There’s currently a national target in Australia about strengthening Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages by 2031. This is Target 16 in a policy framework called Closing the Gap. Zoe and I talk about how language strength can be measured in different ways and how the team have chosen to ask about language strength in this survey in ways that show clearly that the questions are informed by the voices in the co-design process.

Then we discuss the parts of the survey which ask about how languages can be better supported, for example in terms of government funding, government infrastructure, access to ‘spaces for languages’ and access to language materials, or through community support. The latest draft of the survey also mentions legislation about languages as a possible form of support. This is great; the data should encourage policy makers not to intuit or impose solutions, but rather to listen to what language authorities are saying they need. What I especially noticed in this part of the survey was the question about racism affecting the strength of a language – or reducing racism as a form of supporting languages – so I ask Zoe to tell me what led the team to include it.

We go on to discuss the enormous efforts and progress underway, and the love which many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities around Australia have for language maintenance or renewal. People may get the impression that language renewal is all hardship and bad news because a focus on language ‘loss’, ‘death’, or oppression pervades so much of the academic and media commentary. But Zoe and I both recently met in person at a fabulous, Indigenous-led conference in Darwin called PULiiMA in which delegates from 196 Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander languages participated. That’s just one indication of the enormous effort and progress around Australia, mainly initiated by language communities themselves rather than by governments. We talk about why, in this context, it’s important that this survey also has section about languages ‘flourishing’ and being learnt.

Language groups that participated in NILS3

We discuss the plans for reporting on the survey; incorporating the idea of ‘language ecologies’ was one of the biggest innovations in the National Indigenous Languages Report (2020) about the 3rd NILS and continues to inform NILS4. Finally, we talk about providing Language Respondents and communities access to the data after this survey is completed, in line with data sovereignty principles.

The survey should be available for Language Respondents to complete, on behalf of each language, in late 2025. AIATSIS will facilitate responses online, by phone, on paper and in person. If you would like to nominate a person or organisation to tell us about an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander language, please contact the team at nils@aiatsis.gov.au. Respondents will have the option of talking in greater depth about their language in case studies which AIATSIS will then include as a chapters in the report, as part of responding to calls in the co-design process to enable more access to qualitative data and data in respondents’ own words.

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Transcript

Alex: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network.

My name is Alex Grey, and I’m a research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Technology in Sydney in Australia. This university stands on what has long been unceded land of the Gadi people, so I’ll just acknowledge, in the way that we do often these days in Australia, where we are. Ngyini ngalawa-ngun, mari budjari Gadi-nura-da and I’d really like to thank

Ngarigo woman, Professor Jaky Troy, who, in her professional work as a linguist, is an expert on the Sydney Language, and has helped develop that particular acknowledgement.

My guest today is Zoe Avery, a Worimi woman and a research officer at the Centre for Australian Languages. That centre is part of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, which we’ll call AIATSIS. Zoe, welcome to the show!

Zoe: Thank you! I’m really excited to be here and talking about my work that I’m doing at AIATSIS.

Alex: Yeah, so in this work at AIATSIS, you’re one of the people involved in preparing the upcoming National Indigenous Languages Survey. This will be the fourth National Indigenous Languages Survey in Australia. The first one came out now over 20 years ago, in 2005.

This time around, you and your team have made some really important changes to the survey design through the co-design process. Let’s talk about that. Can you tell us, please, what is the National Indigenous Languages Survey, what’s it used for, and how this fourth iteration was co-designed?

Zoe: Yeah, so, the National Indigenous Languages Surveys, or I’ll be calling it NILS throughout the podcast, they’re used to report the status and situation of Indigenous languages in Australia, as you mentioned. This is the fourth one. The first one was done all the way back in 2004 and, the third NILS was done about 6 years ago, in 2019. So it’s been a while, and it’s kind of just to show the progress of how, languages in Australia are being spoken and used, and I suppose the strength of the languages, which we’ll kind of go into a bit more detail. But the data is really important, because it can be used by the government to develop, appropriate language revitalisation programs or understand the areas that require the most support, but it can also be used by communities, which is really important as well.

And so, NILS4 has been a little bit different from the start compared to previous NILS, because the government has asked us to run this survey in order to measure Target 16 of Closing the Gap, which is that by 2031, languages, sorry, by 2031, there is a sustained increase in the number and strength of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages being spoken.

So, the scope for this project is much bigger than the past NILS, and AIATSIS has really prioritised Indigenous leadership in the design, and will be continuing to prioritise Indigenous voices in the rollout and reporting of the results of the survey.

So, because this is a national-level database, and we want to make sure as many languages as possible are represented, including previously under-recognized and under-reported languages, including sign languages, new languages, dialects. It’s really important that we have Indigenous voices, prioritized throughout this entire research process. And we want to make sure that the questions that are being asked in the survey are questions that the community want answers to, whether or not to advocate, to the government that these are the areas that need the most support, the most funding, or whether or not the community want that data for themselves to help develop, appropriate, culturally safe programs.

So what we did is we had this big co-design process, this year to design the survey. We had 16 co-design workshops with Indigenous language stakeholders across Australia, and this was, these workshops were facilitated by co-design specialists Yamagigu Consulting. We had, in total, about 150 people participate in the co-design process, and of these 150 people, about 107 of these were Indigenous. And so these Indigenous language stakeholders included elders, language centre staff members, teachers, interpreters, sign language users, language workers, government stakeholders, all sorts of different people that have a stake in Indigenous languages, for whatever reason. And we had 8 on-country workshops, which were held in cities around Australia, and 8 online workshops as well, which helps make it easier for, people that kind of came from different places, and weren’t able to come to an in-person workshop.

Alex: That’s a huge… sorry, just congratulations, that sounds like it’s been a huge undertaking. So many people, so many, so many workshops, well done.

Zoe: Yeah, it has been huge, and we’ve had so many different people from a variety of different language contexts, participate as well. So, the diversity of language experiences that were kind of showcased at these workshops was immense and has had a huge impact on drafting the survey, which is obviously the whole point of the workshops, but yeah … We took all the insights from the co-design workshops, we analysed them, thematically coded everything, and started incorporating everything into the survey. And then we went back to the people who participated in the co-design workshops and held these validation workshops so we could show them the draft of the survey, show them how we had planned on incorporating all of their insights, you know, that we weren’t just doing it for the sake of ticking a box to say, yes, we’ve had Indigenous engagement, but we were actually really wanting to have Indigenous input from the start, and right until the end of the project. And we had really good feedback from the validation workshops, and it is, you know, not just a massive task running these workshops, but also, making sure that everybody’s listened to, and sometimes they were kind of contrasting views about how things should be done, and yeah, we wanted to make sure that we had as much of a balance as possible.

We also consulted with the Languages Policy Partnership, which are kind of key workers in Indigenous languages policy and, advocacy. They’re kind of leaders in the Closing the Gap Target 16 that I was just talking about, so their input and advice has been really important to us, as have consultations with the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Mayi Kuwayu Study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing. So yeah, there’s been a lot of input, and we’re really excited that we’re at the point now where we’re finishing the survey! Dotting all the I’s, crossing all the T’s and getting ready to start rollout soon.

Alex: Yeah, well, I mean, one would hope good input, good output! You know, such a huge process of designing it. You should get really well-targeted, really informative, useful results.

And you’ve mentioned a few things there that I’ll just explain for listeners, because not all our listeners will be familiar with the Australian context. It’s coming through that there’s enormous diversity of Indigenous peoples and languages in Australia, so to explain a little bit, because we won’t go into this in much detail in this interview, Zoe’s mentioned new languages like, contact languages, Aboriginal Englishes, Creoles, like Yumplatok, which comes from the place called the Torres Strait. If you’re not familiar with Australia, that area is between Australia, the Australian mainland, and Papua New Guinea, in the northeast. And then there’s an enormous diversity of what are sometimes called traditional languages across Australia, both on the mainland and the Tiwi Islands as well. So we have a lot of Aboriginal language diversity, and then in addition, Torres Strait Islander languages, and then in addition, new or contact varieties.

Zoe: Sign languages.

Alex: And sign… of course, yes, and sign languages. Thank you, Zoe. And then you’ve mentioned Target 16. So we have in Australia a policy framework called Closing the Gap. For the first time ever, the current Closing the Gap framework includes a target on language strength.

But as the survey goes in to, language strength can be measured in different ways. So how have you chosen to ask about language strength in this survey, and why have you chosen these ways of asking?

Zoe: Yeah, so, along with, kind of, Target 16 of Closing the Gap, there’s an Outcome 16, which is that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and languages are strong, supported, and flourishing. So it’s important for us in the survey to, kind of, address those kind of buzzwords, strong, supported, and flourishing. But it is very clear, from co-design, that the widely used measures of language strength don’t necessarily always apply to Australian Indigenous languages. So these kind of widely used and recognised measures of how many speakers of a language are there, and is the language still being learned by children as a first language? These are not the only ways of measuring language strength, and we really wanted to make sure that we kind of redefined language strength in the survey based off Indigenous worldviews. So, language is independent [interdependent] with things like community, identity, country, ceremony, and self-determination.

How do we incorporate that into the survey? So we’re still going to be asking questions, like, how many speakers of the language are there? What age are the people who are speaking the language, but we’re also going to be asking questions on how many people understand the language, because people may not be able to speak a language due to disability, cultural protocol reasons, or due to revitalisation, for example. But they can still understand the language, and that can still be an indication of language strength. We’re also asking questions about how and where it’s used. So, do people use the language while practicing cultural activities, in ceremony, in storytelling, in writing, just to name a few? We know that Indigenous languages are so strongly entangled with culture and country, and it’s difficult to measure the strength of culture and country. But we can acknowledge the interdependencies of language, culture, and country, and by asking these kinds of questions, we can get some culturally appropriate and community-led ways of defining language strength.

Alex: And that’s just going to be so useful for, then, the raft of policies that one hopes will follow not just the survey, but follow the Target 16, and even once we get to 2031, will continue in the wake of, you know, supporting that revitalisation.

Zoe: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that, another thing that we heard from co-design, but just also from Indigenous people, in research and advocacy, that language is such a huge part of culture and identity, that by, you know, developing these programs and policies to help address, language strength, all the other Closing the Gap targets, like health and justice and education, those outcomes will all be improved as well.

Alex: Yeah, I guess that’s why, in the policy speak, language is part of one of the priority response areas for the Closing the Gap. And I noticed this round of the survey in particular is different from what I’ve seen in the earlier NILS in the way it asks questions, which also appears to reflect the co-design. So, for example, these questions about language strength, they start with the phrase, ‘we heard that’ and then a particular kind of way of thinking about strength. And then another way of thinking about strength might be presented in the next question: ‘We also heard that…’. So on, so on. So, is this so people trust the survey more, or are you conscious of phrasing the survey questions really differently compared to, say, the 2019 version of the survey?

Zoe: Yeah, absolutely we want people to trust the survey, and understand that we respect each individual response. Like, as much as it’s true, we’re a government agency, and we’ve been asked to do this to get data for Closing the Gap, we want language communities to also be able to use this data for their own self-determination, and we want to try and break down these barriers for communities and reduce the burden as much as possible. So, making sure that the survey was phrased in accessible language, and the questions were as consistent as possible.

But yeah, we wanted to make sure that we were implementing insights from co-design, but making it clear in the survey that we didn’t just kind of come up with these questions out of nowhere, that these were co-designed with community and represent the different priorities of different language organisations, workers, and communities across Australia. So, we want the community to know why we’re asking these questions. And also, why they should answer the questions. Because ultimately, that’s why we’re asking the survey questions, because we want people to answer the questions.

Alex: Yeah, yeah, and I think that also comes through in the next part of the survey as well, which is about how languages can be better supported, which again gives a lot of, sort of co-designed ideas of different ways of support that people can then talk to and expand on, so that what comes through in your data, hopefully, is really community-led ideas of what government support or community support would look like, rather than top-down approaches.

So, for example, the survey asks about forms of government funding, reform to government infrastructure, access to what the survey calls ‘spaces for languages’. I really like this idea as a sociolinguist, I really get that. Access to language materials through community support. The survey also mentions legislation about languages as a possible form of support. So this should encourage policymakers not to intuit or impose solutions, but rather to listen to the survey language respondents and what they say they need.

What I especially noticed in this part of the survey was the question about racism affecting the strength of language. Or, if you like, reducing racism as a way of supporting language renewal. I don’t think this question was asked in previous versions of the survey, right? Can you tell us what led your team to include this one?

Zoe: Yeah, so, this idea of a supported language, as I measured… as I explained before, is one of the measures in, Outcome 16 of Closing the Gap, and that we want policymakers to listen to what the language communities want and need in regards of support, because, you know, in Australia, there’s so much language diversity, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. Funding was something that all language communities had in common, whether it was language revitalisation they needed funding for, resources and language workers, but also languages that, one could say are in maintenance, so languages considered strong languages, that have a lot of speakers, they also need funding to make sure that their language, isn’t at risk of being lost, and that, it can stay a strong language.

So, there are other kinds of ways that a language can be supported, and if we’re talking about, kind of racism and discrimination as a way that a language isn’t supported. It was important for us to kind of ask that question, because in co-design it was clear that racism and discrimination are still massively impacting language revitalisation and strengthening efforts. The unfortunate reality of the situation of Australian languages, Indigenous languages, is that due to colonisation, Indigenous languages have been actively suppressed.

We want to make sure that respondents of the survey have the opportunity to, kind of, participate in this truth-telling. It is an optional question. We understand it can be somewhat distressing to talk about language loss and the impacts of racism and things like that, but if respondents feel comfortable to answer this question, it does give communities the opportunity to share their stories about how their language has been impacted by racism. So, yeah.

Alex: I really think that’s important, not just to inform future policy, but the act of responding itself, as you say, is a form of truth-telling, and the act of asking, and having an institute that will then combine all those responses and tell other people. That’s an act of what we might call truth-listening, which is really important in confronting the social setting of language use and renewal. This goes back then, I guess, to strength. It’s not just how many people learn a language, or how many children exist who grow up in households speaking a language. There has to be a social world in which that language is not discriminated against, and those people don’t feel discriminated against for wanting to learn that language or wanting to use it.

Now, people may get the impression that language renewal is all hardship and bad news because of a focus on ‘language loss’, in quotes, or language ‘death’, or oppression. This pervades so much of the academic and media commentary. But you and I, Zoe, we met recently in person at a fabulous Indigenous-led conference in Darwin called PULiiMA and there, there were delegates from 196 Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander languages participating. So, that’s just one indication of the enormous effort and progress in this space around Australia, and mainly progress and effort initiated by language communities themselves, rather than governments.

So in that context, it’s important, I think, that this survey also has a section about languages flourishing, the positive focus. Languages are being learnt and taught and used and revived and loved. Tell us more about the design and purpose of the ‘flourishing’ sections of the survey.

Zoe: Yeah, I just want to say that how awesome PULiiMA was, and to see all the different communities all there, and there was so much language and love and support in the room, and everyone had a story to tell about how their language was flourishing, which was so awesome to hear. A flourishing language in terms of designing a survey and asking questions about, is a language flourishing, is a tricky thing to unpack, because in co-design, we kind of heard that a flourishing language can be put down to two things, and that’s visibility and growth of a language. And so growth of a language is something that you can understand, based off the questions that we’ve already asked, in kind of the strength of a language, how many speakers, is this number more or less compared to last time, the last survey? We’re also asking questions about, ‘has this number grown?’ in case it kind of sits within the same bracket as it did in the last survey.

And visibility is, kind of the other factor, which can be misleading sometimes as well. We’re asking questions about you know, is it being used in place names, public signage, films and media. Just to name a few. But a language that is highly visible in public maybe assumed to be strong, but isn’t strong where it matters, so, being used within families and communities. So, this section is a little bit smaller, because it kind of builds on the questions in previous sections.

It will be interesting to see, kind of, the idea of a flourishing language, and we do have the opportunity for people to kind of expand on their, responses in, kind of, long form answers, so people can explain, in their own words, in detail, if they choose to, kind of, how they see their language as being flourishing,

But, yeah, for a language to be strong and flourishing, it needs to be supported, and that’s something that was very clear in co-design, and people wanting things like language legislation, and funding, and how these things can be used to support the language strength, and to allow it to flourish. So in this section, we also have, kind of, an opportunity for people to give us their top 3 language goals. So whether that’s, they want to increase the number of speakers, or they want to improve community well-being. All sorts of different language goals and the opportunity for people to put their own language goals and the supports needed to achieve those language goals. So, the people who would benefit from the data from this survey, the government, policy makers, communities, they can see what community has actually said are their priorities for their language, and what they believe is the best way to address those language goals. So, encouraging self-determination, within this survey.

Alex: And following on from that point, I have a question in a second about, sort of, how you report the information, and also data sovereignty, how communities have access to, in a self-determined way, use this resource. But I just wanted to ask one more procedural question first. So, you shared a complete draft with me, and we’ve spoken about the redrafting process, so I know the survey’s close to ready, but where are you at the team at AIATIS is up to now – and now, actually, for those listening in the future, is October 2025. Do you have an idea of when it will be released for people to answer, and who will you be asking to answer this survey?

Zoe: Yeah, so we’ve just hit a huge milestone in the research project where we’re in the middle of our ethics application. So, we’ve kind of finished drafting the survey, and it’s getting ready for review from the Ethics Committee at AIATSIS. And hopefully, if all goes well, we’ll be able to start rolling out the survey in November [2025].

So yes, it’s been a long time coming. This survey’s been in the works for many years. I’ve only personally been working on this project for a little under 12 months, but there have been many people before me working towards this milestone.

And the people that we want to be completing this survey are what we’re calling language respondents. So we don’t necessarily want every Indigenous person in Australia to talk about their language, but rather have one response per language by a language respondent who can kind of speak on the whole situation and status of their language, and can answer questions like how many speakers speak the language. So that could be anyone from an elder to a language centre staff member, maybe a teacher or staff member at a bilingual school. We’re not defining language respondent and who can be a language respondent because we understand that that’s different, depending on the language community, and if there are thousands of speakers of a language, or very few speakers of a language. We also understand that there could be multiple people within one language group that are considered language respondents, so we’re not limiting the survey to one response per language, but that’s kind of the underlying goal that we can get as many responses from the different languages in Australia, but at least one per language.

Alex: That makes sense. So, it’s sort of at least one per speaker group, or one per language community.

Zoe: Yeah.

Alex: Yep. Yeah. Yep. And then… so the questions I foreshadowed just before, one is about the reporting. So, I noticed last time around the National Indigenous Languages Report, which came out after the last survey – so the report came out in 2020 – that incorporated this really important idea of language ecologies, and that was one of the biggest innovations of that round of the survey. And that was, I think, directed at presenting the results in a way that better contextualized what support actually looks like on the ground, rather than this very abstracted notion of each language being very distinct and sort of just recorded in government metrics, but [rather] embedding it in a sense of lots of dynamic language practices, from people who use more than one variety.

So do you want to tell us a little bit more about how you’ve understood that language ecologies idea? Because I see that comes up in a question as well, this time around in the survey, and is it in the survey because you’re hoping to use that in the framing of the report as well?

