Handed my MA dissertation in four years ago on this day. This article by Piller and Takahashi, "A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market" from @Lg_on_the_Move, directly inspired my dissertation and my subsequent PhD research. https://t.co/4i3gjY3UqJ

— Dr Owen Minns (@OTMinns) September 24, 2019

Teaching English in Japan

Even before I set foot in Japan, being a white, university-educated male from England gave me access to jobs at commercial language schools and teaching programs like the JET Program. The first school I taught at, a commercial language school (Eikaiwa in Japanese), advertised itself as a British English school. The company’s adverts featured pictures of young, white, smartly dressed teachers reflecting the trends identified by Piller and Takahashi. I later taught at a private high school where being a British passport holder was one of the requirements for employment. In this school, the foreign teachers were collectively addressed as “natives” by the Japanese teachers, and we had an ambivalent position in the school despite prominently featuring on the school’s website and at open days.

While being white, British, and male gave me privileged mobility to gain stable employment in Japan, both my employers offered little or no encouragement for Japanese learning. This meant that after 6 years of teaching in Japan, I developed a bittersweet relationship with Japanese, characterised by periods of both engagement and non-engagement with learning Japanese.

After returning to the UK to study for a master’s, reading Piller and Takahashi’s work connected many of the dots I had felt while in Japan. Throughout my time in Japan, I met teachers with varying Japanese proficiency levels. There were constant discussions about the need to speak Japanese and even some tension between teachers about their Japanese levels, but there was little institutional support for Japanese learning. Reading about the ideologies identified by Piller and Takahashi on learners led me to wonder how these forces influenced teachers in Japan when they were learning Japanese, so I made this goal of my Ph.D. research.

My research

Poster for an English language school in Japan (Image credit: Shinshin50)

I researched how two groups, newly arrived and long-term teachers learned Japanese. For the newly arrived teachers, 9 took part in a 6-month diary study in which they wrote weekly diaries about their Japanese language learning and participated in monthly interviews. For the long-term teachers, I interviewed 13 teachers who had made lives in Japan about their Japanese language learning histories.

The newly arrived teachers had to self-direct their learning while trying to find their position in the classroom, the school, and Japan. The newly arrived teachers found it challenging to develop consistent learning routines. While they had access to countless online self-study learning resources and approaches, they struggled to consistently use these resources and find appropriate face-to-face Japanese classes. One teacher felt she had to choose between her own mental well-being and Japanese learning, while other newly arrived teachers found managing Japanese learning alongside working and living in Japan caused them stress and mental health issues.

The long-term teachers also experienced trouble regulating Japanese language learning on a long-term basis. Some teachers were able to build long-term learning approaches that combined Japanese study with involvement with local communities, while others experienced more fluctuating Japanese learning, interspersing periods of engaged learning with periods of disengagement. Finding opportunities to use Japanese was a struggle for both groups of teachers as building connections with Japanese people depended on introductions from employers, connections teachers had before they arrived in Japan, or the areas they were placed in.

The deep impact of the desire for English in Japan on the lives of these foreign teachers could be seen in the lives of long-term foreign teachers in Japan. Often these teachers used English in romantic relationships, with one male teacher describing how marrying an English-speaking foreigner was seen as a way out of Japanese society by Japanese women. Due to the enduring desire for English in Japan, many long-term teachers with children in my study used English with their children to transfer their linguistic capital of being a native English speaker to their children. As they became long-term residents of Japan, the value of studying for academic and teaching qualifications that would help advance in their English teaching careers often trumped the symbolic capital Japanese learning gave them.

The key for both groups of teachers to sustaining Japanese learning and use was facilitative communities and individuals to use Japanese with. These individuals and communities often modified their Japanese and encouraged English teachers to learn and use Japanese. They were found within local areas, workplaces, and community groups. They invested in these teachers as Japanese speakers despite ideologies that saw foreign English teachers as short-term visitors to Japan and foreigners as deficient Japanese speakers. The depth and sustainability of each teacher’s Japanese engagement was strongly impacted by whether a learner had access to individuals and groups willing to invest in them as Japanese speakers.

The Future

Given the recent increases in migration to Japan, the importance of providing opportunities for migrants to learn Japanese will only increase in the coming years. Despite this, 70% of Japanese learning programs in Japan outside of the higher education sector are taught by community volunteers, many of whom do not have formal teaching qualifications. One recent study of Japanese foreign language programs in Tokyo found that in one large central ward of Tokyo, the lack of community-based classes meant that: “In 2020, Shibuya reported 10,597 foreign residents; if all of these residents want to complete the ward-sponsored courses, it would take more than 100 years”. Due to the “desire” of Japanese people to learn English, foreign English teachers will no doubt continue to live and work in Japan. Some teachers like me and the participants in my research in Japan will build lives in Japan. It remains to be seen whether there are the learning resources to meet the needs of migrants in Japan.

Being “the desired”

While being “the desired” in Japan gives English teachers “privileged mobility” to access jobs in Japan, the Japanese learning of the teachers in my study was dependent on each teacher’s own agency, their access to facilitative individuals and communities in Japan, and their ability to deal with the stress of learning Japanese while living and working in Japan. Being the “desired” for their English within Japan influenced the teachers in three significant ways: it mediated their access to communities of practice in which to use Japanese, it dictated the support English teachers had for their Japanese learning, and how English teachers and broader Japanese society valued Japanese learning.

One unintended consequence of my research was that it forced me to examine my relationship with Japanese learning and using Japanese. Examining how these teachers learned and used Japanese made me re-evaluate and change my approach to learning Japanese. These changes have allowed me to engage more with learning and using Japanese.

While I outlined some of the broader conclusions of my PhD here, because of the large amount of data I collected, there are even more insights to come from my research in the future.

References

Hatasa, Y. and Watanabe, T. (2017). Japanese as a Second Language Assessment in Japan: Current Issues and Future Directions. Language Assessment Quarterly, 14(3), pp.192-212. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2017.1351565
Lee, S. J., & Niiya, M. (2021). Migrant oriented Japanese language programs in Tokyo: A qualitative study about language policy and language learners. Migration and Language Education, 2(1), 17–33. https://doi.org/10.29140/mle.v2n1.489
Minns, O. T. (2021). The teacher as a learner: English teachers learning Japanese in Japan [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Anglia Ruskin University. Available at: https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/707748
Piller, I., & Takahashi, K., 2006. A passion for English: Desire and the language market. In A. Pavlenko (ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, pp. 59 – 83.
Takahashi, K., 2013. Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Brynn and Michael speak in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. The paper examines two examples of multilingualism in directive signs within Seoul, South Korea, in order to theorize what gives rise to multilingualism in directive signage while other signage remains monolingual.

Some papers and posts that are referenced in this episode include Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape of South Korea, Toiletology and the study of language ideologies, so if you liked this episode be sure to check those out!

Enjoy the show!

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Transcript (added 30/04/2024)

(Image credit: Dr Michael Chesnut)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr Michael Chesnut. Michael is a Professor in the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication at Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea. His work includes researching second language writing, TESOL teacher development, curriculum theory, linguistic landscape research, and translingual academic publishing practices.

Today we are going to talk in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sunwgoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape.

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

Dr Chesnut: I’m so happy to be here and thank you for having me on today. It’s so exciting to get a chance to actually talk about a paper. This is such a rare opportunity. I’m just delighted to be here and share my thoughts.

Brynn: Wonderful! To start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to living and working in Korea?

Dr Chesnut: Sure! Well, I’ll start with the last question there. About 20 years ago, as a young person having graduated university and not too sure what I was going to do for a career or with the rest of my life, I decided to go abroad. I wanted to get out of Canada where I’m from. At the time, a lot of young people in Canada, especially new university graduates, were going to Korea for a year to teach English, come back with a little bit of money, pay off student loans and then carrying on with the rest of their lives.

So basically, I did that, and I had no interest in Korea. I had done a little bit of teaching and I liked it, so I also thought it would be a good opportunity to play with teaching and get some more experience. I applied all over the world, but I applied a lot in Korea because that’s where a lot of people were going. I didn’t get many job offers because I wasn’t particularly qualified, and then I got one offer in a small town in Korea. A few weeks later I got an offer from Siberia in Russia, but they were too late. So off to Korea I went, and it was interesting. It was really interesting to be in a new country, be immersed in a new language, have no idea what was going on. Teaching was quite interesting and challenging, and I really enjoyed that first year so I stayed in that same small town for a second year. After two years I was starting to get more interested in teaching and wanted to become better at what I was doing. I wanted to remain in Korea and better understand the world I found myself in.

So, I was very lucky and I found a position at a small university, and what was so wonderful was they had an MA TESOL program. So, I could teach there, doing all sorts of different classes, and pursue an MA in TESOL to actually learn better how to teach English. And what was really remarkable was that this particular program had a focus on critical pedagogy. Teaching not just as a replication of existing knowledge, not just sort of helping you know more so you could do a job, but teaching as a means to kind of give more power to students, let them make more informed choices, help them better understand why we’re learning something in particular, why we don’t look at certain other issues. And so that was a really wonderful two years. I enjoyed it. I did a small thesis on language learner identity, and I was really interested in continuing this journey, and that program was founded, or at least developed heavily, by a professor who had studied at Penn State. So really, through him, I had an opportunity to apply to Penn State in their College of Education doing a PhD in curriculum and instruction. The professors there mentored him, and some of the professors that he had mentored had come back to Korea too, so I was able to pursue further education through a PhD at Penn State. I went there and took a lot of classes in the Applied Linguistics Department, really found a second home there alongside curriculum and instruction in the College of Education. My goal was to always come back to Korea as quick as possible to do fieldwork.

So, my PhD dissertation was on foreign language teacher identity. The Americans, Canadians and others who come to Korea and teach English. It’s still a major area of research for me, and so all of that let me to come to Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in my department here, the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication, which is essentially an English interpretation and translation department going English and Korean. Here, I teach English and I do research as part of the university’s responsibilities as well, and so that’s my journey to being here now where I teach a lot of different classes. Some are language classes, some are world Englishes or digital media classes, all with this language focus. And I do research on different issues as well. So that’s kind of my story and who I am as a teacher and a researcher. So again, thanks so much for having me on to talk about all of this. It really is such a privilege to get a chance to talk about a paper. I’m so happy to be here!

Brynn: Oh, that’s excellent, I’m so glad. I’m so glad to be talking to you too, and that’s really interesting to think how differently your life might have gone if Siberia had answered just a couple weeks earlier and not been late.

Dr Chesnut: Oh absolutely, if it had just been slightly reversed – off to northern Russia in the early 2000s.

Brynn: A little colder.

Dr Chesnut: A little colder, different environment. Who knows how life could have turned out then, you know?

Brynn: Yeah, so let’s talk a bit about your work. Quite a bit of your work has to do with something called the linguistic landscape. Not everyone listening to us right now is a linguist, so can you explain what that term means and why it’s something that linguists study?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so even if you’re not a linguist or don’t have a particular interest in language, you encounter the linguistic landscape all the time. The linguistic landscape is essentially all the publicly displayed language or text you see around you. So, walking down the street you see street signs, shop fronts, billboards, movie posters – all of that is the linguistic landscape. All the different text and language you see around you. And that includes graffiti, those stickers you see stuck on telephone poles, or maybe on a utility panel on a back alley. It’s menus posted on restaurant walls.

But when people talk about the linguistic landscape there’s often a real emphasis on multilingualism, on things that have more than one language. There are actually many different researchers who look at movie posters or different types of signs. People who study marketing, for example. But people who talk about the linguistic landscape are usually talking about text with more than one language. That’s where a lot of the focus, not all, but a lot of the focus is.

So, one reason to study this is just the general benefit of understanding something better. These signs are important. They’re an important means of communication, so it’s better to have a deeper understanding of how this communication works. Over the years I’ve heard some people, some linguists, say, “This is actually not real research. This is a hobby. This is someone going on holiday, taking a bunch of photographs, enjoying themselves, coming back and sharing these pictures.” But I’d push back on that and say there’s actually a lot of important communication occurring through multilingual signs. An emergency exit sign in multiple languages can be very important. Looking at movie posters and how they use different scripts or different fonts to mimic other languages or play with what they’re writing – that’s an interesting linguistic phenomenon. So, I think it’s worthwhile. And society does value better understanding this communication.

So that’s one general reason, but there’s a lot of specific reasons to examine the language on signs. Some involve determining the vitality or strength of a language in a particular place. So, walking down the street in a French speaking community in Canada – are there a lot of signs in French? That’s a quick and rough way to determine how strong a language is in a place, although there are very serious limits to examining language in that way because often language doesn’t come into signs. There can be a language spoken in a region, but for various reasons it doesn’t appear on signs. Likewise, there can be a place where a language is no longer spoken very much but it often appears on signs. So, people examine that.

People examine issues of language ideology, or the assumptions we make about language, the values we give to language. And then ask how those values and assumptions shape the language on signs. Maybe there are different varieties of a language, but only one appears on signs. So, then we can go in and look at how these assumptions and values are shaping the use of language on signs.

There are studies involving English as a lingua franca, where English sort of has this role as a general and shared means of communication among people who don’t speak English as a first language where the rules of English are determined by what is effective communication, rather than a standard that comes from the United States or the UK – so how does English work in a tourist destination where people are visiting from all over the world? People examine context like that.

There are a lot of different studies out there. English is a major topic in linguistic landscape research. Some people examine how English can be a symbol of cosmopolitanism, sophistication, style and a means of attracting consumers. People examine skinscapes, so multilingual tattoos and everything that happens when people get a tattoo that involves different languages or multiple languages. How languages are involved in the construction of public space. There’s been some great research on Israel and the use of Hebrew, Arabic and English to construct a particular place through those signs.

Studies on commodification – we can examine Little Italy or Chinatown and look at how language is deployed there, not necessarily reflecting how people speak in that place anymore, but as a means of commodifying and selling that place.

There are studies on how problems are addressed, maybe littering, garbage, public intoxication through multiple languages on signs addressing those problems.

There are questions about signs that come from authorities that seem to go down to the people – top-down signs – and the languages used in those signs, and languages that come from regular people. Signs posted by people about problems in their neighbourhood or a lost dog, and the languages used on those signs, and maybe the differences between those top-down/bottom-up signs.

There are studies on how the linguistic landscape can be used in teaching, and I’ve investigated this and used this in a lot of my classes. We can take pictures of signs into classrooms, into educational contexts, and use that to help people develop their language skills.

