(Image credit: Australian Government, Study Australia)

In her 2007 ethnographic study of eight US law schools, Elizabeth Mertz traces the process through which law students learn to “think like a lawyer” in order to become one. She shows how this process is essentially about language: learning to think like a lawyer means adopting new ways of reading, writing and talking.

Crucially, Mertz demonstrates that underlying these processes is a set of linguistic ideologies – assumptions we make about language and how it should manifest in particular social contexts. For example, she identifies a practice in legal analysis and reasoning, as taught in these classrooms: the social characteristics and personal perspectives of people who appear in legal cases and problem questions are rendered irrelevant and made invisible, in favour of the legally relevant facts. Issues of morality and emotion are likewise pushed aside as unimportant.

As students undergo this transformative process of learning to think and speak like a lawyer, Mertz questions the effects this may have on how law students see the world, their ability to see social diversity and inequality and to identify and challenge issues of injustice in their future work.

But what about how students think about themselves? What if they personally face marginalization? And what of their diverse language repertoires? If thinking like a lawyer depends on speaking like one, what is this speech expected to sound like? And what impact does sounding differently have on one’s sense of professional identity and self-worth?

These were just some of the questions raised in my recent digital ethnographic research with students enrolled in a Graduate Diploma in Migration Law and Practice (GDMLP). This one-year university program is required for people who do not have an Australian legal qualification to become Registered Migration Agents (RMAs) and offer professional assistance to people applying for a visa in Australia. Unlike law degrees, which remain difficult to access for many, it has been estimated that at least half of the GDMLP cohort has English as a second language (L2), and perhaps even more are first generation migrants.

I attended online workshops during which students practiced their client interviewing skills through role-plays, observing this practical work and debriefing with them. I also conducted research interviews with students at various points during their study and after graduating, over a period of three years. To have immediate impact, I also offered my interdisciplinary expertise to enhance learning, presenting on various aspects of communication, and helping the teaching team to develop and refine learning materials (see Smith-Khan & Giles 2025).

In a new article, I share some of the ways students talk and think about their study, their future professional goals, their existing strengths, and the skills they wish to improve and how. The discussions brought up beliefs about language, closely tied to ideas about proficiency, professionalism and identity.

Bilingualism: optional benefit, real risk

While every participant who speaks multiple languages planned to use them in their future job, with at least some of their clients, there was a clear hierarchy in how different languages were valued, with English appearing at the apex as non-negotiable, and other languages more as optional extras (see also Piller & Gerber 2021).

Paolo*  The English level, I think it’s very very important too.

Laura   Yeah.

Paolo    I’m Italian, as I said before, I work with a lot of Italians, and they don’t speak English. And will have, a hundred percent sure that I will have a lot of consultations within Italian community. I will go to Italy to do seminars, and that will be in Italian.

Laura   Yeah.

Paolo    So in that way, if you think in that, in that way, you don’t need English, okay?

Laura   Yes.

Paolo    I mean, ‘I don’t need to have a very high English level, because my-, ‘I’m Chinese, I just talk in Mandarin, my consultation in Mandarin, my clients are in Mandarin.’ Okay. And it makes sense. But then you have to do applications in English, you have to study the uh legislation in English. So if the legislation, if you don’t understand properly the legislation, if you mixed up a word, all your translation in Chinese, or in Italian, or in any other language, won’t be, won’t be correct.

Okay? So it’s very, very important that they understand, the people that they want to become a migration agent, that they understand everything. [Paolo, interview 1/2, 2020]

On one level, this makes perfect sense: the work does indeed require close engagement with legal and institutional texts that are only available in English, and application forms required to be submitted to the Immigration Department only are allowed in English. However, this type of discourse also assumes bilingualism is a potential risk to English language proficiency: rather than acknowledging the crucial skills bilingual and multilingual people bring to this work, the fact that they speak more than one language is regarded as a threat to their English. This resembles political and institutional discourses in which the ‘monolingual mindset’ is evident, including in the language proficiency rules around becoming an RMA, and in other areas like skilled migration and university admission, where proficiency is assumed for some, but not for others (Smith-Khan 2021a; Piller & Bodis, 2023). Such discourses are also evident in public political debates about migration and registered migration agents (Smith-Khan 2021b).

‘Australian’ native speakers and language choice

Perceptions about identity are also closely connected with these types of ideologies. As L2 English speakers discuss their experiences and efforts to develop speaking skills in class and connect these evaluations with their future language practices and career plans.

Gemma: If you have poor communication you give them the impression you’re not professional. You probably have lots of knowledge in your mind but you just can’t express yourself properly, or too slow, or I don’t know. You’ve got to give them, the client the impression that oh no, you are professional. I can trust you. You can do the job for me. So I try to, the reason why I said um, um, the native English speaker is better, probably that’s just one side about um, they easily use language um, uh, like more vocabulary than us. We can’t use like beautiful words or whatever it is to express myself uh, precisely. So uh, that will give client the impression like, you not professional like I can’t trust you…. So, yes. So that’s why I said if I speak to Chinese, probably I’ll be more confident. They, they will, will feel less, um, less suspicious. I don’t know. Um, less, how will I say? Um, more trust on you than English-speaking people. [Gemma, interview 1/1, 2020]

Evaluations like these compare L2 English speakers’ skills vis-à-vis what they consider the ideal student and future RMA, an L1 English speaker, with implications for professional identity and future work plans. They also link general professional competence with language proficiency and oral fluency, something that again also comes up in the broader discourse (see Smith-Khan 2021b).

However, these ideologies extend even further, to national identity and moral worth.

Gemma: Yes, with my, one of my classmates… Uh, at the beginning it wasn’t very good. Oh, he’s local. He’s Australian. And he’s very, I feel he pick up very quickly and easily and then he has to put up with me because I have to think. And, you know, thinking probably slower than, than him and then speak slowly. Uh, yes so I find the difference and I try to, I just want to try to improve that by talking more [Gemma, interview 1/1, 2020].

In this encounter, Gemma evaluates herself in relation to an “Australian”, “local” L1-speaking classmate. Here, speaking and thinking are closely connected, and she comes out positioned as a burden in the interaction – something her classmate must “put up with” because of her slower thinking and speaking.

While such discourse is not surprising in this particular social and political context, it sits uneasily against the facts we have about Gemma’s personal and professional background, along with the direct linguistic data collected in the project. She came to Australia as a skilled migrant and was granted a permanent visa because of her professional qualifications. She has been an Australian citizen for over a decade, working as a civil servant in a professional role, in a regional Australian city, in a highly monolingual English office environment. Her English language proficiency is indisputably high. Yet her evaluation demonstrates the power of native-speaker and monolingual mindset ideologies about languages: her capability, her professionalism, and even her nationality become inferior and vulnerable to the point that she imagines herself as at best a burden, and at worst incapable of being trusted, for an L1 English speaking audience in this context (see Piller et al 2024).

Hard work, pushback and pragmatism

However, all is not lost for this group of aspiring migration practitioners. Both L1 and L2 English speakers heavily stressed the need to practice speaking and to study hard to continue to improve their professional skills. While this emphasises individual responsibility and creates an additional burden for L2 speakers, it still allows for a degree of agency and a sense of opportunity: developing professional skills and identity are not regarded as impossible.

At the same time, students also demonstrated a critical awareness of the broader social and political contexts, and what these mean for how people are (sometimes unfairly) evaluated. For example, one student pointed to the broader political context of migration and perceptions of migrants to make sense of how RMAs are perceived: if the government is “very anti-immigration”, it follows that RMAs would be seen as “unnecessary” or a “pain to deal with”, and it would be made difficult for them to enter the profession.

