(Image credit: RACGP)

The global impact of the coronavirus pandemic has reshaped societies worldwide, altering human interactions and perceptions of the world and brought unprecedented challenges, not only in terms of public health management but also in communication. Australia experienced low infection and mortality rates during the initial eight months of the pandemic compared to other regions. This success in containment has been attributed to rigorous testing, contact tracing, mandatory quarantine measures, and timely shutdowns, along with the advantageous geographical location of the country.

During this period, Australian news outlets played a crucial role in disseminating information and shaping public perceptions of the pandemic. This examination delves into the linguistic evolution of media coverage, shedding light on how risk communication strategies evolved over time. The linguistic choices in media coverage significantly influenced public response and adherence to health directives during the pandemic. The strategic changes in language helped stabilize public sentiment and enhance cooperation with health guidelines.

I conducted a study on Australian news outlets at Monash University during the peak of the pandemic. Utilizing the vital work of Mark Davies’ international corpus (Davies, 2019-), I created my own corpus, focusing on nationally recognized news outlets in Australia, such as The Age, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), and Channel 9. This resulted in a comprehensive collection from 18 outlets, comprising 5,969 articles and 961,390 words, covering the period from January to September 2020 (Munn, 2021). Articles from these sources were analyzed, focusing on key words used to frame aspects of the virus. The results of this analysis are detailed in this article.

Novel Coronavirus to COVID-19: the Linguistic Evolution

From ‘Deadly’ to ‘Wuhan’: Negative Connotations and Their Impact

When COVID-19 first became acknowledged by Australian news outlets in early January there was a noticeable use of the adjectives ‘deadly’ and ‘mysterious.’ While ‘deadly’ was quite apt in hindsight the use of negative adjectives is something the World Health Organization (WHO) heavily discourages as it can amplify undue fear in the wider public (2015). The changing and evolving information about the virus lead to a familiar pattern of different media sources reporting different and sometimes inflammatory perspectives that happened during the SARS and H1N1 outbreaks (Berry et al., 2007).

‘Wuhan’, the second-most occurring modifier, continues to exhibit a pattern of negative influence. Labelling the virus as the ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ not only implicates a specific geographical region but also inadvertently fosters discrimination against the Chinese community, contributing to a surge in racist incidents globally (Human Rights Watch, 2020).

Drawing from the research of Tang and Rundblad (2015) and WHO (2015), which emphasizes the significance of linguistic framing in risk communication, it becomes apparent that the language used in media reporting can influence public perceptions and behaviours. This observation underscores the importance of employing responsible language to mitigate fear and prevent stigmatization.

Standardization of Terms: The Introduction of ‘COVID-19’

In reaction to the growing negative connotations a new name was introduced by WHO in February 2020. COVID-19 (Corona VIrus Disease 2019) marked a pivotal moment in the risk communication of the virus. The new name was created using the guidelines presented in WHO’s “Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Disease” (2015).

This standardized nomenclature aimed to alleviate the negative connotations associated with ‘coronavirus’, thus promoting a more objective understanding of the disease and the data shows they were successful as ‘COVID-19’ showed no notable examples of the negative modifiers used with coronavirus.

The presence of the two names for the singular virus led to a spike of instances of ‘coronavirus COVID-19’ and ‘COVID-19 coronavirus’ the instances of both names used as modifiers for the other peaks in March after the introduction of ‘COVID-19’ in February. Over half of the instances of these occurrences were in the single month of March. There is a clear sense of interchangeability between the two terms that the Australian media grasped and communications to the wider public that ‘coronavirus’ and ‘COVID-19’ where the same thing, facilitating its widespread adoption.

By June, ‘COVID-19’ emerged as the preferred term, eclipsing ‘coronavirus’ in media discourse. This shift reflects a conscious effort to streamline communication and ensure consistency in messaging. This was not only the case in Australia, but Oxford English Dictionary also report the same result in their worldwide examination of words use relating to COVID-19 (Oxford English Dictionary, 2020).

Crisis Communication Narratives

Linguistic Framing: Proactive vs. Reactive

As the pandemic unfolded, media coverage shifted from solely focusing on the virus to addressing its broader societal impacts. The term ‘COVID-19’ was associated with proactive actions like understanding the cause, prevention efforts, and managing the ongoing challenges (cause, prevention, handling, etc.). In contrast, ‘coronavirus’ narratives often emphasized containment measures, warnings, and identifying hotspots (stop, warn, strain, epicentre, origin, etc.). These differing narratives reflected the multifaceted nature of the pandemic response, highlighting both proactive and reactive approaches to managing the crisis.

Handling Death

The differences in language usage between ‘coronavirus’ and ‘COVID-19’ regarding reporting on deaths attributed to the virus reveal contrasting narratives in media coverage. While ‘coronavirus’ often precedes mentions of ‘new cases’ and ‘more deaths’, emphasizing the novelty and severity of the virus. ‘COVID-19 ‘conveyed a sense of familiarity and normalization, omitting the need for such qualifiers. This distinction suggests that media outlets may unintentionally amplify fear and uncertainty when using ‘coronavirus’, while portraying ‘COVID-19’ as a manageable entity. Understanding these linguistic nuances is crucial for crafting effective risk communication strategies that promote informed decision-making and resilience among the public in navigating the ongoing challenges posed by the pandemic.

‘Fight’ against coronavirus vs ‘Battle’ against COVID-19

There were distinct linguistic nuances were observed in the portrayal of efforts to combat the virus. While both ‘fight’ and ‘battle’ were employed, ‘battle’ was exclusively associated with ‘COVID-19’, suggesting a more protracted struggle with no definitive endpoint in sight. The media viewed ‘coronavirus’ and ‘COVID-19’ as a fight, while only ‘COVID-19’ was a battle. Fighting coronavirus suggests a victory is possible, but the battle against COVID-19 has no clear victory in mind but just to struggle against the virus.

Linguistic Framing of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs)

Testing

The testing regime for COVID-19 emerged as a crucial strategy employed by the Australian government to curb the spread of the virus. Throughout the analyzed period, there was a discernible uptick in mentions of testing within the corpus, reflecting its increasing importance in public health discourse. Notably, spikes in discussions around testing coincided with the onset of the first and second waves of infections in Australia, underscoring its pivotal role in outbreak management.

While ‘positive tests’ remained consistently prominent, there was a notable anomaly in June, just preceding the second wave, where the frequency of ‘negative tests’ momentarily surpassed that of ‘positive tests.’ This anomaly highlights the dynamic nature of testing trends and suggests potential shifts in public health priorities or testing strategies during specific phases of the pandemic.

Lockdowns

The implementation of restrictions on the Australian public emerged as a crucial measure in controlling the spread of the virus, serving as the second major factor in virus containment. However, the timing and intensity of these restrictions displayed unexpected patterns, both preceding and following the two significant waves of COVID-19 cases in Australia, with ‘lockdown’ being most prevalent during infection peaks. During periods of easing restrictions, language referring to these measures became vaguer, reflecting a gradual relaxation of stringent policies, while during phases of enforcing restrictions, more specific terminology like ‘lockdown’ was employed, indicating a heightened urgency in response to escalating transmission rates.

Conclusion

The linguistic choices made by the Australian media in their coverage of COVID-19 significantly shaped public perceptions and actions in response to the pandemic. By moving from initial, fear-inducing language to more neutral and consistent terminology like ‘COVID-19,’ the media played a pivotal role in stabilizing public sentiment and enhancing adherence to health directives. This strategic linguistic transition underscores the profound impact of media language on public behavior during a health crisis. This observation sets the stage for further research and development of effective communication strategies. By optimizing the linguistic approach in media communication, the aim is to enhance public understanding and cooperation in emergency responses, ensuring that the gap between expert recommendations and public behavior is effectively bridged.

References

Anastasia Tsirtsakis. (2020, July 10). Australia’s COVID-19 response may have saved more than 16,000 lives. https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/australia-s-covid-19-response-may-have-saved-more

Berry, T. R., Wharf-Higgins, J., & Naylor, P. J. (2007). SARS Wars: An Examination of the Quantity and Construction of Health Information in the News Media. Health Communication, 21(1), 35–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410230701283322

Davies, M. (2019-). The Coronavirus Corpus. https://www.english-corpora.org/corona/

Gabriella Rundblad, & Chris Tang. (2015). When Safe Means ‘Dangerous’: A Corpus Investigation of Risk Communication in the Media. Applied Linguistics, 38(5), 666–687. https://academic.oup.com/applij/article-abstract/38/5/666/2952207?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Human Rights Watch. (2020, May 12). Covid-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide | Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide

Munn, C. (2021). What’s In a Name: A Corpus Analysis of Australian Media’s Naming Conventions and Risk Communication During the Coronavirus Pandemic [Masters]. Monash University.

Oxford English Dictionary. (2020, July 15). Using Corpora to Track the Language of Covid-19. Https://Public.Oed.Com/Blog/Using-Corpora-To-Track-The-Language-Of-Covid-19-Update-2/

Stanaway, F., Irwig, L. M., Teixeira‐Pinto, A., & Bell, K. J. (2021). COVID‐19: estimated number of deaths if Australia had experienced a similar outbreak to England and Wales. Medical Journal of Australia, 214(2), 95. https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.50909

World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), & Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). (2015). World Health Organization best practices for the naming of new human infectious diseases (World Health Organization, Ed.). World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-HSE-FOS-15.1

Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL students at Macquarie University (Image credit: Jung Ung Hwang)

As pre-pandemic levels of migration have been restored or exceeded, international students are once again in the spotlight.

Canada is planning to cap international student visas and Australia plans to raise English language proficiency requirements for student visas. The stated rationale is to “improve the quality of students’ educational experience and reduce workplace exploitation” and to “support international students to realise their potential.”

I argue that raising the English proficiency requirements for university admission is not a good way to achieve the stated rationale. International students’ educational experience and their successful integration into the workforce can be improved in a different way.

Why are language proficiency tests used for university admission?

A certain level of language proficiency is undoubtedly required to be able to study in a degree program.

However, standardized language proficiency tests that are designed to be used on a large scale, are, in fact, not good predictors of academic success, and are not viewed as such by university teaching staff and other stakeholders. After all, language proficiency is just one aspect of the many facets that contribute to students’ academic achievement.

Furthermore, language testing is administered selectively and not every applicant’s  language proficiency gets tested, entrenching inequality between different student groups from the outset.

Why is language proficiency testing not enough?

Successful communication depends on many factors, including the communication skills and supportiveness of the interlocutor. In standardized English language proficiency test situations, the interlocutors are trained assessors, who focus on language skills, fluency, and accuracy in a controlled test environment. In real life, however, interlocutors are not trained language experts and not necessarily supportive either, as adult language learners experience all too often.

Here’s an example from Yumiko, a Japanese international student featured in the forthcoming book Life in a New Language. In the first few months of her time in Australia, Yumiko only ordered orange juice because hospitality staff could not understand her Japanese accent when she said ‘apple juice’ (probably sounding like “apuru juice”). Not only did she not achieve the desired result but interlocutors often responded to her in an unkind way. This is an example of a social situation that isn’t academic in nature; however, unfortunately, international students do get judged as competent or incompetent in such situations, which of course, has very real consequences for them.

While language proficiency tests give an indication of general language proficiency, it would be unrealistic to expect them to replicate all the potential language use situations in a university student’s life. Therefore, raising the language test score requirements for university study is unlikely to significantly improve students’ educational experience.

How do we improve student experience then?

Instead of having a higher score on a standardized language proficiency test, what truly helps improve the students’ educational experience is language support and experiential learning that enable them to function in their future workplaces. Language support should be provided to all students with a dual purpose: on the one hand, to assist with their studies – as a more immediate need – and on the other, to gain effective communication skills for employability.

Besides the generic university-wide academic language support that most universities provide, discipline-embedded language support can be provided to all students and not just international students. This is to avoid the ‘sink-or-swim’ approach that they experience in higher education.

At the same time, valuing and building on the multilingual repertoires of students can provide a superior learning experience for all. An inclusive environment clearly benefits all. Engaging with languages in their studies and classes opens up new ways of knowledge production for students. For instance, in a recent seminar activity on the topic of wellbeing for language teachers, my class explored two Japanese concepts as part of the seminar activity. This led to an interesting discussion on what other wellbeing concepts there are in other languages and what we can learn from them.

Preparing students for the workplace

Furthermore, students need to be prepared for workplace requirements both linguistically and by building skills and connections through work-integrated learning (WIL). Learning activities that require students to research and engage with professional bodies are a good start to build awareness and language skills. This can then lead to learning activities and assessment practices that require industry project participation. For instance, Applied Linguistics and TESOL students at Macquarie University design language testing activities for English language schools as part of a unit I teach on language assessment.

In conclusion, setting up additional barriers to admission does not support students. What does support students is creating safe spaces with supportive interlocutors where they can simultaneously grow their linguistic repertoires, their disciplinary knowledge, and their workplace skills.

