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)

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.

Find out more about these and other fascinating aspects of English in Korea in this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast. Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Jinhyun Cho about her 2017 book entitled English Language Ideologies in Korea.

English Language Ideologies in Korea critically examines the phenomenon of “English fever” in South Korea from both micro- and macro-perspectives. Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions: why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the ‘dreams’ and ‘realities’ associated with English in Korea?

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 09/09/2024)

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. Jinhyun Cho.

Jinhyun is a Senior Lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Program of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests are primarily in the field of sociolinguistics and sociolinguistics of translation and interpreting. Jinhyun’s research focuses on intersections between gender, language ideologies, neoliberalism, and intercultural communication across diverse social contexts, including Korea and Australia.

Jinhyun is the author of the 2021 book Intercultural Communication in Interpreting, Power and Choices, and she has authored numerous other publications for international journals. Today, we will be discussing her 2017 book English Language Ideologies in Korea. This book critically examines the phenomenon of English fever in South Korea from both micro and macro perspectives.

Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions. Why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the dreams and realities associated with English in Korea? Jinhyun, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Cho: Oh, thank you for having me.

Brynn: To start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to studying how people think about and view the English language within Korea?

Dr Cho: Sure. I was born in Korea and grew up there, and I spent almost 30 years of my life in Korea before moving to Australia. And I worked as an interpreter between English and Korean in Korea.

And I have to tell you this, and that I didn’t speak English at all until I finished university.

Brynn: I cannot believe that. When I read that in your book, that was an incredible revelation to me.

Dr Cho: It might sound interesting to you and to the listeners, but back then, and I know that was many years ago, the Korean education on English, it focused on grammar and reading. And there was no speaking element at all.

So, I never had a chance to learn how to speak English until I finished university. And I got my first job at a small company after university, which I didn’t enjoy at all. And I started wondering what else I could do.

And I knew that there was such a job as a translator and interpreter, because one of my friends at university, her brother was an English-Korean interpreter. And that looked so cool, instantly switching between English and Korean, and he was working for an established broadcasting company in Korea. So, I thought that, oh, that sounds so cool, and I want to be one of those people.

So, I enrolled in a coaching school designed to train people who wanted to be a translator and interpreter. And that, to provide more details on this, because it doesn’t exist outside Korea, I know that there’s some in Japan. So coaching schools, these schools train people to sit for exams to enter a graduate school that specializes in translation and interpreting.

So that’s how it works, because it’s so competitive to get into a graduate school, graduate schools for translation and interpreting. So, I enrolled in one of those coaching schools and studied English for 14, up to 16 hours a day, and for two years. And that’s how I successfully got into this best graduate school in Korea.

And so, I took it for granted, right? Because everybody in Korea wanted to be good at English and they wanted to learn English. So, I thought that I never questioned why I wanted to learn English so much.

And then revelation came to me when I moved to Australia. And here, English is so natural, right? And everybody is expected to speak English.

And if you don’t speak English, then there’s something wrong with you. Whereas in Korea, if you speak English well, then you’ll be instantly admired. So, I thought that the gap was so interesting and started wondering why I wanted to learn English so much.

And then that led to this research question, as you said, right? So why do people in Korea pursue English so feverishly? You know, so much so that there is this social phenomenon of English fever.

And that’s how I got into this research.

Brynn: And just you saying that you studied English for like 14 to 16 hours a day, I cannot imagine doing that in another language. That had to be exhausting. It does feel like almost feverish study.

Is it exhausting to do that?

Dr Cho: Feverish study, I think it’s a perfect description of how I studied. Oh, it was exhausting. A session at the coaching school, it started at 7 a.m. So, I got up at 5 a.m. You know, because it was very far from, you know, where I lived.

So, I took about more than an hour. So, I got there and then took the three-hour session. And after that, me and then other students in the class, we created a study group.

So, we studied there until like 5 p.m. And after that, I came home and did some exercise and had dinner and studied more English until I went to bed.

Brynn: Collapsed. Collapsed.

Dr Cho: Collapsed. That’s right. And I think I was so consumed with that.

And sometimes I went to bed with CNN on, and I’m hoping that I could, you know, soak in more English in sleep. So that’s how I studied then come to think of it, yes.

Brynn: Well, and that’s what’s so interesting about the book is that you introduce us to this idea of this English fever, but also just this huge drive to study English.

But what’s so interesting is that then you take us back in time and you show in one of the first chapters of the book, it talks about the history of the English language in Korea. And what I find so interesting about that is that there’s this very real beginning point of when English literally made landfall in Korea. And this was in 1882.

Take us through that history a little bit, just in brief, from the arrival of English through to the Korea that we know today from a global perspective.

Dr Cho: Yes, I mean, this was so fascinating. So, this is a discovery that I made during my PhD, at the beginning of my PhD. So, I didn’t plan to examine this from a historical perspective.

But while, you know, just like any other research, you make a discovery by accident. So, while I was collecting data, I found out that the beginning of translation and interpreting in Korea, it coincided with the arrival of English in Korea. And to provide you more background on this, so you said back in 1882, Korea, so Korea’s predecessor, the Joseon dynasty, the last dynasty of Korea, it was under precarious geopolitical situations.

So, it was surrounded by strong and ambitious neighbours, which included Japan, Russia and China, which had acted as Korea’s elder brother traditionally. So, China was like a protector of Korea. And Japan in particular was the most ambitious because Japan was the first country in Asia that introduced modern technologies and civilizations from the West, primarily from the UK.

So, you know, the geographical situation of Korea is a peninsula. And Japan wanted to occupy Korea so that it could advance into the mainland China and into the bigger continent. So, in order to curb Japanese ambition, China joined forces with the US.

And then that led to this first international treaty in Korea, Korea-U.S. Treaty. And back then, there was nobody who could speak English in Korea.

And naturally, that led to the establishment of the English-Korean Translation, sorry, English-Korean Translation and Interpreting School, which is Dongmunhag. So now, what is interesting here is that the beginning of English fever in Korea, it happened at both top government and grass roots levels. And then top government level, that means that the king of the dynasty, King Gojong, had absolute trust in the US.

Why? It’s because of this Good Offices Treaty that was established between the US and Korea. And let me read you the clause of the treaty.

“The Good Offices on being informed of the case, to bring about an amicable agreement, thus showing their friendly feelings between the two countries.” So, this is a mere legal requirement. It meant nothing to then U.S. President Roosevelt.

However, King Gojong of Korea, he interpreted this as unflinching commitment from the US to protect Korea. So, the king relied on the US literally like a child does for his father.

So that was the beginning of English Fever. And also, the beginning of the US as the most powerful and generous country in the world. So that was the perception of the US at that government level.

But at the grassroots level, Translation and Interpreting. So even before this first English Korean Translation and Interpreting School was established, translators and interpreters, there was such a job in Korea because Korea had a lot of trade and business relationships with China. So, translators and interpreters, although they belong to the middle class, they were very wealthy because by using their bilingual skills, they made a lot of money out of trade.

So, becoming a translator and interpreter in Korea, there was an opportunity to climb up the cost system. The cost system in Korea back then, it was so rigid. So, there was no way that you could transcend the class barriers.

So, for people who were at the lowest class, becoming a translator and interpreter, that was the only opportunity to transcend the class barriers. And now what’s really interesting about this government established translation and interpreting school is that students were accepted regardless of class backgrounds. As long as you are linguistically talented, everybody was accepted, right?

So that opened the door for people, commoners in Korea, to become, to belong to a higher class. And then there was more American missionaries in Korea.

There were a lot of American missionaries who arrived in Korea in the 19th century, and they established the schools to teach English. This is what I found so fascinating that the English simultaneously became the language of the US and the language of power, and also the tool for class mobility for commoners. And that’s how English gathered forces and became the language of mobility and the power in Korea.

So, from a global perspective, I think in contemporary Korea, of course, you would say that there’s no such thing as a caste system, but there’s no society that is classless. Right?

Brynn: Exactly.

Dr Cho: Yeah, we all pretend that there’s no class, but there is.

Brynn: Of course there is.

Dr Cho: Yes, that’s right. So, in Korea, the reason why people pursue English so much is the amount of capital that’s attached to English. So English, this is the key findings from my research, that the English constitutes all four capitals and identified by Bourdieu.

So, it’s an economic capital and a cultural capital, social capital and also symbolic capital.

Brynn: Which is amazing. And I think for people who maybe aren’t familiar with English in Korea, or even just the concept of how very powerful English is in the world right now, to think that just having a language gives you that much capital, that much power, that much social mobility. I think especially to monolingual English speakers, it’s kind of like, what? What do you mean? It’s just my language. It’s just English.

But it really is. And in your book, you also go through the wartime era, like with the American occupation in Korea, and how that then influenced English as well. Can you tell me about that a little bit?

Dr Cho: Yes, that’s when there was a watershed in the popularity of English, and more importantly, the images of the US in Korea. So, as you know, Korea was colonized by Japan, and Japan pulled out of Korea when the Second World War ended, the US-led bombing of Hiroshima. And then when Japan left, the US came in.

And so that was to help Korea to manage the transition, right, from the colonized country to become an independent country. And to Koreans, the fact that the colonization was ended by the US, right? And then that made them believe that the US was the most generous benefactor.

And so, US basically freed up Korea. And then people had this fantastic image about the US, and coincidentally, the meaning of the US in Korean. In Korean, the US is called Mi-guk, which is based on the Chinese name of the US, Maegaw, and that means beautiful country.

Brynn: What!? Oh, my goodness. Amazing. I’m going to refer to it as beautiful country from now on. (laughs)

Dr Cho: Yes, you are from the beautiful country. (laughs)

Brynn: The beautiful country, yeah. Oh, that’s amazing.

Dr Cho: Yes. So then, and then the US was established as the most beautiful and wonderful country in the world. And as the language of the US, you know, English represented the power.

And then I wrote in the book that the very first president of the US, you know, Seungman Lee, he was baptized by the US because he was anti-communist. And then, and then he himself studied English at an American missionary school in Korea and went to the US to study. And he was the first Korean who finished a PhD.

And then spent most of his life, you know, in the US. So, Seungman Lee identified himself as American with the US. So, in his book, Autobiography, you know, it reveals his identification of himself and with the US, the freedom, the spirit of freedom and democracy.

So, you know, that kind of ideology view, idealised view of a country, and if that image of the country and then associated images of the language have been accumulated throughout history, then it’s only natural for people to believe that that is true, right? So, the whole point here is that English fever in Korea is not a contemporary phenomenon. It has always existed throughout history, but not many people know about this historical background about English in the US.

Brynn: That is so interesting how just idealizing a certain country or a certain culture can have that knock-on effect to the language of that country or culture. And on that, you discuss in your book, these two groups of English speakers in Korea. And in Korean, they actually have their own terms in the Korean language.

So, we’ve got haewepa, and those are people who learned English while living or visiting abroad in English-dominant countries. And guknaepa, people who learn English as a foreign language within Korea. And the fact that these specific terms even exist might be surprising to people, because it was to me when I first read it, who aren’t familiar with English ideologies in Korea.

So, tell us about what these terms say about the socially constructed nature of linguistic insecurity and neo-liberal ideologies in Korea.

Dr Cho: Yes, again, I didn’t think that this is specific to Korea, right? And because it was natural that people refer to each other that all you are haewepa, because you learned English abroad. And then we are guknaepa, because we have never had a chance to go abroad to learn English.

But it was only after I came here, again, when I was discussing my research and when I told this to people and people were surprised, like you, what? Oh, is there such a term?

Brynn: There’s actual words.

Dr Cho: Yeah. It’s an actual word that is popular, you know, in Korea. So, I thought, oh, that’s so interesting.

And then I started wondering, maybe the fact that such a term exists, you know, that reveals that it works as distinction, you know, between those people who learned English abroad and then people who learned English within Korea. So, it’s not, it’s much more than the fact that, you know, certain people had a chance to learn abroad and the certain people didn’t. It really is about class distinction, that because in Korea and also in many countries, in many non-English speaking countries, having an opportunity to go to an advanced country, and a lot of advanced countries are English speaking, right?

And then go to those advanced countries to study, that itself works as a class marker, right? That your family has enough resources to support you. And also, back then in Korea, going abroad, it was not allowed, right?

Except that you are from certain classes such as diplomats, or from those top class, from the top class. So, I started wondering maybe being a heawepa itself, and overseas learners of English itself, it works as a marker of class. And then that naturally, the other group who never had a chance to learn English abroad, they feel inferior, right?

And then they are not confident about the English, which I observed at the graduate school. Because at the graduate school, and I was one of those guknaepa students, because I learned English at home, right? And whereas there were a lot of students who learned English as a child because of their father’s job, you know, as a diplomat or posting, the father was posted to an English-speaking country, you know, from this company.

And then I observed that this underlying feeling of inferiority among guknaepa students, domestic learners of English and including myself.

Brynn: Yeah. Did you feel that you had to work harder as a guknaepa than the other people?

Dr Cho: Yes. Yes. We often, you know, say some things like, oh, yeah, such and such, you know, a person, their pronunciation is excellent.

Okay. She sounds like British, or he sounds like American, or he sounds like a New Yorker, right? And because they learned English, you know, in those places, yeah, in the US, whereas we, there was no term that could define us.

And the thing about language learning is that, okay, you can learn grammar. I can’t generalize, but in general, right? And people who learn the foreign language as a child, then they tend to acquire better pronunciation.

And then those students who learned English at home, and in general, our pronunciation wasn’t as good as that of, you know, overseas learners of English. I think in itself was a significant source of insecurity for us, you know, who wanted to become top interpreters in Korea. And people do get impressed by good pronunciation.

Brynn: Oh, of course. Yes, absolutely.

Dr Cho: Yes. So that was a significant factor. And then that led us to study harder and harder.

Brynn: For 14 to 16 hours a day.

Dr Cho: And then of course, I didn’t know that it was part of neoliberal ideology. So, I worked under those dominant ideologies without knowing that I was influenced by the historical factors of Korea, as well as the contemporary ideology of neoliberalism.

Brynn: Exactly. And I can absolutely see how that would happen, where, like you said, just the fact that these names exist for these two people does signify sort of this larger story that’s going on, where we’re putting more power and emphasis into the people who do get that chance to go abroad, and who do get to go study, you know, because they do maybe have more money, they have more power already. So, they’re kind of already starting with that leg up, and that’s going to make the guknaepa people feel like they have to go even harder, and even higher.

And not only do we have these two groups of people kind of vying for power, there’s also an incredible part in your book that talks specifically about sort of these gender roles in translating and interpreting. So, there’s a part that talks specifically about Korean women who go into translating and interpreting work, and the factors that are related to gender that influence this. Can you tell us more about how these women view English and English related work, and how their language journeys construct gender norms and expectations?

Dr Cho: Sure. In Korea, back then – I mean, things have changed so much.

Brynn: Sure.

Dr Cho: So, these days, a lot of young Koreans, they don’t want to marry. And if they marry, they don’t want to have a child. And I’m not sure if you know this, but Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world.

Brynn: Does it?

Dr Cho: Yes, it’s less than 0.7%. That means only one out of three women has a child. That’s rock bottom.

Brynn: Wow, that’s amazing.

Dr Cho: Yes. However, there is still this social expectation that you have to marry, and then you have to have a child. And that completes your female biography.

If you are a single woman and a childless, then, well, you might be successful in terms of career, but the people, especially from older generations, they will say something about it.

Brynn: Sure. They’ll say, but you haven’t really lived up to the cultural expectations of what womanhood is.

Dr Cho: That’s right, exactly. So, when I conducted this research, that was in 2012. Right?

So, it was 12 years ago. And a lot of my participants, so there was a single participant, they were living under the marital pressure. You have to get married.

Brynn: You need to find a man. Go find a husband. (laughs)

Dr Cho: Yeah, go find a husband. And at the same time, these women, they wanted to have their own career. And some of them, they worked for companies like I did, and they realized there was a glass ceiling.

And there was only so much that women could do in a corporate setting, which is still true in contemporary Korea, because Korea has one of the lowest levels of female executives among the OECD countries. And so, the glass ceiling is so strong there. So as a woman, there’s a limit to how far you can go.

So, I think to these women, becoming a translator and interpreter, there was an opportunity for them to build their own career, free from corporate structures and gender biases and gender norms, and especially jobs relating to Korea. They have this international image, becoming a translator and interpreter. Oh, there are open-up opportunities to work for international companies, or like the UNESCO or the UN, or you can work for an international company based overseas, or you can do some job relating to language.

So, I think they saw learning English as an avenue to lead their own independent female biography. And that’s how they expressed their beliefs in English, you know, as a language that could change their life and free from the gender norms.

Brynn: And that echoes what we saw before with in, you know, the late 1800s and the early 1900s when Korean, I’m assuming more men at that point, were using English as their sort of ticket out and their ticket up that social ladder. And it’s amazing that you then see that happening over 100 years later, but with women this time.

Dr Cho: Oh, yes, oh, that’s a very good point, Brynn. So back then, and of course I, you know, don’t have time to explain everything, right? That is just to relating to that.

So, one of the distinctive points of the history of English in Korea is this phenomenon called New Women’s Movement. And that’s during the Japanese colonization. So, the New Women’s Movement that was inspired by burgeoning feminism in Japan first, and then that influenced Korea.

So those Korean women who were educated overseas in Japan, you know, primarily because Korea was a Japanese colony, and then they learned advanced concept of feminism and women’s rights. So when they went back to Korea, they lead this movement, New Women, literally. So new women, they distinguish themselves from old women, you know, which was, you know, typically a good wife and a wise mother.

Again, there is this Korean expression, “hyunmoo yangcheo”. Literally, again, that means good wife and wise mother. So, there was the female, there was a gender expectation.

And they rejected the old gender norm to establish themselves as a model, like a new model for Korean women. And they, they consumed English and also Western civilization, right, to import Western ideologies and also to become Westernized. So, when the movement first started, it received a lot of support, including people, the Korean male intellectuals, because of the Korean male intellectuals, educating the populace, you know, under the colonisation.

It was one way to achieve independence. However, as the New Women’s Movement gathered forces, the new intellectuals, they started, they turned their back against them, because they didn’t want women to be too strong.

Brynn: You can get powerful, but only to a certain point, and then we’re going to stop you, right?

Dr Cho: Yes, exactly. That’s what happened. And I mean, also those new women, the leaders, and there was, you know, Korea was an extremely conservative country, and it still is, you know, to some extent, but they, you know, believed in free love and free sex, right?

And that didn’t go down well.

Brynn: That wouldn’t have gone down well with the powerful men. No, no, no. And obviously, we cannot talk about gender roles, especially of women, without talking about beauty standards.

And something that many women all over the world can relate to is the idea of unrealistic beauty standards that society sets on us. And your book discusses how these female interpreters and translators actually have to perform what you call aesthetic labour because they’re under pressure to not only be amazing in English, but also to look beautiful in order to compete with others in the translating and interpreting market. Tell us about that.

Dr Cho: Yes. It was a very interesting discovery. At the end of my research, I observed this phenomenon in Korea, which was called good-looking interpreter.

It was a social phenomenon and frequently featured in Korea that they had this capture of a good-looking female interpreter in action. And they said, Oh, such a such person, she’s one of those good-looking interpreters. And I was thinking, this is very interesting.

Why suddenly good-looking interpreters? And if you are familiar with Korea, you would know that there’s social pressure on good looks. And it’s not just for women, for men too.

Korea, it has obsession with beauty. And at first, I thought that maybe it’s part of that. And then as I had conversations, with the participants, I realised that the interpreting market in Korea, it was becoming saturated.

And because the number of schools specialising in translation and interpreting, it increased and that there were more graduates who specialised in English translation and interpreting. And then more and more people had opportunities to go abroad. After the Korean government lifted the ban on going abroad, and more and more people went abroad to learn English and study it.

And so, there were more English speakers in Korea. So, one way to distinguish language professionals from those people who could speak English, but not to the extent that they could translate and interpret. For female interpreters, I found out that it was beauty.

And the more beautiful you are, then the better chances you might get, especially if you are a freelance interpreter. Why? Because a lot of interpreters in Korea, they work for males.

So, the market itself, it gives an illusion that it’s a female dominant profession, because a lot of language workers are females. However, who do they work for? The males.

Brynn: The men.

Dr Cho: Yeah, the men. They are the top executives of companies, and they have important positions in industries. Therefore, it’s the men who hire female interpreters.

And very interestingly, a look was an important factor. And one of those ads that I collected as part of the data, it specifically said that a woman of a certain height, it said that it has to be over a certain height of 163cm or 165cm. And what’s the height to do with the language work?

So that itself, it demonstrates the male expectations of language work and language workers. And hence the term aesthetic labour is not just about language, but it’s also about how you look.

