Tazin speaks at Talent Day, Bangladesh Forum for Community Engagement

Every year, the Bangladesh Forum for Community Engagement in Sydney, Australia hosts an event called ‘Talent Day’ to acknowledge the achievements of primary and high school students in the Australian-Bangladeshi community. How does this interest a sociolinguist?

In so many ways – the interaction of multiple languages, the code-switching in the speeches, the expressions of heritage and identity in language use, the living examples of language shift through generations of migrants and so much more.

This year, though, my attention was taken by a request to give a short guest speech to the HSC graduates about to embark on their university journeys. My first dilemma was determining what meaningful contribution, as a second year PhD student, I could make. Which part of my university experience could I share? I decided to talk about my PhD supervisors and share two experiences that, for me, underlined the significance of language itself.

I told them about the lecture that Dr. Loy Lising delivers on the first day of class for our students. In the process of introducing me and the other members of the teaching team, she brings up the slide about communicating with us. But before the technical details, she implores the students to remember our common humanity when communicating with teachers. She explains that the use of our shared courtesies, such as “Dear [teacher’s name]”, “could you”, “thank you” acknowledge that a student and a teacher are two human beings communicating with one another.

From Dr. Lising’s words, I extrapolated that approaching someone more learned with humility confers dignity to both the teacher and the student and if anything, reminds one of the humility that should be cultivated in the pursuit of learning.

I then spoke about my first time as a student of Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, when I was doing my Masters of Applied Linguistics. It was time for the final assignment and before giving us the details, she displayed an image of a Persian rug. She directed us to the intricate parts that were woven, bit by bit, to produce something so beautiful.

Her next request was for us to write her a “beautiful” assignment. To achieve this, she asked us to remember the great privilege of higher education, which so many others have been and continue to be deprived of. We were reminded of our moral obligation to use our learning to contribute to society and the first step was to dedicate our attention to writing a good assignment – to remember the privilege of being able to write one.

I had never had an assignment presented quite like this before!

Conceptualising and expressing the act of learning as a privilege and the production of work as beautiful was yet another exercise in humility, a reminder of the very significant role that our teachers play in shaping our minds, and an acknowledgement of the purpose of higher education.

Towards the end of my speech, I realised I had given the students a series of stories and I wanted to explain why I had done this.

To be meaningful, university and higher education must be a journey of purpose, guided by our teachers and mentors who nurture our potential to contribute to the world. Ultimately, the university journey symbolises the lifelong commitment to learning from those who are more learned and passing it on to those that follow.

Tazin and Brynn, two of our enthusiastic podcast hosts

Editor’s note: Time flies: the Language-on-the-Move Podcast in collaboration with the New Books Network just turned one! Time to celebrate and reflect!

We celebrate a passionate team of hosts who created 43 insightful episodes about language in social life which have been downloaded 57,000 times across a range of platforms.

By download numbers, our top-5 episodes were:

1. Muslim Literacies in China: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ibrar Bhatt
2. Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko
3. Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche
4. Making sense of “Bad English:” Brynn Quick in conversation with Elizabeth Peterson
5. Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko

Providing a service to our communities by sharing knowledge about intercultural communication, language learning and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization is a key benefit of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast.

Another benefit accrues to our hosts who get to chat with key thinkers in our field. In this post, two of our hosts, Brynn Quick and Tazin Abdullah, share their reflections on the occasion of our 1st birthday. Enjoy and here’s to many more milestones!

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Brynn Quick and Tazin Abdullah
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Over the past year, many of us on the Language on the Move Team have been excitedly hosting podcasts about a wide range of topics in language and social life! As we dive into recording and producing our podcasts for the year ahead, we would like to share why this continues to be a rich and rewarding experience for us as PhD students at the beginning of our research journeys.

1. Wider horizons: Sounds cliché but oh, so true! Each time we host a podcast, we spend a significant amount of time doing background research. We research our guests, their interests, and their work. The opportunity created for reading is amazing. Not only do we dip our toes into the vast ocean that is all things language, we learn new things to enhance our own research and add to our reference lists!
2. Bigger networks: We establish relationships with our guests and connect with others in their networks. Our guests are great – they stay in touch! As the podcast is promoted on various platforms, we make connections with linguists around the world and are able to remain updated on developments in our field and directions that different researchers are taking.
3. Informal mentors: Did we mention our guests are great? Our guests indulge us in lively and interesting conversations not just during the podcast but also off air. Every guest shares their experiences, offers us advice and stays open to us reaching out if we have any questions on their area of expertise or if we need to understand some part of the academic journey.
4. Technical skills: Who knew how much work goes into the editing and production of a podcast episode? But this has also been a great learning experience, dabbling with technology and learning the ins and outs of various platforms – another transferable skill for emerging researchers.
5. Successful collaboration: The podcast is just one more example of how collaboration between fellow researchers results in an overall increase in both productivity and learning. Many times, we have reflected amongst ourselves about the way our podcast works. We support, mentor and acknowledge each other and, like a feel-good movie, are left wanting to collaborate some more.
6. Future collaborations: And yes, it has opened doors for us to future collaborations, to be able to reach out through our now wider networks and pursue our wide-ranging interests in linguistics and adjacent disciplines.
7. Non-traditional research outputs: Finally, what we love looking at – our updated research output lists every time a podcast drops! And an added bonus for those of us who prefer talking about research rather than writing about it, this format speaks right to us! As non-traditional research outputs, podcasts have offered us a practical way for us to engage with our learning in real-world settings, to use and develop our various skills, and contribute to research at the same time.

We give our podcast hosting experience a 5-star rating! If you enjoy the Language on the Move podcasts, please leave us a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language-on-the-Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Full list of episodes published to date

1. Episode 43: Multilingual crisis communication: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Li Jia (22/01/2025)
2. Episode 42: Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche (14/01/2025)
3. Episode 41: Why teachers turn to AI: Brynn Quick in conversation with Sue Ollerhead (09/01/2025)
4. Episode 40: Language Rights in a Changing China: Brynn Quick in conversation with Alexandra Grey (01/01/2025)
5. Episode 39: Whiteness, Accents, and Children’s Media: Brynn Quick in conversation with Laura Smith-Khan (24/12/2024)
6. Episode 38: Creaky Voice in Australian English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Hannah White (18/12/2024)
7. Episode 37: Supporting multilingual families to engage with schools: Agi Bodis in conversation with Margaret Kettle (20/11/2024)
8. Episode 36: Linguistic diversity as a bureaucratic challenge: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Clara Holzinger (17/11/2024)
9. Episode 35: Judging refugees: Laura Smith-Khan in conversation with Anthea Vogl (02/11/2024)
10. Episode 34: How did Arabic get on that sign? Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Rizwan Ahmad (30/10/2024)
11. Episode 33: Migration, constraints and suffering: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Marco Santello (14/10/2024)
12. Episode 32: Living together across borders: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Lynnette Arnold (07/10/2024)
13. Episode 31: Police first responders interacting with domestic violence victims: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Kate Steel (29/09/2024)
14. Episode 30: Remembering Barbara Horvath: Livia Gerber in conversation with Barbara Horvath (10/09/2024)
15. Episode 29: English Language Ideologies in Korea: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (08/09/2024)
16. Episode 28: Sign Language Brokering: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jemina Napier (30/07/2024)
17. Episode 27: Muslim Literacies in China: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ibrar Bhatt (24/07/2024)
18. Episode 26: Life in a New Language, Pt 6 – Citizenship: Brynn Quick in conversation with Emily Farrell (17/07/2024)
19. Episode 25: Life in a New Language, Pt 5 – Monolingual Mindset: Brynn Quick in conversation with Loy Lising (11/07/2024)
20. Episode 24: Language policy at an abortion clinic: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ella van Hest (05/07/2024)
21. Episode 23: Life in a New Language, Pt 4 – Parenting: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shiva Motaghi-Tabari (03/07/2024)
22. Episode 22: Life in a New Language, Pt 3 – African migrants: Brynn Quick in conversation with Vera Williams Tetteh (27/06/2024)
23. Episode 21: Life in a New Language, Pt 2 –Work: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ingrid Piller (19/06/2024)
24. Episode 20: Life in a New Language, Pt 1 – Identities: Brynn Quick in conversation with Donna Butorac (12/06/2024)
25. Episode 19: Because Internet: Brynn Quick in conversation with Gretchen McCulloch (03/06/2024)
26. Episode 18: Between Deaf and hearing cultures: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jessica Kirkness (01/06/2024)
27. Episode 17: The Rise of English: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Rosemary Salomone (21/05/2024)
28. Episode 16: Community Languages Schools Transforming Education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Joe Lo Bianco (07/05/2024)
29. Episode 15: Shanghai Multilingualism Alliance: Yixi (Isabella) Qui in conversation with Yongyan Zheng (02/05/2024)
30. Episode 14: Multilingual Commanding Urgency from Garbage to COVID-19: Brynn Quick in conversation with Michael Chestnut (27/04/2024)
31. Episode 13: Making sense of “Bad English:” Brynn Quick in conversation with Elizabeth Peterson (13/04/2024)
32. Episode 12: History of Modern Linguistics: Ingrid Piller in conversation with James McElvenny (10/04/2024)
33. Episode 11: 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jasna Novak Milić (08/04/2024
34. Episode 10: Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital: Brynn Quick in conversation with Erin Mulpur, Houston Methodist Hospital (26/03/2024)
35. Episode 9: Interpreting service provision is good value for money. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jim Hlavac (19/03/2024)
36. Episode 8: What does it mean to govern a multilingual society well? Hanna Torsh in conversation with Alexandra Grey (22/02/2024)
37. Episode 7: What can Australian Message Sticks teach us about literacy? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Piers Kelly (21/02/2024; originally published 2020)
38. Episode 6: How to teach TESOL ethically in an English-dominant world. Carla Chamberlin and Mak Khan in conversation with Ingrid Piller (20/02/2024; originally published 2020)
39. Episode 5: Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (19/02/2024; originally published 2021)
40. Episode 4: Language makes the place. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Adam Jaworski (18/02/2024; originally published 2022)
41. Episode 3: Linguistic diversity in education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Ingrid Gogolin (17/02/2024; originally published 2023)
42. Episode 2: Translanguaging: Loy Lising in conversation with Ofelia García (16/02/2024; originally published 2023)
43. Episode 1: Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (15/02/2024)

Book reading is an important part of individual and social wellbeing (Image copyright: Sadami Konchi)

Each year, I survey my Literacies students about their reading and writing activities. Over the years, the time these young people spend on literacy activities has been increasing steadily. In 2024, they spent an average of 8 hours per day reading. At the same time, the number of books they read has been going down. Despite spending close to 3,000 hours per year reading, the number of books they had read for pleasure in the past 12 months averaged a paltry 2.9.

Our reading time is eaten up by social media and other digital shortforms while our book reading is suffering.

This is troubling because the infinite scroll is a drain on our ability to focus. Conversely, the deep reading that comes with the long form is beneficial for our ability to concentrate, to engage critically, and to develop empathy.

As the culture of book reading and its benefits fades before our eyes, encouraging book reading is more important than ever before. And that’s where the annual Language on the Move Reading Challenge comes in. The annual Language on the Move Reading Challenge is designed to encourage broad reading at the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life.

The 2025 Language on the Move Reading Challenge is our eighth challenge in a row:

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2023
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

Join us and challenge yourself – and your students, colleagues, and friends – to read one recommended book each month throughout the year!

For more reading suggestions, make sure to also follow the Language on the Move Podcast on your preferred podcast platform. In partnership with the New Books Network, we have brought you regular conversations about linguistic diversity and social participation for one year now, and we already have exciting new chats lined up for the New Year.

Happy Reading!

January: The Politics of Academic Reading

The crisis of book reading is connected to the textocalypse – textual overproduction that humans no longer have the time to read. In 2024, the editors of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language produced a special issue devoted to “The Politics of Academic Reading.” It is fitting that the 2025 Language on the Move Reading Challenge should start with this fantastic collection.

For full disclosure, I am one of the contributors, and Language on the Move readers might be particularly interested in this piece about our platform:

Piller, I. (2024). Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building [Language on the Move]. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 289-290, 123-127. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/ijsl-2024-0132

Abstract: Rapid developments in digital technologies have fundamentally changed writing practices leading to an explosion in the number of textual products. The result is a “textocalypse” – a deep crisis in knowledge production and dissemination. Instead of pushing back, academics fuel these degenerations because their careers have become subject to the capitalist imperative to produce and consume – measured in the form of research outputs and citation metrics. Against this background, this commentary argues for a reframing of academic publishing as community building and introduces Language on the Move, an alternative sociolinguistics portal that is both a publication platform and a research community. Motivated by a feminist ethics of care, we decenter the textual product and recenter the lived experience of researchers, particularly those writing from the margins.

February: Global Communication Platform WhatsApp

Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends:
Johns, A., Matamoros-Fernández, A., & Baulch, E. (2024). WhatsApp: From a one-to-one messaging app to a global communication platform. Polity Press.

“WhatsApp provides a detailed account of WhatsApp’s growth and widespread uptake worldwide, revealing a new era in Meta’s industrial development. The authors trace WhatsApp from its inception as a chatting app to its metamorphosis into a global communication platform on which a substantial part of the Global South depends for everyday living. The volume maps the platform’s history to offer a nuanced account of its current economic (as a multi-sided market), technical (through platformization and social media features) and social dimensions (with its everyday uses and its role in public communications). Importantly, from an applied sociolinguistics perspective, the book argues that WhatsApp facilitates new types of digital literacies as it has become entrenched in the digital cultures of the world while also shedding light on the platform’s significance in civic participation and democracy. The authors brilliantly show how WhatsApp has accrued significant ‘political, economic, and cultural power’ (p. 12).”

