For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see Life in a New Language, Discrimination by any other name: Language tests and racist immigration policy in Australia, Intercultural Communication – Now in the third edition, and Judging Refugees.

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A comprehensive and critical overview of the field of intercultural communication

• Key concepts and discussions illuminated with international case studies of intercultural communication in real life
• Includes learning objectives, key points, exercises and suggestions for further reading in each chapter
• A new chapter devoted to intercultural crisis communication; expanded coverage of language in migration; and new studies and examples of virtual, online and computer-mediated communication throughout.

Combining perspectives from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, the third edition of this popular textbook provides students with an up-to-date overview of the field of intercultural communication. Ingrid Piller explains communication in context using two main approaches. The first treats cultural identity, difference and similarity as discursive constructions. The second, informed by multilingualism studies, highlights the use and prestige of different languages and language varieties as well as the varying access that speakers have to them.

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Get 30% off if you order now

Order through the Edinburgh University Press website and enter discount code NEW30 to get 30% off.

Transcript (coming soon)

The conversation focuses on a study of adults with three languages ‘at play’ in their childhoods and lives today, exploring how visible racial differences from the mainstream, social power, emotions, and familial relationships continue to shape their use – or erasure – of their linguistic heritage.

Zozan’s book opens with a funny and touching account of how her own experiences as a person of “ambiguous ethnicity” shaped this research. We begin our interview on this topic. Zozan points out that the last Australian Census showed that 48.2% of the population has one or both parents born overseas. Yet, she argues, “our teachers and our education system are unprepared, perpetuating the power relations that reinforce injustice and inequality towards half of the population”.

Then we focus on what diversity feels like to her research participants and how “mixedness” or “hybridity” is not normalised, despite being common. We build on a point Zozan makes in her book, that throughout their daily lives the participants “have to position themselves because our [social and institutional] understanding of identity is narrow-mindedly focused on a single affiliation. […] While all participants are engaged in such strategic positioning, my findings emphasise that this can come at a great personal expense, something which is not sufficiently recognised by scholarly work in this field thus far.”

Dr Zozan Balci with her new book (Image credit: Zozan Balci)

We then delve into the emotions experienced and remembered by participants in relation to certain language practices in both childhood and more recent years, and the way these shape their habits of language choice and self-silencing. While negative emotional experiences have impacted on heritage language transmission and use, Zozan’s study shows how people who had distanced themselves from their heritage language – and its speakers – then changed: “it only [took] one loving person […] to reintroduce my participants to a long-lost interest in their heritage language”. We focus on this “message of hope” and then on another cause of hope, being the engaged results Zozan’s achieved when she redesigned a university classroom activity to un-teach a deficit mentality about heritage languages and identities.

Finally, we discuss Zozan and her team’s current “Say Our Name” project. This practically-oriented extension of Zozan’s research addresses one specific aspect of linguistic heritage and identity formation: the alienation experienced by people whose names are considered ‘tricky’ or ‘foreign’ in Anglo-centric contexts. The project has created practical guides now used by universities and corporations and the City of Sydney recently hosted a public premiere of the Say Our Names documentary. Soon, Zozan will be developing an iteration of the project with the University of Liverpool in the UK.

Follow Zozan Balci on LinkedIn. She’s also available for guest talks and happy to discuss via LinkedIn.

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript

ALEX: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m Alex Grey, and I’m a research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. My guest today is Dr. Zozan Balci, a colleague of mine at UTS. Zozan is an award-winning academic, a sociolinguist, and a social justice advocate. Zozan, welcome to the show.

ZOZAN: Hello, thank you for having me.

ALEX: A pleasure! Now, Zozan, you teach in the Social and Political Science program here at UTS, and I know you have a lot of teaching experience, but today we’ll focus on your sociolinguistics research. In particular, let’s talk about your new book. How exciting! It’s called Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, identity, and belonging in the lives of cultural in-betweeners. You’ve just published it with Routledge.

The first chapter is called A Day in the Life of the Ethnically Ambiguous, and you begin by talking about your own, as you put it, “ambiguous ethnicity”. So let’s start there. Tell us about how your own life shaped this research, and then who participated in the study that you designed.

ZOZAN: Yeah, thank you so much, and yes, “ethnically ambiguous” is kind of like the joke that I always introduce myself with. So, I was born and raised in Germany to immigrant parents, so although I’m German, I look Mediterranean. And so people mistake me from being from all sorts of places. I’ve been mistaken for pretty much everything but German at this point. So, you know, I personally grew up, in my house, we spoke 3 languages, so we spoke German, Italian, and Turkish, which is essentially how my family is made up. And, you know, this has kind of resulted in a bit of a… I’m gonna call it a lifelong identity crisis, because, you know, that’s a lot of cultures in one home.

And it also has played out in language quite interestingly, and I just kind of wanted to see with my study if others struggle with the same sort of thing, other people who are in this kind of environment, and I found that they do. And so in the book. I tell the stories of four people, all who have two ancestries in addition to the country they are born in, so there’s three languages at least at play. And all are visible minorities, so they… they don’t look like the mainstream culture in their… in the country where they were born. And all struggle having so many different cultures and languages to navigate. And, you know, it’s quite interesting, in some of the cases, the parents are from vastly different parts of the world, so the kid actually looks nothing like one of their parents.

So, one example is my participant, Claire. She has a Japanese mother and a Ugandan father, and so she speaks of the struggle of looking nothing like a Japanese person, so in her words, all people ever see is that she’s black.

And so there is some really heartbreaking stories about, you know, how challenging that is, growing up in Australia when you look nothing like your mum, and…You know, it’s also hard to assert your Japanese heritage when people look at you and don’t accept that you are half Japanese, even though she strongly identifies with it, for example. So, there are a couple of participants like that.

One of my participants, Kai, is probably the one I personally relate to the most. His mother is Greek, and his father is Swedish, and he looks very Mediterranean like me. So, he talks a lot about, you know, the guilt towards his heritage community, also internalized racism, and that is something I could probably personally very much relate to. So these are the kinds of stories that are in this book.

ALEX: They’re wonderful stories because you frame them in such a clear way that connects them to research and connects them to bigger ideas than just the personal experience of each participant, but it becomes very moving. These participants clearly have a great rapport with you. When Claire talks about speaking Japanese and the impact being a visible minority and visibly not Japanese, it seems, to other people, has on her. That’s incredibly touching, but also the effect that has on her mum, and her mum’s desire to pass on heritage language to Claire.

But the opening few pages are also, I have to say, really funny and interesting. They drew me in, I wanted to keep reading. So I’ll just add that in there to encourage listeners to go out and seek more of your voice after this podcast by reading the book.

Now, in this book, your intention, in your own words, is to explain what diversity feels like, and to normalize mixedness. And you point out that this is really important, pressing, in a place like Australia, but many places where our listeners will be around the world are similar. In Australia, about half the population are what we might call second-generation migrants, with at least one parent born overseas. And so you go on to say, this book aims to have a genuine conversation about what diversity and inclusion look like.

So, tell us more about what hybridity is. This is a concept you use for the, if you like, the sort of

embodied personal diversity of people, and what it feels like for your participants, and whether hybrid identities are recognised and included.

ZOZAN: Yeah, you know, it’s actually quite interesting, because when people hear that you’re culturally quite mixed, they kind of misunderstand what it’s like. So, you know, your mind doesn’t work in nationalities or languages, right? So in the case of my study, where three cultures or languages, are at play, you know, those… these participants don’t consider that they have three identities. Like, that is not how a mind works.

So rather, you are a person who has mixed it all up. So you don’t just think in one language, unless you have to. Like, for example, right now, I’m speaking to you in English, because I have to, but, you know, when I’m just chopping my vegetables and thinking about my day, I don’t think in only English. It’s a mix, in a single sentence, I would mix. If I speak to someone who can understand another language that I speak, I would probably mix those two. Like, it’s just… but I don’t do this, like, oh, let me mix two languages. Like, I’m not consciously doing that. And the same goes for behaviours or practices.

So, the way I kind of, you know, an analogy that I think you can use here, maybe to make it easier to understand, is if you think of, you know, say you have your 3 cultures, and there are 3 liquids, and so you pour them all in a cup and make a cocktail, right? So you mix them all up. And…

ZOZAN: you know, it’s… It’s very hard, then, to tell the individual flavour of this new cocktail now, right? It’s all mixed. But, you know, that’s not something that people understand. They want… they want the three liquids, the original liquids, what is in there? And often, you know, they will tell you that you probably ruined the drink by mixing them.

Laughter

ALEX: We laugh, but your participants have really experienced words to that effect, sure.

ZOZAN: Absolutely, and so, you know, you are often forced into a position, so you are forced to pretend you’re a different drink, because it’s very hard to, you know, separate the liquids once they have been mixed, right? And, you know, now I’m also Australian, so a dash of a new liquid has been mixed into it, you know, making the whole drink more refreshing, I think.

But, you know, unfortunately, most people still have very rigid ideas about identity, including our parents, right? So my parents cannot relate to my experience at all. They are not mixed. My teachers didn’t get it at school, right? Only people like me get it. But it’s important that we all kind of start thinking a little bit about what we’re asking people to do, because, you know.

when I went to school, for example, I could only be German, so I had to leave my other languages and my behaviours at home, because, you know, of assimilation, right? You need to assimilate to everybody else.

And then in my house with my parents, you need to leave the German outside, so it’s considered disrespectful if I say I’m German, right? So my parents would hate to hear this podcast, for example. Because to them, it’s like renouncing your heritage, right? So it’s about… you need to preserve what we have given you. And so you are kind of this person who’s like, well…

I don’t see it the way… I’m not three things. This is all me, and it’s actually people trying to over-analyse what kind of nationality this behaviour is, or this language is. In your head, you’re not actually doing that. You’re just one person who is a cocktail.

ALEX: That makes a lot of sense when you explain it, but in the findings, it becomes really clear that that’s actually very hard for people to assert as an identity. As you say, with parents, with teachers, with the public at large. You call it strategic positioning, the way people have to downplay, or almost ignore, or not show their language, or not show their other aspects of their… their different heritages, and that that can come at great personal expense.

And you point out that, in fact, while a lot of the research literature may celebrate this mixedness or this hybridity, the fact that it comes at personal expense and is difficult is not really acknowledged very much.

Now in this work you’re also drawing on some really foundational theories of language and power. So it’s not just about feeling bad or feeling excluded. The way people are able to mix their heritage languages and other aspects of their heritage, and the way they’re not able to comes within a power play and that draws really on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. I won’t delve really deeply into his theory of habitus, but I’ll quote this explanation of yours, which I loved: “the habitus can be understood as a linguistic coping mechanism, which is very much shaped by the structures around us. We develop language habits, whether within the same language or in multiple languages, which secure our best position or future in a particular market.”

And then really innovatively, you link the formation of these habits to our emotional experiences, drawing on the work of another theorist, Margaret Wetherall. Please talk us through how these theories help explain the way your participants pretended, as children, not to speak their heritage languages. This is just one aspect of how these emotions have influenced their… their behaviours, but I think many of our listeners will have done the same thing as children themselves, or relate now to knowing children who do this.

ZOZAN: Yeah, absolutely, and I think, you know, you almost need to go back to basics. Like, we use language to communicate, and we communicate to connect with others. You know, it’s a social need, it’s a human need to connect, to belong to a group, because we are social animals. So that’s actually the purpose of language, right?

But we also associate language with a cultural group. So, if the cultural group is well-regarded, so is their language, and vice versa. So, for example, here in Australia, obviously, English is highly regarded. And Arabic is not, for example, right? So this is a direct link to how we perceive the people of these cultures, right? So we’re comparing the dominant mainstream Anglo-Saxon cultural group versus Arabic in an era of really strong Islamophobia, right? So language is both this tool for communication, and it’s also this… this… this symbol of… of power, really. And so if the way you try to connect, so the… whichever language, you use, but also how you present yourself, if that results in a negative experience in disconnect, in fact, or feelings of rejection or inclusion, we will absolutely try and avoid doing that again. So we will try to connect… we will always try to connect in a way that is more successful to achieve inclusion and connection, right? So this is kind of like the theory simplified.

And obviously, you feel these experiences in your body, right? You feel shame, or you feel rejection, you feel loneliness, whatever it may be. And equally, on the bright side, you can feel happiness, you can feel, you know, togetherness, whatever it is, inclusion. So, this is kind of the emotional aspect, right? You feel… because this is a human feeling, the connection and disconnect. So, I think that sometimes we take that a bit out of our study of language. And I think we just need to bring that back a little bit, because it actually explained…explains then, how this plays out with language, so language being a key aspect.

You know, if you are told off for speaking a certain language in a certain context, or you’re being made fun of for speaking it, or something bad happens to you when you speak it, maybe you’re singled out, because you can speak something that others can’t. You will resent that language, and you won’t want to speak it again, and you will habitually almost censor yourself from speaking it, because you don’t want to feel like that again, right? So that’s kind of… and you don’t necessarily consciously do that. This is very important. I don’t mean that, like, you know, a 5-year-old is able to notice that about themselves. But typically, the rejecting a language, by and large, happens the first time a child leaves the home, in the sense of going to kindergarten or preschool, or somewhere that is not within the immediate family, where there’s almost, like, you’re being introduced to the mainstream culture in some systemic way, and you are meeting the mainstream culture there as well. So, you are with children, especially if you have an immigrant background, or your parents do, you’re meeting lots of children who don’t. And so this is your first becoming aware of being different, and so, of course, if you look differently already, that’s… that’s difficult. But then also, if you speak differently, that makes it extra difficult.

And so, you know, one of the examples, from the book that I think was just, it actually, when he did say it in the interview, I did tear up, so I want to share this one. And so this was, Kai, so just as a refresher, he is half Greek, half Swedish, and he grew up here in Australia. And so, at the time that he grew up there was still a lot of, sort of, discrimination, towards Greek people. That has probably tempered down a little bit since, but at the time, it was very acute still, where he grew up. And so, in a school assembly, he must have been in primary school, so fairly young, in front of the entire school, he was asked, singled out, and say, “hey, Kai, you… you speak Greek, right? How do you say hello in Greek?”

And he said, “I don’t know”.

And so when I had this interview, we paused for a second, and I said, “but you knew. You knew how to say hello in Greek”. And he’s like, “yes, I knew”. And I said, “well, why… why do you think you said you didn’t know?” And he said, “well, because they didn’t know, so if I don’t know, then I can be like them”.

And I think that is very heartbreaking, right? Because, especially here in Australia, there’s this idea that, you know, if you speak another language, if you are multilingual, that is almost un-Australian. You’re supposed to be this monolingual English speaker, right? That’s the norm, that’s the mainstream. So if you divert from that, that’s different, but especially if you speak a language where the cultural group is not well regarded, right? That positions you as, firstly, different, but also lower.

ZOZAN: Right? And so we can understand, again, he probably didn’t realize, as a 7-year-old, or whenever this was, what he was doing, consciously, but you can see this pattern, right? That’s why I’m saying it’s more a feeling than it is rational thought. The way your language practices develop is based on how your body feels in response to you using, like, language.

ALEX: And the fact that it’s such an embodied feeling comes out in your participants, who are now in their 20s and 30s, remembering in detail a number of these instances from way back in their childhood. I mean, the example of Kai jumped out at me too, the school assembly, because in the context, it might have seemed to the teachers that they were trying to celebrate his difference, to sort of reward him for knowing extra languages, but that’s not how it came across to him, because he’d already started experiencing the negative disconnection that that language caused.

Now that’s one example of negative feelings, but your study shows quite a number of how people in your study developed very negative feelings and distanced themselves from their heritage languages, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, or perhaps as children, consciously, but not knowing what a drastic impact it would have in the future on their ability to ever pick that language up again.

But then you say, this changed, and this is in adulthood usually, changed through relationships with people who they love and admire: “It only took one loving person to reintroduce my participants to a long-lost interest in the heritage language. I believe this is a message of hope.”

Well, I believe you, Zozan, when you say that’s a message of hope, so tell us more about that hope.

ZOZAN: Yeah, I mean, and again, it’s about connection, right? So, this is really at the forefront of everything. So, you know, if there is a person that you can connect with, that will somehow encourage you to rediscover what you have lost, then it’s actually… it can be reversed. It doesn’t mean that, you know, now you’re completely like, “yay, let me start speaking my language again”, or whatever. It’s not necessarily that, but, you know, it tempers down some of that self-hatred that you perhaps have, that guilt, whatever it is, so that you can actually deal with this illusion.

ZOZAN: a little bit more rationally. And, you know, a lot of participants, also, kind of talked about how they’re psyching themselves up to actually visit the country where their parent is from, because slowly, they can, you know, get to that place where they are able to do that, where that… where, you know, the realization that actually there’s nothing wrong with my heritage, it’s just I have been socialized to think that, because the people I have been trying to connect with couldn’t connect with me on that.

And so in the book, there’s a couple of such examples. So in the example of Claire, she, she met a friend at school who also is Black, and has sort of introduced her to this world that she didn’t know, whether it’s, you know, beauty tips for actually women like her, which of course she said was a struggle with a Japanese mother who didn’t know what to do with her hair, and all of those things, so little things like that, but also just, you know, embracing some of these things that… that she couldn’t actually seem to, sort of grasp in her home or in school. We have Kai, whose grandmother, so he loves his grandmother, she hardly raised him, and she developed dementia, and she forgot how to speak English as a result, so she could only speak Greek, so she kind of remembered only that. And so he was like, “well, I want to speak to my grandma”. So now I have to actually up the Greek, because otherwise I cannot communicate with her, and that would be a huge shame”. So you know, that connection is much stronger than everything else. Like, “I want to stay connected to grandma”. In another instance, you know, we had, father and daughter having a bit of a difficult relationship, as is so common in our teenage years, you know, we struggle. But so her dad then taught her how to drive, and they spend all these long hours, driving together, and he, in fact, is a taxi driver, so he showed her all the, you know, the tricks and the, you know, the shortcuts. And, you know, all this time, almost forced time spent together, kind of reconnected them, and, you know, now she’s much more open to, “hey, can you… can you tell me how I… how I can say this in Hungarian?” Or, you know, feeling excited about maybe visiting Hungary, for example.

So these are the kinds of stories, and so this is really important, because connection can just undo some of that traumatic stuff that happens earlier. And you’re quite right, it typically happens as an adult. It’s almost when you kind of have fully formed, and you can look at it a bit more rationally, and actually realize, you know, all of these experiences, it’s not because something’s wrong with me, but rather there’s a lack of understanding, or there are prejudices around me. That doesn’t make it, you know, they are wrong, and I’m okay, kind of feeling, yeah.

ALEX: Yeah, yeah.

ALEX: And you point out that it’s really, at least in your study, really clear that it’s this relationship, or a change in a relationship, that comes first, and then prompts that return to the heritage language, or that renewed passion for spending some time speaking it, or learning it.

And there had been debate in the literature as to whether it’s, you know, that you learn the language first and that enables connections, and you say, well, at least in your study, it seems to be the other way around, so maybe we really need to think of building those relationships first to enable people to want to, or to feel comfortable embracing that heritage language.

I guess, to that end, to try and help people come to that position of, you know, “it’s not me who’s wrong, there’s this world of prejudices or exclusions that are a problem”, you give the wonderful example of you yourself changing your classroom behaviours in the university subjects you teach to try and unteach the idea that heritage languages and identities are deficits. And when you tried it, this wasn’t your study, but it’s, you know, something you were doing because your own study encouraged you to go in this direction, you got such engaged student participation as a result. Can you please tell our listeners about that?

ZOZAN: Yeah, absolutely, and so this was based on an experience I had in my schooling. So I, as I mentioned, I went to school in Germany, and it is very common in Germany still to study Latin as a foreign language throughout high school, and so I was one of those poor people who had to do that.

ALEX: So was I, and you can imagine it was not as… not as common here in Australia.

ZOZAN: I, I… oh, God. It was tough, …But obviously, I speak Italian, so to me, often it was much easier to write my notes in Italian, because it’s almost the same word, right?