Another student pushed back against the apparent need for people to speak standard Australian English. Nitin explained how whether someone comes across as rude can be a matter of the listener’s perception. He was thus able to turn the spotlight onto the interlocutor, who may misjudge L2 speakers who “don’t have those little, nice touches” in their speech, rather than the “deficient” speaker, and at the same time claim an advantage over L1 interlocutors, as more compassionate and knowledgeable in interactions involving speakers of diverse language varieties or proficiency. However, Nitin still ends on a pragmatic note, related to his own lived reality:

Nitin: People, when I talked to the native speakers here, sometimes they’d think I’m talking rude. My colleagues said that on a few occasions, and I started thinking, what was rude in that? … So I adapted it over a period of about nine years. Now I know what to speak and what not to speak. [Nitin, interview 1/2, 2020]

Therefore, while it is clear that students may come to internalize linguistic ideologies that frame their language practices and repertoires as inferior or in need of ongoing improvement, there is still space to reclaim and challenge these ideologies. However, even while doing so, they must still navigate the very real and enduring practical effects such ideologies have within their social and professional contexts.

Note

*Participant names are pseudonyms.

References

Mertz, E. (2007). The language of law school: Learning to “think like a lawyer”. Oxford University Press.

Piller, I. & Bodis, A. (2024). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 53(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000689

Piller, I. & Gerber, L. (2021). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, (24)5, 622-635. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227

Piller, I. et al. (2024). Life in a New Language. Oxford University Press.

Smith-Khan, L. (2025, AOP). Language, culture and professional communication in migration law education, Language, Culture and Curriculum, https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2025.2481051

Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘Common language’ and proficiency tests: a critical examination of registration requirements for Australian registered migration agents. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 97–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2021.1900031

Smith-Khan, L. (2021b). Deficiencies and loopholes: Clashing discourses, problems and solutions in Australian migration advice regulation. Discourse & Society, 32(5), 598-621. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265211013113

Smith-Khan, L., & Giles, C. (2025, AOP). Improving client communication skills in migration law and practice education. Alternative Law Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X251314205

Imagine stepping into a classroom where students expect you to embody English in its “native” form, fluency, and culture. For many non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in Australia, this expectation is a daily challenge. Yet, these teachers refuse to let such pressures define them. Instead, they embrace a “hybrid professional becoming”—an ongoing process of identity formation—seeing themselves, in many ways, as “cyborgs” in the classroom.

Inspired by Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, NNESTs use the cyborg metaphor to navigate and redefine their professional lives. They mix their multilingual and multicultural lived experiences with digital tools and fluid teaching methods, transcending rigid binaries of “native” versus “non-native” speakers. In this role, they create richer, more inclusive learning environments that challenge hegemonies.

Breaking Down the Native-Speaker “Myth”

Australian classrooms are highly diverse, yet the teaching workforce remains predominantly English monolingual and native-speaking. Many students here learn English as an additional language, making teachers’ lived experiences crucial for bridging linguistic and cultural gaps. However, native-speakerism—an age-old ideology favouring native English speakers—still shapes perceptions. NNESTs are often viewed through a deficit lens, yet they challenge this by showing that effective English teaching goes beyond birthplace or accent.

Phở bò (Image credit: Vinnie Cartabiano, Wikipedia)

Consider Natalie, a teacher from Bangladesh. Despite her experience, she often felt misjudged: “I didn’t just sense that students valued native English-speaking teachers more—I was even asked to be replaced by native speakers before I had a chance to start speaking”. Though these intersectional judgments were hard to ignore, Natalie turned them into a source of multiplicity. “It made me work harder to show that my teaching had depth and cultural awareness,” she explains.

To engage her students, Natalie wove stories, humour, and cultural anecdotes into her lessons, using language-bridging strategies to foster inclusivity. For her Vietnamese students, she joked about the pronunciation differences between “phở” (a noodle soup) and the English word “fur”, drawing laughter as they discussed similar linguistic misunderstandings. For her Lebanese students, she shared stories about common culinary traditions, sparking discussions about cultural similarities and differences. By weaving in phrases like “cảm ơn” (thank you) with her Vietnamese students and “Malual noor” (family is wealth) with her Sudanese students, she created a space where language and cultural understanding flourished, bridging worlds in a shared learning journey.

Embracing the Cyborg Identity in Teaching

Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto frames the cyborg identity as one of assembling diverse parts into a constantly evolving whole. For NNESTs, this hybrid identity defies narrow definitions of an English teacher. Their methods connect students with English while honouring their own cultural heritage, engaging students in ways that promote inclusivity.

Mahati, an Australian qualified teacher from India, exemplifies this hybridity. Though passionate about teaching, adjusting to Australian classrooms wasn’t easy. After working various odd jobs, she found her place in adult migrant education. “Teaching for me is not just a job—it’s my second home” (मेरे लिए पढ़ाना सिर्फ एक नौकरी नहीं है—यह मेरा दूसरा घर है।), she shares. Entwining her cultural heritage in literature and music with modern teaching tools, Mahati creates meaningful connections with her students. “We end sessions with fun songs from Sing with Me Book 1, and I incorporate technology to keep students engaged”, she explains. This approach enriches her classroom with a dynamic, inclusive atmosphere.

Reflective Practice: A Tool for Hybrid Becoming

Reflection is essential to this cyborg-like emergence. For NNESTs, critical reflection goes beyond simple self-assessment; it’s a transformative process to reshape and redefine their roles, tailoring their approaches to the diverse needs of multilingual classrooms and imagining themselves as cosmopolitan teachers of English.

Natalie’s experience with reflective practice exemplifies this plasticity. Despite her extensive teaching background, she continually revisits her lessons to meet her students’ evolving needs. “One of my students once laughed at me for mispronouncing a Vietnamese dish,” she recalls with a smile. “It was a learning moment for both of us—I embraced it and encouraged my students to teach me more about their culture”. Through such exchanges, Natalie moves beyond rigid teaching roles, fostering an environment of mutual learning and responsiveness.

Janaki’s story further illustrates this process. Initially, she felt out of place teaching refugees and migrants in the AMEP (Adult Migrant English Program), many of whom had experienced significant hardship. “It’s been humbling—I had to understand their backgrounds and be patient”, she shares. Reflecting on her experiences, Janaki adapted her methods, drawing on colleagues’ advice and exploring new strategies to better serve her students.

Technology: Expanding the Cyborg Identity

Technology plays a crucial role in helping these teachers develop their cyborg identities. Digital tools enable them to adapt and extend their teaching practices, creating a more inclusive classroom environment.

Namani, a young teacher who initially felt intimidated by her non-native status, illustrates this shift. She struggled with technology, worried about being seen as less competent. “I was so concerned if something went wrong with a digital tool”, she recalls. But instead of avoiding it, she mastered tools like MS Teams and Zoom, transforming her classroom. “Once I felt confident, I realized technology was actually empowering me to be a better teacher”, she reflects.

Frida took this approach even further during the pandemic, recording demo classes to improve timing and engagement. Her experience with technology underscores the cyborg concept, intermingling cultural knowledge with technical proficiency to support students. Using online platforms, she stayed connected despite the distance, teaching her students not just English but also essential digital literacy skills.

Moving from Marginalization to Empowerment

The cyborg identity empowers NNESTs to transcend limitations imposed by native-speakerism. By embracing hybridity, they resist marginalization and actively redefine their roles, affirming their experiences as cosmopolitan educators of English. The cyborg metaphor captures a journey from marginalization to empowerment, where NNESTs reclaim the narrative and leverage their unique identities as strengths.

Laura’s journey illustrates this shift. Coming from a small town in the Philippines, she initially faced students who doubted her due to her accent. “I noticed some of my students were unsure of me, maybe because of my accent”, she recalls. Though it initially unsettled her, Laura decided to use it as a teaching tool. “I always wanted to be a teacher—even as a kid, I’d teach my dolls and pretend to mark papers”, she says with a smile. By sharing her story, Laura highlighted the richness of multilingualism, encouraging students to explore their identities and celebrating diversity in her classroom.

One of Jasha’s most powerful stories involves a Lebanese student whose linguistic journey reflected the beauty of multilingualism. “She spoke French and Arabic at home, then moved to Israel, where her three boys started school”, Jasha recalls. By the time they relocated to Australia, the boys had developed a unique assemblage, mixing French, Arabic, Hebrew, and English in daily conversations. “Listening to them was an absolute joy—I’d try to catch familiar English words,” she shares. This experience reinforced Jasha’s philosophy: learning English best occurs immersively, by discussing texts without a dictionary and encouraging students to “think” in English through activities like jumbled sentences and interactive games. Her approach to grammar focuses on context rather than correctness. “Grammar is just a means to an end”, she says, embedding it within the meaning her students wish to convey.

