“Read – Learn – Grow – Be Kind” – this street library says it all (Image credit: Language on the Move)

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge 2026 is out!

Now in its ninth year, the goals of our reading challenge have remained broadly unchanged since 2018: to encourage reading in the discipline and beyond, and to make linguistics reading fun.

These goals have become even more relevant, due to two converging trends:

On the one hand, book reading is in freefall internationally while, on the other hand, screen time is rising exponentially.

If you think this is just a case of one medium replacing another, you are unfortunately mistaken.

In its most prevalent form – social media use – screen time has negative effects on our ability to concentrate, to think deeply and critically, and to develop empathy. These negative effects are now so widely felt that their popular designation “brain rot” was selected as the Oxford Word of the Year 2024.

Book reading, by contrast, is the antidote to brain rot. Book reading challenges us to concentrate and to deeply engage with an extended argument or a narrative universe.

To train your brain you need to read long form. You can’t outsource your reading to AI-generated summaries, either.

Furthermore, many of our readers are (aspiring) researchers and Stephen King’s advice in On Writing is valid in our profession, too:

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge is here for you develop, enjoy and extend the habits and pleasures of reading, particularly in the field of linguistic diversity and social participation. For each month of 2026, we are suggesting a category and one of our team members offers a recommendation in that category.

Enjoy and feel free to add your own recommendations in the “Comments” section below.

And don’t forget that, in addition to the categories and recommendations suggested here, the Language-on-the-Move Podcast will also continue to bring you regular reading ideas in 2026.

Happy Reading!

Previous Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenges

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2025
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2023
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

January: a book about new technologies in intercultural communication

Recommendation: Cabalquinto, E. C. B. (2022). (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media. Oxford University Press.

Earvin’s presentation about the myth of digital inclusion of older migrants in Australia was one of the highlights of our recent symposium devoted to “New technologies in intercultural communication.”
Whether you missed out on the symposium or want to deepen your engagement with Earvin’s work, (Im)mobile Homes offers a gripping exploration of the use of smartphones, social media, and apps in the family and care practices of transnational families. (Ingrid Piller)

February: a book about settler colonialism

Recommendation: Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press.

This book completely reshaped my understanding of Indigenous politics, border, nation, and sovereignty in North America. It also made me reflect on my reliance on the extensive literature on Indigenous cultures and languages – ritual speech, performances, tales, or beliefs – produced over the last century by anthropologists and linguists, most of which are dismissive of the scene of dispossession, the complicated history of places, or simply what people say about themselves and their struggles. (Gegentuul Baioud)

March: a book stirs that your social imagination

Recommendation: Bregman, R. (2017). Utopia for realists. Bloomsbury.

In this book, Rutger Bregman stirs our imagination by inviting us to re-think the way modern society is organized and by offering us a glimpse into a potentially better future for all. He calls for a new vision that would more effectively address current global challenges such as increasing inequalities or the progressing automation of labor.
But what does he exactly propose?
In short, a 15-hour work week, universal basic income and open borders. The author invites you on a journey between time and spaces with real examples of communities that have taken utopia seriously and have started to experiment with it. (Olga Vlasova)

April: A book about the philosophy of language

Recommendation: Le Guin, U. (1974). The Dispossessed. HarperCollins.

Le Guin constantly fluctuates the reader´s receptors between the old and the new, roots and progress, personal and professional, politics and philosophy. We follow the life and work of a physicist who travels back and forth between two historically connected but contrasting planets and political systems.
The protagonist commits to seeking the truth not only by understanding his own context of origin but also by defying it; how do we find our truth? And is it ever objective? The novel is considered a post-feminist utopian fiction raising discussions on whether linguistic innovation is necessary for conceptual change.
A story of intergalactic migration trying to answer the long-standing question: to whom does knowledge belong? (Mara Kyrou)

May: A book about the experience of growing up as the child of a migrant

Recommendation 1: Vuong, O. (2019). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin.

Vietnamese-American history, language, and generational trauma come together in the form of a poetic letter with utterances such as “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.” Dedicated to someone who will never see it: the author’s mother, who never learned how to read.
Through the eyes of a young man named Little Dog discovering his homosexuality in a space for undocumented immigrants, this book tells the story of a Vietnamese immigrant family in the US and their complex relationship with the English language. It chronicles their migration history escaping the atrocities of war, the fragile family dynamics that emerged from that experience, and the love for words that connects the writer with himself, while ironically separating him from his mother. (Juan Felipe Sánchez Guzmán)

Recommendation 2: Toxische Pommes. (2024). Ein schönes Ausländerkind. Zsolnay.

Ein Schönes Ausländerkind is a fictionalised autobiography of the author’s childhood, after her family fled to Austria due to the Yugoslav Wars. The book made me laugh a lot, as the author (who writes under the pseudonym she uses to post satirical sketches online) pokes fun at the many absurdities of migrant life. But I also found it very powerful in its depiction of a messy, painful, but loving father-daughter relationship where the adult struggles to learn the local language, leading to child language brokering. (Jenia Yudytska)

June: A book about narrative research in a migration context

Recommendation: Stevenson, Patrick (2017). Language and migration in a multilingual metropolis: Berlin Lives. Palgrave Macmillan.

This book offers a highly engaging and innovative exploration of Berlin’s multilingualism through personal migration narratives. Working ethnographically, the researcher situates his analysis in a single shared apartment in Neukölln, using the linguistic repertoires and biographical trajectories of its five residents—a Russian-speaking woman, two Polish-speakers, a Kurdish-speaking man, and a Vietnamese-speaking woman—to demonstrate how migration, identity and sociolinguistic practice intersect in everyday life.
The book portrays the apartment as a microcosm of the city’s wider linguistic landscape, tracing how individuals navigate language ideologies, negotiate belonging, and construct social relations within a complex metropolitan environment. (Martin Serif Derince)

July: A book exploring linguistic diversity from multiple perspectives

Recommendation: Aguilar Gil, Y. E. (2020). Ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística. Almadia.

Language loss, resistance, indigenous literature(s), prejudice, identity, autonyms and exonyms – these are just some of the topics discussed in this collection of essays by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, an Ayuujk linguist, writer, translator, and activist. An interactive work edited by the author’s colleagues, this book presents texts written for an online magazine over several years alongside links to related social media posts, as well as a speech given by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil at the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and a closing epilogue by herself. A great read – refreshing and profoundly reflexive – for anyone interested in linguistic diversity in Mexico and beyond. (Nicole Marinaro)

August: A book about translation and interpreting

Recommendation: Shuttleworth, M., & Daghigh, A. J. (Eds.). (2024). Translation and Neoliberalism. Springer.

This book examines how neoliberalism shapes translation and interpreting across diverse regions, focusing on four themes: market-driven translation and interpreting curricula, policy impacts on language services, technology’s role in translation and interpreting markets, and intersections of translation and neoliberalism at a discourse level. It offers critical insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers into the socio-economic forces transforming translation studies, industries and curricula. (Jinhyun Cho)

September: A book about digital migration studies

Recommendation: Leurs, Koen, & Ponzanesi, Sandra (Eds.). (2025). Doing Digital Migration Studies: Theories and practices of the everyday. Routledge.

This open-access edited volume serves as an introduction to ‘digital migration studies’, an umbrella term for research on migration in relation to digital technologies. The articles examine topics ranging from migrant agency on TikTok to the use of automatic dialect recognition during the asylum procedure.
Although most contributions don’t explicitly focus on language, the breadth of topics and methodologies covered still sparked ideas for new research directions for me as a linguist. (Jenia Yudytska)

October: A book about an under-recognized diaspora

Recommendation: Bald, V. (2013). Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America. Harvard University Press.

Film and other information: http://bengaliharlem.com

Historical Harlem, New York does not conjure up images of South Asians going about their daily lives, but Bengali Harlem tells us the story of immigrants who arrived from the 1800s onwards from the Indian subcontinent.
This book focuses on migrants who were ethnolinguistically Bengalis (from what was known as Bengal) and came as merchants, seamen, or laborers to be absorbed into working class America. In the face of racism and discrimination, they built homes and lives, leaving behind generations of Americans with Bengali cultural and linguistic heritage. (Tazin Abdullah)

November: A book of migrant poetry

Recommendation: Saleh, S. M., Syed, Z., & Younus, M. (Eds.). (2025). Ritual: A Collection of Muslim Australian Poetry. Sweatshop Literacy Movement.

Billed as “evocative, unsettling, and unafraid,” this rich collection of Muslim Australian poetry offers a rich treasure trove of poems to come back to and savour again and again. The poems invite the reader to not only reflect on the diversity of Muslim identities but what it means to live on Indigenous land as a designated migrant within a White settler colony. (Ingrid Piller)

December: Cozy fiction for when you need a break from your research

Recommendation: Arden, K. (2019). The Winternight Trilogy. Del Rey.

I’m now 1.5 years into my PhD and I find that, now more than ever, I need good fiction to read after a long day of academic reading/writing. The Winternight Trilogy is set in the harsh winters of a folkloric version of medieval Russia and follows Vasya, a young woman whose difficult peasant life collides with those of chyerti, the demons and devils of Slavic folklore.
The settings and creatures described in this trilogy are nothing short of magical, and reading the prose makes me feel like I am tucked away snug in a winter cabin with a roaring fire and hot chocolate.
A lesson that I am learning along my PhD journey is that it is imperative to nourish myself while I work so hard, and reading these books is part of that nourishment for me. Knowing that I have the winter snows and rich folklore of these books to look forward to at the end of the day helps me to persevere through the daily ups and downs of PhD life. (Brynn Quick)

(Image credit: © Gert Albrecht für DIE ZEIT, Stiftung Lesen, Deutsche Bahn Stiftung)

Editor’s note: Shared reading – the practice where adults read to children – has many benefits: it improves children’s language and literacy development, as well as their interactive and communicative skills. Additionally, shared reading can be a lot of fun and, like any joint enjoyable activity, strengthens emotional bonds.

In Germany, shared reading is promoted through a dedicated annual “Vorlesetag” (“Shared Reading Day”). In this post, Larissa Cosyns explains more about the event and shares a reading recommendation.

This post was first published on the Literacy in Diversity Settings (LiDS) Research Center website.

***

This year’s “Vorlesetag” (“Shared Reading Day”) will take place today (November 21) under the motto “Shared Reading Speaks Your Language.” The initiative aims to highlight the unifying power of shared reading and show that every language and every voice counts. Let’s use our voices and read together!

If you’re still looking for a suitable book, you’ll find it in the Global Digital Library. As part of the Global Book Alliance, the digital library wants to provide more reading material in underserved languages. Whether it’s video books in Kenyan sign language or first reader books in Bahasa Indonesian, the digital library offers numerous stories.

I would like to recommend this children’s book from the Global Digital Library: “Making Tormo for the Festival“ by Buddha Yonjan Lama.

Have fun reading together!

Related content

• Multiculturalism alive and well in Austria
• Are we killing the joy of reading?
• Lessons learnt from schoolbooks
• Libraries and social inclusion
• Why are academic lectures so weird?

The international research network “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” builds on the “Next Generation Literacies” network

The World Education Research Association (WERA) recently announced the launch of seven new International Research Networks (IRNs) and we are pleased to share that “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” is one of them.

What is a WERA IRN?

