Figure 1: Sarah (in black) and Anna (in purple) at Abrahamic Family House

As friends and fellow sociolinguists, we, Anna and Sarah, have discussed almost every topic under the sun (literally!) on our balmy afternoon walks in our home/second home of Abu Dhabi. However, one topic we hadn’t discussed until recently was languages used within religions. Our visit to the Abrahamic Family House on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island changed this (Figure 1).

Linguistic and semiotic harmony across religions

It’s not often that you see Arabic, Hebrew and English represented together in the same space, but that’s exactly what the Abrahamic Family House does. This cultural and religious centre contains a mosque, synagogue and church as places of worship, linked together by ‘the Forum’, a secular and yet multi-faith connecting space or third space. One of the first features you are drawn towards is the Forum’s water fountain, which highlights the importance of water as a symbol of purity and ablution in Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Figure 2: Trilingual signage at Abrahamic Family House (picture taken by authors)

All the top-down permanent signage in the Abrahamic Family House is trilingual (Arabic, English, Hebrew), and produced in such a way that the languages are equal in size and are represented on an even footing (Figure 2), with order of languages being alphabetical. This ethos mirrors the design of the mosque, church and synagogue themselves, which are represented equitably – with each building being a 30m x 30m square (Figure 3).

The numerological landscape also holds meaning in this space, with the number seven being significant in all three religions, and therefore represented in the architecture. The gardens add another dimension to the semiotic landscape, within serene courtyards dotted throughout as well as the central raised garden which links all three houses of worship. Here, olive trees are significant in all three religions and are planted throughout, again symbolizing the collective and shared history of the faiths, and with regional trees and plants also indicating the shared regional origin of all three religions.

Language choices for religious signs

Figure 3: The church, mosque and synagogue at the Abrahamic Family House (pictures taken by authors)

As we headed back to the Forum from the gardens, we witnessed an interesting lingua-cultural turn in relation to the signage in one of the darkened rooms. Each corner of the room was lit up in turn by a gobo, with a crescent representing Islam, a cross for Christianity, and a menorah symbolizing Judaism (Figure 4).

Where the crescent was, a verse from the Holy Quran was printed in English and Hebrew only (not Arabic), while where the cross was, a verse from the New Testament in the Bible was printed in Hebrew and Arabic. By the menorah, a verse from the Holy Torah was printed in Arabic and English, and not Hebrew. Some very interesting linguistic choices were made in this room. Here, the emphasis is on sharing values across linguistic groups. Multilingual linguistic landscapes here serve as a pedagogical tool for learning not only about languages, but in this case, religions too.

Abandonment of trilingual values on bottom-up and temporary signage

Figure 4: Religious gobos in the Forum (pictures taken by authors)

When looking at the temporary and bottom-up signage in the space, however, trilingual patterns wavered. For example, if you wanted to attend a sign language course which was being offered as part of the community outreach program, the story told was in Arabic and English, and not Hebrew. In the gift shop, while the main signage was in all three languages, the descriptions of the items were given in English only. Similarly, if you wanted to borrow an abaya to follow the dress code, the directions were given in English only. This reminds us of similar patterns found in Covid-scapes in Abu Dhabi, where bottom-up temporary signage tended to be in English only, in an otherwise bilingual linguistic landscape. Furthermore, the digital linguistic landscape seen via the website of the Abrahamic Family House, is bilingual (English and Arabic), with Hebrew not being a language option. Here, we see, as in other multilingual global contexts such as Canada, trilingual efforts are imbalanced across spaces.

The wall of intentions

Figure 5: Multilingual wall of intentions (picture taken by authors)

Having explored the three places of worship and experienced the immersive light show (Figure 4), we came across a wall of tessellating triangles, again speaking to the significance of the number three: three languages, three religions, and echoing the shape of the simple triangular fountains found throughout the complex. We quickly realized that the purpose of this ‘wall of intentions’ was for visitors to write their own messages of intention. From 120 messages on the wall, we could understand the 60 messages written in English, eight in French, five in German, four in Spanish and one in Italian. A further six were written in Arabic, 25 in East Asian languages, and 18 others which we have yet to fully translate. Pictures appeared on 24 of the messages in addition to text, with only one intention including a picture without words, which was three people holding hands together, symbolizing togetherness.

Of the 78 intentions we could understand, 11 of them referred to God and only one indicated a prayer of any kind. Love was mentioned in 24 intentions, sometimes more than once to emphasize it. Peace was mentioned in 22 intentions. Other sentiments expressed included luck (five times) and happiness (seven times). Intentions were sometimes made in general, other times for oneself, for example ‘to be stress-free’, while sometimes they were made for the world (ten times), and for family in general or specific family members (12 times) (Figure 5).

Figure 6: Our intention for further research (picture taken by authors)

Although the wall of intentions is temporary with today’s intentions being different from tomorrow’s, a major takeaway on the day we visited, October 21, 2024, was the focus on love, peace, the world, and family, rather than on religion itself. There is no doubt that further analysis which includes specific and detailed translations will reveal more nuanced truths, but that’s for another day. Suffice to say that there is a lot to get excited about in this multi-faith, multilingual and interculturally rich space. As our hand-written intention states (Figure 6), we plan to delve deeper into this rich landscape and add to the growing research on religious linguistic landscapes and semiotic religious landscapes in the Arab Gulf States and beyond.

Author bios:

Anna Dillon is an Associate Professor at Emirates College for Advanced Education in Abu Dhabi. She is a teacher educator in the UAE, and has research interests in early childhood education, teacher education, language and literacy education, multilingualism and translingualism in education and within families.

Sarah Hopkyns is a Lecturer at the University of St Andrews and a visiting research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Her research interests include language and identity, language policy and linguistic landscapes. Sarah is author of The Impact of Global English on Cultural Identities in the UAE (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of Linguistic Identities in the Arab Gulf States (Routledge, 2022).

The 3-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition is an opportunity for higher degree research students to present their research in 3 minutes. Normally, symposiums, conferences and seminars are some of the ways research students get to talk about their research. Unlike those presentation formats, the 3MT poses a unique challenge – an entire thesis has to be presented within 3 minutes and not a second over!

This year, the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) held its 3MT competition on 27^th September, 2024 and Tazin Abdullah won first prize. She presented on her research on the Linguistic Landscape of Australian mosques titled “Observe overall cleanliness and sound mannerisms at all times!” – Regulating Australian Muslims in mosques and Islamic prayer spaces.

Tazin’s study examined regulatory signs from Australian mosques that gave readers instructions and stated prohibitions regarding behaviour in these places. What do these signs say about the communication practices within Australian Muslim prayer spaces? What languages do these signs use to communicate with readers? What linguistic and visual strategies do they employ to present rules and regulations?

Reference

Abdullah, Tazin. 2024. “Observe overall cleanliness and sound mannerisms at all times!” – Regulating Australian Muslims in mosques and Islamic prayer spaces. (MRes), Macquarie University.

Other 3MT videos by members of the Language on the Move team

• Brynn Quick, Curing Confusion
• Pia Tenedero, Communicating globally while working remotely

For some images of Ibrar’s work, check out the Sino-Muslim Literacies Project.

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

Related content

Ma, Y. (2020). Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic? Language on the Move

Akhmedova, M., & Ahmad, R. (2024). Why Are Uzbek Youth Learning Arabic? Language on the Move

Yasser S. Khan and Rizwan Ahmad

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The offending dress (Image credit: BBC)

Recently, a woman in Lahore was accused of blasphemy for wearing a dress printed with Arabic calligraphy. The crowd had assumed that the sartorial motifs must be verses from the Qur’an.

In reality, the words on the dress were hayah and hulwah meaning ‘life’ and ‘sweet’ respectively. Islamic scholars had to be called in to verify this to eventually disband the crowd.

How did the misunderstanding come about?

The calligraphic style of the print on the dress loosely resembles the Thuluth style of writing. Thuluth literally means “a third,” referring to its compactness, as this style of writing occupies a third of the space in comparison to other more expansive Arabic calligraphic styles.

The Thuluth style is most notably visible on Kiswah, the black fabric that covers the Kaaba with verses from the Qur’an. The iconicity of the Kaaba, being one of the most well-known symbols within Islam alongside the crescent moon, extends to the black cloth that covers and adorns it in golden inscriptions of Qur’anic verses , which makes the association of the Thuluth form of writing with Qur’anic verse even stronger.

Generally, Muslims in Pakistan and the Subcontinent at large are able to read Quranic Arabic, even as they might not understand it; recognizing the script is distinct from comprehending it. Considering their familiarity with the Quranic script and the iconic visibility of the Kiswah, the crowd in Pakistan recognized the Thuluth form of Arabic writing on the dress, which to them is blasphemous as it is perceived as an irreverent treatment of sacred Qur’anic verses.

For the crowd, it was the form of the writing that evoked the sacredness associated with the Qur’an which they mistakenly associated with the content of the writing. If the dress had been printed with Urdu words (in which case the crowd would have known the content) or even perhaps Arabic words in another font, the misrecognition would not have arisen.

Using the sacred associations evoked by Qur’anic form strategically

Arabic “Do not urinate!” sign in Dhaka (Image credit: Global voices)

While the hapless woman in Lahore likely was unaware of the sacred associations evoked by the print on her dress, authorities in Bangladesh use the form of Qur’anic Arabic more strategically.