Toward a New Paradigm in English Language Teaching

The lived experiences of these NNESTs underscore the need for a shift in English language teaching paradigms. Embracing cyborg identities, these teachers demonstrate that an educator’s value lies not in their accent or birthplace but in their hybridity, engagement, and inspiration. Recognizing NNESTs’ hybrid professionalism can help educational institutions move beyond outdated binaries and create spaces where diverse voices are celebrated.

Through their stories, NNESTs like Natalie, Mahati, Janaki, Namani, Laura, and Jasha embody Haraway’s cyborg vision: educators who transcend boundaries, integrate facets of their identities, and reshape the future of education. By embracing cyborg identities, they enrich the classroom and create a new model for English teaching in today’s interconnected world. In their journey from marginalization to empowerment, these teachers remind us that education is a space for hybridity, inclusivity and horizons of possibility—qualities that benefit students, educators, and society alike.

Reference

The blog is based on:
Nigar, N., Kostogriz, A., & Hossain, I. (2024, aop). Hybrid professional identities: Exploring non-native English-speaking teachers’ lived experiences through the Cyborg Manifesto. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1–23.

Author Bios

Dr Nashid Nigar teaches at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, and has diverse experience in English language and literacy teaching, academic writing, and teacher education. Her recently completed PhD thesis, focusing on language teacher professional identity at Monash University, was graded as Exceptional—Of the highest merit, placing within the top 0.1% to fewer than 5% of international doctorates. Her ongoing research interests include language teacher professional identity and language/literacy learning and teaching.

Alex Kostogriz is a Professor in Languages and TESOL Education at the Faculty of Education, Monash University. Alex’s current research projects focus on the professional practice and ethics of language teachers, teacher education and experiences of beginning teachers.

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

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

***

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

Voices of Country

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

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

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

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

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

Language Policy Partnership

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

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

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

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

From this commitment, the LPP has also said

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

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

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

A lookback on previous Target 16 process

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

International Decade of Indigenous Languages

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

Impact of these actions

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

Mia Wallace (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In Quentin Tarantino’s blockbuster Pulp Fiction, Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) asks Vincent Vega (John Travolta) whether he hates uncomfortable silences.  Mia ponders ‘Why is it necessary to yak about bullshit to feel comfortable?’

Regarded as ‘one of the great arts of conversation’, silence is key to how we communicate. Linguist Deborah Tannen explains that silence is ambiguous. It may arise from what is assumed to be evidenced (and thus too obvious to even mention), or that which is supposed to be omitted.

Either way, humans are highly skilled at using silence in conversation through a process of socialisation refined as we move from the cradle to the grave.

When humans interact with generative Artificial Intelligence (generative AI) they tend to assume they are interacting with a fellow human, and they may even assume that these conversations are based on cooperation but they are missing a key piece of the interactional puzzle: the intentional use of silence.

To generate answers to our prompts, generative AI relies on mathematical probabilities. Large language models provide a plausible continuation of a likely next word based on vast amounts of data. Once the most probable next word is identified, the system moves on. Language models are a form of text processing. With silence, though, the text that should be processed is absent.

https://skepticalscience.com/graphics/SprialOfSilence-EN.jpg

When prompted to expand on how it approaches silence, ChatGPT-4 explains that minimal responses may be provided when a given input could lead to contentious or escalating conversations as a strategy to avoid conflict. That is, ChatGPT may sometimes provide a minimal response to ensure safety.

However, silence is not just a strategy to avoid conflict, it plays a key role in human interaction because what is left unsaid has meaning.

When silence points to great danger

In parts of Spain an algorithm called VioGén is used to determine whether a victim of domestic violence is in danger of being attacked again. The algorithm may get it wrong because victims may be embarrassed and not provide a response to direct questions such as ‘Has the aggressor demonstrated substance abuse?’ In such cases, the algorithm interprets the silence as the absence of a ‘yes’ response. In the absence of qualified humans to contextualise silent answers to the algorithm’s questions, the platform tends to miscalculate risk. This has led to multiple victim deaths which might have been avoided with appropriate human intervention.

Why does silence matter?

The expectation that human answers to direct queries will necessarily be lexicalised (manifested as words) does not align with how humans communicate. In conversation, silence is used strategically to express feelings or ideas which are best left unsaid.

One of the main reasons for the use of silence rests on what linguists call ‘face’ and ‘facework’ – ritual elements related to the fragility of our social interactions. When we speak, we spend a lot of our time saving our own and others’ ‘face’. In expressing a challenging opinion to a superior at work, for example, we may use the epistemic phrase ‘I think’ to preface our views to avoid threatening the other person’s right to a positive view of themselves.

Silence sits at the core of social relations across cultures. Each society tolerates a different length of silence in conversation. Mia Wallace’s complaint is her venting against mainstream American culture which tends to favour verbosity over silence. However, not all people in America embrace verbosity. For example, Scollon and colleagues argue that in Alaskan Athabaskan culture, the best interactions between two or more people involve long periods of silence.

Westerners’ need to fill air space with talk also aligns with a preference for direct questions to obtain information. Direct questioning, however, tends to be disfavoured by First Nations people in Australia. In the courtroom, yes/no questions are asked. Small differences in answer timing are sometimes magnified and misinterpreted as hostility by a system biased to stereotype minoritised populations, which may result in longer sentences for the accused.

Different orientations to silence also exist in the classroom, where Japanese students of English tend to miss out on opportunities to hold the floor because of their longer use of silence. Once the conversational floor is taken away, Japanese students find it hard to regain it. It’s not that Japanese students lack in fluency, it is just that expectations regarding the use of silence differ from those of mainstream Australia.

As society continues to embrace automation, algorithms, and AI, it is important to remain aware that not all people on earth behave like the mainstream English speakers who tend to design the technology. It’s also important to embrace language for what it is: a complex communicative system which includes way more than what may be expressed through words. When it comes to language, there is certainly more than meets the eye/ear/hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Reading!

January: The Politics of Academic Reading

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

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

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

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

February: Global Communication Platform WhatsApp

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

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

March: How to Free a Jinn

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

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

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

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

April: Life in a New Language

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

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

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

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

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

May: Judging Refugees

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

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

June: Wordslut

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

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

July: Inspector Singh

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

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

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

August: Speech and the City

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

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

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

September: Multilingual Crisis Communication

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

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

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

October: Critical Sociolinguistics

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

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

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

November: Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples

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

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

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

December: Language Discordant Social Work

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

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

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

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

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

A lack of legal literacy can affect migrants – and indeed anyone – across all aspects of social life. This can include everything from signing a contract with an electricity provider, through earning a living, to having a safe and dignified marriage.

Legal professionals suggest that recent migrants may be special targets of a range of scams and exploitation because they are more likely to lack legal literacy, may lack information about available assistance, or may not be capable of accessing those services even when they do know about them.

However, this is not due simply to a lack of inclination to learn about the law. Rather, the development of legal literacy is dependent on the accessibility of information and education. For those with limited or no English, this naturally requires the provision of resources in other languages and accessible formats, in locations where their target audiences can find them.

While the various government and non-government bodies tasked with providing information about the law have already taken a range of measures to make their resources more accessible to non-English speakers and readers, barriers persist. These barriers can even influence the form of exploitation people face. For example, a lawyer I interviewed in my most recent project shared the story of a man who had migrated to Australia in the late 1990s and became trapped in a highly exploitative work arrangement:

you see the signs from the very beginning. Like, he didn’t have an accountant, he’ll use [his employer’s] accountant. And that accountant played around with his papers. They put him in a house on top of the shop. They denied him English lessons. So, till this day, I speak to him in Arabic, even though my Arabic’s not perfect.