References

Bodis, A. (2017). International students and language: opportunity or threat? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/international-students-and-language-opportunity-or-threat/
Bodis, A. (2021). The discursive (mis) representation of English language proficiency: International students in the Australian media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(1), 37-64.
Bodis, A. (2021). ‘Double deficit’ and exclusion: Mediated language ideologies and international students’ multilingualism. Multilingua, 40(3), 367-392. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2019-0106
Bodis, A. (2023). Gatekeeping v. marketing: English language proficiency as a university admission requirement in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development, 1-15. doi:10.1080/07294360.2023.2174082
Bodis, A. (2023). Studying abroad is amazing, or is it? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/studying-abroad-is-amazing-or-is-it/
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2023). English Language Proficiency for Australian University Admission. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUSqSSploSE
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2024). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 53(1), 1-23. doi:10.1017/S0047404522000689
Piller, I., Bodis, A., Butorac, D., Cho, J., Cramer, R., Farrell, E., . . . Quick, B. (2023). Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into ‘Migration, Pathway to Nation Building’. Canberra: Parliament of Australia. Retrieved from https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8c0d9316-2281-4594-9c7b-079652683f54&subId=735264

Figure 1: Multilingual sign in Abu Dhabi with power disparities indicated through order and size of text

In the critically acclaimed Barbie movie, released in cinemas in mid-2023, Barbie and Ken depart from their fictional utopia of Barbie Land for the ‘real world’ of California, USA. When they arrive, they are very much outsiders observing their environment with new eyes.

It does not take long for a strong message to sink in: their new urban landscape reflects power dynamics between groups of people.

White men dominate, from appearing on banknotes, being carved into mountains, and holding the lion’s share of high-powered and lucrative positions. Ken thus believes it will be easy for him to find a job as he fits the profile of ‘the powerful’ based on race and gender alone. Barbie, on the other hand, finds her identity as a strong, independent, and ambitious woman suddenly out of sync with her surroundings and social interactions. Their reflexive positioning, or the way they view their own identities, shifts according to interactive positioning, or the way they are viewed by others, which in turn is influenced by societal norms and the social construction of reality.

Gender hierarchies parallel linguistic hierarchies

Upon leaving my local independent cinema in the Cotswold town of Chipping Norton on a rainy July day, I contemplated, in particular, one of the many strong messages embedded in the movie. This was the direct interconnectedness of semiotic landscapes, symbolic power, and identities. While the movie focused on challenging the dominance of the patriarchy in society, as a sociolinguist, the parallels with language hierarchies leapt out, particularly in relation to the omnipresence of English, or linguistic imperialism, in many global contexts.

Figure 2: Inclusion of Musqueam on signage at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

In a similar way to Barbie and Ken’s experience of gendered power dynamics being all-encompassing, in multilingual settings, the languages we see in public places not only impact language ideologies and linguistic hierarchies but also affect levels of belonging in a space. In linguistically diverse cities across the globe such as Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) or Vancouver, Canada, official language(s) and English as a global language tend to dominate. While there may be attempts to ‘welcome’ speakers of other languages, such attempts often fall short of true inclusion. For example, greetings in as many languages as will fit onto a sign can often be seen outside tourist attractions and money exchange stores. However, meaningful and balanced multilingualism on signage in public spaces is less common.

English on top

While select second or third languages are strategically included in ‘sticky places’ or spaces which evoke feelings of cultural belonging such as ethnic grocery stores, cafes and restaurants, or where linguistic minorities gather, such multilingual signage is often skewed in favour of dominant languages such as English.

Linguistic hierarchies, in this sense, not only relate to lack of second or third languages but also the order of languages, size, and amount of text. For example, the inclusion of bilingual Indigenous language / English books in Canadian stores is a positive move toward representation and decolonization but at present these books represent a tiny portion of stock sold in stores and they are usually displayed as a special feature.

Figure 3: Dominance of English on signage at an EMI university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

In Abu Dhabi, the inclusion of three languages for a social distancing sign related to the COVID pandemic also sends a message about linguistic hierarchies by placing English at the top, Arabic second, and Filipino (in smaller print) at the bottom (Figure 1). Here power disparities which relate to language and social position (many nannies in the UAE are from the Philippines, whereas the English and Arabic text is directed at parents) can be seen in the linguistic landscape in terms of ordering and size of text.

Language hierarchies in education-scapes

Particularly in English-medium education in multilingual university settings, which are on the rise globally, English-only or English-dominated signage and language objects tend to overshadow not only instruction but also education-scapes, or the linguistic and semiotic landscapes of educational settings. To take Canadian universities as an example, efforts to include Indigenous languages in education-scapes have been made from the east coast to the west coast, in Cape Breton and Vancouver (Figure 2).

Such initiatives are important in terms of decolonizing education-scapes. However, the representation of languages on many Canadian campuses, which host linguistically diverse student populations, is heavily weighted in favour of monolingual English practices. In the Arab Gulf cities of Abu Dhabi, UAE and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, English-medium universities, bilingual (English/ Arabic) signage shares space with many monolingual (English only) signs, sending out a message about the symbolic power of English in these settings (Figure 3). Even when the target readers’ first language is Arabic, as in the case of signs about Islamic dress codes (Figure 3), the chosen language for the text is still English.

Looking at multilingual signage with new eyes

If we imagine that ‘new eyes’ were viewing these global multilingual cities, what message would be received? Similar to Barbie and Ken’s perception of patriarchal dominance and power in California, English-dominated landscapes send out a message about which languages, and speakers, are valued or devalued in a space. In this sense, issues of access, inclusion and belonging, not only relate to gender and race, but also language use and linguistic identities. As Nicholas (2023) states, a main take away from the Barbie movie is that ‘hierarchy and rigid gender benefits nobody’. Through a language lens, greater thought and planning needs to be given to ensuring neither metaphorical ‘Barbies’ nor ‘Kens’ feel excluded, under-represented, or devalued in the real world’s linguistic and semiotic landscapes.

Image from a university website

“An amazing student experience awaits you!” – “a multicultural vibrant experience” in a “stunning landscape” covered by “year-round sunshine.”

These phrases do not come from a tourist brochure, but the websites of Australian universities. They are accompanied by stunning images of urban or natural landscapes and aim to attract international students.

International education is often hailed as a way to keep economies growing as higher education has shifted towards a commercialized model. However, the efforts to increase enrolment numbers are also accompanied by worries that in the haste to attract more students, the admission requirements – in particular that of English language proficiency – are lowered.

Gatekeeping

Countries built on immigration are looking to recover the immigration loss caused by the pandemic years and the ensuing border restrictions. A new proposal to overhaul the Australian visa system has attracted attention as the country is forecast to grow by 715,000 from 2022 to 2024.

International students are affected, of course, as student visas and possible immigration pathways attached to students visas are discussed in the report. In particular, the English language requirements for admission into university courses are recommended to be raised from a “low base” of Band 5.5 on the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) to be able to meet the language demands of the labour market after graduation.

We have addressed this deficit approach to international students before. Recent research by Ingrid Piller and I on university admission requirements found that English language proficiency requirements maintain exclusionary practices of international students by setting up the binary categories of tested and ‘inherent’ English language proficiency (read more about it here).

But how do universities reconcile these two opposing forces of, on the one hand, needing to attract international students for commercial reasons, and on the other, setting up linguistic requirements as a gatekeeping mechanism?

An idealized lifestyle

To answer this question, in my recently published paper at Higher Education Research & Development, I turned to university websites. I wanted to explore what role language plays in the admission process caught between these two opposing forces. And how does it affect the communication of English language proficiency requirements to prospective international applicants. The analysis went beyond looking at content and text and included the multimodal features of the websites: naming and positioning of webpages, the visuals accompanying the texts and, of course, the language use of the English language proficiency requirement webpages.

Image from a university website

I found that the language use, which ranged from highly formal to conversational, references the authority of the law, thus adds objectivity and authority to the requirements. The paper provides an analysis of how the generic features of legal language use are applied to the educational context and interact with marketing discourses.

The visuals on these webpages create a different effect, though.

They serve to depict an idealized student lifestyle to which English language proficiency is a vehicle. The pictures and videos on the websites analysed depict students engaging in various social situations and leisure activities such as shopping, eating out or engaging in activities at the beach. The participants in these activities are depicted in engaging in intercultural situations (indexed by looks of various ethnicities) and enjoying each other’s company, communicating with ease.

In reality, these are activities international students report to struggle with because of social isolation or the difficulty to use English in everyday situations. These visuals of ‘success’ legitimize the English language proficiency requirements, where participants become role models or protagonists in a video footage.

What effect does this representation have on the concept of English language proficiency used as an admission requirement?

A simplified English language proficiency and an accessible student experience

Firstly, English language proficiency gets simplified through the objectivity of simple numerical scores and the authority of legal discourse. After all, if the university policy states that an IELTS Band 6 is  adequate to study in English and the students have this level, they should have no problem with their studies or socialization – a view commonly held.

At the same time, the website visuals communicate a desirable student experience. This is both a misrepresentation of the language proficiency needed for further studies, which in fact all students need to develop, not just internationals, and the realities of the international student experience.

As much as we would appreciate “year-round sunshine”, we need to acknowledge that the weather in Australia is more nuanced than that.

Likewise, university admission requirement communication should indicate that English language proficiency is not a fixed ‘product’ described by the applicant’s IELTS score but rather a process, and acknowledge that discipline-specific language proficiency may need to be developed by all students during their studies.

References

Bodis, A. (2023). Gatekeeping v. marketing: English language proficiency as a university admission requirement in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2023.2174082
Bodis, A. (2021). The discursive (mis) representation of English language proficiency: International students in the Australian media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(1), 37-64.
Bodis, A. (2021). ‘Double deficit’ and exclusion: Mediated language ideologies and international students’ multilingualism. Multilingua, 40(3), 367-392. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2019-0106
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000689

Monika Bednarek (l), Annmaree Watharow (m), and accessibility assistant Susannah McNally (r) (Photo: Helen Caple)

Editor’s note: Language on the Move has recently entered into an informal collaboration with the Sydney Corpus Lab, with mutual support and sharing of information and resources. The Sydney Corpus Lab aims to promote corpus linguistics in Australia and has a special interest in bringing together corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis across different contexts. In this post, we feature a recent collaborative project of researchers in the lab.

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Annmaree Watharow, Monika Bednarek, and Amanda Potts

***

‘What’s in a name?’, we ask, knowing that names matter. Respect matters. So, the question ‘how should people who live with disability be identified?’ becomes a question that speaks to selfhood.

I (Annmaree) have lived with disability for decades, also with the changing tides of identifiers – both how I personally thought of myself and how I was regarded by others. So much Othering in the language, from ‘retard’ and ‘deafie, dumbie’ at school to ‘the deaf one’ at uni. I’ve been ‘disabled’, ‘with disability’ and more recently, ‘living with disability’. When I write, I use ‘person with disability’ or ‘person living with deafblindness’, but honestly, I would rather be ‘a deafblind woman’. For me, the disability which affects communication, access to information and mobility is so intertwined historically and functionally with myself, that we cannot be separated. My experience isn’t the same for many others with disability, and not everyone identifies as having a disability or being disabled or living with disability. When linguists Monika Bednarek and Amanda Potts asked me onboard their project analysing Australian newspapers, I jumped out of my comfort zone to join in looking at how the media is navigating the identifiers of disability, and by extension respect and inclusion.

The difference between identity-first and person-first language – sometimes also called condition-first or people-first language – is key. In the context of disability, identity-first language involves putting the disability first, i.e. using the adjective disabled in front of a ‘human’ noun. Examples include a disabled woman, disabled Australians, a disabled child, disabled people. In contrast, person-first language places the ‘human’ noun – the person – first, and this person-reference is then followed by references to the disability. Different formulations are possible here, for example a woman who has a disability, a man living with disability, children with disabilities, a person with a disability.

This distinction is relevant to a range of identity categories, including disability, obesity, autism, mental illness, substance-abuse, and others. The relative merits of the two different practices are at times hotly debated and there are individual and impairment-specific preferences. It is therefore always best to ask, as Evan Young writes, how people want to be referred to. If it’s not possible to ask someone their preference, Media Diversity Australia’s Disability Reporting Handbook recommends person-first language.

Given these recommendations, how have Australian newspapers actually used these two practices? To find out, we analysed over 22,000 articles from The Australian, The Age and the Herald-Sun over a period of 20 years (from January 2000-December 2019). We chose these three newspapers to include Australia’s generalist national newspaper as well as the metropolitan broadsheet and the tabloid newspaper with the highest average readership level. News stories had to include at least one mention of one of the following terms: “disabled”, “with disability”, “with disabilities”, “with a disability”, “with a mental disability”, “with mental disabilities”, “with a physical disability”, “with physical disabilities”.

Our first interest here is in identifying the ‘human’ nouns that occurred with identity-first and person-first language. We found a large overlap, with most of the following categories identified as frequent and significant in both structures:

• General: people, person, someone
• Adults and children (including family terms): child, man, woman, girl, boy, kid, adult, son, daughter
• National/regional identity: Australian, Victorian
• Role labels: veteran, student, athlete, worker, pensioner, passenger, resident, client

These nouns may occur as singular (child) or plural (children) forms, including possessives (child’s, children’s).

Figure 1: Appearance of identity-first and person-first forms in 3 Australian newspapers over 20 years, normalised to frequency per million words per year.