In Dhaka, as elsewhere on the subcontinent, it is common practice for men to urinate on the street, due to inadequate public toilets.

In addition to providing better sanitary facilities, the Ministry of Religious Affairs commissioned prohibitive messages against public urination in Arabic.

Why write prohibitive messages against public urination in Arabic instead of Bangla, even though Arabic is a language Bangladeshis recognize mostly in relation to the Qur’an?

For many Bangladeshis, as for Pakistanis, anything written in Arabic in a font associated with the Qur’an seems sacred. While they are unlikely to understand the meaning of the prohibitive messages written in Arabic, the use of the form of Qur’anic Arabic for the prohibition is effective, as people will be fearful to urinate on what they assume to be a sacred Qur’anic verse.

In both cases, it is the form that evokes the association with the sacred text, not the content.

These two episodes demonstrate that in the meaning-making process, there is often a complex negotiation and interaction between form and content of language. Conventionally, we give more precedence to content at the peril of losing the meaning conveyed to us by form. The overlooking of form can lead to misunderstandings, as happened in Lahore, just as the deliberate use of form can become a powerful tool to evoke associations that bypass content and thus shape perceptions. Alongside content, the form of language, script, or font shape and are shaped by the meanings they are supposed to carry. A neglect of form in our everyday perception of language can only lead to a fractured understanding of how meaning is produced and how it is perceived and consumed.

***

Yasser Shams Khan is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Qatar University. He is the recipient of the 2024 British Association for Romantic Studies President’s Fellowship. His work focuses on the history of theatricality and performance practices, with specific interest in issues of race, Orientalism, and empire in the long eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

***

Related content

Ahmad, Rizwan. 2022. Mal Lawwal: Linguistic landscapes of Qatar
Ahmad, Rizwan. 2020. “I regret having named him Sahil”: Urdu names in India
Grey, Alexandra. 2018. Do you ever wear language?
Piller, Ingrid. 2010. Transliterated brand names
Piller, Ingrid. 2013. Linguistic theory in Dubai

Ramadan Lights on Coventry Street

Ramadan in London is exceptional in many ways. As the centre of a former Empire which still exerts a global pull on its former subjects and their descendants, London has been at the heart of a wave of migrations since the times of the British Raj. Initiatives inclusive of Muslims have normalised the Muslim presence. While there is no doubt that islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate is on the rise in Britain, too, the relative ease and acceptance of being a Muslim in the public space is manifested here in pragmatic ways, such as the widespread availability of halal food.

London’s Ramadan celebrations are in a class of its own. London’s Ramadan illuminations of 2023 were a testament to the diversity, inclusivity and vibrancy of London. When London’s first ever Ramadan lights were switched on by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the Lord Mayor of Westminster, Hamza Taouzzale, Muslims felt acknowledged in the public space generating a sense of understanding and promoting an equitable society.

Open iftars are another example. These have taken place for decades in Britain, and Muslims and non-Muslims break the fast together in public spaces. Sharing meals with strangers is a powerful experience for people of all faiths. Open iftars are incredibly important to get visibility and also to have communitywide engagement with each other, as is the essence of Islam. Some of the picturesque and breathtakingly beautiful environments where open iftars have taken place include Victoria and Albert Museum, Trafalgar Square, and Cambridge University.

Ramadan 2023 marked a particularly significant moment in British history as Muslim leaders were for the first time invited to the official residence of the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street for an iftar meal.

Corporate Europe is starting to celebrate Ramadan, too. Furniture retailer IKEA, for instance,  launched the GOKVÄLLÅ collection this year with clear connections to the Ramadan spirit.

My Ramadan

The visibility of Ramadan in public shapes personal experiences of Ramadan, too. For me, we start preparing for Ramadan months ahead by getting the house ready, shopping, and cooking. What I aim to do is complete mundane task before the start of the Holy Month, so that there is more time for spiritual reflection and Quran reading.

Ramadan lights in the streets and open iftars remind me of the beauty of our human diversity through these newly formed traditions in Europe.

As the Quran states, “Among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the difference of your languages and colours. There are indeed signs in that for those who know” (30:22).

I wish all who celebrate and observe the month of Ramadan a time full of divine blessings! Ameen.

Map of Transoxania (Source: Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: Arabic language learning is experiencing a revival in many parts of the world, such as China, where it may be a source of empowerment for impoverished Muslim women. This post by Mehrinigor Akhmedova (Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan) and Rizwan Ahmad (Qatar University, Qatar) takes us to Uzbekistan, a part of the post-Soviet world, where some aspects of Transoxania’s multilingual past are being revived for religious and economic reasons.

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Mehrinigor Akhmedova, Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan
Rizwan Ahmad, Qatar University, Qatar
***

Recently, interest in the learning of Arabic language and script among the young generation of Uzbeks has been rising. Young Uzbeks are learning Arabic not simply because of their faith, Islam, but also because it is desirable in the domestic job market and opens a window of opportunities in the Arabic-speaking Gulf states.

In September 2023, the Department of Islamic History Source Studies, Philosophy at Bukhara State University invited a professor from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University to teach courses in Arabic. This is a significant change in the history of Arabic and Islamic learning in Uzbekistan. During the Soviet rule and early years of independence in 1991, Uzbekistan witnessed many ups and down regarding the place of Islam in the constitutionally secular Uzbek society. In 1998, fearing radical Islamic ideologies, the government closed many madrasas, traditional schools of learning, established soon after the independence.

Liquidation of Madrasas and Teaching of Arabic in Uzbekistan

Although the repression of Islam in the former Soviet republics, including modern-day Uzbekistan, began during the Tsarist regime, it reached its climax during the Soviet rule following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The state repression of Islam took many forms, including the persecution and killing of mudarris and ulama, teachers and scholars of Islam, nationalization of vaqf properties, Islam endowments, and forceful removal of veils from Muslim women, known as the hujum campaign.

Dome of the Mir-i-Arab Madrasa (Image credit: Wikipedia)

On the educational and sociolinguistic fronts, the repression led to the dismantling of the centuries old traditional Islamic educational system of maktabs and madrasas where students learned to read and recite the Qur’an in Arabic. In 1928, the Fourth Meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic issued an order on the liquidation of all old method schools and madrasas. According to Ashirbek Muminov and Rinat Shigabdinov, before the 1928 decree, there were 1,362 madrasas in Uzbekistan with 21,183 students enrolled in them.

Another measure that damaged Arabic teaching and learning was the decision to replace the traditional Arabic script of Uzbek with a Latin-based writing system in 1927. Ten years later in 1937, as a measure of Russification, the Cyrillic script replaced the Latin script. These measures dealt a death blow to the teaching of Islam and Arabic language and script in Uzbekistan. In 1945, as a token of acceptance of religious institutions, Stalin allowed Mir-e-Arab madrasa, established in the 16th century, in Bukhara, to reopen with a limited number of students. Subsequently, two more institutions of Islamic learning were established; namely, madrasa Baraq Khan in 1956 and Tashkent Islamic Institute of Imam al-Bukhari in 1971.

Arabic within Multilingual Transoxiana

Present-day Uzbekistan, which in pre-modern times, was part of the larger Transoxiana region in Central Asia, was a thriving center of Arabic language and literature. The Persian-speaking Samanids (819-999 AD), who ruled Central Asia from their capital in Bukhara under the suzerainty of the Arabic-speaking Abbasids, maintained Arabic as the language of administration, Islamic learning, and sciences. The Samanids simultaneously encouraged use of Persian in the court. Under their patronage, many Arabic texts were translated into Persian, including the Quranic tafsir, exegesis, of Al-Tabari (d. 923 AD) and the Kalila wa Dimnah, a collection of fables, originally written in Sanskrit.

1958 Soviet stamp celebrating the 1100th birthday of Rudaki (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Rudaki (858-940), born and raised in Bukhara and regarded as the founder of New Persian Poetry, was granted the esteemed position of the court poet of the Samanids.

In this multilingual linguistic and intellectual environment, there emerged in Bukhara two towering figures among the scholars of Hadith, the most foundational Islamic text after the Quran, namely Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari aka Imam Bukhari (810-870 AD) and Muhammad ibn Isa known as Al-Tirmidhi (824-892). Both were born in the Bukhara region of what is today Uzbekistan. In pursuit of the compilation of the Hadith, the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, they travelled widely to different parts of the Muslim world. They wrote their collections of hadith in Arabic, known as Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sunan Al-Tirmidhi respectively.

To the illustrious history of Bukhara as a center of Arabic can be added the polymath and physician Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in Latin Western sources. He is considered to be the father of early modern medicine. Born in Afshona in Bukhara, Ibn Sina, had memorized the whole of the Quran before the age of ten. Later he turned his attention to the study of medicine. He authored many books in Arabic on philosophy, mathematics and other branches of knowledge. In medicine, his famous work is Al-Qanoon fi Al-Tib, “The Canon of Medicine.” This work consists of five volumes with over 1 million words. He was the physician of the Samanid ruler Nuh II (976-997).

In September 2023, in a speech delivered in the UN, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the president of Uzbekistan, named Imam Bukhari and Ibn Sina, among others, as scholars who richly contributed to science and showed that Islam was a religion of knowledge and peace.

