Livia and her classmates at a crossroads the year before entering (or not) Gymnasium (Switzerland, 2004)

Let me bust a prevalent urban myth: You do not need to be bi- or multilingual to become a linguist. There, busted. In fact, being bilingual initially brought me to a crossroads where I was nearly denied access to the academic pathway I am embarking on today. In Australia, despite native-like English proficiency, my migrant background dictated that I visit ESL classes throughout primary school; during secondary school in Switzerland, my Australian passport resulted in obligatory participation in Deutsch als Fremdsprache classes [German as a foreign language]. This ironic situation of seemingly being deemed ‘not good enough’ at either nation’s language of instruction initially crushed my hopes of being recommended for Gymnasium – the main entry ticket to tertiary education in Switzerland. Fortunately, thanks to a loophole or two, and an additional entry exam, my teachers were able to grant me the much desired recommendation. Without it, I would not have had the opportunity to undertake an academic pathway. Undoubtedly, mine is not the only story influenced by language learning trajectories.

Multilingual values at a crossroads

Multilingual students with migrant backgrounds are particularly vulnerable to academic exclusion in countries such as Switzerland or Germany, where the transition from primary to secondary school is marked by rigorous selection processes. These processes are based on both academic achievement and language proficiency. In a recent article published in Multilingua, Gabriele Budach (2014) suggests that these selection processes predominantly favour monolingualism. Budach (2014) argues that “in primary years multilingualism is drawn on as a capital for social inclusion”; as opposed to secondary schools which “value languages as capital for social distinction and an indicator of individual achievement” (p. 526; italics in the original). Needless to say the shift in values and the transition from one level of education to the next has implications for students’ educational trajectories.

Bilingual communities of practice at a crossroads

Four years after her ethnographic fieldwork in a German-Italian Two-Way-Immersion program in a primary school in Frankfurt (2003-2007), Budach (2014) organised a reunion with her former students. The now fourteen-year-olds had once “enjoyed their bilingual experience” (p. 531); however, now, languages were an academic subject and a terrain for competition like any other school subject. In primary school, the students were encouraged to participate in the common endeavour of sustaining an inclusive pedagogical environment in which multilingualism was utilised across the curriculum. Multilingualism was valued as a means of promoting “social integration as well as intercultural experience” (p. 547).

This is in stark contrast to mainstream education where a ‘monolingual mindset’ prevails. Once the students left the immersion program and went on to attend mainstream secondary schools, most had no further opportunities to use Italian in school. If Italian was available in their secondary school it was purely in the form of foreign language teaching, or Fremdsprachenunterricht. Therefore, and despite their high-level bilingual proficiencies, students from the immersion program struggled to get a foothold in the mainstream and felt that their multicultural knowledge was not recognised and was indeed devalued.

For one student in Budach’s (2014) study, a German-Australian girl, Italian was not offered again as a third foreign language until Year 8. During her primary years, German and Italian were used to teach all subjects; in secondary school the transfer of knowledge was restricted to German. As a result, multilingual students see their linguistic repertoires as being devalued.

The monolingual fork in the road

Budach (2014) writes that only five out of her twenty-three students were able to continue their secondary education in a comparable bilingual program. Other students either did not achieve the recommendation for Gymnasium or chose other pathways within the Gymnasium stream (e.g. they chose a school with musical or artistic profile). Therefore, the value ascribed to languages became dependent on the school curriculum – all subjects were henceforth taught in German, and Italian was either not offered, or only offered within the scope of foreign language teaching as a subject. Students’ bilingual careers had more or less ended in a monolingual cul-de-sac.

Indeed, even the five students who continued in the bilingual Gymnasium found themselves faced with a similar dilemma. Students in this stream can choose whether they want to complete the German school leaving certificate (Abitur), or a combined German/Italian certificate that is also recognised in Italy (matura). Completing the combined matura increases the value of multilingualism and creates “a form of capital for social mobility and distinction” (p. 546). However, for Budach’s students this proved a risky choice that threatened their overall marks.

