This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double developments of two unfinished forces – rapidly progressing climate change and global economic investment – working simultaneously in tension and synergy. Neither process is linear or complete, but both are contradictory and open-ended.

This book traces the multiplicity of Cold Rush in the Finnish Arctic, a high-stakes ecological, economic, and political hotspot. It is a heterogeneous space, understood as indigenous land within local indigenous Sámi people politics, the last frontier from a colonial perspective, and a periphery under the modernist nation-state regime. It is now transforming into an economic hub under global capitalism, intensifying climate change and unforeseen geo-political changes.

Based on six years of ethnography, the book shows how people struggle, strategize, and profit from this ongoing, complex, and multidirectional change.

The author offers a new theoretical approach called critical assemblage analysis, which provides an alternative way of exploring the dynamics between language and society by examining the interaction between material, discursive, and affective dimensions of Cold Rush. The approach builds on previous work at the intersection of critical discourse analysis, critical sociolinguistics, nexus analysis and ethnography, but expands toward works by philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.

This book will be of interest to researchers on language, discourse, and sociolinguistics interested in engaging with social critique embedded in global capitalism and accelerating climate change; as well as researchers in the social and human sciences and natural sciences, who are increasingly aware of the fact that the theoretical and analytical move beyond the traditional dichotomies like language/society, nature/human and micro/macro is central to understanding today´s complex, intertwined social, political, economic and ecological processes.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Reference

Pietikäinen, S. (2024). Cold Rush: Critical Assemblage Analysis of a Heating Arctic. Palgrave Macmillan.

Additional resources

Cold Rush project website
“Language and tourism” on Language on the Move

Transcript (coming soon)

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Agnes Bodis talks to Dr Masaki Shibata from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Dr Shibata researches beach signs in Australia and how they are understood by beachgoers and what consequences this has for beach safety.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Surf Rescue Australia (Image credit: Australian Government, Study Australia)

References

Shibata, M. Peden, A., Watanabe, H., Lawes, J..(2024) “Do red and yellow flags indicate a danger zone?”: Exploring Japanese university students’ beach safety behaviour and their perceptions of Australian beach safety signage. Safety Science. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2024.106606

Shibata, M. Peden, A., Lawes, J., Wong, T., Brander, R.(2023) “What is a shore dump?: Exploring Australian university students’ beach safety knowledge and their perceptions of Australian beach safety signage”. Safety Science. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106366

Transcript (coming soon)

We kick off 2022 with a new episode in our Chats in Linguistic Diversity. In this episode, I speak with Professor Adam Jaworski about his research in language and mobility.

Language as resource to style a place

A languaged Christmas tree in an upmarket Sydney shopping mall

Adam is best known for his work on “linguascaping” – how languages, or bits of languages, are used to stylize a place. A welcome sign may index a tourist destination, artistic arrangements of word blocks like “love”, “peace”, or “joy” may index consumption and leisure spaces, multilingual signage may index a cosmopolitan space, and the absence of language may suggest the quiet luxury of the super-rich.

As these examples suggest, Adam’s focus, often in collaboration with his colleague Crispin Thurlow, has been on privileged mobilities: European tourists in West Africa, business class travelers, and those frequenting the consumption temples of our time, upmarket shopping malls.

Such research is vital to understanding the intersection between language and inequality, as Adam explains in our interview.

Privilege is the other side of the inequality coin, and a side that sociolinguists have often neglected.

English is safe and multilingualism is fun

The research of Adam and his associates has shown that English is often used to index a place as “safe”. However, the English that makes a place safe is not monolingual but plays with other languages or allusions to them. The English of consumption and leisure spaces is one that is shot through with bits and pieces of other languages – an umlaut here, a “bonjour” sign there, and a tourist going “xie xie” over there.

Code-crossing – switching into another language to signal symbolic change of speaker status or identity – thus becomes a sign of privilege, a way to have fun and to index one’s cosmopolitanism and global-mindedness.

Visual language displays have long marked a space as privileged, as in this cross-stitched sampler (Image credit: Nick Michael, Wikipedia)

Focusing visual language

Much of the language that makes a place consists of visual displays. These linguistic signs predominantly serve a decorative purpose, and Adam takes us back to Roman Jakobson and his theorization of the poetic function of language. According to Jakobson, the poetic function of language forces us to attend to the sign itself – the signifier – more than its meaning – the signified.

In today’s world with its ubiquity of signs, images, and other visual displays, it is easy to forget that the presence of signs for the sake of the sign itself has always been a display of power and privilege.

In short, our conversation is an invitation to carefully attend to mundane and everyday (bits of) language as an entry point into the big social questions of power, inequality, and social justice.

And, as always, academic questions do not come out of nowhere. That’s why the conversation is also a chance to hear from Adam about his career trajectory over the past 40 years.

If you want to dig deeper into Adam’s work, here are some suggested readings

Jaworski, A. (2015). Globalese: a new visual-linguistic register. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 217-235.
Jaworski, A. (2015). Word cities and language objects: ‘Love’ sculptures and signs as shifters. Linguistic Landscape, 1(1-2), 75-94.
Jaworski, A. (2019). X. Linguistic Landscape, 5(2), 115-141.
Jaworski, A. (2020). Multimodal writing: the avant-garde assemblage and other minimal texts. International Journal of Multilingualism, 17(3), 336-360.
Jaworski, A., & Lou, J. J. (2021). # wordswewear: mobile texts, expressive persons, and conviviality in urban spaces. Social Semiotics, 31(1), 108-135.
Jaworski, A., & Piller, I. (2008). Linguascaping Switzerland: language ideologies in tourism. In M. A. Locher & J. Strässler (Eds.), Standards and Norms in the English Language (pp. 301-321). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. (available for download here)
Jaworski, A., Thurlow, C., Lawson, S., & Ylänne-McEwen, V. (2003). The uses and representations of host languages in tourist destinations: A view from British TV holiday programmes. Language Awareness, 12(1), 5-29.Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2003). Communicating a global reach: Inflight magazines as a globalizing genre in tourism. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 579-606.
Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2006). The alchemy of the upwardly mobile: symbolic capital and the stylization of elites in frequent-flyer programmes. Discourse and Society, 17(1), 99-135.
Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2010). Tourism discourse: language and global mobility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

There is lots of related content on Language on the Move and this is small selection

Alcaraz, A. T. (2015). Strolling in Barcelona with Sanskrit and Devanāgarī.
Farrell, E. (2010). Visiting the Ausländerbehörde.
Grey, A. (2018). Do you ever wear language?
Hopkyns, S. (2020). Linguistic diversity and inclusion in the era of COVID-19.
Kalman, J. (2020). Signs of the times: Small media during Covid-19 in Mexico City.
Piller, I. (2010). Toiletology.
Piller, I. (2012). Money Talks.
Piller, I. (2013). Polish cemetery in Tehran.
Piller, I. (2017). More on banal cosmpolitanism.
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2021). COVID-safe travel between care and compliance.
Valdez, P. N. (2021). COVID-19 and the struggle for inclusive mobility.

The website of Hohhot Baita International Airport provides information in Chinese and English but not in Mongolian

Update, Sept 16, 2020: A Mongolian translation of this blog post is now available here. Translated by Cholmon Khuanuud.

In April 2016, a Mongolian family missed their flight at Baita International Airport in Hohhot, the capital city of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), an autonomous region within China. People missing their flights happens all the time, of course, in every corner of the world. However, this mishap made national headlines and became symbolic of the struggle faced by speakers of small languages such as Mongolian vis-à-vis a large national language such as Chinese and global English. It demonstrates how even Mongolian, one of the official languages of IMAR, can be sacrificed to the discourses and practices of global English.

