Today, our focus is not on what but who: we’re delighted to spotlight some of the newest members of the network. This post introduces recent advocacy, academic and community-building efforts from a leading barrister, a linguistics professor and a leading forensic linguist, a legal academic, a postdoctoral researcher, three postgraduate research students and our new LLIRN Intern.

Eleanor Kettle at the Cape of Good Hope after the 2025 IAFLL conference in Cape Town (Image credit: Eleanor Kettle)

And to keep sharing news from researchers, professionals, policy-makers and students concerned with problems arising when language issues and legal issues meet, we also have a new website to announce: www.lawandlanguage.org! We’re continuing to add to it. It houses this and other blogs from LLIRN members; teaching and research resources; and profiles of people and projects. Come visit!

Professor Gratien G. Atindogbé

Gratien G. Atindogbé, a Professor of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Buea, Cameroon, has been a significant figure in the field since 1997. His academic journey includes a doctorate in African linguistics from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, in 1996. His research interests are diverse, covering descriptive linguistics, documentation of endangered languages, historical linguistics, tonology, Cameroonian Pidgin English, intercultural communication, forensic linguistics, and the sociolinguistics of French. Notably, he is a key member of the Pluridisciplinary Advances in African Multilingualism project, funded by the National Science Foundation in the US. His dedication to Higher Education management is evident, and he has authored nearly fifty publications, including articles, collective chapters, and scientific books.

Recent publications

Atindogbe, Gratien G. (2022). Digital Humanities for Sustainable Learning: Lessons from Documentary Linguistics. OASIS Commonwealth of Learning’s (COL) Open Access Repository. DOI https://doi.org/10.56059/pcf10.5128
Atindogbé, Gratien G. and Dissake, Koumassol Endurence M. (2019). Forensic Linguistics as a tool for the development of Cameroon national languages. African Study Monographs 40(1): 23- 44. https://doi.org/10.14989/243208
Dissake, Koumassol Endurence M. and Atindogbé, Gratien G. (2020). Analyzing Court Discourse in a Multilingual Setting: The Case of the Buea Court of First Instance. In Pier Paolo Di Carlo and Jeff Good (Eds.), African Multilingualisms. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Dr Edward Clay

Dr Edward Clay is currently a Research Fellow working in the Law School at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research interests focus on empirical and interdisciplinary approaches to law and language, examining the intersection between translation, law, terminology and linguistics. His research examines the effects of translation on terminology in legal discourse, and legal translation as a language contact scenario.

His PhD (2024) was an interdisciplinary project at the interface of law and language, translation, migration studies and linguistics, leading to a thesis entitled ‘Translation-induced language change in the field of migration: a multilingual corpus analysis of EU legal texts and press articles.’ This project examines the potential for migration terminology to emerge across different languages through translation in an institutional setting before becoming more widely established in general discourse. He is currently working on a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust entitled ‘The Impact of Brexit: A Linguistic Perspective’ to investigate the changes in EU legal language since the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and the implications of any changes for the policy and lawmaking environment of the EU and the UK.

Recent publications

Clay, E (2024), Language contact within an institutional ecosystem: The impact of EU translation. in M Dasca & R Cerarols (eds), Translation Studies and Ecology: Mapping the Possibilities of a New Emerging Field. 1st edn, Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies, Routledge, pp. 40-56.
Clay, E (2022), A Corpus-Based Approach to Examining Terminological Variation in EU Law, International Journal of Language & Law, vol. 11, pp. 142-162. https://doi.org/10.14762/jll.2022.142
Clay, E & McAuliffe, K (2021), Reconceptualising the Third Space of legal translation: a study of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Comparative Legilinguistics, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 93-126. https://doi.org/10.2478/cl-2021-0005

Allegra Holmes à Court

Allegra Holmes à Court is a fifth-year undergraduate student at the Australian National University, where she is completing a Law/Arts double degree with a major in linguistics. She is currently contributing to an Indigenous language revitalisation project, conducting linguistic analysis of archival records to support community initiatives. She is interested in the intersection of law and linguistics, particularly in the consequences of language ideologies within legal contexts—an area she has written about for Language on the Move. She is currently working as the inaugural LLIRN intern.

Eleanor Kettle

Eleanor Kettle is a PhD student and a Research Assistant with the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her PhD research area is the forensic transcription of audio featuring non-mainstream varieties of English (NMVE), exploring who should be transcribing these types of audio, and how contextual information may assist in reliable transcription. The aim of this research is to develop evidence-based processes for the reliable transcription of poor-quality forensic audio featuring NMVE, to ensure that only demonstrably reliable transcripts are provided as assistance to the court. In addition, as her specific focus is on NMVE, Eleanor is keen to explore how to represent non-mainstream (or even ‘non-standard’) language features in transcripts while minimising the potential for bias and discrimination of NMVE speakers in the criminal justice system.

Kaela Madrunio, a guest speaker at the 2024 Forensic Linguistic Training Workshop at Quirino State University, The Philippines (Image credit: Kaela Madrunio)

Eleanor has previously worked as a teacher for adult English language learners in Australia and Italy, and as a curriculum and materials developer for basic English literacy materials in eSwatini, as well as developing teaching materials for use in ESL/EFL classrooms.

Recent presentations

Kettle, E., & Fraser, H. (2024a). Evaluating Transcripts of Poor-Quality Forensic Audio: Sine-Wave Speech and Forensic Audio. Proceedings of the Nineteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 242-246. https://assta.org/sst-2024/proceedings
Kettle, E., & Fraser, H. (2024b, 26-29 November). “Feel sorry for your ears”: Exploring challenges in transcribing speech with unknown content in unfamiliar varieties ALS Conference, ANU, Canberra. https://als.asn.au/Conference/2024/Program2024
Kettle, E., & Fraser, H. (2025, 30 June – 4 July). “We speak in broken English and a mix of languages”: Listener familiarity as a factor affecting the reliable transcription of non-mainstream varieties of English IAFLL Biennial Conference, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. https://iafll.org/2025/06/25/17th-biennial-conference-of-iafll-final-programme/

Kaela Madrunio

Ma. Kaela Joselle R. Madrunio is a faculty member of the Faculty of Languages and Literature at Philippine Normal University, Manila. She earned her Master’s degree in Forensic Linguistics from Aston University, UK, making her the first Filipino to hold a degree in this field. With this achievement, she embraces both the honor and responsibility of raising awareness of forensic linguistics in the Philippines and contributing to its development as an academic and applied discipline.

Kaela is currently working on a research project that examines migrant narratives through the lens of forensic linguistics, focusing on how migrants use language to frame their experiences and construct their past and present identities. She is also developing a separate paper that analyzes deception in migrant narratives as reflected in Philippine Senate hearings. In addition, she is working on a special issue on multilingualism in Philippine courtrooms, focusing on its implications for justice and legal understanding.

Kaela’s other research interests include plagiarism detection, deceptive language, the role of Philippine English in forensic linguistics, and forensic phonetics, with a particular focus on transcription. Passionate about bridging theory and practice, she currently serves as the Secretary of the Philippine Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics (PAFLL) and is an Associate Member of the National Research Council of the Philippines (NRCP).

Recent publications

Madrunio, M. K. J. R., & Lintao, R. B. (2023). Power, Control, and Resistance in Philippine and American Police Interview Discourse. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 37(2), 449-484. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10045-8
Madrunio, M. K. J. R., & Madrunio, M. R. (2022). Language in Crisis Negotiations: The Rizal Park Hostage-Taking Incident. 3L: Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 28(3).

Dr Joe McIntyre

Joe McIntyre is a judicial studies scholar at University of South Australia. What does this mean? Well, basically, he studies all things related to judges and courts – including legal theory orientated work on the nature and function of judges, judicial accountability and impartiality, doctrinal work (particularly in constitutional and administrative law), empirical work (including in JusticeTech, civil justice, and accountability) as well as a range of comparative and interdisciplinary research on all things judicial.

In the last five years, this has led him to the very weird but incredibly interesting world of ‘pseudolaw’ where adherents utilise the forms of law, but not its substance, to advance their case in litigation. Think the sovereign citizen litigant (who was probably waving a red ensign at an anti-vax protest in 2021) arguing that they are not a legal entity and the court has no jurisdiction because the wrong coat of arms is displayed.  Last year, he and colleagues undertook a world-first project interviewing judges and administrators whose work is being profoundly affected by pseudolaw. Given the central role language plays in the performance of pseudolaw, Joe has included two applied linguists on the project team, who helped the team understand the communicative expertise of adherents (look out for their upcoming article in the Alternative Law Journal). And now suddenly Joe feels himself falling down the law and linguistics rabbit hole…

His most recent work in this area “Pareidolic Illusions of Meaning: ChatGPT, Pseudolaw and the Triumph of Form over Substance” explores the connections between pseudolaw and GenAI. In doing so it traverses territory of linguistics, psychology and computer science – and has a lot of fun along the way. Joe is still very new in this law and linguistics space but having fun – but please let him know new things to read or explore.

Recent publications

Hobbs, H., Young, S., & McIntyre, J. (Eds.). (2025). Pseudolaw and Sovereign Citizens. Bloomsbury Publishing. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781509978946.
McIntyre, J. (2025). Pareidolic Illusions of Meaning: ChatGPT, Pseudolaw and the Triumph of Form over Substance. SSRN eLibrary. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5181165

Alice Richardson

Alice Richarson is a Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, UK. Alice’s PhD by publication examines the role of interpreters in the UK asylum process through three interconnected studies that move from stakeholder perceptions to real-world practice to legal outcomes. Paper 1 uses thematic analysis of interviews with 30 practitioners to reveal that while interpreters and legal professionals favour a ‘conduit’ role emphasising neutrality, this ideal is complicated by practical demands for cultural mediation, role misunderstandings, and the emotional toll of asylum work. Paper 2 employs Hymes’ ethnography of communication framework to analyse privileged observational data from real Home Office asylum interviews, demonstrating how interpreters navigate complex communicative demands in high-stakes institutional settings where prescribed neutrality often conflicts with actual practice. Paper 3 provides empirical evidence of interpreters’ impact on asylum appeal outcomes through mixed-methods analysis of asylum decision notices, showing that interpreting issues range from procedural to critical impacts, with serious errors sometimes forming the central basis for appeals and cases involving substantial interpreting problems being less likely to result in successful outcomes. Together, these papers demonstrate that interpreters can make or break asylum cases and highlight the need for institutional recognition of interpreters’ crucial role in ensuring fair access to justice, particularly given ongoing concerns about service quality following the 2011 outsourcing of court interpreting services.

Momee Tariq

Momee Tariq is a Higher Degree Research Candidate in the School of Law at the University of New England, Australia. Momee is undertaking an MPhil in Law under the supervision of Dr Laura Smith-Khan. Her experience of going through administrative appeal for herself and two dependent children with regards to citizenship made her think about legal literacy for migrant women in terms of self-representation without having any legal backup.

As a result, her research revolves around identifying barriers for migrant women self-litigants in Australia and enhancing legal education to contribute towards a gender-responsive migration system. Momee’s literature review so far suggests that in accessing migration-specific legal information, women face barriers from both internal and external factors. Internally, they may lack legal knowledge in terms of who to get in touch with in accessing relevant information and how to proceed within the prescribed timeframes, difficulty in understanding legal language in the forms and proceedings, financial issues and shame and stigma owing to their cultural background or migration status. Externally, they may be regarded as a burden on the judicial system due to their rising numbers and being a source of extra workload for staff amounting to prejudice and discrimination, the increasing demand for support services that community legal centres provide when they are already strapped financially, issues in translating and interpreting, the use of automated decision-making in government agencies, lack of definitive data regarding self-litigants, and the potential of Alternative Dispute Resolution in supporting migrant women navigate a legal system that is foreign to them. Her research methodology involves desktop research identifying community legal and settlement services and involving them in a survey questionnaire on what migration-specific issues their clients may have experienced. Since there are a limited number of community legal services dedicated to migration support, identifying migrant women’s information needs is essential in providing tailored solutions. This approach will help uncover information seeking practices among migrants and how advances such as AI and creativity can be harnessed towards promoting legal literacy.

Ifé Thompson

Ifé Thompson (pronounced Ee-feh-ee) is a Black Language Researcher, criminal defence barrister at Nexus Chambers, and community organiser leading pioneering work on Black language justice in the UK legal system. Her legal practice challenges how Black British English (BBE), African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and rap or drill lyrics are misrepresented in court as evidence of criminality rather than being recognised as cultural and linguistic rights.

She has transformed defence strategies by centring linguistic expertise and racial justice. In R v LZ (2024), she defended a Black child prosecuted for using AAVE, and in R v L (2022), she successfully challenged the misinterpretation of Jamaican Patois by a non-expert witness. In the widely publicised March 2025 “N-word trial,” she secured the withdrawal of charges against a Black woman accused of obscene communication for using the N-word, arguing that intra-community use of the term must be understood within its cultural and historical context.

Thompson also critiques the weaponisation of hate crime and communications laws against racialised communities, where intra-community language and political critique are increasingly criminalised. In R v X (2023), she defended a client prosecuted for calling a prospective MP a “coon,” asserting the protection of Black political speech under human rights law.

She is the founder of Black Learning Achievement and Mental Health (BLAM UK), which defends BBE in education and has written teacher plenaries and worksheets on Black Languages. Her forthcoming book, Black British English (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), looks at the history of this contemporary language, the influence of creolised languages and ways we can fashion spaces of linguistic joy and esteem for Black British English speakers.

She is also deeply engaged in language justice via using digital platforms to amplify conversations around Black British linguistic identity. Ife can be found on TikTok (@ifedior), where she shares content as a Black linguistic creator and explores the intersections of race, language, and power.

Podcast

The Black British English Podcast

What about you?

Do you work or do research in an area where language and law intersect? Join the LLIRN and visit our new website!  We run online and in-person events and maintain a lively and growing mailing list, now with members from at least 43 different countries, at diverse stages of their careers, including students, academics, language and legal professionals, and those in policy and decision-making roles.

In-person LLIRN attendees (Image credit: Kristen Martin)

The Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Research Network (LLIRN) facilitates interdisciplinary scholars, language professionals and legal professionals around the world to connect and share their work.

Since its establishment, the network has grown significantly, with over 260 members currently, from or based in approximately 43 countries.

To celebrate the 6th anniversary of the network’s establishment, Dr Alexandra Grey (UTS) and Dr Laura Smith-Khan (UNE) organised an Anniversary Workshop on 14 April 2025. It brought LLIRN colleagues together in person and online in a celebration of the network and planning the network’s next collaborations.

Outline

The LLIRN 6th Anniversary Workshop began with a Law Reform Workshop on “The origins and causes of transcript injustice: How legal misconceptions about written and spoken language threaten the right to a fair trial”, led by Prof Helen Fraser, the founding director of the Research Hub for Language and Forensic Evidence at the University of Melbourne.

This was followed by a Next Steps for Collaboration Workshop, led by Dr Laura Smith-Khan (UNE) and Dr Alexandra Grey (UTS), and then an in-person lunch, providing a rare chance for LLIRN members to catch up informally.

Alexandra Grey began the event with an introduction, thanking those who travelled and those online for being a part of the workshop. I was then invited up to deliver an Acknowledgement of Country, where through acknowledging the Gadigal people, I used my own knowledge of Dhurga (a Yuin dialect) and discussed my purpose for this in connection to how language and power are strongly interconnected; coinciding with the lectures presented on the day.

Alex then followed up with her own Acknowledgement and used Gadi words as taught by Prof Jaky Troy, author of The Sydney Language, and broadened my point about language and power in connection to the origins of the LLIRN and the motivations behind ours and our colleagues’ work. After explaining the agenda for the day, Alex and Laura welcomed everyone to the event.

The origins and causes of transcript injustice: How legal misconceptions about written and spoken language threaten the right to a fair trial

After a sweet celebration and congratulations for the LLIRN’s 6th Anniversary, Helen Fraser then narrowed in on the discussion point of transcript injustice in relation to two criminal cases in Australia, including a prominent case involving Stephen Jamieson. From these cases, Fraser highlighted two misconceptions of transcripts in court:

• Misconceptions about what is involved in producing a verbatim transcript
• Misconception that judges themselves can determine post hoc if a transcript is reliable

Fraser highlighted the issue of transcript injustice in relation to both how transcripts are produced and how they are presented in court. Fraser discussed, through the example of Jamieson’s case, the misconceptions surrounding transcript production including the nature of speech being faster than typing and the possibility of police interference and improper investigation tactics in gaining a confession (i.e. ‘verballing’).

Through the second case, Fraser discussed evidence of transcripts used alongside indistinct audio and how they impact a jury’s unbiased opinion. Fraser exemplified such by having us all read a short text and listen to an audio recording to see if we agreed with what was written. To our surprise, we were deceived, as the audio did not match the writing but sounded like it did. In this playful deceit, Fraser made her point about the priming effect transcripts have in audio-based evidence in courts.

From both cases, Fraser acknowledged the work done so far to prevent such inconsistencies which led to injustice in the two cases, as well as pointing out the long way to go to properly prevent these injustices altogether.

After the presentation, the group reflected on ways forward, including the possibility of forming an interest group from which to develop a working group for reform. Some of the ideas suggested as potential responses included reforms to court practice notes about forensic audio evidence, and the need to build more momentum for the awareness of transcript injustice.

Next Steps for Collaboration

After a small break, it was then Alex and Laura’s turn! This workshop featured a lot of in-group discussions and opportunities for LLIRN members to speak on what they would like from the network.

The first point of discussion was joint proposals for conference panels, relating to both national and international Law, Linguistics and other interdisciplinary societies. Various members watching online gave valuable insights about conferences held internationally. We also had the opportunity to hear about conferences that any of the LLIRN members would be attending this year or are eager to attend in the future.

In-person LLIRN attendees in the UTS Law foyer (Image credit: Kristen Martin)

In particular, we’re looking forward to reports from LLIRN members attending the International Association of Forensic & Legal Linguistics conference at University of the Western Cape, Sth Africa, 30 June – 4 July 2025.

Additionally, there are these upcoming conferences as potentially apt for LLIRN collaborations:

• UNSW Law & Justice Legal Education Research Conference, 24 and 25 November 2025, UNSW Law & Justice (Sydney), “The Crowded Curriculum”: submit papers/panels by COB 7 July
• LSAANZ, Uni of Canterbury (NZ), 3-5 December 2025, “Rights, Relationality, Resilience, Reciprocity
• Australian Linguistic Society, Griffith Uni, Gold Coast (Queensland), 2-5 December 2025

Then, the discussion turned to books and the possibility of LLIRN members collaborating on a book. Discussion surrounded a possible book relating to the research of members of the network itself and new opportunities in the Law and Linguistics interdisciplinary area. This collaboration idea will continue to develop over the next year.

Afterwards, there was one final point to discuss in the form of a surprise…

The new LLIRN website!

We ended by launching our new LLLIRN Website ‘Law and Language.’ Laura introduced the website to the network and talked about some of its exciting features!

The Law and Linguistics website offers a place for members to display their new work as well as read work from their colleagues – an overall nice space for colleagues to connect and uplift each other’s work.

From this announcement, the discussions continued about what members would like from the website, including any features that the members would find beneficial. A key point that was acknowledged was the continued upkeep of the website to keep the website relevant, as well as the possibility of students being involved on the website.

The site is still a work in progress, but it already includes a public-facing overview about the network, its scope, publications and activities; pages sharing information about network members’ projects; and a growing set of republished blog posts.

Following the end of Alex and Laura’s workshop, the group shared excitement for the future of the LLIRN and the new opportunities that may arise. The opportunity for members to come together and share new ideas ended the day in a great mood. Such mood then carried into the LLIRN lunch where members laughed and caught up with each other about their academic endeavours. After the success of the workshops, the LLIRN could celebrate its 6th anniversary and remember it as a great day.

LLIRN members Dr Alexandra Grey, Dr Adrian Hemler and PhD Candidate Emma Genovese at UTS for Adrian’s seminar (Image credit: Alexandra Grey)

This April we celebrated the 6th birthday of the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN) with a fascinating research seminar about the potential for corpus linguistics in legal research.

Six years ago, LLIRN was born out of a new event, the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Symposium, which Laura Smith-Khan and I hosted in Sydney. With researchers from multiple universities in Australia – including a number of people from the Language on the Move community – as well as visiting scholars from Asia and Europe, we workshopped the shared themes underpinning our varied case studies and how to collaborate across disciplines. We swiftly then set up the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network to continue the momentum.

We could only dream (and did dream) of this network becoming as active, friendly and international as it now is. We have over 260 members based in/from at least 40 countries. We’ve cast a spotlight on many of them recently in our LLIRN About US blog series, which we started to mark the 5th LLIRN anniversary.

It felt great to mark our anniversary this April with a visiting scholar, Dr Adrian Hemler from the University of Konstanz in Germany, presenting his innovative research to an interested audience online and in-person at the UTS Faculty of Law. Adrian’s topic was ‘Law and Corpus Linguistics – Current Trends and Future Applications’. He made corpus linguistic methods of analysis seem easily accessible even for those without a background in the field, and he shared a real passion for his research.

Enjoy this video recording of Adrian’s seminar to learn about the basics of Corpus Linguistics, the resources available online, and the potential he sees for corpus linguistic analysis in comparative legal research. You can also read Laura’s live posting about the seminar @lauraskh.bsky.social.

(Image credit: Scott Graham on Unsplash)

Judges are masters of applying the law, but how well do they truly understand the language they use? During a judgment-writing course in my law degree at the Australian National University (ANU), I noticed that while judges make deliberate linguistic choices, their understanding of language—particularly in relation to achieving clarity—could benefit from linguistic expertise.

As a law and linguistics student, I’m often frustrated by the lack of explicit focus on language in legal education. When language is occasionally acknowledged, it is often treated as a neutral vessel for meaning—an assumption that linguistics studies teach you to question.

In 2024, I had the privilege of being a student in the inaugural Judicial Reasoning course at ANU. Designed and convened by Associate Professor Heather Roberts (who runs ANU Law’s Visiting Judges Program) and co-taught with Dr Anne MacDuff, the course brought nine current and former judges with diverse legal backgrounds into the classroom to discuss judgment writing. I gained rare insight into judges’ beliefs about language, and was pleasantly surprised by their heightened awareness of its role in judgment-writing, as well as their ability to make conscious linguistic choices to achieve their desired communication goals. However, their awareness of language seemed to be guided more by their intuition and legal training than linguistic expertise. This is not surprising as few judges are trained in linguistics, but it does raise important questions about the need for greater integration of linguistics in law. The following reflections are based on my own observations of the insights shared by the judges during this course.

Who do judges write for?

The judges were most explicitly aware of language when they talked about writing for a particular audience. They generally wrote for those most directly affected by the judgment. For some judges, this was an individual or community seeking justice for personal harm. For others, this was the legal community seeking answers to complex legal questions, particularly higher courts that may review their decisions.

From my observations, the choice between an audience of laypersons and one of legal practitioners correlates with important linguistic consequences. Judges writing for a legal audience often want their writing to increase distance between themselves and their audience (what I’ll refer to as +D), while the judges writing for laypersons tend to want their writing to minimise distance between themselves and their audience (what I’ll refer to as –D). To achieve these differing goals, judges employed somewhat contrasting linguistic techniques.

How do judges achieve +D in writing for legal audiences?

Judges seeking to achieve +D were often writing for higher courts and emphasised the importance of objectivity, accuracy and impartiality in their legal reasoning to reduce the likelihood of further appeal. The judges cited avoiding emotionally-laden language as important to maintain impartiality. As one judge explained, ‘you are talking to a transcript’.

Clarity in writing was viewed as the most important goal in achieving +D. The judges encouraged efficiency and brevity in achieving clarity, with one judge suggesting to ‘take out all the words you don’t need’, including summarising the statement of the facts in appeal cases. This approach to clarity favours the ‘legal register’ with formal language, legal terminology, and passive voice. Technical legal terms, phrases and syntax most efficiently communicate specific legal meanings to the legal experts who are familiar with them.

How do judges achieve –D in writing for lay audiences?

On the other hand, judges seeking to achieve –D tended to emphasise a desire for their writing to express empathy and compassion. Judges with this goal were often dealing with criminal or negligence matters, and described themselves as ‘writing for the loser’. One such judge demonstrated a keen awareness of linguistic tools: acknowledging and engaging with the intended audience by directly addressing them, framing their experience in their own words, and including a detailed statement of the facts. This judge was also aware of the effect of context: using active voice to place responsibility on the accused and acknowledge harm caused, while using passive voice can have the effect of removing the agent of the harm (and therefore relieving responsibility). But equally, when used in sentencing, the active voice can be interpreted as punishing rather than encouraging self-reflection.

Importantly, while equally concerned with clarity, judges aiming for –D equated this with accessibility. These judges also expressed a desire to articulate a clear picture of the law. However, they sought to do this in lay terms so that their lay audience could understand. The judges cited the use of ‘plain English’, implying avoiding legal jargon and generally complex language.

So, what is ‘clarity’ in judgment writing?

What judges see as ‘clarity’ in judgment writing appears to depend on who they are writing for. Judges seeking +D tend to see clarity as brevity and precision, while those seeking –D see clarity as accessibility. For example, while a judge seeking +D would prefer the concise latinate verb ‘implement’, a judge seeking –D would be more likely to prefer the more informal ‘put into place’.

But judges’ understanding of clarity could benefit from linguistic expertise. For example, phrasal verbs like ‘put into place’ are often challenging for ESL speakers and learners as they are idiomatic, contextual and often lack equivalents in other languages. This example highlights how ‘clarity’ and linguistic accessibility are more complex and subjective than the formal/informal binary described by the judges. Personal understandings of language—such as what is considered ‘plain English’— appear to offer little guidance on what is genuinely accessible to diverse audiences.

Bridging the Gap

These insights suggest that judges do think deeply about language, choosing tools to suit their audiences and communication goals of +D or –D. However, their grasp of linguistic accessibility appears limited, with notions like ‘plain English’ oversimplifying the complexities of clarity across varied audiences.

Additionally, it’s important to note that this distinction reflects general patterns I observed. While impartiality is a fundamental obligation of judges, many also saw compassion as essential to effective judgment-writing, and thus aimed for both goals. Balancing +D and –D simultaneously is a complex linguistic task, and several judges acknowledged the difficulty of navigating this fine line. Greater linguistic expertise could provide valuable tools to help judges manage this dual responsibility more effectively.

Ultimately, while judges demonstrate a practical understanding of language’s social consequences, their grasp of linguistic accessibility appears limited. Incorporating formal linguistic training into legal education could empower judges and lawyers to make more informed, accessible, and socially impactful linguistic choices.

Further reading

A reading from the course that provides further discussion of language in judgment writing: Desmond Manderson ‘Literature in Law – Judicial Method, Epistemology, Strategy and Doctrine’ (2015) 38(4) UNSW Law Journal 1300 https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/swales38&id=1328&men_tab=srchresults

An example of a judgment written with careful reflection on writing style and its consequences: A (Letter to a Young Person), Re (Rev 1) [2017] EWFC 48 (26 July 2017)

Six years later, the LLIRN has grown and we’ve held events, published a law journal special issue that showcased the work of several of our (mainly early career) members, and maintain a lively and growing mailing list, now with members from at least 43 different countries, at diverse stages of their careers, including students, academics, language and legal professionals, and those in policy and decision-making roles.

Since the Network’s inception, one key area of concern is how best we can work – individually and as a community – to integrate law and language expertise in various educational and training contexts, be it working with students in schools or universities, or with professionals in legal settings.