But ultimately, we’re looking at a lot of issues of what languages are present on signs. How are those languages being used? What shapes the presence and absence of different languages on signs? What larger issues in society impact and are impacted by the use of language on signs? Even now, maybe how the use of language on signs can challenge existing assumptions in society regarding language and more.

There are some really exciting developments occurring in different places in the world. There are some massive indigenous construction developments, housing developments in Canada. I’ve seen some pictures of those developments where they are using the language of that community on those signs. That’s really interesting. I’d love to read more about that.

Brynn: That sounds fascinating, and also excuse me now while I go google “linguistic skinscapes”. That sounds so cool! I’ve never heard of that as an area of study before. That’s awesome!

Dr Chesnut: It’s really fascinating. It’s not my area. I did a little research because I encountered one paper years ago, and then I did some more research and there have been some interesting developments in that area. So, there are people doing all sorts of interesting research in different areas, very exciting developments. And some of it is, I think, quite important. It could contribute to creating more productive communication in different ways.

Brynn:  I agree, and that’s a great explanation. And I think that in your explanation, you’re doing a great job of pushing back against those people who would say that this is maybe just a hobby or something just a tourist would do. And you’re right, it’s a really important part of the world that we all live in. So, on that, let’s talk about your 2022 paper From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. In the paper, you develop the concept of “multilingual commanding urgency”. What does “multilingual commanding urgency” mean, and how might it appear in the linguistic landscape?

Dr Chesnut: Sure. Well, why don’t I take us through a little example, something that occurred to me, and then we can explore it together and think about how multilingual commanding urgency kind of helps us understand what’s happening around us with some of the signs we see.

So, we can imagine that we’re at a ski resort in north America, and walking through this ski resort we see lots of different signs. A big welcome sign in English. Maybe a giant sign with the name of the place positioned so we can all take photographs with it, post them on Instagram. And lots of signs that are important – rest area here, ski hills that way. Maybe a sign, all in English, that says, “Only qualified skiers should go down these particular hills” – kind of a warning and informational sign to direct people how they should go depending on their level of skill.

As we walk around this ski resort, we see something different. We see a sign that says, “Do not feed the wildlife,” but this sign is also in Korean and Chinese. Looking around, we see that is the only sign that is in English, Korean and Chinese. So, we might start to wonder, “Why is this sign and this sign alone the only sign that is trilingual, incorporating Korean and Chinese, while all these other signs, some quite important, feature only English?” And multilingual commanding urgency is our attempt to conceptualise an answer to that question.

What we argue is that, often in the world, sign makers will, rightly or wrongly, have an idea about who is likely to violate the regulation posted on a sign. There are certain language communities believed to be potential violators of these particular regulations. And there’s a belief that, if this regulation is posted in the language of that community, it will reduce the enforcement burden of those authorities. And when those two conditions are met, there seems to be a greater urgency or effort or impetus to make that sign multilingual.

So, I would explain this imagined “Do not feed wildlife” sign as occurring because some sign maker, some authority within this resort, for some reason believes Korean-speaking guests and Chinese-speaking guests may be more likely to violate this regulation, and that if they post this message in those languages, it will resolve the situation, reduce the enforcement burden of the authorities.

Now that may be completely incorrect, but that may be the authorities’ belief. And this is an imagined scenario, but it is based on something I actually saw in North America at one point.

And we can see this in other places too. You can imagine walking through an airport, maybe an airport in Germany, and this one did happen to me very recently, and see many signs in German and English – “baggage claim area”, “gates 1-10” – all these different signs in English and German. But then you see a door, and it’s an emergency exit and it’s alarmed. If a member of the public opens the door, the alarm goes off, authorities have to rush in, people have to investigate and a lot of things occur. And that door sign has a warning, but not just in German and English, but also Arabic, Russian and Chinese. And this I saw in an airport in Germany. So, that would be explained, I believe, likely by this multilingual commanding urgency. Authorities have identified certain communities as likely to violate this regulation. They believe that if they put the sign in those languages, it will reduce their enforcement burden. The fewer times they have to rush to that emergency door, the better for them. And this creates an urgency, an impetus, to make signs multilingual.

So that’s multilingual commanding urgency. That’s what we conceptualised as the genesis of multilingualism in many of these signs. And there are a lot of examples in literature that don’t talk about multilingual commanding urgency that come from earlier studies but that were foundational. Examples of a “do not spit” sign in an airport in New Zealand – that sign was only in Chinese and Korean, not in English, and actually seemed to create a bit of a furor on social media. Signs in Hong Kong which include Tagalog prohibiting hawking. Signs in Hungarian in Toronto, Canada about a code of conduct requiring some behaviour for young people. So, we do see across literature lots of examples of this. So, this paper and this concept of multilingual commanding urgency are our attempt to explain and discuss this sort of pretty broad phenomena. Does that provide an explanation of this phenomenon?

Brynn: That’s a great answer, and it also makes me think of another space where I’ve seen these types of signs before here in Australia, and that’s in public restrooms. Public toilets. I do believe I’ve seen papers before and even on our research blog, the Language on the Move research blog, we’ve featured these stories before, where on the backs of the stalls, at least in the women’s toilets, there will be these signs about toilet etiquette, and it will only be in certain languages. So again, to your point, of these potential violators of these rules being identified, rightly or wrongly, by the higher up authorities, and then that being targeted through these specific languages.

And your paper looks at cases of multilingual commanding urgency in Seoul, Korea, and specifically two types of directive signs that you and your colleagues found during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: first, COVID-19-related “masks required” signs in subway stations, and second, signs prohibiting illegal garbage disposal in side streets. These might sound like totally unrelated signs at first, but your paper found a fascinating connection between them. Can you tell us what you discovered about which languages were used for these different types of signs?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so I’ll start by describing these two signs in detail a little bit. The first set of COVID-19 “masks required” signs were posted because, prior to their posting, there had been strong encouragement to wear masks on subways and public transportation, but as the pandemic developed, there was a regulation developed that required masks to be worn by everyone in subways and the subway station, on public transportation. So, suddenly there was this new regulation. On this day, everyone has to wear a mask, and all these signs appeared.

Now, these signs were very large. They covered pillars in subway stations. You could sit at the entrance of the subway station and see half a dozen to a dozen of them, just from one spot. And they were monolingual Korean, and they were large, multicoloured and everywhere.

But, shortly thereafter, in a matter of days, appeared much smaller signs, A4-sized. And these signs had the same general message. Not as much detail. The larger Korean-language signs had details about where to buy masks. Each sign at each station had a little additional information about the nearby convenience store or location about where you could buy masks. These were absent in the other signs, and these other signs, much smaller, a little bit less well-produced, had the same general message in English, Chinese and Japanese. So, they appeared after. And this was quite interesting to us. These two signs appearing together. That’s one set of signs that were really important to us.

The other set of signs – we actually didn’t collect these signs entirely during the pandemic. Images of these signs were collected earlier. These were signs prohibiting the disposal of garbage, basically “don’t letter”. And there’s kind of a sophisticated system in Korea for the disposal of household garbage. A lot of apartment complexes will have a recycling system. Individuals can go buy garbage bags. Payment goes into funding the trash disposal system. So, some people litter to avoid this or because it can be inconvenient or whatever. So, this is a major issue. A lot of people get upset by trash. You don’t want trash in front of your house, and so there’s a lot of district-level government signs about prohibiting the disposal of garbage.

And what we found was that, in certain districts, these signs included Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, English and certain signs only had Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese. No English. So that was quite interesting. And what’s also critical here is that Korean government signage rarely features Arabic and Vietnamese. Some English, some Chinese, but very rarely Arabic and Vietnamese. And very, very rarely on district-level signage. These are neighbourhood-level government signs. So, these were very unusual signs to see Vietnamese and Arabic being used in these ways.

And so, what happened was me and my co-authors – and my apologies for not mentioning Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim earlier, they are absolutely foundational to this whole project and they are continuing work on COVID-19 signs – but we decided to collect data from our daily routines during the COVID-19 pandemic, just to better understand how signs were being used regarding COVID-19. And as we collected data, we examined it and looked at it in different ways. We were really struck by these “masks required” signs and these additional small multilingual signs. And what was really striking was there were other mask signs, signs that were encouraging mask use more generally and often quite powerfully using fear or sometimes cuteness to encourage mask wearing. But they were monolingual Korean. So, we were trying to understand what led to the additional signs requiring people to wear masks in English, Chinese and Japanese.

So, we were viewing literature and we started to look deeper into the context of signage in Korea, and we found the examples in our already-collected data of these garbage signs. And we really thought this might be the same phenomenon in two different ways – in the COVID-19 “masks required” signs we’re finding English, Chinese and Japanese as the languages to speak to the general non-Korean foreign public. And in the signs about garbage using Vietnamese and Arabic, we have the language used to speak to the Arabic and Vietnamese-speaking communities in these districts. So, we found different examples that were both the result of what we believed to be the same phenomenon.

So, our analysis of the COVID-19 linguistic landscape is ongoing, but we found these examples and decided to share sort of a conceptual paper that used these two examples to really look deeply at what we termed “multilingual commanding urgency”, and what we were finding being discussed in the literature. We wanted to bring that all together in one paper, use these different examples to really understand this phenomenon, discuss it and expand on it. That’s what came together in our paper. So, we argue that these two very different signs are ultimately the product of a belief that certain language communities are likely to be violators of a certain regulation, and a belief that by sharing the sign, making the sign in a certain language, you can reach that community and lower the enforcement burden for the authorities. So that’s how this paper came about.

Brynn: And that’s so interesting because, like we said, we all, as just people who are walking around in the world, are going to see these signs, could potentially read these signs. But a really interesting point that you make in your paper is that, exactly this, that these types of signs have the potential to be “overread by passersby”. You point out that these people might not actually be able to read the languages on these signs, so maybe if there’s a monolingual French speaker walking around in that context, they might not be able to read the languages, but they may know what languages they are. They might be able to say, “Oh I can tell that’s Arabic” or “I can tell that’s Vietnamese”. So, what inferences and assumptions might these passersby, who have nothing to do with the government, then make about the communities that are being addressed through these very specific language choices with these directive signs?

Dr Chesnut: So, this concept of “overreading signs” we borrowed from Philipp Angermeyer who has an amazing paper looking at Roma youth from Hungary in Toronto, Canada. Some youth centres and certain places started putting up signs in Hungarian, sort of codes of behaviour, to try and regulate what was perceived to be kind of inappropriate behaviour by these youth. He interviewed youth and authorities there. It’s an absolutely phenomenal paper. What he also pointed out was that these signs can be wrong. They used Google Translate to create the Hungarian, so in some cases it was really nonsensical. So, for these youth it was somewhat offensive, disheartening, disappointing to see not just signs about poor behaviour in a language directed to them, but also poor translations, signs they don’t even care enough to translate.

So, we’re discussing how, in general, these multilingual directive signs about bad behaviour can be overread potentially by anyone, sometimes even mistakenly, in a way that suggest certain communities might be responsible for this bad behaviour, engaging in this inappropriate behaviour or violating these regulations. So, if anyone is walking down the street and maybe you can read one language, maybe the dominant language is there, and you can read a sign saying something about disposal of pet waste, or smoking in an area you’re not supposed to smoke, and then you see it in certain languages that are very rarely used by authorities. It’s very easy to link those language speaking communities with this inappropriate behaviour, this aberrant behaviour.

So, that’s the concern, that these signs might reinforce larger public beliefs that certain communities are engaging in so-called bad behaviour, linking communities with problematic practices, and so really this could be having a negative effect on society, especially when languages are very rarely used in more general government or authoritative signage, or even more generally, and only used in these signs linked with bad behaviour. That’s the really problematic element.

Brynn: Yeah, it’s that perpetuation of a potential stereotype that exists within a community and, like you said, especially if it does come from that more governmental/district level position of power. Then that might perpetuate the stereotype even further.

You mentioned earlier that these particular trash signs came from a little earlier, but the paper was published in 2022. It’s now 2024 – have you seen any change in these types of signs in the intervening years? Are there still these “problem communities” that are being targeted through specific multilingual commanding urgency signs around Seoul?

Dr Chesnut: Well, there are certainly signs like this still about. There was an absolutely fantastic paper about a district with a large Chinese community in Seoul, and that paper had amazing examples, and kind of heartbreaking examples of signs only in Korean that request people to report others for bad behaviour, and then signs only in Chinese saying, “Don’t engage in problematic behaviour like public drunkenness and other inappropriate acts.” So certainly, this still exists now. That paper is from a little while ago too, so some of these signs might have changed.

And certainly, a lot of COVID signs have been taken down. Some remain. But I suspect these are long-enduring signs, metal signs posted on walls, so I suspect many of them are still up. I’ve seen signs that are ten years old. They remain for a long time. And I do want to point out that I think this is a kind of global phenomenon. I think signs like this can be found all over the world, so I wouldn’t single out any city or particular region, but I haven’t seen any major changes that way.

What I have seen that’s encouraging is that I’ve started to see some emergency signage that’s being made more multilingual, so we have a lot of emergency shelter signs and emergency shelters in Seoul. A lot of the time I’ve seen them in Korean, sometimes Korean-English and sometimes Korean-English-Chinese. But I recently saw one that had Korean, and that was the largest language by far. English was the second largest. Beneath that was Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese and Chinese. So, that I would not consider multilingual commanding urgency. That’s maybe a different type of language phenomenon, a different type of sign, and so there might be a move towards more multilingualism in general. That would certainly potentially lessen the potential for overreading certain directive signs. So, that would also be the policy I would advocate.

There is a need for signs directing people not to dispose of trash illegally, and if you want to reach out to a community then reach out in many ways. Not just through this directive signage but include that language on many different signs so it becomes less significant with this problematic directive. So, I do see some positive developments in more general multilingualism, but I think these signs do remain and I think they do have a purpose, so I hope there are some positive developments.

Since COVID I’ve also been out a lot less and I have family responsibilities these days that are new, so I’m collecting less general data and I don’t quite observe as much as I used to. So, I hope that’s a reasonable answer.

Brynn: It is, and what I love too about your paper and about this type of work into the linguistic landscape is that any person walking around in their own community, whether they’re here in Australia, whether they’re in Korea or Canada, they can pay attention to this, you know? You don’t have to be a scientist; you don’t have to be a linguist. Just notice. What do you see? Do you see multilingualism, kind of like you were saying in the context of everyone can read an emergency sign or subway rules, things like that? Or do you only see only very particular languages and therefore language communities being targeted with the signs? So, they are two quite different things.

