The conversation focuses on a study of adults with three languages ‘at play’ in their childhoods and lives today, exploring how visible racial differences from the mainstream, social power, emotions, and familial relationships continue to shape their use – or erasure – of their linguistic heritage.

Zozan’s book opens with a funny and touching account of how her own experiences as a person of “ambiguous ethnicity” shaped this research. We begin our interview on this topic. Zozan points out that the last Australian Census showed that 48.2% of the population has one or both parents born overseas. Yet, she argues, “our teachers and our education system are unprepared, perpetuating the power relations that reinforce injustice and inequality towards half of the population”.

Then we focus on what diversity feels like to her research participants and how “mixedness” or “hybridity” is not normalised, despite being common. We build on a point Zozan makes in her book, that throughout their daily lives the participants “have to position themselves because our [social and institutional] understanding of identity is narrow-mindedly focused on a single affiliation. […] While all participants are engaged in such strategic positioning, my findings emphasise that this can come at a great personal expense, something which is not sufficiently recognised by scholarly work in this field thus far.”

Dr Zozan Balci with her new book (Image credit: Zozan Balci)

We then delve into the emotions experienced and remembered by participants in relation to certain language practices in both childhood and more recent years, and the way these shape their habits of language choice and self-silencing. While negative emotional experiences have impacted on heritage language transmission and use, Zozan’s study shows how people who had distanced themselves from their heritage language – and its speakers – then changed: “it only [took] one loving person […] to reintroduce my participants to a long-lost interest in their heritage language”. We focus on this “message of hope” and then on another cause of hope, being the engaged results Zozan’s achieved when she redesigned a university classroom activity to un-teach a deficit mentality about heritage languages and identities.

Finally, we discuss Zozan and her team’s current “Say Our Name” project. This practically-oriented extension of Zozan’s research addresses one specific aspect of linguistic heritage and identity formation: the alienation experienced by people whose names are considered ‘tricky’ or ‘foreign’ in Anglo-centric contexts. The project has created practical guides now used by universities and corporations and the City of Sydney recently hosted a public premiere of the Say Our Names documentary. Soon, Zozan will be developing an iteration of the project with the University of Liverpool in the UK.

Follow Zozan Balci on LinkedIn. She’s also available for guest talks and happy to discuss via LinkedIn.

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript

ALEX: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m Alex Grey, and I’m a research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. My guest today is Dr. Zozan Balci, a colleague of mine at UTS. Zozan is an award-winning academic, a sociolinguist, and a social justice advocate. Zozan, welcome to the show.

ZOZAN: Hello, thank you for having me.

ALEX: A pleasure! Now, Zozan, you teach in the Social and Political Science program here at UTS, and I know you have a lot of teaching experience, but today we’ll focus on your sociolinguistics research. In particular, let’s talk about your new book. How exciting! It’s called Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, identity, and belonging in the lives of cultural in-betweeners. You’ve just published it with Routledge.

The first chapter is called A Day in the Life of the Ethnically Ambiguous, and you begin by talking about your own, as you put it, “ambiguous ethnicity”. So let’s start there. Tell us about how your own life shaped this research, and then who participated in the study that you designed.

ZOZAN: Yeah, thank you so much, and yes, “ethnically ambiguous” is kind of like the joke that I always introduce myself with. So, I was born and raised in Germany to immigrant parents, so although I’m German, I look Mediterranean. And so people mistake me from being from all sorts of places. I’ve been mistaken for pretty much everything but German at this point. So, you know, I personally grew up, in my house, we spoke 3 languages, so we spoke German, Italian, and Turkish, which is essentially how my family is made up. And, you know, this has kind of resulted in a bit of a… I’m gonna call it a lifelong identity crisis, because, you know, that’s a lot of cultures in one home.

And it also has played out in language quite interestingly, and I just kind of wanted to see with my study if others struggle with the same sort of thing, other people who are in this kind of environment, and I found that they do. And so in the book. I tell the stories of four people, all who have two ancestries in addition to the country they are born in, so there’s three languages at least at play. And all are visible minorities, so they… they don’t look like the mainstream culture in their… in the country where they were born. And all struggle having so many different cultures and languages to navigate. And, you know, it’s quite interesting, in some of the cases, the parents are from vastly different parts of the world, so the kid actually looks nothing like one of their parents.

So, one example is my participant, Claire. She has a Japanese mother and a Ugandan father, and so she speaks of the struggle of looking nothing like a Japanese person, so in her words, all people ever see is that she’s black.

And so there is some really heartbreaking stories about, you know, how challenging that is, growing up in Australia when you look nothing like your mum, and…You know, it’s also hard to assert your Japanese heritage when people look at you and don’t accept that you are half Japanese, even though she strongly identifies with it, for example. So, there are a couple of participants like that.

One of my participants, Kai, is probably the one I personally relate to the most. His mother is Greek, and his father is Swedish, and he looks very Mediterranean like me. So, he talks a lot about, you know, the guilt towards his heritage community, also internalized racism, and that is something I could probably personally very much relate to. So these are the kinds of stories that are in this book.

ALEX: They’re wonderful stories because you frame them in such a clear way that connects them to research and connects them to bigger ideas than just the personal experience of each participant, but it becomes very moving. These participants clearly have a great rapport with you. When Claire talks about speaking Japanese and the impact being a visible minority and visibly not Japanese, it seems, to other people, has on her. That’s incredibly touching, but also the effect that has on her mum, and her mum’s desire to pass on heritage language to Claire.

But the opening few pages are also, I have to say, really funny and interesting. They drew me in, I wanted to keep reading. So I’ll just add that in there to encourage listeners to go out and seek more of your voice after this podcast by reading the book.

Now, in this book, your intention, in your own words, is to explain what diversity feels like, and to normalize mixedness. And you point out that this is really important, pressing, in a place like Australia, but many places where our listeners will be around the world are similar. In Australia, about half the population are what we might call second-generation migrants, with at least one parent born overseas. And so you go on to say, this book aims to have a genuine conversation about what diversity and inclusion look like.

So, tell us more about what hybridity is. This is a concept you use for the, if you like, the sort of

embodied personal diversity of people, and what it feels like for your participants, and whether hybrid identities are recognised and included.

ZOZAN: Yeah, you know, it’s actually quite interesting, because when people hear that you’re culturally quite mixed, they kind of misunderstand what it’s like. So, you know, your mind doesn’t work in nationalities or languages, right? So in the case of my study, where three cultures or languages, are at play, you know, those… these participants don’t consider that they have three identities. Like, that is not how a mind works.

So rather, you are a person who has mixed it all up. So you don’t just think in one language, unless you have to. Like, for example, right now, I’m speaking to you in English, because I have to, but, you know, when I’m just chopping my vegetables and thinking about my day, I don’t think in only English. It’s a mix, in a single sentence, I would mix. If I speak to someone who can understand another language that I speak, I would probably mix those two. Like, it’s just… but I don’t do this, like, oh, let me mix two languages. Like, I’m not consciously doing that. And the same goes for behaviours or practices.

So, the way I kind of, you know, an analogy that I think you can use here, maybe to make it easier to understand, is if you think of, you know, say you have your 3 cultures, and there are 3 liquids, and so you pour them all in a cup and make a cocktail, right? So you mix them all up. And…

ZOZAN: you know, it’s… It’s very hard, then, to tell the individual flavour of this new cocktail now, right? It’s all mixed. But, you know, that’s not something that people understand. They want… they want the three liquids, the original liquids, what is in there? And often, you know, they will tell you that you probably ruined the drink by mixing them.

Laughter

ALEX: We laugh, but your participants have really experienced words to that effect, sure.

ZOZAN: Absolutely, and so, you know, you are often forced into a position, so you are forced to pretend you’re a different drink, because it’s very hard to, you know, separate the liquids once they have been mixed, right? And, you know, now I’m also Australian, so a dash of a new liquid has been mixed into it, you know, making the whole drink more refreshing, I think.

But, you know, unfortunately, most people still have very rigid ideas about identity, including our parents, right? So my parents cannot relate to my experience at all. They are not mixed. My teachers didn’t get it at school, right? Only people like me get it. But it’s important that we all kind of start thinking a little bit about what we’re asking people to do, because, you know.

when I went to school, for example, I could only be German, so I had to leave my other languages and my behaviours at home, because, you know, of assimilation, right? You need to assimilate to everybody else.

And then in my house with my parents, you need to leave the German outside, so it’s considered disrespectful if I say I’m German, right? So my parents would hate to hear this podcast, for example. Because to them, it’s like renouncing your heritage, right? So it’s about… you need to preserve what we have given you. And so you are kind of this person who’s like, well…

I don’t see it the way… I’m not three things. This is all me, and it’s actually people trying to over-analyse what kind of nationality this behaviour is, or this language is. In your head, you’re not actually doing that. You’re just one person who is a cocktail.

ALEX: That makes a lot of sense when you explain it, but in the findings, it becomes really clear that that’s actually very hard for people to assert as an identity. As you say, with parents, with teachers, with the public at large. You call it strategic positioning, the way people have to downplay, or almost ignore, or not show their language, or not show their other aspects of their… their different heritages, and that that can come at great personal expense.

And you point out that, in fact, while a lot of the research literature may celebrate this mixedness or this hybridity, the fact that it comes at personal expense and is difficult is not really acknowledged very much.

Now in this work you’re also drawing on some really foundational theories of language and power. So it’s not just about feeling bad or feeling excluded. The way people are able to mix their heritage languages and other aspects of their heritage, and the way they’re not able to comes within a power play and that draws really on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. I won’t delve really deeply into his theory of habitus, but I’ll quote this explanation of yours, which I loved: “the habitus can be understood as a linguistic coping mechanism, which is very much shaped by the structures around us. We develop language habits, whether within the same language or in multiple languages, which secure our best position or future in a particular market.”

And then really innovatively, you link the formation of these habits to our emotional experiences, drawing on the work of another theorist, Margaret Wetherall. Please talk us through how these theories help explain the way your participants pretended, as children, not to speak their heritage languages. This is just one aspect of how these emotions have influenced their… their behaviours, but I think many of our listeners will have done the same thing as children themselves, or relate now to knowing children who do this.

ZOZAN: Yeah, absolutely, and I think, you know, you almost need to go back to basics. Like, we use language to communicate, and we communicate to connect with others. You know, it’s a social need, it’s a human need to connect, to belong to a group, because we are social animals. So that’s actually the purpose of language, right?

But we also associate language with a cultural group. So, if the cultural group is well-regarded, so is their language, and vice versa. So, for example, here in Australia, obviously, English is highly regarded. And Arabic is not, for example, right? So this is a direct link to how we perceive the people of these cultures, right? So we’re comparing the dominant mainstream Anglo-Saxon cultural group versus Arabic in an era of really strong Islamophobia, right? So language is both this tool for communication, and it’s also this… this… this symbol of… of power, really. And so if the way you try to connect, so the… whichever language, you use, but also how you present yourself, if that results in a negative experience in disconnect, in fact, or feelings of rejection or inclusion, we will absolutely try and avoid doing that again. So we will try to connect… we will always try to connect in a way that is more successful to achieve inclusion and connection, right? So this is kind of like the theory simplified.

And obviously, you feel these experiences in your body, right? You feel shame, or you feel rejection, you feel loneliness, whatever it may be. And equally, on the bright side, you can feel happiness, you can feel, you know, togetherness, whatever it is, inclusion. So, this is kind of the emotional aspect, right? You feel… because this is a human feeling, the connection and disconnect. So, I think that sometimes we take that a bit out of our study of language. And I think we just need to bring that back a little bit, because it actually explained…explains then, how this plays out with language, so language being a key aspect.

You know, if you are told off for speaking a certain language in a certain context, or you’re being made fun of for speaking it, or something bad happens to you when you speak it, maybe you’re singled out, because you can speak something that others can’t. You will resent that language, and you won’t want to speak it again, and you will habitually almost censor yourself from speaking it, because you don’t want to feel like that again, right? So that’s kind of… and you don’t necessarily consciously do that. This is very important. I don’t mean that, like, you know, a 5-year-old is able to notice that about themselves. But typically, the rejecting a language, by and large, happens the first time a child leaves the home, in the sense of going to kindergarten or preschool, or somewhere that is not within the immediate family, where there’s almost, like, you’re being introduced to the mainstream culture in some systemic way, and you are meeting the mainstream culture there as well. So, you are with children, especially if you have an immigrant background, or your parents do, you’re meeting lots of children who don’t. And so this is your first becoming aware of being different, and so, of course, if you look differently already, that’s… that’s difficult. But then also, if you speak differently, that makes it extra difficult.

And so, you know, one of the examples, from the book that I think was just, it actually, when he did say it in the interview, I did tear up, so I want to share this one. And so this was, Kai, so just as a refresher, he is half Greek, half Swedish, and he grew up here in Australia. And so, at the time that he grew up there was still a lot of, sort of, discrimination, towards Greek people. That has probably tempered down a little bit since, but at the time, it was very acute still, where he grew up. And so, in a school assembly, he must have been in primary school, so fairly young, in front of the entire school, he was asked, singled out, and say, “hey, Kai, you… you speak Greek, right? How do you say hello in Greek?”

And he said, “I don’t know”.

And so when I had this interview, we paused for a second, and I said, “but you knew. You knew how to say hello in Greek”. And he’s like, “yes, I knew”. And I said, “well, why… why do you think you said you didn’t know?” And he said, “well, because they didn’t know, so if I don’t know, then I can be like them”.

And I think that is very heartbreaking, right? Because, especially here in Australia, there’s this idea that, you know, if you speak another language, if you are multilingual, that is almost un-Australian. You’re supposed to be this monolingual English speaker, right? That’s the norm, that’s the mainstream. So if you divert from that, that’s different, but especially if you speak a language where the cultural group is not well regarded, right? That positions you as, firstly, different, but also lower.

ZOZAN: Right? And so we can understand, again, he probably didn’t realize, as a 7-year-old, or whenever this was, what he was doing, consciously, but you can see this pattern, right? That’s why I’m saying it’s more a feeling than it is rational thought. The way your language practices develop is based on how your body feels in response to you using, like, language.

ALEX: And the fact that it’s such an embodied feeling comes out in your participants, who are now in their 20s and 30s, remembering in detail a number of these instances from way back in their childhood. I mean, the example of Kai jumped out at me too, the school assembly, because in the context, it might have seemed to the teachers that they were trying to celebrate his difference, to sort of reward him for knowing extra languages, but that’s not how it came across to him, because he’d already started experiencing the negative disconnection that that language caused.

Now that’s one example of negative feelings, but your study shows quite a number of how people in your study developed very negative feelings and distanced themselves from their heritage languages, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, or perhaps as children, consciously, but not knowing what a drastic impact it would have in the future on their ability to ever pick that language up again.

But then you say, this changed, and this is in adulthood usually, changed through relationships with people who they love and admire: “It only took one loving person to reintroduce my participants to a long-lost interest in the heritage language. I believe this is a message of hope.”

Well, I believe you, Zozan, when you say that’s a message of hope, so tell us more about that hope.

ZOZAN: Yeah, I mean, and again, it’s about connection, right? So, this is really at the forefront of everything. So, you know, if there is a person that you can connect with, that will somehow encourage you to rediscover what you have lost, then it’s actually… it can be reversed. It doesn’t mean that, you know, now you’re completely like, “yay, let me start speaking my language again”, or whatever. It’s not necessarily that, but, you know, it tempers down some of that self-hatred that you perhaps have, that guilt, whatever it is, so that you can actually deal with this illusion.

ZOZAN: a little bit more rationally. And, you know, a lot of participants, also, kind of talked about how they’re psyching themselves up to actually visit the country where their parent is from, because slowly, they can, you know, get to that place where they are able to do that, where that… where, you know, the realization that actually there’s nothing wrong with my heritage, it’s just I have been socialized to think that, because the people I have been trying to connect with couldn’t connect with me on that.

And so in the book, there’s a couple of such examples. So in the example of Claire, she, she met a friend at school who also is Black, and has sort of introduced her to this world that she didn’t know, whether it’s, you know, beauty tips for actually women like her, which of course she said was a struggle with a Japanese mother who didn’t know what to do with her hair, and all of those things, so little things like that, but also just, you know, embracing some of these things that… that she couldn’t actually seem to, sort of grasp in her home or in school. We have Kai, whose grandmother, so he loves his grandmother, she hardly raised him, and she developed dementia, and she forgot how to speak English as a result, so she could only speak Greek, so she kind of remembered only that. And so he was like, “well, I want to speak to my grandma”. So now I have to actually up the Greek, because otherwise I cannot communicate with her, and that would be a huge shame”. So you know, that connection is much stronger than everything else. Like, “I want to stay connected to grandma”. In another instance, you know, we had, father and daughter having a bit of a difficult relationship, as is so common in our teenage years, you know, we struggle. But so her dad then taught her how to drive, and they spend all these long hours, driving together, and he, in fact, is a taxi driver, so he showed her all the, you know, the tricks and the, you know, the shortcuts. And, you know, all this time, almost forced time spent together, kind of reconnected them, and, you know, now she’s much more open to, “hey, can you… can you tell me how I… how I can say this in Hungarian?” Or, you know, feeling excited about maybe visiting Hungary, for example.

So these are the kinds of stories, and so this is really important, because connection can just undo some of that traumatic stuff that happens earlier. And you’re quite right, it typically happens as an adult. It’s almost when you kind of have fully formed, and you can look at it a bit more rationally, and actually realize, you know, all of these experiences, it’s not because something’s wrong with me, but rather there’s a lack of understanding, or there are prejudices around me. That doesn’t make it, you know, they are wrong, and I’m okay, kind of feeling, yeah.

ALEX: Yeah, yeah.

ALEX: And you point out that it’s really, at least in your study, really clear that it’s this relationship, or a change in a relationship, that comes first, and then prompts that return to the heritage language, or that renewed passion for spending some time speaking it, or learning it.

And there had been debate in the literature as to whether it’s, you know, that you learn the language first and that enables connections, and you say, well, at least in your study, it seems to be the other way around, so maybe we really need to think of building those relationships first to enable people to want to, or to feel comfortable embracing that heritage language.

I guess, to that end, to try and help people come to that position of, you know, “it’s not me who’s wrong, there’s this world of prejudices or exclusions that are a problem”, you give the wonderful example of you yourself changing your classroom behaviours in the university subjects you teach to try and unteach the idea that heritage languages and identities are deficits. And when you tried it, this wasn’t your study, but it’s, you know, something you were doing because your own study encouraged you to go in this direction, you got such engaged student participation as a result. Can you please tell our listeners about that?

ZOZAN: Yeah, absolutely, and so this was based on an experience I had in my schooling. So I, as I mentioned, I went to school in Germany, and it is very common in Germany still to study Latin as a foreign language throughout high school, and so I was one of those poor people who had to do that.

ALEX: So was I, and you can imagine it was not as… not as common here in Australia.

ZOZAN: I, I… oh, God. It was tough, …But obviously, I speak Italian, so to me, often it was much easier to write my notes in Italian, because it’s almost the same word, right?

ZOZAN: So it just helps me learn that easier. So just in my notebook by myself, I used to write, you know, the Latin word and then the Italian word next to it, because, you know, it obviously makes it easier. Now, my teacher then came around and looked at my notes and said, “well, you have to do this in German”, and I’m like, “well, these are just my personal notes, I can do whatever I want”. And he’s like, “no, that’s an unfair advantage, you have to do it in German’, right? So I’m like, okay, great, so it’s an… it’s a problem at all other times, and all of a sudden, it’s an unfair advantage, so I just… I was not allowed to use my language, even though that was the better way to teach me, right? Like, I mean, that was my individual need as a student, that would have helped me.

So, I know that, obviously, you know, I teach in Sydney, it’s a very diverse student cohort, we have people from all over the place, we have international students, we have students whose first language isn’t English. And I know that many of them, especially if they grew up here and they’ve had this background, this, you know, their parents from elsewhere, they might have had similar experiences to me, whether it’s, you know, either being shamed in some shape or form, or actively forbidden, right?

And so I thought, okay, let me try and see what we can do with that. And so in my class, I then kind of started off with, does anyone here speak or understand another language? And I think it’s very important to say, speak or understand, because that firstly opens up this idea that, oh, okay, maybe the language that I silenced myself in. Typically you can still very much understand it, so I can barely say anything in Turkish, but I understand it quite well. And so, that’s not because I’m not linguistically gifted, it’s because of what I’ve done with it, right? And so, they will then raise their hand, and you can kind of… “what language is that?” And, you know, interestingly, obviously, you will find you speak 10, 15 languages in a classroom of 30 people, because it’s typically quite diverse.

So then we looked at, in this particular example, we looked at a political issue that was, happening at the time. I actually don’t remember what it was now. But I said to them….

ALEX: Hong Kong. I think it was….

ZOZAN: The Hong Kong protests, maybe? This is a while ago. But you could do this with anything. Like, I mean, let’s say I want to do this on the, war in Ukraine, for example. You know, what is the reporting around that? So, importantly because the lesson was around political bias in news reporting, that’s why it’s important for this particular activity to pick a political issue, but you could pick something, obviously, much less confronting, if you want.

