Sunjoo Kim (middle) graduating from her Master of Research

Whenever I write an email to a professor, there is one question lingering in my mind: Should I say “Dr + Last Name” or just “First Name”?

It might look like a simple question, but it exemplifies a deeper cultural dilemma to me.

When I was in university back in Korea, a professor from the U.S. asked us to call him by his first name, not the last name or job title. I understood what I had to do, but was it easy for me? Not really. It took me a while to get used to it. This is because the culture of address terms is quite different in Korea.

In English, first names can be used regardless of age and hierarchical dynamics in relationships without causing offense. This, however, hardly happens in Korean unless they are close friends of the same age. To be specific, addressing someone older and superior by their first name is impossible, unless I want to pick a fight. Likewise, age and social hierarchy are the core elements that have been deeply rooted in Korean society, playing a salient role in the choice of address terms.

Instead of first names, Koreans tend to choose alternatives including kinship terms and professional titles. Kinship terms, such as unni (older sister, 언니) and oppa (older brother, 오빠) are extensively used to non-family members. Professional titles are used as a generic way to address someone politely. For example, I can call someone sacangnim (CEO, 사장님). It does not necessarily mean that he or she is the head of the company. Rather, it is one of the most neutral and polite titles I can use. All choices depend on the nature of the interpersonal relationship.

The complexity of the societal and cultural characteristics reflected in the use of address terms poses a significant challenge in translation. The challenge gets exacerbated in subtitle translation, combined with spatial and temporal limitations. Multiple layers of relational dynamics and cultural nuances can easily get lost and simplified in translation. In relation to this, for my Master of Research, I explored subtitle translation of Korean address terms.

More Than Meets the Eye: Indexical Analysis on Korean Address Terms in Subtitle Translation

Abstract: Cultural references are one of the most significant challenges in subtitle translation. One example is Korean address terms due to their complexity and multiple dimensions reflecting societal and cultural values in Korea. In this vein, this thesis investigates the translation of address terms in English subtitles of one Korean drama, within the theoretical framework of indexicality as conceptualised by Michael Silverstein (1976). Adopting power, solidarity and intimacy (Lee & Cho, 2013) as an analytical prism, the thesis examines the complex interplay of each dimension to construct the non-referential indexicality of the address terms. The drama, Misaeng (Incomplete Life), which portrays corporate settings where Korean societal cultural values are well-reflected, was chosen for the data set. Thirty cases of address terms within a variety of interpersonal relationships from the drama were chosen to explore the formulation of indexical meaning and how it is transferred into the English subtitles. By adopting qualitative analysis focusing on both linguistic and multimodal elements, results from the study underscore the dynamic fluctuations of indexicality depending on the contextual dimension of the interaction, which makes the translation challenging in reflecting this whole range of indexical meanings. This leads to the inevitable indexical meaning gaps between the original and the subtitles. However, non-linguistic elements contribute to understanding of the indexical meaning, which mitigates the limitations of linguistic translation. The findings indicate that, although the translation of Korean address terms has been domesticated to be aligned with the target culture, this practice of domestication may change in a direction to keep the cultural references as much as possible. This study suggests the need for a subtitle translation direction that can preserve indexicality for global audiences to have a better cross-cultural experience, with relevance to the global attention to Korean cultural products.

You can download and read the full thesis from here.

Translation helps bridge language barriers. With the global rise of Korean culture, now is the time to move towards a translation practice preserving the original cultural depth as much as possible. This will open global audiences’ eyes to the unseen layers and help them genuinely enjoy the culture, as there is so much more than meets the eye.

References

Lee, K., & Cho, Y. (2013). Beyond ‘power and solidarity’: Indexing intimacy in Korean and Japanese terms of address. Korean Linguistics, 15(1), 73-100. https://doi.org/10.1075/kl.15.1.04lee

Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. Meaning in anthropology. https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/Courses/ParisPapers/Silverstein1976.pdf

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!

***

‘The Glory’, a Korean drama, has ranked the top among the ten most watched TV and films since its release on March 10, 2023 on Netflix. The Glory has received 1.82 billion views on Weibo, the second largest Chinese social media platform at the time of writing this blog. Chinese youths, the largest group of Weibo members, are enthusiastic about discussing the plot, sharing their memes about this drama, and picking up popular terms for fandom communication.

Over the past two decades, Korean cultural products such as dramas, movies, music and dance, food, cosmetics etc. have gained worldwide popularity, and the global spread of Korean culture is known as Hallyu or Korean Wave (한류). Hallyu has been promoted by the South Korean government as cultural diplomacy and soft power projection since the 1997 financial crisis. The global promotion of Hallyu turns out to be a huge success. There are about 51.74 million population in South Korea, but the number of Hallyu community members reaches over 156 million people across the globe. China constitutes over half of the fan community with over 86 million.

As Hallyu emerges as a global cultural consumption among young people particularly in China, learning Korean has rapidly carved out a niche market for China’s youth to craft their subjectivities and produce bundles of skills. Mr. Bin He, a postgraduate student at Yunnan University under the supervision of Professor Jia Li, has conducted an ethnography with four Chinese university students on how relevant practices and discourses socialize Chinese youths to align themselves with learning Korean through self-study and out of class channels.

Even though China has the largest number of students learning English as a compulsory course, Chinese youths do not necessarily see English as the only source for empowerment and upward mobility. Chinese students who are economically and linguistically under-privileged find it more useful and easier to learn to speak ‘small languages’ (as we previously discussed here and here). This is exactly what happened to Bin’s participants who major in English but found it more desirable and promising to invest into learning Korean and dreamed of taking up Korean-related jobs.

Performing cool posture

Chinese youths develop their initial incentive to learn Korean because of their desire to get close to their Korean idols and their orientation to be part of a Korean-oriented consumption style. The digitization between China and South Korea facilitates such transnational communication. By subscribing to a paid app (about 5 $) per month, Chinese youths can get in contact with their Korean idols by listening to their voices or reading their updates online on a daily basis. They also choose to spend about 20$ collecting a Korean album imported from South Korea to show their distinct cultural taste.

Ming’s Weibo post

Their affective attachment to the Hallyu community gets closer through their interactions with other Hallyu fans on public and private social media platforms. Ming, one of Bin’s participants, has been learning Korean by himself for over six years. Like many Hallyu fans, Ming has developed basic Korean proficiency by watching Korean dramas and variety shows and listening to Korean songs. To test his Korean proficiency and to enhance his reading competence, Ming took up a volunteer job translating Korean idols’ stories into Chinese on Weibo for Chinese fans to keep updated with their idols. In addition to being recognized as a legitimate member of the Hallyu community because of his Korean proficiency, Ming also likes to share his consumption of Korean lifestyle on Weibo.