And I love that it’s something where, once you’re aware of it, you can’t stop seeing. Ever since I read your paper, I now do that, where I just walk around and observe that in my own community.

And you said that you don’t maybe necessarily get to collect this type of data as much these days, but what is next for you and your work? What other research are you working on now?

Dr Chesnut: Our team, Sungwoo Kim and Nate Ming Curran and myself, we’re all still working on our COVID-19 linguistic landscape data, and this potentially could be lifetime work. There’s a lot there, and a lot more that can be done still.

So, right now we have a draft of a paper looking at English usage on authoritative government COVID-19 signage. What we’re looking at is how English is used in at least two very different ways. It’s used in one way for signs intended for a domestic Korean audience, and that’s very interesting to see English used for a Korean domestic audience for non-commercial purposes. It’s not marketing, it’s not cool English necessarily. It’s not trying to create a sense of cosmopolitanism. It’s trying to reinforce good public health behaviour, and we find English being used where the English text itself conveys information. The English has a meaning-making purpose. Not as a symbol, but information is bound into the text.

But it’s also being used as a symbol or a design feature or an emblematic element. It’s being used for Korean-English punning. It’s being used with Korean-English blends where there’s one message that switches between English and Korean to convey a particular message to the public, the Korean public. So, we’re very interested in how English is being used for public health messaging to a Korean audience.

And we’re also seeing English being used for a foreign non-Korean audience of visitors or residents. And what’s interesting there is that very often English is being used alongside Chinese or Japanese as a part of this broad multilingual communication strategy, and that kind of challenges the idea that English is this ultimate language, this lingua franca. That, in fact, it’s being used alongside other languages as part of this broad multilingual strategy except for particular foreign places where we do see monolingual English language signage in this Korean bilingual signage.

And sometimes, multilingualism that goes beyond Korean-English-Japanese-Chinese where there are six languages or eight languages in a particular foreign place. And we do find a few examples, especially early in the pandemic, where there is English that is difficult to understand, and we do want to address that too, and the Korean was actually a little bit odd too. So, it may be a result more of confusion earlier in the pandemic. The messages were unclear both in Korean and English, and that’s something that should be addressed too.

So, we’re looking at that, and we’ll continue looking at the linguistic landscape. We have a beginning of a paper looking at Chinese signage with the heavy concern of overreading, of how Chinese signage may have been overread during the COVID-19 pandemic in Korea. And we want to address how there was private sector signage that was very explicit. Basically, Chinese guests were not welcome. They were told not to enter certain restaurants or institutions. So, we want to address, or bring into academic discussion, the fact that these signs exist and that they were done bilingually in Korean and Chinese and that there are big issues there. That’s another project that’s probably further in the future.

We’ve already published another paper, it’s actually a blog that’s open access. Anyone can read it. It’s quite short. It looks at cuteness and fear in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape. What we saw was a lot of signage, a little bit from authoritative signage, but a lot of private sector signage. So, cafes and restaurants that had signs saying “please wear a mask” but they used a lot of cuteness. Little anime-like figures asking you, “please wear a mask for me”, or cartoon figures with their masks saying, “be like me”, that type of thing. So, there was a lot of cuteness deployed in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape, and we went to an online symposium for that, and then we shared it in a blog as part of that, so “Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape”. Google and you can find the blog and find all the entries there. It’s quite interesting.

And we also, in that piece, talked about fear. There were a few government posters that really strongly attempted to invoke fear. “Wear your proper COVID-19 mask, or you’ll end up wearing a respirator mask in the hospital.” Really strong invoking of fear there. And there were other messages as well, using fear this way.

And in the conference, it was quite interesting. There was a public health expert who joined the conference, and it was quite wonderful he was there. But he was surprised. He was from South Africa, and he said, “We could never use signs like this in our context. They’d be inappropriate. No one would respond to them positively.” But he was very eager to learn what could be done, how we can use signs to successfully promote good public health practices.

Unfortunately, this type of research doesn’t give an easy answer besides, I think, an answer saying that communicating in more languages in general, not specifically with a punitive message, is probably a good productive practice. But ultimately going deeper into that question would be an interesting long-term goal but would require very different research methods. So, maybe that’s something to think about in the future. There’s a lot to be done.

It would be wonderful to better understand communication through signs and other means of course, but I’m doing more research in signs, involving public health and emergencies and disasters and how those signs can be made in a way that is more productive and helpful, less damaging, less concerning in other ways, and better understand all these issues.

Unfortunately, the world remains a very dangerous place. Other events will occur, not exactly the same as the COVID-19 pandemic, but conflict, war, tsunamis, earthquakes – all these things can occur. All may require changing our behaviour as members of the public, and that can be shaped to some extent by these publicly displayed signs. Huge posters in the subway. Things on the bus. All manner of signs in an airport or any public institution. Private businesses, restaurants, cafes and more, all sharing signs that can inform the public about what to do in case of some unfortunate event, can maybe have a role in creating a better society to some extent.

So, we’re going to keep working on this, I think. There’s a lot more that could be done.

Brynn: It sounds like you said, it could be a lifetime worth of research. That’s so much to draw from. And like you said, it is something that I think we all have to take away from the COVID-19 pandemic, to kind of look back and say, “Alright, what did we not anticipate? What did we get wrong, and how can we better prepare in the future so that we can communicate better so that we can make sure that people from any language background can receive the information that they need in that type of a crisis?” So that sounds absolutely fascinating, and on that, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate it.

Dr Chesnut: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute delight. As I mentioned earlier, it is rare to get an opportunity to talk about a research paper, not a big book, not a big project, but just one paper. And this is a paper I’m quite fond of and a research project I find interesting. So, it has been a delight to get to talk with you. Thank you so much for all the wonderful and engaging questions. They really helped direct me and hopefully keep me on task. I really appreciate your guidance there.

And yes, hopefully this encourages more members of the public to keep an eye out for signs and look for those directive signs that are made multilingual in unusual ways. And for researchers out there, this is an exciting area to research. Don’t be afraid, I don’t think researchers are afraid, but this is a productive place to do research, and the more people examining this topic, the richer the discussions become. So, I’m always eager to find new people entering the field and discussing these topics.

Brynn: Excellent, so get out there and go look at some signs!

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

Till next time!

Nagoya City poster titled “Pleasant Communication with Simple Japanese”. Note the play on words for “Nagoya” and “pleasant” (nagoyaka)

“Cheers, mate.” It’s a cold January night in Hokkaido, Japan, the snow is knee-high and we’re sheltering in a ramen shop. I am with friends visiting from Australia, and most had never seen snow until a few days ago.

We’re a mixed group. One of my friends is speaking clearly, slowly, pointing to the menu, adding in “arigatō” and bowing. Another talks as though he’s still in Australia, whether the other party speaks fluent English or only a few words. Just a few days prior the situation was reversed, and this same friend shook his head saying, “Why do they talk to me as though I speak Japanese?”

Obviously it goes both ways. And maybe these encounters are less a question of which language we speak, and more of how we think about those who don’t.

Over my seven years of living in Japan, almost every day has involved some type of multilingual interaction. I’ve seen people across languages either overcompensate or undercompensate for the other party’s perceived lack of understanding. In doing so, we tend to either ignore language barriers, or conversely imagine them up, yet both are problematic.

No one wants to be patronised as a competent language user, and no one wants to be ignored or even belittled as a language learner.

With occasional pride but usually chagrin, I’ve been on all sides of these assumptions at one point or another. Over recent years I’ve reflected on such encounters, including my own incorrect assumptions, and tend to hit upon a pattern of two main factors. The first is assumptions about the other person’s language ability. The second is our perceptions about how best to respond to people in light of those language abilities.

The first factor of assumptions can often be mitigated through an open-mind, by avoiding a priori judgements, and being proactive and observant enough to gauge someone’s language ability through their actual language use. By and large, this approach takes little more than practice, awareness and the willingness to stave off our assumptions.

The second issue of how best to respond, and especially how to cater for less confident language learners’ needs, is more complex. It’s also rarely discussed, at least beyond academic and pedagogical circles, and in the everyday lives of the people actually engaging in such interactions. What I will introduce today, therefore, are several practical examples of Japanese language support, in both its productive and counterproductive forms. For ease of comparison and to provide concrete examples, focus will be dominantly on written Japanese language.

Simplifying Language, Done Right

Let’s start with the concept of Yasashī Nihongo. Yasashī Nihongo (やさしい日本語) literally translates as easy or kind Japanese. It’s useful in situations where Japanese learners lack ready access to translations or interpreting services in their own languages. Other people may choose to interact with people or written texts in Japanese, but find this process easier with language support.

Sample article from NHK’s News Web and News Web Easy. News Web Easy title reads “Students Helping People in Wheelchairs in Event at Ise Shrine”

What then, does Yasashī Nihongo look like in practice? The bright yellow poster in Figure 1 from the Nagoya City website is a good example. In it, two rows of people hold up sketchbooks, each containing a difficult word or phrase. This may be a term in intermediate, formal Japanese, or a loanword requiring knowledge of English or other languages. Arrows point to everyday, simple expressions, which are more accessible for Japanese learners. Both the poster and the Nagoya City website publishing it highlight the value of such communication methods in everyday life, and during emergencies or natural disasters.

Beyond mere simplification of vocabulary, there are many ways to increase language accessibility. Another example is the NHK website News Web Easy. A quick visual comparison of one and the same article in its Yasashī Nihongo version and regular Japanese version shows differences in form and complexity,  even without an understanding of Japanese.

Font and line size adjustments have been made. Spaces, absent from most Japanese writing, have been added between words, and phonetic furigana readings are visible above the kanji (the more complex Chinese-based symbols, separate from the Japanese syllabaries). The text, and noticeably the title, have been simplified and shortened, making the whole Yasashī article 23% shorter than the original. Other changes include colour coding names, a hover over function showing definitions for underlined words, a reduced speed audio version of the text, and even additional images or graphics.

Remembering the concept of meeting learners’ needs in light of their language ability, a final feature of the website is adjustment options for the level of simplification. This includes hiding the colour coding and phonetic furigana readings, and links to view the original article in standard Japanese. This allows readers to tailor or gradually increase difficulty, similar to the scaffolding process in language learning.

Simplifying Language, Done Wrong

There are other instances of Yasashī Nihongo that are less positive, and lack the multimodal accessibility of the previous example. Below is a sample from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s website, “COVID-19 Vaccine Navi”. This website also has a Yasashī Nihongo option, indeed it is one of only three language options (the other two being Japanese and English).

Created during the pandemic, this website has developed since I first came across it in mid 2022, and was like many foreign nationals looking for vaccine information. At that time, the texts for the Yasashī Nihongo version and the regular Japanese version were identical. No simplification had taken place and while phonetic readings for kanji were included, these were in full-sized parentheses beside the original words.

2023 sample from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s website. Which text looks more approachable?

The result was a text linguistically no less confusing, but visually and structurally disjointed, and dauntingly twice the length. I consulted with other speakers of Japanese as a second language, and all agreed that we would rather read the original Japanese than the “easy” version.

Since this time, the Covid Navi website has thankfully improved. However, this was done in an inconsistent manner. Some sections have been paraphrased into simpler versions of the Japanese text, while others keep the same wording as the original. Some sections keep the phonetic readings for kanji in parenthesis, while others only have the phonetic readings, having removed the kanji characters entirely. Also absent from these pages are any different formatting techniques, such as spacing between words and lines, or a larger font size. These internal inconsistencies and missed potential for increased accessibility suggest there is still room for improvement for the website.

Implications

So what do these different instances of Yasashī Nihongo tell us? Clearly there are positive and negative ways of making language accessible. It is noteworthy that organisations, particularly governmental ones, are taking steps in the right direction, but how effective these steps are, and why they have taken so long, remains in question.

If we are not meeting the needs of language learners, it is a sign that we need better education about language learning processes and challenges, and more importantly, chances to hear the voices of language learners about their own accessibility needs. The earlier version of the corona vaccine information website strongly suggested to me (and those I shared it with) that no learner of Japanese as a second language had been consulted in its construction.

Providing language support is more than just ticking a box. While it is frustrating to be overcompensated for as an adept language user, it can be distressing and even have detrimental consequences to be neglected as a language learner. This is why language accessibility support in particular deserves attention, and not only in organisations publishing written materials. We have opportunities within our everyday interactions, both to be more vocal about our needs as language learners, and to consider the effects for other language learners, positive or negative, of how we communicate.

Referenced Websites

City of Nagoya. (2017, November 30). Yasashī nihongo no pēji [Easy Japanese page]. https://mt.adaptive-techs.com/httpadaptor/servlet/HttpAdaptor?.h0.=fp&.ui.=citynagoyahp&.ro.=kh&.st.=rb&.np.=/kurashi/category/395-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0.html
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. (2023). Shingata korona uirusu wakuchin o utte morau koto no oshirase [Information about receiving novel coronavirus vaccines]. Corona Vaccine Navi. https://v-sys.mhlw.go.jp/ja-pl/
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. (2023). Shingata korona uirusu wakuchin sesshu no sōgō an’nai [General information about novel coronavirus vaccine injections]. Corona Vaccine Navi. https://v-sys.mhlw.go.jp/
NHK. (2023, September 18). Isejingū kurumaisu demo kigaru ni sanpai o chūkōkōsei borantia ga kaijo [Ise Shrine: Easy access for shrine visits even in wheelchairs: Middle and high school students volunteer assistance]. NHK News Web. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20230918/k10014199131000.html
NHK. (2023, September 20). Isejingū de seito-tachi ga kurumaisu no hito o tetsudau ibento [“Students helping people in wheelchairs in event at Ise Shrine”]. NHK News Web Easy. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/k10014199131000/k10014199131000.html

“The Tosa dialect is fun!!” Notebook with characters representing the grammar of Tosaben, the dialect of the Kōchi prefecture in Shikoku. The cover also features popular landmarks of the prefecture.

Japan is often erroneously perceived as a monolingual country. This is not true and Japan is a multilingual and multicultural country where varied languages and traditions coexist.

This post explores Japan’s linguistic ecology by exploring the relationship between center and periphery. On our journey, we will see how linguistic resources change value, function and ownership as they move through an ideologically stratified system where the norms and criteria of appropriateness that emanate from the center influence those of peripheral and liminal territories.

Center

Our journey starts from the capital Tōkyō, the city that hosts the majority of the financial and political institutions of the country. Given its importance, it is not surprising that the city has had a central role in issues related to language as well.

