Sunjoo Kim (middle) graduating from her Master of Research

Whenever I write an email to a professor, there is one question lingering in my mind: Should I say “Dr + Last Name” or just “First Name”?

It might look like a simple question, but it exemplifies a deeper cultural dilemma to me.

When I was in university back in Korea, a professor from the U.S. asked us to call him by his first name, not the last name or job title. I understood what I had to do, but was it easy for me? Not really. It took me a while to get used to it. This is because the culture of address terms is quite different in Korea.

In English, first names can be used regardless of age and hierarchical dynamics in relationships without causing offense. This, however, hardly happens in Korean unless they are close friends of the same age. To be specific, addressing someone older and superior by their first name is impossible, unless I want to pick a fight. Likewise, age and social hierarchy are the core elements that have been deeply rooted in Korean society, playing a salient role in the choice of address terms.

Instead of first names, Koreans tend to choose alternatives including kinship terms and professional titles. Kinship terms, such as unni (older sister, 언니) and oppa (older brother, 오빠) are extensively used to non-family members. Professional titles are used as a generic way to address someone politely. For example, I can call someone sacangnim (CEO, 사장님). It does not necessarily mean that he or she is the head of the company. Rather, it is one of the most neutral and polite titles I can use. All choices depend on the nature of the interpersonal relationship.

The complexity of the societal and cultural characteristics reflected in the use of address terms poses a significant challenge in translation. The challenge gets exacerbated in subtitle translation, combined with spatial and temporal limitations. Multiple layers of relational dynamics and cultural nuances can easily get lost and simplified in translation. In relation to this, for my Master of Research, I explored subtitle translation of Korean address terms.

More Than Meets the Eye: Indexical Analysis on Korean Address Terms in Subtitle Translation

Abstract: Cultural references are one of the most significant challenges in subtitle translation. One example is Korean address terms due to their complexity and multiple dimensions reflecting societal and cultural values in Korea. In this vein, this thesis investigates the translation of address terms in English subtitles of one Korean drama, within the theoretical framework of indexicality as conceptualised by Michael Silverstein (1976). Adopting power, solidarity and intimacy (Lee & Cho, 2013) as an analytical prism, the thesis examines the complex interplay of each dimension to construct the non-referential indexicality of the address terms. The drama, Misaeng (Incomplete Life), which portrays corporate settings where Korean societal cultural values are well-reflected, was chosen for the data set. Thirty cases of address terms within a variety of interpersonal relationships from the drama were chosen to explore the formulation of indexical meaning and how it is transferred into the English subtitles. By adopting qualitative analysis focusing on both linguistic and multimodal elements, results from the study underscore the dynamic fluctuations of indexicality depending on the contextual dimension of the interaction, which makes the translation challenging in reflecting this whole range of indexical meanings. This leads to the inevitable indexical meaning gaps between the original and the subtitles. However, non-linguistic elements contribute to understanding of the indexical meaning, which mitigates the limitations of linguistic translation. The findings indicate that, although the translation of Korean address terms has been domesticated to be aligned with the target culture, this practice of domestication may change in a direction to keep the cultural references as much as possible. This study suggests the need for a subtitle translation direction that can preserve indexicality for global audiences to have a better cross-cultural experience, with relevance to the global attention to Korean cultural products.

You can download and read the full thesis from here.

Translation helps bridge language barriers. With the global rise of Korean culture, now is the time to move towards a translation practice preserving the original cultural depth as much as possible. This will open global audiences’ eyes to the unseen layers and help them genuinely enjoy the culture, as there is so much more than meets the eye.

References

Lee, K., & Cho, Y. (2013). Beyond ‘power and solidarity’: Indexing intimacy in Korean and Japanese terms of address. Korean Linguistics, 15(1), 73-100. https://doi.org/10.1075/kl.15.1.04lee

Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. Meaning in anthropology. https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/Courses/ParisPapers/Silverstein1976.pdf

(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

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

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‘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/bridging-new-and-traditional-media-in-the-fight-against-covid-19/ https://languageonthemove.com/bridging-new-and-traditional-media-in-the-fight-against-covid-19/#respond Wed, 12 Aug 2020 03:55:48 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=22753 Editor’s note: The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a renewed focus on linguistic diversity and the way it intersects with social inclusion. In this latest contribution to our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis, Vasiliki Vita offers a case study of the virALLanguages project in Cameroon. An overview of this project, which supports local communities to produce credible COVID-19-related health information in their own languages, is available here. The call for contributions to the series continues to be open.