It seems to me that – even within bilingual secondary education – there is a shift towards mainstream monolingualism. This creates a sense of detachment from the bilingual community of practice which was so important in the students’ primary years. Moreover, the dominance of German as the national language devalues their multilingual repertoires. In their primary school years, students in the bilingual immersion program are able to access curricular knowledge through multilingual learning. At secondary level, regardless of the educational trajectory they choose, students have only limited possibilities to apply their multilingual knowledge across different subjects. At this level, multilingualism is primarily valued within the foreign language leaning curriculum where linguistic competence is evaluated according to the subject’s grading criteria (e.g. whether students use correct grammatical structures, can string sentences together and can complete small translation tasks). Later in life, young job-seekers’ multilingual resources are a nice addition to their résumés, and therefore act as a tool for social distinction. Although multilingualism is believed to lead to greater success in the employment market and to maximise social mobility, the monolingual mindset influences the perception of academic achievement. Therefore – ironically – without monolingual academic distinction, multilinguals cannot succeed.

Beyond the crossroads

In a day and age where cultural and linguistic diversity are an inescapable reality, it seems instrumental to give all students the chance to undertake the educational pathway that best matches their abilities and aspirations, regardless of their linguistic background. To ensure that fewer children fall between the cracks – as I nearly did – it is vital that policy makers, educational stakeholders and sociolinguists work together to turn the monolingual impasse into a gateway to multiple possibilities.

Reference

Budach, G. (2014). Educational trajectories at the crossroads: The making and unmaking of multilingual communities of learners Multilingua, 33 (5-6) DOI: 10.1515/multi-2014-0027

When are immigrant linguistic and cultural rights tolerable? (Source: demotix.com)

Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University presents

Questioning Tolerance: When Are Immigrant Linguistic and Cultural Rights Tolerable?

When: Friday, November 08, 12:00-1:00pm

Where: Macquarie University, E6A 102 Theatrette

Presenter: Professor François Grin, University of Geneva

Abstract: When the linguistic and cultural rights of immigrants are addressed in the perspective of policy analysis, the effectiveness of provisions that give substance to these rights (instead of normative considerations regarding the appropriateness of such rights) is a crucial aspect of public policy. Among the factors that influence the effectiveness of such provisions is the latter’s endorsement by members of the majority. A common assumption in this regard is that this will tend to be the case if the majority displays tolerant attitudes. However, closer examination of the concept of tolerance, as well as of the ways in which this concept is used in various disciplines, suggests that though necessary, it is not sufficient to map the sociological terrain on which majority-minority relations unfold. In this lecture, we begin by revisiting the received notion of tolerance and propose to combine it with the less usual notion of tolerability. After discussing the theoretical implications of this hypothesis, I present its operationalisation through a questionnaire taken by over 43,000 young Swiss men. Results using this data set confirms the existence of tolerability (as distinct from the traditional notion of tolerance), as a condition of toleration viewed as a social practice, and enables us to examine the dimensions in terms of which tolerability is structured.

About the presenter

After a PhD in economics in Geneva, François Grin has worked at the University of Montréal and the University of Washington (Seattle), and served as Deputy Director of the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI) in Flensburg (Germany), and later as Deputy Director of the Education Research Unit of the Geneva Department of Education. He is currently full Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting (FTI) at the University of Geneva, as well as visiting professor at the University of Lugano, where he teaches the management of linguistic and cultural diversity. He is currently on sabbatical leave in Australia, working on a language economics project in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in South Australia, and visiting at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne.

François Grin has specialised in language economics, education economics, and policy evaluation in these areas, with particular emphasis on minority groups. He is the author of numerous publications, has carried out major projects for scientific research agencies and international organisations (Council of Europe, European Commission, World Bank Institute, Agence universitaire de la francophonie), and has advised various national and regional authorities on language and education policy issues. He is the current President of the Délégation à la langue française (DLF) for Switzerland.

Glocalization à la Suisse

When I lived in Basel, a city in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, I often found myself performing an involuntary field experiment in language attitudes. As likely to speak English as German in public, I was regularly confronted with strangers’ different reactions to an English-speaking person and a German-speaking person. My English-speaking me only had positive experiences: strangers who overheard me speak English with my child, for instance, would often accost me and ask, in English, where I was from. As I had no desire to share the story of my life on such an occasion, I would respond “from Australia.” My interlocutors would then usually tell me, in sometimes quite effortful English, what a wonderful country Australia was; they would ask me how I liked Basel, and they would give me tips on how to make my time in Switzerland more enjoyable.

By contrast, my German-speaking me never had such experiences. No one who overheard me speak German ever asked me where I was from. As a “German German” speaker, I was rarely accosted by strangers but if it happened, I didn’t get the friendly, welcoming reception my English me got but semi-hostile questions such as whether I was a day commuter or was planning to stay in Switzerland for longer.

