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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Transcript

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

ZOZAN: Hello, thank you for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laughter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he said, “I don’t know”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALEX: Yeah, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALEX: Hong Kong. I think it was….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ZOZAN: Well, …

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

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

(Image credit: Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino)

August is celebrated in the Philippines as Buwan ng Wika (language month).

This celebration began in 1946, shortly after the then Philippine President Manuel Quezon declared Tagalog as the basis for the creation of a national language (later termed Filipino). Initially, the annual events celebrated the unification of the archipelago of 183 languages through the national language. More recently, the focus has been on recognizing and celebrating the many languages of the Philippines.

This year’s theme declares Filipino at mga Wikang Katutubo sa Dekolonisasyon ng Pag-iisip ng mga Pilipino (Filipino and other Indigenous languages for the decolonization of the Filipino people’s way of thinking). This theme is an extension of UNESCO’s declaration of 2019 as the Year of Indigenous Languages and points to the upcoming decade of action for the world’s Indigenous Peoples and Languages.

The Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) in Australia, particularly it’s SBS Filipino segment, also celebrates Buwan ng Wika. It’s a way to pay homage to Filipino migrants in Australia.

For this year’s Buwan ng Wika, I have been interviewed by Nikki Alfonso-Gregorio about naming practices in the Philippines. You can listen to the interview here.

Before colonization, only given names were common and surnames were not formalized. These given names were based on nature, and cultural and spiritual beliefs. This is still true of given names today, although other themes have been added, including those that reflect love of God, love of family, love of literature and the entertainment industry, and love for creativity.

Family names arrived in the Philippines with the Claveria decree of 1849, which required Filipinos to adopt family names. To learn more, head over to the SBS website.

In fact, it is a key feature of cancel culture that “to cancel” someone increases their notoriety. As a rule, their name and (mis)deeds gain more publicity; and whether there is such a thing as bad publicity continues to be an open question.

Contrast contemporary “cancel culture” with deeply entrenched long-standing cultural practices that systematically erase some people from the collective memory.

Because it is International Women’s Day, this blog post is dedicated to cancelled women.

What was the maiden name of your great-grandmother?

Do you know the birth names of your four great grandmothers? Chances are that you do not. In most European societies, women have traditionally taken their husband’s name on marriage. Many still do. Even in societies where women do not change their name when they marry, the father’s family name is usually bestowed on the children.

As a result, many people in western societies can trace their paternal ancestries back a couple of generations – simply through the surname. By contrast, maternal lines are quickly forgotten.

I don’t know the birth name of my great-grandmother (left) although the mitochondrial DNA in my body is 100% identical to hers (ca. 1914)

Only few people even know the birth names of their great-grandmothers.

Consider how incredibly strange the absence of that knowledge is! We share an eights of our DNA with each of these four women. If you are a woman yourself, your mitochondrial DNA, which is transferred unaltered from mother to daughter, is 100% identical to one of these four women. So, biologically, great-grandmothers are incredibly close. Yet, few of us stop to consider why we know next to nothing about these women and why even their birth names elude us.

Naming practices are a form of entrenched cancel culture that erase women from the genealogical record.

Did you know that James Douglas left something in your lady parts?

Let me restate the previous section: few women know the names of the mothers with who they share an identical mitochondrial DNA for more than two generations back.

While you grieve for those cancelled women, consider this: in medical terminology, one of your lady parts carries the name of a Scottish man from the 18^th century.

There is a cavity between the uterus and the bowel, which is commonly referred to as “Pouch of Douglas” in English. And the term has been adopted into most other languages. In Arabic, it is called “radabat dughlas”, in French “cul-de-sac de Douglas”, in German “Douglas-Raum”, in Japanese “dagurasu”, in Polish “zatoka douglasa”, or “fondo de saco de Douglas” in Spanish.

How did this name come about? Medicinenet.com has the answer: “the Scottish anatomist James Douglas (1675-1742) […] explored this region of the female body and left his name attached to at least 3 other structural features in the area.”

I feel enraged and grossed out no matter how often I read this explanation.

“Pouch of Douglas”

Douglas certainly made sure he would not get cancelled easily.

Maybe that was because he was part of a generation of men who cancelled a whole class of women and their knowledge: midwives.

Douglas worked at a time when the practice of medicine started to become a scientific discipline. In the process, medicine expanded its remit. Beyond diseases, pregnancy and childbirth also came under its purview. Douglas is usually hailed as one of the first anatomists to specialize in female reproductive organs.

That is only true, of course, if you discount any knowledge not derived through the scientific process. Midwives had had solid knowledge of female anatomy and the processes of pregnancy and childbirth for centuries.

