatically trying to disrupt the system or by going against monolingual norms, etc. Sometimes none of that really happens.

Another thing I also was interested in is in how the constraints are part of the multilingualism that people experience. For example, something really surprising in a positive way that I found was that he was even welcoming some constraints.

For example, in his house, and most of them are from West Africa, and he can speak with them either in English, or in Wolof, or in Mandinka, and so on. But there’s one person who doesn’t speak any of these languages. And so, for him, the only way to speak with this guy is in Italian.

And initially, at the Wolof, that must be difficult, you’re not. But, and I asked him, is that okay for you to speak? And he said, yes, yes, because it’s the only way I can improve my Italian by speaking it.

So, the constraint then was not experienced as a dramatic predicament in that specific circumstance. He was even welcomed as an opportunity to be in a, to be able to speak another language which he finds useful. And in a situation where he’s, that he’s lacking in his daily life, which is the possibility to speak in Italian, because of what we were saying before, the isolation, the non-Italian speaking environment in general, and some many tasks that don’t require any circles of people that speak other languages that he speaks, which are very important, of course.

And he says that very often with the Senegalese, with the Gambians and so forth, and other people from the foreign parts of West Africa, that also speak languages related to Mandinka. But so, there’s a kind of a, it’s a complicated picture, where the constraints are not simply impediments that are lived as something to be overcoming on costs. There is also that aspect, of course, of something that is experienced as a problem, and that is actually something that’s blocking.

But at the same time, there are many more things that we can see happening in, for the understanding of the multilingualism.

Piller: Yeah, I mean, just let’s continue with this idea a bit more that constraints can also be opportunities, because I guess from the national European perspective, from the perspective of the Italian state, or from the majority population, there is this idea that if you don’t speak Italian, you’re hugely constrained, and that’s a real lack, and without discounting that it’s important to speak Italian and whatnot, I think you’re also drawing attention to the fact that there are other multilingual repertoires or other languages in Lamin’s repertoire that are really important and that open doors for him in some kinds of ways and enable his life in Italy. So maybe you can speak to that a bit more.

Santello: That’s right. Yeah. So, as we know, in many countries around the world, there’s this kind of sense that a successful migrant is a migrant who’s able to speak very fluently the national language, for example, the national languages.

This is something that we kind of take for granted. And we know how this is very problematic because it kind of assumes that everybody is a more is more a lingual, it assumes a native speaker standard, and so on and so forth. But actually, even if you think about Italy, people born and raised in Italy, we have plenty of people in Italy who don’t speak Italian fluently, maybe they understand, but then to speak it fluently.

For example, people who speak regional languages, dialects, etc., who are not really able to have an entire conversation, monolingual conversation in Italian. And nobody would even dream of telling them that they are not good citizens.

Or else, we often put this label on migrants who might not be entirely proficient the way we think they should be in Italian, for example. So, there’s a huge problem there. And indeed, when you look at people’s lives, you look at the reality of them living with multiple languages and using many of them to create social networks, to work, to shop, for example.

Now, Lamin, for example, talks about this, the importance of using Mandinka and Wolof, or particularly Wolof, in shops, when he was living in Naples, and when he was going around the Central Station, and there were African shops, he says, and there I would be speaking my language, he says. And that’s where I realized that he was talking about Wolof, not Mandinka. So, you can tell that in that specific circumstance, there is no need for him to necessarily to speak Italian.

Of course, Italian is important, because it allows you to do things. And also because, you know, the overall society has a specific idea of Italian, what confidence in Italian is, but that’s not the only side of the story. So, by shedding light on this multilingualism, we try to understand better how things work, simply and without having this kind of preconceived idea that either you speak Italian like a native, or you’re not very, very good as a migrant, right?

So that’s not what comes out of this. However, he really hopes to improve his Italian and to be able to attend classes. That’s something that he conveyed to me.

Remember that Lamin has been in Italy for six years. And to this day, he has problems, you know, having a full conversation in Italian. So, there’s, and his willingness is there.

And he’s hopeful that that can change, particularly when it comes to spoken language, because it’s important for him. But again, that doesn’t mean…

Piller: Are there any Italian speakers in his social networks? Or is Italian really just the language he needs to interact with institution?

Santello: Yeah, so he didn’t say to me that he has any Italian-speaking friends. And so, I don’t think he has a kind of, you know, interaction from that kind of perspective with Italian speakers. So that’s one side, you know, of the coin.

On the other hand, of course, you need Italian in Italy in many ways, also to interact not just with institutions, but sometimes but also with people around. And then in the future, you know, with potential employers and whatever. So, there’s a, he knows that’s useful, that’s for sure.

One thing that, for example, he mentions to me, which is also very interesting, is this kind of idea that he cannot rely fully on English in Italy. Whilst he was making this comparison to Scandinavian countries, for example, where the knowledge of English is much more widespread. And so, people like him who are proficient in English, can easily rely on English if they don’t speak, for example, Swedish or whatever.

And whereas in Italy, he says, that’s not exactly my experience. So, it also tells us something about people speaking in the country. Of course, people in Italy, lots of people speak Italian, but that doesn’t mean, what I’m trying to say is that English and knowledge of English, which sometimes is regarded as only the kind of way to advance your career, etc.

It actually can be a way to create an easier environment for newcomers. In the beginning, those who speak English, so that at least when they’re very proficient in Italian, it’s not there yet to be able to communicate what they want to communicate. You can resort to English.

That’s not exactly his experience. So, he was making this kind of comparison, which also tells me about his knowledge of different countries, different languages, different, this kind of idea that these people come with a boat and they are unaware where they are. That’s not what I’ve found at all.

Piller: Yeah. Let’s maybe just have a bit more of a look at the conceptual side of things a bit more, because one thing that I really enjoyed about your article was actually that going back a bit, typically in applied linguistics, we see individuals as really creative, and you see a lot of multilingual playfulness, and individual multilinguals enjoy their multilingualism, and on the other hand, when we talk about constraints, when we talk about inequality, we locate that on the macro level, or in terms of language policies, in terms of the state, in terms of institutions. I think you are trying to break down that dichotomy a bit, that the constraints are macro, and the playfulness and the joy is individual.

Maybe you can explain that a bit more.

Santello: That’s right. Yeah. It’s exactly the way you explained it to us.

Basically, often what we see is that there are some societal structures that impede multilingualism, and that really is something that comes from above, and it constrains people, and from below instead, there will be a freedom and fluidity, a playfulness. Some authors talked about unbridled use. But actually, what we see happening among these individuals is something a bit more subtle than this.

It’s not simply social structures that push down, and that are, and these kinds of multilinguals would fight against it somehow. Nor is something at the bottom level unbridled use, where simply linguistic resources are used without any problem, and that they just show creativity and so forth. It doesn’t work like that in this kind of experiences.

