multilingual writers – Language on the Move

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2026

Ingrid Piller — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 06:11:00 +0000

“Read – Learn – Grow – Be Kind” – this street library says it all (Image credit: Language on the Move)

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge 2026 is out!

Now in its ninth year, the goals of our reading challenge have remained broadly unchanged since 2018: to encourage reading in the discipline and beyond, and to make linguistics reading fun.

These goals have become even more relevant, due to two converging trends:

On the one hand, book reading is in freefall internationally while, on the other hand, screen time is rising exponentially.

If you think this is just a case of one medium replacing another, you are unfortunately mistaken.

In its most prevalent form – social media use – screen time has negative effects on our ability to concentrate, to think deeply and critically, and to develop empathy. These negative effects are now so widely felt that their popular designation “brain rot” was selected as the Oxford Word of the Year 2024.

Book reading, by contrast, is the antidote to brain rot. Book reading challenges us to concentrate and to deeply engage with an extended argument or a narrative universe.

To train your brain you need to read long form. You can’t outsource your reading to AI-generated summaries, either.

Furthermore, many of our readers are (aspiring) researchers and Stephen King’s advice in On Writing is valid in our profession, too:

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge is here for you develop, enjoy and extend the habits and pleasures of reading, particularly in the field of linguistic diversity and social participation. For each month of 2026, we are suggesting a category and one of our team members offers a recommendation in that category.

Enjoy and feel free to add your own recommendations in the “Comments” section below.

And don’t forget that, in addition to the categories and recommendations suggested here, the Language-on-the-Move Podcast will also continue to bring you regular reading ideas in 2026.

Happy Reading!

Previous Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenges

January: a book about new technologies in intercultural communication

Recommendation: Cabalquinto, E. C. B. (2022). (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media. Oxford University Press.

Earvin’s presentation about the myth of digital inclusion of older migrants in Australia was one of the highlights of our recent symposium devoted to “New technologies in intercultural communication.”
Whether you missed out on the symposium or want to deepen your engagement with Earvin’s work, (Im)mobile Homes offers a gripping exploration of the use of smartphones, social media, and apps in the family and care practices of transnational families. (Ingrid Piller)

February: a book about settler colonialism

Recommendation: Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press.

This book completely reshaped my understanding of Indigenous politics, border, nation, and sovereignty in North America. It also made me reflect on my reliance on the extensive literature on Indigenous cultures and languages – ritual speech, performances, tales, or beliefs – produced over the last century by anthropologists and linguists, most of which are dismissive of the scene of dispossession, the complicated history of places, or simply what people say about themselves and their struggles. (Gegentuul Baioud)

March: a book stirs that your social imagination

Recommendation: Bregman, R. (2017). Utopia for realists. Bloomsbury.

In this book, Rutger Bregman stirs our imagination by inviting us to re-think the way modern society is organized and by offering us a glimpse into a potentially better future for all. He calls for a new vision that would more effectively address current global challenges such as increasing inequalities or the progressing automation of labor.
But what does he exactly propose?
In short, a 15-hour work week, universal basic income and open borders. The author invites you on a journey between time and spaces with real examples of communities that have taken utopia seriously and have started to experiment with it. (Olga Vlasova)

April: A book about the philosophy of language

Recommendation: Le Guin, U. (1974). The Dispossessed. HarperCollins.

Le Guin constantly fluctuates the reader´s receptors between the old and the new, roots and progress, personal and professional, politics and philosophy. We follow the life and work of a physicist who travels back and forth between two historically connected but contrasting planets and political systems.
The protagonist commits to seeking the truth not only by understanding his own context of origin but also by defying it; how do we find our truth? And is it ever objective? The novel is considered a post-feminist utopian fiction raising discussions on whether linguistic innovation is necessary for conceptual change.
A story of intergalactic migration trying to answer the long-standing question: to whom does knowledge belong? (Mara Kyrou)

May: A book about the experience of growing up as the child of a migrant

Recommendation 1: Vuong, O. (2019). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin.

Vietnamese-American history, language, and generational trauma come together in the form of a poetic letter with utterances such as “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.” Dedicated to someone who will never see it: the author’s mother, who never learned how to read.
Through the eyes of a young man named Little Dog discovering his homosexuality in a space for undocumented immigrants, this book tells the story of a Vietnamese immigrant family in the US and their complex relationship with the English language. It chronicles their migration history escaping the atrocities of war, the fragile family dynamics that emerged from that experience, and the love for words that connects the writer with himself, while ironically separating him from his mother. (Juan Felipe Sánchez Guzmán)

Recommendation 2: Toxische Pommes. (2024). Ein schönes Ausländerkind. Zsolnay.

Ein Schönes Ausländerkind is a fictionalised autobiography of the author’s childhood, after her family fled to Austria due to the Yugoslav Wars. The book made me laugh a lot, as the author (who writes under the pseudonym she uses to post satirical sketches online) pokes fun at the many absurdities of migrant life. But I also found it very powerful in its depiction of a messy, painful, but loving father-daughter relationship where the adult struggles to learn the local language, leading to child language brokering. (Jenia Yudytska)

June: A book about narrative research in a migration context

Recommendation: Stevenson, Patrick (2017). Language and migration in a multilingual metropolis: Berlin Lives. Palgrave Macmillan.

This book offers a highly engaging and innovative exploration of Berlin’s multilingualism through personal migration narratives. Working ethnographically, the researcher situates his analysis in a single shared apartment in Neukölln, using the linguistic repertoires and biographical trajectories of its five residents—a Russian-speaking woman, two Polish-speakers, a Kurdish-speaking man, and a Vietnamese-speaking woman—to demonstrate how migration, identity and sociolinguistic practice intersect in everyday life.
The book portrays the apartment as a microcosm of the city’s wider linguistic landscape, tracing how individuals navigate language ideologies, negotiate belonging, and construct social relations within a complex metropolitan environment. (Martin Serif Derince)

July: A book exploring linguistic diversity from multiple perspectives

Recommendation: Aguilar Gil, Y. E. (2020). Ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística. Almadia.

Language loss, resistance, indigenous literature(s), prejudice, identity, autonyms and exonyms – these are just some of the topics discussed in this collection of essays by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, an Ayuujk linguist, writer, translator, and activist. An interactive work edited by the author’s colleagues, this book presents texts written for an online magazine over several years alongside links to related social media posts, as well as a speech given by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil at the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and a closing epilogue by herself. A great read – refreshing and profoundly reflexive – for anyone interested in linguistic diversity in Mexico and beyond. (Nicole Marinaro)

August: A book about translation and interpreting

Recommendation: Shuttleworth, M., & Daghigh, A. J. (Eds.). (2024). Translation and Neoliberalism. Springer.

This book examines how neoliberalism shapes translation and interpreting across diverse regions, focusing on four themes: market-driven translation and interpreting curricula, policy impacts on language services, technology’s role in translation and interpreting markets, and intersections of translation and neoliberalism at a discourse level. It offers critical insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers into the socio-economic forces transforming translation studies, industries and curricula. (Jinhyun Cho)

September: A book about digital migration studies

Recommendation: Leurs, Koen, & Ponzanesi, Sandra (Eds.). (2025). Doing Digital Migration Studies: Theories and practices of the everyday. Routledge.

This open-access edited volume serves as an introduction to ‘digital migration studies’, an umbrella term for research on migration in relation to digital technologies. The articles examine topics ranging from migrant agency on TikTok to the use of automatic dialect recognition during the asylum procedure.
Although most contributions don’t explicitly focus on language, the breadth of topics and methodologies covered still sparked ideas for new research directions for me as a linguist. (Jenia Yudytska)

October: A book about an under-recognized diaspora

Recommendation: Bald, V. (2013). Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America. Harvard University Press.

Film and other information: http://bengaliharlem.com

Historical Harlem, New York does not conjure up images of South Asians going about their daily lives, but Bengali Harlem tells us the story of immigrants who arrived from the 1800s onwards from the Indian subcontinent.
This book focuses on migrants who were ethnolinguistically Bengalis (from what was known as Bengal) and came as merchants, seamen, or laborers to be absorbed into working class America. In the face of racism and discrimination, they built homes and lives, leaving behind generations of Americans with Bengali cultural and linguistic heritage. (Tazin Abdullah)

November: A book of migrant poetry

Recommendation: Saleh, S. M., Syed, Z., & Younus, M. (Eds.). (2025). Ritual: A Collection of Muslim Australian Poetry. Sweatshop Literacy Movement.

Billed as “evocative, unsettling, and unafraid,” this rich collection of Muslim Australian poetry offers a rich treasure trove of poems to come back to and savour again and again. The poems invite the reader to not only reflect on the diversity of Muslim identities but what it means to live on Indigenous land as a designated migrant within a White settler colony. (Ingrid Piller)

December: Cozy fiction for when you need a break from your research

Recommendation: Arden, K. (2019). The Winternight Trilogy. Del Rey.

I’m now 1.5 years into my PhD and I find that, now more than ever, I need good fiction to read after a long day of academic reading/writing. The Winternight Trilogy is set in the harsh winters of a folkloric version of medieval Russia and follows Vasya, a young woman whose difficult peasant life collides with those of chyerti, the demons and devils of Slavic folklore.
The settings and creatures described in this trilogy are nothing short of magical, and reading the prose makes me feel like I am tucked away snug in a winter cabin with a roaring fire and hot chocolate.
A lesson that I am learning along my PhD journey is that it is imperative to nourish myself while I work so hard, and reading these books is part of that nourishment for me. Knowing that I have the winter snows and rich folklore of these books to look forward to at the end of the day helps me to persevere through the daily ups and downs of PhD life. (Brynn Quick)

Literacy in Multilingual Contexts

Language on the Move — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 07:08:38 +0000

The international research network “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” builds on the “Next Generation Literacies” network

The World Education Research Association (WERA) recently announced the launch of seven new International Research Networks (IRNs) and we are pleased to share that “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” is one of them.

What is a WERA IRN?

The WERA IRN initiative brings together global teams of researchers through virtual communication and other channels to collaborate in specific areas of international importance. “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” joins a growing list of IRNs , contributing to the vision of WERA. The purpose of IRNs is to synthesize knowledge, examine the state of research, and stimulate collaborations or otherwise identify promising directions in research areas of worldwide significance. IRNs are expected to produce substantive reports that integrate the state of the knowledge worldwide and set forth promising research directions.

What does the IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” do?

The IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” aims to initiate and extend international collaborative research on literacy in the context of language diversity and migration. The joint focus is on literacy development and practice in multiple languages. Drawing on varied and complementary expertise from Europe, Australasia, Africa and North America, the objectives are:

to enhance knowledge on literacy and student diversity
to trace tendencies that go beyond one national, regional or local context
to examine literacy development across the life-course
to critically discuss the implications of research findings for policy and practice

Literacy is a foundation for participation in complex societies. The proposed research therefore also contributes to pathways to equity. The network’s activities will reach fundamental theoretical insights, which may be transferred to concepts of teaching/learning in educational institutions. This intervention research will attempt to generalise characteristics of successful multilingual literacy development to be adapted to specific contexts. The proposed IRN comprises senior, experienced and early career scholars (incl. PhD students), aimed towards international and intergenerational knowledge generation.

Literacy as a resource

At the heart of our network is the idea that multilingual literacy is a resource to be celebrated. Literacies across languages and scripts empower learners to create knowledge, to navigate education systems, and to participate fully in social and cultural life.

Members of the network bring expertise from early childhood to higher education, from family and community contexts to digital and AI-mediated literacies. Our shared vision is to develop research that responds to the multilingual realities of migration, mobility, and global diversity.

Building on the “Next Generation Literacies” network

The “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” network has grown out of the Next Generation Literacies initiative, an international network of researchers working at the intersection of social participation and linguistic diversity.

Based on the trilateral partnership of Fudan University (China), Hamburg University (Germany) and Macquarie University (Australia), Next Generation Literacies brought together an interdisciplinary group of established and emerging researchers to build a truly global network.

After funding for the Next Generation Literacies network ended in 2024, the IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” keeps that spirit of collaboration alive, while also widening the circle: we are now connected with colleagues from the Network on Language and Education (LeD) in the European Educational Research Association (EERA) and with other WERA initiatives. Under this new umbrella, we will scale up our efforts and make a stronger impact together.

Network Conveners

The network is convened by

Irina Usanova (University of Hamburg; Lead Convenor)
Francis M. Hult (UMBC)
Ingrid Piller (University of Hamburg & Macquarie University)
Yongyan Zheng (Fudan University)
Harkaitz Zubiri-Esnaola (University of the Basque Country)

Together with network members, we bring expertise spanning literacy research across continents and research traditions.

Kick-off meeting

On September 24, 2025, we came together on Zoom across many different time zones and continents to virtually celebrate the official launch of the Literacy in Multilingual Contexts IRN.

The kick-off meeting felt like both a reunion and a new beginning: familiar faces from the Next Generation Literacies network reconnecting, and new colleagues from around the world joining the conversation. Together, we are building a vibrant global community of researchers committed to understanding how literacy develops and thrives in multilingual settings. For all of us, it was a reminder of how much we can achieve when we put our multilingual realities at the center of literacy research.

What’s next?

Over the next three years (2025–2028), we will:

review the state of research on multilingual literacies
analyze existing datasets across different contexts
share our work in joint events and publications
build a sustainable international community dedicated to literacy in diversity

To make this vision concrete, members are invited to join thematic working groups. Topics include multilingual literacy in early childhood, in higher education, in Indigenous contexts, CLIL, multilingual writing and AI, and multilingual policy. Sounds interesting?

An open invitation

The energy of our first meeting showed just how much can be achieved when we bring our different perspectives together. The IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” is open to any researcher working in these areas. If you are interested in joining, please send your inquiry to Dr Irina Usanova.

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2025

Ingrid Piller — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 14:21:19 +0000

Book reading is an important part of individual and social wellbeing (Image copyright: Sadami Konchi)

Each year, I survey my Literacies students about their reading and writing activities. Over the years, the time these young people spend on literacy activities has been increasing steadily. In 2024, they spent an average of 8 hours per day reading. At the same time, the number of books they read has been going down. Despite spending close to 3,000 hours per year reading, the number of books they had read for pleasure in the past 12 months averaged a paltry 2.9.

Our reading time is eaten up by social media and other digital shortforms while our book reading is suffering.

This is troubling because the infinite scroll is a drain on our ability to focus. Conversely, the deep reading that comes with the long form is beneficial for our ability to concentrate, to engage critically, and to develop empathy.

As the culture of book reading and its benefits fades before our eyes, encouraging book reading is more important than ever before. And that’s where the annual Language on the Move Reading Challenge comes in. The annual Language on the Move Reading Challenge is designed to encourage broad reading at the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life.

The 2025 Language on the Move Reading Challenge is our eighth challenge in a row:

Join us and challenge yourself – and your students, colleagues, and friends – to read one recommended book each month throughout the year!

For more reading suggestions, make sure to also follow the Language on the Move Podcast on your preferred podcast platform. In partnership with the New Books Network, we have brought you regular conversations about linguistic diversity and social participation for one year now, and we already have exciting new chats lined up for the New Year.

Happy Reading!

January: The Politics of Academic Reading

The crisis of book reading is connected to the textocalypse – textual overproduction that humans no longer have the time to read. In 2024, the editors of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language produced a special issue devoted to “The Politics of Academic Reading.” It is fitting that the 2025 Language on the Move Reading Challenge should start with this fantastic collection.

For full disclosure, I am one of the contributors, and Language on the Move readers might be particularly interested in this piece about our platform:

Piller, I. (2024). Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building [Language on the Move]. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 289-290, 123-127. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/ijsl-2024-0132

Abstract: Rapid developments in digital technologies have fundamentally changed writing practices leading to an explosion in the number of textual products. The result is a “textocalypse” – a deep crisis in knowledge production and dissemination. Instead of pushing back, academics fuel these degenerations because their careers have become subject to the capitalist imperative to produce and consume – measured in the form of research outputs and citation metrics. Against this background, this commentary argues for a reframing of academic publishing as community building and introduces Language on the Move, an alternative sociolinguistics portal that is both a publication platform and a research community. Motivated by a feminist ethics of care, we decenter the textual product and recenter the lived experience of researchers, particularly those writing from the margins.

February: Global Communication Platform WhatsApp

Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends:
Johns, A., Matamoros-Fernández, A., & Baulch, E. (2024). WhatsApp: From a one-to-one messaging app to a global communication platform. Polity Press.

“WhatsApp provides a detailed account of WhatsApp’s growth and widespread uptake worldwide, revealing a new era in Meta’s industrial development. The authors trace WhatsApp from its inception as a chatting app to its metamorphosis into a global communication platform on which a substantial part of the Global South depends for everyday living. The volume maps the platform’s history to offer a nuanced account of its current economic (as a multi-sided market), technical (through platformization and social media features) and social dimensions (with its everyday uses and its role in public communications). Importantly, from an applied sociolinguistics perspective, the book argues that WhatsApp facilitates new types of digital literacies as it has become entrenched in the digital cultures of the world while also shedding light on the platform’s significance in civic participation and democracy. The authors brilliantly show how WhatsApp has accrued significant ‘political, economic, and cultural power’ (p. 12).”

March: How to Free a Jinn

Laura Smith-Khan recommends:
Shah Idil, Raidah. (2024). How to Free a Jinn. Allen & Unwin

“How to Free a Jinn is supernatural fantasy fiction with some refreshing twists: it follows 12-year-old Insyirah’s return to Malaysia from Australia, navigating turbulent family relationships, school and life in a new country that is supposed to feel like home. Not only that, but Insyirah soon discovers she can see and communicate with jinns, usually invisible spirits. This book offers readers a new voice and perspective, seamlessly integrating Islamic spiritual tradition and Malay and Arabic language in ways that don’t feel overexplained. As one reviewer says, this is the ‘kind of book I wish I had growing up.’”

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

Bonus info: Raidah Shah Idil is a sister of Aisyah Shah Idil, whose work has also featured on Language on the Move.

April: Life in a New Language

“A highly readable and rich account of migrant stories” (Catherine Travis)

If you have not yet done so, you must read Life in a New Language in 2025. The book, which has been co-authored by six of our team members, examines the language learning and settlement trajectories of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries.

Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Williams Tetteh, V. (2024). Life in a New Language. Oxford University Press.

You can also find a companion podcast series – with one episode with each author – on the Language on the Move podcast.