ZOZAN: So it just helps me learn that easier. So just in my notebook by myself, I used to write, you know, the Latin word and then the Italian word next to it, because, you know, it obviously makes it easier. Now, my teacher then came around and looked at my notes and said, “well, you have to do this in German”, and I’m like, “well, these are just my personal notes, I can do whatever I want”. And he’s like, “no, that’s an unfair advantage, you have to do it in German’, right? So I’m like, okay, great, so it’s an… it’s a problem at all other times, and all of a sudden, it’s an unfair advantage, so I just… I was not allowed to use my language, even though that was the better way to teach me, right? Like, I mean, that was my individual need as a student, that would have helped me.

So, I know that, obviously, you know, I teach in Sydney, it’s a very diverse student cohort, we have people from all over the place, we have international students, we have students whose first language isn’t English. And I know that many of them, especially if they grew up here and they’ve had this background, this, you know, their parents from elsewhere, they might have had similar experiences to me, whether it’s, you know, either being shamed in some shape or form, or actively forbidden, right?

And so I thought, okay, let me try and see what we can do with that. And so in my class, I then kind of started off with, does anyone here speak or understand another language? And I think it’s very important to say, speak or understand, because that firstly opens up this idea that, oh, okay, maybe the language that I silenced myself in. Typically you can still very much understand it, so I can barely say anything in Turkish, but I understand it quite well. And so, that’s not because I’m not linguistically gifted, it’s because of what I’ve done with it, right? And so, they will then raise their hand, and you can kind of… “what language is that?” And, you know, interestingly, obviously, you will find you speak 10, 15 languages in a classroom of 30 people, because it’s typically quite diverse.

So then we looked at, in this particular example, we looked at a political issue that was, happening at the time. I actually don’t remember what it was now. But I said to them….

ALEX: Hong Kong. I think it was….

ZOZAN: The Hong Kong protests, maybe? This is a while ago. But you could do this with anything. Like, I mean, let’s say I want to do this on the, war in Ukraine, for example. You know, what is the reporting around that? So, importantly because the lesson was around political bias in news reporting, that’s why it’s important for this particular activity to pick a political issue, but you could pick something, obviously, much less confronting, if you want.

So I asked them to look at news reporting about this issue from the last week or so, and I said, if you can speak or read another language, or even listen to, say, a news report on video, have a look at what, around the world, the reporting on the same issue, how are different countries reporting on it, right? So we actually used these other languages. And it was so interesting, because obviously, once you have, you know, some people looking at, you know, obviously news from Australia, but then others news from around Europe, from around South America, from around Asia, you can absolutely see that the news reporting is different. The angles are different, what is being said, who is being biased, is different, right?

And so here we then, you know, this discussion was much richer than had I just said, okay, read news in English, or just from Australia, where, you know, we’re just gonna hear the same perspective. And so I’ve been trying as much as possible to always do that and allow my students to, you know, if you want to read a journal article for your paper from another from an author that didn’t write in English, please do, if that is helpful. You know what I mean? So, these are the kinds of things I try to bring into my classroom to kind of show them, “hey, this is an asset. You speaking another language is great. It opens another door to another culture, to another way of thinking and viewing the world. It’s not a bad thing. You should use it whenever you can.” And it has worked really well.

ALEX: Oh, I love it, and I love that it doesn’t put pressure on those people to then be perfect in their non-English language or languages either. The way you describe it in the book, the more people spoke, the more other students said, “oh, actually, I do understand a bit of this language”, or “oh yeah, I didn’t mention it before, but I also have these linguistic resources”, and everyone just feels more and more comfortable to bring everything to the table.

ALEX: The next question, I don’t know if we’ll edit it out or not, just depending on the time, but it does flow quite nicely from what you’ve just been discussing, so I’ll ask it, and you can answer it, and we’ll record it.

ALEX: So, Zozan, another way you’ve built on this project, which was originally your thesis, and then you’ve written in this wonderfully engaging book. You’ve then gone on since then to do a different related project that’s ended up with a documentary and a lot of practical applications. And I think listeners would love to hear about it. It’s a project called Say Our Names. You’re leading a team of researchers from various disciplines in this project, and it’s about challenging quote-unquote “tricky” or “foreign” names in Anglophone contexts. You’ve created some really practical guides for colleagues, which I’ve seen, and even directed a mini-documentary that showcases the lived experiences behind these names. It premiered a few months ago here in Sydney in collaboration with the City of Sydney Council. Can you tell us about this project in a nutshell, and what the public responses have been like now that your research is out there beyond the university?

ZOZAN: I know, the Say Our Names is a bit like the beast that cannot be contained for some reason, it’s really, blown up, but I think what made it so successful is because it is such an easy entryway into cultural competence, very much to, you know, speaking to the kinds of themes that are in the book. So as you know, my name, people find hard to pronounce. It really isn’t, but it is immediately foreign in most, in most places that I would go to. And I actually… my name is mispronounced so often that sometimes I don’t even know how to pronounce it correctly anymore. Like, I have to call my mum, reset my ear: “How do I say this again?”

And, you know, there’s obviously lots of people in Australia, around the world, who have this very same issue, right? So you have your name mispronounced, you have it not pronounced, because people are so scared to say it, it looks so wild to them, they just call you “you”, or just don’t refer to you at all. Or perhaps, they anglicize it, or they shorten it, and you know, it seems like a harmless thing to do, but actually, it’s sort of like, you know, it scratches the surface of a much bigger issue, right? So you have, again, this dominant culture, and so here in Australia, obviously, the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon culture with everybody else, right? And so English names we are totally fine with, but as soon as something is not English or not, you know, common European, it becomes a tricky thing, and it’s hard to say. And so you internalize that, as the person whose name that is, you internalize, my name is hard to say, my name is foreign.

And your name is the first thing you say to someone, right? You meet a new person, you say, “hi, my name is Zozan”. And… I mean…

ZOZAN: 90% of the time, either people will mispronounce it, or they will ask me more about it.

ZOZAN: And I tell this story, not in the documentary, but when I introduce the documentary. I tell the story about how I actually, a couple of years ago, this is quite, timely, I had podcast training, how to speak about my research in, for podcasts. The first task that we had to do in this training was explain our work, like, what kind of research are you, what is your research?

And I found… I got really stuck with that, like, I couldn’t put in writing what I do. And I’m a very chatty person, I normally have no trouble talking and, talking about myself, but for some reason, that seemed like an impossible task. I couldn’t… I had no idea how to say it. And I realized the reason why I don’t know how to say it is because I never, in a situation where people speak about their work, I never get past my name. People don’t want to hear about my name, sorry, my work, because they want to hear about my name.

So, you know, I say, hi, I’m Zozan at a networking event. And, “oh, what kind of name is it? Oh, where are you from? Oh, you know, what are your parents? Where are your parents from?” And you don’t actually get a chance to do what you came to do, which is, I would like to speak about my work, because I’d like an opportunity.

And so we realized this is quite important, and yes, of course, it’s adjacent to all of this work from the book. It’s, it’s, you know, your name is a lexical item as part of language, right? So we realized the need to… maybe this is an easy entry point to connect people. If we just show the importance of trying to get someone’s name right, how to ask, how to deal with your own discomfort of not knowing how to pronounce it and asking how to… to take off a little bit of the burden of the other person who’s continuously uncomfortable anyway, right?

And so, yeah, we, we, again, storytelling is my thing, so we, we had some focus groups, obviously where we could do a bit more, you know, what is your story, what is your experience, and also how would you like to be approached, right? This is very important. We don’t want to assume that, as researchers, you know, obviously I have my own ways and thoughts. But it was important, so we asked, and created this best practice guide that really came from community: “This is how people would like to be approached. This is what you can do”.

And then we also created this, little documentary. It’s… it’s really, really beautiful, I think, if I have to say so myself. But obviously it just shows the stories, it shows stories of what it… what the name means, because it is obviously part of your cultural heritage, how people have felt resentful towards their names, and ashamed of their names, in exactly the same way as people do with language in my book. So there were a lot of parallels.

And also what it means when people try to get it right, when there’s actually a person making an effort, because again, it’s about connection. Here’s someone who wants to connect with me, and who’s making the effort. So, of course, now I also want to make the effort, right? So it’s almost like this beautiful…

ZOZAN: Like, thank you for trying, and yes, I want to be your friend, let me help you. …

And so, yeah, and it went beyond UTS, it went citywide. I am… we have been receiving requests around Australia to come and screen it and hold a little panel. We’ve had panel discussions with people who are experts in this field. But also, I think what is important that we now brought in as well is Indigenous voices, because obviously there’s an erasure there of names and language that we also need to talk about in the Australian context. So, we’re doing a lot around that, and yeah, it’s been… it’s been the most practical application, I think, of my research so far.

ALEX: When I heard a panel talking about it, something I took away is just to be encouraged, you know, if you’re the person who’s asking, “how do you say your name?” You don’t have to get it right the first time, you don’t have to have just listened to it, and then you can immediately repeat it, because maybe it is an unusual name for you. You just have to be genuinely making an effort to learn, and to show that you want to connect, and that you want to get it right, and you want to ask the person how they want to be known. And that, I think, is just so important for people to keep in mind. It’s not a standard of immediate perfection, it’s a standard of attempting to genuinely respect and connect with people.

Before we wrap up, can you tell us what’s next for us, Zozan, and can we follow your work online, or even in person?

ZOZAN: Well, …

ZOZAN: Obviously, the book is available, you can buy it as an e-book, or obviously, if you’re really into hardback, you can do that too. Say Our Names is spreading far and wide. I’m taking it to Europe, at the end of the year. It will be, used in classrooms in the UK. I will be screening it at a conference in Paris, so there’s actually quite a bit of… because it’s obviously really relevant all around the world, right? We are more globalized, so very happy to do more screenings and introductions and panels. Obviously, a book tour is in the works … let’s see how we go with that, but, certainly around Sydney, and then perhaps also overseas. So I’m trying to spread the word, and, you know, I’m the kind of person who actually just wants to make an impact. I want to, you know, obviously it’s wonderful to do this research and dive into the literature and all of that, but, you know, I think I am quite proud of having translated it into something that is, you know, we have now in corporate offices our best practice guide on language and on names, and people are trying. And so, you know, I think that is the most rewarding thing, and that’s really something I want to keep working on.

ALEX: Thank you, and we’ll make sure we put your social media handles in the show notes. So thank you again, Zozan, and thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and of course, recommend the Language on the Move podcast if you can, and our partner, The New Books Network, recommend to your students, your colleagues, your friends. Until next time!

The White House (Image credit: Zach Rudisin, Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: The Trump administration has recently declared English the official language of the USA while simultaneously cutting the provision of English language education services. This politicization of language and migration in the USA is being felt around the world.

To help our readers make sense of it all, we bring you a new occasional series devoted to the politics of language and migration.

We start with an essay by Professor Rosemary Salomone, the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. John’s University in New York City. Professor Salomone, an expert in Constitutional and Administrative Law, shows that longstanding efforts to make English the official language of the USA have always been “a solution in search of a problem.”

***

English in the Crossfire of US Immigration: A Solution in Search of a Problem

Rosemary Salomone

Making English the official language of the US has once again reared its head, as it does periodically. This time it has gained legal footing in a novel and troubling way. It also bears more serious implications for American identity, democracy and justice than the unaware eye might see and that the country should not ignore.

Trump Executive Order

Amid a barrage of mandates, the Trump Administration has issued an executive order that unilaterally declares English the “official language” of the United States. It does not stop there. It also revokes a Clinton Administration executive order, operating for the past 25 years, that required language services for individuals who were not proficient in English.

The order briefly caught the attention of the media in a fast-paced news cycle. Yet its potentially wide-sweeping scope demands more thorough scrutiny and reflection for what it says and what it suggests about national identity, shared values, the democratic process and the role of language in a country with long immigrant roots. It also calls for vigilance that this is not a harbinger of more direct assaults to come on language rights. Subsequent reports of closing Department of Education offices in charge of bilingual education programs and foreign language studies clearly signal a move in that direction.

English and National Identity

German Translation of the Declaration of Independence

English has been the de facto official language of the United States for the past 250 years despite successive waves of immigration. Though the nation’s Founders were familiar with the worldview taking hold in Europe equating language and national identity, they also understood that they were embarking on a unique nation-building project grounded in a set of democratic ideals. As a “settler country” those shared ideals and not the English language have defined the US as a nation unlike France, for example, where the French language became intertwined with being a “citoyen” of the Republic.

In the early days of the American republic, the national government issued many official texts in French and German to accommodate new immigrants. Languages were also woven less officially into political life. Within days of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, a newspaper in Pennsylvania published a German translation to engage the large German speaking population in support of the independence movement. As John Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, noted in a letter to Noah Webster in 1831, geographic and social mobility, rather than public laws, would create “an identity of language through[out] the United States.” And so it has been.

The executive order distinguishes between a “national” and an “official” language. English has functioned well as the national language in government, the courts, schooling, the media and business. It has evolved that way through a maze of customs, institutions and policies that legitimize English throughout public life. It is the language spoken by most Americans. Over three-quarters (78.6 percent) of the population age five and older speaks English at home while only 8.3 percent speaks English “less than very well.” And so, by reasonable accounts, formally declaring it the official language after 250 years seems to be a solution without a problem unless the problem is immigration itself and unwarranted fears over national identity.

While benign on its face, at best the Trump order veers toward nationalism cloaked in the language of unity and efficiency. At worst it’s a thinly veiled expression of racism and xenophobia, narrowly shaping the collective sense of what it means to be American. Though less extreme in scope, its spirit conjures up uniform language laws in past autocratic regimes where language was weaponized against minority language speakers. Think of Spain under Franco and Italy under Mussolini where regional languages were outlawed.

Context and Timing

Context and timing matter. The order comes on the heels of the Trump Administration’s shutting down, within an eye-blink of the inauguration, the Spanish-language version of the White House website along with presidential accounts on social media. Reinstated throughout the Biden years, the website had first been removed in 2017 during the first Trump Administration.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump blasted former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is married to a Mexican-American, for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail. “He should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States,” Trump remarked, projecting what became an administration openly hostile to “foreigners” and the languages they speak. Against that history, the official English order now signals rejection of the nation’s large Spanish-speaking population and the anti-immigrant feelings their growing numbers have engendered.

The irony is that Trump, not unlike other politicians, has courted that population with Spanish language ads. With 58 million people in the United States speaking Spanish, political operatives understand that Spanish is the “language of politics.” But the “politics of language” is far more complicated. The 2024 Trump campaign ad repeating the words, “Que mala Kamala eres” (“How bad Kamala you are’) to the tune of a famous salsa song with the image of Trump dancing on the screen is hard to reconcile with his prior and subsequent actions as president.

The current shutdown of the Spanish-language website did not go unnoticed among public dignitaries in Spain. King Felipe VI described it as “striking.” The president of  the Instituto Cervantes, poet Luis Garcia Montero, called it a “humiliating” decision and took exception to Trump’s “arrogance” towards the Hispanic community. On the domestic front, the executive order raised even more pointed concerns among immigrant and Hispanic groups in the United States.

Issued at a time of mass deportations, hyperbolic charges of immigrant criminality, attacks on “sanctuary” cities and states, and rising opposition to immigration in general, the new executive order will further divide rather than unite an already fractured nation. Fanning the flames of hostility toward anyone with a hint of foreignness, it can incite lasting feelings of inclusion and exclusion that cannot easily be undone.

Official Language Movement

The Trump order did not come from out of the blue. It is the product of years of advocacy at the federal and state levels promoting English to the exclusion of other languages. Proposals to make English the nation’s official language have been floating through Congress since 1981 when the late Senator Samuel I. Hayakawa (R. CA), a Canadian-born semanticist and former college president, introduced the English Language Amendment. Though the joint resolution died, it set a pattern for congressional proposals, some less draconian, all of which have stalled. The most recent attempt was in 2023 when then Senator J.D. Vance (R. Ohio) introduced the English Language Unity Act.

Hayakawa went on to form “U.S. English” in 1983. It calls itself the “largest non-partisan action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States.” It currently counts two million members nationwide. In 1986, its then executive director Gerda Bikales tellingly warned, “If anyone has to feel strange, it’s got to be the immigrant, until he learns English.”

The group’s website now celebrates the Trump order as “a tremendous step in the right direction,” a supposed antidote to the 350 languages spoken in the United States. Obviously that level of diversity can also be viewed as a positive unless “diversity” is totally ruled out of even the lexicon. Two other advocacy groups with similar missions subsequently joined the movement: English First and Pro English.

Defying Democratic Norms

The fruits of those efforts can be found in official English measures in 32 states. The earliest, from Nebraska, dates from 1920 in the wake of World War I when suspicion of foreigners and their languages reached unprecedented heights. By 1923, 23 states had passed laws mandating English as the sole language of instruction in public schools, some in private schools as well. With immigration quotas of the 1920s (lifted in the mid-1960s) diluting the “immigrant threat,” the official English movement didn’t seriously pick up again until the 1980s as the Spanish-speaking population grew more visible. The remaining Official English laws were largely adopted through the 2000s, the last in 2016 in West Virginia. Some of them, as in California and Arizona, were tied to popular backlash against public school bilingual programs serving Spanish-speaking children.

Some of these state laws were passed by a voter approved ballot measure, others by the state legislature. Some reside in the state constitution, others in state statutory law. Unlike the Trump order mandated by executive fiat, they all underwent wide discussion by the people or their elected representatives, which a measure of such high importance, especially with national reach, demands. And they can only be removed using a similar process, unlike an executive order subject to change by the mere stroke of a future presidential pen. This is not like naming the official state flower or bird, a mere gesture. The consequences are far more serious.

As official English supporters are quick to point out, upwards of 180 countries also have official languages, some more than one. Standing alone, that argument sounds convincing. In well-functioning democracies, however, those pronouncements are carved into the nation’s constitution from the beginning or by subsequent amendment, or they’ve been adopted by the national legislature, again through democratic deliberation. At times they’ve been triggered by a particular event. France added the French language to its constitution in 1992 for fear that English would threaten French national identity with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union. Exactly what is triggering the current move in the United States? The answer is quite transparent. It’s immigration.

Some countries, like Brazil and the Philippines, allow for regional languages. Other approaches are less formalized. In the Netherlands and Germany, the official language operates through the country’s administrative law. In Italy, though the Italian language is not officially recognized in the constitution, the courts have inferred constitutional status from protections expressly afforded linguistic minorities. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Australia and Argentina, the latter two also “settler countries,” recognize a de facto official language as the United States has done since its beginning.

Clinton Order Protections

While the official English declaration might mistakenly pass for mere symbolism, the revocation of the Clinton order quickly turns that notion on its head. Rather than “reinforce shared national values,” as the Trump order claims, revoking the Clinton order protections undermines a fundamental commitment to equal opportunity and dignity grounded in the Constitution and in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From that Act and its regulations prohibiting  discrimination on the basis of national origin, the Clinton Administration drew its authority, including using national origin as a proxy for language, to protect language rights. In an insidious twist, the Trump executive order uses language as a proxy for national origin, i.e. immigrant status, to pull back on those same protections.

The Clinton order, together with guidance documents issued by the Department of Justice, required federal agencies and other programs that receive federal funds to take “reasonable steps” to provide “meaningful access” to “information and services” for individuals who are not proficient in English. As advocates argue, removing those requirements opens the door for federal agencies and recipients of federal funds, including state and local governments, to deny critical language supports that assure access to medical treatment, social welfare services, education, voting rights, disaster relief, legal representation and even citizenship. In a virtual world of rampant disinformation, it is all the more essential that governments provide non-English speakers with information in emergencies, whether it’s the availability of vaccines during a flu pandemic or the need to evacuate during a flood or wildfire, as well as the facts they ordinarily need to participate in civil life.

With current cutbacks in federal agency funding and staff, rising hostility toward immigrants, and the erosion of civil rights enforcement, one can reasonably foresee backsliding on any of those counts. One need only look at the current state of voting and reproductive rights to figure out where language supports may be heading when left to state discretion with no federal ropes to rein it in.

Multilingualism for All

The Trump order overlooks mounting evidence on the value of multilingualism for individuals and for the national economy. Language skills enhance employment opportunities and mobility for workers. Multilingual workers permit businesses to compete both locally and internationally for goods and services in an expanding global market

It takes us back to a time not so long ago when speaking a language other than English, except for the elite, was considered a deficit and not a personal asset and national resource. It belies both the multilingual richness of the United States and the fact that today’s immigrants are eager to learn English but with sufficient time, opportunity and support. They well understand its importance for upward mobility for themselves and for their children. That fact is self-evident. With English fast becoming the dominant lingua franca globally, parents worldwide are clamoring for schools to add  English to their children’s language repertoire and even paying out-of-pocket for private lessons.

