Image Credit: Dreamtime Creative by Jordan Lovegrove, Ngarrindjeri; from 2023 Annual Closing the Gap Report and 2024 Implementation Plan (p. 10) © Commonwealth of Australia, Commonwealth Closing the Gap Implementation Plan 2024

Editor’s Note: The Australian Commonwealth’s Closing the Gap 2024 Annual Report and 2025 Implementation Plan was released earlier this week. In this post, Kristen Martin reflects on progress towards one specific ‘Closing the Gap’ target, namely Target 16, which aims to strengthen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.

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It has been four years since the Australian Government included Target 16 – to strengthen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages – in the ‘Closing the Gap’ targets. What has been happening since Target 16 was announced? The status of Target 16 is officially ‘unknown’ (as of July 2023),  and the fourth National Indigenous Language Survey will not be published until 2026 but what has progress looked like so far? There is already some exciting, new work happening, as this blog will outline.

Voices of Country

A collaboration between the Australian Government, First Languages Australia and the International Decade of Indigenous Languages Directions Group, the Voices of Country Action plan is described as “framed through five inter-connected themes:

1. Stop the Loss
2. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities are Centre
3. Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer
4. Caring for Country, and
5. Truth-telling and Celebration.”

The purpose of the initiative is to pilot actions towards language strength based on community decisions, outlining various ways governments can approach the Closing the Gap targets. In a report released about the 10-year action plan, it outlines:

“Consistent with the Global Action Plan, the Australian Government will undertake and report on practical commitments that deliver progress against the framework set out in Voices of Country. The Australian Government will report against these commitments on an annual basis”

However, the Voices of Country Action plan is only one of many plans that the Australian government has invested in!

Language Policy Partnership

Alongside the Voice to Country Action plan, a key milestone in the progression of Target 16 is the establishment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Language Policy Partnership, established December 2022 and known as the LPP. The LLP seeks to “establish a true partnership approach with truth-telling, equal representation and shared decision-making fundamental to the National Agreement for Closing the Gap”.

Image credit: The Wattle Tree graphic design agency by Gilimbaa with cultural elements created by David Williams (Wakka Wakka), acknowledging also the Traditional Custodians: © First Languages Australia and Commonwealth of Australia 2023, Voices of Country – Australia’s Action Plan for the International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032, p.9

The program is a collaboration between the Coalition of Peaks, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language experts, and various government members. Through the LPP and discussions with various communities, seven priorities have been outlined to make progress on Target 16 and strengthen Indigenous languages. The priorities are as follows:

1. Speaking and using languages
2. Supporting the people, groups and organisations who work in languages
3. Languages legislation
4. Access to Country
5. More funding that goes where communities need it
6. Bringing language home to the people and communities
7. Help people understand the importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages

From this commitment, the LPP has also said

“The LPP is working to develop a national and coordinated approach to achieving Target 16. This includes working in partnership, centring the community-controlled sector, changing how governments work, and sharing the right data and information to make important decisions. The LPP will also work according to annual work plans and a three-year strategic plan.”

Since its establishment, the organisation has met seven times with published documents reflecting their discussions available.

The Australian Government has invested $9.7 million into the LPP and states the program will undertake evaluation after three years (in 2026).

A lookback on previous Target 16 process

As Alexandra Grey has noted back in 2021, funding  for the Indigenous Languages and Arts (ILA) program had been planned for the progression of Target 16. The ILA, in collaboration with First Languages Australia saw 25 language centres open throughout the country and teach the various languages in their surrounding areas. Following this, the ILA has also said it will invest over $37 million in 2024-2025 to “support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to express, conserve and sustain their cultures through languages and arts activities throughout Australia.”. What this funding will go to in 2025, we will have to wait and see.

International Decade of Indigenous Languages

Australia is not the only country to care about the status of Indigenous languages, as we are currently in the middle of the United Nations’ International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022 – 2032). Following the UN’s International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019, the UN has established this decade to focus on the “preservation, revitalization and promotion” of Indigenous languages. Australia is one of many countries to be a part of this celebration, developing the ‘Voices of Country’ Action Plan as “a call to action for all stakeholders”.

Impact of these actions

Of the many partnerships in place, it appears the Australian government has taken a community-based approach for this goal, consulting with community members and First Nations representatives for official and efficient actions. With all the great initiatives underway, it is easy to assume that progression with Target 16 is happening. However, we will not be able to truly know the effects of these initiatives until 2026 as we wait on the fourth National Indigenous Language Survey and the LPP program evaluation.

This episode also contains excerpts from a Wired YouTube video by dialect coaches Erik Singer and Eliza Simpson called Accent Expert Breaks Down Language Pet Peeves.

If you liked this episode, also check out Lingthusiasm’s episode about creaky voice called “Various vocal fold vibes”, Dr. Cate Madill’s piece in The Conversation entitled Keep an eye on vocal fry – it’s all about power, and the Multicultural Australian English project that Dr. White references (Multicultural Australian English: The New Voice of Sydney).

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

Transcript (added 19/12/2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Hannah White.

Hannah is a postdoc researcher at Macquarie University in the Department of Linguistics. She completed her doctoral research last year in 2023 with a thesis entitled Creaky Voice in Australian English. Today we’re going to be discussing this research along with a 2023 paper that she co-authored entitled Convergence of Creaky Voice Use in Australian English.

This paper is also Chapter 5 of her thesis. The paper and the entirety of Hannah’s thesis examines the use of creaky voice or vocal fry in speech. Hannah, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

I’m so excited to talk to you.

Dr White: Thank you so much for having me. I’m also excited.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what made you decide to pursue a PhD in Linguistics?

Dr White: You might be able to tell from my accent that I am a Kiwi, a Kiwi linguist working here in Australia. I actually kind of fell into linguistics by accident. So I was doing my undergrad in French and German, and I went to Germany on exchange, and I took just on a whim, I took an undergraduate beginner English Linguistics course, and I realized this is what I want to do forever.

I fell in love immediately and came back and added a whole other major to my degree. So yeah, it was kind of by chance that I found linguistics. And in terms of doing a PhD, I just, I love research.

I love the idea of coming up with a hypothesis, designing an experiment to test it and finding like results that might kind of challenge. Ideas that you’ve like preconceptions that you have or yeah, just finding something new. So yeah, that’s kind of what drew me into doing the PhD and in linguistics.

Brynn: Did you go straight from undergrad into a PhD?

Dr White: No, I didn’t. I had a master’s step in between. So, I did that in Wellington.

Brynn: I was going to say, that is quite a leap if you did that!

Dr White: Absolutely not. I did my master’s looking at creaky voice as well. So, I looked at perceptions of creak and uptalk in New Zealand English.

Brynn: Well, let’s go ahead and start talking about that because I’m so excited to talk about creak and vocal fry and uptalk. So, your doctoral research investigated this thing called creaky voice. So, whether we realize it or not, we’ve all heard creaky voice, or as I said, is it sometimes called vocal fry.

So, tell us, what exactly is creaky voice? Why do people study it? And why did you decide to study it?

Dr White: Okay, so creaky voice is a very common kind of voice quality. Technically, if we want to get a little bit phonetics, it’s generally produced with quite a constricted glottis and vocal folds that are slack and compressed. They vibrate slowly and irregularly.

And this results in a very low-pitched, rough or pulse-like sound. You can think of it, often it’s described as kind of sounding like popcorn, like popping corn or a stick being dragged along a railing. They’re quite common analogies for the sound of creaky voice.

Why do people study it? I think that it’s something that people think that they know a lot about. And it’s talked about a lot.

But it’s actually kind of, there has been research on creak for a very long time, since the 60s. It’s gaining popularity at the moment. So, I think it’s a relatively new area of research that’s gaining a lot of popularity right now.

This could be to do with the fact that there’s a lot of media coverage around creaky voice or vocal fry.

Brynn: Because we should say that the probably most common example that we’ve all heard is Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, saying things like, that’s hot, like that, that like, uh, sound voice, yeah.

Dr White: The Valley Girl.

Brynn: Valley Girl, yes.

Dr White: My go-to examples, Britney Spears as well.

Brynn: Oh, absolutely.

Dr White: Yeah. So, a lot of this media coverage, it’s associated with women, right? But it’s also super negative.

So often it’s associated even in linguistic studies, perception studies, it’s associated with vapidness, uneducated, like stuck up, vain sort of persona. So, I think it’s really interesting to kind of, that’s what drew me into study, wanting to study it. I do it all the time.

I’m a real chronic creaker and I love the sound of it personally. So, I kind of just wanted to work out why people hate it so much and see if I can challenge that view of creak.

Brynn: Yeah, and it is true that we tend to associate it with, as you said, with vapidness. Do we have any idea of where that perception came from? Or was it just because it’s more these people that are in the limelight, younger women, the Kim Kardashians of the world, is it because we associate them with being vapid and that’s their type of speech, or do we know where that came from?

Dr White: I don’t know if there’s any research that’s kind of looked at where that association came from originally, but I would say, like just from my own perception, it probably is that association with these celebrities.

Brynn: And these celebrities that we are talking about are generally American, right? But in your thesis, you discuss creaky voice use in multicultural Sydney, Australia. And you write about how social meanings are expressed through the use of creaky voice.

So, can you tell us about that? Where you’re seeing creak come up in Australia? Maybe why you’re seeing it come up and what you saw during your research?

Dr White: I mean, creaky voice is used by everyone. It’s a really common feature. It’s used across the world in different languages.

It can even be used to change the meaning of words in some languages. So, it’s got this kind of phonemic use.

Brynn: Let’s hear what dialect coach Eric Singer has to say about creak changing meanings in other languages. This is from a video posted to YouTube from Wired and it’s called Accent Expert Breaks Down Language Pet Peeves. And we’ll hear more from Eric later in this episode.

Singer: So creaky voice actually has a linguistic function in some languages. In Danish, for example, the word un without any creak in your voice means she, but the word un means dog. So, you have to actually put that creak in and you can change the meaning of a word.

In Burmese, ka means shake and ka means attend on. You have to add creaky voice and it means something totally different. Otherwise, the syllable is exactly the same.

The Mexican language, Xalapa Mazatec, actually has a three-way contrast between modal voice, creaky voice and breathy voice. So, we can take the same syllable, ya, which with that tone means tree. But if I do it with breathy voice, ya, it means it carries.

And if I do it with creaky voice, ya, it means he wears. Same syllable.

Dr White: So, it’s not just this thing that is used by these celebrities in California. So, we know that it’s used by people in Australia, but no one’s really looked at it before. So, there are very, very few studies in Australian English on creaky voice.

So that’s kind of where I started from. The data we used in my thesis was from the Multicultural Australian English Project. So that was led by Professor Felicity Cox at Macquarie University.

And the data was collected from different schools and different areas of Sydney that are kind of highly populated by different kind of ethnic groups. So, we collected data that was conversational speech between these teenagers. And I looked at the creak.

So, we’ve been looking at lots and lots of different linguistic, phonetic aspects of the speech. But I specifically looked at the creak between these teenagers. And I think the really interesting thing that I found was that overall, the creak levels were really quite similar between the boys and the girls.

It wasn’t, I didn’t find an exceptional mass of creak in the girls’ speech compared to the boys.

Brynn: Which is fascinating, because we, honestly, until I started looking into this for this episode, or talking to you, I just assumed that women, girls would have more creak in their voice than men. And then I was reading your data and reading the paper, and I was blown away to find out, wait a minute, no, there’s actually not that much difference in the prevalence of it. So, what’s going on there?

Why do we assume that it’s girls and women?

Dr White: There’s a lot of research in this specific area at the moment. Part of my thesis, I actually did a perception study about, so looking at how people perceive creak in different voices. So, it was a creak identification task, and they heard creak in low-pitched male and female voices, and high-pitched male and female voices.

And it could be something to do with the low pitch of male speech, generally. Post-creak is such a low-pitched feature. It might be that it’s less noticeable in a male voice because it’s already at this baseline low, so there’s less of a contrast when the speaker goes into creak.

Whereas if you’ve got a female speaker with a relatively high-pitched voice, you might notice it a lot more when they go down into the low-pitched creak. So that could be something that’s influencing this perception of creak as a female feature.

Brynn: Let’s give our audience an example of that now. This is from a YouTube video posted by Wired and dialect coach Eric Singer, as well as fellow dialect coach Eliza Simpson. We’ll link to this in the show notes.

Singer: One thing it’s hard not to notice is that most of the time when people are complaining about vocal fry and uptalk, they’re complaining about women’s voices, and especially young women. And it’s not just women who do this. Let’s try our own experiment, shall we?

Let’s take one sentence, the first sentence from the Gettysburg Address. I’m going to do it with some creak in my voice. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Eliza, would you do the same?

Simpson: Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Singer: What did you think? Do you have different associations when you hear it from a male voice? Four score and seven years ago, than when you hear it from a female voice?

Simpson: Four score and seven years ago.

Brynn: We hear this creak in men’s voices, and we hear it in women’s voices. You mentioned that you were looking at multilingual Sydney. What did you discover about creak in multilingual populations?

