You probably don’t need to know much about ethnic discrimination in the labor market or German society to guess the order of employer preference correctly.

In a year-long field experiment a total of 1,474 identical application letters that only varied in name and photo were sent in response to job ads for admin assistants. “Sandra Bauer” was invited for interview in response to 18.8% of her applications. For “Meryem Öztürk” (without headscarf) that figure was 13.5% and for “Meryem Öztürk” (with headscarf) such positive feedback was as low as 4.2%.

These results are neither new nor surprising: that ethnic names serve as signals of ethnic identity and may attract discrimination in the job market if the ethnicity in question is negatively stereotyped has been demonstrated in similar field experiments in a range of national and historical contexts and for a variety of ethnic names (for an overview, see Chapter 4 of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice).

What the study by Doris Weichselbaumer does show is that adding an additional stigma – the headscarf as a signal of Muslim identity in this case – results in stronger discrimination and further disadvantages the bearer. So, stigmatized identities obviously intersect to create multiple and complex barriers; but how can these barriers be lifted?

In the field experiment, “Meryem Öztürk” (with headscarf) received the highest call-back rate from employers whose job ad had explicitly stated that they were an intercultural team or that the company valued diversity. The effect was statistically very small but still seems to suggest that experience with ethnic diversity helps to reduce barriers. This is similar to the experience of women in the workplace: while the barriers for the first women to seeking paid employment, to entering a particular industry, or gaining work at a particular level or to being accepted in a particular workplace are high, they are lowered for other women who follow in their steps.

In order to succeed and overcome gender discrimination, pioneering women in the workplace (be it in paid employment generally, in a particular industry, at a particular level or in a particular company) have had to be “better” – more qualified, more experienced, more talented, more connected – than their male counterparts. In fact, that this has not changed even today is most clearly evident from the current US presidential election where a highly qualified, experienced and accomplished female politician competes against a male candidate who has neither relevant qualifications nor experience.

Even in 2016, women’s equality in the workplace has not been achieved anywhere in the world – one indicator is the persistent gender pay gap, which stands at 15.46% on the OECD average. Nevertheless, women have made their way into the workforce and have overcome incredible obstacles to do so in little over a century. For many individual women, overcoming gender discrimination as an entry barrier has meant that they had to be better qualified and more experienced than their male competitors in order to get a chance.

Does this “strategy” also work with ethnic discrimination? Does being better qualified and having more experience mean that an applicant with a stigmatized ethnic name receives a positive response as often as a less-qualified applicant with a “native” name?

Another recent field experiment study in Sweden was designed to find out exactly that. The researchers, Mahmood Arai, Moa Bursell, and Lena Nekby, also used the CVs and application letters of fictitious applicants to respond to job ads for computer specialists, drivers, accountants, high school teachers, and assistant nurses. In the first stage of the experiment, they compared call-back rates for fictitious applicants with an Arabic and a Swedish name – with the same result as the German-Turkish study above (and many, many others): “Fatima Ahmed” and “Abdallah Hossein” were invited for interview significantly less than “Karolina Svensson” and “Jonas Söderström.”

In a second stage of the experiment, the researchers then systematically enhanced the profile of the applicant with the Arabic name so that he or she was more qualified than their counterpart with the Swedish name.

What do you guess happened? Are you betting on employer rationality where the merits of an individual overcome the negative group stereotype or are you a cynic who thinks that bigotry is relatively immune to factual evidence?

Well, neither view would be quite right – as always, the results turned out to be more complex: enhanced qualifications did nothing for male applicants with an Arabic name and their Swedish-named counterparts still had better call-back rates despite being now less qualified. For drivers, a “male” job with the highest callback rates for all applicants, higher qualifications actually reduced an applicant’s chances of being invited for interview. For female applicants, however, their enhanced qualifications “cancelled” the stigma of having an Arabic name: in the second scenario they were invited for interview as often as their (now less-qualified) counterparts with a Swedish name.

How can these conflicting results be explained? The researchers posit that cultural stereotypes are typically associated with the men of a group and are stronger for men. In other words, negative stereotypes about Middle Eastern men are so strong that superior individual merit does not help to overcome the stigma signaled by an Arabic-sounding name. By contrast, cultural stereotypes associated with women are generally weaker because they are not seen as default representatives of the group in the way men are. Furthermore, cultural stereotypes associated with women are often quite different from the stereotype of men of the same group. Therefore, superior individual merit may be cancelling out the group stigma in the case of female applicants with an Arabic name.

In many countries, there are significant gaps in the employment outcomes of migrants and the native-born. The two studies reviewed here both provide evidence that, at least with regard to Muslims, this difference is partly a result of discrimination at the entry stage. The Swedish study also shows that cultural stereotypes affect men and women differently. As a method, field experiments deliver telling results but the intersections between gender, ethnicity and occupation uncovered by Arai, Bursell and Nekby also remind us of the importance of ethnographic research in workplace contexts to understand how the “native” vs. “migrant” divide continues to be produced and reproduced.

If you liked this post, you might also like

• What’s in a name?
• Behind a name
• Migrant women’s empowerment in the city
• Human capital on the move
• Strange academic women
• What would you do?
• Racism without racists

References

Arai, M., Bursell, M., & Nekby, L. (2016). The Reverse Gender Gap in Ethnic Discrimination: Employer Stereotypes of Men and Women with Arabic Names International Migration Review, 50 (2), 385-412 DOI: 10.1111/imre.12170

Piller, I. (2016). Language at work Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937240.003.0004

Weichselbaumer, D. (2016). Discrimination against Female Migrants Wearing Headscarves. Bonn: IZA.

Rashid al-Din Monument in Soltaniyeh, Iran (Source: Wikipedia)

Recently, I signed a contract for a revised second edition of my 2011 book Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction to be published in 2017. One way in which I am planning to extend the book is to have a greater focus on cultural mediators. What are the stories, experiences and practices of people who act as brokers between languages and cultures?

In some cases, people are pushed into the role of cultural mediators out of necessity, as is the case with child cultural and linguistic mediators. Others take on the roles of cultural brokers as an act of public service. In an age when most of our own political leaders seem to be more inclined towards erecting new borders, strengthening old ones and tearing down bridges, it is instructive to consider the case of two 13^th century statesmen whose friendship helped to connect east and west Asia: the Mongol Bolad and the Persian Rashid al-Din.