Figure 1 plots how these occur within the texts in our dataset over time to see if anything has changed in the last 20 years (here retrieved using regular expressions written to capture these particular human noun labels).

Figure 1 demonstrates that, with the exception of 2001, person-first forms have been the preferred strategy in our corpus for the past 20 years, appearing roughly 1.5 times as often as identity-first forms between 2000 and 2009. However, the second half of our corpus shows a notably sharp uptick in the appearance of person-first forms. Since 2014, person-first language is four times as frequent on average compared identity-first language, which conversely seems to be undergoing a slow but steady decline.

We also analysed relevant uses of identity-first and person-first language in the sentences in which they were contained. The details of this analysis are available here. Overall, we found many similarities between the two practices, and identified multiple negative or otherwise problematic usages across both, including those that construct a social pathology discourse around disability. It is important for news professionals to be aware of how people want to be referred to, but also pay attention to how such references are used. This will allow moving beyond problematic, stereotyped or stigmatising media representations.

To help in this endeavour, Media Diversity Australia’s reporting handbook identifies several golden rules to improve media coverage. The most important of which is to ask individuals and communities what their preferred identifier is, as there’s no one size fits all identifier. For example, someone living with co-occurring sight and hearing loss (like myself) may identify as a deafblind person, a person with deafblindness, a person with dual sensory impairment, a blind person with hearing loss, a Deaf person with low vision, or simply as someone getting old. Disability is complex and diverse, and part of inclusion means paying attention to identity and identifiers.

***

Dr Annmaree Watharow (MD, PhD) is a Lived Experience Fellow with the Centre for Disability Research and Policy at the University of Sydney. Her first book Improving the Experience of Health Care for People Living with Sensory Disability: Knowing What is Going on was published in February 2023.

Monika Bednarek is Professor in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, and the author of several books and multiple other publications on news discourse, including the co-authored Multimodal News Analysis Across Cultures (CUP, 2020) and The Discourse of News Values (OUP, 2017). She also leads the Sydney Corpus Lab.

Dr Amanda Potts is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University. Her specialism is in corpus-based critical discourse analysis of public and professional communication. Her main interest is representations of ideology and identity, most recently in media discourse, medical communication, and language of law.

Reference

Potts, A., Bednarek, M. A., & Watharow, A. (2023). Super, social, medical: Person-first and identity-first representations of disabled people in Australian newspapers, 2000–2019. Discourse & Society, doi:10.1177/09579265231156504 [open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/labelling-people-with-disability-in-australian-newspapers/feed/ 2 24752 https://languageonthemove.com/hallyu-and-korean-language-learning/ https://languageonthemove.com/hallyu-and-korean-language-learning/#comments Mon, 17 Apr 2023 06:20:11 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=24714 LI, Jia & HE, Bin, Yunnan University

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‘The Glory’, a Korean drama, has ranked the top among the ten most watched TV and films since its release on March 10, 2023 on Netflix. The Glory has received 1.82 billion views on Weibo, the second largest Chinese social media platform at the time of writing this blog. Chinese youths, the largest group of Weibo members, are enthusiastic about discussing the plot, sharing their memes about this drama, and picking up popular terms for fandom communication.

Over the past two decades, Korean cultural products such as dramas, movies, music and dance, food, cosmetics etc. have gained worldwide popularity, and the global spread of Korean culture is known as Hallyu or Korean Wave (한류). Hallyu has been promoted by the South Korean government as cultural diplomacy and soft power projection since the 1997 financial crisis. The global promotion of Hallyu turns out to be a huge success. There are about 51.74 million population in South Korea, but the number of Hallyu community members reaches over 156 million people across the globe. China constitutes over half of the fan community with over 86 million.

As Hallyu emerges as a global cultural consumption among young people particularly in China, learning Korean has rapidly carved out a niche market for China’s youth to craft their subjectivities and produce bundles of skills. Mr. Bin He, a postgraduate student at Yunnan University under the supervision of Professor Jia Li, has conducted an ethnography with four Chinese university students on how relevant practices and discourses socialize Chinese youths to align themselves with learning Korean through self-study and out of class channels.

Even though China has the largest number of students learning English as a compulsory course, Chinese youths do not necessarily see English as the only source for empowerment and upward mobility. Chinese students who are economically and linguistically under-privileged find it more useful and easier to learn to speak ‘small languages’ (as we previously discussed here and here). This is exactly what happened to Bin’s participants who major in English but found it more desirable and promising to invest into learning Korean and dreamed of taking up Korean-related jobs.

Performing cool posture

Chinese youths develop their initial incentive to learn Korean because of their desire to get close to their Korean idols and their orientation to be part of a Korean-oriented consumption style. The digitization between China and South Korea facilitates such transnational communication. By subscribing to a paid app (about 5 $) per month, Chinese youths can get in contact with their Korean idols by listening to their voices or reading their updates online on a daily basis. They also choose to spend about 20$ collecting a Korean album imported from South Korea to show their distinct cultural taste.

Ming’s Weibo post

Their affective attachment to the Hallyu community gets closer through their interactions with other Hallyu fans on public and private social media platforms. Ming, one of Bin’s participants, has been learning Korean by himself for over six years. Like many Hallyu fans, Ming has developed basic Korean proficiency by watching Korean dramas and variety shows and listening to Korean songs. To test his Korean proficiency and to enhance his reading competence, Ming took up a volunteer job translating Korean idols’ stories into Chinese on Weibo for Chinese fans to keep updated with their idols. In addition to being recognized as a legitimate member of the Hallyu community because of his Korean proficiency, Ming also likes to share his consumption of Korean lifestyle on Weibo.

The screenshot captures Ming’s enjoyment with his friends drinking 참이슬 (“Chamisul”), the most popular brand of Korean liquor that frequently appears in Korean dramas, TV series, and variety shows. 참이슬 is recontextualized as symbolic source styling himself as someone cool and authentic. Using English ‘talk with’ indicates both modernity and the imagined engagement with the Korean world as Ming told us in interview: “感觉喝着烧酒，仿佛喝着烧酒就置身于韩剧中。” (“I feel like drinking soju, it’s like I’m physically in a Korean drama while drinking soju.”)

Consuming desire

Longing is one of the most featured themes in Korean dramas. The filming locations of hit Korean dramas are often promoted as must-go destinations for Chinese tourists travelling to South Korea. For Chinese youths who are living and studying in China, love stories constitute an important part of their romantic imagination as reported by Fang, a Chinese female university student: “想去首尔学习生活，去看看电视剧里出现的各种场景。” (“I dream of studying and living in Seoul. I want to visit the featured locations that appear in Korean dramas.”

Fang’s post

As someone who was born and brought up in the hinterland, Fang has grown up with the imagination of the sea, and the sea is often depicted as semiotic potential for romance in Korean dramas. Fang expressed her sense of attachment to 갯마을 차차차 (Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha), a romantic story in a small coastal village. She posted a moment on her Chinese social media in Korean: “아~듣기만 해도 바다 냄새 맡은 것 같애” (“Wow～ Just listening [to the song in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha] I feel like the smell of the sea”).

Fang’s sense of enjoyment and desire is also expressed by her semiotic and linguistic choices. Using tilde ‘～’ after ‘wow’ (아) emphasizes her desire and longing. The choice of using Korean indexes her sense of feeling distinct and unique compared to her Chinese peers who might understand English but who are unlikely to be able to read Korean.

Crafting a niche in learning Korean

Ad for Korean online classes

Both Ming and Fang started to learn Korean online through various apps after they had been exposed to Hallyu for some time. Their desire to seriously invest in learning Korean took a clearer form when they saw an ad for online classes:

Why learn a small language
Korean

• The most accessible second foreign language. You will be surrounded by Korean from the moment you turn on your app.

• There are about 70% of Chinese words in Korean. Korean is the language that sounds like ancient Chinese. Chinese students learning Korean do not start from zero.

• Cheap tuition fee for overseas study. The best choice for the working-class family.

• Advanced educational system with the combination of the East and the West and world-leading IT shipping industry, mass communication, e-sports etc. All of these advantages can provide Korean learners with more opportunities.

In contrast to the way Chinese youths learn English, learning Korean has been discursively constructed as ‘accessible’, ‘easy’, ‘affordable’ and ‘advanced’. This promotion discourse is particularly attractive to those who cannot afford to travel to Western countries and who are fed up with the exam-driven learning style in English. As confessed by Ming, “我就是不知道为什么我对好莱坞电影、美剧不感兴趣，我想可能是讨厌英语总是考试吧” (“I just don’t know why I didn’t have any interest in watching Hollywood movies or American TV series. I guess it’s because I was tired of taking English exam.”)

Feeling cosmopolitan

After two years of formal training at a language school, Ming decided to take the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK), and pursue her master’s degree in South Korea after her graduation from an English department in China. When she prepared her application documents, she worked as an English tutor for a Korean family where she taught two children English in Korean. Because of her capacity in Korean, Fang was able to communicate with the Korean mother about her children’s English performance, which in turn facilitated her Korean oracy. Over two years, Fang used the money she earned by working as an English teacher to pay for her Korean language test and tuition fee for Ewha Womans University.

Fang’s chat

In September 2022, Fang started her postgraduate study online due to the restricted travel policy and the Covid-19 pandemic. Fang was eager to go to South Korea and socialize with local people to fulfill her Korean dream. While doing her online classes, she liked to share with her WeChat friends her Korean learning experiences.

The image in Fang’s chat shows the official promotion image of her Korean university with the blooming cherry flowers and one of its famous buildings. By re-posting this world-famous university, Fang also displays her privileged access to advanced education in Seoul, a cosmopolitan city with all her imagination for study and lifestyle in South Korea, as commented by her post “나한테 이게 학교아냐 자유다” (“To me, this is not only a school but also freedom.”) It is worth noting that Fang’s choice of studying in South Korea is partly due to her unwillingness to follow a planned life trajectory by working as an English teacher in her hometown like her peers. Despite her parents’ disagreement with her decision, Fang gave up working as an English teacher and chose to take the risk of investing into an unknown future with Korean.

Becoming entrepreneurial

Apart from desire and cosmopolitanism, Hallyu also displays a strong embodiment of neoliberal discourse upon individuals. Both Ming and Fang have been nurtured by entrepreneurial discourses while exposing themselves to Hallyu. Self-entrepreneurial ethos prevails in many Korean songs, books, and movies. Growing up with Hallyu for over 10 years, Chinese fans have witnessed the ups-and-downs of their idols and have been encouraged by their positive and never-give-up spirits, as Ming shared: “一直喜欢她(Taeyeon),我能从她身上看到许多积极的能量，情绪低落的时候，我就会听听她的歌或是刷刷她舞台表演的视频。” (“I’ve been one of Taeyeon’s fans. I can sense her positive power. When I’m feeling down, I would like to listen to her songs or watch her dancing performance.”)

Ming recalled his struggling experiences when he prepared for his postgraduate entrance exam. For over a year, Ming had to fight alone given that most of his classmates decided to look for a job and very few people including his parents understood his emotional struggles. By listening to Taeyon’s songs, Ming felt understood and comforted. Ming drew strength from witnessing Taeyon’s confrontation with suicide. Taeyon’s re-fashioning herself as someone overcoming her depression became a mental power for Ming to draw from in his own struggles in a competitive and stressful society.

Fang’s post about her Korean readings

Self-regulated and self-enterprising discourses are often circulated on Fang’s social media. Apart from signing up for a gym club and following a healthy lifestyle, Fang also likes to share her reflection on reading Korean novels. The caption about the images of the books she’s reading says: “One section a day; 43 days to finish the book; a story book on life experiences for the youth.”

By purchasing imported reading materials from South Korea, Fang said that she could kill two birds with one stone: enhancing her Korean reading capacity while enriching her life experiences. The philosophical statements of life experiences in the book are mainly self-enterprising and self-driven as indicated by her underlined notes like “너에게 주어지는 기대에 합당한 자기관리를 시작해” (“Start taking care of yourself and meet your expectations”) or “값진 자아 반성 시간” (“the valuable time of self-reflection”).

Navigating between freedom and precarity

Language learning in the digital economy is not problem free. Despite their aspiration to manage their life trajectory through neoliberal promises, Chinese youths find themselves constantly navigating between their desired freedom and structural constraints.

One of the problems that hinder their desire to invest in learning Korean is their lack of time. Chinese youths keep their strong connection with Hallyu but they find it hard to keep learning Korean as learning a language requires consistent and systematic devotion. As English majors at university, they are kept busy by taking exams and getting various certificates to enhance their employment prospects. Two of Bin’s participants imagined that they would have more time for themselves to pick up Korean after they started to work as English teachers in future.

For those who squeeze time and save money to take the TOPIK, their devotion to learning Korean may suffer from anti-Hallyu sentiments due to the diplomatic disputes between China and South Korea. Over the past three decades, the surge of Hallyu has also coincided with several waves of anti-Hallyu movements in China. Ming’s diligence and persistence in learning Korean is not recognized but misunderstood by populist nationalists as “媚韩” (literally, “flattering South Korea”), meaning betraying China and showing allegiance to South Korea.