What you see is something much more subtle. For example, one aspect which comes out of my research, is this kind of constraints that have to do with their personal life. It’s not only societal structures, for example, you know, something that you experience yourself, you know, for example, in another piece of research, you know, the family member passes away, and that actually sets in motion a change in your investment in language or investment in certain things that you need to do for your migration.

So, and that doesn’t mean that it’s not entangled with some other societal processes, it’s also a personal component. There’s also, you know, the lived experience of people in interaction, the social networks, the people helping each other or not helping each other, and so on and so forth. And so surely, we don’t see at a base level, the simple and unbridled use where people, you know, enjoy their multilingual resources, and this is somehow, you know, they will be unrestrained if they could.

It’s not exactly like that. And there are many more aspects that we need to consider. For example, indeed, what we were saying before, this kind of idea that certain constraints actually can function as a way to exercise certain linguistic skills that the person wants to exercise.

And so, it’s not the unbridled use in that case that becomes relevant, that becomes powerful, that becomes meaningful, but it is indeed a constraint which is inhabited. This is what Destot used to say. People inhabit what is given.

And what they inhabit, what is given, doesn’t mean that they adapt to it. It means that they engage with it in a creative way. So there’s a lot of…

Destot never talks about being passive. Quite the opposite. He says there’s a way to be active, to be proactive, to be able to be creative, which isn’t against the system.

It is within a system where people kind of manage to find a way to be creative, to be able to communicate within a given system. Which was sometimes there is no solution to that at the very stage. There is no way that you can all of a sudden speak Italian, all of a sudden doesn’t work like that, right?

And so that’s what I was interested in. There’s a level of creativity, of resourcefulness, which happens within a space of action. And that specific moment that migrant is not trying to go against anything really, she’s just trying to get things done and communicate within that specific space of action.

And we can see a lot of multilingualism there, a lot of creativity, a lot of things being done. So again, this kind of idea of a dichotomy between strong macro structures that oppress us and something at the bottom which is just free and fluid, I think it’s much more complicated than that. That’s what I found.

Piller: Yeah, so true. Look, Marco, before we go, what’s next for your research? Where will you take this project?

Santello: Yeah, so I’m really trying to expand on the things that I’ve been working on. And one thing that, for example, I would like to expand on is a kind of idea of how are constraints related to this kind of educational deprivation, and how is this educational deprivation actually being counterbalanced by other activities? So, for example, things that don’t happen in the classroom, where people, for example, you were saying about the multilingualism of Africans, you know, how is that ability to learn languages in the street, for example?

So many interacting with people inside the classroom. How can this become resourceful for them in the migratory settings? So, in the host country, in this specific case, how is that worked out?

So how is the constraint inhabited by interacting with people when classes are not provided, for example, because it’s not a situation, it’s not conditioned or you yourself are experiencing certain problems, et cetera. So that’s something I’m working on at the moment. Very excited about it.

Piller: Oh, that’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, we’ve also found that even where classes are provided, they sometimes can be so unsuitable.

And so, you know, besides the needs of the learners, that actually the classes can become another barrier to language learning. So, look, good luck with that. Thank you so much for the conversation, Marco.

Santello: Thank you very much. Grazie.

Piller: Grazie mille and thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time.

“How bad is your cultural cringe?” (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed)

Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o.
Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname?
(laughter)
Keith: Do I get three goes?
(Keith, Australian, in a relationship with Lisa from Germany)

Despite the increasing value of multilingualism in a globalised world, English-speaking countries such as Australia remain stubbornly monolingual. At the same time the benefits of speaking more than one language are regularly touted in public discourse. My research investigates how speakers of Australian English with a partner from a non-English-speaking background feel about their linguistic repertoires. Embarrassment, as in the example above from Keith (all names are pseudonyms), comes up a lot. So does inferiority. Because of their low proficiency in foreign languages (often as a consequence of their poor quality or limited language learning experiences in formal education) these participants feel they are bad language learners. This response seems to be one way of engaging with and mitigating their own privilege as native speakers of the powerful global language, English, compared to their partners who learned English as an additional language.

“It’s my deficiency”: being a bad language learner

And I I think I was completely in awe of that the fact that she could speak so many different languages freely, and a little bit jealous, and at the beginning was a bit more kind of definite about trying to learn German, um and I think the whole experience intimidated me cause I think I’m the kind of person who if they don’t pick something up really quickly kind of just gives up very quickly (…) (Keith)

For Lisa and Keith, Keith’s first and Lisa’s second language, English, has been the language of their relationship. Keith sees Lisa’s language skills as impressive while blaming himself for his own inability to learn German. He feels that Lisa “probably speaks better English than most native English speakers in Australia”. While Lisa learnt languages formally in her school education as a child and young adult, Keith faces all the frustration of learning another language as an adult.

In his own education Keith’s choices were limited. Although he comes from an Italian migrant background, Italian was not available at his public school in inner Sydney in the 1990s. He decided to take Latin instead, but he dropped it after junior high school when he lost interest in his schooling. He has done no further foreign language study in contrast to Lisa, who studied four languages over many years in her schooling in Germany. So when it comes to saying Keith’s Italian surname their pronunciation reflects their differing language learning trajectories:

Hanna: And how are you at pronouncing Keith’s last name (laughs)?

Lisa: I am tempted to pronounce it Italian which then nobody understands (laughs).

Keith: She- like I’m reading out a, a pizza on the pizza menu from our local pizzeria and she makes fun of my Italian accent. You know like quattro formaggi, she’s like (puts on a strong Australian accent) quattro formaggi. ‘Cause she speaks Italian, you know, these fucking Europeans!

(laughter)

In Keith’s comment about his partner’s Italian pronunciation of his Italian surname we could read humorous disparagement of her ability to pronounce it in the Italian way; in Australia foreign names are usually anglicised or pronounced in an English way. Both his lack of educational opportunity to study Italian and his Anglicized pronunciation cause him in that moment to position himself as a (monolingual) Australian in opposition to (multilingual) Europeans.

Stephen, from Australia, who is married to Christina from Argentina feels similarly critical of his own poor Spanish skills. He describes his attempts to learn Spanish as “a token effort”, says he “hasn’t got an ear for languages” and it dismissive of his own attempts to learn Spanish:

Hanna: You said you’re the odd one out; how do you feel…

Stephen: No, not at all, because uh because I recognise that it’s my deficiency in not having had the time to devote to learning a language. Now, I I make the standard joke I have 50 words of [unclear] of Spanish that I know. I work very hard and uh it’s a standing family joke (…)

In fact, Stephen studied Spanish at night, has a Spanish speaking community in Sydney and has two children who are bilingual. He also regularly visits Argentina and has frequent Argentine house guests. Spanish is a regular feature in his life. In the interview he also says that learning Spanish is “a commitment I’ve probably made and haven’t fulfilled” and feels he is a “handicapped Aussie” compared to his multilingual relations.