Brynn: Which is just mind-boggling to me to think that somebody could, like you had to, study for 14 to 16 hours a day for years to do all of this really difficult mental and intellectual work. And then to get to a point where someone then says to you, but you also have to conform to beauty standards, that just feels galling, you know? But you don’t see that happening with men at the same rate in Korea, or do you? What do you think?

Well, there was only one male participant. So, and then that person, he had a different motivation to learn English. So, I haven’t had an opportunity, you know, to observe if the same rule applies to men.

But, you know, if you just look at the gender dynamics of the industry, then it speaks itself, right? And it’s a male-dominated, it’s a female, yes, it is a female-dominated profession. However, the industry itself is controlled by men.

Brynn: That’s what’s so interesting.

Dr Cho: Yes.

Brynn: And something that you talk about is, yes, it’s female-dominated, but that also means that because they are freelance workers, they don’t always have consistent work. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dr Cho: Oh, yes, sure. In Korea, the interpreting industry is very different, you know, from, we are in Australia, right, in Australia, and in English-speaking countries, because in English-speaking countries, community interpreting is the mainstream interpreting. So, community interpreting, it refers to the type of interpreting that helps migrants who are not fluent in the societal language, right?

So non-English-speaking migrants who have trouble accessing health care, education, or government assistance, then they need language support. So, translators and interpreters in Australia and in other migrant-receiving countries, they are community interpreters, because they serve communities. Whereas in Korea, Korea is becoming multicultural, because there are a lot more migrants, especially from Southeast Asia.

However, traditionally, Korea is ethnically, it has this belief that Korea is an ethnically homogeneous country. Therefore, the type of interpreting there is not community interpreting. There is community interpreting, but it’s not the mainstream interpreting.

So, the mainstream interpreting is simultaneous interpreting. If you are not familiar with interpreting, you might have seen the image of interpreters working in booths, right? And then speaking into the microphone, interpreting the speech of this prominent political figure, President Obama, giving a speech at the United Nations, or interpreters working for companies.

And because there are a lot of big companies in Korea, like Samsung and Hyundai, and those companies, they have trade relations with businesses overseas. So to deal with the business transactions in English, because English is a global language, then they need a translator and interpreter. So therefore, a lot of interpreters in Korea, they work for businesses or for governments, and either they work for companies on a fixed-term contract or they freelance.

So, when they freelance, again, their clients, they are coming from those industries, government officials or they are top-ranking businessmen. So when you work for these people who have power, then what are the criteria that they are looking at when they hire an interpreter? So again, it’s a gendered question.

Brynn: Yeah, absolutely. And that means that even though this profession of interpreting is so glamorized and, you know, these, especially the women, study for so long, they might have to perform this aesthetic labour, but they might get hired and not have this work all the time. It’s just sort of when these companies need it.

And that means that their own financial income is not going to be consistent, which is just so fascinating to think how glamorized the profession is, but then the reality is, but we’re not always going to have a consistent good income.

Dr Cho: I think that’s the illusion about freelancing jobs. People think that they can be free to build their own career, but when you’re in the industry, you are not controlled. You don’t understand, right?

And then you are literally working for these people at the top. So, therefore, being a freelancer comes with a significant amount of insecurity, feelings of insecurity, financial, and also its feelings, because you don’t know when your next job will be. You might be unemployed for how long or how many months, and that’s why they keep pushing themselves to accept more jobs and to enhance individual competitiveness.

Brynn: Yes, that’s exactly it. It’s that always enhance that competitiveness, look better than anyone else just to try to get those jobs.

Dr Cho: Yes, yes.

Brynn: And this book was published in 2017, and you said that a lot of your work came from 2012. It’s now 2024. Where do you see the future of English language translating and interpreting going in Korea?

Is the profession still ultra-competitive and wrapped up in language ideologies, or do you see it changing in any way?

Dr Cho: I think the profession itself is still very competitive. And then it’s regarded as one of those highly professional jobs. However, because of AI, it’s a very big question.

You know, it’s sometimes said in media that it’s one of the first jobs that might be replaced by AI. Yes, but I don’t see it coming yet because, you know, myself, I have done a lot of experiment with the AI translation and I’m not interpreting. But yes, AI works well for certain type of translation such as legal documents, because the legal documents, there is a template, right?

Brynn: It’s like a formula.

Dr Cho: Yeah, that’s right. So, if you have, if AI has a lot of databases to work out the structure, then it does quite a good job. However, for other types of jobs, and as you know, in language, the hidden meanings of language in humans do a far better job at capturing those meanings. Capturing the nuance of human communication and emotion.

And then, so the AI is still, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of AI. But it’ll be interesting to see how things will change, because the profession itself, especially translation, there has been this prediction that a lot of translators will become post-editors. That means that the AI will do draft translation, and the human translators will review the draft translation done by AI.

And that is already happening in Korea. For example, Netflix, I understand that it does a lot of translation. It’s done by AI, machine translation.

But for interpreting, I think people still feel uncomfortable, right? It’s not natural, speaking to a machine, maybe young generation might not. But people, they prefer to have face to face conversation.

So, for interpreting, I think there is a long way to go.

Brynn: And that is interesting that maybe for, and we should specify for maybe people who don’t know, translating means the written language, literally translating from one language to another, whereas interpreting is for spoken or signed languages. And like you said, that’s often in person. It can be simultaneous or it can be consecutive.

And what about for you? What’s next for you and your work and teaching at Macquarie and research? What do you have coming up?

Dr Cho: Oh, well, in line with this conversation, so I’m working on my third monograph, and it’s about healthcare interpreting in Australia.

Brynn: Which I’m extremely excited about.

Dr Cho: Yes, yes, I can see that. So, I’m approaching healthcare interpreting in Australia again, from a historical and a contemporary perspective, and from a critical social linguistic perspective. Because the contrast in terms of English between Australia and Korea, and that always made me wonder, that why is English so natural in Australia?

I’m asking the question, and people might find that, you know, what a pointless question, because Australia is an English-speaking country. But we know that it’s a multilingual country, and over 300 languages are spoken in Australia. But the English has become so dominant, and then again, so how the historical dominance of English, how has it shaped people’s perspectives on other languages, represented by translation and interpreting, and also their perspectives on other language speakers, represented by interpreters, and how English monolingualism, so how does that impact interpreting?

So, from a historical perspective, again, again, in any societies, and it’s not just Korea and Australia, but in any societies, the very first foreign encounter, it generates interpreting, right? Therefore, interpreting is a birthplace of foreign intercultural communication. So that’s how I see it.

Brynn: That’s going to be fascinating. I cannot wait to read that, because as you know, that’s a lot very similar to research that I am conducting. So, we’re going to have to have another chat sometime soon after that’s done and do another episode.

Well, thank you so much, Jinhyun, for coming on and for talking to me today.

Dr Cho: No worries, I really enjoyed it. I hope that the listeners will enjoy it too.

Brynn: I think they absolutely will. And thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, 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.

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 07/07/2024)

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. Ella van Hest. Ella is a postdoctoral research associate at Ghent University in Belgium at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication, where she is a member of the MULTIPLES research group. She is also affiliated with the interdisciplinary Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees, also known as CESSMIR. Her research interests include language and migration, multilingual communication, (non-professional) interpreting, and language policy. Her previous research for her MA focused on the effects of Flemish language and integration policy on adult newcomers to Belgium.

Today we are going to talk about the research that she conducted for her PhD, which was a linguistic ethnography on language diversity at an abortion clinic in Belgium. The paper, which she co-wrote with July De Wilde and Sarah Van Hoof, is entitled Language policy at an abortion clinic: linguistic capital and agency in treatment decision-making and was published in 2023.

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

Dr van Hest: Thank you for inviting me.

Brynn: To start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to wanting to conduct research into the language practices of an abortion clinic in Belgium for your PhD?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, sure. So actually, when I was 17 years old and I had to make a decision on what to study, I just knew for sure, okay, I want to do something for languages. Like at that point, I was not so reflexive or so aware of what linguistics actually was or what you could do with it.

But I really wanted to do something with languages. So I started Applied Linguistics, German and Spanish, and then into Dutch, which is my native language. And after that, I did a master’s in interpreting.

And well, as I said, at that point, I was not so aware of all the options within linguistics and all the sub fields, but it sort of started when I was doing my master thesis research that I really got interested in the link between language and migration, and especially what it is like for people who come to Belgium, for instance, or any other host society, so to speak. How is it for them if they are learning the language, which was what I focused on for my master thesis, or how is it for them when they don’t speak the language, they’re needing language support, which was then the focus for my PhD research. So that’s how I sort of got interested in that.

And then the fact that I ended up doing research on abortion care and linguistic diversity in abortion care in Belgium was sort of a matter of, okay, what is an unknown context, an underexplored context or setting to study language diversity, because we already know something about it in other medical contexts, for instance, but I thought, okay, abortion care is so relevant and so understudied. And yeah, that’s actually a little bit how I ended up doing that. And I’m also, I have to say, I’ve been very grateful for the clinic, the abortion clinic where I could carry out my research that they allowed me in and let me do that ethnographic research there.

Brynn: That’s what I found so interesting about your paper was the setting. The research that I’m doing for my PhD also looks at medical settings and how language is assessed and how linguistic proficiency is assessed and then how interpreters are then called or used or not used. That’s what was so interesting in reading your paper was that it was at an abortion clinic, which I personally haven’t come across before. But as you said, it is such an important setting where we do need to know more about what happens with language at this clinic.

And in the paper, you start off by talking about the language policy of that clinic where you were conducting the research. This particular institution’s policy said that a patient seeking a medical abortion needed to have a strong proficiency in Dutch, English or French.

Can you just tell us as listeners, what exactly is a medical abortion? How does that differ from a surgical abortion? And why did the clinic state that this language policy was necessary?

Dr van Hest: That was indeed the most important point of this particular paper that we’re discussing now, which was also published in the Journal of Language Policy. So, like the focus was really on that particular aspect of the linguistic diversity in the clinic, because I also focused on, as you mentioned, right, like using interpreters or not, or also conversational, interactional dynamics of multilingual counselling sessions.

But for this particular paper, the focus was on this language policy about medical abortion. So, what is medical abortion? Well, in Belgium and also in a lot of other countries, but there are some differences, but in Belgium, usually women, when they want to terminate the pregnancy, they can choose between two different treatment types.

And one is a medical abortion and the other one is surgical. And the medical abortion, which this paper is mainly about, consists of taking several pills, medication. Usually this is done in two phases, but again, there are differences in approaches and in other countries, sometimes they only use one type of medication or they do it in a different way.

So, but the situation in Belgium is that usually women first take medication that blocks the pregnancy hormone. And then later on, like two days later, they have to take medication that actually will make the uterus contract and cause a miscarriage. So that’s one treatment option.

And that’s very different from a surgical abortion where it’s actually a doctor who performs the abortion, who empties the uterus via a suction, like a suction aspiration. And so those are two completely different types of treatments. And there’s some factors that influence eligibility.

For instance, pregnancy duration. And here there’s differences between countries, but in Belgium generally, they limit it until about eight, nine weeks of pregnancy. Because after that term, the foetus is larger and it could lead to more complications.

So, a surgical abortion is preferred. And then there’s also all other kinds of medical or psychosocial factors that could influence the decision for which treatment. But, and that’s the main point of this paper, in this particular clinic, also language plays a huge role.

And it’s actually a little bit complicated, so maybe bear with me. The whole point of this medical abortion, as I just explained, it’s about taking medication on two different days and it’s about your body causing you to have a miscarriage. And it’s really a whole process of managing, it’s a woman who has to sort of do the work.

There is a small risk of complications. It’s very small, it’s a very safe procedure in general, but something might happen, and usually that’s excessive blood loss. But in any case, these complications might occur.

And especially since COVID, there’s a lot of emphasis on making sure that the clinic can follow up while women are doing this treatment at home. So, before the pandemic, that’s also, I didn’t specify that earlier on, but a large part of my data collection was during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, the clinic made sure to sort of plan the two phases of the medication in the clinic.

So, women would have that miscarriage in the clinic usually, but also there, there was sometimes, the problem sometimes was that the miscarriage did not happen in the foreseen timeframe. And so, they reserved a certain time slot for women to be in the clinic to have that miscarriage, but then in some cases it didn’t happen. And then they sort of, they had to send her home and say, look, okay, you’re going to have this miscarriage at some point during the day.

In case there’s anything wrong or you have questions, you need to call us on this phone number. And so that’s where phone communication, verbal communication comes in and that’s where language starts playing a key role. And during the pandemic, the clinic decided sort of as a measure to limit the amount of people present in one physical space, right?

They said, okay, let’s do all these miscarriages from home. So, like, let’s have the women manage the miscarriage from home all by themselves, but with telephone backup, right? So, it’s sort of almost like a kind of help line to call the clinic, but not even just a help line.

Like they were actually also really supposed to call the clinic between a certain timeframe during a treatment to update them. Like how is it going? How is the blood loss? How is the treatment going?

And so, with that in mind, the clinic said, okay, this is too complicated when there’s a language barrier. When we cannot understand each other, it’s very hard for us to assess, are these cramps normal? Is this too much blood loss or is it a normal amount should we send this woman to emergency care or not? Yeah, what is she feeling? How is she doing?

And so, to ensure safety, the clinic said, okay, look, if there’s too much of a language barrier, we don’t offer this option. And as you mentioned, Dutch, English and French are the three languages which are allowed, so to speak, to have the medical abortion. So, if a woman has some or enough proficiency, whatever that is, because the definition of what exactly is enough proficiency is not that clear-cut.

But in any case, she needs to have proficiency in one of those languages. And that’s a logical consequence of the linguistic reality in Flanders, which is where I carried out my research. So in Flanders, Dutch is the official language, mother tongue of all the staff working in the clinic.

But since we’re in Belgium, and French is another official language, many of the staff also speak some French. And then there’s English as the global language that everyone in high school learns and is supposed to know or have proficiency in when they look for jobs and so on. So those three institutional languages, so to speak, are okay for being eligible for a medical abortion.

It’s quite complicated. It has to do with safety and the unpredictability as well of the medical abortion. Perhaps I did not emphasise that enough before, but I talked about the small risk of complications, but there’s just also a general unpredictability in the sense that with surgical abortion, you know upfront very clearly, treatment is going to happen like this and it’s going to take about 20 minutes.

Whereas with the medical abortion, for some women, this miscarriage happens within three, four hours. For others, it can last up to even 24 hours. So there’s a very high variation in how smooth it goes, also in terms of pain, like some women experience like bearable cramps, others have a lot of cramps, a lot of pain.

And so that’s why it’s so hard to manage. And that’s why communication plays a key role for this clinic.

Brynn: And it’s really interesting that what you mentioned about the communication on the telephone being so important, and especially in this sort of post-COVID world, and like you said, collecting this data during COVID, all across the world, we all know that medical centres kind of had to make a lot of choices. Whether you were in a hospital or a GP or an abortion clinic, anything like that, there was this real reduction in the number of people who could come into the medical centre. And so that’s what is fascinating in this paper, is the amount of telephone communication that needs to be happening in this circumstance.

And kind of on that note, a really interesting piece of data that you uncovered in your research was that this staff at this clinic seemed to be kind of unaware of the potential for using telephone interpreters with their linguistic minority clients. And that non-professional interpreters, or what we might call ad hoc interpreters, such as the client’s family member, were often used to facilitate communication, especially for the psychological counselling aspect. Can you tell us about why the clinic had not made the use of professional interpreters more of an institutional policy?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, of course. And I think I have to also nuance here a little bit or give some background information. First of all, you mentioned that sometimes they use non-professional interpreters, like the client’s partners or relatives or friends, like a person they brought along to the clinic with them for language support and other types of support.

And so perhaps I should explain here that in Belgium, women, when they want to terminate the pregnancy, they first need to receive counselling, like the first appointment. And then they have to sort of do this session with an employee of the clinic, which can be a psychologist or a nurse or social worker to sort of see, you know, are they sure that they want the abortion and then explore a bit the context. There’s usually also the whole explanation of the treatments, you know, like what to expect.

And, you know, also this decision-making usually when they’re eligible for both. And contraceptive counselling. So that’s sort of this first session.

And then, and then that’s stipulated by Belgian law, women have to wait for six days before they can have their actual treatment. Yeah, so then during that first appointment, it’s the second appointment for the actual treatment is then scheduled. And so, it’s during those counselling sessions that they do sometimes use professional interpreters. I have to say rarely, but I mean, there were staff who offered this option. I sometimes saw it happening. It was not the majority of cases while I was there for sure.

But very often this person that the client had brought along would act as the interpreter during that consultation, that counselling session, let’s say. But then this medical abortion and then this whole fact of, you know, it has to be followed up on by telephone. There, indeed, as you mentioned, I noticed while interviewing staff that they were not really considering to use telephone interpreters and that they were not really aware of the technical option to do so, so that you sort of have like this three-way telephone conversation.

But what they also mentioned, and that’s actually true, looking at the numbers of interpreting services in Flanders, is that there’s just a shortage of certified interpreters. And especially in terms of what I just explained about this unpredictability of the medical abortion, the clinic says, yeah, look, even if we would know how to technically do this with telephone interpreters, we’re still not sure that there’s actually an interpreter available at that point, because we never know when the client is going to, if she’s going to call us, if so, when she’s going to call us to ask about certain problems or complications that she’s experiencing. So that unpredictability aspect is still there, despite, I mean, even if you would have the technical knowledge to connect an interpreter on the phone.

And then what I perhaps should also explain is that in this particular clinic where I carried out my research, it was just one, like it didn’t visit various clinics in Flanders or in Belgium for that matter. But the majority of clients is, well, let’s say, I mean, I have difficulty using the word native, but you know what I mean? Like there’s usually like not really a huge communication barrier.

And there’s sort of like this minority parts of the clientele with whom the staff need to find ways to communicate. So perhaps it’s also, I can imagine, for instance, settings where clinics, where there’s a higher amount of migrant clients or that have a very specific target audience, for instance, where they would be more aware of and more explicit about language. But that was not really the case here.

And then in general, the use of interpreters. So even, let’s say for the counselling part, leaving aside now the medical abortion for a moment. Also there, I noticed, I mean, they have the infrastructure, they do sometimes offer, I mean, they have like this agreement with the certified interpreting service.

What I saw there was a lot of differences between staff members in terms of how familiar they were with the options of how to book an interpreter, how to make the phone call, what to ask, what to do when you’re doing a consultation with an interpreter. And yeah, also just like personal preference. Like there was a lot of discretionary power for staff to sort of decide what they wanted to do about it.

But I have to say that actually now I’m still in touch with people from the clinic where I conduct my research. So, I finished my PhD in October last year. So now I’m sort of seeing with them how we can make the findings of my PhD usable, like having really practical relevance for them and to sort of help them with decision-making aids on when to use an interpreter or when not and this kind of thing.

So, I do have to say that being there as a researcher, as an ethnographer, as an observer, this language awareness and awareness of using interpreting services did sort of grow. Yeah.

Brynn: And that part that you were just saying about it being so discretionary and how the decisions would sort of differ between staff members about, does this person have enough language proficiency to be eligible for a medical abortion or no, they don’t have enough language proficiency. They need to only be able to get a surgical abortion. That was really, really fascinating to see that there wasn’t sort of this, you know, assessment checklist or anything like that, because I’ve come across that in my research as well, that really having some sort of a concrete step-by-step process of this is how you assess a patient’s language proficiency, it doesn’t exist in that many places in the world.

So it was interesting to read in that context that that was happening for you too. And I’m really glad that you mentioned about how you as a researcher and ethnographer, sort of the research that you’ve conducted has now potentially led to some effects, which I want to get back to that. I want to hear about that in a minute.

I do want to come to one point in the paper because it stuck out to me. In the paper you say, and this is a quote, among the diverse group of clients in the clinic, a social order or stratification becomes apparent due to the linguistic capital that is unequally distributed.

Talk to us about what you mean by linguistic capital because not everyone who listens to us is a linguist. They might not know what this concept of linguistic capital is, but how did that capital affect the clients from different linguistic backgrounds?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, okay, so linguistic capital, we’re really entering into sort of the theory of social linguistics now, right? So basically, what’s the most important to understand that that’s sort of the viewpoint for which I look at language is that it’s a very social thing. Language can be a regulator or an enabler.

It’s like a resource for people to use. Language allows us to act as social human beings, you know? And this concept of language capital or linguistic capital, which was coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, is sort of a concept that helps us to see how language functions as a form of social power or within the framework of Bourdieu.