Publicity shot of Korean star Taeyeon

For Fang who is receiving her master’s degree in South Korea, she is confronted with high living expenses in Seoul and thinking of returning to China to settle down. However, when it comes to her future employment prospect in China, Fang seems to lack of confidence. For one thing, she does not think she can compete against ethnic Korean Chinese for a job position in teaching Korean to Chinese students. For another, her master’s degree in TKSOL is not as desirable as an English major to secure an English teaching position.

By the time of writing up this blog, two of Bin’s participants had to give up learning Korean because of their overwhelming workload and new identity as English teachers. Only Fang and Ming still kept learning Korean. As noted, Fang is doing her master’s degree in South Korea, and Ming has just got a job offer from a Chinese multinational automotive subsidiary targeting the South Korean market. After several months of training, Ming will be sent to South Korea to work for this Chinese company in South Korea.

This study has provided a nuanced understanding of Chinese youths’ Korean language learning experiences in the context of emerging Asian pop culture and digitization. Chinese youths’ learning of Korean is not driven by pragmatic pursuits or academic pressures, but largely rooted in their desire to be part of the Hallyu community. Growing up with Hallyu and learning Korean opened up new spatial and affective imaginations for them to capitalize on their performance and cultural consumption that traverse national boundaries in our digital age. Despite having access to Hallyu and learning Korean through new technological affordances, their pursuit of Korean-related subjectivities gets inculcated with the affective facets of language learning activities rooted in the neoliberal logic of self-management, human capital development and surging populist nationalism.

Related content

Li, J. (2020). Foreign language learning for minority empowerment? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/foreign-language-learning-for-minority-empowerment/
Li, J. (2021). Esports are the new linguistic and cultural frontier. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/esports-are-the-new-linguistic-and-cultural-frontier/
Li, J. (2021). Peripheral language learners and the romance of Thai. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/peripheral-language-learners-and-the-romance-of-thai/
Ma, Y. (2020). Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/empowerment-of-chinese-muslim-women-through-arabic/

(Image credit: Pexels)

Editor’s note: How do children from minoritized backgrounds experience their exclusion from equitable media representation? New research by Adolé Akue-Dovi sheds light on this question from the perspective of Black German children. This post introduces key findings of the study and examines racism in children’s media more broadly. It is co-authored by Adolé Akue-Dovi and one of the supervisors of her Master’s thesis, Liesa Rühlmann.

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Adolé Akue-Dovi & Liesa Rühlmann

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As a child, I (Adolé) loved listening to detective stories to fall asleep to. One of my favorite was a series called TKKG about four teenage detectives. However, as I got older, I realized that there were hardly any non-white characters on the show. In the rare instances where they appeared, they were usually suspects or otherwise portrayed negatively.

From childhood passion to research topic

The radio drama TKKG has been running since 1981 and continues to be highly popular, currently comprising 225 episodes.

The first 100 episodes (produced between 1981 and 1996) continue to be available in the “TKKG Retro-Archive” on streaming services and are consumed by more than 80,000 listeners a month on Spotify alone. This demonstrates the on-going popularity even of these older episodes. Especially in these first episodes, violent, sexist, and racist language was used.

How do Black children and youth perceive racism on TKKG?

In debates on racism in children’s media, radio drama is largely overlooked, despite its popularity. Therefore, Adolé’s research asked: How do Black children and youths perceive the reproduction of racist stereotypes on TKKG?

The four TKKG detectives

Four Black German children and adolescents between the ages of eight and thirteen participated and listened to three short scenes from three TKKG episodes published between 1981 and 1984. The group discussion showed that those who are affected by racism notice it at an early age and may already experience injuries.

Key findings

First, the participants were able to identify racist stereotypes; some explicitly (“Well, he’s probably a racist”), others implicitly (“He was mean”). Even though some of the interviewees do not seem to have a language for racism yet, they still notice unequal treatment.

Second, the interviewees, especially the two older boys, related the content of the scenes to their own reality and made connections to their experiences of racialization. Third, the participants gave explanations for racist practices. They provided rationalizations for why some characters act racist and why some characters are racially discriminated against.

Media representations need to change to change Black children’s experiences

The research shows that we need more critical examination of racist representations and language in children’s media.

Publishers, educational institutions, and carers all have a responsibility to keep all children safe from harm. Therefore, an essential step is to educate oneself and learn about racism. German society is not as white, heterosexual, able-bodied, and monolingual as normalized in the media. All children must feel represented in a positive way and have access to role models or inspirational figures who look like them.

Augsburg Research Award for Intercultural Studies

The message of Adolé’s research has been well-received and was honored with the 2021 Augsburg Research Award for Intercultural Studies. The award recognizes outstanding achievements by early career researchers whose research deals with diversity in Germany.

About the Authors

Adolé Akue-Dovi is a doctoral researcher at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Liesa Rühlmann recently completed her joint PhD at Macquarie and Hamburg universities. Together they teach seminars on Critical Race Theory in education, have contributed to a conference, and are working on joint publications.

Related content

• Bodis, Agnes. (2017). International students and language: opportunity or threat? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/international-students-and-language-opportunity-or-threat/
• Greenbank, Emily. (2017). Refugees in the media: Villains and victims. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/refugees-in-the-media-villains-and-victims/
• Piller, Ingrid. (2021). Securing the borders of English and Whiteness. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/securing-the-borders-of-english-and-whiteness/
• Roche, Gerald. (2020). Indigenous language denialism in Australia. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/indigenous-language-denialism-in-australia/
• Smith-Khan, Laura. (2019). Debating refugee credibility. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/debating-refugee-credibility/
• Tetteh, Vera Williams. (2010). Voices of African-Australian Youth. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/voices-of-african-australian-youth/

Reference

Akue-Dovi, Adolé. (2022). Kindermedien und Rassismuskritik. Wie Schwarze Kinder die Reproduktion von Rassismus in TKKG-Hörspielen wahrnehmen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38395-4.

The South China-Laos-Thailand region with the new railway line (Source: South China Morning Post)

Language learning through watching films and playing videogames is a new trend. This kind of informal language learning differs significantly from language learning in the classroom or in immersion contexts.

Language learning through media brings new languages to the fore that have not been widely learned in the past, and it is particularly marginalized speakers of peripheral languages for whom media provide new language learning opportunities.

Here, I will illustrate mediated language learning with the example of the Thai language learning by two groups of people marginalized in China: international students from Laos and ethnic minority youths with a Zhuang background. Both Lao and Zhuang are minor peripheral languages in the global linguistic order. And both are closely related to the Thai language.

My account here draws on the work of my students Tingjiang Ge (葛婷江), Yifan Man (满怡帆), and Xinyao Li (李欣瑶).

Students from Laos learning Chinese through Thai

Some of Van’s favorite Thai-medium Chinese dramas on her mobile

Laos is a land-locked country surrounded by China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. The recently opened railway from its capital, Vientiane, to Kunming in China will transform it from land-locked to land-linked, as part of China’s ambitious 5,500-km trans-Asia railway. This material link between Laos and China is further reinforced by an increasing number of scholarships awarded to students from Laos to study in China.

However, despite needing to achieve Chinese language proficiency at HSK-4 level for admission, many students from Laos still lack the Chinese proficiency needed to thrive in their subject learning.

To overcome these difficulties, many of them turn to Thai for their Chinese language learning. Sounds counterintuitive? Well, it is not.

To begin with, Thai is an easy language for Lao students because the two languages are mutually intelligible, there are only slight differences in the scripts of the two languages, and Thai media play a prominent role in Laos.

Second, there are many Chinese language learning resources for Thai speakers but few for Lao speakers.

Combine these two facts and it is obvious how Thai can facilitate Chinese language learning for students from Laos. Thai allows them to use translation apps to check the meaning of Chinese vocabulary, to use textbooks aimed at Thai learners of Chinese, and – the most popular option – to watch Chinese dramas with Thai subtitles.

Becoming a producer of Chinese-themed Thai language content

The story of Van is particularly impressive. Like many of her Lao peers, Van gave up her university study in Laos and came to China to seek a more profitable future. The aspiration of most international students from Laos is to return to Laos after their studies in China, and to find a steady job in a Chinese company there.

One of the main characters in Van’s Chinese-themed Thai-language novel

Van’s aspiration is different: she wants to become an entrepreneurial writer producing Chinese-themed novels for the Thai market.

Since she was very young, Van has loved reading Thai novels and watching Thai dramas. This also exposed her to many novels and dramas translated from Chinese into Thai, long before she even started to learn Chinese.

As her knowledge of Chinese language and culture has blossomed, she has started to write her own fiction. Van’s writing has strong elements of Chinese fantasy and romance but is written in Thai. The reason she has chosen Thai instead of Lao as the medium of her writing lies in the larger size of the Thai-language market and the greater technological sophistication of the Thai-medium online space.

Through her years of exposure to different transnational social media, Van today markets her writing on all major Thai-medium reading apps and has already gained a loyal following of over 2,000 Thai readers.

Chinese students learning Thai through Zhuang

Thai media content is not only attractive to youths from Laos but also those from China. It is particularly the Boys’ Love genre that is hugely popular. While negative attitudes towards same-sex relationships and queer identities persist in China, the opposite is true in Thailand. The Boys’ Love genre centers on romantic relationships between male characters. Thai media thus introduce Chinese youths to a broader range of gender and sexual identities and help to promote gender and sexual diversity. A good example for the popularity of the genre comes from the Boys’ Love actor Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana, also known as Saint, who has over 1.1 million Chinese followers on Weibo,

A scene from “I told sunset about you” – its potential as a language learning resource is obvious

Ban, a Zhuang minority student from Funing, a border town in Yunnan between China and Vietnam, is one of those Chinese fans of Thai dramas. When she started to watch Thai dramas as a teenager out of curiosity for the “exotic” culture of Thailand, she was surprised to discover that the Thai language is quite similar to Zhuang.

This similarity – coupled with the informal exposure through her prolific drama watching – led her to quickly develop proficiency in Thai.

Her proficiency in Thai proved a huge asset when Ban graduated from university and could not find a job suited to her degree in business administration. It was her Thai that helped her secure a position and she now works as a business translator for an international company in Guangzhou.

Transnational Thai media

The popularity of Thai dramas in China has not been lost on Thai producers. Boys’ Love dramas increasingly include Chinese content to reach further into the huge and profitable Chinese market.

A student from the China-Laos Friendship Nongping Primary School on the Lane Xang EMU train of the China-Laos Railway (Source: Xinhuanet)

The drama “I Told Sunset about You” is a case in point. The plot centers on the romance between two boys preparing for university admission by taking Chinese language classes. The story is driven by their joint language learning focusing on key words all involving the Chinese word 心 (xin; “heart”).

This plot is not particularly far-fetched as the Chinese language has indeed become a commodity in Thailand that may help individuals to gain upward mobility in study and at work. Aspects of Thai culture and Chinese language meld to produce a new form of consumer product that may generate profit.

Strengthening transnational relationships

The opening of the Laos-China segment of the trans-Asian railroad constitutes a major milestone for transnational connections between China, Laos, Thailand, and, eventually, beyond. These connections are mostly seen in economic and geopolitical terms. The links that individuals build through linguistic and cultural consumption are too often overlooked.

The concept of language learning for academic or employment advance is no longer sufficient to understand young language learners’ learning experiences. The language desire that is evident in the research presented here deserves further attention to capture how young and marginalized people without much linguistic capital in valuable languages like English and Chinese might be included in the regional integration between China and ASEAN.

Australia as a White nation has deep roots: the aim of this 1914 board game was literally “to get the Coloured Men out and the White men in” (Image credit: National Archives of Australia)

The typical Aussie is widely imagined as a white English speaker

Despite decades of multiculturalism, the typical Australian is widely imagined as a white monolingual speaker of English. Australians who do not look white regularly report that they are made to feel as if they do not belong and those with non-native accents sometimes avoid speaking in public so as to remain inconspicuous.

With almost half of Australians born overseas or having at least one parent born overseas and about a quarter speaking a language other than English at home, the perception of Australia as a nation of white English speakers is completely out of step with demographic realities. Why do so many people continue to hold on to this perception?

The historical roots of Australia as a white English nation

There are historical reasons that can explain how Australia came to be an Anglo nation. One of these is the pernicious fiction of terra nullius that wrote Indigenous people out of the imagined nation.

Another reason is the erasure of the British-Irish conflict that was imported into the penal colony but subsequently glossed over into an imagined homogenous “Anglo-Celtic” settler population. Black convicts, who accounted for 1-2 percent of transportees, were cancelled even more completely.

A third foundation lies in a restrictive immigration policy that was designed to exclude non-British settlers in the first half of the 20^th century and which was literally known as the “White Australia” policy.

These historical myths have deep roots, but do they still influence perception today?

The media teach us ways of seeing

Contemporary Australia is patently diverse. So why do we continue to see Australians who are not white and who do not speak English as their first and only language as perpetual outsiders?

Screenshot from “Border Security” showing officers in uniform

Many scholars have suggested that the media are partly to blame because they overrepresent white English speakers and underrepresent everyone else.

