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To help our readers make sense of it all, we bring you a new occasional series devoted to the politics of language and migration.

Following on from Rosemary Salomone’s essay providing the historical and legal background, political anthropologist Gerald Roche today shows how the axing of language access service provision is an exercise in necropolitics – a use of power that leads to the suffering and death of certain groups of people.

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On March 1st, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States of America. As a result, people are going to be harmed, and some will die.

There are direct and indirect reasons why this order will get people killed. Most directly, people will die as a result of this order because it will deny language access services to the more than 25 million people in the USA who need them. Apart from declaring English the USA’s official language, this order revokes Executive Order 13166 (August 11, 2000), which obliged US government agencies to provide language access services to people who need them.

Government agencies didn’t necessarily always fulfill their obligations under this order. But now, any motive they had to respect people’s language rights has been removed. Access to critical services will have life-threatening consequences in at least three arenas.

First, during natural disasters, such as fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, people require timely access to accurate information to have the best chance of survival. However, linguistic exclusion and discrimination are reproduced in how this information is provided to the public, resulting in what Shinya Uekusa calls ‘disaster linguicism’. Research during the recent LA wildfires by Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, showed that thousands of Asian Americans were denied access to disaster alerts and other information in their preferred language

Secondly, healthcare is another setting where language access is vital. When people’s language rights are respected in healthcare, they are more likely to use healthcare services, which are also more likely to be effective. When people’s language rights are violated, they are more likely to die in mass health incidents, such as pandemics. The individual consequences of linguistic exclusion can be seen in the case of Arquimedes Diaz, who called 911 after being shot, but was denied interpretation services for 10 minutes. Those crucial minutes were enough to leave him paralyzed. Any longer and he could have died.

A third area where people will be exposed to increased risk of death due to this executive order is the justice system. Sociolinguists such as Diana Eades, John Baugh, and many others have demonstrated that failures to account for linguistic differences lead to miscarriages of justice in police encounters, courtrooms, and elsewhere. This has life and death consequences particularly in the 27 states of the USA that still have the death penalty. However, we also need to take into account the fact that incarceration reduces life expectancy by 4 to 5 years, and that after incarceration, people experience twice the risk of death by suicide. Any miscarriage of justice on linguistic grounds that leads to imprisonment therefore has life and death consequences.

So, in disaster management, healthcare, and the justice system, the reduction or removal of language access services will directly expose people to harm and increased risk of death. There are also two additional, less direct ways that this order could lead to death.

First, we can look at the complex link between Trump’s official English order and death that particularly threatens Indigenous people. Trump’s order is almost certainly inspired by a law previously drafted by his vice-president, JD Vance: the English Language Unit Act of 2023. That proposed law included a clause stating that it could not limit Native Alaskan or Native American peoples’ use or preservation of their languages. The new order contains no such clause.

To understand why this is a problem and how it relates to death, we need to look more broadly at Trump’s record on Indigenous policy. During his first term, Trump carried out ‘continuous attacks’ on Indigenous communities, starting with a memo that reinstated construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Starting his second term, Trump signalled his hostility to Indigenous languages by using one of his first executive orders to wipe an Indigenous place name (Mount Denali) from the map. This prior hostility towards Indigenous communities, and Trump’s general austerity agenda, mean that Indigenous languages are likely to be underfunded during his second term. This will have life and death consequences, because decades of research has shown that language revitalization has health benefits, improves wellbeing, and reduces suicide rates.

Finally, Trump’s promotion of English and his hostility towards Indigenous peoples and languages should be viewed as part of a broader white supremacist agenda that has life and death implications for people of color. The push to make English the official language of the USA has always involved opposition to bilingualism, and often to specific languages: Jane Hill has noted how English-only movements often go hand-in-hand with efforts to limit the use and legitimacy of Spanish. These movements have gathered steam since the 1980s, and have consistently been associated with the right, and its more xenophobic, white-supremacist fringes: the linguistic fascists, as Geoffrey Pullum once memorably dubbed them.

Trump’s executive order effectively mainstreams the far-right linking of whiteness, English, and belonging in the USA. Asao Inoue has argued that the life-and-death consequences of this linkage start with the discursive circuits and communicative practices that shape judgments about whose language and life are considered valuable. But more directly, this order will legitimize the white supremacist practice of using perceived proficiency in English to target people for violence. We saw this in December 2024 in New York City when one person was killed, and another injured, after their attacker asked them if they spoke English. In another incident in July 2024, a man shot seven members of a family after telling them to “speak English” and “go back where they came from.” Trump’s official English order risks inciting similar acts of violence.

Taking all of this together, we can see that Trump’s executive order making English the official language of the USA will almost certainly harm people, and is also likely to lead to deaths. That’s why I think we need to take what I call a necropolitical approach to language – one that examines how language, death, and power intersect. A necropolitical approach demonstrates that designating English as the USA’s official language is not just a symbolic declaration, it is also, for some people, a death sentence.

Related content

In this episode of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast, Gerald Roche talks with Tazin Abdullah about his new book The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet. Gerald is also a regular contributor to Language on the Move and you can read more of his work here.

For more content related to multilingualism in crisis communication, head over to the Language-on-the-Move Covid-19 Archives.

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

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

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

Related content

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

Transcript (coming soon)

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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.

Can you share about your work and your pro bono global initiative defending language rights?

Irene: Linguistic Justice® is my personal advocacy initiative. It was born during the early pandemic days in 2020 after I quit my job as an interpreter for the New York State Court System. During my time in the system I witnessed first-hand state violence against linguistic minorities who were trying to access justice, particularly how it impacted Indigenous peoples. Founding Linguistic Justice® was my response to that experience; it provided an outlet for my desire to use my skills working with linguistically marginalized communities, instead of enabling state violence against them.

Since then, I have worked hands-on with multiple grassroots organizations in the US looking to implement a language justice approach in their operations. I consult with those organizations to help them remove access barriers, provide meaningful language access, and encourage them to create effective multilingual participatory settings.

On the global front, The Spanish Group Pilot Initiative was my pro bono initiative and my shot at raising awareness of language rights and justice in spaces traditionally dominated by the English language. Rolled out through the Global Coalition for Language Rights (GCLR), it aimed to shine a light on language rights during the Global Language Advocacy Days (GLAD) volunteer initiatives in February 2024, themed “No Justice Without Language Rights”.

The initiative was launched in July 2023 through the Coalition’s social media platforms, and my main aims were two. First, to build a global community by providing participants with quality education and a safe space to share their diverse perspectives. And second, to disseminate our educational content about language rights and justice, in Spanish, from a global platform.

To structure the educational initiative, I developed a 7-month program to facilitate community development and targeted learning. A diverse and talented group of participants spanning seven countries engaged in non-traditional learning methods inspired by my background as a former attorney, my experience as a seasoned linguist, as well as my integration of restorative practice processes for developing social capital.

The overall success of the initiative stands as a testament to the need for serious investment in the advancement of language justice, including through fully funded multilingual community education programs like this one.

Can you share more about the handbook you developed as part of your pro bono initiative?

Irene: To conclude the pilot initiative, I authored and gathered the introductory language rights handbook titled ‘Queremos escuchar tu voz’ (or ‘We want to hear your voice’).

Throughout this resource, the term ‘voice’ is used in a figurative sense to emphasize the significance of individual language preference in shaping our identity and asserting our self-determination. I wanted to underscore that our ‘voice’ represents the power of communicative autonomy of each person: a fundamental aspect of our human dignity.

In a nutshell, this handbook is a call to action to catalyze support for language justice. It aims to tackle the prevalent collective unawareness surrounding language rights, striving to expand consciousness regarding these rights and, consequently, expand our collective capacity to create language justice. It is meant to provide vocabulary for anyone who wants to understand and articulate how people are disadvantaged as users of non-dominant languages.

What are you hoping to achieve with the first edition of this handbook?

Irene: Firstly, I am hoping that the pilot initiative, along with its resulting handbook, inspires future initiatives to foster community development through multilingual education about language rights.

We must acknowledge that people cannot advocate for rights they don’t know they have in the first place. Our language is intertwined with every facet of our lives, and withholding language rights from people profoundly impacts their lives, hindering their access to social structures: information, opportunities, critical services, education and justice. So, supporting communities in understanding their language rights is crucial to nurturing their self-determination and fostering their own advocacy efforts for those rights.

Secondly, I hope it facilitates a shift in perspective, recognizing linguistically marginalized communities as rights-holders.

When linguistically oppressed communities lack the capacity to articulate their experiences, those in power may not fully understand how pervasive language rights violations are. We have unaware people in positions of authority within our systems.

The result? Without understanding language rights and the impact language oppression has on our communities, efforts remain insufficient. Holding systems accountable is crucial, but supporting them with education on this topic is equally important to foster systemic change.

Those in a position of authority within systems—public and private institutions, policymakers, and the language access industry as a whole—need to better understand language rights, and the impact language oppression has in our communities, to be able to shift their perspective: from linguistic discrimination, half-hearted compliance and indifference, to awareness, inclusion and repair.

We must care for both of these needs seriously: from the bottom-up with our communities, and from within our social structures and its systems.

Can you share more about the content of this handbook?

Irene: This introductory resource provides a thorough examination of language rights on a global scale, encompassing their legal foundations in international humanitarian law, as well as the legal framework for language rights in the United States, including relevant jurisprudence.

Among its features are discussions of language rights theory and practice, guidance on filing national origin discrimination complaints before the US Federal government, and community insights aimed at advancing language justice for all people.

Irene Gotera, Linguistic Justice®

By amplifying the voices of the participating community in the pilot initiative, I also share our findings underscoring several key imperatives to create language justice:

• Promoting self-awareness and recognition of one’s own linguistic privileges.
• Fostering collective understanding of language rights.
• Making the resources like this handbook available and accessible to staff members of organizations serving linguistically diverse populations worldwide.
• Engaging in global dialogues on language oppression to cultivate the solidarity necessary to confront it.
• Proactively defending our language rights to enhance awareness of them.
• Urging states worldwide to enact legislation guaranteeing respect for language rights, recognizing that with language rights come corresponding obligations for compliance.

The handbook closes with my perspective on the connection between language rights and justice: to create language justice for all people, we all need to develop and apply a language rights-conscious lens. I’m hopeful that this resource could be a significant catalyst in fostering exactly that. Download it here.

There is no justice without language rights.

Flag for autism rights (Image credit: Deviantart)

In this post written for autism acceptance month, autistic anthropologist Gerald Roche discusses connections between the communication styles and life expectancy of autistic people, and encourages sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, and applied linguists to help work towards a better life for autistic people. 

Content warning: This post discusses suicide, sexual and physical violence, discrimination, and negative attitudes about autistic people. If you are in Australia and find this post distressing, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or chat online. Lifeline offers language support services. For non-urgent information about autism, call the Australian national autism helpline on 1300 308 699.

***

Hi I’m simply dying to speak to you! I have so much I want to tell you about being autistic because I’ve learned so much since I found out that I’m autistic. I’d love to tell you everything I know but that would probably take too long, so let me just tell you one thing about being autistic. Let me tell you why I went online and searched up “autism life expectancy” soon after I was diagnosed.    

Around that time, I’d just published an article examining how linguistic minoritization reduces life expectancy. To write that article, I’d been reading across literatures in the anthropology of violence, genocide studies, and critical public health for several years, learning about how different minoritized populations are subject to structural violence that produces a ‘slow death’ and reduces their chances of living a long, healthy life. This creates ‘death gaps’ in the social fabric, where the ultimate benefits of privilege are additional years of existence. So when I found out that I was autistic, I had a sense that I might be living in a death gap. And I was right. 

Autistic people in Australia, where I live, have a life expectancy 20 years below the national average. Similar findings have been produced elsewhere. Studies from the UK, USA, and Sweden all show that autistic people die alarmingly early. A recent study in The Lancet has suggested that the ‘death gap’ might be closer to 7 years, showing that the figures are still being debated. But, the pattern of severely reduced life expectancy seems clear. Why is this, and what does it have to do with language?      