Rashid al-Din

Of the two, Rashid al-Din is today the better-known; as the author of the Jāme’ al-Tawārikh (“Universal History”) he is credited with having been “the first world historian” (Boyle 1971).

Rashid al-Din was born around 1250 CE into a Jewish family in Hamadān in north-west Iran. At the age of twenty-one or thirty (different accounts exist in different sources; see Kamola 2012), he converted to Islam and around the same time he entered the service of the then-ruler of Iran, the Il-Khan Abaqa (1265-81) as court physician. Under Abaqa’s grandson Il-Khan Ghazan (1295-1304) Rashid al-Din became vizier, one of the most influential roles in the state. Rashid al-Din also served Ghazan’s son and successor Öljeitü (1304-16). After Öljeitü’s death he became the victim of a court intrigue and was put to death in 1317, when he was around seventy years old.

During his long career he served his kings in many capacities: as physician, head of the royal household, military and general adviser, the mastermind of far-reaching fiscal and agricultural reforms, and, through his writing, as chief ideologue and propagandist of the Il-Khanids. In short, Rashid al-Din was a powerbroker, who did very well for himself and the realm he served:

He had become the owner of vast estates in every corner of the Il-Khan’s realm: orchards and vineyards in Azerbaijan, date-palm plantations in Southern Iraq, arable land in Western Anatolia. The administration of the state was almost a private monopoly of his family: of his fourteen sons eight were governors of provinces, including the whole of Western Iran, Georgia, Iraq and the greater part of what is now Turkey. Immense sums were at his disposal for expenditure on public and private enterprises. (Boyle 1971, p. 20)

Portrait of Kublai Khan (Source: Wikipedia)

Bolad

Thousands of miles to the east, Bolad’s career was very similar to that of Rashid al-Din: Bolad was about ten years older than Rashid al-Din and born around 1240 somewhere in Mongolia. His father was a man named Jürki, a member of the Dörben, a Mongolian tribe, who had submitted to Genghis Khan in 1204. Jürki quickly rose through the ranks of the imperial guard. In addition to his military distinction as a “Commander of a Hundred in the Personal Thousand” of Genghis Khan, he also became a ba’ruchi (“cook”) in the imperial household. While “cook” may not sound like much of a rank, in the Mongolian system this household position carried great prestige and showed close personal ties with the ruler (Allsen 1996, p. 8).

As a result of his father’s position, little Bolad was assigned to the service of Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai Khan at age eight or nine. His education included the military arts and Chinese language and civilization. Bolad, too, forged a distinguished administrative career at the Yuan court. As he grew older, his duties and assignments included formulating court ceremonies, educating young Mongolians who entered the imperial service, and organizing the “Censorate,” the investigative arm of government. He became Head of the Bureau of Agriculture, which he helped establish; took on the role of Vice-Commissioner of Military Affairs; and headed a major anti-corruption investigation. His diverse appointments close to the centre of power at Kublai Khan’s court earned him the Chinese title chengxiang, “chancellor.”

In the spring of 1283, Bolad was appointed Kublai Khan’s ambassador to the Il-Khanids. The journey from Kublai Khan’s capital Khanbaliq (Dadu; modern Beijing) to the Il-Khan’s court in Tabriz took more than one year and Bolad and his embassy arrived in late 1284. He was supposed to return to China in 1285 but hostile forces made it impossible for a man of his rank to travel. He therefore stayed in Iran for the final twenty-eight years of his life. In addition to the role of ambassador, Bolad there assumed the role of chief advisor to the Il-Khan. During Öljeitü’s reign he became third minister and was in charge of logistics during a number of military campaigns. Active until well into his seventies, Bolad died in 1313 while he was in command of the northern garrisons.

Like Rashid al-Din, Bolad was a power broker. He distinguished himself not only at one but at two courts. Like Rashid al-Din, Bolad and his family, too, acquired significant wealth in their service to the Mongolian empire.

The context: the Yuan and Il-Khanid courts

Expansion of the Mongolian Empire, 1206-1294 (Source: Wikipedia)

Rashid al-Din and Bolad obviously met and became friends at the Il-Khanid court. But what was the broader context of their encounter?

After the death of Möngke Khan, a brother of Kublai Khan’s, in 1259, the unity of the Mongolian empire Genghis Khan had forged was permanently broken and the descendants of Genghis Khan fell into various succession wars. Kublai Khan held strong in Yuan China. The Il-Khanid line in Iran, founded by his brother Hülegü, formally acknowledged Kublai Khan’s sovereignty. Between these two allies, the Genghizid lines in Central Asia and Russia established various autonomous regional khanates, including the famous Golden Horde. These were at various times allied in various ways, at war with each other in various ways, and, particularly relevant here, often at war with China and Iran.

As nomadic aristocracy ruling two realms with a settled agrarian population and ancient civilizations, the Yuan in China and the Il-Khanids in Iran faced similar sets of issues: how would nomadic warriors be able to rule these complex agrarian societies?

Kublai Khan understood early that he would need Chinese support. His own Chinese language skills were not strong and he relied on interpreters in interactions with Chinese advisors (Fuchs 1946). However, he did seek out Chinese advisors and, more importantly, initiated the bilingual and bicultural education of young Mongolian courtiers such as Bolad. Bolad developed an intercultural disposition and “his frequent and active support for the recommendations of the emperor’s Han advisers indicates that he found much to admire in Chinese civilization” (Allsen 1996, p. 9).

Map of the Il-Khanate, 1256-1353 (Source: Wikipedia)

It is unclear when and how Bolad learned Persian but on his long trip to Iran and for the first few years there, he was accompanied by an interpreter, a Syriac Christian in the employ of the Mongols, who is known in Chinese sources as Aixue (愛薛) and in Persian sources as Isa kelemchi (“Jesus the interpreter”) (Takahashi 2014, p. 43).

The actual linguistic repertoire of Aixue/Isa kelemchi is uncertain; and that is an indicator of the linguistic situation in the Il-Khanate, which was even more complex than that at the Yuan court.

The preferred languages of Il-Khan Ghazan, for instance, were Mongolian and Turkish. Additionally, he happily spoke Persian and Arabic with his courtiers. Furthermore, he reportedly understood Hindi, Kashmiri, Tibetan, Khitai, Frankish “and other languages” (Amitai-Preiss 1996, p. 27).

