Man wearing shalwar kameez in Tooting

A friend of mine wanted me to accompany them to give my verdict about the Pakistani food in Tooting, London. They are non-Pakistani and they wanted an opinion from an insider of the culture to test whether the food was authentic or not. I accepted their invitation.

On the day of our meet-up, I first walked from Tooting underground station towards Tooting Broadway to get a sense of what was new. I was also looking for something that would catch my attention and that I might develop into a research project. When we met, we roamed some more given my obsession with linguistic practices “in the wild.” To work up our appetite, we proceeded to explore material aspects of social and cultural public life in Tooting, which has been made famous by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, a well-known native of the area.

Saxons and Romans coming through

The origin of the word “Tooting” is Anglo-Saxon, even if the meaning is disputed. Inhabited since before Anglo-Saxon times, Tooting lies on Stane Street, a 91-km road originally created by the Romans from Londinium (London) to Noviomagus Reginorum (Chichester).

So, Tooting has been at the intersection of “foreign” and “local” for at least two millennia. It is obvious that in relation to places like Tooting the imagined homogenous, monolingual ideal has always been a myth.

Pakistanis moving in

Going back to the topic of our day out in Tooting and the spatial practices we were looking for, the first thing that caught my eye was a young man in a dark green modern-day Pakistani-style “kam” or shalwar kameez walking ahead of us. Is this foreign or is this a local practice now, I wondered. Should wearing a shalwar kameez be considered part of a Tooting identity? And what kind of language practices might the person in shalwar kameez have been involved in before the moment I saw him? Was he coming out of a mosque? It was too early for any mandatory prayer times nor was it a Friday. His clothes were slightly formal, fitting for a Pakistani-style party. Perhaps he was off to a wedding or a milad or something similar?

Anarkali shop front

While shalwar kameez, just as any other form of clothing, can exist outside the realm of practice, linguistic happenings are tied to the communicative spaces and geographies where it appears. I wondered whether his outfit would not invoke Pakophobia (see a biography of the word P*ki  here) by some parts of Tooting’s population? And how does the clothing of this man relate to his class, status, and education?

Indexing “Global Britain” locally

Moving forward, I found some words written on shops that caught my attention: “Anarkali,” the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) sign, Habib Bank, Nirala, and a couple of other familiar names originating from Pakistan and neighbouring countries. These naming practices are a form of action in a specific place and time within London. These names may not be indigenous to Britain, but they are embedded in this local neighbourhood.

The word Anarkali, for example, has a history bundled in this eight-letter word: the semantic meaning of the word “anarkali” is the bud of pomegranate. The word is also reminiscent of the legend of Anarkali, a courtesan in the Mughal court of Lahore who had a tragic love affair with the Mughal Prince, the famous bazaar in Lahore named after the courtesan, the Indian film Mughal-e-Azam, and last but not least, a popular Pakistani song from 2002 called Supreme Ishq Anarkali. All of these associations came to my mind.

The word Anarkali at the front of the shop was written in Roman rather than in Urdu, making it legible to descendants of South Asians migrants who might have only spoken competence of Urdu, the lingua franca of multilingual Pakistan.

Our delicious lunch at Spice Village, Tooting

We walked past Anarkali and stopped wherever we found something interesting to observe. There is rising gentrification in the neighbourhood, but the processes of relocalization of various intersecting practices are visible in multi-layered, multimodal language practices.

Food and restaurants were central to our conversation. Pointing to the restaurant Lahore Karahi, my friend said: “That’s one of the restaurants Sadiq Khan likes the most. I read heard it in an interview.”

Sharing a Tooting meal

Sadiq Khan also recommends the restaurants Daawat and Spice Village on the Visit London website.

With these endorsements, it was not surprising that Lahore Karahi and Daawat were full. We settled for savoury dishes in Spice Village for our lunch, followed by a very desi dessert in Daawat.

The question then is: how much of local Pakistani languaging practices are considered part of the fabric of the local ecology by the policy makers of modern-day “Global Britain“? And how much can we as educators and researchers make use of all languaging practices in our environment without labelling them under the binaries of minority/majority, local/foreign, indigenous/migrant?