First, it’s important to understand that differences in communication styles and preferences are central to how autistic people experience the world. Whilst autistic people don’t speak a different language from allistic (non-autistic) people, our communicative practices are vastly different from those of allistic people. The differences are found across multiple areas of language, including acquisition, gesture, pragmatics, lexicon, and preferred modalities. Failure to acknowledge, accept, and accommodate these communicative differences plays a crucial role in reducing autistic life expectancy. 

The most direct connection between autistic communication and premature death relates to health communication. Autistic people experience increased rates of multiple chronic health conditions, including physical health problems across all organ systems, as well as increased rates of multiple mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression. The impacts of all these health conditions is multiplied by failures to accommodate autistic communicative styles and preferences in healthcare settings. For example, one study from 2022 found that many autistic people struggle to make doctors’ appointments by phone (we generally have a strong preference against using phones), and then experience difficulties communicating with doctors, often feeling misunderstood. A 2023 study from Australia found that autistic people frequently felt that healthcare providers did not take their concerns seriously. These communication issues potentially result in delayed treatment, undiagnosed conditions, misdiagnosis, healthcare avoidance, and other problems that lead to poor health.  

Beyond issues of health communication, there are also more diffuse links between communication and the premature death of autistic people. To understand these, we need to think about autistic people as a minority group who experience “exclusion due to discrimination, stigma, and their perceived inferiority.” Since communication is part of what makes us different, it is also part of what makes autistic people vulnerable as a minority. 

Like other minoritized groups, autistic people experience personal and systemic discrimination from the dominant population. The press typically reports negatively on autistic people. Derogatory views of autistic people circulate openly online. Allistic people find us to be deceptive and lacking credibility, in part because of our ‘low quality and inaccurate’ facial expressions. They judge us as less likable, trustworthy, and attractive than allistic peers, and have reduced interest in pursuing social interactions with us. Even when allistic people express explicit positive views of autistic people, psychological testing shows that their behavior is guided more by their implicit negative views. Exposure to such bias and stigma is ‘constant’ for autistic people.

Rather than simply experiencing bias and stigma in the abstract, they manifest in our lives as violence. This begins in childhood, with autistic children experiencing much higher rates of multiple forms of violence than their allistic peers. This continues into adulthood, with autistic people experiencing higher rates of several forms of violence, including sexual harassment, stalking and harassment, sexual violence and physical violence, producing a condition known as poly-victimization. One recent study found that 99.6% of autistic adults had experienced at least one form of violence. Autistic women suffer disproportionately: in one study, nine out of ten autistic women reported being victims of sexual violence. Surrounded and overwhelmed by this violence, many autistic people normalize it as an inevitable part of our life, and even blame ourselves for it. 

Allistic people are able to target us for discrimination and violence in part because our communicative difference makes us visible to them. Perhaps not surprisingly then, many autistic people engage in ‘masking’ or ‘camouflaging’ – suppressing visible signs of autism, such as stimming, and changing our communicative practices to be more acceptable to allistics. However, this only defers the direct and immediate harm of allistic discrimination and violence. In the long term, masking is bad for our mental health, leading to higher levels of depression and anxiety, as well as lower self-esteem. It also contributes to autistic burnout, a debilitating condition characterized by “exhaustion, withdrawal, executive function problems and generally reduced functioning.” 

Masking, discrimination, and violence accumulate in a form of ‘minority stress’ in autistic people that results in “diminished well-being and heightened psychological distress.” In research carried out with other minoritized populations, the impact of such chronic stress on the body has been described as a ‘weathering’ that reduces overall immune function and leads to higher incidence and severity of disease. Chronic discrimination and violence thus harm autistic people both physiologically and psychologically. 

But perhaps the most distressing and tragic impact of this violence and discrimination is autistic people’s increased risk of suicide. Numerous studies show that autistic people are more likely to think about, attempt, and commit suicide; a 2023 meta-review of this literature concluded that “suicidality is highly prevalent” in the autistic population.

When I look at all this information as an autistic person, even though I’ve only learnt the statistics recently, none of it is particularly surprising. It more or less accords with my own lived experience. However, when I look at this information as a researcher, I am surprised: not so much by the information itself, but by who produced it and how. 

We are looking here at a population that is minoritized, in part, because of communicative differences. They are then subjected to discrimination and violence, with tragic outcomes. Despite the centrality of language to this situation, research in this area is led primarily by psychologists, with some speech therapists, a few sociologists, and the occasional anthropologist. The cluster of allied disciplines that look at language and communication in relation to social justice, including applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics, have so far had very little to say about this issue. 

It’s clear to me that our disciplines have a significant contribution to make here. We collectively know so much about the harms of language: slurs, labels, insults, jokes, and insidious discourses. We pay attention to the maldistribution of respect and resources to different language communities. We study how minoritization is produced and reproduced in everyday institutions, like schools, and how it enters into the most banal and intimate spaces and relations. We think carefully about how policy and practice stratify, exclude, and harm through and on the basis of language. And we also have plenty of ideas about what justice looks like, and the languages it uses. It therefore seems to me that we have an important part to play in conversations about what it really means to accept autistic people, and how to go about doing it. As a researcher, I know that we can, and as an autistic person, I hope that we will. Because right now, I’m dying to speak to you, and I wish that I wasn’t.    

Auslan interpreter Stephen Nicholson gained prominence in Tasmania during Covid (Image credit: The Advocate)

When you think about Australia’s linguistic diversity, which languages come to mind?

Based on the nation’s most prominent social discourses, it is likely you first think of Australian English, the Australian Aboriginal languages, and our vast collection of migrant languages. One native Australian language that receives little attention though, is Auslan, Australia’s main sign language. Our Deaf community have a rich and interesting linguistic and cultural heritage, which traces back as far as our hearing community’s, but despite this, Auslan is often neglected from the social spotlight, and left forgotten amid the rest of Australia’s voices.

History

Auslan was developed from the signed languages brought to Australia by the first settlers and convicts, particularly British Sign Language and Irish Sign Language. The first deaf convict to introduce a European sign language into Australia was Elizabeth Steel, who arrived in 1790 on the Second Fleet. Interestingly though, the name “Auslan” was only coined relatively recently in the 1980s, when the language gained more social attention.

The latest census revealed that over 16,000 Australians use Auslan as their primary language, with the number of users growing considerably over time. The 2021 census was the first to accurately capture Auslan’s prevalence in the country, as previously ‘Auslan’ was not identified as an option to select in the “languages other than English used at home” question. A large number of Auslan users were not aware that they could nominate Auslan as an “other language,” meaning the statistics did not reflect the language’s real pervasiveness.

The number of Auslan users recorded in the census has been steadily increasing (Image credit: DeafConnect)

In 2021, Auslan was used as the prompt language for the “other” category, so the census question read:

Does (person) use a language other than English at home?

If other, for example, Auslan, please write here.

The previous lack of recognition of Auslan in the census is quite surprising, considering the Deaf community have always existed in Australia – and even now, in its home country, Auslan is still considered an “other” language. This is one example of how the Australian Deaf community have historically been socially disadvantaged and overlooked. A lack of social awareness and inclusive social structures has meant that Auslan users have had to fight for their acceptance and rights, and this struggle continues even today.

It should be noted that deaf people existed in Australia long before the Europeans arrived, and Aboriginal communities had their own signed languages. These languages are still in use today and deserve recognition, but are less prevalent than Auslan.

Recognition

One major period for Auslan’s recognition was in 1981, which was the International Year of Disabled Persons. In Australia, this year fostered pride in Deaf culture and heightened the social status of Auslan users. This newfound acceptance led to the first signing classes being offered in TAFEs, which gave hearing Australians the opportunity to connect with the Deaf community. In reality, these classes mostly taught signed English rather than Auslan, but nevertheless, it promoted recognition of signed languages as legitimate forms of communication. This significant year also inspired publication of the first Auslan dictionary.

Auslan interpreter Mikey Webb interprets at a music festival (Photo courtesy of Auslan Stage Left)

Unfortunately though, Auslan users are still far from equal in Australia today. I recently read an eye-opening article about the discrimination against sign language users in Australian juries. Currently, Auslan users are excluded from jury duty because there are no provisions in place that allow interpreters to sit with the jury. Researchers have found no linguistic evidence to justify their omission, which means Australia is in violation of its human rights obligations by treating Auslan users unequally. Their unfair exclusion in such a high status domain is significant, as it reifies flawed ideologies about the deficiency of signed languages, and only serves to block Auslan users from achieving equal status.

On a more positive note, if you were in Australia during the pandemic, you may remember that many of the official media announcements featured an Auslan interpreter. This sudden nation-wide uptake of interpreters was significant, as it marked recognition of the Deaf community and highlighted the need for accessible information for Auslan users. It brought attention to the fact that, previously, there had been a language barrier in place for Auslan users in the context of media announcements. This acknowledgement and increased visibility of the language has boosted the number of Australians wanting to learn Auslan, which is hopefully another step towards reaching equality and cross-cultural understanding.

This year, the NSW government announced that an Auslan syllabus will be introduced into the state’s schools in 2026. This comes as a response to Auslan’s recognition during the pandemic, as well as the state’s shortage of interpreters. This change has the power to shift the perspectives of the next generation towards a more inclusive, culturally-sensitive mindset, giving the Australian Deaf community hope for a better future.

Take-Home

It is clear that Australia still has a long way to go to support its Deaf community, however, it seems that progress is slowly happening. Deaf Australians have been limited for hundreds of years by a society that was not designed to include them, but the nation’s shifting attitude offers potential for better outcomes. To my fellow linguists, I encourage you to learn more about Auslan’s history, and to consider how signed languages might play a part in your own linguistic endeavours. Without increased awareness and solidarity, how can we expect to build a nation where everyone’s voices are heard?

[Image credit: “Language, power and identity share an entangled relationship”, Michael Joiner, 360info]

Yu Qi and Venus are both victims of a language barrier in Australia that seriously affects their wellbeing. Language barriers can make public communication inaccessible and exclude people from equitable participation in education, employment, healthcare, welfare, and all aspects of social life.

The number of people who suffer from linguistic exclusion is high. UNESCO estimates that 40 percent of students worldwide experience a mismatch between their language repertoires and the language of instruction. Even within OECD countries, the literacy skills of over 30 percent of the adult population are insufficient to cope with complex bureaucratic demands.

Language barriers can relate to language choice, medium, and platform.

Language choice barriers exist where institutions privilege one particular language in communication with multilingual populations. These barriers mostly affect migrant and indigenous minorities. The mismatch between the language of the institution and that of stakeholders can be egregious. Australian research, for instance, found that schools communicated enrollment information exclusively in English, even if up to 98 percent of families in the catchment area spoke a language other than English.

Even people who speak the language of the institution well may be confronted with language barriers because institutions usually preference the written medium. Written communication is often mismatched to the audience’s level of education. The readability of COVID-19 restrictions published by the NSW Health Department, for instance, was found to be pitched at readers with a tertiary education. This means many people did not have a fair chance to understand what was required of them. Even so, children as young as 13 and people with an intellectual disability were fined for not abiding by these restrictions.

These two forms of language barriers increasingly combine with a third, where an institution’s communication platform may not be equally accessible. As more and more communication has become digitised, people without computer access or with low levels of computer literacy may be excluded from vital information. For example, the health authorities in Indonesia’s West Nusa Tenggara province provided information about how to stop the spread of COVID-19 mostly on the web. Yet only 20 percent of the population use digital technologies to access written materials.

Yu Qi’s problem was a language choice barrier: her dominant language is Chinese, and she feels overwhelmed by the written English information she receives from her son’s school. At the same time, she lacks the linguistic confidence to request or attend a parent-teacher interview. Therefore, she relies on information she can glean from her son, from other Chinese parents, and she seeks extracurricular tutoring from commercial Chinese-language services. She is not aware that government-sponsored interpreting services exist in Australia, which could help mediate her communication with her son’s school.

Venus experienced a different sort of language barrier: having grown up in West Africa, she is a fluent English speaker. However, her literacy level is low, and she has hardly any knowledge of Australian occupational health and safety legislation, leave entitlements, and workers’ compensation provisions. Therefore, all she could do was “argue” with her supervisor. She could not set in motion the written bureaucratic process of documenting her injury and making a claim that would have secured proper care and mitigated any long-term health consequences.