Rise of Interest in Arabic in contemporary Bukhara

After the repression of Arabic and Islamic teaching during Soviet rule, there are signs of change in today’s Uzbekistan. In addition to official institutions such as Bukhara University encouraging the teaching of Arabic, many private language centers have also recently emerged in the city of Bukhara. There are over 50 private language centers in Bukhara, including popular ones like Takallum, An-Nisa, and Naqshbandi School.

Drawing of viscera from Ibn Sina’s “Canon of Medicine” (Source: Wellcome Collection)

On their Facebook page, Takallum invites students as follows, “…reciting the Qur’an with Tajweed is our obligatory deed and our deed will lead us to Paradise! Lead your friends to paradise, help them read the Quran, be a true friend for them”. Evidently, for Takallum the learning of Arabic is coupled with Islamic beliefs and practices.

Based on a pilot study conducted in September-October 2023, we found that there are clear signs of the rise in the interest in Arabic learning. First, we discuss a survey that was given online to an active Telegram group called NIسA_School, Ayollar Maktabi, with over 14,000 women members. The use of the Arabic letter س in the first word of the group is indexical of the fact that it brings back the Arabic language and its history in Uzbekistan.

Next, we discuss statistics of students who received Arabic language proficiency certificates from Davlat Test Markazi Buxoro Viloyat Bo’limi, National Test Center, Bukhara Region.

In response to the survey question ‘what was your goal of learning Arabic?’, an overwhelming 82% of the participants (N=347) answered that they considered learning Arabic as most important knowledge for their self-development. Related to this personal/spiritual goal of learning Arabic was the response from 14% of the participants who learned Arabic in order to teach it to others.

It is important to mention here that Muslims believe that God rewards those who read the Qur’an in the original Arabic, even if they do not understand its message. This means that the original Arabic text has spiritual value that cannot be gained by reading it in translation.

The remaining 4% learned Arabic because they wanted to live and work in an Arabic-speaking country.

Another indicator of the rising interest in Arabic comes from the data of students who have received a proficiency certificate in Arabic based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In 2022, Uzbekistan started to use the six-point CEFR proficiency levels from A1-A2, basic user, through B1-B2, independent user, to C1-C2, proficient user. Since the implementation of CEFR in 2022, the total number of students receiving CEFR enrolled in different Arabic language teaching centers in the Bukhara region alone was 3,079. The vast majority of them (92%) received B1 and B2 and the remaining 8% received the higher proficiency level C1. No Uzbek students attained C2, the highest-level proficiency.

Post-Soviet transformations

Bukhara, Old City (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Another important factor propelling people’s interest in Arabic learning is that the Government of Uzbekistan encourages learning of foreign languages and rewards those who earn high-level proficiency certificates in them. According to a presidential decree of 2021, teachers of Arabic and other foreign languages with a C1 certificate will be paid an additional bonus of 50% of their basic salary. Similarly, employees in any government agency possessing any national or international certificate in a foreign language will receive an extra bonus of 20% on their basic salary. Furthermore, students applying for admission into master’s and Ph.D. in the philological studies must show a C1 level proficiency in a foreign language and those in non-philological fields must have a B2 level proficiency.

The discussion above clearly suggests that the changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union have transformed the linguistic and educational fields. Uzbekistan, one of the great centers of Arabic language during the medieval era is witnessing a renaissance in the learning of Arabic after a long period of state suppression. Many young Uzbeks are rediscovering their history by learning the Arabic language and its script. The government’s incentives of learning a foreign language make Arabic learning even more attractive.

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Akhmedova Mehrinigor Bahodirovna is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Literature & Translation Studies at Bukhara State University. Her research covers issues related to translation, literature, spirituality and sociolinguistics.

Image 1

Like many parents of teenagers, I delightedly welcome any occasion to connect with a generation I don’t always understand and that doesn’t always understand me. As a Muslim family in Australia, this inter-generational exchange is often characterized by questions from my children about our Islamic practices and how we talk about these with our friends who are not Muslim. One of the most questioned of these practices is Ramadan, the month in the Islamic calendar when Muslims abstain from consumption of food and drink during the day.

So, when my children began texting me a range of Ramadan-themed memes, I was elated to find something that we could relate to and laugh at together. Image 1 has always topped the list of our favorites.

There are many versions of this meme, and it owes its popularity to the fact that across generations, we answer this question every Ramadan, without fail. In fact, the first time I showed this meme to a work friend, he exclaimed, “Hey, I asked you that, too!” We both laughed (at him) and then, spent the next half hour going through other Ramadan memes, like those in Image 2 and Image 3.

Image 3

Image 2

And once more, I shared not just a laugh with someone, but an opening for genuine intercultural communication and sharing. In the numerous conversations these memes inspired, most expressed that they had no idea that there was a ‘world’ of Muslim memes that entertained and explained.

For me, these memes have played two important communication roles: intergenerational and intercultural. In the Australian context, second and third generation Muslims communicate with each other and outside of the Muslim community in English. Many of their linguistic expressions relate to sarcasm, irony and wordplays based on English. Their cultural references are TV shows like Friends and The Hunger Games and there is no shortage of memes based on dialogues from popular TV shows and movies. The creative efforts behind Muslim-based memes have been written about in numerous places such as here.

The humor not only provides a platform for internal communication for Muslims but also a means to connect to non-Muslims, with whom they share these linguistic expressions and cultural references. Both my Muslim and non-Muslim friends always get a kick out of the memes in Image 4 and Image 5. By the way, iftar is the meal eaten at sunset to break the day’s fast and traditionally begins with the consumption of dates.

Image 4

Image 5

Humor – specifically, humor in a language and mode that we all relate to – connects us and provides access to the practices of a community often questioned and misunderstood. A few years back, the ABC offered a Ramadan explainer using a series of memes and tweets. There are also innumerable social media feeds devoted to Muslim memes, such as this Facebook page or this Twitter feed.

The volume of meme production on these platforms is indicative of the time devoted to this means of communication. In a study of young American Muslim women who engage in meme-making, Ali (2020) showed how these memes allow their creators to negotiate aspects of their citizenship in USA. For a community that is often subject to stereotyping, these memes offer a way to construct their own identity.

I think that is true, also, of me and my teenagers. We can rummage through our sociolinguistic repertoire, draw on the pertinent elements of our identities, and exercise some control over the way we present ourselves as Muslims. Many of these memes have been the starting point of deeper and more engaging conversations about being Muslim in Australia today.

Image 6

As we come to the end of Ramadan this week and look forward to the day of Eid to celebrate a month of fasting, I have been sharing the meme in Image 6 far and wide.

References

Ali, I. (2020). Muslim women meme-ing citizenship in the era of War on Terror militarism. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 106(3), 334–340.

Related content

Piller, I. (2009). Ramadan Kareem! Or: Urban Etiquette for Monolinguals. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/urban-etiquette-for-monolinguals/
Piller, I. (2017). Money makes the world go round. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/money-makes-the-world-go-round/
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2023). Lent, Language, and Faith Work. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/lent-language-and-faith-work/
Wehbe, A. (2017). Silent Invisible Women. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/silent-invisible-women/

Multilingual responses are common during the special liturgies of Lent

Many people celebrated Easter with chocolate bunny treats and by enjoying the long weekend. But not as many know the religious significance of this celebration, which is regarded in the Catholic faith as even bigger than Christmas!

What makes Easter extra special is the commemoration of Jesus Christ’s resurrection three days after dying in the hands of Roman soldiers and religious leaders over 2,000 years ago. His rising from death gives hope to his followers that they, too, one day will transition to eternal life.

Christians prepared for this great feast for 40 days, the season of Lent. For Catholics, this is an important time of prayer and fasting, somewhat similar to the observance of Ramadan by our Islamic sisters and brothers. An important difference is the reason for the Lenten fast.

Catholics are exhorted to take up some form of sacrifice, like abstaining from meat on Fridays, saving the money they would usually spend on their favorite fast food to give to the poor, or not using Facebook for 40 days and dedicate scrolling time to prayer. These practices of self-restraint, contemplation, and almsgiving are acts of solidarity with the passion and death of Jesus Christ, the central figure of the Christian faith. Jesus Christ’s free choice to embrace an unjust sentence and lay down his own innocent life to free the sinful is the standard of true love that is the centerpiece of the Christian Gospel. This very important season in the Christian tradition culminates in the Sacred Triduum, the three days leading to Easter Sunday, which are called Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Black Saturday.

In places that are deeply Catholic in number and devotion like the Philippines, Vietnam, and Argentina, these three days are very eventful for priests and priests-in-training (seminarians) as they perform various functions to provide more spiritual support to lay Catholics through sacraments and practices of piety. They preside at longer, elaborate liturgical celebrations and hear more confessions from the lay faithful.

Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle leads the commemoration of the Lord’s Passion at Manila Cathedral (Photo by Maria Tan/Rappler)

As an active Catholic myself, I especially appreciate how the Holy Week liturgies are not only more solemn and musical but also more beautifully multilingual. In my Parish, the celebrations are mainly in English but with a modicum of Greek, Hebrew, and Tagalog. For instance, we say “Kyrie Eleison” where outside of Lent, we would typically say “Lord, have mercy.” Our Parish Priest gives very passionate homilies where he sometimes mentions Hebrew words like “Mashiach” in place of the more familiar “Messiah.” During communion (the most solemn part of the Mass), the choir sings beautiful songs of repentance, like “Maging Akin Muli” [Be Mine Again]. In other churches in Manila, we also hear other Philippine languages, like Cebuano, incorporated in the liturgical responses or songs.