In this scenario, it was only when the man’s workplace injuries became so severe that he insisted on seeing a doctor that he was eventually able to learn about his rights and access legal assistance. Among other measures, his exploiters intentionally limited his English language acquisition opportunities as a form of abusive control, to prevent him learning of his rights and seeking help.

This only reinforces the importance of providing resources in a range of languages, and clearly demonstrates the inappropriateness of claims that individual migrants are responsible for learning English as a prerequisite to accessing full inclusion in society and protection of the law.

Unfortunately, his case is far from being an exception. News reports uncover myriad examples, from international students underpaid with justifications that their limited English meant they weren’t good enough for minimum wage, to asylum seekers threatened with deportation if they didn’t comply with forced labour arrangements.

The complex and interconnected barriers recent migrants, especially those with temporary visas, often face means holistic responses are needed for them to access their rights. However ultimately, seeking justice still hinges on them first having knowledge about what those rights are and the processes and resources available to have them enforced. This is not possible unless relevant information is available in a language and format accessible to them.

The landing page

While service providers and regulatory bodies appear aware of this issue and have taken steps to address it, less is known about how accessible the resources and mechanisms are in practice (Victoria Law Foundation 2016). Further, beyond these formal offerings, less still is known about how migrants with limited English actually learn about Australian law and how it applies in their lives.

The Legal Aid bodies in each Australian state are tasked with providing a range of legal services. This includes providing free legal assistance and advice to some individuals, based on need. However another of their statutory functions is what is commonly called Community Legal Education and Information (CLEI) (e.g. Legal Aid Commission Act 1979 (NSW), section 10(2)(j),(k),(m)). This means that they are required to develop and disseminate informational resources and training to help increase the community’s legal literacy.

This is considered a crucial component to ensuring the whole community, and particularly recent migrants and those with limited or no English, can access justice, but we do not yet have a comprehensive picture of what is currently on offer, nor how well it works for these particular groups. Therefore, the peak body of the Australian legal profession has called for research to address the gaps in evidence to ensure migrants’ linguistic and other forms of diversity are understood and incorporated into efforts to improve community legal literacy (Law Council of Australia 2018).

The internet is a popular starting point for individuals looking for all types of information and existing studies on multilingual communications on the websites for government schools and multiple government service providers suggest that much work remains done to ensure that multilingual government communications are both complete and accessible for their target audiences. Therefore, in May, to start exploring the legal literacy resources available for non-English speakers, I undertook a pilot audit of Legal Aid NSW’s website.

The website

Information about Apprehended Violence Orders in Spanish

Legal Aid NSW offers a range of CLEI, with varying accessibility for non-English speakers and readers. As someone with English literacy, the landing page immediately presents me with a promising ‘My problem is about’ section. This part of the website helpfully guides readers step-by-step, in accessible plain language and appealing format, across a wide range of legal issues, e.g. ‘My job’, ‘Disasters’, ‘My rights as’ and ‘Visas and immigration’. Another section provides lay definitions of legal terms. These reflect an evident broader commitment to enhancing the accessibility of the site as a whole. However, these two sections are only available in English. Similarly, face-to-face and online legal education courses are advertised, but all current offerings appear to be in English only.

Another section provides a large collection of resources, like posters and pamphlets, organized across various topics, providing information about legal issues and available services. Some are provided in languages other than English (LOTEs). However, again, non-English speakers have significantly less access. Of the total 233 resources identified, only 40 are available in more than one language. Even then, most only include a few common LOTEs, e.g. Arabic (37), Chinese (36), Vietnamese (29), Dari/Farsi (16). Further, LOTEs are included inconsistently, e.g. Women’s Domestic Violence Court Advocacy information is offered in 13 languages, including several not used in any other resource. In contrast, all resources in the Disasters, Covid-19, Prisoners, and Young People topics are in English only. All resources are written texts (some with images), meaning only those with literacy can access them, a barrier for some refugees, for example, even in their first language (see e.g. Ba Akhlagh & Mehana 2024). Finally, when LOTE versions exist, it appears they cannot be located without English language literacy: the search function seems to operate only with English key words, and the resources are sorted and labelled in English.

One section of the website is more broadly navigable in many LOTEs. The ‘Ways to get help’ section provides information on how to access legal assistance and is available in 31 languages.  However again, there are inconsistencies between languages, e.g. the Spanish version largely replicates the original, with a full overview and four subsections covering contacts, legal advice, help at court, and applying for legal aid. In contrast, others, like Italian and Pashto, have no overview and only two subsections. Others have only an overview and no subsections. Some links lead readers back to English-only content, and website navigation menus remain in English even when on LOTE pages.

Where to from here?

Existing reviews and scholarship emphasise intersectional considerations when examining and addressing barriers to justice. For example, providing multilingual resources in written form only will not reach people who lack literacy or have low or no vision. Telephone information services and audio resources may be inaccessible for migrants who are deaf or hard of hearing (Smith-Khan 2022). Living in a regional area decreases access to language supports more readily available in urban centres, increasing the importance of LOTE resources. Similarly, not all LOTES are equal: speakers of ‘emerging’ community languages (e.g. recently arrived refugee communities) often have less language support, and issues with correctly identifying and categorising minority dialects and languages can lead to unsuitable translation and interpreting (Victorian Law Foundation 2016, pp 8-9; Tillman 2023).

Spanish word search

These considerations must inform the design and prioritization of resources in particular languages. For instance, while it seems logical to offer resources in commonly spoken LOTEs, speakers of these languages often have a higher level of English proficiency than speakers of emerging languages, who may often also face additional vulnerabilities (Grey & Severin 2021, 2022).

This brief pilot has obviously only uncovered what is publicly available via a website: qualitative research is needed to understand how service providers like Legal Aid NSW develop their resources and how legal, policy, and practical considerations influence their choices. At the same time, research could also provide insight into migrants’ decision-making. By better understanding how recent arrivals and people with limited English find out about the law, research could provide valuable evidence to policymakers and service providers to continue to make community legal literacy efforts more universally accessible.

References

Ba Akhlagh, S & Mehana, M. ‘Challenges and opportunities in designing culturally appropriate resources to support refugee families’ (2024) 8(1) Linking Research to the Practice of Education 2.
Grey, A & Severin A, ‘An audit of NSW legislation and policy on the government’s public communications in languages other than English’ (2021) 30(1) Griffith Law Review 122.
——— ‘Building towards best practice for governments’ public communication in LOTEs’ (2022)31(1) Griffith Law Review 25
Smith-Khan, L. ‘Inclusive processes for refugees with disabilities’ in Rioux et al(eds), Handbook of Disability (Springer Nature, 2022)
Tillman, M ‘Ezidi refugees in Armidale say gap in language […]service impacts health care (2023) ABC https://tinyurl.com/2vz3x8s9
Victoria Law Foundation, Legal information in languages other than English (2016) https://tinyurl.com/3nr5vndb

“Giant Head” installation at the Gentle Monster store at Sydney Airport

One of the goals of graduate education is to empower students to reach their academic and professional goals by developing their communication skills. For example, one of the learning outcomes of a class I teach in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University is to enable students to “communicate advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.”

To achieve that learning outcome, students undertake a series of writing tasks throughout the semester on a public forum, namely right here on Language on the Move.

Although moderating around a thousand comments per semester is a huge workload, I’ve always enjoyed this task. The series of responses to writing prompts (aka comments on blog posts) allows me to learn more about my students’ backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. It is also rewarding to see that student comments become more sophisticated and engaged over the course of the semester and that their confidence in their academic writing increases.

Has ChatGPT ruined writing practice?

While I used to enjoy supporting students to develop their communication skills in this way, the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the rapid adoption of other generative AI platforms since then has changed things.

A not insignificant number of students now submit machine-generated writing tasks, and I’m saddled with the additional task of catching out these cheaters.

Submitting machine-generated text obviously has no learning benefits. Therefore, my task descriptions and syllabi now contain an explicit prohibition against the use generative AI:

Use of generative AI is prohibited
Your response must be your own work, and you are not allowed to post machine-generated text. Use of machine-generated text in this or any other unit tasks defies the point of learning. It is also dishonest and a waste of your time and my time. […] If I suspect you of having used generative AI to complete your writing task, your mark will automatically be 0.