Dr White: Yeah, so we, it was more, so the speakers that we were working with are all first language Australian English speakers. A lot of them had different kind of heritage languages, so either their parents spoke other languages at home, or they spoke other languages at home in addition to English. My research was more focused on the areas that the speakers lived in, so rather than their language backgrounds.

I think the most interesting thing we found was that the girls, so I said that there weren’t that many differences between gender, but the girls in Cabramatta or Fairfield area, so this is a largely Vietnamese background population, they actually crept significantly less than the boys in that area. So that was kind of an interesting finding.

And when we, like obviously we want to work out why that might be, so we had a look into the conversations of those girls, and we found that they were talking a lot about kind of cultural identity and cultural pride, and pride in the area as well.

So, talking about how they’re really proud of like how Asian the area is. And that they don’t want it to be whitewashed. So, we wondered whether for those girls, creak might be associated with some kind of white woman identity, and they were distancing themselves from that by not using as much creaky voice.

Brynn: Fascinating! Did you find out anything to do with the boys and why they, this more Vietnamese heritage language population, why they did use creak?

Did it have anything to do with ethnicity or cultural heritage or not? Or we don’t know yet?

Dr White: We don’t know yet. That’s something that needs to be looked into, but I did notice that they didn’t talk about the area in the same way. So it could be, yeah, it could just be the conversation didn’t come up, the topic didn’t come up, but it could also be like that relation to the area and their cultural identity is particularly linked to creaky voice for those girls.

Brynn: That’s absolutely fascinating. Did you find the opposite anywhere? Did you find that certain places had the girls creaking more than the boys?

Dr White: We did find that in Bankstown and in Parramatta, but we don’t know exactly why that is yet.

Brynn: It feels like there’s so much to do potentially with culture and the way that people want to be perceived, the way that they want to be seen. And I guess that could happen with choosing to adopt more creak or choosing not to adopt more creak.

Dr White: Yeah absolutely. It’s like a feature that’s available to them to express their identity for sure.

Brynn: And that brings us to something that you discuss in the 2023 paper that you co-authored called Communication Accommodation Theory and its relation to creaky voice. So, tell us what Communication Accommodation Theory is and how you and your co-authors saw it show up with creaky voice in this study about Australian teenagers.

Dr White: Communication Accommodation Theory is basically this idea that speakers express their attitudes towards one another by either changing their speech to become more similar to each other. So, if the attitudes towards each other are positive or diverging or becoming more different from each other, if these attitudes are potentially negative. So, this has been found with a lot of phonetic features such as the pronunciation of vowels or pitch.

So, speakers are being shown to converge or diverge from each other based on their attitudes or feelings towards each other. So, we wanted to look at this with creak because we had the conversational data there. Like it wasn’t, the data wasn’t collected with this in mind, but we thought it would be really interesting.

And we did find evidence that our Australian teenagers were converging in the use of creaky voice. So, over the course of the conversation, their levels of creak were becoming more similar to each other. We also found that overall, so we didn’t find an interaction between like convergence and gender, but we did find an overall finding of gender.

So that overall girls were more similar to each other in the use of creak than boys were. So, we think this might be some sort of social motivation based on research that’s shown that girls prefer to have a preference for fellow girls more than boys have a preference for solo boys. So, kind of a social motivation to converge.

Brynn: I’ve definitely seen that in research as well. And sometimes you’ll see sort of conflicting things. Sometimes studies will say, you know, oh yeah, girls and women, they always want to try to have that more like accommodative communication. They will socially converge more.

Other studies will say like, oh, we can’t really tell. But it is a fascinating area of research and trying to find out why, if it’s true, that girls and women do converge more.

Why is that? Do you have any personal thoughts on that?

Dr White: I wonder whether it’s like a social conditioning kind of thing. Yeah. That would be my gut instinct towards it.

Brynn: Tell me more about that. What do you mean by social conditioning?

Dr White: That girls, since we’re tiny children, we’re socially conditioned to be nice and to want to please people. It could be that that is coming through and the convergence.

Brynn: Yeah, and trying to show almost like in group, trying to say, hey, I’m one of you, let me into the group, sort of a thing. Yeah, which is so interesting.

What do you think the takeaway message is from your research into creaky voice?

What do the findings tell us about language, social groups, and especially in this case, the Australian English of teenagers? Because like we said before, I think a lot of times, creak is associated with the Americanisation of English, of language, sort of that West Coast Valley girl idea. So, what do we think that this all says about Australian English?

Dr White: I think it’s really hard to sum up a key takeaway from such an enormous part of my life.

Brynn: It’s like someone saying, like, tell me about the last five years in two sentences.

Dr White: Yeah, exactly. But I think my key takeaway from this is that creak is a super complicated linguistic feature. It’s more than just this thing that women do in America.

And the relationship between creak and gender is way more complicated than just, yeah, women do this thing, men don’t do it, or they do it less. So, it’s really important to consider like these other factors, other social factors, such as like language background or where the, like specifically in Sydney, where the speaker is, their identity as a speaker when we are looking at creak prevalence.

Brynn: I think that that’s the part of this research of yours and your co-authors that I found so interesting was this idea of creak being used or not used to show identity and not just gender identity, but also cultural identity, potentially heritage language identity, identity around where you live. So, I think that you’re right, it is more complicated than just saying, oh, don’t talk like that, you sound like a valley girl, you know?

Dr White: Exactly.

Brynn: There’s more about what it means to be a human in a social group in terms of creak than maybe we previously thought.

So, with that, what’s next for you? What are you working on now?

Are you continuing to study creak or are you onto something different? What’s next for you?

Dr White: I can’t stop studying creak. I’m obsessed.

Brynn: That’s fabulous!

Dr White: So, I’m actually currently working on an Apparent Time Study of creak.

Brynn: What does that mean?

Dr White: That is looking at, so we have this historical data that was collected from the Northern Beaches. So, kids, teenagers in the 90s interviews. And we have part of the Multicultural Australian English Project.

We collected data from the Northern Beaches. So, we’ve got these two groups from the same area, 30 years apart. And so, I’m looking at whether there’s been a shift in creak prevalence over that time, because people always say, you know, creak is becoming more popular, but we don’t have like that much firm empirical evidence that that’s the case.

So yeah, I thought it would be really interesting to see.

Brynn: Have you just started or do you have any findings that you can tell us about?

Dr White: I’ve just started. I’m coding the data currently. So yeah, watch the space.

Brynn: Watch the space because when you’re done and when you have some findings, I want to talk to you again, because to think that that’s what’s so interesting is examining it through time because you’re right, there’s so much that is in the media that goes around, especially talking about the export of American English and American ways of speaking.

I’ve talked in this podcast before about how even I as an American have been approached by Australians and they’ll talk about, you know, oh, we sound so American now. It’s because of all of the media and everything like that.

So, to actually be able to have some data to back that up would be incredible.

Dr White: Yeah, that’s really exciting stuff. I’m also going to Munich next year as part of the Humboldt Fellowship. So, I’ll be working with Professor Jonathan Harrington over there and looking at creak in German. That’s something that we don’t know very much about at all.

Brynn: Do we have many studies about Creek in languages other than English where it doesn’t denote another word?

Dr White: There are some, yeah, but it’s definitely, the field is definitely English-centric. So, it’ll be really interesting to see.

Brynn: That’s going to be so fun. I can’t wait to talk to you again. Well, Hannah, thank you so much for coming on today, and thank you to everyone for listening.

Dr White: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.

Brynn: And if you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast. Leave a five-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. Till next time.

Video available at Faculti: https://faculti.net/like-the-fish-not-in-water/

Editor’s note: Despite its diversity, Australia continues to be imagined as a White nation. In this post, which is also available as a 20-minute video, Donna Butorac explains how this idealized image of the White nation shapes the settlement trajectories of women migrants from Asia and Europe in different ways.

Teaching in Australia’s Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP)

I did research on language learning and identity among people who were studying in the Australian Adult Migrant English Program (we call it the AMEP for short), where I taught for 9 years. This is a federally funded and administered settlement English program that provides subsidised language classes for new migrants who have Beginner to Intermediate levels of English proficiency on arrival. The program is delivered by organisations that successfully bid for fixed-term contracts through a competitive tendering process, and historically it has most often been delivered by state-based post-secondary colleges of further education. However, during the time I was working at the AMEP we saw a successful move into the space by profit-seeking private sector organisations.

At the AMEP I often taught classes that were mostly made up of women and I developed a curiosity about what it was like to be them – to be sitting in that class, learning English in this context. I wondered how it made them feel about themselves and how it impacted their relationships and their sense of the future, of who they were and who they felt they could be in the world. This led me to design a study that was about language learning, identity and gendered subjectivity in the context of migration. I wanted to find out how developing a voice in English might impact a woman’s sense of self, her aspirations and also her key family relationships. I also wanted to understand how the way she was being constructed in Australian society might impact her aspirational sense of self and to compare this with her socialisation in her primary languages and country of origin.

An AMEP classroom (Image credit: Immigration Department)

English teaching in the AMEP for the labour market

The AMEP has been around in Australia since the late 1940s but it has evolved quite a bit over that time. Successive governments, whether they are conservative or centre-left, have always tied inward migration to economic development goals but in the time that I was working at the AMEP in the early 2000s, we saw this connection being more overtly expressed within the framing of the contract terms and in the design of the language courses we delivered. It was also expressed by politicians in their media statements and in their presentations to AMEP teachers and researchers. For example, one government spokesperson told us that new arrivals who had come from difficult circumstances were “very marketable in the workplace” because of their “willingness to do jobs that many Australians reject” (Andrew Robb, 2006) and another federal minister described the role of immigration as a “job-matching agency for the nation”, because “as Australians take up the skilled work opportunities available, shortages of labour in the service and regionally based industries will become more and more acute” (Chris Evans, 2008).

So, the government was increasingly seeing the AMEP as leading new migrants from “the airport to the workplace” (as another politician put it in 2007) and this put pressure on the settlement English programs to adopt this outcome as a goal for English language development. Remember that they have to bid every few years for a new contract, so they closely examine government messaging for clues as to how best to frame their programs in the next contract round so they can beat out the competition.

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

2nd: Lena from Russia
Lena realized her white privilege from observing casual racism and selective incivility towards Asian people at her new tennis club in Australia.
2/n pic.twitter.com/BqiinZX2Nl

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 8, 2023

An example of how this translated into program change while I was conducting my study of new migrant women was that some of the curriculum and assessment content was reframed to focus on gaining skills needed for applying for a job, doing a job interview or communicating in the workplace, and there was a strong emphasis placed on helping migrants decide on their future study and employment goals. Each student had to meet with a vocational guidance officer when they arrived and set up a learning plan. This plan was updated by teachers and vocational guidance officers over the course of their time at the AMEP and the students all met with the vocational guidance officer again when they were exiting the program.

Learning a language, when it’s framed like this, becomes a commodity to attain in order to achieve economic settlement goals rather than a way of seeking knowledge and personal growth and a sense of belonging through developing a voice in a new language and culture.

And the way that the migrant language learner is positioned in this kind of context is as someone who is deficient in English, rather than as someone who is an emergent bilingual or multilingual.

But there is no place in all of this where the deficiencies of the society or of the labour market are ever problematised or discussed.

So, for example, racism in the Australian labour market, which has been well attested in the research literature, is never discussed and new migrants are not given strategies for how to counter this. What is also not discussed is that Australia still has a persistent monolingual mindset, in spite of there being hundreds of languages spoken in the community. In this kind of context, people may be judged only for their proficiency in English, rather than for their combined language capital. But in the settlement English program, language learners are led to believe that if they develop English proficiency, they will be able to achieve their social and economic settlement goals. When they struggle to realise these goals even after they have achieved a good level of functional English, and this was the case for some of the women in my project, they may naturally assume that the failing is theirs, and that their English is not good enough, when it might actually be a failing of a prejudiced English monolingual labour market or an unwillingness of employers to adequately acknowledge the skills and qualifications that the person brings with them.

Doing a sociolinguistic ethnography in the AMEP

To realise my research goals, I carried out an ethnographic study of 9 women who had recently migrated from a range of countries and who were studying in an Intermediate level class in the AMEP. I wanted to research with them over an extended period during the early phase of their post-migration settlement because I wanted to find out if the development of their voice in English actually made changes in the way they saw themselves and their aspirations. There had been other interview studies done on language learning and identity following migration, but these had more often been a retrospective reflection on the process. I wanted to try to capture this as it was being experienced.

I used qualitative methods of inquiry and data collection and this included two semi-structured personal interviews with each woman at the beginning and end of a 22-month data collection period, and I held a series of focus groups in the first year of the project; I also gave them an essay task at the beginning and end of the data collection period, in which I asked them to write about their aspirations for the future. In the final interview, I gave each woman the same broad prompts I had given them in the first interview because I was curious to know if their ideas had changed over the intervening period, perhaps as a result of changes in their sense of self from learning and using English. I also asked them to keep an email journal of their experience of learning and using English and how they felt about their lives. Because they were emergent users of English, I had thought that they might find it easier to write in English than to speak it; however, I was proven very wrong because for the most part they didn’t really engage with the journal task but seemed happy to talk to me and to each other! So, I ended up covering this topic in a third personal interview that I set up in the middle of the data collection period.