Afghan-style mantu (Image credit: Wikipedia)

One of our family’s favorite dishes is mantu. Mantu are steamed dumplings filled with minced lamb meat and served with a spicy lentil sauce and yoghurt. Mantu not only make a delicious meal but also offer a fun family activity. To prepare the thin dough sheets, the mince filling, and the lentil sauce, to stuff, fold, and steam the dumplings, and to get the whole assemblage together requires all hands on deck: it is a family affair that easily takes up a few hours.

Because mantu are time-consuming to prepare, it’s not a regular food in our house but we like it well enough that we cook it as a treat for special occasions a few times a year – we’ve recently had it to celebrate a birthday, a graduation, and an anniversary. This suggests that mantu play a pretty important role in our family culture.

Despite this importance, I had never tasted mantu or even heard of them until I was well into my thirties. In other words, mantu are not an ancient family tradition for us but a relatively recent addition to our culture.

Encountering mantu in Sydney

I first encountered mantu on the menu of an Afghan restaurant in Sydney – the excellent Khaybar in Auburn that always deserves a shout-out. Afghan restaurants are today an inextricable part of Sydney’s highly diverse food scene. Indeed, its multicultural cuisine is always a bragging point in Sydney destination marketing. As as a tourist article gushes: “From Hungarian to Taiwanese, Ethiopian to Chilean, Sydney’s multicultural food scene is as diverse as it is delicious.”

Turkish-style mantu (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Most often diversity is indexed through reference to a specific place overseas – the cuisine of a nation or city. For instance, on the Macquarie University Wallumattagal campus alone, our food options include outlets that self-identify as offering Istanbul, Korean, Lanzhou, Malaysian, Mexican, and Việtnamese foods; and there is even the option to have food that is “a French love affair with Vietnamese flavors.”

These restaurant self-descriptions point to the fact that we conceive diverse cuisine as additive: many different national cuisines exist side by side.

Outside marketing discourses, however, cuisines are rarely kept neatly separate, as my family’s adoption of mantu demonstrates.

Who owns mantu?

As I first encountered mantu in an Afghan restaurant, I believed them to be an Afghan dish. When I said so during a party conversation, I was strongly corrected by a man who claimed that mantu are a Turkish dish (and should be called “manti”).

A subsequent internet search informed me that manti (Манты) are a Russian dish.

And when I turned to discuss the matter with my students, I was told that mantu (馒头) was a Chinese dish. Not only that but I was also kindly advised that I was using the term wrong: mantu were steamed buns. The dish I was describing was supposed to be called “baozi” (包子).

Chinese mantu (Image credit: Wikipedia)

It seems that several groups lay claim to the dish; and can, in fact, not even agree what the dish that goes under this name is. Do some of them have to be wrong or can they all be right?

Food chains

Food has been a key site for language and culture contact since time immemorial. The earliest trade probably was in food stuffs. Barter economies center on food. Some of the most universal words are food terms, as I previously discussed with reference to “chocolate.”

Beyond basic necessity, food has also travelled as a marker of identity, out of curiosity, and as a luxury good. The consumption of exotic foods has long served as a marker of distinction for the rich and powerful. In his study of foodscapes in the 19^th century Indian Ocean world, Hoogervorst (2018), for instance, introduces us to an Acehnese sultan with a penchant for Persian sweets and to Mughal court culture, where professional cooks with expertise in West, Central, and South Asian cooking were considered indispensable to the display of courtly sophistication.

In short, food travels readily across languages and cultures. In the process, both the dishes and their terms undergo modification.

Mantu probably originated in China, where the term initially may have been the general word for filled and unfilled buns and dumplings. Its meaning contracted over time although in some Chinese dialects it may apparently still refer to a filled dumpling.

The Mongols picked up the dish and word from the Chinese, liked it, and took it with them to spread it across central Asia all the way to eastern Europe. Along the way, the precise details of the recipe have passed through the hands of countless cooks and so changed countless times.

The way we make and like mantu in my family is one such variety. To think of the language and culture chains and webs through which mantu arrived with us is both exhilarating and humbling: via an Afghan restaurant in Sydney our food connects us all the way back to the Mongol invasions and ancient China.

