Image 1: Chinese and international brands in the most developed commercial area of Rongwo (Image credit: Giulia Cabras)

One of the most striking aspects that catches the attention of researchers or travelers visiting ethnic minority areas in Northwest China is the rapid growth of infrastructure, new buildings, and commercial activities. In Tibetan areas such as Amdo (Qinghai), regions that were once predominantly rural are now becoming increasingly urbanized, transforming into fully developed towns amidst valleys, mountains, and pasturelands. As urbanization expands, public signage plays a significant role in shaping the visual identity of these emerging urban spaces.

In this post, I will guide you through the town of Rongwo (Chinese: Longwu), its commercial signs, and how they reflect broader trends of urbanization and economic development. Located in the Rebgong (Chinese: Tongren) Tibetan Autonomous County in the Rma lho (Chinese: Huangnan) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Rongwo is undergoing rapid urbanization and migration. The town has a population of approximately 50,000, with Tibetans constituting the majority ethnic group; it also hosts Han, Hui, and Salar ethnic groups.

In Tibetan autonomous areas, the use of Tibetan in public spaces is legally mandated. However, there is often a significant gap between language policy, its implementation, and the benefits for minority languages.

Image 2 : The ice cream brand Mixue (Image credit: Giulia Cabras)

In response to the dominance of (Standard) Chinese monolingualism in Rongwo’s public spaces, local authorities introduced a series of regulations in 2017 aimed at promoting bilingualism in public signage (Regulations on Tibetan Language Work in Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture). A diachronic study of various types of public signs reveals that these measures have indeed contributed to an increase in bilingual signs in Rongwo (Wang, 2024: 196–220). Nonetheless, the study found also that, although both Chinese and Tibetan are present on signs, Chinese occupies a hierarchical position in terms of size and the amount of information provided. Exceptions to this hierarchy are observed in signs for businesses selling Buddhist religious objects, as well as in restaurants and hotels that emphasize a Tibetan connection.

While conducting research in the area, I noticed that variation in content and lexical choices across these signs reflect the products or services offered, which, in turn, highlight the different commercial trends shaping the town’s economic development.

Chinese brands and the standardization of space

Strolling through the streets of Rongwo, it is common to encounter numerous franchise shops primarily selling Chinese brands, especially in the more developed area of the city. The signage for these shops typically exhibits a similar visual organization in which the Tibetan language is smaller and marginalized.

Image 1 displays one of the main streets of Rongwo, where Chinese, written in both pinyin and characters, is significantly more visible than Tibetan. Without the small Tibetan language insertions, one might easily mistake this area for a city on the eastern coast or in central China, rather than a town at the edge of the Tibetan plateau.

Image 3: ‘Snow Ladies’ a clothing shop (top), and ‘Elegance of the Land of Snow’ a photo studio (bottom) (Image credit: Dorji Drolma)

A closer look reveals signs from well-known Chinese brands, such as Huawei and China Telecom, leaders in China’s telecommunications industry, as well as technology holdings and multinationals like Skyworth and Siemens. In some cases, such as with the Skyworth/Siemens sign, Tibetan is entirely absent.

In these cases, the content organization of the signs typically includes the Tibetan transliteration of the Chinese brand, along with a caption in Tibetan explaining the type of product or service being offered. This model is exemplified in Image 2 by the sign of a Chinese ice cream and iced tea chain store called ‘Honey snow iced city’ (蜜雪冰城 mixue bingcheng).

Conversely, the Tibetan version displays the transliteration of the Chinese name: མུས་ཞུའེ་ mus zhu’e (note that in the Amdo Tibetan dialect, mus is pronounced as [mi]). As discussed in another Language on the Move post, transliteration reflects only a semblance of bilingualism that ultimately results in the Chinese brand name being written in Tibetan.

The Tibetan content also includes the caption ‘sweet frozen drinks’ (འཁྱགས་བཟོས་བཏུང་རིགས་མངར་མོ་  ). This description in Tibetan clearly explains what the shop sells, whereas the Chinese expressions ‘honey snow’ and ‘iced city’ are more evocative and imaginative. It is noteworthy that the font of the Chinese name is creative (with character strokes designed to resemble water drops), while the Tibetan font is quite standard.

Local Tibetans I spoke with have varying perceptions and opinions regarding the content and lexical choices of these signs.

For some, a catchy and creative presentation is not important; what matters most is a clear description of the product or service offered. This clarity helps avoid misunderstandings, particularly for older generations, who are unfamiliar with the names of Chinese brands.

Image 4: A Tibetan restaurant displaying ceremonial scarves and the Kālacakra (wheel of time) on its door (Image credit: Dorji Drolma)

For others, the Tibetan content is perceived as too lengthy, complex, and unattractive. This opinion highlights a common challenge faced by minority languages competing with concise languages such as Chinese, a phenomenon also documented for the Uyghur language (Dwyer 2005: 28).

Signaling Tibetan identity

Rongwo is also home to local businesses, often related to restaurants, clothing, religious paraphernalia, and thangka art. In these shops, we observe a more balanced visual representation of Tibetan and Chinese, suggesting that making Tibetan more visible positively impacts their commercial activity. Moreover, Tibetan serves as the source language, as evidenced by terms that refer to Tibetan landscape and philosophical-religious tradition.

Some examples are shown in Image 3: ‘Elegance of the Land of Snow’, a photo studio (གངས་ལྗོངས་སྒེག་ཉམས་), a restaurant named after the rope used by kings to ascend to heaven (རྨུ་ཐག་), ‘Snow Ladies’, a clothing shop (ཁ་བ་བུ་མོ་), ‘Treasury of Zambala’, a clothing shop, named after the Buddist fortune god Zambala (ཛམ་དཀར་ གཏེར་མཛོད་).

Often, the signs display visual elements, such as ceremonial scarves, philosophical and religious symbols such as the wheel of time or the wish-fulfilling gem, and Tibetan greetings or blessings, as shown in Images 4 and 5.

Local Tibetans I spoke with expressed positive opinions about the choice of shop names and emphasized the growth of local Tibetan entrepreneurship in sectors such as accommodation, Tibetan food, clothing, and art, and  Buddhist items, contributing to the local community both culturally and economically. In this case, the Tibetan language can be seen as a form of linguistic capital, serving the dual purpose of ‘pride and profit’ (Duchêne and Heller, 2012): it emphasizes a sense of belonging to the ethnic group while also bringing economic benefits.

Language and urbanization: opportunities and challenges

Image 5: A Tibetan clothing shop featuring the norbu membar (wish-fulfilling gem) on the sign, with the blessing ‘May you be well’ (ཨོཾ་བདེ་ལེགས་སུ་གྱུར་ཅིག།) written on a red piece of paper above the door (Image credit: Giulia Cabras)

The linguistic landscape of Rongwo reflects the commercial development of the town, which appears to follow two contrasting directions.

One model of development is based on Chinese brands, and to a lesser extent, multinational companies, making towns in Tibetan areas indistinguishable from other cities in inner and coastal China. In this scenario, Tibetan is present primarily due to language regulations but remains marginalized in terms of size and content.

The other model is fueled by local or Tibetan entrepreneurship, where the Tibetan language and references to Tibetan cultural heritage play a role in shaping the nature of the business and enhancing its appeal.

The perceptions of local Tibetans regarding the content of commercial signs reveal both the opportunities and challenges that minority languages face, highlighting critical aspects of language policy and urban development.

In some instances, Tibetan is merely a transliteration of Chinese brands, and lacks the attractiveness expected from commercial signage. This demonstrates how even languages with an established literary tradition, such as Tibetan, struggle to compete with nationally promoted languages and standardized models of economic and urban development.

References

Duchêne Alexandre & Monica Heller (eds.). 2012. Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit. New York and Oxford: Routledge.
Dwyer, Arienne M. 2005. The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy, and Political Discourse. Policy Studies East-West Center Washington D.C.
Wang, Zixi. 2024. Contacts des langues dans le paysage linguistique scolaire. Regards sociolinguistiques et géo-sémiotiques sur l’Amdo (Qinghai). Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3.

Acknowledgement

This blog post was written as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project “(In)visibility of Multilingualism in Amdo Tibet”, funded by the European Union (Project 101106116). Project website: https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/invisibility-multilingualism-amdo/

Image from a university website

“An amazing student experience awaits you!” – “a multicultural vibrant experience” in a “stunning landscape” covered by “year-round sunshine.”

These phrases do not come from a tourist brochure, but the websites of Australian universities. They are accompanied by stunning images of urban or natural landscapes and aim to attract international students.

International education is often hailed as a way to keep economies growing as higher education has shifted towards a commercialized model. However, the efforts to increase enrolment numbers are also accompanied by worries that in the haste to attract more students, the admission requirements – in particular that of English language proficiency – are lowered.

Gatekeeping

Countries built on immigration are looking to recover the immigration loss caused by the pandemic years and the ensuing border restrictions. A new proposal to overhaul the Australian visa system has attracted attention as the country is forecast to grow by 715,000 from 2022 to 2024.

International students are affected, of course, as student visas and possible immigration pathways attached to students visas are discussed in the report. In particular, the English language requirements for admission into university courses are recommended to be raised from a “low base” of Band 5.5 on the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) to be able to meet the language demands of the labour market after graduation.

We have addressed this deficit approach to international students before. Recent research by Ingrid Piller and I on university admission requirements found that English language proficiency requirements maintain exclusionary practices of international students by setting up the binary categories of tested and ‘inherent’ English language proficiency (read more about it here).

But how do universities reconcile these two opposing forces of, on the one hand, needing to attract international students for commercial reasons, and on the other, setting up linguistic requirements as a gatekeeping mechanism?

An idealized lifestyle

To answer this question, in my recently published paper at Higher Education Research & Development, I turned to university websites. I wanted to explore what role language plays in the admission process caught between these two opposing forces. And how does it affect the communication of English language proficiency requirements to prospective international applicants. The analysis went beyond looking at content and text and included the multimodal features of the websites: naming and positioning of webpages, the visuals accompanying the texts and, of course, the language use of the English language proficiency requirement webpages.

Image from a university website

I found that the language use, which ranged from highly formal to conversational, references the authority of the law, thus adds objectivity and authority to the requirements. The paper provides an analysis of how the generic features of legal language use are applied to the educational context and interact with marketing discourses.

The visuals on these webpages create a different effect, though.

They serve to depict an idealized student lifestyle to which English language proficiency is a vehicle. The pictures and videos on the websites analysed depict students engaging in various social situations and leisure activities such as shopping, eating out or engaging in activities at the beach. The participants in these activities are depicted in engaging in intercultural situations (indexed by looks of various ethnicities) and enjoying each other’s company, communicating with ease.

In reality, these are activities international students report to struggle with because of social isolation or the difficulty to use English in everyday situations. These visuals of ‘success’ legitimize the English language proficiency requirements, where participants become role models or protagonists in a video footage.

What effect does this representation have on the concept of English language proficiency used as an admission requirement?

A simplified English language proficiency and an accessible student experience

Firstly, English language proficiency gets simplified through the objectivity of simple numerical scores and the authority of legal discourse. After all, if the university policy states that an IELTS Band 6 is  adequate to study in English and the students have this level, they should have no problem with their studies or socialization – a view commonly held.

At the same time, the website visuals communicate a desirable student experience. This is both a misrepresentation of the language proficiency needed for further studies, which in fact all students need to develop, not just internationals, and the realities of the international student experience.

As much as we would appreciate “year-round sunshine”, we need to acknowledge that the weather in Australia is more nuanced than that.

Likewise, university admission requirement communication should indicate that English language proficiency is not a fixed ‘product’ described by the applicant’s IELTS score but rather a process, and acknowledge that discipline-specific language proficiency may need to be developed by all students during their studies.

References

Bodis, A. (2023). Gatekeeping v. marketing: English language proficiency as a university admission requirement in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2023.2174082
Bodis, A. (2021). The discursive (mis) representation of English language proficiency: International students in the Australian media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(1), 37-64.
Bodis, A. (2021). ‘Double deficit’ and exclusion: Mediated language ideologies and international students’ multilingualism. Multilingua, 40(3), 367-392. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2019-0106
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000689

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Don’t trust the British speaking English?

The cover story of The Guardian Weekly of 18 September 2020 has a portrayal of Boris Johnson’s back, with both hands behind him, one gripping a hammer, the other with his fingers crossed, and the caption ‘Promises, promises. What will Boris Johnson break next?’ European Union negotiators in dialogue with the British government have every reason to be concerned about whether Johnson can be trusted. British behaviour is probably no surprise to the head of the EU’s task force, Michel Barnier, a top EU and French government insider. The confrontation looks like yet another drama in a millennium of clashes between France and England, now in the form of a war of words. The words in question, for the British negotiators and doubtless for many of the Eurocrats involved, are English words. What is ironical is that the British are leaving the Union, whereas the English language is staying on.

How and why this is so requires an analysis of how the EU manages the multilingualism of its activities and functions in its key institutions and in links with the 27 member states. The way languages are used, and which languages are used, are key social and political issues in an international world.