Rashid Al-Din wrote in Persian, Arabic and Hebrew; from his style, it can be assumed that he also had some knowledge of at least Mongolian, Turkish and Chinese (Findley 2004, p. 92).

In sum, the nomadic Mongolian conquerors, whose strengths was military, needed to integrate their culture with that of the ancient settled civilizations of China and Iran in order to maintain the empires they had gained. They did so by fostering a new class of cultural brokers. These could either be drawn from the Mongolian population and raised bilingually and biculturally, as in Bolad’s case; or recruited from the local population, as in Rashid al-Din’s case. The latter must have been far more numerous because the nomads obviously did not end up imposing their language and culture on China nor Iran.

Fusion of East and West

The World History of Rashid al-Din, Exhibition of the Edinburgh manuscript

Bolad and Rashid al-Din ended up not “only” mediating between the nomad conquerors and the settled societies they came to rule, but their friendship is an example of the deep connections between east and west Asia that were forged during that time:

Their friendship was, without question, a crucial link in the overall exchange process, for Rashid al-Din, a man of varied intellectual interests and tremendous energy, was one of the very few individuals among the Mongols’ sedentary subjects who fully appreciated and systematically exploited the cultural possibilities created by the empire. (Allsen, 1996, p. 12)

The Jāme’ al-Tawārikh presents the culmination of their interactions. These chronicles were the first-ever attempt to write a world history and include information about the Muslim dynasties, the Indians, Jews, Franks, Chinese, Turks, and Mongols. Much of what is today known about the history of Central Asia up to the 13^th century comes from the Jāme’ al-Tawārikh. This could not have been achieved without extensive collaboration, and Rashid al-Din says about Bolad that he had no rival “in knowledge of the genealogies of the Turkish tribes and the events of their history, especially that of the Mongols” (quoted from Allsen 1996, p. 13).

Inter alia, Bolad translated information from a now-lost Mongolian source, the Altan Debter (“Golden Book”). Access to the Altan Debter was forbidden to non-Mongols, and Rashid al-Din even describes how their collaboration proceeded in this case: Bolad, who, as a high-ranking Mongol, had access to the Altan Debter, would extract the desired information and then, “in the morning before taking up administrative chores,” dictate the Persian translation of the desired passages to Rashid al-Din (Allsen 1996, p. 13).

Il-Khan Hülegü and his queen, Doquz Khatun, a Syriac Christian, as depicted in a Jami’ al-Tawarikh manuscript (Source: Wikipedia)

Given the wide-ranging interests and experiences of the two men, it is not surprising that their collaboration was not restricted to history but took in many other fields, too. Principal among these is agriculture. Rashid al-Din also produced an agricultural text (Āthār va ahyā’; “Monuments and animals”), which shows considerable Chinese influence (see Allsen 1996, pp. 14ff. for details). During this time an agricultural model farm was also established in Tabriz and, on Ghazan’s orders, new strains of seeds were solicited from China and India. While the details of these cross-fertilizations have been lost in the shifting sands of time, it “can be asserted with confidence that a considerable body of information on Chinese agriculture was transmitted to Iran and that Bolad was the principal conduit” (Allsen 1996, p. 15).

The two men also collaborated in the introduction of paper money to Iran (which would have necessitated knowledge of block-printing, only available in China at the time); the translation of medicinal treatises and the implementation of aspects of Chinese medicine in the Tabriz hospital Rashid al-Din had founded; and, of course, food. Rashid al-Din, in fact, developed such a taste for the delights of Chinese cuisine that he had a Chinese chef recruited for his household.

The mountains between India and China, depicted in a Jami’ al-Tawarikh manuscript (Source: Wikipedia)

The intense friendship of Bolad and Rashid al-Din is the story of a meeting of like-minded individuals who came together across what might seem a vast chasm of cultural difference. Their wide-ranging interests and intercultural dispositions allowed them to contribute extensively – and deeply – to the fusion of Asian cultures. The results were new heights of achievement in various spheres of life, as Basil Gray, the keeper of Oriental antiquities at the British Museum between 1946 and 1969, has argued with reference to painting:

The paradox which results from a survey of the history of painting in Persia before the Mongol invasions, is that it had not yet achieved the expressive and imaginative force which was to give it its special and unique quality only after it had come in contact with Chinese drawing. This is the agent which seems to have freed the Persian genius from its subordination to the other arts of the book by a mysterious catalysis. […] The “house style” of Rashidiya [the scriptorium in Tabriz founded by Rashid al-Din] is the most thoroughgoing example of Chinese artistic penetration into Iran. In it there is not simply a question of Chinese motifs, but radical adoption of the Chinese vision. [quoted from Robinson 1980, p. 212]

That the East-West fusion enabled by the Mongolian empire was not a one-way street is best exemplified by Bolad’s name: born into a high-ranking Mongolian family, the child was given a Persian name. “Bolad” is the Mongolian version of Persian pulād (“steel”).

References

Allsen, T. T. (1996). Biography of a Cultural Broker, Bolad Ch’eng-Hsiang in China and Iran. In J. Raby & T. Fitzherbert (Eds.), The Court of the Il-Khans, 1290-1340 (pp. 7-22). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Amitai-Preiss, R. (1996). New Material from the Mamluk Sources for the Biography of Rashid Al-Din. In J. Raby & T. Fitzherbert (Eds.), The Court of the Il-Khans, 1290-1340 (pp. 23-37). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Boyle, J. (1971). Rashīd al-Dīn: The First World Historian Iran, 9, 19-26 DOI: 10.2307/4300435

Findley, C. V. (2004). The Turks in World History. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fuchs, W. (1946). Analecta: Zur mongolischen Uebersetzungsliteratur der Yuan-Zeit. Monumenta Serica, 11, 33-64.

Kamola, S. (2012). The Mongol Īlkhāns and Their Vizier Rashīd Al-Dīn. Iranian Studies, 45(5), 717-721. doi: 10.1080/00210862.2012.702557

Robinson, B. W. (1980). Rashid Al-Din’s World History: The Significance of the Miniatures. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 112(2), 212-222.