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New Media is defined as the combination of traditional media, such as television, newspapers, radio with information and communication technology (ICT), such as smartphones, computers and the Internet, in all its forms (social networks, search engines etc.). When the new media emerged, information began to be considered as fast, omnipresent, economical, democratic and interactive, encouraging users to provide feedback, form a community and creatively participate in the creation of such content.

However, this wealth, that is access to information, is not distributed equally and the convergence of traditional and new media has not been everywhere completed. Poor communication infrastructure has halted the spread of information to more rural areas where the majority of people live. Particularly, access to health information, education and promotion, has been limited, even though it sometimes is the main factor for dealing with the spread of contagious diseases.

Such contexts are evident across Africa. Africa has a rich oral tradition. The transmission of knowledge, history and experience, especially in West Africa, occurs mainly through story-telling rather than written texts. This tradition guides social and human morals, gives people a sense of place and purpose, while at the same time, being a community activity, it educates children and passes on history, values and lessons.

virALLanguages as a bridge

The Internet could become the solution for this inequality in information sharing. However, according to Chhanabnai and Holt (2010), there are certain limitations: connectivity, IT literacy, cultural appropriateness, and accessibility. The virALLanguages project is trying to combat these limitations and make the Internet a bridge for endangered language communities around the world to achieve access to accurate and culturally appropriate information, while keeping in mind issues of connectivity and accessibility. The most evident examples of this come from piloting the project in Cameroon.

IT literacy

The virALLanguages library

In Cameroon, there is limited infrastructure in terms of education, and literacy, numeracy, and IT skills are limited (Mbaku, 2016: 150). The virALLanguages project contributes to overcoming these limitations, by enhancing IT skills of younger community members who take part in the project. Older members contributed by performing their role as storytellers who share knowledge with the community. Contributors learn how to document themselves and their language in an additional medium apart from community memory, that of the Internet. In the process, they also enhance their IT skills.

Accessibility and Connectivity

As much as possible, virALLanguages project materials (videos, audios and pictures) are available in various forms and media. An Internet Archive account is provided with the option to download the materials, from low to high quality, adapting to connectivity and accessibility, since the productions (even the videos!), can be shared as voice messages on WhatsApp, a popular and accessible option for Cameroonians.

Additionally, radio and television continue to be popular throughout Cameroon. Radio, in particular, remains the most important and most effective way of disseminating information (Mbaku, 2016: 173). For this reason, virALLanguages has reached out to local radio stations (like Radio Echos des Montagnes) adapting the recordings in languages spoken within the reach of these radio stations. Popular traditional and new media come together in the town crier, who opens this Babanki recording by Julius Viyoff and Godlove Zhuh.

In short, virALLanguages is located at the convergence of old and new media in Cameroon.

Cultural Appropriateness

The Babanki team, Julius Viyoff (right) and Godlove Zhuh

In oral traditions, information is perceived as reliable when it is demonstrated. This is possible in the virALLanguages project because of the use of video. In the Mundabli video, for example, the speaker demonstrates the adequate distance to be kept between individuals. In terms of cultural appropriateness, virALLanguages also encourages participants to share information in a culturally appropriate manner, in the local language and by choosing leaders or respected people of each community. This way the reliability of the message is underlined while at the same time oral tradition rituals are followed, with the community gathering in order to receive this important piece of information.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the inherent complexities of technology and developing country setting are significant obstacles to the fast transmission of Covid-19-related information materials. Against this background, the virALLanguages project hopes to contribute not only to the dissemination of public health information but also to community development. The technology used in the project is simple and local, it builds on what is already there, it involves users in the design, it strengthens the capacity to use, work with and develop effective ICTs, it introduces greater monitoring and evaluation, and, last but not least, encourages ongoing improvement of communication processes.

Reference

Mbaku, J.M. (2016). Cameroon, Republic of  (République du Cameroun). In Toyin F. and Jean-Jacques D. eds), Africa: an encyclopedia of culture and society. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for our full coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis.

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.

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 national language is the mother tongue of the vast majority of citizens in most European states (Source: Josu Amezaga, MQ Lecture, 22-11-2017)

Last week, Professor Josu Amezaga from the University of the Basque Country, Spain, visited Macquarie University to speak about minority languages: what they are and why they should be given space in the ongoing conversation about linguistic diversity.

Participating in this seminar was a timely opportunity as I embark on my PhD journey. I realized that it is one thing to read books and theses arguing about different forms of linguistic inequalities and yet another to engage in an academic debate. Coming from the Philippines, which is home to 187 languages, according to Ethnologue, I went into this seminar hoping to better understand the value – or lack of value – of these belittled languages.