Zoe: Yeah, so the third NILS, which produced the National Indigenous Languages Report in 2020, contributed massively to increasing awareness of language ecologies, and this idea that a language doesn’t exist within a bubble. It has contextual influences, particularly when it comes to multilingualism and other languages that incorporate, are incorporated into the community. So NILS4 aims to build on this work, in collecting interconnected data about what languages are being used. Who are they being used by? In what ways? Where are they being used at schools? At the shops, in the home. Different languages, as you mentioned before, different varieties of English, so that could be Aboriginal English, for example, or Standard Australian English. It could be other Indigenous, traditional Indigenous languages, so some communities are highly multilingual and can speak many different traditional languages. Some communities may use sign languages, whether that’s traditional sign languages or new sign languages, like Black Auslan. And kind of knowing how communities use not only the language that the survey is being responded to about, but also other languages, which will help with things like interpreting and translating services, education services, all sorts of different, things that, by understanding the language ecology better and the environment that the language exists in, yeah —

Alex: That makes sense, and there you’ve mentioned a few things that I didn’t really ask you about, but I’ll just flag they’re there in the survey too, translation and interpreting services, education, government services, and more broadly, workforce participation through a particular Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander language. That’s important data to collect. But the last sort of pressing question I have for you in this podcast is not about language work but about data sovereignty. This is a really big issue in Australia, not just for this survey, but for all research, by and with Indigenous peoples, and particularly looking at older research that was done without the involvement of Indigenous people, where there’s been problems with who controls and accesses data. So, what happens to the data that AIATSIS collects through this survey?

Zoe: Yeah, so data sovereignty is obviously one of our priorities and communities fundamentally will own the data that they input into the survey. And there will be different ways that, this information will be shared or published, depending on what the respondent consents to. So, part of the survey includes this consent form, where they basically, can decide how their data will be used and shared. And so the kind of three primary ways that the data will be used is: it will be sent to the Productivity Commission for Closing the Gap data, as I mentioned before, we have been funded in order to produce data for Closing the Gap Target 16, and so the data that’s sent to the Productivity Commission will be all de-identified. And this will be all the, kind of, quantitative responses, so nothing that can kind of be identified will be sent to the Productivity Commission. And this kind of data is kind of the baseline of what people are consenting to by participating in the survey. If they don’t consent to this, then, they don’t have to do the survey, their response won’t be recorded.

And then the other kind of two ways that AIATSIS will be reporting on the data is through the NILS4 report that will be published next year [2026], and also this kind of interactive dashboard on our website. So people will be able to kind of look at some of the responses. And communities will have the option on whether this data is identified or de-identified, so some communities may wish to have their responses identifiable, and people will be able to search through and see kind of data that relates to their communities, or communities of interest, or they might choose to kind of remain anonymous and de-identified, and so these are going to be mostly quantitative responses as well.

However, we are interested in, kind of publishing these case studies in the NILS report, which will be opportunities for communities to tell their language journey in their own words. And so this is a co-opt, sorry, an opt-in co-authored chapter in the NILS report, that, yeah, language communities can not just have data, or their responses, but have the context provided, the story of their language and their data. And that was something that was really evident in co-design, that the qualitative data needs to exist alongside the quantitative data, and that’s a huge part of data sovereignty as well, like, how communities want to be able to share their data. So, we’re really excited about this kind of, co-authored case study chapter in the report, because community are excited about it as well. They want to be able to tell their story in, in their own words.

And so, that’s kind of how the data will be used and published, but, there are other ways that the community will be able to kind of access their data that they provide in the survey. So, that’s also really important to us, and we’re following the kind of definitions of Indigenous data sovereignty from the Maiam Nayri Wingara data sovereignty principles. So, making sure that, yeah, community have ownership of their data, and they can have access to it, are able to interpret it, analyse it. And this is kind of being done from the beginning of co-design all the way up to the reporting, and that, yeah, community have control over their data at all points of this process.

Alex: It sounded like just such a thoughtfully managed and thoughtfully designed survey, so thanks again, Zoe, for talking us through it, and all the best for a successful rollout. The next phase should be really interesting for you to actually get people reading and responding, and I’ll be looking out for the survey results when you publish them later in 2026. Is there anything else about the survey that you’d like to tell our listeners?

Zoe: I think that we’ve had a really, productive conversation about our survey. We’re really excited to start rolling it out, and we’re really excited for people to look out for the results as they start to be published and shared next year. So, yeah, if anybody has any questions, or would like more information, I encourage everyone to kind of check out our website and send us an email. But yeah, thank you for having me, and for letting me chat about this project. It’s been a huge part of my life for the past few months, and excited for the rest of the world to get to experience this data, which is hopefully going to have such a big impact on communities having this accurate, reliable, comprehensive national database, that can be used for, yeah, major strides in Indigenous languages in Australia.

Alex: Well, we’ll definitely put the AIATSIS website, which is AIATSIS.gov.au, in the show notes, and then when the particular survey is out for people to respond to, we’ll put that in the notes on the Language on the Move blog that embeds this interview as well. And then people will be able to, as I understand it, respond online to the survey, or over the phone, or in person, and in a written form as well. So, as that information is available, we’ll share that with this interview.

So, for now, thanks so much again, Zoe, for talking me through this survey, and thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and of course, please recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, your colleagues, your friends. Speak to you next time!

Zoe: Thank you.

US flags (Image credit: Wikipedia)

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

Following on from Rosemary Salomone’s essay providing the historical and legal background, political anthropologist Gerald Roche today shows how the axing of language access service provision is an exercise in necropolitics – a use of power that leads to the suffering and death of certain groups of people.

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On March 1st, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States of America. As a result, people are going to be harmed, and some will die.

There are direct and indirect reasons why this order will get people killed. Most directly, people will die as a result of this order because it will deny language access services to the more than 25 million people in the USA who need them. Apart from declaring English the USA’s official language, this order revokes Executive Order 13166 (August 11, 2000), which obliged US government agencies to provide language access services to people who need them.

Government agencies didn’t necessarily always fulfill their obligations under this order. But now, any motive they had to respect people’s language rights has been removed. Access to critical services will have life-threatening consequences in at least three arenas.

First, during natural disasters, such as fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, people require timely access to accurate information to have the best chance of survival. However, linguistic exclusion and discrimination are reproduced in how this information is provided to the public, resulting in what Shinya Uekusa calls ‘disaster linguicism’. Research during the recent LA wildfires by Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, showed that thousands of Asian Americans were denied access to disaster alerts and other information in their preferred language

Secondly, healthcare is another setting where language access is vital. When people’s language rights are respected in healthcare, they are more likely to use healthcare services, which are also more likely to be effective. When people’s language rights are violated, they are more likely to die in mass health incidents, such as pandemics. The individual consequences of linguistic exclusion can be seen in the case of Arquimedes Diaz, who called 911 after being shot, but was denied interpretation services for 10 minutes. Those crucial minutes were enough to leave him paralyzed. Any longer and he could have died.

A third area where people will be exposed to increased risk of death due to this executive order is the justice system. Sociolinguists such as Diana Eades, John Baugh, and many others have demonstrated that failures to account for linguistic differences lead to miscarriages of justice in police encounters, courtrooms, and elsewhere. This has life and death consequences particularly in the 27 states of the USA that still have the death penalty. However, we also need to take into account the fact that incarceration reduces life expectancy by 4 to 5 years, and that after incarceration, people experience twice the risk of death by suicide. Any miscarriage of justice on linguistic grounds that leads to imprisonment therefore has life and death consequences.

So, in disaster management, healthcare, and the justice system, the reduction or removal of language access services will directly expose people to harm and increased risk of death. There are also two additional, less direct ways that this order could lead to death.

First, we can look at the complex link between Trump’s official English order and death that particularly threatens Indigenous people. Trump’s order is almost certainly inspired by a law previously drafted by his vice-president, JD Vance: the English Language Unit Act of 2023. That proposed law included a clause stating that it could not limit Native Alaskan or Native American peoples’ use or preservation of their languages. The new order contains no such clause.

To understand why this is a problem and how it relates to death, we need to look more broadly at Trump’s record on Indigenous policy. During his first term, Trump carried out ‘continuous attacks’ on Indigenous communities, starting with a memo that reinstated construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Starting his second term, Trump signalled his hostility to Indigenous languages by using one of his first executive orders to wipe an Indigenous place name (Mount Denali) from the map. This prior hostility towards Indigenous communities, and Trump’s general austerity agenda, mean that Indigenous languages are likely to be underfunded during his second term. This will have life and death consequences, because decades of research has shown that language revitalization has health benefits, improves wellbeing, and reduces suicide rates.

Finally, Trump’s promotion of English and his hostility towards Indigenous peoples and languages should be viewed as part of a broader white supremacist agenda that has life and death implications for people of color. The push to make English the official language of the USA has always involved opposition to bilingualism, and often to specific languages: Jane Hill has noted how English-only movements often go hand-in-hand with efforts to limit the use and legitimacy of Spanish. These movements have gathered steam since the 1980s, and have consistently been associated with the right, and its more xenophobic, white-supremacist fringes: the linguistic fascists, as Geoffrey Pullum once memorably dubbed them.

Trump’s executive order effectively mainstreams the far-right linking of whiteness, English, and belonging in the USA. Asao Inoue has argued that the life-and-death consequences of this linkage start with the discursive circuits and communicative practices that shape judgments about whose language and life are considered valuable. But more directly, this order will legitimize the white supremacist practice of using perceived proficiency in English to target people for violence. We saw this in December 2024 in New York City when one person was killed, and another injured, after their attacker asked them if they spoke English. In another incident in July 2024, a man shot seven members of a family after telling them to “speak English” and “go back where they came from.” Trump’s official English order risks inciting similar acts of violence.

Taking all of this together, we can see that Trump’s executive order making English the official language of the USA will almost certainly harm people, and is also likely to lead to deaths. That’s why I think we need to take what I call a necropolitical approach to language – one that examines how language, death, and power intersect. A necropolitical approach demonstrates that designating English as the USA’s official language is not just a symbolic declaration, it is also, for some people, a death sentence.

Related content

In this episode of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast, Gerald Roche talks with Tazin Abdullah about his new book The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet. Gerald is also a regular contributor to Language on the Move and you can read more of his work here.

For more content related to multilingualism in crisis communication, head over to the Language-on-the-Move Covid-19 Archives.

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

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

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

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

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

Rosemary Salomone

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

Trump Executive Order

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

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

English and National Identity

German Translation of the Declaration of Independence

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

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

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

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

Context and Timing

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

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

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

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

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

Official Language Movement

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

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

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

Defying Democratic Norms

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

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

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

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

Clinton Order Protections

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

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

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

Multilingualism for All

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

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

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

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

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

Related content

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

Hanna and Prash discuss English language in higher education research and practice, in the understudied context of the South Pacific, and Prashneel’s new book, English Language-Mediated Settings and Educational Inequality: Language Policy Agendas in the South Pacific published by Routledge in 2025.

Transcript

Hanna: Welcome to the language on the move, podcast a channel on the new books network. My name is Dr. Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics and applied linguistics at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Prashneel Ravisan Goundar. Dr. Prashneel is an academic based in the graduate research School in the University of New England. His research interests span applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational linguistics. Today we’re going to talk about his new monograph, which will be published next month. English language, Mediated Settings and educational Inequalities published by Routledge. Welcome to the Show Presh.

Prash: Hi, Hanna, thank you for having me.

Hanna: It’s lovely that you could be here, and I really am really excited about introducing your work to our audience, so can you start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book.

Prash: Well, thanks personally to you for inviting me and reaching out. It’s always good to expand on your work and put yourself out of your comfort zone and rethink what you have done. So, the book obviously was part of my PhD. Thesis. But I’ll start just a little bit about myself.

So, I’m originally from Fiji. and I moved to Armidale, which is in the New England region in 2022 to complete my PhD. I’d started working on my PhD in Fiji, but because it was during the Covid period in 2020, and there were restrictions on travel and all of that, so I couldn’t move until mid of 2022, when things got a bit better. Back home back in Fiji I was an academic as well. I taught linguistics and applied linguistics courses for a decade or so. and part of what we had to do was we had to make sure that we upgraded our qualifications. We were given a timeline to do this upgrade, and I started looking at research topics.

Fijian streetscape (Image credit: Felix Colatanavanua via Wikipedia)

The way it kind of worked was the former Prime Minister of Fiji had gone into a function and had spoken at length about the English language problems that he had come across, and he had mentioned some of the civil servants, teachers or professionals who were writing emails. He noticed a lot of spelling mistakes, sentence structure errors, grammatical errors, and things like that. That’s when my my research skills kind of just picked up on this. And I started to think, well, he’s saying that. But does he have any form of data to back up his ideas? Or why have we come to that conclusion? Why is that the case? So that’s when I started to think aloud about this, and I thought this was going to be an interesting topic to investigate.

I sent research proposals over to a few universities, and that landed at UNE and my primary supervisor Finex Ndlovu he picked up on that, and he said, well, this looks like an interesting topic, but there would be other elements that I would like to add on to that. And that’s how I started working on my PhD which I finished in 2023. And that’s when we then started to see how the thesis could then be turned into a monograph and published as a book. So, I sent out the proposal to 2 publication houses and Routledge had sent it out for review, and they got back, and the review was very positive. And I thought, okay, now this is the time to start revising and reworking on how I can reach out to a wider audience who would be interested in this language, planning language policy, medium of instruction book. So that’s how it came about.

Hanna: Fantastic. Well, we’re glad that it did! It makes me feel like very old to think that you were doing this in Covid, because in my mind, Covid was just, you know, last year. But you’ve done so much since then, so I’d like to start in terms of delving into your book to focus on two of the things that I found really innovative and exciting about your research. And that is, of course, that it explores a really under-researched context. So that’s the first thing. And then the second thing is that it’s very participant centred. So, it really allows the participants to have a voice. Could you speak to those two aspects, or expand on them a little bit for our audience?

Prash: Absolutely, so if I did a quantitative study and just looked at a language test to see what the students were doing, or how they were coming into the university with a particular school, I think the study would not have been of merit in the sense that we are just looking at it from the statistics point of view. To just say, this is the level the students have entered the university, this is the level that they are leaving out from the University. What I wanted to go into was why they were at that particular level. What actually happened at the back end of it. And this is where the whole story about the Prime Minister comes into place is that something must have happened along the way for them to have a particular level of English when they entered a university, and that space was under researched.

Other researchers or scholars in Fiji had looked at primary school level of English, they had looked at high school level of English, or they had used interventions in those spaces, but they did not move on to the university and try to investigate. We have students who end up at the 3 main universities in Fiji where they all have English as the medium of instruction. But Fiji is so diverse. The linguistic background spans over 300 islands that we have, and you have students who would come from maritime schools who are very in rural areas. And then you have students who come from urban schools, and they enter the university. But for someone to just say, oh, well, you all come from schools. You should have the same level of English is very unfair. It’s an injustice, because that’s not how it works. So that’s the whole space that I really wanted to tap into and see what we could do to address these issues or what we could do to find out what these issues were, and that’s where the methodology came into place.

So I’ll tell you a funny story about this when I wrote the proposal, and I had sent it out to my supervisors, and I said, This is what I would like to do, and this is what I want to find out, and I remember them writing back to me and saying, Well, have you thought about how you’re going to give voice to the students. and that kind of put me into. Okay, how do I do that? So, I started again, looking at different methodologies. The most suitable one I found was grounded theory, methodology, and why it was suitable was it generates. The findings are centred with the data. So, the data actually generates the themes. The data actually brings about all the information that you could possibly gather. Then I started reading more about grounded theory, and then I noticed it was not used in the South Pacific context. When it came to language testing regimes, it wasn’t in that space. So, I said, okay, this is a new element. That’s coming into the picture and grounded theory, because it is of 3 different coding systems that go into its open coding, selective coding, and theoretical coding, these 3 different stages let the findings shine in their own spaces. Because you have this open coding where we had rural schools’ data. We had data about urban schools. We had data about tertiary institutions. And then we streamlined what we got from there into the selective coding space to look at. Okay, this is from, you know, these 3 streams. Then we grouped it to put rural schools and urban schools together. Whether it’d be primary schools or high schools. We put that information together. Then we moved on to getting the higher education data together as well. So, these were the new elements that kind of came about in the book. The methodology allows the participants to go on and speak about that information that they have.

So, we were able to have the total participants I had in the study which was 120, who did 2 language tests, one at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year. We had writing interventions that I used to give them feedback on how they were progressing. And then, when we looked at the data at the end again qe showed improvements, but then I still wanted to know what had happened. So, we chose 30 participants to have an interview, and they were all randomly selected. It wasn’t someone who has performed the best was selected, or people who were low. And then I started to talk to them about their background educational background in terms of their primary school and high school level of English. What had happened, and those findings then told us a whole new picture.

Recently, even last year, if Fiji has started looking at examination results, and they have tried to look at what’s happening, and they want to have an educational review. So, I recently wrote a newspaper article. and I explained in that review that it’s not just blaming the students and saying that we need to do this review because the students did not perform well or we need to do the review because the teachers are not doing their job. What are the elements that are contributing to the unsatisfactory level that the Ministry of Education or the Fijian Government is looking at? And so, I put my whole findings forward. And a lot of people sent me an email. And they said, yeah, it was spot on that these are the things that in reviews in previous years people have not considered, and they have just put a blame on somebody in that aspect. So yes, the voices that have come from the grounded theory methodology. Now, I’m trying to look at avenues where I can put this through…

Hanna: Yes, contribute your voice to the debate?

Prash: Yes, exactly.

Hanna: So you looked at a 120 students, you tested them at the beginning, and at the end of their first year at university. And then you interviewed 30 students. So, to kind of understand their experiences with English language, learning in all those diverse contexts.

Prash: Absolutely.

Hanna: It’s so relevant to other contexts in English language teaching all over the world where you do have this diversity of educational spaces, particularly in rural and regional areas, but also with you know, with diverse access to resources in all sorts of different spaces, like, even in the same city, you can have very diverse access to resources in the same educational contexts.

Prash: Yes, that’s so true.

Hanna: It’s important, and, as you say, that you are now introducing this into the political space is also so fascinating, and that it wasn’t there before is shocking. But it’s fantastic when you know your research has an impact or can have an impact. So, I guess for our audience, we’d really like to know a little bit more about what you found. So, my next question is, you talk about these different ways in which students in different parts of Fiji, in the primary system, and the high school system, too, I’m imagining, have this unequal access to essentially quality, English language, learning. Can you tell us a bit more about what your main findings were? What were some of the things that you found, and what were some of the main barriers. preventing equal access for all students to quality. English language learning, and teaching?

Prash: You have already mentioned, coming from same region schools, but they have different kind of access to resources. That’s exactly what we discovered in this particular project. So, I spoke to the students. One of the students told me, he came from a rural school. So, the two main islands in Fiji they have Viti Levu, and Vanua Levu. So, he came from one, and he said to me, he said. when I was in second grade, the library had 10 books. When I left the 8th grade to move to high school the library still had the same 10 books. There was no movement in the in the 6 or 7 years that the student was there, so I said there was no new books? He said, no. Ten books for 300 students who would have studied in that whole period. So if we are saying English should be improved, and it can be improved by reading. Well, do we have the resources to give to the students? You can’t just say read, read, but well, let’s look at our backyard. We don’t have those books to give.

Related to that the students told me, about what they found in their library. This is another student, but it’s related to what I just spoke about. The library only had books for upper primary. They didn’t have any books for lower primary. So, if you have students who are from one to four in those classes. They didn’t have books to look at, and it’s the same with other schools. People had books for lower primary, no books for upper primary students, or vice versa. In the high school context as well.