There seems to be something about Lent that loosens the multilingual tongue and opens the sacred space to accommodate linguistic diversity more than we usually do at any other time of the year. Of course, this openness to other languages is not new in the Catholic Church. After the Second Vatican Council, it became more common practice to use the mother tongue of the community for Mass, which traditionally was said in monolingual Latin (Bennett, 2018).

But the story is a bit different for priests and seminarians from non-English speaking backgrounds who celebrate Catholic liturgies in places like the US, the UK, and Australia, which are still largely Anglophone despite the growing multiculturality and multilingualism of the population. In these Global North countries, religious workers from the Global South are expected to speak in English, the assumed heart language of the community. One can only imagine how challenging it must be for this group of adult migrants to deliver profound yet relatable homilies in this second or foreign language before native speakers who look to them for spiritual inspiration and guidance.

Father Harold Camonias is a missionary priest from the Philippines working in Australia

This untold story is what I set out to uncover in my qualitative study about the English language learning experiences in Australia of Catholic missionaries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. How do they learn English in Australia? What are their struggles as adult language learners? What ideologies do they hold about language learning and languages? (Tenedero, 2023)

These questions were answered thanks to seven Catholic missionaries from non-English speaking backgrounds. Originally from Argentina, Ghana, Madagascar, and Vietnam, these were active members of a big international Catholic missionary society, which sponsored their coming to Australia to complete some English language courses as part of their preparation for missionary work.

Overall, the findings of this new study provide evidence that English language learning Catholic missionaries from the Global South are a distinct Community of Practice. More than the average adult language learner, they are highly invested in learning English fueled by their mostly positive beliefs about English and language learning in general, as well as their imagined future selves. The research also gives a glimpse of how the view of English as language of global affordance has the potential to revise or extend novice missionaries’ vision of themselves as users of English. While learning the language for religious work, they also open themselves to alternative pathways to become global language workers.

This new study demonstrates that language in faith contexts serves evangelical and pastoral purposes, as in multilingual Lenten liturgies. At the same time, language could serve other non-religious aspirations of missionaries. This further demonstrates that while people shape language, it, too, has power to (re)shape us, our practices, the way we see ourselves, and our hopes.

References

Bennett, B. P. (2018). Sacred languages of the world: An introduction. Wiley.
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2023). Learning English for faith work: The Australian experience of non-Anglophone Catholic missionaries. Journal of Language, Identity & Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2023.2181813

教堂的中文 标识在 悉尼的 语言景观 中越来 越突出 在以英 语占绝 对主体 地位的 语言 环境中 这些 双语 的标 识是 引人 注目的 更何况 汉语 并非 基督 教的 传统 语言 教堂中英双语标志的使用预示着澳大利亚华人皈依基督教的比例成增长趋势。

新书的第十三章探讨了中国的新移民皈依基督教的经历 揭示了宗教皈依 移民定居和语言学习相互关联 我们 （Yining Wang 和 Ingrid Piller 对中国移民信仰转变的研究兴趣并非仅仅源于教堂的双语标志 更多是受到参与Yining博士课题的中国家庭的启发。 在31个参与课题的中国家庭中 有8个家庭是来澳后皈依基督教的 其它的家庭或多或少表达过对基督教的兴趣或者参与过基督教的活动

基督教之所以在这些中国家庭中广受欢迎和关注 和这些为人父母者在澳州教养子女时碰到的困难和心中的迷惘息息相关 许多参与者既不想沿袭中国式的“虎爸虎妈”的教育理念 同时他们也不觉得西方的育儿方式多有吸引力 他们经常在自己的社交群里面分享一些负面的育儿故事 比如说某些失控的中国孩子 已经完全脱离了中国的价值观，这些孩子学业失败抑或沉迷于毒品或滥交 因此 加入教会经常被认为是一种折衷的方式，即可以相对轻松的教养孩子 又可以引导下一代树立良好的价值观，走上有意义的人生之路

一份关于澳大利亚生活中多语使用 宗教信仰和精神依托的论文集征稿为我们提供了一个机会 我们得以探讨宗教皈依与移民定居之间的交叉点 在此 我们采访了七位来自中国的第一代移民 记录了他们移民前的对宗教的态度 移民后的皈依之旅 以及基督教在他们语言学习 定居生活和育儿经历中的所起的作用。

移民的危机

参与者均在中国受过高等教育，持有学士、硕士或博士学位。在移民之前，他们都曾在学术界、工程界、金融界、IT界和医学界拥有一席之地。移民后，绝大部分都经历了职业生涯的下行。

受访者在中国时都有稳定的职业和收入，来澳后突然发现很难找到专业对口的工作。职业的下行带来的不仅是经济收入的不稳定，还滋生了巨大的心里落差，导致自信心的缺乏，以及对自己的否定，而这一切都与语言障碍息息相关。当他们难以在公众面前重塑自己职场的成功时，生存的危机感油然而生，生活和职业的双重压力使其对婚姻质量和亲子关系也产生了负面地影响。

一位参与者很精辟地总结了移民给其生活带来的创伤，她说：“我们那时真的是心力交瘁，情感和身体上大崩溃。”移民带来的生存危机让这个群体开始在宗教信仰中寻求新的出路，七名参与者中的六名用了同样的词汇来描述当时的心境：“人的尽头应该就是神的开始。”

皈依–人生的重建

正如参与者直言不讳地承认，他们参与教会活动最初的动机并非寻求耶稣，而是希望在困境中能在这个新的国家寻求些许实实在在地帮助，比如说能够建立新的朋友圈，获得更多的人脉，从而弥补因移民而带来的社会资源的缺失。

参与者们都非常肯定他们在教会中所获得的帮助，尤其是他们在教会群体中所建立的相互信任、相互支持的情谊，这在很大程度上弥补了她们远离家人和失去了曾经的社交群体的遗憾。一位参与者明确地将她的教堂定义为家庭，她说：“我去教会的目的不是为了参加活动。教会是我的家。我每周都要回家去看望我的兄弟姐妹们。”

当然，要融于教会这个新群体，需要接受最初与他们格格不入的信仰，首先他们得相信神是一个无所不能的存在。这种信仰需要他们与当初坚定的无神论和科学的世界观彻底决裂。

总的来说，最初参与者们去教会是为了寻求实际帮助来应对他们所遇到的生存危机，结果导致参与者的社交群体和信仰系统发生了根本性的转变。参与者们反复强调，他们的新信仰导致了他们“生命的彻底翻转”。

移民–多重身份的混合体

到2020年采访时为止，这些参与者受洗后的平均时间已超过十年。这意味着，他们最初的移民困境和随后的信仰转变已经过去多年，他们有充足的时间来塑造自己新的身份，他们也非常认可自身的多重新身份（如中英双语使用者和华裔澳大利亚人）。

多语言实践是这些移民宗教活动的核心组成部分。参与者发现，在宗教活动中，不同语言的使用及其风格带给他们不一样的感触。对他们而言，中英两种语言都推动着他们信仰的转变，他们的双重身份也因此而融合。

对参与者来说，移民的成功最终是达成了民族身份、语言身份和宗教身份的融合，即达到语言使用、民族认同和信仰体系的一体化。这种融合使这些一代移民为自己在澳大利亚找到一个舒适的空间。然而，让下一代继承这样一种积极的混合身份则似乎更为困难。

移民和育儿

如上所述，这篇关于宗教皈依，移民定居和语言学习的研究是来自于之前语言传承的课题。此项关于中国移民的课题——和其它对各类移民群体的研究一样——发现语言传承的最终结果是英语成为第二代移民的强势语言。 虽然一部分第二代移民也许可以流畅地用汉语交流，但第二代的汉语识字水平总体较低。

移民父母和他们的孩子在语言能力上的差异可能会导致“中国父母”和“澳大利亚孩子”之间的话语鸿沟。比如，参与者家庭普遍认为澳大利亚的个人主义文化对中国式的父母权威构成了巨大威胁。他们觉得基督教可以给孩子输入客观的道德依据，从而弥合了这一差距。那就是，基督教义为这些参与者向第二代灌输中国价值提供了理论依据。

给非宗教组织的建议

我们的研究为如何促进移民融入当地社会提供了三个重要经验。

第一，我们注意到移民经历容易引发生存危机。这种危机是由经济的不稳定、社会地位的丧失、移民初期的语言障碍、在另一种文化中如何应对婚姻困境和教养子女的挑战等因素造成的。这些种种问题其实与新移民社交圈的缺失紧密相关，远离至亲好友原本让人深感不安，而不安定的情绪很可能使日常问题进一步升级（例如，停电时怎么办，应该呼叫谁？孩子生病了不知如何向学校请假怎么办？），并将其提升到个人危机级别。教会团体为解决这些生活问题提供的具体支持无异于雪中送炭。当然，教堂提供的最重要的帮助是将新移民纳入新的社会群体。我们认为，所有移民，如论他们是什么宗教背景，都应该获得当地社会的关爱和支持，包括帮助他们重建新的社会链接，这对于移居初期尤其重要。

