Children in a bilingual program in Hamburg (Source: AlsterKind)

It is a key finding of contemporary educational research that the children of migrants experience educational disadvantage vis-à-vis their native-born peers. The educational disadvantage of bilingual children has been documented in education systems as diverse as those of Britain, Germany, Japan and the USA. The discrepancy between the home language and the language of the school has been found to play a central role in educational disadvantage: while educational institutions continue to maintain a monolingual habitus, migrant children bring to school the experience of multilingualism.

Throughout the world, schools have been extremely slow to adapt to the realities of linguistic diversity; and the obsession of educational systems with linguistic homogeneity constitutes one of the great paradoxes of our time. While the benefits of bilingual education have been documented in a substantial body of research spanning a number of decades, the implementation of bilingual programs has been relatively slow, small-scale, discontinuous and often politically controversial. That is why academic monitoring of bilingual programs and dissemination of knowledge about bilingual programs continues to be important.

Much of the research about bilingual education for migrant students has been dominated by Spanish programs in the USA, and research in other contexts continues to be relatively scarce. A 2011 article by Joana Duarte about a six-year-monitoring project of bilingual elementary schools in the Northern German port city of Hamburg offers a fascinating exception.

Since the early 2000s, Hamburg has been offering bilingual programs in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. These programs have been designed as dual-immersion programs and the aim is to enroll children whose stronger language is German or the target language in roughly equal numbers. Over a six-year period, the bilingual programs were monitored by researchers from the University of Hamburg, and Duarte’s article focusses particularly on the Portuguese program.

Like many dual-language immersion programs, the bilingual programs under examination have three key aims:

• Development of high-level bilingual proficiencies in German and Portuguese, including the ability to read and write in both languages (biliteracy)
• Achievement in content areas such as mathematics, sciences and social studies at or above grade level
• Development of intercultural competences

In order to achieve these goals about half of the curriculum is taught bilingually: German and Portuguese language classes are taught contrastively and with a strong focus on linguistic form. Social Studies are taught through a team-teaching approach by a German- and a Portuguese-speaking teacher, and Music and parts of Mathematics are taught by a bilingual teacher who uses both languages.

Didactically, there is a strong focus on explicit and contrastive language instruction, and explicit grammar and form-focused instruction is an important feature of all instruction, including subject instruction.

So, how does this kind of program work for the students? The researchers conducted a three-way comparison of students in the program with Portuguese bilingual migrant students and native German monolingual students at a ‘regular’ German elementary school, and also with native Portuguese monolingual students studying in Portugal.

To begin with, the students in the bilingual program significantly outperformed their Portuguese-speaking peers in a ‘regular’ German elementary school on assessments of academic language proficiency and subject content. Their gains were such that, over the six years of elementary school, the initial condition of linguistic heterogeneity disappeared and their performance was equal to that of monolingual German children after controlling for socio-economic background and individual student cognitive ability.

This means that bilingual education in a dual-immersion program can completely erase the educational disadvantage of migrant students.

Comparison with Portuguese students in Portugal showed an additional bonus: Portuguese-speaking migrant children in the program in Hamburg reached proficiency levels in Portuguese that are comparable to those of monolingual Portuguese children in Portugal.

Migrant children are disadvantaged in monolingual schools because they face the double task of learning a new language and new subject content simultaneously and they do so in the presence of native-born monolingual students, for whom the educational system is designed, and who thus ‘only’ face the task of content learning. Where schools level the playing field through the provision of bilingual education, as the Hamburg programs described here do, they not only overcome language-based educational disadvantage but also enable migrants to accumulate cultural capital by institutionalizing and certifying bilingual proficiency.