The dream of ‘global Britain’ of Theresa May and Boris Johnson is the idea that the UK should join up with the old Commonwealth countries and the USA in an Anglosphere network that will replace membership of the EU. The Anglosphere idea is rooted in the assumption that those who speak English are simply superior to others. That an Anglosphere union of ‘English-speaking peoples’ will emerge is a post-imperial pipe dream that has entranced some influential British politicians for decades. In a speech at Harvard University in 1943, when Winston Churchill was awarded an honorary doctorate, he sketched out a plan for the post-Nazi world. The primary aim was to perpetuate British and American global dominance, with a ‘birthright’ to spread English worldwide. The promotion of ‘global English’ had been discussed at conferences on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930s.

Others see English differently.

“Perfidious Albion”

The British have been known in France for centuries as ‘Perfidious Albion’. Wikipédia in its French variant explains that Albion is an ancient way of referring to England, and defines the term as ‘acts relating to diplomatic manoeuvres, duplicity, treachery, and thereby of infidelity (vis-à-vis promises or assumed alliances made with other state-nations) by monarchs or governments of the United Kingdom (or of England prior to 1707) in their quest for egoistic interests.’

Perfidious Albion? (Image credit: thejournal.ie)

This French website provides a wealth of examples of British treachery from the time of Joan of Arc onwards. It refers to Nelson, the banishing of Napoleon to a remote island, incidents of imperial competition in the Middle East, and Winston Churchill’s decision to sink much of the French fleet on 3 July 1940 in the naval port near Oran in French Algeria, Mers-El-Kébir. Churchill acted when the French were allies but had just been overrun by Hitler’s troops. His purpose was to prevent any take-over of French warships by the Germans or the Italians. In addition to many vessels being wrecked, 1,297 French servicemen died.

Wikipedia in English also provides a wealth of examples of how Perfidious Albion has been used by enemies of the UK over several centuries, and recently in connection with Brexit. By contrast an online history course for British schoolchildren has a different understanding of the term: ‘Perfidious Albion is a term used by some people to describe the British Empire. It is a term that suggests that the British were deceitful and treacherous in their dealings as an Empire.’ This website states that the originator of the term was a French author, but fails to provide any examples of the way the term has been used in France or of French resentment of British behaviour.

President Charles de Gaulle rejected an application by the British to join the European Economic Community (as it then was) on 27 November 1967, after blocking an earlier attempt in 1963. The other five member states were keen for the UK to join, but they were not consulted by de Gaulle. At a press conference he stated that the UK would need to change drastically before it could be accepted. De Gaulle did not want the pound sterling complicating European economic integration, and rightly saw the risk of the UK serving as a bridgehead for US influence. This was a reasonable consideration, even if de Gaulle was doubtless well aware that the creation of the EU was as much a project of the US as of key Europeans. Among these the most influential was Jean Monnet, a banker who collaborated with the British and the Americans between the two world wars and was an influential adviser to Franklin Roosevelt during the war. American involvement in planning for Europe is described in Pascaline Winand’s book, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe.

De Gaulle had personal experience of Perfidious Albion, since he lived in exile in London from 1940 to 1943 as head of the Free French movement. Churchill considered de Gaulle ‘an enemy of Britain’, with a ‘messianic complex” and ‘dictatorial’ tendencies. Churchill’s hostile assessment was first made public when secret documents were released in 2000. Richard Norton-Taylor reported on this in ‘How Churchill plotted against “our bitter foe” ’ in The Guardian (5 January 2000). He reveals that Churchill conspired with President Roosevelt to prevent de Gaulle from leading French recovery in the final phase of the war or after it. The article concludes with stating that between the UK and France ‘tensions remain’. This is still the case in 2020. The French and some other Europeans will breathe a sigh of relief once the UK has gone, but its departure weakens both the EU and the UK.

Britain and the European Union

British disagreements about many EU policy issues with other EU countries are partly caused by the goals of European integration being deliberately left unclear. Unification has been a gradual process since 1955. For some the goal is an increasingly merged union and ultimately a federal United States of Europe; for others the EU should remain only an economic union, but it is already vastly more than that. The EU faces major challenges quite apart from Brexit: migration, member states not observing the rule of law, the messy interface between national and supranational interests, and the euro serving some countries better than others. A book by a distinguished American observer of EU affairs, John R. Gillingham, The EU. An obituary (2017, updated in 2018) argues strongly that the EU’s many weaknesses mean that it could disintegrate.

Those who thought that a British exit would rapidly lead to other countries following suit have been proven wrong.

Gillingham, an economic historian, basically recommends that the EU should become more like the USA. This fits well into an Anglosphere agenda, which I will return to. He complains that ‘Europe is governed today neither by its peoples nor by its ideals but by a bank board, but  tendentiously argues that ‘repair of the financial system ….will mean dropping ambitious EU reform plans in favour of American banking practices and accepting increased influence for US investors and financial methods’ (ibid., 239, 207).

This is almost as crude as when the US ambassador to Denmark stated at my university in 1997: ‘The most serious problem for the European Union is that it has so many languages, this preventing real integration and development of the Union’.

It was de Gaulle’s successor as president, Georges Pompidou, who agreed to the UK joining in 1973. This was on one condition, namely that all British staff in EEC institutions should be fluent in French. In Pompidou’s view, French was the language of Europe, and English the language of the Americas. This sample linguistic nationalism provides a glimpse of the complexity of managing multilingualism in the EU, in which in principle and in law all 24 EU languages have equal rights.

There was a witticism circulating during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. Ministers from many continental European countries have often been able to function in more than one language. The British by contrast were relentlessly monolingual. In Thatcher’s government only two of her Ministers had any proficiency in a foreign language. But these two were the ones who really could not be trusted because they were suspiciously interested in foreign cultures! A key factor influencing the outcome of the Brexit referendum vote is English insularity. A key factor influencing the Brexit vote was ignorance about how the EU functions.

The British vote to leave the EU can be seen as British perfidy vis-à-vis its European partners of 47 years. The perfidy reached new heights in September 2020, after three years of complicated negotiations on the terms of the UK’s departure and future relationship with the EU. Johnson’s government decided on legislation that was in breach of a legally binding treaty with the EU, one that he himself had negotiated and described at the time as ‘fantastic’. The legislation, the Internal Market Bill was passed by the House of Commons on 29 September 2020. Perfidious Albion of the crudest kind.

On 1 October 2020 the European Commission reacted by sending the UK a ‘letter of formal notice’ for breaching its obligations under the Withdrawal Agreement. This marks the beginning of an infringement process against the UK, since ‘Article 5 of the Withdrawal Agreement states that the European Union and the United Kingdom must take all appropriate measures to ensure the fulfillment of the obligations arising from the Withdrawal Agreement, and that they must refrain from any measures which could jeopardise the attainment of those objectives. Both parties are bound by the obligation to cooperate in good faith in carrying out the tasks stemming from the Withdrawal Agreement.’

Face to face negotiations on this issue failed to deter the UK from acting illegally. The British legislation is in conflict with the Protocol on Ireland / Northern Ireland, as Ursula von der Leyen stressed in her press statement of 1 October. Failure to react to the infringement notification and to comply with the UK’s obligations can result in the issue being referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which can impose heavy fines. The UK is still legally obliged to respect the Court’s decision.

One of the goals of Brexit was to escape this kind of control. However, the UK’s behaviour is undermining its international reputation as a country that respects the rule of law.

EU language policies

Language policy management in the EU system is complex and politically sensitive. Any analysis of it needs to be calibrated with language rights and language use in law and in practice, and the market forces that have propelled English forward over the past five decades. There are very different challenges for permanent employees of the European Commission, for Members of the European Parliament and their staff, for the activities of the European Council of Ministers, which brings together government ministers of the 27 member states, and for countless experts involved in negotiations on policy documents or budget implementation. The continuous production of policy documents and of the massive corpus of Eurolaw (the ‘acquis communautaire’), which overrides national law, and is published in parallel in 24 languages, in principle with the same semantic content in each of them, requires the world’s largest translation service. These activities are radically different from the management of speech in diverse institutional contexts, supported by extensive, flexible interpretation services.

The language of EU official documents is sui generis. It is screened by legal specialists as well as linguists. High-level negotiation on all of the many policy issues on which the EU legislates is dependent on the precision of every word in written texts, and the capacity to decode these, in all of the 24 languages. The written language is essentially a technical, bureaucratic, legalistic one for very specific purposes. It has to navigate the turbulent waters of maintaining linguistic diversity, and consistency in formulating EU principles. This is of major importance for citizens and for the representatives of all countries, since EU law takes precedence over national law. Unfortunately, the general public, and probably many British Members of Parliament, know little about the interface between national law and EU law, and the shared responsibility of all member states for the formulation and implementation of decisions and policies.

Blaming ‘Brussels’ for EU decisions and decrees is simply false, when each and every country has had a shared responsibility for these policies.

Use of one language rather than another is not merely a pragmatic choice. Seeing a language as purely instrumental, or as ideologically neutral matter, is false.  Choice of language reflects political choices and realities. A language is one particular way of understanding and shaping reality, drawing on a worldview that emerged in specific historical and cultural contexts. All languages change over time, as the variety of English worldwide demonstrates. All 24 EU languages are in both national and international use because of the way the EU operates.

When Finland joined the EU, it needed to translate the over 70,000 pages of Eurolaw into Finnish. They attempted to translate from the English version but could not understand it without consulting the French original.

One of the consequences of British EU membership has been a major change in the language policies of EU institutions. English has gradually since 1973 become the dominant in-house language of the European Commission, largely displacing French. In communications with the wider world, it is mostly English that is used. English has become the default language, and massively important in the conduct of EU affairs, not least when policies are initially conceptualised in English, and drafted in English. Proficiency in English therefore, whether used by a native speaker or by a well-qualified non-native speaker, delivers a strategic advantage to those who think in English and are able to use it optimally in speech or writing. Conversely, for those less proficient, English puts them at a disadvantage. English may not be fully understood, especially when native speakers do not adjust their discourse sensitively for an audience with diverse linguistic backgrounds. Speech in limited English, sometimes disparagingly described as ‘broken English’, can lead to misunderstandings or can complicate interaction. Whether any ‘Euro English’ has evolved, as has been claimed, is disputed, and seems improbable, in part because of the diversity of its users and of its contexts of use.

The triumph of English

Many factors have contributed to the expansion of English in Europe and worldwide. English is the dominant language of the USA, Hollywood, NATO, the UN, international finance, several countries, and many international organisations. Economic integration has strengthened English in continental Europe. It has also contributed to major investment in the UK by corporations from Japan, the USA, and continental Europe because the UK was part of the European common market with freedom of movement of goods, people, and capital. This investment is at risk once Brexit is completed if there is no agreement that suits both the EU and the UK. Industrial products, for instance vehicle or airplane parts, can typically cross borders many times before a finished product exists. Bailey’s Irish cream reportedly crosses the UK/Irish border six times during its production process. Even the pre-eminence of the City of London in finance has suffered because of Brexit.

“Uncle Sam Teaches the World”, Puck Magazine, 1899 (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Other factors influencing the expansion of English in continental Europe are geographical proximity, giving the learning of English pride of place in schools, and extensive use of it in higher education and research. Applications for research grants from the EU are invariably submitted in English (even if the regulations state that any of the 24 languages can be used!). Applications are also assessed by a variety of Europeans using English. This puts applicants and assessors whose primary research language is a Romance, Slav, or Finno-Ugric language, or Greek at a disadvantage. Since there is immense competition for such funds, the hegemony of English is consolidated in this way, and will not change once Brexit is finalised.

The expansion of English was not left to chance. US ‘philanthropic’ foundations invested significantly in academia in Europe from the 1920s onwards. The British and Americans have promoted English worldwide since the 1950s, as advocated by Churchill (and by political leaders in the UK and US over 200 years). Linguistic imperialism of this kind is well documented. When the iron curtain was removed, it was an explicit policy of successive British governments to expand the learning of English in former communist countries so as to make English the link language across the continent, and to marginalise Russian and German. French has been losing out to English for centuries, after losing wars with the British in North America, India, and Europe. Former French colonies in north and western Africa are also moving into using English. English is the dominant language of the African Union. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is modelled on the EU, has English as its sole official language.

Other key factors influencing the expansion of English can be related to what some term its soft power, the reputation of the BBC, prestigious universities, literature and culture from Shakespeare to the Beatles and Harry Potter, the Westminster parliamentary system, etc. Soft power in fact converts into major economic benefits, through fee-paying foreign students, cultural industries, and English language teaching. Almost the entire budget of the British Council, the para-statal body that promotes British interests and English in over 100 countries, is funded by its income from teaching English, testing proficiency, and educational consultancies. English is a billion dollar commodity.

That all of this will continue unchanged once Brexit has been completed is extremely unlikely. Detachment from continental Europe will affect commercial, political, educational, and cultural affairs in the UK negatively. A hard or no Brexit is a catastrophe for higher education as well as business in the UK. Much will depend on what sort of policies the British government will follow worldwide.

The Anglosphere – a policy or a chimera?

The idea of the “Anglosphere” is closely aligned with the former British Empire (1886 map)

The idea of an Anglosphere was first promoted in The Anglosphere challenge. Why the English-speaking nations will lead the way in the twenty-first century, a book written by a USA industrialist, James C. Bennett, in 2004. He defines the Anglosphere as meaning ‘the sharing of fundamental customs and values at the core of English-speaking cultures: individualism; rule of law; honoring of covenants; in general the high-trust characteristics described by Francis Fukujama in Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity; and the emphasis on freedom as a political and cultural value’.