Today, practitioners supporting women through pregnancy and childbirth come in two classes: midwives at the lower end of the professional hierarchy and gynecologists and obstetricians at the upper end. Most of the former are women, most of the latter are men.

So, after our cancelled mothers, let’s remember our cancelled midwives.

Women even get cancelled in favor of a necktie

Before you consider writing in that women have long stopped accepting their collective cancellation and that things are different today, do not bother. I am well aware that we have come a long way. I am also well aware that we still have a long way to go.

Coaster set of famous Croatians

The cancellation of women in matters big and small is a deeply entrenched and ongoing aspect of our culture. I am reminded of that daily by a set of coasters I have in my house. I received these as a gift in 2019.

The set of six coasters celebrate famous Croatians: there is Ivan Vučetić, Faust Vrančić, Eduard Slavoljub Penkala, Ruđer Bošković, and Nikola Tesla.

That is five men (that the concept of nationality did not really apply during their lifetime and that their status as “Croatian” may be debatable is a matter for another time).

Coasters customarily come in sets of six. Who do you think got the sixth slot?

Cvijeta Zuzorić maybe, who ran an influential Renaissance salon and wrote poetry in three languages? Or Paula Preradović, the composer of the Austrian national anthem? Or Savka Dabčević-Kučar, who in the 1960s became one of the world’s first female prime ministers?

Well, no – after five famous Croatian men, the sixth slot went to the famous Croatian necktie.

So, there you have it – even in this day and age, the achievements of women get cancelled in favor of some random object of men’s clothing.

Remembering cancelled women

My elegy for cancelled women could go on and on, and some other time I will write about the cancelled women of linguistics.

Today, just remember this: cultural processes do not rest on individual occurrences but on systematic patterns.

We certainly live in a cancel culture – but not because Dr Seuss did not get mentioned in a speech. We live in a cancel culture because whole groups of people are systematically erased from the historical record, from common knowledge, and from our societal consciousness.

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Akhlaq Ahmad at work on the mural in Shahdara for the ‘Delhi, I Love You’ project. (Image Credit: Delhi, I Love You)

On July 8, 2020, The Wire published an anonymous article by a young Indian Muslim. In it, the writer shares his painful experience of how, in the anti-Muslim Hindutva climate created by the right-wing BJP government, his identity has been reduced to his Muslim name. Despite the fact that he observes no Islamic practices and champions liberal views, his Hindu colleagues look at him with suspicion. On social media, he is often called a jihadi, an ISIS-sympathizer, and mulla, a slur, for speaking up for the rights of minorities, especially Muslims.

Fearing for his life, he has stopped saying in public salamwaleikum, the Muslim greeting in Urdu. He also instructed his kids not to call him abba, an Urdu word for ‘dad’. He even started tweaking his name, so that it does not sound Muslim.

While violence, including mob-lynching of Muslims and the anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi in February 2020, has been discussed, the symbolic violence against the Urdu language—a proxy for and target of hate and discrimination against Muslims—hasn’t. I use the term Urdu in a broader sense to encompass the language as well as names.

Consider Urdu personal names and cases of hatred and discrimination that revolve around the identities they reveal. It is worth noting that the  BJP government in the last few years has renamed many places containing Urdu/Muslim names with names that evoke Hindu history and culture.

Personal names are not simply a system of identification by which people differentiate one person from another; they are also carriers of cultural information, including the social identities of the bearers of the names. A study conducted in the USA found that white-sounding names such as Emily and Greg were more likely to get callbacks from employers than Black-sounding names Lakisha and Jamal. While some names in the US clearly indicate racial identity, others such as John and Michelle are non-discernable. By contrast, in India, most Muslim names are discernable as they draw largely upon Persian and Arabic sources as against Hindu names which are derived, among other sources, from Hindu traditions. Since Urdu names are signposts of the Muslim identity, they easily become instruments of hate and discrimination against Muslims.

In May 2015, a Muslim young man, Zeeshan, holding an MBA degree was denied a job by Hare Krishna Exports, a diamond company based in Mumbai, because of his religion. Less than fifteen minutes after he submitted his application online, Zeeshan received a shocking reply from the company: “We regret to inform you that we hire only non-Muslim candidates”. Clearly, the decision to reject his application was based on the candidate’s Urdu/Muslim name.

Other cases of discrimination based on Muslim names have surfaced recently in companies that deliver goods to people on their doors. On 24 April, 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Barkat Patel, a Muslim employee of Grofers, an online grocery store, went to deliver grocery to Ms. Chaturvedi at Jaya Park in Mumbai. But her father stopped her from taking the delivery. According to the report filed at the police station,  the father wanted to know the  name of the delivery guy first. Once he found out from the name that Barkat was Muslim, he refused to take it. Barkat recorded the whole exchange on his mobile phone and submitted it to the police.

