The material and linguistic representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in parliaments can be important against a history of exclusion. Similarly, this new mural at my workplace by Dr Kirsten Gray, a Yuwaalaraay and Muruwari woman, recent PhD graduate, artist and Associate Professor, aims to signal that the UTS Faculty of Law is a welcoming space for our Indigenous students and colleagues. It’s called Dhiirra-y, ‘to know’ in Yuwaalaraay language. I have permission to share the image.

In parliament of the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) in 2014, parliamentarian Mr Troy Grant spoke in Wiradjuri in a speech about the North West Wiradjuri Language And Cultural Nest. The Hansard transcript records his four-sentence Acknowledgment of Country in Wiradjuri and the closing phrase, ‘Mandaang guwu ngaanha-gu. Thank you for listening.’

The lands of the Wiradjuri Nation comprise a huge proportion of what is now the state of NSW, and the NSW Parliament has existed for almost 170 years, but these Wiradjuri words had never before been spoken in it. Immediately, the NSW Minister for Aboriginal Affairs noted the milestone: ‘It is the first time in this Parliament that Aboriginal language has been spoken. It is a powerful symbol because this is the oldest Parliament in Australia.’

Aboriginal languages had by this point already been spoken in other parliaments around Australia, including in the national (Commonwealth) parliament since 1998, in Western Australia since 2013 and in the Northern Territory as early as 1981. In a just-published study, I’ve tracked down and analysed each instance of Aboriginal language use and also Torres Strait Islander language use (together, Indigenous languages) in Australia’s parliaments, up until 2023.

There are features of Mr Grant’s use of Wiradjuri in NSW that echo across the data. One is that the record of this language use had to be found by tracing back from online reports (e.g. this list on the AIATSIS website). The Hansard transcripts of each parliaments’ daily proceedings are all publicly available but there is no functionality to find when any particular language has been used.

I was therefore not terribly surprised to find after further digging that there had been an earlier but overlooked use of Wiradjuri in the NSW Parliament. Another elected representative, Ms Linda Burney, had in fact used Wiradjuri in 2003. Ms Burney is a Wiradjuri woman and politician who recently retired with many ‘firsts’ to her name, but her own landmark use of Wiradjuri in the NSW Parliament has not been widely recognised. As far as I can find, she is the first Aboriginal person, indeed the first person of any ethnicity, to use an Aboriginal language in Australia’s oldest parliament.

Ms Burney’s inaugural speech began ‘Ballumb Ambal Eoragu yindyamarra. Ngadu—yirra bang marang. I pay respect to the Ancient Eora [Nation]. I say this—good day.’ Neither Ms Burney herself nor the transcriber named this language at the time, although she has since named and used Wiradjuri in other parliamentary speeches.

This year (17 Feb 2025), I had the opportunity to interview Mr Grant about his 2014 speech and we discussed these two ‘first’ times Wiradjuri was spoken in parliament and how this public milestone could fall off the record:

Troy: I felt really proud. So, Linda Burney was in the Parliament at the time. So, I spoke to her, being an Indigenous woman, and you know, let her know that it was my intention to do it. And was she comfortable with that. And she said ‘Yes’. And so […] she says that she has had spoken an Indigenous language in the Parliament before me. But there’s no record of it. I checked with Hansard, and checked with the Parliamentary Library, and a whole and a whole raft of people so —
Alex: […] I did track down her first speech, and there are words in Wiradjuri to begin it. But it doesn’t say she’s speaking Wiradjuri. […] This is an ongoing problem we have with this research more generally, there’s no metadata. There’s no record there of what language she is speaking. […] Troy: […] so, she said, ‘yes, you can claim to have done the first speech in Wiradjuri. But I spoke Wiradjuri first’ and I said, ‘Okay’, so Linda and I always got on really well.
(Interview quoted here with Mr Grant’s permission.)

Later in her 2003 speech, Ms Burney names another language she also uses, Koori English. In my recent article I talk about the importance of representing this and other varieties of “Blackfula English”, sometimes called Aboriginal English(es), too.

Reading the Hansard transcripts of Ms Burney, Mr Grant and others’ speeches revealed another phenomenon which I discuss in the new article, as well, and that is the inclusion of individual words associated with Indigenous languages within English sentences. Many extended uses of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander language in a parliament had already been rightly celebrated outside of academic literature (although not all; I gave the overlooked example of Ms Burney’s 2003 speech above) but individual word use had neither been recognised online, nor academically analysed, to my knowledge.

Figure 1 – Language use by year, from Grey (2025)

My article attempts to notice, celebrate and understand both small and large uses of Indigenous languages in Australia’s parliaments, identifying 86 instances in all. My study shows that these are sociolinguistic resources in the repertoires of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous parliamentarians, that their use is increasing over time, and that they are used in parliamentary debate as well as parliamentary ceremonies.

My study approaches Indigenous language practices in the otherwise English-monolingual parliaments of Australia as having the potential to resist symbolic domination. I argue that this is “a valuable form of representation of people’s diverse ways of speaking, the epistemologies Indigenous languages encode, and the ‘First Nations’ they co-construct through language practices.”

I frame the 86 instances as significant for “slipping and sliding” between different social spaces and identities, following Dr Robyn Ober, a Mamu/Djirribal woman and scholar from Northern Australia. While “moving to and fro between linguistic codes, and cultural, and social domains happens in all socio-cultural contexts”, it does not happen readily for Indigenous students in mainstream Australian education, Ober explains in her own study of a tertiary education context. I have extended her concept to the parliamentary context, which likewise gives normative priority to Standard Australian English. As such, these uses of Indigenous languages are “important in creating affordances, or social space, for later Indigenous language use and other Indigenous identity practices within parliaments”.

Churchill Research Fellow, Cara Kirkwood, who is a member of the Mandandanji and Mithaka peoples, has explained that the exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from Australia’s parliaments can be countered in part by material representation in parliamentary buildings today, for example through art. My study rests on a similar premise, that Indigenous language use in parliaments can be an important form of representation. Overall, I see these language practices as individually and collectively navigating and resisting the social and institutional power structures of parliaments.

I have started a series of chatty and fascinating research interviews about peoples’ experiences practicing multilingualism in Australia’s parliaments. Parliamentarians who have used Indigenous languages and guests who have been invited to use their languages in a parliament are welcome to get in touch to share their stories. My hope is to turn these interviews into an audio resource, with appropriate permissions from the speakers, so that Indigenous linguistic diversity becomes not only more visible but more audible.

References

Grey, A. (2025) ‘Celebrating Indigenous linguistic diversity in Australia’s parliaments’. 45(2) Australian Journal of Linguistics. [Open Access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/making-linguistic-diversity-visible-in-parliament/feed/ 4 26199 https://languageonthemove.com/accents-complex-identities-and-politics/ https://languageonthemove.com/accents-complex-identities-and-politics/#respond Wed, 11 Jun 2025 14:30:30 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=26218 In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Nicole Holliday. Dr. Holliday is a sociophonetician and Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkely in the United States. Today, Dr. Holliday discusses her 2023 paper “Complex Variation in the Construction of a Sociolinguistic Persona: the Case of Vice President Kamala Harris” in which Dr. Holliday analyses VP Harris’ linguistic identity on the 2020 U.S. presidential election debate stage. In the paper, Dr. Holliday examines Harris’ construction of identity through language features and discusses the overt and covert prestige that those features represent to different audiences.

Some references made in this episode include:

• Representative Jasmine Crockett’s use of AAL
• “Dude gotta go”
• Dr. Arthur K. Spears’ “camouflaged features” of AAL
• Dr. Holliday’s fabulous TikTok account
• “You can always tell”

Kamala Harris with women of the Congressional Black Caucus, 2019 (Image credit: United States Senate, Office of Senator Kamala Harris, Wikipedia)

And for more Language on the Move resources about language and social identity:

• In search of language and an identity
• Whiteness, Accents and Children’s Media
• Life in a New Language, Part 1: Identities
• Between Deaf and hearing cultures
• Making Sense of “Bad English”

If you liked this episode, be sure to say hello to Brynn and Language on the Move on Bluesky! You can also support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript (coming soon)

US flags (Image credit: Wikipedia)

To help our readers make sense of it all, we bring you a new occasional series devoted to the politics of language and migration.

Following on from Rosemary Salomone’s essay providing the historical and legal background, political anthropologist Gerald Roche today shows how the axing of language access service provision is an exercise in necropolitics – a use of power that leads to the suffering and death of certain groups of people.

***

On March 1st, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States of America. As a result, people are going to be harmed, and some will die.

There are direct and indirect reasons why this order will get people killed. Most directly, people will die as a result of this order because it will deny language access services to the more than 25 million people in the USA who need them. Apart from declaring English the USA’s official language, this order revokes Executive Order 13166 (August 11, 2000), which obliged US government agencies to provide language access services to people who need them.

Government agencies didn’t necessarily always fulfill their obligations under this order. But now, any motive they had to respect people’s language rights has been removed. Access to critical services will have life-threatening consequences in at least three arenas.

First, during natural disasters, such as fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, people require timely access to accurate information to have the best chance of survival. However, linguistic exclusion and discrimination are reproduced in how this information is provided to the public, resulting in what Shinya Uekusa calls ‘disaster linguicism’. Research during the recent LA wildfires by Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, showed that thousands of Asian Americans were denied access to disaster alerts and other information in their preferred language

Secondly, healthcare is another setting where language access is vital. When people’s language rights are respected in healthcare, they are more likely to use healthcare services, which are also more likely to be effective. When people’s language rights are violated, they are more likely to die in mass health incidents, such as pandemics. The individual consequences of linguistic exclusion can be seen in the case of Arquimedes Diaz, who called 911 after being shot, but was denied interpretation services for 10 minutes. Those crucial minutes were enough to leave him paralyzed. Any longer and he could have died.

A third area where people will be exposed to increased risk of death due to this executive order is the justice system. Sociolinguists such as Diana Eades, John Baugh, and many others have demonstrated that failures to account for linguistic differences lead to miscarriages of justice in police encounters, courtrooms, and elsewhere. This has life and death consequences particularly in the 27 states of the USA that still have the death penalty. However, we also need to take into account the fact that incarceration reduces life expectancy by 4 to 5 years, and that after incarceration, people experience twice the risk of death by suicide. Any miscarriage of justice on linguistic grounds that leads to imprisonment therefore has life and death consequences.

So, in disaster management, healthcare, and the justice system, the reduction or removal of language access services will directly expose people to harm and increased risk of death. There are also two additional, less direct ways that this order could lead to death.

First, we can look at the complex link between Trump’s official English order and death that particularly threatens Indigenous people. Trump’s order is almost certainly inspired by a law previously drafted by his vice-president, JD Vance: the English Language Unit Act of 2023. That proposed law included a clause stating that it could not limit Native Alaskan or Native American peoples’ use or preservation of their languages. The new order contains no such clause.

To understand why this is a problem and how it relates to death, we need to look more broadly at Trump’s record on Indigenous policy. During his first term, Trump carried out ‘continuous attacks’ on Indigenous communities, starting with a memo that reinstated construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Starting his second term, Trump signalled his hostility to Indigenous languages by using one of his first executive orders to wipe an Indigenous place name (Mount Denali) from the map. This prior hostility towards Indigenous communities, and Trump’s general austerity agenda, mean that Indigenous languages are likely to be underfunded during his second term. This will have life and death consequences, because decades of research has shown that language revitalization has health benefits, improves wellbeing, and reduces suicide rates.

Finally, Trump’s promotion of English and his hostility towards Indigenous peoples and languages should be viewed as part of a broader white supremacist agenda that has life and death implications for people of color. The push to make English the official language of the USA has always involved opposition to bilingualism, and often to specific languages: Jane Hill has noted how English-only movements often go hand-in-hand with efforts to limit the use and legitimacy of Spanish. These movements have gathered steam since the 1980s, and have consistently been associated with the right, and its more xenophobic, white-supremacist fringes: the linguistic fascists, as Geoffrey Pullum once memorably dubbed them.

Trump’s executive order effectively mainstreams the far-right linking of whiteness, English, and belonging in the USA. Asao Inoue has argued that the life-and-death consequences of this linkage start with the discursive circuits and communicative practices that shape judgments about whose language and life are considered valuable. But more directly, this order will legitimize the white supremacist practice of using perceived proficiency in English to target people for violence. We saw this in December 2024 in New York City when one person was killed, and another injured, after their attacker asked them if they spoke English. In another incident in July 2024, a man shot seven members of a family after telling them to “speak English” and “go back where they came from.” Trump’s official English order risks inciting similar acts of violence.

Taking all of this together, we can see that Trump’s executive order making English the official language of the USA will almost certainly harm people, and is also likely to lead to deaths. That’s why I think we need to take what I call a necropolitical approach to language – one that examines how language, death, and power intersect. A necropolitical approach demonstrates that designating English as the USA’s official language is not just a symbolic declaration, it is also, for some people, a death sentence.

Related content

In this episode of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast, Gerald Roche talks with Tazin Abdullah about his new book The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet. Gerald is also a regular contributor to Language on the Move and you can read more of his work here.

For more content related to multilingualism in crisis communication, head over to the Language-on-the-Move Covid-19 Archives.

The White House (Image credit: Zach Rudisin, Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: The Trump administration has recently declared English the official language of the USA while simultaneously cutting the provision of English language education services. This politicization of language and migration in the USA is being felt around the world.

To help our readers make sense of it all, we bring you a new occasional series devoted to the politics of language and migration.

We start with an essay by Professor Rosemary Salomone, the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. John’s University in New York City. Professor Salomone, an expert in Constitutional and Administrative Law, shows that longstanding efforts to make English the official language of the USA have always been “a solution in search of a problem.”

***

English in the Crossfire of US Immigration: A Solution in Search of a Problem

Rosemary Salomone

Making English the official language of the US has once again reared its head, as it does periodically. This time it has gained legal footing in a novel and troubling way. It also bears more serious implications for American identity, democracy and justice than the unaware eye might see and that the country should not ignore.

Trump Executive Order

Amid a barrage of mandates, the Trump Administration has issued an executive order that unilaterally declares English the “official language” of the United States. It does not stop there. It also revokes a Clinton Administration executive order, operating for the past 25 years, that required language services for individuals who were not proficient in English.

The order briefly caught the attention of the media in a fast-paced news cycle. Yet its potentially wide-sweeping scope demands more thorough scrutiny and reflection for what it says and what it suggests about national identity, shared values, the democratic process and the role of language in a country with long immigrant roots. It also calls for vigilance that this is not a harbinger of more direct assaults to come on language rights. Subsequent reports of closing Department of Education offices in charge of bilingual education programs and foreign language studies clearly signal a move in that direction.

English and National Identity

German Translation of the Declaration of Independence

English has been the de facto official language of the United States for the past 250 years despite successive waves of immigration. Though the nation’s Founders were familiar with the worldview taking hold in Europe equating language and national identity, they also understood that they were embarking on a unique nation-building project grounded in a set of democratic ideals. As a “settler country” those shared ideals and not the English language have defined the US as a nation unlike France, for example, where the French language became intertwined with being a “citoyen” of the Republic.

In the early days of the American republic, the national government issued many official texts in French and German to accommodate new immigrants. Languages were also woven less officially into political life. Within days of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, a newspaper in Pennsylvania published a German translation to engage the large German speaking population in support of the independence movement. As John Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, noted in a letter to Noah Webster in 1831, geographic and social mobility, rather than public laws, would create “an identity of language through[out] the United States.” And so it has been.

The executive order distinguishes between a “national” and an “official” language. English has functioned well as the national language in government, the courts, schooling, the media and business. It has evolved that way through a maze of customs, institutions and policies that legitimize English throughout public life. It is the language spoken by most Americans. Over three-quarters (78.6 percent) of the population age five and older speaks English at home while only 8.3 percent speaks English “less than very well.” And so, by reasonable accounts, formally declaring it the official language after 250 years seems to be a solution without a problem unless the problem is immigration itself and unwarranted fears over national identity.

While benign on its face, at best the Trump order veers toward nationalism cloaked in the language of unity and efficiency. At worst it’s a thinly veiled expression of racism and xenophobia, narrowly shaping the collective sense of what it means to be American. Though less extreme in scope, its spirit conjures up uniform language laws in past autocratic regimes where language was weaponized against minority language speakers. Think of Spain under Franco and Italy under Mussolini where regional languages were outlawed.

Context and Timing

Context and timing matter. The order comes on the heels of the Trump Administration’s shutting down, within an eye-blink of the inauguration, the Spanish-language version of the White House website along with presidential accounts on social media. Reinstated throughout the Biden years, the website had first been removed in 2017 during the first Trump Administration.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump blasted former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is married to a Mexican-American, for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail. “He should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States,” Trump remarked, projecting what became an administration openly hostile to “foreigners” and the languages they speak. Against that history, the official English order now signals rejection of the nation’s large Spanish-speaking population and the anti-immigrant feelings their growing numbers have engendered.