The fact that the relationship between Swiss German and German German is a fraught one received new evidence last weekend when the citizens of Basel and Zurich accepted a referendum that makes the use of Swiss German mandatory in preschool. Interestingly, the dialect vs. standard referendum doesn’t seem to have been reported at all in the English-speaking media – in contrast to the one about assisted suicide, which took place at the same time, and which received significant English-language coverage.

There is a lot of research evidence to support early mother tongue education. So, the success of the referendum to mandate Swiss German in the cantons of Basel and Zurich seems like a progressive educational decision. Except that it isn’t because, as so often, language debates are made to stand for something entirely different. On closer inspection, this apparent pro-mother tongue decision turns out to be neither “mother tongue” nor “pro.” In Basel, for instance, 54% of preschoolers do not have Swiss German as their mother tongue but a range of migrant languages, including Standard German. Indeed, the educational disadvantage of migrant children lacking sufficient competence in the language of formal education, which is Standard German, is well documented (e.g., Moser & Werlen, 2010).

Furthermore, the decision is not one that is “for” Swiss German but one that is “against” Standard German as is obvious from the fact that the very same Zurichers that now mandate Swiss German in preschool not so long ago also mandated the early introduction of English in elementary school. And at the same time that public preschools are made to use Swiss German, private preschools where the medium of instruction is English are booming.

The Swiss media reports I’ve looked at mostly feature long lists of readers’ comments where the merits of mother tongue education, the relationship between Swiss German and Standard German, and the relationship between language, culture and identity are hotly debated. However, they largely miss the point that this is not about language but about migration and globalization. Zurichers, as so many others, are perfectly comfortable with the kind of globalization that involves financial, commercial, cultural and media flows and simultaneously highly uncomfortable with the kind of globalization that involves actual people flows. The former finds expression in the scramble for English and the latter in the retreat into the local language.

I just wonder why it is so hard to see that this approach doesn’t make migrants disappear? It just serves to alienate and exclude them.

Moser, Urs & Iwar Werlen (2010). Entwicklung der Sprachkompetenzen in der Erst- und Zweitsprache von Migrantenkindern Do you speak Swiss? Verlag Neue Zuercher Zeitung, 105-107

One of the beauties of the report is how the book is iconic of its content. The front cover is quintilingual in English, French, German, Italian and Romansh although the English title obviously overshadows the subtitle in the four national languages. About two thirds of the 240-page report is presented quadrilingually in the four national languages, followed by an English translation, which is printed on green paper. So, the design makes it easy to navigate between the national languages and English. Within the national languages section, the languages are mingling nicely rather than being segregated into separate sections. However, a thumb index makes it possible to go straight to a particular language if you so wish. The thumb index for German is almost a solid line, indicating that there is a lot of German used throughout; the indexes for French and Italian are more like a dotted line, and the index for Romansh consists only of three dots, iconic of the minority status of that language.

Overall, the report provides a wealth of findings around three key research questions: how does Swiss multilingualism work? What are the current linguistic competences of the Swiss population? What should the linguistic competences of the Swiss population be in the future and how can we plan for those? There is such a wealth of findings that I’ll blog about some of the 26 projects individually in the near future. For now, I’ll focus on the six key issues highlighted by the editor as emerging from the national project:

1. How multilingualism works: projects devoted to institutional multilingualism in contexts such as the Swiss army or tourism businesses (as in our project) highlight people’s pragmatism and flexibility in relation to the multilingual realities in which they find themselves. Of course, institutional pragmatism and flexibility is only possible if there are a certain number of multilingual individuals in the institution. However, institutions do not do much to promote individual multilingualism and to offer systematic language training. So, one of the report’s recommendations is for institutions to acknowledge individual multilingualism more as a resource and to remunerate it accordingly and also for the provision of more systematic language training.
2. Learning languages: language learning needs to happen in school and there are a range of challenges to make language education more effective. These range from questions around which languages should be introduced when and other language-in-education policy issues to more classroom oriented questions such as language teaching methods. A number of projects, for instance, highlighted the importance of resourcing language teaching properly as shallow learning results in quick forgetting, and so is largely a wasted effort.
3. English: the role of English is as hot a topic in Switzerland as elsewhere and the report’s pragmatism is refreshing: English is here to stay and a central facet of the Swiss linguistic landscape, as it is globally, but English is not enough. For Switzerland, at least, the future continues to be multilingual.
4. Standard- and non-standard varieties: German-speaking Swiss often quip that Standard German is their first foreign language. However, NFP56 research has shown that the majority population is largely unaffected by this difference between Swiss and standard German varieties. The people who have trouble to master the standard, both in German-speaking and Francophone Switzerland are those with a migration background pointing to the need to improve educational opportunities for migrant populations.
5. Linguistic minorities: the indigenous minority languages of Italian and Romansh have traditionally enjoyed equality before the law, even if not outside the institutions of the state. While the challenge to ensure equal opportunities for the speakers of the indigenous minority languages remains to some degree, the much larger challenge that has emerged in recent years is the one to ensure equal opportunities for the “new” minorities that have resulted from the migrations of the past decades. The report is adamant that there is often a double standard that views the maintenance of indigenous minority languages as desirable but views the same maintenance as a failure of “integration” when it comes to non-indigenous minorities. However, research projects in the NFP56 also found that migrant languages are maintained well in Switzerland, even in the 3^rd generation, and most of the projects highlighted the importance of acknowledging and supporting their maintenance in the interest of Swiss society as a whole.
6. Multilingual media: somewhat surprisingly the media were found to be far behind the country’s multilingual reality with most media catering narrowly to what they see as their linguistic clientele.

Ultimately, the linguistic challenges of Switzerland are those of every contemporary society. The Swiss are fortunate in that they have been thinking about how to make societal multilingualism work for the common good for much longer than pretty much everyone else. Switzerland is also fortunate in that their politicians had the good sense to initiate and fund a national research project that will form the basis of future language policy. Everyone involved in language policy, language-in-education policy, the sociolinguistics of multilingualism and language learning has a lot to learn from NFP56! If you only read one sociolinguistics book this year, make it Do you speak Swiss?

Walter Haas (Ed.) (2010). Do you speak Swiss? Sprachenvielfalt und Sprachkompetenz in der Schweiz. Nationales Forschungsprogramm NFP 56 NZZ Libro

The billboard is in fact an ad for Swiss Tourism – I know the characteristic red, the emblem with the Swiss Cross inside an edelweiss and the slogan “get natural” all too well from a research project into the linguistic and communicative challenges faced by the Swiss tourism industry I conducted a few years ago. The billboard is in Hakone because apparently the railway I was travelling on, Hakone Tozan Railway, is a sister railway of Rhätische Bahn.

No sooner had I got over my surprise of finding myself staring at the Swiss Alps instead of Mt Fuji, I found myself in front of the Cafe St Moritz. There is some serious devotion to Graubünden/Grischun in Hakone! The Cafe St Moritz was also liberally displaying the Swiss flag, including on its tables. Banal nationalism again, of course, but with the imagery of another nation! The menu of the Cafe St Moritz, by contrast, doesn’t seem to be Swiss-inspired. Hot dogs must probably be considered un-Swiss

Advertising takes cultural symbols and images from one place and uses them in another to create authenticity. The use of national imagery from elsewhere in marketing coffee-shops, restaurants, food and drink (and all manner of other products and services) is a feature of contemporary symbolic landscapes the world over.

My first reaction to finding Switzerland in Hakone was one of dismay: I felt like I’d stumbled upon yet another non-space of globalization where globally circulating images make one place exactly like another and Hakone becomes Disentis/Mustér, and Disentis/Mustér becomes Hakone. However, on reflection and after reading up on gaikoku mura (“foreign villages”), country-themed theme parks, I have changed my mind: if local tourism can create an exotic tourism experience, then that is a much more sustainable way of travelling. Why would you make a long and tedious journey to travel all the way to Switzerland and create a huge carbon footprint if you can experience Switzerland 70 min outside downtown Tokyo? And considering that it’s entirely possible that in the meantime some marketeer has come up with a Japanese theme for St Moritz …

When I lived in Basel in Switzerland, my then-preschool child was just learning to make sense of the alphabet and to sound out words – a development I obviously encouraged as much as I could by seizing every literacy opportunity. Generally speaking, pretty much everything can be a learning opportunity. However, I had one problem: the most direct route to her childcare center was past this huge graffiti.