In 2023, this prohibition took care of the problem, but in 2024 it no longer works. This is because machine writing has become virtually indistinguishable from bad human writing.

Machine writing and bad human writing now look the same

Most commentators note that machine-generated text is getting better. This may be true. What has received less attention is the fact that human writing is getting worse as people read less widely. Instead, more and more people seem to model their writing on the bland models of machines.

The feedback loop between reading and writing is breaking down.

The Internet is drowning in an ocean of poor writing, whether created by humans or machines – a phenomenon Matthew Kirschenbaumer has described as the looming “textocalypse:” “a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting.”

Instead of developing their communication skills through audience-focussed practice, my students’ regular writing practice may now be contributing to this tsunami. If students use generative AI, it certainly no longer meets its stated aim – to practice communicating advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.

Where is the line between outsourcing learning to tech and using tech to support learning?

To my mind, the line was clear-cut: to use generative AI is to outsource learning to a machine and therefore pointless. I was not concerned about the use of other language technologies, such as spell checkers, auto-complete, grammar checkers, or auto-translate.

But then I received this student inquiry, which I am reproducing here with the student’s permission:

I am writing to inquire if using the grammar check program for writing tasks is also prohibited.
I’ve been aware that AI generation is prohibited, and I did not use AI for my writing task. I [used all the assigned inputs], and I tried to organize ideas in my first language, then translated them by myself (without using any machine translator).
However, I always use a grammar check program, and sometimes, it suggests better words or expressions that I can adopt by clicking, as I am a paid user of it. I use it because I am unsure if my grammar is okay and understandable. I was wondering if this is also prohibited?

The easy answer to the query is that (automated) translation and grammar checking are allowed because they are not covered by the prohibition.

The more complicated question is whether these practices should be prohibited and, even if not strictly prohibited, whether they are advisable?

Dear reader, I need your input!

Translation as a bridge to English writing?

Let’s start with translation as a form of writing practice. The inputs for the task that triggered this question (Chapter 3 of Life in a New Language, and Language on the Move podcast series about Life in a New Language) were all in English.

After having perused all these inputs in English to then draft the response – a short reflection on the job search experience of one of the participants – in another language is a lot of extra work. You have to process input in English, write in another language, and translate that output.

This extra work may become manageable if it is done by a machine. A generative AI tool could produce a summary of the input in no time. An auto-translate tool could translate the summaries into the other language, again in no time. The student then drafts their response in the other language.

It’s technically the student’s work. Or is it? And, more importantly, is this process developing their English writing and communication?

Grammar checkers, suggested phrasing, and auto-complete

Like the student who posed the question, most of my students are international students, most of whom are still developing their English language skills, at the same time that they are required to learn and perform through the medium of that language.

To avail themselves of all kinds of learning tools is important. I myself use the in-built spell-check, grammar-check, and auto-complete features of MS Word. However, I can evaluate the advice provided by these tools and readily reject it where it’s wrong or inconsistent with my intentions.

Judgement needed: Until recently, the MS Word auto-correct tool incorrectly suggested that the spelling of “in-principle” was “in-principal”

I worry that, for a learner using these tools, these nuances get lost. If the machine is perceived to be always right, language changes from something malleable to form and express our ideas into a right-or-wrong proposition.

Similarly, learning synonyms is important to improve one’s writing. To this day, I regularly look up synonyms when I write with the intent to find the best, the most concise, their clearest expression. However, looking up synonyms for an expression and evaluating the various options is different from receiving automated suggestions and accepting them. One seems like an active, critical form of learning and the other like a passive form of learning. The writer’s sense of ownership and autonomy is different in the two instances.

How best to use language technologies to develop academic literacies and communicative competence?

In sum, most use of language technologies for the kinds of learning tasks I have described here strikes me as counterproductive. Yet, I can also see its uses. Where is the line between using tech to support one’s learning and using tech to avoid doing the hard work of practice, the only way that leads to fluency?

How do you use tech in your university assignments and where do you draw the line? How would you deal with these dilemmas as a teacher?

Some members of the Philippines delegation in the Banquet Hall during lunch

Editor’s note: the 21^st AILA World Conference, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA; “International Association of Applied Linguistics”), took place in Kuala Lumpur last week, hosted by the Malaysian Association of Applied Linguistics.

With several members of our team in attendance, we were able to bring you daily updates: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4. Due to return travel and catch-up responsibilities, the final day report has been slightly delayed. We hope you find it useful nonetheless.

***

Notable highlights of the final day relate to Enric Llurda’s keynote about native-speakerism, a symposium featuring rising stars in Applied Linguistics, a book prize, multilingual catch-ups, and the changing of the guards.

Debunking native-speakerism in Applied Linguistics

Professor Enric Llurda was the final keynote speaker for this year’s conference with a timely topic on “Native-speakerism and standards in Applied Linguistics.” In this talk, foregrounded by his personal experiences, Professor Llurda explored native-speakerism and its definition and manifestation and the question of how it can be overcome. Llurda’s talk was very interesting in two respects: a timely celebratory reminder and a timely advocacy reminder. While Llurda lamented the ongoing devaluing of Other Englishes particularly in the global north, there is much to celebrate in the global south scholarship in terms of the recognition and validation of emerging varieties of English especially in post-colonial global south countries in Southeast-Asia. There is certainly more room for applied linguists to expand the work and advocate for the legitimacy of more emerging varieties of English.

Rising stars in Applied Linguistics Are Unpacking the Complexity of Multilingual Valorization

The Rising Stars of the Symposium “Unpacking the Complexity of Multilingual Valorization: Insights from Chinese-speaking Communities” with their mentors

One of the last symposiums of the conference, chaired by Professors LI Jia and ZHANG Jie, both key members of the Language-on-the-Move team, showcased diverse works of postgraduate students under their supervision. The symposium was titled “Unpacking the Complexity of Multilingual Valorization: Insights from Chinese-speaking Communities.”

This was one of the most inspiring symposia for me not only because it featured postgraduate research work (for all presenters this was their first presentation at an international conference), but because of the students articulate and incisive presentations. The topics covered in this symposium was quite diverse as can be seen in the list below:

The discussant for the symposium was Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, who had been the PhD supervisor of Professors LI Jia and ZHANG Jie, which means that the presenters were her “academic grandchildren” of sorts. Ingrid congratulated both the presenters and chairs, and praised them for approaching these under-researched multilingual contexts with great conceptual and methodological sophistication, with incisive analyses, and with a lot of passion to apply linguistics research to further the common good.

Winning a good book

Delegates from the Philippines catching up during the conference

Lunch throughout the conference was fabulous and rounded out by lucky draws. I was particularly delighted that an early career researcher from the Philippines, Krizza Mae Balisong (University of Santo Tomas), won Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice on Day 5.

Multilingual catch-ups and local experiences

As has been said in previous reports, there were close to 2,000 attendees at the conference. And it really was impossible to attend all the sessions and meet everybody. As an applied linguist based in Sydney, Australia, one of the rewards I find in attending such a large conference is being able to meet long-standing colleagues and emerging scholars doing great applied linguistics work in the Philippines. Lunch times and coffee breaks were, therefore, organised to ensure one maximises these opportunities. It is in these liminal spaces that one gets to catch up and discuss new collaborations.

In addition, being based in an English-dominant country like Australia, I rarely have a chance to exercise my other linguistic identities of being a Tagalog-, a Cebuano-, and a Hiligaynon-speaker and discuss ideas in these languages. The AILA conference gave me that opportunity, and I managed to practice rarely used expressions. One of these is “buwis buhay” [tax life] (Laying one’s life for someone/something). In this context, this was often used in navigating the busy roads of Kuala Lumpur. In one usage, this was particularly used in reference to crossing the busy road to get to the much-coveted Musang King store.