Duarte, J. (2011). Migrants’ educational success through innovation: The case of the Hamburg bilingual schools. International Review of Education / Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft / Revue Internationale de l’Education, 57(5/6), 631-649. doi: 10.2307/41480148 (available for download from academia.edu)

An East Timorese girl speaking Bunak, Tetum, Fataluku and Portuguese (Source: Wikipedia)

A response to Alexandra Grey, “We do aid, not English”

In my experience English is often promoted by aid organisations as part of a package and served up with very little consultation of recipients and not much concern for the local language ecology or the consequences of promoting English. In East Timor, where I have done a lot of research, monolingual English-speaking aid workers often expect their local counterparts to use English and even select them on the basis of their ability to speak it. Native English-speakers have earned a reputation for insensitivity to the constitutional provisions for language and flout them regularly, e.g., by using the fact that English is a working language as a get-out clause, circulating official documents in English and making no real effort to learn the official languages. Ten years after independence, English-speakers still criticise the decision to officialise  Portuguese and Tetum. These two languages are embedded in East Timorese history, culture and national identity and yet the tedious, ethnocentric, Anglophone narrative about how foolish the Timorese were to officialise these languages persists.  In his witty and critical travelogue Beloved Land, Gordon Peake takes aim at well-meaning foreigners who don’t even trouble to learn the local language and would much rather talk to each other than to the people they are trying to help.

My study of the linguistic landscape in downtown Dili (Taylor-Leech, 2012) showed how English is increasingly visible in the commercial, urban landscape, if not yet in the official one. This process contributes to a kind of double diglossia which also reflects the growing social divide that has sprung up in the wake of the aid industry. There are already Portuguese-speaking elites, a hangover from the country’s days as a Portuguese colony but now there are also English-speaking elites with the linguistic capital to make careers in the aid industry, while those who lack the capital to break out of unemployment or low-paid jobs get little opportunity to progress.

I think aid workers need to show sensitivity to local language situations and be aware of how they can promote the hegemony of English to the detriment of local language(s) and culture. I’d go further and say that if aid workers are paid to do development aid work then that indeed is what they should do. If the outcomes of development aid projects are to outlast the lifetime of the (usually short-term) project, it seems to me doubly important that aid workers build lasting relationships and do so by endeavouring to understand the local linguaculture. Capacity-building, like teaching, is not a one-way street and should build on local skills, traditions and knowledge. How is that done effectively in a dominant foreign language? There are lots of irritations that flow from being an elite foreign worker in a poor country but they are minor compared to the humiliations that aid recipients suffer from high-handed “experts” who don’t speak their language.

When I taught English in Mozambique, Mozambicans would frequently ask me how I could help them obtain status symbols like blue jeans or luxury food items. To them people like me seemed impossibly rich, although I was not on a high salary. I would count informal English lessons as a similar sort of status symbol. And be wary that people are not befriending you for those sorts of reasons, which can lead to heartbreak and cynicism. I say get engaged in local culture and local ways of knowing. Let English take a back seat and a low profile, unless you are an English teacher but even or especially then, tread lightly and carefully though the local language ecology.

A shining example of this approach can be seen in the work of one-time Portuguese teacher and now Tetum-Portuguese interpreter and author João Paulo T. Esperança. The photo above was used as illustration in a Portuguese language course in Tetum; lessons were published weekly in the East Timorese newspaper Lia Foun (New Words). João is also the author of the Tetum version of the much loved children’s story Liurai Oan Ki’ik , known in English as The little Prince.
Taylor-Leech, Kerry (2012). Language choice as an index of identity: Linguistic landscape in Dili, Timor-Leste International Journal of Multilingualism, 9 (1), 15-34 DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2011.583654

Migrant children studying in a Brazilian school in Japan (Source: Japan Times)

A recent study of the educational pathways of the children of Brazilian migrants in Japan offers a most welcome addition to the literature on the educational outcomes of migrant children, which has to date focussed mostly on migrant children in North America and Western Europe. The authors, Hirohisa Takenoshita, Yoshimi Chitose, Shigehiro Ikegami and Eunice Akemi Ishikawa, investigate the factors that influence whether migrant children enrol in high school or not.

The Japanese educational system consists of nine years of compulsory schooling, comprised of six years of elementary school and three years of middle school. These are followed by three years of high school, which is not compulsory. Even so, in practice, almost all Japanese children attend high school. However, among the children of migrants, the high school enrolment rate is only 71%. It is thus obvious that migrant children are educationally disadvantaged vis-à-vis their Japanese peers.

On the basis of a survey of 203 adolescent and young adult second-generation residents in Shizuoka prefecture, Takenoshita et al. (2013) explore the family characteristics and characteristics of the local context that distinguish those who were enrolled in high school from those who were not.