The irony is that Trump, not unlike other politicians, has courted that population with Spanish language ads. With 58 million people in the United States speaking Spanish, political operatives understand that Spanish is the “language of politics.” But the “politics of language” is far more complicated. The 2024 Trump campaign ad repeating the words, “Que mala Kamala eres” (“How bad Kamala you are’) to the tune of a famous salsa song with the image of Trump dancing on the screen is hard to reconcile with his prior and subsequent actions as president.

The current shutdown of the Spanish-language website did not go unnoticed among public dignitaries in Spain. King Felipe VI described it as “striking.” The president of  the Instituto Cervantes, poet Luis Garcia Montero, called it a “humiliating” decision and took exception to Trump’s “arrogance” towards the Hispanic community. On the domestic front, the executive order raised even more pointed concerns among immigrant and Hispanic groups in the United States.

Issued at a time of mass deportations, hyperbolic charges of immigrant criminality, attacks on “sanctuary” cities and states, and rising opposition to immigration in general, the new executive order will further divide rather than unite an already fractured nation. Fanning the flames of hostility toward anyone with a hint of foreignness, it can incite lasting feelings of inclusion and exclusion that cannot easily be undone.

Official Language Movement

The Trump order did not come from out of the blue. It is the product of years of advocacy at the federal and state levels promoting English to the exclusion of other languages. Proposals to make English the nation’s official language have been floating through Congress since 1981 when the late Senator Samuel I. Hayakawa (R. CA), a Canadian-born semanticist and former college president, introduced the English Language Amendment. Though the joint resolution died, it set a pattern for congressional proposals, some less draconian, all of which have stalled. The most recent attempt was in 2023 when then Senator J.D. Vance (R. Ohio) introduced the English Language Unity Act.

Hayakawa went on to form “U.S. English” in 1983. It calls itself the “largest non-partisan action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States.” It currently counts two million members nationwide. In 1986, its then executive director Gerda Bikales tellingly warned, “If anyone has to feel strange, it’s got to be the immigrant, until he learns English.”

The group’s website now celebrates the Trump order as “a tremendous step in the right direction,” a supposed antidote to the 350 languages spoken in the United States. Obviously that level of diversity can also be viewed as a positive unless “diversity” is totally ruled out of even the lexicon. Two other advocacy groups with similar missions subsequently joined the movement: English First and Pro English.

Defying Democratic Norms

The fruits of those efforts can be found in official English measures in 32 states. The earliest, from Nebraska, dates from 1920 in the wake of World War I when suspicion of foreigners and their languages reached unprecedented heights. By 1923, 23 states had passed laws mandating English as the sole language of instruction in public schools, some in private schools as well. With immigration quotas of the 1920s (lifted in the mid-1960s) diluting the “immigrant threat,” the official English movement didn’t seriously pick up again until the 1980s as the Spanish-speaking population grew more visible. The remaining Official English laws were largely adopted through the 2000s, the last in 2016 in West Virginia. Some of them, as in California and Arizona, were tied to popular backlash against public school bilingual programs serving Spanish-speaking children.

Some of these state laws were passed by a voter approved ballot measure, others by the state legislature. Some reside in the state constitution, others in state statutory law. Unlike the Trump order mandated by executive fiat, they all underwent wide discussion by the people or their elected representatives, which a measure of such high importance, especially with national reach, demands. And they can only be removed using a similar process, unlike an executive order subject to change by the mere stroke of a future presidential pen. This is not like naming the official state flower or bird, a mere gesture. The consequences are far more serious.

As official English supporters are quick to point out, upwards of 180 countries also have official languages, some more than one. Standing alone, that argument sounds convincing. In well-functioning democracies, however, those pronouncements are carved into the nation’s constitution from the beginning or by subsequent amendment, or they’ve been adopted by the national legislature, again through democratic deliberation. At times they’ve been triggered by a particular event. France added the French language to its constitution in 1992 for fear that English would threaten French national identity with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union. Exactly what is triggering the current move in the United States? The answer is quite transparent. It’s immigration.

Some countries, like Brazil and the Philippines, allow for regional languages. Other approaches are less formalized. In the Netherlands and Germany, the official language operates through the country’s administrative law. In Italy, though the Italian language is not officially recognized in the constitution, the courts have inferred constitutional status from protections expressly afforded linguistic minorities. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Australia and Argentina, the latter two also “settler countries,” recognize a de facto official language as the United States has done since its beginning.

Clinton Order Protections

While the official English declaration might mistakenly pass for mere symbolism, the revocation of the Clinton order quickly turns that notion on its head. Rather than “reinforce shared national values,” as the Trump order claims, revoking the Clinton order protections undermines a fundamental commitment to equal opportunity and dignity grounded in the Constitution and in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From that Act and its regulations prohibiting  discrimination on the basis of national origin, the Clinton Administration drew its authority, including using national origin as a proxy for language, to protect language rights. In an insidious twist, the Trump executive order uses language as a proxy for national origin, i.e. immigrant status, to pull back on those same protections.

The Clinton order, together with guidance documents issued by the Department of Justice, required federal agencies and other programs that receive federal funds to take “reasonable steps” to provide “meaningful access” to “information and services” for individuals who are not proficient in English. As advocates argue, removing those requirements opens the door for federal agencies and recipients of federal funds, including state and local governments, to deny critical language supports that assure access to medical treatment, social welfare services, education, voting rights, disaster relief, legal representation and even citizenship. In a virtual world of rampant disinformation, it is all the more essential that governments provide non-English speakers with information in emergencies, whether it’s the availability of vaccines during a flu pandemic or the need to evacuate during a flood or wildfire, as well as the facts they ordinarily need to participate in civil life.

With current cutbacks in federal agency funding and staff, rising hostility toward immigrants, and the erosion of civil rights enforcement, one can reasonably foresee backsliding on any of those counts. One need only look at the current state of voting and reproductive rights to figure out where language supports may be heading when left to state discretion with no federal ropes to rein it in.

Multilingualism for All

The Trump order overlooks mounting evidence on the value of multilingualism for individuals and for the national economy. Language skills enhance employment opportunities and mobility for workers. Multilingual workers permit businesses to compete both locally and internationally for goods and services in an expanding global market

It takes us back to a time not so long ago when speaking a language other than English, except for the elite, was considered a deficit and not a personal asset and national resource. It belies both the multilingual richness of the United States and the fact that today’s immigrants are eager to learn English but with sufficient time, opportunity and support. They well understand its importance for upward mobility for themselves and for their children. That fact is self-evident. With English fast becoming the dominant lingua franca globally, parents worldwide are clamoring for schools to add  English to their children’s language repertoire and even paying out-of-pocket for private lessons.

Rather than issuing a flawed pronouncement on “official English,” the federal government would better spend its resources on adopting a comprehensive language policy that includes funding English language programs for all newcomers, along with trained translators and interpreters for critical services and civic participation, while supporting schools in developing bilingual literacy in their children. Today’s “American dream” should not preclude dreaming in more than one language. In fact, it should affirmatively encourage it for all.

In the meantime, the Trump order promises to provoke yet more litigation challenging denials in services under Title VI and the Constitution, burdening the overtaxed resources of immigrant advocacy groups and of the courts. Worst of all, it threatens to inflict irreparable harm on thousands of individuals and families struggling to build a new life while maintaining an important piece of the old.

It’s not the English language or national identity that need to be saved. It’s the democratic process, sense of justice and clear-eyed understanding of public policy now threatened by government acts like the official English executive order.

Related content

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Rosemary Salomone chats with Ingrid Piller about her book The Rise of English.

In this video, I discuss the example of bilingual signage in Nanning City, China. I ask who recognises the Zhuang language that’s found on some public signage there, and some of the varied responses which people – even Zhuang speakers – have had to it. Then I explain what this case study can tell us about multilingual signage policies more generally, and about language policy research. I hope this helps you teach Linguistics, or learn Linguistics, or even do your own ‘linguistic landscape’ research!

Related resources:

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’. Chapter 8 in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. (Full text available)

Grey, A. (2024) ‘Using A Lived Linguistic Landscape Approach for Socio-Legal Insight’, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies’ Methodological Musings Blog, Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

‘Language rights in a changing China: Brynn Quick in Conversation with Alexandra Grey’ Language on the Move Podcast, New Books Network (1 January 2025)

Transcript:

Alex and Kristen in the studio, 2024

[Opening screen shows text: Making Zhuang Language Visible, by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, 2024.]

[Narrated by Alexandra Grey:] In 2004, the local government in Nanning, a city in South China, began adding the Zhuang language to street-name signage to preserve Zhuang cultural heritage. The Zhuang language, which originated thousands of years ago in this region, had largely been overshadowed by Putonghua, a standard form of Mandarin Chinese and the official language of China.

However, the public response to this initiative, including from Zhuang speakers, was not as positive as intended. In this video, I will share insights from my research in the 2010s on Zhuang language policy, including a case study of its implementation and reception in Nanning.

China officially recognises the minority group called the Zhuangzu, who have traditionally lived in south-central China, particularly in the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region, where Nanning is the capital. There are millions of Zhuang speakers, but China has such a large national population that these Zhuang speakers constitute only a small minority.

The Zhuang language can hardly be read even by Zhuang speakers themselves. This is due to the inaccessibility of the Zhuang script; most people do not have access to formal or even informal ways of learning to read Zhuang. This has significant implications for the region’s linguistic landscape.

My research aimed to understand the impact of local language policy. I met with 63 Zhuang community leaders and Zhuang speakers for interviews, including interviews in which we walked and talked through the linguistic landscapes. I also found and analysed laws and policies about Zhuang language, from the national constitution down to local regulations. One important set of regulations were interim provisions introduced in 2004 and formalised in 2013 through which the local government added Zhuang script to street signs in Nanning.

This script these street names used was a Romanised version of Zhuang using the Latin alphabet, and it was always accompanied by Putonghua in both Chinese characters and its own alphabetic, Romanised form. The Zhuang script, which uses letters identical to English and also identical to Romanised Putonghua except for the additional letter ‘V’, was never displayed alone and was always in smaller font on the street name signs. In some cases, the signs contained additional information about nearby streets, but only in Putonghua.

In the broader linguistic landscape, these Zhuang street names were a visual whisper. Most public writing in Nanning is in Putonghua, with occasional English. Only a few public institutions, like the regional museum and library, have prominent bilingual signage that includes Zhuang. Otherwise, Zhuang is absent from common public texts such as road directions, commercial signage, transport maps, and safety notices.

From the community’s perspective, this new bilingual signage caused confusion. Newspaper reports from 2009 indicated Zhuang language was mistaken for misspelled Putonghua, leading to complaints. In my interviews, even some Zhuang speakers had been unaware of any Zhuang script in their environment, often mistaking it for English or Putonghua until it was pointed out to them, or until they started learning to read Zhuang as young adults, if they had that opportunity. Some were not aware that the Zhuang language could be written at all:

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

A university student interviewee: Because it is Pinyin script, no one pays it any regard, they can’t read it. In the recent past, people even thought it was English or [Putonghua] Pinyin, something of that nature, but it is not Pinyin, so they could not conceive of it being Zhuang script. 

Interviewer: Right. 

Another university student interviewee: To look at, it looks the same as English, I think.

In my article, I argue that the invisibility of the Zhuang script is partly because people need to learn to read it, even if they speak Zhuang. My research, which includes reports and census data in addition to the interviews, shows that access to learning Zhuang literacy is very low. Additionally, people are not accustomed to seeing Zhuang as a public language, or as a written language.

Why is this the case? Besides its limited presence in public spaces, Zhuang is also largely absent from educational settings and from the media. There was an irregular newspaper in Zhuang and a bilingual magazine in print when I began my study, but by the late 2010s, that magazine was only printed in Putonghua. This lack of exposure to written Zhuang in everyday life affects the recognition of written Zhuang, even when it is displayed in Nanning today.

Two key themes emerged from my participants’ reactions to Zhuang in the linguistic landscape. Some Zhuang people appreciated the Government’s effort to include and preserve their cultural heritage, but they doubted the policy’s effectiveness; since they couldn’t read the script themselves, they wondered how anyone else would learn anything about Zhuang language or culture from these bilingual signs. Others viewed the policy as tokenistic. They highlighted the lack of accessibility to the Zhuang script and the frequent errors in its display.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: But I’ve heard it’s often written wrongly.  

A community leader interviewee: That’s right, it’s often written wrong but no matter how erroneously those sorts of things are written there is no-one who can pick that out, because Guangxi people have no opportunity to receive a Zhuang script education; who can read and understand?

Another point of dissatisfaction was that the way Zhuang has been standardised, which has made it more similar to Han Chinese – more similar to Putonghua – which felt like a reminder of the marginalisation of Zhuang speaking people in Nanning.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Another student interviewee: This Zhuang writing, frankly, this grammar is in my view a really erroneous usage. It’s completely Hanified Zhuang language. Our Zhuang script must have as its goal opposing that, Guangxi’s so-called Standard Zhuang, which is not endorsed. It doesn’t stick to the grammar of our mother tongue, so we feel relatively disgusted.

For these readers, the bilingual Zhuang street names in the landscape were a visual reminder of other aspects of Zhuang language policy that they felt did not adequately support the language.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: So, when you see those signs, what do you think?

A community leader interviewee: It’s simply a joke, to use Chinese it’s “to hang up a sheep’s head and sell it as dog meat”, so it’s on the façade, but in their hearts there is no respect.

These perspectives suggest that efforts to include minority languages in public spaces can be perceived as futile or even offensive if the community cannot engage with the script. The Zhuang case study highlights the importance of accessibility and education, not only display, when policies are aiming to support minority languages, but it also highlights the importance of policy responding to the habits and expectations about that language which people will have already developed from childhood onwards from the way they experience the language being absent or devalued in all sorts of places and activities. People bring those habits and expectations and value structures with them into the linguistic landscape.

Broadening our perspective from Nanning to consider the policies for marginalised or minority languages in general, this case study challenges two common assumptions about display policies.

First, there’s the assumption that displaying a minority language increases its visibility in the linguistic landscape.

[Screen shows text: Is the Zhuang language on display in public actually visible as Zhuang?]

Second, there’s the belief that when a powerful entity, like the government, includes a minority language in public spaces, this symbolises the inclusion and valorisation of the speakers of that language, or more broadly the people who share that linguistic heritage.

[Screen shows text: Does the display of Zhuang language symbolise the inclusion of Zhuang speakers?]

These assumptions are foundational in linguistic landscape research, but this study encourages us to question them. The findings suggest that public display policies need to be integrated with other language policies to be effective. In the case of Zhuang, literacy and script policies undermined the efficacy of Zhuang language displays, making them almost invisible.

[Closing screen shows text:

Making Zhuang Language Visible, produced by Ed Media Team at the University of Technology Sydney, 2024.

Narrated by Dr Alexandra Grey.

Interviews dubbed by Kristen Martin.

Script by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, based on Grey (2021) Full text

Thanks to Dr Laura Smith-Khan for content consultation.

Thanks to Wei Baocheng for singing his translation of the song ‘Gaeu Heux Faex’ into Zhuang, from Qiao Yu and Lei Zhengbang’s 藤缠树. Full rendition at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WO0-biO5xJI ]

Hanna and Prash discuss English language in higher education research and practice, in the understudied context of the South Pacific, and Prashneel’s new book, English Language-Mediated Settings and Educational Inequality: Language Policy Agendas in the South Pacific published by Routledge in 2025.

Transcript

Hanna: Welcome to the language on the move, podcast a channel on the new books network. My name is Dr. Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics and applied linguistics at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Prashneel Ravisan Goundar. Dr. Prashneel is an academic based in the graduate research School in the University of New England. His research interests span applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational linguistics. Today we’re going to talk about his new monograph, which will be published next month. English language, Mediated Settings and educational Inequalities published by Routledge. Welcome to the Show Presh.

Prash: Hi, Hanna, thank you for having me.

Hanna: It’s lovely that you could be here, and I really am really excited about introducing your work to our audience, so can you start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book.

Prash: Well, thanks personally to you for inviting me and reaching out. It’s always good to expand on your work and put yourself out of your comfort zone and rethink what you have done. So, the book obviously was part of my PhD. Thesis. But I’ll start just a little bit about myself.

So, I’m originally from Fiji. and I moved to Armidale, which is in the New England region in 2022 to complete my PhD. I’d started working on my PhD in Fiji, but because it was during the Covid period in 2020, and there were restrictions on travel and all of that, so I couldn’t move until mid of 2022, when things got a bit better. Back home back in Fiji I was an academic as well. I taught linguistics and applied linguistics courses for a decade or so. and part of what we had to do was we had to make sure that we upgraded our qualifications. We were given a timeline to do this upgrade, and I started looking at research topics.

Fijian streetscape (Image credit: Felix Colatanavanua via Wikipedia)

The way it kind of worked was the former Prime Minister of Fiji had gone into a function and had spoken at length about the English language problems that he had come across, and he had mentioned some of the civil servants, teachers or professionals who were writing emails. He noticed a lot of spelling mistakes, sentence structure errors, grammatical errors, and things like that. That’s when my my research skills kind of just picked up on this. And I started to think, well, he’s saying that. But does he have any form of data to back up his ideas? Or why have we come to that conclusion? Why is that the case? So that’s when I started to think aloud about this, and I thought this was going to be an interesting topic to investigate.

