Afghan-style mantu (Image credit: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

Encountering mantu in Sydney

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

Turkish-style mantu (Image credit: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

Who owns mantu?

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

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

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

Chinese mantu (Image credit: Wikipedia)

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

Food chains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference

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

Related content

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

The Sumerian Empire under King Shulgi (2094 to 2046 BCE) (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Do you know in which language the Sumerians started the written chronicle of humanity?

It is a cliché to state that everyone who reads this sentence is an heir of the Sumerians, regardless of what your genetic background may be. The Sumerians were the first inventors of writing; and the Latin alphabet in which this text is written is a distant descendant of the cuneiform script they invented about 5,000 years ago in the ancient Middle East.*

Most people have heard that the Sumerians of Mesopotamia invented writing, along with agriculture, the domestication of plants and animals, metallurgy, urbanization, and social stratification. Their Neolithic revolution fundamentally reshaped the world, and ultimately ushered in the Anthropocene in which we find ourselves today (Crosby, 2004).

But have you ever stopped to think in which language they were writing? Unless you are an Assyriologist – an expert in the languages, cultures, and history of the ancient Middle East – you may not know the details, but you are likely to assume it was one particular language.

Well, you’d be wrong. The Sumerians were multilingual, and language contact is evident in the written record from Day 1.

The multilingual Sumerians

Sumerian is a language isolate that is not related to any other known language, living or dead (Cunningham, 2013). However, back then, as today, most languages of the Middle East were Semitic languages, like modern Arabic or Hebrew. The continuum of Semitic dialects the Sumerians were most in contact with is called Akkadian. And contact between Sumerian and Akkadian is apparent from the very beginning of the written record (Hasselbach-Andee, 2020).

The Manishtushu Obelisk (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

A key indicator of language contact lies in the fact that the language name “Sumerian” is not actually a Sumerian but an Akkadian word. The Sumerian word for their language was “Eme-gir,” which literally means “native language” (Cunningham, 2013).

The earliest written documents legible to us date from around 2,600 BCE. These documents all provide evidence of sustained multilingualism (Crisostomo, 2020). This evidence takes three forms, namely language mixing, parallel translations, and metalinguistic commentary.

Language mixing

First, there are texts that include loanwords from one language into the other or texts that are so heavily mixed that they cannot even be assigned to one language or another. An example comes from the Manishtushu Obelisk, which dates from between 2,277 and 2,250 BCE. The obelisk is basically a title deed to four estates. This is a short excerpt, with Sumerian words in roman font and Akkadian words in italic (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 410):

šu‐niĝin 10 ĝuruš be‐lu gana gu kug‐babbar gana ša‐at e‐ki‐im ù zi‐ma‐na‐ak (“Total: 10 workers, lord of the fields, recipients of the payment of the field of Ekim and Zimanak.”)

As can be seen the text makes use of both languages in about equal parts – translanguaging avant la lettre!

Today, this kind of language mixing is relatively rare in writing, particularly formal writing such as legal texts. The Sumerians clearly had no such qualms about keeping written languages neatly separate. Anyone who went to the trouble of chiseling a record like this into stone surely put up the best kind of language they could think of. So, mixing languages must have felt right and sufficiently “weighty” for such an important title deed.

Whatever the writer’s reasoning was, “Sumerian and Akkadian (Semitic) are, throughout much of our material, intertwined and interconnected” (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 416).

Multilingual texts

In addition to administrative texts, some of the earliest surviving texts are – surprise, surprise – bilingual word lists (Michalowski, 2020).

Sumerian was the powerful lingua franca of the time, but it may well be that, by the time writing really began to take off, most people had switched over to speaking Akkadian. New scribes may not necessarily have been proficient in Sumerian. Therefore, they had to receive formal training in that language as part of their scribal training (Michalowski, 2006). That is why bilingual word lists can be found among the earliest written documents: they served a didactic function and the institutionalization of language learning clearly went hand-in-hand with the institutionalization of writing.

“Ubil-Eshtar, brother of the king, Kalki, scribe, is your servant” (Image credit: British Museum)

Because writing was invented by the Sumerians, writing itself seems to have become associated with Sumerian. It seems likely that Sumerian died out as a spoken language long before it ceased to be used as a written language (Michalowski, 2006).

As a result, scribes not only needed to learn the art of writing, but they also needed to be formally trained in the Sumerian language.

An intriguing example in the kind of diglossia that ensued can be found in an oft-quoted record about an escaped slave. This text records the event in Sumerian (roman font) but reports direct speech in Akkadian (italic font): “Lugalazida, the slave of Lugalkigal, escaped from the Ensi. About his hiding place, the slave girl of Urnigin said: ‘He lives in Maškan-šapir. He should be brought here’” (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 410).

Metalinguistic commentary

Over a period of around a thousand years, writing developed from proto-cuneiform – a logographic aide memoire – to become a language-specific writing system, of the sort we are familiar with today. Over the same period, people who knew how to write established themselves as a small and powerful elite of scribes (Taylor, 2013). What made them powerful was not their writing skills per se but the fact that scribes controlled the Sumerian bureaucracy and administration. In short, they collected and distributed goods.

The status of scribes is evident from cylindrical seals – like modern trademarks and signatures. These served to confirm the authenticity and legitimacy of traded objects (Pittman, 2013). The famous seal of Kalki provides an example. The seal is understood to depict a foreign expedition, which included a hunter, the scribe’s royal patron with an ax, and the scribe with tablet and stylus.

As scribes established themselves as a powerful professional caste, training of scribes became formalized and included Sumerian language teaching, as explained above. In keeping with the importance that was accorded to learning Sumerian in scribal education, some of these comments allow us a glimpse into ancient language teaching methods. Then, as today, teachers seem to have taken it upon themselves to act as language police, as this student complaint shows:

“The one in charge of Sumerian said: ‘He spoke Akkadian!’ Then he caned me.” (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 408)

At the other end of the social spectrum, speaking multiple languages gave you bragging rights – also just like in our own time. Ancient kings are well known for their boasts inscribed in stone, and Shulgi, “King of Sumer and Akkad, King of the Four Corners of the Universe,” whose reign lasted from around 2,094 to 2,046 BCE, had this to say about his prodigious language capabilities:

By origin I am a son of Sumer; I am a warrior, a warrior of Sumer. Thirdly, I can conduct a conversation with a man from the black mountains. Fourthly, I can do service as a translator with an Amorite, a man of the mountains. I myself can correct his confused words in his own language. Fifthly, when a man of Subir yells, I can even distinguish the words in his language, although I am not a fellow-citizen of his. When I provide justice in the legal cases of Sumer, I give answers in all five languages. In my palace no one in conversation switches to another language as quickly as I do. (Shulgi, 2000, pp. ll.20-220)

“Shu-ilishu, Meluhha language interpreter” (Image credit: Louvre)

Note that Shulgi does not even spell out his first two languages – taking it as implicit that a Sumerian must be bilingual in Sumerian and Akkadian.

What about translation and interpreting?

It should have become obvious by now that the Sumerians operated a bilingual language regime. This is certainly true of the scribal caste – and keep in mind that everyone else would have been illiterate – and the kingly elite. Because these groups were bilingual, there was no need for interpretation between Sumerian and Akkadian.

However, linguistic mediation was necessary with the speakers of other languages, such as Shulgi’s third, fourth, and fifth language.

Like the Ancient Egyptians, the Sumerians institutionalized the role of linguistic mediator for trade and diplomacy. The status of interpreters seems to have been similar to that of scribes, as is evident from another famous seal, the seal of the interpreter Shu-ilishu. The idea of professional certification – modern as it may seem – is also first in evidence with the Sumerians, as this seal demonstrates. This seal also happens to be the first-ever known depiction of an interpreter in action – predating the interpreting relief in the Tomb of Horemheb by almost a thousand years.

The writing on the seal says that it belongs to “Shu-ilishu, Meluhha language interpreter” (Edzard, 1968). The image on the seal depicts a Sumerian dignitary being approached by two figures, presumably Meluhhans, and a small interpreter sitting between them. It is not entirely clear what the Meluhha language was and who the Meluhhans might have been, but they are assumed to have been located in the Indus valley, where the Sumerians had extensive trade interests (Thornton, 2013).

Sumerian multilingualism lives on

As is to be expected from the above, the Sumerians used two different words for “linguistic mediator” – a Sumerian word (“eme-bal”) and an Akkadian word (“targummanu”). Now remember that recently we encountered “dragoman” as a fancy English word for “interpreter”? Do you notice that there is a vague similarity between “targummanu” and “dragoman”?

