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

Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Update 07/03/2025: A Chinese translation of the transcript below is now available on The Nexus.

Transcript

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Gretchen McCulloch.

Gretchen has written a resident linguist column at The Toast and at Wired. She’s also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. Today we’re going to talk about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.

Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Gretchen, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me.

Brynn: To start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to wanting to understand more about the intersection between language and the internet?

Gretchen: I first got interested in linguistics when I was maybe 12 or 13. And I remember coming across a pop linguistics book on the shelf that was just written by someone who’d also written some other pop science books. And so, I picked it up and I was like, oh, this is sort of neat.

And I got about halfway through and I was, this is just so cool. Like, I can’t put this down. I can’t stop thinking about this. I need to ask for all of the pop linguistics books for birthdays and Christmases and these sorts of things. And like, this is what I’m going to go to university and study, like there’s a whole thing. You could become a whole linguist and do this and this stuff.

So, in many ways, writing a pop linguistics book was a return to that experience of pop linguistics books being the thing that got me into the rest of the linguistics. I think for why internet language specifically, like many linguists, I seem to have a little language analysing module in my brain that I can’t really turn it off. You get me down at the pub or something and we’re sitting here and we’re trying to have a nice conversation about the weather or something, but I’m also secretly analysing your vowels. That’s just what my brain is doing.

And so, I spend a lot of time online. I wanted to know what was going on because I kept seeing people doing things that seemed like they might be part of a bigger picture or bigger pattern. People write in to me or they tag me on social media and they’re like, ever since I read your book, I can’t stop analysing my text messages. Like I keep thinking about the punctuation that I’m using or like the emoji that people are picking. When does this turn off? And I’m like, I’m so sorry, you’re on this side now. You’re very welcome to the club.

Brynn: 100%, the type of experience that I’ve had as well, where you do, your brain just starts tick, tick, ticking along and you’re analysing everything that everybody is saying.

In Because Internet, one of the first things that you talk about is the idea of networks. And here you aren’t just referring to the internet. You discuss how our networks of friends, particularly in our teenage years, have a profound effect on how we use language. Can you talk to us about what linguists have discovered about the relationship between our social networks as teenagers and the types of language that we come to use as adults?

Gretchen: Many of the factors that we look at as linguists with respect to language are sort of your typical demographic variables. You know, things like age, gender, race, ethnicity, geography, where people are based. But these are sort of proxies for people who talk to each other more, also tend to talk more like each other.

And the easier way to study that, especially before you have the ability to say, okay, so and so is following so and so and so they must get this amount of information from them, is to say, well, all these kids attend the same high school, or all these people live in the same town, or all these people are around the same age or the same gender, and they live in the same area. And so therefore they’re probably going to be hanging out with each other. But we can get more fine-grained than that.

And some of the early work in this area was done in high schools. So, the linguist Penny Eckert embedded in a high school in the 1980s, and she distinguishes between these two social groups called jocks and burnouts. And these two groups of kids, even though many of them were from the same backgrounds or the same ranges of backgrounds, talked differently from each other based on the social attitudes that they were trying to embody.

So, in the case of the jocks and burnouts, the burnouts had a more local accent that was indexed with working class identity and sort of not aligning with the power structures of the school where you’re like, oh, the school’s going to let me become student council president. Like, that sounds great. No, it’s like, I don’t care about this school.

I’m going to drop out as soon as I can and I’m going to not do this. One of the quotes from that study is the, whether you say a sentence that I would say, the buses with the antennas on top. And there’s an example of it pronounced closer to how I would say the bosses with the antennas on top.

As that sort of like Great Lakes, Northern Cities pronunciation, which is a locally salient working-class identity in the area. And the burnouts were doing more of that pronunciation. This is getting at how do you personally identify and you can affect your accent, even if you’re not necessarily doing like, I’m going to front my A’s a bit, you know?

But you’re being like, I want to talk like these people because they’re cool. And I also want to wear the jeans that they’re wearing. And I also want to eat the food that they’re wearing or wear the backpack that they’re wearing or carry my backpack only on one shoulder because that’s what the cool kids are doing or whatever the locally salient variables are.

And some of those are linguistic. And there’s another study by a linguist named Mary Buchholz who looked at nerd girls in California because I had read this Jocks and Burnouts study and I was like, I don’t really know which one of these I am. And then I read the nerd girl study and I was like, I am entirely too called out by this.

Brynn: (laughs) You’re being sub-tweeted.

Gretchen: Yeah, I’m like, oh, okay, well. I did not grow up in California, I grew up in Canada, I still live in Canada. This sort of nerd, additional nerd group, which wasn’t participating in any of these cool variables and they were like, I’m going to pronounce things very, like hyper-articulately, I’m not going to drop any consonants and I’m going to make a lot of puns.

And I was like, how did you know? (laughs)

Brynn: (laughs) Why are you in my room? How can you hear what I’m saying?

Gretchen: These people like wordplay, oh, I see. So, this got me interested in, like, linguists have identified that there are social groups that are relevant, you know, before the Internet Day. But it was really hard to do this type of fine-grained social network analysis before the Internet made us all sort of digitise a lot of our relationships and make them explicit for other people to see.

So instead of being like, because if you want to do this sort of social network analysis, you can do it. What you do is you go into the high school and you ask every kid to list five or 10 of their friends and maybe in order of how close they are to them or something like that. And then you cross-reference all the lists.

And it sort of works in a high school, which is a relatively closed environment, where you assume that most of the kids are mostly friends with other kids in that high school. But when you get to adulthood, people stop having this sort of very consistent and predictable social trajectory. Because you can say, in a given area, all the 17-year-olds are going to be doing roughly the same thing in terms of being required to go to school.

Once you’re, and maybe even there’s an extent of, as higher education has become more ubiquitous, a lot of people are doing a university stage, although not everybody. But certainly, once you get to 25, all bets are off. So some people are moving to a different place, some people are taking up new hobbies, some people are becoming parents, some people are doing all of these sorts of things that can affect what language you use and how your language keeps shifting, but no longer in this consistent and predictable step-by-step way where you can say, okay, 13-year-olds are doing this and 17-year-olds are doing something different.

But if you look at clusters of interest groups – so there’s one study that I cited in Because Internet where they looked at people who had joined beer hobbyist message boards. They were talking to each other about beer tasting and all the different types of beer that they had. And there’s not obviously a consistent age that everybody is.

There’s not a consistent – other demographic factors that they are, but what they had in common was they were members of this beer group and they were learning the words to describe beer. Things like “aroma” or “S” for, I think it’s scent or something like this. Depending on when they joined the beer forum, they were using different terms, either the older term or the newer term based on when they joined the forum.

So, this is sort of a time-based effect, but it’s based on interest group rather than based on the sort of crude demographic factors of approximately, like here’s how all the 37-year-olds are talking. People do really different things with their lives at age 37. Like, people are in very different positions, but this is your first week on the beer forum versus you’ve been here for two years is like a different way of kind of slicing people according to their interests.

And then there was another study that some people did about networks on Twitter, where they classified people into networks based on who they were talking to. So, there’s sort of a book Twitter, or there’s like a parenting Twitter, or there’s like a sports Twitter or like tech Twitter. And these groups have skews that have some demographic factors in common.

So, you might get one group that’s like 60-40 men to women, and you might get another group that’s 60-40 in the other direction. So, there’s a demographic skew there, but it’s certainly not an absolute. What they found was that people tended to talk like other people in their cluster, more than they talked like an average member of their, I think they were using gender based on like inferred information from census information about names.

But also, it’s saying that the way that we talk has a lot to do with our choices and our friends and who we want to associate with. And not only, okay, you’re destined to talk this way because you’re like 24 and female. That’s a way of doing those statistics and trying to get at differences between social groups before we were able to do more fine-grained network analysis.

Brynn: It’s so interesting when you think, like what you were saying, I like this idea of people in their social groups, kind of, especially in those young years, try on dialects or accents or ways of speaking kind in the same way that you do with your fashion when you’re in that same age. And how all of those sorts of series of tryings on affect then how you come to speak as an adult.

And something else that you discuss in the book is this concept of weak ties and strong ties when it comes to language. Can you tell me what do those terms mean? And you started to talk about gender. How can gender impact these ties?

Gretchen: So weak ties versus strong ties are originally from a paper by I think an economist named Mark Granovetter. And he talks about the piece, so strong ties are people that you know very well, you spend a lot of time with, and most crucially, they are also densely embedded into your social network. So, they know a lot of the same people as you do.

So, if you have a group of friends who all hang out with each other, so you’re friends with person A and person B, person A and B are also friends with each other, and so on and so forth. So, you have a group where everybody sort of knows each other. So, you could think of something like a class of students in the school, probably all sort of know each other, or group people at a workplace, maybe all sort of know each other.

A weak tie is someone who probably you don’t spend as much time with, but more crucially, you don’t have as many other connections in common. In linguistics, for example, I know a lot of linguists, but also, I know a lot of people who aren’t employed in linguistics, who don’t have a linguistics background because I also do media and journalism and all of this sort of stuff, pay attention to this world of academia. So, for a lot of those non-linguists that I know, if I go to a non-linguist conference, I’m maybe the only linguist there, I’m the only linguist they know.

And I’m a weak tie that to them that represents this whole open community to the field of linguistics. And conversely, when I go to a linguistics conference, I’m one of the few people there, sometimes the only person there who’s not an academic, for whom my primary network is not an academic one. And so, to the linguists at the linguistics conference, I am so this weak tie source of information to bridge this whole other field of people who are doing interesting things outside of academia.

And what Granovetter found was that people often tend to get jobs via weak ties. For example, you’re unlikely to get a job via your partner, because your partner and you probably know a lot of the same people because you probably socialise together. And so you’d probably know about it directly more than a person that you already know.

But you might get a job via somebody that you knew for a year or two, like 10 years ago, and you took one class together. And for them, it was like, an elective and they actually got a job in some other field. And now their field is hiring and they know all these people who you don’t know.

And one of those people is hiring. And so, they are sort of a bridge to a larger gateway. And it’s much more common to find a job via a weak tie than it is via a strong tie because weak ties have so many other people that they are strongly connected to or that maybe they’re weakly connected to that can like bring in additional information.