It’s a kind of cultural capital that gives you access to certain spaces in society and that has a certain value, and that’s the most important. So that’s also the linguistic capital. So Bourdieu theorized it as this kind of economic metaphor, like some languages are more valuable on the market than others.

So yeah, that idea of his has then been sort of picked up by social linguists, and then nowadays we also see this more as a dynamic. We use the concept to sort of also unpack the dynamics of how do these processes of differentiation come about and so on, whereas with Bourdieu it was a little bit more like static, there’s a certain value or not, whereas nowadays we sort of also look more like how do linguistic resources travel, right? That’s an idea of Jan Blommaert, this idea that your linguistic capital or your resources may be valuable in one place, but then when you go somewhere else, they’re not, or they’re only valuable in certain contexts or domains of society.

So yeah, that’s a little bit what linguistic capital is about. I mean, in a nutshell, right? I am sure there’s others who would explain this so much better than I do now, but I sort of found the concept useful to discuss what was going on in the clinic here because it sort of seems like certain clients in this abortion clinic, when they do have the linguistic capital, they have the free choice to choose between medical and surgical abortion, which is often also important emotionally, because there’s a difference between the clients in the clinic in that they have different linguistic capital, and if they dispose of the right linguistic capital, it sort of allows them to freely choose between medical or surgical abortion, which are two completely different ways of experiencing an abortion.

So, there’s this emotional aspect to it. And it also goes beyond the choosing between the two treatment types. I’m also thinking about looking up information on the website, for instance, before they actually go to the abortion clinic.

Also, the website is available in Dutch, French and English of this abortion clinic. And so, you sort of have this difference in which linguistic capital you can, or how much your linguistic resources are worth in that setting. And Dutch, English and French are highly valued because they allow for you as a client to be cared for when you’re at home doing the medical abortion and the clinic is talking to you on the phone. So that’s what it’s about, actually.

Brynn: It’s really evident in the paper, and that’s something that I found really fascinating, was this idea of choice and how somebody who comes in with that linguistic capital of speaking or having, quote, high proficiency in French, Dutch or English, they are going to have a choice. They’re going to a certain extent, obviously. At a certain stage of the pregnancy, they’re going to have a choice if they want to do the medical abortion or the surgical abortion.

And you’re right. It can be an emotionally trying decision or time. And to give a person a choice in that type of situation does mean a lot.

And like you said, if someone is deemed to not have that proficiency, then that choice is kind of automatically taken away. And their treatment option is chosen for them. And in the paper, towards the end of the paper, you discuss a concept called exclusive inclusion, which was written about by Roberman in 2015.

What does exclusive inclusion mean? And how did you see it play out in the language policy at this clinic?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, so this concept, exclusive inclusion, refers to a kind of exclusion, but not the exclusion that we typically think of in terms of completely discriminating people or not allowing them access to crucial spaces in society or crucial services or means. So, what Roberman explains is that when we look at inclusion, exclusion dynamics, we should look beyond material sufficiency and sort of like her paper is also titled, not to be hungry is not enough. So, it’s like it’s not just about making sure that people can buy food and that they’re not living in poverty.

It’s also about making sure they can actually participate in spaces, practices that are socially relevant. Yeah, that are, as she describes it, it’s about access to social resources of real value and to participation in the arenas of social recognition and belonging. So, in terms of the abortion clinic and why I found the concept applicable in this case is because I thought, well, these women for sure also receive good abortion care.

They’re helped by this very engaged team of practitioners, which I also really want to emphasise. They were so engaged. They were so helpful. This whole policy was also thought of for their safety, right? So, it’s like out of genuine concern. And they receive good care.

They’re helped in a timely manner. You could actually even say that the surgical abortion is sort of, I mean, and there’s definitely discussions about that, but I mean, it’s sort of like, I talked about this unpredictability, right, of the medical abortion, whereas, you know, with surgical abortion, you know, like, okay, it’s that day. It’s going to be just 20 minutes, then it’s over. It’s immediately checked with an ultrasound and so on. It’s like sort of, I mean, it is a good abortion care. It is a good abortion treatment.

So, they’re not excluded, but they are exclusively included in the sense that they don’t have the same level of participation. They don’t have the same level of choice. When you compare them to other clients who did possess or do possess the right linguistic resources.

So that’s for me what the concept is about.

Brynn: Yeah, it’s all about that choice, right? It’s saying that, okay, well, this group of people can have a choice. This group of people is still going to get good treatment, but they can’t have the same level of choice as the other group of people.

And you do in the paper, you really do a great job, I think, of taking great care to mention that this abortion clinic really did create this language policy from a place of genuine precaution and medical care for its clients. And you mentioned that it’s been reconfiguring other policies to reflect its linguistically diverse clients. You do reflect that it could do more to make medical abortions accessible to clients of all linguistic backgrounds.

And maybe that circles us back to what you had sort of hinted at before, that you’re working with that particular clinic now and talking about what the clinic could do to facilitate that. Are you able to tell us anything that you’re working on in that space now with the clinic?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, sure. So, first of all, again, I cannot stress it enough that this clinic where I studied the language practices, I mean, I do adopt sort of a critical stance in the paper, of course. I mean, it’s a critical social linguistic endeavour, but they were so engaged as a team.

And so, I remember their literal wording about their clients, also talking to them on the phone, such as, I’m worried because, you know, like they’re really, they really want to just make sure that they’re safe. And it’s also a matter of responsibility, obviously, like legal responsibility, you know, like as a clinic, they’re responsible for making sure these abortions happen in safe circumstances. And, you know, as soon as that cannot be fully guaranteed, they have to be very careful with that.

But then, yeah, again, you could say, OK, this is safety and these safety concerns are justified, but the safety structure or the sort of securitizing structure that’s now in place, fully relies on verbal communication. And I think that’s something that they, where they might rethink the possibility, like the role of communication, perhaps with the use of technology, perhaps making sure there are some visual aids with which clients could, I don’t know, indicate the levels of pain they’re experiencing or the amount of blood loss or something like that. I don’t know.

I mean, of course, it’s not a quick solution that’s available for us, but rethinking the need for verbal communication and thinking about alternatives, I think. And then perhaps I should also mention here that it’s not only telephone follow-up, like on the day where women are self-managing the miscarriage. There’s also an important aspect, communication aspect, to the counselling or to the, let’s say, when women come to the clinic to receive their first medications.

Remember, I explained, first they take medication that blocks the pregnancy hormone. So, when they come for that first medication, that’s done in the clinic because at that appointment, they also receive all the instructions for them managing the miscarriage two days later in their homes. And so those instructions are also really detailed.

You know, it’s like it’s two pages with written instructions, which are again available in Dutch, French and English. And that then usually nurse goes over and explains point by point, like you should be careful for this or when this happens, this is normal, when this happens, this is not normal. Then you should call us, then you should go to emergency care.

You know, like all this kind of, also the schedule, like when to take the medication, how many pills, which pain medication can you take and when and so on. So, they’re like quite complicated instructions. And also on that part, the staff is worried in terms of language, like that clients might not understand fully how they should then perform the abortion themselves.

But there, for instance, I think you could work with translated or multilingual video instructions or translated materials in any kind of way. And then to answer your question about sort of what I’m working on now or talking about now with the clinic is that they actually do have these videos explaining the different treatment types and again, available in Dutch, English and French, but they are considering to on the long term having those translated as well to, I would say minority languages, but I mean, languages that a considerable part of their clients speak. So that I think would be one step where you sort of have like the all the control over the process of explaining the instructions.

But then again, the telephone follow-up from a distance will remain an issue. Now, one of the ideas that I’m currently discussing with the person responsible for the clinic, like coordinator, is to understand how abortion practitioners abroad deal with language diversity when offering medical abortions. Because, I mean, generally, as we were mentioning, as we were discussing in the beginning, there hasn’t been that much attention for linguistic diversity in abortion care.

And I mean, abortion care generally, it’s like, as I said, the linguistic aspects of that are quite understudied. And so, I would love to set up a study to investigate how the medical abortion is dealt with abroad. Because I think, and as I mentioned in the beginning, there are some differences between different countries.

And whereas in Belgium, you still sort of have like very high, I mean, majority of the performed abortions are still surgical abortions. But there is an evolution towards more medical abortion that’s ongoing. Like, I think in like 10 years or so, the amount of medical abortions doubled.

And so, it’s really some more and more often chosen treatment type. And so, I think it would be very interesting to see, okay, in countries where this medical abortion is already more common. I mean, it’s impossible that they don’t face a linguistic diversity among their clients.

So how do they do it? And what could be learned from them? Which best practices are there that could be applied also here?

Brynn: That would be really interesting to be able to do that type of research with other people abroad. Because you’re right, it really does differ country to country. And I would be so fascinated to hear what you learn.

And I love that idea of the potential for video instructions. It reminds me of a paper that I read for research that I did that talked about translated discharge papers like from a hospital. They found that the patients that needed it translated into other languages sometimes also had low levels of literacy in general.

And they found that it was easier to actually audio record the discharge paper instructions. And they were able to put it into… Have you ever seen those greeting cards where you can open them and they’ll play a song?

Dr van Hest: Right, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. Like birthday cards?

Brynn: Yeah, like birthday cards. So they were able to record the discharge instructions onto these cards where you would open it and it would play the instructions for you. And so obviously something like that wouldn’t necessarily work in this type of a medical situation, but kind of what you said, just sort of thinking outside the box, reconfiguring things, making things different than they have been potentially could be a solution.

Other than this really, really interesting postdoctoral work that you’re doing, is there anything else that’s coming up for you? Any other projects that you’re working on or anything that your research group is doing that you find interesting that you’d like to talk to us about?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, so as you mentioned in the beginning, when introducing me, I’m now a postdoctoral research associate here at the department. So, I’m not really working currently, I’m not really working on the abortion topic, but I do hope to sort of find ways in the near future to develop the ideas I have now and sort of collect more data. But what I am working on now is on something completely different.

Nothing to do, it has nothing to do with abortion, but it is still about language and migration and linguistic diversity in institutional settings. But I’m currently working on a project which is very applied, very practice oriented and which is called MATIAS, which stands for Machine Translation to Inform Asylum Seekers. And the idea is that we develop a prototype of a notification tool, a multilingual notification tool that can be used in asylum centres, in asylum reception centres.

So, we also work together very closely with the federal agency, the Belgian federal agency for the reception of asylum seekers. And so, I’ve been visiting various reception centres for data collection in the past year, because what we want to do with this tool is it’s going to be a tool that will allow staff working at reception centres to sort of to update and inform residents about activities and practical stuff, things that are going on in the centre. Like, oh, apologies, the water will be shut off between four and five tomorrow because they’re going to come and do some works.

Or don’t forget, tomorrow we have this activity at 8 p.m. Please join us, something like that, because that’s often very rapid communication or it’s not always feasible to translate that in so many different languages. And obviously in asylum perceptions facilities, there’s a lot of linguistic diversity. And the idea is that the tool would then allow staff to just write that message in Dutch, English or French.

Again, we have those three dominant languages there. And that then the system will translate and send out the messages in the right language to the residents who would then receive the message on their smartphone. And then, you know, one resident would receive that same message in Arabic and the other one in Turkish, for instance, and another one in Pashto.

And so that’s the idea. So, something completely different, very, very practice oriented, very practical, very applied. But it’s really, it’s a lot of fun and it’s my first steps in the field of machine translation as well and language technology.

So that’s fascinating. And then on the sides, I am obviously still developing my ideas on the data I collected for my doctoral research. And also, this whole phenomenon of nonprofessional interpreting really caught my attention when I was doing my PhD.

So, they have like these clients bringing in relatives or their partner or a friend, someone close to them for language interpreting. And what we see in interpreting studies is, I mean, there’s already a lot of research going on that takes this very interactional and institutional point of view. Sort of like, OK, in this particular setting, you have these people coming and going.

And I’m very fascinated to see how those interpreters, those nonprofessional interpreters, so to speak, how they sort of make sense of that and also of their own role and how does that differ when they go from one setting to the other and so on. So, I’m working on something to hopefully in the near future research that. And yeah, I’m also working together with my colleagues on collecting work that deals with nonprofessional interpreting and sort of trying to really get this contextualised perspective.

Like, who are these people? What are the institutional, interactional expectations to sort of shed light on all these different kinds of nonprofessional interpreting practices and different kinds of nonprofessional interpreters? So yeah, that’s sort of something that really became a topic of interest for me research wise.

So yeah, and then we’ll see what the future brings and what I can get funding for and so on. It will also depend a little bit on that. The connecting thread for sure is always language and migration, linguistic diversity in institutional settings.

So, I will continue to be working on that, yes.

Brynn: Ella, your work sounds so cool. Massive congratulations to you for finishing your PhD last year. As someone who has just started on her PhD, I’m looking at you and thinking, okay, I can do this. She did it. We can do it.

Dr van Hest: It’s so exciting for you. You still have the whole trajectory ahead of you. So yeah, enjoy it, I would say as well. It’s so fascinating.

Brynn: Exciting and scary, but also very awesome. So, all of the things. Ella, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today, to talk about your work. And I can’t wait to hear where your work goes from here.

Dr van Hest: Thank you so much again for having invited me here today. It was amazing to talk to you.

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.

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

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

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

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

FAQs

What exactly is a systematic literature review (SLR)?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you find it useful, please cite as:

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

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

Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Update 07/03/2025: A Chinese translation of the transcript below is now available on The Nexus.

Transcript

Welcome to the New Books Network.

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 Gretchen McCulloch.

Gretchen has written a resident linguist column at The Toast and at Wired. She’s also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. Today we’re going to talk about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.

Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Gretchen, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me.

Brynn: To start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to wanting to understand more about the intersection between language and the internet?

Gretchen: I first got interested in linguistics when I was maybe 12 or 13. And I remember coming across a pop linguistics book on the shelf that was just written by someone who’d also written some other pop science books. And so, I picked it up and I was like, oh, this is sort of neat.

And I got about halfway through and I was, this is just so cool. Like, I can’t put this down. I can’t stop thinking about this. I need to ask for all of the pop linguistics books for birthdays and Christmases and these sorts of things. And like, this is what I’m going to go to university and study, like there’s a whole thing. You could become a whole linguist and do this and this stuff.

So, in many ways, writing a pop linguistics book was a return to that experience of pop linguistics books being the thing that got me into the rest of the linguistics. I think for why internet language specifically, like many linguists, I seem to have a little language analysing module in my brain that I can’t really turn it off. You get me down at the pub or something and we’re sitting here and we’re trying to have a nice conversation about the weather or something, but I’m also secretly analysing your vowels. That’s just what my brain is doing.

And so, I spend a lot of time online. I wanted to know what was going on because I kept seeing people doing things that seemed like they might be part of a bigger picture or bigger pattern. People write in to me or they tag me on social media and they’re like, ever since I read your book, I can’t stop analysing my text messages. Like I keep thinking about the punctuation that I’m using or like the emoji that people are picking. When does this turn off? And I’m like, I’m so sorry, you’re on this side now. You’re very welcome to the club.

Brynn: 100%, the type of experience that I’ve had as well, where you do, your brain just starts tick, tick, ticking along and you’re analysing everything that everybody is saying.

In Because Internet, one of the first things that you talk about is the idea of networks. And here you aren’t just referring to the internet. You discuss how our networks of friends, particularly in our teenage years, have a profound effect on how we use language. Can you talk to us about what linguists have discovered about the relationship between our social networks as teenagers and the types of language that we come to use as adults?

Gretchen: Many of the factors that we look at as linguists with respect to language are sort of your typical demographic variables. You know, things like age, gender, race, ethnicity, geography, where people are based. But these are sort of proxies for people who talk to each other more, also tend to talk more like each other.

And the easier way to study that, especially before you have the ability to say, okay, so and so is following so and so and so they must get this amount of information from them, is to say, well, all these kids attend the same high school, or all these people live in the same town, or all these people are around the same age or the same gender, and they live in the same area. And so therefore they’re probably going to be hanging out with each other. But we can get more fine-grained than that.

And some of the early work in this area was done in high schools. So, the linguist Penny Eckert embedded in a high school in the 1980s, and she distinguishes between these two social groups called jocks and burnouts. And these two groups of kids, even though many of them were from the same backgrounds or the same ranges of backgrounds, talked differently from each other based on the social attitudes that they were trying to embody.

So, in the case of the jocks and burnouts, the burnouts had a more local accent that was indexed with working class identity and sort of not aligning with the power structures of the school where you’re like, oh, the school’s going to let me become student council president. Like, that sounds great. No, it’s like, I don’t care about this school.

I’m going to drop out as soon as I can and I’m going to not do this. One of the quotes from that study is the, whether you say a sentence that I would say, the buses with the antennas on top. And there’s an example of it pronounced closer to how I would say the bosses with the antennas on top.

As that sort of like Great Lakes, Northern Cities pronunciation, which is a locally salient working-class identity in the area. And the burnouts were doing more of that pronunciation. This is getting at how do you personally identify and you can affect your accent, even if you’re not necessarily doing like, I’m going to front my A’s a bit, you know?

But you’re being like, I want to talk like these people because they’re cool. And I also want to wear the jeans that they’re wearing. And I also want to eat the food that they’re wearing or wear the backpack that they’re wearing or carry my backpack only on one shoulder because that’s what the cool kids are doing or whatever the locally salient variables are.

And some of those are linguistic. And there’s another study by a linguist named Mary Buchholz who looked at nerd girls in California because I had read this Jocks and Burnouts study and I was like, I don’t really know which one of these I am. And then I read the nerd girl study and I was like, I am entirely too called out by this.

Brynn: (laughs) You’re being sub-tweeted.

Gretchen: Yeah, I’m like, oh, okay, well. I did not grow up in California, I grew up in Canada, I still live in Canada. This sort of nerd, additional nerd group, which wasn’t participating in any of these cool variables and they were like, I’m going to pronounce things very, like hyper-articulately, I’m not going to drop any consonants and I’m going to make a lot of puns.

And I was like, how did you know? (laughs)

Brynn: (laughs) Why are you in my room? How can you hear what I’m saying?

Gretchen: These people like wordplay, oh, I see. So, this got me interested in, like, linguists have identified that there are social groups that are relevant, you know, before the Internet Day. But it was really hard to do this type of fine-grained social network analysis before the Internet made us all sort of digitise a lot of our relationships and make them explicit for other people to see.

So instead of being like, because if you want to do this sort of social network analysis, you can do it. What you do is you go into the high school and you ask every kid to list five or 10 of their friends and maybe in order of how close they are to them or something like that. And then you cross-reference all the lists.

And it sort of works in a high school, which is a relatively closed environment, where you assume that most of the kids are mostly friends with other kids in that high school. But when you get to adulthood, people stop having this sort of very consistent and predictable social trajectory. Because you can say, in a given area, all the 17-year-olds are going to be doing roughly the same thing in terms of being required to go to school.

Once you’re, and maybe even there’s an extent of, as higher education has become more ubiquitous, a lot of people are doing a university stage, although not everybody. But certainly, once you get to 25, all bets are off. So some people are moving to a different place, some people are taking up new hobbies, some people are becoming parents, some people are doing all of these sorts of things that can affect what language you use and how your language keeps shifting, but no longer in this consistent and predictable step-by-step way where you can say, okay, 13-year-olds are doing this and 17-year-olds are doing something different.

But if you look at clusters of interest groups – so there’s one study that I cited in Because Internet where they looked at people who had joined beer hobbyist message boards. They were talking to each other about beer tasting and all the different types of beer that they had. And there’s not obviously a consistent age that everybody is.

There’s not a consistent – other demographic factors that they are, but what they had in common was they were members of this beer group and they were learning the words to describe beer. Things like “aroma” or “S” for, I think it’s scent or something like this. Depending on when they joined the beer forum, they were using different terms, either the older term or the newer term based on when they joined the forum.

So, this is sort of a time-based effect, but it’s based on interest group rather than based on the sort of crude demographic factors of approximately, like here’s how all the 37-year-olds are talking. People do really different things with their lives at age 37. Like, people are in very different positions, but this is your first week on the beer forum versus you’ve been here for two years is like a different way of kind of slicing people according to their interests.

And then there was another study that some people did about networks on Twitter, where they classified people into networks based on who they were talking to. So, there’s sort of a book Twitter, or there’s like a parenting Twitter, or there’s like a sports Twitter or like tech Twitter. And these groups have skews that have some demographic factors in common.

So, you might get one group that’s like 60-40 men to women, and you might get another group that’s 60-40 in the other direction. So, there’s a demographic skew there, but it’s certainly not an absolute. What they found was that people tended to talk like other people in their cluster, more than they talked like an average member of their, I think they were using gender based on like inferred information from census information about names.