Tōkyō has had a decisive impact on the ‘movement for the unification of the written and spoken language’ 言文一致運動 genbun itchi undō. Its goal was to replace older forms of the Japanese language with the vernacular variety of the time to facilitate literacy.

To achieve that, the Tōkyō variety (or “Edo”, as Tōkyō was called until the late 19^th century) was chosen as the base to envision a ‘national language’ 国語 kokugo.

150 years on and the political efforts that have been made to establish a common language can be considered largely successful. Communications in Japan have indeed been standardized, and Japan’s literacy rate is as high as 99%, one of the highest in the world.

Periphery

Standardization implies deviation. Therefore, all the other ways of speaking throughout the Japanese archipelago were categorized as dialects. Other varieties saw their usage severely curtailed, starting in schools which tried to stamp out anything other than Tōkyō Japanese.

Discouraged in official communication, dialects have become an expression of locality, part of the cultural identity associated with a specific place. This role has been embraced by prefectures and individuals alike. Institutional bodies such as museums and tourism boards use dialects as a means to promote local culture.

Sometimes grammar rules and words are turned into anthropomorphic characters and appear on souvenirs and merchandise like the notebook I have received at the University of Kōchi during my time there as an exchange student. The linguistic and cultural distance between center and periphery has been turned into a marketable commodity. Dialects are also used to portray characters in media for their ability to convey the stereotypes associated to them.

In real life, too, dialects enable people who do not wish to fit within mainstream language practices to inhabit a different ‘voice’, performing what has been called ‘dialect cosplay’ as an act of linguistic transgression.

Dialects may seem to assume playful roles in many occasions. However, it is not all fun and games as the necessity to confront the demands of standard language remains, and most young Japanese students know this well. The dreaded ‘exam hell’, a series of standardized examinations that Japanese students must take during their entire school lives, require mastery of the standard language as well as being able to produce it as part of an appropriate repertoire. The stakes are high and students, already under immense pressure, can afford little to no space for linguistic deviations.

Liminality

The more we head towards the borders of the country, the greater diversity we find, including a number of endangered languages. The languages of the Ainu people from the northernmost island of Hokkaidō, for instance, are on the verge of extinction. The same is true of languages spoken on the islands that dot Okinawa prefecture to the South and those of the Izu islands, an archipelago that stretches far into the Pacific Ocean east of Tōkyō.

In these areas, the demographic crisis is taking a heavy toll on the number of speakers, as young people leave rural areas in search of opportunities otherwise unavailable to them.

The center cannot hold

Meanwhile, Tōkyō has become super-diverse linguistically. It is no longer only the center of Japan but also a global city. Japanese is today used alongside English and a host of migrant languages. Against these, struggling peripheries are trying to find new ways to express their local identities through “authentic” language. They follow the center’s norms but occasionally playfully transcend and violate those norms.

Overall, Japan’s linguistic ecology is deeply rooted in the center-periphery dichotomy but the center and the peripheries are themselves changing.

Reference

Heinrich, Patrick. (2018). Dialect cosplay: Language use by the young generation. In Patrick Heinrich & Christian Galan (Eds.), Being Young in Super-Aging Japan: Formative Events and Cultural Reactions (pp. 166-182). London: Routledge.

Murakami’s Yesterday – a short story that forms one of the seven stories collected in a book titled Men without Women – constitutes a case in point. The story amused me as much as it took me back to some of my recent academic reading: “novelists and journalists constitute a cadre of producers or senders of metadiscursive messages about speech and accent in public space” (Agha, 2007, p. 302).

Novelists not only spread the indexical stereotypes of speech further among the public but also play with and suspend such indexical typification. Let me illustrate how Murakami achieves this via his story Yesterday (for a synopsis see here).

In the story, two young men change their accents to take on different social persona yet in different directions with divergent results. Tanimura, a native of Kansai picked up the standard Japanese language in Tokyo within the first month of his arrival at Waseda University. Clearly, he falls within the group of ‘normal’ people who switch to the standard Japanese in Tokyo.

By contrast, Kitaru, a Tokyo-born-and-bred high school graduate permanently metamorphoses himself into a Kansai dialect speaker. As you can guess, Tanimura fits well with his surroundings and happily starts his university life in cosmopolitan Tokyo without betraying any traces of his Kansai origin.

It is Kitaru with his new Kansai dialect who causes problems for people around him. His dialect use adds an air of eccentricity to his otherwise relatively unremarkable person. He is even described as weird and not normal by his girlfriend Erika, in response to which Kitaru retorts, pointing at Tanimura: “this guy’s pretty weird too, he’s from Ashiya [Kansai dialect area] but only speaks the Tokyo dialect”. Exasperated, Erika said: “that’s much more common, at least more common than the opposite”.

At this point it is helpful to take a short detour to look at how the Kansai dialect spoken mainly in Osaka and its adjacent areas is enregistered. A survey conducted by Södergren (2014) has shown that Kansai dialect was regarded as ‘straightforward’, ‘frank’, ‘expressive’ as well as ‘warm’ and the flipside of which equally applies as it is also seen as ‘rude/over-familiar’, ‘vulgar’, ‘sloppy’ and ‘too intense and too aggressive’. The researcher goes on to note the link between Kansai dialect and comedy. This is related to the boom of manzai, where a comic duo entertain their audience through a comic dialogue in Kansai dialect.

Conversely, the standard Japanese linked with Tokyo conjures up images of ‘new Japan’, advancement, internationalization, politeness and so forth. Clearly, such juxtapositions over-simplify the complexity and nuances of language use and attitudes since they are freely-floating decontextualized stereotypes. However, it is exactly these stereotypical indexicals of accents that are presupposed and reworked in the story Yesterday.

Kitaru, a somewhat idiosyncratic young man who has failed college entrance exams and has ended up in cram schools while his girlfriend enjoys all the freshness a university life can offer, defies his Tokyo identity by uttering everything in Kansai dialect completely disregarding the consequences of such non-congruent linguistic practice in Tokyo. Tanimura aptly describes this strangeness caused by Kitaru’s Kansai dialect as:

Kitaru wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he was pleasant looking enough. He wasn’t tall but he was slim, and his hair and clothes were simple and stylish. As long as he didn’t say anything you’d assume he was a sensitive, well-brought-up city boy. He and his girlfriend made a great-looking couple. His only possible defect was that his face, a bit too slender and delicate, could give the impression that he was lacking in personality or was wishy-washy. But the moment he opened his mouth, this overall positive effect collapsed like a sand castle under an exuberant Labrador retriever. People were dismayed by his Kansai dialect, which he delivered fluently, as if that weren’t enough, in a slightly piercing, high-pitched voice. The mismatch with his looks was overwhelming (p. 51).

What is animated here is the image of a language rather than a person. The object of representation is Kansai dialect through which the novelistic figure Kitaru is represented. This technique of foregrounding the image of dialect runs through the whole story and acts as a key motif to the extent that we can even argue that Kitaru is animated and created through the objectification of his accent.

Even more crucial for the portrayal of Kitaru are the mismatches in his identity: his looks, his hair, his place of origin do not match with his language. This mismatch is what makes him a misfit, despite its effectiveness in setting him free from the ‘shackles’ of his undesirable Tokyo life.

The discomfort and dismay caused by Kitaru’s incongruent semiotic practices challenges the default perception of an essentialized link between language and identity. Most importantly, his actions subvert the norm and lay bare the contested nature of the authoritative and near-universal use of the standard language in the nation’s capital.

In the process, Kitaru engages in the resignification of the social field, to borrow from Butler (1992). Multiplying the voices in a delimited and centripetal place is not without consequences.

Novelists are indeed the senders and producers of metadiscursive messages about accents. Yet, they also reveal the discursive processes through which we build and solidify our own sand castles to avoid communicational mishaps and social castigation.

References

Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, J. P. (1992). Contingent foundations: Feminism and the questions of “postmodernism”. In J. P. Butler & J. W. Scott (Eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge.
Södergren, S. (2014). “Metcha suki ya nen”: A sociolinguistic attitude survey concerning the Kansai dialect. BA thesis. Uppsala Uppsala University.

As its user population has exploded, however, the Internet’s linguistic repertoire inevitably has expanded, too, and transformed it into a multilingual space.

But how multilingual is the Internet? What languages other than English does it speak? Why these languages?

The development of the Wikipedia logo is a metaphor for the journey from English-monolingual to multilingual Internet (Source: Wikipedia)

These are some of the key questions explored in Internationalizing Internet Studies: Beyond Anglophone Paradigms. Published in 2009, this collection of articles celebrates the non-Western, non-English speaking face of the Internet that is often hidden from academia and the media limelight.

Editors Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland challenge the tendency of communications and media scholarship to overemphasize the Anglophone-orientedness of online phenomena, taking for granted the multicultural and multilingual realities that persist alongside Western hegemony in virtual spaces. Using this skewed representation of the Internet as take-off point, the articles problematize whether the Internet truly bridges boundaries or, otherwise, creates other forms of division.

One obvious form of division online is the linguistic divide, which pertains to the differential valuing and representation of languages on the Internet. This issue is elaborated in the second part of the book—Language Communities Online. Through case studies of language practices in non-Western online communities, this section foregrounds languages other than English in the Internet and how the online space and these languages mutually shape each other.

In Chapter 5, Nanette Gottlieb presents the case of Japan:

While language use on the web in Japan, in terms of the selection of languages, is conservative overall with a strong monolingual bent, as dictated by national language policy, infrastructure, and cultural considerations, ludic use of the Japanese language itself online is multifaceted and far from conservative. (p. 65)

The scripts on the Wikipedia logo (Source: Wikipedia)

Gottlieb then describes Japanese language play in online messaging, which is exemplified in the use of emoticons as substitutes for verbal emotive expressions. Despite their banality as built-in features in hand-held gadgets and mobile messaging apps, emoticons can be valued as indexes of cultural distinction.

Subsequent chapters discuss the more serious function of the Internet as instrument for linguistic resistance and cultural preservation. Chapter 7 focuses on Welsh-speaking Internet users promoting Cymraeg as language of choice in their websites, forums, blogs, and social networking sites to assert its status as a contemporary language. The author, Daniel Cunliffe, argues that the success of this language movement can be attributed to institutional policy (the Welsh Language Act) and technical backing (software localization). Despite not having the same quality of support, the case of Catalan, articulated in Chapter 8, shows that the Internet can be a potent tool for the propagation of a minoritized language. The authors, Josep Lluis Mico and Pere Masip, partly echo the insights of Professor Josu Amezaga in his lecture about minority and minoritized languages and evinces the power of new media to facilitate the resurgence of languages silenced in traditional media platforms.

The final chapters in this sociolinguistic section focus on the intersection between language use and identity formation. The link between language and identity particularly in the context of migrant experience echoes the theme of the New Finnish Grammar, which was also reviewed for the Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge. Chapters 9 and 10 talk about how specific groups of migrants use language online to define aspects of their identity, which may be displaced and denied in the “real world” offline.

Urmila Goel examines the Indernet (www.theinder.net), a website that uses German language but which is primarily an Indian space. Through this forum, second generation Indians in Germany, who are othered as neither of India nor of Germany, find a virtual home where their transnational identity is accepted. Meanwhile, Ljilijana Gavrilovic talks about Serbian refugees, for whom “language is the primary element of identification” (p.147) and who use their home language online to assert their pre-refugee identities.

Overall, I found the recognition of the Internet as a beyond-Western phenomenon refreshing. The descriptive articles, whilst not equally engaging, provided information that made me more conscious of what and how languages are used online, by whom, and for what end. Of course, I was silently disappointed that Philippine languages were not mentioned in this conversation, but so were a host of other languages that are certainly represented in some corner or thread of this wide virtual web today. As an introductory reading on multilingual practices in cyberspace, however, the book succeeded in defamiliarizing the English-dominant Internet and inspiring a fresh curiosity for its linguistic repertoire.

４月９日刊行予定『異文化コミュニケーションを問いなおす』イングリッド・ピラー[著]　カバー・帯写真：渡邊リカルド

Since its publication in 2011, Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction has been widely adopted as a textbook and it is exciting to see that our work is now more readily accessible to a Japanese audience.

The book is now available for pre-order on the publisher’s website as well as on several major online bookstores including amazon.co.jp and Rakuten.

***************

『異文化コミュニケーションを問いなおす　－　ディスコース分析・社会言語学的視点からの考察』刊行のお知らせ

イングリッド・ピラーのベストセラー「Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction」の日本語訳が４月９日に創元社より出版されることとなりました。英語原本は２０１１年の刊行から世界の大学で使用されており、日本語版は初の翻訳本です。

ご予約は創元社ウェブサイトまたはオンラインブックストアーからお申し込み頂けます：アマゾン、楽天ブック。お問い合わせはこちらで承っております。

著者：イングリッド・ピラー：マッコーリ大学言語学部教授（オーストラリア）。ドイツ、スイス、アラブ首長国、アメリカなどの大学で教えるなど、国際的に活躍。異文化コミュニケーション、社会言語学、言語習得学、多言語主義、バイリンガル教育が主な研究テーマ。自ら主宰する研究ウェブサイトLanguage on the Moveにて数々の論文やブログを一般公表している。

翻訳：高橋君江、渡辺幸倫、藤田ラウンド幸世、菅野素子、樋口くみ子、加藤明子、清水友子、田村亮、羽井佐昭彦、柳川浩三（順不同）

内容紹介：著者が長年研究テーマとしてきた「人権」、そして「社会的包摂」を対話の軸とした新しい形の異文化コミュニケーション学。「文化」「言語」「異文化コミュニケーション」といった概念が構築されてきた過程や影響を今までにないクリティカルな視点から考察する。グローバル化が進む中で生きる人々の経験や多国籍企業のビジネス戦略、移民や亡命者の体験など、世界各国から集められた資料を凝縮し、学習用、研究用に最適な好著。

本書を書こうとした動機の一つとして、この分野を現実の生活にある異文化コミュニケーションに対応させ、それを反映するものにしたいという願いがある。現実の異文化コミュニケーションは、経済的・社会的・文化的なグローバリゼーションや、国境を越えた移動や留学体験の中に組み込まれている。　第一章「はじめに」より

Written by Masaaki Sasaki of Sankei Shinbun, the article in question has the catchy title of “「Water」が通じない！？　東京五輪にも教訓 (They don’t understand “Water”!? A lesson for the Tokyo Olympic Games”. It reports on the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games under the slogan of “英語の通じない五輪 (Olympic Games Without English)”. Sasaki points out that due to the Soviet-style education system and to the delay in the internationalisation of Sochi as a whole, locals such as police and taxi drivers speak “only” Russian. The writer subsequently warns that Sochi’s language challenge is a good lesson for the organizers of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games.