So I asked them to look at news reporting about this issue from the last week or so, and I said, if you can speak or read another language, or even listen to, say, a news report on video, have a look at what, around the world, the reporting on the same issue, how are different countries reporting on it, right? So we actually used these other languages. And it was so interesting, because obviously, once you have, you know, some people looking at, you know, obviously news from Australia, but then others news from around Europe, from around South America, from around Asia, you can absolutely see that the news reporting is different. The angles are different, what is being said, who is being biased, is different, right?

And so here we then, you know, this discussion was much richer than had I just said, okay, read news in English, or just from Australia, where, you know, we’re just gonna hear the same perspective. And so I’ve been trying as much as possible to always do that and allow my students to, you know, if you want to read a journal article for your paper from another from an author that didn’t write in English, please do, if that is helpful. You know what I mean? So, these are the kinds of things I try to bring into my classroom to kind of show them, “hey, this is an asset. You speaking another language is great. It opens another door to another culture, to another way of thinking and viewing the world. It’s not a bad thing. You should use it whenever you can.” And it has worked really well.

ALEX: Oh, I love it, and I love that it doesn’t put pressure on those people to then be perfect in their non-English language or languages either. The way you describe it in the book, the more people spoke, the more other students said, “oh, actually, I do understand a bit of this language”, or “oh yeah, I didn’t mention it before, but I also have these linguistic resources”, and everyone just feels more and more comfortable to bring everything to the table.

ALEX: The next question, I don’t know if we’ll edit it out or not, just depending on the time, but it does flow quite nicely from what you’ve just been discussing, so I’ll ask it, and you can answer it, and we’ll record it.

ALEX: So, Zozan, another way you’ve built on this project, which was originally your thesis, and then you’ve written in this wonderfully engaging book. You’ve then gone on since then to do a different related project that’s ended up with a documentary and a lot of practical applications. And I think listeners would love to hear about it. It’s a project called Say Our Names. You’re leading a team of researchers from various disciplines in this project, and it’s about challenging quote-unquote “tricky” or “foreign” names in Anglophone contexts. You’ve created some really practical guides for colleagues, which I’ve seen, and even directed a mini-documentary that showcases the lived experiences behind these names. It premiered a few months ago here in Sydney in collaboration with the City of Sydney Council. Can you tell us about this project in a nutshell, and what the public responses have been like now that your research is out there beyond the university?

ZOZAN: I know, the Say Our Names is a bit like the beast that cannot be contained for some reason, it’s really, blown up, but I think what made it so successful is because it is such an easy entryway into cultural competence, very much to, you know, speaking to the kinds of themes that are in the book. So as you know, my name, people find hard to pronounce. It really isn’t, but it is immediately foreign in most, in most places that I would go to. And I actually… my name is mispronounced so often that sometimes I don’t even know how to pronounce it correctly anymore. Like, I have to call my mum, reset my ear: “How do I say this again?”

And, you know, there’s obviously lots of people in Australia, around the world, who have this very same issue, right? So you have your name mispronounced, you have it not pronounced, because people are so scared to say it, it looks so wild to them, they just call you “you”, or just don’t refer to you at all. Or perhaps, they anglicize it, or they shorten it, and you know, it seems like a harmless thing to do, but actually, it’s sort of like, you know, it scratches the surface of a much bigger issue, right? So you have, again, this dominant culture, and so here in Australia, obviously, the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon culture with everybody else, right? And so English names we are totally fine with, but as soon as something is not English or not, you know, common European, it becomes a tricky thing, and it’s hard to say. And so you internalize that, as the person whose name that is, you internalize, my name is hard to say, my name is foreign.

And your name is the first thing you say to someone, right? You meet a new person, you say, “hi, my name is Zozan”. And… I mean…

ZOZAN: 90% of the time, either people will mispronounce it, or they will ask me more about it.

ZOZAN: And I tell this story, not in the documentary, but when I introduce the documentary. I tell the story about how I actually, a couple of years ago, this is quite, timely, I had podcast training, how to speak about my research in, for podcasts. The first task that we had to do in this training was explain our work, like, what kind of research are you, what is your research?

And I found… I got really stuck with that, like, I couldn’t put in writing what I do. And I’m a very chatty person, I normally have no trouble talking and, talking about myself, but for some reason, that seemed like an impossible task. I couldn’t… I had no idea how to say it. And I realized the reason why I don’t know how to say it is because I never, in a situation where people speak about their work, I never get past my name. People don’t want to hear about my name, sorry, my work, because they want to hear about my name.

So, you know, I say, hi, I’m Zozan at a networking event. And, “oh, what kind of name is it? Oh, where are you from? Oh, you know, what are your parents? Where are your parents from?” And you don’t actually get a chance to do what you came to do, which is, I would like to speak about my work, because I’d like an opportunity.

And so we realized this is quite important, and yes, of course, it’s adjacent to all of this work from the book. It’s, it’s, you know, your name is a lexical item as part of language, right? So we realized the need to… maybe this is an easy entry point to connect people. If we just show the importance of trying to get someone’s name right, how to ask, how to deal with your own discomfort of not knowing how to pronounce it and asking how to… to take off a little bit of the burden of the other person who’s continuously uncomfortable anyway, right?

And so, yeah, we, we, again, storytelling is my thing, so we, we had some focus groups, obviously where we could do a bit more, you know, what is your story, what is your experience, and also how would you like to be approached, right? This is very important. We don’t want to assume that, as researchers, you know, obviously I have my own ways and thoughts. But it was important, so we asked, and created this best practice guide that really came from community: “This is how people would like to be approached. This is what you can do”.

And then we also created this, little documentary. It’s… it’s really, really beautiful, I think, if I have to say so myself. But obviously it just shows the stories, it shows stories of what it… what the name means, because it is obviously part of your cultural heritage, how people have felt resentful towards their names, and ashamed of their names, in exactly the same way as people do with language in my book. So there were a lot of parallels.

And also what it means when people try to get it right, when there’s actually a person making an effort, because again, it’s about connection. Here’s someone who wants to connect with me, and who’s making the effort. So, of course, now I also want to make the effort, right? So it’s almost like this beautiful…

ZOZAN: Like, thank you for trying, and yes, I want to be your friend, let me help you. …

And so, yeah, and it went beyond UTS, it went citywide. I am… we have been receiving requests around Australia to come and screen it and hold a little panel. We’ve had panel discussions with people who are experts in this field. But also, I think what is important that we now brought in as well is Indigenous voices, because obviously there’s an erasure there of names and language that we also need to talk about in the Australian context. So, we’re doing a lot around that, and yeah, it’s been… it’s been the most practical application, I think, of my research so far.

ALEX: When I heard a panel talking about it, something I took away is just to be encouraged, you know, if you’re the person who’s asking, “how do you say your name?” You don’t have to get it right the first time, you don’t have to have just listened to it, and then you can immediately repeat it, because maybe it is an unusual name for you. You just have to be genuinely making an effort to learn, and to show that you want to connect, and that you want to get it right, and you want to ask the person how they want to be known. And that, I think, is just so important for people to keep in mind. It’s not a standard of immediate perfection, it’s a standard of attempting to genuinely respect and connect with people.

Before we wrap up, can you tell us what’s next for us, Zozan, and can we follow your work online, or even in person?

ZOZAN: Well, …

ZOZAN: Obviously, the book is available, you can buy it as an e-book, or obviously, if you’re really into hardback, you can do that too. Say Our Names is spreading far and wide. I’m taking it to Europe, at the end of the year. It will be, used in classrooms in the UK. I will be screening it at a conference in Paris, so there’s actually quite a bit of… because it’s obviously really relevant all around the world, right? We are more globalized, so very happy to do more screenings and introductions and panels. Obviously, a book tour is in the works … let’s see how we go with that, but, certainly around Sydney, and then perhaps also overseas. So I’m trying to spread the word, and, you know, I’m the kind of person who actually just wants to make an impact. I want to, you know, obviously it’s wonderful to do this research and dive into the literature and all of that, but, you know, I think I am quite proud of having translated it into something that is, you know, we have now in corporate offices our best practice guide on language and on names, and people are trying. And so, you know, I think that is the most rewarding thing, and that’s really something I want to keep working on.

ALEX: Thank you, and we’ll make sure we put your social media handles in the show notes. So thank you again, Zozan, and thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and of course, recommend the Language on the Move podcast if you can, and our partner, The New Books Network, recommend to your students, your colleagues, your friends. Until next time!

Octonauts

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added on February 21, 2025)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the new books network. My name is Brynn Quick and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Laura Smith-Khan.

Laura is formerly a Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Law at University of New England. Her research examines the inclusion and participation of minoritized groups in legal settings, especially migration processes, and seeks to address inequality. She was also the 2022 recipient of the Max Crawford Medal, Australia’s most prestigious award for achievement and promise in humanities.

In addition to all of these amazing qualifications, Laura also has another resume addition that is relevant to our conversation today. Laura is a mum and so am I. My kids are ages 12 and 9, and Laura’s kids are ages 7 and 3.

And as academic linguist mums, our brains are constantly analysing language, even when that language comes from the cartoons our kids watch. So today, Laura and I are going to discuss language and accents in kids’ cartoon characters. And then we’re going to investigate what a choice as seemingly banal as a character’s accent has to do with whiteness, standard language ideology, and securing a nation’s borders.

Laura, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Smith-Khan: Thanks, Brynn.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became not just a linguist, but a lawyer and migration law scholar as well?

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, well, I think maybe like a lot of people who get into linguistics, I had an interest in learning languages from quite a young age, which was quite unusual in my context of being in a fairly monolingual English-speaking small town and family. That led me to go on an exchange to France when I was a teenager and learn French, and then to pick up further language study at university to study linguistics. I already had that curiosity about learning a language and using different languages in different contexts and then had the chance to start looking at that in a study context.

Towards the end of my first degree, I also started to, I’d been studying politics as well in my first degree as well as languages, and I started thinking like, I want to study something that has some practical application in a professional context somehow, and that actually started to make me think about studying law, which was something that in the past I hadn’t really thought about. So, I ended up enrolling in a law degree after my first degree and spending a total of seven years straight in undergraduate education, which was actually great fun. And I had this opportunity during my law degree to start working with a registered migration agent, which is a professional who does similar work to a lawyer, but specifically on things related to migration, so applying for visas and this type of thing.

And he was originally from Afghanistan himself, and so he actually helped a lot of asylum seekers as part of his work, which really gave me this very unique or very different type of experience and led me into wanting to do some study in refugee law, which I did as part of my law degree. And through that discovered where I could bring my interests together in this lovely subfield of looking at language in asylum and migration processes. And I started that as an undergrad essay in one of my subjects in my law degree.

And it’s still with me now, like 12 years later. So, it’s been really, really interesting work.

Brynn: I can’t believe that you started that in undergrad because I’ve read quite a bit of your PhD thesis. And can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I thought that it was such an interesting combination of language and migration.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah. So, I just, you know, I had this, I did refugee law as a subject in my final year of my law degree. And we had this opportunity to choose a topic for a research essay with, which as an undergrad isn’t something that always happens that much.

But because of, you know, the work I’d been doing, and then this interest in languages, I was having some trouble kind of trying to find a topic. And then I just stumbled across something written by the wonderful Diana Eads, who has done some work, obviously a lot of work on language in legal settings but also did a little bit of work on language in asylum. And that really sparked this interest to me.

I was like, wow, okay, the coming together of my world. And I wrote, you know, I wrote my little essay. And then I was like, I really love research, but I’ve been at university for seven years now, living in one of the most expensive cities in the whole world, working many, many jobs on the side to get through it.

I would love to stay here and do this more. But, you know, I need to find a way to actually get paid to do that. And I was really lucky to get some, you know, a three-year full-time position as a research assistant in refugee law, which led to some really amazing research experience across the world as well.

And that was kind of how I ended up then going into, you know, looking into higher degree research after doing that. So, I was really lucky.

Brynn: Yeah. And I always love when we can bring in our love of languages and linguistics and apply it to another discipline where maybe it doesn’t always seem like it would go together. But I think a lot of us do that.

And I think that that’s a really important work. And especially with yours, with talking about migration and asylum. And I know that your thesis dealt a lot with sort of how migrants face becoming, you know, a citizen or a migrant into Australia.

And the actual immigration officers, how they go through those processes. It’s fascinating. So, if anyone gets a chance to read it, they should because it’s really good.

Now, let’s park that for a minute. We’re going to shift gears into our sort of mum hats. So, we’re going to talk about a post that you made on Blue Sky that started you and I talking about kids cartoon characters and accents.

So, on October 5th of this year, you posted, and I can’t say “skeeted”, I refuse. So, I know that that’s technically the verb for a Bluesky post. You’re shaking your head no, I’m shaking no.

I refuse. I refuse. I’m going to say posted.

So, on October 5th of this year, you posted a question aimed at sociolinguists with small kids. And you asked in the post, quote, has there been any commentary about Octonauts and the characters’ accents in the original UK version? End quote.

So, for our listeners who might not be familiar, very much unlike us, because I hear the theme song in my dreams, tell us a bit about what the Octonauts show is and what you noticed about their accents.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so you’ve just said the word Octonauts, and I’m actually hearing the starting song of Octonauts.

Brynn: I can hear the little siren. The little siren.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so Octonauts is an animation. It involves this team of different types of animals, and they’re basically anthropomorphized animals. So, they wear little outfits and they have equipment, and they’re basically humans, but in animal form.

And they live and they work on this thing called the Octopod, which is this kind of underwater station submarine type thingamy. And they basically travel all around. In the original series, only underwater, but then in the kind of spin-off series, they go on to land a bit, and they travel around the world, and they basically introduce children to, and parents who are listening in, to different species of animal, different kind of nature-related issues, climates, climate change concerns as well, and teach them about that.

And the team themselves, so the Octonauts themselves, each have a specialty or some kind of special expertise. So, you know, there’s a map reader, there’s one that does, you know, healing. So, if they come across an animal who’s injured, that particular character kind of takes the lead on that.

Another one that’s an expert in water, you know, so all these different kinds of expertise that are relevant to nature and animals, and they go around, you know, helping them. So, there’s kind of educational things, but they’re also very much only interested in the natural world. So as far as I know, we never really see humans, we don’t see cities, we don’t hear about kind of political kind of countries or states or anything like that.

It’s really about the natural world and different parts of the natural world, which in itself, I think is quite interesting. So, from what I’ve understood or picked up about the show, it started as a book series, which, you know, people who’ve read say was really good, but kind of limited to the characters and kind of the focus. It was picked up originally as a UK production.

And since then, there’s been kind of some spin-offs. So, there’s a Netflix production called Octonauts Above and Beyond. And so that’s when they get out on the land a little bit more with various vehicles that they have.

And they introduce some additional kind of regular characters at that point in time as well. But what really interested me, and this was really, you know, big caveat, obviously, this is not my professional area. We haven’t, you know, systematically researched the show or other shows or anything like that.

But what interested me as I listened in doing my chores and hearing, you know, the show going on the background was that these animals seem to have a range of different accents. And that they weren’t just, you know, like, all kind of standard American accents or kind of, you know, standard UK accents or something. But there was something interesting going on there with the different characters.

And then I kind of listened in a little bit closer. And I noticed that, you know, we had kind of central, I guess, if you will, English accents, like there are US accents, there are UK accents, but there’s a variety of UK accents. So, there’s like a cockney one who’s the pirate looking one.

And there’s one that sounds Scottish, and there’s at least one Australian accent. And then I noticed as I went on kind of listening to different episodes, like, you know, there was one that sounded like a Spanish speaker, and there was also an Indian English speaker as well. I was like, oh, this is quite cool.

There’s a good range of diversity, but it’s also not presented in a way that’s like super stereotypical. Like, you know, like it’s just who that animal is and how they speak. It’s not like, I come from this place and we always eat, you know, we always have barbecues or, you know, whatever it is.

So, we don’t have those kinds of really overt references to the accent, but they’re just speaking in their accents. So, I found that really refreshing. I was like, oh, this is really cool and, you know, progressive and everything.

And then the second thought was like, hold on. We have Captain Barnacle, who is obviously the captain, the leader, you know, the one who directs everything. And his accent is Received Pronunciation British.

Brynn: All of a sudden, we see Kachru’s circles in our brains, and we go, wait a minute. Now we’ve still got the inner, the outer, the expanding circles.

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. Yeah. So, I was like, okay, so those subtle kinds of representations are still potentially happening there.

But then, you know, I kind of looked a little more. And so, looking at the Indian English speaker, there was this other kind of really nice things that I picked up. So, for example, his name is Pani, which means in Hindi and Urdu, and maybe also some other Indian languages or subcontinental languages, it means water.

And he is the hydrologist. He is an expert in water. Yeah.

So, I thought that was really nice seeing a little bit of, you know, diversity and subtly done as well, not kind of those really kind of strong national stereotypes coming through. Although we can still see some, you know, potential issues or we can comment or observe some things about the way the social hierarchy works within that particular group as well.

Brynn: Well, do you know what was interesting? You said about having that there was an American accent. And for me, originally an American, the first time that I ever heard that American character in the show, I was actually shocked because it’s a deeply Southern American character.

And often Southern American accents get stereotyped as being sort of like the dumb or the stupid character, the uneducated character. So, I was actually really pleased to see that this Southern American who talks like this, she was being portrayed as this very intelligent scientist and still having this accent that often gets discriminated against in America. So, to me, that’s kind of what I glommed on to really quickly.

But then I noticed the exact same thing that you did that, oh, but wait, the captain has this received pronunciation British accent that we all know is that sort of standard, quote unquote, English accent that a lot of people, when they’re learning English, think that they should try to emulate because that’s the, quote, best accent.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, some kind of ideal to work towards. And then, yeah, so having, starting to think about this and having these conversations also kind of led me to do a little bit of online searching. And I’ve come across, you know, there’s whole fan sites dedicated to discussing the Octonauts, the different series.

Brynn: I found someone had written a thesis on it!

Dr Smith-Khan: Oh, amazing!

Brynn: I know, I was like, this is awesome.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so when I started looking at that as well, that brings a whole different level of discourse to it as well, because on a lot of those sites, you’ll have kind of like a little character profile card. And so, then you see the ideologies that maybe aren’t expressed kind of explicitly coming up in the way viewers or fans make sense of the character. So, for example, you have like the Captain Barnacles, who’s again, yeah, that British captain of the team.

His profile has, they all have a nationality line. So, he is listed as British, right, because of the way he speaks. Yet at various points in the show, they talk about how his family come from Alaska or maybe from Canada, because he’s a polar bear, right?

So, there’s this kind of tension between drawing on those ideologies of how people sound to make sense of their political status or where they live to these other types of strange realities that happen when you make animals into humans. Those ideologies are quite interesting as well, and there is quite a lot of discussion or question around accents, and also the changing of some characters’ accents across the two productions.

Brynn: Yeah, we should talk about that. So, when you first were talking to me about, did you know that there was this accent change? I was like, wait, what?

And so, then I had to go look, and it’s true. So, as you said, originally, Octonauts was a British production. And so, I’m assuming that production happened in the UK, that probably casting happened in the UK.

But then Netflix, like you said, I guess acquired at least part of it and has now produced this sort of spin-off series called Above and Beyond. So, tell us what happened then? What happened when Netflix did that?

Dr Smith-Khan: I think in my original post on Bluesky, I was a bit misled because even in my own mind, the problem is when you’re listening in as a mom, and there’s a million episodes available, and they’re all flying around here and there, they all blur together. Originally, I thought there was, for example, the Pani, the Indian English-speaking macaque, who’s a macaque from the Indian subcontinent, nicely enough. I originally thought he was part of that original program, and yeah, so I’m still, I think I still need to go sit down and look at it systematically, but reading the fan discussions, I started to get an idea, problematic as that could be, about, you know, accent change.

So, I’m fairly sure at some point the, yeah, the Southern American accent, for example, wasn’t there and came, or maybe it was the Spanish-speaking accent I think got lost.

Brynn: I think it was the Spanish-speaker accent got lost or changed to, to like a shifted accent, more of like a Central American accent, as opposed to like Spain, Spanish maybe. But you’re right, like regardless, there was a shift. So basically the, the cast, I would assume, changed, probably because for a Netflix production, the production and the casting is happening maybe in America.

Okay, fine. But that means that we then change some of these accents.

Dr Smith-Khan: You’re absolutely right. And so, when, when I went and looked at the cast, I was trying to find out who is actually doing these voices. And so, then again, this comes, this interacts with what we’re going to talk about in a minute about Rosina Lippi Green’s chapter, these issues of, you know, having a small voice cast do lots of characters potentially.

And so therefore putting on and, you know, trying to do convincing varieties of various accents to different degrees of success. I went and looked at the cast in the original and it was like, I think three white guys and a white woman, right? And so that’s your kind of diverse cast for like any number of characters across any number of different accents and that appeared to be British.