Similar cases of discrimination were reported from Zomato and Swiggy, popular food delivery companies. On October 25, 2019, Swiggy lodged a complaint with a police station in Hyderabad stating that a customer refused to receive their food order because the delivery man was Muslim. Another case of discrimination was reported on August 1, 2019 in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. In this case, a customer Amit Shukla cancelled his Zomato delivery when he found out from the name Faiyaz that his delivery man was Muslim. What makes it even more reprehensible is that Shukla argued that this was part of his freedom of expression and religion guaranteed by the constitution.

However, names don’t always correspond with social-religious identities. Some Hindu names of Persian or Arabic origin bear similarities with Urdu/Muslim name. In absence of other visual cues e.g. outfit or facial looks, such names could miscommunicate the identities of the bearers of the names. This is exactly what happened when a 23-old young Hindu man named Sahil was lynched by some Hindus in Maujpur in Delhi. Although the police denies the claim, Sahil’s parents, Sunil and Suneeta, both believe that their son was killed because he was mistaken for a Muslim who had entered a Hindu neighborhood. Suneeta expressed her regret at naming him Sahil, “I wouldn’t have named him Sahil had I known that it would turn out to be the cause of his death”. The incident that led to Sahil’s killing is worth mentioning. Sahil was at home when he found out that some of his friends had a brawl in Gali Number 5 in Maujpur, Delhi. When he rushed to the spot to resolve the issue the residents of the neighborhood asked his name. On knowing that his name was Sahil, the crowd turned to him and thrashed him severely. He died on his way to the hospital.

In another case, a Muslim man’s nickname, which did not sound Muslim, actually saved him. On May 19, 2016, as part of beautification of Delhi, Akhlaq Ahmad, an Indian artist who holds a degree in fine arts, and Swen Simon, a French artist, were writing an Urdu couplet on a wall in Shahdara, Delhi. Some members of the right-wing RSS gathered there and asked them to stop writing the couplet in Urdu and threatened them with dire consequences if they didn’t. They said, “ …they could bear anything, but not the Urdu script” They snatched the artists’ paintbrushes and smudged the Urdu writing on the wall. In an interview, the Muslim artist, said, “…I said my name is Shabbu [his nick name] and they assumed I was Shambhu, a Hindu. So, they turned their ire towards my French colleague, Swen Simon, asking him to pay me my wages and go back to Lahore”.

This exception only proves the rule. The cases of Sahil and Akhlaq/Sabbu are both of some kind of miscommunication based on Muslim names. The action that led to the loss of Sahil’s life and saved Akhlaq’s is based on the ideology of hate and discrimination against Muslims as manifested from their names.

The fear of uttering Urdu names, greetings, or words in public is increasing among Muslims in north India. In response to the anonymous article with which I opened this piece, Rana Safvi, a Muslim writer tweeted that she also avoids saying salaam, Muslim greeting, in public.

Although Akhlaq had a sigh of relief because his non-Muslim-sounding name saved him, the stories of Zeeshan, Barkat, Sahil, and Faiyaz, clearly show how ideologies of hate and discrimination can be routed through personal names, labels over which we as bearers of the names have little control.

Discrimination based on names are just be a tip of the iceberg of a larger systemic process of exclusion and marginalization of Muslims in India. A democracy worthy of its name cannot allow names to be the ground of discrimination against its own citizens in whose very name it rules.

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Annastacia Palaszczuk and members of her family (Source: Couriermail)

Would Kirk Douglas be a Hollywood legend if he had kept his birth name Issur Danielovitch? Would Bob Dylan have achieved global fame if he had kept his birth name Robert Zimmerman? Would the current Australian treasurer Joe Hockey have had an equally successful political career if his father had not anglicized the family surname from Hokeidonian to Hockey? It is, of course, impossible to know the answer to these questions but it is fair to assume that the answer to these questions is ‘not likely.’

Anglicizing stigmatized ethnic names is often considered typical of an earlier era of immigration when assimilation prevailed. In The American Language (first published in 1919) H. L. Mencken famously observed that European immigrants were likely to give up their distinctive names in America for ‘protective coloration’ in order to escape ‘linguistic hostility’ and ‘social enmity:’

[…] more important than this purely linguistic hostility, there is a deeper social enmity, and it urges the immigrant to change his name with even greater force. For a hundred years past all the heaviest and most degrading labor of the United States has been done by successive armies of foreigners, and so a concept of inferiority has come to be attached to mere foreignness. […] This disdain tends to pursue an immigrant with extraordinary rancor when he bears a name that is unmistakably foreign and hence difficult to the native, and open to his crude burlesque. Moreover, the general feeling penetrates the man himself, particularly if he be ignorant, and he comes to believe that his name is not only a handicap, but also intrinsically discreditable – that it wars subtly upon his worth and integrity. […] The immigrant, in a time of extraordinary suspicion and difficulty, tried to get rid of at least one handicap. (Mencken 1919, p. 280)

A recent comparison of the earnings of European immigrants to the USA in the 1930s who did or did not Americanize their names has found that a name change during that period was indeed associated with earnings’ gains of at least 14% (Biavaschi et al., 2013).