Let me relate the incident: an elderly woman from Shiliingol League (also spelled “Xilingol” in English) in mid-eastern Inner Mongolia required medical attention that was not available in her hometown and had to fly to Hohhot for the procedure. Her son and grandson accompanied her to provide support. Mother and son are both monolingual in Mongolian, the official language of IMAR (along with Chinese). The grandson, who brought this story to the attention of Mongols across the country, is bilingual in Mongolian and Chinese. None of the three speaks any English, a language that is irrelevant to people in Shiliingol League, as it is to people in many places around the world.

On their way back home from Hohhot to Shiliingol this family arrived at the airport in good time but missed their flight when they could not make it to the gate on time. As the grandson relates the story, they missed the flight for two reasons.

Map of Inner Mongolia (Source: TravelChinaGuide)

First, announcements at the airport were only provided in Chinese and English but not in Mongolian. This made it impossible for them to obtain timely information. When the Chinese announcement was made, the young man happened to use the bathroom. On his return, his grandmother told him that the loudspeaker had just chattered something in Chinese. A few seconds later, the English announcement for the flight was made but, naturally, they did not think it would be relevant to their flight within IMAR and they could not understand it anyways.

Second, by the time they realized their flight was being called up, an excessive security check caused them further delay. The grandmother was asked to remove her scarf and two layers of winter coats and was checked from head to toe. As no one else was subject to such excessive scrutiny except the old woman wearing minority dress, it is reasonable to assume that the family was the victim of racial profiling.

Realizing they had missed the last flight for the day was distressing, particularly as they had no idea how to spend the night with the sick elderly lady. They approached the service desk to ask for help. There, they received the following response, which infuriated the young man:

This is not Mongolia; this is Inner Mongolia. In Inner Mongolia we have to speak Chinese, it is our official language. Of course, English is also our official language. [my translation]

He has shared his frustration on social media:

After hearing this, my heart was struck as if by ice. It is unbearable. My Chinese is not good enough to argue with the service agent, although I know very clearly that Chinese is the national and official language, and Mongolian is the official language of Inner Mongolia together with Chinese. English is definitely not an official language. [my translation]

Then he continues:

This is my home but why does it look like the home of someone else? Is Britain my country? Is Britain my home? Why do we have to use English? Why can’t we have a service in Mongolian? [my translation]

The young man’s account was shared widely by Mongols, as was his anger. Luckily, IMAR’s Mongolian language regulation and guidelines actually stipulate the use of Mongolian in the public service: government offices and institutions have to be staffed by reasonable numbers of Mongolian and Chinese bilinguals, even if the story shows the gap between the language policy and its implementation (see also Grey, 2017, for another Chinese case study).

In the end, the story had a happy conclusion. The airport apologized to the family and reimbursed them. Even more importantly, Mongolian language announcements are now being offered at Hohhot’s Baita International Airport.

In this concept image of Hohhot Baita International Airport on the designer’s website, the predominance of white travelers is symbolic of the vision of the airport as a “global” rather than “home” space

“The discourses and practices of global English produce an orientation to the global at the expense of the local”, argues Ingrid Piller in her book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice (2016, p. 202). The incidence clearly demonstrates that the spread of English not just further subordinates the oppressed but also deprives them of their language rights on their own land, where they are, at least, the titular nationality. The presence of English in this Inner Mongolian airport gives this peripheral region which vies for investment and economic development an international and advanced outlook. The motivation and desire behind the replacement of Mongolian with English resembles what Bulag observes with relation to the replacement of the Mongolian administrative term aimag (盟, “league”) since the 1980s:

Cities have emerged as the centres where industrial miracles and ‘actions’ occur, pointing towards a future utopia, departing from Mao’s ideological ambivalence, and are represented in the media as an embodiment of modernity replete with much of the palette of global capitalist renderings of “modernity” and its radically persuasive imagery of the good life, progress and development. Such a modernity is what I will call alter/native modernity, that is, not just an alternative Chinese modernity, but one which hinges on altering the native Mongol cultural and political institutions and properties (Bulag, 2002, p. 198).

The presence of English instead of Mongolian at Hohhot airport shares so much similarity with the replacement of the “backward” Mongolian administrative names with modern capital-desiring cities. Or as Piller states, “the promotion of English is tied to an external orientation to development”, which ultimately serves only the interests of global and local elites.

However, in the context of Inner Mongolia, the promotion of English at the expense of Mongolian in public space does more than serve the interests of the small elite; it simultaneously delivers a severe blow to all Mongols. The public presence of Mongolian signifies the “remaining token degree of autonomy” (Bulag, 2002, p. 224) of Mongols; and the destruction of these remaining token means the loss of home. Or, as the young man in his account moans, it begins to look like someone else’s home.

Related content

Access explorations of the linguistic landscape at other airports here.

References

Bulag, U. E. (2002). From Yeke-juu league to Ordos municipality: settler colonialism and alter/native urbanization in Inner Mongolia. Provincial China, 7(2), 196-234. doi:10.1080/1326761032000176122

Grey, A. (2017). How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change. (PhD), Macquarie University.

Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

My banal cosmopolitan fridge magnets

In response to my post about the banal cosmopolitanism of multilingual welcome signs last week, a number of people suggested that they quite enjoy finding their language(s) in such signs. This made me think of the ways in which global linguistic hierarchies are being produced and reproduced through practices that ostensibly value multilingualism. Even being listed in such signage may be an index of privilege while the majority of the world’s languages and peoples are rendered invisible and speechless.

The fridge magnets in my house constitute a perfect example of banal cosmopolitanism: there is one in the shape of a rooster that says “Portugal” and “Macau Souvenir”; one that spells out “Abu Dhabi” (the model horse that used to be stuck under the name has come off); one that has a map of the North American West Coast and says “California – a view of the world”; there is one that says “New Zealand” and features four colorful kiwis; another one in the shape of the map of New York State that says “Ithaca of New York”; a round one with “Buddha Eyes” from “Nepal”, where “Nepal” is written in the Latin script but stylized in a way that looks vaguely like Devanagari; a doll-shaped one with Korean script and the English caption “hand made”; and then there are six magnets featuring a toy rabbit by the name of “Felix”, who plays with a globe, travels by plane and is placed against a bottle of “original American ketchup”.

“Letters from Felix: A little rabbit on a world tour” (Cover page, German edition)

The toy rabbit Felix is the main character in a series of German children’s books and animated films. The character has been immensely successful since it was first launched in 1994. Books in the series have been translated into 29 languages (which is highly unusual for German children’s books) and more than seven million copies have been sold worldwide. There is a feature-length movie and a huge range of Felix-branded merchandise including toys, lollies, reading glasses for children, travel accessories and much more. Since 2013 Felix has been an ambassador for the global charity SOS Children’s Villages.

In my house, we have a copy of one of the German-version books in the series, the well-read and much-loved Briefe von Felix: Ein kleiner Hase auf Weltreise (“Letters from Felix: A little rabbit on a world tour”). It is a prime example of banal cosmopolitanism: it presents the global sphere as mundane and socializes young children into the practice of tourism and international travel as normal.

It also presents the “world” of Felix’ “world tour” as an exclusively North-Atlantic world.

Felix’ letter from Paris

The plot is straightforward: it all starts with an airport scene and a family returning from their (obviously international but destination unspecified) summer holiday. Sophie, one of four children in the family, loses her toy rabbit Felix. After this sad end to the holidays, the new school year starts with a surprise: a letter from Felix. It turns out that the rabbit had ended up on the wrong flight and is now visiting London. The remainder of the book consists of the letters that Felix sends from his travels – in addition to London, he visits Paris, Rome, Cairo, Kenya and New York City. Each letter is read by the whole family and taken as an educational opportunity to learn more about each of Felix’ destinations. On December 06 – St Nicholas Day, when children in Germany get gifts – Felix comes back to Sophie with a suitcase full of souvenirs.

