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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s always interesting to see who the designers of a sign imagined their readers to be. The designers of a sign such as this one have tourism statistics to guide them and one would assume that it is the languages of the largest country-of-origin groups that make it onto warning signs such as this one. Official arrival statistics for short-terms visitors to Australia are available from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and it gets really interesting when you compare those figures with the languages on the sign. English is an obvious choice, of course, as there’s the national market and English is also the language of the three top countries of origin (NZ, UK, USA). 警告 does double-duty for the 4^th and 5^th largest groups of arrivals (Japan, China) and probably also comes in handy for the Singaporeans (6^th). Malaysia ranks 7^th and they don’t get their own warning in Malay but are presumably assumed to be English-speaking. The really interesting story is between rank 8 and 10: Korea is ranked 8 and with 17,000 short-term Korean visitors to Australia in May 2008, they far outnumber German visitors (rank 10) with only 7,000 visitors. How come the Koreans don’t get a Korean-language warning but the Germans get a German-language warning? Because language choice in tourism is not only a rational choice based on market research but also related to the language capacities of the institution that set up the sign, and their language ideologies (as I showed in a paper about language choice in Swiss tourism, which is available from our Resources section).

Not only is it interesting to see which languages are in and which are left out in warning signs such as this one, it is also worth reflecting which bits of the message get translated. In this case, it seems that the information that appears in translation (“Warning”) is less challenging linguistically than the more substantial information on how to keep safe that is NOT translated into other languages.

All of which leads to the more general question whether the limited use value of this sign justifies putting such an ugly sign up in the first place? Is it not possible to think of a more linguistically inclusive and aesthetically less offensive way to keep visitors safe?