With Boris Johnson in charge in the UK, trust is elusive. The idea that the rule of law and trusting others are uniquely Anglo-American traits is an insult to all other countries. The rule of law in British India served British rather than Indian interests, as described in Inglorious empire. What the British did to India, a book written by a senior UN diplomat, Shashi Tharoor.

Parliamentary systems in both the USA and the UK are less democratic than in countries with proportionate representation. They are also invidiously influenced by financial interests, by social media schemes, and by many abstaining from voting. In the EU the rule of law is a well-established key value, despite the varied historical roots and trajectories of member states. The rule of law is now monitored and reported on annually in each country.

The essential unifying bond between countries in the Anglosphere vision is the language. It is English which is the foundational glue that is seen as binding the people together, and expresses what Bennett sees as the particular virtues of ‘English-speaking countries’. English has been privileged in each of them. Major efforts were made to eliminate all other languages in these countries, using punitive legislative and educational measures, but with only partial success. The concept also occludes the reality of each country being multilingual, and English changing over time to meet local needs in each.

The myth of American exceptionalism, that the USA is a uniquely virtuous country, continues when Bennett writes ‘Increasingly during the past few centuries, the English-speaking world has been the pathfinder for all of humanity’ through the ‘first modern nation-state, the first liberal democratic state’. These are very dubious claims. Links between the UK and the USA have for centuries been close, albeit contentious, but were reinvigorated when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan orchestrated the launch of neoliberalism.

Bennett argues that the North American Free Trade Association, NAFTA, and the European Union are ‘of limited value at best, and at worst do harm when they attempt to homogenize nations with substantially different characteristics.’ His contention is that the British people have more in common with Americans than with continental Europeans, and that the media and internet are intensifying this convergence.

Detaching Britain from Europe

The idea of ‘detaching’ the UK from the EU has been pursued in several think tanks in the USA. Conferences on the Anglosphere were organised by the Hudson Institute in 1999 and 2000, with significant participation by leading British cultural conservatives. The third Anglosphere century. The English-speaking world in an era of transition is a tract written by Bennett and published by the Heritage Institute in 2007. It includes an Anglosphere agenda for the economic, political, and military integration of the UK and other ‘English-speaking countries’, possibly India and Singapore too, under USA leadership.

He advocates the merging of the United Kingdom with NAFTA and its detachment from Europe so that the British and US defence industries can integrate, and as in finance, function as a ‘seamless market’. This would strengthen the massive impact of the military expenditure of the US, and of the ‘Five eyes’ intelligence alliance that connects Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK to the US. Bennett propounds that ‘The past thirty years of British history have encompassed a period of political and cultural schizophrenia that has created ongoing unresolved tensions in its national life and identity’, the solution to which is an Anglosphere Network Commonwealth.

(Image credit: ArcGIS Storymap)

One thrust is to entrench English monolingualism.

Bennett recommends that ‘Multiculturalism and bilingualism should be abandoned, and assimilation and learning of English should become national policies’. This proposal dovetails with English-only policies that a number of states in the USA have introduced, whereas this policy has had little support at the national level. Insisting on monolingualism in the UK and Australia is a political no-brainer, even if many people in each country remain personally monolingual. Bennett seems to have forgotten the strength of French in Canada. The indigenous peoples in all these countries and their languages are ignored.

The deep historical roots in the UK of the notion of an Anglosphere are explored in depth in Shadows of empire. The Anglosphere in British politics, by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, published in 2018. A deep commitment to Anglo-American unity and to Anglosphere ideas can be traced across British cultural and political history in statements by Cecil Rhodes, Winston Churchill, Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher.

The book also analyses the way Anglosphere ideas are currently impacting on the British political scene. Several influential British politicians in the Conservative party are attracted by an Anglosphere vision. The main champion of Anglosphere ideas in the build-up to a referendum vote on Brexit of 23 June 216 was Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), but the Leave campaign made sure that Farage was left in the background. A lengthy book entitled All-out war. The full story of Brexit, written by Tim Shipman in 2017, never refers to the Anglosphere. The term has evidently not become established in political discourse or journalism.

There is little evidence of  the Anglosphere ideas appealing to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, and few of the other, less ‘white’ Commonwealth countries are contenders. The Anglosphere, and strengthening economic links with the UK has never been a priority in these countries, quite the opposite.

Championing Brexit

How the UK might benefit by leaving the EU was totally absent from the Brexit Leave campaign, other than fraudulent promises of financial relief and the claim that exiting would be a simple matter. The slogan ‘take back control’ is a meaningless notion in an interconnected world, as the negotiations on exiting have shown. Benefits of any kind have still not been clarified. The vision of a ‘global Britain’ is vacuous and ahistorical, but smacks of the idea of making the UK ‘great’ again.

The trio of British government Ministers appointed by Theresa May to negotiate Brexit with the EU all appear to have had neoimperial dreams: Liam Fox, the Minister for Foreign Trade, had a portrait of Cecil Rhodes in his office. David Davis had attended Anglosphere think tank events in the USA. Boris Johnson, when Foreign Secretary, had a bust of Winston Churchill in his. During a visit to Australia, he talked warmly of the Anglosphere. Later, as Prime Minister, Johnson nominated an unsuccessful former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, as an adviser on trade relations, a hugely controversial appointment.

Trust? (Image credit:
Jannes Van den wouwer, Unsplash)

Creating closer trade links with the USA has figured prominently in the policies of the governments of both Theresa May and Boris Johnson. They are extremely controversial because what is at stake is less stringent regulation of food products (chlorinated chicken, hormones in beef, etc.) and the prospect of the National Health Service being sold off to US corporate interests, despite health care being vastly more expensive in the US, and failing to serve a large section of the population. From what is known about ongoing negotiations, it appears that the UK government is covertly following an Anglosphere agenda. There is virtually no parliamentary control, and the general public have not being given any insight into what is in the transatlantic pipeline. The British NGO Global Justice Now has been following these negotiations carefully and campaigning against what it sees as ‘the corporate take-over of global health’.

The British Academy organized a conference on the Anglosphere on June 15-16, 2017. It brought together academics from several countries, but mainly from the UK, British Foreign Office staff, and James Bennett. Martin Kettle of The Guardian wrote about it under the title ‘Here is Britain’s new place in the world – on the sidelines’.

The myth of the Anglosphere alternative needs nailing. These ideas have old roots. They have shaped a lot of British thinking in different ways, not just on the right of politics, for at least 150 years. In their 2017 incarnation, however, they run into two immovable facts. First, UK trade with the Anglosphere nations has massively declined from its pre-1914 peak; realistically, the US is now the UK’s only significantly large Anglosphere trading partner. Second, the US has long treated bilateral trade deals as zero-sum games, played on US terms, even before the election of an ultra-nationalist president, never mind now.

English in the EU now and in the future

At no point since the accession to the EU of the UK, along with Ireland and Denmark, in 1973 has there been any official recognition of English having a privileged or superior status in the EU. The progressive expansion of its use over nearly half a century has resulted in a downgrading of the use of French, which was primus inter pares earlier, and German, as well as the marginalisation of all other languages.

There has been speculation about whether English will remain as the dominant language in EU institutions after Brexit. Both President Macron and the former President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, are on record as wanting French to regain its former dominant role. Some increase in the use of French is possible. At present any unclear English and French texts are submitted to a language revision before they are translated into other EU languages. Nearly all new policy statements as well as texts that ultimately will have the force of law are drafted initially in English. It therefore seems safe to predict that any downgrading of English within the EU system is very unlikely to occur. Not only because the Irish and Maltese (both formerly run by the British) will continue to function almost exclusively in English, as will many from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and individuals from other countries. The main reason is that EU employees from all parts of Europe have become accustomed to functioning in English. The hegemony of English has been internalised and accepted.

When addressing the media, senior EU staff increasingly make statements in English, even if in principle they could speak any of the other 23 official languages. This practice strengthens the idea of it being ‘natural’ to use English, even if this practice is in conflict with the principle of the EU as a multilingual organisation, and is a consequence of multiple hegemonic forces behind English.

When Ursula von der Leyen, as the incoming President of the Commission in 2019 presented her priorities to the European Parliament, her mission statement was delivered mainly in English, and made brief, token use of French and German. Her multilingual competence is impressive. Her prepared speeches in English are delivered lucidly and persuasively, whereas some of her colleagues, the other Commissioners, are incapacitated and unconvincing when they opt to use English. The same applies when Ministers from continental Europe feel an obligation to speak English even when their mother tongues are languages that are widely used internationally, such as French, Spanish and German.

Charles Michel, the European Council President, reads prepared statements fluently in English but with a strong French accent. Whether he can use English spontaneously and effectively in a negotiating context one is unable to judge, but it is more than likely that he sounds more competent in French.

After a meeting of the European Council on 1 and 2 October 2020, the results were presented in an 8-minute speech delivered by Ursula von Leyen, in English. The written version was available in English, French, and German. One would have expected the presentation of results to be presented by Charles Michel, the European Council president, but it was von Leyen, the Commission president who spoke. One wonders whether this was a tactical decision, simply because she sounds more professional in English. Michel stood silently beside her. In principle these two presidents, plus the president of the European Parliament, have the same status but distinct portfolios.

On 12 September 2020, when reporting on a Brexit meeting in London, the German Minister of Finance Olaf Scholz chose to use English. He was reporting on highly sensitive issues, including the effect of the British intention to renege on the treaty signed a year earlier with the EU. Scholz sounded hesitant and unconvincing in English, and would doubtless have been vastly more effective and informative in German.

In any case it is unreasonable and unfair to expect people from 27 continental European countries to be as effective in English as in their national languages. The problem for von Leyen, Michel, and Scholz is, as the German-Danish linguist Hartmut Haberland points out, that in such contexts there is in effect no choice. ‘You are damned if you speak English and you are damned if you don’t.

This is the true triumph of English language imperialism: leaving everybody with no alternative.’

Romano Prodi, when he was President of the European Commission, was interviewed by an American journalist on many aspects of European integration, and was asked about EU language policy. The journalist is reported in Newsweek (31 May 2004) as saying: ‘A unified Europe in which English, as it turns out, is the universal language?’ Prodi replied: ‘It will be broken English, but it will be English.’

Ursula von der Leyen, the current president of the European Commission, is highly proficient in English

Broken English is increasingly what we hear when continental Europeans choose to address the international media and public in English. Broken English is a derogatory term for use of the language that does not conform to correct native speaker use. It is not a term that is used in scholarly analysis of the language, but it has a long pedigree. It was used by Shakespeare in a scene in the play Henry V, when the English king is wooing a French princess who is a complete beginner in English. There is a comic scene in Act III in which a lot of French is spoken, with Katherine’s lady in attendance teaching her a few basic words. In Act V the triumphal King Henry tells the princess: ‘If you will love me soundly with your French heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue’. What follows is playful interaction on this theme, with Katherine accusing Henry of being ‘full of deceits’. Perfidious Albion?

Broken agreements in not so broken English

Boris Johnson’s government decided in September 2020 to renege on a major agreement with the EU, one enshrined in an international treaty. The decision is in defiance of the UN Convention on International Treaties, as many legal specialists have pointed out. Philippe Sands QC, a professor of international law at University College London: ‘Every international lawyer is familiar with the Vienna convention on the law of treaties, and its article 27, which reflects a general principle: “A party may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for its failure to perform a treaty” ’(cited in The Guardian 12 September 2020). Despite the draft legislation being severely criticized by senior judges and lawyers, it was approved in the House of Commons on 29 September 2020.

It thus appears possible that Johnson’s team of negotiators has been duplicitous throughout negotiations on a Brexit agreement with the EU. Have they been negotiating in good faith? Perfidious Albion once more? Their word is not their bond?

Michel Barnier, the ‘Head of Task Force for Negotiations with the United Kingdom’, has made a succession of official statements on the progress of the Brexit negotiations, and increasingly on the lack of progress. It is difficult to imagine anyone more competent than Michel Barnier to represent the EU. He is the epitome of French experience and competence, was a Commissioner in the EU for two five-year periods, with responsibility for trade and regional policies, and has held several ministerial posts in French governments, including one as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The EU’s position has been transparently clear throughout. The multilingual website on the negotiations is fully informative, whereas nothing comparable exists in the UK. The British have repeatedly been asked to specify what their position is on key issues, among them fishing rights, a level playing field for trade, and Irish border arrangements. This has been frustrating for the EU, as its position has always been that it is in the interests of both the UK and the EU’s 27 member states that the negotiations should reach an agreement.

Since Germany has the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2020, its role is of great importance. Germany’s presidency does not entail direct responsibility for Brexit negotiations, but Germany’s excellent multilingual website has comprehensive coverage of all significant issues, including Brexit.

The EU is drawing its own conclusions. An anonymous EU representative was cited in The Guardian Weekly, on 18 September 2020: ‘People say that state aid and fisheries are the biggest stumbling blocks to a deal. It isn’t. It is trust’.