I sent research proposals over to a few universities, and that landed at UNE and my primary supervisor Finex Ndlovu he picked up on that, and he said, well, this looks like an interesting topic, but there would be other elements that I would like to add on to that. And that’s how I started working on my PhD which I finished in 2023. And that’s when we then started to see how the thesis could then be turned into a monograph and published as a book. So, I sent out the proposal to 2 publication houses and Routledge had sent it out for review, and they got back, and the review was very positive. And I thought, okay, now this is the time to start revising and reworking on how I can reach out to a wider audience who would be interested in this language, planning language policy, medium of instruction book. So that’s how it came about.

Hanna: Fantastic. Well, we’re glad that it did! It makes me feel like very old to think that you were doing this in Covid, because in my mind, Covid was just, you know, last year. But you’ve done so much since then, so I’d like to start in terms of delving into your book to focus on two of the things that I found really innovative and exciting about your research. And that is, of course, that it explores a really under-researched context. So that’s the first thing. And then the second thing is that it’s very participant centred. So, it really allows the participants to have a voice. Could you speak to those two aspects, or expand on them a little bit for our audience?

Prash: Absolutely, so if I did a quantitative study and just looked at a language test to see what the students were doing, or how they were coming into the university with a particular school, I think the study would not have been of merit in the sense that we are just looking at it from the statistics point of view. To just say, this is the level the students have entered the university, this is the level that they are leaving out from the University. What I wanted to go into was why they were at that particular level. What actually happened at the back end of it. And this is where the whole story about the Prime Minister comes into place is that something must have happened along the way for them to have a particular level of English when they entered a university, and that space was under researched.

Other researchers or scholars in Fiji had looked at primary school level of English, they had looked at high school level of English, or they had used interventions in those spaces, but they did not move on to the university and try to investigate. We have students who end up at the 3 main universities in Fiji where they all have English as the medium of instruction. But Fiji is so diverse. The linguistic background spans over 300 islands that we have, and you have students who would come from maritime schools who are very in rural areas. And then you have students who come from urban schools, and they enter the university. But for someone to just say, oh, well, you all come from schools. You should have the same level of English is very unfair. It’s an injustice, because that’s not how it works. So that’s the whole space that I really wanted to tap into and see what we could do to address these issues or what we could do to find out what these issues were, and that’s where the methodology came into place.

So I’ll tell you a funny story about this when I wrote the proposal, and I had sent it out to my supervisors, and I said, This is what I would like to do, and this is what I want to find out, and I remember them writing back to me and saying, Well, have you thought about how you’re going to give voice to the students. and that kind of put me into. Okay, how do I do that? So, I started again, looking at different methodologies. The most suitable one I found was grounded theory, methodology, and why it was suitable was it generates. The findings are centred with the data. So, the data actually generates the themes. The data actually brings about all the information that you could possibly gather. Then I started reading more about grounded theory, and then I noticed it was not used in the South Pacific context. When it came to language testing regimes, it wasn’t in that space. So, I said, okay, this is a new element. That’s coming into the picture and grounded theory, because it is of 3 different coding systems that go into its open coding, selective coding, and theoretical coding, these 3 different stages let the findings shine in their own spaces. Because you have this open coding where we had rural schools’ data. We had data about urban schools. We had data about tertiary institutions. And then we streamlined what we got from there into the selective coding space to look at. Okay, this is from, you know, these 3 streams. Then we grouped it to put rural schools and urban schools together. Whether it’d be primary schools or high schools. We put that information together. Then we moved on to getting the higher education data together as well. So, these were the new elements that kind of came about in the book. The methodology allows the participants to go on and speak about that information that they have.

So, we were able to have the total participants I had in the study which was 120, who did 2 language tests, one at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year. We had writing interventions that I used to give them feedback on how they were progressing. And then, when we looked at the data at the end again qe showed improvements, but then I still wanted to know what had happened. So, we chose 30 participants to have an interview, and they were all randomly selected. It wasn’t someone who has performed the best was selected, or people who were low. And then I started to talk to them about their background educational background in terms of their primary school and high school level of English. What had happened, and those findings then told us a whole new picture.

Recently, even last year, if Fiji has started looking at examination results, and they have tried to look at what’s happening, and they want to have an educational review. So, I recently wrote a newspaper article. and I explained in that review that it’s not just blaming the students and saying that we need to do this review because the students did not perform well or we need to do the review because the teachers are not doing their job. What are the elements that are contributing to the unsatisfactory level that the Ministry of Education or the Fijian Government is looking at? And so, I put my whole findings forward. And a lot of people sent me an email. And they said, yeah, it was spot on that these are the things that in reviews in previous years people have not considered, and they have just put a blame on somebody in that aspect. So yes, the voices that have come from the grounded theory methodology. Now, I’m trying to look at avenues where I can put this through…

Hanna: Yes, contribute your voice to the debate?

Prash: Yes, exactly.

Hanna: So you looked at a 120 students, you tested them at the beginning, and at the end of their first year at university. And then you interviewed 30 students. So, to kind of understand their experiences with English language, learning in all those diverse contexts.

Prash: Absolutely.

Hanna: It’s so relevant to other contexts in English language teaching all over the world where you do have this diversity of educational spaces, particularly in rural and regional areas, but also with you know, with diverse access to resources in all sorts of different spaces, like, even in the same city, you can have very diverse access to resources in the same educational contexts.

Prash: Yes, that’s so true.

Hanna: It’s important, and, as you say, that you are now introducing this into the political space is also so fascinating, and that it wasn’t there before is shocking. But it’s fantastic when you know your research has an impact or can have an impact. So, I guess for our audience, we’d really like to know a little bit more about what you found. So, my next question is, you talk about these different ways in which students in different parts of Fiji, in the primary system, and the high school system, too, I’m imagining, have this unequal access to essentially quality, English language, learning. Can you tell us a bit more about what your main findings were? What were some of the things that you found, and what were some of the main barriers. preventing equal access for all students to quality. English language learning, and teaching?

Prash: You have already mentioned, coming from same region schools, but they have different kind of access to resources. That’s exactly what we discovered in this particular project. So, I spoke to the students. One of the students told me, he came from a rural school. So, the two main islands in Fiji they have Viti Levu, and Vanua Levu. So, he came from one, and he said to me, he said. when I was in second grade, the library had 10 books. When I left the 8th grade to move to high school the library still had the same 10 books. There was no movement in the in the 6 or 7 years that the student was there, so I said there was no new books? He said, no. Ten books for 300 students who would have studied in that whole period. So if we are saying English should be improved, and it can be improved by reading. Well, do we have the resources to give to the students? You can’t just say read, read, but well, let’s look at our backyard. We don’t have those books to give.

Related to that the students told me, about what they found in their library. This is another student, but it’s related to what I just spoke about. The library only had books for upper primary. They didn’t have any books for lower primary. So, if you have students who are from one to four in those classes. They didn’t have books to look at, and it’s the same with other schools. People had books for lower primary, no books for upper primary students, or vice versa. In the high school context as well.

Students also told me that because they came from maritime schools or they came from rural schools there, what happens is they come from very small communities, and it’s so small that you kind of know everybody in the community. So, the students are also very familiar with the teacher who was teaching, so the teacher would not use English to teach English instead of using, you know, English to teach a reading of English class or a grammar of English class the teacher was using a vernacular. What led on from there was when this particular student she moved to high school. She said “I was in culture shock because all the students were speaking in English, and I’m coming from a rural primary school”, an island primary school, and she was so depressed she told me. She said she spent the first year of high school in isolation. She would sit under the tree and just try, and you know, be herself, or she would go to the library because she had no voice. She didn’t know how to communicate. There was a huge language barrier for her.

She wasn’t able to even have a simple conversation with the teacher to talk to the teacher, and I remember her telling me she said, I tried to go and talk to the teacher. I tried to make time to go into the teacher, but the teacher has so many classes. The teacher has so many students, she said. I couldn’t get through to talk to her on how I could improve my conversation skills, or in general, you know my skills in the English language. That was the other situation. A similar one. Another student said to me, she said, I didn’t care that we had to speak in English. I spoke in iTaukei, which is an indigenous Fijian language, she said. I spoke with people of other languages who would speak in English, but I had no words, so I would speak to them in the iTaukei language and just try and make a conversation. But it was hard. It was very hard. It was depressing, for some of the students. How would you go about solving this kind of issue?

So, what I do recommend in the book is that for the students who are coming from these schools, once we know that yes, they are having this kind of issue, we need to set up basic academic kind of skills training for these students so that we nurture them to then progress gradually into the class, and they don’t feel that isolation. They don’t feel that they cannot talk. And the other aspect about resources was very interesting. So, as I said, it’s always vice versa. You cannot have a balance in this. One of the students from a rural school said. which was, I found it a bit funny the way he explained it, he said “oh, well, we didn’t have a lot of resources.” This is a very rural school in Fiji, he said, “we only had seven laptops”, and I said to him, “seven laptops in a rural school. I think you were well in place”, you know. At the same time I spoke to another student who came from the same region but attended an urban school with no computer access. They didn’t have any Internet; they didn’t have any computer access. So, the distribution of resources is unequal here. So how do we look into that.

Another student told me, she spoke to someone who came from another urban school and she also attended an urban school. Sha said “we did not have the same textbook access, they had more textbooks than us, or they had more teaching and learning resources, such as charts. They had access to those things as well”. So, I noticed that students actually make this comparison when they are there in the same space. They do talk about all of these things. And yeah, these are different barriers that they have in trying to excel in exams, because in high schools as well, the medium instructions is in English. But if we don’t look at it right from the beginning when they come here. And that’s when you know the blame game starts. And in the last examination results that came out for Fiji they were 76% pass rate. And everybody was, why is it so low? Why is it? 76? But yes, you’re not looking at the circumstances that the students go through that the teachers go through. Because yes, you can say to the students, but then the teachers can also be like, well, be didn’t have the books to do this.

Another interesting issue is the shortage of teachers which has two aspects. One is a literal shortage. One student said they didn’t have an English teacher for two terms completely, because the teacher fell ill. Now there was no one to step in to look after these students for two terms, and it was an examination class to prepare for an external exam. So, in the third term they got a substitute teacher. But instead of learning, it was just rushing through to cover whatever they could cover to sit for the exam. Who can you point to in in that space? Well, should we say that the school would have had to make contact with the Ministry of Education to try and look for someone to come into this place should we point to the teacher and say, well, if you were unwell, you should have informed us in advance. Should you point to the head of department and say, why didn’t you have a contingency plan in place to get someone to cover that shift as well? It’s a whole structure, who do you kind of get into that space as well. So yeah, it was fascinating to listen to their stories.

Hanna: It’s so relevant as well, these structural educational issues. And they’re also often interconnected with issues around medium of instruction in lots of contexts. We could, we could talk about that for the whole podcast, but I want to move on to your monograph. You used a language testing tool to assess students at the beginning of the semester, and at the end of the year which hadn’t been used in in fact, I think you said it hadn’t been used in the region outside of Europe and the “global north”. The Common European Framework of Reference. So can you tell us a bit about why you chose that tool, and how you argue it should be used to better meet the needs of learners in the Fijian context, because it was developed in quite a different context, as we know.

Prash: That’s a very interesting question that you have asked, because a lot of people come back to me and say, oh, so how did you choose this or what made you think about this one? So, when we had conversations about this, I needed to have a tool that I could use to measure students at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year to check. So, what could work in that? So, I started to investigate language testing regimes, and the book covers all of these aspects about the history of all of those, and what I found was tests such as TOIC test, TOEFL test or IELTS test, Cambridge examination language tests, they all went back to the CEFR, which is the Common European Framework of Reference for languages. The CEFR was where all these other tests got ideas from, and they built onto that. So, I said, instead of using, let’s say, a TOEFL test to do the testing instead of looking at IELTS test to do the testing, why not look at how the CEFR can be used in this context. And then I understood that the CEFR has got so many different sorts of scales for different aspects.

So, if you’re looking at writing, my study looked at academic writing. It had about six different ways of looking at writing. And because it comes from because it comes from Europe it had gone through about 2,000 different descriptors before it was designed. And that’s when I said, okay, if there’s so many languages in Europe, and they have looked at 2,000 different descriptors to come up with this standard one. This could now be suitable for the Fijian context because of the different languages that are being used in this context. And what I found is you already alluded to is that in the South Pacific context that had not been used. The CEFR was very new in that aspect, and the IELTS test is an ongoing thing. So, in Fiji or in Australia the IELTS test is used generally for migration purposes for scholarship purposes. But that’s not what my target audience was my target audience was looking at higher education students and trying to align their educational needs. And this particular framework, the descriptor. So, there are 6 descriptors to this. A1 and A2 indicate that the students are basic users. And then you have B1 and B2, which say, the students are independent users. And then you have C1 and C2, which say, these students are proficient users. And that’s exactly what we wanted to find out from the student when they entered the university, what kind of user can we classify them into? And this really kind of matched into that. And when we it was so nicely utilized when we looked at it at the end of the year we found improvement they had made on the scales.

So, the 120 students who set the test at the beginning of the year, what I found was that 62 of them were at A1 level. And 49 of them were at A2 level. Both were at basic user levels. So, throughout the year, what we did was we had writing interventions for academic writing to improve this skill, because that’s the lower end of the scale, and we tried to see how we can improve on that. So, they had paragraph writing activities that they did. They had some rewriting activities. They worked on academic writing. There were three interventions, academic writing, essay, writing, that they did, and at the end of the year, when we checked how the cohort had done so from the 120, 12 of them moved from A1 to A2, but the significant change that came was 90 moved to B2. And then that’s becoming an independent user. Interestingly, 8 of them moved from A2 at the beginning of the year to C1 as proficient users. But of course, this is just to do with their writing skills. We’re not looking at anything else, so we can’t say, well, very brilliant. They are very proficient speakers. But no, no, we’re just looking at the writing part, so I don’t want to excite the audience too much.

Just to see it function in in that aspect was really something good that came about. So, I sent the book to the Deputy Prime Minister in Fiji, and he has written a blurb in the book as well, and it was good that it’s getting to people who make decisions to see where I can come in, and how I can contribute to that conversation as well.

Hanna: Congratulations! That is fantastic result, isn’t it, that the Deputy Prime Minister not only has read your book but has endorsed it.

Prash: Yes, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Hanna: So, my last question, which is for those of us who are, you know, interested in researching in this space for emergent researchers, for students, linguistics and applied linguistics, and also language teaching students. What is the kind of key findings that you would like us to take away from your exciting and wonderful new book?

Prash: So, I’m trying to share and not over share, so that readers would want to read the book, and I don’t want to give too much away. What I would say, is like the book has connected three different spaces. That is the higher education, language testing regimes, and the grounded theory methodology. So, it’s an interconnection of these three different things that have come about in this book and I think readers and emerging scholars or established scholars like yourself. The book will give you how grounded theory can be applied into language, education, research. When I started looking at grounded theory methodology, it was mostly used with clinical psychology, or it was used in the sciences to get their data. And I read through Urquhart’s book, Cathy Urquhart. She has got a fantastic book that looks at grounded theory methodology. And the book was my bible, because it showed you the steps that you need to do to arrive at the data, how you collect information, and then how you analyse and interpret the data.

One of the [thesis] examiners praised the methodology of the research and said that he didn’t think that theory could be utilized in this way in a language testing or language education, research, so to say, so that that I thought was a very good compliment. I think leaders will then be able to use that space as well, coming towards higher education because they have been findings of different spaces in that language, medium of instruction, language policy. And this here, this is trying to get the student to say, well, what do you think we can do to improve? Or what is the problem that you are facing at this particular juncture. and what I found with the the university students, the way they talked about coming into lectures, and not being able to understand the delivery of the lectures. They said we wanted to just leave everything and go out. We couldn’t process the kind of language that was coming through to us, and then to start writing that seemed a bit challenging for them.

However, one of the things that I think scholars will be happy to hear, I asked the students. I said, what did you think the language test that you did, what did you think about the academic writing interventions which I monitored throughout there. The students gave very honest feedback in that aspect. Some of them said it was very challenging, which is fine, because you want to know what they felt. Some of them said that they found it useful because each had a task that they had to do. And then, obviously, I was giving feedback to them on how they would improve on the next task, or that particular task. They found that very helpful. They said the writing in interventions they found it to be helpful because essentially academic skill, academic writing skills is not just a 1 1-year thing or not a one semester kind of thing. Students go on to the 3 year or 4-year program, but they need to be able to submit assignments. They need to know how they go about making an argument or supporting a discussion. So, this whole book kind of outlines how helpful this were to them.

