Poland in China (Artwork by the author)

Intercultural communication at work in multinational companies (MNCs) is increasingly common. Workplace communication in MNCs can be highly complex, as is the case when Polish expatriate workers of an MNC headquartered in Western Europe are deployed in China. What are the communication challenges they face and how do they overcome these?

To examine this question, my team and I conducted narrative interviews with six Polish professionals who had just returned from a three-year international assignment in China in late 2016. They had worked to build a Chinese subsidiary of the MNC together with 1,500 local and 150 international employees.

The company language in the Chinese subsidiary was English (and, practically, also Chinese) while in Poland the company language was French (and, practically, also Polish).

The findings of our research have recently been published in the journal Multilingua in an article entitled “Intercultural communication within a Chinese subsidiary of a Western MNC: Expatriate perspectives on language and communication issues”.

Interviewees reported a lot of miscommunication and communication problems, which they ascribed to both language and cultural barriers. In particular, they felt under-prepared when they first arrived and highlighted communication problems in the initial stage of their deployment:

We were sent there without… any preparation for working in a different cultural circle. China is far different from France, Romania, or Hungary. We have lots of factories in Eastern, Southern, and Northern Europe—but these are pretty much the same. We think in a similar way, we have the same working style. But what I saw there… I was completely unprepared for that.

One of my co-authors in China (Image credit: A. Gut)

All interviewees claimed that face-to-face communication with locals was problematic and that English as the company language was part of the problem. They found it difficult to understand the English spoken by their Chinese colleagues and the company jargon. They had to either translate the previously acquired terminology from Polish or French into English, or learn new company jargon, for example, abbreviations of products, company positions, or those used in production management.

In turn, because locals often communicated in Mandarin at work and during social events, expatriates’ lack of Mandarin proficiency prevented them from acquiring information from local superiors, learning about problems within a team, or from participating in decision-making processes. It also hampered integration with locals at lunchtime and led to social isolation and a feeling of not belonging to the work group.

To overcome these barriers, expatriates devised a number of ad hoc strategies such as asking clarifying questions, asking for confirmation, or summarizing the message by e-mail. One interviewee recounted how he simply imitated locals:

I often nodded back (…) and did what they did: nodded, smiled, and so on. Even when I needed something very much, and urgently, I knew it would be difficult to get it due to all the steps you need to go through with them. (…) Sometimes I had to ‘walk in their shoes’ and behave like them. That let me get many things faster.

Another interviewee related that changing the medium of communication from oral to digital worked for him:

One of my employees told me…, because I sent him a message via a chat program, (…) ‘You know what? Chatting with you is much better than talking, because I understand you better [this way].’ So they gave me such signals from time to time.

These communication strategies did not always help to alleviate ambiguity or uncertainty. In fact, they often were experienced as counterproductive, for example when their strategies threatened their Chinese interlocutor’s face, as was the case when they asked for clarifications at team meetings. By contrast, showing respect through simply nodding was felt to be more time-consuming but more effective in the long run.

Our research provided an opportunity for interviewees to reflect on their intercultural communication experiences in China. Their retrospective interpretations were in themselves beneficial as they enabled  them to understand, accept, and appreciate the cultural differences they had encountered in China.

Reference

Wilczewski, M., Søderberg, A.-M., & Gut, A. (2018). Intercultural communication within a Chinese subsidiary of a Western MNC: Expatriate perspectives on language and communication issues. Multilingua, 37(6), 587-611. doi:10.1515/multi-2017-0095

Yucky worms or yummy treats?

When I arrived in the UK from Poland in 2004, I did not know that prawns even existed. During our first dubious encounter, I categorized the not-so-aesthetically-pleasing crustaceans as ‘worms’ and refused to look at them, let alone consider eating them. Today, I devour these ‘worms’, and when I do, it is an occasion for my British husband to remind me that, over the years he, my ‘culinary superior’ from Western Europe, has raised my ‘impoverished’ Eastern-European palate to a totally new level. Squid, scallops, mussels, avocado, pomegranate, seaweed, lamb, haggis, sushi, Indian, Thai are some of the foods I encountered only in my adulthood thanks to my migration to Britain and my transnational coupledom that followed.

Like all couples, transnational couples like to talk. Food, as an ethnic marker and thus fertile ground for stereotyping, is one of their favorite topics, as I discovered in my research with Polish-British couples.

Food talk allows transnational couples to negotiate their divergent socio-cultural practices and customs. Ingrid Piller, who extensively researched transnational families, observes that in any relationship partners always bring in their own habits stemming from their individual preferences or family traditions. This is also true of endogamous couples but in the case of partners raised in different countries, the potential for difference talk is greater.