March: How to Free a Jinn

Laura Smith-Khan recommends:
Shah Idil, Raidah. (2024). How to Free a Jinn. Allen & Unwin

“How to Free a Jinn is supernatural fantasy fiction with some refreshing twists: it follows 12-year-old Insyirah’s return to Malaysia from Australia, navigating turbulent family relationships, school and life in a new country that is supposed to feel like home. Not only that, but Insyirah soon discovers she can see and communicate with jinns, usually invisible spirits. This book offers readers a new voice and perspective, seamlessly integrating Islamic spiritual tradition and Malay and Arabic language in ways that don’t feel overexplained. As one reviewer says, this is the ‘kind of book I wish I had growing up.’”

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

Bonus info: Raidah Shah Idil is a sister of Aisyah Shah Idil, whose work has also featured on Language on the Move.

April: Life in a New Language

“A highly readable and rich account of migrant stories” (Catherine Travis)

If you have not yet done so, you must read Life in a New Language in 2025. The book, which has been co-authored by six of our team members, examines the language learning and settlement trajectories of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries.

Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Williams Tetteh, V. (2024). Life in a New Language. Oxford University Press.

You can also find a companion podcast series – with one episode with each author – on the Language on the Move podcast.

1. Episode 1: Life in a New Language, Pt 1 – Identities: Brynn Quick in conversation with Donna Butorac
2. Episode 2: Life in a New Language, Pt 2 –Work: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ingrid Piller
3. Episode 3: Life in a New Language, Pt 3 – African migrants: Brynn Quick in conversation with Vera Williams Tetteh
4. Episode 4: Life in a New Language, Pt 4 – Parenting: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shiva Motaghi-Tabari
5. Episode 5: Life in a New Language, Pt 5 – Monolingual Mindset: Brynn Quick in conversation with Loy Lising
6. Episode 6: Life in a New Language, Pt 6 – Citizenship: Brynn Quick in conversation with Emily Farrell

May: Judging Refugees

Laura Smith-Khan recommends:
Vogl, Anthea. (2024). Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination. Cambridge University Press.

“Judging Refugees examines the role of narrative performance in the procedures for assessing asylum claims in Canada and Australia. Drawing on a close and interdisciplinary analysis of hearings and decisions from the two countries, it offers extensive and compelling evidence of the impossible demands placed on people seeking asylum. The book is featured in a recent Language on the Move podcast episode.”

June: Wordslut

Brynn Quick recommends:
Montell, Amanda. (2019). Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. Harper.

“In this romp of a read, Montell guides the reader through the linguistic history of English pejoratives used to describe women. The central thesis is that, in English, contemporary negative terms for women often began neutrally – ‘hussy’ was just a term for ‘housewife’, ‘slut’ came from a term meaning ‘untidy’, and ‘madam’ was simply a term of address (not the grande dame of a brothel). But through hundreds of years’ worth of semantic change through pejoration and amelioration (new terms that I learned in reading this book!), words have been used to lift the social status of men and denigrate that of women under Western systems of patriarchy. But it’s not all bad news! Montell also discusses the concept of gender according to both language (e.g. masculine and feminine adjectives in Italic languages) and culture (e.g. Buginese people of Indonesia recognise 5 genders, the Native American Zuni tribe recognises 3, etc.), and she reflects on a hope for more equal linguistic and cultural treatment of all genders.”

July: Inspector Singh

If you need vacation reading for the Northern summer, check out Detective Singh of the Singapore Police. The author, Shahimi Flint, has created an unusual detective character – an elderly overweight Singaporean Sikh – who will take you to crime scenes in Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the UK. Each episode combines a thrilling murder investigation with a deep dive into local culture, language, and social issues.

A lawyer herself, Flint brings a keen social awareness to her novels, and I learned more about the Khmer Rouge trials from A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree than from any other source.

1. Flint, S. (2009). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder. Hachette.
2. Flint, S. (2009). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul. Hachette.
3. Flint, S. (2010). Inspector Singh Investigates: The Singapore School of Villainy. Hachette.
4. Flint, S. (2011). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree. Hachette.
5. Flint, S. (2012). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Curious Indian Cadaver. Hachette.
6. Flint, S. (2013). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Calamitous Chinese Killing. Hachette.
7. Flint, S. (2016). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Frightfully English Execution. Hachette.

August: Speech and the City

Matras, Y. (2024). Speech and the City: Multilingualism, Decoloniality and the Civic University. Cambridge University Press.

Speech and the City tells the story of ‘Multilingual Manchester’ and how an academic project succeeded in shifting the monolingual habitus. The book also offers an intriguing glimpse into the author’s distinguished career as a linguist, scholar, and activist.

Abstract: The Brexit debate has been accompanied by a rise in hostile attitudes to multilingualism. However, cities can provide an important counter-weight to political polarisation by forging civic identities that embrace diversity. In this timely book, Yaron Matras describes the emergence of a city language narrative that embraces and celebrates multilingualism and helps forge a civic identity. He critiques linguaphobic discourses at a national level that regard multilingualism as deficient citizenship. Drawing on his research in Manchester, he examines the ‘multilingual utopia’, looking at multilingual spaces across sectors in the city that support access, heritage, skills and celebration. The book explores the tensions between decolonial approaches that inspire activism for social justice and equality, and the neoliberal enterprise that appropriates diversity for reputational and profitability purposes, prompting critical reflection on calls for civic university engagement. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about ways to protect cultural pluralism in our society.

September: Multilingual Crisis Communication

Li, J., & Zhang, J. (Eds.). (2024). Multilingual crisis communication: Insights from China. Taylor & Francis.

This book is the latest outcome of out team’s focus on the communication challenges raised by the Covid-19 pandemic. Li Jia and Jenny Zhang have edited a diverse collection featuring the research of emerging researchers from China.

Abstract: Multilingual Crisis Communication is the first book to explore the lived experiences of linguistic minorities in crisis-affected settings in the Global South, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. China has been selected as a case of inquiry for multilingual crisis communication because of its high level of linguistic diversity. Taking up critical sociopolitical approaches, this book conceptualizes multilingual crisis communication from three dimensions: identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.
Comprising eight main chapters, along with an introduction and an epilogue, this edited book is divided into three parts in terms of the demographic and social conditions of linguistic minorities, as indigenous, migrant, and those with communicative disabilities. This book brings together a range of critical perspectives of sociolinguistic scholars, language teachers, and public health workers. Each team of authors includes at least one member of the research community with many years of field work experience, and some of them belong to ethnic minorities. These studies can generate new insights for enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of multilingual crisis communication.
This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of multilingualism, intercultural communication, translation and interpreting studies, and public health policy.

October: Critical Sociolinguistics

Del Percio, A., & Flubacher, M.-C. (Eds.). (2024). Critical sociolinguistics: dialogues, dissonance, developments. Bloomsbury.

The editors of this alternative festschrift dedicated to Monica Heller have assembled a team of 60 contributors to create an intriguing kaleidoscope of experiments in academic writing and knowledge creation.

Abstract: Providing a series of crucial debates on language, power, difference and social inequality, this volume traces developments and dissonances in critical sociolinguistics. Eminent and emerging academic figures from around the world collaboratively engage with the work of Monica Heller, offering insights into the politics and power formations that surround knowledge of language and society.
Challenging disciplinary power dynamics in critical sociolinguistics, this book is an experiment testing new ways of producing knowledge on language and society. Critically discussing central sociolinguistic concepts from critique to political economy, labor to media, education to capitalism, each chapter features a number of scholars offering their distinct social and political perspectives on the place played by language in the social fabric. Through its theoretical, epistemological, and methodological breadth, the volume foregrounds political alliances in how language is known and explored by scholars writing from specific geopolitical spaces that come with diverse political struggles and dynamics of power. Allowing for a diversity of genres, debates, controversies, fragments and programmatic manifestos, the volume prefigures a new mode of knowledge production that multiplies perspectives and starts practicing the more inclusive, just and equal worlds that critical sociolinguists envision.

November: Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples

Pahom, O. (2024). Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples: gender roles and language choices. Bloomsbury.

This meticulous study of Spanish-English bilingual couples’ conversational storytelling shows how the middle ground in intercultural communication is found when people talk and listen to each other in everyday interactions.

Abstract: For more than three decades, the percentage of people who married someone of a different race, ethnicity, culture, or linguistic background has been on the rise in the United States, but the communication practices of such couples have remained understudied. Combining bilingualism, gender studies, and conversation analysis, this book explores and describes the storytelling practices and language choices of several married heterosexual Spanish-English bilingual couples, all residing in Texas but each from different geographic and cultural backgrounds.
Based on more than 900 minutes of conversations and interviews, the book offers a data-driven analysis of the ways in which language choices and gender performance shape the stories, conversations, and identities of bilingual couples, which in turn shape the social order of bilingual communities. Using a combination of methodologies to investigate how couples launch, tell, and respond to each other’s stories, the book identifies seven main factors that the couples see as primary determinants of their choice of English and Spanish during couple communication. The use of conversation analysis highlights the couples’ own practices and perceptions of their language choices, demonstrating how the private language decisions of bilingual couples enable them to negotiate a place in the larger culture, shape the future of bilingualism, and establish a couple identity through shared linguistic and cultural habits.

December: Language Discordant Social Work

Buzungu, H. F. (2023). Language Discordant Social Work in a Multilingual World: The Space Between. Routledge.

This fascinating ethnography explores how social workers in Norway communicate with clients who speak little or no Norwegian. It is part of a growing number of studies of street-level bureaucrats in linguistically diverse societies – for another example, listen to our podcast interview with Clara Holzinger about Austrian employment officers.

Abstract: Based on ethnographic observations of encounters between social workers and people with whom they do not have a shared language, this book analyzes the impact of language discordance on the quality of professional service provision.
Exploring how street-level bureaucrats navigate the landscape of these discretionary assessments of language discordance, language proficiency, and the need for interpreting, the book focuses on four main themes:

• the complexity of social work talk
• the issue of participation in language discordant meetings
• communicative interaction
• the issue of how clarification is requested when needed, and whether professionals and service users are able to reach clarity when something is unclear

Based on the findings presented on these different aspects of language discordant talk, the consequences of language discordance for social work are presented and discussed, focusing primarily on issues at the intersection of language, communication, power, dominance and subordination, representation, linguicism, and ultimately, human rights and human dignity.
It will be of interest to all social work students, academics and professionals as well as those working in public services and allied health more broadly.

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

The transcript was edited by Brynn Quick.

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Livia: How long were you at Sydney for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Livia: Has no one done that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Livia: And it’s still making waves today!

Barbara: Still making waves today!

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WRONG. It turns out that typing “what is a systematic literature review” into Google will only overwhelm a new researcher! I came across plenty of journal articles that claimed to be explaining what an SLR was (and how that somehow differed from another term I was learning – a scoping review), but for the life of me I could not find a clear-cut set of instructions. All of the information seemed to be pitched at a level far above the one I was operating at, and I began to feel frustrated that I could not find a source that was putting this methodology into terms that the average person could understand. But I knew I needed to figure it out, so over the course of the next few weeks I read what felt like dozens of explainers and guides.

Eventually, my reading and furious note-taking paid off, because by the end of 2023 I had successfully completed my research, entitled “How are language barriers bridged in hospitals?: a systematic review”. But in the process, I had spoken to so many academics who also voiced their frustration that they couldn’t find explanations on how to conduct an SLR in clear lay terms, and so I knew I hadn’t been alone.

Something I feel VERY passionate about is that, as academics, we must be able to talk to people outside of academia, and that means that we need to be able to communicate complex ideas in easily digestible ways. Higher knowledge shouldn’t be reserved for people who have weeks to teach themselves a new research methodology, and I wanted to be able to explain an SLR to everyone, not just other researchers.

And so, I created this “SLR: Easy Guide” explainer for anyone and everyone who would like to conduct an SLR but has no idea where to start. If that’s you, please feel free to use this resource – and know that you aren’t alone as an early researcher who is learning things for the first time. We’ve all got to start somewhere, and we can make it easier on others by sharing what we’ve figured out the hard way!

FAQs

What exactly is a systematic literature review (SLR)?

Ok, so you know how you need to do a literature review before you write a research paper? In that literature review, you are basically summarising what other researchers have said about your research topic so that you can show how your research is building on prior knowledge.

An SLR is different to that. An SLR is your research (your “experiment”, if you will). In an SLR, you read and analyse lots of different published journal articles in order to see patterns in already-published data. There’s an actual methodology that you have to use (which I detail in SLR: An Easy Guide) in order to select these journal articles.

I haven’t heard of an SLR, but I’ve heard of a meta-analysis. What’s the difference?

Literally nothing. They mean the same thing! Surprise! Academia is fun and not at all confusing.

I’ve also heard of a scoping review. Is that the same as a systematic literature review?

In this case, there actually is a difference, albeit a relatively small one. The methodology for both types of reviews will be the same (whew!), but the reason for conducting one versus the other will be a bit different. Let me give you an example based on my own research. When I began looking into how hospitals manage linguistic diversity between patients and staff, I knew that there was already a lot of literature out there about the subject (generally having to do with the work of professional interpreters). I had four very specific research questions that I wanted to answer based on that literature. This is why I conducted a systematic review – because I already knew that I would be able to find existing research that could answer my questions.

