Have you ever listened to a language you don’t know and thought you recognized a word—only to realize later that you were completely mistaken? Our ears play tricks on us.

A while ago, I ran a small experiment with my German students. I played them two short sentences in Czech, my native language, and asked them to transcribe what they heard. The results were fascinating.

For example, about 90% of the forty students wrote down the Czech word malí [maliː] ‘small’ as mani [maniː]. To me, this seems puzzling—there is no n in the word! But for my students, the Czech l-sound somehow resembled the German n-sound. None of the Czech speakers I consulted ever had this impression.

This little classroom experiment shows something important: we don’t all hear sounds the same way. Our ears—or better said, our brains—are tuned by the language(s) we grow up with.

Why do we hear differently?

Image 1: Oscillogram and spectrogram of the Italian words papa ‘Pope’ and pappa ‘porridge’

Long before we speak, we are already great language users. Research shows that newborn babies can already distinguish speech sounds from noises. Even more surprisingly, they are able to recognize the rhythm of their native language from a non-native one before birth.

After birth, infants are surrounded daily by an enormous amount of speech input. Step by step, they build categories for the sounds of their native language. Up until around 8 to 12 months they can distinguish nearly all of the world’s speech sounds, even those that never appear in their environment.

A Japanese baby, for example, can hear the difference between r and l just as well as American or German babies can. But this ability does not last. As children grow, their brains focus on the categories that matter in their own language and ignore the rest—like the difference between r and l. This is why many Japanese adults often find it notoriously difficult to distinguish the two consonants in languages like English. What was once easy for the baby can become very challenging for the adult.

We perceive foreign languages through native filters

Learning the sound system of a language doesn’t stop with vowels and consonants. It also includes rhythm and intonation. And even for individual sounds like a or o, it’s not only about how you articulate them but also how long you hold them. This brings us to segmental quantity, or length. It refers to the use of duration (short vs. long) of vowels or consonants to distinguish lexical meaning. Quantity shows remarkable cross-linguistic variation.

The case of long consonants in Italian

Image 2: Soundproof cabins at the Free University of Berlin (left) and University of Helsinki (right)

What feels natural in one language may not exist in another. Take Italian. It belongs to just 3.3% of the world’s languages that distinguish short from long consonants (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996).

This contrast appears in more than 1,800 Italian words, such as papa /ˈpapa/ ‘Pope’ versus pappa /ˈpapːa/ ‘porridge’ (Image 1). To be understood and to speak well, learners must get long consonants (called geminates) right—although it can be very challenging (e.g., Altmann et al. 2012).

Cross-linguistic differences in learners

In our project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language”, we examine how Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish learners acquire this feature.

The selection of these languages is not random. They all handle consonant length differently. German, for example, has no consonant length but contrasts short and long vowels in stressed syllables (e.g., Stadt [ʃtat] ‘city’ vs. Staat [ʃtaːt] ‘state’). Czech, like German, distinguishes vowel length, but unlike German, it does so in both stressed and unstressed syllables (e.g., nosí [ˈnosiː] ‘(s/he) carries’ vs. nosy [ˈnosɪ] ‘noses’). Finnish is the most similar to Italian, since it has both vowel and consonant length (e.g., muta [ˈmutɑ] ‘mud’ vs. mutta [ˈmutːɑ] ‘but’). And finally, Spanish has no length contrasts at all.

This diversity allows us to test how a learner’s native language shapes the way they hear and produce length in Italian.

How good are learners at perceiving length in Italian?

In a laboratory setting (Image 2) and by means of a perception experiment, we tested and compared 20 Czech, 20 Finnish, 20 German, and 20 Spanish learners of Italian.

We used 45 short nonsense words that followed Italian spelling and sound rules but had no meaning. Each word had two versions, differing only in whether a consonant was short or long (e.g., sàpolo vs. sàppolo; milèta vs. millèta).

The words covered different consonants and stress positions and were recorded by a native Italian speaker. In every trial, participants had to answer the question: “Does the audio pair you hear belong to the same or different word?”

What we found

Image 3: Learner accuracy in perceiving Italian consonant length in comparison to native listeners

First language has great impact! Finnish learners, whose native system is closest to Italian, were the most accurate in hearing the difference between short and long consonants.

Czech learners followed, while German and Spanish learners struggled more (Image 3). Other factors also played a role. Learners heard contrasts more easily when the crucial sound appeared in stressed syllables, and some consonants were easier to notice than others.

Proficiency helped too—advanced learners did much better than beginners.

However, it is unexpected that the German group scored lower than the Spanish group—sometimes research simply surprises us!

Many factors could explain this, since every learner has their own story. Things like previous language experience, weekly study time, exposure to Italian, time spent in Italy, Italian friends, motivation, and personal talent can all play a role.

In our case, German learners had spent fewer hours per week learning Italian and had less experience studying or staying in Italy. Immersion—the experience of being surrounded by a language in real-life settings—seems a plausible factor behind their performance.

Why perception matters in language learning?

Why does pappa sometimes turn into papa in the ears of Italian learners? Because we all hear foreign languages through the features we are familiar with.

Our experiment showed that perception is difficult—but it can be improved. The key is to notice what is different and to train your ears. This means: Pronunciation training must start with perception (e.g., Colantoni et al. 2021).

In the end, learning a language is not just about new words—it’s about learning to hear differently.

References

Altmann, H.; Berger, I., & B. Braun (2012). Asymmetries in the perception of non-native consonantal and vocalic contrasts. Second Language Research 28(4), 387–413.
Colantoni, L., Escudero, P., Marrero-Aguiar, V., & J. Steele (2021). Evidence-based design principles for Spanish pronunciation teaching. Frontiers in Communication, 6, 639889.
Ladefoged, P., & I. Maddieson (1996). The sounds of the world’s languages. Oxford: Blackwell.

Acknowledgement

This blog post was written as part of the DFG-project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language: Czech, Finnish, German and Spanish learners in contrast”, funded by the German Research Foundation (Project number 521229214) and executed at the Free University of Berlin. Project website: https://italiangeminates-project.com/

Australia as a White nation has deep roots: the aim of this 1914 board game was literally “to get the Coloured Men out and the White men in” (Image credit: National Archives of Australia)

The typical Aussie is widely imagined as a white English speaker

Despite decades of multiculturalism, the typical Australian is widely imagined as a white monolingual speaker of English. Australians who do not look white regularly report that they are made to feel as if they do not belong and those with non-native accents sometimes avoid speaking in public so as to remain inconspicuous.

With almost half of Australians born overseas or having at least one parent born overseas and about a quarter speaking a language other than English at home, the perception of Australia as a nation of white English speakers is completely out of step with demographic realities. Why do so many people continue to hold on to this perception?

The historical roots of Australia as a white English nation

There are historical reasons that can explain how Australia came to be an Anglo nation. One of these is the pernicious fiction of terra nullius that wrote Indigenous people out of the imagined nation.

Another reason is the erasure of the British-Irish conflict that was imported into the penal colony but subsequently glossed over into an imagined homogenous “Anglo-Celtic” settler population. Black convicts, who accounted for 1-2 percent of transportees, were cancelled even more completely.

A third foundation lies in a restrictive immigration policy that was designed to exclude non-British settlers in the first half of the 20^th century and which was literally known as the “White Australia” policy.

These historical myths have deep roots, but do they still influence perception today?

The media teach us ways of seeing

Contemporary Australia is patently diverse. So why do we continue to see Australians who are not white and who do not speak English as their first and only language as perpetual outsiders?

Screenshot from “Border Security” showing officers in uniform

Many scholars have suggested that the media are partly to blame because they overrepresent white English speakers and underrepresent everyone else.

