The logo on the side of the bus shelter

Latin at the bus stop

Recently, I was out for a walk when it started to rain. Seeking shelter in a nearby bus stop, I had time to look around, and I noticed something I had never noticed before although I must have seen it often: a Ku-Ring-Gai Council logo.

The logo is a circle of about 20 centimeters in diameter. It depicts two cartoon characters, one sitting, one standing, encircled by the words “KU-RING-GAI COUNCIL” and “SERVIENDO GUBERNO.”

The cartoon characters are presumably intended to depict two Aboriginal men of an earlier period. The drawing is crude, and the image seems retrograde, out of place, and just plain weird. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about some dumb schoolboy graffiti but about a high-quality official logo emblazoned into the plexiglass wall of a bus shelter.

I have been struggling to make sense of it since I first noticed it.

The main council logo (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The context

Ku-Ring-Gai Council is a local government area on Sydney’s North Shore. It has close to 120,000 inhabitants and happens to be Australia’s most socioeconomically privileged area.

The logo I noticed at the bus stop is not the main logo used by Ku-ring-gai Council but an older version. The current main logo depicts a stylized landscape.

However, the logo on the bus stop is not just a historical logo, either: it appears on bus stops of a certain age (less than 10 years old); it appears on signs for bushwalking trails; and it appears on the web.

So, we are dealing with a legacy logo that might be in the process of being phased out but is still imprinted on the landscape.

Indigenous Ku-ring-gai

Ever since I first came to Australia, I’ve liked the romanticism of the name “Ku-ring-gai”. It’s not only the name of a large council area, but also of a suburb where I lived for many years, and a national park I love to explore.

The O’Rourke Family Crest (Image credit: orourkerundle.com)

Like many non-Indigenous Australians, I was, for a long time, under the impression that “Ku-ring-gai” – or a version thereof – was the name of the original inhabitants of northern Sydney. The name made the area more “authentic” for me and seemed to connect the area where I live to its precolonial past.

Inevitably, it turned out to be a naïve fantasy.

A 2015 report by the Aboriginal Heritage Office showed that the term “Ku-ring-gai” was the 19^th century invention of a Scottish schoolteacher. The word may – or may not – have been used by some pre-colonial Indigenous people for – well, we don’t know what.

The report concludes:

It is unfortunate that the term Guringai has become widely known in northern Sydney and it is understandable that people wish to use it as it is convenient to have a single word to cover the language, tribe/nation, identity and culture of a region. However, it is based on a nineteenth century fiction and the AHO [Aboriginal Heritage Office] would argue that the use of the term Guringai or any of its various spellings such as Kuringgai is not warranted given its origin and previous use. It is not authentic to the area, it was coined by a non-Aboriginal person and it gives a misleading impression of the connectivity of some original clan boundaries. It is part of the story of this place that there is no certainty over tribal names, language groups or dreaming stories. To project the opposite is to continue this fiction. (p. 40)

On stolen land

Student uniforms get Latin mottos out into the streets (Image credit: Herald Sun)

Today, Indigenous people in the Ku-ring-gai area are most notable by their absence. The 2016 census recorded 0.2% Aboriginal inhabitants for Ku-ring-gai Council, well below the national average of 2.8%, and even well below the Greater Sydney average of 1.5%.

Why this is so can be summed up quickly: the Sydney area is where the British colonization of Australia began and the Sydney people bore the brunt of the initial invasion, including frontier violence, new diseases brought along by Europeans, and dispossession.

We live on stolen land here.

Still, this is not something polite people like to say and the Council website mutters incoherently about the absence of Indigenous people:

The arrival of Lt James Cook in 1770 devastated in what amounts to the blink of an eye an incomparable and ancient people.
Those not lost completely were altered as survivors gathered into new groups. Much of what we do know about Sydney’s clans must be gleaned from archaeological remains.
While there are some families who have identified links to original Sydney clans-people, very few traditional stories remain about the sites and landscapes of the Ku-ring-gai area.

Latin motto on a military honor roll (Image credit: Monuments Australia)

I also take these ramblings to be an interpretation of sorts of the stick figures in the logo: the mythical Indigenous cartoon characters suggest authenticity and belonging for non-Indigenous Australians.

In the same way that the current logo symbolizes nature and the land through stylized trees, the legacy logo does so through the depiction of stylized Aboriginal people.

“By serving, I rule!”

While the imagery projects an idyllic fantasy about belonging, the Latin motto accompanying the two Aboriginal cartoon characters in the logo is about power and possession.

The motto SERVIENDO GUBERNO is not accompanied by a translation. As the study of Latin has become exceedingly rare, I’m guessing that few people will be able to translate for themselves, and likely just ignore the motto.