May: Judging Refugees

Laura Smith-Khan recommends:
Vogl, Anthea. (2024). Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination. Cambridge University Press.

“Judging Refugees examines the role of narrative performance in the procedures for assessing asylum claims in Canada and Australia. Drawing on a close and interdisciplinary analysis of hearings and decisions from the two countries, it offers extensive and compelling evidence of the impossible demands placed on people seeking asylum. The book is featured in a recent Language on the Move podcast episode.”

June: Wordslut

Brynn Quick recommends:
Montell, Amanda. (2019). Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. Harper.

“In this romp of a read, Montell guides the reader through the linguistic history of English pejoratives used to describe women. The central thesis is that, in English, contemporary negative terms for women often began neutrally – ‘hussy’ was just a term for ‘housewife’, ‘slut’ came from a term meaning ‘untidy’, and ‘madam’ was simply a term of address (not the grande dame of a brothel). But through hundreds of years’ worth of semantic change through pejoration and amelioration (new terms that I learned in reading this book!), words have been used to lift the social status of men and denigrate that of women under Western systems of patriarchy. But it’s not all bad news! Montell also discusses the concept of gender according to both language (e.g. masculine and feminine adjectives in Italic languages) and culture (e.g. Buginese people of Indonesia recognise 5 genders, the Native American Zuni tribe recognises 3, etc.), and she reflects on a hope for more equal linguistic and cultural treatment of all genders.”

July: Inspector Singh

If you need vacation reading for the Northern summer, check out Detective Singh of the Singapore Police. The author, Shahimi Flint, has created an unusual detective character – an elderly overweight Singaporean Sikh – who will take you to crime scenes in Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the UK. Each episode combines a thrilling murder investigation with a deep dive into local culture, language, and social issues.

A lawyer herself, Flint brings a keen social awareness to her novels, and I learned more about the Khmer Rouge trials from A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree than from any other source.

Flint, S. (2009). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder. Hachette.
Flint, S. (2009). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul. Hachette.
Flint, S. (2010). Inspector Singh Investigates: The Singapore School of Villainy. Hachette.
Flint, S. (2011). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree. Hachette.
Flint, S. (2012). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Curious Indian Cadaver. Hachette.
Flint, S. (2013). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Calamitous Chinese Killing. Hachette.
Flint, S. (2016). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Frightfully English Execution. Hachette.

August: Speech and the City

Matras, Y. (2024). Speech and the City: Multilingualism, Decoloniality and the Civic University. Cambridge University Press.

Speech and the City tells the story of ‘Multilingual Manchester’ and how an academic project succeeded in shifting the monolingual habitus. The book also offers an intriguing glimpse into the author’s distinguished career as a linguist, scholar, and activist.

Abstract: The Brexit debate has been accompanied by a rise in hostile attitudes to multilingualism. However, cities can provide an important counter-weight to political polarisation by forging civic identities that embrace diversity. In this timely book, Yaron Matras describes the emergence of a city language narrative that embraces and celebrates multilingualism and helps forge a civic identity. He critiques linguaphobic discourses at a national level that regard multilingualism as deficient citizenship. Drawing on his research in Manchester, he examines the ‘multilingual utopia’, looking at multilingual spaces across sectors in the city that support access, heritage, skills and celebration. The book explores the tensions between decolonial approaches that inspire activism for social justice and equality, and the neoliberal enterprise that appropriates diversity for reputational and profitability purposes, prompting critical reflection on calls for civic university engagement. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about ways to protect cultural pluralism in our society.

September: Multilingual Crisis Communication

Li, J., & Zhang, J. (Eds.). (2024). Multilingual crisis communication: Insights from China. Taylor & Francis.

This book is the latest outcome of out team’s focus on the communication challenges raised by the Covid-19 pandemic. Li Jia and Jenny Zhang have edited a diverse collection featuring the research of emerging researchers from China.

Abstract: Multilingual Crisis Communication is the first book to explore the lived experiences of linguistic minorities in crisis-affected settings in the Global South, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. China has been selected as a case of inquiry for multilingual crisis communication because of its high level of linguistic diversity. Taking up critical sociopolitical approaches, this book conceptualizes multilingual crisis communication from three dimensions: identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.
Comprising eight main chapters, along with an introduction and an epilogue, this edited book is divided into three parts in terms of the demographic and social conditions of linguistic minorities, as indigenous, migrant, and those with communicative disabilities. This book brings together a range of critical perspectives of sociolinguistic scholars, language teachers, and public health workers. Each team of authors includes at least one member of the research community with many years of field work experience, and some of them belong to ethnic minorities. These studies can generate new insights for enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of multilingual crisis communication.
This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of multilingualism, intercultural communication, translation and interpreting studies, and public health policy.

October: Critical Sociolinguistics

Del Percio, A., & Flubacher, M.-C. (Eds.). (2024). Critical sociolinguistics: dialogues, dissonance, developments. Bloomsbury.

The editors of this alternative festschrift dedicated to Monica Heller have assembled a team of 60 contributors to create an intriguing kaleidoscope of experiments in academic writing and knowledge creation.

Abstract: Providing a series of crucial debates on language, power, difference and social inequality, this volume traces developments and dissonances in critical sociolinguistics. Eminent and emerging academic figures from around the world collaboratively engage with the work of Monica Heller, offering insights into the politics and power formations that surround knowledge of language and society.
Challenging disciplinary power dynamics in critical sociolinguistics, this book is an experiment testing new ways of producing knowledge on language and society. Critically discussing central sociolinguistic concepts from critique to political economy, labor to media, education to capitalism, each chapter features a number of scholars offering their distinct social and political perspectives on the place played by language in the social fabric. Through its theoretical, epistemological, and methodological breadth, the volume foregrounds political alliances in how language is known and explored by scholars writing from specific geopolitical spaces that come with diverse political struggles and dynamics of power. Allowing for a diversity of genres, debates, controversies, fragments and programmatic manifestos, the volume prefigures a new mode of knowledge production that multiplies perspectives and starts practicing the more inclusive, just and equal worlds that critical sociolinguists envision.

November: Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples

Pahom, O. (2024). Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples: gender roles and language choices. Bloomsbury.

This meticulous study of Spanish-English bilingual couples’ conversational storytelling shows how the middle ground in intercultural communication is found when people talk and listen to each other in everyday interactions.

Abstract: For more than three decades, the percentage of people who married someone of a different race, ethnicity, culture, or linguistic background has been on the rise in the United States, but the communication practices of such couples have remained understudied. Combining bilingualism, gender studies, and conversation analysis, this book explores and describes the storytelling practices and language choices of several married heterosexual Spanish-English bilingual couples, all residing in Texas but each from different geographic and cultural backgrounds.
Based on more than 900 minutes of conversations and interviews, the book offers a data-driven analysis of the ways in which language choices and gender performance shape the stories, conversations, and identities of bilingual couples, which in turn shape the social order of bilingual communities. Using a combination of methodologies to investigate how couples launch, tell, and respond to each other’s stories, the book identifies seven main factors that the couples see as primary determinants of their choice of English and Spanish during couple communication. The use of conversation analysis highlights the couples’ own practices and perceptions of their language choices, demonstrating how the private language decisions of bilingual couples enable them to negotiate a place in the larger culture, shape the future of bilingualism, and establish a couple identity through shared linguistic and cultural habits.

December: Language Discordant Social Work

Buzungu, H. F. (2023). Language Discordant Social Work in a Multilingual World: The Space Between. Routledge.

This fascinating ethnography explores how social workers in Norway communicate with clients who speak little or no Norwegian. It is part of a growing number of studies of street-level bureaucrats in linguistically diverse societies – for another example, listen to our podcast interview with Clara Holzinger about Austrian employment officers.

Abstract: Based on ethnographic observations of encounters between social workers and people with whom they do not have a shared language, this book analyzes the impact of language discordance on the quality of professional service provision.
Exploring how street-level bureaucrats navigate the landscape of these discretionary assessments of language discordance, language proficiency, and the need for interpreting, the book focuses on four main themes:

the complexity of social work talk
the issue of participation in language discordant meetings
communicative interaction
the issue of how clarification is requested when needed, and whether professionals and service users are able to reach clarity when something is unclear

Based on the findings presented on these different aspects of language discordant talk, the consequences of language discordance for social work are presented and discussed, focusing primarily on issues at the intersection of language, communication, power, dominance and subordination, representation, linguicism, and ultimately, human rights and human dignity.
It will be of interest to all social work students, academics and professionals as well as those working in public services and allied health more broadly.

Are language technologies counterproductive to learning?

Ingrid Piller — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 07:14:25 +0000

“Giant Head” installation at the Gentle Monster store at Sydney Airport

One of the goals of graduate education is to empower students to reach their academic and professional goals by developing their communication skills. For example, one of the learning outcomes of a class I teach in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University is to enable students to “communicate advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.”

To achieve that learning outcome, students undertake a series of writing tasks throughout the semester on a public forum, namely right here on Language on the Move.

Although moderating around a thousand comments per semester is a huge workload, I’ve always enjoyed this task. The series of responses to writing prompts (aka comments on blog posts) allows me to learn more about my students’ backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. It is also rewarding to see that student comments become more sophisticated and engaged over the course of the semester and that their confidence in their academic writing increases.

Has ChatGPT ruined writing practice?

While I used to enjoy supporting students to develop their communication skills in this way, the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the rapid adoption of other generative AI platforms since then has changed things.

A not insignificant number of students now submit machine-generated writing tasks, and I’m saddled with the additional task of catching out these cheaters.

Submitting machine-generated text obviously has no learning benefits. Therefore, my task descriptions and syllabi now contain an explicit prohibition against the use generative AI:

Use of generative AI is prohibited
Your response must be your own work, and you are not allowed to post machine-generated text. Use of machine-generated text in this or any other unit tasks defies the point of learning. It is also dishonest and a waste of your time and my time. […] If I suspect you of having used generative AI to complete your writing task, your mark will automatically be 0.

In 2023, this prohibition took care of the problem, but in 2024 it no longer works. This is because machine writing has become virtually indistinguishable from bad human writing.

Machine writing and bad human writing now look the same

Most commentators note that machine-generated text is getting better. This may be true. What has received less attention is the fact that human writing is getting worse as people read less widely. Instead, more and more people seem to model their writing on the bland models of machines.

The feedback loop between reading and writing is breaking down.

The Internet is drowning in an ocean of poor writing, whether created by humans or machines – a phenomenon Matthew Kirschenbaumer has described as the looming “textocalypse:” “a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting.”

Instead of developing their communication skills through audience-focussed practice, my students’ regular writing practice may now be contributing to this tsunami. If students use generative AI, it certainly no longer meets its stated aim – to practice communicating advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.

Where is the line between outsourcing learning to tech and using tech to support learning?

To my mind, the line was clear-cut: to use generative AI is to outsource learning to a machine and therefore pointless. I was not concerned about the use of other language technologies, such as spell checkers, auto-complete, grammar checkers, or auto-translate.

But then I received this student inquiry, which I am reproducing here with the student’s permission:

I am writing to inquire if using the grammar check program for writing tasks is also prohibited.
I’ve been aware that AI generation is prohibited, and I did not use AI for my writing task. I [used all the assigned inputs], and I tried to organize ideas in my first language, then translated them by myself (without using any machine translator).
However, I always use a grammar check program, and sometimes, it suggests better words or expressions that I can adopt by clicking, as I am a paid user of it. I use it because I am unsure if my grammar is okay and understandable. I was wondering if this is also prohibited?

The easy answer to the query is that (automated) translation and grammar checking are allowed because they are not covered by the prohibition.

The more complicated question is whether these practices should be prohibited and, even if not strictly prohibited, whether they are advisable?

Dear reader, I need your input!

Translation as a bridge to English writing?

Let’s start with translation as a form of writing practice. The inputs for the task that triggered this question (Chapter 3 of Life in a New Language, and Language on the Move podcast series about Life in a New Language) were all in English.

After having perused all these inputs in English to then draft the response – a short reflection on the job search experience of one of the participants – in another language is a lot of extra work. You have to process input in English, write in another language, and translate that output.

This extra work may become manageable if it is done by a machine. A generative AI tool could produce a summary of the input in no time. An auto-translate tool could translate the summaries into the other language, again in no time. The student then drafts their response in the other language.

It’s technically the student’s work. Or is it? And, more importantly, is this process developing their English writing and communication?

Grammar checkers, suggested phrasing, and auto-complete

Like the student who posed the question, most of my students are international students, most of whom are still developing their English language skills, at the same time that they are required to learn and perform through the medium of that language.

To avail themselves of all kinds of learning tools is important. I myself use the in-built spell-check, grammar-check, and auto-complete features of MS Word. However, I can evaluate the advice provided by these tools and readily reject it where it’s wrong or inconsistent with my intentions.

Judgement needed: Until recently, the MS Word auto-correct tool incorrectly suggested that the spelling of “in-principle” was “in-principal”

I worry that, for a learner using these tools, these nuances get lost. If the machine is perceived to be always right, language changes from something malleable to form and express our ideas into a right-or-wrong proposition.

Similarly, learning synonyms is important to improve one’s writing. To this day, I regularly look up synonyms when I write with the intent to find the best, the most concise, their clearest expression. However, looking up synonyms for an expression and evaluating the various options is different from receiving automated suggestions and accepting them. One seems like an active, critical form of learning and the other like a passive form of learning. The writer’s sense of ownership and autonomy is different in the two instances.

How best to use language technologies to develop academic literacies and communicative competence?

In sum, most use of language technologies for the kinds of learning tasks I have described here strikes me as counterproductive. Yet, I can also see its uses. Where is the line between using tech to support one’s learning and using tech to avoid doing the hard work of practice, the only way that leads to fluency?

How do you use tech in your university assignments and where do you draw the line? How would you deal with these dilemmas as a teacher?

Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 21:30:50 +0000

Just before the holidays, Professor Aneta Pavlenko and I chatted about Aneta’s new book Multilingualism and History. We talked about amnesia and ignorance pacts in contemporary sociolinguistics, ghost signs that point to dark pasts and presents, and the politics of romanticized multilingualism.

Enjoy this latest episode of Chats in Linguistic Diversity! The conversation is a sequel to our previous conversation about whether we can ever unthink linguistic nationalism.

Edited transcript below

Can you tell us about the story behind Multilingualism and history?

I have a very short answer and a somewhat longer answer to your question.

The short answer: this is the book I always wanted to read. And I was hoping that somebody else would write it or edit it. That never happened.

The longer answer is that it’s a very natural outcome of the way I see my scholarly trajectory.

If you remember when we were junior scholars, our main preoccupations were, “I want to be heard, I desperately want to be published.” And then you go along and then you start thinking, “What are the conversations going on? How can I contribute to these conversations?”

And then you go along and you start thinking, “What conversations are not happening? How can we start them?”

And you and I have both been very successful starting some conversations about gender, identity, emotions. I’ve also been very lucky to start conversations about forensic linguistics.

And so it seemed like the path is very clear. You put together an invited colloquium, maybe a workshop, you put together a special issue. An edited volume. And you are building a network of people, and you get people interested, and you get people excited, and I’ve always believed that history was another missing piece.

But nothing was ever easy with history and multilingualism. Because when people heard about gender and emotions and identity, it made sense to them. It was relevant. It was relevant to the present moment. But history seemed utterly irrelevant to multilingualism in the digital age.

And so the long answer is the purpose of this edited volume. It’s to make historic research relevant to sociolinguists in a very pointed way because this research undermines the foundational myth of our field which is that we live in a world that’s more multilingual than ever before. When in reality we live in a world that’s less multilingual than ever before.

And the historians know this.

How is Multilingualism and History structured? What topics are being addressed and who are the contributors?

The choices I made was not to be comprehensive, but to highlight what is novel and interesting. So, for example, the pivotal chapter by Ben Fortna shows the transformation of a very multilingual Ottoman Empire into a very monolingual nation state of Turkey. It follows the transformation in a way that for me is emblematic of the main point made in the book.

Susan Gal talks about language ideologies that shape the ways linguists themselves work, and see multilingualism, which is also very relevant.

Or I invited Roland Willemyns to contribute a chapter on why Dutch failed as a lingua franca. Because we love talking about Latin and English and other Lingua Francas, but we never think about languages that were poised to become a lingua franca but never became one. Why is that?

So for me, each chapter highlights a novel dimension in relationships with language in ways that we often don’t talk about.

Ads in Polish and Yiddish for Halpern’s fabric store and warehouse, Skład towarów bławatnych, on Nalyvaiko street, 13 (at the turn of the 20th century the street – then known as Rzeżnicka – was inhabited primarily by Jews). Lviv, September 2019. Photo by A. Pavlenko

The progression in the book is chronological from ancient Egypt to modern day.

The aim of this volume was never to be comprehensive and to only show that multilingualism was here. Multilingualism was there. Because if that’s what I wanted, I would have edited a very different book. The challenge for me is not in the many contexts where we can find multilingualism. But in the story that we have been telling ourselves. And the story we’ve been telling ourselves is a very European, Western story. And we got it wrong.

How did we get the history of multilingualism wrong?

There was a lot of forgetting that happened in the early part and the middle of the twentieth century. And a lot of lack of intergenerational transmission.

It also has to do with the incredible dominance of English as an academic language that emerged in the second part of the twentieth century. That led to the loss of multilingual knowledge that no longer made it into the sociolinguistic mainstream. And that unfortunately also extends to historians.

In my introduction to the volume, I cite one very bitter German historian who says that American historians write the history of the colonial United States without looking at documents in European languages like Dutch and French and Swedish. Not to mention Native American languages.

It has become acceptable to be a scholar of multilingualism while not knowing more than one language. It has become acceptable to be historian while being monolingual. And that is part of forgetting.

To an English speaker, multilingualism is an unusual phenomenon worthy of study. For me, it’s a rediscovery of the wheel. It’s the process of historical amnesia.

Let’s talk a bit more about amnesia and ignorance pacts.

The term “ignorance pacts” is from Joshua Fishman, who talked about the reciprocal ignorance pacts between sociolinguists and sociologists, which made sociolinguistics a very provincial, parochial discipline.

Café Sztuka, with restored Polish and Yiddish ads for groceries and haberdashery. Kotlyarska street 8. Lviv, September 2019. Photo by A. Pavlenko.

And of course, Fishman is still that generation of scholars who are trained in a much broader tradition than we’re currently trained. And so when you spend a lot of time in the field, as you and I did, what becomes apparent?