Focusing on European languages, Professor Amezaga traced the historical roots of the monolingual paradigm to the French Revolution. The one-language-one-nation ideology that became prominent during that period saw some 28 French languages relegated to the position of patois or minority languages. The French revolutionaries were keen to ensure that all citizens shared a common language. Instead of considering bilingualism or a lingua franca—as is the case in the Philippines—they went about eliminating all competitors of French. This hostile policy towards minority languages was set out in Abbé Grégoire’s 1794 treatise entitled “Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser la langue française” (“Report on the necessity and means of annihilating the dialects and of making the French Language universal”).

This shows that minority languages are not necessarily the languages of a numerical minority. Rather they are languages that are subject to active processes of minoritization. While the term “minority language” suggests having small numbers of speakers, the term “minoritized language” is more accurate as it draws our attention to processes of language subordination and to the unequal power relationships that often pertain between “minority” and “majority”.

By contrast, citizens of the Philippines have many different mother tongues (Source: http://www.csun.edu/~lan56728/majorlanguages.htm)

In Europe, processes of linguistic suppression were so successful that by the second half of the 20^th century most European nations were highly monolingual, with the vast majority of citizens speaking the national language as their sole mother tongue. However, globalization and migration of recent decades have thrown this high level of state-engineered monolingualism into disarray.

Many European states have reacted to this “linguistic threat” with new efforts at renationalization, as can be seen in the introduction of language testing for citizenship. Between 1998 and 2015, the number of European states requiring a language test from prospective citizens rose from 6 to 25.

Interestingly, this push to test the language proficiency of immigrants further helps to cement the minoritized position of indigenous minority languages: language testing in France, for instance, is done in French rather than in Basque, despite the fact that the latter is today recognized as an official regional minority language of France.

At the same time, globalization and migration have also pushed language ideologies in the opposite direction, contesting the monolingual one-nation-one-language ideology and giving new legitimacy to minoritized languages. Professor Amezaga showed striking evidence of this trend with TV signals: while around 1,000 TV signals from English-speaking countries reach non-English-speaking territories, 900 signals in languages other than English reach the US. The former is evidence that the media are agents of linguistic homogenization and the latter is evidence that the media are agents of linguistic diversification.

Professor Amezaga’s guest lecture focused on minoritized languages in Europe and the global North more generally. Reflecting on how these insights relate to my home country, the Philippines, it may seem that in this highly multilingual country processes of linguistic homogenization have not been an issue. However, that would be misleading. Our own version of the one-language-one-nation ideology could be called “two-languages-one-nation ideology”: English and Filipino are positioned side-by-side as an essential aspect of the bilingual identity of Filipinos. As a result, the Philippines’ other languages are similarly subject to minoritization.

Furthermore, the challenge posed by globalization and migration to the linguistic status quo of the Philippines does not come from immigration but emigration. Going overseas, primarily for work, has become a viable and even desirable option for many Filipinos, who perceive international labor opportunities as an economic panacea. Consequently, over 10 million Filipinos are estimated to be working or living overseas today. This number is nearly 300% more than the first wave of Filipino migrants in the 1970s, when the overseas employment program was launched. With Filipino migrants now gaining more ground as “workers of the world,” it is worth examining the language component of occupations where they are employed to see how their linguistic repertoire – borne out of a two-languages-one-nation ideology and differential valuing of minority languages – intersects with the language ideologies of destination societies.

Reference

The slides from Professor Amezaga’s lecture are available for download here.

Map of European languages (Source: SB Language Maps)

Invitation to public seminar about “Minority Languages” at Macquarie University

What: Minority languages: what are we talking about? And why are we talking about it now?
When: Wednesday, November 22, 12:00-2:00pm
Where: Macquarie University Y3A 211 Tute Rm (10HA)
Who: Professor Josu Amezaga, University of the Basque Country

Abstract: Minority (or minoritized) languages can be defined as languages historically excluded from the nation-state. Following the French Revolution, which imposed the need of a common and unique language on the French state, many countries applied the “one-language-one-nation” pattern and, in the process, minoritized numerous languages. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, many countries almost seemed to have reached this monolingual ideal. However, in recent decades major changes in mediated communications together with growing migration flows have called this state of affairs into question as minority languages – both “old” and “new” – reassert themselves. At the same time, the reemergence of linguistic diversity has provoked state reactions in the form of new re-nationalization policies focused around language.

In my presentation I will first explain what minoritization of languages means. Then I will show how changes in communication and migration flows have affected the linguistic landscape of Western societies. The focus will be on commonalities and points of difference between regional and immigrant minority languages. Finally, I will discuss why minority languages should be addressed not only as a matter of cultural heritage but also a need for the future. This will lead me to close with some questions about the monolingual paradigm.