Another participant, Amy, has a strikingly similar evaluation of her own language skills. When I asked her why she was interested in talking to me about language she said:

Well, I suppose, I suppose it’s just there and I suppose for me it’s that I’ve got to learn more Spanish (…) And I went to lessons and I started learning and I was enthusiastic because we were going to Columbia, but as soon as we came back from Columbia I was just like that’s it, I’m just not interested anymore. And I learnt that I’m not a good language learner(…) (Amy, in a relationship with German from Columbia)

Amy’s language learning experiences at school were typical for my participants. In twelve years of state school education all she studied was ten weeks each of Italian, German and French in her seventh school year. In contrast, she praises her partner for his excellent English language skills which he acquired in Columbia from the “movies and music” he consumed from their powerful northern neighbour.

A new kind of language cringe

It seems these participants characterise their persistent monolingualism as a personal failing, a source of embarrassment, a source of language cringe. In Australia language cringe is a child of the cultural cringe. It has traditionally been associated with being embarrassed about speaking Australian English, rather than the more highly valued British English of the mother country. However, in my research I have found a new form of language cringe, related to monolinguals who speak the most valuable global language compared to multilinguals who are non-native speakers. This kind of language cringe contradicts the idea that a native speaker will always be “better” than a non-native speaker through an acknowledgment of the level of skill and knowledge which come with learning an additional language to a high proficiency.

This is most obvious when it comes to accent, because language cringe views an Australian native accent as lower value than (some) non-native accents. Lisa points out that she found the Australian accent strange on first hearing.

Lisa: I just remember the first Australian I ever met in my life (…) we started talking in English and I just thought who the fuck is this person? (laughter) It sounded so outlandish I’d never heard that before.

When I asked Keith about what kind of accent he would like his daughter to have, he reluctantly admitted that he wanted hers to be more “international”. Stephen points out that on first travelling to the United States with his wife, the locals “struggled” with his “obvious Australian accent” while she “was much more readily understood”. The implicit high value of a native accent is challenged by the transferability of a more international non-native accent.

Understanding and being able to explain the grammar of a language is another site where language cringe manifests itself. Paul, from Sydney, met Sara from Spain while travelling around South America. He was quickly hired as an English teacher because he was a native speaker. But it was Sara who taught him enough English grammar to make it through the first lesson.

(…) when Sara and I first met I needed to get some work and we were in Chile, um I just before I arrived to Chile we’d split up for a few weeks on the way to. and I’d asked Sara can you hand out a few CVs to English schools when we get there, or when you get there, which she did and I basically arrived and there was a job waiting for me which was perfect. But I’d never taught, I’d never thought about English I had no idea [Sara laughs]. and so the very first lesson I had to do (…) and uh [laughs] they, you know, the school said uh here’s the book this is Headway, this is what you’re using, they’re up to page thirty two or whatever. I opened it up and it was the present perfect and I looked at it and I was like what’s the present perfect, what’s a past participle and Sara sat down and taught me. (Paul, my emphasis)

Sara also spoke four languages to, at that time, Paul’s one. Although Sara is the one with the multilingual skills, Paul was seen by the language school as a better language user because he is a native speaker.

Managing native speaker privilege

Like Keith, Paul is impressed by his wife’s linguistic skills but he also recognises that because of the privilege of the English native speaker Sara’s multilingualism may be less valued. Rather than being embarrassed about his own failings as an individual language user Paul draws attention to the wider failings of the native speaker ideology in terms of its tenuous relation to actual knowledge about language as a system or teaching expertise. Paul acknowledges his partner’s linguistic superiority and the inherent injustice of an employment situation where he benefitted from a discriminatory language ideology because he is a native speaker.

For my other participants it may be that their conception of their own language skills as inferior in relation to the linguistic repertoire of their partners is their way to manage the inequalities brought about by this privilege. Recognising their own limited linguistic repertoire and casting it as a personal failing may be a way to tip the scales back in favour of the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual partner.

Livia and her classmates at a crossroads the year before entering (or not) Gymnasium (Switzerland, 2004)

Let me bust a prevalent urban myth: You do not need to be bi- or multilingual to become a linguist. There, busted. In fact, being bilingual initially brought me to a crossroads where I was nearly denied access to the academic pathway I am embarking on today. In Australia, despite native-like English proficiency, my migrant background dictated that I visit ESL classes throughout primary school; during secondary school in Switzerland, my Australian passport resulted in obligatory participation in Deutsch als Fremdsprache classes [German as a foreign language]. This ironic situation of seemingly being deemed ‘not good enough’ at either nation’s language of instruction initially crushed my hopes of being recommended for Gymnasium – the main entry ticket to tertiary education in Switzerland. Fortunately, thanks to a loophole or two, and an additional entry exam, my teachers were able to grant me the much desired recommendation. Without it, I would not have had the opportunity to undertake an academic pathway. Undoubtedly, mine is not the only story influenced by language learning trajectories.

Multilingual values at a crossroads

Multilingual students with migrant backgrounds are particularly vulnerable to academic exclusion in countries such as Switzerland or Germany, where the transition from primary to secondary school is marked by rigorous selection processes. These processes are based on both academic achievement and language proficiency. In a recent article published in Multilingua, Gabriele Budach (2014) suggests that these selection processes predominantly favour monolingualism. Budach (2014) argues that “in primary years multilingualism is drawn on as a capital for social inclusion”; as opposed to secondary schools which “value languages as capital for social distinction and an indicator of individual achievement” (p. 526; italics in the original). Needless to say the shift in values and the transition from one level of education to the next has implications for students’ educational trajectories.

Bilingual communities of practice at a crossroads

Four years after her ethnographic fieldwork in a German-Italian Two-Way-Immersion program in a primary school in Frankfurt (2003-2007), Budach (2014) organised a reunion with her former students. The now fourteen-year-olds had once “enjoyed their bilingual experience” (p. 531); however, now, languages were an academic subject and a terrain for competition like any other school subject. In primary school, the students were encouraged to participate in the common endeavour of sustaining an inclusive pedagogical environment in which multilingualism was utilised across the curriculum. Multilingualism was valued as a means of promoting “social integration as well as intercultural experience” (p. 547).