Like, yeah, you’re kind of saying, you know, that makes sense based on the location of the production, right? And then you have this shift obviously to the US, we presume, and the cast changes, but they do some interesting things. So, when I was like, okay, so there’s an Indian-English accent in this show now.

Who is doing this voice? Is it a white guy?

Brynn: Oh, please.

Dr Smith-Khan: I went and looked him up. I was like, fingers crossed.

Brynn: Fingers crossed.

Dr Smith-Khan: I went and looked him up, and he’s a British voice actor of Indian origin. So, I read an interview with him, and his grandparents migrated to the UK from India, and they’re from North Indian background. And so, you know, they’re Hindi and Punjabi speaking, and he speaks a little bit of Punjabi and a little even less Hindi.

So, he’s still contriving an accent, right? Because he is a British born, you know, man, and his, you know, his kind of at home accent would sound quite different to the accent he’s using in the program. But I did find that quite interesting, I guess, that that is there.

Brynn: I’m just thrilled that it’s not a white man putting on an accent like the Apu in the Simpsons’ conversation that, you know, has been going on for a few years. That’s at least good to know that maybe we’re getting a little bit better.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, and I think that’s also reflected in the way he speaks as well, because like, I don’t know, in my, again, I’m not an accent expert, but from the way I perceive the way he speaks in the show, it’s not a very kind of stereotypical, exaggerated, you know, Indian English. It’s quite a subtle accent, I would describe it as. So that in itself, even putting aside who the person is doing is quite pleasing, I think.

Brynn: Well, that’s a real win, because this Bluesky discussion about the Octonauts accents prompted one of your followers, Dr. Jonathan Kasstan, my apologies if I’m mispronouncing your last name, of the University of Westminster to reply that this was an example of, quote, the timelessness of Lippi-Green’s paper on Disney, end quote. So, let’s talk about this paper and what he’s referring to. So, Rosina Lippi-Green is, of course, an American writer and very famous linguist.

She is famous for her hugely influential 1997 book, English with an Accent, Language Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. So, this paper that Jonathan was referring to is chapter five in that original book, or chapter seven in the second edition, which is what I have. And the chapter is called “Teaching Children How to Discriminate What We Learn from the Big Bad Wolf”.

So, let’s talk about this paper and what Lippi-Green says about how children learn to interpret social variation in the language of others, even from cartoon characters. In the beginning of this chapter, Lippi-Green talks about how Disney released its animated short called The Three Little Pigs. We’ve probably all seen it.

I definitely remember seeing it as a kid. In this release, at one point, the Big Bad Wolf is visually portrayed with anti-Semitic tropes. So, portrayed with a hook nose, money in the palm of its hand, scraggly beard, curled hair locks, a yarmulke.

And this visual representation stayed in the short until, and I couldn’t believe this, 14 years later in 1948. And it was only then when the Hays office asked Disney to re-release the short with a different portrayal of the wolf because of the horrors of the Holocaust that were by then well known. But what happened was even after Disney re-animated the wolf to not have this visual anti-Semitic depiction, the, quote, Yiddish accent, but like as we were just talking about, it was not a natural, normal Yiddish accent.

It was a very exaggerated Yiddish accent. That was still kept. And the wolf’s accent wasn’t changed until much later.

And then we get so many more examples of this with Disney. I mean, we’re both a very similar age. We probably both saw Aladdin when it came out, or at least shortly thereafter.

And Rosina Lippi-Green says in the chapter, quote, 60 years later, a similar controversy would arise over the portrayal of characters in Disney’s Aladdin, a movie set in a mythical Arabic kingdom. An offending line of dialogue in an opening song, which was as I quote, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home, end quote, was partially changed in response to complaints from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. But as the representative of that committee pointed out, the accents of the characters remained as originally filmed.

So, the representative particularly objected to the fact that the quote, good guys, Aladdin, Princess Jasmine, her father, they have that standard American accent, but all of the other characters that are supposed to be Arab or Arabic speaking, have these nebulous, heavy accents that are not really clear what they’re supposed to be. And quote, this pounds home the message that people with a foreign accent are bad, end quote. So, what else do we think about what Lippi-Green says in this paper?

Tell me your thoughts.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, it’s such a great chapter and it really made me kind of reflect and think more about the Octonauts and about some other things as well. So, she talks about how one of the things that happens when you have an animation is that you potentially can lose some kind of visual identity prompts or, you know, information. And this is especially true when you have an animal who’s supposed to be a human.

So, there’s a chance that you lose some of your visual hints that might be there if it’s a person, you know, are they white, are they black, are they, you know, tall, short, old, young, wearing certain types of clothes, et cetera. Those things aren’t there. So, there’s work that can be done or choices that can be made about accent to try and quickly, she says, you know, like efficiently pass on that message to the viewer so that they understand the type of character this is.

But the problem, as you’ve pointed out very aptly, is that that relies on really problematic stereotypes and helps to perpetuate those stereotypes and entrench those stereotypes in people’s minds, including in children’s minds from a young age. So, you have this idea that, you know, the good guys, the heroes speak like quote unquote us or speak like, you know, the people from whatever the dominant society is. In the context of Disney movies, there’s this kind of mainstream US accent she talks about. And then the others, the problematic others, sound foreign. And so, what the foreignness sounds like can differ.

So, she talks about, you know, particular points in history. You’ll have kind of whoever the baddies are vis-a-vis the US at that particular point in time. So, you got German accents, you got Russian accents, you got Arabic accents, et cetera.

But then there’s all these other types of characters, like you talked about Southern American accents. So even within the US., kind of certain accents are marked in certain ways and are used to index certain kind of social attributes very problematically.

I mean, other ones, she talks about the work that having some characters having an accent, especially with animals, helps to indicate place as well. So, you know, if it’s supposed to be a cartoon set in France, like maybe a couple of the characters have a French accent, but still the main characters, maybe it’s absolutely fine for them to have a kind of mainstream US accent. And that’s, you know, acceptable.

You know, these are the facile kind of stereotypes that come up, right?

Brynn: Because she even points out in the chapter that in, for example, Beauty and the Beast, which is supposed to be set in France, because it is originally a French fairy tale, that the only three characters that have your, quote, stereotypical French accents are, you know, the feather duster who is sort of-

Dr Smith-Khan: The sexually kind of suggestive character.

Brynn: The characters who are promiscuous or suggestive. You’ve got the, the amorous candelabra, Lumiere. And then there’s one other with a French accent. Now I don’t remember who it was.

Dr Smith-Khan: Possibly an artist or a chef, judging by the general trend of things.

Brynn: That would make sense. That makes sense. But you’ve got Belle and her dad have basically my accent, you know?

And it’s like, well, how does this make sense? But you’re right. It’s like that over-exaggerated French accent is being used to index something that the creators want you as the audience member to think about in your head.

It’s like a quick, efficient way of saying, oh, well, this character is romantic, and that’s why they’re given a French accent. And Lippi-Green, I really like this quote. She says in the chapter, quote, animated films entertain, but they are also a vehicle by which children learn to associate specific characteristics and lifestyles with specific social groups and to accept a narrow and exclusionary worldview, end quote.

And, you know, all we have to do is, especially if we’re thinking about Disney, is like you were saying, think about the villains in the Disney movies. So, we’ve got the accents of the bad guys, quote unquote, is usually some form of other, right, English. So often it’ll be received pronunciation British English.

So, Jafar from Aladdin, Scar from The Lion King, Shere Khan from The Jungle Book, Cruella from 101 Dalmatians. So, people might, I mean, obviously not our audience, but other people might think, okay, so what? You know, these are just kids’ movies.

What people sound like in these movies is no big deal. But this carries on into adulthood. And we see this in adult media as well.

And one way that we see people’s accents and languages being used to other is in the arena of nationalism and borders. And you and two co-authors, distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr Hanna Torsh, recently, very recently, published a paper entitled “Trust at the Border, Identifying Risk and Assessing Credibility on Reality Television”. So, tell us about this paper and the parallels that we can see between this research and how we’ve been talking about accents in children’s media.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yes. So, this is the second paper in hopefully an ongoing series of papers that came from a project that Ingrid Piller was running at Macquarie University and it involved us collecting, we ended up with 108 encounters from this very long running famous TV show, the Australian version of which is called Border Security on Australia’s Frontline. I think I haven’t written down the subtitle, which I have now forgotten, but it’s basically it’s filmed at airports around Australia.

It’s been going for I think 23 years or something long, nearly long time. There’s lots of international versions of it as well that I assume are just as successful, and it has involved a very close cooperation between obviously the Australian government agencies that control that space and Channel 7 in Australia that’s been the producer of that particular program. And what it purports to do is basically show us the reality.

So, it follows officials or officers working in these airports and follows them on their everyday work, protecting our borders. So, it’s quite an interesting space because on the one hand, we’ll have criticisms or commentary about TV and other forms of popular media where we say, there’s a real over-representation of the dominant group, like white L1 English speakers on TV, and it doesn’t represent our societies. So, at first glance we go, oh, this show kind of bucks that trend because we see all different types of people with all different language, all different appearances on this program.

But their representation on the program is very specific. And again, it’s teaching us certain things. And there we can actually see some parallels with Lippy Green’s chapter again as well, because there’s an over-representation of, for example, L1 Australian accented, I guess, white presenting people in one group, the officers and the figures.

I’ve got the figures here, so I can tell you about that. So, we had 253 officers across all those encounters. So, we didn’t selectively pick out particular encounters.

We took a whole period of time, whatever episodes were available, and we got each and every encounter that occurred at an airport from those episodes. And so, across those 108 encounters, we had 253 officers to 128 passengers or travelers. And so, we looked at what was happening there, who was represented in those two groups.

And we found that the officers, as I said, were mostly white-presenting. So, we, as a team of three researchers, kind of all coded and compared our codes. And we said, you know, 81%, we counted 81% of the officers looked to be white.

That’s how they present. And 90%, 90% sound, not just like native speakers of English, but Australian-accented native speakers of English. So, this is a huge number.

And the whiteness and the accent almost perfectly map onto each other in that particular group as well. So, I think we counted only two white-looking officers that didn’t have a kind of core or Australian accent, English accent. And we also talk about other things like, so the way they’re named in the show, you know, Officer Susan, Officer Joe.

So, there’s this uniformity and this, on the one hand, officialness, but also casual familiarity with these lovely people who we can personally relate to, and also the fact that they wear, you know, standard uniforms, et cetera. So, there’s this idea that they’re a homogenous group, and there’s all kinds of other mechanisms to kind of, for us to put our trust in them, and that they’re kind of the heroes of the show. They’re tasked with this really important job.

But then we look at the passengers. So, in the passengers, we see almost the flip of that profile. So, we see 73% don’t present as white, and 66% sound like they are not native English speakers at all.

And only 8% actually sound like Australian native English speakers. So almost completely the opposite of the officer group. And again, they’re named and described in different ways.

So, they’re described in kind of vague ways, like a woman from La traveling here, a band member, a Bulgarian farmer, blah, blah, blah. So often specifying nationality or ethnicity and kind of these more generic naming practices. And of course, they don’t look as neat and as uniform as the officers after their long journeys from wherever they’ve been.

So very, very different presentations of the two groups. So first of all, I think those particular percentages themselves are super problematic in terms of representing the reality. Because we know, for example, that in Australia, more than 50% of the population now are born overseas, you know, first generation Australian.

So that’s, you know, you can make some guesses about what that means for accent and also potentially appearance. But also, that very commonly people traveling into Australia will be, A, Australians or B, actually English people. So, in terms of the diversity that’s represented, we’ve got some interesting production choices going on there.

And we also have a very clear over-representation of wrongdoing. So, we counted how many encounters actually involved the officers finding out that the person had done something wrong. So, they’re uncovering some suspicion and they’re actually finding out wrongdoing.

And we found that it was like more than two-thirds of the encounters. They had done something wrong. So obviously this has to be an over-representation of what the reality is.

So, they’re very clear production choices, even though, you know, the quote unquote real encounters is something that’s really happened. The way that the production puts together and chooses what to present within the show forms some very specific messages for the audience.

Brynn: It does. And do you know what I’ve noticed a lot in watching the show is the number of times that they will show the officer sitting across the table from the person who’s wanting to come into Australia. And then they’ve got that speakerphone in the middle.

And there’s an interpreter on the speakerphone because the person who wants to come into Australia, obviously, maybe their English is not at a level where they can understand sort of the complicated nature of what the immigration officer is talking about in English. And I feel like that is always portrayed in a way that makes it seem like, A, a burden on the immigration officer. This is this burden that I have to go call up the service for interpreters and I have to get this interpreter here.

But also, the nature of having the interpreter on a speakerphone is really difficult. It would be really difficult for either party to kind of listen and really understand. And so you as the viewer get this feeling of like, come on, hurry it up. This is annoying, that they have to be engaging in, you know, having to go through an interpreter.

And it sort of like implicitly drives home that point of, isn’t this a burden that this non-English speaking migrant wants to come into Australia or even just, you know, someone who’s coming for a visit will often get pulled aside. And in that way, again, we see that representation of the quote, other accent as being the problem, as being the bad guy. Right?

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. Yeah, so there’s a few things I can kind of say related to those observations. So firstly, that scene that you describe of someone sitting over a table, we can call that like the second stage in an investigation, because it’s, you know, when there’s a serious concern and the person’s actually taken away to a private room for some kind of further investigation or informal interview.

So, there are a number of steps that happened before that. I guess we talk about basically kind of three potential stages. So, the initial kind of one is a visual or potentially just the interaction that takes place at passport control and then someone might be kind of flagged as being suspicious for whatever reason.

Or they’re seen kind of waiting for their baggage and they’re looked at in the distance from one of these officers. And the officer says, this person looked nervous or something. So, they have some kind of explanation for their initial reason to kind of investigate more, to ask questions, to open a bag, to proceed with some kind of investigation.

But then the first stage of their questioning or their interaction and investigation, if you will, takes place out in the open in the hall where the quarantine is or the customs area is or whatever, out in the open. And what we see in that context is almost in every single encounter, it’s only in English. And there are no multilingual accommodations that are kind of clear.

And so, but you have the work that’s done by the narrator of the show and also the work that the platform that offices are given to talk about those investigations, obviously privilege them in terms of being able to frame those interactions in certain ways. So, you’ll have either of those voices saying something like, we have this great quote in the article, that this passenger is difficult to interview because their English isn’t very good or something like that. So, it’s just that straight out, you know, multilingualism is a problem and the problem is the person, the other, the other, right?

It’s not a problem that our whole Porter processes are multilingual, sorry, monolingual English ones, where we don’t routinely have multilingual staff. We don’t, you know, there are a couple of exceptions. There’s one particular airport and one reoccurring officer who is of Chinese background and serves in a very interesting way as a kind of sometimes a communicator, but also sometimes as a kind of cultural mediator for the audience.

So, she talks about, oh, this lady has brought this in because, you know, in Chinese culture, blah, blah, blah. And so, she’s doing this work for this imagined, you know, white Anglo kind of audience, right? That these people need this explained to them.

But generally speaking, this is a very expected to be a very monolingual English space and interaction, yet somehow it’s still framed as if officers are doing work and being accommodating. So, you’ve pointed out an example at the next stage, which is when they actually do call in an interpreter. But even before that, they’ll point to things like, so when you’re coming into Australia, you get this little card where you have to fill out, yes, you’re rolling your eyes Brynn, because we’ve both experienced this card many times.

Brynn: I’m hard rolling my eyes, yes, because that is the worst. They give it to you on the flight, and you have just been on this flight for like 400 hours. You’re exhausted, you’ve been scrunched up in Coach.

They give you these cards and they’re like, fill it out right now before you land. Then you’re like, can I have a pen? The flight attendants are like, no.

And so, you have to make friends real fast with whoever is sitting next to you and be like, does anyone have a pen? Does anyone have a pen? It is, I feel like I could write a whole thesis about that card process. It is so frustrating.

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. And so, there’s lots of examples in those interactions about how people have answered that. So, on that card, it asks you, where you’re coming from, what your profession is, how long you’re staying, diseases.

Really importantly in our context, are you carrying any food? Are you carrying any medicine? So basically, almost every other country I’ve traveled to in the world, you get into the airport, there technically is a quarantine or customs area, but there’s usually no staff there.

No one actually really cares that much. And that was a real shock for me the first time I went somewhere else, because always coming back into Australia, that’s actually super important and it’s taken extremely seriously. And if you’ve watched any episode of this particular show, that is one of the key messages that the show is trying to teach viewers.

So, you really cannot bring any kind of fresh food into the country. But even me as a lawyer, as a first language English speaker, very highly educated in terms of the number of degrees I’ve done, I still find myself second guessing those questions. Have I answered it wrong?

Am I not declaring something that I should declare? You know, I’ve got chocolate. Is that an issue?

Like to this day, I’m still panicking about this because I’m quite paranoid for some reason about going through those processes.

Brynn: I can’t imagine why.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, right? But the problem is then you’ll have this card and you have to fill it out and you have to sign it. So, it really is this official legal document.

And you present that as you’re going through, trying to exit the airport. I think it’s the last step after going through immigration and everything that that entails. And the quarantine officers then will look at it and they’ll look at you.

And then they’ll see whether they want to scan your bags. They want to open your bags. They want to question you more or not.

And there are serious repercussions. For example, if they find something in your bag and you haven’t declared it, big trouble and you’re more likely to get a fine for it, et cetera. If you declare it and they want to keep it because it’s not allowed, then usually that’s fine because you’ve declared it.

But there’s a lot of moral messaging that goes on in the show around this. There’s a lot of kind of framing of like, oh, we think she’s learned a lesson. So, we’re going to let her off today with a warning or this person has received a fine because this is a serious threat and they don’t seem to have understood the seriousness of it, et cetera.

But language comes up in this as well, because for example, for certain flights, from what we could see, they have translated versions of the card, I think into Chinese, for example. So, this card is difficult to get your head around. It’s not something that seems to be common in any other.

Brynn: It’s really not. It’s really not. And for anyone who hasn’t had the fun of having to deal with this particular Australian flight card, it is like a front and a back, and it’s on kind of card stock.

And it’s got like the boxes where you have to put the individual letters of whatever you’re spelling out into these boxes. It’s very much like taking a standardised test. But I, again, I mean, you’re saying it, and I’m the same way.

I have too many degrees, honestly, at this point, you know, and I’m beyond educated. And I have been going back and forth in and out of Australia for a decade, and I still have trouble filling out this card. And English is my first language.

I can’t express enough how frustrating and convoluted this card is. But like you’re saying, how 100% of the utmost importance it is, too. And it’s like those two things together, the fact that it is so convoluted, but so important, means that if you are trying to fill out that card, especially if English is not your most dominant or most comfortable language, that’s going to be so much pressure.

Dr Smith-Khan: And so, we have examples in the encounters. And again, it’s like, you know, you’ve got the written, and then you’ve also got the spoken interaction, right? And they’re two very different things, especially if you’re not an L1 speaker, especially if English isn’t your first language.

So, for example, in that situation, if I’m unsure about the chocolate, I turn up to the quarantine, I have my smiley white face and my Aussie accent, and I say, oh, hey, I’ve ticked no, but I’ve got some chocolate with me kind of thing. And they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s fine. See you later, nine times out of ten, right?

But if you’re someone who isn’t super confident in spoken English, for example, you filled out the card because you have to fill out the card, right? It’s a requirement. And then you turn up there and you try and have the same or a similar type of conversation with the officer.

It might go quite differently. First of all, in the show, across the different types of suspicions, there are kind of clear patterns in who’s kind of overrepresented. So going to the quarantine example again, people who look like they’re from China, for example, or who have just traveled from China, are much more likely to be presented in the show as, you know, raising a suspicion for quarantine, carrying food that they shouldn’t carry into the country.

So again, like what happens in terms of that initial creation of suspicion, right? But then what happens when they try and, you know, negotiate meaning with that officer. So for example, we have an example in the paper where it’s someone who’s brought in some type of food, and they say to the officer, like, look, I thought it, you know, in their L2 spoken English, that’s obviously not super fluent or confident.

I think it means meat, you know, that question. I thought that was what was meant by food, right? Because, you know, it’s obviously, it could mean a lot of things.

And they’re like, but this card was in your language. This was translated into your language. So therefore you’re 100% responsible for determining the only possible one meaning of that particular question in this list of really difficult questions.

So, they hold up that language accommodation of the translation as, you know, first of all, we’re doing something to accommodate you. This is, you know, a plus on our side. But also, you can’t use misunderstanding as an excuse here.

You know, this is not, this is not okay. All while this passenger is trying to kind of put forward their confusion or the ambiguity around the question and them answering this question that’s quite unusual and, you know, uncommon in any other context in their second language in this high-powered kind of interaction. So that’s one example.

Brynn: And because, you know, translation has never gone awry from one thing to another. Like, what?

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. So, we’ve got ideologies around translation and what it means to, you know, do that translation. Whereas like, you know, if I come in, you know, dealing with this card in my first language, I’m not so sure about it.