This is not to say that transnational partners endlessly draw divisions between themselves, experiencing what is known as a ‘cultural clash’. Rather, difference talk in transnational relationships has been shown in a considerable body of research as a positive phenomenon, entailing skillful negotiation strategies. Piller (2002), for instance, demonstrates how partners in English-German couples tend to downplay their socio-cultural differences by directly negating them, drawing out similarities or appealing to shared cosmopolitan identities. In a similar fashion, Kellie Gonçalves’s (2012) study shows how Anglophone and Swiss German partners portray themselves as harmoniously combining their divergent socio-cultural repertoires, from which they derive shared hybrid identities.

Can you imagine anyone calling this Christmas carp an “ugly-looking fish”? (Image credit: mdr.de)

In my recent publication in the Journal of Sociolinguistics (Wilczek-Watson, 2018), I build on this research by discussing other forms of difference talk in transnational families, specifically in relation to food, both in everyday and celebratory contexts. The interactive practices listed above are also present in the data the article is based on – video-recorded meal-time conversations in five UK-based Polish-British families and audio-recorded interviews with them. However, this particular paper focuses on another recurrent discursive strategy emerging across these transnational families, namely ‘culinary othering’ – the family members’ acts of representing the food habits of their partner as different, somewhat strange, or even abnormal.

Drawing an imaginary division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, othering constitutes a form of social distancing from a given individual or a group. This practice can entail stereotyping, derogatory evaluations, and mockery of the Other, often in an attempt to achieve a positive self-presentation. Despite its undeniable negative potential, othering has also been examined as a form of bonding, for instance, in the context of gossiping interactions (Jaworski and Coupland, 2005), when the gossiping parties derive solidarity from their joint mockery aimed at third, absent parties. What if the target of othering is present and is also a member of your family?

In the food-related talk of Polish-British families in my study acts of othering seemed to function in a similar, unifying way. While the othered party was physically present and directly faced culinary mockery, both sides seemed to skillfully navigate through their difference talk, displaying a cooperative spirit. This was exhibited for example by indicating in various ways that a given comment should not be taken as stigmatising: by exaggerating stereotypical evaluations to the point of caricature, or by mitigating them, through joint laughter, reciprocated othering or even through provocation of further othering by the targeted side.

To illustrate, when comparing hospitality practices in Poland and Britain, a British partner stereotyped Polish hosts as over-hospitable and mocked their pretentious hosting with an imaginary quote:

‘Here’s the entire quantity of our cupboards on our table, that’s how great a host we are!’ (Extract 1, p.553).

Using this hypothetical utterance of the Other (Polish hosts) with a hyperbolic expression (entire), and additional stress (entire; great), the partner signaled to his Polish wife (and the Polish interviewer, myself) that his statement was exaggerated, and while it could be received as discriminatory, we (the target) accepted its humorous undertone. Moreover, the Polish partner reciprocated this othering, showing an uptake of the strategy adopted by her British husband. The conversation continued and othering occurred multiple times between the partners throughout the interview, for instance, in relation to:

• the aesthetics of certain dishes (‘Oh God, that’s an ugly-looking fish.’ – about a traditional Polish Christmas Eve dish, carp, Extract 4, p.560);
• the quality of Polish wedding reception foods (‘they were good they were nice but …, the focus was on volume, wasn’t it?’, Extract 5, p.562);

Polish Easter breakfast (Image credit: wikimedia.org)

In cases such as these, neither side seems to take offence. Similar instances of mutual mockery and stereotyping in relation to food habits of the other recur across the participating Polish-British families. Arguably, othering comes more frequently from British partners (perhaps due to the fact the couples reside in the UK and thus Polish cuisine being ‘foreign’, becomes exoticised), some of whom also mock:

• Polish Easter dishes as monotonous (‘everything with gherkin’, Extract 2, p.555);
• everyday eating habits of their Polish spouses (‘all my family find it absolutely astonishing that Kuba will get all that milk, fill it right to the brim and sprinkle cereal on top’, Extract 3, p.557).

Nevertheless, the Polish partners likewise stereotype British culinary practices, as in this example about British Easter traditions: ‘the only English tradition we have is chocolate isn’t it? chocolate Easter eggs’, Extract 2, p.555).

These interactions demonstrate the families’ well-developed skills in manoeuvring through sensitive difference talk. The partners’ communicative collaboration reflects and further shapes their common ground, showing how othering resembles ritual mockery, which can in fact neutralise potential tensions in these transnational relationships and foster the couples’ bonding.

The above findings are limited to the Polish-British families I studied. However, culinary othering and its unifying potential is not exclusive to these relationships. As food acts as a salient indicator of class, status, wealth, and individuality, culinary othering is likely to be common enough. Can you share your own examples?