(Source: Thornton, 2013, p. 601)

“Dragoman” first appeared in English around 1300. It is a relatively rare word that refers specifically to interpreters working in the Middle East and with the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian languages. “Dragoman” arrived in English from Old French “drugemen” or Medieval Latin “dragumanus” and, via late Greek “dragoumanos,” goes back to Old Arabic “targumān.” The modern Arabic word is tarjumān, and from Arabic it goes all the way back to the Sumerians.

“Targummanu” not only made it into English as “dragoman” but into many other modern languages, too. The words for “interpreter” in Turkish (“tercümen”), Georgian (“tarjimani”), Russian (“tolmač”), Polish (“tłumacz”), Hungarian (“tolmács”), and German (“Dolmetscher”) all go back to the same source (Jyrkänkallio, 1952).

It is fitting that the word for “interpreter” in so many modern languages should link us back to ancient Mesopotamia, and remind us that all language is an unbroken chain of transmission from the time when humans first learned to speak some 300,000 years ago.

In fact, “targummanu” did not start in Akkadian but was a borrowing from Luwian, a language spoken in another multilingual and multiethnic empire the Sumerians came into contact with, that of the Hittites, in modern-day Turkey (Melchert, 2020). The Luwian word is likely a borrowing from yet another language, which has been covered by the sands of time (Popko, 2008).

In the peoples of the Ancient Middle East we see our modern selves like through a very old, cracked, blunted, and dusty mirror. One feature we see reaching back into that long history is the commonality of our linguistic diversity.

*Postscript, 21/07/2021: I’ve been asked by a learned reader to clarify that the Latin alphabet does not directly descend from cuneiform. It does not, and you can find the full line of known transmission here and here. Early alphabetic writing systems are more closely linked to Egyptian hieroglyphs than to cuneiform. Whether they were invented independently or inspired by hieroglyphs, and whether hieroglyphs were invented independently or inspired be cuneiform is a matter of ongoing debate that may never be resolved. Given what we know about the ubiquity of linguistic and cultural contact – in the ancient world, as today – I am inclined to think that mutual inspiration is much more likely than independent invention. While there is clear evidence for the independent invention of writing at least three times (Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica), the emergence of several writing systems in the Ancient Middle East in relatively close proximity to each other (geographically and chronologically) would suggest, at the very least, transfer of the general idea.

Related resources:

• Who invented writing?
• The Latin alphabet’s take-over of the world’s languages

References

Crisostomo, C. J. (2020). Sumerian and Akkadian Language Contact. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 401-420). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Crosby, A. W. (2004). Ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cunningham, G. (2013). The Sumerian language. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 95-110). London: Routledge.
Edzard, D. O. (1968). Die Inschriften der altakkadischen Rollsiegel. Archiv für Orientforschung, 22, 12-20.
Hasselbach-Andee, R. (2020). Multilingualism and Diglossia in the Ancient Near East. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 457-470). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jyrkänkallio, P. (1952). Zur Etymologie von russ. tolmač “Dolmetscher” und seiner türkischen Quelle. Studia Orientalia, 17(8), 3-11.
Melchert, C. (2020). Luwian. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 239-256). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Michalowski, P. (2006). The lives of the Sumerian language. In S. L. Sanders (Ed.), Margins of writing, origins of cultures (pp. 159-184). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Michalowski, P. (2020). Sumerian. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 83-105). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Popko, M. (2008). Völker und Sprachen Altanatoliens (C. Brosch, Trans.). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Pittman, H. (2013). Seals and sealings in the Sumerian world. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 343-366). London: Routledge.
Shulgi. (2000). A praise poem of Shulgi (Shulgi B). Retrieved from https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section2/tr24202.htm
Taylor, J. (2013). Administrators and scholars: The first scribes. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 314-328). London: Routledge.
Thornton, C. P. (2013). Mesopotamia, Meluhha, and those in between. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 624-643). London: Routledge.

Easter chocolates in the supermarket (Image credit: Wikimedia)

I’ve been thinking a lot about chocolate lately. Maybe because it is Easter and supermarkets in my part of the world are laden with chocolate products.

Chocolate is good to think with

Chocolate is good to think with – and I don’t mean just because chocolate is known to make our brains release endorphins, chemicals that make us feel good.

Chocolate is good to think with because it provides an easy-to-grasp explanation of the workings of global capitalism and the persistence of a colonial world order.

Global chocolate

The global chocolate industry is worth over 100 billion US$ per year. That wealth accumulation starts with the cultivation of the cacao bean and ends with the Easter egg melting in your mouth.

Cacao grows in tropical climates close to the equator. The world’s largest producer and exporter of cacao beans are two West African countries, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Together with Ecuador, Cameroon, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil, and Papua New Guinea they grow most of the world’s cacao.

Virgin forest cleared to make way for cacao plantation (Image credit: Peru Reports)

Cacao farming is a fast-growing plantation monoculture and a major factor in deforestation. 80% of Côte d’Ivoire’s rain forest, for instance, has in the past few decades been cut down to make way for cacao plantations.

Even though Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana dominate global cacao production, your Easter egg is not going to say “Made in Côte d’Ivoire” or “Made in Ghana.”

The label on your Easter egg is most likely to read “Made in Germany” because Germany is the world’s largest chocolate producer and exporter, followed by Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland.

Cacao – the raw product – is shipped from Africa to Europe to be transformed into the valuable chocolate.

The main consumers of chocolate are in North America and Europe. Over 10% of the world’s chocolate is eaten in USA alone, followed by Germany, France, United Kingdom, and Netherlands.

Per capita chocolate consumption in some of these countries is truly staggering. The average Swiss person, for instance, eats a whooping 8.8 kilos of chocolate per year. The thought alone is enough to give me constipation (although Australians are in no position to point fingers: each of us eats 4.9 kilos of chocolate per year).

The biggest multinational corporations running global chocolate are based in USA (Mars, Mondelēz, Hershey), Italy (Ferrero), Japan (Meiji, Ezaki Glico), Switzerland (Nestlé, Lindt & Sprüngli), UK (Pladis), and South Korea (Orion).

The back-breaking work of cacao production is done in the (supposedly former) colonies (Image credit: Insider)

The global division of labor could not be clearer: those who do the work and suffer the degradation of their environment are completely separated from those who grow rich on their exploitation and those who enjoy the fruits of their labor.

The chocolate profiteers and chocolate victims remain invisible

Despite the ubiquity of chocolate in supermarkets of the global north, few people know how the chocolate got there.

Most of us are ignorant of the money behind chocolate. Italy’s richest man, for instance, is Giovanni Ferrero, of the Nutella chocolate spread. Giovanni’s fortune is estimated to be 32 billion US$. By contrast, the average cacao farmer earns less than one US$ per day.

Now that we have the economics of global chocolate straight, let’s turn to language. The way we think about the word “chocolate” can tell us as much about language and culture contact, as it does about capitalism and colonialism.

“Chocolate” is a universal word

One of the most foundational ways to think about languages is to classify them into many different languages, each separate from the other.

From Afrikaans to Zulu, there are 6,000 languages or so. Each different from the other and each tied to a particular nation, ethnicity, or culture.

The word for “chocolate” and “cacao” in 56 languages (sourced from Google Translate; Latin alphabet used throughout for easy comparability)

Now consider the word for “chocolate” and “cacao” in those languages.

The table shows 56 translation equivalents of “chocolate” and “cacao”, all based on Google Translate, and all written in the Latin alphabet for easy comparability. One glance suffices to see that “chocolate” and “cacao” are essentially the same word in all these languages. There are pronunciation differences, for sure, but it is obvious that that is all there is.

Does it make sense to say that “cokollate” is an Albanian word, that “shukulata” is an Arabic word, that “tsokolate” is a Cebuano word, that “qiǎokèlì” is a Chinese word, that “chocolate” is an English word, that “Schokolade” is a German word, that “chokollis” is a Korean word, that “shoklat” is a Persian word, and that “ushokoledi” is a Zulu word?

Of course, each of these forms is adapted to the phonology of each language but it is equally clear that the most salient aspect of each of these words is not their difference but their similarity.

The German philological tradition has a term for these types of words that are pretty much identical across languages: wanderwort. Wanderwort literally means “wandering word” or “migrating word.” Such migrating words are “items that are borrowed from language to language, often through a long chain of intermediate languages” (Hock & Joseph, 2009, p. 484).