The book is highly multimodal: in addition to text and images, it also features airmailed letters that can be removed from their envelopes and read separately. The letters serve to connect the world of the German children as they go through the fall period between summer holidays and Christmas to the six international destinations visited by the toy rabbit.

In each letter, Felix proves to be a keen observer of language and culture and provides information about Paris, Rome, Cairo, Kenya and New York City that could be considered educational for children. One piece of information that children can take away from the book is that the world is multilingual; or, rather, that the Western world is multilingual. In other words, language is a topic of Felix’ letters from London, Paris, Rome and New York City but not of his letters from Cairo and Kenya.

The map of Felix’ “world” tour

In addition to these language fun facts, the letters from London, Paris, Rome and New York City also provide information about famous buildings and other tourist sights. Each letter then provides a learning opportunity for the family as Sophie asks her parents, grandma or aunt about further information, which they then look up in an encyclopedia, another book or even a photo album from previous travels. Through this kind of further research, Sophie, for instance, discovers that the “secret code” Felix refers to in his letter from Rome is actually Latin. Unlike her older brother who studies Latin in school, we learn that Sophie is too young to study Latin but that she really enjoys looking through her brother’s Latin textbook and looking at the images of ancient Roman buildings such as the Colosseum or the Pantheon.

By contrast to these four cities, Cairo and Kenya are represented differently.

Felix’ souvenirs: stickers – to represent fridge magnets? – for banal cosmopolitanism to colonize yet another space

In the letter from Cairo there is no mention of Arabic or contemporary life in Egypt; rather Felix visits the pyramids and it almost seems as if he had travelled back in time to the age of the pharaohs. The sense of time travel is reinforced through the fact that Sophie’s additional research is not undertaken through conversations with other family members and books but through a visit to the museum where there is a show entitled “ÄGYPTEN – ein vergangenes Königreich” (“Egypt – a bygone kingdom”). Further related learning is achieved by building a Lego pyramid.

Kenya – the only destination that is identified as a country rather than a city – has neither language nor culture: in fact, it seems empty of people. Felix only observes animals: elephants, zebras and lions; and to do further research about Kenya, Sophie visits the zoo.

There can be no doubt that the playful integration of multilingualism in this book is valuable for young children: they learn that there are many different languages in the world, that linguistic diversity is intriguing and that speaking different languages is enjoyable and pleasurable. It’s an important message.

However, the fact that the message of the pleasure of language learning and multilingualism is restricted to European languages also carries another message: that Egyptians and Kenyans do not have languages that are intriguing and worth paying attention to. In fact, along with their languages, the people of Africa are neither heard nor seen: for all the reader learns in the book, they may not even exist.

Felix’ “world tour” reminds us that the world of banal cosmopolitanism is not flat, as many globalization pundits would have us believe. It’s a hierarchy where even being listed can be a privilege.

Related content

• Banal cosmopolitanism
• What makes foreigner weird? A quick guide to orientalism
• Chapter Two “Linguistic Diversity and Stratification” of Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a shopping mall in Munich, Germany

Have you recently seen a “welcome” sign? They constitute a strange genre: ever more ubiquitous on the one hand, yet utterly false and insincere – how can you be “greeted” by a piece of stuff? – on the other.

Whenever I see one of these “welcome” signs, I am reminded of an anecdote told by a colleague who had travelled in Japan in the 1970s: he had visited Japan for an academic conference and added a few days of sightseeing. For the latter, he had rented a car to drive around the countryside. It was the days before GPS and mobile phones and satellite tracking; all he had was an old-fashioned paper map. The map had all the place names in the Latin script while the signs he saw next to the road were all in Japanese. Illiterate in Japanese, he had no way of matching a name on the map with a name on a sign.

Sure enough, he got lost. Because some signs had the place name in both Japanese and Latin scripts, he just kept on driving in the hope of finding such a bilingual sign to regain his bearings. To his mounting frustration, the only non-Japanese signs he encountered for a long time said: “Welcome!” He knew he was “welcome” but he didn’t know where – or even what – it was he was welcomed to …

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a heritage village in Abu Dhabi, UAE

A similar story is unlikely to happen today. Not only because of the advent of GPS and Google maps but also because directional signage outside the Anglophone world and particularly in countries that do not use the Latin script has become bilingual and largely follows the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals. Article 14 stipulates that “The inscription of words on informative signs […] in countries not using the Latin alphabet shall be both in the national language and in the form of a transliteration into the Latin alphabet reproducing as closely as possible the pronunciation in the national language.” As more and more countries have become signatories mono-script directional signage outside the Latin-script world have largely become a thing of the past.

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a shopping mall in Los Angeles, California

In fact, it is not only directional signage that has become bi- or multilingual but the same is true of “welcome” signs, which must be one of the most multilingual genres on the planet.

Any self-respecting institution today says “welcome” multilingually in a show of banal cosmopolitanism.

“Banal cosmopolitanism” is based off the much better-known concept of “banal nationalism”, a frequent topic here on Language on the Move. Banal nationalism refers to the mundane discourses – flags, maps, national references, etc. – that enact national belonging in everyday life. Similarly, banal cosmopolitanism refers to mundane discourses that enact globalization in everyday life. Banal cosmopolitanism is apparent in the “mediatization and consumption of spatially distant places, signifiers of cultural diversity, and opening up of lifestyles to new experiential spaces and horizons” (Jaworski, 2015, p. 220).

One linguistic form that banal cosmopolitanism may take is the excessive use of new letterforms, punctuation marks, diacritics, and tittles, as Adam Jaworski shows in a 2015 paper entitled “Globalese.” Their use, particularly in brand and shop names, serves to create “novel, foreignized, visual-linguistic forms increasingly detached from their ‘original’ ethno-national languages” (p. 217). Detached from their national and local linguistic context, they point to somewhere else, somewhere in the realm of the global.

English “Welcome” graffiti in Ramsar, Iran

Multilingual “welcome” signs are another such mundane index of globalization and banal cosmopolitanism. Multilingual “welcome” signs feature prominently in consumption spaces – as the examples from shopping malls show and tourist destinations show. However, they are not exclusive to those and are increasingly popular also in universities and similar institutional spaces that want to mark themselves as internationalized, diverse and inclusive.

That all this indexing of cosmopolitanism is indeed “banal” and only runs skin deep is best exemplified by those multilingual “welcome” signs that get one or more of their versions wrong. And I don’t mean home-made signs in developing countries that get their English spelling wrong. What I mean are huge signs professionally produced on durable materials that scream “welcome” in dozens of languages – certainly more languages than the designers of the sign could master or could be bothered to verify the translation for.

The versions that go wrong most frequently are those that use right-to-left scripts.

Multilingual “Welcome” sign, University of Limerick, Ireland

If a designer gets the Arabic and Persian translation of “Welcome” from Google Translate and then copies and pastes it into a selection of other translations, their word processor is likely to re-order the letters from left to right; as happened in this sign at the University of Limerick.

As a result of this linguistically-uninformed process, the Persian version, for instance, which should be “خوش آمدید” is scrambled to read something like the equivalent of “emoclew”; a line later (2^nd before last), half of the word, “آمدید” has been repeated, leaving a truncated version similar to “come”; again scrambled to actually spell something like “emoc”.

Examples such as these are not at all rare: in a previous post, we featured an apron that combines both banal nationalism and banal cosmopolitanism in one item and where the Arabic version of “Australia” is spelled backwards.

So who are the recipients of these multilingual “welcome” signs? The signs are intended to send a message of cosmopolitanism, internationalization, diversity and inclusion – but it’s a message that is intended for the dominant population so that they can feel good about themselves. If a reader were not to speak English, the multilingual “welcome” featured here are just as useful as they were to the driver lost in the Japan. And if you are a reader of one of the languages that come in the garbled version, it’s adding insult to injury.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that the University of Limerick’s “Welcome” sign was intended to welcome members of an international conference devoted to multilingualism. That was incorrect. Attendees of that conference posed beneath the banner and shared it on social media – that’s how I came across the image – but the banner was not associated with the conference.

