The conversation focuses on a study of adults with three languages ‘at play’ in their childhoods and lives today, exploring how visible racial differences from the mainstream, social power, emotions, and familial relationships continue to shape their use – or erasure – of their linguistic heritage.

Zozan’s book opens with a funny and touching account of how her own experiences as a person of “ambiguous ethnicity” shaped this research. We begin our interview on this topic. Zozan points out that the last Australian Census showed that 48.2% of the population has one or both parents born overseas. Yet, she argues, “our teachers and our education system are unprepared, perpetuating the power relations that reinforce injustice and inequality towards half of the population”.

Then we focus on what diversity feels like to her research participants and how “mixedness” or “hybridity” is not normalised, despite being common. We build on a point Zozan makes in her book, that throughout their daily lives the participants “have to position themselves because our [social and institutional] understanding of identity is narrow-mindedly focused on a single affiliation. […] While all participants are engaged in such strategic positioning, my findings emphasise that this can come at a great personal expense, something which is not sufficiently recognised by scholarly work in this field thus far.”

Dr Zozan Balci with her new book (Image credit: Zozan Balci)

We then delve into the emotions experienced and remembered by participants in relation to certain language practices in both childhood and more recent years, and the way these shape their habits of language choice and self-silencing. While negative emotional experiences have impacted on heritage language transmission and use, Zozan’s study shows how people who had distanced themselves from their heritage language – and its speakers – then changed: “it only [took] one loving person […] to reintroduce my participants to a long-lost interest in their heritage language”. We focus on this “message of hope” and then on another cause of hope, being the engaged results Zozan’s achieved when she redesigned a university classroom activity to un-teach a deficit mentality about heritage languages and identities.

Finally, we discuss Zozan and her team’s current “Say Our Name” project. This practically-oriented extension of Zozan’s research addresses one specific aspect of linguistic heritage and identity formation: the alienation experienced by people whose names are considered ‘tricky’ or ‘foreign’ in Anglo-centric contexts. The project has created practical guides now used by universities and corporations and the City of Sydney recently hosted a public premiere of the Say Our Names documentary. Soon, Zozan will be developing an iteration of the project with the University of Liverpool in the UK.

Follow Zozan Balci on LinkedIn. She’s also available for guest talks and happy to discuss via LinkedIn.

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Transcript

ALEX: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m Alex Grey, and I’m a research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. My guest today is Dr. Zozan Balci, a colleague of mine at UTS. Zozan is an award-winning academic, a sociolinguist, and a social justice advocate. Zozan, welcome to the show.

ZOZAN: Hello, thank you for having me.

ALEX: A pleasure! Now, Zozan, you teach in the Social and Political Science program here at UTS, and I know you have a lot of teaching experience, but today we’ll focus on your sociolinguistics research. In particular, let’s talk about your new book. How exciting! It’s called Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, identity, and belonging in the lives of cultural in-betweeners. You’ve just published it with Routledge.

The first chapter is called A Day in the Life of the Ethnically Ambiguous, and you begin by talking about your own, as you put it, “ambiguous ethnicity”. So let’s start there. Tell us about how your own life shaped this research, and then who participated in the study that you designed.

ZOZAN: Yeah, thank you so much, and yes, “ethnically ambiguous” is kind of like the joke that I always introduce myself with. So, I was born and raised in Germany to immigrant parents, so although I’m German, I look Mediterranean. And so people mistake me from being from all sorts of places. I’ve been mistaken for pretty much everything but German at this point. So, you know, I personally grew up, in my house, we spoke 3 languages, so we spoke German, Italian, and Turkish, which is essentially how my family is made up. And, you know, this has kind of resulted in a bit of a… I’m gonna call it a lifelong identity crisis, because, you know, that’s a lot of cultures in one home.

And it also has played out in language quite interestingly, and I just kind of wanted to see with my study if others struggle with the same sort of thing, other people who are in this kind of environment, and I found that they do. And so in the book. I tell the stories of four people, all who have two ancestries in addition to the country they are born in, so there’s three languages at least at play. And all are visible minorities, so they… they don’t look like the mainstream culture in their… in the country where they were born. And all struggle having so many different cultures and languages to navigate. And, you know, it’s quite interesting, in some of the cases, the parents are from vastly different parts of the world, so the kid actually looks nothing like one of their parents.

So, one example is my participant, Claire. She has a Japanese mother and a Ugandan father, and so she speaks of the struggle of looking nothing like a Japanese person, so in her words, all people ever see is that she’s black.

And so there is some really heartbreaking stories about, you know, how challenging that is, growing up in Australia when you look nothing like your mum, and…You know, it’s also hard to assert your Japanese heritage when people look at you and don’t accept that you are half Japanese, even though she strongly identifies with it, for example. So, there are a couple of participants like that.

One of my participants, Kai, is probably the one I personally relate to the most. His mother is Greek, and his father is Swedish, and he looks very Mediterranean like me. So, he talks a lot about, you know, the guilt towards his heritage community, also internalized racism, and that is something I could probably personally very much relate to. So these are the kinds of stories that are in this book.

ALEX: They’re wonderful stories because you frame them in such a clear way that connects them to research and connects them to bigger ideas than just the personal experience of each participant, but it becomes very moving. These participants clearly have a great rapport with you. When Claire talks about speaking Japanese and the impact being a visible minority and visibly not Japanese, it seems, to other people, has on her. That’s incredibly touching, but also the effect that has on her mum, and her mum’s desire to pass on heritage language to Claire.

But the opening few pages are also, I have to say, really funny and interesting. They drew me in, I wanted to keep reading. So I’ll just add that in there to encourage listeners to go out and seek more of your voice after this podcast by reading the book.

Now, in this book, your intention, in your own words, is to explain what diversity feels like, and to normalize mixedness. And you point out that this is really important, pressing, in a place like Australia, but many places where our listeners will be around the world are similar. In Australia, about half the population are what we might call second-generation migrants, with at least one parent born overseas. And so you go on to say, this book aims to have a genuine conversation about what diversity and inclusion look like.

So, tell us more about what hybridity is. This is a concept you use for the, if you like, the sort of

embodied personal diversity of people, and what it feels like for your participants, and whether hybrid identities are recognised and included.

ZOZAN: Yeah, you know, it’s actually quite interesting, because when people hear that you’re culturally quite mixed, they kind of misunderstand what it’s like. So, you know, your mind doesn’t work in nationalities or languages, right? So in the case of my study, where three cultures or languages, are at play, you know, those… these participants don’t consider that they have three identities. Like, that is not how a mind works.

So rather, you are a person who has mixed it all up. So you don’t just think in one language, unless you have to. Like, for example, right now, I’m speaking to you in English, because I have to, but, you know, when I’m just chopping my vegetables and thinking about my day, I don’t think in only English. It’s a mix, in a single sentence, I would mix. If I speak to someone who can understand another language that I speak, I would probably mix those two. Like, it’s just… but I don’t do this, like, oh, let me mix two languages. Like, I’m not consciously doing that. And the same goes for behaviours or practices.

So, the way I kind of, you know, an analogy that I think you can use here, maybe to make it easier to understand, is if you think of, you know, say you have your 3 cultures, and there are 3 liquids, and so you pour them all in a cup and make a cocktail, right? So you mix them all up. And…

ZOZAN: you know, it’s… It’s very hard, then, to tell the individual flavour of this new cocktail now, right? It’s all mixed. But, you know, that’s not something that people understand. They want… they want the three liquids, the original liquids, what is in there? And often, you know, they will tell you that you probably ruined the drink by mixing them.

Laughter

ALEX: We laugh, but your participants have really experienced words to that effect, sure.

ZOZAN: Absolutely, and so, you know, you are often forced into a position, so you are forced to pretend you’re a different drink, because it’s very hard to, you know, separate the liquids once they have been mixed, right? And, you know, now I’m also Australian, so a dash of a new liquid has been mixed into it, you know, making the whole drink more refreshing, I think.

But, you know, unfortunately, most people still have very rigid ideas about identity, including our parents, right? So my parents cannot relate to my experience at all. They are not mixed. My teachers didn’t get it at school, right? Only people like me get it. But it’s important that we all kind of start thinking a little bit about what we’re asking people to do, because, you know.

when I went to school, for example, I could only be German, so I had to leave my other languages and my behaviours at home, because, you know, of assimilation, right? You need to assimilate to everybody else.

And then in my house with my parents, you need to leave the German outside, so it’s considered disrespectful if I say I’m German, right? So my parents would hate to hear this podcast, for example. Because to them, it’s like renouncing your heritage, right? So it’s about… you need to preserve what we have given you. And so you are kind of this person who’s like, well…

I don’t see it the way… I’m not three things. This is all me, and it’s actually people trying to over-analyse what kind of nationality this behaviour is, or this language is. In your head, you’re not actually doing that. You’re just one person who is a cocktail.

ALEX: That makes a lot of sense when you explain it, but in the findings, it becomes really clear that that’s actually very hard for people to assert as an identity. As you say, with parents, with teachers, with the public at large. You call it strategic positioning, the way people have to downplay, or almost ignore, or not show their language, or not show their other aspects of their… their different heritages, and that that can come at great personal expense.

And you point out that, in fact, while a lot of the research literature may celebrate this mixedness or this hybridity, the fact that it comes at personal expense and is difficult is not really acknowledged very much.

Now in this work you’re also drawing on some really foundational theories of language and power. So it’s not just about feeling bad or feeling excluded. The way people are able to mix their heritage languages and other aspects of their heritage, and the way they’re not able to comes within a power play and that draws really on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. I won’t delve really deeply into his theory of habitus, but I’ll quote this explanation of yours, which I loved: “the habitus can be understood as a linguistic coping mechanism, which is very much shaped by the structures around us. We develop language habits, whether within the same language or in multiple languages, which secure our best position or future in a particular market.”

And then really innovatively, you link the formation of these habits to our emotional experiences, drawing on the work of another theorist, Margaret Wetherall. Please talk us through how these theories help explain the way your participants pretended, as children, not to speak their heritage languages. This is just one aspect of how these emotions have influenced their… their behaviours, but I think many of our listeners will have done the same thing as children themselves, or relate now to knowing children who do this.

ZOZAN: Yeah, absolutely, and I think, you know, you almost need to go back to basics. Like, we use language to communicate, and we communicate to connect with others. You know, it’s a social need, it’s a human need to connect, to belong to a group, because we are social animals. So that’s actually the purpose of language, right?

But we also associate language with a cultural group. So, if the cultural group is well-regarded, so is their language, and vice versa. So, for example, here in Australia, obviously, English is highly regarded. And Arabic is not, for example, right? So this is a direct link to how we perceive the people of these cultures, right? So we’re comparing the dominant mainstream Anglo-Saxon cultural group versus Arabic in an era of really strong Islamophobia, right? So language is both this tool for communication, and it’s also this… this… this symbol of… of power, really. And so if the way you try to connect, so the… whichever language, you use, but also how you present yourself, if that results in a negative experience in disconnect, in fact, or feelings of rejection or inclusion, we will absolutely try and avoid doing that again. So we will try to connect… we will always try to connect in a way that is more successful to achieve inclusion and connection, right? So this is kind of like the theory simplified.

And obviously, you feel these experiences in your body, right? You feel shame, or you feel rejection, you feel loneliness, whatever it may be. And equally, on the bright side, you can feel happiness, you can feel, you know, togetherness, whatever it is, inclusion. So, this is kind of the emotional aspect, right? You feel… because this is a human feeling, the connection and disconnect. So, I think that sometimes we take that a bit out of our study of language. And I think we just need to bring that back a little bit, because it actually explained…explains then, how this plays out with language, so language being a key aspect.

You know, if you are told off for speaking a certain language in a certain context, or you’re being made fun of for speaking it, or something bad happens to you when you speak it, maybe you’re singled out, because you can speak something that others can’t. You will resent that language, and you won’t want to speak it again, and you will habitually almost censor yourself from speaking it, because you don’t want to feel like that again, right? So that’s kind of… and you don’t necessarily consciously do that. This is very important. I don’t mean that, like, you know, a 5-year-old is able to notice that about themselves. But typically, the rejecting a language, by and large, happens the first time a child leaves the home, in the sense of going to kindergarten or preschool, or somewhere that is not within the immediate family, where there’s almost, like, you’re being introduced to the mainstream culture in some systemic way, and you are meeting the mainstream culture there as well. So, you are with children, especially if you have an immigrant background, or your parents do, you’re meeting lots of children who don’t. And so this is your first becoming aware of being different, and so, of course, if you look differently already, that’s… that’s difficult. But then also, if you speak differently, that makes it extra difficult.

And so, you know, one of the examples, from the book that I think was just, it actually, when he did say it in the interview, I did tear up, so I want to share this one. And so this was, Kai, so just as a refresher, he is half Greek, half Swedish, and he grew up here in Australia. And so, at the time that he grew up there was still a lot of, sort of, discrimination, towards Greek people. That has probably tempered down a little bit since, but at the time, it was very acute still, where he grew up. And so, in a school assembly, he must have been in primary school, so fairly young, in front of the entire school, he was asked, singled out, and say, “hey, Kai, you… you speak Greek, right? How do you say hello in Greek?”

And he said, “I don’t know”.

And so when I had this interview, we paused for a second, and I said, “but you knew. You knew how to say hello in Greek”. And he’s like, “yes, I knew”. And I said, “well, why… why do you think you said you didn’t know?” And he said, “well, because they didn’t know, so if I don’t know, then I can be like them”.

And I think that is very heartbreaking, right? Because, especially here in Australia, there’s this idea that, you know, if you speak another language, if you are multilingual, that is almost un-Australian. You’re supposed to be this monolingual English speaker, right? That’s the norm, that’s the mainstream. So if you divert from that, that’s different, but especially if you speak a language where the cultural group is not well regarded, right? That positions you as, firstly, different, but also lower.

ZOZAN: Right? And so we can understand, again, he probably didn’t realize, as a 7-year-old, or whenever this was, what he was doing, consciously, but you can see this pattern, right? That’s why I’m saying it’s more a feeling than it is rational thought. The way your language practices develop is based on how your body feels in response to you using, like, language.

ALEX: And the fact that it’s such an embodied feeling comes out in your participants, who are now in their 20s and 30s, remembering in detail a number of these instances from way back in their childhood. I mean, the example of Kai jumped out at me too, the school assembly, because in the context, it might have seemed to the teachers that they were trying to celebrate his difference, to sort of reward him for knowing extra languages, but that’s not how it came across to him, because he’d already started experiencing the negative disconnection that that language caused.

Now that’s one example of negative feelings, but your study shows quite a number of how people in your study developed very negative feelings and distanced themselves from their heritage languages, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, or perhaps as children, consciously, but not knowing what a drastic impact it would have in the future on their ability to ever pick that language up again.

But then you say, this changed, and this is in adulthood usually, changed through relationships with people who they love and admire: “It only took one loving person to reintroduce my participants to a long-lost interest in the heritage language. I believe this is a message of hope.”

Well, I believe you, Zozan, when you say that’s a message of hope, so tell us more about that hope.

ZOZAN: Yeah, I mean, and again, it’s about connection, right? So, this is really at the forefront of everything. So, you know, if there is a person that you can connect with, that will somehow encourage you to rediscover what you have lost, then it’s actually… it can be reversed. It doesn’t mean that, you know, now you’re completely like, “yay, let me start speaking my language again”, or whatever. It’s not necessarily that, but, you know, it tempers down some of that self-hatred that you perhaps have, that guilt, whatever it is, so that you can actually deal with this illusion.

ZOZAN: a little bit more rationally. And, you know, a lot of participants, also, kind of talked about how they’re psyching themselves up to actually visit the country where their parent is from, because slowly, they can, you know, get to that place where they are able to do that, where that… where, you know, the realization that actually there’s nothing wrong with my heritage, it’s just I have been socialized to think that, because the people I have been trying to connect with couldn’t connect with me on that.

And so in the book, there’s a couple of such examples. So in the example of Claire, she, she met a friend at school who also is Black, and has sort of introduced her to this world that she didn’t know, whether it’s, you know, beauty tips for actually women like her, which of course she said was a struggle with a Japanese mother who didn’t know what to do with her hair, and all of those things, so little things like that, but also just, you know, embracing some of these things that… that she couldn’t actually seem to, sort of grasp in her home or in school. We have Kai, whose grandmother, so he loves his grandmother, she hardly raised him, and she developed dementia, and she forgot how to speak English as a result, so she could only speak Greek, so she kind of remembered only that. And so he was like, “well, I want to speak to my grandma”. So now I have to actually up the Greek, because otherwise I cannot communicate with her, and that would be a huge shame”. So you know, that connection is much stronger than everything else. Like, “I want to stay connected to grandma”. In another instance, you know, we had, father and daughter having a bit of a difficult relationship, as is so common in our teenage years, you know, we struggle. But so her dad then taught her how to drive, and they spend all these long hours, driving together, and he, in fact, is a taxi driver, so he showed her all the, you know, the tricks and the, you know, the shortcuts. And, you know, all this time, almost forced time spent together, kind of reconnected them, and, you know, now she’s much more open to, “hey, can you… can you tell me how I… how I can say this in Hungarian?” Or, you know, feeling excited about maybe visiting Hungary, for example.

So these are the kinds of stories, and so this is really important, because connection can just undo some of that traumatic stuff that happens earlier. And you’re quite right, it typically happens as an adult. It’s almost when you kind of have fully formed, and you can look at it a bit more rationally, and actually realize, you know, all of these experiences, it’s not because something’s wrong with me, but rather there’s a lack of understanding, or there are prejudices around me. That doesn’t make it, you know, they are wrong, and I’m okay, kind of feeling, yeah.

ALEX: Yeah, yeah.

ALEX: And you point out that it’s really, at least in your study, really clear that it’s this relationship, or a change in a relationship, that comes first, and then prompts that return to the heritage language, or that renewed passion for spending some time speaking it, or learning it.

And there had been debate in the literature as to whether it’s, you know, that you learn the language first and that enables connections, and you say, well, at least in your study, it seems to be the other way around, so maybe we really need to think of building those relationships first to enable people to want to, or to feel comfortable embracing that heritage language.

I guess, to that end, to try and help people come to that position of, you know, “it’s not me who’s wrong, there’s this world of prejudices or exclusions that are a problem”, you give the wonderful example of you yourself changing your classroom behaviours in the university subjects you teach to try and unteach the idea that heritage languages and identities are deficits. And when you tried it, this wasn’t your study, but it’s, you know, something you were doing because your own study encouraged you to go in this direction, you got such engaged student participation as a result. Can you please tell our listeners about that?

ZOZAN: Yeah, absolutely, and so this was based on an experience I had in my schooling. So I, as I mentioned, I went to school in Germany, and it is very common in Germany still to study Latin as a foreign language throughout high school, and so I was one of those poor people who had to do that.

ALEX: So was I, and you can imagine it was not as… not as common here in Australia.

ZOZAN: I, I… oh, God. It was tough, …But obviously, I speak Italian, so to me, often it was much easier to write my notes in Italian, because it’s almost the same word, right?

ZOZAN: So it just helps me learn that easier. So just in my notebook by myself, I used to write, you know, the Latin word and then the Italian word next to it, because, you know, it obviously makes it easier. Now, my teacher then came around and looked at my notes and said, “well, you have to do this in German”, and I’m like, “well, these are just my personal notes, I can do whatever I want”. And he’s like, “no, that’s an unfair advantage, you have to do it in German’, right? So I’m like, okay, great, so it’s an… it’s a problem at all other times, and all of a sudden, it’s an unfair advantage, so I just… I was not allowed to use my language, even though that was the better way to teach me, right? Like, I mean, that was my individual need as a student, that would have helped me.

So, I know that, obviously, you know, I teach in Sydney, it’s a very diverse student cohort, we have people from all over the place, we have international students, we have students whose first language isn’t English. And I know that many of them, especially if they grew up here and they’ve had this background, this, you know, their parents from elsewhere, they might have had similar experiences to me, whether it’s, you know, either being shamed in some shape or form, or actively forbidden, right?

