In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks to Massimiliano Canzanella, a Neapolitan language activist.

The conversation delves into the history of the Neapolitan language and the interplay of culture, race, and national identity that have contributed to the oppression of the language and its speakers. Massimiliano also discusses his own journey as a language activist and the movement to preserve Neapolitan, including his novels, Set Your Soul To It and You Don’t Say, which were the first ever to be written entirely in Neapolitan (and also available in English translation).

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 (coming soon)

Panoramic view of Naples (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Group of international students at Macquarie University (Image credit: Ingrid Piller)

Dr Bodis is a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University as well as the Course Director of the Applied Linguistics and TESOL program. Dr Fang is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie as well as a NAATI-certified translator and interpreter between English and Chinese. She also serves as a panel interpreter/translator for Multicultural NSW and as a NAATI examiner.

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 (coming soon)

In this episode, Brynn and Amy discuss Amy’s doctoral thesis entitled “Learning From Student Perceptions and Peer Feedback in a Virtual Exchange: Reconceptualizing Intercultural Competence as ‘ICCCSA’ – Intercultural Competence as a Co-Constructed and Situated Achievement”. This thesis explored Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) and its influence on (inter)cultural competence in digital spaces.

Image credit: National Centre for Cultural Competence

If you liked this episode, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and be sure to say hello to Brynn and Language on the Move on Bluesky! Also be sure to check out the Intersectionality Matters Podcast, the National Centre for Cultural Competence and How to be Anti-Racist by Dr Ibram X. Kendi.

Transcript (coming soon)

This conversation builds on a chapter written by Karen McAuliffe, Liana Muntean & Virginia Mattioli in the book Researching the European Court of Justice: Methodological Shifts and Law’s Embeddedness, edited by Mikael Rask Madsen, Fernanda Nicola and Antoine Vauchez and published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Karen mentions the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network. You can subscribe to the Network’s listserv and read member profiles on Language on the Move. She also mentions iCourts, which is the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts and Governance, and the Language, Culture and Justice Hub at Bard College.

If you enjoyed this show, say hi to Alexandra on LinkedIn and to Karen on BlueSky @profkmca.bsky.social. Also, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice

Transcript

Alexandra Grey: Welcome to Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m Alex Grey, and I’m a research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Technology in Sydney. My guest today is Professor Karen McAuliffe. Karen is a Professor of Law and Language, and a Birmingham Fellow, at Birmingham Law School in the UK. We’re going to talk about doing research that pools together, law and linguistics, a pet topic, a key interest for both of us. Karen, welcome to the show.

Karen McAuliffe: Thank you so much. It’s lovely to be here. Always a delight to talk about my research.

The European Court of Justice Building in Luxembourg (Image Credit: CJUE)

Alexandra: what we’ve decided to do today is to cover both a specific part of your recent research, and then to talk more generally about the research that you do and how you manage to straddle law and linguistics. But before we get into any of those specifics, let’s just first get to know you a little. You’ve got a really unusual job title. I just read it out. How did you come to be professor not only of law but of language at the same time?

Karen: Well, it’s an interesting story. It’s not a very linear journey to it. So, I originally studied my undergraduate degree was a common and civil law degree at Queen’s University, Belfast. As I’m Irish, I should add, I work in the UK. For anybody listening who wonders why I don’t have a British accent, that is why. So, I studied in Northern Ireland, in Queens University of Belfast, and also at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. So, I studied Northern Irish UK law and Belgian law and the Belgian law part of the degree was obviously in French. So, so I did this dual qualification, dual language degree. And when I graduated, to be honest, I didn’t really think very hard about my career, or what I wanted to do while I was at university, and after graduation I did a– what’s called a competition to work as a lawyer linguist in the European Union and the European institutions, the EU institutions. And so I got a job as a lawyer linguist in at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Worked there for a while. I began to realize that I was a bit more interested in thinking about what I was doing than actually doing it. So, I returned to Academia to do a Phd. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to do a Phd. And I went back to Queens to do it, actually back to Belfast, and this time not to the Law School, but to the Institute of Governance.  While I was working in Luxembourg as a lawyer linguist, I just became fascinated with the job that I was doing. Insofar as  you know, my job was to try to translate judgments that had been drafted in French into English in a way that they would have the same legal effects  in Ireland and the UK then – which was part of the EU back then – as they would, you know, anywhere else in in the EU, and that intersection between law language and translation really, really fascinated me. So that was the topic of my Phd. It was on legal translation at the European Court of Justice, specifically, and in that Phd, I did a lot of I guess what you call it socio legal research.

I ended up staying. I stayed in Academia and in 2016, I moved to the University of Birmingham as a Birmingham Fellow, which was very exciting, really lovely post to get. I had previously got some large grants from the European Commission, so European Research Council Grants, including one, it’s called a Starter grant, which is like a 5 year project to look at law and language in the European Union. And when I got my Chair it was a named chair, and I was allowed to choose the Chair, so it was a Professor of Law and Language. That’s how I got here, I guess.

Alexandra: It’s marvelous to hear, Karen, because I think there are listeners out there, there are academics who email me, who say, ‘Look, I’m interested in law and language but until I, you know, found someone else doing that online, I had no idea that it was a career path’.

Karen: It was all very serendipitous, really, and not as linear as I’ve made it sound there.

Alexandra: But we’re going to make it sound even more linear because you’ve created a perfect segue to the specific piece of work that we’re going to talk about today. It’s a chapter you wrote and published in 2022, along with Liana Muntean and Virginia Mattioli.  It’s called Through the Lens of Language; Uncovering the collaborative nature of Advocates General’s Opinions. I’ll put the full link in the show notes with the book that it’s from. But in this chapter you’re talking about a study where we meet lawyer linguists, exactly the role that you yourself once held and the kinds of people who work alongside them, or for whom they work at the European Court of Justice. The Advocates General, we hear a little bit about the judges. We hear about another type of staff member called a référendaire, who works alongside the Advocates General. And this chapter then gives us an insight into how those people are working together and doing exactly that interaction of law, language and translation that you’ve spoken about.

What I wanted to talk about with this chapter is a little bit your specific findings. But then also to talk more generally about what this chapter is saying in terms of method and how to do research that draws together law and language. So, we’ll come back to that more general question in a minute. But first we’ll focus on the specific context. And I’m just going to read out a little quote from the Chapter, too, to give a bit of background to listeners who might know nothing about the European Court of Justice.

Karen: Right.

Alexandra: Early in the chapter you and your co-authors begin by explaining that in ‘The EU legal order, with twenty-four official languages, integrated in twenty-seven member state legal systems, is linguistically, as well as substantively, unique.’ So, this is a really unusual legal system in many ways, I guess, but particularly here you’re highlighting how multilingual it is. And you’ve done a lot of analysis on how this multilingualism impacts on the development of law in the EU in this chapter but in other works as well. And so, this chapter is specifically a case study about the European Court of Justice, and even more specifically about the role of the Advocate General in presenting legal opinions to that court and the languages that Advocates General use to draft those opinions.

Karen: I might go back a bit further, if you don’t mind. I’m very aware that your listenership is very international, um, and so there may be people listening that don’t know anything at all about the European Court of Justice and how it works. So, the first thing to point out about this particular chapter is that I’m not talking about the judges. The Advocates General are separate. They’re not judges. So, the court itself, it’s seated in Luxembourg. I guess you could call it like the Supreme Court when it comes to European Union law. There’s two sections to it. There’s a General Court, which is the lower court, and then the European Court of Justice, which is the higher court, and I’m focusing on the higher court in this paper.

The court delivers judgments in 24 languages but it works in French. So internally the court works in French, but it delivers judgments in 24 languages. Each case that comes before the court will have what’s called a language of procedure or a language of the case. So, for example, if a Greek court um sent a question to the European Court of Justice for interpretation on a piece of EU law, the language of the case would be Greek, so the question would come to the European Court of Justice in Greek. It would be translated into French. It’ll be worked on within the Court in French, and then the judgment that is delivered, the first version of the judgment that’s drafted, will be in French, and then it’ll be translated into all the other languages. But the authentic version, the version that the judges sign will be the Greek version.

So that’s the first thing about judgments. The second thing is that they are collegiate documents. So, the deliberations of judges are secret. We never know, you know, where compromises might lie in the text of a judgment. They’re a very particular type of document. I’ve described them in in a previous paper as sort of Lego-like building blocks that are put together to make the judgement. The Court doesn’t engage with sort of legal reasoning in a very in-depth way. It answers the questions before it, and a large part of that is because the deliberations are secret. We don’t know what happens in there. Because of the nature of these judgments, because they are collegiate because of the deliberations are secret because there’s no dissenting judgments, you have these members of the court called Advocates General and this is borrowed from the French administrative law system.

So the Advocate General’s job is to deliver an opinion, a reasoned opinion on the case, to guide the court in its judgment and back in the early days of the court, the advocates general delivered opinions in every case but as workload grew, and as members of the European Union grew, you know that just became untenable. And so nowadays opinions, advocates, generals, opinions are delivered in sort of important cases, constitutionally important cases or cases where a Member States requests it specifically. And the Advocate’s general opinion, first of all, historically, was written in the language of the Advocate General. So, you know, there are 11 Advocates General, and there are a number of permanent Advocates General, as in there will be there’s a French permanent Advocate General, there’s a Polish permanent Advocate General, and then the others are rotated among the sort of smaller – in inverted commas – EU Member States. So, these people, they deliver opinions, and historically, that was in their own language. And so that’s the first thing. And the second thing is, the Advocate General can deal with anything they want in their opinion they don’t have to just stick to the questions the parties have asked. They don’t just have to stick to the things that have been raised by parties in the case, and you know, they can act almost as a sparring partner in that they can force the Court to engage in dialogue on certain concepts of EU law. And so any scholar of EU law will tell you that the judgments of the Court, while you know you can look at the judgment of the Court, and you can think about well, you know, how has the court applied that? Or how has the court interpreted the law here, where you really find the interesting dialogue and conversation about where EU law might be going is the is the opinion of the Advocate General. The Court of Justice of the European Unio is famously or infamously known for sort of creating the legal order of the EU. So you know this. The narrative is that that this EU legal order wasn’t created really by treaties and legislation. It was. It was done, you know, by the European Court of Justice kind of reading gaps in those treaties, and then creating these constitutional type principles.

But every one of those big constitutional type principles of EU law was fist seen in an Advocate General’s opinion. So, they’re really, really important in terms of EU scholarship. Now, they’re not binding on the court, but the court must take account of them when delivering the judgment.

Alexandra: They’re incredibly influential on the Court itself, but also influential on everyone else who’s teaching law.

Karen: Exactly. And so a lot of the work scholarship that had been done on the role of the Advocate General, when they talked about the opinion itself scholars would often point out that the fact that the Advocate General is writing in his or her own language first language makes a difference to how persuasive they can be. And so to finally come round to your question: in 2004 there was this sort of mega enlargement of the European Union. 10 new Member States joined in 2004, and then another 3 in 2007. And so what was happening was as Member States joined their languages got added to the list of EU official languages. So, prior to 2004 there were only 11 – only, I say! There were 11 official languages and then in– between 2004 and 2007, that number then rose to 24.

So two things with that. First of all, on a practical level, if you have to provide, if you have to do direct translation between 11 languages, now, I should have written this down beforehand, so don’t judge my math, but I think that it’s 52 combinations, I think. But if you are doing direct translation between 24 languages, that goes up to, I think it’s 552 or 554.

Alexandra: Wow!

Karen: It’s a lot. So in 2004, the European Court of Justice and the other EU institutions introduced a ‘pivot translation system’, they call it, which is relay translation. And the way it works in the court is that certain languages are assigned to– There are 5 pivot languages. So French is a pivot language for all of the other languages, because French is the working language of the Court, and then you have English, German, Spanish, Italian, and now, since 2018, Polish as well. So they’re the pivot languages, and all the other languages are assigned to a pivot language. So, to give you an example, what that means is, if a question or a case comes from a Lithuanian court or from Lithuania, it will be translated into English and then translated from English into the other languages. So, it’s sort of pivoted through relayed translation.

Alexandra: And so what is happening there to the role of the Advocate General, those people now have to start actually drafting and presenting their opinions in a pivot language. Am I right?

Karen: Yeah. Now, the interesting thing is that it’s not — it’s a convention rather than a requirement. They don’t have to. It was introduced early—the person who is, I believe he’s now Registrar of the Court, I think he’s still there, Alfredo Colon Escobar. He took over as Director of the Translation Directorate at the Court. And he introduced this system. But he was also thinking of what’s to come, and I mentioned earlier that Advocates Generals, they rotate. So you’ve got your permanent Advocate Generals, and then you have a number of Advocate generals that rotate countries. And so the court was aware and the director of the of the translation directorate was aware that in a few years you would have a Slovenian and a Slovakian Advocate General and if you had to wait for the translation to be pivoted from Slovenian into whatever the pivot language for Slovenian is back into another language, you’re adding a lot of time onto the process. So so this was all introduced for sort of for practical purposes, for expediency’s sake. And so in 2004 this convention was introduced, whereby Advocate Generals were asked to draft in one of the pivot languages of the court.

The reality of that is that you have the permanent Advocate Generals can continue to draft in their own language because they are the pivot languages of the Court. Other Advocate Generals have to choose to draft in in one of these languages, and they usually draft in English.

Alexandra: And, as you point out in your chapter, it’s not just they draft, as in, it’s not just the Advocate themselves. They have this whole team of a référendaire, who’s like a research assistant sort of position, maybe I’m underselling it; a lawyer linguist, you know. So actually, one of the things I found so interesting in your chapter, the data really shows how it’s a collaborative document, even though only one Advocate General sort of gets to put their name on it.

Karen: Yeah, so this is, this is the other very interesting thing about, I think, about this chapter in particular, is that again, historically. And the literature always talks about individual Advocates General and their opinions, but they’ve always worked in teams. So each advocate general has, I think, nowadays they have 4 référendaires. And a référendaire is similar to a clerk in the US System.

So there are lawyers and they will produce, like the initial drafts or the structures. It will differ from Advocate General to Advocate General. Some are much more hands on, some are much more hands off, but it is absolutely this this team effort. And that has always been the case. But that process remained invisible. And then all the literature talked about was the persuasiveness of this one person, this one very important person, the Advocate General. So what we were able to do in the research for this paper was sort of uncover or shine a light on on this process that’s happening behind the scenes and also shine a light on an additional role that only exists because of this linguistic convention. And that is, in certain cases some Advocate Generals or the teams of some Advocate Generals that the Chambers of some Advocate Generals will require what’s called ‘linguistic assistance’.

So because their référendaire may not be of English mother tongue, and they’re drafting in English, for example. And so what then they have is this wholly invisible part of the process from the outside, of a lawyer linguist coming in and providing what’s called linguistic assistance, and that linguistic assistance, again, will differ depending on who has written an opinion. It could be merely proofreading, there might be no need for linguistic assistance at all. Somebody might be very fluent in English, or, you know, in French, or whatever language they’ve chosen. But we’ll say English. But in other cases that linguistic assistance is much, much more than just proofreading. It’s it’s a rewriting in in certain cases, or a reframing of certain concepts. And so there’s much more of that legal creative work happening there. And that role of that sort of lawyer linguist as the linguistic assistant in the production of Advocate General’s opinions is something that, you know, just wasn’t known about outside of the Court or outside of the EU institutions, certainly not within EU scholarship, before we were able to do this research. So that was very exciting, very interesting.

Alexandra: It was interesting to me, not only to hear about that, but the way you found that out. So you and your co-authors in this chapter are very clear about what sorts of methods are allowing you to see what sorts of information, or what sort of behind the scenes reality might otherwise be invisible. And one of the key ways you do it is to interview not just the Advocates General, but the référendaires, the lawyer linguists, and in another, not in this chapter, in another part of the bigger study, the judges themselves. And what I found really interesting is that while, on the one hand, these interviews shine a light on the reality of this collaborative, interlingual production, on the other hand, what the people are overtly saying, and I’ll summarize, I’ll use a quote that you have in the chapter sort of summarizing the perspective of many interviewees: you say ‘language and substance appear to be distinct and separate things. Any overt acknowledgement of the impact of language on their work seems to be seen as undermining the quality of that work’. So even in the interviews, that invisibility is sort of perpetuated.

Karen: Absolutely. Yeah. And what was very interesting was when we when we coded the interviews the judges, the Advocate Generals for this paper, the référendaires, they all said, ‘oh, like it has no impact. The language that I’m working in has absolutely no impact on the substance that I’m producing, or the way that I’m thinking’. And then, in the same breath they will say, ‘Oh, but of course I think totally differently in my own language’. And I think there’s a quote we actually use in that paper, where they say, ‘my French colleague might come to a different conclusion’.

And what was very interesting to us was that you know, in the context of the interview, you come out of the interview and go, ‘Okay, they don’t think language is that important at all, really’. And at the same time when you go to code the interviews they’re saying this. They know it. It’s there in the back of their mind, and the Advocate Generals themselves will say, ‘Oh, no, no! My voice comes through, no matter what language I’m writing in, it’s my voice’. The fact that that goes against all research in sort of translation and linguistics is neither here nor there. But you know this is what they’re saying, ‘my voice, nothing’s different’. Everything is fine, it’s all the same, and in the same breath, they’ll say, ‘but it’s really important for me that I have a francophone, or that I have an English speaker in my chambers’. So again, they’re acknowledging it. And also the judges, when we interviewed them, said something along the lines of, ‘look, any EU lawyer can learn the law. What we need, what we need are people who are good at languages’. And they rate the linguistic capabilities of the lawyers that they’re hiring to be in their chambers, to be in their teams, higher. They say these things that don’t match up with how they’re acting, and that’s really interesting when you’re coding the interview to go.

Alexandra: One way you, you deal with that in this paper is, you know, to take that sort of reflective stance about the interviews. You don’t just take them at face value, but that’s not a reason not to do interviews. It’s very useful to find out some of these processes, but also to find out that sort of discursive production of the importance of just one voice. But then, what you do in this chapter is, you use an entirely different kind of data and method, and that is corpus linguistics, to then triangulate or compare, if you like, to show just how different these opinions can be depending on whether it’s the mother tongue language or another language that’s used for drafting.

Karen: You know, I am coming from this very privileged position, where I knew that the lawyer linguists were doing that job so I could. I could come up with this hypothesis quite easily, because it seemed to me that the opinions of Advocates General were becoming more synthetic, and more Lego-like, in in the same way. They were coming closer to judgments stylistically. And I was interested in that. So, I suppose I started with this hypothesis: you know I think these opinions are coming closer and closer stylistically to what the judgments are. And if that is the case, then then what’s the point of the opinion? So that’s where I started from, and we did the interviews. And then we did this corpus linguistics analysis on the actual texts themselves, the opinions themselves. And now I didn’t do– I’m not a corpus linguist, so I didn’t do the analysis. Virginia Mattioli did that analysis, and it’s all explained in detail in the paper. And Virginia and I have, I’m pretty sure, on Youtube, there are some presentations that we’ve done where she goes into a lot of detail about what we did there. But basically we compared opinions drafted in somebody’s first language. So, you know, French language opinions, or English language opinions. Italian; I think we looked at as well. Language opinions drafted in a first language. And then we compared them with opinions – post 2004 opinions – that were drafted in the first language as well in a second or third language, a non-native language. And what we found was very interesting, because the interview data which we had done first, so the interview data was saying, right, these people who are drafting the opinions don’t think that anything has changed. They don’t think there’s been a change in voice. They don’t think there’s been a change in style of the opinions since 2004. However, somewhere in the back of their mind they’re acknowledging that language is very important and maybe influences the results that they get to or the end product in some way. But fundamentally they don’t think there’s been a difference. And the corpus linguistics analysis showed us that indeed there is a difference, and the corpus linguistics data shows that opinions are becoming more stylistically like judgments. But very interestingly, not just those opinions drafted in a non-native language. So so even the opinions of the permanent Advocate Generals, Advocates General, who are ostensibly drafting in their own language, their first language, are becoming more stylistically synthetic and less fluent. Not reading so much like a like an academic article, like a fluent article.

Alexandra: Like a a genre, is converging the two genres.

Karen: Hmm, yeah. Yeah. And that’s where it becomes very interesting then to work in an interdisciplinary because, Virginia, I hope– I don’t think she’ll mind me saying this, you know, she got these results and was very excited. She was going, ‘Yes, look! This convention, this convention change in 2004 has resulted in these opinions becoming more like judgments. Wonderful. We’re finished’. And we had a difficult time for a while, because, you know, I was saying, ‘Well but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s because of that convention change that there’s this, as you call it, like a shift in genre. There could be other reasons. There probably are multiple reasons to do with workload’. There are things that we can’t find out even through interviews, even if you did an anthropological study where you’re embedded in an institution like that. I think it will be very difficult to find out. For example, say you have an Advocate General who has a team of référendaires who are from various different places, but they will have been educated in multiple places. So, for example, myself, you know, I’ve been educated in Northern Ireland, in Belgium, in Greece. So all of that will impact the way that you work with language, the way that your mind works, the way that you reason. So things like that are difficult, if not impossible, to uncover. And so I think it’s very dangerous to rely on just one method to come to any kind of conclusion. So for us, what the corpus linguistics study showed was that our coding and our analysis of the interview data was true, because we had looked at the interview data, we had said, ‘Right, they think there’s no change or difference or relevance to them drafting in a language that’s not their own’. But our coding and our analysis of that interview data shows that actually there is. But we can’t prove that unless we look at the text themselves. And when we look at the text themselves and do the corpus linguistics analysis that corroborated what we were finding in the interview data. And it, I think, makes for a stronger argument at the end of the day.

Alexandra: It does. It reads really well to show, I think you call it multiple strategies in the toolbox, you know, if you use multiple methodological strategies at once you get greater rigor. But also you manage to, you know, to articulate very clearly in this chapter that that doesn’t mean that any one of those strategies by itself is without any flaw or weakness, you know. That’s the point of combining them to sort of balance each other. And then I like that you end the paper on a, if you like a forward-looking note, or on a big question that none of that data by itself can answer but maybe another strategy or another study can, and that is well, what is the effect in terms of persuasion? So not just on sort of reaching one or a different legal conclusion in the opinion itself. What does that actually do on the forward development of the law in terms of the persuasiveness or the room to sort of tease out new and different and creative and dissenting ideas. That’s being reduced, you know. That’s a longer term, and if you like more difficult question, I guess, to answer.

Karen: Yeah. But I think in the conclusions to that paper, you know one point that I’m trying to get across, I guess, is that the research question is really important. So, all of that is interesting. You know what I what I have just described. It’s very interesting, but it’s quite– It is just descriptive. You know this conversation I’m telling you: ‘This is what we did. And this is what happened. And isn’t it interesting?’ But I don’t see the point of doing research – I  mean, look, there is point in doing research just for interest’s sake – but in the context of legal research that has any kind of rigor I think you do need to be asking bigger, broader research questions from the outset. And I think that’s very important. And so we try in that paper to come back to those questions. Because yes, we observe all this stuff in the data. But so what?

Alexandra: Hehe.

Karen: And the ‘so what’ in this case will depend on what we think the opinion is for.

Alexandra: Yes.

Karen: And if the opinion, if the job of the opinion, as set out in the treaty, is to guide the Court in its decision in a particular case then maybe the converging of linguistic styles is not a bad thing, because you have the Court and the Advocates General speaking the same language, and everybody is working in their second or third language, anyway. And so you know, you have that phenomenon where everybody’s a non-native speaker. Nobody’s the eloquent speaker, and the power is is dissipated equally, you know, throughout. If that’s what the opinion is supposed to do then maybe it’s not so problematic, and that’s fine. But if the role of the opinion is, as EU scholars would claim, in fact, to persuade more widely and to explain how EU law is developing, and importantly, how it might develop. So one of the most important things about the Advocates General’s opinions are what it’s called prospective.

And it’s this idea of the direction, the future direction of EU law. And if that, in fact, is where the importance of these documents lie. And they lose their fluency, and they just become these very synthetic, Lego- like judgment style documents, they’re not really going to tell us anything about where the law is going to go, or how the law might develop. They’re not really going to engage in that sparring and that raising of dialogue between the Court and the Advocate Generals, and in that case that shift or convergence of linguistic styles does become more problematic, and it and it raises a bigger question about ‘well, what’s the role of the Advocate General then?’