When we started out in the 1990s, there were 3 journals focusing on bilingualism. It was hard to get a publication in, but everybody was reading everybody else, everybody knew everybody else. Since then, our own field, just like other fields, has experienced a tremendous growth. And the growth came with many positives but also with many negatives such as the fragmentation of the field.

And this split into academic tribes with their own little conventions. Their own publications, their own conferences. Bilingualism people for some reason meet separately from the multilingualism people. And the sociolinguists of multilingualism, bilingualism, live in a very different world from the psycholinguists.

Where do data about past multilingualism come from and what methods do we use in the study of historical multilingualism?

By definition, the spoken word is fleeting and so everything that we have pretty much is written records and that, of course, has limits.

The challenges are also advantages because when you look at multilingualism in the past the degree to which we privilege the spoken word becomes very obvious.

In reality, the data is plentiful for many contexts. As of today, there’s still many little clay tablets and many papyruses sitting there unread, containing precious information: administrative records, bureaucratic records, receipts, letters. There is a ton of information to be gained about all aspects of history, economics, politics, and also multilingualism from such trivial things, such as bureaucratic receipts, court records, administrative correspondence.

Moreover, when we look at evidence such as, for example, travel accounts by pilgrims. They also pick up on oral language practices. The eyewitness accounts of these people bring very precious information about what we would call oral practices. And the same goes for court records.

Bilingualism was foundational to the development of literacy. And that is not something we talk about. We kind of imagine the trajectory being the other way around. But people go on and appropriate scripts from other languages and make them their own.

What do ghost signs tell us about past multilingualism?

Ghost signs are very commonly painted, sometimes faded ads. That have lost their functional significance. The business they’re advertising, for example, is no longer there. The store is no longer there. But the sign is still there. And people love them just for the aesthetics for an immediate connection to the past.

Nevsky Prospect 20, St Petersburg, with Russian signs, German signs for St Petersburger Zeitung, the German bookstore and library of Andreas Isler, and a French sign for the Grand Magasin de Paris (ca. 1900)

The capital of ghost signs is the Ukrainian city of Lviv, which before World War 2 was the Polish city of Lwów and before that was the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg.

And so the signs in Lviv are in German and Polish and Yiddish; three languages that are no longer spoken on its streets.

And when you start seeing those signs, some of them very nicely repainted and spruced up, you start asking yourself, well, what is the function of the signs? If they are not really about Ukrainian history, what are they doing on the streets of a modern Ukrainian city?

They tell a story of how multinational the city of Lviv has always been, and an example of the tolerant coexistence between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. And that is a kind of statement that doesn’t make sense on many different levels.

First of all, because the Ukrainian language is missing from the signs. It was not very much in use in signage before World War II in a Polish city.

Secondly, we all know of the historic antagonism between the three main populations, so the coexistence was by no means very tolerant.

The multilingualism was real, it was there, but it was hierarchical. If you were Polish, you may learn German, but you’re not going to learn Ukrainian or Yiddish, but if you were Jewish you would have to learn everybody else’s language, in addition to Yiddish and Hebrew.

Even more importantly, the signs that make this very smooth artificial transition from a Polish to a Ukrainian city obfuscate the amount of violence that took place in the city during and after World War 2, that transformed a historically Polish city into a Ukrainian city through the genocide of its Jewish population, and ethnic cleansing and deportation of its Polish population.

We don’t just innocently reimagine history. We reshape people’s perceptions of what happened in the past. And that is what the ghost signs are very successfully doing. They’re creating someone else’s history. In this case, the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was cosmopolitan, the history of multilingual Poland – to give a very respectable aura of cosmopolitanism to a modern Ukrainian city, that is by no means very tolerant. In my fieldwork I found not a single sign in the language of the largest linguistic minority of the city of Lviv, which is Russian.

How is the past entangled in the present and the future?

It breaks my heart to see war in my homeland of Ukraine. It broke my heart to see Russia invade Ukraine, cruelly, with no justification. Nobody can justify that.

But it also breaks my heart to see the Ukrainian government using the very same invasion to push forth language policies that have been unpopular before and making them popular. Taking down every monument in a Russian writer, reducing the uses of the Russian language further because it’s presumably the language of the enemy and not the language of the population.

And that is something that no sociolinguist comments on because presumably that is okay. We are okay with linguistic nationalism in certain forms. That to me is hypocritical.

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024

Ingrid Piller — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 04:54:34 +0000

Have you been keeping up with the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2023? If so, you will be looking forward to our 2024 Reading Challenge; and so here it is

The annual Language on the Move Reading Challenge is designed to encourage broad reading at the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life.

Challenge yourself to read one book in each category throughout the year!

January: A book that is critical of the AI hype

With the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, AI hype reached new heights in 2023, including in academia and linguistics. If you have not yet done so, it is high time to educate yourself about algorithms, large language models, and generative information technologies. A great way to start is the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us hosted weekly by tech journalist Paris Marx.

Each show comes complete with show notes, which often include excellent reading recommendations. Books I have picked up based on recommendations on Tech Won’t Save Us include Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil, Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant, and Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil. I recommend all of them to you warmly.

February: A book that delves deeper into language and digitization

In a world where more people have access to a mobile phone than to adequate sanitation, it should not come as a surprise that digital technologies are fundamentally changing how we use language. This is particularly true of people on the move who rely on mobile technologies to communicate in their new environments, to learn languages, or to stay connected with dispersed family and friends.

Some excellent recent books that will help you explore the intersections of new technologies and linguistic diversity include Parenting for a Digital Future by Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross, Language, Migration and Multilingualism in the Age of Digital Humanities, an open access collection edited by Ignacio Andrés Soria , Sandra Issel-Dombert and Laura Morgenthaler García, and Mobile assisted language learning by Glen Stockwell. The latter was a runner-up for the 2023 BAAL Book Prize.

March: A book about language and magic

The prevalence of mediated content has meant that influencers have become the lodestars of people’s lives and deep fakes have collapsed the line between fact and fiction. This fundamentally changes what it means to know anything. Ontologically, belief in magic is making a comeback.

Therefore, going back to learn about language and magic becomes essential to understanding the future. Tazin Abdullah recommends Language and Magic by Toshihiko Izutsu:

This book was first published in 1956 and you might wonder why recommend this book in 2024? Written in English by a Japanese sociolinguist, it offers access to ideas about language use from outside of the European and American academic sphere. The very first highlight is the style of writing itself – strikingly personal and an insight into the writer’s philosophical orientation. Examining what language has symbolized historically in various cultures and traditions, this book offers intriguing observations on the magical functions of words and their impact on the way speakers think and behave.

April: A book about names and naming

Names and naming have always been a major part of language magic. Just think of Rumpelstiltskin, whose magic powers rest on his name not being known.

In a diverse society, names present their own challenges as different naming conventions come into contact and sometimes collide. How to use names appropriately and respectfully can become a major conundrum and that’s why a book about names and naming should go onto your reading list for 2024.

Agnes Bodis recommends Say my name by Joanna Ho and illustrated by Khoa Le:

This beautifully written and illustrated children’s book provides a journey into cultures and names, highlighting how our names express our identity through their link to people, stories, and language. The book features six children from Chinese, Tongan, Persian, Dine, Mexican and Ghanaian cultural backgrounds sharing their names and stories, accompanied by beautiful illustrations, which provide a stunning multimodal expression of cultural identity. I especially appreciate the way the book values the spatial and historical aspect of names: each name is built up by building blocks of language that were “constructed over oceans and across generations”. It also teaches readers to value the correct pronunciation of names. The publisher’s site provides a downloadable ‘teaching guide” for educators and parents to engage with the book on a deeper level.

May: A book about multilingualism in history

We’ve heard a lot about how language in the 21^st century is different from anything that has come before: it’s supposedly more multi, more metro, more trans. This narrative is starting to fray as more research about multilingual societies through the ages come out. One of the most important of these is the new collection Multilingualism and History edited by Aneta Pavlenko.

Readers of Language on the Move will have been waiting for this book for a while, as we first spoke to the editor, Aneta Pavlenko, about it in late 2021, when we asked “Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism?” There probably is no answer to that question and Multilingualism and History does not pretend to have one, but it offers a panorama of multilingual contexts from antiquity to the 20^th century. The book will forever put to rest the idea that linguistic diversity in the present is new.

For those who read German, Historische Mehrsprachigkeit [Multilingualism in History] edited by Rita Franceschini, Matthias Hüning und Péter Maitz, promises another rich collection of historical case-studies. This open access title is due to be released on December 31.

June: A book about translanguaging

One of the conceptual frameworks that has taken applied linguistics by storm in recent years is “translanguaging.” Earlier this year, we had a chance to speak to one of its key thinkers, Professor Ofelia García, here on Language on the Move.

For those who want a more in-depth read, Jie Fan recommends Pedagogical Translanguaging by Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter:

This 2021 title in the Cambridge University Press series “Elements in Language Teaching” is designed for educational practitioners. It deals with the concept of translanguaging and pedagogical translanguaging, and explores multilingual approaches to language assessment and how it can be valuable for the preservation of endangered languages. This book contributes significantly to the fields of multilingualism and sociolinguistics by challenging monolingual ideological stances and acknowledging linguistic diversity and inclusion. It is a useful guide for novice teacher educators and researchers who may not be conversant with the the latest sociolinguistic multilingualism research.

July: A novel about linguistic diversity

Since its inception, we have regularly included works of fiction in the Language on the Move Reading Challenge. This year is no different. Fiction allows us to explore linguistic diversity holistically through art, and can produce deeper insights than academic texts alone. Also, it’s the middle of the year and you might need the excitement of novel-reading to keep going.

Emily Pacheco, a Master of Research student at Macquarie University, recommends The House With All The Lights On: Three generations, one roof, a language of light by Jessica Kirkness:

This novel is a memoir from a Goda (Grandchild of Deaf adults) explaining the cultural and linguistic experience they had growing up with their grandparents. The book explains the navigation of Deaf and hearing cultures in Australia with grandparents who migrated and have a native language of BSL (British Sign Language). It is a great novel that shares the experience Deaf-hearing families have and showcases a perspective (Goda) that is not widely written about.

August: A book about linguistic diversity and social justice

Research related to social justice has exploded since the 2016 publication of my Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice book. Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, a PhD student at Fudan University and UNSW, still recommends the book:

Rooted in real-world instances, this book offers invaluable insights into how language shapes economic inequality, cultural dominance, and political participation. It’s an inspirational read, particularly for early career researchers, broadening their understanding of the intricate role of language in social dynamics. The book is more than an academic discourse; it’s a call to recognize the power of language, the resilience of individuals, and the richness of humanity. A truly enlightening read that sparks ongoing conversations about language’s pivotal role in social (in)justice.

2023 also saw the publication of the Arabic translation:

التنوع اللغوي والعدالة الاجتماعية, translated by Abdulrahman Alfahad and published by King Saud University Press.

A brilliant related 2023 title is Global Language Justice edited by Lydia Liu and Anupama Rao. In my blurb for the book I wrote:

By interspersing academic essays with multilingual poems, Liu, Rao, and Silverman have assembled a rich, stimulating kaleidoscope of global explorations of the complex entanglements of language, environment, and technology in the 21st century.

September: A book about discursive construction

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” as Wittgenstein told us. To understand how these limits are made in different contexts, we have added a title about discursive construction to this year’s reading challenge.

National history provides ample examples of discursive constructions that are relevant to how we see linguistic diversity, and Hanna Torsh recommends Making Australian History by Anna Clark:

Who decides what is a nation’s history? Who are the history-makers? I loved this immensely readable book by esteemed historian Anna Clark, who deftly shows us that history is made by everyone, and not only in the form of written histories but in clay, in stone, and in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. In today’s conflict-ridden world it is more important than ever to think about how our collective identities are created and whose voices contribute to that collective imagining. A beautiful journey through major themes in history-making.

October: A book about language and emotions

Books about emotions in intercultural communication have been a mainstay of our annual reading challenge, and Brynn Quick recommends Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita.

Do all humans experience emotions in the same way? Does happiness in France look the same as happiness in Ethiopia or Japan? And what do emotions have to do with language? Is it possible to feel emotionally adept in one culture or language but not another? These are some of the questions that Batja Mesquita investigates in this fascinating book. This book is a pleasant and easy read (or listen! I recommend the Audible version), but it is packed with information about the intersection between psychology, culture, and language. Give this a read and ask yourself – Are Americans inherently fake and the Dutch inherently rude?

November: A sociolinguistic ethnography

Engaging with sociolinguistic ethnographies of linguistic diversity is the bread and butter of our research. Challenge yourself to read one of a context that may not be all that familiar to you!

Hard to recommend one because there are so many excellent titles but my favorite in 2023 was probably Multilingual Baseball by Brendan O’Connor. The book engagingly connects bilingual interactions – the focus is on English and Spanish – with wider questions of globalized corporate sports, migration, and race.

December: A migrant memoir

Like novels, memoirs provide unique insights into linguistic diversity and this year we recommend Solito by Javier Zamora. The book tells the harrowing but also inspiring story of a 9-year-old boy, who makes the journey from El Salvador to the United States as an unaccompanied minor. Also a beautiful example of bilingual storytelling.

Happy Reading!

We, heirs of the multilingual Sumerians

Ingrid Piller — Sun, 18 Jul 2021 03:12:49 +0000

The Sumerian Empire under King Shulgi (2094 to 2046 BCE) (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Do you know in which language the Sumerians started the written chronicle of humanity?

It is a cliché to state that everyone who reads this sentence is an heir of the Sumerians, regardless of what your genetic background may be. The Sumerians were the first inventors of writing; and the Latin alphabet in which this text is written is a distant descendant of the cuneiform script they invented about 5,000 years ago in the ancient Middle East.*

Most people have heard that the Sumerians of Mesopotamia invented writing, along with agriculture, the domestication of plants and animals, metallurgy, urbanization, and social stratification. Their Neolithic revolution fundamentally reshaped the world, and ultimately ushered in the Anthropocene in which we find ourselves today (Crosby, 2004).

But have you ever stopped to think in which language they were writing? Unless you are an Assyriologist – an expert in the languages, cultures, and history of the ancient Middle East – you may not know the details, but you are likely to assume it was one particular language.

Well, you’d be wrong. The Sumerians were multilingual, and language contact is evident in the written record from Day 1.

The multilingual Sumerians

Sumerian is a language isolate that is not related to any other known language, living or dead (Cunningham, 2013). However, back then, as today, most languages of the Middle East were Semitic languages, like modern Arabic or Hebrew. The continuum of Semitic dialects the Sumerians were most in contact with is called Akkadian. And contact between Sumerian and Akkadian is apparent from the very beginning of the written record (Hasselbach-Andee, 2020).

The Manishtushu Obelisk (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

A key indicator of language contact lies in the fact that the language name “Sumerian” is not actually a Sumerian but an Akkadian word. The Sumerian word for their language was “Eme-gir,” which literally means “native language” (Cunningham, 2013).

The earliest written documents legible to us date from around 2,600 BCE. These documents all provide evidence of sustained multilingualism (Crisostomo, 2020). This evidence takes three forms, namely language mixing, parallel translations, and metalinguistic commentary.

Language mixing

First, there are texts that include loanwords from one language into the other or texts that are so heavily mixed that they cannot even be assigned to one language or another. An example comes from the Manishtushu Obelisk, which dates from between 2,277 and 2,250 BCE. The obelisk is basically a title deed to four estates. This is a short excerpt, with Sumerian words in roman font and Akkadian words in italic (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 410):

šu‐niĝin 10 ĝuruš be‐lu gana gu kug‐babbar gana ša‐at e‐ki‐im ù zi‐ma‐na‐ak (“Total: 10 workers, lord of the fields, recipients of the payment of the field of Ekim and Zimanak.”)

As can be seen the text makes use of both languages in about equal parts – translanguaging avant la lettre!

Today, this kind of language mixing is relatively rare in writing, particularly formal writing such as legal texts. The Sumerians clearly had no such qualms about keeping written languages neatly separate. Anyone who went to the trouble of chiseling a record like this into stone surely put up the best kind of language they could think of. So, mixing languages must have felt right and sufficiently “weighty” for such an important title deed.

Whatever the writer’s reasoning was, “Sumerian and Akkadian (Semitic) are, throughout much of our material, intertwined and interconnected” (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 416).

Multilingual texts

In addition to administrative texts, some of the earliest surviving texts are – surprise, surprise – bilingual word lists (Michalowski, 2020).

Sumerian was the powerful lingua franca of the time, but it may well be that, by the time writing really began to take off, most people had switched over to speaking Akkadian. New scribes may not necessarily have been proficient in Sumerian. Therefore, they had to receive formal training in that language as part of their scribal training (Michalowski, 2006). That is why bilingual word lists can be found among the earliest written documents: they served a didactic function and the institutionalization of language learning clearly went hand-in-hand with the institutionalization of writing.

“Ubil-Eshtar, brother of the king, Kalki, scribe, is your servant” (Image credit: British Museum)

Because writing was invented by the Sumerians, writing itself seems to have become associated with Sumerian. It seems likely that Sumerian died out as a spoken language long before it ceased to be used as a written language (Michalowski, 2006).

As a result, scribes not only needed to learn the art of writing, but they also needed to be formally trained in the Sumerian language.

An intriguing example in the kind of diglossia that ensued can be found in an oft-quoted record about an escaped slave. This text records the event in Sumerian (roman font) but reports direct speech in Akkadian (italic font): “Lugalazida, the slave of Lugalkigal, escaped from the Ensi. About his hiding place, the slave girl of Urnigin said: ‘He lives in Maškan-šapir. He should be brought here’” (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 410).

Metalinguistic commentary

Over a period of around a thousand years, writing developed from proto-cuneiform – a logographic aide memoire – to become a language-specific writing system, of the sort we are familiar with today. Over the same period, people who knew how to write established themselves as a small and powerful elite of scribes (Taylor, 2013). What made them powerful was not their writing skills per se but the fact that scribes controlled the Sumerian bureaucracy and administration. In short, they collected and distributed goods.

The status of scribes is evident from cylindrical seals – like modern trademarks and signatures. These served to confirm the authenticity and legitimacy of traded objects (Pittman, 2013). The famous seal of Kalki provides an example. The seal is understood to depict a foreign expedition, which included a hunter, the scribe’s royal patron with an ax, and the scribe with tablet and stylus.