This is in stark contrast to mainstream education where a ‘monolingual mindset’ prevails. Once the students left the immersion program and went on to attend mainstream secondary schools, most had no further opportunities to use Italian in school. If Italian was available in their secondary school it was purely in the form of foreign language teaching, or Fremdsprachenunterricht. Therefore, and despite their high-level bilingual proficiencies, students from the immersion program struggled to get a foothold in the mainstream and felt that their multicultural knowledge was not recognised and was indeed devalued.

For one student in Budach’s (2014) study, a German-Australian girl, Italian was not offered again as a third foreign language until Year 8. During her primary years, German and Italian were used to teach all subjects; in secondary school the transfer of knowledge was restricted to German. As a result, multilingual students see their linguistic repertoires as being devalued.

The monolingual fork in the road

Budach (2014) writes that only five out of her twenty-three students were able to continue their secondary education in a comparable bilingual program. Other students either did not achieve the recommendation for Gymnasium or chose other pathways within the Gymnasium stream (e.g. they chose a school with musical or artistic profile). Therefore, the value ascribed to languages became dependent on the school curriculum – all subjects were henceforth taught in German, and Italian was either not offered, or only offered within the scope of foreign language teaching as a subject. Students’ bilingual careers had more or less ended in a monolingual cul-de-sac.

Indeed, even the five students who continued in the bilingual Gymnasium found themselves faced with a similar dilemma. Students in this stream can choose whether they want to complete the German school leaving certificate (Abitur), or a combined German/Italian certificate that is also recognised in Italy (matura). Completing the combined matura increases the value of multilingualism and creates “a form of capital for social mobility and distinction” (p. 546). However, for Budach’s students this proved a risky choice that threatened their overall marks.

It seems to me that – even within bilingual secondary education – there is a shift towards mainstream monolingualism. This creates a sense of detachment from the bilingual community of practice which was so important in the students’ primary years. Moreover, the dominance of German as the national language devalues their multilingual repertoires. In their primary school years, students in the bilingual immersion program are able to access curricular knowledge through multilingual learning. At secondary level, regardless of the educational trajectory they choose, students have only limited possibilities to apply their multilingual knowledge across different subjects. At this level, multilingualism is primarily valued within the foreign language leaning curriculum where linguistic competence is evaluated according to the subject’s grading criteria (e.g. whether students use correct grammatical structures, can string sentences together and can complete small translation tasks). Later in life, young job-seekers’ multilingual resources are a nice addition to their résumés, and therefore act as a tool for social distinction. Although multilingualism is believed to lead to greater success in the employment market and to maximise social mobility, the monolingual mindset influences the perception of academic achievement. Therefore – ironically – without monolingual academic distinction, multilinguals cannot succeed.

Beyond the crossroads

In a day and age where cultural and linguistic diversity are an inescapable reality, it seems instrumental to give all students the chance to undertake the educational pathway that best matches their abilities and aspirations, regardless of their linguistic background. To ensure that fewer children fall between the cracks – as I nearly did – it is vital that policy makers, educational stakeholders and sociolinguists work together to turn the monolingual impasse into a gateway to multiple possibilities.

Reference

Budach, G. (2014). Educational trajectories at the crossroads: The making and unmaking of multilingual communities of learners Multilingua, 33 (5-6) DOI: 10.1515/multi-2014-0027

Auburn parking ticket (left: quadrilingual on back; right: city logo on front)

In Australia with its persistent monolingual mindset coming across any kind of official institutional multilingual communication always feels like a minor triumph. And that’s how I felt when I recently went to park my car at a Sydney parking garage and the machine at the gate spit out this multilingual parking ticket. In German, English, Italian and French, the ticket says:

Please do not leave the ticket in the car. Please take care not to fold or bring ticket in contact with direct heat. Please note that the parking conditions in operation are displayed within the car park.

European readers will be familiar with this kind of parking ticket. It is produced by Designa, a parking management company headquartered in Germany and I think I received identical parking tickets during visits to Europe. I cannot be sure because I never pay much attention to the text on parking tickets. Receiving a multilingual parking ticket in Australia, however, immediately caught my attention because I had never ever encountered a parking ticket with anything other than text in English only.

Is this quadrilingual parking ticket a sign that the ideology of official English monolingualism that blithely ignores Australian multilingual realities is starting to crack? I don’t think so.

Let me tell you about the context of the parking garage where I received the ticket.

The parking garage is located in the Sydney suburb of Auburn and is operated by the Auburn City Council. Throughout Sydney, Auburn is known as an immigrant suburb with a highly diverse, predominantly Muslim, population of Middle Eastern origin. Consequently, Auburn’s city motto is “Many Cultures, One Community.”

The iconic status of Auburn as a migrant and Muslim suburb is best evidenced by the fact that the acclaimed TV police series East West 101 is set there. The series plays on the global conflict between East and West as well as the local opposition between Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs and its poorer western suburbs with their migrant populations.

Consequently, linguistically, Auburn is a fascinating place, too. According to Australian Census data from 2011, only 13.5% of Auburn households are monolingual in English (for all of Sydney that figure is 72.5% and for all of Australia it is 76.8%). Conversely, at 84.8% the number of bi- and multilingual households in Auburn is exceptionally high in comparison to the rest of Sydney (24.5%) and Australia (20.4%).

In fact, more people in Auburn speak Arabic at home than English. The table shows the top languages other than English.

Table 1: Auburn’s Main Languages (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011 Census)

The fact that many of Auburn’s residents come from the Middle East is easily legible in the streetscape: Auburn is home to Australia’s largest mosque; many women wear some form of hijab; restaurants feature predominantly Afghan, Lebanese, Persian or Turkish cuisine; and commercial signage in Arabic, Persian and Turkish abounds.

So, how does the German-English-Italian-French parking ticket fit into the linguistic landscape of Auburn?

Well, it does not. According to the 2011 census, 19 Auburn residents claimed to speak French at home; 15 German; and 245 Italian. So, the choice of languages on the parking tickets is obviously not locally motivated; if it were, I would have marvelled at an Arabic-English-Turkish-Chinese quadrilingual parking ticket.

The language on a parking ticket may seem banal, mundane, not worthy of further attention. However, language choice on such mundane texts is important because it is not only an expression of what is “normal” – conforms to the norm – but also shapes our expectations of normalcy. The usual monolingual English parking tickets contribute to normalizing Australia as a monolingual English space. A German-English-Italian-French parking ticket sets up the dominant languages of Europe as the norm. In each case, there is a mismatch between the norm and actual multilingual realities. In each case, the effect is to devalue the actual languages of Australia and make them seem “foreign” and “strange.”

