The team behind the Language-on-the-Move Podcast (Image credit: Language on the Move)

Final piece of good news for the year before we head into a publishing break over January: we’ve just heard that the Language-on-the-Move Podcast has won the 2025 Talkley Award

The Talkley Award is issued by the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) and “celebrates the best piece or collection of linguistics communication produced in the previous year by current ALS members. The Award acknowledges that the discipline of linguistics needs champions to promote linguistics in the public sphere and explain how linguistic evidence can be used to solve real-life language problems.”

This is a wonderful end-of-year present for our team in recognition of the work and care we’re putting into creating the podcast. Special thanks and congratulations also to our podcast publishing partner, the New Books Network.

After the 2012 Talkley Award went to Ingrid Piller for the Language on the Move website, this is the second time the award goes to our team – an amazing recognition of the long-term impact Language on the Move has had on public communications about linguistic diversity and social justice.

Thank you to all our supporters who nominated us for the award! Special thanks to Dr Yixi (Isabella) Qiu and her students in the Guohao College Future Technology Program at Tongji University. After using the Language-on-the-Move Podcast as a learning resource, they have been among our biggest fans

To celebrate with us, listen to an episode today! You an find your list of choice below.

As always, please 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.

Students of the Guohao College Future Technology Program at Tongji University in Shanghai are among the fans of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast (Image credit: Dr Yixi (Isabella) Qiu)

List of episodes to date

1. Episode 64: Your Languages are your superpower! Agnes Bodis in conversation with Cindy Valdez (17/11/2025)
2. Episode 63: Australia’s National Indigenous Languages Survey: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Zoe Avery (28/10/2025)
3. Episode 62: Migration is about every human challenge you can have: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shaun Tan (17/09/2025)
4. Episode 61: Cold Rush: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Sari Pietikainen (09/09/2025)
5. Episode 60: Sexual predation and English language teaching: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Vaughan Rapatahana (02/09/2025)
6. Episode 59: Intercultural Communication – Now in the 3^rd edition: Loy Lising in conversation with Ingrid Piller (26/08/2025)
7. Episode 58: Erased voices and unspoken heritage: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Zozan Balci (20/08/2025)
8. Episode 57: The Social Impact of Automating Translation: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ester Monzó-Nebot (03/08/2025)
9. Episode 56: Multilingual practices and monolingual mindsets: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (18/07/2025)
10. Episode 55: Improving quality of care for patients with limited English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Leah Karliner (26/06/2025)
11. Episode 54: Chinese in Qatar: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Sara Hillman (19/06/2025)
12. Episode 53: Accents, complex identities, and politics: Brynn Quick in conversation with Nicole Holliday (12/06/2025)
13. Episode 52: Is beach safety signage fit for purpose? Agnes Bodis in conversation with Masaki Shibata (05/06/2025)
14. Episode 51: The case for ASL instruction for hearing heritage signers: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Su Kyong Isakson (28/04/2025)
15. Episode 50: Researching language and digital communication: Brynn Quick in conversation with Christian Ilbury (22/04/2025)
16. Episode 49: Gestures and emblems: Brynn Quick in conversation with Lauren Gawne (14/04/2025)
17. Episode 48: Lingua Napoletana and language oppression: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Massimiliano Canzanella (07/04/2025)
18. Episode 47: Teaching international students: Brynn Quick in conversation with Agnes Bodis and Jing Fan (31/03/2025)
19. Episode 46: Intercultural competence in the digital age: Brynn Quick in conversation with Amy McHugh (12/03/2025)
20. Episode 45: How does multilingual law-making work: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Karen McAuliffe (05/03/2025)
21. Episode 44: Educational inequality in Fijian higher education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Prashneel Goundar (25/02/2025)
22. Episode 43: Multilingual crisis communication: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Li Jia (22/01/2025)
23. Episode 42: Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche (14/01/2025)
24. Episode 41: Why teachers turn to AI: Brynn Quick in conversation with Sue Ollerhead (09/01/2025)
25. Episode 40: Language Rights in a Changing China: Brynn Quick in conversation with Alexandra Grey (01/01/2025)
26. Episode 39: Whiteness, Accents, and Children’s Media: Brynn Quick in conversation with Laura Smith-Khan (24/12/2024)
27. Episode 38: Creaky Voice in Australian English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Hannah White (18/12/2024)
28. Episode 37: Supporting multilingual families to engage with schools: Agi Bodis in conversation with Margaret Kettle (20/11/2024)
29. Episode 36: Linguistic diversity as a bureaucratic challenge: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Clara Holzinger (17/11/2024)
30. Episode 35: Judging refugees: Laura Smith-Khan in conversation with Anthea Vogl (02/11/2024)
31. Episode 34: How did Arabic get on that sign? Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Rizwan Ahmad (30/10/2024)
32. Episode 33: Migration, constraints and suffering: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Marco Santello (14/10/2024)
33. Episode 32: Living together across borders: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Lynnette Arnold (07/10/2024)
34. Episode 31: Police first responders interacting with domestic violence victims: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Kate Steel (29/09/2024)
35. Episode 30: Remembering Barbara Horvath: Livia Gerber in conversation with Barbara Horvath (10/09/2024)
36. Episode 29: English Language Ideologies in Korea: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (08/09/2024)
37. Episode 28: Sign Language Brokering: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jemina Napier (30/07/2024)
38. Episode 27: Muslim Literacies in China: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ibrar Bhatt (24/07/2024)
39. Episode 26: Life in a New Language, Pt 6 – Citizenship: Brynn Quick in conversation with Emily Farrell (17/07/2024)
40. Episode 25: Life in a New Language, Pt 5 – Monolingual Mindset: Brynn Quick in conversation with Loy Lising (11/07/2024)
41. Episode 24: Language policy at an abortion clinic: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ella van Hest (05/07/2024)
42. Episode 23: Life in a New Language, Pt 4 – Parenting: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shiva Motaghi-Tabari (03/07/2024)
43. Episode 22: Life in a New Language, Pt 3 – African migrants: Brynn Quick in conversation with Vera Williams Tetteh (27/06/2024)
44. Episode 21: Life in a New Language, Pt 2 –Work: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ingrid Piller (19/06/2024)
45. Episode 20: Life in a New Language, Pt 1 – Identities: Brynn Quick in conversation with Donna Butorac (12/06/2024)
46. Episode 19: Because Internet: Brynn Quick in conversation with Gretchen McCulloch (03/06/2024)
47. Episode 18: Between Deaf and hearing cultures: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jessica Kirkness (01/06/2024)
48. Episode 17: The Rise of English: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Rosemary Salomone (21/05/2024)
49. Episode 16: Community Languages Schools Transforming Education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Joe Lo Bianco (07/05/2024)
50. Episode 15: Shanghai Multilingualism Alliance: Yixi (Isabella) Qiu in conversation with Yongyan Zheng (02/05/2024)
51. Episode 14: Multilingual Commanding Urgency from Garbage to COVID-19: Brynn Quick in conversation with Michael Chestnut (27/04/2024)
52. Episode 13: Making sense of “Bad English:” Brynn Quick in conversation with Elizabeth Peterson (13/04/2024)
53. Episode 12: History of Modern Linguistics: Ingrid Piller in conversation with James McElvenny (10/04/2024)
54. Episode 11: 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jasna Novak Milić (08/04/2024
55. Episode 10: Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital: Brynn Quick in conversation with Erin Mulpur, Houston Methodist Hospital (26/03/2024)
56. Episode 9: Interpreting service provision is good value for money. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jim Hlavac (19/03/2024)
57. Episode 8: What does it mean to govern a multilingual society well? Hanna Torsh in conversation with Alexandra Grey (22/02/2024)
58. Episode 7: What can Australian Message Sticks teach us about literacy? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Piers Kelly (21/02/2024; originally published 2020)
59. Episode 6: How to teach TESOL ethically in an English-dominant world. Carla Chamberlin and Mak Khan in conversation with Ingrid Piller (20/02/2024; originally published 2020)
60. Episode 5: Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (19/02/2024; originally published 2021)
61. Episode 4: Language makes the place. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Adam Jaworski (18/02/2024; originally published 2022)
62. Episode 3: Linguistic diversity in education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Ingrid Gogolin (17/02/2024; originally published 2023)
63. Episode 2: Translanguaging: Loy Lising in conversation with Ofelia García (16/02/2024; originally published 2023)
64. Episode 1: Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (15/02/2024)

Tazin speaks at Talent Day, Bangladesh Forum for Community Engagement

Every year, the Bangladesh Forum for Community Engagement in Sydney, Australia hosts an event called ‘Talent Day’ to acknowledge the achievements of primary and high school students in the Australian-Bangladeshi community. How does this interest a sociolinguist?

In so many ways – the interaction of multiple languages, the code-switching in the speeches, the expressions of heritage and identity in language use, the living examples of language shift through generations of migrants and so much more.

This year, though, my attention was taken by a request to give a short guest speech to the HSC graduates about to embark on their university journeys. My first dilemma was determining what meaningful contribution, as a second year PhD student, I could make. Which part of my university experience could I share? I decided to talk about my PhD supervisors and share two experiences that, for me, underlined the significance of language itself.

I told them about the lecture that Dr. Loy Lising delivers on the first day of class for our students. In the process of introducing me and the other members of the teaching team, she brings up the slide about communicating with us. But before the technical details, she implores the students to remember our common humanity when communicating with teachers. She explains that the use of our shared courtesies, such as “Dear [teacher’s name]”, “could you”, “thank you” acknowledge that a student and a teacher are two human beings communicating with one another.

From Dr. Lising’s words, I extrapolated that approaching someone more learned with humility confers dignity to both the teacher and the student and if anything, reminds one of the humility that should be cultivated in the pursuit of learning.

I then spoke about my first time as a student of Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, when I was doing my Masters of Applied Linguistics. It was time for the final assignment and before giving us the details, she displayed an image of a Persian rug. She directed us to the intricate parts that were woven, bit by bit, to produce something so beautiful.

Her next request was for us to write her a “beautiful” assignment. To achieve this, she asked us to remember the great privilege of higher education, which so many others have been and continue to be deprived of. We were reminded of our moral obligation to use our learning to contribute to society and the first step was to dedicate our attention to writing a good assignment – to remember the privilege of being able to write one.

I had never had an assignment presented quite like this before!

Conceptualising and expressing the act of learning as a privilege and the production of work as beautiful was yet another exercise in humility, a reminder of the very significant role that our teachers play in shaping our minds, and an acknowledgement of the purpose of higher education.

Towards the end of my speech, I realised I had given the students a series of stories and I wanted to explain why I had done this.

To be meaningful, university and higher education must be a journey of purpose, guided by our teachers and mentors who nurture our potential to contribute to the world. Ultimately, the university journey symbolises the lifelong commitment to learning from those who are more learned and passing it on to those that follow.

Tazin and Brynn, two of our enthusiastic podcast hosts

Editor’s note: Time flies: the Language-on-the-Move Podcast in collaboration with the New Books Network just turned one! Time to celebrate and reflect!

We celebrate a passionate team of hosts who created 43 insightful episodes about language in social life which have been downloaded 57,000 times across a range of platforms.

By download numbers, our top-5 episodes were:

1. Muslim Literacies in China: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ibrar Bhatt
2. Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko
3. Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche
4. Making sense of “Bad English:” Brynn Quick in conversation with Elizabeth Peterson
5. Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko

Providing a service to our communities by sharing knowledge about intercultural communication, language learning and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization is a key benefit of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast.

Another benefit accrues to our hosts who get to chat with key thinkers in our field. In this post, two of our hosts, Brynn Quick and Tazin Abdullah, share their reflections on the occasion of our 1st birthday. Enjoy and here’s to many more milestones!

***
Brynn Quick and Tazin Abdullah
***

Over the past year, many of us on the Language on the Move Team have been excitedly hosting podcasts about a wide range of topics in language and social life! As we dive into recording and producing our podcasts for the year ahead, we would like to share why this continues to be a rich and rewarding experience for us as PhD students at the beginning of our research journeys.

1. Wider horizons: Sounds cliché but oh, so true! Each time we host a podcast, we spend a significant amount of time doing background research. We research our guests, their interests, and their work. The opportunity created for reading is amazing. Not only do we dip our toes into the vast ocean that is all things language, we learn new things to enhance our own research and add to our reference lists!
2. Bigger networks: We establish relationships with our guests and connect with others in their networks. Our guests are great – they stay in touch! As the podcast is promoted on various platforms, we make connections with linguists around the world and are able to remain updated on developments in our field and directions that different researchers are taking.
3. Informal mentors: Did we mention our guests are great? Our guests indulge us in lively and interesting conversations not just during the podcast but also off air. Every guest shares their experiences, offers us advice and stays open to us reaching out if we have any questions on their area of expertise or if we need to understand some part of the academic journey.
4. Technical skills: Who knew how much work goes into the editing and production of a podcast episode? But this has also been a great learning experience, dabbling with technology and learning the ins and outs of various platforms – another transferable skill for emerging researchers.
5. Successful collaboration: The podcast is just one more example of how collaboration between fellow researchers results in an overall increase in both productivity and learning. Many times, we have reflected amongst ourselves about the way our podcast works. We support, mentor and acknowledge each other and, like a feel-good movie, are left wanting to collaborate some more.
6. Future collaborations: And yes, it has opened doors for us to future collaborations, to be able to reach out through our now wider networks and pursue our wide-ranging interests in linguistics and adjacent disciplines.
7. Non-traditional research outputs: Finally, what we love looking at – our updated research output lists every time a podcast drops! And an added bonus for those of us who prefer talking about research rather than writing about it, this format speaks right to us! As non-traditional research outputs, podcasts have offered us a practical way for us to engage with our learning in real-world settings, to use and develop our various skills, and contribute to research at the same time.