So, for me coming back to an initial research question or understanding why you’re doing these methods. It’s very easy to get caught up in the method and excited about the method – and I mean I do it myself – enjoying doing the method. But I always think you really, really must come back to the ‘so what?’ question. And when I’m writing a paper, I often have a Post-It note stuck on my computer that just says ‘so what?’ because it’s a tough thing to come back to. But I do think it’s important.

Alexandra: Totally, and I think that’s a great tip for our listeners right now find that post it note.

Karen: Write a Post-It note: ‘so what?’

Alexandra: And this maybe brings me to a bigger question I was thinking of when I was reading your work, and it’s about how you make that ‘so what?” meaningful not just for other academics or people who might already be interested, but to a broader group of stakeholders, or, you know, would-be readers, and particularly working in the legal context, I was puzzling over this. You know, I myself also work in a legal context. You know, I came up as a lawyer, and then a linguist, have a similar background to you. And many of the stakeholders in the kinds of work that I encounter, or that you encounter, these are people who’ve probably studied legal research methods, way back, but those methods don’t center anything other than sort of finding and reading jurisprudence. So how do you convince these people that interviews, corpus analysis, other socio legal methods, other linguistic methods, how do you convince them to be trusting partners as participants in your study as they were here? Or, you know, having confidence in you as someone telling them an outcome or the knowledge that’s produced?

Karen: That’s a really good question. Sometimes, with great difficulty. Anybody who has engaged in interviews as a method will know that you are often interviewing people who don’t think very much of what you’re doing, or you as a person. In this case, again, as I say, I come from a very privileged position in this case, in that I have access to people at the Court. So I you know, I worked at the Court back in gosh! The early 2000s like 2000, 2002. And so people that I worked with and who stayed at the Court are now in very senior positions. And so I have access to that institution in a way that other people didn’t, or I had access, you know, in a way that other people didn’t. And people were willing to talk to me.

Then, in terms of yeah, in terms of the audience, like that is really tricky, and and it will depend like I, you will have different reactions. So you know, I’ve presented this type of work to audiences of lawyers, only lawyers, you know. And they’re like, ‘Well, that’s interesting. But it doesn’t really matter, because, you know, we’re making our money doing this, and and we need the law to be defined and definite, and not a malleable language like you’re saying it is.’

I’ve presented this type of work to audiences that are only linguists and linguists tend to be very focused on method, I find, and very interested in just observing these things that are happening. And they’re not always terribly interested in that big ‘So what?’ question.

And I, I suppose, finding your tribe, as anything in life, finding your tribe. The law and language community, I find, is is a very open, interested, curious, friendly community, generally. And this this paper is is published in a book that is specifically about new methods for studying law, studying European law or the European Court of Justice, I think, specifically, and that is the brainchild of researchers who are either permanently or temporarily based out of a center called iCourts, which is a Center for Excellence at the University of Copenhagen, and it’s a Centre of Excellence for international courts. And they are one of the pioneering institutes in law who have taken methods from the social sciences into law. And we actually had a book launch at the University of Luxembourg, and we had discussants from the European Court of Justice. So, we had judges and Advocates Generals discussing papers, which is kind of terrifying but also very fun, very pleasant.

So the Advocate General that that discussed this particular paper found it very interesting but remained unconvinced that their language, the language they were working in, affected their style, which is fine. That’s absolutely fine. People who are not scholars tend to think more in an ad hoc way, you know, than waiting to find out what the data says. And but interestingly, after that book launch, I had people from political science who had, who had come to the book launch. They all came up and went, ‘but these aren’t new methods, like we’ve been doing interviews for years, like, there’s nothing new about this.’ But the fact is that it’s new for Law.

Alexandra: Yes

Karen: Like you say, traditionally, this isn’t the type of stuff that has been done, particularly in European law where the focus has been much more doctrinal and sort of black letter.

Alexandra: Even in linguistics, you know what can be new is the combination of methods to answer one research question in one study. You know, you didn’t invent corpus linguistics, and I don’t think you’re pretending that you and your coauthors did.

Karen: God no!

Alexandra: You are making a really valid point, that it is quite novel and very useful to combine it with the interview method.

Karen: I like to think so. But I I think you know again to sort of try and answer your question a bit better, there are more of us now doing this type of work, which is wonderful. And so there are teams, you know: there’s my team at the University of Birmingham, there’s you guys, there are, you know, there, there are teams of more interdisciplinary people working on that interface between language and law, or just using language as a lens to interrogate other fields. And I think that’s the key. We just need more of us, more PhD students coming through – anybody want to come and do some more research with us? – and more, I guess, more freedom. And for, I guess, funding to do the type of projects that that we want to do. So, you also have to be convincing, depending on what you know the research academy looks like in your own country. You have to persuade a university or a funder that this is a good idea.

Alexandra: But, in fact, sometimes it can be that innovation of linguistics into law, you know, that can be the selling point that can be showing it’s new and worth funding. I’ll just jump in when you say, ‘and you guys’, I’ll just sort of put a little plug here. I think you mean the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers Network that Dr Laura Smith-Khan and I —

Karen McAuliffe: I do. It’s fantastic, and it’s so active. It’s wonderfully active and wonderfully supportive. It’s a it’s a wonderful research community that is somehow worldwide and feels very small and very supportive. There’s also the Language, Justice and Culture Hub.

Alexandra: Now based through Bard University.

Karen: Right. Yeah. And again, they’re all very, very welcoming communities and that isn’t a given, certainly not in the legal field.

Alexandra: It’s not, and that was Laura and my initial thinking, you know, sort of two things. First, we wanted a more welcoming space for ourselves and others. But also, back to what you were saying before, you know, a tide that lifts all boats, or, you know, a platform. It benefits each one of us to create a platform for the whole field.

Karen: And also, I think to create a field that’s rigorous, you know, in terms of scholarship because you sometimes– We can get very excited about building a new subfield and we get focused on our interesting data, and we don’t think about those bigger questions. And then the danger is that the subfield never becomes an established field because it doesn’t have [rigor] associated with it. So I think that’s important as well. And there’s lots of really interesting scholarship happening around the world. For a long time the law and language– the big names in law and language, we could list them on our on our hands, and they were white men.But there’s a lot more early career people, more people from the Global South that are doing really interesting and engaging work that is important to champion.

Alexandra: I totally agree. And so in the show notes, I’m going to put a link to a few other blogs where I think people can find those local and early career researchers in our law and linguistics field. But just to close the interview, I thought I might ask, where online can we find what you’re up to, or indeed in person, if you’ll be speaking.

Karen: I have no plans to speak right now. I have a period of study leave coming up, and I’m hoping that that is going to really get my creative juices flowing. I have been recently thinking about the construction of meaning in the context of multilingual legal reasoning. Jan Engberg, you may have had on this podcast before. He’s based out of Aarhus and he specializes in knowledge, communication, and the construction of meaning and has been doing some really interesting work recently about the construction of meaning in the context of comparative law and how we can’t–, we can’t get inside each other’s heads and fully understand what somebody is trying to communicate. And yet we manage to communicate. And yet global systems of law exist.

I’ve been working on the European Court of Justice for over 20 years, and haha! And I will always love it, and I don’t think I’ll ever move, you know, fully away from looking at it. It’s such an interesting institution. It works in 24 languages, you know. But I would like to do some work on other international courts. Thinking particularly of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, or the African Court of Peoples and Human Rights. Also the Strasbourg court, the European Court of Human Rights. I’m just at that sort of hunch stage. Because, you know, if you look at work that has been done in linguistics and work that has been done in translation studies and knowledge communication, that shows that there’s no inherent meaning in language. And yet– so law is this linguistic construct. And yet courts, international courts in particular, are very fond of saying, ‘well, according to the inherent meaning of this concept’ or, ‘according to the inherent meaning of this treaty’. But if other fields have established firmly that there is no inherent meaning in language then how can there be an inherent meaning in law? And so I’m interested in exploring that, but this is really at the very early stages. So, I’m hoping that in 2025 I can do a bit more thinking about that.

Alexandra: That sounds fascinating, Karen. I can’t wait to hear on that, but I feel we can wait. You know, there’s such a pressure in academia to do things quickly, like, it’s great to actually make the time and take the time to think about something enormous.

Karen: I’m not a, yeah. I have to say, I don’t do things terribly quickly. But again, I think that comes from a place of privilege. I’ve got a Chair, you know I have that space now if I need to, to take time to think about these things, so I’m aware of that.

Alexandra: Oh, but you know we’re grateful that you do have that space ‘cause we’re interested in what you’re producing. Maybe we’ll do another interview at some future point.

Karen: Absolutely. Yeah, any time.

Alexandra: What I’ll do I’ll put in the show notes things that Karen and I have spoken about, if you’ve enjoyed the show, it really does help us if you subscribe to our channel, or if you leave a 5 star review on the podcast app that you use or indeed just recommend the language on the move, podcast to your friends, your colleagues, your students, and we’ll speak to you next time.

Hanna and Prash discuss English language in higher education research and practice, in the understudied context of the South Pacific, and Prashneel’s new book, English Language-Mediated Settings and Educational Inequality: Language Policy Agendas in the South Pacific published by Routledge in 2025.

Transcript

Hanna: Welcome to the language on the move, podcast a channel on the new books network. My name is Dr. Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics and applied linguistics at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Prashneel Ravisan Goundar. Dr. Prashneel is an academic based in the graduate research School in the University of New England. His research interests span applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational linguistics. Today we’re going to talk about his new monograph, which will be published next month. English language, Mediated Settings and educational Inequalities published by Routledge. Welcome to the Show Presh.

Prash: Hi, Hanna, thank you for having me.

Hanna: It’s lovely that you could be here, and I really am really excited about introducing your work to our audience, so can you start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book.

Prash: Well, thanks personally to you for inviting me and reaching out. It’s always good to expand on your work and put yourself out of your comfort zone and rethink what you have done. So, the book obviously was part of my PhD. Thesis. But I’ll start just a little bit about myself.

So, I’m originally from Fiji. and I moved to Armidale, which is in the New England region in 2022 to complete my PhD. I’d started working on my PhD in Fiji, but because it was during the Covid period in 2020, and there were restrictions on travel and all of that, so I couldn’t move until mid of 2022, when things got a bit better. Back home back in Fiji I was an academic as well. I taught linguistics and applied linguistics courses for a decade or so. and part of what we had to do was we had to make sure that we upgraded our qualifications. We were given a timeline to do this upgrade, and I started looking at research topics.

Fijian streetscape (Image credit: Felix Colatanavanua via Wikipedia)

The way it kind of worked was the former Prime Minister of Fiji had gone into a function and had spoken at length about the English language problems that he had come across, and he had mentioned some of the civil servants, teachers or professionals who were writing emails. He noticed a lot of spelling mistakes, sentence structure errors, grammatical errors, and things like that. That’s when my my research skills kind of just picked up on this. And I started to think, well, he’s saying that. But does he have any form of data to back up his ideas? Or why have we come to that conclusion? Why is that the case? So that’s when I started to think aloud about this, and I thought this was going to be an interesting topic to investigate.

I sent research proposals over to a few universities, and that landed at UNE and my primary supervisor Finex Ndlovu he picked up on that, and he said, well, this looks like an interesting topic, but there would be other elements that I would like to add on to that. And that’s how I started working on my PhD which I finished in 2023. And that’s when we then started to see how the thesis could then be turned into a monograph and published as a book. So, I sent out the proposal to 2 publication houses and Routledge had sent it out for review, and they got back, and the review was very positive. And I thought, okay, now this is the time to start revising and reworking on how I can reach out to a wider audience who would be interested in this language, planning language policy, medium of instruction book. So that’s how it came about.

Hanna: Fantastic. Well, we’re glad that it did! It makes me feel like very old to think that you were doing this in Covid, because in my mind, Covid was just, you know, last year. But you’ve done so much since then, so I’d like to start in terms of delving into your book to focus on two of the things that I found really innovative and exciting about your research. And that is, of course, that it explores a really under-researched context. So that’s the first thing. And then the second thing is that it’s very participant centred. So, it really allows the participants to have a voice. Could you speak to those two aspects, or expand on them a little bit for our audience?

Prash: Absolutely, so if I did a quantitative study and just looked at a language test to see what the students were doing, or how they were coming into the university with a particular school, I think the study would not have been of merit in the sense that we are just looking at it from the statistics point of view. To just say, this is the level the students have entered the university, this is the level that they are leaving out from the University. What I wanted to go into was why they were at that particular level. What actually happened at the back end of it. And this is where the whole story about the Prime Minister comes into place is that something must have happened along the way for them to have a particular level of English when they entered a university, and that space was under researched.

Other researchers or scholars in Fiji had looked at primary school level of English, they had looked at high school level of English, or they had used interventions in those spaces, but they did not move on to the university and try to investigate. We have students who end up at the 3 main universities in Fiji where they all have English as the medium of instruction. But Fiji is so diverse. The linguistic background spans over 300 islands that we have, and you have students who would come from maritime schools who are very in rural areas. And then you have students who come from urban schools, and they enter the university. But for someone to just say, oh, well, you all come from schools. You should have the same level of English is very unfair. It’s an injustice, because that’s not how it works. So that’s the whole space that I really wanted to tap into and see what we could do to address these issues or what we could do to find out what these issues were, and that’s where the methodology came into place.

So I’ll tell you a funny story about this when I wrote the proposal, and I had sent it out to my supervisors, and I said, This is what I would like to do, and this is what I want to find out, and I remember them writing back to me and saying, Well, have you thought about how you’re going to give voice to the students. and that kind of put me into. Okay, how do I do that? So, I started again, looking at different methodologies. The most suitable one I found was grounded theory, methodology, and why it was suitable was it generates. The findings are centred with the data. So, the data actually generates the themes. The data actually brings about all the information that you could possibly gather. Then I started reading more about grounded theory, and then I noticed it was not used in the South Pacific context. When it came to language testing regimes, it wasn’t in that space. So, I said, okay, this is a new element. That’s coming into the picture and grounded theory, because it is of 3 different coding systems that go into its open coding, selective coding, and theoretical coding, these 3 different stages let the findings shine in their own spaces. Because you have this open coding where we had rural schools’ data. We had data about urban schools. We had data about tertiary institutions. And then we streamlined what we got from there into the selective coding space to look at. Okay, this is from, you know, these 3 streams. Then we grouped it to put rural schools and urban schools together. Whether it’d be primary schools or high schools. We put that information together. Then we moved on to getting the higher education data together as well. So, these were the new elements that kind of came about in the book. The methodology allows the participants to go on and speak about that information that they have.

So, we were able to have the total participants I had in the study which was 120, who did 2 language tests, one at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year. We had writing interventions that I used to give them feedback on how they were progressing. And then, when we looked at the data at the end again qe showed improvements, but then I still wanted to know what had happened. So, we chose 30 participants to have an interview, and they were all randomly selected. It wasn’t someone who has performed the best was selected, or people who were low. And then I started to talk to them about their background educational background in terms of their primary school and high school level of English. What had happened, and those findings then told us a whole new picture.

Recently, even last year, if Fiji has started looking at examination results, and they have tried to look at what’s happening, and they want to have an educational review. So, I recently wrote a newspaper article. and I explained in that review that it’s not just blaming the students and saying that we need to do this review because the students did not perform well or we need to do the review because the teachers are not doing their job. What are the elements that are contributing to the unsatisfactory level that the Ministry of Education or the Fijian Government is looking at? And so, I put my whole findings forward. And a lot of people sent me an email. And they said, yeah, it was spot on that these are the things that in reviews in previous years people have not considered, and they have just put a blame on somebody in that aspect. So yes, the voices that have come from the grounded theory methodology. Now, I’m trying to look at avenues where I can put this through…

Hanna: Yes, contribute your voice to the debate?

Prash: Yes, exactly.

Hanna: So you looked at a 120 students, you tested them at the beginning, and at the end of their first year at university. And then you interviewed 30 students. So, to kind of understand their experiences with English language, learning in all those diverse contexts.

Prash: Absolutely.

Hanna: It’s so relevant to other contexts in English language teaching all over the world where you do have this diversity of educational spaces, particularly in rural and regional areas, but also with you know, with diverse access to resources in all sorts of different spaces, like, even in the same city, you can have very diverse access to resources in the same educational contexts.

Prash: Yes, that’s so true.

Hanna: It’s important, and, as you say, that you are now introducing this into the political space is also so fascinating, and that it wasn’t there before is shocking. But it’s fantastic when you know your research has an impact or can have an impact. So, I guess for our audience, we’d really like to know a little bit more about what you found. So, my next question is, you talk about these different ways in which students in different parts of Fiji, in the primary system, and the high school system, too, I’m imagining, have this unequal access to essentially quality, English language, learning. Can you tell us a bit more about what your main findings were? What were some of the things that you found, and what were some of the main barriers. preventing equal access for all students to quality. English language learning, and teaching?

Prash: You have already mentioned, coming from same region schools, but they have different kind of access to resources. That’s exactly what we discovered in this particular project. So, I spoke to the students. One of the students told me, he came from a rural school. So, the two main islands in Fiji they have Viti Levu, and Vanua Levu. So, he came from one, and he said to me, he said. when I was in second grade, the library had 10 books. When I left the 8th grade to move to high school the library still had the same 10 books. There was no movement in the in the 6 or 7 years that the student was there, so I said there was no new books? He said, no. Ten books for 300 students who would have studied in that whole period. So if we are saying English should be improved, and it can be improved by reading. Well, do we have the resources to give to the students? You can’t just say read, read, but well, let’s look at our backyard. We don’t have those books to give.

Related to that the students told me, about what they found in their library. This is another student, but it’s related to what I just spoke about. The library only had books for upper primary. They didn’t have any books for lower primary. So, if you have students who are from one to four in those classes. They didn’t have books to look at, and it’s the same with other schools. People had books for lower primary, no books for upper primary students, or vice versa. In the high school context as well.

Students also told me that because they came from maritime schools or they came from rural schools there, what happens is they come from very small communities, and it’s so small that you kind of know everybody in the community. So, the students are also very familiar with the teacher who was teaching, so the teacher would not use English to teach English instead of using, you know, English to teach a reading of English class or a grammar of English class the teacher was using a vernacular. What led on from there was when this particular student she moved to high school. She said “I was in culture shock because all the students were speaking in English, and I’m coming from a rural primary school”, an island primary school, and she was so depressed she told me. She said she spent the first year of high school in isolation. She would sit under the tree and just try, and you know, be herself, or she would go to the library because she had no voice. She didn’t know how to communicate. There was a huge language barrier for her.

She wasn’t able to even have a simple conversation with the teacher to talk to the teacher, and I remember her telling me she said, I tried to go and talk to the teacher. I tried to make time to go into the teacher, but the teacher has so many classes. The teacher has so many students, she said. I couldn’t get through to talk to her on how I could improve my conversation skills, or in general, you know my skills in the English language. That was the other situation. A similar one. Another student said to me, she said, I didn’t care that we had to speak in English. I spoke in iTaukei, which is an indigenous Fijian language, she said. I spoke with people of other languages who would speak in English, but I had no words, so I would speak to them in the iTaukei language and just try and make a conversation. But it was hard. It was very hard. It was depressing, for some of the students. How would you go about solving this kind of issue?

So, what I do recommend in the book is that for the students who are coming from these schools, once we know that yes, they are having this kind of issue, we need to set up basic academic kind of skills training for these students so that we nurture them to then progress gradually into the class, and they don’t feel that isolation. They don’t feel that they cannot talk. And the other aspect about resources was very interesting. So, as I said, it’s always vice versa. You cannot have a balance in this. One of the students from a rural school said. which was, I found it a bit funny the way he explained it, he said “oh, well, we didn’t have a lot of resources.” This is a very rural school in Fiji, he said, “we only had seven laptops”, and I said to him, “seven laptops in a rural school. I think you were well in place”, you know. At the same time I spoke to another student who came from the same region but attended an urban school with no computer access. They didn’t have any Internet; they didn’t have any computer access. So, the distribution of resources is unequal here. So how do we look into that.

Another student told me, she spoke to someone who came from another urban school and she also attended an urban school. Sha said “we did not have the same textbook access, they had more textbooks than us, or they had more teaching and learning resources, such as charts. They had access to those things as well”. So, I noticed that students actually make this comparison when they are there in the same space. They do talk about all of these things. And yeah, these are different barriers that they have in trying to excel in exams, because in high schools as well, the medium instructions is in English. But if we don’t look at it right from the beginning when they come here. And that’s when you know the blame game starts. And in the last examination results that came out for Fiji they were 76% pass rate. And everybody was, why is it so low? Why is it? 76? But yes, you’re not looking at the circumstances that the students go through that the teachers go through. Because yes, you can say to the students, but then the teachers can also be like, well, be didn’t have the books to do this.

Another interesting issue is the shortage of teachers which has two aspects. One is a literal shortage. One student said they didn’t have an English teacher for two terms completely, because the teacher fell ill. Now there was no one to step in to look after these students for two terms, and it was an examination class to prepare for an external exam. So, in the third term they got a substitute teacher. But instead of learning, it was just rushing through to cover whatever they could cover to sit for the exam. Who can you point to in in that space? Well, should we say that the school would have had to make contact with the Ministry of Education to try and look for someone to come into this place should we point to the teacher and say, well, if you were unwell, you should have informed us in advance. Should you point to the head of department and say, why didn’t you have a contingency plan in place to get someone to cover that shift as well? It’s a whole structure, who do you kind of get into that space as well. So yeah, it was fascinating to listen to their stories.

Hanna: It’s so relevant as well, these structural educational issues. And they’re also often interconnected with issues around medium of instruction in lots of contexts. We could, we could talk about that for the whole podcast, but I want to move on to your monograph. You used a language testing tool to assess students at the beginning of the semester, and at the end of the year which hadn’t been used in in fact, I think you said it hadn’t been used in the region outside of Europe and the “global north”. The Common European Framework of Reference. So can you tell us a bit about why you chose that tool, and how you argue it should be used to better meet the needs of learners in the Fijian context, because it was developed in quite a different context, as we know.

Prash: That’s a very interesting question that you have asked, because a lot of people come back to me and say, oh, so how did you choose this or what made you think about this one? So, when we had conversations about this, I needed to have a tool that I could use to measure students at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year to check. So, what could work in that? So, I started to investigate language testing regimes, and the book covers all of these aspects about the history of all of those, and what I found was tests such as TOIC test, TOEFL test or IELTS test, Cambridge examination language tests, they all went back to the CEFR, which is the Common European Framework of Reference for languages. The CEFR was where all these other tests got ideas from, and they built onto that. So, I said, instead of using, let’s say, a TOEFL test to do the testing instead of looking at IELTS test to do the testing, why not look at how the CEFR can be used in this context. And then I understood that the CEFR has got so many different sorts of scales for different aspects.

So, if you’re looking at writing, my study looked at academic writing. It had about six different ways of looking at writing. And because it comes from because it comes from Europe it had gone through about 2,000 different descriptors before it was designed. And that’s when I said, okay, if there’s so many languages in Europe, and they have looked at 2,000 different descriptors to come up with this standard one. This could now be suitable for the Fijian context because of the different languages that are being used in this context. And what I found is you already alluded to is that in the South Pacific context that had not been used. The CEFR was very new in that aspect, and the IELTS test is an ongoing thing. So, in Fiji or in Australia the IELTS test is used generally for migration purposes for scholarship purposes. But that’s not what my target audience was my target audience was looking at higher education students and trying to align their educational needs. And this particular framework, the descriptor. So, there are 6 descriptors to this. A1 and A2 indicate that the students are basic users. And then you have B1 and B2, which say, the students are independent users. And then you have C1 and C2, which say, these students are proficient users. And that’s exactly what we wanted to find out from the student when they entered the university, what kind of user can we classify them into? And this really kind of matched into that. And when we it was so nicely utilized when we looked at it at the end of the year we found improvement they had made on the scales.