As scribes established themselves as a powerful professional caste, training of scribes became formalized and included Sumerian language teaching, as explained above. In keeping with the importance that was accorded to learning Sumerian in scribal education, some of these comments allow us a glimpse into ancient language teaching methods. Then, as today, teachers seem to have taken it upon themselves to act as language police, as this student complaint shows:

“The one in charge of Sumerian said: ‘He spoke Akkadian!’ Then he caned me.” (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 408)

At the other end of the social spectrum, speaking multiple languages gave you bragging rights – also just like in our own time. Ancient kings are well known for their boasts inscribed in stone, and Shulgi, “King of Sumer and Akkad, King of the Four Corners of the Universe,” whose reign lasted from around 2,094 to 2,046 BCE, had this to say about his prodigious language capabilities:

By origin I am a son of Sumer; I am a warrior, a warrior of Sumer. Thirdly, I can conduct a conversation with a man from the black mountains. Fourthly, I can do service as a translator with an Amorite, a man of the mountains. I myself can correct his confused words in his own language. Fifthly, when a man of Subir yells, I can even distinguish the words in his language, although I am not a fellow-citizen of his. When I provide justice in the legal cases of Sumer, I give answers in all five languages. In my palace no one in conversation switches to another language as quickly as I do. (Shulgi, 2000, pp. ll.20-220)

“Shu-ilishu, Meluhha language interpreter” (Image credit: Louvre)

Note that Shulgi does not even spell out his first two languages – taking it as implicit that a Sumerian must be bilingual in Sumerian and Akkadian.

What about translation and interpreting?

It should have become obvious by now that the Sumerians operated a bilingual language regime. This is certainly true of the scribal caste – and keep in mind that everyone else would have been illiterate – and the kingly elite. Because these groups were bilingual, there was no need for interpretation between Sumerian and Akkadian.

However, linguistic mediation was necessary with the speakers of other languages, such as Shulgi’s third, fourth, and fifth language.

Like the Ancient Egyptians, the Sumerians institutionalized the role of linguistic mediator for trade and diplomacy. The status of interpreters seems to have been similar to that of scribes, as is evident from another famous seal, the seal of the interpreter Shu-ilishu. The idea of professional certification – modern as it may seem – is also first in evidence with the Sumerians, as this seal demonstrates. This seal also happens to be the first-ever known depiction of an interpreter in action – predating the interpreting relief in the Tomb of Horemheb by almost a thousand years.

The writing on the seal says that it belongs to “Shu-ilishu, Meluhha language interpreter” (Edzard, 1968). The image on the seal depicts a Sumerian dignitary being approached by two figures, presumably Meluhhans, and a small interpreter sitting between them. It is not entirely clear what the Meluhha language was and who the Meluhhans might have been, but they are assumed to have been located in the Indus valley, where the Sumerians had extensive trade interests (Thornton, 2013).

Sumerian multilingualism lives on

As is to be expected from the above, the Sumerians used two different words for “linguistic mediator” – a Sumerian word (“eme-bal”) and an Akkadian word (“targummanu”). Now remember that recently we encountered “dragoman” as a fancy English word for “interpreter”? Do you notice that there is a vague similarity between “targummanu” and “dragoman”?

(Source: Thornton, 2013, p. 601)

“Dragoman” first appeared in English around 1300. It is a relatively rare word that refers specifically to interpreters working in the Middle East and with the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian languages. “Dragoman” arrived in English from Old French “drugemen” or Medieval Latin “dragumanus” and, via late Greek “dragoumanos,” goes back to Old Arabic “targumān.” The modern Arabic word is tarjumān, and from Arabic it goes all the way back to the Sumerians.

“Targummanu” not only made it into English as “dragoman” but into many other modern languages, too. The words for “interpreter” in Turkish (“tercümen”), Georgian (“tarjimani”), Russian (“tolmač”), Polish (“tłumacz”), Hungarian (“tolmács”), and German (“Dolmetscher”) all go back to the same source (Jyrkänkallio, 1952).

It is fitting that the word for “interpreter” in so many modern languages should link us back to ancient Mesopotamia, and remind us that all language is an unbroken chain of transmission from the time when humans first learned to speak some 300,000 years ago.

In fact, “targummanu” did not start in Akkadian but was a borrowing from Luwian, a language spoken in another multilingual and multiethnic empire the Sumerians came into contact with, that of the Hittites, in modern-day Turkey (Melchert, 2020). The Luwian word is likely a borrowing from yet another language, which has been covered by the sands of time (Popko, 2008).

In the peoples of the Ancient Middle East we see our modern selves like through a very old, cracked, blunted, and dusty mirror. One feature we see reaching back into that long history is the commonality of our linguistic diversity.

*Postscript, 21/07/2021: I’ve been asked by a learned reader to clarify that the Latin alphabet does not directly descend from cuneiform. It does not, and you can find the full line of known transmission here and here. Early alphabetic writing systems are more closely linked to Egyptian hieroglyphs than to cuneiform. Whether they were invented independently or inspired by hieroglyphs, and whether hieroglyphs were invented independently or inspired be cuneiform is a matter of ongoing debate that may never be resolved. Given what we know about the ubiquity of linguistic and cultural contact – in the ancient world, as today – I am inclined to think that mutual inspiration is much more likely than independent invention. While there is clear evidence for the independent invention of writing at least three times (Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica), the emergence of several writing systems in the Ancient Middle East in relatively close proximity to each other (geographically and chronologically) would suggest, at the very least, transfer of the general idea.

Related resources:

References

Crisostomo, C. J. (2020). Sumerian and Akkadian Language Contact. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 401-420). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Crosby, A. W. (2004). Ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cunningham, G. (2013). The Sumerian language. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 95-110). London: Routledge.
Edzard, D. O. (1968). Die Inschriften der altakkadischen Rollsiegel. Archiv für Orientforschung, 22, 12-20.
Hasselbach-Andee, R. (2020). Multilingualism and Diglossia in the Ancient Near East. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 457-470). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jyrkänkallio, P. (1952). Zur Etymologie von russ. tolmač “Dolmetscher” und seiner türkischen Quelle. Studia Orientalia, 17(8), 3-11.
Melchert, C. (2020). Luwian. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 239-256). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Michalowski, P. (2006). The lives of the Sumerian language. In S. L. Sanders (Ed.), Margins of writing, origins of cultures (pp. 159-184). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Michalowski, P. (2020). Sumerian. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 83-105). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Popko, M. (2008). Völker und Sprachen Altanatoliens (C. Brosch, Trans.). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Pittman, H. (2013). Seals and sealings in the Sumerian world. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 343-366). London: Routledge.
Shulgi. (2000). A praise poem of Shulgi (Shulgi B). Retrieved from https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section2/tr24202.htm
Taylor, J. (2013). Administrators and scholars: The first scribes. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 314-328). London: Routledge.
Thornton, C. P. (2013). Mesopotamia, Meluhha, and those in between. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 624-643). London: Routledge.

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021

Language on the Move — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 22:32:31 +0000

2020 has been a strange year for reading: some of us have had a lot more time for reading, others far less. Regardless whether you’ve been able to indulge or have missed out, most Language on the Move readers will be on the look-out for some good reads for the New Year ahead.

The Language on the Move team is here to help!

After the Language on the Move Reading Challenges of 2018, 2019, and 2020, this is the fourth time we are running the Language on the Move Reading Challenge.

This year, we have created a monthly calendar of reading recommendations to keep you company throughout the year.

As was the case previously, the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021 is designed to encourage broad reading in the discipline and beyond, and to make linguistics reading fun. Anyone with an interest in the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life can join.

Throughout the year, make sure to watch out for in-depth reviews and interactive conversations related to each reading, both here on this site and over on Twitter @lg_on_the_move.

Enjoy the recommendations from our team and feel free to add your own recommendations in the comment section below! We are interested in any good reads illuminating the intersection of language and social life.

January

Hanna Torsh recommends The Sydney Language by Jakelin Troy (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2019, 2^nd ed.).

“Jakelin Troy documents the language of the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Sydney Region, which no longer has any speakers. Drawing on historical sources, the book provides a classic example of language contact and intercultural communication. Shadows of those encounters between Aboriginal people and colonizers continue to exist in the vocabulary of Australian English. “Waratah” is a good example. The flower to which it refers is the name of the NSW floral emblem and of a major rugby team.”

February

Pia Tenedero recommends Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain (Crown Publishing, 2012).

“I like having Reading Group via Zoom because I feel more confident to express myself in this digital platform than in our face-to-face meetings – possibly an indication of my introvert side. This is partly why Susan Cain’s exploration of communication styles and the stereotypes linked to them appeals to me. There is a dominant belief that the ideal self, successful students, model employees, or the best leaders enjoy the spotlight, act quickly, and talk fast, aloud, and a lot. Extroversion is also perceived as a “Western” communication style. As a result, those who do not fit the pattern are oftentimes viewed through a deficit lens, as I have found in my research with globalized accountants in the Philippines.”

March

Vera Williams Tetteh recommends Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa by Nwando Achebe (Ohio University Press, 2020).

“In 2009, I gifted Ingrid (Piller) a glossy catalogue celebrating 50 years of Ghanaian history. She was puzzled at this short time span and asked where all the history before that was. Not having an answer at the time, I have become an avid reader of African history since. Nwando Achebe provides a brilliant African-centred history of women in leadership roles on the continent during pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial times. The book opens with my most favourite African proverb – “Until the lions have their own historians, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” and, throughout, addresses the question: whose histories, whose stories, whose archives?”

April

Loy Lising recommends Challenging the Myth of Monolingual Corpora edited by Arja Nurmi, Tanja Rutten, and Paivi Pahta (Brill, 2017).

“This book addresses how the monolingual mindset pervades even the discipline of linguistics itself, specifically the sub-discipline of corpus linguistics. The monolingual mindset manifests in the compilation, annotation, and use of corpora, and multilingual practices are converted into monolingual corpora at each of these levels. As one of the contributors to the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English, I am concerned that any non-English data in that corpus are either marked as , if they are in a local language, or , if they are in Spanish. The book offers many helpful lenses through which to query these practices and to consider how non-English elements could be better incorporated so that they can serve as meaningful evidence of language contact and language change.”

May

Madiha Neelam recommends Language Policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches by Elana Shohamy (Routledge, 2006).

“This book inspires me to think more deeply about how language can serve as a means of control and categorisation. Shohamy explains how perceptions of language as a limited entity, governed by fixed boundaries, and strict rules of correctness make language amenable to manipulation for political, social, and economic purposes. Language tests, in particular, are powerful tools of control and social categorisation.”

June

Samar Al-Khalil recommends Neoliberalism and English Language Education Policies in the Arabian Gulf by Osman Z. Barnawi (Routledge, 2017).

“Barnawi shows how education in the Gulf region is changing as societies move from oil-based to knowledge-based economies. In this context, education has become entirely subject to the needs of the job market and economic agendas. This has resulted in a series of tensions as this form of neoliberal and globalized education comes into conflict with Islamic values and Arab identities. The book helps me to think more critically about the broader socioeconomic context in which my research about the promotional discourses of private English language teaching institutes in Saudi Arabia is embedded.”

July

Shiva Motaghi-Tabari recommends Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia edited by Anita Heiss (Black Inc., 2018).

“Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is an anthology of fifty short life stories written by Aboriginal people from all walks of life and spanning a variety of generations and regions. It is a compilation of diverse voices and perspectives which have identity, culture, and racism at their core. One of the themes that stands out throughout the book is the contributors’ struggles to understand their identity, and to find a sense of belonging and acceptance. The book enriched my own learning and understanding about Indigenous people in many ways, and I would recommend the book particularly to migrants to Australia, who can too easily avoid confronting Australia’s colonial history and the ongoing struggles of its First Nations people.”

August

Alexandra Grey recommends Language Investment and Employability: The Uneven Distribution of Resources in the Public Employment Service by Mi-Cha Flubacher, Alexandre Duchêne and Renata Coray (Palgrave, 2018).

“This book reports on a 9-month institutional ethnography inside various offices of Switzerland’s public employment service across the officially French-German bilingual Canton of Fribourg. It is a brilliant example of an institutional ethnography. The study demonstrates that language policy research should not always take a specific official language policy as its starting point. Instead, it is important for researchers to look at sites and processes where both overt and covert language policy is made and applied without taking on the official guise of ‘a policy about language’. Here, the rules, official policies and official discourses are, on their face, about eligibility for state assistance and employability, but the study shows how language practices, migration histories, and language repertoires are constructed within them.”

September

Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends Home advantage: social class and parental intervention in elementary education by Annette Lareau (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, 2^nd ed).

“Working-class families want their children to succeed in school, just like middle-class families, but they are not endowed with the same resources. Lareau shows that social class has a powerful impact on educational success; that is, parental involvement in schooling correlates strongly to children’s educational attainment. For working-class families, school and family life are strictly separated. By contrast, school and family life are interconnected for middle class families. Parental possession and activation of cultural resources yields social and educational profits for middle class children, which results in the strong connection between social class and educational outcomes. The book challenges me to think more deeply about how the class-school relationship is complicated when linguistic difference and migrant status also come into play. Schools should help fill the gap by providing inclusive multilingual information.”

October

Jinhyun Cho recommends Language and Symbolic Power by Pierre Bourdieu (Polity, 1992).

“I have read this book numerous times and treat it as my sociolinguistic bible. I continue to find new perspectives and insights into the relationship between language and society at each reading. By shifting the focus from language per se to its situatedness in complex social relations, Bourdieu’s theory of language as capital works seamlessly in the theorisation of linguistic markets, in which a price is formed on language, and censorship operates in order to distinguish legitimate language from other varieties. Although Bourdieu’s theory was formed in the French context of the 2^nd half of the 20^th century, it has been foundational to my own research related to translation and interpreting in contemporary South Korea, where English serves as a key instrument of distinction.”

November

Tazin Abdullah recommends Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia by Samia Khatun (University of Queensland Press, 2019).

“Much of the narrative surrounding Australian immigrants posits migration as a recent phenomenon. Australianama (“The book of Australia”), in contrast, is a refreshing insight into the historic connection immigrants have had with land and people. Khatun traces the South Asian Muslim presence in Australia using literature in South Asian languages and stories found in Aboriginal accounts. She explains, convincingly, that an understanding of immigrant history is found not in languages associated with European/colonial knowledge systems, but within the literature of immigrant and Aboriginal languages. The stories that Khatun unearths definitively illustrate the influence of historical, social and cultural factors that produce the linguistic representation of immigrants. I thoroughly enjoyed this fresh perspective on the story of Australia.”

December

Ingrid Piller recommends The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns edited by Dohra Ahmad and with a foreword by Edwidge Danticat (Penguin, 2019).

“I’ve probably learned more about language – and life in general, I might add – from literature than from linguistics. And this anthology offers a kaleidoscope of the many facets in which language is entwined in the experience of migration. Ahmad has brought together a brilliant collection of migrant literature with pieces focused on the experience of leaving home, arriving in a destination, and creating, or trying to create, a new home. Although the US and UK still loom large among the destinations, Ahmad has made a huge effort to include a wide variety of origins and destinations. Another strength of the anthology is that, in addition to some well-known names, it features many newer writers who have not yet been widely anthologized – I’ve discovered a number of authors to add to my favorite writers list.”

Why the linguist needs the historian

James McElvenny — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 02:15:54 +0000

Diagram of the ‘radial definition routes’ of Panoptic Conjugation (Ogden 1930: 12)

A fascinating turn in recent Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) scholarship is the development of ‘Minimal English’, an international auxiliary language combining the best of Standard English and NSM. One of the earliest published mentions of this project is in Anna Wierzbicka’s 2014 Imprisoned in English, where she states that Minimal English ‘is, essentially, the English version of “Basic Human”‘ (Wierzbicka 2014: 195), the rendering in English exponents of the set of primitive concepts uncovered by NSM research. An example of Covid-19-related messages in Minimal English can be found here.

The idea of a simplified engineered language for international communication is by no means new, as Wierzbicka and her colleagues freely acknowledge. The specific proposal of creating a reduced form of English for this purpose has also found many advocates in the past.

The special characteristic of Minimal English that is supposed to set it apart from all prior projects is its culturally neutral standpoint. The use of Minimal English should preserve the existing investment of the millions of second-language learners of English in acquiring the formal shell of that language – its phonology, word forms, grammar and so on – while leaving the baggage of ‘Anglo’ culture behind. Any other language could be reduced in this way to serve as the medium for ‘Basic Human’, argues Wierzbicka, but in the context of present-day globalisation English is indisputably the best host:

[G]iven the realities of today’s globalizing world, at this point it is obviously a mini-English that is the most practical way out (or down) from the conceptual tower of Babel that the cultural evolution of humankind has erected, for better or worse. (Wierzbicka 2014: 194)

Wierzbicka (2014: 194) tells us that Minimal English ‘is not another simplified version of English analogous to Ogden’s […] “Basic English” or Jean-Paul Nerrière’s “Globish”‘ (cf. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2018: 8). But if we look at the particular case of Ogden’s Basic English we may notice many striking parallels to Minimal English. These parallels warrant closer inspection.

In the most detailed published treatment of Minimal English to date, the 2018 edited volume Minimal English for a Global World, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka dedicate a section of their co-authored chapter to comparing Minimal English and Basic English (as well as ‘Plain English’; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2018: 18–22). Goddard and Wierzbicka (ibid.: 19) note ‘enormous’ differences across ‘structure (words and grammar), intended range of functions, and in “spirit”‘ between Basic and Minimal English.

However, the comparison misses many significant points of contact between the two endeavours.

In terms of the differences in ‘structure’, Goddard and Wierzbicka point out that Ogden’s core vocabulary of 850 ‘Basic Words’ (see Ogden 1933 [1930]) does not respect the cross-linguistic primitives proposed within the NSM framework. In addition, a central grammatical feature of Basic English was the elimination of verbs from the language, a goal foreign to NSM thinking. These two differences between Basic and Minimal English are quite real, but focusing on them misses the more profound philosophical and methodological similarity between the projects: that both NSM and Basic English are centred around reductive paraphrase. Although not identical to NSM procedure, Ogden’s (1930) method of ‘panoptic conjugation’ sought, in very similar fashion to NSM reductive paraphrase, to strip down meaning to its fundamentals. From Goddard and Wierzbicka’s commentary we may get the impression that Ogden’s method was not much more than an ad hoc heuristic, but this is by no means the case: his method was grounded in contemporary analytic philosophy and even received monograph-length exposition in the 1931 Word Economy by Leonora Wilhelmina Lockhart, one of his close collaborators.