But is all this of purely historical interest? How do ethnic names fare today after decades of multiculturalism and in a so-called age of super-diversity?

One thing that contemporary research has shown is that ethnic names continue to constitute a barrier at the point of entry into the job market; i.e. job applicants with ethnic names are less likely to receive a response or be invited for interview than candidates with non-ethnic names. For instance, a 2009 Australian study found that fictitious job applicants with Chinese, Middle Eastern and Indigenous names were less likely to be called back than those with identical CVs but Italian names. Fictitious candidates with Anglo-Saxon names had the highest call-back rate (Booth et al. 2009). A similar Western Australian study comparing accountant job applicants with Middle Eastern and Anglo-Saxon names reached similar conclusions (Pinkerton 2013) as did a German study with Turkish and German names (Schneider 2014).

Conversely, changing an ethnic name continues to pay off for some migrant groups as a 2009 Swedish study found: Middle Eastern and Slavic migrants to Sweden who changed their names in the 1990s obtained a substantial increase in labour earnings over similarly qualified migrants from the same origin groups who did not change their name to a Swedish or neutral name (a ‘neutral’ name is one that is not particularly associated with any particular ethnic or national group) (Arai & Skogman Thoursie, 2009).

These studies all focus on the point of entry into the labour market but we do not know much about how ethnic personal names are talked about in everyday life. Do ethnic personal names continue to matter for those who have established themselves? Do ethnic personal names attract disdain, rancor, enmity or crude burlesque in this day and age?

Questions such as these are usually difficult to research systematically but recent events in Australian politics have provided a perfect corpus of reactions to a non-Anglicized and strongly ethnic name, namely the Polish name Palaszczuk.

Annastacia Palaszczuk is a third-generation Australian who was thrown into the national spotlight last weekend as the leader of Queensland’s Australian Labour Party (ALP) and, in an unexpected election outcome, as the likely future state premier of Queensland.

To begin with, Annastacia Palaszczuk is living proof that it is possible to be successful in Australian politics with a non-Anglo name. She has held her electorate, the seat of Inala, a suburb of Brisbane, since 2006, and the name Palaszczuk must be a bit of household name there because Annastacia’s father Henry Palaszczuk preceded his daughter as the member for Inala and held the seat from 1992 to 2006.

However, outside Inala and certainly outside Queensland, Annastacia Palaszczuk was relatively unknown until last Saturday. In social media, her name became an immediate topic of comments and discussion. These comments provide us with a window into the discursive construction of belonging in contemporary Australia’s multicultural society and I hope someone will analyse this precious corpus systematically. A few preliminary observations include the following.

Difficulty

The predominant theme that emerged was around the difficulty of the name as in the following examples:

Might have to learn how to pronounce Palaszczuk at this rate. #qldvotes

— Tanya Ashworth (@ordinarytanya) January 31, 2015

The whole of Queensland just realised they’re going to have to learn to spell their new Premier’s name. #qldvotes

— Wes Mountain (@therevmountain) January 31, 2015

Solutions to the problem of pronouncing or spelling a difficult name were also offered, such as the following mnemonic or the suggestion to use a nickname instead:

Loved @GrahamPerrettMP spelling lesson 4 name of poss next Qld Premier: It is 'PALA, Sydney Zoo, Canberra Zoo UK' #qldvotes @AnnastaciaMP

— OzLabourStart (@OzLabourStart) January 31, 2015

@therevmountain it's Queensland. They will give her a nickname

— ChristopherPatterson (@Christo45046444) January 31, 2015

Most of the comments related to the difficulty of the Palaszczuk name are good-humoured and self-deprecating. At the same time, the very fact that the name and its difficulty is topicalized points to the fact that for these commentators the name is still remarkable and noteworthy as one that does not index a ‘normal’ or ‘default’ imagined Australian identity. That legitimate belonging is tied to the name becomes even clearer in comments that exaggerate the difficulty of the name through intentional misspellings, silly syllable counts or suggestions that it will be impossible to learn:

Wow! 25 days ago I didn't know the ALP had a leader. #QldVotes #Annastaciawho?

