In the interview, Barbara reflects on the early years of her career as an American linguist in Australia in the 1970s, and how linguistics and language in Australia have changed since then.

The transcript was edited by Brynn Quick.

Update 23/09/2024: The audio is now available here or on your podcast app of choice.

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Livia: So, you’re very difficult to google and to do background research on!

Barbara: Really?! Whenever I look myself up, I start finding me all over the place (laughs).

Livia: I did find a couple of things about you, like the fact that you had actually studied in Georgetown and Michigan, and that you came over to Sydney in the 1970s. Then I was astounded to find that you were the second linguist at University of Sydney. It was just you and Michael Halliday.

Barbara: Yes, but he only got there a couple of months before me. It was the birth of the Linguistics Department.

Livia: Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like when the field was so young?

Barbara: Well, I guess the answer to the story is that my husband got a job here. He’s a geographer, and we were in Vancouver at the time in Canada. He was teaching at Simon Fraser, and I was teaching at the University of British Columbia. We were both lucky, those were both just jobs for a year or two. I was writing my dissertation at that point.

So, we started applying, and he applied to the University of Sydney, and he got the job! And I applied, and I was told by a number of people at the University of British Columbia, linguists, that I didn’t have a chance. That there was no chance, it was only going to be one other person hired. And Michael, you know had a wife, Ruqaiya Hassan, and everybody was sure that Ruqaiya would get the other job. So, I didn’t have very much hope, but then I got the job!

I was just so amazed that I got the job, and I found out from Michael later that it turned out that the reason I got the job is, he was very interested in starting a department that would combine both systemics and Labovian kinds of sociolinguistics. He thought somehow we’d be able to mesh in an interesting kind of way, having different interests and different ways of configuring what the major issues were.

But we had great overlaps because I was just as interested in applied linguistics, and Michael certainly was and wanted to build a department up as a place for both theoretical and applied interests. So, it was that it was very exciting times for us when we did both get jobs at the same university which didn’t seem like that was going to be possible at all, but it was!

Livia: How long were you at Sydney for?

Barbara: Until I retired. It was my only place until I retired in 1980-something or 1990-something. I know I retired early because in those days women could retire at 55, so it was when I turned 55 that I retired. But after that is when I got more interested in working with a friend of mine in Louisiana, and we worked together for 10 or 12 years after that.

Livia: You’re also a female scholar who migrated to Australia. How did that shape your research or your role as a researcher?

Barbara: I don’t know that being a female shaped my research. I was much more interested in social issues. The time when I was doing my master’s and PhD were times of great upheaval with the anti-Vietnam war situation. I spent some time in my master’s degree working with Mexican children in California. I collected data there, and so it was more an interest in social issues.

I found the linguistics of theoretical people like Chomsky, for instance, very interesting. I found that the kinds of questions and the way he was doing linguistics was so different from writing grammars of language, for instance, which was the main thing that linguists were doing at that point, describing languages that hadn’t been described. I didn’t mind that either, but I was really taken in by the more political sides of things, and so when Labov first published his dissertation which was only when I was still at the master’s level, I just thought, Oh! This is what I want. This brings social issues and linguistics together.

I thought he was asking questions about how language changes, and I was very interested in that as a theoretical question. If it was going on before and it’s going on now, can you observe it changing? And when they came up with these nice statistical means and then the data necessary for using those statistical means to look at language changes, I found that theoretically exciting.

Livia: So, did you have a very big research team helping you when you first did the nearly 200 interviews in the Sydney?

Barbara: No, no, no! Not at all. I mean, that story is kind of funny. When I came here and it was only Michael and me, I had no idea about how the university worked. It was very different from American universities. I didn’t know how different it was. Michael was much more familiar with it I suspect because of his English background.

I came over here thinking, oh my gosh I have to get tenure because in America you have to get tenure within your first six years or else you’re going to go to some other university. And we had moved all around the world, my husband and I and my two little children. When we get to Sydney we thought, we’re just going to stay there. We’re not going to move at all. So, then I thought I’ve got to get busy, so I applied for a grant to do New York City all over again, except in Sydney.

That first year we collected the data from the Anglos. The Italians and the Greeks were in the third year. So, the first year Anne Snell and I collected all the data (chuckles) and made the preliminary transcripts. I think we had money for getting transcripts typed, and we had money for Anne and me to run around all over Sydney trying to get interviews with people. Then Anne and I sat together in my living room at the end of the data collection period just listening to the tapes and checking with each other if we were all hearing the same thing.

Then I found out afterwards that there is no such thing as tenure. If they hire you, they hire you, and they’re not going to think about getting rid of you. Oh! All that work I did! It was very funny.

It was when my supervisor from Georgetown, Roger Shuy, came over for participating in a conference. He said, “Barbara, I’m going to ask Michael how you’re doing.” And I said, “Ok.” He asked Michael did he think I’d get tenure, and Michael said something like, “I don’t know! I don’t think they do tenure here.” (laughs). Oh dear!

So anyway, I was working really hard. I thought I needed to, but I think I would’ve done it anyway. I definitely have no regrets. I’m glad we worked that hard, but it did mean coming home from teaching at the university – because most of the interviews were done at night, they were done after people had dinner – so Anne and I both got home, fed our families, turned around, got in a car and went off somewhere.

Livia: So, let’s talk about your data. You had a lot of data. I read a quote of yours somewhere where you said it was amazing how much variation there was, and that you were really excited about that.

I actually went to the Powerhouse Museum yesterday, and I looked at the Sydney Speaks app. I didn’t get all of the questions right! One of the teaching points in the app was that unless you live and grew up in Sydney, you’re not likely to get a lot of these right. So, for you, who didn’t grow up in Sydney, as an initial outsider, I’m sure the language variation would have been fascinating for you to learn about, as well as all the social aspects behind it. There are differences in society despite the classlessness that Australia prides itself in.

Barbara: Yeah, and again, you know, I came over here totally understanding that what I was seeing was social class. I mean it’s just social class as far as I’m concerned. It wasn’t that much different except certain ethnicities were different and all that sort of thing.

I looked for the sociology in it, and I though ok I’ll do like Labov did. He just found a sociologist, and he just used whatever categories the sociologist did! I found one tiny article from the University of New South Wales, and it just wasn’t that useful, so in a way I kind of had to figure out for myself what I thought. In the book I talk about how you come up against problems, like for example you have somebody who owns a milk bar, you know, in terms of the working class-or the middle class or whatever. So, you know, I think the class thing is fraught, and it’s still fraught today. It’s not well defined, though it’s better defined than it used to be.

Livia: And in general, there are ideas about the categories we imagine that people fall into. There are so many assumptions and myths out there.

Barbara: Absolutely, but then even when you decide that somebody is either Italian, Greek or Anglo, even those titles are complicated. Very many people didn’t like me using the term Anglo because they would rather be called Australians. That’s the way people were talking about it then, that there were Australians, Italians and Greeks.

But I remember one Scottish person said how insulted he was to be put in with the Anglos. I said well I suppose you are, come to think of it. So yeah, it was kind of fraught. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, to come in as a real foreigner, and not really knowing very much about Australia at all before we came and then trying to jump in to something like this.

I guess the thing that helped a lot is anybody who I hired were Australians, so they could um tell me when I was really going off the rails. I felt more comfortable with the Greeks and the Italians because they were foreigners like me, so they had different ways of understanding Australia as well.

Livia: That’s fascinating, especially considering in sociolinguistics at the moment that researcher positionality is a very big topic and having to justify your own positionality and reflect on your influence in the interview.

Barbara: Yes, but you know I don’t understand how we would ever do studies of other peoples if we only had ourselves to look at, that is if everybody else was just like you. First of all, I wouldn’t have found very many Americans of my particular background, so I think you have to be cautious about these things.

But what I also think is that when you do a kind of statistical analysis in the way that I did, and when you see the patterns that resolve, you think something is generating those patterns. It’s probably the social aspects as well as the linguistic aspects. You need to always be conscious of what you’re doing, as I was, with class. I knew I had no right to be assigning class to people because not even, you know, Marxists do that. Even though they believe in class, absolutely, they don’t go along classifying people. They talk about members of the working class, but it’s kind of a broad sweeping hand kind of thing.

So, in terms of picking up on the linguistic variable that I looked at, I really depended upon Mitchell and Delbridge and their work before me. So, we knew the vowels were very important in Australian English. If you look at Labov’s work, vowels are the most likely changing features of a language, and then of course certain consonants come up as well.