In 2024, we set up a blog series to learn (or “LLIRN”) more about each other, and to make our learning public so that others can learn more about us too. In this latest post, we provide a snapshot of some our Network’s activities related to education. We conceive this theme broadly to include both people who have done research in an educational context, where there is a focus on language and law, and also those who have integrated a language and law focus into education or training that they have designed or delivered, whether in a university or beyond.

This post features LLIRN members from Australia and overseas, working across 11 universities and multiple disciplines.

Donna Butorac, Curtin University, Australia

Donna Butorac coordinates and teaches into the BA major in Anthropology and Sociology at Curtin University. She shares this reflection on how participation in the LLIRN has influenced her teaching:

“I was inspired by what I learned at the excellent Linguistics and Law symposium convened by Alex and Laura at Sydney Uni in 2019 to create a topic titled Language and the Law for my second-year core unit Language and Social Life. The topic introduces some of the ways that language ideology and language use are embedded in the framing and functioning of the Law, explores communication between legal professionals and lay people in legal settings as a form of intercultural (mis)communication, discusses folk linguistics and false beliefs about language as they impact courtroom trials and asylum review hearings, and examines misperceptions about language use, dynamics of power and social inequality involving language use as they play out in specific legal and institutional settings. The lecture covers research by Diana Eades, Susan Ehrlich, Helen Fraser, John Gibbons, Christoph Hafner, Elizabeth Holt and Alison Johnson, Katrijn Maryns, Laura Smith-Khan, and Joseph van Buuren, and in tutorials we discuss some of this research and get students to engage with Helen Fraser’s materials on the Forensic Transcription website.  I love teaching the Language and the Law content and it’s proved quite an eye-opener for our students, making a much-valued contribution to the Language and Social Life curriculum.”

Publications

Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari and Vera Williams Tetteh (2024) Life in a New Language (Oxford)

The Forensic Stream, Speech and Language Lab, Australian National University, Australia

The Forensic Stream of the Speech and Language Lab at ANU conducts research focused on the forensic analysis of linguistic evidence and related areas, and offers courses within the Forensic Linguistics program. These courses include LING2105, Language and the Law, and LING3032, Forensic Voice and Text Comparison. We are also keen to host highly motivated postgraduate students working on topics relevant to our lab. Please contact LLIRN member and Forensic Stream Leader, Professor Shunichi Ishihara for more details.

Dr Alexandra Grey and Dr Laura Smith-Khan, Macquarie Law School

Alexandra Grey, University of Technology Sydney

Dr Alexandra Grey combines legal and linguistic research approaches to study how governments respond to linguistic diversity, and how those responses redistribute or entrench hierarchies of power, access to resources and social groupings. This often includes studying the place of minority languages in education.

Some of her recent work analyses changes in law and language-in-education policy for preschools and schools in China (Grey and Baioud 2021; Grey 2025). Her (2025) review essay on ‘The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights’ canvasses multiple chapters on education rights and practices around the world. With LLIRN co-founder, Dr Laura Smith-Khan, she has examined the limited inclusion of linguistic concepts and linguistic research in legal studies in Australia, as a stepping stone to potential curriculum reform (Grey and Smith-Khan 2021b). Together, they have also mapped law-and-linguistics research around the legislature, executive and judiciary, to assist non-linguists and legal practitioners navigate the field (Grey and Smith-Khan 2021a). One of Alex’s earliest studies evaluated a bilingual, NGO-led clinical legal education model (Grey 2020).

Alex’s current research focuses on self-determination and the role of governments in Aboriginal language renewal in New Soth Wales (NSW), the most populous state in Australia. She was part of the Indigenous-led team authoring The Benefits of Aboriginal Language Use and Revival – Literature Review for the NSW Aboriginal Languages Trust in 2021; this public resource includes a section on the educational benefits of Aboriginal language renewal in NSW. Alex is especially interested in collaborations with First Nations scholars in Taiwan, NZ and Canada, and in collaborations about interdisciplinary methods.

Relevant publications:

Smith-Khan, L. and Grey, A. (2020) ‘Reflections on developing research collaborations across law and linguistics’, Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of NSW 152(3). 332–337. ISSN 0035-9173/18/020332-06

Grey, A. (2020) [Open Access]. ‘The value of participant feedback: Insights from learners in a novel, non-university CLE setting in China, International Journal of Clinical Legal Education. 27(2). 5-67. https://doi.org/10.19164/ijcle.v27i2.959.

Thorpe, K., Booker, L., Grey, A., Rigney, D. and Galassi, M. (2021) [Open Access]. The Benefits of Aboriginal Language Use and Revival – Literature Review. UTS Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research. https://www.alt.nsw.gov.au/assets/Uploads/downloads/files/The-Benefits-of-Aboriginal-Language-Use-and-Revival-in-New-South-Wales-Literature-Review.pdf

Grey, A. and Baioud, G. (2021) [Open Access]. ‘Education Reforms Aim to Mold Model Citizens from Preschool in the PRC’. China Brief. 21 (17) 23-29. The Jamestown Foundation: Washington. https://jamestown.org/program/educational-reforms-aim-to-mold-model-citizens-from-preschool-in-the-prc/

Grey, A. and Smith-Khan, L. (2021a). ‘Bringing linguistic research into legal scholarship and practice’. Alternative Law Journal 46(1). 64-70. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X20962830

Grey, A. and Smith-Khan, L. (2021b). ‘Linguistic diversity as a challenge and an opportunity for improved legal policy’. Griffith Law Review 30(1). 1-17.  https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2021.1996883

Grey, A. (forthcoming 2025) [Review Essay, Open Access]. ‘The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights (Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove and Phillipson, Robert (eds). 2023. Wiley Blackwell. Pp712 + viii)’. Sociolinguistic Studies, issue 19.1. https://utppublishing.com/journal/ss

Grey, A. (2025) [Open Access]. China’s official common language gains further strength against minority languages. Melbourne Asia Review, Edition 21 https://www.melbourneasiareview.edu.au/chinas-official-common-language-gains-further-strength-against-minority-languages/. (Also available in Chinese, 中文: 中国的官方通用语言面对少数民族语言的优势更为显著 https://www.melbourneasiareview.edu.au/中国的官方通用语言在少数民族语言面前进一步强/

Sandra Hale, University of New South Wales, Australia

Professor Sandra Hale is convenor of the Interpreting and Translation programs at the University of New South Wales where she teaches the course Interpreting in Legal Settings, which delves into the language of police interviews, tribunal hearings and court hearings and trials with interpreters. She has been training judicial officers and tribunal members on working effectively with interpreters for over 20 years. She has also delivered professional development on the language of the law and legal interpreting to interpreting practitioners through the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT). She has been invited to speak on this topic at numerous conferences for legal professionals, interpreting professionals and linguists. Her research has included assessing the effectiveness of training.

Publications

Napier, J., Russell, D., Hale, S., Spencer, D., & San Roque, M. (2022). Training legal interpreters to work with deaf jurors. In J. L. Brunson (Ed.), Legal Interpreting: Teaching, Research and Practice (pp. 246-281). Washington D.C.: Gallaudet University Press.

Hale, S. (2021). The need to raise the bar. Court interpreters as specialized experts, in M. Coulthard, A. May and R. Sousa-Silva (eds.). Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, 2^nd Edition. London & NY: Routledge (pp 484-501).

Hale, S. (2019). Specialist legal interpreters for a fairer justice system. In S. Faiq (Ed.), Discourse in Translation (1st ed., pp. 47-66). Oxford & NY: Routledge.

Hale, S. (2015). Approaching the Bench: Teaching Magistrates and Judges how to work effectively with interpreters. MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación, 7, 163-180.

Hale, S., & Ozolins, U. (2014). Monolingual short courses for language-specific accreditation: can they work? A Sydney experience. The Interpreter and Translation Trainer, 8(2), 1-23. doi: 10.1080/1750399X.2014.929371

Hale, S. (2004/2010). The discourse of court interpreting. Discourse practices of the law, the witness and the interpreter. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/btl.52/main

Spanish Supreme Court judge, Ignacio Sancho Gargallo and his co-author Dr Ricardo-María Jiménez-Yáñez (UIC Barcelona) (both middle back) with Antonio Garrigues, Fernando Vives, Mercedes de Prada (both in front) and judges, scholars and writers, celebrating the launch of the book “El derecho a entender el Derecho.”

Ricardo Jiménez-Yáñez

Professor Ricardo Jiménez-Yáñez is an applied linguist and discourse analyst whose work is interested in professional communication, including in court decisions, legal practice, and the drafting of laws. He regularly shares his research expertise with professional stakeholders, most recently presenting work on linguistic clarity in the drafting of public international legal treaties with treaty writers. He has also published guidelines for drafting clearer court decisions, co-authored with a Spanish Supreme Court judge and has delivered training on this topic in a course for Spanish judges.

Selected Publications

Jiménez-Yáñez, RM & Mut-Bosque, M (2025) La escritura jurídica de tratados internacionales: claridad, congruencia y corrección [The legal writing of international treaties: Clarity, consistency, and accuracy] http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.25505.11368

Sancho Gargallo, I & Jiménez-Yáñez, RM (2024) El oficio de juez y la redacción de sentencias [the profession of judge and the drafting of sentences], in De Prada, Mercedes (ed) El Derecho a entender el Derecho. Alcance y límites del lenguaje jurídico [The right to understand the law: Scope and limits of legal language] , ed. Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380576266_El_oficio_de_juez_y_la_redaccion_de_sentencias

Jiménez-Yáñez, RM (2023) Escribir bien es de justicia [Writing well is justice], 3.ª edición, Aranzadi, Pamplona.

Jiménez-Yáñez, RM & Giner, D (2018) What are Spanish Law Firms doing to Improve their Lawyers’ Writing Skills? In J Engberg et al (eds), Popularization and Knowledge Mediation in the Law/ Popularisierung und Wissensvermittlung im Recht (LIT Verlag) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377241685_What_are_Spanish_Law_Firms_doing_to_Improve_their_Lawyers’_Writing_Skills#fullTextFileContent

Hanna Sofia Rehnberg (Uppsala University), Zoe Nikolaidou (Södertörn University), Cecilia Wadensjö (Stockholm University)

The research project Asylum Narratives, conducted by three Swedish linguists, examines communication in the asylum process, with a particular focus on the asylum interview conducted by the Swedish Migration Authority. The main research questions are: How are asylum narratives co-constructed by all participants in the interview, including the interpreter? How are these narratives transformed during their “textual travel” through the asylum process? Their research results have attracted the interest of case officers and decision-makers at the Swedish Migration Authority, as well as asylum judges, who have invited them to conduct several training workshops on communication in asylum interviews.

Selected Publications

Rehnberg, Hanna Sofia, 2023. Positioning of applicants in asylum interviews: Case officers as recontextualizing agents. Language in Society, p. 1–23. E-pub ahead of print.  https://doi.org/10.1017/S004740452300101X

Wadensjö, Cecilia, Hanna Sofia Rehnberg & Zoe Nikolaidou, 2022. Managing a discourse of reporting: The complex composing of an asylum narrative. Multilingua, 42(2), p. 191–213. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2022-0017

Nikolaidou, Zoe, Hanna Sofia Rehnberg & Cecilia Wadensjö, 2022. “Do I have to say exactly word by word?”: The discursive (re)construction and negotiation of asymmetrical relations in asylum interviews. Journal of Migration and Integration, 24(4), p. 745–768. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-022-00945-2

Nikolaidou, Zoe, Hanna Sofia Rehnberg & Cecilia Wadensjö, 2019. Negotiating access with public authorities in research on asylum. Working papers in urban language and literacies, paper 262. (Ed. Ben Rampton.) London: Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication, King’s College. Available: https://wpull.org/product/wp262-negotiating-access-with-public-authorities-in-research-on-asylum/

Dima Rusho, Monash University, Australia

Dima Rusho’s research explores the language and communication barriers affecting Indigenous Australians’ access to the justice system in remote communities, emphasising these inequalities as a critical social justice issue. She also teaches law students at Monash University, most recently in LAW5453: Language, Communication, and the Legal Process, a unit for Juris Doctor and Masters students. The unit examines the complexities of legal language, its role in statutes and contracts, courtroom communication, mediation, investigative processes, and cross-cultural interactions, including working with interpreters. Her future research will focus on developing language support models that incorporate advocacy to improve access and equity in legal settings.

Publications

Rusho, D., Bradley, J., & Dickson, G. (in press). Tailoring language support in legal contexts for Indigenous communities: Insights from Ngukurr and Borroloola. Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice.

Rusho, D. (2024). Coloniality and Australian Indigenous language interpreting in legal settings. In F. Ndhlovu & S. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (Eds.), Routledge handbook of language and decolonisation (ch 15). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003313618-15

Rusho, D. (2023). First Nations interpreters cannot be neutral and should not be invisible. Translation & Interpreting, 15(1), 120–134. https://doi.org/10.12807/TI.115201.2023.A06

Rusho, D. (2022). Cross-currents: Indigenous language interpreting in Australia’s justice system [Doctoral dissertation]. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.13545.42084

Cindy Schneider, University of New England, Australia

Linguistics at the University of New England (Australia) has offered the very popular unit, Language and the Law, for more than a decade. The unit has been a drawcard for undergraduate and postgraduate students in Linguistics, Law, Criminology, and other areas. The class examines the nature of legal language and how it is exploited for maximum effect in the legal system. Using Australian case studies as much as possible, we look at extracts of police interviews and courtroom interactions to understand how language can be used as a tool to reinforce social advantage or disadvantage. We also review the forensic applications of language: disputes over meanings (e.g. contracts and copyright cases); indistinct audio recordings; and authorship analysis.

Dr Cindy Schneider has been the primary coordinator of Language and the Law since its initial offering. With a background in language description, Cindy has published several papers on intelligibility between closely related language varieties, and how speakers of less well-understood, less powerful varieties (such as minority dialects and creoles) can suffer from legal, educational, and socio-economic disadvantage. She has also worked as an expert linguist in a large legal case concerned with poorly drafted legal documents.

Laura Smith-Khan, University of New England, Australia

Laura Smith-Khan’s most recently completed project examined the university course provided for people wanting to become migration law practitioners in Australia. The study explored students’ multilingual repertoires, practices, and beliefs and how these intersected with their learning experiences, identity construction, and career plans.

As part of her collaboration with the teaching team in the course, Laura also delivered a series of lectures, and helped refine other learning materials and activities, embedding sociolinguistic expertise in the offerings related to conducting client consultations, and was recognized by two awards.

Publications

Smith-Khan, L. (accepted, forthcoming) Intercultural Communication in Migration Law Education, in T. Grieshofer & K. Haworth (eds), Communication and Legal Practice: Language, Procedure, Process (Cambridge University Press).

Smith-Khan, L. & Giles, C. (2025). Improving client communication skills in migration law and practice education. Alternative Law Journal (advanced access) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1037969X251314205

Smith-Khan, L. (2023). Intercultural Communication in Migration Law Practice. 3 July Language on the Move https://languageonthemove.com/intercultural-communication-in-migration-law-practice/

Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘Common language’ and proficiency tests: A critical examination of registration requirements for Australian Registered Migration Agents. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 97-121, https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2021.1900031

Rukiya Stein, University of New England, Australia

Rukiya Stein has presented at the Australian Institute of Judicial Administration (AIJA) Conference on effective communication with vulnerable individuals and linguistic complexity in the criminal justice process. She has also presented to District Court and Children’s Court Judges and she has run training for judicial officers at the National Judicial Commission of Australia (NJCA) sexual assault proceedings learning series.

Publications

Stein, R (2024) Vulnerability and the Right to Effective Participation in the Criminal Justice Process: The Role of the Witness Intermediary (October) 36(9), Judicial Officers’ Bulletin, Judicial Commission of NSW. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.T2024102800000200843973055

Stein, R and Goodman-Delahunty, J (2024) ‘Bridging the Justice Gap: Inequity in Provision of Intermediary Assistance for Adults with Disabilities’ Alternative Law Journal https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X241307092

(Image credit: Australian Government, Study Australia)

In her 2007 ethnographic study of eight US law schools, Elizabeth Mertz traces the process through which law students learn to “think like a lawyer” in order to become one. She shows how this process is essentially about language: learning to think like a lawyer means adopting new ways of reading, writing and talking.

Crucially, Mertz demonstrates that underlying these processes is a set of linguistic ideologies – assumptions we make about language and how it should manifest in particular social contexts. For example, she identifies a practice in legal analysis and reasoning, as taught in these classrooms: the social characteristics and personal perspectives of people who appear in legal cases and problem questions are rendered irrelevant and made invisible, in favour of the legally relevant facts. Issues of morality and emotion are likewise pushed aside as unimportant.

As students undergo this transformative process of learning to think and speak like a lawyer, Mertz questions the effects this may have on how law students see the world, their ability to see social diversity and inequality and to identify and challenge issues of injustice in their future work.

But what about how students think about themselves? What if they personally face marginalization? And what of their diverse language repertoires? If thinking like a lawyer depends on speaking like one, what is this speech expected to sound like? And what impact does sounding differently have on one’s sense of professional identity and self-worth?

These were just some of the questions raised in my recent digital ethnographic research with students enrolled in a Graduate Diploma in Migration Law and Practice (GDMLP). This one-year university program is required for people who do not have an Australian legal qualification to become Registered Migration Agents (RMAs) and offer professional assistance to people applying for a visa in Australia. Unlike law degrees, which remain difficult to access for many, it has been estimated that at least half of the GDMLP cohort has English as a second language (L2), and perhaps even more are first generation migrants.

I attended online workshops during which students practiced their client interviewing skills through role-plays, observing this practical work and debriefing with them. I also conducted research interviews with students at various points during their study and after graduating, over a period of three years. To have immediate impact, I also offered my interdisciplinary expertise to enhance learning, presenting on various aspects of communication, and helping the teaching team to develop and refine learning materials (see Smith-Khan & Giles 2025).

In a new article, I share some of the ways students talk and think about their study, their future professional goals, their existing strengths, and the skills they wish to improve and how. The discussions brought up beliefs about language, closely tied to ideas about proficiency, professionalism and identity.

Bilingualism: optional benefit, real risk

While every participant who speaks multiple languages planned to use them in their future job, with at least some of their clients, there was a clear hierarchy in how different languages were valued, with English appearing at the apex as non-negotiable, and other languages more as optional extras (see also Piller & Gerber 2021).

Paolo*  The English level, I think it’s very very important too.

Laura   Yeah.

Paolo    I’m Italian, as I said before, I work with a lot of Italians, and they don’t speak English. And will have, a hundred percent sure that I will have a lot of consultations within Italian community. I will go to Italy to do seminars, and that will be in Italian.

Laura   Yeah.

Paolo    So in that way, if you think in that, in that way, you don’t need English, okay?

Laura   Yes.

Paolo    I mean, ‘I don’t need to have a very high English level, because my-, ‘I’m Chinese, I just talk in Mandarin, my consultation in Mandarin, my clients are in Mandarin.’ Okay. And it makes sense. But then you have to do applications in English, you have to study the uh legislation in English. So if the legislation, if you don’t understand properly the legislation, if you mixed up a word, all your translation in Chinese, or in Italian, or in any other language, won’t be, won’t be correct.

Okay? So it’s very, very important that they understand, the people that they want to become a migration agent, that they understand everything. [Paolo, interview 1/2, 2020]

On one level, this makes perfect sense: the work does indeed require close engagement with legal and institutional texts that are only available in English, and application forms required to be submitted to the Immigration Department only are allowed in English. However, this type of discourse also assumes bilingualism is a potential risk to English language proficiency: rather than acknowledging the crucial skills bilingual and multilingual people bring to this work, the fact that they speak more than one language is regarded as a threat to their English. This resembles political and institutional discourses in which the ‘monolingual mindset’ is evident, including in the language proficiency rules around becoming an RMA, and in other areas like skilled migration and university admission, where proficiency is assumed for some, but not for others (Smith-Khan 2021a; Piller & Bodis, 2023). Such discourses are also evident in public political debates about migration and registered migration agents (Smith-Khan 2021b).

‘Australian’ native speakers and language choice

Perceptions about identity are also closely connected with these types of ideologies. As L2 English speakers discuss their experiences and efforts to develop speaking skills in class and connect these evaluations with their future language practices and career plans.

Gemma: If you have poor communication you give them the impression you’re not professional. You probably have lots of knowledge in your mind but you just can’t express yourself properly, or too slow, or I don’t know. You’ve got to give them, the client the impression that oh no, you are professional. I can trust you. You can do the job for me. So I try to, the reason why I said um, um, the native English speaker is better, probably that’s just one side about um, they easily use language um, uh, like more vocabulary than us. We can’t use like beautiful words or whatever it is to express myself uh, precisely. So uh, that will give client the impression like, you not professional like I can’t trust you…. So, yes. So that’s why I said if I speak to Chinese, probably I’ll be more confident. They, they will, will feel less, um, less suspicious. I don’t know. Um, less, how will I say? Um, more trust on you than English-speaking people. [Gemma, interview 1/1, 2020]

Evaluations like these compare L2 English speakers’ skills vis-à-vis what they consider the ideal student and future RMA, an L1 English speaker, with implications for professional identity and future work plans. They also link general professional competence with language proficiency and oral fluency, something that again also comes up in the broader discourse (see Smith-Khan 2021b).

However, these ideologies extend even further, to national identity and moral worth.

Gemma: Yes, with my, one of my classmates… Uh, at the beginning it wasn’t very good. Oh, he’s local. He’s Australian. And he’s very, I feel he pick up very quickly and easily and then he has to put up with me because I have to think. And, you know, thinking probably slower than, than him and then speak slowly. Uh, yes so I find the difference and I try to, I just want to try to improve that by talking more [Gemma, interview 1/1, 2020].

In this encounter, Gemma evaluates herself in relation to an “Australian”, “local” L1-speaking classmate. Here, speaking and thinking are closely connected, and she comes out positioned as a burden in the interaction – something her classmate must “put up with” because of her slower thinking and speaking.

While such discourse is not surprising in this particular social and political context, it sits uneasily against the facts we have about Gemma’s personal and professional background, along with the direct linguistic data collected in the project. She came to Australia as a skilled migrant and was granted a permanent visa because of her professional qualifications. She has been an Australian citizen for over a decade, working as a civil servant in a professional role, in a regional Australian city, in a highly monolingual English office environment. Her English language proficiency is indisputably high. Yet her evaluation demonstrates the power of native-speaker and monolingual mindset ideologies about languages: her capability, her professionalism, and even her nationality become inferior and vulnerable to the point that she imagines herself as at best a burden, and at worst incapable of being trusted, for an L1 English speaking audience in this context (see Piller et al 2024).

Hard work, pushback and pragmatism

However, all is not lost for this group of aspiring migration practitioners. Both L1 and L2 English speakers heavily stressed the need to practice speaking and to study hard to continue to improve their professional skills. While this emphasises individual responsibility and creates an additional burden for L2 speakers, it still allows for a degree of agency and a sense of opportunity: developing professional skills and identity are not regarded as impossible.

At the same time, students also demonstrated a critical awareness of the broader social and political contexts, and what these mean for how people are (sometimes unfairly) evaluated. For example, one student pointed to the broader political context of migration and perceptions of migrants to make sense of how RMAs are perceived: if the government is “very anti-immigration”, it follows that RMAs would be seen as “unnecessary” or a “pain to deal with”, and it would be made difficult for them to enter the profession.

Another student pushed back against the apparent need for people to speak standard Australian English. Nitin explained how whether someone comes across as rude can be a matter of the listener’s perception. He was thus able to turn the spotlight onto the interlocutor, who may misjudge L2 speakers who “don’t have those little, nice touches” in their speech, rather than the “deficient” speaker, and at the same time claim an advantage over L1 interlocutors, as more compassionate and knowledgeable in interactions involving speakers of diverse language varieties or proficiency. However, Nitin still ends on a pragmatic note, related to his own lived reality:

Nitin: People, when I talked to the native speakers here, sometimes they’d think I’m talking rude. My colleagues said that on a few occasions, and I started thinking, what was rude in that? … So I adapted it over a period of about nine years. Now I know what to speak and what not to speak. [Nitin, interview 1/2, 2020]

Therefore, while it is clear that students may come to internalize linguistic ideologies that frame their language practices and repertoires as inferior or in need of ongoing improvement, there is still space to reclaim and challenge these ideologies. However, even while doing so, they must still navigate the very real and enduring practical effects such ideologies have within their social and professional contexts.

Note

*Participant names are pseudonyms.

References

Mertz, E. (2007). The language of law school: Learning to “think like a lawyer”. Oxford University Press.

Piller, I. & Bodis, A. (2024). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 53(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000689

Piller, I. & Gerber, L. (2021). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, (24)5, 622-635. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227

Piller, I. et al. (2024). Life in a New Language. Oxford University Press.

Smith-Khan, L. (2025, AOP). Language, culture and professional communication in migration law education, Language, Culture and Curriculum, https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2025.2481051

Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘Common language’ and proficiency tests: a critical examination of registration requirements for Australian registered migration agents. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 97–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2021.1900031

Smith-Khan, L. (2021b). Deficiencies and loopholes: Clashing discourses, problems and solutions in Australian migration advice regulation. Discourse & Society, 32(5), 598-621. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265211013113

Smith-Khan, L., & Giles, C. (2025, AOP). Improving client communication skills in migration law and practice education. Alternative Law Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X251314205

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

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

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

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

***

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

Rosemary Salomone

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

Trump Executive Order

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

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

English and National Identity

German Translation of the Declaration of Independence

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

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

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

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

Context and Timing

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

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

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

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

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

Official Language Movement

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

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

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

Defying Democratic Norms

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

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

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

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

Clinton Order Protections

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

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

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

Multilingualism for All

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

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

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

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

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

Related content

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

This conversation builds on a chapter written by Karen McAuliffe, Liana Muntean & Virginia Mattioli in the book Researching the European Court of Justice: Methodological Shifts and Law’s Embeddedness, edited by Mikael Rask Madsen, Fernanda Nicola and Antoine Vauchez and published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Karen mentions the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network. You can subscribe to the Network’s listserv and read member profiles on Language on the Move. She also mentions iCourts, which is the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts and Governance, and the Language, Culture and Justice Hub at Bard College.

If you enjoyed this show, say hi to Alexandra on LinkedIn and to Karen on BlueSky @profkmca.bsky.social. Also, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice

Transcript

Alexandra Grey: Welcome to Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m Alex Grey, and I’m a research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Technology in Sydney. My guest today is Professor Karen McAuliffe. Karen is a Professor of Law and Language, and a Birmingham Fellow, at Birmingham Law School in the UK. We’re going to talk about doing research that pools together, law and linguistics, a pet topic, a key interest for both of us. Karen, welcome to the show.

Karen McAuliffe: Thank you so much. It’s lovely to be here. Always a delight to talk about my research.

The European Court of Justice Building in Luxembourg (Image Credit: CJUE)

Alexandra: what we’ve decided to do today is to cover both a specific part of your recent research, and then to talk more generally about the research that you do and how you manage to straddle law and linguistics. But before we get into any of those specifics, let’s just first get to know you a little. You’ve got a really unusual job title. I just read it out. How did you come to be professor not only of law but of language at the same time?