— Nathan Kneen (@nathankneen) January 31, 2015

And then there are the passive-aggressive comments about her name such as this one:

Cate: Dear Annastacia Palaszczuk,

Can we call you Anna? or do you prefer AP? (Couriermail)

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

While comments such as the above are concerned with belonging in Australia, another theme can be observed around authenticity and the fact that the name is not pronounced in the original Polish fashion. Annastacia and her family apparently pronounce their name /ˌpælǝ’ʒeɪ/, as do the Australian media. Commentators were quick to exhort ‘us’ (i.e. the Australian public) or Annastacia herself to learn how to pronounce her name ‘correctly:’

Let's learn to say it properly. Correct Polish pronunciation of @annastaciaMP Palaszczuk's name is Pa-wa-shchook, not Pallashay. #qldvotes

— Marcus Kuczynski (@cuscus1) February 1, 2015

@AnnastaciaMP Just checked the polish pronunciation guide. Your last name is pronounced "Pala-Chook" you ain't fooling any1! #Fail #qldvotes

— Mitch (@HEELAussie) February 2, 2015

Wendy2: Well you don’t pronounce her name Pala-shay to begin with. Why does everyone do that? Has the media been given notes telling them to pronounce it that way? Palaszczuk being a Polish name would be pronounced Palaz-chook. I can’t imagine why Ms. Palaszczuk would not want to use the traditional pronounciation of her family name, some may even suggest a sort of cultural cringe. It makes me think of Keeping Up Appearances’ snobbish character Hyancinth Bucket who insisted on her surname being pronounced Bouquet. How facile and false. (Couriermail)

What’s in a name?

We’ve come a long way since H. L. Mencken’s time when having a non-Anglo name laid migrants open to rancour, disdain, enmity and crude burlesque. Or have we?

Annastacia Palaszczuk and her father have been successful in Queensland politics since 1992. So, after taking the entry barrier, clearly a lot is possible for bearers of a non-Anglo name. At the same time, the chatter about Annastacia Palaszczuk’s name that could be observed on social media in the last few days also demonstrates that a non-Anglo name continues to ‘raise difficulties’ in contemporary Australia. Beyond being remarkable and noteworthy, such names also continue to be the target of cheap jokes and insults.

The latter seem to come more frequently from anonymous commentators in the comments’ sections of newspapers than from identifiable tweeters. This would suggest that there are two forms of stigma now: having a strong ethnic name continues to carry some stigma but openly questioning the legitimacy of its bearer now attracts stigma, too.

Arai, M., & Skogman Thoursie, P. (2009). Renouncing Personal Names: An Empirical Examination of Surname Change and Earnings Journal of Labor Economics, 27 (1), 127-147 DOI: 10.1086/593964

Behind a name

One’s name is one of the most salient features for one’s identity. Some parents suffer from extraordinary indecisiveness when giving their newborn a wonderfully auspicious and proper name, all with utmost good intentions and expectations. English language learners often have the same experience later in life: how did you get your English name, especially if your mother tongue is not an alphabetic language?

If you ask overseas students how they named themselves in English, you probably will get some surprising and amusing answers. For instance, a young man from Taiwan shared this experience with me: He was given a name by his English teacher when he was a kid. “You are George,” said the teacher to him with a book of names in her hand. After he went home and told his mother about it, he started to hate the name. It was because the way his mother, whose first language is Taiwanese and who doesn’t speak any English, pronounced the name. The way she pronounced “George” made it sound like the Taiwanese word for “toad”. This made him feel upset and humiliated. After a few years, he was given another English name by another teacher. This time, he was called Wilson. He liked it and has kept using it until now for two reasons. Firstly, it is not so common in English textbooks. Secondly, the 28th President of the United States was called Wilson, although that was a surname.

As for me, I decided to name myself in preparation for the educational setting just before I entered college. It was not an easy choice for me, because I didn’t feel any English name sounded like myself and could express my identity. Finally, I named myself Grace after the wife of the US president in the movie, Air Force One. It sounded very elegant to me and surely I could not go wrong with the name of a fictional US first lady. However, in the first semester of college, a teacher played some TV episodes to us in which an “old lady” who was always telling tales had the same name as mine! I felt very embarrassed sitting in class. However, somehow I have just kept on using it. In addition to the English name that I use for English speakers, I have my Chinese name transliterated into the Latin alphabet on my passport as the official name on my documents. Nevertheless, I always feel distant from it because the spelling, which merely presents the sounds, misses out all the great meanings my parents bestowed upon my birth name, which is unique and unlike any other. Never mind all that talk about the Chinese being collectivist, we are very individualistic when it comes to names!

In addition to the many stories you can hear about choosing an English name, I found something interesting in interactions among overseas students introducing themselves to others in Australia. When meeting with non-Mandarin Chinese speakers, some prefer using their English name to make it easier for the audience. Some prefer using the spelling or homonym of their Chinese name, so it feels more like themselves in a sense. There are also some, but very few, using more unusual names to impress people, trying to stand out in this individualist culture.