Students also told me that because they came from maritime schools or they came from rural schools there, what happens is they come from very small communities, and it’s so small that you kind of know everybody in the community. So, the students are also very familiar with the teacher who was teaching, so the teacher would not use English to teach English instead of using, you know, English to teach a reading of English class or a grammar of English class the teacher was using a vernacular. What led on from there was when this particular student she moved to high school. She said “I was in culture shock because all the students were speaking in English, and I’m coming from a rural primary school”, an island primary school, and she was so depressed she told me. She said she spent the first year of high school in isolation. She would sit under the tree and just try, and you know, be herself, or she would go to the library because she had no voice. She didn’t know how to communicate. There was a huge language barrier for her.

She wasn’t able to even have a simple conversation with the teacher to talk to the teacher, and I remember her telling me she said, I tried to go and talk to the teacher. I tried to make time to go into the teacher, but the teacher has so many classes. The teacher has so many students, she said. I couldn’t get through to talk to her on how I could improve my conversation skills, or in general, you know my skills in the English language. That was the other situation. A similar one. Another student said to me, she said, I didn’t care that we had to speak in English. I spoke in iTaukei, which is an indigenous Fijian language, she said. I spoke with people of other languages who would speak in English, but I had no words, so I would speak to them in the iTaukei language and just try and make a conversation. But it was hard. It was very hard. It was depressing, for some of the students. How would you go about solving this kind of issue?

So, what I do recommend in the book is that for the students who are coming from these schools, once we know that yes, they are having this kind of issue, we need to set up basic academic kind of skills training for these students so that we nurture them to then progress gradually into the class, and they don’t feel that isolation. They don’t feel that they cannot talk. And the other aspect about resources was very interesting. So, as I said, it’s always vice versa. You cannot have a balance in this. One of the students from a rural school said. which was, I found it a bit funny the way he explained it, he said “oh, well, we didn’t have a lot of resources.” This is a very rural school in Fiji, he said, “we only had seven laptops”, and I said to him, “seven laptops in a rural school. I think you were well in place”, you know. At the same time I spoke to another student who came from the same region but attended an urban school with no computer access. They didn’t have any Internet; they didn’t have any computer access. So, the distribution of resources is unequal here. So how do we look into that.

Another student told me, she spoke to someone who came from another urban school and she also attended an urban school. Sha said “we did not have the same textbook access, they had more textbooks than us, or they had more teaching and learning resources, such as charts. They had access to those things as well”. So, I noticed that students actually make this comparison when they are there in the same space. They do talk about all of these things. And yeah, these are different barriers that they have in trying to excel in exams, because in high schools as well, the medium instructions is in English. But if we don’t look at it right from the beginning when they come here. And that’s when you know the blame game starts. And in the last examination results that came out for Fiji they were 76% pass rate. And everybody was, why is it so low? Why is it? 76? But yes, you’re not looking at the circumstances that the students go through that the teachers go through. Because yes, you can say to the students, but then the teachers can also be like, well, be didn’t have the books to do this.

Another interesting issue is the shortage of teachers which has two aspects. One is a literal shortage. One student said they didn’t have an English teacher for two terms completely, because the teacher fell ill. Now there was no one to step in to look after these students for two terms, and it was an examination class to prepare for an external exam. So, in the third term they got a substitute teacher. But instead of learning, it was just rushing through to cover whatever they could cover to sit for the exam. Who can you point to in in that space? Well, should we say that the school would have had to make contact with the Ministry of Education to try and look for someone to come into this place should we point to the teacher and say, well, if you were unwell, you should have informed us in advance. Should you point to the head of department and say, why didn’t you have a contingency plan in place to get someone to cover that shift as well? It’s a whole structure, who do you kind of get into that space as well. So yeah, it was fascinating to listen to their stories.

Hanna: It’s so relevant as well, these structural educational issues. And they’re also often interconnected with issues around medium of instruction in lots of contexts. We could, we could talk about that for the whole podcast, but I want to move on to your monograph. You used a language testing tool to assess students at the beginning of the semester, and at the end of the year which hadn’t been used in in fact, I think you said it hadn’t been used in the region outside of Europe and the “global north”. The Common European Framework of Reference. So can you tell us a bit about why you chose that tool, and how you argue it should be used to better meet the needs of learners in the Fijian context, because it was developed in quite a different context, as we know.

Prash: That’s a very interesting question that you have asked, because a lot of people come back to me and say, oh, so how did you choose this or what made you think about this one? So, when we had conversations about this, I needed to have a tool that I could use to measure students at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year to check. So, what could work in that? So, I started to investigate language testing regimes, and the book covers all of these aspects about the history of all of those, and what I found was tests such as TOIC test, TOEFL test or IELTS test, Cambridge examination language tests, they all went back to the CEFR, which is the Common European Framework of Reference for languages. The CEFR was where all these other tests got ideas from, and they built onto that. So, I said, instead of using, let’s say, a TOEFL test to do the testing instead of looking at IELTS test to do the testing, why not look at how the CEFR can be used in this context. And then I understood that the CEFR has got so many different sorts of scales for different aspects.

So, if you’re looking at writing, my study looked at academic writing. It had about six different ways of looking at writing. And because it comes from because it comes from Europe it had gone through about 2,000 different descriptors before it was designed. And that’s when I said, okay, if there’s so many languages in Europe, and they have looked at 2,000 different descriptors to come up with this standard one. This could now be suitable for the Fijian context because of the different languages that are being used in this context. And what I found is you already alluded to is that in the South Pacific context that had not been used. The CEFR was very new in that aspect, and the IELTS test is an ongoing thing. So, in Fiji or in Australia the IELTS test is used generally for migration purposes for scholarship purposes. But that’s not what my target audience was my target audience was looking at higher education students and trying to align their educational needs. And this particular framework, the descriptor. So, there are 6 descriptors to this. A1 and A2 indicate that the students are basic users. And then you have B1 and B2, which say, the students are independent users. And then you have C1 and C2, which say, these students are proficient users. And that’s exactly what we wanted to find out from the student when they entered the university, what kind of user can we classify them into? And this really kind of matched into that. And when we it was so nicely utilized when we looked at it at the end of the year we found improvement they had made on the scales.

So, the 120 students who set the test at the beginning of the year, what I found was that 62 of them were at A1 level. And 49 of them were at A2 level. Both were at basic user levels. So, throughout the year, what we did was we had writing interventions for academic writing to improve this skill, because that’s the lower end of the scale, and we tried to see how we can improve on that. So, they had paragraph writing activities that they did. They had some rewriting activities. They worked on academic writing. There were three interventions, academic writing, essay, writing, that they did, and at the end of the year, when we checked how the cohort had done so from the 120, 12 of them moved from A1 to A2, but the significant change that came was 90 moved to B2. And then that’s becoming an independent user. Interestingly, 8 of them moved from A2 at the beginning of the year to C1 as proficient users. But of course, this is just to do with their writing skills. We’re not looking at anything else, so we can’t say, well, very brilliant. They are very proficient speakers. But no, no, we’re just looking at the writing part, so I don’t want to excite the audience too much.

Just to see it function in in that aspect was really something good that came about. So, I sent the book to the Deputy Prime Minister in Fiji, and he has written a blurb in the book as well, and it was good that it’s getting to people who make decisions to see where I can come in, and how I can contribute to that conversation as well.

Hanna: Congratulations! That is fantastic result, isn’t it, that the Deputy Prime Minister not only has read your book but has endorsed it.

Prash: Yes, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Hanna: So, my last question, which is for those of us who are, you know, interested in researching in this space for emergent researchers, for students, linguistics and applied linguistics, and also language teaching students. What is the kind of key findings that you would like us to take away from your exciting and wonderful new book?

Prash: So, I’m trying to share and not over share, so that readers would want to read the book, and I don’t want to give too much away. What I would say, is like the book has connected three different spaces. That is the higher education, language testing regimes, and the grounded theory methodology. So, it’s an interconnection of these three different things that have come about in this book and I think readers and emerging scholars or established scholars like yourself. The book will give you how grounded theory can be applied into language, education, research. When I started looking at grounded theory methodology, it was mostly used with clinical psychology, or it was used in the sciences to get their data. And I read through Urquhart’s book, Cathy Urquhart. She has got a fantastic book that looks at grounded theory methodology. And the book was my bible, because it showed you the steps that you need to do to arrive at the data, how you collect information, and then how you analyse and interpret the data.

One of the [thesis] examiners praised the methodology of the research and said that he didn’t think that theory could be utilized in this way in a language testing or language education, research, so to say, so that that I thought was a very good compliment. I think leaders will then be able to use that space as well, coming towards higher education because they have been findings of different spaces in that language, medium of instruction, language policy. And this here, this is trying to get the student to say, well, what do you think we can do to improve? Or what is the problem that you are facing at this particular juncture. and what I found with the the university students, the way they talked about coming into lectures, and not being able to understand the delivery of the lectures. They said we wanted to just leave everything and go out. We couldn’t process the kind of language that was coming through to us, and then to start writing that seemed a bit challenging for them.

However, one of the things that I think scholars will be happy to hear, I asked the students. I said, what did you think the language test that you did, what did you think about the academic writing interventions which I monitored throughout there. The students gave very honest feedback in that aspect. Some of them said it was very challenging, which is fine, because you want to know what they felt. Some of them said that they found it useful because each had a task that they had to do. And then, obviously, I was giving feedback to them on how they would improve on the next task, or that particular task. They found that very helpful. They said the writing in interventions they found it to be helpful because essentially academic skill, academic writing skills is not just a 1 1-year thing or not a one semester kind of thing. Students go on to the 3 year or 4-year program, but they need to be able to submit assignments. They need to know how they go about making an argument or supporting a discussion. So, this whole book kind of outlines how helpful this were to them.

So that’s one of the things I could say. The other aspect that the students brought about was not only having teachers but having motivated and passionate teachers. That also really contributes to how the students perform in the class. And I mean, I don’t want to boast here, but I’ll tell you. I used to teach the academic English course many years ago, and I would have a lecture at eight o’clock, and there were 700 students in this class. One day I noticed the attendance would be 90%. There would be 90% students in the class. The students told me that, sir, the subject is very boring, but you make it so exciting that we show up. We want to know, and they would not feel sleepy in the class, because I would deliver the language academic English in such a way that it sorts of hit them, that why, they were in the class, or why they were doing that. So, I think if that filters down, or if that tickles down to primary school teachers or high school teachers, and they are that they know they don’t just there, because in a fortnight they’re going to be paid. They they’re there because they make a difference to the life of the student that it takes them. You know, from primary to high school, from high school to university, and it’s just going to be good in that aspect to look at it. So those are the key things.

Hanna: I think that’s fantastic place to end Prash! That’s so important. And I think it’s lovely also, for I know some of my students who are English language teachers or teachers in training will be listening to this. And I think that’s a really lovely point to end on which is that, yeah, it’s not just about having teachers, of course, although, of course, that is of paramount importance. But it’s about having passionate and motivated teachers. And that’s very impressive to get 700 students to turn up at 8 o’clock in the morning. I think that speaks. That’s a great compliment for any teacher.

Thanks again, Prash, and thanks very much to our audience for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the language on the move podcast because we talk about fantastic topics like this. And our partner, the new books network to your students, colleagues and friends until next time.

Image Credit: Dreamtime Creative by Jordan Lovegrove, Ngarrindjeri; from 2023 Annual Closing the Gap Report and 2024 Implementation Plan (p. 10) © Commonwealth of Australia, Commonwealth Closing the Gap Implementation Plan 2024

Editor’s Note: The Australian Commonwealth’s Closing the Gap 2024 Annual Report and 2025 Implementation Plan was released earlier this week. In this post, Kristen Martin reflects on progress towards one specific ‘Closing the Gap’ target, namely Target 16, which aims to strengthen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.

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It has been four years since the Australian Government included Target 16 – to strengthen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages – in the ‘Closing the Gap’ targets. What has been happening since Target 16 was announced? The status of Target 16 is officially ‘unknown’ (as of July 2023),  and the fourth National Indigenous Language Survey will not be published until 2026 but what has progress looked like so far? There is already some exciting, new work happening, as this blog will outline.

Voices of Country

A collaboration between the Australian Government, First Languages Australia and the International Decade of Indigenous Languages Directions Group, the Voices of Country Action plan is described as “framed through five inter-connected themes:

1. Stop the Loss
2. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities are Centre
3. Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer
4. Caring for Country, and
5. Truth-telling and Celebration.”

The purpose of the initiative is to pilot actions towards language strength based on community decisions, outlining various ways governments can approach the Closing the Gap targets. In a report released about the 10-year action plan, it outlines:

“Consistent with the Global Action Plan, the Australian Government will undertake and report on practical commitments that deliver progress against the framework set out in Voices of Country. The Australian Government will report against these commitments on an annual basis”

However, the Voices of Country Action plan is only one of many plans that the Australian government has invested in!

Language Policy Partnership

Alongside the Voice to Country Action plan, a key milestone in the progression of Target 16 is the establishment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Language Policy Partnership, established December 2022 and known as the LPP. The LLP seeks to “establish a true partnership approach with truth-telling, equal representation and shared decision-making fundamental to the National Agreement for Closing the Gap”.

Image credit: The Wattle Tree graphic design agency by Gilimbaa with cultural elements created by David Williams (Wakka Wakka), acknowledging also the Traditional Custodians: © First Languages Australia and Commonwealth of Australia 2023, Voices of Country – Australia’s Action Plan for the International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032, p.9

The program is a collaboration between the Coalition of Peaks, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language experts, and various government members. Through the LPP and discussions with various communities, seven priorities have been outlined to make progress on Target 16 and strengthen Indigenous languages. The priorities are as follows:

1. Speaking and using languages
2. Supporting the people, groups and organisations who work in languages
3. Languages legislation
4. Access to Country
5. More funding that goes where communities need it
6. Bringing language home to the people and communities
7. Help people understand the importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages

From this commitment, the LPP has also said

“The LPP is working to develop a national and coordinated approach to achieving Target 16. This includes working in partnership, centring the community-controlled sector, changing how governments work, and sharing the right data and information to make important decisions. The LPP will also work according to annual work plans and a three-year strategic plan.”

Since its establishment, the organisation has met seven times with published documents reflecting their discussions available.

The Australian Government has invested $9.7 million into the LPP and states the program will undertake evaluation after three years (in 2026).

A lookback on previous Target 16 process

As Alexandra Grey has noted back in 2021, funding  for the Indigenous Languages and Arts (ILA) program had been planned for the progression of Target 16. The ILA, in collaboration with First Languages Australia saw 25 language centres open throughout the country and teach the various languages in their surrounding areas. Following this, the ILA has also said it will invest over $37 million in 2024-2025 to “support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to express, conserve and sustain their cultures through languages and arts activities throughout Australia.”. What this funding will go to in 2025, we will have to wait and see.

International Decade of Indigenous Languages

Australia is not the only country to care about the status of Indigenous languages, as we are currently in the middle of the United Nations’ International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022 – 2032). Following the UN’s International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019, the UN has established this decade to focus on the “preservation, revitalization and promotion” of Indigenous languages. Australia is one of many countries to be a part of this celebration, developing the ‘Voices of Country’ Action Plan as “a call to action for all stakeholders”.

Impact of these actions

Of the many partnerships in place, it appears the Australian government has taken a community-based approach for this goal, consulting with community members and First Nations representatives for official and efficient actions. With all the great initiatives underway, it is easy to assume that progression with Target 16 is happening. However, we will not be able to truly know the effects of these initiatives until 2026 as we wait on the fourth National Indigenous Language Survey and the LPP program evaluation.

In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world’s languages disappear this century.

Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People’s Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future.

The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis.

Related content

You can read more of Gerald’s work in his blogposts.

Transcript (coming soon)

Each year, we celebrate Buwan ng Wika or (National) Language Month in the Philippines. Formerly focused only on the Filipino national language, the month-long celebration has evolved into a multilingual celebration seeking to raise awareness also of other Philippine languages, including Filipino Sign Language and indigenous tongues and writing systems. But, of course, we are free to celebrate languages any other time of the year.

At the University of Santo Tomas (UST), the oldest university in Asia, Buwan ng Wika was auspiciously extended with three events spotlighting language this year.

First, during the first week of October, new street signs were installed around the Manila campus of UST. Quite distinctive, the new signages had the familiar campus street names transliterated in Baybayin, an old Tagalog writing system largely used in the northern part of the country before the Spanish rule from 1565 to 1898. Along with other initiatives by Filipino scholars to revive this pre-colonial script, the project enriched the university’s linguistic landscape. Notwithstanding criticisms about the weak translation of an earlier version of these signs, the move reflects an appreciation for languages that are less visible.

Second, not long after this multilingual campus update, precisely on October 10, 2024, language scholars across the Philippines were rattled by the ratification of Republic Act No. 12027. This new law discontinues the mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTBMLE) policy enacted in 2013. While the MTBMLE implementation had important challenges such as limited instructional materials, among others, there was palpable panic and disappointment from groups of language teachers and scholars over the legislative imperative to repeal the language-in-education policy that advocated the use of mother tongues as medium of instruction in basic education classrooms.

The Multilingualism and Multilingual Education class under the English Language Studies Program of the UST Graduate School was not going to stand silent. Our small cohort of six (five PhD candidates and course facilitator, Dr. Pia Tenedero) responded to this issue by raising three important questions that problematize the seemingly reactive, government decision to withdraw its support of mother tongue-based instruction. We believe that, given a better fighting chance, the MTBMLE could work wonders as it did in East Timor. Our formal response and appeal (posted in the UST Department of English Facebook page) is pictured here.

Whether this and other official statements released by various universities and professional groups will or can make a difference remains to be seen. But putting forward a position statement allowed us to engage with the real-life implication of the theories we have been discussing in class since the term began in August.

Third, our class had another special opportunity to extend our appreciation of multilingualism in education contexts. On 26 October 2024, Dr. Loy Lising of Macquarie University and Language on the Move, spoke to our group in an exclusive online learning session. Anchored on the theme “The Future of Language Learning: Moving Toward a Multilingual Mindset in Education System,” the two-hour conversation was attended by about 50 language undergraduate and graduate students and teachers from UST, Mariano Marcos State University Baguio, and De La Salle College of Saint Benilde, Antipolo. Dr. Lising shared reflectively on the theme, grounded on two important, recent publications—the “Multilingual Mindset” (Lising, 2024) and the book Life in a New Language (Piller et al., 2024).

Dr. Loy Lising and the Multilingualism and Multilingual Education class of UST

Two key concepts framed the interactive discussion: linguistic hierarchies and multilingual mindset. Reflecting on linguistic hierarchies, we acknowledge the differential social value of languages (based on Ingrid Piller’s (2016) award-winning book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice). To drive this point, Dr. Lising asked us how many languages we have and whether we and the places where we use them value these languages equally.

Multilingual mindset, which Dr. Lising defined in her article, recognizes disparities in language proficiencies, repertoires, and practices. It is “a way of thinking about language that is mindful and expectant of these variations,” which, in fact, characterize every human interaction, but are particularly salient in migration contexts. This disposition or way of seeing presents an important alternative (even, antidote) to the pervasive “monolingual mindset,” which sees the world only in terms of one language – English (Clyne, 2008).