Karen: Well, it’s an interesting story. It’s not a very linear journey to it. So, I originally studied my undergraduate degree was a common and civil law degree at Queen’s University, Belfast. As I’m Irish, I should add, I work in the UK. For anybody listening who wonders why I don’t have a British accent, that is why. So, I studied in Northern Ireland, in Queens University of Belfast, and also at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. So, I studied Northern Irish UK law and Belgian law and the Belgian law part of the degree was obviously in French. So, so I did this dual qualification, dual language degree. And when I graduated, to be honest, I didn’t really think very hard about my career, or what I wanted to do while I was at university, and after graduation I did a– what’s called a competition to work as a lawyer linguist in the European Union and the European institutions, the EU institutions. And so I got a job as a lawyer linguist in at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Worked there for a while. I began to realize that I was a bit more interested in thinking about what I was doing than actually doing it. So, I returned to Academia to do a Phd. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to do a Phd. And I went back to Queens to do it, actually back to Belfast, and this time not to the Law School, but to the Institute of Governance.  While I was working in Luxembourg as a lawyer linguist, I just became fascinated with the job that I was doing. Insofar as  you know, my job was to try to translate judgments that had been drafted in French into English in a way that they would have the same legal effects  in Ireland and the UK then – which was part of the EU back then – as they would, you know, anywhere else in in the EU, and that intersection between law language and translation really, really fascinated me. So that was the topic of my Phd. It was on legal translation at the European Court of Justice, specifically, and in that Phd, I did a lot of I guess what you call it socio legal research.

I ended up staying. I stayed in Academia and in 2016, I moved to the University of Birmingham as a Birmingham Fellow, which was very exciting, really lovely post to get. I had previously got some large grants from the European Commission, so European Research Council Grants, including one, it’s called a Starter grant, which is like a 5 year project to look at law and language in the European Union. And when I got my Chair it was a named chair, and I was allowed to choose the Chair, so it was a Professor of Law and Language. That’s how I got here, I guess.

Alexandra: It’s marvelous to hear, Karen, because I think there are listeners out there, there are academics who email me, who say, ‘Look, I’m interested in law and language but until I, you know, found someone else doing that online, I had no idea that it was a career path’.

Karen: It was all very serendipitous, really, and not as linear as I’ve made it sound there.

Alexandra: But we’re going to make it sound even more linear because you’ve created a perfect segue to the specific piece of work that we’re going to talk about today. It’s a chapter you wrote and published in 2022, along with Liana Muntean and Virginia Mattioli.  It’s called Through the Lens of Language; Uncovering the collaborative nature of Advocates General’s Opinions. I’ll put the full link in the show notes with the book that it’s from. But in this chapter you’re talking about a study where we meet lawyer linguists, exactly the role that you yourself once held and the kinds of people who work alongside them, or for whom they work at the European Court of Justice. The Advocates General, we hear a little bit about the judges. We hear about another type of staff member called a référendaire, who works alongside the Advocates General. And this chapter then gives us an insight into how those people are working together and doing exactly that interaction of law, language and translation that you’ve spoken about.

What I wanted to talk about with this chapter is a little bit your specific findings. But then also to talk more generally about what this chapter is saying in terms of method and how to do research that draws together law and language. So, we’ll come back to that more general question in a minute. But first we’ll focus on the specific context. And I’m just going to read out a little quote from the Chapter, too, to give a bit of background to listeners who might know nothing about the European Court of Justice.

Karen: Right.

Alexandra: Early in the chapter you and your co-authors begin by explaining that in ‘The EU legal order, with twenty-four official languages, integrated in twenty-seven member state legal systems, is linguistically, as well as substantively, unique.’ So, this is a really unusual legal system in many ways, I guess, but particularly here you’re highlighting how multilingual it is. And you’ve done a lot of analysis on how this multilingualism impacts on the development of law in the EU in this chapter but in other works as well. And so, this chapter is specifically a case study about the European Court of Justice, and even more specifically about the role of the Advocate General in presenting legal opinions to that court and the languages that Advocates General use to draft those opinions.

Karen: I might go back a bit further, if you don’t mind. I’m very aware that your listenership is very international, um, and so there may be people listening that don’t know anything at all about the European Court of Justice and how it works. So, the first thing to point out about this particular chapter is that I’m not talking about the judges. The Advocates General are separate. They’re not judges. So, the court itself, it’s seated in Luxembourg. I guess you could call it like the Supreme Court when it comes to European Union law. There’s two sections to it. There’s a General Court, which is the lower court, and then the European Court of Justice, which is the higher court, and I’m focusing on the higher court in this paper.

The court delivers judgments in 24 languages but it works in French. So internally the court works in French, but it delivers judgments in 24 languages. Each case that comes before the court will have what’s called a language of procedure or a language of the case. So, for example, if a Greek court um sent a question to the European Court of Justice for interpretation on a piece of EU law, the language of the case would be Greek, so the question would come to the European Court of Justice in Greek. It would be translated into French. It’ll be worked on within the Court in French, and then the judgment that is delivered, the first version of the judgment that’s drafted, will be in French, and then it’ll be translated into all the other languages. But the authentic version, the version that the judges sign will be the Greek version.

So that’s the first thing about judgments. The second thing is that they are collegiate documents. So, the deliberations of judges are secret. We never know, you know, where compromises might lie in the text of a judgment. They’re a very particular type of document. I’ve described them in in a previous paper as sort of Lego-like building blocks that are put together to make the judgement. The Court doesn’t engage with sort of legal reasoning in a very in-depth way. It answers the questions before it, and a large part of that is because the deliberations are secret. We don’t know what happens in there. Because of the nature of these judgments, because they are collegiate because of the deliberations are secret because there’s no dissenting judgments, you have these members of the court called Advocates General and this is borrowed from the French administrative law system.

So the Advocate General’s job is to deliver an opinion, a reasoned opinion on the case, to guide the court in its judgment and back in the early days of the court, the advocates general delivered opinions in every case but as workload grew, and as members of the European Union grew, you know that just became untenable. And so nowadays opinions, advocates, generals, opinions are delivered in sort of important cases, constitutionally important cases or cases where a Member States requests it specifically. And the Advocate’s general opinion, first of all, historically, was written in the language of the Advocate General. So, you know, there are 11 Advocates General, and there are a number of permanent Advocates General, as in there will be there’s a French permanent Advocate General, there’s a Polish permanent Advocate General, and then the others are rotated among the sort of smaller – in inverted commas – EU Member States. So, these people, they deliver opinions, and historically, that was in their own language. And so that’s the first thing. And the second thing is, the Advocate General can deal with anything they want in their opinion they don’t have to just stick to the questions the parties have asked. They don’t just have to stick to the things that have been raised by parties in the case, and you know, they can act almost as a sparring partner in that they can force the Court to engage in dialogue on certain concepts of EU law. And so any scholar of EU law will tell you that the judgments of the Court, while you know you can look at the judgment of the Court, and you can think about well, you know, how has the court applied that? Or how has the court interpreted the law here, where you really find the interesting dialogue and conversation about where EU law might be going is the is the opinion of the Advocate General. The Court of Justice of the European Unio is famously or infamously known for sort of creating the legal order of the EU. So you know this. The narrative is that that this EU legal order wasn’t created really by treaties and legislation. It was. It was done, you know, by the European Court of Justice kind of reading gaps in those treaties, and then creating these constitutional type principles.

But every one of those big constitutional type principles of EU law was fist seen in an Advocate General’s opinion. So, they’re really, really important in terms of EU scholarship. Now, they’re not binding on the court, but the court must take account of them when delivering the judgment.

Alexandra: They’re incredibly influential on the Court itself, but also influential on everyone else who’s teaching law.

Karen: Exactly. And so a lot of the work scholarship that had been done on the role of the Advocate General, when they talked about the opinion itself scholars would often point out that the fact that the Advocate General is writing in his or her own language first language makes a difference to how persuasive they can be. And so to finally come round to your question: in 2004 there was this sort of mega enlargement of the European Union. 10 new Member States joined in 2004, and then another 3 in 2007. And so what was happening was as Member States joined their languages got added to the list of EU official languages. So, prior to 2004 there were only 11 – only, I say! There were 11 official languages and then in– between 2004 and 2007, that number then rose to 24.

So two things with that. First of all, on a practical level, if you have to provide, if you have to do direct translation between 11 languages, now, I should have written this down beforehand, so don’t judge my math, but I think that it’s 52 combinations, I think. But if you are doing direct translation between 24 languages, that goes up to, I think it’s 552 or 554.

Alexandra: Wow!

Karen: It’s a lot. So in 2004, the European Court of Justice and the other EU institutions introduced a ‘pivot translation system’, they call it, which is relay translation. And the way it works in the court is that certain languages are assigned to– There are 5 pivot languages. So French is a pivot language for all of the other languages, because French is the working language of the Court, and then you have English, German, Spanish, Italian, and now, since 2018, Polish as well. So they’re the pivot languages, and all the other languages are assigned to a pivot language. So, to give you an example, what that means is, if a question or a case comes from a Lithuanian court or from Lithuania, it will be translated into English and then translated from English into the other languages. So, it’s sort of pivoted through relayed translation.

Alexandra: And so what is happening there to the role of the Advocate General, those people now have to start actually drafting and presenting their opinions in a pivot language. Am I right?

Karen: Yeah. Now, the interesting thing is that it’s not — it’s a convention rather than a requirement. They don’t have to. It was introduced early—the person who is, I believe he’s now Registrar of the Court, I think he’s still there, Alfredo Colon Escobar. He took over as Director of the Translation Directorate at the Court. And he introduced this system. But he was also thinking of what’s to come, and I mentioned earlier that Advocates Generals, they rotate. So you’ve got your permanent Advocate Generals, and then you have a number of Advocate generals that rotate countries. And so the court was aware and the director of the of the translation directorate was aware that in a few years you would have a Slovenian and a Slovakian Advocate General and if you had to wait for the translation to be pivoted from Slovenian into whatever the pivot language for Slovenian is back into another language, you’re adding a lot of time onto the process. So so this was all introduced for sort of for practical purposes, for expediency’s sake. And so in 2004 this convention was introduced, whereby Advocate Generals were asked to draft in one of the pivot languages of the court.

The reality of that is that you have the permanent Advocate Generals can continue to draft in their own language because they are the pivot languages of the Court. Other Advocate Generals have to choose to draft in in one of these languages, and they usually draft in English.

Alexandra: And, as you point out in your chapter, it’s not just they draft, as in, it’s not just the Advocate themselves. They have this whole team of a référendaire, who’s like a research assistant sort of position, maybe I’m underselling it; a lawyer linguist, you know. So actually, one of the things I found so interesting in your chapter, the data really shows how it’s a collaborative document, even though only one Advocate General sort of gets to put their name on it.

Karen: Yeah, so this is, this is the other very interesting thing about, I think, about this chapter in particular, is that again, historically. And the literature always talks about individual Advocates General and their opinions, but they’ve always worked in teams. So each advocate general has, I think, nowadays they have 4 référendaires. And a référendaire is similar to a clerk in the US System.

So there are lawyers and they will produce, like the initial drafts or the structures. It will differ from Advocate General to Advocate General. Some are much more hands on, some are much more hands off, but it is absolutely this this team effort. And that has always been the case. But that process remained invisible. And then all the literature talked about was the persuasiveness of this one person, this one very important person, the Advocate General. So what we were able to do in the research for this paper was sort of uncover or shine a light on on this process that’s happening behind the scenes and also shine a light on an additional role that only exists because of this linguistic convention. And that is, in certain cases some Advocate Generals or the teams of some Advocate Generals that the Chambers of some Advocate Generals will require what’s called ‘linguistic assistance’.

So because their référendaire may not be of English mother tongue, and they’re drafting in English, for example. And so what then they have is this wholly invisible part of the process from the outside, of a lawyer linguist coming in and providing what’s called linguistic assistance, and that linguistic assistance, again, will differ depending on who has written an opinion. It could be merely proofreading, there might be no need for linguistic assistance at all. Somebody might be very fluent in English, or, you know, in French, or whatever language they’ve chosen. But we’ll say English. But in other cases that linguistic assistance is much, much more than just proofreading. It’s it’s a rewriting in in certain cases, or a reframing of certain concepts. And so there’s much more of that legal creative work happening there. And that role of that sort of lawyer linguist as the linguistic assistant in the production of Advocate General’s opinions is something that, you know, just wasn’t known about outside of the Court or outside of the EU institutions, certainly not within EU scholarship, before we were able to do this research. So that was very exciting, very interesting.

Alexandra: It was interesting to me, not only to hear about that, but the way you found that out. So you and your co-authors in this chapter are very clear about what sorts of methods are allowing you to see what sorts of information, or what sort of behind the scenes reality might otherwise be invisible. And one of the key ways you do it is to interview not just the Advocates General, but the référendaires, the lawyer linguists, and in another, not in this chapter, in another part of the bigger study, the judges themselves. And what I found really interesting is that while, on the one hand, these interviews shine a light on the reality of this collaborative, interlingual production, on the other hand, what the people are overtly saying, and I’ll summarize, I’ll use a quote that you have in the chapter sort of summarizing the perspective of many interviewees: you say ‘language and substance appear to be distinct and separate things. Any overt acknowledgement of the impact of language on their work seems to be seen as undermining the quality of that work’. So even in the interviews, that invisibility is sort of perpetuated.

Karen: Absolutely. Yeah. And what was very interesting was when we when we coded the interviews the judges, the Advocate Generals for this paper, the référendaires, they all said, ‘oh, like it has no impact. The language that I’m working in has absolutely no impact on the substance that I’m producing, or the way that I’m thinking’. And then, in the same breath they will say, ‘Oh, but of course I think totally differently in my own language’. And I think there’s a quote we actually use in that paper, where they say, ‘my French colleague might come to a different conclusion’.

And what was very interesting to us was that you know, in the context of the interview, you come out of the interview and go, ‘Okay, they don’t think language is that important at all, really’. And at the same time when you go to code the interviews they’re saying this. They know it. It’s there in the back of their mind, and the Advocate Generals themselves will say, ‘Oh, no, no! My voice comes through, no matter what language I’m writing in, it’s my voice’. The fact that that goes against all research in sort of translation and linguistics is neither here nor there. But you know this is what they’re saying, ‘my voice, nothing’s different’. Everything is fine, it’s all the same, and in the same breath, they’ll say, ‘but it’s really important for me that I have a francophone, or that I have an English speaker in my chambers’. So again, they’re acknowledging it. And also the judges, when we interviewed them, said something along the lines of, ‘look, any EU lawyer can learn the law. What we need, what we need are people who are good at languages’. And they rate the linguistic capabilities of the lawyers that they’re hiring to be in their chambers, to be in their teams, higher. They say these things that don’t match up with how they’re acting, and that’s really interesting when you’re coding the interview to go.

Alexandra: One way you, you deal with that in this paper is, you know, to take that sort of reflective stance about the interviews. You don’t just take them at face value, but that’s not a reason not to do interviews. It’s very useful to find out some of these processes, but also to find out that sort of discursive production of the importance of just one voice. But then, what you do in this chapter is, you use an entirely different kind of data and method, and that is corpus linguistics, to then triangulate or compare, if you like, to show just how different these opinions can be depending on whether it’s the mother tongue language or another language that’s used for drafting.

Karen: You know, I am coming from this very privileged position, where I knew that the lawyer linguists were doing that job so I could. I could come up with this hypothesis quite easily, because it seemed to me that the opinions of Advocates General were becoming more synthetic, and more Lego-like, in in the same way. They were coming closer to judgments stylistically. And I was interested in that. So, I suppose I started with this hypothesis: you know I think these opinions are coming closer and closer stylistically to what the judgments are. And if that is the case, then then what’s the point of the opinion? So that’s where I started from, and we did the interviews. And then we did this corpus linguistics analysis on the actual texts themselves, the opinions themselves. And now I didn’t do– I’m not a corpus linguist, so I didn’t do the analysis. Virginia Mattioli did that analysis, and it’s all explained in detail in the paper. And Virginia and I have, I’m pretty sure, on Youtube, there are some presentations that we’ve done where she goes into a lot of detail about what we did there. But basically we compared opinions drafted in somebody’s first language. So, you know, French language opinions, or English language opinions. Italian; I think we looked at as well. Language opinions drafted in a first language. And then we compared them with opinions – post 2004 opinions – that were drafted in the first language as well in a second or third language, a non-native language. And what we found was very interesting, because the interview data which we had done first, so the interview data was saying, right, these people who are drafting the opinions don’t think that anything has changed. They don’t think there’s been a change in voice. They don’t think there’s been a change in style of the opinions since 2004. However, somewhere in the back of their mind they’re acknowledging that language is very important and maybe influences the results that they get to or the end product in some way. But fundamentally they don’t think there’s been a difference. And the corpus linguistics analysis showed us that indeed there is a difference, and the corpus linguistics data shows that opinions are becoming more stylistically like judgments. But very interestingly, not just those opinions drafted in a non-native language. So so even the opinions of the permanent Advocate Generals, Advocates General, who are ostensibly drafting in their own language, their first language, are becoming more stylistically synthetic and less fluent. Not reading so much like a like an academic article, like a fluent article.

Alexandra: Like a a genre, is converging the two genres.

Karen: Hmm, yeah. Yeah. And that’s where it becomes very interesting then to work in an interdisciplinary because, Virginia, I hope– I don’t think she’ll mind me saying this, you know, she got these results and was very excited. She was going, ‘Yes, look! This convention, this convention change in 2004 has resulted in these opinions becoming more like judgments. Wonderful. We’re finished’. And we had a difficult time for a while, because, you know, I was saying, ‘Well but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s because of that convention change that there’s this, as you call it, like a shift in genre. There could be other reasons. There probably are multiple reasons to do with workload’. There are things that we can’t find out even through interviews, even if you did an anthropological study where you’re embedded in an institution like that. I think it will be very difficult to find out. For example, say you have an Advocate General who has a team of référendaires who are from various different places, but they will have been educated in multiple places. So, for example, myself, you know, I’ve been educated in Northern Ireland, in Belgium, in Greece. So all of that will impact the way that you work with language, the way that your mind works, the way that you reason. So things like that are difficult, if not impossible, to uncover. And so I think it’s very dangerous to rely on just one method to come to any kind of conclusion. So for us, what the corpus linguistics study showed was that our coding and our analysis of the interview data was true, because we had looked at the interview data, we had said, ‘Right, they think there’s no change or difference or relevance to them drafting in a language that’s not their own’. But our coding and our analysis of that interview data shows that actually there is. But we can’t prove that unless we look at the text themselves. And when we look at the text themselves and do the corpus linguistics analysis that corroborated what we were finding in the interview data. And it, I think, makes for a stronger argument at the end of the day.

Alexandra: It does. It reads really well to show, I think you call it multiple strategies in the toolbox, you know, if you use multiple methodological strategies at once you get greater rigor. But also you manage to, you know, to articulate very clearly in this chapter that that doesn’t mean that any one of those strategies by itself is without any flaw or weakness, you know. That’s the point of combining them to sort of balance each other. And then I like that you end the paper on a, if you like a forward-looking note, or on a big question that none of that data by itself can answer but maybe another strategy or another study can, and that is well, what is the effect in terms of persuasion? So not just on sort of reaching one or a different legal conclusion in the opinion itself. What does that actually do on the forward development of the law in terms of the persuasiveness or the room to sort of tease out new and different and creative and dissenting ideas. That’s being reduced, you know. That’s a longer term, and if you like more difficult question, I guess, to answer.

Karen: Yeah. But I think in the conclusions to that paper, you know one point that I’m trying to get across, I guess, is that the research question is really important. So, all of that is interesting. You know what I what I have just described. It’s very interesting, but it’s quite– It is just descriptive. You know this conversation I’m telling you: ‘This is what we did. And this is what happened. And isn’t it interesting?’ But I don’t see the point of doing research – I  mean, look, there is point in doing research just for interest’s sake – but in the context of legal research that has any kind of rigor I think you do need to be asking bigger, broader research questions from the outset. And I think that’s very important. And so we try in that paper to come back to those questions. Because yes, we observe all this stuff in the data. But so what?

Alexandra: Hehe.

Karen: And the ‘so what’ in this case will depend on what we think the opinion is for.

Alexandra: Yes.

Karen: And if the opinion, if the job of the opinion, as set out in the treaty, is to guide the Court in its decision in a particular case then maybe the converging of linguistic styles is not a bad thing, because you have the Court and the Advocates General speaking the same language, and everybody is working in their second or third language, anyway. And so you know, you have that phenomenon where everybody’s a non-native speaker. Nobody’s the eloquent speaker, and the power is is dissipated equally, you know, throughout. If that’s what the opinion is supposed to do then maybe it’s not so problematic, and that’s fine. But if the role of the opinion is, as EU scholars would claim, in fact, to persuade more widely and to explain how EU law is developing, and importantly, how it might develop. So one of the most important things about the Advocates General’s opinions are what it’s called prospective.

And it’s this idea of the direction, the future direction of EU law. And if that, in fact, is where the importance of these documents lie. And they lose their fluency, and they just become these very synthetic, Lego- like judgment style documents, they’re not really going to tell us anything about where the law is going to go, or how the law might develop. They’re not really going to engage in that sparring and that raising of dialogue between the Court and the Advocate Generals, and in that case that shift or convergence of linguistic styles does become more problematic, and it and it raises a bigger question about ‘well, what’s the role of the Advocate General then?’

So, for me coming back to an initial research question or understanding why you’re doing these methods. It’s very easy to get caught up in the method and excited about the method – and I mean I do it myself – enjoying doing the method. But I always think you really, really must come back to the ‘so what?’ question. And when I’m writing a paper, I often have a Post-It note stuck on my computer that just says ‘so what?’ because it’s a tough thing to come back to. But I do think it’s important.

Alexandra: Totally, and I think that’s a great tip for our listeners right now find that post it note.

Karen: Write a Post-It note: ‘so what?’

Alexandra: And this maybe brings me to a bigger question I was thinking of when I was reading your work, and it’s about how you make that ‘so what?” meaningful not just for other academics or people who might already be interested, but to a broader group of stakeholders, or, you know, would-be readers, and particularly working in the legal context, I was puzzling over this. You know, I myself also work in a legal context. You know, I came up as a lawyer, and then a linguist, have a similar background to you. And many of the stakeholders in the kinds of work that I encounter, or that you encounter, these are people who’ve probably studied legal research methods, way back, but those methods don’t center anything other than sort of finding and reading jurisprudence. So how do you convince these people that interviews, corpus analysis, other socio legal methods, other linguistic methods, how do you convince them to be trusting partners as participants in your study as they were here? Or, you know, having confidence in you as someone telling them an outcome or the knowledge that’s produced?

Karen: That’s a really good question. Sometimes, with great difficulty. Anybody who has engaged in interviews as a method will know that you are often interviewing people who don’t think very much of what you’re doing, or you as a person. In this case, again, as I say, I come from a very privileged position in this case, in that I have access to people at the Court. So I you know, I worked at the Court back in gosh! The early 2000s like 2000, 2002. And so people that I worked with and who stayed at the Court are now in very senior positions. And so I have access to that institution in a way that other people didn’t, or I had access, you know, in a way that other people didn’t. And people were willing to talk to me.

Then, in terms of yeah, in terms of the audience, like that is really tricky, and and it will depend like I, you will have different reactions. So you know, I’ve presented this type of work to audiences of lawyers, only lawyers, you know. And they’re like, ‘Well, that’s interesting. But it doesn’t really matter, because, you know, we’re making our money doing this, and and we need the law to be defined and definite, and not a malleable language like you’re saying it is.’

I’ve presented this type of work to audiences that are only linguists and linguists tend to be very focused on method, I find, and very interested in just observing these things that are happening. And they’re not always terribly interested in that big ‘So what?’ question.

And I, I suppose, finding your tribe, as anything in life, finding your tribe. The law and language community, I find, is is a very open, interested, curious, friendly community, generally. And this this paper is is published in a book that is specifically about new methods for studying law, studying European law or the European Court of Justice, I think, specifically, and that is the brainchild of researchers who are either permanently or temporarily based out of a center called iCourts, which is a Center for Excellence at the University of Copenhagen, and it’s a Centre of Excellence for international courts. And they are one of the pioneering institutes in law who have taken methods from the social sciences into law. And we actually had a book launch at the University of Luxembourg, and we had discussants from the European Court of Justice. So, we had judges and Advocates Generals discussing papers, which is kind of terrifying but also very fun, very pleasant.

So the Advocate General that that discussed this particular paper found it very interesting but remained unconvinced that their language, the language they were working in, affected their style, which is fine. That’s absolutely fine. People who are not scholars tend to think more in an ad hoc way, you know, than waiting to find out what the data says. And but interestingly, after that book launch, I had people from political science who had, who had come to the book launch. They all came up and went, ‘but these aren’t new methods, like we’ve been doing interviews for years, like, there’s nothing new about this.’ But the fact is that it’s new for Law.

Alexandra: Yes

Karen: Like you say, traditionally, this isn’t the type of stuff that has been done, particularly in European law where the focus has been much more doctrinal and sort of black letter.

Alexandra: Even in linguistics, you know what can be new is the combination of methods to answer one research question in one study. You know, you didn’t invent corpus linguistics, and I don’t think you’re pretending that you and your coauthors did.

Karen: God no!

Alexandra: You are making a really valid point, that it is quite novel and very useful to combine it with the interview method.

Karen: I like to think so. But I I think you know again to sort of try and answer your question a bit better, there are more of us now doing this type of work, which is wonderful. And so there are teams, you know: there’s my team at the University of Birmingham, there’s you guys, there are, you know, there, there are teams of more interdisciplinary people working on that interface between language and law, or just using language as a lens to interrogate other fields. And I think that’s the key. We just need more of us, more PhD students coming through – anybody want to come and do some more research with us? – and more, I guess, more freedom. And for, I guess, funding to do the type of projects that that we want to do. So, you also have to be convincing, depending on what you know the research academy looks like in your own country. You have to persuade a university or a funder that this is a good idea.

Alexandra: But, in fact, sometimes it can be that innovation of linguistics into law, you know, that can be the selling point that can be showing it’s new and worth funding. I’ll just jump in when you say, ‘and you guys’, I’ll just sort of put a little plug here. I think you mean the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers Network that Dr Laura Smith-Khan and I —

Karen McAuliffe: I do. It’s fantastic, and it’s so active. It’s wonderfully active and wonderfully supportive. It’s a it’s a wonderful research community that is somehow worldwide and feels very small and very supportive. There’s also the Language, Justice and Culture Hub.

Alexandra: Now based through Bard University.

Karen: Right. Yeah. And again, they’re all very, very welcoming communities and that isn’t a given, certainly not in the legal field.

Alexandra: It’s not, and that was Laura and my initial thinking, you know, sort of two things. First, we wanted a more welcoming space for ourselves and others. But also, back to what you were saying before, you know, a tide that lifts all boats, or, you know, a platform. It benefits each one of us to create a platform for the whole field.

Karen: And also, I think to create a field that’s rigorous, you know, in terms of scholarship because you sometimes– We can get very excited about building a new subfield and we get focused on our interesting data, and we don’t think about those bigger questions. And then the danger is that the subfield never becomes an established field because it doesn’t have [rigor] associated with it. So I think that’s important as well. And there’s lots of really interesting scholarship happening around the world. For a long time the law and language– the big names in law and language, we could list them on our on our hands, and they were white men.But there’s a lot more early career people, more people from the Global South that are doing really interesting and engaging work that is important to champion.

Alexandra: I totally agree. And so in the show notes, I’m going to put a link to a few other blogs where I think people can find those local and early career researchers in our law and linguistics field. But just to close the interview, I thought I might ask, where online can we find what you’re up to, or indeed in person, if you’ll be speaking.

