New Zealand’s PM wants to raise her newborn daughter bilingually (Source: radionz)

New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, plans to raise her newborn daughter bilingually in Māori and English. Her desire for her child – and all New Zealand children – to grow up proficient in more than one language is not unusual in today’s world and echoes the desires of many Australian parents, too. A recent study of young Australian mothers found high levels of support for bilingual child rearing.

Mothers wanted to give their children “the gift of bilingualism” and spoke glowingly about the many advantages and benefits they hoped bilingualism would bestow on their children. They felt that proficiency in another language in addition to English would enrich their children’s future, that it would give them a career edge, and that it would allow them to travel overseas but also connect with diverse communities in Australia. Many also believed that bilingualism would give their children a cognitive advantage and they were aware of health benefits of bilingualism such as delayed onset of dementia.

In short, like New Zealand’s PM, the mothers in the study aspired to raise their children with English and another language for many good reasons. There was another similarity: while they knew what they wanted, they did not quite know how to achieve their goal. Like Ardern they confided that, while they were sure they wanted their children to learn English and another language, they found it difficult to figure out “how that will happen.”

The main difficulties with raising bilingual children in Australia – as in any English-dominant society – can be traced back to the overbearing role of English. The dominance of English makes bilingual parenting extra hard for a number of reasons.

To begin with, Australians often have relatively low levels of proficiency in another language and this can lead to deep insecurities. How do you do “being a competent parent” while fighting insecurities whether your pronunciation is good enough or struggling to find the right word?

Second, you may want bilingualism for your child. But you also want your child to be well adjusted, to make friends easily and to do well in school. English is the indispensable means to achieve these goals. So, you may suffer from a niggling doubt that the other language may detract from your child’s English.

By focusing on the other language in the home, do you inadvertently jeopardize your child’s academic success or their friendship groups? Research shows that this is not true but it can certainly seem that way when your child throws a tantrum in the supermarket and everyone stares at you as you try to calm her down in another language.

Third, contemporary parenting is difficult and fraught with anxieties at the best of times. Bottle or breast? Disposable or cloth nappy? Soccer or cricket? The number of decisions we have to make seems endless and each decision seems to index whether we are a good parent or a parenting fail.

Questions of language choice and language practices add a whole other dimension to the complexities of modern parenting: When should you start which language? Who should speak which language to the child? Is it ok to mix languages? The list goes on and on. Parents not only need to figure out answers to these questions, they also need to live their answers out on a daily basis.

Furthermore, parenting is not something that we do in isolation. Mums and dads may not arrive at the same answers. When one partner is deeply committed to bilingual parenting and the other is not, that can easily put a strain on the relationship. Many couples know that mundane questions like whose turn it is to do the dishes can easily escalate into a fight when everyone is tired and juggling too many responsibilities. Now imagine such daily problems amplified by debates over whose turn it is to read the bedtime story in the other language or whose fault it is that the bedtime story in the other language is always the same because there are only two books in that language in the local library.

The parents of New Zealand’s “First Baby” want to raise their daughter bilingually because they recognize that bilingualism is important in today’s world – just like Australian parents. They do not quite know how to do it and they will undoubtedly struggle turning their aspiration into a reality as their daughter grows up and starts to have her own ideas about bilingualism. Having to make language decisions part and parcel of all the mundane parenting and family decisions that we all make all the time will be a challenge – just as it is for Australian parents.

But that is where the similarity ends.

New Zealand parents do not have to face the challenges of raising their children bilingually alone – in contrast to Australian parents. We all know that it takes a village to raise a child. Parents need the support of the wider community. This holds even more so when it comes to bilingual parenting. Specifically, bilingual families need institutional support, particularly from schools, in order to thrive.

New Zealand’s te kōhanga reo or “language nests” are preschools that operate through the medium of Māori and have been highly successful in supporting bilingual proficiencies in Māori and English. Additionally, there are now plans to make bilingual education in Māori and English universally available in all public schools by 2025.