And so I thought, okay, let me try and see what we can do with that. And so in my class, I then kind of started off with, does anyone here speak or understand another language? And I think it’s very important to say, speak or understand, because that firstly opens up this idea that, oh, okay, maybe the language that I silenced myself in. Typically you can still very much understand it, so I can barely say anything in Turkish, but I understand it quite well. And so, that’s not because I’m not linguistically gifted, it’s because of what I’ve done with it, right? And so, they will then raise their hand, and you can kind of… “what language is that?” And, you know, interestingly, obviously, you will find you speak 10, 15 languages in a classroom of 30 people, because it’s typically quite diverse.

So then we looked at, in this particular example, we looked at a political issue that was, happening at the time. I actually don’t remember what it was now. But I said to them….

ALEX: Hong Kong. I think it was….

ZOZAN: The Hong Kong protests, maybe? This is a while ago. But you could do this with anything. Like, I mean, let’s say I want to do this on the, war in Ukraine, for example. You know, what is the reporting around that? So, importantly because the lesson was around political bias in news reporting, that’s why it’s important for this particular activity to pick a political issue, but you could pick something, obviously, much less confronting, if you want.

So I asked them to look at news reporting about this issue from the last week or so, and I said, if you can speak or read another language, or even listen to, say, a news report on video, have a look at what, around the world, the reporting on the same issue, how are different countries reporting on it, right? So we actually used these other languages. And it was so interesting, because obviously, once you have, you know, some people looking at, you know, obviously news from Australia, but then others news from around Europe, from around South America, from around Asia, you can absolutely see that the news reporting is different. The angles are different, what is being said, who is being biased, is different, right?

And so here we then, you know, this discussion was much richer than had I just said, okay, read news in English, or just from Australia, where, you know, we’re just gonna hear the same perspective. And so I’ve been trying as much as possible to always do that and allow my students to, you know, if you want to read a journal article for your paper from another from an author that didn’t write in English, please do, if that is helpful. You know what I mean? So, these are the kinds of things I try to bring into my classroom to kind of show them, “hey, this is an asset. You speaking another language is great. It opens another door to another culture, to another way of thinking and viewing the world. It’s not a bad thing. You should use it whenever you can.” And it has worked really well.

ALEX: Oh, I love it, and I love that it doesn’t put pressure on those people to then be perfect in their non-English language or languages either. The way you describe it in the book, the more people spoke, the more other students said, “oh, actually, I do understand a bit of this language”, or “oh yeah, I didn’t mention it before, but I also have these linguistic resources”, and everyone just feels more and more comfortable to bring everything to the table.

ALEX: The next question, I don’t know if we’ll edit it out or not, just depending on the time, but it does flow quite nicely from what you’ve just been discussing, so I’ll ask it, and you can answer it, and we’ll record it.

ALEX: So, Zozan, another way you’ve built on this project, which was originally your thesis, and then you’ve written in this wonderfully engaging book. You’ve then gone on since then to do a different related project that’s ended up with a documentary and a lot of practical applications. And I think listeners would love to hear about it. It’s a project called Say Our Names. You’re leading a team of researchers from various disciplines in this project, and it’s about challenging quote-unquote “tricky” or “foreign” names in Anglophone contexts. You’ve created some really practical guides for colleagues, which I’ve seen, and even directed a mini-documentary that showcases the lived experiences behind these names. It premiered a few months ago here in Sydney in collaboration with the City of Sydney Council. Can you tell us about this project in a nutshell, and what the public responses have been like now that your research is out there beyond the university?

ZOZAN: I know, the Say Our Names is a bit like the beast that cannot be contained for some reason, it’s really, blown up, but I think what made it so successful is because it is such an easy entryway into cultural competence, very much to, you know, speaking to the kinds of themes that are in the book. So as you know, my name, people find hard to pronounce. It really isn’t, but it is immediately foreign in most, in most places that I would go to. And I actually… my name is mispronounced so often that sometimes I don’t even know how to pronounce it correctly anymore. Like, I have to call my mum, reset my ear: “How do I say this again?”

And, you know, there’s obviously lots of people in Australia, around the world, who have this very same issue, right? So you have your name mispronounced, you have it not pronounced, because people are so scared to say it, it looks so wild to them, they just call you “you”, or just don’t refer to you at all. Or perhaps, they anglicize it, or they shorten it, and you know, it seems like a harmless thing to do, but actually, it’s sort of like, you know, it scratches the surface of a much bigger issue, right? So you have, again, this dominant culture, and so here in Australia, obviously, the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon culture with everybody else, right? And so English names we are totally fine with, but as soon as something is not English or not, you know, common European, it becomes a tricky thing, and it’s hard to say. And so you internalize that, as the person whose name that is, you internalize, my name is hard to say, my name is foreign.

And your name is the first thing you say to someone, right? You meet a new person, you say, “hi, my name is Zozan”. And… I mean…

ZOZAN: 90% of the time, either people will mispronounce it, or they will ask me more about it.

ZOZAN: And I tell this story, not in the documentary, but when I introduce the documentary. I tell the story about how I actually, a couple of years ago, this is quite, timely, I had podcast training, how to speak about my research in, for podcasts. The first task that we had to do in this training was explain our work, like, what kind of research are you, what is your research?

And I found… I got really stuck with that, like, I couldn’t put in writing what I do. And I’m a very chatty person, I normally have no trouble talking and, talking about myself, but for some reason, that seemed like an impossible task. I couldn’t… I had no idea how to say it. And I realized the reason why I don’t know how to say it is because I never, in a situation where people speak about their work, I never get past my name. People don’t want to hear about my name, sorry, my work, because they want to hear about my name.

So, you know, I say, hi, I’m Zozan at a networking event. And, “oh, what kind of name is it? Oh, where are you from? Oh, you know, what are your parents? Where are your parents from?” And you don’t actually get a chance to do what you came to do, which is, I would like to speak about my work, because I’d like an opportunity.

And so we realized this is quite important, and yes, of course, it’s adjacent to all of this work from the book. It’s, it’s, you know, your name is a lexical item as part of language, right? So we realized the need to… maybe this is an easy entry point to connect people. If we just show the importance of trying to get someone’s name right, how to ask, how to deal with your own discomfort of not knowing how to pronounce it and asking how to… to take off a little bit of the burden of the other person who’s continuously uncomfortable anyway, right?

And so, yeah, we, we, again, storytelling is my thing, so we, we had some focus groups, obviously where we could do a bit more, you know, what is your story, what is your experience, and also how would you like to be approached, right? This is very important. We don’t want to assume that, as researchers, you know, obviously I have my own ways and thoughts. But it was important, so we asked, and created this best practice guide that really came from community: “This is how people would like to be approached. This is what you can do”.

And then we also created this, little documentary. It’s… it’s really, really beautiful, I think, if I have to say so myself. But obviously it just shows the stories, it shows stories of what it… what the name means, because it is obviously part of your cultural heritage, how people have felt resentful towards their names, and ashamed of their names, in exactly the same way as people do with language in my book. So there were a lot of parallels.

And also what it means when people try to get it right, when there’s actually a person making an effort, because again, it’s about connection. Here’s someone who wants to connect with me, and who’s making the effort. So, of course, now I also want to make the effort, right? So it’s almost like this beautiful…

ZOZAN: Like, thank you for trying, and yes, I want to be your friend, let me help you. …

And so, yeah, and it went beyond UTS, it went citywide. I am… we have been receiving requests around Australia to come and screen it and hold a little panel. We’ve had panel discussions with people who are experts in this field. But also, I think what is important that we now brought in as well is Indigenous voices, because obviously there’s an erasure there of names and language that we also need to talk about in the Australian context. So, we’re doing a lot around that, and yeah, it’s been… it’s been the most practical application, I think, of my research so far.

ALEX: When I heard a panel talking about it, something I took away is just to be encouraged, you know, if you’re the person who’s asking, “how do you say your name?” You don’t have to get it right the first time, you don’t have to have just listened to it, and then you can immediately repeat it, because maybe it is an unusual name for you. You just have to be genuinely making an effort to learn, and to show that you want to connect, and that you want to get it right, and you want to ask the person how they want to be known. And that, I think, is just so important for people to keep in mind. It’s not a standard of immediate perfection, it’s a standard of attempting to genuinely respect and connect with people.

Before we wrap up, can you tell us what’s next for us, Zozan, and can we follow your work online, or even in person?

ZOZAN: Well, …

ZOZAN: Obviously, the book is available, you can buy it as an e-book, or obviously, if you’re really into hardback, you can do that too. Say Our Names is spreading far and wide. I’m taking it to Europe, at the end of the year. It will be, used in classrooms in the UK. I will be screening it at a conference in Paris, so there’s actually quite a bit of… because it’s obviously really relevant all around the world, right? We are more globalized, so very happy to do more screenings and introductions and panels. Obviously, a book tour is in the works … let’s see how we go with that, but, certainly around Sydney, and then perhaps also overseas. So I’m trying to spread the word, and, you know, I’m the kind of person who actually just wants to make an impact. I want to, you know, obviously it’s wonderful to do this research and dive into the literature and all of that, but, you know, I think I am quite proud of having translated it into something that is, you know, we have now in corporate offices our best practice guide on language and on names, and people are trying. And so, you know, I think that is the most rewarding thing, and that’s really something I want to keep working on.

ALEX: Thank you, and we’ll make sure we put your social media handles in the show notes. So thank you again, Zozan, and thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and of course, recommend the Language on the Move podcast if you can, and our partner, The New Books Network, recommend to your students, your colleagues, your friends. Until next time!

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks to Massimiliano Canzanella, a Neapolitan language activist.

The conversation delves into the history of the Neapolitan language and the interplay of culture, race, and national identity that have contributed to the oppression of the language and its speakers. Massimiliano also discusses his own journey as a language activist and the movement to preserve Neapolitan, including his novels, Set Your Soul To It and You Don’t Say, which were the first ever to be written entirely in Neapolitan (and also available in English translation).

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

Transcript (coming soon)

Panoramic view of Naples (Image credit: Wikipedia)

(Image credit: Australian Government, Study Australia)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bilingualism: optional benefit, real risk

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

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

Laura   Yeah.

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

Laura   Yeah.

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

Laura   Yes.

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

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

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

‘Australian’ native speakers and language choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard work, pushback and pragmatism

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

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

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

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

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

Note

*Participant names are pseudonyms.

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Octonauts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Smith-Khan: Thanks, Brynn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Smith-Khan: Oh, amazing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: Oh, please.

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

Brynn: Fingers crossed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me your thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: I can’t imagine why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find out more about these and other fascinating aspects of English in Korea in this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast. Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Jinhyun Cho about her 2017 book entitled English Language Ideologies in Korea.

English Language Ideologies in Korea critically examines the phenomenon of “English fever” in South Korea from both micro- and macro-perspectives. Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions: why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the ‘dreams’ and ‘realities’ associated with English in Korea?

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

Transcript (added 09/09/2024)

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

Jinhyun is a Senior Lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Program of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests are primarily in the field of sociolinguistics and sociolinguistics of translation and interpreting. Jinhyun’s research focuses on intersections between gender, language ideologies, neoliberalism, and intercultural communication across diverse social contexts, including Korea and Australia.

Jinhyun is the author of the 2021 book Intercultural Communication in Interpreting, Power and Choices, and she has authored numerous other publications for international journals. Today, we will be discussing her 2017 book English Language Ideologies in Korea. This book critically examines the phenomenon of English fever in South Korea from both micro and macro perspectives.

Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions. Why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the dreams and realities associated with English in Korea? Jinhyun, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Cho: Oh, thank you for having me.

Brynn: To start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to studying how people think about and view the English language within Korea?

Dr Cho: Sure. I was born in Korea and grew up there, and I spent almost 30 years of my life in Korea before moving to Australia. And I worked as an interpreter between English and Korean in Korea.

And I have to tell you this, and that I didn’t speak English at all until I finished university.

Brynn: I cannot believe that. When I read that in your book, that was an incredible revelation to me.

Dr Cho: It might sound interesting to you and to the listeners, but back then, and I know that was many years ago, the Korean education on English, it focused on grammar and reading. And there was no speaking element at all.

So, I never had a chance to learn how to speak English until I finished university. And I got my first job at a small company after university, which I didn’t enjoy at all. And I started wondering what else I could do.

And I knew that there was such a job as a translator and interpreter, because one of my friends at university, her brother was an English-Korean interpreter. And that looked so cool, instantly switching between English and Korean, and he was working for an established broadcasting company in Korea. So, I thought that, oh, that sounds so cool, and I want to be one of those people.

So, I enrolled in a coaching school designed to train people who wanted to be a translator and interpreter. And that, to provide more details on this, because it doesn’t exist outside Korea, I know that there’s some in Japan. So coaching schools, these schools train people to sit for exams to enter a graduate school that specializes in translation and interpreting.

So that’s how it works, because it’s so competitive to get into a graduate school, graduate schools for translation and interpreting. So, I enrolled in one of those coaching schools and studied English for 14, up to 16 hours a day, and for two years. And that’s how I successfully got into this best graduate school in Korea.

And so, I took it for granted, right? Because everybody in Korea wanted to be good at English and they wanted to learn English. So, I thought that I never questioned why I wanted to learn English so much.

And then revelation came to me when I moved to Australia. And here, English is so natural, right? And everybody is expected to speak English.

And if you don’t speak English, then there’s something wrong with you. Whereas in Korea, if you speak English well, then you’ll be instantly admired. So, I thought that the gap was so interesting and started wondering why I wanted to learn English so much.

And then that led to this research question, as you said, right? So why do people in Korea pursue English so feverishly? You know, so much so that there is this social phenomenon of English fever.

And that’s how I got into this research.

Brynn: And just you saying that you studied English for like 14 to 16 hours a day, I cannot imagine doing that in another language. That had to be exhausting. It does feel like almost feverish study.

Is it exhausting to do that?

Dr Cho: Feverish study, I think it’s a perfect description of how I studied. Oh, it was exhausting. A session at the coaching school, it started at 7 a.m. So, I got up at 5 a.m. You know, because it was very far from, you know, where I lived.

So, I took about more than an hour. So, I got there and then took the three-hour session. And after that, me and then other students in the class, we created a study group.

So, we studied there until like 5 p.m. And after that, I came home and did some exercise and had dinner and studied more English until I went to bed.

Brynn: Collapsed. Collapsed.

Dr Cho: Collapsed. That’s right. And I think I was so consumed with that.

And sometimes I went to bed with CNN on, and I’m hoping that I could, you know, soak in more English in sleep. So that’s how I studied then come to think of it, yes.

Brynn: Well, and that’s what’s so interesting about the book is that you introduce us to this idea of this English fever, but also just this huge drive to study English.

But what’s so interesting is that then you take us back in time and you show in one of the first chapters of the book, it talks about the history of the English language in Korea. And what I find so interesting about that is that there’s this very real beginning point of when English literally made landfall in Korea. And this was in 1882.

Take us through that history a little bit, just in brief, from the arrival of English through to the Korea that we know today from a global perspective.

Dr Cho: Yes, I mean, this was so fascinating. So, this is a discovery that I made during my PhD, at the beginning of my PhD. So, I didn’t plan to examine this from a historical perspective.

But while, you know, just like any other research, you make a discovery by accident. So, while I was collecting data, I found out that the beginning of translation and interpreting in Korea, it coincided with the arrival of English in Korea. And to provide you more background on this, so you said back in 1882, Korea, so Korea’s predecessor, the Joseon dynasty, the last dynasty of Korea, it was under precarious geopolitical situations.

So, it was surrounded by strong and ambitious neighbours, which included Japan, Russia and China, which had acted as Korea’s elder brother traditionally. So, China was like a protector of Korea. And Japan in particular was the most ambitious because Japan was the first country in Asia that introduced modern technologies and civilizations from the West, primarily from the UK.

So, you know, the geographical situation of Korea is a peninsula. And Japan wanted to occupy Korea so that it could advance into the mainland China and into the bigger continent. So, in order to curb Japanese ambition, China joined forces with the US.

And then that led to this first international treaty in Korea, Korea-U.S. Treaty. And back then, there was nobody who could speak English in Korea.

And naturally, that led to the establishment of the English-Korean Translation, sorry, English-Korean Translation and Interpreting School, which is Dongmunhag. So now, what is interesting here is that the beginning of English fever in Korea, it happened at both top government and grass roots levels. And then top government level, that means that the king of the dynasty, King Gojong, had absolute trust in the US.

Why? It’s because of this Good Offices Treaty that was established between the US and Korea. And let me read you the clause of the treaty.

“The Good Offices on being informed of the case, to bring about an amicable agreement, thus showing their friendly feelings between the two countries.” So, this is a mere legal requirement. It meant nothing to then U.S. President Roosevelt.

However, King Gojong of Korea, he interpreted this as unflinching commitment from the US to protect Korea. So, the king relied on the US literally like a child does for his father.

So that was the beginning of English Fever. And also, the beginning of the US as the most powerful and generous country in the world. So that was the perception of the US at that government level.

But at the grassroots level, Translation and Interpreting. So even before this first English Korean Translation and Interpreting School was established, translators and interpreters, there was such a job in Korea because Korea had a lot of trade and business relationships with China. So, translators and interpreters, although they belong to the middle class, they were very wealthy because by using their bilingual skills, they made a lot of money out of trade.

So, becoming a translator and interpreter in Korea, there was an opportunity to climb up the cost system. The cost system in Korea back then, it was so rigid. So, there was no way that you could transcend the class barriers.

So, for people who were at the lowest class, becoming a translator and interpreter, that was the only opportunity to transcend the class barriers. And now what’s really interesting about this government established translation and interpreting school is that students were accepted regardless of class backgrounds. As long as you are linguistically talented, everybody was accepted, right?

So that opened the door for people, commoners in Korea, to become, to belong to a higher class. And then there was more American missionaries in Korea.

There were a lot of American missionaries who arrived in Korea in the 19th century, and they established the schools to teach English. This is what I found so fascinating that the English simultaneously became the language of the US and the language of power, and also the tool for class mobility for commoners. And that’s how English gathered forces and became the language of mobility and the power in Korea.

So, from a global perspective, I think in contemporary Korea, of course, you would say that there’s no such thing as a caste system, but there’s no society that is classless. Right?

Brynn: Exactly.

Dr Cho: Yeah, we all pretend that there’s no class, but there is.

Brynn: Of course there is.

Dr Cho: Yes, that’s right. So, in Korea, the reason why people pursue English so much is the amount of capital that’s attached to English. So English, this is the key findings from my research, that the English constitutes all four capitals and identified by Bourdieu.

So, it’s an economic capital and a cultural capital, social capital and also symbolic capital.

Brynn: Which is amazing. And I think for people who maybe aren’t familiar with English in Korea, or even just the concept of how very powerful English is in the world right now, to think that just having a language gives you that much capital, that much power, that much social mobility. I think especially to monolingual English speakers, it’s kind of like, what? What do you mean? It’s just my language. It’s just English.

But it really is. And in your book, you also go through the wartime era, like with the American occupation in Korea, and how that then influenced English as well. Can you tell me about that a little bit?

Dr Cho: Yes, that’s when there was a watershed in the popularity of English, and more importantly, the images of the US in Korea. So, as you know, Korea was colonized by Japan, and Japan pulled out of Korea when the Second World War ended, the US-led bombing of Hiroshima. And then when Japan left, the US came in.

And so that was to help Korea to manage the transition, right, from the colonized country to become an independent country. And to Koreans, the fact that the colonization was ended by the US, right? And then that made them believe that the US was the most generous benefactor.

And so, US basically freed up Korea. And then people had this fantastic image about the US, and coincidentally, the meaning of the US in Korean. In Korean, the US is called Mi-guk, which is based on the Chinese name of the US, Maegaw, and that means beautiful country.