Reference

Jaworski, A. (2015). Globalese: A New Visual-Linguistic Register. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 217-235. doi: 10.1080/10350330.2015.1010317

On the ferry from Spain to Morocco

My recent book Becoming Diasporically Moroccan explores how next-generations after migration use communicative resources to feel ‘at home’ in their ancestral homeland. By following some Belgian, Dutch and French Moroccan-origin families, I learned the embodied and linguistic strategies next-generation young adults employed for ‘becoming-Moroccan’ through where they were hanging out and spending time in public space,  from marketplaces to nightclubs. By investigating how these interactions actually took place, as opposed to how they are reported when back at ‘home’ in Europe, I illustrate some of the social tensions about ‘Moroccanness’ as it is performed diasporically – in Morocco during the summer, when the diaspora ‘comes home’ and around the world.

As people migrate from place to place around the globe, more and more ‘next generations’ are born into a place where they both belong, and do not belong – they are ‘from’ there, but also ‘from’ somewhere else. Increased access to modes of travel mean that we can be ‘from’ somewhere and regularly visit another place where we are ‘from’. But sometimes those visits mean passing through borders where we are categorized: we become ‘strangers,’ even if the passport says we are not.

I first encountered this phenomenon on a ferry boat between Algeciras, Spain and Tangier, Morocco, in July 1999. I was a person who precisely fit a well-known category: an American college student, spending a summer backpacking through Europe. I was by myself for this leg of the trip, but found that I quickly met people on this boat: other European travelers, looking for adventure in Morocco, as well as Moroccan families living in Europe who were going ‘home’ for their summer holidays.

I was bowled over by the cacophony of voices I heard on that boat, speaking all varieties of European and Moroccan languages. I was surprised that there were so many people making this journey, since I had not known about the massive flow of Moroccan guestworker migration into Europe during the 1960s and 70s. The ferry was overflowingly full with Moroccans who seemed to be ‘going home,’ yet who were definitely coming from homes in Europe. Even today, that ferry is a microcosm of Moroccan migration in Europe, where original migrants, now grandparents and great-grandparents, travel with their children and grandchildren between homes. It is a place where Moroccans from all different parts of Europe might meet each other, since many still travel by car overland from their European homes in order to spend their summer holidays in Morocco. It is also a place where they encounter the border: when travelling by ferry to and from Morocco, passport control often takes place during the three-hour ride. Moroccans from all over must present their passports and national identity cards

***

The route to the port cities of Algeciras and Almeria in southern Spain is signposted in Latin and Arabic scripts

On the ferry crossing from Algeciras to Tangier, I have observed many times how a negotiation of belonging happens as each passenger steps up to the customs officers processing entries. Moroccan citizens are recorded by their national identity card number; the system assumes that if you are ‘Moroccan,’ then you have a Moroccan national identity card. I have watched over and over how individuals step up to the desk to have their passport stamped for entry, and must negotiate being ‘Moroccan’ or not, based on having an ID card, or knowing their national identity card number. One of the diasporic visitors (DVs) who participated in this research, in fact, entered as ‘Belgian’ because she had lost her ID card. Even while she spoke Moroccan Arabic with the officer, who acknowledged that she is a citizen, he stamped her as a visitor, with the same type of visitor ID number in her Belgian passport as I have in my American passport.

These small instances of classification, or categorization, all contribute to an experience of what it means to be ‘Moroccan’ or to be ‘diasporically Moroccan’ for migrant-origin European-Moroccans who took part in this research. During their annual summer visits, ‘being-Moroccan’ a categorial ideal-type, shaped through dimensions and practices of embodiment that emerge in the encounters DVs have with resident Moroccans. I argue that this category exerts considerable force because of the tension of ‘betweenness’ in their materially ‘Moroccan’ bodies – visually categorizable as ‘Moroccan’ – and their materially and expressively ‘non-Moroccan’ corporeality. They belong because of their ‘Moroccan’ bodies, lineages, families, and attachments, yet do not belong because of their ‘non-Moroccan,’ ‘European’ habits, preferences, sensibilities, speech, and ways of being in and through their skins.

I do not, however, want to accept this problematic ‘betweenness’ as the final definition for ‘being diasporic’. Instead, this book is concerned with how DVs reconcile this duality in interaction by negotiating the ways they are categorized through embodied and linguistic practices of belonging. It is also about how these categories of ‘Moroccan’ and ‘non-Moroccan’ are themselves malleable, and are changing in response to the way DVs and others engage with them. So, the subject of this book is not ‘being diasporic’, but ‘becoming diasporic’: exploring how the practices, interactions, experiences, and encounters of people who participated in this research emerge into new, vibrant categorizations of ‘diasporicness’ that change what it means to be ‘Moroccan’ both in Europe and in Morocco, and are becoming more recognizable and more solidified with every return visit.

***

While the categorial distinction they face in Europe is something about descent – not coming from the right parents – in Morocco it is something about place – not being from the right environment, where place-based knowledge, practices, and forms of embodiment are immediately recognizable and categorizable in interaction. For individuals in such diasporically-oriented communities, place and descent are not mapped directly on to each other; they are inevitably askew. For the participants here, the circumstances of their parents’ mobilities led to their residence outside of Morocco, just as circumstances of others of their generation led to residence in Morocco. Each circumstance, through many interacting parts, leaves traces on their bodies and in their practices that are made relevant when coming face-to-face. In encounters where the rupture of migration is relevant, descent and place become pivots for categorial belonging.

***

The way I present this discussion also gives categories, and modes of belonging to them, a certain amount of agency or force: they are working on people, evoking certain behaviors, being made relevant as specific practices. Following methods in membership categorization analysis and ethnomethodology, I used micro-analysis of interactions – to the extent that I was able to record and document these interactions for sequential analysis – to demonstrate how participants responded moment by moment in relation to categories that were made interactionally relevant by their practices. Over repeated iterations of similar activities, patterns emerge of a certain range of practices that are accepted by interlocutors, juxtaposed against unacceptable ones, creating the fuzzy and shifting boundary of categorial belonging. Through micro-analyses, we can see how, as people do things with categories, categories are also shaping the scope of what people can do – up to and including how new categories might emerge as a social collective of individuals are continuously pushing at the edges of current ones.

Reference

Wagner, L. (2017). Becoming Diasporically Moroccan: Linguistic and Embodied Practices for Negotiating Belonging. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Book page on publisher’s site.

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

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

Hudeegin baidal shaltar boltar, chagin ularil oroo bosgo …

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

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

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

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

WeChat version of “Huuchin Huu”

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

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

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

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

Mongol-related headlines on WeChat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

Language needs in the hospitality sector in Pallars Sobirà, Catalonia (Source: paddleinspain.com)

Multilingualism means business. The more foreign language skills are availalble to a company, the better it will be prepared to meet customers’ needs. In our globalized world, multilingualism is key and English is no longer enough. In this sense, companies are seeking to provide a better service by speaking other languages.

This phenomenon is even more important when it comes to the hospitality sector, as we found in our study about Language Needs in Tourism Enterprises in Pallars Sobirà, Catalonia (Cañas & Pérez, 2014). Our research focused on the linguistic strategies that tourism enterprises based in the region of Pallars Sobirà (Catalonia, Spain) follow in order to improve their services.

Globalization does not only occur in mass market destinations. It can also be perceived on a smaller scale in countries and regions off the beaten track. How can the owner of a small cottage in a rural area be linguistically prepared for the arrival of foreign tourists from distant countries? Language strategy is the answer.