So, when it comes to language change, your strong ties, people that you have a lot of friends in common with, you probably already talk a lot like they do. Like, you’re more likely to pick up, to talk the way the people that you see all the time and that you have lots of friends in common with also talk like. But you’re more likely to linguistic innovations or to unfamiliar linguistic features, even if they’ve been around for a long time, but they’re new to you, via people that are weaker ties to you, precisely because they bring in this novel to your social network, because you’re not already densely connected with them.

There’s someone who did a statistical model of like, how do we account for linguistic innovation in terms of people talking to each other differently? And if you run a network analysis of everybody or strong ties, you don’t get any linguistic innovation because everyone’s all talking like each other.

And if you run a social network analysis where everyone is weak ties, like no one has this dense connection to each other, I think that everybody is weak ties is sort of like being in an airport. You don’t, there’s just a bunch of people there and you have this sort of transitory connection with them or being in like a tourist trap, like nobody’s sort of staying there and being there the whole time, getting to know people very well. Whereas a small town is more likely to be more dense ties because there’s only so many people and so you can all kind of get to know each other.

The same as a relatively closed community, like a high school or an elementary school, which is, especially if it’s fairly small, all the students might sort of recognize each other and have multiple ways of getting to know each other. So, if everybody’s weak ties, then there’s never any one thing that sort of catches on in trends because it’s just like you’re not in contact with each other enough to actually influence each other. If everybody’s strong ties, there’s just one thing that stays popular the whole time.

But if you have this mix of strong and weak ties, so let’s say I hear a new form from someone who I know is a weak tie, and then maybe I hear the same new form from someone else that I know is a weak tie, and I say, oh yeah, maybe I’m going to start using this, and then it can spread to my strong ties relatively easily, but I got it from my weaker ties. Or conversely, maybe I get something from one of my strong ties, but they got it from a weak tie. So, you have this sort of additional source of chaos. You know, a stranger comes to town, brings in the exciting words from, you know, the next village over kind of thing.

Brynn: What does gender have to do with that? Like, what do we know especially about younger girls and language development?

Gretchen: So, the traditional finding in sociolinguistics is that young women are on the vanguard of linguistic change and that, you know, this has been found over and over in a lot of studies. What we’re not quite sure about is why, and I think that in some places we could poke a little bit harder at what we mean by a network to try to get to some of that. So, another finding that seems to be found in social science is that women often have more friends on average than men, and so maybe this is more weak ties, more strong ties, more opportunities to find out what’s going on.

You know, other factors that women are still disproportionately child rearing, and so if you’re not spending time with children and you acquire a new form, but you don’t hang out with the next generation, it just doesn’t get passed on. So, it’s a bit of a dead end. So, there’s a variety of potential reasons, and I think that this is something that would really benefit from people doing a more fine-grained network analysis to figure out, like, maybe we could actually, maybe not all women have friends (laughs).

Brynn: We’re allowed to not have friends!

Gretchen: Victory for feminism! Maybe some men do have lots of friends. And so maybe if you did a more fine-grained network analysis, I don’t know anyone who’s done this study, but I’d love to hear about it if anyone does know it. If you did a more fine-grained analysis of like, do extroverts have, are they more likely to be on the, the vanguard of linguistics change, or people who list more friends when you ask them about their friends or something, more likely to be at the vanguard of linguistics change. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. And maybe gender has been this proxy variable for something else.

Brynn: That’s interesting, yeah.

Gretchen: Because like, I don’t feel like I trust a, I don’t feel like I want a biological explanation for this. I feel like it’s social. Probably a variable of something else, but we’d be very interested in trying to disentangle that in the same way that like age feels like it’s a proxy variable for like, are you at a consistent life stage?

The point at which age starts seeming a little bit less relevant to linguistic change is the point at which people stop doing exactly the same thing as all the other 17-year-olds. You know, if we had, if high school was five years longer or five years shorter, then we would probably find those things correlate with, you know, years in schooling, doing the same thing as other people your age, more than years in doing something else.

So yeah, like there’s a study on beer forums, but you could also do a study of like, like new parents end up learning a whole lot of words relating to, you know, all those different types of like, are you going to do sleep training? Are you going to do baby-led weaning?

Brynn: I just had some flashbacks to my own early days of parenting. And truly, when you join those forums, when you join those, especially online communities, your vocabulary shifts so fast and so hard.

Gretchen: And there’s these acronyms, like DD and DS, like darling daughter, darling son, DH, dear husband. And these have been around for like 20 plus years. These are not new acronyms. They’ve been documented to be old enough that I think some of the original like darling children could now become parents themselves. They’ve been around for a while, but they keep getting reinvented every few years because people become new parents in a cyclic fashion. And so, it’s got this kind of replacement aspect to it in terms of a population level.

But then you don’t stay in the forums once you like stop having young kids such that you’re really desperately looking for advice on how to get the baby to sleep.

Brynn: Exactly. It’s so interesting because you do. And just like any social group, I’m sure, all of that stuff comes in so fast. And it almost feels like within the span of a few weeks, a few months, your way of speaking, your way of writing, especially on these online forums, shifts so quickly to the point that you don’t really think about it all that hard, but it does. It makes a really big change.

And on that idea of shifting into writing, I’m not sure how old you are, but I’m an elder millennial, so I can vividly remember being a young teenager right at the advent of the internet as we know it today. And I remember the adults at that time absolutely freaking out about how we used abbreviations and slang online. And everyone seemed really concerned that my microgeneration’s language development was doomed because of this.

And something that you did in your book, which I loved, was explain how the era in which people came online or sort of joined these communities, if you will, makes a big difference to the type of language that they use when communicating online. So can you talk to us a little bit about that, about when we come online and the different eras of that?

Gretchen: There’s this wonderful paper by Crispin Thurlow, who’s not a linguist, I think he’s a sociologist or something in that field, analysing these sort of generational moral panics around how people talk about Internet language and kids using them. And the paper is analysing the sort of acronym era, which I also remember of like, oh no, the kids are going to only communicate in acronyms now. And there were all these hyperbolic media articles that were generally not citing examples of actual practice.

They were creating these constructive examples of acronyms that nobody ever used. Like they would include a sort of like a BTW or an LOL or something. And then they would invent all these sort of fanciful acronyms that no one had ever used for sort of useless purposes and just be like, this is what the kids are doing.

And I remember reading these and thinking, maybe I’m just not cool enough to know what these acronyms stand for. Actually, what they were was a moral panic and not this at all. And I saw this coming up again when it came to talking about emoji, which I think people have gotten a bit less moral panicky about now because, oh, look, we’ve had emoji for over 10 years and it’s been fine.

And the kids are still using words also. But there was this big sort of like, well, what if the kids are only going to communicate the little pictures and sort of all of the like adults –  there was this program on like American TV local news at some point where they were bringing up all of these random emoji. This one stands for drugs and none of them did was the thing. Like it was all like, you know, the hibiscus flower. And it’s like, no one’s ever used that.

Brynn: No one uses that.

Gretchen: No one uses that. And they included a couple of real examples of emoji that do have like a slang meaning, but they got the meanings wrong. Like it was just really some like middle-aged people in a boardroom making up what the teens do, or else some teens having a joke at the expense of adults, which I would not fault them for.

Brynn: Not at all. I applaud them.

Gretchen: Yeah, I applaud them for, you know, messing with some overly credulous adults. Just thinking about like, could we not be overly credulous about linguistic change?

I talked about five different groups of internet people, sort of waves of internet people. And I don’t think I can do them just as orally because it’s hard to summarize a list of five things. Everyone likes a list of three things. So please read this in the actual book.

Brynn: Yeah, please read the book.

Gretchen: But it’s been something that people keep contacting me about and saying like, I resonate with this because I’m like an old internet person, someone who was on the internet before it became mainstream or cool, or I am someone who joined the internet as part of that full mainstream wave, or I’m someone that’s like on the cusp between these two groups. Because of course some people are fall between the cracks of any particular group, but it’s useful to describe a few categories and let people sort themselves between them. Or someone who joined the internet after it was already super mainstream.

This is something that I think is kind of neat where people who joined the internet as part of that big mainstreamisation wave, and some of them joined with their friends and some of them joined sort of through their work, but they all were part of creating what the norms are for the internet and they all get so shocked by young people who don’t know how to write an email anymore, or young people who don’t know how to find file in a folder system. A lot of people have told me that their students don’t know how to find a file in a folder system because you don’t need to do it on a smartphone. And you used to need to know how to do things like that just to use a computer because computers used to be different.

I mean, in the early days of cars, in order to drive a car, you had to be like a mechanic because the cars would just stall so much and you had to know about your own carburettor and all of this sort of stuff. And these days, some people know how cars work but a lot of people can just drive a car and if the car goes wrong, they take it into a shop or they call roadside assistance or whatever, they just, someone else fixes it because the world has this fractal level of complexity and we don’t all have to know how every single complex system works. I don’t know, I just turned a light bulb on today and I don’t know actually properly how a light bulb works.

Right? And this is just how things happen. And when you abstract away certain levels of complexity, that makes it easier to do other things that used to be unimaginably complex because some of the other layers have gotten abstracted away. I don’t think it’s worth sort of doom and gloom about.

There has been, I remember a lot of hyperbole about the idea that some group of people somewhere, and it’s always like the teens, even though they’ve been saying this for 20 years and those teens are no longer teens, but they’re still the teens. But now it’s the current teens and they didn’t notice that this didn’t really happen for the other teens, that some group of kids was going to be so good at the internet and so good at technology that they were going to be quote unquote digital natives. No one was going to have to teach them anything because they were just going to learn it themselves.

Well, has this ever been true for any group of young people that they’ve just taught it themselves everything and they’ve had no need for mentorship? Absolutely not. There are certain skills that young people learn for sort of social reasons to communicate with each other.

And those skills might not need to be taught in schools the same way because they’re teaching each other certain types of skills. But if you want people to learn the kind of drier skills that are workplace related, somebody, whether it’s a parent or a teacher or like an internship counsellor or something, somebody is going to have to explain how to do this at some point because there’s a lot of things that workplaces want that you talking to your friends does not actually require.