Rather than issuing a flawed pronouncement on “official English,” the federal government would better spend its resources on adopting a comprehensive language policy that includes funding English language programs for all newcomers, along with trained translators and interpreters for critical services and civic participation, while supporting schools in developing bilingual literacy in their children. Today’s “American dream” should not preclude dreaming in more than one language. In fact, it should affirmatively encourage it for all.

In the meantime, the Trump order promises to provoke yet more litigation challenging denials in services under Title VI and the Constitution, burdening the overtaxed resources of immigrant advocacy groups and of the courts. Worst of all, it threatens to inflict irreparable harm on thousands of individuals and families struggling to build a new life while maintaining an important piece of the old.

It’s not the English language or national identity that need to be saved. It’s the democratic process, sense of justice and clear-eyed understanding of public policy now threatened by government acts like the official English executive order.

Related content

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Rosemary Salomone chats with Ingrid Piller about her book The Rise of English.

This episode also contains excerpts from a Wired YouTube video by dialect coaches Erik Singer and Eliza Simpson called Accent Expert Breaks Down Language Pet Peeves.

If you liked this episode, also check out Lingthusiasm’s episode about creaky voice called “Various vocal fold vibes”, Dr. Cate Madill’s piece in The Conversation entitled Keep an eye on vocal fry – it’s all about power, and the Multicultural Australian English project that Dr. White references (Multicultural Australian English: The New Voice of Sydney).

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript (added 19/12/2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Hannah White.

Hannah is a postdoc researcher at Macquarie University in the Department of Linguistics. She completed her doctoral research last year in 2023 with a thesis entitled Creaky Voice in Australian English. Today we’re going to be discussing this research along with a 2023 paper that she co-authored entitled Convergence of Creaky Voice Use in Australian English.

This paper is also Chapter 5 of her thesis. The paper and the entirety of Hannah’s thesis examines the use of creaky voice or vocal fry in speech. Hannah, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

I’m so excited to talk to you.

Dr White: Thank you so much for having me. I’m also excited.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what made you decide to pursue a PhD in Linguistics?

Dr White: You might be able to tell from my accent that I am a Kiwi, a Kiwi linguist working here in Australia. I actually kind of fell into linguistics by accident. So I was doing my undergrad in French and German, and I went to Germany on exchange, and I took just on a whim, I took an undergraduate beginner English Linguistics course, and I realized this is what I want to do forever.

I fell in love immediately and came back and added a whole other major to my degree. So yeah, it was kind of by chance that I found linguistics. And in terms of doing a PhD, I just, I love research.

I love the idea of coming up with a hypothesis, designing an experiment to test it and finding like results that might kind of challenge. Ideas that you’ve like preconceptions that you have or yeah, just finding something new. So yeah, that’s kind of what drew me into doing the PhD and in linguistics.

Brynn: Did you go straight from undergrad into a PhD?

Dr White: No, I didn’t. I had a master’s step in between. So, I did that in Wellington.

Brynn: I was going to say, that is quite a leap if you did that!

Dr White: Absolutely not. I did my master’s looking at creaky voice as well. So, I looked at perceptions of creak and uptalk in New Zealand English.

Brynn: Well, let’s go ahead and start talking about that because I’m so excited to talk about creak and vocal fry and uptalk. So, your doctoral research investigated this thing called creaky voice. So, whether we realize it or not, we’ve all heard creaky voice, or as I said, is it sometimes called vocal fry.

So, tell us, what exactly is creaky voice? Why do people study it? And why did you decide to study it?

Dr White: Okay, so creaky voice is a very common kind of voice quality. Technically, if we want to get a little bit phonetics, it’s generally produced with quite a constricted glottis and vocal folds that are slack and compressed. They vibrate slowly and irregularly.

And this results in a very low-pitched, rough or pulse-like sound. You can think of it, often it’s described as kind of sounding like popcorn, like popping corn or a stick being dragged along a railing. They’re quite common analogies for the sound of creaky voice.

Why do people study it? I think that it’s something that people think that they know a lot about. And it’s talked about a lot.

But it’s actually kind of, there has been research on creak for a very long time, since the 60s. It’s gaining popularity at the moment. So, I think it’s a relatively new area of research that’s gaining a lot of popularity right now.

This could be to do with the fact that there’s a lot of media coverage around creaky voice or vocal fry.

Brynn: Because we should say that the probably most common example that we’ve all heard is Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, saying things like, that’s hot, like that, that like, uh, sound voice, yeah.

Dr White: The Valley Girl.

Brynn: Valley Girl, yes.

Dr White: My go-to examples, Britney Spears as well.

Brynn: Oh, absolutely.

Dr White: Yeah. So, a lot of this media coverage, it’s associated with women, right? But it’s also super negative.

So often it’s associated even in linguistic studies, perception studies, it’s associated with vapidness, uneducated, like stuck up, vain sort of persona. So, I think it’s really interesting to kind of, that’s what drew me into study, wanting to study it. I do it all the time.

I’m a real chronic creaker and I love the sound of it personally. So, I kind of just wanted to work out why people hate it so much and see if I can challenge that view of creak.

Brynn: Yeah, and it is true that we tend to associate it with, as you said, with vapidness. Do we have any idea of where that perception came from? Or was it just because it’s more these people that are in the limelight, younger women, the Kim Kardashians of the world, is it because we associate them with being vapid and that’s their type of speech, or do we know where that came from?

Dr White: I don’t know if there’s any research that’s kind of looked at where that association came from originally, but I would say, like just from my own perception, it probably is that association with these celebrities.

Brynn: And these celebrities that we are talking about are generally American, right? But in your thesis, you discuss creaky voice use in multicultural Sydney, Australia. And you write about how social meanings are expressed through the use of creaky voice.

So, can you tell us about that? Where you’re seeing creak come up in Australia? Maybe why you’re seeing it come up and what you saw during your research?

Dr White: I mean, creaky voice is used by everyone. It’s a really common feature. It’s used across the world in different languages.

It can even be used to change the meaning of words in some languages. So, it’s got this kind of phonemic use.

Brynn: Let’s hear what dialect coach Eric Singer has to say about creak changing meanings in other languages. This is from a video posted to YouTube from Wired and it’s called Accent Expert Breaks Down Language Pet Peeves. And we’ll hear more from Eric later in this episode.

Singer: So creaky voice actually has a linguistic function in some languages. In Danish, for example, the word un without any creak in your voice means she, but the word un means dog. So, you have to actually put that creak in and you can change the meaning of a word.

In Burmese, ka means shake and ka means attend on. You have to add creaky voice and it means something totally different. Otherwise, the syllable is exactly the same.

The Mexican language, Xalapa Mazatec, actually has a three-way contrast between modal voice, creaky voice and breathy voice. So, we can take the same syllable, ya, which with that tone means tree. But if I do it with breathy voice, ya, it means it carries.

And if I do it with creaky voice, ya, it means he wears. Same syllable.

Dr White: So, it’s not just this thing that is used by these celebrities in California. So, we know that it’s used by people in Australia, but no one’s really looked at it before. So, there are very, very few studies in Australian English on creaky voice.

So that’s kind of where I started from. The data we used in my thesis was from the Multicultural Australian English Project. So that was led by Professor Felicity Cox at Macquarie University.

And the data was collected from different schools and different areas of Sydney that are kind of highly populated by different kind of ethnic groups. So, we collected data that was conversational speech between these teenagers. And I looked at the creak.

So, we’ve been looking at lots and lots of different linguistic, phonetic aspects of the speech. But I specifically looked at the creak between these teenagers. And I think the really interesting thing that I found was that overall, the creak levels were really quite similar between the boys and the girls.

It wasn’t, I didn’t find an exceptional mass of creak in the girls’ speech compared to the boys.

Brynn: Which is fascinating, because we, honestly, until I started looking into this for this episode, or talking to you, I just assumed that women, girls would have more creak in their voice than men. And then I was reading your data and reading the paper, and I was blown away to find out, wait a minute, no, there’s actually not that much difference in the prevalence of it. So, what’s going on there?

Why do we assume that it’s girls and women?

Dr White: There’s a lot of research in this specific area at the moment. Part of my thesis, I actually did a perception study about, so looking at how people perceive creak in different voices. So, it was a creak identification task, and they heard creak in low-pitched male and female voices, and high-pitched male and female voices.

And it could be something to do with the low pitch of male speech, generally. Post-creak is such a low-pitched feature. It might be that it’s less noticeable in a male voice because it’s already at this baseline low, so there’s less of a contrast when the speaker goes into creak.

Whereas if you’ve got a female speaker with a relatively high-pitched voice, you might notice it a lot more when they go down into the low-pitched creak. So that could be something that’s influencing this perception of creak as a female feature.

Brynn: Let’s give our audience an example of that now. This is from a YouTube video posted by Wired and dialect coach Eric Singer, as well as fellow dialect coach Eliza Simpson. We’ll link to this in the show notes.

Singer: One thing it’s hard not to notice is that most of the time when people are complaining about vocal fry and uptalk, they’re complaining about women’s voices, and especially young women. And it’s not just women who do this. Let’s try our own experiment, shall we?

Let’s take one sentence, the first sentence from the Gettysburg Address. I’m going to do it with some creak in my voice. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Eliza, would you do the same?

Simpson: Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Singer: What did you think? Do you have different associations when you hear it from a male voice? Four score and seven years ago, than when you hear it from a female voice?

Simpson: Four score and seven years ago.

Brynn: We hear this creak in men’s voices, and we hear it in women’s voices. You mentioned that you were looking at multilingual Sydney. What did you discover about creak in multilingual populations?

Dr White: Yeah, so we, it was more, so the speakers that we were working with are all first language Australian English speakers. A lot of them had different kind of heritage languages, so either their parents spoke other languages at home, or they spoke other languages at home in addition to English. My research was more focused on the areas that the speakers lived in, so rather than their language backgrounds.

I think the most interesting thing we found was that the girls, so I said that there weren’t that many differences between gender, but the girls in Cabramatta or Fairfield area, so this is a largely Vietnamese background population, they actually crept significantly less than the boys in that area. So that was kind of an interesting finding.

And when we, like obviously we want to work out why that might be, so we had a look into the conversations of those girls, and we found that they were talking a lot about kind of cultural identity and cultural pride, and pride in the area as well.

So, talking about how they’re really proud of like how Asian the area is. And that they don’t want it to be whitewashed. So, we wondered whether for those girls, creak might be associated with some kind of white woman identity, and they were distancing themselves from that by not using as much creaky voice.

Brynn: Fascinating! Did you find out anything to do with the boys and why they, this more Vietnamese heritage language population, why they did use creak?

Did it have anything to do with ethnicity or cultural heritage or not? Or we don’t know yet?

Dr White: We don’t know yet. That’s something that needs to be looked into, but I did notice that they didn’t talk about the area in the same way. So it could be, yeah, it could just be the conversation didn’t come up, the topic didn’t come up, but it could also be like that relation to the area and their cultural identity is particularly linked to creaky voice for those girls.

Brynn: That’s absolutely fascinating. Did you find the opposite anywhere? Did you find that certain places had the girls creaking more than the boys?

Dr White: We did find that in Bankstown and in Parramatta, but we don’t know exactly why that is yet.

Brynn: It feels like there’s so much to do potentially with culture and the way that people want to be perceived, the way that they want to be seen. And I guess that could happen with choosing to adopt more creak or choosing not to adopt more creak.

Dr White: Yeah absolutely. It’s like a feature that’s available to them to express their identity for sure.

Brynn: And that brings us to something that you discuss in the 2023 paper that you co-authored called Communication Accommodation Theory and its relation to creaky voice. So, tell us what Communication Accommodation Theory is and how you and your co-authors saw it show up with creaky voice in this study about Australian teenagers.

Dr White: Communication Accommodation Theory is basically this idea that speakers express their attitudes towards one another by either changing their speech to become more similar to each other. So, if the attitudes towards each other are positive or diverging or becoming more different from each other, if these attitudes are potentially negative. So, this has been found with a lot of phonetic features such as the pronunciation of vowels or pitch.

So, speakers are being shown to converge or diverge from each other based on their attitudes or feelings towards each other. So, we wanted to look at this with creak because we had the conversational data there. Like it wasn’t, the data wasn’t collected with this in mind, but we thought it would be really interesting.

And we did find evidence that our Australian teenagers were converging in the use of creaky voice. So, over the course of the conversation, their levels of creak were becoming more similar to each other. We also found that overall, so we didn’t find an interaction between like convergence and gender, but we did find an overall finding of gender.

So that overall girls were more similar to each other in the use of creak than boys were. So, we think this might be some sort of social motivation based on research that’s shown that girls prefer to have a preference for fellow girls more than boys have a preference for solo boys. So, kind of a social motivation to converge.

Brynn: I’ve definitely seen that in research as well. And sometimes you’ll see sort of conflicting things. Sometimes studies will say, you know, oh yeah, girls and women, they always want to try to have that more like accommodative communication. They will socially converge more.

Other studies will say like, oh, we can’t really tell. But it is a fascinating area of research and trying to find out why, if it’s true, that girls and women do converge more.

Why is that? Do you have any personal thoughts on that?

Dr White: I wonder whether it’s like a social conditioning kind of thing. Yeah. That would be my gut instinct towards it.

Brynn: Tell me more about that. What do you mean by social conditioning?

Dr White: That girls, since we’re tiny children, we’re socially conditioned to be nice and to want to please people. It could be that that is coming through and the convergence.

Brynn: Yeah, and trying to show almost like in group, trying to say, hey, I’m one of you, let me into the group, sort of a thing. Yeah, which is so interesting.

What do you think the takeaway message is from your research into creaky voice?

What do the findings tell us about language, social groups, and especially in this case, the Australian English of teenagers? Because like we said before, I think a lot of times, creak is associated with the Americanisation of English, of language, sort of that West Coast Valley girl idea. So, what do we think that this all says about Australian English?

Dr White: I think it’s really hard to sum up a key takeaway from such an enormous part of my life.

Brynn: It’s like someone saying, like, tell me about the last five years in two sentences.

Dr White: Yeah, exactly. But I think my key takeaway from this is that creak is a super complicated linguistic feature. It’s more than just this thing that women do in America.

And the relationship between creak and gender is way more complicated than just, yeah, women do this thing, men don’t do it, or they do it less. So, it’s really important to consider like these other factors, other social factors, such as like language background or where the, like specifically in Sydney, where the speaker is, their identity as a speaker when we are looking at creak prevalence.

Brynn: I think that that’s the part of this research of yours and your co-authors that I found so interesting was this idea of creak being used or not used to show identity and not just gender identity, but also cultural identity, potentially heritage language identity, identity around where you live. So, I think that you’re right, it is more complicated than just saying, oh, don’t talk like that, you sound like a valley girl, you know?

Dr White: Exactly.

Brynn: There’s more about what it means to be a human in a social group in terms of creak than maybe we previously thought.

So, with that, what’s next for you? What are you working on now?

Are you continuing to study creak or are you onto something different? What’s next for you?

Dr White: I can’t stop studying creak. I’m obsessed.

Brynn: That’s fabulous!

Dr White: So, I’m actually currently working on an Apparent Time Study of creak.

Brynn: What does that mean?

Dr White: That is looking at, so we have this historical data that was collected from the Northern Beaches. So, kids, teenagers in the 90s interviews. And we have part of the Multicultural Australian English Project.

We collected data from the Northern Beaches. So, we’ve got these two groups from the same area, 30 years apart. And so, I’m looking at whether there’s been a shift in creak prevalence over that time, because people always say, you know, creak is becoming more popular, but we don’t have like that much firm empirical evidence that that’s the case.

So yeah, I thought it would be really interesting to see.

Brynn: Have you just started or do you have any findings that you can tell us about?

Dr White: I’ve just started. I’m coding the data currently. So yeah, watch the space.

Brynn: Watch the space because when you’re done and when you have some findings, I want to talk to you again, because to think that that’s what’s so interesting is examining it through time because you’re right, there’s so much that is in the media that goes around, especially talking about the export of American English and American ways of speaking.

I’ve talked in this podcast before about how even I as an American have been approached by Australians and they’ll talk about, you know, oh, we sound so American now. It’s because of all of the media and everything like that.

So, to actually be able to have some data to back that up would be incredible.

Dr White: Yeah, that’s really exciting stuff. I’m also going to Munich next year as part of the Humboldt Fellowship. So, I’ll be working with Professor Jonathan Harrington over there and looking at creak in German. That’s something that we don’t know very much about at all.

Brynn: Do we have many studies about Creek in languages other than English where it doesn’t denote another word?

Dr White: There are some, yeah, but it’s definitely, the field is definitely English-centric. So, it’ll be really interesting to see.

Brynn: That’s going to be so fun. I can’t wait to talk to you again. Well, Hannah, thank you so much for coming on today, and thank you to everyone for listening.

Dr White: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.

Brynn: And if you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast. Leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time.

A lack of legal literacy can affect migrants – and indeed anyone – across all aspects of social life. This can include everything from signing a contract with an electricity provider, through earning a living, to having a safe and dignified marriage.

Legal professionals suggest that recent migrants may be special targets of a range of scams and exploitation because they are more likely to lack legal literacy, may lack information about available assistance, or may not be capable of accessing those services even when they do know about them.

However, this is not due simply to a lack of inclination to learn about the law. Rather, the development of legal literacy is dependent on the accessibility of information and education. For those with limited or no English, this naturally requires the provision of resources in other languages and accessible formats, in locations where their target audiences can find them.

While the various government and non-government bodies tasked with providing information about the law have already taken a range of measures to make their resources more accessible to non-English speakers and readers, barriers persist. These barriers can even influence the form of exploitation people face. For example, a lawyer I interviewed in my most recent project shared the story of a man who had migrated to Australia in the late 1990s and became trapped in a highly exploitative work arrangement:

you see the signs from the very beginning. Like, he didn’t have an accountant, he’ll use [his employer’s] accountant. And that accountant played around with his papers. They put him in a house on top of the shop. They denied him English lessons. So, till this day, I speak to him in Arabic, even though my Arabic’s not perfect.

In this scenario, it was only when the man’s workplace injuries became so severe that he insisted on seeing a doctor that he was eventually able to learn about his rights and access legal assistance. Among other measures, his exploiters intentionally limited his English language acquisition opportunities as a form of abusive control, to prevent him learning of his rights and seeking help.

This only reinforces the importance of providing resources in a range of languages, and clearly demonstrates the inappropriateness of claims that individual migrants are responsible for learning English as a prerequisite to accessing full inclusion in society and protection of the law.

Unfortunately, his case is far from being an exception. News reports uncover myriad examples, from international students underpaid with justifications that their limited English meant they weren’t good enough for minimum wage, to asylum seekers threatened with deportation if they didn’t comply with forced labour arrangements.

The complex and interconnected barriers recent migrants, especially those with temporary visas, often face means holistic responses are needed for them to access their rights. However ultimately, seeking justice still hinges on them first having knowledge about what those rights are and the processes and resources available to have them enforced. This is not possible unless relevant information is available in a language and format accessible to them.

The landing page

While service providers and regulatory bodies appear aware of this issue and have taken steps to address it, less is known about how accessible the resources and mechanisms are in practice (Victoria Law Foundation 2016). Further, beyond these formal offerings, less still is known about how migrants with limited English actually learn about Australian law and how it applies in their lives.

The Legal Aid bodies in each Australian state are tasked with providing a range of legal services. This includes providing free legal assistance and advice to some individuals, based on need. However another of their statutory functions is what is commonly called Community Legal Education and Information (CLEI) (e.g. Legal Aid Commission Act 1979 (NSW), section 10(2)(j),(k),(m)). This means that they are required to develop and disseminate informational resources and training to help increase the community’s legal literacy.

This is considered a crucial component to ensuring the whole community, and particularly recent migrants and those with limited or no English, can access justice, but we do not yet have a comprehensive picture of what is currently on offer, nor how well it works for these particular groups. Therefore, the peak body of the Australian legal profession has called for research to address the gaps in evidence to ensure migrants’ linguistic and other forms of diversity are understood and incorporated into efforts to improve community legal literacy (Law Council of Australia 2018).