Brynn: What!? Oh, my goodness. Amazing. I’m going to refer to it as beautiful country from now on. (laughs)

Dr Cho: Yes, you are from the beautiful country. (laughs)

Brynn: The beautiful country, yeah. Oh, that’s amazing.

Dr Cho: Yes. So then, and then the US was established as the most beautiful and wonderful country in the world. And as the language of the US, you know, English represented the power.

And then I wrote in the book that the very first president of the US, you know, Seungman Lee, he was baptized by the US because he was anti-communist. And then, and then he himself studied English at an American missionary school in Korea and went to the US to study. And he was the first Korean who finished a PhD.

And then spent most of his life, you know, in the US. So, Seungman Lee identified himself as American with the US. So, in his book, Autobiography, you know, it reveals his identification of himself and with the US, the freedom, the spirit of freedom and democracy.

So, you know, that kind of ideology view, idealised view of a country, and if that image of the country and then associated images of the language have been accumulated throughout history, then it’s only natural for people to believe that that is true, right? So, the whole point here is that English fever in Korea is not a contemporary phenomenon. It has always existed throughout history, but not many people know about this historical background about English in the US.

Brynn: That is so interesting how just idealizing a certain country or a certain culture can have that knock-on effect to the language of that country or culture. And on that, you discuss in your book, these two groups of English speakers in Korea. And in Korean, they actually have their own terms in the Korean language.

So, we’ve got haewepa, and those are people who learned English while living or visiting abroad in English-dominant countries. And guknaepa, people who learn English as a foreign language within Korea. And the fact that these specific terms even exist might be surprising to people, because it was to me when I first read it, who aren’t familiar with English ideologies in Korea.

So, tell us about what these terms say about the socially constructed nature of linguistic insecurity and neo-liberal ideologies in Korea.

Dr Cho: Yes, again, I didn’t think that this is specific to Korea, right? And because it was natural that people refer to each other that all you are haewepa, because you learned English abroad. And then we are guknaepa, because we have never had a chance to go abroad to learn English.

But it was only after I came here, again, when I was discussing my research and when I told this to people and people were surprised, like you, what? Oh, is there such a term?

Brynn: There’s actual words.

Dr Cho: Yeah. It’s an actual word that is popular, you know, in Korea. So, I thought, oh, that’s so interesting.

And then I started wondering, maybe the fact that such a term exists, you know, that reveals that it works as distinction, you know, between those people who learned English abroad and then people who learned English within Korea. So, it’s not, it’s much more than the fact that, you know, certain people had a chance to learn abroad and the certain people didn’t. It really is about class distinction, that because in Korea and also in many countries, in many non-English speaking countries, having an opportunity to go to an advanced country, and a lot of advanced countries are English speaking, right?

And then go to those advanced countries to study, that itself works as a class marker, right? That your family has enough resources to support you. And also, back then in Korea, going abroad, it was not allowed, right?

Except that you are from certain classes such as diplomats, or from those top class, from the top class. So, I started wondering maybe being a heawepa itself, and overseas learners of English itself, it works as a marker of class. And then that naturally, the other group who never had a chance to learn English abroad, they feel inferior, right?

And then they are not confident about the English, which I observed at the graduate school. Because at the graduate school, and I was one of those guknaepa students, because I learned English at home, right? And whereas there were a lot of students who learned English as a child because of their father’s job, you know, as a diplomat or posting, the father was posted to an English-speaking country, you know, from this company.

And then I observed that this underlying feeling of inferiority among guknaepa students, domestic learners of English and including myself.

Brynn: Yeah. Did you feel that you had to work harder as a guknaepa than the other people?

Dr Cho: Yes. Yes. We often, you know, say some things like, oh, yeah, such and such, you know, a person, their pronunciation is excellent.

Okay. She sounds like British, or he sounds like American, or he sounds like a New Yorker, right? And because they learned English, you know, in those places, yeah, in the US, whereas we, there was no term that could define us.

And the thing about language learning is that, okay, you can learn grammar. I can’t generalize, but in general, right? And people who learn the foreign language as a child, then they tend to acquire better pronunciation.

And then those students who learned English at home, and in general, our pronunciation wasn’t as good as that of, you know, overseas learners of English. I think in itself was a significant source of insecurity for us, you know, who wanted to become top interpreters in Korea. And people do get impressed by good pronunciation.

Brynn: Oh, of course. Yes, absolutely.

Dr Cho: Yes. So that was a significant factor. And then that led us to study harder and harder.

Brynn: For 14 to 16 hours a day.

Dr Cho: And then of course, I didn’t know that it was part of neoliberal ideology. So, I worked under those dominant ideologies without knowing that I was influenced by the historical factors of Korea, as well as the contemporary ideology of neoliberalism.

Brynn: Exactly. And I can absolutely see how that would happen, where, like you said, just the fact that these names exist for these two people does signify sort of this larger story that’s going on, where we’re putting more power and emphasis into the people who do get that chance to go abroad, and who do get to go study, you know, because they do maybe have more money, they have more power already. So, they’re kind of already starting with that leg up, and that’s going to make the guknaepa people feel like they have to go even harder, and even higher.

And not only do we have these two groups of people kind of vying for power, there’s also an incredible part in your book that talks specifically about sort of these gender roles in translating and interpreting. So, there’s a part that talks specifically about Korean women who go into translating and interpreting work, and the factors that are related to gender that influence this. Can you tell us more about how these women view English and English related work, and how their language journeys construct gender norms and expectations?

Dr Cho: Sure. In Korea, back then – I mean, things have changed so much.

Brynn: Sure.

Dr Cho: So, these days, a lot of young Koreans, they don’t want to marry. And if they marry, they don’t want to have a child. And I’m not sure if you know this, but Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world.

Brynn: Does it?

Dr Cho: Yes, it’s less than 0.7%. That means only one out of three women has a child. That’s rock bottom.

Brynn: Wow, that’s amazing.

Dr Cho: Yes. However, there is still this social expectation that you have to marry, and then you have to have a child. And that completes your female biography.

If you are a single woman and a childless, then, well, you might be successful in terms of career, but the people, especially from older generations, they will say something about it.

Brynn: Sure. They’ll say, but you haven’t really lived up to the cultural expectations of what womanhood is.

Dr Cho: That’s right, exactly. So, when I conducted this research, that was in 2012. Right?

So, it was 12 years ago. And a lot of my participants, so there was a single participant, they were living under the marital pressure. You have to get married.

Brynn: You need to find a man. Go find a husband. (laughs)

Dr Cho: Yeah, go find a husband. And at the same time, these women, they wanted to have their own career. And some of them, they worked for companies like I did, and they realized there was a glass ceiling.

And there was only so much that women could do in a corporate setting, which is still true in contemporary Korea, because Korea has one of the lowest levels of female executives among the OECD countries. And so, the glass ceiling is so strong there. So as a woman, there’s a limit to how far you can go.

So, I think to these women, becoming a translator and interpreter, there was an opportunity for them to build their own career, free from corporate structures and gender biases and gender norms, and especially jobs relating to Korea. They have this international image, becoming a translator and interpreter. Oh, there are open-up opportunities to work for international companies, or like the UNESCO or the UN, or you can work for an international company based overseas, or you can do some job relating to language.

So, I think they saw learning English as an avenue to lead their own independent female biography. And that’s how they expressed their beliefs in English, you know, as a language that could change their life and free from the gender norms.

Brynn: And that echoes what we saw before with in, you know, the late 1800s and the early 1900s when Korean, I’m assuming more men at that point, were using English as their sort of ticket out and their ticket up that social ladder. And it’s amazing that you then see that happening over 100 years later, but with women this time.

Dr Cho: Oh, yes, oh, that’s a very good point, Brynn. So back then, and of course I, you know, don’t have time to explain everything, right? That is just to relating to that.

So, one of the distinctive points of the history of English in Korea is this phenomenon called New Women’s Movement. And that’s during the Japanese colonization. So, the New Women’s Movement that was inspired by burgeoning feminism in Japan first, and then that influenced Korea.

So those Korean women who were educated overseas in Japan, you know, primarily because Korea was a Japanese colony, and then they learned advanced concept of feminism and women’s rights. So when they went back to Korea, they lead this movement, New Women, literally. So new women, they distinguish themselves from old women, you know, which was, you know, typically a good wife and a wise mother.

Again, there is this Korean expression, “hyunmoo yangcheo”. Literally, again, that means good wife and wise mother. So, there was the female, there was a gender expectation.

And they rejected the old gender norm to establish themselves as a model, like a new model for Korean women. And they, they consumed English and also Western civilization, right, to import Western ideologies and also to become Westernized. So, when the movement first started, it received a lot of support, including people, the Korean male intellectuals, because of the Korean male intellectuals, educating the populace, you know, under the colonisation.

It was one way to achieve independence. However, as the New Women’s Movement gathered forces, the new intellectuals, they started, they turned their back against them, because they didn’t want women to be too strong.

Brynn: You can get powerful, but only to a certain point, and then we’re going to stop you, right?

Dr Cho: Yes, exactly. That’s what happened. And I mean, also those new women, the leaders, and there was, you know, Korea was an extremely conservative country, and it still is, you know, to some extent, but they, you know, believed in free love and free sex, right?

And that didn’t go down well.

Brynn: That wouldn’t have gone down well with the powerful men. No, no, no. And obviously, we cannot talk about gender roles, especially of women, without talking about beauty standards.

And something that many women all over the world can relate to is the idea of unrealistic beauty standards that society sets on us. And your book discusses how these female interpreters and translators actually have to perform what you call aesthetic labour because they’re under pressure to not only be amazing in English, but also to look beautiful in order to compete with others in the translating and interpreting market. Tell us about that.

Dr Cho: Yes. It was a very interesting discovery. At the end of my research, I observed this phenomenon in Korea, which was called good-looking interpreter.

It was a social phenomenon and frequently featured in Korea that they had this capture of a good-looking female interpreter in action. And they said, Oh, such a such person, she’s one of those good-looking interpreters. And I was thinking, this is very interesting.

Why suddenly good-looking interpreters? And if you are familiar with Korea, you would know that there’s social pressure on good looks. And it’s not just for women, for men too.

Korea, it has obsession with beauty. And at first, I thought that maybe it’s part of that. And then as I had conversations, with the participants, I realised that the interpreting market in Korea, it was becoming saturated.

And because the number of schools specialising in translation and interpreting, it increased and that there were more graduates who specialised in English translation and interpreting. And then more and more people had opportunities to go abroad. After the Korean government lifted the ban on going abroad, and more and more people went abroad to learn English and study it.

And so, there were more English speakers in Korea. So, one way to distinguish language professionals from those people who could speak English, but not to the extent that they could translate and interpret. For female interpreters, I found out that it was beauty.

And the more beautiful you are, then the better chances you might get, especially if you are a freelance interpreter. Why? Because a lot of interpreters in Korea, they work for males.

So, the market itself, it gives an illusion that it’s a female dominant profession, because a lot of language workers are females. However, who do they work for? The males.

Brynn: The men.

Dr Cho: Yeah, the men. They are the top executives of companies, and they have important positions in industries. Therefore, it’s the men who hire female interpreters.

And very interestingly, a look was an important factor. And one of those ads that I collected as part of the data, it specifically said that a woman of a certain height, it said that it has to be over a certain height of 163cm or 165cm. And what’s the height to do with the language work?

So that itself, it demonstrates the male expectations of language work and language workers. And hence the term aesthetic labour is not just about language, but it’s also about how you look.

Brynn: Which is just mind-boggling to me to think that somebody could, like you had to, study for 14 to 16 hours a day for years to do all of this really difficult mental and intellectual work. And then to get to a point where someone then says to you, but you also have to conform to beauty standards, that just feels galling, you know? But you don’t see that happening with men at the same rate in Korea, or do you? What do you think?

Well, there was only one male participant. So, and then that person, he had a different motivation to learn English. So, I haven’t had an opportunity, you know, to observe if the same rule applies to men.

But, you know, if you just look at the gender dynamics of the industry, then it speaks itself, right? And it’s a male-dominated, it’s a female, yes, it is a female-dominated profession. However, the industry itself is controlled by men.

Brynn: That’s what’s so interesting.

Dr Cho: Yes.

Brynn: And something that you talk about is, yes, it’s female-dominated, but that also means that because they are freelance workers, they don’t always have consistent work. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dr Cho: Oh, yes, sure. In Korea, the interpreting industry is very different, you know, from, we are in Australia, right, in Australia, and in English-speaking countries, because in English-speaking countries, community interpreting is the mainstream interpreting. So, community interpreting, it refers to the type of interpreting that helps migrants who are not fluent in the societal language, right?

So non-English-speaking migrants who have trouble accessing health care, education, or government assistance, then they need language support. So, translators and interpreters in Australia and in other migrant-receiving countries, they are community interpreters, because they serve communities. Whereas in Korea, Korea is becoming multicultural, because there are a lot more migrants, especially from Southeast Asia.

However, traditionally, Korea is ethnically, it has this belief that Korea is an ethnically homogeneous country. Therefore, the type of interpreting there is not community interpreting. There is community interpreting, but it’s not the mainstream interpreting.

So, the mainstream interpreting is simultaneous interpreting. If you are not familiar with interpreting, you might have seen the image of interpreters working in booths, right? And then speaking into the microphone, interpreting the speech of this prominent political figure, President Obama, giving a speech at the United Nations, or interpreters working for companies.

And because there are a lot of big companies in Korea, like Samsung and Hyundai, and those companies, they have trade relations with businesses overseas. So to deal with the business transactions in English, because English is a global language, then they need a translator and interpreter. So therefore, a lot of interpreters in Korea, they work for businesses or for governments, and either they work for companies on a fixed-term contract or they freelance.

So, when they freelance, again, their clients, they are coming from those industries, government officials or they are top-ranking businessmen. So when you work for these people who have power, then what are the criteria that they are looking at when they hire an interpreter? So again, it’s a gendered question.

Brynn: Yeah, absolutely. And that means that even though this profession of interpreting is so glamorized and, you know, these, especially the women, study for so long, they might have to perform this aesthetic labour, but they might get hired and not have this work all the time. It’s just sort of when these companies need it.

And that means that their own financial income is not going to be consistent, which is just so fascinating to think how glamorized the profession is, but then the reality is, but we’re not always going to have a consistent good income.

Dr Cho: I think that’s the illusion about freelancing jobs. People think that they can be free to build their own career, but when you’re in the industry, you are not controlled. You don’t understand, right?

And then you are literally working for these people at the top. So, therefore, being a freelancer comes with a significant amount of insecurity, feelings of insecurity, financial, and also its feelings, because you don’t know when your next job will be. You might be unemployed for how long or how many months, and that’s why they keep pushing themselves to accept more jobs and to enhance individual competitiveness.

Brynn: Yes, that’s exactly it. It’s that always enhance that competitiveness, look better than anyone else just to try to get those jobs.

Dr Cho: Yes, yes.

Brynn: And this book was published in 2017, and you said that a lot of your work came from 2012. It’s now 2024. Where do you see the future of English language translating and interpreting going in Korea?

Is the profession still ultra-competitive and wrapped up in language ideologies, or do you see it changing in any way?

Dr Cho: I think the profession itself is still very competitive. And then it’s regarded as one of those highly professional jobs. However, because of AI, it’s a very big question.

You know, it’s sometimes said in media that it’s one of the first jobs that might be replaced by AI. Yes, but I don’t see it coming yet because, you know, myself, I have done a lot of experiment with the AI translation and I’m not interpreting. But yes, AI works well for certain type of translation such as legal documents, because the legal documents, there is a template, right?

Brynn: It’s like a formula.

Dr Cho: Yeah, that’s right. So, if you have, if AI has a lot of databases to work out the structure, then it does quite a good job. However, for other types of jobs, and as you know, in language, the hidden meanings of language in humans do a far better job at capturing those meanings. Capturing the nuance of human communication and emotion.

And then, so the AI is still, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of AI. But it’ll be interesting to see how things will change, because the profession itself, especially translation, there has been this prediction that a lot of translators will become post-editors. That means that the AI will do draft translation, and the human translators will review the draft translation done by AI.

And that is already happening in Korea. For example, Netflix, I understand that it does a lot of translation. It’s done by AI, machine translation.

But for interpreting, I think people still feel uncomfortable, right? It’s not natural, speaking to a machine, maybe young generation might not. But people, they prefer to have face to face conversation.

So, for interpreting, I think there is a long way to go.

Brynn: And that is interesting that maybe for, and we should specify for maybe people who don’t know, translating means the written language, literally translating from one language to another, whereas interpreting is for spoken or signed languages. And like you said, that’s often in person. It can be simultaneous or it can be consecutive.

And what about for you? What’s next for you and your work and teaching at Macquarie and research? What do you have coming up?

Dr Cho: Oh, well, in line with this conversation, so I’m working on my third monograph, and it’s about healthcare interpreting in Australia.

Brynn: Which I’m extremely excited about.

Dr Cho: Yes, yes, I can see that. So, I’m approaching healthcare interpreting in Australia again, from a historical and a contemporary perspective, and from a critical social linguistic perspective. Because the contrast in terms of English between Australia and Korea, and that always made me wonder, that why is English so natural in Australia?

I’m asking the question, and people might find that, you know, what a pointless question, because Australia is an English-speaking country. But we know that it’s a multilingual country, and over 300 languages are spoken in Australia. But the English has become so dominant, and then again, so how the historical dominance of English, how has it shaped people’s perspectives on other languages, represented by translation and interpreting, and also their perspectives on other language speakers, represented by interpreters, and how English monolingualism, so how does that impact interpreting?

So, from a historical perspective, again, again, in any societies, and it’s not just Korea and Australia, but in any societies, the very first foreign encounter, it generates interpreting, right? Therefore, interpreting is a birthplace of foreign intercultural communication. So that’s how I see it.

Brynn: That’s going to be fascinating. I cannot wait to read that, because as you know, that’s a lot very similar to research that I am conducting. So, we’re going to have to have another chat sometime soon after that’s done and do another episode.

Well, thank you so much, Jinhyun, for coming on and for talking to me today.

Dr Cho: No worries, I really enjoyed it. I hope that the listeners will enjoy it too.

Brynn: I think they absolutely will. And thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time.

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

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

Fun fact by the way:

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

Dictionaries change

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

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

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

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

Prescriptivists and descriptivists

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

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

Or are they?

And/or, do they have to always be?

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

Quotative like

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

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

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

A strip in the webcomic XKCD about research on quotative like

Evasive so

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing bad things with words

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calling out nefarious language is ok

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn and Michael speak in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. The paper examines two examples of multilingualism in directive signs within Seoul, South Korea, in order to theorize what gives rise to multilingualism in directive signage while other signage remains monolingual.

Some papers and posts that are referenced in this episode include Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape of South Korea, Toiletology and the study of language ideologies, so if you liked this episode be sure to check those out!

Enjoy the show!

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Transcript (added 30/04/2024)

(Image credit: Dr Michael Chesnut)

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

My guest today is Dr Michael Chesnut. Michael is a Professor in the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication at Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea. His work includes researching second language writing, TESOL teacher development, curriculum theory, linguistic landscape research, and translingual academic publishing practices.

Today we are going to talk in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sunwgoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape.

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

Dr Chesnut: I’m so happy to be here and thank you for having me on today. It’s so exciting to get a chance to actually talk about a paper. This is such a rare opportunity. I’m just delighted to be here and share my thoughts.

Brynn: Wonderful! To start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to living and working in Korea?

Dr Chesnut: Sure! Well, I’ll start with the last question there. About 20 years ago, as a young person having graduated university and not too sure what I was going to do for a career or with the rest of my life, I decided to go abroad. I wanted to get out of Canada where I’m from. At the time, a lot of young people in Canada, especially new university graduates, were going to Korea for a year to teach English, come back with a little bit of money, pay off student loans and then carrying on with the rest of their lives.