This may be true of news, current affairs, and fictional genres but there are some extremely popular genres that do show high levels of diversity. Reality TV is one such genre and none more so than the ever-popular Border Security.

Imagining Australia on Border Security

Since it was first aired in 2004, Border Security has provided Australians with “a fascinating insight into the daily workings of the thousands of officers who dedicate their lives to protecting Australia’s border,” as the show’s website explains.

Over the years, the show has attracted many millions of viewers and you are likely familiar with the format: each episode has immigration, customs, or quarantine officers face off with passengers who are suspected of constituting a security threat.

The basic story arc is always suspicion, investigation of the suspicion, and resolution.

My colleagues Hanna Torsh, Laura Smith-Khan, and I have been collecting these episodes because they provide us with a data source for our research in intercultural communication. They also help us answer the question why we continue to imagine the prototypical Australian as a white monolingual speaker of English.

Good guys look white and speak English

The heroes of Border Security are the officers. They are the official representatives of the Australian state, and their job is to keep Australia safe. Each episode shows them in action. As they are on the lookout for illegal activities and investigate the travelers they suspect of wrongdoing, the audience comes to identify with them. We watch with bated breath as they inspect luggage, interview passengers, and share their reasoning with the camera.

The proportions of people who look white and sound like native speakers of English among officers and passengers on “Border Security”

These heroes are not a representative cross-section of Australian society, though. In research just published in the journal Ethnicities, we found that the overwhelming majority of officers on the show look white (83%) and sound like native speakers of Australian English (90%).

Their uniforms further serve to mold them into a homogeneous group. And there is another aspect that enhances their uniformity: the striking diversity of their antagonists.

Suspects look diverse and sound diverse

In the logic of the show, the officers’ hero identity is predicated on their dodgy antagonists: all those travelers who are trying to sneak into Australia on a tourist visa but are really here to work illegally, who are hiding prohibited foods, or who are smuggling contraband.

These suspects provide a stark contrast to the officers. Not only are they under suspicion – sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly – to constitute a threat to Australia but their visual and aural identities are almost the inverse of the officers. 73% of suspects do not look white and 66% sound like non-native speakers of English.

In other words, white English speakers are overrepresented among the show’s heroes and underrepresented among the show’s antagonists.

Shifty characters

The patterns we found in our research go some way to explaining why we continue to imagine Australians as white English speakers. But these patterns are not only about quantitative representation.

Purely on numbers, Border Security shows an incredible diversity of people. More importantly, the show creates a pattern of moral judgement.

As the audience comes to understand Australian identity and threats to national security through the show’s stories, they come to see white English speakers as moral. Australia’s racial and linguistic others, by contrast, seem, at best, forever suspect and, at worst, guilty as charged.

Reference

Piller, I., Torsh, H., & Smith-Khan, L. (2021). Securing the borders of English and Whiteness. Ethnicities. doi:10.1177/14687968211052610. [available open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/securing-the-borders-of-english-and-whiteness/feed/ 94 23655 https://languageonthemove.com/how-to-end-native-speaker-privilege/ https://languageonthemove.com/how-to-end-native-speaker-privilege/#comments Thu, 31 May 2018 09:34:27 +0000 http://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=20988

Native and non-native teachers at Lord Harris’ School, Royapett, Madras, 1865 (Source: British Library)

For some time now, a debate has been raging in TESOL about the relative merits of native and non-native speakers as English language teachers. While many people in the field are critical of the continued dominance of native speakers as “ideal” teachers, proposals for change have largely been ineffectual.

True, job ads asking for “native speakers” are now widely considered discriminatory and the relative strengths of both groups are spruiked at conferences. However, none of this has much changed the fact that institutions, students and parents, by and large, continue to prefer TESOL teachers who they consider to be native speakers; that such teachers are oftentimes paid more and hired into more secure employment; and that teachers considered non-native are regularly subject to micro-aggressions such as having their expertise called into question.

Is there a more effective way to overcome native speaker hegemony other than to educate people about the native speaker fallacy?

Absolutely. It has been done before. The following object lesson of native speaker subordination comes from an unlikely source, namely the British Empire and specifically the East India Company.

Persian – India’s power code

To understand this case study, a bit of historical context is required: when the British brought the Indian subcontinent under colonial control, they displaced an existing state, the Mughal Empire. The Mughals’ state language was Persian. In the 18^th century, when the British rapidly expanded and consolidated their possessions on the subcontinent, Persian had been India’s written language, its power code and its lingua franca for over three centuries. In other words, Persian was the Moghuls’ “technology of governance” (Fisher, 2012, pp. 328f.).

Officer of the East India Company being coached in Persian by a private tutor (Source: Massey & Massey, 1968, p. 473)

In order to rule India, it was therefore essential to know Persian. And Indians knew Persian. Britons did not.

As the East India Company tightened its grip on India, it approached this problem gradually by first replacing Indian speakers of Persian with British speakers of Persian and, further down the track, replacing Persian with English as the language of the state. It is the first step in this process that concerns us here: how did the East India Company go about replacing Indians with Britons as privileged knowers of Persian?

Establishing a Persian language teaching industry

Initially, British colonial officials who wanted to learn Persian (or any other Indian language) were largely left to their own devices and such language study was a matter of private enterprise. Many hired Indian language teachers as private tutors.

Gradually, Persian language learning became more formalized and dedicated language training institutes were established. The most important of these were Fort William College in Calcutta, and, back home in Britain, Haileybury Imperial Service College and Addiscombe Military Seminary. These institutes all opened in the first decade of the 19^th century.

Since the 18^th century, Persian-speaking Indian elites had increasingly shifted from working for the Mughal Empire and its ever smaller and more fragmented successor states to accepting employment from the British. For many of them this meant becoming language teachers.

In India, teaching was a highly respected profession and Indian teachers of Persian initially assumed a high-status position vis-à-vis their British students. They were in a bull market, or so it must have seemed: Persian language teaching became ever more widespread and profitable, not only in the colony, but also in Britain, where middle-class families clamoured for an education that would ensure their sons’ future in lucrative colonial positions. Just how profitable the teaching of Indian languages was can be seen from the autobiography of one such language teacher, Lutfullah:

I regularly held the profession of a teacher of the Persian, Hindustani, Arabic, and Marathi languages to the new comers from England, from time to time, and place to place, as their duty obliged and caprice induced them to go. Upwards of one hundred pupils studied with me during the above period, and none of my scholars returned unlaureled from the Government examination committees. I have a book of most flattering certificates in my possession, and I may say that I was better off than many by following this profession. (Lutfullah, 1858, p. 139)

Haileybury College (Source: Wikipedia)

In the colonial logic of the assumed inferiority of the colonized, high-status Indian language teachers with a good income soon became the targets of envy and efforts to undermine them got underway. Returned colonial officials, in particular, wanted teaching positions for themselves rather than see them occupied by Indians. Given their clout and connections, many of them managed to be recruited into Persian language teaching positions in the new imperial training institutes. That their language competence was sometimes almost non-existent did not matter.

The Professor of Oriental Literature at Addiscombe, for instance, was one John Shakespear, who not only drew a professorial salary but supplemented his income by publishing numerous textbooks and teaching aids. His most successful textbook was one of the earliest grammars of Urdu, A Grammar of the Hindustani Language. First published in 1813, it was reprinted and re-issued in new editions for almost half a century. The above-mentioned Lutfullah met Shakespear during his visit to England in 1844 and describes his encounter as follows:

[I] had the honour of being introduced to three men of learning, viz., John Shakespear, the author of the Hindustani Dictionary […]. Knowing the first-named gentleman to be the author of a book in our language, I addressed to him a very complimentary long sentence in my own language. But, alas! I found that he could not understand me, nor could he utter a word in that language in which he had composed several very useful books. (Lutfullah, 1858, p. 389)

Subordinating native speakers

The above example can leave no doubt that the linguistic qualifications of Indians were superior to those of British language teachers. Even so, the former were excluded almost entirely from the enterprise of Persian language teaching, well before that enterprise was abandoned entirely in favour of making Indians learn English.