When we meet other people from Taiwan, things become even more interesting and sophisticated. While meeting for the first time, one may start with one’s English name since the setting is in Australia. However, once the interlocutors realize they come from the same country, become familiar with each other, and maybe begin to converse in Mandarin or Taiwanese, at some point they start to exchange their Chinese names. This action implies that “now I know you in person,” no matter which name they would prefer calling each other afterwards. Asking and giving our birth given names symbolises a further level of the personal relationship. It is as if one’s real identity has been revealed and is suggestive of the potential for longer and deeper relationships. On the other hand, if a person purposefully refuses to mention their birth given name, the subtle underlying implication is “I am not revealing myself to you” or “I do not want you to know me.” By implication, the English name becomes a mask behind which we can hide.

Have you changed your name in another language environment? I’d love to hear your story!

January 2010

In the year in which I’ve been away from the UAE, the fervor for the use of “Arabian Gulf” instead of “Persian Gulf” has certainly heated up here. This map showing the travels of Ibn Battuta in Dubai’s Ibn Battuta Mall identified the gulf as “Persian” when I took the first picture in January 2010. By December 2010, when I took the second picture an unsightly white piece of paper had been used to cover up the “Persian Gulf” name. I suppose the official internationally recognized name “Persian Gulf” became unspeakable (or rather unshowable) in this Dubai mall in the wake of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deliberate flouting of international conventions when she used “Arabian Gulf” in October this year.

Before I came to live in the UAE, I’m not even sure I was aware that you could call this particular waterway anything other than “Persian Gulf.”

December 2010

However, I have since learnt that the name “Arabian Gulf” has been a bone of contention and an efficient way to stir ethnic tensions and passions for about half a century. In the Huffington Post Jamal Abdi offers the following history of the term “Arabian Gulf:”

The term “Arabian Gulf” first appeared fifty years ago as Pan-Arabism propaganda aimed at unifying Arabs against Iranians, Israelis, and other non-Arabs in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein later co-opted the term to exploit ethnic rivalries in support of his regional claims and territorial ambitions, including his invasion of Iran and his campaigns against Iraqi Kurds. Later, Osama Bin Laden adopted the term in an attempt to stir ethnic rivalries to bolster his appeal among Arab populations.

The name war around “Persian Gulf” vs. “Arabian Gulf” is an age-old strategy of empire: Divide et impera! Still, the fervor with which people fight over nothing more than a name is sad and shocking to see whenever it happens.

One of history’s indictments against our generation will doubtlessly include that we fought over names while the referent of the name was dying. No matter what you want to call it, the Persian Gulf is on the brink of environmental collapse as Waterlink International explains:

The Persian Gulf’s contained environment makes it a natural repository for pollutants. Now the Gulf’s marine ecosystem is under stress from the impacts of unprecedented coastal reclamation, oil exploration and tanker movement, industrial developments and desalination projects.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a gulf by any other name is dying from pollution.

The Encyclopedia of the Muslim World has a good overview if you want to brush up your knowledge about Kyrgyzstan. However, even after reading this monograph, I haven’t been able to figure out what exactly distinguishes a Kyrgyz from an Uzbek. They certainly look alike to the degree that saying a given person is Kyrgyz or Uzbek makes them so, as this chilling account from a blogger on Global Voices shows:

… he called me and asked: “…so, no one is going to help us?” I wouldn’t wish this to anyone. I felt myself like a dog….I met them near the tuberculosis clinic. I took the driving wheel and shouted to everyone that he’s a Kyrgyz. With difficulties we managed to get him out of the district. On the street there were about 20 soldiers and behind them a crowd of young and not so young people of the Kyrgyz ethnicity. I don’t know what to do.

Amnesty International also report ethnicity as a matter of “claiming”:

Eyewitnesses have reported that groups of armed civilians, mostly young men claiming to be Kyrgyz, were roaming the streets of Osh, targeting districts of the city inhabited mainly by Uzbeks shooting at civilians, setting shops and houses on fire and looting private property. (my emphasis)

So, they hate each other with a vengeance but it’s not easily possible to say who is who?! Maybe that’s where accent comes in handy, just as it did in biblical times:

The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan River opposite Ephraim. Whenever an Ephraimite fugitive said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he said, “No,” then they said to him, “Say ‘Shibboleth!’” If he said, “Sibboleth” (and could not pronounce the word correctly), they grabbed him and executed him right there at the fords of the Jordan. On that day forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell dead. (Book of Judges, 12: 5-6)

The varieties of the Kyrgyz and Uzbek languages spoken in the Ferghana Valley seem to be mutually intelligible, which would leave ample scope for “shibboleths.”