Do you have a favorite food with an interesting story of linguistic and cultural connections across time and space?

Reference

Hoogervorst, T. (2018). Sailors, Tailors, Cooks, and Crooks: On Loanwords and Neglected Lives in Indian Ocean Ports. Itinerario, 42(3), 516-548.

Related content

Piller, Ingrid. (2021). Thinking language with chocolate. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/thinking-language-with-chocolate/
Wilczek-Watson, Marta. (2019). Eating, othering and bonding. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/eating-othering-and-bonding/

Yucky worms or yummy treats?

When I arrived in the UK from Poland in 2004, I did not know that prawns even existed. During our first dubious encounter, I categorized the not-so-aesthetically-pleasing crustaceans as ‘worms’ and refused to look at them, let alone consider eating them. Today, I devour these ‘worms’, and when I do, it is an occasion for my British husband to remind me that, over the years he, my ‘culinary superior’ from Western Europe, has raised my ‘impoverished’ Eastern-European palate to a totally new level. Squid, scallops, mussels, avocado, pomegranate, seaweed, lamb, haggis, sushi, Indian, Thai are some of the foods I encountered only in my adulthood thanks to my migration to Britain and my transnational coupledom that followed.

Like all couples, transnational couples like to talk. Food, as an ethnic marker and thus fertile ground for stereotyping, is one of their favorite topics, as I discovered in my research with Polish-British couples.

Food talk allows transnational couples to negotiate their divergent socio-cultural practices and customs. Ingrid Piller, who extensively researched transnational families, observes that in any relationship partners always bring in their own habits stemming from their individual preferences or family traditions. This is also true of endogamous couples but in the case of partners raised in different countries, the potential for difference talk is greater.

This is not to say that transnational partners endlessly draw divisions between themselves, experiencing what is known as a ‘cultural clash’. Rather, difference talk in transnational relationships has been shown in a considerable body of research as a positive phenomenon, entailing skillful negotiation strategies. Piller (2002), for instance, demonstrates how partners in English-German couples tend to downplay their socio-cultural differences by directly negating them, drawing out similarities or appealing to shared cosmopolitan identities. In a similar fashion, Kellie Gonçalves’s (2012) study shows how Anglophone and Swiss German partners portray themselves as harmoniously combining their divergent socio-cultural repertoires, from which they derive shared hybrid identities.

Can you imagine anyone calling this Christmas carp an “ugly-looking fish”? (Image credit: mdr.de)

In my recent publication in the Journal of Sociolinguistics (Wilczek-Watson, 2018), I build on this research by discussing other forms of difference talk in transnational families, specifically in relation to food, both in everyday and celebratory contexts. The interactive practices listed above are also present in the data the article is based on – video-recorded meal-time conversations in five UK-based Polish-British families and audio-recorded interviews with them. However, this particular paper focuses on another recurrent discursive strategy emerging across these transnational families, namely ‘culinary othering’ – the family members’ acts of representing the food habits of their partner as different, somewhat strange, or even abnormal.

Drawing an imaginary division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, othering constitutes a form of social distancing from a given individual or a group. This practice can entail stereotyping, derogatory evaluations, and mockery of the Other, often in an attempt to achieve a positive self-presentation. Despite its undeniable negative potential, othering has also been examined as a form of bonding, for instance, in the context of gossiping interactions (Jaworski and Coupland, 2005), when the gossiping parties derive solidarity from their joint mockery aimed at third, absent parties. What if the target of othering is present and is also a member of your family?

In the food-related talk of Polish-British families in my study acts of othering seemed to function in a similar, unifying way. While the othered party was physically present and directly faced culinary mockery, both sides seemed to skillfully navigate through their difference talk, displaying a cooperative spirit. This was exhibited for example by indicating in various ways that a given comment should not be taken as stigmatising: by exaggerating stereotypical evaluations to the point of caricature, or by mitigating them, through joint laughter, reciprocated othering or even through provocation of further othering by the targeted side.