What emerged from the first stage analysis of the raw data was that the impact of language learning on identity could be usefully organised into three domains where the self is both constructed and performed – the self in key family relationships, the self in wider social interactions, and the self in work. I analysed each of these domains to identify sub-themes related to language, race and gender that emerged from across the data set. I was exploring identity and language learning, but this was also a way in to understanding what it’s like to be someone who has undertaken transnational migration involving language change and who is trying to find inclusion and belonging in a new society.

Migrant trajectories to social inclusion

Michiko from Japan cultivated a unique English language learning and practice strategy: she set up stalls at flea markets. In addition to interaction opportunities, she also gained insights into everyday life in Australia, including casual racism …
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 22, 2023

Social inclusion is a term that has been in use since the 1990s to convey ideas about the goal of creating pathways for economically marginalised people to achieve greater participation in society through employment. It is also used to refer to the inclusion of people from diverse cultures and languages within the mainstream in multiethnic societies. We might think of people who have migrated to a new society as being on trajectories of belonging and inclusion, where they might be on the social edges when they arrive, especially when the dominant language is not one they use well, but eventually the idea is that they will gain acceptance and inclusion and a sense of belonging within the mainstream of that society, in part through developing better competence in a dominant language.

What studies like mine have found is that this trajectory towards social inclusion is not always straightforward or complete for many migrants, often due to things a person may have little control over, like the way their race or their gender is viewed, or the way their language proficiency is judged, as a result of ideologies and prejudices within the receiving society.

Experiences of everyday racism shape pathways to inclusion

In my study I didn’t actually set out to explore race and prejudice but to explore the way a woman’s sense of self was being impacted by language learning in this cultural context; however, as I listened to the experiences of the women who participated in the study, both in interview and in conversation with each other, I realised that race was something I needed to discuss because it was a determiner of differences in the experiences and imaginings of inclusion and belonging that the women were reporting. For example, the women from European countries all expressed the realisation that they were just like everyone else because it seemed to them that most people in Australia came from families that had at some point in their history migrated from somewhere else.

These women felt despondent in the early settlement period about their English proficiency and how hard it was to communicate with others, but they could easily imagine becoming a part of the mainstream as their English improved. This kind of trajectory is normalised in the history of European migration to Australia and in the lives of the people they interacted with. So, the European women communicated a sense of optimism about their trajectories of inclusion and belonging in Australia. In contrast, the Asian women in the study did not express this kind of optimism about their settlement trajectories and they talked about the everyday racism that they and people they knew experienced, as well as what it was like trying to gain meaningful employment.

In the focus group discussions, some of the Asian women expressed the feeling that they might never achieve settlement success and might end up leaving Australia to have a better career. This really surprised the European women, who would say things like “But your English is really good; I don’t understand why you feel so hopeless about your future”.

Actually, one of the Asian women did end up going offshore, soon after the project ended, because she was offered a job with a global company that valued both of her languages, instead of just her English. In Australia, where only her English proficiency was being judged, she had constantly been rebuffed in the labour market and told that she needed to brush up on her English, which was functionally very good and certainly adequate to the jobs she was applying for. But offshore, she was being judged for her entire language capital, which included Japanese and English, and she was seen as a ‘fantastic bilingual’ as she described it.

When a migrant’s full language capital is being considered, as was the case with another Asian woman in the study, the employment outcome was quite different. This woman had migrated from China and she had a similar English proficiency to the woman I have just described, but when she began exploring professional employment opportunities she was immediately successful because the first company that interviewed her for a legal role was trying to build their client list in China and so they saw her as a bilingual, bi-cultural asset to the team instead of someone who was deficient in English. Actually, in the entire hiring process they never once commented on or asked about her English proficiency.

Tina from China already had two law degrees and experience as a corporate lawyer when she arrived in Australia, but she could only get work as a paralegal because her degrees were not recognized.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 20, 2023

Another finding from the study related to how new migrants might feel socially excluded by the language practices of locals. Some of the women in my study reported that in social situations with locals, for example at Church or with fellow students in post-secondary courses, locals in the group would speak in rapid colloquial English, using lots of idiomatic expressions, or they would speak to everyone else but never make eye contact with the women or speak to them. This practice made the women feel invisible, and it’s a fairly overt micro-aggression that excludes newcomers. Actually, this kind of experience was only reported by the Asian women in my study. But it seemed some of the European women were listening because towards the end of the project one of them told me in her final interview that she remembered what the Asian women had said about being made to feel invisible by locals and although she had never experienced this herself, she witnessed it with some Asian members of her tennis club that she played social games with. She had reflected on all this and she expressed a sense of her white privilege when she said to me “it’s nice to be beautiful white woman”.

Aside from these findings on race, there were really interesting findings on negotiating language use in key family relationships, and on how some women felt that they could express a different, more confident self in English than they could in their primary language.

Language learning and finding work

There are a number of conclusions related to language and race that come out of my study. For example, the way language proficiency is framed in the labour market impacts how successful new migrants are in achieving settlement goals through meaningful employment. As I’ve suggested, the Australian labour market is predominantly English monolingual, and this usually means that a migrant’s full language capital is not often considered when they are looking for work. However, in the few instances when their full language capital is being considered, this has the potential to greatly improve the settlement trajectory of new migrants and also to allow the economy to benefit from better utilising the qualifications and skills that migrants bring. It’s ironic really, because skilled migration is desired for Australia’s continued economic development and it makes up the largest proportion of the country’s annual migration intake, yet many people who come under that scheme struggle to find meaningful work in the fields they are qualified for, in part because of the way that ideologies about language and attitudes to race impact hiring practices.

One of the implications of these findings is that they can be used to develop the way that English language learning is framed within the settlement English program. In my experience, language learning was framed as the development of a kind of ideology-free, bounded lexico-grammatical system, and learners were encouraged to believe that developing proficiency in English was the key to social and economic inclusion.

Studies like mine have shown that this is not necessarily the case and their findings suggest that instead of framing learners as deficient speakers of English, we should be seeing them as emergent bi- or multilinguals, and we should be problematising interactions they have in the wider society and using an evidence-based approach to better inform language learners in the settlement English program about what to expect when they are looking for employment, and then we should be advising them on strategies for managing their entry into these important spaces of belonging and inclusion. Without this kind of approach, many new migrants end up blaming themselves for their lack of settlement success and the society as a whole denies itself the valuable contributions that could be made by its newest members.

Life in a New Language

Maria, a Chinese Brazilian, came to Australia via Japan. A savvy business woman and devout Christian, she told us she needed "many faces" to successfully navigate interactions, and foreground or background her multiple identities according to context
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 13, 2023

Many of the findings of my study are included in a forthcoming co-authored book from Oxford University Press called Life in a New Language. It’s a collaboration that sees data from six existing ethnographic studies of language learning and migration in Australia combined into a single large data set with over 100 participants. Sociolinguistic ethnography usually involves small data sets and rich data, but it is often considered to lack generalizability and rarely makes an impact outside specialist circles because it is widely dismissed as “anecdotal.” This book project marries depth with scale by combining and re-analysing data sets from these existing small-scale longitudinal ethnographic studies with the objective of making convincing conclusions about language learning and social inclusion, based on the premise that a larger qualitative data set increases the scope for generalisability. It represents something of an innovation in linguistic ethnography, as an after-the-fact multisite ethnographic study.

Life in a New Language will be published in June – watch this space for updates!

References

Butorac, D. (2011). Imagined Identity, Remembered Self: Settlement Language Learning and the Negotiation of Gendered Subjectivity (PhD). Macquarie University, Sydney. Retrieved from http://www.languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DButorac_PhD.pdf
Butorac, D. (2014). ‘Like the fish not in water’: How language and race mediate the social and economic inclusion of women migrants to Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 37(3), 234-248.
Piller, I., Bodis, A., Butorac, D., Cho, J., Cramer, R., Farrell, E., . . . Quick, B. (2023). Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into ‘Migration, Pathway to Nation Building’. Canberra: Parliament of Australia. Retrieved from https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8c0d9316-2281-4594-9c7b-079652683f54&subId=735264
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Tetteh, V. W. (2023). Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://www.languageonthemove.com/scholarly-sisterhood-collaboration-is-our-academic-superpower/
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Williams Tetteh, V. (in press, 2024). Life in a new language. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Australian of the Year 2021 Local Hero Awardee and recipient of the Order of Australia Medal 2022 proudly launched the book at the Embracing Equity Forum organised by the Community Migrant Resource Centre to celebrate International Women’s Day 2023.

In addition to being an author, Rosemary works as Multicultural Community Liaison Officer with the NSW Police, serves as Swahili-English interpreter, is co-founder of the African women’s group for women at risk of domestic and family violence, and engages in film making, including the documentaries The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe and Rosemary’s Way.

In her memoir A Joyful Life, Rosemary, who was born in Kenya, takes the reader through her survival story back home in Africa of a life strewn with hardship, grief, and trauma, to her migration to Australia. She shares her initial settlement challenges and how she made Australia her home.

The overall message is how Rosemary has found a joyful life, which she generously shares with everyone she meets.

Rosemary taps deeply into the experiences that have shaped her into a courageous person who champions the cause of vulnerable people by advocating for migrant women and women of refugee backgrounds. In the telling of her story, Rosemary is quick to point out, though, that she does not seek to be pitied. On the contrary, she lets the reader know that “these experiences did not break me. If anything, they are what sparked and then fuelled the fire inside me. They have allowed me to help others and live a truly joyful life.”

Rosemary Kariuki OAM has just published her memoir “A joyful life”

Over the years, in her desire to empower vulnerable people with whom she crosses paths, Rosemary has identified new arrivals’ information gaps as their biggest problem. For Rosemary, information is vital to growth, “when you have information you have the power of choice, when you have the power of choice you can earn money when you have money, you can earn independence, you can do anything you want.”

A true believer in embracing people, sharing, and learning from each other, Rosemary also co-founded the African Women’s Dinner Dance, which is now in its 16^th year. Through the event many Australian women from African backgrounds have connected, have gained confidence, and their lives have been positively influenced.

With so many accolades to her name, Rosemary has indeed blazed the trail as a truly inspirational migrant woman, a woman of African descent, a survivor of hardship, grief, and trauma. Having healed, she now uses her past to carve out a future that is joyful for her, and to give back to other vulnerable women, so that they can find their own healing and their own joyful lives.

Hearty congratulations again, Rosemary!

The latest Australian census results show that the top 3 “country of birth” categories that grew the most between 2016 and 2021 were Nepal, India, and Pakistan. Those top 2 countries are predominantly Hindu and this has contributed to Hinduism’s phenomenal growth in Australia since the turn of the millennium. Hindu migrants are generally young, with a median age of 31 years, meaning it is likely they will be raising Hindu children in this country.

Hinduism’s rise is most visibly reflected in the colourful facades of temples appearing in our major cities. My new book explores this growing Hindu community through changes occurring within a long-established Australian temple:

மொழி, மத வேறுபாடுகளை கையாளும் நடைமுறை: ஆஸ்திரேலியாவில் ஒரு தமிழ் இந்து கோவில்
Negotiating linguistic and religious diversity: A Tamil Hindu Temple in Australia

In the temple, where I conducted a linguistic ethnography, there is a surprising level of diversity in language, culture and religious beliefs. On one particular day, there were 14 languages other than English being spoken in the canteen area. The most common were Tamil, Gujarati, and Hindi. The Tamil language was to be expected because the temple was established by mainly Sri Lankan Tamil migrants to venerate a Tamil Hindu god and to be a site for the celebration and transmission of Tamil culture.

However the influx of migrants from the Indian subcontinent has meant that the temple’s devotees are becoming increasingly diverse in their linguistic and religio-cultural practices. This then challenges the temple’s identity and conduct as a Tamil space.

In the context of English-dominant, monolingual-mindset Australia the temple founders saw it as crucial that a safe space for Tamil was created to keep the Tamil language and culture alive for future generations. This goal was particularly urgent because minority languages and religions have been marginalised for decades in Sri Lanka (where I’m from), most evident in the long civil war that involved the persecution of Tamil people, language and culture on a large scale. What you’re hearing in the news today, about the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, is closely linked to this issue, because unworthy and corrupt national leaders have used ethnicity, religion and language as tools to divide the population and maintain power.

Devotees inside the temple (Image from Perera, 2023 © Routledge)

When it comes to passing Hinduism onto future generations, the temple runs a Sunday faith school for children and the language policy is for Tamil-medium lessons. It’s a small school in terms of student numbers but it is an important opportunity for young Tamils to meet with peers and to work out what the Hindu religion means for them in a largely (although diminishing) Christian society. Sitting in on these classes I observed rich translingual practices in how the students deployed mainly Tamil and English language features in the expression of their Tamil pride and their evolving religious beliefs. I was impressed with the students’ confidence in their identities. However, those Hindu children who did not have a Tamil-language background – either being of a different ethnolinguistic group or being Tamil but not having the opportunity to learn it in Australia – were inadvertently excluded from the classes based on the school’s language policy.