The screenshot captures Ming’s enjoyment with his friends drinking 참이슬 (“Chamisul”), the most popular brand of Korean liquor that frequently appears in Korean dramas, TV series, and variety shows. 참이슬 is recontextualized as symbolic source styling himself as someone cool and authentic. Using English ‘talk with’ indicates both modernity and the imagined engagement with the Korean world as Ming told us in interview: “感觉喝着烧酒，仿佛喝着烧酒就置身于韩剧中。” (“I feel like drinking soju, it’s like I’m physically in a Korean drama while drinking soju.”)

Consuming desire

Longing is one of the most featured themes in Korean dramas. The filming locations of hit Korean dramas are often promoted as must-go destinations for Chinese tourists travelling to South Korea. For Chinese youths who are living and studying in China, love stories constitute an important part of their romantic imagination as reported by Fang, a Chinese female university student: “想去首尔学习生活，去看看电视剧里出现的各种场景。” (“I dream of studying and living in Seoul. I want to visit the featured locations that appear in Korean dramas.”

Fang’s post

As someone who was born and brought up in the hinterland, Fang has grown up with the imagination of the sea, and the sea is often depicted as semiotic potential for romance in Korean dramas. Fang expressed her sense of attachment to 갯마을 차차차 (Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha), a romantic story in a small coastal village. She posted a moment on her Chinese social media in Korean: “아~듣기만 해도 바다 냄새 맡은 것 같애” (“Wow～ Just listening [to the song in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha] I feel like the smell of the sea”).

Fang’s sense of enjoyment and desire is also expressed by her semiotic and linguistic choices. Using tilde ‘～’ after ‘wow’ (아) emphasizes her desire and longing. The choice of using Korean indexes her sense of feeling distinct and unique compared to her Chinese peers who might understand English but who are unlikely to be able to read Korean.

Crafting a niche in learning Korean

Ad for Korean online classes

Both Ming and Fang started to learn Korean online through various apps after they had been exposed to Hallyu for some time. Their desire to seriously invest in learning Korean took a clearer form when they saw an ad for online classes:

Why learn a small language
Korean

• The most accessible second foreign language. You will be surrounded by Korean from the moment you turn on your app.

• There are about 70% of Chinese words in Korean. Korean is the language that sounds like ancient Chinese. Chinese students learning Korean do not start from zero.

• Cheap tuition fee for overseas study. The best choice for the working-class family.

• Advanced educational system with the combination of the East and the West and world-leading IT shipping industry, mass communication, e-sports etc. All of these advantages can provide Korean learners with more opportunities.

In contrast to the way Chinese youths learn English, learning Korean has been discursively constructed as ‘accessible’, ‘easy’, ‘affordable’ and ‘advanced’. This promotion discourse is particularly attractive to those who cannot afford to travel to Western countries and who are fed up with the exam-driven learning style in English. As confessed by Ming, “我就是不知道为什么我对好莱坞电影、美剧不感兴趣，我想可能是讨厌英语总是考试吧” (“I just don’t know why I didn’t have any interest in watching Hollywood movies or American TV series. I guess it’s because I was tired of taking English exam.”)

Feeling cosmopolitan

After two years of formal training at a language school, Ming decided to take the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK), and pursue her master’s degree in South Korea after her graduation from an English department in China. When she prepared her application documents, she worked as an English tutor for a Korean family where she taught two children English in Korean. Because of her capacity in Korean, Fang was able to communicate with the Korean mother about her children’s English performance, which in turn facilitated her Korean oracy. Over two years, Fang used the money she earned by working as an English teacher to pay for her Korean language test and tuition fee for Ewha Womans University.

Fang’s chat

In September 2022, Fang started her postgraduate study online due to the restricted travel policy and the Covid-19 pandemic. Fang was eager to go to South Korea and socialize with local people to fulfill her Korean dream. While doing her online classes, she liked to share with her WeChat friends her Korean learning experiences.

The image in Fang’s chat shows the official promotion image of her Korean university with the blooming cherry flowers and one of its famous buildings. By re-posting this world-famous university, Fang also displays her privileged access to advanced education in Seoul, a cosmopolitan city with all her imagination for study and lifestyle in South Korea, as commented by her post “나한테 이게 학교아냐 자유다” (“To me, this is not only a school but also freedom.”) It is worth noting that Fang’s choice of studying in South Korea is partly due to her unwillingness to follow a planned life trajectory by working as an English teacher in her hometown like her peers. Despite her parents’ disagreement with her decision, Fang gave up working as an English teacher and chose to take the risk of investing into an unknown future with Korean.

Becoming entrepreneurial

Apart from desire and cosmopolitanism, Hallyu also displays a strong embodiment of neoliberal discourse upon individuals. Both Ming and Fang have been nurtured by entrepreneurial discourses while exposing themselves to Hallyu. Self-entrepreneurial ethos prevails in many Korean songs, books, and movies. Growing up with Hallyu for over 10 years, Chinese fans have witnessed the ups-and-downs of their idols and have been encouraged by their positive and never-give-up spirits, as Ming shared: “一直喜欢她(Taeyeon),我能从她身上看到许多积极的能量，情绪低落的时候，我就会听听她的歌或是刷刷她舞台表演的视频。” (“I’ve been one of Taeyeon’s fans. I can sense her positive power. When I’m feeling down, I would like to listen to her songs or watch her dancing performance.”)

Ming recalled his struggling experiences when he prepared for his postgraduate entrance exam. For over a year, Ming had to fight alone given that most of his classmates decided to look for a job and very few people including his parents understood his emotional struggles. By listening to Taeyon’s songs, Ming felt understood and comforted. Ming drew strength from witnessing Taeyon’s confrontation with suicide. Taeyon’s re-fashioning herself as someone overcoming her depression became a mental power for Ming to draw from in his own struggles in a competitive and stressful society.

Fang’s post about her Korean readings

Self-regulated and self-enterprising discourses are often circulated on Fang’s social media. Apart from signing up for a gym club and following a healthy lifestyle, Fang also likes to share her reflection on reading Korean novels. The caption about the images of the books she’s reading says: “One section a day; 43 days to finish the book; a story book on life experiences for the youth.”

By purchasing imported reading materials from South Korea, Fang said that she could kill two birds with one stone: enhancing her Korean reading capacity while enriching her life experiences. The philosophical statements of life experiences in the book are mainly self-enterprising and self-driven as indicated by her underlined notes like “너에게 주어지는 기대에 합당한 자기관리를 시작해” (“Start taking care of yourself and meet your expectations”) or “값진 자아 반성 시간” (“the valuable time of self-reflection”).