We give our podcast hosting experience a 5-star rating! If you enjoy the Language on the Move podcasts, please leave us a 5-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.

Full list of episodes published to date

1. Episode 43: Multilingual crisis communication: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Li Jia (22/01/2025)
2. Episode 42: Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche (14/01/2025)
3. Episode 41: Why teachers turn to AI: Brynn Quick in conversation with Sue Ollerhead (09/01/2025)
4. Episode 40: Language Rights in a Changing China: Brynn Quick in conversation with Alexandra Grey (01/01/2025)
5. Episode 39: Whiteness, Accents, and Children’s Media: Brynn Quick in conversation with Laura Smith-Khan (24/12/2024)
6. Episode 38: Creaky Voice in Australian English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Hannah White (18/12/2024)
7. Episode 37: Supporting multilingual families to engage with schools: Agi Bodis in conversation with Margaret Kettle (20/11/2024)
8. Episode 36: Linguistic diversity as a bureaucratic challenge: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Clara Holzinger (17/11/2024)
9. Episode 35: Judging refugees: Laura Smith-Khan in conversation with Anthea Vogl (02/11/2024)
10. Episode 34: How did Arabic get on that sign? Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Rizwan Ahmad (30/10/2024)
11. Episode 33: Migration, constraints and suffering: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Marco Santello (14/10/2024)
12. Episode 32: Living together across borders: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Lynnette Arnold (07/10/2024)
13. Episode 31: Police first responders interacting with domestic violence victims: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Kate Steel (29/09/2024)
14. Episode 30: Remembering Barbara Horvath: Livia Gerber in conversation with Barbara Horvath (10/09/2024)
15. Episode 29: English Language Ideologies in Korea: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (08/09/2024)
16. Episode 28: Sign Language Brokering: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jemina Napier (30/07/2024)
17. Episode 27: Muslim Literacies in China: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ibrar Bhatt (24/07/2024)
18. Episode 26: Life in a New Language, Pt 6 – Citizenship: Brynn Quick in conversation with Emily Farrell (17/07/2024)
19. Episode 25: Life in a New Language, Pt 5 – Monolingual Mindset: Brynn Quick in conversation with Loy Lising (11/07/2024)
20. Episode 24: Language policy at an abortion clinic: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ella van Hest (05/07/2024)
21. Episode 23: Life in a New Language, Pt 4 – Parenting: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shiva Motaghi-Tabari (03/07/2024)
22. Episode 22: Life in a New Language, Pt 3 – African migrants: Brynn Quick in conversation with Vera Williams Tetteh (27/06/2024)
23. Episode 21: Life in a New Language, Pt 2 –Work: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ingrid Piller (19/06/2024)
24. Episode 20: Life in a New Language, Pt 1 – Identities: Brynn Quick in conversation with Donna Butorac (12/06/2024)
25. Episode 19: Because Internet: Brynn Quick in conversation with Gretchen McCulloch (03/06/2024)
26. Episode 18: Between Deaf and hearing cultures: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jessica Kirkness (01/06/2024)
27. Episode 17: The Rise of English: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Rosemary Salomone (21/05/2024)
28. Episode 16: Community Languages Schools Transforming Education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Joe Lo Bianco (07/05/2024)
29. Episode 15: Shanghai Multilingualism Alliance: Yixi (Isabella) Qui in conversation with Yongyan Zheng (02/05/2024)
30. Episode 14: Multilingual Commanding Urgency from Garbage to COVID-19: Brynn Quick in conversation with Michael Chestnut (27/04/2024)
31. Episode 13: Making sense of “Bad English:” Brynn Quick in conversation with Elizabeth Peterson (13/04/2024)
32. Episode 12: History of Modern Linguistics: Ingrid Piller in conversation with James McElvenny (10/04/2024)
33. Episode 11: 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jasna Novak Milić (08/04/2024
34. Episode 10: Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital: Brynn Quick in conversation with Erin Mulpur, Houston Methodist Hospital (26/03/2024)
35. Episode 9: Interpreting service provision is good value for money. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jim Hlavac (19/03/2024)
36. Episode 8: What does it mean to govern a multilingual society well? Hanna Torsh in conversation with Alexandra Grey (22/02/2024)
37. Episode 7: What can Australian Message Sticks teach us about literacy? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Piers Kelly (21/02/2024; originally published 2020)
38. Episode 6: How to teach TESOL ethically in an English-dominant world. Carla Chamberlin and Mak Khan in conversation with Ingrid Piller (20/02/2024; originally published 2020)
39. Episode 5: Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (19/02/2024; originally published 2021)
40. Episode 4: Language makes the place. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Adam Jaworski (18/02/2024; originally published 2022)
41. Episode 3: Linguistic diversity in education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Ingrid Gogolin (17/02/2024; originally published 2023)
42. Episode 2: Translanguaging: Loy Lising in conversation with Ofelia García (16/02/2024; originally published 2023)
43. Episode 1: Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (15/02/2024)

“Giant Head” installation at the Gentle Monster store at Sydney Airport

One of the goals of graduate education is to empower students to reach their academic and professional goals by developing their communication skills. For example, one of the learning outcomes of a class I teach in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University is to enable students to “communicate advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.”

To achieve that learning outcome, students undertake a series of writing tasks throughout the semester on a public forum, namely right here on Language on the Move.

Although moderating around a thousand comments per semester is a huge workload, I’ve always enjoyed this task. The series of responses to writing prompts (aka comments on blog posts) allows me to learn more about my students’ backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. It is also rewarding to see that student comments become more sophisticated and engaged over the course of the semester and that their confidence in their academic writing increases.

Has ChatGPT ruined writing practice?

While I used to enjoy supporting students to develop their communication skills in this way, the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the rapid adoption of other generative AI platforms since then has changed things.

A not insignificant number of students now submit machine-generated writing tasks, and I’m saddled with the additional task of catching out these cheaters.

Submitting machine-generated text obviously has no learning benefits. Therefore, my task descriptions and syllabi now contain an explicit prohibition against the use generative AI:

Use of generative AI is prohibited
Your response must be your own work, and you are not allowed to post machine-generated text. Use of machine-generated text in this or any other unit tasks defies the point of learning. It is also dishonest and a waste of your time and my time. […] If I suspect you of having used generative AI to complete your writing task, your mark will automatically be 0.

In 2023, this prohibition took care of the problem, but in 2024 it no longer works. This is because machine writing has become virtually indistinguishable from bad human writing.

Machine writing and bad human writing now look the same

Most commentators note that machine-generated text is getting better. This may be true. What has received less attention is the fact that human writing is getting worse as people read less widely. Instead, more and more people seem to model their writing on the bland models of machines.

The feedback loop between reading and writing is breaking down.

The Internet is drowning in an ocean of poor writing, whether created by humans or machines – a phenomenon Matthew Kirschenbaumer has described as the looming “textocalypse:” “a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting.”

Instead of developing their communication skills through audience-focussed practice, my students’ regular writing practice may now be contributing to this tsunami. If students use generative AI, it certainly no longer meets its stated aim – to practice communicating advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.

Where is the line between outsourcing learning to tech and using tech to support learning?

To my mind, the line was clear-cut: to use generative AI is to outsource learning to a machine and therefore pointless. I was not concerned about the use of other language technologies, such as spell checkers, auto-complete, grammar checkers, or auto-translate.

But then I received this student inquiry, which I am reproducing here with the student’s permission:

I am writing to inquire if using the grammar check program for writing tasks is also prohibited.
I’ve been aware that AI generation is prohibited, and I did not use AI for my writing task. I [used all the assigned inputs], and I tried to organize ideas in my first language, then translated them by myself (without using any machine translator).
However, I always use a grammar check program, and sometimes, it suggests better words or expressions that I can adopt by clicking, as I am a paid user of it. I use it because I am unsure if my grammar is okay and understandable. I was wondering if this is also prohibited?

The easy answer to the query is that (automated) translation and grammar checking are allowed because they are not covered by the prohibition.

The more complicated question is whether these practices should be prohibited and, even if not strictly prohibited, whether they are advisable?

Dear reader, I need your input!

Translation as a bridge to English writing?

Let’s start with translation as a form of writing practice. The inputs for the task that triggered this question (Chapter 3 of Life in a New Language, and Language on the Move podcast series about Life in a New Language) were all in English.

After having perused all these inputs in English to then draft the response – a short reflection on the job search experience of one of the participants – in another language is a lot of extra work. You have to process input in English, write in another language, and translate that output.

This extra work may become manageable if it is done by a machine. A generative AI tool could produce a summary of the input in no time. An auto-translate tool could translate the summaries into the other language, again in no time. The student then drafts their response in the other language.

It’s technically the student’s work. Or is it? And, more importantly, is this process developing their English writing and communication?

Grammar checkers, suggested phrasing, and auto-complete

Like the student who posed the question, most of my students are international students, most of whom are still developing their English language skills, at the same time that they are required to learn and perform through the medium of that language.

To avail themselves of all kinds of learning tools is important. I myself use the in-built spell-check, grammar-check, and auto-complete features of MS Word. However, I can evaluate the advice provided by these tools and readily reject it where it’s wrong or inconsistent with my intentions.

Judgement needed: Until recently, the MS Word auto-correct tool incorrectly suggested that the spelling of “in-principle” was “in-principal”

I worry that, for a learner using these tools, these nuances get lost. If the machine is perceived to be always right, language changes from something malleable to form and express our ideas into a right-or-wrong proposition.

Similarly, learning synonyms is important to improve one’s writing. To this day, I regularly look up synonyms when I write with the intent to find the best, the most concise, their clearest expression. However, looking up synonyms for an expression and evaluating the various options is different from receiving automated suggestions and accepting them. One seems like an active, critical form of learning and the other like a passive form of learning. The writer’s sense of ownership and autonomy is different in the two instances.

How best to use language technologies to develop academic literacies and communicative competence?

In sum, most use of language technologies for the kinds of learning tasks I have described here strikes me as counterproductive. Yet, I can also see its uses. Where is the line between using tech to support one’s learning and using tech to avoid doing the hard work of practice, the only way that leads to fluency?

How do you use tech in your university assignments and where do you draw the line? How would you deal with these dilemmas as a teacher?

This book offers a highly readable, concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversies, and the role of the social and political context in shaping their ideas and methods.

In the conversation we focus on the national aspects of the story of modern linguistics: the emergence of the discipline in 19^th century Germany and the passing of the baton to make it an American science in the 20^th century.

James also shares the story of writing the book and how it grew out of the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast he hosts.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel 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 (by Brynn Quick, added 12/04/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr James McElvenny. James, is that how you pronounce your name?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that is how I pronounce my name, but I actually do like to encourage varying pronunciations because I think that will give philologists something to do after I die.

Dist Prof Piller: (laughs) Fantastic, so we’ll try another pronunciation like “Mackelveeney”.

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that’s perfect.

Dist Prof Piller: Dr McElvenny, or James, let’s just do it like that – James is a linguist and an intellectual historian at the University of Siegen in Germany. He is the author of “A History of Modern Linguistics” and also of “Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism”. He also hosts the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast.

Today we are going to talk about his new book, “A History of Modern Linguistics”, which has just come out from Edinburgh University Press. Welcome to the show, James.

Dr McElvenny: Thanks for having me on.

Dist Prof Piller: James, can you start us off by telling us how you got to write a “A History of Modern Linguistics”? Aren’t there enough histories of linguistics already?

Dr McElvenny: There are plenty of histories of linguistics. So, what happened is I was doing a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, and I was teaching their course in the history of linguistics while I was there, and the Linguistics editor at Edinburgh University Press came to me. I had already published my first book with them, and the Linguistics editor said that they would like a text book in the history of linguistics for their linguistics series. So, I thought, “Gee, that should be relatively easy. I can just base it on the course I’ve been teaching.”

And I also long had had the ambition of doing a podcast, so I thought that I might be able to imitate Peter Adamson who does the podcast “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps”, and he’s produced books with Oxford University Press based on that podcast. So, I thought, “I could just turn my lectures into a podcast, and I could turn the podcast into a book.”

It didn’t turn out to be quite as simple as that. So, moving from one text type to another, in my experience, was actually quite complicated. Podcasts have their own format and affordances, which I had to adapt my lectures to. And then turning that into a book was also a huge amount of work to make it into a coherent written text. But it’s done now, so… (laughs).

Dist Prof Piller: And it’s eminently readable, I really enjoyed reading the book so much. I think the process you’ve just described of trying out the text with your students and then turning it into a podcast and then turning it into the book really shows in the readability of the book. So, I enjoyed that immensely.

Dr McElvenny: I’m glad you think so.

Dist Prof Piller: Tell us – how did you actually choose where to begin and where to end, because it’s not a history of the longue durée from the Greek and Sanskrit grammarians to the present day. It’s actually a much narrower project. So, can you tell us about the beginning and the end?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so it’s meant to be a history specifically of disciplinary linguistics. By that I mean this modern discipline of linguistics that we study at universities. So, I think that there’s a great deal of value in a longue durée history of linguistics which is the modes that most histories that have previously been published are written in. They go back to ancient Greece and follow things through the medieval period and the early modern period, right up to the modern era.