This may be true of news, current affairs, and fictional genres but there are some extremely popular genres that do show high levels of diversity. Reality TV is one such genre and none more so than the ever-popular Border Security.

Imagining Australia on Border Security

Since it was first aired in 2004, Border Security has provided Australians with “a fascinating insight into the daily workings of the thousands of officers who dedicate their lives to protecting Australia’s border,” as the show’s website explains.

Over the years, the show has attracted many millions of viewers and you are likely familiar with the format: each episode has immigration, customs, or quarantine officers face off with passengers who are suspected of constituting a security threat.

The basic story arc is always suspicion, investigation of the suspicion, and resolution.

My colleagues Hanna Torsh, Laura Smith-Khan, and I have been collecting these episodes because they provide us with a data source for our research in intercultural communication. They also help us answer the question why we continue to imagine the prototypical Australian as a white monolingual speaker of English.

Good guys look white and speak English

The heroes of Border Security are the officers. They are the official representatives of the Australian state, and their job is to keep Australia safe. Each episode shows them in action. As they are on the lookout for illegal activities and investigate the travelers they suspect of wrongdoing, the audience comes to identify with them. We watch with bated breath as they inspect luggage, interview passengers, and share their reasoning with the camera.

The proportions of people who look white and sound like native speakers of English among officers and passengers on “Border Security”

These heroes are not a representative cross-section of Australian society, though. In research just published in the journal Ethnicities, we found that the overwhelming majority of officers on the show look white (83%) and sound like native speakers of Australian English (90%).

Their uniforms further serve to mold them into a homogeneous group. And there is another aspect that enhances their uniformity: the striking diversity of their antagonists.

Suspects look diverse and sound diverse

In the logic of the show, the officers’ hero identity is predicated on their dodgy antagonists: all those travelers who are trying to sneak into Australia on a tourist visa but are really here to work illegally, who are hiding prohibited foods, or who are smuggling contraband.

These suspects provide a stark contrast to the officers. Not only are they under suspicion – sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly – to constitute a threat to Australia but their visual and aural identities are almost the inverse of the officers. 73% of suspects do not look white and 66% sound like non-native speakers of English.

In other words, white English speakers are overrepresented among the show’s heroes and underrepresented among the show’s antagonists.

Shifty characters

The patterns we found in our research go some way to explaining why we continue to imagine Australians as white English speakers. But these patterns are not only about quantitative representation.

Purely on numbers, Border Security shows an incredible diversity of people. More importantly, the show creates a pattern of moral judgement.

As the audience comes to understand Australian identity and threats to national security through the show’s stories, they come to see white English speakers as moral. Australia’s racial and linguistic others, by contrast, seem, at best, forever suspect and, at worst, guilty as charged.

Reference

Piller, I., Torsh, H., & Smith-Khan, L. (2021). Securing the borders of English and Whiteness. Ethnicities. doi:10.1177/14687968211052610. [available open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/securing-the-borders-of-english-and-whiteness/feed/ 94 23655 https://languageonthemove.com/indigenous-language-denialism-in-australia/ https://languageonthemove.com/indigenous-language-denialism-in-australia/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2020 23:15:02 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=23109 Gerald Roche (Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe University) and Jakelin Troy (Director, Indigenous Research, The University of Sydney)

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Source: Australian Museum

Editor’s note: This week (Nov 08-15) we are celebrating NAIDOC week. “NAIDOC” stands for “National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee.” The theme of this year’s NAIDOC week is “Always was, always will be” in recognition of the fact that First Nations people have occupied and cared for the Australian continent for over 65,000 years. Indigenous Languages have been a inextricable part of this history. Yet the value of Indigenous Languages continues to be denied, as Gerald Roche and Jakelin Troy show here.

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A New Era for Indigenous Languages?

Despite decades of research and public outreach demonstrating the importance of Indigenous languages, negative attitudes about the maintenance and revitalization of these languages persist among the general public in Australia. Here, we argue that we need to think about the tenacity of these negative attitudes as a form of denial, like climate denial or genocide denial. We also argue that now is a crucial time to confront that denial.

2019 was nominated by the UN as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and the years 2022-2032 have been nominated as the decade of Indigenous languages. These high-profile international mega-events seemingly promise a coming era of unprecedented attention to and support for Indigenous languages.

This promise extends to Australia. We joined in the International Year of Indigenous Languages, with numerous activities organized by the Department of Communication and the Arts. The Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies recognized 2019 as an “opportunity for all Australians to engage in a national conversation about Indigenous languages.”

Source: Australian Museum

Australia is the only country in the world that has a national schools curriculum that supports the teaching of all its Indigenous languages. ‘The Australian Curriculum Languages – Framework for Teaching Aboriginal Languages and Torres Strait Islander Languages’ provides for every school in Australia to teach one or more Australian languages—the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. In spite of this historic development in our education system, most Australians seem to be oblivious or, worse, hostile to Australian languages. Plans are now afoot to take part in the coming decade of Indigenous languages, but how will Australia support Australian languages?

Ongoing trends and recent events in Australia suggest that significant challenges lie ahead. The Third National Indigenous Languages Report, published in August this year, found that most of Australia’s Indigenous languages are highly ‘endangered,’ while only a small and declining number (currently 12) are considered ‘strong.’ Meanwhile, recent efforts to bolster the role of English, seen in new regulations enforcing English requirements for partner visas, have strengthened problematic associations between the English language and Australian citizenship. And most disturbingly, we continue to see the destruction of Indigenous heritage by both commercial and state parties.

All of this suggests that Australia must still confront massive social and political barriers if Indigenous languages are going to flourish. As the analysis below demonstrates, denial of the importance of Indigenous languages and the reality of their revitalization persists, and are expressed in public forums with surprising impunity.

Indigenous Languages and the Australian Public  

Source: Australian Museum

We undertook a preliminary analysis of comments made on five articles in the Conversation, published between August 2014 and July 2020; the data we analyze is available here. These articles focused on different aspects of the maintenance and revitalization of Indigenous languages in Australia. We collated a total of 49 comments from them.

We began by classifying the comments into negative, positive or both/neither regarding their view of Indigenous languages. We found that  21 (42.8%) of the comments were unambiguously negative in their appraisal, while 14 (28.5%) were positive; the remaining were either neutral or ambiguous.

We then examined the negative comments for recurrent themes that were used to justify and rationalize these views. We found five major themes: language revitalization is impractical; it harms Indigenous people and communities; revitalized languages are inauthentic; government support for Indigenous languages is inappropriate, and; English should be promoted instead of Indigenous languages. Each theme is examined in turn below.

Commentators suggested that it was “impractical,” “absurd,” or not “feasible” to maintain and revitalize Indigenous languages, or that these languages are “doomed,” and therefore any interventions were useless. Some commentators took a modified position, suggesting that the proposed methods, rather than revitalization itself, were impractical. One commentator attempted to demonstrate the impracticality of supporting Indigenous languages with a hypothetical scenario: a factory in an “Aborigine area” where all signage would have to be in English as well as “the various Aboriginal languages/dialects,” leading to an unsafe work environment.

Another theme was that maintaining and revitalizing Indigenous languages is harmful. Some suggested that supporting Indigenous languages has adverse economic impacts, primarily because English is the language of economic advancement: “English, in Australia must be the language of the classroom as it will be the key to the factory, office and other workplaces.” Others stressed that supporting Indigenous languages would isolate Indigenous people: from the rest of society, in remote locations, and in the past. Support for Indigenous language was associated with Indigenous people living “in the desert, isolated from mainstream society,” “condemned” to becoming a “living museum,” unable to “appreciate their links to people in other regions.” A variant of this argument was that providing support for language revitalization takes funds away from communities where Indigenous languages are strong.

Source: Australian Museum

Commentators also employed a ‘bootstraps’ argument, insisting that government interventions in Indigenous languages were inappropriate because communities should take sole responsibility for their languages. One commentator stated that “The real responsibility lies within each community to promote language usage,” while another emphasized the need for “a grass roots commitment within the community.” This point was often stressed by making comparisons with successful efforts of migrant communities to maintain their languages in Australia. These comments seemingly imply that if Indigenous communities need government support, it is because they are either unwilling or unable to maintain their languages themselves.

A fourth theme in the negative comments focused on issues of authenticity. It was argued that the languages, speakers, or the use of languages were, essentially, fake. Regarding revitalized languages, it was argued that, “We don’t know what the languages were really like,” and that we can “never know” their pronunciation. Not only were the languages described as fake, but it was also asserted that, “Aboriginal people are really English speakers.” Finally, the use of such languages is also deemed inappropriate in the modern world, in places that “are now completely covered in concrete, industry, and modern life.”

A final theme was that English should be prioritized. The importance of English was sometimes suggested to derive from its official status: “English is the official language in Australia.” More often, it was suggested that English ‘simply is’ the dominant language, and that prioritizing it is mere realism: “Living in Australia means speaking English.” One commentator also suggested that English is a “very rich language,” that contains “the words needed for modern, global life.” This suggests that Indigenous languages are, by contrast, ‘poor’ and have vocabularies unsuited to ‘modern, global life.’

Source: Australian Museum

Understanding Denial

All the positions outlined above constitute denial insofar as they are counterfactual. In contrast to what these commentators suggest, language revitalization is thriving in Australia. Many languages of the south east and south west of Australia have come back into active use after more than one hundred years of dormancy. One such language is Kaurna of the Adelaide Plains, not spoken for more than one hundred years when its community began to reconstruct the language from sparse memories and some historic documents, assisted by linguist Rob Amery. It is now a thriving language with its community using the language on a daily basis for casual and formal communication. It began with the community wanting to teach the language in their schools and this continues today.

Rather than harming Indigenous people, language revitalization is linked to increased wellbeing. In talking about the renewal of Kaurna and other languages, Kaurna educator Stephen Goldsmith says, “When we’re talking about the Aboriginal culture, we’re talking about the cultural heritage of every Australian…When people go into communities they start to understand the depth and the knowledge of Aboriginal people and how we operate as part of the environment.”

Although language revitalization requires commitment from the community, it also requires government support, in both policy and funding. And languages that have undergone renewal of their use as community languages are as real and authentic as any language. Finally, English is not Australia’s official language nor is it an Australian language; it is a language of Australia, imported like the many others that are now languages of Australia.

Source: Australian Museum

These are all established facts, accessible to anyone who cares to look. There are debates about details, but not basic truths. Therefore, if the comments we analyze are expressions of ignorance, it is willful ignorance. More than merely counterfactual, however, these arguments are also denialist in the sense that they aim to obstruct a course of action that is suggested by those recognized facts. In this case, they aim to justify and rationalize an unjust status quo that Indigenous people have persistently spoken up against.

The denialist arguments described above follow a common pattern shared with denialist efforts to suppress language revitalization elsewhere. However, they also exist in a uniquely Australian context, and an important aspect of this context is anti-Indigenous racism. A recent survey found that three quarters of Australians hold ‘implicit bias’ against Indigenous people, and the Online Hate Prevention Institute has tracked rising anti-Indigenous racism in Australian online space, particularly following this year’s Black Lives Matter protests.

We need to better understand the relationships between anti-Indigenous racism and the denialist positions described here.

If the UN decade of Indigenous language is going to truly help Indigenous languages in Australia flourish, it will be essential to understand both the extent of denialist sentiments, and the complex ways they interact with the wider political context. Broad public support will be essential to promoting Indigenous languages: to create a safe space where Indigenous people can undertake the difficult and emotional work of reclaiming their languages; to protect communities and individuals from backlash; to ensure that funding is secured and its use supported; and as an essential part of any political change within our democratic political system.

To win this support, we have to stop denying the existence of denial, try and better understand how and why opposition to Indigenous language revitalization exists, and explore how it might be countered.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

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Let me start with a brief warning: most of this rant is not about ethics but about legal compliance, and deals with the impact of the EU’s newly adopted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679. This may seem a bit odd at first, because law and ethics represent two fundamentally different orders of normativity, one a formal system of bureaucratically enforced rules, the other grounded in the self-regulation of conduct. Yet, engaging with this new bureaucratic-legal framework does require social scientists to take an ethical stance of some sort. This is particularly the case for those of us who do research in/on the public realm.

GDPR became operative on May 25, 2018. It sets a new standard for the technical and organizational measures that public authorities, business, and non-profit organizations must take to prevent data security breaches and to give individuals control over their own personal data. It states, for example, that personal data cannot be exported outside the EU, and that processing is only allowed if one can prove that the data were collected in accordance with one of the lawful grounds recognized by the regulation. When you are processing someone’s personal data, you should also let them know that you are doing so, by providing them a privacy notice.

GDPR caused quite a stir among anthropologists and social scientists, with certain voices bordering on the apocalyptic. A workshop at SOAS, for instance, had the title “Is anthropology still legal?” (Humphris 2018). Others were more optimistic and argued that the new regulation might help social science researchers to cast off the straitjacket of biomedicine (Sleeboom-Faulkner and McMurray 2018), or pointed out “regulatory provisos […] that accommodate for the specific requirements of ethnographic research” (Corsín Jiménez 2018: 1), creating room for ethnography’s exploratory character and recognizing the dialogical nature of its data-constitution practices.

