Linguistic diversity in Sydney (Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

The media in Anglophone countries regularly engage in a bit of a bragfest about the linguistic diversity of their cities. In Sydney, where I live, the local paper only recently boasted: ‘From Afrikaans to Telugu, Hebrew to Wu, the depth and diversity of languages in Sydney rivals some of the world’s largest cities.’ Not to be outdone, Melbourne – Sydney’s eternal rival for urban preeminence in Australia – quickly followed suit and declared itself ‘justifiably proud of its linguistic diversity’ because ‘more languages are spoken in Melbourne than there are countries in the world.’ These two Australian cities are not alone in their rivalry over the greater number of languages spoken in their communities. Across the Pacific, Canadian media, too, tally the linguistic diversity of Canadian cities and find ‘Toronto leading the pack in language diversity, followed by Vancouver and Montreal.’ Similarly, the media of Canada’s southern neighbor suggest that US cities, too, compete in some kind of multilingualism championship: ‘New York remains the most multilingual city in the country, with 47% of its massive population speaking at least two languages.’ Continuing our journey east across the Atlantic, British media play the same game and we learn that Manchester has been ‘revealed as most linguistically diverse city in western Europe’ while London is celebrated as the ‘multilingual capital of the world.’

Strangely, while media texts such as these regularly brag about the extent of urban multilingualism, another set of media texts can be found simultaneously that bemoans the language deficit in Anglophone countries. Here we learn that the populations of Anglophone countries are lacking the multilingual skills of the rest of the world and will therefore be left behind when it comes to the global economic opportunities of the future. There is concern that students are not studying foreign languages in school and that, as a result, they will miss out on job opportunities at home and abroad. Additionally, lack of foreign language capabilities is presented as diminishing opportunities for international trade, limiting global political influence and threatening national security. The situation seems to be so dire that employers have to leave positions unfilled, secret services are missing out on crucial information and policy makers simply throw up their hands in despair and fund students to study abroad even if they have no knowledge of the language in their destination nor any intention of studying it while there.

Reading depressing news such as these one has to wonder how they can be squared with upbeat language news circulating in the media at the same time. How can the cities of Anglophone nations be hothouses of linguistic diversity where large numbers of languages are spoken by the population at the same time that there is a widespread linguistic deficit?!

The answer to this conundrum lies in the fact that commentators and politicians bemoaning the fact that Americans, Australians or Britons do not know languages other than English have a very different segment of the population in mind than those commentators who note their multilingualism.

Clive Holes, a professor of Arabic at Oxford University, explains the differential visibility of language skills with reference to Arabic in the UK: there are few students who study Arabic at university – a language for which there is high demand both in the private and public sector – and those who do are mostly middle-class students, who have no previous experience with Arabic. The kind of language they study is ‘Arabic university style,’ a variety that is focused on written texts and a standard form that is quite different from the varieties of Arabic spoken across the Arab world.

At the same time, Britain is also home to a large number of people who learnt to speak Arabic in the family. 159,290 residents of England and Wales identified Arabic as their main language in the 2011 census. According to Professor Holes these people have ‘more useable language skills’ than those who study Arabic at university without a background in the language. Even so, those who have Arabic as their main language are being overlooked for Arabic-language jobs: ‘They are an incredibly valuable national resource that we are failing totally to use.’

The existence of an apparent language deficit in contexts of so-called linguistic super-diversity points, yet again, to the fact that some language skills are more equal than others. When it comes to bragging about linguistic diversity and the number of languages spoken in a place, we are happy to count ‘diverse populations;’ but when it comes to the economic opportunities of multilingualism, these same ‘diverse populations’ become invisible all of a sudden.

1. The headline “Multiculturalism has failed” is an incorrect translation of “Multikulti ist absolut gescheitert” because “Multikulti” is not “multiculturalism.” Germany has never had a policy of multiculturalism and the idea continues to be that migrants integrate into a dominant German culture. “Multikulti” could best be described as “flower power with diversity.” So, Merkel is saying that she doesn’t like the idea of everyone doing their own thing in all kinds of diverse ways and be happy. And who wouldn’t agree that “be happy” is a great motto for a party but maybe does not offer much guidance when it comes to thinking about an equitable and productive framework for living together in a diverse society?
2. In the same speech, Merkel also repeated something much more amazing, and something, the English newspaper reports I have read chose to ignore completely: the assertion that Islam is now part of Germany! That statement was first made by German President Christian Wulff during the celebrations to mark 20 years of German reunification a few days earlier.

Anyone who knows anything about German politics and German views of the nation would have to recognize President Wulff’s speech as extraordinary. Most conservative German politicians find it hard to even acknowledge the fact that there is immigration into Germany. The mantra “Germany is not an immigration country” continues to define the nation. So, for the president to say that he is the president of everyone who *lives* in Germany (rather than “everyone who *is* German”) is extraordinary – and for the chancellor to repeat it a few days later is even more so!