So, the 120 students who set the test at the beginning of the year, what I found was that 62 of them were at A1 level. And 49 of them were at A2 level. Both were at basic user levels. So, throughout the year, what we did was we had writing interventions for academic writing to improve this skill, because that’s the lower end of the scale, and we tried to see how we can improve on that. So, they had paragraph writing activities that they did. They had some rewriting activities. They worked on academic writing. There were three interventions, academic writing, essay, writing, that they did, and at the end of the year, when we checked how the cohort had done so from the 120, 12 of them moved from A1 to A2, but the significant change that came was 90 moved to B2. And then that’s becoming an independent user. Interestingly, 8 of them moved from A2 at the beginning of the year to C1 as proficient users. But of course, this is just to do with their writing skills. We’re not looking at anything else, so we can’t say, well, very brilliant. They are very proficient speakers. But no, no, we’re just looking at the writing part, so I don’t want to excite the audience too much.

Just to see it function in in that aspect was really something good that came about. So, I sent the book to the Deputy Prime Minister in Fiji, and he has written a blurb in the book as well, and it was good that it’s getting to people who make decisions to see where I can come in, and how I can contribute to that conversation as well.

Hanna: Congratulations! That is fantastic result, isn’t it, that the Deputy Prime Minister not only has read your book but has endorsed it.

Prash: Yes, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Hanna: So, my last question, which is for those of us who are, you know, interested in researching in this space for emergent researchers, for students, linguistics and applied linguistics, and also language teaching students. What is the kind of key findings that you would like us to take away from your exciting and wonderful new book?

Prash: So, I’m trying to share and not over share, so that readers would want to read the book, and I don’t want to give too much away. What I would say, is like the book has connected three different spaces. That is the higher education, language testing regimes, and the grounded theory methodology. So, it’s an interconnection of these three different things that have come about in this book and I think readers and emerging scholars or established scholars like yourself. The book will give you how grounded theory can be applied into language, education, research. When I started looking at grounded theory methodology, it was mostly used with clinical psychology, or it was used in the sciences to get their data. And I read through Urquhart’s book, Cathy Urquhart. She has got a fantastic book that looks at grounded theory methodology. And the book was my bible, because it showed you the steps that you need to do to arrive at the data, how you collect information, and then how you analyse and interpret the data.

One of the [thesis] examiners praised the methodology of the research and said that he didn’t think that theory could be utilized in this way in a language testing or language education, research, so to say, so that that I thought was a very good compliment. I think leaders will then be able to use that space as well, coming towards higher education because they have been findings of different spaces in that language, medium of instruction, language policy. And this here, this is trying to get the student to say, well, what do you think we can do to improve? Or what is the problem that you are facing at this particular juncture. and what I found with the the university students, the way they talked about coming into lectures, and not being able to understand the delivery of the lectures. They said we wanted to just leave everything and go out. We couldn’t process the kind of language that was coming through to us, and then to start writing that seemed a bit challenging for them.

However, one of the things that I think scholars will be happy to hear, I asked the students. I said, what did you think the language test that you did, what did you think about the academic writing interventions which I monitored throughout there. The students gave very honest feedback in that aspect. Some of them said it was very challenging, which is fine, because you want to know what they felt. Some of them said that they found it useful because each had a task that they had to do. And then, obviously, I was giving feedback to them on how they would improve on the next task, or that particular task. They found that very helpful. They said the writing in interventions they found it to be helpful because essentially academic skill, academic writing skills is not just a 1 1-year thing or not a one semester kind of thing. Students go on to the 3 year or 4-year program, but they need to be able to submit assignments. They need to know how they go about making an argument or supporting a discussion. So, this whole book kind of outlines how helpful this were to them.

So that’s one of the things I could say. The other aspect that the students brought about was not only having teachers but having motivated and passionate teachers. That also really contributes to how the students perform in the class. And I mean, I don’t want to boast here, but I’ll tell you. I used to teach the academic English course many years ago, and I would have a lecture at eight o’clock, and there were 700 students in this class. One day I noticed the attendance would be 90%. There would be 90% students in the class. The students told me that, sir, the subject is very boring, but you make it so exciting that we show up. We want to know, and they would not feel sleepy in the class, because I would deliver the language academic English in such a way that it sorts of hit them, that why, they were in the class, or why they were doing that. So, I think if that filters down, or if that tickles down to primary school teachers or high school teachers, and they are that they know they don’t just there, because in a fortnight they’re going to be paid. They they’re there because they make a difference to the life of the student that it takes them. You know, from primary to high school, from high school to university, and it’s just going to be good in that aspect to look at it. So those are the key things.

Hanna: I think that’s fantastic place to end Prash! That’s so important. And I think it’s lovely also, for I know some of my students who are English language teachers or teachers in training will be listening to this. And I think that’s a really lovely point to end on which is that, yeah, it’s not just about having teachers, of course, although, of course, that is of paramount importance. But it’s about having passionate and motivated teachers. And that’s very impressive to get 700 students to turn up at 8 o’clock in the morning. I think that speaks. That’s a great compliment for any teacher.

Thanks again, Prash, and thanks very much to our audience for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the language on the move podcast because we talk about fantastic topics like this. And our partner, the new books network to your students, colleagues and friends until next time.

Tazin and Brynn, two of our enthusiastic podcast hosts

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

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

By download numbers, our top-5 episodes were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full list of episodes published to date

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

Tazin and Jia discuss crisis communication in a linguistically diverse world and a new book co-edited by Dr. Jia Li and Dr. Jie Zhang called Multilingual Crisis Communication that gives us insights into the lived experiences of linguistic minorities affected during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Multilingual Crisis Communication is the first book to explore the lived experiences of linguistic minorities in crisis-affected settings in the Global South, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. China has been selected as a case of inquiry for multilingual crisis communication because of its high level of linguistic diversity. Taking up critical sociopolitical approaches, this book conceptualizes multilingual crisis communication from three dimensions: identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.

Comprising eight main chapters, along with an introduction and an epilogue, this edited book is divided into three parts in terms of the demographic and social conditions of linguistic minorities, as indigenous, migrant, and those with communicative disabilities. This book brings together a range of critical perspectives of sociolinguistic scholars, language teachers, and public health workers. Each team of authors includes at least one member of the research community with many years of field work experience, and some of them belong to ethnic minorities. These studies can generate new insights for enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of multilingual crisis communication.

This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of multilingualism, intercultural communication, translation and interpreting studies, and public health policy.

This volume brings together 23 contributors and covers a range contexts in which crisis communication during the COVID19 pandemic has been investigated. Focusing on China owing to a high level of linguistic diversity, this book uses critical sociopolitical approaches, to identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.

Advance praise for the book

‘Setting a milestone in critical sociolinguistic and applied linguistic studies, this volume offers critical insights into overcoming communication barriers for linguistic minorities during crises, promoting social justice, and enhancing public health responses through inclusive, multimodal, and multilingual strategies. It also serves as testimonies of resilience, courage and kindness during the turbulent time’ (Professor Zhu Hua, Fellow of Academy of Social Sciences and Director of International Centre for Intercultural Studies, UCL, UK)

‘The global pandemic has brought to the fore the key role of multilingual communication in disasters and emergencies. This volume contains cutting edge ethnographic studies that address this seriously from the perspective of Chinese scholars and minoritized populations in China. A decisive contribution to the burgeoning field of multilingualism and critical sociolinguistics in times of crisis.’ (Professor Virginia Zavala, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Perú)

Related content

For related content, visit the Language on the Move Covid-19 Archives.

Transcript (coming soon)

In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world’s languages disappear this century.

Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People’s Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future.

The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis.

Related content

You can read more of Gerald’s work in his blogposts.

Transcript (coming soon)

A wonderful companion read to this episode is Distinguished Ingrid Piller’s Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building.

If you liked this episode, check out more resources on technology and language: Will technology make language rights obsolete?; the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us; and Are language technologies counterproductive to learning?

(Image credit: EduResearch Matters)

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 (by Brynn Quick, added on February 21, 2025)

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. Sue Ollerhead.

Sue grew up in multilingual South Africa, a country with 12 official languages, where she learned English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, Isikosa, and French at school and university. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Languages and Literacy Education and the Director of the Secondary Education Program at Macquarie University. Her expertise lies in English language and literacy learning and teaching in multicultural and multilingual education contexts.

Her research interests include translanguaging, multilingual pedagogies, literacy across the curriculum and oracy development in schools. Sue is currently Editor of TESOL in Context, the peer-reviewed journal of the Australian Council of TESOL Associations. She serves on the Executive Board of the English as a Medium of Instruction Centre, EMI, at Macquarie University.

Today, Sue and I are going to chat about an article that she’s recently written for the Australian Association for Research in Education, entitled, Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn, Does AI? We’ll discuss the emergence of AI platforms like ChatGPT and how they are affecting teacher training and student learning. Sue, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Ollerhead: Hi, Brynn. Lovely to be here today.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and about how you became an educator in the English as an additional language space?

Dr Ollerhead: Thanks, Brynn. As you said, I grew up in what you would call a super diverse country, South Africa, which is also very multilingual with 12 official languages. So as well as you said, I learned English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, Isikosa, and French at school.

I would also hear a plethora of language mixing or translanguaging by people all around me all the time. And when I finished university, I began my teaching career at a TESOL Medium Primary School and then went on to teach Zulu-speaking factory workers in South Africa’s Adult Migrant Literacy Program. I’ve also spent a large part of my working life teaching English and working in educational publishing in Sub-Saharan Africa and the United Kingdom.

So always within very multilingual and multi-cultural context. And I guess what surprised me when moving to Australia in my mid-30s, was the monolingualness of the schools and working environments that I was working in, which seemed to be at odds with what I knew to be a significant proportion of people living in Australia, speaking languages other than English at home. It was almost as though those became invisible in the public sphere and English seemed to dominate everything.

So, I guess that questioning of monolingual public spaces and how they include or exclude people has driven a lot of my research work. I think particularly how children who speak languages other than English at home can be excluded within classrooms that adopt an English only approach to learning. I guess the focus of my academic career over the past 10 to 15 years has always been to train students to become knowledgeable, reflective, and responsive teachers of learners from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Brynn: That’s amazing. You really did have a lot of multilingual experience. That’s so cool that you were able to be in an environment with so many different languages like that.

And I think that that must be really useful for you as an educator for not just students like primary or secondary school students, but now that you teach future teachers how to teach. So, let’s talk about this article that you’ve written called Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn, Does AI. So, this article discusses the use of AI and platforms like ChatGPT in this teacher training, which you do.

And one important part of learning how to teach is learning how to write effective lesson plans. I mean, I remember doing that for my own teacher training course that I went through when I became a TESOL educator as well. So, talk to us about, I guess, the importance of lesson plans and also about this emerging use of AI in lesson plan creation and what we know about the percentage of teachers who are actually using AI to create their lesson plans.

Dr Ollerhead: I think I heard a statistic the other day that teachers have, on average, about eight minutes to plan lessons over and above the other duties they have. So, we know that teacher workload is a very big issue. And there’s no surprise then that busy teachers are turning to GenAI models like ChatGPT or Perplexity to streamline lesson planning.

I certainly am no expert on AI, but it’s very much part of the landscape now in teacher education. And we know that for teachers, simply by entering prompts, like generate a three-lesson sequence on maybe something like Agricultural Innovation in Australia, they can quickly receive a detailed teaching program tailored to the lesson content, compete with learning outcomes, suggested resources, classroom management tips, and more. So, this is fantastic.

It represents a pragmatic solution to busy teachers, to overwhelming workloads. And it also explains why they’re being taken up quite readily by school teachers and also in places of higher education and teacher training environments. And as far as how many teachers use AI for lesson planning, I suppose a useful survey would be one that was run by the Australian Association of Independent Schools in 2023, where they reported over 70% of primary teachers and 80% of secondary teachers were using generative AI tools in their work.

And the lesson planning or learning design was rated as the top AI assisted task. Now, granted the survey dates back to August 2023, but one could assume that uptake is even greater by now. And in my work as a secondary teacher educator, my observations of AI use amongst teachers across government, independent and Catholic sectors generally support these findings.

Brynn: I can understand why, honestly, because, I mean, we are both educators and I get it, our workloads are huge, and especially if you think about teachers who, I guess, are working in the primary and the secondary school levels, they are not just working from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day. They are putting in so many more hours that people don’t actually see happening.

And then to have to create, not just create lesson plans, but I think maybe people don’t realize that various departments of education or different sectors require you to document these lesson plans in a very specific way and you need to map them onto learning outcomes and objectives and things like that.

So, it’s not just quote unquote creating a lesson plan. You have to really put a lot of effort into it. And if you’re saying that teachers are only getting something like eight minutes to do that, that’s unfathomable. That’s untenable.

Dr Ollerhead: Absolutely. Very, very overwhelming. And we know that lesson planning is really, really important.

A well-planned lesson is really fundamental to classroom management, to effective differentiation, to really, really considering the accessibility of the content. But it is a big task on top of, as you say, all the other tasks that teachers are having to fulfill on a daily basis.

Brynn: You just mentioned something called differentiation. And I think that this is a really important point to talk about. So, talk to us about this concept of differentiation in teaching.

What does it mean? And why is it a concept that teachers need to keep in mind when they’re planning their lessons?

Dr Ollerhead: The D word, yes, differentiation. It’s probably one of the most important and most challenging things to learn when training to become a teacher. And it really, Brynn, it really lies at the heart of Australian Professional Teaching Standard 1.3, which is “know students and how they learn”.

And especially knowing about how to differentiate for students from different cultural, linguistic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds. Differentiation in general refers to the practice of tailoring instruction to meet the varied learning profiles, backgrounds and abilities of each child or student in your class. And it starts with really understanding the diversity profile of your class.

So, for example, I said in the article that let’s say you teach a class where 95% of your class comes from a language background other than English. And you might think, well, that’s unrealistic. Actually, in Sydney, it really isn’t.

There are many areas where that would be the norm rather than the exception. In fact, in New South Wales, one in three students comes from a language background other than English. And in your class, your class comprises a mix of high achieving, gifted and talented individuals, some of whom are expert English users, while others might be newly arrived in Australia and they might have been assessed as emerging on the ELD Learning Progression, which is a tool that we use to measure where students are in their English language learning trajectory.

Now, these students need targeted language support to be able to even access the content of the curriculum. And let’s say your students come from various backgrounds. Some might be Aboriginal Australian students, others might come from countries as diverse as Sudan, China, Afghanistan, Bangladesh.

Some might even have spent three or more years in refugee camps before arriving in Australia, with no access to formal education at all. Others live in Sydney without their families. So, yeah, some are highly literate.

And while others have yet to master basic academic literacies and literacy skills in English. So given this diverse scenario in one class, and as I said, that is actually often the norm, rather than the exception. Differentiation can include things like the types of teaching strategies that you use.

So, using a variety of teaching strategies to engage students at different levels. So, for example, your highly proficient English users might work on extension activities that challenge their critical thinking. New arrivals who are still coming to grips with English as a medium of instruction could benefit from visual aids, graded texts, interactive group work to help them grasp key concepts.

We could also differentiate in terms of the assessment that we use. So, we might implement diverse assessment strategies that allow students to demonstrate their understanding in ways that align with their language proficiency and educational background. So, this might include allowing students to present their knowledge through oral projects or visual representations rather than traditional written assessments.

I always give the example of the water cycle. A child doesn’t necessarily come to the classroom not knowing anything about the water cycle. It’s just that they’re not able to understand it.

They’re not able to express that knowledge in English. So, giving them another mode through which to express that knowledge is really, really important. Of course, language support is very important as well.

So, for those students who are especially new arrivals, who are emergent on the EAL/D learner progression, we can provide targeted language support to scaffolding techniques that can involve using sentence starters, graphic organisers, active vocabulary acquisition activities, specifically designed for the content being taught. You know, in second year, we have a lot of technical vocabulary that is very specific to the field in which you’re teaching. So, for example, the word culture in science means something very different to the way it’s used in society and culture, for example.

And we actually need to think, well, this needs to be, these differences need to be made explicit for our learners, especially those who come from EAL/D backgrounds. But I guess one aspect that’s often overlooked is cultural differentiation. And this refers to modifying lesson content to be culturally relevant and accessible to all students.

So, it’s not just a sink or swim situation where we expect students to come to Australia and understand everything about Australia and its culture. What it means is integrating examples and materials into your lesson that reflect the backgrounds of your students and the various cultural contexts they come from and connecting your curriculum to their experiences. So, Robin Maloney and Leslie Harbin and Susan Oguro have written an amazing book that actually encourages teachers to teach for linguistic responsiveness.

And they encourage teachers to ask questions like, before you teach content, it’s really helpful to ask yourself questions such as, what are my own biases and blind spots related to the subject matter? What insights might my students have that I’m unaware of? So, for example, we know in maths, all countries have mathematical systems that are very particular to their cultural context.

And those can be very rich learning opportunities for all students in the classroom. Also important is what sensitivities could arise in discussions about this content with concerning values, knowledge and language. And I think most importantly, how can I teach this material in a culturally and linguistically responsive manner that promotes my students’ well-being and achievement?

So, do my students see themselves reflected in this content? Or is it presented in a very sort of Australian, monocultural, monolingual way? That is the challenge that I always set for my students to master as teachers who are going into contexts where they’re going to be teaching in very diverse settings.

Brynn: And what I’m hearing in that explanation is that teachers are not just planning this, you know, one lesson plan, saying, okay, everybody in the class is going to be able to do this skill and they’re all at this level. Because even if we had a classroom of monolingual English Australian born students, there is no classroom in which every single student is at the same level on particular skills or in particular classes. So, teachers are already having to do this work constantly, even if they’re in this sort of more monolingual, monocultural environment.

But what I’m hearing you say, and it’s true, is that our reality, as people who live in Sydney and the surrounding suburbs, is that we are becoming more and more and more multilingual, multicultural, and that this is just reality, that teachers are having to now have these additional thoughts and these additional considerations as they plan lesson plans. And the thing is, with this expectation of, well, can teachers just use AI to plan lesson plans? Now we have to think, well, can AI actually take these things into consideration?

Dr Ollerhead: That’s exactly right, Brynn. And it really gets to the heart of what we know about teaching. We know that teaching is not just a science.

It’s not just a process of knowing a series of principles, a series of methods and applying them. It’s actually also an art in terms of that element of, I always say that I think the most important material for success as a teacher is the ability to listen well. So, a teacher that’s in tune with their students will really by default be able to differentiate because in the moment they’re hearing, OK, I’m not sure if my class has actually been taken along with me in this lesson.

I think I might have lost them somewhere. So, I’m not going to ask the question, does everybody understand? Because of course, you’re going to get the answer, yes, of course.

Nobody wants to say they don’t understand. It’s really about the art of listening in, of asking the right questions. And then based on the answers you get to those questions, saying, OK, how can I tailor my delivery to respond to the needs of my learners?

So, I can do many things really, really well. And there’s no doubt there’s a role for it in lesson planning. But I think I guess what I was hoping to explore in that article is that there’s an essential element of listening that is very human, listening and responding with empathy in the moment contingently, that at the moment is still very human, I think.

And I would like to think that with the rise of AI, and we’ve seen it just completely overtake all our expectations, instead of trying to compete with AI, I think what we need to do is to get better at what we do, and that’s being human. And I think that very human empathetic element of listening to our students, finding out more about who they are, where they come from, how they’re feeling today, are they actually even in a space to be learning about equations when they’re still trying to understand the new culture that they found themselves in. So, I guess that’s my biggest hope is that we’re going to graduate a generation of teachers who are really checking in and attuned to the wonderful diversity we have in our classrooms.

Brynn: I think that the whole concept of differentiation in teachers is inherently human. And another part that you talk about in the article that I think is along the same lines is thinking about lesson plan creation in conjunction with the concept of the quote virtual school bag, which I love.

So, what is a virtual school bag? And why is it something that teachers need to think about when planning their lessons, especially when considering linguistic and cultural diversity within a classroom? And then there’s this question of can we expect AI to be able to consider a student’s virtual school bag?

Dr Ollerhead: I’m so glad you asked about that, because that to me has always been a really powerful visual metaphor. And that’s the concept of the virtual school bag comes from Pat Thompson and the work that Barbara Koma has done from the University of Queensland. They’ve done amazing work on looking at the rich cultural and linguistic resources that students from language backgrounds other than English come with to the classroom.

And they conceptualize it in the form of a visual metaphor. And they say that many children come to school with their virtual backpack that’s filled with things like cultural knowledge, geographical knowledge, practical knowledge of cultures and customs and skills from their own context. We call those funds of knowledge.

But what happens is that often they’re asked to leave that schoolbag at the classroom door and not to unpack it. And it’s only really the mainstream resources that are unpacked in the classroom. And so, they say it’s very dehumanizing if children are prevented from showing others what’s in their backpack, what they have to bring to learning, what they have to bring to the teacher.

You know, as teachers, we’re constant learners as well. So, I find that a very powerful metaphor. And you can only really discover what’s in students’ or children’s virtual backpack if you create a space in which all knowledges and cultures are valued in the classroom.

Now, AI is a tool, but it’s not an environment, it’s not a climate, it’s not an ecosystem where children feel safe. That is the teacher’s role. And so, I work a lot with a concept, a theory and a practice of full translanguaging.

And we call that a translanguaging space or a stance where the teacher does not have to be proficient in every single language of the classroom but makes space for the articulation of those languages and cultures throughout certain aspects of their teaching.

Brynn: I think that it gets to this point that I do think that we’ve been seeing more and more in education in general over the last even just decade, which is that we can’t expect every student in a classroom to fit into this one mould. I’m thinking of even just different neuro types or different learning styles, let alone linguistic and cultural backgrounds. And I do think that as a society, we’re getting better at making space for all of those differences.

But I think that we have to keep in mind this long educational tradition of almost trying to force the mainstream that we saw happening, you know, kind of since the beginning of education, really. You know, I’m thinking back to like one room schoolhouses and things like that. And we have to think, okay, we know that that did not work.

You know, we’ve, I mean, I’m a millennial, and that was still very much the education system that I grew up with, was trying to fit all of these kids into this one mould. And so, what I can almost hear is people saying, well, but if we’ve got these multilingual, multicultural students, shouldn’t they just have to learn English? Shouldn’t they just have to assimilate and fit into Australian culture?

But you mentioned the humanity of the teacher and the teacher really recognizing the humanity of the students. And, you know, some people might say that actually, you know, using AI to create these lesson plans, it’s fine, because AI can be more objective. It can almost, you know, force this mainstream.

So, tell me what you would say to those people that are saying, like, well, shouldn’t we all be sort of fitting into this one mould?

Dr Ollerhead: Yeah, that’s a great question, Brynn. And I think it kind of taps into some very powerful discourses at the moment about things like explicit teaching and, you know, being very clear about what the outcomes are for lessons. And there’s definitely merit to explicit teaching and making, you know, making visible the things that students need to achieve in a lesson.

What I want to emphasize is that including students’ cultures and language in the classroom is not antithetical to teaching them how to learn in English. In fact, what we find is that it supports their English learning. And you know why it does that?

It’s because it validates students’ identities. It sees what they come with as a strength and it gets them engaged in lesson content and lesson activities. If you come to school and you don’t see a place for yourself in learning, you’re going to disengage.

And we know that that is a big barrier to successful learning. So these things do not actually necessarily that they don’t preclude each other. So we need to remember that the complete understanding of a student’s unique cultural background, their personal experiences and their emotional needs is complex and often requires human empathy and insight.

And if you’re ever in a classroom, I’m really fortunate to work with some incredible teachers. And I see so many teachers who have been in the field for a very long time. They might not even call what they say differentiation, what they do as differentiation, but they do it instinctively because it’s second nature to them to just tap into where students are, to listen intently, to quickly in the moment tweak their instruction or their strategies to meet their students’ needs.

But we can’t expect new teachers to understand that. We can’t expect new teachers to have the wherewithal to immediately differentiate, especially because our classrooms are becoming more multicultural and multilingual, because of globalization, because of migration. But strangely enough in Australia, that hasn’t actually meant that our teaching practices have become attuned to that increasing diversity.

And it’s something we can’t shy away from. It’s actually something that needs to be dealt with not just in early childhood or primary or secondary, but also at universities. And we really need to, I guess, rethink this “it’s simpler if everybody learns English” because that just doesn’t cut it anymore. We know that it benefits everybody when we have plurality in classrooms where we can learn from each other, where there’s genuine intercultural sharing and understanding. And I guess what we want to do as teacher-trainers and teacher-educators is to say teaching is an ongoing learning process.