Bio blurb: Josu Amezaga is Professor in the Department of Audio-Visual Communication and Advertising at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. After completing his Ph.D. in Sociology about Basque culture, he started researching Basque language and media, from where he moved to a more comprehensive view of minority languages in media and as identity tools. This interest has led him to immigrant languages, as yet another type of minority languages. Currently, he is a visiting professor at Charles Sturt University.

A monument near Baganuur (Outer Mongolia) with an inscription of poem “My Native Land” by Natsagdorj (Source: Wikipedia)

In the middle school Mongolian textbooks there is a well-known text called “Huuchin Huu” (“A young man fallen behind the times”) written by the famous Mongolian writer D. Natsagdorj. Most of us still remember how it starts:

Hudeegin baidal shaltar boltar, chagin ularil oroo bosgo …

(“The rural village is messy and shabby, the society is full of ups and downs…”)

I was impressed by the author’s ironic way of describing a Mongolian young man who was caught in the sudden change of rural life and in the end saw a light under an ‘upside-down’ big metal pot during the Mongolian revolution in the 1920s.

Recently, one of my friends sent a short story called “Suljeen Huu” (“A young man living in the Internet”) written by an online writer, whose pseudonym name is Tatar, in which he describes a phone-addicted young man in a Mongolian village in the same ironic way by employing almost the same sentence structures as those in “Huuchin Huu.”

It starts like this (the full text is available here):

WeChat version of “Huuchin Huu”

Suljiyen ne baidal uimeen shoogaan tai, suruglegsen humus eniyed tai haniad tai. Haaltai Google haxiltai Facebook uruu haya nig hoyar hun herem haraiju orona … gar chenegin haluun yilqi nuur ood nil geju hums in setgel  ig bohinduulna… barimjiya abiya gi urbuulen hurbuulen xinjigseer uder sarig uliruulna… boljoo doyan Mongol soyol ba Mongolchuud in garh jam, delhei dahini hugjiltin tohai hedun mur bichije… nig urloo gi barana.

(Life on the internet is full of noise and hustles, the crowds are smiling and coughing… looking at one or two guys jumping out of the ‘wall’ and wandering on Facebook and Google occasionally… the heat from phone battery flowing to his face and his heart is wistfully wondering… surfing and thinking about the online debate about standard Mongolian implementation, writing and boasting in heaps and bounds from time to time….) [my translation]

The parody focuses on the young man’s “wide knowledge” including others’ secret affairs, the prize money won by celebrity wrestlers, online medicine, the “deteriorating” quality of Mongolian women, and the politics of “hateful” Japan and “evil” America. Off the Internet, this young man leads a reckless yet aimless life: in the winter he plays Mah-jong, and goes bathing in the banner centre; in the summer he frequents fairs in various towns and banners, drinks with “table girls” and sings songs about the wide open grasslands.

This satire shines a critical spotlight on a life characterized by limited information, declining morality, enjoyment of drinking and partying, pursuit of cars and beauties, and boasting about the great Mongols of the past. It shows the dark side of a society under tremendous transformation that can be found in many small towns across Inner Mongolia.

Mongol-related headlines on WeChat

Let us look at some “detours” taken by Mongolians in the north eastern part of Inner Mongolia. Marois (2006) notes that former herders today live in sedentary house as their Chinese counterparts in this area. But they arrange their houses differently from Chinese villagers and engage in different occupancy practices. They keep their ger (“tent”) next to their house and move seasonally to graze their cattle on fertile pasture. Inside the settled-down house the honorific zone is kept at the back of the room as it is in the ger, and they locate the hearth in the room immediately behind the door. This is due to the fact that for Mongolians the fire is a purifying element. By contrast, Han villagers would locate the kitchen and the fire at the back of the house.

Marois (2006) argues that the adoption of sedentary life, fixed dwellings and other material objects are not enough to say that the herders have become sinicized. While making choices from a variety of objects modernity offers the herders, they take detours to make their choices suit their own needs and to express their distinctiveness.

The author Tatar very vividly tells about the life of young Mongolian village men. It is very hard for such men to find a wife, particularly if they do not own an apartment or a car.

But I also want to stress the adaptation made by the herders as they embrace modernity thrust upon them by the nation state and globalization. For instance, an increasing number of villagers in my hometown are buying cars and using WeChat now. The cars have increased the frequency of visits between relatives and friends, and some of them formed a WeChat Mongolian song competition group of over 100 people across several Mongolian villages.