For those who can be bothered, a now-defunct council website provides this explanation:

The Ku-ring-gai Council motto, ‘serviendo guberno’, means ‘I govern by serving’ and has been used by Council since 1928. It is included in the logo to reaffirm Council’s fundamental commitment to serving the community. (quoted from Friends of Ku-ring-gai Environment)

The logo of private boys’ school Scots College (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Mottos are notoriously ambiguous, and this is one possible interpretation. But it is not the full story. My translation is “By serving, I rule.”

What kind of service?

Let’s start with serviendo. The etymological connection with “service” is obvious but what kind of service? Just friendly customer service? Probably not.

The motto serviendo guberno has long been used in the coat-of-arms of a knightly Irish clan, the O’Rourkes, and is clearly associated with military service there. From armed service, the idea of service inherent in the motto later seems to have become broadened a bit to all forms of service that men render to the nation:

Since the demise of the Gaelic order O’Rourkes have continued to follow the proud tradition of serving their nation as soldiers, priests, teachers, civil servants and firefighters. (Another O’Rourke website)

The martial interpretation of serviendo is also backed up by its use in war memorials such as the Sandakan Memorial dedicated to members of the Australian and British armed forces who served in World War II in Borneo.

Who rules?

The Latin verb gubernare has obvious associations with “govern.” It can also mean “to direct, rule, guide.”

“Serviendo guberno” on a war memorial (Image credit: NSW War Memorial Register)

It is here used in the simple present first person singular: “I rule.”

Why would council identify as “I”? Surely, “we” or some agentless form would make much more sense.

One way to interpret the first-person singular is to put the motto into the mouth of the individual colonist, a white male subject. Alternatively, the “I” might be read as that of the sovereign; not the democratic sovereign of the people, of course, but the individual sovereign of the monarch – the Crown as the legitimizing force of colonization.

Why Latin?

Non-English monolingual signage is exceedingly rare in Australia. Where such signage appears, the language in question is often Latin.

In addition to Ku-ring-gai Council, many institutions have Latin mottos and slogans. All the following examples appear in Latin only, without translation. The translations in brackets are mine.

The Monuments Australia database shows many war memorials that include slogans such as “Quo fas et gloria ducunt” (“Where right and glory lead”) or “Pro patria” (“For the fatherland”).

“Masculinity is being enacted” says this school logo (my translation) (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Schools often have Latin mottos. And they really get Latin out into the street as school children sport the mottos on their backpacks, uniforms, and caps.

Examples include “Virile agitur” (“Masculinity is being enacted”), “Utinam patribus nostris digni simus” (“May we were worthy of our fathers”), or “vi et animo” (“with force and courage”).

Australian universities also have a thing for Latin phrases, from ANU’s “Naturam primum cognoscere rerum” (“To know the nature of things first”) to Sydney’s notoriously confusing “Sidere mens eadem mutato” (“The same spirit under different stars”).

Latin is supposedly a dead language. But there is probably more Latin signage in the Australian linguistic landscape than there is signage in any Indigenous language.

Like the cartoon characters in the center of the logo, the function of Latin in these mottos is symbolic. The Latin phrases emblazoned on Australia’s institutional linguistic landscape do not per se mean much: too few people know Latin for this to be the case; and some of the explanations, translations and interpretations provided on institutional websites are – linguistically speaking – pure fantasy.

The use of Latin is another way to anchor Australia’s whiteness in history. Latin symbolically links Australian institutions to European deep history, to a history that happened long before the colonization of Australia: classical antiquity, the Roman Empire, and medieval Christianity.

Marking white possession and belonging

Together, the Aboriginal cartoon characters and the incomprehensible Latin motto do two things in a place where both the presence of actual Indigenous people and any meaningful use of the Latin language is negligible. First, the mythical – in contrast to physical, material, or real – presence of Indigenous people offers non-Indigenous Australians a fantasy of belonging. Second, Latin provides the same illusion but in starker terms: not as a fuzzy feeling but as the legitimacy of possession. Together, they mask unbelonging and erase dispossession.

My thinking about the logo and Latin in the Australian linguistic landscape has greatly benefitted from Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. The author argues that the national belonging of non-Indigenous Australians is predicated on their willful forgetting of the fundamentals of their residence in this land: colonial conquest, racism, and the dispossession of Indigenous Australians.

Indigenous Australians can never forget or overlook the evidence of their dispossession. For non-Indigenous Australians it is easy to forget and not to notice – we have built a world that provides a fantasy of belonging while hiding the original theft.

Polish refugee section of the Catholic cemetery in Tehran

When Kimie Takahashi and myself interviewed participants for Japanese on the Move, our video exhibition of transnational life-stories, one of our interviewees, artist Mayu Kanamori, asked to conduct the interview in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery, where she wanted to show us the final resting place of the first known Japanese settler in Australia. Mayu raised a number of questions about the spiritual belonging of transnationals and about ‘death on the move.’ I was reminded of that conversation with Mayu during my visit to Tehran’s Christian Doulab Cemetery.

Death far from home

The Polish section occupies about three quarters of the Catholic cemetery and constitutes the final resting place of almost 2,000 men, women and children who died in Tehran between 1942-1945.

