Reza's well-used Japanese-Persian and English-Persian dictionaries

This is the first in a series of blog posts about my experiences undertaking an ongoing research project. In this series I will be detailing some of the methodological challenges I encounter as well as the strategies I adopt to deal with them. In this post I will explain how I came to meet one of my informants, the similarities and differences concerning our situations in Japan as foreigners, and how my interactions with him and his family provided me with the impetus for this research project.

I first met Reza (a pseudonym) in Osaka, Japan, about six or seven years ago. We were attending a BBQ for intermarried couples and their children that was being held in a local park. Superficially at least, the differences in our backgrounds couldn’t have been more striking. I hailed from Australia, while he was from Iran. I couldn’t (and still can’t) speak a word of his native Persian, and his proficiency in English has remained, over the years, virtually non-existent.

I’ve since located to a different part of Japan, but Reza and I have remained in contact. Although we meet less than once a year, we are invariably told by Japanese onlookers that the sight of the two of us using the brash, impetuous Osaka-ben (Osaka dialect of Japanese) – complete with a liberal peppering of the sorts of grammatical errors that only non-native speakers can make – as our lingua franca provides them with an immeasurable and endless amount of entertainment. I guess I’ve always been ambivalent about such attention and I don’t think of it as a performance. Moreover, while I’m not particularly concerned about whether or not Japanese onlookers necessarily perceive Reza and my “metroethnic” practices as “cool” (Maher, 2005; 2010), such behavior should, as Otsuji and Pennycook would have it, “lead us to question not only a one-to-one association among language, ethnicity, nation, and territory, but also the authenticity of ownership of language which is based on conventional language ideology” (2010, p. 241).

Nevertheless, the dissimilarities between Reza and I run deeper than just our mutual inability to speak each other’s native language. I think it’s fair to say that, as permanent residents, our experiences of Japan have been markedly different. I’m a ‘white’, tertiary-educated speaker of a language that enjoys a particularly privileged status in Japan; moreover, I have been able to forge a rather lucrative lifestyle for myself and my family in my adopted homeland primarily because of simply being able to speak that language. Conversely, Reza has done it tough here. As a non-English speaking foreigner, his employment prospects have been, in comparison to mine, somewhat limited. He has worked for many years in the construction industry, often for wages lower than his Japanese coworkers. As an Iranian in Japan, he has also had to deal with the sorts of racist, negative stereotypes that I have not been subjected to (McNeill, 2010).

Yet Reza and I also have much in common. We are both permanent residents. We both have Japanese partners. We both enjoy living in Japan immensely, and we also both enjoy, from time to time, a therapeutic whine about what we don’t like about the place. Significantly for this blog post at least, we are both ‘foreign’ fathers attempting to raise our children in a culture quite different from the cultures of our home countries. We both want our children to grow up well-adjusted, happy kids, and we both are finding the challenges of bilingual child-rearing considerably more difficult than we had first imagined.

Stay tuned…

Maher, J. C. (2005). Metroethnicity, language and the principle of cool International Journal of the Sociology of Languages (175-176)

McNeill, D. (Nov 9, 2010). Muslims in shock over police terror leak: Japan residents named in document want explanation – and apology – from Tokyo police force. Japan Times, p. 15.

Otsuji, E. and Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism, fixity, fluidity, and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3), 240-253.

The monolingual myth

This critique has been an important one but it runs into a problem when we consider the idea of monolingualism itself. At the same time that this critique of monolingual mindsets has aimed to stir up the multilingual pot and get us thinking about multilingualism as the norm, “sociolinguists of multilingualism have started to question the language ideological strategy which tries to overcome the monolingual mindset by enumerating languages” as Ingrid Piller put it in Multilingualism 2.0. Sinfree Makoni and I, for example, have argued that a problem with much discussion of multilingualism is that it rests on a pluralization of monolingualism: Multilingualism as often understood in both popular and academic discourse suggests that we speak multiple mono-languages. In line with these arguments, other scholars, such as Jan Blommaert in his recent book The Sociolinguistics of Globalization have been urging us to move away from the idea of enumerable and separate languages, and instead to look at registers, styles, discourses, genres and practices. In a similar vein, Emi Otsuji and I have been talking of “metrolingualism” rather than “multilingualism.”