Maybe we can negotiate that. And there’s room for me to have some doubts about what something might mean. In this particular context, we start with suspicion based on origin.

And then on top of that, oh, you’re using this as an excuse. And we’ve actually accommodated you here because we’ve actually provided this written in your first language. The other way it seems to come up a bit is when the card hasn’t been translated, but the person fills it out, right?

Because they have to, there’s tick boxes and there’s names and et cetera, et cetera. So they’ve ticked a certain box saying they don’t have something to declare. They go through quarantine and then they’re saying, oh, you know, I’m having some trouble explaining to you or, you know, English isn’t my first language.

This is a difficult conversation for me. And they basically use, they pick that up and they say, hey, this lady was able to read and fill out this card in English, in written English. They’re now claiming, quote unquote, to have a problem with their English.

But actually, I’ve evaluated their English as quite fluent because they filled out this card. Therefore, not only is what they’re saying a problem, but I’m going to add an extra layer of suspicion or mistrust against them because they appear to be using the I don’t speak English well card as an excuse to be evasive or to get around this problem that I’ve identified. So, we have all these really problematic, fascinating but problematic language ideologies that come up in the interactions.

Brynn: This makes me want to hit my head against a wall because my background is in teaching English as a foreign language and also as an additional language. So, in the context of people who are living in an English dominant country and learning the language, and the number of people for whom it is so normal to have higher proficiency in written English than it is in spoken English, that’s such a normal thing. And we see that in multiple languages.

When we learn a language for the first time, like in school or something like that, we often start with the written form of the language. And especially for English, where the pronunciation is cuckoo bananas, it makes so much more sense that someone would feel more comfortable writing in English than they would in pronouncing the English. So, the fact that these officers on the show can make like you said, that’s that almost moral judgment about the person based on their macroskill proficiency is just galling. It really is.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah. And there’s also other assumptions, I guess, in terms of even when it comes to the reading, right? Because if you think about that card, most of the questions that actually involve producing an answer are things that people, first of all, they’ll be able to kind of use whatever technology they have to find out what the questions are, if they need help.

But also, they’re very, very straightforward answers, like, what is your name? What is your address? What is your age? These kinds of things. So fairly basic, like, I’m thinking about myself in other languages. Even if I have a really basic proficiency reading another language, I’m probably going to be able to answer those questions quite straightforwardly.

The other questions actually involve a tick box of yes or no. And so, you see examples of this also in the spoken interaction on the border, that you can have a question and someone says yes or they say no. Have they understood?

We have very little idea if they’ve understood because it’s just saying yes or no, right? They could have completely misunderstood the question or the meaning of the question. But that’s not always the way their understanding is characterized.

And that’s what’s really important in the program, obviously, because we have these officials who are acting as gatekeepers, literally gatekeepers and decision makers in terms of that individual interaction. But they’re also saying things, they’re commenting on the people, both specifically those individuals, but those comments then accumulate and make general statements or general kind of, you know, evaluations of certain types of people and certain types of behaviour. And because they have the privileged platform to do that on the show and through the show, we’re being delivered messages about different sorts of groups in society, they’re likely to do and what we need to worry about in terms of those groups in our societies.

Brynn: Well, and then to bring this full circle back to the question about accents and representation in children’s media, this is why this is important, because, as kids, if we grow up seeing diverse representation of different Englishes, of different parts of the world, of different accents, different languages, then when we grow up and we become these officers at an airport, then we might not be so quick to judge based on accent, right? And here I do think that there’s this really good quote that’s attributed to Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, who was or is a prominent scholar in children’s literature. And she wrote an essay in 1990 that I think sort of puts this into perspective.

And she talks about how books can serve three crucial functions for readers. And I kind of take this into children’s media as well. So, books or children’s media can serve as mirrors where children can see their own experiences reflected, which is always important.

But they can serve also as windows where children can look into the experiences of others. And then they can serve as what she calls sliding glass doors where readers can enter and connect with different worlds and different perspectives. And so I think what we see in Octonauts bringing it back is, especially with that accent representation, we’re starting to see the beginnings of those windows and those sliding glass doors and mirrors.

You know, I’m thinking about like any young kid who’s from, say, Alabama in the States, who sees that scientist who’s from Southern America, who sounds like them. And they’re saying, hey, this goes against everything I’ve ever seen in media that says that my accent should be one of stupidity or an uneducated accent. But no, look, I can see someone who sounds like me, who’s a scientist, you know?

So, what do we think is going right in children’s media? Where do we think this is headed? Because I do think that children’s media has come a long way since the 1990s and Disney.

What do you think are some examples of getting it right these days?

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, I really like that idea of mirrors and windows. And also, yeah, also in Octonauts, I think also that idea that you can have this opportunity to travel and see the world, interact with all types of different types of people. So, the team themselves are so diverse and they’re working together and doing really amazing things to make positive change in the world.

So, I think those messages are really beautiful messages to share with children that all different types of people can be involved in that process, people that they can identify with personally and all other different types of people that might look or sound different to them. So, I think that’s a hugely positive message. I did want to acknowledge a caveat, which is that one of the recent episodes that I watched, again, so those stereotypes are still there.

Even when you have shows that are really doing it right, they really linger, they hang on. I think sometimes it’s just this kind of almost laziness in terms of making that and indexing something quickly. So, you have this great core, regular cast of characters in that show, but then they go around the world to different places and interact with one-off animals or whatever, who they’re helping or learning about, for example.

And sometimes that’s quite good. And again, you have this idea of accent indexing place. So, they’re in a place where the humans speak French, for example, and so they might have French accented animals.

But an episode I saw the other day involved, I think they were searching for these eels, this rare type of eel. So yeah, all these characters that they’re interacting with, they have kind of vaguely Australian or New Zealand accents because that’s the ocean that they’re close, they’re in that area of the world. And then they’re searching here and there, and they come across a shark, a problematic shark who is menacing, potentially, to eat them.

They’re searching for something, and he gets a bit defensive and kind of threatens them. And what is his accent? It’s like, again, I’m not an expert, but he sounds like a gangster from the backstreets of New York somewhere.

He has a gangster accent for one of better words, like a mob accent, we could say. But then they kind of are trying to escape from him, and then this pack of orcas comes through. So, they’re black and white, they’re traveling in a group, and they sound like NYPD officers.

They’re actually scaring him or dealing with him and helping the orcas.

Brynn: That part I remembered. I didn’t remember the shark, but I do remember the orcas because I remember I was doing that thing where I was cooking dinner. I wasn’t watching it, but I could hear it in the background, and I was like, what?

I kind of looked over like, wait, what is that accent?

Dr Smith-Khan: Because the particular characters from the regular crew, again, I’m pretty sure it’s called Dashi, the character, so she’s got an Australian accent and was her niece. So, they’re both sounding pretty Aussie, and there’s maybe a third member of the team with a different accent. And then they’re interacting with all these kinds of vaguely Australian/New Zealand type accents as well.

We’re on the streets of New York and there’s this menacing mobster who’s a shark as well. So, it’s like, why did they need to do that? And all I can think of is lazy stereotypes.

He’s a shark already, so the menace is there. We don’t need more menace.

What he’s talking about is there, so why did we need to add this extra layer to just teach children that this type of way of speaking is something we should be scared of, and this particular character is obviously a shifty one that we can’t trust. And then also these hero policemen who have geographically a very similar accent but is kind of noticeably different. Yeah, really, really interesting how these old tropes kind of hang on.

So, I think one of the take-homes for me is that there’s always room for improvement and there’s always room to kind of discuss it. I really feel like the online space of being able to talk about these types of programs has potential to actually influence change, maybe on a scale that it didn’t in the past. So, another example for me, I guess, as a parent of small children right now is obviously Bluey.

For people who don’t have small kids, a little bit of context, it’s another cartoon. It’s an Australian cartoon. It’s set in Brisbane, which is reasonably close to where I come from, which is a city in Australia.

And it’s again a family of dogs in this case. And they’re just a really lovely family. Both parents are really heavily involved in interacting with the kids.

It’s very targeted at the current generation of children and their parents. And it’s just been a huge hit. So, it’s been taken up by Disney, I’m pretty sure again, it’s syndicated by Disney.

“And so, it’s been rolled out basically everywhere in the world. If you travel to other countries where English is not the main language, you can watch it in other languages, which is a lot of fun too. But one thing I really love about it personally, from my perspective, is first of all, it’s an Australian production.

So, you hear a range of Aussie accents, which itself is nice. And then on top of that, you see other things. So, there was a really, from my perspective as a French speaker, it was really cool to see a whole episode where it’s basically Bluey going camping with her family and meeting Jean-Luc, who is Canadian.

The only indication he’s Canadian in the show is that he’s sitting at a table with a maple syrup bottle, this is my attention to detail, with the red maple on it. I’m like, oh, maybe they’re supposed to be Canadian. But basically, the main point is that Jean-Luc speaks French, and only French and Bluey speaks English and only English.

And somehow, they manage over the course of the holiday that they’re both camping at this campsite to strike up this friendship and spend whole days playing together, even though, you know, he’s only speaking French and she’s only speaking English. And to watch that as a bilingual French-English speaker was obviously a lot of fun, but it was also just nice to see a little bit of representation of multilingual cartoon in an Australian English speaking context, and also to have that positive portrayal of kids playing together or people interacting with each other in a positive relationship building way, even where they couldn’t understand everything that was said to each other, where they have that goodwill to do that.

Brynn: And it’s great as a parent, because I as a parent when, I mean, I’ve seen that episode five billion times and I love it, but I was able to talk to my kids about it because when my youngest watched it, I mean, she would have been little, probably like five or six or so, and she kept saying like, what is he saying? I can’t understand what he’s saying. What is that?

And so, then I was able as a parent to say like, yes, that’s the language of French. And look, I can tell you what he’s saying, but look how Bluey doesn’t necessarily need to understand what he’s saying in order for them to play, you know? And that’s just a really lovely thing to teach kids.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, it’s really nice. I’ve read a little bit of online commentary after that, though, and they were saying, you know, why, out of all the languages you could choose, you know, why did they choose French? Why have they chosen other dominant European language?

It’s not really a kind of, you know, a representation of another language that’s commonly spoken in Australia, you know? So, there’s questions around that. And there’s another episode I know where Bluey’s dad is playing.

So, a lot of the episodes involve them, you know, having these really amazing games together. But in that particular episode, he’s a chef at a restaurant.

Brynn: So, I literally watched this episode yesterday. Yes, yes. And the dad and because I don’t speak French, but I, you know, I can kind of guess because I speak Spanish.

And the dad is basically saying, like, you know, where is the discotheque in France in response to an English question that Bluey has? So, it doesn’t make sense in context. So, you’re right. You’re kind of like, well, OK, we could do better here.

Dr Smith-Khan: I think for me, the interesting thing there was just that that reversion to that, you know, stereotypical, like a French character, they’re going to be a chef or an artist. So again, in another show, I listened to the other day with my kids in the background that it was like, yeah, there was a bee and they’d lost their beautiful, no, sorry, a spider and they lost their beautiful web and they were an artist. You know, their web was their art.

And of course, what accent did the spider have? Of course, of course they were French. Yeah, exactly.

Brynn: Layer upon layer, Laura, I can tell you. And this is why, as linguists, we can never just watch children’s media, you know? Like we’re always thinking about it.

But I think that’s a good thing because we’ve seen this progression forward. We’ve seen it get better from that, you know, 1933 Big Bad Wolf depiction. And it has gotten better.

You know, I’m thinking about things like Coco or Moana or Encanto. Those certainly have some really good examples of accent representation, dialect representation, you know, but there’s always room for improvement. And my hope is that we continue to improve in our children’s media.

Dr Smith-Khan: The other really cool example from Bluey was that they made an episode with a deaf character who, you know, used Auslan, which is Australian Sign Language, which is really cool. But also, the fact that they actually heavily consulted with Auslan experts to be able to do that, especially in terms of, you know, animating. You know, they have characters that have not the right number of fingers for doing fingerspelling, for example.

So, they had to be really strategic about which words they needed to fingerspell. And, you know, things around aspect and orientation and all these types of details that obviously, if you do wrong, isn’t great. So, the process of consulting for that particular episode.

But again, yeah, there’s still always room to improve. So, it’s like, yes, that character appears in that one standalone episode, and then we never see them again. So, what’s going on there sort of thing.

And so, there’s always room to kind of question and keep on working on it. But yes, some really cool developments that are really noticeable, especially when you have your constant lens of sociolinguists on and off – rating all the time.

Brynn: As parents, exactly. And that’s, I think that this whole discussion, I think that what’s so important for us as sociolinguists, as parents, is to say, look, we’re really hoping that for this next generation, we’re doing better at showing these windows, these mirrors, these sliding glass doors, at showing representations so that when our kids, our grown-ups in the real world and maybe they are making decisions about accents and who can come into a country and who looks suspicious and things like that, maybe they can think back to the media that they had as kids and not be so scared by the idea of a, quote, different accent. So, before we wrap up, I would love to know, what’s next for you?

What are you working on? Are you going to be doing, you had mentioned, that maybe this paper that you’ve written is part of a series. There is another one that comes before it, which was fantastic as well.

Are you still working on this? Are you working on other things? What do we have to look forward to with you?

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so I’d like to, yeah, hopefully that a third paper in that series is possible, but it’s not kind of currently at the forefront of my mind. At the moment, for myself personally, I’m really interested in thinking about and exploring how people will develop their understanding or beliefs or knowledge about law and legal rights and legal obligations, and also then in the context of migrating and potentially being in a second working or living in a second language or a language that they’re not hugely proficient in.

What does that look like, that process, and kind of looking at not just, I guess on the one hand, there’s kind of official information or resources that different government or NGOs can provide to people to help build their knowledge or explain the law, but is that actually how we find out about the law or how we assume the law works?

Because actually, even for myself as a lawyer, I make a lot of assumptions about what the law is without actually going and looking up every single piece of legislation related to that issue, right? I’m interested in figuring out kind of socially and kind of informally also how we make sense of that. And I can kind of segue back into an episode of Bluey once again.

So, it’s in, I forget the name of it, but there was a kind of long, almost movie length episode, like a longer episode of Bluey that they made, I think, last year or earlier this year. And in one particular scene, the cousins, Bluey’s cousins are also there and they have to go driving around in a car. So, there’s extra kids in the car.

And so Bluey gets the special treat, yes, of sitting in the front seat, which is very exciting for small children. But her mom had to kind of check, maybe googled something to make sure it was OK, you know, to children under a certain age to sit in the front. And then they get pulled over by the police at one point.

And the policeman’s like, hey, there’s a kid in your front seat. And he actually doesn’t know the law. And she has to like, google it or check it on her phone to show him it’s fine if there’s no other seat available in the back seat, right?

But this is actually a law myself, as again, as a parent, it’s very relatable that I have had to look up because I was like, oh, am I going to get in trouble if my kid sits here? Or what are the circumstances in which you can have a child under a certain age sitting in the front seat? And I was reflecting on that.

I was thinking, I didn’t actually go and find out whatever, I don’t even know what the name of the relevant law itself would be, but I just googled and found it was like, the Traffic Authorities website or something had a little summary about car seats and positioning in the car, etc. That I looked up and that would have been exactly what Bluey’s mum did in the context of Queensland law. And so, yeah, so I’m really excited to try and find a way to do that research and look not just what kind of is officially and formally available, but actually how people in real life go and find out more about the law and how language and migration experiences might play into how those beliefs are made and how they find out about information.

Brynn: I can’t wait for that paper and I hereby demand that you cite Bluey in that paper. I need to see that citation.

Dr Smith-Khan: I’ll try and make it work.

Brynn: Laura, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I loved recording this with you and I can’t wait for you to come back sometime.

Dr Smith-Khan: Definitely. Thanks so much, Brynn. Always nice to talk.

Brynn: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move podcast, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time.

Video available at Faculti: https://faculti.net/like-the-fish-not-in-water/

Editor’s note: Despite its diversity, Australia continues to be imagined as a White nation. In this post, which is also available as a 20-minute video, Donna Butorac explains how this idealized image of the White nation shapes the settlement trajectories of women migrants from Asia and Europe in different ways.

Teaching in Australia’s Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP)

I did research on language learning and identity among people who were studying in the Australian Adult Migrant English Program (we call it the AMEP for short), where I taught for 9 years. This is a federally funded and administered settlement English program that provides subsidised language classes for new migrants who have Beginner to Intermediate levels of English proficiency on arrival. The program is delivered by organisations that successfully bid for fixed-term contracts through a competitive tendering process, and historically it has most often been delivered by state-based post-secondary colleges of further education. However, during the time I was working at the AMEP we saw a successful move into the space by profit-seeking private sector organisations.

At the AMEP I often taught classes that were mostly made up of women and I developed a curiosity about what it was like to be them – to be sitting in that class, learning English in this context. I wondered how it made them feel about themselves and how it impacted their relationships and their sense of the future, of who they were and who they felt they could be in the world. This led me to design a study that was about language learning, identity and gendered subjectivity in the context of migration. I wanted to find out how developing a voice in English might impact a woman’s sense of self, her aspirations and also her key family relationships. I also wanted to understand how the way she was being constructed in Australian society might impact her aspirational sense of self and to compare this with her socialisation in her primary languages and country of origin.

An AMEP classroom (Image credit: Immigration Department)

English teaching in the AMEP for the labour market

The AMEP has been around in Australia since the late 1940s but it has evolved quite a bit over that time. Successive governments, whether they are conservative or centre-left, have always tied inward migration to economic development goals but in the time that I was working at the AMEP in the early 2000s, we saw this connection being more overtly expressed within the framing of the contract terms and in the design of the language courses we delivered. It was also expressed by politicians in their media statements and in their presentations to AMEP teachers and researchers. For example, one government spokesperson told us that new arrivals who had come from difficult circumstances were “very marketable in the workplace” because of their “willingness to do jobs that many Australians reject” (Andrew Robb, 2006) and another federal minister described the role of immigration as a “job-matching agency for the nation”, because “as Australians take up the skilled work opportunities available, shortages of labour in the service and regionally based industries will become more and more acute” (Chris Evans, 2008).

So, the government was increasingly seeing the AMEP as leading new migrants from “the airport to the workplace” (as another politician put it in 2007) and this put pressure on the settlement English programs to adopt this outcome as a goal for English language development. Remember that they have to bid every few years for a new contract, so they closely examine government messaging for clues as to how best to frame their programs in the next contract round so they can beat out the competition.

Meet each of the 130 migrants in our book over the next months in a serialized Twitter thread

2nd: Lena from Russia
Lena realized her white privilege from observing casual racism and selective incivility towards Asian people at her new tennis club in Australia.
2/n pic.twitter.com/BqiinZX2Nl

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 8, 2023

An example of how this translated into program change while I was conducting my study of new migrant women was that some of the curriculum and assessment content was reframed to focus on gaining skills needed for applying for a job, doing a job interview or communicating in the workplace, and there was a strong emphasis placed on helping migrants decide on their future study and employment goals. Each student had to meet with a vocational guidance officer when they arrived and set up a learning plan. This plan was updated by teachers and vocational guidance officers over the course of their time at the AMEP and the students all met with the vocational guidance officer again when they were exiting the program.

Learning a language, when it’s framed like this, becomes a commodity to attain in order to achieve economic settlement goals rather than a way of seeking knowledge and personal growth and a sense of belonging through developing a voice in a new language and culture.

And the way that the migrant language learner is positioned in this kind of context is as someone who is deficient in English, rather than as someone who is an emergent bilingual or multilingual.

But there is no place in all of this where the deficiencies of the society or of the labour market are ever problematised or discussed.

So, for example, racism in the Australian labour market, which has been well attested in the research literature, is never discussed and new migrants are not given strategies for how to counter this. What is also not discussed is that Australia still has a persistent monolingual mindset, in spite of there being hundreds of languages spoken in the community. In this kind of context, people may be judged only for their proficiency in English, rather than for their combined language capital. But in the settlement English program, language learners are led to believe that if they develop English proficiency, they will be able to achieve their social and economic settlement goals. When they struggle to realise these goals even after they have achieved a good level of functional English, and this was the case for some of the women in my project, they may naturally assume that the failing is theirs, and that their English is not good enough, when it might actually be a failing of a prejudiced English monolingual labour market or an unwillingness of employers to adequately acknowledge the skills and qualifications that the person brings with them.

Doing a sociolinguistic ethnography in the AMEP

To realise my research goals, I carried out an ethnographic study of 9 women who had recently migrated from a range of countries and who were studying in an Intermediate level class in the AMEP. I wanted to research with them over an extended period during the early phase of their post-migration settlement because I wanted to find out if the development of their voice in English actually made changes in the way they saw themselves and their aspirations. There had been other interview studies done on language learning and identity following migration, but these had more often been a retrospective reflection on the process. I wanted to try to capture this as it was being experienced.