So basically, I did that, and I had no interest in Korea. I had done a little bit of teaching and I liked it, so I also thought it would be a good opportunity to play with teaching and get some more experience. I applied all over the world, but I applied a lot in Korea because that’s where a lot of people were going. I didn’t get many job offers because I wasn’t particularly qualified, and then I got one offer in a small town in Korea. A few weeks later I got an offer from Siberia in Russia, but they were too late. So off to Korea I went, and it was interesting. It was really interesting to be in a new country, be immersed in a new language, have no idea what was going on. Teaching was quite interesting and challenging, and I really enjoyed that first year so I stayed in that same small town for a second year. After two years I was starting to get more interested in teaching and wanted to become better at what I was doing. I wanted to remain in Korea and better understand the world I found myself in.

So, I was very lucky and I found a position at a small university, and what was so wonderful was they had an MA TESOL program. So, I could teach there, doing all sorts of different classes, and pursue an MA in TESOL to actually learn better how to teach English. And what was really remarkable was that this particular program had a focus on critical pedagogy. Teaching not just as a replication of existing knowledge, not just sort of helping you know more so you could do a job, but teaching as a means to kind of give more power to students, let them make more informed choices, help them better understand why we’re learning something in particular, why we don’t look at certain other issues. And so that was a really wonderful two years. I enjoyed it. I did a small thesis on language learner identity, and I was really interested in continuing this journey, and that program was founded, or at least developed heavily, by a professor who had studied at Penn State. So really, through him, I had an opportunity to apply to Penn State in their College of Education doing a PhD in curriculum and instruction. The professors there mentored him, and some of the professors that he had mentored had come back to Korea too, so I was able to pursue further education through a PhD at Penn State. I went there and took a lot of classes in the Applied Linguistics Department, really found a second home there alongside curriculum and instruction in the College of Education. My goal was to always come back to Korea as quick as possible to do fieldwork.

So, my PhD dissertation was on foreign language teacher identity. The Americans, Canadians and others who come to Korea and teach English. It’s still a major area of research for me, and so all of that let me to come to Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in my department here, the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication, which is essentially an English interpretation and translation department going English and Korean. Here, I teach English and I do research as part of the university’s responsibilities as well, and so that’s my journey to being here now where I teach a lot of different classes. Some are language classes, some are world Englishes or digital media classes, all with this language focus. And I do research on different issues as well. So that’s kind of my story and who I am as a teacher and a researcher. So again, thanks so much for having me on to talk about all of this. It really is such a privilege to get a chance to talk about a paper. I’m so happy to be here!

Brynn: Oh, that’s excellent, I’m so glad. I’m so glad to be talking to you too, and that’s really interesting to think how differently your life might have gone if Siberia had answered just a couple weeks earlier and not been late.

Dr Chesnut: Oh absolutely, if it had just been slightly reversed – off to northern Russia in the early 2000s.

Brynn: A little colder.

Dr Chesnut: A little colder, different environment. Who knows how life could have turned out then, you know?

Brynn: Yeah, so let’s talk a bit about your work. Quite a bit of your work has to do with something called the linguistic landscape. Not everyone listening to us right now is a linguist, so can you explain what that term means and why it’s something that linguists study?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so even if you’re not a linguist or don’t have a particular interest in language, you encounter the linguistic landscape all the time. The linguistic landscape is essentially all the publicly displayed language or text you see around you. So, walking down the street you see street signs, shop fronts, billboards, movie posters – all of that is the linguistic landscape. All the different text and language you see around you. And that includes graffiti, those stickers you see stuck on telephone poles, or maybe on a utility panel on a back alley. It’s menus posted on restaurant walls.

But when people talk about the linguistic landscape there’s often a real emphasis on multilingualism, on things that have more than one language. There are actually many different researchers who look at movie posters or different types of signs. People who study marketing, for example. But people who talk about the linguistic landscape are usually talking about text with more than one language. That’s where a lot of the focus, not all, but a lot of the focus is.

So, one reason to study this is just the general benefit of understanding something better. These signs are important. They’re an important means of communication, so it’s better to have a deeper understanding of how this communication works. Over the years I’ve heard some people, some linguists, say, “This is actually not real research. This is a hobby. This is someone going on holiday, taking a bunch of photographs, enjoying themselves, coming back and sharing these pictures.” But I’d push back on that and say there’s actually a lot of important communication occurring through multilingual signs. An emergency exit sign in multiple languages can be very important. Looking at movie posters and how they use different scripts or different fonts to mimic other languages or play with what they’re writing – that’s an interesting linguistic phenomenon. So, I think it’s worthwhile. And society does value better understanding this communication.

So that’s one general reason, but there’s a lot of specific reasons to examine the language on signs. Some involve determining the vitality or strength of a language in a particular place. So, walking down the street in a French speaking community in Canada – are there a lot of signs in French? That’s a quick and rough way to determine how strong a language is in a place, although there are very serious limits to examining language in that way because often language doesn’t come into signs. There can be a language spoken in a region, but for various reasons it doesn’t appear on signs. Likewise, there can be a place where a language is no longer spoken very much but it often appears on signs. So, people examine that.

People examine issues of language ideology, or the assumptions we make about language, the values we give to language. And then ask how those values and assumptions shape the language on signs. Maybe there are different varieties of a language, but only one appears on signs. So, then we can go in and look at how these assumptions and values are shaping the use of language on signs.

There are studies involving English as a lingua franca, where English sort of has this role as a general and shared means of communication among people who don’t speak English as a first language where the rules of English are determined by what is effective communication, rather than a standard that comes from the United States or the UK – so how does English work in a tourist destination where people are visiting from all over the world? People examine context like that.

There are a lot of different studies out there. English is a major topic in linguistic landscape research. Some people examine how English can be a symbol of cosmopolitanism, sophistication, style and a means of attracting consumers. People examine skinscapes, so multilingual tattoos and everything that happens when people get a tattoo that involves different languages or multiple languages. How languages are involved in the construction of public space. There’s been some great research on Israel and the use of Hebrew, Arabic and English to construct a particular place through those signs.

Studies on commodification – we can examine Little Italy or Chinatown and look at how language is deployed there, not necessarily reflecting how people speak in that place anymore, but as a means of commodifying and selling that place.

There are studies on how problems are addressed, maybe littering, garbage, public intoxication through multiple languages on signs addressing those problems.

There are questions about signs that come from authorities that seem to go down to the people – top-down signs – and the languages used in those signs, and languages that come from regular people. Signs posted by people about problems in their neighbourhood or a lost dog, and the languages used on those signs, and maybe the differences between those top-down/bottom-up signs.

There are studies on how the linguistic landscape can be used in teaching, and I’ve investigated this and used this in a lot of my classes. We can take pictures of signs into classrooms, into educational contexts, and use that to help people develop their language skills.

But ultimately, we’re looking at a lot of issues of what languages are present on signs. How are those languages being used? What shapes the presence and absence of different languages on signs? What larger issues in society impact and are impacted by the use of language on signs? Even now, maybe how the use of language on signs can challenge existing assumptions in society regarding language and more.

There are some really exciting developments occurring in different places in the world. There are some massive indigenous construction developments, housing developments in Canada. I’ve seen some pictures of those developments where they are using the language of that community on those signs. That’s really interesting. I’d love to read more about that.

Brynn: That sounds fascinating, and also excuse me now while I go google “linguistic skinscapes”. That sounds so cool! I’ve never heard of that as an area of study before. That’s awesome!

Dr Chesnut: It’s really fascinating. It’s not my area. I did a little research because I encountered one paper years ago, and then I did some more research and there have been some interesting developments in that area. So, there are people doing all sorts of interesting research in different areas, very exciting developments. And some of it is, I think, quite important. It could contribute to creating more productive communication in different ways.

Brynn:  I agree, and that’s a great explanation. And I think that in your explanation, you’re doing a great job of pushing back against those people who would say that this is maybe just a hobby or something just a tourist would do. And you’re right, it’s a really important part of the world that we all live in. So, on that, let’s talk about your 2022 paper From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. In the paper, you develop the concept of “multilingual commanding urgency”. What does “multilingual commanding urgency” mean, and how might it appear in the linguistic landscape?

Dr Chesnut: Sure. Well, why don’t I take us through a little example, something that occurred to me, and then we can explore it together and think about how multilingual commanding urgency kind of helps us understand what’s happening around us with some of the signs we see.

So, we can imagine that we’re at a ski resort in north America, and walking through this ski resort we see lots of different signs. A big welcome sign in English. Maybe a giant sign with the name of the place positioned so we can all take photographs with it, post them on Instagram. And lots of signs that are important – rest area here, ski hills that way. Maybe a sign, all in English, that says, “Only qualified skiers should go down these particular hills” – kind of a warning and informational sign to direct people how they should go depending on their level of skill.

As we walk around this ski resort, we see something different. We see a sign that says, “Do not feed the wildlife,” but this sign is also in Korean and Chinese. Looking around, we see that is the only sign that is in English, Korean and Chinese. So, we might start to wonder, “Why is this sign and this sign alone the only sign that is trilingual, incorporating Korean and Chinese, while all these other signs, some quite important, feature only English?” And multilingual commanding urgency is our attempt to conceptualise an answer to that question.

What we argue is that, often in the world, sign makers will, rightly or wrongly, have an idea about who is likely to violate the regulation posted on a sign. There are certain language communities believed to be potential violators of these particular regulations. And there’s a belief that, if this regulation is posted in the language of that community, it will reduce the enforcement burden of those authorities. And when those two conditions are met, there seems to be a greater urgency or effort or impetus to make that sign multilingual.

So, I would explain this imagined “Do not feed wildlife” sign as occurring because some sign maker, some authority within this resort, for some reason believes Korean-speaking guests and Chinese-speaking guests may be more likely to violate this regulation, and that if they post this message in those languages, it will resolve the situation, reduce the enforcement burden of the authorities.

Now that may be completely incorrect, but that may be the authorities’ belief. And this is an imagined scenario, but it is based on something I actually saw in North America at one point.

And we can see this in other places too. You can imagine walking through an airport, maybe an airport in Germany, and this one did happen to me very recently, and see many signs in German and English – “baggage claim area”, “gates 1-10” – all these different signs in English and German. But then you see a door, and it’s an emergency exit and it’s alarmed. If a member of the public opens the door, the alarm goes off, authorities have to rush in, people have to investigate and a lot of things occur. And that door sign has a warning, but not just in German and English, but also Arabic, Russian and Chinese. And this I saw in an airport in Germany. So, that would be explained, I believe, likely by this multilingual commanding urgency. Authorities have identified certain communities as likely to violate this regulation. They believe that if they put the sign in those languages, it will reduce their enforcement burden. The fewer times they have to rush to that emergency door, the better for them. And this creates an urgency, an impetus, to make signs multilingual.

So that’s multilingual commanding urgency. That’s what we conceptualised as the genesis of multilingualism in many of these signs. And there are a lot of examples in literature that don’t talk about multilingual commanding urgency that come from earlier studies but that were foundational. Examples of a “do not spit” sign in an airport in New Zealand – that sign was only in Chinese and Korean, not in English, and actually seemed to create a bit of a furor on social media. Signs in Hong Kong which include Tagalog prohibiting hawking. Signs in Hungarian in Toronto, Canada about a code of conduct requiring some behaviour for young people. So, we do see across literature lots of examples of this. So, this paper and this concept of multilingual commanding urgency are our attempt to explain and discuss this sort of pretty broad phenomena. Does that provide an explanation of this phenomenon?

Brynn: That’s a great answer, and it also makes me think of another space where I’ve seen these types of signs before here in Australia, and that’s in public restrooms. Public toilets. I do believe I’ve seen papers before and even on our research blog, the Language on the Move research blog, we’ve featured these stories before, where on the backs of the stalls, at least in the women’s toilets, there will be these signs about toilet etiquette, and it will only be in certain languages. So again, to your point, of these potential violators of these rules being identified, rightly or wrongly, by the higher up authorities, and then that being targeted through these specific languages.

And your paper looks at cases of multilingual commanding urgency in Seoul, Korea, and specifically two types of directive signs that you and your colleagues found during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: first, COVID-19-related “masks required” signs in subway stations, and second, signs prohibiting illegal garbage disposal in side streets. These might sound like totally unrelated signs at first, but your paper found a fascinating connection between them. Can you tell us what you discovered about which languages were used for these different types of signs?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so I’ll start by describing these two signs in detail a little bit. The first set of COVID-19 “masks required” signs were posted because, prior to their posting, there had been strong encouragement to wear masks on subways and public transportation, but as the pandemic developed, there was a regulation developed that required masks to be worn by everyone in subways and the subway station, on public transportation. So, suddenly there was this new regulation. On this day, everyone has to wear a mask, and all these signs appeared.

Now, these signs were very large. They covered pillars in subway stations. You could sit at the entrance of the subway station and see half a dozen to a dozen of them, just from one spot. And they were monolingual Korean, and they were large, multicoloured and everywhere.

But, shortly thereafter, in a matter of days, appeared much smaller signs, A4-sized. And these signs had the same general message. Not as much detail. The larger Korean-language signs had details about where to buy masks. Each sign at each station had a little additional information about the nearby convenience store or location about where you could buy masks. These were absent in the other signs, and these other signs, much smaller, a little bit less well-produced, had the same general message in English, Chinese and Japanese. So, they appeared after. And this was quite interesting to us. These two signs appearing together. That’s one set of signs that were really important to us.

The other set of signs – we actually didn’t collect these signs entirely during the pandemic. Images of these signs were collected earlier. These were signs prohibiting the disposal of garbage, basically “don’t letter”. And there’s kind of a sophisticated system in Korea for the disposal of household garbage. A lot of apartment complexes will have a recycling system. Individuals can go buy garbage bags. Payment goes into funding the trash disposal system. So, some people litter to avoid this or because it can be inconvenient or whatever. So, this is a major issue. A lot of people get upset by trash. You don’t want trash in front of your house, and so there’s a lot of district-level government signs about prohibiting the disposal of garbage.

And what we found was that, in certain districts, these signs included Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, English and certain signs only had Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese. No English. So that was quite interesting. And what’s also critical here is that Korean government signage rarely features Arabic and Vietnamese. Some English, some Chinese, but very rarely Arabic and Vietnamese. And very, very rarely on district-level signage. These are neighbourhood-level government signs. So, these were very unusual signs to see Vietnamese and Arabic being used in these ways.

And so, what happened was me and my co-authors – and my apologies for not mentioning Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim earlier, they are absolutely foundational to this whole project and they are continuing work on COVID-19 signs – but we decided to collect data from our daily routines during the COVID-19 pandemic, just to better understand how signs were being used regarding COVID-19. And as we collected data, we examined it and looked at it in different ways. We were really struck by these “masks required” signs and these additional small multilingual signs. And what was really striking was there were other mask signs, signs that were encouraging mask use more generally and often quite powerfully using fear or sometimes cuteness to encourage mask wearing. But they were monolingual Korean. So, we were trying to understand what led to the additional signs requiring people to wear masks in English, Chinese and Japanese.

So, we were viewing literature and we started to look deeper into the context of signage in Korea, and we found the examples in our already-collected data of these garbage signs. And we really thought this might be the same phenomenon in two different ways – in the COVID-19 “masks required” signs we’re finding English, Chinese and Japanese as the languages to speak to the general non-Korean foreign public. And in the signs about garbage using Vietnamese and Arabic, we have the language used to speak to the Arabic and Vietnamese-speaking communities in these districts. So, we found different examples that were both the result of what we believed to be the same phenomenon.

So, our analysis of the COVID-19 linguistic landscape is ongoing, but we found these examples and decided to share sort of a conceptual paper that used these two examples to really look deeply at what we termed “multilingual commanding urgency”, and what we were finding being discussed in the literature. We wanted to bring that all together in one paper, use these different examples to really understand this phenomenon, discuss it and expand on it. That’s what came together in our paper. So, we argue that these two very different signs are ultimately the product of a belief that certain language communities are likely to be violators of a certain regulation, and a belief that by sharing the sign, making the sign in a certain language, you can reach that community and lower the enforcement burden for the authorities. So that’s how this paper came about.

Brynn: And that’s so interesting because, like we said, we all, as just people who are walking around in the world, are going to see these signs, could potentially read these signs. But a really interesting point that you make in your paper is that, exactly this, that these types of signs have the potential to be “overread by passersby”. You point out that these people might not actually be able to read the languages on these signs, so maybe if there’s a monolingual French speaker walking around in that context, they might not be able to read the languages, but they may know what languages they are. They might be able to say, “Oh I can tell that’s Arabic” or “I can tell that’s Vietnamese”. So, what inferences and assumptions might these passersby, who have nothing to do with the government, then make about the communities that are being addressed through these very specific language choices with these directive signs?

Dr Chesnut: So, this concept of “overreading signs” we borrowed from Philipp Angermeyer who has an amazing paper looking at Roma youth from Hungary in Toronto, Canada. Some youth centres and certain places started putting up signs in Hungarian, sort of codes of behaviour, to try and regulate what was perceived to be kind of inappropriate behaviour by these youth. He interviewed youth and authorities there. It’s an absolutely phenomenal paper. What he also pointed out was that these signs can be wrong. They used Google Translate to create the Hungarian, so in some cases it was really nonsensical. So, for these youth it was somewhat offensive, disheartening, disappointing to see not just signs about poor behaviour in a language directed to them, but also poor translations, signs they don’t even care enough to translate.

So, we’re discussing how, in general, these multilingual directive signs about bad behaviour can be overread potentially by anyone, sometimes even mistakenly, in a way that suggest certain communities might be responsible for this bad behaviour, engaging in this inappropriate behaviour or violating these regulations. So, if anyone is walking down the street and maybe you can read one language, maybe the dominant language is there, and you can read a sign saying something about disposal of pet waste, or smoking in an area you’re not supposed to smoke, and then you see it in certain languages that are very rarely used by authorities. It’s very easy to link those language speaking communities with this inappropriate behaviour, this aberrant behaviour.

So, that’s the concern, that these signs might reinforce larger public beliefs that certain communities are engaging in so-called bad behaviour, linking communities with problematic practices, and so really this could be having a negative effect on society, especially when languages are very rarely used in more general government or authoritative signage, or even more generally, and only used in these signs linked with bad behaviour. That’s the really problematic element.

Brynn: Yeah, it’s that perpetuation of a potential stereotype that exists within a community and, like you said, especially if it does come from that more governmental/district level position of power. Then that might perpetuate the stereotype even further.

You mentioned earlier that these particular trash signs came from a little earlier, but the paper was published in 2022. It’s now 2024 – have you seen any change in these types of signs in the intervening years? Are there still these “problem communities” that are being targeted through specific multilingual commanding urgency signs around Seoul?

Dr Chesnut: Well, there are certainly signs like this still about. There was an absolutely fantastic paper about a district with a large Chinese community in Seoul, and that paper had amazing examples, and kind of heartbreaking examples of signs only in Korean that request people to report others for bad behaviour, and then signs only in Chinese saying, “Don’t engage in problematic behaviour like public drunkenness and other inappropriate acts.” So certainly, this still exists now. That paper is from a little while ago too, so some of these signs might have changed.

And certainly, a lot of COVID signs have been taken down. Some remain. But I suspect these are long-enduring signs, metal signs posted on walls, so I suspect many of them are still up. I’ve seen signs that are ten years old. They remain for a long time. And I do want to point out that I think this is a kind of global phenomenon. I think signs like this can be found all over the world, so I wouldn’t single out any city or particular region, but I haven’t seen any major changes that way.