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References

Gonçalves, K. (2013). ‘Cooking lunch, that’s Swiss’: Constructing hybrid identities based on socio-cultural practices. Multilingua, 32: 527–547.
Jaworski, A. and J. Coupland. (2005). Othering in gossip: ‘You go out you have a laugh and you can pull yeah okay but like. . .’ Language in Society, 34: 667–694.
Piller, I. (2002). Bilingual Couples Talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wilczek-Watson, M. (2018). ‘Oh God, that’s an ugly looking fish’ – negotiating sociocultural distance in transnational families through culinary othering. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22: 5: 545–569.

Front of postcard sent by Private Jacob Isak Sicherman on 1 June 1916

Remember library stacks? Browsing among books? Serendipitously finding on a nearby shelf what you didn’t know you needed? There are still stacks, though nowadays you might be crushed if someone turned the crank. Public libraries have stacks. But where do we do most of our research?

On the internet, of course. Does serendipity exist in cyberspace?

It does. At the 2016 annual Institute for Historical Study meeting, Charles Sullivan described finding a document that had seemed non-existent, simply by using the right search terms. Advised to pursue primary sources, he worried about traveling to archives hither and yon. Did he travel? Not at all: the documents had been digitized.

I am now working with primary sources in my possession: ninety-nine postcards that my mother-in-law, Matylda Sicherman, brought with her from Poland when she emigrated in 1928. Out of them, and with the aid of other primary sources, I’ve teased the stories of a mostly Hasidic community in the first quarter of the twentieth century. I’m hoping that the owners of the cards will donate them to the Center for Jewish History in New York, which is digitizing its entire archive. In the future, these cards could be read in the countries from which they were sent—Poland, Romania, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Ukraine, Russia—and by anyone anywhere with access to the internet.

But for me, physically handling these battered cards is essential to understanding them. Each one was written by a particular person in a particular place, stamped by a post office or military postal service, read by someone in a different place and circumstance. One card depicts four generals shaking hands in 1915 to signify Bulgaria’s joining the Central Powers—“der neue Waffenbruder” (“the new brother-in-arms;” in addition to German, the phrase is also given in Hungarian, Czech and Polish). The sender, Private Jacob Isak Sicherman, wrote each “brother’s” nation above his head: “BULG. TURKEI, OS-UNG [Austro-Hungary], DEUT[SCH].” He wrote on 1 June 1916 while convalescing in a Cracow military hospital. The card is stamped by the hospital and by the military postal service (there’s no postage stamp). Like most of the cards, it went to his wife, then living in a small town in Hungary because her home in Poland wasn’t yet safe. His words overflowed the space. He writes intimately, yet anyone who read his crabbed handwriting would find no secrets:

I am going to note for you who each of these high and mighty gentlemen is. You’ll also know by yourself. Let me know whether you received it. I kiss you and the dear children heartily–[also] the dear parents. Your faithful J. Isaak

Holding this card contributes an ineffable sense of connection. Years ago, in the Public Records Office in London, I pored over scraps that a colonial official had scribbled in the course of his duties. I felt his presence.

Back of postcard sent by Private Jacob Isak Sicherman on 1 June 1916

This tactile connection is only part of the pleasure of my often-serendipitous research preparing an edition of the postcards. Early on, an Institute member told me about a genealogy site, JewishGen.org, loaded with an astonishing wealth of ever-growing databases and a large and friendly community of scholars and translators offering their skills for free. The main translator of the German cards, Isabel Rincon, teaches German literature and languages at a Munich Gymnasium. There was more than her training in German philology that prepared her for the task. Her personal history impelled her to volunteer: her grandfather and his best friend (Jewish) had both been in love with a young Jewish woman. She left Germany in the 1930s for America. Tempted to emigrate with her but not sharing her danger, the grandfather remained regretfully in Germany. The other two emigrated and married; all three friends remained in touch throughout their lives. Isabel knew them all.

Besides Isabel, I have had many pen pals met through JewishGen online discussion groups. Valerie Schatzker, author of the monograph Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia—a wonderfully readable book—sent a source in a 1917 Austrian newspaper, explained Polish words, and offered to read the manuscript. A professional translator in Israel grappled with the intolerably messy Yiddish script. Institute member Bogna Lorance-Kot translated Polish cards. A man in Ohio eagerly offered to make a genealogical chart for the book. Rabbi Avrohom Marmorstein figured out the most likely way that Jacob Isak learned to read and write German—from his fellow pupils in one of the yeshivas that he attended. Like many Hasidim, his family ignored the imperial law that required all children to go to school. Jacob and his parents preferred that he sleep on straw and go hungry, as long as he could absorb rabbinic learning.

What has been most rewarding about this research has been the human element: coming to know the people of the cards and the people of the scholarly community–discovering and being offered knowledge that illuminates the stories of these long-gone people.