Supporting language diversity is a matter of social justice. It is a starting point to making institutions more accessible and inclusive. Australia put a plan in place at the national level in the 1980s with the National Policy on Languages. However, having since fallen into disuse, the National Policy on Languages would require an update to adequately serve the changing communication needs of the times.

A comprehensive, effective language access plan includes the provision of translated materials and interpreting services as necessary. It also includes robust communication chains, where low-literacy people have the chance to talk things over as needed. And a needs assessment of the platforms best suited to communicate with the target population would help the plan be accessible and inclusive.

There is no one size fits all but providing information in the languages of key stakeholders, and adjusting the communication medium and platform to their capacities is key to reaching everyone in the community.

In a linguistically diverse world, institutions are likely to already have people with the right linguistic skills among their ranks. Harnessing and rewarding those linguistic skills unlocks potential and allows institutions and individuals to thrive. As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, communication is a vital aspect of disaster preparedness and response. As we take lessons in a post-pandemic world, every institution could benefit from having a language and communication task force embedded.

*** 

The Hani are one of the officially recognized ethnic minorities in China, and can also be found across the border in Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. Like other ethnic minorities in China, Hani people need to become bilingual in Putonghua proficiency for educational and social mobility. At the same time, ethnic minority languages are increasingly valorized in tourism and for China’s soft power project in its borderlands. Even so, the linguistic and social experiences of China’s minority speakers remain poorly understood. How do their linguistic proficiencies and life trajectories intersect? What are the affordances and constraints of using the minority language, the national language Chinese, and the global language English? Here, we examine the experiences of three Chinese Hani women from three different generations to explore these questions.

Hani folksongs bring comfort to older generation facing poverty and hardship

Hani woman singing Haba while weaving

Haba is a Hani folksong genre that was included by UNESCO in the world intangible cultural heritage in 2013. Official reports describe Haba as a men’s tradition. It is commonly assumed that only Hani men may sing Haba and win the respect and reputation it brings. This is not entirely true, as our research has found. Hani women sing Haba, too, as a daily practice of self-comfort. However, they do so without an audience. This may be particularly true of poor older Hani women without formal education.

Let’s consider the example of the Haba singing of Fang (a pseudonym). Fang is the aunt of the second author, Yongzhen. Yongzhen often hears her aunt singing Haba in private spaces. Fang’s Haba singing is full of lament and sorrow featuring narratives of the hardships and misfortunes of her life.

Born in 1966, as the oldest daughter in her poverty-stricken family, Fang’s life has been overshadowed by the pressure to bear a son. As a child, she did not have a chance to receive any formal education and so she remains monolingual in Hani and illiterate. At the age of 16, she was forced to marry a man who she had never met and who lived in an even more remote village. Shortly after, she gave birth to her first daughter. Over the next 20 years, she bore 13 daughters before the desired son was born when she was 40 years old.

Today, that son is her only surviving child, and Fang suffers from poor physical and mental health. Singing Haba is a way for her to digest her bitterness, to reduce her sorrow, and to comfort herself, as in this song (our translation):

I married you because I used to think that you would treat me well and live with me.
Now you don’t care for me and don’t even bother to talk to me.
However, I have delivered these children for you in your home.
How come you don’t talk to me properly?
I plant the land on my own.
Our children are born, and the land is planted.
I gave birth to our children. I don’ t want to leave them or abandon them.
The land is planted. I don’t want to leave it.
You often beat me, hit me with your fists and kick me with your legs.
I don’t want to stay here any longer.
I don’t want to eat at all. Neither do I want to drink.
I can only worry, about these children, this land.
I choose to endure the sufferings and stay.
But still you don’t treat me well, don’t talk to me properly.
In this house, I want to cry every time I pick my bowl and take my chopsticks.
This is not my home, but the home of others, your home.
I eat two meals a day, yet my belly is still empty.
The water I drink is never gulped down.
The threshold of this house is like a python by the river, lying in my way.
I dare not take a step in.
I don’t want to stay any longer.
I don’t want to eat another meal here.
A day here feels as long as a life time.
But I don’t want to abandon these children here and leave them once and for all.
I have no idea why you don’t care for me.
I can’t make up my mind just to leave.
My desire to leave has led my feet two steps forward.
But I still can’t leave.
But then you don’t care for me at all.
My desire to leave has taken three steps away from this home.
But I still can’t leave.
The dog never changes its heart to stay and guard the home.
It is the same with me and my children.
The deer in the wild does not wish to stay, either.
Upon consideration, I also decide to hold back and stay.

Hani becomes glamorous

In contrast to Fang’s mournful Haba, which can only be found in personal and private spaces, Hani pop music has been promoted by government institutions to enhance local tourism. Hani pop music is bouncy, joyful, and optimistic, and the famous Hani singer Mixian (米线) is one of its most famous exponents.

Mixian was also born into a poor Hani farming family in 1983. Her educational opportunities were slightly better than those of Fang and she received a primary education but had to stop school because her parents need her help with farm work (China’s nine-year-compulsory education was not implemented nationwide until 2001).

Like Fang, Mixian’s life was also transformed at the age of 16. However, in her case, she did not have to leave her family for marriage but for work, when she moved to a tourist-centered city and became a waitress. Soon, she combined waitressing with singing for tourists. During one of her restaurant performances, Mixian was discovered by Beijing Dazang Record Company.

Since then, Mixian’s has become a national celebrity. She has released several popular albums, which brought her much profit and fame. One of her most popular songs is “My Hani (Honey) Baby”, which is performed in three languages and combines ethnic and global elements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h8PXgZUdec

The song “My Hani Baby” distinguishes itself from other Chinese pop songs through the use of Hani language, English, and Putonghua, and the integration of ethnic and modern music styles. Although there are four singers who all identify themselves as ethnic minorities (Hani, Wa, Hui, and Yao), only Hani language appears in the text and is performed by Mixian. Mixian thus becomes a symbol of local ethnic identity while the three male singers perform the cool aspect of modernity by switching between English and Putonghua.

The theme of the song is one frequently found in pop music: romantic love. What is challenged is the traditional identity imposed upon Hani women who are not expected to marry for love, as exemplified in Fang’s story. The lyrics form a dialogue between Mixian and the three male singers, where the female character boldly expresses her romantic love, and the male character reciprocates.

Choosing the romantic theme and combining the ethnic language (Hani) with modern languages (English and Putonghua) have served to increase the popularity of this song. Whether it contributes to the emancipation of Hani women is another matter.

It is also worth noting that the commodification of the Hani language apparent in this successful pop song has not only helped Mixian establish her reputation but has also drawn public attention to the Hani language in China and beyond. One Chinese netizen liked “Hani Baby” so much that he started to learn the Hani language by searching for relevant materials and posting Hani scripts online. His posts in turn have become a learning resource for Hani people to acquire Hani literacy.

A new generation of educated multilingual Hani women

Yongzhen is both the second author and the third Hani woman we will now turn to. Born in 1999, receiving a 9-year-compulsory education was normal for Yongzhen, as it is for women of her generation from all over China. Her childhood was also shaped by rural poverty but in a way that is very different from previous generations. Like hundreds of millions of rural people from China’s underdeveloped western regions migrate, both her parents migrated to work in factories in Zhejiang and Guangdong.

Yongzhen introducing her bilingual translation project to university professors

As a result, Yongzhen became a left-behind child at an early age and was raised in a boarding school. Yongzhen distinguished herself by excelling in school and pursued her university dream. Her parents’ migration and labor experiences in developed cities were crucial in forming her ambition to pursue higher education and her parents have been unconditionally supportive of Yongzhen’s ambition.

Choosing English as her major was mainly driven by her parents’ aspiration to get a stable job working as an English teacher in the future. Now that she has been exposed to the Course of Language and Society with a particular focus on linguistic diversity, Yongzhen is motivated to become a new broker for Hani language and cultural heritage.

New Hani voices

When the Covid-19 pandemic was still prevalent last year, Yongzhen organized a team with three other ethnic minority female students to conduct a small project in their communities. They investigated how ethnic minority people in their hometowns might understand Putonghua-mediated public health information. Their findings are very similar to others conducted in minority-centered regions in China and featured in the Language on the Move Covid-19 archives.

Based on their research, Yongzhen and her teammates designed a bilingual app inspired by the national emergency language services. Their bilingual translation product has been recommended by the College of Foreign Languages at Yunnan University to participate in the national project targeting Chinese university students’ innovation and entrepreneurship.

Through the multilingual translation project, Yongzhen and her teammates developed their empathy towards their ethnic minority communities and learned of the importance of providing language service to linguistically diverse populations. Additionally, the have felt it their duty to become a voice for their peoples, especially ethnic minority women.

While writing up this study and having access to knowledge about linguistic diversity via Dr Li Jia’s course and the learning materials on Language on the Move, Yongzhen has come to understand how her aunt and other female Haba singers have been linguistically, economically, and culturally marginalized, and how the official and commercial discourses about the Hani people only reveal a partial truth while sometimes simultaneously erasing minority voices. As a multilingual and educated Hani woman, Yongzhen has developed a new faith devoting herself to the sociolinguistics of gendered trajectories of Chinese ethnic minority women for equal social participation.

How and why are language and social justice connected?

When you think “language”, think “linguistic diversity”

It is a cliché to say that language is a characteristic of our species. But we often forget that “language” is not some sort of entity. Language is an incredibly diverse phenomenon.

There are thousands and thousands of different languages, dialects, and registers. There is spoken language and written language. There is language for political interventions and for whispering love. There is language for our youth and for our old age.

The linguistic bits and pieces that each of us have available as communication tools are called “linguistic repertoire.”

Our linguistic repertoire is shaped by the circumstances of our childhood, our education, our life trajectory, and so comes to stand for who we are. “Language most shows a man: Speak, that I may see thee,” as the English Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson put it.

In fact, our linguistic repertoire does more than show who we are. It is part and parcel of our identity, of who we are.

Linguistic diversity implies linguistic hierarchy

Language is not only something that individuals have or do but it is fundamentally relational. The meaning of language comes about in interaction. And in interaction we translate linguistic diversity into linguistic hierarchies.

Linguistic repertoires are not just seen as a product of time and space and experience but as superior or inferior, as right or wrong, as appropriate or inappropriate.

What is considered good or bad language differs from context to context. Some of these contexts can be very small-scale (even families and friendship groups have ideas about how communication should be conducted within the group) and others are widely agreed upon (think standard language, national language, or even English as a global language).

Although most people know what are considered good or bad ways of using language in any group or society, that does not necessarily mean they can do it. In fact, the number of those who can do socially approved language is always much lower than those who recognize socially approved language.

Linguistic recognition and access

The fact of linguistic diversity and its social reinterpretation as hierarchies leads to a range of social injustices. What undergirds all these is that we consider some people more or less worth listening to – based not on the quality of what they have to say but how they say it.

***On the conditions of authority in academic publics***

This thread summarizes recent article by Ingrid Piller in Journal of #Sociolinguistics for the busy reader#research #AcademicTwitter pic.twitter.com/ixzkvemTu2

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019

Dismissing the language of whole groups of people – and hence dismissing the people – is a harm in itself. It leads to further harm as most social goods – education, work, healthcare, welfare, etc. – are mediated by language.

In other words, a mismatch between the language of an institution and the people it is supposed to serve creates a barrier to the goods distributed by that institution. For instance, last year we amply documented the differential consequences of COVID-19 health communication for linguistic minorities around the world.

How to overcome linguistic injustice

Justice is to reduce injustice. Therefore, the struggle for linguistic justice is necessarily a local struggle: whether it is for rural Indonesians to receive meaningful and accessible COVID-19 prevention information, for Mongolians to maintain their bilingual education system, or for Australian primary schools to have the resources to support new arrival students during pandemic-related school closures.

As linguists we can contribute by faithfully engaging with the struggles of our own communities; and, more generally, by providing the tools to think critically about the relationship between language and social justice. That linguistic diversity is deeply entrenched in social problems still comes as news to too many people.

So our New Year’s resolution here at Language on the Move is to keep researching language in social life. And to keep engaging with the many struggles for fairer linguistic recognition and more equitable communicative access.