A textbook example for a wanderwort is “sugar” – another key ingredient in chocolate – which probably started out in Sanskrit as “śarkara” and moved westwards to become Persian “shakar,” Arabic “sukkar,” Greek “sákkharon,” and Spanish “azúcar.” The word did not stop with Spanish but hopped over to French “sucre”, Italian “zucchero”, German “Zucker”, and English “sugar.” The Greek version “sákkharon” took an additional route into Western Europe and also gave us English “saccharin”.

Migrating words – and there are many of them – remind us that the borders between languages are not fixed but highly porous. Language and culture contact is the norm, and has been the norm since time immemorial.

That is the first language lesson of chocolate.

Chocolate is a colonized word that has become universal

The overarching narrative of language contact and language spread in our time is of the triumph of English. Language – like everything else of value – supposedly emanates from the European centre to the rest of the world. Colonial languages are powerless and dying away in the face of the English juggernaut.

There is certainly some truth to this story but it is not the only story. An alternative story is encapsulated in the word for “chocolate”.

Precolonial Mesoamerican depiction of a marriage ceremony involving a drink of chocolate (Image credit: UC Davis Library)

The cacao bean has been cultivated in Mesoamerica and brewed into a chocolate drink for thousands of years. Accordingly, the words for “cacao” and “chocolate” have a long and varied history in the precolonial languages of the region (Dakin & Wichmann, 2000).

The migrating words for “cacao” and “chocolate” that we encounter today in (possibly?) all the world’s language is based on Nahuatl “kakáwa” and “čokola:tl.”

While colonial languages have certainly been spreading, individual words from colonized languages have been on the move, too. Some, like “kakáwa” and “čokola:tl” have made themselves at home universally.

Like “cacao” and “chocolate,” many universal words come from the world’s most threatened and minoritized languages.

Another iconic example is “kangaroo.” This universal word comes from Guugu Yimidhirr, an Australian language from Far North Queensland with less than 1,000 speakers.

The second language lesson of chocolate is that language spread is not a one-way street and colonized languages have also made their tracks around the globe.

Eurocentric etymologies

The Spanish conquest of the Americas brought the cacao bean and its preparation to the attention of Europeans.

The internet is full of claims that “Cortés was believed to have discovered chocolate during an expedition to the Americas” or that “Christopher Columbus discovered cacao beans after intercepting a trade ship on a journey to America and brought the beans back to Spain with him in 1502” (my emphasis).

Europeans have long lied to themselves about chocolate: this 17th century treatise depicts an Indian princess handing over chocolate to the higher-placed Poseidon, the ancient Greek god of the seas (Image credit: Internet Archive)

This is incorrect – like most “discoveries” of the colonial period and the so-called “Age of Discovery,” the existence of the cacao bean and its use in chocolate preparation was well-known to the Aztecs.

In today’s terms, what Cortés, Columbus, and all the other “discoverers” did might be called plagiarism or intellectual property theft.

Words like “cacao” and “chocolate” bear witness to that grand theft in the languages of the world.

Not surprisingly, the colonizers have tried to erase those linguistic tracks.

“Kangaroo” was for a long time thought to be “unknown” in any Australian language, and the idea was that Captain Cook and Joseph Banks somehow made up the word. Another apocryphal story had it that “kangaroo” actually means “I don’t know” in Guugu Yimidhirr. In this anecdote, local knowledge is completely erased while Cook and Banks come out as the heroic discoverers who made sense out of local ignorance.

It was not until 1980, when the publication of R.M.W. Dixon’s The languages of Australia finally settled the debate and confirmed something the Indigenous people of North Queensland had known all along: that the universal word “kangaroo” came from their language.

A similar obfuscation takes place when you look up the etymology for “chocolate” in English. English “chocolate” is said to derive from Spanish “chocolate” or French “chocolat.” The latter in turn derives from Spanish “chocolate,” and only in another step does it go back to Nahuatl “chocolatl.”

The etymology of the German “Schokolade” similarly highlights inner-European transmission by deriving German “Schokolade” from Dutch “chocolate,” which derives from Spanish “chocolate.” Nahuatl is only mentioned at the end of that list.

In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt writes that “an imperial tendency to see European culture emanating out to the colonial periphery from a self-generating center has obscured the constant movement of people and ideas in the other direction” (p. 88).

Amongst other things, colonialism has been a huge project of knowledge transfer from the colonized to the colonizers. The third language lesson of “chocolate” is to lay bare the big con that has made it look as if knowledge only travels in the other direction.

References

Dakin, K., & Wichmann, S. (2000). Cacao and chocolate: a Uto-Aztecan perspective. Ancient Mesoamerica, 11(1), 55-75.
Dixon, R. M. W. (1980). The Languages of Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hock, H. H., & Joseph, B. D. (2009). Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics (2nd rev ed.). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Pratt, M. L. (2008). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

The Language-on-the-Move team is conducting award-winning research

The Language on the Move team is delighted to share news of our multiple-award-winning research!

2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics

The winners of the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics have just been announced and we are delighted that our very own Alexandra Grey is one of two joint winners of the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics. Alexandra receives the award for her thesis about the ways in which language rights affect minority languages in China. The full thesis can be downloaded here and a short overview is available here.

The second joint winner of the prize is Isabel O’Keeffe (Melbourne University), who receives the award for her thesis about “Multilingual manyardi/kun-borrk: Manifestations of multilingualism in the classical song traditions of western Arnhem Land”.

Both theses were commended for being “outstanding pieces of innovative, creative, and personal linguistic scholarship”.

The Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics is a $500 prize begun in 2013 and awarded annually to the best PhD which demonstrates methodological and theoretical innovations in Australian linguistics (e.g. studies in toponymy, language and ethnography, language and musicology, linguistic ecology, language identity and self, kinship relationships, island languages, spatial descriptions in language, Australian creoles, and language contact).

The notice for submissions for the 2018 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics will appear in early 2018 in the newsletter of the Australian Linguistics Society.

2017 Michael Clyne Prize

For the Language on the Move team, this recognition of Alexandra’s success follows hot on the heels of the announcement that another team member, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, is the winner of the 2017 Michael Clyne Prize. The Michael Clyne Prize is awarded annually by the Australian Linguistics Society for the best postgraduate research thesis in immigrant bilingualism and language contact. Shiva receives the prize for her thesis about “Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families”. An abstract and a link to the full thesis is available here.

This is, in fact, the second time the Michael Clyne Prize award goes to a member of the Language on the Move research group. Donna Butorac won the 2012 Michael Clyne Prize for her thesis about “Imagined identity, remembered self: Settlement language learning and the negotiation of gendered subjectivity”. Furthermore, Vera Williams Tetteh’s thesis about “Language, Education and Settlement: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography on, with, and for Africans in Australia” was the runner-up for the 2016 award.

These and all our PhD theses are available from our PhD Hall of Fame.

Piller, I. (Ed.) (2016) Language and Migration. London: Routledge.

Humans are a migratory species. Although in modern society the dominant imagery we have created about ourselves is that it is normal to be sedentary, nothing could be further from the truth. Prior to the advent of farming about 12,000 years ago, humans were constantly on the move. Even then, not everyone settled and someone or other was always pushed out and had to go and look for new livelihoods elsewhere. It is thus no exaggeration to say that mobility is part of our DNA – it is a species characteristic.

Language is obviously another.

But how do these two species characteristics go together? What does our propensity to migrate mean for the way we use language? And how does language play out in our mobilities?

In 2015, I was offered the opportunity to compile a collection of the key research on “language and migration” for the Routledge Critical Concepts in Linguistics series. The resulting four-volume edited collection Language and Migration has just been published.

In selecting critical contributions to research in language and migration, I aimed to strike a balance between the socially-relevant and topical issues of wider concern raised by migration on the one hand, and disciplinary conceptual and methodological concerns on the other. In doing so, Language and Migration is intended both as a showcase of the most important work in the field as well as an intervention in contemporary debates. To meet this challenge, Language and Migration has been structured around four themes:

• Languages in contact
• Identities and ideologies
• Linguistic diversity and social justice
• Education in linguistically diverse societies

Volumes One (“Languages in contact”) and Two (“Identities and ideologies”) take language as their starting point and explore how migration affects language. Two major perspectives on what constitutes the nature of the central research problem can be identified here: one perspective focusses on the ways in which migration affects language structure and the other situates linguistic diversity in indexical orders and seeks to illuminate how linguistic diversity constructs identities.