Livia: You just brought up Arthur Delbridge. Let’s talk a little bit about your colleagues over the years, particularly also the colleagues you’ve met through the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS). Could you maybe tell me a little bit about your involvement with the ALS?

Barbara: I’m sure that I attended some ALS meetings from whenever I got here to whenever I left! But I didn’t attend after I retired. I don’t recall going to too many meetings, but early on it was a small group of people, as you can imagine. It was Delbridge and I’m not sure who else, but Delbridge for sure was a major person in the early stage in getting the whole thing going as far as I know.

It was a small group of people, a very friendly group of people who got together. It was the first time that I saw a group of students or university people who were interested in Aboriginal languages because we didn’t really have that in Sydney at first until Michael Walsh joined the faculty. So, I realised that, at least among young people, there was really the enthusiasm for Australian linguistics.

The meetings were always held at some university. We always lived in the dormitories together, so it was, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner with a very friendly group of people. And there were good papers. You could listen to papers on Aboriginal languages, for instance, that I wasn’t getting from any other place, so that that was all very interesting.

When I first came here, John Bernard was very helpful to me, and I used his work as well on vowels in Australian English. Those were very fundamental. If I hadn’t had those as a base, I could not have done my work as quickly as I did, but because they’d worked on that for a long time, it was very helpful.

I also remember the systemics people, Jim Martin and Michael (Halliday), coming, and they had a harder time because I think there weren’t a sufficient number of them. There was Ruqaiya and Michael and Jim at first, but eventually, as you know, they got a sufficient number of people, and then they became very, very big.

Then it became the really, the major direction in the department. By the time I left, it was not the only direction. They would go on to certainly hire more people who are in sociolinguistics. Two or three different Americans came over to work, and others like Ingrid (Piller). So yeah, it’s expanded and now it’s a very different department from what it was when I was there.

The department was really small for those first ten or twelve years. We were very close. We used to plan weekends together where, you know, we’d go at the end of the year and we’d go off camping! We’d go somewhere together. The graduate students and the staff just did things together, and that was very nice. So, you made very warm relationships with many people who came from that era. Maybe it’s still the same way. It may still be wonderful.

When Michael Walsh came, it was important for him to come because we were getting to look like we weren’t an “Australian” bunch of people, so when Michael came at least he legitimised us because he was working on Aboriginal languages. He was an Australian, so we all learned how to be Australian from Michael.

Livia: Whatever “Australian” means nowadays, right? (laughs)

Barbara: Yeah, whatever that means. Well, I think of myself as practically Australian now, but nobody else does, so (laughs) that’s just the way it is.

Livia: What’s it like for you walking around, say, Glebe now and hearing all the variation in Australian English? Do you get very excited when you hear people speaking?

Barbara: I don’t think I want to go and do another study, no! No, no. I still like to listen. I feel that there’s some things that I could have pursued, and perhaps I should’ve. I’ve always felt, I keep telling this to every sociolinguist I ever meet in Australia, and that is that somebody needs to study the Lebanese community. The Lebanese community is going to be very, very interesting, and of course if you don’t capture it really soon, you know, it will –

Livia: Has no one done that?

Barbara: No, not really. I know of no major study now. Maybe somebody’s done it a little bit here and there, but I think that would be fascinating to study, so I keep trying to urge people to study the Lebanese community.

Livia: That’s interesting because they’re a fairly recent migrant group but not that recent.

Barbara: No, not that recent. They were when I when I was doing my studies. The Greeks and the Italians were the major groups that anybody ever talked about, so when you were talking about migrants you meant the Greeks and the Italians. But the Lebanese were becoming a force, particularly if you were doing applied linguistic work. If you were working with the schools, the most recent group to migrate in large numbers were the Lebanese. So, I felt even then that I couldn’t face doing another major work like that again. But every time we did get a new sociolinguist, I told them that they should be studying the Lebanese community.

Livia: Too bad I’m nearly finished with my thesis (both laugh). But to take you back to the ALS conference days – what do you remember of those?

Barbara: Bearing in mind I haven’t been to a meeting in many years, what I recall of them is that most of the papers were interesting. I do recall the social aspects of it, getting together with groups of people who are linguists and just talking among yourselves. That, to me, is the best part about meetings all together. Unless it’s somebody who’s absolutely giving a paper right on what you’re interested because then you’re just kind of sitting there absorbing and thinking. But actually talking to people, especially because, as I said, we were a small group at that point, so it was very personal and interactional. That’s the main thing that I think about when I think about the ALS.

Livia: I’m always told when you go to conferences that it’s good to be criticised or challenged in your ideas, or that out of failure come new ideas. I’m just wondering whether you recall a time when that happened to you, that you were maybe challenged in your ideas but that actually ultimately took you in a direction that was more fruitful?

Barbara: I think people treated me very well, so I don’t recall any criticism. No, there was criticism when my book first came out, but it was well-intended. In those days we really didn’t do those things publicly. Everybody was incredibly polite to everyone else, so even if you did think, “oh that was a stupid paper,” you wouldn’t say it, and you wouldn’t embarrass somebody with it. I think you might challenge them later over coffee, but it was a very polite society at that time.

This was unlike some of the American things that you go to where you get somebody in the audience who is just dying to “get you”, you know? That kind of thing was not a nice feeling. People treated me very well, and I know now from looking back that I came over here like a bull in a china shop in the sense of who was I to be coming here and taking on such a big project, and taking it on with the manner and attitude that I had? I know this now because I’ve been here long enough to know how you feel about people who come here, and suddenly they know everything about anything. So, I think I probably stepped on a few toes, partly out of innocence.

One of the reasons I really like Chomsky is that he is argumentative, and I don’t mind a good argument. Not a personal one, not one that’s vindictive or whatever, but I think being strong about what you feel or arguing about what you think is controversial – I think that’s healthy for any field. You need to be able to say, you know, I have a different opinion about that, or I think something else is working here.

I got a really nice letter from John Bernard, for instance, who took me to task for a number of things. He wrote me a very long letter. I appreciated the fact that he had put in all that time to respond. I didn’t necessarily agree with him, but I understood where he was coming from. I guess what I like about John Bernard is that even after that he was always very friendly to me. I never had any problems with him, so I hope he never took whatever I said argumentatively to heart (laughs).

Livia: It’s important to have a good scholarly debate without being personal.

Barbara: Yeah, I think so too. But I can imagine I might have the same reaction if somebody came over and redid my work and they’d only been here three months, and I could say, “What would you know?!” (laughs)

You know, it is true that one of the things was the class issue, that I imposed this class issue. I don’t know that he said I imposed it, but he really did want to make the point that class wasn’t as significant in Australia, and he was still supporting the notion that it was a matter of choice, that you could choose. That was so alien to me, and it is still kind of alien to me.

I think people don’t choose the dialect they speak. I think they speak the dialect they’re brought up in, and that doesn’t mean I don’t think people can’t change their dialect. I think they can if they want to, if they move somewhere else or if they, you know, get a PhD and become professor of Physics or something. I think they can move up and down, up and down. I think that can happen, but it was the word “choose”, I think, that that bothered me a lot. I couldn’t see kids deciding, “oh I’m not going to speak like that anymore,” because they probably haven’t even heard anybody speak any other way except on television, and how much do we get from television? Or radio, or that kind of thing? I don’t think that much. But I just- I came in at that moment, I think, before a lot of people would understand that choosing isn’t probably the right word or the right conception of how dialect changes, that- that you decide to speak a different way. Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it! (chuckles)

Livia: Speaking of changes – you’ve been in Australian linguistics for a bit of a while. What are sort of the major changes that you’ve seen happening in the field?

Barbara: I can tell you about my department. There’s much more interest in descriptive language, grammatical description. That’s really very big in the Sydney department. What’s happening in the rest of the department, I’m just not familiar with.

The set up that Michael (Halliday) managed to create in the department is kind of there, but it has a very different flavour. It’s much more anthropological, what I would call anthropological linguistics. So, still interested in people, still interested in culture and language as well, and especially in studying the variety of languages. I think it’s probably a firmer basis for study than sociolinguistics, and even Michael’s kind of sociolinguistics works best, I think, if you’re a native speaker of the language. I mean, why else is it that we get so much work on English? Because it’s kind of an English-based theoretical position. When I go to meetings, I meet lots of people from Europe and various other places who are studying their own languages in a sociolinguistic manner. But anyway, I would be out of place, I think, in the department now because I’d be the only one doing that.