It seems highly likely that the power behind Johnson’s throne is Dominic Cummings, the ‘Chief Adviser’ to the Prime Minister. He is widely seen as a modern day Svengali or Rasputin. This understanding tallies with a detailed study of the Brexit Leave campaign, which Cummings was the brain behind. The most important Leave slogan was the claim that the UK was sending 350£ million a week to Brussels. This was untrue. It was plastered on campaign buses and widely cited. This did not disturb Cummings, since what was important was ‘message discipline and consistency’. As reported in the Financial Times, Cummings had ‘a cynical understanding that it did not matter if what the campaign said was factually correct’. This is the man that many experienced political commentators see as deciding what Boris Johnson does.

Johnson’s government’s illegality has been denounced by 5 former British Prime Ministers. Many Conservative Members of Parliament, for whom the rule of law is a fundamental principle, are in despair. On the other hand, according to The Economist, and cited in Pankaj Mishra’s Bland fanatics. Liberals, race and empire, conservative politicians are people who ‘coast through life on “bluff rather than expertise”. They are mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers’ who engage in ‘egotistical and destructive behaviour’.

Mishra sees quitting the EU as similar to and as catastrophic as the British division of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 1921, and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, in both cases with appalling loss of life as a result.

The politics of English

In complex negotiations between the EU and the UK over the terms of a Brexit divorce agreement, every word counts. This presupposes that all are using the language or languages of negotiation in an optimal, honest way. The British use English, quite possibly a sophisticated form of native speaker communication which may be difficult for others to understand fully or to see through. Since very few British politicians have attained a high level of proficiency in a foreign language, it is highly likely that they do not adjust their language so that it is easier for foreigners to understand. EU representatives probably mainly speak English, with varying levels of both precision in speaking and in understanding the English of their interlocutors.

Michel Barnier probably mostly uses French, but has spoken English in some statements to the press, and when delivering a prepared speech in Ireland. The general public can only guess at how far language issues are complicating the negotiations, but the issue would need clarification. There is research evidence from universities where students from a variety of language backgrounds are studying in programmes in which English is the language of learning. They experience that people using English with a foreign accent are often clearer and easier to understand than native speakers of English. The same is probably true of politicians and eurocrats with a high level of proficiency in English.

The increase of the use of English in EU affairs has made it easier for the British to remain monolingual, whereas the EU has for many years been committed to making all its citizens able to function multilingually. My book on European language policy, published in 2003, English-only Europe? Challenging language policy, is a lengthy plea for member states to take language policy more seriously, so as to strengthen all European languages and to avoid an excessive focus on English.

The concluding sentence is: ‘If inaction on language policy in Europe continues, at the supranational and national levels, we may be heading for an American English-only Europe. Is that really what the citizens and leaders of Europe want?’

Brexit will significantly diminish British influence on how Europe evolves. This is in the interest of the USA, as think tanks in the USA and the key architect of Anglosphere, James Bennett, have indicated and doubtless worked for.

The book was recently updated and translated into French, entitled La domination de l’anglais: un défi pour l’Europe (The domination of English: a challenge for Europe). Part of this challenge is that many EU policies have strengthened English and simultaneously weakened other languages, in processes that can be seen as constituting linguistic imperialism.

Business leaders in the UK have repeatedly pleaded with Boris Johnson to ensure that businesses are not harmed by both a lack of clarity on an agreement with the EU and on the need to ensure an agreement. They have for years had the feeling that their needs were being neglected. The BBC reported on 26 June 2018, when Johnson was Foreign Secretary: ‘Asked about corporate concerns over a so-called hard Brexit, at an event for EU diplomats in London last week, Mr Johnson is reported to have replied: “Fuck business”. When challenged over what he was overheard saying, he did not deny it. Asked about this in the Commons, he said he may have ‘expressed scepticism about some of the views of those who profess to speak up for business’.

Johnson’s outstandingly perfidious remark ought to come back to haunt him, since the uncertainty for business remains, and has already had devastating consequences. The traffic jams of thousands of lorries clogging roads in Kent symbolize the utter incompetence of the British government. This is harming businesses, the British economy, lorry drivers of all nationalities, and the residents of Kent.

The government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis has been equally incompetent. In Posh boys. How English public schools ruin Britain Robert Verkaik shows how attendance at elite schools and Oxford University cuts the elite off from the rest of British society; it ‘divides society into winners and losers’. It produces politicians who are out of touch with ordinary people and unable to provide informed leadership. These are the people who are responsible for Brexit.

Why should anyone trust them?

Related content

• Cramer, R. 2018. From oil spill to Brexit.
• Piller, I. 2016. Have we just seen the beginning of the end of English?

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

As researchers and teachers, we know that our work is thoroughly social. We accept that we have an ethical responsibility to society and the people who both enable our work and need it. The societal impact of universities, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to the short-term impact increasingly required by funding bodies.

From social to market-based understandings of societal impact

“Researchers’ Night” is an outreach event of the University of Jyväskylä for community members of all ages (Image credit: University of Jyväskylä)

Since the 1970s, a new “entrepreneurial” and “innovative” ethos started to be naturalized in higher education, leading to a discussion of marketization and commodification of higher education conceptualized as “academic capitalism”. This development coincided with demands for a de-bureaucratization of public institutions like universities, thus creating a situation where the bureaucratic budget steering of the public sector made way for an accountability and evaluation based steering. This coincided with neoliberal New Public Management (NPM) theories that called for a decentralized market-like governance of the public sector.

My rant hits this paradox: how can we make universities more meaningful for and in society, while accommodating the market demands steering of higher education? Closer to home: how can we, in the RECLAS collegium, criticize managerialist funding practices and the demands that come with them, while at the same time participating in the game and playing by its rules?

I first discuss meanings of the term “societal impact” for higher education and society at large. In particular: how is societal impact understood and measured? I will then discuss the funding of universities from the perspective of societal impact. This will lead me to a discussion of the artificial divide between basic and applied research and the relevance of this divide for societal relevance of higher education. I finish with a call for arenas for societal impact that go beyond entrepreneurial and market based logics and loop back to the traditional tasks of research and teaching.

What is societal impact?

The basic tasks of higher education are, in the Humboldtian tradition, research and teaching. The “third mission” or “societal” turn of the 1970s was originally understood as co-operation of higher education with governments, industry and society at large, and operationalized as contributions of teaching and research to societal life and political decision making on one hand, and as commercialization of that teaching and research on the other.

A way of further understanding the third mission is to divide it into the social, the enterprising, and the innovative third mission. Especially since the 1970s, the “second academic revolution” has seen a turn from teaching and research to services to community and society – which, in turn, might or might not imply economic benefits to someone.

Critical voices have problematized this naturalization of an industrial and entrepreneurial third mission, which has its roots in demands for ex-post accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness. What is typical of this managerialist turn is that while the formal (normative and regulative) steering of higher education has loosened, the “soft demands” (persuasive and informal) have tightened, making the steering of higher education more opaque.

University funding and societal impact

How do we, then, know what societal impact is? I would like to suggest that the question should not be what but when. I will illustrate this with an example from higher education funding.

The basic tasks of universities, namely education, research, and the dissemination of knowledge gained through research, are ultimately very societal in nature and at the heart of universities’ societal impact mission. Because of this societal task, universities are generally either publicly funded or exempt from taxes in their fundraising even in the most market-oriented systems.

The Strategic Research Funding instrument, coordinated by the Academy of Finland, is an example of funding that is allocated to “high-quality research that has great societal impact” (Image credit: Academy of Finland)

However, in recent years, funding for higher education has started to include more performance based or strategically steered elements, as political goals of “societal impact” have been included in funding systems. Consequently, an increasing proportion of core funding for universities is now allocated as competitive funding or performance based funding; i.e. not as consistent or steady basic funding but funding based on politically dependent criteria and indicators. This applies to both traditional research funding (= need to anticipate impacts of research in funding applications) as well as teaching (= need to provide a particular amount of Masters degrees rather than a particular “amount of critical thinking”).

The societal benefits of higher education are, however, (only) partly predictable. Society needs experts and professionals trained by universities. So much is obvious. But not even the labor market demand for public sector workers such as doctors, teachers, or librarians is easily predictable. And it is even more difficult to anticipate long term impacts of research that is accumulated over decades and centuries. Development of critical thinking is no easier measured. The public funding of universities, thus, is largely based on the funder’s trust on this long-term benefit of higher education without any explicit indicators.

Thus, there is a mismatch between the long-term activities (or “impact”) of universities and their short-term strategic decision-making.

This mismatch affects the universities’ core functions. Funding models and strategic funding may change as political cycles change, and yet, universities need to enter a short-term funding competition based largely on strategizing societal tasks and societal usefulness of their activities to be successful. However, the activities of universities have long-term effects, which are less predictable and less easily measurable.

Societal impact and the artificial divide between “basic” and “applied” research

How, then, can societal impact be understood? What is societal impact? It seems that at least a part of the divide between “research” and “societally relevant research” is based on a divide between basic vs applied research. We have been conditioned to think of research either as something that is inspired by research curiosity (“basic research”) or something that is inspired by a desire to apply that research into practice (“applied research”).This thinking can lead to two kinds of fundamental value judgements on the importance of research:

• Basic research is seen as “academic”, “timeless” and “accumulating knowledge”, whereas applied research is seen as “practical”, “fast” and “accumulating (economic) benefits”
• Basic research is seen as “useless” (for society and economy in particular), whereas applied research is seen as “useful” (for society and economy in particular)

However, the divide between basic and applied research is based on problematic premises and an artificial divide that has its origins in statistical and registry needs rather than actual research internal needs. The linear assumptions of research curiosity leading to basic research, further leading to practical applications, and ending at technological innovations do not hold empirically. “Applied” innovations can lead to “basic” research questions and “basic” research can have very immediate practical applications. Thus, Donald Stokes’ concept of use inspired basic research may be useful, bridging “research promise and societal need”.

Equally, the divide between usefulness or uselessness of research is artificial because just as it is difficult to know whether research is useful, it is equally difficult to know when it is useful. The time span to evaluate the usefulness or scientific work is beyond economic quarterly assessments. It is impossible to know, on a short term basis, what is beneficial for society in the long term. This tweet about the dismissal of coronavirus research as unimportant, even only a year ago provides a stark example:

Why competitive project-based funding is bad for research, part 856249: French scientists specialising in coronavirus research were repeatedly denied funding because their topic was deemed not fashionable enough (and reviewers argued symptoms in humans were `just like a cold`) https://t.co/4OkpiYwwmx

— Aline Courtois (@Aline_Courtois) March 9, 2020

Additionally, the example of the dismissal of coronavirus research also calls into question the overall ethicality of government-steered research. By submitting research to the dictates of short-term payoffs through the denial of long-term guaranteed funding, the overall resilience of higher education – and, hence the overall benefit to humanity – is reduced. A famous example is Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine: Salk did not seek a patent as he felt the rights of the vaccine should be owned by the people. The main value here is to pay it forward to the common good, not to funders and markets.

Should research be societally relevant? Yes.

Do we know what is societally relevant? No. Or, to be precise, not in the short term.

In the end, the societal impact requirement has turned from an integral part of our research and teaching activities into a naturalized political demand, rewarding us for things that are secondary to our ethical responsibility for society.

As academics, this places us in a difficult position. We are good at arguing to ourselves why we need to participate in the “neoliberal governmentality game” of applying for top funding such as the RECLAS profiling money. We have internalized a self-governing ethos where we monitor our behavior and check our Google Scholar citations while at the same time criticizing neoliberal academia with traditional humanist arguments. We need to prove our societal worth by planning, executing and demonstrating societal impact in our research, to the extent that we have lost sight of what societal impact of higher education is.

What should we, then, actually talk about when we talk about societal impact?

Echoing Laredo’s (2007) idea of teaching and research in different constellations as the main roles of the university, I would like us to go back to the intertwined role of teaching and research justifying funding. Universities need funding because they teach and research for the common good. That is a high value. We cannot know the precise minutiae of the societal impact of our work and we must be willing to live with this uncertainty.

References

Laredo, P. (2007). Revisiting the Third Mission of Universities: Toward a Renewed Categorization of University Activities? Higher Education Policy, 20(4), 441-456.
Stokes, D. E. (2011). Pasteur’s quadrant: Basic science and technological innovation. Brookings Institution Press.

Hamburg Central Library welcomes patrons in many languages and offers free wifi

Since I was 19, I’ve often thought about a student who I’ve never met and whose name I don’t even know. I encountered that young man in the preface of the German translation of Eduardo Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America. To make the point how widely the book was read and how influential it had been, the preface told the story of a Buenos Aires university student who wanted to read the book so badly but couldn’t afford to buy a copy. So what he did was read the book in bits and pieces by moving from one bookstore to another: in each store, he would pretend to browse, read 5-10 pages until the manager realized that he had no intention of buying and would throw him out. Over the course of a couple of weeks and with innumerable interruptions, the young man read the whole book this way.

As someone who easily gets lost in a book and has often found it difficult to tear herself away from a gripping read – and Open Veins of Latin America certainly is – I deeply felt for the student. The story brings home the injustice of unequal access to knowledge. It also made me conscious of a privilege I had taken for granted until then: access to a library.

Throughout most of my life I have been fortunate to be affiliated with a variety of institutions that have provided me with access to well-stocked libraries.