Changing of the guards

Like every other participant, I am deeply grateful to the conference organizers from the Malaysian Association of Applied Linguistics, whose incredibly hard work over years of preparation made this success possible. In the closing ceremony, they must have been glad to pass the baton on to the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics, who will host the AILA World Congress 2027 in Vancouver.
Missing #AILA2024?
The Language on the Move Day 5 report is now up: native speakerism, rising stars, and multilingual networking

So, #AILA2024 ended on this critique of native-speakerism by Enric Llurda, and then you walk into the nearest bookstore and see this: “How to sound like a native Korean speaker” pic.twitter.com/3nDLCNwIx6

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 16, 2024

The fourth day of the 21st AILA World Conference continued to be a source of insights and inspiration, featuring cutting-edge research in the field of applied linguistics. Among the many notable presentations, two that emphasize the linguistic diversity, equity and inclusion in English language teaching and learning made a significant impact on us.

Educating Teachers for Linguistic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Future Pathways for Sustainability

The first one is the keynote address by Professor Low Ee Ling, titled Educating Teachers for Linguistic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Future Pathways for Sustainability, highlighting the importance of these principles in the ongoing development of language education.

Professor Low Ee Ling investigates the standards and norms that English as an International Language (EIL) teachers and students should follow in an increasingly diverse world characterized by multilingualism, multiculturalism, and multiple Language Learning Motivations (LLMs). Her research, which provides a snapshot of the real-world Eduscape, reveals that EIL communicators often attain varying levels of comprehensible discourse, with a focus on the primacy of intelligibility. This observation underscores the challenge of maintaining sustainable teaching practices that embrace linguistic diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In a case study on Singapore, Professor Low examines the country’s dynamic multilingual environment, where English is used proficiently. This has given rise to “Singlish,” a localized form of English used in Singaporean communities, particularly in familiar and intimate settings. The emergence of Singlish challenges the practicality and inclusivity of international English standards for teaching and learning. However, Singaporeans who employ Singlish exhibit a strong sense of confidence and identity. Similarly, the phenomenon of localized English is not unique to Singapore. The global spread of English has led to not only the rise of English as a hypercentral language in international domains but also the emergence of localized and indigenized varieties of English which took root, evolve and develop in diverse sociolinguistic contexts, becoming practical tools for local English speakers to communicate internally and externally. This fact highlights a broader trend in language communication, where practicality and intercommunity are often prioritized over standardization.

Professor Low Ee Ling contends that sustainable language education should be developed with a focus on diversity, equality, and inclusivity, rather than strictly adhering to so-called standard language norms. This approach recognizes the value of various English varieties in fostering effective communication and community identity.

Epistemic agency of translational teachers and students for knowledge co-construction in English-medium instruction classrooms

The second one is Dr. Yixi QIU (Isabella)’s presentation titled Epistemic agency of translational teachers and students for knowledge co-construction in English-medium instruction classrooms, which explored how transnational teachers and students can use epistemic agency to build knowledge together in English-medium education.

Isabella not only calls for the recognition of the multilingual realities that characterize EMI education, but she also went a step further to challenge the knowledge tradition centered on mainstream European and American culture mediated by standard English. In her talk, she introduced the concept of “epistemic injustice”, pointing out that monolingualism as a standard form of knowledge production and transmission can lead to linguistic injustice and epistemic exclusion. Therefore, we need to rethink the way knowledge is constructed in the English classroom and give more epistemic agency to multilingual teachers and students. Isabella elaborated on the definition and action of epistemic agency. Epistemic agency refers to the actions taken by individuals in the process of knowledge construction. These actions include promoting linguistic flexibility, leveraging transepistemic resources, and cultivating epistemic reflexivity.

Promoting linguistic flexibility is to encourage students to express their opinions in their mother tongue or other languages, and to build an inclusive cognitive space where students with different language abilities can become contributors and disseminators of knowledge. Leveraging trans-epistemic resources refers to the use of students’ diverse socio-cultural knowledge base to build a shared knowledge base beyond the binary opposition between local language and English. Cultivating epistemic reflexivity refers to guiding students to reflect on what they have learned, integrate it with their own experiences, and critically evaluate it, thereby promoting sustainable learning.

The lecture uses practical examples from the course to show how epistemic agency can be applied to English-taught classrooms. The program features multinational students from different countries and regions, with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In class, they allow students to use their native language in class discussions and encourage them to share perspectives from different cultural perspectives. In addition, students’ multicultural backgrounds are used as teaching resources to encourage them to share their cultural knowledge and experience. It also guides students to reflect on what they have learned and combine it with their own experience for critical evaluation. The results were significant, with students being more engaged, more actively involved in the knowledge construction process, and demonstrating stronger critical thinking skills.

This lecture emphasized the importance of epistemic agency of multilingual teachers and students in EMI classrooms for knowledge co-construction. By promoting language flexibility, leveraging trans-epistemic resources, and cultivating epistemic reflexivity, we can build more inclusive and effective EMI classrooms that allow all students to participate in and benefit from the process of knowledge construction.

After listening to these two lectures, combined with this trip to Malaysia, we deeply reflected on two issues:

First: What is the reality of the English-speaking world?

We are English major students in China. In our English education since primary school, we have been told to learn “Standard” English (i.e. standard American or British English). However, when we came to Malaysia to attend AILA 2024, we found that the real English world is actually characterized by diversity. In this conference, scholars from all over the world used English with different accents to conduct academic communication and express their unique identities. We realize that the English education model based on “Standard English” does not give us true intercultural communication competence. Real intercultural communication competence is based on a correct understanding of the diversity of the English-speaking world.

Second: Who is responsible for failed English-mediated intercultural communication?

When we first arrived in Kuala Lumpur, we found that the local English accent is very different from the Anglo-American accent we learn, so many times we could not understand the English spoken by local people, even though they use very common English expressions. Having long been taught in Anglo-American English has led to a gap between us and the real English-speaking world. Our lived experience in Kuala Lumpur made us realize that Malaysian English is a legitimate variety for locals to communicate within their community and with the outside world.

Communication is a two-way activity, and both parties in communication should be equal. As foreign visitors, we should also take the responsibility and prepare ourselves for the linguistic and cultural diversity of the host country. English users and English teachers around the world should shall the responsibility to challenge the “Standard English” norm and Euro-American knowledge tradition in English education to achieve a more diverse, equal and inclusive world.

Bio blurb

Yifang SUN and Ziyang HU are master students at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China. Both SUN and HU have developed an interest in multilingualism and language policy and planning research. SUN investigates the language practice and governance of a cross-regional company in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (the GBA). HU looks at the WHO’s multilingual crisis communication policies and practices during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Engaging debate at the “Multilingual Crisis Communication” Symposium organized by Profs LI Jia and ZHANG Jie

Highlights of Day 3 of the 21^st AILA World Conference: Southern epistemologies, real-life catch-ups, and the Korean translation of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice.

Southern Epistemologies

Wednesday’s keynote by Professor Sinfree Makoni engaged with decolonizing linguistics and Southern epistemologies. Drawing our attention to the efforts of the African Virtual Studies Global Forum, Professor Makoni called on the field to embrace pluralistic perspectives on key concepts from “language” to “native speaker.” He showed how literacy-centric views of language have led to the exclusion of oracy-based practices from mainstream linguistics.

Another call for “unbooking” – to create and share knowledge through diverse modalities. Makoni showed a video PhD project about multilingualism in Ghana (we’ll share a link here as soon as we find it). The new Language on the Move Podcast is another example

One symposium that engaged deeply with language and communication in a context in the Global South was led by Professors LI Jia and and ZHANG Jie, both key members of the Language-on-the-Move team.

Their symposium about multilingual crisis communication was devoted to exploring the lived experiences of linguistic minorities in China during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Love the opportunity to catch up with old and new friends. Here with Profs In Chull Jang (Seoul National University) and Guofang Li (University of British Columbia)

The symposium was a new outcome of the Language on the Move Covid-19 Archives, which we have been building since early 2020.

Presenters took a variety of critical sociopolitical approaches to conceptualize multilingual crisis communication from three dimensions, namely identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice. All the speakers are also contributors to the forthcoming book Multilingual Crisis Communication: Insights from China, which will be out from Routledge later this year.