So that’s one of the things I could say. The other aspect that the students brought about was not only having teachers but having motivated and passionate teachers. That also really contributes to how the students perform in the class. And I mean, I don’t want to boast here, but I’ll tell you. I used to teach the academic English course many years ago, and I would have a lecture at eight o’clock, and there were 700 students in this class. One day I noticed the attendance would be 90%. There would be 90% students in the class. The students told me that, sir, the subject is very boring, but you make it so exciting that we show up. We want to know, and they would not feel sleepy in the class, because I would deliver the language academic English in such a way that it sorts of hit them, that why, they were in the class, or why they were doing that. So, I think if that filters down, or if that tickles down to primary school teachers or high school teachers, and they are that they know they don’t just there, because in a fortnight they’re going to be paid. They they’re there because they make a difference to the life of the student that it takes them. You know, from primary to high school, from high school to university, and it’s just going to be good in that aspect to look at it. So those are the key things.

Hanna: I think that’s fantastic place to end Prash! That’s so important. And I think it’s lovely also, for I know some of my students who are English language teachers or teachers in training will be listening to this. And I think that’s a really lovely point to end on which is that, yeah, it’s not just about having teachers, of course, although, of course, that is of paramount importance. But it’s about having passionate and motivated teachers. And that’s very impressive to get 700 students to turn up at 8 o’clock in the morning. I think that speaks. That’s a great compliment for any teacher.

Thanks again, Prash, and thanks very much to our audience for listening. 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 because we talk about fantastic topics like this. And our partner, the new books network to your students, colleagues and friends until next time.

In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world’s languages disappear this century.

Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People’s Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future.

The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis.

Related content

You can read more of Gerald’s work in his blogposts.

Transcript (coming soon)

‘That’s not what the dictionary says!’, the pedant bleats.

‘Ah’, retorts the wise linguist, ‘but a dictionary is simply a record of usage, not a rule book’.

Fun fact by the way:

The earliest English dictionaries in the early 1600s, like Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, didn’t actually list all the words, only the most difficult ones, including the rush of words being borrowed into English from French, Latin and Greek – which were much more scientifically and culturally interesting back then than boring old backwater English.

Dictionaries change

Contemporary dictionaries do change their definitions, as language itself changes. Take the English words shall and will, which used to occupy very different territories (for example shall typically appeared before ‘I’ and ‘we’, will after other grammatical subjects) but nowadays will has largely usurped shall. That’s just natural language change, and the Cambridge English Dictionary now marks shall as ‘old-fashioned’. Will is hot; shall is not.

And this is still happening today. In 2019, a petition was launched for the Oxford English Dictionary to update its definition of ‘woman’, to remove various sexist wording and to include “examples representative of minorities, for example, a transgender woman, a lesbian woman, etc.”. This caused quite a stir at the time, but the dictionary folk did what they always do – investigated changing language usage.

The Cambridge Dictionary moved first, adding an entry to its definition ‘an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth’. The OED has also moved but rather more circumspectly, simply adding an example of usage under its definition, ‘Having trans women involved added so much to the breadth of understanding what it means to be a woman.’ In this case we’re witnessing dictionaries catching up in real time, at different paces. But they do catch up. That’s their job, not telling us how to speak proper!

‘Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of ‘woman’, updated to be transgender-inclusive’

Prescriptivists and descriptivists

In academic parlance, those who wish language would just sit still and behave itself are prescriptivists. They prescribe how language should be used (just as your doctor prescribes the medicines you should take).

Linguists, by contrast, are descriptivists, simply describing language as it is actually used without passing judgement.

Or are they?

And/or, do they have to always be?

Naming no names, I have heard unguarded comments from professional linguists, irked by this or that slang term their teenage offspring come out with. Linguists are humans, and they live in human society that is full of that kind of sneering. Some of it slips through. But strictly speaking this is very much the faux pas, and might provoke a subtle change of subject at the conference dinner table.

Quotative like

A widely discussed example from recent decades is a new use of like to quote someone (‘He was like, I don’t care!’). I reviewed and modelled the research into this new ‘quotative like’, which showed teenagers leading the innovation. This new usage quickly ruffled pedant feathers far and wide. Indeed, many schoolteachers heavy-handedly banned its use under the pretence of reinforcing standard literacy. ‘You’ll never get a job speaking like that!’ etc. etc.

But the linguistic research told another story. Quotative like was doing something very special, and more importantly something previously unavailable in English. It allowed you to relate what someone said, but without claiming those were the precise words they used. Compare ‘He was like, I don’t care’ and ‘He said, I don’t care’. The first is a less explicit claim that he said exactly that, simply that he said something like that.

It’s actually a very efficient and strategic conversational device; and linguists sprung to its defence as a novel and intriguing innovation. For those few linguists who continued to privately grumble about it, and other youth lingo, eyebrows were increasingly raised.

A strip in the webcomic XKCD about research on quotative like

Evasive so

But other linguistic innovations garner more divided opinion among linguists, particularly some quirks of politicians, corporate bigwigs, and other denizens of elite circles. A widely discussed example which gained pace in the early 2010s is the use of the word so to begin a sentence. Historically a rather dull grammatical bolt simply plugging together chunks of sentences, this unassuming two-letter word has been promoted to higher tasks in recent years, much to the dismay of the pedants. As a 2015 NPR article notes,

Many of the complaints about sentences beginning with “so” are triggered by a specific use of the word that’s genuinely new. It’s the “so” that you hear from people who can’t answer a question without first bringing you up to speed on the backstory. I go to the Apple Store and ask the guy at the Genius Bar why my laptop is running slow. He starts by saying, “So, Macs have two kinds of disk permissions …”

British journalist and BBC radio presenter John Humprys long marshalled opinion against this use of so. Indeed his listeners frequently echoed the same grumble. Others went on the defensive, urging that so has been used to begin sentences for centuries.

But that defense somewhat misses an important nuance of this irritation. The new usage here is not simply beginning a sentence, but beginning a reply to a question, especially a challenging question, often with something that is not really an answer at all, and often uttered by someone in a position of power, who really should know the answer.

A famous example of that little nuance was a 2015 New York Times interview of Mark Zuckerberg in which he gibbered out some bizarrely rambling answers to very straightforward questions, for example what his new toy ‘Creative Labs’ was supposed to be. Simple question. Define the product. He responded:

So Facebook is not one thing. On desktop where we grew up, the mode that made the most sense was to have a website, and to have different ways of sharing built as features within a website. So when we ported to mobile, that’s where we started — this one big blue app that approximated the desktop presence.

But I think on mobile, people want different things. Ease of access is so important. So is having the ability to control which things you get notifications for. And the real estate is so small. In mobile there’s a big premium on creating single-purpose first-class experiences.

So what we’re doing with Creative Labs is basically unbundling the big blue app.

This spectacularly circuitous response not only patronised a professional journalist and their audience – who might just understand what a website is – but it also did something more sinister. It shirked responsibility and accountability; it kicked up a cloud of corporate haze when a simple product definition was required.

Slippery circuitousness, after all, is an important corporate skill, whether you’re not answering a journalist or not answering a Senate committee.

One reactionary pedant, Bernard Lamb, President of the Queen’s English Society, retorted of this new so: “It’s not being used as a conjunction to join things up, which is how it should be used. … It’s just carelessness, it doesn’t have any meaning when used this way.”

But he was wrong. It does have meaning, just in a new and rather more sinister way.

Doing bad things with words

‘So’, as it’s used here and in other such corporate media interviews (‘How can you justify this kind of oil spill?’ – ‘So oil spills are uncommon and we work very hard to prevent…’) is doing a huge amount of ultimately rather grubby work. Its former career as a conjunction (‘X happened so Y happened’) conditions us to see logical relevance between X and Y. Zuck and other corporate and political bigwigs use this to their advantage, to imply relevance when there is none.

And in the process, in a small but important way, that adds to their aura of elite untouchability.

Powerful people using language to trick their audiences is of course not new. Classical rhetoric gives us the term paradiastole, when a reply to a question turns a negative into a positive, or otherwise deflects and diffracts the focus of the question. (Socrates famously hated political rhetoric, inspiring his student Plato similarly.) Reply-initial so could simply be the new rhetorical kid on the block, the latest ruse in a very long tradition of ruses to distract from not having a good answer, or having one but wanting to avoid it.

Statues of Plato (left) and Socrates (right) by Leonidas Drosis at the Academy of Athens (Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0)

And this brings us to where linguists might get justifiably annoyed, more so than at their teenage kids’ slang.

If a linguistic innovation is achieving something sinister, then perhaps it’s ok to hate on it. Linguists, after all, are not simply interested in sanctifying any and all words as precious gems. Linguists skillfully dissect other language use that is more obviously doing bad things – racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic, and other discriminatory discourse.

Calling out nefarious language is ok

Laying bare when a linguistic innovation is doing something sinister, calling it out for what it is, can simply be an extension of that same important critical insight.

Funnily enough, that reply-initial so has actually been picked up by media training organisations. Corporate elites are always carefully groomed on their language, and since this particular innovation has picked up so much ire, it is now carefully ironed out. You may be hearing it less nowadays as a result.

You’ll still hear ‘I was like…’ though, because teenagers don’t have spin doctors to manage their comms, nor are they interested in fooling the public to buy their widgets or vote for them. Their interest is in being cool, as it should be.

So, criticising linguistic innovations does have its place when there are more shady forces at work. It’s like the principle in comedy that a joke is funny as long as it’s ‘punching up’, i.e. poking fun at those higher on the social ladder. As soon as the jokes begin ‘punching down’, mocking those who are already looked down upon without a comedian piling in, then it’s veering towards criticism.

New words can be fun and useful, or they can hide other more nefarious intentions. For the latter, linguists should feel comfortable punching up. It’s part of the job, alongside calling out more obviously discriminatory language. Linguists are ideally placed to pick those apart – celebrating the grammatically ingenious irreverence of teens while also throwing tomatoes at sneaky elites. So there.

***

Jeffrey Gil and Minglei Wang

***

Taiwan is promoting its linguistic and cultural diversity (Image source: Taiwan Today)

Taiwan faces a dire international environment manifested in a lack of formal diplomatic recognition and a serious threat to its existence from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Under these circumstances, Taiwan must communicate narratives and project images about itself to the international community in order to “increase Taiwan’s visibility and gather moral support”, especially from other democratic societies.

Taiwan has used language policy as one means of doing this, in particular by emphasising its democratic values and cultural heritage to highlight the differences between itself and the PRC. Examples can be seen in the Indigenous Language Development Act of 2017, which recognised indigenous languages as national languages and contained provisions to support and expand their development, teaching and use. The National Languages Development Act, passed in 2018, extended national language status to Holo (Southern Min variety of Chinese), Hakka (Kejia variety of Chinese) and Taiwanese Sign Language. It also aims to provide greater support for the use of these languages in education and society. According to Vickers and Lin (2022), an important purpose of such language policies is to portray Taiwan as “something more or other than simply a ‘Chinese’ society—that is, as a diverse, multicultural Asian democracy”.

In September 2021, Taiwan created the Taiwan Centre for Mandarin Learning (TCML) to teach and promote Mandarin abroad. We argue that the TCML initiative is also intended to enhance Taiwan’s international profile by distinguishing it from the PRC. Following a brief overview of the origins of the TCML, we focus on how Taiwan has attempted to contrast the TCML with the PRC’s Confucius Institutes (CIs), which have dominated the global promotion of Mandarin for the past two decades.

Establishment of the TCML

TCML promotional video

The TCML initiative is overseen by the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC), a cabinet-level agency under the Executive Yuan, that is responsible for facilitating exchanges and interactions between Taiwan and communities of ethnic Taiwanese and Chinese in foreign countries. There are currently 66 TCMLs in the world, with 54 in the US and 12 in Europe.  Taiwan aims to increase the number of TCMLs to 100 by 2025, with a concurrent goal to establish what it describes as an “international status of Taiwanese Chinese language teaching”.

The origins of the TCML lie in the launch of the Taiwan-US Education Initiative in December 2020. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on international education cooperation was signed between the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office and American Institute in Taiwan (AIT),^[1] specifying that this partnership:

is expected to enhance and expand existing Mandarin and English language opportunities in the United States and on Taiwan. The MOU also encourages the exploration of opportunities for Mandarin and English language teachers and resources to be deployed to language programs at U.S. universities and Taiwan educational institutions, and facilitates greater exchange between U.S. and Taiwan institutions on best practices.

To the Taiwanese government, this signalled US support in “emphasizing and consolidating Taiwan’s important role in providing Mandarin learning opportunities for students from the US and other countries”, hence motivating the TCML project.

The establishment of the TCML was also facilitated by the US and Europe’s change of stance on the PRC’s dominating role in spreading Mandarin, as manifested in the shutdown of CIs. The CI project has caused concerns about its influence on teaching and research on China, the propagation of the Chinese government’s views, censorship on sensitive issues, and potential spying activities due to their links to the Chinese government and physical location on university campuses. Compounded by worsening relations between the PRC and the US and Europe, which generally hold an unfavourable image of China due to the country’s domestic and international behaviour, these concerns triggered the termination of CIs. The US, for example, has so far terminated 89 out of 122 CIs, while 19 CIs have been shut down across France, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.

TCML promotional poster

This subsequently leads to opportunities for Taiwan to fill the demand gap for Mandarin learning in the US and Europe, where TCMLs have thus far been established. It is in this sense that the inauguration of the TCML project is situated in a geopolitically competitive environment.

Framing the TCML: Mandarin with Taiwanese Characteristics

The TCML’s website highlights Taiwan’s intention to use the TCML to champion such values as “freedom, diversity, academic freedom, and freedom of speech”, which, in the eyes of the Taiwanese government, “form Taiwan’s key competitiveness” in the world. They have constructed a contrast between the TCML and CIs, although Taiwanese officials and directors of TCMLs have been reluctant to directly admit such a strategic orientation.

When commenting on the purpose of launching the TCML project, Tong Zhenyuan, former Chairman of OCAC, explained that:

we are not competing with Confucius Institutes, which are restricted by the American government and even driven out of the US. We, Taiwan, are collaborating with the US government to promote Mandarin teaching and learning on a different level, and we are confident in this situation to gain more support from America’s mainstream society, as we share the same values with the US.

Despite this, Tong emphasised at the inauguration of a TCML in Irvine, California that the aim of the centre was to provide a language learning environment that values “freedom and democracy while respecting cultural diversity” and this was “something that Confucius Institutes can simply not compete with”.

In a similar vein, Li Wenxiong, member of the OCAC, further elaborated that:

it is obvious that Confucius Institutes are basically used by the Chinese government to spread its communist ideology. I think Taiwan, most importantly, conducts teaching activities in a more open, democratic, and free manner, hence facilitating its educational approach into mainstream society as much as possible.

Kou Huifeng, director of the TCML in Silicon Valley, also held that the distinction between the TCML and CI was that “we have a free and open learning environment”. As Kou further noted, “we don’t compete [with CIs], what we do is to hope to let overseas non-Chinese have free choices [when learning Mandarin]”.

Another facet of diversity: Taiwan was the 1st country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage (Image source: 360info)

This image of Taiwan as a provider of Mandarin language education is also displayed in the TCML’s promotional videos. One such video features several students expressing positive views of studying Mandarin in Taiwan. For instance, an American student said that “when you’re in a free country, which you’re able to express your own feelings and ideas, the Internet is not restricted, which makes studying easier”. Another student from the US shared that “in Taiwan, I’ve never run into any freedom of speech problems”. Likewise, an Israeli interviewee pointed out that there were “so-called sensitive issues” associated with her previous experience learning Mandarin which she had not experienced Taiwan. A Swiss/German learner even argued that Taiwan “is pretty much the only choice you have right now to study Chinese”, as “there is not much choice if you want to study Chinese in a free environment without having to be afraid for being arrested”.

This is not to say that the TCML is free of political constraints. The OCAC’s requirement that teachers employed by TCMLs “must not hold passports from Mainland China, Hong Kong or Macau” is similar to the PRC’s request that language instructors hired at CIs are not allowed to practice certain religious beliefs, such as Falun Gong. Furthermore, there appears to be political intervention from the Taiwanese government in some of the TCML’s media engagement. As reported by Nikkei Asia, a previously arranged interview with staff at a TCML in Heidelberg “was cancelled on short notice after a senior official in Taiwan intervened”.

Conclusion

The TCML has been conceived and portrayed as an alternative to the CIs. From the Taiwanese government’s perspective, emphasising values of democracy and freedom as the foundation for the TCML is a means through which Taiwan can compete with the PRC for the hearts and minds of Mandarin learners. The activities and reception of the TCML need to be further explored to determine whether this initiative will be successful in improving Taiwan’s international environment.

Acknowledgement

Our research project on the TCML is supported by the Flinders University College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) Research Grant Scheme.

Jeffrey Gil

Jeffrey Gil is a Senior Lecturer in TESOL at Flinders University. He has also taught English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and Applied Linguistics courses at universities in China. His main research interests are English as a global language, English language education policy and planning in Asian contexts and the use and status of Chinese in the world. He has published widely on these topics. He is also the author of two books, Soft power and the worldwide promotion of Chinese language learning: The Confucius Institute project (Multilingual Matters, 2017) and The rise of Chinese as a global language: Prospects and obstacles (Palgrave, 2021), and co-editor of Exploring language in global contexts (Routledge, 2022).