What I have seen that’s encouraging is that I’ve started to see some emergency signage that’s being made more multilingual, so we have a lot of emergency shelter signs and emergency shelters in Seoul. A lot of the time I’ve seen them in Korean, sometimes Korean-English and sometimes Korean-English-Chinese. But I recently saw one that had Korean, and that was the largest language by far. English was the second largest. Beneath that was Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese and Chinese. So, that I would not consider multilingual commanding urgency. That’s maybe a different type of language phenomenon, a different type of sign, and so there might be a move towards more multilingualism in general. That would certainly potentially lessen the potential for overreading certain directive signs. So, that would also be the policy I would advocate.

There is a need for signs directing people not to dispose of trash illegally, and if you want to reach out to a community then reach out in many ways. Not just through this directive signage but include that language on many different signs so it becomes less significant with this problematic directive. So, I do see some positive developments in more general multilingualism, but I think these signs do remain and I think they do have a purpose, so I hope there are some positive developments.

Since COVID I’ve also been out a lot less and I have family responsibilities these days that are new, so I’m collecting less general data and I don’t quite observe as much as I used to. So, I hope that’s a reasonable answer.

Brynn: It is, and what I love too about your paper and about this type of work into the linguistic landscape is that any person walking around in their own community, whether they’re here in Australia, whether they’re in Korea or Canada, they can pay attention to this, you know? You don’t have to be a scientist; you don’t have to be a linguist. Just notice. What do you see? Do you see multilingualism, kind of like you were saying in the context of everyone can read an emergency sign or subway rules, things like that? Or do you only see only very particular languages and therefore language communities being targeted with the signs? So, they are two quite different things.

And I love that it’s something where, once you’re aware of it, you can’t stop seeing. Ever since I read your paper, I now do that, where I just walk around and observe that in my own community.

And you said that you don’t maybe necessarily get to collect this type of data as much these days, but what is next for you and your work? What other research are you working on now?

Dr Chesnut: Our team, Sungwoo Kim and Nate Ming Curran and myself, we’re all still working on our COVID-19 linguistic landscape data, and this potentially could be lifetime work. There’s a lot there, and a lot more that can be done still.

So, right now we have a draft of a paper looking at English usage on authoritative government COVID-19 signage. What we’re looking at is how English is used in at least two very different ways. It’s used in one way for signs intended for a domestic Korean audience, and that’s very interesting to see English used for a Korean domestic audience for non-commercial purposes. It’s not marketing, it’s not cool English necessarily. It’s not trying to create a sense of cosmopolitanism. It’s trying to reinforce good public health behaviour, and we find English being used where the English text itself conveys information. The English has a meaning-making purpose. Not as a symbol, but information is bound into the text.

But it’s also being used as a symbol or a design feature or an emblematic element. It’s being used for Korean-English punning. It’s being used with Korean-English blends where there’s one message that switches between English and Korean to convey a particular message to the public, the Korean public. So, we’re very interested in how English is being used for public health messaging to a Korean audience.

And we’re also seeing English being used for a foreign non-Korean audience of visitors or residents. And what’s interesting there is that very often English is being used alongside Chinese or Japanese as a part of this broad multilingual communication strategy, and that kind of challenges the idea that English is this ultimate language, this lingua franca. That, in fact, it’s being used alongside other languages as part of this broad multilingual strategy except for particular foreign places where we do see monolingual English language signage in this Korean bilingual signage.

And sometimes, multilingualism that goes beyond Korean-English-Japanese-Chinese where there are six languages or eight languages in a particular foreign place. And we do find a few examples, especially early in the pandemic, where there is English that is difficult to understand, and we do want to address that too, and the Korean was actually a little bit odd too. So, it may be a result more of confusion earlier in the pandemic. The messages were unclear both in Korean and English, and that’s something that should be addressed too.

So, we’re looking at that, and we’ll continue looking at the linguistic landscape. We have a beginning of a paper looking at Chinese signage with the heavy concern of overreading, of how Chinese signage may have been overread during the COVID-19 pandemic in Korea. And we want to address how there was private sector signage that was very explicit. Basically, Chinese guests were not welcome. They were told not to enter certain restaurants or institutions. So, we want to address, or bring into academic discussion, the fact that these signs exist and that they were done bilingually in Korean and Chinese and that there are big issues there. That’s another project that’s probably further in the future.

We’ve already published another paper, it’s actually a blog that’s open access. Anyone can read it. It’s quite short. It looks at cuteness and fear in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape. What we saw was a lot of signage, a little bit from authoritative signage, but a lot of private sector signage. So, cafes and restaurants that had signs saying “please wear a mask” but they used a lot of cuteness. Little anime-like figures asking you, “please wear a mask for me”, or cartoon figures with their masks saying, “be like me”, that type of thing. So, there was a lot of cuteness deployed in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape, and we went to an online symposium for that, and then we shared it in a blog as part of that, so “Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape”. Google and you can find the blog and find all the entries there. It’s quite interesting.

And we also, in that piece, talked about fear. There were a few government posters that really strongly attempted to invoke fear. “Wear your proper COVID-19 mask, or you’ll end up wearing a respirator mask in the hospital.” Really strong invoking of fear there. And there were other messages as well, using fear this way.

And in the conference, it was quite interesting. There was a public health expert who joined the conference, and it was quite wonderful he was there. But he was surprised. He was from South Africa, and he said, “We could never use signs like this in our context. They’d be inappropriate. No one would respond to them positively.” But he was very eager to learn what could be done, how we can use signs to successfully promote good public health practices.

Unfortunately, this type of research doesn’t give an easy answer besides, I think, an answer saying that communicating in more languages in general, not specifically with a punitive message, is probably a good productive practice. But ultimately going deeper into that question would be an interesting long-term goal but would require very different research methods. So, maybe that’s something to think about in the future. There’s a lot to be done.

It would be wonderful to better understand communication through signs and other means of course, but I’m doing more research in signs, involving public health and emergencies and disasters and how those signs can be made in a way that is more productive and helpful, less damaging, less concerning in other ways, and better understand all these issues.

Unfortunately, the world remains a very dangerous place. Other events will occur, not exactly the same as the COVID-19 pandemic, but conflict, war, tsunamis, earthquakes – all these things can occur. All may require changing our behaviour as members of the public, and that can be shaped to some extent by these publicly displayed signs. Huge posters in the subway. Things on the bus. All manner of signs in an airport or any public institution. Private businesses, restaurants, cafes and more, all sharing signs that can inform the public about what to do in case of some unfortunate event, can maybe have a role in creating a better society to some extent.

So, we’re going to keep working on this, I think. There’s a lot more that could be done.

Brynn: It sounds like you said, it could be a lifetime worth of research. That’s so much to draw from. And like you said, it is something that I think we all have to take away from the COVID-19 pandemic, to kind of look back and say, “Alright, what did we not anticipate? What did we get wrong, and how can we better prepare in the future so that we can communicate better so that we can make sure that people from any language background can receive the information that they need in that type of a crisis?” So that sounds absolutely fascinating, and on that, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate it.

Dr Chesnut: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute delight. As I mentioned earlier, it is rare to get an opportunity to talk about a research paper, not a big book, not a big project, but just one paper. And this is a paper I’m quite fond of and a research project I find interesting. So, it has been a delight to get to talk with you. Thank you so much for all the wonderful and engaging questions. They really helped direct me and hopefully keep me on task. I really appreciate your guidance there.

And yes, hopefully this encourages more members of the public to keep an eye out for signs and look for those directive signs that are made multilingual in unusual ways. And for researchers out there, this is an exciting area to research. Don’t be afraid, I don’t think researchers are afraid, but this is a productive place to do research, and the more people examining this topic, the richer the discussions become. So, I’m always eager to find new people entering the field and discussing these topics.

Brynn: Excellent, so get out there and go look at some signs!

And thanks for listening, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!

This episode’s conversation centers around Dr Peterson’s 2020 book Making Sense of “Bad English,” which is available open access. The book discusses how the notions of “good” versus “bad” English came about, and some of the consequences of these views of language.

The book is a must-use for teachers and professors who introduce their students to sociolinguistics as it contains discussion questions at the end of each chapter as well as recommendations for further reading. However, you don’t have to be a Linguistics student to enjoy this book. Making Sense of “Bad English” is for anyone who has ever wondered how it’s possible to have so many different varieties of one language, what the Standard Language Ideology has to do with Santa Clause, and why English spelling is so chaotic.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

If you like this episode, be sure to check out more Language on the Move resources about language ideologies here!

Episode Transcript

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

My guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Peterson. Elizabeth is a Senior University Lecturer in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

Today we are going to talk in general about her research into language ideologies, and in particular about her 2020 book entitled “Making Sense of ‘Bad English'”.

Elizabeth, welcome to the show, we’re so happy to have you here with us today.

Dr Peterson: Thank you for inviting me. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Brynn: Can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself? How did you become interested in linguistics in general and language ideologies in particular? And on that note, what exactly is a language ideology?

Dr Peterson: Ok, well, I’ll start with your first question, and a little bit about myself. I’m an American migrant to Finland. I’ve lived here for about 20 years. I did my PhD in the United States, and I live in a home with 3 languages – Finnish, Swedish and English. Finnish, of course, is the de facto and also the constitutional majority language in Finland, but Swedish is a constitutional language with about 300,000 speakers, and my family fits into that category. So, language is all around. You know, I’m a strong advocate of multilingualism, and those are the principles that we try to espouse in our home as well. Practice what you preach.

Brynn: I absolutely agree. In my house, we have not so much languages, we have two dialects. We have American English and Australian English. So, not so much the language spectrum but we definitely have words where we’ll say them and ask each other, “What do you mean by that? I don’t know that word.” Still, 15 years on in this multi-dialectal relationship.

Dr Peterson: Isn’t that incredible?

Brynn: I know, right? Can you tell us, for people who might not know, what is a language ideology? What do we mean when we say language ideology as linguists?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, well let’s start with what an ideology is. An ideology, at its most basic sense, means a belief that you have. So, there are many really good definitions of language ideology that are coming out of anthropology, pretty much, and then we kind of borrowed all of that into sociolinguistics. So, an ideology is a belief, therefore a language ideology is a belief about language. A really deep-seated belief. And this is a basic definition that comes from somebody like Michael Silverstein, for example.

There are many definitions that I like. I’ll kind of keep it brief today so it doesn’t turn into a classroom lecture. Nobody’s interested in that.

Another kind of nutshell definition that I like comes from the linguist James Milroy who says that it’s common-sense views about language. So, these are things that we kind of don’t question, and we just think that it’s always been there, that this is just the way it is, and therefore it makes it really, really difficult to turn that around and present it back to people in a way where they’re willing to go, “Oh! So, you mean that might not be an absolute truth? That this is just what I think?”.

So, truth, of course, is a really negotiable concept. Just because it’s what people think doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s complicated. That’s what we need to present back to people, that this is much more complicated than what they might think, and also link it to concepts and realities like language discrimination. They might not be able to make that link on their own, so that’s one thing we can do as linguists, is to make that link for them.

Brynn: That is such a good point that there really is that link between language ideologies and discrimination.

Dr Peterson: And it’s not a weak link, it’s a strong link!

Brynn: 100%, exactly. Exactly. And kind of on that note, one of the first things that we as sociolinguists learn is something called the Three Circles Model, proposed by Braj Kachru. That’s one of those Sociolinguistics 101 things that we learn. But not everyone that’s currently listening to us is a sociolinguist, so can you tell us what the Three Circles Model is and what it has to do with how people perceive different varieties of English?

Dr Peterson: Sure, and maybe I can start a little bit by just talking a little bit about who Braj Kachru was. He was from the Subcontinent. He was from Kashmir originally. He just died a few years ago. He grew up in a colonial setting speaking English as a second language. His idea with creating that model was to empower people from settings like that and not keep putting them down and saying that their English was somehow substandard or a learner variety or whatever, so it was a way of him taking ownership for people who come from that kind of demographic or geographical setting with a colonial history.

Anyway, I’ve presented this so many times in class. So, if you could visualise with me, if you will, 3 concentric circles. It looks like a bullseye with 3 circles, right? Kachru’s idea was that the Inner Circle, and that’s what he actually called it, the inner circle, is comprised of people who live in geographical territories where English is, you could consider it the mother tongue or native language for the vast majority of the population. And English is used in all domains, most domains anyway – family, maybe there’s always some exceptions, we all live in multilingual societies, that’s just the reality.

But anyway, you can see what I mean. It’s mostly English. And furthermore, the way English got to places that are included in that Inner Circle are places where we had settler colonialism. And that’s a key distinction there. It tends to be white people who came from Europe and brought the English language with them. They took over, settled there, and became dominant in many ways. So, this is what happened in Australia, this is what happened in the United States.

Furthermore, these people from the Inner Circle, because of the history that they have, they have the power in today’s world, and it’s been like this for many decades now, people would even say centuries, that they have power over the English language. There’s this sense that it really “belongs” to them, so we call this the “norm-providing” circle as well. I’m from the United States. Brynn, you’re from the United States. We have the privilege of being able to tell other people, “Oh, this is how you should speak English. Speak English like me.” So, we get jobs in Japan and Korea and stuff like that and nobody really questions it. It’s just like, “Oh, yeah, you’re the native speaker, you know everything about the language.” That’s the Inner Circle.

Let’s now contrast that with the Outer Circle. So, picture the ring, we’re moving on. There’s the next ring in the bullseye. That’s the Outer Circle, and these are places that have a colonial history. So, here we’re talking about real overt multilingualism, where English is an additional language which is usually formally acquired. That means they learn it in a classroom, sometimes from a very early age, but more often than not the home language is something different. Or there might even be 2 or 3 home languages. So, the Outer Circle is really characterised by strong multilingualism.

But English is considered this elite language that is learned in formal contexts, and it’s associated with, sort of this colonial history. So, power coming that way. Even though we wouldn’t necessarily consider this a “learner” variety because it’s so ingrained and it’s been there for so many centuries in some cases, there’s still this tension that, ok, do we look to the UK or the US to tell us how to use this English? And there’s a real divide that way. In some places they are looking for that model and in other Outer Circle settings it’s very much like, “Yeah, we got this, thanks. Thanks for giving us English. It’s our now. Just back off.”

Brynn: Exactly. I love that explanation, and I know that there is this real, like you said, tension between the circles that are in that bullseye, and this idea of “Who ‘owns’ English, and who does English belong to?”. Especially since it has become such a powerful language in the world.

Dr Peterson: Absolutely. There’s still one more circle, if I could just briefly mention that, Brynn. And that’s the Expanding Circle, so that’s the outside ring. It’s called the Expanding Circle because that’s where a lot of the action is.

So, the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle, those populations tend to stay pretty stable. I didn’t give any examples of Outer Circle varieties, I just realised that. Here we’re talking about places like Nigeria, India, Pakistan.

In the Expanding Circle we’re talking about the rest of the world. Those are folks who learned English as a foreign language, and even that is such a, kind of, nebulous, confusing concept in today’s world. Because here I am in Finland, and I tell you what, English doesn’t feel that foreign here in a lot of settings anymore. So, these labels, I really want to emphasise that they are not fixed. That’s actually one very big criticism of this model, that we have these labels in this way and understanding English. But it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story.

Brynn: Exactly. And that’s such a big point for us all to consider, that it’s not fixed. And it often feels like it’s becoming even more rapidly not fixed in this globalised world.

Dr Peterson: Absolutely, it’s all over the place. There have been several subsequent models, and I know some people consider this model a little bit old fashioned, but for this exact book what I wanted to do was set up this tension between these kinds of settings. I liked it more for, I guess you could say, a heuristic device, to just get people to think.

One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is because, as a migrant to Finland and to Europe, it became very evident to me that there was this complete disconnect in many ways between what people in the Inner Circle think about English and what people in a setting like Finland think about English. I wanted to connect those dots for people about the ideologies in particular. So, this concept of the Three Circles Model became a way to do that.

Brynn: Absolutely, I absolutely agree. And, continuing on that, a lot of people who do speak English as their first and often only language, so the people in that Inner Circle that you were talking about, they might not be aware of something that’s called the Standard Language Ideology. Can you talk to us about what a Standard Language Ideology is, and in this case particularly in regard to English, and how it might manifest? What I love is that in this book you talk about what this ideology has to do with Santa Clause. Can you tell us about that?

Dr Peterson: Oh yeah, sure, thanks for that! I love that there’s a fan of the Santa Clause metaphor in the book. I wanted to make an analogy, so I chose Santa Clause. Let’s get to that in a moment. First, I’ll answer the first part of your question about Standard Language Ideology.

So, we talked about language ideology as basically just being deep-seated beliefs or common sense, everyday views about what language is and not really questioning what those beliefs are. So, a Standard Language Ideology means that people don’t question the standard. They kind of have this idea that it’s always been there. It’s kind of funny, as if it would have been some kind of divine origins, that it’s got some kind of supernatural force, that it’s always been there, intact and beautiful.

In the book, what I really wanted to point out was that we have these standard varieties of English which have cultural, historical, and social prestige in many ways. But it’s nowhere near the whole story. It’s only one variety of English, or some would say there are several standards. There’s a different standard in Australia than there is in the US, for example. Or different standards, even, plural.

But people who really, really espouse to this standard language culture, they tend to think that is the whole language. There is nothing else. And, when it comes to English in particular, come on! This is a language with, what, 1.5, 2 billion speakers in the world? The estimates vary a lot because we have to first define what it means to speak English, but that’s a different story. Do you really want to tell me that a language with up to 2 billion people has one variety and that’s a standard? Come on, you know? But people think it’s the only valid standard, and that’s what we should all be aiming to achieve. We should all talk like that. How boring that would be if everyone in fact did that!

It’s interesting and a little bit sad actually, to think about how English got to this status through exploitation and colonisation and so on. But what we have now is this treasure trove of varieties, and to try to think that we should all be speaking the same way and using English in one way – oh, how boring! How terrible! No, no, there is so much diversity, and you can celebrate that diversity, but that’s not enough. We need to also recognise that there are these divisions. I use the term linguistic discrimination about these different varieties. I kind of got ahead of myself, but I really wanted to emphasise that there are actual drawbacks and challenges to having this language ideology.

You asked in particular about the Santa Clause analogy that I used in the book. Thanks for bringing that up, and I will tell you that this was a contentious topic when I was proposing the book because the reviewers for the book were other academics, other linguists, of course. This book proposal was reviewed by 14 people if I remember right, something like that. A large majority of them said, “Really? You want to write about Santa Clause in a linguistics book?”. But I tell you what, Brynn, this was a book where I swallowed my academic ego because this book is for students. It’s for people who don’t know about Linguistics. I really wanted to bring it to a level that everyday people could understand and it would resonate. If I haven’t done that, then I haven’t done my job here.

So, I thought long and hard about what could be an analogy. So, you’re talking about, I think it’s Chapter 3 or Chapter 2 even. Anyway, I wanted to show that what we consider now as “standard” English actually has a birthplace in time and that what we consider the “standard” is man-made. It’s not divine. I use these words like there’s this idea that it’s divine and nobody can touch it. It’s this sacred thing. But it’s literally man-made, and I really do mean man-made, because it’s been the people in power, the people who have the most social power who have decided how we should speak, what’s considered correct, and it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of logical sense but it’s that way because they said it should be that way, these rules that we adhere to in Standard English.

So, I went back to any language that has a standardised variety, it’s always connected to having a written variety in that language, a written language. So, I took the history back to the printing press in the 1400s in London. I started there, and then went on about how spelling became fixed and so on and so on. And this is the same trajectory for any language that has a standard variety.

Anyway, I did the same kind of, let’s go back in history, because for me as a person from the US and somebody who comes from a Christian background, Christmas and Santa Clause – these kinds of things that we celebrate as families, they’re seen in the same way as, “Well, this is just what we do. It means so much, and this is our truth.” I compared it to folklore, actually, in the book. I have some nice quotes in there from folklore. We believe it because we think it’s the way it’s always been, but in fact, you can trace the thread back, and that’s what I did.

