Bangladeshi manager speaking English and subtitled in British educational video “How fair is fashion?”

The other day I watched a show about global textile production. How fair is fashion? by British educational media producer Pumpkin TV is an excellent resource explaining the circuits of cheap clothing for consumers in the global North, huge profits for multinational fashion and retail corporations, and the exploitation of textile workers in the global South. The film was shot in Bangladesh and features stories such as those of an 18-year-old woman, who has been working in a textile factory in Dhaka for seven years. Working 100 hours a week, she earns the equivalent of between 40 and 50 USD per month. Together with her husband she lives in a small room in a slum where they share toilet and water facilities with around 10 other families. The mud track leading to the dwelling doubles as an open sewer.

She is one of thousands of workers working for a factory in the Rupashi Group, which has contracts which many well-known clothing brands. On the day the film crew was visiting they were making shirts for Forever 21.

All the workers interviewed for the film spoke Bangla while managers, policy makers and a high-level union official spoke English. The language choices in the film are thus reflective of a well-known divide in Bangladesh: that access to English and proficiency in English is a marker of privilege.

A new wave of thinking about English and development has recently started to argue that English is vital to development and that to improve the lot of people like the 18-year-old garment worker English would be indispensable to her. English in Action, a UK-funded English language teaching program for development in Bangladesh, is an example:

The Programme’s goal is to contribute to the economic growth of the country by providing communicative English language as a tool for better access to the world economy. The purpose of EIA is to significantly increase the number of people who are able to communicate in English, to levels that enable them to participate fully in economic and social activities and opportunities. (English in Action)

Sounds good. However, watching How fair is fashion? revealed one problem with this theory. The problem was that the show treated all Bangladeshi speakers – irrespective of whether they were Bangla-speaking workers or English-speaking elites – as incomprehensible to the British viewer. Both Bangla-speaking and English-speaking Bangladeshis were presented as requiring mediation to become intelligible: Bangla was translated and English was subtitled. The image provides an example: The general manager of Rupashi group says “We are number three now. Our target is to become number two, and then one.” in English at the same time that the subtitles appear in English.

I have blogged about the politics of subtitling English speakers to other English speakers before. As I pointed out there, subtitling some varieties of English but not others to an English-speaking audience serves to mark the subtitled varieties as illegitimate.

The subtitling of educated Bangladesh English constitutes a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the assumption that being able to communicate in English has anything much to do with development. To assume that being able to communicate in English will enable Bangladeshis – or anyone else in the global South – “to participate fully in economic and social activities and opportunities” fails to recognize that language is never just about communication.

Linguistic exchange is always also an economic exchange, as Bourdieu explains:

[U]tterances are not only […] signs to be understood and deciphered; they are also signs of wealth, intended to be evaluated and appreciated, and signs of authority, intended to be believed and obeyed. (Bourdieu 1991, p. 66)

Subtitled speech is a sign of lack of wealth and authority. Only Bangladeshis who speak English can be rendered illegitimate in this way as the translation of Bangla is simply a marker of linguistic difference rather than a linguistic hierarchy.

The elite Bangladeshis featured in the film are competent speakers of English (you can listen to the excerpt with the General Manager of Rupashi Group and judge for yourself). However, linguistic competence does not necessarily translate into legitimate competence:

The competence adequate to produce sentences that are likely to be understood may be quite inadequate to produce sentences that are likely to be listened to, likely to be recognized as acceptable in all the situations in which there is occasion to speak. (Bourdieu 1991, p. 55)

If the English of competent elite Bangladeshi speakers of English is not acceptable on the global stage (however valuable it may be in the local linguistic market), what likelihood is there that English teaching will turn ordinary impoverished Bangladeshis into global players? Hamid’s (2010) analysis of the gap between policy discourses about the promise of English and the reality of the implementation of English language teaching in Bangladesh paints a gloomy picture of high expectations, inadequate resource investment, and poor outcomes. Essentially, he finds that the current policy of “English for everyone” doesn’t produce much competence in English because it is severely under-resourced, and, where donor-funded, unsustainable and poorly integrated with the local environment.

If I were a cynic, I’d argue that the whole point of universal English language teaching is not actually the acquisition of linguistic competence but the recognition of the legitimate language; not to learn how to speak English but to learn how to recognize legitimate – “metropolitan” or “global” – English; to learn one’s place in the linguistic hierarchy and thus to accept one’s inferior position as a natural and incontestable fact. I am not a cynic and I follow Bourdieu in seeing the disparity between knowledge of the legitimate language (always a limited resource) and recognition of the legitimate language (always much more widespread) as a function of the linguistic market.