But also, it’s saying that the way that we talk has a lot to do with our choices and our friends and who we want to associate with. And not only, okay, you’re destined to talk this way because you’re like 24 and female. That’s a way of doing those statistics and trying to get at differences between social groups before we were able to do more fine-grained network analysis.

Brynn: It’s so interesting when you think, like what you were saying, I like this idea of people in their social groups, kind of, especially in those young years, try on dialects or accents or ways of speaking kind in the same way that you do with your fashion when you’re in that same age. And how all of those sorts of series of tryings on affect then how you come to speak as an adult.

And something else that you discuss in the book is this concept of weak ties and strong ties when it comes to language. Can you tell me what do those terms mean? And you started to talk about gender. How can gender impact these ties?

Gretchen: So weak ties versus strong ties are originally from a paper by I think an economist named Mark Granovetter. And he talks about the piece, so strong ties are people that you know very well, you spend a lot of time with, and most crucially, they are also densely embedded into your social network. So, they know a lot of the same people as you do.

So, if you have a group of friends who all hang out with each other, so you’re friends with person A and person B, person A and B are also friends with each other, and so on and so forth. So, you have a group where everybody sort of knows each other. So, you could think of something like a class of students in the school, probably all sort of know each other, or group people at a workplace, maybe all sort of know each other.

A weak tie is someone who probably you don’t spend as much time with, but more crucially, you don’t have as many other connections in common. In linguistics, for example, I know a lot of linguists, but also, I know a lot of people who aren’t employed in linguistics, who don’t have a linguistics background because I also do media and journalism and all of this sort of stuff, pay attention to this world of academia. So, for a lot of those non-linguists that I know, if I go to a non-linguist conference, I’m maybe the only linguist there, I’m the only linguist they know.

And I’m a weak tie that to them that represents this whole open community to the field of linguistics. And conversely, when I go to a linguistics conference, I’m one of the few people there, sometimes the only person there who’s not an academic, for whom my primary network is not an academic one. And so, to the linguists at the linguistics conference, I am so this weak tie source of information to bridge this whole other field of people who are doing interesting things outside of academia.

And what Granovetter found was that people often tend to get jobs via weak ties. For example, you’re unlikely to get a job via your partner, because your partner and you probably know a lot of the same people because you probably socialise together. And so you’d probably know about it directly more than a person that you already know.

But you might get a job via somebody that you knew for a year or two, like 10 years ago, and you took one class together. And for them, it was like, an elective and they actually got a job in some other field. And now their field is hiring and they know all these people who you don’t know.

And one of those people is hiring. And so, they are sort of a bridge to a larger gateway. And it’s much more common to find a job via a weak tie than it is via a strong tie because weak ties have so many other people that they are strongly connected to or that maybe they’re weakly connected to that can like bring in additional information.

So, when it comes to language change, your strong ties, people that you have a lot of friends in common with, you probably already talk a lot like they do. Like, you’re more likely to pick up, to talk the way the people that you see all the time and that you have lots of friends in common with also talk like. But you’re more likely to linguistic innovations or to unfamiliar linguistic features, even if they’ve been around for a long time, but they’re new to you, via people that are weaker ties to you, precisely because they bring in this novel to your social network, because you’re not already densely connected with them.

There’s someone who did a statistical model of like, how do we account for linguistic innovation in terms of people talking to each other differently? And if you run a network analysis of everybody or strong ties, you don’t get any linguistic innovation because everyone’s all talking like each other.

And if you run a social network analysis where everyone is weak ties, like no one has this dense connection to each other, I think that everybody is weak ties is sort of like being in an airport. You don’t, there’s just a bunch of people there and you have this sort of transitory connection with them or being in like a tourist trap, like nobody’s sort of staying there and being there the whole time, getting to know people very well. Whereas a small town is more likely to be more dense ties because there’s only so many people and so you can all kind of get to know each other.

The same as a relatively closed community, like a high school or an elementary school, which is, especially if it’s fairly small, all the students might sort of recognize each other and have multiple ways of getting to know each other. So, if everybody’s weak ties, then there’s never any one thing that sort of catches on in trends because it’s just like you’re not in contact with each other enough to actually influence each other. If everybody’s strong ties, there’s just one thing that stays popular the whole time.

But if you have this mix of strong and weak ties, so let’s say I hear a new form from someone who I know is a weak tie, and then maybe I hear the same new form from someone else that I know is a weak tie, and I say, oh yeah, maybe I’m going to start using this, and then it can spread to my strong ties relatively easily, but I got it from my weaker ties. Or conversely, maybe I get something from one of my strong ties, but they got it from a weak tie. So, you have this sort of additional source of chaos. You know, a stranger comes to town, brings in the exciting words from, you know, the next village over kind of thing.

Brynn: What does gender have to do with that? Like, what do we know especially about younger girls and language development?

Gretchen: So, the traditional finding in sociolinguistics is that young women are on the vanguard of linguistic change and that, you know, this has been found over and over in a lot of studies. What we’re not quite sure about is why, and I think that in some places we could poke a little bit harder at what we mean by a network to try to get to some of that. So, another finding that seems to be found in social science is that women often have more friends on average than men, and so maybe this is more weak ties, more strong ties, more opportunities to find out what’s going on.

You know, other factors that women are still disproportionately child rearing, and so if you’re not spending time with children and you acquire a new form, but you don’t hang out with the next generation, it just doesn’t get passed on. So, it’s a bit of a dead end. So, there’s a variety of potential reasons, and I think that this is something that would really benefit from people doing a more fine-grained network analysis to figure out, like, maybe we could actually, maybe not all women have friends (laughs).

Brynn: We’re allowed to not have friends!

Gretchen: Victory for feminism! Maybe some men do have lots of friends. And so maybe if you did a more fine-grained network analysis, I don’t know anyone who’s done this study, but I’d love to hear about it if anyone does know it. If you did a more fine-grained analysis of like, do extroverts have, are they more likely to be on the, the vanguard of linguistics change, or people who list more friends when you ask them about their friends or something, more likely to be at the vanguard of linguistics change. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. And maybe gender has been this proxy variable for something else.

Brynn: That’s interesting, yeah.

Gretchen: Because like, I don’t feel like I trust a, I don’t feel like I want a biological explanation for this. I feel like it’s social. Probably a variable of something else, but we’d be very interested in trying to disentangle that in the same way that like age feels like it’s a proxy variable for like, are you at a consistent life stage?

The point at which age starts seeming a little bit less relevant to linguistic change is the point at which people stop doing exactly the same thing as all the other 17-year-olds. You know, if we had, if high school was five years longer or five years shorter, then we would probably find those things correlate with, you know, years in schooling, doing the same thing as other people your age, more than years in doing something else.

So yeah, like there’s a study on beer forums, but you could also do a study of like, like new parents end up learning a whole lot of words relating to, you know, all those different types of like, are you going to do sleep training? Are you going to do baby-led weaning?

Brynn: I just had some flashbacks to my own early days of parenting. And truly, when you join those forums, when you join those, especially online communities, your vocabulary shifts so fast and so hard.

Gretchen: And there’s these acronyms, like DD and DS, like darling daughter, darling son, DH, dear husband. And these have been around for like 20 plus years. These are not new acronyms. They’ve been documented to be old enough that I think some of the original like darling children could now become parents themselves. They’ve been around for a while, but they keep getting reinvented every few years because people become new parents in a cyclic fashion. And so, it’s got this kind of replacement aspect to it in terms of a population level.

But then you don’t stay in the forums once you like stop having young kids such that you’re really desperately looking for advice on how to get the baby to sleep.

Brynn: Exactly. It’s so interesting because you do. And just like any social group, I’m sure, all of that stuff comes in so fast. And it almost feels like within the span of a few weeks, a few months, your way of speaking, your way of writing, especially on these online forums, shifts so quickly to the point that you don’t really think about it all that hard, but it does. It makes a really big change.

And on that idea of shifting into writing, I’m not sure how old you are, but I’m an elder millennial, so I can vividly remember being a young teenager right at the advent of the internet as we know it today. And I remember the adults at that time absolutely freaking out about how we used abbreviations and slang online. And everyone seemed really concerned that my microgeneration’s language development was doomed because of this.

And something that you did in your book, which I loved, was explain how the era in which people came online or sort of joined these communities, if you will, makes a big difference to the type of language that they use when communicating online. So can you talk to us a little bit about that, about when we come online and the different eras of that?

Gretchen: There’s this wonderful paper by Crispin Thurlow, who’s not a linguist, I think he’s a sociologist or something in that field, analysing these sort of generational moral panics around how people talk about Internet language and kids using them. And the paper is analysing the sort of acronym era, which I also remember of like, oh no, the kids are going to only communicate in acronyms now. And there were all these hyperbolic media articles that were generally not citing examples of actual practice.

They were creating these constructive examples of acronyms that nobody ever used. Like they would include a sort of like a BTW or an LOL or something. And then they would invent all these sort of fanciful acronyms that no one had ever used for sort of useless purposes and just be like, this is what the kids are doing.

And I remember reading these and thinking, maybe I’m just not cool enough to know what these acronyms stand for. Actually, what they were was a moral panic and not this at all. And I saw this coming up again when it came to talking about emoji, which I think people have gotten a bit less moral panicky about now because, oh, look, we’ve had emoji for over 10 years and it’s been fine.

And the kids are still using words also. But there was this big sort of like, well, what if the kids are only going to communicate the little pictures and sort of all of the like adults –  there was this program on like American TV local news at some point where they were bringing up all of these random emoji. This one stands for drugs and none of them did was the thing. Like it was all like, you know, the hibiscus flower. And it’s like, no one’s ever used that.

Brynn: No one uses that.

Gretchen: No one uses that. And they included a couple of real examples of emoji that do have like a slang meaning, but they got the meanings wrong. Like it was just really some like middle-aged people in a boardroom making up what the teens do, or else some teens having a joke at the expense of adults, which I would not fault them for.

Brynn: Not at all. I applaud them.

Gretchen: Yeah, I applaud them for, you know, messing with some overly credulous adults. Just thinking about like, could we not be overly credulous about linguistic change?

I talked about five different groups of internet people, sort of waves of internet people. And I don’t think I can do them just as orally because it’s hard to summarize a list of five things. Everyone likes a list of three things. So please read this in the actual book.

Brynn: Yeah, please read the book.

Gretchen: But it’s been something that people keep contacting me about and saying like, I resonate with this because I’m like an old internet person, someone who was on the internet before it became mainstream or cool, or I am someone who joined the internet as part of that full mainstream wave, or I’m someone that’s like on the cusp between these two groups. Because of course some people are fall between the cracks of any particular group, but it’s useful to describe a few categories and let people sort themselves between them. Or someone who joined the internet after it was already super mainstream.

This is something that I think is kind of neat where people who joined the internet as part of that big mainstreamisation wave, and some of them joined with their friends and some of them joined sort of through their work, but they all were part of creating what the norms are for the internet and they all get so shocked by young people who don’t know how to write an email anymore, or young people who don’t know how to find file in a folder system. A lot of people have told me that their students don’t know how to find a file in a folder system because you don’t need to do it on a smartphone. And you used to need to know how to do things like that just to use a computer because computers used to be different.

I mean, in the early days of cars, in order to drive a car, you had to be like a mechanic because the cars would just stall so much and you had to know about your own carburettor and all of this sort of stuff. And these days, some people know how cars work but a lot of people can just drive a car and if the car goes wrong, they take it into a shop or they call roadside assistance or whatever, they just, someone else fixes it because the world has this fractal level of complexity and we don’t all have to know how every single complex system works. I don’t know, I just turned a light bulb on today and I don’t know actually properly how a light bulb works.

Right? And this is just how things happen. And when you abstract away certain levels of complexity, that makes it easier to do other things that used to be unimaginably complex because some of the other layers have gotten abstracted away. I don’t think it’s worth sort of doom and gloom about.

There has been, I remember a lot of hyperbole about the idea that some group of people somewhere, and it’s always like the teens, even though they’ve been saying this for 20 years and those teens are no longer teens, but they’re still the teens. But now it’s the current teens and they didn’t notice that this didn’t really happen for the other teens, that some group of kids was going to be so good at the internet and so good at technology that they were going to be quote unquote digital natives. No one was going to have to teach them anything because they were just going to learn it themselves.

Well, has this ever been true for any group of young people that they’ve just taught it themselves everything and they’ve had no need for mentorship? Absolutely not. There are certain skills that young people learn for sort of social reasons to communicate with each other.

And those skills might not need to be taught in schools the same way because they’re teaching each other certain types of skills. But if you want people to learn the kind of drier skills that are workplace related, somebody, whether it’s a parent or a teacher or like an internship counsellor or something, somebody is going to have to explain how to do this at some point because there’s a lot of things that workplaces want that you talking to your friends does not actually require.

Brynn: Exactly. And I do think that especially since I was a teenager and I can remember all of the grownups then saying, now you don’t even know how to look up like for a library book in the Dewey Decimal system, you don’t know how to go into those file cards or anything. And that became this point of the grownups saying like, look at the kids these days. But grownups have always been saying, look at the kids these days. And especially, especially in terms of language and the way that we talk.

Although I now have a bone to pick with Gen X and the Boomers, because one of my favourite chapters in your book is called the Typographical Tone of Voice. What is a typographical tone of voice? Why do Gen X and Boomers use so many ellipses when they type a message? And why do these ellipses scare me so much as an elder millennial?

Gretchen: The idea of typographical tone of voice is that aspects of the way that you type certain words can reflect how you’re intending that message to be read. So, whether it’s sort of slow or fast, loud or quiet, using a higher pitch or a lower pitch or sort of an increasing rising or falling pitch. And we have aspects of this in our conventional punctuation that’s used in things like edited books or long edited prose rather than social media posts.

You know, things like a question mark indicating a question mark intonation or an exclamation mark indicating that something is a bit louder and more excited perhaps. So, there are, or a period indicating the certain finality towards the end of a sentence. And so, this is sort of there in typography to some extent.

It’s there in punctuation and in capitalisation to a certain extent. Something that was apparent to people in the very early days of the Internet was that you could use things like all caps to indicate shouting. There was, well, so there was a period when all computers were entirely in all caps because memory was so expensive that there was no lowercase anywhere.

Shortly after that period, there was a period when suddenly now we have lower and uppercase, and people started using all caps to indicate shouting or emphasis or something being louder. And this one is pretty well known at this point. I think even most Boomers and so on are fairly aware that all caps indicate shouting.

Brynn: Hopefully.

Gretchen: Hopefully! But there was a period like 20 years ago when people weren’t aware, and there was all this sort of like, my boss types his emails in all caps, how do I explain to him that it’s like he’s shouting? Some of these sorts of things take off, and some of them don’t take off.

And there are, like, this has a level of, but this level of expressivity is important. I think that sometimes people compare modern day Internet writing to sort of the older eras of edited prose in books, which is a false comparison. We still have books, and books are actually, books now are actually quite a bit like books then, in terms of punctuation and capitalisation and sort of editorial trends and, like, spelling.

They haven’t changed that much, you know, Because Internet is written mostly in standard capitalization and punctuation except in a few places where I’m, like, preserving something from a quote or doing something for emphasis. What’s actually a better point of comparison is private and informal bits of writing that people did, like letters and postcards and diaries and even things like handwritten recipes or notes, you know, to-do lists that you sort of scribble by the phone. And a lot of these have similar features that we now think of as Internet features or text message features or social media features that used to be part of informal writing, but informal writing wasn’t very visible.

If you’re making, like, a sign on a telephone pole, you know, like, lost cat or, like, yard sale or something like this, like, that’s informal writing. People will sometimes post on social media, like, photos from, like, you know, a local shop or something where they’ve put up a sign that says, you know, we’ll be back in five minutes, this sort of handwritten sign. And these also sometimes have features that are like social media.

But a lot of these are handwritten. And so, in handwriting, if you want to convey emotion, you have resources like writing some letters bigger, literally bigger. You don’t have to read about font size, because you can just make them bigger on the page.

You can underline them. You can underline them a lot. This sort of makes more sense because you’re not just underlining something once to emphasise.

You can underline it like four or five times. And you can do things in other colours in a pretty easy way, because you just reach over for your other pen or for your crayon. Some of the archival scanned letters and so on that I was looking at for Because Internet that didn’t make it into the book had this gorgeous underlining like red crayon that’s really emphatic.

And people would draw little doodles in the margin sometimes because you have the whole page of paper, you have a pen, you can just put whatever you want on the page. In many ways, computers artificially constrained our abilities to do that kind of thing that we were already doing. If you are writing on your own website or in your own word document or whatever, yeah, you can change the fonts, you can change the colours, you can change the size of things.

But for a lot of early computers, you couldn’t necessarily do that in text-based chat type places. And even these days, a lot of social media sites really constrain what fonts you can use, what colours you can use, what size things can be, even whether you can put a link or not. These sites are constraining what people can do so that they’re aesthetically uniform.

But people keep wanting to express themselves. And so, we have to find other ways of doing that. And some of that is playing with the typographical resources we have already.

When I was writing Because Internet, this question of like, why do older people, and it’s not all older people, I want to specify, but why do some older people use these ellipses so much? What are they doing with that?

Brynn: What do they want us to think? What do they mean? Are they mad?

Gretchen: What do they mean? Are they passive aggressive? Yeah. This was one of the questions that I got the most from, especially sort of elder millennials and younger, that was asked of me when I was writing this. And so, I was like, I have to find the answer. What I did was start looking back at handwritten stuff.

What you find in older letters, and especially I was looking at postcards, because a postcard is sort of like an Instagram post, right? Like you have your picture on one side, and then you have your caption on the other side. A lot of older postcards that have been like scanned and digitized aren’t even that long.

And some of them, so there’s this book called Postcards from the Boys, which digitizes a whole bunch of postcards by the members of the Beatles. Three of the Beatles. You know, Paul McCartney, John Lenon, Ringo Starr, they all write in relatively standard ways.

But George Harrison writes with a lot of dot dot dots in his handwritten postcards. And when you, you know, he’ll write things like, you know, much love dot dot dot George and Olivia. And when you type that out, it looks like a text message from your aunt.

Brynn: It looks threatening is what it looks like!

Gretchen: This is the thing with expectations. Because the dot dot dot, one of its advantages is when we talk to each other, especially informally, we don’t talk in complete sentences. We have sort of sentence fragments. We have bits trailing off. We have this and this and this and this. And it’s very additive.

And if you look at a transcript of a podcast, it’ll be like, these people look so strange when they’re talking if it hasn’t been sort of edited into sentence form. But that’s just what all talk looks like. And formal writing has this sort of sentence-by-sentence structure.

But informal writing doesn’t necessarily have to do that. And so, when I asked older people, like I tried to ask them to reflect on their own usage, when I asked them why they would use the dot dot dot, they would say things like, well, it’s correct. The best I can get out of this is a dot dot dot doesn’t commit to whether the next statement is an entirely independent sentence, or whether it’s a clause that continues on from the next thing.

So, a period or a comma sort of commits to this is a full sentence, or this is only part of a sentence. But a dot dot dot, same with a dash, a lot of people also use a lot of dashes, can be used with either independent clauses or dependent clauses. And so, it splits the difference.

It means you don’t have to think about it in this informal writing. You can just do one of these things that doesn’t commit to this type of thing, especially when what you’re really worried about in your writing is what’s correct. And so, you’re trying to do something that doesn’t commit the error, quote unquote, of a comma splice.

So, you’re like, well, I’ll just use a dot dot dot because that’ll be fine. Because these types of punctuation don’t commit to whether or not it’s a full clause or not. And in something like a postcard, you don’t want to necessarily start a new line or something like that because you don’t have that much space. Like, space is at a premium. So, you need a relatively compact way of doing that. For younger people or for people who have been online longer and are more used to the conventions of informal writing in a digital space rather than a physical piece of paper.

So, in the digital space, a new line is free. It doesn’t take up more bytes than just a space. It’s the same amount of space.

So, a lot of people will use a line break or they’ll use a message break itself because you’ve got to send the text message and then send the next one. And the message itself is the break in between thoughts. And if you want to put a break in between them, you can use a new line in some context or you can just use like, here’s the next message break.

Those are relatively free these days. I mean, I remember the days when you were paying like 15 cents for a text message and you were really trying to cram as much as possible into them.

Brynn: Oh, I do too.

Gretchen: But these days, you know, you can send as many texts as you want for free and you can send them on, you know, chat programs and things like that. Or somewhere like Twitter or Facebook or something, you can put a couple different line breaks in to like separate a few ideas if you want to do them in the same post. So, everybody is searching for this sort of neutral way of just separating thoughts a bit that doesn’t commit to this is a full sentence, this isn’t a full sentence, sort of whatever.