Migration is a species characteristics of homo sapiens (Image credit: crystalinks.com)

Volumes Three (“Linguistic diversity and social justice”) and Four (“Education in linguistically diverse societies”) take migration as their starting point and ask how language affects migration. Different language issues in relation to migration arise for first-generation adult migrants and their offspring. Consequently, Volume Three explores linguistic diversity and social justice against questions of adult language learning and in domains that mediate social inclusion for adults such as employment, health and community participation. Volume Four then focusses on education and the challenges of language learning and medium of instruction in linguistically diverse societies.

In addition to topical selection of the most important research, it has also been my aim to showcase research from a wide range of geographical, regional and historical contexts. Throughout, an attempt has been made to strike a balance between general overview articles and contextually-situated case-studies.

Language and Migration is intended for the library market. However, readers without access to a university library might find the table of contents and my editorial introduction useful. These are available for open-access download here. The editorial introduction, also entitled “Language and Migration” spells out the selection principles, surveys the key research issues in the field and identifies future research directions. Happy reading!

Piller, I. (2016). Language and migration Language and migration, 1-20

Author’s note: ‘Malay Sketches’ charts the poet’s gain/loss of language following the British colonisation of Singapore. Mirrored in three columns, the first poem’s silence presents her ignorance of the Jawi script; the second mourns the gradual loss of her Malay mother tongue, while the third celebrates childhood scenes in Lakemba, Sydney. Words that are obscured she has no current knowledge of.

The researcher wearing a Zhuang employee’s work uniform at the Black Clothes Zhuang House in the Ethnic Minorities Village, Nanning, China, 2014

I was surprised, frankly, during my recent fieldwork to find Zhuang language being used in a QQ chatroom in China. Surprised because Zhuang text is absent from the linguistic landscape. Surprised because many of my interview participants reported they had no Zhuang literacy practices: some young Zhuang people had not even realised local street names and a line on the every Chinese bank note were in Zhuang; it’s written in the Latin alphabet, so they had assumed it was English. But on social media, there it was.

Zhuang is the name of a minority ‘ethnic nationality’ originally from Southern China, and Zhuang is also the name of their language. There are about 18 million Zhuang people, but the proportion who are of native, fluent or partial speakers of Zhuang is hard to pinpoint. Certainly, there is a trend away from using Zhuang at home, in public and in traditional media, especially in cities. I’m currently investigating Zhuang language use, with a focus on the ways that legally enshrined language rights do (or do not) affect the maintenance of a minority language in China. Around the time I was on QQ, various other data were also suggesting to me that online there is more space for Zhuang than there is offline, and definitely more space for Zhuang activism. Some of the online Zhuang language use is organised and some dissipated and impromptu; some is deliberately activist and some seems a less conscious promotion of Zhuang. But all of it is grassroots – or bottom-up – language revitalisation, an approach very different to the top-down language rights and minority language policies existing in China. Looking at my QQ screenshots, I began asking myself what special opportunities social media is providing Zhuang language but also whether using Zhuang on social media has any special impact on offline. In what climate do the grassroots grow into something bigger?

Snippet of QQ chatroom screenshot, June 2014

There’s a crop of grassroots language initiatives springing up on online platforms, for all languages all over the world. For example, during my fieldwork, I was asked by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to present on Australian Indigenous language maintenance and in preparing I came across this Yugambeh indigenous language app developed by a local museum-cum-research-centre in Queensland, north-eastern Australia. The app’s effect is amplified through the local primary schools’ Write into Art competition, in which kids use the app to compose poetry. This example, even more than Zhuang use in QQ chatrooms, raised for me the question of how to get grassroots revitalisation which sprouts online to flourish offline.

Transplanting grassroots activity

The link between online language activism and offline language revitalisation movements is a subject Josep Cru (2014) deals with in his recent article. Cru’s case study of grassroots, social-media-enabled language revival follows Mexican university students – Yucatec Maya speakers and would-be-speakers – chatting together on Facebook. Cru (2014 p3) argues that “social media are being appropriated by Maya speakers as a catalyst for language advocacy and activism”. He suggests that part of the impact social media is having on Maya revitalisation stems from the fact that, on Facebook, “Maya can be used on par with dominant languages” (p. 7). But are online platforms always such a level field? They have the potential to be.

Potential online language use

Cru (2014, p. 10) suggests that social media is “a potential catalyst among some youngsters for ethnolinguistic awareness and even political positioning, which is an essential aspect of language revitalisation.” In this way, social media is more than just a “productive new space” for writing down a language typically marginalised in literacy practices. That is, online spaces have a special potential that other media and other domains lack.

But where does this potential come from? I suggest the potential comes from the normative micro-climate of online communication. While Cru’s Facebookers, the kids using the Yugambeh app and my QQ chatters probably have differing levels of social organisation, differing political views about revitalisation, different audiences, and different impacts, one commonality is that online, and especially online on social media, they can all use language in less formal and less standardised ways than they can offline. I’m not arguing online communication has no rules and no norms, simply that they are different from – and often less constraining – than norms in other forms of communication.

Part of the fun, informal, flexible nature of online communication, especially on social media, is that the “fuzziness and the arbitrariness of language boundaries” (Cru 2014, p. 7) is not problematized to the same extent as it is offline in formal use, and especially in offline written forms. Because the integration of different languages and of non-standard spelling and grammar is less remarkable and less of a (socially-constructed) problem in online communication, linguistic features associated with a minority language can be employed online in ways that may not be available in offline, or which may be penalised offline rather than receiving a “valuation-enhancing effect” (Eisenlohr 2004). So this is, arguably, an inherent property of online communication which creates the potential for a minority language to be used on par with a dominant language.

But that potential is not always going to be realised.

Online communication, when it integrates linguistic features associated with minority languages, has the potential to challenge norms of offline minority language (dis)use. But it also has the potential to reproduce those very language norms through which the minority language is dominated.

Actual online language use

It may well be that for Yucatec Maya, the level playing field of Facebook is fertile soil for grassroots language revitalisation. Unfortunately, for many other minority languages, dominance creeps in to online spaces. My own data, while still in the process of analysis, is already suggesting that Zhuang cannot be used on par with dominant languages online.

Social and power structures which minimise Zhuang speech are reproduced online in many ways. For starters, many young Zhuang people have no literacy in Zhuang and almost all non-Zhuang people have no Zhuang language competence whatsoever, so the informational utility of sending an Instant Message in Zhuang is severely restricted. The symbolic and/or phatic use of Zhuang on QQ is sometimes policed by other young Zhuang people: in one instance of my QQ data, a university student uses the Zhuang “haep bak” [‘shut up’] and another student responds “他不是有意的，不理那些话” [‘It has no meaning, ignore those words’]. Even if not receiving a scolding, using some Zhuang language does not import the value of ‘cool-ness’ into communications, largely because minority culture – Zhuang in particular – is still evaluated as ‘backwards’ rather than ‘cool’ in the offline sociolinguistic environment. This perception of low “social capital” is reinforced by the low capital of Zhuang language in both education and employment. This means young people have less reason to use Zhuang online (unless they are deliberately trying to make it cool). Zhuang seems to be rarely used as a resource to create a “we-code” because there is not a wide consciousness of We amongst Zhuang young people.

All this happens with a banality characteristic of linguistic hegemony. In other, less banal circumstances around the world, minority language speakers whose language is associated with civil disobedience, separatism or terrorism may find their online use is policed not just by subtle social processes and throw-away online rebukes, but by state security forces. Online, language choice may be easier, but language choice is also easily monitored.

Becoming a grassroots Green Thumb

My point is that while online minority language use can catalyse grassroots language revitalisation, it can also reproduce processes of minoritisation. What makes a grassroots movement flourish?

Does it depend on how organised the online users are in networks or communities of practice? Does it depend on the form of online media? Does it depend on grassroots activity happening at the same time but offline? In regards to Zhuang in China, the development of one or two shoots to a grassroots movement to a broader change is likely to depend on all three, and more. Certainly, whether online activity in China is actually a hothouse of grassroots political change generally – not just in regards to language revitalisation – is the subject of an ongoing debate (e.g., contrast Yang 2011 and Leibold 2011).

There is still a lot more research to be done on how grassroots politics of language revitalisation develop, online and offline, and how online grassroots activity adds to (or challenges) both top-down policies of language revitalisation and offline grassroots activities.