The WERA IRN initiative brings together global teams of researchers through virtual communication and other channels to collaborate in specific areas of international importance. “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” joins a growing list of IRNs, contributing to the vision of WERA. The purpose of IRNs is to synthesize knowledge, examine the state of research, and stimulate collaborations or otherwise identify promising directions in research areas of worldwide significance. IRNs are expected to produce substantive reports that integrate the state of the knowledge worldwide and set forth promising research directions.

What does the IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” do?

The IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” aims to initiate and extend international collaborative research on literacy in the context of language diversity and migration. The joint focus is on literacy development and practice in multiple languages. Drawing on varied and complementary expertise from Europe, Australasia, Africa and North America, the objectives are:

1. to enhance knowledge on literacy and student diversity
2. to trace tendencies that go beyond one national, regional or local context
3. to examine literacy development across the life-course
4. to critically discuss the implications of research findings for policy and practice

Literacy is a foundation for participation in complex societies. The proposed research therefore also contributes to pathways to equity. The network’s activities will reach fundamental theoretical insights, which may be transferred to concepts of teaching/learning in educational institutions. This intervention research will attempt to generalise characteristics of successful multilingual literacy development to be adapted to specific contexts. The proposed IRN comprises senior, experienced and early career scholars (incl. PhD students), aimed towards international and intergenerational knowledge generation.

Literacy as a resource

At the heart of our network is the idea that multilingual literacy is a resource to be celebrated. Literacies across languages and scripts empower learners to create knowledge, to navigate education systems, and to participate fully in social and cultural life.

Members of the network bring expertise from early childhood to higher education, from family and community contexts to digital and AI-mediated literacies. Our shared vision is to develop research that responds to the multilingual realities of migration, mobility, and global diversity.

Building on the “Next Generation Literacies” network

The “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” network has grown out of the Next Generation Literacies initiative, an international network of researchers working at the intersection of social participation and linguistic diversity.

Based on the trilateral partnership of Fudan University (China), Hamburg University (Germany) and Macquarie University (Australia), Next Generation Literacies brought together an interdisciplinary group of established and emerging researchers to build a truly global network.

After funding for the Next Generation Literacies network ended in 2024, the IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” keeps that spirit of collaboration alive, while also widening the circle: we are now connected with colleagues from the Network on Language and Education (LeD) in the European Educational Research Association (EERA) and with other WERA initiatives. Under this new umbrella, we will scale up our efforts and make a stronger impact together.

Network Conveners

The network is convened by

• Irina Usanova (University of Hamburg; Lead Convenor)
• Francis M. Hult (UMBC)
• Ingrid Piller (University of Hamburg & Macquarie University)
• Yongyan Zheng (Fudan University)
• Harkaitz Zubiri-Esnaola (University of the Basque Country)

Together with network members, we bring expertise spanning literacy research across continents and research traditions.

Kick-off meeting

On September 24, 2025, we came together on Zoom across many different time zones and continents to virtually celebrate the official launch of the Literacy in Multilingual Contexts IRN.

The kick-off meeting felt like both a reunion and a new beginning: familiar faces from the Next Generation Literacies network reconnecting, and new colleagues from around the world joining the conversation. Together, we are building a vibrant global community of researchers committed to understanding how literacy develops and thrives in multilingual settings. For all of us, it was a reminder of how much we can achieve when we put our multilingual realities at the center of literacy research.

What’s next?

Over the next three years (2025–2028), we will:

• review the state of research on multilingual literacies
• analyze existing datasets across different contexts
• share our work in joint events and publications
• build a sustainable international community dedicated to literacy in diversity

To make this vision concrete, members are invited to join thematic working groups. Topics include multilingual literacy in early childhood, in higher education, in Indigenous contexts, CLIL, multilingual writing and AI, and multilingual policy. Sounds interesting?

An open invitation

The energy of our first meeting showed just how much can be achieved when we bring our different perspectives together. The IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” is open to any researcher working in these areas. If you are interested in joining, please send your inquiry to Dr Irina Usanova.

Related content

• Legacies of the Next Generation Literacies Network
• Becoming a world-ready researcher at Macquarie University
• A water perspective on language research
• Publishing is an insiders’ game

For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see Life in a New Language, Discrimination by any other name: Language tests and racist immigration policy in Australia, Intercultural Communication – Now in the third edition, and Judging Refugees.

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

Transcript (coming soon)

The conversation delves into ideological issues involved in the widespread use of machine translation and the real-life impact for those who may rely on machine translations in various situations. Esther’s research and the wide variety of contributions to the book highlight the need to open a discussion about instilling an ‘ethics of care’ perspective into the use of technology to make AI generated translations more inclusive and relevant for the communities using them.

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

Transcript (coming soon)

Isabella’s Award Certificate (Image credit: Yixi Qiu)

Congratulations to Language-on-the-Move team member Dr Yixi Qiu (Isabella) for winning an award under the Shanghai Magnolia Pujiang Talent Program (上海白玉兰浦江人才计划) for her project “人工智能赋能双一流理工特色高校学生学术论文写作能力培养” (“AI Empowerment for Enhancing Academic Writing Skills among Students in Double First-Class STEM Universities”).

The Shanghai Magnolia Pujiang Talent Program was launched in 2005 by the Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau and the Science and Technology Commission. It aims to attract and support overseas-returned scholars to contribute to research, innovation, and social development in Shanghai.

For Isabella, who is now an Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Studies, Tongji University, this is a fantastic recognition and remarkable opportunity to reestablish herself in Shanghai after her time in Sydney.

人工智能赋能双一流理工特色高校学生学术论文写作能力培养 (“AI Empowerment for Enhancing Academic Writing Skills among Students in Double First-Class STEM Universities”)

Isabella’s project focuses on integrating generative AI into academic writing pedagogy, with the goal of supporting STEM students in developing stronger writing competence. Drawing on our team’s long-term research program into the relationship of linguistic diversity and social participation, “AI Empowerment for Enhancing Academic Writing Skills among Students in Double First-Class STEM Universities” conceptualizes writing as more than a technical skill. Instead, Isabella approaches it as a means of expressing agency, negotiating identity, and participating in academic and social life. The aim is to explore the potential of AI to support multilingual students in accessing richer linguistic, social, and epistemic resources, for personal and collective growth.

For background, “Double First-Class University” refers to a university in China that has been selected for development under the Double First-Class Initiative (双一流), launched by the Chinese government in 2015. The goal is to cultivate: First-Class Universities and First-Class Disciplines. These universities and their designated disciplines are given special funding and policy support to become world-leading in research, education, and global influence. Examples of such institutions include Tongji University, where Isabella is based, and Fudan University, where she did her PhD.

Next Generation Literacies and the power of global networking

Isabella’s project was partly inspired by her membership in the Next Generation Literacies network. This network connects the Fudan Multilingual Innovation Research Team under the leadership of Professor Yongyan Zheng and the broader Shanghai Multilingualism Research Alliance with the Language-on-the-Move team at Macquarie University, and the Literacy-in-Diversity-Settings (LiDS) Research Center at University of Hamburg. Next Generation Literacies is a part of the strategic trilateral relationship of these three universities but includes researchers from many other universities from around the globe.

More exciting hot-off-the-press news for the network: Next Generation Literacies has been the launch pad for a new International Research Network (IRN) devoted to “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” under the umbrella of the World Education Research Association (WERA). The “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” IRN will be led by LiDS member Dr Irina Usanova. Watch this space to learn more about the IRN as it constitutes itself!

The magnolia and the river

The magnolia (白玉兰) is the official city flower of Shanghai symbolizing openness and elegance, while Pujiang (浦江) refers to the Huangpu River, which flows through the heart of the city. Together, the Magnolia Pujiang Talent Program reflects Shanghai’s vision of cultivating global talent rooted in local vitality.

An impressive example of our maxim to think globally and to act locally. Congratulations again, Isabella! 恭喜!

Some references made in this episode include:

• Language and the Internet (2001) by David Crystal
• The recontextualization of Multicultural London English: Stylising the ‘roadman’ (2023) by Christian Ilbury
• The Dolly Parton meme
• What’s the difference between AAVE and Gen-Z slang?
• Shetland Islands accent

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

Transcript (coming soon)

Book reading is an important part of individual and social wellbeing (Image copyright: Sadami Konchi)

Each year, I survey my Literacies students about their reading and writing activities. Over the years, the time these young people spend on literacy activities has been increasing steadily. In 2024, they spent an average of 8 hours per day reading. At the same time, the number of books they read has been going down. Despite spending close to 3,000 hours per year reading, the number of books they had read for pleasure in the past 12 months averaged a paltry 2.9.

Our reading time is eaten up by social media and other digital shortforms while our book reading is suffering.

This is troubling because the infinite scroll is a drain on our ability to focus. Conversely, the deep reading that comes with the long form is beneficial for our ability to concentrate, to engage critically, and to develop empathy.

As the culture of book reading and its benefits fades before our eyes, encouraging book reading is more important than ever before. And that’s where the annual Language on the Move Reading Challenge comes in. The annual Language on the Move Reading Challenge is designed to encourage broad reading at the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life.

The 2025 Language on the Move Reading Challenge is our eighth challenge in a row:

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2023
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

Join us and challenge yourself – and your students, colleagues, and friends – to read one recommended book each month throughout the year!

For more reading suggestions, make sure to also follow the Language on the Move Podcast on your preferred podcast platform. In partnership with the New Books Network, we have brought you regular conversations about linguistic diversity and social participation for one year now, and we already have exciting new chats lined up for the New Year.

Happy Reading!

January: The Politics of Academic Reading

The crisis of book reading is connected to the textocalypse – textual overproduction that humans no longer have the time to read. In 2024, the editors of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language produced a special issue devoted to “The Politics of Academic Reading.” It is fitting that the 2025 Language on the Move Reading Challenge should start with this fantastic collection.

For full disclosure, I am one of the contributors, and Language on the Move readers might be particularly interested in this piece about our platform:

Piller, I. (2024). Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building [Language on the Move]. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 289-290, 123-127. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/ijsl-2024-0132

Abstract: Rapid developments in digital technologies have fundamentally changed writing practices leading to an explosion in the number of textual products. The result is a “textocalypse” – a deep crisis in knowledge production and dissemination. Instead of pushing back, academics fuel these degenerations because their careers have become subject to the capitalist imperative to produce and consume – measured in the form of research outputs and citation metrics. Against this background, this commentary argues for a reframing of academic publishing as community building and introduces Language on the Move, an alternative sociolinguistics portal that is both a publication platform and a research community. Motivated by a feminist ethics of care, we decenter the textual product and recenter the lived experience of researchers, particularly those writing from the margins.

February: Global Communication Platform WhatsApp

Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends:
Johns, A., Matamoros-Fernández, A., & Baulch, E. (2024). WhatsApp: From a one-to-one messaging app to a global communication platform. Polity Press.

“WhatsApp provides a detailed account of WhatsApp’s growth and widespread uptake worldwide, revealing a new era in Meta’s industrial development. The authors trace WhatsApp from its inception as a chatting app to its metamorphosis into a global communication platform on which a substantial part of the Global South depends for everyday living. The volume maps the platform’s history to offer a nuanced account of its current economic (as a multi-sided market), technical (through platformization and social media features) and social dimensions (with its everyday uses and its role in public communications). Importantly, from an applied sociolinguistics perspective, the book argues that WhatsApp facilitates new types of digital literacies as it has become entrenched in the digital cultures of the world while also shedding light on the platform’s significance in civic participation and democracy. The authors brilliantly show how WhatsApp has accrued significant ‘political, economic, and cultural power’ (p. 12).”