Administrative map of Inner Mongolia (Source: Inner Mongolia News)

I therefore favour the term “cultural strategizing” (Silverberg, 2007) – instead of “cultural borrowing” – to explain the processes of social change that can be observed in the lives of Mongols. The emphasis on cultural strategizing is predicated on multifaceted dialogic interactions between local and global, between tradition and modernity.

Instead of wasting their lives on the Internet, contemporary Mongols also strategically use the Internet to commodify their culture and in search of profit. On sites such as 蒙古丽人 (“Mongol beauty”), 蒙古圈 (“Mongol circle”) or Onoodor (“Today”), Mongol photography is intended to lure tourists to Inner Mongolia. Traditional costumes and Mongolian girls and women are becoming something to be gazed at, and the herder with his sheep is parading before online users.

The virtual space also allows young Mongols to experience a sense of symbolic connection with their community and a form of ethnic identity, even if one that is entwined with the manipulation of markets.

Online Mongols are beautiful and glamorous people, with an amazing homeland and culture. By contrast, mundane news such as the dropping price of lamb, the harsh weather with summer droughts and winter storms, or the high levels of pollution are rare.

The Mongols’ nostalgic imaginings and pride related to the beauty of traditional life or pristine scenic spots divert their attention from many of the realities of their circumstances.

Social media “recreate” Mongolian lives for their followers, though cloaked ones.

Wedding party in Horqin, Tongliao, Inner Mongolia (Source: Xinhuanet)

The question then is how to play out their identities in their desired symbolically cloaked communities? Maybe attending one of the popular Mongolian weddings to “feel” more Mongolness is not a bad idea; at least our Internet boy can leave his phone for a moment and take a walk in another symbol-cluttered event. He might meet his soul mate dressed in traditional costume.

References

Marois, A. (2006). The Squaring of the Circle: Remarks on Identiy and Change from the Study of a Mongol-Han Community in Hulun Buir, Inner Mongolia. Mongolian Studies: Journal of the Mongolia Society, 28, 75-86.

Silverberg, M. R. (2007). Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Do clouds over VW equal clouds over Germany?

The Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal has received significant media coverage in and outside of Germany. Besides accounts of the developments that led to the discovery of Volkswagen’s unethical behaviour, the immediate impacts on the company’s finances, CEO Martin Winterkorn’s resignation and Matthias Mueller’s appointment as the new chief executive of the firm, a focus on wider impacts of the current affair quickly emerged. Not long and concerns were raised that the unethical actions of the car manufacturer could have negative consequences for the German automobile industry in general and the German and the European economy more broadly.

This has raised a related discussion and media anxiety about the implications of the Volkswagen affair for the trademark “made in Germany”. The German Handelsblatt (Daniel Delhaes 2015), for instance, cited various politicians expressing concern over the loss of the country’s reputation:

Auf alle Fälle ist das ein riesiger Schaden für die Industriemarke Deutschland. (“This is definitely a huge damage for the German industrial brand.”)

Es geht um die Glaubwürdigkeit des Gütesiegels‚‘made in Germany’. (“It is a matter of credibility of the quality label ‘made in Germany’.”)

Both politicians anticipate negative consequences not only for VW but for national reputation, too.

How do constructions of German cultural stereotypes and self-stereotypes become visible in the media reports concerned with the Volkswagen affair? How do they relate to the car manufacturer’s misconduct and how are they aimed at influencing the general public?

A careful analysis of the current media discourse may provide some insights into the discursive construction of “made in Germany” as a “quality label” and, more generally, the discursive construction of reputation as an economic asset. The discussion will be grounded in research in communication studies and applied linguistics that examines advertising as cultural discourse and shows how notions of national identities and ethno-cultural stereotypes are constructed and reproduced through discursive practices.

Volvo campaign: Breaking up with a German

German ethno-cultural stereotypes in advertising

Intercultural advertising has been shown to valorise languages in their symbolic rather than their communicative meaning. The symbolic function of languages is to be understood in this context as “the product of intercultural social, political, economic, historical and linguistic relations between countries” (Kelly-Holmes, 2000, p. 71). In what Kelly-Holmes defines as a deep-rooted ‘cultural competence hierarchy’, “Germans have been assigned the role of car-maker/engineer and brewer” (2000, p. 71). Piller notes that foreign languages in advertising are used “to associate the product with the ethno-cultural stereotype about the country where the language is spoken” (2003, p. 175). In the case of German, these are connotations of reliability, precision and innovation, above all regarding technology.