第二，从长远来看，参与英汉双语和双文化实践能更好地促使移民融入社会，将自己的语言文化带入新的社会生活让这些新移民觉得被接受。教会的双语活动非常务实，只要核心教义不受影响，教会愿意并且身体力行地将基督教和中国的文化习惯结合在一起。这种语言和文化的融合显著促进了新入会者的长期语言学习、移居的稳定过渡和全面融入澳大利亚社会。基督教会对双语活动的推行与澳洲中小学、大学和工作场所等非教会机构的语言行为形成了显著的对比，后者继续实行在他们的单语习惯，一切以英语为主体。

第三，教养子女是具有挑战性的，对于移民尤其如此。如何保护下一代免受伤害，发挥他们的潜力，并引导他们树立正确的道德观并实现其人生价值，这一切都是移民父母的焦虑所在，因为他们不仅要跨越代际差距，还要跨越语言和文化差距。本章所记录的这些中国家庭在子女教育中的迷惘和挑战表明，澳大利亚的学校显然未能帮助这些移民家庭跨越差距，减轻焦虑。这种失败有两个层面：首先，它反映了澳大利亚的教育对语言传承的忽视，这使得许多二代移民没有能力参与父母的社会生活、了解他们的世界观并或与他们进行深度的会话。其次，这也表明学校未能有效地和非英语背景的父母沟通，这意味着父母对孩子在学校的状况缺乏了解，从而引起他们对子女教育现状的担忧和恐惧。因此，促进移民家庭的语言传承和增强家校沟通对于社会和谐至关重要。

References

Piller, Ingrid. (2021). What can churches teach us about migrant inclusion? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/what-can-churches-teach-us-about-migrant-inclusion/
Wang, Yining, & Piller, Ingrid. (2022). Christian bilingual practices and hybrid identities as vehicles of migrant integration. In Robyn Moloney & Shenouda Mansour (Eds.), Language and Spirit: exploring languages, religion and spirituality in Australia today (pp. 307-326). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

The latest Australian census results show that the top 3 “country of birth” categories that grew the most between 2016 and 2021 were Nepal, India, and Pakistan. Those top 2 countries are predominantly Hindu and this has contributed to Hinduism’s phenomenal growth in Australia since the turn of the millennium. Hindu migrants are generally young, with a median age of 31 years, meaning it is likely they will be raising Hindu children in this country.

Hinduism’s rise is most visibly reflected in the colourful facades of temples appearing in our major cities. My new book explores this growing Hindu community through changes occurring within a long-established Australian temple:

மொழி, மத வேறுபாடுகளை கையாளும் நடைமுறை: ஆஸ்திரேலியாவில் ஒரு தமிழ் இந்து கோவில்
Negotiating linguistic and religious diversity: A Tamil Hindu Temple in Australia

In the temple, where I conducted a linguistic ethnography, there is a surprising level of diversity in language, culture and religious beliefs. On one particular day, there were 14 languages other than English being spoken in the canteen area. The most common were Tamil, Gujarati, and Hindi. The Tamil language was to be expected because the temple was established by mainly Sri Lankan Tamil migrants to venerate a Tamil Hindu god and to be a site for the celebration and transmission of Tamil culture.

However the influx of migrants from the Indian subcontinent has meant that the temple’s devotees are becoming increasingly diverse in their linguistic and religio-cultural practices. This then challenges the temple’s identity and conduct as a Tamil space.

In the context of English-dominant, monolingual-mindset Australia the temple founders saw it as crucial that a safe space for Tamil was created to keep the Tamil language and culture alive for future generations. This goal was particularly urgent because minority languages and religions have been marginalised for decades in Sri Lanka (where I’m from), most evident in the long civil war that involved the persecution of Tamil people, language and culture on a large scale. What you’re hearing in the news today, about the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, is closely linked to this issue, because unworthy and corrupt national leaders have used ethnicity, religion and language as tools to divide the population and maintain power.

Devotees inside the temple (Image from Perera, 2023 © Routledge)

When it comes to passing Hinduism onto future generations, the temple runs a Sunday faith school for children and the language policy is for Tamil-medium lessons. It’s a small school in terms of student numbers but it is an important opportunity for young Tamils to meet with peers and to work out what the Hindu religion means for them in a largely (although diminishing) Christian society. Sitting in on these classes I observed rich translingual practices in how the students deployed mainly Tamil and English language features in the expression of their Tamil pride and their evolving religious beliefs. I was impressed with the students’ confidence in their identities. However, those Hindu children who did not have a Tamil-language background – either being of a different ethnolinguistic group or being Tamil but not having the opportunity to learn it in Australia – were inadvertently excluded from the classes based on the school’s language policy.

So this is the dilemma for migrant hubs like Hindu temples which become sites of diversity. Tough decisions about which languages to uphold in the practice of religion and in religious education mean that some groups do not have the same opportunities for linguistic and cultural expression in the temple. External pressures like homeland language politics and war and the dominance of English language in Australia makes these decisions more complex. The temple strives to be an oasis for all Hindu migrants as they make new homes in Australia, to be a site of belonging and identity development for future generations, but finding a way to cater for all language preferences is an ongoing concern.

My book details the challenges encapsulated in the reality of what we celebrate as Australia’s linguistic and religious diversity. Importantly this book also highlights the critical role of migrant religious institutions as sites for maintenance of language and culture in addition to faith. In this way, these institutions offer significant support to migrants so that they can move confidently in broader Australian multicultural society.

Reference

Perera, N. (2023). Negotiating linguistic and religious diversity: A Tamil Hindu Temple in Australia. Routledge. [Flier with 20% Discount Code available here]

Related content

Piller, Ingrid. (2021). What can churches teach us about migrant inclusion? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/what-can-churches-teach-us-about-migrant-inclusion/

In a new book chapter, Yining Wang and I explore the conversion experiences of a group of first-generation migrants from China. Our interest in the intersection between conversion, settlement, and language learning was not only raised by bilingual church signs but also by the fact that many of the Chinese families in Yining’s PhD research about heritage language maintenance were interested in Christianity. Eight of the 31 participating families had converted to Christianity since coming to Australia and others professed an interest and occasionally attended church.

The reason Christianity was such a popular topic among these families was that many participants struggled with parenting in Australia. They did not want to raise their children in the strict and uncompromising Chinese ways they had been raised themselves, but they did not find western parenting appealing, either. They regularly shared horror stories of out-of-control westernized children who failed academically or had slid into drug addiction and promiscuity. Against this background, joining a church was frequently pondered as a middle path that might allow parenting that is both relaxed and emotionally connected yet guiding the next generation on a path to good morals and a fulfilled life.

A call for papers for a book about multilingualism, religion, and spirituality in Australian life provided us with an opportunity to explore the intersection between conversion and settlement further. We interviewed seven first-generation migrants from China about their pre-migration religious beliefs, their post-migration conversion journeys, and the role of Christianity in their language learning, settlement, and parenting experiences.

Arrival crises

The participants are highly educated and hold at least a Bachelors’ degree, which they obtained in China. Prior to migration, all of them had worked in professional roles in academia, engineering, finance, IT, and medicine. After migration, all experienced downward occupational mobility.

The transition from enjoying stable professional careers in China to their inability to find employment at their level in Australia came as a deep shock for the participants. Their economic insecurity was compounded by an attendant loss of status and self-confidence, strongly related to the language barrier, which made them feel incompetent. Their inability to re-establish themselves as highly successful competent adults in public turned into an existential crisis through the ways in which this affected their marriages and their relationships with their children.

One participant summed up the trauma of migration by saying: “We felt broken, both emotionally and physically.” The existential crisis of migration constituted the beginning of their religious seeking. Six of the seven participants used the exact same phrase to describe the situation in which they found themselves during their early time in Australia: “人的尽头” (rén de jìntóu; literally “the end of humans”; “ultimate hopelessness”). And where human capacity ends, the divine begins, as they went on to say: “神的开始” (shén de kāishǐ; “the start of God”).

Conversion as turning point

Spiritual seeking was not the primary purpose of turning to church, as the participants freely admitted. What they sought initially was practical support in the crises they experienced by making new friends that could fill in for the networks they had lost through migration.

The practical assistance offered by the church community helped to build up a supportive and trusting relationship that could partly compensate for the loss of family and friendship networks in migration. One participant explicitly framed her church as family: “I don’t go to church to attend activities. The church is my home. And I go home every week to see my family.”

Gaining entry into this new community, of course, involved accepting beliefs that were, initially at least, alien to them – most notably belief in the existence of a transcendental deity. Such a belief constituted a complete break with their strong socialization into atheism and the scientific worldview.

Overall, what started out as a search for practical support to face the existential crisis of migration resulted in a radical transformation of the participants’ social networks and belief systems. In the vocabulary of their new faith, participants repeatedly stressed that their new beliefs had led to “生命的翻转” (shēngmìng de fānzhuăn; “complete life transformation”).

Hybrid identities

At the time of the interviews in 2020, the average time since baptism had been more than ten years This means that not only the crisis of initial settlement but also the period of transformation through conversion was well in the past. Participants had had time to consolidate their new identities, and they had become comfortable in new hybrid identities as Chinese-English bilinguals and Chinese Australians.