HOWEVER, you might not know how much literature already exists on a given topic. Maybe your topic is fairly niche, so you haven’t seen much about it in publications. This is where a scoping review comes in. In conducting a scoping review, you’ll find out exactly how much literature on the topic already exists. In doing so, you’ll be able to make an argument for why a particular area of research should be looked into more.

If this still sounds confusing (totally understandable!), be sure to talk to a fabulous university librarian. They are really good at knowing the difference between the two!

Is there any kind of SLR “authority” that I should know about?

There sure is! There is an organisation called PRISMA (which stands for Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses). You can go to their website for two very crucial items that you will need for your SLR: a checklist and a flow chart.

The PRISMA checklist is great because it tells you exactly what you need to include in your SLR. The PRISMA flow chart is what you include in your SLR to show why/how you included and excluded studies during your screening process (which you can see in steps 3 and 4 of my SLR: An Easy Guide resource). But don’t worry, you don’t need to create the flow chart from scratch. If you use Covidence, the platform will create it for you. And speaking of Covidence…

This feels overwhelming! Is there one place I can go to manage all my SLR data easily?

Absolutely. I used Covidence, an online platform that essentially walks you through the SLR process. I would HIGHLY recommend using Covidence or a similar service to help you manage all your data in one place. Covidence will also automatically create your flow chart for you as you go through your screening process. What I especially liked about Covidence was that I was able to custom-create my data collection template based on my specific research questions. This made my data analysis much easier than it would have been without it!

What do I do if I’m still confused or feel like I don’t know how to do this?

Remember that every single one of us who goes on to do higher degree research feels like this. We don’t know what we don’t know! I’ve now completed two Masters degrees and am currently working on my PhD, and let me tell you, the learning curve is steep! But you know what? You can do it. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Tell your supervisors and colleagues when you feel lost. Remind yourself that learning these research skills is just as important as the research itself. And when you get super stressed, grab a cup of coffee, stand in the sunshine and take a 10-minute break. You’ve got this!

Download and cite my free “SLR: An Easy Guide” resource

“SLR: An Easy Guide” is a free cheat sheet for your systematic literature review. You can download it here.

If you find it useful, please cite as:

Quick, B. (2024). Systematic Literature Review: An Easy Guide. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://www.languageonthemove.com/systematic-literature-review-easy-guide

This book offers a highly readable, concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversies, and the role of the social and political context in shaping their ideas and methods.

In the conversation we focus on the national aspects of the story of modern linguistics: the emergence of the discipline in 19^th century Germany and the passing of the baton to make it an American science in the 20^th century.

James also shares the story of writing the book and how it grew out of the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast he hosts.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel 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.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 12/04/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr James McElvenny. James, is that how you pronounce your name?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that is how I pronounce my name, but I actually do like to encourage varying pronunciations because I think that will give philologists something to do after I die.

Dist Prof Piller: (laughs) Fantastic, so we’ll try another pronunciation like “Mackelveeney”.

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that’s perfect.

Dist Prof Piller: Dr McElvenny, or James, let’s just do it like that – James is a linguist and an intellectual historian at the University of Siegen in Germany. He is the author of “A History of Modern Linguistics” and also of “Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism”. He also hosts the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast.

Today we are going to talk about his new book, “A History of Modern Linguistics”, which has just come out from Edinburgh University Press. Welcome to the show, James.

Dr McElvenny: Thanks for having me on.

Dist Prof Piller: James, can you start us off by telling us how you got to write a “A History of Modern Linguistics”? Aren’t there enough histories of linguistics already?

Dr McElvenny: There are plenty of histories of linguistics. So, what happened is I was doing a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, and I was teaching their course in the history of linguistics while I was there, and the Linguistics editor at Edinburgh University Press came to me. I had already published my first book with them, and the Linguistics editor said that they would like a text book in the history of linguistics for their linguistics series. So, I thought, “Gee, that should be relatively easy. I can just base it on the course I’ve been teaching.”

And I also long had had the ambition of doing a podcast, so I thought that I might be able to imitate Peter Adamson who does the podcast “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps”, and he’s produced books with Oxford University Press based on that podcast. So, I thought, “I could just turn my lectures into a podcast, and I could turn the podcast into a book.”

It didn’t turn out to be quite as simple as that. So, moving from one text type to another, in my experience, was actually quite complicated. Podcasts have their own format and affordances, which I had to adapt my lectures to. And then turning that into a book was also a huge amount of work to make it into a coherent written text. But it’s done now, so… (laughs).

Dist Prof Piller: And it’s eminently readable, I really enjoyed reading the book so much. I think the process you’ve just described of trying out the text with your students and then turning it into a podcast and then turning it into the book really shows in the readability of the book. So, I enjoyed that immensely.

Dr McElvenny: I’m glad you think so.

Dist Prof Piller: Tell us – how did you actually choose where to begin and where to end, because it’s not a history of the longue durée from the Greek and Sanskrit grammarians to the present day. It’s actually a much narrower project. So, can you tell us about the beginning and the end?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so it’s meant to be a history specifically of disciplinary linguistics. By that I mean this modern discipline of linguistics that we study at universities. So, I think that there’s a great deal of value in a longue durée history of linguistics which is the modes that most histories that have previously been published are written in. They go back to ancient Greece and follow things through the medieval period and the early modern period, right up to the modern era.

That’s very good, but it’s more of a sort of old-fashioned history of ideas kind of approach. And I think there are some problems with that, like it sort of is based on the assumption that there are facts about the nature of language and that we’ve discovered them and that it’s a story of simple progress of us building on what has happened in the past. Of course, we do know a lot of things about language that are the direct result of the research that we do today at universities, but we’ve also forgotten a lot of what has come before. We also have, as university researchers in linguistics departments, we also have a very specific perspective on language. There is much, much more that could be said.

So, I think that it can be problematic to assimilate everything that has come before to say that that is all a prelude to what we do now. All of those things that have come before need to be understood on their own terms. Each of those need their own book, and they have their own books. So, I thought I would start when this modern discipline starts. And I don’t say that nothing came before. I actually do refer back to things that came before when they’re relevant to what is happening in the modern discipline. But I do place a boundary there and say, “This is when the modern discipline starts”. And I say that it’s around the beginning of the 19^th century when modern research universities came into being, the first of those being the University of Berlin, and linguistics as a modern university discipline started to develop.

As for the end point, well that has its own story as well. I actually wanted to come much closer to the present, but I also wanted to get the book finished before my funding ran out. This is one of the contingencies of being a researcher in modern linguistics. So, I decided to end it with WWII where there’s a major shift that the sort of centre of gravity of linguistics as a discipline, and of lots of other university disciplines, shifted from Europe to America. There’s the beginnings of that shift in the book, so I talk about figures like Bloomfield and Sapir, and the so-called American Structuralists, but I don’t venture into the sort of Cold War period when America became preeminent.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and look, I think that makes a whole lot of sense, even if it was sort of an extraneous reason. So, you just stated that essentially the book starts with the foundation of the modern research university in Germany in Berlin University. I’d still like to go one little step before that because your book actually starts with Sir William Jones and the discovery, if you will, of the Indo-European language family. Can you tell us a bit about Sir William Jones and why you started there and what was novel about his work?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean I think it’s easy to over-emphasise the role of Sir William Jones. So, this is the traditional fable of how modern Linguistics came into being. So, I repeat it in the book, but I mark it as the traditional fable. I mention that as soon as Linguistics started to form as a discipline, people started writing histories of Linguistics, and this story that started to develop that there was Sir William Jones and then Schlegel and Bop and then Grimm, and so I repeat it, like I rehearse this story because this is designed as an introduction to the history of Linguistics so that people are aware that this is the traditional narrative.

But at the same time, I try to poke holes in it. So, Sir William Jones is well known because he was a British judge in Calcutta and was very interested in philology. In fact, he probably went to India to pursue his philological interests. He studied Sanskrit, and he gave a famous address where he pointed out the similarities between Sanskrit and ancient Greek and Latin and said that this must mean that they came from a common ancestor. Then this has sort of been taken as the beginning of historical comparative Linguistics.

But if you actually read Sir William Jones’ address, you immediately see that this is not modern Linguistics as we understand it. The framework that he’s putting this genealogical narrative into is actually a Biblical framework. He’s talking about the sons of Noah spreading across the Earth, and that’s how he identifies the families of languages in the world today. So, it’s a sort of medieval hangover.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I really like that idea of the medieval hangover as you put it, and that still we have medieval ideas baked into modern Linguistics. So, let’s then go from William Jones to the German foundations of modern Linguistics. Essentially, you are telling a story of a national discipline that’s grounded in two nations, if you will. The beginnings in Germany in the 19^th century and then the passing of the baton, if you will, to the United States in the 20^th century.

So, why Germany? What was going on in Germany at the time that provided this fertile ground for the creation of this new discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, above all it’s the creation of the research university which is in no small part an achievement of Humboldt, Wilhelm Humboldt, who was himself very interested in language and made sure that professorships in language were represented in the new research university in Berlin and brought Bop to Berlin to pursue his comparative approach to grammar.

But there’s also a broader social and political context which comes out very clearly in the story of Grimm of German nationalism, of trying to show that people who speak German are a unified national group. This is before the days of Germany as a political unit, so it was a project to try and raise German national consciousness as a way of forging a political unity, and also to create a history for the German nation because the great rivals of the Germans at this time, the French, could trace their own intellectual history back to classical Rome, back to the ancient world, whereas the Germans had nothing. They just had barbarians as their ancestors.

But through historical comparative Linguistics, you could show that the Germans actually belonged to this bigger Indo-European family, you know, that links them up with Sanskrit, an even older, more prestigious tradition as was understood in 19^th century Europe.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. So, can you maybe talk us through some of the key linguistic ideas about what’s new in language now? So, if we start with, you’ve mentioned Bop and Grimm – what’s key for Bop and Grimm and maybe the neogrammarians?

Dr McElvenny: Ok, what’s key? Well, the key methodological breakthroughs that they made – so Bop went through the meticulous task of comparing in excruciating detail the conjugational forms across the European languages, and thereby provided a basis of reconstructing to the ancestor that they could have come from. So, instead of talking in sort of general terms about similarity, you could actually show in detail what the ancestral forms would have looked like.

And then Grimm is usually credited with establishing the principles of sound laws, so showing how specific sounds have changed historically over time.

Dist Prof Piller: And I guess this methodological innovation really was new in a sense and was not necessarily well-received by all the key players at the time. Many people sort of thought that Bop in particular was really pedantic. You cite this nice little limerick of sorts about how he’s really a pedant. So, what’s the tradition against which Linguistics established itself as this very formal and very narrow discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so I mean these grammatical tasks, or these details of grammar that people like Bop were interested in that form the basis of comparative grammar were traditionally considered just to be something that you had to know about in order to read texts in an ancient language. The real task was understanding the culture and the literature that is written in these ancient languages and not to obsess about the grammatical forms.

But Bop, for the first time, spearheaded this tradition where grammar becomes the really important thing. You can make your entire career just out of comparing forms, and the literature, what is actually written in the language, is completely irrelevant. Or is of secondary importance.

I think it’s probably fair to say that this is something that characterises Linguistics as a discipline, that Linguistics as a discipline has this sort of fetishisation of form, by which I mean that Linguists want something that their discipline is about. They want an object that they study that is different from what everyone else has. The traditional philologists have literature and culture and so on.

But the linguists have the language itself. They have the grammar. They have the forms. So it’s all about separating the form off. This is what Bop has done, and then with the neogrammarians who you mentioned, they turn this into an art that the sound laws of how languages change become THE key thing. That’s what it’s all about.

Then even if you move into the structuralist era, you could understand Saussure’s distinction between la langue and la parole as being a further manifestation of this desire to hive off language as a special thing that linguists study themselves. La langue is the formal system of the language –

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and it’s an imagined system, right? I mean, he claims or posits this exists and parole is not interesting, but really –

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean it is controversial whether Saussure thought that there could never be any – whether Saussure thought that parole was not interesting at all as a scientific object, but definitely he is usually understood as saying la langue is where all the action is.

Dist Prof Piller: So your book covers these 200 years of intellectual history. There are 15 chapters, and we don’t really have time to go into all of them, but I think you’ve told us very nicely about the German context and where this obsession with form really starts. Let’s maybe jump close to the end of your story, but not quite to the end, not quite to structuralism which is the logical conclusion of the formal obsession. But one step before Sapir and Whorf.

One thing that I’ve noticed, I mean obviously not for the first time, but it’s very clear that the history of modern Linguistics is the history of monolingualism, of national languages, and that there really, because of the way it got started, there really is no interest in language contact and multilingualism and linguistic diversity.

Sapir and Whorf are actually credited with being interested in linguistic diversity. That was actually very important to them, and also drawing on Boaz. So maybe can you tell us a bit about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in quotation marks for everyone who can’t see us. How is that sort of close to the end of your story?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, sure. I’ll quickly say too on the topic of 15 chapters – yeah so there are 15 chapters with content that tell the story, and then an introduction and a conclusion. But I think saying 15 chapters sort of misrepresents the style of the book because it makes it sound like it’s a gigantic tome, but it’s actually a really short book. It’s like, 200 pages, and the chapters are really short. It’s made to be very snappy.

Dist Prof Piller: And it is snappy! It’s really very readable. Sorry to kind of create an impression as this being – I mean I guess we can’t really cover all of these developments here in our conversation.