In fact, a good part of my life has been spent in libraries. As a university student living in a crowded dorm, the university library was the place where I went to read, take notes, draft essays and prepare for exams. Also as a student, one of my many jobs was as “library assistant”, which involved checking out books to patrons and re-shelving returned books to their proper place. After I graduated and became a university lecturer myself, my regular schedule included “library days” spent on teaching preparation and research reading. When I had a child, our family routine for many years involved visits to the children’s and junior sections of our public library, and selecting a week’s worth of books to take home and read.

Another multilingual welcome sign in Hamburg Central Library, saying “Learn German, meet people – for free”

The many places in which I have lived are partly marked in my memory through the library spaces I inhabited at various points in my life. Some, like the school library in my primary school, consisted of nothing more than a little cupboard; others, major university libraries, were multi-storied buildings filled with dimly lit rows upon rows of book shelves – temples to human knowledge and material reminders of the Socratic paradox that I know that I know nothing.

Today, I rarely set foot in a library. I still read a lot, both for work and for pleasure, but I access books and journals remotely via my computer or e-reader. The transformation of libraries from physical to digital repositories has not diminished the privilege as digital access, too, is tied to affiliation.

At the same time, public libraries are some of the last remaining bastions against the privatization of public space. The experience of the 1970s Buenos Aires university student who could not learn about the ways in which colonialism and capitalism had shaped his country without the money to buy the book has not lost its currency. Enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures – sitting back comfortably to chat with friends, enjoy a book, surf the internet or watch the world go – is ever more tied to one’s ability to consume. Even fundamental necessities such as using the toilet have been privatized and may be restricted to those who can pay.

Against this tide of privatization, libraries have been holding out as ever-smaller islands of public space. Today, most patrons no longer turn to libraries (exclusively) for books but in order to enjoy a free and inclusive public space.

How do you use libraries? And what kinds of inclusive and exclusive practices have you encountered in libraries?

These umbrellas quickly became the trademark of ISB11, and could be spotted all over Limerick – and beyond!

In June this year, I was fortunate to attend the 11^th International Symposium of Bilingualism (ISB) at the University of Limerick, Ireland (11-15 June). Since its initiation in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1997, ISB has been held bi-annually in eight different nations and become the premier conference for scholarly debate on multilingualism. This year marked ISB’s 20^th anniversary, attracting over 950 delegates from 65 countries to give papers, posters and colloquia on topics devoted to the overarching theme ‘Bilingualism, Multilingualism and the New Speaker’. The ‘new speaker’ paradigm primarily evolved from studies on language revitalisation, yet it has also come to refer to migrant and transnational language learners. This extension of the paradigm is intended to call the binary categorisation of native versus non-native language users into question (Smith-Christmas et al., 2018).

The conference theme invited scholarly debates on bi- and multilingual speakers’ language learning trajectories and experiences, and how these are shaped by individuals’ beliefs towards their new speech communities.

Abstracts of the presentations can be found in the conference brochure.

I attended ISB11 on an invitation to present my on-going PhD research on the language learning, leisure and work experiences of German backpackers in Australia as part of a panel on ‘Entrepreneurial visions of the self: language teaching and learning under neoliberal conditions’. This panel was chaired by Martina Zimmermann (University of Teacher Education Lucerne) and Sebastian Muth (University of Fribourg), with Cécile Vigouroux (Simon Fraser University) as discussant.

The panel comprised of three papers.

Firstly, Sebastian Muth spoke about the language learning trajectories of students in the Department of Slavonic Languages of a public university in India. As India’s medical tourism industry seeks to accommodate patients from the former Soviet Union, there is a growing demand for Russian-speaking interpreters and so-called medical facilitators. This ethnographic study explored how the demand for language work is reinforcing social inequalities in India. Unlike more prestigious Western European language subjects, Russian Studies has no entry requirements, therefore attracting students from lower middle-class backgrounds. Muth concluded that there are growing tensions between language learners’ desires to capitalise on their language skills, and the realities of finding work in the neoliberal service economy.

Secondly, Martina Zimmermann described her multi-sited ethnography exploring how mobile students, who cross Switzerland’s language borders to attend university, envisage their multilingual repertoires as future assets. These beliefs are reinforced by the Swiss higher education system who market “multilingualism” in their promotional materials. Zimmermann compared these individual and institutional discourses, arguing that these multilingual assets form a shared, yet unchallenged vision of a future in which these repertoires may no longer translate into the imagined outcomes.

Lastly, my paper asked how German backpackers in Australia negotiate language learning opportunities whilst working and travelling. The working holiday has become increasingly commercialised as a meaningful gap year opportunity that facilitates language learning and enhances a CV. An investigation of bottom-up discourses suggests that young Germans’ desires to capitalise on their English language skills in the future clashes with the experiences of their current selves on the road. When engaging in leisure travel, they mainly encounter other German speakers rather than “more desirable” interlocutors. Work is therefore seen as an opportunity for more sustained naturalistic exposure to English. However, backpackers are often faced with communication barriers associated with Australian English. How they speak about navigating these dilemmas can be considered a key site where they construct neoliberal personhood.

The research that was assembled in the panel highlights how language is envisioned as a future asset and career-shaping skill across various contexts: from interpreters in India’s growing medical tourism industry, via Swiss university students, to working holidaymakers in Australia. Across these contexts, individuals share a sense of responsibility for their own social and economic future successes through the acquisition of particular forms of bi- and multilingualism. Whilst some language learners must engage in these forms of bi- and multilingualism through necessity, others may take a more laissez-faire approach to acquiring language competencies for their envisioned futures.

As the year draws to a close, and we are all reflecting on our achievements, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Martina and Sebastian for inviting me to participate on this inspiring panel. As my first international conference, ISB11 marks a significant milestone in my PhD journey.

The 12^th International Symposium of Bilingualism will be held 24 – 28 June 2019 at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Reference

Smith-Christmas, C., Ó Murchadha, N. P., Horsby, M., & Moriarty, M. (2018) (Eds.). New speakers of minority languages: Linguistic ideologies and practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

The initial impetus for the book was sparked by my own language journey. At the age of 23, I decided to become an English-Korean interpreter, a glamorous bilingual, who would be respected for her English language proficiency in Korea caught in the phenomenon of “English fever”.

However, after many years of hard work, when I had finally achieved the dream of becoming a professional interpreter, I found myself perplexed and puzzled as a gap emerged between the pre-held dreams and the realities in the field.

And that’s where English language ideologies in Korea: Interpreting the past and present starts: the book critically examines the contrast between dreams and realities of English in the context of “English fever” in Korea from both historical and contemporary perspectives. It explores two overarching questions: why is English so popular in Korea? And, why, despite the enormous popularity of English, is there such a gap between the promises and realities of English?

In order to explore the first question of why English is so heatedly pursued in Korea, I conducted historical analyses of the development of English in Korea with English-Korean translation and interpreting as a key site of inquiry. The historical relevance of English-Korean translation and interpreting is well illustrated in the fact that English arrived in Korea for the first time in the late 19^th century in order to educate English-Korean translators and interpreters. English was important for the embattled Korean government of the time as they actively tried to strengthen relationships with the U.S. in order to curb its ambitious neighbours with predatory designs. Korea’s continued economic, political, and security dependence on the U.S. throughout the modern era has added more power and prestige to English, which has evolved to serve as a form of cultural, economic, social, and symbolic capital with class mobility as a key driver.

The second question of why there is such a gap between dreams and realities in English is examined from the perspective of contemporary English-Korean translators and interpreters, who represent the most engaged and professional learners of English in Korea. The social reputation of the profession as perfect English speakers and glamorous cosmopolitans provides an ideal site to explore the contrast between expectations and experiences in English, which was investigated from multiple perspectives including commodification, gender, and neoliberalism. Internal conflicts relating to English language learning and use are illustrated through interview data analyses, in which the aspect of English as an ideological construct shaping and shaped by speakers’ internalized beliefs in and hopes about the language is highlighted.

By exploring the gap between dreams and realities in English, I endeavoured to make sense of what appears to be an irrational pursuit of English in Korean society. Making huge sacrifices to learn the language only seems a “rational” act in Korea because English has been firmly established as a language of power and prestige as documented and explored in English language ideologies in Korea: Interpreting the past and present. It is my hope that the book highlights the importance of examining local particularities involved in the construction of particular ideologies of English, which is often approached from the monolithic perspective of “English as a global language”.

Jinhyun Cho was awarded her PhD for her thesis about “Interpreting English language ideologies in Korea: dreams vs. realities”

Many people around the world dream of learning English. The pursuit of English is rarely only, or even predominantly, about language learning: it’s about self-improvement, self-transformation and the aspiration to live a better life. Unsurprisingly, with English as with anything else in life, dreams and realities do not always match. Recent PhD research conducted by Jinhyun Cho at Macquarie University examines this gap between dreams and realities of English in the national context of South Korea and for one of the most intensely engaged groups of English language learners, namely female translators and interpreters.

The thesis is now available for open-access downloaded and can be accessed here.

This research explores English language ideologies in Korea in relation to the recent phenomenon of “English fever” or yeongeo yeolpung, which refers to the frenzied pursuit of English as valued language capital among Koreans. The popularity of English in Korea has recently attracted significant scholarly attention in sociolinguistics. Despite a growing body of research on the issue of English in Korean society, the question of how the promises of English translate into lived experiences and life course trajectories remains underexplored.

Based on a multi-method qualitative approach, the study draws on three sets of data through which to present a holistic picture of the tensions between dreams and realities in relation to English in Korea: historical textual data, media discourses, and one-on-one interviews with 32 English-Korean translators and interpreters.

Historical textual data are used to trace the genealogy of English in Korea since the late 19^th century via Japanese colonization, the post-independence period and industrialization, to government-led globalization campaigns. The English language ideologies identified through the historical periodisation serve as a baseline for the analyses at macro as well as micro levels.

Contemporary English language ideologies are then elucidated through media discourse analyses of news items related to English-medium lectures in higher education in order to examine how dreams about English are sustained and how such dreams contrast with actual classroom experiences.

In order to understand the uptake of these macro-level language ideologies by individuals, interview data from translators and interpreters as the most engaged group of English language learners are then examined. This includes an exploration of the ways in which individual pursuits of linguistic perfectionism reinforce linguistic insecurity in relation to dominant neoliberal discourses of desirable language speakers. Disparities between dreams and realities in English as experienced by the participants are examined from a gender perspective to show that the pursuit of translation and interpreting is a gendered career choice in relation to societal norms of females. Particular attention is paid to the recent media phenomenon of “good-looking interpreters.” The analysis demonstrates how English has been remoulded as an embodied capital in which aesthetic qualities of speakers can enhance the value of English.

The findings of this study highlight the multiplicity and evolutionary nature of English language ideologies. The historical documentation of the development of English suggests English as multiple forms of capital – cultural, economic, political, social and symbolic – with class mobility as a key driver. In addition to the earlier meanings of English, the micro-level investigations illustrate more diverse aspects of English as a gendered tool to achieve desirable female biographies, as an instrument to enhance individual competitiveness, and as added value to personal aesthetics. While such diverse ideologies attached to English testify to the enormous value attached to English and possibly answer the question as to why English is so popular in Korea, the examination of media discourses about English-medium lectures reveals the use of English as a tool to sustain existing societal structures that advantage the already powerful conservative media. Combined with the constant mediatisation of the benefits of English, neoliberal influences on English in which achieving linguistic perfectionism is presented as real and feasible further contribute to masking the sustained gap between dreams and realities in English. As people blame themselves for lacking individual commitment to the mastery of English as celebrated in popular neoliberal personhood, the substantial costs of the pursuit of English remain hidden, which in turn drives more people to pursuing English and further fuels “English fever”.

Overall, the research illuminates historical, mediatized and gendered aspects of English as an ideological construct. The study has implications for future research and stakeholders, particularly as related to the need to rethink English as a global language, the diversification of English language ideologies in gender, and the potential of translation and interpreting for interdisciplinary research.

Related content

• English Gangnam Style
• Why does English spread in global academia
• Would you mind if your child wanted to become an interpreter?
• Internationalization and Englishization in higher education
• Early study abroad students in young adulthood
• Does internationalization change research content?
• The dark side of TESOL
• Warning: Global English may harm your mental health

References

Cho, J. (2012). Campus in English or campus in shock? English Today, 28 (02), 18-25 DOI: 10.1017/S026607841200020X
Cho, J. (2015). Sleepless in Seoul: Neoliberalism, English fever, and linguistic insecurity among Korean interpreters Multilingua DOI: 10.1515/multi-2013-0047
Cho, J. (2016). Interpreting English Language Ideologies in Korea: Dreams Vs. Realities. (PhD), Macquarie University. Retrieved from http://minerva.mq.edu.au:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/mq:60718 [open access to full thesis]
Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy Language in Society, 42 (01), 23-44 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887 [open access to full article]

From inside Jaume Plensa’s House of Knowledge, Bordeaux, France (Photo by Shirley Yeung)

In much of Western and Northern Europe, we find ourselves in the wake of a widespread retreat from—and backlash against—“multiculturalism”, with “Brexit” as one poignant and palpable example of how such backlashes materialize in real politics and in the lives of people. Similar trends are detectable in the Unites States, where imaginaries of walled borders are instrumentalised as promising a renewed sense of security against national “others”.