So this is the dilemma for migrant hubs like Hindu temples which become sites of diversity. Tough decisions about which languages to uphold in the practice of religion and in religious education mean that some groups do not have the same opportunities for linguistic and cultural expression in the temple. External pressures like homeland language politics and war and the dominance of English language in Australia makes these decisions more complex. The temple strives to be an oasis for all Hindu migrants as they make new homes in Australia, to be a site of belonging and identity development for future generations, but finding a way to cater for all language preferences is an ongoing concern.

My book details the challenges encapsulated in the reality of what we celebrate as Australia’s linguistic and religious diversity. Importantly this book also highlights the critical role of migrant religious institutions as sites for maintenance of language and culture in addition to faith. In this way, these institutions offer significant support to migrants so that they can move confidently in broader Australian multicultural society.

Reference

Perera, N. (2023). Negotiating linguistic and religious diversity: A Tamil Hindu Temple in Australia. Routledge. [Flier with 20% Discount Code available here]

Related content

Piller, Ingrid. (2021). What can churches teach us about migrant inclusion? Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/what-can-churches-teach-us-about-migrant-inclusion/

The logo on the side of the bus shelter

Latin at the bus stop

Recently, I was out for a walk when it started to rain. Seeking shelter in a nearby bus stop, I had time to look around, and I noticed something I had never noticed before although I must have seen it often: a Ku-Ring-Gai Council logo.

The logo is a circle of about 20 centimeters in diameter. It depicts two cartoon characters, one sitting, one standing, encircled by the words “KU-RING-GAI COUNCIL” and “SERVIENDO GUBERNO.”

The cartoon characters are presumably intended to depict two Aboriginal men of an earlier period. The drawing is crude, and the image seems retrograde, out of place, and just plain weird. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about some dumb schoolboy graffiti but about a high-quality official logo emblazoned into the plexiglass wall of a bus shelter.

I have been struggling to make sense of it since I first noticed it.

The main council logo (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The context

Ku-Ring-Gai Council is a local government area on Sydney’s North Shore. It has close to 120,000 inhabitants and happens to be Australia’s most socioeconomically privileged area.

The logo I noticed at the bus stop is not the main logo used by Ku-ring-gai Council but an older version. The current main logo depicts a stylized landscape.

However, the logo on the bus stop is not just a historical logo, either: it appears on bus stops of a certain age (less than 10 years old); it appears on signs for bushwalking trails; and it appears on the web.

So, we are dealing with a legacy logo that might be in the process of being phased out but is still imprinted on the landscape.

Indigenous Ku-ring-gai

Ever since I first came to Australia, I’ve liked the romanticism of the name “Ku-ring-gai”. It’s not only the name of a large council area, but also of a suburb where I lived for many years, and a national park I love to explore.

The O’Rourke Family Crest (Image credit: orourkerundle.com)

Like many non-Indigenous Australians, I was, for a long time, under the impression that “Ku-ring-gai” – or a version thereof – was the name of the original inhabitants of northern Sydney. The name made the area more “authentic” for me and seemed to connect the area where I live to its precolonial past.

Inevitably, it turned out to be a naïve fantasy.

A 2015 report by the Aboriginal Heritage Office showed that the term “Ku-ring-gai” was the 19^th century invention of a Scottish schoolteacher. The word may – or may not – have been used by some pre-colonial Indigenous people for – well, we don’t know what.

The report concludes:

It is unfortunate that the term Guringai has become widely known in northern Sydney and it is understandable that people wish to use it as it is convenient to have a single word to cover the language, tribe/nation, identity and culture of a region. However, it is based on a nineteenth century fiction and the AHO [Aboriginal Heritage Office] would argue that the use of the term Guringai or any of its various spellings such as Kuringgai is not warranted given its origin and previous use. It is not authentic to the area, it was coined by a non-Aboriginal person and it gives a misleading impression of the connectivity of some original clan boundaries. It is part of the story of this place that there is no certainty over tribal names, language groups or dreaming stories. To project the opposite is to continue this fiction. (p. 40)

On stolen land

Student uniforms get Latin mottos out into the streets (Image credit: Herald Sun)

Today, Indigenous people in the Ku-ring-gai area are most notable by their absence. The 2016 census recorded 0.2% Aboriginal inhabitants for Ku-ring-gai Council, well below the national average of 2.8%, and even well below the Greater Sydney average of 1.5%.

Why this is so can be summed up quickly: the Sydney area is where the British colonization of Australia began and the Sydney people bore the brunt of the initial invasion, including frontier violence, new diseases brought along by Europeans, and dispossession.

We live on stolen land here.

Still, this is not something polite people like to say and the Council website mutters incoherently about the absence of Indigenous people:

The arrival of Lt James Cook in 1770 devastated in what amounts to the blink of an eye an incomparable and ancient people.
Those not lost completely were altered as survivors gathered into new groups. Much of what we do know about Sydney’s clans must be gleaned from archaeological remains.
While there are some families who have identified links to original Sydney clans-people, very few traditional stories remain about the sites and landscapes of the Ku-ring-gai area.

Latin motto on a military honor roll (Image credit: Monuments Australia)

I also take these ramblings to be an interpretation of sorts of the stick figures in the logo: the mythical Indigenous cartoon characters suggest authenticity and belonging for non-Indigenous Australians.

In the same way that the current logo symbolizes nature and the land through stylized trees, the legacy logo does so through the depiction of stylized Aboriginal people.

“By serving, I rule!”

While the imagery projects an idyllic fantasy about belonging, the Latin motto accompanying the two Aboriginal cartoon characters in the logo is about power and possession.

The motto SERVIENDO GUBERNO is not accompanied by a translation. As the study of Latin has become exceedingly rare, I’m guessing that few people will be able to translate for themselves, and likely just ignore the motto.

For those who can be bothered, a now-defunct council website provides this explanation:

The Ku-ring-gai Council motto, ‘serviendo guberno’, means ‘I govern by serving’ and has been used by Council since 1928. It is included in the logo to reaffirm Council’s fundamental commitment to serving the community. (quoted from Friends of Ku-ring-gai Environment)

The logo of private boys’ school Scots College (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Mottos are notoriously ambiguous, and this is one possible interpretation. But it is not the full story. My translation is “By serving, I rule.”

What kind of service?

Let’s start with serviendo. The etymological connection with “service” is obvious but what kind of service? Just friendly customer service? Probably not.

The motto serviendo guberno has long been used in the coat-of-arms of a knightly Irish clan, the O’Rourkes, and is clearly associated with military service there. From armed service, the idea of service inherent in the motto later seems to have become broadened a bit to all forms of service that men render to the nation:

Since the demise of the Gaelic order O’Rourkes have continued to follow the proud tradition of serving their nation as soldiers, priests, teachers, civil servants and firefighters. (Another O’Rourke website)

The martial interpretation of serviendo is also backed up by its use in war memorials such as the Sandakan Memorial dedicated to members of the Australian and British armed forces who served in World War II in Borneo.

Who rules?

The Latin verb gubernare has obvious associations with “govern.” It can also mean “to direct, rule, guide.”

“Serviendo guberno” on a war memorial (Image credit: NSW War Memorial Register)

It is here used in the simple present first person singular: “I rule.”

Why would council identify as “I”? Surely, “we” or some agentless form would make much more sense.

One way to interpret the first-person singular is to put the motto into the mouth of the individual colonist, a white male subject. Alternatively, the “I” might be read as that of the sovereign; not the democratic sovereign of the people, of course, but the individual sovereign of the monarch – the Crown as the legitimizing force of colonization.

Why Latin?

Non-English monolingual signage is exceedingly rare in Australia. Where such signage appears, the language in question is often Latin.

In addition to Ku-ring-gai Council, many institutions have Latin mottos and slogans. All the following examples appear in Latin only, without translation. The translations in brackets are mine.

The Monuments Australia database shows many war memorials that include slogans such as “Quo fas et gloria ducunt” (“Where right and glory lead”) or “Pro patria” (“For the fatherland”).

“Masculinity is being enacted” says this school logo (my translation) (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Schools often have Latin mottos. And they really get Latin out into the street as school children sport the mottos on their backpacks, uniforms, and caps.

Examples include “Virile agitur” (“Masculinity is being enacted”), “Utinam patribus nostris digni simus” (“May we were worthy of our fathers”), or “vi et animo” (“with force and courage”).

Australian universities also have a thing for Latin phrases, from ANU’s “Naturam primum cognoscere rerum” (“To know the nature of things first”) to Sydney’s notoriously confusing “Sidere mens eadem mutato” (“The same spirit under different stars”).

Latin is supposedly a dead language. But there is probably more Latin signage in the Australian linguistic landscape than there is signage in any Indigenous language.

Like the cartoon characters in the center of the logo, the function of Latin in these mottos is symbolic. The Latin phrases emblazoned on Australia’s institutional linguistic landscape do not per se mean much: too few people know Latin for this to be the case; and some of the explanations, translations and interpretations provided on institutional websites are – linguistically speaking – pure fantasy.

The use of Latin is another way to anchor Australia’s whiteness in history. Latin symbolically links Australian institutions to European deep history, to a history that happened long before the colonization of Australia: classical antiquity, the Roman Empire, and medieval Christianity.

Marking white possession and belonging

Together, the Aboriginal cartoon characters and the incomprehensible Latin motto do two things in a place where both the presence of actual Indigenous people and any meaningful use of the Latin language is negligible. First, the mythical – in contrast to physical, material, or real – presence of Indigenous people offers non-Indigenous Australians a fantasy of belonging. Second, Latin provides the same illusion but in starker terms: not as a fuzzy feeling but as the legitimacy of possession. Together, they mask unbelonging and erase dispossession.

My thinking about the logo and Latin in the Australian linguistic landscape has greatly benefitted from Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. The author argues that the national belonging of non-Indigenous Australians is predicated on their willful forgetting of the fundamentals of their residence in this land: colonial conquest, racism, and the dispossession of Indigenous Australians.

Indigenous Australians can never forget or overlook the evidence of their dispossession. For non-Indigenous Australians it is easy to forget and not to notice – we have built a world that provides a fantasy of belonging while hiding the original theft.

***

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

“What stops Australia from doing something like Sweden has done to promote multilingualism? Is it too hard to implement mother tongue instruction in the education system of Australia?”

These questions about language education planning in Australia (where I was born and grew up) and Sweden (where I became a researcher and now live and work) were asked during an online conversation I got involved with after a conference (#ICCHLE21) organized by the Sydney Institute for Community Languages Education (Sydney University). As the questions relate directly to the topic of my Phd research, they engaged me, to say the least!

Multilingualism is a fact of life

In our globalized world, many people speak languages in addition to the official language(s) of the country they live in. Different terms , for example “home language” “heritage language” even “native language”, are used in different contexts to describe these languages and the forms of education that may exist to promote their development.

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

In Sweden they are labelled “mother tongues”, and education to promote their development is called Mother Tongue Instruction (hereafter MTI). In Australia the term “community language” is well-established, but terms “first” and “background” language are also used, specifically in the Australian National Curriculum. There are a range of different approaches to the study of community, first, or background languages in Australia.

Is Sweden really better at promoting multilingualism?

So why did the person who asked the questions above think that the Swedish model of MTI might be better for promoting multilingualism in Australia than the range of approaches that currently exist? In my thesis I argued that organizational, ideological and classroom factors impact on the opportunities for the development of multilingualism that the different models offered. Unpacking the organizational and ideological factors can help answer the questions.

How does Mother Tongue Instruction (MTI) in Sweden work?

In Sweden, since the Home Language Reform in 1977, students from primary to upper-secondary school have been entitled to apply for MTI in any language other than Swedish that they speak at home. If the student has basic proficiency in the language, more than five students in the local area apply for it and a teacher is available, the school is required to organize MTI in that language.

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

National funding for MTI is administered by local municipalities, who collaborate with schools in the organization of MTI and who employ many of the 6,183 mother tongue teachers who work in Swedish schools. While teacher education is not mandatory for MTI teachers, there are a range of teacher education programmes and professional development courses offered at universities throughout the country that prepare and support MTI teachers for their work.

MTI has a syllabus, and grades in the subject at the end of lower-secondary school can boost the scores that give students eligibility to upper-secondary school programmes. During the academic year 2020-2021, 150 languages were taught through MTI in Swedish schools.

Mother tongue instruction (MTI) within a strong policy framework

Sweden’s system, offering MTI through the national school system, is relatively unique. Although other countries may have some form of support for the maintenance and development of languages other than the national languages, there is no other country where the right to study mother tongues that are different from the national languages, is offered such strong legal protection.

Community language schools in Australia

Education in first, background or community languages in Australia is organized quite differently. It is possible to study five languages as background or first languages through the school system. Education in the other 295 or so languages spoken in Australia is organized through the community language school network.