Takahashi, H. (2014). Syriac as a Vehicle for Transmission of Knowledge across Borders of Empires Horizons, 5(1), 29-52.

Preschool in Karlsruhe, Germany (Source: DW)

Ever since my research for my 2002 book Bilingual Couples Talk I’ve regularly been told by people – or been asked to confirm their belief – that a cross-cultural relationship is beneficial once the couple have children. The children are expected to not only be bilingual but also to enjoy cognitive advantages from growing up with more than one culture and to be more open minded and better communicators. I’ve always struggled how to respond because, of course, nothing is ever this simple. A 2011 study of the cognitive and linguistic abilities of various groups of preschoolers in Germany confirms the assumption – children of intermarried couples outperform all other groups on a cognitive ability test – and, simultaneously, explain why it is a fallacy that confounds ethnicity and class.

The study by Birgit Becker examines the cognitive and linguistic abilities of three- and four-year-olds with different types of parents:

• Children whose parents and grandparents were all born in Germany (the ‘native’ group)
• Children whose parents were both born in Turkey (the ‘second generation’)
• Children whose parents were both born in Germany but each parent had at least one parent born in Turkey (the ‘third generation’)
• Children with one first-generation and one second-generation Turkish parent (the ‘2A generation’)
• Children with one ‘native’ parent and one first- or second generation Turkish parent (the ‘intermarried’ group)

The cognitive abilities of a total of 1,008 children were tested with the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children. The German version of the test was used but it was administered by bilingual researchers and the children could choose to do the test in German, in Turkish or they could mix the two languages as they pleased. So, language proficiency is unlikely to confound test results here, as it so often does in cognitive testing of bilingual and minority children.

Adapted from Becker (2011, p. 448)

The diagram shows that the children from the intermarried group outperformed all the other groups, including the natives. It also shows that, with the exception of the intermarried group, all the other ‘Turkish’ groups performed significantly lower than the ‘native’ group. Children in the ‘2A group’ – with one first-generation and one second-generation Turkish parent – performed particularly poorly. In fact, ‘2A’ parents might be considered ‘intermarried,’ too; but, obviously, their intermarried status is not beneficial for the child.

Once the full diagram is revealed, part of the conundrum is solved.

Source: Becker (2011, p. 448)

Once parents’ socio-economic status (as measured by their level of education and their occupational status) and educational resources (as measured by the number of books in the home; the frequency of bedtime stories; or the number of visits to the zoo) are controlled, the ethnic differences disappear and the influence of all the above ethnic groups/generations is reduced to non-significance.

All group differences regarding children’s cognitive skills can be fully explained by families’ socioeconomic status and educational resources. (Becker 2011, p. 447)

What seems like an ethnic effect (‘children of intermarried couples are smarter’ or ‘German children are smarter than Turkish children’) is, in fact, an effect of socioeconomic status and educational resources; in other words, a well-known class effect. However, class maps onto ethnicity, in this case, as elsewhere. The vast majority of Turkish families in the sample, which can be assumed to be representative of Turks in Germany (or, at least, southwest Germany, where the study was conducted), are poorly educated, work in low-status occupations, and have few educational resources at their disposal.

As far as the two ‘mixed’ groups – ‘2A’ and ‘intermarried’ – are concerned a process of negative and positive selection can be assumed to apply respectively.

Having a first-generation mother and a second-generation father constitutes some sort of ‘double jeopardy’ for the child: the mother is much less likely to speak German than even first-generation women married to first-generation men; and the father is even less likely to have completed secondary education than other Turkish second-generation men. As the researcher explains, second-generation men who ‘import’ brides from the country of origin are likely to be negatively selected on various dimensions and their ‘imported’ brides will lack knowledge and resources that are useful to raising a child in the destination country.

By contrast, a process of positive selection works in favor of a child with a native and a migrant parent. Not only will the native parent ‘automatically’ have country-specific knowledge and resources but the migrant parent is likely to be positively selected with regard to level of education, proficiency in German, and general ‘openness’ and ‘integration.’ This is particularly true in the case German-Turkish intermarriages, which are comparatively rare and only account for five percent of all marriages of first- and second-generation Turks in Germany.

In sum, if intermarriage is an expression of parental cosmopolitanism, it is beneficial for children. Not because there is any intrinsic value in intermarriage but because that is how educational reproduction works: well-educated parents with stable jobs, parents who read to their children and who engage in a wide range of family activities confer an advantage on their children. It is just that the advantages – as well as the injuries – of class are increasingly mapped onto ethnicity, race or ‘culture.’

Becker, B. (2011). Cognitive and Language Skills of Turkish Children in Germany: A Comparison of the Second and Third Generation and Mixed Generational Groups International Migration Review, 45 (2), 426-459 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2011.00853.x

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.”

The National Institute of the English Language in Tehran has used the slogan “A new language is a new life” for more than 50 years

I’m preparing my lecture on “Internationalization and Multilingualism” for a language teaching conference in Bangkok later this week and I’ve been looking for a pithy proverb or quote about the joys of language learning. I’ve discovered more than I can possibly use and so am sharing some below.

The idea that learning a new language extends your horizons, makes you wiser and allows you to live your life more fully can be found in a number of intellectual traditions. This idea is based on the fact that each language is related to a particular cultural and intellectual tradition and a particular world view. As the language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it:

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. (“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”)

Obviously, one way to extend the limits of one language is to learn another one. For instance, the medieval Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, who was also known as doctor mirabilis (“wonderful scholar”), described language learning as the main way to gaining wisdom:

Notitia linguarum est prima porta sapientiae. (“Knowledge of languages is the main door to wisdom.”)

A Chinese proverb makes the same point:

学一门语言，就是多一个观察世界的窗户。(“To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.”)

I have not been able to discover any further information about the context of this saying and maybe one of our Chinese readers can help us out! A similar Persian proverb, for instance, has been used as the slogan of a the Tehran-based language teaching institute National Institute of the English Language (NIEL) for over 50 years and has since acquired the status of an international proverb:

یک زبان جدید یک زندگی جدید است. (“A new language is a new life.”)

There seems to be wide agreement with the idea that a new language is a new life and makes us more human. This Turkish proverb provides another example (again, further details about the context would be welcome!):

Bir dil bir insan, iki dil iki insan. (“One language, one person; two languages, two persons.”)