Instead of the discarded idea of “multiculturalism”, “integration” has emerged as a new and dominant immigration policy paradigm in many of these contexts, dramatically transforming frameworks and practices surrounding the social, legal, and professional inclusion of immigrants in Europe and abroad. A sustained critical and ethnographic engagement with “integration” paradigms and practices will be undertaken in an upcoming special issue of Multilingua; the title of the special issue is “Discourses of Integration: Language, Skills, and the Politics of Difference,” and it will be published in November 2016.

“Integration” needs to be critically examined due to the ubiquity of integration discourses in the migration policies and programs of various states. These discourses demonstrate the flexibility of the integration concept as well as its complexity. This makes the concept highly contested, exceedingly difficult to pin down, and, as such, tremendously productive for arguments across the political spectrum. While in some contexts “integration” invokes the promotion of tolerance, equity, migrant/human rights, and diversity, its proponents more often than not also espouse a rhetoric of activation which strives to cultivate, among immigrants, varied intercultural “capacities”, communication skills, and a sense of personal responsibility for social mobility (often reflecting particularly neoliberal concepts of agency). Furthermore, in the wake of this “integration trend”, the majority of states have placed a policy focus on both promoting and assessing the linguistic competences of migrants in national language(s), commonly arguing that linguistic integration cross-cuts and enables all other forms of inclusion, such as employment-related, educational, and cultural inclusion. In this way, concerns over how to regulate and ensure migrant “integration” both produce and rely on situated ideologies of language, intercultural communication, and mono- and multilingual repertoires (and social orders).

It is not the aim of the special issue to provide an exhaustive panorama of such measures and language policies, but to present succinct and in-depth case studies which address some of the aspects and dilemmas of “integration” across various sites and regional/national contexts: English-speaking Canada, Catalonia, Finland, and French- and German-speaking Switzerland. The contributions by Kori Allan; Maria Sabaté Dalmau; Maiju Strömmer; Shirley Yeung; and Mi-Cha Flubacher, Renata Coray, and Alexandre Duchêne explore and analyze the practices, discourses and dilemmas of “integration” as constituted by, and constitutive of, a (trans)national politics of difference—a politics which incites multiple strategies for managing social diversity across various linguistic and communicative domains. The contributions variously explore logics of integration in relation to agency, citizenship, employment, economic and linguistic investment, language acquisition, multicultural orders, nationhood, skill, and social networks.

• Yeung and Flubacher highlight in their introduction the salience of critical ethnographic analyses for understanding “integration” beyond policy realms. In particular, they propose to untangle this complex by describing three central processes inherent to regimes of “integration”: processes of categorization, selection, and activation.
• Allan examines practices of labour-market integration in multicultural Canada, analyzing a program which strives to enhance the marketability of professionally qualified immigrants through “soft skills” education.
• Sabaté Dalmau reveals how the hegemonic monolingual order of peninsular Spanish and its ideologies of integration are simultaneously reproduced and contested in the translinguistic practices of undocumented labor migrants in a call shop, or “locutorio,” in Catalonia, Spain.
• Flubacher, Coray & Duchêne examine how logics of “investment” construct differing entitlements to language instruction, and thus different potentials for integration, among migrants in an unemployment office in the Swiss canton of Fribourg/Freiburg.
• Strömmer demonstrates how the invisibility of cleaning work prevents migrants from developing the language skills that are deemed necessary for social mobility in Finland, revealing “integration” as an ideal that is difficult to achieve. An extended overview of this article is available here.
• Yeung looks at how recent migration policies in Switzerland yield two social types in Geneva, “migrants” and “expatriates,” which reflect, on the terrain of language and culture, contrasting assessments of risk and profitability.

In view of their in-depth ethnographic approaches, these contributions provide a close reading and nuanced understanding of the effects and consequences that integration policies and language regimes have on the ground – and for migrants, especially. In this, this special issue aims to offer a complementary reading to purely discourse oriented analyses of language policies, language testing and regimes and, in its totality, presents new dimensions to the study of integration.

The articles previewed here can already now be accessed through the Multilingua “Ahead of print” page. Make sure to watch out for the full special issue when it comes out in November as Multilingua 35(6).

To show that language choice is not primarily a question of language, I will focus on the spread of English-medium lectures in Korean universities as an example: in 2011 global media reported the suicides of four students and one professor at an elite Korean university. The media blamed these tragedies on the university’s language policy of conducting classes in English only.  These media reports motivated us (Piller & Cho, 2013) to investigate the more fundamental question of what drives the zealous pursuit of English in Korean higher education.

The findings of our research show how the powerful ideology of neoliberalism can serve as a covert language policy, where market capitalism combines with academic capitalism. Since the neoliberal turn of Korea during the 1997-8 Asian Economic Crisis, improving competitiveness has become a mandate for Koreans, who endured immense social suffering during the crisis (e.g., massive unemployment, family breakups and suicides). In this context, English came to be seen as a key to competitiveness. While English as a competitive advantage may seem a common-sense approach given the global status of English, the Korean case demonstrates that the spread of English is inextricably linked with capitalist expansion.

English-medium lectures are important for local universities as they are mandated to compete for global excellence, which is tied to profits from increasing numbers of foreign students and government grants. Moreover, English-medium lectures are directly related to university rankings conducted by mainstream media. These rankings annually assess Korean universities according to set criteria with English-medium lectures being one of the key components to measure institutional internationalization. While other criteria such as research, learning environment and social reputation of graduates require time to produce measurable outcomes, increasing the number of classes taught in English can create instantaneous effects on the internationalization score and hence improve rankings almost immediately.

Universities are not the only institutions deriving a profit from English-medium lectures. For mainstream newspapers losing revenue due to increasing competition from online media, university rankings serve as a new source of revenue through production of special issues and university advertisement placements. This capitalist chain in which university and media interests are inextricably linked remains largely invisible to the public.

The spread of English as medium of instruction is widely seen as the result of the “free choices” of institutions and individuals who wish to better themselves and accordingly make personal choices as free market agents. However, it usually goes unnoticed that these “personal choices” are not really choices but are made within a narrow set of options that are determined by market interests.

In the e-seminar, Ingrid raised the question of how to remedy disadvantage resulting from language policies in education. I believe that research aiming to investigate and expose the complex power relations behind English-medium lectures has an important role to play. However, all too often such research is not accessible to policy makers and other stakeholders. Our 2013 article demonstrating how neoliberalism works as a language-policy-setting mechanism in favour of English medium lectures, for instance, was published in Language in Society, a sociolinguistic academic journal published in English. Although our article is available for open access from Cambridge University Press, the language of publication means, in effect, that our research follows the same logic that we describe for English-medium lectures. While we do not derive a direct financial benefit from publishing in English, we derive profits of distinction and reputation that may enhance our careers.

How can our research make a difference when it is published in English in an international sociolinguistics journal that is only read by fellow sociolinguists? Does it make sense to be critical of the global spread of English in education if we only publish that criticism in English? For us, the answer is no and we have been fortunate that 녹색평론 (“The Green Review”), a progressive social policy journal in Korea, has just published our work about “English-medium lectures in Korean higher education” in Korean.

References

Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy Language in Society, 42 (01), 23-44. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887

Piller, I. & J. Cho. (2016). 한국의 대학과 영어강의 [English-medium lectures in Korean higher education]. 녹색평론 Green Review 148, 89-106.

Condemned to consume

My migration newsfeed in the past few weeks has been dominated by news about the Syrian refugee crisis and the various European and international responses. But there have also been two other noteworthy migration news: one relates to the changing face of immigration to Canada as increasingly highly educated migrants are admitted and the other relates to revelations that the Australian 7-Eleven convenience stores systematically exploit international students and other temporary visa holders.

How do these various news hang together?

“Traditional” immigration countries such as Australia and Canada have a relatively small refugee intake in comparison to their various work migration schemes. While the former dominate the news, the latter dominate the numbers. According to ABS data, the net immigration to Australia, in the financial year 2013-14, for instance, was over 212,000 people; humanitarian entrants accounted for only around six percent of these. So, maybe unusually internationally, Australia accepts far more “economic migrants” than “refugees.”

The rationale for this selection is that skilled and well-educated migrants, who fill labour shortages, are good for the economy; while refugees are a “burden” on the economy. One of the many complexities that this dichotomy overlooks is, of course, that refugees are often likely to be skilled and well-educated, too.

Let’s ignore that detail for the moment and ask whether migrants’ skills and education necessarily lead to social inclusion.

Social inclusion is a notoriously difficult concept to define. Despite frequent references to social inclusion in contemporary national and international policies, there is actually a notable lack of consensus as to what constitutes social inclusion. Most commentators see the promotion of economic well-being as constituting the core of social inclusion. However, the contributors to two recent collections devoted to “Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion” that I (co)edited for the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics found it necessary to go beyond the economic core meaning of social inclusion to also include a wider meaning of social inclusion as a sense of community participation and belonging. The contributors showed that inclusion is a multifaceted phenomenon and linguistically diverse populations may well be included on one level but excluded on another.

Recent research with Soviet Jewish migrants to Germany offers a highly pertinent discussion. The researcher, Sveta Roberman, undertook a year-long ethnographic project to examine the migration and settlement experiences of this group. She developed the concept of “inclusive exclusion” in response to the following observation:

I kept sensing a peculiar atmosphere, intangible and hard to describe, that pervades the lives of many, an aura of dissatisfaction and restlessness that borders on—or has become—apathy and resignation, articulated in an often-expressed sentiment: “We are kind of existing here, not really living.” (Roberman 2015, p. 744)

It’s an observation that resonates with a lot of the research into the language learning and settlement experiences of adult migrants conducted with very different origin groups by my students and myself here in Australia.

The people Roberman conducted her research with are Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union, mostly from Russia and Ukraine, who settled in Germany in the 1990s and early 2000s. About 220,000 Soviet Jews were admitted during that period. For the re-unified Germany, accepting substantial numbers of Jewish migrants was yet another step on the long road of atonement for the Holocaust. It was hoped that these migrants would contribute to a revival of Jewish cultural and religious life in Germany.

“Germany of all places?!” (Source: Jewish Museum Frankfurt)

Around 80% of these migrants were tertiary-educated and had established professional careers in the Soviet Union. Most of them were secular and, because “Jew” was an ethnic and not a religious category in the Soviet Union, only about a third of these migrants ended up joining Jewish religious communities in Germany. In fact, in contrast to Soviet Jews migrating to Israel or the USA, those coming to Germany were probably least motivated by ideological reasons. Roberman’s participants did not hesitate to explain that they had migrated for economic reasons, in search of a better life.

This context seems ideal to examine the social inclusion of migrants: a highly-educated migrant group, a high degree of cultural similarity between migrants and hosts, and public desire on the part of the destination society to embrace this particular migrant group.

A migration fairy-tale? Not quite.

In the way social inclusion is usually conceived as economic participation and cultural recognition, Roberman’s participants had little to complain:

When speaking about their encounters with the host country, my interviewees were not troubled by their economic situation; they felt secure and protected in that sphere of their lives. Neither did they complain about the lack of possibilities for the articulation of their Russian or Jewish identities: the former could be practiced at the range of Russian cultural centers, clubs, and libraries, while the latter could be actualized and maintained within Jewish communal centers and organizations. Even the constraint they faced in political participation, because many immigrants lacked full citizenship, was hardly an issue for my interviewees. (Roberman 2015, p. 747)

Migration had enabled the participants to partake of Western economic affluence, they had received significant, though not always full, legal and political citizenship rights, and, as a group, cultural recognition.

So what was missing? Access to regular, stable and meaningful employment.

Participants who, at the time of migration, were in their mid-30s or older found it extremely difficult to find employment commensurate with their education, skills and experience. This was not for lack of trying. Participants were deeply influenced by the Soviet work ethos and extremely resourceful in their attempts to find work. The German state also helped with the provision of language and training courses and a suite of short-term work and internship programs designed to help migrants transition into full-time regular employment.

Except they didn’t.

The usual intangible barriers of accent, non-recognition of overseas qualifications, lack of local experience, etc. that we have often discussed here on Language on the Move applied in this case, too. Age discrimination was another factor. Middle-aged participants in the study ended up trying to secure stable employment for years. During that time they were supported by welfare and a range of casual short-term jobs, including state-sponsored employment schemes.

Olga, a qualified and experienced teacher, for instance, arrived in Germany when she was 40 years old. Her qualifications were not recognized and she was involved in various re-training schemes. She also held various casual jobs as an attendant in an aged-care home and as a social worker. When she turned 50 without having achieved regular standard employment, she was officially “removed” from the labour market and declared an “early retiree.”

Being unable to find regular employment meant that the participants struggled to construct a coherent life-story and to see meaning in their migration, as was the case for Olga:

I was sitting in her apartment as she tried to compose a coherent narrative of the 10-year period of her life in Germany. But that seemed to be an unachievable task: the flow of her life narrative stopped at the point of emigration. What followed were fragmented facts that she resisted bringing together into a meaningful story, seeing little achievement or sense in her 10-year migration experience. (Roberman 2015, p. 752)

Another participant, Mark, who had been a cameraman in Kiev and was 53 years old when he arrived in Germany had given up looking for work after six years and lived on welfare. He said, “Once I had some objectives in life, I aspired to something, I had some plans, […] Today, I wake up in the morning, and I have one and the same question to ask myself: what do I do today?” (quoted in Roberman 2015, p. 754).