I used qualitative methods of inquiry and data collection and this included two semi-structured personal interviews with each woman at the beginning and end of a 22-month data collection period, and I held a series of focus groups in the first year of the project; I also gave them an essay task at the beginning and end of the data collection period, in which I asked them to write about their aspirations for the future. In the final interview, I gave each woman the same broad prompts I had given them in the first interview because I was curious to know if their ideas had changed over the intervening period, perhaps as a result of changes in their sense of self from learning and using English. I also asked them to keep an email journal of their experience of learning and using English and how they felt about their lives. Because they were emergent users of English, I had thought that they might find it easier to write in English than to speak it; however, I was proven very wrong because for the most part they didn’t really engage with the journal task but seemed happy to talk to me and to each other! So, I ended up covering this topic in a third personal interview that I set up in the middle of the data collection period.

What emerged from the first stage analysis of the raw data was that the impact of language learning on identity could be usefully organised into three domains where the self is both constructed and performed – the self in key family relationships, the self in wider social interactions, and the self in work. I analysed each of these domains to identify sub-themes related to language, race and gender that emerged from across the data set. I was exploring identity and language learning, but this was also a way in to understanding what it’s like to be someone who has undertaken transnational migration involving language change and who is trying to find inclusion and belonging in a new society.

Migrant trajectories to social inclusion

Michiko from Japan cultivated a unique English language learning and practice strategy: she set up stalls at flea markets. In addition to interaction opportunities, she also gained insights into everyday life in Australia, including casual racism …
13/n pic.twitter.com/HOlZy9HJHI

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 22, 2023

Social inclusion is a term that has been in use since the 1990s to convey ideas about the goal of creating pathways for economically marginalised people to achieve greater participation in society through employment. It is also used to refer to the inclusion of people from diverse cultures and languages within the mainstream in multiethnic societies. We might think of people who have migrated to a new society as being on trajectories of belonging and inclusion, where they might be on the social edges when they arrive, especially when the dominant language is not one they use well, but eventually the idea is that they will gain acceptance and inclusion and a sense of belonging within the mainstream of that society, in part through developing better competence in a dominant language.

What studies like mine have found is that this trajectory towards social inclusion is not always straightforward or complete for many migrants, often due to things a person may have little control over, like the way their race or their gender is viewed, or the way their language proficiency is judged, as a result of ideologies and prejudices within the receiving society.

Experiences of everyday racism shape pathways to inclusion

In my study I didn’t actually set out to explore race and prejudice but to explore the way a woman’s sense of self was being impacted by language learning in this cultural context; however, as I listened to the experiences of the women who participated in the study, both in interview and in conversation with each other, I realised that race was something I needed to discuss because it was a determiner of differences in the experiences and imaginings of inclusion and belonging that the women were reporting. For example, the women from European countries all expressed the realisation that they were just like everyone else because it seemed to them that most people in Australia came from families that had at some point in their history migrated from somewhere else.

These women felt despondent in the early settlement period about their English proficiency and how hard it was to communicate with others, but they could easily imagine becoming a part of the mainstream as their English improved. This kind of trajectory is normalised in the history of European migration to Australia and in the lives of the people they interacted with. So, the European women communicated a sense of optimism about their trajectories of inclusion and belonging in Australia. In contrast, the Asian women in the study did not express this kind of optimism about their settlement trajectories and they talked about the everyday racism that they and people they knew experienced, as well as what it was like trying to gain meaningful employment.

In the focus group discussions, some of the Asian women expressed the feeling that they might never achieve settlement success and might end up leaving Australia to have a better career. This really surprised the European women, who would say things like “But your English is really good; I don’t understand why you feel so hopeless about your future”.

Actually, one of the Asian women did end up going offshore, soon after the project ended, because she was offered a job with a global company that valued both of her languages, instead of just her English. In Australia, where only her English proficiency was being judged, she had constantly been rebuffed in the labour market and told that she needed to brush up on her English, which was functionally very good and certainly adequate to the jobs she was applying for. But offshore, she was being judged for her entire language capital, which included Japanese and English, and she was seen as a ‘fantastic bilingual’ as she described it.

When a migrant’s full language capital is being considered, as was the case with another Asian woman in the study, the employment outcome was quite different. This woman had migrated from China and she had a similar English proficiency to the woman I have just described, but when she began exploring professional employment opportunities she was immediately successful because the first company that interviewed her for a legal role was trying to build their client list in China and so they saw her as a bilingual, bi-cultural asset to the team instead of someone who was deficient in English. Actually, in the entire hiring process they never once commented on or asked about her English proficiency.

Tina from China already had two law degrees and experience as a corporate lawyer when she arrived in Australia, but she could only get work as a paralegal because her degrees were not recognized.
118/130 pic.twitter.com/HGsqEBmS76

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 20, 2023

Another finding from the study related to how new migrants might feel socially excluded by the language practices of locals. Some of the women in my study reported that in social situations with locals, for example at Church or with fellow students in post-secondary courses, locals in the group would speak in rapid colloquial English, using lots of idiomatic expressions, or they would speak to everyone else but never make eye contact with the women or speak to them. This practice made the women feel invisible, and it’s a fairly overt micro-aggression that excludes newcomers. Actually, this kind of experience was only reported by the Asian women in my study. But it seemed some of the European women were listening because towards the end of the project one of them told me in her final interview that she remembered what the Asian women had said about being made to feel invisible by locals and although she had never experienced this herself, she witnessed it with some Asian members of her tennis club that she played social games with. She had reflected on all this and she expressed a sense of her white privilege when she said to me “it’s nice to be beautiful white woman”.

Aside from these findings on race, there were really interesting findings on negotiating language use in key family relationships, and on how some women felt that they could express a different, more confident self in English than they could in their primary language.

Language learning and finding work

There are a number of conclusions related to language and race that come out of my study. For example, the way language proficiency is framed in the labour market impacts how successful new migrants are in achieving settlement goals through meaningful employment. As I’ve suggested, the Australian labour market is predominantly English monolingual, and this usually means that a migrant’s full language capital is not often considered when they are looking for work. However, in the few instances when their full language capital is being considered, this has the potential to greatly improve the settlement trajectory of new migrants and also to allow the economy to benefit from better utilising the qualifications and skills that migrants bring. It’s ironic really, because skilled migration is desired for Australia’s continued economic development and it makes up the largest proportion of the country’s annual migration intake, yet many people who come under that scheme struggle to find meaningful work in the fields they are qualified for, in part because of the way that ideologies about language and attitudes to race impact hiring practices.

One of the implications of these findings is that they can be used to develop the way that English language learning is framed within the settlement English program. In my experience, language learning was framed as the development of a kind of ideology-free, bounded lexico-grammatical system, and learners were encouraged to believe that developing proficiency in English was the key to social and economic inclusion.

Studies like mine have shown that this is not necessarily the case and their findings suggest that instead of framing learners as deficient speakers of English, we should be seeing them as emergent bi- or multilinguals, and we should be problematising interactions they have in the wider society and using an evidence-based approach to better inform language learners in the settlement English program about what to expect when they are looking for employment, and then we should be advising them on strategies for managing their entry into these important spaces of belonging and inclusion. Without this kind of approach, many new migrants end up blaming themselves for their lack of settlement success and the society as a whole denies itself the valuable contributions that could be made by its newest members.

Life in a New Language

Maria, a Chinese Brazilian, came to Australia via Japan. A savvy business woman and devout Christian, she told us she needed "many faces" to successfully navigate interactions, and foreground or background her multiple identities according to context
26/n pic.twitter.com/AtLZyvjtTW

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 13, 2023

Many of the findings of my study are included in a forthcoming co-authored book from Oxford University Press called Life in a New Language. It’s a collaboration that sees data from six existing ethnographic studies of language learning and migration in Australia combined into a single large data set with over 100 participants. Sociolinguistic ethnography usually involves small data sets and rich data, but it is often considered to lack generalizability and rarely makes an impact outside specialist circles because it is widely dismissed as “anecdotal.” This book project marries depth with scale by combining and re-analysing data sets from these existing small-scale longitudinal ethnographic studies with the objective of making convincing conclusions about language learning and social inclusion, based on the premise that a larger qualitative data set increases the scope for generalisability. It represents something of an innovation in linguistic ethnography, as an after-the-fact multisite ethnographic study.

Life in a New Language will be published in June – watch this space for updates!

References

Butorac, D. (2011). Imagined Identity, Remembered Self: Settlement Language Learning and the Negotiation of Gendered Subjectivity (PhD). Macquarie University, Sydney. Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DButorac_PhD.pdf
Butorac, D. (2014). ‘Like the fish not in water’: How language and race mediate the social and economic inclusion of women migrants to Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 37(3), 234-248.
Piller, I., Bodis, A., Butorac, D., Cho, J., Cramer, R., Farrell, E., . . . Quick, B. (2023). Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into ‘Migration, Pathway to Nation Building’. Canberra: Parliament of Australia. Retrieved from https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8c0d9316-2281-4594-9c7b-079652683f54&subId=735264
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Tetteh, V. W. (2023). Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/scholarly-sisterhood-collaboration-is-our-academic-superpower/
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Williams Tetteh, V. (in press, 2024). Life in a new language. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(Image credit: Pexels)

Editor’s note: How do children from minoritized backgrounds experience their exclusion from equitable media representation? New research by Adolé Akue-Dovi sheds light on this question from the perspective of Black German children. This post introduces key findings of the study and examines racism in children’s media more broadly. It is co-authored by Adolé Akue-Dovi and one of the supervisors of her Master’s thesis, Liesa Rühlmann.

***

Adolé Akue-Dovi & Liesa Rühlmann

***

As a child, I (Adolé) loved listening to detective stories to fall asleep to. One of my favorite was a series called TKKG about four teenage detectives. However, as I got older, I realized that there were hardly any non-white characters on the show. In the rare instances where they appeared, they were usually suspects or otherwise portrayed negatively.

From childhood passion to research topic

The radio drama TKKG has been running since 1981 and continues to be highly popular, currently comprising 225 episodes.

The first 100 episodes (produced between 1981 and 1996) continue to be available in the “TKKG Retro-Archive” on streaming services and are consumed by more than 80,000 listeners a month on Spotify alone. This demonstrates the on-going popularity even of these older episodes. Especially in these first episodes, violent, sexist, and racist language was used.

How do Black children and youth perceive racism on TKKG?

In debates on racism in children’s media, radio drama is largely overlooked, despite its popularity. Therefore, Adolé’s research asked: How do Black children and youths perceive the reproduction of racist stereotypes on TKKG?

The four TKKG detectives

Four Black German children and adolescents between the ages of eight and thirteen participated and listened to three short scenes from three TKKG episodes published between 1981 and 1984. The group discussion showed that those who are affected by racism notice it at an early age and may already experience injuries.

Key findings

First, the participants were able to identify racist stereotypes; some explicitly (“Well, he’s probably a racist”), others implicitly (“He was mean”). Even though some of the interviewees do not seem to have a language for racism yet, they still notice unequal treatment.

Second, the interviewees, especially the two older boys, related the content of the scenes to their own reality and made connections to their experiences of racialization. Third, the participants gave explanations for racist practices. They provided rationalizations for why some characters act racist and why some characters are racially discriminated against.

Media representations need to change to change Black children’s experiences

The research shows that we need more critical examination of racist representations and language in children’s media.

Publishers, educational institutions, and carers all have a responsibility to keep all children safe from harm. Therefore, an essential step is to educate oneself and learn about racism. German society is not as white, heterosexual, able-bodied, and monolingual as normalized in the media. All children must feel represented in a positive way and have access to role models or inspirational figures who look like them.

Augsburg Research Award for Intercultural Studies

The message of Adolé’s research has been well-received and was honored with the 2021 Augsburg Research Award for Intercultural Studies. The award recognizes outstanding achievements by early career researchers whose research deals with diversity in Germany.

About the Authors

Adolé Akue-Dovi is a doctoral researcher at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Liesa Rühlmann recently completed her joint PhD at Macquarie and Hamburg universities. Together they teach seminars on Critical Race Theory in education, have contributed to a conference, and are working on joint publications.

Related content

• Bodis, Agnes. (2017). International students and language: opportunity or threat? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/international-students-and-language-opportunity-or-threat/
• Greenbank, Emily. (2017). Refugees in the media: Villains and victims. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/refugees-in-the-media-villains-and-victims/
• Piller, Ingrid. (2021). Securing the borders of English and Whiteness. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/securing-the-borders-of-english-and-whiteness/
• Roche, Gerald. (2020). Indigenous language denialism in Australia. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/indigenous-language-denialism-in-australia/
• Smith-Khan, Laura. (2019). Debating refugee credibility. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/debating-refugee-credibility/
• Tetteh, Vera Williams. (2010). Voices of African-Australian Youth. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/voices-of-african-australian-youth/

Reference

Akue-Dovi, Adolé. (2022). Kindermedien und Rassismuskritik. Wie Schwarze Kinder die Reproduktion von Rassismus in TKKG-Hörspielen wahrnehmen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38395-4.

The logo on the side of the bus shelter

Latin at the bus stop

Recently, I was out for a walk when it started to rain. Seeking shelter in a nearby bus stop, I had time to look around, and I noticed something I had never noticed before although I must have seen it often: a Ku-Ring-Gai Council logo.

The logo is a circle of about 20 centimeters in diameter. It depicts two cartoon characters, one sitting, one standing, encircled by the words “KU-RING-GAI COUNCIL” and “SERVIENDO GUBERNO.”

The cartoon characters are presumably intended to depict two Aboriginal men of an earlier period. The drawing is crude, and the image seems retrograde, out of place, and just plain weird. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about some dumb schoolboy graffiti but about a high-quality official logo emblazoned into the plexiglass wall of a bus shelter.

I have been struggling to make sense of it since I first noticed it.

The main council logo (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The context

Ku-Ring-Gai Council is a local government area on Sydney’s North Shore. It has close to 120,000 inhabitants and happens to be Australia’s most socioeconomically privileged area.

The logo I noticed at the bus stop is not the main logo used by Ku-ring-gai Council but an older version. The current main logo depicts a stylized landscape.

However, the logo on the bus stop is not just a historical logo, either: it appears on bus stops of a certain age (less than 10 years old); it appears on signs for bushwalking trails; and it appears on the web.

So, we are dealing with a legacy logo that might be in the process of being phased out but is still imprinted on the landscape.

Indigenous Ku-ring-gai

Ever since I first came to Australia, I’ve liked the romanticism of the name “Ku-ring-gai”. It’s not only the name of a large council area, but also of a suburb where I lived for many years, and a national park I love to explore.

The O’Rourke Family Crest (Image credit: orourkerundle.com)

Like many non-Indigenous Australians, I was, for a long time, under the impression that “Ku-ring-gai” – or a version thereof – was the name of the original inhabitants of northern Sydney. The name made the area more “authentic” for me and seemed to connect the area where I live to its precolonial past.

Inevitably, it turned out to be a naïve fantasy.

A 2015 report by the Aboriginal Heritage Office showed that the term “Ku-ring-gai” was the 19^th century invention of a Scottish schoolteacher. The word may – or may not – have been used by some pre-colonial Indigenous people for – well, we don’t know what.

The report concludes:

It is unfortunate that the term Guringai has become widely known in northern Sydney and it is understandable that people wish to use it as it is convenient to have a single word to cover the language, tribe/nation, identity and culture of a region. However, it is based on a nineteenth century fiction and the AHO [Aboriginal Heritage Office] would argue that the use of the term Guringai or any of its various spellings such as Kuringgai is not warranted given its origin and previous use. It is not authentic to the area, it was coined by a non-Aboriginal person and it gives a misleading impression of the connectivity of some original clan boundaries. It is part of the story of this place that there is no certainty over tribal names, language groups or dreaming stories. To project the opposite is to continue this fiction. (p. 40)

On stolen land

Student uniforms get Latin mottos out into the streets (Image credit: Herald Sun)

Today, Indigenous people in the Ku-ring-gai area are most notable by their absence. The 2016 census recorded 0.2% Aboriginal inhabitants for Ku-ring-gai Council, well below the national average of 2.8%, and even well below the Greater Sydney average of 1.5%.

Why this is so can be summed up quickly: the Sydney area is where the British colonization of Australia began and the Sydney people bore the brunt of the initial invasion, including frontier violence, new diseases brought along by Europeans, and dispossession.

We live on stolen land here.

Still, this is not something polite people like to say and the Council website mutters incoherently about the absence of Indigenous people:

The arrival of Lt James Cook in 1770 devastated in what amounts to the blink of an eye an incomparable and ancient people.
Those not lost completely were altered as survivors gathered into new groups. Much of what we do know about Sydney’s clans must be gleaned from archaeological remains.
While there are some families who have identified links to original Sydney clans-people, very few traditional stories remain about the sites and landscapes of the Ku-ring-gai area.

Latin motto on a military honor roll (Image credit: Monuments Australia)

I also take these ramblings to be an interpretation of sorts of the stick figures in the logo: the mythical Indigenous cartoon characters suggest authenticity and belonging for non-Indigenous Australians.

In the same way that the current logo symbolizes nature and the land through stylized trees, the legacy logo does so through the depiction of stylized Aboriginal people.

“By serving, I rule!”

While the imagery projects an idyllic fantasy about belonging, the Latin motto accompanying the two Aboriginal cartoon characters in the logo is about power and possession.

The motto SERVIENDO GUBERNO is not accompanied by a translation. As the study of Latin has become exceedingly rare, I’m guessing that few people will be able to translate for themselves, and likely just ignore the motto.

For those who can be bothered, a now-defunct council website provides this explanation:

The Ku-ring-gai Council motto, ‘serviendo guberno’, means ‘I govern by serving’ and has been used by Council since 1928. It is included in the logo to reaffirm Council’s fundamental commitment to serving the community. (quoted from Friends of Ku-ring-gai Environment)

The logo of private boys’ school Scots College (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Mottos are notoriously ambiguous, and this is one possible interpretation. But it is not the full story. My translation is “By serving, I rule.”

What kind of service?

Let’s start with serviendo. The etymological connection with “service” is obvious but what kind of service? Just friendly customer service? Probably not.

The motto serviendo guberno has long been used in the coat-of-arms of a knightly Irish clan, the O’Rourkes, and is clearly associated with military service there. From armed service, the idea of service inherent in the motto later seems to have become broadened a bit to all forms of service that men render to the nation:

Since the demise of the Gaelic order O’Rourkes have continued to follow the proud tradition of serving their nation as soldiers, priests, teachers, civil servants and firefighters. (Another O’Rourke website)

The martial interpretation of serviendo is also backed up by its use in war memorials such as the Sandakan Memorial dedicated to members of the Australian and British armed forces who served in World War II in Borneo.

Who rules?

The Latin verb gubernare has obvious associations with “govern.” It can also mean “to direct, rule, guide.”

“Serviendo guberno” on a war memorial (Image credit: NSW War Memorial Register)

It is here used in the simple present first person singular: “I rule.”

Why would council identify as “I”? Surely, “we” or some agentless form would make much more sense.

One way to interpret the first-person singular is to put the motto into the mouth of the individual colonist, a white male subject. Alternatively, the “I” might be read as that of the sovereign; not the democratic sovereign of the people, of course, but the individual sovereign of the monarch – the Crown as the legitimizing force of colonization.

Why Latin?

Non-English monolingual signage is exceedingly rare in Australia. Where such signage appears, the language in question is often Latin.

In addition to Ku-ring-gai Council, many institutions have Latin mottos and slogans. All the following examples appear in Latin only, without translation. The translations in brackets are mine.

The Monuments Australia database shows many war memorials that include slogans such as “Quo fas et gloria ducunt” (“Where right and glory lead”) or “Pro patria” (“For the fatherland”).

“Masculinity is being enacted” says this school logo (my translation) (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Schools often have Latin mottos. And they really get Latin out into the street as school children sport the mottos on their backpacks, uniforms, and caps.

Examples include “Virile agitur” (“Masculinity is being enacted”), “Utinam patribus nostris digni simus” (“May we were worthy of our fathers”), or “vi et animo” (“with force and courage”).

Australian universities also have a thing for Latin phrases, from ANU’s “Naturam primum cognoscere rerum” (“To know the nature of things first”) to Sydney’s notoriously confusing “Sidere mens eadem mutato” (“The same spirit under different stars”).

Latin is supposedly a dead language. But there is probably more Latin signage in the Australian linguistic landscape than there is signage in any Indigenous language.

Like the cartoon characters in the center of the logo, the function of Latin in these mottos is symbolic. The Latin phrases emblazoned on Australia’s institutional linguistic landscape do not per se mean much: too few people know Latin for this to be the case; and some of the explanations, translations and interpretations provided on institutional websites are – linguistically speaking – pure fantasy.

The use of Latin is another way to anchor Australia’s whiteness in history. Latin symbolically links Australian institutions to European deep history, to a history that happened long before the colonization of Australia: classical antiquity, the Roman Empire, and medieval Christianity.