March: How to Free a Jinn

Laura Smith-Khan recommends:
Shah Idil, Raidah. (2024). How to Free a Jinn. Allen & Unwin

“How to Free a Jinn is supernatural fantasy fiction with some refreshing twists: it follows 12-year-old Insyirah’s return to Malaysia from Australia, navigating turbulent family relationships, school and life in a new country that is supposed to feel like home. Not only that, but Insyirah soon discovers she can see and communicate with jinns, usually invisible spirits. This book offers readers a new voice and perspective, seamlessly integrating Islamic spiritual tradition and Malay and Arabic language in ways that don’t feel overexplained. As one reviewer says, this is the ‘kind of book I wish I had growing up.’”

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

Bonus info: Raidah Shah Idil is a sister of Aisyah Shah Idil, whose work has also featured on Language on the Move.

April: Life in a New Language

“A highly readable and rich account of migrant stories” (Catherine Travis)

If you have not yet done so, you must read Life in a New Language in 2025. The book, which has been co-authored by six of our team members, examines the language learning and settlement trajectories of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries.

Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Williams Tetteh, V. (2024). Life in a New Language. Oxford University Press.

You can also find a companion podcast series – with one episode with each author – on the Language on the Move podcast.

1. Episode 1: Life in a New Language, Pt 1 – Identities: Brynn Quick in conversation with Donna Butorac
2. Episode 2: Life in a New Language, Pt 2 –Work: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ingrid Piller
3. Episode 3: Life in a New Language, Pt 3 – African migrants: Brynn Quick in conversation with Vera Williams Tetteh
4. Episode 4: Life in a New Language, Pt 4 – Parenting: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shiva Motaghi-Tabari
5. Episode 5: Life in a New Language, Pt 5 – Monolingual Mindset: Brynn Quick in conversation with Loy Lising
6. Episode 6: Life in a New Language, Pt 6 – Citizenship: Brynn Quick in conversation with Emily Farrell

May: Judging Refugees

Laura Smith-Khan recommends:
Vogl, Anthea. (2024). Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination. Cambridge University Press.

“Judging Refugees examines the role of narrative performance in the procedures for assessing asylum claims in Canada and Australia. Drawing on a close and interdisciplinary analysis of hearings and decisions from the two countries, it offers extensive and compelling evidence of the impossible demands placed on people seeking asylum. The book is featured in a recent Language on the Move podcast episode.”

June: Wordslut

Brynn Quick recommends:
Montell, Amanda. (2019). Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. Harper.

“In this romp of a read, Montell guides the reader through the linguistic history of English pejoratives used to describe women. The central thesis is that, in English, contemporary negative terms for women often began neutrally – ‘hussy’ was just a term for ‘housewife’, ‘slut’ came from a term meaning ‘untidy’, and ‘madam’ was simply a term of address (not the grande dame of a brothel). But through hundreds of years’ worth of semantic change through pejoration and amelioration (new terms that I learned in reading this book!), words have been used to lift the social status of men and denigrate that of women under Western systems of patriarchy. But it’s not all bad news! Montell also discusses the concept of gender according to both language (e.g. masculine and feminine adjectives in Italic languages) and culture (e.g. Buginese people of Indonesia recognise 5 genders, the Native American Zuni tribe recognises 3, etc.), and she reflects on a hope for more equal linguistic and cultural treatment of all genders.”

July: Inspector Singh

If you need vacation reading for the Northern summer, check out Detective Singh of the Singapore Police. The author, Shahimi Flint, has created an unusual detective character – an elderly overweight Singaporean Sikh – who will take you to crime scenes in Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the UK. Each episode combines a thrilling murder investigation with a deep dive into local culture, language, and social issues.

A lawyer herself, Flint brings a keen social awareness to her novels, and I learned more about the Khmer Rouge trials from A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree than from any other source.

1. Flint, S. (2009). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder. Hachette.
2. Flint, S. (2009). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul. Hachette.
3. Flint, S. (2010). Inspector Singh Investigates: The Singapore School of Villainy. Hachette.
4. Flint, S. (2011). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree. Hachette.
5. Flint, S. (2012). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Curious Indian Cadaver. Hachette.
6. Flint, S. (2013). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Calamitous Chinese Killing. Hachette.
7. Flint, S. (2016). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Frightfully English Execution. Hachette.

August: Speech and the City

Matras, Y. (2024). Speech and the City: Multilingualism, Decoloniality and the Civic University. Cambridge University Press.

Speech and the City tells the story of ‘Multilingual Manchester’ and how an academic project succeeded in shifting the monolingual habitus. The book also offers an intriguing glimpse into the author’s distinguished career as a linguist, scholar, and activist.

Abstract: The Brexit debate has been accompanied by a rise in hostile attitudes to multilingualism. However, cities can provide an important counter-weight to political polarisation by forging civic identities that embrace diversity. In this timely book, Yaron Matras describes the emergence of a city language narrative that embraces and celebrates multilingualism and helps forge a civic identity. He critiques linguaphobic discourses at a national level that regard multilingualism as deficient citizenship. Drawing on his research in Manchester, he examines the ‘multilingual utopia’, looking at multilingual spaces across sectors in the city that support access, heritage, skills and celebration. The book explores the tensions between decolonial approaches that inspire activism for social justice and equality, and the neoliberal enterprise that appropriates diversity for reputational and profitability purposes, prompting critical reflection on calls for civic university engagement. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about ways to protect cultural pluralism in our society.

September: Multilingual Crisis Communication

Li, J., & Zhang, J. (Eds.). (2024). Multilingual crisis communication: Insights from China. Taylor & Francis.

This book is the latest outcome of out team’s focus on the communication challenges raised by the Covid-19 pandemic. Li Jia and Jenny Zhang have edited a diverse collection featuring the research of emerging researchers from China.

Abstract: Multilingual Crisis Communication is the first book to explore the lived experiences of linguistic minorities in crisis-affected settings in the Global South, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. China has been selected as a case of inquiry for multilingual crisis communication because of its high level of linguistic diversity. Taking up critical sociopolitical approaches, this book conceptualizes multilingual crisis communication from three dimensions: identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.
Comprising eight main chapters, along with an introduction and an epilogue, this edited book is divided into three parts in terms of the demographic and social conditions of linguistic minorities, as indigenous, migrant, and those with communicative disabilities. This book brings together a range of critical perspectives of sociolinguistic scholars, language teachers, and public health workers. Each team of authors includes at least one member of the research community with many years of field work experience, and some of them belong to ethnic minorities. These studies can generate new insights for enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of multilingual crisis communication.
This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of multilingualism, intercultural communication, translation and interpreting studies, and public health policy.

October: Critical Sociolinguistics

Del Percio, A., & Flubacher, M.-C. (Eds.). (2024). Critical sociolinguistics: dialogues, dissonance, developments. Bloomsbury.

The editors of this alternative festschrift dedicated to Monica Heller have assembled a team of 60 contributors to create an intriguing kaleidoscope of experiments in academic writing and knowledge creation.

Abstract: Providing a series of crucial debates on language, power, difference and social inequality, this volume traces developments and dissonances in critical sociolinguistics. Eminent and emerging academic figures from around the world collaboratively engage with the work of Monica Heller, offering insights into the politics and power formations that surround knowledge of language and society.
Challenging disciplinary power dynamics in critical sociolinguistics, this book is an experiment testing new ways of producing knowledge on language and society. Critically discussing central sociolinguistic concepts from critique to political economy, labor to media, education to capitalism, each chapter features a number of scholars offering their distinct social and political perspectives on the place played by language in the social fabric. Through its theoretical, epistemological, and methodological breadth, the volume foregrounds political alliances in how language is known and explored by scholars writing from specific geopolitical spaces that come with diverse political struggles and dynamics of power. Allowing for a diversity of genres, debates, controversies, fragments and programmatic manifestos, the volume prefigures a new mode of knowledge production that multiplies perspectives and starts practicing the more inclusive, just and equal worlds that critical sociolinguists envision.

November: Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples

Pahom, O. (2024). Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples: gender roles and language choices. Bloomsbury.

This meticulous study of Spanish-English bilingual couples’ conversational storytelling shows how the middle ground in intercultural communication is found when people talk and listen to each other in everyday interactions.

Abstract: For more than three decades, the percentage of people who married someone of a different race, ethnicity, culture, or linguistic background has been on the rise in the United States, but the communication practices of such couples have remained understudied. Combining bilingualism, gender studies, and conversation analysis, this book explores and describes the storytelling practices and language choices of several married heterosexual Spanish-English bilingual couples, all residing in Texas but each from different geographic and cultural backgrounds.
Based on more than 900 minutes of conversations and interviews, the book offers a data-driven analysis of the ways in which language choices and gender performance shape the stories, conversations, and identities of bilingual couples, which in turn shape the social order of bilingual communities. Using a combination of methodologies to investigate how couples launch, tell, and respond to each other’s stories, the book identifies seven main factors that the couples see as primary determinants of their choice of English and Spanish during couple communication. The use of conversation analysis highlights the couples’ own practices and perceptions of their language choices, demonstrating how the private language decisions of bilingual couples enable them to negotiate a place in the larger culture, shape the future of bilingualism, and establish a couple identity through shared linguistic and cultural habits.

December: Language Discordant Social Work

Buzungu, H. F. (2023). Language Discordant Social Work in a Multilingual World: The Space Between. Routledge.

This fascinating ethnography explores how social workers in Norway communicate with clients who speak little or no Norwegian. It is part of a growing number of studies of street-level bureaucrats in linguistically diverse societies – for another example, listen to our podcast interview with Clara Holzinger about Austrian employment officers.

Abstract: Based on ethnographic observations of encounters between social workers and people with whom they do not have a shared language, this book analyzes the impact of language discordance on the quality of professional service provision.
Exploring how street-level bureaucrats navigate the landscape of these discretionary assessments of language discordance, language proficiency, and the need for interpreting, the book focuses on four main themes:

• the complexity of social work talk
• the issue of participation in language discordant meetings
• communicative interaction
• the issue of how clarification is requested when needed, and whether professionals and service users are able to reach clarity when something is unclear

Based on the findings presented on these different aspects of language discordant talk, the consequences of language discordance for social work are presented and discussed, focusing primarily on issues at the intersection of language, communication, power, dominance and subordination, representation, linguicism, and ultimately, human rights and human dignity.
It will be of interest to all social work students, academics and professionals as well as those working in public services and allied health more broadly.

A lack of legal literacy can affect migrants – and indeed anyone – across all aspects of social life. This can include everything from signing a contract with an electricity provider, through earning a living, to having a safe and dignified marriage.

Legal professionals suggest that recent migrants may be special targets of a range of scams and exploitation because they are more likely to lack legal literacy, may lack information about available assistance, or may not be capable of accessing those services even when they do know about them.

However, this is not due simply to a lack of inclination to learn about the law. Rather, the development of legal literacy is dependent on the accessibility of information and education. For those with limited or no English, this naturally requires the provision of resources in other languages and accessible formats, in locations where their target audiences can find them.

While the various government and non-government bodies tasked with providing information about the law have already taken a range of measures to make their resources more accessible to non-English speakers and readers, barriers persist. These barriers can even influence the form of exploitation people face. For example, a lawyer I interviewed in my most recent project shared the story of a man who had migrated to Australia in the late 1990s and became trapped in a highly exploitative work arrangement:

you see the signs from the very beginning. Like, he didn’t have an accountant, he’ll use [his employer’s] accountant. And that accountant played around with his papers. They put him in a house on top of the shop. They denied him English lessons. So, till this day, I speak to him in Arabic, even though my Arabic’s not perfect.