In our research, we found that an overwhelming 78% of the participating companies are aware of the importance of multilingualism. This is not surprising as nowadays, the visitors to Pallars Sobirà are very diverse: in addition to domestic tourists from Spain, visitors include French, British, Israeli and Russians. According to statistics from the Pallars Sobirà Tourist Information Office Network, the region received nearly 13% international tourists in 2013.

Most tourists visit the region due to white-water rafting competitions. The region is famous for championships such as the Freestyle Spanish Cup or the Noguera Pallaresa International Rally.

In the hospitality industry, there is a general awareness of the scarcity of language skills and most of the companies do not at present have any language strategy – despite their high levels of awareness that such a strategy would be desirable, as mentioned above.

On the other hand, companies with an existing foreign language policy also admitted that they still need more foreign language training. Owners and managers reported that they had come across difficulties with foreign tourists due to this fact and, as a result, many believed they had lost business opportunities.

Regarding the promotional strategy, many companies revealed that their website is already displayed in foreign languages (English, French and German are the most common ones).

Although many companies have their website and promotional information adapted to foreign clients, they need to make an effort in terms of accuracy and correctness. Enterprises must present their best image and in order to have effective content authors need to know how to write for the web, and how to manage the process of text revision, validation and publication.

Accuracy was also an issue with the paper-based information displayed at the hotels, hostels or inns. Often, this was not user-friendly for foreign tourists, except for those companies in which the restaurant menu is provided in English (and even in Hebrew in some cases).

Companies such as the ones participating in our study need to develop their own language management strategy by selecting from a range of various language measures. How to start? Using local agents who speak the target language can be the first step in opening up a new and unknown market. Additionally, it is important that regional institutions invest in the implementation of policies focusing on language training and facilitate recruitment. An example can be found in the Generalitat de Catalunya Strategic Tourism Plan for Catalonia 2013-2016 in which training in language skills is described as one key component within the excellence programme.

Reference

Cañas, J. & Pérez, L. (2014). Language Needs in Tourism Enterprises in Pallars Sobirà, Catalonia. Creació i comercialització de productes turístics. Quaderns de recerca Escola Universitària Formatic Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.

Yangshuo’s West Street (Source: chinatravelca)

Tourism has been found to be beneficial for minority language maintenance in a number of contexts from around the world. For instance, Anand Torrents Alcaraz has recently shown here on Language on the Move that the growing tourism industry in the Pallars Sobirà region of the Spanish Pyrenees extends the range of uses of Pallarès, the local dialect of Catalan, beyond its traditional rural-agricultural domains. Similarly, PhD research by Yang Hongyan has demonstrated that the award of World Heritage status to the city of Lijiang in Yunnan province in China has provided a significant boost for the maintenance of the Naxi language (Yang 2013). However, it is not always the case that the local minority language benefits from the development of tourism in a minority area, as a fascinating case study of West Street in Yangshuo Town in the Guilin district of Guangxi Province in China demonstrates (Gao 2012).

Yangshuo was one of the first backpacker destinations to emerge in China and the frequency with which Yangshuo is featured in English-language travel reports is out of all proportion to its small size, as Xiaoxiao Chen found in her study of representations of Chinese people and languages in English-language newspaper travel writing (Chen 2013). Yangshuo is typically represented as “easy,” “accessible” and “English-speaking” to English-language audiences, as in the following example (quoted in Chen 2013, p. 207):

[Yangshuo] is the most accessible destination in China for independent foreign travelers, offering accommodation across all ranges, an eclectic array of restaurants with English menus and English-speaking tourism service providers.

However, catering to the international tourist market through the provision of English-language services is only one part of the success story of Yangshuo. Capitalising on its popularity with international tourists, Yangshuo began to strategically associate itself with English-speaking visitors in its marketing efforts directed at domestic tourists, as in the following strategy paper (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 343):

We should fully explore the opportunities of mixing Chinese with western cultures by strategically integrating more western elements into local Yangshuo culture.

As a consequence of this branding strategy, part of the attraction of Yangshuo for domestic tourists now is the presence of English in the linguistic landscape, as a tourism site points out (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 336f.):

Yangshuo has picturesque scenery and rich cultural heritage. The most famous is the ancient stone street, West Street, which has many craft shops, calligraphy and painting shops, hostels, cafés, bars, and Chinese kung fu houses. It is also the gathering place for the largest number of foreigners – more than twenty businesses are owned by foreigners. So the place is called the ‘Foreigner Street’. And since all the locals can speak foreign languages, it is also called the ‘Global Village’. Another attraction is the study and exchange of Chinese and foreign languages and cultures. Chinese people teach their foreign friends Chinese cultures including its language, calligraphy, taiji, cooking, chess; at the same time foreigners teach Chinese people their languages and cultures, so that both finish their ‘study abroad’ within a short time.

The presence of English in the local linguistic landscape is continuously stressed in marketing materials, such as this one from the Yangshuo Tourism Bureau (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 345f.):

Yangshuo is a good place to cure your ‘dumb English’ and ‘deaf English’. At West Street, you can always see West Street people talking in fluent English with western travelers for business or just having small talk. Even old grannies in their 70s or teenage kids can chat [Chinese original: 拉呱 lā guǎ] with ‘laowai’ [foreigners] in English. Many western travelers say they just feel no foreignness here. West Street is the largest ‘English Corner’ in China now.

One could assume that in this ‘culture- and language-rich’ tourist destination, local languages are also being strategically incorporated, particularly as Yangshuo is located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the home of the Zhuang ethnic minority. However, this is not the case. In contrast to the ubiquitous focus on English, the local language, Zhuang, the local dialect of Chinese, and other local minority languages present in Yangshuo (Yao, Hui, Miao, Tibetan, Dong and others) are systematically erased: their existence is simply never even mentioned in tourism materials about the area.

Even if the local dialect is mentioned, as in this blog post by a visitor to Yangshuo (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 348f.), it is to be denigrated as not locally appropriate:

You must hold a CET-4 certificate, with relatively fluent spoken English, because at West Street, or just at countryside farmhouses of Yangshuo, even an old grandma or an egg-seller from a rural family could surprise you with their amazing English and at least another foreign language. Next of course you should know Cantonese, kind of an official language here, ‘cause more than half of the xiăozī [=cool person; yuppie] are from Guangdong. The third comes Putonghua, better with Beijing accent. The local dialect just does not work there.

In contrast to Pallars Sobirà or Lijiang, in Yangshuo tourism has done nothing to improve the status of local minority languages. On the contrary, as English takes on the function of indexing not only the global but also the local identity of Yangshuo, it is English that becomes a marker of local authenticity in the global village.

References

Chen, Xiaoxiao. (2013). Opening China to the Tourist Gaze: Representations of Chinese People and Languages in Newspaper Travel Writing since the 1980s. PhD, Macquarie University.

Gao, Shuang (2012). Commodification of place, consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a ‘global village’ in rural China Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16 (3), 336-357 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2012.00534.x

Yang, Hongyan. (2012). Naxi, Chinese and English: Multilingualism in Lijiang. PhD, Macquarie University.

Actress Noemí Busquets as the wise yet naughty Esperanceta Gassia at the Ecomuseu de les Valls d’Àneu during the theatrical night visit to the ethnographic museum of Esterri d’ Àneu in Pallarès

When thinking of promoting tourism in a mountainous area of the Catalan Pyrenees it might seem as if using Pallarès, the local dialect of the Western Catalan type, with very specific vocabulary that visitors from other Catalan-speaking areas are not familiar with and which has been traditionally linked to rural and traditional lifestyles, would make little sense.

Nevertheless, much is to be gained by resorting to this local variety of the Catalan language in touristic activities in the area of Pallars Sobirà… why is that? Well, surprisingly, globalization is the answer.