Brynn: Exactly. And I do think that especially since I was a teenager and I can remember all of the grownups then saying, now you don’t even know how to look up like for a library book in the Dewey Decimal system, you don’t know how to go into those file cards or anything. And that became this point of the grownups saying like, look at the kids these days. But grownups have always been saying, look at the kids these days. And especially, especially in terms of language and the way that we talk.

Although I now have a bone to pick with Gen X and the Boomers, because one of my favourite chapters in your book is called the Typographical Tone of Voice. What is a typographical tone of voice? Why do Gen X and Boomers use so many ellipses when they type a message? And why do these ellipses scare me so much as an elder millennial?

Gretchen: The idea of typographical tone of voice is that aspects of the way that you type certain words can reflect how you’re intending that message to be read. So, whether it’s sort of slow or fast, loud or quiet, using a higher pitch or a lower pitch or sort of an increasing rising or falling pitch. And we have aspects of this in our conventional punctuation that’s used in things like edited books or long edited prose rather than social media posts.

You know, things like a question mark indicating a question mark intonation or an exclamation mark indicating that something is a bit louder and more excited perhaps. So, there are, or a period indicating the certain finality towards the end of a sentence. And so, this is sort of there in typography to some extent.

It’s there in punctuation and in capitalisation to a certain extent. Something that was apparent to people in the very early days of the Internet was that you could use things like all caps to indicate shouting. There was, well, so there was a period when all computers were entirely in all caps because memory was so expensive that there was no lowercase anywhere.

Shortly after that period, there was a period when suddenly now we have lower and uppercase, and people started using all caps to indicate shouting or emphasis or something being louder. And this one is pretty well known at this point. I think even most Boomers and so on are fairly aware that all caps indicate shouting.

Brynn: Hopefully.

Gretchen: Hopefully! But there was a period like 20 years ago when people weren’t aware, and there was all this sort of like, my boss types his emails in all caps, how do I explain to him that it’s like he’s shouting? Some of these sorts of things take off, and some of them don’t take off.

And there are, like, this has a level of, but this level of expressivity is important. I think that sometimes people compare modern day Internet writing to sort of the older eras of edited prose in books, which is a false comparison. We still have books, and books are actually, books now are actually quite a bit like books then, in terms of punctuation and capitalisation and sort of editorial trends and, like, spelling.

They haven’t changed that much, you know, Because Internet is written mostly in standard capitalization and punctuation except in a few places where I’m, like, preserving something from a quote or doing something for emphasis. What’s actually a better point of comparison is private and informal bits of writing that people did, like letters and postcards and diaries and even things like handwritten recipes or notes, you know, to-do lists that you sort of scribble by the phone. And a lot of these have similar features that we now think of as Internet features or text message features or social media features that used to be part of informal writing, but informal writing wasn’t very visible.

If you’re making, like, a sign on a telephone pole, you know, like, lost cat or, like, yard sale or something like this, like, that’s informal writing. People will sometimes post on social media, like, photos from, like, you know, a local shop or something where they’ve put up a sign that says, you know, we’ll be back in five minutes, this sort of handwritten sign. And these also sometimes have features that are like social media.

But a lot of these are handwritten. And so, in handwriting, if you want to convey emotion, you have resources like writing some letters bigger, literally bigger. You don’t have to read about font size, because you can just make them bigger on the page.

You can underline them. You can underline them a lot. This sort of makes more sense because you’re not just underlining something once to emphasise.

You can underline it like four or five times. And you can do things in other colours in a pretty easy way, because you just reach over for your other pen or for your crayon. Some of the archival scanned letters and so on that I was looking at for Because Internet that didn’t make it into the book had this gorgeous underlining like red crayon that’s really emphatic.

And people would draw little doodles in the margin sometimes because you have the whole page of paper, you have a pen, you can just put whatever you want on the page. In many ways, computers artificially constrained our abilities to do that kind of thing that we were already doing. If you are writing on your own website or in your own word document or whatever, yeah, you can change the fonts, you can change the colours, you can change the size of things.

But for a lot of early computers, you couldn’t necessarily do that in text-based chat type places. And even these days, a lot of social media sites really constrain what fonts you can use, what colours you can use, what size things can be, even whether you can put a link or not. These sites are constraining what people can do so that they’re aesthetically uniform.

But people keep wanting to express themselves. And so, we have to find other ways of doing that. And some of that is playing with the typographical resources we have already.

When I was writing Because Internet, this question of like, why do older people, and it’s not all older people, I want to specify, but why do some older people use these ellipses so much? What are they doing with that?

Brynn: What do they want us to think? What do they mean? Are they mad?

Gretchen: What do they mean? Are they passive aggressive? Yeah. This was one of the questions that I got the most from, especially sort of elder millennials and younger, that was asked of me when I was writing this. And so, I was like, I have to find the answer. What I did was start looking back at handwritten stuff.

What you find in older letters, and especially I was looking at postcards, because a postcard is sort of like an Instagram post, right? Like you have your picture on one side, and then you have your caption on the other side. A lot of older postcards that have been like scanned and digitized aren’t even that long.

And some of them, so there’s this book called Postcards from the Boys, which digitizes a whole bunch of postcards by the members of the Beatles. Three of the Beatles. You know, Paul McCartney, John Lenon, Ringo Starr, they all write in relatively standard ways.

But George Harrison writes with a lot of dot dot dots in his handwritten postcards. And when you, you know, he’ll write things like, you know, much love dot dot dot George and Olivia. And when you type that out, it looks like a text message from your aunt.

Brynn: It looks threatening is what it looks like!

Gretchen: This is the thing with expectations. Because the dot dot dot, one of its advantages is when we talk to each other, especially informally, we don’t talk in complete sentences. We have sort of sentence fragments. We have bits trailing off. We have this and this and this and this. And it’s very additive.

And if you look at a transcript of a podcast, it’ll be like, these people look so strange when they’re talking if it hasn’t been sort of edited into sentence form. But that’s just what all talk looks like. And formal writing has this sort of sentence-by-sentence structure.

But informal writing doesn’t necessarily have to do that. And so, when I asked older people, like I tried to ask them to reflect on their own usage, when I asked them why they would use the dot dot dot, they would say things like, well, it’s correct. The best I can get out of this is a dot dot dot doesn’t commit to whether the next statement is an entirely independent sentence, or whether it’s a clause that continues on from the next thing.

So, a period or a comma sort of commits to this is a full sentence, or this is only part of a sentence. But a dot dot dot, same with a dash, a lot of people also use a lot of dashes, can be used with either independent clauses or dependent clauses. And so, it splits the difference.

It means you don’t have to think about it in this informal writing. You can just do one of these things that doesn’t commit to this type of thing, especially when what you’re really worried about in your writing is what’s correct. And so, you’re trying to do something that doesn’t commit the error, quote unquote, of a comma splice.

So, you’re like, well, I’ll just use a dot dot dot because that’ll be fine. Because these types of punctuation don’t commit to whether or not it’s a full clause or not. And in something like a postcard, you don’t want to necessarily start a new line or something like that because you don’t have that much space. Like, space is at a premium. So, you need a relatively compact way of doing that. For younger people or for people who have been online longer and are more used to the conventions of informal writing in a digital space rather than a physical piece of paper.

So, in the digital space, a new line is free. It doesn’t take up more bytes than just a space. It’s the same amount of space.

So, a lot of people will use a line break or they’ll use a message break itself because you’ve got to send the text message and then send the next one. And the message itself is the break in between thoughts. And if you want to put a break in between them, you can use a new line in some context or you can just use like, here’s the next message break.

Those are relatively free these days. I mean, I remember the days when you were paying like 15 cents for a text message and you were really trying to cram as much as possible into them.

Brynn: Oh, I do too.

Gretchen: But these days, you know, you can send as many texts as you want for free and you can send them on, you know, chat programs and things like that. Or somewhere like Twitter or Facebook or something, you can put a couple different line breaks in to like separate a few ideas if you want to do them in the same post. So, everybody is searching for this sort of neutral way of just separating thoughts a bit that doesn’t commit to this is a full sentence, this isn’t a full sentence, sort of whatever.

And for younger people, that’s the line break or the message break. That means that the period and the dot, dot, dot are sort of free to take on other interpretations. Because if you were just doing the neutral thing, the unremarkable thing, you’d just be using a line break or a message break, goes the logic of this group.

And so, if you’re putting a dot, dot, dot, or even in some context like a single period where a period isn’t necessary because you’ve just sent a new message, then that can indicate a certain amount of weight or a certain amount of pause or a certain amount of something left unsaid. A period, you sort of, canonically if you’re reading a declarative sentence, can indicate a falling intonation. And that falling intonation can be something like the difference between thank you, which I’m reading with sort of exclamation mark, like polite, cheerful intonation, versus thank you, where you’re like, oh no, is this sarcastic? Is there something going wrong?

And so, this is what the periods and the exclamation marks are conveying if you have line breaks and message breaks as your default separator. If you don’t have line breaks and message breaks as your default separator, you’re getting these other ones as a default separator and you’re not interpreting any additional tone.

I don’t want to say that one of these ways is right or wrong or that one of these ways is good or bad. I think it’s useful for people to be aware that there are two ways for this to be interpreted in both directions. The thing that I encounter from people who use the dot dot dot there are lots of contexts in which people still use periods all over the place if you’re sending a multi-sentence message.

But if you’re sending just thanks period as a single message, thanks.

Brynn: Oh, that scares me!

Gretchen: But what I hear from this older group, sort of a surprise that anybody could be reading in that much information into what they’re saying. A surprise that this is even possible. And so, this is a group that’s still saying something that I encountered a lot when I was writing Because Internet that the internet and writing is fundamentally incapable of conveying tone of voice.

And for this younger group, they’re like, absolutely not. I am conveying a lot of tone of voice in writing. And occasionally you get confused, but you sometimes get confused face to face as well.