The internet is a popular starting point for individuals looking for all types of information and existing studies on multilingual communications on the websites for government schools and multiple government service providers suggest that much work remains done to ensure that multilingual government communications are both complete and accessible for their target audiences. Therefore, in May, to start exploring the legal literacy resources available for non-English speakers, I undertook a pilot audit of Legal Aid NSW’s website.

The website

Information about Apprehended Violence Orders in Spanish

Legal Aid NSW offers a range of CLEI, with varying accessibility for non-English speakers and readers. As someone with English literacy, the landing page immediately presents me with a promising ‘My problem is about’ section. This part of the website helpfully guides readers step-by-step, in accessible plain language and appealing format, across a wide range of legal issues, e.g. ‘My job’, ‘Disasters’, ‘My rights as’ and ‘Visas and immigration’. Another section provides lay definitions of legal terms. These reflect an evident broader commitment to enhancing the accessibility of the site as a whole. However, these two sections are only available in English. Similarly, face-to-face and online legal education courses are advertised, but all current offerings appear to be in English only.

Another section provides a large collection of resources, like posters and pamphlets, organized across various topics, providing information about legal issues and available services. Some are provided in languages other than English (LOTEs). However, again, non-English speakers have significantly less access. Of the total 233 resources identified, only 40 are available in more than one language. Even then, most only include a few common LOTEs, e.g. Arabic (37), Chinese (36), Vietnamese (29), Dari/Farsi (16). Further, LOTEs are included inconsistently, e.g. Women’s Domestic Violence Court Advocacy information is offered in 13 languages, including several not used in any other resource. In contrast, all resources in the Disasters, Covid-19, Prisoners, and Young People topics are in English only. All resources are written texts (some with images), meaning only those with literacy can access them, a barrier for some refugees, for example, even in their first language (see e.g. Ba Akhlagh & Mehana 2024). Finally, when LOTE versions exist, it appears they cannot be located without English language literacy: the search function seems to operate only with English key words, and the resources are sorted and labelled in English.

One section of the website is more broadly navigable in many LOTEs. The ‘Ways to get help’ section provides information on how to access legal assistance and is available in 31 languages.  However again, there are inconsistencies between languages, e.g. the Spanish version largely replicates the original, with a full overview and four subsections covering contacts, legal advice, help at court, and applying for legal aid. In contrast, others, like Italian and Pashto, have no overview and only two subsections. Others have only an overview and no subsections. Some links lead readers back to English-only content, and website navigation menus remain in English even when on LOTE pages.

Where to from here?

Existing reviews and scholarship emphasise intersectional considerations when examining and addressing barriers to justice. For example, providing multilingual resources in written form only will not reach people who lack literacy or have low or no vision. Telephone information services and audio resources may be inaccessible for migrants who are deaf or hard of hearing (Smith-Khan 2022). Living in a regional area decreases access to language supports more readily available in urban centres, increasing the importance of LOTE resources. Similarly, not all LOTES are equal: speakers of ‘emerging’ community languages (e.g. recently arrived refugee communities) often have less language support, and issues with correctly identifying and categorising minority dialects and languages can lead to unsuitable translation and interpreting (Victorian Law Foundation 2016, pp 8-9; Tillman 2023).

Spanish word search

These considerations must inform the design and prioritization of resources in particular languages. For instance, while it seems logical to offer resources in commonly spoken LOTEs, speakers of these languages often have a higher level of English proficiency than speakers of emerging languages, who may often also face additional vulnerabilities (Grey & Severin 2021, 2022).

This brief pilot has obviously only uncovered what is publicly available via a website: qualitative research is needed to understand how service providers like Legal Aid NSW develop their resources and how legal, policy, and practical considerations influence their choices. At the same time, research could also provide insight into migrants’ decision-making. By better understanding how recent arrivals and people with limited English find out about the law, research could provide valuable evidence to policymakers and service providers to continue to make community legal literacy efforts more universally accessible.

References

Ba Akhlagh, S & Mehana, M. ‘Challenges and opportunities in designing culturally appropriate resources to support refugee families’ (2024) 8(1) Linking Research to the Practice of Education 2.
Grey, A & Severin A, ‘An audit of NSW legislation and policy on the government’s public communications in languages other than English’ (2021) 30(1) Griffith Law Review 122.
——— ‘Building towards best practice for governments’ public communication in LOTEs’ (2022)31(1) Griffith Law Review 25
Smith-Khan, L. ‘Inclusive processes for refugees with disabilities’ in Rioux et al(eds), Handbook of Disability (Springer Nature, 2022)
Tillman, M ‘Ezidi refugees in Armidale say gap in language […]service impacts health care (2023) ABC https://tinyurl.com/2vz3x8s9
Victoria Law Foundation, Legal information in languages other than English (2016) https://tinyurl.com/3nr5vndb

The conversation addresses community and heritage language schooling research and practice, and our guest’s long history of important language policy research and activism, as well as the interconnections between the two.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Reference

Cruickshank, K., Lo Bianco, J., & Wahlin, M. (Eds.). (2023). Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges, and Teaching Practices. Taylor & Francis.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 29/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dr Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

I’m very pleased today to say that my guest is Joseph Lo Bianco, a foundational figure in linguistics here in Australia. I could say many things, but I will introduce him as Professor of Language and Literacy Education at Melbourne University. Today, we’re going to talk about his new book, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. It was co-edited with Ken Cruickshank and Merryl Wahlin and published by Routledge.

Welcome to the show, Jo!

Prof Lo Bianco: Thank you very much, Hanna.

Dr Torsh: Now, for those who don’t know your very impressive body of work or, perhaps, are new to this field, could you just start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Prof Lo Bianco: Ok, well thank you for the invitation. I’ve recently retired from the position at the University of Melbourne in Australia which I’d had for 20 years. Prior to that and even during that period of time at the university, I worked in language policy studies. I started off my academic life as an economist. I was very interested in the integration of migrant populations, particularly migrant women.

I worked in that focus of work in Victoria. But I became less interested in it when it started not to focus on culture and not provide any kind of focus on people’s language. I retrained as a language person and educator and linguist, and then I became slightly uninterested with the descriptive tendencies of a lot of linguistics. I’ve always really been interested in public action probably more than anything. So, I started to research policy around language. I became actively involved in those things myself directly.

Then, during the late 1970s, early 1980s in Melbourne, Victoria and other places, I was very involved in activism around these things. There were some political changes which meant that I was invited to put my money where my mouth was. I was basically demanding that governments do better for minority populations and they said, “Well, let’s see what you would do.” So, I was invited to draft policies. I did write these, and I became extremely interested in the traction of ideas.

The policies were accepted. The National Policy on Languages in 1987 was the peak. Really, it was the first multilingual policy, some people say the first one ever anywhere, but certainly in English speaking settings. Then I became very heavily involved in the implementation of this. I developed a very acute interest in problems of making change real. This moved me away from academic research considerations. I had always loved research, but you can’t do so many things at once. So, I became very actively involved in that.

Because the policy was adopted by government and launched and funded, there was a lot of interest in it internationally, and the early successes that we had. Languages started to boom. We had extraordinary growth in research and interest in translation and interpreting and in the approach that we took in the policy, which was comprehensive.

Most policies, if you look at them, on language tend to be just the policy on behalf of the official dominant language of a country. Country X protects Language Y. That’s typically what language policies do. Or they tend to be some concession to a minority population, but they don’t go very far.

We were trying to do very ambitious things, you know. Think about public discourse, how people spoke to each other, inclusion of minorities, social cohesion, but also justice and rights questions. Naturally, a lot of opposition grew up against this from people who didn’t like what we were trying to do. So, the politics of language became my life, really, for many years.

Then, because of what we were doing, it got noticed by people like Joshua Fishman in the United States, who invited me over there. I’ve never done what I promised him I would do, actually. At one point he said I really should document this as an experiential process, and I will do that in my retirement at some point as a reflection on how to do language policy from the inside. Even though language policy is something that is studied by applied language scholars, they still tend to theorise it a lot. So, its practicality is lost, I think, and I want to reinject that.

But anyway, this was noticed around the world, and I got lots and lots of invitations to work in different places, including with international organisations like UNESCO and UNICEF and the Council of Europe. So, I started to do assignments on invitation in Southeast Asia – Samoa, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu. And in South Asia – Sri Lanka for the World Bank, Myanmar for UNICEF and other Southeast Asian settings. Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines. I went to many assignments in Europe.

So, this has been my career since then, working on practical language policy things, which always raise questions of literacy and language study but also the linguistics of these problems. Who describes what language is? How do they do them? What happens with the work that linguists do? How does it get taken up or not get taken up within practical contexts? That became my obsession.

Recently, we’ve just submitted for publication a book on Tunisia that I’ve done with a colleague. We’ve looked at language, ideological discourses. Arabic, French, the two kinds of Arabic, English and Berber and other language issues there. So, it became a kind of reverberating set of discussions. I’ve had a very wonderful career of working all around the world in different settings on practical problems.

In some places, we’ve produced significant change. In Thailand, we produced the first language policy in that country that wasn’t just about the protection of the national language. In Myanmar, we did 45 public discourses around language rights for minority populations, the learning of the main language by minority populations, which is often also a grievance. This kind of thing. I did a trilingual policy in Sri Lanka in 1999 and submitted this and worked with the President’s office on the implementation on it. Then it got thwarted by conflicts there.

So, I’ve had this wonderful opportunity and in this part of my career I want to think about putting down some reflections on this experience.

Dr Torsh: Oh, thank you. That’s so interesting. I’m thrilled to hear that you’re going to write a reflection about that process of putting together the National Policy on Languages because that’s something that continues to be important in the work of myself and other scholars in Australia, so that’s really exciting.

Ok, but we’re here to talk about your new book at the moment, so congratulations on that new edited book. Before we talk about it, the book is called, as I said, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. For our listeners who aren’t really across the community languages sector in Australia, could you just give us a brief overview of it? Obviously, it’s also connected to your own policy activism, and how did that happen? How did it come about that it was established in Australia, and how has it changed? How has the policy focus and the sector changed since that time?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it’s a long and convoluted story, and I can only tell a tiny fraction of it. Suffice to say that in really nearly every society that I’ve worked in, I’ve visited and worked with community language schools in Nagoya in Japan, these kinds of processes of a community generating institutional structures to support and maintain and transmit their languages to their children is really universal.

In some cases in some societies, it’s heavily repressed, and in other societies they’re actually encouraged. But the phenomenon is practically global, I would say, and it tends to be ignored. Most of what focuses the attention of researchers in relation to language education is mainstream or official or dominant schooling. We’ve had this third sector, you might call it, third sector schools. The two sectors other than that are the public government school and then the independent or private schools, and in Australia there are large Catholic school sectors. So, they’re the two other sectors and then you have these parttime schools in the main, although some of them are also full time, that are schools whose primary purpose is the transmission of language and culture to immigrant children, but also increasingly indigenous children in our society.

Now, traveling around the world and the kind of work that I’ve done that I described before, I noticed at meetings and other places there would be community representatives, or even academics who would come and say, “Look, I’m working with Chinese schools in Malaysia” or something or other. And that can be mainstream government schools or that can be the parttime schools.

So, with Ken and Merryl we decided that we would hold an international conference to try and do some proper comparative work. This had never really been done. And we had this very successful conference in Sydney, much affected by Covid and restrictions on travel, but nevertheless it was a very successful conference. And we realised there’s a huge unaddressed agenda there, well we suspected that. So, we thought we’d produce a volume that started to map out the territory. There’s a little bit of a taxonomy that I started to produce in my own chapter, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done into this.

But also, what needs to be both theorised and then developed in a practical way, is what do we want of these schools? If we’re adopting a pluralist position where we believe in language rights, what role would we hope for these schools? Then, in practical terms, what could be done?

Now, in my policy work, right back to the really early 1980s, late 1970s, I worked for government in Victoria. We promoted all sorts of things like cooperation and integration between these schools. Sometimes these schools use the premises of a mainstream school on a weekend or after hours. So, we used to do very practical things. We did this in 1981, you know, facilitating the writing up of contracts, of meetings between the two sectors. Often, the teachers are not trained, or they can be trained teachers in another system but it’s not recognised here. We would facilitate collaboration.

You can imagine the kinds of problems that would be there of a practical nature. Of people not understanding each other, even mistrust. Sometimes much worse things than that. All of these things were there and in spades, which is a colloquialism of saying in large quantity. So, we started to do lots of facilitation of this.

In 1982, actually from your university, Macquarie University in Sydney, Professor Marlene Norst, who has sadly passed away, she was commissioned partly from some of the pressure we had been putting on the federal government, to do a survey of these schools as a preparation to some kind of systemic support for them. She produced a wonderful report (which) unfortunately got repressed by forces who didn’t want this report. It wasn’t just a survey. She produced a really interesting guide to what could be done. She went beyond the brief in a very helpful way.

There’s always resistance to any kind of progress. We know this. Unfortunately, her work got marginalised. But I promote it a lot because I liked her a lot. She was a good scholar and tried to do a great thing, but it’s got ignored.

I took that up in my 1987 National Policy on Languages and promoted it, and we got some extra funding for these schools, so they started to be incorporated into the system. So, this is what we wanted to do in the book, is to think, “Well, what do other societies do? Are they marginalised? Are they given municipal level support, but not state or federal government support, depending on the governance structures in different countries? Are they actively repressed? Are they underground schools?”. This happens in very repressive systems. This can be very dangerous to the lives, actually, of people, to engage in this kind of activity. So, I think there’s a call for solidarity with people who struggle against repression, but also to learn from systems where more substantial work is done.

In some systems, government and public education, or mainstream schooling, only supports prestige foreign languages and these community languages tend to be marginalised and they might get some token support or acknowledgement or given a license to continue to teach, but they’re not actually encouraged. And all the community language teaching and language maintenance, as distinct from second language learning, would happen only in those marginal settings.

Well, in Australia and many other countries in the world we have a much more integrated approach. Our mainstream schools teach multiple languages, including many community languages. Many students study the language at school, at mainstream school, that they might also study in an after-hours system. So, I think, and we can go onto this with another question, but I think we need to think imaginatively and in a future-oriented way about cleaning up this mess, as it were.

Having principles that start from a different basis, not a toleration basis, but a basis of learning, for having a different way in which all of these – I mean, children just have one brain. The learning goes on in that same one brain, and if that one brain is shopped around different systemic structures, those structures ought to get their act together rather than the child and the family having to continually have to adjust to different forms of provision.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, great, thank you. I think for those who are outside of the sector and aren’t that aware of it, can you just explain what that discontinuity actually can look like for those who haven’t experienced it?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it can look like a child studying whatever language it happens to be, let’s say Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, in a school in Sydney during the week. They might do a one- or two-hour program during the week, so it’s not a huge commitment of time. And then, because their family might come from Malaysia and be an ethnic Chinese family but they might not speak modern standard Chinese, or Mandarin, in their home, the child goes to a Saturday morning school run by the community, or an after-hours school two days a week. And sometimes that after-hours teaching happens in the same physical premises as the week program.

Now, there’s a lot of issues here. One of them is about the coherence of the pedagogies that are used in the two places and the wastefulness of the lack of any collaboration between the two systems. Wouldn’t it be much better if it were possible for this to be maybe not seamless, that would be an ideal aspiration, but at least less jagged and disruptive if it were coordinated in some way, pedagogically as well as in other ways. If there were shared knowledge among the different teachers about individual children.

It would have to start from a child’s focused look and also be informed by good pedagogical language learning processes and also of the affordances. Different systems afford different possibilities. Imagine a highly literate mother tongue speaker teaching on a Saturday or Sunday but who isn’t necessarily a trained teacher. This might be a perfect input for colloquial, continuous communicative language. Then you might have a more structured grammar-centred approach in the school system. These are just some ideas that I’ve had that we could work on, and we’ve put them into action in some places.

But I feel like systems, governments, run away from this. It seems to them like an immense problem, a very messy problem. But as I argue in my chapter in the book and at the talk I gave at the conference, I think they’re going to have to deal with this at some point because of the radical changes that are happening in the world of communication and learning anyway that are going to overwhelm all these structures. We’re going to be forced to think about these things differently. I always think if you can predict a change happening, prepare for it. Start talking about it. Get intellectuals in to start theorising what’s involved. Literacy scholars have got a lot to contribute here, and people who think about the semiotics about the representation of language with communities.

I love partnerships which involve these kinds of interactions. I’ve always found them very productive, and I’ve always tried to set them up. That’s what we did in Myanmar (with) all those dialogues.

Sticking with the community language schools which, in some countries, I have to clarify, are called heritage language schools, or heritage languages, and I and other people have resisted that encroachment of that terminology here. Not because it’s bad terminology but because typically in English, I think, “heritage” has a connotation of something that’s in the past, like a heritage façade of a building. Or the heritage which might be the historical memory of a community. I’m not saying that it’s inevitable that it has that connotation, but I think it often does. Whereas a “community language” suggests that it’s something that is present and vibrant and vital within an existing alive community now. So, I’ve preferred it from that point of view.

In the book, we say “community/heritage” because obviously other people use the other terminology. And of course, we can inject new meaning into terms. We don’t have to be defeated by past ways in which words work. So anyway, there’s that kind of issue there.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, that’s great, thank you. I’m now rethinking my use of “heritage language” in my own work, so that’s great to think about that.

I’m really interested in this argument that you make in your chapter, as you said, about changes in our understanding of what literacy is. So, you have a chapter in the book which is based on a talk that you did at the conference. The chapter, which introduces the volume, is called “Community/Heritage Language Schools Transforming Education: Beyond complementary, more than integration”. And you’ve already said systems need to grapple with this idea that you can’t have these two sectors not talking to each other, that it’s not in the interest of the learner. You argue that in part because of this idea of the way we understand literacy is changing as a result of technology, of the fourth industrial revolution.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that, for our listeners? I realise they have to go read the chapter, but just a little bit of a summary for them, to draw them in?

Prof Lo Bianco: It’s an immense topic, of course. If you look at any organisation that has worked in literacy for a long time, you can’t fail to notice that they have adjusted their definition of what it is. One organisation whose definitions I have studied is UNESCO. Of course, they are a very important organisation in this because when they were founded, from the very beginning, they were given the world mandate I would call it for kind of a global agenda for literacy in the world. That’s how I’ve described it in a publication.

If we look at how they understood literacy in the late 40s, early 1950s, and compare it to how they understand literacy today, it’s cheese and chalk. Two very, very different notions. Teachers and researchers have done this. I mean, there have been many movements in this. One of the most important ones was the new literacy studies of the 1990s which started to inject social understandings of literacy and move away from a pure and psychometric or cognitivist approach. Of course, it’s moved on even a lot since then.

So, what we know is that what is taken to be literacy has expanded beyond simple capacity to read and write a language to multiple other dimensions of what’s involved in being a literate person in a society that penalises people who are not literate. This is the really important social consequence of this, that we have the social cost. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is. The social cost of low literacy even understood in traditional ways of understanding literacy is very, very high. There is a high risk of unemployment. It’s no accident that a really high proportion of prisoners in jails are low literate people. There are multiple explanations of this. It’s not a predictor, it’s a consequence of the social punishment.

I’m very committed to this because both of my parents were very low literate people. Neither of them had any serious formal education. And yet, they were both very intelligent people. So, we can’t make any kind of connection between intelligence. This is an enormous discourse, and I’ll just leave it planted there, but what I did want to say about this is that what’s changed in our understanding about literacies from the 50s to now has been this social dimension.

What’s changing increasingly now is a massive technological injection in which multimodality is the principal characteristic of literacy. I mean, anything we do online cannot be reduced to language-centred semiotics. It involves manipulation of multiple semiotic resources that are not just linguistic anymore. Colour, movement, image – there’s any number of things that go into a very complex meaning-making practice. This is going to continue to accelerate in what some people call literacy 4.0. My colleague Professor Lesley Farrell at the university uses that term. (This) mirrors industry 4.0, the 4^th industrial revolution, which is not just computers but artificial intelligence beyond computing as a practice that people are in charge of. It’s absurd in a way, to call them machines anymore, but machines which learn and can learn independently generate their own kind of knowledge and then project that into the space of meaning. So, we’ve got something really radical going on. That’s going to change how language works.