The story of the Poles lying in Iranian soil is one of the less well-known tragedies of World War II. As part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact what was then Eastern Poland (and is today part of Belarus and Ukraine) was annexed by the Soviets in 1939. Around 1.5 million Poles were deported from the area to camps in Siberia. The vast majority of these died in the following months under horrific circumstances. Only around 250,000 of the deported Poles are known to have survived in Siberia. The survivors were released in 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union so that they could join in the war effort against the Nazis. However, many of these survivors chose to flee instead and around 115,000 managed to reach Allied-occupied Iran.

Two of the headstones in the Polish refugee section

Making it to Iran was like reaching the Promised Land for the evacuees, as one of them recalls in her memoirs:

Exhausted by hard labor, disease and starvation – barely recognizable as human beings – we disembarked at the port of Pahlavi [present-day Bandar-e Anzali]. There, we knelt down together in our thousands along the sandy shoreline to kiss the soil of Persia. We had escaped Siberia and were free at last. We had reached our longed-for Promised Land. (quoted from Ryszard Antolak, “Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942.” ParsTimes)

For a few years, the Polish community flourished in Tehran:

Something more than food and clothing are necessary for the human spirit to survive and grow. Art and Culture are antibodies to feelings of despondency and decay, and within a few months of their arrival, the exiles had set up their own theatres, art galleries, study circles, and radio stations all over the city. Artists and craftsmen began to give exhibitions. Polish newspapers began to spring up; and restaurants began to display Polish flags on the streets.

Among the organizations formed to care for the educational and cultural needs of the exiles was the influential Institute of Iranian Studies begun by a small group of Polish academicians. In three years from 1943 to 1945 this group published three scholarly volumes and scores of other articles on Polish-Iranian affairs. (Ryszard Antolak, “Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942.” ParsTimes)

Memorial stone at the center of the Polish refugee section: French-Persian plaque (the Polish version is on the other side of the monument)

However, death was ever-present in this group of weakened survivors, as the Catholic cemetery in Doulab vividly demonstrates. Each of the small 1,869 refugee graves (see here for a map of the cemetery) has an identical headstone inscribed with a number, the Polish abbreviation ‘S.P.’ (‘swietej pamieci,’ ‘in memory of’), a name, the year of birth and the year of death, and the Latin abbreviation ‘R.I.P.’ (‘requiescat in pace,’ ‘may s/he rest in peace’).

In the center of the Polish refugee section are two memorial stones, one with a trilingual inscription in Polish, French and Persian and the other bilingual in Polish and English. The trilingual one is roughly similar in the three languages and the Polish version reads as follows:

PAMIECI /WYGNANCOW/POLSKICH /KTORZY /W DRODZE DO OJCZYZNY /W BOGU SPOCZELI /NA WIEKI. 1942-1944

To the memory of the Polish exiles who, on their return journey to their homeland, found the peace of God, 1942-1944 (my translation from the French and Persian inscriptions)

The English version of the bilingual memorial stone, which looks more recent than the trilingual one, is similar in content but provides more detail and reads as follows:

IN COMMEMORATION /OF THOUSANDS /OF POLES THE SOLDIERS /OF THE POLISH ARMY /IN THE EAST /OF GENERAL /WLADYSLAW ANDERS /AND CIVILIANS /THE FORMER /PRISONERS OF WAR /AND CAPTIVES /OF THE SOVIET CAMPS /WHO DIED IN 1942 /ON THE WAY /TO THEIR HOMELAND /PEACE TO THEIR MEMORY

As it so happens, the inscriptions on both these monuments are historically incorrect: the Polish refugees were not on their way “to their homeland” because – also in Tehran in 1943 but worlds away from the refugees – Churchill and Roosevelt conceded what had been Eastern Poland to Stalin’s USSR and the remainder of Poland to the Soviet sphere of influence.

Death in a new home

One of the tombstones of the Poles who settled in Tehran. The mixed name shows that Yanina Kaganowska married into a Persian family

For the majority of the survivors, their stay in Iran was temporary and they later resettled in the UK, the Americas, Africa and Australasia. However, some also chose to stay and to rebuild their shattered lives in Iran as is evidenced by the graves in the far corner of the Polish section. There, a number of larger and personalized tombstones have been erected to the memory of people born in Poland who died in Tehran as recently as 2002. Most of these commemorate women who married Iranian men as is evidenced by their Persian surnames.

I looked at these graves with mixed feelings: on the one hand, their personalized details, the fact that they were commemorating much older people than the refugee graves, and the names in which Polish and Persian have become mixed speak of lives lived fully in a new home. On the other hand, they are all single graves and the Iranian husbands and families of these women thus must lie elsewhere (maybe in Tehran’s huge Behest-e Zahra Cemetery, where the city’s Muslims find their final resting place). The fact that none of these graves are family graves – despite the fact that the women obviously had new families in Iran – speaks to the fact that faith and nation continue to divide in death those who were joined in life.