Minglei Wang

Minglei Wang is a Ph.D. candidate and research assistant at Flinders University. His research topic is related to Chinese cultural diplomacy, with a specific focus on the China Cultural Centre. Minglei also holds an M.A. in Culture, Communication and Globalization from Aalborg University, Denmark.

[1] The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office is a de facto embassy or consulate of the Republic of China (Taiwan), established in certain countries that have formal diplomatic relations with the PRC. The US does not formally recognise Taiwan as a sovereign country but conducts unofficial relations with it through the AIT, which effectively functions as its de facto embassy in Taiwan.

Despite being ordinary and unremarkable, a little Persian preposition has caught international attention over the past three months: “baraye” (“برای”), which means “for, because of, for the sake of.”

What makes “baraye” special?

As you might have guessed, the sudden explosion of “baraye” onto the global stage is connected to the ongoing protest movement in Iran, and its brutal repression – similar to the stories of the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” and of pop stick paddle boats.

Baraye – the anthem of a freedom movement

“Baraye” is the title of a song by a young musician, Shervin Hajipour, released on his Instagram channel on September 28, 2022.

The lyrics of the song were compiled from tweets stating reasons why (“baraye”) tweeters are protesting and what they are protesting against (“baraye”) and protesting for (“baraye”): baraye dancing in the streets, baraye fear when kissing, baraye my sister, your sister, our sisters, and so on. The song culminates in “baraye woman, life, freedom, baraye azadi, baraye azadi.”

Shervin was imprisoned and forced to delete the song from his Instagram channel within 48 hours of its release. However, by then, the song had reportedly already been viewed 40 million times, and it had been posted and reposted on countless other platforms.

Initially restricted to Persian-speaking audiences inside and outside Iran, the song soon reached a global audience. How did that happen?

Baraye at protest rallies

First, the song made it from online spaces to the real world through global solidarity rallies. Played on large screens and over loudspeakers, soon protesters started to sing along, as in this example from Berlin.

Baraye covered by artists around the world

Second, more and more artists started to cover the song. One of the versions with the widest reach was sung by British rock band Coldplay during a performance in Buenos Aires, which was broadcast to 81 countries. Another major live performance by German-Iranian singer Sogand was broadcast on German national TV, where thousands of audience members were shown singing along to the final lines “baraye azadi.” Another popular performance is by a collective of some of the most prominent French artists.

It is not only celebrities who are covering the song. In a true testament to the song’s global inspiration, choirs have taken up “Baraye” for their performance projects. Students of a German high school, for instance, sang “Baraye” during their solidarity day with Iran on November 16. In a regional TV segment about their day of action, they were even shown practicing Persian pronunciation with a language teacher in preparation for the performance. Another version that has been widely shared on social media is the rendition by a choir in the small French town of Chalon-Sur-Saône.

The list could go and on. New cover versions are being released all the time, by artists from many parts of the globe. Only last week, a feminist art collective in Rojava released this haunting version.

Baraye in translation

Third, translation played an important role in making the Persian song accessible to global audiences. Many of the music videos floating around the Internet are fitted with subtitles in languages other than Persian. I’ve seen versions with English, French, German, Kurdish, Swedish, and Turkish subtitles. I’m sure there are lots more.

Beyond translated subtitles, the song has also inspired a wave of reinterpretations in other languages. Australian singer Shelley Segal has produced an English version. Other versions receiving a lot of attention include a Swedish version by pop star Carola Häggkvist, a German version by folk singers Lisa Wahlandt & Martin Kälberer, and a version in Iranian Sign Language by Maleehe Taherkhani. Again, the list could go on and on.

Baraye: the global struggle for freedom and justice

Slate Magazine has just declared that ““Baraye” is objectively the most important song of 2022.”

Singing “Baraye” is a way for the world to express its solidarity with the Iranian people and their struggle for freedom. Their struggle is our struggle, in a world where freedom is under threat everywhere. The most recent report on civil society by the German human rights organization “Brot für die Welt” shows that only 3% of the global population live in truly free societies. Another 8% live in societies with narrowed rights (Australia is in this category). The remaining 89% of the world’s population live in obstructed, repressed, and closed societies. Iranians find themselves in a closed society, along with over a quarter of the human population.

“Baraye” strikes a chord because we all need to ask ourselves what we are fighting against and fighting for on this broken planet that we share:

Baraye dancing in the street; Baraye fear while kissing; Baraye my sister, your sister, our sister; Baraye changing rotten minds.
Baraye shame of poverty; Baraye yearning for an ordinary life; Baraye the scavenger kid and his dreams; Baraye the command economy.
Baraye air pollution; Baraye dying trees; Baraye cheetahs going extinct; Baraye innocent, outlawed dogs.
Baraye the endless crying; Baraye the repeat of this moment; Baraye the smiling face; Baraye students; Baraye the future.
Baraye this forced paradise; Baraye the imprisoned intellectuals; Baraye Afghan kids; Baraye all the barayes.
Baraye all these empty slogans; Baraye the collapsing houses; Baraye peace; Baraye the sun after a long night.
Baraye the sleeping pills and insomnia; Baraye man, country, prosperity; Baraye the girl who wished she was a boy; Baraye woman, life, freedom.
Baraye freedom; Baraye azadi.

“Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” banner displayed by Bayern Munich soccer fans (Image credit: Archie Rhind-Tutt)

Some recent images from around the globe: protest rally in Rome with a banner featuring the slogan “donna vita libertà” (“woman, life, freedom”); cover of the French newspaper Libération with the bilingual Persian-French headline “زن زندگی آزادی/femme, vie, liberté” (“woman, life, freedom”); fans at a match between two major German soccer teams holding a banner with the Kurdish slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” (“woman, life, freedom”); video of feminist protesters in Chile chanting in Persian and Spanish “zan, zendegi, azadi; mujer, vida, libertad” (“woman, life, freedom”); poster for a rally in Bilbao, in the Spanish Basque Country, with the bilingual Kurdish-Basque headline “jin jiyan azadi/emakume, bizitza, askatsuna” (“woman, life, freedom”).

The list could go on: in a few hours of internet search, I compiled a 100+ corpus of the slogan used on banners, posters, billboards, graffiti, in digital art, chants, and as hashtag – in 23 different languages. Since a few days ago, the slogan even has a Wikipedia entry, currently in English, Persian, and Kurdish.

That a protest slogan from outside the Anglosphere is spreading globally and multilingually is highly unusual. So, let’s explore the story of the slogan that is travelling against the global linguistic current!

International slogans

The word “slogan” comes from the Scottish Gaelic word “sluagh-ghairm”, which mean “battle cry”. Essentially, slogans are linguistic tools of mass mobilization. This means that the limits of a language are the limits of mobilization. For many mass movements – those devoted to local issues or those with national ideologies – this is not a problem. But movements that seek to mobilize across linguistic boundaries face a challenge.

“Woman, life, freedom” – bilingual English-Persian billboard display, Piccadilly Circus, London (Image credit: Xanyar)

The international workers’ movement has dealt with the linguistic problem of global mass mobilization through translation. One of the globally most recognizable slogans – “Workers of the world, unite!” – is a translation of a German original (“Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch!”) and the Wikipedia entry for the slogan lists around 50 additional versions in other languages.

With the global spread of English, some slogans, particularly commercial ones, have taken a different route. Instead of translating slogans into all the languages of target markets, the English version is used internationally. Famous examples include Nike’s “Just do it”, Apple’s “Think different”, or Uniqlo’s “Made for all.”

A spin-off of “Made for all” can be found on the “Peace for all” t-shirt range, Uniqlo’s charity sale range. The example illustrates how commercial and political slogans have come to shade into each other under the hegemony of English. One of the many global roles of English is that it has also become the language of choice of global mobilization. Political slogans from the Anglosphere spread readily across linguistic borders, too. “Black Lives Matter” and “Me too” offer powerful recent examples.

Non-English slogans in the global arena

While “Black Lives Matter” and “Me too” readily captured the imagination of masses outside the USA, it is difficult to think of a non-English slogan that achieved any level of international recognition in recent decades.

The slogans of major protest movements have certainly been widely translated into English: for example, one of the main slogans of the Arab Spring, “الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام”, often appeared on banners as “the people demand removal of the regime”; or the main slogan of the Hong Kong Uprising “光復香港，時代革命” was often accompanied by “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.”

The function of these English translations, however, was not so much mobilization of non-Arabic-speaking or non-Chinese-speaking groups. Instead, their function was to draw international attention to these movements.

Kurdish origins of “Women, life, freedom”

The Kurdish slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” has been around for about 20 years. It is closely associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a socialist armed guerilla movement operating in the Kurdish-majority areas of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Women’s liberation has been a cornerstone of the ideology of the PKK, and the slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” speaks to a radical commitment to women’s liberation (“jin”), ecology (“jiyan”), and against state oppression (“azadî”).

"Jin, jiyan, azadî" comes from militant, anti-system women. It's a universal slogan – but it mustn't be stolen by the dominant liberal power system.

JIN cannot rely on capitalism and the state.
JIYAN means being against all war and arms trade.
AZADÎ is opposing colonialism.

— Dilar Dirik (@Dlrdrk1) October 1, 2022

The slogan first attracted a larger audience outside Kurdistan in the mid-2010s when a PKK-affiliated all-female militia unit in the Syrian civil war, YPJ, was part of the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish region, Rojava.

The YPJ was the subject of various documentaries and attracted some outside support, particularly in the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. And that is how the slogan began to spread. It could now be found in Kurdish and English as the title of a 2017 photo essay, in Kurdish and Italian as a book title and on the banner of a 2017 protest march in Rome, in Kurdish on a mural in Vienna, in Kurdish, German, English, and Turkish in a 2014 tweet, in Kurdish, English, German, French, and Turkish in a 2019 art exhibition, and in Kurdish and French in the 2018 movie “Les filles du soleil” (“Girls of the sun”).

“Women, life, freedom” extends from Kurdish to Persian

The internationalization of the slogan in the 2010s kept it firmly associated with the Kurdish struggle for self-determination. The traditional homeland of the Kurdish people is spread out over Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and in all these countries Kurds have faced various levels of oppression since the end of the First World War.

Persian-French bilingual version on the newspaper cover of “Libération”

With the recent exception of the autonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq, the Kurdish language is largely excluded from public life in the Kurdish areas and is not taught in schools. The linguistic oppression of Kurdish has been most extreme in Turkey, where it was even prohibited to be spoken in the home and could not even be named.

The situation of the Kurds in Iran is somewhat different from the other three main countries due to strong ethnolinguistic and cultural ties between the Kurds and other peoples of Iran. Kurdish and Persian belong to the same language family and share many similarities, in contrast to the majority languages of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria (Turkish and Arabic).

It is against this background that the transformation of the slogan from Kurdish to Persian must be understood: Kurdish “ژن ژیان ئازادی/jin, jiyan, azadî” and Persian “زن زندگی آزادی/zan, zendegi, azadi” share obvious similarities. The words for “woman” (ژن/jin, زن/zan) and “life” (ژیان/jiyan, زندگی/zendegi) are etymologically related across the two languages, and the word for “freedom” (ئازادی/azadî, آزادی/azadi) is the same in both languages.

The catalyst for the adoption of the slogan in Persian was the death of a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody in Tehran on September 16, 2022. “Women, life, freedom” became the battle cry of a movement against state oppression in Iran and beyond.

Transformations in the global linguistic hierarchy

The global linguistic hierarchy can be understood as a pyramid: the vast majority of languages play no official role anywhere in the world and, as peripheral languages, are relegated to the home and community. Above this large layer sits a smaller layer of a few hundred central languages with an official role in a nation state. On top of the hierarchy sit one single language only, English, the hyper-central language of globalization.

English is exceptional because it can be used for home, national, and international communication. English can fulfill all the linguistic needs of a speaker, and an English speaker may never have to learn another language.

Multilingual version as digital art (Source: H_Rafatnejad)

Speakers of a peripheral language, by contrast, cannot afford to remain monolingual. To get an education, to communicate nationally and internationally, they have to learn other languages.

The same is true for slogans. An English slogan can mobilize locally, nationally, and internationally.

Neither a Kurdish nor a Persian slogan offers such affordances. Peripheral to the global language system, Kurdish slogans can only mobilize locally. For national mobilization, they need to be translated into a language higher up in the hierarchy, Persian in this case. And for international mobilization, it needs to be translated yet again, first and foremost “up” into English, but also laterally into other languages.

Content worth listening to

The global linguistic hierarchy is not only about form (which language?) but also about content (what matters?).

Content in English is widely considered worth paying attention to, as is evidenced by translation statistics: English is the source language of the overwhelming majority of translations in the world. It is the source language of 1,266,110 translated documents recorded by UNICEF. The second most frequent source language is French, and it is far behind with 226,123 translations.

Content translated from Persian is minuscule in comparison although it still ranks as the 34^th most frequent source language with 3,041 documents. There are no statistics for Kurdish – translations from that language are so rare.

Seen against the global linguistic hierarchy, the story of “ژن ژیان ئازادی/jin, jiyan, azadî” and “زن زندگی آزادی/zan, zendegi, azadi” is quite miraculous: the slogan has been swimming against the global linguistic tide. It is meaningful to audiences around the globe who have been using it both in the original language and in translation.

The Bainu social media platform in China

Bainu was founded by two young Mongols in 2015 and now it is the only surviving Mongolian language social media platform in China. A 2015 news report claims that there are around 400,000 registered users although that number has shrunk significantly since the government’s crackdown on Mongols’ protests against the 2020 bilingual education reform.

Although many subjects cannot be discussed openly on Bainu, one topic has never stopped attracting Mongols’ unwavering attention: the “purely” linguistic matters which include but are not limited to Mongolian grammar, spelling, translation, standardization, and regional dialects. Perhaps it is precisely because of the strict policing of social media spaces that seemingly “professional, innocuous, and apolitical” discussions of language proliferate there.

This map briefly settled the debate over “sheep meat” vs “sheep’s meat”

Big debate: “sheep meat” or “sheep’s meat”?

A long-running debate has been over whether it is honin mah (literally “sheep meat”) or honin-ii mah (“sheep’s meat”). To support their respective arguments users post pages from their old middle school grammar textbooks or carry out surveys among speakers from different regions. Recently, the debate was briefly settled (it has now flared up again) when one Bainu user, to the awe of many, triumphantly posted a self-made language map.

This map at least temporarily resolved the question that has intrigued, excited, and frustrated Bainu users for months. The map maker, having attributed the differences in expressions to regional differences, did not forget to settle another long-lasting debate, too: whether it is “putting on a hat” or “wearing a hat”. According to the map, the regions with red shade are areas where “sheep meat” and “putting on a hat” are commonly used, while the rest say “sheep’s meat” and “wear a hat.”

Translation debates

Apart from grammatical problems and dialect differences, the translation of new terms is another field of battle where foes and friends are made. In June 2020, the question of how to translate “emoji” into Mongolian sparked a spirited debate. Some advocated for a native Mongolian word while others supported charaiin ilerel, which is a word-for-word translation from Chinese: 表情 (“facial expression”). Yet others have adopted an internationalist stance and have chosen emoji. My observation over the year 2021 suggests that emoji seems to be winning out among Bainuers.

But not all terms are controversial as shown in their almost unanimous approval of translating “barbecue” into shorlog, or the terms translated by the volunteer translation group anabapa, mostly comprised of Bainu users (see “brake light” image).

Why do metalinguistic discussions proliferate on social media?

Emoji on Bainu

You might wonder why Bainu has become a key platform where metalinguistic discussions proliferate or why users are so keen to translate new terms to replace the common Chinese loans in Inner Mongolia, or to what extent these Mongolian translations are successful.

You can find an answer in a new study of Mongolian linguistic purism discourse on Bainu by myself and my co-author Cholmon Khuanuud. In the study, we situate purist discourses in the sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic context of Inner Mongolia. We show that the weakened autonomy of minority Mongols compounded by the spread of market economy, and China’s drive to build a nation essentially following the “one people, one language (Mandarin Chinese)” model exerts tremendous pressure on the maintenance of Mongolian language. This produces linguistic anxiety, and it underpins purist discourses saturating mediatized spaces such as Bainu.

“Mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss

We find that, apart from translating new terms, another two key purification strategies are prominent in Bainu. First, as with language activists in many other minoritized communities, Mongol purists construct “mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss, including the loss of land, culture, political rights, racial “purity,” and language over the last seven decades. By doing so, they stigmatize “mixed” speech forms, raise awareness about ethnolinguistic boundaries, and invoke historical experiences.

What is noteworthy is that the explicit association of the losses experienced by minority Mongols with mixed language has almost disappeared since the 2020 reform for fear of punishment.

Another widely used purification strategy is to faithfully transcribe “mixed” everyday speech and post it on Bainu. In particular, by positioning the transcribed “mixed” speech vis-à-vis the “pure and correct” Mongolian, purists banish the “mixed” speech to the realm of non-language.