A more detailed – yet still short – overview of the relationship between language and social justice is in the recently published International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology as:

Piller, I. (2020). Language and Social Justice. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786093.iela0416 [you can download your personal copy from here] ]]> https://www.languageonthemove.com/language-and-social-justice/feed/ 7 23324 https://www.languageonthemove.com/how-to-teach-tesol-ethically-in-an-english-dominant-world/ https://www.languageonthemove.com/how-to-teach-tesol-ethically-in-an-english-dominant-world/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2020 03:35:38 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=23124

Carla Chamberlin, Ingrid Piller, and Mak Khan in conversation

TESOL and social justice

One of the thrusts of my research has been a critical examination of the social consequences of the global spread of English.

In my book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice, for example, I argue that “Englishization” engenders an external orientation to development. Knowledge produced and disseminated through the medium of English comes to be regarded more highly than knowledge produced and disseminated through the medium of other languages. On the individual level, the hegemony of global English carries psychological costs and may contribute to linguistic marginalization and feelings of inferiority.

This argument is based on a number of empirical studies conducted by our team mostly in Asia and the Middle East. The focus has been on the consequences of the spread of English on societal structures, institutions, and individuals in those context.

One aspect of our critique has been to highlight the detrimental effects of an ideology that privileges native speakers of English as preferred knowers and teachers of the language. What I have not considered much is how native speaker TESOL teachers from Anglophone center countries position themselves vis-à-vis this kind of critique. But my work is often read in TESOL teacher training programs: how does the kind of critique outlined above affect aspiring TESOL teachers who identify as native speakers from Anglophone center countries?

Or, to put it bit pointedly: Can US native speakers of English teach English ethically?

Conversation with colleagues from the Pennsylvania TESOL organization

This question was put to me in a conversation I recently had with Professors Dr Carla Chamberlin, PennState Abington, and Dr Mak Khan, Community College of Philadelphia. Carla and Mak had asked to chat with me about questions related to linguistic diversity and social justice in preparation for the Pennsylvania TESOL convention on Nov 21, 2020. We’ve recorded our conversation and you can listen to it here:

Other issues we discuss in our hour-long conversation include the following: How can migrant parents foster their children’s biliteracy? What are the language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic? Do multilingualism researchers have a monolingual English-centric blind spot? How do the research paradigms of World Englishes and multilingualism connect?

The conversation was also a lovely opportunity to reconnect with Mak, who used to be a regular contributor to Language on the Move writing about English and multilingual literacies in Pakistan.

So, can native speakers teach English ethically?

There is obviously no easy answer to that question. It’s the same dilemma that confronts every teacher with a privileged identity: how can male teachers teach ethically within institutional frameworks that maintain sexism? How can white teachers teach ethically within institutional frameworks that maintain racism?

My preliminary response is this: There can be no doubt that students need role models who share their backgrounds: English language learners need teachers who themselves learned English “the hard way”; girls need female teachers to look up to; and students of color need successful teachers, principals and leaders who look like them. But to inspire students you do not have to have the same identity as your students – in our diverse world that is not only impossible but counterproductive.

To teach ethically from a privileged identity you need to see yourself in your students: you need to believe in the potential of your students to replace you.

Chats in Linguistic Diversity

Did you enjoy this conversation? It is the second in a series of Chats in Linguistic Diversity. In the past some of you may have enjoyed our Lectures in Linguistic Diversity at Macquarie University. Due to Covid-19, we’ve obviously had to put this lecture series on hold. We hope that our occasional podcast Chats in Linguistic Diversity will make up for these for the time being. Feel free to contact us with topic suggestions.

Previous chat in Linguistic Diversity:

• Ingrid Piller in conversation with Dr Piers Kelly about Australian Aboriginal message sticks.

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick; added on 15/03/2024)

Dr Chamberlin: Hello, I’m Carla Chamberlin, Professor of Applied Linguistics in Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University Abington College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I’m joined by Mak Khan, Director of the Center for International Understanding and Assistant Professor of ESL at the community college of Philadelphia.

Mak and I are here today to talk to Ingrid Piller, Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney. Dr Piller is the author of the award-winning and best-selling books Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice and Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. She is the editor-in-chief of the international journal Multilingua, editor off the blog Language on the Move, and author of numerous publications about multilingualism and social justice.

Mak and I each came to know Ingrid’s work in different ways. In my own work in intercultural communication and TESOL and social linguistics, I was drawn to Ingrid’s voice that forces us to question how language and culture have been defined historically to reinforce linguistic hierarchies and social structures that benefit the privileged few. We have watched such inequalities play out with destructive results in the US. In Philadelphia, where Black Lives Matter protests and voting procedures are being challenged, and where the current pandemic disproportionately affects minorities, the job of language educators goes beyond teaching about grammar. Ingrid’s work reminds us how language and culture and attitudes toward language and culture create and maintain inequalities that profoundly shape our lives.

Dr Khan: It was December 2009 when I went to the American University of Sharjah and Zayed University. They were hosting a conference on fostering multiliteracies through education. I was a naïve doctoral student, presenting my work. After the conference was over, I saw an email. Somebody was seeking my permission to publish my work on Language on the Move. I saw that it was Professor Ingrid Piller. My doctoral supervisor had talked to me about Dr Piller’s work, so first I did not believe that it was from Professor Piller, asking me to publish my work. So, I asked my colleague. I said, “Hey, can you see that this is from Professor Ingrid Piller?”. He said yes. So, this is how we became friends.

Since then, I saw Dr Piller as a mentor throughout my PhD and after my Phd. Visiting Language on the Move regularly gave me a very different view of linguistics, which is not very traditional, I would say. My doctoral work on signage and linguistic ethnography heavily drew on her. Throughout my PhD and after my PhD, she has been the shaping person on my scholarship, on my personality. And I’m so thrilled and honoured that I’m here in her presence today and interviewing her. I’m super, super excited and would like to thank Carla for including me in this one. Thank you.

Dist Prof Piller: Thank you very much, Mak, for having me, and I just have to say I remember that conference in Sharjah very fondly. It was a really international conference in an Arabic-speaking context, and at the same time in an English-speaking context. So very diverse. We were actually handing out awards for the best paper of the day, and Khan had actually disappeared by the time we had gotten around to announcing that his was the best paper of the day.

Dr Chamberlin: Well, we have a lot of questions for you, but obviously we won’t be able to get to everything. I use both of your books in my classes, and as soon as I found them, I just thought, “Yes, yes, this is it. This is what I want my students to be reading.” Before that, I was just cobbling together all these different chapters and articles from Applied Linguistics and other sources that take a critical look at language and teaching and culture. But here, I feel like, “Yes, you’ve brought all of this together.” So I’m really, really grateful for that. And I also think that what you do – obviously your scholarly work is amazing – but I also feel that there is passion there. There’s a mission there. And I wonder what defining moments in your life led you to that. I mean, you’re multilingual. I read about your experiences, but was there anything in particular that really motivated you to pursue social justice?

Dist Prof Piller: I think we all make our lives and careers and paths and journeys. I was educated in a rural area of southern Bavaria, an area where grammar schools didn’t exist. High schools didn’t exist until about my generation. I’m the first from my village to graduate from high school. So, of course, my upbringing has shaped me. I received my higher education in Germany. I studied to become a teacher, specifically a language teacher. The languages that I focused on were English, German and Spanish. From there, I went on various exchanges to the UK. My first postdoc position was actually in the US at Becker College as a visiting professor in the English department there. From then, my career has taken me to various other places including the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland and now Australia.

Dr Chamberlin: I have students who are getting a minor in TESOL with the hopes to go abroad, having the chance to teach. For many, this is a kind of once in a lifetime opportunity to be able to do this. But they are also, and I’m glad they’re questioning this, they’re questioning the moral aspects of it. Some of them feel conflicted about wanting to go abroad and teach English and get experience, and I mean that’s what I did many years ago. It changed my life. It changed my world, but at the same time I think back and think, “Oh my gosh, I was part of this whole system of Englishization of Korea”, where I was working. My students are now asking me how they do this, how they reconcile this. And I told them I would ask you (laughs).

Dist Prof Piller: Look, I mean, it’s a difficult question really. I’ve been thinking about this question. I think it’s the same answer, actually, that we give to anyone who works in an unjust system. We live in an imperfect world, and “imperfect” is probably a euphemism, and we live in very difficult structures. But that doesn’t mean that we should not act at all. I mean, it’s the same question we could ask any white person. Should we go and teach or should we just shut up? Of course we should, but at the same time I think you can’t give up being a teacher because you have a particular identity, and the same goes for if men should teach women. That’s all positions of privilege. I carry these moral questions, I think.

Coming back to the specific question of should Americans or native speakers of English, should they become teachers of English? Look, I still don’t see why not as long, and I think that’s the caveat, as long as they also pay attention to the kinds of structures we’ve been talking about, and as long as they teach under the assumption that they are teaching the next generation of teachers. Because I think one problem that can make the privileged teaching the disadvantaged so difficult is that it’s very often under the assumption that the privileged identity is forever the teacher identity. And non-native speakers or people of colour or women will never be as good, and that kind of assumption is pernicious.

So, I think we need to teach so that our students will replace ourselves. That they will be the next generation. And that, to me, is not only an ethical linguistic question, but that it’s a question that any teacher needs to ask themselves all the time really. How is my teaching beneficial to my students, and how does it contribute to questions of social justice? How does is reinforce existing structures, and how can I help to be part of the solution as opposed to being part of the problem?

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, exactly.

Dr Khan: So, Ingrid, I have a question about the loss of multiliteracy in my family. We moved to the United States in 2013. My wife, I and four kids. When we moved, 3 of our 4 kids were bilingual and biliterate with English and Urdu. The youngest one was 3 years old, so he wasn’t bilingual. He was only monolingual. Ingrid, in these 7 years, I have seen in my family my monolingual ones, although they can speak Urdu and do speak Urdu, they have totally forgotten Urdu script. They cannot read, nor they can write. So, my wife and I, we make a conscious effort. My little boy, he says, “When you love your Urdu language so much, why have you brought us to United States?”. He asks this question to us because, for him, United States means English only. And this question is not of that child. I come across this question from so many people around. From political debates and all these. So, my question is – in such a case as I am in, what agency do I have as a father, as a family member, to help my kids retain their language heritage?

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s a difficult question, and I think one that many, many migrant parents struggle with. I think there are two aspects I’d like to speak to. One is the literacy question, and that’s sort of the very difficult pattern, of course, in migrant families, that you actually have the second generation as bilingual. They can speak the language, but they don’t have literacy skills and don’t know how to read and write the other language. It’s great that they can speak in the family, but at the same time it really cuts them off from the cultural heritage of the language and the literature and also the academic and cognitive development that actually comes through literacy in any language. So, of course, literacy is extremely important but at the same time the hardest to maintain.

And of course, it’s not surprising that it’s hard to maintain because in any context it’s the school’s job. The parents’ job is oracy and oral skills, and that happens in the family and we have outsourced literacy teaching to schools pretty much universally. So, in order to be able to maintain literacy in the language that is not the school language, I think you have to invest a phenomenal amount of time and resources and that’s just usually not a feasible proposition for most people. It really only works if you actually have community schools or if you had the support of the school, and that’s why I actually think to have language learning and bilingualism in the school system is so important.