That’s very good, but it’s more of a sort of old-fashioned history of ideas kind of approach. And I think there are some problems with that, like it sort of is based on the assumption that there are facts about the nature of language and that we’ve discovered them and that it’s a story of simple progress of us building on what has happened in the past. Of course, we do know a lot of things about language that are the direct result of the research that we do today at universities, but we’ve also forgotten a lot of what has come before. We also have, as university researchers in linguistics departments, we also have a very specific perspective on language. There is much, much more that could be said.

So, I think that it can be problematic to assimilate everything that has come before to say that that is all a prelude to what we do now. All of those things that have come before need to be understood on their own terms. Each of those need their own book, and they have their own books. So, I thought I would start when this modern discipline starts. And I don’t say that nothing came before. I actually do refer back to things that came before when they’re relevant to what is happening in the modern discipline. But I do place a boundary there and say, “This is when the modern discipline starts”. And I say that it’s around the beginning of the 19^th century when modern research universities came into being, the first of those being the University of Berlin, and linguistics as a modern university discipline started to develop.

As for the end point, well that has its own story as well. I actually wanted to come much closer to the present, but I also wanted to get the book finished before my funding ran out. This is one of the contingencies of being a researcher in modern linguistics. So, I decided to end it with WWII where there’s a major shift that the sort of centre of gravity of linguistics as a discipline, and of lots of other university disciplines, shifted from Europe to America. There’s the beginnings of that shift in the book, so I talk about figures like Bloomfield and Sapir, and the so-called American Structuralists, but I don’t venture into the sort of Cold War period when America became preeminent.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and look, I think that makes a whole lot of sense, even if it was sort of an extraneous reason. So, you just stated that essentially the book starts with the foundation of the modern research university in Germany in Berlin University. I’d still like to go one little step before that because your book actually starts with Sir William Jones and the discovery, if you will, of the Indo-European language family. Can you tell us a bit about Sir William Jones and why you started there and what was novel about his work?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean I think it’s easy to over-emphasise the role of Sir William Jones. So, this is the traditional fable of how modern Linguistics came into being. So, I repeat it in the book, but I mark it as the traditional fable. I mention that as soon as Linguistics started to form as a discipline, people started writing histories of Linguistics, and this story that started to develop that there was Sir William Jones and then Schlegel and Bop and then Grimm, and so I repeat it, like I rehearse this story because this is designed as an introduction to the history of Linguistics so that people are aware that this is the traditional narrative.

But at the same time, I try to poke holes in it. So, Sir William Jones is well known because he was a British judge in Calcutta and was very interested in philology. In fact, he probably went to India to pursue his philological interests. He studied Sanskrit, and he gave a famous address where he pointed out the similarities between Sanskrit and ancient Greek and Latin and said that this must mean that they came from a common ancestor. Then this has sort of been taken as the beginning of historical comparative Linguistics.

But if you actually read Sir William Jones’ address, you immediately see that this is not modern Linguistics as we understand it. The framework that he’s putting this genealogical narrative into is actually a Biblical framework. He’s talking about the sons of Noah spreading across the Earth, and that’s how he identifies the families of languages in the world today. So, it’s a sort of medieval hangover.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I really like that idea of the medieval hangover as you put it, and that still we have medieval ideas baked into modern Linguistics. So, let’s then go from William Jones to the German foundations of modern Linguistics. Essentially, you are telling a story of a national discipline that’s grounded in two nations, if you will. The beginnings in Germany in the 19^th century and then the passing of the baton, if you will, to the United States in the 20^th century.

So, why Germany? What was going on in Germany at the time that provided this fertile ground for the creation of this new discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, above all it’s the creation of the research university which is in no small part an achievement of Humboldt, Wilhelm Humboldt, who was himself very interested in language and made sure that professorships in language were represented in the new research university in Berlin and brought Bop to Berlin to pursue his comparative approach to grammar.

But there’s also a broader social and political context which comes out very clearly in the story of Grimm of German nationalism, of trying to show that people who speak German are a unified national group. This is before the days of Germany as a political unit, so it was a project to try and raise German national consciousness as a way of forging a political unity, and also to create a history for the German nation because the great rivals of the Germans at this time, the French, could trace their own intellectual history back to classical Rome, back to the ancient world, whereas the Germans had nothing. They just had barbarians as their ancestors.

But through historical comparative Linguistics, you could show that the Germans actually belonged to this bigger Indo-European family, you know, that links them up with Sanskrit, an even older, more prestigious tradition as was understood in 19^th century Europe.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. So, can you maybe talk us through some of the key linguistic ideas about what’s new in language now? So, if we start with, you’ve mentioned Bop and Grimm – what’s key for Bop and Grimm and maybe the neogrammarians?

Dr McElvenny: Ok, what’s key? Well, the key methodological breakthroughs that they made – so Bop went through the meticulous task of comparing in excruciating detail the conjugational forms across the European languages, and thereby provided a basis of reconstructing to the ancestor that they could have come from. So, instead of talking in sort of general terms about similarity, you could actually show in detail what the ancestral forms would have looked like.

And then Grimm is usually credited with establishing the principles of sound laws, so showing how specific sounds have changed historically over time.

Dist Prof Piller: And I guess this methodological innovation really was new in a sense and was not necessarily well-received by all the key players at the time. Many people sort of thought that Bop in particular was really pedantic. You cite this nice little limerick of sorts about how he’s really a pedant. So, what’s the tradition against which Linguistics established itself as this very formal and very narrow discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so I mean these grammatical tasks, or these details of grammar that people like Bop were interested in that form the basis of comparative grammar were traditionally considered just to be something that you had to know about in order to read texts in an ancient language. The real task was understanding the culture and the literature that is written in these ancient languages and not to obsess about the grammatical forms.

But Bop, for the first time, spearheaded this tradition where grammar becomes the really important thing. You can make your entire career just out of comparing forms, and the literature, what is actually written in the language, is completely irrelevant. Or is of secondary importance.

I think it’s probably fair to say that this is something that characterises Linguistics as a discipline, that Linguistics as a discipline has this sort of fetishisation of form, by which I mean that Linguists want something that their discipline is about. They want an object that they study that is different from what everyone else has. The traditional philologists have literature and culture and so on.

But the linguists have the language itself. They have the grammar. They have the forms. So it’s all about separating the form off. This is what Bop has done, and then with the neogrammarians who you mentioned, they turn this into an art that the sound laws of how languages change become THE key thing. That’s what it’s all about.

Then even if you move into the structuralist era, you could understand Saussure’s distinction between la langue and la parole as being a further manifestation of this desire to hive off language as a special thing that linguists study themselves. La langue is the formal system of the language –

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and it’s an imagined system, right? I mean, he claims or posits this exists and parole is not interesting, but really –

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean it is controversial whether Saussure thought that there could never be any – whether Saussure thought that parole was not interesting at all as a scientific object, but definitely he is usually understood as saying la langue is where all the action is.

Dist Prof Piller: So your book covers these 200 years of intellectual history. There are 15 chapters, and we don’t really have time to go into all of them, but I think you’ve told us very nicely about the German context and where this obsession with form really starts. Let’s maybe jump close to the end of your story, but not quite to the end, not quite to structuralism which is the logical conclusion of the formal obsession. But one step before Sapir and Whorf.

One thing that I’ve noticed, I mean obviously not for the first time, but it’s very clear that the history of modern Linguistics is the history of monolingualism, of national languages, and that there really, because of the way it got started, there really is no interest in language contact and multilingualism and linguistic diversity.

Sapir and Whorf are actually credited with being interested in linguistic diversity. That was actually very important to them, and also drawing on Boaz. So maybe can you tell us a bit about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in quotation marks for everyone who can’t see us. How is that sort of close to the end of your story?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, sure. I’ll quickly say too on the topic of 15 chapters – yeah so there are 15 chapters with content that tell the story, and then an introduction and a conclusion. But I think saying 15 chapters sort of misrepresents the style of the book because it makes it sound like it’s a gigantic tome, but it’s actually a really short book. It’s like, 200 pages, and the chapters are really short. It’s made to be very snappy.

Dist Prof Piller: And it is snappy! It’s really very readable. Sorry to kind of create an impression as this being – I mean I guess we can’t really cover all of these developments here in our conversation.

Dr McElvenny: On the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, yeah, and linguistic diversity, I mean this is a very interesting question. It depends a little bit on what you mean by linguistic diversity, but perhaps what you’re getting at with Sapir and Whorf is this interest in indigenous languages of America and other parts of the world. So, indigenous as opposed to the written standardised languages familiar from the European countries, and that is definitely something they were interested in.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is well known, and you put it in inverted commas because neither Sapir nor Whorf formulated a hypothesis in the sense of something that could be tested, like something could be tested with experiments.

Dist Prof Piller: Could you maybe just tell our audience how the name came about? So, neither of these two men ever claimed that they had formulated a hypothesis, and still that’s all we can think of now. I mean, it’s one of the most well known linguistic facts, if you will, outside the academy.

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, the first attestation of the term as far as I’m aware, in print, comes from Harry Hoijer, who had been a student of Sapir’s from the 1950s, so after both Sapir and Whorf had died. Hoijer used the term in the context of a conference that he had convened on the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, so on the idea that there’s some sort of connection between language and thought, or perhaps that even language influences thought.

Sapir and Whorf didn’t formulate a hypothesis as such, but they definitely wrote lots of things about the interplay between language and thought. Whorf perhaps more so. I think one of the most, well there’s a few interesting things that can be said about the background to both Sapir and Whorf’s ideas on linguistic relativity as you could also describe it. One is that there is a German tradition which Sapir was directly in touch with, and Boaz as well who was Sapir’s doctoral supervisor and mentor. This goes back to Humboldt and so on, and that’s also something I talk about in the book.

But there’s also a contemporary context for Sapir emphasising linguistic relativity, that language creates a worldview and shapes how we see the world, and Whorf too for that matter. This contemporary context is there was a lot of discussion on a political level on propaganda in the period between WWI and WWII. This was the era in which totalitarianism arose in central Europe and eastern Europe as well. There was a feeling that propaganda often had a linguistic basis, that it was a deliberate abuse of language to shape the way people think, to sort of brainwash them.

This finds an expression also in the philosophy of the period, so in early analytic philosophy or in the earliest works that fed into what later became analytic philosophy of people like Bertrand Russell, but even Wittgenstein, you can see this discourse that we need to purify language in order to be able to think clearly and logically. So, this is what motivated Russell’s Logical Atomism. He says this as much in his scholarly writings but also in his popular writings where he’s presenting his ideas.

And there was a whole ecosystem of popular books, so like The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards, which forms the basis, or is one of the major works that I talk about in my first book Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism. But also Korzybski with General Semantics, and so on. There’s a whole heap of these.

So, I think that it’s fair to say that Sapir in emphasising linguistic relativity was picking up on this discourse, and you can find Sapir also directly referring to this discourse of how language can be abused to brainwash people. I believe that Sapir was picking up on this discourse and using it as a justification for doing linguistic scholarship. So, Sapir says by studying diverse languages, so languages that have a very different structure from the familiar European languages, such as the indigenous languages of America, we can get a completely different view on the world. We can see how what we assume to be a fact is just an illusion created by our language. This also comes out very clearly in Whorf’s writings, and Whorf is perhaps more explicit about it too.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I was fascinated by how you describe that. Partly the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a form of language critique, and of course that feeds into another key tension that runs through modern Linguistics, the tension between descriptivism and prescriptivism and whether we just describe language or we actually engage with the meanings of language.

Before we end, I’d like to quickly draw one other kind of dichotomy or tension that also comes out really nicely in your book, and that is sort of the establishment of Linguistics as a scientific discipline, and the ambition to be scientific, but at the same time the constant undercurrent of all kinds of romantic ideas. There is the German Romanticism but also the romanticisation of ancient India for instance, so that’s a big topic. Or then Whorf and his spiritual world view.

So, can you maybe talk about this tension a bit more as Linguistics as a science, but Linguistics also as a romantic philosophy or the spiritual undercurrents?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, definitely. This is actually a topic that is much broader than disciplinary Linguistics itself. It has to do with what is considered in this period from the 19^th century to the present, what is considered legitimate scholarship and what is considered science.

So, the English word “science” generally only refers to natural science. We make a clear distinction between the sciences in the sense of the natural sciences and the humanities. I can’t really think if there’s a superordinate term that would cover both of those. I don’t know in English; I don’t think so. Scholarship?

Dist Prof Piller: Hmm, “research”?

Dr McElvenny: Research, yeah, research perhaps. But in the European context, like Wissenschaft, can also be, it can be Geisteswissenschaften, Naturwissenschaft – well do they have their own methods? And do they have their own objects of study? Or are they both two different manifestations of the same thing? This is a debate that ran throughout the 19^th century and influenced Linguistics.

So, by the end of the century, well, if we start at the beginning of the century, the Humboldtian university was very much oriented towards the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften. They were the more important ones, and the natural sciences were considered to be less prestigious. But as the century bore on, the natural sciences could show all sorts of amazing discoveries in fundamental physics in chemistry, and all sorts of really interesting and useful applications of these discoveries in the development of technology – so electricity and new medicines and new chemicals that were synthesised and so on.