The first president of Czechoslovakia after WWI, Tomáš G. Masaryk, made the same point when he wrote:

Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem. (“The more languages you know, the more human you are.”)

While I was looking for proverbs and sayings about the value of language learning, I also discovered a fair number of proverbs that have a more nationalistic tone and celebrate the mother tongue (whichever one it may be …) as superior to all other languages. I’m not going to reproduce any of these quotes here but will leave the last word to one of the great writers in the German language, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who argued that unless you know foreign languages you are not qualified to speak about your own language:

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von der Eigenen. (Those who don’t know foreign languages know nothing of their own.)

Do you know any other quotes or sayings about language learning and multilingualism?

Yasemin Yildiz (2012) Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham University Press.

This book review was originally published in Language in Society 42 (4), 463-466. [Copyright: Cambridge University Press; Language in Society]

Access pdf version of this review here.

Yasemin Yildiz , Beyond the mother tongue: The postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. xi, 306. Hb. $50.05.

In their position paper “Superdiversity and language,” Blommaert & Rampton (2011) assert that “named languages have now been denaturalised.” In it they sum up the emergent consensus in sociolinguistics—and, indeed, the obvious fact—that the contemporary global linguistic landscape is characterised by multilingual superdiversity. Exploring this linguistic superdiversity, multilingual practices—or “metrolingualism” in Otsuji & Pennycook’s (2011) striking term—has become an immensely productive research agenda. Ideologically, however, monolingualism remains predominant. The resulting tensions continue to undermine the educational success of minorities (e.g. Clyne 2005; Menken 2008) and their access to socioeconomic opportunities more broadly (e.g. Piller 2011; Lippi-Green 2012). In that sense the research frontier in sociolinguistics is not in linguistic diversity per se but at the fault zones where multilingual practices meet monolingual ideologies.

Beyond the mother tongue is one of the most concerted and lucid efforts to date to explore precisely that fault zone. The author, Yasemin Yildiz, identifies monolingualism as “a key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern social life, from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as imagined collectives such as cultures and nations” (2). For about three centuries, the monolingual paradigm has provided the lens through which we see multilingualism. The new visibility of linguistic diversity that contemporary scholarship so amply documents is not only the result of an increase in its frequency—multilingualism has existed all along—but also a result of the loosening of the monolingual paradigm due to the ongoing renegotiation of the status of the nation state vis-à-vis the local and the global. Albeit undergoing change, the force of monolingualism as a structuring principle remains and thus creates a range of tensions between multilingual linguistic realities and monolingual ideologies. It is this condition that Yildiz identifies as “postmonolingual.” To view language in society through a postmonolingual paradigm means to engage with the significance of multilingualism and monolingualism and, even more crucially, their intersection. Beyond the mother tonguedoes exactly that in a tour de force enquiry into German-language writing of the twentieth century in its historical and sociocultural context.

The introduction presents a highly readable overview of the German language-philosophical tradition, which has played an important role in establishing the monolingual paradigm. Yildiz shows how the “mother tongue” came to be “the affective knot at the center of the monolingual paradigm” (10). Even if “mother tongue” is rarely used as an analytic concept in contemporary sociolinguistics any more, the intertwined conceptions of language competence on the one hand, and national and/or ethnic origin, belonging, and identity on the other are rarely unravelled consistently, and thus continue to remain in effect today. Therefore Yildiz is interested in the work of those authors who address precisely those effects. Writing “beyond the mother tongue” does not simply mean to write in a “nonnative” language or to write in multiple languages. Rather, “it means writing beyond the concept of the mother tongue” (14).

Ch. 1 explores the postmonolingual condition in Franz Kafka’s work. Kafka only ever wrote in his mother tongue, German. Yet he did so from the context of early twentieth century multilingual Prague and its well-documented tensions between Czech and German. Yildiz goes beyond specific language conflicts to show that the city was also the site of tensions between an older multilingual paradigm—where language did not follow an exclusively identitarian logic—and the emergent monolingual paradigm, which postulates a homologous relationship between language and identity. Prague’s German-speaking Jews constituted a particular challenge for this postulate as they did not fit into the equation of language and ethnicity. Kafka explored the impossibility of his linguistic situation “from within”—by writing in German about other languages, particularly Yiddish, which might have offered linguistic “normalcy,” that is, a match between language and identity. In the process, the mother tongue became unheimlich ‘uncanny’ (lit. ‘unhomely’). Alienation from the “unhomely mother tongue” is thus one distinct post-monolingual response. The chapter also provides a brilliant overview of the relationship between Yiddish and German, the linguistic division between Eastern and Western Jewry, and multilingualism in the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires.

Ch. 2 is devoted to another modernist Jewish writer, the philosopher Theodor Adorno. By the time of Adorno’s late writing, the German language had changed forever, as it had become the “tainted” language of the Holocaust. Adorno, who was frequently criticized on linguistic grounds for the seemingly unrelated reasons that he continued to write in German after the Holocaust and that his German was too elitist, brings the internal multilingualism of the supposedly monolingual language to the fore through his excessive use of loanwords. The chapter also takes the reader through the history of German linguistic purism.

With Yoko Tawada, Ch. 3 moves to contemporary writers. Tawada has produced two distinct literary oeuvres in German and Japanese and has received literary awards for both. In contrast to Kafka and Adorno, her perspective on the monolingual paradigm is not informed by exclusion from the mother tongue, but by the inclusions it enforces. Moving from Japanese to German was a way for her to escape from limiting gender identities associated with Japanese. Indeed, language learning has become a conventional way for Japanese women to escape patriarchal Japan, as also documented by Takahashi (2013). German, however, does not provide a new home for Tawada, nor does she join in celebratory discourses of multilingualism as enabling hybridity and multiple sites of belonging. Instead, for her, bilingualism is a detachment strategy from either language. The chapter can also be read as an introduction to the emotional journeys of adult bilinguals.

The focus of Ch. 4 is on another refugee from her mother tongue, Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Moving to Germany from Turkey as a young adult, Özdamar is one of the most established literary figures in contemporary Germany. In contrast to Tawada, Özdamar writes exclusively in German, with her particular literary style characterized by the frequent use of literal translations from Turkish. Literal translation serves as a strategy to overcome the violence of the “mother tongue” and specifically the trauma resulting from the state violence experienced by young leftists in Turkey in the 1970s. The chapter also serves as an introduction to the monolingualization of Turkish since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 as well as the emergence of Turkish as a German language.