One thing that we all need to be lobbying for in these monolingual countries or these countries with monolingual ideologies as the United States but also Australia, is actually languages in the school system. I think that’s something that actually speaks to the non-migrant population because often bilingualism is a migrant problem and a community problem, “don’t speak it in public and leave us alone”. In order for languages to be valued, everyone needs to see something in them, and coming from a context where in continental Europe you can’t actually become an educated person if you don’t learn another language. At the bare minimum, you have to learn English. That’s part of education. The European ideal, for instance, is that every citizen will learn two foreign languages – so, the national language, English, and the language of a neighbouring country. In many parts of the world, bilingual education has always been a reality and is not unusual at all. To me, it’s like learning math or learning language arts. Learning opens your mind in ways that you just can’t understand if you haven’t had that experience of language learning. It’s not only a social justice issue, but it’s really for everyone. We should lobby for everyone that language learning does something to you, that gives you an insight into another culture and into another world. You can read more things. No one debates, “Should we really learn math? Should children learn math? It takes so much time”. They just consider it natural. Languages are the same, really. They should be a normal, expected part of becoming an educated person.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, interestingly I asked my students in an Introduction to Social Linguistics class, now on my campus we’re 57% minority, I don’t know the exact number of multilingual students because we can’t collect all of that information. But quite a few. Typically, in a class, I have 3 monolingual English students, and the rest are multilingual. So, I ask them, “Are we a monolingual or multilingual nation?”. And they, you know, these are young people, and they say, “We’re multilingual!”. I was taken aback the first time. But then I have them go out and look, make observations, and then kind of come back to me and say, “How are we monolingual?” or “How are we multilingual?”. And of course, you know, they realise then that we are multilingual in the private sphere. It’s ok to talk to your family, to use multiple languages with your friends, but then you get into the public sphere and it’s English. So, I did kind of look at that, but I was surprised the firs time when they all came back and said we’re multilingual. We are statistically, but it’s still a monolingual mindset.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it’s really institutions that reinforce this idea. I mean, we have to operate institutionally in a monolingual world, and that’s what makes it so difficult, and really also creates this disconnect between the lived experience of many people. But I also agree, I mean it’s sort of beautiful to see actually that there is a younger generation who is much more attuned to different languages and now also parents who maintain languages. One thing that I see a lot is actually when there is this resistance in young children in particular. So, primary school is the time when they say things like, “So why did you bring us to this country? We’re in the US now, so let’s speak English.” It’s really also the mental stage where they want to fit in and they really buy in to wanting to fit in. As parents, I think, you have to work a bit to kind of get them through these couple of years, because by the time they are teenagers, having another language is actually a source of distinction. That’s when they enjoy their languages again. I think if you can support your child, they will thank you for it.

Dr Khan: Absolutely correct, Ingrid. My boys, who are in universities, one is in Swarthmore, the other is in Denison, both of them are now so much in love with Urdu. They are at that stage. You are 100% correct, but the little one, you know, he is still reacting, “If you love Urdu so much, why didn’t you stay back?”. You’re so right.

Dr Chamberlin: I’ve experienced that with my daughter. I didn’t think she was going to be speaking French, but I spoke French to her from the day she was born, just trying to, you know, see what would happen. And she just resisted it. She got to the point, we would read a lot of children’s books, and she could read them, but then at a certain point she didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Like you said, elementary school. And now she’s studying French.

Dr Khan: How nice.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, so it did come back. I’ll move on to another topic, and that is language and the pandemic. In your recent special issue in Multilingua, you had said that you received, I think, hundreds of proposals, and you decided to focus on China. And you also recently had, I think it was a symposium, this past weekend, and I just wondered – since even just the publication, things are changing so quickly with this pandemic. What have you seen change in terms of language issues and public health? If you could do another special issue part two, where do you think you would go with it?

Dist Prof Piller: Right, look, when we sent out the call for papers in March, we received, as you said, over 200 abstracts from around the globe. So, really a lot of interest. We decided on China then to make our selection path easier because we felt like Chine was 2-3 months ahead in the pandemic. They were, at that point, winning the fight against the pandemic. It sort of seemed like, to us, there maybe was a course through it, and other nations would go through a phase of outburst but then get it under control in the same way China had done. Of course, that has now been proven completely wrong.

At the same time, you know, I think it’s a really important study to just see what a very different country has done. It’s a very different setup. One that we all think of as a very highly linguistically diverse nation because China, in fact, is incredibly linguistically diverse. There was the standard language and the various varieties of Chinese that are often called dialects, but that in reality are not necessarily mutually intelligible. So, they really constitute different language when it comes to everyday interaction and communication. And then there are 55 counted minorities, so different languages in the country. We’ve heard a lot about Mongolian recently, which is one of the larger minority languages, but China is very linguistically diverse with many different languages. China is increasingly becoming a migrant destination for international students in particular, particularly from places like southeast Asia and Africa, the developing world in particular. So, an aspect of migration that, I think, in the West, is not being recognised at all. We have a very linguistically diverse situation and some interesting challenges when it comes to how they communicate timely, high-quality information as is necessary in a pandemic or in any crisis. How do you do that?

And how would I do it differently, or what would the sequel be? Two aspects that I would want to do, I mean I think there are a zillion others, but one thing is actually to look at situations in the global south where, again, we have highly linguistically diverse situations with indigenous minorities, in particular, being particularly disadvantaged and at exceedingly high risk of the pandemic. To help my students in the Master’s course I’m teaching into Literacies – they did research projects this semester. I just want to share some of their research findings.

For instance, one of my students, Kinza Abbasi, she actually did one that may be particularly of interest to you – a study of how information about Covid-19 was communicated in Khyber Pashtun province in Pakistan. It is a highly linguistically diverse province. I think there are 18 different languages spoken there. Most of the population actually is not literate in those languages, so they if they had an education, they will be literate in Urdu and maybe English. All the public information, all the campaigns that she looked at were published predominantly in English and a bit in Urdu but nothing in any of the other languages, and some of the information was really completely nonsensical. She showed us posters where there was a sheep and the sheep was crossed out, and it said something like “Don’t go near animals”. But actually, sheep herding is like, one of the key livelihoods, so it’s absurd information. And, of course, communicated through the wrong channels because posters are not actually something that works particularly well.

Another student, Alexandra Hermosa from Peru, also had similar findings. She looked at posters that were actually translated into the indigenous languages of the Andes, various languages. And she noted the Quechuan posters in particular. One thing that she found was that, again, it’s not the ideal communication channel to actually provide posters. Also, the communication strategy relied heavily on the internet in a context where there actually isn’t widespread mobile coverage, and again she found information like, “Wash your hands all the time” and “Don’t forget to turn the tap off after you’ve washed your hands”. That’s one of the things it said in Quechuan, except these villages don’t have running water. So, in the information that is – there is so much wrong. And it’s again, I think, a Western mass communication model that’s being applied there. You work through posters, you work through national languages. You have one set of communication, one set of information, whether that is culturally relevant or not.

Another of my students, Yudha Hidayat from Indonesia, he actually suggested one of the key information channels that people in Lombok Province trust is mosques, and there is an established communication channel, like how you share information across villages – through loudspeakers on the mosques. And that one wasn’t used. So, indigenous communication channels on the ground are neglected in favour of, you know, those kind of information channels that don’t actually get the information to the people.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah.

Dr Khan: Very fascinating findings. It’s like getting a model from somewhere else and applying somewhere else without regard to anything. Wow.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, modalities are so important. They shape the communication, but as you were talking about it, I was just going to say – what is the best way to reach different populations? Certainly, the internet is not even going to reach me, I’m not even on social media, you know? It’s just fascinating that people try to apply the exact same model, what works here, I see a lot of signage here. Obviously, there’s you know, every newspaper has free Covid information, every newspaper online, so you don’t have to subscribe to the newspaper, but you still have to have the setup to go to that newspaper. To have the online resources and, I know New York Times translates into Spanish, but that’s it. I didn’t see other languages.

Dist Prof Piller: Well, that brings us to the question of trust. And I think one thing that we’ve seen in the pandemic, and particularly in countries like the US I think, but really many other parts of the world too, is of course a complete breakdown of trust. And that’s why the fake news and disinformation proliferate because there is a lot of communication going on, but people don’t actually know where it comes from, and part of the problem, to my mind, is actually the communication channels don’t match. The languages don’t match. The sources are anonymous. You don’t actually make news of the kind of communication channels that people trust and that people know. Ultimately, a crisis response, of course, needs to be led by the state, but it also needs to be local. The state needs to enable local action. Those kinds of countries that really have been able to respond at all kinds of levels – at the national level, at institutional levels, but really also at community level – and mobilise people who will actually door knock, people who translate, loudspeakers have been very successfully used in China, rural parts of Vietnam, for instance. So, the kind of communication channels that are known to work. One thing that was pointed out by the student that I mentioned was also just that for communication to be successful it needs to be filtered through, like, tribal leaders, and it needs to actually go through families in order to reach both men and women. If that doesn’t happen, you could just as well save the paper you are printing your flyers on.

Dr Chamberlin: Right, and the state here can’t even identify those pathways of trust. And it’s different for everyone. I also know that there’s such an abundance of information, and sometimes people just end up shutting it all off because they don’t even know where to turn to anymore. Like you said, they don’t really trust any sources, and that’s definitely been a big problem. I hope it gets a little bit better. We’ll see. We have some hope (laughs).

Dr Khan: Ingrid, can I ask a question on multilingual research, changing the topic a little bit? When I see research on multilingualism, rarely do I come across references of scholarship outside English. So, the proponents of multilingualism are often restricted to monolingual literature itself. When I was reading your book, surprisingly positively I came across the reference of Isfahan in the 17^th century. I was like, taken aback. I said, “Wow, this is new for me”. That started this thinking in me that, you know, our multilingual research, scholarship is mostly monolingual, and it’s a paradox. So, I was thinking that I would see your comment, and before you do that, I also wanted to show you the diploma, the degree, that my university, Karachi University, gave me. It’s a very bilingual, you see half Urdu and half English, so it’s like the space is divided between Urdu and English, right? Whereas my degree in Lancaster was absolutely monolingual. It’s almost impossible to imagine an American University giving a degree with English and Spanish side by side. So, the point I’m making is this one, that sometimes when we go out of the box to nations, we find lots of things which are so interesting and illuminating, like in the case of Isfahan that you talked about, or like in the case of Karachi University giving degrees in Urdu and English. Any comment?

Dist Prof Piller: Yes, look, I couldn’t agree more. You’re 100% correct. Our scholarship is exceedingly monolingual, exceedingly English-centric. It’s not just monolingual, it’s English, actually, and that is a problem precisely because of the examples we discussed earlier. Because, of course, if we do research in a multilingual context in only one linguistic side of things, we’re bound to miss so many other sides. So that’s obvious. It’s a fundamental problem, I think, of research across the board, actually.

I wrote a paper in 2016 in the Journal of Multicultural Discourses about monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism, and that was a response to research by Anthony Liddicoat who had looked at a sample of research in multilingualism and just looked at in what kind of context does that multilingualism occur, the research contexts. He found that about a third had no context at all, if was just like, you know, context-free theorising about multilingualism, and I think that is a consequence of the English-centrism of the field. Because if you’re actually only seeing English, then multilingualism is something that’s out there but is not really bound to a particular context. And then another 40%, I would say, I forget the exact number, you can look them up, a very large chunk was then about bilingualism in the English-speaking world – the UK, US, Australia. Migrant or indigenous populations, multi-migrant populations. Then a smaller chunk of research in other contexts, multilingualism in other contexts, but really most of it through the lens of English.

I guess a big problem, of course, here are publishing structure and how different research is valued and evaluated and assessed. Of course, there is this assumption built into all kinds of metrics that English publications are better, and so that puts many academics across the world really under pressure to publish through the medium of English, but in order to be able to publish through the medium of English, the ability to publish in international journals, you need to work with frameworks that appeal to the metropolis in the centre. Being part of the discussion, the conversation, the international global conversation if you actually speak to the concerns that are there in the journal. So, it’s not only about language choice.

They key problem, really, is that this English-centrism changes the content of our research because we consistently ignore local considerations, as I’ve just said, with regard to the way Covid is communicated in rural areas in the global south. This kind of ignorance is, in part, related to English western-centric ways of doing things. So, it’s really to the great detriment of everyone that these kinds of relationships pertain. Now, the question is always, “How can we change that?”. We are little people, and that one thing I think that, as university teachers, one thing we should be lobbying for in terms of policy, for instance, is that actually anyone who becomes a language teacher should actually also have learned a language. It seems to me, like, really strange that we continue to (give) graduate linguistics degrees or TESOL degrees and there is no study requirement to have studied another language. That, to me, is something we can do for instance.