Parceling up the dead

French flag marking a little girl as French national

The divisions of faith are made concrete in the architecture of the Doulab cemetery complex, a feature that is, of course, not unique to Iran’s cemeteries. To begin with, Tehran’s dead Christians are physically separated from the city’s Muslims and Jews, who have their own cemeteries elsewhere. Second, even within the Christian complex the various denominations are divided into their own separate compounds: the Catholic cemetery is separated by large walls from the adjoining Armenian and Russian cemeteries (the so-called ‘Russian’ cemetery seems to house all non-Armenian and/or non-Iranian Orthodox Christians).

Divisions of nation of origin also continue to persist within the Catholic cemetery. Although widely known as ‘Polish cemetery’ because such a large number of Poles are lying there, the cemetery was started in 1855 with a mausoleum for Dr. Louis André Ernest Cloquet, a Frenchman who died prematurely while serving as personal physician to the Shah. The memorial to this Catholic was placed close to – but outside of – the Armenian cemetery. Since then Catholics from most European countries have also found their final resting place there and the cemetery’s sections are more or less clearly divided into national sections.

The banal nationalism of death is most obvious in the cases of the French and Italian dead who lie in Doulab: their embassies have taken the trouble of placing little metal French or Italian flags at the foot of each French or Italian grave.

This tombstone could be located anywhere in Germany. There is nothing in the inscription that suggests that Franz Sänger actually lies in Tehran

While such flags are absent from the graves of other nationals lying in Doulab, the language of the tombstones is in most cases the language of the country of birth. None of the German graves I visited, for instance, shows any sign that the person lying there must have lived a transnational life and must, to a smaller or larger degree, have been part of the fabric not only of German but also Iranian society during their lives. The inscriptions on the tombstones bear no traces of a life partly lived in Iran: for all that the inscriptions suggest, the graves might have been located in Germany.

How could a tombstone inscription suggest a transnational life? At the Doulab cemetery, I saw two options: a multilingual inscription or a lingua franca inscription.

A multilingual inscription is exemplified by the Polish, French and Persian trilingual memorial discussed above. On individual tombstones in the Catholic section multilingual inscriptions are rare and, unless I overlooked something, absent from the graves of Europeans. The few that I noticed are bilingual in various combinations of Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, French, Persian and Russian. In some cases, it was impossible to identify the languages other than to say that the inscriptions were both in the Latin and Arabic scripts.

A bilingual tombstone in French and Assyrian is suggestive of the complex life that Paul Sarmas must have led

While monolingual tombstones predominate in the Catholic section, over in the Orthodox section the situation is different and tombstones inscribed in multiple languages and scripts – Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Georgian, Greek, Latin and Russian – are more frequent there.

As regards lingua franca inscriptions, I consider an inscription as lingua franca if the tombstone is inscribed in a language other than a/the language of the country of origin of the deceased or a language of Iran (in practice, in this case, that means Armenian, Assyrian and Persian). The most frequent lingua franca by far is French and one final surprise was the absence of English in this international space: other than in the Polish-English bilingual memorial mentioned above, there was only one single tombstone inscribed in English:

ANNA MARIA VAN /DEN BRINK-LECKE /BORN HOLLAND 19.10.1914 /DIED TEHERAN 13.9.1970 /MAY GOD REJOICE HER SOUL

The nationality of the deceased is listed as German in the cemetery’s registry, a country where she was neither born nor died, further illustrating the complexity of transnational life and death.

Where the spirit rests

Keeping the dead within the boundaries imagined by the living: the gate to the walled-in Catholic section of the Doulab Cemetery Complex

Dying away from ‘home’ is often invested with special sadness. According to an overview of Polish cemeteries in Iran, a number of the commemorative plaques in other Polish burial sites in Iran stress the fact that these people died “on foreign soil.” There is indeed a deep sense of sadness and loss emanating from the refugee graves. However, that is because of the evil that cut short the lives of the people who lie there and that made the circumstances of their final years so horrific.

By contrast, the graves of those Poles who had decided to stay on in Tehran after the war and to rebuild their lives there and those of the other foreign-born lying there did not move me in this way. What is striking about those is the desire of the living to inscribe the boundaries of faith, nation and language even on those who obviously led lives that transcended those very boundaries.

Sir John Bagot Glubb (1897-1986)

Many people tend to think that multilingual and intercultural communication skills are not only useful skills to have but are also somehow morally superior. Multilingual people who are skilled intercultural communicators are often thought to be more open-minded, tolerant, peaceful and understanding than their monolingual counterparts; in short, better people. However, this idealistic view of multilingualism and intercultural communication is difficult to square with the institutional fact that some of the best language learning and teaching as well as intercultural communication training has historically been happening in the halls of power. Military and secret service training academies in particular have produced some of the finest multilinguals and most skilled intercultural communicators.