Mehrsprachige Buecher – multilingual books – ketabhaye chand zabane

The release of the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011 Census of Population data is an invitation to reflect on the composition of society, as the figures make official the realities we have been living since the previous census in 2006. The 2011 census, released in June 2012, reveals that Australia is a strong target of migration, as almost 6 million migrants born in over 200 countries live now in the country. Moreover, Australia has one of the highest proportions of overseas-born residents (27%), third highest behind Singapore (41.5%) and Hong Kong (39%). While migrants from English speaking countries (e.g., UK, New Zealand) are still the largest group of overseas born residents, 19% of the population over 5 years of age speaks languages other than English at home. The Census also shows a shift in the composition of migrants and refugees, with a dramatic increase in African, Middle Eastern and Indian new arrivals.

One of the results of the migration program is the large number of young children for whom English is a second language. While mastery of the English language by migrant children is undoubtedly a crucial aim, it is still to be noted that languages other than English are neglected in the Australian education system. This impacts on second and third generation migrants, as can be seen from high percentages of language attrition rates revealed by the Census (see also Clyne, 2001,  Lo Bianco, 2003).

The lack of institutional support is particularly noteworthy in the area of literacy skills in minority languages. There are very few opportunities, other than classes offered by Community Language Schools in a limited number of languages, for parents wishing to raise their children bilingually, to ensure that their children become literate in their native language(s), or to maintain literacy in the home language if the process of literacy development has been interrupted by migration.

There is ample research that shows that writing is the most fragile skill in linguistic minority situations, as it is not needed in daily life and needs constant use or practice for its maintenance (Clyne et al., 1997,  Oriyama, 2011). Over time, the lack of institutional support results in what has been termed “kitchen” languages, impoverished varieties of community languages that serve mostly oral communication needs around restricted topics. This situation entails a loss of potential economic opportunities for the country as few people develop the advanced language skills required to operate successfully in the international arena. Moreover, insufficient support for home languages deprives children of the recognised educational, social and affective advantages associated with biliteracy (see Bialystok, 2001 for a thorough overview), and can hinder intergenerational cohesion within families and communities.

Paradoxically, given Australia’s dependence on international trade[1] and its often repeated desire to be accepted as part of the Asian Pacific group of nations (e.g., Keating, 2000), the call is made periodically to enhance the role of languages in the curriculum and improve their teaching. However, when it comes to public debate and educational language policy and planning for languages other than English, there is no clear and consistent conceptualisation of how these languages are viewed.

In a classic article, Ruiz (1984) discusses three main policy orientations to language: language as a right, language as a problem, and language as a resource. Although Ruiz was reflecting on the US and Canada, this distinction is pertinent to the Australian context and provides a useful framework for analysis. In Australia, not all language groups have the opportunity to be included in the school curriculum.

When it comes to languages other than English, a clear distinction is made between modern foreign languages, indigenous languages, and migrant/community languages (Lo Bianco, 2003). Only a few “foreign” languages are seen as resources and thus, when it comes to justify the selection of particular languages in the education system, justifications are worded either in relation to the high cultural achievements of the target cultures (e.g., French and German) or to economic and geopolitical national imperatives (e.g., Chinese and Japanese). Most of the languages spoken in Australia however are not seen in this light. Except for the few languages that at different times attracted strong financial support from foreign governments or institutions (e.g., Korean and Italian), ‘migrant/community’ languages are seen as a problem, hindering assimilation into the dominant culture and potentially polarising society. Lo Bianco poignantly summarises the situation noting that in Australia, languages spoken ‘in other countries’ and divorced from daily life are seen as valuable skills. In contrast,

when the languages are less foreign, when emotional attachment and mastery may be high, their study, public use, and maintenance ‘threaten civilisation’. No longer a skill but sedition. (2000: 99).

And Cummins (2005: 586), in a statement that could perfectly apply to Australia, characterises the current situation as a

bizarre scenario of schools successfully transforming fluent speakers of foreign languages into monolingual English speakers, at the same time as they struggle, largely unsuccessfully, to transform English monolingual students into foreign language speakers.

Granted, the great diversity of population, and the variety of languages spoken in Australia, as identified in the 2011 Census, make it difficult to address the educational needs of this culturally and linguistically diverse sector of the population. Ideological and practical considerations further complicate the issue as assimilationist policy orientations call into question the value of diverting resources from the mainstream education system into community languages. Even when the political willingness exists, there are obvious limitations in terms of materials, curricula and teaching expertise in such a varied range of languages. This is a challenge that most plurilingual societies would no doubt face.

In order to explore strategies to develop and promote literacy and discuss the cost of illiteracy in home Languages we are organising a workshop titled ‘Multilingualism and Literacy’ to be held at the 19^th International Congress of Linguists in Geneva, 21-27 July 2013. The workshop description and call for papers – still open until 15 August 2012 – are available here.

The organizers, Susana Eisenchlas, Diana Guillemin and Andrea Schalley, hope that the workshop will generate a much needed debate.

Note

This post was co-authored by Susana Eisenchlas, Diana Guillemin and Andrea Schalley.

References

Bialystok, E. 2001. Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clyne, M., Fernandez, S., Chen, I.M., and Summo-O’Connell, R. 1997. Background Speakers: Diversity and its Management in LOTE Programs. ACT: Language Australia.

Clyne, M. 2001. Can the shift from immigrant languages be reversed in Australia? In Can Threatened Languages be Saved? Reversing Language Shift Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective, ed. J. A. Fishman, 364-391. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.

Cummins, J. 2005. A Proposal for Action: Strategies for Recognizing Heritage Language Competence as a Learning Resource within the Mainstream Classroom. The Modern Language Journal 89:585-592.

Keating, P.J. 2000. Engagement: Australia Faces the Asia-Pacific. Sydney: Macmillan.

Lo Bianco, J. 2000. Multiliteracies and multilingualism. In Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, eds. B. Cope and M. Kalantzis, 92-105. South Yarra: Macmillan.

Lo Bianco, J. 2003. A site for debate, negotiation and contest of national identity: Language policy in Australia. In Guide for the development of language education policies in Europe: From linguistic diversity to plurilingual education. Strasbourg: Language Policy Division DG IV – Directorate of School, Out-of-School and Higher Education Council of Europe.

Oriyama, K. 2011. The effects of the sociocultural context on heritage language literacy: Japanese-English bilingual children in Sydney. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 14:653-681.

Ruiz, R. 1984. Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal 8:15-34.

Cabramatta, Australia

Last week an email was sent around my office about our upcoming Harmony Day celebration on 21 March. The email suggested that to mark the occasion, interested staff could bring in food from their culture and engage in sporting activities, because this year’s official theme is Sport, ‘a universal language’.