Marking white possession and belonging

Together, the Aboriginal cartoon characters and the incomprehensible Latin motto do two things in a place where both the presence of actual Indigenous people and any meaningful use of the Latin language is negligible. First, the mythical – in contrast to physical, material, or real – presence of Indigenous people offers non-Indigenous Australians a fantasy of belonging. Second, Latin provides the same illusion but in starker terms: not as a fuzzy feeling but as the legitimacy of possession. Together, they mask unbelonging and erase dispossession.

My thinking about the logo and Latin in the Australian linguistic landscape has greatly benefitted from Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. The author argues that the national belonging of non-Indigenous Australians is predicated on their willful forgetting of the fundamentals of their residence in this land: colonial conquest, racism, and the dispossession of Indigenous Australians.

Indigenous Australians can never forget or overlook the evidence of their dispossession. For non-Indigenous Australians it is easy to forget and not to notice – we have built a world that provides a fantasy of belonging while hiding the original theft.

Australia as a White nation has deep roots: the aim of this 1914 board game was literally “to get the Coloured Men out and the White men in” (Image credit: National Archives of Australia)

The typical Aussie is widely imagined as a white English speaker

Despite decades of multiculturalism, the typical Australian is widely imagined as a white monolingual speaker of English. Australians who do not look white regularly report that they are made to feel as if they do not belong and those with non-native accents sometimes avoid speaking in public so as to remain inconspicuous.

With almost half of Australians born overseas or having at least one parent born overseas and about a quarter speaking a language other than English at home, the perception of Australia as a nation of white English speakers is completely out of step with demographic realities. Why do so many people continue to hold on to this perception?

The historical roots of Australia as a white English nation

There are historical reasons that can explain how Australia came to be an Anglo nation. One of these is the pernicious fiction of terra nullius that wrote Indigenous people out of the imagined nation.

Another reason is the erasure of the British-Irish conflict that was imported into the penal colony but subsequently glossed over into an imagined homogenous “Anglo-Celtic” settler population. Black convicts, who accounted for 1-2 percent of transportees, were cancelled even more completely.

A third foundation lies in a restrictive immigration policy that was designed to exclude non-British settlers in the first half of the 20^th century and which was literally known as the “White Australia” policy.

These historical myths have deep roots, but do they still influence perception today?

The media teach us ways of seeing

Contemporary Australia is patently diverse. So why do we continue to see Australians who are not white and who do not speak English as their first and only language as perpetual outsiders?

Screenshot from “Border Security” showing officers in uniform

Many scholars have suggested that the media are partly to blame because they overrepresent white English speakers and underrepresent everyone else.

This may be true of news, current affairs, and fictional genres but there are some extremely popular genres that do show high levels of diversity. Reality TV is one such genre and none more so than the ever-popular Border Security.

Imagining Australia on Border Security

Since it was first aired in 2004, Border Security has provided Australians with “a fascinating insight into the daily workings of the thousands of officers who dedicate their lives to protecting Australia’s border,” as the show’s website explains.

Over the years, the show has attracted many millions of viewers and you are likely familiar with the format: each episode has immigration, customs, or quarantine officers face off with passengers who are suspected of constituting a security threat.

The basic story arc is always suspicion, investigation of the suspicion, and resolution.

My colleagues Hanna Torsh, Laura Smith-Khan, and I have been collecting these episodes because they provide us with a data source for our research in intercultural communication. They also help us answer the question why we continue to imagine the prototypical Australian as a white monolingual speaker of English.

Good guys look white and speak English

The heroes of Border Security are the officers. They are the official representatives of the Australian state, and their job is to keep Australia safe. Each episode shows them in action. As they are on the lookout for illegal activities and investigate the travelers they suspect of wrongdoing, the audience comes to identify with them. We watch with bated breath as they inspect luggage, interview passengers, and share their reasoning with the camera.

The proportions of people who look white and sound like native speakers of English among officers and passengers on “Border Security”

These heroes are not a representative cross-section of Australian society, though. In research just published in the journal Ethnicities, we found that the overwhelming majority of officers on the show look white (83%) and sound like native speakers of Australian English (90%).

Their uniforms further serve to mold them into a homogeneous group. And there is another aspect that enhances their uniformity: the striking diversity of their antagonists.

Suspects look diverse and sound diverse

In the logic of the show, the officers’ hero identity is predicated on their dodgy antagonists: all those travelers who are trying to sneak into Australia on a tourist visa but are really here to work illegally, who are hiding prohibited foods, or who are smuggling contraband.

These suspects provide a stark contrast to the officers. Not only are they under suspicion – sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly – to constitute a threat to Australia but their visual and aural identities are almost the inverse of the officers. 73% of suspects do not look white and 66% sound like non-native speakers of English.

In other words, white English speakers are overrepresented among the show’s heroes and underrepresented among the show’s antagonists.

Shifty characters

The patterns we found in our research go some way to explaining why we continue to imagine Australians as white English speakers. But these patterns are not only about quantitative representation.

Purely on numbers, Border Security shows an incredible diversity of people. More importantly, the show creates a pattern of moral judgement.

As the audience comes to understand Australian identity and threats to national security through the show’s stories, they come to see white English speakers as moral. Australia’s racial and linguistic others, by contrast, seem, at best, forever suspect and, at worst, guilty as charged.

Reference

Piller, I., Torsh, H., & Smith-Khan, L. (2021). Securing the borders of English and Whiteness. Ethnicities. doi:10.1177/14687968211052610. [available open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/securing-the-borders-of-english-and-whiteness/feed/ 94 23655 https://languageonthemove.com/indigenous-language-denialism-in-australia/ https://languageonthemove.com/indigenous-language-denialism-in-australia/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2020 23:15:02 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=23109 Gerald Roche (Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe University) and Jakelin Troy (Director, Indigenous Research, The University of Sydney)

***

Source: Australian Museum

Editor’s note: This week (Nov 08-15) we are celebrating NAIDOC week. “NAIDOC” stands for “National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee.” The theme of this year’s NAIDOC week is “Always was, always will be” in recognition of the fact that First Nations people have occupied and cared for the Australian continent for over 65,000 years. Indigenous Languages have been a inextricable part of this history. Yet the value of Indigenous Languages continues to be denied, as Gerald Roche and Jakelin Troy show here.

***

A New Era for Indigenous Languages?

Despite decades of research and public outreach demonstrating the importance of Indigenous languages, negative attitudes about the maintenance and revitalization of these languages persist among the general public in Australia. Here, we argue that we need to think about the tenacity of these negative attitudes as a form of denial, like climate denial or genocide denial. We also argue that now is a crucial time to confront that denial.

2019 was nominated by the UN as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and the years 2022-2032 have been nominated as the decade of Indigenous languages. These high-profile international mega-events seemingly promise a coming era of unprecedented attention to and support for Indigenous languages.

This promise extends to Australia. We joined in the International Year of Indigenous Languages, with numerous activities organized by the Department of Communication and the Arts. The Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies recognized 2019 as an “opportunity for all Australians to engage in a national conversation about Indigenous languages.”

Source: Australian Museum

Australia is the only country in the world that has a national schools curriculum that supports the teaching of all its Indigenous languages. ‘The Australian Curriculum Languages – Framework for Teaching Aboriginal Languages and Torres Strait Islander Languages’ provides for every school in Australia to teach one or more Australian languages—the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. In spite of this historic development in our education system, most Australians seem to be oblivious or, worse, hostile to Australian languages. Plans are now afoot to take part in the coming decade of Indigenous languages, but how will Australia support Australian languages?

Ongoing trends and recent events in Australia suggest that significant challenges lie ahead. The Third National Indigenous Languages Report, published in August this year, found that most of Australia’s Indigenous languages are highly ‘endangered,’ while only a small and declining number (currently 12) are considered ‘strong.’ Meanwhile, recent efforts to bolster the role of English, seen in new regulations enforcing English requirements for partner visas, have strengthened problematic associations between the English language and Australian citizenship. And most disturbingly, we continue to see the destruction of Indigenous heritage by both commercial and state parties.

All of this suggests that Australia must still confront massive social and political barriers if Indigenous languages are going to flourish. As the analysis below demonstrates, denial of the importance of Indigenous languages and the reality of their revitalization persists, and are expressed in public forums with surprising impunity.

Indigenous Languages and the Australian Public  

Source: Australian Museum

We undertook a preliminary analysis of comments made on five articles in the Conversation, published between August 2014 and July 2020; the data we analyze is available here. These articles focused on different aspects of the maintenance and revitalization of Indigenous languages in Australia. We collated a total of 49 comments from them.

We began by classifying the comments into negative, positive or both/neither regarding their view of Indigenous languages. We found that  21 (42.8%) of the comments were unambiguously negative in their appraisal, while 14 (28.5%) were positive; the remaining were either neutral or ambiguous.

We then examined the negative comments for recurrent themes that were used to justify and rationalize these views. We found five major themes: language revitalization is impractical; it harms Indigenous people and communities; revitalized languages are inauthentic; government support for Indigenous languages is inappropriate, and; English should be promoted instead of Indigenous languages. Each theme is examined in turn below.

Commentators suggested that it was “impractical,” “absurd,” or not “feasible” to maintain and revitalize Indigenous languages, or that these languages are “doomed,” and therefore any interventions were useless. Some commentators took a modified position, suggesting that the proposed methods, rather than revitalization itself, were impractical. One commentator attempted to demonstrate the impracticality of supporting Indigenous languages with a hypothetical scenario: a factory in an “Aborigine area” where all signage would have to be in English as well as “the various Aboriginal languages/dialects,” leading to an unsafe work environment.

Another theme was that maintaining and revitalizing Indigenous languages is harmful. Some suggested that supporting Indigenous languages has adverse economic impacts, primarily because English is the language of economic advancement: “English, in Australia must be the language of the classroom as it will be the key to the factory, office and other workplaces.” Others stressed that supporting Indigenous languages would isolate Indigenous people: from the rest of society, in remote locations, and in the past. Support for Indigenous language was associated with Indigenous people living “in the desert, isolated from mainstream society,” “condemned” to becoming a “living museum,” unable to “appreciate their links to people in other regions.” A variant of this argument was that providing support for language revitalization takes funds away from communities where Indigenous languages are strong.

Source: Australian Museum

Commentators also employed a ‘bootstraps’ argument, insisting that government interventions in Indigenous languages were inappropriate because communities should take sole responsibility for their languages. One commentator stated that “The real responsibility lies within each community to promote language usage,” while another emphasized the need for “a grass roots commitment within the community.” This point was often stressed by making comparisons with successful efforts of migrant communities to maintain their languages in Australia. These comments seemingly imply that if Indigenous communities need government support, it is because they are either unwilling or unable to maintain their languages themselves.

A fourth theme in the negative comments focused on issues of authenticity. It was argued that the languages, speakers, or the use of languages were, essentially, fake. Regarding revitalized languages, it was argued that, “We don’t know what the languages were really like,” and that we can “never know” their pronunciation. Not only were the languages described as fake, but it was also asserted that, “Aboriginal people are really English speakers.” Finally, the use of such languages is also deemed inappropriate in the modern world, in places that “are now completely covered in concrete, industry, and modern life.”

A final theme was that English should be prioritized. The importance of English was sometimes suggested to derive from its official status: “English is the official language in Australia.” More often, it was suggested that English ‘simply is’ the dominant language, and that prioritizing it is mere realism: “Living in Australia means speaking English.” One commentator also suggested that English is a “very rich language,” that contains “the words needed for modern, global life.” This suggests that Indigenous languages are, by contrast, ‘poor’ and have vocabularies unsuited to ‘modern, global life.’

Source: Australian Museum

Understanding Denial

All the positions outlined above constitute denial insofar as they are counterfactual. In contrast to what these commentators suggest, language revitalization is thriving in Australia. Many languages of the south east and south west of Australia have come back into active use after more than one hundred years of dormancy. One such language is Kaurna of the Adelaide Plains, not spoken for more than one hundred years when its community began to reconstruct the language from sparse memories and some historic documents, assisted by linguist Rob Amery. It is now a thriving language with its community using the language on a daily basis for casual and formal communication. It began with the community wanting to teach the language in their schools and this continues today.

Rather than harming Indigenous people, language revitalization is linked to increased wellbeing. In talking about the renewal of Kaurna and other languages, Kaurna educator Stephen Goldsmith says, “When we’re talking about the Aboriginal culture, we’re talking about the cultural heritage of every Australian…When people go into communities they start to understand the depth and the knowledge of Aboriginal people and how we operate as part of the environment.”

Although language revitalization requires commitment from the community, it also requires government support, in both policy and funding. And languages that have undergone renewal of their use as community languages are as real and authentic as any language. Finally, English is not Australia’s official language nor is it an Australian language; it is a language of Australia, imported like the many others that are now languages of Australia.

Source: Australian Museum

These are all established facts, accessible to anyone who cares to look. There are debates about details, but not basic truths. Therefore, if the comments we analyze are expressions of ignorance, it is willful ignorance. More than merely counterfactual, however, these arguments are also denialist in the sense that they aim to obstruct a course of action that is suggested by those recognized facts. In this case, they aim to justify and rationalize an unjust status quo that Indigenous people have persistently spoken up against.

The denialist arguments described above follow a common pattern shared with denialist efforts to suppress language revitalization elsewhere. However, they also exist in a uniquely Australian context, and an important aspect of this context is anti-Indigenous racism. A recent survey found that three quarters of Australians hold ‘implicit bias’ against Indigenous people, and the Online Hate Prevention Institute has tracked rising anti-Indigenous racism in Australian online space, particularly following this year’s Black Lives Matter protests.

We need to better understand the relationships between anti-Indigenous racism and the denialist positions described here.

If the UN decade of Indigenous language is going to truly help Indigenous languages in Australia flourish, it will be essential to understand both the extent of denialist sentiments, and the complex ways they interact with the wider political context. Broad public support will be essential to promoting Indigenous languages: to create a safe space where Indigenous people can undertake the difficult and emotional work of reclaiming their languages; to protect communities and individuals from backlash; to ensure that funding is secured and its use supported; and as an essential part of any political change within our democratic political system.

To win this support, we have to stop denying the existence of denial, try and better understand how and why opposition to Indigenous language revitalization exists, and explore how it might be countered.

Dr Vera Williams Tetteh tells her story to AfrOzcentric

Often in my work as a sociolinguistic ethnographer, I am the one seeking out people and asking questions to learn about their settlement stories. This is what I did for my PhD research – a sociolinguistic ethnography on, with and for Africans in Australia; or what I’m currently doing for a project about the experiences of parents from non-English speaking backgrounds during pandemic-related home learning. So, it was a real surprise when the tables were turned recently and I was approached by AfrOzcentric for an interview.

The team behind AfrOzentric wanted me to share my migration story and PhD journey to be included in a series they are running for African Australians. The interview with Ms Holla David is now available on YouTube.

In our conversation, I not only tell my own story but also highlight the importance of African migrant histories and stories. These are too often overlooked in Australia and the diaspora at large. Bringing them to the attention of a broader audience will enable us to move away from perpetual problem discourses to highlight the contributions that African Australians make to our multilingual and multicultural society.

For me, this involves three key points, related to life in a new country, African history in Australia, and dealing with negative representations of African identity.

Life in a new country

Thinking back to my early years in Australia, I arrived as a family reunion migrant from Ghana, an English-speaking country, full of hope and aspirations for my future and the future of my yet-to-be born children. Things did not pan out as smoothly as I had expected.

First, I was shocked when language turned out to be an issue. In Ghana, which is a former British colony, English is the official language and medium of instruction from primary school through to university. I arrived with the belief that I was an English speaker and would, at least linguistically, slot right into Australia, another former British colony.

But that’s not how it turned out: oftentimes, I couldn’t understand people and they couldn’t understand me, either. That’s how I learned about linguistic variation and that there are different varieties of English.

Finding a job that was equivalent to the one I had previously done in Ghana was another challenge. Therefore, when I started a family, I put my career aspirations on hold and worked part-time as a checkout operator in a supermarket.

It took me ten years to go back to university. Starting full-time studies while looking after my family and working part-time was incredibly challenging, particularly as I did not have the kind of family support I would have had back home in Ghana. I’m grateful for the kindness of the people who have been willing to support and mentor me throughout the years.

I would particularly like to acknowledge my academic mentors, who helped me navigate the, for me, unchartered waters of academia. The guidance of my sociolinguistics lecturer during my undergraduate years, Dr Verna Rieschild, was crucial during my undergraduate and honours years, and the same is true of Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller during my PhD and postdoctoral career.

African history in Australia

1834 portrait of William Blue, by J. B. East (Source: Wikipedia)

Black African people are often made to feel like they do not belong in Australia. In reality, Africans have settled in Australia for as long – or as short – a time as whites, and belong as much, or as little.

Therefore, it’s important to share the little-known history of African people in Australia.

You, too, may be surprised to learn that Black Africans arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in 1788 (Pybus, 2006a, 2006b). In her book Black Founders, Cassandra Pybus shares the stories of famous bushranger John Black Caesar, or Billy Blue, who has the Sydney suburb of Blues Point named after him.

Back then “the notion of race was a highly malleable construct, […] and the binary of black or white was not a reliable way of constructing difference” (Pybus, 2006a, p. 181).

Pybus’ account complicates assumptions that race in colonial Australia was an Aboriginal (black) and European (white) binary. However, the African presence in colonial Australia from first fleeters to the steady trickle of black convicts and free people who followed “have been completely whited out of Australian colonial history” (Pybus, 2006b, p. 41).

Negative representations of African identity

The erasure of African people from Australian history goes hand in hand with contemporary racism and the inescapable negative representations of Africans in Australia. The predominant media representations range from pitiful refugees via scheming fraudsters to violent gangsters. Obviously, the vast majority of African-Australians simply do not see themselves represented.

In other words, there is a huge gap between the ways in which African-Australians are seen and the ways in which they see themselves. This gap needs to be bridged.

One way of doing so is through research. My PhD research, a sociolinguistic ethnography on, with and for Africans in Australia, for instance, challenged the homogenised view of African-Australians as a monolithic group by examining the diverse pre- and post-migration experiences of black African immigrants, particularly as they relate to language learning, education and employment.

Focusing on differences in pre-migration educational opportunities and the status of English in their countries of origin, the analysis distinguished four groups: migrants from Anglophone African countries who have completed secondary education or above; migrants from non-Anglophone African countries who have completed secondary education or above; migrants from Anglophone African countries who have had no or low schooling; and migrants from non-Anglophone African countries who have had no or low schooling.

Overall, I found a persistent mismatch between diverse pre-migration linguistic repertories and education trajectories, and post-migration language training and education pathways into settlement in Australia. This mismatch is at the heart of the disadvantage in the Australian labour market experienced by many African-Australians. In short, my research demonstrates the harm that comes from telling a single story.

Indeed, one of my favourite African proverbs goes as follows: “So long as the lions do not have their own historians the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” It is my hope also that we will get to hear more stories and interpretations of African migrant stories through their own voices.

If this has whetted your appetite, head over to YouTube and watch the full interview:

References

Pybus, C. J. (2006a). Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia’s First Black Settlers. Sydney: University of New South Wales.
Pybus, C. J. (2006b). Race relations and early Australian Settlement. The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring), 39-48.
Williams Tetteh, Vera. (2015). Language, education and settlement: A sociolinguistic ethnography on, with, and for Africans in Australia. (PhD), Macquarie University, Sydney.

***

The histories and everyday experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia are etched in the landscape, the waterways and the voices of those who can speak and understand ancestral Aboriginal languages. They also thrive in post-invasion contact varieties such as Kriol and Aboriginal English.

Researching Aboriginal English through yarning

When our sociolinguistic project into Aboriginal English in Nyungar country (southwest Western Australia) started in early 2019 little did we know how much our fieldwork would enrich us. The premise was simple: head out into metropolitan Perth, set up the cameras and talk to people. Then use those recordings to figure out how Aboriginal English is changing. But there were so many questions. What model of research would be favoured and why? How should we collect our data? Who should we approach? What would people talk about?

It would have been reasonable to follow existing practice in sociolinguistics. But the canonical methods of the field are mostly based on industrialised, Western cultures and societies. How could we ensure that different ways of knowing would be incorporated into the project? How could we move beyond the Eurocentric mainstream to “hear the voices” of people historically pushed to the margins?

Data collection in a Perth city park (Photo reproduced with permission)

To the rescue comes Glenys Collard, a Nyungar woman, a native speaker of Aboriginal English and an experienced language worker whose input into the project changed the research forever.

Instead of a sociolinguistic interview, our data collection tool of choice was “yarning” – an Indigenous cultural form of storytelling and conversation. This type of conversation and storytelling is highly dramatic, using much gesture, facial expression and variation in tone and volume. The lack of pre-defined questions in the “yarning” format allowed speakers to remain in control of what they wanted to share while the cameras were on.

Recruiting research participants through listening

Instead of institutions, we headed out to meet people in their homes. But there was a catch. A significant number of Aboriginal people are homeless. In 2016, for example, Aboriginal people made up 3.7% of the total population of Western Australia but accounted for a staggering 29.1% of the homeless population in the state.