To illustrate, when comparing hospitality practices in Poland and Britain, a British partner stereotyped Polish hosts as over-hospitable and mocked their pretentious hosting with an imaginary quote:

‘Here’s the entire quantity of our cupboards on our table, that’s how great a host we are!’ (Extract 1, p.553).

Using this hypothetical utterance of the Other (Polish hosts) with a hyperbolic expression (entire), and additional stress (entire; great), the partner signaled to his Polish wife (and the Polish interviewer, myself) that his statement was exaggerated, and while it could be received as discriminatory, we (the target) accepted its humorous undertone. Moreover, the Polish partner reciprocated this othering, showing an uptake of the strategy adopted by her British husband. The conversation continued and othering occurred multiple times between the partners throughout the interview, for instance, in relation to:

• the aesthetics of certain dishes (‘Oh God, that’s an ugly-looking fish.’ – about a traditional Polish Christmas Eve dish, carp, Extract 4, p.560);
• the quality of Polish wedding reception foods (‘they were good they were nice but …, the focus was on volume, wasn’t it?’, Extract 5, p.562);

Polish Easter breakfast (Image credit: wikimedia.org)

In cases such as these, neither side seems to take offence. Similar instances of mutual mockery and stereotyping in relation to food habits of the other recur across the participating Polish-British families. Arguably, othering comes more frequently from British partners (perhaps due to the fact the couples reside in the UK and thus Polish cuisine being ‘foreign’, becomes exoticised), some of whom also mock:

• Polish Easter dishes as monotonous (‘everything with gherkin’, Extract 2, p.555);
• everyday eating habits of their Polish spouses (‘all my family find it absolutely astonishing that Kuba will get all that milk, fill it right to the brim and sprinkle cereal on top’, Extract 3, p.557).

Nevertheless, the Polish partners likewise stereotype British culinary practices, as in this example about British Easter traditions: ‘the only English tradition we have is chocolate isn’t it? chocolate Easter eggs’, Extract 2, p.555).

These interactions demonstrate the families’ well-developed skills in manoeuvring through sensitive difference talk. The partners’ communicative collaboration reflects and further shapes their common ground, showing how othering resembles ritual mockery, which can in fact neutralise potential tensions in these transnational relationships and foster the couples’ bonding.

The above findings are limited to the Polish-British families I studied. However, culinary othering and its unifying potential is not exclusive to these relationships. As food acts as a salient indicator of class, status, wealth, and individuality, culinary othering is likely to be common enough. Can you share your own examples?

Related content

• Do bilinguals express different emotions in different languages?
• Strolling in Barcelona with Sanskrit and Devanagari
• Beyond Harmony Day
• Language in the catfish war

References

Gonçalves, K. (2013). ‘Cooking lunch, that’s Swiss’: Constructing hybrid identities based on socio-cultural practices. Multilingua, 32: 527–547.
Jaworski, A. and J. Coupland. (2005). Othering in gossip: ‘You go out you have a laugh and you can pull yeah okay but like. . .’ Language in Society, 34: 667–694.
Piller, I. (2002). Bilingual Couples Talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wilczek-Watson, M. (2018). ‘Oh God, that’s an ugly looking fish’ – negotiating sociocultural distance in transnational families through culinary othering. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22: 5: 545–569.

Does this delicious Libyan Herb Bread taste even yummier in English?

Is it the case that bilinguals have dual identities or divided loyalties where they associate each aspect of their identity with a specific language or a national group? In this post, I will explain why things are a bit more fluid when it comes to language and identity in bilinguals. To do so, I am going to share some findings from my current research project about how a group of Arabic-English bilingual sojourners in the UK manage their use of two languages in their everyday interactions.

Let me begin by explaining ‘code-switching’. Code-switching is the practice of going back and forth between two or more languages or dialects, and using them in the same sentence or conversation. This is something my bilingual friends and I do a lot amongst ourselves, and anyone who is bilingual will know what I mean. Mostly we couldn’t explain exactly why we switch languages: it’s like making subtle social moves and certainly not a way of ‘showing off’ around monolinguals.