While eating ‘ethnic’ food is pleasurable and playing sports with people from different cultural backgrounds is undoubtedly positive, it got me thinking that the Harmony Day initiative has severe and rather obvious limitations. Without unduly criticising well-intentioned strategies to promote multiculturalism in Australia,  this type of superficial community buliding echoes a previous blog post that suggested that the way French is taught in schools focuses on “stereotypical and pseudo-cultural information about France such as the fact that the national dress includes the beret or that French people love pancakes”. (Incidentally, I can vouch to having an extremely similar experience with learning Italian from 1990-1992. I learnt more Italian being on holidays in Rome for three days than three entire years at my Sydney primary school, such was the nature of the poorly developed curriculum.)

Official communiqués always mentions that Australia is home to a population that speaks almost 400 languages between us, and given this sexy statistic, why is that in 2012 national initiatives around multiculturalism still focuses on superficial engagement with the actual cultural and lingustic diversity of Australia? One way to switch to more active engagement is to promote multilingualism and encourage the study of languages of significant cultural groups here. Imagine an Australia where a much wider cross-section of society had some knowledge of languages such as Arabic, Greek, Mandarin; how different it would be if people were able to engage more actively with other cultures – and perhaps even develop more empathy and intercultural competence through the process of learning languages.

Australia, as an imagined monolingual nation, has a poor understanding of the multilingual reality of many parts of the non-English speaking world, where people often learn the languages of the country they are living in, as well as languages of neighbouring countries. Yesterday I visited a local and humble Asian grocery store in Sydney’s very culturally diverse suburb Marrickville. During the 15 minutes I was in the store, it became apparent to my ears that the family running the business had spoken at least three different languages – English (from living in Australia) , Vietnamese (the national language of their previous home) and Cantonese (their home language). Furthermore, I found out that they also spoke some Teochew (another minority in Vietnam they interacted with) and could also speak Khmer because they used to live near the border with Cambodia. As another example, last month I spent a day in Cabramatta, another culturally diverse Sydney suburb, and fell into conversation with a Thai business owner who, since migrating to Australia, had made the effort to also learn some Vietnamese because that was the dominant language of business in the suburb.

At a time when language studies of neighbouring Indonesian has dropped to critical levels, the official focus should shift from feel-good and passive multicultural celebrations, to strategies that emphasise learning community languages, which could actually have more of a lasting impact to further tolerance and understanding within Australian society and far beyond.

Harmony Day is celebrated on 21 March 2012 and coincides with the United Nation’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Each time I visit France and have breakfast there, I am reminded of Goethe. In his 1792 essay “Campagne in Frankreich” he offered this spot-on description of the difference between Germans and their neighbors to the West: “White bread and black bread form the shibboleth, the war cry that distinguishes the Germans and the French.”

Shibboleth is a Hebrew word. The tanakh (Sefer Shoftim; Book of Judges 12:5-6) describes it as a military code word in the war of the Gileadites against the Ephraimites. 42,000 Ephraimite refugees were massacred at a ford in the Jordan river because they mispronounced “shibboleth” (which means “ear of corn” and, in this context, also “body of water”) as “sibboleth.” To be historically accurate, despite the spelling sh-b-l-t, the Gileadites pronounced the initial sound as a voiceless dental fricative, like th in English, and the Ephramaites replaced it with an s-sound.

Fatal mispronunciations have been reported in other wars, too. During the War of the Sicilian Vespers, 2,000 French occupiers were killed in Palermo in 1281. They were identified because they couldn’t pronounce the c-sound ceci (“chick-peas”) and chichi (“beans”) in the Italian way.

During World War II, Dutch resistance fighters used the pronunciation of the city of Scheveningen to distinguish between friend and foe. Germans failed to pronounce the city name as s-cheveningen and used an intial sh instead. And during the Finnish-Soviet Winter War of 1939/40, the Finnish code word was Karjala (“Karelia”), which Russian soldiers would mispronounce as “Karelija.”

Marion Tauschwitz reports a particularly gruesome shibboleth in her biography of Hilde Domin. Like many other German-Jewish refugees, the poet Hilde Domin found refuge in the Dominican Republic in 1940. The dictator Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic at the time, thought that European-Jewish refugees provided him with an opportunity to “whiten” his people a bit. While he welcomed European immigrants, he used drastic means to keep Haitian immigrants out. The Dominican Republic shares borders with French-speaking Haiti and Haitians have always tried to move to the more prosperous Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, Trujillo considered them as too dark-skinned in contrast to the more lightly-skinned population of the Dominican Republic, and so the stage was set for the Parsley Massacre. In 1937, 20,000 Haitians residing in border areas were massacred if they failed to pronounce the Spanish word for “parsley”, perejil, with a rolled r. The typical French substitution of l instead of r made them easy targets.

On the positive side, there are harmless shibboleths, too. Non-native speakers of German rarely manage to pronounce Streichholzschächtelchen (“match box”) correctly and those who can’t do the Swiss German Chuchichäschtli (“kitchen cabinet”) are easily identified as German Germans. Northern Germans in Bavaria are stuck when it comes to Oachkatzlschwoaf (“squirrel tail”) and Bavarians falter at the Low German equivalent, Eekkattensteert. Finally, Non-Jews who want to wish their Jewish friends “Happy Hanukkah” should make sure to stress the first syllable. Stressing the second syllable might lead to the conclusion that the well-wisher only has a superficial knowledge of Judaism.

Christoph Gutknecht is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at Hamburg University and the author of numerous popular books about language in German.

One of the beauties of the report is how the book is iconic of its content. The front cover is quintilingual in English, French, German, Italian and Romansh although the English title obviously overshadows the subtitle in the four national languages. About two thirds of the 240-page report is presented quadrilingually in the four national languages, followed by an English translation, which is printed on green paper. So, the design makes it easy to navigate between the national languages and English. Within the national languages section, the languages are mingling nicely rather than being segregated into separate sections. However, a thumb index makes it possible to go straight to a particular language if you so wish. The thumb index for German is almost a solid line, indicating that there is a lot of German used throughout; the indexes for French and Italian are more like a dotted line, and the index for Romansh consists only of three dots, iconic of the minority status of that language.