I think one of the reasons we have a crisis in language study today, and this is very true, sadly in English speaking or dominant countries in particular. We have the biggest struggle for language teaching and learning that we’ve had for many years. People misunderstand the technologies as obviating the need for language study. That’s because they’re very reductionist about what’s involved. People used to take literacy in this very reductionist simple way. They take language to be very reductionist, and they tend to think it’s just basic communication. So, we can inject that stuff with voice retrieval. You can ask your little pen to say something in Japanese and you’ll hand that to someone and it’ll say “good morning” in Japanese.

This is completely possible. It exists. There are very sophisticated technologies that will even do lip syncing, so that you’ll look like you’re speaking the language when you take a video of yourself speaking German or Italian or whatever it happens to be. So, this is going to be a battle that we have, to persuade administrators and other people that language learning is not this. This is forms of communication. Let’s welcome them. Let’s adopt them. Let’s embrace them. We can’t deny them. They’re there. They’re going to grow. Elon Musk wants to inject probes or whatever they are, implants in people’s brains. All of these things are going on at a very rapid rate, and some of them might be ethically very, very questionable. But I can’t see any way that they’re going to be stopped or slowed down until we get on top of what they mean for people.

So, we have to understand them. What they mean is that people’s learning will be occurring in places other than in schooling. It will be self-generated and generated by outside forces including machines. It’s going to be massively challenging to everything that curriculums, official curriculums, require and prescribe in schooling.

This is going to create, I think, for indigenous populations, and especially for dispersed, small populations – I worked with the Tigrinya community in Melbourne many years ago with a very small population in Melbourne but who had other members in Brazil and in Africa and in Italy and other places. You can aggregate numbers in communities with the technologies that you can’t do otherwise very easily. So, there are multiple benefits that we can point to. Individualisation, aggregation, personalisation, learner control and pacing. There’s lots of pedagogical impact that a learner can govern in this.

The challenge for schooling is absolutely foundational, almost existential I would say. Therefore, we have to embrace it. In my chapter, and I only just make a small dent into the problem, we have to think about a new way to imagine learning and start from there. The school systems that currently are the principal institutional ways of delivering learning have to be redone, and they have to be seamless. Teachers have to be managers of the educational experiences of learners. That’s how I call them. Rather than the exclusive input to the learner. So, they have to understand the principles of the acquisition of language knowledge.

I see a bigger role for professional language specialists in this, to interact with practitioners directly, but also curriculum writers and others. We have to rethink these things. And then communities who own community or heritage language schools and who are the repositories of the communication in these languages, you know, the Arabic, Tamil, Vietnamese and Greek in Sydney and everywhere else in Australia and other countries. A large part of what’s involved in learning is interaction with speakers, so we have to make sure that there’s seamless connection there.

So, I’m just touching on the outlier of this, but that’s what I’m trying to do with this, is to get people to imagine more creatively, pushing ahead, but not that far. These things are imaginable within a decade. Many of them exist now. Instantaneous translation, voice to script, I mean all of these things challenge all the separations we’ve ever had. What is literacy going to be when it’s possible to have no division between spoken language, signed language and their representation in a written form or some other form?

They’re really important questions to ask and to be asked by people who are interested in multilingualism.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so much to think about. And I guess this kind of question that you sort of answered, but I want to make sure I understood and maybe you can elaborate a little bit. For mainstream teachers, this is the question you pose at the end of your chapter and that somebody asked you, and I really was interested in this. What can mainstream teachers do in order to support the learning of community languages? It sounds like you’re saying they are also a really important part of this process, of this existential crisis that we’re seeing in education when it comes to both language and literacy and what they mean.

Prof Lo Bianco: I’m often asked this question by mainstream teachers when I give talks. As I said before possibly, I’m speaking to Indonesian teachers in Victoria tomorrow. One of the anticipated questions is exactly this even though their specialist teachers of Indonesian are mainstream teachers.

When you look at students who drop out of language programs – I did a study once in the western suburbs of Melbourne in working class schools. I interviewed and discussed and did subjectivity analysis with large numbers of kids. I published it in a book in 2013 out of Multilingual Matters. One of the things that we found (is that we) classified students according to whether they were going to continue or drop language study. We classified them as “waverers” or “committed” kids and then we worked heavily with the waverers to think about what was it that was going on in their minds.

One of the things that came up repeatedly is something that mainstream teachers have got an enormous amount of influence on, and not just the language teacher. That is the attitude or ideology that is attached to the practice of language teaching and learning.

We found that lots of students had imbibed a negative, sometimes quite racist construction of what they were engaged in. This was not coming from the language teacher. This was coming from systemic imagery and systemic, often not even openly, hostile – anyone who’s had children or raised children or been around children, little children I mean, knows quickly that they are semiotic sponges. They pick up signals from multiple sources. They know when something is half-hearted. In the book I called it half-heartedness. When schools are just half-hearted about something, kids get it. They know it’s less important than something else. You’re not actively saying that learning Japanese or Italian, the two languages in that particular volume, is less important than doing something else like sport. But I see the way the school is arranged, and I can work out that’s exactly what you’re doing. One of the girls I interviewed said this to me. She said, “They don’t really, really mean it. We can tell. So why are they pretending?”. So this is something mainstream teachers can do, be enthusiastic supporters.

I helped introduce a CLIL program in a Japanese school where the boys, it was a boys’ school in this particular case, had had a mostly grammatical or formal syllabus. They were doing fine. And as soon as the Japanese teacher started to teach content that was about the Fukushima earthquake, really interesting material in which the kids had to research online and the teacher had to teach technical language ahead of time so they could manage to read these complex texts and stuff like that, the first thing that happens is pushback from the mainstream teachers. Oh, geography, that’s my space. Or, oh science and physics, that’s my space. You’re just the language teacher. That was all resolved beautifully when the teachers understood that the purpose of the CLIL was for the language teacher to enrich the content in the Japanese program. It wasn’t the exclusive teaching of the science or geography. Then they started to see the benefit of additional focus on the content they were teaching as specialists. So, the collaboration was brought about.

These conversations between the mainstream and specialist language teachers are essential. Mainstream language teachers can either choose to be an innocent bystander, an active supporter or at least an encourager. Again, it’s this same one mind that these children have. One mind, one heart that gets shipped around to different classes. The multiple messages that they pick up about the choices they need to make are significant. So that’s something I would say in relation to that question.

Dr Torsh: Great, thank you. Yeah, I know that study well. I’ve used it in my own research. It’s fantastic. I think that it’s really helpful to teachers, and I know we have education students who listen to the podcast, so really helpful to know what they can do.

That was really my last question, but before we wrap up, I just want to know – you’ve talked a little bit about your next project on Tunisia, which is a fascinating context. I’m excited to hear about that. What else is up next for you?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, that one’s in press, or it’s under review. I’m working with a dear colleague in Sri Lanka. I’ve lived and worked in Sri Lanka, and my colleague and I are putting together a volume on bilingual education there. Bilingual education means, typically, English plus either Sinhala or Tamil. That’s a project that will come out next year. I’ve got a book coming out with some colleagues from Hong Kong Uni on supporting learners of Chinese. There’s a lot of other work. I’m much less efficient than I used to be because of illness and old age, both of which have made me slow down.

But I really, really want to go back into the theory of language change and deliberate language change. Language always changes. Everyone knows that language is a dynamic process and changes. But language policy and planning is deliberate language change, and even deliberate language change can happen unconsciously. But planned deliberate language change, which is what I call language policy, and as I said, Joshua Fishman, when I first met him, said that I should document this, a kind of insider account of policy writing, and that’s what I want to devote some time to.

But unfortunately, I was trained as an academic in an era in which you made a distance between yourself as a scholar and the subject matter. I know I haven’t done that for years, but that’s still my predilection. I have to overcome that a great deal to speak personally in this way in writing. I need to do that. That’s something I ought to do. I’ve got a huge amount of documents from, like, 45 years of engagement in language policy, agitation and writing and stuff, and criticism.

You can’t just criticise if you want to – I mean, a lot of language scholarship is dominated by a critical disposition these days, especially sociolinguistics. That’s been important to uncover and expose a lot of injustices and hierarchies in the world. But I don’t think we should overstate the agentive power of our disciplines to really affect change. You have to engage with processes of concrete change, and you have to not set aside criticism, but make criticism productive. I find that, unfortunately, a lot of critical scholarship, maybe not a lot, some critical scholarship is not so productive. If you want to be productive, you have to engage with people whose views are different from your own. You have to compromise on things. You have to find conceptual categories that unite differences.

When I was working in Myanmar and south of Thailand where there’s been a conflict for many years in which language and script and bilingualism are implicated, it’s really really indispensable. It’s not just a methodological, I think it’s an ethical requirement to adopt a different set of understandings and practices. Criticism is something that has to be understood as being particular to some purposes and not others. So, I do think that there’s too much mindless criticism. Too much of a disposition to begin activity with a critical air.

Having said that, I don’t want to be assumed to be anti-critical. Criticism is critical to civil life, to decent life, to social improvement. I just think that there are moments of productive participation in shared creation of new things in which criticism can be a problem. I’ve seen that to very bad effect. I’ve seen it from people who have been trained just in the critical tradition who don’t know when to stop.

So that’s something I’d like to do. I’m going to think about that a lot. I haven’t written enough about that. I read other people’s writing on this and I’ve learned from it, but I feel as someone who has tried to write language policies and be engaged with concrete productive change and not just analysis or critique, that that’s something I want to think about more carefully.

Dr Torsh: Oh, that’s a really wonderful place to end, I think, on that. What do we do beyond criticism, especially for emerging scholars and research students? So, fantastic. Fantastic.

Look, I would love to keep going, but I have to wrap up. So, thanks again, Jo! Thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend our Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!

Broadly speaking, Croatian Studies in Australia attracts three groups of students: first, children and grandchildren of immigrants from former Yugoslavia who learned the language at home and want to study it formally to develop higher levels of proficiency, including academic literacies; second, students with a heritage connection who did not learn the language in the home but want to develop some level of proficiency to connect with extended family, also on visits back to Croatia; and third, a small but growing number of students, with no heritage connection who have developed an interest in Croatian for various reasons. The latter include mature age students who take up the challenge of learning another language later in life for reasons of personal interest and intellectual development.

Dr Jasna Novak Milić in the Croatian Studies Centre Library at Macquarie University

Croatian is a fascinating language in many ways and so the conversation is also a springboard to speak about language politics and language naming, both back in Croatia/former Yugoslavia and in the diaspora. Croatian speakers first came to Australia in the early 20th century but mass migration from former Yugoslavia was a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century.

The Croatian Studies program at Macquarie University developed in this context and during Australia’s decisive turn to multiculturalism from the 1980s onward. The Croatian Studies Centre today enjoys strong community support through the Croatian Studies Foundation and is also benefitting from the commitment of the Croatian state, a member of the European Union, to the Croatian diaspora.

Beyond the specifics of Croatian language learning, our conversation also turned to broader issues related to “small” languages in Australian higher education, and why the availability of languages programs in higher education is critical for heritage language maintenance.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Related resources

• About the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie University
• Study Croatian at Macquarie University
• “Easy Croatian” Podcast” hosted by Dr Jasna Novak Milić on SBS
• Keynote lecture by Dr Jasna Novak Milić, “Why Australia needs Croatian Studies“
• Petition to save Croatian, German, Greek, Italian, and Russian at Macquarie University

Dr Hlavac is a senior lecturer in the Monash Intercultural Lab in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics. He is a NAATI-certified and practicing professional interpreter and translator. NAATI is Australia’s National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters.

Dr Hlavac’ research interests relate to interpreting in healthcare settings, interprofessional practice with trainee professionals with whom interpreters commonly work, and the incidence of interpreting and translation amongst multilinguals and in multilingual societies.

In the conversation we explore how professional interpreters, language mediators, and language brokers help to support fair and equitable access to healthcare and other forms of social participation.

How does interpreting work in practice in a hospital setting? Who gets to interpret? How is the need for an interpreter identified? Who pays? What is the role of policy vis-à-vis bottom-up practice? Is the process the same for all languages? Will AI make human interpreters superfluous?

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel, leaving a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Further reading

Healthcare interpreting (Image credit: Sydney Local Health District)

Beagley, J., Hlavac, J., & Zucchi, E. (2020). Patient length of stay, patient readmission rates and the provision of professional interpreting services in healthcare in Australia. Health & Social Care in the Community, 28(5), 1643-1650.
Hlavac, J. (2014). Participation roles of a language broker and the discourse of brokering: An analysis of English–Macedonian interactions. Journal of Pragmatics, 70, 52-67.
Hlavac, J. (2017). Brokers, dual-role mediators and professional interpreters: a discourse-based examination of mediated speech and the roles that linguistic mediators enact. The Translator, 23(2), 197-216.
Hlavac, J., Beagley, J., & Zucchi, E. (2018). Applications of policy and the advancement of patients’ health outcomes through interpreting services: data and viewpoints from a major public healthcare provider. The International Journal for Translation and Interpreting, 10(1), 111-136.
Hlavac, J., Gentile, A., Orlando, M., Zucchi, E., & Pappas, A. (2018). Translation as a sub-set of public and social policy and a consequence of multiculturalism: the provision of translation and interpreting services in Australia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 251, 55-88.
Long, K. M., Haines, T. P., Clifford, S., Sundram, S., Srikanth, V., Macindoe, R., Leung, W.-Y., Hlavac, J., & Enticott, J. (2022). English language proficiency and hospital admissions via the emergency department by aged care residents in Australia: A mixed-methods investigation. Health & Social Care in the Community, 30(6), e4006-e4019.

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick)

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney.

My guest today is Dr Jim Hlavac. Dr Hlavac is a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting at Monash University in Melbourne. Today we’re going to talk about language barriers in a diverse society and how they can be bridged through interpreting between different languages. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Dr Hlavac: Thank you very much for the invitation, Ingrid, and to be on the Language on the Move Podcast.

Dist Prof Piller: Maybe I should say servus and tell our listeners – Jim and I are old friends, and usually we would have this conversation in German because that is our main shared language. So, doing this in English is actually a bit unusual for us. Maybe, Jim, you can tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into interpreting?

Dr Hlavac: Well, Ingrid, it’s probably not uncommon for people in my situation to have been brought up bilingually, or with even three languages, but also mobility – living in different countries – being born in Australia but then going to the birthplace from my parents when I was 7.5. And then, going back to other places where I have relatives and friends, spending time in Europe growing up, then coming back to Australia. So, often mobility has been affected which has accounted for my acquisition of languages and also my use of them.

When I travelled again from Europe to Australia in 1995, I had done kind of ad hoc unpaid translation and interpreting work for others, and I decided I really should formalise my credentials. So, I attempted a test and passed it, and since then I’ve been a what’s called a NAATI – NAATI for those who don’t know – it’s the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters – I’m a NAATI translator and interpreter, and I work across 3 languages – English, Croatian and German.

Dist Prof Piller: Thanks a lot, Jim. Jim, maybe can you tell us what a professional interpreter actually does? I don’t think everyone knows. I mean, it sounds very glamorous. What do you do?

Dr Hlavac: I’m glad it sounds glamorous. Some parts are glamorous, some parts are less glamorous. So, what you do if you’re a professional interpreter is that you should have training, which I do have. You should have credentials such as I have from NAATI. Basically, when you work with other people you are working with 2 or more people who don’t have another language. When you work with them, you interpret everything that they say or sign – everything – so you don’t leave things out. You don’t add things. You don’t distort things. You’re impartial. You’re neutral. You’re not on anyone’s side, regardless of who’s paying for you. If you do have a particular relationship with a particular party, that should be declared to the other one.

You also observe confidentiality. Often, interpreters work in situations where people are talking about quite personal or intimate details, and it’s important for an interpreter to observe that confidentiality and to not pass on to anyone else information of events happening in interpreting assignments.

Interpreters work sometimes on site face-to-face with others. Sometimes it’s remote by video interpreting facilities or telephone. We all know about COVID. Everything went remote. So, there are different modes that you can use to communicate with people. But that, in a nutshell, is what a professional interpreter does.

Dist Prof Piller: So, you’ve been stressing “professional” interpreter now, and I’m wondering about – I mean any bilingual can interpret, right? People who don’t have the qualifications you have can also go and interpret, so can you maybe tell us what’s the difference between a professional interpreter and a language mediator or language broker?

Dr Hlavac: So, Ingrid, lots of bilinguals do interpret. If you speak to some bilinguals, they’ll say, “I can’t interpret, and I hate having to do it,” so it’s not a natural progression. It is something else, but you’re right in that many bilinguals do, as a matter of course, do it within their families or circles of friends or whatever.

So, what distinguishes a professional interpreter from a mediator or a broker is the following. I’ve talked about a professional interpreter. A mediator typically is someone who has a different role. They might be a youth worker, a settlement worker, a social worker, housing worker or perhaps a guide at a hospital, etc. where their primary role is to do something else, i.e. to help a person find employment or housing or what have you. And they might do so using another language other than, let’s say, English in Australia, which is the dominant language. Sometimes they’re just having conversations in that language. Sometimes they might be working with an English speaker as well, in which case they do interpret. But they often don’t know or care to know that when they work as an interpreter relaying other people’s speech or signing, that they have to do so fully without distortion. They can’t add their 2 cents’ worth, so to speak.

So, there’s always an issue with a mediator that their own primary role gets in the way, or they’re advancing the situation of a person for settlement or housing, and often the linguistic skills that they have are questionable. Sometimes they can be good, but they haven’t been tested. They don’t see themselves as an interpreter. They don’t know about ethics, etc.

A broker is something else. A broker is typically a family member who is often pressed into service. Sometimes they put their hand up, but often they’re pressed into service. Often, it’s a child who, if the parents don’t speak English, let’s take Australia, is there to interpret what the parents say to an English speaker and vice versa. Classic situations are hospitals, maybe police stations, other places, etc. Now, a broker is a family member, and so although they might look like a person doing interpreting, what they’re doing, their primary role, is being a family member. They’re looking after their parent, or whoever it is. They’re advocating for their interests. They’re making sure that what they hear and what they say is conveyed to their advantage. They’re also available all the time. They understand the parents’ language very well, etc. They’re also available all the time, and they’re free. So, they sound like they’re really great people to use in these situations, and often they are.

But there are some pitfalls, and the pitfalls are that not every child wants to or should be in that kind of a situation. A child can never typically tell a parent how to behave, what to do, because the power relations are such that they’re there to simply hear what they’re told to do.

There’s also many cases of brokers intentionally or unintentionally changing things. Imagine in a healthcare interaction the parent says something and the child doesn’t quite understand or really fully grasp what it’s about and says what they think the parents says. They convey that into English, and so what the healthcare worker hears is a description of symptoms that are actually different from what the parent says. Or, conversely, they might not understand the healthcare professional properly, be too shameful or kind of shy to ask for repetition or clarification, and they tell the parent something else that they think they’ve heard from the healthcare professional.

So that can lead to misdiagnosis, forms of treatment being misunderstood or not followed, to quite embarrassing situations. Let’s say an adult has a particular health issue which is an intimate issue. Is it appropriate that the child is privy to that information, and are they really likely to convey that? And also, when you think about yourself, would you like to go to the doctor and have your brother-in-law sitting next to you and you’re divulging information about your medical history and expecting your brother-in-law or whoever it is to recount this accurately and correctly, and they’re not going to change things that the doctor might say to them? How does that affect your relationship with your brother-in-law afterwards if he’s privy to all these things?

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I’m sure there are many, many difficult situations, and you’ve probably got a huge amount of stories to tell us. You’re not only an interpreter yourself, you’re also an interpreting researcher. A lot of the research you do is in healthcare, and you’ve already started us on healthcare. I guess, by the sound of it, it sounded like you’re not a huge fan of language brokering, and you pointed out all the problems that there are with family members actually interpreting for other family members.

But at the same time, we kind of know that it happens, and so I guess I’d be curious to hear from you specifically about interpreting and language mediation and language brokering in the healthcare system. What are the main barriers that patients in Australia who do not speak English, or who don’t speak English well, what kind of barriers do they face in accessing adequate healthcare in Australia?

Dr Hlavac: Typically, they have a number of barriers. There are often low levels of health literacy. They don’t know the health system in this country. They don’t know what services are available or that they’re entitled to. If they don’t speak English fluently, then they might not know that they’re entitled to an interpreter in most healthcare interactions that they’re likely to have. If they don’t know that, then they’re not going to ask, or ask a family member to ask on their behalf.