And for younger people, that’s the line break or the message break. That means that the period and the dot, dot, dot are sort of free to take on other interpretations. Because if you were just doing the neutral thing, the unremarkable thing, you’d just be using a line break or a message break, goes the logic of this group.

And so, if you’re putting a dot, dot, dot, or even in some context like a single period where a period isn’t necessary because you’ve just sent a new message, then that can indicate a certain amount of weight or a certain amount of pause or a certain amount of something left unsaid. A period, you sort of, canonically if you’re reading a declarative sentence, can indicate a falling intonation. And that falling intonation can be something like the difference between thank you, which I’m reading with sort of exclamation mark, like polite, cheerful intonation, versus thank you, where you’re like, oh no, is this sarcastic? Is there something going wrong?

And so, this is what the periods and the exclamation marks are conveying if you have line breaks and message breaks as your default separator. If you don’t have line breaks and message breaks as your default separator, you’re getting these other ones as a default separator and you’re not interpreting any additional tone.

I don’t want to say that one of these ways is right or wrong or that one of these ways is good or bad. I think it’s useful for people to be aware that there are two ways for this to be interpreted in both directions. The thing that I encounter from people who use the dot dot dot there are lots of contexts in which people still use periods all over the place if you’re sending a multi-sentence message.

But if you’re sending just thanks period as a single message, thanks.

Brynn: Oh, that scares me!

Gretchen: But what I hear from this older group, sort of a surprise that anybody could be reading in that much information into what they’re saying. A surprise that this is even possible. And so, this is a group that’s still saying something that I encountered a lot when I was writing Because Internet that the internet and writing is fundamentally incapable of conveying tone of voice.

And for this younger group, they’re like, absolutely not. I am conveying a lot of tone of voice in writing. And occasionally you get confused, but you sometimes get confused face to face as well.

And this older group is saying, no, it’s fundamentally impossible. Therefore, no one should ever be inferring anything about tone of voice based on how someone’s punctuating something, because this is just not what I’m trying to do. And you do have some, this is why I talk about sort of five generations of internet people and I don’t use the sort of like, you know, demographic categories of millennials or boomers in the same way, because people who have been on the internet for a long time before it was mainstream also have this understanding of typographical tone of voice and of conveying tone in writing because they’ve been doing it for even longer.

And many of them, you know, well, if you were getting on the internet in like the early bulletin board systems of the 1980s, you’re not 20 right now because time has elapsed. You know, they were a whole bunch of ages at the time, but they’ve all aged up together and still have, like these are the people who gave us the smiley face, like, come on, they were really trying to make it capable, being capable of doing stuff like this.

That is such a good point that it circles back to this idea of how long have you been online? What has your experience of either handwriting or typing messages online been? Kind of how did you come up in that age?

And like you said, I think it’s not that any one way is right or wrong. And I’m sure that Gen Zed or Gen Z, you know, looks at our text messages and says, oh my God, I can’t believe that they type that way, you know, and it’s going to keep doing that, which is normal.

I’ve been informed that reaction gifts are such a millennial thing.

Brynn: I know, I have too (laughs).

Gretchen: GIFs are really interesting because they were in in like the 90s and they sort of fell out in the 2000s and they came back in like the 2010s. So maybe there’s like a gift drought in the 2020s and they’ll be back in like the 30s as retro cool again. You never know, right?

Brynn: That’s going to be our era is the 2030s. The resurgence of the GIF. Exactly.

And you and your Lingthusiasm co-host Lauren have so many amazing Lingthusiasm episodes. And I want to encourage everyone to go check out Lingthusiasm. But especially in episode 34, you talk about Because Internet, and you also talk about emoji and gesture and things like that.

Before we wrap up, can you tell us a bit more about Lingthusiasm and maybe some of your favourite topics that you’ve done and why people should go check it out and start listening?

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. So, Lauren Gawne is my co-host on Lingthusiasm, and she’s an Australian linguist who I got to know via the internet as one does. She’s a specialist in gestures. So, she was the one who sort of talked me through the idea that emoji are like gesture in terms of how we use them with other linguistic resources rather than doing a lot of gestures all by themselves.

And sort of, you know, if you do that, it’s more like a fun game like charades rather than this sort of fully fledged linguistic system, which is something we’re looking for in addition to the tone of voice. So that episode, we’re talking about emoji and gestures in episode 34. We also did an episode very recently about orality and literacy and understanding oral cultures.

In this, I read an academic book by Walter J. Ong called Orality and Literacy, which is a really interesting book. And it was published in 1982. And there are a few parts that don’t quite stand up, but a lot of it is really, really interesting as far as its observations go. And I wish that I’d read this book before writing Because Internet. So, here’s your sort of esprit de scalier of like what I wish I also been able to say.

He talks about how in oral cultures, one of your primary issues that you’re trying to solve is like generational memory and transmitting useful and cultural and relevant information across generations, whether this is things like genealogies or cultural histories, but also just as simple as things that are like useful aphorisms to know. And so information becomes repeated in an oral culture because it’s in some sort of memorable unit. So you have something like A Stitch in Time Saves Nine, which rhymes, or you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make a drink, which has this sort of beautiful couplet structure, or Red Sky at Night Sailor’s Delight, kind of, Red Sky in the Morning Sailors Take Warning, which sometimes people say Farmer’s Delight or something like that instead, or Shepherd’s Delight, depending on how bucolic versus marine your region is, but it keeps the rhythm and the rhyme of the structure there, so that you can pass along this type of folk wisdom, because everything has to pass mind to mind, and so if it’s not memorable, it doesn’t get passed on.

What this means is that in an oral culture, you’re really trying to remember and transmit these, in many cases, very fixed phrases or these fixed templates that have a limited degree of variation, but are still very, very memorable. Things like proverbs and fairy tales that always have three sisters or three brothers or three common rules of three, and they have certain types of stock figures, a princess and a dragon and a witch, and these types of stock figures that can combine and recombine and become very memorable units. What was interesting to me to contrast this with was the Internet has this meme culture of things that keep getting remixed and recreated.

The earliest stages of meme culture, you know, the LOL cats that people cite that are now like very much vintage memes were passing around the same images. People would keep reuploading the same images of cats, and there were a few that really reoccurred. These days, memes have become a lot more oral in some ways, because it’s a repetition of the same thing.

Memes have become so much less oral and more written, because when you see a new meme going around, you can go look it up on Know Your Meme, you can find out what the template is, you can see a bunch of examples, and then the goal is to create your own riff. People in some cases encounter like several derivatives, but like if I go on Twitter or somewhere like that, and I see like one kind of weird tweet, I’m like, oh, that’s weird. And then if I see two tweets that are weird in the same way, I’m like, oh, new meme just dropped.

People can create riffs so much easier and can adapt new bits of cultural information to remix so much easier when we have reference materials, which are fundamentally a written culture thing. So, this idea that you have a Know Your Meme entry or Wikipedia page or like a Vox explainer about here’s how this meme works, and here it is explained for people who don’t get it, that is such a written culture thing to do. In oral culture, if you weren’t there, you have to be told this story by someone and you get it altered in the retelling.

You don’t get to just scroll back a couple of hours later and experience all the jokes just in the same order and you get to, and you’re not doing as much in terms of like creating your own versions immediately. You’re doing the retelling of the existing stuff, the retelling of the best of the existing stuff. Newer versions happen much more slowly because you can’t just go consume and digest the entire previous body of work.

It’s sort of a slower way of information transmission because people have to be physically there to say it. Yeah, I wish I’d sort of had more of that literature foundation in what oral culture is and how the information transmission happens there because I think that a lot of people sort of blithely say that the Internet is an oral culture, which it’s really not. It’s so written.

It’s got so many written features. And what is actually the case is that its domains of the human experience that used to be primarily oral are happening more in writing now, which is different from saying that the Internet is oral. It is, in fact, informal language becoming much more written than it used to be.

It’s sort of a slower way of information transmission because people have to be physically there to say it. Yeah, I wish I’d sort of had more of that literature foundation in what oral culture is and how the information transmission happens there because I think that a lot of people sort of blithely say that the Internet is an oral culture, which it’s really not. It’s so written.

It’s got so many written features. And what is actually the case is that its domains of the human experience that used to be primarily oral are happening more in writing now, which is different from saying that the Internet is oral. It is, in fact, informal language becoming much more written than it used to be.

Brynn: That’s so cool. But also, I look forward to your next book where you do get to incorporate all of those things.

Gretchen: Well, it’s not going to be Because Internet 2.0! I was joking for a while that maybe my second book would have to be called Despite Internet, how I wrote a book despite being distracted online.

Brynn: Yes, please. I would read that. Gretchen, thank you so much for your time today and thank you for chatting with me.

And there is so much of Because Internet that we didn’t cover today, like the rise of Emoji. We talked a little bit about meme culture, but also you have a whole section about the history of email etiquette. So, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to read the book and also be sure to subscribe to the Lingthusiasm podcast.

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me.

Brynn: Yeah, 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!

Brynn and Michael speak in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. The paper examines two examples of multilingualism in directive signs within Seoul, South Korea, in order to theorize what gives rise to multilingualism in directive signage while other signage remains monolingual.

Some papers and posts that are referenced in this episode include Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape of South Korea, Toiletology and the study of language ideologies, so if you liked this episode be sure to check those out!

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript (added 30/04/2024)

(Image credit: Dr Michael Chesnut)

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 Michael Chesnut. Michael is a Professor in the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication at Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea. His work includes researching second language writing, TESOL teacher development, curriculum theory, linguistic landscape research, and translingual academic publishing practices.

Today we are going to talk in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sunwgoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape.

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

Dr Chesnut: I’m so happy to be here and thank you for having me on today. It’s so exciting to get a chance to actually talk about a paper. This is such a rare opportunity. I’m just delighted to be here and share my thoughts.

Brynn: Wonderful! To start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to living and working in Korea?

Dr Chesnut: Sure! Well, I’ll start with the last question there. About 20 years ago, as a young person having graduated university and not too sure what I was going to do for a career or with the rest of my life, I decided to go abroad. I wanted to get out of Canada where I’m from. At the time, a lot of young people in Canada, especially new university graduates, were going to Korea for a year to teach English, come back with a little bit of money, pay off student loans and then carrying on with the rest of their lives.

So basically, I did that, and I had no interest in Korea. I had done a little bit of teaching and I liked it, so I also thought it would be a good opportunity to play with teaching and get some more experience. I applied all over the world, but I applied a lot in Korea because that’s where a lot of people were going. I didn’t get many job offers because I wasn’t particularly qualified, and then I got one offer in a small town in Korea. A few weeks later I got an offer from Siberia in Russia, but they were too late. So off to Korea I went, and it was interesting. It was really interesting to be in a new country, be immersed in a new language, have no idea what was going on. Teaching was quite interesting and challenging, and I really enjoyed that first year so I stayed in that same small town for a second year. After two years I was starting to get more interested in teaching and wanted to become better at what I was doing. I wanted to remain in Korea and better understand the world I found myself in.

So, I was very lucky and I found a position at a small university, and what was so wonderful was they had an MA TESOL program. So, I could teach there, doing all sorts of different classes, and pursue an MA in TESOL to actually learn better how to teach English. And what was really remarkable was that this particular program had a focus on critical pedagogy. Teaching not just as a replication of existing knowledge, not just sort of helping you know more so you could do a job, but teaching as a means to kind of give more power to students, let them make more informed choices, help them better understand why we’re learning something in particular, why we don’t look at certain other issues. And so that was a really wonderful two years. I enjoyed it. I did a small thesis on language learner identity, and I was really interested in continuing this journey, and that program was founded, or at least developed heavily, by a professor who had studied at Penn State. So really, through him, I had an opportunity to apply to Penn State in their College of Education doing a PhD in curriculum and instruction. The professors there mentored him, and some of the professors that he had mentored had come back to Korea too, so I was able to pursue further education through a PhD at Penn State. I went there and took a lot of classes in the Applied Linguistics Department, really found a second home there alongside curriculum and instruction in the College of Education. My goal was to always come back to Korea as quick as possible to do fieldwork.

So, my PhD dissertation was on foreign language teacher identity. The Americans, Canadians and others who come to Korea and teach English. It’s still a major area of research for me, and so all of that let me to come to Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in my department here, the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication, which is essentially an English interpretation and translation department going English and Korean. Here, I teach English and I do research as part of the university’s responsibilities as well, and so that’s my journey to being here now where I teach a lot of different classes. Some are language classes, some are world Englishes or digital media classes, all with this language focus. And I do research on different issues as well. So that’s kind of my story and who I am as a teacher and a researcher. So again, thanks so much for having me on to talk about all of this. It really is such a privilege to get a chance to talk about a paper. I’m so happy to be here!

Brynn: Oh, that’s excellent, I’m so glad. I’m so glad to be talking to you too, and that’s really interesting to think how differently your life might have gone if Siberia had answered just a couple weeks earlier and not been late.

Dr Chesnut: Oh absolutely, if it had just been slightly reversed – off to northern Russia in the early 2000s.

Brynn: A little colder.

Dr Chesnut: A little colder, different environment. Who knows how life could have turned out then, you know?

Brynn: Yeah, so let’s talk a bit about your work. Quite a bit of your work has to do with something called the linguistic landscape. Not everyone listening to us right now is a linguist, so can you explain what that term means and why it’s something that linguists study?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so even if you’re not a linguist or don’t have a particular interest in language, you encounter the linguistic landscape all the time. The linguistic landscape is essentially all the publicly displayed language or text you see around you. So, walking down the street you see street signs, shop fronts, billboards, movie posters – all of that is the linguistic landscape. All the different text and language you see around you. And that includes graffiti, those stickers you see stuck on telephone poles, or maybe on a utility panel on a back alley. It’s menus posted on restaurant walls.

But when people talk about the linguistic landscape there’s often a real emphasis on multilingualism, on things that have more than one language. There are actually many different researchers who look at movie posters or different types of signs. People who study marketing, for example. But people who talk about the linguistic landscape are usually talking about text with more than one language. That’s where a lot of the focus, not all, but a lot of the focus is.

So, one reason to study this is just the general benefit of understanding something better. These signs are important. They’re an important means of communication, so it’s better to have a deeper understanding of how this communication works. Over the years I’ve heard some people, some linguists, say, “This is actually not real research. This is a hobby. This is someone going on holiday, taking a bunch of photographs, enjoying themselves, coming back and sharing these pictures.” But I’d push back on that and say there’s actually a lot of important communication occurring through multilingual signs. An emergency exit sign in multiple languages can be very important. Looking at movie posters and how they use different scripts or different fonts to mimic other languages or play with what they’re writing – that’s an interesting linguistic phenomenon. So, I think it’s worthwhile. And society does value better understanding this communication.

So that’s one general reason, but there’s a lot of specific reasons to examine the language on signs. Some involve determining the vitality or strength of a language in a particular place. So, walking down the street in a French speaking community in Canada – are there a lot of signs in French? That’s a quick and rough way to determine how strong a language is in a place, although there are very serious limits to examining language in that way because often language doesn’t come into signs. There can be a language spoken in a region, but for various reasons it doesn’t appear on signs. Likewise, there can be a place where a language is no longer spoken very much but it often appears on signs. So, people examine that.

People examine issues of language ideology, or the assumptions we make about language, the values we give to language. And then ask how those values and assumptions shape the language on signs. Maybe there are different varieties of a language, but only one appears on signs. So, then we can go in and look at how these assumptions and values are shaping the use of language on signs.

There are studies involving English as a lingua franca, where English sort of has this role as a general and shared means of communication among people who don’t speak English as a first language where the rules of English are determined by what is effective communication, rather than a standard that comes from the United States or the UK – so how does English work in a tourist destination where people are visiting from all over the world? People examine context like that.

There are a lot of different studies out there. English is a major topic in linguistic landscape research. Some people examine how English can be a symbol of cosmopolitanism, sophistication, style and a means of attracting consumers. People examine skinscapes, so multilingual tattoos and everything that happens when people get a tattoo that involves different languages or multiple languages. How languages are involved in the construction of public space. There’s been some great research on Israel and the use of Hebrew, Arabic and English to construct a particular place through those signs.

Studies on commodification – we can examine Little Italy or Chinatown and look at how language is deployed there, not necessarily reflecting how people speak in that place anymore, but as a means of commodifying and selling that place.

There are studies on how problems are addressed, maybe littering, garbage, public intoxication through multiple languages on signs addressing those problems.

There are questions about signs that come from authorities that seem to go down to the people – top-down signs – and the languages used in those signs, and languages that come from regular people. Signs posted by people about problems in their neighbourhood or a lost dog, and the languages used on those signs, and maybe the differences between those top-down/bottom-up signs.

There are studies on how the linguistic landscape can be used in teaching, and I’ve investigated this and used this in a lot of my classes. We can take pictures of signs into classrooms, into educational contexts, and use that to help people develop their language skills.

But ultimately, we’re looking at a lot of issues of what languages are present on signs. How are those languages being used? What shapes the presence and absence of different languages on signs? What larger issues in society impact and are impacted by the use of language on signs? Even now, maybe how the use of language on signs can challenge existing assumptions in society regarding language and more.

There are some really exciting developments occurring in different places in the world. There are some massive indigenous construction developments, housing developments in Canada. I’ve seen some pictures of those developments where they are using the language of that community on those signs. That’s really interesting. I’d love to read more about that.

Brynn: That sounds fascinating, and also excuse me now while I go google “linguistic skinscapes”. That sounds so cool! I’ve never heard of that as an area of study before. That’s awesome!

Dr Chesnut: It’s really fascinating. It’s not my area. I did a little research because I encountered one paper years ago, and then I did some more research and there have been some interesting developments in that area. So, there are people doing all sorts of interesting research in different areas, very exciting developments. And some of it is, I think, quite important. It could contribute to creating more productive communication in different ways.

Brynn:  I agree, and that’s a great explanation. And I think that in your explanation, you’re doing a great job of pushing back against those people who would say that this is maybe just a hobby or something just a tourist would do. And you’re right, it’s a really important part of the world that we all live in. So, on that, let’s talk about your 2022 paper From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. In the paper, you develop the concept of “multilingual commanding urgency”. What does “multilingual commanding urgency” mean, and how might it appear in the linguistic landscape?

Dr Chesnut: Sure. Well, why don’t I take us through a little example, something that occurred to me, and then we can explore it together and think about how multilingual commanding urgency kind of helps us understand what’s happening around us with some of the signs we see.

So, we can imagine that we’re at a ski resort in north America, and walking through this ski resort we see lots of different signs. A big welcome sign in English. Maybe a giant sign with the name of the place positioned so we can all take photographs with it, post them on Instagram. And lots of signs that are important – rest area here, ski hills that way. Maybe a sign, all in English, that says, “Only qualified skiers should go down these particular hills” – kind of a warning and informational sign to direct people how they should go depending on their level of skill.

As we walk around this ski resort, we see something different. We see a sign that says, “Do not feed the wildlife,” but this sign is also in Korean and Chinese. Looking around, we see that is the only sign that is in English, Korean and Chinese. So, we might start to wonder, “Why is this sign and this sign alone the only sign that is trilingual, incorporating Korean and Chinese, while all these other signs, some quite important, feature only English?” And multilingual commanding urgency is our attempt to conceptualise an answer to that question.

What we argue is that, often in the world, sign makers will, rightly or wrongly, have an idea about who is likely to violate the regulation posted on a sign. There are certain language communities believed to be potential violators of these particular regulations. And there’s a belief that, if this regulation is posted in the language of that community, it will reduce the enforcement burden of those authorities. And when those two conditions are met, there seems to be a greater urgency or effort or impetus to make that sign multilingual.

So, I would explain this imagined “Do not feed wildlife” sign as occurring because some sign maker, some authority within this resort, for some reason believes Korean-speaking guests and Chinese-speaking guests may be more likely to violate this regulation, and that if they post this message in those languages, it will resolve the situation, reduce the enforcement burden of the authorities.

Now that may be completely incorrect, but that may be the authorities’ belief. And this is an imagined scenario, but it is based on something I actually saw in North America at one point.

And we can see this in other places too. You can imagine walking through an airport, maybe an airport in Germany, and this one did happen to me very recently, and see many signs in German and English – “baggage claim area”, “gates 1-10” – all these different signs in English and German. But then you see a door, and it’s an emergency exit and it’s alarmed. If a member of the public opens the door, the alarm goes off, authorities have to rush in, people have to investigate and a lot of things occur. And that door sign has a warning, but not just in German and English, but also Arabic, Russian and Chinese. And this I saw in an airport in Germany. So, that would be explained, I believe, likely by this multilingual commanding urgency. Authorities have identified certain communities as likely to violate this regulation. They believe that if they put the sign in those languages, it will reduce their enforcement burden. The fewer times they have to rush to that emergency door, the better for them. And this creates an urgency, an impetus, to make signs multilingual.