Karen: I have no plans to speak right now. I have a period of study leave coming up, and I’m hoping that that is going to really get my creative juices flowing. I have been recently thinking about the construction of meaning in the context of multilingual legal reasoning. Jan Engberg, you may have had on this podcast before. He’s based out of Aarhus and he specializes in knowledge, communication, and the construction of meaning and has been doing some really interesting work recently about the construction of meaning in the context of comparative law and how we can’t–, we can’t get inside each other’s heads and fully understand what somebody is trying to communicate. And yet we manage to communicate. And yet global systems of law exist.

I’ve been working on the European Court of Justice for over 20 years, and haha! And I will always love it, and I don’t think I’ll ever move, you know, fully away from looking at it. It’s such an interesting institution. It works in 24 languages, you know. But I would like to do some work on other international courts. Thinking particularly of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, or the African Court of Peoples and Human Rights. Also the Strasbourg court, the European Court of Human Rights. I’m just at that sort of hunch stage. Because, you know, if you look at work that has been done in linguistics and work that has been done in translation studies and knowledge communication, that shows that there’s no inherent meaning in language. And yet– so law is this linguistic construct. And yet courts, international courts in particular, are very fond of saying, ‘well, according to the inherent meaning of this concept’ or, ‘according to the inherent meaning of this treaty’. But if other fields have established firmly that there is no inherent meaning in language then how can there be an inherent meaning in law? And so I’m interested in exploring that, but this is really at the very early stages. So, I’m hoping that in 2025 I can do a bit more thinking about that.

Alexandra: That sounds fascinating, Karen. I can’t wait to hear on that, but I feel we can wait. You know, there’s such a pressure in academia to do things quickly, like, it’s great to actually make the time and take the time to think about something enormous.

Karen: I’m not a, yeah. I have to say, I don’t do things terribly quickly. But again, I think that comes from a place of privilege. I’ve got a Chair, you know I have that space now if I need to, to take time to think about these things, so I’m aware of that.

Alexandra: Oh, but you know we’re grateful that you do have that space ‘cause we’re interested in what you’re producing. Maybe we’ll do another interview at some future point.

Karen: Absolutely. Yeah, any time.

Alexandra: What I’ll do I’ll put in the show notes things that Karen and I have spoken about, if you’ve enjoyed the show, it really does help us if you subscribe to our channel, or if you leave a 5 star review on the podcast app that you use or indeed just recommend the language on the move, podcast to your friends, your colleagues, your students, and we’ll speak to you next time.

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

Related resources:

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

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

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

Transcript:

Alex and Kristen in the studio, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interviewer: Right. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Closing screen shows text:

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

Narrated by Dr Alexandra Grey.

Interviews dubbed by Kristen Martin.

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

Thanks to Dr Laura Smith-Khan for content consultation.

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

This post is one of the outcomes of a themed session on law and linguistics research held at the ALS Conference on 27 November.

***

Dr Joseph van Buuren

ALS Conference (L-R): Dr Alexandra Grey and Dr Joseph van Buuren, November 2024

Joe van Buuren is currently working as a lecturer in Criminology and Justice studies at RMIT University in Narrm (Melbourne). His work has focused broadly on the ways that discretionary power is exercised by police and courts in the provision, and denial, of interpreter access of language minoritised witnesses and accused people. He is particularly interested in examining how this power can reflect an ideological adherence to ‘English-only’ communication.

More recently, his research has examined the ways that legal judicial discourses operate to deny the racialised dimensions of linguistic discrimination and marginalisation. This denial extends to the law itself, which courts can frame as operating ‘neutrally’ to race, while doing anything but in relation to language. This denialism, sustained judicial narratives of formal equality, contributes to the criminalisation of language minoritised people within the criminal punishment system.

Recent Publication

van Buuren, J. (2024). Justice in English-only. Social and Legal Studies, 33(2), 191–212. https://www.rmit.edu.au/contact/staff-contacts/academic-staff/v/van-buuren-dr-joseph

Dr Dissake Koumassol Midinette Endurence

Dr Dissake Koumassol Midinette Endurence’s research examines language-related challenges in courtroom discourse in the Republic of Cameroon. She utilises Speech Act Theory and Interactional Sociolinguistics to analyse the speech acts of both legal professionals and lay litigants. She demonstrates that the use of exoglossic languages in such a multilingual nation poses serious issues for effective communication in the legal context.

Dr Dissake Koumassol Midinette Endurence

Her current research project, sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, aims to demonstrate that the implementation of statutory laws from legal systems such as Civil and Common Law does not adequately address the legal needs of African Indigenous communities.

To establish the effectiveness of oral legal traditions in African rural communities, she has also documented, transcribed, translated, and analysed the Tunen language and the legal traditions of the Banen community in Cameroon.

More broadly, her research intends to explain the field of Forensic Linguistics by exploring African oral traditions. She introduces a novel approach to legal linguistic by examining traditional courtroom discourse in native and foreign languages.

Recent Publications

Dissake, K. M. Endurence. (2021). Language and legal proceedings: Analysing courtroom discourse in Cameroon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dissake, K. M. Endurence. (2021). Assessing litigant’s language proficiency: The case of the Bafoussam Court of First Instance. Language policy 21. 217-234.

Emma Genovese

Emma Genovese is a PhD Candidate and Quentin Bryce Law Doctoral Scholar at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her PhD research draws from queer and corpus linguistic method to explore the construction of sex, gender, and sexuality in Australian law. Her work is focused upon uncovering the normative and historical underpinnings of legislation, along with emphasising how these constructs negatively impact queer identities.

UNSW Law Journal Launch, Emma Genovese, July 2023

As part of her research, Emma built the Australian Legislative Corpus 2023 (‘ALC23’). The ALC23 includes all available and machine-readable acts, regulations, and rules across the nine major jurisdictions in Australia. It includes in force legislation as at 30 June 2023, and is able to be searched according to a variety of different sub-corpora.

More recently, her research examined cases in Australian criminal courts that referenced, or involved, trans people, in order to critique the language used by judicial officers. She argued that judicial judgments often disregard, dismiss, or deny the experiences of trans people. Her article also demonstrated that the lack of knowledge surrounding trans issues also had implications on the outcome of cases.

Recent publications

Genovese, E. (Forthcoming). Building the Australian Legislative Corpus 2023 – Combatting Issues and Highlighting Applications of General Legislative Corpora. International Journal of Law and Language.

Genovese, E. (2023). The Spectacle of Respectable Equality: Queer Discrimination in Australian Law Post Marriage Equality. UNSW Law Journal 46(2). 650-727.

Genovese, E. (2023). Administering harm: the treatment of trans people in Australian criminal courts. Current Issues in Criminal Justice 36(2). 177-196.

Dr Alexandra Grey

Dr Alexandra Grey combines legal and linguistic research approaches to study how governments respond to linguistic diversity, and how those responses redistribute or entrench hierarchies of power, access to resources and social grouping.

Her early work focused on laws supporting the inclusion of the Zhuang minority language in the ‘linguistic landscapes’ of China, and she has recently updated this work with an analysis of a decision in China that deemed certain regulations about bilingual schooling unconstitutional.

She has also focused on the application of international human rights law about linguistic discrimination. This includes in relation to the need of to engage with linguistic inclusion to fulfill their right to health obligations when communicating about Covid, along with whether a ban on prisoners in Australia communicating in languages other than English was a form of racial discrimination of impinged upon their freedom of expression.

Alexandra is currently working with First Nations colleagues on research about self-determination and the role of governments in Aboriginal language renewal in NSW, Australia, and a related study of the increased use of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages in parliaments across Australia and certain parliamentary rules which restrict this inclusion. She’s especially interested in collaborations on related themes with First Nations scholars in Taiwan, NZ and Canada, and in collaborations about interdisciplinary methods.

Recent publications

Grey, A. (2021). Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study, (Contributions to the Sociology of Language #113) De Gruyter: Boston.

Grey, A. (2021). Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study, Abridged Mandarin Version (translated by Gegentuul Baioud), 1-22. Language on the Move: Sydney.

K Thorpe, L Booker, A Grey, D Rigney, and M Galassi. (2021). The Benefits of Aboriginal Language Use and Revival – Literature Review. UTS Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research.

Grey, A. and Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘Linguistic diversity as a challenge and an opportunity for improved legal policy’. Griffith Law Review 30(1). 1-17.

Grey, A. (2021). ‘Perceptions of invisible Zhuang minority language in Linguistic Landscapes of the People’s Republic of China and implications for language policy’. Linguistic Landscape 7(3). 259-284

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’, in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, 163-182.

Grey, A. (2023). Lawful limits on freedom of expression for private communications ‘in public life’. Cambridge International Law Journal 12(2). 328–336.

Grey, A. (2023). Communicative Justice and Covid-19: Australia‘s pandemic response and international guidance. Sydney Law Review 45(1). 1-43

Grey, A. (in print for 2025). ‘The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights’, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove and Phillipson, Robert (eds). 2023. The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights. Wiley Blackwell. 712 + viii. Sociolinguistic Studies, issue 19.1.

Dr Stafford Lumsden

Dr Stafford Lumsden is the in-house educational designer at the University of Sydney Law School. He applies his interest in multimodality and social semiotics to the design and development of online learning environments for units in the LLB, JD, and masters programs. Currently, he is part of a team investigating the use of inclusive Socrative approaches in undergraduate law units to increase student engagement and inclusivity among diverse student cohorts. His recent work has focused on the use of semiotic resources other than language in online teacher training, and in September 2024 he presented on the topic at the 22nd International CALL Research Conference hosted by the Waseda University Law School.

Stafford is keen to collaborate with legal education researchers interested in the use of text, video, audio, and non-language semiotic resources in online teaching and learning in law.

Recent Publications

Lumsden, S. (In Press). A multimodal social semiotic approach to TESOL educator professional development. In A. Alm, C. Lai, & Q. Ma (Eds.), Transitions in CALL. Castledown.

Lumsden, S. (2024, September). A multimodal social semiotic approach to TESOL educator professional development. In Proceedings of the International CALL Research Conference (Vol. 2024, pp. 163-168).

Lumsden, S., Djonov, E., and Slatyer, H. (2024). The multimodal community of inquiry: A framework for evaluating online learning environments in higher education in Lim, V.L. and Querol-Julián (Eds.) Designing Learning with Digital Technologies. Perspectives from Multimodality Education. Routledge.

Lumsden, S. (2023). Student Writing Support with Generative Artificial Intelligence. The English Connection 27(3). 7–12.

Dr Kashif Raza

Dr Kashif Raza is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Canada. His research focuses on language-in-immigration policies in Canada and their impact on the immigration, settlement, and integration experiences of multilingual skilled immigrants.

At the federal level, he examines how Canada’s points-based immigration system, which incorporates language testing, marginalizes linguistic diversity among the multilingual skilled workforce. Provincially, his work investigates the limited availability of translation and interpretation services in Alberta’s legal system, highlighting a reliance on co-ethnic legal counsel.

This provincial dimension is a key area of interest in his research and he is currently exploring the ways co-ethnic lawyers use their shared linguistic repertoire to support clients with lower English skills and how this mediates multilingual communication in legal procedures.

Recent Publications

Raza, K. (2022). Linguistic outcomes of language accountability and points-based system for multilingual skilled immigrants in Canada: A critical language-in-immigration policy analysis. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 45(7). 2605-2619

Dr Dima Rusho

Dr Dima Rusho’s research examines the language and communication barriers impacting access to the justice system for Indigenous Australians in remote communities. Dima is particularly interested in exploring inequalities of access as a critical social justice issue. Dima has recently completed a project about optimising interpreting and other forms of language support for Indigenous Kriol speakers in circuit courts in two remote communities: Ngukurr and Borroloola.

Rukiya Stein at the Vulnerable Accused in the Justice System Conference in Birmingham, 2023

Dima’s future research will continue to explore the provision of language support for Indigenous language speakers, with a focus on establishing language support models involving advocacy.

Recent Publications

Rusho, D., Bradley, J., and Dickson, G. (Forthcoming). Tailoring language support in legal contexts for Indigenous communities: Insights from Ngukurr and Borroloola. Trends and Issues in crime and criminal justice.

Rusho, D. (2024). Coloniality and Australian Indigenous language interpreting in legal settings. In Ndhlovu, F. & Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. (Eds), Routledge Handbook of Language and Decolonisation. Routledge.

Rusho, D. (2023). First Nations interpreters cannot be neutral and should not be invisible. Translation and Interpreting, 15(1). 120-134.

Rusho, D. (2022). Cross-currents: Indigenous language interpreting in Australia’s justice system [PhD thesis].

Rukiya Stein

Rukiya Stein is an Accredited Witness Intermediary, an independent communication intermediary and a Certified Speech and Language Pathologist who facilitates communication for vulnerable children and adults when they give evidence in investigative interviews and at court. Her current thesis explores the role of the intermediary on lawyer questioning and the evidence provided by adults with disabilities in the Australian criminal justice process. She is specifically examining the linguistic complexity of cross-examination, intermediary recommendations on the structure and form of questioning and the clarity of evidence.

She is currently an intern at the Judicial Commission of New South Wales. She has provided a number of trainings and workshops to judges, magistrates and lawyers on effective communication in the courtroom, the intermediary role and effect of disability on participation in the justice process.

Recent Publications

Stein, R., and Goodman-Delahunty, J. (Forthcoming) Bridging the Justice Gap: Inequity in Provision of Intermediary Assistance for Adults with Disabilities, Alternative Law Journal.

What about you?

Do you work or research in an area related to multilingualism in courts and tribunals, or another area where language and law intersect? Join the LLIRN!

What other language and law topics would you like to learn about? Have your say on our next “LLIRN About Us” blog post. Let us know in the comments or join the network and send us an email!

Rooted in a Bourdieusian approach to language, power and legal discourse, this is the first major publication to integrate contemporary debates in linguistics about mobility, capitalism and globalization into a study of China’s language policy.

This book came out in May 2021 after almost a decade of Alex’s doctoral and postdoctoral work. Her doctoral dissertation was recognised as the best dissertation on the sociology of language, internationally, through the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award.

Some academic work and concepts that are referenced in this episode include Language on the Move posts about Dr. Grey’s and Dr. Laura Smith-Khan’s Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN), “aspiring monolingualism” and the one-nation-one-language ideology.

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.

Further readings

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’, in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781800411562-011
Grey, A. (2021) Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study, Abridged Mandarin Version (translated by Gegentuul Baioud), pp1-22. Language on the Move: Sydney. http://hdl.handle.net/10453/172165
Grey, A. (2021, published online 2019). ‘Tourist tongues: high-speed rail carries linguistic and cultural urbanisation beyond the city limits in Guangxi, China’, Applied Linguistics Review 12(1). 11-37. DOI: 10.1515/applirev-2019-0099.
Grey, A. and Baioud, G. (2021). ‘Education Reforms Aim to Mold Model Citizens from Preschool in the PRC’. China Brief. 21 (17) 23-29. The Jamestown Foundation: Washington. https://jamestown.org/program/educational-reforms-aim-to-mold-model-citizens-from-preschool-in-the-prc/
Grey, A. and Martin, K. (2024). ‘Making Zhuang Language Visible’ [Video]. UTS. [link TBC] K Thorpe, L Booker, A Grey, D Rigney, and M Galassi (2021) The Benefits of Aboriginal Language Use and Revival – Literature Review. UTS Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research. https://www.alt.nsw.gov.au/assets/Uploads/downloads/files/The-Benefits-of-Aboriginal-Language-Use-and-Revival-in-New-South-Wales-Literature-Review.pdf

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added on February 21, 2025)

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

Alex is a Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law at University of Technology Sydney in Australia. Alex researches laws about using or not using certain languages and how they impact upon social identities and social justice. For example, what the internationally recognized right to health obliges a government such as Australia’s to do in terms of communicating public health information in languages other than English.

Or, as another example, whether choice of language is part of freedom of expression and whether denying choice of language can be a form of racial discrimination. She is currently researching new legal directions in Australian government support for Aboriginal language renewal. Today we’re going to talk about Alex’s book entitled Language Rights in a Changing China, a National Overview and Zhuang Case Study.

This book came out in May 2021 after almost a decade of Alex’s doctoral and post-doctoral work. Her doctoral dissertation was recognized as the best dissertation on the sociology of language internationally through the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award.

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

Dr Grey: Oh, hello Brynn, and I have been looking forward to this for weeks.

Brynn: As have I, I’m really excited to talk to you today. Listeners of this show and readers of the Language on the Move research blog will very obviously recognize your name and might already know a little bit about you. But I’d love for you to start us off by telling us a bit about yourself, how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to wanting to conduct research into language rights in China.

Dr Grey: Look, it’s a bit of a long story and it didn’t feel as linear in the living of it as it might sound in the retelling. So, take heart if you’re working out a pivot in your own career. But I essentially pivoted from law to linguistics.

Over a series of steps. And that was because I had always loved learning languages and learning about languages. And then in my 20s, I started learning Chinese and I found a way to move to China to work in a legal aid centre doing research and training and studying Chinese language part time.

And then I went back to university there full time. And while I was doing this and living in China, I started to learn more about the linguistic diversity in China, which I just really hadn’t realized it. And at the same time, I was also becoming more interested in the Chinese legal system, particularly the way the constitution deals with minority peoples and minority languages.

And I had always hoped one day to do a PhD. And suddenly I was starting to feel like, yes, this is my question. It’s calling to me.

So, I did a bit of asking around and I heard that Professor Ingrid Piller at Macquarie University was a superb supervisor and also quite suited to this topic. So, I met with her and we hit it off. And, you know, the rest is history in that sense.

We’ve been collaborating and working together and become friends over many years now. And so that’s how I got into the doctoral work that we’re talking about today, this law and linguistics sort of combined research that’s focused on China. And then since then, I’ve really tried to expand that more to develop both for myself and then for other people too, this sense of law and linguistics as a research field in itself, not just in my specific project.

And that’s why I do a lot with my former PhD peer and my still close friend, Dr. Laura Smith-Khan. Through the network we set up, the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers Network.

Brynn: That’s really amazing. The fact that you were able to combine law and linguistics, which I think is probably not something that many people would automatically think go together, but those of us in the linguistics field definitely see happening quite a bit. And the need for that to happen, for research around that to happen.

So, with your research that you did in China, you, like I said, you ended up writing an entire book, which is amazing. And the title of your book talks about a Zhuang case study. So, for those who might not be familiar, can you tell us what the Zhuang language is, and why you chose to examine it in regard to language change and globalization in China?

Dr Grey: Certainly. The first reason is that for one person, one book, one PhD, all the languages of China is just too much. And so, I had to do a case study in some sense.

Part of what I was looking at was a national framework and how things work for all languages or for all official minority groups. But then I was really narrowing down. And to choose how to narrow down, I chose this group.

The people are called the Zhuangzu, and the language that is officially associated with them is called Zhuang language. I chose that because there were, on the one hand, reports that there were something like 17 million speakers of Zhuang. By population, the Zhuang people are the biggest of all the official minority groups in China.

So, they, you know, foreign minority, they have a lot of speakers. But on the other hand, there were also reports that the Zhuang, and now I’m quoting, are completely assimilated, or had, you know, lost any distinct linguistic or cultural identity. And I thought, well, that’s confusing and interesting, you know, what’s going on.

And then in addition, the Zhuang people have nominally autonomous jurisdiction over a region in South Central China called Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region. And from this legal perspective, I thought, oh, that’s interesting. Maybe there’s more power or more ability to govern language in a slightly distinctive way within China for this group.

In terms of the language itself, of course, you know, there’s just infinite variety in the way people speak. And so, when I talk about the Zhuang language, I’m really aware that I and many scholars and many people sort of talk about what is essentially a boundary we’ve put on this group, excluding some other ways of speaking that are related to Zhuang. But what is generally recognized as Zhuang language is part of a family called the TAI, Thai languages, and THAI, Thai language of Thailand, is another of those languages.

It’s also very similar to a language, arguably the same, as a language recognised as a separate language within China, a language of another different official minority group called Buyi language. But it’s essentially a range of dialects, a range of ways of speaking that have been spoken for millennia in that south central region of China, just above Vietnam and slightly to the west of Hong Kong or that sort of area. In terms of why I wanted to do a case study at all and then what else I could see, particularly through the Zhuang case study, I could tell from my preliminary research that there was this very rigid mid-20th century categorization of land into territory and associating that with certain peoples in China.

And then the kinds of legal framework that supported or appeared to support minority languages was related to that. So, it’s a very rigid mid-20th century structure. But then since the mid-20th century, China has gone through just enormous upheaval.

For example, by the time I was doing my research in the 2010s, the urbanization rate was over 50% even in this Guangxi area. The development of the economy, I think everyone knows, took off in the late 20th century. But for the Guangxi sort of area, it was a little bit later and it was really still taking off with some direct government funding in the 2010s and now.

And so, there was this real change in context, both for what was happening within Guangxi, but then also the people who were recognized as Zhuangzi people, who might be Zhuang speakers, they, like everyone else in China, was increasingly mobile, moving to cities, but also moving far away even from South Central China, elsewhere in the country. And so, there was this dispersal of what might have been expected to be a cohesive language group. And then on top of that, while the national language, which is a variety of matter in Chinese called Putonghua, while that had increasingly gained popularity over the 20th century, in the year 2000, a national law was passed that really enhanced or supported the use of Putonghua and its promulgation.

And so with these contextual factors, these changes, I thought it’s really important to use the minority as a window into what’s changing in terms of social organization and social stratification in China. And then the Zhuang seemed a particularly rich and hitherto relatively sort of unresearched group of people or languages.

Brynn: And as someone who I myself do not speak Mandarin, I don’t read it. So, coming at this from this point of ignorance, so pardon me if this is not a wise question, but can the speakers of Zhuang understand Mandarin and vice versa? Are they mutually intelligible or are they not?

Would the speakers of each language have to make a concerted effort to be able to understand the speakers of the other language?

Dr Grey: Good question Brynn. Look, they’re not related languages and so the linguistic view is that they’re mutually unintelligible. I might add that the dialects of Zhuang are also said to be mutually unintelligible to each other.

So, there’s enormous variety within Zhuang. In the mid 20th century, the Chinese government standardised Zhuang language in an attempt to form a hybrid that could be accessed by all sorts of Zhuang speakers. And then also that was for a short period of time taught to incoming government officials who came from a Mandarin speaking background.

What then happened over the latter part of the 20th century is that schooling was rolled out in the medium of Putonghua much more widely throughout the Zhuang speaking regions. And in fact, people had historically probably been multilingual in various Chinese dialects as well as Zhuang dialects in that region. But people started to have more access to and more demand placed upon them to speak standard Chinese, so Putonghua, the national language.

And so, research by people like Professor Zhou Minglang, who’s a real expert on the history of Chinese language policy and now is based at the University of Maryland. He did some work, for instance, showing that throughout the late 20th century and early 21st century, people who were categorized as being part of the Zhuang minority group were increasingly bilingual in Zhuang and Mandarin, and then also shifting towards not even speaking Zhuang at all. So, there’s a real language shift going on there.

Brynn: And is this what you were referring to when you said that in the year 2000, that the Chinese government made like a proclamation about language? Was it about this more trying to go towards this standardized Putonghua, or was it something different?

Dr Grey: It’s about that. It’s particularly carving out exclusive domains or exclusive functions where that standard Mandarin has to be used, certain types of media jobs, for example. It’s also carving out, along with education law, space for bilingual education.

So, there’s a right to Putonghua, and that has to be expressed through access to education, but there is also scope for bilingual schooling, so a language like Zhuang alongside Putonghua. So that national law is both about supporting the national language by creating exclusive domains for its use or obligations on people to use it, but also obligations on institutions like schools to promulgate or to spread Putonghua. And then alongside that, there’s been a lot of policy directed at trying to improve, if you like, the quality of people’s Putonghua, people who think they have learned it or speak it, maybe are still not speaking it in the standardized way.

And so, there’s also been since 2000, a lot of government push to get, if you like, a more universal version of Putonghua spoken and written, in particular, across all of China.

Brynn: And speaking of that idea of standardization, I’ve found it really interesting that toward the beginning of your book, you talk about how the Zhuang language, including, as you said, its dialects, went through this governmental process of written standardization from the 1950s to the 1980s. So, what did this standardization of writing mean for Zhuang? And how was it viewed by the state?

Dr Grey: It was viewed by the state as really important. And this was happening not just to Zhuang initially, but to all the official minority languages in China. And for a brief time also to the majority or the national language, Putonghua, there was a real push to standardize and create alphabetic writing systems to support what was seen as a mass literacy goal.

And this was part of the building of the new nation after to the civil war in the mid 20th century. What happened with Zhuang in particular is there were sort of two phases of standardization. And this happened to oral or spoken Zhuang as well, but we’ll particularly talk about the writing as you asked.

And this was done with the participation of Zhuang people but led by the government. In the 1950s, a writing system was developed that used a mix of Cyrillic letters and the kind of letters that our listeners might be very familiar with from the alphabet we use for English. And it had no diacritic tones.

It used letters to represent letters that looked like numbers in terminal positions to indicate the tone, the numerically ordered tone. I’ve explained that a little bit badly, but it’s a bit confusing.

And then in the 1980s, there was a renewed push towards the standardization of written Zhuang, but at the same time, a push to make it more typable. And so, the Cyrillic letters were dropped and it reduced to just the 26 letters that we also know from the English alphabet. There’s an official auxiliary Romanized script for the standard national version of Chinese as well.

And that uses the same letters, but it doesn’t use V. So, it uses 25 letters and Zhuang uses 26. Now, a few things happened along the way here.

First, there just wasn’t that much teaching of literacy in either of these standard forms of writing Zhuang. And so, people just didn’t learn to use standard Zhuang in this way. And then something I talk about particularly not in the book, but in an open access chapter that people could look up and read for free from 2022 in a book called Language Standardization in Asia edited by McClelland and Zhao.

And in that chapter, I talk about how marketization interacted with standardization of Zhuang. And in particular, something I’m drawing out there is that there ceased to be a visually recognizable or iconic version of the language. And that then also reduced the prospects of using Zhuang in certain more commodified ways as a visual icon, or even just making it recognizable as something distinct from English or Mandarin Chinese when people look at it written in the linguistic landscape.

And so, this standardization process created, as I say in that chapter, an obsolescent form of Zhuang, perhaps not intentionally, but it became increasingly inaccessible to Zhuang speakers. And I should just put there that in the background, historically, Zhuang was not standardized, but it was written by certain people in Zhuang speaking communities who had a sort of social role to be a scribe or to be someone with a literacy practice. And David Holm has written some phenomenal work on this, this really intricate histories of the use of what are called the old Zhuang character script.

So, in particular, if people are interested, he’s got a great book from 2013 on that older writing system.

Brynn: That’s what I was going to say. Was there more of the character-based writing system before this standardized, more Latin-based alphabet that you said was brought in? And it sounds like yes.

Dr Grey: Yes, there was. It just wasn’t widely known either because literacy just wasn’t a widely taught individual practice historically.

Brynn: For anyone, really, in any language context. Yeah.

Dr Grey: Exactly. Exactly. And so, when the government came to interest itself in the standardization of Zhuang, it counted Zhuang as a language with no written script along with certain other minority languages.

And that’s why there was this sort of full tilt effort to create this Romanized or alphabetic way of writing Zhuang.

Brynn: Fascinating that they kind of landed on the Romanized form and they ended up dropping the Cyrillic form. And you said a lot of that was for ease of typing, yeah, in the 1980s?

Dr Grey: That’s my understanding. I mean, there’s some other things to it too, because China was increasingly estranged from the Soviet Union and the Soviet linguists that it had previously worked with. More on that sort of thing can be found in a book by Thomas Mullaney.