The statement that “multikulti is dead” has been part of German political rhetoric for at least a decade. Not because they’ve tried it but because it makes good old divisive political rhetoric. Merkel, like all conservative German politicians, is walking a fine line between avoiding the sceptre of the unspeakable right and pandering to her party’s conservative sensibilities. Treating that pandering to conservative sensibilities, which is not new at all, as if it were new, while ignoring the new acceptance of diversity, and particularly Islam, by the conservative mainstream that is evident in the speech is ignorant or worse.

Focusing on the fact that Chancellor Merkel said “multikulti has completely failed” while ignoring that she also accepted diversity and particularly Muslims as a legitimate part of the imagined German nation is some pernicious form of overlooking the forest for the trees. A sentence spoken by a foreign politician has been taken out of the immediate context of the relatively minor party speech where it occurred and it has also been taken out of the wider historical and political context of the debate about migration and diversity in Germany.

Reporting this sentence misinforms and misleads the reader about contemporary German politics. However, it contributes to the national debates into which it is inserted by suggesting that if “it” doesn’t work “over there,” “it” can’t work “here,” either. Except that “it” is not the same thing.

The Sydney Morning Heralds’ web edition additionally ran a poll together with their report about the speech: “Do you agree with Angela Merkel that a multicultural society can’t succeed?” Apart from the fact that I don’t think it matters much what Sydney Morning Herald readers think about the internal politics of another country, if they had done their homework and listened to her whole speech in the original and placed it in its context, the poll question would have been something like this: “Do you agree with Angela Merkel that we are kidding ourselves if we keep saying living in a multicultural society is happy bliss but that the facts of life are such that we’ve got to make living together work?”

If this is the best international English-language journalism can do with a story from a country as well-observed as Germany and a language as widely-spoken as German, I don’t even want to think about the quality of some of the other stories we are being dished up from around the world …

Elsewhere, accents fractionate people into place of origin but there is no change in inflection among the Australian-born from Perth to Parramatta.

As one of the comments on the Sydney Morning Herald website, where the piece appeared, says: “You should get out more. This is patently wrong.” It is patently wrong on two levels:

1. There is heaps of linguistic variation among the English-speaking Australian-born: in terms of region, class, age, ethnicity and gender, to name the most-researched. A good place to start learning about variation in Australian English is the Australian Voices website at Macquarie University; and there’s of course always Barbara Horvath’s 1985 classic Variation in Australian English: The Sociolects of Sydney.
2. English is not the only language of the Australian-born: according to the 2006 Census, 21% of Australians speak a language other than English at home; in metropolitan Sydney, where Ross Cameron lives, 29% of the population speak a language other than English at home. While many of these will be first-generation migrants – a group the author willy-nilly excludes from the nation – many are also “Australian-born.”

If Ross Cameron had just got the linguistic facts wrong, that would be bad enough but I probably couldn’t be bothered to blog about his piece. What interests me more is the language ideology behind the falsehood: supposed linguistic uniformity appears in a list of the things that are wonderful about Australia. Australia is great because it’s monolingual?! Huh??? I find it hard to follow that reasoning. Sure, there is the Tower of Babel myth but our thinking about unity in diversity has shifted a bit in the past 3,000 years …

Australia is a multicultural and multilingual society. However, while we celebrate the former, we ignore or denigrate the latter. While we are proud of the diversity in cuisines that are available in our cities and the diversity in the dance and music performances we can put on on Harmony Day, the evident linguistic diversity is either willfully ignored as in Ross Cameron’s case, or treated as a cause for public concern. Michael Clyne has coined the terms “monolingual mindset” and “aggressive monolingualism” to describe these Australian linguistic attitudes.

As it is, linguistic uniformity is not a cause for celebration but one for lament! The monolingual mindset is hurting Australia as a recent report by the Australian Academy of the Humanities shows. The Communiqué of the National Languages Summit blames “complacent and aggressive monolingualism” for “our national deficit in language capability, […] Australia’s great unrecognised skills shortage – and the one most directly relevant to our competitiveness, security, prosperity and social harmony in an increasingly global environment.”

When Donald Horne coined “the lucky country” as an epithet for Australia in 1964, he used it ironically to mean that Australia had become prosperous through the good fortune of its natural resources; a fact that had made Australians lazy and complacent in Horne’s view. Almost 50 years on, and we still get a politician opining in the Sydney Morning Herald that to be monolingual and linguistically uniform is the smart way to go about being a nation in the 21^st century … lucky country, indeed!

Reference

Clyne, Michael (2005). Australia’s Language Potential UNSW Press