The ‘intended range of functions’ of Basic English is perhaps also not as far from NSM and Minimal English as Goddard and Wierzbicka suggest. Ogden and his collaborators of course indulged in very off-putting Anglo chauvinism, but this was in many ways an expression of a kind of universalism current in analytic philosophy of the time. While NSM explicitly rejects any claims of cultural superiority, it shares many of the same sources. The historiography of NSM typically looks much further back and conceives of the approach as a continuation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ (1646–1716) characteristica universalis (see, e.g. Wierzbicka 1992: 216–218; Wierzbicka 1996: 11–13), but NSM – like Basic – also has clear proximal predecessors in the language-critical thought of early analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. These connections are something that I have explored at length in my 2018 Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism (see also McElvenny 2014).

Finally, the difference in ‘spirit’ that Goddard and Wierzbicka highlight is another aspect of the comparison between Basic English and Minimal English that deserves deeper scrutiny. It is indeed true that Ogden and many of his collaborators – although by no means all – were quite hostile to multilingualism and saw Basic English as a means to the linguistic homogenisation of the world. By contrast, practitioners of NSM and Minimal English celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity and see their project as a means for facilitating cross-cultural communication.

However, the historical contexts of Basic English and Minimal English are very different in this respect. Ogden and his collaborators were working in a world that was much more multilingual than ours today: in Ogden’s day, many languages were used equally in science, business and international relations. At the same time, this world was deeply fractured, having endured by the middle of the twentieth century two World Wars. Whether right or wrong, many scholars of the first half of the twentieth century imagined a connection between competing national languages and international friction.

Minimal English, on the other hand, has been born into a world where Ogden’s dream has essentially come true: international co-operation in science, business and politics is today overwhelmingly mediated in English (see Piller 2016 for incisive discussion of how this plays out in present-day language scholarship). With the end of the Cold War, most people around the world live in an often uneasy but enduring peace – and let’s hope that there will never be a World War III. In this environment, Minimal English has the opposite mission of overcoming the de facto hegemony of English, which has brought with it a different set of problems.

The ahistorical juxtaposition of Basic English and Minimal English ignores these important points of intellectual and political context, which shape the outlook and design of the two projects. There is no shortage of current secondary literature that would help to illuminate this context. My own Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism, mentioned above, deals with this, as does Michael Gordin’s 2015 Scientific Babel.

This blog post is intended as a plea for greater engagement with intellectual history on the part of linguists. On the example of Minimal English, we can immediately see that there are significant parallels between this project and efforts pursued by scholars of only a few generations ago. Greater awareness of their work and the context in which it was undertaken may cast new light on our own assumptions and practices, and in the process enrich our own thinking and alert us to potential pitfalls.

References

Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (2018), ‘Minimal English and how it can add to Global English, in Minimal English for a Global World: Improved communication using fewer words, ed. Cliff Goddard, Cham: Palgrave McMillan, pp. 5–28.
Gordin, Michael D. (2015), Scientific Babel: How science was done before and after Global English, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lockhart, Leonora Wilhelmina (1931), Word Economy, London: Kegan Paul.
McElvenny, James (2014), ‘Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning and early analytic philosophy’, Language Sciences 41, 212–221. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2013.10.001
McElvenny, Jame (2018), Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism: C. K. Ogden and his contemporaries, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ogden, Charles Kay (1930), ‘Penultima (editorial)’, Psyche 10:3, 1-29.
Ogden, Charles Kay (1933 [1930]), Basic English: a general introduction with rules and grammar, London: Kegan Paul.
Piller, Ingrid (2016), ‘Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism’, Journal of Multicultural Discourses 11.1, pp. 25–33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2015.1102921
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992), ‘The search for universal semantic primitives’, in Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution, ed. Martin Pütz, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 215-242.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1996), Semantics: primes and universals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2014), Imprisoned in English: the hazards of English as a default language, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020

Ingrid Piller — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 08:40:43 +0000

Read a lot, write a lot! Reading enhances your productivity as this selection (!) of recent books authored by Language-on-the-Move team members proves

Are you ready for the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020? After the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018 and 2019, this is the third time we are running the Language on the Move Reading Challenge. As was the case previously, the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020 is designed to encourage broad reading in the discipline and beyond, and to make linguistics reading fun. Anyone with an interest in the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life can join.

Here is how it works: the challenge will run from February to November, or ten books over the course of the year. The challenge is to commit yourself to reading one item in each of the categories below. In each category, you can read the recommended title or replace it with another one of your choice.

We invite anyone who takes the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020 to write a review of a book they have read and submit it to Language on the Move to have it considered for publication.

Another way to share your progress is to tweet about it. Mention @lg_on_the_move as we will occasionally be gifting linguistic goodies to our interactive followers throughout the year. In fact, right now you have the chance to win one of five stylish Language on the Move t-shirts if you mention @lg_on_the_move or respond to one of our tweets in between now and January 20, 2020.

Enough introduction! Are you ready to take the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020?

February: A book about the climate emergency

We will start with a book about the perilous state of our planet. Not strictly about language but it is impossible to think about linguistics if your house is on fire.

Klein, Naomi (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.

This fellow is a regular visitor at our house. Sometimes we feed him, sometimes we don’t. When we don’t, he screeches “Tightarse dugai!” You’ll have to read “Mullumbimby” to find out what that means; although we are a fair way from Bundjalung country …

March: A novel providing an Indigenous perspective and some language learning opportunities

In This Changes Everything, you will have learned that the destruction of the planet is closely intertwined with colonialism and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Therefore, the second challenge will be to read a novel written by an Indigenous author and providing an Indigenous perspective on human relationships to country. Language is an important part of those relationships and the two recommended novels will give you a tantalizing taster of Bundjalung, an indigenous language of Northern NSW and southern Queensland. Both novels were written by the deadly Melissa Lucashenko (in case you did not know, you will also learn that “deadly” means “awesome, great, fantastic” in Australian Aboriginal English).

Lucashenko, Melissa (2013). Mullumbimby. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.
Lucashenko, Melissa (2018). Too Much Lip. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

April: An ethnography of language death

Very early in Too Much Lip you will have encountered this scene:

The snake-crow tilted its mutant head at her.
‘Gulganelehla Bundjalung.’ Speak Bundjalung. A test of good character.
‘Bundjalung ngaoi yugam baugal,’ she said. My Bundjalung is crap. The bird hesitated.
‘It’s a trap, a trap, a trap!’ the other crows screeched.

Reflecting on the scene, you might ask yourself why a proud Bundjalung person would have a poor command of her own language. To find an answer, the April challenge is to read about why and how languages die.

Spoiler alert: the answer is ‘3Cs’ (capitalism, Christianity, colonialism).

The recommended title is by the anthropologist Don Kulick, and you will also learn how a white guy does – or does not – cope with fieldwork in a multilingual swamp village in Papua New Guinea.

Kulick, Don (2019). A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.

May: A classic in urban sociolinguistics set outside the Anglophone world and written by a female academic

In A Death in a Rainforest, the Taiap language is not the only entity that dies. There are many deaths in the book, and one of these affects the village itself. This is in a line with the ongoing migration from rural to urban areas that started with the Industrial Revolution. Today, more than half the world’s population live in cities, and understanding language in urban settings constitutes a pressing issue – one that has been addressed by much of the classic work in sociolinguistics. Therefore, the May challenge will be to read a foundational book in urban sociolinguistics set outside the Anglophone world and written by a female academic.

My suggestion is Agathe Lasch’s Berlinisch.

Lasch, Agathe (1967 [1928]). Berlinisch: Eine berlinische Sprachgeschichte. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

In this book, Agathe Lasch argued that ‘urban language is not, as is often claimed, a random, degenerate mix’ – a full forty years before Bill Labov! Unfortunately, this fact is pretty much universally ignored by sociolinguists; I have yet to see a sociolinguistics textbook that even mentions this pioneering sociolinguist.

Who said that "urban #language is not, as is often claimed, a random, degenerate mix"?

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) February 3, 2019

If you do not read German – sadly, even if unsurprisingly, no English translation exists – or cannot get your hands on Berlinisch, I recommend these two excellent alternatives:

Dakubu, Mary Esther Kropp (1997). Korle Meets the Sea: A Sociolinguistic History of Accra. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haeri, Niloofar (1996). The Sociolinguistic Market of Cairo: Gender, Class, and Education. London: Kegan Paul.

June: An ethnography that makes the connection between urban sociolinguistics and multilingual education

Your May reading will have been primarily concerned with linguistic variation in the city. In June, you will need to read a title that explores the consequences of linguistic diversity for educational achievement. The recommended title is an exemplary ethnography of the tensions, struggles and contradictions involved in the literacy experiences of a number of families from different backgrounds.

Li, Guofang (2010). Culturally contested literacies: America’s” rainbow underclass” and urban schools. London: Routledge.

July: A book about language, migration, education, and class

Most of the families in Culturally contested literacies have high expectations of their children’s academic achievement. However, their capacity to translate those expectations into effective support differ widely. Particularly in migration contexts, the most frequent explanation for differential settlement outcomes is ‘culture’. Guofang Li, however, shows that what really matters is material resources – class background, in other words. Therefore, in July, the challenge is to read a book that systematically explores the intersection between class and education in a transnational context. The recommended reading, by the always highly readable Pei-Chia Lan, explores how global aspirations play out in the lives of middle-class and working-class Taiwanese families at home and abroad.

Lan, Pei-Chia (2018). Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

August: A memoir by an adult who was raised bilingually as a child

Many of the Taiwanese families you will have encountered in Raising global families aspire for their children to grow up speaking English – sometimes in addition to Mandarin, sometimes instead of Mandarin. Indeed, how to raise children bilingually has become a pressing question for many families around the world. While the literature on bilingual child rearing is exploding, we know far less about the actual consequences of bilingual child rearing. Therefore, the July challenge is to read a memoir of someone who was raised bilingually.

There are two suggestions because I can’t make up my mind – both will take you into worlds that no longer exist: highly multilingual upper-class European Jewry of the early 20^th century and equally multilingual upper-class Palestinians before Israel.

Canetti, Elias (1999). The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood. London: Granta.
Said, Edward W. (2000). Out of Place: A Memoir. London: Granta.

September: A book about multilingual governance

Whether you will have read Elias Canetti or Edward Said in August, you likely will have been struck by the fact that both men experienced languages simultaneously as bridges and as barriers. If multilingualism creates tensions and contradictions for individuals, this is even more so true for societies. Managing multilingualism in a just and equitable manner constitutes a substantial policy challenge. The reading challenge for September is therefore to read a book that explores how multilingualism is managed in different polities around the world.

Leung, Janny H. C. (2019). Shallow Equality and Symbolic Jurisprudence in Multilingual Legal Orders. New York: Oxford University Press.

October: A history of a multilingual polity

One of the big questions of Shallow Equality and Symbolic Jurisprudence in Multilingual Legal Orders is whether identity rights are more important than other public interests. Janny Leung concludes that this is not automatically the case. The October challenge is to take that argument one step further through an exploration of the history of a multilingual polity with shifting identities.

Kulczycki, John J. (2016). Belonging to the Nation: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1939–1951. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

**November: A book that explains why the 2020 Language on the Move Reading Challenge is important**

A number of people have asked to make this year’s reading challenge about journal articles and book chapters. Many of our readers are PhD students and university-based academics; so setting journal articles and book chapters might make sense – this is stuff we have to read anyways. The reason I have resisted the call for shorter readings is that books constitute a higher-order challenge for our brain than shorter pieces. The final challenge therefore is to read about the importance of book reading for your intellectual, aesthetic and moral life.

Wolf, Maryanne (2008). Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: HarperCollins.

Happy reading! And keep us posted!

Where does academic authority come from?

Ingrid Piller — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 01:51:29 +0000

The following is a summary of my recent article “On the conditions of authority in academic publics” in 14 tweets. The paper was published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics; an open-access pre-print version is available here.

Q: What makes a #text credible, trustworthy and authoritative?

Many people think it's the quality of #discourse: that some ways of using #language make text more believable

Certainly true BUT: world leaders may talk complete nonsense and still command authority and get elected pic.twitter.com/zTsgJcvD0A

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

Some of the pre-textual resources that give #authority to #discourse are listed by Smith-Khan (2019)

1. Linguistic capital
2. Material resources
3. Identity privilege
4. Platform privilegehttps://t.co/DMS2IAXmMb pic.twitter.com/8yxn8hknVc

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

2. Material resources: if you bring your text to market on a well-designed website with stable URL, it is accorded greater #credibility than a handwritten note on a torn piece of paper

(Examples from Smith-Khan, 2019) pic.twitter.com/3nGGZbQXZs

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

4. Platform privilege: look no further than #Twitter: number of followers and retweets are widely considered markers of #authority …

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

Citation rates serve as a measure of #academic #authority

Irrespective how groundbreaking and innovative the #research, publications in #languages other than #English attract few citations#English = #authority (research)https://t.co/6pOAjeVHda

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

Same is true of #white scholars: they are more likely to be cited and accorded #authority #race #research #AcademicTwitter https://t.co/qIBG7Kb7FA

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

"When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are #free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some #power, then your job is to #empower somebody else." (Toni Morrison)#academia #research pic.twitter.com/aUISjtXJqK

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

Special thanks to @fonolog @Neerlandistiek, who blogged this paper almost immediately when it was published.

What a generous #authority boost! Hartelijk bedankt!https://t.co/0tpTe4uVLU

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

In interview: Alex Grey with Melanie Fernando

Language on the Move — Mon, 06 May 2019 05:45:10 +0000

Dr Alex Grey and Melanie Fernando in conversation

One of the main reasons why Language on the Move exists is to mentor the next generation of researchers in the sociolinguistics of intercultural communication, multilingualism and language learning. As our diverse team at Macquarie University is immensely strengthened by our opportunities to collaborate, interact and learn from each other, we thought we’d share some of our conversations with our global readership in a loose new series of “mentoring conversations.”

The first such conversation that we bring to you today is between Dr Alexandra Grey and Warnakulasuriya Melanie Fernando. It has been edited from a live discussion.

Alex has been a member of the Language on the Move team since 2013, when she started her PhD under the supervision of Ingrid Piller. Her PhD research was an ethnographic investigation of language policy and language change as it relates to the Zhuang language, China’s largest minority language. Her thesis, which is available here, was the winner of the inaugural 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award and also won the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics. Alex is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sydney University’s Law School, where she works on a project devoted to governance in multilingual urban communities.

Melanie is one of our newest recruits and joined the Language on the Move team in 2018 as a Master of Research student. She is researching multilingualism in the collections of public libraries in Sydney.

***

Melanie: You have an interdisciplinary background in Law and Linguistics and also Sinology. How did that come about?

Alex: I studied and practiced law, but I was also interested in learning Mandarin. So, with the help of AusAID [the Australian government’s now defunct overseas aid agency] I managed to arrange an assignment in Beijing for a year which helped me to learn Mandarin practically by speaking to, and emailing with, my colleagues. From that starting point, I then continued living, working and studying in the People’s Republic of China. China is a massive country, and although I consider my work to fit in with China Studies, there is an enormous depth of knowledge which I’m yet to achieve.

Melanie: How did you go about navigating an interdisciplinary career and moving between different departments as a student and early career researcher?

Alex: That’s a big topic for another blog post! Basically, I played to my strengths in communicating and attended seminars etc. to learn about what was happening in different fields. Ingrid encouraged me to apply for a variety of events and prizes, which helped. I like meeting people and I often have questions to ask, which helped me build up relationships and a sense of where my research could fit. However, it is quite worrying, at times, realizing that you’ve entered a different field and that people do not immediately ‘get’ or value your research. Trying to maintain a solid publication record that speaks to various disciplines is hard work but essential.

Melanie: You must be so thrilled to have won the international inaugural 2018 Joshua Fishman Award sponsored by the publisher deGruyter Mouton. Congratulations, again! How is Joshua Fishman’s scholarship still relevant today and particularly in the Chinese context?

Alex: Joshua Fishman was a pioneer of the sociological study of language, so my PhD (and much of the literature that I based my study upon) are indebted to his work. As I review in Section 2.3.3 of my dissertation, this sociolinguistic approach came relatively late to language research in China but has a lot of currency now. Moreover, Fishman was the first major author to examine what it means to a community to undergo language shift and language loss. Although Zhuang is not listed as endangered, it is contracting from certain domains that he identified as germane to language maintenance such as homes, schools and the media. In all these, Zhuang has been losing ground over just a few decades.

Melanie: When I read your thesis, I was stuck by the idea that language policy treats Zhuang as an object rather than a practice. Can you explain that?

Alex: Policy generally turns languages into objects. Language – Zhuang in my case study – is transformed from dynamic practice into an academic artefact and an object for the archives. Zhuang is not unique in this regard. Objectification also happens through language standardization. I will discuss this angle in a chapter for an upcoming book, Language standards, norms, and variation in Asia, edited by McLelland and Zhao and published by Multilingual Matters. Standardization can create a static, abstracted form of the language which then becomes an emblem. The government can then use this emblem to signal that they are doing something for Zhuang or that they are incorporating the voice of Zhuang people. However, as an emblematic visual object, Zhuang needs to be recognized, rather than read, to convey the intended meaning. Since the government did not match the standardization policy with a fulsome literacy policy, many Zhuang people (and others) cannot actually recognize Standard Zhuang when they see it …

Melanie: Does that mean that Zhuang is widely seen in the linguistic landscape?

Alex: No, not at all. In a place like the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (GZAR), which is considered Zhuang’s historical ‘homeland’, very little Zhuang is present other than on bilingual street signs in the capital city. There’s even less Zhuang in linguistic landscapes outside this GZAR. In commercial signage it is not there at all. This absence itself is semiotic: Zhuang does not mean ‘urban’ or ‘future’ or even create a marketable emotional affinity with customers. All it means is ‘heritage’.

Melanie: A big challenge for me as a junior researcher is figuring out how to align my research interests with the most suitable research methods. Can you tell me more about your research methodology?

Alex: In language policy studies in general, and in Chinese studies, people have pointed out the cleavages between overt and covert, or posited and practiced, policy. I built on the emerging field of ethnographies of language policy, which in general target these cleavages. I took it further, adding a more technical legal analysis and using qualitative methods to enrich linguistic landscape study with an intersubjective perspective. Basically, I asked Zhuang language activists, professionals, artists, teachers and scholars as well as university students how they experienced and engaged with policy. Data collection spanned a series of cultural, commercial and campus sites: part of the innovation was the breadth, being able to cross-illuminate within one study, another part was the triangulation of theoretical perspectives.