One of the things that happen in the globalized touristic use of languages, according to authors such as Jaworski and Thurlow (2011) is the “commodification” and “recontextualization” of language. That means, language becomes a commodity in tourism … Aloha in Hawaii and Namaste in Nepal add authenticity to cultural visits, which is always a key asset in tourism. Beyond greetings and occasional language-learning through touristic “grazing” and “gazing”, though, tourism naturally creates new contexts for cultural phenomena and it currently values (oral) intangible heritage greatly. In fact, intangible heritage becomes visible precisely thanks to tourism. Pallarès is, in this sense, an intangible heritage of great value due to its connection to the authentic culture and territory of the Pyrenees.

According to dialectologists (Veny, 1993), Pallarès displays the marks of languages that were spoken before Catalan in the Pyrenees; mainly Basque, which vanished around the 8^th century AD due to the Romanization process, but which endured in “isolated” mountain valleys of the Pallars until the 10^th century, leaving a strong imprint on place names specially.

Mountain regions are ambivalent: either mountains and valleys “isolate”, or they “link” populations, villages, and cultures. So, when researching in order to assess the potential value of Pallarès in the promotion of the rich touristic offer of the Pallars Sobirà region (a land with prime adventure sports environment and unique cultural offers from Romanesque art to gastronomy) I asked cultural anthropologist and director of the Ecomuseu de les Valls d’Àneu Jordi Abella about this. Mr. Abella told me that “the villages of the Pyrenees in the 19^th century were already connected to European capital cities such as Madrid, Paris and Barcelona” and that too long a “good savage myth à la Rousseau had lived on to give a false romantic image of the Pyrenees” based on cultural purity due to isolation.

In a way, both isolation and globalization are forces at play here: isolation is evidenced by the fact that Basque lived on for 200 years in the Pallars; and globalization is evidenced by the fact that people changed to a common language – Catalan – which they could use at fairs and for trading.

Poster of the theater and dance festival “Esbaiola’t” in Esterri d’Àneu. The verb “esbaiolar-se” is unknown in other varieties of Catalan and means “to clear one’s mind” as well as “to clear up the mists (weather)”

Catalonia as a whole is going through what some have called a “thirst for history” (Toledano Gonzàlez, 2004). Catalans are more inclined to consume and discover more about their own culture at the current history-defining moment in which a Catalan vote for self-determination is being discussed. This creates a context that naturally invites greater use of Pallarès as Actress Noemí Busquets (who plays the role of a Pallarès-speaking witch-like wise and wacky lady that confronts local and global values during the night visits to the Eco Museum of the village of Esterri d’Àneu) emphasises: “now I feel that it (Pallarès) is better appreciated by visitors”.  And the fact is that 63% of the visitors coming to the Pallars region are from Catalonia (Boyra & Fusté, 2013), and mostly from the metropolitan area of Barcelona. What is it that Pallarès can offer them?

When in 1913, the philologist Pompeu Fabra wrote the Orthographic Rules of Catalan and later on the General Dictionary of Catalan Language (1931), he based them on the Eastern Catalan dialect – the one spoken in Barcelona – and left aside most vocabulary of other dialects and almost completely ignored Pallarès. Now, as a consequence of this, people coming to the Pallars get surprised by Pallarès. While queuing up at a grocery shop in the beautiful village of Esterri d’Àneu, a spontaneous conversation on dialectology started: a woman shared that when she got married to her Pallarès husband and moved to his village, her mother-in-law once asked her to fetch the “llosa”. “Llosa” in Catalan means “stone slab”; so, she continued “I was hoping that the stone slab wouldn’t be too heavy”. To her relief she later found out that “llosa” in Pallarès means “ladle”.

Pallarès brings back to Catalan-speaking visitors, a richness of vocabulary that they would otherwise ignore. When I asked Yolanda Mas, tourism specialist of the city hall of Sort (the capital of the Pallars Sobirà) what she thought of promoting Pallarès through tourism, she said that “it is an endangered resource that we should definitely invest in”. Nowadays, the visitors to the Pallars Sobirà are very diverse; from French and English to Spanish, Israeli and Russians; so the linguascape of the Pallars might become even more complex soon, and while offering touristic activities in Hebrew or Russian may respond to the economic need of the moment, offering activities in Pallarès Catalan in addition to activities in Standard Catalan and other languages, will be proof that “identity sells” while being at the same time a necessary expression of authentic identity.

References
Boyra, J. & Fusté, F. (2013). Anàlisi dels instruments d’ordenació i dels recursos territorials i l’activitat turística a la comarca del Pallars Sobirà GREPAT/ Escola Universitària Formatic Barna, Barcelona

Fabra, P. (1913). Normes ortogràfiques. Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona.

Fabra, P. (1931). Diccionari general de la llengua catalana. Llibreria Catalònia, Barcelona.

Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (2010). Language and the Globalizing Habitus of Tourism: Towards a sociolingüístics of Fleeting Relationships (From: Handbook of Language and Globalization, edited by Coupland, N.) Wiley- Blackwell Publishing ltd. West Sussex, UK.

Toledano Gonzàlez, L. (2004). Atles del Turisme a Catalunya mapa nacional dels recursos turísitics intangibles. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona- Grup de Recerca Consolidat Manuscrits / Generalitat de Catalunya.

Torrents, A. (2014). La variant dialectal pallaresa com a bé immaterial de la marca de turisme cultural “Pallars”. Creació i comercialització de productes turístics. Quaderns de recerca Escola Universitària Formatic Barna, Barcelona.

Veny, J. (1993). Els parlars catalans (Síntesi de dialectologia) Editorial Moll, Mallorca.

English textbook used at the non-Government school

“I take a bilingual approach, so you might not understand some parts of my class. But I hope you’ll enjoy it.” Dressed in a blue traditional dress, a tall middle-aged Burmese teacher explained her teaching approach to me in the beginning of her class on English at a non-government tertiary school.

The school is located some 40 minute taxi ride away from downtown Yangon, the former capital city of Myanmar. Facing the class of some 50 students from various ethnic backgrounds, she began her class by taking attendance, and then started instructing her students to work on the section on Iceland as a tourist destination in their textbook Travelling.

I have never been to Iceland, and I’m not sure how many of these students are ever going to visit the Nordic country, but looking around the class, I saw all students glued to their textbook. Seeing the recent developments in the country, teaching English for tourism is important indeed.

As Myanmar moves towards further democratization, the country is rapidly emerging as an attractive travel destination. Compared to my first visit to Myanmar two years ago, I saw more Western tourists out and about in the city with a local tour-guide this time. In addition, touted as the ‘last frontier in ASEAN’ by international investors, Myanmar has also seen a rapid increase in the number of business travellers from all over the world. At the same time, the country is taking many measures to encourage tourism. These include visas on arrival and the presence of stylish brand new Toyota Tourist Police cars. In contrast to the much older-looking ‘normal’ police cars these seem to create some sense of safety for tourists. Apart from me, there were several European tourists taking photos of the Tourist Police cars.

Tourist Police cars in Yangon

English proficiency is crucial for the young generation to gain employment in the emerging tourist market. Apart from careers in tourism, English is also seen as an important educational qualification. As Dr. Thein Lwin (2011, p. 12) explains, recent years have seen an unprecedented popularity of English in this former British colony where English proficiencies “lead to economic advantages, help in dealing with the outside world, and improve prospects of study abroad and employment.”

Indeed, many students I met at the school mentioned above said that they are planning to apply for a scholarship to study abroad. Many scholarship programs are available but all require high English proficiency. One student, from Shan State, has set his heart on studying in neighbouring Thailand, and if he succeeds, he’d be the first person from his village to study for a master’s degree abroad. At this stage, for him and his aspiring classmates, their future success depends largely on English.

Many local teachers teach English bilingually, as the teacher I mentioned in the introduction, and the focus is on practical English, English for tourism, for instance. It is obvious that learning English is serious business in Yangon. However, not all teachers seem to realize that.