But if you understand from the outset that the key to being an effective teacher is actually exercising that empathy, exercising that insight, I think that sets you up for success and it certainly sets your learners up for success. We know that even though AI is amazing in the way that it can analyse and recommend resources related to a student’s virtual school bag, teachers still play a crucial role in ensuring that those resources are integrated in a way that is thoughtful and responsive to each student’s needs.

Brynn: I love that idea of not denying the fact that we have AI, AI is here, people are using it. I mean, this is a whole other episode, but we see students use it as well in their writing.

It’s not something that we can close our eyes to and say, “No, no, this doesn’t exist. Let’s just pretend like it’s 25 years ago.” So, I love that you’re acknowledging, yeah, it exists, it can be a tool for certain things, especially for those busy, busy teachers who have so much that they have to accomplish in such a short amount of time.

But I just really love this idea of fundamentally, teachers have to tap into their humanity and their empathy, and they have to recognize the humanity in their students in order to create a more meaningful and productive classroom, because it’s really only going to be a net positive when we have that integration of cultures and languages and students working together, because in our globalized world, that’s what they’re going to have to do when they’re grownups anyway, you know?

So, you said that you can see AI being used as a tool. Where do you see it going? Where do you think it’s heading in the education and teacher training sectors, for good or for bad?

Dr Ollerhead: Yeah, I mean, you’ve summarized it so well Brynn, but I think it’s, I guess my hope is, and again, I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball, and you know, there’ve just been such rapid changes within the last two years. But my hope is that it will become a symbiotic relationship, where, I mean, for sure, the educational sector will not simply adopt AI, it will embrace it as a catalyst for enhancement. But I think the key there is the word enhancement.

It augments things. It’s really amazing at generating big data sets. And you know, that’s what it does.

I don’t think we could ever hope to compete with that. But again, getting back to the hope that there can be a relationship between AI and education that is symbiotic. So I guess what I mean by that is sort of a balancing act where technology supports, not just supports, but actually amplifies the irreplaceable human qualities that drive effective teaching and learning.

And as AI continues to evolve, I’m excited about the possibilities it presents, I guess, for enriching education and empowering students and teachers. But I’m very much aware that we can’t deny that it’s here. But I’m also very wary of outsourcing crucial things like differentiation for control and linguistic diversity to AI, without actually understanding the fundamental knowledge on which we have to base our judicious use of lesson planning.

Brynn: I love that answer. I think that that’s a perfect summary of where we’re at and where, hopefully, we are headed. So, Sue, thank you so much for talking with me today, and thank you for being on the show.

Dr Ollerhead: It’s been a pleasure, Brynn. Thanks so much.

Brynn: And thank you for listening, everyone. 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. Until next time.

Rooted in a Bourdieusian approach to language, power and legal discourse, this is the first major publication to integrate contemporary debates in linguistics about mobility, capitalism and globalization into a study of China’s language policy.

This book came out in May 2021 after almost a decade of Alex’s doctoral and postdoctoral work. Her doctoral dissertation was recognised as the best dissertation on the sociology of language, internationally, through the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award.

Some academic work and concepts that are referenced in this episode include Language on the Move posts about Dr. Grey’s and Dr. Laura Smith-Khan’s Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN), “aspiring monolingualism” and the one-nation-one-language ideology.

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.

Further readings

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’, in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781800411562-011
Grey, A. (2021) Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study, Abridged Mandarin Version (translated by Gegentuul Baioud), pp1-22. Language on the Move: Sydney. http://hdl.handle.net/10453/172165
Grey, A. (2021, published online 2019). ‘Tourist tongues: high-speed rail carries linguistic and cultural urbanisation beyond the city limits in Guangxi, China’, Applied Linguistics Review 12(1). 11-37. DOI: 10.1515/applirev-2019-0099.
Grey, A. and Baioud, G. (2021). ‘Education Reforms Aim to Mold Model Citizens from Preschool in the PRC’. China Brief. 21 (17) 23-29. The Jamestown Foundation: Washington. https://jamestown.org/program/educational-reforms-aim-to-mold-model-citizens-from-preschool-in-the-prc/
Grey, A. and Martin, K. (2024). ‘Making Zhuang Language Visible’ [Video]. UTS. [link TBC] K Thorpe, L Booker, A Grey, D Rigney, and M Galassi (2021) The Benefits of Aboriginal Language Use and Revival – Literature Review. UTS Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research. https://www.alt.nsw.gov.au/assets/Uploads/downloads/files/The-Benefits-of-Aboriginal-Language-Use-and-Revival-in-New-South-Wales-Literature-Review.pdf

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added on February 21, 2025)

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. Alexandra Grey.

Alex is a Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law at University of Technology Sydney in Australia. Alex researches laws about using or not using certain languages and how they impact upon social identities and social justice. For example, what the internationally recognized right to health obliges a government such as Australia’s to do in terms of communicating public health information in languages other than English.

Or, as another example, whether choice of language is part of freedom of expression and whether denying choice of language can be a form of racial discrimination. She is currently researching new legal directions in Australian government support for Aboriginal language renewal. Today we’re going to talk about Alex’s book entitled Language Rights in a Changing China, a National Overview and Zhuang Case Study.

This book came out in May 2021 after almost a decade of Alex’s doctoral and post-doctoral work. Her doctoral dissertation was recognized as the best dissertation on the sociology of language internationally through the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award.

Alex, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Grey: Oh, hello Brynn, and I have been looking forward to this for weeks.

Brynn: As have I, I’m really excited to talk to you today. Listeners of this show and readers of the Language on the Move research blog will very obviously recognize your name and might already know a little bit about you. But I’d love for you to start us off by telling us a bit about yourself, how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to wanting to conduct research into language rights in China.

Dr Grey: Look, it’s a bit of a long story and it didn’t feel as linear in the living of it as it might sound in the retelling. So, take heart if you’re working out a pivot in your own career. But I essentially pivoted from law to linguistics.

Over a series of steps. And that was because I had always loved learning languages and learning about languages. And then in my 20s, I started learning Chinese and I found a way to move to China to work in a legal aid centre doing research and training and studying Chinese language part time.

And then I went back to university there full time. And while I was doing this and living in China, I started to learn more about the linguistic diversity in China, which I just really hadn’t realized it. And at the same time, I was also becoming more interested in the Chinese legal system, particularly the way the constitution deals with minority peoples and minority languages.

And I had always hoped one day to do a PhD. And suddenly I was starting to feel like, yes, this is my question. It’s calling to me.

So, I did a bit of asking around and I heard that Professor Ingrid Piller at Macquarie University was a superb supervisor and also quite suited to this topic. So, I met with her and we hit it off. And, you know, the rest is history in that sense.

We’ve been collaborating and working together and become friends over many years now. And so that’s how I got into the doctoral work that we’re talking about today, this law and linguistics sort of combined research that’s focused on China. And then since then, I’ve really tried to expand that more to develop both for myself and then for other people too, this sense of law and linguistics as a research field in itself, not just in my specific project.

And that’s why I do a lot with my former PhD peer and my still close friend, Dr. Laura Smith-Khan. Through the network we set up, the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers Network.

Brynn: That’s really amazing. The fact that you were able to combine law and linguistics, which I think is probably not something that many people would automatically think go together, but those of us in the linguistics field definitely see happening quite a bit. And the need for that to happen, for research around that to happen.

So, with your research that you did in China, you, like I said, you ended up writing an entire book, which is amazing. And the title of your book talks about a Zhuang case study. So, for those who might not be familiar, can you tell us what the Zhuang language is, and why you chose to examine it in regard to language change and globalization in China?

Dr Grey: Certainly. The first reason is that for one person, one book, one PhD, all the languages of China is just too much. And so, I had to do a case study in some sense.

Part of what I was looking at was a national framework and how things work for all languages or for all official minority groups. But then I was really narrowing down. And to choose how to narrow down, I chose this group.

The people are called the Zhuangzu, and the language that is officially associated with them is called Zhuang language. I chose that because there were, on the one hand, reports that there were something like 17 million speakers of Zhuang. By population, the Zhuang people are the biggest of all the official minority groups in China.

So, they, you know, foreign minority, they have a lot of speakers. But on the other hand, there were also reports that the Zhuang, and now I’m quoting, are completely assimilated, or had, you know, lost any distinct linguistic or cultural identity. And I thought, well, that’s confusing and interesting, you know, what’s going on.

And then in addition, the Zhuang people have nominally autonomous jurisdiction over a region in South Central China called Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region. And from this legal perspective, I thought, oh, that’s interesting. Maybe there’s more power or more ability to govern language in a slightly distinctive way within China for this group.

In terms of the language itself, of course, you know, there’s just infinite variety in the way people speak. And so, when I talk about the Zhuang language, I’m really aware that I and many scholars and many people sort of talk about what is essentially a boundary we’ve put on this group, excluding some other ways of speaking that are related to Zhuang. But what is generally recognized as Zhuang language is part of a family called the TAI, Thai languages, and THAI, Thai language of Thailand, is another of those languages.

It’s also very similar to a language, arguably the same, as a language recognised as a separate language within China, a language of another different official minority group called Buyi language. But it’s essentially a range of dialects, a range of ways of speaking that have been spoken for millennia in that south central region of China, just above Vietnam and slightly to the west of Hong Kong or that sort of area. In terms of why I wanted to do a case study at all and then what else I could see, particularly through the Zhuang case study, I could tell from my preliminary research that there was this very rigid mid-20th century categorization of land into territory and associating that with certain peoples in China.

And then the kinds of legal framework that supported or appeared to support minority languages was related to that. So, it’s a very rigid mid-20th century structure. But then since the mid-20th century, China has gone through just enormous upheaval.

For example, by the time I was doing my research in the 2010s, the urbanization rate was over 50% even in this Guangxi area. The development of the economy, I think everyone knows, took off in the late 20th century. But for the Guangxi sort of area, it was a little bit later and it was really still taking off with some direct government funding in the 2010s and now.

And so, there was this real change in context, both for what was happening within Guangxi, but then also the people who were recognized as Zhuangzi people, who might be Zhuang speakers, they, like everyone else in China, was increasingly mobile, moving to cities, but also moving far away even from South Central China, elsewhere in the country. And so, there was this dispersal of what might have been expected to be a cohesive language group. And then on top of that, while the national language, which is a variety of matter in Chinese called Putonghua, while that had increasingly gained popularity over the 20th century, in the year 2000, a national law was passed that really enhanced or supported the use of Putonghua and its promulgation.

And so with these contextual factors, these changes, I thought it’s really important to use the minority as a window into what’s changing in terms of social organization and social stratification in China. And then the Zhuang seemed a particularly rich and hitherto relatively sort of unresearched group of people or languages.

Brynn: And as someone who I myself do not speak Mandarin, I don’t read it. So, coming at this from this point of ignorance, so pardon me if this is not a wise question, but can the speakers of Zhuang understand Mandarin and vice versa? Are they mutually intelligible or are they not?

Would the speakers of each language have to make a concerted effort to be able to understand the speakers of the other language?

Dr Grey: Good question Brynn. Look, they’re not related languages and so the linguistic view is that they’re mutually unintelligible. I might add that the dialects of Zhuang are also said to be mutually unintelligible to each other.

So, there’s enormous variety within Zhuang. In the mid 20th century, the Chinese government standardised Zhuang language in an attempt to form a hybrid that could be accessed by all sorts of Zhuang speakers. And then also that was for a short period of time taught to incoming government officials who came from a Mandarin speaking background.

What then happened over the latter part of the 20th century is that schooling was rolled out in the medium of Putonghua much more widely throughout the Zhuang speaking regions. And in fact, people had historically probably been multilingual in various Chinese dialects as well as Zhuang dialects in that region. But people started to have more access to and more demand placed upon them to speak standard Chinese, so Putonghua, the national language.

And so, research by people like Professor Zhou Minglang, who’s a real expert on the history of Chinese language policy and now is based at the University of Maryland. He did some work, for instance, showing that throughout the late 20th century and early 21st century, people who were categorized as being part of the Zhuang minority group were increasingly bilingual in Zhuang and Mandarin, and then also shifting towards not even speaking Zhuang at all. So, there’s a real language shift going on there.

Brynn: And is this what you were referring to when you said that in the year 2000, that the Chinese government made like a proclamation about language? Was it about this more trying to go towards this standardized Putonghua, or was it something different?

Dr Grey: It’s about that. It’s particularly carving out exclusive domains or exclusive functions where that standard Mandarin has to be used, certain types of media jobs, for example. It’s also carving out, along with education law, space for bilingual education.

So, there’s a right to Putonghua, and that has to be expressed through access to education, but there is also scope for bilingual schooling, so a language like Zhuang alongside Putonghua. So that national law is both about supporting the national language by creating exclusive domains for its use or obligations on people to use it, but also obligations on institutions like schools to promulgate or to spread Putonghua. And then alongside that, there’s been a lot of policy directed at trying to improve, if you like, the quality of people’s Putonghua, people who think they have learned it or speak it, maybe are still not speaking it in the standardized way.

And so, there’s also been since 2000, a lot of government push to get, if you like, a more universal version of Putonghua spoken and written, in particular, across all of China.

Brynn: And speaking of that idea of standardization, I’ve found it really interesting that toward the beginning of your book, you talk about how the Zhuang language, including, as you said, its dialects, went through this governmental process of written standardization from the 1950s to the 1980s. So, what did this standardization of writing mean for Zhuang? And how was it viewed by the state?

Dr Grey: It was viewed by the state as really important. And this was happening not just to Zhuang initially, but to all the official minority languages in China. And for a brief time also to the majority or the national language, Putonghua, there was a real push to standardize and create alphabetic writing systems to support what was seen as a mass literacy goal.

And this was part of the building of the new nation after to the civil war in the mid 20th century. What happened with Zhuang in particular is there were sort of two phases of standardization. And this happened to oral or spoken Zhuang as well, but we’ll particularly talk about the writing as you asked.

And this was done with the participation of Zhuang people but led by the government. In the 1950s, a writing system was developed that used a mix of Cyrillic letters and the kind of letters that our listeners might be very familiar with from the alphabet we use for English. And it had no diacritic tones.

It used letters to represent letters that looked like numbers in terminal positions to indicate the tone, the numerically ordered tone. I’ve explained that a little bit badly, but it’s a bit confusing.

And then in the 1980s, there was a renewed push towards the standardization of written Zhuang, but at the same time, a push to make it more typable. And so, the Cyrillic letters were dropped and it reduced to just the 26 letters that we also know from the English alphabet. There’s an official auxiliary Romanized script for the standard national version of Chinese as well.

And that uses the same letters, but it doesn’t use V. So, it uses 25 letters and Zhuang uses 26. Now, a few things happened along the way here.

First, there just wasn’t that much teaching of literacy in either of these standard forms of writing Zhuang. And so, people just didn’t learn to use standard Zhuang in this way. And then something I talk about particularly not in the book, but in an open access chapter that people could look up and read for free from 2022 in a book called Language Standardization in Asia edited by McClelland and Zhao.

And in that chapter, I talk about how marketization interacted with standardization of Zhuang. And in particular, something I’m drawing out there is that there ceased to be a visually recognizable or iconic version of the language. And that then also reduced the prospects of using Zhuang in certain more commodified ways as a visual icon, or even just making it recognizable as something distinct from English or Mandarin Chinese when people look at it written in the linguistic landscape.

And so, this standardization process created, as I say in that chapter, an obsolescent form of Zhuang, perhaps not intentionally, but it became increasingly inaccessible to Zhuang speakers. And I should just put there that in the background, historically, Zhuang was not standardized, but it was written by certain people in Zhuang speaking communities who had a sort of social role to be a scribe or to be someone with a literacy practice. And David Holm has written some phenomenal work on this, this really intricate histories of the use of what are called the old Zhuang character script.

So, in particular, if people are interested, he’s got a great book from 2013 on that older writing system.

Brynn: That’s what I was going to say. Was there more of the character-based writing system before this standardized, more Latin-based alphabet that you said was brought in? And it sounds like yes.

Dr Grey: Yes, there was. It just wasn’t widely known either because literacy just wasn’t a widely taught individual practice historically.

Brynn: For anyone, really, in any language context. Yeah.

Dr Grey: Exactly. Exactly. And so, when the government came to interest itself in the standardization of Zhuang, it counted Zhuang as a language with no written script along with certain other minority languages.

And that’s why there was this sort of full tilt effort to create this Romanized or alphabetic way of writing Zhuang.

Brynn: Fascinating that they kind of landed on the Romanized form and they ended up dropping the Cyrillic form. And you said a lot of that was for ease of typing, yeah, in the 1980s?

Dr Grey: That’s my understanding. I mean, there’s some other things to it too, because China was increasingly estranged from the Soviet Union and the Soviet linguists that it had previously worked with. More on that sort of thing can be found in a book by Thomas Mullaney.

He’s got some great work on the history of type and type technology in the Chinese context. In addition to a book I should have mentioned before, he’s got a wonderful book on the initial creation of these minority peoples into official minorities and official languages associated with each and the kinds of divisions or merging together that happened for certain people. And he’s traced back to the diaries and the field notes of the Chinese government’s linguistic ethnographers who went out to do a whole lot of survey work and then early census data from the mid-20th century.

So that’s a wonderful resource to really bring home this idea that people maybe just don’t realize that, you know, are people or a language, neither of these is a natural fact. These are important, but they’re social facts. And we can see in the Chinese context more than in some other contexts, that process of construction.

And one of the reasons we can see that more is the government is more involved using laws and policies and records and documentation in that construction than perhaps in other contexts like other countries.

Brynn: That’s what I find fascinating in your book is that process of construction. And that’s what really comes through in the book. And it was something that I myself hadn’t really thought that much about.

And something else that I learned in reading your book was that Imperial China standardized Mandarin script and then actually banned non-Mandarin scripts in the third century BCE and that there has always been a national narrative around language and its use in China. And you talk about how the China of today has a national constitution that addresses non-standard or minority languages and scripts, like you were talking about with the Zhuang language. So, tell us about what the Chinese Constitution says about language, including these minority languages, and what your research found about how minority language rights are actually interpreted in practice.

Dr Grey: Thanks for that question. And that really gets to the heart of why I did this project. You know, what is in that Constitution and what does it mean in practice?

So, the Constitution in Article 4 gives the recognized minorities, and there are 55 recognized official minority groups in China, the freedom to use and develop their language. And then separately in Article 19, there is also a right to the national standard language, Putonghua. And so, there’s been constitutional reform over the last 70-odd years, but there’s always been some version of that freedom to use and develop minority languages.

And then one of the things that flows from that is a quite intricate and I would argue quite fractured system of authority, different government institutions at the national and the regional and the local level dealing with different aspects of language governance. And then on top of all of that, there is, I would say, a narrative or a preoccupation that sort of cuts against making the most of that freedom. And that is particularly what I call developmentalism, an ideology, a language ideology, but more broadly, an ideology of developmentalism that comes through in the laws and policies about language.

And that positions languages as falling into either less developed or more developed languages, which in itself can be really problematic or stifling for people’s expectations or people’s use or what people do with policy. And then also, increasingly, there is a sense that some languages are no longer useful. They’re not instrumental for particular economic development.

And I mean minority languages. And so, there’s less expectation or less push to, say, teach them in education because it is seen that the work of bringing people together has already been done. And now, that development needs to happen through the medium of Putonghua, or maybe I should say through the embodied citizenship of Putonghua speaking citizens.

And over time, there’s been other narratives as well that go with language. One that sort of waxes and wanes, but probably is ascendant at the moment, is a sense that you have to have allegiance to a language to have allegiance to a nation. And the flip side of that, if you are bilingual, you are inherently underlined.

Some people call this linguistic securitization. In my own data, I didn’t sense that people who were bilingual were identifying as both Zhuang and Chinese. There was a layered identity for them, but not a raptured or conflicting identity necessarily.

The other discourse that’s really prominent in Chinese language policy is poverty alleviation. And the idea that people are very poor and the solution to that is better access to Putonghua. And I don’t talk about this at length in my book, but one, maybe not one, I wonder to what extent that poverty is caused by speaking a language other than Putonghua.

And to what extent coming out of poverty needs to come at the expense of that home language or that traditional language or that minority language.

Brynn: I feel like that’s something that could be said of many different language contexts in many different countries and cultures. And we certainly see it in the English-speaking world as well.

Dr Grey: Enormously in the English-speaking world. This sense that not only is English the ticket to development, but that any other language is actually holding you back and a waste of time.

Brynn: Yeah, exactly. And you mentioned just a couple of minutes ago, the idea of the linguistic landscape. And that brings me to a question that I have about the type of methodology that you used while you were conducting this research that would later become the book.

So, you described this as a lived linguistic landscape methods. Now, listeners of this show will have heard previous episodes where we talk about linguistic landscape studies. But can you tell us what the difference is between sort of your standard linguistic landscape study and a lived linguistic landscape methodology?

And then how did you use it in this research?

Dr Grey: I’m really proud of this aspect of the book. And the difference basically, Brynn, is putting the people back in. I think particularly when we’re talking about languages, sometimes we forget we’re talking about speakers of languages or notional inheritors to quote some other scholars, people associated with a language suffer the disempowerment or the marginalization or the advancement or whatever that comes with the use of certain languages.

And so in the lived linguistic landscape approach, or starting from this basis, which I think is there right from the origin of linguistic landscape studies, and that is a sense that not only does the built environment offer data for research about language, what language is on display, particularly written, but also maybe audio or other forms of recorded language, but that there’s a power to that. So, the initial point of departure is that the emplacement of language in this way creates a sense of normativity of what language is in place or what language is out of place in a particular physical context or in the sort of practices or discourses associated with that place. And I wanted to take that further.

And so, I brought in people, if you like, or the lived aspect in a couple of ways. First, I did walk and talk interviews with participants through various linguistic landscapes in the study to get their sense of how they interacted, what they remembered, what was important to them. When we did occasionally see Zhuang in the landscape, for example, they could tell me when they first learned to recognize it as Zhuang, how they learned to read, or what it meant to them.

Was it, for some people, it’s actually very offensive because they didn’t like the way it was written. These sort of things, these sort of more subjective or perceptual data came from walking through but also living in the landscapes in a more ethnographic where I spent a lot of time in these places. And then I took that another layer up, if you like, in what I call my Linguascaping Through Law layer.

And that’s to look at what law does to give agency or to not permit agency to certain kinds of actors, both to be authors in the public space, but also to be regulators of language in the public space. And then another aspect I added in there, there had already been quite a bit of research at this point on what was called the Semiotic Landscape, looking beyond just linguistic data in the landscape to other meaning making. But I focused that Semiotic Landscape data a little bit more on how we saw or didn’t see people doing Zhuang language or people being Zhuang speakers represented in the landscape.

And I found that they weren’t. They were representations of Zhuang culture in certain kinds of landscapes using motifs associated with Zhuang history and musical practice and weaving, textiles, that sort of thing, costumes. But there wasn’t a representation of being a Zhuang speaker, of practicing Zhuang language that wasn’t represented semiotically in the environment.

And to a large extent, it wasn’t linguistically represented either. And then the laws that intervened or shaped the linguistic landscape were not doing a lot to support individual language use in the landscape. They were allowing and at times mandating the government to use standardized Zhuang in certain naming practices or certain kind of signage.

And that’s, you know, that’s not nothing, but it’s a very particular kind of authorship. It’s a very particular kind of discourse that it participates in.

Brynn: And you conducted this research into language rights in China, but talking to you, I’m kind of hearing a lot that reminds me of even here in Australia, how English is positioned, how speakers of minority languages are positioned, the linguistic landscapes that we might see around Sydney, for example, in other languages.

So, I’m curious as to whether or not you saw or you see parallels between how the Chinese state treats language and how language is treated by the Australian government here in Australia. So, what similarities or differences do you see between these two nations’ policies around language?

Dr Grey: Yeah, I see these resonances too, Brynn. And, you know, for that reason, I urge all listeners, even if you work in other contexts, if you work in North America or Europe, go and read my book. You know, it’s not another planet.

It says something about language policy in general, this book. But in terms of Australia specifically, that’s where we now both live. That’s where I focus my current research.

I’m constantly seeing some parallels. You know, the first parallel is, of course, there is enormous linguistic diversity. And we might think of it as both old and new.