And this older group is saying, no, it’s fundamentally impossible. Therefore, no one should ever be inferring anything about tone of voice based on how someone’s punctuating something, because this is just not what I’m trying to do. And you do have some, this is why I talk about sort of five generations of internet people and I don’t use the sort of like, you know, demographic categories of millennials or boomers in the same way, because people who have been on the internet for a long time before it was mainstream also have this understanding of typographical tone of voice and of conveying tone in writing because they’ve been doing it for even longer.

And many of them, you know, well, if you were getting on the internet in like the early bulletin board systems of the 1980s, you’re not 20 right now because time has elapsed. You know, they were a whole bunch of ages at the time, but they’ve all aged up together and still have, like these are the people who gave us the smiley face, like, come on, they were really trying to make it capable, being capable of doing stuff like this.

That is such a good point that it circles back to this idea of how long have you been online? What has your experience of either handwriting or typing messages online been? Kind of how did you come up in that age?

And like you said, I think it’s not that any one way is right or wrong. And I’m sure that Gen Zed or Gen Z, you know, looks at our text messages and says, oh my God, I can’t believe that they type that way, you know, and it’s going to keep doing that, which is normal.

I’ve been informed that reaction gifts are such a millennial thing.

Brynn: I know, I have too (laughs).

Gretchen: GIFs are really interesting because they were in in like the 90s and they sort of fell out in the 2000s and they came back in like the 2010s. So maybe there’s like a gift drought in the 2020s and they’ll be back in like the 30s as retro cool again. You never know, right?

Brynn: That’s going to be our era is the 2030s. The resurgence of the GIF. Exactly.

And you and your Lingthusiasm co-host Lauren have so many amazing Lingthusiasm episodes. And I want to encourage everyone to go check out Lingthusiasm. But especially in episode 34, you talk about Because Internet, and you also talk about emoji and gesture and things like that.

Before we wrap up, can you tell us a bit more about Lingthusiasm and maybe some of your favourite topics that you’ve done and why people should go check it out and start listening?

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. So, Lauren Gawne is my co-host on Lingthusiasm, and she’s an Australian linguist who I got to know via the internet as one does. She’s a specialist in gestures. So, she was the one who sort of talked me through the idea that emoji are like gesture in terms of how we use them with other linguistic resources rather than doing a lot of gestures all by themselves.

And sort of, you know, if you do that, it’s more like a fun game like charades rather than this sort of fully fledged linguistic system, which is something we’re looking for in addition to the tone of voice. So that episode, we’re talking about emoji and gestures in episode 34. We also did an episode very recently about orality and literacy and understanding oral cultures.

In this, I read an academic book by Walter J. Ong called Orality and Literacy, which is a really interesting book. And it was published in 1982. And there are a few parts that don’t quite stand up, but a lot of it is really, really interesting as far as its observations go. And I wish that I’d read this book before writing Because Internet. So, here’s your sort of esprit de scalier of like what I wish I also been able to say.

He talks about how in oral cultures, one of your primary issues that you’re trying to solve is like generational memory and transmitting useful and cultural and relevant information across generations, whether this is things like genealogies or cultural histories, but also just as simple as things that are like useful aphorisms to know. And so information becomes repeated in an oral culture because it’s in some sort of memorable unit. So you have something like A Stitch in Time Saves Nine, which rhymes, or you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make a drink, which has this sort of beautiful couplet structure, or Red Sky at Night Sailor’s Delight, kind of, Red Sky in the Morning Sailors Take Warning, which sometimes people say Farmer’s Delight or something like that instead, or Shepherd’s Delight, depending on how bucolic versus marine your region is, but it keeps the rhythm and the rhyme of the structure there, so that you can pass along this type of folk wisdom, because everything has to pass mind to mind, and so if it’s not memorable, it doesn’t get passed on.

What this means is that in an oral culture, you’re really trying to remember and transmit these, in many cases, very fixed phrases or these fixed templates that have a limited degree of variation, but are still very, very memorable. Things like proverbs and fairy tales that always have three sisters or three brothers or three common rules of three, and they have certain types of stock figures, a princess and a dragon and a witch, and these types of stock figures that can combine and recombine and become very memorable units. What was interesting to me to contrast this with was the Internet has this meme culture of things that keep getting remixed and recreated.

The earliest stages of meme culture, you know, the LOL cats that people cite that are now like very much vintage memes were passing around the same images. People would keep reuploading the same images of cats, and there were a few that really reoccurred. These days, memes have become a lot more oral in some ways, because it’s a repetition of the same thing.

Memes have become so much less oral and more written, because when you see a new meme going around, you can go look it up on Know Your Meme, you can find out what the template is, you can see a bunch of examples, and then the goal is to create your own riff. People in some cases encounter like several derivatives, but like if I go on Twitter or somewhere like that, and I see like one kind of weird tweet, I’m like, oh, that’s weird. And then if I see two tweets that are weird in the same way, I’m like, oh, new meme just dropped.

People can create riffs so much easier and can adapt new bits of cultural information to remix so much easier when we have reference materials, which are fundamentally a written culture thing. So, this idea that you have a Know Your Meme entry or Wikipedia page or like a Vox explainer about here’s how this meme works, and here it is explained for people who don’t get it, that is such a written culture thing to do. In oral culture, if you weren’t there, you have to be told this story by someone and you get it altered in the retelling.

You don’t get to just scroll back a couple of hours later and experience all the jokes just in the same order and you get to, and you’re not doing as much in terms of like creating your own versions immediately. You’re doing the retelling of the existing stuff, the retelling of the best of the existing stuff. Newer versions happen much more slowly because you can’t just go consume and digest the entire previous body of work.

It’s sort of a slower way of information transmission because people have to be physically there to say it. Yeah, I wish I’d sort of had more of that literature foundation in what oral culture is and how the information transmission happens there because I think that a lot of people sort of blithely say that the Internet is an oral culture, which it’s really not. It’s so written.

It’s got so many written features. And what is actually the case is that its domains of the human experience that used to be primarily oral are happening more in writing now, which is different from saying that the Internet is oral. It is, in fact, informal language becoming much more written than it used to be.

It’s sort of a slower way of information transmission because people have to be physically there to say it. Yeah, I wish I’d sort of had more of that literature foundation in what oral culture is and how the information transmission happens there because I think that a lot of people sort of blithely say that the Internet is an oral culture, which it’s really not. It’s so written.

It’s got so many written features. And what is actually the case is that its domains of the human experience that used to be primarily oral are happening more in writing now, which is different from saying that the Internet is oral. It is, in fact, informal language becoming much more written than it used to be.

Brynn: That’s so cool. But also, I look forward to your next book where you do get to incorporate all of those things.

Gretchen: Well, it’s not going to be Because Internet 2.0! I was joking for a while that maybe my second book would have to be called Despite Internet, how I wrote a book despite being distracted online.

Brynn: Yes, please. I would read that. Gretchen, thank you so much for your time today and thank you for chatting with me.

And there is so much of Because Internet that we didn’t cover today, like the rise of Emoji. We talked a little bit about meme culture, but also you have a whole section about the history of email etiquette. So, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to read the book and also be sure to subscribe to the Lingthusiasm podcast.

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me.

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

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/

***

Editor’s note: Covid-19 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. In our latest contribution, Martha Sif Karrebæk and Solvej Helleshøj Sørensen share a perspective from Denmark, where there have been obvious failures to communicate with linguistically diverse populations and, simultaneously, migrants have been scapegoated as disease carriers.

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.

***

Language ideological debates in Denmark

A Somali community worker hands out Covid-19 information pamphlets in Aarhus

In Denmark, as elsewhere, the COVID-pandemic has resulted in what is both an entirely new societal situation and an intensification of existing tensions and challenges, including issues associated with immigration.

The Prime Minister recently declared that all Danish citizens have received sufficient information about the virus: “The information is there and has been available for months, no one in Denmark can be in doubt about how to behave in relation to COVID-19.” The extent to which this statement is true is an open question. Rather than a description of an actual sociolinguistic fact, it must be understood as politically motivated.

Nobody knows how many residents have no or only a poor command of Danish. A 2018 report by the Ministry of Immigration and Integration estimated that between 7 and 30 percent of the 325,000 residents with non-Western backgrounds have difficulties reading and/or speaking Danish. Insufficient Danish skills are often regarded as intentional neglect and evidence of lack of willingness to “integrate” into society.

As language proficiency is widely seen as an individual issue, authorities rarely feel compelled to use any language other than Danish in official communications. Additionally, English is used in some official communications, but languages associated with (non-western) immigration are rare in public communication.

Outsourcing health communication to volunteers

As has been documented previously on Language on the Move, grassroots organisations and volunteers have played a large role in addressing the needs of linguistic minorities during the COVID-19 pandemic in many places. This is also the case in Denmark, where the state has been heavily reliant on non-governmental actors in disseminating Covid-19 related information across all communities.

We talked to the Head of Boligsocialnet, a collaboration between social housing associations and the association of Danish municipalities, Louise Buch Viftrup, who mentioned several reasons why civil society organisations (CSOs) take on the important informational tasks. For instance, they are quick to notice the needs in the community that they serve, they have employees on the ground to address them, and they can deliver at a higher speed than the authorities, who often operate with lengthy quality assurance procedures. Furthermore, community members tend to trust people that they already know which increases the rate of adherence to advice and guidelines.

Viftrup expressed satisfaction with the cooperation between the authorities and the CSOs in ensuring minority groups’ access to information regarding the pandemic.

Sådan ser informationspjecen fra Sundhedsstyrelsen ud på arabisk. (Foto: Sundhedsstyrelsen © sundhedsstyrelsen)

For example, the health authorities provided posters with pictograms and short texts describing the five key recommendations in fifteen different languages. These were displayed in social housing blocs with high concentrations of residents with immigrant backgrounds.

However, representatives of the residents quickly pointed out that these posters were insufficient in terms of information for non-Danish speaking groups. Volunteer networks within social housing blocs additionally use social media platforms such as Facebook and Whatsapp to disseminate live translations or summaries of government press conferences.