Capping the month with a conversation that explored challenges and hopes of multilinguals based in the Philippines, we came out of it feeling more certain about the importance of language mindfulness and energized to do our part as language teachers and researchers to grow the multilingual mindset in our homes, classrooms, research sites, places of worship, holiday destinations, and everyday interactions.

This time of the year certainly taught us several ways to grow in our mindfulness of multilingualism beyond the traditional Buwan ng Wika. Afterall, languages ought to be celebrated every day of the year!

References

Clyne, M. (2008). The monolingual mindset as an impediment to the development of plurilingual potential in Australia. Sociolinguistic Studies, 2(3). 347–366.
Lising, L. (2024). Multilingual mindset: A necessary concept for fostering inclusive multilingualism in migrant societies. AILA Review, 37 (1), 35–53.
Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice. Oxford University Press.
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Williams-Tetteh, V. (2024). Life in a new language. Oxford University Press.

To read a FREE chapter about participants’ experiences with finding work head over to the Oxford University Press website.

We celebrated with a big launch party last Friday and there are some photos for absent friends to enjoy on the book page. There you can also find additional resources such as a blog post on the OUP website about data-sharing as community building or this one on the Australian Academy of the Humanities site about being treated as a migrant in Australia. Feel free to bookmark the page as we hope to keep track there of the life of the book.

Don’t forget if you order the book directly from Oxford University Press, the discount code is AAFLYG6.

If you are teaching a course related to language and migration, consider adopting the book. It includes a “How to use this book in teaching” section, which will make it easy to adopt. Contact Oxford University Press for an inspection copy. Book review editors can also request a review copy through the same link.

Transcript of Part 6 of the Life in a New Language podcast series (by Brynn Quick, added 05/08/2024)

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. Today’s episode is part of a series devoted to life in a new language.

Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, I’ll chat to each of the co-authors about their perspectives on writing the book.

Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experiences of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity-making in a new context are explored.

The research uncovers significant hardship, but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements. My guest today is Dr. Emily Farrell.

Emily earned her PhD from Macquarie University in 2008 with a thesis entitled Negotiating Identity, Discourses of Migration and Belonging. She completed a DAAD-supported postdoctoral fellowship in 2010, focused on language and the international artist community in Berlin. She began her career in publishing as the acquisitions editor for applied linguistics and sociolinguistics at DeGreuter, and has since worked in sales, business development, and in the commercial side of publishing for the MIT Press, and now as the global commercial director for open research at Taylor & Francis.

She was an early board member at UnLocal, a legal services and educational outreach organization that serves undocumented migrants in the New York City area, and also served on the board of the foundation for the Yonkers Public Library. At Taylor & Francis, she focuses on increasing access to research through support for both open access agreements and open research practices, including data sharing, as well as support for humanities and social sciences in particular.

Welcome to the show, Emily. It’s wonderful to have you with us today.

Dr. Farrell: Thanks so much, Brynn.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself, how you got into linguistics, and how you and your co-authors got the idea for the book, Life in a New Language?

Dr. Farrell: It’s great to think back along the trajectory and also to think about the six of us, and what brought us all together in the end to combine some of our research projects, and to work together, and the work we’ve done together over a lot of years.

For me personally, I, now long ago, left Australia for the US study, and when I came back to Australia after a few years in the US, after an undergraduate degree, I was more in English Literature and Music. I had the experience of living elsewhere, in some ways growing into a young adult in a different country, even though America, obviously the US, is an English speaking nation predominantly, that experience of going there at age 18, growing there, seeing myself in a different light, and in ways creating a new space for myself and identity, and then coming home and sort of drawing all those pieces together.

I’d become interested in language through that, and particularly that idea of how do you kind of create belonging for yourself in a new place as you grow across your lifespan. And when I got back to Australia, I actually started a master’s degree at Sydney with Ingrid Piller. She had not been at Sydney for a long time at that point.

I was teaching courses with a linguistic grounding in cross-cultural communication, and I was completely hooked once I started because it drew together all these things that had sort of been percolating, you know, the idea of identity creation, how language fits into that picture, how people assess each other and the biases people have based on the way that people sound, whether that accent’s within a, you know, whether it’s a Southern US accent versus a, you know, received pronunciation in the US, and all that kind of groundwork in closely linguistics. I think once you start to read all of that literature, really, I found it so captivating. And it sort of started to answer lots of questions for me about all these things that you get a hunch about, but it’s also, in what’s a way, so implicit, right?

Because it’s language, and you sort of take it for granted. And so being able to dive into that sociolinguistics and applied linguistics literature and starting to understand all that from a new perspective was just so captivating. And so, from there, it was at the time that Ingrid had just secured an ARC grant to look at people that had migrated to Australia and become highly proficient in English.

And so, I started on a research assistant with Ingrid and started my PhD on a related topic to that. So particularly looking at the cohort of highly proficient speakers and how they were navigating this sense of belonging and identity and how that connected to language.

Brynn: It’s so true, I think, that nothing radicalises us more than when we have to kind of leave what we know in our home country and, like you said, even if we go to another country where technically we speak the same language, all of a sudden you realise, oh, wait a minute, there is so much more to establishing a home for myself in this new place and to establishing this sense of belonging than just being able to speak the language.

You’re an Australian living in the US., I’m an American living in Australia, and I think we probably have both experienced that, and even before we started this recording, we were talking about how interesting it is that, you know, technically, yeah, we speak the same language, but we’ve both experienced having those cultural moments where just because we can technically understand each other, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy, and I love that that kind of was this through line for you because then when you were looking at this research where you were a research assistant, you were looking at these people who had high levels of proficiency in English.

So, technically, they can speak the language here, and yet there was still this sense of, but I’m not able to establish this sense of belonging maybe in the same way as someone who sounds like someone from this area.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, and I think that, you know, you do have all this privileging, obviously, depending on the sort of accent you have and obviously how audible you are, how visible you are as other in a place, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier as well, just seeing that again with my son, who’s six, and has a very strong American accent, bringing him back to Australia where he has an Australian passport and an American passport, and, you know, I am audibly Australian or, well, not all Americans, can I identify the accent to be honest?

Brynn: I’m sure many think you are British, yes.\

Dr. Farrell: That’s fine, I forgive them. But it’s also another point that was of interest to me in my research, which is our national boundaries and citizenship also sort of create these categories where people do and don’t fit. So just because you have a passport, does that make you feel like you’re able to sort of create an identity of belonging or how do you find these sort of in-between spaces?

So, you know, so often the people in my research were sort of, they talked quite a lot about accentedness, how they had been in Australia for, you know, 30 years were master’s degree holders, were incredibly accomplished, people who could sort of suddenly have this experience of being other just because someone would say to them, Oh, where do you come from? Because they would hear their accent. And it’s tricky because, you know, there is that weird power in such a banal question.

And you know, sometimes that felt really frustrating for people. But sometimes that also was, you know, I got to hear some of these amazing stories from people who were then able to kind of mobilise a much more powerful in-betweenness or transnational feeling, where they sort of felt, well, yes, you can hear I come from somewhere else, and I do come from somewhere else, but I also come from here. And that it doesn’t necessarily have to be either or in that way.

And that there is a lot more, you sort of can create a bigger space for yourself. But it’s sort of not always quite so easy, because there is kind of that, again, it’s that banal sort of everyday othering that might not seem so consequential for someone else because they’re asking a question that’s just, that seems simple. But for someone that’s asked that, oh, where do you come from?

Or, you know, what accent do I hear? You know, hearing that over and over again can feel really frustrating in your own sort of personal project of, you know, making a life for yourself somewhere else.

Brynn: And I’m sure both you and I have heard that question. I literally had that question asked of me last night. I had an Australian man say to me, and what accent do I detect?

And I wanted to say to him, I hear yours. I hear your Australian accent, you know?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah.

Brynn: You’ve gotten that in America too.

Dr. Farrell: For sure. And I do think you get that much more in English-dominant monolingual environments where people aren’t used to switching between languages. There’s just certain, you know, assumptions about what it is to sound a certain way, what counts as an accent.

That’s quite fascinating. I mean, it also, part of that kind of international, interesting kind of international basis is what drew me to the post-doctoral work that I did in Berlin, because you have this fascinating environment where, at least when I was there in 2009, for three years, it was still a pretty affordable place to live. And it was really, by that stage, you know, the wall had come down quite some time beforehand, I suppose, you know, 20 years before, but there was still this kind of sense of this emerging city and a real kind of very vibrant artistic community that was starting to sort of, people were talking about, like, people in New York, everybody kind of knows about New York or Berlin and sort of another hub for artists.

And so, there’s sort of a real international community there. But English still, there’s a real dominance of English in that environment. And a lot of people that have kind of moved, they’re not thinking about moving to Germany, but thinking about moving to this kind of international art city.

And just the way that language circulates and how people learn languages and which languages they’re speaking, which bits of what in different ways, in different spaces was so interesting to me, because a lot of the ways that people there were doing this sort of identity work and belonging work was much more about being able to be in a space where you could define yourself as an artist, whereas in New York, it’s really hard to balance paying the rent and also work on your artistic practice.

So these sorts of, all of that sort of the way, you know, all these pieces to me connect to this idea of you’re doing all this work of how do you find a job, how do you raise a family, but also how do you do this sort of your own work to feel like this is where you belong and, you know, how do you find your people and how do you make that space for yourself?

Brynn: Yeah, and that is a very central part of the research that you brought into this book, Life in a New Language. Can you tell us a little bit about your participants in the research that you did? You said that they had high levels of English proficiency, which is a little bit different from some of the other participants that we’ve discussed in this series that some of the other authors worked with.

What was that like? What did you see in your participants in having that high level of English, but maybe still seeking to build belonging and build a home?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, so the people that I spoke with during my research were all, they’d all migrated to Australia as adults. They had a mix of different amounts of English education before arriving in Australia. Most of them had migrated from Europe or South America and were already reasonably highly educated and then a good number of them got higher degrees once they got to Australia.

They were going through that process of learning English but were, and a good number of them were already reasonably proficient once they arrived in Australia. And it was a mix of reasons for migrating, a good number being sort of economic migration or a lot of actually there were a couple that had moved for a partner, they’d met an Australian and moved to see where that would go. And a lot of the people that had been in Australia the longest, I think, had already been here 30 years, I think it was the maximum.

Some had only been in Australia for a few years. But all of them were sort of in that process of setting their lives up or raising their families and were much more in that space of sort of how is it that you continue to kind of find community and belonging in a new language. And also how, you know, where you find ways to use the languages that you arrived with.

So, one of my favourite set of participants or a couple, I really felt very privileged speaking to this couple who had both, they had these fantastic stories of the way that they had met and the romantic story and their language use in Australia and their community building here, where they had both left Poland separately. I think, you know, we did in the space of a year or two of each other. And the man had left first and they’d both ended up in Denmark.

And I don’t think either of them had had much Danish before leaving Poland. She had moved with a daughter, very young daughter. They met because he was visiting a friend that was also in one of these living spaces.

They’d put people up, like early migrant housing. And he tells this fabulous, they sort of tell this story together, where he talks about how he sees her for the first time and he immediately thinks that she’s this incredible woman. And she, at the same time, is sort of telling their meeting story, sort of saying, oh, I thought he was crazy.

He was like, this guy just seen me and he’s trying to give me his phone number. And I was like, what’s this about? Some crazy man’s shown up and he’s just giving me his phone number.

He doesn’t even know. He probably does this for every girl. But then, you know, they sort of go on and then they went on a date and then, you know, end up married with another daughter.

And then ultimately, you know, many years later, they migrated to Australia with both daughters and raised a family here. And the way that they sort of tell that story with lots of humour, sort of teasing each other, like much love, but just kind of how language can weave through that narrative. And that once they got to Australia, you know, they have the elder daughter who is most comfortable in Danish but speaks highly proficient Polish and now English.

The younger daughter who grew up mostly in Danish. So, it’s sort of the way that the family then talks to each other. You know, you have the parents still speak to each other in Polish.

You know, the elder daughter often speaks in Danish. You know, so they have all these different languages that they’re using sort of over the dinner table, you know, in the ways that they kind of craft what it is to be a family in Australia, and then how they’re sort of finding their own seat and sort of continuing to live out their own practices that fit their family in Australia. And it’s just really amazing to hear just how complex, but also how people are able to sort of craft these spaces for themselves and to find ways to use and continue their own language repertoire when they’re here.

Brynn: And that’s something that we’ve heard from some of the other authors, too, is about this negotiation of family over the dinner table. You know, like these languages that get used in just the ways that the family as a unit interacts with each other. And it can be really broad with meaning, the different choices that are made for the languages.

And that’s just in your own house. That’s not even thinking about then what did the parents do when they leave the house to go to work? You know, what language choices are they making then?

Or what do the kids then do now that they’re in Australia and presumably going to an Australian school? What are those language choices? So, it’s really interesting that it can be as small as that nuclear family.

And then you think about the way that language choices branch out from there.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, absolutely. What’s so beneficial about, I mean, what we’ve done with this book in drawing together these six different studies and covering a large period of time, 20 years, and also a large group of people, 130 people, we get all that really beautiful, sort of rich granularity of the stories you hear from people that do defy the sorts of stereotypes and assumptions that you have about what people actually do in their lives because so often, you know, even those of us who’ve spent a lot of time, you know, thinking critically and studying this specifically, you know, you’re taking in so much media, politics. It’s easy, I think, to sort of get detached from what it is to understand the real detail of lived experience.

And then it’s also incredibly challenging, I think, again, even for those of us who have our heads in this sort of work, to think about how you take that detail and try to bring it out to that more sort of policy level, to that more, the public space where these sorts of issues are politicised and flattened out and simplified in such ways that are really quite detrimental to the actual lives of people. And I think that when Ingrid was discussing the idea of drawing this study together into one book, what was so appealing to me was the fact that so often, when you think about ethnographic work, it is about that detail and that’s the importance of it, right? Is that you are able to sort of take a context for what it is, really listen to the people, the community that you’re working with and in.

But then I think all of us who have done this sort of work get to that point where it’s difficult to know how to try to have a greater impact. And I think that when you think about the real sort of applied part of applied linguistics, I think all of us want to see more of an influence on the broader discourse around language and migration or other sort of language use topics. And I think it’s really quite difficult to see how you make that impact and how you try to connect what you’re doing in that sort of granular way to the broader sort of ways of speaking across society.

And I think, you know, you sort of have things like census data which really just doesn’t give you that qualitative or detailed view. And in bringing together these six different studies, we have the hope that we make a bit of a step towards the ability to be able to say, look, this isn’t just one person’s or this small community’s experience. We can look across these different communities of people or different individual migrant experiences and draw from them together from this group of 130 people, very common threads that show us, I think, some direction for how we could shape policy, how we could shape education, how we could shape even individual interaction with people when you don’t ask where somebody comes from.

You know, there are certain things you can start to think about your own ways of approaching someone as a human in interaction that I think can have both on a small scale and then on a societal level a really big impact for positive change.

Brynn: And that’s why I think Life in a New Language is just such a groundbreaking book because as I’ve said in previous episodes, you do not have to be a linguist to read this book, to understand this book, to get a lot of meaning out of this book because it does show this really human experience that we all have when we are the new kid in a place, you know. And like we said earlier in this episode, it doesn’t even matter if you already speak the language of the place that you’re going to or in the case of your participants, you have a high level of proficiency. There is still so much that goes into being a migrant, and there’s still so much that you have to build into your life as a migrant that doesn’t necessarily come easily.

And that’s why I think bringing these six studies together, just like you said, so well, shows what we can do as individuals on an individual level is just have that human empathy for each other and then also can say, well, hey, look, we’re noticing these trends in finding work, in getting an education for kids. We’re seeing this through line in how we do family and how we negotiate language and family. And I think, like you said, that’s something that could be taken to that policy level so easily.

So that’s why I think the book is so fantastic. And speaking of that coming together with all of those six stories, I would love to hear about your experience in co-authoring with five other people and bringing those things together. And what I think is so interesting about your particular experience is that you were doing all of this from the other side of the world.

You were living in New York. I think it was four of the authors were living in New South Wales and then one was living on the other side of Australia. But you were the furthest away and you had a little baby at the time.

So, what was all of that like for you?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, so I was the spanner in the time zone works. For me, I had moved into publishing quite a number of years beforehand. So, we, I think, started discussing this book in 2018 when my son was six months old, I think, and around then, six, eight months old.

And so, I’d already been working in publishing for around eight, seven or eight years by then. It was really quite a joyous experience to be able to rejoin and revisit this research that I hadn’t really been working, I hadn’t worked with for quite a long time and to feel like there was still so much in there to draw out and draw together and, you know, and have the opportunity to work with five incredible other women who have done such brilliant work and to sort of see how we could fit our different projects together. Obviously, you know, we had Ingrid as the consistent, you know, the supervisor across all these projects, which I think gave us a huge benefit in already having a certain shared framework and viewpoint.

But even then, I mean, there was still so much to do for all of us to sort of go back to the research we’ve done, you know, some more recent and some older, and sort of go back right from the beginning, back to the transcripts, really read back through, you know, and I haven’t done that in quite a long time, and to really kind of view it again from this perspective of how are we drawing these together, what are the shared, you know, themes that we can bring out, how can we sort of make this most powerful and also most accessible, I would say, so to a broader readership. And, you know, I mean, certainly with six people, everybody works at a different pace, everybody’s juggling different commitments. No, I think that were it to have just been a single author, the book probably would have moved at a different pace, but we also managed to do it through a number of years of a pandemic and, you know, where I wasn’t able to come home, I hadn’t been able to get back to Australia for about three years.

So, you know, there was certainly not the same as sort of working on something on your own, but I think the benefits that you gain from bringing these projects together and the things that you can learn from, you know, the viewpoint of different co-authors, it’s been an incredible experience, at least from my perspective. I feel very lucky to have been part of it. And I think that what we have at the other end of these years of drawing it together is, you know, something greater than the separate parts, which is really, truly fabulous.

Brynn: And I think what’s very cool is that because your son was, you said, six, eight months old, at the time that you started, he’s now six years old, right? So, we have like this child that grew with the book, which is so cool. And also, you know, many of us in the research group that we have, Language on the Move, many of us are mums, and many of us are doing the juggle of the academic work and the raising of the family and trying to figure all of that out.

What was that like for you, especially being in that other time zone and juggling this new motherhood as well?

Dr. Farrell: You know, I think what’s so eye-opening about it is that you just sort of are able to, there’s obviously a lot to juggle, but at the same time, I think it helps you prioritize, it helps you sort of see what’s important. And for me, where I was often kind of working late into the evening and you have to turn the laptop off or at least shut it, shut it down, close the lid, you have to go and help with your nod, do your story time. You know, I think that that’s, it’s a really important kind of chance to look at what matters and also see that you can get a tremendous amount done, you just have to work out the ways to get the schedule right, I suppose.

And I mean, that’s all, again, saying that from a point where I have a very supportive partner and also that working with five other incredible authors who are also juggling their lives and incredible, the huge amount of work that everybody has on their plate, both family commitments and professionally, I think it’s a real, it’s a really good way to see how much you, it’s not a vulnerability to rely on a group and to have a network of support and that it’s so, so important to have that. And I think being able to see that strength in others and look at what people are managing and sort of how everybody supports each other and cheers everyone on. You know, I think it’s been, for me, having seen, I mean, I think we all see this in different ways, the sort of very competitive environment of academia.