In this scenario, it was only when the man’s workplace injuries became so severe that he insisted on seeing a doctor that he was eventually able to learn about his rights and access legal assistance. Among other measures, his exploiters intentionally limited his English language acquisition opportunities as a form of abusive control, to prevent him learning of his rights and seeking help.

This only reinforces the importance of providing resources in a range of languages, and clearly demonstrates the inappropriateness of claims that individual migrants are responsible for learning English as a prerequisite to accessing full inclusion in society and protection of the law.

Unfortunately, his case is far from being an exception. News reports uncover myriad examples, from international students underpaid with justifications that their limited English meant they weren’t good enough for minimum wage, to asylum seekers threatened with deportation if they didn’t comply with forced labour arrangements.

The complex and interconnected barriers recent migrants, especially those with temporary visas, often face means holistic responses are needed for them to access their rights. However ultimately, seeking justice still hinges on them first having knowledge about what those rights are and the processes and resources available to have them enforced. This is not possible unless relevant information is available in a language and format accessible to them.

The landing page

While service providers and regulatory bodies appear aware of this issue and have taken steps to address it, less is known about how accessible the resources and mechanisms are in practice (Victoria Law Foundation 2016). Further, beyond these formal offerings, less still is known about how migrants with limited English actually learn about Australian law and how it applies in their lives.

The Legal Aid bodies in each Australian state are tasked with providing a range of legal services. This includes providing free legal assistance and advice to some individuals, based on need. However another of their statutory functions is what is commonly called Community Legal Education and Information (CLEI) (e.g. Legal Aid Commission Act 1979 (NSW), section 10(2)(j),(k),(m)). This means that they are required to develop and disseminate informational resources and training to help increase the community’s legal literacy.

This is considered a crucial component to ensuring the whole community, and particularly recent migrants and those with limited or no English, can access justice, but we do not yet have a comprehensive picture of what is currently on offer, nor how well it works for these particular groups. Therefore, the peak body of the Australian legal profession has called for research to address the gaps in evidence to ensure migrants’ linguistic and other forms of diversity are understood and incorporated into efforts to improve community legal literacy (Law Council of Australia 2018).

The internet is a popular starting point for individuals looking for all types of information and existing studies on multilingual communications on the websites for government schools and multiple government service providers suggest that much work remains done to ensure that multilingual government communications are both complete and accessible for their target audiences. Therefore, in May, to start exploring the legal literacy resources available for non-English speakers, I undertook a pilot audit of Legal Aid NSW’s website.

The website

Information about Apprehended Violence Orders in Spanish

Legal Aid NSW offers a range of CLEI, with varying accessibility for non-English speakers and readers. As someone with English literacy, the landing page immediately presents me with a promising ‘My problem is about’ section. This part of the website helpfully guides readers step-by-step, in accessible plain language and appealing format, across a wide range of legal issues, e.g. ‘My job’, ‘Disasters’, ‘My rights as’ and ‘Visas and immigration’. Another section provides lay definitions of legal terms. These reflect an evident broader commitment to enhancing the accessibility of the site as a whole. However, these two sections are only available in English. Similarly, face-to-face and online legal education courses are advertised, but all current offerings appear to be in English only.

Another section provides a large collection of resources, like posters and pamphlets, organized across various topics, providing information about legal issues and available services. Some are provided in languages other than English (LOTEs). However, again, non-English speakers have significantly less access. Of the total 233 resources identified, only 40 are available in more than one language. Even then, most only include a few common LOTEs, e.g. Arabic (37), Chinese (36), Vietnamese (29), Dari/Farsi (16). Further, LOTEs are included inconsistently, e.g. Women’s Domestic Violence Court Advocacy information is offered in 13 languages, including several not used in any other resource. In contrast, all resources in the Disasters, Covid-19, Prisoners, and Young People topics are in English only. All resources are written texts (some with images), meaning only those with literacy can access them, a barrier for some refugees, for example, even in their first language (see e.g. Ba Akhlagh & Mehana 2024). Finally, when LOTE versions exist, it appears they cannot be located without English language literacy: the search function seems to operate only with English key words, and the resources are sorted and labelled in English.

One section of the website is more broadly navigable in many LOTEs. The ‘Ways to get help’ section provides information on how to access legal assistance and is available in 31 languages.  However again, there are inconsistencies between languages, e.g. the Spanish version largely replicates the original, with a full overview and four subsections covering contacts, legal advice, help at court, and applying for legal aid. In contrast, others, like Italian and Pashto, have no overview and only two subsections. Others have only an overview and no subsections. Some links lead readers back to English-only content, and website navigation menus remain in English even when on LOTE pages.

Where to from here?

Existing reviews and scholarship emphasise intersectional considerations when examining and addressing barriers to justice. For example, providing multilingual resources in written form only will not reach people who lack literacy or have low or no vision. Telephone information services and audio resources may be inaccessible for migrants who are deaf or hard of hearing (Smith-Khan 2022). Living in a regional area decreases access to language supports more readily available in urban centres, increasing the importance of LOTE resources. Similarly, not all LOTES are equal: speakers of ‘emerging’ community languages (e.g. recently arrived refugee communities) often have less language support, and issues with correctly identifying and categorising minority dialects and languages can lead to unsuitable translation and interpreting (Victorian Law Foundation 2016, pp 8-9; Tillman 2023).

Spanish word search

These considerations must inform the design and prioritization of resources in particular languages. For instance, while it seems logical to offer resources in commonly spoken LOTEs, speakers of these languages often have a higher level of English proficiency than speakers of emerging languages, who may often also face additional vulnerabilities (Grey & Severin 2021, 2022).

This brief pilot has obviously only uncovered what is publicly available via a website: qualitative research is needed to understand how service providers like Legal Aid NSW develop their resources and how legal, policy, and practical considerations influence their choices. At the same time, research could also provide insight into migrants’ decision-making. By better understanding how recent arrivals and people with limited English find out about the law, research could provide valuable evidence to policymakers and service providers to continue to make community legal literacy efforts more universally accessible.

References

Ba Akhlagh, S & Mehana, M. ‘Challenges and opportunities in designing culturally appropriate resources to support refugee families’ (2024) 8(1) Linking Research to the Practice of Education 2.
Grey, A & Severin A, ‘An audit of NSW legislation and policy on the government’s public communications in languages other than English’ (2021) 30(1) Griffith Law Review 122.
——— ‘Building towards best practice for governments’ public communication in LOTEs’ (2022)31(1) Griffith Law Review 25
Smith-Khan, L. ‘Inclusive processes for refugees with disabilities’ in Rioux et al(eds), Handbook of Disability (Springer Nature, 2022)
Tillman, M ‘Ezidi refugees in Armidale say gap in language […]service impacts health care (2023) ABC https://tinyurl.com/2vz3x8s9
Victoria Law Foundation, Legal information in languages other than English (2016) https://tinyurl.com/3nr5vndb

“Giant Head” installation at the Gentle Monster store at Sydney Airport

One of the goals of graduate education is to empower students to reach their academic and professional goals by developing their communication skills. For example, one of the learning outcomes of a class I teach in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University is to enable students to “communicate advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.”

To achieve that learning outcome, students undertake a series of writing tasks throughout the semester on a public forum, namely right here on Language on the Move.

Although moderating around a thousand comments per semester is a huge workload, I’ve always enjoyed this task. The series of responses to writing prompts (aka comments on blog posts) allows me to learn more about my students’ backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. It is also rewarding to see that student comments become more sophisticated and engaged over the course of the semester and that their confidence in their academic writing increases.

Has ChatGPT ruined writing practice?

While I used to enjoy supporting students to develop their communication skills in this way, the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the rapid adoption of other generative AI platforms since then has changed things.

A not insignificant number of students now submit machine-generated writing tasks, and I’m saddled with the additional task of catching out these cheaters.

Submitting machine-generated text obviously has no learning benefits. Therefore, my task descriptions and syllabi now contain an explicit prohibition against the use generative AI:

Use of generative AI is prohibited
Your response must be your own work, and you are not allowed to post machine-generated text. Use of machine-generated text in this or any other unit tasks defies the point of learning. It is also dishonest and a waste of your time and my time. […] If I suspect you of having used generative AI to complete your writing task, your mark will automatically be 0.

In 2023, this prohibition took care of the problem, but in 2024 it no longer works. This is because machine writing has become virtually indistinguishable from bad human writing.

Machine writing and bad human writing now look the same

Most commentators note that machine-generated text is getting better. This may be true. What has received less attention is the fact that human writing is getting worse as people read less widely. Instead, more and more people seem to model their writing on the bland models of machines.

The feedback loop between reading and writing is breaking down.

The Internet is drowning in an ocean of poor writing, whether created by humans or machines – a phenomenon Matthew Kirschenbaumer has described as the looming “textocalypse:” “a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting.”

Instead of developing their communication skills through audience-focussed practice, my students’ regular writing practice may now be contributing to this tsunami. If students use generative AI, it certainly no longer meets its stated aim – to practice communicating advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.

Where is the line between outsourcing learning to tech and using tech to support learning?

To my mind, the line was clear-cut: to use generative AI is to outsource learning to a machine and therefore pointless. I was not concerned about the use of other language technologies, such as spell checkers, auto-complete, grammar checkers, or auto-translate.

But then I received this student inquiry, which I am reproducing here with the student’s permission:

I am writing to inquire if using the grammar check program for writing tasks is also prohibited.
I’ve been aware that AI generation is prohibited, and I did not use AI for my writing task. I [used all the assigned inputs], and I tried to organize ideas in my first language, then translated them by myself (without using any machine translator).
However, I always use a grammar check program, and sometimes, it suggests better words or expressions that I can adopt by clicking, as I am a paid user of it. I use it because I am unsure if my grammar is okay and understandable. I was wondering if this is also prohibited?

The easy answer to the query is that (automated) translation and grammar checking are allowed because they are not covered by the prohibition.

The more complicated question is whether these practices should be prohibited and, even if not strictly prohibited, whether they are advisable?

Dear reader, I need your input!

Translation as a bridge to English writing?

Let’s start with translation as a form of writing practice. The inputs for the task that triggered this question (Chapter 3 of Life in a New Language, and Language on the Move podcast series about Life in a New Language) were all in English.

After having perused all these inputs in English to then draft the response – a short reflection on the job search experience of one of the participants – in another language is a lot of extra work. You have to process input in English, write in another language, and translate that output.

This extra work may become manageable if it is done by a machine. A generative AI tool could produce a summary of the input in no time. An auto-translate tool could translate the summaries into the other language, again in no time. The student then drafts their response in the other language.

It’s technically the student’s work. Or is it? And, more importantly, is this process developing their English writing and communication?

Grammar checkers, suggested phrasing, and auto-complete

Like the student who posed the question, most of my students are international students, most of whom are still developing their English language skills, at the same time that they are required to learn and perform through the medium of that language.

To avail themselves of all kinds of learning tools is important. I myself use the in-built spell-check, grammar-check, and auto-complete features of MS Word. However, I can evaluate the advice provided by these tools and readily reject it where it’s wrong or inconsistent with my intentions.

Judgement needed: Until recently, the MS Word auto-correct tool incorrectly suggested that the spelling of “in-principle” was “in-principal”

I worry that, for a learner using these tools, these nuances get lost. If the machine is perceived to be always right, language changes from something malleable to form and express our ideas into a right-or-wrong proposition.