I’ve written about this conundrum in my new book Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction (and, btw, make sure to join the official launch on August 02), particularly with reference to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) and Edward T. Hall’s work there. As the author of classics such as The Silent Language (1959) and The Hidden Dimension (1966), Hall is widely considered as the intellectual god-father of the field of intercultural communication. That his work was based in the institutional needs and concerns of the FSI is less well known. The FSI grew out of various language training programmes for military personnel during World War II to prepare US diplomats for their missions abroad.

Kingmakers, a collection of the biographies of the British and American men (and a few women) who invented the modern Middle East provides another set of intriguing case studies of the relationship, if any, between language and intercultural communication skills on the one hand and contributing to world peace and global understanding on the other. The authors, Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, call their subjects “kingmakers” because they attempted to influence the course of the Middle East through “indirect rule,” mostly in Her Majesty’s Service. In the late 19th century, “indirect rule” became a much-hyped strategy of semi-colonial administration, which did not involve full-fledged occupation but rather wielding influence through being the power behind an indigenous autocrat. What possibly distinguishes the kingmakers of the early 20^th century, aka “advisers” from the consultants of today is that they were actually accomplished Orientalists, highly proficient in Arabic and that they spent most of their lives in the region. Overall, people such as A. T. Wilson, Gertrude Bell, T. E. Lawrence, H.S.J.B. Philby, John Bagot Glubb or Percy Cox seem to have genuinely felt that by serving Britain they were also acting in the best interests of the people in the region.

The feelings for the region and its people prevalent among this group are expressed well by John Bagot Glubb, also known as Glubb Pasha, the British commander of the Arab Legion, in his autobiography:

I spent thirty-six years living among the Arabs. During the first nineteen of these years, I lived entirely with them, rarely meeting Europeans and sometimes not speaking a word of English for weeks on end. I originally went to Iraq in 1920 as a regular officer of the British Army, seeking fresh fields of adventure and a wider knowledge of the many different forms of modern soldiering. But when I had spent five years among the Arabs, I decided to change the basis of my whole career: I made up my mind to resign my commission in the British Army and devote my life to the Arabs. My decision was largely emotional. I loved them. (quoted in Kingmakers, p. 265).

One of the forms that this “devotion” and “love” took is that he pioneered aerial bombing in Iraq. It’s a long story and the simple version goes something like this: during World War I, the British promised King Faisal’s father, a tribal chief in the Hejaz, a kingdom. After the war, no suitable kingdom was available for various reasons, including conflicting promises made to others. So, eventually, he was installed in the newly-created Iraq, where he had no local base whatsoever and where local tribes felt no need to be loyal to the new king nor to pay taxes to support his regime. The fact that Iraq had only recently been invented (by another set of British advisors, of course) as a nation out of three previous Ottoman provinces didn’t help. So, it was decided to engage in some stark nation-building: the submission of the Beni Huchaim tribes of Southern Iraq to their new nation and imported king was to be achieved through terrorizing them with aerial bombing.

In 1923 what is today Southern Iraq thus became a testing ground for the aerial bombing of civilian populations and in those early days someone needed to map the terrain before any bombing could be undertaken. The only person with the right skill set was Glubb: he had the geographical mapping skills, the military knowledge of operational aspects, and the language and cultural skills to be able to move among the local population. As he notes in his autobiography, on at least two occasions it was the Beni Huchaim tribes’ hospitality that enabled him to make the maps that would enable the RAF to bomb them. In addition to mapping the terrain, he was also “mapping” their social structure by pinpointing those sheiks whose influence among their people would render them particularly “suitable” for attack.

Glubb was not without sympathy for the tribes: he notes their poverty as well as the fact that to them the central government was nothing but “a kind of absentee landlord which never concerns itself with them except periodically to demand revenues” (Glubb, quoted in Kingmakers, p. 268). Given his excellent cultural knowledge, he was also well aware that what he was doing was a serious breach of the norms of Arab hospitality (as a matter of fact, any norms of hospitality it would seem to me). The justification offered by Glubb is that he did not actually in any way betray the Beni Huchaim or lied to them. On the contrary, he says he was candid about his purpose and even warned them “that he, himself, would lead the bombers if they [=the Beni Huchaim] proved recalcitrant” (ibid.). In the end, that’s exactly what happened: Glubb lead the enforcement of government policy to use aerial bombing for non-payment of taxes. He praised the strategy as “extremely efficient” because it demoralized the tribesmen by making them feel helpless and precluding any effective response on their part.

The way I see it, if you warn a people who have never even seen airplanes and who have no idea of what a bomb might be of potential air raids, and if you consider that fair warning, then that obviously demonstrates an extraordinary lack of empathy. Not to mention that aerial bombing is obviously an extraordinarily unjust and cruel way of enforcing tax compliance. So, we are back with our original conundrum: a highly competent linguist and intercultural communicator acting immorally and violating basic principles of trust and interpersonal relationships. However, tying the question of multilingualism and ethics to an individual would be to miss the point in the same way that assumptions of multilinguals as peace makers and better people miss the point.