This post was first published in the Summer 2016 issue of the newsletter of the Institute for Historical Study.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Difficulty

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

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

— Tanya Ashworth (@ordinarytanya) January 31, 2015

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

— Wes Mountain (@therevmountain) January 31, 2015

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

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

— OzLabourStart (@OzLabourStart) January 31, 2015

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

— ChristopherPatterson (@Christo45046444) January 31, 2015

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

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

— Nathan Kneen (@nathankneen) January 31, 2015

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

Cate: Dear Annastacia Palaszczuk,

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

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

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

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

— Marcus Kuczynski (@cuscus1) February 1, 2015

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

— Mitch (@HEELAussie) February 2, 2015

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

What’s in a name?

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

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

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

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

Polish refugee section of the Catholic cemetery in Tehran

When Kimie Takahashi and myself interviewed participants for Japanese on the Move, our video exhibition of transnational life-stories, one of our interviewees, artist Mayu Kanamori, asked to conduct the interview in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery, where she wanted to show us the final resting place of the first known Japanese settler in Australia. Mayu raised a number of questions about the spiritual belonging of transnationals and about ‘death on the move.’ I was reminded of that conversation with Mayu during my visit to Tehran’s Christian Doulab Cemetery.

Death far from home

The Polish section occupies about three quarters of the Catholic cemetery and constitutes the final resting place of almost 2,000 men, women and children who died in Tehran between 1942-1945.

The story of the Poles lying in Iranian soil is one of the less well-known tragedies of World War II. As part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact what was then Eastern Poland (and is today part of Belarus and Ukraine) was annexed by the Soviets in 1939. Around 1.5 million Poles were deported from the area to camps in Siberia. The vast majority of these died in the following months under horrific circumstances. Only around 250,000 of the deported Poles are known to have survived in Siberia. The survivors were released in 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union so that they could join in the war effort against the Nazis. However, many of these survivors chose to flee instead and around 115,000 managed to reach Allied-occupied Iran.

Two of the headstones in the Polish refugee section

Making it to Iran was like reaching the Promised Land for the evacuees, as one of them recalls in her memoirs:

Exhausted by hard labor, disease and starvation – barely recognizable as human beings – we disembarked at the port of Pahlavi [present-day Bandar-e Anzali]. There, we knelt down together in our thousands along the sandy shoreline to kiss the soil of Persia. We had escaped Siberia and were free at last. We had reached our longed-for Promised Land. (quoted from Ryszard Antolak, “Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942.” ParsTimes)

For a few years, the Polish community flourished in Tehran:

Something more than food and clothing are necessary for the human spirit to survive and grow. Art and Culture are antibodies to feelings of despondency and decay, and within a few months of their arrival, the exiles had set up their own theatres, art galleries, study circles, and radio stations all over the city. Artists and craftsmen began to give exhibitions. Polish newspapers began to spring up; and restaurants began to display Polish flags on the streets.

Among the organizations formed to care for the educational and cultural needs of the exiles was the influential Institute of Iranian Studies begun by a small group of Polish academicians. In three years from 1943 to 1945 this group published three scholarly volumes and scores of other articles on Polish-Iranian affairs. (Ryszard Antolak, “Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942.” ParsTimes)

Memorial stone at the center of the Polish refugee section: French-Persian plaque (the Polish version is on the other side of the monument)

However, death was ever-present in this group of weakened survivors, as the Catholic cemetery in Doulab vividly demonstrates. Each of the small 1,869 refugee graves (see here for a map of the cemetery) has an identical headstone inscribed with a number, the Polish abbreviation ‘S.P.’ (‘swietej pamieci,’ ‘in memory of’), a name, the year of birth and the year of death, and the Latin abbreviation ‘R.I.P.’ (‘requiescat in pace,’ ‘may s/he rest in peace’).

In the center of the Polish refugee section are two memorial stones, one with a trilingual inscription in Polish, French and Persian and the other bilingual in Polish and English. The trilingual one is roughly similar in the three languages and the Polish version reads as follows:

PAMIECI /WYGNANCOW/POLSKICH /KTORZY /W DRODZE DO OJCZYZNY /W BOGU SPOCZELI /NA WIEKI. 1942-1944

To the memory of the Polish exiles who, on their return journey to their homeland, found the peace of God, 1942-1944 (my translation from the French and Persian inscriptions)

The English version of the bilingual memorial stone, which looks more recent than the trilingual one, is similar in content but provides more detail and reads as follows:

IN COMMEMORATION /OF THOUSANDS /OF POLES THE SOLDIERS /OF THE POLISH ARMY /IN THE EAST /OF GENERAL /WLADYSLAW ANDERS /AND CIVILIANS /THE FORMER /PRISONERS OF WAR /AND CAPTIVES /OF THE SOVIET CAMPS /WHO DIED IN 1942 /ON THE WAY /TO THEIR HOMELAND /PEACE TO THEIR MEMORY

As it so happens, the inscriptions on both these monuments are historically incorrect: the Polish refugees were not on their way “to their homeland” because – also in Tehran in 1943 but worlds away from the refugees – Churchill and Roosevelt conceded what had been Eastern Poland to Stalin’s USSR and the remainder of Poland to the Soviet sphere of influence.