Similarly, learning synonyms is important to improve one’s writing. To this day, I regularly look up synonyms when I write with the intent to find the best, the most concise, their clearest expression. However, looking up synonyms for an expression and evaluating the various options is different from receiving automated suggestions and accepting them. One seems like an active, critical form of learning and the other like a passive form of learning. The writer’s sense of ownership and autonomy is different in the two instances.

How best to use language technologies to develop academic literacies and communicative competence?

In sum, most use of language technologies for the kinds of learning tasks I have described here strikes me as counterproductive. Yet, I can also see its uses. Where is the line between using tech to support one’s learning and using tech to avoid doing the hard work of practice, the only way that leads to fluency?

How do you use tech in your university assignments and where do you draw the line? How would you deal with these dilemmas as a teacher?

For some images of Ibrar’s work, check out the Sino-Muslim Literacies Project.

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Have you ever wondered why Boomers’ well-meaning texts can be full of ellipses that make Millennials and Gen Z shudder?  Or why language evolves quickly on Twitter but not on Facebook?  What exactly is a “typographical tone of voice”, and why is it an essential part of our identities?  Gretchen answers these questions and more in this fascinating and highly readable book.  Whether you are a tech genius, a luddite, or something in between, Because Internet will take you on a journey into the world of language evolution via the internet of the past four decades.

Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.

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.

Update 07/03/2025: A Chinese translation of the transcript below is now available on The Nexus.

Transcript

Welcome to the New Books Network.

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

Gretchen has written a resident linguist column at The Toast and at Wired. She’s also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. Today we’re going to talk about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.

Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Gretchen, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me.

Brynn: To start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to wanting to understand more about the intersection between language and the internet?

Gretchen: I first got interested in linguistics when I was maybe 12 or 13. And I remember coming across a pop linguistics book on the shelf that was just written by someone who’d also written some other pop science books. And so, I picked it up and I was like, oh, this is sort of neat.

And I got about halfway through and I was, this is just so cool. Like, I can’t put this down. I can’t stop thinking about this. I need to ask for all of the pop linguistics books for birthdays and Christmases and these sorts of things. And like, this is what I’m going to go to university and study, like there’s a whole thing. You could become a whole linguist and do this and this stuff.

So, in many ways, writing a pop linguistics book was a return to that experience of pop linguistics books being the thing that got me into the rest of the linguistics. I think for why internet language specifically, like many linguists, I seem to have a little language analysing module in my brain that I can’t really turn it off. You get me down at the pub or something and we’re sitting here and we’re trying to have a nice conversation about the weather or something, but I’m also secretly analysing your vowels. That’s just what my brain is doing.

And so, I spend a lot of time online. I wanted to know what was going on because I kept seeing people doing things that seemed like they might be part of a bigger picture or bigger pattern. People write in to me or they tag me on social media and they’re like, ever since I read your book, I can’t stop analysing my text messages. Like I keep thinking about the punctuation that I’m using or like the emoji that people are picking. When does this turn off? And I’m like, I’m so sorry, you’re on this side now. You’re very welcome to the club.

Brynn: 100%, the type of experience that I’ve had as well, where you do, your brain just starts tick, tick, ticking along and you’re analysing everything that everybody is saying.

In Because Internet, one of the first things that you talk about is the idea of networks. And here you aren’t just referring to the internet. You discuss how our networks of friends, particularly in our teenage years, have a profound effect on how we use language. Can you talk to us about what linguists have discovered about the relationship between our social networks as teenagers and the types of language that we come to use as adults?

Gretchen: Many of the factors that we look at as linguists with respect to language are sort of your typical demographic variables. You know, things like age, gender, race, ethnicity, geography, where people are based. But these are sort of proxies for people who talk to each other more, also tend to talk more like each other.

And the easier way to study that, especially before you have the ability to say, okay, so and so is following so and so and so they must get this amount of information from them, is to say, well, all these kids attend the same high school, or all these people live in the same town, or all these people are around the same age or the same gender, and they live in the same area. And so therefore they’re probably going to be hanging out with each other. But we can get more fine-grained than that.

And some of the early work in this area was done in high schools. So, the linguist Penny Eckert embedded in a high school in the 1980s, and she distinguishes between these two social groups called jocks and burnouts. And these two groups of kids, even though many of them were from the same backgrounds or the same ranges of backgrounds, talked differently from each other based on the social attitudes that they were trying to embody.

So, in the case of the jocks and burnouts, the burnouts had a more local accent that was indexed with working class identity and sort of not aligning with the power structures of the school where you’re like, oh, the school’s going to let me become student council president. Like, that sounds great. No, it’s like, I don’t care about this school.

I’m going to drop out as soon as I can and I’m going to not do this. One of the quotes from that study is the, whether you say a sentence that I would say, the buses with the antennas on top. And there’s an example of it pronounced closer to how I would say the bosses with the antennas on top.

As that sort of like Great Lakes, Northern Cities pronunciation, which is a locally salient working-class identity in the area. And the burnouts were doing more of that pronunciation. This is getting at how do you personally identify and you can affect your accent, even if you’re not necessarily doing like, I’m going to front my A’s a bit, you know?

But you’re being like, I want to talk like these people because they’re cool. And I also want to wear the jeans that they’re wearing. And I also want to eat the food that they’re wearing or wear the backpack that they’re wearing or carry my backpack only on one shoulder because that’s what the cool kids are doing or whatever the locally salient variables are.

And some of those are linguistic. And there’s another study by a linguist named Mary Buchholz who looked at nerd girls in California because I had read this Jocks and Burnouts study and I was like, I don’t really know which one of these I am. And then I read the nerd girl study and I was like, I am entirely too called out by this.

Brynn: (laughs) You’re being sub-tweeted.

Gretchen: Yeah, I’m like, oh, okay, well. I did not grow up in California, I grew up in Canada, I still live in Canada. This sort of nerd, additional nerd group, which wasn’t participating in any of these cool variables and they were like, I’m going to pronounce things very, like hyper-articulately, I’m not going to drop any consonants and I’m going to make a lot of puns.

And I was like, how did you know? (laughs)

Brynn: (laughs) Why are you in my room? How can you hear what I’m saying?

Gretchen: These people like wordplay, oh, I see. So, this got me interested in, like, linguists have identified that there are social groups that are relevant, you know, before the Internet Day. But it was really hard to do this type of fine-grained social network analysis before the Internet made us all sort of digitise a lot of our relationships and make them explicit for other people to see.

So instead of being like, because if you want to do this sort of social network analysis, you can do it. What you do is you go into the high school and you ask every kid to list five or 10 of their friends and maybe in order of how close they are to them or something like that. And then you cross-reference all the lists.

And it sort of works in a high school, which is a relatively closed environment, where you assume that most of the kids are mostly friends with other kids in that high school. But when you get to adulthood, people stop having this sort of very consistent and predictable social trajectory. Because you can say, in a given area, all the 17-year-olds are going to be doing roughly the same thing in terms of being required to go to school.

Once you’re, and maybe even there’s an extent of, as higher education has become more ubiquitous, a lot of people are doing a university stage, although not everybody. But certainly, once you get to 25, all bets are off. So some people are moving to a different place, some people are taking up new hobbies, some people are becoming parents, some people are doing all of these sorts of things that can affect what language you use and how your language keeps shifting, but no longer in this consistent and predictable step-by-step way where you can say, okay, 13-year-olds are doing this and 17-year-olds are doing something different.

But if you look at clusters of interest groups – so there’s one study that I cited in Because Internet where they looked at people who had joined beer hobbyist message boards. They were talking to each other about beer tasting and all the different types of beer that they had. And there’s not obviously a consistent age that everybody is.

There’s not a consistent – other demographic factors that they are, but what they had in common was they were members of this beer group and they were learning the words to describe beer. Things like “aroma” or “S” for, I think it’s scent or something like this. Depending on when they joined the beer forum, they were using different terms, either the older term or the newer term based on when they joined the forum.

So, this is sort of a time-based effect, but it’s based on interest group rather than based on the sort of crude demographic factors of approximately, like here’s how all the 37-year-olds are talking. People do really different things with their lives at age 37. Like, people are in very different positions, but this is your first week on the beer forum versus you’ve been here for two years is like a different way of kind of slicing people according to their interests.

And then there was another study that some people did about networks on Twitter, where they classified people into networks based on who they were talking to. So, there’s sort of a book Twitter, or there’s like a parenting Twitter, or there’s like a sports Twitter or like tech Twitter. And these groups have skews that have some demographic factors in common.

So, you might get one group that’s like 60-40 men to women, and you might get another group that’s 60-40 in the other direction. So, there’s a demographic skew there, but it’s certainly not an absolute. What they found was that people tended to talk like other people in their cluster, more than they talked like an average member of their, I think they were using gender based on like inferred information from census information about names.

But also, it’s saying that the way that we talk has a lot to do with our choices and our friends and who we want to associate with. And not only, okay, you’re destined to talk this way because you’re like 24 and female. That’s a way of doing those statistics and trying to get at differences between social groups before we were able to do more fine-grained network analysis.

Brynn: It’s so interesting when you think, like what you were saying, I like this idea of people in their social groups, kind of, especially in those young years, try on dialects or accents or ways of speaking kind in the same way that you do with your fashion when you’re in that same age. And how all of those sorts of series of tryings on affect then how you come to speak as an adult.

And something else that you discuss in the book is this concept of weak ties and strong ties when it comes to language. Can you tell me what do those terms mean? And you started to talk about gender. How can gender impact these ties?

Gretchen: So weak ties versus strong ties are originally from a paper by I think an economist named Mark Granovetter. And he talks about the piece, so strong ties are people that you know very well, you spend a lot of time with, and most crucially, they are also densely embedded into your social network. So, they know a lot of the same people as you do.

So, if you have a group of friends who all hang out with each other, so you’re friends with person A and person B, person A and B are also friends with each other, and so on and so forth. So, you have a group where everybody sort of knows each other. So, you could think of something like a class of students in the school, probably all sort of know each other, or group people at a workplace, maybe all sort of know each other.

A weak tie is someone who probably you don’t spend as much time with, but more crucially, you don’t have as many other connections in common. In linguistics, for example, I know a lot of linguists, but also, I know a lot of people who aren’t employed in linguistics, who don’t have a linguistics background because I also do media and journalism and all of this sort of stuff, pay attention to this world of academia. So, for a lot of those non-linguists that I know, if I go to a non-linguist conference, I’m maybe the only linguist there, I’m the only linguist they know.

And I’m a weak tie that to them that represents this whole open community to the field of linguistics. And conversely, when I go to a linguistics conference, I’m one of the few people there, sometimes the only person there who’s not an academic, for whom my primary network is not an academic one. And so, to the linguists at the linguistics conference, I am so this weak tie source of information to bridge this whole other field of people who are doing interesting things outside of academia.

And what Granovetter found was that people often tend to get jobs via weak ties. For example, you’re unlikely to get a job via your partner, because your partner and you probably know a lot of the same people because you probably socialise together. And so you’d probably know about it directly more than a person that you already know.

But you might get a job via somebody that you knew for a year or two, like 10 years ago, and you took one class together. And for them, it was like, an elective and they actually got a job in some other field. And now their field is hiring and they know all these people who you don’t know.

And one of those people is hiring. And so, they are sort of a bridge to a larger gateway. And it’s much more common to find a job via a weak tie than it is via a strong tie because weak ties have so many other people that they are strongly connected to or that maybe they’re weakly connected to that can like bring in additional information.