Hence, it is not surprising that it is a common marketing strategy amongst multinational companies to use the national language of their headquarters for advertising their products on the foreign market. Volkswagen and Audi are two successful examples of global corporations based in Germany that take advantage of this strategy by using the slogans ‘Volkswagen – Das Auto’ and ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’, respectively, in print and audio-visual ads.

It is first and foremost the recognition of these words as German, rather than their literal meaning, that is important for their success. For instance, a monolingual English-speaking Australian recently cited the Audi-slogan ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ to me when he discovered that I was German. To my surprise, and despite the fact that he was able to pronounce the catchphrase quite well, he had no idea what it actually meant. I was German; the slogan was German; and that’s all that mattered.

It is not only German manufacturers who use ethno-cultural stereotypes to promote their products. A marketing campaign by the Swedish car manufacturer Volvo uses associations with German ‘efficiency’ and ‘order’ defensively to promote their own products.

How does all this relate to the Volkswagen scandal?

Volkswagen as a symbol for German cultural core values

Media reports about the Volkswagen scandal draw on the same ethno-cultural stereotypes of technological advancement and high quality:

A lot of Germany’s present economic success is based on engineering expertise, specialised technology and expensive heavy machinery sold to fire up China’s factories. […] But “Made in Germany” is supposed to be a quality trusted brand worth paying money for. (bbc.com; McGuinness 2015)

“Made in Germany is quality and trust. Now that trust is lost,” said Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer of the University of Duisburg-Essen. (autonews.com; Chambers 2015)

Thereby, the media reinforces the positive connotations with German national culture but, at the same time, mounts the argument that the company’s misconduct is threatening exactly these. This argument is strengthened by means of a link that the reports establish between Germany, “made in Germany”, the corresponding ethno-cultural stereotypes and Volkswagen itself. Autonews (Chambers 2015), as well as the German Handelsblatt (dpa 2015), provide good examples:

The great success of the export nation of Germany rests on the quality label ‘Made in Germany,'” said Marcel Fratzscher, head of the DIW economic institute in Berlin. “VW stands for this German quality — for perfection, reliability and trust.

Ob Volkswagen, ob Deutschland verlorenes Vertrauen zurückgewinnt, entscheidet sich auch bei der Aufarbeitung des Skandals. (“How the scandal is dealt with will determine whether VW and Germany can regain trust.”)

In examples such as these, Volkswagen is put into place as an emblem for the positive associations with Germany and “made in Germany”. But not only that: striking in these and the preceding excerpts is the recurring association with ‘trust’ that is put into place alongside the ethno-cultural stereotypes commonly connected with Germany and also Volkswagen. It seems to do two things. First, it enables the media, and the referenced commentators, to strengthen the argument that the positive connotations with German products have been challenged by the company’s wrongdoing. The use of ‘supposed to be’ in the second BBC comment indicates that one cannot be entirely sure whether the label “made in Germany” still stands for good quality. One of the commentators goes even further by saying that trust has already been ‘lost’. Second, and possibly even more important, it allows for a reinforcement and maintenance of the ethno-cultural stereotypes. It is not the quality that is ‘lost’ in the eyes of commentator Dudenhoeffer but the trust in this quality. In this way, quality is implicitly constructed as the dominant connotation.

What is achieved by introducing trust into this discourse?

Volkswagen. Das Auto.

The nation brand and Germany’s reputation are constructed as greater than just the sum of cultural values associated with the nation. ‘Reputation’ ties the belief in a certain moral standard to the cultural values which, only then, attain relevance. Therefore, trust issues regarding the positive cultural stereotypes must arise if a company like Volkswagen, which stands for the country’s reputation, acts against these moral standards. This construction of ‘reputation’ allows the media to paint Volkswagen as a ‘black sheep’ and to elaborate about possible nationwide consequences of the emissions scandal without saying that assumed high quality, reliability and precision of German products may no longer apply. That Volkswagen is the one to blame is also strongly expressed by the title of a Handelsblatt article:

Volkswagen und der “Anschlag auf den Standort Deutschland. (“Volkswagen and the ‘attack on Germany as a business location’.”)

“Anschlag” (“attack”) even has connotations of terrorism on the part of Volkswagen.

In sum, ‘reputation’ is an economic asset and a crucial aspect of Germany’s economic success. To minimize the risk of losing this national reputation a former national emblem can quickly become a villain.

The way in which language is used in the media coverage of the Volkswagen emission scandal has transformed a corporate issue into a nationwide cultural concern. Ethno-cultural stereotypes are not only questioned but also reinforced.