Addiscombe Military Seminary, c. 1859 (Source: Wikipedia)

The subordination of native speaker teachers was achieved in two ways, namely through arguments related to teacher identity and through a reorganization of language teaching.

The arguments related to teacher identity basically stated that Muslim men were unfit to teach Christian boys and young men. The board of Haileybury College, for instance, decided in 1816 that “the linguistic advantages of having a ‘native speaker’ teach British students was outweighed by the alleged disruption these Muslim Indian men had on the students’ moral education” (Fisher, 2012, p. 344). As in other language training institutions, Indian teachers were replaced with British teachers.

Reorganization of language teaching meant that Indian ways of language teaching (through the study of literature) were devalued in favour of British ways of language teaching (through the study of grammars and dictionaries). While the former approach requires a high level of language competence of the teacher, the latter does not.

Furthermore, Indian teachers were reframed as specialists in pronunciation, and pronunciation as a language skill was marginalized. Instead of hiring them into teacher roles, Indian teachers were offered positions as drill masters and teaching assistants of British teachers. The latter were fashioned as experts both in methods of language teaching and in the grammar skills that were now considered the essential test of language competence.

By the 1840s, all Indian language teachers had been removed from imperial language training institutes and the newly established university chairs in Persian, Arabic and other oriental languages all went to Britons. Any Indian language teachers who remained in Britain were relegated to the private tutoring market, which was shrinking, too, as a knowledge of Persian and other Indian languages became increasingly irrelevant to pursuing a career in the colonies.

Fort William College (Source: Navrang India)

Who is to be master?

As is obvious from this brief account, the battle between Indians and Britons over who was a better teacher of Indian languages was fought on linguistic terrain only on the surface. Some of the British 19^th century superstars of oriental language teaching such as John Shakespear obviously had serious linguistic deficits. That did not keep them from becoming privileged knowers of colonial languages. A holistic knowledge of the language, cultural competence and conversational fluency were all devalued in favour of a focus on methods and a narrow understanding of language proficiency as grammatical mastery.

Ironically, once Persian was out of the way as the power code of India and the global English language teaching enterprise got underway, the rules of the game were re-written yet again. What we consider desirable linguistic competence today is to a significant degree shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of the new privileged language knowers, native speakers of English.

References

Eastwick, E. B. (Ed.) (1858). Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohamedan Gentleman; and the transactions with his fellow-creatures; interspersed with remarks on the habits, customs, and character of the people with whom he had to deal. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Fisher, M. H. (2012). Teaching Persian as an Imperial Language in India and in England during the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries. In B. Spooner & W. L. Hanaway (Eds.), Literacy in the Persianate world : writing and the social order (pp. 328-358). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Massey, R., & Massey, J. (1968). Lutfullah in London, 1844. History Today, 18(7), 473-479.

“…and in the end, Britain, which had colonized the world, destroyed itself in fantasies that it was being colonized in turn” — historians.

— Ted Scheinman (@Ted_Scheinman) June 24, 2016

Of course, this spectacular act of self-harming is more like a murder-suicide in that the damage done will not be contained to Britain and affect the rest of the world in ways that we cannot yet know but that look distinctly unpleasant for Europe and “the West”:

With a single vote, England just screwed us all https://t.co/1RT6LjEAjp

— Patrick Park (@patricktpark) June 24, 2016

If Britain is self-destructing, what will happen to English as a global language? Have we just witnessed the beginning of the end of the global hegemony of English? Some have already started to question the role of English in the EU after the British will no longer be part of the union.

Let’s examine how other global languages have lost influence.

To begin with, for a language to rise to importance as a transnational language, it seems inevitable that its native speakers successfully pursue imperial expansion. That is how English spread and that is how other lingua francas acquired their status. However, history also shows that a transnational language does not necessarily go into decline with the decline of the empire that spread the language. Indeed, English has shown no signs of decline since the end of the British Empire in the mid 20^th-century; on the contrary, global English language learning has gone from strength to strength since then.

When an empire dies, the language of the empire may simply cease to serve as a transnational language but may still serve as the native language of the group who used to be dominant. Obviously, English will continue to be used as mother tongue in England etc. even after its speakers have shot their own political and economic influence in the foot. What is interesting is whether speakers of other languages will continue to embrace English as enthusiastically as they have to date.

In his examination of the fate of lingua francas after the fall of their empires, Nicholas Ostler argues that their survival as transnational languages “depends on the successful renewal of the marketing campaign, implicit or explicit, that has supported its rise to currency […] the language [needs] to find itself another raison d’être” (Ostler 2010, p. 174).

(c) Axel Scheffler

Latin, for instance, saw its greatest triumph as a transnational language after the fall of the Roman Empire. Its continued success after the Romans proved themselves incapable of constructively addressing the population movements and socio-economic and military challenges of their time, depended on two consecutive new purposes: first, Latin became the language of the Catholic Church, which gave it a new lease on life as a transnational language of religion for almost two millennia. Second, from the Renaissance into the 19^th century Latin also served as a transnational language of education and higher learning in universities across Europe and beyond.

Persian provides another example: after Iran fell to the Arab invasion, Persian became the language of the army that spread Islam into Central and South East Asia, and was then taken up by Turks, Mongols and, in fact, all Muslim rulers of the region as the administrative language of their realms.

Latin and Persian thrived as transnational languages for well over a millennium after their native speakers had lost military-political and socio-economic clout. In the end, Latin as a transnational language faded away before the ascendancy of national languages. The end of transnational Persian came more abruptly as the administrative structures of Central and Southeast Asia were dismantled by the British and Russian Empires in the 19^th century.

What does this mean for transnational English after Brexit? English has already been repurposed as the transnational language of multinational corporations and international business. So, we have not seen the beginning of the end of English as a transnational language and it may well thrive for a long time to come.

What we have seen is another nail in the coffin of native speaker supremacy. Native speakers have just chosen to make themselves even more irrelevant to the story of English.

Reference

Ostler, N. (2010). The Last Lingua Franca: English until the Return of Babel. London: Penguin.

“How bad is your cultural cringe?” (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed)

Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o.
Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname?
(laughter)
Keith: Do I get three goes?
(Keith, Australian, in a relationship with Lisa from Germany)

Despite the increasing value of multilingualism in a globalised world, English-speaking countries such as Australia remain stubbornly monolingual. At the same time the benefits of speaking more than one language are regularly touted in public discourse. My research investigates how speakers of Australian English with a partner from a non-English-speaking background feel about their linguistic repertoires. Embarrassment, as in the example above from Keith (all names are pseudonyms), comes up a lot. So does inferiority. Because of their low proficiency in foreign languages (often as a consequence of their poor quality or limited language learning experiences in formal education) these participants feel they are bad language learners. This response seems to be one way of engaging with and mitigating their own privilege as native speakers of the powerful global language, English, compared to their partners who learned English as an additional language.

“It’s my deficiency”: being a bad language learner

And I I think I was completely in awe of that the fact that she could speak so many different languages freely, and a little bit jealous, and at the beginning was a bit more kind of definite about trying to learn German, um and I think the whole experience intimidated me cause I think I’m the kind of person who if they don’t pick something up really quickly kind of just gives up very quickly (…) (Keith)

For Lisa and Keith, Keith’s first and Lisa’s second language, English, has been the language of their relationship. Keith sees Lisa’s language skills as impressive while blaming himself for his own inability to learn German. He feels that Lisa “probably speaks better English than most native English speakers in Australia”. While Lisa learnt languages formally in her school education as a child and young adult, Keith faces all the frustration of learning another language as an adult.