My research participants are a group of six adult female Arabic speakers in their 20s and 30s. Five of them came to the UK from Libya as international students about seven years ago and are currently living in the city of Manchester. In addition to these five ‘late’ bilinguals, who learnt English later in life, the sixth participant is an ‘early’ bilingual and grew up speaking Arabic and English in the UK. The participants form a small social circle and have known each other for a considerable amount of time.

In my research I record natural conversations of this group of bilingual friends in order to explore the link between the different ways speakers code-switch and the ways they ‘do’ identity work, i.e. perform inter-personal aspects of their identities and achieve interactional/communicative effects through code-switching. A lot of code-switching is for practical reasons to fill a linguistic gap for a word or concept but I am particularly interested in instances of code-switching where speakers are expressing emotions, making evaluations or achieving in-group bonding. To demonstrate this, I am going to discuss three examples.

In the first example, Fadia, a late bilingual is switching from Arabic to English, then back to Arabic again. She first switches to English to make a positive judgement about the Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef, then switching back to Arabic to express an almost diametrically opposed view about (some of) his performances.

The first code-switching instance from Arabic into English marks the transition the speaker makes from stating a fact (’I watch Bassem Youssef’) to making an evaluative judgement (‘I think he’s funny.’). The next instance of code-switching from English back into Arabic provides a second judgement restricting the scope of the first one (‘but I don’t find all things he says funny’).

In the example, the speaker is using both languages to convey her message but she is clearly not assigning a particular function to one language or another. In this example, as in much of my data, there is not much of a difference between the functional role of Arabic and English.

Having said that, there seems to be a general pattern that is emerging in the data that English – or rather switches from Arabic into English – is used to take up ‘expressive’ stances, particularly positive ones. This pattern is particularly marked when it comes to compliments, positive evaluations, shows of appreciation and the expression of excitement. Although Arabic can, of course, be used for all of these, utilising English repeatedly for achieving the same purpose stands out, especially when considering that English is the L2 for these speakers. The next example aims to illustrate this.

Here, Fadia repeatedly shows her appreciation of the bread that Narjis made – all of them in English in a conversation that is otherwise conducted in Arabic.  However, switching into English is not only used for positive emotions but also to express negative emotions, as in the next example.

Notice at how many points Kamila and Fadia switch to English to express their emotions? When comparing the communicative function of Arabic and English here, one cannot fail to notice that Arabic is mostly used for recounting the factual aspects of the story while English is used to express evaluative stance towards that story.

A possible explanation for the code-switching patterns observed here might be that it is driven by certain attitudes and social meanings that these speakers share and assign to the English language. In one-to-one semi-structured interviews with my participants, each of them talked about her positive experience in the UK and the positive light in which they perceive British people, whom they generally describe as ‘nice’ and ‘polite’. Given these positive attitudes it is maybe not surprising that they adopt the expressive language of the target community. Adopting English styles of emotional expression must also be understood against the cultural norms of the Arab world in general and Libya in particular, where a preference exists for expressing emotions in a more subtle way. In (Libyan) Arabic, things tend to be left unsaid, emotions are mostly implied and expressed non-verbally.

In sum, the code-switching utilised by this group of friends is not as arbitrary as it may seem at first blush: it can best be understood in relation to the evaluative positions speakers take. Through their use of Arabic and English these bilinguals move between different zones and carve out their own “third” space as an expression of the new and complex reality they are experiencing as bilingual immigrants.

Tapas bar Samsara

Strolling in Barcelona’s city center reveals an astounding variety of spoken languages: there are the languages used by the throngs of visitors coming from literally everywhere, and also the languages of the 300,000 registered foreign citizens from more than 160 nationalities. Residents of Barcelona speak “a total of 277 languages.” These languages cannot only be heard but also seen: Besides Latin script, at smaller or specialized businesses (along with Catalan, which is compulsory but not exclusive on signage in Catalonia) we find Cyrillic (Russian), Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, and … Devanāgarī, the script of Hindi, Nepalese, and of the classical language of India, Sanskrit.