Parental education and employment

It is well known that parental level of education is a key determinant of children’s educational achievement both in migrant and non-migrant populations. However, the researchers found that the correlation between Brazilian parents’ educational level and their children’s high school enrolment was much more modest than is usually the case. That means that parental educational level gets devalued in the process of migration. The devaluation of educational credentials in the migration process with regard to the labour market is not surprising. What is surprising is their devaluation also with regard to parental ability to transmit their educational achievements to their children.

The relative unimportance of parental education can be explained with the way Brazilian migrants are incorporated into the Japanese labour market. Irrespective of their educational level and other characteristics, Brazilian migrants are incorporated into the irregular labour market working unskilled or low-skilled jobs. The regular Japanese labour market, from which Brazilian migrants are largely excluded, is characterised by strong company-based labour unions, lifetime employment, seniority earnings and, overall, a high level of labour protection and stability. However, in Japan, as elsewhere, globalization has involved a concerted assault on labour and the regular labour market has been shrinking fast while irregular jobs have been mushrooming. And that’s where Brazilian migrants find themselves. They are typically employed through agencies in temporary, unstable and poorly paid jobs without benefits.

90% of Brazilian migrants work unskilled or low-skilled jobs under irregular conditions. By contrast, only 30% of all Japanese workers are employed in such jobs and, at only 12%, that figure is even lower for male Japanese workers. As a result of their precarious employment status, migrants work longer hours than their native-born counterparts. This is significant as more time spent at work means less time spent with children – a fact that disadvantages the children of the working poor from Day 1, as Barry (2005) demonstrates.

Indeed, parental employment turned out to be the most significant factor distinguishing enrolled from unenrolled children: having a father employed in standard work was the most significant factor that correlated positively with migrant children’s high school enrolment.

Gender

Gender was also highly significant but in surprising ways: a number of studies have found that, in North America and Europe, migrants girls are doing better in school than boys. However, for Brazilian migrants in Japan it is the other way round: boys are more likely to be enrolled in high school than girls. The authors explain this with persistent gender discrimination in Japan: it is more rational for migrants to invest what limited resources they may have into the education of their sons as girls, by comparison, are not likely to get very far in education and employment anyway. Additionally, when parents both have to work long and irregular hours, girls are often deployed to look after siblings and the household more generally.

Race

On the basis of other studies that had shown that non-Japanese and non-Western children are often bullied in Japanese schools, the authors hypothesized that race might influence high school enrolment, too. Therefore, they distinguished between nikkei and non-nikkei migrant children. The former are born to two parents of Japanese descent and would thus look phenotypically similar to native-born Japanese children while the latter are born to at least one parent who is not of Japanese descent.

It turned out that race played no role in high school enrolment and that nikkei migrant children had no advantage vis-à-vis non-nikkei migrant children. In fact, both groups were equally disadvantaged vis-à-vis their native-born Japanese peers. The authors explain this finding with regard to Japan’s myth as a homogeneous nation and the collective denial that Japan has become an immigration country.

Age at migration and transnationalism

Like comparable studies in other contexts, the authors found that the 1.5 generation is the most educationally disadvantaged: those who had migrated at age 10 or above (the maximum age for inclusion in the study was 14 at the time of migration) were least likely to be enrolled in high school. By contrast, the enrolment rates of those who were 4 years or younger at the time of migration or who had been born in Japan were almost as high as those of their Japanese peers.

When it comes to the educational success of migrant children, younger is clearly better as these children had more exposure not only to the Japanese language but also to the Japanese education system.

By the same token, children whose parents moved frequently back and forth between Japan and Brazil found their exposure to the Japanese language and the Japanese education system frequently interrupted and these interruptions significantly reduced their likelihood of high school enrolment. Children of parents who had no history of re-migration to Brazil were four times more likely to be enrolled in high school than those who moved back to Brazil for an extended period one or more times.

Other studies have argued that a family’s transnational lifestyle influences children’s educational achievement favourably and equips them to thrive in more than one national context. However, Takenoshita et al. (2013) clearly demonstrate that this is not uniformly the case and the value or otherwise of transnationalism depends on the socioeconomic circumstances in which it takes place.