It was really fun research to go back and realise, “Oh, you mean our contemporary conception of Santa Clause only dates to the 1800s in New York City? What?!”. The red suit, the reindeer, all that, it literally dates back to one poem – “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”. Then it just exploded, just like the idea of a standard language ideology. So, getting students to make that connection, to realise that these are man-made phenomenon, and therefore they are not fixed. They are not divine, and we can do something about it. We don’t have to just accept this. We can question this. We can mold this ourselves.

Brynn: And that’s what I loved about the Santa ideology. And I loved how, in the book, as you said, it really is such a resource for not just students but teachers. Professors. Anyone who is teaching undergrad, or an intro to sociolinguistics course. And in the book, when you talk about the Santa Clause story, and how that then became the standard because of that poem, you also say, “And if this particular folklore doesn’t apply to you and your culture or to the standard language that you’re thinking of, think of anything else.” Because we all have these types of stories in any culture that then take off and become the “norm” that we all, like you said, don’t question.

Dr Peterson: I was concerned that that would be too Western-centric, and even the Christian overtones there with this Christmas thing. But in the end, I went with it. Thanks for bringing that up because I definitely don’t want to be exclusionary in any way. The same kind of concept could be applied to how you celebrate weddings or any kind of ritual. Any kind of holiday. Doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim or Jewish or whatever. Or any kind of social group or lifestyle that maybe you’re a part of.

Brynn: Anything where it feels like it’s just “always been”.

Dr Peterson: Exactly, that’s the point.

Brynn: I like that you just brought up the idea of us getting a Standard Language Ideology particularly when a language becomes written. In the book you do take care to point out that there are so many languages in the world that are not written, that are oral languages.

You have, I wrote it down, a quote in the book, and it says, “Indeed, there is a common fallacy that the ‘best’ speakers of English should speak English like it is written…In other words, a written form of a language is a prerequisite for standardization, which in turn is a prerequisite for prescriptivism about language.” I just think that’s such a valuable thing to keep in mind, especially when we talk about prescriptivism and people saying, “Well you can’t say xyz because it’s not written like that.” But in the book, you do really take care to point out that there are so many languages that aren’t written and therefore don’t go through this standardisation process.

Dr Peterson: It’s really ridiculous that if you look at English spelling, and I think I say that in the book as well, that, “Really? You want me to pronounce this like it’s written? Are you sure?!”. English spelling is so chaotic. It was such a chaotic process really. It was so haphazard. I think it’s quite funny, actually, I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but the idea that being able to spell in English is a sign of intelligence and there’s these spelling been and everything? That means you can memorise really well, but there is no logic. There is no logic in English spelling. None.

Brynn: 100%. My background before I re-entered academia was as a teacher of English as a second or foreign language. And I often told my students, “Do not be upset that you’re not remembering how to spell these things. Remember that English is basically 4 languages standing on top of each other wearing a trench coat and it makes no sense. So definitely don’t feel bad if you can’t spell these absolutely bananas words in English.” They make no sense, I agree.

And kind of on that idea, thinking about people who are coming from those sort of Outer Circles, your book has a section called, “When ‘bad’ really means ‘foreign’”. Can you tell us about how and why people perceive someone’s English to be ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ and the deeper implications behind that judgment?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, great question, Brynn. I love this question. So, one thing that we know from a lot of research on sociolinguistics and language ideologies and also a connected area called language attitudes is that when we are judging other people’s languages, we’re putting ourselves in a position of superiority. We’re saying, “You need to be more like me.” It might be so hard to admit that, but if you tear back the layers or, like you just mentioned, you take off the trench coat, that’s what it is at its core.

So, the way we use language is such a beautiful manifestation of who we are as people. And it tells all these social cues, you know, within seconds of hearing somebody’s voice. Research backs me up on this. You are doing statistics in your brain. You’re thinking, “Where is this person from? How old are they? What’s their gender? How educated are they? What kind of work do they do?”. It’s incredible, but you’re mapping onto the templates in your head all this information about people.

So, what this means, if you peel back the layers, we’re taking one of these beautiful, beautiful things we have as humans, not only to express our thoughts and contents of what we do, but who we are as people. When you’re judging somebody’s language because they sound foreign, maybe because they sound like they might be Native American or African American or whatever, all this information, a young person, a woman, whatever, that you’re actually judging that person. If you then take it further and say, “You’re a young girl and you shouldn’t talk like this,” you’re actually not saying something about the language, but you’re saying something about young girls and your biases towards them. So that’s a really important point to make, that when we say somebody’s “talking wrong” we might think we’re doing them a favour, like, “Oh, let me help you,” but what you’re really saying is, “I’m judging you as a person, and I don’t think that you’re good enough.” That’s the core message there.

You asked specifically about people who are foreign, so here we’re talking about people who speak English with an accent that clearly marks them as speaking English as a second language. So, ok, what did I just talk about? What we’re doing is we’re saying, “Oh, you’re not one of us.” It’s xenophobic, really. It’s racist. And we cushion that by saying, “Oh, but I’m trying to help you”.

I think there are different ways of helping people, and when I teach in the class, I call it “giving someone the hand linguistically. As a migrant myself in Finland, I feel this very deeply. My Finnish clearly marks me as a foreigner. Sometimes people literally do give you the hand when you try to speak Finnish, and it feels so bad.

There’s this famous line from this American comedy, Modern Family, with Sophia Vergara. And she has this famous line, “You have NO idea how smart I am in Spanish!”. And that’s how it is, like please recognise that this is a whole person in their native language. Instead of putting that person down and saying, “Why can’t you speak proper English?”, maybe this person speaks Punjabi and Hindi and you don’t even know what else. Like, let’s respect that and the fact that they’re trying to communicate with you in your mother tongue. Let’s applaud that instead of making the person feel terrible about it. So, that’s what it comes down to. It becomes a form of xenophobia and colonialism in your own setting, like, “You don’t speak English right, let me tell you.”

Brynn: Yes, absolutely. That has so much impact, I think, on the field that I came from, which is teaching English as a second or foreign language. In my experience, because I would teach adults, I would often get students who would ask me for advice on “accent reduction”. They would say, “Can I go to a class to reduce my accent?”, and I would always tell them no because I have an accent in my second language, which is Spanish, because of the muscles in my mouth. Because of the way that I was raised speaking English, these were the inputs that I got at such an early age, and I don’t want to take away the accent that marks me as who I am. There is nothing wrong with having “an accent” because every single one of us has an accent.

Something I heard once from someone, and I wish I could remember who said this because I would love to attribute this to them, is that it’s important that when you talk to someone, if you recognise that they are speaking your language as an additional language, so maybe that’s not the language that they were raised with, when you hear their accent think about how their mother sang lullabies to them as a baby, and how they learned their language starting that way. They learned how to move their mouth listening to their mother sing to them. The muscles in their mouth formed that way, and that’s what eventually leads to an accent. And there’s nothing wrong with that. All it shows is that we’ve been taught language by the people who cared for us.

Dr Peterson: Yeah, I think that’s a really beautiful way to look at that.

Brynn: I’ll have to find out who said that, and I will tell you. So let’s talk about some of the factors that influence language. Your book discusses several explanations posited for the existence of distinct dialects of English. What are those, in brief, explanations and how do they combine in ways that cause us to make judgments about someone’s use of a language, in this case English?

Dr Peterson: I’ll maybe answer the last part of the question first. What causes us to make judgments – like I just said, it assumes a position of power and authority. Like, “Oh, I’m so important and I think I’m better than you, so I think I have the right to tell you how you should be speaking.” Something as innate, as essential to the human condition as language. Let me just tell you how you should be doing that. You’re doing it wrong. It has the risk of cutting to the very heart of somebody. Like you just said, the lullabies that your parents sing to you, and then somebody at school or in different more formal settings outside the home say, “The way you talk at home is wrong.” What does that do to a child or a person, when you rip away at this very intimate and core part of somebody’s identity? It can be very potentially damaging to people, and I think it’s time that we faced that reality.

You asked about some of the explanations, and the reason I included this chapter in the book where I talked about these explanations was because I had spent so much time in the previous chapters talking about why there’s a standard variety and what it means and what are the drawbacks of that, what are the reasons why languages have a standard.

But I wanted to make it clear, you know, if there’s so much push for us all to be speaking some kind of standard variety, then why do we have so much variation? Why don’t dialects die out? And they never will because we’re very different as people. It was a difficult mental exercise, and I know there could be many other explanations, but the explanations that I thought long and hard about and ultimately wrote in the book were 3 different areas.

The first is what I call access and isolation. I talk about prestige, particularly what has been called covert prestige. That means, like, in-group prestige. It might not be prestigious at different levels of society, especially formal, top-down levels of society. I think this is actually the most important, this third concept which is identity and group identity. These factors, as you pointed out in your question, they interact in many ways.

I come from the setting of the US. The examples that I have in the book draw largely from the US, so I’ll stick with those examples. In the United States, we no longer have official segregation, not official, but there is definitely de facto segregation. You see this in pretty much every major US city, and the situation does not improve. You have really start differences. You can literally cross the street – I used to live in Washington DC –

Brynn: I did too!

Dr Peterson: Oh, that’s interesting! So, you know this, you remember this. Did you ever go to Southeast? I never went there once.

Brynn: I never went there, but I know that area, and you’re absolutely right. The difference between just two streets – one street and the street next to it – was stark.

Dr Peterson: And that’s in the nation’s capital. It’s just so grim and so stark, like you said. So, this access and isolation, and by access what I mean is access to socioeconomic factors like, I talked in the book about housing, education. So, this is de facto segregation. It goes on and it ties to socioeconomic status.

So, if you look at statistics from the United States, I believe it was John Law who said that this is pretty much in any developed society, we see the same kind of trend. Very unfortunate trends, that race and ethnicity tend to be intertwined with a lower socioeconomic status and less socioeconomic advantage. You might have the idea from the outside looking in of, “Well, why don’t you just better yourselves? Why don’t you just pick up and move on?” But how do you do that if you have this extreme cycle of poverty and disadvantage and this is your everyday life? It takes money, it takes ties to the outside world. It takes support to be able to pick up and leave. I think it’s quite shocking, actually, to have to acknowledge how isolated certain speech communities really are, even in the middle of a big city like Washington DC.

Then this obviously ties into these factors like prestige. If your day-to-day life is the people around you, you know, your family, your friends who live in this community with you, there are of course going to be norms of linguistic prestige within that community itself that are very specific to that community because that’s the day-to-day reality. It has nothing to do with what’s happening in rooms where there’s important white people or whatever, whichever way you want to envision it. This, in turn, of course, leads to an enormous sense of identity about who we are.

So, you can really see how these 3 factors can intertwine. I thought these were quite important factors. Of course, there might be others. I would be happy to hear what other people would think would be some of the major reasons for why such extremely non-mainstream or non-standardised varieties continue to exist. But the key reason that keeps coming out again and again is because they mean so much to the people who speak them. They’re such a huge part of the identity, and why would you possibly want to take that away? It tells the story of who they are, and who their parents were, and so on.

Brynn: And who sang them lullabies, exactly.

Dr Peterson: Yeah, and who sang them lullabies.

Brynn: Exactly, and on that, thinking about this idea of standardisation and especially English – in the past 25 years, English has truly kind of exploded. It’s often been referred to as a lingua franca in today’s world. What is a lingua franca, for people who might not know, and what does this view of English have to do with the way that, kind of as we were talking about before, English as a second or a foreign language has been or is taught?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, ok, great question, and this certainly ties in with your previous career. A lingua franca means some kind of a vehicular language, a language that you try to use to find common ground when you don’t share a mother tongue or maybe even a second language. In today’s work, this has become English because English is just there.

I talked earlier about how Finland is an officially bilingual country, constitutionally bilingual. You might be shocked to find out that it’s increasingly common for Swedish speakers and Finnish speakers here in Finland to speak English with each other. I understand that the same thing is happening to Belgium as well, another officially bilingual country, trilingual actually. So yeah, multilingual Europe, there we go. Does it really mean just speaking English in addition to the other languages? But anyway, that’s what English as a lingua franca is. It means that English has emerged as this language that people can use as a medium of communication when there is no other logical choice available.

You asked how it compares to English as a second language or a foreign language, and it does differ in very important ways. One of the things that I really appreciate, we call this the ELF movement, not to be confused with small people, or people from Lord of the Rings or whatever.

So, we do call it ELF, and it stands for English as a Lingua Franca, and it differs in its ideology very, very much from second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. In English as a Lingua Franca, the principle is that it’s something that people have. You’re a user of English as a Lingua Franca, an ELF speaker, but you’re not an ELF learner. It’s not something that is, “Ok, you need to do this and this and this to speak it well.” That’s more tied up with the principles of English as a second language.

But English as a lingua franca, the principles are that people have their language background. You might be a German speaker and then you speak English as an additional language, and you meet somebody from, I don’t know, Taiwan. Then they merge, and each one will bring characteristics from their mother tongue, and it’s not seen as being error-based.

I remember studying second language acquisition when I was in graduate school in the United States. There were all these error-based models and, you know, here’s the native speaker norm, and let’s compare it. The second language speaker got this wrong and this wrong and this wrong. We were always talking about mistakes and errors, and it was a really prescriptivist view is what we would call that.

But with English as lingua franca, it’s just “look, this is what this person brings in and this is what this person brings in,” and somehow, they manage. I really appreciate that the ELF research is trying to celebrate what a success story this tends to be. You think of it as bringing out the goodness in people. People want to communicate, so they’re trying to find common ground. They’re trying to understand each other, and nobody’s really in a position of authority.

Another thing that characterises ELF conversations is that native speakers like you or me, we wouldn’t necessarily have an advantage. We would be another ELF speaker, and we wouldn’t be able to say, “Oh, well I speak English right. You should gravitate towards me.” The research shows that very often, people who are using English as a lingua franca, they understand each other, especially if they have a shared language background, they understand each other certainly better than they would understand someone from Glasgow or Aberdeen or, you know, inner Baltimore or whatever.

Brynn: Or Outback, Australia. Yes, exactly. That is what is so interesting to me, especially coming from a background of teaching English as a second and sometimes I taught as a foreign language, and just seeing the ways that people naturally were able to understand each other. It was almost like watching language evolve in real time. I think that’s just so fascinating and, like you said, that’s something to really be celebrated because, as humans we’re able to do that. And how awesome is that? And, like you said, it’s not about prescriptivism or errors, it’s about saying, “Wow, look at them! We can communicate with each other and potentially make something new.”

Dr Peterson: It’s about ownership, and it’s important to point out that we as lecturers, as scientists, as teachers of English, we’re victim to our own ideologies. And that’s an ideology that just did a complete pivot.

Brynn: It really is. I’d like to ask you the following question because I ask this to other guests that we have on the show. What do you feel is something that generally monolingual English speakers get wrong, just kind of in general, when they think about people from non-English speaking backgrounds who learn to speak English?

Dr Peterson: This ties in with something we talked about before – giving somebody the hand. We tend to associate language with thought, and this is what a lot of people who are interested in linguistics as lay people, they really think that there’s this widespread popular belief that we think through language. So, therefore, if somebody has a learner way of speaking English, we somehow think that they’re not a whole person or that they’re maybe kind of stupid or they can’t think straight. That’s so belittling. Do you see what I mean? That if, you know, this person can’t speak my language correctly, if somebody really has that standard language ideology, they think English should only be spoken this way, and then here’s somebody who’s trying to communicate and use English that they’ve learned later in life. That you might not value what that person has to say and just think that this person has no credibility, this person’s stupid. They can’t even speak. Not recognising that this person has a rich linguistic repertoire. Everybody has a full language capability in their mother tongue. I think that’s something really important.

What else could I say? I think that, very often, because of these ideologies that native speakers have, people from the inner circle, they don’t question the English language in the same way that people do who have acquired it later in life or through different means. So, we have all kinds of inaccurate things that we believe about the English language in particular that just don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Like, when I’ve been visiting North Carolina, that’s what I wrote this book actually, it was wonderful. Somebody there told me that, “Did you know that they speak like Shakespeare here in the Appalachian Mountains?”, and I was like, no they don’t. “Yeah, they do! There’s these communities there and they speak Shakespeare’s English there because it’s so isolated!”. Nah. So just these folk ideas that say a lot, but they don’t necessarily say truths about language. Those are always interesting to hear.

I think we touched on something previously as well when we talked about English as a lingua franca, and that is that standard English would somehow be logical or superior or easier to understand. That’s not the case either, as we’ve discussed, not necessarily true, that those are just other varieties that have more social prestige for some people. That’s the only thing that makes them special. Those are the important things that come to my mind.

Brynn: Honestly, I agree. And I think it’s worth coming back to that image of the four languages standing on top of each other in a trench coat when we think about people who do learn English, especially later in life. Truly, English, when we think about it, is just such a hodgepodge of other languages, of other influences. You can see the history that has happened within English, and to expect people to be able to do all of that as they learn English, to be able to do everything “correctly”, when we think about how difficult English can be – you’re right, it’s not fair and it demeans them as a whole person.

Dr Peterson: And have you noticed as well that sometimes you get the feeling that it’s never enough? The carrot is dangled ever higher. Ok, you can do that, but you still don’t sound like this person.

Even as native speakers, we’re forced to kind of achieve this impossible target, and native speakers can certainly have those insecurities. Studies from Americans showing, “Oh I don’t speak good English, they speak better English in Britain.” I mentioned that in Chapter 1 of the book. This insecurity that even somebody who has English as their mother tongue, this is what standard language ideology does to people.

Brynn: Exactly, and before we wrap up, I could talk to you forever but I guess we do have to wrap up eventually. Can you tell us what’s next for you and your work?

Dr Peterson: Yeah! I love this question. I’m really excited to tell you about a project that I’ve had for a few months now which is called Language Awareness and Ideologies in Finland. It’s funded by the Kone Foundation which is a private foundation based in Finland. Even in Australia, though, you might see lifts and escalators made by this company.

We have this project funded by them, and you could say that this book was really a stepping stone for me, and we certainly see this movement in linguistics, and sociolinguistics in particular. And you folks there, you’re doing such wonderful work. Anyway, the Kone Foundation is “make the world a better place”, and I love that. The way our project runs is we want to make the world a better place through language.

We’re working on addressing the tension and the fear that people feel in Finland about the Finnish language being at risk because of the input of English. This is a real fear with these language communities here in Europe and elsewhere, of course. We’re dealing with this in Finland. I have some brilliant postdocs, a PhD researcher, and one thing that makes our project stand out is that we have a dedicated science communicator, a public relations person, who is making that liaison between our science and the public. We’re hearing more and more about how we need to do this, build in social impact.

So yeah, we’re getting going with the project and it’s really exciting to have that. As I said before, just pointing out the richness of English is not enough. It’s time to redress the social injustices. I feel like we’re part of a larger movement. There’s lots of folks in the US, Australia and so on who are really trying to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak, with our science and making the world a better place through language. So that’s what’s up. Get out of the lab and out of the ivory tower and talk to people! Get our message out there, what we have known about language for decades.

I also have a new book on the topic. It’s called “English in the Nordic Countries”. That’s open access. It’s an anthology, so chapters that are talking about this tension and these challenges that the Nordic countries in particular seem to feel is such a problem now, how do we protect Icelandic, how do we protect Danish and so on, when English is making such inroads into all these different levels of society. So that’s what I’ve been up to. Lots of exciting stuff. It’s so fun to be a linguist!

Brynn: That sounds absolutely fascinating! I cannot wait to follow your work and to just kind of see how you keep going. It sounds wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here, and it’s just been an absolute delight to talk to you.

Dr Peterson: I feel the same way. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Brynn: Thank you! And thanks for listening, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!

Dr Laura Smith-Khan during her keynote at InDialog (Image credit: Dries Cavents, UGhent)

Editor’s Note: Asylum seekers in countries of the Global North need to communicate a credible fear of persecution to assessors who speak a different language, come from a different cultural background, and operate in a different institutional context. To bridge these gaps between asylum seekers and assessors, the work of interpreters is essential, yet widely devalued and erased. Dr Laura Smith-Khan explored these vanishing acts in her keynote lecture at the recent InDialog 4 conference at Ghent University, Belgium. We are privileged to be able to share a version of her talk with our readers.