In Australia, our policy makers have so far ignored the aspirations of an ever-growing number of families for meaningful language education that fosters high levels of linguistic proficiency in English and another language. In fact, the overbearing role of English in academic achievement often means that schools actively conspire against the wishes of families. As a result, those best able to raise bilingual children in Australia are those who have the means to afford specialized private schools, extended overseas holidays or bilingual nannies.

When will our leaders end the disconnect between families’ linguistic aspirations and the education system? When will we see an all-of-society effort to help put the bilingual proficiencies needed to thrive in the 21^st century within the reach of all?

Reference

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [if you do not have institutional access, you may download an open access version here. The number of OA downloads is limited, so, institutional users, make sure to leave this link for readers without institutional access … An OA pre-publication version is available here].

Previous research into media discourses surrounding refugees and asylum seekers has shown that these groups are regularly dehumanised through homogenising discourses, and portrayed as a threat to the host societies (e.g. Baker & McEnery, 2005; Gabrielatos & Baker, 2008; Khosravinik, 2009; Sulaiman-Hill, Thompson, Afsar, & Hodliffe, 2011). Refugee arrivals also are referred to in metaphors comparing refugees to movement of water (flooding, pouring, or streaming over borders; camps or centres overflowing) or pestilence (swarms of refugees), which contribute to an image of these groups not as individuals seeking asylum but as some kind of uncontrolled and unpredictable force of nature.

In New Zealand the general view is that our media report issues surrounding refugees and asylum seekers in a fairly benevolent manner compared with other countries, which may have something to do with New Zealand’s geographical distance from most refugee migration. However, this isn’t to say that underlying ideologies in local media discourses don’t recreate and reinforce taken-for-granted narratives that deny power and self-determination to refugees and asylum seekers.

I explored these discourses in New Zealand’s three most widely-read newspapers, The New Zealand Herald, The Dominion Post, and The Press (Greenbank, 2014). Articles were collected from the months leading up to general elections in 2005, 2008 and 2011. I chose these periods to best capture the recognised patterns of increased attention towards refugees, as this group, and immigration generally, are particularly politicised in the months surrounding national elections.

The themes and attitudes associated with a particular word can be revealed by observing the types of lexical items that it commonly appears with or near it – that word’s ‘aura of meaning’, also known as semantic prosody. Put simply, common collocates of a word can become part of its meaning.

I found that the concepts of refugee and asylum seeker are frequently linked to words associated with politics (e.g. political, policies, nations), foreign countries (e.g. Iraq, Nauru, Palestine, Assyrian) and violence (e.g. terrorism, terrorist, conflict) in these articles, particularly when compared to a general corpus of New Zealand newspaper articles. These kinds of associations together can result in an overall negative semantic prosody of refugees as problematic, non-local victims of violence.

Refugees were also afforded much less voice that non-refugee voices in these articles, in terms of number of words attributed through direct quote or paraphrase. Furthermore, the content of quotes and paraphrases often allowed refugees to express gratitude or helplessness, while the technicalities and practicalities of the situation were left to non-refugee ‘experts’ to describe. For example, in a 2014 article from The New Zealand Herald, an eleven-year-old spokesperson for the family is ascribed the following quote:

“Mum wants to say thank you to all those people and may God bless them”

Following from this, a Public Health Nurse is given the role of explaining what goods were donated to the family, and how they will be helpful:

“They have never had a drier before. They didn’t have a toaster. The curtains are very thin, so warm thermal curtains will be awesome. The trailer of firewood — that’s how they heat the house.”

Refugee ‘issues’ are presented here as matters for ‘experts’ to deal with, while refugee voices were largely confined to affective roles, expressing emotion, gratitude and despair. This kind of limited or selective reporting of voice can be a strategy of ‘othering’ certain groups. Othering of refugees can and does occur in other ways in the articles. This may be done through associations of refugee status with crime, as can be seen in the following two excerpts:

A 22-year-old Syrian man, Mohammad Shanar Ryad, a former commando and recent refugee, has been arrested over the murder.