Glenys Collard was adamant these people’s stories should be heard, too. She led us into the streets and parks they call home. She reached out to them, she explained what we were doing and why. The photo shows Glenys Collard and the four women we spoke to at a Perth City Park in mid-2019. Glenys explains what was special about yarning with these women:

These yorgas [women] were too deadly [great], they could spin a few good yarns and they took after yarnin flat out about who they was, what they been doin. It was deadly. Celeste talked to them and they already looked at me so I gave them the ok with my eyes and closed mouth. The four of them were Aboriginal English speakers. I don’t think another researcher would have chosen them to speak with because of the area and the other people who were there. They all had a yarn and they wanted to share so we stay an listen.

They wanted to speak to us because of Glenys. She made the research safe for them. At the end of the session, Celeste asked Glenys why people – both in the park and elsewhere – had been so keen to speak to us. Glenys replied: No one has ever listened to them before.

These feelings are echoed by Dr Chelsea Bond, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman and University of Queensland academic. Dr Bond explains that Australian society is founded on the non-existence of Indigenous people. She frames a lack of listening around police aggression. “Blackfellas are always speaking about police brutality – why aren’t people listening?”

Recording stories about police brutality and racism

Indeed, accounts of police brutality feature prominently in our collection. The corpus is replete with stories of racism and abuse.

Nita’s story stands out. We were outside a popular medical centre in downtown Perth when we saw her. Nita (a pseudonym) seemed upset, but she was keen to have a yarn so we set up the cameras. The microphones are on. Her twenty-something-year-old nephew is dead. Found dead at one of Perth’s private prisons. The police tells her and her family that her nephew killed himself. She and her family disagree: the bruises on his body indicate otherwise. She is sure her nephew was killed.

In another example, a prominent Aboriginal Perth leader spontaneously told us the story of a Nyungar woman who was evicted from her home in metropolitan Perth. When he arrived to try and stop the eviction, the woman’s heels were dug into the framework of the door, her little grannies (grandchildren) everywhere, police “by the mass”. He recalls seeing the police dragging the woman by the hair as her grannies looked on. He saw the Department of Child Protection officers take the woman’s grandchildren away.

Why aren’t people listening?

A young Aboriginal student we yarned with sums it up perfectly: “Someone who has grown up privileged cannot even fathom the idea of how we [Aboriginal people] might have grown up. It’s like a bad dream to them, like a nightmare. But that’s what we’ve lived, you know?”.

More than sociolinguistic samples

The voices in the stories we collected for our research are much more than high-quality linguistic samples of Aboriginal English. They are raw and real accounts of the community’s histories and everyday experiences. Our cross-cultural fieldwork allowed us to record the community’s voices using a culturally appropriate genre (yarning) and placing a community member, Glenys Collard, at the core. Her presence, experience and wisdom allowed us to move a step closer towards decolonising research into Aboriginal English. Importantly, her expertise allowed us to “hear the voices” of those rarely featured in sociolinguistic research.

Acknowledgement

This research is funded through a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) (DE DE170100493) and a 2019 Australian Linguistic Society Research Grant.

The official WHO name of the disease

I am a citizen of Wuhan. Like millions of other Wuhan residents who now live in a state of fear and anxiety, the first thing I do when I wake up every morning is to check the latest news of the coronavirus epidemic.

In December 2019, a month before the Spring Festival holiday, an unknown coronavirus broke out and rapidly spread in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, China. This virus is a new strain of coronavirus that has not been previously identified in humans.  Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002. Compared to the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003, the novel coronavirus has a lower mortality rate but seems to be spreading much faster. It took almost four months for SARS to spread to 1,000 people, but the novel coronavirus infected more than 1,200 people in just 25 days. On January 19, 2020, the first exported case of this virus was discovered in Guangdong Province, hundreds of miles from Wuhan. Just three days later, on January 22, 23 provinces across the country had confirmed cases. So far, around 80,000 people from 29 countries have been infected with the virus and more than 2,000 have died.

Facing the complicated and severe epidemic situation, China has taken drastic measures to limit the spread of the virus. On January 23, Wuhan – a city of 14 million inhabitants and about 5 million migrants – was put in lockdown. All transport – airplanes, subways, buses, and trains – have been suspended. Private cars are no longer permitted to be driven on the streets without a special permit. All citizens are required to stay at home to avoid cross infection. A virus has silenced a bustling city. A few days later, 13 cities in Hubei Province with a total population of 56 million people were locked down. 31 provincial-level regions in China all activated top-level emergency responses to the coronavirus. These measures are without precedent, not only in China but perhaps in the whole history of humankind.

On January 30, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. And on February 11, the WHO announced an official name for the disease, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (abbreviated “COVID-19”).

Anti-Chinese caricature in Jyllands Posten

If I did not live in the epicenter of the disease, I probably would not give much thought to the naming of a new disease. As it is, I am forced to reflect how much harm the inappropriate naming of infectious diseases can do to certain groups.

In recent years, the world has seen the emergence of several new human infectious diseases. These diseases are often given common names outside the scientific community for everyday communication. Inappropriate disease names, once established, are difficult to change and can bring serious negative impacts and harms to individuals and communities. Therefore, it is important that an appropriate name is assigned to a newly identified human disease by whoever first reports it.

In response to such concerns, WHO developed a set of standard best practices for the naming of new human infectious diseases in 2015. In this guideline, the WHO advises against using place names, human names, or animal names for naming new infectious diseases with the aim of “minimising unnecessary negative impact of disease names on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare, and avoid causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.”

Anti-Asian headline in Courrier Picard

According to these guidelines, disease names such as Ebola, Zika, swine flu, Rift Valley fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or monkeypox are all problematic. The use of place name for a disease should be avoided as they can stigmatise entire regions or ethnic groups. For example, the Ebola River of Congo or the Zika Forest of Uganda, where the Ebola and Zika diseases were first identified, are now inevitably linked to these diseases in the public imagination.

The use of animal species in names such as “swine flu” (officially known as “H1N1”) has had unintentional negative economic and social impacts by stigmatising the pork industry, even though this disease is being spread by people rather than pigs. (See related post on the “Danish boar fence”)

People’s names, usually the scientists who identified the disease, may also be inappropriate as are “terms that incite undue fear” such as “unknown” or “fatal.” “We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals,” the WHO says in its guidelines.

Before the announcement of the official name, COVID19, by the WHO, “Wuhan virus” or “China virus” were widely used (and continue to be used) for the disease by some foreign media.

Anti-Chinese headline in Der Spiegel

At a time when China is mobilising all resources to fight COVID-19, fear and discrimination spread rapidly outside China through these stigmatized names. Jyllands Posten, a Danish broadsheet paper, for example, published a cartoon of the Chinese national flag where the five stars were replaced with virus-like figures. In response to China’s protest, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded that “we have freedom of expression in Denmark – also to draw.”

An increase in racial stereotyping of Chinese in particular and Asians in general over the novel coronavirus can be seen in the media of other Western countries, too. The French newspaper Le Courrier Picard used inflammatory headlines including “Alerte jaune” (Yellow alert) and “Le peril jaune?” (Yellow peril?), stigmatising all Asian people as virus. Der Spiegel, a German magazine, featured a man wearing a red hoody, protective masks, goggles and earphones, with a giant headline “Coronavirus – Made in China.” And the US Wall Street Journal published an article with racist overtones under the headline, “China is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” humiliating China’s subordination to Western countries in the 19^th Century and marking down the prospect of the Chinese economy.

These biased media reports not only constitute racial stereotyping but undoubtedly contribute to racial discrimination experienced by Chinese and Asians in these countries.

This anti-Chinese racism has now gone well beyond the media. As of February 20, Amazon allows individual businesses to openly sell T-shirts, hoodies, cups and other products imprinted with the insulting slogan “coronavirus made in China” on its English mall.

Anti-Chinese merchandise on Amazon

Even more outrageously Chinese students and migrants have been racially vilified and attacked because of their nationality and race. On January 30, for instance, a Chinese postgraduate student was attacked by three local people in Sheffield, UK, for wearing a mask to protect herself and others from COVID-19. In the US, racist attacks against Asians are said to be spreading faster than the virus. In Australia, Chinese restaurants are struggling to survive as their customer numbers have plummeted.

The list of examples of anti-Chinese racism could go on and on.

Facing deadly infectious diseases, it is, of course, normal that we feel scared or anxious. However, racism and any act of discrimination driven by such fear is completely unacceptable. As Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said, the coronavirus is a public health event, not a matter of ethnicity or nationality, “Even though the virus started in Wuhan, it doesn’t respect nationality or race. It does not check your passport before it goes into your body. Anybody can be infected.”

A virus does not have a nationality, ethnicity or a race. Discrimination can be the most dangerous virus.

I studied in Australia for six years. In a sense, I have been educated in the West. Personally, I truly appreciate the pursuit of freedom of speech in Western countries and agree that this may be something the Chinese government needs to work on. But, the premise of freedom of speech is not to infringe upon the rights and dignity of others. While the Chinese people are suffering from this calamity and are united as one in combating this “war without smoke,” attacking the country and its people in the name of “freedom of speech” is undoubtedly a retrogression of human civilization.

Epidemics have been rampant throughout human history, and they have often caused devastation. It is the responsibility of us all to ensure that there is no stigma associated with any infectious disease, and the unnecessary and unhelpful profiling of individuals based on nationality or race.

Fighting the novel coronavirus, as we do here, is protecting both China and the world. On behalf of millions of ordinary people living in Wuhan, I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to the international community who has given us valuable moral and material support. China is not fighting alone. We believe “winter will eventually pass, and spring is sure to come.”

Dr Fadila Boutouchent during her guest lecture at Macquarie University

When she was in kindergarten, my oldest daughter came home one day talking about “our soldiers” who “went to war for us“. It was the Anzac Day history lesson, a day which commemorates Australia’s involvement in World War 1 and the loss of life which resulted. However, just who was that “us” supposed to be?

My daughter has past and present relatives from the (former) Austro-Hungarian, British and Ottoman empires. As is true of most Australians, during WW1 my daughter’s ancestors would have actually been on both sides of the battle. This made me particularly uncomfortable with the idea of pitching a unified “us” against “them”.

As a parent, I expect my school to utilize a curriculum which is inclusive, not exclusionary and divisive. In fact, most of the time, they do. This was the only time I could recall that our school had tapped into this way of thinking about culture and belonging.

Educational curricula are powerful sites for the construction of national identity.

How does that work in a diverse society? What happens to newcomers who may not fit the dominant imagined identity? How can schools fullfil their obligation to meet the needs of students of diverse backgrounds while still attempting to instill a shared sense of identity and belonging?

The research of Dr. Fadila Boutouchent (University of Regina, Canada) addresses these important and fascinating questions and asks how immigrant parents perceive their children’s education, particularly in Francophone schools, which have as a central role the maintenance and construction of a Canadian Francophone identity. As part of the Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University, Dr. Boutouchent presented her research on these schools in the small city of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada.

New Brunswick is a province with a bilingual language policy, which means that citizens have the right to access services in either French or English. In addition, New Brunswick prioritizes French-speaking immigrants, in order to maintain its Francophone community.

In the Canadian context, research into immigrant students has tended to focus on Anglophone schools which are in the majority, have more experience with and are better resourced to manage the needs of diverse students. In contrast, little is known about the experience of migrant children in Francophone educational contexts, which are managed by the Francophone community.

Bilingual welcome sign at the entrance to Moncton city (Source: Wikipedia)

So how do recent migrant families fit into this picture? Dr. Boutouchent and her team sought to understand how immigrant families perceive their children’s education before and after their arrival in Moncton, and how they are involved in their social and educational integration.

The researchers interviewed 14 parents of families who had migrated from Africa or the Caribbean between 3-10 years prior and whose children were enrolled in Francophone schools. They found that there were some key issues for immigrant parents across the group.

The first was that immigrant parents felt they were not informed about the school system before arriving in Moncton. In particular, they did not know about the existence of Francophone schools. This group of parents was mostly highly educated and had very high expectations of their children’s educational success. Although they had trusted that the school would be good quality because it was in a developed country, some were disappointed, and one mother even said she would have liked to teach her daughter at home if she had been able to.

These issues of quality were at times compounded by language. The local variety of French is quite distinct. The Acadian French identity is historically very strong, and is marked by an accent which may be difficult for newcomers. This is similar to my own research on adult migrants in linguistic intermarriage who reported that they had unexpected problems with the Australian English accent on arrival.

The Chiac slogan “Right Fiers!” (“Right proud!”) has caused controversy (Source: cbc.ca)

We know from the previous lectures in the series that children’s willingness to speak different languages changes over time and that schooling is a key time for the formation of language habits. A particular challenge for immigrant children in Moncton is constituted by the fact that local youths speak a variety called Chiac, a mixture of French and English. Francophone migrants raised with standard French found Chiac incomprehensible and alienating.

One participant reported that her son began to stay inside during break times because he could not understand or speak to his fellow students.

If you can’t speak to other kids, how can you feel like you belong?

Parents also reported that their children experienced bullying and racism, and that the schools were not always well-equipped to manage the needs of refugee children who were not at the same educational level as their peers. They also regarded the lack of inclusive, multi-ethnic content in the curriculum as a problem.

There are no easy answers as to how to balance the educational and linguistic needs of newcomers with those of old-timers, but a good first step is to listen to the voices of those who are living the encounter. Small cities, like small schools, have the advantage that the distances between people and institutions are smaller, making both problems and solutions more visible. This also means that change is potentially easier to implement.

Dr. Boutouchent finished her lecture by making the case that Moncton is a site where Francophone schools could become “spaces for intercultural communication and nourish a culture of understanding and acceptance”. That sounds like a goal which all schools and parents could agree on.

Reference:

Benimmas, A., Boutouchent, F., & Kamano, L. (2017). Relationship Between School and Immigrant Families in French-Language Minority Communities in Moncton, New Brunswick: Parents’ Perceptions of Their Children’s Integration. In G. Tibe Bonifacio & J. L. Drolet (Eds.), Canadian Perspectives on Immigration in Small Cities (pp. 235-253). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Manus Island Detention Centre, where Faysal Ishak Ahmed collapsed (Source: ABC News)

On December 23, 2016, as most Australians were winding down for the holiday week ahead, Faysal Ishak Ahmed, a 27-year-old man from South Sudan died in immigration detention when he collapsed with a seizure. After his death, it emerged that the young man had repeatedly presented at the facility’s healthcare provider over a period of several months for a range of health issues such as stomach upsets, high blood pressure, fevers and heart problems. However, he never got to see a doctor and each time was dismissed by the nurse on duty. He described one such incident to his friends shortly before his death:

I went to the [healthcare provider] and then [they] told me that, hey you don’t have anything, you are not sick and you’re pretending to be sick, and from now on, we don’t want you to come down here, so please stop coming here. (Quoted from ABC News)

Even if rarely with fatal consequences as in Ahmed’s case, the experience of not being listened to and not being taken seriously is one that many people who speak English “with an accent” can relate to.

Cases such as these where patients with limited proficiency in the dominant language are not taken seriously and oftentimes simply ignored are not unique to Australia, as a US study of doctors and nurses working with patients with limited English proficiency demonstrates (Kenison et al., 2016). In a quote that has almost uncanny echoes of Faysal Ishak Ahmed’s experience on the other side of the world, one junior doctor reported this conversation with a senior clinician to the researchers:

And he said, ‘Oh, you know we see this, a lot of this Haitian chest pain.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ And he said, ‘Well, they come in and the tests are negative, and they have a different perception of pain than other people.’ He kind of wrote it off that way. I felt a little weird that it was written off that quickly. To write off the chest pain on a patient who is having trouble communicating because she’s using a phone interpreter. (Kenison et al., 2016, p. 3)

Faysal Ishak Ahmed, who died after being dismissed by health care provider (Source: ABC News)

Most people assume that language proficiency is a specific skill set that a person has or does not have. It is further assumed that, once migrants have reached a particular level of English, they will be able to “integrate” and interact on a level playing field. This view of language proficiency as a property of the speaker is fundamentally mistaken because we don’t use language as isolated individuals. Language is a social tool and language proficiency is jointly constructed in interaction. To be able to form grammatically correct sentences does not necessarily translate into “the power to impose reception”, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out.

A wealth of sociolinguistic evidence demonstrates that non-standard speech, such as the English of multilinguals that shows traces of their non-English-speaking background (NESB), is rarely taken just as a specific way of speaking but as an index of a particular identity – often the identity of someone who is considered less worthy. Ahmed was assumed to be a fake patient. In our research with adult NESB migrants here at Macquarie University, we have met highly qualified job applicants whose skills were obscured by their accents; capable and diligent students who were considered lazy and poorly motivated on the basis of their English expression; or consumers who did not manage to return faulty products within the warranty period because shop assistants pretended not to understand them.

Mundane interactions such as these have broad social consequences. Far from interacting on a level playing field, NESB speakers have unequal opportunities to access employment, education, health care or community participation.

While we have become increasingly vigilant with regard to discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality or disability, linguistic disadvantage is far more difficult to recognize. Partly this is due to the fact that Australians who speak English as their first language have fewer and fewer opportunities to learn another language and hence are poorly equipped to relate to the challenges of language learning. As a result, discussions of linguistic diversity are often based on the false premise that individuals exert full control over their linguistic repertoires. In reality, learning a new language while also trying to do things through the medium of that language – to work, to study, to present your symptoms to a nurse – is a double challenge and these two aims of communication are not always compatible.

To mitigate linguistic disadvantage requires both individual and institutional efforts. Individuals need to be prepared to share the communicative burden rather than placing it exclusively on the shoulders of NESB speakers. Institutions need to put in place adequate policies and training opportunities to identify and meet language needs. Switching on to an unfamiliar accent may require extra mental effort and catering to the language development needs of everyone in an institution requires extra resources. However, these investments will pay dividends by contributing to the kind of inclusive and cohesive society we all want to live in.

How language barriers such as these can be bridged will be the focus of tomorrow’s “Bridging Language Barriers” Symposium. We’ll be looking forward to welcoming attendees to Macquarie University but if you cannot attend in person, you can still join the conversation with our team of live-tweeters. Our Twitter hashtag will be #LOTM2017. Follow @Lg_on_the_Move

Kenison TC, Madu A, Krupat E, Ticona L, Vargas IM, & Green AR (2017). Through the Veil of Language: Exploring the Hidden Curriculum for the Care of Patients With Limited English Proficiency. Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 92 (1), 92-100 PMID: 27166864

“Good people make a good country” by Addo Tetteh

As I am trying to finalize the manuscript for the second revised edition of my 2011 book Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction, I’ve been finding it hard to concentrate and not to be sucked into despair at the US election outcome. 2016 has not been a good year for intercultural understanding as ever more barriers between people have been put up and fortified while bridges and connections are being torn down.

As unscrupulous media and politicians stoke ethnic and racial fear and hatred for their personal gain, it is the weakest members of society who suffer most.

A recent survey of more than 10,000 Australians, for instance, found stark differences in the experiences of discrimination by various groups, as evidenced by responses to the question ‘Have you experienced discrimination because of your skin colour, ethnic origin or religion over the last 12 months?’

• Third-generation Australians and overseas-born from English-speaking backgrounds (ESB) were least likely to have experienced discrimination in the last 12 months (ca. 15%)
• Overseas-born from non-English speaking-backgrounds (NESB) were more likely to have experienced discrimination (39%); but within the NESB group, there was significant variation:
  • Only 11-22% of those from Europe reported having experienced discrimination.
  • Within the Asia-born, there was a much larger range with only 15% of Afghanistan-born reporting discrimination but 55% of the South Korea-born.
  • The highest level of discrimination was reported by the Africa-born (54% on average) and particularly those from South Sudan (77%), Zimbabwe (76%) and Kenya (67%).

‘What form did the discrimination take?’ (Markus 2016, p. 65)

Most of the experiences of discrimination occurred in interactions where people were made to feel excluded or where they were verbally abused, as the table shows. While ‘made to feel like don’t belong’ may sound relatively mild, nothing could be further from the truth. Qualitative descriptions of what it means to be ‘made to feel like don’t belong’ gathered in focus group interviews are harrowing, as in the excerpt where a young man from South Sudan sums up his experience as ‘makes it hell.’

Being made to feel ‘like hell’ (Markus 2016, p. 63)

The young men from South Sudan in the focus group live in Sydney’s diverse western suburbs and specifically locate their experiences of exclusion in Sydney’s affluent and predominantly white northern suburbs. They are no exception in the report and many immigrant participants tied their alienation to specific spaces, as in these examples:

• It’s weird … when you go to really white places.
• If I have to go to … the city or … somewhere that is … white, … like white-dominated Australia…. I would feel … a bit off. I would feel like, ‘Oh my god, they’re looking at me. They’re looking at me. What is she doing here?’
• They look at you like you’re an alien … Everyone was just like… ‘What are you doing in this area?’ (Quoted from Markus 2016, p. 58)

Conversely, spaces where diversity was the norm had the opposite effect and interviewees reported a sense of belonging to a place just because it was ‘diverse’:

• I used to live in …Berala. Berala’s kind of Auburn City Council. In this area … it’s like very multicultural, like I could see [the] Arab base, mostly, and then like Asians, and then even Sudanese. There’s a lot of Sudanese here. So it’s very multicultural. I feel like I fit in here, because it’s so multicultural.
• I’ve got a lot of friends who come from the affluent side of Melbourne and they come from old Australian money and to them, I am like this foreign being because I’m half Asian, I’m half European, but born here. … When I’m in Broadmeadows I’m just normal.