Melanie: Moving on from your PhD research, can you tell me a bit about your postdoctoral research?

Alex: There is a lot to be done back here in Australia in regards to multilingualism, and lack of multilingualism, in the public space of diverse urban communities. I am curious how legally enshrined as well as ad hoc language policies are formed. Specifically, my post-doctoral research is about how the Australian government makes decisions about which language(s) to use for public communication and in which contexts, and how people get involved in these language policy processes.

Melanie: The public libraries I am studying are incredibly diverse. How do you think libraries users can influence language policy?

Alex: Libraries are a good site for looking up-close at how a community remakes or applies language policies. We’ve featured examples from public libraries in Vienna and Sheffield here on Language on the Move. However, it’s another step to get the ‘language stakeholders’ of a library to feed ideas back to policy-makers, especially to influence other, non-library aspects of language policy. That’s determined by people’s political dispositions as well as by communication protocols which the policy-makers may set up. I suspect there could be room for more engagement leveraging libraries and other community spaces or networks.

Melanie: Finally, what has winning the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman award meant to you personally and what’s next?

Alex: The win was a completely thrilling piece of news to receive. I am obviously honored, as I know more people are reading my thesis and that the judges approved of it. This has reassured me to trust my judgement, which is a useful boost to an early career researcher. Based on the award, DeGruyter Mouton will be publishing a book based on my thesis. The book is provisionally titled Language Rights in a Changing China. What a boon! It will be out in early 2020 and Language on the Move readers will hear more about it in due course. I feel really lucky that Professor Piller fostered in me a sense of confidence, and Language on the Move gave me lots of writing practice opportunities and great exposure for my work. Now I feel like I’ve got the skill and the intuition to go in the right direction (but never enough time to do it all!)

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019

Ingrid Piller — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 10:20:26 +0000

Shelves in the Martha-Muchow-Library of Education at Hamburg University

After a busy 2018 and a relaxing break, Language on the Move is back for another year of sociolinguistics of intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in contexts of migration and globalization. After the success of last year’s Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018, we’ll start the excitement with yet another reading challenge.

As was the case last year, the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019 is designed to encourage broad reading in the discipline and to make linguistics reading fun. It is aimed at anyone with an interest in the relationship between linguistic diversity and social life.

Here is how it works: the challenge will run from February to November, and the challenge is to commit yourself to reading one item in each of the categories below. Team members at Macquarie will undertake the reading challenge as part of their weekly meetings. Others can commit publicly by pledging in the comments below or they can keep their participation to themselves.

One piece of feedback we received from last year’s Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018 was that participants had difficulties selecting a reading in each category, that they spent more time on selecting than reading, or that they were disappointed in their choices. Therefore, this year each category includes one or more suggested readings. You may simply follow the suggestion or choose a different reading within the set category.

February

Anthropological linguist Alexandra “Misty” Jaffe passed away in November 2018. She will be sadly missed and an obituary is available here. Her paper “Poeticizing the economy: The Corsican language in a nexus of pride and profit” was in production with Multilingua at the time of her death, as part of a special issue devoted to “Re-Imagining Language Revitalization in Contemporary Europe” (guest-edited by Sabina Perrino and Andrea Leone-Pizzighella). The publisher, deGruyter Mouton, has made the paper freely available as a tribute to Misty, and I suggest you start this year’s Reading Challenge with this paper, and maybe (re)read some of Misty’s other publications.

Suggestion

Jaffe, A. (2019). Poeticizing the economy: The Corsican language in a nexus of pride and profit. Multilingua, 38 (1), 9-27. doi:10.1515/multi-2018-0005 [open access]

March

A book about language policy in a migration context.

Suggestion

Salomone, R. C. (2010). True American: Language, identity, and the education of immigrant children. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

Reading Challenge or not … always a good read

April

A book about intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in a legal context.

Suggestion

Angermeyer, P. S. (2015). Speak English or What? Codeswitching and Interpreter Use in New York City Courts. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

May

A book about intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in early childhood.

Suggestion

Benz, V. (2017). Bilingual Childcare: Hitches, Hurdles and Hopes. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
You might wish to complement this with the following paper, which is available open access:
Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227

June

A longitudinal ethnography about intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization. These are as rare as hens’ teeth and the two suggested titles are the only ones I am aware of. So, let’s read both.

Suggestion

Farr, M. (2006). Rancheros in Chicagoacán: Language and Identity in a Transnational Community. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Oxford: Blackwell.

July

For the Northern Hemisphere summer holidays: a novel where intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism are central themes.

Suggestion

Adichie, C. N. (2013). Americanah. London: HarperCollins.

August

UNESCO has declared 2019 the Year of Indigenous Languages. This means a reading about indigenous languages will have to go on your list. My recommendation is based on what was, for me, the highlight of last year’s Reading Challenge.

Suggestion

Adejunmobi, M. (2004). Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-native Languages in West Africa. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

And don’t forget to add some children’s books to your readings this year!

September

By September, my annual Literacies class for postgraduate students at Macquarie University will be in full swing and so the challenge will be to read a book about literacy and the politics of knowledge.

Suggestion

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2012). Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: Columbia University Press.

October

An autobiography of a multilingual writer. Having started on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in September and keeping the Year of Indigenous Languages in mind, continue the challenge with his two memoirs with their focus on the politics of language in colonial Kenya.

Suggestion

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2010). Dreams in a time of war: a childhood memoir. New York et al.: Random House.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2012). In the house of the interpreter: a memoir. New York et al.: Random House.

November

In November we’ll be hosting the conference of the Australian and New Zealand Associations of von Humboldt Fellows at Macquarie University. The theme is Sharing Knowledge in the Spirit of Humboldt. 2019 is also Humboldt’s 250^th anniversary. Therefore, the final reading of the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019 will have to be about the extraordinary multilingual polymath Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859).

Suggestion

Wulf, A. (2015). The invention of nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s new world. New York: Alfred Knopf.

Share your progress

We invite Reading Challenge participants to submit reviews of their readings to Language on the Move, and we’ll consider them for publication. For ideas check out the review posts which were written as part of the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018:

Yining Wang, Being Chinese in Australia
Pia Tenedero, Virtually multilingual
Ingrid Piller, In search of myself
Laura Smith-Khan, In search of a language and an identity
Gegentuul Baioud, One orientalism or many orientalisms?
Ingrid Piller, Why are you not citing any African female expert?
Ingrid Piller, The Devil’s Handwriting
Ingrid Piller, Globalization between crime and piety

Another way to share your progress is to tweet about it. If you do, mention @lg_on_the_move as we will occasionally be gifting copies of Intercultural Communication and Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice to one of our interactive followers throughout the year.

Research and knowledge need linguistic diversity

Before you get started, enjoy this multilingual video, which the Language-on-the-Move team produced to celebrate Humboldt’s 250th anniversary. For us, Humboldt today means linguistic diversity in research, science and education.

Can you identify all the languages spoken in the video?*

Humboldt heute = multilingual science. „Humboldt forschte und lehrte auf Deutsch, en français, en español and in English.” #Humboldtian Ingrid Piller and the @Lg_on_the_Move team

What does Humboldt mean to you today? Share your video or photo: https://t.co/QwUjkesytf #AvH250 pic.twitter.com/xUoj0vMDq4

— Humboldt-Stiftung (@AvHStiftung) January 18, 2019

*Other than the obvious English, they are, in this order: Tagalog, Ga, French, Arabic, Mandarin, Persian, Ndebele, Urdu, Cantonese, German

Getting published while foreign

Ingrid Piller — Sun, 25 Mar 2018 23:51:50 +0000

Unpublished manuscripts from the estate of Hans Natonek (Source: Arts in exile)

On International Women’s Day I explored why female academics publish less than their male peers. Academic journal submissions by female economics researchers face greater scrutiny and take longer to get published, as a study by Erin Hengel has found. Successful women learn to anticipate greater scrutiny than their male peers and eventually write better; a quality improvement that comes at the expense of quantity.

The data for Hengel’s study come from published journal articles and that constitutes a limitation because publication is the exception rather than the rule: the majority of submissions – both for academic and non-academic publication – are rejected.

Systematic knowledge of rejected authorship is extremely scarce. Rejection is ostensibly based on the quality of a manuscript; but it is reasonable to assume that the identity of the author also plays a role and that female, non-white or working-class authors are more likely to have their manuscripts rejected.

A study of the archives of the US trade publisher Houghton Mifflin sheds light on this question. The researcher, Yuliya Komska, examines the relationship between indicators of foreignness and manuscript rejection during the period of World War II. The period lends itself to this kind of examination as many of the European refugees arriving in the USA during that time were intellectuals and had been writers back home. Most of them failed miserably in their attempts to reestablish their careers in a new country and through a new language, as I previously showed with reference to the Bavarian exile Oskar Maria Graf.

Komska presents some stark figures: during the period under examination Houghton Mifflin received anywhere between 150 and 300 manuscript submissions per month but signed up only one or two of these. In other words, the rejection rate was above 99%. Rejection was for the same reasons that manuscripts get rejected today: they were poorly written, they were dull, they were not timely or they did not fit with the publisher’s list.

However, as the researcher shows, quality had an accent. What does that mean? Komska defines “accented writing” as narrative themes and writing styles that were perceived as unmarketable.

First and foremost among accented writing were indicators of foreignness. A whole body of work that never saw publication were accounts of the anti-Jewish pogroms of the early 20^th century in the Russian empire and of the migration experiences of the refugees these produced. Editors and reviewers routinely denigrated such migration stories as “painfully Jewish, dull, not our book,” “monotonously tragic and so completely unrelieved by anything humorous or un-Jewish” or “a screwball book by a screwball Russian” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 285f.).

Writing with a foreign accent was not only the product of the author’s migration experience but also their class background, as Komska shows by comparing the reception of the refugees from Russia in the early 20th century to that of the refugees from the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. This new cohort of displaced authors, mostly German-speaking Jews, were more likely to come from bourgeois backgrounds than their Yiddish- and Russian-speaking predecessors of a generation earlier. In response to the submissions of this new group of migrant authors “racist remarks receded” (Komska, 2017, p. 287).

Hans Natonek, for instance, had been one of the foremost literary critics of Weimar Germany and head of the feuilleton of Neue Leipziger Zeitung, a major national newspaper, when he arrived in the USA in 1941 after an almost decade-long odyssey from one European refuge to another. He submitted a memoir of his refugee experience and was described by reviewers as a “nice human being with a good clear intelligence” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 288). Even so, he was still rejected by Houghton Mifflin but received a contract for his autobiography In search of myself from another publisher.

In search of myself describes the author’s struggles with reestablishing himself through the medium of the English language in a language that shows no traces of that struggle. The reason for that is that the book is a translation of Natonek’s German original. When migrant manuscripts were favorably considered, translations seem to have been preferred over English-language publications with an accent, i.e. manuscripts that showed traces of late language learning. Describing an author as “not yet at home in the English language” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 288) meant rejection.

Refugees’ “broken English” could cancel out even the most extensive cultural capital, as was the case with the Mann family. While Houghton Mifflin did sign on a number of books by Erika and Klaus Mann, they rejected a manuscript by Golo Mann because of its “German overtone” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 289).

Incidentally, concerns with accented writing were not restricted to migrant writing but also extended to the presence of dialects and other non-standard forms of English, which were also viewed negatively.

The researcher concludes that “it was accents – wide-ranging, all-pervasive, far-reaching – more than language or languages per se that worried Houghton Mifflin the most” (Komska, 2017, p. 292). This trade press did not so much enforce monolingualism – manuscripts in languages other than English could be translated after all – as it homogenized linguistic, ethnic and class differences into one single “native” white middle-class idiom.

Reference

Komska, Y. (2017). Trade Publisher Archives: Repositories of Monolingualism? Race, Language, and Rejected Refugee Manuscripts in the Age of Total War. Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 53(3), 275-296.

Serendipity, Cyberspace, and the Tactility of Documents

Carol Sicherman — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 01:41:28 +0000

Front of postcard sent by Private Jacob Isak Sicherman on 1 June 1916

Remember library stacks? Browsing among books? Serendipitously finding on a nearby shelf what you didn’t know you needed? There are still stacks, though nowadays you might be crushed if someone turned the crank. Public libraries have stacks. But where do we do most of our research?

On the internet, of course. Does serendipity exist in cyberspace?

It does. At the 2016 annual Institute for Historical Study meeting, Charles Sullivan described finding a document that had seemed non-existent, simply by using the right search terms. Advised to pursue primary sources, he worried about traveling to archives hither and yon. Did he travel? Not at all: the documents had been digitized.

I am now working with primary sources in my possession: ninety-nine postcards that my mother-in-law, Matylda Sicherman, brought with her from Poland when she emigrated in 1928. Out of them, and with the aid of other primary sources, I’ve teased the stories of a mostly Hasidic community in the first quarter of the twentieth century. I’m hoping that the owners of the cards will donate them to the Center for Jewish History in New York, which is digitizing its entire archive. In the future, these cards could be read in the countries from which they were sent—Poland, Romania, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Ukraine, Russia—and by anyone anywhere with access to the internet.

But for me, physically handling these battered cards is essential to understanding them. Each one was written by a particular person in a particular place, stamped by a post office or military postal service, read by someone in a different place and circumstance. One card depicts four generals shaking hands in 1915 to signify Bulgaria’s joining the Central Powers—“der neue Waffenbruder” (“the new brother-in-arms;” in addition to German, the phrase is also given in Hungarian, Czech and Polish). The sender, Private Jacob Isak Sicherman, wrote each “brother’s” nation above his head: “BULG. TURKEI, OS-UNG [Austro-Hungary], DEUT[SCH].” He wrote on 1 June 1916 while convalescing in a Cracow military hospital. The card is stamped by the hospital and by the military postal service (there’s no postage stamp). Like most of the cards, it went to his wife, then living in a small town in Hungary because her home in Poland wasn’t yet safe. His words overflowed the space. He writes intimately, yet anyone who read his crabbed handwriting would find no secrets:

I am going to note for you who each of these high and mighty gentlemen is. You’ll also know by yourself. Let me know whether you received it. I kiss you and the dear children heartily–[also] the dear parents. Your faithful J. Isaak

Holding this card contributes an ineffable sense of connection. Years ago, in the Public Records Office in London, I pored over scraps that a colonial official had scribbled in the course of his duties. I felt his presence.

Back of postcard sent by Private Jacob Isak Sicherman on 1 June 1916

This tactile connection is only part of the pleasure of my often-serendipitous research preparing an edition of the postcards. Early on, an Institute member told me about a genealogy site, JewishGen.org, loaded with an astonishing wealth of ever-growing databases and a large and friendly community of scholars and translators offering their skills for free. The main translator of the German cards, Isabel Rincon, teaches German literature and languages at a Munich Gymnasium. There was more than her training in German philology that prepared her for the task. Her personal history impelled her to volunteer: her grandfather and his best friend (Jewish) had both been in love with a young Jewish woman. She left Germany in the 1930s for America. Tempted to emigrate with her but not sharing her danger, the grandfather remained regretfully in Germany. The other two emigrated and married; all three friends remained in touch throughout their lives. Isabel knew them all.

Besides Isabel, I have had many pen pals met through JewishGen online discussion groups. Valerie Schatzker, author of the monograph Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia—a wonderfully readable book—sent a source in a 1917 Austrian newspaper, explained Polish words, and offered to read the manuscript. A professional translator in Israel grappled with the intolerably messy Yiddish script. Institute member Bogna Lorance-Kot translated Polish cards. A man in Ohio eagerly offered to make a genealogical chart for the book. Rabbi Avrohom Marmorstein figured out the most likely way that Jacob Isak learned to read and write German—from his fellow pupils in one of the yeshivas that he attended. Like many Hasidim, his family ignored the imperial law that required all children to go to school. Jacob and his parents preferred that he sleep on straw and go hungry, as long as he could absorb rabbinic learning.

What has been most rewarding about this research has been the human element: coming to know the people of the cards and the people of the scholarly community–discovering and being offered knowledge that illuminates the stories of these long-gone people.

This post was first published in the Summer 2016 issue of the newsletter of the Institute for Historical Study.

Herder: an explainer for linguists

Ingrid Piller — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 02:01:29 +0000

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)

Some contemporary sociolinguists love to hate an 18^th century educator, philosopher, theologian, translator and general polymath by the name of Herder. Hardly a week goes by with an article denouncing something “Herderian” coming across my desk. Let me start by providing a small selection of quotes related to “Herderian” as it appears in contemporary sociolinguistics (I’m not providing references because it is not my intention to single out any particular colleague):

“… the monoglot Herderian ideology …”
“… Herder’s 18^th century writings are now common terminology in reference to one-language one-nation ideologies …”
“… the classic “Herderian” triad people-language-territory …”
“… a typical Herderian cocktail of one language-one culture-one territory …”
“… the “Herderian triad:” an adult-centric, modernist notion that language is tied to identity and located in a specific (and singular) place …”
“… the Herderian triad defines a person a native of a single language …”
“ … the Herderian triad has made us obsessed with bounded communities …”
“ … the Herderian triad also leads to places being colonized for one language or another …”
“… Herder’s romantic view of the ‘Volk’ is back in force …”
“Once we leave the Orthodox and Herderian combination behind, as we do in almost all of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, we find that the combination of zealous Islam and triumphalist Westernization has often had a regional impact, much as Catholicism and the Industrial Revolution had had earlier in the West.”

I could go on. While the meaning of these quotes may not be entirely clear, the overall message is summed up easily: “Herderian” refers to an objectionable ideological mélange of retrograde thought about the relationship between language and society.

While I am pretty confident that I am not doing any of the writers I have quoted here an injustice by assuming that they have never read a single original line written by Herder in their lives, I can guess who they have read and where the current Herder-bashing in sociolinguistics comes from: a book chapter by anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs first published in 2000 and then adapted for another book chapter in 2003, where it is entitled “Language, poetry, and Volk in eighteenth-century Germany: Johann Gottfried Herder’s construction of tradition” (Bauman & Briggs, 2000, 2003).