Multilingual practices were central to their new faith. Participants had discovered that different languages and styles touched them differently. In the same way that both languages contributed to their spiritual development, their dual identities became fused, too.

For the participants, successful migration was ultimately a fusion of different national, linguistic, and religious identities; an integration of languages, national identities, and belief systems. This integration allowed the participants to find a comfortable space for themselves as first generation migrants in Australia. However, grounding the next generation in such a positive hybrid identity was more complicated.

Migrant parenting

As mentioned above, our study of conversion, settlement, and language learning developed out of a study investigating heritage language maintenance. That study – like many others with many different migrant groups – found that English dominance of the second generation is the most frequent heritage language learning outcome. While oral proficiency may be more variable, Chinese literacy levels were consistently low in the second generation.

These differences in linguistic repertoires between migrant parents and their children may result in discursive gaps between “Chinese parents” and “Australian children.”

Partly due to different linguistic repertoires, participants perceived Australia’s individualistic culture as constituting a formidable threat to their parental authority. They felt that Christianity allowed them to bridge this gap by providing an objective source of moral reference. Ironically, Christianity thus provided the participants with the vocabulary to instill what they considered Chinese values in the second generation.

Lessons for secular institutions

Our study holds three key lessons for migrant integration into secular institutions.

First, we noted that the experience of migration triggered an existential crisis for the participants. This crisis arose from a combination of economic insecurity, loss of status, the initial language barrier, marital difficulties, and parenting challenges. These migration traumas were closely connected to the loss of social networks in migration. The absence of family and friendship networks itself was deeply unsettling. Furthermore, it could escalate relatively mundane problems (e.g., who to call in the case of a power outage; how to send a sick note to school) and elevate them to personal crisis level. Church groups provided instrumental support to address these problems. This included a host of practical matters but, most importantly, the creation of new social networks. We would argue that in a secular society practical settlement support and human fellowship through new network building should be accessible to all migrants, irrespective of whether they accept a new belief system or not. To this end the provision of culturally-sensitive migrant support services particularly in the initial settlement phase is of paramount importance.

Second, in the long-term, participants thrived by engaging in English-Chinese bilingual and bicultural practices. Being able to draw on both their languages and cultures, and bringing them together in a holistic hybrid fusion made them feel settled and comfortable. The Christian congregations they attended were pragmatic about the use of bilingual repertoires. They also readily combined Christian and Chinese ways of doing things, as long as core doctrine was not affected. This linguistic and cultural syncretism significantly contributed to participants’ long-term language learning, settlement, and overall integration into Australian society. This constitutes a significant contrast between these Christian churches and secular institutions such as schools, universities, and workplaces. The latter continue to implement exclusive English-only practices ingrained in their monolingual habitus.

Third, all parenting is challenging and migrant parenting maybe even more so. How to guide the next generation to keep them save from harm, to fulfil their potential, and to lead ethical lives contributing to the common good can be an enormous source of anxiety for migrant parents as they navigate not only generational but also linguistic and cultural gaps. The parenting experiences documented here show a clear failure on the part of Australian schools to minimize those gaps. This failure is twofold: first, it relates to the well-documented inability of the Australian school system to support the language learning aspirations of heritage language learners. This means that the second generation, by and large, does not have the capacity to deeply engage with the discourse worlds that shaped their parents’ socialization, world views, and values.

Second, it relates to weaknesses in institutional communication with parents from non-English-speaking backgrounds. This means that parents lack a good understanding of their children’s Australian education. This may give rise to fears of and anxieties about the education their children are receiving. In the interest of social cohesion, it is vital to overcome these barriers by improving heritage language education and home-school communication.

To read the full study, access this open-access preprint:

Wang, Y. & I. Piller. (in press, 2022). Christian bilingual practices and hybrid identities as vehicles of migrant integration. In Moloney, R., Mansour, S., & J. Troy. Eds. Language and Spirit: exploring languages, religion and spirituality in Australia today. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

This lecture – delivered as a keynote at the 2021 Approaches to Migration, Language, and Identity conference – offers another way to learn about the relationship between conversion, settlement, and language learning:

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

Uluru (Image Credit: Ondrej Machart via Unsplash)

Call for papers: Exploring multilingualism, religion and spirituality in Australian life

Editors: Dr Robyn Moloney, Macquarie University; and Very Rev Fr Dr Shenouda Mansour, NSW Ecumenical Council

Today in Australia there is robust growth of communities of religious life and spirituality, each with their own language background, contributing to social and spiritual wellbeing. What are the connections and personal experiences in the intersection of languages, religion and spirituality? What is the role of the religious practice in supporting the language? Or the role of the language in supporting the spirituality? Do language choices impact faith and identity? Is there a connection between language and social justice action? What are First Nation people’s experiences of the relationship between the teaching of Indigenous languages, and Indigenous spirituality?  Is there an emerging inclusive ecumenism of linguistic issues and faiths?

We are seeking expressions of interest in two different types of writing. The book will feature

• Current academic research studies or commentary
• Collections of shorter community narratives and voices

Through this mix, the book will profile the multiple intersections of multilingualism, religion, and spirituality, in Australian society. The volume will be double-blind reviewed by external referees.

We welcome:

• Research studies related to (probably non-English) language use and identity within faith-based communities
• Accounts of language teaching and learning associated with a spiritual context
• Individual or group narratives of using or understanding a non-English language within a spiritual context
• Linguistic and faith issues in inter-ethnic conflict reduction
• Portraits of the development of a community and its language
• Language knowledge enabling spiritual development in particular contexts

How to contribute

Stage 1. Please submit an abstract of your intended contribution (either academic, or community narrative), length approximately 300 words by 15 September 2020 to Dr Robyn Moloney and Very Rev Fr Dr Shenouda Mansour.

Stage 2. We will invite you to develop your final submission by 1 February 2021

Suggested questions

The following questions are offered to provide stimulus ideas. Please select those areas which are relevant to your focus context. Research studies will probably follow the genre of research reporting. You may extend beyond these suggestions.

1. What language(s) do you or others use or understand in your faith/ spirituality? How did you learn that language? What role(s) does that language have? You may like to give some short examples of the language, with translation, and explain why they are significant to you. What role has it had in shaping your identity or sense of belonging, as a member of that community?
2. How would you describe the relationship between your languages, your religious practice/experience, and the languages of your everyday life?
3. Has your church/community made (or had to make) choices in language use? Is this a source of tension? Do these choices impact faith and identity?
4. Is your community connected to a community outside Australia? Are language issues a source of conflict in that context?
5. Are there connections between languages, and your community’s involvement with social justice and action?

Muslim women praying in a Minquan mosque

While everyone knows that China is now the second largest economy in the world, few people realize that there are still over five million people living in poverty in the country. The majority of China’s poor live in its multilingual and multicultural peripheral regions.

Therefore, as part of its efforts to eradicate poverty, the Chinese government has implemented the nationwide project to promote Putonghua as a form of linguistic capital. This promotion of Putonghua – along with widespread English language learning – from above has been widely discussed and researched by Chinese sociolinguists (see, for instance, these PhD theses available right here on Language on the Move: Grey, 2017, Li, 2017, Yang, 2013, Zhang, 2011).

However, what seems to have been largely overlooked is language learning of other languages from below and the empowerment it can bring, as I learned in my research into Arabic language learning in Minquan, a Muslim-centered and poverty-stricken region.

Socioeconomic and demographic features of Minquan

Located in the far east of Henan Province, central China, Minquan County has a population of 870,000. The vast majority of these are farmers. Because the ever more frequent droughts have rendered production of the main crops of maize, cotton, peanuts, and wheat unstable, an increasing number of young people are leaving Minquan for China’s big developed cities in search of better opportunities.

Education and literacy levels in Minquan are low in comparison with the rest of China and only two third of teenagers in Minquan continue their studies beyond compulsory junior high school education.

Another feature of Minquan is its sizable Hui ethnic minority, whose members are Muslim. In Minquan it is common for local people to exchange greetings in Arabic and for the women to wear colorful hijabs. Five times a day, the streets echo with the Muslim call to prayer chanted slowly and sonorously in Arabic over the audio systems of the local mosques.

Arabic as a way out for Minquan’s Muslim women

The Hui ethnic group do not have their own language but speak Chinese. However, in recent years, I have observed an increasing trend for local people to study Arabic, the holy language of Islam, not only for religious purposes but also for material profit. For my graduation research project at Yunnan University, I probed the Arabic language learning experiences of three Muslim women from Minquan. All three participants, two of whom are my relatives, were born and raised in Muslim families in Minquan. Their mother tongue is Chinese and they all started to study Arabic formally in their teens.

Their reasons for Arabic language study were initially due to their limited opportunities.

The youngest participant, Ma Lifang (all names are pseudonyms) is a 19-year-old high-school graduate, who has studied Arabic in a mosque since 2018. After failing the gaokao (the national university entrance exam), she followed an imam’s recommendation to learn Arabic in order to maintain her education and with an eye to a profitable future through Arabic as experienced by Ma Zhenyi (32) and Ma Xiangling (39).