In the article, which has been featured in the special section on the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games on Yahoo Japan (www.sochi.yahoo.co.jp), an Austrian visitor was reportedly appalled at the inability of personnel to speak English at security checkpoints at train stations. A Japanese woman was apparently surprised that a local shop keeper couldn’t even understand “water”. And an American visitor, who is said to have been to 16 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, is quoted as saying “This is the first Olympic Games I visited where we can’t use English”.

Sasaki explains that this is the first time Sochi, a resort area frequented only by Russians, has been visited by a large number of international visitors. A survey conducted by a local agency last year found that 80% of residents didn’t possess basic knowledge of English.

The writer goes on to point out the growing concern among the International Olympic Committee regarding this language issue as the next few Games (2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, 2018 Winter Games in Korea and 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo) will be held in ‘non-English speaking’ countries. The article ends by suggesting the importance of a technology-based solution for Tokyo, such as smart phone applications allowing communication with foreign visitors.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s English bidding speech in Buenos Aires in September 2013. Credit: Reuters

Indeed, English language proficiency has been central to the discourse of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games from the beginning. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gained a great deal of public admiration when he gave a speech in English at the bidding meeting in Buenos Aires in September 2013. His “impressive” speech in English, which is considered as one of the key winning factors, is even used as learning material how to give presentations in English.

Having secured the right to host the 2020 Olympic Games, Japanese people from all walks of life have increasingly expressed their concern about Japanese people’s presumed ‘poor’ English. The former Tokyo Governor was so worried that last year he proposed to send 200 Japanese secondary school teachers of English overseas for a three-month training period every year. There is no doubt that English fever will further intensify in the years to come, as was the case for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games (Zhang, 2011).

It is against this context of the taken-for-granted belief that English is neceessary to host successful Olympic Games that many of the comments on the article about the Sochi 2014 Winter Games need to be understood. These comments reveal a wide range of deep-seated disagreement with, if not contempt of and disgust for, the English-centric mindset.

Published on 19 February 2014, the article attracted 1,170 comments on Yahoo Japan site by 25 February. Yahoo Japan allows you to see comments in five different ways; (1) timing of posts (latest to earliest), (2) agreement [no. of thumbs up), (3) disagreement [no. of thumbs down], (4) trending [no. of thumbs up + no. of thumbs down), and (5) sympathized (most to least) [no. of thumbs up minus no. of thumbs down]. I’ll introduce the top five most-agreed comments here.

“The flip side of this is egocentrism among English monolingual speakers”

The most agreed (and simultaneously most disagreed, trending and sympathized) comment of all was made by fre***** (handle name) as follows:

“裏を返せば、英語しか話せない連中の自己中 [The flip side of this is egocentrism among English monolingual speakers; my translation]”

fre*****’s comment has received 10,039 thumbs up and 1,760 thumbs down, attracting a whopping 172 replies. The replies are a site of intense debate, mixed between approval and disapproval.

The other four most-agreed comments are:

Number 2: “こんなのはさ、受け入れる側の国も最低限の英語を学ぶようにするのと同時に、行く人間も現地での挨拶くらい覚えてから行けよ。相互理解とか国際協調とかいうならそれが第一歩。[The issue like this, people in a host country should learn basic English, but at the same time visitors should learn local greetings before they go. That’s the first step towards mutual understanding and international corporation. My translation. 8,717 thumbs up; 454 thumbs down; 15 replies]

Number 3: さすがにWater位は日本人も分かるとは思うけど、案外同様のことが起こるかもね。戦後の日本で簡単な英会話本が結構売れたこともあったし、これからは自発的に簡単な会話が学べ、活用できる環境になれば良いと思う。 [Japanese would at least understand water, but something similar might happen. A lot of English conversation books have been sold after the war, and I hope an environment where we can learn basic conversation proactively and make use of it will be created. My translation. 3,415 thumbs up; 249 thumbs down; 31 replies]

Number 4: 「水」ぐらいは、ロシア語を覚えて行ってもいいんじゃないの？そんな、ソチの地元民からすれば、別に英語を話さなきゃいけない義務なんか無いだろ。[Shouldn’t they have learnt at least “Water” in Russian? It is not a duty of Sochi residents to speak English. My translation. 2,740 thumbs up; 124 thumbs down; 13 replies]

Number 5: 世界中どこでも英語が通じると思ってる方がバカでしょ！[Those who think English is used everywhere in the world are stupid! My translation. 2,865 thumbs up; 273 thumbs down; 24 replies]

Here, I’m not trying to demonstrate whether more or less people endorse or reject English as an Olympic language. Rather, I find an internet site such as Yahoo Japan an intriguing space to learn about wide ranging counter-discourses, including disgust for the hegemony of English as a global language and its resulting English-centric arrogance that often unfolds at international events such as the Olympic Games. These are the comments we have little chance of hearing face-to-face. Four out of the top five comments are critical of the hegemonic discourse of English as an international language and it is criticisms such as these that often remain unexpressed in other media, particularly in a country where English has long been equated to intelligence and hence academic, professional and personal success.

Furthermore, Number 2 and 4 most-agreed comments condemn the imposition on non-English speaking residents of an Olympic host city to accommodate visitors in English; at the same time, they are an expression of a multilingual mindset. Indeed, many other comments outside the top five suggest that the real issue is the fact that complaining visitors didn’t bother to learn basic Russian before they arrived, as in this comment:  “ロシアは英語圏じゃないから、通じないのは当たり前じゃん。逆になんて英語しかしゃべれないやつに合わせなあかんの？他国に行く事前に、相手国の最低限日常用語くらい勉強してから行け！英語イコール国際的じゃねーよ。勘違いすんな！！[Of course they don’t use English because Russia is not an English speaking country. Why do they have to accommodate English monolingual speakers? Learn basic everyday vocabularies of the country before you visit! English doesn’t equal being international. Don’t fool yourself!!]” These pro-multilingual comments constitute a sharp contrast to the discourse of monolingual or English-crazed Japan.

Overall, interactive sites such as these demonstrate that the role of English as a global language may be much more contested than it seems on the basis of mainstream media discourses.

Zhang, J (2011). Language Policy and Planning for the 2008 Beijing Olympics: An Investigation of the Discursive Construction of an Olympic City and a Global Population PhD thesis, Macquarie University, Sydney.

Japan Store near the University of Yangon

“Welcome to the Golden Guest Inn, Ms Takahashi! We’ve been expecting you!” A Chinese-Burmese man warmly welcomed me on my arrival at his family-run inn in Yangon. It’s just a typical welcome greeting, not a big deal, of course, except that he delivered this in his fluent Japanese: “ようこそゴールデンゲストインへ、高橋さん！お待ちしてました！”

My cheerful conversation in Japanese with this smiling inn owner was set against a conversation in English earlier that day: just then, a Western NGO staff had told me that “Burmese are too busy learning English. Not many people are interested in learning Japanese at this stage”.

It was not only the Japanese-speaking inn owner that proves this observation wrong. Let me give you a quick account of what you could expect in Yangon if you know Japanese.

One of the first things that you’ll notice is the hundreds of busses on the roads of Yangon that are imported from Japan. Some busses still carry original logos in Japanese, while some others are covered with local advertisements. Inside, however, most of the busses still have original Japanese signs and notices. Japanese tourists love those signs as a quick google image search of “日本語　バス　ヤンゴン” demonstrates.

Japanese writing left on the window: Forwarded to ミャンマー(Myanmar) from アル アイン (Al Ain, UAE)

Also, expect to see many second hand cars and trucks from Japan running around in town. Many of them carry Japanese writings on the body of the cars or markings on the windscreen. Why would the car owners leave these writings on? It seems that they function as a symbol of authenticity. While products made in China and South Korea are on the increase, Japanese products continue to be seen as ‘high quality’ and thus desirable. No wonder, then, that Daiso is already there, as well as its local equivalent shops who sell “Japanese products”.

You’ll also find many Japanese(-themed) eateries in Yangon, even if the scale and range is still limited in comparison to other major cities in Southeast Asia, which is currently going through a Japanese food craze. Japanese eateries are often more expensive than local ones but many of them are packed with locals and Japanese expats alike. My favorite is Oishii Sushi on Latha Street in downtown Yangon, where the Burmese owner spent 12 years training as a sushi chef at Bikkuri Zushi in Tsuzuki-ku, Yokohama.

Indeed, I met many Japanese-speaking Burmese in Myanmar. Realizing that I’m Japanese, they excitedly told me that they love everything Japanese; that they have Japanese friends who taught them Japanese; and that their family members are studying or working in Japan. Of course, these language proficiencies in Japanese remain invisible to non-Japanese speakers.

What is strikingly visible, however, is the rapidly increasing number of Japanese companies that are opening their businesses in Yangon.

Ads about Japanese Entertainment Festival 2014 with the Genie Family anime characters at Sakura Tower (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Genie_Family)

Enter Sakura Tower. Located across from the Traders Hotel (by Shangri-La) and built by a Japanese company, Sakura Tower hosts many large Japanese corporations and organisations including Honda, Mitsubishi Corporation, ANA, NTT, NHK and JICA. When I had a coffee at Sakura Tower’s Sky Bistro, one third of the customers were Japanese expats having power lunch. I happened to meet a young Japanese man who told me that he decided to open a business in Yangon because he thought Myanmar was “Asia’s last frontier”. During our conversation, a Japanese car pulled up and the driver yelled out, “吉田さん、迎えに来ました！(Mr. Yoshida, I’ve come to pick you up!” Mr. Yoshida turned to me and said, “He is my local business partner. I’m studying Burmese, but it helps a lot that his Japanese is really good.”

Indeed, Japanese-speaking local people are one of the factors that make Myanmar attractive to Japanese businesses. For instance, established in 2008, Myanmar DCR is rapidly expanding its IT business by hiring Japanese-speaking local staff. According to their website, Japanese is their official company language and everything is presumably carried out in Japanese. It is likely that as more Japanese businesses, large or small, are entering the Myanmar market, the demand for Japanese speaking staff will increase further.

Given all these observations above, it is rather surprising that there seems to be little discussion on improving the provision of Japanese language education in Myanmar. It is understandable that improving English language education is a must for Myanmar as it continues to embrace globalization. At the Seminar on Promoting Multilingual Education, which was held in Yangon in early February, English was the only international language (in addition to minority languages and Burmese) that was considered worth discussing. Chinese was mentioned occasionally but only as a remote option. Other languages, including Japanese, did not even rank a mention.

Learning Japanese in Mon State: “I want to study in Japan in the future”

During the seminar, however, I met many local students who expressed their interest in learning Japanese. During lunch time, for example, an English-speaking young man, a member of the Mon ethnic group, showed me his notebook which was full of Japanese writing, saying that he wanted to study in Japan in the future. A teacher told me that her 23-year-old son, who is currently studying Japanese in Japan self-funded, is seeking a scholarship to continue his studies in Tokyo. They both said that Japanese proficiency and familiarity with Japanese culture would be a great advantage given that more Japanese businesses are entering Myanmar and that English proficiency alone would no longer suffice to secure attractive employment. Although they are not trained language education experts, these participants, who never spoke up during the official parts of the workshop, can clearly see that a single-minded focus on English is short-sighted.

In fact, a language policy without a material basis might leave many multilingual youths disillusioned. Towards the end of the last day at the seminar, a male high school student stood up and commented: “All these discussions are very useful. But we want to be kept informed, too, like what we are learning all these languages for or what we can do with these language skills in the future.” Also, some of other young Burmese I met during my visits are already multilingual, and yet they are uncertain about finding meaningful work or securing scholarships in the future.

To build a socially-inclusive language policy in Myanmar necessarily requires research on the intersection between multilingual proficiency and employment and education. It will be crucial to have a systematic understanding of current and emerging employment (for instance, foreign companies and organisations in local areas) and further educational opportunities locally and internationally, and to base language policy on language requirements to secure these.

Mariko Watanabe and Ingrid Piller celebrate their reunion at Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

This post is also available in pdf-format. Click here.

In early July, YM Fashion’s CEO Mariko Watanabe flew in from Tokyo to Bangkok. She was scheduled to meet Ingrid Piller, who, on the way back from the Middle East to Australia, also just arrived in Bangkok to deliver a plenary speech at the H.I.S. Research and Industry Forum on Linguistic Diversity and Tourism in Amazing Thailand at Assumption University.

Mariko and Ingrid first met in Tokyo back in 2010 when YM Fashion Co., Ltd. became an official supporter of Language on the Move. Collaboration between the fashion industry and academics is unique, originating from the company’s increasing interest in the role of language and communication in their global business operation.

The day after the Forum, the CEO and the sociolinguist celebrated the success of the event in Chit Lom, one of Bangkok’s most fashionable neighbourhoods. Their conversation soon turned to YM Fashion’s first overseas venture in Thailand, which began some 26 years ago and was a trail-blazing endeavour in Japanese-Thai joint ventures.

In 2012, Thailand overtook the US for the first time and ranked second, after China, as the most desired destination for international joint ventures by Japanese companies (Japan External Trade Organization, 2013). At the time of Mariko’s first visit in the 1980s, however, the situation was quite different and only a handful of large-sized Japanese companies had manufacturing operations in Thailand. Mariko says “Bangkok back then was a small touristy city without much of its skyscrapers, glamorous shopping centers and the Skytrains. During the rainy season, it once took us three days by taxi to get to the airport.”

Japanese Business on the Move

The survey points at an assumption that has long been present in the minds of the Japanese – to succeed overseas you need English. In the context of global business, the Japanese language is often considered as useless because, in the mentality of many Japanese companies, it is assumed to be only spoken by the Japanese in Japan. The trajectory of Mariko’s company in Thailand, however, is a story that not only challenges this myth but also highlights the importance of setting aside pre-conceptions about linguistic deficits and of embracing cultural and linguistic diversity.

Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

Mariko established YM Fashion in Tokyo in 1979 with her husband Isamu Watanabe and their long-time friend Yasuko Hayata. Ten years later, YM Fashion International Thailand was set up in 1990 with a young Thai partner. At the time of the launch of their business in Bangkok, none of the founders or their staff spoke English or Thai on a functional level. How did a Japanese medium-sized fashion retail company manage to find a local contact, secure a partnership, hire and train employees, and grow to operate a 7,000sqm factory with 400 employees and 10 retail shops in central Bangkok today? Mariko explains that the opportunity to expand YM Fashion and develop its trademark brand Yaccomaricard in Thailand originally came through an informal international network of hippies in the late 1980s. And their story in Thailand is a story of languages on the move, beginning with a business proposal from unlikely collaborators.

Hippie Connections

Back in the 1980s in Tokyo, two German internationalists, Guy and Helga Pachet, were producing European-style baby clothes at home. After a long trip around the world in the 60s and the 70s, the couple had settled in Tokyo where their first baby was born. As their home-made European children’s clothes gained popularity in their local area, they wanted to commercialise their production. They turned to their friend Mariko to explore collaborative business opportunities.

Mariko initially turned down their proposal. Communication was a problem. Guy spoke German, French and English but had very little Japanese at the time. Mariko and her staff couldn’t speak English, let alone German or French.

Mariko: “I didn’t think it would be possible to work together if they couldn’t speak Japanese. I asked him to learn Japanese first. I promised that, in the meantime, we would try to learn English. But he learned Japanese better and faster than I ever learned English [laughs].”

As Guy quickly taught himself Japanese, the couple and YM Fashion began collaborating, and soon their new brand, Annya and Besna, became a hit among fashion-conscious mothers in the upmarket town of Denenchofu, Tokyo. As sales increased, the need to secure a production site devoted to Annya and Besna emerged. The couple decided to turn to their old hippie connections in Bangkok, Thailand.

Passion for Success

From left: Mariko Watanabe, Helga and Guy Pachet, and Punsuri Revirava in Yawara, Bangkok, 1989

In 1989, the Pachets and Mariko flew to Bangkok to meet Punsuri Revirava, whom they knew from their travels during their hippie years. The three parties, the Pachets, YM Fashion and Punsuri, co-founded a company, Clair Moda. Punsuri, who is Chinese-Thai, provided a manufacturing site within her family-owned shop house and initially secured six seamstresses for the production. Mariko was responsible for teaching the six young Thai women how to sew and produce clothes that would satisfy the desires and tastes of highly discerning Japanese consumers. She recalls that in terms of language, training the Thai workers was not a problem.

Mariko: “I couldn’t speak Thai, and these girls are from rural areas in Thailand, so they could speak neither English nor Japanese. Basically I taught these girls everything by using Japanese and through body language. These women still work for us today, and 26 years on at our factory, they have become leaders and teach apprentices how to sew using Japanese technical terms.”

A year later, YM Fashion bought out Clair Moda in order to set up YM Fashion International Thailand. That was also when they invited a young Thai woman, Ichaya Khamala, to come on board as co-owner and CEO. Under Thai business law, a foreign company must have a Thai partner who maintains a significant share in the company. While majoring in Business Studies with a minor in Japanese at Thammasat University, Ichaya had worked as a part-time interpreter for Mariko in the previous year. 22-year-old Ichaya had limited work experience and no experience whatsoever in running a company. Mariko recalls that it was unheard of for a Japanese company to partner with a fresh university graduate, and a woman to boot. However, she had no hesitation:

Mariko: “What she had instead of experience was language proficiencies in Thai, Japanese and English and a passion for business success in her country on the verge of an economic boom. She had so much passion and desire to learn and grow with us.”

As their collaboration began, Mariko taught Ichaya everything she knew about production and business management, and for all these years, Japanese has remained the language of their transnational partnership. From the beginning, Mariko not only instructed Ichaya how to do business, but also helped her improve her spoken and written Japanese.

At the same time, all the YM Fashion employees who have been transferred from Japan to Thailand to oversee the production are required to undertake a three-month intensive course in Thai immediately upon their arrival. As Mariko explains: “How can Japanese managers win the heart of their Thai workers if they can’t speak Thai?”

Global Expansion and Family

The day before the Forum: Sei and Mariko Watanabe select outfits for Ingrid’s keynote speech at Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

On her trip to Bangkok this time, Mariko was accompanied by her daughter, Sei Watanabe. Together with her younger brother Kari, Sei established YM Fashion UK in 1997 and managed the operation until her return to Japan in 2012. The siblings will take over YM Fashion in Japan in the near future as Mariko and Isamu ready themselves for retirement. As the mother of a young girl herself, Ingrid asked Mariko how she had managed to raise her children while building a successful fashion company and expanding overseas.

Mariko explained that she always took her children along on her business trips, letting them directly experience culture and language of other countries so that they would develop a deep appreciation for diversity. It was also important for Mariko and Isamu to raise their children multilingually:

Mariko: “After the war, we wanted to study English, but English education in Japan was really inadequate at that time. Early on in our overseas ventures, we did everything we could to succeed without English, but we always thought that our children must learn English AND other important languages to thrive even more in the 21^st century.”

Starting with English as a second language, their children went on to also learn French and Thai. While making sure their children learnt English is unsurprising, the insistence on French and Thai, too, is unusual. Mariko argues that French is the language of global fashion and continues to be important in international business negotiations and Thai is the language of their close partner and first overseas expansion.

Not only did Mariko work to instil an appreciation of cultural and linguistic diversity in her own children but she’s also committed to ensure that the children of production workers have similar opportunities. The nursery school that is located within the Thai production site, was established to cater for the young children of workers. The nursery teaches not only Thai but also English and the library provides children’s books in different languages.

Over her long career Mariko has remained a passionate internationalist: “We live in Japan, we live in Asia and we live in the world. Our perspective is global.” She never let herself be held back by the limited opportunities available to women of her generation: where she lacked language resources, she responded with flexibility by drawing on Japanese, her passion for fashion, her commitment to capacity building in Thailand and the common humanity that binds us all.

Carrying on the legacy of the pioneering founders, the next generation of YM Fashion – Sei, Kari and Ichaya – are equipped not only with many more language resources, but also an appreciation of linguistic and cultural diversity characteristic of the 21^st century business world in which they operate.

____

MARIKO WATANABE | Founder and CEO of YM Fashion Co., Ltd, Japan

Mariko Watanabe

Mariko was born in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1938. Having studied at the Kuwasawa Design Institute in 1957, Mariko worked as a freelance buyer, importing second-hand clothes to Japan, and later opened a vintage European clothes shop in Keio Limone Harajuku in 1975.

Mariko launched a new women’s brand, Yaccomaricard, with Yasuko Hayata and Isamu Watanabe in 1977 and established YM Fashion Co., Ltd. in 1979.

Having celebrated its 35^th anniversary in 2012, YM Fashion today has 24 direct shops and 120 wholesale shops in Japan, 11 direct shops in the UK and Thailand, and 42 wholesale shops in Europe and the US.

 

Yasemin Yildiz (2012) Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham University Press.

This book review was originally published in Language in Society 42 (4), 463-466. [Copyright: Cambridge University Press; Language in Society]

Access pdf version of this review here.

Yasemin Yildiz , Beyond the mother tongue: The postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. xi, 306. Hb. $50.05.

In their position paper “Superdiversity and language,” Blommaert & Rampton (2011) assert that “named languages have now been denaturalised.” In it they sum up the emergent consensus in sociolinguistics—and, indeed, the obvious fact—that the contemporary global linguistic landscape is characterised by multilingual superdiversity. Exploring this linguistic superdiversity, multilingual practices—or “metrolingualism” in Otsuji & Pennycook’s (2011) striking term—has become an immensely productive research agenda. Ideologically, however, monolingualism remains predominant. The resulting tensions continue to undermine the educational success of minorities (e.g. Clyne 2005; Menken 2008) and their access to socioeconomic opportunities more broadly (e.g. Piller 2011; Lippi-Green 2012). In that sense the research frontier in sociolinguistics is not in linguistic diversity per se but at the fault zones where multilingual practices meet monolingual ideologies.

Beyond the mother tongue is one of the most concerted and lucid efforts to date to explore precisely that fault zone. The author, Yasemin Yildiz, identifies monolingualism as “a key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern social life, from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as imagined collectives such as cultures and nations” (2). For about three centuries, the monolingual paradigm has provided the lens through which we see multilingualism. The new visibility of linguistic diversity that contemporary scholarship so amply documents is not only the result of an increase in its frequency—multilingualism has existed all along—but also a result of the loosening of the monolingual paradigm due to the ongoing renegotiation of the status of the nation state vis-à-vis the local and the global. Albeit undergoing change, the force of monolingualism as a structuring principle remains and thus creates a range of tensions between multilingual linguistic realities and monolingual ideologies. It is this condition that Yildiz identifies as “postmonolingual.” To view language in society through a postmonolingual paradigm means to engage with the significance of multilingualism and monolingualism and, even more crucially, their intersection. Beyond the mother tonguedoes exactly that in a tour de force enquiry into German-language writing of the twentieth century in its historical and sociocultural context.

The introduction presents a highly readable overview of the German language-philosophical tradition, which has played an important role in establishing the monolingual paradigm. Yildiz shows how the “mother tongue” came to be “the affective knot at the center of the monolingual paradigm” (10). Even if “mother tongue” is rarely used as an analytic concept in contemporary sociolinguistics any more, the intertwined conceptions of language competence on the one hand, and national and/or ethnic origin, belonging, and identity on the other are rarely unravelled consistently, and thus continue to remain in effect today. Therefore Yildiz is interested in the work of those authors who address precisely those effects. Writing “beyond the mother tongue” does not simply mean to write in a “nonnative” language or to write in multiple languages. Rather, “it means writing beyond the concept of the mother tongue” (14).

Ch. 1 explores the postmonolingual condition in Franz Kafka’s work. Kafka only ever wrote in his mother tongue, German. Yet he did so from the context of early twentieth century multilingual Prague and its well-documented tensions between Czech and German. Yildiz goes beyond specific language conflicts to show that the city was also the site of tensions between an older multilingual paradigm—where language did not follow an exclusively identitarian logic—and the emergent monolingual paradigm, which postulates a homologous relationship between language and identity. Prague’s German-speaking Jews constituted a particular challenge for this postulate as they did not fit into the equation of language and ethnicity. Kafka explored the impossibility of his linguistic situation “from within”—by writing in German about other languages, particularly Yiddish, which might have offered linguistic “normalcy,” that is, a match between language and identity. In the process, the mother tongue became unheimlich ‘uncanny’ (lit. ‘unhomely’). Alienation from the “unhomely mother tongue” is thus one distinct post-monolingual response. The chapter also provides a brilliant overview of the relationship between Yiddish and German, the linguistic division between Eastern and Western Jewry, and multilingualism in the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires.

Ch. 2 is devoted to another modernist Jewish writer, the philosopher Theodor Adorno. By the time of Adorno’s late writing, the German language had changed forever, as it had become the “tainted” language of the Holocaust. Adorno, who was frequently criticized on linguistic grounds for the seemingly unrelated reasons that he continued to write in German after the Holocaust and that his German was too elitist, brings the internal multilingualism of the supposedly monolingual language to the fore through his excessive use of loanwords. The chapter also takes the reader through the history of German linguistic purism.

With Yoko Tawada, Ch. 3 moves to contemporary writers. Tawada has produced two distinct literary oeuvres in German and Japanese and has received literary awards for both. In contrast to Kafka and Adorno, her perspective on the monolingual paradigm is not informed by exclusion from the mother tongue, but by the inclusions it enforces. Moving from Japanese to German was a way for her to escape from limiting gender identities associated with Japanese. Indeed, language learning has become a conventional way for Japanese women to escape patriarchal Japan, as also documented by Takahashi (2013). German, however, does not provide a new home for Tawada, nor does she join in celebratory discourses of multilingualism as enabling hybridity and multiple sites of belonging. Instead, for her, bilingualism is a detachment strategy from either language. The chapter can also be read as an introduction to the emotional journeys of adult bilinguals.

The focus of Ch. 4 is on another refugee from her mother tongue, Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Moving to Germany from Turkey as a young adult, Özdamar is one of the most established literary figures in contemporary Germany. In contrast to Tawada, Özdamar writes exclusively in German, with her particular literary style characterized by the frequent use of literal translations from Turkish. Literal translation serves as a strategy to overcome the violence of the “mother tongue” and specifically the trauma resulting from the state violence experienced by young leftists in Turkey in the 1970s. The chapter also serves as an introduction to the monolingualization of Turkish since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 as well as the emergence of Turkish as a German language.

Ch. 5 continues the German-Turkish theme by exploring multilingualism in Feridun Zaimoğlu’s work. In contrast to Özdamar, Zaimoğlu is not a migrant but a “native,” albeit the son of migrants. Yildiz calls the second generation—the children of migrants who have not actually ever migrated themselves—“postmigrants.” Similarly to Kafka and Adorno a century earlier, this particular group of “native speakers” is widely seen as illegitimate. Being ascribed racialized illegitimacy deforms the speaker, and Zaimoğlu inscribes this deformation into the German language by writing in a confronting and jarring mix of genres and registers. Yildiz’ analysis draws mostly on Kanak Sprak, which became an instant sensation when it was published in 1995. In a defiant appropriation of German, Kanak Sprak combines the racist slur Kanake with a dialect version of Sprache ‘language.’ The chapter can also be read as an overview of postmigrant writing in contemporary Germany, the debates around German identity since reunification and the role of global hip hop in the cultural expression of postmigrants.

The conclusion sums up the complex tensions inherent in the postmonolingual condition where monolingualism continues to inform multilingualism. Kafka, Adorno, Tawada, Özdamar, and Zaimoğlu all chart points on the way towards an emergent multilingual paradigm. At the same time, reading them makes clear the challenges ahead before a full delinking between language and ethnicity will be achieved. Germany—as most other “Western” societies—currently finds itself in the grip of an attempted reassertion of homogeneity. Whether these are the death throes of the monolingual paradigm or whether it is gaining a new lease on life remains to be seen. The emergent multilingual paradigm, too, is fraught with contradictions, as Germany’s embrace of bilingual German-English education and its simultaneous disavowal of bilingual German-Turkish education vividly demonstrates.

Beyond the mother tongue is a rare book that combines wide-ranging interdisciplinary inquiries in language, literature, history, and cultural studies. I hope postmonolingualism will become foundational for a new research agenda in language in society: multilingualism cannot be understood without monolingualism and vice versa.