Overall, the tone of the symposium was hopeful about the future of multilingual crisis communication, building as it did on engaged, co-designed, and participatory research with local communities.

Real-life catch-ups

At a conference such as AILA with close to 2,000 delegates a multiplicity of perspectives emerges not only in the academic program but, perhaps even more importantly, in all the informal conversations going on during breaks, in the corridors, and while exploring the amazing city of Kuala Lumpur.

“Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice” has been translated into Korean by Prof In Chull Jang (Seoul National University)

While the many parallel sessions can feel overwhelming, many of the real highlights that shift perspectives and allow us to see things in different ways are happening outside the academic program.

A huge shout-out is due to the conference organizers who have pulled out all the stops to have these meetings, dialogues and conversations take place in a setting with a wow factor – the Petronas Twin Towers overlook the conference venue – and supported by amazing food that keeps body and soul together.

Korean translation of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice

The most amazing present I received during the conference has been the Korean translation of my 2016 book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice, which has just been published by Sahoi Pyoungnon Publishing in Seoul. The translator, In Chull Jang from Seoul National University, brought along an advance copy for me. The book is called Linguistic Diversity and Inequality in Korean and I hope the translation will bring its call to take linguistic diversity seriously as part of the social justice agenda of our time to a new audience.

And a bit of nerdy linguistics conferencing fun:

Just overheard at #AILA2024:
“I’m from @Macquarie_Uni/@MQLinguistics”
“Wow, Halliday.”
“yes, it’s a nice tropical holiday for us.”

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 14, 2024

Online and onsite attendees of Ana’s presentation

The 21^st AILA World Conference is in full swing, and Day 2 has brought us some incredibly insightful presentations showcasing the current scholarship of applied linguistics. In this blog post, I share my experience as an online presenter and attendee during day 2.

This year’s conference theme is “Linguistic Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Sustainability,” seeking to understand the pivotal role of applied linguistics in tackling worldwide issues and fostering a more equitable world. The theme could not be a more pertinent topic in the current climate where diverse, inclusive, and sustainable research is becoming increasingly challenging due to the degradation of knowledge stemming from various factors, such as the surge of AI in academic publishing and the loss of the human element in research, as highlighted by Distinguished Professor Piller in her thought-provoking keynote speech “How can we make our research diverse, inclusive, and sustainable?” during the conference’s opening day.

For me, the day kicked off, tuning in to the ‘Language in Society’ track, where several presenters shared their work in a symposium entitled ‘Minority Language Learning for Adult Migrants in Europe’. The symposium shared their findings about the struggles of migrant language learning from Sweden to the Faroe Islands, leading to boundary maintenance among Hungarian diasporic speakers in Catalonia to understand the lived experiences of adult migrants as they pertain to migration and what are considered ‘worthy’ or ‘useful’ languages to learn.

Following, Professor Dr. Catherine Nickerson delivered the third keynote, which delved into the future of applied linguistics in the context of business and professional communication. Dr. Nickerson’s speech was both inspirational and gave an incredible glimpse of where the field is moving and how ‘we can bridge the gap between research and practice’ in ESP.

In the afternoon, it was my turn to present. I was delighted to contribute to a symposium on ‘Language Diversity, Inclusivity and Sustainability’ by sharing my PhD research findings on Family Language Policy and the intersectionality of digital technologies and transnationality in Spanish maintenance. My presentation touched on how private and public language policy domains are interconnected and fed off each other and that technology can be a double-edged sword in heritage language maintenance. However, as voiced by parents, technology also has many positive applications in language learning. I concluded with some suggestions for making heritage languages more visible in schools by using technology and learning from the experiences of the home domain.

My co-presenter during the symposium, Silvia Melo-Pfeifer, a leading member of the Next Generation Literacies Network, presented the findings of her work titled ‘The (pseudo) institutionalisation of language diversity in the internationalisation strategies of universities: a comparative study in Germany and The Netherlands’. Silvia brilliantly discussed new bilingual policies of two universities, one in Germany and one in The Netherlands, explaining the ideologies behind the push for English in the German institution due to internationalisation goals vs the push for Dutch in the latter, which is linked to far-right ideologies. She described this imposition to adopt English in teaching and other university activities at the German institution as ‘academic blackmail’, given that this was imposed from the top down and used as a scholarly success metric.

Thank you, AILA, for this fabulous implementation of a successful hybrid conference. AILA has done a marvellous job of providing live access to streamed symposiums and keynotes while also giving online participants from all corners of the globe access to recorded sessions so AILA delegates can engage with the latest and most innovative research in applied linguistics from any time zone. Spaces like AILA2024 empower us scholars, especially early career researchers like myself, to contemplate how we can strive to produce more ‘diverse, inclusive, and sustainable’ research, as Professor Piller left us reflecting after her keynote speech. The AILA conference, with its focus on these crucial issues, is shaping the future of applied linguistics and inspiring hope for a more equitable world.

Members of the Next Generation Literacies Network at AILA 2024

For me, the highlight of Day 1 was the keynote by Ingrid Piller, who spoke about “How can we make our research diverse, inclusive, and sustainable?”

Ingrid shared her thoughts on the following critical issues:

1. The diversity problem in Applied Linguistics with peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production
2. The looming textocalypse, a crisis of reception and degradation of knowledge
3. The open research lifecycle
4. The FAIR principles in open data
5. Life in a New Language as a working model for data-sharing and community building

I was most impressed by two aspects of her speech. First, Ingrid’s discussion of the textpocalypse struck a chord. She illustrated this with a poignant image of a woman collecting a brick from the Berlin Wall—a relic filled with personal meaning, as the Wall once separated her from her brother. Although Ingrid took copious notes on that rainy day, she found it almost impossible to capture and convey the subtle emotions and lived experiences that the scene evoked. This raises profound questions about how we can achieve the embodiment of research and ensure that the depth of human experience is retained in our digital assets.

Ingrid also shared the story behind Life in a New Language, a group ethnography project that explores the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 countries over 20 years. The project underscores the benefits and challenges of data-sharing and reuse, aiming to inspire more collaborative research.

This reminded me of the unbooking project I’m involved in, which uses a collective group name instead of listing individual authors for the book as a whole. Through our relationships with one another as well as with the concepts that shape our scholarship, we hold one another accountable to building interdependent, sustainable relations around data creation and interpretation across our multiple continental locations.

Ingrid concluded with a quote by Alexander von Humboldt:

Ideas can only be useful if they come alive in many minds.

This powerful reminder calls us back to our core as researchers: to make meaningful connections through our work. It’s why we gather at conferences like AILA—to exchange knowledge in ways that are impactful, to carry forward our collective understanding across diverse geographic, linguistic, and epistemic landscapes, to question and reflect on making writing meaningful, and to reimagine knowledge-making by redefining researcher responsibility and productivity in diverse, inclusive, and sustainable academic practices.

For some images of Ibrar’s work, check out the Sino-Muslim Literacies Project.

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

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Ma, Y. (2020). Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic? Language on the Move

Akhmedova, M., & Ahmad, R. (2024). Why Are Uzbek Youth Learning Arabic? Language on the Move

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

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

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

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

FAQs

What exactly is a systematic literature review (SLR)?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you find it useful, please cite as:

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

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

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

Enjoy the show!

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

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

Transcript

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Gretchen McCulloch.

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

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

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: We’re allowed to not have friends!

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

Brynn: That’s interesting, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: No one uses that.

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

Brynn: Not at all. I applaud them.

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

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

Brynn: Yeah, please read the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: Hopefully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: It looks threatening is what it looks like!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: Oh, I do too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brynn: Oh, that scares me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me.

Brynn: Yeah, and if you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move podcast, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time!

‘That’s not what the dictionary says!’, the pedant bleats.

‘Ah’, retorts the wise linguist, ‘but a dictionary is simply a record of usage, not a rule book’.