I’ve been going to the seminars this year, and they’re very interesting papers that are being given with a lot of really interesting and new (to me) people in the department. I know this honours student that I was telling you about, that I was mentoring this year. She is so enthusiastic, and yet there isn’t any real place in this department for her to pursue her work. She had to do a lot of work in figuring out how to collect data, how to interpret your own findings after you’ve done the statistical analysis, all that stuff. She had a real task ahead of her, and I’m glad to say that Catherine Travis has picked up some of my work with that.

I don’t know if you know, but I was about to get rid of all my tapes. I downsized about five years ago. I just decided I was going to downsize. I was not going to do any more research, so it was time to just clean up my house, and I came to those tapes that I had saved from all these years ago. I thought, ah I know somebody in the world would like to have these tapes eventually, but they were still on these little cassettes. They needed a lot of work done with them before they’d be useful to anybody anymore, so anyway she got in touch with me. I said to her, by the way if you have any interest at all in my tapes because I’m just about to ditch them – and she wrote back quickly, “Don’t! Don’t! I’ll be up-I’ll come up and pick them up!”. (laughs)

So, she did, and I’m so glad because she really is doing some great work down there. So, I hope my little honours student goes down there to finish her work because I think she’s so enthusiastic.

Livia: Coming back to Sydney Speaks – I was looking through the Sydney Speaks webpage and there seem to be quite a few projects that are reaching a wider population.

Barbara: Yes, there’s lots of stuff. They’re collecting more data. They seem to be interested in ethnic varieties of English, that sort of thing, so yeah! It’s a whole new revitalisation, I think, of the interest in ethnic varieties of English. There are so many new and large migrations that have happened since the Italians. I mean, the Italians and the Greeks – Leichhardt, for instance, it’s not there anymore. You can’t go there and see that whole row of Italian restaurants that you used to find. Now you go to buy your coffee where you’ve always been to buy your coffee, and it does not seem to be run by Italians anymore, that kind of thing. So yeah, no Greeks and Italians.

I think it’s probably the case that you need two generations. You need the parent generation and the teenager (more or less what I did) because I suspect by the time it gets to the third generation, it’s gone. They’re just Aussies, and they speak like Aussies, and you wouldn’t find anything very interesting. So, you’ve got to catch it when it’s there. Timing is everything.

Livia: Are you going to be attending the ALS conference in December? Are you able to make it?

Barbara: No, no, no. I’ve actually not been in linguistics for quite a while now. That’s why I was downsizing, and I had to face it that I hadn’t been doing anything, that’s it! Give it up! Yeah.

Livia: Well, given that the ALS would like some snippets, I was thinking – Are there any wishes you have for the linguistics society moving forward? For their 50^th anniversary?

Barbara: I’m interested in all of these people who are doing the dynamics of language. When I started looking up Catherine and looking up various others and I see all these people are doing something called the dynamics of language. So, what do they mean by that? Well, you know, I doubt they are all Labovians. I guess I’d love to see the group of them getting together in a discussion of just that. What are the dynamics of language that you’re focussing on? What kind of theoretical issues are there? Do you have overlapping goals, or do you have a single set of goals? Does dynamics actually mean language change as it is associated with historical linguistics? Or does it just mean socially dynamic, like other people picking up your language? Or just the use of language? Or how many people still speak Polish? Or is that the dynamics of language? I’d love to see what people are thinking about with the dynamics of language. It’s obviously got people very interested, whatever it is. That’s what I would like I would like to see a discussion of.

Livia: In that vein of wishing things – do you have any advice for PhD and honours students pursuing linguistics?

Barbara: Be passionate about something, and purse that. I was passionate myself for a long time when I did my bachelor’s degree. I knew I wanted to do English and it was all literature. I knew that what I really like is grammar, but I had never heard the word linguistics before. It wasn’t until I went to Ethiopia and I was teaching at Haile Selassie, the first university (now, Addis Ababa University), that I met a group of linguists who had come over there. And I thought oh, Linguistics! That’s what I want to be, you know? Then I really pursued that afterwards, but yeah, find your passion.

I had a very strong kind of social commitment to making a good society, and language is really kind of right in the middle of that.

That’s such an easy cliché, but because, as I said, when I started off, I had a very strong kind of social commitment to making a good society, and language is really kind of right in the middle of that. What I loved about sociolinguistics is that you could easily go in between the more sophisticated theoretical issues as well as being right on the ground and saying here are some problems that we’ve got. How can we think about these things? So, I did a lot of work with schools, and I think being able to interact with your community for me, not everybody, but for me, that was a very important thing.

Livia: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s interesting that language keeps coming up in the media. People are grasping how complex it is, and it has complex social meanings behind it. I mean, most recently we saw this in the citizenship debates of some of the politicians. There were politicians making fun of each other, saying I don’t sound Greek, but everyone always says where are you from, and now I’m the most Aussie in the room.

Barbara: Yeah, absolutely. No, that’s not true of me because I can go to David Jones tomorrow and get up to pay for my goods, and the people will think I’m an American tourist. They’ll ask me how I find Sydney. So, it isn’t true of me. Nobody has ever, ever said that I was an Aussie. (laughs)

Livia: I’ll ask you maybe one last reflective thing. Thinking back to when you first started and you were involved with all these linguists, particularly in the ALS, what advice would you give to yourself?

Barbara: I think, like I said before, it would be about time. I thought I needed to hit the ground running because my kids didn’t want to move to any other place. We didn’t want to move into any other place, so I had to hit the ground running and make sure that I could stay in this position, so that’s what I did. I think if I had known, “oh look, you know, you’re going to be here forever.” Just sort of do it calmly and carefully, and don’t step on any toes. My thing is, yes, take your time with something, but when you first start, you don’t know how much time you’ve got. Anyway, that’s just an excuse.

My thing is, yes, take your time with something, but when you first start, you don’t know how much time you’ve got

Livia: I can imagine. I mean, I’m in a very big department now at Macquarie, and so being particularly around as linguistics students, we’re socialised into the way the university works and what’s expected of us very quickly. But if you’re one of two in a linguistics department that would’ve been extremely confronting.

Barbara: Yes, and I mean it was hard enough for us to figure out everything with us, meaning Michael (Halliday) and me. Where are you going to be coming from? Where am I? He’s always an open sort of person. If you said, “oh I’m going to talk about this, that or the other thing,” he would never say anything negative. He was very open and so there wasn’t a lot of direction there either, so I just took my own direction in a hurry. (laughs)

Livia: And it’s still making waves today!

Barbara: Still making waves today!

Livia: Well, that’s it. It’s been nice! Was there anything else you wanted to add?

Barbara: I think I’ve said it all. (laughs)

References

For a full list see Barbara’s Google Scholar profile.

Horvath, B. M. (1985). Variation in Australian English: the sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge University Press.

Horvath, B. M. (1991). Finding a place in Sydney: migrants and language change. In S. Romaine (Ed.), Language in Australia (pp. 304-317). Cambridge University Press.

Horvath, B. M., & Horvath, R. J. (2001). A multilocality study of a sound change in progress: The case of /l/ vocalization in New Zealand and Australian English. Language Variation and Change, 13, 37–57.

Horvath, B. M., & Sankoff, D. (1987). Delimiting the Sydney Speech Community. Language in Society, 16(2), 179-204.

Mitchell, A. G., & Delbridge, A. (1965). The pronunciation of English in Australia. Angus and Robertson.

Mitchell, A. G., & Delbridge, A. (1965). The speech of Australian adolescents. Angus and Robertson.

Long-time Language-on-the-Move team members and friends Hanna Torsh and Alex Grey got to sit down for a formal interview

Here are Language on the Move we know that linguistic diversity is often seen through a deficit lens. Another way of saying this is that it’s perceived as a problem, particularly by institutions and governments.

So what does good governance in a multilingual city actually look like?

This was the key question of Dr. Alexandra Grey’s keynote speech at the Linguistic Inclusion Today Symposium held at Macquarie University on December 14^th 2023. I was fortunate to interview Dr. Grey the day before her presentation and to ask her the following questions:

1. What was it about the topic of good governance in a multilingual urban environment such as Sydney that sparked your interest? Why is this an important or relevant topic to research today?
2. How did you investigate good governance in multilingual urban environments? What were the main challenges and opportunities when you carried out this research?
3. What did you find out and why does it matter?