I want to show here that their interpretation of Herder as a theorist of monolingualism, of static nationalism and of the boundedness of communities is highly questionable. I will do so by concentrating on Herder’s ideas related to multilingualism, language learning and intercultural communication but the overall thrust of my argument is similar to the one advanced by the philosopher and Herder translator Michael Forster regarding the perception of Herder in political philosophy:

Concerning international politics, Herder is often classified as a “nationalist” or (even worse) a “German nationalist,” but this is deeply misleading and unjust. On the contrary, his fundamental position in international politics is a committed cosmopolitanism, in the sense of an impartial concern for all human beings. This is a large part of the force of his ideal of “humanity.” Hence in the Letters his slogan is “No one for himself only, each for all!” and he approvingly quotes Fénelon’s remark, “I love my family more than myself; more than my family my fatherland; more than my fatherland humankind.” (Forster, 2002, p. xxxif.)

Herder as a “German” author

The Baltics in the late 18th century

Herder is a “German” author but what it meant to be “German” in the 18^th century is very different from what that means today (and has meant at various points in between). The historian Dirk Hoerder suggests that, if we wanted to use today’s terminology, it might be a good idea to describe Herder as “transnational”:

He came from an East Prussian German family, experienced the hierarchical multicultural urban life of Riga and was thus socialized during a critical period of his intellectual development in the context of the Baltic segment of the Tsarist Empire, was subject to the Russian administrative and hegemonic culture, and came into contact with French Enlightenment thought. He migrated to the multiply dynastically segmented cultures of the Lippe region in present-day North Rhine Westphalia and then moved to Weimar, the political capital of Saxony-Weimar and a center of German high culture. Referring in particular to the many Baltic and Slavic cultures ruled by distant imperial dynasties, he postulated in his Outline of a Philosophical History of Humanity (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit) the equal value of different cultures which—under God’s benevolence—develop from the spirit of common people (Volksgeist). In modern terms, Herder was transnational in spirit and practice. (Hoerder, 2008, p. 5f.)

Let me tell you a bit about Herder’s fascinating life story.

Johann Gottfried Herder was born in 1744 into a relatively poor family of the lower gentry in the town of Mohrungen, today Morąg. Morąg is located in Poland; Mohrungen in the 18^th century was mostly part of East Prussia but shifted ownership between the Prussians and the Russians during the Seven Years’ War (1755-1764). The town of some 1,800 inhabitants had a resident German majority and a Polish minority, and various troops coming and going periodically.

Broadly speaking, the area of north-east Europe where Morąg is located had been the subject of imperial expansion projects – mostly German, Russian and Swedish – and the wars this inflicted on their populations for centuries. So, one of Herder’s formative experiences was being the inhabitant of a war-torn border place fought over by different imperial dynasties. And that’s where his aversion to imperial expansion and his lifelong obsession with finding a better way for humans to organize their affairs and to live in peace started.

In Mohrungen the young Herder felt stifled by poverty, provincialism, a tyrannical master to whom he was apprenticed and a general lack of opportunity. Like many young men before him and many since, he dreamt of leaving, emigrating, seeing the big wide world.

The opportunity to make good on his dreams arose when a Russian army surgeon offered to take the 18-year-old on as a trainee. The young Herder was delighted. He accepted against the misgivings of his parents, who he would never see again, and off he went.

The offer from the Russian army surgeon confirmed his passionate admiration for all things Russian: a few months earlier his first publication had been a poem of admiration devoted to the Russian emperor. Writing in 1880 in a very different intellectual and political climate, Herder’s biographer (Haym, 1880, p. 15) diagnosed Herder with “broken patriotism” (“gebrochenem Patriotismus”) because his youthful poem was in honour not of the “native” (“angestammt”) but the “foreign” monarch.

At the age of 18, Herder arrived in what was then Königsberg, the metropolis of East Prussia, and is today Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania. The study of surgery did not work out because Herder fainted during his first practical observation.

View of Koenigsberg in the mid-19th c. (Source: Wikipedia)

Although penniless, Herder was determined not to return to Mohrungen and to try his luck in the big city instead. Armed with a reference from his despised Mohrungen master, he received a scholarship to study theology at the local college. The scholarship covered accommodation and board and in return he had to take on all kinds of jobs in the college. The college, Collegium Fridericianum, was a Latin-medium institution that attracted students from around the Baltics.

After three years in Königsberg, at the age of 20, Herder was offered his first “real” job, as a clergyman and schoolmaster in Riga. Herder was excited to leave his fatherland and his status as a Prussian subject behind; forever, as it turned out. Years later he wrote:

Als ich mein Vaterland Preußen zum ersten Mal verließ, hätte ich vor Freude an der Grenze bei Polangen auf die Erde fallen und sie wie Brutus küssen mögen. In Riga habe ich die fröhlichste Blüte meines Lebens erlebt.
When I left my fatherland Prussia for the first time, I was so happy that, like Brutus, I would have liked to fall down and kiss the earth at the border at Palanga. In Riga I experienced the happiest time of my life. (Quoted from Kantzenbach, 1970, p. 23)

The old Hanseatic city, today the capital of Latvia, had only a few decades earlier changed hands from Sweden to Russia. Like most cities of the Hanseatic League, Riga was a cosmopolitan city. Socially, the German- and Russian-speaking upper classes dominated over the subjected Latvian majority.

Herder was deeply impressed by Latvian culture such as peasant songs and dances, and his lifelong dedication to the collection and preservation of folksongs started there. He was also deeply impressed by the misery in which most of the Latvian serf population lived. His admiration for Latvian folk culture coupled with the keenness with which he felt the injustice of Latvian serfdom influenced Herder’s thinking around cultural nationalism deeply. His view was that Latvian had the potential to be a great language and culture but was kept in a state of barbarity by the exploitative conditions in which Latvians were forced to live by their various German, Swedish and Russian overlords.

Despite the fact that Herder loved Riga – for the first time in his life he felt able to overcome the social handicap of his modest provincial background – he was also very aware of the limitations of his knowledge, which he felt to be too bookish and too narrow. He longed to expand his horizons and in 1769, after almost five years in Riga, he took an extended leave of absence from his position to travel the world. Although the Riga Council kept his position open for him, he would never return to Riga, either.

Herder had huge ambitions for his travels: he wanted to further his practical education so that he would later be in a better position to serve in the education and the general betterment of the Livonian province in particular and the Russian empire in general. To achieve his ambitions he felt he needed to travel and in his diary he set out his ambitions:

[…] Frankreich, England und Italien und Deutschland in diesem Betracht durchreisen, Französische Sprache und Wohlstand, Englischen Geist der Realität und Freiheit, Italienischen Geschmack feiner Erfindungen, Deutsche Gründlichkeit und Kenntniße, und endlich, wo es nöthig ist, Holländische Gelehrsamkeit einsammlen, […] und den Geist der Gesetzgebung, des Commerzes und der Policei gewinnen, alles im Gesichtspunkt von Politik, Staat und Finanzen einzusehen wagen, Vergnügen, und Charaktere und Pflichten, und alles, was Menschen hier glücklich machen kann, sei meine erste Aussicht. […]

[…] with this aim I want to travel in France, England, Italy and Germany; I want to learn about the French language and French wealth, English spirit of realism and liberty, Italian taste for beauty, German thoroughness and knowledge, and finally, as necessary, Dutch learning […] I want to acquire an understanding of law making, of commerce and governance; I want to look at everything from the perspective of politics, the state and finance, pleasure, character and responsibilities, and everything that can contribute to making people here [=Livonia] happy, that shall be my first purpose. (Herder, 2011 [1769], Chapter 3)

Herder was on the road for almost two years, spending longer periods in Nantes, Paris, Hamburg, Eutin, Darmstadt, and Strasbourg. His eternal problem – lack of funds – meant that his travels were neither as extensive nor as systematic as he had hoped. After the initial journey, which took him to Nantes and Paris, his travel plans became contingent on those of any patrons he could attract.

During his travels, he met two people who would shape his future: in Strasbourg he met Goethe, who first became an admirer, later a good friend and, even later, an enemy.

In Darmstadt, he met Karoline Flachsland, who later became his wife. Unusually for the time, both Herder and Flachsland wanted to marry for love and they expected spouses to be friends and companions. At a time, when marriage usually was based on dynastic and economic considerations, this was an unusual position to take. Both of them were unconventional, and entered into correspondence before they were even engaged (anyone who has ever read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility will know how courageous but also injurious to female virtue this would have been at the time). Their letters show that Herder believed in female equality long before that idea started to gain any currency. In 1772 he wrote to Caroline:

Ein Mann muss sich, glaub ich, im Weibe sehen, so wie das Weib im Manne: dann sind sie beide gesund und ganz.
I believe a man has to see himself in the woman, just like the woman in the man: then both will be healthy and whole. (Quoted from Haux, 1988, p. 21)

For someone with neither position nor fortune to enter into a love marriage with a woman who had no fortune, either, was certainly a way of walking the talk. It also meant that Herder had to find a way to secure an income. When the position of superintendent of schools in Livonia, which he saw as his vocation, fell through, he reluctantly accepted in 1771 a relatively lowly position as court preacher in Bückeburg. Bückeburg is today a town in northern Germany; back then it was the capital of the Principality of Schaumburg-Lippe.

The Principality of Schaumburg-Lippe was one of numerous mini-states that dotted the landscape of most of what is today Germany. Each of these mini-states had its own absolutist ruler; some of these were more enlightened than others but most of them were exploitative tyrants, who tried to live up the highlife a là le Roi-Soleil, except with significantly fewer resources than the French monarchs. Herder detested them all; that he was dependent on them was the bitterness of his life.

Map of “Germany” in the late 18th century

Bückeburg was deeply provincial although the ruler was relatively enlightened and tried to improve the cultural life of his domain by bringing people such as Herder to the principality. He did so against the advice of his ministers who dreaded the “most outspoken freethinker” (“erklärtesten Freigeist”) and warned that with Herder’s arrival “the collapse of religion” (“der Untergang der Religion”) was inevitable (Kantzenbach, 1970, p. 61).

For a while Herder was despondent and his letters of his early time in Bückeburg show an unhappy, deeply dissatisfied whinger, whose ambitions and endeavours were frustrated at every turn. Caroline urged him to create a better world in his mind:

Ach leider! Daß unser Vaterland nur Phantom und Schatten unserer Väter ist! Zumal für Männer and für einen Mann, wie Du, o Herder, bist. Ach, dann muß man sich ein verborgenes Vaterland schaffen!
How unfortunate that our fatherland is only the ghost and shadow of our fathers! Particularly for men, and for a man like you, Herder. Oh well, then you have to create a hidden fatherland for yourself! (Quoted from Kantzenbach, 1970, p. 63)

Herder took this to heart and went back to his almost manic writing projects; taking inspiration from his voracious reading, his interactions with the students and parishioners in his care, and his love of nature, some of his most important publications were prepared during this period.

Even so, the gist of Bückeburg was: “Ich muss hier weg, das ist das Ja und Amen.” (“I need to get away from here, that is the key point.” (Quoted from Kantzenbach, 1970, p. 75)

After five years in Bückeburg, he succeeded. His friend Goethe had intervened on his behalf with Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who offered Herder the position of chief clergyman and superintendent in the grand duchy. Herder was to spend the remainder of his life, interrupted only by a yearlong trip to Italy in 1788/89, in Weimar.

Karl August, too, was a relatively enlightened monarch; even so, he was an absolutist monarch and those around him had to suck up to him, to use a contemporary term. Herder found the flattery, subservience and intrigue of court circles despicable. Two years into his appointment, he had this to say about his new country:

Es ist und bleibt doch ein elend Leben, sich früh auf die hölzerne Folterbank zu spannen und unter dem alten sächsischen Dreck zu wühlen. Dies Land war von jeher von Kindern und Schwachen beherrscht und eine erbärmliche Apanage der Reformation.
It is certainly a miserable life to put oneself early to the wooden torture rack and to dig in this old Saxon shit. This country has always been reigned by children and weaklings and is a miserable apanage of the Reformation. (Quoted from Kantzenbach, 1970, p. 79)

Obviously, Herder took a much more measured tone in his publications than in his private journals and letters. None of this would have passed the censor’s office; not to mention that it hardly would have kept him in office. In his publications, he often used historically or geographically distant societies, which he felt freer to criticize, to make his point.

Even so, he kept pushing the envelope. In the early phase of the French Revolution, which he unambiguously welcomed, he created a scandal by pointedly refusing to include the French monarch and aristocracy in Sunday prayers; not because they were French or cosmopolitan, as some English-language commentators seem to assume, but because they were tyrants.

Herder’s tombstone in Weimar

Unlike Goethe and most other German intellectuals of the time, Herder never went back on his support for the French revolutionaries. When their sovereign, Grand Duke Karl August joined the War of the First Coalition against Revolutionary France, Herder was relatively outspoken against this foreign intervention; he felt the French people had a right to give themselves a new constitution without foreign intervention. His outspokenness in this matter resulted in the break with Goethe, the Weimar court and most of his friends there. As a result, he and his family spent his final years in relative isolation.

During his years as chief clergyman and superintendent in Weimar, Herder, unlike most of his contemporaries in similar positions, worked hard on the daily grit of his job. One of his many causes was the improvement of the conditions of teachers and his steady (though not particularly successful) efforts to improve their salaries and overall condition.

Despite his dedication to his day job, he kept up his prodigious writing and was a dedicated and loving father and husband. During his second decade in Weimar his health, which had never been strong, began to fail and he died in 1803 in bitterness and, as mentioned above, relative isolation. The inscription on his tombstone reads “Licht, Liebe, Leben” (“light, love, life”) – the motto he had chosen for himself from the First Epistle of John.

Now that we have a measure of the man, let’s address his supposed advocacy for bounded monolingual nations.

Was Herder monolingual?

One of the key charges that sociolinguists currently level against Herder is that he was supposedly the purveyor of an “ideology of a monoglot and monologic standard […] demand[ing] one language, one metadiscursive order, one voice […] denying the legitimacy of multiple voices and multiple languages in public discourse” (Bauman & Briggs, 2003, p. 194).

I would argue that only a modern English-centric monolingual reading of Herder’s writing can lead to this conclusion.

To begin with, no man of Herder’s time and education was monolingual. So, of course, Herder wasn’t, either. In fact, by the paltry standards of what goes for multilingualism these days, Herder was exceptionally polyglot.

His mother tongue would have been some East Prussian form of German; already as a child in Mohrungen he studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew. By the time he started teaching in Königsberg his proficiency in these languages was such that he was given tutoring jobs in all three of them, plus French. I’m unclear where he first started to learn French but one of his timetables from Königsberg shows that he set aside two hours each day for the study of French.

In Königsberg he also became friends with another prodigious language learner, the philosopher and writer Johann Georg Hamann. Hamann’s extensive repertoire included, unusually for the time, English, which he had learnt in London a few years earlier, and Arabic, which he taught himself just because he wanted to read the Quran. Hamann taught Herder English (by reading Hamlet together – how is that for a language teaching methodology?!) and together they also devoted themselves to the study of Italian.

All these languages – Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, English, Italian – constituted some form of “learning up” if you will: these languages were considered superior to German at the time, and the hallmarks of an educated man. That Herder as an ambitious young man should devote himself to these languages is perhaps not surprising. Where his love of languages really begins to shine is with his dedication to Latvian, a language that, at the time, was considered an inferior peasant language.

Stender’s Latvian Grammar

When they met in Strasbourg, Herder recommended to Goethe a Latvian grammar he himself had used in Riga (Stender, 1761). That grammar provides some interesting evidence for ideas about language contact at the time. In the Introduction, the grammarian, Gotthard Friedrich Stender, another Baltic German Lutheran clergyman with an intense interest in the languages and cultures of the Baltics, devotes quite some detail to discussing the relationships between Latvian and other languages in the region. Stender’s assessment of the relationship between various languages is remarkably astute. In addition to the discussion of genetic relationships (for example, Latvian is not related to Estonian), he notes that Latvians and Russians learn each other’s languages easily “through interaction” (“durch den Umgang miteinander”). In contrast, he notes that this is not so with Latvian and German, which are in a hierarchical relationship:

Daß in der lettischen Sprache nunmehr so viele Wörter deutschen Ursprungs anzutreffen, das ist gar kein Wunder, weil die Letten von den Deutschen als Leibeigene beherrscht werden.
That so many words of German origin can be found in Latvian is not surprising because the Latvians are ruled as serfs by the Germans. (Stender, 1761, p. 13)

The consequence of the subjected position of Latvian means that it has not been able to develop any educated registers:

Seitdem die vormaligen Heiden in Lief- und Kurland von den Deutschen bezwungen, und zum Christenum, zugleich aber auch unter das Joch gebracht worden, ist die lettische Sprache bis auf den heutigen Tag eine gemeine Baurensprache. […] Die lettische Sprache ist eben keine reiche, dennoch aber eine deutliche, wohlklingende und zierliche Sprache […]

Since the former heathens of Livonia and Courland were subjugated by the Germans and brought to Christianity – but simultaneously under the yoke – the Latvian language has to this day remained a common peasant language. […] The Latvian language is therefore not a rich language but nonetheless a clear, pleasant-sounding and beautiful language. (Stender, 1761, p. 17)

Stender’s specific observations about Latvian were more generally developed in Herder’s language philosophy: external domination stunts the development of a language; therefore, for people to be able to develop their full potential they need to be free from domination. This can be best achieved if nations leave each other in peace and let each nation develop organically.

With Latvian, Herder first discovered his passion for folk songs and oral poetry; and initiating and inspiring their collection constitutes one of his abiding achievements. To be able to publish his collections, he had to dedicate himself not only to language learning but also to translation. One of his best-known publications, which was titled Folk Songs in the 1778/79 edition but The Voices of Peoples in Songs in the 1807 edition is testament to his achievements as a translator. The last publication he completed before his death was, incidentally, also a translation: El Cid from Spanish.

In sum, Herder was a prodigious polyglot and language lover who achieved a high level of proficiency in a number of languages and dabbled in many others.

Did Herder hold a monoglot ideal?

Of course, being multilingual himself does not mean that he must have thought multilingualism was a good idea. He could still have been opposed to language learning in the wider population; except that he wasn’t.

We know what Herder thought about multilingualism and language education from at least two of his writings: a 1764 essay entitled “Über den Fleiß in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen” (“On Diligence in the Study of Several Learned Languages,” an English translation is available here) and his travel diary “Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769” (“Journal of my Voyage in the Year 1769,” (Herder, 2011 [1769]), which does not seem to have been translated into English).