Fun fact by the way:

The earliest English dictionaries in the early 1600s, like Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, didn’t actually list all the words, only the most difficult ones, including the rush of words being borrowed into English from French, Latin and Greek – which were much more scientifically and culturally interesting back then than boring old backwater English.

Dictionaries change

Contemporary dictionaries do change their definitions, as language itself changes. Take the English words shall and will, which used to occupy very different territories (for example shall typically appeared before ‘I’ and ‘we’, will after other grammatical subjects) but nowadays will has largely usurped shall. That’s just natural language change, and the Cambridge English Dictionary now marks shall as ‘old-fashioned’. Will is hot; shall is not.

And this is still happening today. In 2019, a petition was launched for the Oxford English Dictionary to update its definition of ‘woman’, to remove various sexist wording and to include “examples representative of minorities, for example, a transgender woman, a lesbian woman, etc.”. This caused quite a stir at the time, but the dictionary folk did what they always do – investigated changing language usage.

The Cambridge Dictionary moved first, adding an entry to its definition ‘an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth’. The OED has also moved but rather more circumspectly, simply adding an example of usage under its definition, ‘Having trans women involved added so much to the breadth of understanding what it means to be a woman.’ In this case we’re witnessing dictionaries catching up in real time, at different paces. But they do catch up. That’s their job, not telling us how to speak proper!

‘Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of ‘woman’, updated to be transgender-inclusive’

Prescriptivists and descriptivists

In academic parlance, those who wish language would just sit still and behave itself are prescriptivists. They prescribe how language should be used (just as your doctor prescribes the medicines you should take).

Linguists, by contrast, are descriptivists, simply describing language as it is actually used without passing judgement.

Or are they?

And/or, do they have to always be?

Naming no names, I have heard unguarded comments from professional linguists, irked by this or that slang term their teenage offspring come out with. Linguists are humans, and they live in human society that is full of that kind of sneering. Some of it slips through. But strictly speaking this is very much the faux pas, and might provoke a subtle change of subject at the conference dinner table.

Quotative like

A widely discussed example from recent decades is a new use of like to quote someone (‘He was like, I don’t care!’). I reviewed and modelled the research into this new ‘quotative like’, which showed teenagers leading the innovation. This new usage quickly ruffled pedant feathers far and wide. Indeed, many schoolteachers heavy-handedly banned its use under the pretence of reinforcing standard literacy. ‘You’ll never get a job speaking like that!’ etc. etc.

But the linguistic research told another story. Quotative like was doing something very special, and more importantly something previously unavailable in English. It allowed you to relate what someone said, but without claiming those were the precise words they used. Compare ‘He was like, I don’t care’ and ‘He said, I don’t care’. The first is a less explicit claim that he said exactly that, simply that he said something like that.

It’s actually a very efficient and strategic conversational device; and linguists sprung to its defence as a novel and intriguing innovation. For those few linguists who continued to privately grumble about it, and other youth lingo, eyebrows were increasingly raised.

A strip in the webcomic XKCD about research on quotative like

Evasive so

But other linguistic innovations garner more divided opinion among linguists, particularly some quirks of politicians, corporate bigwigs, and other denizens of elite circles. A widely discussed example which gained pace in the early 2010s is the use of the word so to begin a sentence. Historically a rather dull grammatical bolt simply plugging together chunks of sentences, this unassuming two-letter word has been promoted to higher tasks in recent years, much to the dismay of the pedants. As a 2015 NPR article notes,

Many of the complaints about sentences beginning with “so” are triggered by a specific use of the word that’s genuinely new. It’s the “so” that you hear from people who can’t answer a question without first bringing you up to speed on the backstory. I go to the Apple Store and ask the guy at the Genius Bar why my laptop is running slow. He starts by saying, “So, Macs have two kinds of disk permissions …”

British journalist and BBC radio presenter John Humprys long marshalled opinion against this use of so. Indeed his listeners frequently echoed the same grumble. Others went on the defensive, urging that so has been used to begin sentences for centuries.

But that defense somewhat misses an important nuance of this irritation. The new usage here is not simply beginning a sentence, but beginning a reply to a question, especially a challenging question, often with something that is not really an answer at all, and often uttered by someone in a position of power, who really should know the answer.

A famous example of that little nuance was a 2015 New York Times interview of Mark Zuckerberg in which he gibbered out some bizarrely rambling answers to very straightforward questions, for example what his new toy ‘Creative Labs’ was supposed to be. Simple question. Define the product. He responded:

So Facebook is not one thing. On desktop where we grew up, the mode that made the most sense was to have a website, and to have different ways of sharing built as features within a website. So when we ported to mobile, that’s where we started — this one big blue app that approximated the desktop presence.

But I think on mobile, people want different things. Ease of access is so important. So is having the ability to control which things you get notifications for. And the real estate is so small. In mobile there’s a big premium on creating single-purpose first-class experiences.

So what we’re doing with Creative Labs is basically unbundling the big blue app.

This spectacularly circuitous response not only patronised a professional journalist and their audience – who might just understand what a website is – but it also did something more sinister. It shirked responsibility and accountability; it kicked up a cloud of corporate haze when a simple product definition was required.

Slippery circuitousness, after all, is an important corporate skill, whether you’re not answering a journalist or not answering a Senate committee.

One reactionary pedant, Bernard Lamb, President of the Queen’s English Society, retorted of this new so: “It’s not being used as a conjunction to join things up, which is how it should be used. … It’s just carelessness, it doesn’t have any meaning when used this way.”

But he was wrong. It does have meaning, just in a new and rather more sinister way.

Doing bad things with words

‘So’, as it’s used here and in other such corporate media interviews (‘How can you justify this kind of oil spill?’ – ‘So oil spills are uncommon and we work very hard to prevent…’) is doing a huge amount of ultimately rather grubby work. Its former career as a conjunction (‘X happened so Y happened’) conditions us to see logical relevance between X and Y. Zuck and other corporate and political bigwigs use this to their advantage, to imply relevance when there is none.

And in the process, in a small but important way, that adds to their aura of elite untouchability.

Powerful people using language to trick their audiences is of course not new. Classical rhetoric gives us the term paradiastole, when a reply to a question turns a negative into a positive, or otherwise deflects and diffracts the focus of the question. (Socrates famously hated political rhetoric, inspiring his student Plato similarly.) Reply-initial so could simply be the new rhetorical kid on the block, the latest ruse in a very long tradition of ruses to distract from not having a good answer, or having one but wanting to avoid it.

Statues of Plato (left) and Socrates (right) by Leonidas Drosis at the Academy of Athens (Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0)

And this brings us to where linguists might get justifiably annoyed, more so than at their teenage kids’ slang.

If a linguistic innovation is achieving something sinister, then perhaps it’s ok to hate on it. Linguists, after all, are not simply interested in sanctifying any and all words as precious gems. Linguists skillfully dissect other language use that is more obviously doing bad things – racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic, and other discriminatory discourse.

Calling out nefarious language is ok

Laying bare when a linguistic innovation is doing something sinister, calling it out for what it is, can simply be an extension of that same important critical insight.

Funnily enough, that reply-initial so has actually been picked up by media training organisations. Corporate elites are always carefully groomed on their language, and since this particular innovation has picked up so much ire, it is now carefully ironed out. You may be hearing it less nowadays as a result.

You’ll still hear ‘I was like…’ though, because teenagers don’t have spin doctors to manage their comms, nor are they interested in fooling the public to buy their widgets or vote for them. Their interest is in being cool, as it should be.

So, criticising linguistic innovations does have its place when there are more shady forces at work. It’s like the principle in comedy that a joke is funny as long as it’s ‘punching up’, i.e. poking fun at those higher on the social ladder. As soon as the jokes begin ‘punching down’, mocking those who are already looked down upon without a comedian piling in, then it’s veering towards criticism.

New words can be fun and useful, or they can hide other more nefarious intentions. For the latter, linguists should feel comfortable punching up. It’s part of the job, alongside calling out more obviously discriminatory language. Linguists are ideally placed to pick those apart – celebrating the grammatically ingenious irreverence of teens while also throwing tomatoes at sneaky elites. So there.