This rant picks up one specific issue: the way GDPR engages with the ‘public sphere.’ Contrary to what many of us (including myself) initially naively assumed, the new directive does not provide a free ticket for processing personal data that are already publicly available. A crude lexicostatistic analysis of the regulation reveals that the adjective public systematically collocates with authorities, interest, and security. Public availability and public accessibility are occasionally mentioned, but as a basis for positing additional restrictions rather than as a license for processing. In short, GDPR is concerned with personal data, regardless of whether they were collected in a ‘public space’ or in the ‘public domain’. The GDPR’s restrictions on their use apply regardless. Yet, interpreting and applying GDPR does force us to critically interrogate what we precisely mean when we talk about public space. This is what this text purports to do. I will try to recover some of the polysemy hidden underneath the surface of this presumably monolithic category, and to this end, I will be tossing Goffman against Habermas (without claiming any credits as to the originality of such a move, see, for example, Sarangi 2011). Note that I am not interested, at least not initially, in distinguishing between ‘public place,’ ‘domain’, or ‘sphere.’ The underlying spatial metaphor that is present in all three of them refers “not [to] a thing but rather [to] a set of relations between things” (Lefebvre 1991: 83), and that is what matters at this point.

The intimacy of the public sphere

One anchoring point for theorizing the public sphere is Goffman’s well-known distinction, first advanced in The presentation of self in everyday life (1959), between front– and backstage. Frontstage is the arena where social actors act out the roles that are societally and institutionally expected from them, carefully controlling their performance in the knowledge that it will be evaluated by an audience of others. The backstage is the region where actors prepare for this role performance, where they can deviate from the script and engage in the performance of a more authentic self, unexposed to the public gaze. The notion of frontstage, then, is the one that is readily equated with the ‘public’ sphere (see, for example, Sarangi 2009). However, one should not forget that frontstage also inevitably refers to a constellation of people entangled with one another through co-presence (Goffman 1963). Co-presence occurs whenever social actors are aware that they are within each other’s perceptual range. It manifests itself in relentless mutual monitoring and in the reflexive self-regulation of one’s own conduct, in an attempt to regulate whatever information about ‘self’ and ‘other’ might be leaking through.

Do these pedestrians offer “publicly available data”?

If we look at it from this perspective, a large part of what we routinely gloss as ‘public’ suddenly acquires an unexpected intimate quality. Public conduct is not just a scripted role. It is a scripted role that we inhabit, and therefore it will always contains glitches, moments of uncertainty, and failures to meet expectations. These are highly intimate moments, and GDPR enforces respect for this intimacy. Nobody likes being caught on camera picking their nose, or arguing with their partner on the way to the supermarket. As a rule, GDPR prevents the processing of personal data collected during such ‘public’ performances of intimate conduct. The same rules apply as to other information which allows individual data subjects to be identified: You can only process personal data collected in a public place (for example, footage containing faces and/or voices) if you can demonstrate that processing is done based on one of the lawful grounds specified in Art. 6 (consent of the data subject, processing in the public interest, etc.). In a way, this makes perfect sense. The fact that someone engages in a certain kind of behavior in a publicly accessible space should not be taken to mean that it is up for grabs as data.

This new GDPR framework does not entirely prohibit Goffman-styled inquiries into how people navigate public spaces. Although it forbids processing personal data (photos, video footage, audio recordings) collected without permission from the data-subject, carefully anonymized field notes (which do not provide any clues as to the identity of the data subject) are still perfectly lawful. A good example is my earlier work on the various forms of practical geographical knowledge that Dar es Salaam commuters need for traveling from one part of the city to another (D’hondt 2009). As a rare instance of conversation-analytic research that does not use recordings of conduct, it combined a systematic interrogation of my own practical knowledge, as a user of informal minibus transport, with vignettes illustrating “noteworthy patterns of behaviour” (Iphofen 2015: 47) that I occasionally jotted down while on the move. As such, it represents a form of observational practice that, although not covert, elides the formal solicitation of consent (Iphofen 2015: ibid.). This practice can be questioned from an ethical angle, but under GDPR it does not pose a problem of legal compliance since no personal data are being collected. Dar es Salaam is a megalopolis of over four million inhabitants. Each day, literally hundreds of thousands of city residents rely on minibus transport for getting to work, school, etc. There is no way in which my fellow commuters whose conduct accidentally drew my attention could ever be identified from the short written notes that I entered in my notebook, let alone from the schematic descriptions of courses of action that ended up in the resulting publication.

Public, as in res publica

In The structural transformation of the public sphere (1962[1989]), Habermas describes how the aggregate of print media, coffee houses, lodges and reading clubs that spread through 18^th century Europe resulted in the formation of a new critical space, separate from the state, where individuals could interact and exchange ideas on public matters in a way that had never been possible before. Habermas’ account of this budding ‘public sphere,’ which mediates between the private life-world and the state apparatus, has subsequently been criticized from various angles. Later on, Habermas (1981) himself added that in modern mass-societies, the available space for rational-critical debate is gradually contracting, as clear-cut demarcations between the public and private, and between state and society, are eroded by bureaucratization and consumerism. Feminist scholars pointed out the policed nature of the public-private distinction and the pervasiveness of exclusionary mechanisms, while poststructuralists and postcolonialists called into question its monolithic character and insist on a plurality of public spaces (for a useful overview, see Koller and Wodak 2008). Still, the idea of a universally accessible common deliberative space has a strong normative presence in contemporary society. It is enshrined in Art. 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, on the freedom of expression and information. Social scientists are an integral part of this deliberative space, and instances of critical interventions that have transformed ongoing societal debates are manifold. Blommaert and Verschueren’s (1998) critical inquiry into the rhetoric of tolerance underpinning the 1990s debate on immigration in Belgium is a classic example of a study that fundamentally altered the structure of the debate it commented upon, by pointing out uncanny similarities between the discourse of far-right parties and of the self-declared tolerant majority. Arguing pro domo, I would say that my current ethnographic work on trial performance at the International Criminal Court (ICC; see, for example, D’hondt 2019) falls under the same category. Transnational legal orders, like the one epitomized by the ICC, exert a growing impact on national legal systems. However, the way in which the public exercise of authority by this transnational institution is negotiated in the court’s daily operation has never before been subject to critical scrutiny.

International forums like the ICC (but also the UN’s Universal Periodic Review or the UN Human Rights Committee, see Cowan and Billaud 2017, Halme-Tuomisaari 2018) are undeniably ‘public’ in the sense of Goffman, as the actors involved will always tailor their frontstage conduct to that of the other participants who are co-present (one might also add virtual audiences here, as many of these events are live-streamed). Still, one can sensibly argue that many of the restrictions on data processing mentioned in the previous section do not apply here, precisely because what transpires on these international forums is intrinsically connected to the deliberative space Habermas identified. Importantly, GDPR offers us a good starting point for developing such an argument.

GDPR formulates a set of general principles for personal data processing that apply universally. However, in addition it also specifies a number of ‘specific processing situations’ in which the application of these rules is legitimately curtailed (‘derogations’). It is up to the respective EU member states to specify the precise scope and content of these exemptions. In the national data acts through which the different member states implement GDPR, they must itemize the articles of the original GDPR that do not apply in these specific processing situations. Hence, GDPR Art. 89(2) stipulates that national legislations may provide exemptions for data processing “for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes.” Significantly, this article does not contain any provisions as to where the research in question is supposed to take place, and Recital 159 explicitly includes “privately funded research.” In fact, the only place in GDPR that explicitly mentions academia is Art. 85, on the freedom of expression. This article gives EU member states the responsibility to specify exemptions in order to “reconcile the right to the protection of personal data pursuant to this Regulation with the right to freedom of expression and information, including processing for journalistic purposes and the purposes of academic, artistic or literary expression.” Of course, the nature of these exemptions will slightly vary form one member state to another, but the overall effect of Art. 85 is a “redefinition of the social sciences on a par with journalism, characterizing their activities as in the public interest and their pursuits as in themselves valuable as academic knowledge” (Sleeboom-Faulkner and McMurray 2018: 23). Not surprisingly, the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council in 2017 advised that British universities should maximally exploit the derogations this article provides. Similarly, the European Association of Social Anthropologists explicitly insists that “ethnographic research [should be placed] within the special clause on ‘academic expression’ included in Article 85(2) of the GDPR [, … which] has been designed to guarantee the critical social value of humanities and social sciences research” (EASA 2018: 1).

It seems, then, that there are at least two sets of derogations that social scientists can invoke to legitimize their data processing: the research exemption (Art. 89) and the one that guarantees the freedom of academic expression (Art. 85). For those of us working in critical research traditions, this second exemption is particularly relevant and liberating. Although GDPR makes no mention of the public sphere as such, it nevertheless provides the necessary exemption social scientists require for participating in the shared deliberative space outlined by Habermas, guaranteeing their right to critically engage with ongoing societal debates and allowing data processing on the condition that it is necessary to execute that right.

Ethics, after all

As I anticipated at the start, this excursion into legal compliance finally takes us back to ethics. For the time being, GDPR is still in the process of interpretation, and we are still waiting for case law in order to find out where lines will be draw and how GDPR will eventually be interpreted. This is a moment of uncertainty, and there is a tendency among universities and funders to err on the side of caution.

The chilling effect of these new regulations is real. It should be clear, however, that GDPR, in fact, offers quite some maneuvering space to those of us who are working with public data. At this stage, it would be perilous for applied linguists and ethnographers to assume a quietist stance.

The most dangerous kind of censorship is self-censorship.

In the current circumstances this aphorism is more relevant than ever. As scholars, we should be prepared to defend the available space for critical intervention. Universities should be prepared to back its scholars in this, as this debate revolves around basic democratic principles. In the end, even going to court should not necessarily frighten us. After all, it is an opportunity to stand up for the values we believe in.

References

Blommaert, Jan, and Jef Verschueren. 2002. Debating Diversity. London: Routledge.
British Academy & ESRC. 2017. A British Academy and Economic & Social Research Council submission to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) call for views on the General Data Protection Regulation derogations.
Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. 2018. A Data Governance Framework for Ethnography. Madrid, CSIC.
Cowan, Jane K. and Julie Billaud, 2017. The ‘public’ character of the Universal Periodic Review: Contested concept and methodological challenge. In: Niezen, R. and M. Sapignoli (Eds.), Palaces of Hope. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp.106-126.
D’hondt, Sigurd. 2009. Calling the stops in a Dar-es-Salaam minibus: Embodied understandings of place in a drop-off routine. Journal of Pragmatics 41, no. 10 (2009): 1962-1976.
D’hondt, Sigurd. 2019. Humanity and its beneficiaries: Footing and stance-taking in an international criminal trial. Signs and Society 7 (3), 427-453.
European Association of Social Anthropologists. 2018. EASA’s Statement on Data Governance in Ethnographic Projects.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY, Doubleday.
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public Places. New York: Free Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1962 (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Polity.
Halme-Tuomisaari, Miia, 2018. Methodologically blonde at the UN in a tactical quest for inclusion. Social Anthropology 26 (4), 456-470.
Humphris, Rachel. 2018. Is anthropology still legal? Notes on the impact of GDPR. Birmingham, IRiS.
Iphofen, Ron. 2015. Research Ethics in Ethnography/Anthropology. European Commission, DG Research and Innovation.
Koller, Veronika, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent publics. In: R. Wodak and V. Koller (Eds.), Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1-17.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sarangi, Srikant. 2011. Public discourse. In: Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jef Verschueren (Eds.), Discursive Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 248-265.
Sleeboom-Faulkner, Margaret, and James McMurray. 2018. The impact of the new EU GDPR on ethics governance and social anthropology. Anthropology Today 34 (5), 22-23.

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Editor’s note: In this latest contribution to our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis, Sue Ollerhead, Shepi Mati, and Monica Hendricks ask whether laughter is the best medicine to deal with the hardships of the pandemic in multilingual South Africa. The call for contributions to the series continues to be open.

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South Africa’s hard lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic has hurt its poorest citizens the most (Image credit: Sue Maclennan)

Like many developing countries around the world, South Africa faces serious challenges in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. With one of the world’s largest disparities in living standards, the country is especially vulnerable to infection spread in its densely populated ‘informal settlements’ (some argue that the term ‘informal settlement’ is a sanitization of the harsh reality of shack settlements or imijondolo, a Zulu term meaning ‘a temporary house built from any material’).

The government’s swift imposition of a hard lockdown, enforced by the police and military troops, has already inflicted grave damage on the national economy and led to widespread hardship among the marginalized poor. Yet why is it that, despite having many reasons to despair, South Africans appear to be responding with humor to a situation that poses an existential threat?

One does not need to look very far in South Africa to find an amusing meme, video-clip or joke leveled at the Covid-19 crisis. Many citizens have taken to Twitter,  Facebook and Whatsapp to post parodies of prominent politicians, or cleverly worded puns, integrating two or more of South Africa’s eleven official languages with isiCamtho, a dynamic multilingual form spoken mostly by urban youth. Among Xhosa-speaking South Africans, the term lockdown has been transmuted into the homophone lokhwendala, meaning ‘an old dress’.