Just as with the Bihari speakers of Urdu, the invention of ethnicity and language in the Ferghana Valley has largely been a product of colonial intervention: in Tsarist times, both groups (and some others) were lumped together as “Turks.” Soviet policy than made a distinction between “settled Turks” and “nomadic Turks” – the former were to be collectively known as “Uzbeks” and the latter went by a range of tribal names, including “Kipchak-Uzbeks” for those who are today “Kyrgyz.”

It’s all very confusing and to determine the “precise” meaning of “Kyrgyz” and “Uzbek” seems to be a bottomless-pit problem. However, the upshot is that the colonial re-definition of a social distinction (nomad vs. settled) as an ethnic distinction (which intersected in some way with the social distinction) in conjunction with the colonial creation of arbitrary boundaries (just as the British carved up India, Stalin carved up the Ferghana Valley between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) has created a recipe for mayhem and bloodshed.

This recipe is now readily available to corrupt politicians and criminals of all sorts if and when they choose to mobilize for their own purposes. Right now, the best hope for the people in Southern Kyrgyzstan seems to be more colonial intervention in the form of Russian peace-keepers. In the long term, all humanity will all have to look for ways to put the evil genies of ethnic and linguistic division back into the bottle.

A Canadian couple of Ghanaian origin was visiting Australia in November 2001. Their first stop was Brisbane. Having escaped the chill of the northern hemisphere, they enjoyed every bit of their week’s stay there and were looking forward to an even better time in Sydney. Their dream turned nightmarish when accommodation booked online fell way short of the standard shown in the brochure, and the area surrounding the hotel boasted iron bars in windows and a sea of graffiti greeted them as they made their way in the rental car. Feeling unsafe and unable to sleep that night, they decided to look up listings in the White Pages for Ghanaian names. They found Tetteh. And that is how I came to receive a telephone call late that night almost nine years ago.

They introduced themselves with their first (Anglo) names. The woman’s name turned out to be the same as my mother’s, Comfort. Intrigued, I asked her “ofai nε mεni dji ogbεi diεntsε?” [“Please what is your real/clan name?”] She hesitated and said “moko moko biko mi nεkε sane dan. Atso mi Komle, aankpa Komle.” [“Nobody has ever asked me this before. My name is Komle.”] The same clan name as that of my late sister-in-law!

The reason I had asked her for her clan name can be traced back to my first migration experience when I was eight years old. My family moved from Accra to Koforidua because of my father’s work. In our socialization in this new setting and other regions in Ghana that dad worked in, I got to observe my parents trace the family backgrounds of Ga people introduced to them through clan names, surnames and siblings’ names: “Mεni shia mli odjε?” [“Which house do you come from?”] “Mεni dji ogbεi diεntsε?” [“What is your real/clan name?”] “Mεni dji onyεmi mεi agbεi?” [“What are the names of your siblings?”] I learnt that through a person’s family name and/or their clan name their heritage and their history is preserved. This means also that families like ours living outside their hometown are able to link their kin who have settled in similar parts of the country. Many were the families and communities we forged out of these links as migrants!

As an adult on that night in Sydney many years later, we traced the family’s roots of our surprise callers to the same roots as my husband’s. We welcomed them into our home and hosted them for the remainder of their stay in Sydney. To both of them we became mi nyεmi yoo, mi nyεmi nuu kε wo bii [my sister, my brother and our children]. And to us and our children they became “auntie” and “uncle”. I don’t know why of all the Ghanaian names listed in the Sydney White Pages, it had to be ours that they found and why auntie bears the name of two very important people in my family’s history. What I do know is that on that fateful day a transnational family was born with links that go back in time and space and that criss-cross four continents – North America, Africa, Australia and even Europe – I had stayed with my sister-in-law and her husband in Italy during my migrant application process to Australia in 1992. Last month, I finally got to visit auntie and uncle in their home in Canada – as a sidetrip after attending AAAL in Atlanta!

What does this story tell us about language in transnational contexts? Is a name simply what people call you and what you respond to or is there something more to a name? The age-old question of “what’s in a name?” with a twist: names on the move and how they provide links in a world characterized by global (people) flows!

For Ga people, the clan name together with the person’s surname is usually traceable to a particular tsεmεi awe [fathers’ home] thus linking people to their roots. This is useful particularly for future generations born in Diasporas who go back to trace their lineage and unite with kin. As well as helping to forge family and community links, this system of naming also ensures that by checking on family backgrounds, relatives on the move do not end up marrying each other.