Death in a new home

One of the tombstones of the Poles who settled in Tehran. The mixed name shows that Yanina Kaganowska married into a Persian family

For the majority of the survivors, their stay in Iran was temporary and they later resettled in the UK, the Americas, Africa and Australasia. However, some also chose to stay and to rebuild their shattered lives in Iran as is evidenced by the graves in the far corner of the Polish section. There, a number of larger and personalized tombstones have been erected to the memory of people born in Poland who died in Tehran as recently as 2002. Most of these commemorate women who married Iranian men as is evidenced by their Persian surnames.

I looked at these graves with mixed feelings: on the one hand, their personalized details, the fact that they were commemorating much older people than the refugee graves, and the names in which Polish and Persian have become mixed speak of lives lived fully in a new home. On the other hand, they are all single graves and the Iranian husbands and families of these women thus must lie elsewhere (maybe in Tehran’s huge Behest-e Zahra Cemetery, where the city’s Muslims find their final resting place). The fact that none of these graves are family graves – despite the fact that the women obviously had new families in Iran – speaks to the fact that faith and nation continue to divide in death those who were joined in life.

Parceling up the dead

French flag marking a little girl as French national

The divisions of faith are made concrete in the architecture of the Doulab cemetery complex, a feature that is, of course, not unique to Iran’s cemeteries. To begin with, Tehran’s dead Christians are physically separated from the city’s Muslims and Jews, who have their own cemeteries elsewhere. Second, even within the Christian complex the various denominations are divided into their own separate compounds: the Catholic cemetery is separated by large walls from the adjoining Armenian and Russian cemeteries (the so-called ‘Russian’ cemetery seems to house all non-Armenian and/or non-Iranian Orthodox Christians).

Divisions of nation of origin also continue to persist within the Catholic cemetery. Although widely known as ‘Polish cemetery’ because such a large number of Poles are lying there, the cemetery was started in 1855 with a mausoleum for Dr. Louis André Ernest Cloquet, a Frenchman who died prematurely while serving as personal physician to the Shah. The memorial to this Catholic was placed close to – but outside of – the Armenian cemetery. Since then Catholics from most European countries have also found their final resting place there and the cemetery’s sections are more or less clearly divided into national sections.

The banal nationalism of death is most obvious in the cases of the French and Italian dead who lie in Doulab: their embassies have taken the trouble of placing little metal French or Italian flags at the foot of each French or Italian grave.

This tombstone could be located anywhere in Germany. There is nothing in the inscription that suggests that Franz Sänger actually lies in Tehran

While such flags are absent from the graves of other nationals lying in Doulab, the language of the tombstones is in most cases the language of the country of birth. None of the German graves I visited, for instance, shows any sign that the person lying there must have lived a transnational life and must, to a smaller or larger degree, have been part of the fabric not only of German but also Iranian society during their lives. The inscriptions on the tombstones bear no traces of a life partly lived in Iran: for all that the inscriptions suggest, the graves might have been located in Germany.

How could a tombstone inscription suggest a transnational life? At the Doulab cemetery, I saw two options: a multilingual inscription or a lingua franca inscription.

A multilingual inscription is exemplified by the Polish, French and Persian trilingual memorial discussed above. On individual tombstones in the Catholic section multilingual inscriptions are rare and, unless I overlooked something, absent from the graves of Europeans. The few that I noticed are bilingual in various combinations of Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, French, Persian and Russian. In some cases, it was impossible to identify the languages other than to say that the inscriptions were both in the Latin and Arabic scripts.

A bilingual tombstone in French and Assyrian is suggestive of the complex life that Paul Sarmas must have led

While monolingual tombstones predominate in the Catholic section, over in the Orthodox section the situation is different and tombstones inscribed in multiple languages and scripts – Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Georgian, Greek, Latin and Russian – are more frequent there.

As regards lingua franca inscriptions, I consider an inscription as lingua franca if the tombstone is inscribed in a language other than a/the language of the country of origin of the deceased or a language of Iran (in practice, in this case, that means Armenian, Assyrian and Persian). The most frequent lingua franca by far is French and one final surprise was the absence of English in this international space: other than in the Polish-English bilingual memorial mentioned above, there was only one single tombstone inscribed in English:

ANNA MARIA VAN /DEN BRINK-LECKE /BORN HOLLAND 19.10.1914 /DIED TEHERAN 13.9.1970 /MAY GOD REJOICE HER SOUL

The nationality of the deceased is listed as German in the cemetery’s registry, a country where she was neither born nor died, further illustrating the complexity of transnational life and death.