In “On Diligence in the Study of Several Learned Languages” Herder argues for the importance of studying “two or three” foreign languages in addition to the mother tongue. His arguments are both utilitarian (commerce cannot flourish without knowledge of different languages; it is inefficient for the advancement of humanity if knowledge only circulates within the boundaries of a given language and is not freely shared) and idealistic (knowledge of a language “expands [the] soul” and “raises up the mind”).

As I’ve pointed out above, studying languages was not unusual at the time and all higher learning in Europe included the study of at least Latin and Greek. Part of Herder’s originality lies in the fact that he insists on diligence in the study of both foreign languages AND the mother tongue: “Our learning must shape both kinds of languages, must tie both to each other to become the bond of knowledge” (p. 33).

In the Journal he sets out his vision how this “bond of knowledge” between mother tongue and learned languages could be achieved. He begins by denouncing the contemporary practice of Latin-medium education. He concedes that Latin grammar is superior to the grammar of all other languages but goes on to vividly describe the “torture” experienced by children for who Latin is a “dead building that tortures them without providing them with any tangible benefit, without learning a language” (“das todte Gebäude, das ihm Quaal macht; ohne Materiellen Nutzen zu haben, ohne eine Sprache zu lernen”).

Weg also das Latein! […] durch sie werden wir klug im Sprechen und schläfrig im Denken: wir reden fremder Leute Worte und entwöhnen uns eigner Gedanken.
Therefore, away with Latin! […] it makes us clever in speech but lazy in our thoughts: we speak the words of other people and become disaccustomed to thinking for ourselves. (Herder, 2011 [1769], Chapter 5)

Voices of Peoples in Songs

Therefore, the first language in the education of children has to be their mother tongue.

However, for Herder the mother tongue is never enough. In his reform plans for the school curriculum of Livonia, he proposed three years in primary devoted exclusively to education in the mother tongue. After that, an ambitious program of language learning was to start.

Another innovation is constituted by the fact that he regarded the study of living languages superior to the study of dead languages. For Herder, there can be no doubt that the first foreign language should not be Latin but French:

Nach der Muttersprache folgt die Französische: denn sie ist die allgemeinste und unentbehrlichste in Europa: sie ist nach unsrer Denkart die gebildetste: der schöne Styl und der Ausdruck des Geschmacks ist am meisten in ihr geformt, und von ihr in andre übertragen. […] Sie muß also nach unsrer Welt unmittelbar auf die Muttersprache folgen, und vor jeder andern, selbst vor der Lateinischen vorausgehen. Ich will, daß selbst der Gelehrte beßer Französisch, als Latein könne!

The mother tongue is followed by French because it is the most widely used and indispensable in Europe. We believe it to be the most educated. Beautiful style and the expression of style is most developed in French and has from there been transferred into other languages. […] In our view French therefore has to follow immediately after the mother tongue, and precede any other languages, even Latin. I want even scholars to speak better French than Latin! (Herder, 2011 [1769], Chapter 6)

The Herder Award: an award of the German Democratic Republic for exemplary teachers of Russian

Latin would be the second foreign language in Herder’s ideal curriculum. With regard to the third foreign language, students should be given the option to choose between Greek and Italian. He does not fully commit himself whether there should be a fourth foreign language in his school: if yes, it would have to be Hebrew; maybe not much – just enough to appreciate the beauty of the original of the Old Testament.

“On Diligence in the Study of Several Learned Languages” and “Journal of my Voyage in the Year 1769” were written relatively early in Herder’s life. While some of his positions changed, the one on the importance of learning multiple languages never did. In the 1790s he reiterated his position:

Gewöhnich denken wir nur in der Sprache, in der wir erzogen wurden, in der wir zuerst die innigsten Gefühle empfingen, in der wir liebten, in der wir schlafend und wachend träumen. Sie ist uns die Liebste; sie ist unsres Gemüthes Sprache. Und doch hindert sie nicht, daß wir nachher nicht zehn andre, alte und neue Sprachen lernen, ihre Schönheit lieben und Früchte des Geistes aus ihnen allen sammlen könnten. Ein gebildeter Mensch zu unsrer Zeit muß dies thun.
Usually, we only think in the language in which we were brought up, in which we first received the deepest feelings, in which we loved, in which we dream and day-dream. It is our favourite language, the language of our soul and mind. But it is no obstacle to later learning ten more languages, living and dead; to love their beauty and to collect fruits of the mind from them. An educated person of our time has to do that. (Suphan, 1883, p. 336f.)

In sum, Herder insists on the primacy of the mother tongue as the first perspective on the world through which thought and learning are formed and, indeed, become possible. However, it never seems to have occurred to him that anyone might think that the mother tongue might be enough and that our education should stop there.

Did Herder believe in bounded languages and communities?

The picture of Herder’s views on multilingualism and linguistic diversity I have offered here is almost diametrically opposed to the one current in sociolinguistics at the moment, where Herder is assumed to have formulated the ideology of an isomorphic relationship between language and nation. Baumann and Briggs sum this view up as follows:

The desired goal of unification rests upon discursive unity, provided by the authority of tradition and a unified adherence to the national spirit. And here too, linguistic homogeneity is a necessary condition: “One people, one fatherland, one language” (SW 18: 347). In Herder’s vision, a viable polity can only be founded on a national language resistant to the penetration of foreign tongues. (Bauman & Briggs, 2003, p. 193f.)

There are a number of severe problems with this interpretation. To begin with, Herder is no sloganeer; and the slogan “One people, one fatherland, one language” seemed to me to sound a bit too much like “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer!” to ring true to Herder. So, I looked it up …

The quote is from an appendix in the complete works for Herder, which offers a collection of “letters kept back and ‘cut off.’ Mostly unpublished. […] Older drafts and discarded pieces.” [“zurückbehaltene und ‘abgeschnittene’ Briefe. Meist ungedruckt. […] Ältere Niederschriften und ausgesonderte Stücke.” (Suphan, 1883, ToC)]. If I understand this correctly, the damning slogan that now supposedly sums up Herder can thus be found somewhere in Herder’s “discarded” private notes and was first published in 1883, exactly eighty years after his death.

Even in this minor piece, it does not appear as a slogan. The text is a short report about a conversation among friends who discuss the state of disunity among the German states whose rulers abuse and backstab each other.

Alle waren [wir] der Meinung, daß in Deutschland, wenn wir nicht ein zweites Pohlen seyn wollten, keine Mühe edler angewandt werde, als diese Dissension zu zerstören. Alle Waffen der Ueberzeugung und Ironie, des guten Herzens und des gesunden Verstandes sollte man gebrauchen, um jene Provinzialgötzen zu Dan und Bethel, den Wahn und [Selbst]Dünkel abzuthun, und in Allem das große Gefühl emporzubringen, daß wir Ein Volk seyn, Eines Vaterlandes, Einer Sprache. Daß wir uns in dieser ehren und bestreben müßen, von allen Nationen unpartheiisch zu lernen, in uns selbst aber Nation zu seyn.
We were all of the opinion that, if Germany was not to become a second Poland [in the 18^th century, Austria, Prussia and Russia divided Poland amongst themselves and Poland ceased to exist as a nation until after WWI], no endeavour would be more worthy than to destroy this disunity. All the weapons of persuasion and irony, the good heart and the good sense should be used to tear down the provincial idols of Dan and Bethel [a biblical reference to idol worship; 1 Kings 12: 25-33] and of delusion and conceit; and to raise up in everything the great feeling that we should be one people, of one fatherland, of one language. That through it we must honour ourselves and strive to learn from all nations without fear or favour but remain a nation in ourselves. (Suphan, 1883, p. 347)

In order to arrive at Bauman and Briggs’ interpretation, the context had to be removed and misread. One might be generous and accept that “One people, one fatherland, one language” is a fair translation of “[…] Ein Volk seyn, Eines Vaterlandes, Einer Sprache” although on the basis of the English I had assumed to find “Ein Volk, ein Vaterland, eine Sprache;” and although the customary square brackets to signal an omission are missing. More importantly, Bauman and Briggs’ interpretation renders as universal a statement that clearly is intended to only apply to the divided German states of Herder’s time. It is to overlook Herder’s general relativist stance and impute a universalist philosophy to him.

The claim that in Herder’s vision “a viable polity can only be founded on a national language resistant to the penetration of foreign tongues” is pure fantasy. While Herder did, thankfully, not use masculinist metaphors of interlanguage penetration, the very next sentence following “the slogan” points out the importance of learning from all nations without taking sides; in modern terms we might say, that “von allen Nationen unpartheiisch zu lernen” asks the reader to learn widely without being ethnocentric.

The exhortation to learn widely is not unique to this passage but a recurrent theme in Herder’s writing, as we also saw in the discussion of language learning above. The key claim is the belief in the organic connectedness of all humanity in every field of human endeavour. What is particularly noteworthy here is that his insistence on the necessity to learn from others is, for an 18^th century European, exceptionally “non-Eurocentric.” In his plan for the reformation of the Livonian curriculum (Journal, Chapter 4), for instance, he writes that students will always have to study French and English history. He concedes their importance but goes on to add that one cannot rest there but also needs to include the history of the Jews, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Tartars, the Indians and Persians, the Arabs, the Greeks, and “the newer peoples” (“die neuern Völker”).

While Herder insists on learning from every people, language and culture with an open mind, he does object to the mixing of peoples, languages and cultures that is the result of empire. An excerpt from the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, which were published in the 1790s, is worth quoting at some length:

But why must peoples have effect on peoples in order to disturb each other’s peace? It is said that this is for the sake of progressively growing culture; but what a completely different thing the book of history says! […] And if through the friction between peoples there perhaps spread here this art, there that convenience, do these really compensate for the evils which the pressing of the nations upon one another produced for the victor and the vanquished? Who can depict the misery that the Greek and Roman conquests brought indirectly and directly for the circle of the earth that they encompassed? Even Christianity, as soon as it had effect on foreign peoples in the form of a state machine, oppressed them terribly; in the case of several it so mutilated their own distinctive character that not even one and a half millennia have been able to set it right. Would we not wish, for example, that the spirits of the northern peoples, of the Germans, of the Gaels, the Slavs, and so forth, might have developed without disturbance and purely out of themselves?
And what good did the crusades do for the Orient? What happiness have they brought to the coasts of the Baltic Sea? The old Prussians [an extinct people indigenous to the Baltics; IP] are destroyed; Livonians, Estonians, and Latvians in the poorest condition still now curse in their hearts their subjugators, the Germans.
What, finally, is to be said of the culture that has been brought by Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen, and Dutchmen to the East and West Indies, to Africa among the negroes, into the peaceful islands of the southern world? Do not all these lands, more or less, cry for revenge? All the more for revenge since they have been plunged for an incalculable time into a progressively growing corruption. All these stories lie open to view in travel descriptions; they have also in part received vocal expression in connection with the trade in negroes. About the Spanish cruelties, about the greed of the English, about the cold impudence of the Dutch – of whom in the frenzy of the madness of conquest hero poems were written – books have been written in our time which bring them so little honor that, rather, if a European collective spirit lived elsewhere than in books, we would have to be ashamed of the crime of abusing humanity before almost all peoples of the earth. Let the land be named to which Europeans have come without having sinned against defenseless, trusting humanity, perhaps for all aeons to come, through injurious acts, through unjust wars, greed, deceit, oppression, through diseases and harmful gifts! Our part of the world must be called, not the wise, but the presumptuous, pushing, tricking part of the earth; it has not cultivated but has destroyed the shoots of peoples’ own cultures wherever and however it could.
What, generally, is a foisted, foreign culture, a formation [Bildung] that does not develop out of [a people’s] own dispositions and needs? It oppresses and deforms, or else it plunges straight into the abyss. […]
One human being, goes the saying, is for the other a wolf, a god, an angel, a devil. What are the human peoples that affect each other for each other? The negro depicts the devil as white, and the Latvian does not want to enter into heaven as soon as there are Germans there. “Why are you pouring water on my head?” said that dying slave to the missionary. “So that you enter into heaven.” “I do not want to enter into any heaven where there are whites” he spoke, turned away his face, and died. Sad history of humanity! (Forster, 2002, p. 380ff.)

It should be clear that, for Herder, it is not cultural closure per se that is desirable; what he objects to is foreign intervention. It is particularly admirable that his list of foreign oppressions can in no way be constructed as ethnocentric demanding freedom only for his own group. He does not hesitate to list Germans as oppressors of Balts and Slavs and, at the height of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism, he not only denounces these injustices of foreign intervention but tries to construct his argument from the perspective of the oppressed (“the negro depicts the devil as white”).

An English-centric monolingual mindset in sociolinguistics?

This Herder biography in the Macquarie University library was donated by the Australia-German Democratic Friendship Society

I believe I have shown that the current understanding in sociolinguistics of Herder as a theorist of monolingual bounded nations is simply not borne out by the evidence. Herder was a keen language learner, who argued for the importance of cultivating the mother tongue as the basis of the equally important learning of other languages so as to be able to learn from other cultures. He insisted that multilingual and multicultural learning is beneficial for the individual, the country, and for humanity if engaged in freely. If cultural and linguistic contact, on the other hand, are forced upon a people through imperial expansion he considers them a “crime of abusing humanity.”

In writing this piece I have found myself in the odd position of defending a pale, stale male. As such, this rehabilitation may seem a relatively pointless exercise, particularly as it does not reflect well on our discipline that we should be arguing over the ideas of a man who died more than 200 years ago and whose lasting influence has been relatively moderate.

The reason I consider this exercise important is because it evidences a lack of academic rigour in the reception of material in languages other than English. The sociolinguistic reception of Herder is evidence for what I have elsewhere called “English-centric monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism.”

Textual interpretation is ultimately the setting forth of a claim. Bauman & Briggs (2000, 2003) have set forth such a claim based on their reading of Herder, and I have here set forth a counterclaim. We’ve both used accepted methods of philological argument. That is how it should be.

How it should not be is that a deeply flawed interpretation is left completely untested for 16 years and immediately accepted as gospel in the field. Why did not one of those sociolinguists who are so keen to denounce “the Herderian triad” consider themselves under an obligation to actually go back to the original and arrive at their own interpretation?

Is it because we regard a critical approach as unnecessary when it comes to texts produced in languages other than English? Is it because of a hidden language ideology that texts produced in languages other than English are only objects of analysis? That the meaning of texts produced in languages other than English is somehow more transparent and that any claims about such texts are not subject to the usual tests?

If an analysis of a text (treating Herder’s writings as “a text”) in German, a major European language – and, furthermore, a text that is fully published and by an author about whom a significant body of work exists – is so uncritically accepted, what does that mean for all those analyses we read of texts (written, spoken, online, published, unpublished) in languages even further down the global linguistic hierarchy?

References

Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. L. (2000). Language Philosophy as Language Ideology: John Locke and Johann Gottfried Herder. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (pp. 139-204). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. L. (2003). Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Forster, M. N. (Ed.). (2002). Herder: Philosophical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haux, C. (1988). “Eine Empfindsame Liebe:” Der Brautbriefwechsel zwischen Caroline Flachsland und Johann Gottfried Herder. MA thesis. Bielefeld.

Haym, R. (1880). Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken dargestellt [Herder Portrayed on the Basis of His Life and Works] (Vol. 1). Berlin: Gaertner.

Herder, J. G. (2011 [1769]). Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 [Diary of My Journey in the Year 1769]. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/journal-meiner-reise-im-jahr-1769-2011

Hoerder, D. (2008). Migration and Cultural Interaction across the Centuries: German History in a European Perspective. German Politics & Society, 87(26, 2), 1-23. doi: 10.2307/23742821

Kantzenbach, F. W. (1970). Herder. Reinbek: Rowohlt.

Piller, I. (2015). Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 1-9 DOI: 10.1080/17447143.2015.1102921

Stender, G. F. (1761). Neue Vollständige Lettische Grammatik [New Complete Latvian Grammar]. Mitau [Jelgava]: Steffenhagen.

Suphan, B. (Ed.). (1883). Herders Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 23. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.

multilingual writers – Language on the Move

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2026

Previous Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenges

January: a book about new technologies in intercultural communication

February: a book about settler colonialism

March: a book stirs that your social imagination

April: A book about the philosophy of language

May: A book about the experience of growing up as the child of a migrant

June: A book about narrative research in a migration context

July: A book exploring linguistic diversity from multiple perspectives

August: A book about translation and interpreting

September: A book about digital migration studies

October: A book about an under-recognized diaspora

November: A book of migrant poetry

December: Cozy fiction for when you need a break from your research

Literacy in Multilingual Contexts

What is a WERA IRN?

What does the IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” do?

Literacy as a resource

Building on the “Next Generation Literacies” network

Network Conveners

Kick-off meeting

What’s next?

An open invitation

Related content

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2025

January: The Politics of Academic Reading

February: Global Communication Platform WhatsApp

March: How to Free a Jinn

April: Life in a New Language

May: Judging Refugees

June: Wordslut

July: Inspector Singh

August: Speech and the City

September: Multilingual Crisis Communication

October: Critical Sociolinguistics

November: Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples

December: Language Discordant Social Work

Are language technologies counterproductive to learning?

Has ChatGPT ruined writing practice?

Machine writing and bad human writing now look the same

Where is the line between outsourcing learning to tech and using tech to support learning?

Translation as a bridge to English writing?

Grammar checkers, suggested phrasing, and auto-complete

How best to use language technologies to develop academic literacies and communicative competence?

Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism

Edited transcript below

Can you tell us about the story behind Multilingualism and history?

How is Multilingualism and History structured? What topics are being addressed and who are the contributors?

How did we get the history of multilingualism wrong?

Let’s talk a bit more about amnesia and ignorance pacts.

Where do data about past multilingualism come from and what methods do we use in the study of historical multilingualism?

What do ghost signs tell us about past multilingualism?

How is the past entangled in the present and the future?

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024

January: A book that is critical of the AI hype

February: A book that delves deeper into language and digitization

March: A book about language and magic

April: A book about names and naming

May: A book about multilingualism in history

June: A book about translanguaging

July: A novel about linguistic diversity

August: A book about linguistic diversity and social justice

September: A book about discursive construction

October: A book about language and emotions

November: A sociolinguistic ethnography

December: A migrant memoir

Happy Reading!

We, heirs of the multilingual Sumerians

Do you know in which language the Sumerians started the written chronicle of humanity?

The multilingual Sumerians

Language mixing

Multilingual texts

Metalinguistic commentary

What about translation and interpreting?

Sumerian multilingualism lives on

References

Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021

January

February

**November: A book that explains why the 2020 Language on the Move Reading Challenge is important**