One thing that I try to do, through Language on the Move for instance – because we also have a great opportunity with digital communication – so it’s no longer either or. The traditional paper journal, of course, it was more like, you know, you have one shot at it. So that no longer pertains in the digital world either. We can actually create more, kind of, academic and community spaces, and that’s the responsibility ultimately. Everyone has to come to the table and try and also disseminate their research. So, those of us who work in the west and who work through the medium of English, I think the bare minimum that we should be doing for our research is to also create translations and create other channels.

So that’s, for instance, what we’ve been getting with this special issue that we’ve just published on linguistic diversity in a time of crisis. The symposium that you mentioned that we just had this weekend – we actually ran two parallel sessions – one was an English language channel session and the other was a Chinese session, and it brought together key researchers in the Chinese spaces, really targeted at a Chinese audience. We tried to disseminate the research beyond those who speak English because, ultimately, if we look at it from a global perspective, it’s of course only a very slim number of privileged few who actually speak English too or have proficiency in English to the kind of level that allows them to absorb academic information. So, yeah, these are a couple of things that we do.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, changes in publishing. I’ve been on editorial boards, and I’m an editor now, and I know that the publishers only want to publish in English. It’s a journal about interculturalism, but yeah, they resist it. So, we find ourselves having to insist on English in the field of intercultural communication and intercultural education, and that’s cutting out so many people, but I don’t know how to fix it right away.

Dist Prof Piller: The problem with academic papers is also that it’s extremely rigid because it’s not always an either or question, like English or Chinese or something. Of course, in everyday communication, as we all know, bilingual people communicate through translanguaging and code switching in all kinds of ways. But academic journal articles, of course, are the most rigid and extreme end of the monolingual spectrum. So it’s not only that we publish in English but we publish in standard English that shouldn’t have any traces of (other languages). So that creates an additional barrier.

Dr Khan: Most regulated spaces, yeah.

Dist Prof Piller: Khan, as you’ve said, there’s really an interesting tension. Many of us kind of rage against the monolingual mindset, but at the same time, when it comes to our own practices, it’s quite highly regulated.

Dr Khan: Yeah, yeah.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, and in higher education, you know, I’m hopefully coming up with the proposals for something that we can do, not just to validate our students’ multilingualism but to use it. Let them use it. So, you know, we can recognise it, we can value it, but what are we asking them to do in languages other than English? Why can’t they, if they write a paper for some kind of capstone project before they graduate, why can’t they take that paper, that information, and disseminate it in another language through a blog or, you know, through a community organisation? So, I’m hoping to kind of put something together like that, but it’s going to be a lot of work, a lot of convincing people that it’s a worthwhile endeavour. I think it is, but I know it’s not going to be easy, but we have to start with something structurally, I think. Just talking about it, and talking about being inclusive, and I just feel like we’re talking and talking and talking and talking and not really doing. At your university or at other schools – how do you really let students use multiple languages?

Dist Prof Piller: Not really at our university. I mean, it’s very much Anglo and an English-speaking country, or a country that sees itself as English-speaking. But I guess one thing that I would like to add to your thoughts, kind of, is that all around the world we see an increasing valorisation of diversity, and that’s great. I mean, I think that really needs to happen.

But, at the same time, I think we also need to critically examine how discourses of diversity can actually coexist with very exclusionary practices. One issue that I see for people from minority backgrounds as they enter the academy in particular and as they grapple with these questions of standard English, monolingualism, multilingualism, translanguaging, using all of their languages is of course that this not entirely up to them. I mean, they enter ways of seeing, and minoritized populations are also seen as linguistically deficient. So, for anyone from a non-native – or people of colour migrants, disadvantaged backgrounds, or underprivileged backgrounds, to actually succeed they’ll always have to battle. On the one hand, they may want to use all their linguistic repertoire. On the other hand, if they do, they are still going to be seen as linguistically deficient. One person’s creativity is another person’s error, right?

And so, these kinds of tensions are something that – I think one thing we can do is actually help our students come to terms with these tensions and learn how to live with it or learn how to recognise them at least. I mean, that’s maybe the most emancipatory thing we can do as teachers – to talk to them about it and let them talk about their experiences and kind of acknowledge that it’s not only something we can do. I mean, we are actors but at the same time, everyone’s reach is limited, so it’s also about building new communities, so yeah.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah.

Dist Prof Piller: Khan, you wanted to say something? I’ve been going on a bit.

Dr Khan: I really want to discuss with you the discourse of World Englishes if you have 5 minutes. (laughs)

Dr Chamberlin: Five minutes to discuss World Englishes? (laughs)

Dr Khan: Ingrid, when I was introduced (to) this whole field of World Englishes, I really admired it a lot because it gave me how the field of English was attached to a few countries and how this was liberating. The whole scholarship was liberating, and coming from Pakistan and South Asia, I became very confident. I was talking to Professor Carla before the interview. I found myself as a legitimate teacher of English because of this whole scholarship of World Englishes, so I was a great admirer initially when this was introduced to me.

But when I was introduced (to) the field of multilingualism, my professor taught me, then I started looking at the relationship between these two fields, and I was finding them so puzzling because when I used to read Kachru and other pioneers, I used to see the whole world through the lens of Englishes only. As if there was nothing in the world but English. And then, from the other seminar, I had this bombardment of multilingualism, that the world is entirely multilingual. In India, you drive 40 miles, you come across a new language. The relationship between these two, I’ve never been able to, you know, understand this. Could you say something (about) how these two scholarships relate to one another?

Dist Prof Piller: Look, I think that’s a rather high expectation of me. (laughs) I certainly wouldn’t presume to be able to resolve those. Just one thought or two. The World Englishes paradigm, of course, comes out of the original sin of the modern world. It’s a colonial paradigm. Ultimately it comes out of colonialism and slavery. Even if our academic discourses that we value all varieties of English, and so on and so forth, it only actually makes sense within a colonial world. So that’s that about World Englishes.

Now, of course, it has made immense contributions and we continue to live in this post-colonial world, in the world that was shaped by colonialism. So, of course, the way English works in that world is tied to our global order. So that’s a fact. That English predominates is a fact, and we try to find our way around it as we do as humans, and as we try to navigate the world in which we live and make it a better place to the degree that we can.

Now, how does this all relate to multilingualism? One interesting relationship to many is actually – I’m very interested in the history of the Mughal Empire and the Persian language. And so, the Mughal Empire, for those who don’t know, was kind of the trans-Asian empire that existed in what is today pretty much the subcontinent and other parts of Central Asia. It existed prior to British colonisation. Their imperial order was a highly multilingual imperial order, so Persian was the language. Every educated person would learn to write in Persian, and there was a whole class of scribes who got their livelihoods out of being able to read and write documents in Persian. But at the same time, Urdu and Hindi and a wide variety of also literate and non-literate languages played important roles in art, in poetry, in the familial structure. And then there was the holy language of Islam, Arabic, that was in the mix kind of. And in the transition from the Mughal Empire to the British Empire, Persian was actually used by the British in their administration of colonial English because the people they needed to run the country, of course, were all those scribes and bureaucrats and writers who spoke Persian. But gradually, Persian was being replaced by English, and not only was Persian being replaced, but the whole multilingual ecology was being changed over to a more English-centric ecology.

And so, I guess the way to maybe resolve the tension between the scholarship around multilingualism and the scholarship in World Englishes is actually to think about how these two linguistic orders are part of social orders.

Dr Khan: Yeah, thank you so much.

Dr Chamberlin: I know, I’m just thinking and thinking now. Ingrid, I don’t know how much time you have, actually, we didn’t talk about that. I don’t want to overstep.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I’m really enjoying this conversation. At the same time, maybe we’ll – I mean, you want to show this at your conference, right? So there will be a limit to how much time there is.

Dr Khan: Yeah.

Dr Chamberlin: I do have one more question I want to sneak in. I wrote this to you last night. It’s pretty much just the question of – Will we ever get over Hofstede?

Dist Prof Piller: (laughs)

Dr Chamberlin: No, it’s just, everybody goes back to that! And I’m just thinking, I have some lines, like ways to respond, but it’s like I’m talking to a brick wall or something. Of course, I know why it’s popular. It’s easy knowledge. It’s like, “Oooh, yes, we can just classify people’s behaviours according to these world views.” And then I read the literature in our field and I’m like, “Oh yeah, we’re over that.” But then I go to a workshop or a webinar and it just comes back to me. I don’t know if – I wondered if you were experiencing some of that still. I’m waiting for that pithy kind of comeback I can have (laughs). But it still just hangs on, doesn’t it? This idea that we can just, first of all, define cultures in terms of national boundaries, and then just define those cultures, those national cultures by things like individualism, collectivism, masculinity, femininity. And I’m just –

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it does hang on, but you know what? So many things, so many discourses are hanging on. I’m kind of – you know there is this – I think it was Saint Francis who said, “God, grant me the wisdom to change the things I can change and accept the things I can’t change and always know the difference between the two.” And I think some of those, you know, forever essentialist discourses, I mean it’s not something that, at the moment, I want to really want to waste my time on.

Dr Chamberlin: Yes, I’ll just make sure people read your books (laughs). How’s that? (laughs)

Dist Prof Piller: Well, this was a lovely conversation. I really enjoyed talking to you guys.

Dr Khan: Yeah, it was wonderful. Oh my gosh. It was great. Yeah.

Dist Prof Piller: I said at the beginning, there are always ways to look at the bright side too. This is certainly one of the positive things that has come out of this pandemic. We wouldn’t have had this conversation if it hadn’t been for the pandemic. So, I think, you know, one opportunity that I see is actually for greater engagement across national borders and these kinds of barriers. As our lives have been sucked into Zoom, we really can also use those to have these conversations amongst different people from different backgrounds and across borders. And so, there is also this opportunity that we can also reach out more.

Dr Khan: True.

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Editor’s note: There is a Chinese saying that two heads are better than one (三个臭皮匠赛过一个诸葛亮). This proverb emphasizes both collective wisdom and the value of grassroots work. At its best, teaching is both. In this mini-series, Dr LI Jia and Ms LV Yong, Yunnan University, share how teaching about linguistic diversity has changed their understanding of linguistic diversity. Specifically, they summarize the findings of 77 small research projects undertaken by their undergraduate students. These research projects provide insight into the multifaceted and dynamic language experiences of Chinese youth from Yunnan province, a highly diverse border region in the southwest of China. Following on from their recent posts about the revalorization of Chinese dialects and the changing role of minority languages in Yunnan, this final post in the series focuses on the learning of foreign languages other than English in China.

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Yunnan as a link between China and Southeast Asia

Yunnan province in China’s southwest shares over 4,000 kilometers of borderline with Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. Because of its geopolitical advantage and China’s regional expansion project, Yunnan is constructed as a window linking China to Myanmar and other Southeast Asian countries (see detailed discussion of the linguistic consequences of the geopolitical position of Yunnan here and here). In the emerging discourse of China’s engagement with its neighbouring countries, Yunnan has seized the opportunity and actively developed its cooperation Southeast and South Asian countries on all levels.

In education, for instance, over 80% of international students in Yunnan are from Southeast Asia and South Asia.

The increasing number and scale of non-English foreign language programs is unprecedented and largely geopolitically motivated. Yunnan University, for instance, has established ten foreign language degree programs in languages of Southeast Asia and South Asia only within the past seven years. This bi-directional flow of international students learning Chinese and Chinese students learning Southeast Asian and South Asian languages constitutes a new approach in foreign language education in China, which is very different to the approach of metropolitan cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Learning Burmese as extension of family capital

The study by Yang Hongli (杨洪黎) has offered some interesting learning experiences of a Chinese female student majoring in Burmese. Being brought up in Yingjiang, a border town in Yunnan, this Chinese student was able to speak simple Burmese language for daily communication with her parents before entering university. Her Burmese proficiency is mainly associated with the fact that she has a Burmese mother and a Chinese father, and both of her parents have been involved in the jade trade and crossing the border for decades. While studying at university, this student reports that “缅语越学越有成就感，越学越有自信” (“the longer I study Burmese, the more I feel accomplished and the more I feel confident”). As one of the top students in her class, she is often set up as an example in pronunciation, oral communication, and academic achievement. Despite undertaking her Burmese studies in Yunnan, this student does not feel inferior to other Chinese peers from elite universities in Beijing and Shanghai because her university has a one-year-exchange program with Yangon University, the top university in Myanmar and her excellent oral performance in the national Burmese language competition also proves her competence over other Burmese majors in China.