So, the challenge is for healthcare workers to recognise that a person is unable to communicate effectively in English and to offer or to organise an interpreter on their behalf. I’ve done some research, and even amongst those people who claim that they do know that health interpreting services are for free, it’s often the healthcare provider who still ends up providing them. And it sounds silly, or sounds obvious, but often people with so little English don’t know how to ask for an interpreter. They don’t even have those skills sometimes. And if you haven’t got effective communication, then, as you know, as the healthcare professional, they can’t work out what the symptoms are, what the level of health literacy is. They can’t work out a diagnosis and things like that.

Dist Prof Piller: So, who actually has to ask? I mean, you’re saying patients may not know they have the right to an interpreter, or they may not know how to ask. What’s the role of the healthcare professional, or how does – if I go to the doctor and I don’t speak any English, how does it actually work that an interpreter comes in? How is that decided, and what’s the process?

Dr Hlavac: So, the process is that, if you go into a large hospital, particularly in a metropolitan area like Sydney or Melbourne, you’re likely to have front of house staff who knows that this is one of the questions that they would ask as a regular feature when they’re addressing you for the first time through triage or whatever. Now, if you can functionally express yourself clearly, fluently, then they’re unlikely to ask you, but they still might. So, they’re obliged to ask this question, “Do you need an interpreter?” or “What language would you like your healthcare services provided to you in?”, which is a kind of optimal question, you know.

So, it’s up to them, and there’s a lot of cultural competence training happening in hospitals. There’s a lot of information that healthcare workers learn through professional development through their respective professional associations – how to work with interpreters. There’s a lot of skilling up that has happened across, particularly, hospitals. GP clinics are not so skilled up very much. I’m tracking data that’s looking at use of interpreters by GP clinics. It’s lower. Aged care facilities are also lower, so we do have variation. They key thing is, often it’s the front of house person to make the diagnosis. If they don’t, though, the healthcare professional can make the call that this person, this patient, needs an interpreter. So that’s how it usually happens.

The other challenge is, I mentioned health literacy and what have you. There’s a lot of information that’s been translated as well. I know we’re talking about interpreting mainly, Ingrid, but here in Victoria, I’m based in Melbourne, there’s the Victorian Health Translations website, which is 28,000 translations of material related to healthcare across 150 languages. There’s a lot of information out there to advise people about healthcare conditions, and one of the challenges is the discoverability of these resources. How do you get to them? They’re there, but how does the person for whom they are intended actually access them?

Dist Prof Piller: I’ve been wondering about that a lot, actually, because they’re usually organised by language, right? So, if you’re not good at spelling the Latin alphabet, or if you don’t know the name of your language in English, it’s really hard to find that information.

Dr Hlavac: It is. Typically, it’s a family member often, a younger family member, I did talk about brokers, who can lead them there. But they also need to know about this existing. So we do have a challenge in the accessibility of this information to people we want it to reach. When you do get to that site, you’ll find that there’s not just written text there. They’re moving now to audio files as a way of conveying information to people because we have a lot of data to tell us that this is the way people like to consume health information. Not through written text, but through an audio file. And there’s audio plus video. So, the repository of translations in Victoria does reflect people’s preferred ways of reading or gaining information in other languages. And it’s also quality checked.

There’s a lot of work happening recently of, firstly, the translations being checked and sampled amongst communities. And secondly, when healthcare departments or healthcare facilities are looking to compose a document in English, let’s say about Covid or whatever, that they actually involve translators at the stage where the plain English version is developed in the first place. It’s very helpful if you can have translators as part of the group, working on them, so that when the translations are then developed you don’t have the issues of “What does this mean? Let’s rephrase this”, etc. So, there is a lot of work happening in this area to optimise health translations. But we’ll go back to interpreting because I know that’s your focus.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, well look, I mean translation is fascinating too, and that leads me to another question. How do we actually know which languages are needed? We can go back to the clinics, so the receptionist establishes that this person needs an interpreter, but how do they find the right interpreter? Or, going back to your translations, how do we actually know in which languages do we need to make available information about a particular condition, for instance?

Dr Hlavac: The big hospitals collect data on not only interpreter requests, but the languages that are being requested, and they direct their resources to employing interpreters either in-house or freelance for those languages which are in demand. But they could have, you know, within the catchment area of northern health here in Melbourne, they service residents across 150 languages. They also have data from the ABS. Every 5 years we have the census.

So, we do have a fairly fine-grained idea in each municipality or local government are, what the profile is of the languages of the residents there, and also the level of English proficiency. The census data, the census has a question – “If English is not your language spoken at home, what is your level of proficiency in English?”, right? There are 2 gradings – “not at all” and “not well”. When residents tick those responses, that’s pretty indicative that those are people that will need an interpreter. So, we’ve got some demographic data. We’ve got data from hospitals themselves to know which languages are needed.

In terms of sourcing the interpreters, yes, Ingrid, this is a challenge because for bigger languages we do have an ok kind of cohort of interpreters to fall back on, but for new and emerging languages like Rohingya, when Rohingyas started to arrive say, 5, 6, 7 years ago, Chaldeans 15 or 20 years ago, we had to quickly develop testing for potential interpreters for those languages. Then getting them out to be able to work in communities. Often, it’s a kind of chicken and egg situation where you kind of approach people who are community leaders and ask them if they know of people who have good language skills who might have been doing this before migrating to Australia. And to locate people who have the attributes that you’re looking for in a potential interpreter and supporting them through training.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I guess one problem that also kind of relates to named languages, you know. I mean, in my own research I’ve encountered people who’ve said they needed an Arabic interpreter, but they actually needed someone with Sudanese Arabic but then got someone with Lebanese Arabic and it was really, really difficult. The interpreter couldn’t really understand them. Or there have been all these media reports about the Yazidis in northern NSW who speak a variety of Kurdish but couldn’t really work with the Kurdish interpreters because their brand of Kurdish was quite different. So, I guess that’s an additional challenge.

Dr Hlavac: It is, and we do know about them. South Sudanese Arabic – there are 3 varieties of Kurdish that NAATI credentials. There are regular meetings, and I’ve been a part of them, between the language service providers who are at the coal face (Australian or British idiom for “front end” or “grassroots level”). They supply the interpreters, and they get together with NAATI, with the professional associations, and they say, “Hey, we’ve got this problem. We can’t find interpreters for this language. We’ve got a high incidence of people reporting this language, but they can’t understand the interpreters.” There are different varieties of Kurdish, etc. So, these things are fairly quickly made aware to the people who need to know about them, and we do respond accordingly.

Australia, through NAATI, is probably the only crediting organisation to have 3 varieties of Kurdish. And that’s simply because, as you said, there are Kurdish varieties that are mutually incomprehensible. And the whole thing of interpreting is that you need to be able to communicate effectively. If Lebanese Arabic interpreters aren’t able to communicate effectively with a South Sudanese Arabic speaker, the interpreter needs to inform the service provider, the English speaker, about this issue, that they are unable to communicate properly and that they need to rebook the assignment with a South Sudanese Arabic interpreter.

You do have speakers who might be speaking varieties that are not your primary one. You kind of, well you know about this very well, Ingrid, you practice accommodation. You try and work out how do they speak, you try and avoid things that are specific to your variety. I’m often working with Slovenians, who I don’t understand that well, and they, through misallocation that happens. If you really can’t understand that, the onus is on the interpreter to declare this issue, and for that assignment to be booked with the correct interpreter.

Dist Prof Piller: So, does that happen a lot? Like, you talk about misallocation. Is that a problem in the system, and then if I’m, I don’t know, I need to attend the emergency department, for instance. Maybe there is not a whole lot of time, actually, for people to find out what language I speak, and then to book and rebook, so how does that work?

Dr Hlavac: Yeah, it’s not easy, but there is infrastructure to address this. If you turn up to emergency and you’re incoherent or what have you, there are people at front of staff who will try to work out how much English you have, and if you don’t have English, what’s your language. They’ll often ask you anything – your country or language – in English, etc. It’s often possible for front of house staff to at least work out the language or the country of birth. Often, the country of birth does not coincide with the language, but that’s at least a piece of information that’s helpful for the front of house staff to start the process of locating an interpreter.

The free interpreting service is available 24/7. This is financed by the federal government. It’s free, so the healthcare facilities with emergency departments use this service, particularly after hours, and the ability to be able to locate and get an interpreter on the other end of the phone is not bad. The waiting time is usually between 3 and 5 minutes on average, which is not bad. There is a fair bit of infrastructure in place to address this issue.

People say, “This costs a lot of money”, etc. But if you look at the sums and if you look at the rates of misdiagnosis, healthcare workers not being able to communicate properly, the health effects, etc. and how much it costs the health system when these things happen – it’s much cheaper to pay for interpreting services that address the linguistic discordance in the first place.

Dist Prof Piller: Jim, you’ve got fantastic data, actually, on how the provision of interpreting services kind of reduces length of stay in hospital and how it reduces readmission rates for linguistically diverse people. So, really, this kind of value for money that our interpreting system gives Australian society – can you maybe talk us through that research and how interpreting really, you know, improves outcomes for people from non-English speaking backgrounds and overall lowers the burden on the Australian taxpayer if you will?

Dr Hlavac: So Ingrid, yeah, that was data that was collected by a colleague of mine, and friend, Emiliano Zucchi, based at Northern Health here in Melbourne. He tracked the use of interpreting services over 10 years. In those 10 years, interpreting services greatly expanded, as did the population in the area, but what we had happening was, and we can’t quite say it was only the interpreting services that resulted in lower length of stay in hospital and lower readmission rates. We’d need to do what’s called multivariate analysis to say that conclusively. But what we did see was that the increase in interpreting services co-occurred with these really good health outcomes – reducing the length of stay in hospital, lowering readmission rates – those are compelling reasons. They’re also reasons that hospital managers like to see. It’s not just the fact that patients and healthcare workers can communicate with each other optimally. There are great healthcare outcomes that have occurred or co-occurred with this happening.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s really brilliant. I mean, we’ve already been talking about NAATI a lot and provisions in Australia. Our listeners come from all around the world, so I was wondering whether you could talk us through how Australia compares in terms of provisions for people who don’t speak English or don’t speak it well to other countries and the interpreting provisions and translation provisions available there?

Dr Hlavac: So, Australia compares favourably. I go back to really 1975 when they changed the macro policy, social policy of Australia, to introduce multiculturalism. If it wasn’t for multiculturalism, the flow on effect of that such as interpreting services would not be in this country to the extent that they are. So, Australia compares favourably in that throughout your provision of services acorss health, education, defence, employment, welfare – no matter what it is, each department has to have a multiculturalism policy, including linguistic diversity.

Part of linguistic diversity is the linguistic diversity of the government employees in that department, but also the people who use those services. So, when you’re unemployed and you need welfare assistance, the government department that you go to has to have a policy on providing interpreting services if you require them. Health is a big area, what I’ve mentioned. The courts, police, defence, tourism, etc. So, it’s actually built into the provision of all government services.

When you have money from government at federal and state level to support this, you can build up an infrastructure. When you don’t have the government support, it’s much harder. It’s much less prevalent and widespread, so that’s really the reason why Australia does compare favourably and why, compared to other countries, you do find, you know, a good service in terms of interpreting service and translation.

Dist Prof Piller: So, you’ve already spoken a lot about top-down and that the policies in Australia are really favourable, and the funding situation is quite favourable. Can you maybe talk us through bottom-up efforts? What needs to happen in institutions? Government can only do so much, you know. We need the policy framework in place, but at the same time at the institutional level, as you said earlier, people have to make things happen. There has to be a commitment to multilingualism and service provision for everyone and so on and so forth. I know that, from your research, you’ve also done a lot at the institutional level. Can you tell us a bit about what works and what doesn’t work?

Dr Hlavac: That example I gave before, when language service providers gather around a table to talk shop, to talk about what’s happening, what are our problems, issues, things we’re not doing well. That’s an example where people who are at the coal face do tell those people further up about what their gaps are and how they can be addressed. People aren’t short of suggestions. Now, sometimes those suggestions can’t always be addressed, but there’s this interchange of people at various levels that does characterise the system here which is pretty comprehensive.

If I go back to the 1970s though, when I was talking about multiculturalism being a key thing, there were people such as police officers complaining to their local members of parliament to say, “I can’t actually interview this potential witness because they don’t speak English and I don’t speak their language. They’re getting someone off the street to interpret. What are you going to do about it?”. You had doctors writing letters to say, “I can’t treat my patients. What are you going to do about it?”. When the country had actually gotten to a stage where they thought, “Ok, migration is an ongoing thing. This problem is not going to go away. How are we going to solve the problem?”. There were a lot of activists in that period coming up with lots of suggestions, and that’s how a lot of almost revolutionary things happened in that period. We’re fortunate we’ve had bipartisan support from both Liberal and Labor parties. Both sides of politics continue to support multiculturalism. So, interpreting services have not become a political football which can affect their future existence. So, that’s how things kind of panned out.

I’m sorry I’m not giving you a very good bottom-up example, but there’s a lot of interchange happening at many levels, and the system is kind of being fine-tuned, reviewed, and it’s open to lots of suggestions which are forthcoming from lots of people.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I mean, that’s the democratic process, I guess, and it is encouraging to see it working. Now, I hear a lot of people currently coming forth with suggestions about AI and saying, you know, “We won’t need interpreting anymore in the very near future because AI is going to do it all for us,” and all those translation apps and so on and so forth. So, I have to ask that question, Jim. Are language technologies going to make human interpreting and translation superfluous?

Dr Hlavac: Ingrid, what a question! It might, one day, not tomorrow or the day after. With voice recognition technology which is the basis for technology understanding human talk and then being able to convert it into another language is really advancing, as we all know. We can turn on the captions function and that will probably give a pretty good rendition of what I’m saying and what you’re saying.

So, we’re speaking English, and hopefully we’re speaking standard English and speaking reasonably slowly and clearly, so voice recognition technology is good if you’re speaking a big language slowly, clearly, and a standard version of it. If you’re speaking a slow, standard version of another big language, you’re probably going to be able to use technology that is going to, I don’t know, probably interpret most of what is said correctly without too many mistakes and distortions. So, the technology is there, and it’s improving.

However, there’s two things. Most of the interpreting assignments that interpreters work in in this country is they’re working with people who typically don’t speak standard varieties who are often, particularly in health, they might be sick, distraught, unwell, unhappy, they don’t speak coherently. They don’t speak slowly. They don’t speak clearly enough. And so, the technology is not there to be able to pick up what they’re saying to then reliably be able to transfer it into English.

For the time being, the technology is not good enough to deal with the vast array of different varieties that people use in their vernaculars when they’re interacting with a healthcare worker. You need a lot of feeding of data from all sorts of languages, including colloquialisms, dialect, variation, etc. to have a voice recognition technology system that reliably can replace an interpreter. I don’t think it’s going to happen tomorrow or soon, but it might happen in 10 or 15 years, but it’s up to interpreters to work with this because there still needs for many things to be some sort of human overview, or at least supervision of this.

I’ve got a PhD student who’s testing voice recognition and using a tablet and asking interpreters, “Do you want to take notes like you normally do, or do you want to look at the tablet and see what the transcription looks like? When you interpret, is it easier from that or from your notes?”. So, there’s research happening.

The other thing is though, Ingrid, if the technology makes a mistake and there’s some sort of horrible outcome, who has liability for it? If you try and contact Google Translate and say, “Hey you made a mistake and this cost me $100 million. Can I sue you?”, you won’t get an answer, probably, because it is unclear who is responsible for that transfer of recorded speech from one language into another if you use automatic or neural translation technology. So, it’s a grey area, but we’re not going to be replaced tomorrow I don’t think.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, personally I don’t even think in 10-15 years. I mean, there is so much technology hype, and I guess I’m also interested in the dangers of that belief that at some point in the future interpreters will be replaced because, as you’ve pointed out, it’s the most vulnerable and the most high-stakes situations where technology actually fails. Technology is great if I need to get directions, if I’m a tourist somewhere and sort of in the leisurely, fun situation. Then it’s really, really good to have Google Translate or Google Lens or whatever. But if I’m in a vulnerable situation, a high-stake needs situation in healthcare, before the courts or whatnot, I think there is a real danger, actually, of thinking that this leisure and fun situation is somehow going to transfer to that situation where it really matters. Where we need human accountability. Where we need to make sure that it’s the right variety, it’s all those connotations that are there and so on and so forth as you’ve explained so beautifully.

Dr Hlavac: Yeah, things are developing. People might think, “Hey, I used it on holiday, why can’t I use it with my legal client here?”. There are some disclaimers and warnings out there. So, for example, Optus has a particular function where they can do speech recognition software, so you can speak, let’s say, German to someone. And at the other end of the telephone call, someone can speak Italian or Swahili or whatever. They said this is good for general communication only. They’ve kind of used the term “general communication”.

They do warn that this is not suitable for health or legal or high-risk situations. So, it’s often up to people to assess what the level of risk, particularly if there’s a miscommunication or mistranslation, what the consequences of that are. So, you know, the messages, as you said, it might be good in low-risk situation, but as soon as you have something at stake, you need to ask yourself questions. And human beings are a better evaluator of risks are. Human beings do make mistakes, but they are better in dealing with high-risk situations than what the technology has to offer us at the moment.

Like we say to our students, though, those interpreters who don’t work with interpreters will end up without a job, but those interpreters who do work with technology can look forward to continuing to have a job.

Dist Prof Piller: Well thanks a lot. I think that’s sort of a good note to end on actually. Thank you so much, Jim. And thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on our podcast or on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Til next time!

Ramadan Lights on Coventry Street

Ramadan in London is exceptional in many ways. As the centre of a former Empire which still exerts a global pull on its former subjects and their descendants, London has been at the heart of a wave of migrations since the times of the British Raj. Initiatives inclusive of Muslims have normalised the Muslim presence. While there is no doubt that islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate is on the rise in Britain, too, the relative ease and acceptance of being a Muslim in the public space is manifested here in pragmatic ways, such as the widespread availability of halal food.

London’s Ramadan celebrations are in a class of its own. London’s Ramadan illuminations of 2023 were a testament to the diversity, inclusivity and vibrancy of London. When London’s first ever Ramadan lights were switched on by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the Lord Mayor of Westminster, Hamza Taouzzale, Muslims felt acknowledged in the public space generating a sense of understanding and promoting an equitable society.

Open iftars are another example. These have taken place for decades in Britain, and Muslims and non-Muslims break the fast together in public spaces. Sharing meals with strangers is a powerful experience for people of all faiths. Open iftars are incredibly important to get visibility and also to have communitywide engagement with each other, as is the essence of Islam. Some of the picturesque and breathtakingly beautiful environments where open iftars have taken place include Victoria and Albert Museum, Trafalgar Square, and Cambridge University.

Ramadan 2023 marked a particularly significant moment in British history as Muslim leaders were for the first time invited to the official residence of the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street for an iftar meal.

Corporate Europe is starting to celebrate Ramadan, too. Furniture retailer IKEA, for instance,  launched the GOKVÄLLÅ collection this year with clear connections to the Ramadan spirit.

My Ramadan

The visibility of Ramadan in public shapes personal experiences of Ramadan, too. For me, we start preparing for Ramadan months ahead by getting the house ready, shopping, and cooking. What I aim to do is complete mundane task before the start of the Holy Month, so that there is more time for spiritual reflection and Quran reading.

Ramadan lights in the streets and open iftars remind me of the beauty of our human diversity through these newly formed traditions in Europe.

As the Quran states, “Among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the difference of your languages and colours. There are indeed signs in that for those who know” (30:22).

I wish all who celebrate and observe the month of Ramadan a time full of divine blessings! Ameen.

Long-time Language-on-the-Move team members and friends Hanna Torsh and Alex Grey got to sit down for a formal interview

Here are Language on the Move we know that linguistic diversity is often seen through a deficit lens. Another way of saying this is that it’s perceived as a problem, particularly by institutions and governments.

So what does good governance in a multilingual city actually look like?