References

Cru, Josep (2014). Language Revitalisation from the Ground Up: Promoting Yucatec Maya on Facebook Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-13 : 10.1080/01434632.2014.921184

Eisenlohr, Patrick (2004). Language Revitalization and New Technologies: Cultures of Electronic Mediation and the Refiguring of Communities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (1): 21–45.

Leibold, James (2011). Blogging Alone: China, the Internet, and the Democratic Illusion? The Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (4): 1023-1041.

Yang, Guobin (2011). Technology and Its Contents: Issues in the Study of the Chinese Internet. The Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (4): 1043-1050.

German International School Sydney

It is one of the great narratives of our time that the market will fix everything. In education this means that parental choice is assumed to improve education. Rather than the state supplying high-quality education, the neoliberal credo is that parental choice will create high-quality education. Does that mean that we do not have high quality language education in Australia because there simply is not the demand for language education?

Or could it be the other way round? Could it be that the state of languages in Australia is “a national tragedy and an international embarrassment,” as Michael Clyne, Anne Pauwels and Roland Sussex put it in 2007, simply because the supply is not there? A case study of what happens when high-quality bilingual education becomes available in a community could prove just that.

In 2008, the German International School Sydney (GISS) moved to a new location in the suburb of Terrey Hills, about 25km north of the Sydney CBD. GISS runs a high-quality K-12 English-German bilingual immersion program that is accredited by both the German Ministry of Education and the NSW Board of Studies, and leads to the International Baccalaureate. The 2008 GISS relocation in conjunction with Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census data from 2006 and 2011 allow us to explore how the linguistic profile of a community changes when high-quality bilingual education becomes available.

By way of background, it is important to know that German in Australia is the second least maintained migrant language (after Dutch); i.e. German speakers shift from German to English at very high rates and the rate of German transmission from one generation to the next is relatively low (see Clyne 2005 for details). Low language maintenance rates for German are usually attributed to cultural affinity to the dominant English-speaking culture; to the fact that language is not a core value for Germans; to relatively high proficiency rates in English among German migrants; to relatively high rates of exogamy; and to low ethnic concentrations (see Clyne 2005, Ch. 3). All these reasons could be described as market model reasons: the ‘demand’ for German among German migrants is low and so they give up the language. My case study suggests that supply – or rather the absence of a supply of high-quality bilingual education – may be another crucial factor.

Terrey Hills, where GISS has been located since 2008, is in the Local Government Area (LGA) of Warringah, and it is also conveniently accessible to residents of two other LGAs, namely Pittwater and Ku-ring-gai. So, has the presence of German increased in these LGAs? Census data allow us to approach this question through two data sets, namely ‘country of birth’ and ‘language spoken at home.’

Figure 1: Percentage of residents born in Germany

To begin with, as Figure 1 shows, the percentage of residents born in Germany increased in both Warringah and Pittwater between 2006 and 2011. For Ku-ring-gai it remained virtually unchanged. These figures are in contrast to those for Greater Sydney and Australia as a whole where the percentage of residents born in Germany slightly decreased during the same period.

Second, the figures for German as a home language show the same tendencies but the changes are more pronounced (Figure 2). This means that there were markedly more residents who spoke German at home in Warringah and Pittwater in 2011 than in 2006.

Figure 2: Percentage of residents speaking German at home

Third, the census data also allow us to compare the figures of residents born in Germany with the figures for those who claim German as a home language. We can use ‘born in Germany’ as a proxy for ‘speaking German as a first language.’ Admittedly, this is a crude measure as it excludes ethno-linguistic minorities born in Germany as well as German speakers from Austria, Switzerland and other European countries. It also excludes those Australian-born residents who speak German as their first language. Even so, relating the number of Germany-born residents to that of German speakers allows us to gauge language maintenance and shift: if the number of those who claim German as their home language is lower than the number of Germany-born residents, we can consider this as evidence of language shift from German to English in the first generation. If, on the other hand, the number of those who claim German as their home language exceeds the number of Germany-born residents, then we can consider this as evidence of language maintenance. These additional German speakers can be assumed to be mostly second-generation Australians of German ancestry. They might also include intermarried families. The latter would be particularly intriguing as the sociolinguistics literature typically assumes that exogamy results in the adoption of the majority language (i.e. English) as the family language.

Figure 3: Residents who claim German as their home language as a percentage of the Germany-born

Figure 3 confirms what we know from the literature about language maintenance among German migrants – but only for Australia as a whole and for the Greater Sydney area. In both these locales the number of residents who speak German at home is much lower than the number of the Germany-born. In Australia, there were 108,001 Germany-born residents in 2011 but only 80,370 who used German as their home language. The figures for Greater Sydney are 19,340 and 15,894 respectively. That means the rate of language shift from German to English is at least 25% in Australia as a whole and at least 17% in the Greater Sydney area.

Against this background, the figures for Warringah, Pittwater and Ku-ring-gai are highly exceptional. With the number of German speakers between 11.7 and 13.1 per cent higher than the number of Germany-born residents, the German language is clearly thriving in these areas.

Can this be just a coincidence with the fact that a high-quality bilingual English-German immersion school is available to the residents of these areas? I don’t think so. While mindful of the fact that correlation does not equal causality, the data presented here would plausibly suggest that the presence of GISS has attracted both Australian residents born in Germany and Australian residents speaking German at home (two overlapping but not identical categories) to Warringah, Pittwater and, to a lesser degree, Ku-ring-gai.

Furthermore, these data would also seem to suggest that it is the presence of GISS that enables local residents to raise their children bilingually. A project that is not feasible for many German speakers elsewhere in Sydney and in Australia – however much they might wish for it.

Clyne, Michael (2005). Australia’s Language Potential. Sydney, UNSW Press.

Is this Arabic or English? Or is that asking the wrong question? (Transliteration: sbaisi tinisi tshikn and shrmb*)

I’ve often wondered what linguistic theory would look like if its foundations did not lie in 19^th century Europe and 20^th century America but in 21^st century Dubai. Would we still think predominantly in terms of discrete languages or would we take a more holistic view of communication? Would we treat linguistic diversity as the default and consider monolingualism as an exception worthy of special (but somewhat marginal) attention? Would mainstream journals deal with diversity in communication as the norm and would we then have some smaller special interest journals such as a Journal of Monolingualism and maybe another one devoted to International Studies in Monolingual Education?

A coach at the Dubai Ice Rink yells at a group of kids: “Boro, boro! Let’s go, boys! Yallah!” Does it make sense to think about this utterance in terms of code-switching? In the most mainstream current analysis of this exclamation, the coach would be seen as mixing Persian, English and Arabic and we would then have to ask why he is mixing. As the audience remains constant and he is basically saying the same thing (‘let’s go’) three times, we would most likely start to muse about the identities he is claiming by switching: Is he trying to affiliate with the Persian, English and Arabic “speech communities” (another of those theoretical concepts that no longer make much sense)?

I overheard this interaction as a bystander and so cannot claim any further insights as to what the coach was trying to do other than the obvious: he was trying to get a group of exhausted 8-12-year-olds to keep together in a crowd and to keep them moving. From the labels on the kids’ uniforms, I know that they are from a school attended only by Emirati students (rather than non-nationals who make up more than 80% of the UAE’s population). In terms of their ethnic looks, the kids look all different – as befits the inhabitants of a place that has been a kind of way-station at the cross-roads of Africa, Asia and Europe since time immemorial. I cannot guess where the coach is from. As I just said, going by looks is even more pointless in Dubai than in most other parts of the world. He could have been Emirati but the statistics about teachers in national schools suggest that he is more likely to hail from elsewhere.

Khaleeji (Gulf Arabic) has always been a “mixed” language and variationists break it up further into Coastal and Saudi; the former can be subdivided into Emirati, Kuwaiti, Omani etc.; Emirati can be subdivided into Bahrani, Bedouin, Coastal, Shihhi, etc.; not to mention Ajami, another traditional language of the Gulf, which is mostly classified as an “Arabicized Persian dialect” or some such. You get the idea: it’s complicated …

If Khaleeji as the ancestral way of communicating in Dubai challenges linguistic theory, contemporary linguistic and communicative practices render it completely useless. Artists and designers have been among the first to have embraced obvious heterogeneity as foundational rather than condemning it as deviant. Salem Al-Qassimi, a designer specializing in bilingual urban design, for instance, refers to Dubai’s seemingly chaotic linguistic practices as “Arabish.” Arabish originally referred to Arabic texting in the Latin script but “is now more than just that. It is a way of speaking and a way of life,” he explains.