While proponents of universal English language teaching for development may not intend to collude in linguistic domination, they fail to achieve any of their well-intentioned aims because they ignore the fact that language is not only about communication but also about legitimacy – an error Bourdieu (1991, p. 53) calls “the naïvety par excellence of the scholarly relativism which forgets that the naïve gaze is not relativist.”

While I’m pessimistic about English for development, How fair is fashion? ends on an optimistic note by featuring a cooperative in rural Bangladesh producing for People Tree, a fair trade fashion label. The garment worker interviewed there earns about the same as her Dhaka-based counterpart. However, in contrast to the factory workers in Dhaka, she has fixed hours and works from 5-9; she has a proper contract and the cooperative also provides childcare and schooling for her children; above all, more autonomous and diverse, there is dignity in her work.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hamid, M. Obaidul (2010). Globalisation, English for everyone and English teacher capacity: language policy discourses and realities in Bangladesh Current Issues in Language Planning, 11 (4), 289-310 DOI: 10.1080/14664208.2011.532621

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where once we expected students to move into our media world (into grown-up, serious media, taking a newspaper every day), today we’re pouring into theirs, signing up to Facebook and dabbling with Second Life. Where once lecturers would expect to know more as their careers progressed, with Professors representing the apex of knowledge in their discipline, today that has been inverted: the older we are the more our qualifications and knowledge rest upon the past. Both students and lecturers, of course, vary in their technical competence and interest, but the general pattern is difficult to deny: new technologies, applications, content, activities, behaviours, modes of consumption and new relationships with older forms are reconfiguring our media worlds, and academics are having to work harder than their students to keep up. (Merrin, 2009, p. 25)

Of course, this makes me want to sulk at the injustice of it all wouldn’t you know it, no sooner do I become a professor, it turns out a professor is no longer the apex of knowledge … just my luck!

However, the argument that Merrin and Gauntlett make for Media Studies rings true for Sociolinguistics as well: the subject of Media Studies has transformed to such a degree that a transformation of the “broadcast-era discipline” – Media Studies 1.0 – is required as well. The observation that the advent of digital media has fundamentally changed the way people use media and that Media Studies needs to reinvent itself to stay with it, strikes me as a bit of a no-brainer. But does the argument also hold water for sociolinguistics? Are there too many (applied socio)linguistics students out there who thought they were studying language (teaching) when they enrolled and found they were studying linguistics? Has language in social life changed so fundamentally to shake the core of the discipline?

Here, I am offering some random arguments in favor of the need for Sociolinguistics 1.0 to be transformed into Sociolinguistics 2.0 (or call it L.CoM if you like

# 1. Multilingualism is normal

When my 6-year-old child attends a birthday party of one of her classmates, they sing the “Happy Birthday” song in English (global practice of having birthday parties), German (the language of their school) and Arabic (the language of the UAE, the country in which they live). These kids have a multilingual consciousness – in their world the fact that different people speak multiple and different languages is as normal as the fact that people have different looks. I’m not sure this has ever been different for most of the worlds’ people. However, one of the foundational assumptions of sociolinguistics is of multilingualism as a special case that needs to be treated separately from the monolingual default. I’ve just gone through all the sociolinguistics textbooks on my shelves (and there are a few of them …) and all of them have one or more chapters specifically devoted to “bilingualism/multilingualism/language contact/diglossia” – i.e. they treat multilingualism as a special sociolinguistic condition that is out there but the default is presumably monolingualism. Of course, the default doesn’t have a name, it’s just “language” and “multilingualism” is thus made to look special. Let’s make multilingualism the default of Sociolinguistic Enquiry 2.0 and treat monolingualism as the special case it is.

# 2. Language is always embodied in communication

Have you ever come across disembodied language? Spoken language without an irritating accent, a charming timbre? Written language without a dreadful color scheme on a website, small print flickering quickly across the screen? It obviously matters who says something, how they say it, through which medium they express it, when and where they say it. However, linguistics has worked hard to abstract all those “incidentals” of “language use” away from the discipline to be able to make claims about the universal system. As a scientific discipline, linguistics has had its greatest triumphs in phonology and syntax. Sociolinguistics – just like semantics and pragmatics – have a much more tenuous claim to being a “hard science” and one way sociolinguistics has been trying to compensate is through abstracting away from real language as much as possible to be able to make general statements about “the system”. Sociolinguistics 2.0 will make communication in social life a more central facet of the discipline.