Where migrants are incorporated into the lower and temporary segments of the labour market, as Brazilian migrants are in Japan, their transnationalism is usually related to the vagaries of their employment. Consequently, transnationalism hinders children’s schooling in this case.

Local context of reception

The researchers also explored the local context of reception as a factor in migrant children’s educational outcomes. Throughout Shizuoka prefecture migrants find themselves in highly diverse circumstances as regards the targeted services available to them. The largest concentration of Brazilians in Shizuoka lives in Hamamatsu, an industrial city. Hamamatsu municipal government has provided a variety of special education programs targeting migrant children since the 1990s, including the provision of Portuguese-, Spanish- and Chinese-speaking tutors to provide Japanese language support. Additionally, Hamamatsu municipal government subsidizes private ethnic schools and organizations devoted to the education of migrant children.

Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that migrant children in Hamamatsu are more likely to be enrolled in high school than their counterparts living elsewhere in Shizuoka. This is indeed what the researchers found: residency in Hamamatsu with its targeted services was favourably associated with high school enrolment.

Parental Japanese language proficiency

I have left parental proficiency in Japanese for last because the effect turned out to be relatively small. Unsurprisingly, there is a positive correlation between higher levels of self-reported parental Japanese proficiency and children’s high school enrolment but it is one of the smallest correlations examined by the researchers.

The most important positive factors are the regular employment of the father and residence in Hamamatsu. The most important negative factors are female gender, having been aged 10 or older at the time of migration and having experienced multiple migrations between Brazil and Japan.

It is a frequent trope in discourses about migrant achievement that learning the language of the destination country matters most. Migrants are continuously exhorted to learn Japanese (or English or German or whatever the national language may be). Learning the destination language is supposed to be a matter of personal responsibility and integration into the labour market and educational advancement are supposed to be conditional on language learning.

Linguists have known all along that language learning is more complicated than the mantra of personal responsibility suggests. However, even if it were that simple to learn a new language as an adult, the evidence presented in Takenoshita et al. (2013) shows that it actually doesn’t matter all that much. What matters is the material base:

Notably, the family’s economic resources facilitate their children’s enrolment in high school. In other words, Brazilian children’s schooling is impeded by employment instability among their parents. (p. 11)

Barry, B. (2005). Why social justice matters. Oxford, Polity.

Takenoshita, H., Y. Chitose, et al. (2013). Segmented Assimilation, Transnationalism, and Educational Attainment of Brazilian Migrant Children in Japan International Migration DOI: http://dx..org/10.1111/imig.12057

The front cover of the tourist map of multilingual Macau

Last week I had the privilege of visiting the University of Macau and in Macau I discovered yet another unique variation on the many multilingual landscapes we have featured here on Language on the Move.

Macau, a former Portuguese colony, has been a Special Administrative Region of China since 1999. The official languages of Macau are Chinese and Portuguese. English plays an unofficial but highly prominent role: it is the medium of instruction at the University of Macau and at a number of secondary schools. Other schools use Cantonese as medium of instruction and there is one Portuguese-medium school.

Trilingualism in Chinese, Portuguese and English is just the beginning, though. The linguistic situation is further complicated by the diversity of Chinese and the importance of the tourism industry.

The version of Chinese that is local to Macau is Cantonese but Putonghua is gaining in importance. Macau has about half a million residents but welcomes a staggering number of tourists: close to 30 million tourists visit Macau each year. Most of these come from Mainland China and so it is not surprising that in tourism spaces I overheard much more Putonghua than Cantonese. Written Chinese, too, comes in at least three varieties: traditional characters, simplified characters and pinyin. Furthermore, pinyin looks different depending on whether the writer followed English-based or Portuguese-based conventions.

The languages of other tourist markets also feature with maps and signs in Japanese, Korean and Thai.

The linguistic landscape of Macau is thus extremely diverse and each tourist site has its own conventions, as the following examples demonstrate.