Ma Zhenyi is an entrepreneur who now runs her own translation and interpreting company in Yiwu, the world largest wholesale market. Despite her excellent academic performance in junior high school and her desire to continue her studies, she was denied the opportunity of receiving a high school education because of her family’s poverty. The traditionally low expectations on Muslim women in her community also played a role. While she did not have the courage at age 15 to oppose her parents when it came to high school, she found a way to convince them to let her study Arabic in the mosque:

别人都一直说，都是建议让我跟爸爸妈妈讲（我想学），然后当时也没那么大的勇气。因为我姐姐她也想去学习，但是爸妈没同意，就没学成。我也没有那么大的勇气去说。后来越学越感兴趣，越学越感兴趣。然后，就鼓起勇气说。
Others kept telling me, suggesting that I should tell my parents (I want to study), but I didn’t have the courage. My older sister also meant to study, but my dad and mom refused and she could not. I just didn’t have the courage. Later Arabic interested me more and more, I had to be brave enough to tell them. (Interview with Ma Zhenyi)

Perhaps it was Ma Zhenyi’s talent in memorizing Arabic verses that contributed to her success; or the fact that her older sister could share the family’s financial burden so that Ma Zhenyi could have the chance of further study for a couple of years. Either way, while seeking her spiritual asylum in the holy language of Islam, Ma Zhenyi could continue to study and build her dream for the future.

Middle-Eastern buyer checking cargo with seller in Yiwu (Image credit: promotional video for Yiwu)

Her excellent performance together with her deep faith next launched her to another opportunity to continue her Islamic and Arabic studies in Xi’an, one of China’s largest cities and the capital of Shaanxi Province. At that stage, she won a scholarship to go to Egypt for further Arabic study. There, she met her husband and when both of them returned to China, they settled in Yiwu, where they first took up Arabic translation and interpreting jobs and eventually opened their own translation company in 2012.

Ma Xiangling (39) also works as an Arabic-Chinese translator and interpreter in Yiwu. Like Ma Zhenyi, she was denied a senior high school education after graduating from junior high school in 1998. She was sent to learn Arabic at a local mosque-based school instead. At the time, she did not expect any material rewards from learning Arabic at all. She simply followed the local expectation of being a good Muslim woman in the hope that she might assist her future husband and educate their child in the faith. Upon graduation, she got married but almost immediately found herself engulfed in constant domestic violence. Over many years, Ma Xiangling’s life was torn to pieces as her only financial support was her tormenting husband. She finally managed to regain her freedom through a painful divorce. In 2014, with the help of friends doing business in Yiwu, she revived her Arabic language skills and migrated to Yiwu to work as translator there.

Self-transformation through Arabic

Confronting their disadvantages in age, gender and poverty, these three women turned to Arabic as a way out.

All three women started to learn Arabic as a low-cost study option when they failed to progress in the Chinese public educational system. Their parents believed that learning Arabic would increase their daughters’ marriage prospects by making them good assistants to their future husbands serving the faith. The value of speaking Arabic as a profitable commodity in the new contexts of China’s global expansion was not obvious to my participants until they embarked on their journey and seriously invested in learning Arabic. Nevertheless, their Arabic skills have shaped a brand new life vision for them.

Ma Xiangling’s social media post in Chinese and Arabic about destiny (my English translation)

Their years of investment into Arabic have transformed their identities from poor subjugated Muslim women into independent and enterprising individuals. Despite failing to gain admission to a Chinese university, Ma Lifang, for instance, now even considers PhD study within her reach:

有的(课本）都是北大的什么的… 还有那种全阿语的.都是老师们从国外给带来的。好多老师也是从国外的毕业，还有博士学位。
Some (textbooks) are from Peking University, and some are written in Arabic, imported from abroad. Many teachers graduated from abroad, some with PhD degree. (Interview with Ma Lifang)

When asked what she wanted to do with her life, Ma Lifang readily talked about several options, such as taking up a translation job in China’s booming export industry or going abroad for higher education, just like her teachers.

Ma Zhenyi has experienced the transformational career that Ma Lifang anticipates. Learning Arabic has expanded her life trajectory from a poor village girl first to the big city of Xi’an and from there to Egypt. The level of Arabic language proficiency she gained there, enabled her to work as an interpreter and translator in Yiwu, and later to establish her own business there.

Business opportunities related to Arabic are plentiful, as she explained to me:

大概有目前来说有102个国家的人来这里(义乌)进行购物。其中呢大概有40到50个国家，大概了50%左右是以阿拉伯语为沟通媒介的……我现在接触的这些人啊，多数都是在40以上的。年龄40以上的人并没有意识到他们需要学英语你知道吗。
There are foreign businessmen from 102 countries coming to Yiwu to purchase commodities. 40 or 50 countries out of 102, about 50% of foreigners use Arabic for communication…the majority of my foreign customers are over 40 years old. You know, people over 40 are not aware of the necessity to speak English. (Interview with Ma Zhenyi)

Although Ma Xiangling’s career has been less stellar, Arabic has transformed her, too, into an economically and spiritually independent woman supporting herself and her family. In January 2020, her family (her parents and her disabled son) was able to move into a newly built two-storey house.

Tensions and contradictions of Arabic

Despite their empowerment, Arabic is not a panacea and all three women face tensions and contradictions embedded in wider structural constraints that are beyond their control.

Reflecting on the profits Arabic has brought to her, Ma Zhenyi, for instance strongly feels the tension between its material and spiritual rewards. While she is grateful for the material rewards that learning Arabic has brought her, she also finds herself in a constant state of dilemma between her entrepreneurial identity as a successful businesswoman and her sense of guilt at not having enough time for prayer and reading Quran, or for mothering her school-aged daughter.

The gendered market also impacts their opportunities to invest in their future, as Arabic language practices are more gendered than those of many other languages. Ma Xiangling explained that women can only go so far with Arabic. While they might be able to secure a translation job in Yiwu or elsewhere in China, their opportunities to work abroad or even travel for business are heavily constrained, particularly when it comes to major Arabic-speaking trading partners like Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Ma Xiangling’s reflections on working abroad must be understood against the emerging oversupply of Arabic speakers in China as Chinese universities have begun to actively promote non-English foreign languages. As a middle-aged woman without a degree, Arabic proficiency alone is no longer enough to make her feel confident about her future.

Arabic as a third space

Arabic has become a significant foreign language for China’s relationship with the Middle East. However, for the women in my study, it is much more than that. Arabic also functions as a way out, as a reachable escape route for Muslim women who have been trapped in the cage of poverty and religion.

Reciting Arabic verses as a child, reading the Holy Quran as a teenager, and eventually translating for Sino-Middle East trade as adults, Chinese Muslim women from less-developed areas have turned the Arabic language into a third space where they can continue their education, obtain career success, and achieve emancipation in their daily lives. In Minquan, this impoverished corner of the world, Arabic provides both a spiritual asylum and financial independence. It frees and awakens Muslim women tormented by misogyny and poverty.

After quoting to me the Hadith “all men are brothers”, Ma Zhenyi added what has been missing from there: “and women are sisters.”

References

Grey, A. (2017). How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Yang, H. (2012). Naxi, Chinese and English: Multilingualism in Lijiang. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Zhang, J. (2011). Language Policy and Planning for the 2008 Beijing Olympics: An Investigation of the Discursive Construction of an Olympic City and a Global Population. (PhD), Macquarie University.

Secure the Soul examines Christian practices of self-transformation in five spaces of globalization: high security prisons, reality TV shows, offshore call centers, child sponsorship programs, and Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. One key participant, Mateo, who has been in and out of all these institutional spaces, provides the narrative arc of the book. Mateo is introduced early in the book as an iconic type of a particular global person: a Guatemalan child migrant who is “illegal” in Los Angeles, becomes involved in drugs and organized crime, and, as a young adult is deported back to Guatemala, where he gets stuck between belonging and non-belonging:

Mateo, […] was not tall, but he was obviously strong. He had broad shoulders, a thick neck, and a sturdy back. He could be mistaken for an athlete, a boxer perhaps, were it not for his gait. He walked like a gangsta. This is his word, not mine. He walked a little slower, a little more stridently than the average Guatemalan. Mateo had a kind of swagger that made him stand out. He knew it, and he liked it. The bald head, the baggy jeans, and the tattoos peeking out from under his collar—it all signaled a certain kind of time spent in the States. His stunted Spanish was also a tell. Mateo was not from Guatemala. Everyone knew as much. But, of course, he was. Everyone knew that, too. (O’Neill, 2015, p. 2f.)

Language – “his stunted Spanish” – is a key signal of Mateo’s identity as someone who got caught up in the specific global circuits that link Guatemala and the USA.

A very short history of Guatemala

The territory that today constitutes Guatemala was sucked into the vortex of globalization in 1511 with the conquista, the Spanish colonization of Latin America. After more than 300 years, Guatemala gained independence from Spain in the 19^th century. By that time, its agricultural exploitation by multinational companies based in the US was in full swing. By the mid-20^th century, United Fruit was the largest landowner and employer in Guatemala. As the interests of United Fruit would have been jeopardized by an attempted modest land reform by a democratically elected government in 1954, the United States intervened. The coup d’état plunged Guatemala into more than three decades of a genocidal civil war. Today, Guatemala is officially at peace but is the most violent non-combat zone on earth. It is also still in the clutches of an exploitative globalization for which Guatemala is nothing but a way station: in 2011, 84% of all cocaine produced for the US market passed through Guatemala.