Learning English as burden

Li Jia with Dai and Shan students in a Yunnan primary school

This student, however, feels quite stressed when asked about her English proficiency. In the interview she confessed that her English is poor because she has not passed CET-4 (College English Test Band-4). Without this certificate, she is afraid that her future job prospects might be affected. Similar to this Burmese learner’s story, a Thai major also reported her different language learning experiences in English and in Thai to Bai Qiongfang (白琼芳）.

This Thai learner used to study English in her first year, but due to her lack of interest and unsatisfactory performance in English, she decided to transfer to major in Thai. Another important reason to shift to study Thai is because of her ethnic identity as Dai. As a Dai speaker, she can understand 40% of Thai language because of the shared linguistic and cultural background.

Cross-border minorities learning Thai for additive identities

As China is increasingly promoting non-English foreign languages, Thai has become one of the most popular foreign languages in Yunnan and the spread of Thai social media also shapes Chinese young people’s desire to learn Thai. Due to the similarity between her mother tongue and Thai, this Thai learner has proved her competence in her class when she just started to learn Thai compared to other Chinese classmates who have to struggle from zero knowledge. It is interesting to note that her competence in Thai also shapes her curiosity and desire to maintain her ethnic identity. By working with her teacher on a project, she is running an official account on introducing the cultural practices of both Dai and Thai people. In fact, the increasing interest in speaking ethnic minority languages like Dai is not limited to grassroots efforts but also observed from top down approach in the shifting context of China’s geoeconomic and geopolitical conditions, as we shared in the previous post.

The studies mentioned above are mainly based on our students’ observations and lived experiences. An in-depth and longitudinal study is needed in future in order to understand how the shifting meanings of speaking “small languages” like Thai and Burmese might contribute to more equitable access to social resources. Whether the valorization of these foreign languages will fulfill the career aspirations of their speakers in education and at work also remains an open question.

While having abundant linguistic and cultural resources in Yunnan, we should not exaggerate the idea of multicultural prosperity. As we pointed out in the previous post, only a very small number of ethnic minority students can overcome the linguistic and social barriers to be accepted into university. English still constitutes a huge barrier for their access to equal education especially in remote and minority-centered regions of Yunnan. In order to fulfill minority people’s aspirations, a more diversified foreign language educational policy needs to be adopted. Rather than using English as the only foreign subject, Southeast Asian languages such as Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Laotian should be established to make use of the local linguistic resources and to empower young people’s upward mobility in the borderlands.

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Editor’s note: There is a Chinese saying that two heads are better than one (三个臭皮匠赛过一个诸葛亮). This proverb emphasizes both collective wisdom and the value of grassroots work. At its best, teaching is both. In this mini-series, Dr LI Jia and Ms LV Yong, Yunnan University, share how teaching about linguistic diversity has changed their understanding of linguistic diversity. Specifically, they summarize the findings of 77 small research projects undertaken by their undergraduate students. These research projects provide insight into the multifaceted and dynamic language experiences of Chinese youth from Yunnan province, a highly diverse border region in the southwest of China. Following on from their recent post about the revalorization of Chinese dialects, the second article of this 3-part series explores the state of minority languages in China.

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Maoduoli candy from Yunnan is a huge success. Its name means “bright boy” in the Dai language.

Yunnan province is one of the most linguistically diverse provinces in China. It also ranks near the bottom for degree of socioeconomic development in China. With China’s rapid development in the world economy, Yunnan is seeking to capitalize on its linguistic and cultural heritage to integrate itself into China’s regional expansion. Tourism is one of the three pillar industries in Yunnan, and offers associated business opportunities related to minority languages.

Ethnic minority people’s languages and their cultural products increasingly come to be seen as a form of capital to boost the local economy.

This is apparent in the names and images of local foods, as Xiong Qingqing (熊青青) has found. Xiong finds that ethnic minority languages transcribed in Mandarin scripts can create exotic and authentic feelings among Chinese customers who are keen to purchase these commodities. Maoduoli (猫哆哩) is such a case in point: this snack made from local fruit is named after a word from the Dai language, where “Maoduoli” means “bright boy”. Since it was first sold online in 2011, Maoduoli has gained such nationwide popularity that there was a significant rise in its Baidu index from 300 to 2500 within half a year.

Ethnic minority people lack interest in maintaining their heritage languages

The commodification of ethnic minority languages has been studied by many scholars both in China and the world. Some of our students are ethnic minorities themselves, but what they have observed is quite different from the official discourse of celebrating diversity via tourism. Their studies indicate that ethnic minority people themselves do not have much confidence in maintaining their heritage languages.

Wang Liping’s (王丽萍) study is based on the language practices of Bai people from Heqing, Yunnan. Despite the tourist discourse in promoting Bai language and cultural products, the local Bai people see it as challenging to revitalize their heritage language. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, the Bai language in Heqing has no written script and Bai people do not have any religious belief or other strong ideological desire to maintain their cultural practices.

Second, Heqing’s geographical location between two popular tourist destinations (Dali and Lijiang) have actually sped up the loss of Bai. This is due to the fact that more and more translocal migrants settle down in Heqing and marry locals. In the process, Putonghua replaces Bai as the medium for family and wider communication.

Third, many local Bai people migrate to more developed cities in the east of China for better prospects.

Finally, despite the discursive valorization of Bai as a commodity, the language has not been legitimized in the mainstream educational system.

For all these reasons, Bai people do not find it worthwhile to pass Bai on to their younger generation. Instead, the prefer to invest in Putonghua and English. According to Wang’s study with Bai people of different age groups, young people between 7 and 18 have only receptive but no productive knowledge of Bai language, even though they live in a Bai-centered region.

Constructing ethnic minority language as soft power

Despite the lack of interest in minority language maintenance on the part of minority groups, local governments are keen to promote these languages by displaying ethnic minority language signage at tourist destinations (see also Yang Hongyan’s study) and other public spaces. Such top-down approaches to revitalizing ethnic minority languages and cultural practices become more prominent in Yunnan’s border regions such as 西双版纳 (Xishuangbana; see map), a Dai-centered city bordering Myanmar and Laos.

Bai Qiongfang’s (白琼芳) analysis of official documents about the promotion of Dai and Dai culture indicates that Xishuangbanna is becoming a window targeting its neigbouring countries where there are many cross-border ethnic groups living on both sides of the border and sharing a similar language and culture.

Dai people constitute the majority in Xishuangbanna. The Dai are called Shan in Myanmar, and Dai language is also similar to Laotian, the national language of Laos. Given its geopolitical importance, Dai language is not only promoted as commodity but more importantly as “soft power of the borderland”. By making use of digital information technologies and social media transmission, the quality of spreading Dai language and culture has been greatly enhanced, and many national projects and funding supports have been granted to revitalize Dai language and culture via TV/radio/movies and by compiling Dai textbooks and a dictionary.

The local government has even initiated a new policy requiring local leaders and civilians to wear ethnic minority clothes and accessories for at least two days a week.

The increasing visibility of minority languages and cultural practices in China and across its border constitutes a new perspective on China’s language practices in which ethnic minority languages are part of China’s soft power projection, revitalization of the local economy and reinforcement of minority groups’ cultural confidence. However, it remains to be seen whether the discourse of constructing ethnic minority languages as commodity and symbolic identity is actually beneficial to ethnic minorities and does not create more tensions and discontinuities within ethnic minorities and cross-border groups.

Despite the discourse of embracing diversity and having abundant linguistic and cultural resources in Yunnan, we should not exaggerate the idea of multicultural prosperity.

Based on our decades of teaching experience, we are well aware that only a very small number of ethnic minority students can overcome the linguistic and social barriers to being accepted into university. English still constitutes a huge barrier for their access to equal education especially in remote and minority-centered regions of Yunnan. An in-depth and longitudinal study is needed in future in order to understand how ethnic minority students might get empowered through education and at work. What our students Zhu Ziying (朱子莹), Li Jincheng(李锦程), Liu Zongtuo(刘宗拓),Bi Yanming(毕砚茗) and Li Jia have been doing in recent months and in the years to come is to investigate how language shapes the educational and employment trajectories of Yi ethnic minority students and hopefully our study might contribute to the linguistic diversity at the borderlands.

In the next and final part of this series, we’ll focus more on these cross-border languages and explore foreign language learning of languages other than English in China.

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Editor’s note: There is a Chinese saying that two heads are better than one (三个臭皮匠赛过一个诸葛亮). This proverb emphasizes both collective wisdom and the value of grassroots work. At its best, teaching is both. In this mini-series, Dr LI Jia and Ms LV Yong, Yunnan University, share how teaching about linguistic diversity has changed their understanding of linguistic diversity. Specifically, they summarize the findings of 77 small research projects undertaken by their undergraduate students. These research projects provide insight into the multifaceted and dynamic language experiences of Chinese youths from Yunnan province, a highly diverse border region in the southwest of China. In the first article of this 3-part series, we learn how Chinese dialects (“fangyan”) are increasingly valorized as an expression of distinctive identity and as a profitable commodity.

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(Source: Language Atlas of China, Wikipedia)

Fangyan (方言) is usually translated as “dialect” into English, meaning a variety of Mandarin. 70% of China’s 1.4 billion people speak eight different types of Mandarin and only a small number of these speak standard Mandarin, or Putonghua, as their mother tongue. Speaking Fangyan has long been associated with social stereotypes such as lack of education and low-class status. However, such negative indexicality of speaking Fangyan has been challenged by the COVID-19 outbreak and by the emerging circulation of diverse social media online.

Fangyan as an index of authenticity and authority

Speaking Fangyan is increasingly considered as an index of authenticity and a source of authority. This can be observed in an increasing number of Chinese movies, songs, TV series and other entertainment programs. In 2019, the animated movie “Ne Zha”, for instance, raked in over 4.6 billion yuan at the box office. Sichuan Fangyan was used right at the beginning of the film to indicate the main character Ne Zha’s origin from Sichuan.

The choice of Fangyan not only brings our attention to history but also returns to the lived experiences of contemporary people.

This is confirmed by student Shi Lihua’s (施利华) interview with the director Zhou Jueyu, whose work “Sleepless in Licang” won the first prize for the second Asian Micro Film Festival held in Lincang, a border city between China and Myanmar. In her study, Shi describes that “the grassroots story in Lincang Fangyan captures the theme of facing setbacks in life, moving forward bravely, living with a smile and ultimately achieving success”.

The emotional attachment to speaking Fangyan is also confirmed by Li Jie’s (李杰) observation on the daily circulation of short-video platforms. Easy access to Fangyan via short-video APPs provides hundreds of millions of Chinese migrant workers and students with a space for connection and psychological comfort.

Fangyan as a source of success and knowledge dissemination

Poster of the “1.3 Billion Decibel” show

Fangyan is also promoted as a source of success and knowledge dissemination by celebrities and academic scholars via different social media. The “1.3 Billion Decibel” music competition, for example, was established in 2016 and has become the most popular music TV show promoting Fangyan via singing contests across 32 Chinese provinces and regions. By combining Fangyan with popular songs, Chinese grassroots singers’ creativity and talents have been acknowledged by wider audiences and the value of speaking Fangyan has been revitalized among diverse populations in China.

Besides, some Chinese linguists have made use of online resources to highlight the historical relevance of and knowledge inheritance from Fangyan.

According to Li Jie’s analysis of video posts on TikTok by Ruan Guijun from Wuhan University, Fangyan contains rich resources for exploring Chinese proverbs, riddles and other civilizational knowledge. Fangyan as historical reference has been promoted via the form of “the Fangyan Poem Contest” to celebrate the International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019. Based on Li Jie’s study, Chinese audiences are aware of the historical connection between Fangyan and ancient poems. It is through reading Chinese ancient poems that Fangyan instead of Putonghua is constructed as legitimate medium of classical and advanced Chinese literary works. In the process, respect towards Fangyan is also revitalized.