Dr McElvenny: On the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, yeah, and linguistic diversity, I mean this is a very interesting question. It depends a little bit on what you mean by linguistic diversity, but perhaps what you’re getting at with Sapir and Whorf is this interest in indigenous languages of America and other parts of the world. So, indigenous as opposed to the written standardised languages familiar from the European countries, and that is definitely something they were interested in.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is well known, and you put it in inverted commas because neither Sapir nor Whorf formulated a hypothesis in the sense of something that could be tested, like something could be tested with experiments.

Dist Prof Piller: Could you maybe just tell our audience how the name came about? So, neither of these two men ever claimed that they had formulated a hypothesis, and still that’s all we can think of now. I mean, it’s one of the most well known linguistic facts, if you will, outside the academy.

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, the first attestation of the term as far as I’m aware, in print, comes from Harry Hoijer, who had been a student of Sapir’s from the 1950s, so after both Sapir and Whorf had died. Hoijer used the term in the context of a conference that he had convened on the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, so on the idea that there’s some sort of connection between language and thought, or perhaps that even language influences thought.

Sapir and Whorf didn’t formulate a hypothesis as such, but they definitely wrote lots of things about the interplay between language and thought. Whorf perhaps more so. I think one of the most, well there’s a few interesting things that can be said about the background to both Sapir and Whorf’s ideas on linguistic relativity as you could also describe it. One is that there is a German tradition which Sapir was directly in touch with, and Boaz as well who was Sapir’s doctoral supervisor and mentor. This goes back to Humboldt and so on, and that’s also something I talk about in the book.

But there’s also a contemporary context for Sapir emphasising linguistic relativity, that language creates a worldview and shapes how we see the world, and Whorf too for that matter. This contemporary context is there was a lot of discussion on a political level on propaganda in the period between WWI and WWII. This was the era in which totalitarianism arose in central Europe and eastern Europe as well. There was a feeling that propaganda often had a linguistic basis, that it was a deliberate abuse of language to shape the way people think, to sort of brainwash them.

This finds an expression also in the philosophy of the period, so in early analytic philosophy or in the earliest works that fed into what later became analytic philosophy of people like Bertrand Russell, but even Wittgenstein, you can see this discourse that we need to purify language in order to be able to think clearly and logically. So, this is what motivated Russell’s Logical Atomism. He says this as much in his scholarly writings but also in his popular writings where he’s presenting his ideas.

And there was a whole ecosystem of popular books, so like The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards, which forms the basis, or is one of the major works that I talk about in my first book Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism. But also Korzybski with General Semantics, and so on. There’s a whole heap of these.

So, I think that it’s fair to say that Sapir in emphasising linguistic relativity was picking up on this discourse, and you can find Sapir also directly referring to this discourse of how language can be abused to brainwash people. I believe that Sapir was picking up on this discourse and using it as a justification for doing linguistic scholarship. So, Sapir says by studying diverse languages, so languages that have a very different structure from the familiar European languages, such as the indigenous languages of America, we can get a completely different view on the world. We can see how what we assume to be a fact is just an illusion created by our language. This also comes out very clearly in Whorf’s writings, and Whorf is perhaps more explicit about it too.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I was fascinated by how you describe that. Partly the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a form of language critique, and of course that feeds into another key tension that runs through modern Linguistics, the tension between descriptivism and prescriptivism and whether we just describe language or we actually engage with the meanings of language.

Before we end, I’d like to quickly draw one other kind of dichotomy or tension that also comes out really nicely in your book, and that is sort of the establishment of Linguistics as a scientific discipline, and the ambition to be scientific, but at the same time the constant undercurrent of all kinds of romantic ideas. There is the German Romanticism but also the romanticisation of ancient India for instance, so that’s a big topic. Or then Whorf and his spiritual world view.

So, can you maybe talk about this tension a bit more as Linguistics as a science, but Linguistics also as a romantic philosophy or the spiritual undercurrents?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, definitely. This is actually a topic that is much broader than disciplinary Linguistics itself. It has to do with what is considered in this period from the 19^th century to the present, what is considered legitimate scholarship and what is considered science.

So, the English word “science” generally only refers to natural science. We make a clear distinction between the sciences in the sense of the natural sciences and the humanities. I can’t really think if there’s a superordinate term that would cover both of those. I don’t know in English; I don’t think so. Scholarship?

Dist Prof Piller: Hmm, “research”?

Dr McElvenny: Research, yeah, research perhaps. But in the European context, like Wissenschaft, can also be, it can be Geisteswissenschaften, Naturwissenschaft – well do they have their own methods? And do they have their own objects of study? Or are they both two different manifestations of the same thing? This is a debate that ran throughout the 19^th century and influenced Linguistics.

So, by the end of the century, well, if we start at the beginning of the century, the Humboldtian university was very much oriented towards the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften. They were the more important ones, and the natural sciences were considered to be less prestigious. But as the century bore on, the natural sciences could show all sorts of amazing discoveries in fundamental physics in chemistry, and all sorts of really interesting and useful applications of these discoveries in the development of technology – so electricity and new medicines and new chemicals that were synthesised and so on.

So, the natural sciences grew in prestige during the 19^th century, and by the 1880s this became a bit of a sticking point for the humanities, and in Linguistics there was this question of whether Linguistics should orient itself towards the natural sciences or whether it should claim its own special method as one of the humanities. The neogrammarians, of course, were very strongly on the natural science end of this debate with their emphasis on sound laws, saying that these are a kind of natural law.

But critics of the neogrammarians, people like Schuchardt, were saying that that doesn’t make any sense, that the sound laws are not like natural laws because they have limited applicability. They only work in a single language or a single dialect, and they only work for a certain period of time. They go to completion, so they can’t be equated to things like the law of gravity, which applies everywhere in the universe. So, someone like Schuchardt argued it’s just trying to grasp at the prestige, incorrectly, of the natural sciences by importing this to Linguistics.

I say that this came to a head in the 1880s, but it was already building up through the century. Schleicher, another figure who I talk about in the book, in mid-century was already going down this path where the debate was more in terms of materialism, as I described in the book, which is more a debate about whether laws of matter, like laws of physics, tell us everything we need to know about the world, or whether there is a special world of the soul or world of the mind that exists separately from this.

This debate continued after this period. It didn’t end in the 19^th century, but it’s probably fair to say that the model that has won out in Linguistics is very much a scientistic model that wants to orient Linguistics as a discipline to a sort of natural scientific conception of the world.

Dist Prof Piller: One question maybe. So, for a sociolinguist like myself, one thing that is very noticeable in your history is that there really was no place in the story of the birth of modern Linguistics, there was no place for linguistic diversity. There was no place for language contact. There was no place for multilingualism and all those kinds of things that weren’t clearly tied to “one nation, one language”, if you will.

So, can you maybe talk a bit about this history that is not there and how that got back into Linguistics again? Or how it was written out?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I think it was written out because of this form fetishism, of this obsession with the language as the object of study that is an entity in its own right, and the job of the linguist is to describe its grammar and so on. Because if you make the language into the thing that you are studying, then there’s no space for speakers. It’s not about people speaking language, it’s about this abstract thing that exists independently of them.

But even in the 19^th century, you know, I talk about William Dwight Whitney. Even William Dwight Whitney in the mid 19^th century started to talk about diversity in texts, so he still had a philological method where he was analysing written texts, but he looked at the distribution of different sounds in the texts. He produced tables and calculated statistically how sound was distributed, not using the sophisticated statistical methods that we know today, but still talking in terms of percentages and using that to describe tendencies in the development of languages. On a theoretical level he also talked about the individual speaking subject and how people interacting with each other in language will influence each other, and how an individual might innovate a change, but then it has to be ratified by the speech community to become part of the language.

There were other figures as well into the latter half of the 19^th century who talked about the speaking subject and their place in the community of speakers. But it is definitely true that this was a minority, an oppositional position that you could take in studying language because the default position in Linguistics was to talk about the language as an abstract thing.

The introduction of modern sociolinguistics, or the advent of modern sociolinguistics, is probably, I think it’s fair to say, a phenomenon mostly of the post WWII era. So, it definitely has roots that go back earlier than that, but as a sub-discipline in its own right it’s a post WWII thing. So, you’ll have to wait for volume II of the book to be able to find out about that.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s brilliant. So is that what’s next for you, James? Volume II? Post World War?

Dr McElvenny: Well, if I get funding, yes. (laughs)

Dist Prof Piller: Brilliant. So looking forward to that and very much hope you’ll get the funding. Thanks again, James.

Thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Until next time!

Ana Bruzon presenting her PhD research at ECREA conference in Rotterdam

As a third-year PhD candidate in the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, I recently had the awe-inspiring opportunity to travel to Europe as a visiting researcher at Hamburg University. I presented my research at two international conferences and delivered a seminar. Here, I reflect on a fantastic professional development experience that has enriched my PhD studies and will undoubtedly shape me as an early career researcher.

The Postgraduate Research Fund opportunity at Macquarie University

Higher Degree Research (HDR) students at Macquarie University can apply for an internal grant, the Postgraduate Research Fund (PGRF). PGRF is a generous and competitive award aimed at teaching HDR students grant writing skills whilst allowing us to build an international platform to disseminate our research and promote academic collaboration.

In my application, I had to explain how my planned research visit would enhance my doctoral thesis and align with the University’s strategic objectives. One of Macquarie’s objectives is “to prepare world-ready HDR candidates”. The concept of being ‘world-ready’ deeply resonates with me, and I believe that the best way to embody a world-ready HDR candidate is through connection and collaboration.

Therefore, my goal was to become an internationalised researcher, as Macquarie University envisions for its graduate students, by learning from and with colleagues in Europe. When my grant application was successful, I sought every opportunity to provide an international platform for my research and make new connections for future collaborations. My journey offered me a wealth of opportunities to achiveve that goal.

Conference attendance

The first stop on my journey was Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where I attended the conference of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). The conference topic was ‘Transnational families and media practices: methods, ethics and critical approaches’. At this interdisciplinary conference with attendees from around the globe, I presented the results of my study about ‘Using technology in transnational bilingual parenting’ in a dedicated PhD workshop and during the main conference. In Rotterdam, I connected with fellow PhD students from different corners of the world and met senior academics who contributed to my critical thinking about ethnographic work.

One of the conference highlights was the opportunity to learn from Dr Tanya Ahlin, a lecturer at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science, who shared her vision as an anthropologist about ethical challenges when studying transnational families and presented her new book, ‘Calling Family: Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives’.

Ana Bruzon (r) with Next Generation Literacies colleagues Professor Yongyan Zheng (Fudan U, Shanghai) and Dr Pia Tenedero (U of Santo Tomas, Manila) in Hamburg

Visiting network partners

From Rotterdam I travelled to Hamburg in Germany, where I had the privilege to be a visiting researcher at Hamburg University as a guest of world-renowned Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Ingrid Gogolin. During my stay in Hamburg, I also had the pleasure of representing Macquarie at the Next Generation Literacies (NGL) Network Conference. The NGL network promotes international collaboration in the field of literacy and multilingualism and is a program jointly organised by Fudan, Macquarie, and Hamburg universities.

As Language on the Move readers will know, the theme of the NGL network conference was ‘Social Participation in Linguistically Diverse Societies.’ The exciting program showcased global research on multilingualism and social participation in diverse settings. For me, one of the highlights of the conference was the keynote speech by Professor Piller, where she beautifully explained the legacies of the NGL network.

Also, I had the honour of presenting my study on the same panel as my associate supervisor, Dr Hanna Torsh, who shared her study ‘Ten years on Revisiting family language policy’. Another high point was Associate Professor Tenedero’s reflections on being a network member and how the mentorship program shaped her as an early career researcher. In her reflections at the end of the two-day conference, she proposed the metaphor of research-water. Tenedero clearly explained that ‘water, like research, can look and taste different depending on where I am, who I do it with, and what my purpose is. But, the purpose is always to serve life’. Personally, I also parted this conference and closed my time in Hamburg full of renewed life and new refreshing ideas for the last stretch of my PhD journey.

Seminar presentation

The last stop on my itinerary was London, where I had the privilege of conducting a seminar at the Centre for Applied Linguistics in UCL hosted by Associate Professor Perez-Milans. In this seminar, I had another opportunity to share my findings with an engaged audience and to receive valuable feedback. In London, I also continued to make connections as a Macquarie representative and think about the next steps of my career as a novice researcher.

Building lasting academic connections

For me, the PGRF experience meant building academic relationships that will surely last a lifetime. Being part of Macquarie University, the Language on the Move team, and the Next Generation Literacies network opened the doors to travel to Europe, connect, and build bridges for prospective international collaborations, that is to be ‘world-ready’ and better prepared for the future. As I reflect on how to be successful in academia, one needs to acknowledge that it is always part of something larger and that collaboration forms the foundation for a solid academic career. My PGRF journey has filled me with incredible memories and lessons about connection and collaboration that will accompany me for the remainder of my journey as a PhD student and into my postdoctoral career beyond.

The annual Language on the Move Reading Challenge is designed to encourage broad reading at the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life.

Challenge yourself to read one book in each category throughout the year!

January: A book that is critical of the AI hype

With the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, AI hype reached new heights in 2023, including in academia and linguistics. If you have not yet done so, it is high time to educate yourself about algorithms, large language models, and generative information technologies. A great way to start is the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us hosted weekly by tech journalist Paris Marx.

Each show comes complete with show notes, which often include excellent reading recommendations. Books I have picked up based on recommendations on Tech Won’t Save Us include Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil, Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant, and Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil. I recommend all of them to you warmly.

February: A book that delves deeper into language and digitization

In a world where more people have access to a mobile phone than to adequate sanitation, it should not come as a surprise that digital technologies are fundamentally changing how we use language. This is particularly true of people on the move who rely on mobile technologies to communicate in their new environments, to learn languages, or to stay connected with dispersed family and friends.

