Victorian Multicultural Commission, Melbourne (Image credit: Pramuk Perera, via Unsplash)

In August, Australia’s Acting Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs, Alan Tudge, announced the extension of the Adult Migrant Education Program (AMEP) as well as a stronger focus on Australian values in the Australian citizenship test.

Increasing the provision of free English classes through the AMEP is undoubtedly a good thing. Although it needs to be mentioned in brackets that most classes will be online, which is highly problematic because language in use actually involves collaboration and communication.

Here, I am concerned with the rationale for the extended provision of English language lessons.

Non-English speakers a fifth column

In his address to the National Press club, “Keeping Together at a Time of COVID”, the minister claimed that national cohesion in Australia was at risk because of communities who have poor English. He explained that “poor English” made them “more reliant on foreign language sources.” This is a problem, according to the Minister: ‘‘Despite now being proud Australians, some communities are still seen by their former home countries as ‘their diaspora‘ – to be harassed or exploited to further the national cause.”

This negative understanding of  “diaspora” is selective because, in fact, the overwhelming majority of Australians are part of some diaspora or other. After all, all non-Aboriginal Australians have ties and loyalties to ancestral cultures and languages that come from somewhere else. This is true even if their family has lived in Australia for generations. When I grew up in Australia in the 1960s, we learnt Scottish, Welsh, and Irish folk songs at school, about heather and misty braes, and we swore allegiance to an English queen.

Diaspora, then, is the lived experience of millions of Australians. But does a diasporic sense of belonging – the experience that various cultural traditions may touch your heart or that your palate has a taste for cuisine associated with more than one place – necessarily involve dual loyalty in the political sense?

Non-English media as sources of misinformation

The Minister says so and his reasoning is this:  “malign information or propaganda can be spread through multicultural media, including foreign language media controlled or funded by state players.”

The connection between English language proficiency and “multicultural or foreign language media” consumption is spurious. After all, in a globalized world, direct contact with home country media is just a few clicks away. Even fluent bilinguals are likely to access news from their home country and keep in contact with family members, who are often dispersed across the world and intertwine other languages with English in their home.

The choice of media and language is complex, depending on the time, the place, the users and the context. A Chinese friend who has lived in Australia for 25 years tells me that she and her husband access multiple daily sources of information in both languages, of both local and international provenance. Her Australian-born children use only English-language media and her elderly parents-in-law rely exclusively on Chinese language media and their family members as sources of information. She reports that this diversity of information sources sometimes leads to lively family discussions!

English doesn’t make national cohesion and multilingualism doesn’t break it

Furthermore, the Minster confuses community and foreign languages when he claims that “through the pandemic […] it has been difficult to communicate with all Australians through the mainstream channels.” “Mainstream channels”, in Australia, of course, include local multilingual sources, including government notifications and the extensive local ethnic media, as well as recognizing that most immigrant families and networks include some fluent English users who pass on information.

Finally, “malign information or propaganda” does not only spread through languages other than English. English monolinguals are just as prone to draw on malign sources and fall prey to “fake news”. And many of the English-language media sources they draw on are not Australian at all and emanate from foreign countries.

Ultimately, the link that the Minister makes between English language proficiency and national cohesion is unfortunate. Instead of building bridges between communities and enhancing national cohesion, as was presumably intended, the framing of English language learning as a matter of national loyalty can only increase barriers between communities and lead to distrust.

The special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a time of crisis”, which originally motivated the call for contributions to this series, has now been published and all the papers are available for free access.

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Covid-related misinformation in Morocco

African sayings related to crocodiles – the author at the Agadir Crocodile Park

The Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis has just published a report entitled “Moroccans and Quarantine: General satisfaction and cautious optimism”. The findings show considerable negative psychological effects of the pandemic despite the fact that most Moroccans are satisfied with the government’s measures to keep the epidemic under control. One of the reasons for this discrepancy may be information overload.

Since the beginning of the lockdown in Morocco on March 20, 2020, information and misinformation have abounded, and it has not been easy to distinguish between these two.

The closure of schools, cafes, hammams, restaurants, and mosques, together with the ban on mass gatherings, inter-city travel, parties and family celebrations have helped to keep the spread of the virus under control. But they have also been controversial and deprived people of functioning normally in a society.

Moroccans’ sources of information – and misinformation – have been social media, national and international TV channels, the internet, and communications from a range of social actors and groupings.

Social media, in particular, provide the ideal platform for the dissemination of misinformation.

The mimesis power of disinformation

The Covid-19 infodemic can be approached as a synthesis of concepts: a static signified (COVID-19) and a dynamic signifier (misinformation) are transformed in local, regional and global contexts.

Globalization has promised Moroccans – as many others around the world – wealth and prosperity together with equality and respect. Unfortunately, these have turned out to be chimeras. How is anyone to know that the measures taken to curb the spread of COVID-19 are not another such chimera?

Misinformation is like a carcinogenic cell that duplicates irrational and implausible facts, and then transforms them into a growth of seemingly trustworthy and verified information via social media. Misinformation is fueled by a melange of a bit of reality and a lot of chimeras.

It is in the nucleus where the misinformation is duplicated, echoed and confabulated into a form of neo-information or malignant misinformation that mimics the style, the content, and the source of credible information. Once the target audience has become trapped, the reptilian and emotional brain does not have the time or capacity to think critically due to cognitive overload. Thus, misinformation proliferates because the human brain is prone to cognitive bias and dissonance.

Lack of timely high-quality information is the perfect niche for misinformation to get a foot in the door and from there to create a web of lies and half-truths for the anguished and traumatized of this world for whom the pandemic is yet another disaster that incomprehensibly befalls them from afar.

The crocodile giggles while we paddle with the stream, as the proverb says.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for the full Language on the Move coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. The special issue of Multilingua of 12 peer-reviewed research papers about “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis” is available here.