In the interview Dr. Grey presented in her clear and engaging way why we should care about this topic, what some of the key challenges of doing this research during the COVID-19 pandemic were, and how this research into linguistic diversity is connected to social justice in a participatory democracy.

Happy listening to this latest episode of Chats in Linguistic Diversity!

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick; added on March 06, 2024)

Dr Torsh: Hello and welcome to this Language on the Move interview. My name is Dr Hanna Torsh, and I’m interviewing Dr Alexandra Grey today as part of our Chats in Linguistic Diversity. I’d like to start by acknowledging that the land on which this interview was carried out is the land of the Wallumattagal people of the Dharug nation whose customs have nurtured this country since the Dreamtime, and I’d like to pay my respects to any indigenous listeners listening today and to acknowledge that this always was and always will be aboriginal land. Dr Alexandra Grey is giving the keynote speech at the symposium held here at Macquarie University hosted by Language on the Move entitled Linguistic Inclusion Today. She’s a chancellor’s research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, and she’ll be very familiar to many of our readers as she writes frequently about her work which lies at the intersection of law and linguistics. Today Alex is going to be talking about her work on urban multilingualism in Australia, and we started the interview when I asked her why this topic was important to her and how it became something that she noticed.

Dr Grey: Look, Hanna, it’s important not just to me but to researchers who are still researching and were in this space before me who were pointing out the fact that Australia has, in fact, since the time of settlement and particularly in recent times been a very multilingual society with a lot of individuals who speak more than one language and across Australia a great range of languages. From various times over history what those languages are changes – aboriginal languages, Torres Strait Islander languages, migrant languages from different parts of the world and different varieties of English. My own background is in both law and linguistics, so I’m always interested in how governments respond to and represent linguistic diversity. The project I had just come out of was about a really quite legislative approach, you know, a government that saw law as something that should be used in relation to languages and multilingualism, and that was my PhD in China. In the Australian context that’s not really the way things are done, but I was still interested in this underlying reality of multilingualism and thinking, “Well, how does our government do in that situation, and does it do things that could do better, you know? Does governing in a in a good or a better way rely on acknowledging or somehow actually adapting to this linguistic diversity?” And then there was a very particular catalyst. My father was working at a local council in Sydney, and he brought home (because he just knows of my general interest in posters) that they’d made, had designed, had laminated all about when bins were collected and other sort of, you know, services that local governments provide in Mandarin. And I thought to myself, “Ah!”. You know, that’s clearly not the only local council in Australia doing this, but equally not all local councils are doing that, and in the past local councils were not necessarily doing that. What’s driving that sort of decision-making in government? And so I started thinking to myself, “ Well, is that coming just from the grassroots or from pressure people are putting on local government or requests they’re making in that sort of interactive politics, or is it coming from some sort of rule or some sort of rights-based approach that is, if you like, more top-down that’s directing decision-makers to think about linguistic diversity?”. And I proposed a project about essentially that question to Sydney law school. They had a sort of, as it turned out, one-off postgraduate research funding opportunity, and they liked this question too. So I took it up, and I framed it really around that bigger question that I’ve just articulated – what is the framework of rights or rules that might be influencing decision-makers within Australian governments, so at state and federal level, to tailor their approach for a linguistically diverse public? And that’s still a bit of a broad question, so I had to focus on specific jurisdictions, and I focused then also on mass communications from government departments. Of course, there might be other ways that governments respond to that linguistic diversity too, but in a way, thinking back to those local council posters, I was still thinking, “Well, you know, there’s not a lot of documentation or research for investigation going on but clearly they’re changing practices with those mass communications, so let’s have a look.”

Dr Torsh: I’m really interested in what you said about the different approaches between China and Australia, and out of your PhD research what were some of the key differences that you can think about between those two different approaches to multilingualism?

Dr Grey: Look, I can probably say three things, and these are all structural things, and so I will preface them with a caveat that those structures don’t necessarily work the way you might think, or they work differently in different practice. But three structural differences: First of all, there are officially-recognised minority languages in China. Not just one, but many. Secondly, there is a constitutionally right to use and develop minority languages. The Australian constitution says nothing about languages, doesn’t say anything about English either, says nothing about languages at all in terms of recognition of official status or use or language rights. The third difference is that in China, linked to this idea of official minority language and official minority groups, there are counties, cities, prefectures, regions which have nominally, at least, a legal autonomous structure. And that is not unique to China, and it’s not even unique to, if you like, similar countries. It comes out of a Soviet model. For instances, I understand also Spain had developed autonomous regions in the 20^th century. So there was, if you like, a mode of thinking that was not unique to China. But it’s definitely not something that was imported into the Australian context. And there are reasons for that to do with culture and our culture of, if you like, adherence to English as a dominant language, maybe a sense of the need for a unifying language and a unifying ethnicity. But there are also legal structure reasons. Australia is a federation, so each state has a very high level of legal autonomy, if you like, anyway, within a federal structure. And so an autonomous region doesn’t sit well within a federal structure.

Dr Torsh: So interesting. Okay, so, you went about this project looking at these sorts of structural issues in mass communication in multilingual urban Australia. How did you approach it? It’s a huge topic, as you said. So, what sort of approaches did you take to doing that research, and what were some of the challenges that you encountered, and maybe some of the opportunities as well?

Dr Grey: I think the first challenge was my approach, which was a bit chaotic (laughs). I went into the project attempting to gather data, attempting to do lots of things on lots of fronts, and as it turned out I really needed to sort of step back and spend more time doing things slowly and planning. My approach in general was to, first of all, look at legislation on the books. Australia has very good public records of acts of parliament, or what we call legislation, and so along with a research assistant who later became my co-author, Ali Severin, who I know is a teaching colleague of yours, we started assembling legislation and doing an analysis of words using search terms to find laws that dictated a choice of language. And then we had to go through them to find was it in terms of individual interactions, say, mediated by an interpreter, or was it the sort of public communications that I was focusing on? And my plan was to do that jurisdiction by jurisdiction in NSW, the commonwealth, but also say Victoria, Queensland, etc. And at the same time, I wanted to, but these are only two points, I was going to say triangulate, but at least compare (laughs) empirical data that I was to collect of actual public communications practices. So website posters, government announcements, government radio slots, all these sorts of things, and I had gone somewhat down the road of starting to do that when Covid struck, which was, of course, the major challenge. And I clearly remember well sort of pivoting the research because, you know, from my perspective at least, a benefit of Covid for this project is that the government, at the state and federal level, started to take multilingual communications more seriously. It started to be discussed in the news media, and we started just to see a lot of government mass communications about Covid rules, about where to get testing, and then as we rolled into 2021, vaccination campaigns and so forth. So just a time of a lot of mass communications from governments. So once we had sort of adjusted to that scenario and it was safe to at least go out of my house and do some field work, you might recall, Hanna, we did this together on a bitterly cold day in the middle of 2020. We went to a couple of Sydney suburbs that, on the census data, have high rates of multilingual households, and we started recording the signage that we could find, both commercial and government signage in key public spaces and the language that it was in. And so that turned out to be one of the key forms of empirical data that I collected that I collected, and then I also, along with Ali, did research on government mass communications on websites, which we had planned to do anyway and we had already started looking at websites in 2019 across a number of NSW government departments. Again, with Covid I could focus, drill down on a number of NSW and federal government health websites in particular that were really important when we were all sort of locked at home with the internet as the main source of information. So I ended up gathering a whole subset of the empirical data that was just about Covid communications, but I also then continued to do the analysis of legislation. Covid interrupted a lot of things, and so I didn’t end up having the time to do every jurisdiction as I’d hoped. But, with Ali, I ended up doing NSW and the federal jurisdictions, so looking at acts that control choice of language, and then to sort of marry with that Covid-specific data set, I then did an extra limb which I had not originally envisaged, which was to look at international law, and then international organisations’ commentary about a rights-based approach, particularly in regards to the right to health and linguistic non-discrimination in the enjoyment of human rights, and sort of looking at guidance from that space as another supplementary form of, if you like, top-down impetus for decision-makers, whether that guided them and obliged them to make multilingual government communications.

Dr Torsh: I’m so interested in the idea that there was this obligation because one of the things that we found, and I remember that too when we were going around and looking at all the signage, it was very interesting and for me it was the first time that really a lot of those language, because I usually read English, were really so salient in communities that we walked around. So, what struck you during that time about some of the examples of governments doing multilingual communication about Covid well or not so well?