Some excellent recent books that will help you explore the intersections of new technologies and linguistic diversity include Parenting for a Digital Future by Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross, Language, Migration and Multilingualism in the Age of Digital Humanities, an open access collection edited by Ignacio Andrés Soria , Sandra Issel-Dombert and Laura Morgenthaler García, and Mobile assisted language learning by Glen Stockwell. The latter was a runner-up for the 2023 BAAL Book Prize.

March: A book about language and magic

The prevalence of mediated content has meant that influencers have become the lodestars of people’s lives and deep fakes have collapsed the line between fact and fiction. This fundamentally changes what it means to know anything. Ontologically, belief in magic is making a comeback.

Therefore, going back to learn about language and magic becomes essential to understanding the future. Tazin Abdullah recommends Language and Magic by Toshihiko Izutsu:

This book was first published in 1956 and you might wonder why recommend this book in 2024? Written in English by a Japanese sociolinguist, it offers access to ideas about language use from outside of the European and American academic sphere. The very first highlight is the style of writing itself – strikingly personal and an insight into the writer’s philosophical orientation. Examining what language has symbolized historically in various cultures and traditions, this book offers intriguing observations on the magical functions of words and their impact on the way speakers think and behave.

April: A book about names and naming

Names and naming have always been a major part of language magic. Just think of Rumpelstiltskin, whose magic powers rest on his name not being known.

In a diverse society, names present their own challenges as different naming conventions come into contact and sometimes collide. How to use names appropriately and respectfully can become a major conundrum and that’s why a book about names and naming should go onto your reading list for 2024.

Agnes Bodis recommends Say my name by Joanna Ho and illustrated by Khoa Le:

This beautifully written and illustrated children’s book provides a journey into cultures and names, highlighting how our names express our identity through their link to people, stories, and language. The book features six children from Chinese, Tongan, Persian, Dine, Mexican and Ghanaian cultural backgrounds sharing their names and stories, accompanied by beautiful illustrations, which provide a stunning multimodal expression of cultural identity. I especially appreciate the way the book values the spatial and historical aspect of names: each name is built up by building blocks of language that were “constructed over oceans and across generations”. It also teaches readers to value the correct pronunciation of names. The publisher’s site provides a downloadable ‘teaching guide” for educators and parents to engage with the book on a deeper level.

May: A book about multilingualism in history

We’ve heard a lot about how language in the 21^st century is different from anything that has come before: it’s supposedly more multi, more metro, more trans. This narrative is starting to fray as more research about multilingual societies through the ages come out. One of the most important of these is the new collection Multilingualism and History edited by Aneta Pavlenko.

Readers of Language on the Move will have been waiting for this book for a while, as we first spoke to the editor, Aneta Pavlenko, about it in late 2021, when we asked “Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism?” There probably is no answer to that question and Multilingualism and History does not pretend to have one, but it offers a panorama of multilingual contexts from antiquity to the 20^th century. The book will forever put to rest the idea that linguistic diversity in the present is new.

For those who read German, Historische Mehrsprachigkeit [Multilingualism in History] edited by Rita Franceschini, Matthias Hüning und Péter Maitz, promises another rich collection of historical case-studies. This open access title is due to be released on December 31.

June: A book about translanguaging

One of the conceptual frameworks that has taken applied linguistics by storm in recent years is “translanguaging.” Earlier this year, we had a chance to speak to one of its key thinkers, Professor Ofelia García, here on Language on the Move.

For those who want a more in-depth read, Jie Fan recommends Pedagogical Translanguaging by Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter:

This 2021 title in the Cambridge University Press series “Elements in Language Teaching” is designed for educational practitioners. It deals with the concept of translanguaging and pedagogical translanguaging, and explores multilingual approaches to language assessment and how it can be valuable for the preservation of endangered languages. This book contributes significantly to the fields of multilingualism and sociolinguistics by challenging monolingual ideological stances and acknowledging linguistic diversity and inclusion. It is a useful guide for novice teacher educators and researchers who may not be conversant with the the latest sociolinguistic multilingualism research.

July: A novel about linguistic diversity

Since its inception, we have regularly included works of fiction in the Language on the Move Reading Challenge. This year is no different. Fiction allows us to explore linguistic diversity holistically through art, and can produce deeper insights than academic texts alone. Also, it’s the middle of the year and you might need the excitement of novel-reading to keep going.

Emily Pacheco, a Master of Research student at Macquarie University, recommends The House With All The Lights On: Three generations, one roof, a language of light by Jessica Kirkness:

This novel is a memoir from a Goda (Grandchild of Deaf adults) explaining the cultural and linguistic  experience they had growing up with their grandparents. The book explains the navigation of Deaf and hearing cultures in Australia with grandparents who migrated and have a native language of BSL (British Sign Language). It is a great novel that shares the experience Deaf-hearing families have and showcases a perspective (Goda) that is not widely written about.

August: A book about linguistic diversity and social justice

Research related to social justice has exploded since the 2016 publication of my Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice book. Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, a PhD student at Fudan University and UNSW, still recommends the book:

Rooted in real-world instances, this book offers invaluable insights into how language shapes economic inequality, cultural dominance, and political participation. It’s an inspirational read, particularly for early career researchers, broadening their understanding of the intricate role of language in social dynamics. The book is more than an academic discourse; it’s a call to recognize the power of language, the resilience of individuals, and the richness of humanity. A truly enlightening read that sparks ongoing conversations about language’s pivotal role in social (in)justice.

2023 also saw the publication of the Arabic translation:

التنوع اللغوي والعدالة الاجتماعية, translated by Abdulrahman Alfahad and published by King Saud University Press.

A brilliant related 2023 title is Global Language Justice edited by Lydia Liu and Anupama Rao. In my blurb for the book I wrote:

By interspersing academic essays with multilingual poems, Liu, Rao, and Silverman have assembled a rich, stimulating kaleidoscope of global explorations of the complex entanglements of language, environment, and technology in the 21st century.

September: A book about discursive construction

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” as Wittgenstein told us. To understand how these limits are made in different contexts, we have added a title about discursive construction to this year’s reading challenge.

National history provides ample examples of discursive constructions that are relevant to how we see linguistic diversity, and Hanna Torsh recommends Making Australian History by Anna Clark:

Who decides what is a nation’s history? Who are the history-makers? I loved this immensely readable book by esteemed historian Anna Clark, who deftly shows us that history is made by everyone, and not only in the form of written histories but in clay, in stone, and in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. In today’s conflict-ridden world it is more important than ever to think about how our collective identities are created and whose voices contribute to that collective imagining. A beautiful journey through major themes in history-making.

October: A book about language and emotions

Books about emotions in intercultural communication have been a mainstay of our annual reading challenge, and Brynn Quick recommends Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita.

Do all humans experience emotions in the same way? Does happiness in France look the same as happiness in Ethiopia or Japan? And what do emotions have to do with language? Is it possible to feel emotionally adept in one culture or language but not another? These are some of the questions that Batja Mesquita investigates in this fascinating book. This book is a pleasant and easy read (or listen! I recommend the Audible version), but it is packed with information about the intersection between psychology, culture, and language. Give this a read and ask yourself – Are Americans inherently fake and the Dutch inherently rude?

November: A sociolinguistic ethnography

Engaging with sociolinguistic ethnographies of linguistic diversity is the bread and butter of our research. Challenge yourself to read one of a context that may not be all that familiar to you!

Hard to recommend one because there are so many excellent titles but my favorite in 2023 was probably Multilingual Baseball by Brendan O’Connor. The book engagingly connects bilingual interactions – the focus is on English and Spanish – with wider questions of globalized corporate sports, migration, and race.

December: A migrant memoir

Like novels, memoirs provide unique insights into linguistic diversity and this year we recommend Solito by Javier Zamora. The book tells the harrowing but also inspiring story of a 9-year-old boy, who makes the journey from El Salvador to the United States as an unaccompanied minor. Also a beautiful example of bilingual storytelling.

Happy Reading!

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2023
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

International Women’s Day is a great opportunity to share news about the book and reflect on the strength of women’s academic collaborations.

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Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Vera Williams Tetteh

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Life in a new language

Life in a new language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years.

The aim is to understand the dual challenge of learning a new language while living one’s life through the medium of that language. This is a challenge that remains poorly understood and non-migrants tend to underestimate its severity and the hardships involved.

1. There is the shock of finding oneself in a new linguistic environment where you may not understand much of what is going on around you, while all the time being cognizant of the fact that not understanding what is going on may have acute repercussions for your wellbeing.
2. There is the difficulty of finding work that will not only pay the bills but also sustain your ambitions and self-worth. Most participants took years to recapture their careers, many never did.
3. To improve proficiency in the new language, migrants need to interact in the new language, a task that is made difficult by the frequent absence of interlocutors willing to indulge newcomers, a lack of common topics, and the pervasiveness of misunderstandings. Misunderstandings may go on to reverberate through future interactions as each misunderstanding leads to a loss of confidence that needs to be reclaimed over time.
4. Migration intrudes even into the most intimate domains of life and alters family roles and relationships. It is not only that familial obligations and duties are redistributed but also that new family tasks emerge. Prominent among these are new ways of parenting, including setting an—implicit or explicit—family language policy, and managing child language learning of both new and heritage languages. As children usually learn the new language faster, the potential impact of their superior (oral) proficiency on parental authority can become another tribulation for adult migrants.
5. Migration continues to be imagined as a point of difference from the idealized sedentary mainstream population of their destination. This difference often marks those with a migration history as perpetual outsiders to their new society. Difference may be audible in their ways of speaking and visible where they are differently racialized. Experiences of Othering, exclusion, discrimination, and racism based on such differences create another level of adversity, as migrants need to cope with micro-aggressions, invalidations, insults, and sometimes even assaults.
6. Migration severs the self into a before and after. As pre-migration habits and identities have disappeared, new selves with a new sense of belonging, home, and community need to be fashioned.

Through the voices of our participants, we document the magnitude and anatomy of these challenges. Understanding them leads to an appreciation of migrants’ courage, perseverance, and resilience.

Ethnographic data-sharing and re-use

The research behind Life in a new language was conducted over a period of more than 20 years in six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies. For this book project, we revisited those six projects, shared our data, and re-analyzed them to answer questions about language learning, employment, interaction, parenting, experiences with racism, and sense of belonging.

Our methodological approach was inspired by open science principles and the desire to share our data and to pool our existing resources to be able to paint a bigger picture of language and migration. While most researchers now accept the value of data sharing and reuse, implementation and practice remain patchy, particularly when it comes to qualitative data in the humanities and social sciences. In ethnographic research, data sharing and reuse is in its infancy as researchers struggle with questions on what open research might even mean for them and how to implement FAIR principles, i.e., making their data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. These problems are compounded by time pressures and the absence of tried and tested workflows for reanalyzing and bringing to publication shared datasets.

During one of our rare in-person writing workshops

As such, Life in a new language ventures into unchartered methodological territory. We explain the academic motivations, affordances and limitations we encountered in the book. Here, we want to share a more personal story.

The story behind the book

Life in a new language is co-authored by six academic women, who have collaborated over an extended period as members of the Language on the Move research team. Donna, Emily, Shiva, and Vera conducted their PhD research under Ingrid’s supervision, and Loy was mentored by Ingrid as an early career researcher.

As such, Life in a new language shows what can be done with linguistic ethnography and provides a working model for how to combine existing small datasets into larger longitudinal studies of a social phenomenon or practice. It also provides a framework for supervising academics and their doctoral students to create a research and publishing community of practice that connects separate higher degree research projects under a single, post-award project umbrella. Similarly, our study provides a model for early career and experienced scholars to work together to create and analyze big datasets from qualitative methods of inquiry.

Life in a new language is personal in yet another way. For the six of us, the intersection of language learning and settlement is not only an academic research topic. Beyond our academic expertise, we share with our participants the experience of being migrant speakers. Like our participants, our group of authors reflects the diversity of 21^st century Australia. All of us are settlers on Indigenous land. We or our ancestors have come to Australia from Germany, Ghana, Iran, Ireland, the Philippines, and Yugoslavia. Those four of us who came to Australia as adults share with our participants the experience of settling in a new country through the medium of a new language. Our experience as English language teachers and teacher trainers also informs our account. We hope that the way we have pooled our lived experiences in a unique intercultural team to write this book will add richness and depth to our account.

Meet each of the 130 migrants in our book over the next months in a serialized Twitter thread

First up: Katja from Poland
Katja’s engineering degree was not recognized in Australia. She retrained as a beautician. Tremendous skills loss for herself and our society
1/n https://t.co/ehvPDznp6f

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 7, 2023

Good things really do take time

Data collection on the first project to feed into our analysis started in 2000, but the idea for the book and the reanalysis of previously collected datasets started to take shape in 2018, just around the time one of us had a baby. Seeing this little person ready to start school now, has been the yardstick for how long it has taken us to turn a brilliant idea into a completed manuscript.

We not only got derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but we also discovered that writing a truly co-authored book with a team of six authors, who are not even co-located, is more challenging than anticipated. It is also much more rewarding and fun.

We learned that the principles of open science can be best brought to life through the spirit of collaboration, engagement, dialogue, and friendship that guided our endeavor. And we warmly recommend collaborative writing to all academic women this International Women’s Day because pooling strengths can better keep us all afloat.

What’s next?

We hope we have whetted your appetite for Life in a new language. The academic publication process is a protracted one and we will share key dates here on Language on the Move as they come to hand.