Media and political discourse are powerful institutions. However, they only constitute one side of the medal. If and how the receivers of their messages will be influenced by them, can only be seen in the long run. Since ethno-cultural stereotypes have slowly grown over time and are deep-rooted in people’s minds, it remains anyone’s guess whether the Volkswagen emission scandal will change people’s associations with Germany and German products.

References

Kelly-Holmes, H. (2000). Bier, Parfum, Kaas: Language Fetish in European Advertising. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 3(1), 67-82.

Piller, I. (2003). Advertising as a site of language contact Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23, 170-183 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254
Further reading

Chambers, M. (2015, September 22). Diesel scandal at VW threatens ‘Made in Germany’ image. Autonews.

Delhaes, D. (2015, September 23). ‘Made in Germany’ ist in Gefahr. Handelsblatt.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (2015, October 4). Volkswagen und der „Anschlag auf den Standort Deutschland“. Handelsblatt.

Who is a real refugee?

The refugee crisis in Europe has caught a lot of global media attention. Countries at the entry points and their official actions, as well civil organizations, get a lot of attention in online media; furthermore, social media comments quite often focus on the refugees’ origins, intentions, religion, and behaviour. For instance, in the coverage of how a parish near the Hungarian border helps refugees, one interviewee voices her misgivings:

They spend a lot of money for coming, but if they are real refugees, they can come on order, on normal way. Not this other ways how they are trying.

While not uncommon, comments such as this one miss a key aspect of the refugee experience. Having taught refugees in Australia, I am aware that people intending to leave their countries may sell all their possessions to be able to afford a journey to a safer place. When it isn’t possible for whole families to move together, they may raise money to enable a select member who may try to help others once they have reached safety.

So what are some of the possible origins of this ‘not a real refugee’ discourse?

It is quite often attributed to politicians. Earlier this year, in June, the Deputy of the ruling party in Hungary commented on national radio that people entering Hungary are not ‘real refugees’ as they have the funds to buy even first class plane tickets to Europe, but somehow they prefer to pay thousands of Euros to people smugglers and walk all the way. This comment, of course, blatantly ignores the fact that one needs both a passport and a valid visa to board a plane. While it is virtually impossible to trace the origins of such ideas, the above opinion seems to be a popular one globally present in reader comments on social media as well.

Undoubtedly, Hungary is just one of many countries using the ‘not a real refugee’ discourse, and possible reasons, like having enough money to buy plane tickets, and the issue of these people having smart phones, have been discussed in the media in other countries, too. Consequently, ideas and concepts linked to the construction of ‘non-real refugees’ are not localized to Hungarian politicians and media only. However, it is obvious that the position and role of the country in tackling the refugee crisis gives Hungary a central place in the discussions, so I will focus on the Hungarian context.

Confusion regarding terminology can be a possible reason why refugees are not seen as ‘real’. When analyzing discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press 1996-2006, Baker et al. (2008) mention a fundamental disagreement in defining refugees and asylum seekers in official bodies and sources, such as the Refugee Council or various dictionary definitions. By commonly applying the term ‘migrants’ to all people on the move, refugees and their rights for asylum can become invisible or even associated with those of ‘economic migrants’. In an attempt to clarify the issue, the UNHCR has published a statement saying:

Conflating refugees and migrants can have serious consequences for the lives and safety of refugees. Blurring the two terms takes attention away from the specific legal protections refugees require. It can undermine public support for refugees and the institution of asylum at a time when more refugees need such protection than ever before.

Since early September, when Hungary sealed its border with Serbia and made border-crossing punishable with up to three years imprisonment, the terminology used in the media has been shifting to ‘unauthorized or irregular arrivals’.

Could it be that, apart from politicians fanning the flames, Hungarians simply have a different picture of ‘refugees’ in their minds? To answer this, I have examined how two historical events are linked to the construction of ‘real refugees.’

Based on Ruth Wodak’s (2001) discourse-historical approach in her work exploring anti-Semitic and populist discourse in Austria, I firstly focus on the historical dimension of the discourse, then briefly look at argumentation strategies, also called topoi, to examine claims about refugees, and finally focus on metaphors.

Linking refugees to history

In media and social media comments world-wide, Hungary’s response to the refugee crisis is most commonly linked to two events in the country’s history: the Holocaust, and the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, both of which produced huge waves of Hungarian refugees needing to be resettled in various parts of the world. In a reaction to these parallels, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance even released a statement in September, stating that:

The circumstances surrounding the current refugee situation are notably different from the persecution of Jews and other victims before, during and after the Holocaust; nonetheless, there are parallels between the treatment of refugees then and now – particularly regarding the shameful closing of borders, the rise of xenophobia, and the use of dehumanising language.