In the end, multilingualism and intercultural communication don’t exist “per se” outside a particular context. In the context of the imperial make-over of the Middle East during and after World War I, language and culture teaching were a key aspect of the education of an imperial elite, and intercultural communication was nothing more and nothing less than an aspect of establishing and maintaining imperial control.

Each time I visit France and have breakfast there, I am reminded of Goethe. In his 1792 essay “Campagne in Frankreich” he offered this spot-on description of the difference between Germans and their neighbors to the West: “White bread and black bread form the shibboleth, the war cry that distinguishes the Germans and the French.”

Shibboleth is a Hebrew word. The tanakh (Sefer Shoftim; Book of Judges 12:5-6) describes it as a military code word in the war of the Gileadites against the Ephraimites. 42,000 Ephraimite refugees were massacred at a ford in the Jordan river because they mispronounced “shibboleth” (which means “ear of corn” and, in this context, also “body of water”) as “sibboleth.” To be historically accurate, despite the spelling sh-b-l-t, the Gileadites pronounced the initial sound as a voiceless dental fricative, like th in English, and the Ephramaites replaced it with an s-sound.

Fatal mispronunciations have been reported in other wars, too. During the War of the Sicilian Vespers, 2,000 French occupiers were killed in Palermo in 1281. They were identified because they couldn’t pronounce the c-sound ceci (“chick-peas”) and chichi (“beans”) in the Italian way.

During World War II, Dutch resistance fighters used the pronunciation of the city of Scheveningen to distinguish between friend and foe. Germans failed to pronounce the city name as s-cheveningen and used an intial sh instead. And during the Finnish-Soviet Winter War of 1939/40, the Finnish code word was Karjala (“Karelia”), which Russian soldiers would mispronounce as “Karelija.”

Marion Tauschwitz reports a particularly gruesome shibboleth in her biography of Hilde Domin. Like many other German-Jewish refugees, the poet Hilde Domin found refuge in the Dominican Republic in 1940. The dictator Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic at the time, thought that European-Jewish refugees provided him with an opportunity to “whiten” his people a bit. While he welcomed European immigrants, he used drastic means to keep Haitian immigrants out. The Dominican Republic shares borders with French-speaking Haiti and Haitians have always tried to move to the more prosperous Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, Trujillo considered them as too dark-skinned in contrast to the more lightly-skinned population of the Dominican Republic, and so the stage was set for the Parsley Massacre. In 1937, 20,000 Haitians residing in border areas were massacred if they failed to pronounce the Spanish word for “parsley”, perejil, with a rolled r. The typical French substitution of l instead of r made them easy targets.

On the positive side, there are harmless shibboleths, too. Non-native speakers of German rarely manage to pronounce Streichholzschächtelchen (“match box”) correctly and those who can’t do the Swiss German Chuchichäschtli (“kitchen cabinet”) are easily identified as German Germans. Northern Germans in Bavaria are stuck when it comes to Oachkatzlschwoaf (“squirrel tail”) and Bavarians falter at the Low German equivalent, Eekkattensteert. Finally, Non-Jews who want to wish their Jewish friends “Happy Hanukkah” should make sure to stress the first syllable. Stressing the second syllable might lead to the conclusion that the well-wisher only has a superficial knowledge of Judaism.

Christoph Gutknecht is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at Hamburg University and the author of numerous popular books about language in German.

Over the past three days the Sydney Morning Herald has been reporting on a “natural field experiment” that once again confirms the tenuous link between English language proficiency and settlement success, particularly as measured by employment outcomes. The story is that of Iraqis who worked as translators and interpreters for the Australian army during the 2003 invasion. When Australian forces withdrew from Iraq in 2008, many of those translators and interpreters, who were by then considered traitors in their homeland and the target of insurgents, were granted residency in Australia and airlifted to safety in a secret military mission.

Three years on, the Sydney Morning Herald has now surveyed over 200 of these individuals about their current life in Australia (read here and here). According to conventional wisdom settling in Australia should be a breeze for these people: as translators and interpreters, they are obviously highly proficient in English; they all have high levels of education, with most of them tertiary educated and having prior experience in their professions; and they’ve obviously demonstrated their commitment to Australian values in a more personal and tangible way than could ever be measured by any citizenship test.

Unfortunately, the fate of these model migrants is no different from those who our politicians like to exhort to learn English, to get an education and to embrace Australian values so that they can find a job. Of 223 former Iraqi army translators and interpreters now living in six capital cities around Australia, only nine are in full-time employment, and of these only one single person is employed in their area of expertise. Thus, for this group, the Australian national unemployment rate of only 4.9% is turned on its head and pretty much constitutes their employment rate.