So, what does all this complexity mean for linguistic theory? We need to step back and let go of linear lenses such as the monolingual and variationist ones. In fact, you do not need to spend time in Dubai to do that; we could also turn to the natural sciences. The physicist (and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry) Ilya Prigogine wrote in his 1997 book The End of Certainty that linearity is no longer a viable form of scientific thinking. He explains that linear science only works well where it deals with phenomena that are close to equilibrium.

The social contexts where many mainstream linguistic theories developed could be described as spaces of equilibrium and – combined with the desire to imitate classical science – it is not surprising that order and stability became the bedrock of linguistic thinking.

However, the natural sciences have moved on, noting “fluctuations, instability, multiple choices, and limited predictability at all levels of observation” (Prigogine 1997, p. 4). Chaos theory recognizes that, as complexity increases in a system, precision and relevance become mutually exclusive.

Trying to describe even a mundane little utterance such as “Boro, boro! Let’s go, boys! Yallah!” precisely with current linguistic tools (“Arabic,” “code-switching,” “code-mixing,” “English,” “multilingualism,” “Persian,” “speech community”) renders the analysis either meaningless or irrelevant.

Whether we take our inspiration for a new linguistic theory from the chaotic world around us or the natural sciences may be a matter of preference but change our lenses we must. Bob Hodge has a useful preliminary introduction to chaos theory for TESOL practitioners here.

*Standard English: “Spicy Tennessee Chicken and Shrimp”

Africa Town, Guangzhou (Source: ChinaSmack)

What does an urban middle-class male university graduate from Conakry, the capital of Guinea, have in common with a peasant woman with little education from a village in Sichuan? Well, both are caught up in the processes of globalization and find themselves as semi-legal migrants with limited resources in Guangzhou’s Africa Town. “Africa Town” is the name of two suburbs in Guangzhou where the largest community of Africans in Asia resides. According to this photo essay on ChinaSmack, there were around 20,000 Africans registered there in 2011. The number of Africans estimated to come there for short business visits and those without a legal status was assumed to be about ten times that number.

Africans come to Guangzhou to trade: at one end of the spectrum there is the so-called “luggage bag trade,” which involves an African community pooling their financial resources. A member of the group then travels to China and purchases as many goods as possible. These are then shipped back home and sold on for a profit. At the other end of the spectrum of African traders in Guangzhou are more established people who run their own shops, catering to bulk buyers, including the luggage bag traders.

The retailers of Africa Town do not only include Africans but also rural Chinese migrants whose status is as semi-legal as that of their African peers if they don’t have an urban hukou (residence permit) for Guangzhou.

It is in this “marginal space in a peripheral country” (Han 2013, p. 95), that Huamei Han, a sociolinguistic ethnographer, met Ibrahim, the university graduate from Conakry, and Laura, the villager from Sichuan, as part of her project to study multilingualism in this high-contact situation.

English, as the global language of business, plays an in important role in Africa Town. So does Mandarin as the national language. Additionally, Cantonese, the local language and a number of other Chinese vernaculars are widely used in Africa Town, as are a number of African languages, including colonial languages such as French. So, there are a lot of codes being used in Africa Town but the preeminent power codes are English and Mandarin.

However, access to formal instruction in these power codes is rare and African Towners have to find other ways to learn whatever they can of these languages. As a result a contact variety, which locals call “Chinglish,” has developed. According to Han (2013, p. 88) this kind of “Chinglish” (not to be confused with unidiomatic Chinese English signage Westerns like to make fun of) is characterized by simple English vocabulary and sentence structures, repetition of key words, the mixing of Mandarin expressions, and the influence of Chinese syntax.

Africa Town, Guangzhou (Source: ChinaSmack)

It is this variety that Ibrahim mostly used, in addition to French, Susu, Pular, Mandinka and Arabic. However, his impressive multilingual repertoire was of relatively limited value without access to Chinese, as he explained to the researcher:

“Some factory they speak no French, they speak no English. So no Chinese, no business!” (p. 90).

However, immediate financial pressures in conjunction with a restrictive visa regime meant that his dream to attend formal Chinese language classes was beyond his grasp.

Laura, by contrast, felt she needed English to extend her business opportunities. However, formal English language instruction was out of her reach, too. Instead, she mobilized personal relationships and networks to acquire English, including the pursuit of transnational romantic relationships.

As Han points out, globalization is often conceived as associated with “elite multilingualism” where “the global person” is supposed to be highly proficient in standard varieties of the languages involved. However, access to these power codes depends upon economic capital: in order to study a language formally, you need to have money, time and legal status.

The inhabitants of African Town who Han spoke to had none of these and their structural marginalization thus also resulted in their linguistic marginalization. Even so, their informal language learning – the grassroots multilingualism of the inhabitants of Africa Town – is locally meaningful and enables their livelihoods in this space characterized by “globalization from below.”

Han, Huamei (2013). Individual Grassroots Multilingualism in Africa Town in Guangzhou: The Role of States in Globalization International Multilingual Research Journal, 7, 83-97

Inside the Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Savior in Isfahan. Construction began in 1606 and was completed in the 1660s (Source: Wikipedia)

Last week I had the privilege of attending, virtually, a seminar devoted to “Mobilities, Language Practices and Identities” organized by the CIEN Group at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The seminar brought together a small number of international scholars working in the sociolinguistics of mobility to discuss questions of method, theory and practices.

In my contribution I outlined a proposal for a global sociolinguistic ethnography and raised a number of challenges that contemporary sociolinguistics is facing in my view. One of these challenges is a relative lack of attention to historical linguistic diversity. Combined with a strong focus on English, on the North American and European experience, and on linguistic diversity as a problem, this results in significant gaps in our knowledge. Indeed, these biases potentially result in a distorted vision of the intersection between language and mobility.

One way to remedy such distortions, and an urgent research task in my view, is to focus on ‘real utopias’ where societal multilingualism actually works to the social, economic and cultural benefit of a community. We’ve previously showcased such examples here on Language on the Move in posts about multiculturalism in the central library of Vienna or about a French-German bilingual school operating in Berlin since the 17^th century. Another intriguing case is constituted by 17^th century Isfahan.

In 1598, Shah Abbas I, also known as Shah Abbas the Great, a king of the Safavid dynasty, moved the Persian capital to Isfahan and within less than a generation the city became a splendid cosmopolitan economic and political center; so impressive that it earned itself the nickname “half the world.” The German scholar Adam Olearius, who visited Isfahan in 1637, described it as follows:

There is not any nation in all Asia, not indeed almost of Europe, who sends not its merchants to Isfahan […]. There are ordinarily about twelve thousand Indians in the city […]. Besides these Indians, there is at Isfahan a great number of Tartars from the provinces of Khurasan, Chattai, and Bukhar; Turks, Jews, Armenians, Georgians, English, Dutch, French, Italians and Spaniards. […] The Armenian merchants, who are Christians, are the richest of any, by reason of the pains they take in making voyages themselves which is more than the other Persians do; though both have an absolute freedom to traffic where they please themselves, as foreigners have the liberty to come into Persia and put off their commodities there, paying custom; […]. (Travels of Olearius in seventeenth-century Persia)

Of all of Isfahan’s multilingual and multicultural inhabitants, it was the Armenians who stand out as having played a special role in Isfahan’s success during its golden age. And their contribution was carefully orchestrated by Shah Abbas himself.

In 1603-04 Shah Abbas transferred all the Armenian inhabitants of the city of Jolfa, located in what is today Iran’s far north-west, to Isfahan. They were re-settled in a new part of the city called New Jolfa and the original Jolfa was razed.

This may not sound like a particularly auspicious beginning to a multicultural golden age. However, one has to bear in mind the historical context: throughout the 16^th century the Ottoman and Safavid empires had been waging war against each other and the battleground was usually their borderlands, i.e. territory that today comprises Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, north-western Iran, northern Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and eastern Turkey. In these borderlands, both empires repeatedly pursued a scorched earth policy, including mass killings and massive displacement of local populations into the heartlands of both empires.

Re-settling the inhabitants of Jolfa was thus scorched-earth policy with a twist: Shah Abbas pursued a long-term objective in addition to the short-term objective of military advantage. The long-term objective was to gain human capital.

He succeeded on both counts. As for the short-term military objective, Ottoman troops had to withdraw from the devastated lands for the winter giving the Safavid troops time to recuperate and the following year they won a decisive victory.