In referring to these two historical points, contemporary events become understood against these foils invoking above all shame. Reader comments on social media, however, oftentimes reject any kind of connection to the actions producing the present refugee situation, sometimes even clearly stating ‘we are not responsible for what happened to them’. Responsibility then, is an important element in constructing the meaning of ‘real refugees’.

The other element is resilience, at least the attribution of it to a certain group, which manifests in two ways: firstly, Hungarian refugees of the 1956 Uprising are said to have experienced the same treatment in refugee camps before they were admitted in other countries. This can be seen from the following excerpt from a reader comment detailing what those refugees had to endure:

How do you think the 1956 dissidents were treated? They slept in wooden barracks for at least 20-27 months. […] it was very cold. In summer it was scorching hot. In the meantime they worked in labour camps. There was no talking back or demanding things, blackmail or other things. If they were late, they risked being returned… [my translation]

It is clear that strength and endurance are values attached to the 1956 refugees, and this seems to be contrasted with contemporary refugees who are constructed as lacking these characteristics.

The second way attributed resilience gets expressed is by linking it to moral worth and referring to Hungarians who stayed behind during the events in 1956 as patriots. For example, a Hungarian conservative paper suggested that it as a moral obligation towards the country to stay rather than to flee, i.e. those who fled are ‘exiles with bleak souls’ while those who stayed have ‘the homeland in their hearts’. What this romantic presentation of the past does is that it positions people staying behind as superior to people fleeing war, and consequently, it questions the moral worth of all refugees.

Argumentation

Getting back to my first example from Al Jazeera, it is clear that commenters have clear arguments to support their views on refugees. The noun for ‘refugee’ in Hungarian (‘menekült’) derives from the verb ‘to flee’ (‘menekülni’), which suggests leaving everything behind and run. Having no possessions then is an important feature of a refugee. Linking these to topoi, we can apply the topos of definition to this case, which says “if an action, a thing, or person (group of persons) is named/designated as X, the action, thing or person (group of persons) carries or should carry the qualities/traits/attributes contained in the (literal) meaning of X” (Wodak 2001, p. 75). And being able to organize an escape and pay people smugglers clearly contradicts the above picture of a ‘menekült’.

Another reason brought up in the argument that contemporary entrants to Europe are not real refugees is their behaviour: they are violent, they refuse help; consequently, they are not ‘real refugees’. An example of this can be seen in a Tweet of two pictures presented side by side: on the left, people apparently protesting against Hungary’s closed borders, and on the right, a woman and children lying on bundles of clothes. A commenter mentions that the ‘real refugees’ are in the right hand side picture. Although this particular tweet emanates from the UK, it is a good example for what can be found in local comments in Hungary too. The reasoning behind this distinction between ‘real’ vs. ‘ not real refugees’ is based on their behaviour – filtered through media coverage, of course – and suggests that ‘real refugees’ should be humble and behave so that they could ‘earn’ their admission into Europe, quite like the 1956 Hungarian refugees supposedly did 60 years ago.

Language use

Metaphors are important linguistic devices used to create these ideas, and, ultimately, the picture of ‘real/non-real refugees’ in people’s heads. On Language on the Move, we have discussed the effects of metaphors here and here. In her recent article in the Austrian newspaper Kurier, Ruth Wodak explains that certain word choices in the discussion of the refugee crisis in Europe can gear people towards thinking about refugees as armed and violent. The use of metaphors of natural disaster (‘waves’ and ‘floods’ of refugees) creates a menacing picture. Wodak argues that these metaphors create the misconception that the reasons for the refugee movements are not human-made, which ties in well with the idea of ‘responsibility’ discussed above.

However, there are more direct references to danger, too. Wodak mentions the construction of Europe as a ‘fortress’, which needs to be ‘protected’ from refugees by Hungary’s ‘border guards’ who ‘hunt’ refugees. It is not difficult to see how these metaphors of war can relate to the reasoning regarding ‘behaviour’ discussed above, and thus further strengthen the idea that these refugees are not ‘real refugees’.

In sum, historical experience, argumentation and metaphors have contributed to creating a powerful anti-migration discourse in Hungary and Europe as a whole. This may feed the interests of certain political elites and parties but it cuts short any attempt at having an objective and effective discussion on the issue.

References

Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., KhosraviNik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McEnery, T., & Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press Discourse & Society, 19 (3), 273-306 DOI: 10.1177/0957926508088962

Wodak, R. (2001). The discourse-historical approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (Vol. 63-94). London: Sage.