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

Community language schools have existed in Australia since 1857 and are located in most large cities and some smaller towns throughout the country. Each state has a different approach to organizing community language education. See for example how different the systems in the Victorian School of Languages is from Queensland. New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania have their own systems as well.

While many community language teachers have tertiary qualification, not infrequently in education, they often receive only symbolic payment or work voluntarily. Most community language schools hold lessons on weekends or after school hours, and it is not always possible for all students at community language schools to gain certification or formal recognition of their community language studies.

Community language schools are disconnected from mainstream schooling

Education in community languages in Australia thus usually takes place outside the mainstream school system, is concentrated in larger cities, run by volunteers and not always recognized by the formal education system. These organizational factors can impact negatively on equality of access (for bilinguals living in remote regions) and on student motivation.

It all comes down to language ideologies and policy frameworks

So how do ideological factors impact on the promotion of multilingualism in Sweden and Australia? Language ideologies are not about truth but rather are “beliefs, feelings and conceptions about language that are socially shared and relate language and society in a dialectical fashion” (Piller, 2015). Language ideologies are thus socially situated and dynamic.

Sweden underwent a political and social transformation in the 1970s, throwing off anything associated with the “old assimilationist Sweden” and embracing the vision of “the new Sweden” (modern and pluralistic). It has been argued that it is partly because these ideas were so powerful at a community and political levels that an educational reform as radical as The Home Language Reform, a reform that politicians from every party were committed to, was possible (Hyltenstam & Milani, 2012).

(Image credit: Cruickshank et al, 2021, NSW Community Languages Report)

Collaborations between researchers, activists, social scientists, and officials were instrumental in transforming attitudes in Sweden concerning the value of education in all languages (Wickström, 2015). As Sweden’s policies on mother tongue instruction have traditionally been influenced more by the academic field than the political field, it is clear that language ideologies held by policymakers in Sweden have been influenced by researchers, community members and collaborations between them, leading to the Home Language Reform of 1977 and the establishment of mother tongue instruction.

Australia’s monolingual mindset remains a barrier

In Australia, a major hindrance to funding and giving equal access to the study of a wider range of languages other than English is a very particular set of beliefs about language that researchers have called, the monolingual mindset. This is a deep-rooted, widespread belief that “Standard Australian English” is the most important language and that being monolingual is common and expected.

There is a lot of research that discusses the negative impact of the monolingual mindset on language learning and use and multilingual identity in Australia. However, policy makers do not appear to have engaged with this research, or if they have, they have not had the political means to enact legislation that would make the study of community languages more widely accessible.

Two diverse societies with different approaches to multilingualism

Although Sweden today is not socially or ideologically the same place as it was in the 1970s and there is no longer unanimous support in the Swedish parliament for MTI, the number of students who study the subject has increased steadily since its introduction. Almost one-third of the student population (Table 8A) in the compulsory school was eligible for the subject in the 2020/2021 academic year. MTI thus remains an important, elective subject in the Swedish curriculum, part of a national and systematic approach to language education.

Australia is also home to many people who speak languages in addition to English. The person who asked the questions at the beginning of this blogpost and many researchers as well believe that a national, systemic approach to education in community languages would benefit these individuals, their families, and the Australian community.

So what is stopping Australia from doing something like Sweden then? To answer this, I ask another question: Are Australian policymakers ready to listen to and collaborate with their multilingual citizens and researchers? Until they are, an Australian version of the Home Language Reform is still a way off.

Victorian Multicultural Commission, Melbourne (Image credit: Pramuk Perera, via Unsplash)

In August, Australia’s Acting Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs, Alan Tudge, announced the extension of the Adult Migrant Education Program (AMEP) as well as a stronger focus on Australian values in the Australian citizenship test.

Increasing the provision of free English classes through the AMEP is undoubtedly a good thing. Although it needs to be mentioned in brackets that most classes will be online, which is highly problematic because language in use actually involves collaboration and communication.

Here, I am concerned with the rationale for the extended provision of English language lessons.

Non-English speakers a fifth column

In his address to the National Press club, “Keeping Together at a Time of COVID”, the minister claimed that national cohesion in Australia was at risk because of communities who have poor English. He explained that “poor English” made them “more reliant on foreign language sources.” This is a problem, according to the Minister: ‘‘Despite now being proud Australians, some communities are still seen by their former home countries as ‘their diaspora‘ – to be harassed or exploited to further the national cause.”

This negative understanding of  “diaspora” is selective because, in fact, the overwhelming majority of Australians are part of some diaspora or other. After all, all non-Aboriginal Australians have ties and loyalties to ancestral cultures and languages that come from somewhere else. This is true even if their family has lived in Australia for generations. When I grew up in Australia in the 1960s, we learnt Scottish, Welsh, and Irish folk songs at school, about heather and misty braes, and we swore allegiance to an English queen.

Diaspora, then, is the lived experience of millions of Australians. But does a diasporic sense of belonging – the experience that various cultural traditions may touch your heart or that your palate has a taste for cuisine associated with more than one place – necessarily involve dual loyalty in the political sense?

Non-English media as sources of misinformation

The Minister says so and his reasoning is this:  “malign information or propaganda can be spread through multicultural media, including foreign language media controlled or funded by state players.”

The connection between English language proficiency and “multicultural or foreign language media” consumption is spurious. After all, in a globalized world, direct contact with home country media is just a few clicks away. Even fluent bilinguals are likely to access news from their home country and keep in contact with family members, who are often dispersed across the world and intertwine other languages with English in their home.

The choice of media and language is complex, depending on the time, the place, the users and the context. A Chinese friend who has lived in Australia for 25 years tells me that she and her husband access multiple daily sources of information in both languages, of both local and international provenance. Her Australian-born children use only English-language media and her elderly parents-in-law rely exclusively on Chinese language media and their family members as sources of information. She reports that this diversity of information sources sometimes leads to lively family discussions!

English doesn’t make national cohesion and multilingualism doesn’t break it

Furthermore, the Minster confuses community and foreign languages when he claims that “through the pandemic […] it has been difficult to communicate with all Australians through the mainstream channels.” “Mainstream channels”, in Australia, of course, include local multilingual sources, including government notifications and the extensive local ethnic media, as well as recognizing that most immigrant families and networks include some fluent English users who pass on information.

Finally, “malign information or propaganda” does not only spread through languages other than English. English monolinguals are just as prone to draw on malign sources and fall prey to “fake news”. And many of the English-language media sources they draw on are not Australian at all and emanate from foreign countries.

Ultimately, the link that the Minister makes between English language proficiency and national cohesion is unfortunate. Instead of building bridges between communities and enhancing national cohesion, as was presumably intended, the framing of English language learning as a matter of national loyalty can only increase barriers between communities and lead to distrust.

***

Source: Australian Museum

Editor’s note: This week (Nov 08-15) we are celebrating NAIDOC week. “NAIDOC” stands for “National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee.” The theme of this year’s NAIDOC week is “Always was, always will be” in recognition of the fact that First Nations people have occupied and cared for the Australian continent for over 65,000 years. Indigenous Languages have been a inextricable part of this history. Yet the value of Indigenous Languages continues to be denied, as Gerald Roche and Jakelin Troy show here.

***

A New Era for Indigenous Languages?

Despite decades of research and public outreach demonstrating the importance of Indigenous languages, negative attitudes about the maintenance and revitalization of these languages persist among the general public in Australia. Here, we argue that we need to think about the tenacity of these negative attitudes as a form of denial, like climate denial or genocide denial. We also argue that now is a crucial time to confront that denial.

2019 was nominated by the UN as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and the years 2022-2032 have been nominated as the decade of Indigenous languages. These high-profile international mega-events seemingly promise a coming era of unprecedented attention to and support for Indigenous languages.

This promise extends to Australia. We joined in the International Year of Indigenous Languages, with numerous activities organized by the Department of Communication and the Arts. The Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies recognized 2019 as an “opportunity for all Australians to engage in a national conversation about Indigenous languages.”

Source: Australian Museum

Australia is the only country in the world that has a national schools curriculum that supports the teaching of all its Indigenous languages. ‘The Australian Curriculum Languages – Framework for Teaching Aboriginal Languages and Torres Strait Islander Languages’ provides for every school in Australia to teach one or more Australian languages—the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. In spite of this historic development in our education system, most Australians seem to be oblivious or, worse, hostile to Australian languages. Plans are now afoot to take part in the coming decade of Indigenous languages, but how will Australia support Australian languages?

Ongoing trends and recent events in Australia suggest that significant challenges lie ahead. The Third National Indigenous Languages Report, published in August this year, found that most of Australia’s Indigenous languages are highly ‘endangered,’ while only a small and declining number (currently 12) are considered ‘strong.’ Meanwhile, recent efforts to bolster the role of English, seen in new regulations enforcing English requirements for partner visas, have strengthened problematic associations between the English language and Australian citizenship. And most disturbingly, we continue to see the destruction of Indigenous heritage by both commercial and state parties.

All of this suggests that Australia must still confront massive social and political barriers if Indigenous languages are going to flourish. As the analysis below demonstrates, denial of the importance of Indigenous languages and the reality of their revitalization persists, and are expressed in public forums with surprising impunity.

Indigenous Languages and the Australian Public  

Source: Australian Museum

We undertook a preliminary analysis of comments made on five articles in the Conversation, published between August 2014 and July 2020; the data we analyze is available here. These articles focused on different aspects of the maintenance and revitalization of Indigenous languages in Australia. We collated a total of 49 comments from them.

We began by classifying the comments into negative, positive or both/neither regarding their view of Indigenous languages. We found that  21 (42.8%) of the comments were unambiguously negative in their appraisal, while 14 (28.5%) were positive; the remaining were either neutral or ambiguous.

We then examined the negative comments for recurrent themes that were used to justify and rationalize these views. We found five major themes: language revitalization is impractical; it harms Indigenous people and communities; revitalized languages are inauthentic; government support for Indigenous languages is inappropriate, and; English should be promoted instead of Indigenous languages. Each theme is examined in turn below.

Commentators suggested that it was “impractical,” “absurd,” or not “feasible” to maintain and revitalize Indigenous languages, or that these languages are “doomed,” and therefore any interventions were useless. Some commentators took a modified position, suggesting that the proposed methods, rather than revitalization itself, were impractical. One commentator attempted to demonstrate the impracticality of supporting Indigenous languages with a hypothetical scenario: a factory in an “Aborigine area” where all signage would have to be in English as well as “the various Aboriginal languages/dialects,” leading to an unsafe work environment.

Another theme was that maintaining and revitalizing Indigenous languages is harmful. Some suggested that supporting Indigenous languages has adverse economic impacts, primarily because English is the language of economic advancement: “English, in Australia must be the language of the classroom as it will be the key to the factory, office and other workplaces.” Others stressed that supporting Indigenous languages would isolate Indigenous people: from the rest of society, in remote locations, and in the past. Support for Indigenous language was associated with Indigenous people living “in the desert, isolated from mainstream society,” “condemned” to becoming a “living museum,” unable to “appreciate their links to people in other regions.” A variant of this argument was that providing support for language revitalization takes funds away from communities where Indigenous languages are strong.

Source: Australian Museum

Commentators also employed a ‘bootstraps’ argument, insisting that government interventions in Indigenous languages were inappropriate because communities should take sole responsibility for their languages. One commentator stated that “The real responsibility lies within each community to promote language usage,” while another emphasized the need for “a grass roots commitment within the community.” This point was often stressed by making comparisons with successful efforts of migrant communities to maintain their languages in Australia. These comments seemingly imply that if Indigenous communities need government support, it is because they are either unwilling or unable to maintain their languages themselves.

A fourth theme in the negative comments focused on issues of authenticity. It was argued that the languages, speakers, or the use of languages were, essentially, fake. Regarding revitalized languages, it was argued that, “We don’t know what the languages were really like,” and that we can “never know” their pronunciation. Not only were the languages described as fake, but it was also asserted that, “Aboriginal people are really English speakers.” Finally, the use of such languages is also deemed inappropriate in the modern world, in places that “are now completely covered in concrete, industry, and modern life.”

A final theme was that English should be prioritized. The importance of English was sometimes suggested to derive from its official status: “English is the official language in Australia.” More often, it was suggested that English ‘simply is’ the dominant language, and that prioritizing it is mere realism: “Living in Australia means speaking English.” One commentator also suggested that English is a “very rich language,” that contains “the words needed for modern, global life.” This suggests that Indigenous languages are, by contrast, ‘poor’ and have vocabularies unsuited to ‘modern, global life.’

Source: Australian Museum

Understanding Denial

All the positions outlined above constitute denial insofar as they are counterfactual. In contrast to what these commentators suggest, language revitalization is thriving in Australia. Many languages of the south east and south west of Australia have come back into active use after more than one hundred years of dormancy. One such language is Kaurna of the Adelaide Plains, not spoken for more than one hundred years when its community began to reconstruct the language from sparse memories and some historic documents, assisted by linguist Rob Amery. It is now a thriving language with its community using the language on a daily basis for casual and formal communication. It began with the community wanting to teach the language in their schools and this continues today.