***

To grant protection to asylum seekers, officials in the global north require them to communicate a fear of persecution. Not only that, they also must believe them. The process of evaluating an asylum claim and an asylum-seeker’s credibility involves multiple forms of communication, and given the transnational nature of seeking asylum, this setting is one with a great deal of linguistic diversity.

Therefore, it should be obvious that interpreting is a common feature in asylum procedures and that interpreters play a crucial role in facilitating the communication of the various participants involved. Yet misconceptions about interpreting can affect participation in interpreter-mediated encounters and can also influence the way asylum communication is evaluated as part of the credibility assessment process.

Existing studies have found that interpreters’ work is sometimes devalued, and interpreters are even made invisible within institutional structures, discourses and practices. This is despite a large body of research about the many roles and impacts interpreters have within the encounters they mediate, both in asylum procedures and beyond.

Below I’ll share some of my own research, focusing on refugee credibility assessment in Australia. I will introduce some key “language ideologies” that operate in asylum procedures. I believe this is important, because “the study of interpreters, their experiences, and the ideologies of voice and language within which they work offers ways to interrogate the contradictions of global capital and its related humanitarian enterprises” (Kunreuther & Rao, 2023, p. 250). So I will explore how these ideologies have an impact on institutional understandings of interpreting, and through this, how they can undermine how asylum seekers’ communication and credibility are assessed.

Seeking asylum in Australia

To provide some context, here is a short overview of the process for seeking asylum in Australia (see Diagram). The procedures differ depending on whether people seeking asylum arrive by boat or with a visa.

First, for people arriving by boat, they have a basic entry interview. And then if the government allows them to, they will later make a protection visa application, along with other asylum seekers who were able to reach Australia by plane, with some other visa, for example as tourists or students.

The protection visa application is assessed by the Immigration Department, and involves completing a long set of complicated application forms and then later participating in a detailed and rigorous interview with the official who is tasked with evaluating the application.

If the application is unsuccessful, a merits review, where the facts of their case are reconsidered, is possible. There are two separate bodies for this: people who arrive by boat have their application reconsidered by the Immigration Assessment Authority, which usually reviews the existing records only, and does not call the applicant for further questions. In contrast, people who arrive with a visa can opt for a review which is carried out by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and involves attending a further hearing.

If the applicant is successful at the merits review stage, they can seek judicial review. If they continue to be unsuccessful, they can make further appeals up through the Australian Federal court hierarchy. However, what can be considered in a judicial review is quite limited and it is difficult to successfully navigate this process without professional legal assistance, so only a small proportion of cases are appealed there, and even fewer are successful.

In this post, I’ll draw on a mix of data from Australia: published decisions from one of the merits review bodies, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, a Federal Court decision, and interviews that I conducted with migration lawyers.

Language ideologies and the law

In Anglophone scholarship, the concept of “language ideology” began developing in the late 1970s. It is the idea that everyone has their own “common-sense” beliefs about what good language is and about how communication works or should work. Importantly, scholars emphasize how power structures are implicated in how particular language ideologies are mobilized and prioritized. For example, Ingrid Piller notes that language ideologies “serve to legitimize the social order and therefore they are always interested, multiple and contested” (Piller, 2015, p. 87). Diana Eades concurs, observing that they “can play an important role in the reproduction of inequality (Eades, 2012, p. 474).

This concept has proven useful for examining a variety of legal contexts, when it comes to understanding how testimony and evidence are gathered and assessed. Drawing on a range of existing research, Eades articulated some key language ideologies relevant to legal processes. In summary and for our purposes they are:

• Ideology of inconsistency: A “central strategy” to undermine witness credibility – this involves identifying inconsistency between different tellings of a story.
• Ideology of narrator authorship: The idea that the witness or interviewee produces testimony on their own.
• Ideology of decontextualized fragments: Accepting that it is okay to take single words or phrases out of their original context to examine and test them.
• Ideology of entexualization: Related to the previous ideology, this one involves taking decontextualized testimony, and recontextualizing it somewhere else. In legal and bureaucratic settings, this often involves transforming oral texts into written ones. This transformation is accepted as producing an accurate and official record of institutional encounters.

Here, I’d like to consider more closely these ideologies and explore how they affect understandings of interpreting and interpreters within migration procedures, and in turn, how this can affect policy, practices, and participation within these processes.

A central concern in asylum procedures is determining whether an asylum-seeker’s stories and claims are credible. Much like what Eades found in the criminal law context, one of the key ways refugee credibility is tested relies on the ideology of inconsistency: asylum-seekers are made to tell their story on multiple occasions in multiple ways to try to pick up inconsistencies between each telling.

The three remaining ideologies Eades identifies all help enable the testing of inconsistency. They also all rely on or help to produce a certain understanding of the role of interpreters and interpreting: that interpreting is neutral, and that it puts minority-language participants on an equal footing with other participants, and has no tangible impact on the production of testimony.

As we will see, this means and requires that interpreters and interpreting become almost invisible in the official documents of the asylum decision-making institutions.

Acknowledging the interpreter

I examined a collection of 27 published decisions from the Administrative Appeals Tribunal where credibility is discussed. These are the documents where the Tribunal decision-maker sets out the asylum claim, explains what happened in the hearing, where they ask the asylum seeker questions about their claim. During the hearing, they also raise any concerns that they have and give the asylum seeker the chance to respond. The written decision should include the details of this process and explain the official’s reasoning process for arriving at their decision.

Figure 1

In this corpus of decisions, I found that there is very little mention of interpreters: in four cases there is absolutely no mention of interpreting, nor does the official specify that the decision was conducted in English, so it remains completely unclear what language or languages were involved (see Figure 1).

In the decisions where it was clear that an interpreter was present, more than half only have generic, copy-paste template sort of statements about them, for example “The Tribunal hearing was conducted with the assistance of an interpreter in the Punjabi and English languages.”

While these written decisions often describe the applicant (or asylum seeker) as speaking, saying, claiming, responding etc, interpreters themselves are only infrequently presented as communicating.

In eight cases, including one where the hearing was conducted in English, there is a little more discussion of interpreting, but only because it has been raised as an issue by an applicant or their lawyer. In only two decisions does a decision-maker make what appears to be unsolicited remarks related to an interpreter.

This very minimal inclusion of interpreters in these written decisions contrasts sharply with how asylum applicants are represented. Throughout, they are most often described as communicating, e.g. “the applicant stated this”, “the applicant claimed that” (for more discussion see Smith-Khan, 2017), when of course in actual fact in most cases it would have been an interpreter’s English words that are being written down or summarized. Already in this corpus of decisions, it is evident that the written performance of credibility assessment hinges primarily on presenting how the asylum-seeker communicates, with very little explicit recognition of interpreters’, or indeed other interlocutors’, contributions to the communication.

Raising multilingual communication, challenging authorship

When applicants or lawyers try to challenge this invisibility of interpreting or translation, it can be hard for them to get the decision-makers to accept their arguments.

For example, in one case in this corpus, a decision-maker drew on the ideologies of inconsistency and decontextualized fragments to find an asylum-seeker not credible. She was mainly concerned about the inconsistent use of the words “giving” and “sending” when it came to the part of the applicant’s claim where he talked about sharing information about Christianity with his customers.

In this particular case, it was earlier noted that the applicant, who was Chinese, had professional assistance putting together his application, and that he had prepared a written statement which was “later translated into English” to be included as part of the application. The tribunal hearing was conducted with a Mandarin-English interpreter.

The official reports in her decision:

The Tribunal indicated to the applicant that there appears to be inconsistencies in the evidence, namely that in oral evidence he had said that he was giving the customer some material whereas in writing he has claimed that he was sending the material. The applicant stated that the mistake had been made by the translator. The Tribunal indicated that the inconsistency could raise doubts about the veracity of his claims and his credibility generally, and his general credibility. The Tribunal invited him to comment or respond. The applicant said if there is any doubt he is regretful.

From what is evident from the written decision, the asylum seeker (referred to as an “applicant” as per Tribunal conventions) consistently stated throughout the hearing that he gave and did not send these materials, so the apparent inconsistency is between what appears in the written statement prepared when he initially applied for asylum, and later when interviewed.

Here, along with relying on decontextualized fragments to find an inconsistency, the ideology of narrative authorship is clearly demonstrated. When raising the apparent inconsistency between “sending” and “giving” the tribunal member assigns authorship to the asylum seeker: the applicant said in oral evidence and the applicant claimed in writing. However, in fact, those utterances and words were produced by two others: an interpreter and a translator. When the applicant seeks to respond to this issue – again, communicating with the assistance of an interpreter – he raises this exact point: that it was the translator who produced the English version of the statement and so it must have been a mistake they made.

The tribunal decision-maker mentions this particular inconsistency at multiple points, and the applicant consistently points to the translator. But unfortunately, the tribunal member does not accept this at any point and continues to suggest that this inconsistency undermines the applicant’s credibility.

Written texts as reliable representations

I’ve been discussing these types of issues and ideologies for some time now, and a few years ago I was excited to find an Australian Federal Court review where the original rejection had involved a similar type of inconsistency, and the Federal Court judge rejected the use of decontextualized fragments (Smith-Khan, 2022).

Part of the claim was that the asylum-seeker’s family started running a shop, and that sometime later the shop had been attacked. The apparent inconsistency was that during one interview, the asylum-seeker talked about an attack occurring “a few months” after opening the shop; and at another interview, the asylum-seeker provided two dates that suggested the attack was about six months after the shop opened. The merits review official rejected the case, and at first appeal a judge agreed with their approach.

In a further appeal to the Federal Court of Australia, however, I was very happy to discover that the asylum seeker’s lawyers argued that the judge should look beyond these decontextualized fragments to consider the actual interaction, involving questions and answers, that took place in one of these interviews. Even better, the judge accepted this argument, and throughout his written decision, we find extracts of a transcript of the immigration interview to which he refers to demonstrate this reasoning.

Analysing protection interview discourse

Particularly relevant to our current discussion is this extract of the transcript (see Image). The transcript is reproduced in the court decision (references are to the Immigration Officer (Off) and the asylum seeker (App)).

By looking more closely at the interaction, instead of just those decontextualized fragments, the judge concluded that the original finding of an inconsistency was not logical, and that the answer “a few” could be explained by the way the questions were worded, and because of the official’s interruptions too. He observed that “the question … posed two alternatives. It was not an open question” and the asylum seeker’s “answer was the most accurate of the two alternatives.”

Importantly, the judge also emphasizes that relying on decontextualized words is particularly problematic “in an interview where the [asylum seeker] was unrepresented and which required an interpreter …” (my emphasis).

However even in this exceptionally positive case in which we see an uncommon resistance against these pervasive language ideologies, where the lawyers and judge support the approach of looking more closely at the interaction, we are still not actually looking at the interaction itself. We are looking at an entextualization of a spoken interaction into a written transcript.

And very significantly for our purposes, not only is it a transcription of speech into writing, in doing so, we also see a multilingual interaction, involving Arabic and English, transformed into a monolingual English one. In the process, all of the asylum-seeker’s and interpreter’s Arabic utterances simply no longer exist.

We also see an interaction that actually had at least three speakers – the decision-maker, the asylum-seeker and an interpreter, transformed into one where the interpreter is once again made invisible.  All of the interpreter’s English utterances are textually reassigned to the asylum-seeker, reflecting and reinforcing this ideology of narrative authorship.

This shows that even in very exceptional cases where there is resistance to the problematic language ideologies at play in asylum credibility assessments, these ideologies are so deeply engrained in institutional practices that they persist in ways like this.

Hypothetical transcript with the vanished interpreter contributions in red.

Perhaps the choice of a monolingual transcript was pragmatic in this particular case, since the lawyers’ arguments relied on questioning approach rather than any particular issue with interpreting. However, the fact that they could make this choice suggests that transforming multilingual oral communication into monolingual written texts is an accepted norm in this setting. Further, the choice to attribute the English utterances to the asylum seeker, similar to the Tribunal decision corpus, further erases the interpreter’s contributions.

In this example from Australia, we can see how the choices made in how audio recording of the immigration interview is transcribed involves a transformation process. However, in many other jurisdictions, this can happen through other forms of entextualization. In places where asylum interviews are typically not audio recorded, the immigration official must simultaneously conduct the interview, while also making a written record of what is apparently said (Maréchal, 2022; Wadensjö et al., aop).  Arguably with that arrangement there is even less transparency than in the Australian case, because there will be no audio records to consider when seeking to examine the accuracy of that written record, or to raise issues with the interpreting or any other part of the interaction. However, even in the Australian case, we can see that languages and participants circulate unequally throughout asylum procedures: multilingual interactions become monolingual documents, and interpreters, though very often physically present in interview room, are all but erased on paper.

Structures and practices

If we look beyond the decision-making process, these ideologies also help justify and are reinforced by structural aspects of asylum processes, and again the Australian setting provides a clear example, but these considerations are also relevant elsewhere.

Despite Australia being a world-leader in terms of its professional accreditation for interpreters, poor working conditions for community interpreters suggest that their professional skills are not highly valued. These conditions include being poorly paid and working mainly in insecure freelance roles (Cho, 2023). For legal interpreting many report not even having access to a chair to sit on in court, or a table to take notes, or not being given water to drink, or adequate breaks (Hale & Stern, 2011).

In the asylum system, interpreters are generally only booked for the exact start time of the asylum interview or hearing, and are given very little or no briefing on the application. The government department is effectively the client – they choose and pay the interpreters. The interpreters do not have permanent contracts but work casually, on an ad-hoc basis through external agencies. This set-up understandably has an impact on the power dynamics in the interaction, limiting interpreters’ ability to raise issues about how the officials conduct the sessions, how they ask questions or interrupt the asylum-seekers.

This type of work arrangement is also an environment where interpreters may feel uncomfortable asking for clarifications or sharing doubts. There are also time-related pressures created by room bookings and interpreting assignment booking which limit the duration of interviews or the duration of an individual’s interpreter’s involvement.

The way languages are classified by the interpreting agencies and official interpreter accreditation body can also create challenges: lawyers report having trouble being able to choose the right type of interpreter for their needs, for example not being able to specify a particular variety of Arabic.

Also, while there is effectively a right to interpreting in asylum interviews and hearings, there is no such right beyond the interview room. Some community legal centres have very tight interpreting budgets, and have to sometimes rely on untrained volunteers or family members to help with interpreting, or preference telephone interpreting over face-to-face interpreting because it costs less.

Further, going back to this idea of the asylum seekers being the sole narrators of their testimony, there is no right to legal representation for asylum seekers in Australia. This somehow seems justified in a system where the testimony is ideologically viewed as simply the asylum-seekers’ own.

This is significant for so many reasons: both research and practice both tell us that having legal assistance has a huge impact on how strong an asylum application will be, and whether it will meet very stringent procedural requirements (Ghezelbash et al., 2022; Smith-Khan, 2021). Further though, the lawyers I’ve interviewed often talk about the interaction monitoring role they play in asylum interviews. Being familiar with their client’s case means that they are better placed to pick up any issue that might come up in interpreter mediated encounters and to intervene and advocate on behalf of their client – something that interpreters can’t do due to the limits created by their code of conduct and ethics. Lawyers can also note such issues and use them as grounds for an appeal, putting more pressure on officials to do the best they can to ensure smooth communication (Smith-Khan, 2020).

Having knowledge of institutional processes and challenges, they are also better placed to navigate the bookings processes, to best ensure an appropriate interpreter is chosen. This makes them valuable in terms of addressing some of these structural issues just discussed, yet only the small number of asylum seekers who have access to legal support can benefit from this sort of assistance.

If we adopt this ideology of asylum-seekers producing their refugee narrative all alone, then all of these structural issues are much harder to challenge, and both interpreters’ and lawyers’ contributions to the production of refugee testimony can be denied.

Conclusions

In this post I have introduced some key language ideologies that operate in asylum processes. Through the data I have shared, I have tried to demonstrate how these ideologies affect how asylum claims are assessed and how asylum seekers’ credibility is evaluated. In particular, I have sought to demonstrate how these ideologies operate to render invisible interpreters’ and interpreting’s contributions in asylum communication. This is a key part of the institution’s discursive performance of objectivity and legitimacy that acts to entrench their authority to make these types of decisions: because for them to rely on assessments of asylum-seekers’ communication in the way they do, other participants’ contributions in the co-production of testimony cannot be acknowledged.

To close, I want to leave us with this thoughtful quote in which to find motivation for our work:

As figures who stand at the intersection of global economic and political projects, interpreters enable the movement of people, ideas, and capital across borders. An understanding of the invisible labor of interpreters disturbs the alleged transparency, neutrality, and ease of communication that is so foundational to the authority of institutions of global governance. (Kunreuther & Rao, 2023, p. 250)

This is why I believe that research in this area is so crucial, and that we must all continue to do our part to investigate interpreters’ work and working contexts, and to challenges discourses, rules and practices that devalue them.

References 

Cho, J. (2023). Bilingual workers in a monolingual state: Bilingualism as a non-skill. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 10.1080/13670050.2023.2213374
Eades, D. (2012). The social consequences of language ideologies in courtroom cross-examination. Language in Society, 41(4), 471-497.
Ghezelbash, D., Dorostkar, K., & Walsh, S. (2022). A data driven approach to evaluating and improving judicial decision-making: Statistical analysis of the judicial refugee of refugee cases in Australia. UNSW Law Journal, 45(3), 1085-1123.
Hale, S., & Stern, L. (2011). Interpreter quality and working conditions: Comparing Australian and internationa courts of justice. Judicial Officers’ Bulletin, 23(9), 5-8.
Kunreuther, L., & Rao, S. (2023). The Invisible Labor and Ethics of Interpreting. Annual Review of Anthropology, 52. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-091752
Maréchal, M. (2022). Engagements institutionnels. Enjeux glottopolitiques de l’interprétation dans les instances décisionnaires de l’asile en France. Glottopol : Revue de sociolinguistique en ligne, 36. 10.4000/glottopol.1653
Piller, I. (2015). Language Ideologies. In K. Tracy (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction. 10.1002/9781118611463
Smith-Khan, L. (2017). Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society, 28(5), 512-534.
Smith-Khan, L. (2020). Migration practitioners’ roles in communicating credible refugee claims. Alternative Law Journal, 45(2), 119-124.
Smith-Khan, L. (2021). “I try not to be dominant, but I’m a lawyer!”: Advisor resources, context and refugee credibility. Journal of Refugee Studies, 34(4), 3710-3733. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feaa102
Smith-Khan, L. (2022). Incorporating sociolinguistic perspectives in Australian refugee credibility assessments: The case of CRL18. Journal of International Migration and Integration. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-022-00937-2
Wadensjö, C., Rehnberg, H. S., & Nikolaidou, Z. (Ahead of print). Managing a discourse of reporting: the complex composing of an asylum narrative. Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2022-0017

Official coronation portrait (Image credit: Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2015)

The Queen and the English language are both unique within their categories. The Queen enjoyed special social status among humans through a complex combination of exceptional legal standing, imperial power, accumulated wealth, and sophisticated celebrity cult. The same is true of English: it is different from any other language in terms of reach, clout, and popularity.

English has more speakers than any other language

English today is said to have around 1.5 billion speakers, close to 20% of the global population. Even if counting speaker numbers is notoriously tricky, that’s a lot more than any other language in history. If we were to include everyone with basic proficiency, 1.5 billion is a substantial undercount.

But it is not the large number of speakers that makes English exceptional. After all, Chinese is not far behind with 1.1 billion speakers.

What makes English categorically different from Chinese is the relationship between first and second language speakers. The overwhelming majority of Chinese speakers live in Greater China and speak Chinese as their mother tongue.