Thus, for Ghanaians in the Diaspora and for Ga people who seek to enjoy links with their community of origin, names provide one way of identifying and forging such links. There is an interconnectedness of lives that is embedded in names, which provide for a redefinition of family and which is worth exploring to understand community formation in lesser known linguistic and immigrant groups.

Many native speakers take it upon themselves to judge the English of people who don’t speak their brand of English. In the case of migrants to Australia this is most often to point out some deficiency: the judgment that someone’s English isn’t good enough has become a key facet of social exclusion and the judgment is used to keep migrants out of jobs or keep them in jobs below their qualifications. In fact, migrants, and particularly refugees, have become so firmly associated with “poor English” in the public imagination that having good English is now being used in the media to judge whether a refugee is “genuine” or not. I’m talking about the spokesman for the asylum seekers who were stuck on the Oceanic Viking until a few days ago. Both the fact that he is using an English name (Alex) instead of his “real” name and the fact that he is “well-spoken” and speaks “English with an American accent” have been held against him and have been used to discredit him. This is from an ABC interview:

MARK COLVIN: And the High Commissioner also said, I’ll quote “Alex’s accent is quite a distinct American accent. It is not the accent of a Sri Lankan Tamil”.
ALEX: Does the Sri Lankan High Commissioner feel that people in Sri Lanka don’t have American accents or British accents? Is there not international schools in Sri Lanka? Is there not people that do accent training for call centres and various other customer care services?
MARK COLVIN: So you trained in a call centre?
ALEX: Pardon me? I was trained in a call centre for an American call centre.

Alex himself has apparently been as surprised as I am that his high level of English proficiency could come to discredit his claim to refugee status:

[Alex] has expressed surprise over the fact that how his American accent English could become a reason for the rejection of his refugee plea. “Just because I speak English, and I was educated in an American boys mission school in my home town, and then I finished my BA, and then I finished my MBA in India, so does that mean I am not a refugee?

“We are facing genocide in Sri Lanka — it’s not about whether you are educated or not educated. Just the fact that you are Tamil, […]

A true Catch 22 story: call center operators all over the world as well as many migrants to Australia have to change their names to make it in an English-speaking world; similarly, they have to adjust their accents so that they sound less “foreign” to their far-away call-center customers or close-by employers.

Around the world learning English comes with the promise of social advancement and inclusion in the mythical “West” – just to be told “Ooops, overshot the mark, you’re too good to be genuine.”

I’m Japanese, but I’ve lived in Australia since 1993, while my husband, Marcin, migrated from Poland to Australia in 2000. Neither of us knew much about each other’s country nor language, before we met at the Three Wise Monkey, aka the cheesiest bar in Sydney, in 2005. After I handed in my PhD thesis in 2006, I dragged Marcin to Japan for a year and a half, where he learned many Japanese words and phrases including “娘さんと結婚させて下さい！[Please allow me to marry your daughter!]”

Unfortunately Marcin didn’t get to ask my otoosan (father) that very question – my otoosan passed away three months after we arrived in Japan. Given the fact that Marcin was totally new to the Japanese culture and language, he coped really well, not only in terms of helping us look after my bed-ridden otoosan, who lost his speech four years earlier, but also at his funeral and the rest of our stay in Japan.

Now back in Sydney, we have been married for over a year. “My/Kimie’s otoosan” has become simply “Otoosan”: he is also Marcin’s father now. We talk about otoosan a lot. Marcin had very little time to get to know his Japanese father-in-law, so he still asks many questions about him, which makes me feel warm inside – except the last question he posed during our lunch in a Chinese restaurant the other day:

Marcin: what’s otoosan’s name? (eating Chinese noodle)

Kimie: what? (stop eating the dim sim)

Marcin: what’s otoosan’s name?? (continuing to eat the noodle)

Kimie: ……………….you mean….his name?

Marcin: yes yes, what’s his name? (drinking jasmine tea)

Kimie: ……………….you mean…..you met my father, looked after him in the hospital, saw him pass away there, helped us organise his funeral, married me, all these years, you didn’t know otoosan’s name?

Marcin: nope (still eating the noodle, looking innocent).

According to him, no one told him otoosan’s first name and every one refers to him as otoosan or Takahashi san. In Japan, I suppose, you just don’t call your parents by their first name. Nevertheless I got a little bit upset. I was about to get angry, but then I quickly remembered our marriage ceremony. In front of all our guests (including Ingrid) and the celebrant, I just couldn’t remember Marcin’s middle name while exchanging marriage vows. It still doesn’t look good to see myself on the video asking the celebrant to repeat my husband-to-be’s middle name. To this day, I secretly check the spelling of his middle name by having a sneak peek at his passport when I have to fill out official documents.

Names can be a tricky business for multilingual/multicultural couples and their families! Please share your favorite multilingual and multicultural naming stories