Navigating between freedom and precarity

Language learning in the digital economy is not problem free. Despite their aspiration to manage their life trajectory through neoliberal promises, Chinese youths find themselves constantly navigating between their desired freedom and structural constraints.

One of the problems that hinder their desire to invest in learning Korean is their lack of time. Chinese youths keep their strong connection with Hallyu but they find it hard to keep learning Korean as learning a language requires consistent and systematic devotion. As English majors at university, they are kept busy by taking exams and getting various certificates to enhance their employment prospects. Two of Bin’s participants imagined that they would have more time for themselves to pick up Korean after they started to work as English teachers in future.

For those who squeeze time and save money to take the TOPIK, their devotion to learning Korean may suffer from anti-Hallyu sentiments due to the diplomatic disputes between China and South Korea. Over the past three decades, the surge of Hallyu has also coincided with several waves of anti-Hallyu movements in China. Ming’s diligence and persistence in learning Korean is not recognized but misunderstood by populist nationalists as “媚韩” (literally, “flattering South Korea”), meaning betraying China and showing allegiance to South Korea.

Publicity shot of Korean star Taeyeon

For Fang who is receiving her master’s degree in South Korea, she is confronted with high living expenses in Seoul and thinking of returning to China to settle down. However, when it comes to her future employment prospect in China, Fang seems to lack of confidence. For one thing, she does not think she can compete against ethnic Korean Chinese for a job position in teaching Korean to Chinese students. For another, her master’s degree in TKSOL is not as desirable as an English major to secure an English teaching position.

By the time of writing up this blog, two of Bin’s participants had to give up learning Korean because of their overwhelming workload and new identity as English teachers. Only Fang and Ming still kept learning Korean. As noted, Fang is doing her master’s degree in South Korea, and Ming has just got a job offer from a Chinese multinational automotive subsidiary targeting the South Korean market. After several months of training, Ming will be sent to South Korea to work for this Chinese company in South Korea.

This study has provided a nuanced understanding of Chinese youths’ Korean language learning experiences in the context of emerging Asian pop culture and digitization. Chinese youths’ learning of Korean is not driven by pragmatic pursuits or academic pressures, but largely rooted in their desire to be part of the Hallyu community. Growing up with Hallyu and learning Korean opened up new spatial and affective imaginations for them to capitalize on their performance and cultural consumption that traverse national boundaries in our digital age. Despite having access to Hallyu and learning Korean through new technological affordances, their pursuit of Korean-related subjectivities gets inculcated with the affective facets of language learning activities rooted in the neoliberal logic of self-management, human capital development and surging populist nationalism.

Related content

Li, J. (2020). Foreign language learning for minority empowerment? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/foreign-language-learning-for-minority-empowerment/
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Ma, Y. (2020). Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/empowerment-of-chinese-muslim-women-through-arabic/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

King Sejong also was interested in jurisprudence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

Top 10 languages other than English spoken in England and Wales, 2011 (Source: ONS)

Modern languages are not merely European languages. Obvious as this may seem, it needs restating as I discovered when attending a Westminster Education Forum devoted to “The future of Modern Foreign Languages in Higher Education” in London earlier this year.

The Westminster Education Forum targets policy makers, educational practitioners and academics to share thoughts on issues related to education in the UK. Attended by colleagues teaching “Modern Foreign Languages” in the UK, the focus of the event was staunchly on French, Italian, Spanish – in short, on European languages. As a university educator of Korean, I found this Eurocentrism somewhat surprising and alienating.

While it is true that the provision of Asian language teaching in the UK is poor compared to European languages, we urgently need to have a discussion as to whether this should not change.

To begin with, the linguistic landscape in the UK has radically changed. According to the 2011 Census, after Polish the next five main spoken languages other than English are Asian: Panjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati and Arabic. This means that the majority of languages other than English spoken in the UK are no longer European languages but Asian languages. This is in line with migration demographics: The 2011 Census also showed that about a third of the foreign-born population identified as Asian/Asian British (33%, 2.4 million). Until now, however, this linguistic and demographic change has not been significantly reflected in national language teaching.

Most important “languages for the future” according to British Council

Furthermore, Asian languages figure prominently among the most important languages for the UK in terms of trade, diplomacy, and security. According to a 2013 British Council Report, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Turkish and Japanese are the ten most important “languages for the future” in the UK. Korean is ranked 14th in this report.

Unfortunately, language teaching policies are lagging behind. The UK government is only now starting to recognise the importance of Asian languages. For instance, the Mandarin Excellence Programme was launched in 2016 with the aim to deliver a minimum of 5,000 fluent speakers of Mandarin by 2020. This is a very positive move and awareness of the importance of Asian languages now needs to spread to other languages, too.

In my work as Associate Professor of Korean Linguistics at Oxford University, I work towards this goal together with the Korean Embassy. In collaboration with exam boards we work to include Korean as one additional option among the modern foreign languages in the GCSE. However, we sense a reluctance from some exam boards and publishers that is difficult to understand.

The Westminster Forum event was another occasion where a lot of effort was put into the – undoubtedly important – promotion of European language learning. However, why should this have to mean that non-European languages have to be given the cold shoulder? As we reconceptualze the UK’s multilingualism as a national asset, surely all languages have a role to play?

Language Lovers Blogging Competition 2017

If you liked this post, don’t forget to vote for Language on the Move in the 2017 Language Lovers blogging competition over at the ba.bla voting page! Voting closes on June 06.

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• Kimie Takahashi, English and ASEAN

Panel devoted to Jeju Global Education City (Source: Jeju Weekly)

Now that Psy’s “Gangnam Style” has become a global hit, I wonder if you know what Gangnam is? The dictionary definition of ‘Gangnam’ is the southern part of Seoul – the capital of South Korea – but in actuality ‘Gangnam’ is much more than a place name: it refers to the most affluent and exclusive area of the country. “Tower Palace,” a luxury residential apartment complex, is the pinnacle of its exclusivity. Built in the most prestigious section of the Gangnam district by Samsung between 2002 and 2004, it is literally a palace, in that its occupants are among the wealthiest and the buildings are equipped with amazing amenities ranging from a library, spas, a golf range, banks, and, yes, high-end boutique shops such as Channel.