Dahir Noor Shire, 37, who came to New Zealand as a Somali refugee in 1999, gave evidence in his own defence before a jury in Wellington District Court yesterday.

These two men, both accused of crimes, have both their ethnicity and former refugee status explicitly mentioned. Ethnic and refugee-related qualifiers, when repeatedly used in the context of articles about crime, expose an ideology which correlates criminal activity with refugees, and goes some way to actually attributing the crime to refugeehood.

Emphasising positive differences can also result in othering of a given group from a presumed ingroup, as this may fetishise the apparent differences, bestowing exotic or otherworldly attributes to that group. This can be seen in the excerpt below describing a funeral:

Women in headscarves wailed yesterday morning as Eman Jani Hurmiz was carried into the Ancient Church of the East in Strathmore.

This kind of phrasing throughout the article creates the feeling of an exotic spectacle of otherness, using distance to bestow mystery and reverence. Despite perhaps being benevolently enacted, this positive othering still imagines an outgroup whose observed differences from society exclude those groups from that society by implication, affecting their ability to fully participate as members of their community.

In sum, the media discourses that combine semantic prosody, othering, and disparity in voice attribution together make a compelling argument for denial of power to refugees in these representations. The taken-for-granted and out-of-sight discursive processes depict refugees as othered victims, associated with crime and danger, as well as exoticism and helplessness.

Of course, the intentions of the writers of these articles may be honourable. By definition, refugees have experienced adversity, and representing groups as traumatised victims can draw much needed attention to their plight. At the same time, even if benevolently enacted, employing these prevalent discourses of helplessness and othering can have negative real-world consequences for the ways in which the mainstream views refugees, suggesting they are incapable of helping themselves, and impeding full participation in society.

It’s important to recognise ordinary refugee perspectives that are not associated with trauma or suffering, and to consider refugee views and contributions in discourses that concern them. Given the way that all language use generally, and media discourse specifically, reproduce and transform society, re-framing of refugees and asylum seekers in this manner could contribute to addressing the inequalities currently maintained by the mainstream media. Instead of being framed using linguistic strategies that suggest victimhood, refugees and asylum seekers could perhaps better be framed as capable, resilient people who have overcome adversity, who have resisted and freed themselves from oppressive or dangerous situations.

Related content

• Agnes Bodis, Who is a real refugee?
• Laura Smith-Khan, Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Ingrid Piller, The real problem with linguistic shirkers
• Laura Smith-Khan, We all have a culture, we all speak a language: the Australian legal system discusses diversity
• Ingrid Piller, Bitter gifts: migrants’ exclusive inclusion
• Ingrid Piller, Children as language brokers

References

Baker, P., & McEnery, T. (2005). A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts. Journal of Language and Politics, 4(2), 197–226.

Gabrielatos, C., & Baker, P. (2008). Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding – A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press 1996-2005. Journal of English Linguistics, 36(1), 5–38.

Greenbank, E. (2014). Othering and Voice: How media framing denies refugees integration opportunities. Communication Journal of New Zealand, 14(1), 35–58.

Khosravinik, M. (2009). The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers during the Balkan conflict (1999) and the British general election (2005). Discourse & Society, 20(4), 477–498.

Sulaiman-Hill, C. M. R., Thompson, S. C., Afsar, R., & Hodliffe, T. L. (2011). Changing Images of Refugees: A Comparative Analysis of Australian and New Zealand Print Media 1998-2008. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 9(4), 345–366.