In his own education Keith’s choices were limited. Although he comes from an Italian migrant background, Italian was not available at his public school in inner Sydney in the 1990s. He decided to take Latin instead, but he dropped it after junior high school when he lost interest in his schooling. He has done no further foreign language study in contrast to Lisa, who studied four languages over many years in her schooling in Germany. So when it comes to saying Keith’s Italian surname their pronunciation reflects their differing language learning trajectories:

Hanna: And how are you at pronouncing Keith’s last name (laughs)?

Lisa: I am tempted to pronounce it Italian which then nobody understands (laughs).

Keith: She- like I’m reading out a, a pizza on the pizza menu from our local pizzeria and she makes fun of my Italian accent. You know like quattro formaggi, she’s like (puts on a strong Australian accent) quattro formaggi. ‘Cause she speaks Italian, you know, these fucking Europeans!

(laughter)

In Keith’s comment about his partner’s Italian pronunciation of his Italian surname we could read humorous disparagement of her ability to pronounce it in the Italian way; in Australia foreign names are usually anglicised or pronounced in an English way. Both his lack of educational opportunity to study Italian and his Anglicized pronunciation cause him in that moment to position himself as a (monolingual) Australian in opposition to (multilingual) Europeans.

Stephen, from Australia, who is married to Christina from Argentina feels similarly critical of his own poor Spanish skills. He describes his attempts to learn Spanish as “a token effort”, says he “hasn’t got an ear for languages” and it dismissive of his own attempts to learn Spanish:

Hanna: You said you’re the odd one out; how do you feel…

Stephen: No, not at all, because uh because I recognise that it’s my deficiency in not having had the time to devote to learning a language. Now, I I make the standard joke I have 50 words of [unclear] of Spanish that I know. I work very hard and uh it’s a standing family joke (…)

In fact, Stephen studied Spanish at night, has a Spanish speaking community in Sydney and has two children who are bilingual. He also regularly visits Argentina and has frequent Argentine house guests. Spanish is a regular feature in his life. In the interview he also says that learning Spanish is “a commitment I’ve probably made and haven’t fulfilled” and feels he is a “handicapped Aussie” compared to his multilingual relations.

Another participant, Amy, has a strikingly similar evaluation of her own language skills. When I asked her why she was interested in talking to me about language she said:

Well, I suppose, I suppose it’s just there and I suppose for me it’s that I’ve got to learn more Spanish (…) And I went to lessons and I started learning and I was enthusiastic because we were going to Columbia, but as soon as we came back from Columbia I was just like that’s it, I’m just not interested anymore. And I learnt that I’m not a good language learner(…) (Amy, in a relationship with German from Columbia)

Amy’s language learning experiences at school were typical for my participants. In twelve years of state school education all she studied was ten weeks each of Italian, German and French in her seventh school year. In contrast, she praises her partner for his excellent English language skills which he acquired in Columbia from the “movies and music” he consumed from their powerful northern neighbour.

A new kind of language cringe

It seems these participants characterise their persistent monolingualism as a personal failing, a source of embarrassment, a source of language cringe. In Australia language cringe is a child of the cultural cringe. It has traditionally been associated with being embarrassed about speaking Australian English, rather than the more highly valued British English of the mother country. However, in my research I have found a new form of language cringe, related to monolinguals who speak the most valuable global language compared to multilinguals who are non-native speakers. This kind of language cringe contradicts the idea that a native speaker will always be “better” than a non-native speaker through an acknowledgment of the level of skill and knowledge which come with learning an additional language to a high proficiency.

This is most obvious when it comes to accent, because language cringe views an Australian native accent as lower value than (some) non-native accents. Lisa points out that she found the Australian accent strange on first hearing.

Lisa: I just remember the first Australian I ever met in my life (…) we started talking in English and I just thought who the fuck is this person? (laughter) It sounded so outlandish I’d never heard that before.

When I asked Keith about what kind of accent he would like his daughter to have, he reluctantly admitted that he wanted hers to be more “international”. Stephen points out that on first travelling to the United States with his wife, the locals “struggled” with his “obvious Australian accent” while she “was much more readily understood”. The implicit high value of a native accent is challenged by the transferability of a more international non-native accent.

Understanding and being able to explain the grammar of a language is another site where language cringe manifests itself. Paul, from Sydney, met Sara from Spain while travelling around South America. He was quickly hired as an English teacher because he was a native speaker. But it was Sara who taught him enough English grammar to make it through the first lesson.

(…) when Sara and I first met I needed to get some work and we were in Chile, um I just before I arrived to Chile we’d split up for a few weeks on the way to. and I’d asked Sara can you hand out a few CVs to English schools when we get there, or when you get there, which she did and I basically arrived and there was a job waiting for me which was perfect. But I’d never taught, I’d never thought about English I had no idea [Sara laughs]. and so the very first lesson I had to do (…) and uh [laughs] they, you know, the school said uh here’s the book this is Headway, this is what you’re using, they’re up to page thirty two or whatever. I opened it up and it was the present perfect and I looked at it and I was like what’s the present perfect, what’s a past participle and Sara sat down and taught me. (Paul, my emphasis)

Sara also spoke four languages to, at that time, Paul’s one. Although Sara is the one with the multilingual skills, Paul was seen by the language school as a better language user because he is a native speaker.

Managing native speaker privilege

Like Keith, Paul is impressed by his wife’s linguistic skills but he also recognises that because of the privilege of the English native speaker Sara’s multilingualism may be less valued. Rather than being embarrassed about his own failings as an individual language user Paul draws attention to the wider failings of the native speaker ideology in terms of its tenuous relation to actual knowledge about language as a system or teaching expertise. Paul acknowledges his partner’s linguistic superiority and the inherent injustice of an employment situation where he benefitted from a discriminatory language ideology because he is a native speaker.

For my other participants it may be that their conception of their own language skills as inferior in relation to the linguistic repertoire of their partners is their way to manage the inequalities brought about by this privilege. Recognising their own limited linguistic repertoire and casting it as a personal failing may be a way to tip the scales back in favour of the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual partner.

Broadly speaking, I came away from this book thinking about the ‘native speaker’ as a classic problem of categories. In Michiyo Takato’s case, involving ethnic Okinawan migrants ‘returning’ from colonies in Bolivia and Brazil, a wild sea of categorizations mix together and render some of her research participants severely disadvantaged. They are caught between schooling systems in different countries that stress competence in imperial/national languages (standard Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish), or enable students to learn and maintain ‘heritage’ languages (all of the above, plus Okinawan), depending on a given framing of where they come from as a ‘native’ or migrant. Takato picks up on one of the striking insights of this book, highlighted in Doerr’s theoretical chapter, that ‘native’ is often assumed to include universal competence of written and spoken forms. Teachers in her focal school system sometimes fail to recognize students’ weaker competence in written forms by assuming that their ‘native-like’ speech is associated with ‘native-like’ written training at home, while their ethnically Japanese parents – who themselves grew up in South America – are effectively illiterate in most Japanese written forms. Takato’s young participants, then, end up caught between ideologies of ethnic/national linguistic proficiency, as well as ideologies of linguistic competence as being a 4-skilled, equal package – reading, writing, listening and speaking. They become people who don’t quite fit into any easy category.