These examples confirm at the level of personal experience what recent elections statistics (here in Australia and, more famously, in the Brexit referendum and yesterday’s US elections) tell us: that these societies are deeply divided: the anger of rural and deindustrialized communities cut adrift by neoliberal globalization is readily harnessed against the more concrete scapegoat of minorities, particularly if people have little experience with diversity.

Against this context, opportunities for everyday mundane connections that allow people to engage beyond the stereotypes can become a crucial means to overcome division and exclusion. That this is not just a pious hope is demonstrated in Vera W. Tetteh’s research with African migrants in Australia. There we meet Timothy, a man in his early 30s from Sudan, who lives in rural NSW. According to census statistics, 90% of the inhabitants of the town where he lives are Australia-born and the largest groups of non-Australia-born have migrated from the UK, New Zealand and South Africa (in this order). So, the town is a ‘white space’ if you will and is certainly significantly less diverse than is true for the NSW average, where only 68% of the population are Australia-born.

However, in contrast to many other Africans who the researcher met in the course of her research, Timothy, who only completed primary education in Sudan and whose self-assessed English is ‘not good’, is gainfully employed and working happily for a car parts manufacturer. His employment success is the direct result of a mundane relationship where two people were able to connect beyond mediated stereotypes of the racial other.

As Timothy recounts it, one of his white Australian neighbours, Mark (both names are pseudonyms), accosted him one day and asked why Africans didn’t work and relied on welfare. That Africans are ‘dole bludgers’ and ‘welfare cheats’ is a racist stereotype many Australians are familiar with from the media and extremist political groups. In fact, it was not only Mark who had been exposed to the stereotype but Timothy, too. However, instead of hunkering down in the face of his neighbour’s racism, Timothy set about educating Mark and appealed to the ‘typical Australian’ sense of a fair go:

And then one day I will stay here and then he ask me, he say why you you Africa you stay at home and receive money from Centrelink [=Australia’s social welfare office], you don’t want the job. I tell him no because not like that, we need a job but here it’s difficult for us because we are, some people put the application and then they tell me call you back, and nothing. If you apply for [Name of abattoir] they call you immediately. Why? (quoted from Tetteh 2015, p. 267)

It turned out that Mark had his heart in the right place and could learn to see beyond the racist stereotype. What Timothy tried to tell him – that Africans faced discrimination on the job market and only abattoir work was readily available to them – made sense to him. A few days later he showed up at Timothy’s door with an application form and recommended him to the car parts factory, where they have been colleagues since.

At a time when stereotypes divide us ever more deeply and the temptation to retreat into our own in-group bubbles is great, Timothy’s and Mark’s story reminds us of the power of ordinary people and our mundane everyday interactions as a force for good.

Related content

• Voices of African-Australian Youths
• Language, Education and Settlement: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography on, with, and for Africans in Australia
• Cultural brokering

References

Markus, A. (2016). Australians Today: The Australia@2015 Scanlon Foundation Survey Scanlon Foundation.

Tetteh, V. W. (2015). Language, Education and Settlement: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography on, with, and for Africans in Australia PhD, Macquarie University

Australia: The White Man’s Land (Source: NLA)

Australia has a proud national narrative of migration and multiculturalism. It also has an equally prevalent history of exclusionary and discriminatory migration policy. Perhaps the most famous is its “White Australia Policy”, which sought to restrict the migration of “non-European” people. While the Australian government still uses language tests for a variety of visas, the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 implemented a race- and colour-based approach through what is perhaps Australia’s most infamous language policy. Section 3 (a) of the Act prohibited the immigration of:

Any person who when asked to do so by an officer fails to write out at dictation and sign in the presence of an officer a passage of fifty words in length in an European language directed by the officer.

This law was used, up until 1958, to restrict the migration of “undesirable” people, including anyone who was visibly non-white. This was achieved by the immigration official choosing a language which they expected would be unknown to the would-be migrant.

What is particularly striking when looking at the law is that there is no explicit mention of the discriminatory way in which it would be implemented. This is even clearer when compared with the laws that proceeded it, such as the Coloured Races Restriction Bills (passed in various parts of Australia) and the Chinese Act 1881 (Victoria). Debates in Parliament in the lead-up to the Act’s creation indicate that the test would not apply to “qualified European immigrants” and that officers were to intentionally choose a language that the unwanted immigrants would not know (Crock & Berg 2011). Yet, there was clearly a desire to present the legislation itself in a much more neutral form than previous statute, balancing the need for diplomacy with Asia against ongoing white-centrism (Mason 2014).

Shohamy (2006) introduces the idea of hidden or “de facto” language policies that accompany official policy. In the case of the Immigration Restriction Act, it is clear that while the official policy (as presented in the law) seems to be aimed solely at the need for immigrants to speak a European language in this new “European” country, the way the Act was implemented indicated that covert policy hinged less on issues of language and much more on race. Thus the language test here is used politically, as a “two-edged sword” made to include some, at the exclusion of others (McNamara 2012).

In some cases, the White Australia Policy separated the Asian spouses and children of Australian citizens, sometimes leading to public outcry and successful lobbying by their local communities. For example, in the 1940s, the Jacobs, an Indonesian family, fled Australia after the arrival of the Japanese military in their home region. After Samuel Jacob died in an accident, Annie, his wife, and children were left stranded. When the war ended and the Australian government sought to expel Asian evacuees, Annie and her children were desperate to stay and fought their repatriation. An Australian citizen, Jack O’Keefe took the family in and married Annie. The Immigration Department denied that this gave the family any rights to reside in Australia, and insisted that they must be repatriated. It was only thanks to significant lobbying from the local community, and with the assistance of media support, that the O’Keefes successfully challenged the application of the White Australia policy in the High Court.

Directions for applying the dictation test (Source: NAA)

In other cases the policy was used against persons who were deemed unworthy of citizenship on apparently moral grounds, as was the case for Mabel Freer. Born in India, Freer was a white, English-speaking British subject, who was coming to Australia to marry her Australian lover, who intended to divorce his first wife. Her lover’s family were unhappy about the impending divorce and must have been well-connected within the government, because Freer was made to do the dictation test in Italian to prevent her from remaining in Australia.

However, the case that caught the public’s attention more than any other involved the application of the dictation test on an educated, white European, for clearly political reasons. In 1934, Egon Kisch, a communist writer and activist, came to Australia to speak at a series of anti-Fascism rallies. Following instructions from the British secret service, the Australian government sought to deport him by using the dictation test. Although Kisch was literate in several European languages, including English, he was made to do the dictation test in Scottish Gaelic, so that he would fail. In this highly publicized case, Kisch and his supporters challenged the use of the test in the High Court. Kisch was ultimately successful, but only because the Court ruled that Scottish Gaelic was not a European language for the purposes of the Act (Mason 2014).

Over time, the language of the Parliament changed. By the 1950s, the public seemed to have less of a taste for policy that was explicitly racist in its aims and language. Yet, once again, the way law was implemented maintained its race-based focus, simply operating in an increasingly covert manner. Previously classified (confidential) government communications, stored in the Australian National Archives, show that while the official language of migration policy becomes more progressive over time, the covert policy may take some time to catch up. The language of private Immigration Department communications in the 1950s remained very much the same as it had been in the past.

One particularly interesting case is that of would-be migrants, the Ioannou family from Greece.  In a de-classified 1955 memorandum to the Minister, the Acting Secretary, A. L. Nutt sets out the “behind-the-scenes” policy in clearly race-based terms. The Ioannou family’s application had been rejected “because the husband was dark skinned” and there was some concern that this could cause controversy, if it meant that the policy was publicly viewed at restricting Europeans on the grounds of colour.

Nutt responded:

In years gone by it used to be the practice to refer quite openly…to the “coloured” races and the preference for “white” people. Since the war, with growing awareness both here and in Asia, we have, of course, dropped such terms from our official vocabulary and we speak of “non-Europeans” or, where suitable, “Asians”.

This change in terms was not, however…accompanied by any corresponding change in policy which has continued to be that a person who, whether by cast of feature or by the colour of his skin or by mode of living, is not readily “assimilable” here, should not be admitted for permanent residence. The implicit assumption is that Australians would regard a very dark-skinned person as being “non-European” just as much as they would a person who has the cast of features of a negro or Chinese.

Egon Erwin Kisch in Australia (Source: Wikipedia)

Nutt also draws support from contemporary media discourse, which had criticised the arrival of ships “carrying very dark Cypriots, Lebanese and Greeks”. He then goes on to argue that suitable European-ness is connected closely to whiteness, explaining that the policy is that “anyone who in appearance shows any marked departure from the ‘white’ European type, should be refused entry… even though they and their families may have lived in Europe for generations”. He notes that since applicants are not generally provided with reasons for rejection, there was no need to mention the colour bar, “whatever suspicion our individual decisions may arouse”.

This communication raises two important issues. Firstly, the giving of reasons may provide some ground upon which to challenge migration decisions. Having said that, the earlier lesson of the dictation test shows that legal mechanisms can be used for ulterior reasons. Further, while reasons are more commonly given now, applicants for a number of visas even today have no right to reasons (for example, family-sponsored humanitarian visas). Secondly, this is a clear example of how publicly available law and policy may depart significantly from the confidential instructions given to officials. Decisions may appear to align closely with official policy, however there may be other guidance or influence at play which external investigators can only guess at.

While noting the general advances in official migration law and policy over time, we should ask what the “hidden policy” is today. And just as Nutt suggests back in 1955, in many cases we can only rely on “whatever suspicion individual decisions may arouse”, especially given the concerted lack of transparency in parts of the current regime. It is possible that much will remain guess work, until such time when some future researchers will have access to the de-classified files from 2015 and have their turn to – perhaps – experience shock at the covert policies behind our current migration regime.

References

Crock, M. & Berg, L. (2011). Immigration, Refugees and Forced Migration: Law, policy and practice in Australia, Annandale: The Federation Press.

Mason, K. (2014). The saga of Egon Kisch and the White Australia Policy. Bar News: The Journal of the New South Wales Bar Association, (Summer), 64-67.

McNamara, T. (2012). Language Assessments as Shibboleths: A Poststructuralist Perspective Applied Linguistics, 33 (5), 564-581 DOI: 10.1093/applin/ams052

Shohamy, E. (2006). Language Policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches, London & New York: Routledge.

Churchill Square Shopping Mall, Brighton, UK (Source: Wikipedia)

In a shopping mall in the city of Brighton, UK, a tourist was arrested on terrorism charges last week for taking a selfie video. Surely, taking selfies in a shopping mall is such a part of contemporary culture that the act itself wouldn’t raise an eyebrow? What was different in the case of this tourist and this selfie? Well, the protagonist of the selfie did not speak English. According to a Daily Mail article, this is how the selfie-taking tourist aroused suspicion:

A Sussex Police spokesman said they were called by security staff after they ‘had challenged a 38-year-old London man who was filming on his mobile phone and recording in a foreign language’. The spokesman added: ‘They were concerned about his motives and he was reported to be acting strangely.’

What “foreign language” do you guess the tourist was speaking? Are you picturing tourists from France or Germany, where the holiday season has just started? Or tourists from China or Japan, who are globally stereotyped as excessive image takers? It’s unlikely that you do, and it’s unlikely that a tourist recording a selfie in any of these languages would have attracted the suspicions of a Brighton security guard.

The suspicious language – you guessed it – was Arabic. The tourist, Nasser Al-Ansari, a 38-year-old London resident and Kuwait native, was recording a Snapchat message for his friends back home. The man was released after three hours, and his side of the story is described in the Daily Mail as follows:

The former banker, who has lived in London since 2013, said: ‘It was a very horrible experience and unacceptable to happen without any specific reason or suspicion.’ ‘It is absurd. It is not something I would expect when visiting somewhere in the UK.’ He added: ‘I was very understanding and I said to them “I know it was a foreign language and my race is a factor but please be fair”. ‘I think there is a thin line between being safe and going over-the-top and this time I think they went a little over-the-top.’

According to the police, it was the “foreign language” spoken by Mr Al-Ansari that was suspicious; he himself links language and race in trying to explain why he was targeted; and some social media commentators, also raised his religion as a factor. One blogger, for instance, went with the headline “Muslim tourist takes selfie in Brighton, arrested on terrorism offences.”

We have often discussed the relationship between linguistic and racial discrimination here on Language on the Move (e.g., ‘Race to teach English;’ ‘Linguistic discrimination at work;’ ‘Shopping while bilingual can make you sick;’ or ‘Racism without racists’). But what about the relationship between language and religion when it comes to exclusion in multicultural societies characterized by linguistic and religious pluralism? How is linguistic and religious difference related to social inequality?

A recent article by the sociologist Rogers Brubaker offers a framework for thinking systematically about the ways in which linguistic and religious difference structure inequality in contemporary liberal democracies. The author identifies four domains where difference may be turned into inequality: the political and institutional domain; the economic domain; the cultural and symbolic domain; and the domain of informal social relationships.

In the political and institutional domain language is inescapable but modern liberal states are relatively neutral vis-à-vis religion. In fact, religious discrimination is widely prohibited where linguistic discrimination is seen as perfectly legitimate. Think, for instance, of citizenship testing: many liberal democracies require a language test in the national language as a precondition of naturalization while no similar religious tests currently exist in liberal democracies; and would widely be considered abhorrent.

Furthermore, in addition to explicit linguistic discrimination in favor of the national language(s), there is the inescapable fact that institutions operate exclusively in one language (or in some cases a small set of legitimate languages): this constitutes, eo ipso, a massive advantage for speakers of the institutional language and a massive disadvantage for people who do not speak the institutional language or do not speak it well.

In the economic domain similar considerations apply: proficiency in the language in which an economic activity occurs is a precondition for participation in that economic activity in a way that religion is not. Speakers of an economically powerful language enjoy an economic advantage because they do not have to invest in learning that language. Furthermore, language learning is a complex – and hence costly – undertaking that may make it difficult to acquire the kind of linguistic proficiency that has high economic value. By contrast, membership in a powerful religion is usually not as directly economically useful as language proficiency is. Furthermore, joining a powerful religion requires a smaller investment. For instance, it is much easier for a non-Christian to convert to Christianity than it is for a non-native speaker of English to acquire high-level proficiency in English.

The cultural and symbolic domain works differently. This domain includes all the discursive and symbolic processes through which respect, prestige, honor – in short symbolic value – is conferred. Here, language is less affected than religion because the “content” of a language is much thinner than that of a religion. That means that negative stereotypes about language tend to be relatively mild in comparison to negative stereotypes about religion. While many people object to the specific tenets of a particular religion, very few people object to the specific grammatical structures or means of expression of a particular language. For instance, the widespread stigmatization of Islam in contemporary media discourses simply has no equivalent in negative stereotypes about any language.

Informal social relationships also have a significant bearing on inequality, and can work through exclusion and through inclusion. Processes of social exclusion may disadvantage members of certain religions or speakers of certain languages. Examples include differential treatment of minorities on the rental market or attacks against minorities on public transport. Both members of religious minorities and speakers of minority languages are vulnerable to such “everyday exclusions.” Of course, a language may be stereotypically associated with a particular religion – as is the case with Arabic and Islam – and in such cases it is impossible to disentangle language and religion as the immediate cause of an experience such as that of Mr Al-Ansari anyways.

Informal social relationships also mediate inequality through inclusion in that social circles tend to form around shared identities; and social networks, friendship circles or marriage opportunities are often based on shared identities. Again, religion and language work differently here. Preferences for religion-internal networks is dogma in some religions while preferences for the formation of language-internal networks tend to be much weaker.

In sum, linguistic and religious difference both translate into social inequality in diverse societies but they do so in clearly distinct ways:

The major sources of religious inequality derive from religion’s thicker cultural, normative and political content, while the major sources of linguistic inequality come from the pervasiveness of language and from the increasingly and inescapably ‘languaged’ nature of political, economic and cultural life in the modern world. (Brubaker 2014, p. 23)

Brubaker, R. (2014). Linguistic and Religious Pluralism: Between Difference and Inequality Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41 (1), 3-32 DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2014.925391

Preschool in Karlsruhe, Germany (Source: DW)

Ever since my research for my 2002 book Bilingual Couples Talk I’ve regularly been told by people – or been asked to confirm their belief – that a cross-cultural relationship is beneficial once the couple have children. The children are expected to not only be bilingual but also to enjoy cognitive advantages from growing up with more than one culture and to be more open minded and better communicators. I’ve always struggled how to respond because, of course, nothing is ever this simple. A 2011 study of the cognitive and linguistic abilities of various groups of preschoolers in Germany confirms the assumption – children of intermarried couples outperform all other groups on a cognitive ability test – and, simultaneously, explain why it is a fallacy that confounds ethnicity and class.

The study by Birgit Becker examines the cognitive and linguistic abilities of three- and four-year-olds with different types of parents:

• Children whose parents and grandparents were all born in Germany (the ‘native’ group)
• Children whose parents were both born in Turkey (the ‘second generation’)
• Children whose parents were both born in Germany but each parent had at least one parent born in Turkey (the ‘third generation’)
• Children with one first-generation and one second-generation Turkish parent (the ‘2A generation’)
• Children with one ‘native’ parent and one first- or second generation Turkish parent (the ‘intermarried’ group)

The cognitive abilities of a total of 1,008 children were tested with the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children. The German version of the test was used but it was administered by bilingual researchers and the children could choose to do the test in German, in Turkish or they could mix the two languages as they pleased. So, language proficiency is unlikely to confound test results here, as it so often does in cognitive testing of bilingual and minority children.

Adapted from Becker (2011, p. 448)

The diagram shows that the children from the intermarried group outperformed all the other groups, including the natives. It also shows that, with the exception of the intermarried group, all the other ‘Turkish’ groups performed significantly lower than the ‘native’ group. Children in the ‘2A group’ – with one first-generation and one second-generation Turkish parent – performed particularly poorly. In fact, ‘2A’ parents might be considered ‘intermarried,’ too; but, obviously, their intermarried status is not beneficial for the child.

Once the full diagram is revealed, part of the conundrum is solved.

Source: Becker (2011, p. 448)

Once parents’ socio-economic status (as measured by their level of education and their occupational status) and educational resources (as measured by the number of books in the home; the frequency of bedtime stories; or the number of visits to the zoo) are controlled, the ethnic differences disappear and the influence of all the above ethnic groups/generations is reduced to non-significance.

All group differences regarding children’s cognitive skills can be fully explained by families’ socioeconomic status and educational resources. (Becker 2011, p. 447)

What seems like an ethnic effect (‘children of intermarried couples are smarter’ or ‘German children are smarter than Turkish children’) is, in fact, an effect of socioeconomic status and educational resources; in other words, a well-known class effect. However, class maps onto ethnicity, in this case, as elsewhere. The vast majority of Turkish families in the sample, which can be assumed to be representative of Turks in Germany (or, at least, southwest Germany, where the study was conducted), are poorly educated, work in low-status occupations, and have few educational resources at their disposal.

As far as the two ‘mixed’ groups – ‘2A’ and ‘intermarried’ – are concerned a process of negative and positive selection can be assumed to apply respectively.

Having a first-generation mother and a second-generation father constitutes some sort of ‘double jeopardy’ for the child: the mother is much less likely to speak German than even first-generation women married to first-generation men; and the father is even less likely to have completed secondary education than other Turkish second-generation men. As the researcher explains, second-generation men who ‘import’ brides from the country of origin are likely to be negatively selected on various dimensions and their ‘imported’ brides will lack knowledge and resources that are useful to raising a child in the destination country.

By contrast, a process of positive selection works in favor of a child with a native and a migrant parent. Not only will the native parent ‘automatically’ have country-specific knowledge and resources but the migrant parent is likely to be positively selected with regard to level of education, proficiency in German, and general ‘openness’ and ‘integration.’ This is particularly true in the case German-Turkish intermarriages, which are comparatively rare and only account for five percent of all marriages of first- and second-generation Turks in Germany.

In sum, if intermarriage is an expression of parental cosmopolitanism, it is beneficial for children. Not because there is any intrinsic value in intermarriage but because that is how educational reproduction works: well-educated parents with stable jobs, parents who read to their children and who engage in a wide range of family activities confer an advantage on their children. It is just that the advantages – as well as the injuries – of class are increasingly mapped onto ethnicity, race or ‘culture.’

Becker, B. (2011). Cognitive and Language Skills of Turkish Children in Germany: A Comparison of the Second and Third Generation and Mixed Generational Groups International Migration Review, 45 (2), 426-459 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2011.00853.x