So that’s multilingual commanding urgency. That’s what we conceptualised as the genesis of multilingualism in many of these signs. And there are a lot of examples in literature that don’t talk about multilingual commanding urgency that come from earlier studies but that were foundational. Examples of a “do not spit” sign in an airport in New Zealand – that sign was only in Chinese and Korean, not in English, and actually seemed to create a bit of a furor on social media. Signs in Hong Kong which include Tagalog prohibiting hawking. Signs in Hungarian in Toronto, Canada about a code of conduct requiring some behaviour for young people. So, we do see across literature lots of examples of this. So, this paper and this concept of multilingual commanding urgency are our attempt to explain and discuss this sort of pretty broad phenomena. Does that provide an explanation of this phenomenon?

Brynn: That’s a great answer, and it also makes me think of another space where I’ve seen these types of signs before here in Australia, and that’s in public restrooms. Public toilets. I do believe I’ve seen papers before and even on our research blog, the Language on the Move research blog, we’ve featured these stories before, where on the backs of the stalls, at least in the women’s toilets, there will be these signs about toilet etiquette, and it will only be in certain languages. So again, to your point, of these potential violators of these rules being identified, rightly or wrongly, by the higher up authorities, and then that being targeted through these specific languages.

And your paper looks at cases of multilingual commanding urgency in Seoul, Korea, and specifically two types of directive signs that you and your colleagues found during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: first, COVID-19-related “masks required” signs in subway stations, and second, signs prohibiting illegal garbage disposal in side streets. These might sound like totally unrelated signs at first, but your paper found a fascinating connection between them. Can you tell us what you discovered about which languages were used for these different types of signs?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so I’ll start by describing these two signs in detail a little bit. The first set of COVID-19 “masks required” signs were posted because, prior to their posting, there had been strong encouragement to wear masks on subways and public transportation, but as the pandemic developed, there was a regulation developed that required masks to be worn by everyone in subways and the subway station, on public transportation. So, suddenly there was this new regulation. On this day, everyone has to wear a mask, and all these signs appeared.

Now, these signs were very large. They covered pillars in subway stations. You could sit at the entrance of the subway station and see half a dozen to a dozen of them, just from one spot. And they were monolingual Korean, and they were large, multicoloured and everywhere.

But, shortly thereafter, in a matter of days, appeared much smaller signs, A4-sized. And these signs had the same general message. Not as much detail. The larger Korean-language signs had details about where to buy masks. Each sign at each station had a little additional information about the nearby convenience store or location about where you could buy masks. These were absent in the other signs, and these other signs, much smaller, a little bit less well-produced, had the same general message in English, Chinese and Japanese. So, they appeared after. And this was quite interesting to us. These two signs appearing together. That’s one set of signs that were really important to us.

The other set of signs – we actually didn’t collect these signs entirely during the pandemic. Images of these signs were collected earlier. These were signs prohibiting the disposal of garbage, basically “don’t letter”. And there’s kind of a sophisticated system in Korea for the disposal of household garbage. A lot of apartment complexes will have a recycling system. Individuals can go buy garbage bags. Payment goes into funding the trash disposal system. So, some people litter to avoid this or because it can be inconvenient or whatever. So, this is a major issue. A lot of people get upset by trash. You don’t want trash in front of your house, and so there’s a lot of district-level government signs about prohibiting the disposal of garbage.

And what we found was that, in certain districts, these signs included Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, English and certain signs only had Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese. No English. So that was quite interesting. And what’s also critical here is that Korean government signage rarely features Arabic and Vietnamese. Some English, some Chinese, but very rarely Arabic and Vietnamese. And very, very rarely on district-level signage. These are neighbourhood-level government signs. So, these were very unusual signs to see Vietnamese and Arabic being used in these ways.

And so, what happened was me and my co-authors – and my apologies for not mentioning Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim earlier, they are absolutely foundational to this whole project and they are continuing work on COVID-19 signs – but we decided to collect data from our daily routines during the COVID-19 pandemic, just to better understand how signs were being used regarding COVID-19. And as we collected data, we examined it and looked at it in different ways. We were really struck by these “masks required” signs and these additional small multilingual signs. And what was really striking was there were other mask signs, signs that were encouraging mask use more generally and often quite powerfully using fear or sometimes cuteness to encourage mask wearing. But they were monolingual Korean. So, we were trying to understand what led to the additional signs requiring people to wear masks in English, Chinese and Japanese.

So, we were viewing literature and we started to look deeper into the context of signage in Korea, and we found the examples in our already-collected data of these garbage signs. And we really thought this might be the same phenomenon in two different ways – in the COVID-19 “masks required” signs we’re finding English, Chinese and Japanese as the languages to speak to the general non-Korean foreign public. And in the signs about garbage using Vietnamese and Arabic, we have the language used to speak to the Arabic and Vietnamese-speaking communities in these districts. So, we found different examples that were both the result of what we believed to be the same phenomenon.

So, our analysis of the COVID-19 linguistic landscape is ongoing, but we found these examples and decided to share sort of a conceptual paper that used these two examples to really look deeply at what we termed “multilingual commanding urgency”, and what we were finding being discussed in the literature. We wanted to bring that all together in one paper, use these different examples to really understand this phenomenon, discuss it and expand on it. That’s what came together in our paper. So, we argue that these two very different signs are ultimately the product of a belief that certain language communities are likely to be violators of a certain regulation, and a belief that by sharing the sign, making the sign in a certain language, you can reach that community and lower the enforcement burden for the authorities. So that’s how this paper came about.

Brynn: And that’s so interesting because, like we said, we all, as just people who are walking around in the world, are going to see these signs, could potentially read these signs. But a really interesting point that you make in your paper is that, exactly this, that these types of signs have the potential to be “overread by passersby”. You point out that these people might not actually be able to read the languages on these signs, so maybe if there’s a monolingual French speaker walking around in that context, they might not be able to read the languages, but they may know what languages they are. They might be able to say, “Oh I can tell that’s Arabic” or “I can tell that’s Vietnamese”. So, what inferences and assumptions might these passersby, who have nothing to do with the government, then make about the communities that are being addressed through these very specific language choices with these directive signs?

Dr Chesnut: So, this concept of “overreading signs” we borrowed from Philipp Angermeyer who has an amazing paper looking at Roma youth from Hungary in Toronto, Canada. Some youth centres and certain places started putting up signs in Hungarian, sort of codes of behaviour, to try and regulate what was perceived to be kind of inappropriate behaviour by these youth. He interviewed youth and authorities there. It’s an absolutely phenomenal paper. What he also pointed out was that these signs can be wrong. They used Google Translate to create the Hungarian, so in some cases it was really nonsensical. So, for these youth it was somewhat offensive, disheartening, disappointing to see not just signs about poor behaviour in a language directed to them, but also poor translations, signs they don’t even care enough to translate.

So, we’re discussing how, in general, these multilingual directive signs about bad behaviour can be overread potentially by anyone, sometimes even mistakenly, in a way that suggest certain communities might be responsible for this bad behaviour, engaging in this inappropriate behaviour or violating these regulations. So, if anyone is walking down the street and maybe you can read one language, maybe the dominant language is there, and you can read a sign saying something about disposal of pet waste, or smoking in an area you’re not supposed to smoke, and then you see it in certain languages that are very rarely used by authorities. It’s very easy to link those language speaking communities with this inappropriate behaviour, this aberrant behaviour.

So, that’s the concern, that these signs might reinforce larger public beliefs that certain communities are engaging in so-called bad behaviour, linking communities with problematic practices, and so really this could be having a negative effect on society, especially when languages are very rarely used in more general government or authoritative signage, or even more generally, and only used in these signs linked with bad behaviour. That’s the really problematic element.

Brynn: Yeah, it’s that perpetuation of a potential stereotype that exists within a community and, like you said, especially if it does come from that more governmental/district level position of power. Then that might perpetuate the stereotype even further.

You mentioned earlier that these particular trash signs came from a little earlier, but the paper was published in 2022. It’s now 2024 – have you seen any change in these types of signs in the intervening years? Are there still these “problem communities” that are being targeted through specific multilingual commanding urgency signs around Seoul?

Dr Chesnut: Well, there are certainly signs like this still about. There was an absolutely fantastic paper about a district with a large Chinese community in Seoul, and that paper had amazing examples, and kind of heartbreaking examples of signs only in Korean that request people to report others for bad behaviour, and then signs only in Chinese saying, “Don’t engage in problematic behaviour like public drunkenness and other inappropriate acts.” So certainly, this still exists now. That paper is from a little while ago too, so some of these signs might have changed.

And certainly, a lot of COVID signs have been taken down. Some remain. But I suspect these are long-enduring signs, metal signs posted on walls, so I suspect many of them are still up. I’ve seen signs that are ten years old. They remain for a long time. And I do want to point out that I think this is a kind of global phenomenon. I think signs like this can be found all over the world, so I wouldn’t single out any city or particular region, but I haven’t seen any major changes that way.

What I have seen that’s encouraging is that I’ve started to see some emergency signage that’s being made more multilingual, so we have a lot of emergency shelter signs and emergency shelters in Seoul. A lot of the time I’ve seen them in Korean, sometimes Korean-English and sometimes Korean-English-Chinese. But I recently saw one that had Korean, and that was the largest language by far. English was the second largest. Beneath that was Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese and Chinese. So, that I would not consider multilingual commanding urgency. That’s maybe a different type of language phenomenon, a different type of sign, and so there might be a move towards more multilingualism in general. That would certainly potentially lessen the potential for overreading certain directive signs. So, that would also be the policy I would advocate.

There is a need for signs directing people not to dispose of trash illegally, and if you want to reach out to a community then reach out in many ways. Not just through this directive signage but include that language on many different signs so it becomes less significant with this problematic directive. So, I do see some positive developments in more general multilingualism, but I think these signs do remain and I think they do have a purpose, so I hope there are some positive developments.

Since COVID I’ve also been out a lot less and I have family responsibilities these days that are new, so I’m collecting less general data and I don’t quite observe as much as I used to. So, I hope that’s a reasonable answer.

Brynn: It is, and what I love too about your paper and about this type of work into the linguistic landscape is that any person walking around in their own community, whether they’re here in Australia, whether they’re in Korea or Canada, they can pay attention to this, you know? You don’t have to be a scientist; you don’t have to be a linguist. Just notice. What do you see? Do you see multilingualism, kind of like you were saying in the context of everyone can read an emergency sign or subway rules, things like that? Or do you only see only very particular languages and therefore language communities being targeted with the signs? So, they are two quite different things.

And I love that it’s something where, once you’re aware of it, you can’t stop seeing. Ever since I read your paper, I now do that, where I just walk around and observe that in my own community.

And you said that you don’t maybe necessarily get to collect this type of data as much these days, but what is next for you and your work? What other research are you working on now?

Dr Chesnut: Our team, Sungwoo Kim and Nate Ming Curran and myself, we’re all still working on our COVID-19 linguistic landscape data, and this potentially could be lifetime work. There’s a lot there, and a lot more that can be done still.

So, right now we have a draft of a paper looking at English usage on authoritative government COVID-19 signage. What we’re looking at is how English is used in at least two very different ways. It’s used in one way for signs intended for a domestic Korean audience, and that’s very interesting to see English used for a Korean domestic audience for non-commercial purposes. It’s not marketing, it’s not cool English necessarily. It’s not trying to create a sense of cosmopolitanism. It’s trying to reinforce good public health behaviour, and we find English being used where the English text itself conveys information. The English has a meaning-making purpose. Not as a symbol, but information is bound into the text.

But it’s also being used as a symbol or a design feature or an emblematic element. It’s being used for Korean-English punning. It’s being used with Korean-English blends where there’s one message that switches between English and Korean to convey a particular message to the public, the Korean public. So, we’re very interested in how English is being used for public health messaging to a Korean audience.

And we’re also seeing English being used for a foreign non-Korean audience of visitors or residents. And what’s interesting there is that very often English is being used alongside Chinese or Japanese as a part of this broad multilingual communication strategy, and that kind of challenges the idea that English is this ultimate language, this lingua franca. That, in fact, it’s being used alongside other languages as part of this broad multilingual strategy except for particular foreign places where we do see monolingual English language signage in this Korean bilingual signage.

And sometimes, multilingualism that goes beyond Korean-English-Japanese-Chinese where there are six languages or eight languages in a particular foreign place. And we do find a few examples, especially early in the pandemic, where there is English that is difficult to understand, and we do want to address that too, and the Korean was actually a little bit odd too. So, it may be a result more of confusion earlier in the pandemic. The messages were unclear both in Korean and English, and that’s something that should be addressed too.

So, we’re looking at that, and we’ll continue looking at the linguistic landscape. We have a beginning of a paper looking at Chinese signage with the heavy concern of overreading, of how Chinese signage may have been overread during the COVID-19 pandemic in Korea. And we want to address how there was private sector signage that was very explicit. Basically, Chinese guests were not welcome. They were told not to enter certain restaurants or institutions. So, we want to address, or bring into academic discussion, the fact that these signs exist and that they were done bilingually in Korean and Chinese and that there are big issues there. That’s another project that’s probably further in the future.

We’ve already published another paper, it’s actually a blog that’s open access. Anyone can read it. It’s quite short. It looks at cuteness and fear in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape. What we saw was a lot of signage, a little bit from authoritative signage, but a lot of private sector signage. So, cafes and restaurants that had signs saying “please wear a mask” but they used a lot of cuteness. Little anime-like figures asking you, “please wear a mask for me”, or cartoon figures with their masks saying, “be like me”, that type of thing. So, there was a lot of cuteness deployed in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape, and we went to an online symposium for that, and then we shared it in a blog as part of that, so “Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape”. Google and you can find the blog and find all the entries there. It’s quite interesting.

And we also, in that piece, talked about fear. There were a few government posters that really strongly attempted to invoke fear. “Wear your proper COVID-19 mask, or you’ll end up wearing a respirator mask in the hospital.” Really strong invoking of fear there. And there were other messages as well, using fear this way.

And in the conference, it was quite interesting. There was a public health expert who joined the conference, and it was quite wonderful he was there. But he was surprised. He was from South Africa, and he said, “We could never use signs like this in our context. They’d be inappropriate. No one would respond to them positively.” But he was very eager to learn what could be done, how we can use signs to successfully promote good public health practices.

Unfortunately, this type of research doesn’t give an easy answer besides, I think, an answer saying that communicating in more languages in general, not specifically with a punitive message, is probably a good productive practice. But ultimately going deeper into that question would be an interesting long-term goal but would require very different research methods. So, maybe that’s something to think about in the future. There’s a lot to be done.

It would be wonderful to better understand communication through signs and other means of course, but I’m doing more research in signs, involving public health and emergencies and disasters and how those signs can be made in a way that is more productive and helpful, less damaging, less concerning in other ways, and better understand all these issues.

Unfortunately, the world remains a very dangerous place. Other events will occur, not exactly the same as the COVID-19 pandemic, but conflict, war, tsunamis, earthquakes – all these things can occur. All may require changing our behaviour as members of the public, and that can be shaped to some extent by these publicly displayed signs. Huge posters in the subway. Things on the bus. All manner of signs in an airport or any public institution. Private businesses, restaurants, cafes and more, all sharing signs that can inform the public about what to do in case of some unfortunate event, can maybe have a role in creating a better society to some extent.

So, we’re going to keep working on this, I think. There’s a lot more that could be done.

Brynn: It sounds like you said, it could be a lifetime worth of research. That’s so much to draw from. And like you said, it is something that I think we all have to take away from the COVID-19 pandemic, to kind of look back and say, “Alright, what did we not anticipate? What did we get wrong, and how can we better prepare in the future so that we can communicate better so that we can make sure that people from any language background can receive the information that they need in that type of a crisis?” So that sounds absolutely fascinating, and on that, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate it.

Dr Chesnut: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute delight. As I mentioned earlier, it is rare to get an opportunity to talk about a research paper, not a big book, not a big project, but just one paper. And this is a paper I’m quite fond of and a research project I find interesting. So, it has been a delight to get to talk with you. Thank you so much for all the wonderful and engaging questions. They really helped direct me and hopefully keep me on task. I really appreciate your guidance there.

And yes, hopefully this encourages more members of the public to keep an eye out for signs and look for those directive signs that are made multilingual in unusual ways. And for researchers out there, this is an exciting area to research. Don’t be afraid, I don’t think researchers are afraid, but this is a productive place to do research, and the more people examining this topic, the richer the discussions become. So, I’m always eager to find new people entering the field and discussing these topics.

Brynn: Excellent, so get out there and go look at some signs!

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

Till next time!

This episode’s conversation centers around Dr Peterson’s 2020 book Making Sense of “Bad English,” which is available open access. The book discusses how the notions of “good” versus “bad” English came about, and some of the consequences of these views of language.

The book is a must-use for teachers and professors who introduce their students to sociolinguistics as it contains discussion questions at the end of each chapter as well as recommendations for further reading. However, you don’t have to be a Linguistics student to enjoy this book. Making Sense of “Bad English” is for anyone who has ever wondered how it’s possible to have so many different varieties of one language, what the Standard Language Ideology has to do with Santa Clause, and why English spelling is so chaotic.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

If you like this episode, be sure to check out more Language on the Move resources about language ideologies here!

Episode Transcript

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. Elizabeth Peterson. Elizabeth is a Senior University Lecturer in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

Today we are going to talk in general about her research into language ideologies, and in particular about her 2020 book entitled “Making Sense of ‘Bad English'”.

Elizabeth, welcome to the show, we’re so happy to have you here with us today.

Dr Peterson: Thank you for inviting me. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Brynn: Can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself? How did you become interested in linguistics in general and language ideologies in particular? And on that note, what exactly is a language ideology?

Dr Peterson: Ok, well, I’ll start with your first question, and a little bit about myself. I’m an American migrant to Finland. I’ve lived here for about 20 years. I did my PhD in the United States, and I live in a home with 3 languages – Finnish, Swedish and English. Finnish, of course, is the de facto and also the constitutional majority language in Finland, but Swedish is a constitutional language with about 300,000 speakers, and my family fits into that category. So, language is all around. You know, I’m a strong advocate of multilingualism, and those are the principles that we try to espouse in our home as well. Practice what you preach.

Brynn: I absolutely agree. In my house, we have not so much languages, we have two dialects. We have American English and Australian English. So, not so much the language spectrum but we definitely have words where we’ll say them and ask each other, “What do you mean by that? I don’t know that word.” Still, 15 years on in this multi-dialectal relationship.

Dr Peterson: Isn’t that incredible?

Brynn: I know, right? Can you tell us, for people who might not know, what is a language ideology? What do we mean when we say language ideology as linguists?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, well let’s start with what an ideology is. An ideology, at its most basic sense, means a belief that you have. So, there are many really good definitions of language ideology that are coming out of anthropology, pretty much, and then we kind of borrowed all of that into sociolinguistics. So, an ideology is a belief, therefore a language ideology is a belief about language. A really deep-seated belief. And this is a basic definition that comes from somebody like Michael Silverstein, for example.

There are many definitions that I like. I’ll kind of keep it brief today so it doesn’t turn into a classroom lecture. Nobody’s interested in that.

Another kind of nutshell definition that I like comes from the linguist James Milroy who says that it’s common-sense views about language. So, these are things that we kind of don’t question, and we just think that it’s always been there, that this is just the way it is, and therefore it makes it really, really difficult to turn that around and present it back to people in a way where they’re willing to go, “Oh! So, you mean that might not be an absolute truth? That this is just what I think?”.

So, truth, of course, is a really negotiable concept. Just because it’s what people think doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s complicated. That’s what we need to present back to people, that this is much more complicated than what they might think, and also link it to concepts and realities like language discrimination. They might not be able to make that link on their own, so that’s one thing we can do as linguists, is to make that link for them.

Brynn: That is such a good point that there really is that link between language ideologies and discrimination.

Dr Peterson: And it’s not a weak link, it’s a strong link!

Brynn: 100%, exactly. Exactly. And kind of on that note, one of the first things that we as sociolinguists learn is something called the Three Circles Model, proposed by Braj Kachru. That’s one of those Sociolinguistics 101 things that we learn. But not everyone that’s currently listening to us is a sociolinguist, so can you tell us what the Three Circles Model is and what it has to do with how people perceive different varieties of English?

Dr Peterson: Sure, and maybe I can start a little bit by just talking a little bit about who Braj Kachru was. He was from the Subcontinent. He was from Kashmir originally. He just died a few years ago. He grew up in a colonial setting speaking English as a second language. His idea with creating that model was to empower people from settings like that and not keep putting them down and saying that their English was somehow substandard or a learner variety or whatever, so it was a way of him taking ownership for people who come from that kind of demographic or geographical setting with a colonial history.