A Xhosa meme: People of Mazizini (a village in the Eastern Cape province), this is not an old dress (lokhwe – dress, endala – that is old) but a lockdown

Could it be that through “Xhosalising” the term lockdown, South Africans have been able to reframe the government’s draconian shelter in place strategy, which has seen 57 million people confined to their homes for seven weeks, the banning of liquor and tobacco sales and a heavy military presence, as a colloquial, rather pitiful object of satire, thereby diminishing its psychological power?

Some commentators suggest that using humor during a crisis allows South Africans to resist or reframe official government policies that they deem untrustworthy. Another particularly popular series of memes shared via Whatsapp parodies the regular official television addresses made by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, in which he updates the nation’s citizens about the country’s latest lockdown measures. While initially imposed for a two-week period, the government has had to extend the lockdown period at regular intervals, severely curtailing the way South Africans work, socialize, commute, and learn.

In this meme, originally published in Sesotho, and thereafter in isiXhosa the creator writes:  “At the end of April, if I hear “Fellow South Africans” I will switch off my TV and say I didn’t hear him.” The meme is a wry commentary on the fact that when Ramaphosa uses the English words “Fellow South Africans”, people should interpret them as a cue that further (and harsher) lockdown measures are imminent. The writer cynically suggests that switching off one’s radio or television on hearing these words may absolve them of their duty to obey further lockdown measures.

A Sesotho meme: On the 30 April, if I hear “Fellow South Africans” I will switch off my TV

When Ramaphosa appeared on television with his official spokesperson Khusela Diko to announce a third extension of the lockdown, bringing it to nine weeks in total, the public noted that the term “Fellow South Africans” had been replaced with the term “Dear compatriots”. Social commentators joked that this was a shrewd move on Ramaphosa’s part to hoodwink the nation into not turning off their television sets. The meme below is published in a mixture of isiZulu, English and isiCamtho.

Through including isiCamtho, the commentator comically reframes Ramaphosa’s official discourse into language frequently spoken by streetwise urban youth, thereby reducing his status from President to ‘one of the people’. This appropriation of official government communications resonates with the concept of radio trottoir or pavement radio, a term coined by Stephen Ellis in 1989 to refer to the popular and unofficial discussion of current affairs within a community. Radio trottoir has its roots in widespread oral traditions found across Africa.

On a more serious note, this meme could also be interpreted as a sociolinguistic commentary on the way in which language has been used for official communications during the pandemic in South Africa. Despite receiving much public praise for his management of the pandemic, Ramaphosa has also been criticized for the fact that his government has delivered most official communications about the pandemic in English. In this country of eleven official languages, English is often used as the primary language in state discourse, yet it is the first language of only 9 per cent of its population, comprising the largely wealthy, white upper-middle class.

Meme published in isiZulu, English and isiCamtho: Hey Khusela our people think I am a country bumpkin. I’m a smart guy from Soweto. They were waiting for “Fellow South Africans” so that they could switch off their TVs. I did a u-turn instead and said “Compatriots”

As the consequences of the pandemic are undoubtedly more likely to be suffered by the poor and marginalized living in shack settlements, many argue that official announcements regarding Covid-19 should be made in at least two African languages, including an Nguni language (alternately isiZulu and isiXhosa) or a Sotho language (alternately Setswana and Sesotho). There is widespread sentiment that those who do not have a strong command of English should not have to rely on second-hand reporting of crucial announcements in their home languages. Furthermore, the act of saying important things in any African language by leaders signifies that African languages matter, as well as the people who speak them.

In South Africa, issues around language choice and representation are inextricably linked to issues of race and inequality. In one of the most unequal societies in the world, where the white, predominantly English-speaking population continue to hold the majority of the country’s wealth, language use seen as favoring this population can cause division and even resentment, especially in times of heightened national crisis.

During these unprecedented times, public discourses play a powerful role in shaping the opinions and actions of a nation’s citizens. Among urbanized, mobile and digitally literate South Africans, radio trottoir appears to have harnessed the power of humor to stare down the social and material consequences of the Covid-19 crisis. Could memes go down in the archives as one of South Africans’ best defenses against a pandemic?

Reference
Ellis, S. (1989). Tuning in to pavement radio. African Affairs, 88 (352), pp. 321- 330. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a098185

Language on the Move

In mediated and digital communication, it seems today that we hear a myriad of public voices. Additionally, linguistic productions are not necessarily carefully edited and policed before they go public. One effect appears to be that formerly unmarked populations and their language practices are questioned in their position as ‘the normal people’ using ‘normal language’. They are no longer an unquestioned  hegemonic source of power. So-called ‘voices from nowhere’ (Gal & Woolard 2001) that once were able to pass themselves off as standard and neutral, find their social situatedness and privilege exposed. They have come to be seen for what they are: as being ‘from somewhere’, too.

Thus, new forms of public spaces have emerged in which the ‘normal’ is increasingly questioned. In this situation, formerly hegemonic populations adopt new discursive strategies of legitimation. To understand social and linguistic diversity, it is of paramount importance to examine such reconfigurations of social patterns and discourse relationships. This means to understand potentially new forms of establishing social hierarchies. And, as sociolinguistically minded academics, we also need to reflect on our own positions, ideologies, desires and activities in relation to societal publics and in contexts of academic publics.

How do traditional social and academic elites react to the exposure of their hitherto naturalized position of authority? What are the strategies of reproducing and legitimizing privilege employed by (formerly) hegemonic speakers? What is our role as academics and linguists in these new public spaces? Where do we tacitly (and maybe unwillingly) reproduce existing dichotomies? And what can we do in academia in practical terms to support marginalized voices in academic public spaces and beyond?

The November issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics on ‘The Sociolinguistics of Late Modern Publics’, guest-edited by Theresa Heyd and myself is devoted to precisely these questions and brings together scholars working on discourses of legitimation of socio-political elites in different cultural contexts and, secondly, focuses on academic notions of ‘publics’ and on authority in academic publics.

Susan Gal analyses the phenomenon of the ‘piggy-backing’ of discourses of social justice and humanitarianism by right-wing politicians and develops a differentiation of discursive moves that contribute to the enregisterment of authority in current political discourse. In addition to this analysis of authoritative discursive structures, two contributions add to our understanding of late‐modern public discourse as emotional regimes. Mary Bucholtz focuses on the affective construction of white fragility in US American late‐modern publics and examines discursive strategies of fragile white affects. Ana Deumert examines how white South Africans respond to being constructed as colonizers.

Jürgen Spitzmüller changes perspective by taking a meta‐disciplinary perspective on sociolinguistics. He proposes an explicit link between the analyzed phenomenon – public space – and the analyzing sociolinguistic actor. The allure of diverse and multilingual publics may rub off upon researchers of such spaces and endowing them with an aura of creativity or even subversiveness.

Finally, Ingrid Piller demonstrates that authority, ultimately, rests on pre-textual conditions. She shows that, in academic publics, publications in languages other than English, and publications by women and/or people of color, are seen as carrying little authority. One way to accord authority to marginalized voices is to reference them.

All in all, it is the aim of ‘The Sociolinguistics of Late Modern Publics’ to start a conversation about the complex pre-textual, affective and discursive strategies employed to maintain and challenge authority in contemporary discourse. How do you enact, challenge or simply observe authority in your everyday lives?

References

Bucholtz, M. (2019). The public life of white affects. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 485-504. doi:10.1111/josl.12392 [open access]

Deumert, A. (2019). Sensational signs, authority and the public sphere: Settler colonial rhetoric in times of change. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 467-484. doi:10.1111/josl.12377

Gal, S. (2019). Making registers in politics: Circulation and ideologies of linguistic authority. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 450-466. doi:10.1111/josl.12374

Gal, S., & Woolard, K. A. (2001). Languages and publics: The making of authority. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

Heyd, T., & Schneider, B. (2019). The sociolinguistics of late modern publics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 435-449. doi:10.1111/josl.12378 [open access]

Piller, I. (2019). On the conditions of authority in academic publics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 521-528. doi:10.1111/josl.12393 [unedited preprint available here]

Spitzmüller, J. (2019). Sociolinguistics going ‘wild’: The construction of auratic fields. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 505-520. doi:10.1111/josl.12383 [open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/the-sociolinguistics-of-late-modern-publics/feed/ 2 22155 https://languageonthemove.com/debating-refugee-credibility/ https://languageonthemove.com/debating-refugee-credibility/#comments Thu, 11 Jul 2019 03:01:31 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=21731

Manus Hospital often treats refugees (Image credit: ABC News, Natalie Whiting)

A growing body of literature across multiple disciplines attests to the importance of credibility in the bureaucratic processes for assessing refugee claims. This includes in my own research, exploring the experiences asylum seekers have in these processes, the published reasons of decision-makers and the guidelines aimed at managing their assessments.

However, this focus on whether we should believe people who seek asylum is also popular in media reporting and political discourse. For instance, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton recently commented that some refugees on Nauru who had fallen pregnant as a result of rape were “trying it on” by seeking medical transfer to Australia via new “medevac” legislation.

This comment is not exceptional but rather part of an ongoing commentary on similar cases. The 2015 “debate” involving “Abyan” (a pseudonym), a Somali refugee living in Nauru, was an earlier case that attracted heavy media coverage, and formed the basis of a case study included in my doctoral research and recently published in the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics and Language in Society.

Abyan was living in the small island nation of Nauru as part of the Australian government’s policy to exclude boat arrivals from being able to seek asylum in Australia. As part of this regime, she had been detained in a detention centre, had her refugee status claim assessed and was then relocated to open accommodation on the island. She approached medical services when she became unwell and when they discovered she was pregnant, she reported that she had been raped. After some delay, Australian authorities arranged for her to be transferred to Australia to access adequate medical assistance and potentially have a termination. After less than a week in Australia, the authorities returned her to Nauru via chartered jet, without her having had the termination, presumably to avoid legal action to prevent her removal.

The ministerial statement

These events and their repercussions were highly reported in the media. My analysis of a corpus of Australian journal articles from this period found that most reporting centred on what was presented as a “debate”, with the then Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, and Abyan as the two main participants. Their competing versions of the events often drew on two key documents: a media release from the Minister and a handwritten note from Abyan that was circulated by Australian advocates. Whose version of events readers should believe seemed closely tied to determining who could be considered the most credible speaker.

However, the way this reporting presented these and other key actors was problematic. By presenting Abyan primarily as a speaker and decision-maker the reporting gave the impression that she was somehow an equal individual debate participant, pitted against the Immigration Minister. This was aptly demonstrated by reporting reframing Abyan’s statement as her claiming that the Immigration Minister had lied, for instance by suggesting she said that his “description of events – backed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull – were false”.

I was troubled by the impression that was created by this “debate” as it appeared to ignore serious structural inequality and individual differences between the two supposed key participants. Could Abyan really have had an equal opportunity to present her side of events and be believed? This led me to more closely examine how communicative resources impact the way different social actors are able to communicate and present credible identities to their audience. In this analysis, I argued that far from being equal participants, the Immigration Minister and Abyan had unequal communicative resources on four different levels.

Abyan’s statement

First, they had different linguistic resources at their disposal to present an argument or version of reality that would be convincing and believable to their audience. I noted, for example, how the Minister’s press release used agent-free passive structures that backgrounded government or individual responsibility for Abyan’s movements to and from Nauru, thus distancing her traumatic experiences from government policy. These structures were largely replicated across the media reporting, suggesting their influence on the broader public discourse. In comparison, Abyan’s handwritten note entailed a series of reasonably basic structures sharing her experiences. English is not Abyan’s first language, and reporting suggests that her ability in English may be even more limited than the language in the note, meaning it may have been composed by somebody assisting her. This obviously limits the linguistic choices she had to engage in the “debate”.

Inextricably intertwined with their linguistic resources are the two actors’ identity resources: the way their language is heard and evaluated depends on how their audience perceives their speech and which version of events is accepted as truth. While the Immigration Minister and/or his policies may not be well liked by all Australians, he has a verifiable identity in the form of his name and history, and titles that mark him as an institutional insider: he is a Member of Parliament and Hon. (honourable). Abyan, on the other hand, is relatively anonymous: the public knows very little about her other than her age, gender and nationality. The elements of her experiences that are known do not necessarily lend support to her credibility: as both a refugee and as a woman who has experienced sexual violence, she falls into identity categories that are known to systematically attract discussion about their credibility.

The two also had obvious different material resources. The Minister’s communication was shared digitally, on an official institutional website with a stable URL, with government header, conventional font and formatting. This contrasts with Abyan’s handwritten note that appears on a page torn from a journal, dated 25^th December, and photographed sitting on a wooden table top. While the document resembles the genre of an asylum application statement, setting out her experience, this ironically may index a contested version of events, given that such applications attract credibility assessment, and its deviation from the expected norms of typed and printed forms may further harm its reception.

Finally and crucially, the difference in resources between the two speakers in most obvious when we consider the respective platform resources they have from which they can communicate. The Immigration Minister has ample opportunities to directly communicate with the broader community and media, through a number of means. A count of the larger corpus collected for this project identified at least eighteen occasions over a one-month period in which the Immigration Minister and his senior colleagues, including the Prime Minister, publicly commented on the case, including in radio and television interviews, official press statements and in Parliament.