He’s got some great work on the history of type and type technology in the Chinese context. In addition to a book I should have mentioned before, he’s got a wonderful book on the initial creation of these minority peoples into official minorities and official languages associated with each and the kinds of divisions or merging together that happened for certain people. And he’s traced back to the diaries and the field notes of the Chinese government’s linguistic ethnographers who went out to do a whole lot of survey work and then early census data from the mid-20th century.

So that’s a wonderful resource to really bring home this idea that people maybe just don’t realize that, you know, are people or a language, neither of these is a natural fact. These are important, but they’re social facts. And we can see in the Chinese context more than in some other contexts, that process of construction.

And one of the reasons we can see that more is the government is more involved using laws and policies and records and documentation in that construction than perhaps in other contexts like other countries.

Brynn: That’s what I find fascinating in your book is that process of construction. And that’s what really comes through in the book. And it was something that I myself hadn’t really thought that much about.

And something else that I learned in reading your book was that Imperial China standardized Mandarin script and then actually banned non-Mandarin scripts in the third century BCE and that there has always been a national narrative around language and its use in China. And you talk about how the China of today has a national constitution that addresses non-standard or minority languages and scripts, like you were talking about with the Zhuang language. So, tell us about what the Chinese Constitution says about language, including these minority languages, and what your research found about how minority language rights are actually interpreted in practice.

Dr Grey: Thanks for that question. And that really gets to the heart of why I did this project. You know, what is in that Constitution and what does it mean in practice?

So, the Constitution in Article 4 gives the recognized minorities, and there are 55 recognized official minority groups in China, the freedom to use and develop their language. And then separately in Article 19, there is also a right to the national standard language, Putonghua. And so, there’s been constitutional reform over the last 70-odd years, but there’s always been some version of that freedom to use and develop minority languages.

And then one of the things that flows from that is a quite intricate and I would argue quite fractured system of authority, different government institutions at the national and the regional and the local level dealing with different aspects of language governance. And then on top of all of that, there is, I would say, a narrative or a preoccupation that sort of cuts against making the most of that freedom. And that is particularly what I call developmentalism, an ideology, a language ideology, but more broadly, an ideology of developmentalism that comes through in the laws and policies about language.

And that positions languages as falling into either less developed or more developed languages, which in itself can be really problematic or stifling for people’s expectations or people’s use or what people do with policy. And then also, increasingly, there is a sense that some languages are no longer useful. They’re not instrumental for particular economic development.

And I mean minority languages. And so, there’s less expectation or less push to, say, teach them in education because it is seen that the work of bringing people together has already been done. And now, that development needs to happen through the medium of Putonghua, or maybe I should say through the embodied citizenship of Putonghua speaking citizens.

And over time, there’s been other narratives as well that go with language. One that sort of waxes and wanes, but probably is ascendant at the moment, is a sense that you have to have allegiance to a language to have allegiance to a nation. And the flip side of that, if you are bilingual, you are inherently underlined.

Some people call this linguistic securitization. In my own data, I didn’t sense that people who were bilingual were identifying as both Zhuang and Chinese. There was a layered identity for them, but not a raptured or conflicting identity necessarily.

The other discourse that’s really prominent in Chinese language policy is poverty alleviation. And the idea that people are very poor and the solution to that is better access to Putonghua. And I don’t talk about this at length in my book, but one, maybe not one, I wonder to what extent that poverty is caused by speaking a language other than Putonghua.

And to what extent coming out of poverty needs to come at the expense of that home language or that traditional language or that minority language.

Brynn: I feel like that’s something that could be said of many different language contexts in many different countries and cultures. And we certainly see it in the English-speaking world as well.

Dr Grey: Enormously in the English-speaking world. This sense that not only is English the ticket to development, but that any other language is actually holding you back and a waste of time.

Brynn: Yeah, exactly. And you mentioned just a couple of minutes ago, the idea of the linguistic landscape. And that brings me to a question that I have about the type of methodology that you used while you were conducting this research that would later become the book.

So, you described this as a lived linguistic landscape methods. Now, listeners of this show will have heard previous episodes where we talk about linguistic landscape studies. But can you tell us what the difference is between sort of your standard linguistic landscape study and a lived linguistic landscape methodology?

And then how did you use it in this research?

Dr Grey: I’m really proud of this aspect of the book. And the difference basically, Brynn, is putting the people back in. I think particularly when we’re talking about languages, sometimes we forget we’re talking about speakers of languages or notional inheritors to quote some other scholars, people associated with a language suffer the disempowerment or the marginalization or the advancement or whatever that comes with the use of certain languages.

And so in the lived linguistic landscape approach, or starting from this basis, which I think is there right from the origin of linguistic landscape studies, and that is a sense that not only does the built environment offer data for research about language, what language is on display, particularly written, but also maybe audio or other forms of recorded language, but that there’s a power to that. So, the initial point of departure is that the emplacement of language in this way creates a sense of normativity of what language is in place or what language is out of place in a particular physical context or in the sort of practices or discourses associated with that place. And I wanted to take that further.

And so, I brought in people, if you like, or the lived aspect in a couple of ways. First, I did walk and talk interviews with participants through various linguistic landscapes in the study to get their sense of how they interacted, what they remembered, what was important to them. When we did occasionally see Zhuang in the landscape, for example, they could tell me when they first learned to recognize it as Zhuang, how they learned to read, or what it meant to them.

Was it, for some people, it’s actually very offensive because they didn’t like the way it was written. These sort of things, these sort of more subjective or perceptual data came from walking through but also living in the landscapes in a more ethnographic where I spent a lot of time in these places. And then I took that another layer up, if you like, in what I call my Linguascaping Through Law layer.

And that’s to look at what law does to give agency or to not permit agency to certain kinds of actors, both to be authors in the public space, but also to be regulators of language in the public space. And then another aspect I added in there, there had already been quite a bit of research at this point on what was called the Semiotic Landscape, looking beyond just linguistic data in the landscape to other meaning making. But I focused that Semiotic Landscape data a little bit more on how we saw or didn’t see people doing Zhuang language or people being Zhuang speakers represented in the landscape.

And I found that they weren’t. They were representations of Zhuang culture in certain kinds of landscapes using motifs associated with Zhuang history and musical practice and weaving, textiles, that sort of thing, costumes. But there wasn’t a representation of being a Zhuang speaker, of practicing Zhuang language that wasn’t represented semiotically in the environment.

And to a large extent, it wasn’t linguistically represented either. And then the laws that intervened or shaped the linguistic landscape were not doing a lot to support individual language use in the landscape. They were allowing and at times mandating the government to use standardized Zhuang in certain naming practices or certain kind of signage.

And that’s, you know, that’s not nothing, but it’s a very particular kind of authorship. It’s a very particular kind of discourse that it participates in.

Brynn: And you conducted this research into language rights in China, but talking to you, I’m kind of hearing a lot that reminds me of even here in Australia, how English is positioned, how speakers of minority languages are positioned, the linguistic landscapes that we might see around Sydney, for example, in other languages.

So, I’m curious as to whether or not you saw or you see parallels between how the Chinese state treats language and how language is treated by the Australian government here in Australia. So, what similarities or differences do you see between these two nations’ policies around language?

Dr Grey: Yeah, I see these resonances too, Brynn. And, you know, for that reason, I urge all listeners, even if you work in other contexts, if you work in North America or Europe, go and read my book. You know, it’s not another planet.

It says something about language policy in general, this book. But in terms of Australia specifically, that’s where we now both live. That’s where I focus my current research.

I’m constantly seeing some parallels. You know, the first parallel is, of course, there is enormous linguistic diversity. And we might think of it as both old and new.

There were languages in Australia that have been spoken for millennia, likewise in China. And then there’s also linguistic diversity that’s come more recently through the migration or the sort of reorganisation of where people live. There are also some really similar current policy concerns.

In China, there’s a lot of investment and policy towards building what’s called a cybermuseum of languages that’s going to gather all sorts of resources about minority languages in a digital form. Australia is not quite as far along in that, but the same idea is actually underway at the national level, as I understand it. Another thing that’s really similar in both is the way linguistic diversity is transformed in the urban environment.

It doesn’t entirely go away, but it becomes marginalised or stratified, I would say, in the sense of how language is used in the built environment of this city, and what it does or doesn’t say about the sociolinguistic order in that city. I actually am trying to steer some current research of mine further towards lived linguistic landscape work in Australia, because I think there is an interesting overlap there. In terms of what’s different, look, in Australia, the politics of indigeneity are much more developed, much more important in the local context.

I would say also that demands from indigenous people, and in Australia, we particularly think of both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, demands from those groups for access to their linguistic resources and control over language policy, I think is stronger here, particularly in recent years. When I first started this research, something I thought was different is that Australia is a nation that doesn’t really concern itself with language as a national or constitutional issue. Whereas China, as you pointed out in an earlier question, has for a very long time.

But I think that is changing actually in Australia. There is a move towards national language policy in Australia again. And of course, there’s still that de facto policy of English as the national language, or I think it’s Francis Holt has used the phrase aspirational monolingualism in the North American context.

I think we can see that here and in China. Of course, when you stop to think about Australia, the Australian government and the state governments have involved themselves in language policy and laws about language, actually since the early days of colonisation, but usually in a more obstructive or oppressive way than we might choose to focus on today. But that history of language is a really important part of shaping, you know, what we might call civic engineering, shaping the populace, shaping also the national identity.

That’s really important in both China and Australia. And the tension between a multicultural national identity and the practice of multilingualism is something in both contexts.

Brynn: And that’s what I see quite a bit of in my own research as well. And I think it is worth going back to what you were saying about that one nation, one language ideology, that idea of, well, allegiance to a country is going to necessitate allegiance to a certain language or certain dialect. And I think we absolutely see that here in Australia as well, especially with certain political groups, certain people who have certain ideologies about languages, and what that says about our allegiance to a country too.

Dr Grey: Believe me, Brynn, and I would add to that to what I call a zero-sum mentality. You know, it’s very easy for people in China, in Australia, many other places to argue, well, we need everyone to speak the same language. We need to support that through policy and schools and rules so that we can get things done, so that it’s cohesive to govern, so that the economy runs well.

You know, I’m not necessarily saying that that is wrong, but in addition to that, people can have more than one language, and many people around the world still do, and historically people have been very multilingual, and we tend to forget that you can have a lingua franca and something else, and then when we remember it, often we talk about it in this zero-sum. Well, if you have another language, that’s, you know, that’s reducing your ability in that lingua franca. It’s undermining your accent or the time you can spend learning to read or, you know, whatever.

It’s somehow a deficit that’s holding back your participation in that lingua franca community, and in doing so, you’re, you know, you’re robbing us all of a sort of a chance for prosperity. It’s, you know, it’s a very loaded kind of zero-sum thinking, and it doesn’t need to be that way. And a lot of the, you know, the interviewees in this podcast series have spoken about that, usually in reference to English rather than Mandarin.

But this idea that it can be, you know, lingua franca and, and that can be really beneficial for you and your community and your nation.

Brynn: Exactly. I agree. And I want to know what’s next for you.

Are you continuing this work into China? You mentioned that you wanted to maybe do a lived linguistic landscape in Australia. Do you have any projects that you’re working on now?

Where are you headed now?

Dr Grey: Yeah, look, everything’s happening slowly because good research takes time. But this year, I’ve, so this is 2024 when we’re recording. I’ve just had an article accepted in the Melbourne Asia Review and I’ve also just with my wonderful research assistant, Kristin Martin, produced a little video that will be online soon and both of those are about the Chinese context.

The video is particularly drawing out some ideas to do with language display policy and who that assists or whose aspirations that represents and the short article, which will be freely available online, that’s updating Chinese language policy to look particularly at the use of constitutional law mechanisms in recent years and how that is adding to the infrastructure in support of Putonghua. But other than those things, I’m now going to park my focus on China because I’m really, really interested in what I’m doing in my new project or relatively new project and it needs all of my attention.

I’m working with Kristin who I just mentioned and a couple of other colleagues here from the UTS Jumbunna Institute and a scholar from Sydney Uni who are all indigenous people from the eastern part of Australia and together we’re doing a project that’s really examining the role of the state and in particular the use of government resources like laws in Aboriginal language renewal with a focus on this eastern, southeastern part of Australia.

One of the big questions we have there or the motivation for the study is how is this push for sovereignty or how is this principle of self-determination able to sit with the renewed interest of governments in Australia in Aboriginal language renewal?

Brynn: Wow, that sounds amazing. I can’t wait to hear more about that. Alex, thank you so much for coming on and chatting with me today and I highly recommend this book to everyone.

Dr Grey: Brynn, it’s just a delight to talk about all these years of research and thinking.

Brynn: It makes a big difference when we get to talk about our work, doesn’t it?

Thank you so much and thank you for listening everyone. If you liked our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast. Leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time.

Octonauts

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added on February 21, 2025)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the new books network. My name is Brynn Quick and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Laura Smith-Khan.

Laura is formerly a Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Law at University of New England. Her research examines the inclusion and participation of minoritized groups in legal settings, especially migration processes, and seeks to address inequality. She was also the 2022 recipient of the Max Crawford Medal, Australia’s most prestigious award for achievement and promise in humanities.

In addition to all of these amazing qualifications, Laura also has another resume addition that is relevant to our conversation today. Laura is a mum and so am I. My kids are ages 12 and 9, and Laura’s kids are ages 7 and 3.

And as academic linguist mums, our brains are constantly analysing language, even when that language comes from the cartoons our kids watch. So today, Laura and I are going to discuss language and accents in kids’ cartoon characters. And then we’re going to investigate what a choice as seemingly banal as a character’s accent has to do with whiteness, standard language ideology, and securing a nation’s borders.

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

Dr Smith-Khan: Thanks, Brynn.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became not just a linguist, but a lawyer and migration law scholar as well?

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, well, I think maybe like a lot of people who get into linguistics, I had an interest in learning languages from quite a young age, which was quite unusual in my context of being in a fairly monolingual English-speaking small town and family. That led me to go on an exchange to France when I was a teenager and learn French, and then to pick up further language study at university to study linguistics. I already had that curiosity about learning a language and using different languages in different contexts and then had the chance to start looking at that in a study context.

Towards the end of my first degree, I also started to, I’d been studying politics as well in my first degree as well as languages, and I started thinking like, I want to study something that has some practical application in a professional context somehow, and that actually started to make me think about studying law, which was something that in the past I hadn’t really thought about. So, I ended up enrolling in a law degree after my first degree and spending a total of seven years straight in undergraduate education, which was actually great fun. And I had this opportunity during my law degree to start working with a registered migration agent, which is a professional who does similar work to a lawyer, but specifically on things related to migration, so applying for visas and this type of thing.

And he was originally from Afghanistan himself, and so he actually helped a lot of asylum seekers as part of his work, which really gave me this very unique or very different type of experience and led me into wanting to do some study in refugee law, which I did as part of my law degree. And through that discovered where I could bring my interests together in this lovely subfield of looking at language in asylum and migration processes. And I started that as an undergrad essay in one of my subjects in my law degree.

And it’s still with me now, like 12 years later. So, it’s been really, really interesting work.

Brynn: I can’t believe that you started that in undergrad because I’ve read quite a bit of your PhD thesis. And can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I thought that it was such an interesting combination of language and migration.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah. So, I just, you know, I had this, I did refugee law as a subject in my final year of my law degree. And we had this opportunity to choose a topic for a research essay with, which as an undergrad isn’t something that always happens that much.

But because of, you know, the work I’d been doing, and then this interest in languages, I was having some trouble kind of trying to find a topic. And then I just stumbled across something written by the wonderful Diana Eads, who has done some work, obviously a lot of work on language in legal settings but also did a little bit of work on language in asylum. And that really sparked this interest to me.

I was like, wow, okay, the coming together of my world. And I wrote, you know, I wrote my little essay. And then I was like, I really love research, but I’ve been at university for seven years now, living in one of the most expensive cities in the whole world, working many, many jobs on the side to get through it.

I would love to stay here and do this more. But, you know, I need to find a way to actually get paid to do that. And I was really lucky to get some, you know, a three-year full-time position as a research assistant in refugee law, which led to some really amazing research experience across the world as well.

And that was kind of how I ended up then going into, you know, looking into higher degree research after doing that. So, I was really lucky.

Brynn: Yeah. And I always love when we can bring in our love of languages and linguistics and apply it to another discipline where maybe it doesn’t always seem like it would go together. But I think a lot of us do that.

And I think that that’s a really important work. And especially with yours, with talking about migration and asylum. And I know that your thesis dealt a lot with sort of how migrants face becoming, you know, a citizen or a migrant into Australia.

And the actual immigration officers, how they go through those processes. It’s fascinating. So, if anyone gets a chance to read it, they should because it’s really good.

Now, let’s park that for a minute. We’re going to shift gears into our sort of mum hats. So, we’re going to talk about a post that you made on Blue Sky that started you and I talking about kids cartoon characters and accents.

So, on October 5th of this year, you posted, and I can’t say “skeeted”, I refuse. So, I know that that’s technically the verb for a Bluesky post. You’re shaking your head no, I’m shaking no.

I refuse. I refuse. I’m going to say posted.

So, on October 5th of this year, you posted a question aimed at sociolinguists with small kids. And you asked in the post, quote, has there been any commentary about Octonauts and the characters’ accents in the original UK version? End quote.

So, for our listeners who might not be familiar, very much unlike us, because I hear the theme song in my dreams, tell us a bit about what the Octonauts show is and what you noticed about their accents.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so you’ve just said the word Octonauts, and I’m actually hearing the starting song of Octonauts.

Brynn: I can hear the little siren. The little siren.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so Octonauts is an animation. It involves this team of different types of animals, and they’re basically anthropomorphized animals. So, they wear little outfits and they have equipment, and they’re basically humans, but in animal form.

And they live and they work on this thing called the Octopod, which is this kind of underwater station submarine type thingamy. And they basically travel all around. In the original series, only underwater, but then in the kind of spin-off series, they go on to land a bit, and they travel around the world, and they basically introduce children to, and parents who are listening in, to different species of animal, different kind of nature-related issues, climates, climate change concerns as well, and teach them about that.

And the team themselves, so the Octonauts themselves, each have a specialty or some kind of special expertise. So, you know, there’s a map reader, there’s one that does, you know, healing. So, if they come across an animal who’s injured, that particular character kind of takes the lead on that.

Another one that’s an expert in water, you know, so all these different kinds of expertise that are relevant to nature and animals, and they go around, you know, helping them. So, there’s kind of educational things, but they’re also very much only interested in the natural world. So as far as I know, we never really see humans, we don’t see cities, we don’t hear about kind of political kind of countries or states or anything like that.

It’s really about the natural world and different parts of the natural world, which in itself, I think is quite interesting. So, from what I’ve understood or picked up about the show, it started as a book series, which, you know, people who’ve read say was really good, but kind of limited to the characters and kind of the focus. It was picked up originally as a UK production.

And since then, there’s been kind of some spin-offs. So, there’s a Netflix production called Octonauts Above and Beyond. And so that’s when they get out on the land a little bit more with various vehicles that they have.

And they introduce some additional kind of regular characters at that point in time as well. But what really interested me, and this was really, you know, big caveat, obviously, this is not my professional area. We haven’t, you know, systematically researched the show or other shows or anything like that.

But what interested me as I listened in doing my chores and hearing, you know, the show going on the background was that these animals seem to have a range of different accents. And that they weren’t just, you know, like, all kind of standard American accents or kind of, you know, standard UK accents or something. But there was something interesting going on there with the different characters.

And then I kind of listened in a little bit closer. And I noticed that, you know, we had kind of central, I guess, if you will, English accents, like there are US accents, there are UK accents, but there’s a variety of UK accents. So, there’s like a cockney one who’s the pirate looking one.

And there’s one that sounds Scottish, and there’s at least one Australian accent. And then I noticed as I went on kind of listening to different episodes, like, you know, there was one that sounded like a Spanish speaker, and there was also an Indian English speaker as well. I was like, oh, this is quite cool.

There’s a good range of diversity, but it’s also not presented in a way that’s like super stereotypical. Like, you know, like it’s just who that animal is and how they speak. It’s not like, I come from this place and we always eat, you know, we always have barbecues or, you know, whatever it is.

So, we don’t have those kinds of really overt references to the accent, but they’re just speaking in their accents. So, I found that really refreshing. I was like, oh, this is really cool and, you know, progressive and everything.

And then the second thought was like, hold on. We have Captain Barnacle, who is obviously the captain, the leader, you know, the one who directs everything. And his accent is Received Pronunciation British.

Brynn: All of a sudden, we see Kachru’s circles in our brains, and we go, wait a minute. Now we’ve still got the inner, the outer, the expanding circles.

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. Yeah. So, I was like, okay, so those subtle kinds of representations are still potentially happening there.

But then, you know, I kind of looked a little more. And so, looking at the Indian English speaker, there was this other kind of really nice things that I picked up. So, for example, his name is Pani, which means in Hindi and Urdu, and maybe also some other Indian languages or subcontinental languages, it means water.

And he is the hydrologist. He is an expert in water. Yeah.

So, I thought that was really nice seeing a little bit of, you know, diversity and subtly done as well, not kind of those really kind of strong national stereotypes coming through. Although we can still see some, you know, potential issues or we can comment or observe some things about the way the social hierarchy works within that particular group as well.

Brynn: Well, do you know what was interesting? You said about having that there was an American accent. And for me, originally an American, the first time that I ever heard that American character in the show, I was actually shocked because it’s a deeply Southern American character.

And often Southern American accents get stereotyped as being sort of like the dumb or the stupid character, the uneducated character. So, I was actually really pleased to see that this Southern American who talks like this, she was being portrayed as this very intelligent scientist and still having this accent that often gets discriminated against in America. So, to me, that’s kind of what I glommed on to really quickly.

But then I noticed the exact same thing that you did that, oh, but wait, the captain has this received pronunciation British accent that we all know is that sort of standard, quote unquote, English accent that a lot of people, when they’re learning English, think that they should try to emulate because that’s the, quote, best accent.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, some kind of ideal to work towards. And then, yeah, so having, starting to think about this and having these conversations also kind of led me to do a little bit of online searching. And I’ve come across, you know, there’s whole fan sites dedicated to discussing the Octonauts, the different series.

Brynn: I found someone had written a thesis on it!

Dr Smith-Khan: Oh, amazing!

Brynn: I know, I was like, this is awesome.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so when I started looking at that as well, that brings a whole different level of discourse to it as well, because on a lot of those sites, you’ll have kind of like a little character profile card. And so, then you see the ideologies that maybe aren’t expressed kind of explicitly coming up in the way viewers or fans make sense of the character. So, for example, you have like the Captain Barnacles, who’s again, yeah, that British captain of the team.

His profile has, they all have a nationality line. So, he is listed as British, right, because of the way he speaks. Yet at various points in the show, they talk about how his family come from Alaska or maybe from Canada, because he’s a polar bear, right?

So, there’s this kind of tension between drawing on those ideologies of how people sound to make sense of their political status or where they live to these other types of strange realities that happen when you make animals into humans. Those ideologies are quite interesting as well, and there is quite a lot of discussion or question around accents, and also the changing of some characters’ accents across the two productions.

Brynn: Yeah, we should talk about that. So, when you first were talking to me about, did you know that there was this accent change? I was like, wait, what?

And so, then I had to go look, and it’s true. So, as you said, originally, Octonauts was a British production. And so, I’m assuming that production happened in the UK, that probably casting happened in the UK.

But then Netflix, like you said, I guess acquired at least part of it and has now produced this sort of spin-off series called Above and Beyond. So, tell us what happened then? What happened when Netflix did that?

Dr Smith-Khan: I think in my original post on Bluesky, I was a bit misled because even in my own mind, the problem is when you’re listening in as a mom, and there’s a million episodes available, and they’re all flying around here and there, they all blur together. Originally, I thought there was, for example, the Pani, the Indian English-speaking macaque, who’s a macaque from the Indian subcontinent, nicely enough. I originally thought he was part of that original program, and yeah, so I’m still, I think I still need to go sit down and look at it systematically, but reading the fan discussions, I started to get an idea, problematic as that could be, about, you know, accent change.

So, I’m fairly sure at some point the, yeah, the Southern American accent, for example, wasn’t there and came, or maybe it was the Spanish-speaking accent I think got lost.

Brynn: I think it was the Spanish-speaker accent got lost or changed to, to like a shifted accent, more of like a Central American accent, as opposed to like Spain, Spanish maybe. But you’re right, like regardless, there was a shift. So basically the, the cast, I would assume, changed, probably because for a Netflix production, the production and the casting is happening maybe in America.

Okay, fine. But that means that we then change some of these accents.

Dr Smith-Khan: You’re absolutely right. And so, when, when I went and looked at the cast, I was trying to find out who is actually doing these voices. And so, then again, this comes, this interacts with what we’re going to talk about in a minute about Rosina Lippi Green’s chapter, these issues of, you know, having a small voice cast do lots of characters potentially.

And so therefore putting on and, you know, trying to do convincing varieties of various accents to different degrees of success. I went and looked at the cast in the original and it was like, I think three white guys and a white woman, right? And so that’s your kind of diverse cast for like any number of characters across any number of different accents and that appeared to be British.

Like, yeah, you’re kind of saying, you know, that makes sense based on the location of the production, right? And then you have this shift obviously to the US, we presume, and the cast changes, but they do some interesting things. So, when I was like, okay, so there’s an Indian-English accent in this show now.

Who is doing this voice? Is it a white guy?

Brynn: Oh, please.

Dr Smith-Khan: I went and looked him up. I was like, fingers crossed.

Brynn: Fingers crossed.

Dr Smith-Khan: I went and looked him up, and he’s a British voice actor of Indian origin. So, I read an interview with him, and his grandparents migrated to the UK from India, and they’re from North Indian background. And so, you know, they’re Hindi and Punjabi speaking, and he speaks a little bit of Punjabi and a little even less Hindi.

So, he’s still contriving an accent, right? Because he is a British born, you know, man, and his, you know, his kind of at home accent would sound quite different to the accent he’s using in the program. But I did find that quite interesting, I guess, that that is there.

Brynn: I’m just thrilled that it’s not a white man putting on an accent like the Apu in the Simpsons’ conversation that, you know, has been going on for a few years. That’s at least good to know that maybe we’re getting a little bit better.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, and I think that’s also reflected in the way he speaks as well, because like, I don’t know, in my, again, I’m not an accent expert, but from the way I perceive the way he speaks in the show, it’s not a very kind of stereotypical, exaggerated, you know, Indian English. It’s quite a subtle accent, I would describe it as. So that in itself, even putting aside who the person is doing is quite pleasing, I think.

Brynn: Well, that’s a real win, because this Bluesky discussion about the Octonauts accents prompted one of your followers, Dr. Jonathan Kasstan, my apologies if I’m mispronouncing your last name, of the University of Westminster to reply that this was an example of, quote, the timelessness of Lippi-Green’s paper on Disney, end quote. So, let’s talk about this paper and what he’s referring to. So, Rosina Lippi-Green is, of course, an American writer and very famous linguist.

She is famous for her hugely influential 1997 book, English with an Accent, Language Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. So, this paper that Jonathan was referring to is chapter five in that original book, or chapter seven in the second edition, which is what I have. And the chapter is called “Teaching Children How to Discriminate What We Learn from the Big Bad Wolf”.

So, let’s talk about this paper and what Lippi-Green says about how children learn to interpret social variation in the language of others, even from cartoon characters. In the beginning of this chapter, Lippi-Green talks about how Disney released its animated short called The Three Little Pigs. We’ve probably all seen it.