This was the key question of Dr. Alexandra Grey’s keynote speech at the Linguistic Inclusion Today Symposium held at Macquarie University on December 14^th 2023. I was fortunate to interview Dr. Grey the day before her presentation and to ask her the following questions:

1. What was it about the topic of good governance in a multilingual urban environment such as Sydney that sparked your interest? Why is this an important or relevant topic to research today?
2. How did you investigate good governance in multilingual urban environments? What were the main challenges and opportunities when you carried out this research?
3. What did you find out and why does it matter?

In the interview Dr. Grey presented in her clear and engaging way why we should care about this topic, what some of the key challenges of doing this research during the COVID-19 pandemic were, and how this research into linguistic diversity is connected to social justice in a participatory democracy.

Happy listening to this latest episode of Chats in Linguistic Diversity!

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick; added on March 06, 2024)

Dr Torsh: Hello and welcome to this Language on the Move interview. My name is Dr Hanna Torsh, and I’m interviewing Dr Alexandra Grey today as part of our Chats in Linguistic Diversity. I’d like to start by acknowledging that the land on which this interview was carried out is the land of the Wallumattagal people of the Dharug nation whose customs have nurtured this country since the Dreamtime, and I’d like to pay my respects to any indigenous listeners listening today and to acknowledge that this always was and always will be aboriginal land. Dr Alexandra Grey is giving the keynote speech at the symposium held here at Macquarie University hosted by Language on the Move entitled Linguistic Inclusion Today. She’s a chancellor’s research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, and she’ll be very familiar to many of our readers as she writes frequently about her work which lies at the intersection of law and linguistics. Today Alex is going to be talking about her work on urban multilingualism in Australia, and we started the interview when I asked her why this topic was important to her and how it became something that she noticed.

Dr Grey: Look, Hanna, it’s important not just to me but to researchers who are still researching and were in this space before me who were pointing out the fact that Australia has, in fact, since the time of settlement and particularly in recent times been a very multilingual society with a lot of individuals who speak more than one language and across Australia a great range of languages. From various times over history what those languages are changes – aboriginal languages, Torres Strait Islander languages, migrant languages from different parts of the world and different varieties of English. My own background is in both law and linguistics, so I’m always interested in how governments respond to and represent linguistic diversity. The project I had just come out of was about a really quite legislative approach, you know, a government that saw law as something that should be used in relation to languages and multilingualism, and that was my PhD in China. In the Australian context that’s not really the way things are done, but I was still interested in this underlying reality of multilingualism and thinking, “Well, how does our government do in that situation, and does it do things that could do better, you know? Does governing in a in a good or a better way rely on acknowledging or somehow actually adapting to this linguistic diversity?” And then there was a very particular catalyst. My father was working at a local council in Sydney, and he brought home (because he just knows of my general interest in posters) that they’d made, had designed, had laminated all about when bins were collected and other sort of, you know, services that local governments provide in Mandarin. And I thought to myself, “Ah!”. You know, that’s clearly not the only local council in Australia doing this, but equally not all local councils are doing that, and in the past local councils were not necessarily doing that. What’s driving that sort of decision-making in government? And so I started thinking to myself, “ Well, is that coming just from the grassroots or from pressure people are putting on local government or requests they’re making in that sort of interactive politics, or is it coming from some sort of rule or some sort of rights-based approach that is, if you like, more top-down that’s directing decision-makers to think about linguistic diversity?”. And I proposed a project about essentially that question to Sydney law school. They had a sort of, as it turned out, one-off postgraduate research funding opportunity, and they liked this question too. So I took it up, and I framed it really around that bigger question that I’ve just articulated – what is the framework of rights or rules that might be influencing decision-makers within Australian governments, so at state and federal level, to tailor their approach for a linguistically diverse public? And that’s still a bit of a broad question, so I had to focus on specific jurisdictions, and I focused then also on mass communications from government departments. Of course, there might be other ways that governments respond to that linguistic diversity too, but in a way, thinking back to those local council posters, I was still thinking, “Well, you know, there’s not a lot of documentation or research for investigation going on but clearly they’re changing practices with those mass communications, so let’s have a look.”

Dr Torsh: I’m really interested in what you said about the different approaches between China and Australia, and out of your PhD research what were some of the key differences that you can think about between those two different approaches to multilingualism?

Dr Grey: Look, I can probably say three things, and these are all structural things, and so I will preface them with a caveat that those structures don’t necessarily work the way you might think, or they work differently in different practice. But three structural differences: First of all, there are officially-recognised minority languages in China. Not just one, but many. Secondly, there is a constitutionally right to use and develop minority languages. The Australian constitution says nothing about languages, doesn’t say anything about English either, says nothing about languages at all in terms of recognition of official status or use or language rights. The third difference is that in China, linked to this idea of official minority language and official minority groups, there are counties, cities, prefectures, regions which have nominally, at least, a legal autonomous structure. And that is not unique to China, and it’s not even unique to, if you like, similar countries. It comes out of a Soviet model. For instances, I understand also Spain had developed autonomous regions in the 20^th century. So there was, if you like, a mode of thinking that was not unique to China. But it’s definitely not something that was imported into the Australian context. And there are reasons for that to do with culture and our culture of, if you like, adherence to English as a dominant language, maybe a sense of the need for a unifying language and a unifying ethnicity. But there are also legal structure reasons. Australia is a federation, so each state has a very high level of legal autonomy, if you like, anyway, within a federal structure. And so an autonomous region doesn’t sit well within a federal structure.

Dr Torsh: So interesting. Okay, so, you went about this project looking at these sorts of structural issues in mass communication in multilingual urban Australia. How did you approach it? It’s a huge topic, as you said. So, what sort of approaches did you take to doing that research, and what were some of the challenges that you encountered, and maybe some of the opportunities as well?

Dr Grey: I think the first challenge was my approach, which was a bit chaotic (laughs). I went into the project attempting to gather data, attempting to do lots of things on lots of fronts, and as it turned out I really needed to sort of step back and spend more time doing things slowly and planning. My approach in general was to, first of all, look at legislation on the books. Australia has very good public records of acts of parliament, or what we call legislation, and so along with a research assistant who later became my co-author, Ali Severin, who I know is a teaching colleague of yours, we started assembling legislation and doing an analysis of words using search terms to find laws that dictated a choice of language. And then we had to go through them to find was it in terms of individual interactions, say, mediated by an interpreter, or was it the sort of public communications that I was focusing on? And my plan was to do that jurisdiction by jurisdiction in NSW, the commonwealth, but also say Victoria, Queensland, etc. And at the same time, I wanted to, but these are only two points, I was going to say triangulate, but at least compare (laughs) empirical data that I was to collect of actual public communications practices. So website posters, government announcements, government radio slots, all these sorts of things, and I had gone somewhat down the road of starting to do that when Covid struck, which was, of course, the major challenge. And I clearly remember well sort of pivoting the research because, you know, from my perspective at least, a benefit of Covid for this project is that the government, at the state and federal level, started to take multilingual communications more seriously. It started to be discussed in the news media, and we started just to see a lot of government mass communications about Covid rules, about where to get testing, and then as we rolled into 2021, vaccination campaigns and so forth. So just a time of a lot of mass communications from governments. So once we had sort of adjusted to that scenario and it was safe to at least go out of my house and do some field work, you might recall, Hanna, we did this together on a bitterly cold day in the middle of 2020. We went to a couple of Sydney suburbs that, on the census data, have high rates of multilingual households, and we started recording the signage that we could find, both commercial and government signage in key public spaces and the language that it was in. And so that turned out to be one of the key forms of empirical data that I collected that I collected, and then I also, along with Ali, did research on government mass communications on websites, which we had planned to do anyway and we had already started looking at websites in 2019 across a number of NSW government departments. Again, with Covid I could focus, drill down on a number of NSW and federal government health websites in particular that were really important when we were all sort of locked at home with the internet as the main source of information. So I ended up gathering a whole subset of the empirical data that was just about Covid communications, but I also then continued to do the analysis of legislation. Covid interrupted a lot of things, and so I didn’t end up having the time to do every jurisdiction as I’d hoped. But, with Ali, I ended up doing NSW and the federal jurisdictions, so looking at acts that control choice of language, and then to sort of marry with that Covid-specific data set, I then did an extra limb which I had not originally envisaged, which was to look at international law, and then international organisations’ commentary about a rights-based approach, particularly in regards to the right to health and linguistic non-discrimination in the enjoyment of human rights, and sort of looking at guidance from that space as another supplementary form of, if you like, top-down impetus for decision-makers, whether that guided them and obliged them to make multilingual government communications.

Dr Torsh: I’m so interested in the idea that there was this obligation because one of the things that we found, and I remember that too when we were going around and looking at all the signage, it was very interesting and for me it was the first time that really a lot of those language, because I usually read English, were really so salient in communities that we walked around. So, what struck you during that time about some of the examples of governments doing multilingual communication about Covid well or not so well?

Dr Grey: Yeah, two things struck me. First, in article after article in the news you would read, you know, quotes from community organisations, all sorts of sources saying, “Look, there’s a problem with multilingual communications. It’s not reaching us. We’re not being taken account of. This was translated terribly, etc.” And the government response would always say something like, “We’ve produced 700 million pdfs in different languages.” And already in some of the data I had been analysing pre-Covid, I had been seeing with Ali that information in languages other than English might be on websites but very hard to find for various reasons. And we later came to the conclusion that that website architecture had both a monolingual logic and was primarily designed for an English-speaking intermediary to somehow find that material in other languages and share it with the appropriate people. And so that just became more and more clear through Covid, that, you know, there was a problem with the government almost, I won’t say complacently, because they were putting a lot of effort into some of these multilingual communications, but somewhat misunderstanding the uptake or the accessibility of these resources. And so the fact that these resources existed or that the number of these resources was increasing, was not really addressing the problem that people were raising. So that’s something that really struck me. The other thing that struck me, particularly when we did the physical fieldwork together, was not only that you saw that translating into the public space some of these freely-available government posters and so forth were just not appearing in shop fronts, but instead we saw that a lot of local businesses in some areas, and in some areas local councils, were stepping in and producing their own not handwritten, totally ad hoc signs, but you know, designed professional-printed, multiple copies of their own Covid information signage. And to me, that was really interesting that these were the players stepping into this space. Local businesses, often in consortia, and local councils. And I started digging a little deeper, and it’s research that I’d like to pursue a lot more if and when the time presents itself, but local governments seemed to have a better feel for the linguistic needs of the community and be more responsive, but not in all cases. Like, you know, the day we were out and about in Strathfield, in Sydney, Korean, Mandarin clearly present on signs made by the local council. In neighbouring Burwood, just a few kilometres away with equally high rates of multilingual households, and we’re talking over 70% of households in that area in the last census having a language other than English spoken, nothing from the local council at all. Is it a resourcing question? Is it just a blind spot? Is it one particular decision-maker who says yes or no? What is it that leads to these very differential outcomes?

Dr Torsh: Yeah, it’s such a good question, and I think we are seeing since the pandemic more and more awareness of the need for multilingual communication because it literally means the difference between good and bad outcomes, and we saw that during the pandemic, of those communities being, unfortunately, subject to higher rates of disease and death because, in part, of that communication gap.

Dr Grey: That communication gap can definitely cause those sorts of serious health outcomes, but it can also cause the policing, or if you like, higher incidences of getting slapped with a fine. And that’s not because particular communities are more willing to bend the rules or less respectful of the police necessarily. It might also be because the types of information with the specific, really up-to-date rules – those who mainly communicated in English through certain media channels that certain people cannot read or do not have the habit of accessing or perhaps even knowing are there – that is an area that I think we’ve seen even this year a reversal of a huge number of on-the-spot fines given by police. I think there’s more to look into the question of how the differential linguistic reach also led to differential policing.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so fines that were issued during the Covid pandemic, for international listeners who might not be sure, yes during the periods of lockdown we had on-the-spot fines for all sorts of things, like being out of your house when everything was really shut up to if you were out and you were a non-essential worker, those sorts of things. And we’re seeing those being challenged in the courts and being reversed at the moment.

Dr Grey: So, I mean, that’s an area that, you know, as someone who is in a law school with criminologists, that’s an area of research that occurs to me, but that’s sadly not the research that I have the time and resources to do myself as one person or even, you know, with you or with Ali. But I just wanted to hone in on that point that the differential outcomes of having fewer resources in one language compared to English, they can be quite serious. As you say, health. As I say, policing outcomes. But I also make the point in some of my work that sort of regardless of these grave outcomes, it’s also just about autonomy of individual people being able to make decisions about their own health, their own healthcare, family, and to do that, people should have equal access to information.

Dr Torsh: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that’s a really good point. I’m really focused on health at the moment, but of course I think justice and also education but I am not a law person myself, so I often forget about justice. So I think that’s a really important space. So, what else did you find out once you did all this research and put these, I think, three case studies that you did together? What did you find out about multilingual urban communication that we haven’t already covered?

Dr Grey: Well, for the first study, I call it an audit. That’s the one that’s about sort of what legislation controls language of communication. I found, predominantly, that legislation in NSW doesn’t touch on choice of language and it certainly is not providing strong impetus for multilingual communications. It’s not forbidding it either. There are a few what are called government advertising guidelines that say that for various government information campaigns over various spending thresholds, a certain percentage has to be spent on what they call “culturally and linguistically diverse communities”. But it doesn’t go into details as to what kind of language that might entail or who should be involved or what the quality assurance processes are. I’ll come back to that issue in a minute, but that’s sort of what the first case study identified. And I have an inkling that it’s very similar in other Australian jurisdictions, but I didn’t get to complete my audit of these sets of laws. In terms of actual NSW language practices then, it’s probably not a surprise that the second case study found really great variability, but something I haven’t perhaps touched on is just the extent to which the NSW government sometimes uses so many languages. So, we looked at 24 websites of all 10 government departments and then a sample of government agencies. Across these websites there were 64 languages. And so most of those websites, in addition to English, if they were going to use another language would use some of the most frequently spoken languages in Australia, which are also most frequently spoken in NSW – Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese – but not always. For instance, I think it was at the time the Taronga Zoo website for the usual pattern, but not Arabic, for no obvious reason to me, you know, a great number of those, I think over half of those in this sample were only in English. Not a really clear pattern necessarily. We’re trying to look at is it public-facing government departments vs others, or various kinds of agencies vs others? But not necessarily. And then some websites, particularly Department of Health at the NSW level, that’s the one that’s creating this enormous list of languages, you know, up into the 60s, but on all those websites the information in English is both more voluminous and more up to date than the information in other languages. And then, you know, this might be sort of suggesting perhaps that there needs to be some more rethinking or some more quality assurance or some more community participation, you know, it suggests that there might be a problem. It doesn’t necessarily conclusively prove it. Then the Covid case study, the one in which I looked at international law and international organisations’ commentary on how those legal obligations should apply, I found there’s a really clear emerging standard, it’s not yet crystallised, it’s a very strong discourse in recent years, about planning for community involvement in at least crisis communications. Maybe more generally. So at least for health crises. Not just, you know, ad hoc, suddenly having to find “Who is our Nepali community, and how do we reach them?”, but in having training to raise the capacity of various members of that community. Of having pre-existing works and links and an idea of what media that group might consume, and a strategic plan as to how language might be used in communicating with that group. And so that’s advanced planning with community input, and that’s really emphasised in a rights-based approach that the international organisations are talking about. And you can understand why that might be something they want to encourage because it does, to my mind, seem to be an approach that might help with the kinds of problems that I’m empirically pointing out in Australia, particularly an absence of materials or very inaccessible materials, very disparate or unequal materials, and a legal framework that doesn’t really guide decision-making in that space. So I have said in my most recent paper that international guidance could be very useful for Australian government in terms of thinking about how to do their public communications better. And by “better” I mean not just reaching people in a way that is more effective, getting information across and getting people to act on it, but also more representative, building up a sense of affiliation or trust or social inclusion.

Dr Torsh: Yeah I think that is such an important point, that last point that you make, that it’s not just about the communication or information. It’s not just about, you know, getting people to get their shots on time and know when to enrol their children in school. But it’s also about including everyone in this imagined community of this country, and acknowledging that it’s not an extra that they are included. It’s not a special favour. It’s not tolerance. It’s genuine inclusion. I think that’s a really important point. And do you think that your next step is going to sort of continue that work? I know now that you are doing this fantastic work at the University of Technology. Is that something you’re going to take into your next project?

Dr Grey: Yes and no. My new project is just really commencing, but for our listeners, just sort of shifting headspace – a lot of the current thinking about indigenous policy and indigenous research really focuses on what we call a self-determination paradigm. You know, allowing people to not just have a say in matters that affect them, but have some level of control. And so my current project is looking at a different kind of inclusion. It’s looking at the space of language renewal, which is a space that Australian governments have, in recent years, made quite unusual steps into, both in terms of sort of policy support and legislative support for aboriginal language renewal. But it raises this sort of potential tension or question of “Is the state including indigenous people sort of in a paradigm or approach that the state itself is dictating, or is there a way of allowing indigenous people to take control of their own language renewal processes that might be different to different communities? And if that approach is taken, what is the role of the state?” So that’s a project that raises some different questions of social inclusion, but it all stems back to these bigger questions of language use in the public space. Things like naming of places according both to indigenous language and indigenous knowledges of place. Something I’m looking at very much at the moment – using indigenous languages in Parliament, which requires in most cases a change of the rules, which are called the standing orders that govern the parliaments themselves. And so again, there I’m looking at both sort of linguistic diversity and inclusion through this lens of political participation and representation.

Dr Torsh: Thank you for listening and thank you, Alex, for being here.

Dr Grey: Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks, Hanna.

Attendees at “Linguistic Inclusion Today” workshop pose for a group photo

There is only one Australian university that has a program in Croatian Studies: Macquarie University. A few weeks ago, the University proposed to disestablish this program, along with four other language programs, citing low enrollment numbers, expected advances in language technologies that would make language learning redundant, and a strategic shift to generic cultural competence focused on Asia.

Against this background, we explored the role of languages in Australian higher education at last week’s Linguistic Inclusion Today workshop.

In a powerful keynote the director of the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie, Dr Jasna Novak Milić, explored the role of Croatian Studies in Australia.

The lecture clearly identifies the academic, community, and socio-cultural benefits of a “small” languages program in Australian higher education. Since its founding in 1983, Croatian Studies at Macquarie has built a strong model for a university language program that is closely integrated with the Croatian community in Australia and also has deep international ties.

The curricular and funding model created by Croatian Studies at Macquarie University provides excellent language education in a language that is both learned as heritage and international language. Additionally, it also has the potential to serve as a template of a successful university-community partnership for other languages within Australia’s multicultural fabric.

Ultimately, the question is not why we need a Croatian Studies program at an Australian university. The answer to that question is abundantly clear. The real question should be why we would consider destroying something that is so valuable to so many people.

Image 1

Like many parents of teenagers, I delightedly welcome any occasion to connect with a generation I don’t always understand and that doesn’t always understand me. As a Muslim family in Australia, this inter-generational exchange is often characterized by questions from my children about our Islamic practices and how we talk about these with our friends who are not Muslim. One of the most questioned of these practices is Ramadan, the month in the Islamic calendar when Muslims abstain from consumption of food and drink during the day.

So, when my children began texting me a range of Ramadan-themed memes, I was elated to find something that we could relate to and laugh at together. Image 1 has always topped the list of our favorites.

There are many versions of this meme, and it owes its popularity to the fact that across generations, we answer this question every Ramadan, without fail. In fact, the first time I showed this meme to a work friend, he exclaimed, “Hey, I asked you that, too!” We both laughed (at him) and then, spent the next half hour going through other Ramadan memes, like those in Image 2 and Image 3.

Image 3

Image 2

And once more, I shared not just a laugh with someone, but an opening for genuine intercultural communication and sharing. In the numerous conversations these memes inspired, most expressed that they had no idea that there was a ‘world’ of Muslim memes that entertained and explained.

For me, these memes have played two important communication roles: intergenerational and intercultural. In the Australian context, second and third generation Muslims communicate with each other and outside of the Muslim community in English. Many of their linguistic expressions relate to sarcasm, irony and wordplays based on English. Their cultural references are TV shows like Friends and The Hunger Games and there is no shortage of memes based on dialogues from popular TV shows and movies. The creative efforts behind Muslim-based memes have been written about in numerous places such as here.