I mean, I stepped outside of it, you know, working in publishing, but I’m certainly still very adjacent to it, very much adjacent to it. So, I see how difficult the job market is and, you know, I experienced that to some degree in sort of initially trying to apply for academic jobs, and that hasn’t gotten me better since I left academia. And I think that making sure that you’re able to find a really supportive network, just for mental health, honestly, and also for those moments where you lose belief in your own work or you get a job rejection or you maybe lose direction a little bit to have a supportive group that can remind you that, you know, what you can do and what you can achieve, I think can’t overstate the importance of that.

Brynn: And that really comes through in the book, in reading the book and knowing that the six of you did this together. It’s one of my favourite things about the book is that collaboration and that camaraderie. And as I’ve said to some of the other authors, it sets a great example for the rest of us in the Language on the Move research group who are kind of just starting this process because we have learned how to support each other in this academic field that can be really hard and it can be emotionally hard to get rejected, you know, in papers or publications or things like that.

But I love being able to work with each other. And I think that makes our research better when we’re able to collaborate like this as well. And you mentioned that you stepped outside of academia and went into publishing.

I would be really interested to hear what that’s like and sort of what you do now and what you’re up to these days and sort of the decision that led you into publishing and what it’s like. Because those of us in the beginning of this process, we’re on the other side. We’re trying to get our papers published.

We don’t know what it’s like to work on your side. So, I’d love to hear about it.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, I mean, that’s one of many fascinating parts that I still remember how much fear and worry I had about publishing as a PhD student. And then, you know, you get a very different perspective of it when you get on to the other side when you work for a publisher. And, you know, I used to do more frequently when I was an editor, I would do how to turn your dissertation into a book workshop and things like that and constantly sort of trying to encourage students or early career researchers.

So really, when you’re at a conference making an effort to talk to publishers, go up and talk to editors, hear what they’re looking for, ask them about what they expect in a book proposal or, you know, what their journals are like and get as much information as you can. Don’t be afraid. I mean, they’re there to try to, especially books acquisitions editors, you know, they’re looking for new projects.

They want to work with people. And so, you know, the more you can kind of mine out of people that work for publishers, the better. I think there’s a lot to learn there, especially because you do find at a lot of academic pressures that you have a lot of former PhDs or people with PhDs working in their field, acquiring books in their field.

So, yeah, I mean, I was drawn into publishing because I finished in 2008, 2009, right, as the job market crashed. And I had sort of been on the fence about a standard academic career. I adore teaching, but I wasn’t entirely sure that I was cut out for a really focused academic career in the ways that I sort of– when I looked around at the people that were really excelling and were really dedicated to their academic careers, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was sort of willing to give up.

It felt like to me when I looked at it, and I know that this isn’t the case for everybody, but I sort of looked and it felt like there were things I would have had to give up. I wasn’t willing to give up. The other thing was, frankly, from a personal point of view, and I know that people think about this, but I don’t know that people sort of voice it very often.

I had a partner who could only really work in a few cities, frankly. He works in the art world. I didn’t want to move to the middle of nowhere just for a job.

And I didn’t want to drag a partner who wouldn’t have any job prospects to a small town somewhere. And I didn’t feel that I was really competitive enough to get a job in a big city where so many people would be competing for jobs. And so I’d considered that maybe publishing might be a path.

And as luck would have it, when I was living in Berlin, I saw this job ad for an acquisition editor in books for applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. And I sort of felt, well, if that’s not my job, I don’t know what is. And was lucky enough to get it and that sort of started my career in publishing.

The other thing that I think is worth keeping in mind, and I have spoken to people that are sort of looking for perhaps non-academic careers after their PhD, is that a lot of people look only at editorial work in publishing. I started out as an editor and it was incredibly rewarding. It ended up that I got the chance to sort of stay connected to the field.

I got to go to a lot of conferences that I couldn’t afford to go to as a student. I got to meet lots of amazing people and speak to academics who I was sort of in awe of, because they’re, you know, knowing their research. But ultimately, I started to get more interested in kind of the bigger picture of publishing and, you know, the scholarly communication ecosystem and knowledge sharing and distribution.

What does that mean? How does it work? And at the core of that too is how does the business side of it work?

I mean, I think when you’re inside the sort of academic space, you can seem a bit, I don’t know, less appealing to sort of think about those sort of more commercial aspects. But I started to get drawn in trying to understand those parts and have moved from editorial into the commercial side and now working particularly with sort of open access business models. And it’s been a really interesting journey to sort of be able to take all of that academic knowledge and the experience in the research side and kind of consider, well, what does that mean for ultimately a sustainable knowledge distribution sharing landscape?

And how do we do as much good in that as we can? How do we make sure information scholarship is accessible to the broadest amount and broadest group of people? You know, what does that mean and how do you do it and all of that?

What does it mean infrastructurally? What does it mean, you know, what are all the gory details of that has become, you know, very interesting? So, I think, you know, I guess all of that to say, you know, it’s worth keeping an open mind and kind of looking across publishing.

That’s something that should be just outside of an academic career. And, you know, I’m always happy to talk to people about it, especially early career or students, early career researchers and students that are considering other pathways.

Brynn: Well, and I’m glad to know that people like you are out there doing that work because I think wanting to bring the research that we do and the knowledge that we in the academic world have to the broader public. That’s something that I feel really passionate about. I’m always advocating putting things into language that lay people can understand.

And I think that that’s really, really important. So, I’m really glad that that’s something that you’re doing.

Dr. Farrell: What was so lovely about ultimately sort of getting to the conclusion of the book was that, no, we knew it from the beginning, but once we’d sort of written the book and we were kind of concluding and thinking about what it meant to have drawn all these studies together, we sort of ended up coming back to this notion of data sharing. And that’s become such a big topic in open access and sort of increasing open research practices. And it’s been such a big topic in hard sciences, where there’s been the sort of crisis of reproducibility and replicability in some of the more quantitative social sciences.

You know, there’s been a lot of discussion about that sort of thing and issues around research fraud and research transparency. It’s really only more recently where there’s been more of a discussion about, well, what does that mean for the humanities and social, more qualitative social scientists? And should we be sharing data?

How on earth can we share data? Do researchers in humanities even call what they have data? Should we be sort of forcing these frameworks on researchers from the outside, either as publishers or, you know, the sorts of mandates from funders to share data?

Obviously, you have funders like the Gates Foundation that have a data sharing policy, and others, you know, more and more of these mandates for sharing research. But, you know, have we done enough of the work in thinking about what that means for ethnographers in particular? Because especially if you haven’t built sharing into what you’ve done from the beginning, there are so many ways that it can feel very complex, not just personally from the point of view of, oh, I don’t know that I feel comfortable sharing all these, you know, field notes and so forth with other people, but also that they’re sort of not written to be read by anyone else, but also that there’s just so much context that’s not there just in the transcript or even in your field notes.

And so, part of what we ended up being able to explore a little bit is that we see the benefit of drawing these studies together, but we also saw the challenge of, you know, how on earth you do that. So, you know, how do you provide the context? How do you make sure that your notes and your transcriptions are read in the right ways and not taken without all of that extra detail?

So, you know, I think in some ways it’s something of a beginning of a journey to think about what data sharing truly means for ethnography and how we can really best draw on the huge benefits, I think, that we all saw this sharing, but also do it with the right amount of caution in kind of considering how we connect these pieces together and what it would mean for somebody else coming from the outside to use it. I mean, I think that’s also come up more and more in the last year with the explosion of large language models and AI and knowing that if we’re making this data available publicly, what does it mean if a ChatGPT, et cetera, is using that data to feed modelling without any broader context? How do we consider what that means and how we’re feeding that?

So I think it’s very topical and I think at least for me being so involved in open research from the publisher side of working very closely with libraries and some funders, considering what it means to actually be part of the research side of it, digging in and understanding in more detail what are the benefits but also the real challenges here and I think there’s a lot more thinking to be done there. So, I’m really hoping that out of this book, you know, we can continue to think about and work on ways that we can buffer and care for our data in the right way and care for the people that are that data when we’re talking about ethnographic work. So yeah, for me, I really hope in my professional life to continue to expand on what that means, even in things like how we talk about our own open data sharing policies for humanities and social sciences at Taylor and Francis. So, there’s so much more that can come out of this.

Brynn: And you’re right, it’s such a huge topic right now – data sharing, doing collaborative work, making sure that your data is available for reuse and reproducibility. And that’s what I think Life in a New Language does so well and is such a good ground breaker for that. Thank you for giving us that food for thought.

And on that note, thank you for being here today. We really appreciate it.

Dr. Farrell: Likewise, thanks Brynn. Thanks for all the fabulous questions and great conversation and yeah, looking forward to talking more.

Brynn: And thank you to everyone for listening. 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. Until next time!

The conversation addresses community and heritage language schooling research and practice, and our guest’s long history of important language policy research and activism, as well as the interconnections between the two.

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.

Reference

Cruickshank, K., Lo Bianco, J., & Wahlin, M. (Eds.). (2023). Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges, and Teaching Practices. Taylor & Francis.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 29/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dr Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

I’m very pleased today to say that my guest is Joseph Lo Bianco, a foundational figure in linguistics here in Australia. I could say many things, but I will introduce him as Professor of Language and Literacy Education at Melbourne University. Today, we’re going to talk about his new book, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. It was co-edited with Ken Cruickshank and Merryl Wahlin and published by Routledge.

Welcome to the show, Jo!

Prof Lo Bianco: Thank you very much, Hanna.

Dr Torsh: Now, for those who don’t know your very impressive body of work or, perhaps, are new to this field, could you just start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Prof Lo Bianco: Ok, well thank you for the invitation. I’ve recently retired from the position at the University of Melbourne in Australia which I’d had for 20 years. Prior to that and even during that period of time at the university, I worked in language policy studies. I started off my academic life as an economist. I was very interested in the integration of migrant populations, particularly migrant women.

I worked in that focus of work in Victoria. But I became less interested in it when it started not to focus on culture and not provide any kind of focus on people’s language. I retrained as a language person and educator and linguist, and then I became slightly uninterested with the descriptive tendencies of a lot of linguistics. I’ve always really been interested in public action probably more than anything. So, I started to research policy around language. I became actively involved in those things myself directly.

Then, during the late 1970s, early 1980s in Melbourne, Victoria and other places, I was very involved in activism around these things. There were some political changes which meant that I was invited to put my money where my mouth was. I was basically demanding that governments do better for minority populations and they said, “Well, let’s see what you would do.” So, I was invited to draft policies. I did write these, and I became extremely interested in the traction of ideas.

The policies were accepted. The National Policy on Languages in 1987 was the peak. Really, it was the first multilingual policy, some people say the first one ever anywhere, but certainly in English speaking settings. Then I became very heavily involved in the implementation of this. I developed a very acute interest in problems of making change real. This moved me away from academic research considerations. I had always loved research, but you can’t do so many things at once. So, I became very actively involved in that.

Because the policy was adopted by government and launched and funded, there was a lot of interest in it internationally, and the early successes that we had. Languages started to boom. We had extraordinary growth in research and interest in translation and interpreting and in the approach that we took in the policy, which was comprehensive.

Most policies, if you look at them, on language tend to be just the policy on behalf of the official dominant language of a country. Country X protects Language Y. That’s typically what language policies do. Or they tend to be some concession to a minority population, but they don’t go very far.

We were trying to do very ambitious things, you know. Think about public discourse, how people spoke to each other, inclusion of minorities, social cohesion, but also justice and rights questions. Naturally, a lot of opposition grew up against this from people who didn’t like what we were trying to do. So, the politics of language became my life, really, for many years.

Then, because of what we were doing, it got noticed by people like Joshua Fishman in the United States, who invited me over there. I’ve never done what I promised him I would do, actually. At one point he said I really should document this as an experiential process, and I will do that in my retirement at some point as a reflection on how to do language policy from the inside. Even though language policy is something that is studied by applied language scholars, they still tend to theorise it a lot. So, its practicality is lost, I think, and I want to reinject that.

But anyway, this was noticed around the world, and I got lots and lots of invitations to work in different places, including with international organisations like UNESCO and UNICEF and the Council of Europe. So, I started to do assignments on invitation in Southeast Asia – Samoa, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu. And in South Asia – Sri Lanka for the World Bank, Myanmar for UNICEF and other Southeast Asian settings. Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines. I went to many assignments in Europe.

So, this has been my career since then, working on practical language policy things, which always raise questions of literacy and language study but also the linguistics of these problems. Who describes what language is? How do they do them? What happens with the work that linguists do? How does it get taken up or not get taken up within practical contexts? That became my obsession.

Recently, we’ve just submitted for publication a book on Tunisia that I’ve done with a colleague. We’ve looked at language, ideological discourses. Arabic, French, the two kinds of Arabic, English and Berber and other language issues there. So, it became a kind of reverberating set of discussions. I’ve had a very wonderful career of working all around the world in different settings on practical problems.

In some places, we’ve produced significant change. In Thailand, we produced the first language policy in that country that wasn’t just about the protection of the national language. In Myanmar, we did 45 public discourses around language rights for minority populations, the learning of the main language by minority populations, which is often also a grievance. This kind of thing. I did a trilingual policy in Sri Lanka in 1999 and submitted this and worked with the President’s office on the implementation on it. Then it got thwarted by conflicts there.

So, I’ve had this wonderful opportunity and in this part of my career I want to think about putting down some reflections on this experience.

Dr Torsh: Oh, thank you. That’s so interesting. I’m thrilled to hear that you’re going to write a reflection about that process of putting together the National Policy on Languages because that’s something that continues to be important in the work of myself and other scholars in Australia, so that’s really exciting.

Ok, but we’re here to talk about your new book at the moment, so congratulations on that new edited book. Before we talk about it, the book is called, as I said, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. For our listeners who aren’t really across the community languages sector in Australia, could you just give us a brief overview of it? Obviously, it’s also connected to your own policy activism, and how did that happen? How did it come about that it was established in Australia, and how has it changed? How has the policy focus and the sector changed since that time?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it’s a long and convoluted story, and I can only tell a tiny fraction of it. Suffice to say that in really nearly every society that I’ve worked in, I’ve visited and worked with community language schools in Nagoya in Japan, these kinds of processes of a community generating institutional structures to support and maintain and transmit their languages to their children is really universal.

In some cases in some societies, it’s heavily repressed, and in other societies they’re actually encouraged. But the phenomenon is practically global, I would say, and it tends to be ignored. Most of what focuses the attention of researchers in relation to language education is mainstream or official or dominant schooling. We’ve had this third sector, you might call it, third sector schools. The two sectors other than that are the public government school and then the independent or private schools, and in Australia there are large Catholic school sectors. So, they’re the two other sectors and then you have these parttime schools in the main, although some of them are also full time, that are schools whose primary purpose is the transmission of language and culture to immigrant children, but also increasingly indigenous children in our society.

Now, traveling around the world and the kind of work that I’ve done that I described before, I noticed at meetings and other places there would be community representatives, or even academics who would come and say, “Look, I’m working with Chinese schools in Malaysia” or something or other. And that can be mainstream government schools or that can be the parttime schools.

So, with Ken and Merryl we decided that we would hold an international conference to try and do some proper comparative work. This had never really been done. And we had this very successful conference in Sydney, much affected by Covid and restrictions on travel, but nevertheless it was a very successful conference. And we realised there’s a huge unaddressed agenda there, well we suspected that. So, we thought we’d produce a volume that started to map out the territory. There’s a little bit of a taxonomy that I started to produce in my own chapter, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done into this.

But also, what needs to be both theorised and then developed in a practical way, is what do we want of these schools? If we’re adopting a pluralist position where we believe in language rights, what role would we hope for these schools? Then, in practical terms, what could be done?

Now, in my policy work, right back to the really early 1980s, late 1970s, I worked for government in Victoria. We promoted all sorts of things like cooperation and integration between these schools. Sometimes these schools use the premises of a mainstream school on a weekend or after hours. So, we used to do very practical things. We did this in 1981, you know, facilitating the writing up of contracts, of meetings between the two sectors. Often, the teachers are not trained, or they can be trained teachers in another system but it’s not recognised here. We would facilitate collaboration.

You can imagine the kinds of problems that would be there of a practical nature. Of people not understanding each other, even mistrust. Sometimes much worse things than that. All of these things were there and in spades, which is a colloquialism of saying in large quantity. So, we started to do lots of facilitation of this.

In 1982, actually from your university, Macquarie University in Sydney, Professor Marlene Norst, who has sadly passed away, she was commissioned partly from some of the pressure we had been putting on the federal government, to do a survey of these schools as a preparation to some kind of systemic support for them. She produced a wonderful report (which) unfortunately got repressed by forces who didn’t want this report. It wasn’t just a survey. She produced a really interesting guide to what could be done. She went beyond the brief in a very helpful way.

There’s always resistance to any kind of progress. We know this. Unfortunately, her work got marginalised. But I promote it a lot because I liked her a lot. She was a good scholar and tried to do a great thing, but it’s got ignored.

I took that up in my 1987 National Policy on Languages and promoted it, and we got some extra funding for these schools, so they started to be incorporated into the system. So, this is what we wanted to do in the book, is to think, “Well, what do other societies do? Are they marginalised? Are they given municipal level support, but not state or federal government support, depending on the governance structures in different countries? Are they actively repressed? Are they underground schools?”. This happens in very repressive systems. This can be very dangerous to the lives, actually, of people, to engage in this kind of activity. So, I think there’s a call for solidarity with people who struggle against repression, but also to learn from systems where more substantial work is done.

In some systems, government and public education, or mainstream schooling, only supports prestige foreign languages and these community languages tend to be marginalised and they might get some token support or acknowledgement or given a license to continue to teach, but they’re not actually encouraged. And all the community language teaching and language maintenance, as distinct from second language learning, would happen only in those marginal settings.

Well, in Australia and many other countries in the world we have a much more integrated approach. Our mainstream schools teach multiple languages, including many community languages. Many students study the language at school, at mainstream school, that they might also study in an after-hours system. So, I think, and we can go onto this with another question, but I think we need to think imaginatively and in a future-oriented way about cleaning up this mess, as it were.

Having principles that start from a different basis, not a toleration basis, but a basis of learning, for having a different way in which all of these – I mean, children just have one brain. The learning goes on in that same one brain, and if that one brain is shopped around different systemic structures, those structures ought to get their act together rather than the child and the family having to continually have to adjust to different forms of provision.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, great, thank you. I think for those who are outside of the sector and aren’t that aware of it, can you just explain what that discontinuity actually can look like for those who haven’t experienced it?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it can look like a child studying whatever language it happens to be, let’s say Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, in a school in Sydney during the week. They might do a one- or two-hour program during the week, so it’s not a huge commitment of time. And then, because their family might come from Malaysia and be an ethnic Chinese family but they might not speak modern standard Chinese, or Mandarin, in their home, the child goes to a Saturday morning school run by the community, or an after-hours school two days a week. And sometimes that after-hours teaching happens in the same physical premises as the week program.

Now, there’s a lot of issues here. One of them is about the coherence of the pedagogies that are used in the two places and the wastefulness of the lack of any collaboration between the two systems. Wouldn’t it be much better if it were possible for this to be maybe not seamless, that would be an ideal aspiration, but at least less jagged and disruptive if it were coordinated in some way, pedagogically as well as in other ways. If there were shared knowledge among the different teachers about individual children.