A-Ma Temple

Chinese inscriptions at the A-Ma Temple

The famous Taoist temple dedicated to the goddess of seafarers, Matsu, from which the name “Macau” is thought to derive, is enlisted on the UNESCO World Heritage List. On the day we visited it was crowded with Chinese tour groups. The languages on display were ancient Chinese inscriptions in stones and on the temple façades. The prayer tablets where the devout can record their wishes and prayers also seemed to be Chinese only (although there were hundreds of them so I cannot be sure that prayers in other languages were not also hidden away somewhere).

The direction and prohibition signs were either in Chinese only or in Chinese and English (of the non-standardized “Chinglish” variety). One stall selling incense sticks and other devotionalia featured Chinese and Thai signs. Portuguese and what might be called “standard English” were notable for their absence.

Our Lady of Penha Church

Latin and Chinese on a devotional card at La Penha Church

One of Macau’s many Catholic churches (Macau used to be the staging post for the Christianisation of East Asia and has the largest number of Catholic churches by square mile in Asia), Penha Church sits on a hill and affords an excellent view over the harbour and across the bay to the mainland. The church itself is not a tourist destination but the spiritual centre of a community of Trappist nuns from Indonesia.

When we visited, the church was empty. Outside, there were a few newly-wed couples in Western wedding garb who were out to have their pictures taken. As far as I could hear, they received their instructions from the photographers on how to pose in Cantonese.

The languages on the signage could not have been more different from the A-Ma Temple: inscriptions on the façade were also monolingual but monolingual in Portuguese rather than Chinese. Signs about the code of conduct came in three language combinations: Chinese-Only, Chinese-English and English-Chinese.

Signage relating to the spiritual life of the church was either predominantly in Chinese or English, with one or the other language predominating and a few expressions in the other interspersed. To my great surprise, I also discovered some Latin slogans on devotional cards. A collection box, which looked quite old and featured Portuguese, Chinese and English suggests that the English presence in Macau predates the tourism boom and globalized signage of the past decade.

Mandarin House

Trilingual poster at the Mandarin House about 盛 世 危 言 (Warning to a Prosperous Age)

The so-called “Mandarin House” is another UNESCO World Heritage listed building. It used to be the residence of the Qing dynasty reformer Zheng Guanying. When we visited, the building was deserted and other than the attendants we were the only people present making it a very serene space. Information and prohibition signs were relatively standardized and trilingual in Chinese, Portuguese and English although some prohibition signs were more haphazard and contained only Chinese and English.

What was most interesting was the posters about Zheng Guanying’s book Words of Warning to a Prosperous Age (Shengshi weiyan 盛 世 危 言). What little information about the book I could gather from the information panels suggests that it is a highly relevant text for Intercultural Communication Studies. One website sums up the argument as follows:

As a famous reformer of late Qing China, Zheng Guanying was the earliest advocate of representative and participatory political system in the 1870s, the earliest to call for “commercial warfare ” against Western economic imperialism, and one of the earliest to seriously study international law and its relevance to China’s national identity and foreign relations. He was also one of the earliest Chinese to emphasize the combination of Western medicine and Chinese medicine.

His ideas continue to be highly influential in contemporary China and a translation of Shengshi weiyan would be highly desirable. Unfortunately, I have not been able to discover an English translation. I hope this is not another case of “no translation;” if it is, a translation would be highly desirable not only for Chinese Studies but also for Intercultural Communication Studies.

Casinos

Official trilingual “no smoking” sign

A discussion of the touristic linguistic landscape of Macau would not be complete without reference to the casinos because that is where most of the 30 million annual visitors are headed. I got to visit two of them: the Venetian, which is operated by the Las Vegas-based Sands corporation and is an imitation of the Las Vegas Venetian, and City of Dreams, a joint venture between the Macau casino dynasty Ho and the Australian billionaire James Packer. Before anyone gets the wrong idea, the gambling areas occupy only a relatively small part of the casinos and while that is obviously where the action is, I did not enter.

Casino resorts are intended to be spectacular and novel. The Venetian, for instance, looks like a cross between a baroque church and Venetian canals and plazas and City of Dreams features a huge fish tank with (digital) mermaids. However, when it comes to signage there is no trace of the spectacular and unique. In both casinos, commercial signage was completely standardized in the non-language of other global consumer spaces. Direction signs were also standardized in Chinese and English.