Ch. 5 continues the German-Turkish theme by exploring multilingualism in Feridun Zaimoğlu’s work. In contrast to Özdamar, Zaimoğlu is not a migrant but a “native,” albeit the son of migrants. Yildiz calls the second generation—the children of migrants who have not actually ever migrated themselves—“postmigrants.” Similarly to Kafka and Adorno a century earlier, this particular group of “native speakers” is widely seen as illegitimate. Being ascribed racialized illegitimacy deforms the speaker, and Zaimoğlu inscribes this deformation into the German language by writing in a confronting and jarring mix of genres and registers. Yildiz’ analysis draws mostly on Kanak Sprak, which became an instant sensation when it was published in 1995. In a defiant appropriation of German, Kanak Sprak combines the racist slur Kanake with a dialect version of Sprache ‘language.’ The chapter can also be read as an overview of postmigrant writing in contemporary Germany, the debates around German identity since reunification and the role of global hip hop in the cultural expression of postmigrants.

The conclusion sums up the complex tensions inherent in the postmonolingual condition where monolingualism continues to inform multilingualism. Kafka, Adorno, Tawada, Özdamar, and Zaimoğlu all chart points on the way towards an emergent multilingual paradigm. At the same time, reading them makes clear the challenges ahead before a full delinking between language and ethnicity will be achieved. Germany—as most other “Western” societies—currently finds itself in the grip of an attempted reassertion of homogeneity. Whether these are the death throes of the monolingual paradigm or whether it is gaining a new lease on life remains to be seen. The emergent multilingual paradigm, too, is fraught with contradictions, as Germany’s embrace of bilingual German-English education and its simultaneous disavowal of bilingual German-Turkish education vividly demonstrates.

Beyond the mother tongue is a rare book that combines wide-ranging interdisciplinary inquiries in language, literature, history, and cultural studies. I hope postmonolingualism will become foundational for a new research agenda in language in society: multilingualism cannot be understood without monolingualism and vice versa.

 References 

Piller, Ingrid (2013). Book review of Yasemin Yildiz , Beyond the mother tongue: The postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. xi, 306. Hb. $50.05. Language in Society, 42 (4), 463-466 [Copyright: Cambridge University Press; Language in Society]

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

Ernst Reuter, West Berlin’s post-war Mayor, was Professor of Urban Studies in Ankara from 1938 to 1946 (Source: turkishpress.de)

While the internationalization of higher education is a hot topic at the moment and is widely seen as unique to the present, internationalization of higher education is not new. The politics of internationalization at Istanbul University in the early years of the Turkish republic provide a fascinating case study (Ergin, 2009).

In the 1930s 38 out of 65 chair professors at Istanbul University were German. If university rankings had been around then, Istanbul University would obviously have done fantastically well on the ‘internationalization’ criterion. Two events in 1933 were responsible for this amazing level of internationalization: Hitler’s ascent to power meant that Germany’s Jewish and/or Socialist intellectual elite started to leave the country. Simultaneously, the Turkish republic undertook a major reform of higher education, which was to be a radical break from the Ottoman past.

In its efforts to modernize and Westernize, Turkey employed a large number of Western academics in the early years of the Republic (1923-1950), many of them refugees from Nazi Germany. The irony of employing the victims of Western modernity to achieve Western modernity was not lost on many of those academics who inhabited this paradoxical world.

The Turkish reformers largely accepted the Orientalist and racist world view of the time but wanted to switch sides. They accepted that ‘the West’ was superior to ‘the East’ but contested the idea that they were part of ‘the East.’ The humanities and social sciences of the reformed universities were expected to demonstrate exactly that: that historically, linguistically and racially Turkey was on par, if not superior, to Western modernity and civilization, conceived as an essential trait of culture and race. Specifically, academics were mobilized to demonstrate the ‘Europeanness’ of Turks and their membership in ‘the white race;’ to establish the ancient and enduring character of ‘Turkishness;’ and to show that the Turkish language was the source of Western languages.

In effect, refugees from Nazi Germany, which was ideologically built on exactly the same universalist conceptions of history, language and race (localized, of course, to “Germanness” rather than “Turkishness”), became the local personifications of Turkey’s modernization project. How did they live their paradoxical situation?

Ergin (2009) explores this paradox with reference to the work of Wolfram Eberhard, who was Professor of Chinese at Ankara University from 1937 to 1948. Eberhard, who was widely seen as one of the most talented sinologists of his generation, left Germany because he was under pressure to become a member of the Nazi Party in order to advance his academic career. His approach to language and culture did not fit in with the nationalistic and racial ideologies of the time (neither in Germany nor in Turkey) and his work thus provides an interesting case of intercultural communication in research.

Specifically, Eberhard sought to reject the then-prevailing idea of Chinese as an autonomous civilization and to demonstrate that Chinese language and civilization were as much a product of linguistic and cultural contact and exchange as any other. In one article, he identified five major influences on ancient Chinese, including a ‘Western’ influence “whose possessors were of Turkish stock” (quoted in Ergin, 2009, p. 117). While intended to contest notions of national and racial purity, this academic article was reinterpreted by Turkish academics and in the Turkish media as evidence that many achievements of Chinese civilization occurred because of Turkish influence. Eberhard’s anti-nationalistic and anti-essentialist argument thus came to be read as its exact opposite.

However, it would be wrong to assume that Turkey’s German academics only participated in the Turkish nationalist project inadvertently and through being misinterpreted, as in this example. They also had their careers and the interests of their employer – the Turkish state – to consider. Like many others, Eberhard, too, on occasion explicitly located his research agenda in Turkish nationalistic and racial positions. The tension between producing universalistic research for local purposes was continuously present.

While finding themselves welcomed and admired as ‘Western intellectuals’ these émigré scholars also found themselves resented and envied by their Turkish colleagues. One terrain where resentment against ‘Westerners’ could be openly expressed was language: most of the German academics taught in English, French or German and their contracts stipulated that, after three years, they would switch to Turkish. The assumption was that they would help to enrich and develop the Turkish language by lecturing and publishing in Turkish. In practice, unsurprisingly, only a relatively small number was able to achieve sufficient proficiency in Turkish to be able to teach in Turkish. For most, the contractually stipulated linguistic transition period went by and they quietly continued to teach in English, French or German.