The volunteers also answered questions in minority languages in the connected Facebook-threads and on the phone. Further examples include a YouTuber known for his online Danish-classes for Arabic speakers who did a video with phrases related to the pandemic, and an interpreting agency offering free interpreting services.

On April 06, 2020, the Danish Refugee Council established a hotline in 25 different languages for questions regarding the pandemic. Both initiatives were taken in cooperation with different CSOs and received support from private foundations such as the Novo Nordisk Foundation, while national health authorities assisted with quality assurance. Eventually, the authorities additionally issued more detailed material in other languages to complement the original posters, but it was also suggested that the linguistic quality of this material was not always high.

From translating materials to communication strategies

As pointed out by Viftrup, the challenge consists not only in creating informative content in different languages, but also ensuring that it actually reaches its target groups. Here, local efforts as those cited, have played a crucial role as “role models” spread information to specific communities. And, there was a huge need for information, as Lise Dyhr, Senior Researcher in Family Medicine, University of Copenhagen, and Morten Sodemann, Clinical Professor at Odense University Hospital’s Migrant Health Clinic discovered.

Some of their patients were frightened by the empty streets, an initial lack of basic necessities in the super-markets, and the regular appearance of a line-up of authorities (PM and health officials) on television. Others experienced gaps between home country and diaspora news and the information they received from Danish sources. This led to distrust of the Danish media. Some did not dare to go out at all, and when the educational sector gradually re-opened, they did not see how it suddenly would be safe again to send their children to school, in particular as many work places were still closed.

Some professional interpreters saw their tasks expanding. Some of our research participants, interpreters employed by a hospital, were asked to make phone calls to screen non-Danish speaking patients scheduled for other appointments for COVID-19 symptoms using a questionnaire. Some interpreters felt overwhelmed by the new responsibilities, others experienced it as an easy transition into new aspects of their work. But these interpreters had the impression that the patients were overall well-informed about the pandemic, and they believed this to be due to efficient social networks and the internet.

Minorities are more vulnerable to infection

At the same time, as we have seen in many other countries, minority citizens have been and are still over-represented in the statistics of those infected with COVID-19. By May 07, those with a migration background accounted for 18% of infected citizens although they only constitute 9% of the total population. In the week of August 03 to August 09, 70% of the 756 individuals testing positive for COVID-19 had ethnic minority backgrounds.

The factors leading to increased vulnerability include a high percentage working in particularly exposed sectors (e.g., public transportation, service and health care sectors) and large families sharing small living spaces, as well as existing underlying health conditions in this demographic.

Scapegoating

Despite these obvious reasons, the statistical over-representation – and, not least, its public announcement – has led to hostility expressed by ethnic Danes.

As an example, after recent clusters of COVID-19 cases among non-ethnic Danes in the city of Aarhus, politicians were quick to address this, among them Pia Kjærsgaard, Member of Parliament for the Danish People’s Party, a national-conservative party. She called for “a close down of the ghettoes” and accused immigrants of not taking the pandemic seriously enough.

At the same time, members of the Somali community have reported an increase in harassment and discrimination. For example, a kindergarten asked for a negative COVID-19 test for the children of a Somali family, and a public transport company reporting received requests to take Somali drivers of their shifts.

Experiences such as these problematize the publication of data concerning the ethnic backgrounds of infected individuals. On the one hand, this data can expose community specific vulnerabilities such as the ones documented by the DIHR report and allow for targeted measures adapted to the needs of specific community. On the other hand, rather than addressing the underlying issues such as housing, working conditions, and access to information, specific immigrant groups are scapegoated as disease-carriers.

Pushing back on social media

There has been some resistance and efforts to reframe the debate on social media. At the initiative of the Danish-Somali advocacy group “Mediegruppen” (the Media group) the hashtags #SomalisSayNo (#Somalieresigerfra) and #NoToPublicShaming (#Nejtiludskamning) started trending. Members of “the Blue Stars”, a group of young Danes with Somali backgrounds who fight prejudices against Somalis, decried the public shaming of the community as a whole on television and expressed fears over possible future consequences.

#SomaliereSigerFra#NejTilUdskamning#dkpol
Vore demokratiske samfund bygger på pressefrihed, men denne frihed indebærer ansvarlighed. Vi vil derfor opfordre samtlige myndigheder, politikere og medier til at kæmpe for…https://t.co/YppTGiGSD8 pic.twitter.com/D32OD8W2Rw

— Mediegruppen (@mgfsdk) August 8, 2020

Furthermore, the Aarhus Somali taskforce wrote an open letter to the prime minister where they questioned the PMs statement that information had been available to all (cited in the beginning of this piece). After reviewing the Somali translations of the guidelines issued by the authorities, they found them to be mostly unintelligible, perhaps the result of a google translate effort.

Covid-19 as an opportunity to rethink linguistic diversity and social justice in Denmark?

The issue of reaching non-Danish speaking groups is not uniquely related to the Covid-19 pandemic; nor is the fact of preexisting anti-immigrant sentiments among segments of the population and their political representatives. The crisis has undeniably heightened the need for communication strategies across languages and communities and exposed its relevance to everybody, but in principle the issue is not new. Maybe the crisis will ultimately constitute an opportunity to reconsider the intersection of linguistic diversity and social justice in Danish society.

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.

***

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.

This story was authored by Antra Kalnins and first published at Macquarie University’s The Lighthouse. It is reproduced here with permission.

***

If the question in the headline makes you flinch a little, you’re not alone. As the popularity of social media – and its associated ‘cyberspeak’ language forms – continues to grow, there is concern that sites like Twitter and Facebook are leading to a ‘dumbing down’ of the English language. Actor Ralph Fiennes even went so far as to say Twitter was the reason why today’s drama students struggle to understand Shakespearean texts.

But while new technology has unquestionably given rise to new types of language use, we shouldn’t be so quick to judge social media against Shakespeare, according to Ingrid Piller, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie and editor of Language on the Move, a sociolinguistics research site focusing on multilingualism, language learning and intercultural communication.

“If we measure social media language use, which has characteristics of both spoken and written language and is relatively informal, with the yardstick of formal written language, the impression may arise that the language is being degraded,” said Professor Piller.

“But it’s like complaining that apples don’t taste like pears.”

“It’s important we don’t confuse the medium through which we communicate with the level of formality we use to communicate.”

The good news is that most of us are actually very good at switching between levels of formality. So there’s no reason why your tweeting teen can’t also knock out a fantastic formal job application letter.

“Unless a person has a specific impairment, they will always adapt their language to the context,” Professor Piller said.

“That includes adapting our level of formality to suit the person we are talking to, the situation or medium we are in, and the purpose we are trying to achieve.”

And while sites like Twitter might see someone using shorter words and abbreviations to fit their message into the required 140 characters, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have mastery of a wide range of multisyllabic words.

“Social media use is relatively irrelevant to the size of a person’s vocabulary,” Professor Piller said.

“Rather, it’s a function of the education they have received and is also associated with specialist knowledge – for example a doctor might use ‘fracture’ instead of ‘break’.”

Piller argues that online communities can, in fact, provide good opportunities for language learners to actually increase their vocabulary.

“This is particularly true of international students who may not have easy access to offline communities outside the classroom,” she said.

As for those who pine for the pre-social media days when people spoke ‘proper’ English, Piller suggests adjusting our expectations and embracing the fact that wherever there is rapid social, economic, cultural or technological change, there will be accompanying language change.

“No living person uses English as it was used in the 16th century, or even in the same way as their grandparents did,” she said.

“Furthermore, no one speaks the standard language – or what we imagine to be the standard language – at least, not all the time. Language change and linguistic diversity are a fundamental fact of life.”

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.

Everyone wants to be a winner in the dating game; but it doesn’t always work that way …

A 2015 article in the New York Post argued that mobile dating apps, such as Tinder and its many clones, are ultimately ‘tearing society apart’ by drastically changing the way young single adults in Western society seek and pursue romantic and sexual partners.

A recent study by Mitchell Hobbs, Stephen Owen and Livia Gerber (2016) asks whether that assessment is really true. The project explores the experiences of dating app users and investigates how the technology has influenced their sexual practices and views on romantic ideals and long-term relationships.

Offline desires, online realities

Meeting sexual and romantic partners specifically through dating apps has four characteristics: First, users are able to engage in casual, one-off or short-term, sexual encounters without engaging in any further social interaction. Second, dating apps allow users to broaden their romantic networks, extending beyond their existing social networks. Thirdly, dating apps are an efficient means of connecting with several potential partners at the same time. And, fourth, the emergence of dating apps has perpetuated a culture in which communication is increasingly focused around self-presentation and self-commodification.

The latter characteristic in particular may generate a sense of anxiety and frustration around the need to create a successful profile.

Self-presentation in the dating game

Mobile dating apps were initially designed as a type of game to take the stress and emotional investment out of dating. The tactile functionality of the app, combined with users’ photo-based profiles resembles a virtual stack of cards: Profiles are presented like playing cards, and the user can swipe left on the screen to ‘dislike’ or swipe right to ‘like’ a profile. These profiles are only shown once – swiping left to ‘dislike’ therefore eliminates these profiles from the ‘game’. Mutual right swipes result in a ‘match’ and only then can communication be initiated. Successful tindering is therefore in part measured by the amount of matches one obtains, as one of our participants explained:

Yeah when you get matched it’s like ooh! That’s quite cool, that’s the fun part and that’s also probably quite the addictive part of it as well, I’d imagine. And yeah it’s obviously good for good feelings.

Despite this elation of getting a match, many – particularly male – participants expressed a sense of frustration over their lack of success (i.e. their lack of matches) when using dating apps, indicating that dating apps may be perpetuating the exact anxiety they were designed to eliminate:

Tinder is purely based on looks. It’s a numbers’ game essentially. It’s swipe how many times you want. Um so I don’t personally like it still as a primary means of finding a relationship.

Engagement with the ‘game’ creates a level of anxiety that appears to stem from not gaining access to the smorgasbord of potential sexual and romantic partners theoretically available through dating apps. As another male participant remarked:

Everyone is copping a root but me.

In the online sphere, unattractive men have less chances at winning mutual matches, creating a sense that the average-looking guy is missing out on the dating game:

The 10% of highly attractive people fucking all the time make the rest of us feel bad.