Education is part of Gangnam’s attraction: South Korea’s best schools are located in Gangnam. And that includes English-language education. Gangnam parents are wholeheartedly devoted to their children’s English education, as English proficiency is a key status marker in 21^st-centry Korea. They led the trend of sending children abroad for English learning (known as jogi yuhak) either alone or accompanied by their mothers as guardians beginning in late 1990s. The number of jogi yuhak children, which peaked at 27,331 in 2008, has been on the wane since 2009. Apart from the Global Financial Crisis, family breakups as well as readjustment issues found among the first-generation returnees are cited as reasons behind the decline.

Undeterred, Gangnam parents are now setting a new trend in English education of Korea: they have found a way to immerse their children in an English-Only environment without actually going abroad. English language immersion is now available on Jeju Island, the country’s largest island. As part of Korea’s globalization drives, the government launched 940-acre Jeju Global Education City, a self-contained community, in 2011. Designed as an English-only district, there are currently three international schools operating within Jeju Global Education City.

Tuition fees in Jeju Global Education City are hefty. If accommodation is included, parents pay between 31,000 and 48,000 US dollars per year for schooling there.

Despite these high fees parents have little control over their child’s education once they are enrolled in a school in Jeju Global Education City. A recent report on a bullying case in one of the three schools there exposes what happens behind the ambitious global education project. The family of a victim student, who had been bullied by his roommate for one and a half years, was helpless at the school’s inaction. While that may not be unusual, what is unusual is that the victim’s family could not take this matter to the Korean education authorities or to police, since the school is “international” in nature and thus not subject to the Korean laws. International schools operating in Jeju have neither internal dispute settlement systems nor a teacher-parent committee to discuss such issues as bullying, as such measures are merely recommended, not required. As is the case in other countries, the Korean anti-bullying regulations stipulate that primary, middle, and high schools put in place an anti-school violence committee composed of various education stakeholders of whom parents should take up a majority. In the absence of such schemes, parents take to the media to air their grievances.

The absence of a requirement to follow Korean laws is even more extraordinary when one considers that the Korean government made a huge financial commitment to woo foreign schools to Jeju. For example, North London Collegiate School Jeju is committed to pay 56 million US dollars in royalty to their parent school North London Collegiate School in the U.K. over the next 21 years. In fact, the government even promised to find money from tax revenues (paid by all citizens) in case the school (which caters to a tiny elite who can afford to send their children there) runs into deficit.

The bullying cases reported above occurred in an extraordinary constellation of a globalization-driven Korean government, commercialized international schools, and education-obsessed parents. Who is the ongoing expansion of Western schools in Asia actually serving? As seen in the Jeju case, international schools even get away with not protecting the children in their care from harm as they are granted exclusive powers to resolve any ‘internal’ matters.

Whether you can afford going Gangnam style or not, it is a losing game for everyone in South Korea. In their search for exclusivity, Gangnam parents have ended up being excluded from their children’s education in the island. As for non-Gangnam parents who work hard to pay for their children’s extracurricular English education on land, they are doing so without realizing that their hard-earned money might only fatten the pockets of schools faraway.

University rankings drive the Englishization of global academia

The Intercultural Communication Special Interest Group of the British Association of Applied Linguistics is hosting a seminar at Newcastle University next week devoted to “Intercultural Communication in Higher Education – principles and practices.” Given that internationalization of higher education is all the rage internationally, the seminar could not be more timely. I am one of the invited speakers and, as I cannot be there in person, have just finished recording my lecture about the “Englishization” of global higher education.

I use the term “Englishization” to refer to the spread of English as medium of instruction in institutions of higher education in non-Anglophone countries. A recent case study of English as medium of instruction in higher education in South Korea, particularly at the elite university KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), demonstrates that the pursuit of “global excellence” as expressed through a high rank in global university rankings is a key driver behind the expanding use of English as medium of instruction (Piller & Cho 2013).

University rankings are based on assessments of four broad areas: research and publications, learning environment, reputation of graduates, and internationalization. Of these four areas only ‘learning environment’ is a language-independent variable. It measures things like infrastructure and student-teacher ratio.

The fact that measurement of ‘research and publication,’ usually the most heavily-weighted criterion, is language-dependent is well-known: the most highly ranked journals (as measured by being indexed or having an impact factor) are predominantly published in Anglophone countries and, even if published elsewhere, tend to use English as their medium of publication. Reputation of graduates, too, is language-dependent as it is usually measured through surveys of the HR departments of international corporations where English is widely used.

Here I want to focus on ‘internationalization.’ While ‘internationalization’ is usually the assessment area with the lowest weighting, it is an important aspect of any institution’s strategy to improve its ranking because it is relatively easy to manipulate. Notching up points for ‘internationalization’ takes much less time than to improve research, the learning environment or the reputation of graduates. And achieving a quick jump in rankings through improved internationalization from one year to the next will have flow-on effects on the measurement of research (where reputation also plays a huge role, as evidenced by attempts to influence research reputation votes such as this one by University College Cork) and graduate reputation.

So how is an institution’s ‘internationalization’ measured? In the Korean rankings explored by Piller & Cho (2013), there were four measurements:

• The proportion of foreigners among a university’s teaching staff
• The number of international students
• The number of exchange students
• The proportion of English-medium lectures

Internationalisation is therefore both directly and indirectly language-dependent: the proportion of English-medium lectures is a direct measurement of language; measurements of foreigners among students and faculty are indirectly language-dependent as foreign faculty are more likely to lecture in English than Korean and as the presence of foreign students (even if they are almost exclusively from other non-Anglophone countries, particularly China) is – in circular logic – used as a further justification for the ‘need’ to have English as medium of instruction.

In sum, the desire to perform well on national and international university rankings pushes for English as a medium of instruction in a number of direct and indirect ways. University rankings are phenomenally influential: students base their decisions on where to seek admission on university rankings, governments base their funding decisions on university rankings, the public increasingly understand the value of academia based on university rankings. In that sense, increasing the use of English as medium of instruction is a rational strategy for a university as it has consequences for its position on university rankings. Sadly, in the rush to compete no one seems to have taken pause to reflect on the intrinsic value of the measurements that go into university rankings. Does the proportion of foreigners, for instance, really mean anything much other than, well, the proportion of foreigners?

The benefits to an individual institution of performing highly on university rankings are obvious. The costs of academic competition usually remain hidden. However, there are significant social costs attached to the Englishization of global academia. Here on Language on the Move we have recently discussed the transfer of the burden of language learning from society to the individual; increased social stratification as those who can afford private tuition in English will enjoy better access to higher education than those who cannot; and the damage done to critical inquiry if the medium is more important than the message. Cho (2012) adds educational costs as teachers may feel insecure, or lack proficiency and confidence when teaching in English or students may simply find lectures delivered in English incomprehensible.