Sveta Roberman, Sweet Burdens (SUNY Press, 2015)

Like others in his situation, he filled his life with surfing the internet, watching TV, attending doctor’s appointments and, above all, shopping. Some developed elaborate routes to stretch out daily grocery shopping, others threw themselves into the pursuit of specials and sales. While these activities fill time, in the long run they breed a deep sense of isolation and loneliness. Being an anonymous shopper trapped them in the position of social strangers.

At one level, consumption spaces are some of the least discriminatory spaces imaginable; one participant made this point with regard to language proficiency:

One does not need language in the supermarket. The system is itself interested to sell you the thing, and the system finds its way to do it; they succeed in selling it to you in any way. It does not matter what language you speak. (quoted in Roberman 2015, p. 756)

At the same time, this participant makes the point that consumption spaces are spaces of extreme dislocation. In the supermarket or shopping mall it does not matter who you are. In fact, it does not even matter that you are there. Being reduced to filling their time with consumption resulted in a sharp feeling of невостребованность: “uselessness,” “redundancy,” like unclaimed luggage. One participant compared her situation to that of cows who are allowed to graze on lush green pastures but nobody bothers to come and milk them.

In short, participants were free to consume: they had achieved a comfortable and economically secure existence through their migration. However, their access to resources of real value – stable and meaningful work – was constrained. In this context, the freedom to consume condemned them to consume. Consumption did not result in a sense of dignity and self-worth, it did not allow them to forge coherent positive life-stories and it did not provide them with a sense of belonging. While included economically, legally and culturally, their participation is ultimately constrained – a condition Roberman calls “exclusive inclusion.”

Our economic system is characterised by overproduction and there is the regular need to dispose of surplus goods. Consequently, even relatively poor members of affluent consumer societies, such as Roberman’s irregularly employed and/or welfare-dependent interviewees, are readily included in the sphere of consumption. By contrast, stable and regular employment is in short supply. Exclusion from this scare and valuable resource continues to be a powerful way to reproduce social hierarchies. Disadvantaged groups of local people may be similarly excluded but migrants are particularly vulnerable on post-industrial labour markets and to the unemployment, underemployment and exploitation that go for “flexibility.” As Roberman (2015, p. 759f.) concludes:

Exclusive inclusion is a much more civilized, camouflaged form of exclusion. It seems to be mild. But, in spite of its apparent mildness, exclusive inclusion, which limits access to social resources of real value and to participation in the arenas of social recognition and belonging, is no less destructive in the ways it undermines the excluded individual’s world, threatens humanness, and strains the social fabric as a whole.

References

Piller, I. (2014). Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion in Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 37(3), 190-197.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2011). Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 14(4), 371 – 381.

Roberman, S. (2015). Not to Be Hungry Is Not Enough: An Insight Into Contours of Inclusion and Exclusion in Affluent Western Societies Sociological Forum, 30 (3), 743-763 DOI: 10.1111/socf.12190

Further reading

Zwanzig Jahre Jüdische Zuwanderung nach Deutschland. (2009, 2009-09-22). Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland.

Ferguson, A., & Toft, K. (2015, 2015-09-02). 7-Eleven: The Price of Convenience. ABC Four Corners.

Goldmann, A., & Krauss, M. (2015, 2015-01-21). Weniger Jüdische Zuwanderer im Jahr 2013. Jüdische Allgemeine.

Ortiz, A. (2015, 2015-09-08). Increasingly Mobile and Educated: The Future of Canadian Immigration. World Education News and Reviews.

Shcherbatova, S., & Plessentin, U. (2013, 2013-11-18). Zuwanderung und Selbstfindung: Die Jüdischen Gemeinden im Wiedervereinten Deutschland. Heinrich Böll Stiftung: Migrationspolitisches Portal.

Sveta Roberman recently also published a book about the larger study, which, if the Google preview is anything to go by, is even more fascinating:

Roberman, S. (2015). Sweet Burdens: Welfare and Communality among Russian Jews in Germany. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

A locutorio shop front in Barcelona (Source: El Periodico)

There is now a well-established body of work exploring the language work provided by service workers in call centres and tourist businesses. By contrast, the multilingual language work provided by migrants for migrants in multiethnic service enterprises has rarely been the focus of sociolinguistic attention. A recent book by Maria Sabaté i Dalmau, Migrant Communication Enterprises published by Multilingual Matters, fills this gap with an ethnographic inquiry into the language practices in a locutorio, a call shop, in Barcelona. A locutorio offers all kinds of telecommunication services such as billed calls in booths, the sale of top-ups for mobiles, fax services, internet access and international money transfers.

The locutorio the research is based on also served as meeting point for working class Spaniards and migrants, both documented and undocumented, from a variety of countries of origin. Beyond the sale of telecommunication services, the locutorio thus provided access to information, a place to hang out and it even served as the ‘public’ toilet for homeless people in the neighbourhood, mostly undocumented men from West Africa.

The locutorio was part of a chain of similar call shops owned by a Pakistani venture capitalist whose aim was to make a profit rather than provide social services for Barcelona’s marginalized. It was his employee Naeem, who was in charge of running the locutorio, who ended up caught between more than one rock and more than one hard place. Naeem was a fellow Pakistani hired by the owner in Pakistan two years before the fieldwork began. Naeem’s position was legal as a temporary resident but in order to achieve permanent residency in Spain he needed another two years of proven work, which left him vulnerable to exploitation by the owner. He worked twelve hours per day, seven days a week, for a meagre salary of less than Euro 800 per month. Naeem’s job consisted of opening the locutorio in the morning and closing it at night. He would start with booting up the computers and getting all the equipment to run. During the day, his duties consisted of assisting and charging customers, and making various phone calls (to his boss; to call card distributors; to the money transfer agency etc.). Additionally, he was in charge of maintaining the premises, including sweeping the floors, removing garbage and cleaning the toilets.

Much of this work is obviously language work and Naeem had to operate in a complex sociolinguistic environment. In addition to a range of varieties of Spanish – from Standard Peninsular Spanish via various Latin American varieties to a range of second language varieties – this included Catalan, English, Urdu, Punjabi, and Moroccan Arabic in various spoken and written constellations and used by clients with variable levels of proficiencies, including proficiencies in the use of telecommunication services. In this highly diverse environment, communication was rigidly regimented by the meters on the machine where communication was paid for by the minute.

Unsurprisingly, misunderstandings and communication break-downs were common. On top of all that, Naeem had to deal with customers who tried to cheat him (the balance of each financial irregularity was deducted from his meagre salary) and who abused and insulted him. Working in a highly constrained yet super-diverse environment left little room for personal autonomy and, only in his late twenties, Naeem was suffering from eating disorders, compulsive smoking, chronic fatigue and anxiety attacks.

The researcher concludes that locutorio language workers constitute “a voiceless army of multilingual mediators” (p. 170) whose multilingualism is not only a site of language work but also a site of linguistic exploitation.

Migrant Communication Enterprises offers a rich migrant-centred ethnographic account of a prototypical enterprise of the 21^st century. If this blog post has piqued your interest and this is your area of research expertise, you might want to review the book for Multilingua. If so, please get in touch with a short description of your expertise.

Maria Sabaté i Dalmau (2014). Migrant Communication Enterprises: Regimentation and Resistance Multilingual Matters

German International School Sydney

It is one of the great narratives of our time that the market will fix everything. In education this means that parental choice is assumed to improve education. Rather than the state supplying high-quality education, the neoliberal credo is that parental choice will create high-quality education. Does that mean that we do not have high quality language education in Australia because there simply is not the demand for language education?

Or could it be the other way round? Could it be that the state of languages in Australia is “a national tragedy and an international embarrassment,” as Michael Clyne, Anne Pauwels and Roland Sussex put it in 2007, simply because the supply is not there? A case study of what happens when high-quality bilingual education becomes available in a community could prove just that.

In 2008, the German International School Sydney (GISS) moved to a new location in the suburb of Terrey Hills, about 25km north of the Sydney CBD. GISS runs a high-quality K-12 English-German bilingual immersion program that is accredited by both the German Ministry of Education and the NSW Board of Studies, and leads to the International Baccalaureate. The 2008 GISS relocation in conjunction with Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census data from 2006 and 2011 allow us to explore how the linguistic profile of a community changes when high-quality bilingual education becomes available.

By way of background, it is important to know that German in Australia is the second least maintained migrant language (after Dutch); i.e. German speakers shift from German to English at very high rates and the rate of German transmission from one generation to the next is relatively low (see Clyne 2005 for details). Low language maintenance rates for German are usually attributed to cultural affinity to the dominant English-speaking culture; to the fact that language is not a core value for Germans; to relatively high proficiency rates in English among German migrants; to relatively high rates of exogamy; and to low ethnic concentrations (see Clyne 2005, Ch. 3). All these reasons could be described as market model reasons: the ‘demand’ for German among German migrants is low and so they give up the language. My case study suggests that supply – or rather the absence of a supply of high-quality bilingual education – may be another crucial factor.

Terrey Hills, where GISS has been located since 2008, is in the Local Government Area (LGA) of Warringah, and it is also conveniently accessible to residents of two other LGAs, namely Pittwater and Ku-ring-gai. So, has the presence of German increased in these LGAs? Census data allow us to approach this question through two data sets, namely ‘country of birth’ and ‘language spoken at home.’

Figure 1: Percentage of residents born in Germany

To begin with, as Figure 1 shows, the percentage of residents born in Germany increased in both Warringah and Pittwater between 2006 and 2011. For Ku-ring-gai it remained virtually unchanged. These figures are in contrast to those for Greater Sydney and Australia as a whole where the percentage of residents born in Germany slightly decreased during the same period.

Second, the figures for German as a home language show the same tendencies but the changes are more pronounced (Figure 2). This means that there were markedly more residents who spoke German at home in Warringah and Pittwater in 2011 than in 2006.

Figure 2: Percentage of residents speaking German at home

Third, the census data also allow us to compare the figures of residents born in Germany with the figures for those who claim German as a home language. We can use ‘born in Germany’ as a proxy for ‘speaking German as a first language.’ Admittedly, this is a crude measure as it excludes ethno-linguistic minorities born in Germany as well as German speakers from Austria, Switzerland and other European countries. It also excludes those Australian-born residents who speak German as their first language. Even so, relating the number of Germany-born residents to that of German speakers allows us to gauge language maintenance and shift: if the number of those who claim German as their home language is lower than the number of Germany-born residents, we can consider this as evidence of language shift from German to English in the first generation. If, on the other hand, the number of those who claim German as their home language exceeds the number of Germany-born residents, then we can consider this as evidence of language maintenance. These additional German speakers can be assumed to be mostly second-generation Australians of German ancestry. They might also include intermarried families. The latter would be particularly intriguing as the sociolinguistics literature typically assumes that exogamy results in the adoption of the majority language (i.e. English) as the family language.

Figure 3: Residents who claim German as their home language as a percentage of the Germany-born

Figure 3 confirms what we know from the literature about language maintenance among German migrants – but only for Australia as a whole and for the Greater Sydney area. In both these locales the number of residents who speak German at home is much lower than the number of the Germany-born. In Australia, there were 108,001 Germany-born residents in 2011 but only 80,370 who used German as their home language. The figures for Greater Sydney are 19,340 and 15,894 respectively. That means the rate of language shift from German to English is at least 25% in Australia as a whole and at least 17% in the Greater Sydney area.

Against this background, the figures for Warringah, Pittwater and Ku-ring-gai are highly exceptional. With the number of German speakers between 11.7 and 13.1 per cent higher than the number of Germany-born residents, the German language is clearly thriving in these areas.

Can this be just a coincidence with the fact that a high-quality bilingual English-German immersion school is available to the residents of these areas? I don’t think so. While mindful of the fact that correlation does not equal causality, the data presented here would plausibly suggest that the presence of GISS has attracted both Australian residents born in Germany and Australian residents speaking German at home (two overlapping but not identical categories) to Warringah, Pittwater and, to a lesser degree, Ku-ring-gai.

Furthermore, these data would also seem to suggest that it is the presence of GISS that enables local residents to raise their children bilingually. A project that is not feasible for many German speakers elsewhere in Sydney and in Australia – however much they might wish for it.

Clyne, Michael (2005). Australia’s Language Potential. Sydney, UNSW Press.

These are the kinds of comments I have been hearing ever since the Guardian published an article last month on sexless young Japanese as the reason behind the nation’s low birth rate. As these reports went viral on social media, several people asked me for my thoughts on sexless Japan.

The gist of the currently trending discourse is this: The world’s third biggest economy’s population is shrinking and aging rapidly. By 2060, Japan’s current population of 126 million is predicted to drop by one-third because fewer and fewer babies are being born each year. These articles claim that the reason behind Japan’s declining birth rate is that many young Japanese are not having sex while others are in paid-for relationships with virtual anime girlfriends.

In her Guardian article, Abigail Haworth begins with an interview with sex and relationship therapist Ai Aoyama, aka Queen Love, who is photographed in her red kinky outfit, standing next to a middle-aged male client cuddling a small dog. Queen Love is quoted as saying “Both men and women say to me they don’t see the point of love. They don’t believe it can lead anywhere… Relationships have become too hard.”