Complementarily, Anne Whiteside’s chapter on the presence of Maya in San Francisco questions any categorization of ‘native speaker’ as a matter of proficiency. She runs into contexts where Yucatecan migrants – many of whom come from Mayan-speaking origins – describe contradictory ideologies of what a ‘native speaker’ of Maya might be, in light of the devaluation of Maya in relation to Spanish as well as idealized images of a ‘good’ speaker of Maya. She observes how Maya becomes a common language in some restaurant kitchens, where many of the staff might be Maya-origin, enlaced with many other spoken codes. Whether or not her participants could be considered ‘native speakers’ by an external definition, their use of language flows so much between different codes (English, Spanish, Maya, Cantonese, Greek, French or Wolof, as she lists them) that it becomes difficult even to categorize what ‘language’ is in use, nevermind who is the ‘native’ speaking it. This is one example of what Doerr advocates for research as ‘native speaker effects’: the real-world implications for participants in their everyday linguistic competence and use.

These discussions highlight two of the problematic issues that come to the fore again and again in much recent research in language and diversity. One is that the traditional definitions and divisions of categories upon which we base an idea of a ‘language’ only really hold up in a context where they ‘matter’ – in a ‘when, where and how’ that individuals need to draw lines of distinction in order to access social, economic, and political resources. The second is that this pragmatic aspect to language use opens important questions on how the 4 skills might need to be considered as separable attributes, rather than lumped into one ‘language’ as being qualified as a ‘native’. This issue comes up over and over again in my own research among Moroccans in Europe, where the complex combinations of migrant communities produces individuals who often have extensive spoken competencies across several ‘languages’ and much more limited written competencies, either because they didn’t have any training or because the codified written forms do not exist. Beyond thinking about what it means to be a ‘native speaker’, this book also points to ways that sociolinguistic research pokes holes in definitions of a ‘language’, and signals new approaches to thinking about what elements make up linguistic practice.

Reference

Doerr, Neriko Musha, ed. 2009. The Native Speaker Concept: Ethnographic Investigations of Native Speaker Effects. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

In English language teaching ads English seems always fun, easy and accessible to everyone

Taiwanese people’s motivation for learning English is a desire to communicate and a major obstacle to the mastery of spoken English has been the lack of opportunities to speak. As noted in my previous post, the purpose of buxiban is to assist students to pass standardized tests rather than to speak proficiently. Although effective for test-taking, these traditional grammar-translation and teacher-centered methods do not produce fluent speakers. This is a common complaint from teachers and students alike. Students are continually frustrated by the fact that they have been studying English for many years, but can’t carry a basic conversation or communicate with a foreigner.

This realization has popularized teaching methods such as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and English-Only immersion methods. As a result, there is a huge English language teaching market in Taiwan comprised of literally thousands of language schools geared towards teaching English for communication. The methods employed in private language schools emphasize active participation in the learning process and include a variety of teaching aids and materials, handouts, activities, and games to assist learners in increasing their English speaking proficiency. Moreover, the use of native English-speaking teachers and small class sizes are other factors in the success of private language schools. Learners learn to use the language as a tool of communication rather than viewing it as one more subject to be memorized and regurgitated.

Although there is often a notable improvement in a student’s speaking ability there are socio-economic aspects of language learning that render these innovative communicative and English-immersion methodologies problematic, such as the linguistic environment outside the school and the almighty TaiBi (Taiwan Dollar).

In order to illustrate my point, I will use a TV commercial by Jordan Language School. The dynamic commercial presents Jordan Language School as an English language learner’s utopia: Taiwanese students are taught by Caucasian foreigners, multi-media computer programs are utilized, and parents participate with their children in the learning process. The main theme of the commercial is that Jordan’s English Language School uses a scientific teaching method that integrates classroom lessons with multimedia and Internet English teaching. The commercial ends with their slogan, 喬登數位美語，輕鬆快樂無比 ‘Jordan’s Digital American English, absolutely relaxing and fun.’

Slogans such as this one come to define the ideal English language teaching method independent of context.

This commercial promotes English teaching as a practical skill and it suggests that English can be learned easily if the ideal teaching method is used: interactive immersion classroom teaching with an enagaging Caucasian teacher combined with computer technology. After school, children can learn English with their parents at home via online English learning or with language-learning devices such as smartphones.

Commercials such as this one suggest that English teaching and learning is always autonomous and never affected by social, cultural and economic conditions outside the classroom. Nothing could be further from the truth – in Taiwan as elsewhere.

The reality is that disadvantaged children often have limited access to the Internet and cannot afford to study in private language schools.

Private language schools are also privileged as regards method because students tend to be grouped by ability levels in private schools. By contrast, teachers in public schools are usually faced with students of varying levels of English ability. Dealing with a diversity of needs is an elementary school is an English teacher’s greatest challenge in Taiwan.

Methods used in private language schools encourage parents to spend money for additional English study, so their children will not fall behind in their regular elementary school English classes. This creates an injustice whereby wealthy families are able to allocate significant amounts of money to their children’s English education, while poor families are unable to do the same for their children. In other words, it is only wealthy families who can afford to send their children to English language schools and/or send them abroad to immerse themselves in real life communication situations in an English-speaking country. The end result is that English language learning to high levels of proficiency has become the exclusive privilege of the wealthy.

English is often touted as a way to lift poor people out of poverty but the exact opposite is true: English is an important instrument of social stratification in contemporary Taiwanese society (as elsewhere?) where the rich get richer because they can afford to learn the kind of English that opens doors while the poor get poorer because they can’t.

“美語是通往世界最近的路” (American English, for children, is the royal road to the world): An English educator promises the world

Taiwan is enthralled with learning American English. One of the reasons for this love affair lies in the fact that English is the global lingua franca. In Taiwan, as elsewhere, English is associated with status and modernity: an essential instrument to access the world of finance, economy, technology and science; in short, English is regarded as a tool to achieve social modernization, economic growth and internationalization. To individuals, too, English language mastery promises globalization: it is viewed as the key to achieving a better life and future in a world which is imagined as borderless.

In this post, I would like to show that advertising for private language schools is critical to creating the association between English and globalization and to keeping that discourse in circulation. As in my recent post about Taiwan’s love affair with American English, I draw on my PhD thesis (Chang, 2004), where I employed Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze data drawn from private English language school and buxian promotional materials.

Consider the following example from a TV commercial for the famous Giraffe Language Schools. In this commercial (1:10-1:25), two figures, a little Taiwanese girl and Father Jerry Martinson walk along a beach. Father Jerry Martinson is an American Jesuit priest who, as a Christian missionary and English educator, is one of the most recognizable public figures in Taiwan. In addition to being an influential broadcaster with Kuangchi TV, he is also the founder of the Giraffe Language Schools. The little girl is looking out at the sea and observes that the world is very, very big. She then asks “Uncle Jerry” how to get to the other side of the world. “Uncle Jerry” responds:

美語是孩子通往世界最近的路  ‘American English, for children, is the royal road to the world.’ (My translation).

As in the examples I discussed last week, this commercial reinforces perceptions of the close relationship between native speaker teacher (“Uncle Jerry”), American English (美語), and, particularly, globalization (indicated by the reference to 世界 ‘the world’).

“For children” in this slogan does not refer only to the featured little Taiwanese girl but, by extension, to the television audience and all Taiwanese English language learners. Indeed, the question “How to get to the world?” is a vexing question for all Taiwanese.

Metaphorically, the commercial places all Taiwanese in a child position vis-à-vis an omniscient Western father figure. While viewers are left to fill “the world” with their own hopes and dreams, the commercial ultimately also suggests that the Taiwanese will only ever be able to enter the world, which is assumed to be Western, as child-like junior partners.