All this raises a key question about Englishization and internationalization: What is the meaning of ‘excellence’ if it does not involve service to the common good?

Cho, J. (2012). Campus in English or campus in shock? English Today, 28 (02), 18-25 DOI: 10.1017/S026607841200020X
Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy Language in Society, 42 (01), 23-44 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887

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.

Jogiyuhak (early study abroad) is very popular in South Korea (Source: chosun.com)

Readers of Language on the Move will be familiar with South Korea’s English fever, the sweeping zeal for learning English. Parents enrol children in English medium-preschools, arts and sports classes, nursery schools with native-speaking English staff, toddler gyms with English speaking trainers, or hire English-speaking babysitters to talk to their baby in English. Pregnant mothers read an English storybook, attend English medium church services or listen to online English courses for prenatal education in hopes that their foetus will hear and absorb English. Some parents drag their child to a clinic to have tongue surgery, snipping the membrane under the tongue, on the assumption that they will then be able to pronounce the r-sound better.

In short, Koreans are obsessed with English, particularly with native-like fluency and accent.For Koreans who have limited English skills, English proficiency means native-like accent and fluency and the key to this is starting early and being around English speakers. Children’s study abroad, jogiyuhak, is the perfect embodiment of the belief in early exposure in a native environment. While it is often said that Korea’s examination-obsessed education system and intense competition is another reason for early study abroad decisions, the overarching goal is to achieve a native level of English proficiency. More precisely, their ultimate aspiration is to add perfect English to their presumably impeccable Korean.

My first encounter with an early-study-abroad student dates back to the days when I was doing my master’s degree in TESOL as a ‘late’-study-abroad student in Sydney. It was for the first time in my life I was sitting in two hour-long academic lectures in English and I missed much of the lecturer’s instruction. I thought that my problem was normal for an adult international student from Korea who had hardly experienced such a situation before. After the class, I went up to another Korean student, I’ll call her Jenny, and said, in Korean, of course: “It’s hard to understand the lecturer, isn’t it?” Jenny’s response was surprising, “No. I’m used to listening to lectures.” Oh, was this only my problem? To my relief, she added that she had completed her bachelor degree in Australia. Yeah! I was not abnormal after all!

Later on I found out more about Jenny’s background. She had come to Australia at age 16 and had joined a private high school as a boarder, spending a total of eight years in Australia before starting her master’s degree. Soon I started to notice that Jenny often missed the point of an argument or presented irrelevant ideals in informal discussions with other Korean international students. It was obvious that she frequently did not understand the subject of discussions. In addition, she did not understand some words that we were using in discussions, which we had learnt from books or through formal education. These language problems in her ‘mother tongue’ presumably resulted from the fact that she had been absent from the Korean curriculum and other Korean literacy contexts. So, there was a formal Korean register she either forgot or had never learnt.

This observation led me to ponder the role of literacy in language development. The absence of Korean education during jogiyuhak would mean an interruption to the development of formal and literate varieties in Korean.

Well, you might say that stunted Korean is the price Jenny had to pay for her high level of English. However, it did not take long before I found out that, even if listening to a two-hour lecture in English was not arduous to her, her level of understanding of the class contents was not enough to fulfill subject assignments. Jenny often had to ask her Korean classmates, including myself, about concepts and terminologies and she sought assistance with her assignments. I should acknowledge that she wasn’t hiding her difficulties and was straightforward enough to tell everyone that she wrote her essays by cutting and pasting from other texts and that her boyfriend helped her.

Jenny’s struggle with academic English reminded me of Cummins (2000), who argues for the need to distinguish conversational fluency from academic language proficiency, noting that despite their seeming fluency in English, the level of migrant students’ academic achievement is usually far behind their local peers. He suggests that the students may attain age-appropriate levels of conversation fluency within two years. However, it takes at least five to seven years to reach grade-level academic proficiency in English. Furthermore, this does not necessarily mean that migrant students eventually catch up to grade norms after five to seven years. Rather, during that time of language learning students’ academic performance is most likely impeded due to language barriers. This long period of language impairment of migrant students has significant implications for their overall academic development and their preparation for the worlds of employment and citizenship.

My own PhD research on Korean students’ early study abroad and bilingualism in Australia sheds further light on these issues. Many of my research participants reported that they were constrained to select learning areas such as Mathematics and Sciences in which reading and writing was less demanding compared with humanities subjects. So, ironically, early study abroad placed a severe constraint on pursuing language-related areas of inquiry: those who might have had more aptitude for heavily language-dependent fields in the humanities and social sciences were not able to pursue those areas of study in English. Consequently, their choice of careers in Business and IT was linguistically constrained.

To put it differently, early study abroad seems to be more favorable to those with an aptitude for and an interest in these less-language-dependent areas.

On the other hand, the language barriers and impeded adaptation can also mean that early-study-abroad students lose interest in studying. Some of my participants accordingly were regretful that they had come to Australia where they felt they had been transformed from academic high achievers into students with no interest in academic work.

Overall, early study abroad or submersion into English monolingual education in an English-speaking environment seems to entail the under-development of linguistic repertoires in both languages. Most participants revealed that they felt that neither language was fully developed or that they were not as good as a native speaker of either language. This resulted in a sense of confusion and feelings of discomfort. Consequently, they reported difficulties in interactions with speakers of both languages and a sense of not knowing where to belong.

Sending children overseas is costly but many Koreans believe that early study abroad will bring their children advantages outweighing those enormous expenses. While the assessment of the outcome is an individual one, as young adults many of my research participants, whether they continue to reside in Australia or have returned to Korea, struggle to find their place – maybe more so than those who never left?

Cummins, Jim (2000). Language, power and pedagogy: bilingual children in the crossfire, Multilingual Matters

Australia in Asia (Source: unitingworld.org.au)

Since starting a PhD in February in a different field to my previous work, I’ve been running a weekly alert with the words “language” and “Australia” to see what was around. That’s when I discovered a key theme in linguistics in public discourse in Australia, and that is the need for “Asia literacy”.

“Australia must boost Asian language learning!”

Almost every week since February there has been an article, mostly in an Australian media source but also, as in the heading above, from the country’s Asian neighbours in Indonesia and India, lamenting Australia’s declining enrolments in Asian languages. Other headlines read: “Australia needs to break out of language cocoon”, “Loss of Indonesian expertise poses security risk” , “Australia lagging in learning a second language”, “Foreign Affairs staff have a French accent”, “Australia should send Hindi-speaking diplomats to India: Expert”,  “Asian literacy critical to children” , “In the right place but lost for words”. This media attention is the result of the commission and imminent release of the Australian Government’s White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century. Furthermore, significant political figures such as the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his deputy Julie Bishop have made their commitment to Asian language learning public in the last twelve months (“Asian Language Should be Mandatory for Australian Schoolchildren Julie Bishop Says”, “Abbott Accuses Government of Playing Class War Card”).