Overall, the report provides a wealth of findings around three key research questions: how does Swiss multilingualism work? What are the current linguistic competences of the Swiss population? What should the linguistic competences of the Swiss population be in the future and how can we plan for those? There is such a wealth of findings that I’ll blog about some of the 26 projects individually in the near future. For now, I’ll focus on the six key issues highlighted by the editor as emerging from the national project:

1. How multilingualism works: projects devoted to institutional multilingualism in contexts such as the Swiss army or tourism businesses (as in our project) highlight people’s pragmatism and flexibility in relation to the multilingual realities in which they find themselves. Of course, institutional pragmatism and flexibility is only possible if there are a certain number of multilingual individuals in the institution. However, institutions do not do much to promote individual multilingualism and to offer systematic language training. So, one of the report’s recommendations is for institutions to acknowledge individual multilingualism more as a resource and to remunerate it accordingly and also for the provision of more systematic language training.
2. Learning languages: language learning needs to happen in school and there are a range of challenges to make language education more effective. These range from questions around which languages should be introduced when and other language-in-education policy issues to more classroom oriented questions such as language teaching methods. A number of projects, for instance, highlighted the importance of resourcing language teaching properly as shallow learning results in quick forgetting, and so is largely a wasted effort.
3. English: the role of English is as hot a topic in Switzerland as elsewhere and the report’s pragmatism is refreshing: English is here to stay and a central facet of the Swiss linguistic landscape, as it is globally, but English is not enough. For Switzerland, at least, the future continues to be multilingual.
4. Standard- and non-standard varieties: German-speaking Swiss often quip that Standard German is their first foreign language. However, NFP56 research has shown that the majority population is largely unaffected by this difference between Swiss and standard German varieties. The people who have trouble to master the standard, both in German-speaking and Francophone Switzerland are those with a migration background pointing to the need to improve educational opportunities for migrant populations.
5. Linguistic minorities: the indigenous minority languages of Italian and Romansh have traditionally enjoyed equality before the law, even if not outside the institutions of the state. While the challenge to ensure equal opportunities for the speakers of the indigenous minority languages remains to some degree, the much larger challenge that has emerged in recent years is the one to ensure equal opportunities for the “new” minorities that have resulted from the migrations of the past decades. The report is adamant that there is often a double standard that views the maintenance of indigenous minority languages as desirable but views the same maintenance as a failure of “integration” when it comes to non-indigenous minorities. However, research projects in the NFP56 also found that migrant languages are maintained well in Switzerland, even in the 3^rd generation, and most of the projects highlighted the importance of acknowledging and supporting their maintenance in the interest of Swiss society as a whole.
6. Multilingual media: somewhat surprisingly the media were found to be far behind the country’s multilingual reality with most media catering narrowly to what they see as their linguistic clientele.

Ultimately, the linguistic challenges of Switzerland are those of every contemporary society. The Swiss are fortunate in that they have been thinking about how to make societal multilingualism work for the common good for much longer than pretty much everyone else. Switzerland is also fortunate in that their politicians had the good sense to initiate and fund a national research project that will form the basis of future language policy. Everyone involved in language policy, language-in-education policy, the sociolinguistics of multilingualism and language learning has a lot to learn from NFP56! If you only read one sociolinguistics book this year, make it Do you speak Swiss?

Walter Haas (Ed.) (2010). Do you speak Swiss? Sprachenvielfalt und Sprachkompetenz in der Schweiz. Nationales Forschungsprogramm NFP 56 NZZ Libro

Condoms in translation

It’s been impossible to escape this week’s media coverage of the pope’s comments about condoms and male prostitutes. There has been a lot of debate about what he really said in the German original and about the quality of the translations into English and Italian. I thought there might be some interesting language-on-the-move problem à la “What did Chancellor Merkel really say?” involved and went to investigate. However, it turns out that it’s obscure in whichever language you look at it.

Here is the story: Global media coverage has it that the pope has loosened the church’s ban on condom use for the faithful. The pope now says that using a condom is ok in exceptional cases – the exceptional case being a male prostitute. Male sex workers who are devout Catholics  merit a 10 on a scale of exceptionality from 1 to 10. However, if you change your position, you have to start somewhere: in the 18^th century, the flock must have been heartened when the Catholic church lifted its blanket ban on the printing of heliocentric books and must have seen it as a sign that one day even the church would come round to recognizing that the earth was round. Similarly, today the faithful are feeling heartened by this sign that the Catholic church will eventually come to accept that condom use is a simple means of birth control and a simple way to curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Of course, with the Catholic church being the organization it is, not everyone is thrilled with this nod in the direction of the obvious. George Pell, the archbishop of Sydney, for instance, seemed to say in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald that the pope had been misunderstood, misquoted and mistranslated, and scoffed:

I have not seen the German original of what the Pope said but […]

All Cardinal Pell needs to do is google the German excerpt. So here it is, from a German Catholic site:

Es mag begründete Einzelfälle geben, etwa wenn ein Prostituierter ein Kondom verwendet, wo dies ein erster Schritt zu einer Moralisierung sein kann, ein erstes Stück Verantwortung, um wieder ein Bewusstsein dafür zu entwickeln, dass nicht alles gestattet ist und man nicht alles tun kann, was man will.

According to the Catholic World Report, this has been translated into English as follows:

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants.

I can’t find any fault with the translation. The sentence is as difficult to understand in German as it is in English, and “Prostituierter” clearly refers to a “male prostitute” despite the fact that some bloggers have been speculating that the fact that German has grammatical gender means that “Prostituierter” (m.) can refer both to female and male prostitutes. It cannot. “Prostituierte” (f.) is one of the few terms for people where the feminine rather than the masculine form is the unmarked form.

Either way, the discussion is as consequential as the one about how many angels fit on the pin of a needle. The Vatican has since clarified that the gender of “Prostituierter” doesn’t matter because the pope meant to be inclusive of male, female, and even transsexual prostitutes:

“I personally asked the pope if there was a serious, important problem in the choice of the masculine over the feminine,” Lombardi said. “He told me: ‘No.'”

Lombardi said the key point was: “It’s the first step of taking responsibility, of taking into consideration the risk of the life of another with whom you have a relationship … This is if you’re a woman, a man, or a transsexual.” (from The Guardian)

My Catholic father used to say that Catholicism was great until the church gave up Latin. When they started to use vernacular languages in the 1960s you could understand what they were talking about and it turned out to be a real disappointment.

Intriguing as those numbers are – who can resist pouring over a score-board? – they actually hide the multilingual practices of social networking as much as they reveal it! The numbers are evidence of a multilingual world but they suggest a multilingual world of discrete languages. The count itself is based on users’ language settings. As a Facebook user, you can set your language to only one language at a time. Mine is set to English because that’s the default setting for someone based in Australia and I couldn’t be bothered to change it. However, the language of your settings doesn’t actually say much about the languages in which you actually interact. My news feed regularly includes updates not only in English but also العربية, Boarisch, 中文, Nederlands, 日本語, Deutsch, Bahasa Indonesia, 한국의, Português, فارسی, Español, Schwyzerdütsch, Français, Tagalog and Türk. If you become a fan, you will find that the Facebook wall of Language-on-the-Move is pretty multilingual, too

When I write on Facebook myself, I like to follow urban etiquette and use formulae (“Congratulations,” “Thank you,” “Well done,” “Way to go” etc.) in the preferred language of my addressee. Sometimes that language choice is conventional (“native language” of the interlocutor), often it isn’t.