Citing recent official statistics on young people preferring to stay single and losing interest in sex, Haworth goes on to report on the views of career-oriented women who claim that a marriage would only jeopardize their professional and private lives, as well as those of so-called soshoku danshi (“grass-eating men”) who have little sexual appetite and regard relationships as ‘troublesome’. Both groups are presented as having little to no interest in sex and, consequently, their generation is single-handedly leading their nation to the brink of extinction.

Anita Rani, the presenter of the BBC documentary series “No Sex Please, We’re Japanese” has a different group in the same generation of young adult Japanese to blame, namely Japan’s ultra geeks, known as otaku. In her article Japanese men who prefer virtual girlfriends to sex, Rani explains that otaku find real relationships troublesome and are instead enjoying virtual relationships with Nintendo-computer game characters. The reporter also cites ‘several surveys’ that show that even when men and women are in relationships, they barely have sex, and only 27% claim to have sex every week.

Then Rani claims that Japan’s shrinking birth-rate is a time-bomb and the country’s reluctance to accept migrants is another serious, contributing factor. This leads Rani to ponder: “Japan has managed to preserve its unique culture in an increasingly globalised world but could that very sense of identity stand in the way of solving its population problems?”

So, what do I make of all this?

Orientalist discourses of exotic Japan and its weird inhabitants are centuries- old. Unfortunately, they continue to be disguised as scientific facts and are increasingly commodified for media outlets’ profits in today’s digital age. In the global media, sex sells, weird Japan sells, and combining these two discourses sells big time. Journalists such as Haworth and Rani may well have been physically in Japan, but their analysis was obviously done through a stereotypical way of seeing and with the stereotypes of their Western audiences – and the dollar sign – in mind.

Have sex or not have sex, Japanese are never normal from the perspective of ill-informed journalists and researchers. Their sex life has become a commodified concern, and this ‘concern’ is deeply patronizing and racist as Beckie Smith argues in her recent article in The Independent:

We have a kind of voyeuristic fascination with Japan’s strangeness, spurred on by irresponsible journalism and sensationalised headlines. These stories gain traction because they support a simplistic view of East Asia which is at best patronising and at worst overtly racist. Lazy journalism supports these prejudices; every poorly written puff piece and ill-researched documentary serves, as one viewer charmingly put it, as “confirmation of Japanese weirdness”.

But if it is not heartless, materialist Japanese women, grass-eating Japanese men without any sex drive and creepy otaku that are behind the nation’s falling birth rate, what is? Well, Japan has slipped to 105^th place among 136 countries in the gender equality list; 25% of pregnant women have experience in being harassed in their workplace; 22,000 children are on waiting lists for day-care centres; and all five awardees of the Order of Culture and all 15 Persons of Cultural Merit selected by the Japanese government this year are male. Unfortunately, for women having children is largely incompatible with holding a job and the stay-at-home mum is an increasingly unattractive and economically unfeasible option.

A series of ethnographic research conducted by Ingrid Piller and myself with single Japanese women of this generation fleshes out this perspective further.

The women we interviewed in Australia mentioned sexism and gender inequality in the workplace as the main reasons why they had left Japan in the first place. Although all of them were seeking love and romance, most of our participants continue to remain unmarried and childless. This has nothing to do with the fact that they are all hard-nosed career women – they are not – and everything to do with the fact that ‘flexible’ mobile jobs such as those in the hospitality industry are incompatible with raising a family.

For instance, the bilingual Japanese flight attendants in their 20s and 30s we spoke to for research that has just been published in Language, migration and social Inequalities: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work (Duchêne, Moyer and Roberts, 2013) had limited opportunities to pursue romantic goals due to their irregular shift work and frequent absence from their social networks. Their long-term goal was to marry, have children and quit their job. However, as their jobs did not enable them to save and the job was incompatible with that goal, the only scenario that made this a likely outcome was to find a bread-winner husband and revert to traditional gender roles.

In a neoliberal employment regime – of which low-cost airlines provide a prototypical example – there is less and less opportunity and time to enjoy intimacy, to care for children and to nurture family relationships. The women we spoke to were under continuous pressure to compete and to be ever more productive. They were well aware that their jobs were perpetually on the line in Japan’s ageist, sexist and cut-throat job market where the tradition of life-long employment has long gone.

Young adult Japanese women may have sex but they don’t want to procreate. Does that make them so different from their globally mobile but economically insecure peers in other countries? I don’t think so. It is not only this generation of Japanese that is opting out of starting families; the same is true internationally: Generation On-the-Move is trapped in perpetual insecurity and competition (aka ‘flexibility’), and the stability necessary to raise a family becomes increasingly difficult to achieve.

In addition to gender inequality and socio-economic insecurity, there is another way of looking at the issue of the shrinking Japanese population. Put in the bigger picture, a smaller population is more sustainable on a planet with limited resources. Ultimately, a sustainable approach needs to undergird the engagement with the root cause of perpetual gender inequality; it also needs to involve rethinking the issue of the shrinking national population itself in light of the world’s overpopulation and the promotion of multicultural Japan.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2006). A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market. In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation (pp. 59-83). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2010). At the intersection of gender, language and transnationalism. In N. Coupland (Ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization (pp. 540-554): Blackwell.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2012). Japanese on the Move: Life Stories of Transmigration. Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/japanese-on-the-move

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2013). Language work aboard the low-cost airline. In A. Duchêne, M. Moyer & C. Robers (Eds.), Language, Migration and Social (In)equality. A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Takahashi, K. (2012). Multilingualism and Gender. In M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge & A. Creese (Eds.), Handbook of Multilingualism (pp. 419 – 435). London: Routledge.

Takahashi, K. (2013). Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

University rankings drive the Englishization of global academia

The Intercultural Communication Special Interest Group of the British Association of Applied Linguistics is hosting a seminar at Newcastle University next week devoted to “Intercultural Communication in Higher Education – principles and practices.” Given that internationalization of higher education is all the rage internationally, the seminar could not be more timely. I am one of the invited speakers and, as I cannot be there in person, have just finished recording my lecture about the “Englishization” of global higher education.

I use the term “Englishization” to refer to the spread of English as medium of instruction in institutions of higher education in non-Anglophone countries. A recent case study of English as medium of instruction in higher education in South Korea, particularly at the elite university KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), demonstrates that the pursuit of “global excellence” as expressed through a high rank in global university rankings is a key driver behind the expanding use of English as medium of instruction (Piller & Cho 2013).

University rankings are based on assessments of four broad areas: research and publications, learning environment, reputation of graduates, and internationalization. Of these four areas only ‘learning environment’ is a language-independent variable. It measures things like infrastructure and student-teacher ratio.

The fact that measurement of ‘research and publication,’ usually the most heavily-weighted criterion, is language-dependent is well-known: the most highly ranked journals (as measured by being indexed or having an impact factor) are predominantly published in Anglophone countries and, even if published elsewhere, tend to use English as their medium of publication. Reputation of graduates, too, is language-dependent as it is usually measured through surveys of the HR departments of international corporations where English is widely used.

Here I want to focus on ‘internationalization.’ While ‘internationalization’ is usually the assessment area with the lowest weighting, it is an important aspect of any institution’s strategy to improve its ranking because it is relatively easy to manipulate. Notching up points for ‘internationalization’ takes much less time than to improve research, the learning environment or the reputation of graduates. And achieving a quick jump in rankings through improved internationalization from one year to the next will have flow-on effects on the measurement of research (where reputation also plays a huge role, as evidenced by attempts to influence research reputation votes such as this one by University College Cork) and graduate reputation.

So how is an institution’s ‘internationalization’ measured? In the Korean rankings explored by Piller & Cho (2013), there were four measurements:

• The proportion of foreigners among a university’s teaching staff
• The number of international students
• The number of exchange students
• The proportion of English-medium lectures

Internationalisation is therefore both directly and indirectly language-dependent: the proportion of English-medium lectures is a direct measurement of language; measurements of foreigners among students and faculty are indirectly language-dependent as foreign faculty are more likely to lecture in English than Korean and as the presence of foreign students (even if they are almost exclusively from other non-Anglophone countries, particularly China) is – in circular logic – used as a further justification for the ‘need’ to have English as medium of instruction.

In sum, the desire to perform well on national and international university rankings pushes for English as a medium of instruction in a number of direct and indirect ways. University rankings are phenomenally influential: students base their decisions on where to seek admission on university rankings, governments base their funding decisions on university rankings, the public increasingly understand the value of academia based on university rankings. In that sense, increasing the use of English as medium of instruction is a rational strategy for a university as it has consequences for its position on university rankings. Sadly, in the rush to compete no one seems to have taken pause to reflect on the intrinsic value of the measurements that go into university rankings. Does the proportion of foreigners, for instance, really mean anything much other than, well, the proportion of foreigners?

The benefits to an individual institution of performing highly on university rankings are obvious. The costs of academic competition usually remain hidden. However, there are significant social costs attached to the Englishization of global academia. Here on Language on the Move we have recently discussed the transfer of the burden of language learning from society to the individual; increased social stratification as those who can afford private tuition in English will enjoy better access to higher education than those who cannot; and the damage done to critical inquiry if the medium is more important than the message. Cho (2012) adds educational costs as teachers may feel insecure, or lack proficiency and confidence when teaching in English or students may simply find lectures delivered in English incomprehensible.

All this raises a key question about Englishization and internationalization: What is the meaning of ‘excellence’ if it does not involve service to the common good?

Cho, J. (2012). Campus in English or campus in shock? English Today, 28 (02), 18-25 DOI: 10.1017/S026607841200020X
Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy Language in Society, 42 (01), 23-44 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887

Who profits from an early start in English language learning?

不要讓你的孩子輸在起跑點上 (Don’t let your children lose out at the starting point.) is one of the most popular slogans whenever English education in Taiwan is discussed. The notion that, when it comes to English language learning, younger is better, is widely accepted by Taiwanese people.

As a result, Taiwanese children are compelled to learn English as early as possible. In 2004 Taiwan’s Ministry of Education mandated all public elementary schools should start English courses from Grade 3 but the majority of schools actually begin to teach English in the first grade. Some private language schools even offer all-English programs for toddlers as young as one-year-old. Thus, there can be no doubt that both the public and private sectors subscribe to the argument that English should be taught at an early age.

The belief in the importance of an early start in English is widely promoted by private language schools, as in this video clip, which likens young children to the earth in which English is planted like a seed. The short text in Mandarin Chinese introducing the video explains the principle as follows:

埋下一顆種籽

教育，在孩子的心裡埋下一顆種籽

在往後的人生中發芽、抽枝，

終至成為綠葉成蔭的大樹。

自然而然的讓語言活起來！

 

Plant a seed

Education (English) – plant a seed in children’s minds.

It will germinate and eventually it will grow into a big tree with large green leaves.

Let language grow naturally! (My translation.)

This text implies that age is the critical factor in successful English language learning  as an early start will enable “natural mastery” of English. One of the central themes of the commercial is the repeated assertion that children have an extraordinary ability to learn English and that they will acquire English naturally through English-Only immersion methods taught by native English-speaking teachers. The video also suggests that English can be learned in a “joyful” way at an early age in the school’s playful learning environment and that this “natural method” will achieve extremely positive outcomes.

The commercial drives this point home with testimonials by parents interspersed throughout the video: they claim that their children became “more confident”, “more active” and “more opened-minded” through learning English. Reaffirming points made by the parents are native English-speaking teachers basically promising that Taiwanese children will see the whole world differently as English will give them a global perspective. The overarching concepts of the text and video are that English should be learned at an early age and in doing so English learning will transform Taiwanese children into “global” individuals.

As mentioned earlier, although public schools officially start teaching English from 3^rd grade, the language school market pressures Taiwanese parents to send their pre-school children to language schools to get a head start. Language schools market English language learning to mirror first language acquisition. In other words, age is considered the primary determinant in successful English language learning. This directly links to the widespread belief that there is a critical period in language learning and that children are better second language learners.

However, there are many studies that contradict the premise of “the earlier, the better.” There is ample evidence to suggest that language learners who have a firm foundation in their native language, in this case Chinese, will fare better in second language learning. Nonetheless, in Taiwan there is no shortage of over-eager parents sending their children to language schools or bilingual kindergartens to obtain an English education at a very young age. Given the English learning hype they are prepared to ignore the possibility that their children might be disadvantaged eventually for being deprived of basic knowledge in their first language.

Furthermore, even when Taiwanese English learners begin at an early age, they rarely exhibit perfect mastery of English. In reality, age is only one of the many factors that contribute to an individual’s language learning. Second language or foreign language acquisition involves a number of complex learner variables, such as student motivation, attitudes towards learning, learning styles, aptitude, conditions for English teaching and learning and the goals of English education. Furthermore, these are all embedded in the broader political, social, economic and teaching contexts.

The aim of an earlier start for English is assumed to lead to modernization and internationalization in Taiwan but before achieving this lofty ideal English creates an unequal relationship among the people in contemporary Taiwanese society.

In light of the evidence that an early start in English is not necessarily beneficial and may have negative consequences even for the individual and in light of the heavy social cost of Taiwan’s English craze, Taiwan may need to re-evaluate its current beliefs and think about restructuring its failing English learning system. Just because children start early, does not mean they will reach the finish line faster. In fact, when it comes to English language learning, there is no absolute finish line …