In an offline context, ‘average-looking’ guys might be able to harness their interpersonal and communication skills instead:

I’m not suited to this app. I’m trying to find the right phrase but like the profiles that you think would get like high likes because of certain things they put in isn’t really me and I don’t try and do it. I also just think I’m more traditional in so far as I like to bump into someone at a bar or room across- eyes across a room that’s how I actually connect with people because I think half of meeting someone the fun is body language like reading little bits of body language.

In sum, how to present oneself in the best possible light online is a major concern for the users of dating apps. Whilst some participants felt that they are not suited to mobile dating apps due to a lack of successful self-presentation strategies, others engage in self-commodification in an attempt to increase their dating app success.

Self-commodification in the Tinder game

Self-commodification becomes an essential part of designing one’s profile. One interviewee described how he helped his friend to improve his Tinder profile:

So I ask ‘Can I look at your profile and can I change it for you?’ So I get him a different picture and I make his profile his ‘buyer’ – he didn’t have a buyer. I made his profile a buyer, and said ‘You can always go back’ and it blew up! It was almost like in the movies.

Users have the option of adding additional information or captions (referred to here as a ‘buyer’ and elsewhere as ‘digital pick-up line’) to their profiles. While some profiles strategically communicate very little, some male participants reported feeling put off by long digital pick-up lines:

So most of the time apparently it’s just a highly sexualised or very blunt statement of intentions. Um there are funny ones. But um and then some like you see some girls will put- um have like a really long thing, really long statement about fun-loving. Everyone in the world apparently is fun-loving. Oh god. Worst, most overused statement I’ve ever- but anyway [sighs] um the- at the very end of these monstrous spiels sometimes they’ll write ‘say orange if you’ve read this.’ And so you’re expected if you match, the first thing you say to them is orange to show that you’ve actually read through it.

In general, men appear to be less particular about whom they swipe right on in an attempt to increase their chances of gaining a match. However, these swipes do not always result in the kind of match the users were looking for, as another participant indicated:

He was frustrated cause of like five matches he’d had in the last two weeks four of them turned out to be prostitutes. The thing that made him so angry was that one of them actually talked to him for a whole week before she told him her rates.

In sum, male participants reported many frustrations related to looking for love on the move: getting a match was not actually ‘as easy as play’ – and even if they got matches, they were not always the kind of match they desired.

Changing communication strategies for the sexual marketplace

Dating apps certainly do not take the stress out of trying to find love, sex and romance. On the contrary, they may be creating new anxieties around online communication strategies. Male users, in particular, expressed frustration over the need to brand themselves as desirable commodities in the sexual marketplace. If dating apps are indeed ‘tearing society apart’ it is not because they result in everyone having casual sex all the time but because they create many more desires than they can fullfil.

If you like this post, you might also like

• No Sex for Generation On-the-Move
• Language shift and phone sex
• To English with love

Reference

Hobbs, M., Owen, S., & Gerber, L. (2016). Liquid love? Dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy Journal of Sociology DOI: 10.1177/1440783316662718

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

‘Luxury permanent’ Mongolian yurt for sale on Alibaba

Last week when I saw in my friends’ Wechat group an advertisement for delicately made Mongolian yurts, I thought of an article I had read earlier written by Mongolian scholar Naran Bilik. In his paper about urbanized Mongolians Bilik writes:

In the Inner Mongolian region, emotional discourse and collectivism are welded together by events and inventions of the past, as well as by regular cultural activities. […] To be modern means to rebel against or modify a tradition that legitimizes the ethnicity previously taken for granted. If the gap between modernism and traditionalism, which is often translated into one between practicality and emotion, can be bridged, it is by symbolisms that overlap, touch upon, invent, or transpose reality. However, this sort of reconciliation is bound to be short-lived, situational, superficial, and manipulable (Bilik 1998, pp. 53-54).

The bridging of traditional symbols and commodification is indeed situational, relatively superficial and easily manipulable for different interests, but not necessarily short-lived. I kept visiting my friends’ Wechat group, and I found notices in traditional Mongolian script (Mongol Bichig) about looking for a sheepherder, about renting grassland, and also about selling camels. There are also advertisements for teaching how to play the Mongolian horse-head string instrument, and notices about an evening class for Mongolian costume making.

Ad for teaching how to play the Mongolian horse-head string instrument

The enthusiasm for learning a traditional musical instrument, the lack of tailors due to the increasing popularity of Mongolian costumes, and those very artistically made Mongolian furniture items and yurts confirm Naran Bilik’s argument: the gap between practicality and emotion is bridged by the reinvention or transformation of ethnic symbols.

However, in this case the reinvented symbols are also a commodity with high symbolic and material value, as Trine Brox, a scholar from Copenhagen University, explains with reference to a Tibetan market in Chengdu. In that market, Tibetans and Han Chinese meet to buy and sell ethnic minority products (Brox, 2015).

Since the mid-1980s the Chinese central government has embraced a more lenient and tolerant policy concerning religion and this has allowed a revival of Tibetan Buddhism. And Tibetan businessmen began to trade in religious commodities and set up shops in Chengdu, where they sell stone beads, ceremonial scarfs, Buddha statues, carpets, etc. to the Tibetans, Chinese and foreign tourists.

Brox speculates at the end of her article whether we are witnessing the transformation of the minzu (‘ethnicity’) categorization from a political collective identity to an economic collective identity. While she does not suggest any de-politicization of ethnic identity, she speculates that markets may be the future of ethnic culture.

Even if a market does have the potential to provide ethnic groups with a new form of ethnic collectivity, the reality will be replete with contradictions resulting from the tension between ethnic culture, on the one hand, and national and global structures, on the other hand. These tensions will leave particular Mongolian and other ethnic identities more fuzzy and shaky, but Mongolian identity will undoubtedly endure the ‘modernization’ process, as it is reinvented or reinterpreted (Bilik & Burjgin, 2003).

WeChat containing Mongolian script

Let us look at the advertisement written in traditional Mongolian script on Wechat: Mongolian script is very eye-catching because it is surrounded by other information that is predominantly in Chinese. In this case, the traditional Mongolian script is not only telling us the content of the advertisement, but also, more importantly, acting as an advertising image. In other words, the symbolic or emotional meaning of the script outweighs its practical purpose. Of course, it also demonstrates who is excluded and included, given that there is no Chinese translation provided.

The traditional scripts, the Mongolian yurts or the costumes are indeed commoditized for diverse interests, but their dynamic interaction with Mongolians’ identity and their role in both compliance with and resistance to inescapable structures should not be neglected.

So when ethnic culture and identity meet the market and go through the process of commodification, we cannot simply assume that the ethnic identity or traditional culture is undermined in the ‘modernization’ or that they are in opposition to commodification. What future research should focus on is the interaction between ethnic practices and overarching structures and influences from modernization, or globalization.

References

Bilik, N. (1998). Language Education, Intellectuals and Symbolic Representation: Being an Urban Mongolian in a New Configuration of Social Evolution. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 4(1-2), 47-67. doi: 10.1080/13537119808428528

Bilik, N., & Burjgin, J. (2003). Contemporary Mongolian Population Distribution, Migration, Cultural Change and Identity. Armonk, N.Y.: Armonk, N.Y. : M.E. Sharpe.

Brox, T. (2015). Tibetan minzu market: the intersection of ethnicity and commodity Asian Ethnicity, 1-21 DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2015.1013175

This tweet says: “CSU issues correction: its proposal was translated into German incorrectly”

Germany is currently witnessing a delightful language ideological farce. It all started when the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) party proposed last Friday that migrants needed to speak German not only in public but also at home. By way of background: the conservative CSU only operates in the southern state of Bavaria, where it has been the sole party in government for most of the time since 1945. On the federal level, the CSU is in a permanent coalition with its sister party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The CSU thus currently forms the Bavarian state government and is a member of the coalition that forms the current federal government. Generally, the national perception is that of these two conservative parties, the CSU is the one that is more conservative, more provincial, more parochial and less modern.

One immediate reaction to the CSU proposal that migrants should speak German at home was that the language of the home is clearly none of the business of the state. The Secretary General of the CDU, for instance, tweeted: whether people speak Latin, Klingon or Hessian at home is no one’s business but their own.

Ich finde ja, es geht die Politik nichts an, ob ich zu Hause lateinisch, klingonisch oder hessisch rede.

— Peter Tauber (@petertauber) December 5, 2014

By choosing a dead language, an invented language, and a dialect as examples, Peter Tauber draws attention to a far more complex linguistic situation than the CSU must have had in mind. One of these complexities that immediately hit the comments and responses on social media is related to the fact that Bavarian identity is strongly connected to the Bavarian dialect, which is well-maintained and not always easy to understand by other Germans. Being a dialect speaker has typically been a prerequisite for a successful political career in Bavaria (i.e. in the CSU). Consequently, many social media commentators have been drawing attention to the fact that CSU politicians and the citizens they represent are unlikely to speak German at home. In a typical example, a tweeter asks whether Bavarian can even be considered German:

The party of the only part of Germany where people don't speak German wants to force Immigrants to do so at home! http://t.co/Fp8DtWRni4

— Dirk Matten (@dirkmatten) December 7, 2014

The social media debate has also been used as an opportunity to tweet in Bavarian. In the following example a tweeter writes in Bavarian and asks in a pretend-stupid manner (a characteristic of Bavarian humour) whether he still has permission to speak Bavarian:

Derf i jetz dahoam noh bairisch redn oda wos? #csu #weltfremd

— The Jöcker (@chrisjoecker) December 8, 2014

Irrespective of whether politicians speak dialect or the standard, they frequently can be caught saying things that make no sense whatsoever and links to videos of CSU politicians stumbling through speeches that seem to lack all grammar, coherence or sense have also been making the rounds:

Jetzt mit Hashtag: Man hatte es schon fast vergessen, das exzellente Deutsch der CSU. #YallaCSU. https://t.co/bTeIV19KV3

— Deniz Yücel (@Besser_Deniz) December 7, 2014

Another layer of absurdity is added by the fact that the CSU sees itself as being representative not only of Bavaria but also of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, who have settled in Bavaria since 1945 and are sometimes referred to by CSU politicians as “the fourth Bavarian tribe.” The claim of these ethnic Germans to German citizenship rests on the fact that they have maintained the German language and culture outside the German-speaking countries, often in the face of adversity, over centuries. So, obviously, when it comes to ethnic Germans, speaking a language other than the national language at home has been considered a good thing.