It would have to start from a child’s focused look and also be informed by good pedagogical language learning processes and also of the affordances. Different systems afford different possibilities. Imagine a highly literate mother tongue speaker teaching on a Saturday or Sunday but who isn’t necessarily a trained teacher. This might be a perfect input for colloquial, continuous communicative language. Then you might have a more structured grammar-centred approach in the school system. These are just some ideas that I’ve had that we could work on, and we’ve put them into action in some places.

But I feel like systems, governments, run away from this. It seems to them like an immense problem, a very messy problem. But as I argue in my chapter in the book and at the talk I gave at the conference, I think they’re going to have to deal with this at some point because of the radical changes that are happening in the world of communication and learning anyway that are going to overwhelm all these structures. We’re going to be forced to think about these things differently. I always think if you can predict a change happening, prepare for it. Start talking about it. Get intellectuals in to start theorising what’s involved. Literacy scholars have got a lot to contribute here, and people who think about the semiotics about the representation of language with communities.

I love partnerships which involve these kinds of interactions. I’ve always found them very productive, and I’ve always tried to set them up. That’s what we did in Myanmar (with) all those dialogues.

Sticking with the community language schools which, in some countries, I have to clarify, are called heritage language schools, or heritage languages, and I and other people have resisted that encroachment of that terminology here. Not because it’s bad terminology but because typically in English, I think, “heritage” has a connotation of something that’s in the past, like a heritage façade of a building. Or the heritage which might be the historical memory of a community. I’m not saying that it’s inevitable that it has that connotation, but I think it often does. Whereas a “community language” suggests that it’s something that is present and vibrant and vital within an existing alive community now. So, I’ve preferred it from that point of view.

In the book, we say “community/heritage” because obviously other people use the other terminology. And of course, we can inject new meaning into terms. We don’t have to be defeated by past ways in which words work. So anyway, there’s that kind of issue there.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, that’s great, thank you. I’m now rethinking my use of “heritage language” in my own work, so that’s great to think about that.

I’m really interested in this argument that you make in your chapter, as you said, about changes in our understanding of what literacy is. So, you have a chapter in the book which is based on a talk that you did at the conference. The chapter, which introduces the volume, is called “Community/Heritage Language Schools Transforming Education: Beyond complementary, more than integration”. And you’ve already said systems need to grapple with this idea that you can’t have these two sectors not talking to each other, that it’s not in the interest of the learner. You argue that in part because of this idea of the way we understand literacy is changing as a result of technology, of the fourth industrial revolution.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that, for our listeners? I realise they have to go read the chapter, but just a little bit of a summary for them, to draw them in?

Prof Lo Bianco: It’s an immense topic, of course. If you look at any organisation that has worked in literacy for a long time, you can’t fail to notice that they have adjusted their definition of what it is. One organisation whose definitions I have studied is UNESCO. Of course, they are a very important organisation in this because when they were founded, from the very beginning, they were given the world mandate I would call it for kind of a global agenda for literacy in the world. That’s how I’ve described it in a publication.

If we look at how they understood literacy in the late 40s, early 1950s, and compare it to how they understand literacy today, it’s cheese and chalk. Two very, very different notions. Teachers and researchers have done this. I mean, there have been many movements in this. One of the most important ones was the new literacy studies of the 1990s which started to inject social understandings of literacy and move away from a pure and psychometric or cognitivist approach. Of course, it’s moved on even a lot since then.

So, what we know is that what is taken to be literacy has expanded beyond simple capacity to read and write a language to multiple other dimensions of what’s involved in being a literate person in a society that penalises people who are not literate. This is the really important social consequence of this, that we have the social cost. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is. The social cost of low literacy even understood in traditional ways of understanding literacy is very, very high. There is a high risk of unemployment. It’s no accident that a really high proportion of prisoners in jails are low literate people. There are multiple explanations of this. It’s not a predictor, it’s a consequence of the social punishment.

I’m very committed to this because both of my parents were very low literate people. Neither of them had any serious formal education. And yet, they were both very intelligent people. So, we can’t make any kind of connection between intelligence. This is an enormous discourse, and I’ll just leave it planted there, but what I did want to say about this is that what’s changed in our understanding about literacies from the 50s to now has been this social dimension.

What’s changing increasingly now is a massive technological injection in which multimodality is the principal characteristic of literacy. I mean, anything we do online cannot be reduced to language-centred semiotics. It involves manipulation of multiple semiotic resources that are not just linguistic anymore. Colour, movement, image – there’s any number of things that go into a very complex meaning-making practice. This is going to continue to accelerate in what some people call literacy 4.0. My colleague Professor Lesley Farrell at the university uses that term. (This) mirrors industry 4.0, the 4^th industrial revolution, which is not just computers but artificial intelligence beyond computing as a practice that people are in charge of. It’s absurd in a way, to call them machines anymore, but machines which learn and can learn independently generate their own kind of knowledge and then project that into the space of meaning. So, we’ve got something really radical going on. That’s going to change how language works.

I think one of the reasons we have a crisis in language study today, and this is very true, sadly in English speaking or dominant countries in particular. We have the biggest struggle for language teaching and learning that we’ve had for many years. People misunderstand the technologies as obviating the need for language study. That’s because they’re very reductionist about what’s involved. People used to take literacy in this very reductionist simple way. They take language to be very reductionist, and they tend to think it’s just basic communication. So, we can inject that stuff with voice retrieval. You can ask your little pen to say something in Japanese and you’ll hand that to someone and it’ll say “good morning” in Japanese.

This is completely possible. It exists. There are very sophisticated technologies that will even do lip syncing, so that you’ll look like you’re speaking the language when you take a video of yourself speaking German or Italian or whatever it happens to be. So, this is going to be a battle that we have, to persuade administrators and other people that language learning is not this. This is forms of communication. Let’s welcome them. Let’s adopt them. Let’s embrace them. We can’t deny them. They’re there. They’re going to grow. Elon Musk wants to inject probes or whatever they are, implants in people’s brains. All of these things are going on at a very rapid rate, and some of them might be ethically very, very questionable. But I can’t see any way that they’re going to be stopped or slowed down until we get on top of what they mean for people.

So, we have to understand them. What they mean is that people’s learning will be occurring in places other than in schooling. It will be self-generated and generated by outside forces including machines. It’s going to be massively challenging to everything that curriculums, official curriculums, require and prescribe in schooling.

This is going to create, I think, for indigenous populations, and especially for dispersed, small populations – I worked with the Tigrinya community in Melbourne many years ago with a very small population in Melbourne but who had other members in Brazil and in Africa and in Italy and other places. You can aggregate numbers in communities with the technologies that you can’t do otherwise very easily. So, there are multiple benefits that we can point to. Individualisation, aggregation, personalisation, learner control and pacing. There’s lots of pedagogical impact that a learner can govern in this.

The challenge for schooling is absolutely foundational, almost existential I would say. Therefore, we have to embrace it. In my chapter, and I only just make a small dent into the problem, we have to think about a new way to imagine learning and start from there. The school systems that currently are the principal institutional ways of delivering learning have to be redone, and they have to be seamless. Teachers have to be managers of the educational experiences of learners. That’s how I call them. Rather than the exclusive input to the learner. So, they have to understand the principles of the acquisition of language knowledge.

I see a bigger role for professional language specialists in this, to interact with practitioners directly, but also curriculum writers and others. We have to rethink these things. And then communities who own community or heritage language schools and who are the repositories of the communication in these languages, you know, the Arabic, Tamil, Vietnamese and Greek in Sydney and everywhere else in Australia and other countries. A large part of what’s involved in learning is interaction with speakers, so we have to make sure that there’s seamless connection there.

So, I’m just touching on the outlier of this, but that’s what I’m trying to do with this, is to get people to imagine more creatively, pushing ahead, but not that far. These things are imaginable within a decade. Many of them exist now. Instantaneous translation, voice to script, I mean all of these things challenge all the separations we’ve ever had. What is literacy going to be when it’s possible to have no division between spoken language, signed language and their representation in a written form or some other form?

They’re really important questions to ask and to be asked by people who are interested in multilingualism.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so much to think about. And I guess this kind of question that you sort of answered, but I want to make sure I understood and maybe you can elaborate a little bit. For mainstream teachers, this is the question you pose at the end of your chapter and that somebody asked you, and I really was interested in this. What can mainstream teachers do in order to support the learning of community languages? It sounds like you’re saying they are also a really important part of this process, of this existential crisis that we’re seeing in education when it comes to both language and literacy and what they mean.

Prof Lo Bianco: I’m often asked this question by mainstream teachers when I give talks. As I said before possibly, I’m speaking to Indonesian teachers in Victoria tomorrow. One of the anticipated questions is exactly this even though their specialist teachers of Indonesian are mainstream teachers.

When you look at students who drop out of language programs – I did a study once in the western suburbs of Melbourne in working class schools. I interviewed and discussed and did subjectivity analysis with large numbers of kids. I published it in a book in 2013 out of Multilingual Matters. One of the things that we found (is that we) classified students according to whether they were going to continue or drop language study. We classified them as “waverers” or “committed” kids and then we worked heavily with the waverers to think about what was it that was going on in their minds.

One of the things that came up repeatedly is something that mainstream teachers have got an enormous amount of influence on, and not just the language teacher. That is the attitude or ideology that is attached to the practice of language teaching and learning.

We found that lots of students had imbibed a negative, sometimes quite racist construction of what they were engaged in. This was not coming from the language teacher. This was coming from systemic imagery and systemic, often not even openly, hostile – anyone who’s had children or raised children or been around children, little children I mean, knows quickly that they are semiotic sponges. They pick up signals from multiple sources. They know when something is half-hearted. In the book I called it half-heartedness. When schools are just half-hearted about something, kids get it. They know it’s less important than something else. You’re not actively saying that learning Japanese or Italian, the two languages in that particular volume, is less important than doing something else like sport. But I see the way the school is arranged, and I can work out that’s exactly what you’re doing. One of the girls I interviewed said this to me. She said, “They don’t really, really mean it. We can tell. So why are they pretending?”. So this is something mainstream teachers can do, be enthusiastic supporters.

I helped introduce a CLIL program in a Japanese school where the boys, it was a boys’ school in this particular case, had had a mostly grammatical or formal syllabus. They were doing fine. And as soon as the Japanese teacher started to teach content that was about the Fukushima earthquake, really interesting material in which the kids had to research online and the teacher had to teach technical language ahead of time so they could manage to read these complex texts and stuff like that, the first thing that happens is pushback from the mainstream teachers. Oh, geography, that’s my space. Or, oh science and physics, that’s my space. You’re just the language teacher. That was all resolved beautifully when the teachers understood that the purpose of the CLIL was for the language teacher to enrich the content in the Japanese program. It wasn’t the exclusive teaching of the science or geography. Then they started to see the benefit of additional focus on the content they were teaching as specialists. So, the collaboration was brought about.

These conversations between the mainstream and specialist language teachers are essential. Mainstream language teachers can either choose to be an innocent bystander, an active supporter or at least an encourager. Again, it’s this same one mind that these children have. One mind, one heart that gets shipped around to different classes. The multiple messages that they pick up about the choices they need to make are significant. So that’s something I would say in relation to that question.

Dr Torsh: Great, thank you. Yeah, I know that study well. I’ve used it in my own research. It’s fantastic. I think that it’s really helpful to teachers, and I know we have education students who listen to the podcast, so really helpful to know what they can do.

That was really my last question, but before we wrap up, I just want to know – you’ve talked a little bit about your next project on Tunisia, which is a fascinating context. I’m excited to hear about that. What else is up next for you?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, that one’s in press, or it’s under review. I’m working with a dear colleague in Sri Lanka. I’ve lived and worked in Sri Lanka, and my colleague and I are putting together a volume on bilingual education there. Bilingual education means, typically, English plus either Sinhala or Tamil. That’s a project that will come out next year. I’ve got a book coming out with some colleagues from Hong Kong Uni on supporting learners of Chinese. There’s a lot of other work. I’m much less efficient than I used to be because of illness and old age, both of which have made me slow down.

But I really, really want to go back into the theory of language change and deliberate language change. Language always changes. Everyone knows that language is a dynamic process and changes. But language policy and planning is deliberate language change, and even deliberate language change can happen unconsciously. But planned deliberate language change, which is what I call language policy, and as I said, Joshua Fishman, when I first met him, said that I should document this, a kind of insider account of policy writing, and that’s what I want to devote some time to.

But unfortunately, I was trained as an academic in an era in which you made a distance between yourself as a scholar and the subject matter. I know I haven’t done that for years, but that’s still my predilection. I have to overcome that a great deal to speak personally in this way in writing. I need to do that. That’s something I ought to do. I’ve got a huge amount of documents from, like, 45 years of engagement in language policy, agitation and writing and stuff, and criticism.

You can’t just criticise if you want to – I mean, a lot of language scholarship is dominated by a critical disposition these days, especially sociolinguistics. That’s been important to uncover and expose a lot of injustices and hierarchies in the world. But I don’t think we should overstate the agentive power of our disciplines to really affect change. You have to engage with processes of concrete change, and you have to not set aside criticism, but make criticism productive. I find that, unfortunately, a lot of critical scholarship, maybe not a lot, some critical scholarship is not so productive. If you want to be productive, you have to engage with people whose views are different from your own. You have to compromise on things. You have to find conceptual categories that unite differences.

When I was working in Myanmar and south of Thailand where there’s been a conflict for many years in which language and script and bilingualism are implicated, it’s really really indispensable. It’s not just a methodological, I think it’s an ethical requirement to adopt a different set of understandings and practices. Criticism is something that has to be understood as being particular to some purposes and not others. So, I do think that there’s too much mindless criticism. Too much of a disposition to begin activity with a critical air.

Having said that, I don’t want to be assumed to be anti-critical. Criticism is critical to civil life, to decent life, to social improvement. I just think that there are moments of productive participation in shared creation of new things in which criticism can be a problem. I’ve seen that to very bad effect. I’ve seen it from people who have been trained just in the critical tradition who don’t know when to stop.

So that’s something I’d like to do. I’m going to think about that a lot. I haven’t written enough about that. I read other people’s writing on this and I’ve learned from it, but I feel as someone who has tried to write language policies and be engaged with concrete productive change and not just analysis or critique, that that’s something I want to think about more carefully.

Dr Torsh: Oh, that’s a really wonderful place to end, I think, on that. What do we do beyond criticism, especially for emerging scholars and research students? So, fantastic. Fantastic.

Look, I would love to keep going, but I have to wrap up. So, thanks again, Jo! 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 our Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!

In this post, Rizwan Ahmad and Shaikha Al-Hemaidi (Department of English Literature & Linguistics, Qatar University) examine the specific form this language panic takes in the Gulf countries, where Arabic is in close contact both with the languages of labor migrants from South and South-East Asia and with English as the language of globalization.

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Rizwan Ahmad and Shaikha Al-Hemaidi
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Is Arabic under threat in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries of Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, and the UAE, where the number of non-nationals exceeds the nationals? Do non-Arabs living in the GCC pose a threat to the Arabic language and Arab identity? These questions have been the subject of debates not only in the Arabic language media but also conferences and seminars. Since Arabic is a symbol of national identity in the GCC, it is understandable why Arabs may be concerned, but beyond the emotional rhetoric, do facts support the anxiety about the decline of Arabic?

Demographic changes after discovery of oil in GCC

The GCC countries have experienced an influx of migrant workers over the past few decades following the discovery of oil and gas. The massive economic and social projects undertaken by the GCC governments have further created needs for labor and skills that the local population cannot fulfil leading to reliance on temporary foreign labor. In the GCC, non-nationals outnumber the nationals, accounting for 52% of the total population. In the workforces, the percentage of non-nationals is even more pronounced reaching up to 95% in Qatar. While migration into the GCC has brought many benefits to the region, it has also given rise to concerns among the local population that the Arabic language and Arab identity are in danger.

Fear of decline of Arabic

GCC Flag (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In popular discussions, the perceived decline of Arabic is generally attributed to two factors. First, it is argued that the presence of non-Arab migrant population from South and Southeast Asia not only poses a threat to the structure and use of Arabic but also endangers the Arab identity of the youth. Al-Farajānī, a political thinker and a columnist, in an article published on Aljazeera in 2008 argued that the presence of Asians had negative cultural consequences, the most important of which is ifsād al-lughah al-‘Arabīyyah, ‘corruption of the Arabic language’.

In 2013, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Center for Language Planning and Policies, based in Saudi Arabia, organized a conference aimed at developing strategies to strengthen the Arabic language and identity against the backdrop of social, demographic, and economic changes in the GCC. On a panel, Dr. Lateefah Al-Najjar, a professor of Arabic at UAE University, presented a paper on the effects of the Asian workforce on the Arabic language in which she argued that Asian maids and drivers affect the language of children and recommended that the Asian workforce be replaced with Arabs and that the learning of Arabic be a condition of employment in the GCC.

A second source of anxiety comes from the presence of numerous English-medium schools and colleges in the region. In a report published in 2019 on the occasion of UN Arabic Language Day – celebrated annually on December 18 – it was argued that English was a threat to Arabic in the GCC in the same way as French endangers Arabic in Arabic-speaking countries in North Africa. According to another report published in the Economist, in 2022, the youth in the GCC uses English more than Arabic and the use of Arabic is becoming limited to the home domain.

English is literally on the move on the roads of the UAE (Image: Language on the Move)

Some scholarly studies have also argued that English medium schools and colleges in the GCC are a threat to Arabic and Arab identity. A similar fear of the decline of Arabic in the entire Arab World was the theme of a Pan-Arab conference entitled “The Arabic language is in danger: We are all partners in protecting it” held in the UAE in 2013 indicating that the purported decline of Arabic is not limited to the GCC.

Language policy changes in the GCC

The presence of large non-Arab populations has also led to communication problems between monolingual Arabs and non-Arabs. The governments of Qatar and UAE have started to use migrant languages in dealing with issues related to the workforce. At the same time, the concerns about the decline of Arabic have led the countries in the region, especially Qatar and UAE, with the largest foreign populations, to take measures aimed at protecting the Arabic language and identity. In the UAE, the Cabinet passed Resolution Number 21/2 in 2008 whereby all ministries, federal entities, and local government departments were required to use Arabic in all their official communications. In 2015, the Department of Economic Development of Dubai in the UAE issued violation tickets to 29 restaurants for not having their menus in Arabic in addition to not specifying the prices. Similarly, in 2019, Qatar passed the Law on Protection of the Arabic Language which regulates the use of Arabic and foreign languages and provides a fine up to 50,000 Qatari Riyal in case of non-compliance in some cases.

Language decline as proxy for social and political crises

A major shortcoming of the above reports, studies, and conferences is that no concrete evidence was provided to support the purported decline of Arabic. There is no linguistic evidence that Arabic spoken by young people in the GCC shows linguistic influences of their maids and drivers. They may have acquired some words, phrases, and sentences from their languages to communicate with them, which only suggests that their linguistic repertoire has been expanded. In fact, maids and drivers learn to communicate in Arabic with proficiency ranging from broken pidgin Arabic to native-like command. There is a need of systematic research based on empirical data to understand the linguistic effects of maids and drivers on the languages of host society.

Magazine ad for the University of Wollongong’s branch campus in Dubai (Image: Language on the Move)

Moreover, the discourse of the decline of Arabic is not limited to the GCC but covers the entire Arab World, as was the theme of the 2013 conference in the UAE. Yasir Suleiman, a sociolinguist who has written extensively on the Arabic language and identity describes the situation as one of language anxiety, which is less about language and more about social and political tensions and crises besetting the Arab world.