Sanskrit names in Barcelona are obvious on Indian restaurants and, of course, Yoga centers; but they are not exclusive to these: we can find a tapas bar (“tapas” are tasty small local appetizers) called “Samsāra” (the cycle of reincarnation), a marriage agency with the same name, a ladies’ apparel shop called “Dharma” (the Cosmic Law), a cosmetics shop called “Ādhāra” (“support”), and many more.

Marriage agency Samsara

Why was the verb form “Bhavantu” (“may they become”) chosen for a clothing shop for babies? Its owner, Mr. Rodrigo, born in Argentina, explained: “When my wife was pregnant with our baby we used to listen to an Indian mantra: ‘sarve bhavantu śaraṇam’ (‘may all beings be protected’). We do not practice Yoga, but we liked the sound of that word.”

A “mālā” is a rosary for mantra repetition (“japa”), so the name of the ladies’ apparel shop “Japamala & friends” owned by Mr. Sandro, of German origin, was intriguing. Mr. Sandro kindly indicated to me that his former partner was of the opinion that “names with many “a” sounds are better for business than names with many “o” or “u” sounds.” Mr. Sandro added that he has kept the name because “it sounds good.”

Sweet Minu Madhu

The “sweetest” experience in my quest was with a “fake” Sanskrit word. Walking in the old town I came across “Minu & Madhu”, another ladies’ apparel shop. The shop is run by Mrs. Martine, the friendliest lady from Périgord in France you could ever meet. She welcomed my explanation of the meaning of “Madhu” as “sweet” or “honey”: “Indian ladies tell me that it is a person’s name but they were not able to tell me what it means! People ask me so often about it and now I will be finally able to explain it, “je vous aime!”

Mrs. Martine got the owner, Mrs. Laura Serrat, a Catalan of French descent, on the phone: “I am sorry if this comes to you as disappointment”, she said, “but I did not choose the name for any reason connected to India. ‘Minou’ is what we endearingly call in French kitten or children, and ‘Madhu’ is what I used to call my Grandmother.” Assuming that this was a diminutive for “Madeleine”, I asked whether it should not be spelt “M-a-d-o-u”, instead. Mrs. Serrat’s response was: “I thought that it sounded sweet this way.” Well, isn’t this exactly what “Madhu” means?

Bhavantu baby store

Does Sanskrit then have a euphonic quality to itself? I asked Doctor Maria Elena Sierra, teacher of Sanskrit at the University of Barcelona. Dr. Sierra explained that interest in Sanskrit has grown in the past ten years, and so have the course offering of this language at the University. She told me that half of her students are foreigners who have gone as far as extending their stay in Barcelona in order to be able to complete their studies. They come from Belgium, the UK, Italy, Latin America and elsewhere; even including Indians and Nepalese residing now in Catalonia.

Dr Sierra teaching Sanskrit at the University of Barcelona

As to why Sanskrit “sounds good”, Dr. Sierra explained that the culture of ancient India was very concerned about the vibrations of spoken language. So, does Sanskrit have any special system to deal with the quality of sound? Dr. Sierra pointed to “Sandhi”, a rule of phonetic alteration, which she explained as “aimed at avoiding cacophony.” Besides, “Sanskrit shows a consonantism of a much older stage common to all Indo-European languages, which we recognize when we hear it.”

It is not only Sanskrit words in the Latin script that can be found in Barcelona, but imitations of Devanāgarī script are common too, as shown on the board of an attraction called “Shambhala” at the theme park of Port Aventura in the coastal area of Salou-Vilaseca.

Indexing “the exotic Orient”: fake devanāgarī on amusement park ride

The aesthetics of signs such as these is still tied to the Western idea of the “mysterious East”, crafted by colonial travelers and unmasked in Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (1978).

In other examples, as in the Nepalese restaurant “Himāli”, the signs are in both “Indianized” Latin script and in the actual Devanāgarī script. Diversity appears as important as communication here, and signage evidences that “we live in a new paradigm where homogeneity is no longer sustainable and cannot be simulated and where identities must be projected in global settings”, as Pujolar et al. (2011, p. 81) argue.

Surya Restaurant

Devanāgarī script may even appear without translation or transliteration, as on the sign of restaurant “Sūrya”. The sign displays the name of the Sun-God above a subtitle that reads: भोजनालय “bhojanalāya” (“dining hall” or “restaurant”).