Dr Grey: Yeah, two things struck me. First, in article after article in the news you would read, you know, quotes from community organisations, all sorts of sources saying, “Look, there’s a problem with multilingual communications. It’s not reaching us. We’re not being taken account of. This was translated terribly, etc.” And the government response would always say something like, “We’ve produced 700 million pdfs in different languages.” And already in some of the data I had been analysing pre-Covid, I had been seeing with Ali that information in languages other than English might be on websites but very hard to find for various reasons. And we later came to the conclusion that that website architecture had both a monolingual logic and was primarily designed for an English-speaking intermediary to somehow find that material in other languages and share it with the appropriate people. And so that just became more and more clear through Covid, that, you know, there was a problem with the government almost, I won’t say complacently, because they were putting a lot of effort into some of these multilingual communications, but somewhat misunderstanding the uptake or the accessibility of these resources. And so the fact that these resources existed or that the number of these resources was increasing, was not really addressing the problem that people were raising. So that’s something that really struck me. The other thing that struck me, particularly when we did the physical fieldwork together, was not only that you saw that translating into the public space some of these freely-available government posters and so forth were just not appearing in shop fronts, but instead we saw that a lot of local businesses in some areas, and in some areas local councils, were stepping in and producing their own not handwritten, totally ad hoc signs, but you know, designed professional-printed, multiple copies of their own Covid information signage. And to me, that was really interesting that these were the players stepping into this space. Local businesses, often in consortia, and local councils. And I started digging a little deeper, and it’s research that I’d like to pursue a lot more if and when the time presents itself, but local governments seemed to have a better feel for the linguistic needs of the community and be more responsive, but not in all cases. Like, you know, the day we were out and about in Strathfield, in Sydney, Korean, Mandarin clearly present on signs made by the local council. In neighbouring Burwood, just a few kilometres away with equally high rates of multilingual households, and we’re talking over 70% of households in that area in the last census having a language other than English spoken, nothing from the local council at all. Is it a resourcing question? Is it just a blind spot? Is it one particular decision-maker who says yes or no? What is it that leads to these very differential outcomes?

Dr Torsh: Yeah, it’s such a good question, and I think we are seeing since the pandemic more and more awareness of the need for multilingual communication because it literally means the difference between good and bad outcomes, and we saw that during the pandemic, of those communities being, unfortunately, subject to higher rates of disease and death because, in part, of that communication gap.

Dr Grey: That communication gap can definitely cause those sorts of serious health outcomes, but it can also cause the policing, or if you like, higher incidences of getting slapped with a fine. And that’s not because particular communities are more willing to bend the rules or less respectful of the police necessarily. It might also be because the types of information with the specific, really up-to-date rules – those who mainly communicated in English through certain media channels that certain people cannot read or do not have the habit of accessing or perhaps even knowing are there – that is an area that I think we’ve seen even this year a reversal of a huge number of on-the-spot fines given by police. I think there’s more to look into the question of how the differential linguistic reach also led to differential policing.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so fines that were issued during the Covid pandemic, for international listeners who might not be sure, yes during the periods of lockdown we had on-the-spot fines for all sorts of things, like being out of your house when everything was really shut up to if you were out and you were a non-essential worker, those sorts of things. And we’re seeing those being challenged in the courts and being reversed at the moment.

Dr Grey: So, I mean, that’s an area that, you know, as someone who is in a law school with criminologists, that’s an area of research that occurs to me, but that’s sadly not the research that I have the time and resources to do myself as one person or even, you know, with you or with Ali. But I just wanted to hone in on that point that the differential outcomes of having fewer resources in one language compared to English, they can be quite serious. As you say, health. As I say, policing outcomes. But I also make the point in some of my work that sort of regardless of these grave outcomes, it’s also just about autonomy of individual people being able to make decisions about their own health, their own healthcare, family, and to do that, people should have equal access to information.

Dr Torsh: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that’s a really good point. I’m really focused on health at the moment, but of course I think justice and also education but I am not a law person myself, so I often forget about justice. So I think that’s a really important space. So, what else did you find out once you did all this research and put these, I think, three case studies that you did together? What did you find out about multilingual urban communication that we haven’t already covered?

Dr Grey: Well, for the first study, I call it an audit. That’s the one that’s about sort of what legislation controls language of communication. I found, predominantly, that legislation in NSW doesn’t touch on choice of language and it certainly is not providing strong impetus for multilingual communications. It’s not forbidding it either. There are a few what are called government advertising guidelines that say that for various government information campaigns over various spending thresholds, a certain percentage has to be spent on what they call “culturally and linguistically diverse communities”. But it doesn’t go into details as to what kind of language that might entail or who should be involved or what the quality assurance processes are. I’ll come back to that issue in a minute, but that’s sort of what the first case study identified. And I have an inkling that it’s very similar in other Australian jurisdictions, but I didn’t get to complete my audit of these sets of laws. In terms of actual NSW language practices then, it’s probably not a surprise that the second case study found really great variability, but something I haven’t perhaps touched on is just the extent to which the NSW government sometimes uses so many languages. So, we looked at 24 websites of all 10 government departments and then a sample of government agencies. Across these websites there were 64 languages. And so most of those websites, in addition to English, if they were going to use another language would use some of the most frequently spoken languages in Australia, which are also most frequently spoken in NSW – Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese – but not always. For instance, I think it was at the time the Taronga Zoo website for the usual pattern, but not Arabic, for no obvious reason to me, you know, a great number of those, I think over half of those in this sample were only in English. Not a really clear pattern necessarily. We’re trying to look at is it public-facing government departments vs others, or various kinds of agencies vs others? But not necessarily. And then some websites, particularly Department of Health at the NSW level, that’s the one that’s creating this enormous list of languages, you know, up into the 60s, but on all those websites the information in English is both more voluminous and more up to date than the information in other languages. And then, you know, this might be sort of suggesting perhaps that there needs to be some more rethinking or some more quality assurance or some more community participation, you know, it suggests that there might be a problem. It doesn’t necessarily conclusively prove it. Then the Covid case study, the one in which I looked at international law and international organisations’ commentary on how those legal obligations should apply, I found there’s a really clear emerging standard, it’s not yet crystallised, it’s a very strong discourse in recent years, about planning for community involvement in at least crisis communications. Maybe more generally. So at least for health crises. Not just, you know, ad hoc, suddenly having to find “Who is our Nepali community, and how do we reach them?”, but in having training to raise the capacity of various members of that community. Of having pre-existing works and links and an idea of what media that group might consume, and a strategic plan as to how language might be used in communicating with that group. And so that’s advanced planning with community input, and that’s really emphasised in a rights-based approach that the international organisations are talking about. And you can understand why that might be something they want to encourage because it does, to my mind, seem to be an approach that might help with the kinds of problems that I’m empirically pointing out in Australia, particularly an absence of materials or very inaccessible materials, very disparate or unequal materials, and a legal framework that doesn’t really guide decision-making in that space. So I have said in my most recent paper that international guidance could be very useful for Australian government in terms of thinking about how to do their public communications better. And by “better” I mean not just reaching people in a way that is more effective, getting information across and getting people to act on it, but also more representative, building up a sense of affiliation or trust or social inclusion.

Dr Torsh: Yeah I think that is such an important point, that last point that you make, that it’s not just about the communication or information. It’s not just about, you know, getting people to get their shots on time and know when to enrol their children in school. But it’s also about including everyone in this imagined community of this country, and acknowledging that it’s not an extra that they are included. It’s not a special favour. It’s not tolerance. It’s genuine inclusion. I think that’s a really important point. And do you think that your next step is going to sort of continue that work? I know now that you are doing this fantastic work at the University of Technology. Is that something you’re going to take into your next project?

Dr Grey: Yes and no. My new project is just really commencing, but for our listeners, just sort of shifting headspace – a lot of the current thinking about indigenous policy and indigenous research really focuses on what we call a self-determination paradigm. You know, allowing people to not just have a say in matters that affect them, but have some level of control. And so my current project is looking at a different kind of inclusion. It’s looking at the space of language renewal, which is a space that Australian governments have, in recent years, made quite unusual steps into, both in terms of sort of policy support and legislative support for aboriginal language renewal. But it raises this sort of potential tension or question of “Is the state including indigenous people sort of in a paradigm or approach that the state itself is dictating, or is there a way of allowing indigenous people to take control of their own language renewal processes that might be different to different communities? And if that approach is taken, what is the role of the state?” So that’s a project that raises some different questions of social inclusion, but it all stems back to these bigger questions of language use in the public space. Things like naming of places according both to indigenous language and indigenous knowledges of place. Something I’m looking at very much at the moment – using indigenous languages in Parliament, which requires in most cases a change of the rules, which are called the standing orders that govern the parliaments themselves. And so again, there I’m looking at both sort of linguistic diversity and inclusion through this lens of political participation and representation.