Internationalizing Turkish academia in the early years of the republic was a creative response by the Turkish modernizers to turn Western academic Orientalism to their advantage. They tried to establish the Turkish origins of Western civilization with the help of Western knowledge and Western academics. Ergin’s article is a fascinating account of the entanglements in global and local power struggles that internationalizing discourses and international academics can find themselves in – then as today.

Ergin, M. (2009). Cultural encounters in the social sciences and humanities: western emigre scholars in Turkey History of the Human Sciences, 22 (1), 105-130 DOI: 10.1177/0952695108099137

KOALA Buchstabenhaus (Adapted from: Urbanek, R. et al. (2006): Tinto grün. Arbeitsheft 1. Schreiben. Berlin: Cornelsen)

Contemporary Germany is the 3^rd largest immigrant-receiving country internationally. In 2008, 15.6mio inhabitants (19% out of a total of 82.1mio) were post-1950 immigrants or their descendants (German Bureau of Statistics). With 2.9mio, Turks constitute the largest group of these. Unfortunately, a study released in 2009 indicates that people with a Turkish background are the least integrated immigrant group in Germany. Many of them have low or no educational qualifications, are unemployed, on welfare, etc. In fact, they are often referred to as “Sorgenkind der Nation” (the nation’s problem child). The reasons for this dismal state of affairs are complex, of course, with language proficiency (or rather lack thereof) often leading the list of reasons (see also here and here for recent discussions on Language-on-the-Move)!

When commentators bring up language proficiency, they usually refer to German language proficiency, of course. Consequently, German states and schools develop German as a second language courses from early childhood on, mostly throughout the years of primary school.[1] Additionally a few of them adopt first language promotion. Where such programs are incorporated, they are justified with reference to Cummin’s theory that first language promotion supports second language acquisition. However, the research findings regarding the effects of institutional bilingual instruction are actually inconsistent. One reason for the results’ divergence is that most researchers focus on the effect on the second language only.

With the aim to meet the third or forth generation’s language learning needs a bit more and with the educational philosophy that any knowledge and skills in the first language are beneficial, I modified an existing biliteracy project for primary schools in Germany, with the aim to make it accessible to a wide range of schools and teachers.

The project is a contrastive bilingual reading and writing program for Year 1 students with a Turkish background. The students attended an urban mainstream school with an “average complex” ethnic make-up. As the school’s curriculum is based on the compulsory state curriculum, they were taught all regular subjects along with everybody else, including German reading and writing. All children with “deficiencies” in German also attended daily German as a second language classes. The submersion method with sheltered majority language promotion is the international norm in most immigration countries. It must also be considered a major reason for migrant educational disadvantage as it almost seems designed to hide their academic skills.

For this project, all Year 1 students with a Turkish background were invited to join the “coordinated alphabetisation in elementary instruction” (a little catchier name for the course is “KOALA”, derived from its German initials). Twice a week, these children attended the KOALA class, where the letters, which were introduced in the mainstream German lessons, were taken up to introduce the Turkish alphabet[2]. The contrastive method uses the German alphabet as a starting point, comparing Turkish letters and their phonetic realisation to the German letters. This way, children do not only learn the Turkish alphabet but also keep revising the German alphabet they learn in their mainstream classes.

The major difference to other concepts is that both classes were taught by one and the same teacher. As the focus is on biliteracy, which doesn’t require high levels of grammar and vocabulary knowledge, this person does not even have to be a native Turkish speaker. It can all be done by a native in the majority language with some knowledge and skills in the children’s first language. This has the big advantage that teaching is consistent and that it has relatively limited administrative, financial and staffing implications. Above all it valorises German and Turkish as languages of identity in Germany.

After one year of biliteral instruction, the children’s writing competencies in both languages were assessed. They were compared to children in classes with a similar composition and from similar social backgrounds. One control group was not being institutionally instructed in their first language and the other group was being instructed in both languages, but by two different teachers. The results showed the unequivocal success of the one-teacher-two-languages model! The students from the one-teacher-two-languages model correctly realised 85% of Turkish and German letters (two-teacher-model and no-L1-model 71% and 65%, respectively). Interestingly, students from the one-teacher-two-languages model (which could also negatively be considered the “non-native-speaker-model”) especially excelled in realising shared graphemes with a different phonetic realisation. They used 62% of these interference letters correctly, whereas the other groups only achieved 25% and 15%.  Other tests, which did not focus on the use of single letters, showed that they were also the most advanced in their overall writing development.

These results demonstrated that the model is realistic and provides a good possibility for enhancing a student’s overall academic success. In the long run, this is an important contribution to social justice in an “integrated” society. If implemented on a larger scale, it thus holds promises for individuals, schools and society as a whole.

For a long time now, we have been aware of the key role played by language in achieving academic and social success. For too long, the implementation of that knowledge has been haphazard and half-hearted and we need more programs such as the one I have described here if we don’t want to consign 2.5 million people with a Turkish background to be the perpetual national “Sorgenkind.”

Benz, Victoria (2011). Koordinierter Lese-Schreib-Lehrgang Türkisch-Deutsch im ersten Schuljahr. Durchführung und Evaluation eines Unterrichtskonzeptes Deutsch als Zweitsprache (2), 29-40

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you are a student or a guest researcher (like me) in Berlin and you need to get or renew a visa or need to change your visa status, you need to wait. The Ausländerbehörde (Immigration Office), which serves Berlin’s non-German citizens, is open three days a week (Monday and Tuesday from 7am to 2pm, Thursday from 10am to 6pm) and as a student you cannot make an appointment. Instead, you have to arrive during office hours and take a number. If there are no more numbers, you cannot talk to an official and you have to try again. Usually you learn, through trial and error, that you must arrive at least one hour, often two, before the office opens and wait outside in order to get a number. It is always nice when your visa renewal time falls in the summer rather than the winter months.

There are no instructions on the official website to tell you about these lengthy waiting times (not even in German!), and no officials offering information about the procedure. The small amount of information you can gather about where to stand and how long to wait comes from the people around you. Everyone waiting uses the language resources they have: L2 German, English, Turkish, among many other languages, attempting to work out if the person ahead or behind them has better information about what is going on. During the wait, strangers share stories about previous experiences at the office.