Many have sought to escape this hell by migrating north. However, while Guatemalan bananas and drugs are welcome there, its people are not. Caught up in the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror”, deportation back to Guatemala has soared since the beginning of the 21^st century.

Language and global crime

Guatemala’s civil war pushed tens of thousands of refugees into poor neighbourhoods of Los Angeles in the 1980s (along with El Salvadorians, Hondurans and Nicaraguans). In these harsh circumstances, their children quickly became involved in gangs and two transnational criminal organizations, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, gained strength from the 1990s onwards. From modest beginnings in Los Angeles, these gangs have now gone global. One step in their globalization was the US policy of deporting migrants with a conviction.

These deportees met minimum life chances, a complete lack of social services, and a glut of weapons left over from the region’s civil wars. And, as men and women born in Central America but oftentimes raised in the United States, the youngest of these deportees did not speak Spanish fluently; they had no close family ties and no viable life chances but gang life. (O’Neill, 2015, p. 15)

Call center signage, Guatemala (Source: O’Neill, 2015, p. 107)

Lack of proficiency in Spanish is one of many factors that further limits the opportunities of deportees back in Guatemala and pushes them into gangs. Conversely, their proficiency in English is another. However, their proficiency in English sometimes becomes profitable in other ways.

Language and global service work

In addition to organized crime, a sector that has been growing in Guatemala is call center work. Off-shoring call center work to India or the Philippines has increasingly given way to “near-shoring”. In this process, the work is still outsourced to a low-wage country but one that is in the same time zone and has greater “cultural affinity.” Linguistically, deportees make ideal call center workers. Having learned English “not just in LA public schools but also in the U.S. prison system or while shuttling product from Los Angeles to Las Vegas” (p. 99), their English accents are ideal to maintain the illusion that the US customer is actually speaking to a US service agent.

At the same time, their habitus constitutes a problem. The fact that their bodies are full of tattoos remains invisible in call center work but addiction, problems with punctuality and following tedious scripts, or anger in the face of customer abuse were more difficult to hide. Call centers attempt to manage employee’s habitus through Protestant Christian piety mixed with corporate maxims. In most cases, this was not enough to keep employees on the job, off the streets and out of drugs for long. As long as the deportees came rolling back in, this was no problem for management, though:

Instead they troll the airports looking for more talent. “The ones that we fight for are the mojados [wetbacks],” the director of human resources admitted. “They are the most valuable here. Because they have perfect English. Perfect. We can place them in any account. We find them in the airport.” (O’Neill, 2015, p. 116)

Prisoner transport vehicle, Guatemala (Source: O’Neill, 2015, p. 35)

Language and global Christianity

The language of Protestant self-improvement permeates the sites in which the deportees circulate. Without material resources or any vision for social change, North American Christian piety is the sole means through which a destitute population comes to be governed. These global communications readily descend into farce, as is the case in the child sponsorship program, where US sponsors commit to a monthly contribution of US$35 to the education of a Guatemalan child. Additionally, sponsors are encouraged to enter into an exchange of letters with “their” child. These exchanges end up producing highly disparate texts, as the head of one child sponsorship NGO explained:

“It was ridiculous,” the director of child sponsorship complained. “Sponsors would write these wonderful letters. They’d write about their life and their hobbies. And then they’d get a letter back from a fourteen-year-old kid who should know how to write, and all it says is, ‘Dear sponsor. I love you. Love, your sponsor child.’” These scrawny efforts suggested ungracious subjects. (O’Neill, 2015, p. 136)

The idea behind the letter exchange is that it would help the sponsored child find god, show them they are loved, and, ultimately, prevent them from getting into drugs and crime. However, for children growing up in a Guatemalan slum keeping up a correspondence with middle-class North Americans constituted an almost impossible task. In the end, NGOs coach the children how to write letters following templates. Unsurprisingly, the content becomes entirely fictional in the process.

Ethnography of language on the move

Secure the Soul is a brilliant ethnography of Christian piety as a form of soft security. It also offers instructive glimpses into the ways in which language has become enmeshed in global circuits of crime, service work and security efforts. Highly recommended!

Full reference:

O’Neill, K. L. (2015). Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Those of you who are after recommendations for ethnographies located more centrally in sociolinguistics, here are some of my favourites:

• Codo, E. (2008). Immigration and Bureaucratic Control: Language Practices in Public Administration. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Duchêne, A. (2009). Ideologies across Nations: The Construction of Linguistic Minorities at the United Nations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Farr, M. (2006). Rancheros in Chicagoacán: Language and Identity in a Transnational Community. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
• Heller, M. (2006). Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography (2nd ed.). London: Continuum.
• Hoffman, K. E. (2008). We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Martín Rojo, L. (2010). Constructing Inequality in Multilingual Classrooms. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Prendergast, C. (2008). Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Sabaté i Dalmau, M. (2014). Migrant Communication Enterprises: Regimentation and Resistance. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
• Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Oxford: Blackwell.

Happy reading! And don’t forget to share your progress. If you tweet about it and mention @lg_on_the_move, you’ll be in the running for our monthly draw of a copy of Intercultural Communication. The February winner will be announced on Twitter shortly.

U.S. Vice President Pence ignores NASA “DO NOT TOUCH” sign. Would anyone else get away with such illiterate behavior?

“Literacy” is one of those words that everyone uses as a technical term but that is actually really hard to pin down. When I asked the new students in my “Literacies” unit last week what they thought “literacy” meant, they came up with quite a variety of definitions.

The most popular definition of “literacy” was that it is simply a cover term for “reading and writing”. That understanding of literacy contrasts with spoken language. Closely related to this first understanding of literacy is a second of literacy as “the ability to read and write.” Students with a background in language teaching readily referenced the “four skills” – speaking, listening, reading and writing – that make up language proficiency.

The latter understanding of literacy has spawned a significant expansion of the use of “literacy”: today, “literacy” is no longer exclusively about language but may be used to refer to all kinds of knowledge and competences: financial literacy, computer literacy, digital literacy, media literacy, news literacy, environmental literacy, ethics literacy, health literacy, spiritual literacy, artistic literacy, emotional literacy, etc. etc. While the connection with written language is more obvious in some of these literacies than in others, the reason for the extension of the meaning of “literacy” to “competence” is clear: in the contemporary world, the acquisition of most competences is mediated through the written word and at least some reading and writing is involved in the vast majority of learning.

The multiple meanings of “literacy” from “written language” via “ability to use written language” to “all kinds of language-mediated competences” make the link with social practices obvious and give us yet another perspective on literacy: literacy is a way to do things with words. Literacy practices are intricately linked to the way we manage our social affairs and organize our social lives. In short, literacy is a tool of power.

While some people like to pretend that literacy is a neutral technology and that “the ability to read and write” will be equally beneficial to everyone and have the same consequences for any individual and in any society, nothing could be further from the truth.

One simple way to start thinking about the power relationships inherent in literacy practices is to consider its semantic field. A semantic field is constituted by all the words in a language that relate to a particular subject. In English, the key terms in the semantic field “literacy” are obviously “reading” and “writing”. Both words have Germanic roots: “read” derives from Old English “rædan”, which meant “to advise, counsel, persuade; discuss, deliberate; rule, guide.” Its German cognate is “raten”, which means both “to advise, counsel, guide” but also “to guess.” So, reading was associated with thought and cognition early on.

“Write” derives from Old English “writan” meaning “to carve, scratch.” Well, writing started out as a way to scratch marks on bone, bark or clay, or to carve them in stone or wood. So, it’s not surprising that the word for “write” originally meant something like “to carve or scratch” in many languages. Latin “scribere” is no exception.

You may wonder why I’m bringing up Latin here. Well, it is not to show off my classical education but to draw attention to the fact that – apart from basic “read” and “write” – most English words in the “literacy” field are actually derived from Latin.

The Latin verb “scribere” has given us “ascribe”, “describe”, “inscribe”, “prescribe” and “proscribe”, to name a few. The latter two in particular point to the fact that the written word is closely connected to the enactment of power: so close, in fact, that the written word may be equal to the law. The expression “the writ runs” makes this connection obvious: where a particular written language is used, a particular law applies.

English words that make the power of literacy obvious are usually derived from Latin (and, of course, “literacy” itself is another example). This demonstrates the strong hold that not only the written language per se but Latin writing in particular had over Europe for almost two millennia. Latin was the language of the law and the language of religion – two domains that took a long time to separate from each other. The close association of writing with religion is also obvious from the word “scripture” – where a word for “writing” generally has come to stand specifically for religious writing.

There are many other fascinating associations to explore in the semantic field of “literacy” but I’ll close with an example from German, which makes a neat point about the fact that the relationship between written and spoken language is also a power relationship in itself. The German word “Schriftsprache” literally translates as “written language” but specifically refers to the standard language. The expression “nach der Schrift sprechen” (“to speak according to writing”) means to not use a regionally marked dialect but to speak the national language in a standard manner.

As linguists we like to insist on the primacy of speech but “nach der Schrift sprechen” reminds us that power usually runs in the opposite direction and, in literate societies, the power code is either written or writing-based speech.

What does the semantic field for “literacy” look like in your language? What is the etymology of the translation equivalents of “read and write” or of “literacy”? And what do they tell us about literacy as a social practice embedded in relationships of power?

Reference

Details of the vice-presidential transgression in the image are available in this Time article.