One major external factor that contributes to the anxiety is the presence of English in educational institutions. Another is the demographic changes that the discovery of oil and the massive modernization projects have brought to the GCC countries whereby non-nationals constitute a significant part of the Gulf social and cultural space. Suleiman argues that the discourse of decline of Arabic is a proxy for these social tensions whereby a defense of Arabic becomes a defense of the Arab social and moral order.

The issue of anxiety and fear notwithstanding, something concrete has appeared in the linguistic landscape of the GCC, and maybe even more broadly in the Arab World, which is that for the first time in their history, Arabs are becoming bilingual in their dialect and English.

Before the advent of English-medium international schools and universities, Arabs from the region would seek higher education in other Arab countries such as Egypt and Syria, where the medium of instruction was Arabic. Their level of education would be displayed in their knowledge and use of Standard Arabic.

By contrast, many GCC students today graduate from English-medium schools and international universities in Qatar and the UAE with a better command of English than Standard Arabic, especially in discussing professional issues.

This is part of the anxiety that English is encroaching upon the space of Arabic. However, we know bilingual people can command two languages equally proficiently and use each in its appropriate context. More research is needed to better understand usage patterns at home and in professional spaces. Census data, similar to those collected in bilingual Quebec in Canada could shed empirical light on what language(s) people use in different social domains such as the home, the workplace, or social gathering such as majlis. This might be more productive than the fear about the decline of Arabic that currently prevails.

Join us on Thursday, December 14, at Macquarie University for a workshop to explore Linguistic Inclusion Today.

The aim of the workshop is to take stock of the state of linguistic inclusion in Australia, as we see ever-increasing linguistic diversity clashing with the continued monolingual hegemony of English. Following our CfP, we have put together an exciting program of keynote lectures and panels focusing on multilingual practices and policies in families, schools, healthcare settings, and government.

The workshop includes a special symposium focusing on the situation of languages in Australian Higher Education. Languages programs at Australian universities operate under the ever-looming threat of cuts to small programs, a threat that has gained new currency due to the rise of automated translation and generative AI.

The symposium “Languages in Australian Higher Education” can be attended as part of the full-day workshop or as a standalone option. For background reading on declining language learning opportunities in Australian higher education, see this new article by Svetlana Printcev over at SBS.

Program

9:00-9:15 Welcome
9:15-10:15 Keynote: Alexandra Grey, Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia (Chair: Yixi Isabella Qiu) (view abstract)
10:15-10:30 Break
10:30-12:00 Panel, Multilingualism in Australian Families (Chair: Hanna Torsh) (view abstracts)

• Speaker 1: Priyanka Bose, Conceptualisation of family and language practice in family language policy research on migrants
• Speaker 2: Sithembinkosi Dube, Bringing emerging African languages into the social inclusion agenda
• Speaker 3: Undarmaa Munkhbayar, Heritage Language Maintenance in the Mongolian Community in Australia
• Speaker 4: Emily Pacheco, Sign language maintenance among children of migrant Deaf adults in the diaspora
• Speaker 5: Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani, Constructing transnational family language policy through translanguaging

12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:00 Keynote: Trang Nguyen, Language Policy and Individual Voices: Introducing “Individual Language Policy” (Chair: Jinhyun Cho) (view abstract)
2:00-2:15 Break
2:15-3:45 Panel, Language Polices for Inclusion in the 21^st Century (Chair: Loy Lising) (view abstracts)

• Speaker 6: Jie Zhang, Between vulnerability and agency: crisis communication with Deaf communities in Wuhan during the Covid pandemic
• Speaker 7: Brynn Quick, How are language barriers bridged in hospitals?
• Speaker 8: Natalie Skinner, Cultural and linguistic diversity in children with a disability affecting their communication
• Speaker 9: Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, Navigating epistemic injustice
• Speaker 10: Tazin Abdullah, Citizen science: inclusive practices in data collection

3:45-4:00 Break
4:00-5:30 Symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education

• Keynote: Jasna Novak Milic, Language Preservation and Identity: The Story of Croatian Studies in Australia (view abstract)
• Chair: Ingrid Piller
• Discussants: Antonia Rubino, Mark Matic, Jane Hanley
• Zoom host: Agnes Bodis

5:30-7:30 Reception

Registration

Attendance is free but spaces are strictly limited so register asap to avoid disappointment.

There are three attendance options:

• Full day (register here) [sold out]
• Only symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education, and Reception (register here) [sold out]
• Virtual attendance at only symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education (register here)

Abstracts, Keynotes

Dr Alexandra Grey, UTS, Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia

This presentation reports on my 2018-2021 investigation into ‘Good Governance in Multilingual Urban Australia’. That project included three studies: an audit of NSW legislation and policy that does (not) provide a framework for decision-making and standards of multilingual government communications (undertaken with A Severin); a case study of such communication outputs from the NSW government, across portfolios (undertaken with A Severin); and a case study of multilingualism in public Covid-19 communications from NSW and Commonwealth governments.

The Covid case study also includes an analytic review of international human rights about language and health, as well as the commentary of international organizations as to how to take a rights-based approach to pandemic communications in order to fulfill certain international law obligations upon Australia (and other nations). That review found new expectations emerging that governments’ multilingual health communications be not merely partially available, but rather produced without (unreasonable) linguistic discrimination; with minority communities’ involvement at preparatory stages; strategic planning; and an eye to effectiveness. In explaining what more effective communication could entail, I advocate assessing government communications’ Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Adaptability — that is, the ‘Four As’ recognized by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and crisis communications scholars.

In this keynote at Macquarie University’s Workshop on conceptual and methodological challenges in linguistic inclusion, I will explain my interdisciplinary methodology, present the key findings of each of these three studies, and draw them together by inquiring whether developments in governments’ public communications during the pandemic have given Australia any lasting improvements in the linguistic and social inclusion. The research leads to a novel suggestion for 3 Rs of response to recurrent problems in governments reaching, and including, linguistically diverse publics: (further) Research; Redesigning online communications; and Rights-based Regulation (or Standard Setting). I will end with a reflection on the path ahead for researchers by noting how three studies have each also given rise to an awareness of ‘dead-ends’ and a need for government-partnered research in this space.

Dr Trang Nguyen, Melbourne University, Language Policy and Individual Voices: Introducing “Individual Language Policy”

Language policy often refers to regulations and rules made by governmental or institutional bodies to determine and influence the use of languages in a society or community. Such a common understanding of the term may lead to an impression among the public and authorities that language policy making should be the task of officials and governors rather than ordinary people, thus potentially creating conceptual challenges in incorporating individual voices into the policy making process. Recognising that there is also a language policy at an individual level, which is a critical part of higher-layer language policies and a link of the complex language policy circle, may contribute to addressing these conceptual challenges.

In this talk, I will introduce the concept “individual language policy” which I built in reference to a combination of language policy theories in an attempt to attract attention to such a language policy at an individual level. I suggest that individual language policy is a kind of implicit policy that individuals discursively define and apply to themselves in their daily language behaviours under the influence of external forces and higher-level language policies in the environments where they are living. Individual language policy comprises three main components: practised language policy (guiding language practices), perceived language policy (informing language beliefs), and negotiated language policy (directing language management) (Nguyen, 2022). Individual language policy does not stand independent of other-level language policies, but can be considered as the first step on the path to the outcomes of the top-down policies (Grin, 2003). In our advocacy for policy change towards language inclusion and justice, we should, therefore, emphasise the importance of individual language speakers and their individual language policy, as “it is at the individual level that the success or failure of a language policy is finally revealed” (Spolsky, 2022, p.x).

Dr Jasna Novak Milić, Macquarie University, Language Preservation and Identity: The Story of Croatian Studies in Australia

Among the approximately 200,000 Croats believed to reside in Australia, a significant majority have undergone assimilation, with English often serving as their primary functional language. When the largest wave of Croatian immigrants arrived in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s, the struggle for linguistic identity accompanied them. This struggle led to the recognition of the Croatian language in Australia as early as 1979, well before the declaration of Croatian independence in 1991. Subsequently, ethnic schools were established, and in the 1980s, Croatian language courses were introduced at the high school level. In 1983, Macquarie University launched the study of Croatian language and culture, a program through which several thousand students have passed over its four decades of existence. Initially funded by the Croatian community in Australia, this program began receiving financial support from the government of the Republic of Croatia about two decades ago. This support reflects the recognition of the program’s significance in preserving the language and community identity. However, within the predominantly monolingual mindset, the future of Croatian Studies in Australia faces renewed uncertainty.

Abstracts, Multilingualism in Australian Families

Priyanka Bose, UNSW, Conceptualisation of family and language practice in family language policy research on migrants

Family language policy (FLP) is increasingly recognised as a distinct domain of language policy concerned with the family as an arena of language policy formulation and implementation. While FLP is a relatively new research area, its conceptualisation of family and language practice requires re-examination due to social changes and technological developments, including the expansion of digital communication within families and the rise of globally dispersed families, a product of global migration and transnationalism. In this systematic review of migrant FLP research, we investigate how the notions of family and language practice are conceptualised in research. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, we identified a total of 163 articles for analysis. Our analysis reveals that the majority of studies were conducted in nuclear families, i.e., those consisting of a father, a mother, and one or more children. Studies also tend to conceptualise the family as fixed and physically located in one place. Paradoxically, around half of the studies acknowledge the presence of geographically dispersed family relations, but this does not necessarily affect their conceptualisation of what comprises a family. Language practice was conceptualised as physical and face-to-face communication in 51% of instances, with only 11% incorporating an analysis of digital communications. Based on our review, we recommend that FLP researchers researching migrant families reconceptualise the family as geographically dispersed and language practice as digital and multimodal when necessary. Such a reconceptualisation will help researchers understand the hitherto underexamined contributions of dispersed family members and multimodal digital
communications in migrant FLP.

Sithembinkosi Dube, MQ/UNSW, Bringing emerging African languages into the social inclusion agenda

When compared to other English-speaking nations, Australia is regarded as a leader in the provision of community language services (Edwards, 2004). Since the initial establishment of ethnic language schools, the government understood that community languages are critical for the equitable delivery of major community services (health, justice & social services). However, the current structures and policies for community language schools are blind to the smaller communities with emerging languages, thus undermining the social inclusion agenda (Piller & Takahashi, 2011). This talk will highlight how LangDentity, an online Shona-Ndebele Community school, is overcoming these hurdles to maintain Zimbabwean heritage languages.

Undarmaa Munkhbayar, MQ, Heritage Language Maintenance in the Mongolian Community in Australia

Maintaining heritage languages is of paramount importance to immigrants all over the world as the language is not just a communication tool. It carries our culture, tradition, belief, and identity. Australia is ideologically monolingual, yet factually multilingual and numerous minority languages exist here. Based on a small interview study with Mongolian families in Sydney, it was found that English is the main language of Mongolian children and parents struggle to support the heritage language. Sending children to Mongolian language community schools, opting for Mongolian language in the home, investing in extra tutoring sessions, joint reading, and perusing video contents can facilitate the preservation of Mongolian into the second generation.

Emily Pacheco, MQ, Sign language maintenance among children of migrant Deaf adults in the diaspora

About 90% of Deaf parents’ children are born hearing. Culturally, these individuals identify as Codas: Children of Deaf Adult(s). The linguistic practices of Codas have been minimally explored in sociolinguistics research. An aspect of this research is child language brokering (CLB), from which sign language brokering (SLB) emerged. This project aims to draw from these two concepts to investigate the experiences of children of migrant Deaf adults (Comdas). Through a scoping review and semi-structured interviews, data will be collected and later analysed through thematic analysis. By uncovering the experiences Comdas have towards SLB, this project hopes to highlight an often-overlooked population of sign language users in heritage language maintenance research.

Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani, UNSW, Constructing transnational family language policy through translanguaging

This study investigates the roles of home and school in constructing translanguaging spaces among Indonesian transnational families in Australia using an ecological approach to language policy. Data were collected from recordings of naturally occurring conversations, interviews, and diaries, and also interviews with teachers who teach the children of participant families. Preliminary evidence suggests that translanguaging serves as a means for transnational families to fight for epistemic inclusion in a context where monolingualism is prevalent and where their perspectives are often disregarded.

Abstracts, Language Polices for Inclusion in the 21^st Century

Jie Zhang, ZUEL/MQ, Between vulnerability and agency: crisis communication with Deaf communities in Wuhan during the Covid pandemic

Previous studies have demonstrated that deaf people are an underserved vulnerable community before, during, and after emergencies. At the same time, deaf people can also mobilize their agency to produce linguistically and culturally appropriate information and services to deaf communities in the absence of accessible crisis communication provided by the government, and even participate in crisis management. Adopting a community-based participatory approach to research, the study involves researchers and community members as equal partners in the research process. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this study describes the needs of and barriers faced by deaf people during the 76-day lockdown after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2020 as perceived by a group of deaf volunteers, and how the deaf volunteers collaborated with the Wuhan Deaf Association, other civil groups, community workers, volunteers, medical staff, and psychological consultant to respond to deaf people’s needs. The study shows that challenges faced by deaf people include barriers to accessing information and aids, barriers to communication with stakeholders, as well as compound disadvantages caused by communication barriers. Deaf volunteers, apart from providing emergency services tailored to specific needs of deaf communities, helped empower ‘vulnerable’ deaf people in emergency responses and resilience building, and effectively raised the awareness of accessible communication among stakeholders and the public. The study demonstrates the critical role of deaf volunteers, who are highly motivated, fully aware of the needs of deaf people, well-networked both within the deaf community and with the broader community, in providing a bridge between stakeholders and deaf communities. Therefore, the study calls for a shift from a top-down emergency management approach in which emergency management organizations provide special services for deaf people to a participatory and inclusive approach that actively involves deaf people in designing and implementing plans tailored to specific needs of deaf communities in emergency settings.

Brynn Quick, MQ, How are language barriers bridged in hospitals?

This presentation explores how hospitals communicate multilingually to bridge language barriers experienced by linguistic minority patients by asking how hospital staff assess a linguistic minority patient’s language proficiency and identify the need for a multilingual communication strategy. It also examines the language support strategies that hospitals use to communicate with these patients. This is done through a systematic literature review of 50 studies. The findings show that current literature most often examines spoken language barriers bridged through interpreters. The problems identified with consistent interpreting service provision relate to time constraints and inconsistencies in procedures related to assessing a patient’s linguistic proficiency.

Natalie Skinner, MQ, Cultural and linguistic diversity in children with a disability affecting their communication

Communication disability is not typically included in discussion and research around linguistic inclusion. For children with a disability affecting their communication, there is a significant lack of research on cultural and linguistic diversity that can be used to guide the development and delivery of speech pathology services. Services incorporate language technologies, including Alternative and Augmentative Communication systems, that facilitate social participation. Interviews were conducted with 23 speech pathologists across Australia, exploring provision of appropriate services for children with a communication disability, in families who speak a language other than English. While cultural and linguistic diversity is acknowledged and valued, English is pervasive in services and associated resources.

Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, Fudan U/UNSW, Navigating epistemic injustice

Informed by the perspective of “epistemic (in)justice” and “epistemic agency”, this study explored how multilingual teachers and students negotiate a more epistemologically effective and equal access to knowledge negotiation in an EMI program in a Chinese university. A variety of data were collected in the study, including lesson recordings, multilingual notes, reflective journals, and stimulated recalls, to understand how the transnational teachers and students as epistemic agents negotiate disciplinary concepts and engage in knowledge co-construction to express silenced voices, countering epistemic oppression and enhancing participation.

Tazin Abdullah, MQ, Citizen science: inclusive practices in data collection

The field of sociolinguistics has seen an emerging method of data collection known as Citizen Science (CS), whereby members of the public are enlisted to collect data. The utilization of CS allows for large volumes of data collection and enables researchers to tap into the diverse sociolinguistic knowledge of the participants. This paper discusses the innovative use of CS in a Linguistic Landscape study, in which specific groups of participants were engaged to take photographs of signs that were used for analysis. The study notes how the utilization of CS acknowledges diversity and offers an approach to build inclusivity into sociolinguistc methodologies.

Bilingual sign in Sydney (photo by Alexandra Grey)

Readers are warmly invited to the next webinar of the series of webinars of the Linguistic Justice Society (LJS):
When: Friday 28 July 2023, 1am (CEST)/9am (AEST)/Thursday 27 July 2023, 7pm (EDT)

Alexandra Grey (University of Technology Sydney), “Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia”

Abstract. This presentation reports on my 2018-2021 investigation into ‘Good Governance in Multilingual Urban Australia’. That project included three studies: an audit of NSW legislation and policy that does (not) provide a framework for decision-making and standards of multilingual government communications (undertaken with Alyssa Severin); a case study of such communication outputs from the NSW government, across portfolios (undertaken with Alyssa Severin); and a case study of multilingualism in public Covid-19 communications from NSW and Commonwealth governments.

The Covid case study also includes an analytic review of international human rights about language and health, as well as the commentary of international organizations as to how to take a rights-based approach to pandemic communications in order to fulfill certain international law obligations upon Australia (and other nations). That review found new expectations emerging that governments’ multilingual health communications be not merely partially available, but rather produced without (unreasonable) linguistic discrimination; with minority communities’ involvement at preparatory stages; strategic planning; and an eye to effectiveness. In explaining what more effective communication could entail, I advocate assessing government communications’ Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability, and Adaptability — that is, the ‘Four As’ recognized by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and crisis communications scholars.

In this seminar for the Linguistic Justice Society, I will present the key findings of each of these three studies, and draw them together by inquiring whether developments in governments’ public communications during the pandemic have given Australia any lasting improvements in linguistic and social inclusion. The research leads to a novel suggestion for 3 Rs of response to recurrent problems in governments reaching, and including, linguistically diverse publics: (further) Research; Redesigning online communications; and Rights-based Regulation (or Standard Setting).  The three studies have each also given rise to an awareness of ‘dead-ends’ and need for government-partnered research in this space.

Bio: Dr Alexandra Grey is a Chancellor’s Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney in the Faculty of Law. This seminar draws on work published in The Conversation, the Griffith Law Review (with Alyssa Severin, 2021 and 2022) and in the Sydney Law Review.

Alexandra is also the author of Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study (De Gruyter, 2021). Free Mandarin excerpts and an overview in Zhuang are available here. Her new research examines the role of the state in Aboriginal language renewal, in Australia. Alexandra runs the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network, which workshop attendees are welcome to join: https://mailman.sydney.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/law_linguistics_network  

How to attend

To receive the weblink for the talk, please fill out this form (if possible, using your institutional academic email address): https://forms.gle/pXKTzkxxe2jw2xnJ8

To catch up on previous talks in the series, please visit the LJS YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/@linguisticjusticesociety. The webinar will be recorded and will be available there after the live event.

For more details about, and to subscribe to, the LJS, please visit:  https://hiw.kuleuven.be/ripple/research/linguisticjusticesociety

(Image credit: Mana Akbarzadegan via Unsplash)

Have you noticed the persistent divide between domestic and international students at Australian universities? Do you worry how the English-monolingual habitus of our highly linguistically diverse institutions of higher learning affects student learning? Would you like to discuss the recent Language in Society article “Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission” with the authors?

Here’s your chance: The Linguistics Department at Macquarie University will host a free webinar devoted to “Rethinking English Language Proficiency and Academic Achievement in Australian Higher Education” this Friday.