The monolingual German signage at the Ausländerbehörde stands in stark contrast to the linguistically diverse waiting crowd.

Berlin, in general, is a multilingual city. You hear many languages as you walk the streets: you learn Turkish words when you do your groceries and read ads in Polish, English and Arabic, alongside German, on the trains. The government department for Integration and Migration makes their website available in German, English, Spanish, French, Polish, Russian, and Turkish and boasts that Berlin “was and is a city of immigrants. Immigrants from numerous countries”. 13.7% of Berlin’s population are not German citizens. Why is it then that at the Ausländerbehörde, where clients by definition speak German as an additional language if at all, there is no multilingual information?

Not only is the limited official information provided only in German, it is contradictory and confusing. The writing is small and it takes a number of readings to work out which floor it is you need to go to. In fact, on my first visit I read the sign (above), saw ‘Australien’ and, after confirming with the woman at the front desk (who told me she does not have a phone line, so cannot call any of the offices to get further information), I went to wait on the 3^rd floor. After finally talking to an official I was sent to the 1^st floor where I was meant to be waiting (as a guest academic) to wait some more.

There are a few glimpses of recognition that people navigating the immigration office might need assistance beyond this monolingual signage. A smaller sign (left) indicates the separate entrance for Turkish nationals, the largest group of applicants in Berlin, and includes the German for the country’s name in addition to the Turkish flag. It is unclear, however, which entrance you should choose if you are a visiting academic from Turkey. There is no Turkish language presence at all, only the Turkish flag acknowledging Turkish nationals while quietly insisting on German monolingualism.

What does all of this say about language on the move and social inclusion in a multilingual city? The Ausländerbehörde makes it clear that the nation remains the great arbiter of access to resources and that exclusion is enforced through lack of information in even the major L2s of the country. Offering information in other languages for ‘Ausländer’ (foreigners) challenges the legitimacy of the one language, one nation tie and yet for the people waiting in line speaking, multilingualism is the only way to access information.

The fellow pictured is German comedian Kaya Yanar, who has made a living from comedic characters that consist of exaggerations and stereotypes of various immigrant groups. He’s best known for his show “Was guckst Du?” which translates into English as “What are you looking at?” and refers to staring as a form of passive-aggressive social control in German society. Staring is used as a means to express implicit social disapproval of the looks of another person and foreigners are often the object of “the stare.” The question “Was guckst Du?” is a form of resistance as it forces the silent disapprover to either make their criticism explicit or to respond with a cowardly “oh, nothing, nothing.”

One of the characters in “Was guckst Du?” is the pictured Hakan, a Turkish immigrant to Germany, who works as a nightclub bouncer. Hakan speaks in an exaggerated form of Turkish-German, although Yanar himself is an L1 German speaker. His comedy is of a pretty common ‘ethnic comedy’ variety, drawing on circulating stereotypes to get a laugh. It seems that “Lümütüd Edition”, then, is supposed to be an imitation of Hakan speaking English, and yet, as far as I’ve been able to gather, the character Hakan never speaks English in Yanar’s show and neither does Yanar. So what’s going on?

It is a case of multilingual advertising, with a twist. The English ‘Limited Edition’ is in common usage on German products. Hakan’s cartoonish representation of a Turkish immigrant bouncer is then layered on top, producing a consumable snack of multicultural ‘döner’ meets ‘crisps’. The gratuitous umlauts serve to make the English phrase look like mock Turkish and sound like accented English.

The designation of the chips’ flavor adds to the stereotyped language: “Döner mit alles” translates as “Doner kebab with everything.” The grammatically correct form would be “Döner mit allem” and the form of the expression thus mimics foreigner talk, or, more specifically, a form of uneducated and fossilized “Turkish German.” The Lorenz snack food company takes Yanar’s ready-made caricature: greased-back hair, accentedness, and foreigner talk, and commodifies it, with a sprinkling of contemporary advertising multilingualism (English-as-mock-Turkish) to top it off.

With anti-immigration (specifically anti-Islamic immigration) discourses in political advertising in other parts of German-speaking Europe being unapologetically racist, it’s hard to see past the stereotypes and language mockery to find the humor in Hakan, or the chips.

You can read more about ‘ethno-comedy’ in the German context (in German) in: Keding, K., & Struppert, A. (2006). Ethno-Comedy im deutschen Fernsehen: Inhaltsanalyse und Rezipientenbefragung zu “Was guckst du?!”. Berlin: Frank & Timme.

One dad in our trick-or-treating party figured Prestÿ was German: “Don’t you guys put umlauts on everything?” “No.” I figured it was Turkish but am told that a y with umlaut does not exist in Turkish, either. At least, Turkish is an educated guess seeing that the wrapper also has “Sütlü Çikolata” written on it. “Sütlü Çikolata” is Turkish for “Milk Chocolate” – the other bit of language on the wrapper I recognize.

Further clues: The candy was found in a trick-or-treat bag in Abu Dhabi and so can be presumed to have been purchased in the UAE although there is no Arabic writing on the wrapper. There is no country-of-origin information on the wrapper, either, although there is some illegible small print under something that looks like “asas” and which might conceivably contain statutory information if it were not too small to be legible. Googling “Elvan chocolates” produces a further Turkish connection: Elvan is the name of an Istanbul-based company producing chocolates and pastries for “more than 70 countries over 6 continents.”

Of course, it doesn’t really matter whether Prestÿ “exists” in any real language – as long as people associate it with a particular language and transfer the associations they have with that language onto the product, Prestÿ is doing its job. Along the lines “I suppose Prestÿ is German for ‘prestige’ so the qualities of German must apply to the chocolate, too.” Mostly, German is associated with cars and technology, though, where it tends to be used to connote high quality. I know because I’ve written a few research papers on the iconic use of foreign languages in advertising and if you want to follow up on multilingualism in advertising, you can find some of my research papers in our resources section.

More likely, Prestÿ is just supposed to be “general European” and supposed to connote the sophistication of European chocolate and cuisine. There’s a lot of multilingual meaning-making on this humble little piece of junk and I would love to hear your interpretations!