Dr Torsh: Thank you for listening and thank you, Alex, for being here.

Dr Grey: Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks, Hanna.

We prepared and distributed numerous learning packs

Editor’s note: The language challenges of the COVID-19 crisis have held much of our attention this year. Here on Language on the Move, we have been running a series devoted to language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis since February, and readers will also have seen the special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis”.

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

Here, Nusrat Parveen reflects on the challenges of home learning from her experience as a teacher in a highly linguistically diverse primary school in a Sydney suburb with relatively low socio-economic status.

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We set up remote learning stations

When COVID-19 was declared a public health emergency in Australia in March 2020, schools shifted to implementing home-based learning. For a period of 10 weeks, students in NSW were “home-schooled.” This post explores the language and communication challenges remote teaching posed in my school, where 98% of students come from a language background other than English and where over half of students come from homes that find themselves in the lowest socio-economic status bracket, according to government data.

Scrambling to shift to remote learning

Shifting to remote learning constituted a huge challenge for schools.

On March 23, 2020, the NSW Department of Education declared remote learning for all students, except for the children of essential workers who could continue to attend school physically. The Department outlined the action plan for learning from home: schooling was to go digital with a combination of online and offline tasks.

Teachers went into overdrive to create learning from home activities, collate resources, and deliver home learning resource packs to students.

The challenges of communicating with all stakeholders

But creating activities and resource packs turned out to be the least of it. Communicating what was going on to all stakeholders turned out to be an even greater challenge.

We created remote learning grids

Department guidelines needed to be communicated to staff, parents, and students. This was not a one-off task as there were frequent changes, and everyone needed to be kept in the loop. Some of these communications needed to occur not only in English but also needed to be translated or interpreted for parents from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

School strategies to support remote learning

The following are some of the strategies that our school adopted to support remote learning:

• Loaning devices and providing internet access to households
• Providing IT support for students and parents
• Translating documents and interpreting communications as needed. This was done through community language teachers and community liaison officers.
• Setting up ‘Learning Stations’ in the school hall to deliver home learning resources and supporting parents to understand the resources and what was required of them in person but while adhering to social distancing safety protocols.
• Making regular phone calls to students and parents to follow up on learning and well-being
• Up-skilling teachers in the use of various online resources and platforms
• Using automated translation software to translate tasks for newly-arrived students with limited English
• Offering alternative offline resources for students with no internet options

We created special materials for new arrival students

As these examples show, remote learning created a large variety of communication challenges that needed to be met in a short time frame and with little preparation.

Maintaining regular communication with new arrival families

Generally, newly-arrived students receive extensive support with their English language learning and to ensure their well-being (see also Tazin Abdullah’s exploration of the language learning and support needs of ELICOS students during the pandemic).

Maintaining that level of support over the internet and through phone calls while also attending to all the communications mentioned above was almost impossible.

We created bilingual notices for parents

In this situation, where everyone was stretched to their limits, the tiered intervention support for new-arrival students took a backseat and more or less fell apart during the period of remote learning.

Eventually, the communication and support gap with new-arrival students that had emerged during the lockdown period had to be restored when NSW schools resumed face-to-face learning in May.

Lessons from the remote learning period

Parent feedback showed a lot of appreciation for the school’s efforts. However, it also showed that many tasks were considered too difficult for students and parents to understand. As 98% of our students come from a language-other-than-English background this may not be surprising.

Beyond the linguistic difficulties, the digital divide was very real in our community, which is at the lower end of socio-economic status in Sydney. Not having access to the required devices or to an internet connection was a problem for many families.

Now that the NSW school closure is in the past, heeding the lessons from this effort is vital for future disaster preparedness:

• We need a multilingual communication strategy that does not leave out anyone irrespective of whether they speak English (well) or not.
• We need to urgently bridge the digital divide so that everyone can access online communication if need be.

In short, policies and strategies need to pay attention to vulnerable students and families, including those who have limited English and/or are affected by poverty. This is not only vital during times of crisis but should be standard practice to ensure social cohesion and equitable access for all.

“How does human language interact with increasing social complexity in a unified global network?”

This is not only a question that is fundamental to understanding language barriers but it is also the big question addressed by Ingrid Piller in a video segment that is part of Macquarie University’s new Coursera Specialisation Solving Complex Problems.

Solving Complex Problems synthesizes knowledge across the sciences and the humanities, and thereby provides a powerful foundation to think and research in new ways. The specialization consists of four individual courses and the segment on “Linguistic Complexity” is part of the introductory course devoted to “Analysing Complexity”.

Focusing on linguistic complexity in contemporary Australia, Ingrid explains key tensions in linguistic diversity against the social background of migration and globalization.

Migration and globalization contribute to making our societies more linguistically complex and that often means raising language barriers. Next week we will explore how such language barriers can be bridged in the “Bridging Language Barriers” Symposium. Registration for the symposium has now closed but if you cannot attend in person, you can still join the conversation with our team of live-tweeters on the day. Our Twitter hashtag will be #LOTM2017. Follow @Lg_on_the_Move

A transcript of the video is available here. For further videos, transcripts and a host of related resources, visit the Solving Complex Problems site over at Coursera.

Parramatta Anglican Church (©Sadami Konchi)

The deadline to submit abstracts for papers to be presented at the 46th annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) at the University of Western Sydney in Parramatta is getting closer: September 01.

The conference dates are Wednesday 9 December – Friday 11 December.

As part of the conference a workshop devoted to “Language and migration” is being convened by Ingrid Piller and Donna Butorac. We invite relevant abstracts. Visit the call for papers and view an overview of the workshop here.

Parramatta is the home of linguist-artist Sadami Konchi. Sadami is an enthusiastic children’s picture book illustrator, award winning portraitist and event/conference sketcher. Sadami uses the research skills gained in her linguistics and sociology degrees to capture insights from a text and conceptualise them in fine art for multifarious subjects.

To whet your appetites for the sights of multicultural Parramatta, Sadami has agreed to host a virtual exhibition of some of her Parramatta-related drawings here on Language on the Move. Most of these images were first published in the book Speak Out: 30 Migrant Women Tell Their Stories, published by the Immigrant Women’s Association of NSW in 2012.

Sadami will be hosting a solo exhibition “People of Parramatta” at Riverside Theatres Parramatta from Monday, 16 November until Sunday 13th December. The exhibition features, inter alia, the original sketches of the images shown here. The dates of the exhibition have been specially extended to include the conference dates!

Enjoy and don’t forget that deadline! Looking forward to seeing you in Parramatta in December!

Benz, Victoria. 2015. Dynamics of bilingual early childhood education: Parental attitudes and institutional realisation. PhD. Macquarie University.

Victoria Benz recently completed her PhD thesis about “Dynamics of bilingual early childhood education: Parental attitudes and institutional realisation.” The thesis is now available for download from Language on the Move here.

Congratulations, Victoria!

Abstract

Bilingual education in Australia is widely considered to be highly desirable but unsuccessful. This study seeks to explore this tension through an ethnographic investigation of a bilingual German-English programme at an early childhood education centre operating at two locations in Sydney. The study addresses the complex relationship between the childcare provider and its clientele in the socio-political context.

Four sets of data were collected for the research, namely documents, on-site observations, interviews with educators, directors and parents, as well as a demographic survey. The triangulation of these different data sets results in a holistic picture of the dynamics at
work in early childhood education. These dynamics include the complex interplay between parental attitudes and their expectations of the bilingual programme and language learning, as well as the childcare provider’s background, linguistic practices, orientation and public image. Based on this analysis, the research problematizes the ways in which Australia’s ideological environment influences and shapes the implementation and value of bilingual childcare in Sydney.

At the time of data collection, the childcare centres where the research took place had only recently been established. Therefore, programmes, policies and practices were still under development and in flux, while parents encountered bilingual education as a novel
experience. This allowed the research to focus on bilingual education as a dynamic set of tensions between opportunities and constraints. Sites of tension include language choice, internal policies, bilingual qualifications, parental involvement, centre marketing, and the German language.