Rather than harming Indigenous people, language revitalization is linked to increased wellbeing. In talking about the renewal of Kaurna and other languages, Kaurna educator Stephen Goldsmith says, “When we’re talking about the Aboriginal culture, we’re talking about the cultural heritage of every Australian…When people go into communities they start to understand the depth and the knowledge of Aboriginal people and how we operate as part of the environment.”

Although language revitalization requires commitment from the community, it also requires government support, in both policy and funding. And languages that have undergone renewal of their use as community languages are as real and authentic as any language. Finally, English is not Australia’s official language nor is it an Australian language; it is a language of Australia, imported like the many others that are now languages of Australia.

Source: Australian Museum

These are all established facts, accessible to anyone who cares to look. There are debates about details, but not basic truths. Therefore, if the comments we analyze are expressions of ignorance, it is willful ignorance. More than merely counterfactual, however, these arguments are also denialist in the sense that they aim to obstruct a course of action that is suggested by those recognized facts. In this case, they aim to justify and rationalize an unjust status quo that Indigenous people have persistently spoken up against.

The denialist arguments described above follow a common pattern shared with denialist efforts to suppress language revitalization elsewhere. However, they also exist in a uniquely Australian context, and an important aspect of this context is anti-Indigenous racism. A recent survey found that three quarters of Australians hold ‘implicit bias’ against Indigenous people, and the Online Hate Prevention Institute has tracked rising anti-Indigenous racism in Australian online space, particularly following this year’s Black Lives Matter protests.

We need to better understand the relationships between anti-Indigenous racism and the denialist positions described here.

If the UN decade of Indigenous language is going to truly help Indigenous languages in Australia flourish, it will be essential to understand both the extent of denialist sentiments, and the complex ways they interact with the wider political context. Broad public support will be essential to promoting Indigenous languages: to create a safe space where Indigenous people can undertake the difficult and emotional work of reclaiming their languages; to protect communities and individuals from backlash; to ensure that funding is secured and its use supported; and as an essential part of any political change within our democratic political system.

To win this support, we have to stop denying the existence of denial, try and better understand how and why opposition to Indigenous language revitalization exists, and explore how it might be countered.

***

The histories and everyday experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia are etched in the landscape, the waterways and the voices of those who can speak and understand ancestral Aboriginal languages. They also thrive in post-invasion contact varieties such as Kriol and Aboriginal English.

Researching Aboriginal English through yarning

When our sociolinguistic project into Aboriginal English in Nyungar country (southwest Western Australia) started in early 2019 little did we know how much our fieldwork would enrich us. The premise was simple: head out into metropolitan Perth, set up the cameras and talk to people. Then use those recordings to figure out how Aboriginal English is changing. But there were so many questions. What model of research would be favoured and why? How should we collect our data? Who should we approach? What would people talk about?

It would have been reasonable to follow existing practice in sociolinguistics. But the canonical methods of the field are mostly based on industrialised, Western cultures and societies. How could we ensure that different ways of knowing would be incorporated into the project? How could we move beyond the Eurocentric mainstream to “hear the voices” of people historically pushed to the margins?

Data collection in a Perth city park (Photo reproduced with permission)

To the rescue comes Glenys Collard, a Nyungar woman, a native speaker of Aboriginal English and an experienced language worker whose input into the project changed the research forever.

Instead of a sociolinguistic interview, our data collection tool of choice was “yarning” – an Indigenous cultural form of storytelling and conversation. This type of conversation and storytelling is highly dramatic, using much gesture, facial expression and variation in tone and volume. The lack of pre-defined questions in the “yarning” format allowed speakers to remain in control of what they wanted to share while the cameras were on.

Recruiting research participants through listening

Instead of institutions, we headed out to meet people in their homes. But there was a catch. A significant number of Aboriginal people are homeless. In 2016, for example, Aboriginal people made up 3.7% of the total population of Western Australia but accounted for a staggering 29.1% of the homeless population in the state.

Glenys Collard was adamant these people’s stories should be heard, too. She led us into the streets and parks they call home. She reached out to them, she explained what we were doing and why. The photo shows Glenys Collard and the four women we spoke to at a Perth City Park in mid-2019. Glenys explains what was special about yarning with these women:

These yorgas [women] were too deadly [great], they could spin a few good yarns and they took after yarnin flat out about who they was, what they been doin. It was deadly. Celeste talked to them and they already looked at me so I gave them the ok with my eyes and closed mouth. The four of them were Aboriginal English speakers. I don’t think another researcher would have chosen them to speak with because of the area and the other people who were there. They all had a yarn and they wanted to share so we stay an listen.

They wanted to speak to us because of Glenys. She made the research safe for them. At the end of the session, Celeste asked Glenys why people – both in the park and elsewhere – had been so keen to speak to us. Glenys replied: No one has ever listened to them before.

These feelings are echoed by Dr Chelsea Bond, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman and University of Queensland academic. Dr Bond explains that Australian society is founded on the non-existence of Indigenous people. She frames a lack of listening around police aggression. “Blackfellas are always speaking about police brutality – why aren’t people listening?”

Recording stories about police brutality and racism

Indeed, accounts of police brutality feature prominently in our collection. The corpus is replete with stories of racism and abuse.

Nita’s story stands out. We were outside a popular medical centre in downtown Perth when we saw her. Nita (a pseudonym) seemed upset, but she was keen to have a yarn so we set up the cameras. The microphones are on. Her twenty-something-year-old nephew is dead. Found dead at one of Perth’s private prisons. The police tells her and her family that her nephew killed himself. She and her family disagree: the bruises on his body indicate otherwise. She is sure her nephew was killed.

In another example, a prominent Aboriginal Perth leader spontaneously told us the story of a Nyungar woman who was evicted from her home in metropolitan Perth. When he arrived to try and stop the eviction, the woman’s heels were dug into the framework of the door, her little grannies (grandchildren) everywhere, police “by the mass”. He recalls seeing the police dragging the woman by the hair as her grannies looked on. He saw the Department of Child Protection officers take the woman’s grandchildren away.

Why aren’t people listening?

A young Aboriginal student we yarned with sums it up perfectly: “Someone who has grown up privileged cannot even fathom the idea of how we [Aboriginal people] might have grown up. It’s like a bad dream to them, like a nightmare. But that’s what we’ve lived, you know?”.

More than sociolinguistic samples

The voices in the stories we collected for our research are much more than high-quality linguistic samples of Aboriginal English. They are raw and real accounts of the community’s histories and everyday experiences. Our cross-cultural fieldwork allowed us to record the community’s voices using a culturally appropriate genre (yarning) and placing a community member, Glenys Collard, at the core. Her presence, experience and wisdom allowed us to move a step closer towards decolonising research into Aboriginal English. Importantly, her expertise allowed us to “hear the voices” of those rarely featured in sociolinguistic research.

Acknowledgement

This research is funded through a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) (DE DE170100493) and a 2019 Australian Linguistic Society Research Grant.

The Twitter thread below offers a quick teaser for each episode. Indulge yourself, head over to the Earshot website, download the 5 episodes, and enjoy 2.5 hours of linguistic bliss!

In Episode 1, you will learn about the global #language hierarchy, and discover why a #multilingual person may not be able to say "take a shower" in all their #languages https://t.co/JfTzWUyqDV

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 23, 2019

Part 3 takes us to #Armenian–#English #bilingual Galstaun College, an #Arabic community school, and to a frustrated #Japanese teacher in a Sydney public school … and you will begin to understand why #language #education in Australia is such a disasterhttps://t.co/L5OL2d3yG6

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 23, 2019

And in Episode 5 @birdpham and @masakofukuisyd finally figure out that #English is a #migrant #language, too …

Ultimately, #multilingualism is not about #languages but about creating more inclusive societieshttps://t.co/DY5u9MzLvH

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 23, 2019

Here’s That Awkward Video Of Scott Morrison Saying “Ni Hao” To A Korean Voter: Scott Morrison is being skewered on social media after he greeted a Korean-Australian voter with “ni hao” hello in Mandarin while campaigning in Strathfield, Sydney. excerpthttps://t.co/4ttITsJXwM pic.twitter.com/WOpPjZWh4l

— lynlinking (@lynlinking) April 13, 2019

Chinese warning against illegal parking in Sydney apartment building

Australia today is a de facto multilingual society. According to 2016 census data, 22.2% of Australians speak a language other than English (LOTE) at home. In the major cities the number of multilinguals is much higher (38.2% in Sydney; 34.9% in Melbourne).

Mandarin is the most frequently spoken LOTE and is the home language of 2.5% of the Australian population (4.7% in Sydney). This means that no LOTE strongly predominates nationally although this may differ across localities. In Strathfield, the Sydney suburb where the ministerial gaffe occurred, Korean is spoken by 10.9% of residents and thus slightly ahead of Mandarin with 10.6%.

That politicians would try to reach these diverse groups is not surprising. However, a gauche attempt to greet an Asian-looking person in Chinese exposes the gap between our predominantly white Anglo monolingual politicians and the diverse population they are supposed to represent.

Multilingual warning against trolley dumping in Sydney apartment complex

Multilingualism in Australia is largely restricted to the immigrant population and their children. This means that proficiency in a LOTE is, by and large, also a marker of an ethnic identity that is not Anglo/white.

The Anglo/white population has been struggling to come to terms with this reality. For the longest time, the key strategy has been to simply ignore LOTEs and carry on as if Australia were a monolingual English-speaking society – the infamous monolingual mindset. However, our multilingual reality has become increasingly difficult to ignore, and as a result we see more and more efforts at multilingual communication.

The problem with these multilingual communications is that the LOTE speaker is not imagined as a conversation partner but as a dupe. “Greet them in their language and they will be pleased”, “Provide campaign posters in their language and they’ll vote for me”, seems to be the thinking.

The red lines are the visual equivalent of shouting at Chinese residents to do their laundry properly

In short, most of the time when Anglo-Australians use a LOTE, they do not imagine interacting with another complex person but talking at some uni-dimensional simpleton. These multilingual practices do not engage but otherize.

That multilingual practices can exclude just as much as they can include is most apparent in multilingual prohibition signs. When prohibitions are stated in more than one language in an otherwise largely monolingual space, these prohibitions position LOTE speakers as trespassers and interlopers who cannot be relied upon to do the right thing. Signage stating bathroom etiquette is one such example.

Chinese-English signs placed over toilets during open houses (when a house that is for sale is open for inspection by potential buyers) are another. I find it difficult to imagine that toilet use during open houses is such a problem that it requires intervention with a specifically designed sign. The sign in all probability serves less to deter inappropriate toilet use than to disseminate its implicit message: that Chinese customers have questionable hygiene. Multilingual prohibition signs related to illegal parking, illegal use of shopping trolleys, or illegal use of washing lines all invite the same conclusion: Chinese residents are offenders against the norms of everyday interaction.

Open house toilet sign

LOTE use, and specifically the use of Asian languages, predominantly Chinese, in the public space in Australia – in cases where it emanates from outside the LOTE community – is the latest incarnation of the fear of Asians that has been inscribed into Australian culture ever since it became a British outpost far away from Europe but close to Asia.

Australia’s fear of Asia manifested itself most explicitly in the “White Australia” policy, which excluded Asian immigrants for most of the 20^th century. While a racist immigration policy has given way to a non-discriminatory immigration policy for almost half a century now and most immigrants today come from Asia, Anglo-Australia is still struggling to come to terms with the reality that Australia is an Asian country geographically and is increasingly becoming an Asian country demographically.

Another open house toilet sign

But what do these realities mean for our diverse society? The linguistic evidence at present suggests that “Australian” and “Asian” continue to be imagined as mutually exclusive categories. But our collective embarrassment at this state of affairs is palpable, and change is in the air.

Related content

• Diversity made invisible in 2010 federal Australian election [yeah, we’ve been blogging this long …]
• Monolingual mindset in the lucky country
• Multilingual prohibitions
• Toiletology
• The monolingual mindset goes to war
• Banal multilingualism
• Banal cosmopolitanism

Passport photos of early Chinese immigrants (Source: Invisible Australians)

For most Chinese migrants, China is what they call home. China is the basis on which they establish a sense of rootedness. However, inevitably, a new identity also emerges in relation to their destination country.

The memoirs collected in Dragon Seed in the Antipodes explore these tensions: while Chinese-Australians’ sense of rootedness “structured their existence and identity” (Shen, 2001, p. 60), their “Chineseness” depends on Australian discourses of identity.

Dragon Seed in the Antipodes is a collection of autobiographies of over twenty Chinese migrants to Australia from different historical periods, spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century.

One striking feature of Dragon Seed in the Antipodes lies in the authors’ dynamic and rich identities which are profoundly moulded both by the broader socio-historical context as well as their personal situations as individuals.

I read Dragon Seed in the Antipodes for the 2018 Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge and I was particularly interested in the self-representations of Chinese Australians dating to the second half the last century. Autobiographies from this period were authored by three distinct groups: new migrants from China, new migrants from Southeast Asia, and members of the second and third generations.