The subtitle “Indian Street Food & Drinks” provides an explanation. The sign appeals to an experience of “authenticity”: only those who have travelled to India (or Sanskrit students) will be able to fully savor the term भोजनालय … and the delicacies of Indian street cuisine. At the same time, the sign exhibits a “de-territorialisation effect on cultural practices” (Pujolar et al., 2011, p.80; drawing on Appadurai).

Global culture is made of mobile individuals who link distant cultural spaces, as proven by the presence of the classical language of India in Barcelona. And since Sanskrit does indeed sound very good, let me end by saying: ॐ सर्वे   भवन्तु   सुखिनः (“Om sarve bhavantu sukhinah”), “Om, may all beings be happy!”

Reference:

Pujolar, Joan; Fernàndez, Josep-Anton; Subirana, Jaume. Language, Culture and Identity in the Global Age. Digithum, May 2011. ISSN 1575-2275. Available at: <http://journals.uoc.edu/index.php/digithum/article/view/n13-identicat>. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7238/d.v0i13.1186.

Language in the catfish war

I’ve just read False Economy and in addition to learning many new intriguing things about economic history, I’ve also learnt that the catfish war, was, inter alia, fought on the terrain of language. Never heard about the catfish war?! The catfish war is a trade war between the USA and Vietnam, which started in the mid-1990s and in which US catfish producers lobbied for trade barriers and tariffs be imposed on Vietnamese catfish imports.

Initially, US catfish lobbyists delivered a heavy blow to Vietnamese catfish producers when they convinced US lawmakers to implement a law that banned imported catfish from being called “catfish.” Both the US and Vietnamese fish are in the same order of Siluriformes but in different families.

However, their joy didn’t last long because the Vietnamese retaliated by rebranding their catfish as basa. “Basa” is simply the Vietnamese word for the fish in question. First they didn’t have a coherent strategy and so other names also proliferated, including tra, bocourti, panga and swai. Panga, which is mostly used in Europe, derives from the Latin family name Pangasiidae. Basa and tra are different subfamilies – basa is technically known as Pangasius bocourti (hence the trade name bocourti) and tra is technically known as Pangasius hypophthalmus. The Vietnamese word for Pangasius hypophthalmus is tra and the Thai word for it is swai (hence the trade names tra and swai).

It was all very confusing (it took me a good two hours of internet research to figure this all out), particularly as basa is used internationally for both Pangasius bocourti and Pangasius hypophthalmus, and the same is true for panga in Europe. However, since 2010 Vietnam has instituted legislation to label all basa and tra for export consistently as basa.

The Vietnamese strategy of market differentiation worked. In the past decade, basa has come to be seen as an imported premium product and has been doing well in a range of export markets, including the USA. Consequently, US catfish lobbyists changed their strategy: they went to lobby for basa to be treated as a “like product” – i.e. completely reversing their earlier strategy which had been to argue that Vietnamese catfish was different from American catfish. They were successful again and Vietnamese basa has been subjected to heavy import tariffs.

As a discussion paper by the Center for International Management and Development Antwerp explains, the catfish war has transformed Vietnamese aquaculture: export markets have diversified beyond the USA, basa and tra are now being farmed in large agribusinesses, who have the means to innovate and to impose quality controls and to produce to international standards (another strategy in the catfish war has been to allege the inferior quality of Asian catfish and aquaculture).

The catfish war is not the only trade war fought on the terrain on language. Trade names have significant implications for competitiveness and consumer protection, particularly in the seafood business where new species continue to be bred and where the final product on the supermarket shelf has often undergone substantial technological intervention and transformation from animal to food.

The catfish war continues. US catfish producers have recently released a new catfish product, specially filleted premium catfish, under the car-name-like trade name Delacata. However, by now both US and Vietnamese catfish producers are more worried about competition from China than from each other.

In the meantime, if you ask Australian fish-and-chip vendors what kind of fish they use and where it comes from, they tell you: “Dunno! It comes in a box” Do you know what your food is and where it comes from?