For instance, one student, Elizabeth (pseudonym), told me about a visiting professor from the US. Assuming that volunteer teachers are welcome in a country where English language education is being taken so seriously, I said “Oh that’s great!” I also knew that Elizabeth was an admirer of the US – she had studied in the US for one year on a scholarship in 2013, and she said she was aspiring to go back there to pursue a master’s degree in business.

She hesitantly replied, however, “Well… actually no so great”. The reason – the US professor’s teaching approach didn’t match their sense of identity as adult learners of English:

We didn’t like her class because … she treated us like children. She gave us children’s books to read, and like, we are adults, but she asked us to sing songs, and we were like, what the he-!?

Elizabeth continued to explain how the professor asked them to sing Christmas songs, which they didn’t want to, but “we didn’t want to be impolite, so we sang along those stupid songs and did everything she asked us to do” she said, half-smiling and half making a face.

Elizabeth’s story reminded me of a similar experience I had when I was studying at a two-year college of English in Tokyo back in the 1990s.

In our second year, we had a new teacher from the US, a fresh university graduate, to teach literature. The textbook she chose for us was Mother Goose. While some of my classmates found it useful to learn “American culture”, the majority erupted in anger. In the second week, we told her at the beginning of class that we were offended by her choice of Mother Goose. I remember one frustrated classmate telling her off, “You think we are children?!” What she didn’t know was the fact that many of my classmates could have easily gone to a four-year university but chose this immersion school to master English for the purpose of career development and further education. Just like the students I met in Yangon, English was not some kind of fun hobby but serious business for us.

Our American teacher was lucky. She learned, even if the hard way, that selecting learning materials requires knowing her students’ sense of identity and their aspirations. By contrast, the professor teaching at Elizabeth’s school seems to have gone home without realising how her teaching materials may have been offensive to some of her students. Whether they become tour guides or office workers or English teachers or continue to study overseas, reading American children’s books and learning how to sing Christmas songs may have some use but it also runs the risk of hurting adult students’ dignity.

Of course, whether more practical textbooks like Travelling are preferable to children’s books depends on the context in which learning takes place. Children’s books or songs can be very useful for adults learning a new language but learning materials need to match the students’ aspirations, and their purpose needs to be clearly explained to them.

This is all language teaching 101, and the current English language teaching boom in Myanmar shows that there are many opportunities to put high-quality English language teaching it into practice.

“Speak English or Die!” Vilification on a Melbourne bus caught on camera

About a year ago, a video of a language-related altercation on a Melbourne bus was widely reported in the media and went viral on social media. The video and associated reports document the following sequence of events: Three French tourists, white women in their 20s, sat at the back of a late-night bus and sang a French song. This annoyed an Australian woman of similar age and racial appearance who began to shout “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie.” Another bus passenger then told the French women to “speak English or die.” From around there, the video starts and shows a quickly escalating ugly scene dominated by a middle-aged white Australian male pushing a pram with a baby and with a bewildered four- or five-year-old kid in tow: the man is ranting abuse at the French women, including grotesque violent threats. After he gets off the bus, the window closest to the French women is smashed, presumably by something he throws.

The video is a shocking example of mob hysteria and continues to exert viewers, as the ongoing discussions on social media demonstrate (at the time of writing, the latest of over 28,000 youtube comments had only been posted ten hours earlier).

What interests me is the way in which the incident has become labelled as “racist” in the media, where it has been described as “racist abuse,” “racist bus attack,” “racist rant,” or “racist violent bus abuse.”

However, the incident was obviously not triggered by race but by language, as the Sydney Morning Herald was one of the few to recognize with their headline “’Speak English or die’ – terror on a suburban bus.”

Once the abusive rant is underway, most of the swears uttered are sexist insults (the c-word figures prominently as does ‘bitch’) and most of the threats of violence are also specifically of sexist violence such as the threat to cut off the woman’s breasts. The only explicitly racist label used by the main agitator is ‘ding,’ which according to the Macquarie Dictionary is a derogatory term for Italian migrants used in Western Australia. Some contributors add that the term is used in Melbourne, too, and that it is sometimes extended to other southern and central European migrants, particularly Greeks and Yugoslavs.

In sum, the abuse is triggered by language and is mostly expressed in sexist terms. Even so, what the public sees is racism. There is no doubt that racism was an important part of the event: in addition to the use of ‘ding’ in the main speech act, another white middle-aged male bus passenger, seemingly taking his cue from the main abuser, starts to rant against black people. His tirade is not addressed at the French girls but the person who took the video on his mobile phone, stand-up comedian Mike Nayna, whose parents are from the Maledives and the Netherlands and who describes himself as “brown” while the media were a bit more coy describing him as having “light-brown skin.”

Where it gets really confusing is in the fact that all the reports I have read identify one of the French women, Fanny Desaintjores, as the target of the “racial abuse.” By contrast, the evidence suggests that Desaintjores became the target of abuse because of her linguistic difference and her vilification took mostly the form of sexist insults. The expression of linguistic and sexist prejudice against Desaintjores then ‘licensed’ the expression of racial insults to Nayna in a bigoted melange where various prejudices fed off each other.

Does my insistence on distinguishing linguistic, sexist and racist prejudice matter? At one level, it doesn’t because bigotry usually comes as a package. However, at another level, the distinction I am making is highly important: the injunction to “speak English” is ubiquitous in Australian society and expressing intolerance against linguistic diversity in this way is not usually seen as problematic. On the contrary, telling someone to speak English may even be seen as an expression of good manners.

As the Melbourne incident shows, all kinds of intolerance feed off each other. Expressing linguistic intolerance is ‘cheap’ – it can be expressed without even being recognized as intolerance. By contrast, it is much more ‘costly’ to come straight out with sexist or racist abuse – everyone recognizes these as discriminatory and there are social sanctions against vilification. Would the man on the Melbourne bus have racially insulted Nayna if he hadn’t felt the expression of racial intolerance was ok because other bus passengers were also expressing intolerance? Unlikely.

While linguistic intolerance may be expressed where racial intolerance is sanctioned, the two must be recognised as connected, with linguistic intolerance becoming both a pretext for racial intolerance and enabling its expression.

It is worth remembering Ovid’s injunction in Remedia Amoris: Principiis obsta. Sero medicina parata, cum mala per longas convaluere moras. (‘Resist beginnings! It is too late to intervene when evil has grown strong through delay.’)

Barely legible today but evidence of ‘super-diversity’ in the 9th century: Runic graffiti in Hagia Sophia

On a parapet in Hagia Sophia’s gallery there is an obscure little graffiti written in Viking runes and dating back to the 9^th century. All that is legible today is ‘alftan,’ which refers to the Norse name ‘Halfdan’ and it is assumed that it was part of a formula such as ‘Halfdan carved these runes’ – the medieval equivalent of the modern graffiti formula ‘XY was here.’

How did a medieval Viking get all the way to what is today Istanbul and was back then Constantinople, the centre of the Byzantine Empire, the most powerful metropolis on earth? Maybe Halfdan was a mercenary in the Varangian Guard. Drawn from all over Northern Europe, the Varangian Guard were an elite army unit serving as personal body guards of the Byzantine Emperor. The Byzantine Emperors felt safer with foreigners as body guards who had no local loyalties. Little is known about the motivations of the young men who left Northern Europe to serve far from home in present-day Turkey but I imagine the usual mixture of lack of opportunities at home and the lure of the metropolis – a lure so powerful that medieval Constantinople drew migrants from all across the known world to this multilingual and multicultural city.