When: Friday, March 31, 2023, 4-5pm AEDT (Sydney time)
Where: via Zoom (Pwd: 798325)
Who: Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr Agnes Bodis

Abstract: English language proficiency (ELP) is central to the academic achievement of the 1.5 million students enrolled in Australian universities each year. Yet, students are highly linguistically diverse, with a mix of domestic students from English- and non-English-speaking backgrounds and international students from national contexts where English may be the main language, an official language in a multilingual context, or a foreign language with limited communicative functions.

How do universities manage students’ linguistic diversity through their admission requirements and set students up for success?

In this seminar, we examine ELP requirements for university admission in Go8 universities to answer this question. Our language ideological analysis found two categorically different constructs of ELP: inherent ELP based on citizenship, linguistic heritage, and prior education, and tested ELP. We show how these two different conceptualizations of ELP map onto two dichotomous student groups. One of these is deemed to naturally speak English while the other is constructed as deficient and subject to perpetual scrutiny.

These language ideological constructs frame ELP as a matter of individual responsibility rather part of embedded in learning processes. Conversely, they obscure the need for continuous language development of all students and the need for pedagogical innovation in linguistically diverse educational institutions. We close with implications for policy and practice.

Further reading

Bodis, A. (2023). Gatekeeping v. marketing: English language proficiency as a university admission requirement in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2023.2174082
Piller, I. (2023). How do universities decide whose English needs to be tested for admission? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/how-do-universities-decide-whose-english-needs-to-be-tested-for-admission/
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000689 [open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/event-multilingual-students-in-monolingual-universities/feed/ 9 24679 https://languageonthemove.com/what-happens-when-researcher-and-researched-speak-different-languages/ https://languageonthemove.com/what-happens-when-researcher-and-researched-speak-different-languages/#comments Mon, 31 Oct 2022 03:51:42 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=24488

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon interviewing unidentified Yanomami people

Editor’s note: How do researchers in anthropology and sociology deal with linguistic diversity? Do they learn the language(s) of the people they work with or do they hire interpreters? Turns out that they are quite naive about language and do neither systematically, as new research by Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky shows. How to make good decisions about language choice and language mediation in fieldwork needs to become part of research training.

***

Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky

***

We have surveyed field researchers in sociology and anthropology programs in the United States and found only limited proficiency in field languages, accompanied by a widespread reliance on translators and interpreters. The scholars, therefore, did not dispense with translators as early-twentieth century anthropologists called for (Mead, 1939); instead, they dispensed with the myth of linguistic fluency. At the same time, results indicate disparities in the use of vernacular and translation services in the post-colonial societies and haphazard ‘hiring’ patterns of interpreters that cause ethical and methodological concerns.

The imaginary anthropologist is a fluent polyglot; the real anthropologist is too time-poor to learn another language

When you think about an anthropologist, what stereotypes do you imagine?  Maybe a gaunt Englishman wearing a pith helmet with a copy of African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1940) stuffed in his back pocket? Our imaginary anthropologist is, of course, fluent in a language at risk of extinction, learned during years of field research while living with an endangered community.

Perhaps your image of a sociologist is quite different. You might conjure a scholar working in an urban setting in their home country, which of course is in one of the complex industrial societies. They are studying social problems using their native language with locals who also speak the same tongue.

The shape of today’s societies however, as well as forms of field research challenge those effigies. Anthropologists cannot permit themselves the ‘luxury’ of spending years within a single community, being involved in many projects and teaching duties at home institutions. Sociologists, on the other hand, now work in culturally diverse settings and face the same issues as anthropologists a century ago.

Experience with Fieldwork Translation by Discipline

Yet, the scholarly associations and method textbooks are virtually mum on the problem of language, translation and interpreting in field research. To the contrary, a blatant disregard for translation services is noticeable in some discussions, that – righteously – attempt to reclaim the status of research assistants: “Research assistants play a vital role in the research process, often acting as more than just [! – exclamation and bold added] translators or interpreters.” (Dean & Stevano 2016)

We surveyed US-based scholars about their language practices

That is why we surveyed US-based scholars from anthropology and sociology programs. We analyzed 913 answers that provided insights into our respondents’ linguistic capabilities and their experiences conducting research in over 180 countries and interacting with over 400 languages. A more extensive presentation of the results may be found in our article published by Multilingua (Sepielak, Wladyka & Yaworsky 2022).

We discovered that in only 24% of the field sites with languages other than English present did scholars assess that they had professional (or higher) fluency. In almost 60% of cases, our respondents interacted with languages in which they reported a proficiency at or below a limited working level.

It would seem it’s not all bad news with 75% of respondents reporting fluency in at least one fieldwork language. However, they were typically fluent in languages derived from the colonizers, such as French and Spanish, but rarely in languages from the colonized.

Social science researchers are “getting by”

It is then worth noting that most anthropologists and sociologists were getting by at times like everybody else, using interpreters and translators, or conducting research using the English language. ‘Only’ 54.1% of the sociologists in our sample ever collaborated with a translator compared to 68.9% of anthropologists.

Translation and interpreting are often rendered invisible

Example: #interpreter was literally erased from this photo of meeting between Iran's Rouhani and Malaysia' Mahathir in media coverage #xl8 https://t.co/RIcNpy38t2 pic.twitter.com/aNCCivzY0F

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 30, 2020

It would, however, be spurious to claim that American sociologists had less need for translators due to their linguistic proficiency. It is rather due to the traditional research interests exposing anthropologists to an increased number of languages and geographies. In comparison, sociologists frequently work in the US and regions like Western Europe where one could claim to “get by” with English.

One could ask how can this reality diverge so significantly from the ideal of language fluency and dismissal of interpreters pushed by generations of authoritative field scholars?

Is English proficiency really the superpower of today’s social scientists?

English is the language superpower of the world (Piller, 2022). And our thematic analysis indicates that researchers turn to this ‘superpower’ quite often. This is due to a variety of circumstances hampering the acquisition of fluency in another language, such as short-term studies, multi-sited fieldwork, international collaborative research, or studies of communities with multiple co-existing languages. While the global popularity of English appears as one of the deterrents to mastering field languages among scholars, one should also note that Indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Tlapanec and thousands of others are virtually extinct from academic curricula in the US.

Anthropologists, in particular, may be wary about revealing these linguistic deficiencies due to the fear it might undermine their ethnographic authority. They will be mindful of Margaret Mead’s fieldwork being criticized as ‘superficial’ in part due to her linguistics deficiencies (see Freeman 1983) or Napoleon Chagnon wasting months analyzing the fictitious and scatological “names” of Yanomamo villagers presented to him by amused tribesmen (see Chagnon 1992), mold current beliefs of scholars?

Paying lip-service to the importance of linguistic proficiency does make fluent researchers

Well, it would seem so, with 81% of our respondents perceiving knowledge of local language as important and 95% agreeing that knowing the vernacular enriches the understanding of “local knowledge”.  They also agreed that researchers who don’t speak the vernacular miss important data and have less control over the study. A clear example of detachment between the persisting ethos and contemporary practice reported in previous paragraphs.

The invisible translators and interpreters of social science

In this context, the question about what this heavy reliance on translators means for Western representations of post-colonial societies, persists as well. How do scholars perceive its effect on the research process? For one, most respondents agreed that translators help in gaining access to data and that scholars with foreign-language deficiencies should collaborate with them. Nevertheless, concerning was a trend of haphazardly “hiring” persons that interpret (including research assistants, spouses, colleagues, representatives of local institutions) driven by cost and convenience. This widespread practice carries a series of ethical, methodological, and even security risks rarely considered during methods training.

To that end, field researchers did not dispense with translators as early 20^th century anthropologists called for, instead, they dispensed with the sleight of hand of linguistic fluency. This state of affairs should at the very minimum deserve greater attention in current methodological and ethical discussions regarding fieldwork and collaboration with interpreters.

To read the full article

Sepielak, K., Wladyka, D. & Yaworsky, W. (2022). Language proficiency and use of interpreters/translators in fieldwork: a survey of US-based anthropologists and sociologists. Multilingua. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2022-0071

Related content

Laihonen, Petteri. (2020). Do concepts and methods have ethics? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/do-concepts-and-methods-have-ethics/
Piller, Ingrid. (2016). Herder – an explainer for linguists. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/herder-an-explainer-for-linguists/
Piller, Ingrid. (2021). The interpreting profession in ancient Egypt. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/the-interpreting-profession-in-ancient-egypt/
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/how-to-challenge-anglocentricity-in-academic-publishing/

References

Chagnon, Napoleon. 1992. Yanomamo: The last days of Eden. New York: Harvest Books.
Deane, K. & Stevano, S. 2016. Towards a political economy of the use of research assistants: reflections from fieldwork in Tanzania and Mozambique. Qualitative Research, 16(2). 213-228.
Fortes, Meyer, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.). 1940. African Political Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freeman, Derek. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mead, Margaret. 1939. Native languages as fieldwork tools. American Anthropologist 41(2): 189–205.
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). “Women, life, freedom” – the slogan swimming against the global tide. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/women-life-freedom-the-slogan-swimming-against-the-global-tide/

An area under “total lockdown” (Image credit: rappler.com)

Lockdowns everywhere

The lockdown discourse has become ubiquitous, especially in current affairs and social media. In fact, ‘lockdown’ and ‘quarantine’ have been designated word of the year 2020 by Collins and Cambridge dictionaries, respectively.

Talk about restrictions on travel, curfew, and onsite capacity limits are particularly salient in countries that, unfortunately, continue to battle waves of the modern-day virus that does not even need to be named. The word ‘pandemic’ used in the present context has become synonymous to the still-evolving COVID-19 virus that started plaguing the world in early 2020.

Less straightforward, however, is the nuanced vocabulary that has been created around the notion of lockdown.

What does “lockdown” mean?

Different nation-state governments have developed their own nomenclatures for public health safety protocols.

In the Philippines, the Department of Health introduced the phrase ‘community quarantine’ (CQ) to refer to area-specific mobility restrictions intended to reduce virus transmission.

Depending on the severity of cases in different parts of the archipelagic state, the government may differentially impose four levels of CQ—enhanced CQ, modified enhanced CQ, general CQ, or modified general CQ. The lowest level is termed ‘new normal’ which is defined as the situation where, with significant reduction in the threat of virus transmission, only minimum public health standards will remain enforced. This, however, still involves practicing new routines and habits, such as mask wearing and avoiding large gatherings.

Using these terminologies and understanding what they mean were part of my adjustment since managing to fly back to Manila just when restrictions were beginning to tighten in Sydney.

You need a solid level of English and literacy to understand these lockdown rules and alert levels

The effectiveness of these protocols and their implementation, however, has been questioned in light of the still increasing number of reported new cases of COVID-19 infection (Pajaron & Vasquez, 2021).

The latest response by the Department of Health is to introduce new quarantine vocabulary: ‘granular lockdown’ which refers to micro-level quarantine for critical areas that have a surge in COVID-19 cases.  Beginning September 16, 2021, 57 areas in the National Capital Region were put under granular lockdown. This means individuals staying in houses, residential buildings, streets, blocks, villages, or barangays that have been identified as ‘critical areas’ are forced to strictly stay indoors for 14 consecutive days. As affected households absolutely cannot leave their residence, the local government units and social welfare department are in charge of sending them food, and military officials are stationed in the areas to ensure compliance.

Along with this new quarantine protocol is a new five-level alert system, which provisionally takes the place of the CQs. A description of the activities that are (dis)allowed in each level is provided by explainers circulated in social media. Information campaign tools, like the ones in the image, however, do not necessarily guarantee public comprehension or compliance.

Are Filipinos deliberately breaking the rules?

Indubitably, the construction of such public health protocols and nomenclature is necessary. But it is difficult to perceive their effectiveness in light of the continued spread of the virus.

This persistent problem has been blamed partly on people who allegedly, deliberately ignore the rules. Colloquially labelled pasaway [naughty], this group of delinquents includes those living below the poverty line, who need to fend for themselves on a daily basis in order to survive. Between August 21 and September 15, 2021 alone, the Philippine National Police reported 224,626 violators in Metro Manila and 1,153,833 in the nearby provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal.

These monitored lockdown violations rival the reported statistics of new COVID-19 cases and is publicly chastised with threats of brute force. Such negative, even violent discourse is seen as further enlarging the power wielded by the government over the public that is imagined as uncooperative, irresponsible, and needing more discipline (Hapal, 2021).

An area under granular lockdown (Image credit: Philippine News Agency)

Whether it is true that more than a million Filipinos are deliberate delinquents is highly debatable. But an even more serious question is—What happens to violators? Reports say curfew violators have been arrested, locked up in dog cages, left to suffer the intense heat of the midday sun, and threatened or actually shot dead. The severity of punishment for non-compliance raises questions of human rights—Does violating public health rules justify violation of people’s basic human rights?

At the same time, it raises an important concern on the comprehensibility of regulations because comprehension precedes compliance. In other words, is it right to punish people for not following policies, which they cannot understand in the first place?

The gap between policy and compliance

Without intending to diminish the value of civil obedience, I argue that the problem of ambiguity in pandemic regulations represents a critical gap between policy and compliance.

As Professor Lawrence Solan of Brooklyn Law School explained in the 1^st International Conference on Forensic Linguistics (organized by the University of Santo Tomas – English Department on 18 September 2021), the seemingly simple pattern of reading the law and then obeying it is actually not that simple because it is not always easy to understand what policy requires. This issue presents an argument for the localized translation of public health information.

While multilingual health information materials have been deployed in the Philippines at the beginning of the pandemic, there is less known about the multilingual translation of lockdown policies, which are largely in English, as shown in the sample explainers.

Harsh punishments for non-compliance with lockdown rules (Image credit: Human Rights Watch)

Globally, the effect of linguistic ambiguity in pandemic regulations include what Professor Richard Powell of Nihon University reported as ‘pandemic confusion’ and ‘alert fatigue.’ As also experienced in France, Australia, the US, among others, shifting and ambiguous lockdown rules are successfully engendering confusion, making compliance extra challenging globally.

But with more deliberate and glaring social injustices tied to the discourse of compliance, the current situation of the Philippines demonstrates how policy ambiguity can be (ab)used as a power tool and can reinforce inequalities (Kurnosov & Varfolomeeva, 2020), especially those related to differences in the ability to comprehend constantly changing lockdown names and guidelines.

References

Hapal, K. (2021). The Philippines’ COVID-19 response: Securitising the pandemic and disciplining the pasaway. Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 40(2), 224-244. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1868103421994261
Kurnosov, D., & Varfolomeeva, A. (2020). Constructing the not-so-new normal: Ambiguity and familiarity in governmental regulations of intimacies during the pandemic. Anthropology in Action, 27(2), 28. doi:https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270204
Pajaron, M. C., & Vasquez, G. N. A. (2021). Re: How effective is community quarantine in the Philippines? A quasi-experimental analysis. Message posted to http://hdl.handle.net/10419/230315

The phenomenal expansion in English language learning among China’s growing middle classes has been so intense during the past three decades to warrant the label “English fever.” As a result, China today has more English speakers than the United Kingdom, and – after USA, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan – China is home to the fifth-largest national population of English speakers on earth.

How did this paradox of the connected rise of China and English come about?

A new book by our executive board member Dr Zhang Jie traces the complexities of this paradox: its history, its lived experience, and its future. Published by de Gruyter under the title Language Policy and Planning for the Modern Olympic Games, the book takes the 2008 Beijing Olympics as its focal point to show how English became central to this mega-event, which also constituted a key plank in China’s efforts to showcase its national progress to the world.

Based on a wealth of data including policy documents, media reports, English language learning textbooks, signage in Beijing’s linguistic landscape, and interviews with policy makers and Olympic volunteers, the book meticulously traces the complex intersections between Chinese national ambition and English language learning. In the process, the author also brings Chinese sociolinguistics to an English language audience in an illuminating overview of “language services” research.

Jie Zhang, Language Policy and Planning for the Modern Olympic Games

The modern Olympic Games as national investment

To regain its rightful place among the great civilizations and powers had been China’s aspiration ever since the humiliations of the 19th and early 20th century. The 2008 Beijing Olympics provided the perfect opportunity to showcase what had been achieved. Therefore, China invested significant resources into its Olympic bid. This included linguistic resources, and Zhang Jie shows how the country went about making that investment: by ramping up English language capacity on all levels of society.

Beijing 2008: Showcasing China (Image credit: IOC)

Once the 2008 Olympics had been awarded to Beijing, the ambition was to make it not only perfect but spectacular. In addition to getting the games themselves right, this meant getting the environment right by transforming Beijing into a global city.

The meticulous planning and immense resources that went into that transformation are staggering. Zhang Jie shows how the language capacities of a population of many millions were carefully assessed and improved. Between 2002 and 2007, the percentage of Beijing residents with foreign language proficiency – mostly in English – rose from 22 percent to 35 per cent. In absolute numbers these are well over five million people whose language capabilities were systematically upgraded.

The lived experience of linguistic transformation

However, Zhang Jie digs deeper. She not only shows language planning and management for the Beijing Olympics in exquisite detail but also how individuals experienced their transformation into English speakers and global citizens. Most threw themselves dutifully into the effort to improve their English but they were not motivated by a desire for English and the Western cultural values associated with it, as much previous research has found. Rather, they were motivated by a desire for the rewards associated with passing English language tests: university admissions and job prospects.

Not everyone could compete on equal terms, though, and turning performance on English language tests into a gatekeeper for social advancement brought existing inequalities to the fore. Outside of China’s metropolises, the material conditions to do well on English language tests – qualified teachers, up-to-date textbooks, or media libraries – simply were not available in many cases.

2022 Winter Olympics logo (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The single-minded pursuit of English also led to the devaluation of other languages, as Zhang Jie shows with reference to Russian. Russian, which had been learned to high levels, particularly in the northern border provinces, and was of high practical value there in trans-border exchanges, became worthless almost overnight, as university admission was tied to English. As one Olympic volunteer, who had studied Russian throughout her secondary education mournfully complained to the researcher: “There were a great number of Russian people in our county, thus I had never thought of learning English. I didn’t realize English is so important elsewhere until I left my hometown. Now, learning Russian has become such a disadvantage!”

That was in 2008. But that is not where this study ends.

Having successfully conducted the Beijing Olympics and continuing its economic and geopolitical rise, language policy and planning have been reevaluated. As China now gets ready to host the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed the meaning of “globalisation,” as we have traced here in the Language on the Move COVID-19 archives. This time, China follows a comprehensive language action plan that is quite different to the one for the 2008 Summer Games: there is now a recognition of an oversupply of English language capabilities and the focus is on strengthening language service provision in other languages. Beyond English, China has embraced a truly multilingual vision. There are now programs at Chinese universities in 101 languages – the official languages of all countries that have established diplomatic relations with China. Capacities in most of these languages may still be limited but, as this book amply documents, China has a track record of turning its dream into a reality.

The concomitant rise of China and English may well have come to an end.

Jie Zhang, Language Policy and Planning for the Modern Olympic Games

To find out more about Jie Zhang’s new book Language Policy and Planning for the Modern Olympic Games head over to the publisher’s website. To order the book and receive a 20% discount, click on the De Gruyter order page.

This blog post is a slightly revised version of the book’s preface: Piller, Ingrid. (2021). Preface: The paradox of the concomitant rise of China and English. In Jie Zhang (Ed.), Language Policy and Planning for the Modern Olympic Games (pp. V-VIII). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton.