Any wicked problem is an occasion for different people to have different reasonable but often incompatible ideas about how to approach it. Chief Health Officers might properly emphasize health-related aspects of the problem, whereas Chief Executive Officers of major firms might emphasize aspects of the problem relevant to the economy.

Both these takes (and others) are reasonable and yet they are potentially incompatible; the economy can’t be both open (to protect it) and closed (to slow the spread of disease). Each approach would be only partially successful in addressing the overall problem; each approach leaves a nasty remainder. Wicked problems don’t have sweet spot solutions.

What seems to have happened in Australia is that these two, and other, perspectives were politically mediated, so that Chief Health Officers didn’t get as much as they would have liked, but neither did CEOs. If there was no sweet spot, at least it seemed to be possible to avoid the bitterest spots; there was a partial “solution” on which otherwise differently-minded participants converged … and it was compromise between those with different perspectives that made this possible.

Social Media

Another set of ideas involves the rise of internet facilitated social media platforms that enable individuals to say to many others whatever they choose.

Social media form an archipelago (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The social media landscape is an archipelago, with islands of intensely intercommunicating participants separated by large gaps across which communication is fitful and low-fidelity, indeed often grossly distorted.

These islands are created by a convergence of basic human psychology and social media tools.

The psychology is that we like to be in groups whose members share our thinking and feeling (cf. social comparison theory, à la Leon Festinger.) The social media tools – of likes, shares, and follows – make it easy for us to join such groups.

Importantly, these islands of the like-minded often quickly become echo chambers, where (think QAnon) participants drive each other to more extreme versions of the thoughts they share and to greater degrees of orthodoxy in their thinking.

Again, the psychology is simple. Membership is conditional upon the alignment of a person’s thinking with the thinking characteristic of the group. If a new member has reservations about the group’s characteristic thinking – for example because they recognise that there are multiple perspectives and that the focal problem for the group is, in fact, a wicked problem – they might opt out, but, if not, they will need to silence their reservations in order to be comfortable, psychologically, in their membership (this is dissonance reduction à la Festinger) … indeed, in order to avoid being driven out. Once reservations are silenced all around, it becomes a race to the bottom, with various members competing with one another to express their commitment to the group.

What happens when wicked problems encounter social media echo chambers?

The Epistemological Crisis

Because a wicked problem has only partial solutions, we’re all, inevitably, going to have to decide which aspect is important to us and which we’re going to treat as unhappy remainders of our chosen approach.

What’s different with the rise of social media is that we can now find insulated and uncurated space, where everyone agrees with us about which approach to a wicked problem is better and where the game within that space is to ignore the unpleasant side-effects of the socially preferred approach and to enforce orthodoxy about this preference within the group.

And this explains what we plainly witness, namely, the polarisation of “discussion” on social media platforms where a self-stirring group which has one preferred approach to a wicked problem demonizes other also self-stirring groups which have other approaches to this problem, despite the possibility that none of these approaches is an unreasonable one and that all of them represent only partial “solutions”. Each group could be seeing an aspect that’s relevant to the problem, but they’re not able to acknowledge that the other groups might also be seeing aspects that are relevant, because what the other groups are seeing are aspects that they have had to discount, for dissonance reduction, as bad consequences of their own favored approach.

The inhabitants of each such echo chamber just ignore the inhabitants of others or, worse still, exchange insults across the gaps that separate them. Indeed, there are polarisation entrepreneurs working the social media to demonise those outside any given echo chamber as morally depraved, or perhaps craven (“sheeple” is a word that’s been used), or so befuddled by “fake news” that it would be pointless and immoral to engage with them.

These are the mechanisms that have given us the epistemological crisis of contemporary culture, manifested, for example, in science scepticism, distrust of experts, intolerance, fundamentalism, authoritarianism, populism, polarisation, erosion of civility, and an unwillingness to engage in constructive discussion or to compromise with “others”.

What’s the alternative to such mutual assured demonisation?

The Principle of Civility

Whenever we encounter people whose views are different from our own, we should attribute to them as much wisdom, knowledge, and good judgment as we’d like them to attribute to us. The Golden Rule, in other words. We don’t assume, from the bare fact of their disagreeing with us, that our interlocutors are stupid or ignorant or evil. More importantly, we try to consider not just what they believe but how they came to believe as they do. This crucially involves listening to them.

And perhaps, by listening, we discover that, though we wouldn’t have, indeed didn’t, think things through the same way they did, they nevertheless did think things through … and maybe even in a way that makes sense to us. In some cases, we will indeed “get it” why they believe what they do. In some cases, we will perhaps see aspects of the issue that we, through social comparison and dissonance reduction mechanisms, or maybe just from perspectival effects, didn’t initially see.

And when we execute civility in this sense, we don’t demonize our “opponents”; we humanize them. And, crucially, we make it easier for them to humanize us; perhaps our civility will be reciprocated. And when that does happen, we can, together, create a space where we’re interested in each other … where we’re not just trying to score points or to win favor with our own in-group. Where we’re trying to expand the circle of our fellows to include rather than exclude those who aren’t just like us, in order, if we’re lucky, to build a compromise between us … a solution that gives each of us some, but unavoidably not all, of what we’re looking for.

Civility requires discipline. There are social comparison and dissonance reduction mechanisms that we need to be aware of and to rein in if we are to exercise civility. It also requires institutional settings in which different points of view can be brought together. But it’s by exercising this discipline in such settings that we can engineer compromises as an alternative to the war of all against all that increasingly constitutes our cultural situation.

Image 1

Like many parents of teenagers, I delightedly welcome any occasion to connect with a generation I don’t always understand and that doesn’t always understand me. As a Muslim family in Australia, this inter-generational exchange is often characterized by questions from my children about our Islamic practices and how we talk about these with our friends who are not Muslim. One of the most questioned of these practices is Ramadan, the month in the Islamic calendar when Muslims abstain from consumption of food and drink during the day.

So, when my children began texting me a range of Ramadan-themed memes, I was elated to find something that we could relate to and laugh at together. Image 1 has always topped the list of our favorites.

There are many versions of this meme, and it owes its popularity to the fact that across generations, we answer this question every Ramadan, without fail. In fact, the first time I showed this meme to a work friend, he exclaimed, “Hey, I asked you that, too!” We both laughed (at him) and then, spent the next half hour going through other Ramadan memes, like those in Image 2 and Image 3.

Image 3

Image 2

And once more, I shared not just a laugh with someone, but an opening for genuine intercultural communication and sharing. In the numerous conversations these memes inspired, most expressed that they had no idea that there was a ‘world’ of Muslim memes that entertained and explained.

For me, these memes have played two important communication roles: intergenerational and intercultural. In the Australian context, second and third generation Muslims communicate with each other and outside of the Muslim community in English. Many of their linguistic expressions relate to sarcasm, irony and wordplays based on English. Their cultural references are TV shows like Friends and The Hunger Games and there is no shortage of memes based on dialogues from popular TV shows and movies. The creative efforts behind Muslim-based memes have been written about in numerous places such as here.

The humor not only provides a platform for internal communication for Muslims but also a means to connect to non-Muslims, with whom they share these linguistic expressions and cultural references. Both my Muslim and non-Muslim friends always get a kick out of the memes in Image 4 and Image 5. By the way, iftar is the meal eaten at sunset to break the day’s fast and traditionally begins with the consumption of dates.

Image 4

Image 5

Humor – specifically, humor in a language and mode that we all relate to – connects us and provides access to the practices of a community often questioned and misunderstood. A few years back, the ABC offered a Ramadan explainer using a series of memes and tweets. There are also innumerable social media feeds devoted to Muslim memes, such as this Facebook page or this Twitter feed.

The volume of meme production on these platforms is indicative of the time devoted to this means of communication. In a study of young American Muslim women who engage in meme-making, Ali (2020) showed how these memes allow their creators to negotiate aspects of their citizenship in USA. For a community that is often subject to stereotyping, these memes offer a way to construct their own identity.

I think that is true, also, of me and my teenagers. We can rummage through our sociolinguistic repertoire, draw on the pertinent elements of our identities, and exercise some control over the way we present ourselves as Muslims. Many of these memes have been the starting point of deeper and more engaging conversations about being Muslim in Australia today.

Image 6

As we come to the end of Ramadan this week and look forward to the day of Eid to celebrate a month of fasting, I have been sharing the meme in Image 6 far and wide.

References

Ali, I. (2020). Muslim women meme-ing citizenship in the era of War on Terror militarism. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 106(3), 334–340.

Related content

Piller, I. (2009). Ramadan Kareem! Or: Urban Etiquette for Monolinguals. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/urban-etiquette-for-monolinguals/
Piller, I. (2017). Money makes the world go round. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/money-makes-the-world-go-round/
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2023). Lent, Language, and Faith Work. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/lent-language-and-faith-work/
Wehbe, A. (2017). Silent Invisible Women. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/silent-invisible-women/

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‘The Glory’, a Korean drama, has ranked the top among the ten most watched TV and films since its release on March 10, 2023 on Netflix. The Glory has received 1.82 billion views on Weibo, the second largest Chinese social media platform at the time of writing this blog. Chinese youths, the largest group of Weibo members, are enthusiastic about discussing the plot, sharing their memes about this drama, and picking up popular terms for fandom communication.

Over the past two decades, Korean cultural products such as dramas, movies, music and dance, food, cosmetics etc. have gained worldwide popularity, and the global spread of Korean culture is known as Hallyu or Korean Wave (한류). Hallyu has been promoted by the South Korean government as cultural diplomacy and soft power projection since the 1997 financial crisis. The global promotion of Hallyu turns out to be a huge success. There are about 51.74 million population in South Korea, but the number of Hallyu community members reaches over 156 million people across the globe. China constitutes over half of the fan community with over 86 million.

As Hallyu emerges as a global cultural consumption among young people particularly in China, learning Korean has rapidly carved out a niche market for China’s youth to craft their subjectivities and produce bundles of skills. Mr. Bin He, a postgraduate student at Yunnan University under the supervision of Professor Jia Li, has conducted an ethnography with four Chinese university students on how relevant practices and discourses socialize Chinese youths to align themselves with learning Korean through self-study and out of class channels.

Even though China has the largest number of students learning English as a compulsory course, Chinese youths do not necessarily see English as the only source for empowerment and upward mobility. Chinese students who are economically and linguistically under-privileged find it more useful and easier to learn to speak ‘small languages’ (as we previously discussed here and here). This is exactly what happened to Bin’s participants who major in English but found it more desirable and promising to invest into learning Korean and dreamed of taking up Korean-related jobs.

Performing cool posture

Chinese youths develop their initial incentive to learn Korean because of their desire to get close to their Korean idols and their orientation to be part of a Korean-oriented consumption style. The digitization between China and South Korea facilitates such transnational communication. By subscribing to a paid app (about 5 $) per month, Chinese youths can get in contact with their Korean idols by listening to their voices or reading their updates online on a daily basis. They also choose to spend about 20$ collecting a Korean album imported from South Korea to show their distinct cultural taste.

Ming’s Weibo post

Their affective attachment to the Hallyu community gets closer through their interactions with other Hallyu fans on public and private social media platforms. Ming, one of Bin’s participants, has been learning Korean by himself for over six years. Like many Hallyu fans, Ming has developed basic Korean proficiency by watching Korean dramas and variety shows and listening to Korean songs. To test his Korean proficiency and to enhance his reading competence, Ming took up a volunteer job translating Korean idols’ stories into Chinese on Weibo for Chinese fans to keep updated with their idols. In addition to being recognized as a legitimate member of the Hallyu community because of his Korean proficiency, Ming also likes to share his consumption of Korean lifestyle on Weibo.

The screenshot captures Ming’s enjoyment with his friends drinking 참이슬 (“Chamisul”), the most popular brand of Korean liquor that frequently appears in Korean dramas, TV series, and variety shows. 참이슬 is recontextualized as symbolic source styling himself as someone cool and authentic. Using English ‘talk with’ indicates both modernity and the imagined engagement with the Korean world as Ming told us in interview: “感觉喝着烧酒，仿佛喝着烧酒就置身于韩剧中。” (“I feel like drinking soju, it’s like I’m physically in a Korean drama while drinking soju.”)

Consuming desire

Longing is one of the most featured themes in Korean dramas. The filming locations of hit Korean dramas are often promoted as must-go destinations for Chinese tourists travelling to South Korea. For Chinese youths who are living and studying in China, love stories constitute an important part of their romantic imagination as reported by Fang, a Chinese female university student: “想去首尔学习生活，去看看电视剧里出现的各种场景。” (“I dream of studying and living in Seoul. I want to visit the featured locations that appear in Korean dramas.”

Fang’s post

As someone who was born and brought up in the hinterland, Fang has grown up with the imagination of the sea, and the sea is often depicted as semiotic potential for romance in Korean dramas. Fang expressed her sense of attachment to 갯마을 차차차 (Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha), a romantic story in a small coastal village. She posted a moment on her Chinese social media in Korean: “아~듣기만 해도 바다 냄새 맡은 것 같애” (“Wow～ Just listening [to the song in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha] I feel like the smell of the sea”).

Fang’s sense of enjoyment and desire is also expressed by her semiotic and linguistic choices. Using tilde ‘～’ after ‘wow’ (아) emphasizes her desire and longing. The choice of using Korean indexes her sense of feeling distinct and unique compared to her Chinese peers who might understand English but who are unlikely to be able to read Korean.

Crafting a niche in learning Korean

Ad for Korean online classes

Both Ming and Fang started to learn Korean online through various apps after they had been exposed to Hallyu for some time. Their desire to seriously invest in learning Korean took a clearer form when they saw an ad for online classes:

Why learn a small language
Korean

• The most accessible second foreign language. You will be surrounded by Korean from the moment you turn on your app.

• There are about 70% of Chinese words in Korean. Korean is the language that sounds like ancient Chinese. Chinese students learning Korean do not start from zero.

• Cheap tuition fee for overseas study. The best choice for the working-class family.

• Advanced educational system with the combination of the East and the West and world-leading IT shipping industry, mass communication, e-sports etc. All of these advantages can provide Korean learners with more opportunities.

In contrast to the way Chinese youths learn English, learning Korean has been discursively constructed as ‘accessible’, ‘easy’, ‘affordable’ and ‘advanced’. This promotion discourse is particularly attractive to those who cannot afford to travel to Western countries and who are fed up with the exam-driven learning style in English. As confessed by Ming, “我就是不知道为什么我对好莱坞电影、美剧不感兴趣，我想可能是讨厌英语总是考试吧” (“I just don’t know why I didn’t have any interest in watching Hollywood movies or American TV series. I guess it’s because I was tired of taking English exam.”)

Feeling cosmopolitan

After two years of formal training at a language school, Ming decided to take the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK), and pursue her master’s degree in South Korea after her graduation from an English department in China. When she prepared her application documents, she worked as an English tutor for a Korean family where she taught two children English in Korean. Because of her capacity in Korean, Fang was able to communicate with the Korean mother about her children’s English performance, which in turn facilitated her Korean oracy. Over two years, Fang used the money she earned by working as an English teacher to pay for her Korean language test and tuition fee for Ewha Womans University.

Fang’s chat

In September 2022, Fang started her postgraduate study online due to the restricted travel policy and the Covid-19 pandemic. Fang was eager to go to South Korea and socialize with local people to fulfill her Korean dream. While doing her online classes, she liked to share with her WeChat friends her Korean learning experiences.

The image in Fang’s chat shows the official promotion image of her Korean university with the blooming cherry flowers and one of its famous buildings. By re-posting this world-famous university, Fang also displays her privileged access to advanced education in Seoul, a cosmopolitan city with all her imagination for study and lifestyle in South Korea, as commented by her post “나한테 이게 학교아냐 자유다” (“To me, this is not only a school but also freedom.”) It is worth noting that Fang’s choice of studying in South Korea is partly due to her unwillingness to follow a planned life trajectory by working as an English teacher in her hometown like her peers. Despite her parents’ disagreement with her decision, Fang gave up working as an English teacher and chose to take the risk of investing into an unknown future with Korean.

Becoming entrepreneurial

Apart from desire and cosmopolitanism, Hallyu also displays a strong embodiment of neoliberal discourse upon individuals. Both Ming and Fang have been nurtured by entrepreneurial discourses while exposing themselves to Hallyu. Self-entrepreneurial ethos prevails in many Korean songs, books, and movies. Growing up with Hallyu for over 10 years, Chinese fans have witnessed the ups-and-downs of their idols and have been encouraged by their positive and never-give-up spirits, as Ming shared: “一直喜欢她(Taeyeon),我能从她身上看到许多积极的能量，情绪低落的时候，我就会听听她的歌或是刷刷她舞台表演的视频。” (“I’ve been one of Taeyeon’s fans. I can sense her positive power. When I’m feeling down, I would like to listen to her songs or watch her dancing performance.”)

Ming recalled his struggling experiences when he prepared for his postgraduate entrance exam. For over a year, Ming had to fight alone given that most of his classmates decided to look for a job and very few people including his parents understood his emotional struggles. By listening to Taeyon’s songs, Ming felt understood and comforted. Ming drew strength from witnessing Taeyon’s confrontation with suicide. Taeyon’s re-fashioning herself as someone overcoming her depression became a mental power for Ming to draw from in his own struggles in a competitive and stressful society.

Fang’s post about her Korean readings

Self-regulated and self-enterprising discourses are often circulated on Fang’s social media. Apart from signing up for a gym club and following a healthy lifestyle, Fang also likes to share her reflection on reading Korean novels. The caption about the images of the books she’s reading says: “One section a day; 43 days to finish the book; a story book on life experiences for the youth.”

By purchasing imported reading materials from South Korea, Fang said that she could kill two birds with one stone: enhancing her Korean reading capacity while enriching her life experiences. The philosophical statements of life experiences in the book are mainly self-enterprising and self-driven as indicated by her underlined notes like “너에게 주어지는 기대에 합당한 자기관리를 시작해” (“Start taking care of yourself and meet your expectations”) or “값진 자아 반성 시간” (“the valuable time of self-reflection”).

Navigating between freedom and precarity

Language learning in the digital economy is not problem free. Despite their aspiration to manage their life trajectory through neoliberal promises, Chinese youths find themselves constantly navigating between their desired freedom and structural constraints.

One of the problems that hinder their desire to invest in learning Korean is their lack of time. Chinese youths keep their strong connection with Hallyu but they find it hard to keep learning Korean as learning a language requires consistent and systematic devotion. As English majors at university, they are kept busy by taking exams and getting various certificates to enhance their employment prospects. Two of Bin’s participants imagined that they would have more time for themselves to pick up Korean after they started to work as English teachers in future.

For those who squeeze time and save money to take the TOPIK, their devotion to learning Korean may suffer from anti-Hallyu sentiments due to the diplomatic disputes between China and South Korea. Over the past three decades, the surge of Hallyu has also coincided with several waves of anti-Hallyu movements in China. Ming’s diligence and persistence in learning Korean is not recognized but misunderstood by populist nationalists as “媚韩” (literally, “flattering South Korea”), meaning betraying China and showing allegiance to South Korea.

Publicity shot of Korean star Taeyeon

For Fang who is receiving her master’s degree in South Korea, she is confronted with high living expenses in Seoul and thinking of returning to China to settle down. However, when it comes to her future employment prospect in China, Fang seems to lack of confidence. For one thing, she does not think she can compete against ethnic Korean Chinese for a job position in teaching Korean to Chinese students. For another, her master’s degree in TKSOL is not as desirable as an English major to secure an English teaching position.

By the time of writing up this blog, two of Bin’s participants had to give up learning Korean because of their overwhelming workload and new identity as English teachers. Only Fang and Ming still kept learning Korean. As noted, Fang is doing her master’s degree in South Korea, and Ming has just got a job offer from a Chinese multinational automotive subsidiary targeting the South Korean market. After several months of training, Ming will be sent to South Korea to work for this Chinese company in South Korea.

This study has provided a nuanced understanding of Chinese youths’ Korean language learning experiences in the context of emerging Asian pop culture and digitization. Chinese youths’ learning of Korean is not driven by pragmatic pursuits or academic pressures, but largely rooted in their desire to be part of the Hallyu community. Growing up with Hallyu and learning Korean opened up new spatial and affective imaginations for them to capitalize on their performance and cultural consumption that traverse national boundaries in our digital age. Despite having access to Hallyu and learning Korean through new technological affordances, their pursuit of Korean-related subjectivities gets inculcated with the affective facets of language learning activities rooted in the neoliberal logic of self-management, human capital development and surging populist nationalism.

Related content

Li, J. (2020). Foreign language learning for minority empowerment? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/foreign-language-learning-for-minority-empowerment/
Li, J. (2021). Esports are the new linguistic and cultural frontier. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/esports-are-the-new-linguistic-and-cultural-frontier/
Li, J. (2021). Peripheral language learners and the romance of Thai. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/peripheral-language-learners-and-the-romance-of-thai/
Ma, Y. (2020). Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/empowerment-of-chinese-muslim-women-through-arabic/

The Bainu social media platform in China

Bainu was founded by two young Mongols in 2015 and now it is the only surviving Mongolian language social media platform in China. A 2015 news report claims that there are around 400,000 registered users although that number has shrunk significantly since the government’s crackdown on Mongols’ protests against the 2020 bilingual education reform.

Although many subjects cannot be discussed openly on Bainu, one topic has never stopped attracting Mongols’ unwavering attention: the “purely” linguistic matters which include but are not limited to Mongolian grammar, spelling, translation, standardization, and regional dialects. Perhaps it is precisely because of the strict policing of social media spaces that seemingly “professional, innocuous, and apolitical” discussions of language proliferate there.

This map briefly settled the debate over “sheep meat” vs “sheep’s meat”

Big debate: “sheep meat” or “sheep’s meat”?

A long-running debate has been over whether it is honin mah (literally “sheep meat”) or honin-ii mah (“sheep’s meat”). To support their respective arguments users post pages from their old middle school grammar textbooks or carry out surveys among speakers from different regions. Recently, the debate was briefly settled (it has now flared up again) when one Bainu user, to the awe of many, triumphantly posted a self-made language map.

This map at least temporarily resolved the question that has intrigued, excited, and frustrated Bainu users for months. The map maker, having attributed the differences in expressions to regional differences, did not forget to settle another long-lasting debate, too: whether it is “putting on a hat” or “wearing a hat”. According to the map, the regions with red shade are areas where “sheep meat” and “putting on a hat” are commonly used, while the rest say “sheep’s meat” and “wear a hat.”

Translation debates

Apart from grammatical problems and dialect differences, the translation of new terms is another field of battle where foes and friends are made. In June 2020, the question of how to translate “emoji” into Mongolian sparked a spirited debate. Some advocated for a native Mongolian word while others supported charaiin ilerel, which is a word-for-word translation from Chinese: 表情 (“facial expression”). Yet others have adopted an internationalist stance and have chosen emoji. My observation over the year 2021 suggests that emoji seems to be winning out among Bainuers.

But not all terms are controversial as shown in their almost unanimous approval of translating “barbecue” into shorlog, or the terms translated by the volunteer translation group anabapa, mostly comprised of Bainu users (see “brake light” image).

Why do metalinguistic discussions proliferate on social media?

Emoji on Bainu

You might wonder why Bainu has become a key platform where metalinguistic discussions proliferate or why users are so keen to translate new terms to replace the common Chinese loans in Inner Mongolia, or to what extent these Mongolian translations are successful.

You can find an answer in a new study of Mongolian linguistic purism discourse on Bainu by myself and my co-author Cholmon Khuanuud. In the study, we situate purist discourses in the sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic context of Inner Mongolia. We show that the weakened autonomy of minority Mongols compounded by the spread of market economy, and China’s drive to build a nation essentially following the “one people, one language (Mandarin Chinese)” model exerts tremendous pressure on the maintenance of Mongolian language. This produces linguistic anxiety, and it underpins purist discourses saturating mediatized spaces such as Bainu.

“Mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss

We find that, apart from translating new terms, another two key purification strategies are prominent in Bainu. First, as with language activists in many other minoritized communities, Mongol purists construct “mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss, including the loss of land, culture, political rights, racial “purity,” and language over the last seven decades. By doing so, they stigmatize “mixed” speech forms, raise awareness about ethnolinguistic boundaries, and invoke historical experiences.

What is noteworthy is that the explicit association of the losses experienced by minority Mongols with mixed language has almost disappeared since the 2020 reform for fear of punishment.

Another widely used purification strategy is to faithfully transcribe “mixed” everyday speech and post it on Bainu. In particular, by positioning the transcribed “mixed” speech vis-à-vis the “pure and correct” Mongolian, purists banish the “mixed” speech to the realm of non-language.

In the context of Inner Mongolia, the stigmatizing power garnered by the orthographic representation of “mixed” Mongolian also has to do with the highly-ideologized classical (vertical) Mongolian script. This traditional script has been retained in Inner Mongolia while abandoned in the country of Mongolia for the Cyrillic script in the 1940s. Clearly, the purists’ transcription of “deviant and impure speech” through the medium of a valued classical Mongolian script enhances the shaming effect.

To learn more, including how the transnational status of Mongolian language influences purist discourses, who exactly Bainu users are, what “wooden Mongolian” is, or how technology impacts minority language ideology and practices or vice versa, our article has just been published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics – it is open access so feel free to click through to the journal!

Reference

Baioud, Gegentuul, & Khuanuud, Cholmon. Linguistic purism as resistance to colonization. Journal of Sociolinguistics, n/a(n/a). doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12548 [available open access]

Related content

Baioud, Gegentuul. (2020). Fighting Covid-19 with folklore.  Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/fighting-covid-19-with-folklore/
Baioud, Gegentuul. (2020). Will education reform wipe out Mongolian language and culture?  Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/will-education-reform-wipe-out-mongolian-language-and-culture/
Piller, Ingrid. (2017). Anatomy of language shaming.  Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/anatomy-of-language-shaming/
Piller, Ingrid. (2017). Explorations in language shaming.  Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/explorations-in-language-shaming/

Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

Here, Kinza Afraz Abbasi shows how mismatched language choices and mismatched communication channels render public health communication in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province ineffective.

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English-Only COVID-19 signage in a school in KPK (Image credit: Express Tribune)

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), one of the four provinces of Pakistan, it is widely believed that polio vaccination is a Western plot to make children infertile in their childhood with the aim to control Muslim population growth. As a result of this belief, health clinics have been torched and health care workers killed. Polio, almost eradicated elsewhere, remains a health threat in the province.

What happens in a situation such as this – where mistrust between the population and public health services is rampant – when a new public health disaster such as the COVID-19 pandemic strikes?

There is wide agreement that Pakistan’s response to the pandemic has not been effective and that the country is now in a lethal second wave.

In my research project, I set out to discover what the government has done to inform the public about the dangers of the virus and about measures to stop the spread of the virus.

The linguistic situation in KPK

KPK is located in the northwest of Pakistan and shares a border with Afghanistan. The largest ethnic group in the province are the Pashtuns, who are comprised of many tribes and clans. Tribes are independent to govern themselves and most of the population live in rural areas. In addition to Pashto, Hazara, Hindko, Kohistani, Torwali, Baluchi, Persian, and other languages are spoken in the province.

This linguistically and culturally diverse rural population of around 35 million people has a literacy rate of 50%. In some tribal areas the literacy rate is as low as 9%.

Those who are fortunate to have learned how to read and write will have done so in a language that is not native to the province, Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.

In addition to Urdu, English also enters the picture because it is a co-official language of Pakistan.

English dominates official COVID-19 communication

English has, in fact, been the preferred language of communicating official information about COVID-19. Pakistan’s official COVID-19 website is entirely in English.

The government of KPK has followed the lead of the national government and also communicated most official information in English.

I explored a number of official websites and social media feeds and determined the language of communication was almost always English, with some Urdu communications, mostly on social media. I could not discover any use at all of Pashto, or any of the other languages of KPK.

Few people follow official government information

Equally noteworthy as the mismatched language choice is the lack of attention that official government communications receive.

The official Twitter account of Pakistan’s Ministry of National Health Services, for instance, has 29,400 followers. In other words, out of a population of 212.2 million, a minuscule 0.013 percent follow official health information on Twitter.

With 1,771,291 followers, their Facebook page is slightly more popular but still under 1% of the population.

The follower numbers of the official Facebook page of the KPK government are equally dismal: 11,544 followers out of a population of 35 million, or 0.03% of the population.

Given the dismal state of telecommunications in the province and the low literacy rates, these figures are not surprising.

Private TV channels broadcasting in local languages

The COVID-19 messages of the Pashto-language TV channel AVT Khyber are in English

TV is popular in KPK and many private channels broadcast in Pashto, Saraiki, Hindko, and other languages.

Unfortunately, the information related to COVID-19 broadcast on these channels seems to be in English, too, as I discovered when researching COVID-19 messages on the Pashto-language channel AVT Khyber.

Their COVID-19 messages are directly copied from the English language messages of the World Health Organization without any adaptation or localization.

Mismatched communication costs lives

In my research I identified three key communication mismatches:

• Information is made available through the medium of English and, to a lesser degree, Urdu to a population who largely lacks proficiency in either of these languages.
• Information is made available through the written medium to a population who has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world.
• Information is made available online in a context where telecommunications infrastructure is widely lacking.

Given these mismatches, is it surprising that people in KPK do not believe that COVID-19 is real? And that it is yet another plot – by the government, by the West – to oppress and exploit them?

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Source: Australian Museum

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

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A New Era for Indigenous Languages?

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

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

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

Source: Australian Museum

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

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

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

Indigenous Languages and the Australian Public  

Source: Australian Museum

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Australian Museum

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

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

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

Source: Australian Museum

Understanding Denial

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

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

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

Source: Australian Museum

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

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

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

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

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

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Editor’s note: There is a Chinese saying that two heads are better than one (三个臭皮匠赛过一个诸葛亮). This proverb emphasizes both collective wisdom and the value of grassroots work. At its best, teaching is both. In this mini-series, Dr LI Jia and Ms LV Yong, Yunnan University, share how teaching about linguistic diversity has changed their understanding of linguistic diversity. Specifically, they summarize the findings of 77 small research projects undertaken by their undergraduate students. These research projects provide insight into the multifaceted and dynamic language experiences of Chinese youth from Yunnan province, a highly diverse border region in the southwest of China. Following on from their recent post about the revalorization of Chinese dialects, the second article of this 3-part series explores the state of minority languages in China.

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Maoduoli candy from Yunnan is a huge success. Its name means “bright boy” in the Dai language.

Yunnan province is one of the most linguistically diverse provinces in China. It also ranks near the bottom for degree of socioeconomic development in China. With China’s rapid development in the world economy, Yunnan is seeking to capitalize on its linguistic and cultural heritage to integrate itself into China’s regional expansion. Tourism is one of the three pillar industries in Yunnan, and offers associated business opportunities related to minority languages.

Ethnic minority people’s languages and their cultural products increasingly come to be seen as a form of capital to boost the local economy.

This is apparent in the names and images of local foods, as Xiong Qingqing (熊青青) has found. Xiong finds that ethnic minority languages transcribed in Mandarin scripts can create exotic and authentic feelings among Chinese customers who are keen to purchase these commodities. Maoduoli (猫哆哩) is such a case in point: this snack made from local fruit is named after a word from the Dai language, where “Maoduoli” means “bright boy”. Since it was first sold online in 2011, Maoduoli has gained such nationwide popularity that there was a significant rise in its Baidu index from 300 to 2500 within half a year.

Ethnic minority people lack interest in maintaining their heritage languages

The commodification of ethnic minority languages has been studied by many scholars both in China and the world. Some of our students are ethnic minorities themselves, but what they have observed is quite different from the official discourse of celebrating diversity via tourism. Their studies indicate that ethnic minority people themselves do not have much confidence in maintaining their heritage languages.

Wang Liping’s (王丽萍) study is based on the language practices of Bai people from Heqing, Yunnan. Despite the tourist discourse in promoting Bai language and cultural products, the local Bai people see it as challenging to revitalize their heritage language. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, the Bai language in Heqing has no written script and Bai people do not have any religious belief or other strong ideological desire to maintain their cultural practices.

Second, Heqing’s geographical location between two popular tourist destinations (Dali and Lijiang) have actually sped up the loss of Bai. This is due to the fact that more and more translocal migrants settle down in Heqing and marry locals. In the process, Putonghua replaces Bai as the medium for family and wider communication.

Third, many local Bai people migrate to more developed cities in the east of China for better prospects.

Finally, despite the discursive valorization of Bai as a commodity, the language has not been legitimized in the mainstream educational system.

For all these reasons, Bai people do not find it worthwhile to pass Bai on to their younger generation. Instead, the prefer to invest in Putonghua and English. According to Wang’s study with Bai people of different age groups, young people between 7 and 18 have only receptive but no productive knowledge of Bai language, even though they live in a Bai-centered region.

Constructing ethnic minority language as soft power

Despite the lack of interest in minority language maintenance on the part of minority groups, local governments are keen to promote these languages by displaying ethnic minority language signage at tourist destinations (see also Yang Hongyan’s study) and other public spaces. Such top-down approaches to revitalizing ethnic minority languages and cultural practices become more prominent in Yunnan’s border regions such as 西双版纳 (Xishuangbana; see map), a Dai-centered city bordering Myanmar and Laos.

Bai Qiongfang’s (白琼芳) analysis of official documents about the promotion of Dai and Dai culture indicates that Xishuangbanna is becoming a window targeting its neigbouring countries where there are many cross-border ethnic groups living on both sides of the border and sharing a similar language and culture.

Dai people constitute the majority in Xishuangbanna. The Dai are called Shan in Myanmar, and Dai language is also similar to Laotian, the national language of Laos. Given its geopolitical importance, Dai language is not only promoted as commodity but more importantly as “soft power of the borderland”. By making use of digital information technologies and social media transmission, the quality of spreading Dai language and culture has been greatly enhanced, and many national projects and funding supports have been granted to revitalize Dai language and culture via TV/radio/movies and by compiling Dai textbooks and a dictionary.

The local government has even initiated a new policy requiring local leaders and civilians to wear ethnic minority clothes and accessories for at least two days a week.

The increasing visibility of minority languages and cultural practices in China and across its border constitutes a new perspective on China’s language practices in which ethnic minority languages are part of China’s soft power projection, revitalization of the local economy and reinforcement of minority groups’ cultural confidence. However, it remains to be seen whether the discourse of constructing ethnic minority languages as commodity and symbolic identity is actually beneficial to ethnic minorities and does not create more tensions and discontinuities within ethnic minorities and cross-border groups.

Despite the discourse of embracing diversity and having abundant linguistic and cultural resources in Yunnan, we should not exaggerate the idea of multicultural prosperity.

Based on our decades of teaching experience, we are well aware that only a very small number of ethnic minority students can overcome the linguistic and social barriers to being accepted into university. English still constitutes a huge barrier for their access to equal education especially in remote and minority-centered regions of Yunnan. An in-depth and longitudinal study is needed in future in order to understand how ethnic minority students might get empowered through education and at work. What our students Zhu Ziying (朱子莹), Li Jincheng(李锦程), Liu Zongtuo(刘宗拓),Bi Yanming(毕砚茗) and Li Jia have been doing in recent months and in the years to come is to investigate how language shapes the educational and employment trajectories of Yi ethnic minority students and hopefully our study might contribute to the linguistic diversity at the borderlands.

In the next and final part of this series, we’ll focus more on these cross-border languages and explore foreign language learning of languages other than English in China.

Related content

• Baioud, Gegentuul, Will education reform wipe out Mongolian language and culture?
• Grey, Alexandra, How do language rights affect minority languages in China?
• Li, Jia and Lv, Yong, Power to Fangyan!
• Ma, Yuanmeng, Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic?
• Piller, Ingrid, Access denied

Editor’s note: The Covid-19 crisis has exposed fractures in the social and linguistic fabric in many contexts internationally, as we have been documenting in our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis since February. This article provides yet another perspective on crisis communication in multilingual Australia. It was first published as “Lost in translation: COVID-19 leaves migrants behind” by Macquarie University’s The Lighthouse.

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Photo: Engin Akyurt, Unsplash

Many migrants struggle to understand public health information about COVID-19. Ingrid Piller, Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, considers what a linguistic crisis response should look like.

Before February 11, when the World Health Organisation christened the novel coronavirus, COVID-19 was not even long-listed for most popular name.

Just as parents might choose a new baby moniker that keeps all stakeholders happy, WHO advisers were diplomatic: Co and Vi come from coronavirus, D stood for disease and 19 standing for 2019, the year the first cases were seen.

It’s fair to say that COVID-19 was delivered to the linguistic repertoire of the largest number of people after the shortest gestation period.

Naming the disease, however, has been just a minuscule part of the mass communication enveloping the pandemic.

Almost everyone in the world has had to learn about public health concepts such as ‘social distancing’, ‘droplet transmission’ or ‘flattening the curve’ to avoid getting sick.

Almost everyone has had to understand the specifics of containment measures such as lockdowns, contact tracing, or mask wearing in their jurisdiction.

And almost everyone has had to weigh into public debates that pit health against the economy, link the virus to particular social groups, or politicise the disease.

As a topic of conversation, COVID-19 is the water cooler wunderkind.

But not everyone is joining the chat. Multilingual crisis communication has emerged as a global challenge. Australia’s migrants, refugees, the aged, and those with low levels of literacy have struggled to process public health information about the virus.

More than one in five Australian households speak a language other than English. Between 800,000 and one million people in Australia either don’t speak English at all, or don’t speak it well enough to understand complex information.

What people most need is local intel. As well as symptoms to look for, they want answers to questions such as where to get tested, hotspots, new cases in the area, how many people can come to the house, whether restrictions have changed, and so on. The answers differ across jurisdictions.

The trust factor

There is a real onus on government to make this information as widely accessible as possible. But that kind of information has not kept up multilingually.

Communication isn’t always consistent. Face masks, for example, have gone from being: not a good idea … might make things worse because people touch their faces more … recommended to wear only if there are symptoms, no need to if there are none … suggest wearing one on public transport but not mandatory ….must wear one anywhere in Victoria.

How much information is available to migrants depends on which language community they belong to. Speakers of languages with sizeable numbers of practitioners – Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese or Greek – can glean information from community publications, newspapers, radio stations, Facebook groups, churches, mosques, national organisations and clubs.

Covid-19 signage in a Sydney shop

Large communities also can rely on diasporic communities like those in the US where the media is big on community TV channels. But there are smaller languages that may not be affiliated with a particular state, and they can be poorly served both at home and internationally.

Trust is key to selling COVID-19 messages and triumphing over the fake news that has proliferated during the pandemic.

But levels of trust among linguistic minorities might be influenced by a community’s mother country and attitudes of the Australian media. Some groups experience more racism than others, and that can limit the trust they have towards authorities.

Keeping it local

Physical distancing and lockdowns have disrupted our social fabric. Older generations of migrants who don’t speak English well tend to rely on family and friends to step in as language brokers or mediators for everyday information, for dealing with public services, or attending medical appointments.

Cognitive or degenerative diseases can further impact language processing. In bilingual populations, these tend to affect the weaker language more. Add to that being in lockdown in an aged care facility, where you can’t have visitors, family or a carer who speaks your language, and the isolation compounds.

What will improve the lot of linguistic minorities in this pandemic?

A communications strategy should be part of a public health strategy. One thing that has been learned about controlling COVID-19 is the importance of having local measures in place, especially around testing and contact tracing.

You need to reach people who are in high traffic places, understanding what their information needs are, and identify language communities in each suburb. Different council areas have different needs, and therefore local communications strategy is important.

The language clusters of, say, the Sydney suburbs of Marsfield, Fairfield, and Mona Vale couldn’t be more different.

In Marsfield, 54 per cent of households speak a language other than English at home, the top three being Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean. That’s more than the Sydney average of 38 per cent but small in comparison to Fairfield, where 80 per cent of households speak a language other than English at home: the top three being Assyrian, Arabic, and Vietnamese. Mona Vale is on the other end of the spectrum, with only 13 per cent of households speaking a language other than English – the top three are Serbian, German, and Croatian.

A colleague, Dr Alexandra Grey, has done a study of the posters in the Sydney suburbs of Strathfield and Burwood, and she found there was quite a mismatch between the linguistic profiles of these communities and the language of the posters.

A mismatch between the language in which COVID-19 information is communicated and the linguistic repertoires of those who need the information exacerbates the effect of disasters like a pandemic on linguistic minorities.

Emergency preparation and crisis planning

Not having access to timely, high quality, trusted information increases vulnerability. If information is not available in a language people understand, or from a source they trust, they end up looking for answers on social media. And while that is not necessarily a bad thing, the WHO has warned that an over-abundance of COVID-19 information could be misleading and even harmful.

The ‘infodemic’ that has accompanied the pandemic, WHO warned, is just as dangerous as the virus itself.

Moroccan clinical neuropsychologist Mohamed Taibine wrote in the ‘Language on the Move’ blog last month: “Misinformation is like a carcinogenic cell that duplicates irrational and implausible facts, and then transforms them into a growth of seemingly trustworthy and verified information via social media.”

It is important we have a diversified and sophisticated communications strategy, and social media certainly needs to be part of that because that is where most people get their information.

May the force be with you…

Not only migrants have trouble interpreting complex COVID-19 messages. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 13.8 per cent of Australians don’t read above primary school level.

‘A little while ago I googled ‘nsw corona/covid restrictions’. The top hits all referred to NSW Government websites. I homed in on two of them  “What you can and can’t do under the rules” and “Public Health Orders and restrictions”.’

A readability analysis using algorithms that are now built into most word processing software showed that one post required 11 years of formal education to read and the other 14 years of formal education.

In other words, at least 2.3 million Australians will not be able to read the two key texts about NSW’s COVID-19 restrictions. In a crisis where the actions of every one of us have a big impact on the course of the pandemic, this is a large number.

What Australia needs is a communications volunteer taskforce.

As the bushfires have taught us, an effective way to deal with disaster is to mobilise a volunteer force, a large segment of the population, in the same way the Rural Fire Service has a system in place for recruiting volunteers, training them, keeping them on hold, and then mobilising them.

However, for a public health crisis, you need volunteers with different skills and capabilities: people who can translate, interpret; who are willing to sit down with people filling in forms and explain things like what a postcode is (in order to find the nearest testing centre).

We have multilingual talent so we could actually do this. It’s unrealistic to expect the government to put out all the information in all the languages, so we need to shape a communications strategy and a national language policy suitable for a rapidly changing and complex information environment, one that takes into account all the communications channels including social media.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for the full Language on the Move coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. The special issue of Multilingua of 12 peer-reviewed research papers about “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis” is available here. And if you’d like to listen to a lecture about “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis” head over to YouTube.

The special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a time of crisis”, which originally motivated the call for contributions to this series, has now been published and all the papers are available for free access.

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Covid-related misinformation in Morocco

African sayings related to crocodiles – the author at the Agadir Crocodile Park

The Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis has just published a report entitled “Moroccans and Quarantine: General satisfaction and cautious optimism”. The findings show considerable negative psychological effects of the pandemic despite the fact that most Moroccans are satisfied with the government’s measures to keep the epidemic under control. One of the reasons for this discrepancy may be information overload.

Since the beginning of the lockdown in Morocco on March 20, 2020, information and misinformation have abounded, and it has not been easy to distinguish between these two.

The closure of schools, cafes, hammams, restaurants, and mosques, together with the ban on mass gatherings, inter-city travel, parties and family celebrations have helped to keep the spread of the virus under control. But they have also been controversial and deprived people of functioning normally in a society.

Moroccans’ sources of information – and misinformation – have been social media, national and international TV channels, the internet, and communications from a range of social actors and groupings.

Social media, in particular, provide the ideal platform for the dissemination of misinformation.

The mimesis power of disinformation

The Covid-19 infodemic can be approached as a synthesis of concepts: a static signified (COVID-19) and a dynamic signifier (misinformation) are transformed in local, regional and global contexts.

Globalization has promised Moroccans – as many others around the world – wealth and prosperity together with equality and respect. Unfortunately, these have turned out to be chimeras. How is anyone to know that the measures taken to curb the spread of COVID-19 are not another such chimera?

Misinformation is like a carcinogenic cell that duplicates irrational and implausible facts, and then transforms them into a growth of seemingly trustworthy and verified information via social media. Misinformation is fueled by a melange of a bit of reality and a lot of chimeras.

It is in the nucleus where the misinformation is duplicated, echoed and confabulated into a form of neo-information or malignant misinformation that mimics the style, the content, and the source of credible information. Once the target audience has become trapped, the reptilian and emotional brain does not have the time or capacity to think critically due to cognitive overload. Thus, misinformation proliferates because the human brain is prone to cognitive bias and dissonance.

Lack of timely high-quality information is the perfect niche for misinformation to get a foot in the door and from there to create a web of lies and half-truths for the anguished and traumatized of this world for whom the pandemic is yet another disaster that incomprehensibly befalls them from afar.

The crocodile giggles while we paddle with the stream, as the proverb says.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for the full Language on the Move coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. The special issue of Multilingua of 12 peer-reviewed research papers about “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis” is available here.

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New Media is defined as the combination of traditional media, such as television, newspapers, radio with information and communication technology (ICT), such as smartphones, computers and the Internet, in all its forms (social networks, search engines etc.). When the new media emerged, information began to be considered as fast, omnipresent, economical, democratic and interactive, encouraging users to provide feedback, form a community and creatively participate in the creation of such content.

However, this wealth, that is access to information, is not distributed equally and the convergence of traditional and new media has not been everywhere completed. Poor communication infrastructure has halted the spread of information to more rural areas where the majority of people live. Particularly, access to health information, education and promotion, has been limited, even though it sometimes is the main factor for dealing with the spread of contagious diseases.

Such contexts are evident across Africa. Africa has a rich oral tradition. The transmission of knowledge, history and experience, especially in West Africa, occurs mainly through story-telling rather than written texts. This tradition guides social and human morals, gives people a sense of place and purpose, while at the same time, being a community activity, it educates children and passes on history, values and lessons.

virALLanguages as a bridge

The Internet could become the solution for this inequality in information sharing. However, according to Chhanabnai and Holt (2010), there are certain limitations: connectivity, IT literacy, cultural appropriateness, and accessibility. The virALLanguages project is trying to combat these limitations and make the Internet a bridge for endangered language communities around the world to achieve access to accurate and culturally appropriate information, while keeping in mind issues of connectivity and accessibility. The most evident examples of this come from piloting the project in Cameroon.

IT literacy

The virALLanguages library

In Cameroon, there is limited infrastructure in terms of education, and literacy, numeracy, and IT skills are limited (Mbaku, 2016: 150). The virALLanguages project contributes to overcoming these limitations, by enhancing IT skills of younger community members who take part in the project. Older members contributed by performing their role as storytellers who share knowledge with the community. Contributors learn how to document themselves and their language in an additional medium apart from community memory, that of the Internet. In the process, they also enhance their IT skills.

Accessibility and Connectivity

As much as possible, virALLanguages project materials (videos, audios and pictures) are available in various forms and media. An Internet Archive account is provided with the option to download the materials, from low to high quality, adapting to connectivity and accessibility, since the productions (even the videos!), can be shared as voice messages on WhatsApp, a popular and accessible option for Cameroonians.

Additionally, radio and television continue to be popular throughout Cameroon. Radio, in particular, remains the most important and most effective way of disseminating information (Mbaku, 2016: 173). For this reason, virALLanguages has reached out to local radio stations (like Radio Echos des Montagnes) adapting the recordings in languages spoken within the reach of these radio stations. Popular traditional and new media come together in the town crier, who opens this Babanki recording by Julius Viyoff and Godlove Zhuh.

In short, virALLanguages is located at the convergence of old and new media in Cameroon.

Cultural Appropriateness

The Babanki team, Julius Viyoff (right) and Godlove Zhuh

In oral traditions, information is perceived as reliable when it is demonstrated. This is possible in the virALLanguages project because of the use of video. In the Mundabli video, for example, the speaker demonstrates the adequate distance to be kept between individuals. In terms of cultural appropriateness, virALLanguages also encourages participants to share information in a culturally appropriate manner, in the local language and by choosing leaders or respected people of each community. This way the reliability of the message is underlined while at the same time oral tradition rituals are followed, with the community gathering in order to receive this important piece of information.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the inherent complexities of technology and developing country setting are significant obstacles to the fast transmission of Covid-19-related information materials. Against this background, the virALLanguages project hopes to contribute not only to the dissemination of public health information but also to community development. The technology used in the project is simple and local, it builds on what is already there, it involves users in the design, it strengthens the capacity to use, work with and develop effective ICTs, it introduces greater monitoring and evaluation, and, last but not least, encourages ongoing improvement of communication processes.

Reference

Mbaku, J.M. (2016). Cameroon, Republic of  (République du Cameroun). In Toyin F. and Jean-Jacques D. eds), Africa: an encyclopedia of culture and society. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for our full coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis.

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Editor’s note: In this latest contribution to our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis, Sue Ollerhead, Shepi Mati, and Monica Hendricks ask whether laughter is the best medicine to deal with the hardships of the pandemic in multilingual South Africa. The call for contributions to the series continues to be open.

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South Africa’s hard lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic has hurt its poorest citizens the most (Image credit: Sue Maclennan)

Like many developing countries around the world, South Africa faces serious challenges in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. With one of the world’s largest disparities in living standards, the country is especially vulnerable to infection spread in its densely populated ‘informal settlements’ (some argue that the term ‘informal settlement’ is a sanitization of the harsh reality of shack settlements or imijondolo, a Zulu term meaning ‘a temporary house built from any material’).

The government’s swift imposition of a hard lockdown, enforced by the police and military troops, has already inflicted grave damage on the national economy and led to widespread hardship among the marginalized poor. Yet why is it that, despite having many reasons to despair, South Africans appear to be responding with humor to a situation that poses an existential threat?

One does not need to look very far in South Africa to find an amusing meme, video-clip or joke leveled at the Covid-19 crisis. Many citizens have taken to Twitter,  Facebook and Whatsapp to post parodies of prominent politicians, or cleverly worded puns, integrating two or more of South Africa’s eleven official languages with isiCamtho, a dynamic multilingual form spoken mostly by urban youth. Among Xhosa-speaking South Africans, the term lockdown has been transmuted into the homophone lokhwendala, meaning ‘an old dress’.

A Xhosa meme: People of Mazizini (a village in the Eastern Cape province), this is not an old dress (lokhwe – dress, endala – that is old) but a lockdown

Could it be that through “Xhosalising” the term lockdown, South Africans have been able to reframe the government’s draconian shelter in place strategy, which has seen 57 million people confined to their homes for seven weeks, the banning of liquor and tobacco sales and a heavy military presence, as a colloquial, rather pitiful object of satire, thereby diminishing its psychological power?

Some commentators suggest that using humor during a crisis allows South Africans to resist or reframe official government policies that they deem untrustworthy. Another particularly popular series of memes shared via Whatsapp parodies the regular official television addresses made by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, in which he updates the nation’s citizens about the country’s latest lockdown measures. While initially imposed for a two-week period, the government has had to extend the lockdown period at regular intervals, severely curtailing the way South Africans work, socialize, commute, and learn.

In this meme, originally published in Sesotho, and thereafter in isiXhosa the creator writes:  “At the end of April, if I hear “Fellow South Africans” I will switch off my TV and say I didn’t hear him.” The meme is a wry commentary on the fact that when Ramaphosa uses the English words “Fellow South Africans”, people should interpret them as a cue that further (and harsher) lockdown measures are imminent. The writer cynically suggests that switching off one’s radio or television on hearing these words may absolve them of their duty to obey further lockdown measures.

A Sesotho meme: On the 30 April, if I hear “Fellow South Africans” I will switch off my TV

When Ramaphosa appeared on television with his official spokesperson Khusela Diko to announce a third extension of the lockdown, bringing it to nine weeks in total, the public noted that the term “Fellow South Africans” had been replaced with the term “Dear compatriots”. Social commentators joked that this was a shrewd move on Ramaphosa’s part to hoodwink the nation into not turning off their television sets. The meme below is published in a mixture of isiZulu, English and isiCamtho.

Through including isiCamtho, the commentator comically reframes Ramaphosa’s official discourse into language frequently spoken by streetwise urban youth, thereby reducing his status from President to ‘one of the people’. This appropriation of official government communications resonates with the concept of radio trottoir or pavement radio, a term coined by Stephen Ellis in 1989 to refer to the popular and unofficial discussion of current affairs within a community. Radio trottoir has its roots in widespread oral traditions found across Africa.

On a more serious note, this meme could also be interpreted as a sociolinguistic commentary on the way in which language has been used for official communications during the pandemic in South Africa. Despite receiving much public praise for his management of the pandemic, Ramaphosa has also been criticized for the fact that his government has delivered most official communications about the pandemic in English. In this country of eleven official languages, English is often used as the primary language in state discourse, yet it is the first language of only 9 per cent of its population, comprising the largely wealthy, white upper-middle class.

Meme published in isiZulu, English and isiCamtho: Hey Khusela our people think I am a country bumpkin. I’m a smart guy from Soweto. They were waiting for “Fellow South Africans” so that they could switch off their TVs. I did a u-turn instead and said “Compatriots”

As the consequences of the pandemic are undoubtedly more likely to be suffered by the poor and marginalized living in shack settlements, many argue that official announcements regarding Covid-19 should be made in at least two African languages, including an Nguni language (alternately isiZulu and isiXhosa) or a Sotho language (alternately Setswana and Sesotho). There is widespread sentiment that those who do not have a strong command of English should not have to rely on second-hand reporting of crucial announcements in their home languages. Furthermore, the act of saying important things in any African language by leaders signifies that African languages matter, as well as the people who speak them.

In South Africa, issues around language choice and representation are inextricably linked to issues of race and inequality. In one of the most unequal societies in the world, where the white, predominantly English-speaking population continue to hold the majority of the country’s wealth, language use seen as favoring this population can cause division and even resentment, especially in times of heightened national crisis.

During these unprecedented times, public discourses play a powerful role in shaping the opinions and actions of a nation’s citizens. Among urbanized, mobile and digitally literate South Africans, radio trottoir appears to have harnessed the power of humor to stare down the social and material consequences of the Covid-19 crisis. Could memes go down in the archives as one of South Africans’ best defenses against a pandemic?

Reference
Ellis, S. (1989). Tuning in to pavement radio. African Affairs, 88 (352), pp. 321- 330. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a098185

(Image credit: Psychology Today)

Device use is a major contemporary education challenge for parents and teachers alike. In our family, we have fairly strict rules around the use of internet-connected screens. However, these rules have become increasingly difficult to implement, as our child has grown older. This is because the boundaries between device use for leisure and for study have disappeared.

A few years back, our teenager’s school instituted a bring-your-own-device policy and notebook computers and tablets quickly became a major part of learning. A lot of homework and out-of-school studying shifted onto devices, too.

All of a sudden, limiting screen time to less than two hours per day, as recommended by pediatricians, no longer made sense. It became obvious that approved screen time had to be extended. But that was not all. The big question – and the source of what seems like a running battle that has been going on for years now – became whether, at any given point, the device was used for studying or for other purposes.

Monitoring what your child and your students do on their devices – as opposed to whether they are using them or not – is much harder and less clear-cut.

Multitasking

The challenge goes back to the amazing capacity of today’s technology for multitasking. While I am writing up this blog post in my computer’s word processor, I also have Adobe Reader running in the background (with an annotated article by May and Elder open), my Endnote bibliographic database, a file explorer, and an Internet browser (with four separate windows open). All these tools help me to write this text.

I know that this is a comparatively Spartan use of my computer’s capacity. I have no personal social media accounts, I have no push notifications enabled, and, over the three decades of my professional career, I have developed the habit of monitoring my time closely.

Young people are socialized into a very different use of digital technologies and can easily confuse the computer’s capacity for multitasking with their own ability to multitask.

A recent study (reported in May and Elder, 2018) found that as many as 90% of college students multitask when they use digital devices. They also report that their multitasking aides their learning.

As a mother and a teacher, my gut feeling has always been that these young people are kidding themselves, and that it requires strict discipline to reap the benefits of new technologies.

Turns out that I have been right, as the review of research into device use and learning by May and Elder (2018) shows. Reviewing 38 research articles related to multitasking and academic performance, these authors find that “multitasking interferes with attention and working memory, negatively affecting GPA, test performance, recall, reading comprehension, note-taking, self-regulation, and efficiency” (p. 1).

These negative effects hold both in-class and out-of-class. They hold whether the multitasking is off-task (e.g., checking Facebook while listening to a lecture) or on-task (e.g., looking up a Wikipedia entry relevant to course content).

Source: May and Elder (2018, p. 12)

What is more, these negative effects hold not only for the multitasker themselves but also for nearby peers: seeing someone else going through their news feed while studying is almost as distracting as engaging in such multitasking yourself. One study found that students within view of a multitasking peer scored 17% lower on tests than those who had no multitasking peer in their field of vision. This means that – in classrooms where digital devices are permitted – it is almost impossible for students to escape the negative effects of multitasking.

I mentioned above that I have my internet browser open in the background. I do not go there while writing other than to fact-check and language-check. Turns out, I might be better off even without this sparse use of the Internet: one research reported by May and Elder (2018) found that students who write their assignments on computers that are not connected to the Internet achieve higher grades than those who write while connected …

Digital technologies doubtlessly have huge benefits and are here to stay. However, we need to mitigate their negative effects if we want to ensure that out devices make us more, not less, smart. To this end, off-task multitasking needs to be eliminated.

Elimination requires awareness of the dangers of multitasking and self-regulation. As May and Elder (2018) show, both awareness and self-regulation are currently widely lacking. This post is here to help raise awareness and I will be curious to hear what strategies for self-regulation you have in place. How do you ensure you are staying focused and on task while using your device to learn and study?

Reference

May, K. E., & Elder, A. D. (2018). Efficient, helpful, or distracting? A literature review of media multitasking in relation to academic performance. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 15(1), 1-13. [open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/what-can-you-do-so-that-your-device-doesnt-make-you-stupid/feed/ 150 21907 https://languageonthemove.com/virtually-multilingual/ https://languageonthemove.com/virtually-multilingual/#comments Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:27:43 +0000 http://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=21007 English is the mother tongue of the Internet, or so it seems. English is omnipresent in the architecture of this breakthrough technology. You see it in the QWERTY keyboard, domain names, major search engines, and how most of this world’s knowledge is coded. Therefore, to use the Internet, one has to know some English. It is the original gatekeeper of this powerful global communication technology.

As its user population has exploded, however, the Internet’s linguistic repertoire inevitably has expanded, too, and transformed it into a multilingual space.

But how multilingual is the Internet? What languages other than English does it speak? Why these languages?

The development of the Wikipedia logo is a metaphor for the journey from English-monolingual to multilingual Internet (Source: Wikipedia)

These are some of the key questions explored in Internationalizing Internet Studies: Beyond Anglophone Paradigms. Published in 2009, this collection of articles celebrates the non-Western, non-English speaking face of the Internet that is often hidden from academia and the media limelight.

Editors Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland challenge the tendency of communications and media scholarship to overemphasize the Anglophone-orientedness of online phenomena, taking for granted the multicultural and multilingual realities that persist alongside Western hegemony in virtual spaces. Using this skewed representation of the Internet as take-off point, the articles problematize whether the Internet truly bridges boundaries or, otherwise, creates other forms of division.

One obvious form of division online is the linguistic divide, which pertains to the differential valuing and representation of languages on the Internet. This issue is elaborated in the second part of the book—Language Communities Online. Through case studies of language practices in non-Western online communities, this section foregrounds languages other than English in the Internet and how the online space and these languages mutually shape each other.

In Chapter 5, Nanette Gottlieb presents the case of Japan:

While language use on the web in Japan, in terms of the selection of languages, is conservative overall with a strong monolingual bent, as dictated by national language policy, infrastructure, and cultural considerations, ludic use of the Japanese language itself online is multifaceted and far from conservative. (p. 65)

The scripts on the Wikipedia logo (Source: Wikipedia)

Gottlieb then describes Japanese language play in online messaging, which is exemplified in the use of emoticons as substitutes for verbal emotive expressions. Despite their banality as built-in features in hand-held gadgets and mobile messaging apps, emoticons can be valued as indexes of cultural distinction.

Subsequent chapters discuss the more serious function of the Internet as instrument for linguistic resistance and cultural preservation. Chapter 7 focuses on Welsh-speaking Internet users promoting Cymraeg as language of choice in their websites, forums, blogs, and social networking sites to assert its status as a contemporary language. The author, Daniel Cunliffe, argues that the success of this language movement can be attributed to institutional policy (the Welsh Language Act) and technical backing (software localization). Despite not having the same quality of support, the case of Catalan, articulated in Chapter 8, shows that the Internet can be a potent tool for the propagation of a minoritized language. The authors, Josep Lluis Mico and Pere Masip, partly echo the insights of Professor Josu Amezaga in his lecture about minority and minoritized languages and evinces the power of new media to facilitate the resurgence of languages silenced in traditional media platforms.

The final chapters in this sociolinguistic section focus on the intersection between language use and identity formation. The link between language and identity particularly in the context of migrant experience echoes the theme of the New Finnish Grammar, which was also reviewed for the Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge. Chapters 9 and 10 talk about how specific groups of migrants use language online to define aspects of their identity, which may be displaced and denied in the “real world” offline.

Urmila Goel examines the Indernet (www.theinder.net), a website that uses German language but which is primarily an Indian space. Through this forum, second generation Indians in Germany, who are othered as neither of India nor of Germany, find a virtual home where their transnational identity is accepted. Meanwhile, Ljilijana Gavrilovic talks about Serbian refugees, for whom “language is the primary element of identification” (p.147) and who use their home language online to assert their pre-refugee identities.

Overall, I found the recognition of the Internet as a beyond-Western phenomenon refreshing. The descriptive articles, whilst not equally engaging, provided information that made me more conscious of what and how languages are used online, by whom, and for what end. Of course, I was silently disappointed that Philippine languages were not mentioned in this conversation, but so were a host of other languages that are certainly represented in some corner or thread of this wide virtual web today. As an introductory reading on multilingual practices in cyberspace, however, the book succeeded in defamiliarizing the English-dominant Internet and inspiring a fresh curiosity for its linguistic repertoire.

Map of European languages (Source: SB Language Maps)

Invitation to public seminar about “Minority Languages” at Macquarie University

What: Minority languages: what are we talking about? And why are we talking about it now?
When: Wednesday, November 22, 12:00-2:00pm
Where: Macquarie University Y3A 211 Tute Rm (10HA)
Who: Professor Josu Amezaga, University of the Basque Country

Abstract: Minority (or minoritized) languages can be defined as languages historically excluded from the nation-state. Following the French Revolution, which imposed the need of a common and unique language on the French state, many countries applied the “one-language-one-nation” pattern and, in the process, minoritized numerous languages. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, many countries almost seemed to have reached this monolingual ideal. However, in recent decades major changes in mediated communications together with growing migration flows have called this state of affairs into question as minority languages – both “old” and “new” – reassert themselves. At the same time, the reemergence of linguistic diversity has provoked state reactions in the form of new re-nationalization policies focused around language.

In my presentation I will first explain what minoritization of languages means. Then I will show how changes in communication and migration flows have affected the linguistic landscape of Western societies. The focus will be on commonalities and points of difference between regional and immigrant minority languages. Finally, I will discuss why minority languages should be addressed not only as a matter of cultural heritage but also a need for the future. This will lead me to close with some questions about the monolingual paradigm.

Bio blurb: Josu Amezaga is Professor in the Department of Audio-Visual Communication and Advertising at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. After completing his Ph.D. in Sociology about Basque culture, he started researching Basque language and media, from where he moved to a more comprehensive view of minority languages in media and as identity tools. This interest has led him to immigrant languages, as yet another type of minority languages. Currently, he is a visiting professor at Charles Sturt University.

The shaming – what happened?

Shaming comments (Source: Sharma, 2014, p. 24)

On June 10, 2011, the then Minister for Health and Population of Nepal, the Honorable Dharma Shila Chapagain, addressed the UN High-Level Meeting on AIDS in New York. The 7-minute speech was live-streamed on the UN’s multimedia channel and an excerpt was then shown on Kathmandu-based TV station Kantipur. From there a 4-minute clip made its way onto Youtube, where it was titled “Nepali Stupid Speech at UN”. This prompted many Internet users to comment: the sociolinguist Krishna Bal Sharma, in whose 2014 article I first learned about the incident, counted 603 comments in April 2013.

The comments heaped scorn on the way the speech was delivered, as in the following examples:

• in that forum u are allowed to speak any language not just english but she choose to disgrace our country
• Wtf bitch… A kid from primary level has a better English than u.
• Fuck this is why i’m not proud to say i’m nepali
• Its like letting a nursery kid to read those paragraphs..shame on you…
• very shameful speech.
• what’s this? it is just a shame for all nepalese
• really fucking speech shame on

From these few examples, it is obvious that the comments are vile and constitute an example of language shaming par excellence.

The shamed speech – what was the content?

Shaming comments (Source: Sharma, 2014, p. 26)

From the comments it seems hardly anyone chose to pay attention to the actual content of the speech. Those who did pedantically pointed out non-standard pronunciations (and thereby clearly demonstrated that Capagain’s pronunciation did not actually impede comprehension of the speech), as in this example:

“She is reading totally different words with different meanings, for example she read “republic health” instead of reproductive health. What a funny! Don’t pretend, if you can’t do it. You are embarrassing Nepalese, your party, and making a fool yourself…”

The speech presented an outline of the HIV situation in Nepal, including public health measures and challenges related to the disease. The Minister used the opportunity to particularly highlight gender inequality as a key issue in HIV transmission and sexual and reproductive health more generally:

Women and girls are still the most affected group. In this context, there is a need to fight against gender inequalities, insufficient access to healthcare and services, and all forms of discrimination and violence, including sexual and gender based violence and exploitation. We must ensure their sexual and reproductive health. (Quoted from the official transcript of the speech available from the UN website)

The shamee – who was shamed?

Dharmashila Chapagain (Source: “Women behind Nepal’s constitution – a personal story”)

When Minister Chapagain spoke about gender inequality, she knew what she was talking about from personal experience. Her personal story can be traced from The Nepal Papers edited by Mandira Sharma and Seira Tamang.

Chapagain was born in the late 1970s in a village in Jhapa District in eastern Nepal and discovered from a young age that women and girls were not valued: one of four girls, her father divorced her mother when she failed to bear him a son; and although her mother made sure she could attend school, her education remained patchy and came to an end in her teens. Unsurprising, given that Nepal’s large gender literacy gap has only started to close in the 2000s. This is the lesson about women’s status that Chapagain learned in childhood:

It was tiring and painful to be a woman in the village and I was looking for a way out. […] I felt that as women, my mother, my sisters and I were not wanted. That kind of torture haunt you at night, makes you want to take revenge. (quoted from Sharma & Tamang, 2016)

As a way out, Chapagain joined Nepal’s Maoist insurgency (1996-2006) in her late teens and became a guerilla fighter. By her mid-20s she had distinguished herself and risen to the rank of district-in-charge for Morang District in southeast Nepal. In 2002 she was arrested together with her six-month-old baby. The following five years in prison left their mark on Chapagain: as a consequence of the torture she suffered, she developed chronic health problems, including breathing difficulties and inability to stand and walk for extended periods.

During her five long years in various Nepali prisons, Chapagain was yet again confronted with gender inequality in the form of sexual violence against women.

‘The security forces didn’t care if they were old or young, they even raped a 64-year-old woman after killing her son,’ says Chapagain. ‘What kind of rules of war was the state following?’ She says that the then government saw the Maoists as enemies and wanted to destroy them, and sexual torture was one of the tools they used. (Sharma & Tamang, 2016)

When a Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed with the rebels in 2006, the Maoists became part of the government. In the elections of 2008, Chapagain was elected to parliament and served as Minister for Health and Population. And that’s how she came to deliver that speech at the UN in 2011.

The shamers – who did the shaming?

Locations of the commenters (Source: Sharma, 2014, p. 22)

The shamers are an anonymous mass who individually hide behind their Youtube handles and social media pseudonyms. Sharma (2014) shows that most of them are Nepalis who are, however, not based in Nepal but outside the country. Because of the dire economic situation in Nepal – partly a result of the decade-long Maoist insurgency – Nepalis have been leaving their country in large numbers, and Sharma identifies two distinct streams of emigrants: low-skilled migrant workers whose preferred destinations are the Gulf countries, on the one hand, and tertiary students on the other. The top destinations of the latter include other South-East Asian and Anglophone western countries.

On the basis of their location, commenters mostly seem to belong to the latter group. Shamers and shamee thus share the same nationality but differ on other dimensions:

• Location: based inside or outside Nepal
• Education: barely high-school educated vs tertiary educated
• Gender: to the degree that it is possible to tell, the majority of commenters seem to be male
• Political orientation: the Maoists’ socialist ideology is an explicit target of criticism and many commenters present it as the underlying cause of Chapagain’s poor English pronunciation.

The commonalities and differences between Chapagain and the commenters mean the delivery of the speech is not only represented as a cause of a shame for the speaker but also for the nation – a shame that the commenters themselves partly share (“it is just a shame for all nepalese”).

Consequences of language shaming

The consequences of a language shame campaign on the internet such as the one described here are twofold and affect both the shamee and the shamers.

To begin with, the shame campaign silences the actual content of the speech and suppresses political debate. Instead of engaging with the merits of the minister’s arguments and her politics, the focus is exclusively on the form in which her speech was delivered.

The fact that many of the comments take the form of specifically sexist insults (“Wtf bitch”) also demonstrates that linguistic shaming is not only about illegitimate speech but about illegitimate speakers. Language shaming is a way to keep people – here: rural women with little formal education – in their place; or to show them “their place” if they have risen above is, as Chapagain has.

Second, a shame campaign such as this one also serves to keep the overall hierarchy of global English in its place. While the commenters presumably believe themselves to speak better English than Chapagain, they do not set themselves up as model of “good English”. That model remains implicitly but firmly outside Nepal, presumably in Anglophone western countries (although some commenters also compare the English of Indian politicians favorably to that of Nepali politicians).

This means that the shame campaign ultimately is as harmful to the shamers as it is to the shamed person: it perpetuates the linguistic and cultural inferiority complex that Franz Fanon identified as an inevitable consequence of colonial international relations:

To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization. […] Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, the culture of the mother country. (Fanon, 1967, p. 17f.)

References

Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.

Sharma, B. K. (2014). On High Horses: Transnational Nepalis and Language Ideologies on Youtube. Discourse, Context & Media, 4–5, 19-28. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2014.04.001

Sharma, M., & Tamang, S. (2016). A Difficult Transition: The Nepal Papers. New Delhi: Zubaan Publishers.

A monument near Baganuur (Outer Mongolia) with an inscription of poem “My Native Land” by Natsagdorj (Source: Wikipedia)

In the middle school Mongolian textbooks there is a well-known text called “Huuchin Huu” (“A young man fallen behind the times”) written by the famous Mongolian writer D. Natsagdorj. Most of us still remember how it starts:

Hudeegin baidal shaltar boltar, chagin ularil oroo bosgo …

(“The rural village is messy and shabby, the society is full of ups and downs…”)

I was impressed by the author’s ironic way of describing a Mongolian young man who was caught in the sudden change of rural life and in the end saw a light under an ‘upside-down’ big metal pot during the Mongolian revolution in the 1920s.

Recently, one of my friends sent a short story called “Suljeen Huu” (“A young man living in the Internet”) written by an online writer, whose pseudonym name is Tatar, in which he describes a phone-addicted young man in a Mongolian village in the same ironic way by employing almost the same sentence structures as those in “Huuchin Huu.”

It starts like this (the full text is available here):

WeChat version of “Huuchin Huu”

Suljiyen ne baidal uimeen shoogaan tai, suruglegsen humus eniyed tai haniad tai. Haaltai Google haxiltai Facebook uruu haya nig hoyar hun herem haraiju orona … gar chenegin haluun yilqi nuur ood nil geju hums in setgel  ig bohinduulna… barimjiya abiya gi urbuulen hurbuulen xinjigseer uder sarig uliruulna… boljoo doyan Mongol soyol ba Mongolchuud in garh jam, delhei dahini hugjiltin tohai hedun mur bichije… nig urloo gi barana.

(Life on the internet is full of noise and hustles, the crowds are smiling and coughing… looking at one or two guys jumping out of the ‘wall’ and wandering on Facebook and Google occasionally… the heat from phone battery flowing to his face and his heart is wistfully wondering… surfing and thinking about the online debate about standard Mongolian implementation, writing and boasting in heaps and bounds from time to time….) [my translation]

The parody focuses on the young man’s “wide knowledge” including others’ secret affairs, the prize money won by celebrity wrestlers, online medicine, the “deteriorating” quality of Mongolian women, and the politics of “hateful” Japan and “evil” America. Off the Internet, this young man leads a reckless yet aimless life: in the winter he plays Mah-jong, and goes bathing in the banner centre; in the summer he frequents fairs in various towns and banners, drinks with “table girls” and sings songs about the wide open grasslands.

This satire shines a critical spotlight on a life characterized by limited information, declining morality, enjoyment of drinking and partying, pursuit of cars and beauties, and boasting about the great Mongols of the past. It shows the dark side of a society under tremendous transformation that can be found in many small towns across Inner Mongolia.

Mongol-related headlines on WeChat

Let us look at some “detours” taken by Mongolians in the north eastern part of Inner Mongolia. Marois (2006) notes that former herders today live in sedentary house as their Chinese counterparts in this area. But they arrange their houses differently from Chinese villagers and engage in different occupancy practices. They keep their ger (“tent”) next to their house and move seasonally to graze their cattle on fertile pasture. Inside the settled-down house the honorific zone is kept at the back of the room as it is in the ger, and they locate the hearth in the room immediately behind the door. This is due to the fact that for Mongolians the fire is a purifying element. By contrast, Han villagers would locate the kitchen and the fire at the back of the house.

Marois (2006) argues that the adoption of sedentary life, fixed dwellings and other material objects are not enough to say that the herders have become sinicized. While making choices from a variety of objects modernity offers the herders, they take detours to make their choices suit their own needs and to express their distinctiveness.

The author Tatar very vividly tells about the life of young Mongolian village men. It is very hard for such men to find a wife, particularly if they do not own an apartment or a car.

But I also want to stress the adaptation made by the herders as they embrace modernity thrust upon them by the nation state and globalization. For instance, an increasing number of villagers in my hometown are buying cars and using WeChat now. The cars have increased the frequency of visits between relatives and friends, and some of them formed a WeChat Mongolian song competition group of over 100 people across several Mongolian villages.

Administrative map of Inner Mongolia (Source: Inner Mongolia News)

I therefore favour the term “cultural strategizing” (Silverberg, 2007) – instead of “cultural borrowing” – to explain the processes of social change that can be observed in the lives of Mongols. The emphasis on cultural strategizing is predicated on multifaceted dialogic interactions between local and global, between tradition and modernity.

Instead of wasting their lives on the Internet, contemporary Mongols also strategically use the Internet to commodify their culture and in search of profit. On sites such as 蒙古丽人 (“Mongol beauty”), 蒙古圈 (“Mongol circle”) or Onoodor (“Today”), Mongol photography is intended to lure tourists to Inner Mongolia. Traditional costumes and Mongolian girls and women are becoming something to be gazed at, and the herder with his sheep is parading before online users.

The virtual space also allows young Mongols to experience a sense of symbolic connection with their community and a form of ethnic identity, even if one that is entwined with the manipulation of markets.

Online Mongols are beautiful and glamorous people, with an amazing homeland and culture. By contrast, mundane news such as the dropping price of lamb, the harsh weather with summer droughts and winter storms, or the high levels of pollution are rare.

The Mongols’ nostalgic imaginings and pride related to the beauty of traditional life or pristine scenic spots divert their attention from many of the realities of their circumstances.

Social media “recreate” Mongolian lives for their followers, though cloaked ones.

Wedding party in Horqin, Tongliao, Inner Mongolia (Source: Xinhuanet)

The question then is how to play out their identities in their desired symbolically cloaked communities? Maybe attending one of the popular Mongolian weddings to “feel” more Mongolness is not a bad idea; at least our Internet boy can leave his phone for a moment and take a walk in another symbol-cluttered event. He might meet his soul mate dressed in traditional costume.

References

Marois, A. (2006). The Squaring of the Circle: Remarks on Identiy and Change from the Study of a Mongol-Han Community in Hulun Buir, Inner Mongolia. Mongolian Studies: Journal of the Mongolia Society, 28, 75-86.

Silverberg, M. R. (2007). Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Berkeley: University of California Press.