Chinese migrants from China

“The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a massive exodus of many of the most brilliant Chinese intellectuals from the mainland” (Shen, 2001, p. 90) for the purpose of “better[ing] themselves financially and academically” (Shen, 2001, p. 95). In the autobiographies, members of this group construct themselves as “historical drifters”, “wandering Chinese” or “homeless Chinese”.

The central theme running through their autobiographies are “rootlessness” and “alienation”. Their “rootlessness” mainly arose from their experiences during the Cultural Revolution and China’s economic backwardness at that time.

Settlement in Australia does not provide a remedy and their rootlessness from China is complemented by their sense of alienation in Australia. Alienation is mostly a result of their shattered dreams and ambitions related to their financial difficulties and failure to (re)establish themselves professionally.

Shen sums up the experiences of this group with reference to another autobiography by a Chinese migrant to Australia, Liu Guande (1991, 1995), who said:

To go overseas is not easy; to stay overseas is hard; and to return to China is even harder.

Chinese migrants from Southeast Asia

The experiences of Chinese migrants “whose roots were planted in Asia, not in the mythical motherland, China” (Shen, 2001, p. 122) are quite different. “To Be or Not to Be Chinese” is one central issue that this group constantly had to face. Whether they chose to identify as Chinese or not was related to reasons such as their emphasis on scholastic achievement, their love of Chinese food, or the fact that they found Chineseness to be of practical value in multicultural Australia. By contrast, whether they spoke the Chinese language, “the soul of Chinese identity” (Shen, 2001, p. 123), was less important to them.

Consequently, the Chineseness of this group becomes “a state of mind, a self-perception” (Shen, 2001, p. 125).

Chinese born in Australia

The second and third generations of Chinese experienced painful trajectories of constructing themselves as Chinese Australians, which may have started with their initial hatred of their Chinese self and even their heritage language during the period of the white Australian policy. In the second half of the twentieth century, many in this group reconciled themselves with their Chinese side and they finally achieved a Chinese-Australian identity in what had by then become multicultural Australia.

The initial embarrassment from their Chinese heritage is vividly conveyed in a series of autobiographical essays written by William Yang whose ancestors had “put roots into Australian soil” (as cited in Shen, 2001, p. 130) since 1880s:

What a strong emotion. What an attachment to the country. All my family’s roots were in Australia, I was more Australian than the kids who told me to go back to China. I didn’t even know where China was. (as cited in Shen, 2001, p. 130).

Being Chinese was a terrible curse. (as cited in Shen, 2001, p. 133).

[…] she [Yang’s mother] couldn’t see the point. What was the use of a Chinese language, it would only mark you out as a target, it would confirm the difference of appearance. […] My mother wanted us to assimilate. (as cited in Shen, 2001, p. 135).

Being Chinese in Australia

Overall, Dragon Seed in the Antipodes vividly demonstrates that the meaning of being Chinese differs from generation to generation, even form person to person, depending both on the socio-economic and political dynamics of their heritage community as well as those in the destination society.

The book follows the footprints of different generations of Chinese and resolves a core question people who are interested in migration studies want to ask: how did immigrants construct their identities in different historical periods? This book not only uncovers the self-perceptions of Chinese of different generations living in Australia but offers a glimpse of Australian history related to immigrants from a Chinese perspective.

More about our Reading Challenge

• Virtually multilingual
• In search of myself
• In search of a language and an identity
• One orientalism or many orientalisms?
• Why are you not citing any African female expert?
• The devil’s handwriting
• Globalization between crime and piety
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

References

刘观德. (1991). 我的财富在澳洲. 上海文艺出版社. [Liu, Guande. 1991. My fortune in Australia. Shanghai Literature and Arts Press, Shanghai]

Liu, G. D. (1995). My Fortune in Australia. Trans. Bruce J Jacobs and Ouyang Yu. Bitter Peaches and Plums: Two Chinese Novellas on the Recent Chinese Student Experience in Australia. Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute.

Shen, Y. F. (2001). Dragon Seed in the Antipodes: Chinese Australian Autobiographies. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Studying English (©Sadami Konchi)

The program for the “Language and Migration” workshop in Parramatta on Friday, December 11, 2015 is now available. The workshop is part of the 46th annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) at the newly rebranded Western Sydney University.

Organizers: Ingrid Piller, Macquarie University, and Donna Butorac, Curtin University

The artwork featured here is by Sadami Konchi, who will be hosting a solo exhibition “People of Parramatta” at Riverside Theatres Parramatta from Monday, 16 November until Sunday 13th December, to coincide with the conference dates. The exhibition features, inter alia, the original sketches of the images shown here.

Overview

International migration is widely perceived to have reached levels of complexity unprecedented in human history (Czaika & de Haas, 2014). A few international migration magnet destinations (Australasia, the Gulf States, North America and Western Europe) have been transformed into ‘super-diverse’ societies in the past few decades (Vertovec, 2007). Consequently, social questions related to migration (how to ensure social cohesion and sustainability; how to safeguard the rights of old-timers and newcomers; how to manage migration economically and ethically; etc.) have become pressing and hotly contested political issues in many societies around the globe, including Australia. Language is central to many of these debates.

While the social importance of migration can hardly be overstated and needs little justification, migration raises equally pressing theoretical questions for the discipline of linguistics: we are currently witnessing a paradigm shift from language understood as an object in space towards an understanding of language as a process in motion. Developing a new ‘sociolinguistics of mobility’ is widely considered as constituting the current frontier in (socio)linguistic theorizing (e.g., Blommaert, 2010; Dick, 2011; Heller, 2007).

The workshop is intended to showcase current Australian research exploring the relationship between language and migration and contributing to the sociolinguistics of mobility.

Studying English (©Sadami Konchi)

The workshop is organized in two blocks, one devoted to ‘Public discourses’ and the other to ‘Family repertoires.’ Each block will contain four featured speakers. The workshop will be highly interactive, with short presentations and panel discussions.

The key questions to be addressed are:

• How do public and private discourses of language, identity and belonging intersect?
• What are the policy challenges raised by the research presented here, particularly with regard to education?
• What can applied linguists do to positively influence media and institutional migration discourses?

Public discourses

Angus Stirling, Representations of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Australian Print Media: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis

Utilising corpus linguistics, this research examines representations of refugee and asylum seeker identity within Australian newspapers. It analyses dominant and competing discourses, revealing how identity is constructed and contextualised. As media representations may influence broader discourse, there is value in establishing which representations are commonly formed (thus enabling them to be investigated for accuracy) and which representations are silenced.

Building on recent British research led by professor Paul Baker of Lancaster University (Baker et al, 2008), this study melds the socio-political contextualisation of Critical Discourse Analysis with the methods of corpus linguistics to analyse language within 40,000 articles sampled from an eight year period. Findings indicate there are two major competing discourses: that of plight and illegitimacy. Asylum seeker and refugee identities are constructed differently, with refugees receiving a mixed yet comparatively favourable representation. Implications include the potential to now challenge key sites of problematic discourse and possible grounds for reform of press practices.

Laura Smith-Khan, Fair go? Communication and credibility in Australian asylum procedures

Australian Citizenship (©Sadami Konchi)

Almost 60 million people are forcibly displaced around the world today. Those who seek asylum in countries like Australia meet increasingly restrictive government policy. Often lacking documentary proof of persecution, asylum seekers must construct a credible refugee narrative. Yet they face many challenges: Intercultural communication or interpreting errors can create inconsistencies or misunderstanding; language use may clash with institutional expectations. These issues can damage credibility, fatally undermining the claim’s success.

This presentation draws on my ongoing doctoral research. Analysing decisions of the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal, I critically examine how decision-makers assess credibility, comparing this with government policy instructions. I consider the ways in which institutional and individual beliefs about language may influence these decisions. While policy explicitly promotes fairness, credibility assessments involving apparent clashes of language beliefs and misunderstandings still disproportionately disadvantage applicants. Revising the role and nature of credibility assessments in Australian asylum decision-making would help ensure fairer outcomes.

Maria Chisari, Learning English and becoming an Australian citizen: A sociolinguistic study of migrants preparing for the Australian citizenship test

This paper explores how the relationship between language, national identity and belonging is negotiated by migrants and refugees who want to become Australian citizens. The work is based on an ethnographic study which investigates how migrants respond to official citizenship policy that promotes learning English as a way of securing social cohesion and constructing Australian national identity. The study, conducted among recently-arrived NESB participants from a range of countries, reveals that migrants experience ambivalence towards developing English competency in order to be considered ‘integrated’ and ‘suitable’ for the conferral of Australian citizenship. They identify with multiple ways of being ‘model’ Australian citizens that are enriched by their cultural and linguistic differences and transnational desires. This research makes a useful contribution to understanding the complex and fluid relationship between language, citizenship and belonging and has the potential to inform future scholarship on language ideology and language testing policy.

Alexandra Grey, Urbanisation and minority language in China: a case study of urban, upwardly mobile and language-less Zhuang people

Lantern Making (©Sadami Konchi)

This research concerns the impacts large-scale internal migration has on maintaining minority languages in China, given state structures and public discourses locate languages within specific regions. This matters in assessing the Chinese model of minority language protection and examining the applicability of migration studies scholarship, which largely concerns international migration (e.g. Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004), to social studies within China.

The project analyses ethnographically-oriented interviews with 43 university students (Zhuang members/speakers) and 18 adults doing Zhuang “language work”; observations; law/policy corpus; and semiotic landscapes within China, undertaken between 2014-15. It finds, under conditions of mobility, Putonghua is replacing Zhuang as a vehicle for social inclusion. The “tolerability” (Grin 1995) of this is produced through public and private discourses rationalizing non-speaking of Zhuang, underpinned by ideologies about the suitability of Putonghua for public discourses and functions, and about Zhuang failing to “grow” in cities. Despite this, a Zhuang grouping retains social and political meaning.

Family repertoires

Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families

This paper reports on a qualitative study investigating bidirectionality in second language learning in migrant families in Australia. The study, drawn from newly-arrived Persian migrant families, explores children’s experiences of English language learning and use as well as their intersection with parental language learning and use. Additionally, this study explores the impacts of such interactions on familial relationships. ‎In this presentation, I will discuss some of the findings, focussing on the ways in which children may affect parental English learning, their influential role in family language policy (FLP) decisions, and the impacts of children’s agency on familial relationships. Findings have implications for understanding the important role of children in family processes of language learning and use in migration contexts, which can be used for the development of appropriate language educational policies and services for migrant families.

Sabina Vakser, Authenticity in superdiversity

Studying (©Sadami Konchi)

This paper reports on an ethnographically-informed study of Russian speakers in Melbourne which explores the question of authenticity in transcultural family life. In an era of ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec, 2007), former models of language and society are now shifting to reflect more dynamic realities. Conceptualisations of authenticity, however, seem to lag behind.

Drawing on audio-recorded interactions from one multilingual household, this paper explores polycentric social alignments (Blommaert, 2010) that give rise to tensions around ‘authentic Russianness’. It demonstrates how ‘authenticity’ is construed as different histories interact (Lacoste, et al., 2014), resulting in attempts at linguistic and cultural revisionism in order to accommodate disparate norms. The work contributes to developments within a broader sociolinguistics of mobility by providing a case analysis of the lived experience of superdiversity.

Hanna Torsh, Unequal beginnings: linguistic intermarriage between locals and migrants in Australia

As a focus for understanding language practices in the context of global migration linguistic intermarriage is of significant interest. However, the focus of linguistic intermarriage research is almost always only on language maintenance (De Klerk 2001, Ishizawa 2004, De Houwer 2007). This research focuses on the language beliefs and feelings of monolingually raised English speakers who are married to migrant partners and seeks to contribute to the debate about language learning and use in the family in multilingual and multiethnic Sydney. I interviewed thirty participants over a period of eighteen months, designed and collected a questionnaire and compiled a media corpus of articles on couples and bilingualism from Australian media sources. One of the early findings is that very few of the English-speaking background (ESB) participants had any consistent opportunities to study foreign languages (FL) in their schooling in Australia, which is typical for Anglophone countries where FL learning is weaker.

Vera Williams Tetteh, African linguistic repertoires in migration contexts: The experiences of African migrants in Australia

Lonely Boy (©Sadami Konchi)

This paper explores African migrants’ lived experiences of transnational migration, highlighting the relationship between their diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds and their settlement and social inclusion in Australia. The paper argues that African migrants arrive with diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds, derived from a range of pre-migration language experiences, but how these inform their settlement trajectories is poorly understood and often neglected in Australian settlement policy. The paper presents data from sociolinguistic ethnographic research conducted with 47 newly arrived adult African migrants. It examines data from in-depth interviews and the research participants’ self-reported evaluations of their linguistic competencies and English proficiencies. The resulting analysis draws on the notion of “linguistic repertoires” (Gumperz, 1964; Blommaert & Backus, 2012) to interpret the data and illuminate how these play out for participants’ choices and decisions in their post-migration language socialisation processes. Findings complicate mainstream ideologies of the second language learners, who are often constructed in homogeneous and deficit terms. In addition, the paper outlines implications for language-in-migration policies and migrant language training programs.