There were languages in Australia that have been spoken for millennia, likewise in China. And then there’s also linguistic diversity that’s come more recently through the migration or the sort of reorganisation of where people live. There are also some really similar current policy concerns.

In China, there’s a lot of investment and policy towards building what’s called a cybermuseum of languages that’s going to gather all sorts of resources about minority languages in a digital form. Australia is not quite as far along in that, but the same idea is actually underway at the national level, as I understand it. Another thing that’s really similar in both is the way linguistic diversity is transformed in the urban environment.

It doesn’t entirely go away, but it becomes marginalised or stratified, I would say, in the sense of how language is used in the built environment of this city, and what it does or doesn’t say about the sociolinguistic order in that city. I actually am trying to steer some current research of mine further towards lived linguistic landscape work in Australia, because I think there is an interesting overlap there. In terms of what’s different, look, in Australia, the politics of indigeneity are much more developed, much more important in the local context.

I would say also that demands from indigenous people, and in Australia, we particularly think of both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, demands from those groups for access to their linguistic resources and control over language policy, I think is stronger here, particularly in recent years. When I first started this research, something I thought was different is that Australia is a nation that doesn’t really concern itself with language as a national or constitutional issue. Whereas China, as you pointed out in an earlier question, has for a very long time.

But I think that is changing actually in Australia. There is a move towards national language policy in Australia again. And of course, there’s still that de facto policy of English as the national language, or I think it’s Francis Holt has used the phrase aspirational monolingualism in the North American context.

I think we can see that here and in China. Of course, when you stop to think about Australia, the Australian government and the state governments have involved themselves in language policy and laws about language, actually since the early days of colonisation, but usually in a more obstructive or oppressive way than we might choose to focus on today. But that history of language is a really important part of shaping, you know, what we might call civic engineering, shaping the populace, shaping also the national identity.

That’s really important in both China and Australia. And the tension between a multicultural national identity and the practice of multilingualism is something in both contexts.

Brynn: And that’s what I see quite a bit of in my own research as well. And I think it is worth going back to what you were saying about that one nation, one language ideology, that idea of, well, allegiance to a country is going to necessitate allegiance to a certain language or certain dialect. And I think we absolutely see that here in Australia as well, especially with certain political groups, certain people who have certain ideologies about languages, and what that says about our allegiance to a country too.

Dr Grey: Believe me, Brynn, and I would add to that to what I call a zero-sum mentality. You know, it’s very easy for people in China, in Australia, many other places to argue, well, we need everyone to speak the same language. We need to support that through policy and schools and rules so that we can get things done, so that it’s cohesive to govern, so that the economy runs well.

You know, I’m not necessarily saying that that is wrong, but in addition to that, people can have more than one language, and many people around the world still do, and historically people have been very multilingual, and we tend to forget that you can have a lingua franca and something else, and then when we remember it, often we talk about it in this zero-sum. Well, if you have another language, that’s, you know, that’s reducing your ability in that lingua franca. It’s undermining your accent or the time you can spend learning to read or, you know, whatever.

It’s somehow a deficit that’s holding back your participation in that lingua franca community, and in doing so, you’re, you know, you’re robbing us all of a sort of a chance for prosperity. It’s, you know, it’s a very loaded kind of zero-sum thinking, and it doesn’t need to be that way. And a lot of the, you know, the interviewees in this podcast series have spoken about that, usually in reference to English rather than Mandarin.

But this idea that it can be, you know, lingua franca and, and that can be really beneficial for you and your community and your nation.

Brynn: Exactly. I agree. And I want to know what’s next for you.

Are you continuing this work into China? You mentioned that you wanted to maybe do a lived linguistic landscape in Australia. Do you have any projects that you’re working on now?

Where are you headed now?

Dr Grey: Yeah, look, everything’s happening slowly because good research takes time. But this year, I’ve, so this is 2024 when we’re recording. I’ve just had an article accepted in the Melbourne Asia Review and I’ve also just with my wonderful research assistant, Kristin Martin, produced a little video that will be online soon and both of those are about the Chinese context.

The video is particularly drawing out some ideas to do with language display policy and who that assists or whose aspirations that represents and the short article, which will be freely available online, that’s updating Chinese language policy to look particularly at the use of constitutional law mechanisms in recent years and how that is adding to the infrastructure in support of Putonghua. But other than those things, I’m now going to park my focus on China because I’m really, really interested in what I’m doing in my new project or relatively new project and it needs all of my attention.

I’m working with Kristin who I just mentioned and a couple of other colleagues here from the UTS Jumbunna Institute and a scholar from Sydney Uni who are all indigenous people from the eastern part of Australia and together we’re doing a project that’s really examining the role of the state and in particular the use of government resources like laws in Aboriginal language renewal with a focus on this eastern, southeastern part of Australia.

One of the big questions we have there or the motivation for the study is how is this push for sovereignty or how is this principle of self-determination able to sit with the renewed interest of governments in Australia in Aboriginal language renewal?

Brynn: Wow, that sounds amazing. I can’t wait to hear more about that. Alex, thank you so much for coming on and chatting with me today and I highly recommend this book to everyone.

Dr Grey: Brynn, it’s just a delight to talk about all these years of research and thinking.

Brynn: It makes a big difference when we get to talk about our work, doesn’t it?

Thank you so much and thank you for listening everyone. If you liked 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.

Octonauts

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added on February 21, 2025)

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. Laura Smith-Khan.

Laura is formerly a Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Law at University of New England. Her research examines the inclusion and participation of minoritized groups in legal settings, especially migration processes, and seeks to address inequality. She was also the 2022 recipient of the Max Crawford Medal, Australia’s most prestigious award for achievement and promise in humanities.

In addition to all of these amazing qualifications, Laura also has another resume addition that is relevant to our conversation today. Laura is a mum and so am I. My kids are ages 12 and 9, and Laura’s kids are ages 7 and 3.

And as academic linguist mums, our brains are constantly analysing language, even when that language comes from the cartoons our kids watch. So today, Laura and I are going to discuss language and accents in kids’ cartoon characters. And then we’re going to investigate what a choice as seemingly banal as a character’s accent has to do with whiteness, standard language ideology, and securing a nation’s borders.

Laura, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Smith-Khan: Thanks, Brynn.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became not just a linguist, but a lawyer and migration law scholar as well?

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, well, I think maybe like a lot of people who get into linguistics, I had an interest in learning languages from quite a young age, which was quite unusual in my context of being in a fairly monolingual English-speaking small town and family. That led me to go on an exchange to France when I was a teenager and learn French, and then to pick up further language study at university to study linguistics. I already had that curiosity about learning a language and using different languages in different contexts and then had the chance to start looking at that in a study context.

Towards the end of my first degree, I also started to, I’d been studying politics as well in my first degree as well as languages, and I started thinking like, I want to study something that has some practical application in a professional context somehow, and that actually started to make me think about studying law, which was something that in the past I hadn’t really thought about. So, I ended up enrolling in a law degree after my first degree and spending a total of seven years straight in undergraduate education, which was actually great fun. And I had this opportunity during my law degree to start working with a registered migration agent, which is a professional who does similar work to a lawyer, but specifically on things related to migration, so applying for visas and this type of thing.

And he was originally from Afghanistan himself, and so he actually helped a lot of asylum seekers as part of his work, which really gave me this very unique or very different type of experience and led me into wanting to do some study in refugee law, which I did as part of my law degree. And through that discovered where I could bring my interests together in this lovely subfield of looking at language in asylum and migration processes. And I started that as an undergrad essay in one of my subjects in my law degree.

And it’s still with me now, like 12 years later. So, it’s been really, really interesting work.

Brynn: I can’t believe that you started that in undergrad because I’ve read quite a bit of your PhD thesis. And can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I thought that it was such an interesting combination of language and migration.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah. So, I just, you know, I had this, I did refugee law as a subject in my final year of my law degree. And we had this opportunity to choose a topic for a research essay with, which as an undergrad isn’t something that always happens that much.

But because of, you know, the work I’d been doing, and then this interest in languages, I was having some trouble kind of trying to find a topic. And then I just stumbled across something written by the wonderful Diana Eads, who has done some work, obviously a lot of work on language in legal settings but also did a little bit of work on language in asylum. And that really sparked this interest to me.

I was like, wow, okay, the coming together of my world. And I wrote, you know, I wrote my little essay. And then I was like, I really love research, but I’ve been at university for seven years now, living in one of the most expensive cities in the whole world, working many, many jobs on the side to get through it.

I would love to stay here and do this more. But, you know, I need to find a way to actually get paid to do that. And I was really lucky to get some, you know, a three-year full-time position as a research assistant in refugee law, which led to some really amazing research experience across the world as well.

And that was kind of how I ended up then going into, you know, looking into higher degree research after doing that. So, I was really lucky.

Brynn: Yeah. And I always love when we can bring in our love of languages and linguistics and apply it to another discipline where maybe it doesn’t always seem like it would go together. But I think a lot of us do that.

And I think that that’s a really important work. And especially with yours, with talking about migration and asylum. And I know that your thesis dealt a lot with sort of how migrants face becoming, you know, a citizen or a migrant into Australia.

And the actual immigration officers, how they go through those processes. It’s fascinating. So, if anyone gets a chance to read it, they should because it’s really good.

Now, let’s park that for a minute. We’re going to shift gears into our sort of mum hats. So, we’re going to talk about a post that you made on Blue Sky that started you and I talking about kids cartoon characters and accents.

So, on October 5th of this year, you posted, and I can’t say “skeeted”, I refuse. So, I know that that’s technically the verb for a Bluesky post. You’re shaking your head no, I’m shaking no.

I refuse. I refuse. I’m going to say posted.

So, on October 5th of this year, you posted a question aimed at sociolinguists with small kids. And you asked in the post, quote, has there been any commentary about Octonauts and the characters’ accents in the original UK version? End quote.

So, for our listeners who might not be familiar, very much unlike us, because I hear the theme song in my dreams, tell us a bit about what the Octonauts show is and what you noticed about their accents.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so you’ve just said the word Octonauts, and I’m actually hearing the starting song of Octonauts.

Brynn: I can hear the little siren. The little siren.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so Octonauts is an animation. It involves this team of different types of animals, and they’re basically anthropomorphized animals. So, they wear little outfits and they have equipment, and they’re basically humans, but in animal form.

And they live and they work on this thing called the Octopod, which is this kind of underwater station submarine type thingamy. And they basically travel all around. In the original series, only underwater, but then in the kind of spin-off series, they go on to land a bit, and they travel around the world, and they basically introduce children to, and parents who are listening in, to different species of animal, different kind of nature-related issues, climates, climate change concerns as well, and teach them about that.

And the team themselves, so the Octonauts themselves, each have a specialty or some kind of special expertise. So, you know, there’s a map reader, there’s one that does, you know, healing. So, if they come across an animal who’s injured, that particular character kind of takes the lead on that.

Another one that’s an expert in water, you know, so all these different kinds of expertise that are relevant to nature and animals, and they go around, you know, helping them. So, there’s kind of educational things, but they’re also very much only interested in the natural world. So as far as I know, we never really see humans, we don’t see cities, we don’t hear about kind of political kind of countries or states or anything like that.

It’s really about the natural world and different parts of the natural world, which in itself, I think is quite interesting. So, from what I’ve understood or picked up about the show, it started as a book series, which, you know, people who’ve read say was really good, but kind of limited to the characters and kind of the focus. It was picked up originally as a UK production.

And since then, there’s been kind of some spin-offs. So, there’s a Netflix production called Octonauts Above and Beyond. And so that’s when they get out on the land a little bit more with various vehicles that they have.

And they introduce some additional kind of regular characters at that point in time as well. But what really interested me, and this was really, you know, big caveat, obviously, this is not my professional area. We haven’t, you know, systematically researched the show or other shows or anything like that.

But what interested me as I listened in doing my chores and hearing, you know, the show going on the background was that these animals seem to have a range of different accents. And that they weren’t just, you know, like, all kind of standard American accents or kind of, you know, standard UK accents or something. But there was something interesting going on there with the different characters.

And then I kind of listened in a little bit closer. And I noticed that, you know, we had kind of central, I guess, if you will, English accents, like there are US accents, there are UK accents, but there’s a variety of UK accents. So, there’s like a cockney one who’s the pirate looking one.

And there’s one that sounds Scottish, and there’s at least one Australian accent. And then I noticed as I went on kind of listening to different episodes, like, you know, there was one that sounded like a Spanish speaker, and there was also an Indian English speaker as well. I was like, oh, this is quite cool.

There’s a good range of diversity, but it’s also not presented in a way that’s like super stereotypical. Like, you know, like it’s just who that animal is and how they speak. It’s not like, I come from this place and we always eat, you know, we always have barbecues or, you know, whatever it is.

So, we don’t have those kinds of really overt references to the accent, but they’re just speaking in their accents. So, I found that really refreshing. I was like, oh, this is really cool and, you know, progressive and everything.

And then the second thought was like, hold on. We have Captain Barnacle, who is obviously the captain, the leader, you know, the one who directs everything. And his accent is Received Pronunciation British.

Brynn: All of a sudden, we see Kachru’s circles in our brains, and we go, wait a minute. Now we’ve still got the inner, the outer, the expanding circles.

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. Yeah. So, I was like, okay, so those subtle kinds of representations are still potentially happening there.

But then, you know, I kind of looked a little more. And so, looking at the Indian English speaker, there was this other kind of really nice things that I picked up. So, for example, his name is Pani, which means in Hindi and Urdu, and maybe also some other Indian languages or subcontinental languages, it means water.

And he is the hydrologist. He is an expert in water. Yeah.

So, I thought that was really nice seeing a little bit of, you know, diversity and subtly done as well, not kind of those really kind of strong national stereotypes coming through. Although we can still see some, you know, potential issues or we can comment or observe some things about the way the social hierarchy works within that particular group as well.

Brynn: Well, do you know what was interesting? You said about having that there was an American accent. And for me, originally an American, the first time that I ever heard that American character in the show, I was actually shocked because it’s a deeply Southern American character.

And often Southern American accents get stereotyped as being sort of like the dumb or the stupid character, the uneducated character. So, I was actually really pleased to see that this Southern American who talks like this, she was being portrayed as this very intelligent scientist and still having this accent that often gets discriminated against in America. So, to me, that’s kind of what I glommed on to really quickly.

But then I noticed the exact same thing that you did that, oh, but wait, the captain has this received pronunciation British accent that we all know is that sort of standard, quote unquote, English accent that a lot of people, when they’re learning English, think that they should try to emulate because that’s the, quote, best accent.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, some kind of ideal to work towards. And then, yeah, so having, starting to think about this and having these conversations also kind of led me to do a little bit of online searching. And I’ve come across, you know, there’s whole fan sites dedicated to discussing the Octonauts, the different series.

Brynn: I found someone had written a thesis on it!

Dr Smith-Khan: Oh, amazing!

Brynn: I know, I was like, this is awesome.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so when I started looking at that as well, that brings a whole different level of discourse to it as well, because on a lot of those sites, you’ll have kind of like a little character profile card. And so, then you see the ideologies that maybe aren’t expressed kind of explicitly coming up in the way viewers or fans make sense of the character. So, for example, you have like the Captain Barnacles, who’s again, yeah, that British captain of the team.

His profile has, they all have a nationality line. So, he is listed as British, right, because of the way he speaks. Yet at various points in the show, they talk about how his family come from Alaska or maybe from Canada, because he’s a polar bear, right?

So, there’s this kind of tension between drawing on those ideologies of how people sound to make sense of their political status or where they live to these other types of strange realities that happen when you make animals into humans. Those ideologies are quite interesting as well, and there is quite a lot of discussion or question around accents, and also the changing of some characters’ accents across the two productions.

Brynn: Yeah, we should talk about that. So, when you first were talking to me about, did you know that there was this accent change? I was like, wait, what?

And so, then I had to go look, and it’s true. So, as you said, originally, Octonauts was a British production. And so, I’m assuming that production happened in the UK, that probably casting happened in the UK.

But then Netflix, like you said, I guess acquired at least part of it and has now produced this sort of spin-off series called Above and Beyond. So, tell us what happened then? What happened when Netflix did that?

Dr Smith-Khan: I think in my original post on Bluesky, I was a bit misled because even in my own mind, the problem is when you’re listening in as a mom, and there’s a million episodes available, and they’re all flying around here and there, they all blur together. Originally, I thought there was, for example, the Pani, the Indian English-speaking macaque, who’s a macaque from the Indian subcontinent, nicely enough. I originally thought he was part of that original program, and yeah, so I’m still, I think I still need to go sit down and look at it systematically, but reading the fan discussions, I started to get an idea, problematic as that could be, about, you know, accent change.

So, I’m fairly sure at some point the, yeah, the Southern American accent, for example, wasn’t there and came, or maybe it was the Spanish-speaking accent I think got lost.

Brynn: I think it was the Spanish-speaker accent got lost or changed to, to like a shifted accent, more of like a Central American accent, as opposed to like Spain, Spanish maybe. But you’re right, like regardless, there was a shift. So basically the, the cast, I would assume, changed, probably because for a Netflix production, the production and the casting is happening maybe in America.

Okay, fine. But that means that we then change some of these accents.

Dr Smith-Khan: You’re absolutely right. And so, when, when I went and looked at the cast, I was trying to find out who is actually doing these voices. And so, then again, this comes, this interacts with what we’re going to talk about in a minute about Rosina Lippi Green’s chapter, these issues of, you know, having a small voice cast do lots of characters potentially.

And so therefore putting on and, you know, trying to do convincing varieties of various accents to different degrees of success. I went and looked at the cast in the original and it was like, I think three white guys and a white woman, right? And so that’s your kind of diverse cast for like any number of characters across any number of different accents and that appeared to be British.

Like, yeah, you’re kind of saying, you know, that makes sense based on the location of the production, right? And then you have this shift obviously to the US, we presume, and the cast changes, but they do some interesting things. So, when I was like, okay, so there’s an Indian-English accent in this show now.

Who is doing this voice? Is it a white guy?

Brynn: Oh, please.

Dr Smith-Khan: I went and looked him up. I was like, fingers crossed.

Brynn: Fingers crossed.

Dr Smith-Khan: I went and looked him up, and he’s a British voice actor of Indian origin. So, I read an interview with him, and his grandparents migrated to the UK from India, and they’re from North Indian background. And so, you know, they’re Hindi and Punjabi speaking, and he speaks a little bit of Punjabi and a little even less Hindi.

So, he’s still contriving an accent, right? Because he is a British born, you know, man, and his, you know, his kind of at home accent would sound quite different to the accent he’s using in the program. But I did find that quite interesting, I guess, that that is there.

Brynn: I’m just thrilled that it’s not a white man putting on an accent like the Apu in the Simpsons’ conversation that, you know, has been going on for a few years. That’s at least good to know that maybe we’re getting a little bit better.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, and I think that’s also reflected in the way he speaks as well, because like, I don’t know, in my, again, I’m not an accent expert, but from the way I perceive the way he speaks in the show, it’s not a very kind of stereotypical, exaggerated, you know, Indian English. It’s quite a subtle accent, I would describe it as. So that in itself, even putting aside who the person is doing is quite pleasing, I think.

Brynn: Well, that’s a real win, because this Bluesky discussion about the Octonauts accents prompted one of your followers, Dr. Jonathan Kasstan, my apologies if I’m mispronouncing your last name, of the University of Westminster to reply that this was an example of, quote, the timelessness of Lippi-Green’s paper on Disney, end quote. So, let’s talk about this paper and what he’s referring to. So, Rosina Lippi-Green is, of course, an American writer and very famous linguist.

She is famous for her hugely influential 1997 book, English with an Accent, Language Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. So, this paper that Jonathan was referring to is chapter five in that original book, or chapter seven in the second edition, which is what I have. And the chapter is called “Teaching Children How to Discriminate What We Learn from the Big Bad Wolf”.

So, let’s talk about this paper and what Lippi-Green says about how children learn to interpret social variation in the language of others, even from cartoon characters. In the beginning of this chapter, Lippi-Green talks about how Disney released its animated short called The Three Little Pigs. We’ve probably all seen it.

I definitely remember seeing it as a kid. In this release, at one point, the Big Bad Wolf is visually portrayed with anti-Semitic tropes. So, portrayed with a hook nose, money in the palm of its hand, scraggly beard, curled hair locks, a yarmulke.

And this visual representation stayed in the short until, and I couldn’t believe this, 14 years later in 1948. And it was only then when the Hays office asked Disney to re-release the short with a different portrayal of the wolf because of the horrors of the Holocaust that were by then well known. But what happened was even after Disney re-animated the wolf to not have this visual anti-Semitic depiction, the, quote, Yiddish accent, but like as we were just talking about, it was not a natural, normal Yiddish accent.

It was a very exaggerated Yiddish accent. That was still kept. And the wolf’s accent wasn’t changed until much later.

And then we get so many more examples of this with Disney. I mean, we’re both a very similar age. We probably both saw Aladdin when it came out, or at least shortly thereafter.

And Rosina Lippi-Green says in the chapter, quote, 60 years later, a similar controversy would arise over the portrayal of characters in Disney’s Aladdin, a movie set in a mythical Arabic kingdom. An offending line of dialogue in an opening song, which was as I quote, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home, end quote, was partially changed in response to complaints from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. But as the representative of that committee pointed out, the accents of the characters remained as originally filmed.

So, the representative particularly objected to the fact that the quote, good guys, Aladdin, Princess Jasmine, her father, they have that standard American accent, but all of the other characters that are supposed to be Arab or Arabic speaking, have these nebulous, heavy accents that are not really clear what they’re supposed to be. And quote, this pounds home the message that people with a foreign accent are bad, end quote. So, what else do we think about what Lippi-Green says in this paper?

Tell me your thoughts.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, it’s such a great chapter and it really made me kind of reflect and think more about the Octonauts and about some other things as well. So, she talks about how one of the things that happens when you have an animation is that you potentially can lose some kind of visual identity prompts or, you know, information. And this is especially true when you have an animal who’s supposed to be a human.

So, there’s a chance that you lose some of your visual hints that might be there if it’s a person, you know, are they white, are they black, are they, you know, tall, short, old, young, wearing certain types of clothes, et cetera. Those things aren’t there. So, there’s work that can be done or choices that can be made about accent to try and quickly, she says, you know, like efficiently pass on that message to the viewer so that they understand the type of character this is.

But the problem, as you’ve pointed out very aptly, is that that relies on really problematic stereotypes and helps to perpetuate those stereotypes and entrench those stereotypes in people’s minds, including in children’s minds from a young age. So, you have this idea that, you know, the good guys, the heroes speak like quote unquote us or speak like, you know, the people from whatever the dominant society is. In the context of Disney movies, there’s this kind of mainstream US accent she talks about. And then the others, the problematic others, sound foreign. And so, what the foreignness sounds like can differ.

So, she talks about, you know, particular points in history. You’ll have kind of whoever the baddies are vis-a-vis the US at that particular point in time. So, you got German accents, you got Russian accents, you got Arabic accents, et cetera.

But then there’s all these other types of characters, like you talked about Southern American accents. So even within the US., kind of certain accents are marked in certain ways and are used to index certain kind of social attributes very problematically.

I mean, other ones, she talks about the work that having some characters having an accent, especially with animals, helps to indicate place as well. So, you know, if it’s supposed to be a cartoon set in France, like maybe a couple of the characters have a French accent, but still the main characters, maybe it’s absolutely fine for them to have a kind of mainstream US accent. And that’s, you know, acceptable.

You know, these are the facile kind of stereotypes that come up, right?

Brynn: Because she even points out in the chapter that in, for example, Beauty and the Beast, which is supposed to be set in France, because it is originally a French fairy tale, that the only three characters that have your, quote, stereotypical French accents are, you know, the feather duster who is sort of-

Dr Smith-Khan: The sexually kind of suggestive character.

Brynn: The characters who are promiscuous or suggestive. You’ve got the, the amorous candelabra, Lumiere. And then there’s one other with a French accent. Now I don’t remember who it was.

Dr Smith-Khan: Possibly an artist or a chef, judging by the general trend of things.

Brynn: That would make sense. That makes sense. But you’ve got Belle and her dad have basically my accent, you know?