While these two critiques – of the monolingual mindset and of multilingualism as multiple monolingualisms – might seem to be fairly compatible with each other, at another level they are at odds. The critique of monolingualism and the monolingual mindset addresses the lack of pluralism in both practice and ideology: “Monolinguals exist and the world would be a better place if they didn’t!”

The critique of the language ideologies that maintain the notion of multilingualism as an enumerable capacity (“I speak five languages!”), by contrast, focuses on the need for an account of language diversity based on semiotic resources rather than languages. This is not because speaking only one language is seen as OK but rather because it is as impossible as speaking several mono-languages. Languages do not exist in this way, either as single entities or as collections.

In the end, we would have to conclude that the critique of the monolingual mindset derives from the same language ideology that it is critiquing.  The idea of a monolingual mindset is based on the fiction of monolingualism. If we take the current sociolinguistic literature on styles, registers, discourses, genres and practices seriously, then monolingualism is also a myth: a monolingual mindset does not emerge from a state of monolingualism, because no such state can exist. If languages are myths, so too is monolingualism!

Blommaert, J (2010) The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Makoni and Pennycook (2007) ) Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In S Makoni and A Pennycook (Eds) Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1-41.

Otsuji, E and A Pennycook (2010) Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3), 240-254.

Intriguing as those numbers are – who can resist pouring over a score-board? – they actually hide the multilingual practices of social networking as much as they reveal it! The numbers are evidence of a multilingual world but they suggest a multilingual world of discrete languages. The count itself is based on users’ language settings. As a Facebook user, you can set your language to only one language at a time. Mine is set to English because that’s the default setting for someone based in Australia and I couldn’t be bothered to change it. However, the language of your settings doesn’t actually say much about the languages in which you actually interact. My news feed regularly includes updates not only in English but also العربية, Boarisch, 中文, Nederlands, 日本語, Deutsch, Bahasa Indonesia, 한국의, Português, فارسی, Español, Schwyzerdütsch, Français, Tagalog and Türk. If you become a fan, you will find that the Facebook wall of Language-on-the-Move is pretty multilingual, too

When I write on Facebook myself, I like to follow urban etiquette and use formulae (“Congratulations,” “Thank you,” “Well done,” “Way to go” etc.) in the preferred language of my addressee. Sometimes that language choice is conventional (“native language” of the interlocutor), often it isn’t.

I love the comfortable language mixing I engage in on Facebook. It is good fun. However, it is more than that. It also challenges conventional notions of multilingualism as a combination of two or more monolingualisms. Where sociolinguists of multilingualism have started to question the language ideological strategy which tries to overcome the monolingual mindset by enumerating languages (see Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010, for a useful overview), Facebookers practice diversity – a diversity that is not a matter of quantity but a matter of quality!

Oh, and if you were wondering whether I can actually read all the languages I listed above as appearing in my Facebook news feed, the answer is, “I wish!” However, you don’t have to be a multilingual wunderkind to enjoy Multilingualism 2.0! Google Chrome offers a nice little extension, Social Translate:

The Social Translate chrome extension automatically translates event streams and friends’ comments on social network sites.  A user selects a primary language in the Options settings panel.  Then when the user visits a social network site such as Facebook or Twitter, the Social Translate extension will use Google Translate to detect the language of the event stream (or comments) and then translate the text to the user’s primary language.  The extension displays the Social Translate icon beside the translated text.  Click the icon that appears in the navigation bar to see the text in the original language.

Event streams or comments in the primary language should not be translated.  A user can also set multiple secondary languages in the Options settings.  Event streams or comments in these languages will also not be translated.  This is useful for users that read multiple languages and who would like to be able to see non-translated content that is posted in other languages.

Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: fixity, fluidity and language in flux International Journal of Multilingualism, 7 (3), 240-254 DOI: 10.1080/14790710903414331