 References 

Piller, Ingrid (2013). Book review of Yasemin Yildiz , Beyond the mother tongue: The postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. xi, 306. Hb. $50.05. Language in Society, 42 (4), 463-466 [Copyright: Cambridge University Press; Language in Society]

Migrant children studying in a Brazilian school in Japan (Source: Japan Times)

A recent study of the educational pathways of the children of Brazilian migrants in Japan offers a most welcome addition to the literature on the educational outcomes of migrant children, which has to date focussed mostly on migrant children in North America and Western Europe. The authors, Hirohisa Takenoshita, Yoshimi Chitose, Shigehiro Ikegami and Eunice Akemi Ishikawa, investigate the factors that influence whether migrant children enrol in high school or not.

The Japanese educational system consists of nine years of compulsory schooling, comprised of six years of elementary school and three years of middle school. These are followed by three years of high school, which is not compulsory. Even so, in practice, almost all Japanese children attend high school. However, among the children of migrants, the high school enrolment rate is only 71%. It is thus obvious that migrant children are educationally disadvantaged vis-à-vis their Japanese peers.

On the basis of a survey of 203 adolescent and young adult second-generation residents in Shizuoka prefecture, Takenoshita et al. (2013) explore the family characteristics and characteristics of the local context that distinguish those who were enrolled in high school from those who were not.

Parental education and employment

It is well known that parental level of education is a key determinant of children’s educational achievement both in migrant and non-migrant populations. However, the researchers found that the correlation between Brazilian parents’ educational level and their children’s high school enrolment was much more modest than is usually the case. That means that parental educational level gets devalued in the process of migration. The devaluation of educational credentials in the migration process with regard to the labour market is not surprising. What is surprising is their devaluation also with regard to parental ability to transmit their educational achievements to their children.

The relative unimportance of parental education can be explained with the way Brazilian migrants are incorporated into the Japanese labour market. Irrespective of their educational level and other characteristics, Brazilian migrants are incorporated into the irregular labour market working unskilled or low-skilled jobs. The regular Japanese labour market, from which Brazilian migrants are largely excluded, is characterised by strong company-based labour unions, lifetime employment, seniority earnings and, overall, a high level of labour protection and stability. However, in Japan, as elsewhere, globalization has involved a concerted assault on labour and the regular labour market has been shrinking fast while irregular jobs have been mushrooming. And that’s where Brazilian migrants find themselves. They are typically employed through agencies in temporary, unstable and poorly paid jobs without benefits.

90% of Brazilian migrants work unskilled or low-skilled jobs under irregular conditions. By contrast, only 30% of all Japanese workers are employed in such jobs and, at only 12%, that figure is even lower for male Japanese workers. As a result of their precarious employment status, migrants work longer hours than their native-born counterparts. This is significant as more time spent at work means less time spent with children – a fact that disadvantages the children of the working poor from Day 1, as Barry (2005) demonstrates.

Indeed, parental employment turned out to be the most significant factor distinguishing enrolled from unenrolled children: having a father employed in standard work was the most significant factor that correlated positively with migrant children’s high school enrolment.

Gender

Gender was also highly significant but in surprising ways: a number of studies have found that, in North America and Europe, migrants girls are doing better in school than boys. However, for Brazilian migrants in Japan it is the other way round: boys are more likely to be enrolled in high school than girls. The authors explain this with persistent gender discrimination in Japan: it is more rational for migrants to invest what limited resources they may have into the education of their sons as girls, by comparison, are not likely to get very far in education and employment anyway. Additionally, when parents both have to work long and irregular hours, girls are often deployed to look after siblings and the household more generally.

Race

On the basis of other studies that had shown that non-Japanese and non-Western children are often bullied in Japanese schools, the authors hypothesized that race might influence high school enrolment, too. Therefore, they distinguished between nikkei and non-nikkei migrant children. The former are born to two parents of Japanese descent and would thus look phenotypically similar to native-born Japanese children while the latter are born to at least one parent who is not of Japanese descent.

It turned out that race played no role in high school enrolment and that nikkei migrant children had no advantage vis-à-vis non-nikkei migrant children. In fact, both groups were equally disadvantaged vis-à-vis their native-born Japanese peers. The authors explain this finding with regard to Japan’s myth as a homogeneous nation and the collective denial that Japan has become an immigration country.

Age at migration and transnationalism

Like comparable studies in other contexts, the authors found that the 1.5 generation is the most educationally disadvantaged: those who had migrated at age 10 or above (the maximum age for inclusion in the study was 14 at the time of migration) were least likely to be enrolled in high school. By contrast, the enrolment rates of those who were 4 years or younger at the time of migration or who had been born in Japan were almost as high as those of their Japanese peers.

When it comes to the educational success of migrant children, younger is clearly better as these children had more exposure not only to the Japanese language but also to the Japanese education system.

By the same token, children whose parents moved frequently back and forth between Japan and Brazil found their exposure to the Japanese language and the Japanese education system frequently interrupted and these interruptions significantly reduced their likelihood of high school enrolment. Children of parents who had no history of re-migration to Brazil were four times more likely to be enrolled in high school than those who moved back to Brazil for an extended period one or more times.

Other studies have argued that a family’s transnational lifestyle influences children’s educational achievement favourably and equips them to thrive in more than one national context. However, Takenoshita et al. (2013) clearly demonstrate that this is not uniformly the case and the value or otherwise of transnationalism depends on the socioeconomic circumstances in which it takes place.

Where migrants are incorporated into the lower and temporary segments of the labour market, as Brazilian migrants are in Japan, their transnationalism is usually related to the vagaries of their employment. Consequently, transnationalism hinders children’s schooling in this case.

Local context of reception

The researchers also explored the local context of reception as a factor in migrant children’s educational outcomes. Throughout Shizuoka prefecture migrants find themselves in highly diverse circumstances as regards the targeted services available to them. The largest concentration of Brazilians in Shizuoka lives in Hamamatsu, an industrial city. Hamamatsu municipal government has provided a variety of special education programs targeting migrant children since the 1990s, including the provision of Portuguese-, Spanish- and Chinese-speaking tutors to provide Japanese language support. Additionally, Hamamatsu municipal government subsidizes private ethnic schools and organizations devoted to the education of migrant children.

Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that migrant children in Hamamatsu are more likely to be enrolled in high school than their counterparts living elsewhere in Shizuoka. This is indeed what the researchers found: residency in Hamamatsu with its targeted services was favourably associated with high school enrolment.

Parental Japanese language proficiency

I have left parental proficiency in Japanese for last because the effect turned out to be relatively small. Unsurprisingly, there is a positive correlation between higher levels of self-reported parental Japanese proficiency and children’s high school enrolment but it is one of the smallest correlations examined by the researchers.

The most important positive factors are the regular employment of the father and residence in Hamamatsu. The most important negative factors are female gender, having been aged 10 or older at the time of migration and having experienced multiple migrations between Brazil and Japan.

It is a frequent trope in discourses about migrant achievement that learning the language of the destination country matters most. Migrants are continuously exhorted to learn Japanese (or English or German or whatever the national language may be). Learning the destination language is supposed to be a matter of personal responsibility and integration into the labour market and educational advancement are supposed to be conditional on language learning.

Linguists have known all along that language learning is more complicated than the mantra of personal responsibility suggests. However, even if it were that simple to learn a new language as an adult, the evidence presented in Takenoshita et al. (2013) shows that it actually doesn’t matter all that much. What matters is the material base:

Notably, the family’s economic resources facilitate their children’s enrolment in high school. In other words, Brazilian children’s schooling is impeded by employment instability among their parents. (p. 11)

Barry, B. (2005). Why social justice matters. Oxford, Polity.

Takenoshita, H., Y. Chitose, et al. (2013). Segmented Assimilation, Transnationalism, and Educational Attainment of Brazilian Migrant Children in Japan International Migration DOI: http://dx..org/10.1111/imig.12057

The front cover of the tourist map of multilingual Macau

Last week I had the privilege of visiting the University of Macau and in Macau I discovered yet another unique variation on the many multilingual landscapes we have featured here on Language on the Move.

Macau, a former Portuguese colony, has been a Special Administrative Region of China since 1999. The official languages of Macau are Chinese and Portuguese. English plays an unofficial but highly prominent role: it is the medium of instruction at the University of Macau and at a number of secondary schools. Other schools use Cantonese as medium of instruction and there is one Portuguese-medium school.

Trilingualism in Chinese, Portuguese and English is just the beginning, though. The linguistic situation is further complicated by the diversity of Chinese and the importance of the tourism industry.

The version of Chinese that is local to Macau is Cantonese but Putonghua is gaining in importance. Macau has about half a million residents but welcomes a staggering number of tourists: close to 30 million tourists visit Macau each year. Most of these come from Mainland China and so it is not surprising that in tourism spaces I overheard much more Putonghua than Cantonese. Written Chinese, too, comes in at least three varieties: traditional characters, simplified characters and pinyin. Furthermore, pinyin looks different depending on whether the writer followed English-based or Portuguese-based conventions.

The languages of other tourist markets also feature with maps and signs in Japanese, Korean and Thai.

The linguistic landscape of Macau is thus extremely diverse and each tourist site has its own conventions, as the following examples demonstrate.

A-Ma Temple

Chinese inscriptions at the A-Ma Temple

The famous Taoist temple dedicated to the goddess of seafarers, Matsu, from which the name “Macau” is thought to derive, is enlisted on the UNESCO World Heritage List. On the day we visited it was crowded with Chinese tour groups. The languages on display were ancient Chinese inscriptions in stones and on the temple façades. The prayer tablets where the devout can record their wishes and prayers also seemed to be Chinese only (although there were hundreds of them so I cannot be sure that prayers in other languages were not also hidden away somewhere).

The direction and prohibition signs were either in Chinese only or in Chinese and English (of the non-standardized “Chinglish” variety). One stall selling incense sticks and other devotionalia featured Chinese and Thai signs. Portuguese and what might be called “standard English” were notable for their absence.

Our Lady of Penha Church

Latin and Chinese on a devotional card at La Penha Church

One of Macau’s many Catholic churches (Macau used to be the staging post for the Christianisation of East Asia and has the largest number of Catholic churches by square mile in Asia), Penha Church sits on a hill and affords an excellent view over the harbour and across the bay to the mainland. The church itself is not a tourist destination but the spiritual centre of a community of Trappist nuns from Indonesia.

When we visited, the church was empty. Outside, there were a few newly-wed couples in Western wedding garb who were out to have their pictures taken. As far as I could hear, they received their instructions from the photographers on how to pose in Cantonese.

The languages on the signage could not have been more different from the A-Ma Temple: inscriptions on the façade were also monolingual but monolingual in Portuguese rather than Chinese. Signs about the code of conduct came in three language combinations: Chinese-Only, Chinese-English and English-Chinese.

Signage relating to the spiritual life of the church was either predominantly in Chinese or English, with one or the other language predominating and a few expressions in the other interspersed. To my great surprise, I also discovered some Latin slogans on devotional cards. A collection box, which looked quite old and featured Portuguese, Chinese and English suggests that the English presence in Macau predates the tourism boom and globalized signage of the past decade.

Mandarin House

Trilingual poster at the Mandarin House about 盛 世 危 言 (Warning to a Prosperous Age)

The so-called “Mandarin House” is another UNESCO World Heritage listed building. It used to be the residence of the Qing dynasty reformer Zheng Guanying. When we visited, the building was deserted and other than the attendants we were the only people present making it a very serene space. Information and prohibition signs were relatively standardized and trilingual in Chinese, Portuguese and English although some prohibition signs were more haphazard and contained only Chinese and English.

What was most interesting was the posters about Zheng Guanying’s book Words of Warning to a Prosperous Age (Shengshi weiyan 盛 世 危 言). What little information about the book I could gather from the information panels suggests that it is a highly relevant text for Intercultural Communication Studies. One website sums up the argument as follows:

As a famous reformer of late Qing China, Zheng Guanying was the earliest advocate of representative and participatory political system in the 1870s, the earliest to call for “commercial warfare ” against Western economic imperialism, and one of the earliest to seriously study international law and its relevance to China’s national identity and foreign relations. He was also one of the earliest Chinese to emphasize the combination of Western medicine and Chinese medicine.

His ideas continue to be highly influential in contemporary China and a translation of Shengshi weiyan would be highly desirable. Unfortunately, I have not been able to discover an English translation. I hope this is not another case of “no translation;” if it is, a translation would be highly desirable not only for Chinese Studies but also for Intercultural Communication Studies.

Casinos

Official trilingual “no smoking” sign

A discussion of the touristic linguistic landscape of Macau would not be complete without reference to the casinos because that is where most of the 30 million annual visitors are headed. I got to visit two of them: the Venetian, which is operated by the Las Vegas-based Sands corporation and is an imitation of the Las Vegas Venetian, and City of Dreams, a joint venture between the Macau casino dynasty Ho and the Australian billionaire James Packer. Before anyone gets the wrong idea, the gambling areas occupy only a relatively small part of the casinos and while that is obviously where the action is, I did not enter.

Casino resorts are intended to be spectacular and novel. The Venetian, for instance, looks like a cross between a baroque church and Venetian canals and plazas and City of Dreams features a huge fish tank with (digital) mermaids. However, when it comes to signage there is no trace of the spectacular and unique. In both casinos, commercial signage was completely standardized in the non-language of other global consumer spaces. Direction signs were also standardized in Chinese and English.

Portuguese, by contrast, only had a tiny presence on state-mandated signs, particularly the ubiquitous no-smoking signs, which are in Chinese, Portuguese and English. The biggest surprise were the emergency exit signs: they did not contain any English and were in Portuguese and Chinese only.

Linguistic Pragmatism

Analysts of multilingualism in Macau have described multilingualism in Macau as “an illusion” because official societal Chinese-Portuguese bilingualism is rarely undergirded by individual bilingualism. Indeed, all the people I had extended conversations with were either English speakers from Australia, UK and the USA or Putonghua speakers from Mainland China and Taiwan. With three exceptions none of these had learnt either of the two official languages (the exceptions being an American and a Tawainese who had learnt Cantonese and an Australian who had learnt Portuguese).

Despite the amazing multilingualism in the public signage it may thus well be that the various language communities largely keep themselves to themselves. The fact that each space I visited has its own language practices with regard to signage seems to point in the same direction. If so, it is a pragmatic approach that seems to work perfectly well as a way to manage linguistic diversity and public communication with multiple audiences.