By contrast, only a minority of ca. 370 million English speakers live in the United Kingdom and its settler colonies (most notably the USA but also Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa).

The vast majority of English speakers live outside the Anglosphere: some in former exploitation colonies of the UK or USA (e.g., India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Bangladesh, Ghana), and others in countries with no special ties to the Anglosphere where English is learned as a foreign language (e.g., China, Germany, France, Japan, Russia).

In short, what makes English exceptional among languages is twofold: it is widely used outside the heartlands of the Anglosphere, and it is learned as an additional language by countless multitudes across the globe.

The most spoken languages worldwide, 2022 (Source: Statista)

English is more powerful than any other language

A language does not have power per se. It derives its power from the people and institutions it is associated with. And English has been associated with some of the most powerful people and institutions of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries.

The British Empire was the largest empire in human history, covering 35.5 million km² in 1920 (when it was at its largest), or more than a quarter of the world’s land mass. Even after the decline of the British Empire, English got a second imperial boost due to US global domination.

English is not only associated with powerful states but almost all international organizations have English as their working language (sometimes along with a few other languages), from Amnesty International to the World Trade Organization. Even organizations far removed from the Anglosphere have adopted an English Only policy, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The political might of English is accompanied by economic clout. Most of the world’s most powerful corporations are headquartered in the USA, and even those that are not have been adopting English as their corporate language.

The world’s richest people speak English, too: 8 of the world’s 10 richest people are based in the USA, and the other two (one in France, one in India) undoubtedly also have English in their repertoires.

The examples could go on and on to illustrate that English is spoken in most of the world’s halls of power. That creates an effect that sociologists call “misrecognition”. Power comes from control over military, economic, or political resources; not from language. However, because English is so consistently associated with high power, it becomes “misrecognized” as a source of power.

And because everyone wants a piece of the cake, everyone wants to learn English so that they, too, can reap the successes it seems to confer.

Countries with largest numbers of English speakers

English is more hegemonic than any other language

Misrecognition is closely tied to another exceptional characteristic of English: it dominates through the ideas associated with it. English is stereotypically associated with the best in almost any field of human endeavor.

Most languages are associated with cultural stereotypes, beliefs, ideas, and emotions. Unlike the specific and relatively narrow cultural stereotypes associated with other languages (e.g., “French sounds romantic”), ideas about English are highly versatile: it is the language of modernity itself.

English is seen as the language of Hollywood media glitz and glamour, the language of freedom and liberal democracy, or the language of science and technology. Indeed, the cultural versatility of English is so great that it not only serves as the language of global capitalism but can also appear as its antagonist: the language of resistance.

One important way in which the hegemony of English is maintained is through the pomp and pageantry of the British monarchy. We are currently seeing global media saturation coverage. Its effect is not only to create a cultural, emotional, aspirational, and personally-felt connection with the Queen but with everything she stands for, including the English language.

The future of English

Although the role of the Queen is highly exceptional, her passing reminds us that the role was filled by an ordinary human being. It is likely that the next incumbent will be less capable at arresting the decline of the British monarchy. The role is likely to become less special, with a reduced realm and against the continuing diversification of celebrity cults.

The passing of the Queen has unleashed a global media frenzy, which also reinforces the hegemony of English (Image credit: sohu.com)

It might take longer for English to see a diminished status. In the past, imperial languages such as Latin and Persian survived the empires that spread them by hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

At the same time, the fate of English now rests to a significant degree with the language policies of countries outside the Anglosphere. And these might change as beliefs about the importance of the language change. For instance, if China were to curtail the role of English language proficiency for university entrance, this could send speaker numbers plummeting quite quickly.

The role of English is no longer solely in the hands of the Anglosphere.

Related content

To explore further how English went from peripheral peasant tongue to global superspreader language, and what its meteoric rise means, head over to this guest lecture I delivered at Yunnan University, Kunming, China) on Sept 28, 2021.

The Bainu social media platform in China

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translation debates

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

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

Why do metalinguistic discussions proliferate on social media?

Emoji on Bainu

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

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

“Mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss

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

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

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

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

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

Reference

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

Related content

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

Language on the Move

That English has spread in Asia is well-known, and the peer-reviewed editorial, five research articles, and a book review enrich the sociology of language literature with new case studies. The focus is on investigating how socially constructed East-West binaries interact with language ideologies about English and other languages.

Our contributors identify and analyze ideologies which map international Orientalist hierarchies onto socially salient hierarchies on more local scales, particularly in relation to language. The specific Orientalist ideologies that our authors analyze include Self-Orientalism, Internal Orientalism, and Internal Colonialism. The five contributions could each be summarized with a phrase that Brook Bolander uses to describe her own findings about the indexicality of English amongst Ismaili Muslim communities in Pakistan and Tajikistan: “ownership of English [is] polysemous”.

The articles also cover varied time periods. To start, Cho uses fascinating 19th century data from the diary of Korea’s first professional Korean-English translator, Yun Chi-Ho, to explore his participation in and reproduction of a process of self-Orientalization. He sought to identify with both the West and the East but became despondent in response to the exclusionary racialisation of English speaker identities which he experienced while living in America. Later in the Special Issue, Michiko Weinmann and her co-authors bring us right up to the present moment with their study of shifts in the sociolinguistic environment of Japan in relation to the 2020/2021 Olympic and Paralympic Games that some of us just had the chance to watch.

My own article, happily co-authored with Gegentuul Baioud, as well as Xiaoxiao Chen’s article examine forms of orientalism and colonization in China in recent times (Internal Orientalism and Self-Orientalism, respectively). Baioud and I foreground minoritized peoples’ experiences. You may have read about our two separate sociolinguistic studies of Chinese minority languages previously on Language on the Move (here and here). This time, we’ve come together to compare our studies and draw out similarities, showing how binary East-West ideologies are reproduced but not necessarily as Foreign language–Local language ideologies. Rather, English and Mandarin are both becoming constructed languages of East China, which further marginalizes minority languages.

This research on the sociology of language has been an intellectual pleasure to edit, research and write. Loy, Jean and I wish you happy reading!

Ideologies of English in Asia: Table of Contents

• Ideologies of English in Asia: an editorial (by Alexandra Grey, Loy Lising and Jinhyun Cho)
• Constructing a white mask through English: colonized consciousness and racialized identities (by Jinhyun Cho). This article is Open Access, i.e. free for all to read online.
• English as Eastern: Zhuang, Mongolian, Mandarin and English in the linguistic orders of globalized China (by Alexandra Grey and Gegentuul Baioud)
• Language ideologies and self-orientalism: Representing English in China Daily travelogues (by Xiaoxiao Chen)
• Voices of English: Language and the construction of religious identity amongst Ismaili Muslims in Pakistan and Tajikistan (by Brook Bolander)
• English language education reform in pre-2020 Olympic Japan: Educator perspectives on pedagogical change (by Michiko Weinmann, Ryo Kanaizumi and Ruth Arber); and
• a book review, It Is Never a Language Itself!: Language Ideologies of English, Gender, and Embodied Capital in South Korea (by Juyoung Song, reviewing Cho’s (2017) book, English Language Ideologies in Korea).

Diversity of international students is celebrated through images that map students onto nations represented by their flags

International education is often touted as a golden road to fluency in another language and the development of a global vision. However, ethnographic research into the language learning and settlement experiences of international students in a variety of national contexts has painted a less rosy picture, as the Language-on-Move archives devoted to international education show.

Such research has found many discontinuities between the promises of international education and students’ actual experiences.

One of the problems in the existing system of international education is the nation-based categorization of seeing international students of diverse backgrounds as a homogeneous group (Piller, 2017).

This categorization is further complicated when international students return to their ancestral homelands for their international education. Such “return migrants” may be positioned in often conflicting ways on the continuum of local and migrant, native and foreigner, as our recent research explores (Li & Han, 2020).

Ethnic Chinese students migrating to China for their international education

As one of the largest diasporas, ethnic Chinese constitute a population of over 50 million. The great majority of them live in Southeast Asia. Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia have been perceived as a powerful nexus between China and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, mostly due to their remarkable economic performance and their historical contribution to China’s nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. As China is emerging as one of the largest receiving countries for international education, ethnic Chinese may get the first admission ticket to higher education institutions in China.

However, the prioritization of ethnic Chinese migrating to China for their international education is not without problems. These students are confronted with several linguistic and cultural challenges.

Some of these challenges are similar to what has been reported in previous studies, and others are specific to this group and have to date mostly been overlooked in the existing literature on international education.

One big challenge relates to a conflict between students’ self-perceptions of their identities and the ways in which others perceive them. An ethnic Chinese student from Myanmar, for instance, expressed her shock and confusion since coming to China: “我以为我的根在中国，来中国我发现我没根了！” (“I used to think that my roots are in China. However, coming to China has made me rootless.”)

Like this female student, ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar used to be oriented towards China. Learning Putonghua in Myanmar was a top priority for their transnational empowerment (Li, 2017; Li, 2020; Li, Ai, & Zhang, 2020). However, once they move to China for their studies, their trajectories gradually gear them to identify Myanmar as their true homeland and as their land of opportunity. How is this possible?

Linguistic and cultural essentialism

To find out, we (Li & Han 2020) examined the learning experiences of 14 ethnic Chinese from Myanmar who were enrolled in Putonghua-medium degree programs at a Chinese university. We found that the language ideologies of speaking standard Putonghua and writing simplified Chinese characters challenged these students’ sense of being authentically Chinese. In the process, they were turned from proficient Chinese speakers in Myanmar to deficient Putonghua speakers in China.

Ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar are often made to feel weird for engaging in practices that are considered “Burmese”, such as putting on thanaka, a protective white-paste face mask

National essentialism was another ideological force that challenged their Chinese identity. In their classrooms and everyday interactions, the students found themselves positioned not as ethnic Chinese but as Burmese nationals. This “one nation, one culture, one language” mindset not only erased our participants’ Chinese identity but also reinforced an essentialist view of Myanmar as the country of the Burmese, the dominant ethnic group in that highly diverse country.

Neo-essentialist curriculum

Most research into international education is based in Anglophone countries, where a monolingual mindset prevails and exclusive use of English is promoted while languages other than English are devalued.

This is not the case in China. China’s promotion of Putonghua as an international language follows a reciprocal approach that also values the languages international students bring. Their bilingualism is regarded as an asset. In our case, both Burmese and Putonghua constitute desired linguistic capital to achieve mutual cooperation and promote the regional economy and integration between China and ASEAN.

However, this promotion of bilingualism is not unproblematic, either. Linguistic diversity is not unconditionally valued but rests on its convertibility in an international communication market – between the Chinese and Burmese state in this context.

This orientation to the nation as a market applauds bilingualism in Burmese and Putonghua but marginalizes bilingualism in non-standard Chinese varieties and languages that are not official to a nation.

In short, our research demonstrates that the neoliberal valorization of bilingualism is not in and of itself better than the monolingual mindset: it only reproduces the cultural superiority of essentialized linguistic icons while devaluing and erasing non-privileged cultural forms and identities.

The future of Chinese international education

While the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the language challenges confronting diverse populations worldwide (Piller, 2020; Piller, Zhang, & Li, 2020), it has also reconfigured the global economic and political order.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 early last year, China has shifted its global strategy by strengthening its regional connectivity with Asian countries. In 2020, ASEAN replaced the USA and EU to become China’s largest trading partner. A recent trade agreement, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) has reinforced the regional integration between China and its region. As the largest free trading zone covering 30% of the global populations and 30% of global GDP, RCEP will mark a new era for Asia-Pacific cooperation in various social dimensions.

Will the free movement of goods and people in this vast zone also lead us to a greater valorization of linguistic and cultural diversity? Will it open a space for embracing diversity and bringing greater equity and social justice?

Our research suggests that, as long as the ideological foundations of linguistic and cultural essentialism stay in place, the international education in RCEP may just be old wine in a new bottle.

References

Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD). Macquarie University.
Li, J. (2020). Transnational migrant students between inclusive discourses and exclusionary practices. Multilingua, 39(2), 193-212. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2019-0125
Li, J., Ai, B., & Zhang, J. (2020). Negotiating language ideologies in learning Putonghua: Myanmar ethnic minority students’ perspectives on multilingual practices in a borderland school. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41(7), 633-646. doi:10.1080/01434632.2019.1678628
Li, J., & Han, H. (2020). Learning to orient toward Myanmar: ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar at a university in China. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 1-19. doi:10.1080/07908318.2020.1858095
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural communication. Edinburgh University Press.
Piller, I. (Ed.) (2020). Language-on-the-Move COVID-19 Archives.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multilingua, 39(5), 503-515. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/multi-2020-0136/html

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Editor’s note: There is a Chinese saying that two heads are better than one (三个臭皮匠赛过一个诸葛亮). This proverb emphasizes both collective wisdom and the value of grassroots work. At its best, teaching is both. In this mini-series, Dr LI Jia and Ms LV Yong, Yunnan University, share how teaching about linguistic diversity has changed their understanding of linguistic diversity. Specifically, they summarize the findings of 77 small research projects undertaken by their undergraduate students. These research projects provide insight into the multifaceted and dynamic language experiences of Chinese youths from Yunnan province, a highly diverse border region in the southwest of China. In the first article of this 3-part series, we learn how Chinese dialects (“fangyan”) are increasingly valorized as an expression of distinctive identity and as a profitable commodity.

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(Source: Language Atlas of China, Wikipedia)

Fangyan (方言) is usually translated as “dialect” into English, meaning a variety of Mandarin. 70% of China’s 1.4 billion people speak eight different types of Mandarin and only a small number of these speak standard Mandarin, or Putonghua, as their mother tongue. Speaking Fangyan has long been associated with social stereotypes such as lack of education and low-class status. However, such negative indexicality of speaking Fangyan has been challenged by the COVID-19 outbreak and by the emerging circulation of diverse social media online.

Fangyan as an index of authenticity and authority

Speaking Fangyan is increasingly considered as an index of authenticity and a source of authority. This can be observed in an increasing number of Chinese movies, songs, TV series and other entertainment programs. In 2019, the animated movie “Ne Zha”, for instance, raked in over 4.6 billion yuan at the box office. Sichuan Fangyan was used right at the beginning of the film to indicate the main character Ne Zha’s origin from Sichuan.

The choice of Fangyan not only brings our attention to history but also returns to the lived experiences of contemporary people.

This is confirmed by student Shi Lihua’s (施利华) interview with the director Zhou Jueyu, whose work “Sleepless in Licang” won the first prize for the second Asian Micro Film Festival held in Lincang, a border city between China and Myanmar. In her study, Shi describes that “the grassroots story in Lincang Fangyan captures the theme of facing setbacks in life, moving forward bravely, living with a smile and ultimately achieving success”.

The emotional attachment to speaking Fangyan is also confirmed by Li Jie’s (李杰) observation on the daily circulation of short-video platforms. Easy access to Fangyan via short-video APPs provides hundreds of millions of Chinese migrant workers and students with a space for connection and psychological comfort.

Fangyan as a source of success and knowledge dissemination

Poster of the “1.3 Billion Decibel” show

Fangyan is also promoted as a source of success and knowledge dissemination by celebrities and academic scholars via different social media. The “1.3 Billion Decibel” music competition, for example, was established in 2016 and has become the most popular music TV show promoting Fangyan via singing contests across 32 Chinese provinces and regions. By combining Fangyan with popular songs, Chinese grassroots singers’ creativity and talents have been acknowledged by wider audiences and the value of speaking Fangyan has been revitalized among diverse populations in China.

Besides, some Chinese linguists have made use of online resources to highlight the historical relevance of and knowledge inheritance from Fangyan.

According to Li Jie’s analysis of video posts on TikTok by Ruan Guijun from Wuhan University, Fangyan contains rich resources for exploring Chinese proverbs, riddles and other civilizational knowledge. Fangyan as historical reference has been promoted via the form of “the Fangyan Poem Contest” to celebrate the International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019. Based on Li Jie’s study, Chinese audiences are aware of the historical connection between Fangyan and ancient poems. It is through reading Chinese ancient poems that Fangyan instead of Putonghua is constructed as legitimate medium of classical and advanced Chinese literary works. In the process, respect towards Fangyan is also revitalized.

Fangyan as commodified capital

The choice of using Fangyan to advertise China’s high-tech commodities such as Huawei mobile phone has also proven a great success. According to Zhao Yang’s (赵洋) analysis of Chinese netizens’ comments, Fangyan embedded in a giant high-tech company not only enhances Fangyan speakers’ confidence towards their mother tongue, but also indicates Huawei’s innovation and willingness to include linguistic diversity other than Putonghua and English. As such, Fangyan becomes one of the branding resources for advertisements and constitutes a selling point to attract potential customers from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Fangyan as a commodity is also apparent on social media. In Li Jie’s analysis of online celebrities, speaking Fangyan does not reduce but attract millions of followers and significant sums of money for advertising products. 多语和毛毛姐 (name of short video owner), for example, speaks Guizhou Fangyan and has become one of the most popular celebrities with over 33 million followers in China.

Speaking Fangyan is not only confined to Chinese people. Many foreigners living and working in China have come to realize the value of speaking Fangyan. Speaking Fangyan can construct their identity as a 中国通 (China expert) for newly arrived foreigners and as cross-cultural communicator for introducing Chinese local practices.

Yan Wenzhen’s (闫文珍) study with foreigners speaking Chinese Fangyan contributes an interesting language practice which is often overlooked, if not ignored, by the mainstream educational discourse. In her study, Yan has exemplified how foreigners make use of TikTok and Fangyan to display their local knowledge and attract followers. 伊博, for instance, is an African man living in Shenyang, northeast of China. Speaking Shenyang Fangyan and capturing foreigners’ linguistic and cultural challenges living in their local community has helped him win over 6 million followers. Behind this number follows his social reputation and material rewards.

The studies of our students are mainly based on their observations and lived experiences. They chose to research Fangyan because none of them speak Putonghua as their mother tongue and they all have to take a Putonghua proficiency test to prove their ability, which will in turn impact their job prospects. All of our students, and ourselves included, have our own problems in speaking “perfect” Putonghua. However, access to learning about linguistic diversity and online resources undoubtedly provides us with a third space to reconstruct our connection with Fangyan in the tensions between power and social justice.

In the next part of this series, we’ll move beyond Chinese to consider yet another aspect of China’s linguistic diversity: ethnic minority languages and their changing role.

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

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

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Language ideological debates in Denmark

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

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

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

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

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

Outsourcing health communication to volunteers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From translating materials to communication strategies

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

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

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

Minorities are more vulnerable to infection

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

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

Scapegoating

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

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

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

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

Pushing back on social media

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

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

— Mediegruppen (@mgfsdk) August 8, 2020

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

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

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

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

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

Besides meetings, webinars, and classes, another traditionally face-to-face event organized this year via Zoom is the 3-minute thesis (3MT) competition.  This yearly academic contest, which challenges students to explain their thesis in three minutes to a non-specialist audience, was started during one of the worst droughts in the history of Australia. With the current COVID-19 pandemic far from over, the 3MT organizers decided to go virtual this year.

On 11 August 2020, the Macquarie University Linguistics Department hosted its first-ever virtual 3MT competition. My contribution, which won the People’s Choice Award, is about the communication practices and ideologies of globalized accountants in the Philippines. Unlike many, they did not start to work remotely during the pandemic but have been doing so for a long time. In my presentation, I highlight the unique challenges of professional communication from home in multilingual, global work contexts. These points are discussed at length in my online lectures on how Global South accountants are prepared to communicate in Global North workplaces and lessons about working from home.

While it is tempting to think that joining a virtual 3MT is faster and easier, my experience is quite the opposite. Surely, the competition proper was a less tensed moment for me and my fellow-participants as we sat and watched our pre-recorded presentations. However, such a small production involves a big investment of time and effort, as faculty members doing online teaching this semester can testify. Even so, a memorable learning experience!