So, when it comes to language change, your strong ties, people that you have a lot of friends in common with, you probably already talk a lot like they do. Like, you’re more likely to pick up, to talk the way the people that you see all the time and that you have lots of friends in common with also talk like. But you’re more likely to linguistic innovations or to unfamiliar linguistic features, even if they’ve been around for a long time, but they’re new to you, via people that are weaker ties to you, precisely because they bring in this novel to your social network, because you’re not already densely connected with them.

There’s someone who did a statistical model of like, how do we account for linguistic innovation in terms of people talking to each other differently? And if you run a network analysis of everybody or strong ties, you don’t get any linguistic innovation because everyone’s all talking like each other.

And if you run a social network analysis where everyone is weak ties, like no one has this dense connection to each other, I think that everybody is weak ties is sort of like being in an airport. You don’t, there’s just a bunch of people there and you have this sort of transitory connection with them or being in like a tourist trap, like nobody’s sort of staying there and being there the whole time, getting to know people very well. Whereas a small town is more likely to be more dense ties because there’s only so many people and so you can all kind of get to know each other.

The same as a relatively closed community, like a high school or an elementary school, which is, especially if it’s fairly small, all the students might sort of recognize each other and have multiple ways of getting to know each other. So, if everybody’s weak ties, then there’s never any one thing that sort of catches on in trends because it’s just like you’re not in contact with each other enough to actually influence each other. If everybody’s strong ties, there’s just one thing that stays popular the whole time.

But if you have this mix of strong and weak ties, so let’s say I hear a new form from someone who I know is a weak tie, and then maybe I hear the same new form from someone else that I know is a weak tie, and I say, oh yeah, maybe I’m going to start using this, and then it can spread to my strong ties relatively easily, but I got it from my weaker ties. Or conversely, maybe I get something from one of my strong ties, but they got it from a weak tie. So, you have this sort of additional source of chaos. You know, a stranger comes to town, brings in the exciting words from, you know, the next village over kind of thing.

Brynn: What does gender have to do with that? Like, what do we know especially about younger girls and language development?

Gretchen: So, the traditional finding in sociolinguistics is that young women are on the vanguard of linguistic change and that, you know, this has been found over and over in a lot of studies. What we’re not quite sure about is why, and I think that in some places we could poke a little bit harder at what we mean by a network to try to get to some of that. So, another finding that seems to be found in social science is that women often have more friends on average than men, and so maybe this is more weak ties, more strong ties, more opportunities to find out what’s going on.

You know, other factors that women are still disproportionately child rearing, and so if you’re not spending time with children and you acquire a new form, but you don’t hang out with the next generation, it just doesn’t get passed on. So, it’s a bit of a dead end. So, there’s a variety of potential reasons, and I think that this is something that would really benefit from people doing a more fine-grained network analysis to figure out, like, maybe we could actually, maybe not all women have friends (laughs).

Brynn: We’re allowed to not have friends!

Gretchen: Victory for feminism! Maybe some men do have lots of friends. And so maybe if you did a more fine-grained network analysis, I don’t know anyone who’s done this study, but I’d love to hear about it if anyone does know it. If you did a more fine-grained analysis of like, do extroverts have, are they more likely to be on the, the vanguard of linguistics change, or people who list more friends when you ask them about their friends or something, more likely to be at the vanguard of linguistics change. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. And maybe gender has been this proxy variable for something else.

Brynn: That’s interesting, yeah.

Gretchen: Because like, I don’t feel like I trust a, I don’t feel like I want a biological explanation for this. I feel like it’s social. Probably a variable of something else, but we’d be very interested in trying to disentangle that in the same way that like age feels like it’s a proxy variable for like, are you at a consistent life stage?

The point at which age starts seeming a little bit less relevant to linguistic change is the point at which people stop doing exactly the same thing as all the other 17-year-olds. You know, if we had, if high school was five years longer or five years shorter, then we would probably find those things correlate with, you know, years in schooling, doing the same thing as other people your age, more than years in doing something else.

So yeah, like there’s a study on beer forums, but you could also do a study of like, like new parents end up learning a whole lot of words relating to, you know, all those different types of like, are you going to do sleep training? Are you going to do baby-led weaning?

Brynn: I just had some flashbacks to my own early days of parenting. And truly, when you join those forums, when you join those, especially online communities, your vocabulary shifts so fast and so hard.

Gretchen: And there’s these acronyms, like DD and DS, like darling daughter, darling son, DH, dear husband. And these have been around for like 20 plus years. These are not new acronyms. They’ve been documented to be old enough that I think some of the original like darling children could now become parents themselves. They’ve been around for a while, but they keep getting reinvented every few years because people become new parents in a cyclic fashion. And so, it’s got this kind of replacement aspect to it in terms of a population level.

But then you don’t stay in the forums once you like stop having young kids such that you’re really desperately looking for advice on how to get the baby to sleep.

Brynn: Exactly. It’s so interesting because you do. And just like any social group, I’m sure, all of that stuff comes in so fast. And it almost feels like within the span of a few weeks, a few months, your way of speaking, your way of writing, especially on these online forums, shifts so quickly to the point that you don’t really think about it all that hard, but it does. It makes a really big change.

And on that idea of shifting into writing, I’m not sure how old you are, but I’m an elder millennial, so I can vividly remember being a young teenager right at the advent of the internet as we know it today. And I remember the adults at that time absolutely freaking out about how we used abbreviations and slang online. And everyone seemed really concerned that my microgeneration’s language development was doomed because of this.

And something that you did in your book, which I loved, was explain how the era in which people came online or sort of joined these communities, if you will, makes a big difference to the type of language that they use when communicating online. So can you talk to us a little bit about that, about when we come online and the different eras of that?

Gretchen: There’s this wonderful paper by Crispin Thurlow, who’s not a linguist, I think he’s a sociologist or something in that field, analysing these sort of generational moral panics around how people talk about Internet language and kids using them. And the paper is analysing the sort of acronym era, which I also remember of like, oh no, the kids are going to only communicate in acronyms now. And there were all these hyperbolic media articles that were generally not citing examples of actual practice.

They were creating these constructive examples of acronyms that nobody ever used. Like they would include a sort of like a BTW or an LOL or something. And then they would invent all these sort of fanciful acronyms that no one had ever used for sort of useless purposes and just be like, this is what the kids are doing.

And I remember reading these and thinking, maybe I’m just not cool enough to know what these acronyms stand for. Actually, what they were was a moral panic and not this at all. And I saw this coming up again when it came to talking about emoji, which I think people have gotten a bit less moral panicky about now because, oh, look, we’ve had emoji for over 10 years and it’s been fine.

And the kids are still using words also. But there was this big sort of like, well, what if the kids are only going to communicate the little pictures and sort of all of the like adults –  there was this program on like American TV local news at some point where they were bringing up all of these random emoji. This one stands for drugs and none of them did was the thing. Like it was all like, you know, the hibiscus flower. And it’s like, no one’s ever used that.

Brynn: No one uses that.

Gretchen: No one uses that. And they included a couple of real examples of emoji that do have like a slang meaning, but they got the meanings wrong. Like it was just really some like middle-aged people in a boardroom making up what the teens do, or else some teens having a joke at the expense of adults, which I would not fault them for.

Brynn: Not at all. I applaud them.

Gretchen: Yeah, I applaud them for, you know, messing with some overly credulous adults. Just thinking about like, could we not be overly credulous about linguistic change?

I talked about five different groups of internet people, sort of waves of internet people. And I don’t think I can do them just as orally because it’s hard to summarize a list of five things. Everyone likes a list of three things. So please read this in the actual book.

Brynn: Yeah, please read the book.

Gretchen: But it’s been something that people keep contacting me about and saying like, I resonate with this because I’m like an old internet person, someone who was on the internet before it became mainstream or cool, or I am someone who joined the internet as part of that full mainstream wave, or I’m someone that’s like on the cusp between these two groups. Because of course some people are fall between the cracks of any particular group, but it’s useful to describe a few categories and let people sort themselves between them. Or someone who joined the internet after it was already super mainstream.

This is something that I think is kind of neat where people who joined the internet as part of that big mainstreamisation wave, and some of them joined with their friends and some of them joined sort of through their work, but they all were part of creating what the norms are for the internet and they all get so shocked by young people who don’t know how to write an email anymore, or young people who don’t know how to find file in a folder system. A lot of people have told me that their students don’t know how to find a file in a folder system because you don’t need to do it on a smartphone. And you used to need to know how to do things like that just to use a computer because computers used to be different.

I mean, in the early days of cars, in order to drive a car, you had to be like a mechanic because the cars would just stall so much and you had to know about your own carburettor and all of this sort of stuff. And these days, some people know how cars work but a lot of people can just drive a car and if the car goes wrong, they take it into a shop or they call roadside assistance or whatever, they just, someone else fixes it because the world has this fractal level of complexity and we don’t all have to know how every single complex system works. I don’t know, I just turned a light bulb on today and I don’t know actually properly how a light bulb works.

Right? And this is just how things happen. And when you abstract away certain levels of complexity, that makes it easier to do other things that used to be unimaginably complex because some of the other layers have gotten abstracted away. I don’t think it’s worth sort of doom and gloom about.

There has been, I remember a lot of hyperbole about the idea that some group of people somewhere, and it’s always like the teens, even though they’ve been saying this for 20 years and those teens are no longer teens, but they’re still the teens. But now it’s the current teens and they didn’t notice that this didn’t really happen for the other teens, that some group of kids was going to be so good at the internet and so good at technology that they were going to be quote unquote digital natives. No one was going to have to teach them anything because they were just going to learn it themselves.

Well, has this ever been true for any group of young people that they’ve just taught it themselves everything and they’ve had no need for mentorship? Absolutely not. There are certain skills that young people learn for sort of social reasons to communicate with each other.

And those skills might not need to be taught in schools the same way because they’re teaching each other certain types of skills. But if you want people to learn the kind of drier skills that are workplace related, somebody, whether it’s a parent or a teacher or like an internship counsellor or something, somebody is going to have to explain how to do this at some point because there’s a lot of things that workplaces want that you talking to your friends does not actually require.

Brynn: Exactly. And I do think that especially since I was a teenager and I can remember all of the grownups then saying, now you don’t even know how to look up like for a library book in the Dewey Decimal system, you don’t know how to go into those file cards or anything. And that became this point of the grownups saying like, look at the kids these days. But grownups have always been saying, look at the kids these days. And especially, especially in terms of language and the way that we talk.

Although I now have a bone to pick with Gen X and the Boomers, because one of my favourite chapters in your book is called the Typographical Tone of Voice. What is a typographical tone of voice? Why do Gen X and Boomers use so many ellipses when they type a message? And why do these ellipses scare me so much as an elder millennial?

Gretchen: The idea of typographical tone of voice is that aspects of the way that you type certain words can reflect how you’re intending that message to be read. So, whether it’s sort of slow or fast, loud or quiet, using a higher pitch or a lower pitch or sort of an increasing rising or falling pitch. And we have aspects of this in our conventional punctuation that’s used in things like edited books or long edited prose rather than social media posts.

You know, things like a question mark indicating a question mark intonation or an exclamation mark indicating that something is a bit louder and more excited perhaps. So, there are, or a period indicating the certain finality towards the end of a sentence. And so, this is sort of there in typography to some extent.

It’s there in punctuation and in capitalisation to a certain extent. Something that was apparent to people in the very early days of the Internet was that you could use things like all caps to indicate shouting. There was, well, so there was a period when all computers were entirely in all caps because memory was so expensive that there was no lowercase anywhere.