Fangyan as commodified capital

The choice of using Fangyan to advertise China’s high-tech commodities such as Huawei mobile phone has also proven a great success. According to Zhao Yang’s (赵洋) analysis of Chinese netizens’ comments, Fangyan embedded in a giant high-tech company not only enhances Fangyan speakers’ confidence towards their mother tongue, but also indicates Huawei’s innovation and willingness to include linguistic diversity other than Putonghua and English. As such, Fangyan becomes one of the branding resources for advertisements and constitutes a selling point to attract potential customers from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Fangyan as a commodity is also apparent on social media. In Li Jie’s analysis of online celebrities, speaking Fangyan does not reduce but attract millions of followers and significant sums of money for advertising products. 多语和毛毛姐 (name of short video owner), for example, speaks Guizhou Fangyan and has become one of the most popular celebrities with over 33 million followers in China.

Speaking Fangyan is not only confined to Chinese people. Many foreigners living and working in China have come to realize the value of speaking Fangyan. Speaking Fangyan can construct their identity as a 中国通 (China expert) for newly arrived foreigners and as cross-cultural communicator for introducing Chinese local practices.

Yan Wenzhen’s (闫文珍) study with foreigners speaking Chinese Fangyan contributes an interesting language practice which is often overlooked, if not ignored, by the mainstream educational discourse. In her study, Yan has exemplified how foreigners make use of TikTok and Fangyan to display their local knowledge and attract followers. 伊博, for instance, is an African man living in Shenyang, northeast of China. Speaking Shenyang Fangyan and capturing foreigners’ linguistic and cultural challenges living in their local community has helped him win over 6 million followers. Behind this number follows his social reputation and material rewards.

The studies of our students are mainly based on their observations and lived experiences. They chose to research Fangyan because none of them speak Putonghua as their mother tongue and they all have to take a Putonghua proficiency test to prove their ability, which will in turn impact their job prospects. All of our students, and ourselves included, have our own problems in speaking “perfect” Putonghua. However, access to learning about linguistic diversity and online resources undoubtedly provides us with a third space to reconstruct our connection with Fangyan in the tensions between power and social justice.

In the next part of this series, we’ll move beyond Chinese to consider yet another aspect of China’s linguistic diversity: ethnic minority languages and their changing role.

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But if language revitalization is political, just what sort of politics is it?

Here, I want to think about language revitalization as a form of radical politics, based on a reading of the recently published Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics.

To begin with, what is radical politics?

Radicals don’t propose a single definition of the concept. My understanding of radicalism is that it is oppositional, and seeks fundamental transformation (rather than superficial tweaks), through the abolition of various forms of domination. In this sense, language revitalization is radical, because it challenges the global status quo: a planetary system of language oppression that is presently eliminating at least half of the world’s languages.

Language revitalization seeks a different world, not a better version of this one. It seeks a world where structural power arrangements allow all languages to flourish. This requires a fundamental transformation of current social and political arrangements, which are presently geared towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples and the continuing subordination of other groups according to race, ethnicity, caste, and religion.

Radical politics seeks to achieve this transformation through direct action. Although campaigning, lobbying, consciousness-raising, and other forms of progressive politics are part of the radical toolkit, more important are acts of civil disobedience, protest, disruption, hacktivism, and so on.

Moments of direct action have always preceded language revitalization movements. Such movements can only occur in the context of greater rights, expanded freedoms, and diminished domination that are won through struggle.

A key case in point is the revitalization of Indigenous languages in settler colonies such as Australia, the USA, Canada, and New Zealand. In all these contexts, larger revitalization movements emerged out of earlier efforts to maintain languages only after civil rights had been secured through protest and other forms of direct action. States did not grant these rights willingly; rather, these rights were won as a result of coordinated, purposeful, direct action by Indigenous peoples, fighting simultaneously in their homelands whilst networked across the globe.

Language revitalization is also connected to direct action in another way. If we accept that current structural arrangements lead to the elimination of certain languages, then simply using those languages is a form of direct action. In this sense, the anthropologist and Chickasaw language activist Jenny Davis has called language revitalization an “act of breath-taking resistance, resilience, and survivance.”

In addition to direct action, language revitalization demonstrates another important feature of radical politics: prefiguration. Prefiguration refers to efforts to create the sought-after forms of justice in the process of achieving structural transformation: to prefigure the world one wants to build. Language revitalization is prefigurative in that it restores languages to a community and the world before broad-scale transformation has taken place, as a model of how the world could and should be.

In addition to direct action and prefiguration, another important feature of radicalism is critique. It aims to name, describe and expose systems of domination, and to clearly outline their harms and their perpetrators. Radical politics is thus typically ‘anti’: antifascist, antiracist, anti-capitalist, antimilitarist, anticolonial, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchy.

This sort of critique has so far played only a limited role in language revitalization. Instead, discourses of language revitalization, particularly in the popular imagination, have been dominated by tropes of what Jane Hill called ‘hyperbolic valorization’: the heaping of abundant praise on these languages. Such praise, without a critique of domination, leads to what Daniel G. Solorzano and Dolores Delgado Bernal call ‘conformist resistance,’ which works towards social justice by offering ‘Band-Aid’ solutions that do not address deeper, systemic issues.

However, a structurally-informed critique is gradually emerging in relation to language revitalization. For example, Alice Taff and her collaborators use the term ‘language oppression’ to describe the ‘enforcement of language loss by physical, mental, social and spiritual coercion,’ and I have written about how language oppression can be analyzed similarly to other forms of oppression that occur in relation to race, nation, ethnicity, and religion. Indigenous scholars such as Wesley Leonard, Jenny Davis, and Michelle M Jacob are increasingly tying language revitalization to a critique of colonialism. Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh, in discussing the radical language politics of political prisoners in what is currently Northern Ireland, ties their language revitalization work to broader struggles against colonialism and neo-colonial globalization. And in Australia, Kris Eira has stated that, “what causes the loss of languages is dominance of one group of people over another.” Together with Tonya Stebbins and Vicki Couzens, Kris Eira has therefore called for the decolonization of linguistic practice.

This focus on a critique of colonialism and a positive project of decolonization increasingly forms a central aspect of radical politics, due to efforts to ensure that radical politics are intersectional. This means that radical projects explore how varying forms of domination and oppression interact, through discussion of concepts like racial capitalism, environmental racism, and the decolonization-decarbonization nexus. They also seek to ensure that radical projects do not create injustice for some while seeking justice for others, for example, through anti-oppression policies.

Because radical politics seeks to be intersectional, solidarity is central to its practice: solidarity within, across, and between movements. The first type of solidarity is highly relevant to language revitalization, given its communal nature. Thinking about solidarity as a form of negotiated goal-setting and coordinated action seems to provide a more constructive way of dealing with the conflicts that often arise in the process of language revitalization, compared to present interests in achieving ‘ideological clarification’.

Solidarity across movements refers to how people outside a movement can act as advocates, allies, affiliates, or accomplices to those within it. For example, I see my role as that of an ally for linguistic justice, rather than a language revitalization practitioner. One thing I think we can usefully do as allies is to help create safer spaces for language revitalization. As Ruth A. Deller explains in the handbook, safer spaces are those where, “…people from different marginalized groups can gather, speak and be resourced safely”—these may be physical or virtual. Whatever practices of solidarity we engage in, it is crucial to think about how we can decolonize solidarity—how we avoid reproducing the power structures and relations that cause language oppression in the first place.

Thinking about the third form of solidarity—between movements—provides a critical insight into an important shortcoming of the Routledge handbook. In a volume containing a chapter on radical bicycle politics and another dedicated to discussing what does and does not constitute radical music, language barely rates a mention. In a book that takes intersectionality and decolonization as organizing principles, the near total absence of any discussion of language is indicative of the need for a more expansive and more inclusive vision of what counts as radical politics.

This presents an opportunity for language activists, advocates, and allies to engage with radical academics and activists. We need to demonstrate how any analysis of oppression is incomplete without understanding the ways in which language serves as a contour of domination and an objective for emancipation. In turn, we have much to gain from a deeper engagement with the practices and philosophies of radical politics.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Shannon Woodcock, Christopher Annis, Rokhl Kafrissen, and Ingrid Piller for discussions and comments that helped improve this article.

Language on the Move

In mediated and digital communication, it seems today that we hear a myriad of public voices. Additionally, linguistic productions are not necessarily carefully edited and policed before they go public. One effect appears to be that formerly unmarked populations and their language practices are questioned in their position as ‘the normal people’ using ‘normal language’. They are no longer an unquestioned  hegemonic source of power. So-called ‘voices from nowhere’ (Gal & Woolard 2001) that once were able to pass themselves off as standard and neutral, find their social situatedness and privilege exposed. They have come to be seen for what they are: as being ‘from somewhere’, too.

Thus, new forms of public spaces have emerged in which the ‘normal’ is increasingly questioned. In this situation, formerly hegemonic populations adopt new discursive strategies of legitimation. To understand social and linguistic diversity, it is of paramount importance to examine such reconfigurations of social patterns and discourse relationships. This means to understand potentially new forms of establishing social hierarchies. And, as sociolinguistically minded academics, we also need to reflect on our own positions, ideologies, desires and activities in relation to societal publics and in contexts of academic publics.

How do traditional social and academic elites react to the exposure of their hitherto naturalized position of authority? What are the strategies of reproducing and legitimizing privilege employed by (formerly) hegemonic speakers? What is our role as academics and linguists in these new public spaces? Where do we tacitly (and maybe unwillingly) reproduce existing dichotomies? And what can we do in academia in practical terms to support marginalized voices in academic public spaces and beyond?

The November issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics on ‘The Sociolinguistics of Late Modern Publics’, guest-edited by Theresa Heyd and myself is devoted to precisely these questions and brings together scholars working on discourses of legitimation of socio-political elites in different cultural contexts and, secondly, focuses on academic notions of ‘publics’ and on authority in academic publics.

Susan Gal analyses the phenomenon of the ‘piggy-backing’ of discourses of social justice and humanitarianism by right-wing politicians and develops a differentiation of discursive moves that contribute to the enregisterment of authority in current political discourse. In addition to this analysis of authoritative discursive structures, two contributions add to our understanding of late‐modern public discourse as emotional regimes. Mary Bucholtz focuses on the affective construction of white fragility in US American late‐modern publics and examines discursive strategies of fragile white affects. Ana Deumert examines how white South Africans respond to being constructed as colonizers.

Jürgen Spitzmüller changes perspective by taking a meta‐disciplinary perspective on sociolinguistics. He proposes an explicit link between the analyzed phenomenon – public space – and the analyzing sociolinguistic actor. The allure of diverse and multilingual publics may rub off upon researchers of such spaces and endowing them with an aura of creativity or even subversiveness.

Finally, Ingrid Piller demonstrates that authority, ultimately, rests on pre-textual conditions. She shows that, in academic publics, publications in languages other than English, and publications by women and/or people of color, are seen as carrying little authority. One way to accord authority to marginalized voices is to reference them.

All in all, it is the aim of ‘The Sociolinguistics of Late Modern Publics’ to start a conversation about the complex pre-textual, affective and discursive strategies employed to maintain and challenge authority in contemporary discourse. How do you enact, challenge or simply observe authority in your everyday lives?

References

Bucholtz, M. (2019). The public life of white affects. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 485-504. doi:10.1111/josl.12392 [open access]

Deumert, A. (2019). Sensational signs, authority and the public sphere: Settler colonial rhetoric in times of change. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 467-484. doi:10.1111/josl.12377

Gal, S. (2019). Making registers in politics: Circulation and ideologies of linguistic authority. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 450-466. doi:10.1111/josl.12374

Gal, S., & Woolard, K. A. (2001). Languages and publics: The making of authority. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

Heyd, T., & Schneider, B. (2019). The sociolinguistics of late modern publics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 435-449. doi:10.1111/josl.12378 [open access]

Piller, I. (2019). On the conditions of authority in academic publics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 521-528. doi:10.1111/josl.12393 [unedited preprint available here]

Spitzmüller, J. (2019). Sociolinguistics going ‘wild’: The construction of auratic fields. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(5), 505-520. doi:10.1111/josl.12383 [open access] ]]> https://www.languageonthemove.com/the-sociolinguistics-of-late-modern-publics/feed/ 2 22155