For now, people in Sydney might want to pencil our International Symposium on Bilingualism workshop devoted to the project into their diaries. For everyone else, we have started a Twitter series @lg_on_the_move, where you can meet one of each of our 130 participants per day while we count down to publication.

Related International Women’s Day content

• 2021, Remembering cancelled women
• 2020, Female academics and shamans face the same glass ceiling
• 2019, Why are there so few notable academic women?
• 2018, Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• 2013, Migrant women’s empowerment in the city
• 2012, Strange Academic women

Challenge yourself to read one book in each category! Our team have compiled an exciting list of suggestions.

January: Literature produced on the move

Ingrid Piller recommends the other side of hope.

The other side of hope is a UK-based literary magazine edited by refugees and immigrants. Publishing one print and one online issue per year, the magazine offers a smorgasbord of short stories, poems, novel extracts, non-fiction writing, and book reviews from a highly diverse group of writers. Many of the works deal with linguistic diversity and the challenges of language learning. The most recent issue contains two poems that will show you new dimensions of English as a lingua franca, and phonetics in a diverse world.

February: A book about open access

Emily Farrell recommends Open Access by Peter Suber.

How do we broaden the readership of our research, increase impact and trust in science? Open access and open research have become a vital part of the answer to this question. If you’re interested in getting a better understanding of the basics of open access, there’s no better place to start than Peter Suber’s succinct, but detailed, overview Open Access. Suber, Senior Advisor on Open Access (Harvard Library) and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project (the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society) is an authority on the topic. Although the book is over 10 years old, it remains relevant and Suber continues to update and supplement the book here.

March: A book about language on the move in cyberspace

Because Internet is out in paperback TOMORROW (for ordering-via-the-internet purposes, that's practically today)

Same bright yellow cover, now with 10x more nice quotes from people

Get it for anyone you communicate with online: https://t.co/YOl6jNrVZG pic.twitter.com/O7cL47cSxQ

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) July 20, 2020

Brynn Quick recommends Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch.

Have you ever wondered why Boomers’ well-meaning texts can be full of ellipses that make Millennials and Gen Z shudder?  Or why language evolves quickly on Twitter but not on Facebook?  What exactly is a “typographical tone of voice”, and why is it an essential part of our identities?  Gretchen answers these questions and more in this fascinating and highly readable 2019 book.  Whether you are a tech genius, a luddite, or something in between, Because Internet will take you on a journey into the world of language evolution via the internet of the past four decades.

April: A book about language on the move in a language other than English

Hanna Torsh recommends Warum Deutsch bellt und Französisch schnurrt [Why German barks and French purrs] by François Conrad.

This is a light-hearted and engaging exploration of the sounds of German in comparison to other languages of central Europe. The book describes the European travels of a young German student and his dog, Horst and Strumpf, as they meet up with multilingual friends in five countries and attempt to puzzle out the main phonological differences between their national languages. This he does at the behest of his friend Konrad, a linguist and researcher who knows the answers but wants his friend to work it out for himself.

May: A book about linguistic diversity in the workplace

Jean Cho and Madiha Neelam recommend Communication that Counts: Language Practice and Ideology in Globalized Accounting by Pia Tenedero.

Communication that counts demystifies a persistent stereotype that accountants are only good with numbers and bad with communication. With the accounting industry in the Philippines, a major exporter of human resources in Global South thanks to English language proficiency, as a key site of examination, this thought-provoking book challenges the conventional approaches to communication skills of accountants as lacking and deficient by exploring what counts as good communication and why. Written from a Global South Perspective, the book provides deep insights into the taken-for-granted communication “standards”, opening up a new perspective on the power of language ideologies in English-speaking workplaces and beyond. (Jean Cho)

The book examines the language and communication practices and ideologies in the field of accounting in the context of the Philippines. The author examines prevailing perspectives on “communication” and examines how these views are shaped in the accounting industry from the perspective of the Global South. The author also analyses the concept of “good communication” in the field of globalized accounting. The book is an excellent and practical example of how good communication is perceived globally and works in a real-world context, with the Philippines, which is a world leader in offshore accounting, rightly chosen as the research site. (Madiha Neelam)

For more information see “Language that counts.”

June: A book about linguistic diversity in the family

Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame by Hanna Torsh.

This book investigates linguistically intermarried couples’ language attitudes and practices in a migration context, specifically in Sydney, Australia. The monograph sets out to explore how ideologies influence family language policy in linguistic intermarriage and the attitudes towards languages other than English (LOTEs) from the perspective of the English-speaking partner (ESP). The author exposes the gendered nature of language work as an intrinsic part of motherhood. She compellingly argues that the linguistically intermarried couple is a “site where celebratory discourses of multilingualism meet exclusionary approaches to linguistic diversity” (p.1), as she could identify both pride and shame regarding LOTEs.

July: Take a break and read something completely different

Ingrid Piller recommends Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

Year after year I have watched the administrative dimensions of my job increase. Teaching used to be about knowing your content, deliver it in an engaging way, and examining students for graduation. Now, teaching also involves strategy development, performance targets, quality audits, program reviews, student evaluations, performance appraisals, and what not. Graeber explains this state of affairs as the “bullshitization” of work and explores its harm to individuals and societies.

August: A book about linguistic diversity in history

Vera Williams Tetteh recommends Sheroes of the Haitian Revolution, written by Bayyinah Bello with illustrations by Kervin Andre.

This book portrays ‘our story’ – stories of ten women of African descent who played key roles in the Haitian Revolution against European colonisers but who are often rendered invisible in ‘his story’ directed accounts. The book inserts these sheroes’ stories to boldly rectify some of the injustice served when women and their feats get systematically erased from ‘his story’ books. The book also profiles a collection of the women’s words while offering glimpses into ‘our story’ inscribed feminine brilliance, bravery, tenacity and the courage of the women which centuries on, live after them. For instance, it tells the fascinating story of Empress Felicite, including her active role in the writing of child protection clauses into the Imperial Constitution of 1805, as well as her Soup Joumou, a Haitian Independence Soup tradition she initiated which is observed yearly from 1^st to 7^th January. A great read!

September: An ethnography of linguistic diversity

Gegentuul Baioud recommends Mongolian Sound Worlds edited by Jennifer C. Post, Sunmin Yoon, and Charlotte D’Evelyn.

Scholars from different fields have written about the lifeways, diverse identities, histories, political economy, languages, and cultures of Mongols in the last few decades. But there is one lens through which we can gain a glimpse of how all these dimensions work together. That is Mongolian music-making. Mongolian Sound Worlds, edited by Jennifer C. Post, Sunmin Yoon, and Charlotte D’Evelyn vividly weaves all these threads together into a multicolored tapestry. The first part “Landscapes and soundscapes” focuses on how music-making constitutes place-making and memory-making and how musical practices shape and are shaped by changing lifeways. The second part, “Ethnicity and diversity”, explores how music-making practices constitutes a site to negotiate sub-ethnic group identities, gender, and cultural hierarchies. The third part, “Material and social history” introduces musical instruments from the perspectives of their makers and performers. The fourth part, “Heritage and globalization” deals with the key question of how Mongolian music-making has evolved in response to nationalization and globalization processes. The book Mongolian Sound Worlds is a compelling contribution to the fields of ethnomusicology, sociolinguistics, Inner Asia studies, heritage studies, and folklore studies.

October: A book about gendered multilingualism

Jean Cho recommends Muslim Women as Speakers of English by Madiha Neelam.

This book makes the voices of perhaps one of the most under-represented groups heard – Muslim immigrant women who speak English as their second language. The book demystifies the negative images of Muslim women, particularly those associated with English language proficiency, by exploring the intersections between language ideologies, gender and race. It innovatively exposes the covert operation of language ideologies as a tool to oppress minority groups through which to maintain the interest of the dominant. This important book opens up a critical perspective on the power of language ideologies in English-speaking countries and beyond.

November: A book about language workers

Pia Tenedero recommends Intercultural communication in interpreting: power and choices by Jean Cho.

This book opens with an unsettling vignette that gives a glimpse of the hidden linguistic-cum-moral dilemmas that professional interpreters navigate. Real-life narratives of these under-recognized intercultural communicators form the core of this book, viewed through cultural lenses that highlight tensions in their language work across differential linguistic and cultural contexts. In these highly complex communication scenarios, a big question is how to balance the norms of professional interpretation and the interpreter’s agency in order to communicate not just accurate messages but, perhaps more importantly, compassion. The stories of Jean’s fellow interpreters in Australia, Korea, and Japan provide readers a critical point of reflection—What would you do if you were the interpreter?

December: A book about language and globalization

Ingrid Piller recommends Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters.

I’m old enough to remember a time when the concept of “mental health” was not widely known outside psychiatric circles. Now, of course, we live in a mental health epidemic. Watters traces how Americans brought anorexia to Hong Kong, PTSD to Sri Lanka, schizophrenia to Zanzibar, and depression to Japan. None of these are strictly contagious diseases yet rampant individualism, commercialization, and the Western superiority complex have spread them like wildfire – all the while ignoring local idioms of distress and indigenous ways of coping with life’s traumas.

Happy Reading!

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

Loy is perfectly placed to model this balance, as she was recently recognized with a 2022 Lighthouse Award for a staff member who, in an exemplary fashion, models the values of the Faculty of Medicine, Health, and Human Sciences at Macquarie University.

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So proud of the special issue of Multilingua devoted to family language policy I guest-edited together with supportive colleagues

Balancing academic responsibilities of teaching, research, and service has become increasingly challenging under conditions of social acceleration. Of course, academics are not alone in having to deal with the speeding up of our lives under neoliberal capitalism, as I showed in a study with Filipino migrant workers in Australia.

Three of the key strategies I use to keep everything together while inspiring students and achieving excellence with grace are:

1. I always remember that as academics we are first and foremost teachers, so our main role is to inspire minds and hearts.
2. I strive to create synergies in my work by making sure my tasks and roles align with my passion and skills.
3. I surround myself with like-minded colleagues who can do the work with me and can spur me on to achieve our individual and collective goals.

In the following, I will show what I achieved in 2022 guided by these principles.

Teaching to inspire minds and hearts

One of the units I convene is “Professional and Community Engagement (PACE).” PACE is one of the hallmarks of a Macquarie University’s education. It places students in a work environment so that they can gain professional experience.

PACE provides students with an opportunity to experience a work environment and enhance their employability. Academics also derive benefits, as PACE provides a platform to connect research and teaching. In 2021, when I first convened this unit, I started an initiative where I invited colleagues in my department and beyond to host PACE students to work with them on their research.

In addition to organizing the work experience for all Linguistics students in our Department, I hosted six students this year, who were interested in finding out how sociolinguistic research is conducted. Together, we worked on a corpus study of migrant English in the media. This provided the students with an appreciation of what sociolinguistic research entails and constituted valuable research assistance for me.

Maybe some of my PACE students will progress to undertaking research degrees. Supervising higher degree research is another of my passions, where I achieve synergies between teaching and research.

Heritage language maintenance in Australia

As with teaching, collaboration is at the heart of my research endeavors.

One of my key publications this year was a special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Multilingual family language policy in monolingual Australia: multilingual desires and monolingual realities,” which I co-edited with my colleague, Dr Hanna Torsh.

This publication has a long history – and patience is another academic virtue! – and goes back to 2019. Back then, I was awarded a small research grant by the Australian Linguistics Society (ALS) for a research project entitled, “Understanding migrants’ multilingual practices: Evidence from Filipino families.” This project aimed to investigate heritage language maintenance practices of Filipino migrant families in Sydney.

On the back of data collection for the project, I co-hosted a themed panel devoted to “Linguistic diversity in Australian migrant families” at the 2019 ALS annual conference. The presentations at that panel eventually transformed into the articles that make up the special issue (for a full list of the contributions, see the reference below).

Sociolinguistics in Connection

Academic meetings are a great way to facilitate research collaborations, and as the outcome of the 2019 panel was published, we hosted another event that will hopefully lead to new research projects further down the track.

This event was a symposium devoted to “Sociolinguistics in connection: Towards a healthy and resilient society.” Funded by Macquarie University’s Linguistics Department’s Research Community Incubator Scheme, the symposium was intended to strengthen the Department’s applied sociolinguistics cluster.

Together with my co-organizers Dr Agi Bodis, Dr Jean Cho, A/Prof Peter Roger, and Dr Hanna Torsh we assembled around 30 colleagues from across the university and other universities in the Sydney region for an inspirational day of lightning talks and academic speed dating.

Snapping a group photo during the “Sociolinguistics in Connection” symposium

The aim of the symposium was to deepen and expand existing research strengths by providing a platform for colleagues from various disciplines who do research at the intersections of language, healthcare, and education in our linguistically diverse society.

Surrounding yourself with like-minded colleagues

In work as in life, it is essential that we surround ourselves with colleagues who support us and spur us on so we can become better versions of ourselves as researchers, teachers, and administrators. I have been very fortunate in my mentors, peers, and mentees. Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller has been a constant and consistent mentor and support in all my academic endeavors since 2008. She has also created the Language on the Move research group, which has inspired so many of us to conduct research that actually improves people’s lives.

I must also mention Emeritus Professor Pam Peters, who has supported my corpus linguistics research related to diverse Englishes, particularly in Australia and the Philippines.

Maintaining focus on students and community

I started off this blog post by saying that one of the challenges with working in today’s academia is balancing one’s teaching, research, and service duties. What this year’s endeavors and experiences have taught me is that if we remain focused on the heart of our profession – our students and our community – we will always be inspired to do more and do better.