In sum, English language teaching schools in Taiwan respond to a need: the need to learn English for globalization and modernization. However, at the same time, that need does not necessarily pre-exist English language teaching schools. In their advertising they continuously discursively construct and re-construct that link between English and globalization.

Reference

Chang, J. (2004). Ideologies of English Teaching and Learning in Taiwan, Ph.D. thesis.University of Sydney.

This is not the first time that I (who watches TV very rarely) have wondered about the ways in which subtitles work to make speakers sound (or, rather, look) not only unintelligible but also deficient and illegitimate. Earlier this year, for instance, the advertising block during the evening news ended with a preview of a show about migration, in which a migrant engineer from Colombia spoke about her experiences of settlement in Australia. She had lived in Australia for a number of years so it’s probably unsurprising that I found her Spanish-accented English perfectly intelligible. Nonetheless, it was subtitled. Shortly after, there was a news item about soccer violence in Glasgow which included an interview with a Scottish publican. Even with context clues, I had a hard time trying to make out what he was saying. However, this time, there weren’t any subtitles to help.

In yet another example, in August 2010, the evening news featured a report about the 2010 Pakistan floods as well as one about the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. For the former, senior members of Pakistan’s army and civil defense forces were interviewed in English. In my perception, their educated English sounded a bit stilted but perfectly intelligible. It was subtitled. For the Hurricane Katrina report, ordinary New Orleans residents were interviewed. Their broad Southern American English was difficult for me to understand but – you guessed it! – there were no subtitles.

Is it possible that I am so out of touch with my speech community that I find accents that no one else understands intelligible and that I find accents unintelligible that everyone else understands? Possible, yes, but unlikely. The fact is that most Australians, just as myself, are likely to have more exposure to Australian English with a Spanish accent than to Glaswegian, or to an educated Commonwealth accent from Pakistan than a Southern drawl.

Subtitling varieties of English (as opposed to foreign languages) is thus a matter of ideology and identity construction as much as a matter of intelligibility. In the examples I have described here, the pattern is obvious: native speakers of English are presumed to be universally intelligible on Australian TV, even if theirs is a distant and obscure dialect. The speech of non-native speakers, by contrast, is presented as problematic and unintelligible even if they speak educated Standard English.

Familiarity with an accent is a key aspect of intelligibility. So, if the more familiar varieties are subtitled while less familiar ones are not, subtitling is clearly an exercise in linguistic subordination (a fact that hasn’t escaped the comedians behind this 2003 Skithouse sketch). Familiarity not only improves intelligibility but also influences attitudes towards speakers positively, as Eisenchlas and Tsurutani demonstrate in a recent matched-guise study. Participants, who were native speakers of Australian English, rated a speaker with Spanish-accented English as the most competent out of speakers of six different varieties of accented English (including standard Australian English) and a speaker with Japanese-accented English as the most attractive speaker. The researchers explain these rather surprising findings as a result of the fact that their participants are foreign language students. Consequently, they make this recommendation for a more equitable and harmonious multicultural society:

employment of non-native speakers within the education system and the introduction of compulsory foreign language study into school curricula will help to broaden people’s perceptions of foreign accented speech from an early age when world views are formed. (p. 234)

Additionally, the media also have an important role to play. All my examples above come from SBS, the broadcaster tasked with “reflecting the multicultural spirit of our own community.” Surely, that includes not branding familiar accents as exotic and illegitimate by subtitling them.

Susana A. Eisenchlas, Chiharu Tsurutani (2011). YOU SOUND ATTRACTIVE! PERCEPTIONS OF ACCENTED ENGLISH IN A MULTILINGUAL ENVIRONMENT Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 34 (2), 216-236

I’ve since come to recognize bilingual students with high levels of oracy but low levels of (academic) literacy as a distinct subgroup among my students as I encounter one or two of them in almost every class I teach. I was reminded of that bilingual student and all my other students with a similar linguistic profile, when I read Kate Menken and Tatyana Kleyn’s paper about long-term English language learners (LTELLs). According to the authors, LTELLs comprise one-third of the ELL population in high schools in New York City. LTELLs are defined as having attended school in the USA for seven or more years and still requiring language support.

Although […] LTELLs are orally proficient for social purposes in English and their native language, their skills in these languages are several grade levels below in reading and writing, resulting in poor overall academic performance. (p. 403)

Despite the fact that the numbers of LTELLs in NYC schools are substantial, they do not receive any specialized services, and the services they receive are mismatched. For ESL support they are usually placed in the same class as new arrivals with limited or no oral proficiency in English. As a consequence, their ESL support is way below their level, they get bored and they disengage. For Spanish on the other hand (most of the LTELLs Menken & Kleyn interviewed were English-Spanish bilinguals), they are either placed in Spanish-as-a-Foreign-Language classes (too easy again) or in Spanish enrichment classes with new arrivals who have received prior education in Spanish and whose Spanish is much more proficient. In this scenario, too, the LTELLs disengage, this time because the class is far too difficult for them.

Because of their high levels of oral proficiency, these students are often misjudged and their need for reading and writing support is overlooked. However, their low literacy in English results in poor academic performance overall. The high school average of the LTELLs in Menken & Kleyn’s study was a D+, and almost 20% had an F average. Failure breeds failure and many LTELLs drop out of school altogether.

LTELLs develop in a context of subtractive schooling where there is a lack of support for writing development in their home language and a sink-or-swim attitude to English learning. In such a scenario one language “subtracts” from the other and neither develops sufficiently.

As Kimie and I are finalizing the special issue devoted to “Language and Social Inclusion” which we are guest-editing for the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, we’ve been thinking about the many ways in which institutions, including educational institutions, conspire to exclude linguistically diverse populations rather than promoting their inclusion. LTELLs are a case in point: schools fail these students by failing to address their specialized language learning needs. Surely bilingual children deserve better then receiving an education that turns them first into LTELLs, and then poor students, and then drop-outs, and ultimately excludes them permanently from the mainstream.

Menken, K., & Kleyn, T. (2010). The long-term impact of subtractive schooling in the educational experiences of secondary English language learners International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13 (4), 399-417 DOI: 10.1080/13670050903370143

Lotus Pond (part of Shinobazu Pond) in Ueno Park

“There are so many stupid Japanese women around, huh? Many Westerners are coming to our country and the stupid women love stupid white men.”

My husband and I were stunned by this comment thrown at us by a stranger in Ueno Park during our Language-on-the Move tour to Japan. The insult came from a middle-aged Japanese man who was standing near Shinobazu Pond holding a can of beer in his hand with a flat expression on his face.

“Excuse me? What did you say?!” My husband, a white Western man walking with his Japanese wife, was not going to let the insult pass and was getting ready for a fight.

“Not worth it!” I grabbed his arm and quickly dragged him away assuming that the stranger was a drunk or mentally ill. Ueno Park is notorious for the large number of homeless people living there and we had already seen so many of them along the way from the park’s entrance. Homelessness is one of the hidden dark sides of Japan’s declining prosperity as Shiho Fukada so poignantly demonstrates in her photography.

Although I hadn’t wanted a confrontation, the comment upset me. I have explored issues of misogyny and of animosity towards interracial relationships in Japan in my research but this was the first time I personally experienced this kind of harassment in a public space.  I was also intrigued by the fact that the man had insulted us in fluent English. I couldn’t get the incident out of my mind: Where did he learn English so well? Does he stand there all day insulting interracial couples walking by? What else does he do? Why is he doing this? How often have such comments resulted in a fight?

After we had looked at the pond and decided not to take the famous swan-shaped boat, we had to take the same way back passing the man again. I felt weary and he, too, noticed us. He was staring at us but said nothing this time. My curiosity got the better of me:

Kimie: “Excuse me, but may I ask where you learned English so well?”
Stranger: “I didn’t learn English. It’s God’s gift.”