Portuguese, by contrast, only had a tiny presence on state-mandated signs, particularly the ubiquitous no-smoking signs, which are in Chinese, Portuguese and English. The biggest surprise were the emergency exit signs: they did not contain any English and were in Portuguese and Chinese only.

Linguistic Pragmatism

Analysts of multilingualism in Macau have described multilingualism in Macau as “an illusion” because official societal Chinese-Portuguese bilingualism is rarely undergirded by individual bilingualism. Indeed, all the people I had extended conversations with were either English speakers from Australia, UK and the USA or Putonghua speakers from Mainland China and Taiwan. With three exceptions none of these had learnt either of the two official languages (the exceptions being an American and a Tawainese who had learnt Cantonese and an Australian who had learnt Portuguese).

Despite the amazing multilingualism in the public signage it may thus well be that the various language communities largely keep themselves to themselves. The fact that each space I visited has its own language practices with regard to signage seems to point in the same direction. If so, it is a pragmatic approach that seems to work perfectly well as a way to manage linguistic diversity and public communication with multiple audiences.

Mother Language Day in East Timor

International Mother Language Day is celebrated annually to promote linguistic and cultural diversity. In East Timor, Mother Language Day 2011 provided the perfect opportunity to launch a new national education policy document promoting the use of children’s mother tongues in the classroom.

Let me begin with a thumbnail sketch of the language situation: The East Timorese Constitution of 2002 declares Portuguese and Tetum to be the co-official languages with Indonesian and English as working languages. The indigenous languages are declared national languages but they have no official status. The reasons for this decision lie in the colonial history of East Timor. It was a Portuguese colony for over 400 years and Indonesia occupied the territory in 1975 at the moment of decolonisation from Portugal. Hence, these two exogenous languages have well established roots in East Timor. A growing number of East Timorese also speak English, the language of tourism, trade, the United Nations and the aid industry, present in the country since the exit of the Indonesians in 1999. Tetum was originally a contact language which came to symbolise national identity during the Indonesian occupation, especially after the Indonesian colonisers banned the use of Portuguese. Beneath this layer of dominant languages adopted by the state lies a complex network of some 30 indigenous language varieties.

This is the broader linguistic context in which the new national education policy is embedded. Along with other international advisers from Australia and Europe, I was invited to provide advice on the formulation of the new policy.

Until now, East Timorese teachers have been expected to use Portuguese as the language of instruction along with Tetum as a pedagogic aide. Although Tetum is spoken widely as a first or second language, it is not known in all parts of the country. Moreover, few teachers are confident in Portuguese and it is mainly affluent, urban, middle class families that know this language. One consequence of this policy is that many children have been expected to learn in a language they do not understand or use, and they have not been achieving the desired literacy results. Grade repetition and school dropout are also alarmingly high. Literacy amongst East Timorese primary-age school children is so low that the Ministry of Education is now considering the use of local languages for teaching in pre-primary and primary schools to help children acquire the basic foundations for literacy development in their first language and to address some of the reasons for the high rate of school dropout.

The new policy direction is an exciting and brave initiative. Relatively few independent countries of the South have broken the norm of adopting the former colonial language as the medium of instruction or succeeded in breaking the vicious cycle of subtractive bilingualism and low educational achievement leading in turn to continued low literacy levels. The policy document sets out guidelines for using home languages for initial instruction with the gradual introduction of Tetum and Portuguese and the later addition of Indonesian and English while maintaining the home languages in the system for as long as possible.

In another posting here on Language on the Move, the blogger, Md. Ali Khan, passionately argues that in situations of extreme poverty and low human development it is a luxury for foreign advisors to talk of maintaining children’s first languages. I understand his scepticism about foreign advisers who promote idealistic notions in situations they themselves do not have to live, let alone educate their children. However, I believe advisers have much to offer provided they share their knowledge in an equitable, ethical way. There is increasing evidence showing that children whose first languages are well developed acquire literacy skills in both first and additional languages more easily. There is also evidence that children taught in the languages they know best develop their numeracy skills better than those who are not. This evidence is now coming from countries of the South as well as from the North. Literate and numerate citizens are better equipped to participate in the public life and the political affairs of their country. A literate population has better access to information about health, nutrition and maintaining wellbeing. When children learn in languages they know, they are more likely to remain in school and parents are often more willing to send their children to school. Strong multilingualism and literacy offer a way to break the cycle of underachievement and low education levels, offering a way out of poverty and a pathway towards active citizenship.