Anyway, I’ve presented this so many times in class. So, if you could visualise with me, if you will, 3 concentric circles. It looks like a bullseye with 3 circles, right? Kachru’s idea was that the Inner Circle, and that’s what he actually called it, the inner circle, is comprised of people who live in geographical territories where English is, you could consider it the mother tongue or native language for the vast majority of the population. And English is used in all domains, most domains anyway – family, maybe there’s always some exceptions, we all live in multilingual societies, that’s just the reality.

But anyway, you can see what I mean. It’s mostly English. And furthermore, the way English got to places that are included in that Inner Circle are places where we had settler colonialism. And that’s a key distinction there. It tends to be white people who came from Europe and brought the English language with them. They took over, settled there, and became dominant in many ways. So, this is what happened in Australia, this is what happened in the United States.

Furthermore, these people from the Inner Circle, because of the history that they have, they have the power in today’s world, and it’s been like this for many decades now, people would even say centuries, that they have power over the English language. There’s this sense that it really “belongs” to them, so we call this the “norm-providing” circle as well. I’m from the United States. Brynn, you’re from the United States. We have the privilege of being able to tell other people, “Oh, this is how you should speak English. Speak English like me.” So, we get jobs in Japan and Korea and stuff like that and nobody really questions it. It’s just like, “Oh, yeah, you’re the native speaker, you know everything about the language.” That’s the Inner Circle.

Let’s now contrast that with the Outer Circle. So, picture the ring, we’re moving on. There’s the next ring in the bullseye. That’s the Outer Circle, and these are places that have a colonial history. So, here we’re talking about real overt multilingualism, where English is an additional language which is usually formally acquired. That means they learn it in a classroom, sometimes from a very early age, but more often than not the home language is something different. Or there might even be 2 or 3 home languages. So, the Outer Circle is really characterised by strong multilingualism.

But English is considered this elite language that is learned in formal contexts, and it’s associated with, sort of this colonial history. So, power coming that way. Even though we wouldn’t necessarily consider this a “learner” variety because it’s so ingrained and it’s been there for so many centuries in some cases, there’s still this tension that, ok, do we look to the UK or the US to tell us how to use this English? And there’s a real divide that way. In some places they are looking for that model and in other Outer Circle settings it’s very much like, “Yeah, we got this, thanks. Thanks for giving us English. It’s our now. Just back off.”

Brynn: Exactly. I love that explanation, and I know that there is this real, like you said, tension between the circles that are in that bullseye, and this idea of “Who ‘owns’ English, and who does English belong to?”. Especially since it has become such a powerful language in the world.

Dr Peterson: Absolutely. There’s still one more circle, if I could just briefly mention that, Brynn. And that’s the Expanding Circle, so that’s the outside ring. It’s called the Expanding Circle because that’s where a lot of the action is.

So, the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle, those populations tend to stay pretty stable. I didn’t give any examples of Outer Circle varieties, I just realised that. Here we’re talking about places like Nigeria, India, Pakistan.

In the Expanding Circle we’re talking about the rest of the world. Those are folks who learned English as a foreign language, and even that is such a, kind of, nebulous, confusing concept in today’s world. Because here I am in Finland, and I tell you what, English doesn’t feel that foreign here in a lot of settings anymore. So, these labels, I really want to emphasise that they are not fixed. That’s actually one very big criticism of this model, that we have these labels in this way and understanding English. But it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story.

Brynn: Exactly. And that’s such a big point for us all to consider, that it’s not fixed. And it often feels like it’s becoming even more rapidly not fixed in this globalised world.

Dr Peterson: Absolutely, it’s all over the place. There have been several subsequent models, and I know some people consider this model a little bit old fashioned, but for this exact book what I wanted to do was set up this tension between these kinds of settings. I liked it more for, I guess you could say, a heuristic device, to just get people to think.

One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is because, as a migrant to Finland and to Europe, it became very evident to me that there was this complete disconnect in many ways between what people in the Inner Circle think about English and what people in a setting like Finland think about English. I wanted to connect those dots for people about the ideologies in particular. So, this concept of the Three Circles Model became a way to do that.

Brynn: Absolutely, I absolutely agree. And, continuing on that, a lot of people who do speak English as their first and often only language, so the people in that Inner Circle that you were talking about, they might not be aware of something that’s called the Standard Language Ideology. Can you talk to us about what a Standard Language Ideology is, and in this case particularly in regard to English, and how it might manifest? What I love is that in this book you talk about what this ideology has to do with Santa Clause. Can you tell us about that?

Dr Peterson: Oh yeah, sure, thanks for that! I love that there’s a fan of the Santa Clause metaphor in the book. I wanted to make an analogy, so I chose Santa Clause. Let’s get to that in a moment. First, I’ll answer the first part of your question about Standard Language Ideology.

So, we talked about language ideology as basically just being deep-seated beliefs or common sense, everyday views about what language is and not really questioning what those beliefs are. So, a Standard Language Ideology means that people don’t question the standard. They kind of have this idea that it’s always been there. It’s kind of funny, as if it would have been some kind of divine origins, that it’s got some kind of supernatural force, that it’s always been there, intact and beautiful.

In the book, what I really wanted to point out was that we have these standard varieties of English which have cultural, historical, and social prestige in many ways. But it’s nowhere near the whole story. It’s only one variety of English, or some would say there are several standards. There’s a different standard in Australia than there is in the US, for example. Or different standards, even, plural.

But people who really, really espouse to this standard language culture, they tend to think that is the whole language. There is nothing else. And, when it comes to English in particular, come on! This is a language with, what, 1.5, 2 billion speakers in the world? The estimates vary a lot because we have to first define what it means to speak English, but that’s a different story. Do you really want to tell me that a language with up to 2 billion people has one variety and that’s a standard? Come on, you know? But people think it’s the only valid standard, and that’s what we should all be aiming to achieve. We should all talk like that. How boring that would be if everyone in fact did that!

It’s interesting and a little bit sad actually, to think about how English got to this status through exploitation and colonisation and so on. But what we have now is this treasure trove of varieties, and to try to think that we should all be speaking the same way and using English in one way – oh, how boring! How terrible! No, no, there is so much diversity, and you can celebrate that diversity, but that’s not enough. We need to also recognise that there are these divisions. I use the term linguistic discrimination about these different varieties. I kind of got ahead of myself, but I really wanted to emphasise that there are actual drawbacks and challenges to having this language ideology.

You asked in particular about the Santa Clause analogy that I used in the book. Thanks for bringing that up, and I will tell you that this was a contentious topic when I was proposing the book because the reviewers for the book were other academics, other linguists, of course. This book proposal was reviewed by 14 people if I remember right, something like that. A large majority of them said, “Really? You want to write about Santa Clause in a linguistics book?”. But I tell you what, Brynn, this was a book where I swallowed my academic ego because this book is for students. It’s for people who don’t know about Linguistics. I really wanted to bring it to a level that everyday people could understand and it would resonate. If I haven’t done that, then I haven’t done my job here.

So, I thought long and hard about what could be an analogy. So, you’re talking about, I think it’s Chapter 3 or Chapter 2 even. Anyway, I wanted to show that what we consider now as “standard” English actually has a birthplace in time and that what we consider the “standard” is man-made. It’s not divine. I use these words like there’s this idea that it’s divine and nobody can touch it. It’s this sacred thing. But it’s literally man-made, and I really do mean man-made, because it’s been the people in power, the people who have the most social power who have decided how we should speak, what’s considered correct, and it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of logical sense but it’s that way because they said it should be that way, these rules that we adhere to in Standard English.

So, I went back to any language that has a standardised variety, it’s always connected to having a written variety in that language, a written language. So, I took the history back to the printing press in the 1400s in London. I started there, and then went on about how spelling became fixed and so on and so on. And this is the same trajectory for any language that has a standard variety.

Anyway, I did the same kind of, let’s go back in history, because for me as a person from the US and somebody who comes from a Christian background, Christmas and Santa Clause – these kinds of things that we celebrate as families, they’re seen in the same way as, “Well, this is just what we do. It means so much, and this is our truth.” I compared it to folklore, actually, in the book. I have some nice quotes in there from folklore. We believe it because we think it’s the way it’s always been, but in fact, you can trace the thread back, and that’s what I did.

It was really fun research to go back and realise, “Oh, you mean our contemporary conception of Santa Clause only dates to the 1800s in New York City? What?!”. The red suit, the reindeer, all that, it literally dates back to one poem – “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”. Then it just exploded, just like the idea of a standard language ideology. So, getting students to make that connection, to realise that these are man-made phenomenon, and therefore they are not fixed. They are not divine, and we can do something about it. We don’t have to just accept this. We can question this. We can mold this ourselves.

Brynn: And that’s what I loved about the Santa ideology. And I loved how, in the book, as you said, it really is such a resource for not just students but teachers. Professors. Anyone who is teaching undergrad, or an intro to sociolinguistics course. And in the book, when you talk about the Santa Clause story, and how that then became the standard because of that poem, you also say, “And if this particular folklore doesn’t apply to you and your culture or to the standard language that you’re thinking of, think of anything else.” Because we all have these types of stories in any culture that then take off and become the “norm” that we all, like you said, don’t question.

Dr Peterson: I was concerned that that would be too Western-centric, and even the Christian overtones there with this Christmas thing. But in the end, I went with it. Thanks for bringing that up because I definitely don’t want to be exclusionary in any way. The same kind of concept could be applied to how you celebrate weddings or any kind of ritual. Any kind of holiday. Doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim or Jewish or whatever. Or any kind of social group or lifestyle that maybe you’re a part of.

Brynn: Anything where it feels like it’s just “always been”.

Dr Peterson: Exactly, that’s the point.

Brynn: I like that you just brought up the idea of us getting a Standard Language Ideology particularly when a language becomes written. In the book you do take care to point out that there are so many languages in the world that are not written, that are oral languages.

You have, I wrote it down, a quote in the book, and it says, “Indeed, there is a common fallacy that the ‘best’ speakers of English should speak English like it is written…In other words, a written form of a language is a prerequisite for standardization, which in turn is a prerequisite for prescriptivism about language.” I just think that’s such a valuable thing to keep in mind, especially when we talk about prescriptivism and people saying, “Well you can’t say xyz because it’s not written like that.” But in the book, you do really take care to point out that there are so many languages that aren’t written and therefore don’t go through this standardisation process.

Dr Peterson: It’s really ridiculous that if you look at English spelling, and I think I say that in the book as well, that, “Really? You want me to pronounce this like it’s written? Are you sure?!”. English spelling is so chaotic. It was such a chaotic process really. It was so haphazard. I think it’s quite funny, actually, I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but the idea that being able to spell in English is a sign of intelligence and there’s these spelling been and everything? That means you can memorise really well, but there is no logic. There is no logic in English spelling. None.

Brynn: 100%. My background before I re-entered academia was as a teacher of English as a second or foreign language. And I often told my students, “Do not be upset that you’re not remembering how to spell these things. Remember that English is basically 4 languages standing on top of each other wearing a trench coat and it makes no sense. So definitely don’t feel bad if you can’t spell these absolutely bananas words in English.” They make no sense, I agree.

And kind of on that idea, thinking about people who are coming from those sort of Outer Circles, your book has a section called, “When ‘bad’ really means ‘foreign’”. Can you tell us about how and why people perceive someone’s English to be ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ and the deeper implications behind that judgment?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, great question, Brynn. I love this question. So, one thing that we know from a lot of research on sociolinguistics and language ideologies and also a connected area called language attitudes is that when we are judging other people’s languages, we’re putting ourselves in a position of superiority. We’re saying, “You need to be more like me.” It might be so hard to admit that, but if you tear back the layers or, like you just mentioned, you take off the trench coat, that’s what it is at its core.

So, the way we use language is such a beautiful manifestation of who we are as people. And it tells all these social cues, you know, within seconds of hearing somebody’s voice. Research backs me up on this. You are doing statistics in your brain. You’re thinking, “Where is this person from? How old are they? What’s their gender? How educated are they? What kind of work do they do?”. It’s incredible, but you’re mapping onto the templates in your head all this information about people.

So, what this means, if you peel back the layers, we’re taking one of these beautiful, beautiful things we have as humans, not only to express our thoughts and contents of what we do, but who we are as people. When you’re judging somebody’s language because they sound foreign, maybe because they sound like they might be Native American or African American or whatever, all this information, a young person, a woman, whatever, that you’re actually judging that person. If you then take it further and say, “You’re a young girl and you shouldn’t talk like this,” you’re actually not saying something about the language, but you’re saying something about young girls and your biases towards them. So that’s a really important point to make, that when we say somebody’s “talking wrong” we might think we’re doing them a favour, like, “Oh, let me help you,” but what you’re really saying is, “I’m judging you as a person, and I don’t think that you’re good enough.” That’s the core message there.

You asked specifically about people who are foreign, so here we’re talking about people who speak English with an accent that clearly marks them as speaking English as a second language. So, ok, what did I just talk about? What we’re doing is we’re saying, “Oh, you’re not one of us.” It’s xenophobic, really. It’s racist. And we cushion that by saying, “Oh, but I’m trying to help you”.

I think there are different ways of helping people, and when I teach in the class, I call it “giving someone the hand linguistically. As a migrant myself in Finland, I feel this very deeply. My Finnish clearly marks me as a foreigner. Sometimes people literally do give you the hand when you try to speak Finnish, and it feels so bad.

There’s this famous line from this American comedy, Modern Family, with Sophia Vergara. And she has this famous line, “You have NO idea how smart I am in Spanish!”. And that’s how it is, like please recognise that this is a whole person in their native language. Instead of putting that person down and saying, “Why can’t you speak proper English?”, maybe this person speaks Punjabi and Hindi and you don’t even know what else. Like, let’s respect that and the fact that they’re trying to communicate with you in your mother tongue. Let’s applaud that instead of making the person feel terrible about it. So, that’s what it comes down to. It becomes a form of xenophobia and colonialism in your own setting, like, “You don’t speak English right, let me tell you.”

Brynn: Yes, absolutely. That has so much impact, I think, on the field that I came from, which is teaching English as a second or foreign language. In my experience, because I would teach adults, I would often get students who would ask me for advice on “accent reduction”. They would say, “Can I go to a class to reduce my accent?”, and I would always tell them no because I have an accent in my second language, which is Spanish, because of the muscles in my mouth. Because of the way that I was raised speaking English, these were the inputs that I got at such an early age, and I don’t want to take away the accent that marks me as who I am. There is nothing wrong with having “an accent” because every single one of us has an accent.

Something I heard once from someone, and I wish I could remember who said this because I would love to attribute this to them, is that it’s important that when you talk to someone, if you recognise that they are speaking your language as an additional language, so maybe that’s not the language that they were raised with, when you hear their accent think about how their mother sang lullabies to them as a baby, and how they learned their language starting that way. They learned how to move their mouth listening to their mother sing to them. The muscles in their mouth formed that way, and that’s what eventually leads to an accent. And there’s nothing wrong with that. All it shows is that we’ve been taught language by the people who cared for us.

Dr Peterson: Yeah, I think that’s a really beautiful way to look at that.

Brynn: I’ll have to find out who said that, and I will tell you. So let’s talk about some of the factors that influence language. Your book discusses several explanations posited for the existence of distinct dialects of English. What are those, in brief, explanations and how do they combine in ways that cause us to make judgments about someone’s use of a language, in this case English?

Dr Peterson: I’ll maybe answer the last part of the question first. What causes us to make judgments – like I just said, it assumes a position of power and authority. Like, “Oh, I’m so important and I think I’m better than you, so I think I have the right to tell you how you should be speaking.” Something as innate, as essential to the human condition as language. Let me just tell you how you should be doing that. You’re doing it wrong. It has the risk of cutting to the very heart of somebody. Like you just said, the lullabies that your parents sing to you, and then somebody at school or in different more formal settings outside the home say, “The way you talk at home is wrong.” What does that do to a child or a person, when you rip away at this very intimate and core part of somebody’s identity? It can be very potentially damaging to people, and I think it’s time that we faced that reality.

You asked about some of the explanations, and the reason I included this chapter in the book where I talked about these explanations was because I had spent so much time in the previous chapters talking about why there’s a standard variety and what it means and what are the drawbacks of that, what are the reasons why languages have a standard.

But I wanted to make it clear, you know, if there’s so much push for us all to be speaking some kind of standard variety, then why do we have so much variation? Why don’t dialects die out? And they never will because we’re very different as people. It was a difficult mental exercise, and I know there could be many other explanations, but the explanations that I thought long and hard about and ultimately wrote in the book were 3 different areas.

The first is what I call access and isolation. I talk about prestige, particularly what has been called covert prestige. That means, like, in-group prestige. It might not be prestigious at different levels of society, especially formal, top-down levels of society. I think this is actually the most important, this third concept which is identity and group identity. These factors, as you pointed out in your question, they interact in many ways.

I come from the setting of the US. The examples that I have in the book draw largely from the US, so I’ll stick with those examples. In the United States, we no longer have official segregation, not official, but there is definitely de facto segregation. You see this in pretty much every major US city, and the situation does not improve. You have really start differences. You can literally cross the street – I used to live in Washington DC –

Brynn: I did too!

Dr Peterson: Oh, that’s interesting! So, you know this, you remember this. Did you ever go to Southeast? I never went there once.

Brynn: I never went there, but I know that area, and you’re absolutely right. The difference between just two streets – one street and the street next to it – was stark.

Dr Peterson: And that’s in the nation’s capital. It’s just so grim and so stark, like you said. So, this access and isolation, and by access what I mean is access to socioeconomic factors like, I talked in the book about housing, education. So, this is de facto segregation. It goes on and it ties to socioeconomic status.

So, if you look at statistics from the United States, I believe it was John Law who said that this is pretty much in any developed society, we see the same kind of trend. Very unfortunate trends, that race and ethnicity tend to be intertwined with a lower socioeconomic status and less socioeconomic advantage. You might have the idea from the outside looking in of, “Well, why don’t you just better yourselves? Why don’t you just pick up and move on?” But how do you do that if you have this extreme cycle of poverty and disadvantage and this is your everyday life? It takes money, it takes ties to the outside world. It takes support to be able to pick up and leave. I think it’s quite shocking, actually, to have to acknowledge how isolated certain speech communities really are, even in the middle of a big city like Washington DC.

Then this obviously ties into these factors like prestige. If your day-to-day life is the people around you, you know, your family, your friends who live in this community with you, there are of course going to be norms of linguistic prestige within that community itself that are very specific to that community because that’s the day-to-day reality. It has nothing to do with what’s happening in rooms where there’s important white people or whatever, whichever way you want to envision it. This, in turn, of course, leads to an enormous sense of identity about who we are.

So, you can really see how these 3 factors can intertwine. I thought these were quite important factors. Of course, there might be others. I would be happy to hear what other people would think would be some of the major reasons for why such extremely non-mainstream or non-standardised varieties continue to exist. But the key reason that keeps coming out again and again is because they mean so much to the people who speak them. They’re such a huge part of the identity, and why would you possibly want to take that away? It tells the story of who they are, and who their parents were, and so on.

Brynn: And who sang them lullabies, exactly.

Dr Peterson: Yeah, and who sang them lullabies.

Brynn: Exactly, and on that, thinking about this idea of standardisation and especially English – in the past 25 years, English has truly kind of exploded. It’s often been referred to as a lingua franca in today’s world. What is a lingua franca, for people who might not know, and what does this view of English have to do with the way that, kind of as we were talking about before, English as a second or a foreign language has been or is taught?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, ok, great question, and this certainly ties in with your previous career. A lingua franca means some kind of a vehicular language, a language that you try to use to find common ground when you don’t share a mother tongue or maybe even a second language. In today’s work, this has become English because English is just there.

I talked earlier about how Finland is an officially bilingual country, constitutionally bilingual. You might be shocked to find out that it’s increasingly common for Swedish speakers and Finnish speakers here in Finland to speak English with each other. I understand that the same thing is happening to Belgium as well, another officially bilingual country, trilingual actually. So yeah, multilingual Europe, there we go. Does it really mean just speaking English in addition to the other languages? But anyway, that’s what English as a lingua franca is. It means that English has emerged as this language that people can use as a medium of communication when there is no other logical choice available.

You asked how it compares to English as a second language or a foreign language, and it does differ in very important ways. One of the things that I really appreciate, we call this the ELF movement, not to be confused with small people, or people from Lord of the Rings or whatever.