Overall, the study finds that internal and external constraints militate against the success of the bilingual programme. The research has implications for language policy at family, institutional and state levels.

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.

Auburn parking ticket (left: quadrilingual on back; right: city logo on front)

In Australia with its persistent monolingual mindset coming across any kind of official institutional multilingual communication always feels like a minor triumph. And that’s how I felt when I recently went to park my car at a Sydney parking garage and the machine at the gate spit out this multilingual parking ticket. In German, English, Italian and French, the ticket says:

Please do not leave the ticket in the car. Please take care not to fold or bring ticket in contact with direct heat. Please note that the parking conditions in operation are displayed within the car park.

European readers will be familiar with this kind of parking ticket. It is produced by Designa, a parking management company headquartered in Germany and I think I received identical parking tickets during visits to Europe. I cannot be sure because I never pay much attention to the text on parking tickets. Receiving a multilingual parking ticket in Australia, however, immediately caught my attention because I had never ever encountered a parking ticket with anything other than text in English only.

Is this quadrilingual parking ticket a sign that the ideology of official English monolingualism that blithely ignores Australian multilingual realities is starting to crack? I don’t think so.

Let me tell you about the context of the parking garage where I received the ticket.

The parking garage is located in the Sydney suburb of Auburn and is operated by the Auburn City Council. Throughout Sydney, Auburn is known as an immigrant suburb with a highly diverse, predominantly Muslim, population of Middle Eastern origin. Consequently, Auburn’s city motto is “Many Cultures, One Community.”

The iconic status of Auburn as a migrant and Muslim suburb is best evidenced by the fact that the acclaimed TV police series East West 101 is set there. The series plays on the global conflict between East and West as well as the local opposition between Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs and its poorer western suburbs with their migrant populations.

Consequently, linguistically, Auburn is a fascinating place, too. According to Australian Census data from 2011, only 13.5% of Auburn households are monolingual in English (for all of Sydney that figure is 72.5% and for all of Australia it is 76.8%). Conversely, at 84.8% the number of bi- and multilingual households in Auburn is exceptionally high in comparison to the rest of Sydney (24.5%) and Australia (20.4%).

In fact, more people in Auburn speak Arabic at home than English. The table shows the top languages other than English.

Table 1: Auburn’s Main Languages (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011 Census)

The fact that many of Auburn’s residents come from the Middle East is easily legible in the streetscape: Auburn is home to Australia’s largest mosque; many women wear some form of hijab; restaurants feature predominantly Afghan, Lebanese, Persian or Turkish cuisine; and commercial signage in Arabic, Persian and Turkish abounds.

So, how does the German-English-Italian-French parking ticket fit into the linguistic landscape of Auburn?

Well, it does not. According to the 2011 census, 19 Auburn residents claimed to speak French at home; 15 German; and 245 Italian. So, the choice of languages on the parking tickets is obviously not locally motivated; if it were, I would have marvelled at an Arabic-English-Turkish-Chinese quadrilingual parking ticket.

The language on a parking ticket may seem banal, mundane, not worthy of further attention. However, language choice on such mundane texts is important because it is not only an expression of what is “normal” – conforms to the norm – but also shapes our expectations of normalcy. The usual monolingual English parking tickets contribute to normalizing Australia as a monolingual English space. A German-English-Italian-French parking ticket sets up the dominant languages of Europe as the norm. In each case, there is a mismatch between the norm and actual multilingual realities. In each case, the effect is to devalue the actual languages of Australia and make them seem “foreign” and “strange.”

Sydney Language Festival 2014

The Sydney Language Festival will take place in Redfern on Saturday 5th July.

For details visit here.

What is a language festival?

A language festival is a cultural and educational event held in different countries of the world. The purpose of language festivals is to provide information about as many different languages of the world as possible to people who are interested in languages and show how great the variety of languages in the world is. Language festivals also try to demonstrate that all languages in the world are equally important and valuable and that there should be no “major” and “minor” languages. It is very unfair to judge a language by its number of speakers. The festival aims at encouraging people to learn foreign languages and not just the languages most widely spoken. Esperanto organisations initiated the idea of the festivals. They want to promote international communication on an equal footing and want to prevent major languages from swallowing up smaller ones.

Motto

Speak a regional language locally, a national language nationally, and an international language like Esperanto internationally.

History

The idea of the Language Festival originated with a US Esperanto speaker, Dennis Keefe, who initiated and organized the first Language Festival in 1995 in Tours, France. A report about the event was published in the international Esperanto magazine “Kontakto” and already the following year (1996) the first Russian Language Festival was held in Cheboksary. The biggest Language Festival so far was held at the University of Nanjing (China) in 2008 with 13,547 visitors and 72 languages or dialects presented.

The Sydney Language Festival is organised by the Sydney Language Festival Association, whose director Dmitry Lushnikov is a board member of the NSW Esperanto Federation.

Last year the Sydney language festival was held at Macquarie University and you can watch several videos from last year’s event:

• Concert
• Welcome
• “Waltzing Matilda” sung in Esperanto
• Esperanto
• Fitusa

I hope that many of you will attend this year’s festival and think about fairer ways to communicate internationally. If you can’t attend, it will be possible to watch parts of the festival online on Sydney’s IPTV Esperanto channel.

More information about Esperanto in Sydney is available here.

Cultural Diversity @ Work

This one-day symposium is organized by the Cultural Diversity Research Network at Macquarie University, Hudson Talent Management and the Ethnic Communities Council of NSW. The program features perspectives informed by research, community service and politics. The program is available for download here.

• Participation is free but online registration is necessary.
• Date: Tuesday, 10 December 2013
• Time: 9am – 6pm
• Venue: Hudson Talent Management, Level 19, 20 Bond Street, Sydney

NSW Fair Trading 2013 Think Smart – Multicultural Conference

Under the theme “Many Cultures – Many challenges: Educating consumers in a multicultural nation,” this conference presents ideas and strategies about effective delivery of consumer education and awareness, communication and accents, social media marketing, governance, case studies and challenges educating consumers from CALD backgrounds. The program includes a special focus on serving linguistically diverse customers and is available for download here.

• Participation is free but registration by e-mail is necessary.
• Date: Thursday, 12 December 2013
• Time: 8.30am – 12.30pm
• Venue: Holiday Inn, 19-40 Anderson Street, Parramatta

Kimie Takahashi (2013) Language learning, gender and desire: Japanese women on the move. Multilingual Matters.

It’s Valentine’s Day today. Valentine’s Day is a truly global event inextricably linking the emotional life of individuals with the capitalist world order. Young women around the world dream of romantic love and many men do their best to meet those dreams, showing how much they care by buying flowers, chocolates, lingerie, jewellery or any of the other consumer goods that have come to symbolize romantic love. Those that do not engage in the consumption bonanza also find their lives touched by Valentine’s Day: for instance, an estimated 198 million red roses are grown specifically for Valentine’s Day and that’s a huge amount of one particular crop to get ready, to harvest and to bring to market for one single day: the socio-economic structure of whole counties in Kenya, Colombia or Ecuador has been changed to make way for this floral industry.

Given the deep connections between individual emotions and the socio-economic order, it is not surprising that English, too, has found its way into this mix. A timely new book, Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move* by Kimie Takahashi, explains exactly those connections.

Following a group of young adult Japanese women studying overseas in Sydney, the book shows how, during their teenage years, the romantic desires of these young women had been shaped by Hollywood movies and other popular media. Teenage crushes on media stars are nothing unusual and each generation seems to have their own idols. However, for the Japanese women in the study the pop stars they had teenage crushes on (men like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt) had a salient characteristic: they were white native speakers of English.

As a result, they ended up making a deep emotional connection between romantic attractiveness, Whiteness and English. While they outgrew their teenage crushes, their desire for white English-speaking men lingered on.

As the study shows, this was not only an idiosyncratic romantic desire that the five women who were the study’s main participants happened to develop. Rather, the association between learning English, going abroad and falling in love is actively fostered in many discourses promoting English language learning, from women’s magazines to language school advertising. Indeed, teaching ‘the language of love’ – Relationship English or Renai English – has become a form of English for Specific Purposes that is addressed in specific language learning materials and courses.

In sum, a range of powerful media discourses worked to inculcate particular emotional sensibilities in these women, which included a conflation of going abroad, learning English, and romantic desires.