In the context of Inner Mongolia, the stigmatizing power garnered by the orthographic representation of “mixed” Mongolian also has to do with the highly-ideologized classical (vertical) Mongolian script. This traditional script has been retained in Inner Mongolia while abandoned in the country of Mongolia for the Cyrillic script in the 1940s. Clearly, the purists’ transcription of “deviant and impure speech” through the medium of a valued classical Mongolian script enhances the shaming effect.

To learn more, including how the transnational status of Mongolian language influences purist discourses, who exactly Bainu users are, what “wooden Mongolian” is, or how technology impacts minority language ideology and practices or vice versa, our article has just been published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics – it is open access so feel free to click through to the journal!

Reference

Baioud, Gegentuul, & Khuanuud, Cholmon. Linguistic purism as resistance to colonization. Journal of Sociolinguistics, n/a(n/a). doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12548 [available open access]

Related content

Baioud, Gegentuul. (2020). Fighting Covid-19 with folklore.  Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/fighting-covid-19-with-folklore/
Baioud, Gegentuul. (2020). Will education reform wipe out Mongolian language and culture?  Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/will-education-reform-wipe-out-mongolian-language-and-culture/
Piller, Ingrid. (2017). Anatomy of language shaming.  Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/anatomy-of-language-shaming/
Piller, Ingrid. (2017). Explorations in language shaming.  Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/explorations-in-language-shaming/

Victorian Multicultural Commission, Melbourne (Image credit: Pramuk Perera, via Unsplash)

In August, Australia’s Acting Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs, Alan Tudge, announced the extension of the Adult Migrant Education Program (AMEP) as well as a stronger focus on Australian values in the Australian citizenship test.

Increasing the provision of free English classes through the AMEP is undoubtedly a good thing. Although it needs to be mentioned in brackets that most classes will be online, which is highly problematic because language in use actually involves collaboration and communication.

Here, I am concerned with the rationale for the extended provision of English language lessons.

Non-English speakers a fifth column

In his address to the National Press club, “Keeping Together at a Time of COVID”, the minister claimed that national cohesion in Australia was at risk because of communities who have poor English. He explained that “poor English” made them “more reliant on foreign language sources.” This is a problem, according to the Minister: ‘‘Despite now being proud Australians, some communities are still seen by their former home countries as ‘their diaspora‘ – to be harassed or exploited to further the national cause.”

This negative understanding of  “diaspora” is selective because, in fact, the overwhelming majority of Australians are part of some diaspora or other. After all, all non-Aboriginal Australians have ties and loyalties to ancestral cultures and languages that come from somewhere else. This is true even if their family has lived in Australia for generations. When I grew up in Australia in the 1960s, we learnt Scottish, Welsh, and Irish folk songs at school, about heather and misty braes, and we swore allegiance to an English queen.

Diaspora, then, is the lived experience of millions of Australians. But does a diasporic sense of belonging – the experience that various cultural traditions may touch your heart or that your palate has a taste for cuisine associated with more than one place – necessarily involve dual loyalty in the political sense?

Non-English media as sources of misinformation

The Minister says so and his reasoning is this:  “malign information or propaganda can be spread through multicultural media, including foreign language media controlled or funded by state players.”

The connection between English language proficiency and “multicultural or foreign language media” consumption is spurious. After all, in a globalized world, direct contact with home country media is just a few clicks away. Even fluent bilinguals are likely to access news from their home country and keep in contact with family members, who are often dispersed across the world and intertwine other languages with English in their home.

The choice of media and language is complex, depending on the time, the place, the users and the context. A Chinese friend who has lived in Australia for 25 years tells me that she and her husband access multiple daily sources of information in both languages, of both local and international provenance. Her Australian-born children use only English-language media and her elderly parents-in-law rely exclusively on Chinese language media and their family members as sources of information. She reports that this diversity of information sources sometimes leads to lively family discussions!

English doesn’t make national cohesion and multilingualism doesn’t break it

Furthermore, the Minster confuses community and foreign languages when he claims that “through the pandemic […] it has been difficult to communicate with all Australians through the mainstream channels.” “Mainstream channels”, in Australia, of course, include local multilingual sources, including government notifications and the extensive local ethnic media, as well as recognizing that most immigrant families and networks include some fluent English users who pass on information.

Finally, “malign information or propaganda” does not only spread through languages other than English. English monolinguals are just as prone to draw on malign sources and fall prey to “fake news”. And many of the English-language media sources they draw on are not Australian at all and emanate from foreign countries.

Ultimately, the link that the Minister makes between English language proficiency and national cohesion is unfortunate. Instead of building bridges between communities and enhancing national cohesion, as was presumably intended, the framing of English language learning as a matter of national loyalty can only increase barriers between communities and lead to distrust.

***

Don’t trust the British speaking English?

The cover story of The Guardian Weekly of 18 September 2020 has a portrayal of Boris Johnson’s back, with both hands behind him, one gripping a hammer, the other with his fingers crossed, and the caption ‘Promises, promises. What will Boris Johnson break next?’ European Union negotiators in dialogue with the British government have every reason to be concerned about whether Johnson can be trusted. British behaviour is probably no surprise to the head of the EU’s task force, Michel Barnier, a top EU and French government insider. The confrontation looks like yet another drama in a millennium of clashes between France and England, now in the form of a war of words. The words in question, for the British negotiators and doubtless for many of the Eurocrats involved, are English words. What is ironical is that the British are leaving the Union, whereas the English language is staying on.

How and why this is so requires an analysis of how the EU manages the multilingualism of its activities and functions in its key institutions and in links with the 27 member states. The way languages are used, and which languages are used, are key social and political issues in an international world.

The dream of ‘global Britain’ of Theresa May and Boris Johnson is the idea that the UK should join up with the old Commonwealth countries and the USA in an Anglosphere network that will replace membership of the EU. The Anglosphere idea is rooted in the assumption that those who speak English are simply superior to others. That an Anglosphere union of ‘English-speaking peoples’ will emerge is a post-imperial pipe dream that has entranced some influential British politicians for decades. In a speech at Harvard University in 1943, when Winston Churchill was awarded an honorary doctorate, he sketched out a plan for the post-Nazi world. The primary aim was to perpetuate British and American global dominance, with a ‘birthright’ to spread English worldwide. The promotion of ‘global English’ had been discussed at conferences on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930s.

Others see English differently.

“Perfidious Albion”

The British have been known in France for centuries as ‘Perfidious Albion’. Wikipédia in its French variant explains that Albion is an ancient way of referring to England, and defines the term as ‘acts relating to diplomatic manoeuvres, duplicity, treachery, and thereby of infidelity (vis-à-vis promises or assumed alliances made with other state-nations) by monarchs or governments of the United Kingdom (or of England prior to 1707) in their quest for egoistic interests.’

Perfidious Albion? (Image credit: thejournal.ie)

This French website provides a wealth of examples of British treachery from the time of Joan of Arc onwards. It refers to Nelson, the banishing of Napoleon to a remote island, incidents of imperial competition in the Middle East, and Winston Churchill’s decision to sink much of the French fleet on 3 July 1940 in the naval port near Oran in French Algeria, Mers-El-Kébir. Churchill acted when the French were allies but had just been overrun by Hitler’s troops. His purpose was to prevent any take-over of French warships by the Germans or the Italians. In addition to many vessels being wrecked, 1,297 French servicemen died.

Wikipedia in English also provides a wealth of examples of how Perfidious Albion has been used by enemies of the UK over several centuries, and recently in connection with Brexit. By contrast an online history course for British schoolchildren has a different understanding of the term: ‘Perfidious Albion is a term used by some people to describe the British Empire. It is a term that suggests that the British were deceitful and treacherous in their dealings as an Empire.’ This website states that the originator of the term was a French author, but fails to provide any examples of the way the term has been used in France or of French resentment of British behaviour.

President Charles de Gaulle rejected an application by the British to join the European Economic Community (as it then was) on 27 November 1967, after blocking an earlier attempt in 1963. The other five member states were keen for the UK to join, but they were not consulted by de Gaulle. At a press conference he stated that the UK would need to change drastically before it could be accepted. De Gaulle did not want the pound sterling complicating European economic integration, and rightly saw the risk of the UK serving as a bridgehead for US influence. This was a reasonable consideration, even if de Gaulle was doubtless well aware that the creation of the EU was as much a project of the US as of key Europeans. Among these the most influential was Jean Monnet, a banker who collaborated with the British and the Americans between the two world wars and was an influential adviser to Franklin Roosevelt during the war. American involvement in planning for Europe is described in Pascaline Winand’s book, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe.

De Gaulle had personal experience of Perfidious Albion, since he lived in exile in London from 1940 to 1943 as head of the Free French movement. Churchill considered de Gaulle ‘an enemy of Britain’, with a ‘messianic complex” and ‘dictatorial’ tendencies. Churchill’s hostile assessment was first made public when secret documents were released in 2000. Richard Norton-Taylor reported on this in ‘How Churchill plotted against “our bitter foe” ’ in The Guardian (5 January 2000). He reveals that Churchill conspired with President Roosevelt to prevent de Gaulle from leading French recovery in the final phase of the war or after it. The article concludes with stating that between the UK and France ‘tensions remain’. This is still the case in 2020. The French and some other Europeans will breathe a sigh of relief once the UK has gone, but its departure weakens both the EU and the UK.

Britain and the European Union

British disagreements about many EU policy issues with other EU countries are partly caused by the goals of European integration being deliberately left unclear. Unification has been a gradual process since 1955. For some the goal is an increasingly merged union and ultimately a federal United States of Europe; for others the EU should remain only an economic union, but it is already vastly more than that. The EU faces major challenges quite apart from Brexit: migration, member states not observing the rule of law, the messy interface between national and supranational interests, and the euro serving some countries better than others. A book by a distinguished American observer of EU affairs, John R. Gillingham, The EU. An obituary (2017, updated in 2018) argues strongly that the EU’s many weaknesses mean that it could disintegrate.

Those who thought that a British exit would rapidly lead to other countries following suit have been proven wrong.

Gillingham, an economic historian, basically recommends that the EU should become more like the USA. This fits well into an Anglosphere agenda, which I will return to. He complains that ‘Europe is governed today neither by its peoples nor by its ideals but by a bank board, but  tendentiously argues that ‘repair of the financial system ….will mean dropping ambitious EU reform plans in favour of American banking practices and accepting increased influence for US investors and financial methods’ (ibid., 239, 207).

This is almost as crude as when the US ambassador to Denmark stated at my university in 1997: ‘The most serious problem for the European Union is that it has so many languages, this preventing real integration and development of the Union’.

It was de Gaulle’s successor as president, Georges Pompidou, who agreed to the UK joining in 1973. This was on one condition, namely that all British staff in EEC institutions should be fluent in French. In Pompidou’s view, French was the language of Europe, and English the language of the Americas. This sample linguistic nationalism provides a glimpse of the complexity of managing multilingualism in the EU, in which in principle and in law all 24 EU languages have equal rights.

There was a witticism circulating during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. Ministers from many continental European countries have often been able to function in more than one language. The British by contrast were relentlessly monolingual. In Thatcher’s government only two of her Ministers had any proficiency in a foreign language. But these two were the ones who really could not be trusted because they were suspiciously interested in foreign cultures! A key factor influencing the outcome of the Brexit referendum vote is English insularity. A key factor influencing the Brexit vote was ignorance about how the EU functions.

The British vote to leave the EU can be seen as British perfidy vis-à-vis its European partners of 47 years. The perfidy reached new heights in September 2020, after three years of complicated negotiations on the terms of the UK’s departure and future relationship with the EU. Johnson’s government decided on legislation that was in breach of a legally binding treaty with the EU, one that he himself had negotiated and described at the time as ‘fantastic’. The legislation, the Internal Market Bill was passed by the House of Commons on 29 September 2020. Perfidious Albion of the crudest kind.

On 1 October 2020 the European Commission reacted by sending the UK a ‘letter of formal notice’ for breaching its obligations under the Withdrawal Agreement. This marks the beginning of an infringement process against the UK, since ‘Article 5 of the Withdrawal Agreement states that the European Union and the United Kingdom must take all appropriate measures to ensure the fulfillment of the obligations arising from the Withdrawal Agreement, and that they must refrain from any measures which could jeopardise the attainment of those objectives. Both parties are bound by the obligation to cooperate in good faith in carrying out the tasks stemming from the Withdrawal Agreement.’

Face to face negotiations on this issue failed to deter the UK from acting illegally. The British legislation is in conflict with the Protocol on Ireland / Northern Ireland, as Ursula von der Leyen stressed in her press statement of 1 October. Failure to react to the infringement notification and to comply with the UK’s obligations can result in the issue being referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which can impose heavy fines. The UK is still legally obliged to respect the Court’s decision.

One of the goals of Brexit was to escape this kind of control. However, the UK’s behaviour is undermining its international reputation as a country that respects the rule of law.

EU language policies

Language policy management in the EU system is complex and politically sensitive. Any analysis of it needs to be calibrated with language rights and language use in law and in practice, and the market forces that have propelled English forward over the past five decades. There are very different challenges for permanent employees of the European Commission, for Members of the European Parliament and their staff, for the activities of the European Council of Ministers, which brings together government ministers of the 27 member states, and for countless experts involved in negotiations on policy documents or budget implementation. The continuous production of policy documents and of the massive corpus of Eurolaw (the ‘acquis communautaire’), which overrides national law, and is published in parallel in 24 languages, in principle with the same semantic content in each of them, requires the world’s largest translation service. These activities are radically different from the management of speech in diverse institutional contexts, supported by extensive, flexible interpretation services.

The language of EU official documents is sui generis. It is screened by legal specialists as well as linguists. High-level negotiation on all of the many policy issues on which the EU legislates is dependent on the precision of every word in written texts, and the capacity to decode these, in all of the 24 languages. The written language is essentially a technical, bureaucratic, legalistic one for very specific purposes. It has to navigate the turbulent waters of maintaining linguistic diversity, and consistency in formulating EU principles. This is of major importance for citizens and for the representatives of all countries, since EU law takes precedence over national law. Unfortunately, the general public, and probably many British Members of Parliament, know little about the interface between national law and EU law, and the shared responsibility of all member states for the formulation and implementation of decisions and policies.

Blaming ‘Brussels’ for EU decisions and decrees is simply false, when each and every country has had a shared responsibility for these policies.

Use of one language rather than another is not merely a pragmatic choice. Seeing a language as purely instrumental, or as ideologically neutral matter, is false.  Choice of language reflects political choices and realities. A language is one particular way of understanding and shaping reality, drawing on a worldview that emerged in specific historical and cultural contexts. All languages change over time, as the variety of English worldwide demonstrates. All 24 EU languages are in both national and international use because of the way the EU operates.

When Finland joined the EU, it needed to translate the over 70,000 pages of Eurolaw into Finnish. They attempted to translate from the English version but could not understand it without consulting the French original.

One of the consequences of British EU membership has been a major change in the language policies of EU institutions. English has gradually since 1973 become the dominant in-house language of the European Commission, largely displacing French. In communications with the wider world, it is mostly English that is used. English has become the default language, and massively important in the conduct of EU affairs, not least when policies are initially conceptualised in English, and drafted in English. Proficiency in English therefore, whether used by a native speaker or by a well-qualified non-native speaker, delivers a strategic advantage to those who think in English and are able to use it optimally in speech or writing. Conversely, for those less proficient, English puts them at a disadvantage. English may not be fully understood, especially when native speakers do not adjust their discourse sensitively for an audience with diverse linguistic backgrounds. Speech in limited English, sometimes disparagingly described as ‘broken English’, can lead to misunderstandings or can complicate interaction. Whether any ‘Euro English’ has evolved, as has been claimed, is disputed, and seems improbable, in part because of the diversity of its users and of its contexts of use.

The triumph of English

Many factors have contributed to the expansion of English in Europe and worldwide. English is the dominant language of the USA, Hollywood, NATO, the UN, international finance, several countries, and many international organisations. Economic integration has strengthened English in continental Europe. It has also contributed to major investment in the UK by corporations from Japan, the USA, and continental Europe because the UK was part of the European common market with freedom of movement of goods, people, and capital. This investment is at risk once Brexit is completed if there is no agreement that suits both the EU and the UK. Industrial products, for instance vehicle or airplane parts, can typically cross borders many times before a finished product exists. Bailey’s Irish cream reportedly crosses the UK/Irish border six times during its production process. Even the pre-eminence of the City of London in finance has suffered because of Brexit.

“Uncle Sam Teaches the World”, Puck Magazine, 1899 (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Other factors influencing the expansion of English in continental Europe are geographical proximity, giving the learning of English pride of place in schools, and extensive use of it in higher education and research. Applications for research grants from the EU are invariably submitted in English (even if the regulations state that any of the 24 languages can be used!). Applications are also assessed by a variety of Europeans using English. This puts applicants and assessors whose primary research language is a Romance, Slav, or Finno-Ugric language, or Greek at a disadvantage. Since there is immense competition for such funds, the hegemony of English is consolidated in this way, and will not change once Brexit is finalised.