References

Ellis, E. M., & Sims, M. (2022). “It’s like the root of a tree that I grew up from….”: parents’ linguistic identity shaping family language policy in isolated circumstances. Multilingua, 41(5), 529-548. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0100
Lising, L. (2021). ‘Speak English!’: social acceleration and language learning in the workplace. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2021.1955499
Lising, L. (2022). “I want her to be able to think in English”: challenges to heritage language maintenance in a monolingual society. Multilingua, 41(5), 549-569. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0106
Rubino, A. (2022). Family language policy and dialect-Italian dynamics: across the waves of Italo-Australian migrant families. Multilingua, 41(5), 571-589. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0095
Taylor-Leech, K. (2022). Transnational identities, being and belonging: the diverse home literacies of multilingual immigrant families. Multilingua, 41(5), 591-609. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0092
Torsh, H. I. (2022). ‘Maybe if you talk to her about it’: intensive mothering expectations and heritage language maintenance. Multilingua, 41(5), 611-628. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0105
Torsh, H. I., & Lising, L. (2022). Multilingual family language policy in monolingual Australia: multilingual desires and monolingual realities. Multilingua, 41(5), 519-527. doi:10.1515/multi-2022-0103

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon interviewing unidentified Yanomami people

Editor’s note: How do researchers in anthropology and sociology deal with linguistic diversity? Do they learn the language(s) of the people they work with or do they hire interpreters? Turns out that they are quite naive about language and do neither systematically, as new research by Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky shows. How to make good decisions about language choice and language mediation in fieldwork needs to become part of research training.

***

Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky

***

We have surveyed field researchers in sociology and anthropology programs in the United States and found only limited proficiency in field languages, accompanied by a widespread reliance on translators and interpreters. The scholars, therefore, did not dispense with translators as early-twentieth century anthropologists called for (Mead, 1939); instead, they dispensed with the myth of linguistic fluency. At the same time, results indicate disparities in the use of vernacular and translation services in the post-colonial societies and haphazard ‘hiring’ patterns of interpreters that cause ethical and methodological concerns.

The imaginary anthropologist is a fluent polyglot; the real anthropologist is too time-poor to learn another language

When you think about an anthropologist, what stereotypes do you imagine?  Maybe a gaunt Englishman wearing a pith helmet with a copy of African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1940) stuffed in his back pocket? Our imaginary anthropologist is, of course, fluent in a language at risk of extinction, learned during years of field research while living with an endangered community.

Perhaps your image of a sociologist is quite different. You might conjure a scholar working in an urban setting in their home country, which of course is in one of the complex industrial societies. They are studying social problems using their native language with locals who also speak the same tongue.

The shape of today’s societies however, as well as forms of field research challenge those effigies. Anthropologists cannot permit themselves the ‘luxury’ of spending years within a single community, being involved in many projects and teaching duties at home institutions. Sociologists, on the other hand, now work in culturally diverse settings and face the same issues as anthropologists a century ago.

Experience with Fieldwork Translation by Discipline

Yet, the scholarly associations and method textbooks are virtually mum on the problem of language, translation and interpreting in field research. To the contrary, a blatant disregard for translation services is noticeable in some discussions, that – righteously – attempt to reclaim the status of research assistants: “Research assistants play a vital role in the research process, often acting as more than just [! – exclamation and bold added] translators or interpreters.” (Dean & Stevano 2016)

We surveyed US-based scholars about their language practices

That is why we surveyed US-based scholars from anthropology and sociology programs. We analyzed 913 answers that provided insights into our respondents’ linguistic capabilities and their experiences conducting research in over 180 countries and interacting with over 400 languages. A more extensive presentation of the results may be found in our article published by Multilingua (Sepielak, Wladyka & Yaworsky 2022).

We discovered that in only 24% of the field sites with languages other than English present did scholars assess that they had professional (or higher) fluency. In almost 60% of cases, our respondents interacted with languages in which they reported a proficiency at or below a limited working level.

It would seem it’s not all bad news with 75% of respondents reporting fluency in at least one fieldwork language. However, they were typically fluent in languages derived from the colonizers, such as French and Spanish, but rarely in languages from the colonized.

Social science researchers are “getting by”

It is then worth noting that most anthropologists and sociologists were getting by at times like everybody else, using interpreters and translators, or conducting research using the English language. ‘Only’ 54.1% of the sociologists in our sample ever collaborated with a translator compared to 68.9% of anthropologists.

Translation and interpreting are often rendered invisible

Example: #interpreter was literally erased from this photo of meeting between Iran's Rouhani and Malaysia' Mahathir in media coverage #xl8 https://t.co/RIcNpy38t2 pic.twitter.com/aNCCivzY0F

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 30, 2020

It would, however, be spurious to claim that American sociologists had less need for translators due to their linguistic proficiency. It is rather due to the traditional research interests exposing anthropologists to an increased number of languages and geographies. In comparison, sociologists frequently work in the US and regions like Western Europe where one could claim to “get by” with English.

One could ask how can this reality diverge so significantly from the ideal of language fluency and dismissal of interpreters pushed by generations of authoritative field scholars?

Is English proficiency really the superpower of today’s social scientists?

English is the language superpower of the world (Piller, 2022). And our thematic analysis indicates that researchers turn to this ‘superpower’ quite often. This is due to a variety of circumstances hampering the acquisition of fluency in another language, such as short-term studies, multi-sited fieldwork, international collaborative research, or studies of communities with multiple co-existing languages. While the global popularity of English appears as one of the deterrents to mastering field languages among scholars, one should also note that Indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Tlapanec and thousands of others are virtually extinct from academic curricula in the US.

Anthropologists, in particular, may be wary about revealing these linguistic deficiencies due to the fear it might undermine their ethnographic authority. They will be mindful of Margaret Mead’s fieldwork being criticized as ‘superficial’ in part due to her linguistics deficiencies (see Freeman 1983) or Napoleon Chagnon wasting months analyzing the fictitious and scatological “names” of Yanomamo villagers presented to him by amused tribesmen (see Chagnon 1992), mold current beliefs of scholars?

Paying lip-service to the importance of linguistic proficiency does make fluent researchers

Well, it would seem so, with 81% of our respondents perceiving knowledge of local language as important and 95% agreeing that knowing the vernacular enriches the understanding of “local knowledge”.  They also agreed that researchers who don’t speak the vernacular miss important data and have less control over the study. A clear example of detachment between the persisting ethos and contemporary practice reported in previous paragraphs.

The invisible translators and interpreters of social science

In this context, the question about what this heavy reliance on translators means for Western representations of post-colonial societies, persists as well. How do scholars perceive its effect on the research process? For one, most respondents agreed that translators help in gaining access to data and that scholars with foreign-language deficiencies should collaborate with them. Nevertheless, concerning was a trend of haphazardly “hiring” persons that interpret (including research assistants, spouses, colleagues, representatives of local institutions) driven by cost and convenience. This widespread practice carries a series of ethical, methodological, and even security risks rarely considered during methods training.

To that end, field researchers did not dispense with translators as early 20^th century anthropologists called for, instead, they dispensed with the sleight of hand of linguistic fluency. This state of affairs should at the very minimum deserve greater attention in current methodological and ethical discussions regarding fieldwork and collaboration with interpreters.

To read the full article

Sepielak, K., Wladyka, D. & Yaworsky, W. (2022). Language proficiency and use of interpreters/translators in fieldwork: a survey of US-based anthropologists and sociologists. Multilingua. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2022-0071

Related content

Laihonen, Petteri. (2020). Do concepts and methods have ethics? Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/do-concepts-and-methods-have-ethics/
Piller, Ingrid. (2016). Herder – an explainer for linguists. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/herder-an-explainer-for-linguists/
Piller, Ingrid. (2021). The interpreting profession in ancient Egypt. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/the-interpreting-profession-in-ancient-egypt/
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/how-to-challenge-anglocentricity-in-academic-publishing/

References

Chagnon, Napoleon. 1992. Yanomamo: The last days of Eden. New York: Harvest Books.
Deane, K. & Stevano, S. 2016. Towards a political economy of the use of research assistants: reflections from fieldwork in Tanzania and Mozambique. Qualitative Research, 16(2). 213-228.
Fortes, Meyer, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.). 1940. African Political Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freeman, Derek. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mead, Margaret. 1939. Native languages as fieldwork tools. American Anthropologist 41(2): 189–205.
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). “Women, life, freedom” – the slogan swimming against the global tide. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/women-life-freedom-the-slogan-swimming-against-the-global-tide/

Each year Elsevier publishes the @Stanford list of the “World’s Top 2% Scientists" – this year's list just dropped and it includes 335 #linguists – want to know who they are? And what's good and bad about the list?
Quick on citation #metrics
1/10https://t.co/e3YyYA8nOq pic.twitter.com/JboVvkHfkW

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) October 16, 2022

The dataset

A couple of people have asked me where they can find the full list of the 335 most-cited linguists. So, I am making it available for download here. I extracted this table from the Ioannidis (2022) dataset based on the “subfield-1” code for “languages and linguistics”. That means, linguists who primarily publish in another discipline (e.g., psychology) are not included here.

Reference

Ioannidis, John P.A. (2022), “September 2022 data-update for “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators””, Mendeley Data, V4, doi: 10.17632/btchxktzyw.4

Related content

Piller, Ingrid. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/how-to-challenge-anglocentricity-in-academic-publishing/
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). What exactly does an editor do? Multilingua. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2022-0125
Piller, Ingrid, Zhang, Jie, & Li, Jia. (2022). Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2022-0034

***

Judith Reynolds, Sara Ganassin and Prue Holmes

***

Readers of Language On The Move will be familiar with the idea that different languages and language varieties are imbued with different levels of social prestige, and that language use and language choice are closely tied up with issues of social justice in many contexts. But have you ever considered what impact the language choices made during a multilingual research process might have on the research outcomes, and on the individuals involved in research?

The Politics of Researching Multilingually

In our recently published edited volume The Politics of Researching Multilingually, this question is critically and reflexively explored by researchers from across the social sciences, many of whom are researching in global South contexts. We asked our contributors to think, write and research about the political dimensions of how they did researching multilingually, defined as ‘the process and practice of using, or accounting for the use of, more than one language in the research process’ (Holmes et al., 2016, p. 101). The result is a collection of 16 powerful chapters, in which our authors write candidly about their own ideological positions towards the languages involved in their research, their changing awareness of the power effects inherent in language choices and language use in research, and their journeys towards ‘researcher intentionality’ (Stelma and Fay, 2014; Stelma, Fay and Zhou, 2013) when researching in or through multiple languages.

In introducing the volume, we argue that our decisions about how we use linguistic resources in research are political, in that they involve the negotiation of relationships of unequal power in aspects such as the selection of research topics, engaging with different stakeholders, navigating the language hierarchies in play in the different contexts of the research, and determining the languages of dissemination of the research. The volume thematises both the constraints on researchers working multilingually, and their responses to such constraints, under four themes briefly presented here.

Hegemonic structures

Under the theme of hegemonic structures, contributions critically examine the role of institutional structures such as funding bodies, gatekeepers, the academy and the publishing industry in prioritising and legitimising or delegitimising certain languages in research.

In the context of French academia, Adam Wilson discusses the double linguistic burden placed on researchers seeking to publish and advance their careers in a dual French- and English-dominated globalised academic environment. In turn, Shameem Oozeerally describes the tensions involved in working as an interdisciplinary and multilingual research team in a Mauritian university context defined by a particular linguistic ideology and epistemological stance.

Lamia Nemouchi and Prue Holmes reflect on the experience of an international doctoral researcher implementing a project grounded in fieldwork in the multilingual context of Algeria, yet which was framed by the Anglo-monolingual conventions and expectations of a British university. In a different context, Wine Tesseur’s reflexive account of doing research about language practices within international NGOs operating in Kyrgyzstan emphasises the imperative to accommodate languages other than English in the research process.

Overall in this section of the volume, the impact of institutional frameworks of power on researching multilingually are highlighted.

Power relations

Trilingual sign at Mouloud Mammeri University in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria (Image credit: Wikiwand)

In contrast, within the second theme of power relations, contributions focus on the micro-interactional dimension of power and its negotiation in and through language use and language choices in a range of research spaces and relationships.

Jessica Chandras offers an ethnographic account of her heritage language learning process in the context of class- and caste-bound Indian-Pune society, and reflects on how this impacted on her research outcomes. In a study about multilingual refugee children in Cyprus, Alexandra Georgiou demonstrates the importance of understanding children’s views and perspectives through their own forms of expression using an inclusive research practice.

Helina Hookoomsing also highlights language choices and power dynamics in engaging in research focused on children’s multilingualism, albeit in the postcolonial context of multilingual Mauritius. In a further multilingual postcolonial context, Olga Camila Hernández Morales and Anne-Marie de Mejía discuss how they dealt with the linguistic hierarchies manifest in the Caribbean island of San Andrés in order to give access to the voices of the participants.

The contributions within this theme remind us that research is a domain of social life like any other, with inherent power dynamics that are negotiated in, with and through language(s).

Decolonising methodologies

The third theme of decolonising methodologies highlights how contributors to the volume have sought to address issues of inequality and voice in their research by drawing on methodological innovations and non-Eurocentric epistemologies.

Reporting on research examining community radio in rural India, Bridget Backhaus adopts a cognitive justice framework to theorise her collaboration with a local interpreter. In turn, in the context of a research project focusing on language learning experiences of forced migrants in Luxembourg, Erika Kalocsányiová and Malika Shatnawi describe a collaborative process of work between researcher and translator to faithfully represent participants’ complex linguistic repertoires on the page.