Once in Sydney, of course, a different reality quickly hit: establishing contacts and relationships with locals (and particularly the kinds of locals they desired) was far from easy; becoming fluent in English was not as easy as they had imagined it would be once they were in Australia; and few of the men they met conformed to the chivalrous image of Westerners they had formed in their minds.

Each of the participants has her own life story and had to face her own trials and tribulations in Sydney. However, their emotional experiences are deeply shaped by the role of English as both an object of desire and a consumer commodity.

If you are looking for some academic reading this Valentine’s Day, Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move is the one. Don Kulick’s endorsement of the book sums up the reading experience you can expect:

Romance blossoms, hearts break, and lives change as Japanese women go troppo in the Antipodes and tell the author all about their dreams, adventures and experiences of learning English as a second language. This delightful book is the definitive answer to the question, ‘Is the concept of “desire” useful to students of language?’. The ethnography is wacky, the analysis is insightful and the writing is engaging and crisp. An absolute must-read for everyone interested in language and desire, language and learning, and language and globalization.

Enjoy! And Happy Valentine’s Day!

*In the interest of full disclosure: I was the supervisor of the PhD research the book is based on.

Takahashi, Kimie (2013). Language learning, gender and desire: Japanese women on the move Multilingual Matters

Tuesday, October 09, 7:30pm: Bilingual Education Matters, Public lecture by Professor Ingrid Piller, German International School, Terry Hills

Wednesday, October 10, 5:30pm: Language as Society: The Discipline of Sociolinguistics, Public lecture by Distinguished Visiting Professor Nikolas Coupland, UTS

Friday, October 12, 9am-5pm: Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion in Australia, Human Sciences Perspectives Workshop, Macquarie University and global live-stream

Friday, October 19, 5pm: Language and Mobility in Unexpected Places, Book launch of Professor Alastair Pennycook’s new book, UTS

Cabramatta, Australia

Last week an email was sent around my office about our upcoming Harmony Day celebration on 21 March. The email suggested that to mark the occasion, interested staff could bring in food from their culture and engage in sporting activities, because this year’s official theme is Sport, ‘a universal language’.

While eating ‘ethnic’ food is pleasurable and playing sports with people from different cultural backgrounds is undoubtedly positive, it got me thinking that the Harmony Day initiative has severe and rather obvious limitations. Without unduly criticising well-intentioned strategies to promote multiculturalism in Australia,  this type of superficial community buliding echoes a previous blog post that suggested that the way French is taught in schools focuses on “stereotypical and pseudo-cultural information about France such as the fact that the national dress includes the beret or that French people love pancakes”. (Incidentally, I can vouch to having an extremely similar experience with learning Italian from 1990-1992. I learnt more Italian being on holidays in Rome for three days than three entire years at my Sydney primary school, such was the nature of the poorly developed curriculum.)

Official communiqués always mentions that Australia is home to a population that speaks almost 400 languages between us, and given this sexy statistic, why is that in 2012 national initiatives around multiculturalism still focuses on superficial engagement with the actual cultural and lingustic diversity of Australia? One way to switch to more active engagement is to promote multilingualism and encourage the study of languages of significant cultural groups here. Imagine an Australia where a much wider cross-section of society had some knowledge of languages such as Arabic, Greek, Mandarin; how different it would be if people were able to engage more actively with other cultures – and perhaps even develop more empathy and intercultural competence through the process of learning languages.

Australia, as an imagined monolingual nation, has a poor understanding of the multilingual reality of many parts of the non-English speaking world, where people often learn the languages of the country they are living in, as well as languages of neighbouring countries. Yesterday I visited a local and humble Asian grocery store in Sydney’s very culturally diverse suburb Marrickville. During the 15 minutes I was in the store, it became apparent to my ears that the family running the business had spoken at least three different languages – English (from living in Australia) , Vietnamese (the national language of their previous home) and Cantonese (their home language). Furthermore, I found out that they also spoke some Teochew (another minority in Vietnam they interacted with) and could also speak Khmer because they used to live near the border with Cambodia. As another example, last month I spent a day in Cabramatta, another culturally diverse Sydney suburb, and fell into conversation with a Thai business owner who, since migrating to Australia, had made the effort to also learn some Vietnamese because that was the dominant language of business in the suburb.

At a time when language studies of neighbouring Indonesian has dropped to critical levels, the official focus should shift from feel-good and passive multicultural celebrations, to strategies that emphasise learning community languages, which could actually have more of a lasting impact to further tolerance and understanding within Australian society and far beyond.

Harmony Day is celebrated on 21 March 2012 and coincides with the United Nation’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Despite the fact that around 30% of Sydneysiders speak a language other than English at home and the fact that Sydney aspires to be a top international tourist destination, official signage – directions, prohibitions, warnings, street names etc. – are in English only. By contrast, pretty much all such signage I’ve seen in Tokyo during the past week was at least bilingual in Japanese and English. A fair number were not only bilingual but quadrilingual in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean as this direction sign at Shinjuku Station. To put this in perspective, only around 250,000 of Tokyo’s 35 million residents are non-Japanese – less than 1% of the population (as I learnt from the poster below).

If Tokyo’s official signage can be inclusive of the languages of less than 1% of the population, why can’t Sydney’s official signage attempt to be inclusive of the languages of 30% of the population? Chinese speakers alone constitute a much larger segment of the population than all non-Japanese speakers in Tokyo combined …

Not surprisingly many of the Japanese tourists in our study of language challenges faced by the Australian tourism industry commented that simply adding multilingual signage at Sydney’s international airport, for instance, could easily improve passenger flow at that airport. They obviously speak from experience. Seeing the usual crowds, queues and general chaos that greeted me in the arrivals hall when I arrived back home yesterday, I can only say it’s high time we started to pay attention to international best practice!

The lovers of English poetry among you will recall how the phrase “Betreten verboten” (“No trespassing”) encapsulates his alienation from Berlin and his longing for his English home for Rupert Brooke. Prohibition signs – signs that tell us what not to do– have become much more widespread in the century that has passed since Brooke noticed them on German lawns. This is due to a proliferation of spaces in which people who can no longer be expected to share the same set of norms congregate and circulate (airports, for instance, are a prime space where prohibition signs appear). At the same time, we also have seen a proliferation of rules and these rules often differ across spaces that even one single urban person might frequent in the course of their daily activities (e.g., the increase in smoking bans).

I have a hunch that prohibition signs are more likely to be multilingual than other types of signs (and I’m expecting that my students’ assignment will throw some light on whether that hunch bears out in Sydney’s suburbs). My hunch is based on the fact that humans often take a dim view of “the other” and tend to expect outsiders to be less compliant than insiders. As evidence for my hypothesis I have collected signs such as the one above. This hexalingual sign appears in the canteen of a Soviet-style hotel in Prague. The management of this budget hotel is clearly worried that guests might take the opportunity of the buffet-style breakfast to fill their lunchboxes, too. One thing that the sign obviously does is to mark the hotel as budget accommodation and to position its guests as cheapskates. What’s more, the language choices on the sign clearly address cheapskates of particular linguistic backgrounds. When I stayed in that hotel, most guests were Czechs, Germans and Russians, and it is entirely possible that the six languages represented are the languages of the majority of guests, and including any more languages would not have been useful (nor practical; as it is, the sign is huge).

While the language choices in the above sign in a multilingual tourist destination in the heart of Europe don’t single out a particular group as likely offenders, this sign does. I found this little flier in a hotel room in Sydney. I have a large collection of signage in Australian hotel rooms and they are mostly monolingual in English. In the minority of multilingual hotel room signage, Chinese figures rarely. This sign is thus exceptional in its bilingualism, its language choice, and even in the fact that Chinese appears above English. Clearly, someone is trying very hard to send a message to Chinese guests. When I stayed in that hotel, there were no Chinese guests present. The sign thus does double duty: not only does it alert guests to the prohibition against smoking, it also positions Chinese guests as likely offenders! The non-smoking sign below from a New Zealand train does exactly the same thing: again, we find a bilingual sign in a context dominated by monolingual signage. Again, the other language, Japanese in this case, stands out not only because of the choice itself but also because of its design (this time it’s not the position but the size and color).

Proponents of multilingualism often like to think that bi- and multilingualism per se are better than monolingualism, and that multilingual signs by their very nature are more inclusive than monolingual ones. Not so! It all depends on the context! While these signs include Chinese and Japanese readers as potential recipients of the message, they exclude them from “polite society” by singling them out as likely offenders.