Abyan’s platform is very different. The public have access to one handwritten note, provided to the media by Australian lawyers. For Abyan and other refugees and asylum seekers in Nauru and Manus Island (PNG) due to Australian policy, this very policy greatly limits the access they have to the Australian media and vice versa. The Government of Nauru has implemented changes to its visa regime to almost universally restrict Australian media from travelling to Nauru in recent years. The Australian Government has also legislated to limit those professionals who do have the opportunity to interact with refugees from being able to speak out publicly about their treatment, with penalties of up to two years’ imprisonment for breaches.

Behrouz Boochani received the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for his book about his experiences in Australian offshore refugee detention (Image Credit: ABC News)

This final point perhaps most vividly demonstrates the way in which those with power to control the dominant discourse seek to preserve this control. In this case, explicit legal and policy measures are implemented to control how journalists can access information about refugees and the refugees’ own ability to speak out via the media. This restricts challenges to the government’s preferred version of events – not only in the specific case of Abyan, but also in how this and other experiences contribute to the broader ongoing discourse on refugees and refugee-related policy.

However, discourse and its creation are never static. Those who have access to social media either directly or with the assistance of language brokers present a challenge to these types of efforts to control the dominant discourse. For example, an increasing number of refugees and asylum seekers self-advocate through platforms like Twitter, such as in the recent case of Saudi refugee, Rahaf Mohammed, who successfully attracted international attention and support when she was stranded in Thailand on her way to seek asylum in Australia. For some, having access to technology has also facilitated publishing in traditional media. This is the case for Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian refugee in Papua New Guinea, who frequently comments in the media regarding refugee rights, and wrote and published a book sharing his experiences, via messages written by smartphone, and has now been awarded one of Australia’s most prestigious literary prizes.

Still, even as potential platforms change, looking closely at the full range of communicative resources of individual actors helps uncover inequalities: not everyone has access to social media, or has the specific linguistic and communicative skills needed to advocate within a particular area, to a particular audience. The rise of social-media-based self-advocacy therefore presents an opportunity for a closer examination of the ways in which communicative resources are harnessed through non-traditional platforms, whose resources are most valuable in these areas and the implications this has for challenging dominant discourses.

References

Smith-Khan, L. (2018). Contesting credibility in Australian refugee visa decision making and public discourse. (Doctor of Philosophy), Macquarie University.
Smith-Khan, L. (2016). Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews. Language on the Move
Smith-Khan, L. (2019a). Communicative resources and credibility in public discourse on refugees. Language in Society, 48(3), 403-427.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019b). Debating credibility: Refugees and rape in the media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 42(1), 4-36.

The oil slick as seen from space (Source: Wikipedia)

The British decision to exit the European Union (EU) in 2016 came as a surprise to many. In the lead up to the referendum, nationalist discourses were successfully mobilized to promote a vote for the anti-globalisation campaign. Nationalism proved to have an ongoing appeal in our global world.

But these nationalist discourses did not come out of nowhere in 2016 nor were they solely emanating from the sphere of politics.

In a recently published paper, “‘The BP is a great British company’: The discursive transformation of an environmental disaster into a national economic problem”, I examine the relationship between discourses of corporate responsibility and nationalism in the media coverage of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Surprisingly, nationalist discourses featured heavily in reports about that disaster.

The media play a powerful role in shaping our perceptions of global issues, including environmental disasters. The media may obstruct or support interests of various stakeholders, and do not necessarily educate us in an uninterested way.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the worst industrial disaster in US history and 4.9 million barrel crude were released into the environment. In addition to the huge immediate damage, long-term effects are as yet unknown but are likely to include oil remaining in the food chain for generations to come.

The disaster was the fault of BP (short for “British Petroleum”), a multinational corporation headquartered in the UK operating the oil well, who was found to be “primarily responsible for the oil spill because of its gross negligence and reckless conduct.”

So how did the media represent corporate responsibility in their coverage of the event?

From perpetrator to victim

Comparing UK and US media, I found that the former were less concerned with the environmental impact than the consequences for British interests and even cast BP in the role of victim rather than perpetrator. The Telegraph, for instance, headlined: “Barack Obama’s attacks on BP hurting British pensioners.” The article continued:

Barack Obama has been accused of holding “his boot on the throat” of British pensioners after his attacks on BP were blamed for wiping billions off the company’s value.

The corporation was metaphorically described as a person and depicted as vulnerable and in need of protection:

We need to ensure that BP is not unfairly treated – it is not some bloodless corporation.

It is not unusual for corporate responsibility to be obscured in the media, particularly if no individuals can be clearly identified as “bad guys”. However, British media went beyond that by casting BP as victim rather than perpetrator, and making it stand for a particularly vulnerable segment of the population, namely “British pensioners”.

As a consequence, solidarity was not rallied with the victims of the disaster but the perpetrator:

I want to see the UK government defend the company while it is under this attack.

This blame-shifting where the perpetrator turned victim meant that another scapegoat had to be found to fit the conventional narrative. In this case the head of another state, US president Barack Obama, was cast in that role. This further enhanced the economic and nationalist framing of the environmental disaster:

Although fund managers accept that BP must pay compensation for the oil spill and the damage it is doing to parts of America’s coastline, they argue that the cost to the company’s market value from the president’s criticism is far outweighing the clean-up costs.

In sum, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was told in some UK media as a national-economic problem for Britain rather than a global environmental disaster. In the process, corporate responsibility was obscured and readers were led to see the issue as one of national threat to themselves. Reporting the news in this way aligns the readers with corporate economic interests by framing these as national interests.

This framing was then available to be mobilized in the Brexit campaign five years later.

Beyond the British case, my study is also relevant to the revival of nationalist and separatist discourses in other contexts, which similarly obscure that nationalism is entirely irrelevant to the big issues of our time as they pose existential threats to life on this planet. Like an oil spill, these do, after all, not stop at national borders …

Reference

Cramer, R. (2017) ‘The BP is a great British company’: The discursive transformation of an environmental disaster into a national economic problem. Discourse & Communication, 0(0), n/a-n/a. doi:10.1177/1750481317745744

The shaming – what happened?

Shaming comments (Source: Sharma, 2014, p. 24)

On June 10, 2011, the then Minister for Health and Population of Nepal, the Honorable Dharma Shila Chapagain, addressed the UN High-Level Meeting on AIDS in New York. The 7-minute speech was live-streamed on the UN’s multimedia channel and an excerpt was then shown on Kathmandu-based TV station Kantipur. From there a 4-minute clip made its way onto Youtube, where it was titled “Nepali Stupid Speech at UN”. This prompted many Internet users to comment: the sociolinguist Krishna Bal Sharma, in whose 2014 article I first learned about the incident, counted 603 comments in April 2013.

The comments heaped scorn on the way the speech was delivered, as in the following examples:

• in that forum u are allowed to speak any language not just english but she choose to disgrace our country
• Wtf bitch… A kid from primary level has a better English than u.
• Fuck this is why i’m not proud to say i’m nepali
• Its like letting a nursery kid to read those paragraphs..shame on you…
• very shameful speech.
• what’s this? it is just a shame for all nepalese
• really fucking speech shame on

From these few examples, it is obvious that the comments are vile and constitute an example of language shaming par excellence.

The shamed speech – what was the content?

Shaming comments (Source: Sharma, 2014, p. 26)

From the comments it seems hardly anyone chose to pay attention to the actual content of the speech. Those who did pedantically pointed out non-standard pronunciations (and thereby clearly demonstrated that Capagain’s pronunciation did not actually impede comprehension of the speech), as in this example:

“She is reading totally different words with different meanings, for example she read “republic health” instead of reproductive health. What a funny! Don’t pretend, if you can’t do it. You are embarrassing Nepalese, your party, and making a fool yourself…”

The speech presented an outline of the HIV situation in Nepal, including public health measures and challenges related to the disease. The Minister used the opportunity to particularly highlight gender inequality as a key issue in HIV transmission and sexual and reproductive health more generally:

Women and girls are still the most affected group. In this context, there is a need to fight against gender inequalities, insufficient access to healthcare and services, and all forms of discrimination and violence, including sexual and gender based violence and exploitation. We must ensure their sexual and reproductive health. (Quoted from the official transcript of the speech available from the UN website)

The shamee – who was shamed?

Dharmashila Chapagain (Source: “Women behind Nepal’s constitution – a personal story”)

When Minister Chapagain spoke about gender inequality, she knew what she was talking about from personal experience. Her personal story can be traced from The Nepal Papers edited by Mandira Sharma and Seira Tamang.

Chapagain was born in the late 1970s in a village in Jhapa District in eastern Nepal and discovered from a young age that women and girls were not valued: one of four girls, her father divorced her mother when she failed to bear him a son; and although her mother made sure she could attend school, her education remained patchy and came to an end in her teens. Unsurprising, given that Nepal’s large gender literacy gap has only started to close in the 2000s. This is the lesson about women’s status that Chapagain learned in childhood:

It was tiring and painful to be a woman in the village and I was looking for a way out. […] I felt that as women, my mother, my sisters and I were not wanted. That kind of torture haunt you at night, makes you want to take revenge. (quoted from Sharma & Tamang, 2016)

As a way out, Chapagain joined Nepal’s Maoist insurgency (1996-2006) in her late teens and became a guerilla fighter. By her mid-20s she had distinguished herself and risen to the rank of district-in-charge for Morang District in southeast Nepal. In 2002 she was arrested together with her six-month-old baby. The following five years in prison left their mark on Chapagain: as a consequence of the torture she suffered, she developed chronic health problems, including breathing difficulties and inability to stand and walk for extended periods.

During her five long years in various Nepali prisons, Chapagain was yet again confronted with gender inequality in the form of sexual violence against women.

‘The security forces didn’t care if they were old or young, they even raped a 64-year-old woman after killing her son,’ says Chapagain. ‘What kind of rules of war was the state following?’ She says that the then government saw the Maoists as enemies and wanted to destroy them, and sexual torture was one of the tools they used. (Sharma & Tamang, 2016)

When a Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed with the rebels in 2006, the Maoists became part of the government. In the elections of 2008, Chapagain was elected to parliament and served as Minister for Health and Population. And that’s how she came to deliver that speech at the UN in 2011.

The shamers – who did the shaming?

Locations of the commenters (Source: Sharma, 2014, p. 22)

The shamers are an anonymous mass who individually hide behind their Youtube handles and social media pseudonyms. Sharma (2014) shows that most of them are Nepalis who are, however, not based in Nepal but outside the country. Because of the dire economic situation in Nepal – partly a result of the decade-long Maoist insurgency – Nepalis have been leaving their country in large numbers, and Sharma identifies two distinct streams of emigrants: low-skilled migrant workers whose preferred destinations are the Gulf countries, on the one hand, and tertiary students on the other. The top destinations of the latter include other South-East Asian and Anglophone western countries.

On the basis of their location, commenters mostly seem to belong to the latter group. Shamers and shamee thus share the same nationality but differ on other dimensions:

• Location: based inside or outside Nepal
• Education: barely high-school educated vs tertiary educated
• Gender: to the degree that it is possible to tell, the majority of commenters seem to be male
• Political orientation: the Maoists’ socialist ideology is an explicit target of criticism and many commenters present it as the underlying cause of Chapagain’s poor English pronunciation.

The commonalities and differences between Chapagain and the commenters mean the delivery of the speech is not only represented as a cause of a shame for the speaker but also for the nation – a shame that the commenters themselves partly share (“it is just a shame for all nepalese”).

Consequences of language shaming

The consequences of a language shame campaign on the internet such as the one described here are twofold and affect both the shamee and the shamers.

To begin with, the shame campaign silences the actual content of the speech and suppresses political debate. Instead of engaging with the merits of the minister’s arguments and her politics, the focus is exclusively on the form in which her speech was delivered.

The fact that many of the comments take the form of specifically sexist insults (“Wtf bitch”) also demonstrates that linguistic shaming is not only about illegitimate speech but about illegitimate speakers. Language shaming is a way to keep people – here: rural women with little formal education – in their place; or to show them “their place” if they have risen above is, as Chapagain has.

Second, a shame campaign such as this one also serves to keep the overall hierarchy of global English in its place. While the commenters presumably believe themselves to speak better English than Chapagain, they do not set themselves up as model of “good English”. That model remains implicitly but firmly outside Nepal, presumably in Anglophone western countries (although some commenters also compare the English of Indian politicians favorably to that of Nepali politicians).

This means that the shame campaign ultimately is as harmful to the shamers as it is to the shamed person: it perpetuates the linguistic and cultural inferiority complex that Franz Fanon identified as an inevitable consequence of colonial international relations:

To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization. […] Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, the culture of the mother country. (Fanon, 1967, p. 17f.)

References

Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.

Sharma, B. K. (2014). On High Horses: Transnational Nepalis and Language Ideologies on Youtube. Discourse, Context & Media, 4–5, 19-28. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2014.04.001

Sharma, M., & Tamang, S. (2016). A Difficult Transition: The Nepal Papers. New Delhi: Zubaan Publishers.