Evidence of contemporary ‘super-diversity:’ Chinese flier in Antwerp (Source: Blommaert&Rampton, 2011)

The Viking graffiti in Hagia Sophia reminded me of the Chinese flier in a contemporary Antwerp shop window that Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton recently used as example to explain the scope of linguistic research under conditions of super-diversity. Arguing that the example – an ad for a room for rent – bears traces of worldwide migration flows which make language varieties and scripts globally mobile, they outline the theoretical and methodological implications of migration and globalization for contemporary sociolinguistic research. I largely agree with their conclusions but I cannot help but wonder that two qualitatively similar examples – Viking graffiti in 9^th century Constantinople and a hand-written Chinese flier in 21^st century Antwerp – have such different effects: why has sociolinguistics been oblivious to linguistic diversity through the ages and why is the recognition that linguistic diversity is fundamental to all research in language and communication relatively recent?

Why does evidence of contemporary linguistic diversity move us to re-think sociolinguistics in a way that evidence of linguistic diversity through the ages has not? I answered that question previously with reference to the position of key linguistic thinkers in monolingual environments. However, there is another answer, too, and – like the medieval Viking graffiti – it also stares you in the face here in Istanbul. That further explanation is that multilingualism has been actively expunged from the historical record.

Ottoman Turkish inscription above the gate through which Mehmed II entered the city: its Greek name is Χαρ[ι]σίου πύλη/πόρτα (‘Gate of Char[i]sius’) and its Turkish name is Edirnekapı (‘Adrianopole Gate’)

However, the transient nature of language is only part of the story why we fail to see linguistic diversity in the historical record. The other part of the story is that evidence of linguistic diversity has been systematically erased from the historical record.

This obelisk inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphs has been part of Istanbul’s linguistic landscape since the 4th century when Emperor Theodosius had it brought in from Egypt. The pedestal with its bilingual Greek and Latin inscription was added at the same time.

When Halfdan wrote his Viking graffiti and, presumably, spoke some form of Old Norse with those of his fellow Varangians who shared his dialect, the main language of Constantinople – and the lingua franca of its diverse population – was (medieval) Greek. Latin was also widely used and then there were the languages of all the city’s migrants and visitors. Christian Constantinople was a hugely multilingual place.

The city’s linguistic make-up changed on May 29, 1453 when Mehmed II took the city: not only did the Christian city become a Muslim one – and the Hagia Sophia church a mosque – the city’s dominant languages also changed from Greek and Latin to Arabic, Persian and Turkish.

What did not change was the fact of the city’s multilingualism: Arabic was the language of prayer and religion, Persian was the language of the court and Turkish was the language of the troops. Greek found itself as the language of a now down-trodden and subjected population and, as before, there were many other languages spoken by the city’s diverse inhabitants: Armenian, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Russian and Serbian would have been particularly prominent.

The Turkish that came to predominate over the centuries as Istanbul’s lingua franca was itself a highly heteroglossic language. Ottoman Turkish was inflected particularly by Arabic and Persian but also by all the other languages of this great melting-pot city.

Arabic calligraphy in Hagia Sophia: Quranic verse inscribed in the dome

The city’s multilingualism and the multilingual character of Turkish officially came to an end with the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The new Turkey wanted to sever its links with its Ottoman and ‘Eastern’ past and wanted to become modern and European. The multilingual laissez-faire of the past was now seen as decidedly ‘backward’ and ‘Eastern.’ Languages other than Turkish started to be repressed, with Kurdish as the most well-known victim of the new repression of linguistic diversity by the state. Not only was Turkey going to have only one language – Turkish – but that language was going to be ‘modernized,’ i.e. rid of the traces of other languages, particularly linguistic traces associated with ‘the East,’ i.e. Arabic and Persian.

The most well-known aspect of the Turkish language reform is the abolition of the Arabic script and its replacement with the Latin script. In one fell sweep, modern Turks lost access to their written historical record. Another target of the language reformers was Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Such words were replaced with ‘Turkish’ ones or loans from ‘modern’ European languages.

The futility of this undertaking – even if lost on everyone but the philologist – is nicely encapsulated by the word for ‘city’: Ottoman Turkish used ‘شهر‎ şehir.’ Because of its obvious association with Persian ‘شهر‎  šahr’ the language reformers saw no place for it in ‘Modern’ Turkish and cast around for a ‘pure’ Turkish word. They found it in the ancient ‘kent.’ The irony is that ‘kent’ is iself a much older loanword from Sogdian, the lingua franca of Central Asia before the Islamic Conquest.

Multilingualism has made a powerful comeback thanks to the tourism economy: this restaurant menu sports entries in 10 languages. And, no, this particular dish doesn’t sound appealling in any of them …

The reform was “a catastrophic success,” as the Turkologist Geoffrey Lewis has called it. As a result, most contemporary Turkish speakers are cut off from their linguistic and cultural heritage predating the 1930s. A famous – and also ironic – example of the monolingualization of Turkish is the fact that a major 1927 speech by Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, has had to be ‘translated’ repeatedly into contemporary Turkish so as to remain comprehensible to contemporary Turks.

In Istanbul, as elsewhere, contemporary examples of ‘super-diversity’ – the Russian ‘Sale’ signs in the shop windows, the tourist communications in all the languages of countries with strong currencies, the handwritten Arabic ‘for rent’ signs, the Kurdish music stalls – are impossible to ignore. By contrast, the fact that super-diversity has been a characteristic of Istanbul-Constantinople-Byzantium since time immemorial is easy to overlook.

Monolingualism and the Turkish language – just as all other standardized languages – are invented traditions. Diversity is, in fact, the normal human experience, as the anthropologist Ward Goodenough, who passed away last weekend, pointed out back in 1976. A research agenda that takes linguistic diversity as the basis of sociolinguistic inquiry must also include the hidden histories of linguistic diversity and modernity’s attempts to erase diversity.

Jan Blommaert, & Ben Rampton (2011). Language and superdiversity Diversities, 13 (2)
Goodenough, W. (1976). MULTICULTURALISM AS THE NORMAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE Council on Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 7 (4), 4-7 DOI: 10.1525/aeq.1976.7.4.05x1652n

Linguistic Diversity and Tourism

FORUM DETAILS
Date: July 02, 2013 | Time: 16:00 – 19:30
Venue: The Hall of Fame, Assumption University, Hua Mak, Bangkok
RSVP: Open to public. Please Send an email to abacforum@gmail.com

Recent years have seen an unprecedented growth in tourism in Thailand. In addition to well-established markets such as the UK, Germany, Japan and Malaysia, rapidly increasing numbers of tourists are arriving from China, Russia and India. Towards the launch of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015, both tourists, and tourism and hospitality workers are expected to arrive from newly emerging markets such as Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar, adding even more linguistic diversity to the already multilingual tourism landscape and peoplescape. The ongoing tourism boom thus presents both a tremendous economic opportunity and a linguistic challenge to the nation – how can Thailand effectively attract and cater for tourists from linguistically diverse backgrounds, and meet their needs and desires satisfactorily while ensuring their safety? Tourism is made up of language- or communication-based practices, be they tourist-service provider interaction, promotion of destinations, signage in tourist attractions or guidebooks. Yet, the role of language and communication in tourism has largely been left out of the ongoing discussion on the future of Thai tourism.

Co-hosted by the Graduate School of Business and the Graduate School of English, this special one-day forum is the nation’s first attempt to bring linguists, tourism scholars and industry representatives to tackle the challenge of increasing linguistic diversity in the tourism industry in Thailand.

TENTATIVE PROGRAM
4:00 – 4:15   Welcome note: President Brother Bancha Saenghiran
4:15 – 5:00   Commemorative Address: Former Prime Minister His Excellency Mr Abhisit Vejjajiva
5:00 – 5:45   Keynote Lecture: Professor Ingrid Piller, Macquarie University, Australia
5:45 – 6:45   Panel discussion: Moderator: AJ. Glen Chatelier, Director of the Office of International Affairs
6:45 – 7:00   Closing address: Dr. Kitti Phothikitti, Dean of the Graduate School of Business