Soon we were having a friendly conversation because it turned out that he didn’t mind Australians as much as Americans! He told us how Asian women were stupid going after White men, and how interracial marriage, which he called stupidity, weakens the nation. In his view, Japan should never have opened its doors to the West in the 19^th century. Ever since then, the country had been infected with evil Western influences. In particular he was aggravated by the fact that Japanese women are so into White men. “They say ‘I love you, I love you’ and the women love it. It’s stupid. If love is there, you don’t have to say it.” I asked him if he had a partner. With the same contempt, he said “How can I find a partner when women here watch stupid American romantic movies and expect me to say I love you?”

He also told us that he was a freelance writer and that we were standing right in his publishing office. “I write many things including haiku”, and he took out several hand-made copies of a small booklet. “If you’d like to take one, I’d appreciate a small contribution.” We paid and left. By way of farewell he said “I hope you will enjoy my work.”

When we sat down in a café later, I looked at his collection of twelve haikus. They were beautifully hand-written in English and in a fude brush pen with titles such as ‘Bird’, ‘Northerly wind’ or ‘Journey’.  “How interesting”, I thought to myself in that café in the Ueno Park.

Hideo Asano on the right and Kimie with his haiku collection, September 29, 2010

At that point I did not yet know that we had actually met Hideo Asano, a well-known Tokyo artist, writer and blogger! Attacking Japanese-Western couples seems to be some sort of street performance he engages in as this, rather disrespectful, YouTube video shows.  However, the haikus, poems and short stories on his website are beautiful.

Hideo Asano is a bilingual, English-as-a-second-language writer who could be an inspiration to many learners of English. On his website he writes:

I hope especially my work could encourage students who study English as a second language that anyone could reach to a higher level, striving with persistence, to reach to the point of realizing that the more you know the more you don’t know. English belongs to everyone who cares, a baseball player’s son can’t automatically be a good baseball player.

This must be one of the strongest encouragements to find your own voice in a second language I have seen in a long time! That Asano is left to peddle his art as a homeless person on the streets of Tokyo and to draw attention to himself by insulting others, in a country that is obsessed with English language learning and idolizes native-speaking teachers is a sad and deeply disturbing testament to the power of the intersection of linguistic and racial ideologies.

The CEO of Rakuten, one of the companies who are changing to English, apparently is tweeting stuff like “All elementary school teachers must be sacked. Their English is bad,” “Let’s fire all Japanese English teachers and hire native speakers” or “Japan has failed. Cambodians speak better English than the Japanese.” I’m quoting from memory so this may not have been the exact wording but it’s the gist of the messages. Apart from the fact that the message that “Japanese can’t speak English” is now also delivered via Twitter, nothing seems to have changed in the many years since I’ve been following news about English in Japan.

Hang on! Japan has invested heavily into English language teaching for a couple of decades. Japan probably has a higher native-speaker-teacher—English-language student ratio than any other English-as-a-Foreign country in the world. If anyone has any actual stats on that ratio, send them in! While the eikaiwa business seems to have slowed down a bit, over the past decades huge numbers of Japanese from all walks of life enrolled in private English classes to practice their speaking skills. Many went abroad to study English in a total immersion environment. All for nothing?!

Factually, all that English language learning must have had an impact and today’s Japanese are more proficient in English than ever before, and the way it’s going, each generation is progressively more proficient. However, the discourse that the Japanese collectively don’t know how to speak English hasn’t moved an inch: everyone with an opinion on the matter still seems to say that they need to start earlier, have more native-speaker teachers, overcome their anxiety and just speak, work harder or send their children abroad in the same way the Koreans do as was suggested in yesterday’s discussion. Regular readers of Language-on-the-Move already know what I think of that.

So what does it all mean? The Japanese have been learning English with great dedication and determination for many years and yet the perception of their English as a poor has not changed. There can be only one explanation: inflationary pressure! As proficiency in English goes up, the bar to achieve the promise of English (a better job, a more competitive economy, self-transformation into a cool cosmopolitan etc. etc.) goes up to. Drawing on Bourdieu, Joseph Park has incisively analyzed the process for Korea: as more and more people learn English and attain the qualifications that promised access to jobs and other desired economic (and also social and cultural) benefits, the market constantly needs to be recalibrated to maintain the value of English as a marker of distinction.

Language is immensely suited to be such a marker of distinction and to reproduce social inequalities because in an absolute, philosophical sense it is impossible for anyone to ever speak “perfectly.”

I fully expect to hear another lecture drawing on media data deploring the dire state of English in Japan in 10 years’ time unless someone tells all those commentators to just butt out! Leave our language alone and concentrate on the real challenges – maybe global warming for starters.

Park, Joseph S.-Y (2009). The local construction of a global language: ideologies of English in South Korea
Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110214079

Multilingual sign in Namtso (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Italian version of my blog post about Chinglish. Translated by Emanuela Moretto

Per un attimo provate a pensare che il New York Times abbia chiesto ai propri lettori di inviare barzellette sulle classiche oche giulive, oppure di riportare un episodio divertente che aveva per protagonista una persona di colore. Bene, adesso provate ad immaginare che a seguito della richiesta la blogosfera sia stata bombardata da messaggi e che tutti coloro che si interessano di differenze tra i sessi o tra le etnie abbiano creato un blog o abbiano mandato il proprio contributo su facebook o twitter e che persino gli studiosi nel campo improvvisamente si siano animati ed abbiano proposto analisi sul perché le sopracitate oche giulive o le persone di colore si comportino in una maniera così assurda.

In realtà, ciò non potrebbe succedere, semplicemente perché sarebbe palesemente ed oscenamente sessista o razzista. Ed infatti tiro un sospiro di sollievo che queste cose non facciano più parte della mainstream. Quindi è anche arrivato il momento di giungere allo stesso risultato dal punto di vista della diversità linguistica. Chiariamo subito una cosa: il prendersi gioco di un’altra lingua non è un gioco! Infatti non è altro che una riprova della stessa mentalità ristretta che si ritrova nelle barzellette sulla differenza tra i sessi o tra le etnie, con la piccola eccezione che mentre si considera inaccettabile l’espressione del sessimo o del razzismo, a nessuno viene in mente di eccepire qualcosa quando sono espressi dei pregiudizi a carattere linguistico.

Il New York Times ha pubblicato di recente un articolo intitolato Chinglish, ovvero ‘cinglese’, che per qualche tempo è stato anche l’articolo che ha ricevuto il numero maggiore di email-commento. La reazione da parte dei lettori è stata tale, e tale anche la circolazione di commenti nella blogosfera, che il giornale ha chiesto ai lettori di inviare immagini di “cartelli stranieri e strani”. Persino un blog accademico del campo si è offerto di illuminare i lettori dibattendo sul perché e sul percome “gli errori di traduzione dalla lingua cinese risultino in una versione inglese ridicola o addirittura incomprensibile”.

Non riscontro nessun problema nel ridicolizzare cartelli ridicoli e e dal linguaggio pomposo. Ma vedo un problema quando ci si prende gioco della lingua utilizzata nel cartello solo perché, apparentemente, non corrisponde alla norma linguistica seguita dai madrelingua.

Che il mondo intero si metta ad imparare l’inglese ed allo stesso tempo ne derivi un perenne complesso di inferiorità ha certamente senso dal punto di vista commerciale – ne è la riprova, l’industria multimiliardaria del TESOL. È un sistema aperto allo sfruttamento. È anche del tutto immorale.