In the sphere of participatory arts research, Michael Richardson offers a reflexive account of the design and implementation of a UK based research project in deaf theatre, aiming to give equal prominence to spoken and signed languages. Finally, in a broader and more longitudinal account of their careers in research, Julie Byrd Clark and Sylvie Roy explore transdisciplinary and relational processes of interculturality that they have operationalised in their research on multilingual education for migrant youth in Canada.

The theme emphasises that when researching multilingually, researchers can and should engage in active processes of reshaping and repurposing the methodologies available to them in the research canon, in order to address epistemic and representational imbalances arising from and through language(s).

Decolonising languages

In the final theme of decolonising languages, contributors give accounts of the impact on their research of first, recognising that ‘named languages’ (Li, 2018, p. 19) often associated with nation-states are inherently political instruments carrying ideological baggage for participants; and second, acknowledging that human communication extends beyond named languages into languaging and translanguaging.

Welcome to Gagauzia! (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In this part of the volume, Rebekah Gordon proposes an approach to working multilingually with US-based transnational language teachers grounded in translanguaging pedagogy, that seeks to engage the linguistic and cultural repertoires of both researcher and participants. Liliane Meyer Pitton and Larissa Semiramis Schedel document language choices made in the different research phases of three projects conducted in Western Europe, exploring the reasons for these choices and analysing their (dis)empowering effects for researchers and researched.

Writing from Colombia, Rosa Alejandra Medina Riveros and Teresa Austin draw on critical multilingualism and translanguaging perspectives in their account of the research practices they developed for making decisions in a decolonising spirit in pedagogical research in this context. Finally, Christiana Holsapple shares an autoethnographic account of her own process of coming to understand the shifting significations and political nature of language practices in the Moldovan region of Gagauzia.

This theme opens the door to deeper conversations about the nature of research as a language process and product, and its potential to both preserve and maintain the status quo of established power relations and to disrupt, contest and resist that status quo.

Researchers as political actors

Overall, the volume takes a stance presenting researchers who research multilingually as social actors with the capacity for political action. We encourage all researchers, and particularly those involved in sociolinguistic, applied linguistic and/or intercultural communication research, to: (a) reflect actively on your own linguistic resources and those of others involved in the research; (b) become aware of the political and ideological implications of these language(s) in the spaces and relationships of research; and (c) take purposeful decisions about how to use which language(s) in research processes in ways that further the ultimate goals of the research and those whom it is intended to benefit.

Related content

Piller, Ingrid. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing.

Contributor bios

Judith Reynolds is a Lecturer in Intercultural Communication in the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research focuses on how language and culture intersect, and how both shape identities, in professional and workplace settings in particular. She has published on intercultural communication in refugee and asylum legal advice communication, and is the current Treasurer of the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC).

Sara Ganassin is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Communication at Newcastle University (UK). She teaches, researches and supervises postgraduate students in intercultural communication and education, with a particular interest in migrant and refugee communities. She has published on internationalisation and mobility, on Chinese heritage language and on languages and research.

Prue Holmes is a Professor of Intercultural Communication and Education, and Director of Research at the School of Education, Durham University, United Kingdom. Her research areas include critical intercultural pedagogies for intercultural communication, language and intercultural education, and multilingualism in research and doctoral education. Prue has worked on several international projects. She was the former chair of the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC), and she is the lead editor of the Multilingual Matters book series Researching Multilingually.

Hans Sauer was a specialist in the English language and literature of the Middle Ages. An overview of his career can be found in the obituary by another of his students, Professor Gaby Waxenberger, which I’m reproducing here in full:

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Vale Professor Hans Sauer

It is with great sadness that we announce the sudden and unexpected passing of Prof. Dr. Hans Sauer on 31 May 2022. Hans will be remembered as an outstanding teacher, researcher, and person.

Born on 9 September 1946 in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Hans Sauer attended school there. He studied English, Latin, and German at LMU Munich.

Hans Sauer taught and lectured at many universities in Germany (Würzburg, Dresden, Eichstätt and Munich), in Europe (e.g., Innsbruck, Austria; Brno, Czech Republic; Warsaw, Poznan, Lodz, and Katowice, Poland; Palermo, Italy) and worldwide (e.g., Columbus, Ohio, US; Tokyo, Japan; Beijing and Chongqing, China; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia).

He was a caring university teacher and supported both his students and his staff beyond the call of duty. Hans Sauer supervised more than 30 dissertations and habilitations, and innumerable M.A. theses.

Hans was a never-ending fountain of knowledge and wisdom. His publications bear witness to his expertise in a wide variety of topics. He published more than 20 books, editions and studies on medieval English texts as well as more than 200 articles. These covered a wide range of subject areas: word-formation; plant names; glossaries and lexicography; Beowulf; especially Beowulf translations and adaptations; the history of linguistics and of English studies; the varieties of English; pidgins and creoles; advertising language; interjections, and binomials.

He was co-editor of Anglia, LexMA (Lexikon des Mittelalters), MET (Middle English Texts), MUSE (formerly TUEPh = Texte und Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie), and of the book series English and Beyond.

Hans Sauer was a unique person of unparalleled kindness, generosity, and wisdom, of unprejudiced curiosity and open-mindedness, and with a heart of gold, rooted in his deep faith in God. He will be remembered with great admiration and respect, and above all, with much affection. We have lost a great scholar and a wonderful person.

(Gaby Waxenberger)

***

I also remember Professor Sauer as a teacher and scholar of extraordinary kindness and generosity.

I first met Professor Sauer as a graduate student at the University of Würzburg, where I took one of his classes about Chaucer. The seminar involved a lot of close reading of the Canterbury Tales – we learned the opening lines of the Prologue by heart – and a fascinating mélange of linguistics, literature, and history.

When I recite the opening lines to myself, as I often do, I always think of Professor Sauer:

Chaucer as pilgrim (Ellesmere manuscript) (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in switch licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So Priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

***

When Professor Sauer accepted a new position as chair professor of English Linguistics at Dresden University of Technology just around the time of my graduation, he offered me a position as his assistant. For the next three years, I worked alongside him in an exciting teaching and research position in a vibrant university, city, and region undergoing deep transformations just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. A reflection on my unique teaching experience during that time can be found in this post about multilingual Europe.

I experienced an academic apprenticeship that continues to form the basis for my own approach to supervision. There are at least four lessons I learned.

First, Professor Sauer believed in academic freedom to a fault. He granted me complete freedom in the choice of my research topic and accepted my interest in American Automobile Names – which another of my academic teachers, Professor Erwin Koller, had ignited – without even trying to steer me to a topic more closely aligned with his own research interests.

Unlike many PhD supervisors, Professor Sauer was never overbearing. He was there with advice and guidance when I needed it but he never attempted to steer me in a particular direction or lay claim to my work. For that early experience of academic independence I am deeply grateful.

Attending operas in the Semperoper was one of the side benefits of doing a PhD with Professor Sauer (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Second, Professor Sauer created networks and opportunities for interaction and exchange. He enjoyed “geselliges Beisammensein” – spending time in sociable interaction – and arranged for a steady stream of seminars, academic visits, and joint meals. These occasions allowed myself and other junior scholars associated with the newly founded English Department to engage in conversations as a form of joint inquiry.

To this day, I value this socialization and the Language on the Move network has been my attempt to recreate something similar for my own students and mentees in a different context.

Third, Professor Sauer was a committed European and internationalist. At a time when academics in English Departments in Germany looked almost exclusively to the UK and USA for international exchange, Professor Sauer fostered connections with colleagues in Eastern Europe. During my candidature, he encouraged me to take up a visiting fellowship at the University of Łódź, Poland, and secured funding for me to attend conferences at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and at the University of Timișoara, Romania.

After graduation, Professor Sauer helped me obtain a position as visiting assistant professor at Ithaca College in New York. For me, these efforts created formative experiences and led to lifelong networks and friendships. I know that the same is true for many other students and colleagues in Professor Sauer’s orbit.

Fourth, Professor Sauer modelled the ideal of the well-rounded humanist. A passionate opera lover, he was always organizing parties to see one performance or other. He taught us to make the most of life in a city with a famous opera house, the Semperoper, and a unique operetta venue, the Staatsoperette. Tickets were still subsidized and with a bit of planning it was always possible to secure affordable seats. Before I started my PhD, I had never been to see an opera and one of the side benefits of my doctoral years was that I learned to appreciate the operatic tradition.

The three years I worked for Professor Sauer launched my academic career and I remember them with much fondness. I will be forever grateful to Professor Sauer for his teaching, his guidance, his mentorship, and the doors he opened for me.

While we mourn his passing, his legacy lives on in his students. May he rest in peace and may his family find comfort in the affection and admiration he inspired!

Related content

• In memoriam Michael Clyne
• In memoriam Erwin Koller
• In memoriam Hans Reich

Interview with Professor Sauer, 9th International Conference on Middle English, Wrocław, 2015

Top-10 countries producing linguistics research (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

US- and UK-based scholars dominate linguistics

Global academic knowledge production is dominated by the Anglosphere. In Linguistics, for example, scholars based in the USA and UK produce more academic publications than scholars from the next eight top-10 countries combined. Not only do American and British scholars produce a lot more linguistics research than everybody else, their work is also much more influential as the comparatively high h-indexes of linguists from these countries indicate.

55% of the 100 most cited scholars under each of the keywords “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” with a Google Scholar profile are affiliated with a US or UK institution.[i] To put this figure in perspective: the population of the USA and UK together accounts for 5.12% of the global total. In other words, linguists from these two countries are massively overrepresented among the thought leaders in our field.

By contrast, not a single applied linguist or sociolinguist based at a university in Mainland China is among the 100 most highly cited scholars in “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics.” To put this figure in perspective: China accounts for 18.47% of the global population.

Challenging the Anglophone publication monopoly

Where the world’s most cited Applied Linguists and Sociolinguists are based, according to Google Scholar

For multilingual scholars, i.e. those with English as an additional language in their repertoire, particularly if they are based outside the Anglosphere, the stats above can be pretty demoralizing. Publication in “top-tier” journals and impact metrics have become central to hiring, promotion, and funding decisions in the neoliberal academy worldwide. Yet, despite the meritocratic rhetoric, the playing field is obviously far from level and multilingual scholars based in global peripheries labor “under a heavy mountain.”

The burden is intensified by the fact that academic publishing can very much look like a black box. While advice on how to get published abounds, what is missing are positive case-studies that showcase experiences of multilingual peripheral scholars challenging their linguistic and epistemic exclusion.

A look into the black box of academic publishing

In a new article titled “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production,” which has just been published in Multilingua, my colleagues Jenny Zhang, Jia Li and I provide precisely such a positive case study.

As regular readers of Language on the Move will remember, in 2020, we co-edited a special issue of the highly-ranked international sociolinguistics journal Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis.” To the best of our knowledge, this was the first concentrated effort in English to address the language and communication challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. The special issue centered on research from the Chinese world.

The special issue has been widely read and is already well cited. In addition to its topical exploration, it also constitutes a contribution to intercultural dialogue in applied and sociolinguistics.

US and UK linguistics research has an overwhelming impact on the field (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

Reflecting on the process that led to the publication of the special issue, we felt that it contained several lessons for linguistic and epistemic justice in our field. In “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production” we make those lessons explicit in the form of a collaborative autoethnography that illuminates the process behind the product.

In the article, we reflect on enabling personal and academic networks, textual scaffolding, and linguistic and epistemic brokerage. And we have three take-home messages.

Against the center vision of “global” academic knowledge

The dominant vision of linguistic research is solely focused on the central circuit of academic knowledge production. Efforts at global knowledge transfer almost always move outward from this central circuit. In this vision, sharing center knowledge with the periphery is considered transformational. By contrast, Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis demonstrated that some of the most exciting developments in contemporary applied sociolinguistics, such as the development of Chinese emergency language services, are located outside the center.

Knowledge flows in many directions and many circuits. Engaging with multi-directionality and multi-scalarity requires the kind of networks and teamwork we were able to bring to bear.

For community building and an ethics of care

Within circuits of knowledge production, peripheral multilingual knowledge producers are assigned seemingly perpetual status as international students, academic novices, visiting scholars, junior partners, and interlopers in center institutions. These positionings ultimately preclude deep engagement.

At this conference in Wuhan in 2012, we had no idea our friendship would lead to joint research on COVID-19 communication in 2020

The foundation of our joint work goes beyond academic collaboration and is based on longstanding personal friendship. We consider recognition of the affective dimensions of knowledge production and the importance of ethical relationships of care vital to the decolonization of knowledge.

Confronting privilege

Jenny, Li Jia, and I each write from different points in our career and from different points of inclusion and exclusion in various centers and peripheries. The same is true for all academics and each of us has a responsibility to center questions of linguistic and epistemic justice in whichever position we may find ourselves.

For us, this has involved building and engaging with various networks, collaborating across borders and generations, creating publication opportunities, and volunteering our time and expertise to act as linguistic and epistemic brokers.

Reference

To read our collaborative autoethnography about linguistic and epistemic justice in global academic publishing in full head over to Multilingua:

Piller, Ingrid, Zhang, Jie, & Li, Jia. 2022. Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua. [free access]

Piller, Ingrid. Can we make intercultural communication less Anglo- and Eurocentric? Reflections on linguistic and epistemic justice. Keynote lecture at Re-Thinking Interculturalism, The Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR) Europa Congress, May19-21, 2022

[i] As of April 17, 2021. This includes some duplicates as scholars who appear both under “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” were counted in each category.