I definitely remember seeing it as a kid. In this release, at one point, the Big Bad Wolf is visually portrayed with anti-Semitic tropes. So, portrayed with a hook nose, money in the palm of its hand, scraggly beard, curled hair locks, a yarmulke.

And this visual representation stayed in the short until, and I couldn’t believe this, 14 years later in 1948. And it was only then when the Hays office asked Disney to re-release the short with a different portrayal of the wolf because of the horrors of the Holocaust that were by then well known. But what happened was even after Disney re-animated the wolf to not have this visual anti-Semitic depiction, the, quote, Yiddish accent, but like as we were just talking about, it was not a natural, normal Yiddish accent.

It was a very exaggerated Yiddish accent. That was still kept. And the wolf’s accent wasn’t changed until much later.

And then we get so many more examples of this with Disney. I mean, we’re both a very similar age. We probably both saw Aladdin when it came out, or at least shortly thereafter.

And Rosina Lippi-Green says in the chapter, quote, 60 years later, a similar controversy would arise over the portrayal of characters in Disney’s Aladdin, a movie set in a mythical Arabic kingdom. An offending line of dialogue in an opening song, which was as I quote, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home, end quote, was partially changed in response to complaints from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. But as the representative of that committee pointed out, the accents of the characters remained as originally filmed.

So, the representative particularly objected to the fact that the quote, good guys, Aladdin, Princess Jasmine, her father, they have that standard American accent, but all of the other characters that are supposed to be Arab or Arabic speaking, have these nebulous, heavy accents that are not really clear what they’re supposed to be. And quote, this pounds home the message that people with a foreign accent are bad, end quote. So, what else do we think about what Lippi-Green says in this paper?

Tell me your thoughts.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, it’s such a great chapter and it really made me kind of reflect and think more about the Octonauts and about some other things as well. So, she talks about how one of the things that happens when you have an animation is that you potentially can lose some kind of visual identity prompts or, you know, information. And this is especially true when you have an animal who’s supposed to be a human.

So, there’s a chance that you lose some of your visual hints that might be there if it’s a person, you know, are they white, are they black, are they, you know, tall, short, old, young, wearing certain types of clothes, et cetera. Those things aren’t there. So, there’s work that can be done or choices that can be made about accent to try and quickly, she says, you know, like efficiently pass on that message to the viewer so that they understand the type of character this is.

But the problem, as you’ve pointed out very aptly, is that that relies on really problematic stereotypes and helps to perpetuate those stereotypes and entrench those stereotypes in people’s minds, including in children’s minds from a young age. So, you have this idea that, you know, the good guys, the heroes speak like quote unquote us or speak like, you know, the people from whatever the dominant society is. In the context of Disney movies, there’s this kind of mainstream US accent she talks about. And then the others, the problematic others, sound foreign. And so, what the foreignness sounds like can differ.

So, she talks about, you know, particular points in history. You’ll have kind of whoever the baddies are vis-a-vis the US at that particular point in time. So, you got German accents, you got Russian accents, you got Arabic accents, et cetera.

But then there’s all these other types of characters, like you talked about Southern American accents. So even within the US., kind of certain accents are marked in certain ways and are used to index certain kind of social attributes very problematically.

I mean, other ones, she talks about the work that having some characters having an accent, especially with animals, helps to indicate place as well. So, you know, if it’s supposed to be a cartoon set in France, like maybe a couple of the characters have a French accent, but still the main characters, maybe it’s absolutely fine for them to have a kind of mainstream US accent. And that’s, you know, acceptable.

You know, these are the facile kind of stereotypes that come up, right?

Brynn: Because she even points out in the chapter that in, for example, Beauty and the Beast, which is supposed to be set in France, because it is originally a French fairy tale, that the only three characters that have your, quote, stereotypical French accents are, you know, the feather duster who is sort of-

Dr Smith-Khan: The sexually kind of suggestive character.

Brynn: The characters who are promiscuous or suggestive. You’ve got the, the amorous candelabra, Lumiere. And then there’s one other with a French accent. Now I don’t remember who it was.

Dr Smith-Khan: Possibly an artist or a chef, judging by the general trend of things.

Brynn: That would make sense. That makes sense. But you’ve got Belle and her dad have basically my accent, you know?

And it’s like, well, how does this make sense? But you’re right. It’s like that over-exaggerated French accent is being used to index something that the creators want you as the audience member to think about in your head.

It’s like a quick, efficient way of saying, oh, well, this character is romantic, and that’s why they’re given a French accent. And Lippi-Green, I really like this quote. She says in the chapter, quote, animated films entertain, but they are also a vehicle by which children learn to associate specific characteristics and lifestyles with specific social groups and to accept a narrow and exclusionary worldview, end quote.

And, you know, all we have to do is, especially if we’re thinking about Disney, is like you were saying, think about the villains in the Disney movies. So, we’ve got the accents of the bad guys, quote unquote, is usually some form of other, right, English. So often it’ll be received pronunciation British English.

So, Jafar from Aladdin, Scar from The Lion King, Shere Khan from The Jungle Book, Cruella from 101 Dalmatians. So, people might, I mean, obviously not our audience, but other people might think, okay, so what? You know, these are just kids’ movies.

What people sound like in these movies is no big deal. But this carries on into adulthood. And we see this in adult media as well.

And one way that we see people’s accents and languages being used to other is in the arena of nationalism and borders. And you and two co-authors, distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr Hanna Torsh, recently, very recently, published a paper entitled “Trust at the Border, Identifying Risk and Assessing Credibility on Reality Television”. So, tell us about this paper and the parallels that we can see between this research and how we’ve been talking about accents in children’s media.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yes. So, this is the second paper in hopefully an ongoing series of papers that came from a project that Ingrid Piller was running at Macquarie University and it involved us collecting, we ended up with 108 encounters from this very long running famous TV show, the Australian version of which is called Border Security on Australia’s Frontline. I think I haven’t written down the subtitle, which I have now forgotten, but it’s basically it’s filmed at airports around Australia.

It’s been going for I think 23 years or something long, nearly long time. There’s lots of international versions of it as well that I assume are just as successful, and it has involved a very close cooperation between obviously the Australian government agencies that control that space and Channel 7 in Australia that’s been the producer of that particular program. And what it purports to do is basically show us the reality.

So, it follows officials or officers working in these airports and follows them on their everyday work, protecting our borders. So, it’s quite an interesting space because on the one hand, we’ll have criticisms or commentary about TV and other forms of popular media where we say, there’s a real over-representation of the dominant group, like white L1 English speakers on TV, and it doesn’t represent our societies. So, at first glance we go, oh, this show kind of bucks that trend because we see all different types of people with all different language, all different appearances on this program.

But their representation on the program is very specific. And again, it’s teaching us certain things. And there we can actually see some parallels with Lippy Green’s chapter again as well, because there’s an over-representation of, for example, L1 Australian accented, I guess, white presenting people in one group, the officers and the figures.

I’ve got the figures here, so I can tell you about that. So, we had 253 officers across all those encounters. So, we didn’t selectively pick out particular encounters.

We took a whole period of time, whatever episodes were available, and we got each and every encounter that occurred at an airport from those episodes. And so, across those 108 encounters, we had 253 officers to 128 passengers or travelers. And so, we looked at what was happening there, who was represented in those two groups.

And we found that the officers, as I said, were mostly white-presenting. So, we, as a team of three researchers, kind of all coded and compared our codes. And we said, you know, 81%, we counted 81% of the officers looked to be white.

That’s how they present. And 90%, 90% sound, not just like native speakers of English, but Australian-accented native speakers of English. So, this is a huge number.

And the whiteness and the accent almost perfectly map onto each other in that particular group as well. So, I think we counted only two white-looking officers that didn’t have a kind of core or Australian accent, English accent. And we also talk about other things like, so the way they’re named in the show, you know, Officer Susan, Officer Joe.

So, there’s this uniformity and this, on the one hand, officialness, but also casual familiarity with these lovely people who we can personally relate to, and also the fact that they wear, you know, standard uniforms, et cetera. So, there’s this idea that they’re a homogenous group, and there’s all kinds of other mechanisms to kind of, for us to put our trust in them, and that they’re kind of the heroes of the show. They’re tasked with this really important job.

But then we look at the passengers. So, in the passengers, we see almost the flip of that profile. So, we see 73% don’t present as white, and 66% sound like they are not native English speakers at all.

And only 8% actually sound like Australian native English speakers. So almost completely the opposite of the officer group. And again, they’re named and described in different ways.

So, they’re described in kind of vague ways, like a woman from La traveling here, a band member, a Bulgarian farmer, blah, blah, blah. So often specifying nationality or ethnicity and kind of these more generic naming practices. And of course, they don’t look as neat and as uniform as the officers after their long journeys from wherever they’ve been.

So very, very different presentations of the two groups. So first of all, I think those particular percentages themselves are super problematic in terms of representing the reality. Because we know, for example, that in Australia, more than 50% of the population now are born overseas, you know, first generation Australian.

So that’s, you know, you can make some guesses about what that means for accent and also potentially appearance. But also, that very commonly people traveling into Australia will be, A, Australians or B, actually English people. So, in terms of the diversity that’s represented, we’ve got some interesting production choices going on there.

And we also have a very clear over-representation of wrongdoing. So, we counted how many encounters actually involved the officers finding out that the person had done something wrong. So, they’re uncovering some suspicion and they’re actually finding out wrongdoing.

And we found that it was like more than two-thirds of the encounters. They had done something wrong. So obviously this has to be an over-representation of what the reality is.

So, they’re very clear production choices, even though, you know, the quote unquote real encounters is something that’s really happened. The way that the production puts together and chooses what to present within the show forms some very specific messages for the audience.

Brynn: It does. And do you know what I’ve noticed a lot in watching the show is the number of times that they will show the officer sitting across the table from the person who’s wanting to come into Australia. And then they’ve got that speakerphone in the middle.

And there’s an interpreter on the speakerphone because the person who wants to come into Australia, obviously, maybe their English is not at a level where they can understand sort of the complicated nature of what the immigration officer is talking about in English. And I feel like that is always portrayed in a way that makes it seem like, A, a burden on the immigration officer. This is this burden that I have to go call up the service for interpreters and I have to get this interpreter here.

But also, the nature of having the interpreter on a speakerphone is really difficult. It would be really difficult for either party to kind of listen and really understand. And so you as the viewer get this feeling of like, come on, hurry it up. This is annoying, that they have to be engaging in, you know, having to go through an interpreter.

And it sort of like implicitly drives home that point of, isn’t this a burden that this non-English speaking migrant wants to come into Australia or even just, you know, someone who’s coming for a visit will often get pulled aside. And in that way, again, we see that representation of the quote, other accent as being the problem, as being the bad guy. Right?

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. Yeah, so there’s a few things I can kind of say related to those observations. So firstly, that scene that you describe of someone sitting over a table, we can call that like the second stage in an investigation, because it’s, you know, when there’s a serious concern and the person’s actually taken away to a private room for some kind of further investigation or informal interview.

So, there are a number of steps that happened before that. I guess we talk about basically kind of three potential stages. So, the initial kind of one is a visual or potentially just the interaction that takes place at passport control and then someone might be kind of flagged as being suspicious for whatever reason.

Or they’re seen kind of waiting for their baggage and they’re looked at in the distance from one of these officers. And the officer says, this person looked nervous or something. So, they have some kind of explanation for their initial reason to kind of investigate more, to ask questions, to open a bag, to proceed with some kind of investigation.

But then the first stage of their questioning or their interaction and investigation, if you will, takes place out in the open in the hall where the quarantine is or the customs area is or whatever, out in the open. And what we see in that context is almost in every single encounter, it’s only in English. And there are no multilingual accommodations that are kind of clear.

And so, but you have the work that’s done by the narrator of the show and also the work that the platform that offices are given to talk about those investigations, obviously privilege them in terms of being able to frame those interactions in certain ways. So, you’ll have either of those voices saying something like, we have this great quote in the article, that this passenger is difficult to interview because their English isn’t very good or something like that. So, it’s just that straight out, you know, multilingualism is a problem and the problem is the person, the other, the other, right?

It’s not a problem that our whole Porter processes are multilingual, sorry, monolingual English ones, where we don’t routinely have multilingual staff. We don’t, you know, there are a couple of exceptions. There’s one particular airport and one reoccurring officer who is of Chinese background and serves in a very interesting way as a kind of sometimes a communicator, but also sometimes as a kind of cultural mediator for the audience.

So, she talks about, oh, this lady has brought this in because, you know, in Chinese culture, blah, blah, blah. And so, she’s doing this work for this imagined, you know, white Anglo kind of audience, right? That these people need this explained to them.

But generally speaking, this is a very expected to be a very monolingual English space and interaction, yet somehow it’s still framed as if officers are doing work and being accommodating. So, you’ve pointed out an example at the next stage, which is when they actually do call in an interpreter. But even before that, they’ll point to things like, so when you’re coming into Australia, you get this little card where you have to fill out, yes, you’re rolling your eyes Brynn, because we’ve both experienced this card many times.

Brynn: I’m hard rolling my eyes, yes, because that is the worst. They give it to you on the flight, and you have just been on this flight for like 400 hours. You’re exhausted, you’ve been scrunched up in Coach.

They give you these cards and they’re like, fill it out right now before you land. Then you’re like, can I have a pen? The flight attendants are like, no.

And so, you have to make friends real fast with whoever is sitting next to you and be like, does anyone have a pen? Does anyone have a pen? It is, I feel like I could write a whole thesis about that card process. It is so frustrating.

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. And so, there’s lots of examples in those interactions about how people have answered that. So, on that card, it asks you, where you’re coming from, what your profession is, how long you’re staying, diseases.

Really importantly in our context, are you carrying any food? Are you carrying any medicine? So basically, almost every other country I’ve traveled to in the world, you get into the airport, there technically is a quarantine or customs area, but there’s usually no staff there.

No one actually really cares that much. And that was a real shock for me the first time I went somewhere else, because always coming back into Australia, that’s actually super important and it’s taken extremely seriously. And if you’ve watched any episode of this particular show, that is one of the key messages that the show is trying to teach viewers.

So, you really cannot bring any kind of fresh food into the country. But even me as a lawyer, as a first language English speaker, very highly educated in terms of the number of degrees I’ve done, I still find myself second guessing those questions. Have I answered it wrong?

Am I not declaring something that I should declare? You know, I’ve got chocolate. Is that an issue?

Like to this day, I’m still panicking about this because I’m quite paranoid for some reason about going through those processes.

Brynn: I can’t imagine why.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, right? But the problem is then you’ll have this card and you have to fill it out and you have to sign it. So, it really is this official legal document.

And you present that as you’re going through, trying to exit the airport. I think it’s the last step after going through immigration and everything that that entails. And the quarantine officers then will look at it and they’ll look at you.

And then they’ll see whether they want to scan your bags. They want to open your bags. They want to question you more or not.

And there are serious repercussions. For example, if they find something in your bag and you haven’t declared it, big trouble and you’re more likely to get a fine for it, et cetera. If you declare it and they want to keep it because it’s not allowed, then usually that’s fine because you’ve declared it.

But there’s a lot of moral messaging that goes on in the show around this. There’s a lot of kind of framing of like, oh, we think she’s learned a lesson. So, we’re going to let her off today with a warning or this person has received a fine because this is a serious threat and they don’t seem to have understood the seriousness of it, et cetera.

But language comes up in this as well, because for example, for certain flights, from what we could see, they have translated versions of the card, I think into Chinese, for example. So, this card is difficult to get your head around. It’s not something that seems to be common in any other.

Brynn: It’s really not. It’s really not. And for anyone who hasn’t had the fun of having to deal with this particular Australian flight card, it is like a front and a back, and it’s on kind of card stock.

And it’s got like the boxes where you have to put the individual letters of whatever you’re spelling out into these boxes. It’s very much like taking a standardised test. But I, again, I mean, you’re saying it, and I’m the same way.

I have too many degrees, honestly, at this point, you know, and I’m beyond educated. And I have been going back and forth in and out of Australia for a decade, and I still have trouble filling out this card. And English is my first language.

I can’t express enough how frustrating and convoluted this card is. But like you’re saying, how 100% of the utmost importance it is, too. And it’s like those two things together, the fact that it is so convoluted, but so important, means that if you are trying to fill out that card, especially if English is not your most dominant or most comfortable language, that’s going to be so much pressure.

Dr Smith-Khan: And so, we have examples in the encounters. And again, it’s like, you know, you’ve got the written, and then you’ve also got the spoken interaction, right? And they’re two very different things, especially if you’re not an L1 speaker, especially if English isn’t your first language.

So, for example, in that situation, if I’m unsure about the chocolate, I turn up to the quarantine, I have my smiley white face and my Aussie accent, and I say, oh, hey, I’ve ticked no, but I’ve got some chocolate with me kind of thing. And they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s fine. See you later, nine times out of ten, right?

But if you’re someone who isn’t super confident in spoken English, for example, you filled out the card because you have to fill out the card, right? It’s a requirement. And then you turn up there and you try and have the same or a similar type of conversation with the officer.

It might go quite differently. First of all, in the show, across the different types of suspicions, there are kind of clear patterns in who’s kind of overrepresented. So going to the quarantine example again, people who look like they’re from China, for example, or who have just traveled from China, are much more likely to be presented in the show as, you know, raising a suspicion for quarantine, carrying food that they shouldn’t carry into the country.

So again, like what happens in terms of that initial creation of suspicion, right? But then what happens when they try and, you know, negotiate meaning with that officer. So for example, we have an example in the paper where it’s someone who’s brought in some type of food, and they say to the officer, like, look, I thought it, you know, in their L2 spoken English, that’s obviously not super fluent or confident.

I think it means meat, you know, that question. I thought that was what was meant by food, right? Because, you know, it’s obviously, it could mean a lot of things.

And they’re like, but this card was in your language. This was translated into your language. So therefore you’re 100% responsible for determining the only possible one meaning of that particular question in this list of really difficult questions.

So, they hold up that language accommodation of the translation as, you know, first of all, we’re doing something to accommodate you. This is, you know, a plus on our side. But also, you can’t use misunderstanding as an excuse here.

You know, this is not, this is not okay. All while this passenger is trying to kind of put forward their confusion or the ambiguity around the question and them answering this question that’s quite unusual and, you know, uncommon in any other context in their second language in this high-powered kind of interaction. So that’s one example.

Brynn: And because, you know, translation has never gone awry from one thing to another. Like, what?

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. So, we’ve got ideologies around translation and what it means to, you know, do that translation. Whereas like, you know, if I come in, you know, dealing with this card in my first language, I’m not so sure about it.

Maybe we can negotiate that. And there’s room for me to have some doubts about what something might mean. In this particular context, we start with suspicion based on origin.

And then on top of that, oh, you’re using this as an excuse. And we’ve actually accommodated you here because we’ve actually provided this written in your first language. The other way it seems to come up a bit is when the card hasn’t been translated, but the person fills it out, right?

Because they have to, there’s tick boxes and there’s names and et cetera, et cetera. So they’ve ticked a certain box saying they don’t have something to declare. They go through quarantine and then they’re saying, oh, you know, I’m having some trouble explaining to you or, you know, English isn’t my first language.

This is a difficult conversation for me. And they basically use, they pick that up and they say, hey, this lady was able to read and fill out this card in English, in written English. They’re now claiming, quote unquote, to have a problem with their English.

But actually, I’ve evaluated their English as quite fluent because they filled out this card. Therefore, not only is what they’re saying a problem, but I’m going to add an extra layer of suspicion or mistrust against them because they appear to be using the I don’t speak English well card as an excuse to be evasive or to get around this problem that I’ve identified. So, we have all these really problematic, fascinating but problematic language ideologies that come up in the interactions.

Brynn: This makes me want to hit my head against a wall because my background is in teaching English as a foreign language and also as an additional language. So, in the context of people who are living in an English dominant country and learning the language, and the number of people for whom it is so normal to have higher proficiency in written English than it is in spoken English, that’s such a normal thing. And we see that in multiple languages.

When we learn a language for the first time, like in school or something like that, we often start with the written form of the language. And especially for English, where the pronunciation is cuckoo bananas, it makes so much more sense that someone would feel more comfortable writing in English than they would in pronouncing the English. So, the fact that these officers on the show can make like you said, that’s that almost moral judgment about the person based on their macroskill proficiency is just galling. It really is.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah. And there’s also other assumptions, I guess, in terms of even when it comes to the reading, right? Because if you think about that card, most of the questions that actually involve producing an answer are things that people, first of all, they’ll be able to kind of use whatever technology they have to find out what the questions are, if they need help.

But also, they’re very, very straightforward answers, like, what is your name? What is your address? What is your age? These kinds of things. So fairly basic, like, I’m thinking about myself in other languages. Even if I have a really basic proficiency reading another language, I’m probably going to be able to answer those questions quite straightforwardly.

The other questions actually involve a tick box of yes or no. And so, you see examples of this also in the spoken interaction on the border, that you can have a question and someone says yes or they say no. Have they understood?

We have very little idea if they’ve understood because it’s just saying yes or no, right? They could have completely misunderstood the question or the meaning of the question. But that’s not always the way their understanding is characterized.

And that’s what’s really important in the program, obviously, because we have these officials who are acting as gatekeepers, literally gatekeepers and decision makers in terms of that individual interaction. But they’re also saying things, they’re commenting on the people, both specifically those individuals, but those comments then accumulate and make general statements or general kind of, you know, evaluations of certain types of people and certain types of behaviour. And because they have the privileged platform to do that on the show and through the show, we’re being delivered messages about different sorts of groups in society, they’re likely to do and what we need to worry about in terms of those groups in our societies.

Brynn: Well, and then to bring this full circle back to the question about accents and representation in children’s media, this is why this is important, because, as kids, if we grow up seeing diverse representation of different Englishes, of different parts of the world, of different accents, different languages, then when we grow up and we become these officers at an airport, then we might not be so quick to judge based on accent, right? And here I do think that there’s this really good quote that’s attributed to Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, who was or is a prominent scholar in children’s literature. And she wrote an essay in 1990 that I think sort of puts this into perspective.

And she talks about how books can serve three crucial functions for readers. And I kind of take this into children’s media as well. So, books or children’s media can serve as mirrors where children can see their own experiences reflected, which is always important.

But they can serve also as windows where children can look into the experiences of others. And then they can serve as what she calls sliding glass doors where readers can enter and connect with different worlds and different perspectives. And so I think what we see in Octonauts bringing it back is, especially with that accent representation, we’re starting to see the beginnings of those windows and those sliding glass doors and mirrors.

You know, I’m thinking about like any young kid who’s from, say, Alabama in the States, who sees that scientist who’s from Southern America, who sounds like them. And they’re saying, hey, this goes against everything I’ve ever seen in media that says that my accent should be one of stupidity or an uneducated accent. But no, look, I can see someone who sounds like me, who’s a scientist, you know?

So, what do we think is going right in children’s media? Where do we think this is headed? Because I do think that children’s media has come a long way since the 1990s and Disney.

What do you think are some examples of getting it right these days?

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, I really like that idea of mirrors and windows. And also, yeah, also in Octonauts, I think also that idea that you can have this opportunity to travel and see the world, interact with all types of different types of people. So, the team themselves are so diverse and they’re working together and doing really amazing things to make positive change in the world.

So, I think those messages are really beautiful messages to share with children that all different types of people can be involved in that process, people that they can identify with personally and all other different types of people that might look or sound different to them. So, I think that’s a hugely positive message. I did want to acknowledge a caveat, which is that one of the recent episodes that I watched, again, so those stereotypes are still there.

Even when you have shows that are really doing it right, they really linger, they hang on. I think sometimes it’s just this kind of almost laziness in terms of making that and indexing something quickly. So, you have this great core, regular cast of characters in that show, but then they go around the world to different places and interact with one-off animals or whatever, who they’re helping or learning about, for example.

And sometimes that’s quite good. And again, you have this idea of accent indexing place. So, they’re in a place where the humans speak French, for example, and so they might have French accented animals.

But an episode I saw the other day involved, I think they were searching for these eels, this rare type of eel. So yeah, all these characters that they’re interacting with, they have kind of vaguely Australian or New Zealand accents because that’s the ocean that they’re close, they’re in that area of the world. And then they’re searching here and there, and they come across a shark, a problematic shark who is menacing, potentially, to eat them.

They’re searching for something, and he gets a bit defensive and kind of threatens them. And what is his accent? It’s like, again, I’m not an expert, but he sounds like a gangster from the backstreets of New York somewhere.

He has a gangster accent for one of better words, like a mob accent, we could say. But then they kind of are trying to escape from him, and then this pack of orcas comes through. So, they’re black and white, they’re traveling in a group, and they sound like NYPD officers.

They’re actually scaring him or dealing with him and helping the orcas.

Brynn: That part I remembered. I didn’t remember the shark, but I do remember the orcas because I remember I was doing that thing where I was cooking dinner. I wasn’t watching it, but I could hear it in the background, and I was like, what?

I kind of looked over like, wait, what is that accent?

Dr Smith-Khan: Because the particular characters from the regular crew, again, I’m pretty sure it’s called Dashi, the character, so she’s got an Australian accent and was her niece. So, they’re both sounding pretty Aussie, and there’s maybe a third member of the team with a different accent. And then they’re interacting with all these kinds of vaguely Australian/New Zealand type accents as well.

We’re on the streets of New York and there’s this menacing mobster who’s a shark as well. So, it’s like, why did they need to do that? And all I can think of is lazy stereotypes.

He’s a shark already, so the menace is there. We don’t need more menace.

What he’s talking about is there, so why did we need to add this extra layer to just teach children that this type of way of speaking is something we should be scared of, and this particular character is obviously a shifty one that we can’t trust. And then also these hero policemen who have geographically a very similar accent but is kind of noticeably different. Yeah, really, really interesting how these old tropes kind of hang on.

So, I think one of the take-homes for me is that there’s always room for improvement and there’s always room to kind of discuss it. I really feel like the online space of being able to talk about these types of programs has potential to actually influence change, maybe on a scale that it didn’t in the past. So, another example for me, I guess, as a parent of small children right now is obviously Bluey.

For people who don’t have small kids, a little bit of context, it’s another cartoon. It’s an Australian cartoon. It’s set in Brisbane, which is reasonably close to where I come from, which is a city in Australia.

And it’s again a family of dogs in this case. And they’re just a really lovely family. Both parents are really heavily involved in interacting with the kids.

It’s very targeted at the current generation of children and their parents. And it’s just been a huge hit. So, it’s been taken up by Disney, I’m pretty sure again, it’s syndicated by Disney.

“And so, it’s been rolled out basically everywhere in the world. If you travel to other countries where English is not the main language, you can watch it in other languages, which is a lot of fun too. But one thing I really love about it personally, from my perspective, is first of all, it’s an Australian production.

So, you hear a range of Aussie accents, which itself is nice. And then on top of that, you see other things. So, there was a really, from my perspective as a French speaker, it was really cool to see a whole episode where it’s basically Bluey going camping with her family and meeting Jean-Luc, who is Canadian.

The only indication he’s Canadian in the show is that he’s sitting at a table with a maple syrup bottle, this is my attention to detail, with the red maple on it. I’m like, oh, maybe they’re supposed to be Canadian. But basically, the main point is that Jean-Luc speaks French, and only French and Bluey speaks English and only English.