So, the natural sciences grew in prestige during the 19^th century, and by the 1880s this became a bit of a sticking point for the humanities, and in Linguistics there was this question of whether Linguistics should orient itself towards the natural sciences or whether it should claim its own special method as one of the humanities. The neogrammarians, of course, were very strongly on the natural science end of this debate with their emphasis on sound laws, saying that these are a kind of natural law.

But critics of the neogrammarians, people like Schuchardt, were saying that that doesn’t make any sense, that the sound laws are not like natural laws because they have limited applicability. They only work in a single language or a single dialect, and they only work for a certain period of time. They go to completion, so they can’t be equated to things like the law of gravity, which applies everywhere in the universe. So, someone like Schuchardt argued it’s just trying to grasp at the prestige, incorrectly, of the natural sciences by importing this to Linguistics.

I say that this came to a head in the 1880s, but it was already building up through the century. Schleicher, another figure who I talk about in the book, in mid-century was already going down this path where the debate was more in terms of materialism, as I described in the book, which is more a debate about whether laws of matter, like laws of physics, tell us everything we need to know about the world, or whether there is a special world of the soul or world of the mind that exists separately from this.

This debate continued after this period. It didn’t end in the 19^th century, but it’s probably fair to say that the model that has won out in Linguistics is very much a scientistic model that wants to orient Linguistics as a discipline to a sort of natural scientific conception of the world.

Dist Prof Piller: One question maybe. So, for a sociolinguist like myself, one thing that is very noticeable in your history is that there really was no place in the story of the birth of modern Linguistics, there was no place for linguistic diversity. There was no place for language contact. There was no place for multilingualism and all those kinds of things that weren’t clearly tied to “one nation, one language”, if you will.

So, can you maybe talk a bit about this history that is not there and how that got back into Linguistics again? Or how it was written out?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I think it was written out because of this form fetishism, of this obsession with the language as the object of study that is an entity in its own right, and the job of the linguist is to describe its grammar and so on. Because if you make the language into the thing that you are studying, then there’s no space for speakers. It’s not about people speaking language, it’s about this abstract thing that exists independently of them.

But even in the 19^th century, you know, I talk about William Dwight Whitney. Even William Dwight Whitney in the mid 19^th century started to talk about diversity in texts, so he still had a philological method where he was analysing written texts, but he looked at the distribution of different sounds in the texts. He produced tables and calculated statistically how sound was distributed, not using the sophisticated statistical methods that we know today, but still talking in terms of percentages and using that to describe tendencies in the development of languages. On a theoretical level he also talked about the individual speaking subject and how people interacting with each other in language will influence each other, and how an individual might innovate a change, but then it has to be ratified by the speech community to become part of the language.

There were other figures as well into the latter half of the 19^th century who talked about the speaking subject and their place in the community of speakers. But it is definitely true that this was a minority, an oppositional position that you could take in studying language because the default position in Linguistics was to talk about the language as an abstract thing.

The introduction of modern sociolinguistics, or the advent of modern sociolinguistics, is probably, I think it’s fair to say, a phenomenon mostly of the post WWII era. So, it definitely has roots that go back earlier than that, but as a sub-discipline in its own right it’s a post WWII thing. So, you’ll have to wait for volume II of the book to be able to find out about that.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s brilliant. So is that what’s next for you, James? Volume II? Post World War?

Dr McElvenny: Well, if I get funding, yes. (laughs)

Dist Prof Piller: Brilliant. So looking forward to that and very much hope you’ll get the funding. Thanks again, James.

Thank you 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 recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Until next time!

Enjoy this latest episode of Chats in Linguistic Diversity! The conversation is a sequel to our previous conversation about whether we can ever unthink linguistic nationalism.

Edited transcript below

Can you tell us about the story behind Multilingualism and history?

I have a very short answer and a somewhat longer answer to your question.

The short answer: this is the book I always wanted to read. And I was hoping that somebody else would write it or edit it. That never happened.

The longer answer is that it’s a very natural outcome of the way I see my scholarly trajectory.

If you remember when we were junior scholars, our main preoccupations were, “I want to be heard, I desperately want to be published.” And then you go along and then you start thinking, “What are the conversations going on? How can I contribute to these conversations?”

And then you go along and you start thinking, “What conversations are not happening? How can we start them?”

And you and I have both been very successful starting some conversations about gender, identity, emotions. I’ve also been very lucky to start conversations about forensic linguistics.

And so it seemed like the path is very clear. You put together an invited colloquium, maybe a workshop, you put together a special issue. An edited volume. And you are building a network of people, and you get people interested, and you get people excited, and I’ve always believed that history was another missing piece.

But nothing was ever easy with history and multilingualism. Because when people heard about gender and emotions and identity, it made sense to them. It was relevant. It was relevant to the present moment. But history seemed utterly irrelevant to multilingualism in the digital age.

And so the long answer is the purpose of this edited volume. It’s to make historic research relevant to sociolinguists in a very pointed way because this research undermines the foundational myth of our field which is that we live in a world that’s more multilingual than ever before. When in reality we live in a world that’s less multilingual than ever before.

And the historians know this.

How is Multilingualism and History structured? What topics are being addressed and who are the contributors?

The choices I made was not to be comprehensive, but to highlight what is novel and interesting. So, for example, the pivotal chapter by Ben Fortna shows the transformation of a very multilingual Ottoman Empire into a very monolingual nation state of Turkey. It follows the transformation in a way that for me is emblematic of the main point made in the book.

Susan Gal talks about language ideologies that shape the ways linguists themselves work, and see multilingualism, which is also very relevant.

Or I invited Roland Willemyns to contribute a chapter on why Dutch failed as a lingua franca. Because we love talking about Latin and English and other Lingua Francas, but we never think about languages that were poised to become a lingua franca but never became one. Why is that?

So for me, each chapter highlights a novel dimension in relationships with language in ways that we often don’t talk about.

Ads in Polish and Yiddish for Halpern’s fabric store and warehouse, Skład towarów bławatnych, on Nalyvaiko street, 13 (at the turn of the 20th century the street – then known as Rzeżnicka – was inhabited primarily by Jews). Lviv, September 2019. Photo by A. Pavlenko

The progression in the book is chronological from ancient Egypt to modern day.

The aim of this volume was never to be comprehensive and to only show that multilingualism was here. Multilingualism was there. Because if that’s what I wanted, I would have edited a very different book. The challenge for me is not in the many contexts where we can find multilingualism. But in the story that we have been telling ourselves. And the story we’ve been telling ourselves is a very European, Western story. And we got it wrong.

How did we get the history of multilingualism wrong?

There was a lot of forgetting that happened in the early part and the middle of the twentieth century. And a lot of lack of intergenerational transmission.

It also has to do with the incredible dominance of English as an academic language that emerged in the second part of the twentieth century. That led to the loss of multilingual knowledge that no longer made it into the sociolinguistic mainstream. And that unfortunately also extends to historians.

In my introduction to the volume, I cite one very bitter German historian who says that American historians write the history of the colonial United States without looking at documents in European languages like Dutch and French and Swedish. Not to mention Native American languages.

It has become acceptable to be a scholar of multilingualism while not knowing more than one language. It has become acceptable to be historian while being monolingual. And that is part of forgetting.

To an English speaker, multilingualism is an unusual phenomenon worthy of study. For me, it’s a rediscovery of the wheel. It’s the process of historical amnesia.

Let’s talk a bit more about amnesia and ignorance pacts.

The term “ignorance pacts” is from Joshua Fishman, who talked about the reciprocal ignorance pacts between sociolinguists and sociologists, which made sociolinguistics a very provincial, parochial discipline.

Café Sztuka, with restored Polish and Yiddish ads for groceries and haberdashery. Kotlyarska street 8. Lviv, September 2019. Photo by A. Pavlenko.

And of course, Fishman is still that generation of scholars who are trained in a much broader tradition than we’re currently trained. And so when you spend a lot of time in the field, as you and I did, what becomes apparent?

When we started out in the 1990s, there were 3 journals focusing on bilingualism. It was hard to get a publication in, but everybody was reading everybody else, everybody knew everybody else. Since then, our own field, just like other fields, has experienced a tremendous growth. And the growth came with many positives but also with many negatives such as the fragmentation of the field.

And this split into academic tribes with their own little conventions. Their own publications, their own conferences. Bilingualism people for some reason meet separately from the multilingualism people. And the sociolinguists of multilingualism, bilingualism, live in a very different world from the psycholinguists.

Where do data about past multilingualism come from and what methods do we use in the study of historical multilingualism?

By definition, the spoken word is fleeting and so everything that we have pretty much is written records and that, of course, has limits.

The challenges are also advantages because when you look at multilingualism in the past the degree to which we privilege the spoken word becomes very obvious.

In reality, the data is plentiful for many contexts. As of today, there’s still many little clay tablets and many papyruses sitting there unread, containing precious information: administrative records, bureaucratic records, receipts, letters. There is a ton of information to be gained about all aspects of history, economics, politics, and also multilingualism from such trivial things, such as bureaucratic receipts, court records, administrative correspondence.

Moreover, when we look at evidence such as, for example, travel accounts by pilgrims. They also pick up on oral language practices. The eyewitness accounts of these people bring very precious information about what we would call oral practices. And the same goes for court records.

Bilingualism was foundational to the development of literacy. And that is not something we talk about. We kind of imagine the trajectory being the other way around. But people go on and appropriate scripts from other languages and make them their own.

What do ghost signs tell us about past multilingualism?

Ghost signs are very commonly painted, sometimes faded ads. That have lost their functional significance. The business they’re advertising, for example, is no longer there. The store is no longer there. But the sign is still there. And people love them just for the aesthetics for an immediate connection to the past.

Nevsky Prospect 20, St Petersburg, with Russian signs, German signs for St Petersburger Zeitung, the German bookstore and library of Andreas Isler, and a French sign for the Grand Magasin de Paris (ca. 1900)

The capital of ghost signs is the Ukrainian city of Lviv, which before World War 2 was the Polish city of Lwów and before that was the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg.

And so the signs in Lviv are in German and Polish and Yiddish; three languages that are no longer spoken on its streets.

And when you start seeing those signs, some of them very nicely repainted and spruced up, you start asking yourself, well, what is the function of the signs? If they are not really about Ukrainian history, what are they doing on the streets of a modern Ukrainian city?

They tell a story of how multinational the city of Lviv has always been, and an example of the tolerant coexistence between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. And that is a kind of statement that doesn’t make sense on many different levels.

First of all, because the Ukrainian language is missing from the signs. It was not very much in use in signage before World War II in a Polish city.

Secondly, we all know of the historic antagonism between the three main populations, so the coexistence was by no means very tolerant.

The multilingualism was real, it was there, but it was hierarchical. If you were Polish, you may learn German, but you’re not going to learn Ukrainian or Yiddish, but if you were Jewish you would have to learn everybody else’s language, in addition to Yiddish and Hebrew.

Even more importantly, the signs that make this very smooth artificial transition from a Polish to a Ukrainian city obfuscate the amount of violence that took place in the city during and after World War 2, that transformed a historically Polish city into a Ukrainian city through the genocide of its Jewish population, and ethnic cleansing and deportation of its Polish population.

We don’t just innocently reimagine history. We reshape people’s perceptions of what happened in the past. And that is what the ghost signs are very successfully doing. They’re creating someone else’s history. In this case, the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was cosmopolitan, the history of multilingual Poland – to give a very respectable aura of cosmopolitanism to a modern Ukrainian city, that is by no means very tolerant. In my fieldwork I found not a single sign in the language of the largest linguistic minority of the city of Lviv, which is Russian.

How is the past entangled in the present and the future?

It breaks my heart to see war in my homeland of Ukraine. It broke my heart to see Russia invade Ukraine, cruelly, with no justification. Nobody can justify that.

But it also breaks my heart to see the Ukrainian government using the very same invasion to push forth language policies that have been unpopular before and making them popular. Taking down every monument in a Russian writer, reducing the uses of the Russian language further because it’s presumably the language of the enemy and not the language of the population.

And that is something that no sociolinguist comments on because presumably that is okay. We are okay with linguistic nationalism in certain forms. That to me is hypocritical.

International Women’s Day is a great opportunity to share news about the book and reflect on the strength of women’s academic collaborations.

***

Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Vera Williams Tetteh

***

Life in a new language

Life in a new language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years.

The aim is to understand the dual challenge of learning a new language while living one’s life through the medium of that language. This is a challenge that remains poorly understood and non-migrants tend to underestimate its severity and the hardships involved.

1. There is the shock of finding oneself in a new linguistic environment where you may not understand much of what is going on around you, while all the time being cognizant of the fact that not understanding what is going on may have acute repercussions for your wellbeing.
2. There is the difficulty of finding work that will not only pay the bills but also sustain your ambitions and self-worth. Most participants took years to recapture their careers, many never did.
3. To improve proficiency in the new language, migrants need to interact in the new language, a task that is made difficult by the frequent absence of interlocutors willing to indulge newcomers, a lack of common topics, and the pervasiveness of misunderstandings. Misunderstandings may go on to reverberate through future interactions as each misunderstanding leads to a loss of confidence that needs to be reclaimed over time.
4. Migration intrudes even into the most intimate domains of life and alters family roles and relationships. It is not only that familial obligations and duties are redistributed but also that new family tasks emerge. Prominent among these are new ways of parenting, including setting an—implicit or explicit—family language policy, and managing child language learning of both new and heritage languages. As children usually learn the new language faster, the potential impact of their superior (oral) proficiency on parental authority can become another tribulation for adult migrants.
5. Migration continues to be imagined as a point of difference from the idealized sedentary mainstream population of their destination. This difference often marks those with a migration history as perpetual outsiders to their new society. Difference may be audible in their ways of speaking and visible where they are differently racialized. Experiences of Othering, exclusion, discrimination, and racism based on such differences create another level of adversity, as migrants need to cope with micro-aggressions, invalidations, insults, and sometimes even assaults.
6. Migration severs the self into a before and after. As pre-migration habits and identities have disappeared, new selves with a new sense of belonging, home, and community need to be fashioned.

Through the voices of our participants, we document the magnitude and anatomy of these challenges. Understanding them leads to an appreciation of migrants’ courage, perseverance, and resilience.

Ethnographic data-sharing and re-use

The research behind Life in a new language was conducted over a period of more than 20 years in six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies. For this book project, we revisited those six projects, shared our data, and re-analyzed them to answer questions about language learning, employment, interaction, parenting, experiences with racism, and sense of belonging.

Our methodological approach was inspired by open science principles and the desire to share our data and to pool our existing resources to be able to paint a bigger picture of language and migration. While most researchers now accept the value of data sharing and reuse, implementation and practice remain patchy, particularly when it comes to qualitative data in the humanities and social sciences. In ethnographic research, data sharing and reuse is in its infancy as researchers struggle with questions on what open research might even mean for them and how to implement FAIR principles, i.e., making their data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. These problems are compounded by time pressures and the absence of tried and tested workflows for reanalyzing and bringing to publication shared datasets.

During one of our rare in-person writing workshops

As such, Life in a new language ventures into unchartered methodological territory. We explain the academic motivations, affordances and limitations we encountered in the book. Here, we want to share a more personal story.

The story behind the book

Life in a new language is co-authored by six academic women, who have collaborated over an extended period as members of the Language on the Move research team. Donna, Emily, Shiva, and Vera conducted their PhD research under Ingrid’s supervision, and Loy was mentored by Ingrid as an early career researcher.

As such, Life in a new language shows what can be done with linguistic ethnography and provides a working model for how to combine existing small datasets into larger longitudinal studies of a social phenomenon or practice. It also provides a framework for supervising academics and their doctoral students to create a research and publishing community of practice that connects separate higher degree research projects under a single, post-award project umbrella. Similarly, our study provides a model for early career and experienced scholars to work together to create and analyze big datasets from qualitative methods of inquiry.

Life in a new language is personal in yet another way. For the six of us, the intersection of language learning and settlement is not only an academic research topic. Beyond our academic expertise, we share with our participants the experience of being migrant speakers. Like our participants, our group of authors reflects the diversity of 21^st century Australia. All of us are settlers on Indigenous land. We or our ancestors have come to Australia from Germany, Ghana, Iran, Ireland, the Philippines, and Yugoslavia. Those four of us who came to Australia as adults share with our participants the experience of settling in a new country through the medium of a new language. Our experience as English language teachers and teacher trainers also informs our account. We hope that the way we have pooled our lived experiences in a unique intercultural team to write this book will add richness and depth to our account.

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

First up: Katja from Poland
Katja’s engineering degree was not recognized in Australia. She retrained as a beautician. Tremendous skills loss for herself and our society
1/n https://t.co/ehvPDznp6f

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 7, 2023

Good things really do take time

Data collection on the first project to feed into our analysis started in 2000, but the idea for the book and the reanalysis of previously collected datasets started to take shape in 2018, just around the time one of us had a baby. Seeing this little person ready to start school now, has been the yardstick for how long it has taken us to turn a brilliant idea into a completed manuscript.

We not only got derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but we also discovered that writing a truly co-authored book with a team of six authors, who are not even co-located, is more challenging than anticipated. It is also much more rewarding and fun.

We learned that the principles of open science can be best brought to life through the spirit of collaboration, engagement, dialogue, and friendship that guided our endeavor. And we warmly recommend collaborative writing to all academic women this International Women’s Day because pooling strengths can better keep us all afloat.

What’s next?

We hope we have whetted your appetite for Life in a new language. The academic publication process is a protracted one and we will share key dates here on Language on the Move as they come to hand.

For now, people in Sydney might want to pencil our International Symposium on Bilingualism workshop devoted to the project into their diaries. For everyone else, we have started a Twitter series @lg_on_the_move, where you can meet one of each of our 130 participants per day while we count down to publication.

Related International Women’s Day content

• 2021, Remembering cancelled women
• 2020, Female academics and shamans face the same glass ceiling
• 2019, Why are there so few notable academic women?
• 2018, Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• 2013, Migrant women’s empowerment in the city
• 2012, Strange Academic women

Challenge yourself to read one book in each category! Our team have compiled an exciting list of suggestions.

January: Literature produced on the move

Ingrid Piller recommends the other side of hope.

The other side of hope is a UK-based literary magazine edited by refugees and immigrants. Publishing one print and one online issue per year, the magazine offers a smorgasbord of short stories, poems, novel extracts, non-fiction writing, and book reviews from a highly diverse group of writers. Many of the works deal with linguistic diversity and the challenges of language learning. The most recent issue contains two poems that will show you new dimensions of English as a lingua franca, and phonetics in a diverse world.

February: A book about open access

Emily Farrell recommends Open Access by Peter Suber.

How do we broaden the readership of our research, increase impact and trust in science? Open access and open research have become a vital part of the answer to this question. If you’re interested in getting a better understanding of the basics of open access, there’s no better place to start than Peter Suber’s succinct, but detailed, overview Open Access. Suber, Senior Advisor on Open Access (Harvard Library) and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project (the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society) is an authority on the topic. Although the book is over 10 years old, it remains relevant and Suber continues to update and supplement the book here.

March: A book about language on the move in cyberspace

Because Internet is out in paperback TOMORROW (for ordering-via-the-internet purposes, that's practically today)

Same bright yellow cover, now with 10x more nice quotes from people

Get it for anyone you communicate with online: https://t.co/YOl6jNrVZG pic.twitter.com/O7cL47cSxQ

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) July 20, 2020

Brynn Quick recommends Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch.

Have you ever wondered why Boomers’ well-meaning texts can be full of ellipses that make Millennials and Gen Z shudder?  Or why language evolves quickly on Twitter but not on Facebook?  What exactly is a “typographical tone of voice”, and why is it an essential part of our identities?  Gretchen answers these questions and more in this fascinating and highly readable 2019 book.  Whether you are a tech genius, a luddite, or something in between, Because Internet will take you on a journey into the world of language evolution via the internet of the past four decades.

April: A book about language on the move in a language other than English

Hanna Torsh recommends Warum Deutsch bellt und Französisch schnurrt [Why German barks and French purrs] by François Conrad.

This is a light-hearted and engaging exploration of the sounds of German in comparison to other languages of central Europe. The book describes the European travels of a young German student and his dog, Horst and Strumpf, as they meet up with multilingual friends in five countries and attempt to puzzle out the main phonological differences between their national languages. This he does at the behest of his friend Konrad, a linguist and researcher who knows the answers but wants his friend to work it out for himself.

May: A book about linguistic diversity in the workplace

Jean Cho and Madiha Neelam recommend Communication that Counts: Language Practice and Ideology in Globalized Accounting by Pia Tenedero.

Communication that counts demystifies a persistent stereotype that accountants are only good with numbers and bad with communication. With the accounting industry in the Philippines, a major exporter of human resources in Global South thanks to English language proficiency, as a key site of examination, this thought-provoking book challenges the conventional approaches to communication skills of accountants as lacking and deficient by exploring what counts as good communication and why. Written from a Global South Perspective, the book provides deep insights into the taken-for-granted communication “standards”, opening up a new perspective on the power of language ideologies in English-speaking workplaces and beyond. (Jean Cho)

The book examines the language and communication practices and ideologies in the field of accounting in the context of the Philippines. The author examines prevailing perspectives on “communication” and examines how these views are shaped in the accounting industry from the perspective of the Global South. The author also analyses the concept of “good communication” in the field of globalized accounting. The book is an excellent and practical example of how good communication is perceived globally and works in a real-world context, with the Philippines, which is a world leader in offshore accounting, rightly chosen as the research site. (Madiha Neelam)

For more information see “Language that counts.”

June: A book about linguistic diversity in the family

Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame by Hanna Torsh.

This book investigates linguistically intermarried couples’ language attitudes and practices in a migration context, specifically in Sydney, Australia. The monograph sets out to explore how ideologies influence family language policy in linguistic intermarriage and the attitudes towards languages other than English (LOTEs) from the perspective of the English-speaking partner (ESP). The author exposes the gendered nature of language work as an intrinsic part of motherhood. She compellingly argues that the linguistically intermarried couple is a “site where celebratory discourses of multilingualism meet exclusionary approaches to linguistic diversity” (p.1), as she could identify both pride and shame regarding LOTEs.

July: Take a break and read something completely different

Ingrid Piller recommends Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

Year after year I have watched the administrative dimensions of my job increase. Teaching used to be about knowing your content, deliver it in an engaging way, and examining students for graduation. Now, teaching also involves strategy development, performance targets, quality audits, program reviews, student evaluations, performance appraisals, and what not. Graeber explains this state of affairs as the “bullshitization” of work and explores its harm to individuals and societies.

August: A book about linguistic diversity in history

Vera Williams Tetteh recommends Sheroes of the Haitian Revolution, written by Bayyinah Bello with illustrations by Kervin Andre.

This book portrays ‘our story’ – stories of ten women of African descent who played key roles in the Haitian Revolution against European colonisers but who are often rendered invisible in ‘his story’ directed accounts. The book inserts these sheroes’ stories to boldly rectify some of the injustice served when women and their feats get systematically erased from ‘his story’ books. The book also profiles a collection of the women’s words while offering glimpses into ‘our story’ inscribed feminine brilliance, bravery, tenacity and the courage of the women which centuries on, live after them. For instance, it tells the fascinating story of Empress Felicite, including her active role in the writing of child protection clauses into the Imperial Constitution of 1805, as well as her Soup Joumou, a Haitian Independence Soup tradition she initiated which is observed yearly from 1^st to 7^th January. A great read!

September: An ethnography of linguistic diversity

Gegentuul Baioud recommends Mongolian Sound Worlds edited by Jennifer C. Post, Sunmin Yoon, and Charlotte D’Evelyn.

Scholars from different fields have written about the lifeways, diverse identities, histories, political economy, languages, and cultures of Mongols in the last few decades. But there is one lens through which we can gain a glimpse of how all these dimensions work together. That is Mongolian music-making. Mongolian Sound Worlds, edited by Jennifer C. Post, Sunmin Yoon, and Charlotte D’Evelyn vividly weaves all these threads together into a multicolored tapestry. The first part “Landscapes and soundscapes” focuses on how music-making constitutes place-making and memory-making and how musical practices shape and are shaped by changing lifeways. The second part, “Ethnicity and diversity”, explores how music-making practices constitutes a site to negotiate sub-ethnic group identities, gender, and cultural hierarchies. The third part, “Material and social history” introduces musical instruments from the perspectives of their makers and performers. The fourth part, “Heritage and globalization” deals with the key question of how Mongolian music-making has evolved in response to nationalization and globalization processes. The book Mongolian Sound Worlds is a compelling contribution to the fields of ethnomusicology, sociolinguistics, Inner Asia studies, heritage studies, and folklore studies.

October: A book about gendered multilingualism

Jean Cho recommends Muslim Women as Speakers of English by Madiha Neelam.

This book makes the voices of perhaps one of the most under-represented groups heard – Muslim immigrant women who speak English as their second language. The book demystifies the negative images of Muslim women, particularly those associated with English language proficiency, by exploring the intersections between language ideologies, gender and race. It innovatively exposes the covert operation of language ideologies as a tool to oppress minority groups through which to maintain the interest of the dominant. This important book opens up a critical perspective on the power of language ideologies in English-speaking countries and beyond.

November: A book about language workers

Pia Tenedero recommends Intercultural communication in interpreting: power and choices by Jean Cho.

This book opens with an unsettling vignette that gives a glimpse of the hidden linguistic-cum-moral dilemmas that professional interpreters navigate. Real-life narratives of these under-recognized intercultural communicators form the core of this book, viewed through cultural lenses that highlight tensions in their language work across differential linguistic and cultural contexts. In these highly complex communication scenarios, a big question is how to balance the norms of professional interpretation and the interpreter’s agency in order to communicate not just accurate messages but, perhaps more importantly, compassion. The stories of Jean’s fellow interpreters in Australia, Korea, and Japan provide readers a critical point of reflection—What would you do if you were the interpreter?

December: A book about language and globalization

Ingrid Piller recommends Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters.

I’m old enough to remember a time when the concept of “mental health” was not widely known outside psychiatric circles. Now, of course, we live in a mental health epidemic. Watters traces how Americans brought anorexia to Hong Kong, PTSD to Sri Lanka, schizophrenia to Zanzibar, and depression to Japan. None of these are strictly contagious diseases yet rampant individualism, commercialization, and the Western superiority complex have spread them like wildfire – all the while ignoring local idioms of distress and indigenous ways of coping with life’s traumas.

Happy Reading!

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

***

Judith Reynolds, Sara Ganassin and Prue Holmes

***

Readers of Language On The Move will be familiar with the idea that different languages and language varieties are imbued with different levels of social prestige, and that language use and language choice are closely tied up with issues of social justice in many contexts. But have you ever considered what impact the language choices made during a multilingual research process might have on the research outcomes, and on the individuals involved in research?

The Politics of Researching Multilingually

In our recently published edited volume The Politics of Researching Multilingually, this question is critically and reflexively explored by researchers from across the social sciences, many of whom are researching in global South contexts. We asked our contributors to think, write and research about the political dimensions of how they did researching multilingually, defined as ‘the process and practice of using, or accounting for the use of, more than one language in the research process’ (Holmes et al., 2016, p. 101). The result is a collection of 16 powerful chapters, in which our authors write candidly about their own ideological positions towards the languages involved in their research, their changing awareness of the power effects inherent in language choices and language use in research, and their journeys towards ‘researcher intentionality’ (Stelma and Fay, 2014; Stelma, Fay and Zhou, 2013) when researching in or through multiple languages.

In introducing the volume, we argue that our decisions about how we use linguistic resources in research are political, in that they involve the negotiation of relationships of unequal power in aspects such as the selection of research topics, engaging with different stakeholders, navigating the language hierarchies in play in the different contexts of the research, and determining the languages of dissemination of the research. The volume thematises both the constraints on researchers working multilingually, and their responses to such constraints, under four themes briefly presented here.

Hegemonic structures

Under the theme of hegemonic structures, contributions critically examine the role of institutional structures such as funding bodies, gatekeepers, the academy and the publishing industry in prioritising and legitimising or delegitimising certain languages in research.

In the context of French academia, Adam Wilson discusses the double linguistic burden placed on researchers seeking to publish and advance their careers in a dual French- and English-dominated globalised academic environment. In turn, Shameem Oozeerally describes the tensions involved in working as an interdisciplinary and multilingual research team in a Mauritian university context defined by a particular linguistic ideology and epistemological stance.

Lamia Nemouchi and Prue Holmes reflect on the experience of an international doctoral researcher implementing a project grounded in fieldwork in the multilingual context of Algeria, yet which was framed by the Anglo-monolingual conventions and expectations of a British university. In a different context, Wine Tesseur’s reflexive account of doing research about language practices within international NGOs operating in Kyrgyzstan emphasises the imperative to accommodate languages other than English in the research process.

Overall in this section of the volume, the impact of institutional frameworks of power on researching multilingually are highlighted.

Power relations

Trilingual sign at Mouloud Mammeri University in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria (Image credit: Wikiwand)

In contrast, within the second theme of power relations, contributions focus on the micro-interactional dimension of power and its negotiation in and through language use and language choices in a range of research spaces and relationships.

Jessica Chandras offers an ethnographic account of her heritage language learning process in the context of class- and caste-bound Indian-Pune society, and reflects on how this impacted on her research outcomes. In a study about multilingual refugee children in Cyprus, Alexandra Georgiou demonstrates the importance of understanding children’s views and perspectives through their own forms of expression using an inclusive research practice.

Helina Hookoomsing also highlights language choices and power dynamics in engaging in research focused on children’s multilingualism, albeit in the postcolonial context of multilingual Mauritius. In a further multilingual postcolonial context, Olga Camila Hernández Morales and Anne-Marie de Mejía discuss how they dealt with the linguistic hierarchies manifest in the Caribbean island of San Andrés in order to give access to the voices of the participants.

The contributions within this theme remind us that research is a domain of social life like any other, with inherent power dynamics that are negotiated in, with and through language(s).

Decolonising methodologies

The third theme of decolonising methodologies highlights how contributors to the volume have sought to address issues of inequality and voice in their research by drawing on methodological innovations and non-Eurocentric epistemologies.

Reporting on research examining community radio in rural India, Bridget Backhaus adopts a cognitive justice framework to theorise her collaboration with a local interpreter. In turn, in the context of a research project focusing on language learning experiences of forced migrants in Luxembourg, Erika Kalocsányiová and Malika Shatnawi describe a collaborative process of work between researcher and translator to faithfully represent participants’ complex linguistic repertoires on the page.

In the sphere of participatory arts research, Michael Richardson offers a reflexive account of the design and implementation of a UK based research project in deaf theatre, aiming to give equal prominence to spoken and signed languages. Finally, in a broader and more longitudinal account of their careers in research, Julie Byrd Clark and Sylvie Roy explore transdisciplinary and relational processes of interculturality that they have operationalised in their research on multilingual education for migrant youth in Canada.

The theme emphasises that when researching multilingually, researchers can and should engage in active processes of reshaping and repurposing the methodologies available to them in the research canon, in order to address epistemic and representational imbalances arising from and through language(s).

Decolonising languages

In the final theme of decolonising languages, contributors give accounts of the impact on their research of first, recognising that ‘named languages’ (Li, 2018, p. 19) often associated with nation-states are inherently political instruments carrying ideological baggage for participants; and second, acknowledging that human communication extends beyond named languages into languaging and translanguaging.

Welcome to Gagauzia! (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In this part of the volume, Rebekah Gordon proposes an approach to working multilingually with US-based transnational language teachers grounded in translanguaging pedagogy, that seeks to engage the linguistic and cultural repertoires of both researcher and participants. Liliane Meyer Pitton and Larissa Semiramis Schedel document language choices made in the different research phases of three projects conducted in Western Europe, exploring the reasons for these choices and analysing their (dis)empowering effects for researchers and researched.

Writing from Colombia, Rosa Alejandra Medina Riveros and Teresa Austin draw on critical multilingualism and translanguaging perspectives in their account of the research practices they developed for making decisions in a decolonising spirit in pedagogical research in this context. Finally, Christiana Holsapple shares an autoethnographic account of her own process of coming to understand the shifting significations and political nature of language practices in the Moldovan region of Gagauzia.

This theme opens the door to deeper conversations about the nature of research as a language process and product, and its potential to both preserve and maintain the status quo of established power relations and to disrupt, contest and resist that status quo.

Researchers as political actors

Overall, the volume takes a stance presenting researchers who research multilingually as social actors with the capacity for political action. We encourage all researchers, and particularly those involved in sociolinguistic, applied linguistic and/or intercultural communication research, to: (a) reflect actively on your own linguistic resources and those of others involved in the research; (b) become aware of the political and ideological implications of these language(s) in the spaces and relationships of research; and (c) take purposeful decisions about how to use which language(s) in research processes in ways that further the ultimate goals of the research and those whom it is intended to benefit.

Related content

Piller, Ingrid. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing.

Contributor bios

Judith Reynolds is a Lecturer in Intercultural Communication in the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research focuses on how language and culture intersect, and how both shape identities, in professional and workplace settings in particular. She has published on intercultural communication in refugee and asylum legal advice communication, and is the current Treasurer of the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC).

Sara Ganassin is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Communication at Newcastle University (UK). She teaches, researches and supervises postgraduate students in intercultural communication and education, with a particular interest in migrant and refugee communities. She has published on internationalisation and mobility, on Chinese heritage language and on languages and research.

Prue Holmes is a Professor of Intercultural Communication and Education, and Director of Research at the School of Education, Durham University, United Kingdom. Her research areas include critical intercultural pedagogies for intercultural communication, language and intercultural education, and multilingualism in research and doctoral education. Prue has worked on several international projects. She was the former chair of the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC), and she is the lead editor of the Multilingual Matters book series Researching Multilingually.

Top-10 countries producing linguistics research (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

US- and UK-based scholars dominate linguistics

Global academic knowledge production is dominated by the Anglosphere. In Linguistics, for example, scholars based in the USA and UK produce more academic publications than scholars from the next eight top-10 countries combined. Not only do American and British scholars produce a lot more linguistics research than everybody else, their work is also much more influential as the comparatively high h-indexes of linguists from these countries indicate.

55% of the 100 most cited scholars under each of the keywords “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” with a Google Scholar profile are affiliated with a US or UK institution.[i] To put this figure in perspective: the population of the USA and UK together accounts for 5.12% of the global total. In other words, linguists from these two countries are massively overrepresented among the thought leaders in our field.

By contrast, not a single applied linguist or sociolinguist based at a university in Mainland China is among the 100 most highly cited scholars in “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics.” To put this figure in perspective: China accounts for 18.47% of the global population.

Challenging the Anglophone publication monopoly

Where the world’s most cited Applied Linguists and Sociolinguists are based, according to Google Scholar

For multilingual scholars, i.e. those with English as an additional language in their repertoire, particularly if they are based outside the Anglosphere, the stats above can be pretty demoralizing. Publication in “top-tier” journals and impact metrics have become central to hiring, promotion, and funding decisions in the neoliberal academy worldwide. Yet, despite the meritocratic rhetoric, the playing field is obviously far from level and multilingual scholars based in global peripheries labor “under a heavy mountain.”

The burden is intensified by the fact that academic publishing can very much look like a black box. While advice on how to get published abounds, what is missing are positive case-studies that showcase experiences of multilingual peripheral scholars challenging their linguistic and epistemic exclusion.

A look into the black box of academic publishing

In a new article titled “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production,” which has just been published in Multilingua, my colleagues Jenny Zhang, Jia Li and I provide precisely such a positive case study.

As regular readers of Language on the Move will remember, in 2020, we co-edited a special issue of the highly-ranked international sociolinguistics journal Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis.” To the best of our knowledge, this was the first concentrated effort in English to address the language and communication challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. The special issue centered on research from the Chinese world.

The special issue has been widely read and is already well cited. In addition to its topical exploration, it also constitutes a contribution to intercultural dialogue in applied and sociolinguistics.

US and UK linguistics research has an overwhelming impact on the field (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

Reflecting on the process that led to the publication of the special issue, we felt that it contained several lessons for linguistic and epistemic justice in our field. In “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production” we make those lessons explicit in the form of a collaborative autoethnography that illuminates the process behind the product.

In the article, we reflect on enabling personal and academic networks, textual scaffolding, and linguistic and epistemic brokerage. And we have three take-home messages.

Against the center vision of “global” academic knowledge

The dominant vision of linguistic research is solely focused on the central circuit of academic knowledge production. Efforts at global knowledge transfer almost always move outward from this central circuit. In this vision, sharing center knowledge with the periphery is considered transformational. By contrast, Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis demonstrated that some of the most exciting developments in contemporary applied sociolinguistics, such as the development of Chinese emergency language services, are located outside the center.

Knowledge flows in many directions and many circuits. Engaging with multi-directionality and multi-scalarity requires the kind of networks and teamwork we were able to bring to bear.

For community building and an ethics of care

Within circuits of knowledge production, peripheral multilingual knowledge producers are assigned seemingly perpetual status as international students, academic novices, visiting scholars, junior partners, and interlopers in center institutions. These positionings ultimately preclude deep engagement.

At this conference in Wuhan in 2012, we had no idea our friendship would lead to joint research on COVID-19 communication in 2020

The foundation of our joint work goes beyond academic collaboration and is based on longstanding personal friendship. We consider recognition of the affective dimensions of knowledge production and the importance of ethical relationships of care vital to the decolonization of knowledge.

Confronting privilege

Jenny, Li Jia, and I each write from different points in our career and from different points of inclusion and exclusion in various centers and peripheries. The same is true for all academics and each of us has a responsibility to center questions of linguistic and epistemic justice in whichever position we may find ourselves.

For us, this has involved building and engaging with various networks, collaborating across borders and generations, creating publication opportunities, and volunteering our time and expertise to act as linguistic and epistemic brokers.

Reference

To read our collaborative autoethnography about linguistic and epistemic justice in global academic publishing in full head over to Multilingua:

Piller, Ingrid, Zhang, Jie, & Li, Jia. 2022. Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua. [free access]

Piller, Ingrid. Can we make intercultural communication less Anglo- and Eurocentric? Reflections on linguistic and epistemic justice. Keynote lecture at Re-Thinking Interculturalism, The Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR) Europa Congress, May19-21, 2022

[i] As of April 17, 2021. This includes some duplicates as scholars who appear both under “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” were counted in each category.

As Pia says in the video, academic publishing is an insiders game. Her presentation was part of a workshop to demystify academic publishing for PhD students and early career researchers. This international workshop was hosted during the past two days by the Next Generation Literacies research network.

As academic publishing becomes increasingly subject to the gamification of metrics, Pia charges us not to lose sight of the fact that the point of publishing is sharing knowledge. Enjoy!

Based on recommendations from our team, we have created a monthly calendar of readings to keep you company throughout the year. Throughout the year, make sure to watch out for in-depth reviews and interactive conversations related to these and other readings, both here on Language on the Move and over on Twitter @lg_on_the_move.

Enjoy the recommendations from our team and feel free to add your own recommendations in the comment section below! We are interested in any good reads illuminating the intersection of language and social life.

You might also wish to check back on the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021, where, over the course the year, readers have added over 50 recommendations in addition to our original 12.

Girt, True Girt, and Girt Nation

As a bonus recommendation for December 2021, Ingrid Piller recommends the Girt trilogy about Australian history by David Hunt. Girt covers the early colony, True Girt continental expansion, and Girt Nation federation. Australian history becomes a comedy of errors and absurdities that is in equal parts hilariously funny and breathtakingly nasty. Hunt is not only a brilliant historian and writer but also a meticulous linguist and astute observer of intercultural relationships. And any academic will turn green with envy at the footnotes. Who knew that footnoting could be elevated to a true art!

Mixed Messages

To start the year, Gegentuul Baioud recommends Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia. Based in the Buryat region in the Russian Far East, Cathryn Graber illuminates how minoritized language media affect everyday discourses and linguistic practices, and vice versa. Graber presents a vivid picture of how Buryat journalists produce minority language media; how Buryat (semi)speakers experience performance anxiety during interviews; and how these media products circulate in living rooms and kitchens. Above all, Graber situates her analyses in the historical legacies of the Soviet Union, including the Soviet nationality policy, the development of Buryat language media to produce modern Soviet Buryatia, and efforts to standardize the Buryat language. Essential reading in minority and indigenous language shift and maintenance, language standardization, minority language media, and cultures and histories of Siberia and central Asia.

Decolonising Multilingualism in Africa

For February, Vera Williams Tetteh recommends Decolonising Multilingualism in Africa: Recentering Silenced Voices from the Global South by Finex Ndhlovu and Leketi Makalela. As most research in the social sciences continues to be informed by global north ways of viewing the world, Decolonising Multilingualism in Africa offers a refreshing insight from global south experiences and more nuanced ways of viewing the world. Ndhlovu and Makalela ground the reader in a decolonial agenda by tracing their own parents’ multilingual language practices free from normative approaches to numeracy and literacy. They also use examples from continental and diasporic African communities to challenge monolingual ways of researching multilingualism and to push for a rethink of sociolinguistic methods. A thoroughly enjoyable read offering fresh ways of seeing multilingual practices at the margins.

I saw the dog

For March, Hanna Torsh recommends I saw the dog: How language works by Alexandra Aikenvald. Drawing on the author’s considerable linguistic and cultural expertise, this book answers the question what language is and how it works to create our social world. Written for a general audience, this book is clear and accessible in its explanation of central concepts in the study of linguistic diversity. The author argues passionately that although all languages are similar in their fundamentals, the differences between them are not superficial but fundamental to different subjective experience. Losing a language then is akin to losing an entire world.

Another book cover illustrated by the talented Sadami Konchi

Bilingual Development in Childhood

For April, Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends Bilingual Development in Childhood by Annick De Houwer. This book reviews novel literature on bilingual child-rearing in monolingual contexts, where a societal language is used in education and government, and a non-societal language is used in the home. De Houwer shows that language hierarchies and different language learning environments significantly impact the learning trajectories of bilingual children. She also debunks some of the most deep-seated myths associated with bilingualism in childhood, such as the idea that bilingual children show slower language development than their monolingual peers.

Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice

For May, Madiha Neelam recommends Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice by Ingrid Piller. The book explains the global languages system and how linguistic subordination is linked to social stratification. The book has gained renewed relevance and urgency due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as it not only provides insights into linguistic and social inequality but also includes many practical suggestions how to achieve greater social justice.

Dancing with Strangers

For June, students in the “Languages and Cultures in Contact” unit in Macquarie University’s postgraduate program in Applied Linguistics recommend Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers.

Inga Clendinnen "Dancing with Strangers"

In this thread students @MQLinguistics read Clendinnen's historical #ethnography based on the diaries of the officers of the 1st fleet to learn about #InterculturalCommunication between British colonizers and Sydney's Indigenous people pic.twitter.com/dfm6DbHNU7

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) October 7, 2021

Art of Islam: Language and Meaning

For July, Tazin Abdullah recommends Art of Islam: Language and Meaning by Titus Burckhardt with photographs by Roland Michaud. A visual delight to flip through, Art of Islam may, initially, appear to be just another book of beautiful photographs from the Islamic world. But this expansive work does much more: it reveals the history behind artistic creations from the birth of Islam to the most prominent manifestations of Islamic thought in buildings, paintings and artifacts. With meticulous attention to the ideological and metaphysical processes behind the construction of artworks, this book affirms that history, culture and expression are inextricably bound. Burckhardt and Michaud’s ethnographic presentation of the Islamic world is a profound historical insight into many of the most discussed aspects of Muslim thought and life.

On not speaking Chinese

For August, Jinhyun Cho recommends On not speaking Chinese: living between Asia and the West by Ien Ang. This book critically examines tensions between Asia and the West in both Australian and global contexts with a particular focus on the disparate meanings of Chineseness. Ang illustrates multiculturalism as a form of symbolic politics aimed at redefining national identity but suppressing a problematization of race and racism. As a result, Asians in Australia are ambivalently situated between official inclusion and practical exclusion.

We Children and the Narrow Road to the Deep North

September is always a busy month so Sadami Konchi recommends a special treat: the picture book We Children and the Narrow Road to the Deep North by Libby Hathorn and illustrated by Sadami Konchi herself. The book breaks new ground in Australian publishing by showcasing a famous Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). The charming and heart-warming story of three village children’s meeting with the poet stimulates the imagination, promotes understanding of Japanese culture, and showcases world poetry. The book also celebrates nature and provides insight into the human condition and intercultural understanding from the children’s eye level. The book is an important addition to the limited resources supporting the Australian curriculum with quality stories and teaching materials about Japanese culture and literature, particularly haiku.

How to Pronounce Knife

For October, Loy Lising recommends How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa. The book offers glimpses into the challenges and triumphs that Lao immigrants face in their new country through 14 short stories covering diverse themes of love, power, survival, identity, and belonging. The title story is about a schoolgirl who brings home a book and asks her immigrant dad for help with an unfamiliar word. Unfortunately, he mispronounces it, and repeating the mispronunciation in school lands her in a lot of trouble …

Language and Spirit

For November, Robyn Moloney recommends Language and Spirit: Exploring languages, religion and spirituality in Australia today. Edited by Robyn Moloney and Father Shenouda Mansour, the book will be published by Palgrave Macmillan earlier in 2022. This book portrays the often neglected connection between language and faith in a mix of 36 personal narratives and 11 academic studies. All major religions and over 40 languages are represented. For instance, teachers of Indigenous languages speak of the critical connection between language, spirituality of Country, and well-being. A pre-print of the chapter about Chinese converts to Christianity and their language learning and settlement experiences is available here.

Learning Languages in Early Modern England

Last but not least, Ingrid Piller recommends Learning Languages in Early Modern England by John Gallagher. A further nail in the coffin of the idea that multilingualism and superdiversity are modern phenomena, this book traces language learning in the early modern period – of European languages by British people and English by immigrants to the British Isles. The book is a brilliant attempt to historicize the concept of linguistic competence. It is also one of those rare academic books that are both meticulously researched and a delight to read.

Happy Reading!

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

Let’s demystify academic publishing! (Image credit: Green Chameleon via Unsplash)

The Next Generation Literacies international research network hosts a free 2-day workshop for PhD candidates and early career researchers devoted to the perennial question how to get published.

When: December 08 and 09, 2021
Where: online (register your attendance here)
Who: PhD candidates and early career researchers

Academic publishing can be a daunting challenge for PhD candidates and early career researchers. In this workshop, we tackle this challenge heads on with the aim to demystify academic publishing. We will be addressing practical questions such as how to transform a research thesis into a journal article, how to select a target journal, how to respond to reviews, how to deal with rejection, and how to maximize impact once you’ve been published. In addition to input from experienced academic authors, reviewers, and editors, you will have the opportunity to receive personalized feedback on a publication project you are currently working on.

Day 1: Wednesday, December 08

8:30 am CEST: Welcome and introduction
8:40 am CEST: International research partnerships and mentoring in a global context

• Professor Claus Krieger, Forschungsdekan Fakultät Erziehungswissenschaft, Universität Hamburg
• Professor Lesley Hughes, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Integrity & Development), Macquarie University
• Professor HU Anning, Dean of Graduate Studies, Fudan University

8:55 am CEST: Journal editors share dos and don’ts

• Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, Editor of Multilingua
• Professor Yongyan Zheng, Editor of Language, Culture and Curriculum
• Professor Ingrid Gogolin, Editor of Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft

10:30 – 11:30 am CEST: Individual consultations (applications have closed)

Day 2: Thursday, December 09

8:30 – 10:30 am CEST: Individual consultations (applications have closed)
10:40 – 11:30 am CEST: Panel discussion with PhD students and early career researchers

• Dr. Irina Usanova, Universität Hamburg
• Dr. Pia Tenedero, Macquarie University and University of Santo Tomas, Philippines
• Qiu Yixi, Fudan University

Please register for this unique professional development opportunity here.

After 3 years of hard work, today I hit the “submit” button on my PhD thesis

Today, I’ve submitted my PhD for examination – a major milestone on my PhD journey. Time to take stock of the value of investing three years of my life into this rigorous academic endeavour.

I’m going to do so through a thematic analysis of my research journals. In these notebooks I have scribbled information, reflections, research ideas, questions, and inspirations from lectures, readings, reading group sessions, and supervision meetings with Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr. Loy Lising. 10 lessons stand out that helped me not only survive my PhD but thrive and grow as a researcher and person.

1. Listen more. This is the advice my parents gave me on my first day at Macquarie University. It is a reminder that I am a learner, the world is my classroom, and every person and moment that becomes part of it has something to teach me. So, I try to listen for brilliance in formal lectures of experts as well as conversations with 6-year-olds. I also pay more attention to my health now and listen to my body. I don’t check my email on Sunday, I frame each day with prayer, and I cap the year with a silent retreat. These habits of creating more silence around and within me helped me regularly recenter my otherwise easily anxious mind.
2. Go outside your comfort zone. For me this meant being more sociable than I normally am and investing time in building relationships with people whose life and work inspire me to be better. This also meant volunteering, actively seeking out opportunities, and braving the challenge of trying new things (like joining the 3MT!) and exploring new places with new people or, sometimes, by myself.
3. 

   A bit over 3 years ago: first day on campus as a new PhD student with my parents and my new supervisors

   Surround yourself with people who believe in you. This wisdom from Dr. Loy was an important lifeline in moments of self-doubt. In moving out of my comfort zone, I have found new safe spaces, like the Language on the Move reading group that Prof. Ingrid has created for her current and previous PhD supervisees. These like-minded researchers have become my academic family. We support each other by sharing research and life milestones, mentoring each other, and encouraging one another to keep writing and reading.

4. Read good books. The Language on the Move yearly reading challenge has taught me the value of reading beyond my research topic and my usual interest. For instance, I wouldn’t normally read about cyberspace, but I did for my first reading challenge in 2018 and wrote a review about a book on multilingualism on the Internet. Reading widely has stretched my thinking, challenged my own views, and enhanced my writing. Remember to check out our reading challenge for this year!
5. Write every day. This is an advice that worked for Alfredo Roces, a respected Filipino artist and author who wrote a daily column in the Manila Times for 12 years. “Magsulat ka. Gusto mo, ayaw mo, magsulat ka.” (Write. Whether you like it or not, write.) “Write with passion and honesty.” I did my best to do the same, aiming to write at least a few hundred words every day. Of course, it has happened several times that I revised all those words the next day. But no matter, the point is making writing a habit, like brushing your teeth.
6. 

   Members of the Language-on-the-Move team were there to witness my Sunday submission

   Be flexible in a structured way. These words from Livia Gerber, one of my PhD sisters, beautifully captures the attitude and approach that thesis writing (or any kind of purposeful writing) calls for. Planning is always an exciting stage for me, but now, so is re-planning. As Stephen Krashen said, “Rigid outlines are an enemy of creativity. Good writers plan but they’re willing to change their plan.”

7. Reflect. “Reflections on life feed into our research and our research feeds into our life” (Ingrid Piller). Diarizing my plans and thoughts about my progress has helped me stay grounded and cope better with unexpected changes. For example, I learned an important lesson on resilience when the travel restrictions in 2020 cancelled my much-awaited research trip to the US, for which I had received highly competitive funding from Macquarie University. In retrospect, I see how finishing my PhD during the time of pandemic has enriched my research experience in a unique way. Auspiciously, it even extended the relevance of my study, which also looks into work communication practices of offshore accountants working from home, a now-normal situation for many professionals across the globe.
8. Celebrate complexity. One of my early mistakes was trying to paint a simple picture of my data. My supervisors were quick and patient to show me that human beings, the way we use language, and the institutions we shape and that, in turn, shape us are all gloriously complex. The beauty of ethnographic research is that it brings this complexity to light, and it is my duty to be truthful to my findings. My PhD project has been a special opportunity to outgrow my own biases about people and their communication practices and views. Indeed, research has helped widen my understanding of what it means to be human.
9. 

   My supervisor taught me that it takes innumerable carefully placed stitches to create a beautiful whole

   Do one stitch at a time. The PhD is the biggest academic project I have ever undertaken in my life so far. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the idea and to get caught up with the goal of turning in the perfect thesis. But as a wise person once said: there are two kinds of thesis—perfect and submitted. Prof. Ingrid Piller offered different metaphors to capture the sense of steadily working towards completing quality work rather than fixating with the elusive notion of perfection. My favorite metaphor is weaving. Etymologically, the word ‘text’ means ‘something that is woven.’ To produce a big text, the key is to focus on the big idea and to work on one small stitch at a time, steadily chaining the thread, being careful not to drop any stitches, until the idea is finally woven into a whole. Thinking of my work this way helped make it a more manageable and meaningful process.

10. Keep moving. “The PhD is a point on a journey, not the pinnacle of achievement” (Ingrid Piller). Certainly, it is a big milestone. But life goes on after pressing the “submit thesis” button. It is equally essential to anticipate life after PhD. I am grateful to the Macquarie University HDR mentors for organizing a seminar about this and especially to my supervisors, who continue to mentor me as I prepare to go back to my home university in Manila, where I hope to pay it forward.