L’articolo del New York Times è seguito da due errate corrige; la prima per non aver riportato in modo corretto il titolo di un lettore cinese e la seconda per aver sbagliato a scrivere il nome di un programma di software per la traduzione cinese-inglese. E allora sono l’unica a vedere l’ironia di tutto questo?

Multilingual sign in Namtso (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Persian version of my recent blog post about Chinglish
Translated by Tahmineh Tayebi (تهمینه طیبی) & Vahid Parvaresh (وحید پرورش)

تصور کنید که روزنامه ی نیویورک تایمز از خواننده های خود بخواهد خنده دار ترین لطیفه ایی که در مورد افرادِ موبور  شنیده اند را برای روزنامه بفرستند و یا خنده دار ترین کاری که دیده اند شخصی با رنگ پوست و نژاد متفاوت انجام داده را برای روزنامه گزارش کنند. و حالا تصور کنید که قبل از اینکه این اقدامات مسیر کامل خود را طی کند،  دنیای وبلاگ ها از این گزارش ها پر شود و هر کسی که به نژاد و جنسیت علاقه مند است در وبلاگش چیزی نوشته ویا اینکه در فیسبوک وتویتر ذکری از آن به میان آورد و حتی مراکز دانشگاهی در زمینه ی مطالعات نژادی و جنسیت همگی از این پیشنهاد به وجد آمده و تجزیه و تحلیل هایی ارائه دهند مبنی بر این که چرا افراد موبور یا آن هایی که رنگ پوست و نژاد متفاوت دارند چنین رفتار مسخره ایی از خود نشان می دهند.

البته این موضوع قرار نیست رخ دهد چرا که چنین چیزی به طور وقیحانه و شرم آوری نژاد پرستانه یا تبعیض جنسیتی به شمار خواهد رفت. من خوشحالم  که چنین مسایلی دیگر قسمتی از تفکرات رایج و غالب  نیست و اکنون دیگر زمان آن رسیده که ما به درک مشابهی از گوناگونی و اختلاف های زبانی نیز برسیم. مسخره کردن زبانِ یک شخص اصلا خنده دار نیست! بلکه به اندازه ی شوخی های نژاد پرستانه و جنسیتی متعصبانه  است با این تفاوت که بیان کردن تبعیضات جنسیتی و نژادی غیر قابل قبول است. اما این چنین که به نظر می آید هیچ کس هیچ مشکلی با اظهار کردن تعصباتِ زبانیِ خود نمی بیند.

روزنامه نیویورک تایمز اخیرا مقاله ایی درباره چینگلیش (انگلیسیِ چینی ها) به چاپ رساند که برای مدتی بیشترین مقاله ی ایمیل شده ی آن ها بود. در واقع این مقاله چنان مورد توجه خوانندگان قرار گرفت و چنان سر و صدایی  در دنیای وبلاگ ها ایجاد کرد که از مردم خواسته شد تصاویر شخصی خود از “نشانه هایِ عجیبِ خارج” را برای آن روزنامه بفرستند. حتی یک وبلاگ دانشگاهی نیز در این زمینه دست به کار شد تا با ارائه ی یک سری تجزیه و تحلیل، این موضوع را که “چگونه اشتباهات غیر عمد در ترجمه های عبارات چینی منجر به انگلیسیِ مضحک و غیر قابل فهم می شود” روشن کند.

من هیچ مشکلی با مسخره کردن نشانه های اغراق آمیز و خنده دار ندارم. مسئله ایی که مورد اعتراض من است به سُخره گرفتن زبان آن نشانه ها ست آن هم صرفا به این علت که زبان آن نشانه ها با استانداردهای بعضی از بومیان هماهنگ نیست.

وادار کردن تمام جهان به یادگیری زبان انگلیسی و در عین حال تزریق آهسته ی یک عقده ی حقارتِ همیشگی به افرادی که به زبان های دیگر صحبت می کنند ممکن است به لحاظ تجاری، یعنی برای صنعت چند میلیارد دلاری آموزش زبان انگلیسی ، با مفهوم باشد ولی در اصل یک حُقه ی استثماری محض بوده و کاملا غیر اخلاقی است.

مقاله مذکور در روزنامه نیو یورک تایمز با دو اصلاح همراه شد چرا که هیأت تحریریه نتوانسته بود لقب یک منبعِ آگاهِ چینی و هم چنین املایِ صحیحِ یک نرم افزارِ ترجمه ی انگلیسی-چینی را در اولین دورِ چاپ خود درست در بیاورد. آیا من تنها فردی هستم که این طنزِ ظریف را دریافته است؟

Multilingual sign in Namtso (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Korean version of my recent blog post about Chinglish

Translated by Sun-Young Chung (정선영)

뉴욕타임즈가 독자들로부터 그들의 재미난 금발머리 농담이나 유색인종 사람과 관련된 배꼽 잡는 얘깃거리를 받아 싣겠노라고 했다고 상상해보자. 이제, 그러한 캠페인이 진행되면서 블로그 세계는 네티즌들의 이러한 얘기들로 가득 차고, 성별이나 인종 블로그에 관심 있는 사람이라면 누구나 페이스북이나 트위터 등을 통해 그것에 대해 얘기하며, 성별이나 민족성 분야의 학자들 또한 격분하여 금발머리 여자나 유색인종들이 왜 그렇게 우스꽝스럽게 묘사되어야 하는 지에 대해 분석한다고 상상해보자.

그러한 일은 말도 안되게 터무니없이 성차별적이고 인종차별적이기 때문에 당연히 일어나지 않을 것이다. 그러한 것들이 더 이상은 주류의 일부가 아니고 우리가 언어적 다양성의 인정 면에서도 유사한 정점에 이르렀다는 사실에 난 감사한다. 누군가의 언어에 대해 조롱하는 것은 정말이지 하나도 재미있지 않다! 그것은 성차별적 또는 인종차별적 농담만큼이나 편견적이고 편협적이다. 단 성차별이나 인종차별에 대한 발언은 용납되지 않아도 언어 편견적인 발언에 대해서는 아무도 이상하게 여기지 않는다는 점을 제외하고선 말이다.

뉴욕타임즈는 최근에 중국식 영어(칭글리쉬)에 대한 기사를 실었는데, 한 동안 이 기사는 가장 많이 이메일로 전달되기도 했다. 사실, 이 기사는 독자들로 하여금 “해외에서 찍은 이상한 표지판”에 관한 자신의 사진을 신문에 투고할 것을 요청하여 독자들로부터 수많은 회신을 받았고, 블로그 세계에서도 파문을 일으켰다. 관련분야의 학문적 블로그들 조차도 어떻게 “중국어에서의 의도치 않은 번역의 오류가 터무니없고 불가해한 영어를 만들어내는지” 밝혀내기 위해 일련의 분석을 늘어놓으며 가세했다.

터무니없고 거만한 표지판을 조롱하는 것에 대해서는 난 전혀 문제삼지 않는다. 내가 반대하는 것은 표지판의 언어가 몇몇 원어민의 표준에 맞지 않는다고 하여 그것에 대해 조롱하는 것이다.

세상 전체로 하여금 영어를 배우게 하면서 동시에 추가 언어 화자들에게 끊임없이 열등의식을 주입시키는 것은 기업을 증대시키는데, 더 정확히 말해서, 수십억 TESOL 산업을 발전시키는 데에 중요한 것일지도 모른다. 그것은 완벽한 착취의 체제이다. 그것은 또한 완벽하게 비도덕적이다.

이 뉴욕타임즈 기사는 처음 게시할 때 중국인 제보자의 직위와 중국어-영어 번역 소프트웨어의 철자를 바르게 쓰지 않아서 두 번이나 수정되었다. 여기서 아이러니를 보는 사람이 나뿐일까?

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.”