And it’s like, well, how does this make sense? But you’re right. It’s like that over-exaggerated French accent is being used to index something that the creators want you as the audience member to think about in your head.

It’s like a quick, efficient way of saying, oh, well, this character is romantic, and that’s why they’re given a French accent. And Lippi-Green, I really like this quote. She says in the chapter, quote, animated films entertain, but they are also a vehicle by which children learn to associate specific characteristics and lifestyles with specific social groups and to accept a narrow and exclusionary worldview, end quote.

And, you know, all we have to do is, especially if we’re thinking about Disney, is like you were saying, think about the villains in the Disney movies. So, we’ve got the accents of the bad guys, quote unquote, is usually some form of other, right, English. So often it’ll be received pronunciation British English.

So, Jafar from Aladdin, Scar from The Lion King, Shere Khan from The Jungle Book, Cruella from 101 Dalmatians. So, people might, I mean, obviously not our audience, but other people might think, okay, so what? You know, these are just kids’ movies.

What people sound like in these movies is no big deal. But this carries on into adulthood. And we see this in adult media as well.

And one way that we see people’s accents and languages being used to other is in the arena of nationalism and borders. And you and two co-authors, distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr Hanna Torsh, recently, very recently, published a paper entitled “Trust at the Border, Identifying Risk and Assessing Credibility on Reality Television”. So, tell us about this paper and the parallels that we can see between this research and how we’ve been talking about accents in children’s media.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yes. So, this is the second paper in hopefully an ongoing series of papers that came from a project that Ingrid Piller was running at Macquarie University and it involved us collecting, we ended up with 108 encounters from this very long running famous TV show, the Australian version of which is called Border Security on Australia’s Frontline. I think I haven’t written down the subtitle, which I have now forgotten, but it’s basically it’s filmed at airports around Australia.

It’s been going for I think 23 years or something long, nearly long time. There’s lots of international versions of it as well that I assume are just as successful, and it has involved a very close cooperation between obviously the Australian government agencies that control that space and Channel 7 in Australia that’s been the producer of that particular program. And what it purports to do is basically show us the reality.

So, it follows officials or officers working in these airports and follows them on their everyday work, protecting our borders. So, it’s quite an interesting space because on the one hand, we’ll have criticisms or commentary about TV and other forms of popular media where we say, there’s a real over-representation of the dominant group, like white L1 English speakers on TV, and it doesn’t represent our societies. So, at first glance we go, oh, this show kind of bucks that trend because we see all different types of people with all different language, all different appearances on this program.

But their representation on the program is very specific. And again, it’s teaching us certain things. And there we can actually see some parallels with Lippy Green’s chapter again as well, because there’s an over-representation of, for example, L1 Australian accented, I guess, white presenting people in one group, the officers and the figures.

I’ve got the figures here, so I can tell you about that. So, we had 253 officers across all those encounters. So, we didn’t selectively pick out particular encounters.

We took a whole period of time, whatever episodes were available, and we got each and every encounter that occurred at an airport from those episodes. And so, across those 108 encounters, we had 253 officers to 128 passengers or travelers. And so, we looked at what was happening there, who was represented in those two groups.

And we found that the officers, as I said, were mostly white-presenting. So, we, as a team of three researchers, kind of all coded and compared our codes. And we said, you know, 81%, we counted 81% of the officers looked to be white.

That’s how they present. And 90%, 90% sound, not just like native speakers of English, but Australian-accented native speakers of English. So, this is a huge number.

And the whiteness and the accent almost perfectly map onto each other in that particular group as well. So, I think we counted only two white-looking officers that didn’t have a kind of core or Australian accent, English accent. And we also talk about other things like, so the way they’re named in the show, you know, Officer Susan, Officer Joe.

So, there’s this uniformity and this, on the one hand, officialness, but also casual familiarity with these lovely people who we can personally relate to, and also the fact that they wear, you know, standard uniforms, et cetera. So, there’s this idea that they’re a homogenous group, and there’s all kinds of other mechanisms to kind of, for us to put our trust in them, and that they’re kind of the heroes of the show. They’re tasked with this really important job.

But then we look at the passengers. So, in the passengers, we see almost the flip of that profile. So, we see 73% don’t present as white, and 66% sound like they are not native English speakers at all.

And only 8% actually sound like Australian native English speakers. So almost completely the opposite of the officer group. And again, they’re named and described in different ways.

So, they’re described in kind of vague ways, like a woman from La traveling here, a band member, a Bulgarian farmer, blah, blah, blah. So often specifying nationality or ethnicity and kind of these more generic naming practices. And of course, they don’t look as neat and as uniform as the officers after their long journeys from wherever they’ve been.

So very, very different presentations of the two groups. So first of all, I think those particular percentages themselves are super problematic in terms of representing the reality. Because we know, for example, that in Australia, more than 50% of the population now are born overseas, you know, first generation Australian.

So that’s, you know, you can make some guesses about what that means for accent and also potentially appearance. But also, that very commonly people traveling into Australia will be, A, Australians or B, actually English people. So, in terms of the diversity that’s represented, we’ve got some interesting production choices going on there.

And we also have a very clear over-representation of wrongdoing. So, we counted how many encounters actually involved the officers finding out that the person had done something wrong. So, they’re uncovering some suspicion and they’re actually finding out wrongdoing.

And we found that it was like more than two-thirds of the encounters. They had done something wrong. So obviously this has to be an over-representation of what the reality is.

So, they’re very clear production choices, even though, you know, the quote unquote real encounters is something that’s really happened. The way that the production puts together and chooses what to present within the show forms some very specific messages for the audience.

Brynn: It does. And do you know what I’ve noticed a lot in watching the show is the number of times that they will show the officer sitting across the table from the person who’s wanting to come into Australia. And then they’ve got that speakerphone in the middle.

And there’s an interpreter on the speakerphone because the person who wants to come into Australia, obviously, maybe their English is not at a level where they can understand sort of the complicated nature of what the immigration officer is talking about in English. And I feel like that is always portrayed in a way that makes it seem like, A, a burden on the immigration officer. This is this burden that I have to go call up the service for interpreters and I have to get this interpreter here.

But also, the nature of having the interpreter on a speakerphone is really difficult. It would be really difficult for either party to kind of listen and really understand. And so you as the viewer get this feeling of like, come on, hurry it up. This is annoying, that they have to be engaging in, you know, having to go through an interpreter.

And it sort of like implicitly drives home that point of, isn’t this a burden that this non-English speaking migrant wants to come into Australia or even just, you know, someone who’s coming for a visit will often get pulled aside. And in that way, again, we see that representation of the quote, other accent as being the problem, as being the bad guy. Right?

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. Yeah, so there’s a few things I can kind of say related to those observations. So firstly, that scene that you describe of someone sitting over a table, we can call that like the second stage in an investigation, because it’s, you know, when there’s a serious concern and the person’s actually taken away to a private room for some kind of further investigation or informal interview.

So, there are a number of steps that happened before that. I guess we talk about basically kind of three potential stages. So, the initial kind of one is a visual or potentially just the interaction that takes place at passport control and then someone might be kind of flagged as being suspicious for whatever reason.

Or they’re seen kind of waiting for their baggage and they’re looked at in the distance from one of these officers. And the officer says, this person looked nervous or something. So, they have some kind of explanation for their initial reason to kind of investigate more, to ask questions, to open a bag, to proceed with some kind of investigation.

But then the first stage of their questioning or their interaction and investigation, if you will, takes place out in the open in the hall where the quarantine is or the customs area is or whatever, out in the open. And what we see in that context is almost in every single encounter, it’s only in English. And there are no multilingual accommodations that are kind of clear.

And so, but you have the work that’s done by the narrator of the show and also the work that the platform that offices are given to talk about those investigations, obviously privilege them in terms of being able to frame those interactions in certain ways. So, you’ll have either of those voices saying something like, we have this great quote in the article, that this passenger is difficult to interview because their English isn’t very good or something like that. So, it’s just that straight out, you know, multilingualism is a problem and the problem is the person, the other, the other, right?

It’s not a problem that our whole Porter processes are multilingual, sorry, monolingual English ones, where we don’t routinely have multilingual staff. We don’t, you know, there are a couple of exceptions. There’s one particular airport and one reoccurring officer who is of Chinese background and serves in a very interesting way as a kind of sometimes a communicator, but also sometimes as a kind of cultural mediator for the audience.

So, she talks about, oh, this lady has brought this in because, you know, in Chinese culture, blah, blah, blah. And so, she’s doing this work for this imagined, you know, white Anglo kind of audience, right? That these people need this explained to them.

But generally speaking, this is a very expected to be a very monolingual English space and interaction, yet somehow it’s still framed as if officers are doing work and being accommodating. So, you’ve pointed out an example at the next stage, which is when they actually do call in an interpreter. But even before that, they’ll point to things like, so when you’re coming into Australia, you get this little card where you have to fill out, yes, you’re rolling your eyes Brynn, because we’ve both experienced this card many times.

Brynn: I’m hard rolling my eyes, yes, because that is the worst. They give it to you on the flight, and you have just been on this flight for like 400 hours. You’re exhausted, you’ve been scrunched up in Coach.

They give you these cards and they’re like, fill it out right now before you land. Then you’re like, can I have a pen? The flight attendants are like, no.

And so, you have to make friends real fast with whoever is sitting next to you and be like, does anyone have a pen? Does anyone have a pen? It is, I feel like I could write a whole thesis about that card process. It is so frustrating.

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. And so, there’s lots of examples in those interactions about how people have answered that. So, on that card, it asks you, where you’re coming from, what your profession is, how long you’re staying, diseases.

Really importantly in our context, are you carrying any food? Are you carrying any medicine? So basically, almost every other country I’ve traveled to in the world, you get into the airport, there technically is a quarantine or customs area, but there’s usually no staff there.

No one actually really cares that much. And that was a real shock for me the first time I went somewhere else, because always coming back into Australia, that’s actually super important and it’s taken extremely seriously. And if you’ve watched any episode of this particular show, that is one of the key messages that the show is trying to teach viewers.

So, you really cannot bring any kind of fresh food into the country. But even me as a lawyer, as a first language English speaker, very highly educated in terms of the number of degrees I’ve done, I still find myself second guessing those questions. Have I answered it wrong?

Am I not declaring something that I should declare? You know, I’ve got chocolate. Is that an issue?

Like to this day, I’m still panicking about this because I’m quite paranoid for some reason about going through those processes.

Brynn: I can’t imagine why.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, right? But the problem is then you’ll have this card and you have to fill it out and you have to sign it. So, it really is this official legal document.

And you present that as you’re going through, trying to exit the airport. I think it’s the last step after going through immigration and everything that that entails. And the quarantine officers then will look at it and they’ll look at you.

And then they’ll see whether they want to scan your bags. They want to open your bags. They want to question you more or not.

And there are serious repercussions. For example, if they find something in your bag and you haven’t declared it, big trouble and you’re more likely to get a fine for it, et cetera. If you declare it and they want to keep it because it’s not allowed, then usually that’s fine because you’ve declared it.

But there’s a lot of moral messaging that goes on in the show around this. There’s a lot of kind of framing of like, oh, we think she’s learned a lesson. So, we’re going to let her off today with a warning or this person has received a fine because this is a serious threat and they don’t seem to have understood the seriousness of it, et cetera.

But language comes up in this as well, because for example, for certain flights, from what we could see, they have translated versions of the card, I think into Chinese, for example. So, this card is difficult to get your head around. It’s not something that seems to be common in any other.

Brynn: It’s really not. It’s really not. And for anyone who hasn’t had the fun of having to deal with this particular Australian flight card, it is like a front and a back, and it’s on kind of card stock.

And it’s got like the boxes where you have to put the individual letters of whatever you’re spelling out into these boxes. It’s very much like taking a standardised test. But I, again, I mean, you’re saying it, and I’m the same way.

I have too many degrees, honestly, at this point, you know, and I’m beyond educated. And I have been going back and forth in and out of Australia for a decade, and I still have trouble filling out this card. And English is my first language.

I can’t express enough how frustrating and convoluted this card is. But like you’re saying, how 100% of the utmost importance it is, too. And it’s like those two things together, the fact that it is so convoluted, but so important, means that if you are trying to fill out that card, especially if English is not your most dominant or most comfortable language, that’s going to be so much pressure.

Dr Smith-Khan: And so, we have examples in the encounters. And again, it’s like, you know, you’ve got the written, and then you’ve also got the spoken interaction, right? And they’re two very different things, especially if you’re not an L1 speaker, especially if English isn’t your first language.

So, for example, in that situation, if I’m unsure about the chocolate, I turn up to the quarantine, I have my smiley white face and my Aussie accent, and I say, oh, hey, I’ve ticked no, but I’ve got some chocolate with me kind of thing. And they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s fine. See you later, nine times out of ten, right?

But if you’re someone who isn’t super confident in spoken English, for example, you filled out the card because you have to fill out the card, right? It’s a requirement. And then you turn up there and you try and have the same or a similar type of conversation with the officer.

It might go quite differently. First of all, in the show, across the different types of suspicions, there are kind of clear patterns in who’s kind of overrepresented. So going to the quarantine example again, people who look like they’re from China, for example, or who have just traveled from China, are much more likely to be presented in the show as, you know, raising a suspicion for quarantine, carrying food that they shouldn’t carry into the country.

So again, like what happens in terms of that initial creation of suspicion, right? But then what happens when they try and, you know, negotiate meaning with that officer. So for example, we have an example in the paper where it’s someone who’s brought in some type of food, and they say to the officer, like, look, I thought it, you know, in their L2 spoken English, that’s obviously not super fluent or confident.

I think it means meat, you know, that question. I thought that was what was meant by food, right? Because, you know, it’s obviously, it could mean a lot of things.

And they’re like, but this card was in your language. This was translated into your language. So therefore you’re 100% responsible for determining the only possible one meaning of that particular question in this list of really difficult questions.

So, they hold up that language accommodation of the translation as, you know, first of all, we’re doing something to accommodate you. This is, you know, a plus on our side. But also, you can’t use misunderstanding as an excuse here.

You know, this is not, this is not okay. All while this passenger is trying to kind of put forward their confusion or the ambiguity around the question and them answering this question that’s quite unusual and, you know, uncommon in any other context in their second language in this high-powered kind of interaction. So that’s one example.

Brynn: And because, you know, translation has never gone awry from one thing to another. Like, what?

Dr Smith-Khan: Absolutely. So, we’ve got ideologies around translation and what it means to, you know, do that translation. Whereas like, you know, if I come in, you know, dealing with this card in my first language, I’m not so sure about it.

Maybe we can negotiate that. And there’s room for me to have some doubts about what something might mean. In this particular context, we start with suspicion based on origin.

And then on top of that, oh, you’re using this as an excuse. And we’ve actually accommodated you here because we’ve actually provided this written in your first language. The other way it seems to come up a bit is when the card hasn’t been translated, but the person fills it out, right?

Because they have to, there’s tick boxes and there’s names and et cetera, et cetera. So they’ve ticked a certain box saying they don’t have something to declare. They go through quarantine and then they’re saying, oh, you know, I’m having some trouble explaining to you or, you know, English isn’t my first language.

This is a difficult conversation for me. And they basically use, they pick that up and they say, hey, this lady was able to read and fill out this card in English, in written English. They’re now claiming, quote unquote, to have a problem with their English.

But actually, I’ve evaluated their English as quite fluent because they filled out this card. Therefore, not only is what they’re saying a problem, but I’m going to add an extra layer of suspicion or mistrust against them because they appear to be using the I don’t speak English well card as an excuse to be evasive or to get around this problem that I’ve identified. So, we have all these really problematic, fascinating but problematic language ideologies that come up in the interactions.

Brynn: This makes me want to hit my head against a wall because my background is in teaching English as a foreign language and also as an additional language. So, in the context of people who are living in an English dominant country and learning the language, and the number of people for whom it is so normal to have higher proficiency in written English than it is in spoken English, that’s such a normal thing. And we see that in multiple languages.

When we learn a language for the first time, like in school or something like that, we often start with the written form of the language. And especially for English, where the pronunciation is cuckoo bananas, it makes so much more sense that someone would feel more comfortable writing in English than they would in pronouncing the English. So, the fact that these officers on the show can make like you said, that’s that almost moral judgment about the person based on their macroskill proficiency is just galling. It really is.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah. And there’s also other assumptions, I guess, in terms of even when it comes to the reading, right? Because if you think about that card, most of the questions that actually involve producing an answer are things that people, first of all, they’ll be able to kind of use whatever technology they have to find out what the questions are, if they need help.

But also, they’re very, very straightforward answers, like, what is your name? What is your address? What is your age? These kinds of things. So fairly basic, like, I’m thinking about myself in other languages. Even if I have a really basic proficiency reading another language, I’m probably going to be able to answer those questions quite straightforwardly.

The other questions actually involve a tick box of yes or no. And so, you see examples of this also in the spoken interaction on the border, that you can have a question and someone says yes or they say no. Have they understood?

We have very little idea if they’ve understood because it’s just saying yes or no, right? They could have completely misunderstood the question or the meaning of the question. But that’s not always the way their understanding is characterized.

And that’s what’s really important in the program, obviously, because we have these officials who are acting as gatekeepers, literally gatekeepers and decision makers in terms of that individual interaction. But they’re also saying things, they’re commenting on the people, both specifically those individuals, but those comments then accumulate and make general statements or general kind of, you know, evaluations of certain types of people and certain types of behaviour. And because they have the privileged platform to do that on the show and through the show, we’re being delivered messages about different sorts of groups in society, they’re likely to do and what we need to worry about in terms of those groups in our societies.

Brynn: Well, and then to bring this full circle back to the question about accents and representation in children’s media, this is why this is important, because, as kids, if we grow up seeing diverse representation of different Englishes, of different parts of the world, of different accents, different languages, then when we grow up and we become these officers at an airport, then we might not be so quick to judge based on accent, right? And here I do think that there’s this really good quote that’s attributed to Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, who was or is a prominent scholar in children’s literature. And she wrote an essay in 1990 that I think sort of puts this into perspective.

And she talks about how books can serve three crucial functions for readers. And I kind of take this into children’s media as well. So, books or children’s media can serve as mirrors where children can see their own experiences reflected, which is always important.

But they can serve also as windows where children can look into the experiences of others. And then they can serve as what she calls sliding glass doors where readers can enter and connect with different worlds and different perspectives. And so I think what we see in Octonauts bringing it back is, especially with that accent representation, we’re starting to see the beginnings of those windows and those sliding glass doors and mirrors.

You know, I’m thinking about like any young kid who’s from, say, Alabama in the States, who sees that scientist who’s from Southern America, who sounds like them. And they’re saying, hey, this goes against everything I’ve ever seen in media that says that my accent should be one of stupidity or an uneducated accent. But no, look, I can see someone who sounds like me, who’s a scientist, you know?

So, what do we think is going right in children’s media? Where do we think this is headed? Because I do think that children’s media has come a long way since the 1990s and Disney.

What do you think are some examples of getting it right these days?

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, I really like that idea of mirrors and windows. And also, yeah, also in Octonauts, I think also that idea that you can have this opportunity to travel and see the world, interact with all types of different types of people. So, the team themselves are so diverse and they’re working together and doing really amazing things to make positive change in the world.

So, I think those messages are really beautiful messages to share with children that all different types of people can be involved in that process, people that they can identify with personally and all other different types of people that might look or sound different to them. So, I think that’s a hugely positive message. I did want to acknowledge a caveat, which is that one of the recent episodes that I watched, again, so those stereotypes are still there.

Even when you have shows that are really doing it right, they really linger, they hang on. I think sometimes it’s just this kind of almost laziness in terms of making that and indexing something quickly. So, you have this great core, regular cast of characters in that show, but then they go around the world to different places and interact with one-off animals or whatever, who they’re helping or learning about, for example.

And sometimes that’s quite good. And again, you have this idea of accent indexing place. So, they’re in a place where the humans speak French, for example, and so they might have French accented animals.

But an episode I saw the other day involved, I think they were searching for these eels, this rare type of eel. So yeah, all these characters that they’re interacting with, they have kind of vaguely Australian or New Zealand accents because that’s the ocean that they’re close, they’re in that area of the world. And then they’re searching here and there, and they come across a shark, a problematic shark who is menacing, potentially, to eat them.

They’re searching for something, and he gets a bit defensive and kind of threatens them. And what is his accent? It’s like, again, I’m not an expert, but he sounds like a gangster from the backstreets of New York somewhere.

He has a gangster accent for one of better words, like a mob accent, we could say. But then they kind of are trying to escape from him, and then this pack of orcas comes through. So, they’re black and white, they’re traveling in a group, and they sound like NYPD officers.

They’re actually scaring him or dealing with him and helping the orcas.

Brynn: That part I remembered. I didn’t remember the shark, but I do remember the orcas because I remember I was doing that thing where I was cooking dinner. I wasn’t watching it, but I could hear it in the background, and I was like, what?

I kind of looked over like, wait, what is that accent?

Dr Smith-Khan: Because the particular characters from the regular crew, again, I’m pretty sure it’s called Dashi, the character, so she’s got an Australian accent and was her niece. So, they’re both sounding pretty Aussie, and there’s maybe a third member of the team with a different accent. And then they’re interacting with all these kinds of vaguely Australian/New Zealand type accents as well.

We’re on the streets of New York and there’s this menacing mobster who’s a shark as well. So, it’s like, why did they need to do that? And all I can think of is lazy stereotypes.

He’s a shark already, so the menace is there. We don’t need more menace.

What he’s talking about is there, so why did we need to add this extra layer to just teach children that this type of way of speaking is something we should be scared of, and this particular character is obviously a shifty one that we can’t trust. And then also these hero policemen who have geographically a very similar accent but is kind of noticeably different. Yeah, really, really interesting how these old tropes kind of hang on.

So, I think one of the take-homes for me is that there’s always room for improvement and there’s always room to kind of discuss it. I really feel like the online space of being able to talk about these types of programs has potential to actually influence change, maybe on a scale that it didn’t in the past. So, another example for me, I guess, as a parent of small children right now is obviously Bluey.

For people who don’t have small kids, a little bit of context, it’s another cartoon. It’s an Australian cartoon. It’s set in Brisbane, which is reasonably close to where I come from, which is a city in Australia.

And it’s again a family of dogs in this case. And they’re just a really lovely family. Both parents are really heavily involved in interacting with the kids.

It’s very targeted at the current generation of children and their parents. And it’s just been a huge hit. So, it’s been taken up by Disney, I’m pretty sure again, it’s syndicated by Disney.

“And so, it’s been rolled out basically everywhere in the world. If you travel to other countries where English is not the main language, you can watch it in other languages, which is a lot of fun too. But one thing I really love about it personally, from my perspective, is first of all, it’s an Australian production.

So, you hear a range of Aussie accents, which itself is nice. And then on top of that, you see other things. So, there was a really, from my perspective as a French speaker, it was really cool to see a whole episode where it’s basically Bluey going camping with her family and meeting Jean-Luc, who is Canadian.

The only indication he’s Canadian in the show is that he’s sitting at a table with a maple syrup bottle, this is my attention to detail, with the red maple on it. I’m like, oh, maybe they’re supposed to be Canadian. But basically, the main point is that Jean-Luc speaks French, and only French and Bluey speaks English and only English.

And somehow, they manage over the course of the holiday that they’re both camping at this campsite to strike up this friendship and spend whole days playing together, even though, you know, he’s only speaking French and she’s only speaking English. And to watch that as a bilingual French-English speaker was obviously a lot of fun, but it was also just nice to see a little bit of representation of multilingual cartoon in an Australian English speaking context, and also to have that positive portrayal of kids playing together or people interacting with each other in a positive relationship building way, even where they couldn’t understand everything that was said to each other, where they have that goodwill to do that.

Brynn: And it’s great as a parent, because I as a parent when, I mean, I’ve seen that episode five billion times and I love it, but I was able to talk to my kids about it because when my youngest watched it, I mean, she would have been little, probably like five or six or so, and she kept saying like, what is he saying? I can’t understand what he’s saying. What is that?

And so, then I was able as a parent to say like, yes, that’s the language of French. And look, I can tell you what he’s saying, but look how Bluey doesn’t necessarily need to understand what he’s saying in order for them to play, you know? And that’s just a really lovely thing to teach kids.