And somehow, they manage over the course of the holiday that they’re both camping at this campsite to strike up this friendship and spend whole days playing together, even though, you know, he’s only speaking French and she’s only speaking English. And to watch that as a bilingual French-English speaker was obviously a lot of fun, but it was also just nice to see a little bit of representation of multilingual cartoon in an Australian English speaking context, and also to have that positive portrayal of kids playing together or people interacting with each other in a positive relationship building way, even where they couldn’t understand everything that was said to each other, where they have that goodwill to do that.

Brynn: And it’s great as a parent, because I as a parent when, I mean, I’ve seen that episode five billion times and I love it, but I was able to talk to my kids about it because when my youngest watched it, I mean, she would have been little, probably like five or six or so, and she kept saying like, what is he saying? I can’t understand what he’s saying. What is that?

And so, then I was able as a parent to say like, yes, that’s the language of French. And look, I can tell you what he’s saying, but look how Bluey doesn’t necessarily need to understand what he’s saying in order for them to play, you know? And that’s just a really lovely thing to teach kids.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, it’s really nice. I’ve read a little bit of online commentary after that, though, and they were saying, you know, why, out of all the languages you could choose, you know, why did they choose French? Why have they chosen other dominant European language?

It’s not really a kind of, you know, a representation of another language that’s commonly spoken in Australia, you know? So, there’s questions around that. And there’s another episode I know where Bluey’s dad is playing.

So, a lot of the episodes involve them, you know, having these really amazing games together. But in that particular episode, he’s a chef at a restaurant.

Brynn: So, I literally watched this episode yesterday. Yes, yes. And the dad and because I don’t speak French, but I, you know, I can kind of guess because I speak Spanish.

And the dad is basically saying, like, you know, where is the discotheque in France in response to an English question that Bluey has? So, it doesn’t make sense in context. So, you’re right. You’re kind of like, well, OK, we could do better here.

Dr Smith-Khan: I think for me, the interesting thing there was just that that reversion to that, you know, stereotypical, like a French character, they’re going to be a chef or an artist. So again, in another show, I listened to the other day with my kids in the background that it was like, yeah, there was a bee and they’d lost their beautiful, no, sorry, a spider and they lost their beautiful web and they were an artist. You know, their web was their art.

And of course, what accent did the spider have? Of course, of course they were French. Yeah, exactly.

Brynn: Layer upon layer, Laura, I can tell you. And this is why, as linguists, we can never just watch children’s media, you know? Like we’re always thinking about it.

But I think that’s a good thing because we’ve seen this progression forward. We’ve seen it get better from that, you know, 1933 Big Bad Wolf depiction. And it has gotten better.

You know, I’m thinking about things like Coco or Moana or Encanto. Those certainly have some really good examples of accent representation, dialect representation, you know, but there’s always room for improvement. And my hope is that we continue to improve in our children’s media.

Dr Smith-Khan: The other really cool example from Bluey was that they made an episode with a deaf character who, you know, used Auslan, which is Australian Sign Language, which is really cool. But also, the fact that they actually heavily consulted with Auslan experts to be able to do that, especially in terms of, you know, animating. You know, they have characters that have not the right number of fingers for doing fingerspelling, for example.

So, they had to be really strategic about which words they needed to fingerspell. And, you know, things around aspect and orientation and all these types of details that obviously, if you do wrong, isn’t great. So, the process of consulting for that particular episode.

But again, yeah, there’s still always room to improve. So, it’s like, yes, that character appears in that one standalone episode, and then we never see them again. So, what’s going on there sort of thing.

And so, there’s always room to kind of question and keep on working on it. But yes, some really cool developments that are really noticeable, especially when you have your constant lens of sociolinguists on and off – rating all the time.

Brynn: As parents, exactly. And that’s, I think that this whole discussion, I think that what’s so important for us as sociolinguists, as parents, is to say, look, we’re really hoping that for this next generation, we’re doing better at showing these windows, these mirrors, these sliding glass doors, at showing representations so that when our kids, our grown-ups in the real world and maybe they are making decisions about accents and who can come into a country and who looks suspicious and things like that, maybe they can think back to the media that they had as kids and not be so scared by the idea of a, quote, different accent. So, before we wrap up, I would love to know, what’s next for you?

What are you working on? Are you going to be doing, you had mentioned, that maybe this paper that you’ve written is part of a series. There is another one that comes before it, which was fantastic as well.

Are you still working on this? Are you working on other things? What do we have to look forward to with you?

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so I’d like to, yeah, hopefully that a third paper in that series is possible, but it’s not kind of currently at the forefront of my mind. At the moment, for myself personally, I’m really interested in thinking about and exploring how people will develop their understanding or beliefs or knowledge about law and legal rights and legal obligations, and also then in the context of migrating and potentially being in a second working or living in a second language or a language that they’re not hugely proficient in.

What does that look like, that process, and kind of looking at not just, I guess on the one hand, there’s kind of official information or resources that different government or NGOs can provide to people to help build their knowledge or explain the law, but is that actually how we find out about the law or how we assume the law works?

Because actually, even for myself as a lawyer, I make a lot of assumptions about what the law is without actually going and looking up every single piece of legislation related to that issue, right? I’m interested in figuring out kind of socially and kind of informally also how we make sense of that. And I can kind of segue back into an episode of Bluey once again.

So, it’s in, I forget the name of it, but there was a kind of long, almost movie length episode, like a longer episode of Bluey that they made, I think, last year or earlier this year. And in one particular scene, the cousins, Bluey’s cousins are also there and they have to go driving around in a car. So, there’s extra kids in the car.

And so Bluey gets the special treat, yes, of sitting in the front seat, which is very exciting for small children. But her mom had to kind of check, maybe googled something to make sure it was OK, you know, to children under a certain age to sit in the front. And then they get pulled over by the police at one point.

And the policeman’s like, hey, there’s a kid in your front seat. And he actually doesn’t know the law. And she has to like, google it or check it on her phone to show him it’s fine if there’s no other seat available in the back seat, right?

But this is actually a law myself, as again, as a parent, it’s very relatable that I have had to look up because I was like, oh, am I going to get in trouble if my kid sits here? Or what are the circumstances in which you can have a child under a certain age sitting in the front seat? And I was reflecting on that.

I was thinking, I didn’t actually go and find out whatever, I don’t even know what the name of the relevant law itself would be, but I just googled and found it was like, the Traffic Authorities website or something had a little summary about car seats and positioning in the car, etc. That I looked up and that would have been exactly what Bluey’s mum did in the context of Queensland law. And so, yeah, so I’m really excited to try and find a way to do that research and look not just what kind of is officially and formally available, but actually how people in real life go and find out more about the law and how language and migration experiences might play into how those beliefs are made and how they find out about information.

Brynn: I can’t wait for that paper and I hereby demand that you cite Bluey in that paper. I need to see that citation.

Dr Smith-Khan: I’ll try and make it work.

Brynn: Laura, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I loved recording this with you and I can’t wait for you to come back sometime.

Dr Smith-Khan: Definitely. Thanks so much, Brynn. Always nice to talk.

Brynn: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move podcast, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time.

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Anyone who has ever travelled to or from Australia will agree that the last thing you want after getting off a long-haul flight is any further barriers between you and the outside world, a shower, and a bed.  However, given the ever-increasing securitization of borders across the global north, international travellers must first succeed in convincing border officials that they do not pose any type of threat to the nation.

This may be much easier for some people than others. In a recent study, we examined the various aspects of individuals’ language, identity and behaviour that are made salient by border officials in their work, when deciding whether particular people are suspicious or can be trusted. To explore this question, we collected and analysed 108 encounters between border officials and travellers arriving at Australian airports, filmed, produced and broadcast as part of the long-running, popular television series, Border Security: Australia’s Front Line.

In our new article, we show how in these encounters, border officials carry out evaluations of travellers’ credibility, much like those used in other migration processes, such as the assessment of asylum claims.  We find that different individuals are unequally positioned to construct a trustworthy identity based on the way they speak, their social capital, their (perceived or actual) nationality or ethnic origin, their knowledge, and material factors, like the clothes they wear, the money they have, or the other items in their possession.

Officer: (to camera) “This gentleman has arrived on an Italian passport. Speaking to him our officers realized that he’s not a native Italian speaker. The question is now what is his nationality.”

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

These factors are made salient in ways that are unreliable and inconsistent, and we critically examine and denaturalize the problematic assumptions underlying them. For example, in the encounter above, Italian citizenship, a political/legal status, is imagined to involve specific social and linguistic experiences and practices, being born and raised in an Italian speaking context, to the exclusion of others, such as migration and naturalization.

In each case, we also compare how border officials are in a stronger position to mobilize the same categories of resources to construct identities for themselves that are trustworthy and credible.

This, we argue, is due largely to the privileged position they have on two different levels, both in terms of how they can control the discourse within their interactions with individual travellers, but also at the level of the television show, in how discourse about these interactions is produced and disseminated.

At the level of the encounters, officials obviously have a very specific role to play: they are the ones who decide who to stop, how to question them, what technologies to use, and, ultimately, how they interpret what they see and hear.

Officer: When we commenced our interview, I specifically stated to you that pursuant to Section 234 of the Migration Act, you’re required to provide me with truthful information. Can you demonstrate to me conclusively that you did work on that farm? I’ll give you this opportunity again, Declan, I’m a pretty fair sort of a guy.

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Not only this, but officers wield power over travellers in terms of the outcomes of these encounters: they may issue fines or warnings, cancel people’s visas and have them deported, or refer them for police investigation. This power undoubtedly influences the way travellers interact with them, and their perceived and actual levels of discursive agency.

However, the inequality does not end there: the television show itself produces discourse about traveller credibility, both in relation to the individuals who appear in the various encounters, but also in terms of the general messages that come from the combination of such interactions. At this level, we identify a range of discursive strategies, including giving the floor to officials to explain to camera the reasons for their suspicions and final decisions, and the use of an omniscient narrator who plays a similar role.

Such is the level of discursive inequality that, for instance, two friends returning to Australia after an overseas trip and going through passport control separately – as required for non-family groups – can become a “hidden” fact to be uncovered and construed as suspicious.

Narrator: Officers have just discovered what seems like a strange coincidence. A passenger at another bench has virtually IDENTICAL travel movements. […] Officers now suspect that these two passengers may in fact know each other.

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

This adds another layer of credibility to officials’ border work: along with the show’s narrator, they have a chance to explicitly describe their reasoning processes and the accommodations they offer travellers, to perform procedural fairness for the viewing public.

At the same time, it also provides an additional opportunity to teach the viewing audience to suspect certain types of people and problematize certain attributes or behaviour. We learn, for instance, that people who hold an Italian passport should speak Italian natively, and that not doing so is cause for suspicion.

We learn that travellers from particular countries or ethnicities should be treated with a higher level of suspicion and that their behaviour or explanations require closer scrutiny. The two friends mentioned above weren’t just travelling together – they were travelling to countries in South-East Asia and are themselves of Asian ethnicity. These facts contributed to framing their trip together and their behaviour in the airport as suspicious, where these may otherwise appear completely innocuous.

This is apparent in the individual encounters themselves and how they are narrated, but this is also the case cumulatively, across the television show as a whole: non-white, non-Australian people and those who don’t speak English as a first language are overrepresented as travellers in the show, and can be contrasted with border officials who are predominately white, and “Australian-accented” English speakers (as we discuss in another article).

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Detection of wrongdoing is also overrepresented: in 61 percent of the encounters in our collection, there was a “guilty” outcome: people are detected, fined, have food or goods confiscated, or are arrested or deported. We can imagine that this is vastly disproportionate with the percentage of “wrongdoers” detected in reality. The combined effect of this is that viewers are taught that there is a high level of wrongdoing, meriting a high level of suspicion, and that this needs to be directed primarily at society’s linguistic and racial “others”.

These findings have implications beyond the television show itself: such discourses of suspicion have the potential to encourage viewers to take on personal responsibility for everyday bordering in their own social contexts. They also help to reinforce and garner trust in border policy, procedures and practices, even as it has moved towards criminalizing asylum seekers and other migrants and adopting a “culture of suspicion”.

References

Piller, I., Securing the border of English and Whiteness. Language on the Move, 8 November 2021, https://languageonthemove.com/securing-the-borders-of-english-and-whiteness/
Piller, I., Torsh, H., & Smith-Khan, L. Securing the borders of English and Whiteness. Ethnicities. 2023; 23:5, 706-725. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968211052610
Smith-Khan, L., Five language myths about refugee credibility. Language on the Move, 6 May 2020, https://languageonthemove.com/five-language-myths-about-refugee-credibility/
Smith-Khan, L., Piller, I., Torsh, H. Trust at the border: identifying risk and assessing credibility on reality television. Journal of Law and Society. 2024; 51:4 513–538. https://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12505

Anthea’s new book is being launched at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, on the 20^th of November, with hybrid attendance options available. Event information and free registration are via this link: Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination Tickets, Wed 20/11/2024 at 5:30 pm | Eventbrite

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.

Transcript

Laura Smith-Khan: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Dr. Laura Smith-Khan and I’m a senior lecturer in law at the University of New England, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Anthea Vogl, who is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research takes a critical interdisciplinary approach to the regulation of migrants and non-citizens, and she researches and teaches across refugee and migration law, administrative law and legal theory. She is currently co-leading an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant on private refugee sponsorship in Australia and a national grant examining the health requirement imposed on non-citizens under Australian migration law.

Today we are going to talk about Anthea’s new book, Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination, which is published by Cambridge University Press as part of their series, entitled Cambridge Asylum and Migration Studies.

I’ve read the book, of course, and recently reviewed it for the International Journal of Refugee Law. And, as I say in that review, I particularly appreciated how the book explores the “multiple ways narrative performance is implicated in (both) the conduct and the evaluation of refugee hearings”, and I described the book as “the most substantial and persuasive account to date of the impossible narrative demands placed on people seeking asylum.”

So on that note, Anthea. Congratulations on the book, welcome to the show, and thanks so much for joining us today.

Anthea Vogl: Thanks, Laura. It’s a real pleasure to be here, and thanks for that lovely introduction.

Laura Smith-Khan: My pleasure! To start, I’d like you to introduce the book for us, and perhaps you can explain a little more what it’s about.

Anthea Vogl: So the book really is about what we call refugee status determination. And for listeners who don’t exist in a legal framing, that’s really how the law comes to understand whether or not someone is going to be granted refugee status and believed to be the refugee, as they claim to be according to a particular legal definition.

That is the focus of the book that that question of what we do around refugee status determination at its most general. But the book is fundamentally about what happens when we put refugee status determination into practice, and there has been a lot of work done on refugee status determination. And we can talk in a minute about how, why, it’s such a difficult process, but a lot of the work that has been done on refugee status determination hasn’t necessarily had access to or been able to examine what is called the oral hearing, as part of that process.

A fundamental step in the refugee status determination process is where an asylum seeker comes before a decision maker to explain his or her claim. It’s really difficult to access those hearings. It’s really difficult, because of another thing that the book tries to do, which is to set refugee status determination within the broader context of the regulation of the border, and in particular, the incredibly violent and sometimes lethal means states have used to prevent refugees not from just getting to the border, but getting to that place where States are obligated to assess someone’s right to refugee status within their particular country or territory.

In looking at refugee status determination and the oral hearing, what the book tried to do was access some of those spaces that have been so hard to get into and ask, what happens when an applicant comes before a person empowered by the state to assess and judge their story? And how do those oral exchanges ultimately inform and determine that final decision that sometimes we have access to from the public records of refugee status determination bodies. Sometimes we don’t have access to that decision. And what is the relationship between those two things at a really prosaic level? You know, I was really interested in what is happening in the hearings, and then, more legally, I was interested in the relationship between the evidence that comes out in those hearings and what is finally decided. And at a critical level, a long standing critical engagement with the very premise of refugee law and the idea of border regulation, and only letting certain people cross borders on certain terms.

I was interested in the ways in which state written narratives about refugees, and who is an authentic refugee, and who deserves our protection, influences the kind of stories that are told in those hearings.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, thank you so much. There are so many layers to this. And I really admire how well that you bring all those different threads and those different layers together in the book.

And personally, I can attest to how difficult it can be to access this type of research data – incredibly difficult to get permission to sit in and observe these types of hearings or be able to record them or to access recordings of them. So congratulations even on that first crucial step, especially in Australian context.

And it’s also worth pointing out that in a number of countries the hearings aren’t even usually recorded as an official procedural step, so recordings may not ever exist for hearings as well, and that raises a lot of questions about the accountability of those processes, too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And tracking those gaps, I think is something that is a real challenge for researchers and I think it relates back to the secrecy and control that states seek to maintain over refugee issues and refugee law and practice. And actually, it’s a lot of your work, Laura, that I think has really nicely pointed out that even though – and this is a big part of the book, too, and a really nice intersection between our work – even though it’s the refugee who’s ultimately attributed with the testimony that they bring before decision makers, and they’re considered to be the author or the speaker, and then they are judged on that basis, your work has shown really carefully how actually, there are so many different voices, and so many different people who contribute to that particular testimony. And I’m thinking of your work and Katrijn Maryns’ work, and Marie Jacob’s work too.

And yet the refugee’s held responsible for that testimony in the end, and we have no way of tracing some of those processes, and how that comes about for a range of reasons, but also because it’s so hard to access the data.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah. And I think that’s where your work really comes in to provide a really good evidence base of what is going on behind the scenes, and also how you can have, on the one hand, these ideas of giving refugees a voice, or that, they’re “telling their story”, and that’s put forward as maybe increasing the legitimacy and fairness of the process. But what your book does so well is actually pulls apart what is happening, what is expected, and actually demonstrates so clearly how the demands or the expectations of a certain type of narrative, are controlled by the decision maker, ultimately, both within the hearing, and then also afterwards by the fact that they are the ones that take what has happened in the hearing and reframe it in their decision on both those levels the narrative is never really under the control of the asylum seeker. And that’s just such a great contribution to demonstrate that across all these different examples across Canada and Australia.

But I think maybe we should step back and give a little bit more overview of what the process looks like for someone if they’re seeking protection as a refugee in a country in the global north.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, great. There’s a lot we could say about the content of refugee law and how it operates. But I think it might be useful to focus on the procedure for the purposes of the podcast.

Very briefly, there’s a definition in international refugee law, and it’s often imported into states that have become signatories to the Refugee Convention. Refugees have to prove that they face a well founded fear of persecution on one of five grounds, race, religion, ethnicity, and political opinion and particular social group.

What’s interesting there is that sense that the refugee has to give an account of their own fear on the basis of a particular ground, and that fear has to be both judged to be true on a subjective level, in that the refugee has to themselves have that well-founded fear, but it has to be objectively true, so it has to accord with a legal and evidence-based assessment of whether or not that person has or would have experienced, something to give rise to a fear in their country of origin.

As listeners, as you start to think through who refugees are and how they come before a decision making body in a global north state, what will probably spring into your mind is that people don’t necessarily come with access to the kinds of things that the law takes to be convincing and compelling in terms of forms of evidence. So someone’s fleeing their home state, and they are seeking to prove that their home state has persecuted them or harmed them, or people in their home state have persecuted or harmed them. The chance of being able to access those records, or having indeed left with written or documentary evidence of that having happened, is really slim.

Even where people leave with the most basic forms of documentary evidence which would help their claim. So really simple things, like even identity documents, even those identity documents are not necessarily the kinds of evidence, or they’re not in a category of what we talk about as probative evidence. We can’t even see prove that those written documents are authentic and true. And so there’s already this massive barrier to making a claim.

And in many ways the refugee status determination process and how it works both seeks to respond to that challenge – I think if we read in good faith the setting up of the refugee status determination process, it talks about having to give applicants the benefit of the doubt, because they don’t have other forms of evidence to build their claim for the purpose of the book. Why, that’s really important is because where we’re left is with both written and oral testimony, as the absolute foundation of how most refugees will make a claim before a court.

Sometimes there are other witnesses or people that someone might be able to call. That happens rarely, and sometimes people have had access to really good records, to substantiate their claim interestingly with social media and the digitization of some forms of evidence that’s like added a whole other interesting element to evidence that might be available. But to really summarize what happens, both at the first and sometimes second level of decision making. So before things are reviewed by courts, an asylum seeker comes before a decision maker. He or she or they may or may not have access to legal assistance, and both Canada and Australia are good examples. Without generalizing too much, even in the hearings, those who have access to a lawyer and a lawyer present, it really is the applicant giving testimony to the decision maker and the decision maker questioning and interrogating that evidence for most of the hearing.

And then, very importantly, the other person in the hearing, in almost all cases, is the interpreter. Keeping in mind another core challenge of refugee status determination, which you are, of course, very familiar with Laura, and will probably be of central relevance to listeners is that that the whole process happens across the applicant’s own language and the language of the host country, which are very rarely the same language, but sometimes they are. In all of the hearings that were included in the book, in both Australia and Canada, there was an interpreter present. In one of the hearings one of the applicants was confident with English, and the interpreter dipped in and out, but otherwise the interpreter was also the third voice in the hearing.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, so you’ve got this really strong reliance on both written oral testimony, and very specific requirements in terms of the written testimony in terms of application forms, filling out a lot of different types of information. And there’s some great scholarship around how those different forms of testimony can also then be used to find inconsistencies. And these types of things come up in credibility assessment, too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, and it’s probably worth saying that one of those taken for granted bits of knowledge within refugee status determination and refugee law is that the claim is assessed on the basis of the substance of the claim. So it is assessed in terms of what is being told, and whether the decision maker finds those things to be plausible and true are a key part of that, and whether or not they accord with the legal framework, and also does your claim fit into what the law has said in your country, of where you’re seeking asylum a refugee is, or how it defines refugee.

But a key part of all refugee status determination, precisely because often of this absence of other evidence, is the credibility of the applicant and their evidence. So the applicant themselves, and the credibility of the story that’s being told, or the evidence being given, and credibility assessment in most countries turns on three main criteria: the idea of consistency and coherence that you just referred to and that’s consistency and coherence across multiple tellings. So you have to make sure that you are telling the same story again and again and again, which again, listeners can think about how difficult that is even just in the ordinary course of their own lives, not in an adjudicative setting.

The second criterion is plausibility, so is the story being told plausible. And then a third criterion that comes up is demeanour which has been really roundly criticized in a lot of jurisdictions, and I don’t necessarily address too much in the book, because I wanted to reinforce the ways in which, of all the criteria that have all been criticized, it’s the one, I think, with even less credibility than the other criteria.

But that credibility assessment is a key part of the claim, and it’s almost like a compulsory part of a lot of work on refugee status determination, that as scholars, we all know that decision making turns on the credibility of the applicant, much more so than it does on the legal and factual elements of the claim.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think the demeanour one is quite interesting in the sense that. There is a stronger consensus that it’s not something that should be relied on. But then, maybe it still is, and it’s not explicitly mentioned, or in my own research, I found at least that it’s mentioned when it’s relied on positively. So for, you know, “there are some inconsistencies here, but this person in general seems, you know, authentic” and blah blah, So it can be used in somebody’s favour, and then maybe not mentioned when it goes against them, something along those lines.

But yes, absolutely, the different types of what have been called indicators of credibility. And it really is such a foundational and crucial part of the refugee status determination process

And it’s so important in how your analysis, looking at these different narrative demands, really brings out how credibility or incredibility can be produced through unrealistic expectations of this particular type of narrative, and also the way that the decision maker controls the hearing in such a way that it makes it really difficult for the person seeking asylum to actually perform as they’re required to perform. So I’m really looking forward into drilling down a little bit more into that process.

I’d really like to just briefly talk again about your data that you have. So we’ve already mentioned that you had access to hearings. But could you just explain to us exactly what type of data you collected, where, when and the challenges, you might have faced with that.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, for sure. Essentially, the method at the core of the book was, what is maybe a bit counterintuitively called participant observation of hearings which, some listeners might be familiar with, but I mean, to just to encapsulate it, it was sitting in refugee hearings as they took place, without actively participating in them, beyond making my presence known and seeking permission to be in those spaces.

Interestingly, and relevant to our discussion earlier. All of my access to those spaces came by the refugee applicants themselves. And there was more hostility from the Australian refugee decision making space than the Canadian refugee decision making space in relation to my presence, even though under the relevant statute in Australia, the refugee applicant has the right to allow people into their own hearing, the tribunal, some way into the research, overrode that.

They also have the right to control who is and isn’t in the hearing. It’s a little bit legally grey. But it wasn’t a point I was going to pursue, obviously, in the really delicate and stressful context of someone having their claim assessed, when the Department said, “No, thank you. We don’t want you in the hearing anymore.”

That’s when I started to work with some audio transcripts and recordings of particular hearings in the Australian context. In the Canadian context, both through refugee applicants and through the UNHCR, I attended the hearings.

It’s important to note, I think, for the book, it’s work that came out of my doctoral project, and the hearings really have not, even though the last hearing that I attended was 2015, which doesn’t make it current data. And it’s not current work of mine, but it’s something I really wanted to come back to in terms of publishing and thinking about it. The one thing in thinking that through and thinking about. What does it mean that these hearings don’t continue on into the present day?

I tracked the history of the oral hearing itself. And what has happened to the oral hearing in both jurisdictions. And I guess one of the things that I came to in doing that was that there’s been a lot of reform around refugee status determination processing. And I argued primarily to make it faster and more efficient in ways that disadvantage the applicant.

But really what hasn’t changed. So those changes have happened around the oral hearing and the oral hearing has remained. This central fulcrum on which the whole process turns, and I would say, unfortunately, there’s even more pressure on the applicant getting their claim right in the oral hearing, because timelines have been shorter in the lead up to it, and appeal and review rights have gotten even more attenuated and limited.

So what that ended up as was 15 hearings across both jurisdictions along with the case files for the applicants. And, importantly, the decisions. Coming back to that earlier point, that really interesting question of what was said in the hearing? How did stories and language come up, and how are they assessed and tested? And then what did the decision makers say about what happened in the hearing? There were some really interesting gaps to follow through and comparisons to make.

So it was the hearings themselves, being in the hearings and observing them. And then the case files. And I really used that material to conduct pretty deeply qualitative assessment of what was going on in the hearings. And again, you know, you’re always thinking through methods and trying to be critical about your approach.

At the start, I was hoping to maybe look at one particular ground, or one particular kind of claim or claimant. But really some of those challenges of accessing the hearing influenced this final decision to look across claims and across claimants and across countries of origin.

And the other thing was, I guess what I was looking at was this sense of what was going on in the oral exchange, and the structure and procedure of the hearing so that helped make those things more comparable.

But I would like to really acknowledge work that I think has been really critical looking at particular kinds of claimants. So, LGBTIQ claimants, people making claims on the basis of gendered persecution, particularly women, particular political opinions coming out of particular countries of origin. I think that work’s been really important. I look at some stock stories and assumptions in the hearing and the way narrative works more generally, and they really drill down into the ways in which global north states require particularly racialised people to tell particular stories about themselves when they are, for example, a woman facing harm, or a queer person who hasn’t been able to live safely on the basis of sexuality.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I think I think that’s what’s so great about this quite broad and quite large collection of scholarship, as you say, is that everyone has had different kinds of access to different types of data and different conceptual frameworks as well and different methodologies, but actually so much of it complements each other so well. So we have that ability to draw on that scholarship, and then see how it applies to our particular context, our particular data in such really valuable ways.

And such a great reflection as well, on how, in the one sense, you could potentially-  See, your data is amazing, and I’m very jealous of it. But in terms of the small number of hearings that you got to observe. On the one hand, you could see it as like a gap or a lost opportunity to, as you say, drill down and look at a specific type of claim across a really large number of cases. But, on the other hand, it creates this really fantastic opportunity to look at that bigger picture across those particular hearings, and see what they have in common, or the patterns that you can see emerging from it.