So should you bother to do a PhD?

For me, it has been a way to become a better version of myself for the world. While not everyone is called to do a PhD, it is a specific path to grow in knowledge of oneself and others, and in virtues of the mind as well as the soul. I am very grateful for this three-year vocation.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

When I think back to my last ethnographic study, one of the fondest memories I have is drinking tea and coffee with young women from Afghanistan in a school cafeteria. They were students at that school, working towards their basic education degrees, and had come to Finland a few years before I met them there. As the cafeteria emptied, we would often stay behind for one more cup, laugh, chat, show off the latest pictures we took on our phones, and exchange advice about workout apps and videos. When I describe, analyze, and interpret data from these conversations, who I am matters. In the women’s circle, I was an insider and outsider at the same time. I am a white, college-educated, relatively wealthy European and represent the population that too often others and mistreats them. But, like them, I am also a woman, an immigrant, a mother, and a Finnish learner – so in many ways, we could relate and they were able to trust me. My research can’t be understood unless one understands my positionality in it.

What is researcher positionality?

Researcher positionality can be defined as the position a researcher takes towards the world around them in general and vis-à-vis a particular research topic or study, its process, and participants in particular (Holmes, 2010). Both are shaped by a researcher’s identities, including social factors such as race, class, gender, sexual identity, ability, citizenship status as well as linguistic and cultural backgrounds, familial histories, personal experiences, and professional trajectories. All of these may – more or less overtly – have a bearing on the research process at every stage from the conceptualization of a study to the dissemination of findings (Holmes, 2016).

As Holmes (2010) emphasizes, a researcher’s worldview “concerns ontological assumptions …, epistemological assumptions …, and assumptions about human nature and agency” (p. 2), all of which shape how we engage in research. For instance, our research is rooted in what we believe to exist, how we know about, organize, and describe these entities, and how we understand the position of human power and its limits within a particular context. Such knowing and believing pans out in particular power dynamics that permeate the research process, e.g. between researcher and the researched, in the representation of voices in writing, and in the legitimation of knowledge (Muhammad et al., 2015). Unpacking those dynamics can increase the transparency and ethicality of our work.

(Why) Do we need this?

The notion that our identities and worldviews as researchers shape the work we do is not an uncontroversial one, especially given that much scientific work has aimed to minimize or even eliminate the researcher’s person from the research process with the goal of claiming objectivity or neutrality. Such claimed objectivity or neutrality, oftentimes conflated with the unmarked male, white, and middle-class position in scholarly work, has long been at the core of scientific quality measures, particularly when researchers have aimed to present their work as independent of the researcher, replicable beyond its original context, and thus scientifically valid. In Western religious pre-Enlightenment societies, such “research without researcher” has played an important role in establishing scientific traditions and methods, often in opposition to religious beliefs (Lin, 2015), but was also, to the detriment of qualitative research, foundational in promoting the positivist paradigm as the dominant and only legitimate one within many academic contexts. Although in some ways qualitative research is still struggling to shed this positivist yardstick, the notion that all research is shaped by researcher positionalities has in recent decades gained traction. While there may be great differences in how researchers approach their work ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically, we all make decisions, act in particular social contexts, and are shaped by what we know, believe, and strive for. As Lin (2015) puts it,

Problems emerge if we fail to recognize the inherent partial and positioned nature of every research study (and researcher) that is inevitably located in a certain sociohistorical and epistemological position. (p. 15)

In a similar vein, Hamby (2018), speaking for social scientists and particularly her field of psychology, calls for a shedding of the ”cloak of objectivity” (para 7), emphasizing that “lack of objectivity is not just a problem, it is also an opportunity”. (para 9). Acknowledging one’s positionality, she argues, can enhance a researcher’s awareness of their own biases, assumptions, and points of development, but also their (potential) contributions to the field. It can enable us to

• better understand our own biases and (expected) blind spots, so we can begin to challenge them
• better understand and reflect on our position in the research field (e.g., insider-outsider of a community), and based on this, identify ways of building more ethical and fruitful relationships with our participants, colleagues, and audience
• interpret our findings with greater confidence and greater care, and in general, increase the trustworthiness of our work

It is important to keep in mind that stating our (potential) biases does not erase them. Our intellectual reflections cannot lift us beyond our socio-material realities (e.g., who, where, when, with whom we are …) and we cannot confess-away our subjectivity or create a “neutral” place from which we operate. However, the process and statement of acknowledging our positionality can open doors to a deeper understanding of our place and purpose within our field for our participants, our audience, and ourselves.

An important question to ask is what information we include in a positionality statement and how we go about that. Having engaged in a self-reflexive process does not mean we disclose all aspects of it – this would likely be unnecessary or impossible, and in some cases inappropriate, risky, and even unethical (e.g., because participants’ anonymity/safety or the researcher’s integrity/freedom are at stake). As we make decisions about what to include in a paper that is publically or widely available, the following questions can offer guidance:

• What are my goals as a researcher, particularly in regards to the study/paper in question?
• What/who has shaped my processes of selecting (and not selecting) the research field, participants, methods, terms, data, literature, etc.?
• How are my choices tied to who I am, what I know, what I have access to, and what I believe in?
• How may my choices differ from the ones of a reader/colleague who belongs to a different social, cultural, or disciplinary group? What do they need to know about me so they can relate to my choices?

If we keep in mind that the overall purpose of a positionality statement, in the end, is to make our work more transparent, we can minimize the risk of it either becoming a merely rhetorical exercise on the one hand or a disclosure that puts us or others at risk on the other hand.

Group membership: Where do I (not) belong?

When we explicate our position toward our topic, participants, and research processes, we do so in order to get a better sense of what we know and see and what we do not know and see. This is particularly true for researchers who work with populations that they are not members of. Most typically, group membership will be dynamic, complex (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009), partial and/or situational (see Huisman, 2008: Milner, 2007), so that awareness of one’s own insider- and outsiderness, privilege and power position (Muhammad et al., 2015), is a crucial first step (although no guarantee) towards building respectful and ethical relationships. In such situations, it becomes crucial to know how to actively disrupt deficit discourses and hegemonic notions of normality and knowledge, to name only a few harmful practices that researchers from socially dominant groups will encounter and unfortunately oftentimes perpetuate.

Useful questions to ask

• Which (racial, cultural, professional, ethnic, linguistic …) groups do I belong to, and in what ways? How has that shifted or might that shift in the future?
• How do my group memberships manifest themselves? How do they relate to each other?
• What is easy for me to see/focus on because of these memberships? Where do I assume to have blind spots? What might someone else see in my field/data/literature… ?

Epistemologies: What do I (not) know?

Part of the question about one’s own researcher identities, worldview, and relationship to the topic, process, and participants is also to develop a critical understanding of what we do and do not and what we can and cannot know (Muhammad et al., 2015). Many individuals and communities have historically been excluded from academic knowledge and knowledge production, so that research and its dissemination are still dominated by male, white and middle-class norms (e.g., Ahmed, 2017; Banks, 2009; Ennser-Kananen, 2019; Scheurich & Young, 1997). Although it cannot be an individual’s responsibility to rectify this, every researcher can be explicit and honest about their own epistemological limitations and contribute to a move towards epistemic and epistemological justice (Ennser-Kananen, 2019).

Useful questions to ask

• Which (racial, cultural, professional, ethnic, linguistic …) context does the literature I read and cite do belong to? What are or could be the blindspots and omissions of my work? (See Piller, 2018)
• What parts of the research process will I be able to do relatively easily because of my racial, cultural, professional, ethnic or linguistic memberships? Which ones might be challenging?

Positionality statements

Positionality statements are often integrated into introductory or methodology sections of research articles or theses, but they can also consist of smaller parts scattered throughout a piece of writing. Both qualitative and quantitative researchers can and should offer a statement of this kind that enables the reader to get a better sense of their approach to the topic, the research process, their analyses, interpretations, and conclusions. While positionality statements by definition have to be individualized and personalized, I recommend the ones by Matias and Mackey (2015, pp. 33-34) and Arsenault (2018, pp. 52-55) as inspiration and models for how such statements can be realized. Once a positionality statement has been made in written or spoken form, the job of acknowledging and critically reflecting on our position continues. In the end, positionality work underlines the importance of a supportive and (self-)reflective academic community, where open dialogue and spaces to learn are valued and fostered (not just tolerated). It is on all of us to create such spaces.

References

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Arsenault, C. (2018). How white teachers’ identity development translates to classroom interactions with minority students. Doctoral dissertation. Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology. Retrieved in March 2020 from https://uknowledge.uky.edu/edp_etds/80
Banks, J. A. (2009). Knowledge construction and the education of citizens in diverse societies. Keynote speech. Interkulturell Pedagogik, Göteborg, Sweden.
Delamont, S. (2018). Truth is not Linked to Political Virtue: Problems with Positionality. In B. Clift, J. Hatchard & J. Gore (Eds.). How Do We Belong? Researcher Positionality Within Qualitative Inquiry: Proceedings of 4th Annual Qualitative Research Symposium (pp. 1-6). University of Bath.
Dwyer, S.C., Buckle, J. L. (2009). The space between: on being an insider-outsider in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(1), 54–63.
Ennser-Kananen, J. (2019). Knowledge is power is knowledge: Can we break the cycle of epistemic and epistemological injustice? Tiedepolitiikka, 4, 22-40.
Hamby, S. (2018). Know thyself: How to write a reflexicity statement. Psychology Today. Retrieved in March 2020 from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-web-violence/201805/know-thyself-how-write-reflexivity-statement
Holmes, P. (2016). Navigating languages and interculturality in the research process: The ethics and positionality of the researcher and the researched. In M. Dasli & A. R. Díaz (Eds.). The Critical Turn in Language and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy (pp. 115-132). New York: Routledge.
Holmes, A.G. (2020). Researcher positionality: a consideration of its influence and place in research. A new researcher guide. Available at http://shanlaxjournals.in/journals/index.php/education/article/view/3232
Huisman, K. (2008). “Does this mean you’re not coming to visit anymore?”: An inquiry into an ethics of reciprocity and positionality in feminist ethnographic research. Sociological Inquiry, 78(3), 371-396.
Lin, A. M. Y. (2015). Researcher positionality. In F. M. Hult, & D. C. Johnson (Eds.), Research Methods in Language Policy and Planning: A Practical Guide (pp. 21-32). London: Routledge.
Matias, C. E., & Mackey, J. (2016). Breakin’ down whiteness in antiracist teaching: Introducing critical whiteness pedagogy. The Urban Review, 48(1), 32-50.
Milner IV, H. R. (2007). Race, culture, and researcher positionality: Working through dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen. Educational researcher, 36(7), 388-400.
Muhammad, M.; Wallerstein, N.; Sussman, A. L.;  Avila, M.; Belone, L.; Duran, B. (2015) Reflections on researcher identity and power: The impact of positionality on community based participatory research (CBPR) processes and outcomes. Critical Sociology, 41
Piller, Ingrid. 2018. Why are you not citing any African female expert? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/why-are-you-not-citing-any-african-female-expert/
Scheurich, J. J., & Young, M. D. (1997). Coloring epistemologies: Are our research epistemologies racially biased?. Educational researcher, 26(4), 4-16.

The Language-on-the-Move team is conducting award-winning research

The Language on the Move team is delighted to share news of our multiple-award-winning research!

2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics

The winners of the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics have just been announced and we are delighted that our very own Alexandra Grey is one of two joint winners of the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics. Alexandra receives the award for her thesis about the ways in which language rights affect minority languages in China. The full thesis can be downloaded here and a short overview is available here.

The second joint winner of the prize is Isabel O’Keeffe (Melbourne University), who receives the award for her thesis about “Multilingual manyardi/kun-borrk: Manifestations of multilingualism in the classical song traditions of western Arnhem Land”.

Both theses were commended for being “outstanding pieces of innovative, creative, and personal linguistic scholarship”.

The Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics is a $500 prize begun in 2013 and awarded annually to the best PhD which demonstrates methodological and theoretical innovations in Australian linguistics (e.g. studies in toponymy, language and ethnography, language and musicology, linguistic ecology, language identity and self, kinship relationships, island languages, spatial descriptions in language, Australian creoles, and language contact).

The notice for submissions for the 2018 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics will appear in early 2018 in the newsletter of the Australian Linguistics Society.

2017 Michael Clyne Prize

For the Language on the Move team, this recognition of Alexandra’s success follows hot on the heels of the announcement that another team member, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, is the winner of the 2017 Michael Clyne Prize. The Michael Clyne Prize is awarded annually by the Australian Linguistics Society for the best postgraduate research thesis in immigrant bilingualism and language contact. Shiva receives the prize for her thesis about “Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families”. An abstract and a link to the full thesis is available here.

This is, in fact, the second time the Michael Clyne Prize award goes to a member of the Language on the Move research group. Donna Butorac won the 2012 Michael Clyne Prize for her thesis about “Imagined identity, remembered self: Settlement language learning and the negotiation of gendered subjectivity”. Furthermore, Vera Williams Tetteh’s thesis about “Language, Education and Settlement: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography on, with, and for Africans in Australia” was the runner-up for the 2016 award.

These and all our PhD theses are available from our PhD Hall of Fame.