So, we do call it ELF, and it stands for English as a Lingua Franca, and it differs in its ideology very, very much from second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. In English as a Lingua Franca, the principle is that it’s something that people have. You’re a user of English as a Lingua Franca, an ELF speaker, but you’re not an ELF learner. It’s not something that is, “Ok, you need to do this and this and this to speak it well.” That’s more tied up with the principles of English as a second language.

But English as a lingua franca, the principles are that people have their language background. You might be a German speaker and then you speak English as an additional language, and you meet somebody from, I don’t know, Taiwan. Then they merge, and each one will bring characteristics from their mother tongue, and it’s not seen as being error-based.

I remember studying second language acquisition when I was in graduate school in the United States. There were all these error-based models and, you know, here’s the native speaker norm, and let’s compare it. The second language speaker got this wrong and this wrong and this wrong. We were always talking about mistakes and errors, and it was a really prescriptivist view is what we would call that.

But with English as lingua franca, it’s just “look, this is what this person brings in and this is what this person brings in,” and somehow, they manage. I really appreciate that the ELF research is trying to celebrate what a success story this tends to be. You think of it as bringing out the goodness in people. People want to communicate, so they’re trying to find common ground. They’re trying to understand each other, and nobody’s really in a position of authority.

Another thing that characterises ELF conversations is that native speakers like you or me, we wouldn’t necessarily have an advantage. We would be another ELF speaker, and we wouldn’t be able to say, “Oh, well I speak English right. You should gravitate towards me.” The research shows that very often, people who are using English as a lingua franca, they understand each other, especially if they have a shared language background, they understand each other certainly better than they would understand someone from Glasgow or Aberdeen or, you know, inner Baltimore or whatever.

Brynn: Or Outback, Australia. Yes, exactly. That is what is so interesting to me, especially coming from a background of teaching English as a second and sometimes I taught as a foreign language, and just seeing the ways that people naturally were able to understand each other. It was almost like watching language evolve in real time. I think that’s just so fascinating and, like you said, that’s something to really be celebrated because, as humans we’re able to do that. And how awesome is that? And, like you said, it’s not about prescriptivism or errors, it’s about saying, “Wow, look at them! We can communicate with each other and potentially make something new.”

Dr Peterson: It’s about ownership, and it’s important to point out that we as lecturers, as scientists, as teachers of English, we’re victim to our own ideologies. And that’s an ideology that just did a complete pivot.

Brynn: It really is. I’d like to ask you the following question because I ask this to other guests that we have on the show. What do you feel is something that generally monolingual English speakers get wrong, just kind of in general, when they think about people from non-English speaking backgrounds who learn to speak English?

Dr Peterson: This ties in with something we talked about before – giving somebody the hand. We tend to associate language with thought, and this is what a lot of people who are interested in linguistics as lay people, they really think that there’s this widespread popular belief that we think through language. So, therefore, if somebody has a learner way of speaking English, we somehow think that they’re not a whole person or that they’re maybe kind of stupid or they can’t think straight. That’s so belittling. Do you see what I mean? That if, you know, this person can’t speak my language correctly, if somebody really has that standard language ideology, they think English should only be spoken this way, and then here’s somebody who’s trying to communicate and use English that they’ve learned later in life. That you might not value what that person has to say and just think that this person has no credibility, this person’s stupid. They can’t even speak. Not recognising that this person has a rich linguistic repertoire. Everybody has a full language capability in their mother tongue. I think that’s something really important.

What else could I say? I think that, very often, because of these ideologies that native speakers have, people from the inner circle, they don’t question the English language in the same way that people do who have acquired it later in life or through different means. So, we have all kinds of inaccurate things that we believe about the English language in particular that just don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Like, when I’ve been visiting North Carolina, that’s what I wrote this book actually, it was wonderful. Somebody there told me that, “Did you know that they speak like Shakespeare here in the Appalachian Mountains?”, and I was like, no they don’t. “Yeah, they do! There’s these communities there and they speak Shakespeare’s English there because it’s so isolated!”. Nah. So just these folk ideas that say a lot, but they don’t necessarily say truths about language. Those are always interesting to hear.

I think we touched on something previously as well when we talked about English as a lingua franca, and that is that standard English would somehow be logical or superior or easier to understand. That’s not the case either, as we’ve discussed, not necessarily true, that those are just other varieties that have more social prestige for some people. That’s the only thing that makes them special. Those are the important things that come to my mind.

Brynn: Honestly, I agree. And I think it’s worth coming back to that image of the four languages standing on top of each other in a trench coat when we think about people who do learn English, especially later in life. Truly, English, when we think about it, is just such a hodgepodge of other languages, of other influences. You can see the history that has happened within English, and to expect people to be able to do all of that as they learn English, to be able to do everything “correctly”, when we think about how difficult English can be – you’re right, it’s not fair and it demeans them as a whole person.

Dr Peterson: And have you noticed as well that sometimes you get the feeling that it’s never enough? The carrot is dangled ever higher. Ok, you can do that, but you still don’t sound like this person.

Even as native speakers, we’re forced to kind of achieve this impossible target, and native speakers can certainly have those insecurities. Studies from Americans showing, “Oh I don’t speak good English, they speak better English in Britain.” I mentioned that in Chapter 1 of the book. This insecurity that even somebody who has English as their mother tongue, this is what standard language ideology does to people.

Brynn: Exactly, and before we wrap up, I could talk to you forever but I guess we do have to wrap up eventually. Can you tell us what’s next for you and your work?

Dr Peterson: Yeah! I love this question. I’m really excited to tell you about a project that I’ve had for a few months now which is called Language Awareness and Ideologies in Finland. It’s funded by the Kone Foundation which is a private foundation based in Finland. Even in Australia, though, you might see lifts and escalators made by this company.

We have this project funded by them, and you could say that this book was really a stepping stone for me, and we certainly see this movement in linguistics, and sociolinguistics in particular. And you folks there, you’re doing such wonderful work. Anyway, the Kone Foundation is “make the world a better place”, and I love that. The way our project runs is we want to make the world a better place through language.

We’re working on addressing the tension and the fear that people feel in Finland about the Finnish language being at risk because of the input of English. This is a real fear with these language communities here in Europe and elsewhere, of course. We’re dealing with this in Finland. I have some brilliant postdocs, a PhD researcher, and one thing that makes our project stand out is that we have a dedicated science communicator, a public relations person, who is making that liaison between our science and the public. We’re hearing more and more about how we need to do this, build in social impact.

So yeah, we’re getting going with the project and it’s really exciting to have that. As I said before, just pointing out the richness of English is not enough. It’s time to redress the social injustices. I feel like we’re part of a larger movement. There’s lots of folks in the US, Australia and so on who are really trying to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak, with our science and making the world a better place through language. So that’s what’s up. Get out of the lab and out of the ivory tower and talk to people! Get our message out there, what we have known about language for decades.

I also have a new book on the topic. It’s called “English in the Nordic Countries”. That’s open access. It’s an anthology, so chapters that are talking about this tension and these challenges that the Nordic countries in particular seem to feel is such a problem now, how do we protect Icelandic, how do we protect Danish and so on, when English is making such inroads into all these different levels of society. So that’s what I’ve been up to. Lots of exciting stuff. It’s so fun to be a linguist!

Brynn: That sounds absolutely fascinating! I cannot wait to follow your work and to just kind of see how you keep going. It sounds wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here, and it’s just been an absolute delight to talk to you.

Dr Peterson: I feel the same way. Thank you so much for inviting me.

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

Till next time!

Hospital corridor, by Sadami Konchi ©

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Erin Mulpur about how hospitals can provide linguistic minority patients with access to interpreting services.

Erin holds a Master of Public Health and is the System Director at Houston Methodist Global Health Care Services in Houston, Texas, United States.

The conversation addresses the potential barriers to both communication and healthcare that linguistic minority patients may face in hospitals, as well as Erin’s 2021 paper Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic which details Houston Methodist Hospital’s innovative use of a particular language assistance technology during the first waves of Covid-19.

This episode is a natural extension of Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller’s chat with Dr Jim Hlavac, so be sure to listen to both episodes!

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel, leaving a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Artwork

The artwork in this post is from Sadami Konchi’s hospital collection. To learn more about Sadami Konchi’s art visit her website or follow her on Instagram.

Surgery, by Sadami Konchi ©

Reference

Mulpur, E., & Turner, T. (2021). Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 23(5), 1126-1128. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-021-01251-2

Episode Transcript

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 Erin Mulpur. Erin holds a Master of Public Health and is the System Director at Houston Methodist Global Health Care Services in Houston Texas, United States. Today we are going to talk in general about her work with hospital patients from non English-speaking backgrounds, and in particular about the 2021 paper that she co-authored with Travis Turner entitled “Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic”.

Welcome to the show, Erin. It’s lovely to have you.

Erin: Thank you so much, Brynn. I am delighted to be here today.

Brynn: So, can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself? How did you become interested in working with hospital patients from non-English speaking backgrounds, and what kind of work do you do now?

Erin: Absolutely. So, I originally grew up in Montana, a state in the US, and I actually grew up on an Indian reservation. It was the Flathead Indian reservation, so the Salish and Kootenai tribes both lived on that reservation. At a young age, I had a deep, deep desire, instilled by my family, to be respectful of all cultures, and also a deep understanding that language is such a vital part to people’s culture. It’s their voice, it’s how they articulate themselves in the world, and when there isn’t a shared language, then it’s really difficult to connect.

Nurse, by Sadami Konchi ©

And so, at a young age that is definitely something that was a part of my life. Moving on, I went to graduate school and, you know, went to undergrad and then to graduate school, and ended up getting my Masters in Public Health after spending some time in Uganda working for a government-run hospital in Iganga District. And again, this focus on wanting to deeply understand other cultures, be respectful of other cultures, and understanding that language is such a vital part of that – it really led me into this role at Houston Methodist, where I am now.

So, what I do at Houston Methodist, I’ve been here for about 10 years, and I oversee our Special Constituent Management Program and also our Global Patient Services Program. So, what that means is that we have patients who travel from over 70 countries from around the world, speak multiple different languages, and they are facilitated by an amazing team here at Houston Methodist that I have the privilege to work with every day. And my staff come from over 30 countries from around the world. They speak so many different languages, and it’s this beautiful, diverse scenery where we have the ability to take care of patients from different backgrounds, different cultures here at out hospital because they travel to Houston for care.

And we also oversee our Domestic Language Program. So, when you think about it from a healthcare perspective, when a physician walks into a room and he notices that a patient does not speak English, he or she is not thinking, “Is this patient traveling internationally, or is this patient a local patient from our community?”. So, our team, my team, has the privilege to take care of both of those patient populations here at this hospital.

And for those who may not know as much about Houston, TX, we are the fastest-growing diverse city in the United States. So, over 40% of people over the age of 5 speak another language than English in our city, and so when you think about that, over 140 languages are spoken in our city. And when we just looked at our data last year, over 70 languages are spoken just by patients at our hospital. So, it’s so, so important to think about language assistance and think about making sure that patients understand the care that they’re receiving, and that is what I’m doing today.

Treatment room, by Sadami Konchi ©

Brynn: That is fascinating, and what an amazing opportunity to do that kind of work. That’s incredible. So, can you tell us what are some common barriers that patients face if they don’t have a high level of English proficiency and seek treatment at an English-dominant hospital? And this could apply at Houston, but it could also apply to where I’m coming from in Sydney, Australia.

Erin: Absolutely. Absolutely, Brynn. I would say that everything can be a barrier, honestly. When you think about patients navigating a website to a hospital – is the website available in multiple languages? If the patient is calling the call centre to schedule an appointment, is that call centre offering language assistance? Are there options to push for Spanish or Arabic or Vietnamese? What is that infrastructure around language assistance? So, I can say that everything is a barrier if it’s not thought about and intentional to make sure that you’re opening access to everyone, not just English-speaking patients.

And that’s what we see here at Houston Methodist, and that’s why we have created content that’s in multiple languages. That’s why we have our phone system that can be in multiple languages. We have so much infrastructure and technology because we know that if you don’t create that, then patients don’t have a voice.

Brynn: Absolutely, and I absolutely agree. And that brings us to your paper, “Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic”. This is a fascinating paper, and if anyone has the chance to read it, I would highly recommend. So, can you tell us a bit about something called the Vocera Smartbadge? What is that, and how was your hospital already using it before the Covid-19 pandemic struck?

Erin: Absolutely, so our nurses, prior to Covid, had what is referred to as a Vocera Smartbadge. The way that I would articulate that is that it’s like a smart walkie-talkie where you can dial in, you have the ability to ask the device to call other departments and other services, and so it was really leveraged and utilised amongst the clinical team for patient care. So, if the nurse was in a room, needed another nurse, she could push the button and she could say, “Dial this nurse in this other room”, and so it had that technology and was utilised in that way prior to Covid. It was really helpful because it allowed a hands-free way to care for patients, but also have the ability to connect with other people on the care team.

Brynn: And I think for those of us who’ve been in hospitals before, we’ve seen this happen with handheld phones. We’ve seen nurses be in hospital rooms and call each other on handheld phones, so from my understanding, the Vocera Smartbadge is really kind of that same idea, but, like you said, hands-free, and it’s more voice command, voice-activated.

Treatment, by Sadami Konchi ©

Erin: Absolutely, so it can attach to the lapel or a jacket, and you don’t have to dial anything, you can push a button and you can ask the Vocera device to call into a directory that has already been created.

Brynn: Exactly, and so your hospital, during Covid-19, was able to use the Vocera Smartbadge in a really novel way to provide language services to patients during the pandemic. Can you tell us how that happened and what you observed?

Erin: Absolutely, so unfortunately, with the Covid pandemic, here in the US and in many other countries, we had a limited supply of personal protective equipment. So, I currently have staff who provide in-person interpretation. So, you think about any time an in-person, someone needs to go into the room and provide in-person interpretation, they would have to don and doff gowns. So, with the limited supply of PPE, really the goal was to just use PPE for people who were physically clinically caring for the patient to keep them safe. So, it was really a difficult time to think about, “How are we going to provide language assistance and still keep with that value of ours and making sure that our patients understand the care they are receiving, but not have enough PPE for our in-person interpreters?”

So, what we ended up doing is we ended up integrating our technology around language assistance. Over the phone interpretation was then embedded within that Vocera device to where a nurse who was in PPE, speaking with a patient who was limited English proficient, would have the ability to dial in an over-the-phone interpreter and that patient would still be able to hear, from the nurse’s chest, to that patient to be able to understand the care that they’re receiving, and receive care in the language that is needed to them. That was something that we were able to do. We were able to stand that up fairly quickly because we already had the Vocera device in action and already utilised across our system. It made it really, really easy for us to be able to do it once we were able to accomplish that.

What we found during some of the waves during the Covid pandemic, a few of the surges of patients, there was a large Latino population that ended up receiving care at our hospital that were Spanish speaking. So, it came right in the nick of time, I would say, for us to be able to have that in-person, that interpretation provided by the nurse between the patient and the nurse.

Brynn: And that’s so important because, part of the research that I’ve been doing has been looking into the disparities, the health disparities between majority language speakers and linguistic minorities. We know that there was a larger Covid-19 mortality amongst linguistic minority patients. So, the fact that you were able to integrate this technology could have made the difference, literally, between life and death for patients. So, that is fantastic that that was able to happen.

Patient, by Sadami Konchi ©

You mentioned this, this is something that I found really interesting in your paper, was that concept of the voice coming from the person’s chest because the Vocera Smartbadge was located on the chest, so it was almost like that interpreting voice was coming from the healthcare provider which, as we know, can sometimes be something that is tricky to deal with. When there is this, especially over the phone interpreting, or video interpreting, is this idea of distance between the person who is trying to receive the healthcare and then the healthcare provider. So, the fact that it was literally coming from the healthcare provider’s chest, I think, made it that much more valuable.

Erin: Absolutely, no you’re absolutely right, Brynn. When talking with patients and, you know, hearing their experience with that, they understood the limited amount of PPE, and they also understood and felt that that connection with the nurse and having that voice be so close to the person’s heart, it allowed it to be more intimate than it otherwise has been in the past with some of the technology that has been created around language assistance.

Brynn: Absolutely, thank you. Sort of shifting gears a little bit, what do you feel is something that people, generally monolingual English-speaking or Americans or, even in my case, monolingual English-speaking Australians, I know I don’t sound Australian, I’m originally American, obviously. What do you think is something that those people get wrong when they think of people from non-English speaking backgrounds who seek treatment in predominantly English-speaking hospitals?

Erin: That’s a great question, Brynn, and I would have to say that there’s a tremendous amount of unconscious bias that can occur in a healthcare setting, and even outside of a healthcare setting. It persists in the world that we live in, and so that unconscious bias can impact the provider, it can impact the patient, and so what I would say is – have no assumptions. Be curious. Always be willing to learn something new.

So, as an example, in the role I’m in, I work with patients who are coming from the Middle East, and there are Muslim men who come to our hospital for care, and I know that I’m not to extend my hand. It’s a sign of respect in US culture to extend your hand and to shake someone else’s hand, but in other cultures it’s not necessarily seen as respectful. So, that is something that I have had to learn and implement into my life and my routine. That’s the piece around monolingual cultures, I think it’s important to draw no assumptions. To be curious, and to be open to learning. And, when you’re open to learning, you’re also open to making mistakes. Once you’ve made a mistake because, maybe you find out that you have unconscious bias that you’re not aware of, change. Adapt. Evolve. Learn. Continue to grow. Be curious about other cultures.

Brynn: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. In your opinion, what can hospitals do to ensure that linguistic minority patients can access care in a language they can understand?

Patient, by Sadami Konchi ©

Erin: I would say, Brynn, that depending on where these hospitals are located – I know that not all hospitals are looking at this data. Maybe some hospitals don’t even have data to look at. So, you know, in our system, we have an electronic medical health records system, and we utilise EPIC. We’re able to see, based on how that patient is flagged within EPIC, we’re able to see if they need language assistance or not. So, we’re able to see that data, and we’re able to implement solutions and structure and infrastructure and policies around that.

For other hospitals, maybe there are some hospitals that don’t have that kind of access to data, and so what I loved about your paper, Brynn, is that you’re looking at what is the community? What is the language of the community that you’re serving? If you don’t have the data within your hospital, expand to your population. What languages are spoken in your population? Those people are coming to your hospital for care. So, what language programs and language assistance do you need to set up to make sure that these patients feel seen and valued and heard? That is something that I think is so important.

And if you don’t have that expertise, it’s ok! There are consultants. There are different organisations, I mean we have a consulting arm to our operations as well. We have the ability to come in and advise, but be ok asking for support and expertise outside if you don’t have that infrastructure created, because, ultimately, what will happen in any hospital setting, is if a patient receives care that does not share the language of the provider, and they consent, or they end up having a surgery, and they have some sort of complication that they were not aware of, the legal risks and the lawsuits that come from patients not understanding their care are so grave for organisations. So, first and foremost, providing language assistance is just the right thing to do. It’s just the right thing to do. If that’s not convincing you enough, there are major financial risks if you do not provide language assistance to patients.

Brynn: 100%, absolutely. So, before we wrap up, can you tell us what’s next for you and your work? It sounds like you all are doing some truly amazing work at Houston Methodist, and I would just love to know where you go from here.

Erin: Yes, so as you can hear from my history, I am a bridge-builder. I like to bridge people to have access and resources and understanding. So, I love the idea of building bigger bridges in the future so more people have access to care, more people understand the care that they’re receiving. I also believe that when you look at healthcare right now, it’s being so rapidly disrupted. There’s so much technology that is being pushed into healthcare. You see so much artificial intelligence as well being utilised in healthcare. That is where I see language assistance going next, but it could be leveraged. I do think artificial intelligence will be leveraged in a healthcare setting in the future and even with language assistance in the future.

But artificial intelligence will never take away from human connection. It will never take away from in-person interpretation and from a person being seen, heard and valued by a person who physically is there with them and is able to speak their language. But when you think about the amount of care that patients receive at a hospital – there’s nurses rounding on them, physicians rounding on them, specialists, respiratory therapists, occupational therapists – there’s all sorts of people that are part of the clinical care team that help that patient while they’re here. Being able to allow them access to multimodalities for language assistance just means that that patient is getting as much language assistance as they can while they’re at our hospital. So, I do see the bridge getting bigger and wider in the future, and I see technology being a big part of that. And that is really where we are looking in the future here at Houston Methodist.

Brynn: And I love that idea of, yes, there’s absolutely a place for these technologies that we’re seeing expanding and developing, but that, at the core, we as humans still need other humans. We need that human connection and interaction that human interpreting can provide.

With that said, Erin, thank you so much for speaking with us today. We really appreciate it, and I feel like our listeners have learned a lot. Thank you.

Erin: Wonderful, thank you so much, Brynn, it has been such a pleasure connecting today.