The long-term objective to gain human capital succeeded, too. What exactly was it that made the Armenians attractive to Shah Abbas? Well, Armenians brought a wealth of transnational connections: as Christians, they brought valuable connections to Europe and their trading networks extended to the far east of Asia.

[T]heir acquaintance with cultures of the region and their familiarity with the languages and traditions of the people of the East and West placed them in a position to perform well as the entrepreneurs of the Safavid dynasty and Shiite Persia. (Gregorian 1974, p. 662)

Gregorian (1974) provides a long list of the transnational connections of Armenians which ranged from serving as interpreters at the Moghul courts in India to being established traders in Poland, where a whole range of foreign goods came to be known as “Armenian goods.”

In short, Shah Abbas wished to secure the national loyalty of a transnational group. The success of his plan benefitted both Armenians and the wider society, with Isfahan turning into a flourishing trade hub.

The implementation of the Shah’s plan involved far-reaching concessions to the Armenians of New Jolfa in a concerted effort to gain their loyalty and even affection: religious freedom, full citizenship rights and their own jurisdiction. One of the more intriguing rights they enjoyed was the right to curse and cuss during bazaar disputes in the same manner as Muslims.

Shah Abbas would often visit New Jolfa, even attend Christmas and Easter Mass, and take a deep interest in the new citizens’ welfare. When challenged that he seemed to favour his new subjects, non-Muslims to boot, over the majority population, he would respond that the Armenians had given up their homeland to live in Isfahan and so should be treated as valued guests. Furthermore, he went on to say, their relocation had cost him 1,000 tomans per head, an investment he had made not for the Armenians but for Iran.

As a result of the Shah’s practical and liberal approach both the minority and the wider society of which they were a part flourished.

In the 1630s, Armenians established their own bilingual university focusing on the liberal arts and metaphysics. This institute of higher learning produced many notable graduates including Hovhannes Vardapet, who later went to study printing in Italy and consequently introduced the printing press to Persia. The first book ever printed in Iran was an Armenian translation of the Book of Psalms in 1638.

Even today, more than four centuries on, Iranian Armenians maintain their own schools and churches and the levels of language maintenance of Armenians are very high. A recent study of Armenians in Tehran found that 100% of respondents claimed to know and use Armenian, i.e. the minority language, regularly and to value their bilingualism (Nercissians 2001).

For the study of language and mobility, it is not only instructive to study the golden age of cosmopolitan, multilingual and multicultural Isfahan, but also its decline. Not all rulers were as enlightened as Shah Abbas the Great. Some of his successors mostly saw the wealth of New Jolfa as a cash-cow from where they could extract taxes. However, even if no regime ever again went to such lengths to secure the loyalty of Armenians as Shah Abbas had done, their religious freedom and their full citizenship rights have been continuously upheld over more than four centuries.

The alliance between state and transnational minority for the benefit of both has thus never ceased. However, it ceased to be effective in the face of a new set of global forces that came from outside: with the expansion of the British Empire, the Iranian state was forced into a set of humiliating and debilitating capitulation treaties and Armenians lost much of their economic base in the overland trade between Asia and Europe as Britain opened up and controlled the sea route.

Gregorian, V. (1974). “Minorities of Isfahan: The Armenian Community of Isfahan 1587-1722.” Iranian Studies 7 (3/4): 652-680.

Nercissians, E. (2001). Bilingualism and diglossia: patterns of language use by ethnic minorities in Tehran International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2001 (148) DOI: 10.1515/ijsl.2001.014

(a) Because I speak German.
(b) Because it’s a place name, so a translation is not going to make it any more meaningful.
(c) Because verdammt noch mal I speak German!

Issues of opportunity to practise come up a lot in a language classroom, and as an English language teacher I’ve done my fair share of encouraging learners to take every opportunity to practise their newly acquired language skills. I am guilty, however, of ignoring the politics of speaking different languages in different contexts and what using different ways of speaking means in different spaces. For a classroom of Mandarin speakers in Australia, asking them to speak English with their fellow students may in fact be asking them to ignore context-specific rules about what is appropriate language use. Different language ideologies come into play: how is each language valued in that space? What does it signify, to use English or Mandarin or another language to a fellow student?

In her article “Malays are expected to speak Malay”, Rajadurai describes a case study of a learner who went to great lengths to practise her second language, English, despite the social isolation she encountered as a direct result of what speaking English meant in many Malay-speaking contexts, where “promoting English is often regarded as a threat to the Malay identity and an erosion of Malay dominance” (Rajadurai, 2010, p. 94). Her efforts to use English were seen, not as an attempt to engage with dominant ideas about the value of English as a global language, but rather as an attempt to distance herself from her Malay identity and to criticise Malay culture as inferior.

In my case, I think that my new acquaintances were drawing on a their own ideas that speaking English was the appropriate thing to do in a space where there were non-German speakers present, while I was drawing on my identity as a second language speaker who was keen to become visible as such, not something I get to do very often in Sydney unfortunately. So while my conversation partner was no doubt responding to pressure from herself and her friends about the right thing to do, I was very disappointed that she didn’t pick up on what I actually wanted, which was to speak a bit of German! Interestingly, the one non-German speaker there was herself multilingual, so being in a multilingual environment would have been familiar. Despite the fact that everyone at the gathering was multilingual then, I felt that the language ideology which ‘ruled’ was a monolingual one, which privileged singularity over diversity. It would be interesting to explore these sorts of language contact events more thoroughly to see if my ideas about language ideologies actually hold.

Interestingly, when I complained to a friend of mine who counts German and English as part of her language repertoire she responded by assuring me that although she would make an effort to speak as much German with me as possible, it was in fact impolite to speak a language others around you do not understand.

In my Australian TESOL contexts this constitutes a powerful discourse of language control. Something I often heard in the staffroom was that it was impolite for Mandarin speakers (for example) to speak Mandarin if there were other language speakers in their group. This linguistic control is often cast as being in the best interests of the learners, rather than being about teacher exclusion from learner talk and the consequent loss of power over what is said to whom. Speaking another language in an ‘English-only’ classroom is thus constructed as being a bad student who is also a rude person. This is also an ideology learners themselves internalise, as I often found when I discussed “class rules” with learners. As language teachers and researchers, we need to be more aware of the ways in which our students really experience what we might think are ideal opportunities to practise, but which they may see and experience very differently.

Rajadurai, J. (2010). “Malays Are Expected To Speak Malay”: Community Ideologies, Language Use and the Negotiation of Identities Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 9 (2), 91-106 DOI: 10.1080/15348451003704776

Hungarians in Romania

Up until a few decades ago, the academic consensus – along with public opinion – was that bilingualism is detrimental to the individual and society. Nowadays, that has all changed and the new consensus is that bilingualism is enriching and advantageous both for the individual and society. Unfortunately, both sentiments are facile and reductive. Bilingualism – just as monolingualism – is neither good nor bad in itself. What matters is what we make of it, as a recent article about language policy and language ideologies in Székely Land (Kiss, 2011) reminds us.

Székely Land is a region of three counties with a bit over 800,000 inhabitants in Transylvania in Romania (the large green part in the center of the map). Also known as Székelyföld in Hungarian, Ținutul Secuiesc in Romanian, Szeklerland in German and Terra Siculorum in Latin, its many names are indicative of the region’s complex history. Since medieval times, Székely Land has been settled by Székely Hungarians and formed an autonomous region within the Hungarian Kingdom until the middle of the 19^th century. While Székely Land lost its autonomy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it continued to form part of Hungary until it was awarded to Romania after World War I with the Treaty of Trianon. In the 1940s, Székely Land became again part of Hungary for another five years and has been part of Romania ever since 1946. For most of the 1950s and 1960s, Székely Land was administered as the Hungarian Autonomous Province within Socialist Romania. The Hungarian Autonomous Province was dissolved in 1968, one year after Ceaușescu became head of state. For the next 20 years, the Romanian authorities pursued a policy of “Rumanization,” which involved the mass resettlement of ethnic Romanians in Székely Land and the resettlement of Székely Hungarians with higher education outside of Székely Land in other parts of Romania. A quick way to sum up the history of Székely Hungarians throughout most of the 20^th century might thus be to say that they have been messed around.