The same old story

But on closer inspection it seems that this theme is not new. In his book The Politics of Language in Australia Ozolins notes that Asian literacy was first considered a problem by the Australian Ambassador to Japan, Alan Watt, in the 1950s. He was clearly before his time as it was not until the 1990s that the then Labour government committed to Asian languages in the form of the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools (NALSAS) program. This was then discontinued by the Howard government two years before the funding was supposed to run out. The Rudd/Gillard government reinvented the program as the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Scheme (NALSS) from 2008 to 20012. Both programs focused on four ‘strategic’ languages, namely Mandarin, Indonesian, Korean and Japanese, and the rationale for choosing these languages came directly from figures from the Department of Trade, rather than from numbers of speakers in the community.

Who are the Australians who need to learn Asian languages?

So it seems that suggesting Australians learn another language, and particularly an Asian language, in order to increase our job skills (note the continued focus on the diplomatic service in the headlines above) has a lot of currency in our public discourse today and indeed over the last sixty years. But who are the imagined language learners here? When the numbers of students studying Mandarin is referred to in the debate, there is often reference to the fact that many of them come from a Chinese ethnic background, as though this dilutes the strength of the numbers (e.g., “Australians Falling Behind in Asian Language Education”). Can it be that these young people, whose “ethnic” background should in no way lead us to assume any knowledge of Mandarin, given the diversity of languages in China as well as the diversity of language practices in migrant homes , do not “count” as normal Australians in the debate?

“Ethnic” Asians do not count

Indeed, despite the fact that NALSAS and its successor mention drawing on the considerable population of speakers of the four strategic languages as potential language learners, as Susana Eisenchlas  and others have pointed out here on Language on the Move, often this group is seen as a problem for language learning. When Ms Bishop is quoted as saying “It would be a brilliant form of soft diplomacy if we had a large body of people in Australia who were able to speak an Asian language,” my immediate response is that, “Actually, we do! … but they are clearly not the Australians you have in mind!”

Rather than acknowledging the linguistic diversity in Australia (as evidenced by the 2011 census results), this imagined group of learners are homogenous in their English-speaking  (Anglo-Celtic?) Australianness . Rather than seeing it as a tale of failure to provide bilingual education for a diverse population, the comments on imagined learners in the Asian literacy debate construct a world of learning which is uni-directional; from the Australian classroom outwards to the world of foreign diplomacy. And rather than building on and supporting the use of these four languages (and others) in many thousands of Australian families, this approach values these skills so little they are not even a salient part of the debate. For those who genuinely believe in more language education in Australia, we must start by acknowledging, appreciating and supporting the diversity of potential language learners themselves, rather than harking back to a mythical White monoculture which masks our true diversity.

“Imported Teacher”, the British Council’s new campaign in Thailand

As a language educator in Thailand my in-box is always full of invitations to conferences devoted to ASEAN and English language teaching. At such conferences, keynote speakers from the UK or the US make similar, if not identical, arguments for the importance of English as a lingua franca in the linguistically diverse ASEAN region. Their trump card is normally the economic value of English.

For example, at a seminar I attended recently in Bangkok, an American TESOL celebrity told an audience of Thai English teachers that: “English-speakers earn THREE times more than non-English speakers” [capitalization original to her Powerpoint slide]. This was a fact, she assured us, by referring to a report about English in the Middle East and North Africa. Commissioned by the British Council, the report claims that English-speaking receptionists in a city such as Bagdad in Iraq can earn three times more than their non-English-speaking counterparts. It’s impossible to determine the sample size but the results are based on 50 job ads for all kinds of professions. Only receptionists have a three-fold earning differential. To generalize on the basis of a handful of job ads for receptionists in Baghdad to a global assertion is, well, problematic, to put it mildly …

Propaganda such as this result in a single-minded wave of English fever. Of course, this is not unique to Thailand – Japan, South Korea and many other Asian nations also have their hearts set firmly for English. But it is important to ask ourselves if such a narrowly focused belief in the power of English – based as it is on questionable data and assumptions – is a good thing for Thailand and for its ASEAN project. The reality of ASEAN nations today are the ever-increasing flows of people and businesses from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds; in such a fluid transnational space, chances are that languages other than English are more useful or more realistic choices.

Let me illustrate this point by an example of a major Japanese company in Thailand. This company is considering providing English lessons for their Thai drivers, whose job it is to drive expat Japanese employees and their families stationed in Bangkok. Most of these Thai drivers speak poor English. As many of the Japanese employees and their families themselves have limited English proficiency, communication between the two parties is rather constrained.

A Japanese expat wife, whose husband works for this company, told me that she was scared of asking the driver to drive her and her children to their school in the morning. Because they don’t have a language in common, a number of failed communications have led to mistrust between them. Funded by her husband’s company, she’s learning English at a school in Bangkok, but with only a one-hour lesson per week she’s making little progress. Frustrated, her family’s decision to solve this problem with the driver was rather unique – they moved next to their children’s school.

The ideology of English as ‘useful’ is obviously implicit in the company’s consideration of providing English lessons for their drivers. It seems to keep the company from considering a more efficient option: teaching Japanese to the Thai drivers and Thai to the Japanese expats. In addition to such lessons where they can learn basics, both groups will get many daily practice opportunities with each other.

Increasing numbers of Japanese restaurants are opening in Bangkok

Despite last year’s flooding that affected over 450 Japanese companies in Thailand, more Japanese companies are planning to launch their business here. According to Teikoku Data Bank (2011), 3,133 Japanese companies are registered in Thailand, and approximately 37,000 expats (plus approx. 13,000 non-company worker Japanese) are sent from Japan to work in this country. According to some Japanese expats and business owners I’ve met, they need not English-speaking but Japanese-speaking Thais or Japanese-Thai translators. While they also pay lip-service to the importance of English and are often forced to use English, they would actually prefer to use Japanese in business negotiations and feel much more at ease in the presence of Japanese-speaking Thai interpreters. According to one consulting company, the demand for Thai-Japanese interpreters is on the rise. However, they are difficult to find. Actually, Japanese-Thai interpreters can easily earn much higher salaries than English-Thai interpreters!