Imagine my dilemma: normally we talk a lot about letters and words and how to put them together, except when it comes to the writing on the wall and mummy gets all cagey and goes “never mind” … Although I like to think of myself as a creative teacher, I’ve never been able to come up with an age-appropriate way to talk about this piece of graffiti except to change my route and take a longer route that did not involve walking past the wall with the “Fuck Blocher” graffiti. Blocher, btw, is a controversial right-wing politician.

Judging on the basis of graffiti, the f-word is continental Europeans’ favorite English-language word. The margins of the English-language empire writing back?! Most commentators on graffiti agree that graffiti are intended to be transgressive and to express some kind of opposition. This is clearly the case with fuck-graffiti. Opposition may be directed against specific politicians and the politics they stand for, as in the example above or the large number of “Fuck Bush” graffiti that graced many European cities in the middle of the decade (the first example in the slide is from the window sill of a Basel tram). Instead of targeting a particular politician, opposition may also be expressed against “the system” and its oppressive apparatus more generally, as in ubiquitous “fuck the police” graffiti (one example in the slide show is from the play equipment on a Swiss playground; the other is from a suburban Munich train station).

Why does a 1988 NWA gangsta rap protest song from the American ghettos continue to speak to European youths, in a different time and a different place? One explanation might lie in the appropriation and commercialization of hip hop and African-American cultural styles more generally that has seen them expand around the globe. Another explanation can be found in other fuck-graffiti, namely those that speak of ethnic tensions and conflicts in Europe and that allude to the exclusion of migrant youths and the concomitant formation of ethnic gangs. Slides 4-6 provide evidence of such ethnic tensions. All three come from public transport spaces in Basel: “Türkiye The best fuck of The rest;” “Fuck of Swiss” and “Fuck you Serben,” with “Serben” (“Serbians”) subsequently crossed out and replaced with “self.”

Some fuck-graffiti simply speak of animosity between individuals such as those in Slides 7-9 with “Fuck you Dina Ok!;” “Fuck off Deba” and “Fuck you bitch!!” The use of “ok” and “bitch” also suggests an indebtedness to rap and hip hop and an allusion to gang culture. Apparently, international youth culture has become so infused with rap and hip hop that English has become the medium of choice even for the expression of personal animosity – if one chooses to express that animosity through graffiti.

I’m not too sure what to make of the last two examples in the slide show. One comes from a bunk bed in a Swiss youth hostel and the other from a Basel building: “If you wanna reach the sky, fuck a duck and try to fly!! :-)” and “think fuck is funny fuck yourself and safe the mony.” They are obviously some kind of sayings or proverbs but the intertextuality escapes me. It doesn’t matter, either – graffiti are supposed to be ephemeral and not analyzed by an academic. What intrigues me is the language choice: nowhere in my collection of German and Swiss graffiti do I have a rhyme in German or French or any other language. The language of transgression is overwhelmingly English in these graffiti!

Jørgensen (2008) makes a similar observation about Scandinavian graffiti. However, where he concludes that the choice of English is evidence of the fact that graffiti break, inter alia, the monolingualism norm, I don’t actually see a monolingualism norm operating in much of continental Europe. A hybrid language that makes substantial use of English is the public language both of those who buy into the rhetoric of globalization (see my recent post about English as a non-language) and those who oppose it. In the fuck-graffiti I’ve presented here, English is both the language of the Self and the language of the Other.

Reference

Jørgensen, J. (2008). Urban Wall Languaging International Journal of Multilingualism, 5 (3), 237-252 DOI: 10.1080/14790710802390186

Everywhere in Switzerland the number of prostitutes and relevant establishments increased in 2005. In Zurich, for example, the number of prostitutes has risen by almost 20% since 2003; in Basel a new brothel opened on average every two weeks in 2005. For the whole of Switzerland, the profits of the sex industry are estimated to be around CHF 3.2 billion per annum. (Bundesamt für Polizei, 2006; my translation)

These numbers are provided by the Federal Police and they just confirm the pervasiveness of the sex industry. Outlets of the sex industry enjoy a higher visibility in Swiss cities than churches, and they are immensely more frequent than mosques with minarets, of which there are only four in the whole of Switzerland.

In the referendum last week 57% of Swiss citizens voted for a ban on building minarets because they apparently don’t fit with the traditional Christian character of the country. Seeing that no one is even considering a ban on building brothels, sex shops and other such establishments, I can only conclude that these fit just fine with the traditional cityscapes of European Christianity … as does intolerance, discrimination and bigotry.