Shortly after that period, there was a period when suddenly now we have lower and uppercase, and people started using all caps to indicate shouting or emphasis or something being louder. And this one is pretty well known at this point. I think even most Boomers and so on are fairly aware that all caps indicate shouting.

Brynn: Hopefully.

Gretchen: Hopefully! But there was a period like 20 years ago when people weren’t aware, and there was all this sort of like, my boss types his emails in all caps, how do I explain to him that it’s like he’s shouting? Some of these sorts of things take off, and some of them don’t take off.

And there are, like, this has a level of, but this level of expressivity is important. I think that sometimes people compare modern day Internet writing to sort of the older eras of edited prose in books, which is a false comparison. We still have books, and books are actually, books now are actually quite a bit like books then, in terms of punctuation and capitalisation and sort of editorial trends and, like, spelling.

They haven’t changed that much, you know, Because Internet is written mostly in standard capitalization and punctuation except in a few places where I’m, like, preserving something from a quote or doing something for emphasis. What’s actually a better point of comparison is private and informal bits of writing that people did, like letters and postcards and diaries and even things like handwritten recipes or notes, you know, to-do lists that you sort of scribble by the phone. And a lot of these have similar features that we now think of as Internet features or text message features or social media features that used to be part of informal writing, but informal writing wasn’t very visible.

If you’re making, like, a sign on a telephone pole, you know, like, lost cat or, like, yard sale or something like this, like, that’s informal writing. People will sometimes post on social media, like, photos from, like, you know, a local shop or something where they’ve put up a sign that says, you know, we’ll be back in five minutes, this sort of handwritten sign. And these also sometimes have features that are like social media.

But a lot of these are handwritten. And so, in handwriting, if you want to convey emotion, you have resources like writing some letters bigger, literally bigger. You don’t have to read about font size, because you can just make them bigger on the page.

You can underline them. You can underline them a lot. This sort of makes more sense because you’re not just underlining something once to emphasise.

You can underline it like four or five times. And you can do things in other colours in a pretty easy way, because you just reach over for your other pen or for your crayon. Some of the archival scanned letters and so on that I was looking at for Because Internet that didn’t make it into the book had this gorgeous underlining like red crayon that’s really emphatic.

And people would draw little doodles in the margin sometimes because you have the whole page of paper, you have a pen, you can just put whatever you want on the page. In many ways, computers artificially constrained our abilities to do that kind of thing that we were already doing. If you are writing on your own website or in your own word document or whatever, yeah, you can change the fonts, you can change the colours, you can change the size of things.

But for a lot of early computers, you couldn’t necessarily do that in text-based chat type places. And even these days, a lot of social media sites really constrain what fonts you can use, what colours you can use, what size things can be, even whether you can put a link or not. These sites are constraining what people can do so that they’re aesthetically uniform.

But people keep wanting to express themselves. And so, we have to find other ways of doing that. And some of that is playing with the typographical resources we have already.

When I was writing Because Internet, this question of like, why do older people, and it’s not all older people, I want to specify, but why do some older people use these ellipses so much? What are they doing with that?

Brynn: What do they want us to think? What do they mean? Are they mad?

Gretchen: What do they mean? Are they passive aggressive? Yeah. This was one of the questions that I got the most from, especially sort of elder millennials and younger, that was asked of me when I was writing this. And so, I was like, I have to find the answer. What I did was start looking back at handwritten stuff.

What you find in older letters, and especially I was looking at postcards, because a postcard is sort of like an Instagram post, right? Like you have your picture on one side, and then you have your caption on the other side. A lot of older postcards that have been like scanned and digitized aren’t even that long.

And some of them, so there’s this book called Postcards from the Boys, which digitizes a whole bunch of postcards by the members of the Beatles. Three of the Beatles. You know, Paul McCartney, John Lenon, Ringo Starr, they all write in relatively standard ways.

But George Harrison writes with a lot of dot dot dots in his handwritten postcards. And when you, you know, he’ll write things like, you know, much love dot dot dot George and Olivia. And when you type that out, it looks like a text message from your aunt.

Brynn: It looks threatening is what it looks like!

Gretchen: This is the thing with expectations. Because the dot dot dot, one of its advantages is when we talk to each other, especially informally, we don’t talk in complete sentences. We have sort of sentence fragments. We have bits trailing off. We have this and this and this and this. And it’s very additive.

And if you look at a transcript of a podcast, it’ll be like, these people look so strange when they’re talking if it hasn’t been sort of edited into sentence form. But that’s just what all talk looks like. And formal writing has this sort of sentence-by-sentence structure.

But informal writing doesn’t necessarily have to do that. And so, when I asked older people, like I tried to ask them to reflect on their own usage, when I asked them why they would use the dot dot dot, they would say things like, well, it’s correct. The best I can get out of this is a dot dot dot doesn’t commit to whether the next statement is an entirely independent sentence, or whether it’s a clause that continues on from the next thing.

So, a period or a comma sort of commits to this is a full sentence, or this is only part of a sentence. But a dot dot dot, same with a dash, a lot of people also use a lot of dashes, can be used with either independent clauses or dependent clauses. And so, it splits the difference.

It means you don’t have to think about it in this informal writing. You can just do one of these things that doesn’t commit to this type of thing, especially when what you’re really worried about in your writing is what’s correct. And so, you’re trying to do something that doesn’t commit the error, quote unquote, of a comma splice.

So, you’re like, well, I’ll just use a dot dot dot because that’ll be fine. Because these types of punctuation don’t commit to whether or not it’s a full clause or not. And in something like a postcard, you don’t want to necessarily start a new line or something like that because you don’t have that much space. Like, space is at a premium. So, you need a relatively compact way of doing that. For younger people or for people who have been online longer and are more used to the conventions of informal writing in a digital space rather than a physical piece of paper.

So, in the digital space, a new line is free. It doesn’t take up more bytes than just a space. It’s the same amount of space.

So, a lot of people will use a line break or they’ll use a message break itself because you’ve got to send the text message and then send the next one. And the message itself is the break in between thoughts. And if you want to put a break in between them, you can use a new line in some context or you can just use like, here’s the next message break.

Those are relatively free these days. I mean, I remember the days when you were paying like 15 cents for a text message and you were really trying to cram as much as possible into them.

Brynn: Oh, I do too.

Gretchen: But these days, you know, you can send as many texts as you want for free and you can send them on, you know, chat programs and things like that. Or somewhere like Twitter or Facebook or something, you can put a couple different line breaks in to like separate a few ideas if you want to do them in the same post. So, everybody is searching for this sort of neutral way of just separating thoughts a bit that doesn’t commit to this is a full sentence, this isn’t a full sentence, sort of whatever.

And for younger people, that’s the line break or the message break. That means that the period and the dot, dot, dot are sort of free to take on other interpretations. Because if you were just doing the neutral thing, the unremarkable thing, you’d just be using a line break or a message break, goes the logic of this group.

And so, if you’re putting a dot, dot, dot, or even in some context like a single period where a period isn’t necessary because you’ve just sent a new message, then that can indicate a certain amount of weight or a certain amount of pause or a certain amount of something left unsaid. A period, you sort of, canonically if you’re reading a declarative sentence, can indicate a falling intonation. And that falling intonation can be something like the difference between thank you, which I’m reading with sort of exclamation mark, like polite, cheerful intonation, versus thank you, where you’re like, oh no, is this sarcastic? Is there something going wrong?

And so, this is what the periods and the exclamation marks are conveying if you have line breaks and message breaks as your default separator. If you don’t have line breaks and message breaks as your default separator, you’re getting these other ones as a default separator and you’re not interpreting any additional tone.

I don’t want to say that one of these ways is right or wrong or that one of these ways is good or bad. I think it’s useful for people to be aware that there are two ways for this to be interpreted in both directions. The thing that I encounter from people who use the dot dot dot there are lots of contexts in which people still use periods all over the place if you’re sending a multi-sentence message.

But if you’re sending just thanks period as a single message, thanks.

Brynn: Oh, that scares me!

Gretchen: But what I hear from this older group, sort of a surprise that anybody could be reading in that much information into what they’re saying. A surprise that this is even possible. And so, this is a group that’s still saying something that I encountered a lot when I was writing Because Internet that the internet and writing is fundamentally incapable of conveying tone of voice.

And for this younger group, they’re like, absolutely not. I am conveying a lot of tone of voice in writing. And occasionally you get confused, but you sometimes get confused face to face as well.

And this older group is saying, no, it’s fundamentally impossible. Therefore, no one should ever be inferring anything about tone of voice based on how someone’s punctuating something, because this is just not what I’m trying to do. And you do have some, this is why I talk about sort of five generations of internet people and I don’t use the sort of like, you know, demographic categories of millennials or boomers in the same way, because people who have been on the internet for a long time before it was mainstream also have this understanding of typographical tone of voice and of conveying tone in writing because they’ve been doing it for even longer.

And many of them, you know, well, if you were getting on the internet in like the early bulletin board systems of the 1980s, you’re not 20 right now because time has elapsed. You know, they were a whole bunch of ages at the time, but they’ve all aged up together and still have, like these are the people who gave us the smiley face, like, come on, they were really trying to make it capable, being capable of doing stuff like this.

That is such a good point that it circles back to this idea of how long have you been online? What has your experience of either handwriting or typing messages online been? Kind of how did you come up in that age?

And like you said, I think it’s not that any one way is right or wrong. And I’m sure that Gen Zed or Gen Z, you know, looks at our text messages and says, oh my God, I can’t believe that they type that way, you know, and it’s going to keep doing that, which is normal.

I’ve been informed that reaction gifts are such a millennial thing.

Brynn: I know, I have too (laughs).

Gretchen: GIFs are really interesting because they were in in like the 90s and they sort of fell out in the 2000s and they came back in like the 2010s. So maybe there’s like a gift drought in the 2020s and they’ll be back in like the 30s as retro cool again. You never know, right?

Brynn: That’s going to be our era is the 2030s. The resurgence of the GIF. Exactly.

And you and your Lingthusiasm co-host Lauren have so many amazing Lingthusiasm episodes. And I want to encourage everyone to go check out Lingthusiasm. But especially in episode 34, you talk about Because Internet, and you also talk about emoji and gesture and things like that.

Before we wrap up, can you tell us a bit more about Lingthusiasm and maybe some of your favourite topics that you’ve done and why people should go check it out and start listening?

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. So, Lauren Gawne is my co-host on Lingthusiasm, and she’s an Australian linguist who I got to know via the internet as one does. She’s a specialist in gestures. So, she was the one who sort of talked me through the idea that emoji are like gesture in terms of how we use them with other linguistic resources rather than doing a lot of gestures all by themselves.

And sort of, you know, if you do that, it’s more like a fun game like charades rather than this sort of fully fledged linguistic system, which is something we’re looking for in addition to the tone of voice. So that episode, we’re talking about emoji and gestures in episode 34. We also did an episode very recently about orality and literacy and understanding oral cultures.

In this, I read an academic book by Walter J. Ong called Orality and Literacy, which is a really interesting book. And it was published in 1982. And there are a few parts that don’t quite stand up, but a lot of it is really, really interesting as far as its observations go. And I wish that I’d read this book before writing Because Internet. So, here’s your sort of esprit de scalier of like what I wish I also been able to say.