For instance, a newly opened Japanese restaurant hired a Japanese-speaking Thai waiter and his starting salary is 40,000 baht – four times more than his non-Japanese speaking co-workers, twice as much as that of my English-speaking Thai friend working for an international education firm in Bangkok, and close to that of a foreign lecturer with a PhD at a reputable university in Bangkok.

Furthermore, one Japanese expat working for a major Japanese company told me that English is often not the preferred choice of language among their increasing number of Korean and Chinese clients operating in Thailand. For instance, a Japanese expat, Ken, whom I met recently, had a meeting with a Korean expat businessman in Bangkok. Ken began his meeting by greeting in Korean (Ken is Japan-born Korean with basic Korean proficiency) and mostly used Thai and sometimes English during the meeting as his Korean client speaks good Thai but cannot speak English. He had a Thai secretary who translated Ken’s ‘no-so-perfect Thai’ into ‘proper’ Thai to her Thai-speaking Korean boss.

For Thailand to be competitive in ASEAN and the global economy, English will continue to be of importance, of course. However, it seems short-sighted and dangerous to ignore other languages. As Thailand prepares for the launch of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 and as it strives to attract foreign investments from ASEAN Plus Three nations Japan, China and South Korea, the importance of a workforce that speaks their languages is paramount.

The need for more diverse language education and its link to employment needs to be based on empirical research evidence of the emerging language needs of international employers actually operating in Thailand in order to achieve positive policy change. Currently, this evidence doesn’t exist – a blind spot created by the relentless propaganda for English.

Mehrsprachige Buecher – multilingual books – ketabhaye chand zabane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eatery on Kat Hing St, Wuhan, site of Chi Li’s Life Show (Source: city.ifeng.com)

I am very much looking forward to attending the Intercultural Literacy, Communication, and Competence in the Context of Multiculturalism Conference at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan in November this year. I’ve never been to Wuhan before (nor anywhere else in China) and what I usually do before going anywhere is read. I’ve asked my students and colleagues from China for recommendations, and as soon as I mention Wuhan, they’ve all said: “Chi Li! You have to read Chi Li’s novel about a restaurant owner in Wuhan.”

I’d heard the advice a couple of times but googling “Chi Li” turned out to be easier said than done, particularly as I had a summary of the plot of her most famous novel but no title. I asked around some more among the Chinese I know, wondering whether there was a translation into English and the answer I received was “Of course! She’s very famous. Her work has been translated into many languages.”

So, I asked for “Chi Li” in Chinese characters and then googled “池莉” – restricted to English-language sites, of course, as I can’t read Chinese. This way I found the Wikipedia entry for Chi Li although it’s only a stub and disappointingly short. However, at least I found out the English title of the novel I was after this way: Life Show. The Wikipedia link from “Chi Li” to “Life Show” however did not bode well: “Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name” it says.

No matter, I now had the author and the English title and so I should have found the book in a matter of a few clicks. It wasn’t to be. In a blog post on ilookchina I learnt why:

Although many of her novels have been translated into French, there are no English translations yet, which is a shame.

What?! A famous Chinese author not translated into English?!

Unfortunately, it’s true and I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course. Global book translations look very much like a one-way street out of English. According to UNESCO’s Index Translationum English is the original language of a cool 1,220,893 books translated into other languages. The runner-up, French, is the source language of less than 20% of that number with 215,216.

Chinese is in 16^th position – behind such relatively minor European languages as Swedish (7^th), Danish (9^th), Dutch (11^th), Czech (13^th), Polish (14^th) and Norwegian (15^th).

Table 1: Top 20 Source Languages of Translated Books (Source: Index Translationum)

By contrast, considering the target languages into which the world’s books are being translated, unbelievably English is nowhere near the top. As Table 2 shows, English is only in fourth place as the target language with less than half of the number of translations than the 1^st placed, German. If you think 4^th place is not bad, consider the number of English-language readers and the size of the English-language book market, and the position is obviously ridiculously low.

Table 2: Top 5 Target Languages of Translated Books (Source: Index Translationum)

1. German 290,828
2. French 237,890
3. Spanish 228,151
4. English 145,737
5. Japanese 130,610

The figures for source and target languages of books translated in the world are a good indicator of the inequality of cultural flows. The UNESCO figures make a mockery of the rhetoric of intercultural communication: it’s almost as if the whole world was listening to the communication emanating from a narcissist.

In Australia “becoming Asia-literate” is currently a very fashionable media topic. How that is supposed to happen without translations from Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Asia’s many other languages, I don’t know.

As far as my quest to read at least one novel by Chi Li before I visit Wuhan is concerned, I’ve now ordered Le Show de la vie and will be looking forward to brushing up my French while I learn about China!

These reflections are not unique to me and my circle of friends as I’ve just discovered when I read Youna Kim’s article about “Asian women on the move” (and, yes, the title was a major part of the attraction). Many of the interview excerpts with Chinese, Korean and Japanese women living in London sounded as if it was me and my friends talking.

All these women come from quite privileged and educated backgrounds and one of their key motivations to move to London had been to further their education and to free themselves from the traditional constraints imposed on women back home, including the imperative to marry. When they spoke about the reasons for their move they included the Western media who they had used frequently back home and  which had instilled a hope for self-transformation in them. Regular readers of Language-on-the-Move will know that this is also something Kimie Takahashi and I have found in our research with Japanese women studying in Australia (see, for instance, here and here).

However, additionally, Kim found that, once they had left home and moved to London, the women’s patterns of media consumption changed drastically. They lost interest in the Western media that had motivated them in the first place and started to use ethnic media. The reason for that change was not nostalgia, as one might expect, but rather an acute sense of exclusion, as expressed in these quotes:

In the first year I watched television to know this society. Now [after three years] don’t watch. The more I watch, the more I feel alienated.… There’s no connection. It’s too British. I liked the British accent before because it sounded posh, but now that accent feels alienating too. (Korean woman in London; p. 139)

No quality food, no caring for others’ feelings.… I stop fighting because it was my choice to move here, because my English is not good enough. I cannot even express frustration to outsiders as they say, ‘You live in attractive London!’ My friend depressed in Paris hears the same, ‘You live in beautiful Paris!’ (Japanese woman in London; p. 142)

I feel like a woman warrior of China. I feel the wall, whether that is racism, invisible hostility, coldness, or superiority in culture.… I am becoming more Chinese while living abroad. This feeling grows. (Chinese woman in London; p. 148)

One of the reasons for the boom in international education in general and for language study-abroad in particular is that study abroad and the proficiency in English it is supposed to confer are frequently touted as the high road to social inclusion, with social inclusion being defined as economic success and career advancement. However, as these women have found, this imagined form of aspirational social inclusion comes at the cost of actually being social excluded in a mundane, every-day sense. Transnational migrants often lose their connections with home or see real connections transformed into virtual connections. At the same time, they don’t find a way into the host society in a mundane sense, either: Kim’s interviewees speak about domestic discomforts (“no quality food”), their overall disappointment with (to them) surprisingly low levels of quality of life or the sense of marginalization that comes with not being able to share a joke. Above all, they trace their sense of exclusion back to linguistic difficulties: routine encounters become daily reminders that they are different and that they don’t belong.