At the policy document launch I presented a seminar on the features and benefits of mother tongue-based multilingual education.  My main message was that by using and valorising children’s home languages and cultures in the classroom, teachers can promote social inclusion and contribute to peaceful nation building. If the policy document is passed by the Council of Ministers, the stage will be set for children to acquire early literacy in the languages of the home. East Timor took its first steps toward achieving mother tongue-based multilingual education on this historic Mother Language Day, 2011. I am proud to have played a small part in it.

Intriguing as those numbers are – who can resist pouring over a score-board? – they actually hide the multilingual practices of social networking as much as they reveal it! The numbers are evidence of a multilingual world but they suggest a multilingual world of discrete languages. The count itself is based on users’ language settings. As a Facebook user, you can set your language to only one language at a time. Mine is set to English because that’s the default setting for someone based in Australia and I couldn’t be bothered to change it. However, the language of your settings doesn’t actually say much about the languages in which you actually interact. My news feed regularly includes updates not only in English but also العربية, Boarisch, 中文, Nederlands, 日本語, Deutsch, Bahasa Indonesia, 한국의, Português, فارسی, Español, Schwyzerdütsch, Français, Tagalog and Türk. If you become a fan, you will find that the Facebook wall of Language-on-the-Move is pretty multilingual, too

When I write on Facebook myself, I like to follow urban etiquette and use formulae (“Congratulations,” “Thank you,” “Well done,” “Way to go” etc.) in the preferred language of my addressee. Sometimes that language choice is conventional (“native language” of the interlocutor), often it isn’t.

I love the comfortable language mixing I engage in on Facebook. It is good fun. However, it is more than that. It also challenges conventional notions of multilingualism as a combination of two or more monolingualisms. Where sociolinguists of multilingualism have started to question the language ideological strategy which tries to overcome the monolingual mindset by enumerating languages (see Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010, for a useful overview), Facebookers practice diversity – a diversity that is not a matter of quantity but a matter of quality!

Oh, and if you were wondering whether I can actually read all the languages I listed above as appearing in my Facebook news feed, the answer is, “I wish!” However, you don’t have to be a multilingual wunderkind to enjoy Multilingualism 2.0! Google Chrome offers a nice little extension, Social Translate:

The Social Translate chrome extension automatically translates event streams and friends’ comments on social network sites.  A user selects a primary language in the Options settings panel.  Then when the user visits a social network site such as Facebook or Twitter, the Social Translate extension will use Google Translate to detect the language of the event stream (or comments) and then translate the text to the user’s primary language.  The extension displays the Social Translate icon beside the translated text.  Click the icon that appears in the navigation bar to see the text in the original language.

Event streams or comments in the primary language should not be translated.  A user can also set multiple secondary languages in the Options settings.  Event streams or comments in these languages will also not be translated.  This is useful for users that read multiple languages and who would like to be able to see non-translated content that is posted in other languages.

Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: fixity, fluidity and language in flux International Journal of Multilingualism, 7 (3), 240-254 DOI: 10.1080/14790710903414331

During the three years I studied for my MA at the University of Würzburg, I must have taken at least one class with Professor Koller each term. I loved those classes and looked forward to them each week. They were supposed to be classes in German linguistics but they were much more: they were dialogues about language, culture, communication and literature, and Professor Koller never seemed particularly bothered about the official boundaries of the discipline. One of the highlights of my MA studies was a semester-long unit about Unsagbares and Ungesagtes “what we can’t say and what we don’t say” – a class partly inspired, as he told us, by his experience of learning Japanese. Like most disciplines, linguistics is far too focused on what is “there” in the data – rather than what is absent, as has only recently been started to be recognized more widely, including in growing research on silence.