The humor not only provides a platform for internal communication for Muslims but also a means to connect to non-Muslims, with whom they share these linguistic expressions and cultural references. Both my Muslim and non-Muslim friends always get a kick out of the memes in Image 4 and Image 5. By the way, iftar is the meal eaten at sunset to break the day’s fast and traditionally begins with the consumption of dates.

Image 4

Image 5

Humor – specifically, humor in a language and mode that we all relate to – connects us and provides access to the practices of a community often questioned and misunderstood. A few years back, the ABC offered a Ramadan explainer using a series of memes and tweets. There are also innumerable social media feeds devoted to Muslim memes, such as this Facebook page or this Twitter feed.

The volume of meme production on these platforms is indicative of the time devoted to this means of communication. In a study of young American Muslim women who engage in meme-making, Ali (2020) showed how these memes allow their creators to negotiate aspects of their citizenship in USA. For a community that is often subject to stereotyping, these memes offer a way to construct their own identity.

I think that is true, also, of me and my teenagers. We can rummage through our sociolinguistic repertoire, draw on the pertinent elements of our identities, and exercise some control over the way we present ourselves as Muslims. Many of these memes have been the starting point of deeper and more engaging conversations about being Muslim in Australia today.

Image 6

As we come to the end of Ramadan this week and look forward to the day of Eid to celebrate a month of fasting, I have been sharing the meme in Image 6 far and wide.

References

Ali, I. (2020). Muslim women meme-ing citizenship in the era of War on Terror militarism. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 106(3), 334–340.

Related content

Piller, I. (2009). Ramadan Kareem! Or: Urban Etiquette for Monolinguals. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/urban-etiquette-for-monolinguals/
Piller, I. (2017). Money makes the world go round. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/money-makes-the-world-go-round/
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2023). Lent, Language, and Faith Work. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/lent-language-and-faith-work/
Wehbe, A. (2017). Silent Invisible Women. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/silent-invisible-women/

教堂的中文 标识在 悉尼的 语言景观 中越来 越突出 在以英 语占绝 对主体 地位的 语言 环境中 这些 双语 的标 识是 引人 注目的 更何况 汉语 并非 基督 教的 传统 语言 教堂中英双语标志的使用预示着澳大利亚华人皈依基督教的比例成增长趋势。

新书的第十三章探讨了中国的新移民皈依基督教的经历 揭示了宗教皈依 移民定居和语言学习相互关联 我们 （Yining Wang 和 Ingrid Piller 对中国移民信仰转变的研究兴趣并非仅仅源于教堂的双语标志 更多是受到参与Yining博士课题的中国家庭的启发。 在31个参与课题的中国家庭中 有8个家庭是来澳后皈依基督教的 其它的家庭或多或少表达过对基督教的兴趣或者参与过基督教的活动

基督教之所以在这些中国家庭中广受欢迎和关注 和这些为人父母者在澳州教养子女时碰到的困难和心中的迷惘息息相关 许多参与者既不想沿袭中国式的“虎爸虎妈”的教育理念 同时他们也不觉得西方的育儿方式多有吸引力 他们经常在自己的社交群里面分享一些负面的育儿故事 比如说某些失控的中国孩子 已经完全脱离了中国的价值观，这些孩子学业失败抑或沉迷于毒品或滥交 因此 加入教会经常被认为是一种折衷的方式，即可以相对轻松的教养孩子 又可以引导下一代树立良好的价值观，走上有意义的人生之路

一份关于澳大利亚生活中多语使用 宗教信仰和精神依托的论文集征稿为我们提供了一个机会 我们得以探讨宗教皈依与移民定居之间的交叉点 在此 我们采访了七位来自中国的第一代移民 记录了他们移民前的对宗教的态度 移民后的皈依之旅 以及基督教在他们语言学习 定居生活和育儿经历中的所起的作用。

移民的危机

参与者均在中国受过高等教育，持有学士、硕士或博士学位。在移民之前，他们都曾在学术界、工程界、金融界、IT界和医学界拥有一席之地。移民后，绝大部分都经历了职业生涯的下行。

受访者在中国时都有稳定的职业和收入，来澳后突然发现很难找到专业对口的工作。职业的下行带来的不仅是经济收入的不稳定，还滋生了巨大的心里落差，导致自信心的缺乏，以及对自己的否定，而这一切都与语言障碍息息相关。当他们难以在公众面前重塑自己职场的成功时，生存的危机感油然而生，生活和职业的双重压力使其对婚姻质量和亲子关系也产生了负面地影响。

一位参与者很精辟地总结了移民给其生活带来的创伤，她说：“我们那时真的是心力交瘁，情感和身体上大崩溃。”移民带来的生存危机让这个群体开始在宗教信仰中寻求新的出路，七名参与者中的六名用了同样的词汇来描述当时的心境：“人的尽头应该就是神的开始。”

皈依–人生的重建

正如参与者直言不讳地承认，他们参与教会活动最初的动机并非寻求耶稣，而是希望在困境中能在这个新的国家寻求些许实实在在地帮助，比如说能够建立新的朋友圈，获得更多的人脉，从而弥补因移民而带来的社会资源的缺失。

参与者们都非常肯定他们在教会中所获得的帮助，尤其是他们在教会群体中所建立的相互信任、相互支持的情谊，这在很大程度上弥补了她们远离家人和失去了曾经的社交群体的遗憾。一位参与者明确地将她的教堂定义为家庭，她说：“我去教会的目的不是为了参加活动。教会是我的家。我每周都要回家去看望我的兄弟姐妹们。”

当然，要融于教会这个新群体，需要接受最初与他们格格不入的信仰，首先他们得相信神是一个无所不能的存在。这种信仰需要他们与当初坚定的无神论和科学的世界观彻底决裂。

总的来说，最初参与者们去教会是为了寻求实际帮助来应对他们所遇到的生存危机，结果导致参与者的社交群体和信仰系统发生了根本性的转变。参与者们反复强调，他们的新信仰导致了他们“生命的彻底翻转”。

移民–多重身份的混合体

到2020年采访时为止，这些参与者受洗后的平均时间已超过十年。这意味着，他们最初的移民困境和随后的信仰转变已经过去多年，他们有充足的时间来塑造自己新的身份，他们也非常认可自身的多重新身份（如中英双语使用者和华裔澳大利亚人）。

多语言实践是这些移民宗教活动的核心组成部分。参与者发现，在宗教活动中，不同语言的使用及其风格带给他们不一样的感触。对他们而言，中英两种语言都推动着他们信仰的转变，他们的双重身份也因此而融合。

对参与者来说，移民的成功最终是达成了民族身份、语言身份和宗教身份的融合，即达到语言使用、民族认同和信仰体系的一体化。这种融合使这些一代移民为自己在澳大利亚找到一个舒适的空间。然而，让下一代继承这样一种积极的混合身份则似乎更为困难。

移民和育儿

如上所述，这篇关于宗教皈依，移民定居和语言学习的研究是来自于之前语言传承的课题。此项关于中国移民的课题——和其它对各类移民群体的研究一样——发现语言传承的最终结果是英语成为第二代移民的强势语言。 虽然一部分第二代移民也许可以流畅地用汉语交流，但第二代的汉语识字水平总体较低。

移民父母和他们的孩子在语言能力上的差异可能会导致“中国父母”和“澳大利亚孩子”之间的话语鸿沟。比如，参与者家庭普遍认为澳大利亚的个人主义文化对中国式的父母权威构成了巨大威胁。他们觉得基督教可以给孩子输入客观的道德依据，从而弥合了这一差距。那就是，基督教义为这些参与者向第二代灌输中国价值提供了理论依据。

给非宗教组织的建议

我们的研究为如何促进移民融入当地社会提供了三个重要经验。

第一，我们注意到移民经历容易引发生存危机。这种危机是由经济的不稳定、社会地位的丧失、移民初期的语言障碍、在另一种文化中如何应对婚姻困境和教养子女的挑战等因素造成的。这些种种问题其实与新移民社交圈的缺失紧密相关，远离至亲好友原本让人深感不安，而不安定的情绪很可能使日常问题进一步升级（例如，停电时怎么办，应该呼叫谁？孩子生病了不知如何向学校请假怎么办？），并将其提升到个人危机级别。教会团体为解决这些生活问题提供的具体支持无异于雪中送炭。当然，教堂提供的最重要的帮助是将新移民纳入新的社会群体。我们认为，所有移民，如论他们是什么宗教背景，都应该获得当地社会的关爱和支持，包括帮助他们重建新的社会链接，这对于移居初期尤其重要。

第二，从长远来看，参与英汉双语和双文化实践能更好地促使移民融入社会，将自己的语言文化带入新的社会生活让这些新移民觉得被接受。教会的双语活动非常务实，只要核心教义不受影响，教会愿意并且身体力行地将基督教和中国的文化习惯结合在一起。这种语言和文化的融合显著促进了新入会者的长期语言学习、移居的稳定过渡和全面融入澳大利亚社会。基督教会对双语活动的推行与澳洲中小学、大学和工作场所等非教会机构的语言行为形成了显著的对比，后者继续实行在他们的单语习惯，一切以英语为主体。

第三，教养子女是具有挑战性的，对于移民尤其如此。如何保护下一代免受伤害，发挥他们的潜力，并引导他们树立正确的道德观并实现其人生价值，这一切都是移民父母的焦虑所在，因为他们不仅要跨越代际差距，还要跨越语言和文化差距。本章所记录的这些中国家庭在子女教育中的迷惘和挑战表明，澳大利亚的学校显然未能帮助这些移民家庭跨越差距，减轻焦虑。这种失败有两个层面：首先，它反映了澳大利亚的教育对语言传承的忽视，这使得许多二代移民没有能力参与父母的社会生活、了解他们的世界观并或与他们进行深度的会话。其次，这也表明学校未能有效地和非英语背景的父母沟通，这意味着父母对孩子在学校的状况缺乏了解，从而引起他们对子女教育现状的担忧和恐惧。因此，促进移民家庭的语言传承和增强家校沟通对于社会和谐至关重要。

References

Piller, Ingrid. (2021). What can churches teach us about migrant inclusion? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/what-can-churches-teach-us-about-migrant-inclusion/
Wang, Yining, & Piller, Ingrid. (2022). Christian bilingual practices and hybrid identities as vehicles of migrant integration. In Robyn Moloney & Shenouda Mansour (Eds.), Language and Spirit: exploring languages, religion and spirituality in Australia today (pp. 307-326). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

“What stops Australia from doing something like Sweden has done to promote multilingualism? Is it too hard to implement mother tongue instruction in the education system of Australia?”

These questions about language education planning in Australia (where I was born and grew up) and Sweden (where I became a researcher and now live and work) were asked during an online conversation I got involved with after a conference (#ICCHLE21) organized by the Sydney Institute for Community Languages Education (Sydney University). As the questions relate directly to the topic of my Phd research, they engaged me, to say the least!

Multilingualism is a fact of life

In our globalized world, many people speak languages in addition to the official language(s) of the country they live in. Different terms , for example “home language” “heritage language” even “native language”, are used in different contexts to describe these languages and the forms of education that may exist to promote their development.

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

In Sweden they are labelled “mother tongues”, and education to promote their development is called Mother Tongue Instruction (hereafter MTI). In Australia the term “community language” is well-established, but terms “first” and “background” language are also used, specifically in the Australian National Curriculum. There are a range of different approaches to the study of community, first, or background languages in Australia.

Is Sweden really better at promoting multilingualism?

So why did the person who asked the questions above think that the Swedish model of MTI might be better for promoting multilingualism in Australia than the range of approaches that currently exist? In my thesis I argued that organizational, ideological and classroom factors impact on the opportunities for the development of multilingualism that the different models offered. Unpacking the organizational and ideological factors can help answer the questions.

How does Mother Tongue Instruction (MTI) in Sweden work?

In Sweden, since the Home Language Reform in 1977, students from primary to upper-secondary school have been entitled to apply for MTI in any language other than Swedish that they speak at home. If the student has basic proficiency in the language, more than five students in the local area apply for it and a teacher is available, the school is required to organize MTI in that language.

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

National funding for MTI is administered by local municipalities, who collaborate with schools in the organization of MTI and who employ many of the 6,183 mother tongue teachers who work in Swedish schools. While teacher education is not mandatory for MTI teachers, there are a range of teacher education programmes and professional development courses offered at universities throughout the country that prepare and support MTI teachers for their work.

MTI has a syllabus, and grades in the subject at the end of lower-secondary school can boost the scores that give students eligibility to upper-secondary school programmes. During the academic year 2020-2021, 150 languages were taught through MTI in Swedish schools.

Mother tongue instruction (MTI) within a strong policy framework

Sweden’s system, offering MTI through the national school system, is relatively unique. Although other countries may have some form of support for the maintenance and development of languages other than the national languages, there is no other country where the right to study mother tongues that are different from the national languages, is offered such strong legal protection.

Community language schools in Australia

Education in first, background or community languages in Australia is organized quite differently. It is possible to study five languages as background or first languages through the school system. Education in the other 295 or so languages spoken in Australia is organized through the community language school network.

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

Community language schools have existed in Australia since 1857 and are located in most large cities and some smaller towns throughout the country. Each state has a different approach to organizing community language education. See for example how different the systems in the Victorian School of Languages is from Queensland. New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania have their own systems as well.

While many community language teachers have tertiary qualification, not infrequently in education, they often receive only symbolic payment or work voluntarily. Most community language schools hold lessons on weekends or after school hours, and it is not always possible for all students at community language schools to gain certification or formal recognition of their community language studies.

Community language schools are disconnected from mainstream schooling

Education in community languages in Australia thus usually takes place outside the mainstream school system, is concentrated in larger cities, run by volunteers and not always recognized by the formal education system. These organizational factors can impact negatively on equality of access (for bilinguals living in remote regions) and on student motivation.

It all comes down to language ideologies and policy frameworks

So how do ideological factors impact on the promotion of multilingualism in Sweden and Australia? Language ideologies are not about truth but rather are “beliefs, feelings and conceptions about language that are socially shared and relate language and society in a dialectical fashion” (Piller, 2015). Language ideologies are thus socially situated and dynamic.

Sweden underwent a political and social transformation in the 1970s, throwing off anything associated with the “old assimilationist Sweden” and embracing the vision of “the new Sweden” (modern and pluralistic). It has been argued that it is partly because these ideas were so powerful at a community and political levels that an educational reform as radical as The Home Language Reform, a reform that politicians from every party were committed to, was possible (Hyltenstam & Milani, 2012).

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

Collaborations between researchers, activists, social scientists, and officials were instrumental in transforming attitudes in Sweden concerning the value of education in all languages (Wickström, 2015). As Sweden’s policies on mother tongue instruction have traditionally been influenced more by the academic field than the political field, it is clear that language ideologies held by policymakers in Sweden have been influenced by researchers, community members and collaborations between them, leading to the Home Language Reform of 1977 and the establishment of mother tongue instruction.

Australia’s monolingual mindset remains a barrier

In Australia, a major hindrance to funding and giving equal access to the study of a wider range of languages other than English is a very particular set of beliefs about language that researchers have called, the monolingual mindset. This is a deep-rooted, widespread belief that “Standard Australian English” is the most important language and that being monolingual is common and expected.

There is a lot of research that discusses the negative impact of the monolingual mindset on language learning and use and multilingual identity in Australia. However, policy makers do not appear to have engaged with this research, or if they have, they have not had the political means to enact legislation that would make the study of community languages more widely accessible.

Two diverse societies with different approaches to multilingualism

Although Sweden today is not socially or ideologically the same place as it was in the 1970s and there is no longer unanimous support in the Swedish parliament for MTI, the number of students who study the subject has increased steadily since its introduction. Almost one-third of the student population (Table 8A) in the compulsory school was eligible for the subject in the 2020/2021 academic year. MTI thus remains an important, elective subject in the Swedish curriculum, part of a national and systematic approach to language education.

Australia is also home to many people who speak languages in addition to English. The person who asked the questions at the beginning of this blogpost and many researchers as well believe that a national, systemic approach to education in community languages would benefit these individuals, their families, and the Australian community.

So what is stopping Australia from doing something like Sweden then? To answer this, I ask another question: Are Australian policymakers ready to listen to and collaborate with their multilingual citizens and researchers? Until they are, an Australian version of the Home Language Reform is still a way off.

(Image credit: Markus Spiske via Unsplash)

Parental engagement is a critical aspect of student achievement

When we think about student achievement, we typically think about student qualities: how smart a student is, how hard-working, or how personable. What we tend to overlook is the role parents play in their children’s school success. However, parental engagement is critical to student outcomes: parents choose a school or program for their child, they socialize their children into ways of interacting with institutions and their representatives, and they lobby for the needs of their children.

Obviously, different parents have different levels of capacity to engage with their children’s education. As a rule of thumb, middle-class parents are good at engaging with schools and this can secure significant advantages for their children. By contrast, working-class parents often face barriers to engaging with their children’s education.

Language as a barrier to parent engagement

The role of class in parent engagement is well-known, thanks to the work of US sociologists such as Shirley Brice-Heath, Annette Lareau, or Jessica Calarco.

But what about language proficiency?

For children, limited proficiency in the language of the school is a leading cause of educational disadvantage. Children who face the double burden of having to learn new content while learning a new language are bound to struggle, particularly when their double burden is not recognized, and they are compared to peers who are fully proficient in the language and ‘only’ need to learn new content.

Parents who are learners of the school language face the same challenge: being an engaged parent if you are struggling with the language of the school is extra difficult.

Given what we know about the advantages of parental engagement, language thus becomes a social justice issue: parent exclusion from full and equitable participation in their child’s schooling may negatively impact their child’s educational achievement, and have lifelong consequences for their social advancement.

How do schools bridge the language barrier?

Parents with limited proficiency in the language of the school constitute a substantial group in many societies. In some schools they make up the majority of parents.

Can a parent with low literacy in English readily find the enrollment form in their language?

What do schools do to level the playing field for these parents and their children?

That’s what my colleagues Ana Sofia Bruzon, Hanna Torsh, and I wanted to find in a recent research project investigating how enrollment information is communicated to new parents on the websites of some of Sydney’s most linguistically diverse primary schools. The findings of our research have just been published in Language and Education – the article is open access so feel free to click through to the journal!

Schools present themselves as monolingual

One of our key findings is that the school websites and their enrollment information is resolutely monolingual. Languages other than English simply do not seem to exist and they are absent from the websites. Other languages are simply not there – neither for communicative purposes (there is no information available in another language) nor for symbolic purposes (there are no phatic words such as greetings in another language).

We had selected only schools with above-average enrollment of children from non-English-speaking backgrounds. In some of the schools in our sample, the percentage of non-English-speaking backgrounds was as high as 98%. Even so, there is no linguistic trace of this diversity on the school websites.

We argue that this absence of languages other than English shuts out parents with limited proficiency in English from the moment of enrollment; in other words, even from before their child actually starts school.

Translated materials follow a monolingual information architecture

Most of the websites we examined provided the Google Translate plug-in and all had links to translated forms available on the Department of Education website.

This certainly demonstrates an effort to include parents with limited proficiency in English.

Unfortunately, a not-negligible level of English language proficiency is needed to access those translations: you need to know to watch out for English words such as “language,” “translation” or “translated version;” you need to know the name of your language in English and in the Latin alphabet; and you need to be familiar with the conventional sort order of the Latin alphabet.

All of this requires a level of English literacy that renders the translated documents inaccessible for those who need them most.

How can enrollment information be made more linguistically inclusive?

Based on our study we suggest that more attention needs to be paid to linguistically inclusive design.

Specifically, schools should provide a central hub for information in each of the school’s most frequently used languages. This is highly practical as different schools cater to different clusters of languages and 3-5 languages in addition to English will cover the vast majority of languages used in a school’s catchment area.

Such a hub page could explain what further language-specific resources are available and how they can be accessed.

Placing a link to such language-specific pages on the home page and in the flow-through navigation bars in the language-specific name (and script, if applicable) would also add a multilingual dimension to the overall website that makes visible the fact of a school’s linguistic diversity.

In short, such hub pages in languages other than English would address both the information gap and the recognition gap. And it would allow parents with limited proficiency in English to get a foot in the door from day 1 of their child’s schooling.

Read the full research article

Piller, I., Bruzon, A. S., & Torsh, H. (2021). Monolingual school websites as barriers to parent engagement. Language and Education, 1-18. doi:10.1080/09500782.2021.2010744 (open access)