In post-communist Romania, the minority rights of Székely Hungarians are being protected by the constitution, as this was a key requirement for EU ascension in 2007. Furthermore, Székely Hungarians constitute the most vocal and best organized minority group in contemporary Romania. Despite the fact that their numbers continue to shrink due to emigration, the position of Székely Hungarians in Romania is often considered exemplary in contemporary Eastern Europe, as in this quote from US President Clinton in the 1990s:

Who is going to define the future of this part of the world? Slobodan Milosevic, with his propaganda machine and paramilitary forces which compel people to give up their country, identity, and property, or a state like Romania which has built a democracy respecting the rights of ethnic minorities?

So, how does this ‘model minority’ fare when it comes to bilingualism? Not great, according to Kiss (2011). Székely Hungarians, like minority groups elsewhere, aspire to full socio-economic participation through high-level bilingualism in the ethnic language (Hungarian) and the state language (Romanian). Indeed, full participation through bilingualism is a constitutional right Székely Hungarians enjoy in democratic Romania. However, in reality, bilingualism is difficult to achieve and social mobility is currently tied to either giving up Hungarian and becoming monolingual in Romanian or giving up the ancestral homeland and emigrating to Hungary.

Why is it that bilingualism does not work for most Székely Hungarians despite the fact that that is what they want and that it is state policy? The problem is slightly different for each language and I will discuss each in turn.

Hungarian, the mother tongue of Székely Hungarians, has been severely damaged by decades of more or less active anti-Hungarian policies. Thus, contemporary Hungarian-medium education suffers from a lack of qualified teachers, appropriate teaching materials and specialized dictionaries. Vocational teachers whose mother tongue is Hungarian, for instance, feel they cannot teach vocational subjects in Hungarian because they lack the technical vocabulary. Since the end of communism, many advanced textbooks have been translated into Hungarian but this has been done in an ad hoc manner and there is a lack of standardization as textbook translations are neither moderated nor are translators necessarily technically competent.

It would seem that these problems of Hungarian teaching could be easily solved with the provision of professional development by teacher training institutions in Hungary and through importing teaching materials from Hungary and/or standardizing local textbooks with reference to norms operating in Hungary. However, this seemingly straightforward solution is not an option because the Romanian state insists on its educational sovereignty and prohibits these measures – the fact that Hungary is a fellow member of the European Union notwithstanding! In sum, despite constitutional language rights, Székely Hungarians in practice largely lack the opportunity to extend their mother tongue into the domains of vocational and higher education.

Romanian doesn’t fare much better but for different reasons. In those parts of the country where they constitute a minority, Romanian Hungarians usually attend Romanian-medium schools and use Romanian on a daily basis outside the home – and more and more of those Hungarians are finding it more convenient to simply switch to Romanian altogether. However, the situation is different in Székely Land, where Hungarians continue to constitute more than three quarters of the population and where Hungarian-medium education is widely available. Lacking the opportunity to practice Romanian in everyday life, Székely Hungarians rely on the school to learn Romanian. Romanian is indeed a compulsory subject throughout the entire education system and some subjects such as Romanian history have to be taught through the medium of Romanian even in Hungarian-medium schools. Even so, the Romanian proficiency of many students is so poorly developed that they fail final school examinations at the end of 8^th grade and even at the end 12^th grade they often don’t speak Romanian “as correctly and fluently as expected” (p. 241).

The reasons for the unsatisfactory outcomes of Romanian instruction lie in teaching methods, which Kiss (2011: 257) terms ‘worst-practice.’ In Székely Land schools, Romanian is taught not as a foreign language but as a first language, including a heavy emphasis on literary analysis. Consequently, comprehension is limited and students only succeed by memorizing. For instance, a teacher of Romanian Language and Literature in a Székely Land high-school comments as follows:

Competence in Romanian doesn’t develop even in twelve years’ time. Naturally, this can be explained by the fact that the textbook that we use was written for Romanian students, and they do not expect that students will possibly have any difficulties with them, and none of the textbooks concentrate on communicative language use. So, our students learn by heart everything they have to know for the exams. (p. 256)

Again, it would seem that there is a straightforward solution for this problem, namely to employ foreign language teaching methods rather than mother-tongue teaching methods. However, the term ‘foreign language’ with reference to Romanian is apparently so ideologically laden that context-appropriate teaching methods have largely become unthinkable on the national level.

Székely Hungarians aspire to high levels of bilingualism as a resource for socio-economic participation in Romania and Europe. Despite constitutional guarantees, however, in practice their bilingualism is a barrier to full participation. The problems they are facing have nothing to do with bilingualism per se and everything with ideologies about what it means to be Romanian. These ideologies disallow pragmatic solutions to local problems and ensure that, for the time being, bilingualism remains a problem for Székely Hungarians.

Kiss, Z. (2011). Language policy and language ideologies in Szekler Land (Rumania): A promotion of bilingualism? Multilingua – Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 30 (2), 221-264 DOI: 10.1515/mult.2011.010

While the participants and I thus broadly agreed in our interpretation of the slogan, some participants actually rejected the premise of my question that the slogan was in English. They argued that the slogan might look English but was actually Persian because “end” in English doesn’t mean ‘ultimate,’ ‘super’ or ‘great.’ Rather the word has been borrowed into Persian and acquired that meaning there. On consideration, I have to agree: the premise of my question was indeed mistaken, based, as it is, on an assumption of linguistic discreteness. The question of whether the slogan is in English or Persian is ultimately pointless and I fell into the same trap that Bourdieu berates linguists for:

To speak of the language, without further specification, as linguists do, is tacitly to accept the official definition of the official language of a political unit. (Language and Symbolic Power, 1991, p. 45)

I’m grateful to all the workshop participants for that reminder and for the many stimulating discussions we had during the 2^nd Language-on-the-Move Workshop at the University of Isfahan!

The Encyclopedia of the Muslim World has a good overview if you want to brush up your knowledge about Kyrgyzstan. However, even after reading this monograph, I haven’t been able to figure out what exactly distinguishes a Kyrgyz from an Uzbek. They certainly look alike to the degree that saying a given person is Kyrgyz or Uzbek makes them so, as this chilling account from a blogger on Global Voices shows:

… he called me and asked: “…so, no one is going to help us?” I wouldn’t wish this to anyone. I felt myself like a dog….I met them near the tuberculosis clinic. I took the driving wheel and shouted to everyone that he’s a Kyrgyz. With difficulties we managed to get him out of the district. On the street there were about 20 soldiers and behind them a crowd of young and not so young people of the Kyrgyz ethnicity. I don’t know what to do.

Amnesty International also report ethnicity as a matter of “claiming”:

Eyewitnesses have reported that groups of armed civilians, mostly young men claiming to be Kyrgyz, were roaming the streets of Osh, targeting districts of the city inhabited mainly by Uzbeks shooting at civilians, setting shops and houses on fire and looting private property. (my emphasis)

So, they hate each other with a vengeance but it’s not easily possible to say who is who?! Maybe that’s where accent comes in handy, just as it did in biblical times:

The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan River opposite Ephraim. Whenever an Ephraimite fugitive said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he said, “No,” then they said to him, “Say ‘Shibboleth!’” If he said, “Sibboleth” (and could not pronounce the word correctly), they grabbed him and executed him right there at the fords of the Jordan. On that day forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell dead. (Book of Judges, 12: 5-6)

The varieties of the Kyrgyz and Uzbek languages spoken in the Ferghana Valley seem to be mutually intelligible, which would leave ample scope for “shibboleths.”

Just as with the Bihari speakers of Urdu, the invention of ethnicity and language in the Ferghana Valley has largely been a product of colonial intervention: in Tsarist times, both groups (and some others) were lumped together as “Turks.” Soviet policy than made a distinction between “settled Turks” and “nomadic Turks” – the former were to be collectively known as “Uzbeks” and the latter went by a range of tribal names, including “Kipchak-Uzbeks” for those who are today “Kyrgyz.”

It’s all very confusing and to determine the “precise” meaning of “Kyrgyz” and “Uzbek” seems to be a bottomless-pit problem. However, the upshot is that the colonial re-definition of a social distinction (nomad vs. settled) as an ethnic distinction (which intersected in some way with the social distinction) in conjunction with the colonial creation of arbitrary boundaries (just as the British carved up India, Stalin carved up the Ferghana Valley between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) has created a recipe for mayhem and bloodshed.

This recipe is now readily available to corrupt politicians and criminals of all sorts if and when they choose to mobilize for their own purposes. Right now, the best hope for the people in Southern Kyrgyzstan seems to be more colonial intervention in the form of Russian peace-keepers. In the long term, all humanity will all have to look for ways to put the evil genies of ethnic and linguistic division back into the bottle.