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, it’s really nice. I’ve read a little bit of online commentary after that, though, and they were saying, you know, why, out of all the languages you could choose, you know, why did they choose French? Why have they chosen other dominant European language?

It’s not really a kind of, you know, a representation of another language that’s commonly spoken in Australia, you know? So, there’s questions around that. And there’s another episode I know where Bluey’s dad is playing.

So, a lot of the episodes involve them, you know, having these really amazing games together. But in that particular episode, he’s a chef at a restaurant.

Brynn: So, I literally watched this episode yesterday. Yes, yes. And the dad and because I don’t speak French, but I, you know, I can kind of guess because I speak Spanish.

And the dad is basically saying, like, you know, where is the discotheque in France in response to an English question that Bluey has? So, it doesn’t make sense in context. So, you’re right. You’re kind of like, well, OK, we could do better here.

Dr Smith-Khan: I think for me, the interesting thing there was just that that reversion to that, you know, stereotypical, like a French character, they’re going to be a chef or an artist. So again, in another show, I listened to the other day with my kids in the background that it was like, yeah, there was a bee and they’d lost their beautiful, no, sorry, a spider and they lost their beautiful web and they were an artist. You know, their web was their art.

And of course, what accent did the spider have? Of course, of course they were French. Yeah, exactly.

Brynn: Layer upon layer, Laura, I can tell you. And this is why, as linguists, we can never just watch children’s media, you know? Like we’re always thinking about it.

But I think that’s a good thing because we’ve seen this progression forward. We’ve seen it get better from that, you know, 1933 Big Bad Wolf depiction. And it has gotten better.

You know, I’m thinking about things like Coco or Moana or Encanto. Those certainly have some really good examples of accent representation, dialect representation, you know, but there’s always room for improvement. And my hope is that we continue to improve in our children’s media.

Dr Smith-Khan: The other really cool example from Bluey was that they made an episode with a deaf character who, you know, used Auslan, which is Australian Sign Language, which is really cool. But also, the fact that they actually heavily consulted with Auslan experts to be able to do that, especially in terms of, you know, animating. You know, they have characters that have not the right number of fingers for doing fingerspelling, for example.

So, they had to be really strategic about which words they needed to fingerspell. And, you know, things around aspect and orientation and all these types of details that obviously, if you do wrong, isn’t great. So, the process of consulting for that particular episode.

But again, yeah, there’s still always room to improve. So, it’s like, yes, that character appears in that one standalone episode, and then we never see them again. So, what’s going on there sort of thing.

And so, there’s always room to kind of question and keep on working on it. But yes, some really cool developments that are really noticeable, especially when you have your constant lens of sociolinguists on and off – rating all the time.

Brynn: As parents, exactly. And that’s, I think that this whole discussion, I think that what’s so important for us as sociolinguists, as parents, is to say, look, we’re really hoping that for this next generation, we’re doing better at showing these windows, these mirrors, these sliding glass doors, at showing representations so that when our kids, our grown-ups in the real world and maybe they are making decisions about accents and who can come into a country and who looks suspicious and things like that, maybe they can think back to the media that they had as kids and not be so scared by the idea of a, quote, different accent. So, before we wrap up, I would love to know, what’s next for you?

What are you working on? Are you going to be doing, you had mentioned, that maybe this paper that you’ve written is part of a series. There is another one that comes before it, which was fantastic as well.

Are you still working on this? Are you working on other things? What do we have to look forward to with you?

Dr Smith-Khan: Yeah, so I’d like to, yeah, hopefully that a third paper in that series is possible, but it’s not kind of currently at the forefront of my mind. At the moment, for myself personally, I’m really interested in thinking about and exploring how people will develop their understanding or beliefs or knowledge about law and legal rights and legal obligations, and also then in the context of migrating and potentially being in a second working or living in a second language or a language that they’re not hugely proficient in.

What does that look like, that process, and kind of looking at not just, I guess on the one hand, there’s kind of official information or resources that different government or NGOs can provide to people to help build their knowledge or explain the law, but is that actually how we find out about the law or how we assume the law works?

Because actually, even for myself as a lawyer, I make a lot of assumptions about what the law is without actually going and looking up every single piece of legislation related to that issue, right? I’m interested in figuring out kind of socially and kind of informally also how we make sense of that. And I can kind of segue back into an episode of Bluey once again.

So, it’s in, I forget the name of it, but there was a kind of long, almost movie length episode, like a longer episode of Bluey that they made, I think, last year or earlier this year. And in one particular scene, the cousins, Bluey’s cousins are also there and they have to go driving around in a car. So, there’s extra kids in the car.

And so Bluey gets the special treat, yes, of sitting in the front seat, which is very exciting for small children. But her mom had to kind of check, maybe googled something to make sure it was OK, you know, to children under a certain age to sit in the front. And then they get pulled over by the police at one point.

And the policeman’s like, hey, there’s a kid in your front seat. And he actually doesn’t know the law. And she has to like, google it or check it on her phone to show him it’s fine if there’s no other seat available in the back seat, right?

But this is actually a law myself, as again, as a parent, it’s very relatable that I have had to look up because I was like, oh, am I going to get in trouble if my kid sits here? Or what are the circumstances in which you can have a child under a certain age sitting in the front seat? And I was reflecting on that.

I was thinking, I didn’t actually go and find out whatever, I don’t even know what the name of the relevant law itself would be, but I just googled and found it was like, the Traffic Authorities website or something had a little summary about car seats and positioning in the car, etc. That I looked up and that would have been exactly what Bluey’s mum did in the context of Queensland law. And so, yeah, so I’m really excited to try and find a way to do that research and look not just what kind of is officially and formally available, but actually how people in real life go and find out more about the law and how language and migration experiences might play into how those beliefs are made and how they find out about information.

Brynn: I can’t wait for that paper and I hereby demand that you cite Bluey in that paper. I need to see that citation.

Dr Smith-Khan: I’ll try and make it work.

Brynn: Laura, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I loved recording this with you and I can’t wait for you to come back sometime.

Dr Smith-Khan: Definitely. Thanks so much, Brynn. Always nice to talk.

Brynn: And thank you for listening, everyone. 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.

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.

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, I speak to Professor Margaret Kettle about the Multilingual Glossary of School-based Terms. This is list of school-related terms selected and translated to help multilingual families connect with schools. The research-based glossary was developed jointly with the Queensland Department of Education, Education Queensland school personnel, Multicultural Australia, and community group members and families.

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.

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Transcript (coming soon)

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, I speak with Dr Clara Holzinger (University of Vienna) about her PhD research investigating how employment officers deal with the day-to-day communication challenges arising when clients have low levels of German language proficiency.

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.

Employment Office, Vienna

Further reading

Holzinger, C. (2020). ‘We don’t worry that much about language’: street-level bureaucracy in the context of linguistic diversity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(9), 1792-1808.
Holzinger, C. (2023). “Wir können nicht alle Sprachen der Welt sprechen”. Eine Studie zu Street-level Bureaucracy im Kontext migrationsbedingter Heterolingualität am Beispiel des österreichischen Arbeitsmarktservice [“We can’t speak all the languages of the world”. A study of street-level bureaucracy in the context of migration-induced heterolingualism as exemplified by Austrian employment services]. PhD thesis. Universität Wien.
Holzinger, C., & Draxl, A.-K. (2023). More than words: Eine mehrsprachigkeitsorientierte Perspektive auf die Dilemmata von Street-level Bureaucrats in der Klient*innenkommunikation. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 52(1), 89-104.
Scheibelhofer, E., & Holzinger, C. (2018). ‘Damn it, I am a miserable eastern European in the eyes of the administrator’: EU migrants’ experiences with (transnational) social security. Social Inclusion, 6(3), 201-209.
Scheibelhofer, E., Holzinger, C., & Draxl, A.-K. (2021). Linguistic diversity as a challenge for street-level bureaucrats in a monolingually-oriented organisation. Social Inclusion, 9(1), 24-34.

Transcript (coming soon)

Anthea’s new book is being launched at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, on the 20^th of November, with hybrid attendance options available. Event information and free registration are via this link: Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination Tickets, Wed 20/11/2024 at 5:30 pm | Eventbrite

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

Laura Smith-Khan: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Dr. Laura Smith-Khan and I’m a senior lecturer in law at the University of New England, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Anthea Vogl, who is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research takes a critical interdisciplinary approach to the regulation of migrants and non-citizens, and she researches and teaches across refugee and migration law, administrative law and legal theory. She is currently co-leading an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant on private refugee sponsorship in Australia and a national grant examining the health requirement imposed on non-citizens under Australian migration law.

Today we are going to talk about Anthea’s new book, Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination, which is published by Cambridge University Press as part of their series, entitled Cambridge Asylum and Migration Studies.

I’ve read the book, of course, and recently reviewed it for the International Journal of Refugee Law. And, as I say in that review, I particularly appreciated how the book explores the “multiple ways narrative performance is implicated in (both) the conduct and the evaluation of refugee hearings”, and I described the book as “the most substantial and persuasive account to date of the impossible narrative demands placed on people seeking asylum.”

So on that note, Anthea. Congratulations on the book, welcome to the show, and thanks so much for joining us today.

Anthea Vogl: Thanks, Laura. It’s a real pleasure to be here, and thanks for that lovely introduction.

Laura Smith-Khan: My pleasure! To start, I’d like you to introduce the book for us, and perhaps you can explain a little more what it’s about.

Anthea Vogl: So the book really is about what we call refugee status determination. And for listeners who don’t exist in a legal framing, that’s really how the law comes to understand whether or not someone is going to be granted refugee status and believed to be the refugee, as they claim to be according to a particular legal definition.

That is the focus of the book that that question of what we do around refugee status determination at its most general. But the book is fundamentally about what happens when we put refugee status determination into practice, and there has been a lot of work done on refugee status determination. And we can talk in a minute about how, why, it’s such a difficult process, but a lot of the work that has been done on refugee status determination hasn’t necessarily had access to or been able to examine what is called the oral hearing, as part of that process.

A fundamental step in the refugee status determination process is where an asylum seeker comes before a decision maker to explain his or her claim. It’s really difficult to access those hearings. It’s really difficult, because of another thing that the book tries to do, which is to set refugee status determination within the broader context of the regulation of the border, and in particular, the incredibly violent and sometimes lethal means states have used to prevent refugees not from just getting to the border, but getting to that place where States are obligated to assess someone’s right to refugee status within their particular country or territory.

In looking at refugee status determination and the oral hearing, what the book tried to do was access some of those spaces that have been so hard to get into and ask, what happens when an applicant comes before a person empowered by the state to assess and judge their story? And how do those oral exchanges ultimately inform and determine that final decision that sometimes we have access to from the public records of refugee status determination bodies. Sometimes we don’t have access to that decision. And what is the relationship between those two things at a really prosaic level? You know, I was really interested in what is happening in the hearings, and then, more legally, I was interested in the relationship between the evidence that comes out in those hearings and what is finally decided. And at a critical level, a long standing critical engagement with the very premise of refugee law and the idea of border regulation, and only letting certain people cross borders on certain terms.

I was interested in the ways in which state written narratives about refugees, and who is an authentic refugee, and who deserves our protection, influences the kind of stories that are told in those hearings.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, thank you so much. There are so many layers to this. And I really admire how well that you bring all those different threads and those different layers together in the book.

And personally, I can attest to how difficult it can be to access this type of research data – incredibly difficult to get permission to sit in and observe these types of hearings or be able to record them or to access recordings of them. So congratulations even on that first crucial step, especially in Australian context.

And it’s also worth pointing out that in a number of countries the hearings aren’t even usually recorded as an official procedural step, so recordings may not ever exist for hearings as well, and that raises a lot of questions about the accountability of those processes, too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And tracking those gaps, I think is something that is a real challenge for researchers and I think it relates back to the secrecy and control that states seek to maintain over refugee issues and refugee law and practice. And actually, it’s a lot of your work, Laura, that I think has really nicely pointed out that even though – and this is a big part of the book, too, and a really nice intersection between our work – even though it’s the refugee who’s ultimately attributed with the testimony that they bring before decision makers, and they’re considered to be the author or the speaker, and then they are judged on that basis, your work has shown really carefully how actually, there are so many different voices, and so many different people who contribute to that particular testimony. And I’m thinking of your work and Katrijn Maryns’ work, and Marie Jacob’s work too.

And yet the refugee’s held responsible for that testimony in the end, and we have no way of tracing some of those processes, and how that comes about for a range of reasons, but also because it’s so hard to access the data.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah. And I think that’s where your work really comes in to provide a really good evidence base of what is going on behind the scenes, and also how you can have, on the one hand, these ideas of giving refugees a voice, or that, they’re “telling their story”, and that’s put forward as maybe increasing the legitimacy and fairness of the process. But what your book does so well is actually pulls apart what is happening, what is expected, and actually demonstrates so clearly how the demands or the expectations of a certain type of narrative, are controlled by the decision maker, ultimately, both within the hearing, and then also afterwards by the fact that they are the ones that take what has happened in the hearing and reframe it in their decision on both those levels the narrative is never really under the control of the asylum seeker. And that’s just such a great contribution to demonstrate that across all these different examples across Canada and Australia.

But I think maybe we should step back and give a little bit more overview of what the process looks like for someone if they’re seeking protection as a refugee in a country in the global north.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, great. There’s a lot we could say about the content of refugee law and how it operates. But I think it might be useful to focus on the procedure for the purposes of the podcast.

Very briefly, there’s a definition in international refugee law, and it’s often imported into states that have become signatories to the Refugee Convention. Refugees have to prove that they face a well founded fear of persecution on one of five grounds, race, religion, ethnicity, and political opinion and particular social group.

What’s interesting there is that sense that the refugee has to give an account of their own fear on the basis of a particular ground, and that fear has to be both judged to be true on a subjective level, in that the refugee has to themselves have that well-founded fear, but it has to be objectively true, so it has to accord with a legal and evidence-based assessment of whether or not that person has or would have experienced, something to give rise to a fear in their country of origin.

As listeners, as you start to think through who refugees are and how they come before a decision making body in a global north state, what will probably spring into your mind is that people don’t necessarily come with access to the kinds of things that the law takes to be convincing and compelling in terms of forms of evidence. So someone’s fleeing their home state, and they are seeking to prove that their home state has persecuted them or harmed them, or people in their home state have persecuted or harmed them. The chance of being able to access those records, or having indeed left with written or documentary evidence of that having happened, is really slim.

Even where people leave with the most basic forms of documentary evidence which would help their claim. So really simple things, like even identity documents, even those identity documents are not necessarily the kinds of evidence, or they’re not in a category of what we talk about as probative evidence. We can’t even see prove that those written documents are authentic and true. And so there’s already this massive barrier to making a claim.

And in many ways the refugee status determination process and how it works both seeks to respond to that challenge – I think if we read in good faith the setting up of the refugee status determination process, it talks about having to give applicants the benefit of the doubt, because they don’t have other forms of evidence to build their claim for the purpose of the book. Why, that’s really important is because where we’re left is with both written and oral testimony, as the absolute foundation of how most refugees will make a claim before a court.

Sometimes there are other witnesses or people that someone might be able to call. That happens rarely, and sometimes people have had access to really good records, to substantiate their claim interestingly with social media and the digitization of some forms of evidence that’s like added a whole other interesting element to evidence that might be available. But to really summarize what happens, both at the first and sometimes second level of decision making. So before things are reviewed by courts, an asylum seeker comes before a decision maker. He or she or they may or may not have access to legal assistance, and both Canada and Australia are good examples. Without generalizing too much, even in the hearings, those who have access to a lawyer and a lawyer present, it really is the applicant giving testimony to the decision maker and the decision maker questioning and interrogating that evidence for most of the hearing.

And then, very importantly, the other person in the hearing, in almost all cases, is the interpreter. Keeping in mind another core challenge of refugee status determination, which you are, of course, very familiar with Laura, and will probably be of central relevance to listeners is that that the whole process happens across the applicant’s own language and the language of the host country, which are very rarely the same language, but sometimes they are. In all of the hearings that were included in the book, in both Australia and Canada, there was an interpreter present. In one of the hearings one of the applicants was confident with English, and the interpreter dipped in and out, but otherwise the interpreter was also the third voice in the hearing.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, so you’ve got this really strong reliance on both written oral testimony, and very specific requirements in terms of the written testimony in terms of application forms, filling out a lot of different types of information. And there’s some great scholarship around how those different forms of testimony can also then be used to find inconsistencies. And these types of things come up in credibility assessment, too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, and it’s probably worth saying that one of those taken for granted bits of knowledge within refugee status determination and refugee law is that the claim is assessed on the basis of the substance of the claim. So it is assessed in terms of what is being told, and whether the decision maker finds those things to be plausible and true are a key part of that, and whether or not they accord with the legal framework, and also does your claim fit into what the law has said in your country, of where you’re seeking asylum a refugee is, or how it defines refugee.

But a key part of all refugee status determination, precisely because often of this absence of other evidence, is the credibility of the applicant and their evidence. So the applicant themselves, and the credibility of the story that’s being told, or the evidence being given, and credibility assessment in most countries turns on three main criteria: the idea of consistency and coherence that you just referred to and that’s consistency and coherence across multiple tellings. So you have to make sure that you are telling the same story again and again and again, which again, listeners can think about how difficult that is even just in the ordinary course of their own lives, not in an adjudicative setting.

The second criterion is plausibility, so is the story being told plausible. And then a third criterion that comes up is demeanour which has been really roundly criticized in a lot of jurisdictions, and I don’t necessarily address too much in the book, because I wanted to reinforce the ways in which, of all the criteria that have all been criticized, it’s the one, I think, with even less credibility than the other criteria.

But that credibility assessment is a key part of the claim, and it’s almost like a compulsory part of a lot of work on refugee status determination, that as scholars, we all know that decision making turns on the credibility of the applicant, much more so than it does on the legal and factual elements of the claim.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think the demeanour one is quite interesting in the sense that. There is a stronger consensus that it’s not something that should be relied on. But then, maybe it still is, and it’s not explicitly mentioned, or in my own research, I found at least that it’s mentioned when it’s relied on positively. So for, you know, “there are some inconsistencies here, but this person in general seems, you know, authentic” and blah blah, So it can be used in somebody’s favour, and then maybe not mentioned when it goes against them, something along those lines.

But yes, absolutely, the different types of what have been called indicators of credibility. And it really is such a foundational and crucial part of the refugee status determination process

And it’s so important in how your analysis, looking at these different narrative demands, really brings out how credibility or incredibility can be produced through unrealistic expectations of this particular type of narrative, and also the way that the decision maker controls the hearing in such a way that it makes it really difficult for the person seeking asylum to actually perform as they’re required to perform. So I’m really looking forward into drilling down a little bit more into that process.

I’d really like to just briefly talk again about your data that you have. So we’ve already mentioned that you had access to hearings. But could you just explain to us exactly what type of data you collected, where, when and the challenges, you might have faced with that.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, for sure. Essentially, the method at the core of the book was, what is maybe a bit counterintuitively called participant observation of hearings which, some listeners might be familiar with, but I mean, to just to encapsulate it, it was sitting in refugee hearings as they took place, without actively participating in them, beyond making my presence known and seeking permission to be in those spaces.

Interestingly, and relevant to our discussion earlier. All of my access to those spaces came by the refugee applicants themselves. And there was more hostility from the Australian refugee decision making space than the Canadian refugee decision making space in relation to my presence, even though under the relevant statute in Australia, the refugee applicant has the right to allow people into their own hearing, the tribunal, some way into the research, overrode that.

They also have the right to control who is and isn’t in the hearing. It’s a little bit legally grey. But it wasn’t a point I was going to pursue, obviously, in the really delicate and stressful context of someone having their claim assessed, when the Department said, “No, thank you. We don’t want you in the hearing anymore.”

That’s when I started to work with some audio transcripts and recordings of particular hearings in the Australian context. In the Canadian context, both through refugee applicants and through the UNHCR, I attended the hearings.

It’s important to note, I think, for the book, it’s work that came out of my doctoral project, and the hearings really have not, even though the last hearing that I attended was 2015, which doesn’t make it current data. And it’s not current work of mine, but it’s something I really wanted to come back to in terms of publishing and thinking about it. The one thing in thinking that through and thinking about. What does it mean that these hearings don’t continue on into the present day?

I tracked the history of the oral hearing itself. And what has happened to the oral hearing in both jurisdictions. And I guess one of the things that I came to in doing that was that there’s been a lot of reform around refugee status determination processing. And I argued primarily to make it faster and more efficient in ways that disadvantage the applicant.

But really what hasn’t changed. So those changes have happened around the oral hearing and the oral hearing has remained. This central fulcrum on which the whole process turns, and I would say, unfortunately, there’s even more pressure on the applicant getting their claim right in the oral hearing, because timelines have been shorter in the lead up to it, and appeal and review rights have gotten even more attenuated and limited.

So what that ended up as was 15 hearings across both jurisdictions along with the case files for the applicants. And, importantly, the decisions. Coming back to that earlier point, that really interesting question of what was said in the hearing? How did stories and language come up, and how are they assessed and tested? And then what did the decision makers say about what happened in the hearing? There were some really interesting gaps to follow through and comparisons to make.

So it was the hearings themselves, being in the hearings and observing them. And then the case files. And I really used that material to conduct pretty deeply qualitative assessment of what was going on in the hearings. And again, you know, you’re always thinking through methods and trying to be critical about your approach.

At the start, I was hoping to maybe look at one particular ground, or one particular kind of claim or claimant. But really some of those challenges of accessing the hearing influenced this final decision to look across claims and across claimants and across countries of origin.

And the other thing was, I guess what I was looking at was this sense of what was going on in the oral exchange, and the structure and procedure of the hearing so that helped make those things more comparable.

But I would like to really acknowledge work that I think has been really critical looking at particular kinds of claimants. So, LGBTIQ claimants, people making claims on the basis of gendered persecution, particularly women, particular political opinions coming out of particular countries of origin. I think that work’s been really important. I look at some stock stories and assumptions in the hearing and the way narrative works more generally, and they really drill down into the ways in which global north states require particularly racialised people to tell particular stories about themselves when they are, for example, a woman facing harm, or a queer person who hasn’t been able to live safely on the basis of sexuality.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I think I think that’s what’s so great about this quite broad and quite large collection of scholarship, as you say, is that everyone has had different kinds of access to different types of data and different conceptual frameworks as well and different methodologies, but actually so much of it complements each other so well. So we have that ability to draw on that scholarship, and then see how it applies to our particular context, our particular data in such really valuable ways.

And such a great reflection as well, on how, in the one sense, you could potentially-  See, your data is amazing, and I’m very jealous of it. But in terms of the small number of hearings that you got to observe. On the one hand, you could see it as like a gap or a lost opportunity to, as you say, drill down and look at a specific type of claim across a really large number of cases. But, on the other hand, it creates this really fantastic opportunity to look at that bigger picture across those particular hearings, and see what they have in common, or the patterns that you can see emerging from it.

And you’ve also done such fantastic conceptual thinking. And I really think, yeah, as you say, you acknowledge that this has come from your PhD research, which was a number of years ago. But I’m very grateful that you went ahead and did the book, because I think it’s a great contribution. But I also assume, based on my own experience of how my understanding of my research has changed over time, I assume that maybe your development of the concepts or the theories that you’d like to apply to this data has changed over time. Because I think that’s also a really important contribution in the book. The way that you bring in a number of different areas, a number of different theoretical frameworks, and use them to analyze your data.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, that’s such a nice way of thinking about it. And it makes me reflect on the ways in which sometimes, yeah, your analysis can be latent, or you start with an idea, and the more you come back to your work. I think for me that sense of reading the hearing contextually and refusing to just individualise what was going on in the hearing, both in relation to the decision makers actually, and the applicants.

So not understanding that the decision makers have a lot of responsibility for how the hearing works, and your work has looked at this, too, Laura, the really limited ways in which credibility is actually governed, or how we define the credibility criteria themselves, how we understand them, and then how they are implemented and the responsibility the decision maker has leaves for some pretty big, capacious, billowy spaces of legal regulation.

But having said that, yes, coming back to the book, that sense of some of the structural forces at play, both in terms of narrative and language and in terms of the politicization of the hearings that has really continued in a pretty relentless way was important.