Kim’s research is evidence of a perpetual dialectic that is at the heart of the intersection between language and social inclusion: while language learning and international education hold the promise of social inclusion as economic advancement, in everyday life they actually serve to marginalize and exclude (even relatively privileged) transnational migrants from a sense of home. Maybe that’s another explanation why Japanese students, at least, have started to choose home over learning English abroad.

Reference
Kim, Y. (2011). Diasporic nationalism and the media: Asian women on the move International Journal of Cultural Studies, 14 (2), 133-151 DOI: 10.1177/1367877910382184

I’ve since come to recognize bilingual students with high levels of oracy but low levels of (academic) literacy as a distinct subgroup among my students as I encounter one or two of them in almost every class I teach. I was reminded of that bilingual student and all my other students with a similar linguistic profile, when I read Kate Menken and Tatyana Kleyn’s paper about long-term English language learners (LTELLs). According to the authors, LTELLs comprise one-third of the ELL population in high schools in New York City. LTELLs are defined as having attended school in the USA for seven or more years and still requiring language support.

Although […] LTELLs are orally proficient for social purposes in English and their native language, their skills in these languages are several grade levels below in reading and writing, resulting in poor overall academic performance. (p. 403)

Despite the fact that the numbers of LTELLs in NYC schools are substantial, they do not receive any specialized services, and the services they receive are mismatched. For ESL support they are usually placed in the same class as new arrivals with limited or no oral proficiency in English. As a consequence, their ESL support is way below their level, they get bored and they disengage. For Spanish on the other hand (most of the LTELLs Menken & Kleyn interviewed were English-Spanish bilinguals), they are either placed in Spanish-as-a-Foreign-Language classes (too easy again) or in Spanish enrichment classes with new arrivals who have received prior education in Spanish and whose Spanish is much more proficient. In this scenario, too, the LTELLs disengage, this time because the class is far too difficult for them.

Because of their high levels of oral proficiency, these students are often misjudged and their need for reading and writing support is overlooked. However, their low literacy in English results in poor academic performance overall. The high school average of the LTELLs in Menken & Kleyn’s study was a D+, and almost 20% had an F average. Failure breeds failure and many LTELLs drop out of school altogether.

LTELLs develop in a context of subtractive schooling where there is a lack of support for writing development in their home language and a sink-or-swim attitude to English learning. In such a scenario one language “subtracts” from the other and neither develops sufficiently.

As Kimie and I are finalizing the special issue devoted to “Language and Social Inclusion” which we are guest-editing for the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, we’ve been thinking about the many ways in which institutions, including educational institutions, conspire to exclude linguistically diverse populations rather than promoting their inclusion. LTELLs are a case in point: schools fail these students by failing to address their specialized language learning needs. Surely bilingual children deserve better then receiving an education that turns them first into LTELLs, and then poor students, and then drop-outs, and ultimately excludes them permanently from the mainstream.

Menken, K., & Kleyn, T. (2010). The long-term impact of subtractive schooling in the educational experiences of secondary English language learners International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13 (4), 399-417 DOI: 10.1080/13670050903370143

Space challenged Shinjuku, Tokyo (September 2010): Photo by Kimie Takahashi

Tokyo is getting more and more linguistically diverse every time I go back there. During this trip, I was really amazed by how efficiently and elegantly Tokyo does multilingual signs, particularly on trains and at stations. And I wasn’t the only one to notice! Ingrid Piller’s and my observations contradict the prevalent view that it is hard to travel in Japan because Japanese can’t speak English or there are not enough English signs. One comment in response to Multilingual Tokyo also expressed the opinion that there is only so much space for multilingual signs. In this post, I’m going to bust these stereotypes and show that multilingual signs can be done elegantly using some examples from space-challenged Tokyo!

To begin with, in Tokyo, with 35 to 39 million people on the move from one place to another every day, electronic signage provides the answer. It is everywhere and so well designed! Ride one of the metro lines in Tokyo and you are bound to find electronic information (as in the photos below). First, information on the electronic signage above the doors on this train appears entirely in Japanese kanji (Picture 1), and then the name of the next station in green changes to hiragana (Picture 2 – great for kanji-challenged people like myself) and then to Roman characters (Picture 3). The name of the next station is back in kanji in Picture 4, but the other station names in black and connecting train lines to these stations are now in Roman characters. In Picture 5, the name of the next station changes to hiragana and the other station names remain in Roman characters and pretty much everything gets displayed in Roman characters in Picture 6. The prohibition against the use of mobile phones (Picture 7) appears bilingually (Picture 8), and as your train approaches to the station, the warning for the opening doors appears in Japanese (Picture 9) and English (Picture 10)!

According to their website, JR (the Japan Railway Company) is even switching from bilingual (Japanese and English) language services to quadrilingual services. They have started to offer, for instance, the website, signage within the stations, Information Centers and the Infoline (a telephone-based service) in four languages (Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean).

Airport Limousine, too, is now thoroughly multilingual in the provision of their services (see pictures below), not only with their electronic signage at Limousine stops, but also information online and on the bus.

There are many more examples (I’ve taken more than 1,500 pictures in two weeks!), but the above certainly busts the persistent, monolingual myth about Japan, or at least Tokyo’s transport systems. Some parts of the city, of course, remain monolingual in Japanese, but in light of what we see in Tokyo today it is amazing that discourses of monolingual Japan or how funny Japanese English is still circulate. It is only recently that the Japanese Government launched its tourism campaign, Yokoso! Japan. It seems that the campaign has contributed to raising awareness of the importance of non-Japanese language services among government officials and business representatives. Coming from Sydney, where non-English signs on trains and busses are a rarity (including the train to our international airport as we reported in the Sydney Morning Herald) and having seen too many half-hearted, unprofessional signages in non-local languages in other tourist places, I take my hat off to Tokyo. If you take customer service and safety seriously in a metropolitan city and a tourism destination, you can never underestimate the importance of language provisions.

Overall, the increasing number of multilingual signs in general and the elegant and efficient ways in which these signs are displayed is a sign that Tokyo is a thriving international city and a great tourism destination.