The expansion of English was not left to chance. US ‘philanthropic’ foundations invested significantly in academia in Europe from the 1920s onwards. The British and Americans have promoted English worldwide since the 1950s, as advocated by Churchill (and by political leaders in the UK and US over 200 years). Linguistic imperialism of this kind is well documented. When the iron curtain was removed, it was an explicit policy of successive British governments to expand the learning of English in former communist countries so as to make English the link language across the continent, and to marginalise Russian and German. French has been losing out to English for centuries, after losing wars with the British in North America, India, and Europe. Former French colonies in north and western Africa are also moving into using English. English is the dominant language of the African Union. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is modelled on the EU, has English as its sole official language.

Other key factors influencing the expansion of English can be related to what some term its soft power, the reputation of the BBC, prestigious universities, literature and culture from Shakespeare to the Beatles and Harry Potter, the Westminster parliamentary system, etc. Soft power in fact converts into major economic benefits, through fee-paying foreign students, cultural industries, and English language teaching. Almost the entire budget of the British Council, the para-statal body that promotes British interests and English in over 100 countries, is funded by its income from teaching English, testing proficiency, and educational consultancies. English is a billion dollar commodity.

That all of this will continue unchanged once Brexit has been completed is extremely unlikely. Detachment from continental Europe will affect commercial, political, educational, and cultural affairs in the UK negatively. A hard or no Brexit is a catastrophe for higher education as well as business in the UK. Much will depend on what sort of policies the British government will follow worldwide.

The Anglosphere – a policy or a chimera?

The idea of the “Anglosphere” is closely aligned with the former British Empire (1886 map)

The idea of an Anglosphere was first promoted in The Anglosphere challenge. Why the English-speaking nations will lead the way in the twenty-first century, a book written by a USA industrialist, James C. Bennett, in 2004. He defines the Anglosphere as meaning ‘the sharing of fundamental customs and values at the core of English-speaking cultures: individualism; rule of law; honoring of covenants; in general the high-trust characteristics described by Francis Fukujama in Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity; and the emphasis on freedom as a political and cultural value’.

With Boris Johnson in charge in the UK, trust is elusive. The idea that the rule of law and trusting others are uniquely Anglo-American traits is an insult to all other countries. The rule of law in British India served British rather than Indian interests, as described in Inglorious empire. What the British did to India, a book written by a senior UN diplomat, Shashi Tharoor.

Parliamentary systems in both the USA and the UK are less democratic than in countries with proportionate representation. They are also invidiously influenced by financial interests, by social media schemes, and by many abstaining from voting. In the EU the rule of law is a well-established key value, despite the varied historical roots and trajectories of member states. The rule of law is now monitored and reported on annually in each country.

The essential unifying bond between countries in the Anglosphere vision is the language. It is English which is the foundational glue that is seen as binding the people together, and expresses what Bennett sees as the particular virtues of ‘English-speaking countries’. English has been privileged in each of them. Major efforts were made to eliminate all other languages in these countries, using punitive legislative and educational measures, but with only partial success. The concept also occludes the reality of each country being multilingual, and English changing over time to meet local needs in each.

The myth of American exceptionalism, that the USA is a uniquely virtuous country, continues when Bennett writes ‘Increasingly during the past few centuries, the English-speaking world has been the pathfinder for all of humanity’ through the ‘first modern nation-state, the first liberal democratic state’. These are very dubious claims. Links between the UK and the USA have for centuries been close, albeit contentious, but were reinvigorated when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan orchestrated the launch of neoliberalism.

Bennett argues that the North American Free Trade Association, NAFTA, and the European Union are ‘of limited value at best, and at worst do harm when they attempt to homogenize nations with substantially different characteristics.’ His contention is that the British people have more in common with Americans than with continental Europeans, and that the media and internet are intensifying this convergence.

Detaching Britain from Europe

The idea of ‘detaching’ the UK from the EU has been pursued in several think tanks in the USA. Conferences on the Anglosphere were organised by the Hudson Institute in 1999 and 2000, with significant participation by leading British cultural conservatives. The third Anglosphere century. The English-speaking world in an era of transition is a tract written by Bennett and published by the Heritage Institute in 2007. It includes an Anglosphere agenda for the economic, political, and military integration of the UK and other ‘English-speaking countries’, possibly India and Singapore too, under USA leadership.

He advocates the merging of the United Kingdom with NAFTA and its detachment from Europe so that the British and US defence industries can integrate, and as in finance, function as a ‘seamless market’. This would strengthen the massive impact of the military expenditure of the US, and of the ‘Five eyes’ intelligence alliance that connects Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK to the US. Bennett propounds that ‘The past thirty years of British history have encompassed a period of political and cultural schizophrenia that has created ongoing unresolved tensions in its national life and identity’, the solution to which is an Anglosphere Network Commonwealth.

(Image credit: ArcGIS Storymap)

One thrust is to entrench English monolingualism.

Bennett recommends that ‘Multiculturalism and bilingualism should be abandoned, and assimilation and learning of English should become national policies’. This proposal dovetails with English-only policies that a number of states in the USA have introduced, whereas this policy has had little support at the national level. Insisting on monolingualism in the UK and Australia is a political no-brainer, even if many people in each country remain personally monolingual. Bennett seems to have forgotten the strength of French in Canada. The indigenous peoples in all these countries and their languages are ignored.

The deep historical roots in the UK of the notion of an Anglosphere are explored in depth in Shadows of empire. The Anglosphere in British politics, by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, published in 2018. A deep commitment to Anglo-American unity and to Anglosphere ideas can be traced across British cultural and political history in statements by Cecil Rhodes, Winston Churchill, Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher.

The book also analyses the way Anglosphere ideas are currently impacting on the British political scene. Several influential British politicians in the Conservative party are attracted by an Anglosphere vision. The main champion of Anglosphere ideas in the build-up to a referendum vote on Brexit of 23 June 216 was Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), but the Leave campaign made sure that Farage was left in the background. A lengthy book entitled All-out war. The full story of Brexit, written by Tim Shipman in 2017, never refers to the Anglosphere. The term has evidently not become established in political discourse or journalism.

There is little evidence of  the Anglosphere ideas appealing to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, and few of the other, less ‘white’ Commonwealth countries are contenders. The Anglosphere, and strengthening economic links with the UK has never been a priority in these countries, quite the opposite.

Championing Brexit

How the UK might benefit by leaving the EU was totally absent from the Brexit Leave campaign, other than fraudulent promises of financial relief and the claim that exiting would be a simple matter. The slogan ‘take back control’ is a meaningless notion in an interconnected world, as the negotiations on exiting have shown. Benefits of any kind have still not been clarified. The vision of a ‘global Britain’ is vacuous and ahistorical, but smacks of the idea of making the UK ‘great’ again.

The trio of British government Ministers appointed by Theresa May to negotiate Brexit with the EU all appear to have had neoimperial dreams: Liam Fox, the Minister for Foreign Trade, had a portrait of Cecil Rhodes in his office. David Davis had attended Anglosphere think tank events in the USA. Boris Johnson, when Foreign Secretary, had a bust of Winston Churchill in his. During a visit to Australia, he talked warmly of the Anglosphere. Later, as Prime Minister, Johnson nominated an unsuccessful former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, as an adviser on trade relations, a hugely controversial appointment.

Trust? (Image credit:
Jannes Van den wouwer, Unsplash)

Creating closer trade links with the USA has figured prominently in the policies of the governments of both Theresa May and Boris Johnson. They are extremely controversial because what is at stake is less stringent regulation of food products (chlorinated chicken, hormones in beef, etc.) and the prospect of the National Health Service being sold off to US corporate interests, despite health care being vastly more expensive in the US, and failing to serve a large section of the population. From what is known about ongoing negotiations, it appears that the UK government is covertly following an Anglosphere agenda. There is virtually no parliamentary control, and the general public have not being given any insight into what is in the transatlantic pipeline. The British NGO Global Justice Now has been following these negotiations carefully and campaigning against what it sees as ‘the corporate take-over of global health’.

The British Academy organized a conference on the Anglosphere on June 15-16, 2017. It brought together academics from several countries, but mainly from the UK, British Foreign Office staff, and James Bennett. Martin Kettle of The Guardian wrote about it under the title ‘Here is Britain’s new place in the world – on the sidelines’.

The myth of the Anglosphere alternative needs nailing. These ideas have old roots. They have shaped a lot of British thinking in different ways, not just on the right of politics, for at least 150 years. In their 2017 incarnation, however, they run into two immovable facts. First, UK trade with the Anglosphere nations has massively declined from its pre-1914 peak; realistically, the US is now the UK’s only significantly large Anglosphere trading partner. Second, the US has long treated bilateral trade deals as zero-sum games, played on US terms, even before the election of an ultra-nationalist president, never mind now.

English in the EU now and in the future

At no point since the accession to the EU of the UK, along with Ireland and Denmark, in 1973 has there been any official recognition of English having a privileged or superior status in the EU. The progressive expansion of its use over nearly half a century has resulted in a downgrading of the use of French, which was primus inter pares earlier, and German, as well as the marginalisation of all other languages.

There has been speculation about whether English will remain as the dominant language in EU institutions after Brexit. Both President Macron and the former President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, are on record as wanting French to regain its former dominant role. Some increase in the use of French is possible. At present any unclear English and French texts are submitted to a language revision before they are translated into other EU languages. Nearly all new policy statements as well as texts that ultimately will have the force of law are drafted initially in English. It therefore seems safe to predict that any downgrading of English within the EU system is very unlikely to occur. Not only because the Irish and Maltese (both formerly run by the British) will continue to function almost exclusively in English, as will many from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and individuals from other countries. The main reason is that EU employees from all parts of Europe have become accustomed to functioning in English. The hegemony of English has been internalised and accepted.

When addressing the media, senior EU staff increasingly make statements in English, even if in principle they could speak any of the other 23 official languages. This practice strengthens the idea of it being ‘natural’ to use English, even if this practice is in conflict with the principle of the EU as a multilingual organisation, and is a consequence of multiple hegemonic forces behind English.

When Ursula von der Leyen, as the incoming President of the Commission in 2019 presented her priorities to the European Parliament, her mission statement was delivered mainly in English, and made brief, token use of French and German. Her multilingual competence is impressive. Her prepared speeches in English are delivered lucidly and persuasively, whereas some of her colleagues, the other Commissioners, are incapacitated and unconvincing when they opt to use English. The same applies when Ministers from continental Europe feel an obligation to speak English even when their mother tongues are languages that are widely used internationally, such as French, Spanish and German.

Charles Michel, the European Council President, reads prepared statements fluently in English but with a strong French accent. Whether he can use English spontaneously and effectively in a negotiating context one is unable to judge, but it is more than likely that he sounds more competent in French.

After a meeting of the European Council on 1 and 2 October 2020, the results were presented in an 8-minute speech delivered by Ursula von Leyen, in English. The written version was available in English, French, and German. One would have expected the presentation of results to be presented by Charles Michel, the European Council president, but it was von Leyen, the Commission president who spoke. One wonders whether this was a tactical decision, simply because she sounds more professional in English. Michel stood silently beside her. In principle these two presidents, plus the president of the European Parliament, have the same status but distinct portfolios.

On 12 September 2020, when reporting on a Brexit meeting in London, the German Minister of Finance Olaf Scholz chose to use English. He was reporting on highly sensitive issues, including the effect of the British intention to renege on the treaty signed a year earlier with the EU. Scholz sounded hesitant and unconvincing in English, and would doubtless have been vastly more effective and informative in German.

In any case it is unreasonable and unfair to expect people from 27 continental European countries to be as effective in English as in their national languages. The problem for von Leyen, Michel, and Scholz is, as the German-Danish linguist Hartmut Haberland points out, that in such contexts there is in effect no choice. ‘You are damned if you speak English and you are damned if you don’t.

This is the true triumph of English language imperialism: leaving everybody with no alternative.’

Romano Prodi, when he was President of the European Commission, was interviewed by an American journalist on many aspects of European integration, and was asked about EU language policy. The journalist is reported in Newsweek (31 May 2004) as saying: ‘A unified Europe in which English, as it turns out, is the universal language?’ Prodi replied: ‘It will be broken English, but it will be English.’

Ursula von der Leyen, the current president of the European Commission, is highly proficient in English

Broken English is increasingly what we hear when continental Europeans choose to address the international media and public in English. Broken English is a derogatory term for use of the language that does not conform to correct native speaker use. It is not a term that is used in scholarly analysis of the language, but it has a long pedigree. It was used by Shakespeare in a scene in the play Henry V, when the English king is wooing a French princess who is a complete beginner in English. There is a comic scene in Act III in which a lot of French is spoken, with Katherine’s lady in attendance teaching her a few basic words. In Act V the triumphal King Henry tells the princess: ‘If you will love me soundly with your French heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue’. What follows is playful interaction on this theme, with Katherine accusing Henry of being ‘full of deceits’. Perfidious Albion?

Broken agreements in not so broken English

Boris Johnson’s government decided in September 2020 to renege on a major agreement with the EU, one enshrined in an international treaty. The decision is in defiance of the UN Convention on International Treaties, as many legal specialists have pointed out. Philippe Sands QC, a professor of international law at University College London: ‘Every international lawyer is familiar with the Vienna convention on the law of treaties, and its article 27, which reflects a general principle: “A party may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for its failure to perform a treaty” ’(cited in The Guardian 12 September 2020). Despite the draft legislation being severely criticized by senior judges and lawyers, it was approved in the House of Commons on 29 September 2020.

It thus appears possible that Johnson’s team of negotiators has been duplicitous throughout negotiations on a Brexit agreement with the EU. Have they been negotiating in good faith? Perfidious Albion once more? Their word is not their bond?

Michel Barnier, the ‘Head of Task Force for Negotiations with the United Kingdom’, has made a succession of official statements on the progress of the Brexit negotiations, and increasingly on the lack of progress. It is difficult to imagine anyone more competent than Michel Barnier to represent the EU. He is the epitome of French experience and competence, was a Commissioner in the EU for two five-year periods, with responsibility for trade and regional policies, and has held several ministerial posts in French governments, including one as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The EU’s position has been transparently clear throughout. The multilingual website on the negotiations is fully informative, whereas nothing comparable exists in the UK. The British have repeatedly been asked to specify what their position is on key issues, among them fishing rights, a level playing field for trade, and Irish border arrangements. This has been frustrating for the EU, as its position has always been that it is in the interests of both the UK and the EU’s 27 member states that the negotiations should reach an agreement.

Since Germany has the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2020, its role is of great importance. Germany’s presidency does not entail direct responsibility for Brexit negotiations, but Germany’s excellent multilingual website has comprehensive coverage of all significant issues, including Brexit.

The EU is drawing its own conclusions. An anonymous EU representative was cited in The Guardian Weekly, on 18 September 2020: ‘People say that state aid and fisheries are the biggest stumbling blocks to a deal. It isn’t. It is trust’.

It seems highly likely that the power behind Johnson’s throne is Dominic Cummings, the ‘Chief Adviser’ to the Prime Minister. He is widely seen as a modern day Svengali or Rasputin. This understanding tallies with a detailed study of the Brexit Leave campaign, which Cummings was the brain behind. The most important Leave slogan was the claim that the UK was sending 350£ million a week to Brussels. This was untrue. It was plastered on campaign buses and widely cited. This did not disturb Cummings, since what was important was ‘message discipline and consistency’. As reported in the Financial Times, Cummings had ‘a cynical understanding that it did not matter if what the campaign said was factually correct’. This is the man that many experienced political commentators see as deciding what Boris Johnson does.

Johnson’s government’s illegality has been denounced by 5 former British Prime Ministers. Many Conservative Members of Parliament, for whom the rule of law is a fundamental principle, are in despair. On the other hand, according to The Economist, and cited in Pankaj Mishra’s Bland fanatics. Liberals, race and empire, conservative politicians are people who ‘coast through life on “bluff rather than expertise”. They are mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers’ who engage in ‘egotistical and destructive behaviour’.

Mishra sees quitting the EU as similar to and as catastrophic as the British division of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 1921, and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, in both cases with appalling loss of life as a result.

The politics of English

In complex negotiations between the EU and the UK over the terms of a Brexit divorce agreement, every word counts. This presupposes that all are using the language or languages of negotiation in an optimal, honest way. The British use English, quite possibly a sophisticated form of native speaker communication which may be difficult for others to understand fully or to see through. Since very few British politicians have attained a high level of proficiency in a foreign language, it is highly likely that they do not adjust their language so that it is easier for foreigners to understand. EU representatives probably mainly speak English, with varying levels of both precision in speaking and in understanding the English of their interlocutors.

Michel Barnier probably mostly uses French, but has spoken English in some statements to the press, and when delivering a prepared speech in Ireland. The general public can only guess at how far language issues are complicating the negotiations, but the issue would need clarification. There is research evidence from universities where students from a variety of language backgrounds are studying in programmes in which English is the language of learning. They experience that people using English with a foreign accent are often clearer and easier to understand than native speakers of English. The same is probably true of politicians and eurocrats with a high level of proficiency in English.