Where the spirit rests

Keeping the dead within the boundaries imagined by the living: the gate to the walled-in Catholic section of the Doulab Cemetery Complex

Dying away from ‘home’ is often invested with special sadness. According to an overview of Polish cemeteries in Iran, a number of the commemorative plaques in other Polish burial sites in Iran stress the fact that these people died “on foreign soil.” There is indeed a deep sense of sadness and loss emanating from the refugee graves. However, that is because of the evil that cut short the lives of the people who lie there and that made the circumstances of their final years so horrific.

By contrast, the graves of those Poles who had decided to stay on in Tehran after the war and to rebuild their lives there and those of the other foreign-born lying there did not move me in this way. What is striking about those is the desire of the living to inscribe the boundaries of faith, nation and language even on those who obviously led lives that transcended those very boundaries.

Speak English, people! says British politician Ed Miliband (Source: msn.com)

Every ten years the UK government conducts a census, which every British resident is obliged by law to take part in. The last one happened in 2011, and the results are now in the process of being released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The 2011 census contained a section on language. Respondents were asked to name their main language, and those who named a language other than English or Welsh were also asked to indicate how well they spoke English—very well, well, not well, or not at all. This question about English proficiency had not been asked before, and its inclusion was a sign of the political times. In the last few years, politicians have become obsessed with promoting the English language as a symbol of ‘Britishness’. All the mainstream political parties now deploy a kind of rhetoric in which speaking English is a patriotic duty, while not speaking it is a threat to national unity and ‘social cohesion’.

In many countries this sort of rhetoric has a long history, but in Britain, for various reasons, it does not. For one thing, the modern UK is a union of four historic nations: there is no single British national identity, and no single language that all Britons have always spoken. English only became the majority language of some parts of the UK in the 20^th century, and it has never been given ‘official’ status in law. Nor, until recently, has its status featured prominently on the mainstream political agenda. The only politicians who consistently raised the subject were representatives of the Celtic nationalist parties, whose concern was not the status of English but the rights of Britain’s Welsh and Gaelic-speaking minorities. Elsewhere in British politics, the feeling was quite strong that what languages people spoke was not the business of the state.

But around the turn of the millennium this began to change. Two main developments prompted the shift: on one hand, increasing popular concern about rising numbers of immigrants, and on the other, increasing anxiety about the threat of radical Islam. This was seen not only as an external threat, but also as an internal one, especially after the ‘7/7’ bombings that killed more than 50 people in London in July 2005. Unlike the 9/11 attackers in the US, the 7/7 bombers were native rather than foreign: most were of Pakistani ancestry, but they were born and bred in Britain. Attention began to focus on the problem of the ‘home grown terrorist’, prototypically imagined as a young male Muslim who had been radicalized because he wasn’t properly integrated into British society.

In 2006, in response to these concerns, the Labour administration created a new department for ‘communities and local government’, whose remit included responsibility for promoting better integration or ‘social cohesion’. It soon became clear that what this actually meant was attacking the ideology of multiculturalism, and removing whatever structures had supported it in practice. And multilingualism, the linguistic correlate of multiculturalism, was one of the easiest and most obvious targets.

In 2008, after a security report announced that multiculturalism was making Britain ‘a soft touch for terrorists’, the minister in charge of the department for communities made a speech castigating local councils for translating material into community languages. This, she suggested, was ghettoizing minorities, giving them no incentive to bother learning English, and so preventing them from integrating with the majority. We all knew where that would lead: ultimately, it was implied, it would lead to more suicide bombings on London underground trains. (Though inconveniently for this theory, the 7/7 bombers did speak English like the natives they were; they even left martyrdom videos in Yorkshire-accented English.)

Since 2008, a steady stream of this kind of rhetoric from politicians and in the media has created a new ‘folk devil’: the immigrant, or member of an established minority ethnic group, who doesn’t speak English and can’t be bothered to learn it. This figure is blamed for all kinds of things: for sending non-English-speaking children to school where they will hold the natives’ children back; for demanding translation and interpreting services that cost the taxpayer millions; for putting up signs in shops that make the natives feel excluded; for fragmenting our communities and threatening our security. Our main political parties have vied with each other to whip up anxiety and resentment which they can then address by taking punitive action against linguistic shirkers and freeloaders.

Labour’s main contribution when they were in power was to ‘reform’ the immigration laws to reflect the new importance accorded to speaking English. First they brought in a citizenship test that has to be taken in ‘a recognized British language’ (aka English—in theory you could do it in Welsh or Gaelic, but Home Office statistics suggest that no one ever does), and then they tightened the English language requirements for those needing work or family visas. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government which came to power in 2010 continued the demonizing process. In 2011, the Tory communities minister Eric Pickles declared it unacceptable for anyone to leave a British school unable to ‘speak English like a native’: young people who fell short of that ideal were making themselves, he said, ‘an unemployable subclass’. Which was rich, considering that unemployment among 16-22 year-olds was running at about 20%–large numbers of young people couldn’t get jobs whatever languages they did or didn’t speak, because there were no jobs.