I love the comfortable language mixing I engage in on Facebook. It is good fun. However, it is more than that. It also challenges conventional notions of multilingualism as a combination of two or more monolingualisms. Where sociolinguists of multilingualism have started to question the language ideological strategy which tries to overcome the monolingual mindset by enumerating languages (see Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010, for a useful overview), Facebookers practice diversity – a diversity that is not a matter of quantity but a matter of quality!

Oh, and if you were wondering whether I can actually read all the languages I listed above as appearing in my Facebook news feed, the answer is, “I wish!” However, you don’t have to be a multilingual wunderkind to enjoy Multilingualism 2.0! Google Chrome offers a nice little extension, Social Translate:

The Social Translate chrome extension automatically translates event streams and friends’ comments on social network sites.  A user selects a primary language in the Options settings panel.  Then when the user visits a social network site such as Facebook or Twitter, the Social Translate extension will use Google Translate to detect the language of the event stream (or comments) and then translate the text to the user’s primary language.  The extension displays the Social Translate icon beside the translated text.  Click the icon that appears in the navigation bar to see the text in the original language.

Event streams or comments in the primary language should not be translated.  A user can also set multiple secondary languages in the Options settings.  Event streams or comments in these languages will also not be translated.  This is useful for users that read multiple languages and who would like to be able to see non-translated content that is posted in other languages.

Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: fixity, fluidity and language in flux International Journal of Multilingualism, 7 (3), 240-254 DOI: 10.1080/14790710903414331

The lovers of English poetry among you will recall how the phrase “Betreten verboten” (“No trespassing”) encapsulates his alienation from Berlin and his longing for his English home for Rupert Brooke. Prohibition signs – signs that tell us what not to do– have become much more widespread in the century that has passed since Brooke noticed them on German lawns. This is due to a proliferation of spaces in which people who can no longer be expected to share the same set of norms congregate and circulate (airports, for instance, are a prime space where prohibition signs appear). At the same time, we also have seen a proliferation of rules and these rules often differ across spaces that even one single urban person might frequent in the course of their daily activities (e.g., the increase in smoking bans).

I have a hunch that prohibition signs are more likely to be multilingual than other types of signs (and I’m expecting that my students’ assignment will throw some light on whether that hunch bears out in Sydney’s suburbs). My hunch is based on the fact that humans often take a dim view of “the other” and tend to expect outsiders to be less compliant than insiders. As evidence for my hypothesis I have collected signs such as the one above. This hexalingual sign appears in the canteen of a Soviet-style hotel in Prague. The management of this budget hotel is clearly worried that guests might take the opportunity of the buffet-style breakfast to fill their lunchboxes, too. One thing that the sign obviously does is to mark the hotel as budget accommodation and to position its guests as cheapskates. What’s more, the language choices on the sign clearly address cheapskates of particular linguistic backgrounds. When I stayed in that hotel, most guests were Czechs, Germans and Russians, and it is entirely possible that the six languages represented are the languages of the majority of guests, and including any more languages would not have been useful (nor practical; as it is, the sign is huge).

While the language choices in the above sign in a multilingual tourist destination in the heart of Europe don’t single out a particular group as likely offenders, this sign does. I found this little flier in a hotel room in Sydney. I have a large collection of signage in Australian hotel rooms and they are mostly monolingual in English. In the minority of multilingual hotel room signage, Chinese figures rarely. This sign is thus exceptional in its bilingualism, its language choice, and even in the fact that Chinese appears above English. Clearly, someone is trying very hard to send a message to Chinese guests. When I stayed in that hotel, there were no Chinese guests present. The sign thus does double duty: not only does it alert guests to the prohibition against smoking, it also positions Chinese guests as likely offenders! The non-smoking sign below from a New Zealand train does exactly the same thing: again, we find a bilingual sign in a context dominated by monolingual signage. Again, the other language, Japanese in this case, stands out not only because of the choice itself but also because of its design (this time it’s not the position but the size and color).

Proponents of multilingualism often like to think that bi- and multilingualism per se are better than monolingualism, and that multilingual signs by their very nature are more inclusive than monolingual ones. Not so! It all depends on the context! While these signs include Chinese and Japanese readers as potential recipients of the message, they exclude them from “polite society” by singling them out as likely offenders.

Rarely do language students get an actual say in institutional offerings and a current polling initiative by the Student Council at Zayed University is therefore the more exciting. This internal poll has been running for a couple of days and I can’t take my eyes of it: for a sociolinguist this is like Melbourne Cup Day without the hats!

The way the survey was first published a few days ago, the choice was between Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish. “Chinese plus the usual choice of European languages” I thought and noticed particularly that none of these languages are widely spoken in the UAE while some of those spoken by large segments of the UAE population such as Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu or Tagalog are absent.

This is not particularly surprising as language learning is often about the desire to reinvent oneself and that desire is crucially influenced by media discourses and these discourses often set up Western identities as the pinnacle of desirability as Kimie Takahashi and I have shown in a study of the Occidental longings of young Japanese women and how they are exploited by the English language teaching industry (available from our Resources Section (click on “Language learning, gender & identity” > ”A passion for English”).

محمد إدريس, who blogs on “Language and Globalization,” has a similar, even if somewhat more sinister explanation for the reasons why learning Spanish has become so popular in Germany: he sees Germans’ desire to learn Spanish as mindless copying of US tastes and preferences, an acceptance of US hegemony. He argues that learning Spanish is undoubtedly in the interests of US-Americans and so that preference is mediated by Hollywood to the world, even if German foreign language learners would be better served with the languages of neighboring countries such as Czech, French or Polish. So, that’s similar to my own observation that there were no regional languages offered in the Zayed University Student Council Poll.

Well, it’s not all that simple, at least not here at ZU: after the original poll was published, the members of the Japanese and Korean clubs demanded the inclusion of these languages, and since then Korean had been gaining ground steadily on French, the initial leader, until it drew ahead yesterday.

So, does that invalidate the idea that the desire to learn another language is influenced by hegemonic discourses? It doesn’t – it just shows that the center of gravity is shifting. The West is no longer the only source of desirable identities, and particularly cool youth identities, on offer. South Korea has been an exporter of popular melodramas for about a decade and the popularity of Korean youth culture has become known as Korean Wave or even “Korean Fever” in China and Japan. Little surprise then that this also opens up a market for Korean language teaching!

I’ll keep watching that poll – for now, I’m betting on Korean.

Piller, Ingrid, & Takahashi, Kimie (2006). A passion for English: desire and the language market Aneta Pavlenko. Ed. Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression, and representation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 59-83