# 3. The native speaker is dead

For the majority of students for postgraduate degrees in Applied Linguistics, TESOL or English (Socio)Linguistics at Australian and British universities English is an additional language. They are overseas students aspiring to a degree from a country in the “center” of the English-speaking world. Even so, these same programs for the most part continue to treat English in the “periphery” as marginal. A glance at module lists is instructive: electives such as “English beyond Britain” (treely ruly as the Muddleheaded Wombat would say! A citation would be unkind …), “English as a Lingua Franca” or “English as a Global Language” again point to the default assumption: the default is the English of the “center countries”, which is assumed to be equivalent to native-speaker-English. However, most of what is interesting in English sociolinguistics is currently happening in the periphery: be it the akogare (=desire) of some young Japanese women for English Kimie and I have written about; or the role English language learning and teaching played in turning Beijing into an Olympic City as investigated by our forum moderator Jenny Zhang – to name just two examples from the work I am involved in. Although the native speaker was declared dead more than 20 years ago (Paikeday 1985), the native speaker – and, more recently, it’s assumed opposite, the non-native speaker, continue to flourish in (applied and/or socio)linguistics, ignoring the experience of the majority of the world’s English speakers for whom the notion has become a straight-jacket. Sociolinguistics 2.0 will need to get over its focus on the native speaker in the center.

# 4. A language with a name is an idea not a fact

Michael Billig (1995) coined the term “banal nationalism” to describe all those mundane forms of nationalism that produce and reproduce the nation – such as the daily weather forecast on TV, which even in the smallest landlocked nation is presented against the background of a national map as if the weather was tied to national boundaries. Irritatingly, for any critical sociolinguist, the ToC of many journals in the field reads like a list of textbook examples of banal nationalism: study after study of this, that and the other thing in this, that and the other national language. Bourdieu (1991, p. 45) says it all:

To speak of the language, without further specification, as linguists do, is tacitly to accept the official definition of the official language of a political unit.

Sociolinguistics 2.0 can and must do better! Let’s stop pretending that English, German, Japanese or any other language with a name have some kind of primordial existence and are not in need of further explanation. The interesting questions are around language as “a cause, a solution, a muse for the national self, and a technology of the state” (Ayres 2009, p. 3). Btw, Ayres’ study of the language-nation-culture link in Pakistan offers a great example of Sociolinguistics 2.0 research!

# 5. “All uses of language are equal” – Not!

The overseas students mentioned above flock to universities in “center” countries not only because the degree programs there are so great but because they also want to improve their English. However, their chosen course of study collectively negates that ambition by making the equality of all language use one of its foundational assumptions. While I’m not as acidic as Mark Halpern about the refusal of many linguists to recognize that various ways of using language are rarely equally received in the real world, I cannot help wondering why so many linguists, and even sociolinguists, insist on defying common sense when it comes to the idea that all language is equally good. Our students know their writing needs improving, future employers know it, the whole world is talking about it, so Sociolinguistics 2.0 will have to engage with questions of standards and good (and bad) usage in order to remain relevant or regain relevance.

This blog post is too long already so I’ll keep some other arguments for a transformation of the discipline over for some other time (e.g., the disconnect between academic (socio)linguistics and the (English) language teaching enterprise which undergirds the discipline; the colonial roots and neo-colonial entanglements of the discipline). In the meantime, I’m looking forward to your feedback!

As with Gauntlet’s and Merrin’s proposal for Media Studies 2.0, the L.CoM challenge is not only about different content. It is also about different ways of creating and disseminating knowledge, it’s about open-sourcing the discipline. And so I’ll end with another quote from Merrin (2009, p. 31):

Web-publishing allows more to be published, making it immediately available to everyone for free, instead of only to those who can afford the increasingly expensive books or who have access to subscribing libraries. We need to give up our desperate collusion in the academic evaluation of the worth of publication outlets, embrace the web and take our ideas out of the academy to a global audience.

References

Ayres, A. (2009). Speaking like a state: Language and nationalism in Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity.

Gauntlett, D. (2009). Media Studies 2.0: a response. Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 1(1), 147-157.

Merrin, W. (2009). Media Studies 2.0: upgrading and open-sourcing the discipline. Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, 1(1), 17-34.

Paikeday, T. M. (1985). The native speaker is dead! An informal discussion of a linguistic myth with Noam Chomsky and other linguists, philosophers, psychologists and lexicographers. Toronto: Paikeday Publishing.