The Labour Party, now in opposition, has evidently decided that their best strategy is to be even tougher on this issue than the Tories. In December 2012 the party leader Ed Miliband made a speech outlining Labour’s future policy on ‘social integration’. ‘We should start’, he said, ‘with language’. He went on to announce that a future Labour government will cut back further on resources for translation and interpreting, make immigrant parents sign ‘home-school agreements’ underlining their responsibility for ensuring their children speak English, and bring in English proficiency tests for any public sector worker whose job involves talking to members of the public.

Banging on about the importance of English, and the menace of the immigrant who can’t/won’t speak it, is now such a political commonplace, a week scarcely passes without some politician or other making a speech or a comment on the subject. And so far, no one (apart from academics like myself, whose opinions may safely be dismissed as ivory tower nonsense) has challenged the basic presuppositions of this discourse. But the census, whose findings on language were released a couple of weeks ago, has provided what I’m hoping will be some usable ammunition.

If you read about these findings in the media you will probably wonder what I’m talking about, since the reporting was mostly framed by the very presuppositions I’ve just been criticizing. The press and the national TV channels all went with the same story: ‘Polish now Britain’s second language’. In the right wing press, another popular story was ‘22% of households in London contain no one who has English as their main language’. But if you go to the ONS website and take a look at their facts and figures, you may well conclude that the most significant finding is not how many British residents speak Polish, it’s how few of them don’t speak any English.

According to the census data, English in 2011 was the declared main language of 92% of British residents over the age of 3 (around 50 million people). Of the 8% who named another main language, 80% (3.3 million) reported speaking English well or very well. 726,000 said they did speak English but not well, and 138,000 said they spoke no English. The ONS has done the maths: those with limited or no proficiency in English are 1.6% of the British population; those with no proficiency are less than 0.5% of the population. (And that figure must include pre-school children and people who had only just arrived in Britain at the time of the census.)

So, the UK government’s attempt to ascertain the scale of the problem they’ve been talking about incessantly for the past five years has revealed that they’ve been making a mountain out of a molehill—or to put it another way, manufacturing a moral panic. It’s ugly, it’s shameful, and it’s time for it to stop.

Percentage of Europeans who speak three or more languages (2012 Eurobarometer ‘Europeans and their Languages’, p. 14)

The 2012 Eurobarometer Report “Europeans and their languages” was published last month and makes fascinating reading. To begin with, it’s always heartening to see the value the European Union places on linguistic and cultural diversity:

There are 23 officially recognised languages, more than 60 indigenous regional and minority languages, and many non-indigenous languages spoken by migrant communities. The EU, although it has limited influence because educational and language policies are the responsibility of individual Member States, is committed to safeguarding this linguistic diversity and promoting knowledge of languages, for reasons of cultural identity and social integration and cohesion, and because multilingual citizens are better placed to take advantage of the economic, educational and professional opportunities created by an integrated Europe. A mobile workforce is key to the competitiveness of the EU economy. (p. 2)

It is even more heartening to see that this vision is shared by the majority of Europeans: almost all Europeans (98%!) think that learning at least one foreign language is important for the future of their children. And the current generation is itself well on the way towards that goal: with 46% of the population, monolingual Europeans are now in the minority. 19% of Europeans are bilingual, 25% are trilingual and 10% speak four or more languages.

The European policy objective of a trilingual population (national language, English, another language) is already met by the majority of the population in Luxembourg (84%), the Netherlands (77%), Slovenia (67%), Malta (59%), Denmark (58%), Latvia (54%), Lithuania (52%) and Estonia (52%). By contrast, the countries furthest away from this objective include Portugal and Hungary (13% in each), the UK (14%) and Greece (15%).

Looking at where Europeans are now in terms of knowledge of languages and relating it to where they want their children to be makes me feel confidently optimistic about the future of multilingual Europe!

At the same time, not all findings of the 2012 Eurobarometer Report “Europeans and their languages” give cause for optimism, as knowledge of languages has decreased considerably in some countries vis-à-vis the 2006 Eurobarometer Report “Europeans and their languages”. The proportion of respondents able to speak at least two languages has declined considerably in these five countries:

• Slovakia (-17 percentage points to 80%)
• the Czech Republic (-12 percentage points to 49%)
• Bulgaria (-11 percentage points to 48%)
• Poland (-7 percentage points to 50%)
• Hungary (-7 percentage points to 35%)

The culprit is English

Why has bi- and multilingualism decreased so notably in these Eastern European countries when the overall European trend is towards more language learning and valuing linguistic diversity more? I knew the answer before I read the explanation of the report because I actually was part of making Eastern Europeans less multilingual at one point in my life.

As a PhD student, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, I had a job in what used to be the German Democratic Republic that involved teaching English linguistics to high school teachers of Russians who were being retrained to become high school teachers of English. This bizarre scenario was repeated across Eastern Europe: as everyone scrambled to learn English, demand for Russian and, to a lesser degree, German, plummeted. The widespread result was not bilingualism in a different combination of languages but monolingualism.