He talks about how in oral cultures, one of your primary issues that you’re trying to solve is like generational memory and transmitting useful and cultural and relevant information across generations, whether this is things like genealogies or cultural histories, but also just as simple as things that are like useful aphorisms to know. And so information becomes repeated in an oral culture because it’s in some sort of memorable unit. So you have something like A Stitch in Time Saves Nine, which rhymes, or you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make a drink, which has this sort of beautiful couplet structure, or Red Sky at Night Sailor’s Delight, kind of, Red Sky in the Morning Sailors Take Warning, which sometimes people say Farmer’s Delight or something like that instead, or Shepherd’s Delight, depending on how bucolic versus marine your region is, but it keeps the rhythm and the rhyme of the structure there, so that you can pass along this type of folk wisdom, because everything has to pass mind to mind, and so if it’s not memorable, it doesn’t get passed on.

What this means is that in an oral culture, you’re really trying to remember and transmit these, in many cases, very fixed phrases or these fixed templates that have a limited degree of variation, but are still very, very memorable. Things like proverbs and fairy tales that always have three sisters or three brothers or three common rules of three, and they have certain types of stock figures, a princess and a dragon and a witch, and these types of stock figures that can combine and recombine and become very memorable units. What was interesting to me to contrast this with was the Internet has this meme culture of things that keep getting remixed and recreated.

The earliest stages of meme culture, you know, the LOL cats that people cite that are now like very much vintage memes were passing around the same images. People would keep reuploading the same images of cats, and there were a few that really reoccurred. These days, memes have become a lot more oral in some ways, because it’s a repetition of the same thing.

Memes have become so much less oral and more written, because when you see a new meme going around, you can go look it up on Know Your Meme, you can find out what the template is, you can see a bunch of examples, and then the goal is to create your own riff. People in some cases encounter like several derivatives, but like if I go on Twitter or somewhere like that, and I see like one kind of weird tweet, I’m like, oh, that’s weird. And then if I see two tweets that are weird in the same way, I’m like, oh, new meme just dropped.

People can create riffs so much easier and can adapt new bits of cultural information to remix so much easier when we have reference materials, which are fundamentally a written culture thing. So, this idea that you have a Know Your Meme entry or Wikipedia page or like a Vox explainer about here’s how this meme works, and here it is explained for people who don’t get it, that is such a written culture thing to do. In oral culture, if you weren’t there, you have to be told this story by someone and you get it altered in the retelling.

You don’t get to just scroll back a couple of hours later and experience all the jokes just in the same order and you get to, and you’re not doing as much in terms of like creating your own versions immediately. You’re doing the retelling of the existing stuff, the retelling of the best of the existing stuff. Newer versions happen much more slowly because you can’t just go consume and digest the entire previous body of work.

It’s sort of a slower way of information transmission because people have to be physically there to say it. Yeah, I wish I’d sort of had more of that literature foundation in what oral culture is and how the information transmission happens there because I think that a lot of people sort of blithely say that the Internet is an oral culture, which it’s really not. It’s so written.

It’s got so many written features. And what is actually the case is that its domains of the human experience that used to be primarily oral are happening more in writing now, which is different from saying that the Internet is oral. It is, in fact, informal language becoming much more written than it used to be.

It’s sort of a slower way of information transmission because people have to be physically there to say it. Yeah, I wish I’d sort of had more of that literature foundation in what oral culture is and how the information transmission happens there because I think that a lot of people sort of blithely say that the Internet is an oral culture, which it’s really not. It’s so written.

It’s got so many written features. And what is actually the case is that its domains of the human experience that used to be primarily oral are happening more in writing now, which is different from saying that the Internet is oral. It is, in fact, informal language becoming much more written than it used to be.

Brynn: That’s so cool. But also, I look forward to your next book where you do get to incorporate all of those things.

Gretchen: Well, it’s not going to be Because Internet 2.0! I was joking for a while that maybe my second book would have to be called Despite Internet, how I wrote a book despite being distracted online.

Brynn: Yes, please. I would read that. Gretchen, thank you so much for your time today and thank you for chatting with me.

And there is so much of Because Internet that we didn’t cover today, like the rise of Emoji. We talked a little bit about meme culture, but also you have a whole section about the history of email etiquette. So, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to read the book and also be sure to subscribe to the Lingthusiasm podcast.

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me.

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

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

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

Fun fact by the way:

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

Dictionaries change

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

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

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

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

Prescriptivists and descriptivists

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

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

Or are they?

And/or, do they have to always be?

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

Quotative like

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

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

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

A strip in the webcomic XKCD about research on quotative like

Evasive so

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing bad things with words

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calling out nefarious language is ok

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Broadly speaking, Croatian Studies in Australia attracts three groups of students: first, children and grandchildren of immigrants from former Yugoslavia who learned the language at home and want to study it formally to develop higher levels of proficiency, including academic literacies; second, students with a heritage connection who did not learn the language in the home but want to develop some level of proficiency to connect with extended family, also on visits back to Croatia; and third, a small but growing number of students, with no heritage connection who have developed an interest in Croatian for various reasons. The latter include mature age students who take up the challenge of learning another language later in life for reasons of personal interest and intellectual development.

Dr Jasna Novak Milić in the Croatian Studies Centre Library at Macquarie University

Croatian is a fascinating language in many ways and so the conversation is also a springboard to speak about language politics and language naming, both back in Croatia/former Yugoslavia and in the diaspora. Croatian speakers first came to Australia in the early 20th century but mass migration from former Yugoslavia was a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century.

The Croatian Studies program at Macquarie University developed in this context and during Australia’s decisive turn to multiculturalism from the 1980s onward. The Croatian Studies Centre today enjoys strong community support through the Croatian Studies Foundation and is also benefitting from the commitment of the Croatian state, a member of the European Union, to the Croatian diaspora.

Beyond the specifics of Croatian language learning, our conversation also turned to broader issues related to “small” languages in Australian higher education, and why the availability of languages programs in higher education is critical for heritage language maintenance.

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.

Related resources

• About the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie University
• Study Croatian at Macquarie University
• “Easy Croatian” Podcast” hosted by Dr Jasna Novak Milić on SBS
• Keynote lecture by Dr Jasna Novak Milić, “Why Australia needs Croatian Studies“
• Petition to save Croatian, German, Greek, Italian, and Russian at Macquarie University

Alia Amir’s grandfather with his three daughters, ca. 1950 (Copyright: Alia Amir)

I admire people, who, on the move, maintain and transfer their heritage languages to the next generations. By “maintain,” I mean the transfer of spoken language or as a boli (Mahboob, 2023).

In our family, our generation has grappled with the challenges of preserving all of our languages, and unfortunately, we have not succeeded in passing down all these languages to the next generation.

Multilingual Kashmiri ancestries

My paternal grandfather Shams-ud-Din was born in Srinagar in Kashmir, and raised in a Kashmiri-speaking family, shortly after the Great Famine of India (1876-1878) under British Crown rule and after Jang-e-Azadi (the War of Independence) (1857), also referred to as “Mutiny” from the British Raj’s and coloniser’s perspective and language.

The Great Famine of India itself, during the Crown rule, not only took the lives of millions of people but also caused mass displacements and internal migrations. This era did not only result in an astounding loss of life, but also came to have long-lasting consequences for health. Recent research shows that the British Raj era heightened the risk of diabetes in South Asians, a testament to the complex and extensive consequences of historical episodes.

Even though my initial childhood years were spent with my grandfather, I am not aware of the extent of his formal education. Vivid in my fond memories of him, however, remain his proficiency in several languages. He was well-versed in writing English, Persian and Urdu, accompanied by the eloquence of his bolis, Kashmiri and Punjabi. A brief part of his life was spent in service of the Empire’s machinery, the British Hindustani Police. Despite that, I recall the fervor in his stories about the resistance against the angrez rulers.

My paternal grandmother, Rehmat, was also a Kashmiri, however, her Kashmiriness manifested slightly differently from my grandfather’s. Her story, and subsequently my story and my linguistic skills, are also entrenched in the environmental, socio-historic events and linguistic ecology of the region. Her family, along with numerous others, were among the migrants from Kashmir to the-then unified Punjab, specifically Lahore, colloquially referred to as the province’s heart, during a famine in the seventeenth century under the Company Raj.

Among these migrant Kashmiris was Allama Iqbal, one of the foremost poets and philosophers of the region. He wrote in Urdu (also called Hindustani at that time), Persian, English, and German, while he was a lecturer of Arabic. Also fluent in Punjabi, one of the major languages of Sialkot city, where his ancestors settled, Allama Iqbal’s second and third generations (as well his predecessors) can be regarded as fully assimilated into Punjabi culture and language. It highlights a poignant contrast – the loss of one language, and the gain of another, a reminder of the pulsating progression of cultural and linguistic identities.

South Asian diglossia

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris exemplify how diglossia functioned in multilingual communities. Pakistan and other South Asian nations similarly encapsulate traits of diglossic countries. In the case of South Asia and Pakistan, the notion of one language or one ethnic group is rendered a myth, just as the assumption that one nation necessitates one language. Based on this assumption, in linguistic communities such as the Kashmiris, it remains a challenge to pinpoint a single language that represents all of them. This monoethnic perspective, however, is rooted in Eurocentric global North discourses and epistemologies which does not capture the nuanced realities of bilingual communities (Bagga-Gupta et al., 2017).

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris also showcase that the purposes of languages in one’s repertoire can be different, and those uses do not necessarily need to confirm imperial language categorizations. For instance, consider the Punjabi language in present-day Pakistan (and in the context of British Hindustan). Even though it is a written language as well, it has never been used as a medium of instruction or even taught as a compulsory subject in schools. Its absence in primary, secondary and higher education does not mean it is endangered in any form. Take the example of ‘Pasoori,’ a Punjabi song from Pakistan that garnered 696 million views and was the most searched song on Google in 2022. This not only showcases the song’s immense popularity but also underscores the idea that languages can thrive in various forms and modalities.

New bolis in migration

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris also exemplify that language shift occurs in diasporic communities when the connection between the homeland and the migrants is weakened. Language shift means that when communities settle in new lands, new varieties will become part of the repertoire.

Fast forward to 2024, I find myself incapable of being able to speak all the bolis of my grandparents. I have lost two of my heritage bolis. Similarly, my children cannot speak all the bolis of their grandparents. Triple migrations and moving from one place to another have left us leaving one language for another; however, we still carry some of the mannerisms of our bolis in other languages – our Kashmiri-Pakistaniness manifests in English, Urdu, Swedish, and a mixture of all the above! We perform our identities through new vehicles, in new mediums, new bolis.

My autoethnographic account, my story, my loss of language is similar to some of those who are on the move and from those whose ancestors are forced to leave whether it is because of colonization, famine, family reunification, forced persecution, or fear.

My deep admiration extends to those who successfully maintain and pass on more than one heritage language in all modalities. I have strived to break free from the confines of limiting language competence within Euro-centric epistemologies and linguistic standardization ideals, recognizing their inherent written language bias (Linell, 2004) and the promotion of the notion of one language for one linguistic community. On the contrary, I argue that linguistic communities transcend beyond the geographical boundaries of nation states, provinces, regions, or clans.

Within the broad landscape of linguistic theories and epistemologies that conceptualize the multilingual competence of communities within the former British Raj, there emerges a pivotal challenge deserving attention: Euro-centric epistemologies and theorization fall short of accurately labelling and describing both individual and societal multilingualism. This challenge becomes vividly apparent in my family’s diglossia, where the interchange between two distinct linguistic varieties mirrors the diverse language practices found in both Pakistani society and its diaspora.