But yeah, I guess, as you say, in thinking about, you know the data that you have, and coming back to it, I’m wondering, you know, of its relevance. Some of the law and language work in this space, I guess it’s simpatico in particular ways, because you look at one hearing, and you can look at a paragraph within a hearing and really break down what is happening between, say, an interpreter and an applicant and a decision maker, and there’s so much going on at the level of understanding that even if the hearings were perfectly structured and the fairest possible versions of themselves, there would still be these incredible linguistic, cultural, and adjudicative or contextual barriers to understanding and communicating in that space.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, absolutely. There are so many opportunities to look at the data on so many different levels and make sense of it in so many different ways. And, as you said, also contextualizing the hearings within their political and historical context as well. And I really enjoyed that chapter as well where you gave this overview of that exact thing across both Australia and Canada, and mapped some of the parallels, and also noted some of the differences. And also this really ironic or interesting tension, or seemingly contradictory pattern that emerges between, on the one hand, really, you bigoted, discriminatory, hateful political discussion about people seeking asylum on the one hand, and needing to control and stop their entry and deter them and punish them. And, on the other hand, at the same time, this development of what seems to be oh, we need to make the processes more fair, and you know, set them out in a bit more detail and have really good procedures. And there’s that weird tension, because those things are happening similar like simultaneously, it’s really quite interesting. So then you’re left with these processes that look very rigorous, trying to make sure that everyone’s accommodated, and we can communicate across language, barriers and all these things. But, on the other hand, it’s all happening against this really horrible kind of political discourse in the broader public space.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, and trying, yes you say, there’s a real tension, and I think you know the book very much I guess aims to be a critical theoretical take on what’s going on in the hearings and what’s demanded of refugee applicants as testimony givers. But you know, as an advocate, and someone really committed to refugee justice on the ground I wanted to make really clear that we can’t lose sight of in the context is as it is a commitment to as fair a process as possible. Even if I’m you know, pretty directly critical of procedural fairness or improving credibility standards in this context as fixing the process. I don’t think it will, but the hearing itself and access to legal assistance and access to interpreters, you know, these are really fundamentally important things.

And when people had no ability to put their claims. So, looking at that history, you know, it comes from a complete, almost completely discretionary determination of people’s claims into what was a reform around individual rights to fair hearings both in Australia and Canada, and the right to be heard as a form of administrative justice and natural justice.

You know, I think, given the context, those things are really very important. But then, you see the way in which that individualizing feeds back into this broader narrative of authentic and inauthentic refugees, reinforces, and indeed generates and creates stories of genuine and credible asylum seekers as against bogus and unbelievable and incredible asylum seekers. And the person who bears the responsibility for that, you know, is sometimes, is the asylum seeker at the center of this assessment process regardless sometimes. Not always. You know there are some. There are concessions made, and I think, importantly, really important, research. Looking at the challenges, particular kinds of applicants facing, speaking their claims and narrating their claims.

But you know, generally, it’s the applicant that bears the responsibility of navigating that system and putting forward a claim that it is deemed to be credible. I think it’s important as scholars and thinkers that we don’t become inured or numb, or we stop forgetting how shocking that is. You know that, regardless of what an applicant has been through, or what testimony that they’re giving, their testimony must meet these particular standards of evidence giving, which I guess the book tries to draw on this the amazing literature at the intersection of law and psychology, which has said these are just, entirely unreasonable expectations to have of people’s language, and what the human memory can and can’t do generally. Just, you know, regardless of what might have happened to one person as an individual, but particularly in the context of anyone who suffered major violence, harm and trauma. And what that does to language.

Laura Smith-Khan: Absolutely. And that, yeah, we then still expect these individual people to be able to perform in these very, very specific ways.

Okay. So I think I would like to ask you a little bit in more detail now, because I’ve been hinting at this. What exactly is demanded, what types of different narratives or expectations did you find.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. One thing that I that motivated the project and led to, I guess a series of findings was a bit of curiosity around what we mean when we talk about narrative in law and narrative studies and law and literature. So these bodies of work were really helpful, and I think particularly law and storytelling, which has come out of critical race theory and really looked at, you know, who gets to tell stories before the law who gets to judge them, and which ones are credible. For the refugee hearings and the book, I think drilling down into the specific narrative demands made of refugees, and the construction of narrative really informed the findings of the book.

Because it’s one thing to say, yeah. People, we demand stories. We demand people tell stories. But what does that mean? And why is it a problem, I think, for refugee applicants?

There are a couple of things. One, very significantly was that idea of a really Western narrative form which is temporarily located, even if it might not be chronological, that it’s sequenced in a way that is explicable. And that there’s a sense of most narrative studies talking one way or another about causation or connection between events and an accounting of that causation. So you can’t say, you know, “I went to the shop today, and tomorrow I brush my teeth.” That doesn’t make a narrative, because you’re meant to, you know, account for why you’re telling these things in a particular way, in a particular order, and someone might say that was out of order, because you should brush your teeth first.

So that sense of refugees being able to account for the connection between events in their lives and account for them in a way that – and this is a narrative, that coming from Western and Anglo European narrative studies – where there’s a real sense of not only being able to explain causality between events that happened to you, but that they should all come together in a sense of what’s sometimes called moral closure, a moral lesson or meaning. So a story has to have a particular meaning, and that that has to make sense. So that comes back to that credibility standard of plausibility. So it’s only plausible if you can sequence it, account for connections between events, and then provide some form of moral meaning or moral closure.

And this is the work of Marita Eastmond and a range of other really great critical non legal scholars often talking about refugee status determination. That’s not how things happen to people, and seeing that play out in the hearings was really apparent, making things make sense in a particular way, accounting for connections between events.

And then the other really important part of narrative studies as it connects to the work that I did, and what I saw in the hearings, was an accounting, a demand for refugees to account for themselves, like to understand themselves, and be able to really clearly explain how and why they did things, and to do that in a way that denied ambivalence, denied confusion, denied the impact of the circumstances that they were in that might have led to arbitrary decision, making or decision making that I can’t account for.

And then really, I wanted to say shockingly, but it was more infuriating, listening to decision makers wanting refugees to also account for other actors in their story. So you can imagine.

Laura Smith-Khan: Oh, my God! Yes.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, it’s so. You know, this is where you start to see how literature helps us understand why this is a problem.

Work has been done on this in a more legal framing. But the idea that the applicant would have to account for the decisions of their persecutors. So if a persecutor let them, if someone was let out of jail, even though they were then you know they were then free of their captors. But then, say, re-imprisoned. If that didn’t make sense to the decision maker, the refugee had to account for why a state jailer might let someone free from arbitrary detention.

And again, the need to do that with clarity and certainty in order to reassure a decision maker in a sense of what might or might not be consistent or plausible, was really disturbing. And then I connected that to a narrative voice, or a particular version of the coming of age novel, or what gets called the Bildungsroman in German, because that’s where it’s said to come from. Which is the formation novel, which is like an all-knowing narrator. So if you did just.

Laura Smith-Khan: Omniscient.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, exactly. So. It’s like the refugee applicant, in the hearings I observed, didn’t just have to tell a story that ended in this moral closure of becoming a refugee and a resolution to seek confidently seek refugee status. But along the way had to account for sometimes really minute aspects of the story that they themselves were part of, or that they were subject to as a narrator, in order to make the claim credible to a decision maker.

So to summarize that, I think, looking at the elements of narrative a little bit more theoretically, or looking at narrative structure, and then asking how they informed, or how they came up in the hearings, was a useful way to come back to a broader politics of storytelling and how it was operating in the hearing.

And I really appreciated, when you said earlier, you know, we assume that this right to tell one’s story is something that is a positive development and that, you know, being able to – and yes, storytelling itself has been cast as a really important part of, I think, campaigns for political justice, and I think that is true.

But there’s also a disciplining function of telling particular stories and people are disciplined into being certain kinds of subjects before the law, and it’s really clear the kinds of subjects refugees have to be in order to fit within the storytelling frame that decision makers accepted as true.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I when I was reading those parts of the book, I was – you know, waving my hands around and screaming almost. And I really appreciated like, because they resonated a lot with me, things that I’ve observed myself in work contexts.

But the theoretical frameworks that you had to work with from narrative studies and law and literature really helped name or you know, account for what’s happening there and why it’s so problematic. And it’s this, expectation, as you said, that we have somebody who not only has to account for themselves and explain why every single choice that they’ve made along the way is completely rational and well informed, and not emotional, or needs to be more emotional, or, you know, whatever the expectations are, but also that they have to account for every single other person who’s part of “their story” along the way, including sometimes even they’re persecutors.

Of course they can’t get inside the head of other people, and people do irrational things all the time. Or you know, there are motivations that we don’t understand informing why they make the choices that they do.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, just so problematic too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And I think you know, what was really apparent was when that wasn’t. It happened in so many of the hearings that there were a couple of hearings that I point to where it’s like. Oh, no! There was a space for the applicant to express what happened without having to take responsibility for imbuing that with plausibility, sense, rationality, as you say, and like moral meaning.

And that burden of having to do that was was so conspicuous in its absence. Because you started to say, Oh, this is this could look significantly different. I think it wouldn’t solve all the problems or the fact that we still don’t have great indicia. We don’t have great ways to tell, to determine with any degree of certainty what truth is in these contexts.

But yeah, as you say, when it was there, it was just such a barrier to being able to just provide the evidence that was required of the applicants as they were coming before decision makers.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, and something that a lot of the literature talks about especially in the Australian context, and perhaps also in the Canadian context, the idea that theoretically this is supposed to be an inquisitorial process where the decision maker is responsible for, you know, searching around for evidence and helping to produce the evidence. But in reality, at least in these particular contexts, it does seem quite adversarial. Right? That’s maybe a reflection of our particular legal systems.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And I think again, yeah, narrative theory was helpful in thinking through the different reasons we tell stories and the different settings that we tell them in, and how that will inflect the story that’s being told, what can be said, what can’t be said, how we might imagine an audience receives our testimony or testimony more generally.

And I think one of the things that became apparent in thinking through this idea of a narrative occasion is that it’s not easy to tell one’s story to begin with. But if there is a context in which a decision maker is also impeding your ability to meet these narrative standards. Then I guess that’s when for me the argument about credibility and decision making spaces as gatekeeping comes together because one of the findings and I think this has come through in other people’s work because it’s clear in decisions.

So a lot of work in the credibility space has also looked at the written reasons and written decisions. But people that I observed, the hearings that I observed, applicants were asked to tell the story and to meet some of these standards that we’ve just spoken about. And then the hearing itself did all of these things to just make that actually impossible. So even if the applicant could meet those demands the behaviour of a decision maker, the norms-

And so again, not necessarily bringing this home to individual decision makers because I didn’t- it wasn’t an ethnography of decision making. I didn’t have a quantitative number of, it wasn’t a quantitative study of how decision makers behave.

But the norms, as you say, around how the hearing is conducted was not to open up a space where someone could present narrative on their own terms, and then be judged on the on the terms of the decision maker and hearing it was instead, I guess what I observed was fragmentation decision makers interjecting themselves into applicant’s stories and actually asking exactly the kinds of questions that even the very limited guidance, legal guidance, or usually policy guidance, on credibility that exists, asking those kinds of questions. So the guidance that we have generally says it’s not uncommon for people to forget dates. It’s not uncommon for memory to be interrupted by traumatic events. And so that’s all there.

And yet, you know, decision makers really pushing for “did this”, not just “did this happen before or after this other thing?” But you know, “when did this happen? What year was it? You earlier said it was early in the year. Now you’re saying it was October. Why are you doing that?” So really interrogating and looking for moments where the credibility criteria wasn’t being met against the credibility guidance, such as it is, that exists.

So yeah, that that sense of the inquisitorial hearing was absolutely, apart from, I would say two of the hearings that I observed, just really absent from the hearings that were part of the study.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah. So even where there are guidelines with very specific advice, the fact that they just seem to be routinely overlooked or ignored is yeah, very, quite concerning yeah. And you’ve touched on another really important chapter in your book in terms of the conduct of the hearing and the fact that we have this idea of applicants having the space, and the floor, I guess, in communication to be able to just say things, tell their story. But what that actually looks like in terms of the hearing structure can be very different.

And I think you talked about the difference between Canada and Australia as well in terms of the order of the hearing.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. There was a similar kind of unpredictability around how the hearings went. So I guess that was another finding. And I must say, I attended hearings first in the context of, before coming to research, in the context of refugee advocacy.

And I really did, I think it’s not naive to think that if you have a hearing where a refugee believes that his or her or their story is being assessed that they will be able to tell their story. I mean, I look back on it, and I think it’s naive. It feels a bit naive, but, as you say, it’s like, well, here’s the space. It’s an open space, tell your story. It’s not how it works.

Sometimes the Canadian hearings, even though they were, they sometimes they made much clearer that they were just going to interrogate aspects that the decision maker found implausible, or the aspects of the decision maker was concerned to get more information about. And that was done more predictably. So, even though it wasn’t this open space for storytelling on one level, that benefited applicants because they were told what was coming at them

In the Australian hearings, a little bit about how the hearing is introduced, or how the decision maker sets up the hearing, when the applicant walks in and begins the hearing and it was, it was still- You know, an applicant would still be forgiven for thinking they’re about to be able to tell their story, and to do that in something of a chronological way. What we sometimes would call just for shorthand, and maybe even non lawyers know this, the idea of evidence in chief. So you get to tell your story before someone tests it. That really didn’t happen in any of the hearings that I observed.

And so the that sense of being able to create coherence and create plausibility was denied to the applicant, even though you know a lot of work on law and language and credibility in the hearings and Law and Psych has pointed out, it’s, you know there are barriers to doing that, in any event.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I think it’s probably worth just as a slight aside to explain to listeners who aren’t familiar with the setting that in the Australian context that the hearings that you were observing were a second hearing. So there’d already been an application process, and there’d already been an interview with the Immigration Department, and that hadn’t gone well, and the particular person had been, you know, rejected. They had their claims rejected. And then, after that, the second stage hearing was with a review body that looks at the whole claim afresh. So they aren’t supposed to just look at the first decision, and see whether that was done correctly, but actually look afresh at any fresh claims, or you know what’s happened since then, and the whole claim. So on the one hand, there could potentially be the expectation that they’re just reviewing the existing record. But ideally they would give the applicants a complete fresh chance to share their story, as it were.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, yeah, that’s always. I teach a refugee law clinic. And it’s always so difficult to explain to students that this process is meant to be fresh review of the original decision, so just a rehearing of the decision as it was first made. And of course that’s not what happens in the hearings, and as advocates you’re always you’re already, and the book talks a little bit about and there’s been great work done by Jesse Hambly and Nick Gill and others about the role of lawyers, and also a lot of the law and language schools, too. Great recent piece by Katrijn Maryns and Marie Jacobs about the role of lawyers and their politics.

But I think, what really comes through when you’re looking at the way in which the hearings operate, and what the applicant can and can’t say is that there’s no version where there’s an ability to clearly articulate your story on your own terms. And so you then, you’re just fed back into this process where the decision maker is picking up on things that he or she has already observed as a problem with your narrative.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yep. Starting from that point of problem or distrust.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: To somehow work from that back footed position, which is, yeah, a whole different challenge.

Yes. Wow. So yeah, I think it was valuable to read about your reflections in terms of you know. What does all this mean for our ability to make an impact? And you know, what is it? Does this lead us to any kind of suggested reform? Or you know, what does this all mean, especially when we’re looking at that broader question of structural unfairness, that really comes out so clearly in the book.

Do you have any hope?

Anthea Vogl: I mean, look. One thing, that without being a prescription of reforms to fix the process which the book just, you know, is really open about that. That’s not. That would be that would come out of, or that some of these observations would hope to inform that maybe accepting that some of the broader political challenges, or that the reforms have to take place in light of attention to the idea that there’s some, if we have in Australia, and you know Canada does its own share of this increasingly with the US-Canada border.

If we have a regime that’s willing to exert such brutal violence on people seeking to cross the borders and make an asylum claim, what does it mean, then, to demand, or how do we understand that alongside, is a real question. I think a very sincere and genuine quest of many scholars, advocates, lawyers, decision makers to make this process fair and equitable.

I think that they’re the two really hard things to hold within the frame together. I mean that, having been said, I do think the interdisciplinary work that has been done on the problems with the process. And I am not just saying this because we’re conducting a law and language podcast you know the work that has been done by law and language, and like law and, the intersection of law and language attending to what goes on in the hearing, and how decisions are made.

The other interdisciplinary, that big body of interdisciplinary work, looking at the intersection between law and psychology, and trying to really understand how these incredibly unfair and incorrect, you know, just blatantly incorrect inferences are drawn in the hearings, gives me hope.

Because I don’t think, you know –  I think there is a gap between the politics and also the will of decision makers and decision making bodies to make good decisions. That having been said, you know, I think that site of interdisciplinary knowledge is crucial for understanding legal processes here. I don’t think we get very far with a legal analysis of refugee decision making.

So in that kind of sense of grounding reforms, I think it’s really important. And the other thing that I do think, and I try and talk about this at the end of the book, if we are stuck with this process, if we, and I know a lot of things are on the horizon, including AI and Automated decision making, which will require us as researchers and advocates interested in justice for good decision making and refugee justice, we’ll have to engage with those things.

But I think if the hearing is in its current form, working hard to preserve the quality of the procedure and people’s access to good legal advice and proper interpreters and proper timelines before and after the hearing is part of the struggle in the interim.

I think there’s really good work. I do think the critical work which has just really come at credibility as lacking. I mean your own work. But really, the critical cultural studies work about the problems with all of these stereotypes that exist within credibility assessment.

Even at the level of international NGOs, maybe not yet government, there is a real consensus that credibility is dysfunctional, like the credibility assessment process is not working, and I do hope that they will work on that, that there will be an ability to really think of something. I don’t think that will solve the problems, but it affords a little bit more justice in these testimonial spaces and spaces of decision making.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, for sure. While ever we’re working within the existing system, it is really heartening to see, I think, at least at an individual level, lawyers and also decision makers being quite receptive to that type of interdisciplinary research.

Anthea Vogl: Interest.

Laura Smith-Khan: And I guess we just all have, you know, a kind of quite hefty duty and responsibility to communicate it to them in ways they are going to take it on and use it productively within the problematic context in which we we’re all doing our work.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, I mean, yeah. So true. I mean, sometimes I catch myself. I’m not pessimistic. But I’m kind of you know, I think it’s important to always think politically and contextually. And you know, I was like, I just don’t think, you know, coming to a pretty negative conclusion. But like, yeah, towards the end of the book.

Anthea Vogl: Gregor Noll recently also wrote something, so a scholar of credibility and refugee assessment for a long time, reflecting on whether or not we can make RSD work in the context of the current credibility standards, and I think the work of Jane Herlihy, who has also engaged with this.

And you know that there’s just a really clear no, you know, there’s not a reformist agenda. I don’t think that works around the credibility assessment, the current credibility criteria, as they’re currently expressed. And then what that looks like in these hearings. So even though I don’t mean to be, I was like, “am I being too pessimistic?” You know “is it too much of a harsh conclusion?” But I think that kind of consensus, and then the receptiveness of at least trying to think of other ways, to approach testimony is hugely important. Unless we really take seriously the problem of individualized status determination which I don’t think states will be doing away with anytime soon.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yes, absolutely. I think I personally felt that you did a really good job of very explicitly, you know, drawing a line, really making it clear that you know it’s not just enough to walk away from reading this book and say, “Oh, well, you know, we can just tweak this little bit, or just avoid doing that particular thing, or requiring this, or don’t interrupt,” or you know these little things that we can check off the list, and then everything’s going to be fine, not enough. And we can’t accept that as good enough. And I think that’s a really powerful and important statement to walk away from with this book.

I thought it was really well expressed. And yeah, it is very easy to just fall into cynicism when you’re working in this space, but also to be able to say specifically, you know, these are the things that I’m identifying in this work. This is what other people are identifying. This is what we can say within this system, but to acknowledge that the system is fundamentally flawed within itself, and while ever it exists, as it is, there’s a limit to achieving the ultimate goal of, you know truly fair processes and affording everyone protection when they need it. Yeah, hopefully, that’s not too glum.

Anthea Vogl: No. And I think, yeah, I’m reminded of yeah, of Hilary Evans Cameron’s work, who’s worked in this space. And you know, she really reinforces that in the search for truth that our focus should be on – the state’s focuses on the danger of a false positive, you know, giving someone status when they “shouldn’t” have been given status because they didn’t have a real claim. And you know, like shifting the focus to actually, a false negative. You know? How do we actually attend to the ways in which decision making that should be the focus of our concerns, given what refugee law regulates and what’s at stake in these decisions.

Laura Smith-Khan: Absolutely. I find that argument, I’ve heard that one from her as well, so persuasive that it’s much more important to protect against or avoid false negatives, you know rejections that shouldn’t have been rejections rather occasionally, you know, “letting someone in” who, you know, doesn’t “deserve our protection”. And I’ve spoken with lawyers as well, who make a parallel between this particular setting and credibility and the criminal law. You know, we give people the benefit of the doubt. We assume someone is innocent until proven guilty rather than the other way around, and the stakes are just as high or arguably higher in this particular setting. So why not try something similar here? Yeah.

If we can address the larger socio-political context in which all of it…Yeah, to to be worked on today and in the future.

Anthea Vogl: That small problem. Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: Thanks so much for speaking with me today, Anthea, and congratulations once again on this really incredible contribution that you’ve made to this very important scholarship. I understand that you have a book launch which is coming up fairly soon. Could you share the details with us?

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, so the book came out earlier this year. But these things take more time than you anticipate. So on the 20th of November here. I’m currently, I should have said, I’m so sorry I should have said I’m here in Gadigal land, on Gadigal Land, in Sydney. We are having a book launch at the Centre for International Law and the Centre for Criminology, Law and Justice at UNSW. And the UNSW Kaldor Centre would have the details and the registration link. So I’m really looking forward to that. I’m grateful to those centres for launching the book, and it’ll be just an hour discussion at 5.30 in a few weeks from now.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, it’s not too far away, I think hopefully, we will have this podcast up and published before then, so we can publicize it. And I’ll be able to include a link to the invitation.

Anthea Vogl: Amazing. That’d be great. And it is also a hybrid for people who are listening from places other than Sydney, it’s a hybrid event. So there’s an online attendance option.

Laura Smith-Khan: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thanks again.

Anthea Vogl: Thank you. Thanks for such wonderful questions, Laura, and you are absolutely the best person for engaging with the book. So it’s been really a pleasure to speak to you about it.

Laura Smith-Khan: So wonderful to read it, and thanks for taking the time to discuss it with us, and thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time!

References

Berg, Laurie & Millbank, Jenni (2009). Constructing the Personal Narratives of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Asylum Claimants. Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 195-223.

Eastmond, Marita (2007). Stories as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research. Journal of Refugee Studies, vol 20, no. 2, pp. 248-264.

Evans Cameron, Hilary (2018). Refugee Law’s Fact-Finding Crisis: Truth, Risk and the Wrong Mistake (Cambridge University Press).

Hambly, Jessica & Gill, Nick (2020). Law and Speed: Asylum Appeals and the Techniques and Consequences of Legal Quickening. Journal of Law and Society, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 3-28.

Herlihy, Jane & Turner, Stuart W (2009). The Psychology of Seeking Protection. International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 21, pp. 171-192.

Jacobs, Marie & Maryns, Katrijn (2022). Managing Narratives, Managing Identities: Language and Credibility in Legal Consultations with Asylum Seekers. Language in Society, vol 51, no. 3, pp. 375-402.

Noll, Gregor (2021). Credibility, Reliability, and Evidential Assessment, in C Costello, M Foster & J McAdam (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law (Oxford University Press), ch. 33.

Smith-Khan, Laura (2019). Why Refugee Visa Credibility Assessments Lack Credibility: A Critical Discourse Analysis. Griffith Law Review, vol 28, no. 4, pp 406-430.

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

The conversation delves into the use of Arabic in both Arabic-speaking and non-Arabic-speaking contexts for different purposes. Rizwan explains how variations in grammar, font, and script combined with the distinct social contexts of different countries produces distinctive meanings in relation to culture and identity.

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.

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Transcript (coming soon)

The 99 names of Allah, in a Doha Mall, 2018 (Image Credit: Ingrid Piller)