Why?

The Russian-to-English teacher re-training program on which I taught was comparatively well-resourced but even so the outcomes were not great and the fact that you can’t simply switch from one language proficiency to another was the major obstacle. Quality language teaching needs a good infrastructure including qualified and proficient teachers, resources, and practice opportunities. It is difficult if not impossible to willy-nilly transplant this infrastructure from one language to another. For instance, some of the teachers I taught had for many years organized language camps and exchanges with schools in Russia. They had no comparable contacts in an English-speaking country and so camps and exchanges went out the window. In this way many Russian language learning opportunities, big and small, were not replaced with English equivalents but disappeared.

It is the effects of the lost language learning opportunities in the 1990s in Eastern Europe that we are now seeing as statistics of declining numbers of multilinguals in the new member states. The 2012 Eurobarometer Report “Europeans and their languages” speaks of a ‘lost generation:’

Within these countries the proportions of respondents able to speak foreign languages such as Russian and German have declined notably since 2005. For example, the proportion able to speak Russian has dropped in Bulgaria (-12 points), Slovakia (-12 points), Poland (-8 points) and the Czech Republic (-7 points). Similarly, the proportions speaking German are down in the Czech Republic (-13 points), Slovakia (-10 points) and Hungary (-7 points). It is likely that in these post-Communist countries these downward shifts are the result of a ‘lost’ generation. Many of those who were able to speak German (following the Second World War) or who learnt Russian at school (it is now much less commonly taught) are now deceased, or, as time has elapsed, have forgotten how to speak these languages. (p. 16)

The global hegemony of English works in mysterious ways: not only is it closely tied to the monolingual mindset in English-speaking countries but apparently it can also result in monolingualism in Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish or Slovakian!

A recent network study of Polish migrants in London (Ryan 2011) goes beyond these beliefs and examines how newcomers actually establish networks in a new place. The case studies are unsurprising and will sound familiar to anyone in the field. We meet people such as Marek, a single university graduate in his 20s. Through a Polish network, he had accommodation and a job lined up when he arrived in London. So, his ethnic network allowed him to get a foot in the door. However, Marek soon realized that that was the end of the potential of his Polish network: living and working with other Poles, he had no opportunities to improve his English and the job opportunities that particular network had access to only extended to low-skilled, low-paid jobs but offered no avenue into a career or work consistent with his qualifications. Marek decided that learning English was a priority and a precondition for seeking alternative employment. So, he moved out and moved into share accommodation with Australians and New Zealanders. They got on like a house on fire, Marek’s English has improved and he has acquired an ever-widening circle of mates from down under.

However, Marek’s success in learning English and making English-speaking friends has not translated into other social benefits such as career advancement that are usually expected to flow from improved language skills and improved networks. In a sense, Marek has backed the wrong horse: his English-speaking friends are newcomers like himself but in contrast to him, they have no desire to “make it” in London: they are there to fill a gap year, to see the world, and to party. Marek reflects on the fact that his English and friendship networks have not provided him with a way in:

I didn’t have here in London people, if I had a problem, for example . . . to sort out at an institution, to go somewhere, sort something out . . . I never had a person, who I could ask, who could tell me: you’ll do it like that and everything will be OK. No . . . all the people, I was surrounded by, didn’t have a clue about anything. (Ryan 2011: 716)

Another group who found that acquiring English and English-speaking friends did not necessarily translate into social capital in their new environments were moms. Migrant mothers of young children often find it relatively easy to access local networks through school, and the Polish women with children in the study were no exception. Practically, such mothering networks translated into play-dates and so childcare support. However, because of social dislocation in the migration context, they didn’t translate into desirable ways into British society, either. Two of the Polish mothers featured in detail were university-educated and could have been considered middle-class in Poland. However, in London they lived in a working-class and underprivileged neighborhood. While they made friends with local mothers, they found that they didn’t actually have much in common with the other mothers in their local area, and, like Marek’s Australian backpacker friends, local mothers didn’t have a clue, either, how to gain access to the professional worlds the migrant women aspired to.

It is not only language learners who buy into the assumption that learning English and making friends are part and parcel of the same package of settlement success. Language teachers and applied linguists often seem to share these socially naïve assumptions. The study of Polish migrants in London I have described here reminds us how much we can learn from migration studies. Linguistics continues to need the sociologist as Dell Hymes pointed out all those decades ago.

Ryan, Louise (2011). Migrants’ social networks and weak ties: accessing resources and constructing relationships post‐migration The Sociological Review, 59 (4), 707-724 : 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2011.02030.x

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

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

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

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

Kimie: what? (stop eating the dim sim)

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

Kimie: ……………….you mean….his name?

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

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

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

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

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