Hiroshi Mikitani, Englishnization in Marketplace 3.0 (Source: gettyimages.co.uk)

The business and self-help section of my local Kinokuniya bookstore is currently featuring shelves and shelves of Marketplace 3.0: Rewriting the rules of borderless business by Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder and CEO of e-commerce giant Rakuten. I’m not a fan of books in the “how to improve your business” genre and mostly Marketplace 3.0 seems to be a (poorly written) run-of-the-mill text about empowering your business through KPIs. It is also the self-aggrandizing account of an egomaniac. However, the first chapter is absolutely unique to the genre as it is devoted to Rakuten’s language policy: entitled “Englishnization,” it describes how Mikitani decided in May 2010 from one day to the next, “without consulting anyone,” to change the company language from Japanese (and other national languages spoken in subsidiaries outside Japan) to English.

I had, of course, heard about the Rakuten English-Only language policy before in the media so I was keen to read the inside story and to learn what happened after the announcement. However, Mikitani tells the reader at length about his decision to introduce English but is rather coy about what happened next, particularly in the medium term. Mikitani imposed English so that communication within the company would be faster. Not surprising in a world where speed is money. But did it really work? Are they really faster at Rakuten because they speak English? Mikitani only says that the first board meeting after the introduction of English was twice as long as usual leaving the reader to assume that this slow-down was a one-off and communication has significantly sped up since.

How is communicating in English supposed to be faster than communicating in Japanese? To begin with, Mikitani argues that the need for linguistic mediation – translating and interpreting – falls away. Second, as employees gain confidence in English, they no longer send e-mails to the USA but pick up the phone and call. Finally, Mikitani believes that English communication is faster per se because it is supposed to be a more egalitarian language than Japanese and so employees are forced to stop prevaricating in the face of superiors.

“Englishnization” thus is a collection of more or less common language ideologies: linguistic diversity as a barrier to be overcome by an English-Only policy is a throw-back to the Tower of Babel myth and English as more direct is the stock-in-trade of popular forms of linguistic relativism.

So, how does such a radical language policy play out at Rakuten? Well, Mikitani is not saying. He says that Rakuten is much more widely known now because the English-Only policy caught the attention of the global media and even the Harvard Business School. But that is not really due to their English-Only policy per se but to a clever press release about it.

The only indicator of how English at Rakuten is going comes from the claim that 90% of employees had met the language test score required for their level within a year. The remaining 10% were excused because of the 2011 tsunami and given an extension. Personally, I’m guessing that most Rakuten employees had pretty good English to begin with and the few who hadn’t, well, they couldn’t do much about it. Language learning after all is time-consuming business.

That language learning takes time lies at the crux of evaluating a monolingual language policy: if you have a cohort of proficient speakers, then making them use the common language makes perfect sense but if you have to train them up first, then you are not only not speeding things up but slowing them down considerably. This point is unfortunately overlooked in many contemporary decisions to turn transnational institutions into English-Only institutions.

At a time when more and more transnational institutions, similarly to Rakuten, turn to English-Only an assessment of the effectiveness of the European Union’s multilingual provision is particularly timely. Having been committed to multilingual provision through translating and interpreting for many decades, the EU model is often dismissed as too costly and thus inefficient and unaffordable for other transnational organizations such as ASEAN.

Unfortunately, the dismissal of the EU’s multilingual language policy as costly and inefficient is wrong, as Gazzola and Grin explain in a new article in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics. They show that the EU’s language bill for translating and interpreting is Euro 1.1 billion per year. That may seem a lot until you see that this amounts to less than 1% of the EU’s annual budget of €147.2 billion. That means that the expenditure for the EU’s current multilingual language policy is €2.2 per person per year; about the price of a cup of coffee and clearly not so astronomical …

Despite this small amount, it is true that it would be even cheaper if the EU abolished all translating and interpreting and adopted an English-Only policy. Anyone advancing that argument has to bear in mind that the language costs would not be entirely eliminated because language services to make sure all those documents are well written and legally watertight would still be needed. Cost would shift from translators and interpreters to ghost-writers, copy-editors and proof-readers.

But the overall cost could still be brought down from one cup of coffee to say half a cup of coffee?

Well, no, actually not. Under an English-Only regime, most Europeans would be paying much, much more than the equivalent of a cup of coffee for linguistic provision. The British and the Irish would not be paying at all. Those 7% of continental Europeans who already speak “very good” English would not be paying, either. That leaves everyone else – around 80% of Europeans – out of pocket for English language learning if they wanted to exercise their democratic right to understand what is going on in the European parliament and to participate in the European project in any other way. The cost for those 80% of Europeans to bring their English up to scratch would be less for some (those who already have “good” or “modest” English) and astronomical for those adults who have no English – for all these individuals it would be much, much higher than is currently the case.

Turning language costs from a public expense to personal language learning expenses is, of course, totally unfair and undemocratic. Not only would it make participation in the European project contingent about an individual’s financial capacity to invest in language learning, it would also be unfair for continental vis-à-vis English native speakers in Ireland and the UK who would not have to invest in language learning. Already receiving huge language subsidies by everyone learning their language, they could completely withdraw from sharing the costs of linguistic provision in the EU.

Rakuten’s Englishnization includes a similar cost transfer from the company to employees: Mikitani made them learn English in their own time and at their own cost. Viewed this way, Englishnization is nothing more than a billionaire’s trick to socialize cost (language learning) to employees and privatise profits (derived from eliminating linguistic provision) to himself.

The evidence is clear: the EU’s multilingual provision is more cost-effective and fairer than an English-Only policy would be.

Every language policy maker in a multilingual environment should have a copy of Mazzola’s and Grin’s article on their desk.

Gazzola, M., & Grin, F. (2013). Is ELF more effective and fair than translation? An evaluation of the EU’s multilingual regime International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 23 (1), 93-107 DOI: 10.1111/ijal.12014

Different languages for different jobs in this Los Angeles restaurant

Are there language requirements for working in restaurants in Los Angeles? These two employment signs that I saw in the window of a sushi restaurant near UCLA suggests that you need English to wait tables and Spanish to work in the kitchen.

On the left, the English sign says ‘Experienced servers! Full or Part Time, Inquire Within’. On the right, the Spanish sign seeks ‘amigo con experiensia en cocina japonesa’ (‘friend^** with experience in Japanese cooking/cuisine’).

It makes sense for the sign about servers to be in English. English is the predominant language in the United States, and this restaurant is located in a largely white and Persian neighbourhood. Servers would have to be able to communicate in English to do their job adequately. But why is the second sign in Spanish? Is knowledge of Spanish necessary to work in the kitchen?

Language and labour market segmentation

By posting the ad for the kitchen job in Spanish and the server job in English, the restaurant is making a statement about the hierarchy of race, language, and nativity in the Los Angeles restaurant workforce. Restaurant worker advocacy group ROC United has found that in the US, white and native-born workers tend to be hired for better-paid positions in the ‘front of the house’ (areas where employees interact with customers), while immigrants and people of colour tend to work in low-pay, hazardous jobs in the back of the house.

The choice of language in these employment ads suggests that the restaurant owners expect back of the house workers to be Spanish-speaking immigrants. In Los Angeles, Mexican and Central American immigrants, many of whom are undocumented, are concentrated in back of the house jobs. This ethnic/racial niching extends even to restaurants in non-Latin American immigrant communities. Chinese restaurants in the dense Chinese ‘ethnoburbs’ to the east of the city will hire Mexican and Central American dishwashers and bussers, for example. The Los Angeles location of Ding Tai Fung, the Taiwan-based dumpling chain, has Latino kitchen workers wrapping their famous Shanghainese soup dumplings.

Speaking Spanish is not a requirement for working in the restaurant kitchen in the way that speaking English is a requirement for working as a server. Front of the house employees are expected to know enough English to do the type of linguistically complex performance that customers expect. While communication is important in the back of the house, one does not need to be fluent in English or Spanish to wash plates or wrap dumplings. That is part of the reason why one sees so many linguistically isolated immigrants in restaurant kitchen jobs.

Thinking sociologically about this, though, perhaps speaking Spanish is a requirement for back of the house work in Los Angeles. Waldinger (1998) suggests that as immigrants of a particular group get concentrated in particular sectors of particular industries, employers prefer not to hire workers from other groups because they have trouble fitting in:

‘Because of the language barrier, there are two jobs here (for blacks), if they are unskilled: shipping and sweeping the floor’. ‘Unless the blacks speak Spanish’, noted one furniture manufacturer, ‘we have a major problem’; another reported that language was an issue, not so much for management, but for ‘blacks dealing with Hispanics’; a third, who emphasized the need for cooperation and communication, went on to tell us that ‘the fact that our workforce is homogenous’ – they were all Mexican – ‘helps towards this communication’. Explaining why it was ‘difficult to hire blacks when you have a predominantly Hispanic workforce’, a hotel manager pointed to ‘discomfort with Latino influence. They don’t understand the language’.

Employers’ stereotypes of Latin American workers and hiring within migrants’ social networks compounds the effects of this implicit language requirement. Social and linguistic barriers to employment initiated a path dependent process by which more immigrants of a similar cultural and linguistic background came to be employed in the same types of jobs. The result is a workforce that is highly stratified by race, ethnicity, class, and language. Spanish-speaking immigrants occupy the bottom rung of the ladder, even in restaurants operated by  other non-white immigrants.

Note 1: The use of ‘amigo’ (friend) in the Spanish sign is an example of what Hill calls ‘mock Spanish’, a racist and racializing parody of Spanish in the Southwest. Used among non-Spanish speakers, ‘amigo’ refers specifically to men of Latin American origin. For example, someone who does not speak Spanish may call a Latin American origin man over by calling out, ‘Hey, amigo!’ (The feminine ‘amiga’ is not as common.) Though ‘amigo’ is definitely a holdover from mock Spanish, taken as a whole, the sign seems to be a genuine attempt at communication in Spanish with Spanish speakers. Hill argues that mock Spanish is generally used for comedic effect among native English speaking whites. However, other ethnic groups have also adopted it, using it to distance themselves discursively from Latin American immigrants, who are situated near the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
Waldinger, Roger (1998). The Language of Work in an Immigrant Metropolis Journal des anthropologues (72-73)

If you google images for “study abroad,” you get many pictures of inclusive-looking racially-diverse groups of people such as this one.

A persistent theme in research with international students in Australia is the tension between dreams of inclusion pre-departure and the experience of exclusion once in the country. In Kimie Takahashi’s ethnography with international students from Japan, for instance, participants often spoke about how their decision to study abroad was partly motivated by dreams of being part of a multicultural student body. Indeed, marketing materials for study abroad abound with images of groups of diverse students jointly engaging in study or leisure activities. Inclusiveness in such images is typically signalled by images of people who look racially different.

Participants in Takahashi’s research described elaborate fantasies of how they had imagined themselves being part of an international (in their case, that meant mostly ‘non-Japanese’ and sometimes also ‘non-Asian’) group of friends, hanging out in a cool café in Sydney and chatting away in their fluent English.

Unfortunately, in real life such scenarios hardly ever happened. Making friends, joining study groups, collaborating in diverse groups all turned out to be extraordinary difficult. This problem is not unique to the Japanese participants in Takahashi’s study but comes up again and again in research with international students: locals stick to them themselves and international students stick to their co-ethnics or other international students.

The campus advertising images of happily collaborating diverse student groups only seem to happen for the camera and fostering an inclusive culture on campus remains a vexing problem for universities. While there is a large body of advice aimed at individual international students (“Don’t be shy!” “Get over your lack of confidence!”), the actual production of international student exclusion on the micro-level of daily interactions remains poorly understood.

Maybe that is where internationalization can learn from Critical Race Theory.

A 2009 article published in the Harvard Educational Review (“Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate for Latina/o Undergraduates” by Tara Yosso, William Smith, Miguel Ceja and Daniel Solórzano) draws on the concept of “micro-aggression” to explain why Hispanic students at US elite universities share the experience of exclusion and isolation reported by international students at Australian universities.

“Micro-aggression” is a concept introduced by the psychiatrist Chester Pierce in the 1960s and refers to “subtle, innocuous, preconscious, or unconscious degradations, and putdowns, often kinetic but capable of being verbal and/or kinetic” (Yosso et al. 2009, p. x). In itself any act of micro-aggression may seem harmless but their cumulative effect over time can be deleterious: it causes stress, takes time and energy, and leads to an erosion of confidence and self-image. Can a concept developed to explain the exclusion of African Americans in workplaces of the 1960s be of any use to explain the exclusion of international students at contemporary universities?

As Yosso et al. show, the concept can certainly explain the exclusion of Hispanic students at US elite universities. In focus groups interviews, students spoke about their experiences of interpersonal relationships on campus. Everyone had a story to tell about subtle and not-so-subtle exclusions. The net result of many trivial interactions was a sense of non-belonging and a lack of feeling comfortable on campus, as one student explained:

I’m not really comfortable just being in the classrooms. Just going to class I feel the fact that I know that I’m different and I’m reminded of it every day . . . There’s me, a Black male and a Black female, and everybody else is White in my classroom. And me and those two Black individuals tend to sit together every session, every class session, whereas everybody else would just kind of tend to sit away from us. So as I put my book bag on the table, I would notice that the rest of the chairs would be empty while the other table would get crowded. It would be sixty people sitting at one table pushing each other off whereas I would be by myself sitting at my own table. […]The professor is talking and the whole time you’re thinking . . . Why doesn’t anybody sit here? (Yosso et al. 2009, p. x)

Experiences such as these made campus a stressful and exhausting place for Hispanic students in the study. They responded by withdrawing and by creating safe spaces with co-ethnics. The latter often led to accusations of self-segregations and so was an ambivalent strategy, too, even as it helped to ameliorate the acute sense of exclusion they experienced in the wider campus community.

In the 1960s, Chester Pierce had argued that the best defence against micro-aggression was the ability to recognize it and to defend promptly so as to reduce the cost of accumulation. That seems true of the Hispanic students in the study, too: their ability to recognize micro-aggressions as racist gave them the chance to create counter-spaces and, at the very least, to recognize that their exclusion was not their individual personal problem.

As regards international students, the racism inherent in micro-aggressions is often obscured by linguistic proficiency and the assumption that they are being excluded because their “English isn’t good enough.” Making micro-aggressions visible is thus a key task to create a more inclusive campus experience. As educators in internationalizing institutions we have a lot to learn from Critical Race Theory.

Tara J Yosso; William A Smith; Miguel Ceja; Daniel G Solórzano (2009). Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate for Latina/o UndergraduatesHarvard Educational Review, 79 (4)