And you’ve also done such fantastic conceptual thinking. And I really think, yeah, as you say, you acknowledge that this has come from your PhD research, which was a number of years ago. But I’m very grateful that you went ahead and did the book, because I think it’s a great contribution. But I also assume, based on my own experience of how my understanding of my research has changed over time, I assume that maybe your development of the concepts or the theories that you’d like to apply to this data has changed over time. Because I think that’s also a really important contribution in the book. The way that you bring in a number of different areas, a number of different theoretical frameworks, and use them to analyze your data.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, that’s such a nice way of thinking about it. And it makes me reflect on the ways in which sometimes, yeah, your analysis can be latent, or you start with an idea, and the more you come back to your work. I think for me that sense of reading the hearing contextually and refusing to just individualise what was going on in the hearing, both in relation to the decision makers actually, and the applicants.

So not understanding that the decision makers have a lot of responsibility for how the hearing works, and your work has looked at this, too, Laura, the really limited ways in which credibility is actually governed, or how we define the credibility criteria themselves, how we understand them, and then how they are implemented and the responsibility the decision maker has leaves for some pretty big, capacious, billowy spaces of legal regulation.

But having said that, yes, coming back to the book, that sense of some of the structural forces at play, both in terms of narrative and language and in terms of the politicization of the hearings that has really continued in a pretty relentless way was important.

But yeah, I guess, as you say, in thinking about, you know the data that you have, and coming back to it, I’m wondering, you know, of its relevance. Some of the law and language work in this space, I guess it’s simpatico in particular ways, because you look at one hearing, and you can look at a paragraph within a hearing and really break down what is happening between, say, an interpreter and an applicant and a decision maker, and there’s so much going on at the level of understanding that even if the hearings were perfectly structured and the fairest possible versions of themselves, there would still be these incredible linguistic, cultural, and adjudicative or contextual barriers to understanding and communicating in that space.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, absolutely. There are so many opportunities to look at the data on so many different levels and make sense of it in so many different ways. And, as you said, also contextualizing the hearings within their political and historical context as well. And I really enjoyed that chapter as well where you gave this overview of that exact thing across both Australia and Canada, and mapped some of the parallels, and also noted some of the differences. And also this really ironic or interesting tension, or seemingly contradictory pattern that emerges between, on the one hand, really, you bigoted, discriminatory, hateful political discussion about people seeking asylum on the one hand, and needing to control and stop their entry and deter them and punish them. And, on the other hand, at the same time, this development of what seems to be oh, we need to make the processes more fair, and you know, set them out in a bit more detail and have really good procedures. And there’s that weird tension, because those things are happening similar like simultaneously, it’s really quite interesting. So then you’re left with these processes that look very rigorous, trying to make sure that everyone’s accommodated, and we can communicate across language, barriers and all these things. But, on the other hand, it’s all happening against this really horrible kind of political discourse in the broader public space.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, and trying, yes you say, there’s a real tension, and I think you know the book very much I guess aims to be a critical theoretical take on what’s going on in the hearings and what’s demanded of refugee applicants as testimony givers. But you know, as an advocate, and someone really committed to refugee justice on the ground I wanted to make really clear that we can’t lose sight of in the context is as it is a commitment to as fair a process as possible. Even if I’m you know, pretty directly critical of procedural fairness or improving credibility standards in this context as fixing the process. I don’t think it will, but the hearing itself and access to legal assistance and access to interpreters, you know, these are really fundamentally important things.

And when people had no ability to put their claims. So, looking at that history, you know, it comes from a complete, almost completely discretionary determination of people’s claims into what was a reform around individual rights to fair hearings both in Australia and Canada, and the right to be heard as a form of administrative justice and natural justice.

You know, I think, given the context, those things are really very important. But then, you see the way in which that individualizing feeds back into this broader narrative of authentic and inauthentic refugees, reinforces, and indeed generates and creates stories of genuine and credible asylum seekers as against bogus and unbelievable and incredible asylum seekers. And the person who bears the responsibility for that, you know, is sometimes, is the asylum seeker at the center of this assessment process regardless sometimes. Not always. You know there are some. There are concessions made, and I think, importantly, really important, research. Looking at the challenges, particular kinds of applicants facing, speaking their claims and narrating their claims.

But you know, generally, it’s the applicant that bears the responsibility of navigating that system and putting forward a claim that it is deemed to be credible. I think it’s important as scholars and thinkers that we don’t become inured or numb, or we stop forgetting how shocking that is. You know that, regardless of what an applicant has been through, or what testimony that they’re giving, their testimony must meet these particular standards of evidence giving, which I guess the book tries to draw on this the amazing literature at the intersection of law and psychology, which has said these are just, entirely unreasonable expectations to have of people’s language, and what the human memory can and can’t do generally. Just, you know, regardless of what might have happened to one person as an individual, but particularly in the context of anyone who suffered major violence, harm and trauma. And what that does to language.

Laura Smith-Khan: Absolutely. And that, yeah, we then still expect these individual people to be able to perform in these very, very specific ways.

Okay. So I think I would like to ask you a little bit in more detail now, because I’ve been hinting at this. What exactly is demanded, what types of different narratives or expectations did you find.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. One thing that I that motivated the project and led to, I guess a series of findings was a bit of curiosity around what we mean when we talk about narrative in law and narrative studies and law and literature. So these bodies of work were really helpful, and I think particularly law and storytelling, which has come out of critical race theory and really looked at, you know, who gets to tell stories before the law who gets to judge them, and which ones are credible. For the refugee hearings and the book, I think drilling down into the specific narrative demands made of refugees, and the construction of narrative really informed the findings of the book.

Because it’s one thing to say, yeah. People, we demand stories. We demand people tell stories. But what does that mean? And why is it a problem, I think, for refugee applicants?

There are a couple of things. One, very significantly was that idea of a really Western narrative form which is temporarily located, even if it might not be chronological, that it’s sequenced in a way that is explicable. And that there’s a sense of most narrative studies talking one way or another about causation or connection between events and an accounting of that causation. So you can’t say, you know, “I went to the shop today, and tomorrow I brush my teeth.” That doesn’t make a narrative, because you’re meant to, you know, account for why you’re telling these things in a particular way, in a particular order, and someone might say that was out of order, because you should brush your teeth first.

So that sense of refugees being able to account for the connection between events in their lives and account for them in a way that – and this is a narrative, that coming from Western and Anglo European narrative studies – where there’s a real sense of not only being able to explain causality between events that happened to you, but that they should all come together in a sense of what’s sometimes called moral closure, a moral lesson or meaning. So a story has to have a particular meaning, and that that has to make sense. So that comes back to that credibility standard of plausibility. So it’s only plausible if you can sequence it, account for connections between events, and then provide some form of moral meaning or moral closure.

And this is the work of Marita Eastmond and a range of other really great critical non legal scholars often talking about refugee status determination. That’s not how things happen to people, and seeing that play out in the hearings was really apparent, making things make sense in a particular way, accounting for connections between events.

And then the other really important part of narrative studies as it connects to the work that I did, and what I saw in the hearings, was an accounting, a demand for refugees to account for themselves, like to understand themselves, and be able to really clearly explain how and why they did things, and to do that in a way that denied ambivalence, denied confusion, denied the impact of the circumstances that they were in that might have led to arbitrary decision, making or decision making that I can’t account for.

And then really, I wanted to say shockingly, but it was more infuriating, listening to decision makers wanting refugees to also account for other actors in their story. So you can imagine.

Laura Smith-Khan: Oh, my God! Yes.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, it’s so. You know, this is where you start to see how literature helps us understand why this is a problem.

Work has been done on this in a more legal framing. But the idea that the applicant would have to account for the decisions of their persecutors. So if a persecutor let them, if someone was let out of jail, even though they were then you know they were then free of their captors. But then, say, re-imprisoned. If that didn’t make sense to the decision maker, the refugee had to account for why a state jailer might let someone free from arbitrary detention.

And again, the need to do that with clarity and certainty in order to reassure a decision maker in a sense of what might or might not be consistent or plausible, was really disturbing. And then I connected that to a narrative voice, or a particular version of the coming of age novel, or what gets called the Bildungsroman in German, because that’s where it’s said to come from. Which is the formation novel, which is like an all-knowing narrator. So if you did just.

Laura Smith-Khan: Omniscient.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, exactly. So. It’s like the refugee applicant, in the hearings I observed, didn’t just have to tell a story that ended in this moral closure of becoming a refugee and a resolution to seek confidently seek refugee status. But along the way had to account for sometimes really minute aspects of the story that they themselves were part of, or that they were subject to as a narrator, in order to make the claim credible to a decision maker.

So to summarize that, I think, looking at the elements of narrative a little bit more theoretically, or looking at narrative structure, and then asking how they informed, or how they came up in the hearings, was a useful way to come back to a broader politics of storytelling and how it was operating in the hearing.

And I really appreciated, when you said earlier, you know, we assume that this right to tell one’s story is something that is a positive development and that, you know, being able to – and yes, storytelling itself has been cast as a really important part of, I think, campaigns for political justice, and I think that is true.

But there’s also a disciplining function of telling particular stories and people are disciplined into being certain kinds of subjects before the law, and it’s really clear the kinds of subjects refugees have to be in order to fit within the storytelling frame that decision makers accepted as true.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I when I was reading those parts of the book, I was – you know, waving my hands around and screaming almost. And I really appreciated like, because they resonated a lot with me, things that I’ve observed myself in work contexts.

But the theoretical frameworks that you had to work with from narrative studies and law and literature really helped name or you know, account for what’s happening there and why it’s so problematic. And it’s this, expectation, as you said, that we have somebody who not only has to account for themselves and explain why every single choice that they’ve made along the way is completely rational and well informed, and not emotional, or needs to be more emotional, or, you know, whatever the expectations are, but also that they have to account for every single other person who’s part of “their story” along the way, including sometimes even they’re persecutors.

Of course they can’t get inside the head of other people, and people do irrational things all the time. Or you know, there are motivations that we don’t understand informing why they make the choices that they do.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, just so problematic too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And I think you know, what was really apparent was when that wasn’t. It happened in so many of the hearings that there were a couple of hearings that I point to where it’s like. Oh, no! There was a space for the applicant to express what happened without having to take responsibility for imbuing that with plausibility, sense, rationality, as you say, and like moral meaning.

And that burden of having to do that was was so conspicuous in its absence. Because you started to say, Oh, this is this could look significantly different. I think it wouldn’t solve all the problems or the fact that we still don’t have great indicia. We don’t have great ways to tell, to determine with any degree of certainty what truth is in these contexts.

But yeah, as you say, when it was there, it was just such a barrier to being able to just provide the evidence that was required of the applicants as they were coming before decision makers.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, and something that a lot of the literature talks about especially in the Australian context, and perhaps also in the Canadian context, the idea that theoretically this is supposed to be an inquisitorial process where the decision maker is responsible for, you know, searching around for evidence and helping to produce the evidence. But in reality, at least in these particular contexts, it does seem quite adversarial. Right? That’s maybe a reflection of our particular legal systems.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And I think again, yeah, narrative theory was helpful in thinking through the different reasons we tell stories and the different settings that we tell them in, and how that will inflect the story that’s being told, what can be said, what can’t be said, how we might imagine an audience receives our testimony or testimony more generally.

And I think one of the things that became apparent in thinking through this idea of a narrative occasion is that it’s not easy to tell one’s story to begin with. But if there is a context in which a decision maker is also impeding your ability to meet these narrative standards. Then I guess that’s when for me the argument about credibility and decision making spaces as gatekeeping comes together because one of the findings and I think this has come through in other people’s work because it’s clear in decisions.

So a lot of work in the credibility space has also looked at the written reasons and written decisions. But people that I observed, the hearings that I observed, applicants were asked to tell the story and to meet some of these standards that we’ve just spoken about. And then the hearing itself did all of these things to just make that actually impossible. So even if the applicant could meet those demands the behaviour of a decision maker, the norms-

And so again, not necessarily bringing this home to individual decision makers because I didn’t- it wasn’t an ethnography of decision making. I didn’t have a quantitative number of, it wasn’t a quantitative study of how decision makers behave.

But the norms, as you say, around how the hearing is conducted was not to open up a space where someone could present narrative on their own terms, and then be judged on the on the terms of the decision maker and hearing it was instead, I guess what I observed was fragmentation decision makers interjecting themselves into applicant’s stories and actually asking exactly the kinds of questions that even the very limited guidance, legal guidance, or usually policy guidance, on credibility that exists, asking those kinds of questions. So the guidance that we have generally says it’s not uncommon for people to forget dates. It’s not uncommon for memory to be interrupted by traumatic events. And so that’s all there.

And yet, you know, decision makers really pushing for “did this”, not just “did this happen before or after this other thing?” But you know, “when did this happen? What year was it? You earlier said it was early in the year. Now you’re saying it was October. Why are you doing that?” So really interrogating and looking for moments where the credibility criteria wasn’t being met against the credibility guidance, such as it is, that exists.

So yeah, that that sense of the inquisitorial hearing was absolutely, apart from, I would say two of the hearings that I observed, just really absent from the hearings that were part of the study.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah. So even where there are guidelines with very specific advice, the fact that they just seem to be routinely overlooked or ignored is yeah, very, quite concerning yeah. And you’ve touched on another really important chapter in your book in terms of the conduct of the hearing and the fact that we have this idea of applicants having the space, and the floor, I guess, in communication to be able to just say things, tell their story. But what that actually looks like in terms of the hearing structure can be very different.

And I think you talked about the difference between Canada and Australia as well in terms of the order of the hearing.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. There was a similar kind of unpredictability around how the hearings went. So I guess that was another finding. And I must say, I attended hearings first in the context of, before coming to research, in the context of refugee advocacy.

And I really did, I think it’s not naive to think that if you have a hearing where a refugee believes that his or her or their story is being assessed that they will be able to tell their story. I mean, I look back on it, and I think it’s naive. It feels a bit naive, but, as you say, it’s like, well, here’s the space. It’s an open space, tell your story. It’s not how it works.

Sometimes the Canadian hearings, even though they were, they sometimes they made much clearer that they were just going to interrogate aspects that the decision maker found implausible, or the aspects of the decision maker was concerned to get more information about. And that was done more predictably. So, even though it wasn’t this open space for storytelling on one level, that benefited applicants because they were told what was coming at them

In the Australian hearings, a little bit about how the hearing is introduced, or how the decision maker sets up the hearing, when the applicant walks in and begins the hearing and it was, it was still- You know, an applicant would still be forgiven for thinking they’re about to be able to tell their story, and to do that in something of a chronological way. What we sometimes would call just for shorthand, and maybe even non lawyers know this, the idea of evidence in chief. So you get to tell your story before someone tests it. That really didn’t happen in any of the hearings that I observed.

And so the that sense of being able to create coherence and create plausibility was denied to the applicant, even though you know a lot of work on law and language and credibility in the hearings and Law and Psych has pointed out, it’s, you know there are barriers to doing that, in any event.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I think it’s probably worth just as a slight aside to explain to listeners who aren’t familiar with the setting that in the Australian context that the hearings that you were observing were a second hearing. So there’d already been an application process, and there’d already been an interview with the Immigration Department, and that hadn’t gone well, and the particular person had been, you know, rejected. They had their claims rejected. And then, after that, the second stage hearing was with a review body that looks at the whole claim afresh. So they aren’t supposed to just look at the first decision, and see whether that was done correctly, but actually look afresh at any fresh claims, or you know what’s happened since then, and the whole claim. So on the one hand, there could potentially be the expectation that they’re just reviewing the existing record. But ideally they would give the applicants a complete fresh chance to share their story, as it were.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, yeah, that’s always. I teach a refugee law clinic. And it’s always so difficult to explain to students that this process is meant to be fresh review of the original decision, so just a rehearing of the decision as it was first made. And of course that’s not what happens in the hearings, and as advocates you’re always you’re already, and the book talks a little bit about and there’s been great work done by Jesse Hambly and Nick Gill and others about the role of lawyers, and also a lot of the law and language schools, too. Great recent piece by Katrijn Maryns and Marie Jacobs about the role of lawyers and their politics.

But I think, what really comes through when you’re looking at the way in which the hearings operate, and what the applicant can and can’t say is that there’s no version where there’s an ability to clearly articulate your story on your own terms. And so you then, you’re just fed back into this process where the decision maker is picking up on things that he or she has already observed as a problem with your narrative.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yep. Starting from that point of problem or distrust.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: To somehow work from that back footed position, which is, yeah, a whole different challenge.

Yes. Wow. So yeah, I think it was valuable to read about your reflections in terms of you know. What does all this mean for our ability to make an impact? And you know, what is it? Does this lead us to any kind of suggested reform? Or you know, what does this all mean, especially when we’re looking at that broader question of structural unfairness, that really comes out so clearly in the book.

Do you have any hope?

Anthea Vogl: I mean, look. One thing, that without being a prescription of reforms to fix the process which the book just, you know, is really open about that. That’s not. That would be that would come out of, or that some of these observations would hope to inform that maybe accepting that some of the broader political challenges, or that the reforms have to take place in light of attention to the idea that there’s some, if we have in Australia, and you know Canada does its own share of this increasingly with the US-Canada border.

If we have a regime that’s willing to exert such brutal violence on people seeking to cross the borders and make an asylum claim, what does it mean, then, to demand, or how do we understand that alongside, is a real question. I think a very sincere and genuine quest of many scholars, advocates, lawyers, decision makers to make this process fair and equitable.

I think that they’re the two really hard things to hold within the frame together. I mean that, having been said, I do think the interdisciplinary work that has been done on the problems with the process. And I am not just saying this because we’re conducting a law and language podcast you know the work that has been done by law and language, and like law and, the intersection of law and language attending to what goes on in the hearing, and how decisions are made.

The other interdisciplinary, that big body of interdisciplinary work, looking at the intersection between law and psychology, and trying to really understand how these incredibly unfair and incorrect, you know, just blatantly incorrect inferences are drawn in the hearings, gives me hope.

Because I don’t think, you know –  I think there is a gap between the politics and also the will of decision makers and decision making bodies to make good decisions. That having been said, you know, I think that site of interdisciplinary knowledge is crucial for understanding legal processes here. I don’t think we get very far with a legal analysis of refugee decision making.

So in that kind of sense of grounding reforms, I think it’s really important. And the other thing that I do think, and I try and talk about this at the end of the book, if we are stuck with this process, if we, and I know a lot of things are on the horizon, including AI and Automated decision making, which will require us as researchers and advocates interested in justice for good decision making and refugee justice, we’ll have to engage with those things.

But I think if the hearing is in its current form, working hard to preserve the quality of the procedure and people’s access to good legal advice and proper interpreters and proper timelines before and after the hearing is part of the struggle in the interim.

I think there’s really good work. I do think the critical work which has just really come at credibility as lacking. I mean your own work. But really, the critical cultural studies work about the problems with all of these stereotypes that exist within credibility assessment.

Even at the level of international NGOs, maybe not yet government, there is a real consensus that credibility is dysfunctional, like the credibility assessment process is not working, and I do hope that they will work on that, that there will be an ability to really think of something. I don’t think that will solve the problems, but it affords a little bit more justice in these testimonial spaces and spaces of decision making.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, for sure. While ever we’re working within the existing system, it is really heartening to see, I think, at least at an individual level, lawyers and also decision makers being quite receptive to that type of interdisciplinary research.

Anthea Vogl: Interest.

Laura Smith-Khan: And I guess we just all have, you know, a kind of quite hefty duty and responsibility to communicate it to them in ways they are going to take it on and use it productively within the problematic context in which we we’re all doing our work.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, I mean, yeah. So true. I mean, sometimes I catch myself. I’m not pessimistic. But I’m kind of you know, I think it’s important to always think politically and contextually. And you know, I was like, I just don’t think, you know, coming to a pretty negative conclusion. But like, yeah, towards the end of the book.

Anthea Vogl: Gregor Noll recently also wrote something, so a scholar of credibility and refugee assessment for a long time, reflecting on whether or not we can make RSD work in the context of the current credibility standards, and I think the work of Jane Herlihy, who has also engaged with this.

And you know that there’s just a really clear no, you know, there’s not a reformist agenda. I don’t think that works around the credibility assessment, the current credibility criteria, as they’re currently expressed. And then what that looks like in these hearings. So even though I don’t mean to be, I was like, “am I being too pessimistic?” You know “is it too much of a harsh conclusion?” But I think that kind of consensus, and then the receptiveness of at least trying to think of other ways, to approach testimony is hugely important. Unless we really take seriously the problem of individualized status determination which I don’t think states will be doing away with anytime soon.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yes, absolutely. I think I personally felt that you did a really good job of very explicitly, you know, drawing a line, really making it clear that you know it’s not just enough to walk away from reading this book and say, “Oh, well, you know, we can just tweak this little bit, or just avoid doing that particular thing, or requiring this, or don’t interrupt,” or you know these little things that we can check off the list, and then everything’s going to be fine, not enough. And we can’t accept that as good enough. And I think that’s a really powerful and important statement to walk away from with this book.

I thought it was really well expressed. And yeah, it is very easy to just fall into cynicism when you’re working in this space, but also to be able to say specifically, you know, these are the things that I’m identifying in this work. This is what other people are identifying. This is what we can say within this system, but to acknowledge that the system is fundamentally flawed within itself, and while ever it exists, as it is, there’s a limit to achieving the ultimate goal of, you know truly fair processes and affording everyone protection when they need it. Yeah, hopefully, that’s not too glum.

Anthea Vogl: No. And I think, yeah, I’m reminded of yeah, of Hilary Evans Cameron’s work, who’s worked in this space. And you know, she really reinforces that in the search for truth that our focus should be on – the state’s focuses on the danger of a false positive, you know, giving someone status when they “shouldn’t” have been given status because they didn’t have a real claim. And you know, like shifting the focus to actually, a false negative. You know? How do we actually attend to the ways in which decision making that should be the focus of our concerns, given what refugee law regulates and what’s at stake in these decisions.

Laura Smith-Khan: Absolutely. I find that argument, I’ve heard that one from her as well, so persuasive that it’s much more important to protect against or avoid false negatives, you know rejections that shouldn’t have been rejections rather occasionally, you know, “letting someone in” who, you know, doesn’t “deserve our protection”. And I’ve spoken with lawyers as well, who make a parallel between this particular setting and credibility and the criminal law. You know, we give people the benefit of the doubt. We assume someone is innocent until proven guilty rather than the other way around, and the stakes are just as high or arguably higher in this particular setting. So why not try something similar here? Yeah.

If we can address the larger socio-political context in which all of it…Yeah, to to be worked on today and in the future.

Anthea Vogl: That small problem. Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: Thanks so much for speaking with me today, Anthea, and congratulations once again on this really incredible contribution that you’ve made to this very important scholarship. I understand that you have a book launch which is coming up fairly soon. Could you share the details with us?

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, so the book came out earlier this year. But these things take more time than you anticipate. So on the 20th of November here. I’m currently, I should have said, I’m so sorry I should have said I’m here in Gadigal land, on Gadigal Land, in Sydney. We are having a book launch at the Centre for International Law and the Centre for Criminology, Law and Justice at UNSW. And the UNSW Kaldor Centre would have the details and the registration link. So I’m really looking forward to that. I’m grateful to those centres for launching the book, and it’ll be just an hour discussion at 5.30 in a few weeks from now.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, it’s not too far away, I think hopefully, we will have this podcast up and published before then, so we can publicize it. And I’ll be able to include a link to the invitation.

Anthea Vogl: Amazing. That’d be great. And it is also a hybrid for people who are listening from places other than Sydney, it’s a hybrid event. So there’s an online attendance option.

Laura Smith-Khan: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thanks again.

Anthea Vogl: Thank you. Thanks for such wonderful questions, Laura, and you are absolutely the best person for engaging with the book. So it’s been really a pleasure to speak to you about it.

Laura Smith-Khan: So wonderful to read it, and thanks for taking the time to discuss it with us, and thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time!

References

Berg, Laurie & Millbank, Jenni (2009). Constructing the Personal Narratives of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Asylum Claimants. Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 195-223.

Eastmond, Marita (2007). Stories as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research. Journal of Refugee Studies, vol 20, no. 2, pp. 248-264.

Evans Cameron, Hilary (2018). Refugee Law’s Fact-Finding Crisis: Truth, Risk and the Wrong Mistake (Cambridge University Press).

Hambly, Jessica & Gill, Nick (2020). Law and Speed: Asylum Appeals and the Techniques and Consequences of Legal Quickening. Journal of Law and Society, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 3-28.

Herlihy, Jane & Turner, Stuart W (2009). The Psychology of Seeking Protection. International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 21, pp. 171-192.

Jacobs, Marie & Maryns, Katrijn (2022). Managing Narratives, Managing Identities: Language and Credibility in Legal Consultations with Asylum Seekers. Language in Society, vol 51, no. 3, pp. 375-402.

Noll, Gregor (2021). Credibility, Reliability, and Evidential Assessment, in C Costello, M Foster & J McAdam (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law (Oxford University Press), ch. 33.

Smith-Khan, Laura (2019). Why Refugee Visa Credibility Assessments Lack Credibility: A Critical Discourse Analysis. Griffith Law Review, vol 28, no. 4, pp 406-430.

Vogl, Anthea (2024). Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination (Cambridge University Press)

What: Public seminar
When: October 08, 2024, 1-3pm
Where: Macquarie University, Wallumattagal Campus, 01 Central Courtyard 204

Guest lecture abstract:

Communicating credibly in refugee status determination: How beliefs about language can affect decision-making

Dr Laura Smith-Khan, School of Law, University of New England

To gain refugee protection, asylum seekers must pass through demanding interview and application procedures to convince migration officials that they and their claims are credible. Communication is an essential, yet highly complex and demanding, element of these processes.

While asylum authorities highlight the many measures they take to ensure procedural fairness, including accommodating cultural and linguistic diversity, a closer look uncovers ongoing challenges.

This presentation shares research findings on language and credibility in Australian asylum procedures, focusing on a 2020 appeal decision from the Federal Court of Australia (FCA) (Smith-Khan, 2023). It draws on sociolinguistic scholarship to critically compare the original decision-maker’s approach with the approach taken by the FCA judge.

In doing so the presentation identifies and challenges problematic beliefs about language on which credibility-based rejections sometimes rely. It argues that the FCA decision provides an example of better practice, demonstrating that approaches reflecting sociolinguistic understandings of language allow for a fairer assessment of credibility.

Reference

Smith-Khan, L. (2023) Incorporating Sociolinguistic Perspectives in Australian Refugee Credibility Assessments: the Case of CRL18. Journal of International Migration & Integration 24 (Suppl 4), 727–743. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-022-00937-2

We discuss discursive management in the context of police first responders and domestic violence victims, focusing on Kate’s research in her 2024 paper ‘“Can I Have a Look?”: The Discursive Management of Victims’ Personal Space During Police First Response Call-Outs to Domestic Abuse Incidents’.

Using body cam footage from police call outs for domestic violence incidents, this paper focuses on how the interaction between police and domestic violence victims is managed. The interaction analysis reveals the impact of the context – in this case, the victims’ personal space – which police must enter in order to perform their role and responsibilities as first responders.

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.

Reference

Steel, K. (2024). “Can I Have a Look?”: The Discursive Management of Victims’ Personal Space During Police First Response Call-Outs to Domestic Abuse Incidents. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 37(2), 547-572. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10050-x

For related content, see our “Language and Law” category.

Transcript (coming soon)