References

Friends (©Sadami Konchi)

Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McErery, T., & Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse and Society, 19(3), 273-306. doi: 10.1177/0957926508088962

Blommaert, Jan. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blommaert, J., & Backus, A. (2012) Superdiverse repertoires and the individual. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Paper 24.

Czaika, Mathias, & De Haas, Hein. (2014). The Globalization of Migration: Has the World Become More Migratory? International Migration Review, n/a-n/a. doi: 10.1111/imre.12095

De Houwer, A. (2007). “Parental language input patterns and children’s bilingual use.” Applied Psycholinguistics 28(3): 411.

De Klerk, V. (2001). “The Cross-Marriage Language Dilemma: His Language or Hers?” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 4(3): 197-216.

Dick, Hilary Parsons (2011). Language and Migration to the United States. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40: 227-240.

Grin, F. (1995). Combining immigrant and autochthonous language rights: A territorial approach to multilingualism. In T. Skutnabb-Kangas and R Phillipson (eds.), Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter, 31-48.

Gumperz, J. (1964). Linguistic and social interaction in two communities. American Anthropologist, 66(6), Part 2: The Ethnography of Communication: 137-153.

Heller, Monica. (2007). Bilingualism as Ideology and Practice. In M. Heller (Ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-22.

Ishizawa, H. (2004). “Minority Language Use among Grandchildren in Multigenerational Households.” Sociological Perspectives 47(4): 465-483.

Lacoste, V., Leimgruber, J., & Breyer, T. (Eds.) (2014). Indexing Authenticity: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter.

Levitt, P. and Glick Schiller, N. (2004). ‘Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society’. International Migration Review 38 (3): 1002-1039.

Vertovec, Steven. (2007). Super-Diversity and Its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6): 1024-1054.

2012 workshop on ‘Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion in Australia’ at Macquarie University

How does language intersect with social inclusion in contemporary Australia? Do social inclusion policies address linguistic diversity? What do we know about the relationship between linguistic diversity and inclusion in schools, workplaces and higher education? It is questions such as these that a special issue of the  Australian Review of Applied Linguistics devoted to Linguistic diversity and social inclusion in Australia addresses. Guest-edited by Ingrid Piller, the special issue brings together selected presentations from the 2012 Macquarie University workshop devoted to the same topic.

Please find abstracts of the articles in the collection below. All the contributions in the special issue are available for open access through the National Library of Australia.

Linguistic diversity and social inclusion in Australia

Ingrid Piller

This editorial introduction orients the reader to current public debates and the state of research with regard to the intersection of linguistic diversity and social inclusion in contemporary Australia. These are characterised by a persistent lack of attention to the consequences of linguistic diversity for our social organisation. The editorial introduction serves to frame the five original research articles that comprise this special issue and identifies the key challenges that linguistic diversity presents for a fair and just social order. These challenges run as red threads through all the articles in this issue and include the persistent monolingual mindset which results in a pervasive language blindness and an inability to even identify language as an obstacle to inclusion. Furthermore, where language is recognised as an obstacle to inclusion this usually takes the form of assuming that an individual suffers from a lack of English language proficiency. Improving English language proficiency is then prescribed as a panacea for inclusion. However, on close examination that belief in itself can constitute a form of exclusion with detrimental effects both on language learning and equal opportunity.

Language and social inclusion: Unexplored aspects of intercultural communication

Simon Musgrave, Julie Bradshaw

Social inclusion policy in Australia has largely ignored key issues of communication for linguistic minorities, across communities and with the mainstream community. In the (now disbanded) Social Inclusion Board’s reports (e.g., Social Inclusion Unit, 2009), the emphasis is on the economic aspects of inclusion, while little attention has been paid to questions of language and culture. Assimilatory aspects of policy are foregrounded, and language is mainly mentioned in relation to the provision of classes in English as a Second Language. There is some recognition of linguistic diversity but the implications of this for inclusion and intercultural communication are not developed. Australian society can now be characterised as super-diverse, containing numerous ethnic groups each with multiple and different affiliations. We argue that a social inclusion policy that supports such linguistic and cultural diversity needs an evidence-based approach to the role of language and we evaluate existing policy approaches to linguistic and cultural diversity in Australia to assess whether inclusion is construed primarily in terms of enhancing intercultural communication, or of assimilation to the mainstream.

Dodgy data, language invisibility and the implications for social inclusion: A critical analysis of indigenous student language data in Queensland schools

Sally Dixon, Denise Angelo

As part of the ‘Bridging the Language Gap’ project undertaken with 86 State and Catholic schools across Queensland, the language competencies of Indigenous students have been found to be ‘invisible’ in several key and self-reinforcing ways in school system data. A proliferation of inaccurate, illogical and incomplete data exists about students’ home languages and their status as English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D) learners in schools. This is strongly suggestive of the fact that ‘language’ is not perceived by school systems as a significant operative variable in student performance, not even in the current education climate of data-driven improvement. Moreover, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), the annual standardised testing regime, does not collect relevant information on students’ language repertoires and levels of proficiency in Standard Australian English (SAE). Indigenous students who are over-represented in NAPLAN under-performance data are targeted through ‘Closing the Gap’ for interventions to raise their literacy and numeracy achievements (in SAE). However, Indigenous students who are EAL/D learners cannot be disaggregated by system data from their counterparts already fluent in SAE. Reasons behind such profound language invisibility are discussed, as well as the implications for social inclusion of Indigenous students in education.

‘Like the fish not in water’: How language and race mediate the social and economic inclusion of women migrants to Australia

Donna Butorac

Learning English is an important aspect of post-migration settlement in Australia, and new migrants with beginner to intermediate proficiency are strongly encouraged to attend government-subsidised English language classes. Underpinning the framing and delivery of these classes is a commitment to the discursive construction of Australia as an English-monolingual nation state, in which increased English proficiency will lead to new migrants gaining employment, thereby achieving an important benchmark of successful inclusion in Australian society. The assumption that English language acquisition leads to social and economic inclusion is not challenged within the settlement English program, and the language learner is seen as linguistically deficient in English, rather than as an emerging bi- or multilingual. Moreover, the ways that race, as well as gender, mediate both language learning and social inclusion are never problematised. This paper is based on data from a longitudinal ethnography that examines subjectivity in three interactional domains – family, society and work – in order to explore how language, race and gender impact on the post-migration settlement trajectories and sense of social inclusion of women migrants to Australia.

Working it out: Migrants’ perspectives of social inclusion in the workplace

George Major, Agnes Terraschke, Emily Major, Charlotte Setijadi

This paper explores the concept of social inclusion from the perspective of recent migrants, from language backgrounds other than English, at work in Australia. We adopt an understanding of social inclusion that acknowledges the importance of economic independence, while also considering migrants’ feelings of connectedness at work and their sense of belonging. Based on qualitative interviews with migrants collected two years apart, we explore the ways language and language practices can lead to feelings of inclusion or exclusion at work. The data suggests that migrants who felt included at work often had colleagues and/or bosses who actively supported and encouraged them in learning new skills, and made an effort to connect with them through small talk. In contrast, participants who felt excluded were unable to fully participate in work activities and/or workplace interaction because of limitations they or others placed upon them based on their English proficiency. We suggest that social inclusion, as it relates to employment, can also encompass different things for different people. For some, a sense of belonging is not promoted solely by having work or the ability to connect with colleagues, but also by obtaining employment of a type and level commensurate with their pre-migration status.

Writing feedback as an exclusionary practice in higher education

Grace Chu-Lin Chang

This ethnographic research probes into feedback on academic writing received by Taiwanese students in Australian higher education institutions, and examines whether the feedback received helped students to participate in the written discourse of academic communities. Academic writing dominates the academic life of students in Australia and is the key measure of their academic performance. This can be problematic for international students who speak English as an additional language and who are expected to acquire academic literacies in English ‘by doing’. As a social practice, academic writing depends on participation in dialogue for students to be included in the community of academia. However, the findings show that few participants received any useful feedback. Some assignments were never returned; in other cases, the hand-written feedback was illegible, and often included only overly general comments that puzzled the participants. As a result, the learning process came to an end once the students handed in their assignments; feedback failed to promote further learning related to content, and particularly to academic writing. The article highlights the few instances where participants received helpful feedback that was accessible and constructive, and which can be considered best practice for the promotion of academic literacy.

English-Only Australia? (Source: blogs.crikey.com.au)

In recent Australian political conversation, there is an increasingly bipartisan recognition of the value of cultural and linguistic diversity. So it’s fair to ask, what is Australian society offering those whom it characterises as “diverse”? As far as being multilingual goes, it seems highly skilled, highly educated migrants still experience it as a negative rather than something that is highly valued. Below I briefly discuss the cases of two such women who I interviewed as part of my doctoral research into linguistic intermarriage in Australia.

The wrong accent

“’Scuse the recording but I fuck it up so many times with my accent [laughs] … it’s years after and I still muck it up in terms of accent sometimes.” (Sara)

Sara (all names are pseudonyms) is a trilingual professional from Spain who has worked in Australia for over ten years. Despite her high level proficiency in English, her accent shapes people’s views of her as an exotic foreigner. Sara is well aware of the stereotypes her accent evokes and she talks about using them to her own advantage to connect with people by putting them off their guard and playing up to stereotypes about the European who talks with her hands.

Yet despite all this she still feels that she doesn’t get it right sometimes, and that she should mention this to me in the interview. Why? At what point will she get to “own” English and her way of using it? When does the linguistic privilege of an English speaker rub off on someone who has clearly mastered the language in so many domains?

The wrong language

“It’s my right to speak Chinese mate!” (Jessie)

Jessie is another professional who completed her Masters in Australia, worked in Shanghai for many years for a multinational company and now works in the finance sector in Australia. Like Sara she is a highly balanced bilingual. It is perhaps not surprising then that she was offended when she experienced the kind of policing which is part of linguistic privilege. A colleague in Australia, herself an adult migrant from a non-English speaking background, criticised her for speaking Mandarin socially at work. In fact, she exhorted her to “speak English!”, putting herself in the linguistically privileged position and making Jessie the foreigner who doesn’t know the rules. As Jessie said to me in the interview, it can feel strange or artificial to speak another language with someone you know shares the same linguistic and cultural background as you. Jessie is granted none of the privileges associated with being a “native” English speaker and is a target for criticism for the way she speaks even during her own personal time.

Rather than being a plus, it seems that being a speaker of accented English in Australia is often a minus. Minus linguistic privilege and minus social power, it’s all about what you are not, rather than what you are.

Multilingualism at work

“… and so I just realised I did not want to be the ethnic in the ethnic team, and so I went from that position to the most boring dry … policy officer in the most boring department. Middle-aged white fat women, just because I thought otherwise I’m gonna be always ethnic, ethnic, ethnic.” (Sara)

It is often argued that speaking many languages will lead to better job opportunities. I asked both women about their experience working in Sydney. Had their language skills, particularly their multilingualism, been useful to them? Neither of them found that speaking Spanish or Mandarin had helped them in their careers. In fact, for Sara coming from a language background other than English meant she was stuck in a career pathway which was limited to what she called “ethnic” roles in the public service. For Jessie, speaking Mandarin did help her with customers at a Sydney branch, but that work was largely invisible to her employers. Both women talked about how they got out of roles they felt limited them professionally. Even where multilingualism was useful, as it sometimes is in customer service in a diverse society, this value was not recognized by the organization nor was it remunerated.

Multilingualism at home

“For me I feel like I uh I s-, I don’t have a choice as such that I would like to, Louis to be able to speak Chinese and English or I would like Louis to speak English only, I don’t have a choice because my parents they can’t speak English, so Louis has to speak Chinese otherwise they can’t communicate with Louis and I’m in big trouble then so (laughs).” (Jessie, talking about her son Louis)

It is easy to see why some parents might be ambivalent about the often expressed and casual exhortation to raise their children bilingually when they experience their own linguistic repertoire in such contradictory and often negative ways. Like Jessie, for many parents it may be more about personal relationships than about any notion of global citizenhood that they want to raise their children in two (or more) languages. Even when multilinguals are highly proficient language users and better educated than ninety per cent of qualified Sydney residents (based on Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012), they still experience language anxiety and discrimination on the basis of language. Given that bilingual child rearing is incredibly hard work, and even more so if you are the only parent who speaks that language and you have no institutional support, it may not seem such an obvious proposition.

As long as diversity is seen to be the province of those who are outside the mainstream people like Sara and Jessie will bear the burden of living within the contradictory celebration of diversity on the one hand and the lack of social recognition of the value and experience of multilingualism on the other. This is the double burden of multilingualism in Australia today. However you look at it, it is not as simple as having something that the majority do not. It may be a richer experience of communication, even a more diverse and complex experience of life but it can also be a burden that is no less heavy for being invisible to those who do not share it.

Reference

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2012). “2011 Census of Population and Housing: Basic Community Profile (Catalogue number 2001.0) Sydney (1030) 4063.7 sq Kms.”