The increase of the use of English in EU affairs has made it easier for the British to remain monolingual, whereas the EU has for many years been committed to making all its citizens able to function multilingually. My book on European language policy, published in 2003, English-only Europe? Challenging language policy, is a lengthy plea for member states to take language policy more seriously, so as to strengthen all European languages and to avoid an excessive focus on English.

The concluding sentence is: ‘If inaction on language policy in Europe continues, at the supranational and national levels, we may be heading for an American English-only Europe. Is that really what the citizens and leaders of Europe want?’

Brexit will significantly diminish British influence on how Europe evolves. This is in the interest of the USA, as think tanks in the USA and the key architect of Anglosphere, James Bennett, have indicated and doubtless worked for.

The book was recently updated and translated into French, entitled La domination de l’anglais: un défi pour l’Europe (The domination of English: a challenge for Europe). Part of this challenge is that many EU policies have strengthened English and simultaneously weakened other languages, in processes that can be seen as constituting linguistic imperialism.

Business leaders in the UK have repeatedly pleaded with Boris Johnson to ensure that businesses are not harmed by both a lack of clarity on an agreement with the EU and on the need to ensure an agreement. They have for years had the feeling that their needs were being neglected. The BBC reported on 26 June 2018, when Johnson was Foreign Secretary: ‘Asked about corporate concerns over a so-called hard Brexit, at an event for EU diplomats in London last week, Mr Johnson is reported to have replied: “Fuck business”. When challenged over what he was overheard saying, he did not deny it. Asked about this in the Commons, he said he may have ‘expressed scepticism about some of the views of those who profess to speak up for business’.

Johnson’s outstandingly perfidious remark ought to come back to haunt him, since the uncertainty for business remains, and has already had devastating consequences. The traffic jams of thousands of lorries clogging roads in Kent symbolize the utter incompetence of the British government. This is harming businesses, the British economy, lorry drivers of all nationalities, and the residents of Kent.

The government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis has been equally incompetent. In Posh boys. How English public schools ruin Britain Robert Verkaik shows how attendance at elite schools and Oxford University cuts the elite off from the rest of British society; it ‘divides society into winners and losers’. It produces politicians who are out of touch with ordinary people and unable to provide informed leadership. These are the people who are responsible for Brexit.

Why should anyone trust them?

Related content

• Cramer, R. 2018. From oil spill to Brexit.
• Piller, I. 2016. Have we just seen the beginning of the end of English?

***

Editor’s note: Covid-19 has exposed fractures in the social and linguistic fabric in many contexts internationally, as we have been documenting in our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis since February. In our latest contribution, Martha Sif Karrebæk and Solvej Helleshøj Sørensen share a perspective from Denmark, where there have been obvious failures to communicate with linguistically diverse populations and, simultaneously, migrants have been scapegoated as disease carriers.

The special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a time of crisis”, which originally motivated the call for contributions to this series, has now been published and all the papers are available for free access.

***

Language ideological debates in Denmark

A Somali community worker hands out Covid-19 information pamphlets in Aarhus

In Denmark, as elsewhere, the COVID-pandemic has resulted in what is both an entirely new societal situation and an intensification of existing tensions and challenges, including issues associated with immigration.

The Prime Minister recently declared that all Danish citizens have received sufficient information about the virus: “The information is there and has been available for months, no one in Denmark can be in doubt about how to behave in relation to COVID-19.” The extent to which this statement is true is an open question. Rather than a description of an actual sociolinguistic fact, it must be understood as politically motivated.

Nobody knows how many residents have no or only a poor command of Danish. A 2018 report by the Ministry of Immigration and Integration estimated that between 7 and 30 percent of the 325,000 residents with non-Western backgrounds have difficulties reading and/or speaking Danish. Insufficient Danish skills are often regarded as intentional neglect and evidence of lack of willingness to “integrate” into society.

As language proficiency is widely seen as an individual issue, authorities rarely feel compelled to use any language other than Danish in official communications. Additionally, English is used in some official communications, but languages associated with (non-western) immigration are rare in public communication.

Outsourcing health communication to volunteers

As has been documented previously on Language on the Move, grassroots organisations and volunteers have played a large role in addressing the needs of linguistic minorities during the COVID-19 pandemic in many places. This is also the case in Denmark, where the state has been heavily reliant on non-governmental actors in disseminating Covid-19 related information across all communities.

We talked to the Head of Boligsocialnet, a collaboration between social housing associations and the association of Danish municipalities, Louise Buch Viftrup, who mentioned several reasons why civil society organisations (CSOs) take on the important informational tasks. For instance, they are quick to notice the needs in the community that they serve, they have employees on the ground to address them, and they can deliver at a higher speed than the authorities, who often operate with lengthy quality assurance procedures. Furthermore, community members tend to trust people that they already know which increases the rate of adherence to advice and guidelines.

Viftrup expressed satisfaction with the cooperation between the authorities and the CSOs in ensuring minority groups’ access to information regarding the pandemic.

Sådan ser informationspjecen fra Sundhedsstyrelsen ud på arabisk. (Foto: Sundhedsstyrelsen © sundhedsstyrelsen)

For example, the health authorities provided posters with pictograms and short texts describing the five key recommendations in fifteen different languages. These were displayed in social housing blocs with high concentrations of residents with immigrant backgrounds.

However, representatives of the residents quickly pointed out that these posters were insufficient in terms of information for non-Danish speaking groups. Volunteer networks within social housing blocs additionally use social media platforms such as Facebook and Whatsapp to disseminate live translations or summaries of government press conferences.

The volunteers also answered questions in minority languages in the connected Facebook-threads and on the phone. Further examples include a YouTuber known for his online Danish-classes for Arabic speakers who did a video with phrases related to the pandemic, and an interpreting agency offering free interpreting services.

On April 06, 2020, the Danish Refugee Council established a hotline in 25 different languages for questions regarding the pandemic. Both initiatives were taken in cooperation with different CSOs and received support from private foundations such as the Novo Nordisk Foundation, while national health authorities assisted with quality assurance. Eventually, the authorities additionally issued more detailed material in other languages to complement the original posters, but it was also suggested that the linguistic quality of this material was not always high.

From translating materials to communication strategies

As pointed out by Viftrup, the challenge consists not only in creating informative content in different languages, but also ensuring that it actually reaches its target groups. Here, local efforts as those cited, have played a crucial role as “role models” spread information to specific communities. And, there was a huge need for information, as Lise Dyhr, Senior Researcher in Family Medicine, University of Copenhagen, and Morten Sodemann, Clinical Professor at Odense University Hospital’s Migrant Health Clinic discovered.

Some of their patients were frightened by the empty streets, an initial lack of basic necessities in the super-markets, and the regular appearance of a line-up of authorities (PM and health officials) on television. Others experienced gaps between home country and diaspora news and the information they received from Danish sources. This led to distrust of the Danish media. Some did not dare to go out at all, and when the educational sector gradually re-opened, they did not see how it suddenly would be safe again to send their children to school, in particular as many work places were still closed.

Some professional interpreters saw their tasks expanding. Some of our research participants, interpreters employed by a hospital, were asked to make phone calls to screen non-Danish speaking patients scheduled for other appointments for COVID-19 symptoms using a questionnaire. Some interpreters felt overwhelmed by the new responsibilities, others experienced it as an easy transition into new aspects of their work. But these interpreters had the impression that the patients were overall well-informed about the pandemic, and they believed this to be due to efficient social networks and the internet.

Minorities are more vulnerable to infection

At the same time, as we have seen in many other countries, minority citizens have been and are still over-represented in the statistics of those infected with COVID-19. By May 07, those with a migration background accounted for 18% of infected citizens although they only constitute 9% of the total population. In the week of August 03 to August 09, 70% of the 756 individuals testing positive for COVID-19 had ethnic minority backgrounds.

The factors leading to increased vulnerability include a high percentage working in particularly exposed sectors (e.g., public transportation, service and health care sectors) and large families sharing small living spaces, as well as existing underlying health conditions in this demographic.

Scapegoating

Despite these obvious reasons, the statistical over-representation – and, not least, its public announcement – has led to hostility expressed by ethnic Danes.

As an example, after recent clusters of COVID-19 cases among non-ethnic Danes in the city of Aarhus, politicians were quick to address this, among them Pia Kjærsgaard, Member of Parliament for the Danish People’s Party, a national-conservative party. She called for “a close down of the ghettoes” and accused immigrants of not taking the pandemic seriously enough.

At the same time, members of the Somali community have reported an increase in harassment and discrimination. For example, a kindergarten asked for a negative COVID-19 test for the children of a Somali family, and a public transport company reporting received requests to take Somali drivers of their shifts.

Experiences such as these problematize the publication of data concerning the ethnic backgrounds of infected individuals. On the one hand, this data can expose community specific vulnerabilities such as the ones documented by the DIHR report and allow for targeted measures adapted to the needs of specific community. On the other hand, rather than addressing the underlying issues such as housing, working conditions, and access to information, specific immigrant groups are scapegoated as disease-carriers.

Pushing back on social media

There has been some resistance and efforts to reframe the debate on social media. At the initiative of the Danish-Somali advocacy group “Mediegruppen” (the Media group) the hashtags #SomalisSayNo (#Somalieresigerfra) and #NoToPublicShaming (#Nejtiludskamning) started trending. Members of “the Blue Stars”, a group of young Danes with Somali backgrounds who fight prejudices against Somalis, decried the public shaming of the community as a whole on television and expressed fears over possible future consequences.

#SomaliereSigerFra#NejTilUdskamning#dkpol
Vore demokratiske samfund bygger på pressefrihed, men denne frihed indebærer ansvarlighed. Vi vil derfor opfordre samtlige myndigheder, politikere og medier til at kæmpe for…https://t.co/YppTGiGSD8 pic.twitter.com/D32OD8W2Rw

— Mediegruppen (@mgfsdk) August 8, 2020

Furthermore, the Aarhus Somali taskforce wrote an open letter to the prime minister where they questioned the PMs statement that information had been available to all (cited in the beginning of this piece). After reviewing the Somali translations of the guidelines issued by the authorities, they found them to be mostly unintelligible, perhaps the result of a google translate effort.

Covid-19 as an opportunity to rethink linguistic diversity and social justice in Denmark?

The issue of reaching non-Danish speaking groups is not uniquely related to the Covid-19 pandemic; nor is the fact of preexisting anti-immigrant sentiments among segments of the population and their political representatives. The crisis has undeniably heightened the need for communication strategies across languages and communities and exposed its relevance to everybody, but in principle the issue is not new. Maybe the crisis will ultimately constitute an opportunity to reconsider the intersection of linguistic diversity and social justice in Danish society.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for the full Language on the Move coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. The special issue of Multilingua of 12 peer-reviewed research papers about “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis” is available here.

Akhlaq Ahmad at work on the mural in Shahdara for the ‘Delhi, I Love You’ project. (Image Credit: Delhi, I Love You)

On July 8, 2020, The Wire published an anonymous article by a young Indian Muslim. In it, the writer shares his painful experience of how, in the anti-Muslim Hindutva climate created by the right-wing BJP government, his identity has been reduced to his Muslim name. Despite the fact that he observes no Islamic practices and champions liberal views, his Hindu colleagues look at him with suspicion. On social media, he is often called a jihadi, an ISIS-sympathizer, and mulla, a slur, for speaking up for the rights of minorities, especially Muslims.

Fearing for his life, he has stopped saying in public salamwaleikum, the Muslim greeting in Urdu. He also instructed his kids not to call him abba, an Urdu word for ‘dad’. He even started tweaking his name, so that it does not sound Muslim.

While violence, including mob-lynching of Muslims and the anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi in February 2020, has been discussed, the symbolic violence against the Urdu language—a proxy for and target of hate and discrimination against Muslims—hasn’t. I use the term Urdu in a broader sense to encompass the language as well as names.

Consider Urdu personal names and cases of hatred and discrimination that revolve around the identities they reveal. It is worth noting that the  BJP government in the last few years has renamed many places containing Urdu/Muslim names with names that evoke Hindu history and culture.

Personal names are not simply a system of identification by which people differentiate one person from another; they are also carriers of cultural information, including the social identities of the bearers of the names. A study conducted in the USA found that white-sounding names such as Emily and Greg were more likely to get callbacks from employers than Black-sounding names Lakisha and Jamal. While some names in the US clearly indicate racial identity, others such as John and Michelle are non-discernable. By contrast, in India, most Muslim names are discernable as they draw largely upon Persian and Arabic sources as against Hindu names which are derived, among other sources, from Hindu traditions. Since Urdu names are signposts of the Muslim identity, they easily become instruments of hate and discrimination against Muslims.

In May 2015, a Muslim young man, Zeeshan, holding an MBA degree was denied a job by Hare Krishna Exports, a diamond company based in Mumbai, because of his religion. Less than fifteen minutes after he submitted his application online, Zeeshan received a shocking reply from the company: “We regret to inform you that we hire only non-Muslim candidates”. Clearly, the decision to reject his application was based on the candidate’s Urdu/Muslim name.

Other cases of discrimination based on Muslim names have surfaced recently in companies that deliver goods to people on their doors. On 24 April, 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Barkat Patel, a Muslim employee of Grofers, an online grocery store, went to deliver grocery to Ms. Chaturvedi at Jaya Park in Mumbai. But her father stopped her from taking the delivery. According to the report filed at the police station,  the father wanted to know the  name of the delivery guy first. Once he found out from the name that Barkat was Muslim, he refused to take it. Barkat recorded the whole exchange on his mobile phone and submitted it to the police.

Similar cases of discrimination were reported from Zomato and Swiggy, popular food delivery companies. On October 25, 2019, Swiggy lodged a complaint with a police station in Hyderabad stating that a customer refused to receive their food order because the delivery man was Muslim. Another case of discrimination was reported on August 1, 2019 in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. In this case, a customer Amit Shukla cancelled his Zomato delivery when he found out from the name Faiyaz that his delivery man was Muslim. What makes it even more reprehensible is that Shukla argued that this was part of his freedom of expression and religion guaranteed by the constitution.

However, names don’t always correspond with social-religious identities. Some Hindu names of Persian or Arabic origin bear similarities with Urdu/Muslim name. In absence of other visual cues e.g. outfit or facial looks, such names could miscommunicate the identities of the bearers of the names. This is exactly what happened when a 23-old young Hindu man named Sahil was lynched by some Hindus in Maujpur in Delhi. Although the police denies the claim, Sahil’s parents, Sunil and Suneeta, both believe that their son was killed because he was mistaken for a Muslim who had entered a Hindu neighborhood. Suneeta expressed her regret at naming him Sahil, “I wouldn’t have named him Sahil had I known that it would turn out to be the cause of his death”. The incident that led to Sahil’s killing is worth mentioning. Sahil was at home when he found out that some of his friends had a brawl in Gali Number 5 in Maujpur, Delhi. When he rushed to the spot to resolve the issue the residents of the neighborhood asked his name. On knowing that his name was Sahil, the crowd turned to him and thrashed him severely. He died on his way to the hospital.

In another case, a Muslim man’s nickname, which did not sound Muslim, actually saved him. On May 19, 2016, as part of beautification of Delhi, Akhlaq Ahmad, an Indian artist who holds a degree in fine arts, and Swen Simon, a French artist, were writing an Urdu couplet on a wall in Shahdara, Delhi. Some members of the right-wing RSS gathered there and asked them to stop writing the couplet in Urdu and threatened them with dire consequences if they didn’t. They said, “ …they could bear anything, but not the Urdu script” They snatched the artists’ paintbrushes and smudged the Urdu writing on the wall. In an interview, the Muslim artist, said, “…I said my name is Shabbu [his nick name] and they assumed I was Shambhu, a Hindu. So, they turned their ire towards my French colleague, Swen Simon, asking him to pay me my wages and go back to Lahore”.

This exception only proves the rule. The cases of Sahil and Akhlaq/Sabbu are both of some kind of miscommunication based on Muslim names. The action that led to the loss of Sahil’s life and saved Akhlaq’s is based on the ideology of hate and discrimination against Muslims as manifested from their names.

The fear of uttering Urdu names, greetings, or words in public is increasing among Muslims in north India. In response to the anonymous article with which I opened this piece, Rana Safvi, a Muslim writer tweeted that she also avoids saying salaam, Muslim greeting, in public.

Although Akhlaq had a sigh of relief because his non-Muslim-sounding name saved him, the stories of Zeeshan, Barkat, Sahil, and Faiyaz, clearly show how ideologies of hate and discrimination can be routed through personal names, labels over which we as bearers of the names have little control.

Discrimination based on names are just be a tip of the iceberg of a larger systemic process of exclusion and marginalization of Muslims in India. A democracy worthy of its name cannot allow names to be the ground of discrimination against its own citizens in whose very name it rules.

Related content

• Stereotyped names as a barrier to workplace entry
• What’s in a name?
• Behind a name
• Names on the move: Ghanaian names in the diaspora