The modern complexities of a diverse globalized society are even more striking. Commentators have been pointing to these in all kinds of ways; for instance, by drawing attention to hipster Berlin families who speak English at home in order to raise their children bilingually:

Prenzlauer-Berg-Eltern in Aufregung: Dürfen sie mit ihren Kindern zuhause kein Englisch mehr sprechen? #YallaCSU

— Philip Meinhold (@Philip_Meinhold) December 6, 2014

Others have raised the practice of watching foreign-language movies on TV as one that would be inconsistent with the proposal:

Kommt schon mal vor dass ich fremdsprachige filme gucke usw, hoffentlich bekommt die csu davon nichts mit! #YallaCSU

— Laura (@awwwkid) December 9, 2014

The complexity of what it means to “be German” and to “speak German” today is best expressed by the Twitter hashtag #yallaCSU. The hybrid based on Arabic yalla (“let’s go!”) has been trending on German Twitter:

"Trending Germany:05:26 AM CET"
1. #halligalli
2. #DagiVSTimo
3. #askBrudis
4. #Bibibeitaff
5. #YallaCSU
6. Weihnachten

— TrendieDE – Trends (@TrendieDE) December 9, 2014

#yallaCSU brings together tweets that are critical of the CSU proposal and most express their views in an ironic fashion. The overall point is that Germany is a modern multicultural society where it is not linguistic diversity that is out of place but old-fashioned ideas about linguistic and ethnic uniformity such as those expressed by the CSU:

Danke CSU! Wir haben wirklich ein Integrationsproblem: aber wie integrieren wir Euch nur in unser modernes, buntes Deutschland?!? #YallaCSU

— Karimatun (@KarimaELO) December 9, 2014

By now the CSU proposal has hit the international media – it has been covered by the New York Times, the BBC, the Lebanese An Nahar and others. What has drawn this attention is not so much the retrograde proposal of a relatively obscure and – in the global scheme of things – minor political party but the response of a mature multilingual and multicultural society. I found following the #yallaCSU tweets not only immensely entertaining and informative about language ideologies in contemporary Germany but, above all, heartening: in Germany, at least, monolingualism and monoculturalism are fighting a rear-guard battle.

The researcher wearing a Zhuang employee’s work uniform at the Black Clothes Zhuang House in the Ethnic Minorities Village, Nanning, China, 2014

I was surprised, frankly, during my recent fieldwork to find Zhuang language being used in a QQ chatroom in China. Surprised because Zhuang text is absent from the linguistic landscape. Surprised because many of my interview participants reported they had no Zhuang literacy practices: some young Zhuang people had not even realised local street names and a line on the every Chinese bank note were in Zhuang; it’s written in the Latin alphabet, so they had assumed it was English. But on social media, there it was.

Zhuang is the name of a minority ‘ethnic nationality’ originally from Southern China, and Zhuang is also the name of their language. There are about 18 million Zhuang people, but the proportion who are of native, fluent or partial speakers of Zhuang is hard to pinpoint. Certainly, there is a trend away from using Zhuang at home, in public and in traditional media, especially in cities. I’m currently investigating Zhuang language use, with a focus on the ways that legally enshrined language rights do (or do not) affect the maintenance of a minority language in China. Around the time I was on QQ, various other data were also suggesting to me that online there is more space for Zhuang than there is offline, and definitely more space for Zhuang activism. Some of the online Zhuang language use is organised and some dissipated and impromptu; some is deliberately activist and some seems a less conscious promotion of Zhuang. But all of it is grassroots – or bottom-up – language revitalisation, an approach very different to the top-down language rights and minority language policies existing in China. Looking at my QQ screenshots, I began asking myself what special opportunities social media is providing Zhuang language but also whether using Zhuang on social media has any special impact on offline. In what climate do the grassroots grow into something bigger?

Snippet of QQ chatroom screenshot, June 2014

There’s a crop of grassroots language initiatives springing up on online platforms, for all languages all over the world. For example, during my fieldwork, I was asked by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to present on Australian Indigenous language maintenance and in preparing I came across this Yugambeh indigenous language app developed by a local museum-cum-research-centre in Queensland, north-eastern Australia. The app’s effect is amplified through the local primary schools’ Write into Art competition, in which kids use the app to compose poetry. This example, even more than Zhuang use in QQ chatrooms, raised for me the question of how to get grassroots revitalisation which sprouts online to flourish offline.

Transplanting grassroots activity

The link between online language activism and offline language revitalisation movements is a subject Josep Cru (2014) deals with in his recent article. Cru’s case study of grassroots, social-media-enabled language revival follows Mexican university students – Yucatec Maya speakers and would-be-speakers – chatting together on Facebook. Cru (2014 p3) argues that “social media are being appropriated by Maya speakers as a catalyst for language advocacy and activism”. He suggests that part of the impact social media is having on Maya revitalisation stems from the fact that, on Facebook, “Maya can be used on par with dominant languages” (p. 7). But are online platforms always such a level field? They have the potential to be.

Potential online language use

Cru (2014, p. 10) suggests that social media is “a potential catalyst among some youngsters for ethnolinguistic awareness and even political positioning, which is an essential aspect of language revitalisation.” In this way, social media is more than just a “productive new space” for writing down a language typically marginalised in literacy practices. That is, online spaces have a special potential that other media and other domains lack.

But where does this potential come from? I suggest the potential comes from the normative micro-climate of online communication. While Cru’s Facebookers, the kids using the Yugambeh app and my QQ chatters probably have differing levels of social organisation, differing political views about revitalisation, different audiences, and different impacts, one commonality is that online, and especially online on social media, they can all use language in less formal and less standardised ways than they can offline. I’m not arguing online communication has no rules and no norms, simply that they are different from – and often less constraining – than norms in other forms of communication.

Part of the fun, informal, flexible nature of online communication, especially on social media, is that the “fuzziness and the arbitrariness of language boundaries” (Cru 2014, p. 7) is not problematized to the same extent as it is offline in formal use, and especially in offline written forms. Because the integration of different languages and of non-standard spelling and grammar is less remarkable and less of a (socially-constructed) problem in online communication, linguistic features associated with a minority language can be employed online in ways that may not be available in offline, or which may be penalised offline rather than receiving a “valuation-enhancing effect” (Eisenlohr 2004). So this is, arguably, an inherent property of online communication which creates the potential for a minority language to be used on par with a dominant language.

But that potential is not always going to be realised.

Online communication, when it integrates linguistic features associated with minority languages, has the potential to challenge norms of offline minority language (dis)use. But it also has the potential to reproduce those very language norms through which the minority language is dominated.

Actual online language use

It may well be that for Yucatec Maya, the level playing field of Facebook is fertile soil for grassroots language revitalisation. Unfortunately, for many other minority languages, dominance creeps in to online spaces. My own data, while still in the process of analysis, is already suggesting that Zhuang cannot be used on par with dominant languages online.

Social and power structures which minimise Zhuang speech are reproduced online in many ways. For starters, many young Zhuang people have no literacy in Zhuang and almost all non-Zhuang people have no Zhuang language competence whatsoever, so the informational utility of sending an Instant Message in Zhuang is severely restricted. The symbolic and/or phatic use of Zhuang on QQ is sometimes policed by other young Zhuang people: in one instance of my QQ data, a university student uses the Zhuang “haep bak” [‘shut up’] and another student responds “他不是有意的，不理那些话” [‘It has no meaning, ignore those words’]. Even if not receiving a scolding, using some Zhuang language does not import the value of ‘cool-ness’ into communications, largely because minority culture – Zhuang in particular – is still evaluated as ‘backwards’ rather than ‘cool’ in the offline sociolinguistic environment. This perception of low “social capital” is reinforced by the low capital of Zhuang language in both education and employment. This means young people have less reason to use Zhuang online (unless they are deliberately trying to make it cool). Zhuang seems to be rarely used as a resource to create a “we-code” because there is not a wide consciousness of We amongst Zhuang young people.

All this happens with a banality characteristic of linguistic hegemony. In other, less banal circumstances around the world, minority language speakers whose language is associated with civil disobedience, separatism or terrorism may find their online use is policed not just by subtle social processes and throw-away online rebukes, but by state security forces. Online, language choice may be easier, but language choice is also easily monitored.

Becoming a grassroots Green Thumb

My point is that while online minority language use can catalyse grassroots language revitalisation, it can also reproduce processes of minoritisation. What makes a grassroots movement flourish?

Does it depend on how organised the online users are in networks or communities of practice? Does it depend on the form of online media? Does it depend on grassroots activity happening at the same time but offline? In regards to Zhuang in China, the development of one or two shoots to a grassroots movement to a broader change is likely to depend on all three, and more. Certainly, whether online activity in China is actually a hothouse of grassroots political change generally – not just in regards to language revitalisation – is the subject of an ongoing debate (e.g., contrast Yang 2011 and Leibold 2011).

There is still a lot more research to be done on how grassroots politics of language revitalisation develop, online and offline, and how online grassroots activity adds to (or challenges) both top-down policies of language revitalisation and offline grassroots activities.

References

Cru, Josep (2014). Language Revitalisation from the Ground Up: Promoting Yucatec Maya on Facebook Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-13 : 10.1080/01434632.2014.921184

Eisenlohr, Patrick (2004). Language Revitalization and New Technologies: Cultures of Electronic Mediation and the Refiguring of Communities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (1): 21–45.

Leibold, James (2011). Blogging Alone: China, the Internet, and the Democratic Illusion? The Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (4): 1023-1041.

Yang, Guobin (2011). Technology and Its Contents: Issues in the Study of the Chinese Internet. The Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (4): 1043-1050.