The personal testimony of the people interviewed for the story is heart-breaking. They cannot go back to Iraq where they’ve seen their colleagues killed because of their work for the Australian troops and where they fear their names can still be found on the execution lists of terror commandos. At the same time, they see their life, skills and self-esteem wasting away in Australia, where they survive by relying on welfare.

How many more migrants will have to face that fact that “coming to Australia was the worst decision of my life,” as a 28-year-old chemical engineer says in the feature, before we recognize that the problem is systemic and not the consequence of individual failures to learn English, get an education or embrace Australian values? Thanks to the Sydney Morning Herald for bringing the issue to a wider audience and thanks also for some excellent journalism!

Futenma Airbase, right in the middle of the city

I’ve recently come across the story of Chibana Shoichi, who burnt the Japanese flag in 1987 to commemorate the Okinawan victims of WWII Japanese militarism. The story is intriguing not because of the flag-burning incident but because Shoichi also keeps another Japanese flag in his house, which he respects: it dates from the 1960s and for him is a symbol of the Okinawan struggle against US tyranny. In the process of researching Chibana Shoichi’s story I learnt a lot about the double colonization of the Ryukyu Islands – or Okinawa Prefecture – by both Japan and the USA.

In the same way that the Japanese flag can be simultaneously a symbol of liberation and oppression for the same person, the use of Ryukyu languages similarly has dual, and seemingly mutually exclusive, meanings. Most of my knowledge about the Ryukyu languages comes from the admirable work of Patrick Heinrich. Okinawa Prefecture is Japan’s most southern prefecture and an archipelago of over 1,000 islands stretching between Kyushu and Taiwan. Also known as the Ryukyu Islands, the archipelago’s five mutually unintelligible language varieties are considered a language in their own right by most linguists but have been treated as a dialect of Japanese by the Japanese state since the annexation of the Ryukyus in the 19th century.

When the Ryukyus became part of Japan, the Ryukyu language continuum suffered the same fate as many a minority language in modern nation building: public life and everything that was modern and advanced became the domain of Japanese and the “dialect” was relegated to the home. The full brutality of Japanese colonization became apparent in WWII with the Battle of Okinawa being one of the most disastrous campaigns of the Pacific War resulting not only in huge military casualties on both sides but also extremely high numbers of Okinawan civilian casualties, many of them forced into mass suicide by the Japanese army.

After the war, the USA separated Okinawa from Japan, put it under US “trusteeship” and, given its strategic location, installed a large number of military bases. Linguistically, however, that’s when the most intriguing part of the story starts. The USA were keen to legitimize their presence in Okinawa by actually highlighting the fact that Okinawa was not a part of Japan. Therefore, they also supported the promotion of the Ryukyuan language. Consequently, one could expect that severance from Japan would have heralded a new era for the flourishing of the Ryukyu language or, at least, bring its decline to a halt. However, exactly the opposite happened: Ryukyuan did not only not make any headway in the public domain, it even stopped being transmitted in the private domain. Today, there are no proficient speakers of Ryukyuan born after 1950.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, speaking Japanese at the time became part of the Okinawan struggle against US imperialism. Okinawans wanted to be free of US domination and the only feasible way to liberation seemed to be to claim a Japanese identity and membership in the Japanese nation. That part of the struggle was successful in 1972 when Okinawa was returned to Japan.

Unfortunately, becoming a part of Japan did not mean demilitarization. Today, almost 20% of the territory of the archipelago is occupied by US military bases, accounting for about two-thirds of the US military presence in Japan (despite the fact that Okinawa accounts for only 0.6% of Japanese territory). In a 2007 opinion poll, 85% of Okinawans expressed their opposition to the presence of the US military. The heavy US military presence in Okinawa means high levels of noise pollution, danger of accidents, environmental degradation and criminal offences committed by US servicemen. However, when Japan and the USA negotiate aspects of their military arrangement, they do so without consultation of Okinawans who, consequently, find themselves in a double colonial position.

Today, there are some efforts to revive the Ryukyuan language as a symbol of an Okinawan identity and as a symbol of resistance against Okinawa’s double colonial position. However, again the linguistic story is not quite as expected. Language revitalization is not a central part of the Okinawan struggle against imperial oppression, military basing and their double colonial position. Linguistically, English has become a key tool in their struggle and, particularly, their discursive positioning as an indigenous minority in the global arena. Globally, interest in, solidarity with and support for the Okinawan struggle has been much enhanced by this newly claimed identity of an indigenous minority, which is recognizable and makes sense to campaigners globally.

The Okinawan story is an instructive one for understanding the relationship between language revitalization and liberation struggles: there is no simple, straightforward relationship! What it means to speak Ryukyuan or to not speak Ryukyuan is, as always, historically and socially contingent.

Dietz, K. (2010). Demilitarizing sovereignty: self-determination and anti-military base activism in Okinawa, Japan. In P. McMichael (Ed.), Contesting development: critical struggles for social change (pp. 182-198). London: Routledge.
Heinrich, P. (2004). Language Planning and Language Ideology in the Ryūkyū Islands Language Policy, 153-179 DOI: 10.1023/B:LPOL.0000036192.53709.fc
Inoue, M. S. (2007). Okinawa and the U.S. military: identity making in the Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press.