Professor Koller was a great humanist, whose teaching and research doesn’t easily fit the labels of disciplinary research specializations and a Festschrift devoted to him on the occasion of his 60^th birthday – the all-too-recent publication date of 2007 is a poignant reminder that he died far too early – was appropriately entitled Wildern in luso-austro-deutschen Sprach- und Textrevieren. The metaphor is almost impossible to translate into English. Wildern literally translates as “poaching,” which in English of course has nothing positive about it and as a motif for an academic career reeks of plagiarism if anything. However, in the Alpine folklore of southern Germany and Professor Koller’s native Tyrol, wildern is associated with romantic Robin Hood-type heroes who refuse to be hemmed in by arbitrary and historically unjust laws. When I needed to translate the title for my publications list (it was, of course, a special honor for me to contribute to the Festschrift and my modest offering is available from our resources section), I translated the title as Roughing it in the linguistic and textual wilds of Portuguese, Austrian and German. While the Alpine outlaw romanticism is gone, a new cultural universe has been introduced: the vernacular experience of the New World – the experience of people “of no account,” as Mark Twain called them in his 1891 travelogue; people who find themselves far from home, indeed homeless, and trying to make the best of it; in short, a metaphor for the on-the-move experience!

The editors of the Festschrift, Cristina Flores and Orlando Grossegesse, offered a beautiful tribute and account of Professor Koller’s career in their preface and I’m linking to both the German and Portuguese version here.

Professor Koller and myself left Würzburg around the same time in the early 1990s and we only ever met up face-to-face once in all the years since – when I visited the German Department at the Universidade do Minho in Braga, Portugal, where he was the head of the department, as a side-trip from a conference in Galicia in 1997. However, in all these years, we’ve been in contact by e-mail and Professor Koller followed my own budding career as a sociolinguist as a wonderful mentor and reader of my work. When Cristina Flores told me about his death yesterday, it was obviously impossible for me to attend the funeral and so I grieved by going through those e-mails, and I found that many of them made me smile, such as the one where he said that he’d just read one of my articles during a faculty board meeting; and offered the general advice that the only way to survive boring faculty board meetings was to bring some interesting reading. I suppose in many ways Professor Koller’s practice was a perfect example of teaching to transgress as bell hooks calls it, even if this label and the attendant feminist theorizing would have been very alien to him.

Unfortunately, Professor Koller’s work is not widely known. It’s not for lack of merit but because his work is mostly in the in-between spaces that no discipline lays claim to. His research includes such seemingly obscure topics as academic literacy in a non-standard language (the Franconian dialect of the area around Würzburg) (Koller 1991), love of Portuguese and the translation of poems from Portuguese into Swabian, another non-standard language of Southern Germany (Koller 1992) or the medieval concept of oral sins (Koller 2000) (a full list of his ca. 100 publications can also be found in the Festschrift). His work also falls between the cracks because the ever-increasing status of English as a global language means that other languages become less and less “interesting” and thus “research-worthy”. On the occasion of his early retirement he sent me an e-mail in which he said – with characteristic self-irony – that it was fortuitous that his ill-health coincided with a slump in Portuguese students’ interest in studying German. At the same time, he also pointed out to me that it was a smart move on my part to emigrate into English as at least there was more job-security in English linguistics compared to the humanities in any other language.

Professor Koller was a passionate multilingual, a lover of languages, an exemplary European, a great humanist and an inspiring teacher.

REQUIESCAT IN PACE!

Cristina Flores, & Orlando Grossegesse (Eds.) (2007). Wildern in luso-austro-deutschen Sprach- und Textgefilden: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Erwin Koller [Roughing it in the linguistic and textual wilds of Portuguese, Austrian and German: Festschrift for Erwin Koller on the occasion of his 60th birthd Braga, PT: Cehum – Centro de Estudos Humanísticos

Koller, Erwin (1991). “Fraenggisch gschriim?” – Eine Fehleranalyse unterfraenkischer Schueleraufsaetze. Tuebingen: Niemeyer

Erwin Koller (1992). Karl Moritz Rapp – Um lusofilo quase esquecido Runa: Revista Portuguesa de Estudos Germanisticos, 13-14, 475-484

Erwin Koller (2000). Mundsuenden: Ein Fastenpredigtzyklus Geilers von Kaisersberg Sprache und Dichtung in Vorderoesterreich. Ed. G.A. Plangg & E. Thurnher. Innsbruck, 136-172