A locutorio shop front in Barcelona (Source: El Periodico)

There is now a well-established body of work exploring the language work provided by service workers in call centres and tourist businesses. By contrast, the multilingual language work provided by migrants for migrants in multiethnic service enterprises has rarely been the focus of sociolinguistic attention. A recent book by Maria Sabaté i Dalmau, Migrant Communication Enterprises published by Multilingual Matters, fills this gap with an ethnographic inquiry into the language practices in a locutorio, a call shop, in Barcelona. A locutorio offers all kinds of telecommunication services such as billed calls in booths, the sale of top-ups for mobiles, fax services, internet access and international money transfers.

The locutorio the research is based on also served as meeting point for working class Spaniards and migrants, both documented and undocumented, from a variety of countries of origin. Beyond the sale of telecommunication services, the locutorio thus provided access to information, a place to hang out and it even served as the ‘public’ toilet for homeless people in the neighbourhood, mostly undocumented men from West Africa.

The locutorio was part of a chain of similar call shops owned by a Pakistani venture capitalist whose aim was to make a profit rather than provide social services for Barcelona’s marginalized. It was his employee Naeem, who was in charge of running the locutorio, who ended up caught between more than one rock and more than one hard place. Naeem was a fellow Pakistani hired by the owner in Pakistan two years before the fieldwork began. Naeem’s position was legal as a temporary resident but in order to achieve permanent residency in Spain he needed another two years of proven work, which left him vulnerable to exploitation by the owner. He worked twelve hours per day, seven days a week, for a meagre salary of less than Euro 800 per month. Naeem’s job consisted of opening the locutorio in the morning and closing it at night. He would start with booting up the computers and getting all the equipment to run. During the day, his duties consisted of assisting and charging customers, and making various phone calls (to his boss; to call card distributors; to the money transfer agency etc.). Additionally, he was in charge of maintaining the premises, including sweeping the floors, removing garbage and cleaning the toilets.

Much of this work is obviously language work and Naeem had to operate in a complex sociolinguistic environment. In addition to a range of varieties of Spanish – from Standard Peninsular Spanish via various Latin American varieties to a range of second language varieties – this included Catalan, English, Urdu, Punjabi, and Moroccan Arabic in various spoken and written constellations and used by clients with variable levels of proficiencies, including proficiencies in the use of telecommunication services. In this highly diverse environment, communication was rigidly regimented by the meters on the machine where communication was paid for by the minute.

Unsurprisingly, misunderstandings and communication break-downs were common. On top of all that, Naeem had to deal with customers who tried to cheat him (the balance of each financial irregularity was deducted from his meagre salary) and who abused and insulted him. Working in a highly constrained yet super-diverse environment left little room for personal autonomy and, only in his late twenties, Naeem was suffering from eating disorders, compulsive smoking, chronic fatigue and anxiety attacks.

The researcher concludes that locutorio language workers constitute “a voiceless army of multilingual mediators” (p. 170) whose multilingualism is not only a site of language work but also a site of linguistic exploitation.

Migrant Communication Enterprises offers a rich migrant-centred ethnographic account of a prototypical enterprise of the 21^st century. If this blog post has piqued your interest and this is your area of research expertise, you might want to review the book for Multilingua. If so, please get in touch with a short description of your expertise.

Maria Sabaté i Dalmau (2014). Migrant Communication Enterprises: Regimentation and Resistance Multilingual Matters

Written by Masaaki Sasaki of Sankei Shinbun, the article in question has the catchy title of “「Water」が通じない！？　東京五輪にも教訓 (They don’t understand “Water”!? A lesson for the Tokyo Olympic Games”. It reports on the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games under the slogan of “英語の通じない五輪 (Olympic Games Without English)”. Sasaki points out that due to the Soviet-style education system and to the delay in the internationalisation of Sochi as a whole, locals such as police and taxi drivers speak “only” Russian. The writer subsequently warns that Sochi’s language challenge is a good lesson for the organizers of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games.

In the article, which has been featured in the special section on the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games on Yahoo Japan (www.sochi.yahoo.co.jp), an Austrian visitor was reportedly appalled at the inability of personnel to speak English at security checkpoints at train stations. A Japanese woman was apparently surprised that a local shop keeper couldn’t even understand “water”. And an American visitor, who is said to have been to 16 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, is quoted as saying “This is the first Olympic Games I visited where we can’t use English”.

Sasaki explains that this is the first time Sochi, a resort area frequented only by Russians, has been visited by a large number of international visitors. A survey conducted by a local agency last year found that 80% of residents didn’t possess basic knowledge of English.

The writer goes on to point out the growing concern among the International Olympic Committee regarding this language issue as the next few Games (2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, 2018 Winter Games in Korea and 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo) will be held in ‘non-English speaking’ countries. The article ends by suggesting the importance of a technology-based solution for Tokyo, such as smart phone applications allowing communication with foreign visitors.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s English bidding speech in Buenos Aires in September 2013. Credit: Reuters

Indeed, English language proficiency has been central to the discourse of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games from the beginning. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gained a great deal of public admiration when he gave a speech in English at the bidding meeting in Buenos Aires in September 2013. His “impressive” speech in English, which is considered as one of the key winning factors, is even used as learning material how to give presentations in English.

Having secured the right to host the 2020 Olympic Games, Japanese people from all walks of life have increasingly expressed their concern about Japanese people’s presumed ‘poor’ English. The former Tokyo Governor was so worried that last year he proposed to send 200 Japanese secondary school teachers of English overseas for a three-month training period every year. There is no doubt that English fever will further intensify in the years to come, as was the case for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games (Zhang, 2011).

It is against this context of the taken-for-granted belief that English is neceessary to host successful Olympic Games that many of the comments on the article about the Sochi 2014 Winter Games need to be understood. These comments reveal a wide range of deep-seated disagreement with, if not contempt of and disgust for, the English-centric mindset.

Published on 19 February 2014, the article attracted 1,170 comments on Yahoo Japan site by 25 February. Yahoo Japan allows you to see comments in five different ways; (1) timing of posts (latest to earliest), (2) agreement [no. of thumbs up), (3) disagreement [no. of thumbs down], (4) trending [no. of thumbs up + no. of thumbs down), and (5) sympathized (most to least) [no. of thumbs up minus no. of thumbs down]. I’ll introduce the top five most-agreed comments here.

“The flip side of this is egocentrism among English monolingual speakers”

The most agreed (and simultaneously most disagreed, trending and sympathized) comment of all was made by fre***** (handle name) as follows:

“裏を返せば、英語しか話せない連中の自己中 [The flip side of this is egocentrism among English monolingual speakers; my translation]”

fre*****’s comment has received 10,039 thumbs up and 1,760 thumbs down, attracting a whopping 172 replies. The replies are a site of intense debate, mixed between approval and disapproval.

The other four most-agreed comments are:

Number 2: “こんなのはさ、受け入れる側の国も最低限の英語を学ぶようにするのと同時に、行く人間も現地での挨拶くらい覚えてから行けよ。相互理解とか国際協調とかいうならそれが第一歩。[The issue like this, people in a host country should learn basic English, but at the same time visitors should learn local greetings before they go. That’s the first step towards mutual understanding and international corporation. My translation. 8,717 thumbs up; 454 thumbs down; 15 replies]

Number 3: さすがにWater位は日本人も分かるとは思うけど、案外同様のことが起こるかもね。戦後の日本で簡単な英会話本が結構売れたこともあったし、これからは自発的に簡単な会話が学べ、活用できる環境になれば良いと思う。 [Japanese would at least understand water, but something similar might happen. A lot of English conversation books have been sold after the war, and I hope an environment where we can learn basic conversation proactively and make use of it will be created. My translation. 3,415 thumbs up; 249 thumbs down; 31 replies]

Number 4: 「水」ぐらいは、ロシア語を覚えて行ってもいいんじゃないの？そんな、ソチの地元民からすれば、別に英語を話さなきゃいけない義務なんか無いだろ。[Shouldn’t they have learnt at least “Water” in Russian? It is not a duty of Sochi residents to speak English. My translation. 2,740 thumbs up; 124 thumbs down; 13 replies]

Number 5: 世界中どこでも英語が通じると思ってる方がバカでしょ！[Those who think English is used everywhere in the world are stupid! My translation. 2,865 thumbs up; 273 thumbs down; 24 replies]

Here, I’m not trying to demonstrate whether more or less people endorse or reject English as an Olympic language. Rather, I find an internet site such as Yahoo Japan an intriguing space to learn about wide ranging counter-discourses, including disgust for the hegemony of English as a global language and its resulting English-centric arrogance that often unfolds at international events such as the Olympic Games. These are the comments we have little chance of hearing face-to-face. Four out of the top five comments are critical of the hegemonic discourse of English as an international language and it is criticisms such as these that often remain unexpressed in other media, particularly in a country where English has long been equated to intelligence and hence academic, professional and personal success.

Furthermore, Number 2 and 4 most-agreed comments condemn the imposition on non-English speaking residents of an Olympic host city to accommodate visitors in English; at the same time, they are an expression of a multilingual mindset. Indeed, many other comments outside the top five suggest that the real issue is the fact that complaining visitors didn’t bother to learn basic Russian before they arrived, as in this comment:  “ロシアは英語圏じゃないから、通じないのは当たり前じゃん。逆になんて英語しかしゃべれないやつに合わせなあかんの？他国に行く事前に、相手国の最低限日常用語くらい勉強してから行け！英語イコール国際的じゃねーよ。勘違いすんな！！[Of course they don’t use English because Russia is not an English speaking country. Why do they have to accommodate English monolingual speakers? Learn basic everyday vocabularies of the country before you visit! English doesn’t equal being international. Don’t fool yourself!!]” These pro-multilingual comments constitute a sharp contrast to the discourse of monolingual or English-crazed Japan.

Overall, interactive sites such as these demonstrate that the role of English as a global language may be much more contested than it seems on the basis of mainstream media discourses.

Zhang, J (2011). Language Policy and Planning for the 2008 Beijing Olympics: An Investigation of the Discursive Construction of an Olympic City and a Global Population PhD thesis, Macquarie University, Sydney.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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