Massey University (http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/home.cfm)

Despite recent shaky events here in Wellington, sunshine is forecast for the Annual Linguistic Society of New Zealand (Language in Society) Conference at Massey University on 21-22 November. We have an excellent line up with over sixty presentations on topics spanning Language ideology, Language and identity, Language maintenance, Linguistic landscapes, Discourse analysis and pragmatics, Language variation and change and Structural linguistics. We are very happy to be able to have talks focusing specifically on New Zealand Sign Language and Te Reo Maori – and at the end of Day 1 there will be an opportunity to discuss how we teach Linguistics.

View the conference program here.

We are very excited to have Professor Ingrid Piller as our plenary speaker to showcase our theme of Doing and Applying Linguistics in a Globalised World. Ingrid will present on the important topic of ‘Linguistic diversity and social justice in a globalised world’. The interaction between linguistic resources and social opportunities is a thread which will be evident throughout the conference, with talks addressing language attitudes, employability, education, the New Zealand court system and experiences of transition in diasporic communities.

We are looking forward to exchanging our many and varied ideas on Language and Society with scholars from all around New Zealand and Australia and also some visitors from as far as Japan, Jeddah and Taiwan.

Watch this space for further updates as the conference gets underway.

Sharon Marsden & Tony Fisher (conference organisers)

The lovers of English poetry among you will recall how the phrase “Betreten verboten” (“No trespassing”) encapsulates his alienation from Berlin and his longing for his English home for Rupert Brooke. Prohibition signs – signs that tell us what not to do– have become much more widespread in the century that has passed since Brooke noticed them on German lawns. This is due to a proliferation of spaces in which people who can no longer be expected to share the same set of norms congregate and circulate (airports, for instance, are a prime space where prohibition signs appear). At the same time, we also have seen a proliferation of rules and these rules often differ across spaces that even one single urban person might frequent in the course of their daily activities (e.g., the increase in smoking bans).

I have a hunch that prohibition signs are more likely to be multilingual than other types of signs (and I’m expecting that my students’ assignment will throw some light on whether that hunch bears out in Sydney’s suburbs). My hunch is based on the fact that humans often take a dim view of “the other” and tend to expect outsiders to be less compliant than insiders. As evidence for my hypothesis I have collected signs such as the one above. This hexalingual sign appears in the canteen of a Soviet-style hotel in Prague. The management of this budget hotel is clearly worried that guests might take the opportunity of the buffet-style breakfast to fill their lunchboxes, too. One thing that the sign obviously does is to mark the hotel as budget accommodation and to position its guests as cheapskates. What’s more, the language choices on the sign clearly address cheapskates of particular linguistic backgrounds. When I stayed in that hotel, most guests were Czechs, Germans and Russians, and it is entirely possible that the six languages represented are the languages of the majority of guests, and including any more languages would not have been useful (nor practical; as it is, the sign is huge).

While the language choices in the above sign in a multilingual tourist destination in the heart of Europe don’t single out a particular group as likely offenders, this sign does. I found this little flier in a hotel room in Sydney. I have a large collection of signage in Australian hotel rooms and they are mostly monolingual in English. In the minority of multilingual hotel room signage, Chinese figures rarely. This sign is thus exceptional in its bilingualism, its language choice, and even in the fact that Chinese appears above English. Clearly, someone is trying very hard to send a message to Chinese guests. When I stayed in that hotel, there were no Chinese guests present. The sign thus does double duty: not only does it alert guests to the prohibition against smoking, it also positions Chinese guests as likely offenders! The non-smoking sign below from a New Zealand train does exactly the same thing: again, we find a bilingual sign in a context dominated by monolingual signage. Again, the other language, Japanese in this case, stands out not only because of the choice itself but also because of its design (this time it’s not the position but the size and color).

Proponents of multilingualism often like to think that bi- and multilingualism per se are better than monolingualism, and that multilingual signs by their very nature are more inclusive than monolingual ones. Not so! It all depends on the context! While these signs include Chinese and Japanese readers as potential recipients of the message, they exclude them from “polite society” by singling them out as likely offenders.