My grandfather going to war in 1915

My daughter spent weeks practicing “Advance Australia Fair,” “Eternal Father,” “Victors’ March” and “Waltzing Matilda” for her band’s performance at her school’s ANZAC Day ceremony. However, she came away from the ceremony angry and disappointed. What angered her was the invited speaker’s account of the First World War. The invited speaker, the president of the local RSL, explained Gallipoli as follows: the ANZACs had stood up to “the awful Germans” because “the awful Germans” were bullies and “we Australians don’t like bullies, do we?”

The audience’s understanding of 20th century history is as yet rather hazy and somewhat simplistic. Furthermore, the audience included a number of patriotic little Australian kids of German and Japanese descent. In this context, an account of Australian military history as a series of fights against German and Japanese villains is insensitive and was bound to make them feel excluded. However, what struck me, as the adult observer, was how extraordinarily narrow and exclusive the ANZACs and all the men and women of the Australian Defense Forces are actually conceived. It’s a cast of characters that not only excludes Germans and Japanese but anyone with a migrant background. When the speaker asked “Hands up if you have fathers or grandfathers who served in times of conflict to defend our freedom?” most hands in the assembly went up. Guess whose hands didn’t go up? As far as I could tell, the fault line between hands up or not coincided quite neatly with being of Anglo-Celtic descent or not. Those with their hands up were then told how proud they must be of their families.

And where does that leave the kids who didn’t put their hands up (aka kids of migrant backgrounds)? NOT PROUD of their families, obviously. Making children feel ashamed of their families, loved ones and backgrounds is horrible. To do so under the guise of fostering a national sense of identity is pernicious.

The message of that ANZAC day ceremony was pernicious in another way, too. Presumably, to make it all more “relevant” for the children, the invited speaker then went on to tell the story of James Martin, the youngest Australian soldier known to have died in WWI at age 14. Only two years older than the oldest children in the audience, the speaker exhorted the audience to take pride in this boy who “died so that we could be free.” I thought the story of this misguided child-soldier who lost his life unnecessarily (he didn’t even die in battle but of typhoid) was an extremely sad one. That he should be held up as a role model for today’s children is outrageous.

Later that day, I took my daughter to look at a picture of my grandfather going to war for Germany in 1915, aged 16: another fresh-faced, innocent and misguided boy whose life was ruined by the war. There are many ways to honor the memory of the lost generation who became canon fodder in WWI. Blathering about pride in child soldiers and sowing a sense of exclusion and divisiveness in the next generation is not one of them.

I can only speak Pashto

ABC News yesterday broke a whistleblower report that US army interpreters deployed in Afghanistan often don’t speak the local languages. ABC News reports that up to a quarter of the interpreters hired by a private provider, Mission Essential Personnel, failed basic language tests.

Click on the picture, to watch one such interpreting episode unfold: a Pashto-speaking villager in effect offers to cooperate with US troops but the interpreter makes up an entirely different scenario with the Americans eventually walking away and cursing the villager. No wonder they don’t get anywhere winning the hearts and minds of the locals!

A Christian Science Monitor report has some examples of the damage caused by incompetent interpreters: in one case, misinterpreted directions resulted in a misdirected mortar attack on the wrong spot. The entire livestock of a village was killed in that attack; US troops paid compensation to the villagers. In another example, a request for shooting illumination flares was misinterpreted as a request for a mortar attack, which resulted in an unspecified number of casualties.

The reasons for these disasters are manifold: to begin with, war interpreting is a lucrative business both for the interpreters on the ground but even more so for corporations such as Mission Essential Personnel. Second, Afghanistan is a multilingual country and apparently someone hired as a Dari interpreter may well be then assigned to interpret in a Pashto- or Baluchi-speaking part of the country. Third, army interpreters are often uneducated and inexperienced young men as the more senior interpreters opt for more secure employment with the UN or NGOs in Kabul. One of the interpreters interviewed for the Christian Science Monitor report, for instance, tells how he learnt English by selling cigarettes to soldiers outside Bagram Airbase. He was only 16 when someone asked him whether he spoke Dari and Pashto. He said “yes” and, voila, he had a new job as army interpreter.

Would anyone have given him a job as, say, an accountant? “Hey, are you good at maths?” “Yes!” “Beaut! I’ve got a job for you as an army account.” Wouldn’t happen because everyone understands the need for accountants to be properly trained, qualified and to have substantial experience for a high-stakes role. By contrast, decision makers in the US army are seemingly so naive about language and communication skills that they think nothing of putting the lives of civilians and soldiers, indeed the entire outcome of the operation, into the hands of untrained, unqualified and inexperienced interpreters. Just another reason to Rethink Afghanistan!